The other day in the diner on Facebook we got to talking about whatsherface Emma Watson and her speech to the UN.

There was a picture of her in the ridiculous dress she wore to some award, and the women of course started discussing the dress and the men started discussing her looks and then one of the women – and understand I’m not mad at her, this reaction is by way of being a conditioned reflex among educated women these days – chided that we only cared about a woman’s appearance, more than about her utterances and we never did that for men.

My first reaction – I too am an educated woman – was “yeah, why?” particularly since I never in my life cared much for what women look like and I have only marginal interest in what they wear, unless it’s a meat dress or something else that makes your jaw drop open and makes you go “Is that a cry for help?”

My second reaction was “Wait, that’s built in.”

Recently, and I apologize I’m not going to look for this (for one the study was social sciences and so poppycock, except for where it fit things we all know – hold on to that, it’s important) there was a study that proved that lesbians cared less about their appearance than gay men did.

This is because of one of those things that, unless you make your profession out of being in someone else’s head (a lot of someone else’s heads) convincingly as writers’ do, it’s hard to understand. I know because I’ve told my sons this about a bazillion times, but they don’t fully understand it. And they’re smarter than the average bear.

Here it is, the secret and tragedy of the human race: Man and women aren’t the same. Gender is NOT a social construct, no matter what some madwoman in the seventies came up with to justify her lesbianism (why she needed to justify it is beyond me.) Your gender goes beyond what’s between your legs. It starts with hormone baths early in pregnancy that shape both what’s between your legs and your brain and nervous system.

Note I’m not saying it’s black and white. Older son, whose degree (one of them) is on human biology says that sometimes it’s a miracle humans work at all considering everything that goes infinitesimally off plan every step of the way. Depending on what your mother was eating, and what temperature it was outside and things we can’t even know about, those hormones might be calibrated a little closer to the other side. I tend to test as having a male brain (but I keep it in a jar in my desk and the statute of limitations has run out) on most tests that distinguish that. Considering that I was born very premature, who knows what went wrong there?

But whatever hormones you got that were enough to shape unambiguous genitalia, you can generally guarantee you’re closer to your external gender than to the other one. (Again outliers do happen, but they happen in infinitesimal degrees. I might prefer physics over chemistry, i.e. reasoning over memorization, as the sciences are taught at high school level (I know it’s different further on) but I still have screwed up visual perception, and can’t visualize anything in three dimensions, in which cases I have “extreme female brain.”)

This is not a big deal. Note that “different” doesn’t mean “worse.” If you’re putting that construction on having a female brain, then the problem is yours. For instance, one of the salient characteristics of the female brain is memory, because estrogen helps with memory. (Go figure.) This, gentlemen, is why we remember EXACTLY when you promised to mow the lawn, and why are you on that sofa with that book. (Oh, wait, it’s my book? Never mind.)

But the place where all of this comes to a head, where things for heterosexual (and if that study is right, homosexual) males and females really bifurcates is the things that attract us.

Men are more visual than women. Remember, I didn’t say this was better or worse. Just different. Men’s attraction is mostly predicated on visual signals, and many of them have nothing to do with those faces that women spend so much time fixing up. They spend time fixing them up because women look at faces. And no, this isn’t a crack at men looking at breasts. The signals are more subtle than that. One of the attraction signals, apparently, is the difference in size between waist and hips. So if you wish to attract a guy you’d be better off washing off the makeup and cinching that corset.

This is evolutionary. Men are designed to prowl the world looking for young and fertile women and impregnating them.

Now, we’re not in the caves, so sane men look for other things too, but the signal for attractiveness in females is there, buried in the back brain with “things that make woman have Og’s babies.”

Women’s signals of attraction are harder to quantify. Yes, we care for appearance too, but only insofar as our guy’s appearance will make other women jealous. This is why movie stars, etc. are such powerful attractants: because the media have convinced us everyone wants them.

Other things that are powerful attractants are: success in a field you’re interested in; money; signs of stability and kindness.

This too makes perfect evolutionary sense. The impregnatable woman is looking for signs that Og will not only stick around when she’s pregnant (stability and kindness) but also that he’ll be able to provide much mammoth grease to chew on those cold winter nights.

Of course, we’re also not in the caves, so this mutates to “leader of the band” type signals.

However, no matter how far we’ve come or how far we go yet, humans come from very far. These signals were shaped over tens of thousands of years. They’re buried in our psyches, deep. Compared to these signals, the amount of time humans have been civilized – let alone conscious about “gender equality” – is the blink of an eye.

You can’t completely overcome the deep programing. You can moderate it. Most men I know don’t run around trying to impregnate twenty year olds all their life. They do that for a time then settle down and raise kids and the ability to talk to their wives becomes more important than the waist/hip ratio.

And most women I know don’t run around being groupies for rich and famous guys. They settle down with something they can make a life with.

It’s taken millennia of civilization and conscious education and religious preaching to get us where we are. You want to see countries the males have it all their own way look to the Arab countries. You want to see a place girls rule, look to middle school. Neither are happy places.

However, unless you don’t believe in evolution, you’ll see there are things you can’t combat and which remain. Like, when men look at a woman, no matter whether she’s saying world-saving things, they’re going to first say “Oh, gads, did she have a boob job?”

And when women look at a woman, no matter what she has to say, they’re going to say “Her teeth are like a ferret’s. And where did she get that dress?”

This is because the male back brain is looking at the body FIRST and the female back brain is looking at “signals of potential rival first.”

(There is a way to short circuit that, btw. If you’re matronly and middle aged, those signals do not come up first, UNLESS you’re something special in the way of ugly, like Helen Thomas. This is probably because, judging by our nearest primate relatives, our brain has a setting for “matriarch of the band.” And those aren’t judged on appearance though they might be judged on the size of their family.)

Do we do the same for men? Not nearly. But that’s because of the evolutionary choosing mechanism. What men look like doesn’t matter as much as what they say, because men are judged on power and ability to support.

Is this unfair?

Oh, of course it is. Life is unfair. We’re a dual species, in which only one gender bears the burden of carrying the babies, while the other gender in civilized circumstances has to bear the burden of a partner whose movement and health is diminished while bearing the babies. This might not seem like much for women in present day, but imagine being very pregnant and having to trek between summer and winter camps, hundreds or thousands of miles, with dangerous animals on the way.

Was the man’s caring for you as onerous as your pregnant-trek? In some places probably. But here’s the important thing: it was never about fairness. Evolution doesn’t care about fairness. G-d, if you believe in Him, also doesn’t. Obviously He doesn’t or we’d all be alike with equal chances and equipment for salvation.

Fairness is not only a human value but possibly a human handicap.

And we weren’t designed by humans. We might be in the process of taming ourselves, but we’re early in that process.

What I mean is, when we get that first impulse to judge a woman on looks? Normal. Everyone is like that.

The quick correction, the quick guilt of “I shouldn’t be doing that” is wrong. Humans are humans.

“But Sarah, you said we’d tamed ourselves. Shouldn’t we tame ourselves too to listen to a woman first, before looking at her?”

Yeah? There’s one way to do that. It’s called a radio. And even then, men will listen for sexiness and women for social status.

Look, what I’m trying to say is this – we humans can overcome our instincts. Obviously. But there was something for the caveman in looking for the one (or two if he was a really good hunter) woman who had his babies. As humans’ maturation became a longer and longer process, which allowed for more and more information to be passed on to the new generation, so did the “expense” of raising them. For that man to pass his genes on, he needed to make sure the woman didn’t starve. This was evolutionarily sound. A change in strategy, but sound.

