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Looking at that title, I want to emphasize that this is NOT  a post on Colorado which, in this fine morning, seems to be warm (yesterday we got to 70 though that might be urban isle effect, since it was not supposed to get that hot) and rather rosy.  Or at least the sky is rosy.

At six am I got up too late to see the city lights outside my sunroom as I had breakfast.  Or at least they were rather pale and wan.  It’s the beginning of summer, and in a way the beginning of a new phase in my life, though, as such things go, the change will be gradual and with turn backs for about two years.

As some of you know — at least those who offered him material support should I kick him out when he did a facebook post pretending my writing novels was a delusion and that I was a mental patient (it ended with “She really thinks she makes a living from her novels.  As if anyone did that.”) — younger son moved out at the end of November.  I wasn’t ready for it, but to ask a young man to go to school in the Springs from Denver is cruel and unusual.  Not unheard of, mind, some do it regularly.  But Marshall has “highway curse”TM and three out of four times he gets on the highway, he ends up behind a massive traffic jam. Beyond that, in addition to an overloaded and often eccentric schedule (the penalty of doing multiple engineer degrees at once) he runs a fencing club, is a member of a very active young engineers’ society and has a gaggle of friends, all of which meant mostly he made it home to sleep — maybe.

Anyway, I’m mostly accustomed to his not living here.  If by accustomed you include “not at all.”  He thinks I’m sappy and strange for going all the way to the springs for a hug.  Eh.  He’ll learn.

His older brother has been occupying our basement, in starving student fashion, but if everything goes well he starts doing clinical rotations in a couple of months, which mean that at least for portions of it (for other portions they’ll ship him across the state) he’ll need a pied a terre minutes from the school (which we aren’t, particularly not in city traffic.)

So it’s rather likely that in a couple of months older son will only be coming back for infrequent visits.  And then next year he’ll again be living here more or less full time, with periodic trips to the airport for — hopefully — interviews for internship.

All of which should leave me more time to write.  Maybe.  I rather enjoyed my month or so of empty nestdom (totally a word), before boys relocated here last summer.  However I suspect there will be a period of adjustment.

Among other things, I MUST get back to driving, an activity interrupted by “vision going awry” about five years ago.  Not quite sure how to get back on the road, as instruction — and being told I’m fine, except at parking, which frankly I knew — hasn’t helped conquer the subconscious fear shading to panic.  It’s not rational.  I’m hoping now it’s lighter I can hit the roads at six or before that and conquer the fear by sheer habit.  We’ll see. The reason I must do it is that right now I count on tyrannizing one or the other of the sons (one of them is susceptible to ambushing on FB pm and I know his afternoon off) and getting them to drive me to a museum or a lecture or wherever I want to go.  But in two years, everything going well, they probably won’t even be in-state, and it’s not fair to Dan for me to demand he take time off for my whims (even when he works from home.)  So in two years I either must be driving without fear (because otherwise I make excuses not to drive) OR we must have a lot of money for Uber.

Re: pursuit of the later: I had intended to put out a book a month starting last September.  Life intervened, as it has a tendency to.  The most disruptive intervention was collapsing in the shower early December, though the flu in January was a doozy in that for the first time in years it left me severely compromised enough to catch serial secondary infections, including the last one that gave me a week and a half severe headaches (only two days without them since, yesterday and the day before) and which attacks only severely immune-compromised patients.

So, yesterday being the first time I COULD clean in about a month, I’ve changed sheets, towels and wiped down every surface that COULD be wiped with bleach.  I also cleaned those that couldn’t, including deploying the dreaded carpet cleaner.  Hopefully this will keep us well enough to recover and resist the next infection.

All of this has affected my work, of course.  I delivered Darkship Revenge in late January (Now available in e-arc, come and get it while it’s e-arcky) and should have been done with the next book on my schedule — a collaboration with Kevin J. Anderson, taking place in a shared world and called Uncharted: Lewis and Clark in the Arcane Territories — a week or two later.  I had, as I thought, done all the research and was prepared.

The problem is that it’s a shared world and one that splits off earlier, and in which the American Revolution never happened.  This means many tiny things could not be the same, besides the main premiss (that magic returned.)  I keep running into things I need to check like “When was north America circumnavigated, and were they sure it went all the way to the pacific?”  (Kind of.) And other such issues.  And they’re not the type of issues where I can insert “research later here” because it affects major parts of the motivation.

Anyway, the headaches didn’t help either.  Turns out writing through a headache is extremely difficult. So February is done and I’m maybe halfway done with this.  It shall be done.  Should be today, but I’m shooting for this week.

Part of the reason it’s taking so long is that I’m very impatient to get to Guardian.  As a fan who writes fanfic in the MHI world, I’m having trouble staying out of it to fulfill my other obligations. I’m really hoping to start sending a chapter a day to Larry starting next week.  Which means this thing has to be put to bed.

I’ll also confess I’m having flashbacks to writing the Magical British Empire (Heart of light, etc) which are Magical travelogues, but I’m no longer that writer, so it’s a bit of a struggle to get back in that mind set. Which of course is why I’ve not edited or released those two books yet, under my own imprimatur.  That and because they were so tampered with it’s an intensive editing job.  Hopefully they’ll be up before summer.

Also up, the second one probably this next week, will be the Furniture Refinishing Mysteries.  Dipped, Stripped and Dead is already out, and A French Polished Murder is actually ready to go.  It’s just that I’d like to pace it, so that when I bring out the third it will only be a couple of weeks till I bring out A Well-Inlaid Death, the fourth, at present only half written.  (But these are short books.)

And then, once the collaborations are in, (or Guardian in the process of going in) I hope to start going through the many drawer-books (those that for some reason didn’t sell to traditional publishing, which for the space operas often included “space opera doesn’t sell.”  Ah.) and finishing/editing releasing them at as great a pace as I can manage, since the indie game is a game of volume.

I still intend to write a couple more books for Baen this year, maybe three, if it looks like they’ll be amenable to the Magical Legion (the foreign legion but extending through time and with magic.)   The couple of books, not under contract but continuation of a series, are Hacking the Storm, third book in the Earth Revolution subseries and Bowl of Red the fourth in the Shifter’s series.  Also for Baen and penciled in for late August this year is a book in the Black Tide universe but that will be a collaboration, so actually bringing it out depends on a lot of things.

All of this should be facilitated by its being just two of us int he house.  And the income should help with paying the final expenses for the boys’ schooling before they fly solo and (hopefully) laying in enough money we can fly to visit them when they move out of state.  We’ve agreed there’s absolutely no point us trying to move near them for ten years or so, when they’ll be of necessity somewhat mobile.  In ten years we’ll evaluate where they are and hopefully figure out how to be near them (which could be hard if they go to extreme ends of the country, but what’s life without a little challenge?)

Until then, the order of the day is to work as hard as I can, while the sun shines, or rather while health allows.

On the health it would really help if we didn’t catch stupid cr*p.  Oh, sure, it’s not as bad as it was before we moved here, but it’s still pretty idiotic to lose two months because of flu.  Of course, the fact older son wishes to decamp during his clinical rotations should help my health also, since he’s a good, sharing son and brings home the most interesting parts of his work, even now when his clinical work is only a day a week.  Without Victor the Vector here, it should be easier.

I will be doing a follow up on both the tumor in the brain, to determine whether mass effect requires rapid removal, and the demelination (sp) event, aka “the thingy int he brainy” which is the more worrisome of the two, but not unduly so given that I was hypothyroidal and untreated for 20 years give or take, resulting in the onset of hypothyroidal dementia (which is weirdly actually what stopped me almost completely for about 4 to 5 years.  Though the moving didn’t help.)  It is likely the demilianated areas are the result of that, and judging from improved memory and verbal facility, that they are also reversible.  We shall see.  I should have an MRI this month.

Among the welter of projects started, planned and waiting revision (seriously, this covers around 35 projects that will be done AT SOME TIME, some more pressing than others) should I write a fantasy version of the American revolution, you guys should remember it’s all Amanda Green’s fault, who insinuated the idea into my brain in a conversation yesterday, a feat in which she was aided by my stupid brain having been chain-reading the lives of the founders.

And now I’m going to stop wasting time and go work.

The state of the writer is guardedly optimistic but buried in a mountain of work, and with the sort of major life-changes ahead that are always a bit rocky to navigate.  Prayers, well wishes and crossed fingers appreciated.  I really don’t like having lost four to five years to my body not cooperating, and would like to get things done now.

Oh, suggestions for topics, both here and at Mad Genius Club (i.e. topics of a writerly and often instructional nature) much appreciated.

This is a quick throw away post.  I’m not dead, but I am very busy.  However, younger son pinged me on FB and said “Do the dems really think that the right to Healthcare INSURANCE really is a universal human right?  What part of unalienable and natural did they fail to get?”

