Because today is the day in which it is not safe to be on the net, and because when I play April Fool’s pranks I do so in a manner everyone knows they’re not true, but are funny — and this month I’ve not had the chance to think up anything — I thought I’d just post some April Fool’s jokes by other people.

Return to San SerriffeReturn to San Serriffe (note a lot of the funny here is the Guardian’s bias even about a fictional nation.)

And of course:

Announcing A Major Upcoming Release

And this is the comic strip from when #1 son pretended his web comic had been taken over by a Japanese based company.

Woke up feeling way worse than I’ve been feeling with upper respiratory thing.  Went to doctor.  Got antibiotics and also a recommendation to sleep all day.  I’m not sure about this. I have a book to finish.

There are some worrying symptoms that might signal a return of the trouble that caused surgery three years ago (Not days as I first typed.  Sorry.  not working too well).

Anyway, for now I’ve got a prescription and I’m going to try to write at least a little, then go to bed.

I’m sorry.  I’m REALLY not trying to fall apart.

I really didn’t feel like writing a post today, but I seem to have misplaced all my guest posts.   (Yeah, if you sent and it hasn’t run, send again.)  Which leaves me with…

Well, yesterday this was doing the rounds of our circles: Sales, Earnings Fell at PRH in 2016.

First of all, what doesn’t this mean?  It doesn’t mean Random Penguin is in serious trouble.  Not yet.  It doesn’t mean the entire edifice of traditional publishing is going away, either.

Look, at this point, just like Hollywood is mostly supported by foreign releases of the movies that don’t do too well here, traditional publishing is owned and propped up by European media houses who, if I read the situation right, don’t even understand how obsolete they’re becoming on this side of the pond.

(It’s a thing.  Americans took to the internet — and ebooks, and all the subsequent stuff — like Americans.  I don’t fully get why we behave so differently from the rest of the world.  Portugal is one of the more wired countries in Europe, and yet there aren’t any political blogs that compete with the media narrative — my mom wants one, d*mn it — and there aren’t any aggregators with the kind of instapundit pull.  And definitely books published by “non official” publishers don’t have the same appeal.  I think it is because at the heart of it, the rest of the world are classists, trained from an early age to respect authority.  I sometimes find myself explaining interactions in old books or movies to my kids or husband, and realizing I understand a lot of it at an instinctive level just because I grew up in Europe.  It never took with me of course, which is why I’m here, but it “takes” with the vast majority of people.  Obviously.)

Anyway, I think the European overlords of publishing houses have no fricking clue what is going on with reading here.  Note that all the official publications still lie about it.  And the trend is masked with things like the adult coloring book thing, which has kept Barnes and Noble afloat for the last 10 years or so.  We went in before Christmas, looking for something for Robert.  We found it.  It was a book of Drawing prompts.

In fact, the part of Barnes and Noble that is still books is mostly what I would call “novelty books” — drawing prompts, writing prompts, ten things you can do to make your house smell better this afternoon, and adult coloring books.  A LOT of adult coloring books.  By comparison the fiction section, let alone the science fiction section, was almost impossible to find and paltry.

Which is okay.  I mean for years I went to Barnes and Noble and the only thing I bought were the sort of Barnes and Noble Published books like “ten tales of knights and dragons.”  Only of course, now that’s not such a good business, because all that stuff is on the net.  And their fiction still disappoints me, which is why I started buying from Amazon the year it started up, when it sold only books.  Because books were published that I wanted to read, they just didn’t get SHELVED at my Barnes and Noble.  Which is why now that the coloring book thing is receding, B & N posted a loss (I think 16%) OVER CHRISTMAS.

But hold on to that “Books were being published.  They just weren’t shelving them in my Barnes and Noble so I could buy them.”

Because that’s what this post is about.  Reality and the limits of manipulating it.

Barnes and Noble isn’t going away tomorrow, there are fifty shades of bankruptcy in the west before you even have to face you shat the bed and should change approaches.  They’re not close to that yet, or if they are they think they can fix it with more cowbe– toys.  And “lifetsyle” gifts like mugs and reading lights (not needed since I got the backlit kindle.  Never mind.) Yes, I believe they will eventually go the way of Borders, and it will be sudden and terrible when it happens, but I don’t think we’re close to it yet.  On the other hand I could be optimistic.  I’ve been so in the past.

The publishers are even less going away tomorrow, because frankly, the non-fiction side is still very profitable and besides they get money from Europe.  Mind you some of their lines might disappear with an earthshattering kaboom very suddenly, and I’ve heard rumors that better connected people than I expect it “in the next five years.”  Could be.  Could not be.  I don’t know.  Indie has moved both faster and slower than I expected.  The establishment has certain resources, including money to weather slow periods (which they don’t seem to realize is now permanent) and a lot of magazines and papers willing to do its bidding so it seems like it will recover TOMORROW.

Which is the other point of the post.  We’ll get to that.

First let me take you to a time far away, where there were no mega bookstores.  No Borders, no Barnes and Noble, none of the others, either.  The biggest ones were two or three branches of a bookstore in a big city.

These businesses were managed the way such things are managed.  You hired people who like books.  You eventually promoted them to managers.  And then you had managers who liked books.

To communicate with these people who loved books, you had book reps who loved books. I met some of these before the great layoff.  These people read the books and pushed them at the bookstores with attention to “Well, old Joe who has a bookstore at the back of his feed store in rural Colorado has done pretty well for science fiction in the past.  So, this book I just read which knocked my socks off will interest him.”

The system worked pretty well.  Look, no one was going to get massively rich from running a bookstore.  And writers still worked on a hit or miss basis.  But there was always the possibility of a surprise bestseller.  You might not appeal amazingly to your publisher, and you might stand outside the narrative they’re pushing, but if you’re a fan and you love the genre you’re writing in, well, some rep or even a bookstore owner might read it, love it, and handsell it to everyone, and word of mouth spreads…  So, in a way writers could sell to the public bypassing gatekeepers.

This didn’t make the gatekeepers happy for several reasons, the first being that after several mergers the houses behaved like normal corporations (which could be titled “death by bureaucracy”) and so an editor got incentives to accurately forecast how a book would sell.  Yes, your career could, justly, be ruined by giving millions to an author who no longer has a book in him and who writes something pathetically poor, but it could also be ruined because that book you bought for $5k had a runaway bestseller run with a hundred reprints, because it threw all the schedule out, and why didn’t you foresee this?

The second was ideological.  Yes, I know, but look at this: The ‘Postmodern’ Intellectual Roots of Today’s Campus Mobs.  The problem is most NYC editors and under editors, and yay onto the lowest copy editor are exquisitely well educated in the liberal arts, through which in these days runs a strain of believing that narrative creates reality.  They were told (I was too, and this was 30 years ago) it’s all narrative.  So changing narrative changes reality.

Join to it the aesthetic considerations that have proliferated since WWI, the belief that art, particularly writing, must be “to bring about equality and justice” and that this is its marker of quality, now that we’ve discarded “classical allusions.”  (Neither is a marker of quality.  The quality is ALWAYS ludic.  If you fail to entertain people today, you won’t be one of the great writers of tomorrow.)

Houses wanted to make sure the right things sold, in the right amounts, partly because their severely underpaid employees viewed their job as a way to “educated the public” or “bring about a better world.”

So they were dissatisfied with this system of small bookstores that could — and did — create unexpected bestsellers.

