Category: Uncategorized

*I’m still sick and I’m beginning to be tired of it.  At least I know it’s not something peculiar to me, or something I’m doing wrong, because “this is going around” and taking a long time to get over for everyone.  Though at almost two weeks, it is pushing the limits of my tolerance.  And my poor husband’s too (since he’s down with it also.)
I was casting about for a BPF for today, and this seemed to be apropos.  At least part of the reason that idiots are losing their minds on the street is that they think nationalism or ANY enforcement of borders equals Nazism.
It is important to remember what Nationalism is and what it isn’t, particularly in reference to the US which in this as in so many other things stands alone and apart from the rest of the world.
As I was reading through several posts and hit this one, a Portuguese poem came to mind that ends with “Give us against the erroneous hour when a new infidel threatens, the sword as a blessing and the blessing as a sword.” (Fernando Pessoa, Don Afonso Henriques).  I thought if you substitute sword with Constitution, you won’t go far wrong: Give us against the erroneous hour in which a new infidel threatens, the Constitution as a Sword.  And a blessing too, while you’re at it.
Go on, take it.

Come On, Take It – A Blast From the Past from January 2016

Yesterday, on a private forum a friend of mine who here will go under the name Sam Anderson said the following:

Patriotism is good. Nationalism through a patriotic lens, seeing your country as worthwhile, as having prospects and things to be proud of, is not only acceptable but necessary for the health of any nation. But MOST especially the United States, because it’s one thing for the French to be ashamed of being French, but at the end of the day, they’re still going to be French. France is established on ethnic and historical foundations, and even if the French think they suck, there can still be citizens of France. Just not very long, since self-loathing aligns you, first metaphorically, then inevitably in practice, with enemies who ALSO loathe you.

But an American just CAN’T believe in nothing, CAN’T reject the philosophy underpinning America, and be one. Philosophy IS America. There’s nothing else to base it on, and there’s no “philosophy on the side” option. There’s no “shared values” or that bullshit. There’s a piece of paper that lays out precisely how the government functions, tells it what it doesn’t get to do, and tells YOU to go shift for yourself. Now yeah, maybe you can quibble with a point or two of it. Lots of people did then, too. But people who reject, wholesale, that that makes sense as the foundation of a country- who complain about negative rights, who call the constitution outdated- de facto, aren’t American, the same way you couldn’t be a Catholic but not believe in G*d. Aphilosophical American is a contradiction in terms. The most they can do is live somewhere between Mexico and Canada. We’ve got a lot of that kind of “American”.

But nationalism is only a problem when it starts to supersede rather than represent a people. The American people, left mostly to their own devices, with most of their own money and most of their own time, even if they only SORT OF try to adhere to their founding principles, can turn the world upside down. It’s not because of any particular genetic, ethnographic, economic, or so on reason. You could do it with anyone… they’d just have to agree to the challenging but rewarding terms of freedom, which historically much of humanity would rather trade for security. But America, the national body- the government bureaucrats meant to represent the people, who increasingly act in contravention of same- that America cannot find its ass with both hands. It’s just the resurgence of a far inferior product coming back under a much more successful and respected brand.

One of the lines you can draw between right and left is, when a conservative roots for America, they mean the individual entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and scholars- the millions of little people who even now, every so often, by the grace of determination, judicious risk taking, and hard work, manage to do a few really big things. When a liberal roots for “America”, they back the bully-boys in the government with the private jets… the big institutions that nevertheless manage routinely to fuck up thousands of little things.

THAT’S the form of nationalism that’s toxic.

Let’s go back to what Sam said “Philosophy IS America.”  If you don’t believe in the founding principles, you’re not an American.  You’re at best a permanent resident who grew up here and behaves generally within the law.

We’re a volitional citizenship.  Yes, if you were born here, you are LEGALLY an American.  You can legally be a lot of things that you’re not even close to being in reality.  Take all the college people running around screaming they want to be protected from micro-micro aggressions.  They are legally adults.

My younger kid is also legally an adult, and although closer to an adult than most of the micro-aggressed, he still lives at home and has never had to provide for his daily upkeep.  He’s a legal adult, but not an adult like say any of you who have to work for a living.  (We let him only because he’s taking two stem degrees concurrently and not taking accommodations for his sensory issues.)

Do I think it was a mistake of the founders to allow citizenship of birth in a nation of volition?  You bet your beepy I do.  They got so much right, though, and they were only human.  They couldn’t believe anyone born here, enjoying the blessings of liberty could possibly wish to believe that a system where “we belong to the government” is better.

They were wrong.  In a way, again, understandable, since they’d given their life, their fortunes, their sacred honor for this endeavor and many lost it.  (Read a book called Signing their lives away, if you haven’t yet.)  On the other hand, not understandable, since they knew how revolutionary their system was.  Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness?  You must be mad.  The government as a servant to the sovereign citizen?  Cooee, what world do you come from?  Separation of powers to make it difficult to “get things done”?  Mister, you must be one of them escapees from the asylum.

And yet — and yet — some of us are very much citizens of the volitional nation.  We embrace the vision of the founders, we work to protect the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.  We took an oath, and we keep it.

Come on.  Go ahead and take it.  Take it by yourself in the privacy of your heart; take it with your family; take it with a co-worker.

Take the oath.  Then keep it.

