Which means I’m doing fiction, not you know blog posts.  Though I need to do some posts-for-money today, and have…. six topics on the board I use to keep track of such.  That will probably happen later in day, though.

I have at least one guest post, but I was busy with the MGC workshop and now it’s late to put a guest post up.

Therefore…  My circles were talking about this, yesterday, including some of you in the comments, when I skimmed.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch wows space experts, heralds new era of exploration.

The new, larger rocket is designed to hoist supersize satellites as well as equipment to the moon, Mars or other far-flung points.

“This is a tremendous accomplishment by the SpaceX team and a great day for space exploration,” commented Explore Mars CEO Chris Carberry, in a statement. “With this launch and other heavy lift vehicles slated to be launched in the upcoming years, we are truly on the verge the golden age of space exploration.”

It sure has been a LONG time coming.  But exploration rarely goes linearly.  I had to study the story of the discoveries (natch) growing up, and it’s amazing even under absolute monarchies, the stutters, set backs, and abandonment for years of the dreams of exploration.

And yet, everything alive on Earth is a colonist species.  We will go because we have to.  And we’ll take the species of Earth with us to the stars.

There are worlds out there that will resound with the voices of our descendants.  We will live under the light of unknown suns, eventually.  Our progeny will inherit the stars.

Ad Astra!  Go team human.

 

Yesterday I was talking to Third-Son-By-Adoption (and before I (again) get jumped by a bunch of people on facebook when this post shares, he’s not my adopted son, he’s my son-by-adoption, a science fiction thing where you claim your close friends as family members.  He has parents (whom I like very much too) and claiming him as my son would impinge on their rights) late at night and I told him I haven’t been this angry since my young street-brawl days.  (I wore reinforced boots for a reason.)

Between 12 and sixteen, I took a saying by some commie (which was taught to us by our lefty teachers, because really, the left never seems to understand when they ARE in power) “A flea can’t stop a train, but it can give an itch to the conductor” as my motto, and engaged in hooliganism, sabotage and general … well, I aimed to misbehave and boy, oh, boy I did.

Except for one occasion when fate thrust me in front of machine guns and my reaction might or might not have determined the reaction of the crowd, my actions were small and might never have been illegal.  Or if they were — it was illegal to remove political posters, because you needed a license to put them up — it was more than flesh and blood could manage, when they plastered the city in posters maligning the Americans, that I wouldn’t find a way to tear them out.  (I’d back up to the poster, and remove it behind my back, then stuff the pieces in my very large purse.  Every night I’d come home and hand my mom the pieces to burn.)  Mostly it was “pranks to make my classmates and teachers look stupid, because they are.”  And there was street fighting.

All of this kept me from getting in real serious trouble, of the “setting people on fire” variety.

For that matter, my blog might be my safety valve.

As to why I’m more angry now than I’ve been since then, it’s rather the same thing and the same reasons.

Another friend — might have been a commenter here — the other day was classing people according to Pratchett characters and said “And you’re William DeWorde.”

I don’t think this person had any idea how close — for various reasons — that hit to the mark.

Despite being a fiction writer (fiction is consensual mutual lies, okay?) I despise seeing truth abused.  There has been so much of it in my life.  I’ve been told so many lies by people who were sure they were my moral betters, even while they knew they were lying to me.  And those lies were so poisonous.  Their lying interpretation of history and economics have filled 100 million graves at least (and as Colonel Kratman says, probably more.)

For people in power to speak power to truth, particularly when those people are leftists who are reversing victim and aggressor makes me INCANDESCENTLY angry.

I can take people lying.  Of course, I can take people lying.  I even understand the concept of social/polite lying and don’t get bent out of shape over it (yes, I DO want a medal.  Why?)

It’s when the lies are poisonous and you reverse power and powerless and victim and attacker that I become angry.  VERY VERY ANGRY.

So the memo… was not news, except for where it matched ideas that were so “crazy” they made even me uncomfortable.  And yet… it was true.  Yeah.  So.

I’m angrier than I’ve been in decades.  I don’t think I’m alone in this.

And Number Three Son By Adoption said “Remember you said revolutions occur when things are getting better?  Well, things are getting better.”

He’s right you know.  For the first time in years a lot of us have emotional space to be angry.  At the same time the left, the side formerly in control of all the mass everything from communications to entertainment, feels their power slipping away and are getting outright stupid.  Stupid people make mistakes, and not of the kind we shouldn’t interrupt them while said mistakes are being made.  I.e. as we used to say in the eighties “the bear is most dangerous while wounded.”

So — beware.  There’s quicksand ahead.  A revolution or armed conflict is still the worst case scenario.  Even we — particularly we — on the freedom side aren’t likely to like the result.  But it might also be very hard to avoid.

Keep your wits about you.  Beware of how your emotions cloud your judgement.  Do not retreat.  Do not apologize.  But don’t strike the first blow.

Sursum corda.  The odds are slim but there IS still a chance we get through this unscathed and emerge closer to the constitution.  And you know, maybe G-d isn’t tired of looking out for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.  Yet.

 

 

I haven’t talked about this before, because it’s hard to type when you’re stunned.

I love all the people who say that it doesn’t matter, that we all already knew this, that …

Guys, no.  We didn’t all already do this.  And if the dems all already knew this, they should make a pilgrimage, barefoot and in sack cloth to Nixon’s grave and beg his pardon, because what he did in bugging the opponent’s political offices didn’t include (Adding some stuff we’ve found the last year and a half):

-collusion and help from a sitting president.

-the concoction of a foreign attachment to the opponent to smear him and undermine his presidency.

-the use of our law enforcement agencies to spy on someone’s campaign.

-the leaking of entirely made up “salacious information” to the media, using people whose position should prevent their stooping that low.

-the use of the DOJ to exonerate someone who plainly and clearly broke the law, in a way that any American with security clearance would be in Levenworth for.

I can’t claim I didn’t know the Dems were dirty, and way dirtier than the Republicans.  I knew they were because it stands to reason.  Part of the reason I’ve always (but once) voted Republican, even for candidates that were in fact democrats like McCain was this precisely: the press will cover for dems but not for republicans.  So even if you assume at some point in the distant past they both got up to the same exact sheneningans, the republicans being constantly caught, or even accused of crazy stuff at random, means they’d watch themselves all the time and limit corruption, because they’d be afraid of getting caught.

The Dems on the other hand, could lead dissolute public and private lives with no fear.  And therefore they did.

But this…

Look, I’m not a political innocent.  Never had a chance to be.  As early as I started thinking about politics, it was during a revolution and … well… you see things very clearly then.

And coming here, I saw that the dems were using exact speeches I’d heard communists deliver the week before.  Note I’m not saying same talking points.  I’m saying same speeches, in another language.  Maybe that’s why Comey said that Trump gets his speeches from Russia.  Maybe they have, for years.  After all the left ALWAYS projects.

So this shouldn’t be a shock.

Except it is.  America means nothing if it doesn’t mean the rule of law applies equally to both sides.

Heinlein said — and was right — that when people stop believing in he rule of law, society is broken.

And maybe that’s why the media is pedaling so hard.  They think they can make us believe again and then everything will be fine.