I told him the left side of the isle DOES indeed believe so.

And hence, this post.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are the rights listed in the declaration of independence.  And they’re so listed because they’re the rights you have unless the government  takes them away from you.

But Sarah, you say, you’ll eventually die.  And you might end up so confined that you don’t have liberty.  And what about happiness.  You can pursue but you might not catch.

At which point I’m going to tell you that this is the lamest argument since pro-abortion people bring in that one in two pregnancies end in spontaneous miscarriage.  That’s comparing apples to kumquats and doesn’t make it any more “natural” or “right”  or whatever to abort the ones that remain.

In the same way, sure, you were born to die.  And you eventually will.  And sure, your liberty is constrained by the circumstances of your birth and might impair your happiness.  Like, for instance, having a functional body would dramatically contribute to my happiness.

But that doesn’t mean the government has the right to confine you, kill you or prevent you striving towards what you want.

Note the striving in that last one.

It just means that you should take reasonable care to keep them, and that if someone violates them in an illegal manner (murder, false arrest) they should be punished.

Note, btw, that you keeping those rights involves your striving towards them but does not require anyone to give them to you.  Because to have someone assure your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness by necessity means impairing another’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Cue the whining: but life needs food and shelter and health care. What if you don’t have those?  Shouldn’t a just society provide them?

What about liberty?  How free can you be when you spend nine to five at a job you hate?  Shouldn’t you just get whatever you need so you can be free?

What about the pursuit of happiness?  What if my happiness is creating mediocre art?  Shouldn’t others support me while I do it?

Um… what you see here is a difference between the American and the French revolutions.  The American revolution granted you life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness.  The French revolution granted you Equality, Fraternity and Liberty.  Whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.  What it mean in practice is that American liberties are hands off liberties.  “We won’t violate your rights to this, and you’re free to keep them if you can.  It is your right to strive to keep them, in other words.”  The French revolution guaranteed outcomes.  “You’ll be equal.  You’ll be free of all restraint.”  I have no idea how they planned to enforce fraternity, so I’m going to assume magic mushrooms or argot or something were involved.

The first one is attainable and it leads to freedom for individuals attaining what they can by their own efforts.  The second…  The second guarantees intrusive government any minute of the day into everyone’s life.   After all, HOW can you ensure everyone is equal, except by hobbling the ones who are faster in the race of life, expropriating anything anyone saves, and generally trying to turn humans into widgets.

And making sure everyone has free health care, means enslaving doctors.  Let me tell you, as the mother of a medical student that the US has quite possibly the craziest and definitely the most expensive health care training in the world.  All the idiots who think that doctors should be paid like teachers fail to get the difference between 4 years undergrad study for teachers, and 4 years undergrad study, plus often these days to make it into medschool, a Master’s (which fortunately son didn’t need.)  Plus four years post graduate training at exorbitant cost in both money and effort, plus seven to ten years internship paid at close to minimum wage.  Now take someone who has devoted ten to fourteen years of his life to becoming a healthcare provider, and pay him like a teacher.  Not only will you see them quitting in droves, you’ll see suicides skyrocket more than they already are among that group.  (And yes, other countries have this.  In Portugal at least MDs get 7 years, total.  Straight out highschool.  I know other countries are closer to Portugal than the US. And still they don’t get paid like teachers.)

Then comes the ridiculous, like, you know, you can’t live without food, so farmers should be enslaved to producing food for you.

Oh, yeah, and your happiness requires companionship, so we get to providing you with someone to give you that and sex, right?

But, you say, the dems actually only want people to have INSURANCE, not health care.

Right.  And let me tell you, the problems with that start with the fact that there aren’t enough doctors to cover everyone who will go to the doctor for a hangnail or because they are bored.  No?  Well, I’m not sure what the arrangement is, but apparently Obamacare covers ambulance rides for seniors COMPLETELY.  This means that when son was a scribe in ER, they spent half the night with the regulars.  I.e. elderly people (the neighborhood we used to live in was more than 50% Catholic and Jewish grandmothers, very useful to keep an eye on the kids) who were bored and called with symptoms requiring an ambulance right then, when what they actually needed was company, a cup of hot chocolate and a doughnut.

Everything the government gives for free introduces that kind of perverse incentive, and we really don’t have enough doctors for people who think they should go to the doctor for every sneeze.

The other stuff, the serious stuff, was already being taken care of.  Sure, it often means crushing bills for survivors.  But there are arrangements already in place for people who can’t pay.  I’ve seen people with cancer and no insurance get top flight treatment.  This is done by the hospitals, because doctors take treating people seriously. It’s why they put up with the bullshit needed to become doctors.  I know the type: not just my son but a lot of my fans would jeopardize their own lives to save others’.  I don’t get it (I’m one of those people who has a horror of illness, even my own.)  BUT it’s who they are. Just like I can’t help making up stories.  Healing the sick is something they were born to do. (Okay, not all of them, but a good number of them.)

So giving everyone insurance is just… well a way to enslave the tax payers to make sure people have a “Right” that not only isn’t natural but might be counterproductive or at least meaningless.  I mean, you can have a right to insurance all you want to.  But no one can make you magically find someone to treat you, when every doctor is busy with seniors taking a joyride to ER.

And yet you’ll be taking money for it from people who could use it to… oh, make sure their sons or daughters can become doctors.  You’ll be taking money from people who could afford to eat better with it, and not get sick.

You’ll be impoverishing others for a cosmetic “gain.”

This is what’s known as ignoring the gift and playing with the wrapper.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are gifts you bring with you at birth.  Unequal, sure, but we’re all unequal from the moment of birth. You have unique abilities and talents.  There is no way to make you equal to everyone else, except by reducing each person’s ability and capacity.  Because you can’t INCREASE someone’s capacity.  You can’t for instance make me into a ravishing skinny blond.  (Trust me, even without the blond part.  I’ve tried.)  OTOH you can’t give other people my relative facility with language.  Even very smart people.  Trust me, again, I tried.  I used to teach the stuff.

Meanwhile, ENSURING that you have Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness is something no one can do.  There is no way to do it without enslaving someone else to provide you with these things.  Even if what you’re taking is 1/4 of a person’s life, that’s still slavery.  You do not have the right to take another person’s life, liberty or pursuit of happiness to pursue your own.  You can, sure, bargain for those, or pay for those, but not take them.  It has to be a mutually agreed contract, not an imposition by the state.

People who want everything provided for them are not at war with oppression.  They’re at war with reality.

We’re not like onto angels, who can get everything by thinking about it.  The benevolence of governments dictating you must have this or that — free health care, free food, free lodgings — is always a threat of force against those they force to provide you with those.

Which is why such pursuits always end in blood and mass graves, just like the French revolution.

Because humans are apes, and imperfect.  We are born with different wants, different needs, different talents, different weaknesses.

You want to give according to your ability and receive according to your talents?  Good.  This is the path of happiness.  But don’t expect the government or even those nearest or dearest to you to know what those abilities and needs are.  Hell, you might not know them yourself, when you start out.  A lot of the stammering on the road to maturity is that we have no clue who we are and what we can do, or what we NEED yet.

Humans are striving humans.  It is in strife and struggle you find yourself.  If you eliminate struggle from life, you’ve eliminated all reason to live.  This is why aristocrats and people in socialist regimes lose interest in life.

Things that are against reality can’t go on.  What can’t go on stops.

Meanwhile, striving to keep your natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is happiness in itself and will make you strong and productive.

Go out there and strive.

Yesterday someone asked about my post “upside down” and why cheap data processing and storing and communication would affect our social structure.

What I answered with was an example from my field and I’m going to repeat it here, and then we’re going to explore some other things.

My field is,  of course, the area I know best how this worked.

If I am to believe memoirs, the field was fully taken over by the left in the forties.  This would explain the rather gratuitous (and quite mind-twistingly bizarre) occasional political-diatribe paragraphs in things like Agatha Christie.

I once read a biography of a post WWII publisher, and it was obvious as the author of the bio was talking about “socially conscious publishing” or some such rot that it was when “we’ll publish what is good for you and you’ll like it.”

And people did.  I mean, by and large.  After all, what else was there?  Even the classics had to be re-bought and the same houses published them and they cost money.  And besides, you know, these books were getting very good reviews in the newspapers, were bought to make movies from, and precisely who wanted to go against the tide of what everyone knew was the best current literature?

The blanket of left-coverage and of presenting left ideas as sane was fairly pervasive.  It extended to the press, academia, publishing, art and any kind of mass communications.  The result was that the overton window made communism simply a fast and extreme way of pushing what EVERYONE KNEW were good ideas.  Ideas like central planning, or “progressive” education that minimized love of country and trust in technocratic, multinational elites (“our best men.”) and an idea of social life that ditched all traditional restraint, and an equality of the sexes that seemed to maximize women’s utility as corporate gears.