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen [or a moonstruck admirer for those on the right and left who think those people abroad have a better idea- sah]; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

Illegal – by Cedar Sanderson

il·le·gal

i(l)ˈlēɡəl/

adjective

1. 1.

contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law.

“illegal drugs”

synonyms:

unlawful, illicit, illegitimate, criminal, felonious; More

 

Words have meanings. As simplistic as that sounds when I write it down, it seems to have gotten lost in the current political atmosphere. I’ve taken to avoiding most social media because it seems most of y’all have taken to using dumb memes and absolutely no reading comprehension so that you can be filled with shrill self-righteous outrage. Learn to read. And then? Learn to comprehend. Then come back and talk to me, because before that, you’re not worth my time.

The word illegal is frequently used in discourse, and it means just what it means. It is not an optional modifier that you can discard when you’re tired of typing and don’t want to lift a finger to say what you actually mean. Illegal immigrants are breaking the law. Period, stop, end. Immigrants? Are working very hard to stay within the law, and should be justifiably pissed to be lumped in with the people who are smearing their good name by flouting immigration laws.

They are not the same. And no, you cannot say that they are. Legality makes a difference. If they choose to break one law, why wouldn’t they choose to break another? Ours is a nation that functions under rule of law, and if you want to come here and stay here, you need to learn what that means. It doesn’t mean that you can claim victimhood and wave that around as a get-out-of-jail-free card. It certainly doesn’t mean that you can come into our great nation, decide you don’t like our laws, so you’re only going to follow the ones you brought with you. Nope.

I’m all out of patience with memetic morons. If you can’t wrap your mind around more than the shortest possible message, you may want to rethink your life. Seriously.

I’m proud to know many legal immigrants. There are immigrants in my family a couple of generations back. I’ve been able to sit in the audience and watch the swearing-in of a new citizen, and frankly I thought at the time that she was coming into this a better citizen than I, who was born to it. Studying to become a citizen, taking an oath forsaking all others… that’s what it’s about. That is what the illegals slinking in under the cover of darkness flout. It’s not an easy process. I’ve been told it’s in dire need of reform. So? Reform it. Get involved in the legislation. Make your voices known there.

But don’t, for heaven’s sakes, show your asses in public by shouting ignorant and dangerous slogans encouraging the masses waiting at our door to break our laws and swarm the walls. Words matter. Law matters. Anarchy will just get you tyranny. None of us want that.

It’s not bigotry, or racism, to oppose the breaking of laws. I’ve always advocated that if you don’t like a law, you should change it. Petition, get elected, donate to a cause – however you want to chase that dream. But while the law is on the books, it must be adhered to.

Let me take another tack, perhaps you’ll understand this one. Let’s say you want to open up your house to a renter. It’s not a perfect analogy, but we’ll run with it. You advertise, and you get a lot of calls from interested people. But before you sign papers agreeing that they can share your home, you check up on them. You get references, you run a credit check, you take a deposit against any damages they might do. In other words, you follow a similar procedure to the immigration policies of our nation. Other nations have even stricter immigration laws. Don’t believe me? Look up what it takes to emigrate to Canada, or Australia.

Now, let’s flip this around. I’m not even going to discuss renting without doing any checks on the applicants. You can imagine this. No – I’m going straight to squatters. Yes, this is what an illegal immigrant is doing. He’s cruising through your neighborhood, looking for a house where the occupants are out of the house, on vacation – in other words, not enforcing house rules. When he finds one, he moves in. He brings along his family. He raids your refrigerator and pawns your jewelry for cash. Then, when you come home and want him out? He picks up the smallest doe-eyed child and holds it up, sobbing that you want to make babies homeless.

Who would you rather have living in your home? The respectful hardworking immigrant who has proven their intent and ability to contribute to our society? Or the illicit duplicitous one who flouts all the rules and destroys from within?

Illegal is not a useless modifier. It is, arguably, the most important defining characteristic in the phrase ‘illegal immigrant.’  That single word, with it’s clear meaning, tells you all you need to know about the person bearing it. Not their race, nor religion, nor any other modifier. Just illegal.

I was raised in a village, so like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, I have one up on the rest of the world, since I know all kinds of evil and how evil works.

It’s not that there isn’t evil in cities, of course, but it’s more anonymous, less personal, and far more expected, so it doesn’t sucker punch you when you least expect it.

Which is why I prefer cities, preferably large cities, because it’s possible to be almost completely isolated there.  I suspect for extreme introverts there are only two choices of residence, out in the middle of nowhere, or the center of a large city.  In both cases, unless you’re ravishingly interesting to look at, or a celebrity, you’re like to meld with the landscape and matter to no one.

The most annoying evil of living in a village was the gossip.

I read enough regency and other fiction from historical eras to know it’s always been considered proper to take “a decent interest in your fellow man” by which they don’t mean that we should ogle good-looking guys (though by all means, good looking guys are a reason we know G-d loves women and wants them to be happy) but that it is important to be aware of those around you, their needs, their problems, or you know, if their younger son is listening to voices again and likely to try to kill you in the little alley that runs behind their garden, in which case you have no one to blame but yourself if you end up dead.  (You only think I’m joking.  It wasn’t death, but we did have a violent neighbor my age and it was totally my fault when I took the alley shortcut and got punched and bitten.  And I’m not even disagreeing on that.  I’d been told to be careful, but I was living in my own head as usual.)

