Humans are imperfect and transitory beings.  Our moods, attachments and directions, often change.  You don’t even need to scan the Ashley Madison ranks for that.  You just need to go to your local craigslist “Lovely puppy, two years old, moving in with boyfriend who doesn’t want him.  Free to a good home.”  (The ones who try to get rid of their elderly pets?  Those I want to shoot.  We have gone through this six times now, seeing a cat down to that final spiral, trying to keep them as comfortable as possible and give them as much love as possible because it’s going to be a long time before we see them again — yeah, I do know what theologians say. I don’t believe them.  Souls on the order of a human, no.  Able to partake their humans redemption? I believe so.  Otherwise Himself is not a gentleman — and OMG cleaning up stuff where they forget where the box is.  We’re going through this with an 18 yo now, and when he goes we have two not very far behind.  But they’re family members.  More importantly, they’re bonded to you and your family.  In this case, the vow is not spoken, but is there.  Upending their little world at the end?  Putting them in the hands of strangers who almost for sure won’t have our patience?  People who do that are SCUM.)

I suspect that since long before civilization our associations and bonds were held together with vows, bonds, and a given word.  Yeah, people will default on that — humans are imperfect — but it’s pretty clear who defaulted, and how to repair it, if the bonds, both ways, are clear.

We know from earliest recorded history that the “kings” (at about the level of tribal lords if that.  Remember Ulysses, king of Ithaca, plowing his field with a team of oxen?  Yeah.  Not stuff you’d catch Louis XIV doing.  Or for that matter Chaka Zulu.  Those were more kings and chiefs as we understand them, but human groups used to be bands.  Like that band of banditi led by Romulus and Remus, which took all the women from the nearby band and proceeded to spawn Romans) held their servants by fealty, oaths, often with the gods thrown in for good measure, in case you felt like defaulting.

Feudalism, which is a sophisticated form of government evolved from the tribal, was held together at every level by mutual bonds.  The lord to the vassal, the vassal to the Lord, world without end.

In a world torn by invasions, where the Pax Romana had collapsed, the vows and given word were the architraves of society.

Did they get broken?  Oh, holy hell, yes.  Read up on the War of the Roses sometime. Humans are flawed and imperfect.  But it held enough to build civilization on.

Did marriage vows, solemnized before priest and society get broken?  Eh.  Your generation — whichever one it is — didn’t invent sex or adultery.  It’s been around always, and people are flawed.  But it held enough that the married couple/family was the foundation of society.  Good enough to raise the kids.  Something to build on.

We haven’t gone to many weddings recently.  It’s the age we’re in.  There was a time in our late twenties when we went to several weddings a year, and it would probably have been a monthly activity if we hadn’t moved away from all our friends from high school and college.   Right now, we’ve gone to a “second batch wedding” of a friend’s daughter.  There have been others of people marrying late or whatever.  Not a lot.  They might ramp up, they might not.  It’s not the eighties anymore.

But I’ve watched movies.  Okay, pieces of movies, usually when my husband is watching something and I’m doing something else in the room.  I am not precisely ADHD, but most movies don’t have interesting enough plots to keep me riveted.  Even when I read, I’m usually doing something else like crocheting or (audio books) cleaning the house.  If I didn’t have audio books, the house would never get cleaned.  I bore easily and wonder off.  But I have watched a lot of weddings, in a lot of media.  Honestly it started with the year right after 9/11 when I mindlessly watched a lot of sitcoms because it was easier than thinking.

That’s where I first came across the concept of writing your own wedding vows.  I thought “that’s weird” but assumed the same generation that thinks the height of originality is misspelling your kids’ names had decided they wanted the promises of lifelong love, support and fidelity  to be more poetic or something.

And then I started seeing/hearing examples.  And boy was I wrong.

Most wedding vows — at least real people’s we’ve heard — are rambling incoherent speeches that don’t even have any kind of promise in them.  They usually start with “Ever since we met” pass on to reassurances of love, and if they are semi-decent, end with stuff like “I shall always love your independent spirit, and will do my best to support you.”  The professional ones, which we hear in movies, are surprisingly not much better.  The “Serious” ones are poetic and pretty, but if they remember to promise to always love, you’re ahead of the curve.  The funny ones…  I overheard one of those recently, will say things like “I promise to never blow my nose in the shower.”  “I’ll keep your bicycle in good working order.”

Half the time when I hear these “wedding vows” I start yelling “That’s not a wedding.”  “That’s not a marriage.”

I mean, I can promise to keep a friend’s bicycle in good working order (I could, if I knew how to) without it carrying anything else with it, much less love and lifelong fidelity.  Even promising to always love someone is not a wedding vow, and it doesn’t make a marriage.  I have tons of divorced friends where they and their exes still “love” the other despite having married someone else.  There are many forms of love.  How do you define love?  How do you KNOW when you’re in breach.

And that’s where we come back again to “do you divorce the guy because he broke his ‘vow’ of not blowing his nose in the shower?”

You’re going to say I’m being silly.  Sure, the wedding/marriage comes with assumed bonds.  Everyone knows what being married means.  You’re signing contracts that make you an economic team, etc.  Sure.

But those are laws around what you’re doing.  Those vows?  That’s you putting the yoke on your shoulders, voluntarily.  They’re putting your honor on the line.  If you didn’t promise, personally promise, all that’s between you is a contract and contracts are broken and dissolved all the time.  Sure, okay, you might have to pay some penalty, but it’s no big deal.  It doesn’t break you.

I don’t know how far this lack of making good vows goes.  I KNOW that medical classes are writing their own oaths and that Hippocrates would lose his mind if he heard it.  Nothing about “first do no harm” but a lot of rambling incoherence on social justice and helping the helpless, and being voices for the voiceless.

I don’t know if this has reached county offices.  I don’t know if engineers take oaths.

I do know that every profession, contract, bond, in which people are writing their own vows and oaths is rotten to the core.

What is the point of vows, if you’re going to write them to suit yourself and not to be difficult?  “As long as we both shall love,” means absolutely nothing.  As someone in a 33 year long marriage, how do you track love?  How do you define love?  Love as most newlyweds feel it is a chintzy thing.  That elderly couple in the corner who never talks to each other, probably love each other more.  The butterflies at his being near will eventually vanish.  Does that mean you stopped loving and the marriage is invalid?

“Caring for the most disadvantaged” means nothing.  Who are the most disadvantaged?  How do you care for them?  Gosh, gee, would it be better to put them out of their misery?  It means nothing.  It is bound by human interpretations of the moment, and humans are flawed beings.

I suspect, though I have no proof, that the rot is all the way through.

In a time of fast technological change, my life is bounded by principles, which derive from the oaths I took.  My citizenship oath, my marriage vows, which included promises to look after the kids.  All of that.  Am I perfect at them?  Dear heaven.  I’m human.

But they’re sort of directional beacons, beyond my human understanding and vision.  Even if I don’t feel like something, I promised, and there’s an eternal pointing light.

It makes life easier.  It’s hard to be adrift when you have a compass.