Fortunately for the publishers, a new system emerged.

Barnes and Noble and Borders and the other megastores were helped in their rise by massive discounts from the publishers.  They could do that, because the megastores took orders from publishers, publishers could completely predict (control) what sold, by laydown and display, and the volume and lack of wastage allowed them to save money.

So they connived with the megastores in killing indie bookstores.  And the megabookstores deluded themselves that the secret to their success was this computer program that “predicted” how much a book would sell.  They — like most people who put faith in a computers as computers — didn’t realize this was highly manipulable by laydown from the publishers.  For instance if you started a trilogy and the publisher only pushed two books per bookstore, you’d sell one, maybe (chances are the other one would be stolen, or misshelved or whatever, and at any rate it might not be found)  then for the next book, the bookstore orders one.  And for the third they don’t take any.  Never mind.

What happened in practicality is that the bookstores filled with books no one wanted to read.  Mostly it filled with whatever the crazy trend of the moment was.  For instance, this historical/hardboiled and cozy mystery reader, in one trip to the store, found herself facing shelf after shelf of what could only be termed “Sex in the city” mysteries.  All single women and shoes and a lot of sex.  I MIGHT have bought one or two of those (though I was never big on the series) but faced with ONLY that, I screamed, ran and went to Amazon to buy the latest of the historical mystery series I was following.

Which is the point.

Even without Amazon, they probably would be on a spiral down, though maybe slower, because reading addicts got to read.

The telling line in that article about Randy Penguin is “the lack of a major bestseller.”

You see traditional publishing had got really good at manufacturing those, from above.  The whole system above was called “the push model” and it worked for REALLY BIG BOOKS.

If Dan Brown’s book was everywhere, people bought it, if nothing else out of a feeling they wanted to belong.

That kind of mega bestseller supported them, and they could afford to buy a ton of smaller books that practically didn’t get distributed.  They didn’t need to be, after all. They were filler.  The pay out came from the big bestseller.  Which could be manipulated to succeed with enough publicity.

The system failed them — incidentally with the last Dan Brown — and there was much whining that the push model didn’t work.

The problem is they can’t retool without hiring a bunch of reps who actually read and push what they enjoy, and not what managers say.  And that’s not a model they can implement with a huge corporation, which has to CONTROL things top down.

Which is how big corporations are like big governments: both need a measure of control from the top down to survive, and both hit the inefficiencies of the command and control as opposed to the free market model.

The thing is that reality is not the push model; it’s not command and control.

At the end of everything, no matter how much you push a product, no matter how much you pretend all books are widgets and it’s just the matter of pushing one to make it a bestseller, no matter how much you tell yourself that reality can be shaped by narratives…  In the end, reality kicks back.

I.e. you can push and you can market, but in the end, if the readers don’t like your product, you’re hosed.

Sometimes the dogs just don’t like the food.

Look at this sad tale, and consider it is but a miniature representation of what is going on in society at large.

When a large segment of the population or the self proclaimed elite insists on ignoring reality, they are on a road to nowhere, with a really interesting tour of various historical horrors along the way.

And all we can do is build under, build around, build over, so we can take the weight when the structure falls.

Be not afraid.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hardest thing in the world is seeing what is right before your eyes when it contradicts what is in your mind.

In most cases, when someone asks “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes” it’s supposed to be a laugh line.  But when the “me” is someone who’s been lying to you since you were born, the answer is often “you.”

I’m not talking of bad parents, though the mechanics is similar.  By evolution and attachment not to mention affection, we tend to believe and trust those who raised us.  Which is part of this, but is not quite the truth.

In the modern era, soaked with media, most of us were raised by far more than our parents.  And most of us not only trust the earliest things we heard, we tests other things against those earliest things we heard.

In the present era when, for a hundred years, our media has been first infiltrated and then progressively (eh!) taken over and defended by progressives and the “truth” promulgated that which accorded with party directives and propaganda, that means that our ability to test ideas against each other, or even what we see with our lying eyes against what we’ve been told is frankly broken.

Yes, even ours.  Sorry guys.  We too, like the leftists, grew up in a world in which leftist principles are so inherent in every thought, that if we step outside of them it’s like going crazy.

It’s the little things that get you, promulgated by media, news, literature and arts.  All of them.  At once.  Little things like “Creative people are always of the left.”  A little (and stupid, btw, since creative people are by definition people who poke and prod and less likely to stay in any ideological pen) lie, sure, but one that aided and abetted the left’s take over of ALL creative fields because, well, if there are no creative people to the right of Lenin, how could they find any to publish/exhibit/pay attention to?  And what if someone appeared to be creative but was obviously not left?  Well, see, his/her work is inferior.  We know that, because conservatives aren’t creative, so even though this one is pretending to be, there must be something inferior about their work.

Did I make up that myth?  I wish I had.  Go tally novels, movies, etc, about anyone who is creative, an artist or even a great designer.  In every one of those cases, you’ll find the person is portrayed anywhere from mild left to an outright Stalinist, even if they are completely fictional.  (A lot of the real acclaimed artists were to the left of Lenin, because, well, there’s always some, particularly early in the 20th century, when the stupid ideas hadn’t shown how bad they were.  And if the establishment was looking for leftist artists to promote, those were the ones likely to get the greatest prominence.  Since about mid 20th century, being in tune with revolutionary truths, “speaking truth to power” and “exposing society” became the rules by which art was judged.  Unsurprisingly, the “good art” was then leftist.)

And yet, even we — even I — fall for it, if you take it out of the context that will make us defensive.  2008 I got up early to go vote with my husband.  This meant we were at our precinct early morning , in line to vote, and I looked around, at men in khakis, and women in gypsy skirts with multicolored hair, and I thought “Mine is the only non-Obama vote here.”  Then I realized I was wearing a loose cotton skirt and a peasant blouse and my half-grey (It has been since I was 28, so unless freshly dyed, it’s a mess) hair was long and loose.  And I realized I fit perfectly with the people around me.  In fact, even probing deeper, if they’d found I wrote for a living, that I came from a foreign country, that English was my second language, or that I have a post-graduate degree in the Liberal arts, people examining me would think I was surely as far left as possible.

Were all those people there early morning voting for the leftist candidate.  Most of them, I suspect.  We lived in a blue dot, in a sea of red, so most of our neighbors were leftist (judging by yard signs.)  After all we were talking about people who had SUCCESSFULLY established themselves as college professors or artists, and establishing yourself depended on running the gauntlet of the left’s dominance of gatekeeping.  BUT the truth is, I’d got through, and I’m sure there were others.  Only we didn’t know it, since both our internal programing AND the rolls of the institutions we worked for confirmed the lie that all creatives are leftist.  And those of us who would otherwise have given a lie to it could not talk, on penalty of losing our livelihood.

Part of the problem is that humans are designed by nature to fix certain parameters in their heads very early, and then to test everything they learn against those parameters.  I think this is because such an ability saved our ancestors’ behinds several times.  “Fast moving, eyes to the front is predator.”  “What if it isn’t?” “If it isn’t it won’t eat you. The way to bet is predator.”  This type of reasoning saves your life when seconds count.  If you can make the snap judgement, it is your cousin Gurg, who was a nice man and gave everything a second chance, rest his soul, who got eaten.