But the thing I dreaded most about living in the village was rumor.  Not only rumor about me — I am reliably informed I married a baker from the next village, I just SAID he was American — but rumor about anyone.  Part of this was my living inside my head.  I didn’t know half the names grandma rained down on me when giving me her reports.  This was complicated all the more because grandma didn’t use the people’s names, or even their nicknames.  Nine times out of ten she used references for which you’d have to know the gossip from her mother’s time, “Remember the people in the fields by x? The ones whose grandfather was said to be a pirate, and whose great grandmother was said to be way too attached to a billy goat?  Well, SHE–”

However what truly appalled me was when someone — usually an old lady — made a reference to a village family of unexceptionable virtue and good behavior and said something like “Well, you know, their money comes from embezzling, so you know what they are.”

Often if you chased down that rumor, you’d find an ancestor in the late eighteenth century had made a fortune in the stock market and his fellows, either as a joke or because they really suspected him, SAID he’d embezzled the money. You might further find that not only hadn’t he embezzled, but he had, in his time, a reputation as a stickler for honesty.  But the rumor, coming down the generations, gave it as a sure thing, and his descendants were tainted, often without being aware of it.  (I did, without researching but by accident find this was the truth about a family whose ancestress was said to have got in the family way by a passing soldier — I think — and whose history was mentioned in a diary of the time which I read in another context, and the rumor was, of course, completely baseless, and known to people who had investigated it or were close to it at the time to be absurd.  BUT it had grown in the telling, and subsequent generations “knew”.

We are living in an age of rumors, and I’ll be honest, my field is a village, one in which the left has masterfully controlled the gossip for decades.

For instance, when I broke in, I was told not to be publicly friends with people who had been “frozen out” of publishing.  They might have been frozen out for reason (this could include things like threatening publishers, yes, but mostly it was “wrong and forbidden thoughts, or rumors of having such.”) Hanging out with them would tar me by association. Needless to say I’m too stupid to heed that advice, but most of the field does, with the odd result that if you were frozen out on suspicion of being persona non-grata, you then BECAME persona non-grata as your social circle made haste to be elsewhere.  I experienced this in 2003, after the Shakespeare series failed, and experienced a “come back and we didn’t mean anything by it” in 2005 when I was selling again.  By then I didn’t trust half of those people, because I’d seen their backsides as they ran away.

I was reminded of this as a fan — whom I’m not blaming — asked in a private group about one of the remaining legends of science fiction: was he racist?  She’d heard somewhere that he was racist.  Was that true?  She couldn’t remember the circumstances.

As people answered, the circumstances turned out to be the usual and only slightly less ludicrous than when a fellow writer accused me of using a “racist epithet” when I was actually using a state department abbreviation for citizens of a certain country who happened to embrace a communist philosophy.  This author, it seems, wrote an historical book in which racist characters use racist language.

The set that cannot think, but rather examines the entrails of language for signs of something other than what the text actually says, decided because he used the words, he was the racist.  (Yeah, this is why you end up with things such as “African-Americans” who have never left Africa, or who left Africa for Europe.  Because the left treats words as magical spells, not as significants for something real.  My favorite was found in an article, recently: “She wore an African-American coat.”  That better have been Kente cloth, or someone named Hannibal was involved.)

Yes, this is changing.  It is changing, because people not-in-the-bubble are paying less and less attention to the serial melt downs of the bien pensant.  OTOH I’m fairly sure there are people on the other side who think I’m fascist, racist, sexist and homophobic, as well as secretly Northern European (since that was one I actually caught.)  And also that there is the effect I observed in the village: People quite far away from the precipitating incident for the ridiculous rumor don’t know any better and will assume there was something there, at the back.  You know “No smoke without fire.”

So — when dealing in rumors, make sure you check.  Even if it’s about someone you dislike intensely.  Check what is actually happening, if you can with the person him/herself.  And then spread the truth as loudly as you can.

The times they are achanging, and by killing one of the tools of social disgrace and ostracism for conservatives in mostly left professions, you can give them a push in the right direction.

When someone says a colleague is “well, you know” say you don’t know and ask.  Nine times out of ten the “well, you know” will turn out to be conservative.  (BTW heard twice in recent series which I don’t watch but listen to, as Dan is watching them and I’m doing stuff like cooking or cleaning or drawing “it’s not like he’s conservative/republican” as a “well, it could be worse.”  Um…. they really thought they’d won.  So much ink drunk they must pee blue.)  In the remaining instance sometimes the rumor is just insane, like, you know “he once had a gay character as a villain in a story, so we know he’s homophobe.”

Deny rumor its power.  Refuse to repeat it, investigate it, tell the truth.

The reputation and professional life you save may be your own.  For the times, they are achanging.

 

Because I have guest posts but hate to give them low exposure by posting late, and because I’m either having massive autoimmune or the con crud returned in all its glory (either is possible.  It’s been a stressful month.)

So — the theme for this vignette (try to keep it to two paragraphs, under 500 words) — is “Almost the end of the world.”

I.e. how the world almost ended and how the end was averted.

Points given for originality.  (E.g. Bradbury, the end almost came because TV went out forever, it was averted by someone getting the idea of painting and cleaning.)

