Guns in Mexico by Foxfier

If anybody here doesn’t know– the border towns are getting rather ugly. Mostly it’s a matter of gangs moving in and throwing their weight, which I’m sure is a great comfort to the hundreds dead just across the border from one of the lowest crime cities in the USA….

Obama rather famously tried to blame the violence on guns. As an excuse to remove guns from folks up here, of course. Even though we have more guns, and less violence. It’s almost like it matters who has the guns….

I just ran into an article that makes it clear this is a golden example of why they always say “guns,” rather than looking at if it’s possible to have legally owned guns and how common that is.

(Warning, Borderland Beat is basically just translating with a little commentary, and some of the folks there see nothing especially wrong with cartels, homicide and all. And don’t get me started on the comments.)

The current number of registered arms in the hands of private individuals is only 3, 153 in the entire country of Mexico. The Ministry of National Defense has only granted 68 such licenses of that type to 2016, but, in exchange programs during the sexennium, it has collected more than 93,000 weapons of war, mainly delivered by heads of households; another 28,000 weapons were secured during arrests.

That is the total number of weapons; further down it mentions there were only 47 authorizations for individuals to have a firearm at home. So three thousand, one hundred, fifty eight legal weapons.

I’m pretty sure that the little gun shop my folks use sells more guns than that each year, and it’s one of at least three in that town, less than five miles from a town with a few more stores. The entire state of Washington hasn’t broken 300 murders since they started keeping stats; the closest it ever came was back in ’94, with 294. In contrast, Chihuahua Mexico hit 90 in the first 17 days of this year. They are a smaller population, in a larger area. Now it’s true, El Paso had record-challenging murders in 2017 as well–thirty eight. Did not break the 2013 record of forty three. Oh, and that’s the county– the city had 19.

All of Chihuahua has fewer legal firearms than some perfectly normal hunters do. Heck, do a quick cast-around of the relatively young, relatively low income geeks in my husband’s D&D group will probably net more than 30 weapons.

Go figure, crime flourishes when a gun is overwhelming, unanswerable force…..

There are moments of strange unreality, when something someone says aligns with my memories and I go “I’m not crazy, after all.”

(Mind you, this is for a limited definition of “not crazy” considering I woke up with the following sentences running through my head “It’s like wearing pants. No one likes it, but it’s necessary.”  And no, I have absolutely no idea where that came from, either.)

In this case I was reading on São João, aka St. John, who is the patron saint of the city I come from and whose celebration is a very big thing indeed, including dancing in the city streets all night and lighting bonfires as well as launching lighted balloons (not sure why that one.  But dad liked that part.  A lot.  The weeks before would be spent designing the frame work, picking the onion paper to go over it, etc. Had the man been born in the US he’d have been a rocketeer.)

The festival is ridiculously badly advertised, though it should be a touristic high point.  At least now most of Europe knows about it, but in the seventies and eighties, we were often confronted with tourists who had come to town for a week and had no clue what this was and why this was happening.  In the seventies sometimes they thought it was some kind of a revolution, before realizing no one goes to a revolution with giant plastic squeaky hammers and bunches of herbs which is what people carry while forming lines and dancing/running through the city singing.

At some point the dime would drop and you’d find tourists looking incredibly bewildered but very happy, along the lines of “Wait till I tell my friends this” joining one of the lines and attempting to sing the (either religious or incredibly off color or sometimes both) songs.

I don’t exactly miss it, but the smells in the air in June remind me of it, as does the “body temperature” air.  And I’d meant to be setup enough to host a barbecue for my friends this year, which didn’t happen.  So I was looking it up on line.

And came across a reference to how in the Middle Ages St. John’s feast was considered incredibly important and also “Christmas in June” which means it ported over a lot of the same traditions.

Now, look, São João has any number of really strange traditions — yes, stranger than hitting each other on the head with plastic hammers that squeak, or rubbing herbs under other people’s noses with or without their permission — there’s jumping the bonfire together (or alone for particularly daring teen males), there’s staying up till the sun comes up and then having cafe au lait and buttered toast, because it’s tradition.  There’s giving each other pots of basil (manjerico) which is not used for cooking, in Portugal as a sign of good wishes for the new year.  (I love cooking with basil, but the smell always takes me back.)  There’s poetry contests over basil (my brother usually wins a couple run by local newspapers, as well as putting verses in the vases of basil he gives everyone, from my mom to old work mates, to his wife.

But the one I remember from childhood, and which was bigger in my parents’ time, I never heard mentioned anywhere outside my own head, at least not by anyone who didn’t grow up with me or someone who hadn’t experienced it.

You made a nativity for São João.  It was done with different figures, because the indoor nativity was often porcelain and expensive, while the outdoor one was often made of the cheapest clay and crudely painted (but charming.  I wish they’d sell those in the tourist areas, instead of the “penis as everything” trend they seem to think pleases the tourists.)

It also had more figures.  Yes, elaborate nativity sets here have camels, etc.  But “Cascata” sets in Portugal had EVERYTHING from houses to vendors (sometimes in Medieval Portuguese clothing) to… everything.

A Cascata was like your very own construction project where you could make an entire miniature landscape.  It was like a nativity crossed with miniature railroads (which some cascatas included.)

The very religious would have a sort of “life of Jesus” theme interlaced in their constructions.

The rest of us went a little goofy on things like, let’s make a very large landscape.

I would build the mountains a month in advance, and cover them with moss which I watered till it took (because it looks like grass in miniature) and I no longer remember if I built an artesian fountain or just planned it.  I know boys in the village often had real running rivers with boats on them, etc.

So for us it was a great mid-summer geek fest.  And I didn’t know where the tradition came from and now I know it’s the whole “Christmas in June” thing.

Oh, and see that dish with money next to the saint statue?  The thing was to brandish an image of the saint and say “Penny for the saint” when people admired your cascata.

I don’t know.  I’m now sad my kids didn’t get the geek fest of building entire landscapes for a mid summer festival, and I might find an excuse to teach the grand kids to do this.  Because our sort of people just loves that, and getting really elaborate on it consumed the first half of summer holidays and kept kids out of trouble.  Also you learned interesting things, like how to build a well/fountain with a little plastic bucket and some tubing.

Oh, and next year, maybe I’ll be moved-in settled enough to have a barbecue.

 

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

 

 

FROM DOROTHY GRANT:  Shattered Under Midnight.

Raina escaped to Freeport with a tour booked under a stolen ID, and a plan to lose herself in the city. Instead, she found a city in revolt, and now both sides are after her to control the alien gifts engineered into her DNA.

Her only ally is an offworld investigator trying to get to the bottom of the explosive mix of on-planet and alien politics… but his secrets are even deadlier than her own.

From the back alleys of the souk to the depths of alien ruins, they’re now in a desperate fight to stop the revolution before everything is lost!

FROM J. D. BECKWITH:  Horizons Unlimited: Volume 1: A Space Adventure Anthology.

HORIZONS UNLIMITED

Matter conversion technology—Matt-Con—has broadened the scope of mankind’s existence. It has opened up the real possibility of viable colonies on other planets in our solar system, and even space itself. Anywhere matter can be captured or energy from the sun can be felt, the possibility of expanding human habitation exists.

In this volume:

Quicksilver

The space station Chariot of Helios—on its way to Mercury to become a power collection station for Earth’s growing need for energy to power matt-con tech—encounters a strange anomaly that threatens ship and crew.Escaping Aurora

The sudden destruction of mankind’s first atmospheric terraforming platform leaves three unlucky exonauts struggling to survive in the skies of Venus aboard a cobbled-together airship. Meanwhile, the commander of the space station above battles obstacles that might keep her from rescuing her stranded husband and crew in time.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: open

Hollywood: “Take what we give you, and shut up!” – by the Phantom (reblogged from his blog) with commentary by Sarah

In the latest in a series of science fiction fandom witch burnings, we have this article in Forbes magazine:

Kathleen Kennedy Is Still The Best Person To Make ‘Star Wars’ Movies

The reason I post this apologia to the Disney gods is the virulent language in it. It reads like a comment at Vile 666 or Floppy Cameltron. Or maybe Jezebel. Emphasis and colours mine.

[And bracketed comments mine.]

Rumors surfaced this week that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy might step down from company leadership in the aftermath of Solo: A Star Wars Story’s box office failure. This comes amid rampaging racism, sexism, and other extreme toxic behavior from a segment of mostly male (and mostly white) fans who’ve taken to harassing female actors and artists for existing. This is all part of a larger bigoted backlash of complaints against Star Wars for incorporating people of color and other types of diversity into the previously predominantly white male storytelling.