They don’t get that part of what cost Hillary the presidency was that a lot of Americans have or had clearance and know the rules, and know what would happen to them if they did what she did, intent or no intent.  It wasn’t the crime, it was her being allowed to skate on this, that made people mad enough to vote against her.  Millions of people who otherwise would not have voted went to the polls.  But they don’t get that.  They think they can wave everything away because they have for years.

In a way it reminds me of publishing, where if you say something against a darling, they demand you apologize and — as we saw during SP — blare that we’ll never work in this town again.

They don’t seem to get that for most of us our careers aren’t artifacts of “my house pushed and helped me” but rather “I succeeded in the face of their despising me and hating me” and “granted only so far, but now I have indie, so this is my middle finger for you and all your compadres.”

They don’t get, either in the media, in the politics, or in publishing, that the gate is firmly locked, but the wall has fallen.

The wall has fallen — thank G-d almighty, the wall has fallen — and they hold NOTHING in their hands.

They also don’t seem to understand the only way to cleanse the body politico is to come down hard and fast on everyone who openly and clearly breaks the law and has broken the law.  It’s the only way to save any power, any structure, any traditional respect for the law.

This is a critical moment for the republic.  Things have been revealed that even I would think were borderline fever swamp three years ago.  And yet everyone is pretending everything is normal.

I’ve said before the book for our times is Puppet Masters.

They think they can carry on the masquerade forever.

Build under, build over, build around.

The rule of law not only hit the iceberg, but steerage is filling with water.

And yet in the salon of the would-be elite the music plays on and there’s a squabble over what type of fork to use to eat oysters.

 

Books Get Pimped

Hello, it’s Sunday and it’s time for the books of the horde to put on their high heels and mini skirts and strut their stuff up and down the blog page, and not come home again till they’ve made writers some money.  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.

Nathan Bissonette, A Wizard in the Monastery

A weary wizard. A cloistered cleric. An enchanted manuscript. Will they save the world, or destroy it?

Laura Montgomery, Mercenary Calling.

Exoplanets. Terrorists. Lawyers…

Calvin Tondini has his first client, but he may be in over his head.

It’s the twenty-second century. Humanity’s first and only interstellar starship returns safely. Its mission to discover a habitable planet succeeded beyond all hopes, but there’s one problem. Captain Paolina Nigmatullin of the USS Aeneid left an unsanctioned human colony behind and now stands charged with mutiny.

Despite a somewhat spontaneous approach to his own career, life, and limb, Calvin intends to map a more cautious path for his new client. Captain Nigmatullin, however, shows an unnerving penchant for talk shows–appearing on them, that is–and otherwise ignoring her attorney’s sober counsel.

How can Calvin ensure his client’s freedom when death stalks the Aeneid‘s crew, and Nigmatullin herself hides secrets from everyone, even her lawyer?

Karen Meyers: The Chained Adept Bundle (Books 3-4): A Lost Wizard’s Tale.

Broken Devices – Book 3 of The Chained Adept

CHAINS WITHOUT WIZARDS AND A RISING COUNT OF THE DEAD.

The largest city in the world has just discovered its missing wizards. It seems the Kigali empire has ignited a panic that threatens internal ruin and the only chained wizard it knows that’s still alive is Penrys.

The living wizards and the dead are not her people, not unless she makes them so. All they have in common is a heavy chain and a dead past—the lives that were stolen from them are beyond recall.

What remains are unanswered questions about who made them this way. And why. And what Penrys plans to do to find out.

—

On a Crooked Track – Book 4 of The Chained Adept

SETTING A TRAP TO CATCH THE MAKERS OF CHAINED WIZARDS.

A clue has sent Penrys back to Ellech, the country where she first appeared four short years ago with her mind wiped, her body stripped, and her neck chained. It’s time to enlist the help of the Collegium of Wizards which sheltered her then.

Things don’t work out that way, and she finds herself retracing a dead scholar’s crooked track and setting herself up as a target to confirm her growing suspicions. But what happens to bait when the prey shows its teeth?

In this conclusion to the series, tracking old crimes brings new dangers, and a chance for redemption.

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:  private.

 

 

 

 

 

So, ladies, gentlemen and small squirrels, I’m here to assure you that I did not forget Dark Fate, though my idea is to take a stray week in February, write it to the end, and then put it up in great big chunks.  Um… Might be in March.

You see, I didn’t forget either Alien Curse OR A Well Inlaid Death (the next Dyce mystery, for which I have a cover and everything done by the amazingly talented Jack Wylder, see above.)  I’m just running about 3 weeks late on when I intended to release things, which I feel calls for some small explanation.

You see, late last year older son was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea, which had probably been going on for three and a half years, judging by symptoms.  There is an unfortunate airways configuration in my husband’s family, so that men get this issue quite early, but you know, the thing about sleep apnea is that it’s a stealth issue, and you don’t notice and the person just thinks they’re depressed, or at least that was the case.  Also, since son didn’t snore as in AT ALL it never occurred to us he had an issue, since you usually can hear someone with apnea across the house.  (We used to joke when my father in law visited about sleeping as far away as possible.)

Anyway, we know Dan had it, he just for several reasons hadn’t treated it for about 10 years (long and complex story involving insurance and stuff) and he realized suddenly he was suffering severe problems and should go along with it.  Fine.  And then I thought, “Well, when it comes to dropping projects, etc, I’ve been having the same issues, including an inability to lose weight, and a massive issue with being able to concentrate on anything longer than an article.”

The doctor was doubtful (as he should be) on my needing a test, because it seemed to be (and was, to an extent) a case of “Well, since we’re at it.”

So I did the home sleep test and they found I was running oxygen in the low eighties most of the night.  This wasn’t actually a huge shock, since I was high eighties to low nineties during the day.  You see, I was born premature, and then I had a bunch of illnesses that left my lungs in screwed up shape.

So they scheduled a full sleep test.  I went to that sure they’d tell me all was normal and I wasn’t right in the head.  Um… turns out not so much.  Still down in the low eighties to sometimes high eighties for blood ox.

It’s not exactly the same issue as husband and son, since it seems to be mostly an insufficiency of oxygen.  But it’s solved more or less the same way.  I do apnea and probably have most of my adult life, but that can be fixed by an appliance that moves my lower jaw forward.  The problem is I’d still need an oxygen concentrator with that.  The other problem is that I found I had the exact same issue with the appliance as I had with the one my doctor made me years ago to prevent my grinding my teeth: I grind my teeth MORE on it  and more or less destroy my gums in the process.  OTOH just having an apap blowing an almighty jet of air into me both stops the apnea and the oxygen deficiency.

So I’ve been a week and a half on it.  I think this is called “The week of fighting the machine.”

It’s getting better, but last night one of the stupid straps that aren’t supposed to come loose came loose, and I was too sleepy to figure out what it was until 5 am.

ANYWAY there is a difference.  I resumed dreaming with just the dental appliance, which I’ve had for a couple of months (before that I was sleeping in two minute increments, so not so much.)  But the blowy air thingy has stopped the perenial congestion and in a week and a half is well on its way to clearing the chronic bronchitis. It makes me think of tons of things, since mom — she does snore.  Loud too.  Also has the symptom I was having, of getting maybe two seconds warning I needed a nap and falling asleep anywhere and everywhere — and her family all develop this chronic congestion and bronchitis starting at around 40.  I know I’ve been oxygen deficient at least that long.  The thing is if I’m oxygenated at night, I seem to remain so during the day.  Though it’s entirely possible not to say likely that in ten years or so I’ll need an oxygen concentrator during the day, at least while living at altitude.  (And yeah, on “why didn’t people get this stuff before?”  Well, they did.  I’m sure a sleep study on mom would be interesting.  My family has the charming habit of stopping sharing a bedroom when the kids move out.  Not because of not getting alone, but because of sudden onset, bizarrely loud snoring.  This tells you something.)