The top three — as pronounced by me — get a choice of signed copy of DST, signed copy of Through Fire or (when available, but I’m glacially slow at mailing, anyway.  I eventually do it, but it usually takes three months or so, because I HATE THE POST OFFICE) signed (by author, not artist) poster of Darkship Revenge. (See cover below.)

I hate to tell you guys this, but part of what made it easy for the vile progs to take over education and turn it into the sort of brainwashing hate-your-own-country fest that you’d expect of occupiers trying to change the very essence of the country they took over, is an essential component of the national character.

As far as I can tell, ever since the Puritans formed the Mayflower compact, Americans have been obsessed with self-help and self-improvement, not just as a people, but as a nation.

As a nation, we are forever obsessed with making ourselves better, more just, more welcoming, more prosperous, more…. everything.

“But doesn’t every nation do that?” you ask.  Uh… not really.  Not so you’d notice it.  Oh, sure, you hear a lot of blather about “restoring the great glory of the nostrilian people” and whatever, but mostly what that means is not an effort at internal transformation, but more a “get in our neighbors’ faces and saber rattle, so they acknowledge how we’ve always been superior to them and full of sparklies.”

(And no, “making America great again” is not of that order.  It mostly is — like every other program of self improvement America embarks on, about changing our own fundamentals and how we operate, but now with more of a return to “things Marxists hate” like border security and actual pride in who we are (no more apology tours is not the same as getting in the neighbors’ faces and saber rattling. Okay, the elites think it is, but I think we’ve established both here and in Europe that the elites are dangerously abroad, and I mean that in every possible sense.))

I think it’s because of who we are.  Who we are as a nation, in the sense that we were founded on an idea and documents that affix that idea.  Look, yeah, other countries have constitutions (it’s a thing.  We’re the cool kids they all want to imitate) but most of them were countries and peoples before the constitution, and they’re just trying to be cool.  (Though apparently one of my ancestresses was enthralled with the first Portuguese constitution, which, like the Magna Carta gave subjects some rights. The things I learn when I’m talking to my dad.)  Also, who we are as individuals, because most of us are descended from people who left everything behind to seek a new beginning, or did so ourselves.  This means as human beings (remember we’re social Great Apes) we’re fairly weird already, and genetically as well as culturally that “Seek a better life” probably remains part of us.

All of this is fine, of course.  No, it’s actually more than fine. It’s great and makes us who we are to a great extent, and a vexation and confusion onto all the other nations.

Though frankly we also don’t understand them at any sort of fundamental level.  Those of us like me who grew up elsewhere are like voices that preach in the desert saying things like “other nations are not like us” but most of the great mass of people has no clue.  I quote this incident a lot, because at the time it made me choke with laughter and tears, but one of the idiots going to serve as human shields for Saddam actually said on television that Iraq could not have weapons of mass destruction, since it couldn’t even provide clean water for its people.  Apparently the idea that other nations/peoples have different priorities is completely foreign to most people. They should read PJ O’Rourke’s description of traveling by train in Siberia, where not only were there not enough bathrooms for even half the passengers, but the floor was raised to keep in the effluvia should someone throw up (or piss) on the floor.  Because one of the characteristics of dictatorships is that they don’t give a good g*ddamn what the people they rule over think or want.

The problem with not understanding other countries is that we also don’t see where we are different.  Which means we don’t realize the dark side of our thirst for self improvement.

Frankly, for chest beating, self-blaming, screaming about our defects to all and sundry and generally giving people abroad the idea we’re much worse than the hell holes they inhabit, NO ONE can beat the US.  Oh, okay, fine, Israel comes close and ancient Israel was about as “good” at it as we are (EVERY defeat was blamed on their having fallen short of G-d’s expectations.  And maybe it was true, but it’s not how any other country then or now reacts.)  England can at times be very self blamey.  But that’s about it.

Even compared with our Western peers (not France, because la Belle France always knows it’s better and superior to any other form of human civilization.  I mean, really) we are like the bolemic girl damaging her health with self-blame, while her peers just, now and then, go on a diet.

This made it trivially easy for the progressives who were by and large taken over by Russian agit-prop by the middle twentieth century to take over our schools and the minds of our kids and by misdirection turn us into self-enemies convinced that the US is the worst nation on Earth.

Take slavery.  Please.  We certainly don’t want it, and we’re one of the nations on Earth that has eradicated it as thoroughly as it can be eradicated from human society.  We fought a war and died in great numbers to eradicate it.

It had, of course, been a point of self-blame from the beginning.  Our constitution, based on the Natural Rights of men leaves no space for it.  That it was allowed to subsist past the founding was a real politik decision forced on the founders, one without which we would not have existed as a nation.  Which doesn’t make it right, but makes it… understandable.

The other thing that makes it understandable is that slavery is an old sin of mankind.  It probably existed amid hominid groups.  (I’m not going to say it exists among great apes.  I have a vague memory of having read an article saying it did, but it’s too long ago, and I can’t remember where, besides the fact that this “animal observation” studies are often wrong.) It is, in the end, just an outgrowth of the “band” structure of great apes, in which the leader has the power of life and death over all around him.

Slavery both hooks into the really bad parts of humans, those that want to control others and treat them as things, and in pre-industrial societies where there is a lot more boring, unpleasant or outright dangerous work than anyone today can even imagine (I remember articles about the horrors of working assembly line.  Your ancestors would have LAUGHED at those), slavery is often the way this is solved, by having people who can’t refuse to do such work.