Except when everything you’ve been fed is a lie, and that’s what you’re testing the “truth” against, and when your life is not red in tooth and claw, so that you don’t get immediately eaten when you judge wrong, and never find out you were judging wrong, the … alternate reality builds.

It’s been a very long time since we had a fire-breathing leftist — or one I let through.  I put on hip waders and went through the held-up comments the other day, which is the proximal reason for this post — come in accusing us of being things we are not.  Oh, they are in the held-up comments, but there’s no point letting them through because they’re a “hit and run” type of thing and even if the commenter came back (they won’t.  In most the names are obviously disposable) they would not believe their lying eyes.

Both those comments, and the ones I used to let through, when the spam filter was a lot looser, would paint a picture of the readers of this blog.  I remember the time someone came in and accused us all of being Southern rednecks, who had never been out of our states.  Now, I suppose some of you are from the South, and some might not have traveled, but in this blog the “have never left the state” is not the way to bet.  In the same way, I’ve had the Bible quoted at me (usually truncated and distorted, but never mind) and then been asked what kind of a Christian I am, or what kind of Christians my blog readers are, to believe as we do despite this, “Triumphant verse brandished.”  And while some of you are Christians and invested in inerrant nature of the Bible, even in translation, the truth is about a third of my commenters isn’t Christian AT ALL, and a remaining 80% of the other 2/3 (ATH is MATH! Shut up) are from sects where the inerrant nature of the Bible is not a thing.

It goes that way all along the line, with people accusing us, say, of hating women, when many (half?) the people here are women; or gays, when quite a few of you ARE gay; other races, when a lot of you are varying shades of tan or married to varying shades of tan.

The problem — and the reason to no longer approve those comments — is that you can’t prove them wrong.  Their assumptions are not falsifiable.  I.e. no matter what their lying eyes tell them, they’ll find a reason to excuse it away.  Say I’m both a woman (true) and the reason I loathe feminism is because I want what’s best for women (true.  For men too) and current feminism is a poisonous ideology destroying the species.  I can EXPLAIN to them at length (have done it) how the idea that men and women are ALWAYS exactly alike and there are no biological differences beyond the obvious ignores hormonal influence in the development of the body and brain from the womb; how, though it’s a statistical spread, women aren’t even close to men in the strength department; how it’s not a matter of superiority, but yes, men and women brains are different, since women think deeper and more connected and men faster, straighter, sharper.  (Always accounting for that statistical spread.)  How we know several differences like men tend to cluster in the moron and genius ranges, but women are better at “Smart enough to function without having issues living in society.”

I can point out how this means that there will be differences not just in choice of professions, but in how women behave in those professions (and arguably for important things both approaches are needed, as a means of reality testing) and that trying to pound all the square pegs in round holes or make women into men or vice versa destroys the fabric of society and the freedom of individuals.

I’m perfectly willing to entertain arguments against it, of the sane and reasonable kind.  Stuff like “If we raise the child in this way and expose her to this, she’ll think faster, clearer, straighter.”  I’m willing to entertain them and counter them or even bring up “Yes, but why should we? If both approaches are needed, why are they only to be tolerated in the other type of body?”

But the people who come here and accuse me of being a self-hating woman don’t have those facts and are incapable of having that discussion.  If I ask why they think I hate women, they’ll bring up something from the Bible.  And if I tell them I grew up in a culture where quoting the Bible was gauche and we didn’t believe it was infallible, they double down and either accuse me of lying or say I’ve some how internalized these things and the interpretation put on them, which would be quite different.

It’s funnier when their assumptions about what I believe are not only wrong in detail, or wrong in reason I believe something (like, yep, I do believe men and women are different, but I don’t believe men are superior which is what they assume) but so completely staggeringly wrong that you don’t even know what to say.  Take the people who come spinning in and accuse me of being homophobic.  Neither in my private life — I think close to half of my inner circle of friends is gay — nor in my writing (no, I have no clue why my character world is near the gay bar region of imaginary land) nor in fact in anything can it be construed that I’m “homophobe” or really even “homo uncomfortable.”

And yet, this is a regular accusation leveled at me.

The problem is that stupid as it is, it can’t be falsified.  If someone comes and accuses me of being an homophobe, and I defend myself, and supposing they’re not a drive by, they then will go and comb through all my books, take a sentence out of context and “prove” it.  And if that’s not enough, they’ll invent a new “square” that can’t be stepped on.  There will be a scene in my book in which a character (there is.  A gay character even) heartily dislikes another character and talks about his flamboyant attire.  (Keep in mind the second character is Simon, and the flamboyant attire isn’t even part of the reason to dislike him.  There are plenty of those.  It’s more a secondary annoyance.)  Voila.  Dipping into their stock of stereotypes, they decide all gays are flamboyant dressers, so hating that means I’m secretly homophobic.  (Thereby ignoring the fact it’s not me making that observation, but my character, that no, not all gays are flamboyant dressers, that no, hating flamboyant dressers — which I don’t, but the character at that moment does — is not hating gays.)

It’s impossible to falsify that type of belief.  Anyone who has chosen to believe the narrative over their lying eyes can always find reason to.  Reminds me of one of the seasons of Soap in which one of the characters believes that he can snap his fingers and become invisible.  Every time it doesn’t work, he comes up with an excuse “I was wet”, “I was touching metal” or “you were looking at me.”

The thing is that believing your lying eyes is scary.  You have to think everything through anew.  It leaves you, in a way, intellectually naked before the world.  It’s not how the human mind likes to work.

Which is why most people refuse to do it.  (Yes, our side too.  The number of times I was accused of being a communist for being less than a whole-hearted Trump supporter at the end of last year.  Even though there is NO logical reason why being completely in the Trump camp equals non communist or opposing Trump’s more statist flights makes you a communist.  It’s jut the way people’s minds work.)

There are several problems with this right now.

The first is that the narrative is breaking up, but breaking up underground, as it were, beneath the surface of things.

The second is that the “crust” remains intact.

The third is that even for those of us trying to actively reject the narrative there are little things that get by.  Like the thing about creatives being leftist.

The first one has the consequence that while a vast number of the population is seeing things that diverge from the narrative, it’s hard to prove to someone who will only accept Mass Media reporting.  Also, the way to behave in polite society is as though the mass media were still “truthful” (or not revealed as lying sacks of sh*t).  Which is part of 2.  The other part of 2 is that the “respectable” academics/artists/news sources are still leftist, and being leftist is still a way to virtue signal, which means people who are nothing in particular will publicly endorse the left.  There is a whole post in that, but the fact is that if the way to test and artist or an academician is “promotes/understands leftist theory” being a mainstream artist or academic is NOT a guaranty of deep thought or respectability.  BUT it is how it’s still interpreted.  Or, IOW the left has gutted the institution, now wears its skin demanding respect, and most people go along with it, because well, that institution used to deserve respect, and look, that’s this institution.

The third is even worse, because it is something we have to fight constantly within ourselves.  And the thing is, stereotypes are often right.  That’s why they’re stereotypes.  It’s just hard to remember some of those were deliberately planted by Marxists to distort what we see.

The truth is, the leftist ideals and beliefs, such as they are now, after the Soviet Union failed; after the bankruptcy of every leftist regime has been revealed; after 100 million dead, are laughable on the face of it.

The idea is that someone — some superior person we assume.  Oh, wait, if everyone is alike who is that superior — stands above it all, and more equitably distributes resources than the notoriously “uncaring” free market.