[You know, it’s very weird that they bring in the same thing every time.  “Racism and sexism” — even though I’ve seen absolutely zero comments about having a black character. (Understand, okay, I don’t have a dog in this fight.  At the risk of being burned at the stake, I never took to Star Wars.  You see, when it came out I was reading science fiction, and had explored ideas far more threatening and interesting than Star Wars. And I’m not visual, so the special effects did nothing for me.  I’d seen better in my head.) Zero, zip none.  And all the problems I’ve heard about the female character have to do with her springing up fully formed and perfect, like Athena from Zeus’ head and therefore us not seeing her struggle up in a hero’s journey kind of way.  The other problems I’ve heard come from the left’s obsession that I call “no one is good, Mr., no one is clean.”  They broke up marriages, made people miserable and had kids turn out bad. Look, I’m not a novice at this story telling thing.  Nihilism doesn’t sell.  It just doesn’t.  It can for a while — Game of Thrones — given enough push, but if it continues to be all “no one turns out all right” it just crashes.  And Star wars didn’t start out nihilist but as a thing of hope for the future.  They could ponder that.  They might even be able to figure out why they always go to nihilism and darkness (my guess?  to soothe the hatred and envy that propelled them to a philosophy that hinges on envy and makes it a virtue. But hey, I could be wrong. They could be doing it to sound “intellectual.”) However, examining their actions is so horrifying and scary they prefer to cast their sins upon the dissenting scapegoat — in this case the whole public — and send us out into the desert as “racist, sexist” (did they forget homophobic this time?) I don’t know about you but when you are that afraid to look upon yourself in the mirror, it’s because you know a monster will stare back.- SAH]

That’s the first three sentences. Yes, you read that right, Solo, or Soylo as they are saying over at Ace of Spades, is tanking -hard- at the box office, and the reason is… the audience is a bunch of toxic racist fanbros. Yep. Movie tanks, blame the -audience-. Oh, and shut up!, because ain’t nobody got time for none of your “extreme toxic behavior.”

[It’s amazing how many “racist fanbros” there must be. I mean, to make a box office hit it takes a broad, broad segment of the population.  If Hollywood really thinks that many of us are “racist fanbros” maybe they should decamp our shores and go make movies in some headland of enlightment like Cuba, or… or the United Arab Emirates.  No?  I know, I know, Venezuela.  They can be paid in flamingo steaks!- SAH]

Amazing in Forbes magazine, right? But wait, there’s more! The next three paragraphs:

Mindless screams of “keep your politics out of my entertainment” abound from that corner of fandom ignorant of the most basic facts about what the films say and represent (the Empire’s designs and titles were heavily influenced by fascism and Nazi imagery, the Ewok uprising was a veiled commentary about the Vietnam War, and the entire concept is about rebelling against authoritarianism and fighting back against oppression and slavery).

[Yeah, and what Hollywood should ask itself is why the “racist fanboys” didn’t mind it then.  No, please, don’t tell us that it’s because they didn’t catch on.  Before Kathleen Kennedy was out of diapers (I have no idea how old she is, but she is still in mental diapers, so roll with it) and before I’d left college, I’d read analysis of the politics in Star Wars written by people on all sides of the political spectrum who were fans of the movies.  (BTW if people on our side are right, then the Empire was actually supposed to be the evolution of the USA.  Yeah, this is me rolling eyes so hard.  Yeah, people saw those politics.  They were also glad that Lucas, like a great many artists before and after him was lousy at transcribing his political idiocy into movie, so what came across was often the opposite of what he meant.)
Why do they assume we don’t see politics in the original? Look, political stories on both sides have succeeded and become beacons in the field.  The Foundation, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and a long list of others.  We saw the politics, thank you so much, and something from politics we didn’t like might not be our favorite, but it might still be cherished.  Why?  Because there was a story there, and we LIKED stories.  That’s why we read.
Any explanation of failure that says it failed because we’re racist and sexist ignores the basics of what is ultimately the most open of the genres.  Guys, we like stories about people with many sexes, or none.  (One of my favorites, whose name and author I keep forgetting because I read it in Portuguese in 9th grade where it was called, if I recall “Os Duros” the species was energy beings with three sexes.  Another favorite growing up was The Left Hand of Darkness. My very first published work had a sex-shifting elf. I’m sure I’m neither rare nor unusual among SF/F fandom.)  Some of our favorite characters are reptilian aliens. “Racism, sexism” is a lousy explanation.
Yes, it’s one that Hollywood — and publishing — have told themselves for a long time.  Outside Baen it’s hard to publish books with gay characters — in my experience — because the rest of publishing is terrified of invisible homophobes in the audience.  It’s hard to publish characters of a different race — in my experience — because publishing is convinced flyover country is racist.  I’m sure despite the fact that EVERY ACTION HERO published in the last ten years is a woman they think we’re sexist too.
It might really help — really — if instead they looked at the screeds disguised as books that they publish, and realized that’s what makes them tank, not unusual characters, etc.
And Hollywood, and Ms Kennedy, that goes double for you.  When you publish pictures like this:

you think you’re making a bold statement.  And you are.  It’s just not the one you think you’re making.
You think you’re standing up against “racists” in the field and telling them to shut up.  What you’re actually doing is telling us you’re twelve and your version of feminism is to paint a sign saying “No icky boys allowed.”
That’s fine, but I think we found the sexist. It’s you!
Real feminism, and real fight for equality does not consist in excluding a sex.  Only hysterics are so terrified of men that they must exclude them in order to be “equal.”
Let’s put this way, woman, you just insulted half of your audience and told them they’re not wanted.  You also just displayed SUCH stunning levels of immaturity and virtue signaling that even women with half a brain know your movies are going to be ham-fisted preaching fests, the kind we don’t like in church, much less in a theater we pay to enter. In what world does this end well? It might feel good, but do you want to do that? Perhaps a little less self-indulgence and a lot more trying to engage the audience instead of screaming at them? – SAH]

This is the same group of fans, remember, whose entire rant is rooted in their own personal politics and a desire to see their personal preferences projected onto the screen while nobody else is entitled to the same right or representation. That enraged reactionaries want to deny everybody else equal representation while demanding their own right to be heard and obeyed is hardly new or shocking, of course. These types of vulgar fans always existed, because fandom is just a portion of the population as a whole, and the population always includes angry self-entitled bigots.

[I find it hilarious they call people like me, who want to abolish as much of the state as possible, and live in never-before-tried freedom reactionary.  But hey, they also call people like me racist and sexist when we say it’s the individual that counts.  They are semantically incoherent.
And again, I don’t understand what the hell they’re screaming about.  No, seriously.  Throughout my entire life, one side of the conversation has held Hollywood — the left.  Movies like “Reds” weren’t made by the right, the glorification of the sixties protesters wasn’t an artifact of the right, etc.  So, who the hell wants to deny who “representation?”  We’ve had plenty of action-hero females, plenty of male castrati, plenty of people of all colors — hey, one of my favorite sf movies remains Independence Day — so… why would these “reactionaries” (Really, do you get your entire vocabulary from “the Illustrated Lenin for children”?) only react NOW?
Perhaps there’s something more going on.  Look in the mirror, you assholes, look.  You feel threatened and you’re everything you accuse us of being. – SAH]

In other words, it’s fine to ignore them and to not care what they want or what they say, and to deny them the myopic whitewashed world they demand. They don’t deserve representation of their ideas, since their ideas are backward, hateful, and devoid of merit in the first place. If you scream in anger about seeing other people represented, if you harass and insult and threaten marginalized people for daring to exist and to appear in movies, then you and your beliefs have no place in modern storytelling or modern society (except as villains to be defeated and cast aside forever).

[Marginalized people… like people who disagree with your ideas?  Like the many writers, artists and creatives you’ve kept out because no matter how good they are, they’re just not “good people”?  Like people who, by opening their mouth once and saying “That’s not exactly true” render their work unacceptable to you forever?
It must be.  Because other than that, WHO IS MARGINALIZED in entertainment in the 21st century?  Who isn’t represented, in proportion and beyond proportion to the population?  Who?

As for ideas being backward and hateful and devoid of merit, you mean like the collectivist ideas that caused the death of AT LEAST a hundred million innocents throughout the world?  You flaming hypocrites, you power seekers.  The rot of a HUNDRED MILLION graves calls out against you, even as the dead hands of Stalin and Mao creep up your asses to manipulate your unthinking brains.  No wonder you’re afraid of the mirror.  We know the monster that looks back.