In industrial societies, such as in the parts of the middle East and Africa where slavery subsists, it’s just because humans can be twisted and horrible, at least if they don’t make an effort to be otherwise.

However, your children likely think that America invented slavery to oppress black people, which makes America uniquely racist and uniquely evil and a terrible place that needs to atone for sins in the world.

I don’t really have the time or the inclination to go look up the dates of the abolition of slavery, but not only wasn’t America the last, slavery subsists in some countries today.

Then there is the racism thing.  Oh, PLEASE.  Americans don’t even GET racism in other countries, where often different ethnic variants OF THE SAME PEOPLE are considered wholly different races.  And for Americans looking at them (including the country I came from) they all look like cousins to each other (and no, that’s not racism.  It’s just that America has greater genetic variety and we get used to it.  Watching the Portuguese gymnastics team while I was visiting my parents, I realized for the first time how much everyone there looks… related.  Even what I used to see as pale blonds aren’t blonds.  Really.)

And if you go back and examine every place that there was a racial minority, I believe the normal reaction of the majority is to kill them (eating them is optional, though it happened in a lot of places.)

But because Americans still feel guilty over compromising their own principles over slavery, people from countries with far-worse histories can feel superior to us.  Well, if we weren’t that bad, why would we be beating our chests so hard?  And people who hate us (some of them our very own indoctrinated brethren) can use our guilt to brow beat us and turn our children’s loyalties away from us.

Take that “our founding fathers owned slaves”.  To anyone who knows any history that is “So they were men of their time and fairly wealthy?  Okay then.”  Sure, it went against their own stated principles, but in a society in which slavery is actually part and parcel of the fabric of society, freeing your own slaves might not be practical or even really possible, due to contracts, obligations, and other such constraints.

The fact that such men could DREAM of a society without classes and without slavery is what is a miracle, not that they were flawed human beings and men of their time.  Judged by that standard, I’m afraid the future will see us as vastly inferior to those 18th century men.

So — what to do?

I’m not saying America should stop trying to improve.  I do not think that is even possible, given the makeup, genetic and constitutional, of this country.

But we must always remember the past is another country (and other countries are other countries, too, and not just America with cooler food and interesting clothes.)  Declaring a moratorium on judging our own past, and taking it as writ that the founders and everyone else who made us were men (and women) of their time (it is, for instance, probably inappropriate to judge people like FDR on their eugenics beliefs or the belief that a command economy was best.  It was what was in the air at the time. It hadn’t been proven otherwise, as it has now.)  Perhaps it is a good time to think of it as “judge not, lest you be judged” and we just need to stride forward doing the best we can.

Beating our chest is not what is important.  Building a better future is.

Teach your children well.

Then get out there and build.  The funny image in the mirror is just that, projected there by neurotics and the enemies who manipulate them.

We are, flaws and all, the last best hope of mankind.  Keep it so.

 

 

Ask the Mad Scientist! – by Sabrina Chase

Welcome to another episode of Ask the Mad Scientist, coming to you *live* from the underwater submarine base of Raison d’Ethray! Brought to you by the fine folks at Blue Glow, purveyors of fusion reactors, Cherenkov radiation sources, and other petawatt power supplies for every kind of lair. Remember, look for the Blue Glow!

First, the winner of last week’s Research Funding Proposal Obfuscation contest is “I.M.A. Tank”, for “Method for Rapid Tissue Sampling by Means of High-Density, High-Velocity Discrete Metal Devices of Uniform Size and Weight.” Enjoy the crate of lovely Penrose tiling for your lab, and remember to correct for windage!

Now, on to the mailbag. Our first communication comes via long-range gravitational pulses from the galactic core…

“Dear Mad Scientist and other Earthlings: Long time reader, first time invader. I am a big fan of your column, and I have decided I simply *must* invade your buccolic little blue-green planet on my next trip! I understand Tokyo is a popular destination for rampant destruction, but do you have any other recommendations that might be off the beaten track?

With respectful tentacle-wavings in your general direction, Cketpakgh”

Always nice to hear from a fan, especially out in the Galactic Core! I don’t want to rain on your invasion, but Tokyo is an example of what you will have to deal with. No matter how flat it gets pummelled, you may have noticed it gets built right back up very quickly. Even Godzilla is defenseless against the construction unions. There’s a reaon Earth is listed as a Class 12 Hazardous Planet, you know. Even our single-celled organisms are quite dangerous, and a wise Mad Scientist treats them with respect. Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most dangerous life-form here! There are certain planets in the Sol system, Cketpakgh, I would not advise you to invade–especially if this is your first. But *do* let us know when you decide to visit! The Death Ray and Orbital Cannon Club gets very excited when visitors come and always extends a very warm–if slightly radioactive–welcome.

And now from that hotbed of agricultural Mad Science, Kansas!

“Dear Mad Scientist. I want to keep my spherical cows healthy but I am afraid the inoculation shots will cause them to deflate. What should I do?”

Good question! And kudos for considering the welfare of your cows. Happy specimens make for reproducible experimental results! As long as you avoid the flotation bladder, injections are perfectly safe. Have your lab assistant grasp the tail firmly in one hand and tickle the very top of the head with the other. When the cow starts giggling, inject at the line between the shoulder blades to either side of the spine.

So, what other Mad Science issues are troubling your brains? (Including the brains in jars).  Remember, there are no stupid questions in Mad Science!