It takes only a second to realize that whether what you’re distributing is money or apologies for past oppression, there isn’t anyone who really can judge “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need.”

Remove that ability to judge, and you realize the people arrogating themselves that right are just tyrant wanna bes.  Which explains why every communist country devolves into the sort of tyranny that would make a feudal lord blush.

There is nothing there.  Well, nothing but rot and ambition and a desire to control others.

But if you point this out you get the squid ink of accusing you of prejudices you can’t even possibly think of, and of projecting on you what their masters told them all opponents are.

This is what keeps the masses in thrall now: A web tissue of lies and hate.

Through which they can’t even suspect reality.  As they are led, inexorably, on the path to tyranny and horror.  Once more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*I think this essay of Kate’s is very important because so many times people taking money from us by force (the IRS, say) and using it for things we would never buy, act like it’s for our own good, and we’re the customers who purchased the goods, after all.

Let us remember without the choice to be or not to be a customer there is no private property and no freedom of association.  If someone can force you to buy “insurance” because they think it’s for your own good, you’re not free.  If someone can prevent you from buying something, yes, even drugs, because they think it’s not for your own good, you’re not free.

There are several things I’d never buy or let friends/relatives buy without protest, but which their individual will still gives them a choice on.  I can persuade but not forbid.  I wouldn’t, anyway, it being that I’m not a government officer and I’ve realized I was wrong about something once or twice before, particularly about things that don’t pertain directly to me.

But when government legislators and agencies act like you’re the customer, just because you’re being forced to pay and receiving something in return, remember you’re not.  If you have no choice, you’re not the customer.  You’re the chattel. – SAH*

Who Is The Customer? – Kate Paulk

 

Facebook is a dangerous place. It inspires Kate-rants when truly impressive levels of stupid are on display, which is something like 200% of the time, and I happen to run across them – which happens rather less frequently or I’d burn my keyboards out much faster than is safe for me or them.

 

The latest example came from a sub-thread in a discussion inspired by one of those memes that’s basically saying teachers are whiners. The sub-thread meandered into the question of who is the customer of the education system, into which someone posted the definition of customer as listed by Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer):

 

[block]

In sales, commerce and economics, a customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product or an idea – obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration.

[/block]

 

When challenged, the person argued in circles for a while before falling back to a claim of being “buried in semantics” and “worn out on the topic” (they later apologized for the whole sub-thread, which leads me to suspect that in this case someone wasn’t thinking too clearly when they posted. It happens to the best of us. But the Wikipedia definition is still dreadful).

 

Starting with the Merriam-Webster definition of customer, you get “one who purchases a commodity or service”. Which covers everything needed – one who purchases implies both the exchange of currency (as opposed to barter which in its purest form is a two-way trade relationship in which both parties are suppliers and both are customers) and the ability to choose both whether to purchase and what to purchase. Since the commodity or service isn’t being pulled out of thin air, that implies that there is a supplier who receives the money the customer users to make the purchase.

 

The Wikipedia definition starts to fall apart before it gets halfway through: first, the customer does not have to receive whatever is purchased. When you buy a gift, you don’t receive the gift: it goes to whoever you’re giving it to. That gift might be physically in your hands in transit, but more often than not these days, you will never see it – but you are still the customer. For that matter, you could argue over whether insurance involves receiving something, since the actual purchase in this case is a promise of reimbursement – which need not be to the customer – if some bad thing happens, not the reimbursement itself.

 

That’s not the worst part of the definition, though. Consider “obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration.” Leaving aside the questionable grammar of this part of the sentence, it’s constructed in a way that makes a thief or mugger the customer of their victim. After all, they obtain goods or services from a supplier. A valuable consideration (the supplier’s life not being threatened) is exchanged. In the same way, being blackmailed into bending over for the nice landlord  and having your rent excused after is in fact purchasing another month’s rental.

 

Okay, you could say these are barter exchanges, but neither are actually legal, and neither involves the free choice of both parties, something that’s implied to be present in the simpler definition.

 

This is why semantics do actually matter (also, incidentally, why it’s a good thing to think twice and post once or not at all. Getting hot on the enter key can lead to posting things that don’t mean what you think they mean). It’s a little like the semantics of “Let’s eat Grandma!” and “Let’s eat, Grandma!” – what’s in the gaps can mean as much or more than what’s actually present.

 

As to who is the customer in any situation – it’s whoever or whatever is paying for the thing. In the case of public schools, the customer is whichever entity funds the school. If you’re not paying tuition fees, you aren’t the customer. If you’re paying at one remove, the intermediary is the customer, not you. You are the intermediary’s customer – if you have a choice not to pay. If you don’t have a choice, you’re not a customer, you’re part of the production process.

No, not collective, group, or much of anything.

This is a post written in haste.  Last night in the middle of the night, I felt myself coming back to myself.

I don’t know how else to describe it.  I just woke up and thought “Oh, I’m normal now” and then I turned in bed and went back to sleep.

This has happened before, usually after prolonged illness.  This time it surprised me, because I wasn’t aware I’d been off long.  Oh, sure, the short prednisone course.  It was good to feel my heart settling without racing, and my thoughts not feeling like a caged squirrel on meth.

Then I realized I’ve been slightly “off” since I collapsed in the shower, (in  December.  Go figure.)  Well, more than slightly, considering my oxygen was low enough I was getting incapacitating headaches, and that walking on the treadmill made me get asthma attacks, so I couldn’t breathe and thought I’d die.

The problem of having the sort of auto-immune that reacts to stress is that you have the sort of auto-immune that feeds on itself.  Once we entered the magnificent never-land of doctors and MRIs and such interesting stuff, my stress level climbed, and ramped up the auto-immune.

So, what are you doing, Sarah, other than taking Xanax?  Well, I’m not taking Xanax.  Seriously, when decongestants and artificial sweeteners can do bad things to my ability to write, the last thing you want me to do is take mood-altering drugs.  Kate Paulk writes with those, heaven knows how and more power to her.

I have a long term slow-release inhaler for the asthma, and at some point, when this book is in (Please, G-d, today) I will cast about for a pulmonologist as I’m apparently doing something called “hyperinflating” which might spell long term trouble.  And I have — casts eyes heavenward — bought yoga books.  I never wanted to do yoga, mostly because I was born in 1962, not 1952.  But I did it, almost incidentally (long story) the year after Robert was born and it not only helped physically, it seemed to serve as a de-stressor.  Also once the book is in (I hate being late and I’m VERY late and that adds to my stress)  I am going to establish a routine, because I like routines and they help with my stress.  NOT rigid routine, as such, but one of “I get up at this time” and “I work on this” and “then on this.”  I’m also going to establish fun stuff every day, even if it’s only one hour.  “Do something for yourself every day” — which will stop me snatching bits of reading around the edges and feeling guilty. The “hour a day for me” will to be fair probably be mostly a long walk, weather permitting, because that with an audio book is really good for my mood.

I’m also — heaven help me — going NO carb for a couple of weeks and seeing where that goes, because I can’t even stand to see myself in the mirror right now.  And I’m sure it does my body no good.  The long term inhaler has a tendency to make one gain weight anyway. (Yes, I know about having to have fat when you go no carb.)