OTOH what good is there to berating a man for looking at a woman first, instead of listening to her?

There is a good, or entire institutions wouldn’t be built on this concept of “making men and women not act according to their instinctive response.”

I’ll tell you. The merchants of fairness – not at the street level, where it’s just people like me who learned it in college – are playing for very high stakes indeed. They think they can remake humans.

You see, their system requires perfectly unselfish humans who work for ‘the community’ and this requires perfect fairness, a value never found in nature. On the way there, they have to get in your head and change every instinctive reaction, every thought.

The added bonus for those who know you can’t actually rebuild humans that quickly (it would take millennia and perfect selection ability) it has the advantage of making everyone feel guilty All the time. Which lends credence to the cries of victimhood and injustice. All the time.

You look at an actress delivering a speech to the UN (and why was she picked? It certainly wasn’t for her brain. What is she famous for? Right, her looks and the ability to emote on camera. Um…) and you think “that dress is awful, and why did she do that to her hair.” And, male or female, you immediately feel guilty of sexism. And then when the merchants of equality come around and berate you on patriarchy, you feel guilty, and you know that sexism is indeed rampant. You know it instinctively.

Is sexism rampant? Not in the US. There is a difference between your instinctive evaluation and the back brain and hiring decisions. That’s a conscious thing, and most sane people try to make it from learned principles which include fairness.

BUT you can’t suppress your immediate, instinctive response. At most you can deny it. And because you’re denying it, you feel compelled to preach to others to deny it to and to work for those people who say they can suppress it.

This “remaking of mankind” is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy in the social sense is pretending to be better than you are – but you don’t have to deny who you are. Not internally.

This is more of the spreading of a low-grade neurosis over all of society. It’s intentionally making people feel guilty for being people.

It is a lever for those who scream that society must be “fair”. And yet they create neo-feudal dystopias when given their head, note, because someone must be there to continuously ensure fairness, and it certainly can’t be you, you sexist pig.

We need to understand two things “life isn’t fair. Kindergarten is.”

“Every human is different.” Yes, women are physically weaker than men. And I can tan, and my husband can’t (though weirdly, he doesn’t burn either.) And he can think in quadratic equations, and I need paper to do long division. And I can remember complex events from history, and he needs to be reminded what appointment he has on Wednesday.

This doesn’t make him better or me better. We’re just different.

And he’s going to look any comely female over. And I’m going to snark her dress or hair (actually I usually snark her word choice. I’m not visual at all.)

Try to be the best you can for your fellow men, but stop berating yourself for not being perfect. Stop feeling guilty. Stop making others feel guilty.

This project of turning humans into perfectly equal automatons was doomed from the beginning. It has filled 100 million graves and it has created societies in which normal people are watched continually by power-hungry loons (Have you watched The Lives of Others? No? You should.)

It has created societies like Cuba in which, with the wide ocean filled with seafood all around, they starve and the agents of their government, instead of doing something about it, search people’s shopping bags every so often, to make sure they’re not getting more shrimp than anyone else.

We are not equal. We weren’t designed to be equal. It could be argued that’s what makes life worth living.

Enjoy who you are. Enjoy who others are.

And stop with the guilt over what you could never be.

Next time you start feeling guilty for looking a woman over or for making fun of another woman’s attire, remember it’s evolutionary.

Why give anyone permission to remake humanity in their own, neurotic image?

 

 

 

*Yeah, I’m doing a blast from the past, because yeah, I’m still trying to finish Through Fire, and it must be done before it finishes me.  It’s … probably going to be a very good book, because it scares me to death.

I might or might not do another post later today, depending on how quickly house gets cleaned and stuff packed (it’s all over the living room and I’m tired of it.) Meanwhile, this post still applies to Amazon-is-evil vs. Publishers-are-evil and you know, sometimes I need to remind people of the realities of the business.*

Yesterday night I didn’t know what to blog about.  The problem looked even more complex when Amanda Green dropped Mad Genius Club rotating Saturday blogship on my lap late last night.

Fortunately the gods of fate are kind to me.  And fortunately the publishing industry will never, ever, ever run out of teh stoopid for me to marvel at.  So just as I was about to go to bed, a friend of mine gave me a link to The Passive Voice which made my blood boil and my mind become awed at the sheer amount of stupid in this field.  The particular link was this.

The background for this is the DOJ case against the big six publishers who are accused of collusion in pricing in the so called “agency pricing” that was imposed on ebook retailers.  Amanda has covered this very ably here (as here, here, here here and here)  I don’t have time to go into it, but fell free to check it up.

Every time Amanda talked about it, someone came up with the talking point that “it didn’t matter” and “it didn’t hurt anyone.”  This puzzled us because on the face of it, agency pricing hurt quite a lot.  It hurt readers, who had to pay more for a book they wanted than they would have, had the free market been allowed to operate.  It hurt publishers, who sold fewer books because some people simply refuse to pay that much for what is essentially a license to carry the book on one, or a limited number of e-readers.  It hurt authors (at least it would, if publishers in most cases didn’t calculate ebook royalty by guess and by golly) because they made less money.  (This is not in dispute.  Publishers say everywhere the agency model means they’ve made less money.)

More importantly, Amanda said the law – unjust or not – is the law and price fixing is against the law, period.

BUT the talking point still puzzled us.  How they’d even come up with that gem made no sense to us (or probably ninety percent of human beings.)  And then, as I said, a friend sent me that link.  The link was about a letter Simon Lipskar, agent and board member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, sent to the Department of Justice regarding the antitrust suit filed by the DOJ against Apple and five large publishers alleging the group colluded to fix prices on ebooks.

Joe Konrath, long may his beard grow, fisked the letter here.  Also linked was another column by Konrath – a letter by a publishing insider.  And that is what caused this blog post, because it FINALLY explained what they meant by “but it doesn’t hurt anyone.”

This is the money shot: 2.  One Book Is Pretty Much The Same As Any Other.  Lipskar acknowledges, as he must, that the prices of New York Times bestselling books went up following the simultaneous industry-wide imposition of agency pricing (“prices for a limited number of titles published by these publishers increased, i.e. those ebooks that were digital editions of newly released bestselling hardcover titles.  Amazon had quite explicitly promised its consumers that these titles would be available at $9.99, and with the switch to agency pricing, these titles did indeed increase in price, mostly to $12.99”).  But, he claims, these higher prices couldn’t hurt anyone because the prices of other books decreased (“No Price Increase for Non-Bestselling Titles”).

Okay, got that?  (Beyond the fact that yes, they increased the price of non-bestselling books or else some of my books are REALLY selling beyond statements, but we’ll leave it at that.)  ONE BOOK IS JUST LIKE ANOTHER.

Look, guys, I’ve been in this field forever, and I have the bruises to prove it, but the thing about shocks me to my core.

We’ve long known that publishing execs weren’t readers.  But NOW, now, we have proof they’re not only not readers, they’re insane, or possibly an alien life form.

What they’re saying above is that if you’re a fan, say, of Nora Roberts, you’ll be just as happy with a book by Terry Pratchett.  If you’re a fan of Jonah Goldberg, you’ll be equally pleased with a book by Michael Moore.  If you’re a fan of Robert A. Heinlein, you’ll simply adore a random book with “SF” on the cover.

Got that?  Books are fungible, which means they are interchangeable.  You want to read Shadow Warriors by Tom Clancy and we don’t have it?  No problem, we have If you Give A Mouse A Cookie.  It’s a book and it should make you just as happy.