No one threatens “marginalized people.”  You’re the gatekeepers.  You’re the ones who marginalize, unperson and isolate.  Look at yourself, LOOK.

As for “beliefs have no place in modern story telling”…. Yeah, we’ve seen it.  Oh we’ve seen it.  You create straw opponents who are racist, sexist, homophobic and either become enlightened and repentant, or die horrible deaths, and then you dance around proclaiming victory.  You have no idea what individualists actually stand for.  You create your tower of unfalsifiable beliefs and then dance around proclaiming virtue.  I’d call you kindergartners, except kindergartners don’t have gatekeeping power and probably wouldn’t use it to support genocidal philosophies- SAH]

Yeah! De-platform those assholes! No place in modern storytelling! Wait, wut?

Who -is- this maniac? Well, he’s this guy. Mark Hughes.

Mark Hughes, screen writer and SJW weenie.

 

I work as a screenwriter for film and TV. In a former life I was a media specialist & campaign ad writer.

I think he left out a word. He meant to say DEMOCRAT campaign ad writer.

Thing is, I’ve seen this reaction before. Remember Fantastic Four? We were all nerd-racists for saying that was going to suck, right? Then when Marvel Comics was tanking hard in April last year? That was nerd-racism then, too. The four years of the Sad Puppies Campaign, super-duper nerd-racism. Kicking nerd-racist Conservative authors out of Guest-of-Honor spots at conventions, totally consistent with the narrative.

[PARTICULARLY the Sad Puppies campaign, of whom ONE person qualified as a white male and two as white females (though one a severely disabled one.)  All of us Dudebro racist and sexist.  Which took effort.  Like, sex and race change operations.  They’ll do ANYTHING to avoid that mirror.  ANYTHING.  One is starting to wonder if it’s their own hateful beliefs they avoid, or if they’re aware of their stunning lack of talent and that it’s only virtue signaling and liberal privilege that keeps them making money. – SAH]

Prediction: If she doesn’t get fired over the failure of Solo, Kathleen Kennedy will double down on the SJW themes for the next Star Wars. There will be gay droids and trans Jedi, disabled POC heros and the whole quilt-bag full of progressive agenda goodness. The movie will suck, the box-office will bomb harder than a B-52 squadron, and Ms. KK will be violently defended by Mark Hughes. Right before they fire her.

[Because of course, Kathleen Kennedy and her ilk are unable to conceive of people except as widgets within groups.  So these characters will not be real or resemble anyone alive or dead (as the disclaimer goes) because they’ll come from a planet where you are your minority and oppression group ONLY.  (I think we found the racist, sexist homophobic, too.) So the story will be about as much fun as reading The Communist Manifesto, but infinitely longer.  And of course, the unfalsifiable beliefs of the left, that equate political signaling with quality will insist that the only reason it can fail is that the people are bad and evil.  The same people who, for years before the left went full potato supported lavishly filmmakers with whose political opinions they disagreed (and yes, we saw the.  You leftists are about as stealthy as Godzilla in a ninja costume. But we didn’t care as long as the story and characters were good.) – SAH]

Dear Disney, save yourself the money and fire her now. Your shareholders will thank you.

[For sure.  Another characteristic of the left is that you’ll never be enlightened enough for them.  Not until “capitalism” is destroyed, and everyone is forced to watch movies that are “good for them.”  Walt Disney is spinning so fast in his grave, you could power California from the movement.  This is not what Disney’s massive fortune and power are founded on.  But hey, if you want to squander it in virtue signaling, you can lose it all.  That’s fine too.- SAH]

The Phantom NerdRacist.

[by which he means the kind of racist who doesn’t care what color people or characters are provided they’re decent people and interesting characters.

It is weird the left now insists that “color blind”is “erasing people of color” and therefore racist.  This only makes sense if to you “people of color” are ONLY the color and not individuals.  So you see only the relative level of tanning, and you consult the chart of relative victimhood.  You don’t see that people are people and individuals are individuals, and in fact racists are ones that view the whole world through the lens of race.
Boy, oh, boy, Hitler would love YOU.

Once again you are revealing the ugly biases and monstrous beliefs that you try to project onto us.

And because you follow the same path of unpersoning large sections of the population, YOU my dear leftists would bring about the same hell Hitler caused if you ever got power. Because, yeah, Hitler was a despicable racist.  So was FDR.  And?  It’s believing that some segment of people aren’t “really people” that unfolds the horrors of Hitler, or Stalin or Mao, the last two having unleashed their horrors not on races as such, but groups they defined as non-human.  Not worthy of being heard.  Standing in the way of progress. As you do.
Fortunately a lot of us will make sure you never get that power.  Unlike you, most of us have children and grandchildren and other kids we care about.  We’re not fighting for these big lumpen “groups” you’re so fond of.  We’re fighting for real people.  And we’ll make sure you don’t spread your poison to them.  Because with your philosophies, it always ends in the mass graves. – Sincerely yours, Sarah A. Hoyt, who you assure me is a (racist, sexist, homophobic, da.) Mormon White Male.]

 

A couple of days ago, while looking at the deep ancestry thing, I become somewhat confused about whether Portuguese had Yamnaya ancestry or not (the answer is probably, but like everything about Portugal, the answer is complicated.)  From the region I come from, very probably, but again…

Anyway, let me state right up front my “down” on genealogy.  When Dan’s dad got older (starting at about our age) he became obsessed with family genealogy.  This made a certain sense, I suppose, since until older son, and from the mid 1600s, all of Dan’s ancestors were born in Norwalk, Connecticut.  So, it was one of those “we are from here.  We belong here.”

Only the reason it made me snort-giggle is that of course that’s not true.  Genealogy is in a way a lie, because you follow one line or at most two. But we’re not products of one line or at most two.  Not even my mom’s family (where family reunions are considered great places to pick up chicks) works that way.  It doesn’t mate only with itself.  (Though if rumors are true there have been a lot of cousin marriages before mom’s parents who were first cousins.  Hey, it’s selective breeding, right.  What it selects for is the question.)

So tons of other branches fell into Dan’s ancestry while his male line stayed rooted in Norwalk, CT, from his grandmother’s relatively recent Irish ancestry to his mom’s… uh… she came from that part of West Virginia that was settled by the sweepings of London’s undesirables (quite literally.  I no longer remember if it was Elizabeth or one of the James who had the less than regular inhabitants of London (yeah, street people, but also street performers, prostitutes and just people who hadn’t found a place to live yet, or a job, yet, and dumped them in a ship headed to the Americas.  The past is not only a different country, it’s a scary one.) but into which and inexplicably had fallen an Amish ancestress.  Anyway…

Despite all of my Father in Law’s careful accounting of the ancestry as much as he could, he missed something I found when I was researching for Plain Jane.  You see, the current Earl of Seymour (who is descended from two or three generations in the American branch, as someone went back to claim the title after the mess of the Tudor years) had a thing about how his ancestor (I’ve slept since I’ve done that research.  Also, had major surgery and hypothyroidism, so I can’t remember names) the youngest of Jane Seymour’s brothers, and the only one to survive the Tudor years, immigrated to America with a bunch of other puritans (which he was) having changed his name to the per-immigration to England name: St. Maur.  He and six other families founded Norwalk Connecticut.  The families all intermarried extensively.  Btw, their plot was right next to a family named Haytte…  Yes, Hoyt.  Yes, one of the St. Maur daughters had married into the Hoyt Clan (I think a Sarah, who married the first Daniel who fought in the Revolutionary war with the Connecticut Volunteers.)

My father in law had completely missed this, although he’d tried very hard to find the “French family” who married into the family.  Which is right, in a way, since they were Normans…

This makes Dan descended from Edward III, like something close to 70% of Americans.  (The ladies liked pretty Eddie, and also he was trying to compensate for his dad.)  This is only amusing, because (though I haven’t tracked very closely) I’m probably descended from one of the Bourbons on the Marques side.  This puts the permanent argument between our sons (the younger looks like a prettier Louis XIII) in the form of a continuing wars between medieval England and medieval France.  Never mind.

The funny thing is that the Earl of Seymour is a Mathematician, and also that the picture at the end of that book looks STARTLINGLY like my FIL, only taller.  See above where I joke younger son looks like the portraits of Louis XIII, only thank heavens prettier, and it makes you wonder exactly about this heredity thing.

Because a few centuries back of shared heredity should have bloody nothing to do with how you look or who you really are, because your chances of sharing more than “casual acquaintance” level of gneetics with your great great great great great great grandthing is less than zero.

And yet we obviously do.  I mean, look how many of us carry the remainders of a cross with Neanderthals they not think took place like 40k years ago.