This is probably the cause of the demilienation events going on in my brain, and in six months or so I’ll ring up the neurologist and ask to check.  I haven’t had cases of my foot not obeying me, but that might be just coincidence, since a week and a half is not enough (probably) to recover from that, unless it was caused by sheer tiredness.

The other thing that seems to be clearing up is the incipient and permanent depression.  You guys have no idea how amusing it has been for years to be berated for being “too optimistic” when in fact my “optimism” was self administered therapy so I didn’t fall completely into the pit of despond.

There are indications that the brain is coming back on line, too.  I mean, the last two years since being treated for hypothyroidism, I have been markedly better, but not … up to my own standards.  And long works still required an enormous amount of will power.

Speaking of which, I want major props because while extremely sleep deprived and hypothyroidal, I still finished at least a novel a year and often more.  (And by the last two years have been better: well, I haven’t need to tape a list of character names to the monitor because I kept forgetting them or have the issue of forgetting where I’d left people in the last chapter.)

I am older, perhaps 5 or ten years since the problems set in, so I have no idea how far I’ll recover.

Anyway apparently one of the things that this oxygen thing and not breathing properly (Seriously, guys, how can I flunk breathing?  I’m special) has done is cause me to get sick a lot.  This January I caught what my son classified as a “Pseudo flu” (I mean, I couldn’t even have the real thing?) and was even more out than usual.  So I lost three weeks, a week of which I couldn’t even write for PJMedia, because I was out of it.

Things are better, even if last night was a mess.  And I hope they’ll get steadily better over the next few months, and that I can type in the novels I have long hand, and finish others, including but not limited to a couple of Dyce novels, and the sixth musketeer mystery.  (I might have waited too long on that and lost the fans, but it couldn’t be helped.  I wasn’t well.  I hope the sixth revives the series.  If not it will be the last.)

Lately too, I’ve stumbled on the half written 4th Shakespeare book (there were five planed in the series) but I hesitate on that, just because of the massive amount of research it will take to get back to that mode.  We’ll see.

Anyway, I should be writing.  Books, I mean.  Oh, and articles.  This weekend too I hope to finish typesetting the next short story collection and get it out next week.  There’s this velum program for typesetting I mean to try to put out paper editions of all the stuff that doesn’t have it.

I shall go.  More Grant in Portugal and other stuff next week, I promise.

 

I realized the other day that I was born the same distance from the end of World War II as we are now from 9/11.

It seems like a weird idea.  After all, 9/11 happened yesterday, just about.  I remember the shock, and worrying about Dan (he was working in DC at the time) and bringing out the bourbon and frying doughnuts.  I remember months of not being able to think straight.

But WWII was ancient history when I was born, a thing of the past done and over with.  It helps process things like the holocaust when you feel as though they happened in the unimaginably distant past.

Yeah I grew up watching WWII movies, which were all in black and white, and where the decisions seemed obvious and simple.  I grew up in the sixties, with the idea of hallucinogenic drugs if not the reality (sure they existed in Portugal.  Heck, they probably existed in my circles, but I turned 8 in 1970 and if those existed in the playground, it was more than I could guess) the idea of space travel and a bunch of truly bad ideas that were all about overturning centuries old practices and ideas with the new shiny of what boiled down to a few really dumb syllogisms (we’re all naked under our clothes, man) and a lot of also very old, never worked anywhere, and dressing them up in new psychology won’t help (free love, man.)

I literally did not realize how close I was born to WWII because it was old history to me.  Dead and gone.  The harrowing uncertainty of the past had become history, written, cut, dried, judged, finished.  I was so uninterested in it I never opened my dad’s multi volume history of WWII.

And thinking back, it’s no wonder I viewed it that way.  Sure, my parents remembered WWII, but they were kids then.  (And since Portugal, which was even more broke than usual, and also really couldn’t go in on any side except the Axis without prompting an invasion by its old enemy, Spain, [which btw tells you that Portugal, national socialist though it was, didn’t align with the Axis intellectually, because otherwise it would have gone in, easily enough.  These things are way more complicated than we tend to think.  I mean FDR was also largely national socialist.  It was the spirit of the time.] was neutral, my parents memories were mostly rationing, and that time that people came around to glue film on the windows, to minimize the risk in case of bombing.  And they didn’t even know what kind of political brinksmanship led to that, except that the bombing expected was German.]  My grandparents were the ones of age to have fought in WWII, had the country not been neutral.  My grandfather did tell a story about a trip from Brazil when his boat was boarded by a German submarine crew, looking for someone or something, and if I got the gist of the story right, they really had a (British or American) spy hiding among them, whom they didn’t turn in.  (Grandad spoke English, and also he really didn’t have a fiction-writer bone in his body.  He couldn’t have embellished any story to save his life.  That comes from his wife, the storyteller.)  But I don’t remember the details very well, because I was very young and most of the referents he was using made no sense to me.  There was a type of coat my mom wouldn’t let me wear, because it reminded her of the emaciated Jewish refugees arriving in the train stations in Portugal during and after the war.  Not that she was hostile to them, but as she put it, the coat made her think of “famine and desperation.”

Sure the rationing made the country very poor.  National socialism did too.  (And you know, Bernie might be truthful about his national socialism, though I’d doubt the national part of it, because I remember he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, the weasel.  His hatred of “corporations” matches the regime I grew up under, and mind you, that kept us d*mn poor.  Particularly the insistence on keeping out multinational trade.)  My mom was one of those children who walked along the train line, picking up bits of fallen coal to use to cook with at home.  Being older and Portuguese, she wasn’t one of the children John Ringo saw, but she was their spiritual sister.  And she and her siblings gleaned the fields, after the farmers were done, to get potatoes, to supplement the household food.  (And grapes, and whatever.)  My dad came from a more stable/better off family, though the country itself was so broke that his father worked abroad for 30 years of his life, to send money home to keep them so.  But when dad got a scholarship to high school (at the time a paying thing,) his mom made him a book bag out of old cloth, because they couldn’t afford to buy him the normal leather ones.

But all these hardships were far in the past when I was born.  It never occurred to me how close they were, or that my brother, himself, was born only 9 years after the end — and the horrors — of World War II.

I was a child of the cold war.  We grew up knowing we were all going to be blown up, at any minute, by a dispute in which neither us nor our rather tiny country had any say.  Always, from earliest understanding in the world, I ran through plans to survive nuclear war, because I knew this would come in my lifetime.  (Yeah, I do know it might still, but it’s different, isn’t it?)  I grew up jaundiced and cynical, looking at the “Soviet Life” magazines and snorting, and passing the Gulag Archipelago under the desk to classmates, because it wasn’t legally forbidden, but heaven help us if our teachers found out we were reading it.  Say goodbye to that A and be harangued forever about buying into propaganda.