This “dream” was being busily sold in the science fiction of the period, too.  At some point a few years ago, an older colleague reminded me of it when she said in the future we were all supposed to be eating at state owned cafeterias, weren’t we?  In fact, from such books as I remember (Heinlein only glanced off it) all of family life had been off loaded to “public” functions, which if you’ve ever read The Communist Manifesto was right up there.  The individual had to become an indistinguishable/genderless cog of the all pervasive state.  It was this efficiency that allowed the planned economy to outstrip all of this disorganized capitalism.  And we knew this for sure because soviet press told us how the Happy People of Brutopia er the Soviet Union had no poverty and no unemployment, and hell, we saw them all happy at May Day parades.  It was just that they had used brutal methods to achieve that paradise too quickly, and we were going to do it slowly, with brainwashing, I mean social engineering, so that when that perfect future arrived where the state was your mother and your father, and you were used to the greater glory of the state while being made perfectly happy and taken care of, (from YOU according to your ability and to YOU according to your needs, which the perfect, benevolent state knew, anyway) you’d greet it with joy.  After all it was perfectly logical and all your sources of information told you so.

Perhaps I saw this more clearly because I grew up in Europe, where they took less care to disguise what they were doing.  Everyone KNEW the future was socialist.  Everyone knew that was the best thing.  And everyone knew the US was a failed, rump experiment in individualism which succeeded only in fostering the inequalities and decadence of Rome, and which, like Rome, would be swallowed up any day now.

It became obvious when I first came to America that both major parties believed this too.  It was just a difference in how fast they wanted to get there.  Which is why Ronald Reagan was a shock to their system.  Even previous Republican presidents had ASSUMED it was a matter of speed, not of destination.

And Reagan was where the blanket thrown over everyone’s minds started to unravel.  Not as fast as it should, mind.  I mean in any rational plot, in any novel written about this, the revelation of how spectacularly unpleasant, poor and just ridiculous (300 baby shoes was the same as 300 shoes of assorted sizes to supply the population) the USSR was would have put paid to the idea that communism was better.  In any world with a modicum of decency “communist” would be a greater insult than nazi, because one killed over a hundred million and the other only seven? twelve million?  Mind you both are mind bogglingly awful and both should be insults because they’re both short hand to “power hungry mass murderer” but communist is orders of magnitude worse.  (And no, as my younger self tried to exculpate this nonsense “at least the communists had good intentions” doesn’t wash it.  The Nazis did too.  By their lights. According to the best scientific theory of the time.  Don’t believe me?  Read the Green Man from Greypeck, where the man laments that eugenics weren’t followed and so the race isn’t fit to survive.  And this btw was based on ideas from H. G. Wells.  And the author was not a communist, or a Nazi, just a middle class Englishman.  (In case you wonder, yes, it used to be worse.  Which is the whole point of this essay.  Mostly.))

Societies don’t work that way.  The people who’d long marched to the top of all mass communications weren’t about to roll over and admit they’d devoted their lives to a lie.  (We’re still seeing the rump action of this contingent in politics.  McCain for instance, is typical of the “of course the all-pervasive state is better, but we have to herd the peasants there slowly.”  So is Vichy Mitchy.)  So we slowly, after frantic re-grouping, got the narrative that socialism and communism aren’t all bad.  It’s just that the wrong people were in charge.  And after all, Russia, such a backward country to try this in.  The fact the ridiculous ideology only “took” in backward countries is an interesting narrative.  Hungary, if I remember, rivaled Germany and Austria, for culture and art, and hey, look at what communism did to half of Germany.  Even the other half, plunged deep in socialism, like all of Europe, is better off.  But hey, it is only a matter of “the right people” and America will do this better because it’s such a wealthy country.

Anyway, so the narrative persisted, and still persists in every possible quarter.

But here’s the thing.  I’m not sure what we’ll call the beginning of the unraveling was all Reagan. Sure it was him when he arranged the breakup of the Bell system.  When I was in the states in 80/81, calling the next city a couple of times cost $50.  I know, because I had a boyfriend in the next city and didn’t realize the charges, so I had to reimburse my host parents.  This meant friendships over say fifty miles were difficult, unless you were willing to write each other letters everyday.

Everyone lamenting the decline of letter writing reminds me a bit of ladies my grandmother’s age lamenting the demise of long skirts.  Sure, they were lovely for dressing up on occasion, but anyone who’s worn costume knows how difficult it makes everyday life: climbing a bus, going to the bathroom, going up stairs, etc.  Sure, fun every once in a while — like letters — but cumbersome to live with.

Four years later, my husband courted me by phone, with a call every week, and yeah, okay, it cost a few hundred dollars, but it was not as prohibitive as four years before.  Not by a long shot.  Like a ten times larger long shot.

I’ve come to the conclusion that 1984 was written at the only time it could be written, and the only time it could work was that time with a small increase in tech.

Very pervasive, intrusive regimes require being able to not just see everything, but also to control everything people see.

The real world of 1984 would be different.  There would always be black market tech to make it look you were perfectly innocent, and there would be underground markets (many) and there would be underground news sources too.  There always were. BUT in terms of what was acceptable behavior, and what people thought was sane, 1984 was about right, so long as they controlled all forms of communication.

Let’s remember that part of what brought down the soviet union was… typewriters.  Just the ability to make fast copies of something and disseminate it widely opened cracks in the totalitarian information they were being fed.

By the mid eighties when I came over, not only was phone way cheaper, but fax machines were all the rage.  When I had an honest job, office workers would fax each other cartoons and jokes.  We also talked a lot across offices.  I remember it seemed magical to me to talk to my counterpart at our company’s branch in Columbus Ohio and ask how the weather was.  Wow, instant information across the country, and no intermediates.  Wow.

Since then it’s been a break neck race in… ah, disintermediation of information and getting out of central gatekeepers.  And from information to politics and the arts.

The thing is, most people aren’t even aware of changing their political opinions, for the reason most people never think about politics.  I do, but that’s because I was bitten by politics when I was a wee little girl, and I carry the scars.

Most people aren’t aware of their opinion changing.  It’s more that when we all got all our info from daily news, we’d have been subjected to a barrage of news telling us how successful and wonderful Obama was and how prosperous the country.  And we’d have believe it.  Even the WSJ joined in the chorus through the first summer of recovery at least.  Probably because they thought the chorus was, of course, going to be successful and they didn’t want to sound crazy.

But it never took.  Even eight years ago, right after the election, it never took. They managed to sell their shiny package of Obama with talk of women fainting and how smart he was, but that was it.  People could talk to aunt Mimmi in Miami and uncle Hank in Cleveland and they knew that they too were struggling.  So it never took.  In moments “Summer of recovery” became a joke.

Two thousand and twelve was a triumph of fraud plus putting a cone of silence on the Republican candidate.  As uninspiring/soft as Romney was, a lot of us knew by then that we needed anyone but Obama.  But things like the massive rally in Denver where more than ten times the people in the stadium were turned away and every road in CO was stopped up with people trying to get to the rally were cone-of-silenced.

Also for the smarter people, the ones who of course, still trusted gatekeepers (it takes more than smarts to go against pervasive narrative.  It takes being an odd.  The people who want to fit in and be popular, the “nice kids” even when adults, just buy what seems to be “everyone says”) there was a narrative that the measures Obama had taken were JUST about to pay off.  This made perfect sense to those (mal) educated in our institutions, because the measures Obama had taken had been sold to them as “sensible” and “logical.”

Unfortunately the media didn’t realize they were blowing their last powder charge.  Well, unfortunately for them, but good for the nation.

By the time 16 came around, they redoubled their efforts.  In a way they had to, because the harp–  Hillary is such a d*mn uninspiring candidate.  Though at least the democrats in charge understood she was saner than crazy uncle Bernie, a Jewish man in his sixties who declared himself a “National Socialist” without a qualm.

But because they knew they had a problem on their hands, they pushed the least likely to win Republican candidate possible, and didn’t cone of silence him.  D*mn it all, the things he said were so stupid and repulsive.  Surely the people would laugh at him.

And then election night came.  You had to have a heart of stone not to laugh like an hyena.

I’ve seen this before.  I’ve been watching it slo-mo in publishing over the last ten years or so from “We control all the books you get to see, and the least repulsive/political will sell the most, but don’t worry, because we’re starting to take over even romance.”  and “The lower sales are just the result of people reading less, but look, they still love our soft porn, feminist romances!  Look how they sell!”  Or “They still love our social justice fantasies/mysteries/science fiction, look how they sell.”