Which brings us to why people are fascinated by genealogy.  Of course they are.  They’re looking for what went into making them.  And things are inherited not predictably, but inherited anyway.  Both mental dispositions and looks.

But the thing is that we’re really bad at understanding real genealogy and real heredity, and that family histories as such as a confused mess and completely wrong because the things you tell your kids get confabulated; people make wrong assumptions about their ancestors, and frankly your ancestors might have been hiding for all sorts of very good reasons having bloody nothing with being whores or horse thieves (though in the long history of human ancestry, yeah, we’ve probably all have whores or horse thieves as ancestors, and some I suspect have had human sacrifices and canibalistic priests.  Okay, probably all of us for that last, too.  Though most of our ancestry is probably dull-normal.  (Well, most human ancestry.  I don’t answer for the people on this blog, since Odds tend to mate and reproduce according to their kind.)

In the midst of trying to figure out if Yamnaya had replaced the paternal DNA of Portugal as well as most of Europe, I came across an… interesting blog of people trying to figure out their Portuguese ancestry.

This was highly amusing to me — I resisted leaving a comment that said “you’ll never make it on your wits alone” because as Dan pointed out to me it’s not their fault that they don’t know anything about what is a poorly recorded and frankly a bit weird culture — because most of the people were looking for names that either aren’t Portuguese or don’t in point of fact exist.

Take the person who was looking for an ancestor named Guan or Juan…. Heaven help us.  If he was Portuguese he was neither of those, though he might have been trying desperately to get people to pronounce his name semi-right.  You see, João is pronounced… well, J in portuguese is pronounced like a soft g as in George (so not at all like the Spanish J) and oão  might best be transcribed as ooahoon.  Which I’m sure no one can read in the US because I wanted to climb through the headphones and strangle the reader of MHI who consistently pronounced it Jooawow.  Though to be fair the “teaching people to speak Portuguese” videos do too.  But anyway, there it is.

There are other names that people get consistently wrong from the Portuguese.  One of them was my birth name and the reason I changed to “something completely different.”

You see, Portugal was not, until about 40 years ago one of those places where you gave your kids English names because you’d heard them in a movie.  Unlike all the Latin countries in America, we didn’t have Johns and Wandas running around.  This is because in Portugal, until about 40 years ago, it was illegal to give your kid a foreign name.  Immigrants with kids born abroad had to find a similar Portuguese name for the Portuguese birth registry.  So, my kids, if we’d gone back would be Roberto and Eurico (he goes by his middle name.  I don’t even know what Marshall would have been in Portuguese.  I don’t think there’s an equivalent.  Probably they’d just go for “Starts with same letter” and he’d end up as Maximiliano or something.  I had a student who was Martine in France and they named her Martinha in Portuguese, which has no connection whatsoever. My annoying aunt insists on calling younger son Henrique, which has nothing to do with Eric.  It’s the translation of Henry.  Rolls eyes.)

Anyway, so my name was Alice, from either the Roman Alix (and if I were changing today I’d probably go with that, as closer, but you know, you make the decisions you make with what you have on hand at the time.  Um…. pen name.) or the same German root as Adelaide, i.e. “Daughter of someone important.” I.e. Princess.

It was supposed to be pronounced Uh-lease.  But you couldn’t get through people’s heads that a name spelled like an English name wasn’t in fact the same name.  And I dislike Alice in English more than I dislike Alice (Uh-lease) in Portuguese, which is to say an enormous amount.  Also, most people on hearing it heard Elise, which I don’t …. exactly dislike, just didn’t want to be called because the only Elise I ever met was over 80 and couldn’t eat by herself when I met her.

So… I changed to Sarah which was my pen name. But look above at the confusion.  I’m rather amused at the idea of a ggggg child looking for Sarah D’Almeida in Portugal and coming up blank.

To make things worse, I never found it necessary to spend the 4k and time to have my marriage recognized in Portugal.  So, even though we were married in the church there, and there’s a record, my civil registry says I’m single. Yep, my descendants are going to have so much fun if they get bitten by the genealogy bug.  Serves them right!

Anyway, other interesting Portuguese names lead people to be called King and their descendants can’t find them.  That’s because the name Americans hear as King is Quim, (pronounced Kin) which is a diminutive of Joaquim, which is pronounced with that soft g sound  joakin.  And I found when I was an exchange student that Portuguese Rs can cause problems too.  I didn’t realize it till my host parents sent gifts back for Christmas, including for my then best friend Rosa and wrote it Kosa.  Yeah….

All of which adds up to the past being another country and… well… other countries being other countries too.

Sure, you might be the spit and image of some ancestor or ancestress (I know I am the image and probably mental image, too, from things I’ve heard) of my paternal grandfather’s mother, except for being considerably shorter, probably because premature, and small pox and TB and G-d knows what.)

Does it really make a difference to you?  It’s fun, of course, in a way.  but one thing you can be sure of, it’s that over the years and the permutations of fate we’re all descended from kings and beggars, from noble people (in the moral sense) and utter bastards.

I’m not going to say how you raise your kid counts for more than anything else.  There is that genetic mix.  But it’s so haphazard that your kid might take after your ggggggg uncle whom you never heard of.  So instead of searching for answers in the past, it’s best to just take your kid as an individual, learn his limitations and abilities and work with those.

Working with those is important, because the one thing that seems to be true is that trauma (the sins of the fathers) takes seven generations or so to work itself out.  But since we’re not Lisenkoists, that must by force be because of how traumatized people raise their kids, not because of genetics.

And yeah, each of us is probably carrying some load from those “sins of the fathers.”  (To put this in perspective, older son is the tenth generation born in this country, and the second fought in the revolutionary war and husband’s family immigrated early.)  You probably have no clue where the trauma occurred, but it’s passed on, and shows up in the form of “born owing money and must justify my existence.”

So, let’s leave our behinds in our past.  I.e. leave our pasts behind, which is one of the great things about being American.  It’s interesting, but it’s just interesting.

Yes, some Yamnaya invaders probably put all the male EEFs to the sword, and yep, we’re descended from both populations.  That trauma, HOPEFULLY is long forgotten and not echoing itself in bad upbringing for new babies.  Though, who knows?  Humans being humans sometimes I think if the equivalent of Atlantis ever existed, we’re probably still passing on the trauma of that fall.

You’re descended from kings and slaves, raped women and their rapists, entrepeneurs and serfs, trobadours and merchants.  You’re descended from horse thieves and pirates, scientists and churchmen.

And none of it matters.  You are you.  Go create yourself and your world anew.

 

 

 

 

 

Trekonomics – Work and what it means – by Amanda S. Green

Space. . . The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It’s five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. . . .

Those words inspired a generation of TV viewers to a new love of science fiction. At the time, our country had a thriving space program. People could imagine NASA one day doing what we saw the Federation doing – sending out ships to explore those strange new worlds, to fight the good fight to protect those who needed it. To have adventure and Tribbles!

So what happened? Somewhere along the way, the adventure of Star Trek: TOS turned into The Love Boat in Space, er, Star Trek: The Next Generation. The opening lines changed slightly but that change turned into a good indication of changes we would see in the Trek Universe going forward.

Space… The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

It’s a subtle change but it signals a change in attitude, in philosophy in the franchise. That change in attitude is something we see come to full fruition in books like Trekonomics. In ST:TOS, we met characters like Harry Mudd. Mudd might not have been the most upstanding member of the Federation but he wasn’t “feared and loathed around the galaxy for [his] ruthless entrepreneurial drive and shady business practice.” That quote, from Trekonomics, is used to describe the Ferengi.

Think about it. Those little Ferengi with their bad teeth and follicle-challenged pates, were feared and loathed because they were good businessmen who wanted to make a profit. Instead of seeing those tendencies as a plus, the Federation valued “heroism, enlightened ethics and self-sacrifice.” Except heroism isn’t needed for the vast majority of members of the Federation. Only those joining Star Fleet might be required to possess that quality. After all, according to Trekonomics, there is no want and no need in the Federation. You have your handy-dandy replicators. Your sense of enlightened ethics means you will volunteer to work the mines if necessary to make sure there are enough dilithium crystals – or whatever else it might be. And self-sacrifice? Again, other than a very few in Star Fleet, where is the self-sacrifice in the Federation?