“Of course they don’t mean it to that extent,” you say.  “Are you out of your ever-loving mind, Sarah?”

Okay, so they don’t mean that to THAT extent, to what extent do they meant it?  I can tell you to what extent they mean it.  They mean if you’re into a certain sub-genre of science fiction or fantasy or Romance or anything, you’ll be just as happy with a book which is more or less along the same lines.  Say, you’re a fan of Nora Roberts and her book is too expensive.  Well, you can buy this nice book by Julia Quinn (or, since JQ is also a bestseller, let’s use a made up name, like Mary Smith).  See, you have a book.  It has words and everything.  So, you – being an idiot child who is easily distracted – will be perfectly happy.

“But Sarah,” you say, “they didn’t call us idiots who are easily distracted.”  No?  Really?  But they’ve been TREATING you and me and every other reader as idiots who are easily distracted.  This is the only way they can treat books as fungible and think a book is just as good as the other.  (And I’ll have something to say on this before I close this article, btw.)

This particular sentence though, this concept of any book being just as good as any other suddenly made sense of a bunch of industry practices which – otherwise – make no sense whatsover.  (It also made a mockery of a bunch of other industry practices, which is why I’ll have more to say on this.)

For instance, how many of you, as readers, are aware that publishers think books are bananas?  Okay, maybe not bananas, but some other, fragile, quickly-expiring, short-sell-by-date produce?  Probably not many of you.  Heck, I didn’t when I was just a reader.  (Though it was a little different then, too, because the particular inventory tax laws that killed back list hadn’t come into existence yet.)  Most books these days have a an expiration date of just a few weeks.  When you have a traditionally published book, you have to start promoting MONTHS before it is even available because that influences how much it will be available, which influences how many will be bought in the first weeks they are on the shelf.  After that, they are removed from the shelves (if they ever got on the shelves at all) and replaced with other books.  This never made sense to me, but now it does.

If books are fungible, why would you want to read a book that’s older than a few weeks?  If any book is much like another, all that counts is that the book is new and shiny and on the shelf, right?

Or consider what publishers do, by buying books for the AUTHOR’S life story or the author’s cute face, or the author’s nice bit of leg in lace stocking.  It makes no sense to readers who – silly us – read for the story and the words and couldn’t care less if the creature who wrote them is secretly a cockroach.  BUT if one book is exactly like another, then the only way to sell them is the “image” and the “narrative” – therefore buying writers for things other than their writing?  Genius!

Or consider “stocking to the net.”  Since all books are alike, readers – those idiots – must be attaching to the writers’ name in order to buy books (who knows why?  Maybe it’s like imprinting.)  So they will buy every book with the same author name in the same amounts, even if they are in totally different fields.  Romance by Georgette Heyer?  TOTALLY the same thing as mystery by Georgette Heyer.  And if a writers’ name isn’t selling, the best thing possible is to change the name, since that’s all the reader imprints on.

Or consider that the publishers thought it was a PERFECTLY VALID and, in fact, marvelous state of affairs to be able to control which books even got seen, much less bought.  They would buy a hundred books and plan on 80 of them failing and, in fact, make it impossible for those books to succeed.  (The reason for the inventory being so large is related to all sorts of other stuff, including “holding space” and the fact that even a book which “doesn’t sell” will sell a few hundred copies, which with the new print on demand tech was enough for them to make money.)  How could they think this made sense?  How could they think they could PICK the books the public would want to read, across the country with that much exactness?  How could they think they could say “this book will sell 100,000 copies and this one will sell 500?”  Let alone why would they buy the book which would sell 500, let’s concentrate on their belief that it was a good thing to decide how much the book would sell before exposing it to the reading public (this from an industry that does no consumer surveys and in which twenty one houses turned down Harry Potter.)

HOW could any sane industry think it was a good thing to be able to say “Well, I don’t care if the customers want more Pratchett.  We shall give them more Laurell Hamilton.  They’re both fantasy.  The readers will buy more of what is in a bigger display, and that’s the end of it?”  (Of course, both Mr. Pratchett and Ms. Hamilton sell.  However, Pratchett didn’t for almost a decade in the US while selling in the UK.  Why?  Because NYC had decided he wouldn’t sell.  So he got print runs of five thousand books and was about as well known here as I am.  The moment at the first Discworld con when Pratchett said “What changed between then and now?  Different agent, different publisher.  I write the same,” was a moment of intense relief for me, because if they can hold Pratchett at that level, they can hold anyone.  It’s their decision, not the writer.  More on that later.)

Well, the publishing execs think one book is much like the other.  So, it’s perfectly fine to push the books they want to push, with the opinions and attitudes they want to promote.  The reader, is after all an idiot, and they can just buy whatever is available.

But Sarah, you say, printruns have been falling since this became policy.  Well, yes, I know that, but editors and publishers say it’s video games and TV and movies.  That’s their problem, not mine.  (And also, readership has increased with the e-book revolution.  I wonder why.)

Other things that are their problem – if every book is fungible and every reader will be just as happy with one book as another:

How come you stop buying an author when he/she doesn’t magically become a bestseller, when you haven’t slated him/her for it?  Because, look, if the reader will be just as happy with Harry Potter, A Farewell to Arms or If you Give A Mouse A Cookie, HOW can it be the writer’s fault?

How come you give different advance levels to different writers?  Exclude the celebrities, since you think that sells a book.  How come you give some writers millions and some a thousand?  If a book is the same as the other, then all writers should be paid the same, right?  Maybe a certain amount per word?

And if every book is the same as another book, why would anyone buy books from a certain publisher?  (Baen fans, SIT DOWN.  I’m not saying every book is the same.  Big Publishing is.  Baen is NOT part of teh stupid in this, and Baen is not guilty of this nonsense.)  Why not buy indie instead?

By their very logic this brings us to the conclusion that the big six might or might not be alien life forms or mentally damaged, but they ARE in fact fungible.

Don’t give big publishing a cookie.  BUY INDIE (Small press, micro press or self published and, of course, Baen who is in many ways indie).

*My title btw, is taken from Shakespeare, whose works still sell, and therefore – by not being bananas – puncture all of big publishing’s argument.

And even those who mock, joke and deride, particularly those who do so to an almost-universally held faith in their region/time/place.   People must be free to hold dissenting opinions without risking death.

Why do I say that?

There was that climate march in NYC and people tried, by means of slogans and shouting to insist that we must all change the way we live; that we must go back to a way of life that would necessitate the demise of 80% of human population, in order to… stop the planet warming up.

This despite the fact that we have no idea how much the planet is really warming up or why (corrupt data, corrupt data-keeping, corrupt… everything – the result of science done to government specifications.), the fact that most of the world couldn’t care less what these marchers do and say and that the ecological disaster that is China will offset any sacrifices we attempt to make, and the fact that the celebrity marchers all produce enough carbon in a month to offset any reductions I could make in my lifestyle over a lifetime, even if I went to the loony point of living as we did in the village where I grew up: a lightbulb per room and early hours to bed; no labor saving devices; a radio as the only electrical form of entertainment, etc.

Let’s leave that aside for a moment though, and concentrate on the truly appalling spectacle of Robert Kennedy Jr. demanding that those who don’t agree with him about what is causing the climate problems (?) be put in jail or killed.