They sold because they were the only thing available.  The dogs might hate the food, but if the alternative was starving, they’d make an attempt.  (And, btw, for some of us games and movies aren’t an option.  Hell, for a lot of us, we still need print even if we game and watch movies.)

But the communications/data revolution progressed.  BTW we are a fairly unusual country.  The same tech is available other countries, but it didn’t go into the same channels.  I think it’s because, bad as we are, we are less socialist than even other Western countries.  People trust “the proper authorities” less.

My mother says Portugal badly needs news blogs.  And it does.  But if there is something like instapundit there, I haven’t seen it. Which is in itself interesting, since in the seventies there were all sorts of unauthorized radio stations, which you’d think were more work.

I know newspapers are struggling because I have friends who work in journalism.  Or used to.  Or are riding that puppy to the ground in a race between the industry’s bankruptcy and retirement age.

I have my ideas about traditional publishing.  I think one house in my field will survive.  And no cookies for which house.  BUT I also think even that is going to get really fraught.  Because I won’t lie to you, with no promo except my efforts on this blog, Witchfinder made me double the money my traditional books make me.  Now, that’s at me getting 75% of the take, of course, but still.  No effort.  No publicity.  And money does speak loudly.

Almost every indie I know who is professional and puts out at least two books a year, without interruption, is making a living.  When I was in their position, I was making maybe 10k a year and, depending on the vagaries of payments, sometimes 5k, which was good for kid’s shoes and one or two vacations, but not a material input.

Right now the money is in indie.  But more importantly, indie is giving the lie to the things we were told by the blanket control of the gatekeepers.  Turns out that no, space opera isn’t dead.  In fact it’s pushed by some indies as a “get rich quick” scheme.  Turns out mil sf isn’t dead (something Baen had proven, but the blanket-media never mentioned Baen) turns out cozies aren’t dead (the very SILLY Dipped, Stripped and Dead has made me, on re-release more than I made in royalties from it.)

Turns out they lied to us.  Which is what cheap communications and data has been telling us for years.  As someone put it in comments “hottest summer ever” is hard to sell when friends and acquaintances around the world are talking about how late and cold spring was.  And how summer is just meh.

Most people don’t think about politics, or the veracity of gatekeepers, and the Gell-Man amnesia (where you know the media is up its own behind on something you know personally then believe it on other things) is a thing.

But there is this Portuguese proverb “Soft water and hard stone, if the water hits long enough it will make a hole.”  The soft water started as a drip, drip, drip.  The number of occasions the gatekeepers were wrong, or bizarrely wrong, accumulated.  There followed a running flow through the hole, and right now it’s a torrent.

How long did it take for “fake news” to be turned around?

And why did they think they could pull it off?  Because they’ve got away with it for so long. Because it had to work.  It had to.

Just like publishing houses, feeding off the remnants of people who need to be “real” writers are getting them really cheap, and doing nothing for them, because it’s always worked.

I hope they enjoy the glut, because this going on is not the way to bet.  And I hope the media enjoys the few “fake news” it can get in, because not only is that not the way to bet, but it loses them credibility the more they try.

Selling socialism as paradise only works when you control all the means of pushing it at people, from education to mass reporting.

The blanket only works while it’s all pervasive, because even those that see the holes won’t say anything.  After all, everyone knows the world is dark, and warm and smells vaguely of sweat.

Once the blanket is pulled off, you can’t get it on again, because people run in all directions, to all of the known world.

(I wish Sweden luck with their denial of rape-by-refugee, and their newly discovered agreement with China that their citizens forays on the internet must be limited so they don’t hear of such shocking things.  People have cell phones.  Right now they might be afraid to voice unpopular opinions, but the drip drip drip has begun.  It has begun EVERYWHERE.)

Sure the world outside the blanket is confusing, and some of our brethren will willingly crawl back to be smothered.  But they’re, increasingly, a minority.

They’ll never blanket us again.  And the future isn’t with them.

*Nitay had sent me this post before I did yesterday’s, and he thought it had been rendered obsolete by yesterday’s post.  I think rather, it is a good complementary post, showing I’m not air-dreaming. The symptoms are there.*

The Great Realignment  by Nitay Arbel

“Masgramondou” shared a most interesting article: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/02/theresa-mays-new-third-way/ about Theresa May in the UK, about whom he is about to post on his blog https://ombreolivier.liberty.me

[UPDATE: https://ombreolivier.liberty.me/the-darling-trumps-of-may/ ]

In its very opening sentence, the article strikes a chord that resonates much more broadly than the UK:

Forget left and right — the new divide in politics is between nationalists and globalists. Donald Trump’s[..] nationalist rhetoric on everything from trade to global security enabled him to flip traditionally Democratic, blue-collar states and so to defeat that personification of the post-war global order, Hillary Clinton.

The presidential election in France is being fought on these lines, too. Marine Le Pen is the nationalist candidate, a hybrid of the hard right and the far left. She talks of quitting the European single currency and of bringing immigration down to 10,000 a year, while cursing international capitalism with an almost socialist fervour. Her likely second round opponent, the ex-finance minister Emmanuel Macron […] is the globalist candidate: a former […] banker who believes in a eurozone budget, the Schengen borderless area and the need for France to deregulate.

Yes, we are seeing this across the Western world. A “Great Realignment” of politics is taking place: the dividing line runs no longer between liberals and conservatives in the narrow sense, but between transnational elitism and what I would call patriotic populism. Between the Davoisie and the rest of the ‘credentialed gentry’ https://spectator.org/39326_americas-ruling-class-and-perils-revolution/  on the one hand, and the “barely making do”

members of the middle and working classes on the other hand. [in Theresa May’s words, the “Just About Managing”, or Jams] Between the “Brahmandarin caste” https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2016/12/17/trump-and-the-rage-of-the-brahmandarins/  and the rest of us.

We can indeed see this “Great Realignment” create unexpected bedfellows. Thus the cri de coeur of our Beautiful but Evil Space Mistress https://accordingtohoyt.com/2017/02/22/if-they-take-milo-down-youre-next/ was applauded by outspoken social conservatives whom you would not expect to have any common cause with a flamboyantly homosexual “grandmaster troll” like Milo Yioannopoulos. (In fact, I personally have never seen Milo as a conservative at all — rather as a cultural libertarian who is as sick and tired of PC and SJW insanity.) It is a sight to see fundamentalist Christians, semi-Orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics, agnostics, and neo-pagans united in his support. What all these supporters have in common is that, wherever else they may differ, they are firmly on the populist side of the map.

Is that because we’re all dumb hicks? Nope. Several of us, for instance, have multiple advanced degrees, IQs deep in Mensa territory, or both.

Is it because we’re all provincial American chauvinists? I hate to break it to you, but some of us have lived in several countries and are fluent in multiple foreign languages.

Is it because we’re all mindless Trump admirers? Heck no. Our contingent runs the entire gamut from NeverTrumpers to MAGA hat wearers, with many of us highly ambivalent about Trump, or having been driven from NeverTrumper to reluctant Trump supporter by spiraling descent into insanity of his opponents. I could quit my day job if I got a dollar for every variation on this meme I’ve seen:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/?s=YOU+WANT+MORE+TRUMP%3F+THIS+IS+HOW+YOU+GET+MORE+TRUMP

In fact, the irresponsible hyperbole and blatant intellectual dishonesty are worrisome to anyone who believes the POTUS should be kept honest, because they discredit any measured criticism if/when he will engage in overreach.

Of course, it is no surprise that the sexually libertine wing of the tranzi Left would be all too happy to take down a renegade who dares step off the plantation — these are, after all, the people who think nothing of calling a black conservative an Uncle Tom, to accuse a Jew of being a white nationalist, to attribute homophobia to an openly homosexual author, or to describe a libertarian Latina as a misogynist white Mormon male. Or, for that matter, to blame a shooting massacre at a gay nightclub, perpetrated by an ISIS supporter, on Christian homophobia. (Some “reality-based community”.) More interesting is how, in the case of a character like Milo, they find themselves strange bedfellow of some establishment conservatives. (The case of “crunchy cons” like Rod Dreher is different again, in that they have declaredly given up all hope of reforming the culture and are looking inward, seeking shelter in isolated communities of the like-minded.)

What these strange bedfellows of the “Ctrl-Left” and the “Ctrl-Right” have in common is that they are on the same side of the new divide: the one separating transnationalist elitists from patriotic populists. As much as the tranzi left may disagree with, say, a Bret Stephens (an editor I have generally admired in the past), or the National Review crowd, they have certain commonalities with them. (Mind you, this goes only so far. I was pleasantly surprised to read this thoughtful article by David French http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445185/trump-less-authoritarian-obama ) This has nothing to do with education or ethnic background: for instance, I’m a coreligionist of Stephens and actually have more academic credentials than he does, but a working-class childhood followed by decades of immersion in the Brahmandarin class appear to have awakened me to the self-centeredness and bubble vision of the latter.