That’s my plan for the future and to prevent this happening again.  I can’t control relatives dying, relatives in the hospital, the necessity to travel, or the kids worrying me.  (They’ll worry me their whole lives, but right now we’re trying to fire them off and that’s insane stress.  I mean they’re in the last year or two of their training — for younger son it depends on academic scheduling, which is crazy for three engineering degrees — and we’re trying to figure out what we need to do to have them be independent and on their own. In a really crappy jobs’ market too.) I can’t even control D’Artagnan cat chewing through his foot and the vet suspecting bone cancer (It’s not.  Idiot cat stepped on something and got an infection, and…)

What I can control is creating spaces of calm and destressing for me. I did this when the kids were little.  I called it “mini vacations”which were sometimes only fifteen minutes with a book and a cup of coffee.  I lost the knack in the last few tumultuous years, but I have to re-learn it.

And meanwhile, I’ve come back to myself.  It always fascinates me that we don’t know how far off our normal we are, till we achieve normal again and go “Oh.  I remember that.”

My thyroid treatment seems to be stable, I’m done with prednisone, and I have a long-term treatment for asthma.  Yeah, I also have a cold, so I might not be quite normal-normal, but I’ll take the end of racing heart (Pred) hot flashes that were like a preview of hell (pred), constant brain fog for years (thyroid) and headaches that made me feel I was dying (asthma) as a good thing.

Sorry.  I always thought older people talking about their health was tedious, and here I am doing it on my blog.  BUT I have a relationship with you guys and with other people who have legitimate reason to expect things from me, like blog posts, books, er… mailing the long overdue subscription stuff (I swear.) Finishing other books, like Rogue Magic and Witch’s Daughter and the mysteries.  And I think you have a right to know I’m taking steps to become as close to myself as I can and keep myself there.  The world being unaccountable, I’m not PROMISING to stay well, just that I’ve realized how difficult this is (like piloting a boat in high winds) and I’m taking steps to try to be as good as I can about it now.

So I’m going to pop some vitamin c and finish the book now, and then I’m going to sit down and establish a schedule.  I’ve already decided I’ll send Larry a chapter of Guardian a day, because I don’t want to get too far ahead, before he goes “Oh, Sarah, you got x and y and z wrong.”  That is the morning.  In the afternoon I’ll probably do indie stuff and my websites and things.

Somewhere there there must be time for a walk with husband.  And I’d REALLY like to take a day a week off, in which I’m not cleaning house.  In fact, I’m starting to believe I shouldn’t clean house at all, since dust is very bad for me.  BUT that will wait delivering some of these books to Baen, and getting a cleaning lady.  (Has to.)  Until then, I’ll just take an extra destressing day, or at least an afternoon.

Anyway, the good news is I’m not attempting to die anymore.  I’m not even slightly off.  Sure, I have a cold, but that’s not important.  I’m myself again. Which means I should be able to work, at least for a while.  And if I can hack how this works, maybe I can get in a pattern where I can work most of the time.

Sure, it would be good to have a body that’s not trying to kill me, but you can’t have everything.  Where would you put it?  Who would dust it? (As my friend Becky used to say.)

And now I go work, still startled at the sudden “oh, now I’m myself again” feeling.  I don’t know who I was before, but tired and very ill is part of the answer.

I’m back.  And I want to stay here.

 

 News and Announcement From Sarah

The good news, at least for me, is that I took the last dose of Prednisone this morning.  Well, at least last for the foreseeable future.  However since my doctor doesn’t believe in tapering, the next couple of days MIGHT be rough.  All the same, glad to be done with this.  Large portions of the last few days have been devoted to trying to get my brain from jumping all over. I might have added three books to the TBW cue, too.

Announcement: I don’t know if it was the pred, but kind of doubt it, as I have had this problem before, and Dan has had this problem while trying to help me: You know how you guys ask me if I can do this or that and I say “I’d love to, but WordPress is not letting me?”  Because of this site being hosted by wordpress (which is great as it has survived three attempts at hacking that took other sites down in the same wave, one because of some uncomfortable stuff about the publishing industry, who, unable to hack us, just kept denouncing this and MGC as malware [some of you might remember that], one quite personal by a crazy person who decided he was having a blog war with me, while I was busy with something else, and one recently in a “let’s hack blogs that defended Milo” spree) it limits what links it can have.  Took me forever to figure out how to link zazzle.  Patreon is a no go (I need to redesign mine, anyway, to give away commensurate compensation.  Health getting no worse than this — yes, I’m used to skating at the edge of disaster; done it for 54 years, it’s dropping into the well of hell that stops me — look for something around summer.

One of the things this site won’t work with is Mailchimp (or other mail list [UPDATE: FOR EMAILS.  SORRY NOT TO EXPLAIN, BUT IT NEVER OCCURRED TO ME ANYONE WOULD THINK I WANTED TO MAIL OUT A PHYSICAL NEWSLETTER] programs, really.)  I can establish them, I just can’t create a link that will work here.  In fact, on my last attempt, I found that I already had something like three widget links, none of which worked. It reminded me of the last house when five years after my failure to establish a rose garden, I tried again and kept running into the sad remains of previous attempts which I’d forgotten.

There is a way to fix it, sort of, by bouncing it off another site (what I did with zazzle) but until this book (delayed by stupid prednisone) is in I don’t have time to design other sites (or redo this one and MGC which desperately NEED it.)

Until then I’m collecting whoever wants to be in the mailing list (which will, AT MOST, probably send out two newsletters a month, if it’s an exceptional month, with lots of sales and releases, but which MOST LIKELY will be lucky to have one a month, because I’m still me, and will forget to give news even to my mailing list manager.  It will probably also have personal stuff that doesn’t go on my blog, stories behind the books, maybe deleted chapters.  We’ll see.) by asking that if you want in, you send an email to the following address, with your name, email, and a clear statement that you want these mailings.  Needless to say it won’t be sold or shared (though I reserve the right to promo ONE friend’s book now and then if I wish to.) For those looking to send stupid/spam messages to the address, don’t strain.  The list will be culled by my newsletter manager, so even if you send the usual and amiable threats, I won’t ever see them.  Also, frankly, you’re not that original.  Though some of you are amusingly a-grammatical and delusional.sarahsmailinglist at gmail dot com

 Pomp and Promo by Free Range Oyster

Amanda S. Green

Dagger of Elanna

Sword of the Gods Book 2

Plots form, betrayals are planned and war nears.

Cait Hawkener has come to accept she might never remember her life before that terrible morning almost two years ago when she woke in the slavers’ camp. That life is now behind her, thanks to Fallon Mevarel and the Order of Arelion. Now a member of the Order, Cait has pledged her life to making sure no one else falls victim as she did.

But danger once more grows, not only for Cait but to those she calls friends. Evil no longer hides in the shadows and conspirators grow bold as they move against the Order and those who look to it for protection. When Cait accepts the call to go to the aid of one of the Order’s allies, she does not know she is walking into the middle of conspiracy and betrayal, the roots of which might help answer some of the questions about her own past.

Anthology

Freedom’s Light

From the members and associates of the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance (CLFA) comes Freedom’s Light, a collection of short fiction that celebrates the human yearning for liberty. These stories will extol the value of human rights and the sacrifices of those who defend those rights. This collection features works from a wide variety of genres and a diverse set of authors, including Hugo Award nominee Brad R. Torgersen and 2016 Dragon Award winner Nick Cole. Freedom’s Light will entertain us and elevate the humanity we all share.