They say that family is the cornerstone of society.  If so we are doing it wrong.  “Not blow your nose in the shower” is a hell of  a promise to build society upon.  Worse, each couple writes their own, so maybe the people next to you promised to dance under the moonlight every month.

There’s no predictability, no assumed certainty.  There’s nothing to build upon.

Humans are creatures of the band and personal loyalty.  When you lose that we’re just great apes with vaguely social instincts.

As we have proof daily.

Let’s turn ‘er around.  Take your oaths and mean them, and do your best to keep them.  It’s what’s difficult that’s most worth doing.  It’s what’s stood the test of time that stands forever.

Follow the beacons shining in the night.

 

Book Promo by Sarah

*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*

 

KEVIN J. ANDERSON AND SARAH A. HOYT: Uncharted (Arcane America Book 1)

After Halley’s Comet was destroyed in a magical battle in 1759, the backlash separated the entire New World from the Old in an event known as The Sundering. Now isolated from the rest of the globe, America has become a very different place, where magic works and history has been changed forever.

It is 1803—a new 1803. Young Meriwether Lewis, footloose and intrigued, goes to hear a lecture in St. Louis by the venerated old wizard Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s talk is disrupted by the attack of a winged fire-breathing beast, much like legends from Lewis’s own Welsh heritage. In the aftermath, Franklin tells the young man that he knows of a great, growing evil that lurks in the uncharted Arcane Territories west of the Mississippi.

Using his own vast fortune, Franklin commissions Lewis and his own talented partner William Clark to embark on a remarkable voyage of exploration, to meet and document the indigenous tribes, to find a route all the way to the Pacific Ocean—and perhaps beyond the magical veil to Europe again—and to stop the growing evil that is filling the American West. For while the Sundering separated the rest of the world and granted the original colonists unexpected magical gifts, sorcery inspired by native legends has also been ignited. And the Arcane Territories may hold unparalleled dangers for the expedition, both natural and magical.

Accompanied by the brilliant shape-shifting sorceress Sacajawea, Lewis and Clark set off on an unparalleled adventure across a landscape that no European has ever seen.

TERRY R. LACY:  Final Rebellion: A War Story in a Love Zone.

China won WWIII. The US is occupied, Americans enslaved. But hope lives in the hearts of a few patriots. Can a handful of insurgents take down the Chinese Army?

ALMA T. C. BOYKIN:  Staré: Shikari Book Two.

Staré Rights! Staré Freedom! Staré secrets…

Auriga “Rigi” Bernardi, now a young woman and a recognized artist, returns to Shikhari. Neither an adult nor a child, Rigi navigates colonial society, wishing humans made as much sense as do the native Staré. But the Staré now demand independence and full rights as sapient beings. Or do they?

An archaeological expedition gone lethally awry leaves Rigi caught between cultures, a human in a Staré world. Then her uncle and his Staré assistant disappear just when Rigi needs his advice the most. Rigi and her cousin Tomás have discovered the key to the lost cities. Now someone—human, or Staré?—wants her dead.

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: woe

Uncharted — written with Kevin J. Anderson — is available in e-version now, with the paper version coming out on the eighth.

Yes, I know this is very bad of me, to use this post for promotion.  Look, it’s not even that, it’s that it’s been a really rough week (nothing bad, just a ton of work) and I’m behind on three short stories and a novel.  And I thought maybe you guys would want to see this anyway.

And yes, my bio is wrong on the Baen site, and what they gave to Amazon.  Even counting ONLY the non-secret books, I’m well over two dozen novels, close to thirty BOOKS with the collections.  Counting the closed pen name books I’m around 34/35.  And my published short stories are over a 100 (just professional, I don’t count the early ones.)  I don’t even think I can count them, as I keep forgetting half a dozen.  I tried to correct it in the podcast but my phone disconnected just at that time.  And meh, I’m still a newby compared to Kevin.

Uncharted (Arcane America Book 1) – Kevin J. Anderson and Sarah A. Hoyt

UNCHARTED:

Lewis and Clark in the Arcane Territories

 

Kevin J. Anderson

Sarah A. Hoyt

When Halley’s Comet was destroyed above our Earth in May, 1759, so was our old way of life, along with the natural science I had studied so intently. The Sundering did just as its name suggests: it sundered the Old World from the New.

This dramatic event created an entirely separate American continent where the laws of magic vie for equal and, sometimes superior, place with the laws of nature. The Sundering created an America where sorcery and science sit in unlikely and uncomfortable partnership. As for Europe…no one knows. That continent is lost to us. The great barrier across the Atlantic has proved impenetrable to all our best efforts, even mine, even now that I control the powers of lightning!

But Europe need not be lost to us forever. The passage east across the ocean appears closed permanently. So, my darling Keira—and any else who read these words—we must consider that the way West may be open! Unknown, yes. Perilous, undoubtedly. But open for anyone who dares to explore.

Ah, would that I were seventy again!

 

From the Arcane Autobiography of Dr. Benjamin Franklin; Printer, Scientist & Mage

Fire and Parry

 

My Dear William,

I am writing you to request you join me in a great and exhilarating enterprise. There is no one else I’d rather have at my side than you, and I am thus hastening to tell you before my mind has even ceased reeling.

But first I suppose I should explain how I came to be called to this great mission of discovery. As you might know, I was lately in St. Louis with the charge to discover a medicinal plant said to be a cure-all to the French settlers in that area.

During my visit, the great sorcerer Benjamin Franklin was also due to make an appearance. As you can imagine, I could not resist going to see, if only from a distance, a man of such immense age and such wise learning. Little did I know what I would actually witness. It changed my life forever.

—Letter from Captain Meriwether Lewis to Captain William Clark, St. Louis, February 10, 1803.

 

In the warm sunshine, Meriwether Lewis realized that he should not have worn his great coat with its many capes. It wasn’t exactly warm in St. Louis in early February, but it was warm enough to make the icicles drip from the eaves of the great white houses, and the ice that covered the street mud crackle underfoot. As he walked along, swinging his cane, he began to feel too warm.

Of course, the heat he felt might also be due to his excitement.

When he’d come to St. Louis to procure black sage, much mentioned in the correspondence of the French Colonists in this city as – made into tea – being a sovereign remedy against pain, he’d never expected this would give him a chance to cross paths with the ancient wizard Ben Franklin himself.

Since the cometary explosion and the magical aftermath that had isolated these American shores from the rest of the world, Ben Franklin had made the sort of name for himself that in other times would have made him a demi-god.

Maybe that was true, regardless, with the New World shaking and resonating with all the changed rules of unleashed magic. And Meriwether now had a chance to meet the great man….

He quaked with trepidation and subdued excitement. As a rational man, he knew it was not likely that Franklin would even notice him. Everywhere the great wizard went, he was surrounded by admirers, well-wishers, sycophants, and those who would be his pupils to learn the arcane sciences. If Meriwether managed to see more of the man than (what remained of) his famously coiffed locks bobbing amid the crowd as the man spoke his famous witticisms, he would be greatly satisfied, even thrilled.

And yet, he felt a strange sense of expectancy.