*Sorry guys, still somewhat under the weather and made myself ill by doing a blitz clean yesterday (it’s double edged, as I’m allergic to household dust too so if I don’t clean I get sick.) I’m not bad, just about where I was three days ago.  Well enough to write, but not well enough to come up with an idea for a blog that doesn’t take me all morning to write.*

It started innocently. At the time we were living in the small mountain town of Manitou Springs. There were the two of us, (of course) our two sons and four cats. So the logical thing for my younger son to ask for, for his fourth birthday, was… two hamsters.

In a sign our lunacy was too far gone, we then named them Butterscotch and Fudge. And then – such our folly – we put them in an aquarium on the back porch. An aquarium covered only by fine mesh net.

Oh, yeah, one more thing – these hamsters were both female.

The cats left the hamsters curiously unmolested, but the hamsters clearly felt that they lived under hostile conditions.

In the dark of night, they would screech in their little aquarium like tribbles in heat. And in the summer – such our folly – we left the back-porch windows open. So their call went out to the world at large and – I only surmise this, but it’s almost certain – all over the rodent world little signs sprang up written in whatever it is rodents write in saying “Free the Aquarium Two.” And “No Mercy For the Captors.” Rodent students organized protests and there would have been rodent demonstrations at our door step save for the fact that at least one of our cats was the great calico huntress.

Squashed, ignored, desperate, digested the surviving neighboring rodents resorted to extreme measures.

His name was Jean Pierre and he was born in the yard of a neighborhood French family, from which he learned protest songs, a disdain for the establishment, and a tendency to smoke really stinky cigarettes.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started as so many things did with Pete, our oldest cat. You name a cat Petronius the Arbiter, you get what’s coming to you. In this case, it probably wasn’t so much his fault. Pete was getting old. He was fifteen or so, and he caught a cold. As those of you in multiple cat households know, you really can’t have them all together when they are sick. So we locked Pete in the powder room in the attic where we tempted his fading appetite with truly stinky tuna.

Now, to get the action in this story, a little description of the locale must intrude. Manitou Springs looks like a village in an early twentieth century comic, with buildings perched at erratic intervals on the mountain side. Our house was near the top of one of the hills. Our garden was seventeen steps up from the street. The house itself was three floors high and my office was on the third floor. The only doors into the house were on the bottom floor, and we only used the front one, because the back porch one stuck. One of my boys had a door to a second floor porch, but to get to his room you had to walk through his brother’s room AND a bathroom.

The third floor itself, up a narrow staircase, consisted of small powder room, on the left (with a door.) Dan’s office, on the right, without a door (just a railing dividing it from the top of the stairs. And then my office, through the door straight ahead and taking up the entire front of the house. (Not as luxurious as that sounds, since most of it had sloping ceilings. It might explain something about my early writing, that I continuously walked into the side of the ceiling. HARD. To the point of giving myself near-concussion.

On that day, I was running up into my office, to get mail to take out, when I heard the oddest of sounds coming from behind the door of the powder room. It sounded like… an animal choking. I panicked. Pete was getting to be and a little odd, and I thought he was choking. I screamed for my husband, whose cat Pete was, because if Pete was having seizures, he was more likely to be calm with Dan dealing with him.

As Dan came running up the stairs, I threw the door open and…

There was a small, mad-looking squirrel cornered by Pete and making the tcha-tcha-tcha sounds which I believe are French squirrel for “you’ll never take me alive, nom d’un nom.”

So… Dan and I stood stunned in the doorway (not the least of which because a rodent had survived for minutes in a room with Pete.) We stared a moment too long. The squirrel ran between our legs and … into my office, where he holed up behind the printer, singing the Marseillese in squirrel. “Allons squirrels de la patrie” – or, in other words,(Squirrel languages being less differentiated) tcha, tcha, tcha, tcha.

After running in circles a while, we closed the door on Pete, got the phone, leafed madly through the yellow pages (yes, it was that long ago) and called Animal Control.

Most of them just hung up on us. They knew Manitou had a problem with rodents. Though they seemed to think the problem was endemic plague. And then a bright boy told us “Just leave the front door open and a path to the front door, and he’ll go straight out of it.” Now, this would make perfect sense if the path to the front door weren’t: Down the stairs (ignoring Dan’s office, which we couldn’t block) down a zigzagging corridor. Down another set of stairs (with railings we couldn’t block) past the entrance to the library (no door) and THEN out the door. But we were desperate. And Dan had a window in his office. We thought… Block the stairs. Open the window in Dan’s office. Take screen out. Get out of the way.

We didn’t of course realize that this was a special squirrel.

At first it seemed like everything would work. Spying his way clear, the squirrel bolted out of my office and to… Dan’s desk. Where he took advantage of a tiny hole in the back and holed up in a drawer saying tcha tcha tcha * (*translation “I am your worst nightmare, you oppressors of innocent rodents.”)

We called animal control again. One of them took pity on us and told us he wouldn’t handle it, but since the squirrel had probably got in through a hole in the roof, anyway, how about we call his friend who replaces missing roof tiles and has been known to capture the occasional wild animal. At that point, frankly, we’d have called Beelzebub and Sons, Animal Control and Soul Collection. There was something about a possibly rabid squirrel in a house with kids and cats that made our blood run cold. That the squirrel seemed to be singing protest songs from inside our desk file drawer just made it even scarier. For all we knew he was collecting our account numbers to pass to the squirrel resistance.