When Nog, a young Ferengi wants to join Star Fleet in ST: Deep Space Nine, Commander Sisko is more than a bit skeptical. In fact, he basically sets the kid up for failure. In doing so, however, he – and the show’s writers – prove the Federation isn’t as enlightened as it is supposed to be. First, Sisko fails to understand the cultural differences between humans in the Federation and the Ferengi. Now, a lot of folks will say this shouldn’t be held against Sisko. After all, we live in a day and age of cultural misunderstanding and cultural appropriation. Except DS9 doesn’t take place in today’s world. It takes place in a time and place where members of the Federation are supposed to be uplifted and enlightened. Sisko should know by the time Nog makes his request the process young Ferengis go through in becoming adults. He doesn’t and Nog proves his skepticism to be wrong.

More than that, Nog shows his work ethic is apparently better than that of Sisko’s own security forces. How? By finding contraband they failed to find. How did this kid, without the training and supposed knowledge of the security force, do this? By having the desire and determination to do his job well – something you would have thought the enlightened Federation personnel would have exhibited.

According to Saadia, author of Trekonomics, work in the Federation “offers the promise of finding one’s true calling, free of the shackles of tradition and economic necessity.” Why do I have visions of someone jumping from job to job, career to career as they try to find their “one true calling”. Screw those they are supposed to be doing the job for because that doesn’t matter. This is the Trekverse. You can do whatever you want because there is no scarcity of goods. You have your replicator to take care of your basic needs. Want to live in your parents’ basement all your life – you can do it. Want to make a lifetime career of studying the lint in your belly button, you can do it.

You are enlightened and uplifted.

Riiiight.

So why work in the Federation? According to Saadia, it’s simple. “Because learning, making and sharing is what makes life in the Federation worth living.”

OMG.

Life apparently isn’t worth living because you have a spouse you adore or children you love. It isn’t because you value yourself. Life is worth living because of the fact you can learn and then make and share the products of your labor. “Welcome, comrade, you need to produce for the good of the rest of us.”

According to Saadia, there is no money in the Federation, therefore, there is no salary work and no profit motive. The chips used in a poker game have no value. Guinan, the character played by Whoopie Goldberg, doesn’t “run” a bar on the Enterprise because she doesn’t charge for her wares. Royalties aren’t earned on inventions or other works of creation. You do all this because you want to give, to share.

Right. No.

Saadia goes on to say that someone could – and probably should – spend their lives walking around the beaches of Risa if that’s what they want to do. I guess bumming is okay because the state – sorry, the Federation – will take care of you. Does that mean the Federation is nothing more than an attractive-looking welfare state? It is certainly beginning to look that way, isn’t it? The only way to possibly escape is to join Star Fleet or to leave the Federation. But, as we have seen with the perpetuation of the welfare state in our own country, that might be a lot easier said than done.

“There is nothing particularly odd in choosing to work for free,” Saadia writes. To support this claim, he points out how we do so even today. Of course, his examples are where we volunteer on a part-time basis doing things like picking up litter on the beaches or volunteering at a hospital. He even points to Wikipedia as an example of our working and sharing our knowledge for free. All of that is his way of justifying working for free in the world of Trek. After all, in the Federation, work is essential but “for purposes of a higher order: increasing knowledge, perfecting technology, and promoting personal and collective self-improvement.”

Why don’t I buy it? Maybe because of the use of the phrases “higher order” and “collective self-improvement”.

Again, the lessening of personal valuation bothers me and it should you. The ideology in Trekonoics reminds me too much of what we’ve seen in the writings of Marx and Lenin, in the political speeches of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Collectivism. Socialism. “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine, comrade.” Nope. Nope and oh, hell no.

In order to prove his point about work being something you do out of some “higher order” and because you want to promote “personal and collective self-improvement”, Saadia turns to Commander Sisko’s family’s restaurant back on Earth. Sisko’s Creole Kitchen doesn’t need to worry about keeping down overhead or paying wages because this is the new, improved Earth of the Federation. It doesn’t charge for its meals but puts out quality food because the only way to judge success is through its reputation and popularity. Hmm, I thought that was pretty much how success in the restaurant business was judged today. After all, if a restaurant doesn’t have a good reputation or isn’t popular, it isn’t going to be successful because people aren’t going to come. In fact, there are any number of restaurants that have garnered critical acclaim but that weren’t popular with the dining public and closed as a result. So what is the difference, other than the fact you pay for your meals now and you supposedly won’t in the world of the Federation?

And, buried in the text is the real limitation of the Federation when it comes to being able to do whatever you want. It’s something Saadia basically glosses over because it doesn’t really fit his narrative. “The only real limitations are one’s imagination and job availability.” So, that puts the lie to what he’s said earlier. You really can’t be anything you want. There are limits.

But let’s take that a step further. In this enlightened world of the Federation, in a world where you are expected to not have the ego that pushes you to be competitive with your fellow man, what happens if you want a job and you know you are better qualified for it than the person who currently holds it? Do you just shrug and pat your comrade on the back and go away? After all, that would be part of the collective self-improvement, wouldn’t it? You’d be letting that person improve himself by doing the job and learning from it.

And what about the employer who isn’t really an employer because they aren’t paying those wo “work” for them? Do they have to settle for someone in a job who isn’t as qualified as the next person to come along or do they have the ability to tell the lesser qualified person to move along? Even if they have the ability to do so, would they? After all, telling them to find something else to do just because they weren’t as qualified might damage their poor little egos and that doesn’t seem like something an enlightened citizen of the Federation would do, does it?

Now, I think this is where I completely lost it with Saadia and this particular chapter:

Work is another way to love and be loved and to express one’s unique sensibility.

What. The. Fuck?

You are only worthy of love based on your work, on what you produce? You can only express your “unique sensibility” (whatever the hell that might mean) through work? Nope, nope, and nope again.

Saadia sees the problem with this, and the reason some fail at it, because there can be a “constant striving for recognition and social currency.” You can push yourself, working without break.  You can find yourself working on dead-end projects without getting out. You can develop performance anxiety, something he terms as a “mental illness”. Hmm, sounds like there really is a dark side to the glories of the Trek universe. You have everything you want but you are driven to continually “improve” – read prove – yourself as a productive and valued member of society.

Yep, I wanna be a Ferengi.

Now, after spending so much time telling us everyone in the Federation is basically equal because there isn’t that nasty little thing called money driving them, Saadia tells us the Federation is a meritocracy where the “highest crime” is cheating. Wow. I guess that means there is no murder, no treason, no theft of ideas (after all, you can’t steal money because there isn’t any). My mind simply can’t wrap around this. We know there are worst crimes. We’ve seen them in the various series. We’ve read about them in the books. But the new canon, not to mention the socialist blinders it adds, ignore them. Everything now must be for the good of the Federation with the individual coming in well down the line.

There’s more, much more. I’m going to finish up the book next week. Let’s just say ST:TOS is a much different show and a much different universe from the later shows. ST:DS9 isn’t the show this book tries to make it. The mental gymnastics Saadia goes through to try to justify the Federation’s so-called values and economic ideals (as identified by Saadia) are exhausting and infuriating. It also explains a great deal about why races such as the Ferengi were presented in the way they were. It all basically boils down to this: Capitalism bad, socialism good. Individualism evil, collectivism a virtue.

That is bad enough. But what we have to remember is this is the sort of thing we are getting from Hollywood and too many traditional publishers. This is the sort of brainwashing our children are being exposed to. We need to put our foot down. We need to make sure we counter this sort of thing with Thomas Sowell, with the founding documents of our nation, with common sense alternatives. This is a war and, if we aren’t careful, one that will claim our children’s minds if not their lives.

I’m up for the battle. Are you?

 

One of the best definitions of what a writer does is to extract narrative from random events.  Okay, I guess that applies mostly to non-fiction writers.

Say you set out to write the biography of one of the English fighters in the peninsula during the Napoleonic invasions.  You’ll find there’s not one narrative but at least four or five.  And I don’t mean just that this guy looks completely different in his auto-biography, his mentions in his superiors’ biographies, or his friends memories of their parties.  It goes far beyond that.

You could extract the moments of his soujourn in the peninsula to craft a “homeland and heroism” story, by picking all the highs and moments of valor, and how he wanted to rout Napoleon for England and glory. It would be a true account, as he really was a patriotic young man who wanted to serve.

Or if you had an anti-war bend, you could choose every one of the incidents in which he saw what we call “the horror of war” and show him becoming jaded and depressed.  Look, even if he in general was suited to a military career and thought the cause just, he’d have moments of discouragement.  Everyone does, and war really is a horrible business.  Also if he joined at 17 or so, as many did, he couldn’t’ help but become at least somewhat jaded. By showing/lending prominence to this, an anti-war writer will craft the narrative no one should serve.

Or you could string together all the times he got drunk and went rabbit hunting, and had a contretemps with a local woman of uneasy virtue, and craft a tragi-comic narrative.