In the more than forty years since the comet’s arrival and the shift in the world, Meriwether couldn’t say the coming of magic had done much for him. He had been born into it, fifteen years after the change, and so this was the world he had always known since childhood. Perhaps the increased magic had enhanced his ability with herbal healing, which he had learned from his mother in childhood. Or perhaps not. Who could say? He did possess a sense that when he touched a plant he could know what it might do, but how was he to know whether that had always been in this world, even before magic started working? His mother had certainly displayed a similar skill and talked of his grandmother having it, too, which was well before the 1759 return of Mr. Halley’s comet.

But Meriwether also experienced odd, unnatural dreams from early childhood—the feeling of wings and fire, the portent that something was about to burst forth within him. Though he was a man of twenty-nine now, he still had those dreams, still felt that brooding presence. He both feared it and desired it in a way he could not explain.

The streets here in St. Louis were more spacious than those in the East. Those original American cities had modeled themselves after the cities of Europe, the cramped and crammed together sort of life one could expect in the weary continent that had birthed and been swallowed by civilization. But in the West, the proportions of sky and land allowed for expansive building such that in many streets three carriages could have driven abreast without danger of collision.

And yet, as he approached the government house where Franklin was due to speak in a few minutes, Meriwether could barely move through the throngs in the streets. Well-dressed men and women walked cheek to jowl with people in work clothes, all moving in the same direction. Only with the greatest determination could Meriwether make his way to the outer edges of the plaza outside the government house. Then his progress halted completely.

And so that’s it, he thought, half amused and half exasperated. I should have known it was foolish to hope for even a glimpse of old Franklin, much less dream of making his acquaintance. At least I shall be able to describe to my friends in Virginia the press of people occasioned by an appearance of the great wizard from Philadelphia.

Meriwether debated turning back just to escape the overwhelming crowd, which would entail moving against the prevailing flow of people, but he decided to stay here, hoping he might hear some hint of his speech passed back through the crowd, sure that Franklin’s words would be distorted and exaggerated by unreliable listeners.

What he heard instead was a loud scream close up ahead.

At first he took it to be an expression for excitement of the occasion, an overexcited man or a nervous and flighty woman, but he quickly realized that something was genuinely wrong. The scream held too sharp a note, containing too much shock and fear. And then another scream resounded, and another, coming from the other side of the plaza, right across from government house.

Perhaps the famed wizard had let loose with his notorious electrical magic, Meriwether strained to see above the turmoil of bodies, hats, coats. Then he heard the sound—not the zap of electricity, but more a sound like when the household staff would beat the rugs in spring. It was a flap, flap, as of a great piece of fabric against the air—except the fabric must be truly immense, and the sound was coming straight toward—

Though the bodies were packed together in the St. Louis square, the crowd managed to move like a living thing as people screamed and ran. Caught by surprise, Meriwether swung his arm and his cane to ward off the panicked crowd about to trample him, but he lost his footing and almost went under onto the dirty street .

Thrashing, trying to save himself, he twirled and swung his cane in all directions, forcing the maddened and blind crowd to deviate around him. When he cleared a small space, he barely managed to pick himself up, prodding with his cane to ward off the human stampede.

As he dragged himself back to his feet, he was aware of other people stumbling and being trampled. He heard the screams and sounds of pain and wished to help, knowing he could not.

Meanwhile from above came that infernal sound again, the flapping of enormous rugs in the air. He nearly gagged with a smell of brimstone.

He risked a glance upward and saw a big, red bulk swoop around in the air and head for government house again, which launched a fresh stampede, and new screams.

Dragon, the back of Meriwether’s head said. Dragon!

And just like that, he found himself running, not with the crowd in blind headlong flight, but against it. His movement was so fast, so desperate, that he bowled people out of his way with the force of it. He had the strange, irrational thought that only he could protect the people of St. Louis from the dragon. It was the same reckless feeling that made him go into fever-ridden households, to help and save whomever he might. Arrogance, perhaps, but some part of Meriwether Lewis’s constitution led him to the certainty that matters sometimes depended on him.

When he broke through the scattering crowd into the clearing in front of the government house, he came upon sheer confusion. A carriage was now on fire, completely engulfed in flames. The horses, still in their traces, reared and pulled, spreading the fire to tree and bush as they went.

Government House was on fire, too, the tall wood and brick mansion set ablaze in an instant. Yellow flames and black smoke strained skyward.

Meriwether rushed toward the horses, desperate to free the screaming, terrified animals. Embers from the burning carriage sprayed on their hides, driving them into greater frenzy. He could not bear to let even the poor animals be consumed in his sight.

As he reached the horses, using all his knowledge of frightened creatures acquired through years of woodcraft, he avoided the pounding hooves and saw that another man was running to the horses from the opposite side. Without much thought, he registered that the man looked like the representations of old wizard Franklin he had seen, all the way down to the suit of inexpressible pink velvet. But this man looked maybe seventy years old, spry and showing his age, but far too young to be the ancient wizard, who was said to be very nearly a hundred years old. Now he was sidestepping the terrified animals with as much grace and ease as Meriwether himself.

Seeing him, the old man called out, “If we each get hold of the pins where they attach to the carriage, sir, we can release these unfortunate animals.” He puffed slightly, out of breath as he spoke. “Even if they drag the traces behind them, they will find it a better alternative than burning alive.”

Without wasting breath on an answer, Meriwether dashed to the burning carriage, using both hands to grab the pin that held the long poles to the burning carriage. With the spreading fire, the pin was hot even through his thin gloves. He inhaled smoke and coughed, but he grabbed hard at the pin, yanking it with all his might. The other man was fighting to do the same on the other side. Meriwether’s eyes watered, and he was sure he could feel ashes and embers sifting down on his head.

Though he struggled, the pin would not budge. Due to the heat of the fire, the metal had expanded and now fit more tightly than ever. He felt as if his flesh were burning. The horses screamed, dragging the conflagration with them.

The pin gave so suddenly that Meriwether stumbled backward, and the other man must have experienced success at the same time, because the horses galloped free and the burning pile of carriage lunged forward and collapsed. He jumped out of the way.

Now he watched the old man in fine clothes standing in place, waving a wand about, jabbing toward the sky. Up in the sky, the monstrous dragon had flapped away, gaining speed and altitude, and now came back for another pass. Like a cat playing with a mouse.

Any minute, Meriwether was sure he and the old man would be cinders. The people had fled the square and the empty circle around them was like a killing zone. The older man stood defying the dragon, as if confident he would not be consumed by the furnace breath. There was nothing Meriwether could do to help.

Behind them, he heard the noise of feet and hooves retreating, or perhaps it was the sound of his blood beating a drumbeat past his ears, making it impossible to think. Meriwether could not make himself run away from what was sure to be certain death, and he couldn’t even tell why. It depends on me. He simply knew that as long as the stranger in his soot-stained pink velvet suit stood there, he could not leave.

“Sir!” he cried, but his voice came out unaccountably small and squeaky, as though he weren’t a full grown man. “Sir,” he said.