I grew up knowing that all the intellectuals thought communism was cool, that leftism was a positional good, that being patriotic was gauche, and that, nuclear war or not, communism would eventually win out.  Even those who hated it believed so.  It was so efficient after all.  Inhuman, but efficient.

And then the Soviet Union fell, and the sheer inefficiency misery and stupid of the regime leaked out.

And yet I remember, in my thirties, after the fall of the wall, reading my first Reason magazine and realizing with a shock that overpopulation and pollution, let alone the exhaustion of natural fuels, were nowhere near as close as I’d been taught to believe, that the end of the world in my time or even my grandchildren’s time, wasn’t inevitable, that there was hope.  It was both a shock and a breath of fresh air.

Why am I bringing all this up?

We all grow up caught in the tidal wave of history, only the wave of made of amber.  It pins us in place.  We carry with us a set of beliefs, thoughts, feelings, that are completely transitory, but feel like they’ll last forever, like they are eternal verities.

I was born in the after-shock of World War II, which was itself, and aftershock of World War I.  I grew up suspicious of nationalism, because people were suspicious of nationalism after World War I.  I grew up with leftism being a positional good, because communist (mostly Soviet) propaganda during and after WWII made it so.  FDR let the soviets cast themselves as the alternative to fascism, when they were no such thing, all to secure the cooperation of good old uncle Joe.  Sometimes you make pacts with the devil.  I’m not sure that one was needed or worth it, but then I wasn’t there, and for all FDR was a bastard I don’t think he hated America.  We had to wait a while for presidents who did hate America. So he did what he thought he had to do, and I can’t judge it.

And the patina of leftism as a social good hasn’t worn off yet.  All our intellectuals think that it’s inevitable some form of socialism will win out.  Except that Europe is choking on socialism and dying, and if it saves itself it will by renouncing it.  (And no, I don’t know if that’s possible.)  And the poverty and misery of leftism keeps pouring out, every chance, leaking, guttering, seeping through, becoming obvious despite their domination of the media that does its best to keep all that hidden.  It’s becoming very obvious.

We’re on the crest of yet another wave of history, where it turns, and curls under.

Go easy on the millenials, particularly the young ones.  They were taught to believe in a senescent philosophy that never worked anywhere. They suffered the shock of 9/11 but no one at all helped them process it.  They were taught to hate their country by the people who think that removing nationalism will remove war (“nothing to kill or die for” — I’m spitting on you John Lennon.)  They are taught to hate corporations by people who are as economically naive as the national socialists I was born under.  And no one has taught them the horrors of communism, everywhere it was tired.

Well, we’re on the turning of the wave.  And part of it is the leftist boomers getting old/losing their grip on the institutions they so carefully crawled through.  And part of it is the new media, and unbelievably dirt, vast, unimaginable secrets leaking out.

The kids will be all right.  It’s only about 100 years since Europe tore itself apart psychologically and Western civ decided that the way to stop this was to destroy itself.  And we’re already turning away from that.  We’re rebuilding.

Grandma’s grandmother was born just after the Napoleonic wars.  A hundred years and change isn’t much in human history.  It is much for HUMANS because we’re caught in our little bit of amber, and only see so far.  But human history, human ideas move slower.  They do move, though.  No movement, no trend — particularly dysfunctional ones — lasts forever.  Things self-correct.  Maybe it’s too late for Europe.  And maybe not.  Sure, there’s a lot of Arabs around, but a lot of them converted and became part of the weave of Europe before.  It’s not the genes, it’s the culture.  It could still turn around.

In biographies of Englishmen who fought the peninsular wars, I read how devastated the country was, till there was not a work-cow to eat, till fields were ruined, great houses and families destroyed.  After it came a time of lawlessness and fear, the tall stone walls of the village topped by broken glass, in a more or less vain attempt to keep thieves at bay.  Grandma’s house was built around that time, and so designed there was only one window in the lower floor, and it had a huge board that went over it at night, to prevent break ins.

Yet I grew up in a poor country, but one in which food was plentiful and where walls were decorative, and maybe five feet high.  Now mom and dad have raised the walls, and have security bars on all the lower floor windows.  And steel shutters that shut the house tight at night.

No trend is forever.  There is nothing as stupid as extrapolating present trends to infinity.  And none of us is given to see more than a little bit of the great waves of human history that come from an unimaginable, not-remembered time and carry on to a future none of us will see.

When you’re inclined to despair, remember, most of us were born very soon after World War II, after the two conflicts that ripped Europe’s heart out and ate it.  We’re still in the shock wave, in the concussion.  Even our kids and grandkids will still be affected by that great explosion.

But nothing lasts forever.  Even the most grievously maleducated generation in the history of the west will have events that change their mind, discover ideas and secrets that transform all.

And our function is to snatch brands from the fire, to take these great grandchildren of World War II and the fall of Europe, and teach them that yeah, their history is not immaculate, their country not without flaw.

But in the long march of history, the United States might be the last great hope of mankind, and Europe itself, ragged and soaked in blood is no more so than other continents, other cultures, and is perhaps better in, for the first time, having raised a lot of people above the poverty line.

The flag of personal freedom will rise and fall, as will the idea.  But respect and freedom for the individual are the only thing we found that breaks, for at least a short time, the cycle of “bad luck” and evil that afflicts humanity.

Carry it proudly, and give copies to your children or to young people whom you can reach.

It’s a long, long road.  None of us will see the end of it.  Battle on.

 

 

Ah, Interpretation!- On The State And Revolution Part 2– by Amanda S. Green

Or how Lenin proves he’s no better than those he condemns.

In the previous post, I noted how Lenin opened  The State and Revolution with a condemnation of those “socialists” who didn’t follow his own particular brand of socialism. In good lawyer fashion, he accused the Mensheviks and others of watering down the doctrines of Marx and Engels. In the second chapter of  The State and Revolution he continues that attack. This time, he wraps his arguments in historical “facts” along with more sleight of hand as he presents his own interpretation of those “facts” as well as socialism’s foundation texts.

As always, everything revolves around the oppressed working class and Lenin’s basic tenet that capitalism, imperialism and all the other isms can only be replaced by a true socialist state through violent revolution. However, in order to prove his approach is the one Marx and Engels supported, he had to find a way to debunk Marx’s statement in the Poverty of Philosophy about the process leading to the disappearance of the state:

The working class in the course of its development will replace the old bourgeois society with an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism; there will no longer be political power properly so-called since political power is the official expression of the antagonism of classes in bourgeois society. (TSAR, pg 22)

This statement seems to imply a withering away of the state. More than that, a withering away without revolution or violence. Oops. Lenin certainly couldn’t let that go unchallenged. So he turned to the Communist Manifesto, written not long after Poverty of Philosophy:

We have seen above that the first step in the workers’ revolution is the transformation (literally ‘elevation’) of the proletariat into the ruling class, the conquest of democracy. The proletariat uses its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all the instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

(TSAR, pg 22-23)

Leaving aside the fact the Poverty of Philosophy was never meant to be the political treatise the Communist Manifesto was, let’s be honest. The two passages aren’t at odds. The latter simply expands on the former. Lenin, however, being a master at manipulating facts and emotions to fit his needs and wants, used the “difference” to do more than point out the differences between his Bolsheviks and the other so-called socialists in 1917 Russia. He used it to paint those others as enemies of the working class, no better than their bourgeois “masters”. Unfortunately for Russia, he did his job all too well.