The United States government, Kennedy lamented in an interview with Climate Depot, is not permitted by law to “punish” or to imprison those who disagree with him — and this, he proposed, is a problem of existential proportions. Were he to have his way, Kennedy admitted, he would cheer the prosecution of a host of “treasonous” figures — among them a number of unspecified “politicians”; those bêtes noires of the global Left, Kansas’s own Koch Brothers; “the oil industry and the Republican echo chamber”; and, for good measure, anybody else whose estimation of the threat posed by fossil fuels has provoked them into “selling out the public trust.” Those who contend that global warming “does not exist,” Kennedy claimed, are guilty of “a criminal offense — and they ought to be serving time for it.”

Let’s suppose that everything Mr. Kennedy thinks about the climate is true. Why would he want to silence anyone who disagrees with him?

If everything he says is true, surely he has proof. More importantly, surely he has ways to explain/get around the fact that without modern technology 80% of the people in the world would die, due to problems of transportation and growing enough food in enough places. Surely he has ways to convince China. I mean, if his science is that iron clad, they wouldn’t want to die any more than we do? Surely he has ways to convince all the rest of the world, which has nothing to do with the (Libertarian, and for all I know AGW supporting,) Koch brothers or the Republicans.

Unless he thinks the rest of the world hangs suspended from those peoples’ lips? And even a trust-fund-baby celebrity can’t be that stupid.

In other words, if he’s really concerned about AGW, he should be talking to the rest of the world, particularly the emerging nations, not just the US public. To pretend otherwise is a cop out, and a dishonest one.

Instead, the power he wants is the power to kill or imprison – to silence – anyone he disagrees with.

Note that people like me, who think that proponents of AGW demonstrate they don’t believe in it with their lives, don’t wish to stop them talking. On the contrary. The more they parade and berate, and show their allegiance to communist causes, the less credible they are. We want them to keep talking.

This extends all across the pet causes of the left. Feminism? Oh, please, do keep talking about how you want to kill all but 10% of males.

The lack of women and minorities in science fiction? Do keep talking. We have books going back to the fricking fifties that give you the lie and you just expose your crass ignorance.

The War on Women, in the group with the most pampered, indulged women in the world? Please, even some of the kids no longer buy it.

White privilege, which is screamed in the faces of Hispanic and even Black males who disagree with the narrative? Please, oh, insane mind, speak thyself.

However, from their side all we hear is that they want us to shut up and (in sff where they’re soft) “hurry up and die. Or in the rest of the world “be killed.”

Whence this recoil from opposing opinions, this desire to shut us up?

I have joked in the past that militant Islam with its demands that anyone who says anything about the prophet should be killed betrays a fundamental insecurity. Those of us who truly believe G-d exists don’t believe He needs US to defend his honor.

We figure if He’s really upset, He’ll take care of it in his own good time.

But this effect of having to defend something so much bigger than you that if you’re sure it exists, surely it doesn’t need YOUR efforts to defend it, seems to be an effect of theocracies, where people of not very strong beliefs are afraid of hearing opinions/ideas that contradict what they must believe in to remain in the fold and in the good with the society around them.

Hence, medieval Christianity and most of Islam today.

Hence, the left.

The progressive project that, in various forms, consumed most of the twentieth century, ran out of ideological justification with the fall of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China into… something more approaching Nazi Germany than the Communist Project.

This has taken the certainty from under the followers of the left. The smarter ones, surely, know their ideology is rubbish and there isn’t a working example of a top-down socialist/communist society in the world that is self-sustaining, let alone competes with the US in innovation and creation at any level.

Even the not so smart ones have to have an inkling. They can no longer point to the USSR and tell us if only we knew its wonders we’d convert.

Their leaders are old, their ideas are depleted. They, in the parlance of my kids generation “got nothing.”

So instead of real belief they have the desperate clutching at the appearance of belief and conformity, the appearance of being right.

They’ve done so much for the cause, most of these celebrities and ideologues, that to backtrack now would be unthinkable. They’d have to face themselves in the morning and realize that they supported causes and movements that killed a hundred million people worldwide and held far more in abject squalor.

They can’t do that. Courage was never their strong suit, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone along with the crowd after the fall of the USSR.

So they just want us to “shut up already” and “die” so that in their totalitarian version of reality no little voice shall mar their self image.

They are like MacBeth, trying to silence his conscience. They are in fact

“in blood

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,

Which must be acted ere they may be scanned.”

And our only hope is to keep speaking, to keep making them scan their strange things in head before they come to hand.

Because the other way is unthinkable.

Obama once said (after arresting a film maker for making a movie about Islam, which did not after all spark the murder of our ambassador) that the future must not belong to those who insult Islam.

On the contrary, Mr. President. Insofar as “insult” is questioning and pointing out contradictions and, yes, even joking, the future MUST belong to those who insult Islam, to those who insult Christianity, to those rare souls that bother insulting Hinduism and the other more exotic beliefs, and even to those who insult the Marxist religion of the left yay and verily, even its Global Warming branch.

That is because any belief, religious, scientific, economic, ANY BELIEF that would claim the allegiance of the whole of humanity must be tested and tested and tested. It must be able to withstand jokes and knocks and above all argument.

Remember at one time Incan human sacrifice and Nazism commanded a large group of believers. This didn’t make them right.

It’s only hypocrites and cowards who demand the silence of others, afraid their own weakness be exposed and they’ll be forced to look at themselves in a true mirror and recoil in fear and error at what they see there.

*So this started because the lovely Jagi Lamplighter asked me to participate in a character blog tour thing, in which each of us invited other people and each person blogged the following Monday, linking before and ahead.  Jagi’s link is here.  I did mine here.  Links to the other people I invited here. I invited Doug Dandrige, who in turn invited Charles E. Gannon.  Chuck doesn’t have a blog of his own, though he’s under permanent invite to blog at MGC Sundays when he wishes (I’ll just add to Elf Blood in its own page, then) so if you guys egg him on, maybe he’ll take us up on it. Anyway, so his interview of his character came out really long.  I’m putting the first half here, and the other half will be up at Doug’s blog in a couple of hours.  And meanwhile, I’ll be working on Through Fire, and I’ll be back tomorrow with a for reals blog post, promise.  I think this book scares me.  If you wish I can explain why, but for now color me spitless.

This is what Chuck says about the following interview: “the content provides some “ah HAH!” background fill in for my series.”*

Transcript of event 786: Virtua security breach, class 2, during Virtual Exchange  – Charles E. Gannon

Subjects: (two)

 

Human visitor, tagged “Interviewer” (identity data suppressed; see concluding access notes)

Origin-sourced precarnation Simulacrum, tagged “Corcoran”

 

Summary Description of intended Virtual Exchange:

 

“Interviewer” was authorized to interview origin-source Simulacrum “Corcoran” in Virtual Node after full debriefing and explicit agreement to observe interrogatory constraints. Intentional or unintentional compromise of the Simulacrum’s current contiguous knowledge base was established as condition which would trigger partial discontinuation and pause of the Virtual Node as warning (i.e.; “environment hazing”). Full termination occurs upon multiple compromises or disregard of warnings.

 

 

 

Transcript Begins

 

 

Interviewer: It’s quite an honor to interview you, Admiral Corcoran.

 

Corcoran: It’s my pleasure. Where would you like to start?

 

Interviewer: How about telling us something about yourself that we probably don’t know?

 

Corcoran: Well, to do that, I need to know what you expect your readers will know about me?

 

Interviewer: I’m sure they’ll all be familiar with your roles in the Highground War, the Belt Wars, and the mission to intercept the Doomsday Rock. A lot will remember your name in conjunction with a variety of the subcommittees and military initiatives that made the United States and the United Commonwealths and Aligned States the preeminent space powers, but ultimately, transformed humanity into a star-faring race. And of course, younger audience members are most likely to associate you with the Parthenon Dialogs.