Ignoring him, the man swept his hands apart and uttered words that Meriwether thought might be Greek. Maybe the man was a foreigner, trapped here for nearly fifty years since the magic severing of America from the rest of the world?

“Sir!” he cried again.

When the man spread his hands and swept his wand about like an orchestra conductor directing a great piece, cracklings of electricity and lightning united his two hands like a rope.

Meriwether could only gasp, his ears blocked by the panicked spinning of his blood. The back of his neck prickled, and his hairs attempted to stand on end. Seeing this obvious magic, he was more certain than ever that this was truly the wizard Benjamin Franklin. This was the great man he had come to see.

But he hadn’t counted on a dragon….

The red monster hove into view directly overhead, its shadow darkening the sky, Meriwether realized that Franklin could not possibly defeat the thing. The creature was as large as the plaza, end to end. Meriwether felt the wind from its wings, smelled its hot pumice stench. Rows of fangs filled the gigantic mouth that yawned open, large enough to swallow whole buildings if it tried. At the back of the reptilian throat something flared like the spark given off by flint and steel.

Meriwether had no weapon to fight a beast like this, but he grabbed for the knife in its sheath at his waist, an affection of his walks in the woods; he felt naked without it.

Before he could draw the blade, an explosion occurred—and it did not come from the dragon. A stream of light like a captive lightning bolt escaped Franklin’s hands, a roiling ball of electricity like a giant, spinning ball of dazzling blue and white. It hurtled through the air toward the dragon’s open mouth and struck the monster with a sound like a deafening, suspended musical note. It seemed to echo from the beginning of time and would sound until the world itself vanished in blackness and chaos.

When it ceased, two more balls of lightning flew from Franklin’s hands, slamming the dragon between the eyes, and the giant reptile keened like a creature slain. The second crackling sphere singed the great flapping wings. The old wizard from Philadelphia hurled two more electrical balls, and then two more.

Meriwether stood rooted on the street, his begrimed clothes rough and heavy upon him. His eyes and his throat burned, and his body seemed to vibrate with an echo of magic. And as he watched, aghast, the dragon shimmered and shifted. For a moment, hanging in midair, it wasn’t a great primeval beast, but instead became a conjunction of geometric patterns: circles and triangles, squares and shapes, all glowing angles and strange junctions flowing into each other.

He blinked the stinging sweat out of his eyes, and he found himself looking at the dragon again. The huge wings flapped like scaly rugs, and Meriwether felt something touch his mind for just a moment.

More ball lightning flew, fast, fast, from Franklin’s hands, too fast for Meriwether to even see which parts of the dragon were hit.

“Be gone!” The magic echoed in Franklin’s voice, resonating with the same loud and unbearable cadences he’d heard before.

The dragon spun, a streak of movement, a dancing center of magic, too graceful and quick for a beast so big and unwieldy.

Meriwether no longer had the strength to stand. Awareness and force flowed out of him, like a liquid seeping through his feet. Before darkness swept over him, he heard a sentence, not in Franklin’s voice, but in another, stranger accent—inside his head. “We will meet again, Meriwether Lewis…son of Wales.”

He was absolutely sure it was the dragon speaking.

 

 

If there’s one thing everyone agrees on, particularly those who’ve never read him, is that Heinlein was an optimist.  The cup was damnright brimming full.  We’d go to the stars and stay there. Humans would survive everything, even puppet masters.  We’re rough, we’re tough, and by G-d we can make it.

It’s only when you read him and pay attention, particularly now, thirty years (has it really been that long?) after his death that you realize what a dark canvas he painted his individual streaks of light and individualism on.

No?

The world is overpopulated.  There is some kind of planetary authority (often specifically designated as belonging to or being an outgrowth of the United nations) and the US has lost all sovereignty (even if Jubal Harshaw thinks it’s indecent.  It would be.)  The universal government — so to put it — as depicted in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is exactly what you’d expect from an outgrowth of the UN.  It’s clear there’s a redistribution of food around the world and most of it is — natch — snatched up by kleptocrats.  Etc etc  etc.  In some worlds there’s references to students striking (?) for higher pay (???)  I Will Fear No Evil, which might not be the same world at all is even darker.  Your elementary school teachers decide what you get to do and even if you get to learn to read.  People live in compounds to protect themselves and outside them it’s like the worst parts of Chicago.  Cars are armored.  The normal people are either on welfare or criminals or both.

This is not a pie in the sky world.  It’s the world that you’d expect as a logical outgrowth of the world in the first half (and for IWFNE the second half of the twentieth century.)  And if you look at it, behind the giant shadow cast by Heinlein’s competent and self-sufficient characters, you find worlds that put 1984 and Brave New World to shame.  (Neither of those setups would resist a Heinlein character for more than 2 days.)

And yet Heinlein was an optimist.  He really was.  Recently, during a brief illness, I had the opportunity to re-read most of Clifford Simak.  What I’m going to say is not a disparagement of Simak.  As most of you know, I love his work and it is what pulled me into science fiction.

Simak was a realist.  For the mid-century, the time his books were written, he wasn’t even a depressive.  I spent a lot of time reading depressives, most of them on the left (possibly in the conviction they’d be eaten last.)  The USSR has won, the world is a grey grayness and no one can escape, and everything ends badly.  About as bad as what’s acclaimed now, but without as much preaching.  (Or different preaching.  I remember one going on and on about how the US had fallen through being as decadent as Rome.  That might have been an early example of left-puritanism.  Or maybe the author was a real communist.  They’re all suspicious of sex, because is competes with the rewards the government can give.  Never mind.  I don’t remember the title or the author’s name, which is merciful, I’m sure.)

Simak was a realist.  He was also a journalist.  He knew what crossed his desk every day.  He did a realistic extrapolation of the future.  And in most of his books, beyond the characters and their interests and love affairs there is a clear certainty that humanity is doomed.  Oh, his books aren’t downers.  They usually end well, but we’re saved by time travelers, or aliens, or we escape to the past, or…  The cold war and the bomb loom big in his backgrounds.

I used to like Simak better than Heinlein until I was about 17.  Reading them in the seventies, Simak was more grounded in reality.  Yes, reality was depressing as hell.  And it tells you something that I didn’t notice until re-reading him years later how dark his assumptions were, and how it would take a miracle to save Earth and humanity.

So, Heinlein was an optimist.  His assumptions for the world building were the best of all possible worlds, given what was going on at the time.  Individual liberties? Who was going to claw that back from the increasingly communitarian and international world of the 40s 50s 60s 70s?

Me, I’m not an optimist in my world building (yeah, my background is also quite dark) but Heinlein was an optimist.

Sure, all of us wish that he’d been right in his optimism about space science and how far we’d be by now.  It’s my belief that was deliberately killed.  You want to see a lefty froth at the mouth, talk about space colonies.  They don’t WANT us to escape.  They’re tormented every minute of their lives with the idea that a human being, somewhere, could be thinking, doing, or living in a way they disapprove.  Space would just magnify their worries.  It’s also my belief the lack of massive overpopulation — that he anticipated — made the urgency of taking all our eggs out of the Earth basket less urgent.