According to Lenin, the above quote establishes “the most remarkable and most important ideas of Marxism on the question of the state, namely the idea of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.” (TSAR, pg 23) How ironic is it, looking back on Russia over the last 100 years, to see how his “dictatorship of the proletariat” never grew beyond that – a dictatorship. Russia once more became as interested in colonial expansion as the England and United States Lenin envisioned and condemned. Oh, Russia used different tactics, but no one can deny the way it moved into Eastern Europe after World War II. That expansion was not motivated by some desire to help those countries behind the Iron Curtain. Far from it. That expansion was for land, people, resources and money. Such a wonderful example of the “proletariat dictatorship” and there is no evidence that dictatorship is withering away to a true people’s state.

One of the key passages in this chapter, in my opinion, is this:

The notion that the proletariat needs a state is repeated by all opportunists, social-chauvinists and Kautskyites, who affirm this to be Marx’s doctrine while ‘forgetting’ to add, firstly, that the proletariat (according to Marx) needs a state on the wane, i.e. a state so organized that it immediately begins to wither. And, secondly, the ‘state’ needed by the laboring people is to be ‘the proletariat organized as the ruling class’. (TSAR, pg 23)

“Needs a state on the wane.” That’s true for any revolution to have a chance of succeeding. If the state is strong (healthy), most citizens aren’t going to want to overthrow it. Why would they? A healthy state has a healthy economy, a strong infrastructure and hasn’t (under most circumstances) turned to oppressive tactics that foment discontent.

Russia in the early years of the Twentieth Century was anything but healthy or “strong” and the decline begun before Nicholas II became the tsar continued and was worsened due to a number of factors, including World War I. After the Romanovs were overthrown and the provisional government formed, Lenin took advantage of the fact the “change” the revolutionaries fought for not only didn’t come but that it looked like many of those professing to be socialists simply slipped into the role of oppressors.

The state is a special organization of force; it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class. What class must the proletariat suppress? Naturally, only the exploiting class, i.e. the bourgeoisie. The labouring people need a state only to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat is in a position to direct this suppression, to carry it out; for the proletariat is the only class that is consistently revolutionary, the only class that can unite all the laboring and exploited people in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, in its complete overthrow. (TSAR, pg 23)

So the state is the oppressing force and necessary for the proletariat to rule. Except it’s not just rule. The proletariat is to “suppress” the bourgeoisie. Yet, even as it suppresses one class, the proletariat is supposedly the only class able to unite all the other classes.

I don’t know about you but I’m a suspicious sort of person. If I see a group of people proclaiming to be the liberators, the heroes of freedom and equality, suppressing anyone, I have a problem. What is to prevent the “dictatorship of the proletariat” from deciding I need to be suppressed? It is now the “state”, remember.

Lenin doesn’t answer that question, at least not yet. Instead, he returns to his attack on the social democrats, the Mensheviks and others. In today’s terms, he’d call them squishy socialists who only want to adopt the feel-good aspects of the philosophy. They didn’t preach revolution. They saw the state withering away into a true socialist society as a natural progression, something akin to an evolutionary process. Oh, sometimes you had to rise up and push the oppressors out of office, but you didn’t make the streets run red with blood. This, according to Lenin, was “petty-bourgeois socialism.”

Does that make what happened after the Bolsheviks took control “superior-bourgeois socialism”?

Here is where things start sounding familiar, almost reminiscent of the 2016 election cycle and some of the rhetoric that came from not only the Sanders camp but HRC’s as well:

The proletariat needs state power, the centralized organization of force, the organization of violence both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population – the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the semi-proletarians – in the work of ‘establishing’ a socialist economy. (TSAR pg 25)

Again, Lenin reinforces the idea of not only the need of revolution but of a proletariat rule, not of the people but of an oppressor. Oh, he pretties it up to mask what he’s saying but that’s the gist of it all. The bourgeoisie must be oppressed and so must everyone else until they have been sufficiently indoctrinated that they no longer fight. The oppression, he promises, will lead to a “socialist economy”.

Riiight.

With regard to the state, Lenin is of a singular mind, or so he’d have his followers believe/ “all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed.” (TSAR, pg 25) Given this has been the belief of many revolutionaries throughout history. However, history does have 20-20 vision and we can look back and see how often the “crushing” of a state either left it vulnerable to invasion from outside enemies or how the crushing led to even worse conditions from within.

Irony, thy name is Lenin when we come to this:

The centralized state power characteristic of bourgeois society arose in the epoch of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions are most typical of this state machine: the bureaucracy and the standing army. (TSAR, pg 27)

Anyone who has done even the most minimal study of any socialist or communist government knows there is a centralized power. That power is absolute and failure to follow Party doctrine can lead to not just punishment but death. Bureaucracy is rife and the standing army there to quickly quash the first sign of rebellion. We’ve seen that in China, in the Soviet Union/Russia, in the actions of the USSR in putting down rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But we are supposed to sit back and wait for the dictatorship of the proletariat to mature enough that it can finally wither away. The only problem with that it won’t. In the time it would take, the proletariat dictatorship will have become the oppressors of the future.

I think you get the picture. For the proletariat to fulfill its place in history, it must lead the revolution. Even though the state will be unnecessary in the socialist existence, the proletariat needs it to not only oppress but destroy the ruling class. It needs it to maintain control and prevent uprisings until a socialist economy can be established. Once that happens the dictatorship of the proletariat will no longer be necessary and the ‘state” will finally begin to wither away. Until then, everyone must trust and follow the proletariat because only it is able to lead and unite.

Now, can you imagine what would happen if a Wall Street lawyer was to get up and say this today? Most of us would laugh him off the stage. However, we didn’t laugh Bernie off the stage. A number of young voters fell into step with him, praising his “unique message”. Why? Because he took the tact of the Mensheviks and others Lenin condemned. He didn’t come out and preach that they need to make the streets run red. Even so, he – and Hillary in her own way – promoted this proletariat dictatorship where wealth would be redistributed, the “state” would care for you and we’d all be happy little socialist ants.

To limit Marxism to the doctrine of the class struggle means to chop up Marxism, distort and reduce it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only those persons are Marxists who extend the recognition of class struggle as far as the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is what constitutes the most profound difference between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as grand) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which a real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. (TSAR, pp 31-32)

Read the first sentence and remember it. Remember it the next time you listen to Bernie or any of his ilk talking issues in Washington. Remember it when you listen to DNC talking heads or the media. The modern socialists, even if they don’t believe in the extreme version of the philosophy Lenin did, have learned a lesson from him. It’s not the one he meant to teach but, in some ways, it is more dangerous. They have learned how to drape their policies in a way they are “acceptable” to most people. That is what makes them so dangerous.

Think about it. How many people do you know who support universal healthcare in some form or fashion? It’s almost a knee-jerk reaction in some people because they believe no one should suffer because they can’t afford to see a doctor or go to the hospital. We’ve been taught, in our churches, at our dinner tables and in our schools to be charitable. Those leaning into the socialism spectrum play on that when they talk about universal healthcare or free college education, etc. What they never discuss is how those will be paid for because, once the veil is ripped away, there is a cost.

We have to start asking if these policies that sound so good are worth the price.