I grew up in Europe, seeing (Euro-style) liberalism as a haven for freedom of thought. I have meanwhile gotten inured to the US group calling itself “liberal” being less tolerant of diversity of opinion (which is much more fundamental than skin-deep “fauxversity”) than most conservatives and especially libertarians. Now we’re being treated to the spectacle that dyed-in-the-wool social conservatives are in some ways more tolerant of actual people with lifestyles they consider sinful, than the Left and the establishment Right.

Somehow I find this spectacle unexpectedly… bracing.

Postscript: it is hard not to see parallels with the slain Dutch journalist and academic turned politician, Pim Fortuyn. He too was flamboyantly homosexual, deliberately spoke in provocative and at times shocking tones, fiercely criticized multiculturalism, and appealed to patriotism and the preservation of Dutch freedoms. And while his left-wing enemies tried to paint him as an extreme rightist (and actual far-rightists unsuccessfully tried to coopt him), his actual views were an amalgam of ideas from the traditional left-wing and right-wing, with a libertarian streak mixed in. Sounds familiar?

*I started this post about 24h ago, and then life pulled me away, and I got home too late to write.  I tried to finish it last night, but got lost in the weeds.  This morning I started discussing it with son over breakfast, and I THINK I figured out what the stops would be for people born and raised here, and what I have to address.  So, once more, with feeling.*

After the last week — sweet slithering mother of soycakes and tofu, that was SOME week — I was in a private group, where one of my friends said that our problem right now is not left against right; it’s not political correctness against free thinkers; it’s not even SJWs against Libertarians.  No.  It is the elites against everyone else and, of course, vice versa.

He said we’re in the middle of a great populist spasm.

This is true… ish.

What I mean is, I know the idea we have in our minds of a populist revolution.  But that is not … exactly what we’re facing.  It’s possible that a lot of the so called populist spasms of the past weren’t that, precisely, either, because these spasms seem to work out with incredibly regularity at moments similar to what we’re facing now.

Because of movies and books, and the inevitable Marxist gloss on anything created/taught in the last century, a lot of us think a revolution comes about when the pressure on the people being oppressed is so strong that they rise come against the oppressor, and assert the will of the people.

This is not jut crazy, it is fricking delusional.  Like most ideas Marx had and disseminated to gullible minds, it would have benefited a little bit from JUST a little exposure to the real world.

If this were the case, the Soviet Union would not have lasted, and Cuba and for that matter North Korea would be a thing of history.  As would be Venezuela for that matter.  And before you tell me “no, because those are populist movements” think very carefully, because otherwise I’ll send you to the corner without books to contemplate your sins.  This is precisely what the left thinks, that those governments are populist and “the will of the people” and that’s why no matter how horrible the suffering they haven’t been overturned.

This is not how this works.  This  is not how any of this works.

Revolution happens not when things are at their direst and when the boot of the oppressor is solidly on the neck of the people, but when conditions ease up, when things are better, when the boot lifts enough to allow movement.

Sure, the wheat harvest in France (rolls eyes.)  Pull the other one, it plays the Marseillaise.  The revolution happened not because people were starving, however bad things were momentarily, but because  things were changing really fast, and the reformist, soft leader (wanna compare him to his grandfather) was viewed as weak.

The same can be said of just about any revolution.  Horrible tyrants don’t get toppled.  Their softer, kinder successors do.

It’s enough to make you despair of the human race.  But that’s when you have to lift the hood of history and take a good look at the engine beneath.

I’m not a materialist.  Most of you know that.  But it is important not to forget the material (which bizarrely Marx by and large did, so inspired was he by his prophecy of class struggle and revolution) in your examination of human history.

Man might not be an ape, but it’s not an angel, either.  Somewhere between, there is a creature that dreams and projects, superimposed on the body of a tinkering ape.

If man craved that fruit of the tree of knowledge, it was probably because humans have a really hard time with paradise.  No matter how nice the Savannah, how plentiful the food, there would be some Odd ape who went “What if we could?” And then he made some sparks and started fire and–

The problem is this: humans crave leadership but proper leadership requires that the leader know what the heck is going on.  Leaders work, if they’re carefully trained to lead (one of the reasons Heinlein advocated breeding and raising rulers, or at least jokingly advocated it) and in our complex technocratic society, more so, but what if what they’re learning actually renders them more unfit to lead, because they can’t see conditions as they are right now?

Louis XVI paid the price of the being a leader trained for an agrarian, feudal society who was in fact installed over an industrial, fluid (in relation to the past) society.  The revolution of France was not started nor spawned by the people, the poorest of the poor who were suffering, but by the bourgeois who instigated it, because they had no place, no role, no traditional expectations.  They had to create their own place and the old order was in the way.

The same could be said for the American revolution, though that’s complicated by things like “distance” and the US still being largely rural.  Our war to adapt to the industrial revolution, our equivalent of France’s thirsty Madame la Guillotine was the civil war.  It adapted our form of government to a more centralized one, in tune with the times we were entering: times of centralized production, of vast industrial scales, and yes, of mass production, of standardized sizes and types of product.  All of this needed centralized decisions, highways, possibly at times federal grants for truly big projects in terms of energy supply or mass communication.  The road to get there was strewn with corpses and soaked in blood.

We are in such a period now.  People underestimate how big a change extremely cheap data storage and processing and communication at a distance have made.

No, mass production for some things is not going away, any more than agriculture went away.  But it is going to shrink, products are going to become more customizable.  And one size fits all government will be almost impossible, the further we get into that change.

I’ve talked about this, and the necessity to build under, build around, build over to take the weight of the structures that aren’t working.

But it wasn’t until this weekend and the conversations about last week that I GOT it.  It’s not just government.  If it were just government, it would be easy.  But the same stick hitting politics is hitting EVERYTHING from Hollywood to your local grocery store.  A lot of it is still being done the way it was ten years ago, sure, but that is probably incompetent, delusional, and quite likely hurting the business.

I know the establishment of publishing is mostly running around with its head in a sack, insisting it’s still night.  Their extended modified hangouts when from “Amazon is just a bookstore” to “Ebooks are inconvenient and the readers are expensive, it will never catch on” to “Ebooks are a thing of the past” (!) to now “those puny little indies aren’t threatening us, it must be people are reading less.  Red staters are so teh dumb.”

But they’re not alone.  The leadership of CHURCHES seems out of touch with their parishioners.  Do not even get me started on the corporate leaders, either, as they have no clue how to change  to fit where we are now, much less where we’re going.

This means that the leaders appear incompetent.  Really incompetent.  Crowds smell fear, like any wild animal.  The other things crowds do is notice failure, and the collapse and insanity of the press makes it hard for them to hide it.

Eight years ago people were sensing something was wrong.  Hiring Obama was part of this.  He was the dream-boat of the Marxists and everyone had been educated to believe Marxism (even when they weren’t told the name) was the way of the future.  I mean, it’s right there on the tin “progressive.”  It must be progress.  He had the education, he didn’t have experience in government but the media burned its last shreds of credibility to convince everyone he was a deep thinker.

Only, like managers being hired now on impeccable credentials, he was trained to administer the government of the thirties, at most.  Not the chaotic economy and intricate specializations of the oughts.

More and more people are failing like he did — by the book — and being declared successes, btw, by the similarly indoctrinated, while leaving the thing they were leading and administered in pieces behind them.

It is not their fault in a way.  Modern society requires training, but the training they’re being given, besides being infected with Marxist fantasies (this is similar to what held Catholic countries back from the industrial revolution.  All their training was religious, so it was hard to see past the ideal to the pragmatic) the techniques they’re being taught are fifty to a hundred years out of date.

Even people graduated now are already wrong, and about to become more wrong, because change keeps coming.

If you look around in the fields you know, the feeling is always that the worst possible bozos are in charge.

This is not true.  It’s easier to adapt when you don’t carry the responsibility for others, and for picking the right change for others.

But what it means in practical fact is that it’s fueling a vast tide of “populism”.  We can see that the people who are supposedly smarter and in charge really don’t get US much less the changes in what is happening around them.  They’re not taking things in account, they’re lost.  They don’t know what to do.

Let’s hope this tide is not a blood tide, though it will be, in some places, at some times.  It always is.  Man is a fighting ape.

But if you are a manager, or have the ear of one, think through things.  How everything is affected, what is likely to come next.  Then try to influence things to keep stuff going, with minimal shocks.

Because the confused and shell-shocked elites have started fighting back.  This is most obvious after the elections, and in politics, but it’s happening at all levels.  And because they don’t know why things are failing, they’re starting to get paranoid. There’s going to be a lot of deplatforming and politics of destruction ahead.  And that leads very easily to politics of physical destruction.