So we called the roof repairman, who was an almost preternaturally laid back man. We told him that the squirrel was holed up in the file drawer, that he’d been singing protest songs and that we were fairly sure we caught a faint wiff of galoises. He didn’t even look like we should be committed. He didn’t even ask us if the squirrel was wearing a beret. Instead, he said, “We’ll get him out,” in the tone of a man who has encountered the Rodent Liberation Front before.

For his first attempt, he opened the drawer a little, holding a trap at the ready. He said this often worked. But Jean-Pierre wasn’t JUST any squirrel. Instead of falling for the trap of the oppressor, he holed up further in the drawer, a little mad eye (not that squirrels have any other kind of eye) peeking over “accounts receivable” and his defiant tcha tcha tcha echoing throughout the house.

The unflappable rodent-controller sighed and said “Well, this is more risky, but I have some sleeping gas. I’ll just pump it into the drawer. He’ll be out like a light in no time.”

So he started pumping gas into the drawer. But Jean-Pierre had clearly trained for this eventuality by snorting a little bit of sleeping gas every day.

Once the normal dosage. Tcha, tcha, tcha!

Twice the normal dosage. Tcha, Tcha, tcha!

Three times the normal dosage. I laugh in the face of your puny sleeping gas. For years, I trained with lidocaine powder sleeping gas!

At that point the would-be captor opened the drawer just a little. Taking advantage of this, Jean-Pierre ran out through the opening and into the tinier opening of the drawer above it. Where he holed up saying “Never go up against a squirrel when desks are on the line!”

By now the unflappable man was thoroughly flapped. “I’ve never seen a squirrel do this before,” he said. “It’s like he’s a commando squirrel or something.”

To which Jean-Pierre replied Tcha Tcha Tcha (squirrel for “make my day.”)_

“I’m going to try something I’ve never tried before. I’m afraid of hurting him, but if I give him more gas, I’ll kill him.”

We said okay and fine. Without saying a word – because by then he knew Jean-Pierre understood human English – the man made a little lasso. Then he quickly opened the drawer with one hand, while lassoing Jean-Pierre with the other.

To everyone’s surprise – but PARTICULARLY Jean-Pierre’s – it worked. And, faster than Jean Pierre could formulate curses profane enough, the rodent-catcher threw him a little carrier and shut the door on him.

Our kids, of course, being ours and therefore of dubious sanity, wanted to see the squirrel before the man repatriated him in another neighborhood.

I’ll never forget the squirrel standing inside the cage, looking at us in unquenchable fury. I swear he was holding up his little squirrel fist and singing We shall overcome. Za, Rodentia! (Tcha, tcha, tcha.)

The punch line to this is that a couple of years later, we moved to the neighborhood to which Jean-Pierre, or, as the kids call him, Super Squirrel, had been relocated.

The very first night, I hear our less-than-bright cat, Euclid, make the sort of meowing sounds that mean that he’s scared of something. I run downstairs. Euclid is staring out the dining room window. And there – in the dark of night (since when are squirrels nocturnal?) is an elderly and bedraggled squirrel, dancing along the fence, taunting our cat, singing tcha, tcha, tcha.*

*Allons Squirrels de la patrie……

A few days ago, I was on the book of faces, on a thread started by Brad Torgersen, in which we’d already had at least three progressives come by and scream at us that Hillary had won the popular vote and why weren’t we making her president, when progressive #4 came by to announce that it just wasn’t fair we weren’t giving the presidency to Hillary Clinton, despite her popular vote in.  By that time I’d grown a little testy (who, me? Nevah) and my answer was “Another constitutional scholar!” after which I gave a cursory answer about the electoral college protecting us from being dictated to by California, and, in the long run, from ending up in a civil war.

The lady (!) arguing with me came back with one of the most bizarre answers I’ve heard in a long time.  She said since I’d first resorted to ad hominem, she won.  A few of the other people on the thread asked her WHAT she’d won, and that’s, indeed, the material question.  Never mind that, to my knowledge so far “constitutional scholar” is not yet a recognized insult, she seemed to think she could win an argument about FACTS (i.e. does the electoral college exist?  Can it be said to have a beneficial purpose?) because an opponent used a logical fallacy.

That is not how the world works.  If we’re both arguing over whether the sky is blue or bright red, and I call you the corrugated son of a whorish slug, it doesn’t make the sky bright red.  That she thought it did alarmed me more than her belief that the electoral college was somehow unfair.  But that doesn’t mean her ignorance of our fundamental structures as a nation and the reason for them was any less alarming.

And then a friend on the book of faces posted this video.  If you have time to see it, the gentleman who calls himself Big Joe, schooled the derpapotomi in style, but in the middle of this, one of the shrieking ignorami who presumes to tell him that he needs to “educate” himself, also tells him he’s so “ignorant” because Trump wasn’t elected, he was “selected” by the electoral college.

At that point, the hair was standing up at the back of my head, and I immediately went to the phone and called my two millenials to ask them if they knew what the electoral college was, and  what its function was.

Older son said he knew but only because his last History Teacher in High School was a retired Navy Commander who, upon discovering that they knew nothing about how the republic was constituted, and after he was done blowing a gasket, took them through an accelerated course on what the founding fathers had wrought.  Before that all they really knew was that the founding fathers had owned slaves and therefore all their opinions were tainted.