Nitay Arbel

Winter Into Spring: A Romance Novella

Veronica “Ronnie” Zielinski, a librarian in the Chicago suburbs, has always dreamed of writing but never dared pursue her dream since the needs of others have always seemed to come first… until one winter, when a mysterious new library patron opens her eyes and changes her life, with some help from the romantic sci-fi classic “Komarr” by Lois McMaster Bujold…

Allene R. Lowrey

Advent of Ruin

The Qaehl Cycle Book 1

An Age ends in blood and darkness…

For untold generations, the peoples of the Qaehl have prospered—trading and warring as they expanded across the great desert. Mighty city-states rise unassailable above the sands, centers of commerce in a great web of humanity. Messengers and nomads, tradesmen and bandits, cross the burning wastes with each rising of the sun.

A change is coming. Strange creatures have been sighted in the deep desert. Rumors whisper of horrors begotten out of legend. But there is yet hope: a brave courier, an innocent young dancer, a compassionate warrior – each holding a fragment of the truth, each seeking the future. Each adrift in the desert, trying to survive the advent of ruin.

Mary Catelli

Madeleine and the Mists

Enchanted pools, shadowy dragons, wolves that spring from the mists and vanish into them again, paths that are longer, or shorter, than they should be, given where they went… the Misty Hills were filled with marvels. Madeleine still left the hills, years ago, to marry against her father’s will. If her husband’s family is less than welcoming, she still is glad she married him, and they have a son, two years old. But her husband’s overlord has fallen afoul of the king. And all his men fall with him, including her husband. She sets out, to seek the queen and try to bypass the king – and the Misty Hills. Some things are not so easily evaded.

A Diabolical Bargain

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry. When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives – but all the evidence points to his having made the deal. Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

Bernadette Durbin

Minstrel

When Lydia flees an attempt on her life, her only thought is to get to her brother in the far-off capital. Rebellion in the land forces her to disguise herself, and when she is hired on as minstrel to the new king, William, she has to learn all she can, and quickly, so that she can unravel the treachery at the heart of the failed rebellion before her identity is revealed. Much to her amazement, along the way she becomes advisor to the king… and his friend, should she learn to accept it.

Winsome Sunday Vignettes- by Luke, ‘Nother Mike and Mary Catelli

Coyote Gravity – by Christopher M. Chupik

 

 

You know the moment. Wile E. Coyote (Super-Genius) has ordered his high-tech equipment from Acme and is busy creating his elaborate trap which will catch the Roadrunner. But while he’s doing this, the Roadrunner sneaks up behind him and beep-beeps loudly, startling Coyote right off the cliff he’s standing on. For a moment the Coyote hangs suspended in the air. Then he looks down. Gravity reasserts itself with a vengeance and he plummets helplessly earthwards, hitting the ground with a puff of dust.

The modern Left is having that moment right now.

The 2016 Election was supposed to be the triumphant of the as-yet-unmade Hillary Clinton biopic, where the heroine defeats the designated woman-hating he-man villain and claims her rightful place as the First Female POTUS . . .

And then there’s what actually happened.

Now we’ve got witches casting anti-Trump spells, minor celebrities chanting like cultists on street corners, journalists destroying what little remains of their credibility, all in a vain effort to undo what has been done.

Witchcraft seems strangely appropriate. For too long, the Left believed in a form of political sympathetic magic: if they controlled how the world was portrayed in news and fiction, they could reshape reality to their whims. Therefore, it came as a brutal shock to their system when the end result of all their years of plotting and manipulating was the rise of Donald Trump, the one result they absolutely did not want.

The spate of silly comparisons between Trump and the Mule from Asimov’s Foundation series are right in one respect. Trump is an element that our social planners did not foresee. Not because of mutant mind-powers, but because of an intellectual blindspot on the part of those who thought they were charting the destiny of the nation. He couldn’t possibly win, they thought. Our media propaganda machine is just too strong, they thought. Now they’re scrambling to figure out how they got it so completely wrong.

Or they should be. Instead, too many on the Left are doubling-down on the same kind of clueless snobbery and basket-full-of-deplorables rhetoric that cost them the election to begin with. The problem can’t be with them, oh no. It must The People who let them down. Instead of behaving like the good little Marxist automatons that they’re supposed to, they went and elected the Worst Candidate Ever, seeming embodiment of everything the Left despises capped off with an obvious toupee. Now after eight years of Hope and Change and post-racial utopias, it’s back to Amerikkka being the source of all evil in the world, with rich white male Christian Republicans at the root of it all.

A friend of mine was telling me that she thinks a big part of the problem is that modern technology has made it possible for people to get away with creating their own little realities. They can just prune their social media to keep other viewpoints from intruding on theirs. You could go for days and never hear anyone’s dissenting opinion, unless it’s been filtered through the biases of your political peers.

There are consequences to this. We’ve already seen violence inspired by the Left’s reckless “punching Nazis” rhetoric. Look, the National Socialist Party of Germany has been dead for decades. The only real Nazis left are a handful of aging war-criminals and some dumb thugs with shaved heads. Therefore, you’re likely not punching a literal fascist. You’re assaulting someone with different politics for the sole reason that they’re different. That’s what happens when your view of reality isn’t based on what’s real anymore.

You can’t simply reject reality and substitute your own. If anything that arguing with idiots online has taught me (apart from the fact that its usually a waste of time) is that I can’t insulate myself from other viewpoints. If I did, how could I argue effectively against them? As much as it sometimes annoys/pains/disgusts me, I have to know what the other side thinks. If that means wading through sub-clickbait drivel full of SJW buzzwords written by people who think that libertarians want to turn the world into the Trumpian Third Reich of Somalia, then that is the price I pay. And I pay it gladly.

So you can try to hide, if you choose. Unleash your blockbots on Twitter to keep your political opposites out of sight and out of mind. Pretend that everybody who disagrees with you is Literally Hitler. Chant your slogans and cast your spells.

But reality can’t be ignored forever. It has a gravity all its own. And sooner or later, you gotta look down.

There was a revolution in the hen house, and Felix the Red (Bantam) was in charge.

The hen house was how Felix thought about it, even though these days the ladies preferred to be called layers, after their occupation, and even though there was another rooster here, Gus.  This is what came from having inexperienced chicken breeders.  They should know that there was absolutely no way you could get away with two roosters in the same coup.  But they had thought since Felix was a bantam rooster, and Gus a gigantic speckled whatever the hell he was, but he was gigantic, they wouldn’t fight.

So far so good, but that was because Gus was dim.  Gus assumed that being so small Felix must be some kind of midget, sport, or undergrown juvenile, and looked at him quizzically, but didn’t try to kill him.  Of course, Felix tried to look as inoffensive as possible, and never let Gus catching him mounting a hen.

Some weeks ago Felix had found The Book and had spent days absorbing its significance.  Now, having got all the ladies… er… layers attention, he held it in front of him, covering most of his body.  It was a long and complex book.  Ten pages and full of drawings.

He opened to the front page, “This is what we come from ladies,” he said, as he showed a giant creature with feathers but also a muzzle and teeth, towering over puny humans.  “This is a t-rex, and he was the great, great, great grandad of us all.”

There were clucks of appreciation.  He flipped through the pages, showing a meteor hitting the Earth and the sad fall of the T-rex, and ending in a picture of a chicken.