[T]he essence of Marx’s doctrine of the state has been assimilated only by those who have grasped that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general and not only for a proletariat which has overthrown its bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period dividing capitalism from ‘society without classes’, from communism. The forms of bourgeois states are extraordinarily varied, but their essence is the same: all these states somehow or other in the final analysis simply have to be a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism, of course, cannot help but produce a vast abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat. (TSAR, pg 32)

Something else to consider as you read Lenin, he wants to do away with capitalism. He wants to not only overthrow but destroy the bourgeois. He advocates for the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. What he hasn’t told us yet is how long it will take to reach the nirvana of the true socialist state. Nor does he tell us how a socialist economy will work. If you take the carrot of not only success but potential fame and fortune (and all the other reasons people work hard), what will be a worker’s incentive to do more than the minimum required of him?

In its own way, Atlas Shrugged is as slanted and impossible as is Lenin’s socialist/communist haven. However, Rand was right about one thing. There comes a point when those who value themselves and their work will no longer be happy turning their work over to a “state” or those the state appoints without compensation or recognition. As much as humans want to be generous and merciful, we are human. We have faults and pride and greed are just two of them. For the state to wither away slowly as we evolve into a people who will willingly follow the adage “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, how many more revolutions will have occurred and how many more “dictatorships of the proletariat” will have morphed into the new state?

[For raising the tone of this blog — ATH is culture! — and helping me with the exposing of the roots of the current mess — in her case with more facts! — if you decide to  send the woman a drink–  And her Amazon author page is here -SAH]

The Right Way to Grieve and Support the Grieving

By Out of the Darkness

Grieving is a topic most of us wish we could ignore, but is an absolutely universal process. We will all grieve a loss and we will all support someone who is grieving. It’s not just about death either, but about any kind of loss that one experiences. This can mean losing a job through termination or retirement, your worldview shifting, the end of a relationship, or simply growing out of an old identity. Anything that causes a break with something or someone on which you previously based a part of your identity can trigger grief. This post will be broken into two parts. The first is for the grieving. The second is for people supporting a grieving person. This is not meant to be a substitute for real medical advice or an all-inclusive guide. It’s an overview, meant to shine a light into a process that feels murky at best. Take what is helpful and leave the rest.

For the Grieving

Despite the name of this post, one thing needs to be made very clear. There is no WRONG way to grieve. We’ve all heard of the five stages of grief, and damn near everyone who has been through it will say it’s bullshit. It is. That model has been replaced with a seven stage model.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably intelligent enough to look at the pretty picture and get the idea. The main thing to remember is that these stages are not a straight line for most people, and that it is possible to move back and forth between stages at any given time or to feel like you’re experiencing two stages at once. That is normal and it’s okay. You are allowed to be both angry and depressed. You are allowed to be both testing and bargaining. You are allowed to be none of the above and in between stages, or too emotionally exhausted to deal with any of it right now.

The second thing to remember, especially as it pertains to death, is that you start grieving as soon as you actually get the news. If you found out two years ago that you or someone you love has a terminal disease process, you started grieving two years ago when the reality of the situation came to your attention. Sometimes people in this situation find that when the loss is final (in the case of death, the death actually occurs), that they don’t really feel anything or that they’re at peace. And then they feel guilty, because they feel at peace or because other people keep making them feel like everything shouldn’t be okay when it is. “What’s wrong with me that I don’t feel the least bit bad right now?” There’s an excellent chance that nothing is wrong with you. You’ve just already had a chance to grieve the loss before it occurred. That’s okay, and it’s healthy. When the people around you keep expecting you to feel bad, just try to remember that they haven’t had a chance to grieve yet, or don’t know how to support you right now. You can’t let their expectations define your experience.

There is a point, however, at which grief becomes overwhelming and destructive. Some people get stuck at one specific stage of the grieving process and just can’t move on. (The most common stages to get stuck on are shock, denial, anger, and depression.) They forget how to do anything else and just can’t deal with life any more, and this goes on for longer than a month or two. This is when you need help. It’s time to see a professional grief counselor, a therapist, or perhaps a member of your preferred clergy. If you happen to be in the military, your chaplain is trained to help with grief issues. Don’t let yourself linger too long in any one stage of grief, and don’t be afraid to get help. It doesn’t matter if you’re grieving the loss of your job or the loss of your wife. Your grief is real, and it is important. If you fail to deal with it, it will destroy your life.

For Those Supporting the Grieving

The absolute first thing for you to remember here is to shut the hell up. This isn’t about you. This isn’t about your normal or even your previous experiences with grief. When the grieving widow throws herself over her husband’s casket, you stand the fuck back and let her sob and scream out her pain and loss. She needs to do this, and you’re an asshole if you stop her. You’re literally stunting her ability to grieve. If your best friend starts screaming about how much of an asshole his dad is for dying and leaving him, you shut the fuck up. If your cousin starts trying to make deals with the gods to get his girlfriend back, shut the fuck up. If your coworker just got diagnosed with terminal cancer and seems to be pretending that nothing has changed, shut the fuck up. Rule number one is always to shut the fuck up and let people experience their grief.

Never, under any circumstances, tell someone that this experience is part of God’s plan when they are grieving. Even if you believe it, and perhaps especially if you believe it. It doesn’t help, and in that moment, you’re telling the person that God wants them to suffer. You’re telling them that God wants to take away things that make up their identity. You’re telling them that God is cruel. Later, when they’ve worked through the grief, they may be in a position to understand that they are better and stronger for having lost something. While they’re still grieving, there is no reason good enough. There doesn’t need to be a reason either. Part of living is learning to accept that bad things happen and we must adapt and overcome. Don’t build a wall between a person who needs a deity and the deity by telling them that whoever they worship is cruel.

If you have to shut up and can’t give them a reason for their suffering, what can you do? You can listen. When they’re ready to cry it out, you can hold them and let them cry. You can take up a fundraiser to give them financial resources if they’re needed. You can bring over meals, or invite them over for meals. You can help clean house or run errands. You can babysit. Basically anything you can do to lighten the burden of life so that the person you’re supporting can devote emotional resources to actually doing the work of grieving is a good idea.

Now, if this has been going on for quite some time (longer than a month with no forward movement) and the person you’re supporting has just completely lost the ability to function, or is burning every bridge around them as fast as they can light matches? You need to be willing to step in and gently but firmly tell the grieving person that they need help. You can get them the name of a grief counselor or take them to their bishop/priest/religious authority figure. You can be there for them and help them find the resources to get the help they need.

Grief is a universal experience, but it’s so incredibly unique. Every person will grieve several times in their life, and they will support people they love through grief several more times than that. There’s no wrong way to grieve, but there is a destructive way. There is a wrong way to provide support, however, and lots of people get that wrong. They mean well, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Don’t be afraid of grief. Be prepared for it.

 

I‘ve been saying for a long time that the way in which our environment is particularly abnormal, compared to most of the history of the human race, is that we’re saturated with story.

Humans like stories.  We seek them out.  It is entirely possible that is the difference between us and the various human breeds that existed before us.  Of course, we can’t know unless someone invents a machine to observe the past.  Pre-history by definition left no records of stories, unless, of course, cave paintings are that.  It is possible they are.

But ever since humans have been humans we’ve had stories.  Personal stories, family stories, tribe stories, sometimes all of them blending together, melding together.