Younger son said he learned about the structure of government from PJM and from the books I flung at his head when he said something particularly stupid.  (Sometimes literally flung at his head.)  In school he learned only that the founding fathers owned slaves and were rich, and therefore all their work was tainted.

I’m not going to pretend my sons are representative of their generation.  I’m not even going to pretend the derpapotamus who thought Constitutional Scholar was an insult is representative of the generation between mine and my sons’.

I’m just going to say that while a lot of people are taught about our system, they are taught about it wrapped in a lot of scolding about the founding fathers owning slaves (and there will be a post about slavery next week, because Americans have SOMEHOW got the bizarre idea it’s uniquely American, and this is a stick the Liberals use to discredit the whole American experiment.  A stick that must be wrenched out of their hands and used on their own backs.  I don’t despise Barrack Obama because he’s descended from slavers on both sides or his family — no, truly, research it — but because he’s chockfull of socialist ideas which are a re-institution of slavery and just as offensive to the human spirit as the original.)

Experimental questions to less politically involved young people got me answers about our system that ranged from its being a democracy (which is about as accurate as saying it is a monarchy) or — and this is a doozy — that we live in “capitalism” which is not a political system, it’s not even, really, an economic system, more what emerges when government doesn’t screw with the economy.

Look, this is the problem we’re up against.  Back in the nineties, I found Rush Limbaugh’s habit of referring to America under Clinton as occupied America, annoying and thought of it as a schtick.  (Even though I hated what Clinton did on most fronts, starting with Motor Voter.)

But in the last ten years, I’ve come to realize he was right.  America was and largely still is an occupied country.  Foreign agents (natural born, but recruited early by Soviet Agit Prop) control our media, our education, our entertainment.  And most of what the occupiers have done is try to destroy that which is uniquely American: our individualism, and our system of government.  They also try to inoculate against people finding about our system on their own and thinking it’s brilliant, by tainting the character of the founding fathers and the idea of America as a nation AT LEAST as good as any other, if not better.

It is important, as we face the difficult task of rebuilding, to look towards the countries that came out of occupation by the enemy for examples.

As in France after World War II it might be convenient, as the tide turns and people pretend they were always in the resistance to the occupation, to let them pretend, and to not forget but turn a blind eye to their acts while under enemy influence.

But most of all, and above all, it is important to storm the bastions of the enemy, and to start teaching facts to young and old; it is important to start a great work of teaching citizens about our system.

This is more important in America than anywhere else, since our polity depends on at least a decent percentage of informed citizens.  (It will never be all of them.)

Now I don’t see any point in storming the schools or the bastions of current culture.  Due to what Iowa Hawk defined as the process of the vile progs taking over an institution, gutting it, skinning it, then wearing its skin demanding respect, all those institutions are in great trouble, and thanks to technology all the gatekeepers in such institutions will be taken down in the next ten years or so.

So, build under, build around, build over, and make sure you teach and explain as we go.

A lot of the people behaving very badly aren’t stupid.  They just know a lot of things that just ain’t so.  And a lot of them aren’t evil: they were intentionally corrupted by enemy agents, and turned into weapons against their own country and their own form of government.

Not all will be reachable, but a lot of them will be.  Yeah, this will call for you to be patient, when it’s the last thing you want to be.

But we’ve already started the most important part of this work: we’re talking back, and letting them know we’re here.

Yeah, this is sending a lot of them into a blind panic.  This happens when the foundations of your world shift under you.

But once they calm down some percentage will be reclaimable.  And we need to reclaim them, because our country needs them.

Be not afraid.  Go forth and work and teach as you go. In the end, we win they lose.  But it doesn’t absolve you from doing everything you can.  Go and do it.

But I’m really not feeling very well.  Our room at Cosine didn’t have heat for the first twenty four hours we were there and we both caught SOMETHING.  I had been TRYING not to catch something for two weeks, to be fair, and the cold weakened me enough it whomped me.  Dan is sick too.

On the good side, I finished Darkship Revenge and it is in.  I wrote two chapters yesterday (because I’d changed the thrust of the ending, different people died, and I had to adjust things.  I know the action chapter was good and I was there, because I was covered in sweat as I finished (eh.)

Anyway, today I feel ick.  I just want to sleep, and my ear is killing me.  There might be doctorage for the ear, as it’s not supposed to hurt that bad.

I’m going to take it easy, maybe do some art or house cleaning, and have a lot of chicken soup.  See you tomorrow.

Okay, so I need to send this book in today.  And I mean, NEED to, and I am still recovering from con crud from h*ll and had some worrying news from my parents.

Which means, I really am not functioning very well.

I know that there is such a thing as “It came from Imgur” but seriously, this one is cute.  On Friday we had dinner with the Greens, and Steve infected us with these “real animal names” including doing the the National Geographic voice on the narration for the Majestic Sea Flap Flap.

The full thing is here, but I’m going to put some of my favorites below, then add a couple Robert and I thought of.

This page has more.

My favorite is:

And now for Robert’s and my creations:

On a recent trip to the zoo we watched secretary birds trying to scare/kill an emu and decided they’re the most psychotic thing ever.  SO…  For context video of murder riverdance bird.

And yeah, it honestly tried to kill an emu.