Be prepared.  Think about the future as well as you can.  This is difficult, on account of the future hasn’t happened yet, and there’s things you’ll not take in account and things that will go wrong.  Sure.  But you’re plenty smart enough to keep a step or two ahead of destructive change.  Most of us are.

Most industries/institutions/polities won’t get this.  You must try to save what you can from the wreckage, but be aware, too, that we’re about to go upside down.

Be ready for it.  Be prepared.  Don’t lose your way.  We’re going to need all the people who can think through this, plus some, to avoid a blood letting that will make the French Revolution or the American Civil war look like tea with the parish ladies.

Keep your head, keep your sanity.  Be not afraid.

But mostly written and, I think, interesting.

Sorry, was finishing page proofs for Baen because I was late and then typesetter was late (due to flu in both cases) and thing needs to go to print.

And now I must run to an unavoidable appointment, and even I can’t type half a blog post in five minutes.

I will be back.

Almost done with antibiotic for secondary infection following the flu, and it DID work, but oh, heck, that thing about severe headaches being a side effect is absolutely true. I’ve been having the kind of blinding headache that makes you long for a good trepanning.  So, be patient with me when I’m a little slower than normal.

UPDATE: Yah, no.  That took longer than I expected.  Post tomorrow.

Itsy Bitsy Promo Post by Freerange Oyster

Elise Hyatt (one of Sarah A. Hoyt’s pen names.)

Dipped, Stripped and Dead

Daring Finds Book 1

When she was six, Dyce Dare wanted to be a ballerina, but she couldn’t stop tripping over her own feet. Then she wanted to be a lion tamer, but Fluffy, the cat, would not obey her. Which is why at the age of twenty nine she’s dumpster diving, kind of. She’s looking for furniture to keep her refinishing business going, because she would someday like to feed herself and her young son something better than pancakes.

Unfortunately, as has come to be her expectation, things go disastrously wrong. She finds a half melted corpse in a dumpster. This will force her to do what she never wanted to do: solve a crime.

Dorothy Grant

Scaling The Rim

When Annika Danilova arrived at the edge of the colony’s crater to install a weather station, she knew the mission had been sabotaged from the start. The powers that be sent the wrong people, underequipped, and antagonized their supporting sometimes-allies. The mission was already slated for unmarked graves and an excuse for war…

But they hadn’t counted on Annika allying with the support staff, or the sheer determination of their leader, Captain Restin, to accomplish the mission. Together, they will overcome killing weather above and traitors within to fight for the control of the planet itself!

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.

Bonus Horrendous Self Promo by Sarah

To date this is the best book I’ve written.

Darkship Revenge E-arc.

Myth Matched – A Blast from the past post from December 2015

Every culture has myths. For instance, I grew up in a culture where I knew (not thought, mind you, knew) that if you took more than one aspirin at once, you’d die.

Proven?  You don’t need proven.  Everyone knew this.  Why would you test something that could kill you?

So my first week in the states, when I told my host mother I had a headache and she said “just take a couple of aspirin” I thought she was trying to kill me.  She had to show me the instructions on the bottle.

This trivial incident was my first exposure to the idea that “what everybody knows” can be wrong.

Progressive culture in the US, having been the dominant culture in media/entertainment and the news for the last 100 years at least (not the dominant culture in the country, necessarily, but the dominant culture in the classes that controlled these intellectual products and which were consolidated/made uniform by the “mass” aspects of communication since at least the end of the nineteenth century) has lacked challenges to its internal myths, which means it ended up with as many unfounded “everybody knows” as a small village in Portugal where aspirin was still a miracle drug and a little scary.

I normally don’t pay attention to what Bernie Sanders says, and pay Hillary only the attention necessary to roll my eyes at the things that come flying out of her mouth.  (Like, for instance, that Republicans don’t know that terrorists use guns to kill people.  Oh, lady, we know, that’s why we want guns of our own to defend ourselves, because the terrorists, you know, aren’t likely to obey gun regulations.)

But yesterday Mike Rowe went after Bernie Sanders.

At first I just read it wishing that popcorn didn’t have so many carbs.  Then I went back and read the tweet that inspired Mike’s take down. Here it is in its full glory:

“At the end of the day, providing a path to go to college is a helluva lot cheaper than putting people on a path to jail.”

Mike got seriously upset — as he should — at the notion that not going to college is the same as being condemned to becoming a criminal, and he went after it, as well as after the fact that absent a few professions (and the only reason my kids are in college is because they’re aiming for two of those professions) college really doesn’t help.  (Make an informal count in your head.  How many of your friends with degrees work at anything even vaguely related to their degree?  And don’t tell me “but they learned to learn” because this is another thing altogether and you might have confused cause and effect.)

But there’s more than that in that tweet, there are at least three warring myths, all of them so central to what liberalism once was that the current progressives aren’t even aware most of them have been disproven by the real world tm.  These are things “everyone knows” and why would you question something everyone knows?

The thing is outside their world, where no one gives a good goddamn about their myths, these things are disproven, and most people only don’t realize it because of the entertainment news industrial complex repeating them so often and acting like they’re proven.

The first and most basic myth, and one of which, once upon a time, I was an ardent proponent, is that education is transformative.  This goes along with the myth that man is infinitely perfectible.

The liberal project — back when liberal meant classical liberal — as undertaken by our ancestors, hinged on the idea that education would transform everyone into individual thinkers and philosophers like themselves.  It would make them more moral too and improve them to be onto like angels.

They had a point of sorts, in their time.  Most of the people who weren’t learning weren’t learning because they were underfed, too busy making a living, sick with a million little illnesses that made them not function well intellectually.

I saw this in action in the village, which is why I was an ardent believer in this myth.  Giving people education truly uplifts them if the people giving the education also provide a meal and clothes.

The thing is, it’s one of those things that has huge gains up front.  “Teach everyone to read” makes a huge difference.  And yes, can make for a more moral society, if the education has a moral component.  This is important as “education” is not a neutral value.  It can be adaptive or maladaptive to reality.

However just about every country in the world that isn’t in dire crisis or doesn’t belong to a religion that forbids secular education has free education — yes, even where I came from, though often the kids were taken out of fourth grade to work in factories.  This was strictly speaking illegal, but you could always find a doctor to sign a paper saying your kid was educable mentally retarded and couldn’t learn any more “abstract stuff” but could learn to be a factory worker) — at least through 9th grade and often through 12th.

I’ll pause here to point out that when I was little, someone with a 9th grade education was accorded the respect here given to people with Masters Degrees now.  They were learned and performed work of the mind, and didn’t dirty their hands.  This I’d guess is true for most of history.  The level of a 9th degree education allows you enough to explore and learn just about everything that doesn’t require hands on training or specialized tutoring only administrated by professionals.  (I’ll not specify which trades because it varies per learner.  I can’t learn languages outside a classroom, at least a virtual one.  I also have trouble with art by myself.  I’d guess there’s the same problem with most things requiring labs to learn.)

So, are people made more moral?  Snort giggle.  Hardly.  The causes for this are complex and a lot of it has to do with how wealthy our society is.  Wealthy people have always had more time to get funny on morality.  Other parts include a morally neutral or worse education (when the purpose of education is to deconstruct the culture that made more people wealthy and healthy than any other culture in history, while praising cultures that mutilate women, kill gays and enslave children, it is worse.)

Are people individual little philosopher kings, for all these years of education thrown at them?

I read something in a book I can no longer remember the title of, when I was researching Shakespeare.  The number of people who are fluent enough readers to read for pleasure in our day is the same as in Shakespeare’s day.  When they didn’t have free education, much less 12 years of it.

The idea that if you gave everyone enough food and time and free schooling they’d all become erudite and thinkers can be disproved by a stroll through your local Welfare hub.  Go on, I dare you, go down and start a little discussion on Kantian philosophy.

But it’s an idea that remains a myth on the left which has lost all other classical liberal ideals (like, you know, individual freedom) but holds fast onto this idea that education will somehow make a progressive out of everyone.  (Patently ridiculous as they’ve been indoctrinating several generations now, and it still won’t take the way they want.  That cold slap of reality counteracts it.  Which is why they advocate more cowbell.)

The other myth in that statement — and the only way to make sense out of that linkage between education and prison — is actually several linked myths:

1- that people turn to crime when they’re poor  (an insult to every poor but honest person ever.)

2- that without a college education you’ll be poor (Mike Rowe ably disposed of this one in the linked article.)

3- that if the government won’t pay for something it’s unobtainable because there is no private charity and also people can’t lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

All of these are nonsense.  Sometimes I think people like Bernie Sanders watch Les Miserables (a piece of propaganda even when it was written) and say “it’s true, it’s all true” and then see the world through that lens ever since.