 

Corcoran: Well, I’m not so sure that my name is as closely associated with all those activities as you seem to presume . . .

 

Interviewer: It is, I assure you. In fact, in many accounts, your name is the one that figures most prominently. However, what is not mentioned is this: which of these involvements was, personally, the greatest challenge, the hardest job?

 

Corcoran: You want the hardest job? You’re sure?

 

Interviewer: Yes, Admiral, quite sure.

 

Corcoran: Then it’s none of the ones you’ve mentioned. For me, the hardest job was the one that probably won’t get into any history books. At best, it will warrant a few footnotes in specialty military histories that will probably have only a handful of hardcopies published. Which will then spend their dreary existence gathering dust in those few repositories that actually archive physical books.

 

Interviewer: So, what is this almost unknown job that was the hardest you’ve ever done?

 

Corcoran: Without a doubt, it was chairing the Services Integration Committee.

 

Interviewer: (after a long pause) The what?

 

Corcoran: See? I told you it’s not on the radar. The Services Integration Committee was convened before you were born, and, unless I miss my guess, was concluded just about when you started high school.

 

Interviewer: That’s an incredibly long process.

 

Corcoran: Because it was an incredibly complex—and incendiary— process. The Services Integration Committee was an Executive initiative passed to the Joint Chiefs early in 2092. It was necessary and everyone knew it was coming. But nonetheless, it was a political football and tar-pit that no sane officer in the general ranks wanted to touch, because it was sure to be their professional doom. On the other hand, I had to take it on because of the direction I knew we were going: namely, into space, and ultimately to the stars. And that was going to change the roles and command structures of all our armed services. Forever.

 

Interviewer: Okay, now I understand what you’re talking about. I’ve actually heard about this process, but it’s usually referred to by its acronym, now: SIC.

 

Corcoran: Which is what everyone called it, for obvious reasons. Because for everyone involved—which meant almost everyone in the armed services—it was indeed an utterly sick process. Everything was on the table, so anything might change. However, the more classically educated persons involved chose a latin quip: Sic transit Gloria mundi.

 

Interviewer: “Thus passes the glory of the world?”

 

Corcoran: You got it in one. Yes, because, for a lot of career officers, this meant that all the missions they had trained for, all the roles and even service traditions that had determined the shape of their adult lives were poised on the brink of change so profound that they might not recognize the new reality that they’d be ask to navigate. A lot of people were legitimately worried about finding themselves being discharged simply because there was no role left for them. We managed to avoid most of that—but not without a lot of horse trading and creative problem-solving.

 

Interviewer: It sounds daunting. What was it like running that kind of initiative, on the gut level?

 

Corcoran: It was like herding cats. With their tails on fire. Pursued by budget-cutting Dobermans. Only harder. Next question.

 

Interviewer: (laughs) It sounds like if I ask any more questions about SIC, we’ll never get to another topic. So let’s move on from the most difficult job to the one that you are most proud of. What would that be?

 

Corcoran: You mean, aside from my children?

 

Interviewer: (laughs) I wasn’t aware they were part of your resume.

 

Corcoran: No, they weren’t. Which is not something I’m proud of. But after learning that the Doomsday Rock had been, indisputably, pushed at us by exosapients—well, my life was no longer really my own. Which means I was not around for my children or my wife anywhere near as often as I wanted—as I needed—to be. So, while that absence is one of my greatest regrets, it is also one of my greatest sources of pride that Elena and Trevor became the fine young woman and young man that they became. And that my wife Patrice somehow managed to remain an all-star physician and family locus, was the glue that held us all together, since I so often was not there to do so. (Pause) So I guess I have to add “deeply grateful” to “proud,” when I think of my family.

 

Interviewer: I get the sense that your life’s work has left you with some significant feelings of ambivalence.

 

Corcoran: I think we could safely call that an understatement.

 

Interviewer: Then I wonder if you wouldn’t mind sharing with us what you feel most ambivalent about, as you think back about your career?

 

Corcoran: Circumventing due process.

 

Interviewer: I beg your pardon?

 

Corcoran: Circumventing due process. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. When you take that oath, you never envision that your career could take you to a place where you are not only authorized, but mandated, to suppress facts, avoid ready accountability, create the illusion of transparency where none exists, and just plain lie. All at the behest of my Commander in Chief, mind you, and the Joint Chiefs. All approved by Senate Subcommittees, both Near Earth-approaching Asteroid Response and Intelligence. But it doesn’t make you feel any better about doing it, doesn’t remove the raw reality of looking in the mirror every day and asking, “How is it that I am technically fulfilling my oath of service by doing all the things it seemed implicit that I swore not to do?” (Long pause) And of all the incidents where that kind of circumvention and clandestine misrepresentation was involved, the case of Caine Riordan is right at the top of my list of regrets.

 

Interviewer: I’m sorry if this is a sensitive topic, but it’s also a natural segue into a part of this interview that I’m sure you were expecting, and I would be remiss to skip over. Specifically, in regard to that circumvention of due process, your detractors charge that your manipulation of government agencies, commercial entities, and even other nations through information control and influence peddling constitutes one of the most sustained and successful conspiracies on record. How would you respond?

 

Corcoran: Well, firstly, I think we need to distinguish between ‘conspiracy’ and ‘covert operation.’ I was involved in the latter, not the former, and yes, there is most certainly a distinction. As I just pointed out, I was not operating as a rogue agent, and I was not operating against the orders or interests of the United States of America. In the wake of our discoveries on the Doomsday Rock, we created a top secret collective: the Institute for Reconnaissance, Intelligence and Security. It was not only permitted but mandated by the Executive Branch, after recommendation by a blue-ribbon panel from the Senate Near Earth-approaching Asteroid Response subcommittee, chaired by Arvid Tarasenko. And within five years time, it had official buy in and clandestine assistance from the European Union, the Russian Federation, and select elements of what later became the Trans Oceanic Commercial and Industrial Organization.

 

Interviewer: Let’s go back a moment. Arvid Tarasenko was also a friend from your days at the Naval Academy, correct?

 

Corcoran: Correct. And I fully expected that, when our activities became a matter of public record, a lot of people would misconstrue my work with Arvid as evidence of some kind of “Bilderbergers in the Making” relationship.

 

Interviewer: Which they have since done. Repeatedly.

 

Corcoran: Naturally. Unfortunately, although I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind with this assertion, that’s a case of putting the cart in front of the horse. Arvid and I were not schemers who fell upon an opportunity to power: we were friends who could trust each other and were in the right places to establish a long-duration initiative to accelerate the pace at which Earth might accrue the advances essential to its survival.

 

Interviewer: As I’m sure you are aware, your detractors prefer the first interpretation of your relationship with Tarasenko: that you were power-seeking illuminati.

 

Corcoran: I’m sure they do: it makes for better copy. But if they stopped to think through the details, they might find some contradictions that they’ll be at profound pains to explain away. (Seems puzzled momentarily) I must admit, though, that I have no actual knowledge of such detractors. But your report of their existence doesn’t surprise me.

 

Interviewer: Well, we’ve certainly followed a circuitous course in getting to the answer to my original question, which was: “Your detractors charge that your manipulation of government agencies, commercial entities, and even other nations through information control and influence peddling constitutes one of the most sustained and successful conspiracies on record.” What’s your verdict upon yourself, guilty or not guily?