Story is useful in a way, as an invention, hence my saying that might have been what gave us an edge.  I mean we’re fairly sure the difference between us and the other primates is that we can pass knowledge better through the generations, so it accumulates.  So, language, sure, is an edge.  But sometime probably at the dawn of unimaginably early pre-history, some genius realized that story was the teaspoon full of sugar that made the medicine go down easier.

And we crave story.  Even people who are not aware of craving it, or who think they don’t like fiction (my mom is one of those) crave story.  It might manifest as an interest in history or mythology, or something, but it is story.

Now, we’ve always been pretty good, clever apes that we are, at getting what we need.  Grandmothers told stories to their grandkids, kids made up stories for each other, some of us roll our own, and then there were tribal stories.  They wouldn’t be transmitted orally, memorized with great trouble, at a time when people lived very close to the bone, and told retold and embellished, unless they were a need, a craving of our kind.

Sure they “explained things” or at least a lot of them did.  But that was the superficial utility.  Just like mom who listens to history and mythology compulsively, because “they’re real” that ignores the fact that the explanations or the injunctions were wrapped up in story.  A far more elaborate story than needed.

There are linguists that think that the indo-european culture was a culture and a common-wealth, not necessarily a race or a tribe, and that the major drive for their conquering of Europe was in fact the big banquets they gave and the sagas told at those banquets.  There is some indication that each new tribe, coming in contact with these, western-civ’s ur-ancestors, invented a story to add to the tribal sagas, one that explained they always belonged, etc.

And civilization moved on.

It’s just that our craving for story has since the twentieth century become more easy to gratify.  There are stories everywhere you look.  Songs are stories, and are delivered whether you want to hear them or not in most public spaces.  Newspapers shaped “narrative” into stories, for easier interest and delivery.  Books are… trivially cheap.  (And now in audible, you can consume them while you clean.  Honestly, without audio books my house would be knee deep in trash.  I bore easily.  I’d never clean.)  TV and movies might actually be able to implant false memories.

My name is Sarah A. Hoyt and I’m a story junkie.  We didn’t have a TV till I was 8, so that is probably why I’m more immune to that form of story telling than to others.  But I listen, read, and make up stuff ALL THE TIME.

My morning used to start with three newspapers read back to back: the Colorado Springs paper, the Denver paper, and the Wall Street Journal.

Now it often starts with a skim of the usual blogs, to make sure no one destroyed the world while I was asleep (you know I can’t trust you.)

I find audio stories particularly enthralling, because as a sick little kid I lived for when my brother would read me stories.  When I re-read Enid Blyton (don’t judge me) or other early tales, I hear them in my brother’s voice.

This is of course all well and good.  The problem is that narrative — stories if you will — can be weaponized.

I don’t know how long ago that started.  I know that in one of China’s (many) fits of book burning, someone outlawed grannies telling stories.  I know that the Tudors got hold of probably the greatest story telling genius the world has ever seen and used him to burnish their image to a shine.  (I’m not one of the people obsessed with rehabilitating Richard III, which by itself is almost a shock, since I have such a need to rehabilitate so many historical figures, from Kit Marlowe to Kathryn Howard.  Because I’m not right in the head, that’s why,  but the truth is that on the bare facts of it, we have no indication he was any worse than most of the people involved in the bloody mess of the time, and he might have been better.  Yeah, we do know that the princes in the tower did die, but it’s a very cold case, and again, unless we develop a way to look back at the past, we’ll never be able to tell how or who actually killed them.  Even if it was someone in Richard’s service, it might well have been one of those “will no one rid me…”  However, we all use Richard III as a byword for evil and a forerunner of Hitler.  Meanwhile the Tudors who sent the same proportion of their subjects to the block as the great tyrants of the 20th century killed of theirs, are made out to be the “good” guys.)  And we know now that poor, doomed Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake.”  And that the idea the populace had of the royal couple complete with orgies and all out sexual perversions (which weirdly would have applied to the grandfather of Louis XVI) was a tissue of lies made up by the press.  Scurrilous stories.  Fake news, if you will.

But the 20th century, coming at the apex of the industrial revolution, which tended to the centralization and industrialization of everything, including communication, made it possible to tell a unified story.

Needless to say the party of big, unified and centralized government, got there first.  Those that thought the state needed to change humanity took full advantage of it.

We know that FDR was made into what people thought him to be by the stories.  The idea he saved us from the great depression (instead of causing it, and only letting go of the economy enough it recovered when WWII distracted him) is a media creation.  And many people still believe it.

Camelot appears to have been a photogenic man and woman lashed together in a semblance of marriage which hid a whole lot of #metoo and sex for money, but hey, the media, the books, the movies even made a rather flawed man into a king of legend.

And a millenial friend going through his comic book collection, reminded me recently that one of the superhero comics had a cameo by Clinton (I don’t really remember it) and that the opening for a cartoon of the time had Billy boy playing his saxophone.  I don’t remember either cartoon or comic, but when friend said their names (which have vacated my head) I recognized them as influential in the nineties.

The train wreck of Obama appearing in various comics as a superhero is a given.  Story.  Just story used as a weapon of control.

And yes, we know that the story is fracturing.  I don’t think Obama got as much mileage out of it as Clinton did.

But stories as a political weapon would be relatively (very relatively) harmless if all they did was burnish this or that historical figure, or give them an undeserved glow of success.  Because people can look at those things and go “oh, propaganda.”  That has developed, too, as a way to counter the pervasiveness of centralized story.

Slightly more effective are the stories about pet causes of the left.  I find Europe, where there are no dissenting blogs, and contrary facts don’t get reported, everyone thinks we’re losing glaciers and might never see snow again, or whatever.  (Glaciers are changing, not so much vanishing.)  They are therefore far more amenable to draconian measures to stop this doom of which there is no objective sign.

Then there are the people who are still convinced we’re on track for explosive over population, though the danger in western countries (and probably all over the world, if we could trust those statistics) is rather the other way.  Because there were so many stories, books, movies, made about over population.  And even though if we were on that track it would already have shown, they read these stories as kids and it became part of their unexamined idea of how the world will work.

This causes second order effects, like “plant based diets” which were supposed to counter the inevitable coming famine, and were therefore “sold” (in story including in scientific publications) as the healthiest thing ever, and which might be single-handedly responsible for various health crisis.

But there is more than that.  When Reagan took the presidency, the boomer generation was just starting to write, edit and consume vast quantities of story.

And suddenly stories, particularly those dealing with the future, went to grimdark, we’re all living under the bridge and eating garbage.  I called this “the rusty future” and it drove me insane, but it invaded everything.  It invaded everything, because most of the writers, and most of the publishers believed this was what would happen since Reagan had deviated from the policies (socialized everything, centralized everything, and nanny state) which, despite their not working, every story had told them was the way to go.  So publishers and writers panicked and foresaw a grim, dark future.  (Ginjer Buchanan, sometime shortly after Bush was elected, said that now horror would become ascendant, because under republicans “all we can do is scream and die.”  I don’t think she’s particularly unique for her generation or her profession.  At least not from the reaction to this comment, and other things I overheard at conventions.)

So what is the problem with that?

The problem is that humans attach to the narrative they heard when very young.  They fixate on it like it’s a true foretelling of the future.