Well, it’s not just in books, you know? And not just writers.  Life is chaotic.  It has been said that the human brain is a machine for extracting meaning from chaos.

Hell, some people think that we — our minds — create time as a sequence, and that it has no existence outside our heads.  (I have issues with this.  Though it might be true, there where physics becomes theology.)

Just like the young officer in the Napoleonic wars, your life, your every day has many meanings, and you can pick and choose to craft a narrative.  In fact, you do, instinctively.

Now–

This is where it’s important to write and craft stories.  Humans are social apes.  That means, to quote my grandmother “we don’t make ourselves.”  Okay, I think she meant something more religious.  But she was right in a more mundane sense, too.

Humans often aren’t even aware of crafting their narrative, or shaping their view of the world.  Heck, most of us writers aren’t either.  Not in our real, actual, personal life.  Instead we fasten onto stories which are complete and coherent narratives, as a way to figure out who we are, where we are and where we are going, and to try to plot our path to a happy future.

Jane Austen with her incredibly practical view of marriage did more to reconcile me to physical existence and the realities of life than any number of “feminist” writers.

And that’s part of the problem too.  When some stories — say the fairy tales with the happy ever after save when they threw the furniture at each other endings — are condemned by damnatio memory and people are told they can no longer use them to shape themselves, you craft anti-narratives.  And these never have a happy ending.

I understand idiots — really — are complaining about Incredibles 2 and saying that Mrs. Incredible should divorce her husband.  That’s the anti-narrative at work.  The women don’t need men, the no woman is totally happy in marriage.

Now I’m not going to say women should only or primarily look for happiness in marriage. And I don’t think you should look for a perfect prince/princess, someone who will make you happy without questions.  If you’re going to dip into legends and fairytales, go for the older more realistic ones, not Disney.  The woman still had to do something brave, to go exploring, to perform tasks, before she was ready to be married.  And married couples sometimes threw furniture at each other…

I’m saying be aware of the narrative in your head and how it’s influencing you.  Because it’s possible to be trapped in a narrative that not only doesn’t suit you, but makes you miserable.

I’ve seen women rant and rave about how happy they are since the divorce, when it’s obvious they’re telling everyone this, and destroying any and all possible chance of happiness.  I’ve seen men tell me how much they love their job and they don’t have time for family or friends, and yet their eyes are miserable.

They’re trapped in narratives where what they sold themselves as happiness and joy isn’t, but they can’t find their way out because they bought their own narrative, and can’t see it’s killing them.

In the same way, if men buy into the tales that men are inherently violent/war like/awful while women are perfect, they go through life with a huge chip on their shoulder, being passive aggressive, alternating grovelling with posturing.  It’s not great for women to believe that either, btw, because no human being is perfect, and while women are far less likely to bash your skull in, they’re far more likely to poison your chocolate.

More importantly, if you believe the lies you were told in school, about the overpopulated world, depleted resources, everyone is a killer ape and a horrible person, there is no joy or glory anywhere, and “nothing to live or die for”, you’re going to live in a dark world with no future and no hope.  And it isn’t even true.

I don’t know if there were humans before story.  Maybe at the beginning there were tiny, tiny stories: “Gorg wans to be like Ogg and be leader of band.”  Or “If Mog makes basket and catches fish Gorg will notice her, and they’ll have many babies.”

What I do know is that anything, even at the level of semi-competent tribal existence has a story.

Those sagas told over millennia provided role models.  Are you Odysseus the quick, always with a stratagem?  Faithful Penelope?  Circe who lures men and has the power of making them animals? Are you Telemachus searching for his dad?

There were roles in those stories, things that went to the back of the brain and gave people ways to react to things that would otherwise destroy them, and ways of behaving that were if no constructive congruent with their society and the lives they could live.

Beware of stories.  Beware of those that can trap you and suck you dry, like a spider catching an insect in a web.

If you can, pick a narrative with a future, one that allows you to build and be happy.  In my experience the happiest people have something to live for: a spouse, a lover, a child, a garden, a house, a cause, an institution. (Just make sure the cause is not one that promotes misery.)  Humans were built to work.  To build. To expand. To create.

Make yourself a narrative that allows for that.  And then build and live and, yes, if you can, write stories of building and living, so that others might live and build.

And in that Garden, where Adam and Even wandered dreaming, there was a peacock…

Wait, what?

In my deep dive for the origins of modern mankind, of modern civilization, of modern stories, I came across the bizarre idea that the Yazidis were devil worshipers. And then I realized they were self-declared Satanists.  Sort of.

Like you, perhaps, I only knew the Yazidis as victims of the Daesh-bags.  Their women were taken away and raped, and sold in slave markets for sex slaves, a portion of them were starved on top of a mountain.  The news reported them as “an ancient religion of fire-worshipers” and they’re not wrong.  But there’s more to it than that.

First and foremost, the Yazidis,whatever they are, are not angels of light and love.  You could have told that, duh, because they’re an ethnic group that has persisted very long in a deeply hostile religion, but they also have some of the bad habits we associate with Muslims (and which to an extent are the sins of desert peoples.)  In my deep dive into “what the heck, the Yazidis, really” I found reference to young women stoned to death for the crime of wanting to marry outside the tribe, so there’s that.

But other than that, which is not exactly a sin unknown to any human tribe, (though the west got over it a few centuries ago and we used to slam them in convents rather than kill them for centuries before that) I found nothing particularly heinous.  There were no baby sacrifices upon stone altars, while a being made entirely of flies buzzed a demand for more blood.

If we’re going to talk what we in the west would associate with devil-worship, we’re more likely to fasten on Inca Aztec (corrected after error pointed out by commenter.  Yeah, the Incas were no angels, but the Aztecs… man.  And sorry, too much blood in my caffeine stream this morning.) ceremonies (or even the “peaceful” Mayans or the ancient Celts than on the Yazidis.) Yes, the Muslims think they’re devil worshipers. But the Muslims also think that the Christian trinity includes the Virgin Mary.  Mahommed had comprehension problems (or perhaps got his ideas from small heretical sects long forgotten.  Or perhaps from some merchant who was neither Christian nor Jew) and Islam has some serious lapses in understanding Judaism or Christianity.  So we’re not obligated to believe what they do about the Yazidis.  Nor, frankly, do we have any reason to think they have any clue about it, though they’ve lived near the Yazidis for so long.

But then we come to that self-declared Satan worship…

….the group consider themselves to be the chosen people of Melek Taus, the “Peacock Angel,” who they also know as Shaitan, or Satan. In Yazidi tradition, this special relationship began when Shaitan visited their ancestor Adam in the garden of Eden, bearing forbidden fruit.

The Yazidis are an ancient rural people from the plain of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. Almost forgotten archaeological layers of belief still poke through the surface here, old echoes that stretch religious absolutes held sacred by Muslims, Christians and Jews alike into weird, unsettling shapes.

The parallels between the Peacock Angel and the Satan we’re more familiar with can be baffling—Melek Taus is God’s most important angel, his commander-in-chief in this world, which was also his original role in the Abrahamic traditions. He’s also a fallen angel who rebelled against God and was subsequently cast into Hell; but in the Yazidi cosmology, after 40,000 years his tears quenched Hell’s flames and God forgave and reinstated him.

One of Melek Taus’ symbols is fire, and he can illuminate as well as burn. He’s responsible for granting mankind knowledge and free will, and in an intriguing twist on the familiar Garden of Eden story, he first initiates Adam with forbidden fruit: “[God] commanded Gabriel to escort Adam into Paradise, and to tell him that he could eat from all the trees, but not of wheat. Here Adam remained for a hundred years […] Melek Taus visited Adam and said, ‘Have you eaten of the grain?’ He answered, ‘No, God forbade me.’ Melek Taus replied and said, ‘Eat of the grain and all shall go better with thee.’”

First, if you’re like me and one of your main failings is a perverse sense of humor that last paragraph amused you mightily.  What if it were true?  What if the forbidden fruit, metaphorically speaking was wheat/agriculture/civilization?

It’s actually not that far off what I understand of current, orthodox (meaning the main one, not the Orthodox church) that the paradise was the time of our innocence, the animal state in which we could not sin because we did not think or plan.

And I do get that a lot of people — not me.  Sorry, not buying it.  It’s like the noble Vikings thing who are exactly like NYC professors.  I know fads when I see them — now think that the nomadic state of humanity was better, more egalitarian, less oppressive than agricultural society.

So of course, I grinned like a loon thinking of centuries/millennia of discussion on the apple symbolizing sex or science or–  And here all along, the evil was those golden strands that allowed us to grow and have cities and spread across the face of the world.