Being poor doesn’t lead to crime.  Wealthy people can and do commit crimes, not all of them white collar (in one of the stunning contradictions that would make their heads explode if they paused and thought about it, progressives also assume that all rich people are criminals, since economics is a fixed pie (giggle-snort) and to have more you have taken “more than your fair share.)

Lack of a college education doesn’t make you poor.  I’ve yet to meet a poor, competent plumber. And I sometimes regret I didn’t learn more carpentry from grandad, instead of going to college.  We knew someone who built cabinets by grandad’s method (think all manual tools) in reproduction of colonial furniture.  One of those cabinets which he could build in 3 months, sold for what my husband was making at the time, as a computer programmer. I’m fairly sure anyone who knows one of those trades really well is raking it in.  We’ve become a nation of do-it-yourselvers not because we enjoy it, or want to save money but because finding a competent tradesmen takes longer than just doing the best you can.  (Been there, done that, have spackle on my t-shirt.)

People have managed to be educated beyond their relatives and parents without any government intervention (in fact until government stuck its nose and quotas in, there were a lot of merit scholarships.  My husband did his college with them and a part-time job.)

Once you realize those myths ARE myths, Bernie’s prescription to end crime makes about as much sense as saying something like “Hit yourselves on the head with rubber mallets, increase the production of wheat.”

In fact, someone came trolling a share of this post trying desperately to keep the two things linked by yelling that it was a shame we spent more on jails than education.

Again, with the what?  Nothing our government does makes much sense, but this makes as much sense as “Abolish the helium reserve. Subsidize canneries.”

What we’ve found since the classical liberal times when we thought education would uplift everyone is that education and proper nutrition and proper civic instruction does uplift some people.  Yeah, there are a percentage of people out there who could/would do much better with a little help.  I don’t know about you, but I make it a point, on my own, to identify such people and such situations and intervene and help when I can.

But you can lead a student to school; you can imprison him/her in it for 8 hours a day for 12 years: what you can’t do is make them learn.

The same person who was whining about that horrible discrepancy between jail spending and education spending said that you know, most criminals stop learning in grade school.  I think he meant they dropped out.  This is probably true, although I’d bet the reverse, that if you dropped out of grade school you’re likely to be a criminal isn’t true.  It’s also insulting to claim so.  For this he advised more cowbell… er I mean more free education.

The sad fact is that we’ve continuously not only dumbed down education, but tried to make it “fun” (listen, if you’re learning a language, there’s no way to make it fun.  To be fluent, you need to start by memorizing vocabulary and studying grammatical structures.  Neither of those is fun.  Useful. Needed.  Not fun.) to the point that a High School diploma means nothing, which is why the new push to put everyone to college, as if more of the same will fix the problems.

There are people who don’t learn because they have no interest in learning.  Some of them might be very good at things — engines. Carpentry — that would baffle phds who are not put together that way.  There are people who don’t learn because our educational system, barring active teaching at home after class, is put together NOT to teach but to keep the masses from rebelling in their pseudo-scholastic prisons.

Lack of book learning doesn’t make anyone a criminal.  It doesn’t make them poor either.  I think my dad’s dad had a third grade (might be fourth) education.  Like younger son when he was younger, he had problems with verbal expression, and issues writing a legible hand.  In those days this meant “stupid” or at least book stupid, so his caring parents apprenticed him as a carpenter.  He supported his family in (for the village — grin) a more than middle class lifestyle, never that I know so much as stole a stamp, and raised sons and daughter who did better than him, and grandchildren who — weirdly — all have college educations, almost all of them (except me) in useful fields that actually make things or cure people.

The left is so wrapped up in their myths that they don’t understand “subsidize more education.  You’ll need fewer prisons” makes about as much sense as “eat more fiber. Control garden pests.” Worse, they legislate based on these myths, without the slightest qualm.  And then are shocked and posit bizarre theories (the GOP is holding back solar energy! The oil lobby! Eleventy!) for why it didn’t work.

And this is why our monoculture of progressivism hurts every field in which it is in fact a monoculture: education, the arts, entertainment, politics.

This is why diversity of thought is important. And why the progressives’ crazy attempts to shut down opinions they don’t agree with are … well… crazy.

In the safe space everyone believes as you do.  And that’s the problem.  Human beings aren’t built to be safe.

It is in the rubbing of thought against thought, in the contest of vision against vision that the truly ludicrous is eliminated and that, at least, we avoid the worst errors.

It is in not being locked up in a tiny intellectual village that real progress is made.  Not the “progressive” of progressives, which fills mass graves with those humans who weren’t infinitely perfectible, but the progress that fills bellies, raises humans above poverty and makes it possible to aspire to the stars.

Real progress comes from strife and work.

Which is why they’re acting more and more like isolated, illiterate villagers in a land where myth is more important than evidence.

And why in the end we win, they lose.

*No, this is not going to become all Milo, all the time.  In fact this is probably the last post DIRECTLY about it unless something more happens.  It’s just that the owner of this blog and some of her friends have also been victims of “high tech lynching.”  We know the signs and we say: the character destroyers won’t claim another victim without our fighting against them.  Because we know the marks of this game and where it ends – SAH.*

Je Suis Milo, Yanno? by Kate Paulk

The last few days have seen the unedifying spectacle of holier than thou conservative types gleefully joining in the “break Milo” gang-bang, presumably in the belief that because his lifestyle is immoral anything bad that happens to him is something he deserved in some way. I hope for their sake that they fail.

Because people like them doing everything from looking the other way from the thick smoke rising from crematoriums near the “work camps” with the skeletal workers to joining in the “kick ‘em in the goolies while they’re down” party are the people evil regimes like the Nazis and the Communists need to stay in power. As long as the self-styled good people will look the other way when the fuckers target someone, they can consolidate their hold until they’ve got control of all the levers of power – the media, education, bureaucracy, government…

Let me be absolutely clear here. The stickybeaked moralists who are claiming that Milo Yiannopoulos somehow brought this shitstorm on himself because his lifestyle squicks them are endorsing lying to eliminate a person. They are endorsing show trials and guilt by association and all the evils of every fucking Communist regime ever. They are endorsing the tactics both the Soviets and the Nazis used to crush dissenting voices and enemies of the regime. In short, they are the Good Jews who kept quiet in the hope they would not be sent to the camps and wound up in Hell anyway. The Good Germans who never saw a thing. The Good Russians who knew nothing about the Gulag, Citizen, nothing at all.

When – as will happen if those of us who refuse to be intimidated fall – they face the firing squads or the Gulags or the death camps or the Holodomor, they will wonder why. Briefly. Then they will face the unenviable truth when they are asked, “Did you fight this evil?”

Because the answer to that question is that they did not fight. They helped. By refusing to tarnish their halo even a little, they opened the gates of Hell and welcomed Satan inside. They are the priest who passes the injured traveler for fear of becoming unclean, not the Samaritan who ignores the dislike, even hatred between his people and the traveler and helps the injured man. As such, they are the good intentions on the path to Hell.

And they disgust me. The air of sanctimonious righteousness, the condemnation of someone who doesn’t act quite the way they do, the fucking prissy wowsers who can’t stand that someone they disapprove of is being heard, is winning respect, and is doing a better job of fighting evil than they are…

The diseased flaccid dicks who created this piece of rancid shit to smear the man are at least openly evil. The tight-assed moralists standing back-to-back with the people who should be their worst enemy are just as eager to control everyone else as the openly statist fuckwit throwing metaphorical (and sometimes literal) turd grenades. They think because they call themselves “conservative” it makes them good and righteous and proper, and all the while they’re arm in arm with Satan – who is happier than a pig in mud.

If you are not condemning the use of lies and rumor to destroy someone – or even attempt to destroy someone – you are the Enemy of civilization. You are the orcs. The demons. The useful idiots.

I don’t care whether the target is a nice person or not. I don’t care if the target is the fucking Grand Poo-Bah of the KKK, the Big Wahoonie of the Black Panthers, or the fucking Biggest Bag of the Daeshbags. If you lie to destroy him, you are worse than he is. If you accept those lies, knowing that they are lies, because you disapprove of him, you are worse than he is.

The Soviet Union’s multi-generational plan to destroy the USA was to tear us apart from within by exploiting our differences and turning them into battle lines. If you are truly conservative and you care at all about Western civilization, the United States, or even looking at your festering vile mug in the mirror every morning, why in the fuck are you helping to destroy what you care about? Are you that much of a useless drongo?

Or are you just so sure you’re right that you think your shit is pure gold?

It’s not. It stinks. And so, oh righteous conservative, do you.