But even with space colonies, would you trade our world for his?  Would you really want a famished world, administered by kakistocracies through the UN for their purpose?  A world in which the only individualists were in space, and only till it became properly “civilized” (Did you catch what happened on the moon not long after TMIAHM?)

Heinlein was an optimist.  What he envisioned from the mid twentieth was the best world possible.  Simak was the more likely and all of civilization consumed in a nuclear fire.

Do we have space colonies?  No.  But we will.  We’re just a little behind schedule.  The rest?  For the rest we and the Earth are immensely, incomparably, amazingly better off than he could have envisioned.  If he’d written us, no editor wold have bought it.  No editor would have believed it.

Sure we have setbacks and problems.  Did you think that the other side didn’t get a say?  Sometimes they’ll win a battle or fifty.  This is a very long war.  Some would say it’s endless.  But we can at least hope that generations yet unborn will be free.

We’re building a future beyond even the dreams of the optimist.  Don’t waver now.  Steady as she goes.

The future is already better than Heinlein could imagine.  And it much better than anyone else could.

The future’s so bright I got to wear shades.  Go and build.

 

Hillary and Bernie, Politics Oddest of Odd Couples – by Amanda S. Green

Hillary almost told the truth.

Or, as someone commented on social media, this is probably the closest she’s come to it in a long time. At least that’s the case when you talk HRC and politics.

No, this isn’t the opening to a new review of a book about the last presidential election. Nor am I returning to Clinton’s book What Happened. In fact, I’d planned on starting a new review today. I wanted to find something to snark. I wanted to have fun with a review. I spent time looking at possibilities. I wasn’t going to pay almost $15 for Amy Chozick’s book, Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling. I sure as hell wasn’t going to try to wade through Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World by Jennifer Palmieri. Instead, I thought I would live up to the nickname Sarah has hung on me and be the masochistic reader by picking up Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In by Bernie Sanders. Yes, you can all point and laugh. I swear I haven’t lost my mind and I’ll prove it.

I sat down this afternoon to start reading the book. By the end of the first page, I didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically or run to the bathroom to throw up. The laughter was because Bernie tries to hard to be serious and project concerned leadership while, at the same time, proving himself to be nothing but a bitter, spoiled old man.

Then there was the irony of someone who calls himself a democratic socialist referring to himself with the royal “we”. There are numerous references in the first two introductions – yes, two. One written at the time he first wrote the book and one added after his 2016 campaign for the Democratic nomination. Time after time, he wrote about how “we “ ran for president or how “our” campaign did this or that. No, he wasn’t referring to all the people taking part in his campaign. The context proves he wasn’t worried about them. It was all about him. It was and always will be the cult of Bernie.

The only thing that surprised me, other than the royal we crap, was that the intro added after he lost the nomination to Clinton dealt only with Trump and how evil he is and what a liar he is and how will be the downfall of our nation if we don’t raise a political revolution against him NOW! If he were a true socialist, or even a true champion of the people and more interested in exposing injustices than promoting his own agenda, he would have at least mentioned how the DNC and Clinton conspired to keep the nomination away from him. But no, he barely – if ever – mentions it.

Which means, in my mind, that he is still hoping to play the game and make nice with the DNC in the hope of getting the nomination in the next presidential election. If he truly was committed to his socialist roots, he wouldn’t be trying to keep in the DNC’s good graces. Hell, he wouldn’t keep all the millions he and his wife have accumulated over the years. He’d be redistributing his wealth, just as he claims the 1% should be doing now.

What happened by the time I got to the first chapter of the book is simple. I felt dirty. The slime fairly oozed off the pages of the book. Don’t get me wrong. Bernie – or his ghost writer – writes eloquently. If you aren’t familiar with the traps of socialism, it would be easy to fall for much of what he says, especially if you haven’t been a student of history. Fortunately, I can’t and won’t fall for his line of bull. Instead, I felt dirty. I wanted a figurative, if not literal, bath. There was no way I could get through more of the book, even for snarking reasons.

At least not this week.

So, I wondered what I should do. I didn’t want to leave Sarah high and dry for a post today. I had just about decided to go ahead and buy one of the books about HRC when I came across this article. It was as if the gods of snark had suddenly decided to smile down upon me. I had my topic.

According to the article, HRC is finally admitting she might have done something wrong in her campaign, something that might have cost her votes. Is it her actions as SecState regarding Benghazi? Nope. How about using her own private server? Nope, not that either. So what does she see as her mistake? Identifying as a capitalist.

Yes, you read that right. HRC, she of the Clinton Foundation, she who, along with her husband, have earned an estimated $240 million in the last 15 years. Of that, HRC is estimated to have earned $51 million. But she made a mistake saying she was a capitalist.

What that really means is she thinks she could have said she was a democratic socialist like Bernie and everyone would have forgotten her wealth, the huge speaking fees she demanded after leaving the State Department and the monies funneled into the Clinton Foundation. Yes, she really things the American public is that stupid. Not that it should surprise any of us. After all, she has insulted Middle America for supporting Trump. She has insulted women who voted against her, saying they only did so because voting as their husbands told them to.

“It’s hard to know, but I mean if you’re in the Iowa caucuses and 41 percent of Democrats are socialists or self-described socialists, and I’m asked ‘Are you a capitalist?’ and I say, ‘Yes, but with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability.’ You know, that probably gets lost in the ‘Oh my gosh, she’s a capitalist!’ ” Clinton said.

Take a moment and think about what she said. Despite all the protestations of the DNC that their party isn’t just socialist leaning but racing hard toward full socialism, she just admitted that’s the truth. At least, it seems, for some states. If that doesn’t turn your blood cold and make you stop and think, it should, especially since these are the same politicians who want to put severe limitations on the Second Amendment.

According to Clinton, “reputation of capitalism is pretty much in tatters”, especially for young people. Not really, but not for want of trying on the part of liberals. Just as they want to destroy the Second Amendment, they have worked to destroy capitalism in this country for decades. Yet, even as they talk about income inequalities and the need for universal healthcare, among other pet projects, do you see them practicing what they preach? Hell no.

Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist and people’s champion, has a net worth of more than $1 million (in conjunction with his wife), according to The American Thinker. At the time the article was written, he and his wife owned two homes, one in Vermont and one in the D. C. area where the median home valuation was in the range of $700,000 plus. He might not be the richest member of Congress but, for a man who preaches about income inequality and such, he sure has a hell of a lot of money he could be sharing with the less fortunate.

Nancy Pelosi’s net worth is reportedly in the $140 million range. As a member of Congress and Minority Leader in 2017, she made $193,000. Is it any wonder she disparaged the tax breaks we’ve gotten under the Trump Administration? That $1,000 or so is nothing but crumbs to her. Gee, I wonder if you look up Pelosi or Clinton or Sanders in a thesaurus you find the word “hypocrite” as a synonym?