But should we take the Yazidis’ origin story as … well… gospel truth?

Why?

Sure, genetically they’re one of the oldest human groups.  Sure, they say and the article linked buys — rolls eyes — that they were there at the beginning at Gobleki Tepe, (if that was the beginning and not the debased state after the fall of the previous civilization.  I will hold out for more findings .)

People say all kinds of things.  And people buy all sorts of stories and incorporate them into their myths and into the “it has always been so.”

Looking for truth in the legends of mankind is even more slippery than looking for truth in human genetics.  You might as well use Napoleon’s Book of Dreams or Nostradamus as a way of interpreting the history of mankind and be done with it, it’s about as reliable.  Or perhaps you should sit quietly in your corner and wait the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

Legends and stories, the place from where humanity dreams, are one of my fascinations, as are the places where those meet, and the places where those diverge.

But every time we dig into a particular story or try to pin down particular details, we find it was borrowed from elsewhere, pre-figured elsewhere, or influenced by people who lived around.

So, yeah, the Yazidis worship the peacock angel, Melek Taus, though worship might be a faulty term.  It’s more like they try to keep him from getting too mad.

Did he have anything to do with paradise as Jews and Christians believe in it?  Or with the temptation in that primeval garden of the soul?

Unlikely.  Is it likely that the Yazidis lived at a religious crossroads, with Muslims and Christians and the various sects that lived only a short time, and didn’t imbibe any of the stories, adapt any of the stories? Borrow any of the symbology?

It’s not written, remember? These are stories granny tells and some grannies (mine, for instance) are novelists who never got around to writing things down, and instead made up elaborate stories, weaving them skillfully with the real world.  (It took me years to figure out the Parish Priest was not in fact a werewolf.)  And then, you know, kids absorb stories imperfectly and through their experience, things they’ve seen and other things that they heard.  For instance, it took me years to figure out my son thought I was the youngest of three, not the younger of two.  This is because my cousin, who was raised with us is called “Aunt.”  And she was raised with us, which means in the childhood stories I tell she figures as a sister.

The “they all steal from each other” Heinlein said of writers applies to all story tellers.  I suspect the Yazidis incorporated their own fire-idol into the cosmogony of their neighbors, however they could.

Someone else I was reading said that people who use birds and serpents as sacred symbols are always bad news and perhaps they’re right.  Except Christians use the holy dove as a symbol of the holy spirit, and the peacock as one of the symbols for the Christ.  (No serpents, though, as far as I know.)

And yes, the Yazidis say that the symbols at Gobleki Tepe are Melek Taus and his friends.  And perhaps they even believe it, but the only reason I would is if they’d said this and talked of creatures that resembled those symbols before Gobleki Tepe was excavated.

I might sound like I’m making the Yadizis out to be deceptive or confused.  I’m not.  They’re just human.  Every time you pursue this sort of mythical (in the sense of where myths live, not in the sense of false, though some obviously are) account down the rabbit hole, you come back with your teeth clenched on nothing.

Take Roots, the myth that American blacks fastened on to, the origin of “we were kings.”  There were so many problems with it that even when it came out as a mini-series, anyone half-educated in the history of Africa went “Wait what?” and the most kindly thing some of us could say was “well, maybe the author’s family history was highly atypical.”  But of course, it wasn’t family history.  It was fiction, based on a totally unsourced fiction book.  But it was what people wanted to believe, and you can never debunk it enough that people will stop believing it.

Or take the great lost matriarchy that makes up so much of the background of both feminism and New Age in the U.S. It’s nonsense, partly based on Marija Gimbutas’ willful misinterpretations of things like bull’s head as uteri. And partly on people wanting to believe and have something to base their dreams upon.  People want to believe that women are peaceful, and that “if women were in charge” everything would be peace and love.  Mostly because people want peace and love, and because they’ve come from another planet and never met any real women.  (What? I spent six years in an all-girls school.  Books positing a peaceful planet of “all women” get walled so hard they dent the brick. It’s not that we didn’t even have physical violence.  In an all-female environment, the strongest and biggest inevitably turn to male-style hooliganism.)

I have no idea why the Yazidis chose to identify themselves as the people of the tempter in the garden, except, well… they were living among Muslims for generations.  So many “we’re on the other side” made some sort of sense.

I don’t particularly credit it more than Arabs being descended of Esau Ishmael (Edit. Really high blood in caffeine stream).  Though that wheat thing is intriguing.  That wheat thing might relate back to something.

Every language has a “fall” built into it, and the assumption we came from on high to our present debased state.  This is explained by the idea that every generation thinks the world is in decline.  But it doesn’t satisfy.  Not quite.

Look, if that were the case, would Latin have that built in?  The Romans were the peacockiest of all races (but no angels) and convinced they were pinnacle of everything.  But their language betrays them.

Perhaps, if there was a higher civilization before, a higher state of being — let’s say that there was a civilization of agriculturalists before the pastoralists of Gobleki Tepe — and it fell in some horrible way.  Nuclear fire is not needed for the fall, though heaven help us, every “historian” who posits ancient civilizations is fascinated with it.  Their own myths of the seventies, their idea we’d all die by fire taints everything they see.  The black plague would suffice and be enough, and quite likely to start rounding the moment humans massed in cities, and take a humanity that wasn’t used to it.

Would that not get incorporated as a “fall”into the legends of long ago?  Before wheat we lived in a state of health and innocence, and then we had wheat and fell from grace.  Indulge not in the tempting agriculture…

The legend need not even have originated with the Yazidis, just was taken by them, at some point, to explain why they were “a people set apart.”

Look not for truth in the legends of mankind.  Not real truth.  We might be made of ape and angel, but we’re mostly made of story, story that weaves into our thoughts, our bodies, our beings, and becomes part of us and makes us who we are, and shapes our being and our choices.

We all steal from each other.  We all make up stuff.

But perhaps some attention needs to be paid to the stories we tell.  This modern myth that humans are always wrong and evil and must disappear is starting to manifest itself in a birth dearth, in young people with no purpose, in a civilizational suicide from which there is no return, not for thousands of years.

In the garden there was a serpent, and he whispered “Humans are uniquely bad. Eat of this fruit of emotional irrationality and you’ll go into the long night with no regrets.”

Do not listen.

Humans are evil compared to what? Who judges absolute evil, or absolute good?  Without us, what is absolute evil or absolute good?

Suicide is never the answer.  Not for a person, not for a civilization, not for a species.

Perhaps out there, in the starts, the good that we do is desperately needed.

Forget the peacock angel and build for the future, and the centuries yet unborn.

The children might believe all sorts of crazy things about themselves and us, but that’s all right, so long as we give them the tools to survive, to build and to go on.

Evil is the negation of the future, of hope, of creation. Evil is the voice that whispers “Kill yourself now and it will be better.”

In the beginning there was chaos, void without form.  We came from it.  We’re not going back.

 

 

 

So, in my deep dive into human origins (it’s all Francis Turner’s fault, really) and the origins of various groups in Europe I came across what seems now to be a more or less established fact: that modern Europeans are the result of a mix between Early European Farmers ( likely immigrated from somewhere near Anatolia, btw the group that Otzi belonged too.  They looked, and genetically resemble modern Sardinians.) and the Indo European herder invaders, the Yamnaya.

The curious thing is that Europeans have mostly maternal lines from Early European Farmers and paternal lines from the Yamnaya.

The conclusion drawn (and not wrong, though probably not absolutely right either) is that the Yamnaya killed the EEF and took their women.

This is part of the view of man as the killer ape that shaped so much of the thought in the seventies, and incidentally gave rise to — if not the whole — an entire strain of New Wave Science fiction.

Incidentally this helped shape the idea that humans should never go to other planets, and over time poisoned generations with a hatred for their own species and a drive to self-extinction which we unfortunately see a lot of in the new generation.

Pinches nose bridge.

Yeah, okay I fell for it.  Remember I was very young. At fourteen the idea that humans were uniquely bad and killers wasn’t implausible.  After all, you know, adults who had degrees were saying this stuff, they probably knew something I didn’t know.

Turns out not so much.  It was mostly hysteria from the (then) most pampered generation in history at the idea that war existed and they might be required to serve, or worse, they might die in a nuclear exchange.  The second was scary, admittedly, and no one who didn’t grow up with the hammer hanging over them can know how scary it was that all authorities told us we were most likely to be killed in our beds because we wouldn’t roll over for communism.  (And I’m sorry, yes, that’s what every authority and entertainer said.  Bah.)  It was made scarier and crazier by propaganda from the soviet union that targeted mostly the young and convinced them pacifism (which is known as surrender) was some kind of an answer.)  Those who kept an eye on the fall of the Sov Union (difficult as our press here didn’t really cover it) or who keep an eye on China agree that war is scary but it’s not the scariest thing.  And there are things worth fighting for.