 

Corcoran:Unfortunately, I’d have to say guilty as charged. But some deeds are not well understood—or judged—without context. A few—particularly those to feed perverse personal appetites for power—don’t require careful contemplation: people who kill others simply to feel a rush, to bathe in the sewage of their own megalomaniacal egos, can be judged pretty summarily, I think. But the sad truth is that there are innumerable shades of grey. Unfortunately, that is the most frequent rationalization employed by zealots to perpetrate atrocities: “the ends justified my means.”

Of course, sometimes they do—but not just because the person employing the means claims they do. Ultimately, it is history that will sit in judgment—and it is often true that an analyst looking back from a distant point upon the unspooling historical timeline will see the context more clearly than a more proximal viewer.

 

Interviewer: Do you think that will be the case with your own deeds—that they will be better understood, and perhaps more widely-praised—with the increasing passage of time and accrual of greater perspective?

 

Corcoran: I’d like to think so. But then, there’s so much that was done that never came to light, and so much we encountered that had to be addressed that was never revealed. I’m not sure that the complete story will ever—or should ever—be told.

 

Interviewer: Because people can’t handle the truth?

 

Corcoran: No, because some truths are so profoundly convoluted and byzantine in their pathways and nuances that it’s almost impossible to lay them all out briefly in any reasonably comprehensive fashion. Yet, to do any less ensures that those truths are likely to be misunderstood, generating misperceptions so profound that one might easily make inferences that are 180 degrees reversed from the actual underlying facts.

So how do you correct that, how do you provide more context? By sharing more information. But that’s like cutting the heads off a hydra: in the process of clearing up the first misperception you often create two or three more. And so it goes. At some point, the problem is not that most people fail to comprehend the backstories: it’s that they get weary of the onion-layers you have to keep peeling back in order to get to the fundamental exigencies that shape and motivate deep intelligence work. The number of variables involved, and the way they tug on each other—the fact that there is almost nothing immutable in that extremely dynamic equilibrium—is really difficult to appreciate unless you are working inside it.

 

Interviewer: The rejection of that perspective—the difficulty of ensuring that non-insiders have a reasonable appreciation of the paradoxical and often counter-productive effects of working toward full disclosures—has been voiced repeatedly and stridently by Earth’s megacorporations. And they have been among your most vocal, and suspiciously well-informed, detractors.

 

Corcoran: No surprises there. Either in terms of their being vocal or suspiciously well-informed.

 

Interviewer: As you say, no surprises. But I wonder: if you had it to do over again, would you take such a hard line against the megacorporations?

 

Corcoran: I think I need to unpack that question before I can answer it.

 

Interviewer: Please do so.

 

Corcoran: Firstly, I’m not sure I can accept the allegation that I adopted a “hard line” against the megacorporations. As anyone who’s done any research knows, I coordinated regularly, and was as forthcoming as classification allowed, with the Industrial megacorporations. Not my distinction: the Industrial megacorporations.That is not chance, and it cannot be airily explained away by simply asserting that, since they are the other half of the “military-industrial” complex, that they were IRIS’ willing tools. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is utterly ludicrous. Multi-billion dollar manufacturing concerns that supply multiple nations are not anyone’s puppets. But likewise, their sales and therefore survival is directly tied to the nation-states. In many circumstances, that has been a major problem. It’s no secret that there has been a long history of fiscal abuses arising from what many rightly characterize as that inherently incestuous relationship, particularly as concerns the inefficiencies of the materiél procurement process. It was worse in the last century, but it’s still not great.

However, in some circumstances, the extant relationship between Industrials and government has been singularly advantageous. In the case of getting ourselves ready for a robust expansion into space with an eye towards self-defense, our prior work together put us on the same page in three important ways.

Firstly, much of our joint work has always involved both achieving scientific breakthroughs and then actualizing them in terms of real-world engineering. That was the very foundation of our extant working partnership, and in many ways, our new goals in space were actually a better fit for our relationship. This was a case where we had comparatively very long development cycles and where the only objective was to get the job done. There was no room for favoritism and regional pork-belly competition. We were operating under the aegis of a special mandate that necessarily could not be open to conventional Congressional oversight. There was oversight—more than a lot of folks presume—but it is in the nature of secret projects that they cannot be subject to line-item review. Kind of defeats the “secret” part.

And that brings up the second way in which we started out on the same page: we were used to working with the Industrials through a set of security protocols that allowed for a pretty broad mix of classification levels and compartmentalization firewalls, all safeguarded on their side. It’s probably hard for someone not familiar with the defense and aerospace industries to understand how important all that is. Normal companies are just not set up for the complex demands of being responsible for projects involving various intel-sensitive fabrication sites, and design teams, and coordinators, and maintaining adequate internal security while also being on the lookout for external penetration. I’ve heard people try to compare this level of security challenge to that faced by online data firms, or financial institutions. Sorry: orders of magnitude of difference, just at the level of evidentiary footprint alone. Industrials maintain and do their work in factories—physical plants—that have traffic numbering in the hundreds or even thousands of persons. They literally have a shop floor, from which various pieces of technical intelligence can be swept and used as the basis of inferential analysis of what they are working on. I repeat: we are talking about easily accessed, highly suggestive, physical evidence. We’re not talking about securing data streams or proprietary code: we’re talking nuts and bolts handled by hundreds of people every day. And the Industrials already had a pretty good system in place to protect secrecy in those kinds of environments. Given some extra latitude, they were able to do the necessary security job without involving more people on the government side. And they were all accustomed to not only having limited knowledge of what they were protecting or why, but more importantly, they had already been acculturated to know the difference between critically examining an order that seems ill-considered —a good trait—and being nosey to sate their own curiosity—a very very bad trait.

Lastly, but possibly most importantly, the industrials shared, deep down, an intangible but crucial cultural value with those of us who’ve spent a lifetime in military or space endeavors: the sovereignty, and importance, of the nation-state. And not merely according to some blind, team-spirit reflex. The women and men in the board rooms of the Industrials are no less educated than those you might find in the other megacorporations, but you might say they’ve drawn different lessons from their educations—and from their life experiences. Many of the people in the Industrials have taken oaths of service, or have spent years serving alongside those who have. Most of them have lived lives negotiating the compromises that arise between pursuing one’s own happiness and the preserving its pursuit–along with life and liberty—for others. It would not be correct to say that the Industrials embody a service ethos, but they maintain close ties to it—too close for them to forget that other people are depending upon them. And I’m happy to say that when the chips are down, that’s when they really rise to the occasion, when they really shine. I’d like to think that about not only all Americans, and all members of the United Commonwealths and Allied States bloc, but humans in general. But I know I can say it about the majority of the Industrials because, in the years leading up to the Parthenon Dialogs, I saw them do just that: rise to the occasion, take on an incredible set of challenges and not only meet, but exceed all expectations.

 

Interviewer: With that said—and thank you for unpacking what has been a much-debated matter—I’d like to return to the question that launched us into the topic in the first place. Which was this: if you had it to do over again, would you take such a hard line against the megacorporations? (A long pause.) Admiral Corcoran, would you rather skip this question?

 

Corcoran: No, no. Unless compelled to do so by official secrecy constraints, I hate agreeing to an interview and then hiding behind “no comments.” I’m just trying to think carefully before I answer your question, because it’s a very good one. It troubled me a lot, over the years, in fact. Frankly, I did not foresee the problems we had with so many of the non-Industrial megacorporations.

 

Interviewer: How did they surprise you?

You can find the rest in Doug Dandriges’s Website.