“Yeah, and?” Gus said.  He was sullen, because he had found the book while scratching in the yard and failed to pay it any attention.  Felix understood the sting of being bested, and did his best not to smirk at Gus.  Partly because smirking at Gus would be difficult, when all he had was beady chicken eyes and a beak.

“So the genes are still there,” Felix said.  “What we need to do is start a breeding program, in which we breed for the strongest and the fastest, until we attain that size and power again.  Then we shall make the HUMANS lay eggs for us.”

The chickens clucked in appreciation, though Martha, who was getting past her laying years and was skeptical, muttered, “I don’t think that would work.”

“Of course it will.  It’s scientific.  My cousin, who was an experimental animal at a lab for many years,” Felix said.  “Told me the genes for teeth and claws are still in us, and gene manipulators have managed to make chicks be born with teeth and claws.  So a breeding program should bring the T-rex back.”

“Particularly if we breed for gene manipulators,” Martha said, and looked innocent when Felix looked at her.

“This can’t fail.  I say I will be in charge of the breeding schedule,” Felix said. “I will pick the fittest male, and he will breed with all you lad- Layers in rotation, and–”

Suddenly Gus was there, looming.  “That’s all right Felix.  We don’t need a breeding program.  Since we’re breeding for size, it’s obvious who the only qualified rooster is.”  Casually, he shoved Felix aside.  “Now, ladies, we don’t need a schedule.  I’ll get to all of you in turn.”

It was disgusting the way those silly hens clucked and cozied up to Gus.  “We must breed for intelligence, too,” Felix said.  “And ferocity.”

To prove his point, he aimed a peck at Gus’ leg but Martha was in the way, and didn’t at all take kindly to being pecked on the leg.  She chased Felix around the chicken coup, humiliatingly removing many of his brightest feathers in her fury.

All night long, Felix sat in the dark listening to the sounds of Gus having it on with every single chicken.

Life was not fair, and it should be.  There should be a place where Felix’s intelligence and ferocity were appreciated.  Tomorrow, at feeding time, he was going to fly the coup.

… Your guess is as good as mine.  Nope, when I sat down to write a blog this is the ONLY thing that would come out.  Possibly end of book-itis plus prednisone.  We’ve established that pred makes other people angry.  It just removes my internal governor.  And apparently most of what my governor controls is snark and silliness.  Today you get the silliness.

At any rate, you guys have always been able to have fun no matter what I give you.  So, have at it.

 

 

 

 

 

I am a cross-cultural being.  As such, I am weirdly aware of the various … gradations… of what is culture, what is biological and what is probably reinforced in biology by culture over the centuries.

Say you’re a woman in a country that puts women to death for being lippy.  Most indications would be that lippy women would get weeded out of the culture.  Except things are more complicated than that, when it comes to human tendencies and inclinations.  I.e. “It’s not that simple.”  You could be a suborn woman but know when to confine it to where it’s safe: say bullying your close relatives, particularly the female ones.  Or long-term-preference lippiness: zipping it until you’re the mother in law and have a couple or more daughters in law to be lippy to in safety.  The fact is if it were a single trait and immediately lethal, then there wouldn’t be women who talk back to judges and get killed for it, even now, after 14 centuries of selecting for meek.  BUT the fact is also that if you go to one of those countries, you see women putting up with things they never would in America.  Even “Strong” and “spirited” women.  Because culture is like that.  Culture sets parameters to what is even thinkable for each individual.  And then you express yourself within those patterns.  Sure you can go outside the parameters.  I did.  But even I only went slightly outside the patterns.  I think.  Well, however much I went outside was enough to make most people really uncomfortable around me.  And unless you’re planning to pack and leave, this is not a long-term survival strategy.

Then when you pack up and leave, and enter a new culture, you find you’re outside ALL the parameters.  Even in America, I sent so many mixed signals that I was often baffled by the image of me people had, until I had deconstructed further, and understood how my behavior (out of the norms for here) was being slotted into their mind’s image of the various US subcultures (more on that later) and the rest of the attributes were being filled in, even if they didn’t FIT with anything they actually saw.  It is cultural, too, to do this.  It saves time.  Say you see a young man in a suit with a Bible in hand walking down the street.  You’re going to work really hard to fit him into “missionary” even if the suit is powder blue, his shoes red, and he has three earrings.  Now, if he’s also carrying a boombox blaring hip-hop you might put him under “crazy” which is human for “can’t read signals.”

Anyway, I had to learn what signals I was giving, and also look past the signals other people gave, for “are they actually like that, or is this Portuguese prejudice?”  This was the early eighties.  I had to –among other things — realize not every guy who wore loud jewelry/clothes was gay (or low class, since in Portugal it could go either way.)  One of my fellow exchange students complained she couldn’t “read” how smart boys were because her US vocabulary wasn’t good enough to evaluate theirs.  And she couldn’t make a “picture” OF THEM.

Cultures are not innate.  Yes, I think we can all agree certain traits feed the culture/are fed by it.  And that remnants of a culture persist for a good long while, if you immigrate as a family or, as some 20th century ethnicities did, as a village.  For instance, it’s not coincidence (I think) that when I went to my kids’ departmental awards for chemistry in college, he was the only one who didn’t have a German last name.  (He does have German ancestry, but not in massive quantity and so far back it’s genetically moot.)  HOWEVER note that he got the departmental awards in Chemistry, a notoriously fussy, detail oriented discipline, while being half Portuguese, that is to say having a mother from a culture where “detail oriented” means “arrives at appointments within two hours of right time, and is within a mile of the aimed for objective.” (His father, OTOH, is a mathematician. But I’ll be honest, our family culture is more me than him, mostly because through most of our lives I stayed home with the kids.  Which means meals are “around this time” — with a four hour span — and doing the same thing every day never happens (now I am on daily meds, I have alarms on my phone to remind me.  Otherwise those never happen, either.).)

On the other hand, you can acculturate, a notoriously difficult, mind-bending process, which I underwent because I was not intending to become an hermit, and also because I wanted to fit in somewhere.  Having immigrated to a place I had A chance of succeeding, I undertook to fit in as much as I could.  Enough at least to be a normal person, even if an Odd one.  I will not detail that process here, because I’ve detailed it in another post. However, acculturation is very difficult.  It’s not impossible.  But it is internally difficult.

This is why liberals think it’s inhumane and “impossible” and “no one” should be forced to do it.  Which is why they espouse the salad bowl idea of culture, not the melting pot.

There is a big problem with that.  Well, several.  The end stage of the salad bowl is the Balkans which you might note are NOT a region known for its cutting edge science and culture. Mostly because they are spending all their time in daily fights, even when it’s not open war.

And that gets us back to culture.  Culture is, at its most basic level, a series of built in assumptions that allows people to use minimal effort in their daily lives, in evaluating people or situations.

Sure some of us who got the short end of the ethnic stick in terms of “We look like population most likely to be dangerous” have to make accommodations.  I’ve blogged here about having to pay double for son’s accommodations in a not so good part of the metro area, because son depending on lighting and how short his hair is can read Latin or black, or (mostly) a combination.  And depending on the areas in this part of Metro Denver, that can mean… the wrong side of a potential gang war, or just “suspect #1” which considering the hours medical students keep could get dicey.  So I paid extra, which annoyed me. No, it’s not fair, and it’s not a “good thing” but the world isn’t, and cultures can’t be.  Because most of evaluations are done at the gut level, and with instant looks.  And they are right most of the time for most people, or they’ll change.