So pardon me if I laugh hysterically when Clinton blames losing votes on admitting she’s a capitalist. At least she was honest about one thing during her campaign. When Sanders writes about the “grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in this country”, (Our Revolution, pg. 2) I want to curse. How dare he? How dare any of them sitting on Capital Hill and proclaiming to be Democratic-Socialists or Socialists and who accept their paychecks? As of December 2014, members of Congress earn $174,000 a year. This doesn’t count all the benefits they receive, benefits that include, iirc, medical insurance. They don’t have to worry about finding affordable insurance after passing the atrocity that was the Affordable (or should I say Unaffordable) Care Act. That salary increases substantially if they are in a leadership position, such as Speaker of the House, President Pro Tem of the Senate or Majority or Miniorty Leader of either House.

Maybe Clinton did lose a few votes because she said she was a capitalist. But that isn’t the reason she lost the election. She lost because the American people didn’t trust her to sit in the Oval Office as our leader. They saw her double-standard for women. We remember how she condemned the women who spoke out about their relationships with Bill. How different her tune was when the man accused of sexually harassing – or assaulting – a woman was Donald Trump. We remembered Benghazi. We didn’t believe her excuses about her private server. She was also part of the political establishment, something many voters were tired of.

As for Sanders, he was seen as someone outside the establishment. He had a message younger voters hadn’t heard before. Well, they would have if they were taught history and not simply indoctrinated into liberal ideology in all too many schools. In some ways, he was the Democrats’ Donald Trump. But the fix was in. The DNC had no intention of letting anyone but HRC have the nomination.

When will she admit the truth about that? Or about any of the rest of it? I don’t know about you, but I’m not holding my breath to find out.

There is a type of idiocy so profound, and so profoundly anti-reality that you need to go to school for several years, at a cost of millions before you actually internalize it and believe it with all your heart.

A lot of this kind of crazy stupidity is epitomized by the left in the country and by our former president.  People often referred to president Obama as believing all the sorts of things that college freshmen discuss late into the night as though they were great mysteries of the world when they are fairly obvious irrelevancies.  They weren’t wrong.  And that kind of learned ignorance, of purposeful perplexity, can be incredibly dangerous in a head of state, as we’re finding out with the Iran deal.

So how could a grown man, who had studied — presumably — history believe that it was a good idea to give lots of money to Iran to… build nuclear facilities?  What kind of baby unborn would buy that the regime which has declared itself at war with us for forty years, and which calls us things like Great Satan, and which keeps their own people in abject subjection would use that money for good and realize we were really good guys?

You have to go down the list of facts the left believes that just aren’t so.

When Obama took power, he talked about being an anti-Reagan and how everything that Reagan had done was wrong and had sent the country down a wrong path.

He did manage to be the anti-Reagan, making us a mockery abroad, and ruining the economy.  But that’s not what he was trying to do.

He was trying to be the second term of Jimmy Carter.  Okay, granted he managed that too, but not the way he meant to do it.  He meant to be the second term of Jimmy Carter as the left had been making it up since Jimmy left the White House.  “If only he’d had another term, he’d have managed total peace in the world, by not being aggressive at all.”  “If he had stayed in power, you’d see that his policies were responsible for the prosperity under Reagan.”  “If he’d stayed in power, we’d have green energy and live off unicorn farts.”  Okay, I might have made up the part about unicorn farts, but it’s only a minor exaggeration.

Mister Obama was told this from earliest childhood, by the leftists surrounding him.  People he respected, and who presented themselves as learned and intelligent told him these things. To not believe them would be to doubt the foundations of the world.

Other things he obviously believed, vid the apology tour: America was the big bully in the world, and if only America were made small and unimportant, other countries would grow and be prosperous, proportionally.  And also, every culture is alike, except ours which is uniquely bad.

Given this indoctrination, dinned into his brain from earliest consciousness, how could he do but what he did: picking up Jimmy Carter’s appeasement abroad and impairment of the economy abroad in the absolute belief that it would net prosperity and peace?

Anyone else, whose view of the real world wasn’t obscured by propaganda from the time he/she acquired language, knows that speaking soft to bullies and those who hate you is a good way to get killed, and that America for all its faults has maintained relative peace in the world, compared to was here before the Pax Americana.  Oh, also any idiot who reads about women stoned to death because they were raped, or gay people dropped from roofs, or even a country so screwed up that drug gangs are the true government, knows this is nothing like our own culture, where microaggressions are an actual concern.

But people who’ve been indoctrinated and told all smart people believe counterfactuals can’t see the reality.

Hence the Iran deal, and what was for a while a moribund economy, and what came really close to making Russia think it could take us.

Look, guys, we got off lightly.  For a while there, I fully expected us to lose a city or two.

But just remember that Obama is not an oddity.  There are many many people around who aren’t’ so much ignorant, as they know so many things that just ain’t so.

What they think they know can kill us.  Simple law of averages, a few of them will get into power.  (a few of them are in power, elected or not.)

Which is why we can’t rest, we can’t relax, and it’s no time to assume everything is already lost and therefore we can do nothing.

It’s time to fight.  It’s time to work.  It’s time to keep the pressure on.

This is no time to go wobbly.

 

Years ago, Kate Paulk and I fell into watching a Greek Orthodox monk on youtube, because he did the most fascinating lectures on theology, on psychology (I believe he had been a psychologist in secular life, before professing) and on living a rewarding/fulfilled life.

I don’t remember the details anymore, though I did buy his book, which is — waves hand vaguely — somewhere in the library of Babylon downstairs.

But one thing stuck with me through the years, partly because it was so different from what I was raised believing: The doors of hell are locked from the inside.

I remember his image of G-d as a spurned lover who yet doesn’t give up, and keeps knocking at the door, and the fact that the damned, the truly damned can’t endure the light, and therefore lock themselves in.  For eternity.

It stuck with me because it’s a far cry from the Hieronymous Bosch kind of horror I grew up with.  And it’s both a repugnant idea (really, would you want Hitler to have a moment of clarity in all eternity, open the door, and let G-d in?  Stalin?  Mao? I know the author of the book that went something like “you’ll meet Hitler in heaven” made me recoil so hard I almost went backwards through a wall. Yes, I know, it could be said if they did that their worst punishment would be realizing what they did, and that afterwards they would be different creatures.  But the human mind recoils at it) and yet, there is something to it.

Here is where we depart from religion, because I’m neither going to make this blog a religious one, nor am I Greek Orthodox.

But there is something to the idea that the worst hell is one in which the person locks themselves in, from the inside.  One in which they can’t admit what they’ve done, and therefore must remain locked in the hell forever, because to admit they were wrong and did wrong things would be to cease being.  Their instinct of self-preservation keeps them mired in evil and unhappiness, rather than being able to open the door and set themselves free.

We’ve seen this with communism when it fell.  For a while communists (the open ones in Europe and the closed ones here) walked around as Umberto Ecco put it “like defrocked priests.”

And then suddenly, out of nowhere and with the same fervor with which they pushed communism, there was Politically Correct language, and environmentalism, and eventually the crazy social justice of dividing people in oppressors and oppressed according to external characteristics that sure, influence our lives, but are a factor among many, now that legally you can’t discriminate against color or place of origin.