You can buy his books here:

Fire with Fire

Trial By Fire

(Sorry, I tried to insert images but WordPress Delenda Est — SAH)

Or, this black dog is following me around, but I don’t want to keep him.

I don’t think it’s news to any of you that I’m depressive. No, let me rephrase that. I’m depressive by nature, and I usually compensate for it mentally. It’s sort of like being born lame, but doing your best to walk on both feet, normally even if one hurts.

I’ve stayed away from medications for various reasons. This is not a judgment on people who take them, but I’m one of those people who hated sleeping as kids, and who still hates drinking too much, and who refuses to take pain meds, because I’d rather endure pain than not being sure who is doing my thinking for me.

Perhaps it is a function of having many people in my mind. It’s important to know which voice is yours.

But the last two years have been challenging and I have come very close to throwing in the towel and asking for meds.

Part of it is politics and world affairs. Part of is personal health. Part of it is the economy making family economics shaky. Part of it was various struggles the kids went through. Part of was the fact my neighborhood is simply not safe for me to walk alone anymore, so if I can’t get a son to go with me, I don’t get the exercise I need to stay sane (let alone this side of a mac truck.) (Yes, I have a treadmill, bought used, but I haven’t had time/help to turn it into a standing desk, and I hate exercise machines because I get SO bored. Finding a good show to watch while running helps, but the last one was the prime backlog of Foyle’s war, almost two years ago.)

All of these fed on each other.

This was not the most depressed I’ve been. I was never suicidal. I was just at a bottom of a pit and couldn’t reach out.

I could write these blogs, but not write fiction, because fiction is emotion, and I couldn’t bear emotion. It’s like a magnetic repulsion. I “read” because I have a need for story, but I “read” by listening to audio, which can be done while cleaning, which further distances the emotions.

And I didn’t read. Not really. I skimmed a few books there in the middle. Even Romance which I mostly consider “not real” was too serious for me.

This was gradual, so that at the end of last year I was reading less and less.

And what I wrote – well, I’ve said this – the first version of Through Fire, which is getting fixed, read like a profoundly autistic main character.

This year I’ve been making a conscious effort, been trying to dig out. But there are relapses. The problem of being that close with the black dog so long is that any slight “bad news” no matter how minor revive that feeling of futility and push you back into the pit and then the climbing back out takes longer than falling in.

When Jagi Lamplighter asked if I’d read and blurb her book, The Raven, the elf and Rachel, I should have said no, because I was having trouble making myself read things. But I said yes. And she sent me both books, because I hadn’t read the first one yet.

As deadline approached I thought “I’ll skim it.” But then I found myself reading it. Both of them, back to back.

And suddenly I was reading again. Which has helped, because writing needs to be “fed.” You can’t write too long without experiencing reading.

I re-read things that I barely remembered reading before the depression clamped down. Like Dog and Dragon.

And I’m on the way up.

But remember I said this is all very frail. Anything can push you back all the way again.

This last week I got sick. Seems to be a virus mainly characterized by making you feel exhausted, so it’s a dangerous one, because you feel blah and don’t know why. I felt better (psychologically) when I realized I had a fever, because that’s not psychological.

And I’ve been getting better.

But yesterday we had some disappointing news. Nothing really bad, and most of the time I’d not even have thought about it, but where I am right now it was enough to knock me on my can.

I’m looking at the writing backlog of two years, and I’m still tired from being sick, and suddenly the writing shut down again and I was tottering at the edge.

And then a friend, on Facebook, asked me if I’d finished a story he read the beginning of. He’d been searching Amazon for it. It’s a minor little thing, not a novel, and not something I thought anyone would be waiting for.

But he was. And he told me. And suddenly the world refocused.

It’s very easy when you’re a writer to forget that people receive your writing; that it matters.

It’s very easy to see fans asking for things as demands, as pushing at you when you can’t do everything at once. It’s easy to get rude at readers (the whole George R.R. Martin is not your bitch thing. No, he’s not, but he has a contract with the readers that he’ll finish the series. It’s easy to think of this as an imposition, but we writers shouldn’t. It’s a tie. A human connection. All those can be burdens or occasions of grace.)

Kris Rush, who understands me pretty well, once told me – when I was frustrated and angry at my publishers – “Ignore all that, Sarah, write for your readers.”

Only that’s not so easy because when you’re writing, you’re writing alone. Which is why writers are prone to the black dog, as Dave blogged about yesterday.

I was going to blog about fascism, (no, real one) and about intolerance of dissent.

But I still feel frail from yesterday. Not depressed, just tired. Part of it might be a hangover from being sick, since as I said whatever this was was mostly characterized by tiredness.

I don’t feel I have the… ah… force to blog about something like that.

So I thought I’d blog about how sometimes we need a rope. We’re down there, struggling, and we don’t even realize we’re drowning, until someone throws us a rope and we pull up a little and go “Oh.”

Before I wrote this, I sent Jagi a thank you note. It occurred to me I never told her. I don’t know if she struggles with the black dog, but every writer this side of J K Rowling struggles with not knowing the impact they have, or what importance what they do has.

Writing is a lonely business. Too lonely.

I hadn’t told her how I felt because I thought it sounded stupid. So other than teasing demands for more, I didn’t tell her. Then I realized it’s not stupid. Yes, she might know, but she might not.

I’m not fishing for compliments – please don’t – I got my rope last night, unexpectedly, from someone who didn’t realize he was throwing it; from someone I can trust not to say it just because.

And that’s important. Don’t say it just because. And don’t say it just to writers. But if someone knit you a scarf, cooked you a meal, took time to talk to you, and it mattered – it really mattered and it really helped, let them know.

Tell them. They might need a rope, or they might not, but they should know. And even if you didn’t need a rope. Even if it was just something you really liked/enjoyed, something well done that someone put effort into, something that gave you joy, let them know.

Don’t think “surely they know.” Achievement and accomplishment and reward aren’t often covalent in the world, nor is ability and self-confidence.

And you might not know it – I suspect there are a lot of people like me out there, doing their best to walk on two feet even if they were born lame – but you might be throwing someone a rope into the pit and shining a light into the abyss.

So do it. It costs nothing except a little embarrassment. And the ripples go on forever.

 

Rebuilding Humanity- Cedar Sanderson

 

I had to write a paper this week on the state of human trafficking in the Balkans. As I wrote for the paper, this requires a deeper understanding first, of the current and historical role of police in the region, the socio-economic status of the people in the region who participate in trafficking, and finally, the role of external monitors who ostensibly would be a deterrent to such trafficking. However, outside the confines of the classroom, I can add my own editorial comments about the state of affairs morally and politically that has led to this situation. Slavery, and in particular what is now euphemistically termed ‘human trafficking’ has been around since the dawn of time. This is evident in literature and archaeological evidence from the dawn of pre-civilization eras. How is it possible such an archaic tradition can linger on it our enlightened world?

The more modern woes came about with the fall of communism, and in the struggles that followed, as a generation of people brought up without the ‘burden’ of Western morality and religious teachings tried to make ends meet in any way they could. That they could sell their wares, as it were, to the ‘more civilized’ UN peacekeepers and various NGO personnel is indicative of other issues, more close to home for those of us who frequent this blog. I am going to allow you to draw your own conclusions, and suggest your own resolutions to these problems. I am merely going to say that when the philosophy that is taught either directly, or by omission, is morally bankrupt because morals are no longer a thing, and good is indefinable, then what is evil?