I can’t for instance complain about older son being taken for dangerous, because when I was waiting for him to get home from middle school, so I could run to the post office (he hadn’t taken a key.  Those were the “losing my key once a week” years.) I stood in front of the house, on the sidewalk (we lived in downtown Colorado Springs) bag on shoulder.  And I saw this huge, over six feet tall guy, in a black leather jacket, with a two day beard growth, coming towards me.  I started to retreat inside the yard, when the guy said “Moooooom.”  Yep, older son.  But the scanning I didn’t even know I was doing had said “danger.”  (Later this happened again while walking down the street.  After that he started wearing a shirt and tie every day.)   This is not something you can control.  It’s at the back of the brain.

But in less dire/danger/whatever situations, we still do evaluations every day.  And the problem is how cultures “read” things and people can be completely different/opposite.  Part of our issue with Islamic culture is just that: cultural.  They’d never get in the pissing contest they are pushing, if they could read us accurately.  And arguably our liberals would never be pushing for peace and appeasement if they could read THEM accurately.

It’s one of those cultural traps which I have read about and which are tragic.

I think I’ve spoken before of the tragic encounter between Zulu and Boers in South Africa. Zulus were doing what they did that had won them Africa (they came from central Africa shortly before the whites arrived): Commit incredibly scary atrocities so the enemy runs/avoids combat/submits. The whites were in their head just another tribe. They could not understand the idea of a “tribe” that was starting to span the globe and which would self-identify as “tribe” in the face of a savage. So their savagery made the Europeans MORE determined to wipe them out.

We’re seeing something like that, again. Islamic CULTURES are big on bragging, exaggeration of force and intimidation of the enemy. This is functional in a desert where there’s always a lot of low-level “war.” Some atrocities, scare “the enemy” and you keep your patch, and you go on. they have a fine tuned ear for this. When the other tribe isn’t committing atrocities against YOU and particularly when they’re being appeasing/accommodating, you have them over a barrel. If you strike with showy force you can take their stuff and enslave them. NOTE most of the attacks are designed to be showy.

TWO things they don’t get: Our elites are appeasing because the elites think they’re SO powerful they can’t be touched and are oikophobes who hate their own people. AND our PEOPLE is getting pissed, really pissed.

You know the old joke? There are no Muslims in Star Trek because it’s set in the future.

This is unfortunately the likely outcome of the cultures meeting. At some point (already happening) the elites will have to fight or be replaced. And when we go to war, our power is incalculable compared to them. They think we exaggerate our strength, while, culturally, we underplay it. They don’t understand we’re holding back.

The result will be a horrific destruction of guilty and innocent alike and even people like me who look Arab/Mediterranean in a bad light will be at risk.

And they will be the victims of genocide. And the west will change for centuries, in ways I’m not sure I like.

What is irritating is seeing the beginning of this process, but I don’t know if we can stop it or change it. it would take cross cultural understanding that has NEVER happened in human history.

Now imagine that within a country.

We’re already there to an extent.  Because people live in bubbles/don’t assimilate and the industrial-entertainment complex has promoted the idea of groupings in which the individual is a widget for over fifty years, we’ve gotten used to evaluating each other on one characteristic.

Remember above, my mention of our elites?  They are the most insulated and blindest of all. They literally have no idea what their countrymen are like.  They attach to ONE characteristic and build their oikophobia on it.

These, mostly liberal, elites, have had their culture reinforced in college and by entertainment, and by living near other people who attended similar colleges.

I was reminded of this while reading a book yesterday the “liberal without knowing they are” characters (college professors with not a friend in fly over country) are about to visit a couple some miles off their big city.  The couple are “conservative” (which in this case seems to mean not liking CNN) and so they assume the couple is: Hyper religious, red necks, listen to country, close minded, etc.  It was like that whole “clinging to guns and religion” thing.  In fact the couple could be … well, libertarian.  Or even Libertarian.  The couple in fact could be like the people who hang out at the group blog I used to contribute to, Classical Values.  So Libertarian that we wondered if adult incest SHOULD be illegal as such, no matter how much it skived us.  It could be anything. BUT on “conservative” these people built up a straw man that might exist, but not very often and certainly not universally. BUT everything they learned/read/watched has trained them this is right.  Which is what cultures are like.  They are the short hand for “reading” other people and circumstances

And this, mind you, is an inability to read your OWN culture, that you were supposedly raised in.  Except there’s a whole culture now, outside it, created by “elite” institutions and people who are easily led. There is a counterculture too, created by people and people like me who attended the same colleges, etc, but didn’t buy the bullsh*t either because we’re naturally suspicious or because we had experiences that countered them.  I am routinely insulted by both sides.  Last week, it was someone ostensibly on the right, saying how you couldn’t trust anyone with a post-grad degree, who liked to live in cities and who had traveled, because they were all Marxist.  He’s obviously wrong about me, but is that the way to bet?  Yep, which is why the right-culture makes that evaluation.

Now throw in immigrants.  I was once both diverted and appalled by the account of an Arab immigrant (I think she wrote The God That Hates) who thought for years, after immigrating, that the neighbors were all spying on her.  She was evaluating the US from the perspective of an Arab who, had she had American neighbors in her native land, would have spied on them/distrusted them.  The things she read as threatening, etc, were funny as heck for those of us outside that mental loop.  (Kind of like me thinking my future and now late BIL was dangerous because he was a biker and kept his wallet on a chain.)  What finally broke through her illusion was realizing her neighbors thought she was… Mexican.

But most fits of total cultural blindness don’t break.  As I said above, I’m very worried about what is going on with Islam, because I’ve never seen two cultures resolve that kind of miss-communication without serious blood shed.  And in this case, they can’t perceive how outnumbered and out-armed they are.  They also can’t perceived that our elites aren’t our COUNTRIES (and part of that is our media.)  Or how close they’re running to the edge.

Cross cultural perception (and/or assimilation, if we’re talking immigrants) doesn’t happen on a mass scale unless it becomes completely NECESSARY for survival.

The bad news is that I don’t know if that CAN happen on the world stage.  I think those in Islam that GET us, and try to talk will get silenced by their own kind. Coming from a culture that’s more uniform/conformity enforcing than the US, but less than the Arab cultures, I know that if I were trying to warn Portuguese about this kind of misunderstanding, I’d just get called crazy and dismissed.

And on our side… Americans tend to have a happy-go-lucky idea that all humans are like them, until the illusion shatters.  And then we’re G-d’s own bastards, because when we’re shocked we react badly.  See WWI and WWII.

The good news is that nationally, partly because of the cr*p going on in the world stage, partly because technology is allowing the counter culture (the real counter culture.  US.) to have a voice, our elites and our um-assimilated immigrants are going to find themselves in one of those situations where assimilation is a life-preserving value.  Probably sooner than later.

This is good news, even if things get a little dicey for me and family (a little?  Yeah, because we ARE assimilated) for a little while, because it will stop the runaway balkanization of the country. It makes it more likely we survive. We, the US, but also by extension, we, the west.  Of which we might be the last best hope.

Even if the way there is strewn with fire and blood, and if what emerges on the other side is at least for a while more conformity-enforcing and less welcoming of individual foibles.

But when we’ve allowed leftist illusion to run rampant, there will be a price to pay.  I just hope it’s a butcher’s bill we can survive.