Maybe I shouldn’t judge.  It was a concerted propaganda front from Imagine to New Wave post apocalyptic stories.  Most humans don’t want to think everything out for themselves.  We are social apes, if not particularly killer ones. (More on that later.) So we absorb the ethos of our time and tribe through our senses and bypass our thought to belong.

But the truth is that it’s all a load of Marshall’s pre-school teacher (second son had the improbably named Mrs. Hooey for pre-school.)  I mean, all of it.

Are humans killers?  All animals are.  Even so called herbivores.  Periodically people get pictures of cows chomping on bunnies and are shocked.  Every one who has kept chickens knows the dastardly creatures haven’t forgotten they were once dinosaurs.  To see a flock pursuing a lizard is a thing of beauty, but they will even turn on their mates and eat large chunks. With chickens, ladies and gentlemen it’s a matter of size.  Forget Godzilla and King Kong.  If Aliens wanted to exterminate us, they’d create T- Rex sized chickens, and we’d be running away frantically, as they laid our cities to waste.

And apes?  Dear lord, apes.  Far from being uniquely killer apes, we’re somewhat restrained and controlled.  Chimps will tear baby chimps from their mothers’ arms, rip them to shreds and eat them.  Mostly when the female is a stranger to the group, and sure there’s an evolutionary reason there.  But sometimes they seem to do it to a member of their own band and just chomp them.

So, no, we’re not uniquely bad.  And if the voluntary extinction movement had their way, we’d only be leaving the Earth to those worse than us.  Never mind.

But then there’s the whole “EVERY MAN WAS SLAUGHTERED, EVERY CUTE AND YOUNG WOMAN TAKEN” which the right proposes in the idea they’re being “realistic” while the left embraces with “See how evil humans are!” and both of which give me a headache and a pain in… wherever rationality is located.

Yeah, sure, one of the strains — paternal — was almost completely eliminated.  The question is… over how long, and how widespread an area?

Are we really studying ONLY the generation immediately after the invasions, and finding no paternal EEF strains?  Are we studying it everywhere?

If we were then that conclusion would be warranted.  But…

No, of course we aren’t.  Good heavens.  Yeah, we have a lot more remains showing up every day, and our tools are getting better.  But the preservation of human remains is an iffy thing, and great strides though we’re making, it’s not that fine a tool or an exploration.

I suspect that yes, in many places there were raids that killed every man and took every woman.  The rape of the Sabines is not a unique thing in the world (and the women had their revenge.  The grandmother’s told stories, remember?  And maybe the invaders influenced the new generation less than they thought) and for primitive tribes or nomadic tribes, or the Middle East until very very recently, it was the pattern.

I’m sure those isolated EEF hamlets and farms got trounced suddenly, in the night, without any idea what was coming.  And my mind can conjure up quite vivid and scary images, thank you so much, of being a young woman and seeing her whole family slaughtered and what came after.  The farm burning in the night, the wagons, the mistreatment  over the next few years till she acquired Stockholm syndrome and identified with the oppressor.  (Did you know there is a mechanism in humans that can replace the native tongue with a learned one, given enough trauma.  Given I’ve pretty much done it it makes me wonder about “enough trauma.”)  The plains Indians did that, and read the stories of young female abductees to get the full force of their condition.

There is a reason nomadic herding cultures, and primitive cultures of all kinds keep their women covered up or in the back of the house.  And no, it’s not “evil patriarchy” (though it is evil patriarchy, in the sense of father-the-protector.)  It’s because the casual travelers who drop by for a drink and the sacred host’s duty offering of a bite to eat might be scouts for a whole tribe on the move.  Showing them your beautiful women is inviting one of those raids in the night.  It’s the way the world is, outside our very fortunate and technological life. And until 90 lb women can reliably trounce 200 lb men, it will be.  We have what keeps the tribe going.  We will be coveted. The more primitive and savage a people is, the worse that turns out.)

I’m sure there were horrors there, too, like the things we’ve learned from the Middle East and which echo some of the less savory Greek legends: parents served their children’s flesh, cannibalism and human sacrifice and indescribable tragedy.

In fact, in many ways, for many of us from European extraction (and even those who are only partially so) you could say this was the invasion our collective unconscious comes from, the place where the dreams and nightmares fester, and a lot of our legends originate.

But EVERY village?  EVERY hamlet of EEF?  Oh, please.  If you’re going to maintain that, you have to tell me which innovation caused the Yamnaya to be so devastating in battle.  And don’t tell me bronze weapons, because the EEF had that.  And don’t tell me that it was because the EEF were peaceful agriculturalists, because we have proof they weren’t  They seemed to conduct lively raiding and stealing among themselves, just to keep their hand in.

If you’re going to make that kind of claim, you surely best show your work.

No, the people who say it was ONLY the hypergamic nature of women that did it aren’t right either.

But knowing what difference a difference in the “attractiveness” of a population can make over a thousand years and that women were and are hypergamic, and also, honestly, that women instinctively prefer brutal men (though those of us who are rational have let that far behind), yeah…

Some village, hamlets, farms were completely obliterated except for the cute women.  But a preference over say 50 generations for Yamnaya men would do the rest of the work, till EEF farmer male contributions were mostly trace.

Which, of course, brings us to “Humans, who we are.”

Yeah, I’m sure there was unimaginable horror in that invasion.  There’s been unimaginable horror all through history.

But there are other things.  Man is not the killer ape.  Man is the killer MAN.  By which I mean a self-tamed ape, who sure indulges in violence but usually has a reason for it (good or bad, as future generations might judge it.) and a goal, and who tells himself stories about who he is.  Stories that make us more noble, braver, but also less bound by instincts, more able to temper them in the ways we wish we were.

Was that already operating in that ur-invasion.  I think yes, because, as I said that’s where our legends come from (ah, those grandmothers!)  So I suspect there were other feats, our deeds in those dark nights when the wagons full of young fighting men descended on the sleeping villages: bravery and altruism; young men dying for their women and friends; young men dying for the village, and sometimes, yes, young women insisting on fighting alongside brothers and husbands; but also less futile sacrifices,  mothers running into the forest with male children who would otherwise be killed, and men fighting so their women could run away.  But there would be other behaviors, too, from the invaders: unexpected mercy, unwonted and sudden kindness to the very old and very young, and yeah, occasionally, falling in love with one of the young women taken in the raid, and giving her more power over your culture and your young than she would ever have got otherwise.

Do I have proof of this?  No. It’s not the sort of thing that leaves a mark in the bone and the gene.  (And btw, most Jews have Egyptian paternal DNA.  And every Jewish male wasn’t killed.  It’s just women are hypergamic, and over time it tells.  But the culture, the culture was still not Egyptian.  Or they’d not be around now.)

But it is almost guaranteed, because they’re human and we’re human.

Humans are not Killer Apes.  Sure, they’re that too, but that doesn’t distinguish them from other apes, who are just as killer or more.

Humans are story telling apes.  And some of the stories we tell ourselves are about a morality that’s probably anti-evolution, but is part of civilization, of what allows us to live together in numbers and make scientific progress.  To the extent it is present, society, and innovation functions more.

The west seems to be the wedge of this storytelling, this self-taming, this innovation.

To beat our chests and/or cry over our origin story is just zany.  To say we can’t go to the stars due to our horrible taint is goofy.

What do we know about the morality or killer instincts of the crustaceans of Antares or the lizardoids of Proxima?  Do we have any reason to think that any species made of flesh and come through the crucible of evolution would be like unto angels of gentleness and light?

Pfui.

It’s time to quit the disparaging stories and the self hatred.  Killer Ape?  Builder Ape! Dreamer Ape! Lover Ape! Poet Ape! Engineer Ape! Traveler Ape!

We deserve the stars, and they wait us.

 

 

 

*Sorry guys.  I’m actually on the mend.  At least today, for the first time in three weeks, I woke up with a clear head.  But the overdue short story is still not finished, the house looks like Pompeii after the volcano, and I am trying to do three things at once, so I forgot this.  I have a couple of books to promo, but they’ll get done next week.  I just can’t do the finicky work right now. I’ll add them next week.  For now, here’s the vignette, and I’ll be back tomorrow – SAH*

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: mature.

Oh, yeah, and Happy Father’s Day!