Of Ancient Plate Tectonics and Unknown Carbon Reservoirs

By Stephanie Osborn

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com

A couple of articles were recently brought to my attention by my particle physicist friend. One of them is a patently alarmist article in a UK newspaper. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4226566/Scientists-discover-massive-reservoir-greenhouse-gases.html) The other is the scientific article it purports to reference. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X16307543/#ec0040) [NOTE: this one is behind a purchase wall, but the abstract is available to read.] I won’t go into the whole contents of the articles; you can read those for yourself, or at least the abstract of one. The gist of it is, the UK newspaper is claiming that a recently-discovered deep-Earth structure and a possible ‘volatiles’ reservoir associated with it could create a catastrophically huge release of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

This brought on some brief email discussion, as not everyone has a strong background in some of these sciences, and I thought it might be good to explain some of the things being discussed in the articles.

Now, I don’t know how much the average person knows about seismology, but it’s one of the reasons I picked up an undergrad minor in geology and did some graduate subspecialty work in geology, as well. I grew up in an area of the country that regularly felt quakes from the New Madrid Fault Zone, which is a whole ‘nother article in itself — several, actually. I can do those at some point, if there is enough interest. Anyway.

Seismology is really a form of optics; the very same rules apply, since you are looking at wave propagation, reflection, and refraction. (Having just finished the Optics sequence in the Physics dept., when I got to seismology in my Geology studies, I was better and faster than the Geology majors, because the concepts were already very familiar to me. For that matter, I made use of the concepts in my racquetball course, too, and the coach couldn’t believe I’d never played the sport before. Hee!)

So there are various ‘types’ of seismic waves, which is really just another way of saying they are polarized differently. (The only kind of wave that seismology has that optics doesn’t is the longitudinally-polarized wave — aka the acoustic wave. And so if you’ve studied acoustics, you even already have THAT.) Now the interesting thing is that certain of these wave polarizations create differing effects on the ground surface, and the budding science of seismology therefore named them accordingly. (A ‘shear wave,’ which the article references, is a ‘transverse body wave’ — this means that the wave motion is perpendicular to the direction of motion, and it moves through the body of an object like the Earth via elasticity within the object. It was named ‘shear’ by geologists because it had a shearing effect upon structures when it arrived.)

However, just like in optics, when the medium changes, so does the refractive index. And just like in optics, the boundary between media creates a reflective surface, which in turn also generates additional polarized reflected waves. And this is what complicates the thing so much. But certain polarizations are easier to ‘read’ than others, and they can tell us a lot about the various strata, including what state of matter they are in — liquids tend not to transmit some of those waves at all because, once inside the melt, the waves usually experience total internal reflection, and thus you get a blank zone.

So we know when there is a blob of actual melt down there, because we get all reflections from it, and no refraction through it to speak of. If it’s partly molten, you can get some refraction, but it tends to generate ‘mushy’ surfaces, is maybe a way to put it.

Now, the Farallon Plate referenced by the articles is an ancient oceanic-floor tectonic plate under what has become the Pacific Ocean. There are a few remnants of it left that have not yet been subducted under the North and South American plates; they’re most notable in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where there are some triangular bits, now known as the Juan de Fuca Plate, and the adjacent Gorda Plate. Another notable remnant is the tongue-shaped plate (Cocos Plate) that forms the west coast of Central America, and the better-known Nazca Plate just off the western South American coast. In all cases, the principal direction of motion takes them east and under the continental plates in intensive subduction zones. (It’s worth noting that these are serious quake zones, capable of generating monster quakes and tsunamis, in some cases equivalent to the Boxing Day quake/tsunami combo in 2004.) You can find out more about it by plugging in ‘Farallon Plate’ to Wikipedia.

Now, it is also worth noting that there are volcanic and regular mountain ranges that run parallel to, and just inland of, the west coast from Alaska/Canada all the way down to the tip of South America, and it is this subduction of the Farallon Plate that is responsible for both types of ranges. Obviously the whole ‘big crunch’ thing is responsible for the standard mountain ranges, in various forms — when two plates slam together, buckling occurs, and mountains result. But what about the volcanic chains, such as the heavily volcanic Cascade Range?

Well, since most crustal plates are a mixture of mineral types, and various families of minerals melt at different temperatures, as the plate is subducted, low-melting-point minerals melt out of the solid plate. Being liquid, they’re more buoyant and rise upward through whatever cracks and crevices and imperfections they can find in the overlying plate, or force such cracks and crevices to open by dint of increasing pressure (which, I might note, tends to form magma chambers, either way). When they reach the surface, blooie, volcano.

Note also that the type of volcano tends to change as you move from the coast inland; this is because, as you go farther inland, the plate being subducted is being shoved deeper and deeper into the mantle, encountering hotter and hotter temperatures, and thus melting out minerals with increasingly higher melting points. This results in a separation of the minerals, and a corresponding chemical difference in the melts, in a smooth transition moving from coastal volcanoes and progressing inland. It’s been theorized that this is the reason why certain areas have more explosive volcanoes — the chemistry resulting from the melt leads to a more viscous lava, trapping the dissolved gases inside and allowing for pressure buildup.

There is also increasing evidence that the heat resulting from subduction was insufficient to fully melt the Farallon Plate, and the continental plates overrode the Farallon, which may have fragmented/faulted and ‘stacked up’ in slabs under the continents. According to a NASA research group, a significant portion of the Farallon sank to the bottom of the mantle, and is much farther east, most likely under the eastern USA. (http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a002400/a002410/) The footprint area is quite considerable. And no, it wasn’t that the Farallon drove so far eastward, as much as it was that the North American Plate just moved over it. Still and all, dang big plate, when you think about it.

That said, it strikes me that the Daily Mail has once again gotten its science mixed up. (Yes, I’ve dealt with anxieties produced by articles from this and other similar UK newspapers several times.) It references the same area that the Science Direct article does. And it does link to the Science Direct article. But that doesn’t mean they interpreted it correctly.

They, of course, immediately focus on the fact that the Yellowstone supercaldera is supposedly in the middle of it. I say ‘supposedly’ because the NASA research plainly indicates the Farallon Plate remants in a VERY different location from that depicted in the Daily Mail article. I’d really love to know where they got their graphic, and how accurate it really is, relative to what they think they’re talking about.

HOWEVER, all that said:

1) The Daily Mail article immediately assumes that virtually the entire volume of ‘volatiles’ referenced by the scientific paper is carbon, when the first volatile mentioned by the science paper is hydrogen. And even that is speculative, as denoted by the phrase, ‘such as.’

1a) Typically the constituents of volcanic gases are: water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and several of the noble gases such as neon, helium, and argon. (Other gases may be found in trace quantities as well.) According to Wikipedia (and this matches my training), “The abundance of gases varies considerably from volcano to volcano. Water vapor is consistently the most common volcanic gas, normally comprising more than 60% of total emissions. Carbon dioxide typically accounts for 10 to 40% of emissions.”

2) The Yellowstone hotspot is separate from the Farallon Plate structures, and goes far down, into the mantle. Its upper regions have been 3-D mapped, and are not a part of the Farallon structures. More, it has a tracked geologic history of eruptions, with fossil calderas that can be traced back from its current location, regressing southwest almost all the way to the northeast corner of California. There is no indication of catastrophic gaseous emissions of which I am aware; the volume of ejecta ultimately came from much deeper. The danger from a Yellowstone eruption is in the massive blast which would devastate the area for at least 1-2 hundred miles in every direction, followed by the truly titanic volume of ash which would be pumped high into the atmosphere. There have been discoveries of fossilized, fully-articulated herd animals in mass deaths from acute silicosis as far east as, if memory serves, at least the vicinity of the Mississippi River. (I distinctly recall reading this, but cannot now find the article online. However, not so very far away, near the Missouri River somewhat westward of my recollection, is also found the Ashfall Fossil Beds State Historical Park in NE Nebraska. A huge die-off of animals, from turtles all the way up to herds of horses, camels, and rhinos, are found intact, embedded in what is evidently the Mesa Falls Tuff — tuff being a type of loose, porous rock composed of ‘welded’ ash. The Mesa Falls Tuff was the ash layer deposited by a Yellowstone eruption some 1.3 million years ago. Evidence indicates they died of acute silicosis and were then entombed in the very ash that caused their deaths. You can find lots of information here http://museum.unl.edu/research/vertpaleo/ashfall.html and here http://www.rhinoresourcecenter.com/index.php?s=1&act=pdfviewer&id=1378684580&folder=137 )

Is it possible for some of these volatile gases to ‘leak’ into the Yellowstone magma chamber? Sure it is. That’s how natural gas and petroleum get around, after all, not to mention groundwater. But there are limits; impermeable strata effectively block such migrations (which is how artesian wells occur).

And frankly, if we have a Yellowstone eruption, we got way bigger, and much more immediate, problems than trying to figure out how much carbon dioxide the thing is belching.