Of course now, all that, that half baked stew of poisonous ideas that rape the language and meaning, mistake government ownership of land, and industry crippling regulations for stewardship, and have managed to turn men against women and women against men, is circling back around to communism.

It’s not a very coherent longing, and mostly it infects kids who have never learned true history, because their aging leftist teachers and professors had decided that it was capitalism which created all the ills in the world.

Some of these kids honestly think that “true communism” has never been tried (true, to the extent humans are not a communal species) and this time we’ll do it right (impossible. Still the wrong species.)

The older leftists, who long for socialism/communism and a pony “just like France has”… er, I mean single payer healthcare, do it partly because this justifies all their previous years of activism.  If they don’t admit they were EVER wrong, then they can continue thinking well of themselves.  And if they sell us on socialized everything, they can have everything for free in their old age.  (Most of them not only failed to have children, they failed to establish meaningful relationships that would help them.)

Sure, at some level they have to know history — they lived through it — and the cognitive dissonance must be amazing, but they just refuse to let themselves think of it, and that’s that.  It’s the same way westerners remained communists after the Stalin purges.

And that’s not taking in account how many converted after, because, you know, they wanted the tiger to eat them last. Something, also they can never admit to themselves, because that would mean breaking in two and admitting the miserable little piss-cowards they are.

The old USSR and its agit prop was very successful in penetrating the intellectual classes.  I understand so were Nazis before WWII.

That’s because, you know, intellectuals KNOW themselves to be brighter than the rest of the public (and are quite unable to believe a lot of manual professions require a form of “intelligence” [and dexterity] they lack) and are rarely compensated accordingly.  So at their heart they’re sure the world is an unfair place that denies them the prominence they should have.

This makes them easy prey to theories that have no contact with the real world, but which form a complete whole internally.  Like Communism.  Or National socialism.

So the intellectual classes having been conquered, leftism became equivalent to “smart.” In fact, this was so imprinted in the culture, that the third generation Marxists, chosen not for their intelligence or competence, but for their politics, and so daft that they can’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel (one wonders how much of the stupidity is learned.  All that was required of them, ever, was mouthing the right platitudes.  Nothing that passed for rational thought) start screeching “stupid and uneducated” at anyone they disagree with, no matter how strange and unlikely that accusation is.

But the fact that equivalency is established means that for any of our bien pensants to admit they were wrong about Marxist societies would be the same as giving up their intellectual pretensions and admit they’re not particularly bright or innovative, and in fact, not better than those people they’ve been taught to despise.

So, they don’t.  They won’t.  They can’t.

And since Marxism is a sour religion, of envy and malice; of bringing down the other in an effort to elevate themselves, not admitting they are wrong requires them to hate all of the past, the country they live in, all of western civilization, all of the bourgeois virtues, all order, all happy people, all productive people and ultimately themselves.

They believe the Earth is irretrievably damaged, they believe the end is coming soon, they believe most members of their species need to die, they believe their own species — and therefore themselves — are a blight on the universe.  They believe humans are guilty for everything wrong ever, and that it would be better if none of us had ever existed.

Their misery and hatred pours out of themselves and destroys everything they touch and every field they have taken over.  There is no escape from the poisonous ideology that animates them, without changing so much they might as well be dead.  They can’t comprehend why the rest of the human race insists on being happy and productive, and so they hate them a bit more.

And everything is horrible, all the time.  Even their virtue signaling is a faint (if continuous) signal that barely drowns out the inner voice that tells them something is very wrong and there are cracks in their philosophy you could drive a mac truck through.  They mind-kill themselves rather than think wrong thoughts.  They hate everyone and themselves most of all. There is no escape.

It’s a small price to pay for not admitting they’re humans, like all others, and as capable of error, isn’t it?

The doors of hell are locked from the inside.

 

 

 

 

The main thing Jordan Peterson concerns himself with is making order in a world that has lost it.

This is the reason the opposition to him and calling him things like fascist, was loony.  They started even before he’d come out as opposing some/most of the left’s projects.   Mind you, his political philosophy isn’t even particularly well integrated.  He still falls for leftist lies that “inequality is very bad” eve though a) inequality is natural.  Great apes have hierarchies with different privileges for each, even in the most primitive band.  Well, I don’t agree with privileges for existing, but capitalism — aka the way humans function naturally — does not provide grey and mindless equality, so that’s fine.  b) we don’t have the kind of corrosive inequality that results in someone starving while someone else rolls around in silks and eats nightingale’s tongues which was rather the norm throughout most of history. c) the only way to stop this “inequality” thing is to have the government redistribute, ultimately, poverty.

But it’s normal for Peterson not to have thought this through. Economics is not his jam.  And this is not what he set out to do.  What he set out to do is bring order out of chaos and help people make a place in the world.

Throughout most of human history, and even before that, probably, there was an order to life.  You knew who you were and whom you belonged to.  “Belong” is how the Portuguese say you are related to someone.  “Oh, she belongs to me/I belong to her in some fashion.  My second cousin married her mother.”  Like many things buried in languages it gives a hint to how society functions.  Recently I went through a situation where I very much wanted to break heads on behalf of one of my sons.  In Portugal this would be fine.  You cold be forty, but someone is treating you badly, and mom shows up in this person’s office and goes, “I’m here about my son.”  No one bats an eye.

The US, for reasons of what we are — a pioneer culture that values individualism — leaves adults to solve their own problems.  You don’t “Belong” to your family.  You do/can get help from them out of love and care, but your problems are yours to solve.

I’m not disagreeing with this system here, mind.  It has certain advantages, like not having the entire tribe look over your shoulder and call out hints for everything, from what pet you keep to what kind of house to buy, or how to cook cabbage.  Or–  It was just very hard to hold back the instinctive reach for the cast iron frying pan, is all.

To be fair even English culture started departing from that model around the time of Shakespeare or before.  Which is why individuals had more freedom and autonomy to be and create in it.

Part of the reason the future comes from America, is that each is free to be and create, and not be told “you’re an engineer now?  But none of your people are engineers.”  We’re free to be innovative, break the rules, make the never-seen.

Innovation and freedom are double edged swords.  In a talk Peterson says that the democrats can’t understand why we laughed at “we belong to the government” and that what we don’t understand is that desperate need to belong to anything that caused them to fasten on that, possibly the worst of masters.

It’s not so much that humans want to belong, in the sense of being slaves, and I think if the left understood that they won’t be in charge, but just told how to do, it would cool their anxiety to “belong” to government.

It’s more homey: humans want to have someone to work for, they want to have something that gives rules and shape to their world.

And this explains why the left hated Peterson, even before he was political, and why he drives them to a frenzy such that they feel the need to do daft things, like try to break into the place where he’s going to speak, carrying a garrotte.

The project of the left since the 20th century at least (and honestly, they were only continuing a prior project) has been to remove all those things that give shape to a life.  The hymn to daftness and anomie, “Imagine” makes that very clear: “Nothing to kill or die for.”