To some extent, western civ has been telling itself bad things about itself since World War One.  This was partly the shock of finding they weren’t nearly as civilized as they thought they were and partly well… frankly communist propaganda.  If you read books written at that time they’re a bizarre stew of both.

But for a while it was all going to be redeemed by communism, or at least “socialism” which was really like communism but said that way so as not to scare the rubes, which was going to give us a shiny future, where everyone was taken care of and there was no need and no illness.

And then Reagan happened and the wall fell.  And even getting Clinton in wasn’t enough to change the tenor of the stories, because at the back of their heads they knew that people resisted this shiny future and that the Soviet Union had proven to be hell on Earth.

So they lost faith, again, just as they had after WWI, and since then their writing has been oh… alternate history, rejection of science, “problematic” (rusty, really, but they want to sound smart) futures and everything bad sad and going to hell in a handbasket.

The problem is the people who grew up on these tales are now adults, and that adults have a way of internalizing the fables of their childhood unexamined.  There are any number of people out there waiting for — and frankly wanting — doomsday any day.

I’ve heard them.  Doomsday, like the boomers “come the revolution” gives them a chance to settle scores and even up circumstances with all those people they feel should NOT have done well.  And it will prove once and for all that our way is wrong and their way is right.

These are sane and even nice people.  Consciously they don’t want things to fall apart.  Subconsciously, though…

So what to do about it?

Western civ is poisoned with stories against itself, choked full of the idea it must die that the world must live.  And these stories have corrupted many, maybe most people.  Yes, on all political sides.  Our last president was definitely an agent of these stories.

Like Puppet Masters, these stories sit in the subconscious and direct people against reality, against their own observation, against their (or anyone’s) best interest.

We are the cure.

We can’t stop the world being full of story.  But we must change the story.  We must change the movie in people’s heads.  We must give people a future of hope and life.

Go write, read, watch, create.

The future is ours.  Claim it.

 

One of the things that has always puzzled me about the left is that they assume wars are volitional, there is no reason at all behind them, and people just “decide” to go to war.

I used to think this silliness had started with the boomers and Vietnam, until someone gave me the collected, bound periodicals of World War I and I researched World War II, and nope, even then there were people treating war as a decision we could choose to engage in or not.

Sure, maybe WWI for America specifically (not for the rest of Europe) and maybe we should have stayed out of it (it seems odd for Europe to have lost most of a generation only to, 70 years later, give Germany what it wanted under another name.  Never mind.)

But that was a rare situation, and it certainly didn’t apply to WWII, where the enemy, filled with ideological evangelism, wouldn’t be satisfied unless they took on the world.  For the same reason, it doesn’t apply to the cold war or to the war started on 9/11, which some call the war on terror, thereby making as much sense as calling WWII the war on bombs.

Most of the time countries go to war for the following reasons:

1- their situation is unbearable.  This might be because of subjection to neighbors, or in more modern eras because it’s the only way to collect on debts; escape debts; OR get access to markets.
I know this is the part that the left thinks is “just because” because none of their collective have ever understood how business works.  Business, particularly for a country, can be the difference between starvation and prosperity for your people.  What’s more, economics rules always apply — always — regardless of whether your country has free trade or not, internally.  Because international politics doesn’t work by wishful thinking (nor does national but you can disguise it better.)

2- Disputed lands.  This was most of the reason for wars in pre-modern times, even when the disputed lands were minuscule, and didn’t seem to matter.  Again, the left views this as “just because” but it’s not, not really. Wait till point 4.

3 – To distract their people from the situation at home.  This is actually a common reason for totalitarian regimes, from fascist to communist to wage war.  It has the side benefit of bringing home consumer goods, which tend to fall off while a country is busily despoiling its own targeted citizens, be they Jews or Kulaks.  You know, if you took all the money of the 1% and redistributed it, it would be very little person.  And then it would be gone.  And then you’d have to come up with another plan next month.  This is why some nations go to war, but never, contrary to the lefty projection, constitutional republics.

4- To prevent people from attacking you.  This is something else the lefties never fully understand, but it goes like this: If you appear weak other countries will attack you.  Saying no country should attack another, is like trying to make one man responsible for #yesallmen or a woman responsible for #yesallwomen.  There is nothing you can do that will make sure no country falls into the insanity of totalitarianism, and no country ever misbehaves.  There will always be countries who need to do the dance in point 3, and if you look like an easy target, particularly if you’re fat and rich, they’re going to pounce on you.  So, sometimes point 2 is needed simply to avoid the appearance of weakness.  I.e. to prevent people from attacking you.

5- Because other countries are making noises like they want to attack you/bring you down/be a danger to your citizens.
Yesterday on TV I watched the circus of the usual demonstrators throwing a fit about the “travel ban anniversary.”
It’s …. cute.
If banning people from countries who have hated us for generations (hint, Great Satan is not a term of endearing) and whose compatriots have been caught trying to harm citizens of our country is forbidden, the only route left to us is to annihilate the country.
Yes, most people in that country/coming here are innocent.  But many who come here are de facto enemy combatants.  Is this a risk you wish to take with YOUR INNOCENT CIVILIANS for the sake of foreign nationals?  Yes?  Then don’t be surprised if after a few more attacks the answer pivots to “annihilation of the guilty with the innocent.”  Or you can shut up and let enhanced scrutiny go through.

6- In response to being attacked.  What we did after 9/11 was complicated by being attacked by non-state actors, but the threads leading back to supporters were there, sure enough, and beating up on those who attack your people is the most just of wars.

Unless you are a leftist, who thinks war is volitional — because so often their regimes are totalitarian and need it, perhaps? — and who therefore think there would be “peace” if people just decide not to fight.

Soft headed leftists, at least.  And those who pretend to be soft headed, and who want you to stop fighting so they can take over.  It’s not a coincidence that almost all the anti-nuke movements in the US were financed by the Soviet Union.

There is nothing we can do with these people.  They’re not amenable to understanding or explanation.  Laughing at them is the only possible response.

Except of course that they will do the same in private life.  They use “war” or in this case interpersonal conflict as a distraction from their truly crappy results when they take over an industry, a field or an institution.

This is why the first thing that happens after a collectivist take over of a country, an industry, a company, is the cannibal feast of denunciations, finger pointing and attacks.

And here, as in the greater conflicts between nations, they can only be distracted from eating their own by finding someone else to eat, someone else to attack.

So, when you get tired of their pounding on you, and you dare make a peep in response, they turn from their fellows into total war against you. Holy war, you could say.  They’re actually much like jihadists, believing paradise will come once they take over the world, and ignoring the fact they always fight among themselves and any place they take over is hell on Earth. (There is a post of mine going up at MGC in half an hour or so, speaking of.)

So, even at an individual level, war is not a choice.  Even for those who would rather read, write and ignore the *ssholes, they won’t let us ignore them.  They’ll come after us, our friends, our families, those to whom we have pledged loyalty.

And then we get off the desk chair (or on it, since it’s a war of words) and go to war.  Because the only way to be left alone is to win, and the left is famous for leaving people nothing left to lose.

You go to war with the underwear you have on.  And you fight to win, because there’s no other alternative: not because you want to; not because you enjoy it; not because it’s fun (it’s not.)

You go to war because there will be no peace till it’s won.

 

*Sentence for title gleefully stolen from Mark Alger, who is innocent of any association with me, save my reading him.