The same left that jabbers incoherently about the anomie of capitalism and the lack of structure of consumerism “buying a lot of things to fill a spiritual hole” and other such twaddle, are the people who have made sure there is nothing to live for and that our lives don’t matter.

“Nothing to kill or die for” is the exact same as “nothing to live for.”  And their tragic mistake is not comprehending that.  Partly because they’ve made their destructive philosophy into a quasi-religion, to give themselves something to kill and die for.  Hence the garrotte at Peterson’s lecture, because instinctively they feel their entire reason for existing is threatened.  They just don’t get why they feel that way.

But this is why the Peterson project matters.  Something to kill or die for, is something that matters beyond your life.  Most humans in history had that: the tribe,the faith, the land, the king.  Whatever it was, they had something that mattered to them more than their own lives and their transitory fulfillment.  Enjoying yourself is not happiness.  Happiness consists in having a purpose in life.  Something you live for.

A course on the black plague almost convinced me (almost) that the black plague was the first unmooring of Europe.  But the disconnection to the perhaps too tight bonds of the church, left Europe free to innovate.  It was the second blow of all those young men who died stupidly in world war one, that left Europe adrift.

And then the Soviet agit prop of the sixties and seventies, designed to make the free world ripe for domination finished the work.

So, what do you live for?  I don’t know.  You’re you.  I’m me.

I know what matters to me, and the things I work towards: Securing the blessings of liberty for my descendants; writing stuff that might help with that war; caring for my family; keeping my environment livable and organized; making sense of the timeless demands of Him who is beyond time, and yeah, trying to follow through in my life, because the Eternal Law is beyond human need.

All of those are things to live for, and maybe things to die for in the sense that you use your life in service of something, and die a little.

Kill?  For liberty for me and mine world without end, for sure.  I won’t kill someone for simply deep sixing one of my books (something for which people alive in the world today should be grateful.)

But my life has boundaries and purpose.  I think all of us need boundaries and purpose.  Which, again, is what Peterson is trying to bring to the world.

It is also why some of the happiest people any of us knows are not those who left themselves totally unfettered to pursue some undefined “happiness” but those who gave themselves up for something.  (Who gave their lives up in order to save them you might say.)  Some of those things might be transcendent and everyone will agree are vital, like saving babies, or securing medical help for the third world.  Some we can see why they’re important to people, like art or religious vocations, or saving kittens, or running a store. It might not be for us, but we can see why people are willing to sacrifice all for it. And some might be silly, like making the SCA chapter REALLY good, or making crochet curtains or whatever.  BUT people who give their whole lives to an endeavor that matters to them, those are usually happy.

(It’s tricky when you give your whole life to a project based on envy and malice, like the SJWs.  It gives you purpose but it also corrodes your soul.  Particularly since the project is ultimately “make humans into something else” that will work with the communitarian project”, which is inherently doomed to failure.)

So, choose your purpose well but choose it.  What would you give your whole life to or for?

That way lies the path i the search for happiness.

Book Promo by Sarah

*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 MARGARET BALL:  A Pocketful of Stars.

Thalia Kostis will be the first to tell you it’s not magic, it’s theoretical math when she walks a Möbius strip through walls to her office at the Institute for Applied Topology. CIA Case Officer Bradislav Lensky doesn’t care what it is, as long as she can help track down a smuggling ring and the terrorists in their safe house in Austin. The other magicians nearby don’t agree, and don’t care for new rivals either!

Now Thalia and the rest of her misfit crew are in a race against time, terrorists, common sense, grackles, and their graduate advisor to save the day!

FROM BRUCE BRETTHAUER:  Setosha: The Beating Heart of Empire.

The Colandran Empire struck back with brutal efficiency, occupying one of the three Families planets, and sending death squads after Families commanders, including Corey Andersen. Ambushed and injured, Corey fights back, trying to protect herself, her sib-sisters, and her new neices. But a greater challenge awaits her, the Imperial Main Fleet is nearby, poised to put an end to the Families in a final decisive battle. The Eldest of the Families Navy turns to her to lead the fleet, outnumbered and outgunned, to liberate Setosha and drive the Imperial Fleet away.

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: wrench

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

For various reasons having nothing to do with this post, I keep coming back to the phrase “an antidote to sin.”

Well, I don’t know about sin, but if killing vast numbers of your citizens in batch lots, like Nazis and Communists did, or through privation, economic destruction (or economic distortion) and repression as socialists did and do (poor Venezuela is the most extreme example but any government that considers it their business to determine what’s “death with dignity” and values it over life is doing the same, just slower, with softer gloves and more pretty words) isn’t a sin, then the Almighty and I need to have a word or fifty.

And as I was thinking of the sad state of the people of Europe who don’t even realize they are objects, owned by the government, serving at the will of the government, and destroyed just as easily, or that the hand that mollycoddles them can (and often does) snuff them out, I realized our founding documents are a remedy to that particularly horrendous sin.

We can’t, at least if we take them seriously — the left here doesn’t, of course, but enough of us still do.  And yes, Woodrow Wilson and FDR, but they also thought they were above the intents of the founders — fall into the sins of Nazi Germany or the many communist abattoirs of the the 20th century.

If government derives its power from the governed, and if the people you want to destroy are part of the governed — if not, then why are they subjected to your law? — you can’t do it, because you don’t have the right to destroy those from whom your rights come.

Yes, I know, it is normal for tyrants to declare you a foreign invader before they destroy you.  This is done either for racial reasons — Nazis — or ideological reasons — the many who died under Stalin and in this country the amazing number of people who have tried to declare anyone who disagrees with them a foreign agent, either “Fascist” or “Russian.” (Aren’t they the ones who admire Russia?) or Racissssexisssshomophobic and therefore not a real person — but it’s usually done before the batch killing begins.

BUT even then the declaration of independence is an antidote.  You can’t kill people who aren’t your subjects, but the people from whom your power derives.  Not unless you can prove they are not citizens, not of the body.  Yes, sure, governments do that, and we should be aware of that, but it’s at least a hurdle for them to get over, not simply “we’ve determined you’re better off dead.”

Unlike what our leftists believe, you don’t belong to the government.  The government belongs to you.  You’re not a subject nor a slave.  You’re the owner of the joint.

They can think that you’re inconvenient, that your life has no purpose — 22 years ago, doctors tried to convince me to have a procedure that would almost certainly kill me, because I was useless, as a housewife with two small kids, and my life did no good, and I was a burden to my family.  It’s not like I even had a job — or that they’re saving you from a fate worse than death, in having to live with a disability or a health problem, but the evaluation is not THEIRS to make.  They can think whatever they want, but your life is none of their playthings.

We are endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Not the government’s to give.  Not the government’s to take away.  The government can take a flying leap, and all its supposedly pure-hearted busybodies with it.

A citizen, not a subject.

An antidote to sin.  And killing vast numbers of people, or destroying them, or making it impossible for them to live is a customary sin of government.

But we need to know those words, and understand them, because they ARE the founding documents of THIS land, and against them, the lies of collectivism cannot stand.

Repeat them, learn them, fight for them.

Lest we forget, lest we forget.