The shattering of the former communist state of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s led to the creation of several smaller states in the early 1990s, and a civil war that tore the new countries apart from their beginning. Previous to this, however, the police during the reign of the communist Tito were tasked with many other things than an American observer would anticipate, as the role of the police in the United States is quite different. Aleksa Djilas, in an article for Foreign Affairs (http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/51216/aleksa-djilas/tito-s-last-secret-how-did-he-keep-the-yugoslavs-together) says, “The main guarantors of Yugoslavia’s unity were the communist police and army. No force in the country could challenge them, and Tito always had complete control of both.”

During the civil wars the police took on an even uglier role, as discussed by Dr. Robert Winslow,

“At the end of May, Federal and Serbian Government authorities began exhuming five mass grave sites discovered near the towns of Batajnica, a suburb of Belgrade, and Petrovo Selo, in eastern Serbia. More than 300 bodies were recovered during the year; an estimated 700 bodies are expected to be found. The victims were assumed to be ethnic Albanian men, women, and children, most likely victims of 1999 massacres by the Yugoslav police and army in and around Pec in Kosovo.”

(http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/rwinslow/europe/yugoslavia.html)

Is it any wonder, then, that the people in the Balkan states fear and despise their police forces? The European Union has made it a part of their criteria that the police must be separated from their former roles in the military, de-politicized, and reformed before the EU will accept the new states. To this end, the United Nations has been working with the new nations for the last decade and a half to restructure and reform the police from a terror group to trusted law enforcement agents.

Human trafficking in the Balkans exploded in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union (and that of Yugoslavia in the same time frame). “By the mid-1990s, the Global Survival Network estimated that upwards of 500,000 women were being trafficked from Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union into Western Europe each year.” (Human Trafficking, Human Security and the Balkans.) We now know that the economy of the Soviet states was stretched beyond bankruptcy. The estimated national income of a Serbian, for example, was only $988 USD. The new reality was that in a warn-torn land, with unemployment keeping more than a quarter of the workers from earning a living, the temptation to make a living through crime was insurmountable. For the first time, a measure was pushed through the UN with the funding that made it seem possible to combat the wave of traffickers. Friman writes

“Unlike earlier steps against human trafficking, the United States also supported the Trafficking Protocol through funding for foreign anti-trafficking programs and personnel training, and, more importantly, threats of shame and sanction linked to assessments of the activities of foreign governments as published in the annual TIP Report” ((Human Trafficking, Human Security and the Balkans.)

Unfortunately a great deal of debate has slowed the fight against human trafficking, as there is no firm definition of what it is, and thus, what actions should be taken against it. Another paper from the same year (2007) points out that perhaps a ground-up approach would be more effective.

“Many of these actors respond to human trafficking as if it were a social and criminal phenomenon that can be isolated for moral condemnation and addressed separately from other problems. Such efforts, we argue, are destined to fail, because the connection between trafficking and poverty, unemployment, discrimination, violence in the family, and the demand in countries of destination is undeniable.” (Combating trafficking: international efforts and their ramifications)

With the United Nations, then, tasked with peacekeeping in the area, one might expect the incidence of trafficking to be reduced. Instead, we see between 1999 to 2004, the premises listed as being suspected of forced prostitution local to the peacekeeping forces rise from four, to well over two hundred. While the initial patrons inviting these establishments to believe they could make money and risk the penalties may have been the UN personnel, it is now believed that their patronage is also significantly local.

Sadly, the UN peacekeepers have been implicated worldwide and for many years in atrocities either implicitly, or complicitly. In Africa, in 2008, in the Congo

(http://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2009-10-13/dr-congo-civilian-cost-military-operation-unacceptable), in 2011, in the Ivory Coast (AP, 2011), and again in Congo, in 2012 (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-20422340). The BBC, in investigating the Ivory Coast claims, found many who were willing to come forward about what they had endured at the hands of the purported ‘peacekeepers.’(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7420798.stm)

“A 13-year-old girl, “Elizabeth” described to the BBC how 10 UN peacekeepers gang-raped her in a field near her Ivory Coast home. “They grabbed me and threw me to the ground and they forced themselves on me… I tried to escape but there were 10 of them and I could do nothing,” she said. “I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.” No action has been taken against the soldiers.”

Reports of “Rampant corruption”( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/17/AR2007121701914.html) have been brought forth since the early 1990s against UN peacekeeping missions in Africa, the Balkans, and Cambodia. “In response, in 1994 the United Nations created the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS), but it has a poor record of holding corrupt officials to account.” Stepping forward twenty years, we see again that little has changed. Mark Pyman of Transparency International:

“There is external corruption in the host nation which is “likely to be endemic” and where greater efforts are needed to keep it from becoming embedded, he said, and there is corruption within the peacekeeping force which needs stronger oversight than the U.N. has today.” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/10/09/united-nations-corruption-report/2956565/)

It seems clear that not only is the UN neutered when it comes to real power, it is a corrupting influence on countries where it is supposed to bring peace and stability. Or perhaps it is corrupted by those nations? Whatever else is or is not clear, it is certain that history weighs on this part of the world, and it cannot be ignored in looking at today’s reality. The states and their newly-minted police forces did not spring forth fully-formed, as Athena from the head of Zeus, and they are in need of guidance and support if they are to fully return humanity to countries ravaged by war and reduced to animalistic behavior under the veneer of civilization. What can accomplish this? No less, I would suggest, than solid educations and the freedom to make their own choice, to build their own markets and sell what they can, to bring their nations up out of the pits they have been cast into by the scourge of what came before. Who can give this? Ah, now there is the question. Not, I think, the USA, which is still a bastion but would do well to look within for the signs of that corruption of police and politics that led to the likes of Tito ruling over a nation that only endured until his iron fist was gone before shattering in a bloody mist of lost lives and innocence.

 

There are science fiction stories that I remember more in aggregate than in individual, which start with a place/date thing to avoid having the characters tell you when this takes place.  This is often true if the story involves multiple centuries.  I’m finding myself doing it in this time travel thing I hope to finish today after writing a bit on Through Fire (only 10k words yesterday, but things are beginning to fall in place and the story to be functional.  Apparently it’s a bad idea to write while profoundly depressed and tired from being ill.  Then the story is just blah.  Who knew?  Maybe the people writing grey goo are chronically depressed?  No?)

The device goes something like this “It was the twenty-second century and we were all mourning.” Or “It was May of 1534 and we were all dancing.”

So, it was September and there were terrorists under every bed. It was enough to make one wonder what was Isil and what was over here.

It was September, and it was a time of pleading.  The family of an hostage pleaded for his life.  England pleaded that Scotsmen might accept the proffered near independence, instead of independence. Our “friends” in the Middle East asked for us to help them combat Islamic extremism (possibly the same exact Islamic extremism they funded.  The Middle East is like that.)  Liberia pleaded for help with Ebola. But the only plea that worked as cold hard cash, even if we all know what  happens when you give Dane Geld.

It was September and the Western world was losing faith in its institutions. From health to care nothing worked as advertised. Finances were in disarray. And we couldn’t help but wonder if the elites were as smart as they claimed to be.

It was September and Russian Putin was blustering.  Pushing the limits of what he thought he should be allowed, and trying to terrify the rest of Europe, which one fears might not be very hard.

It was September and the  cry of the SJWs was heard in the land, and this author was sick and tired of her colleagues with Stockholm syndrome.

And she put this post up, and went back to pounding on the keyboard, which is the thing for which she actually gets paid.  Have fun in the comments.

First, I’ll try to have a chapter of Rogue Magic sometime this week.  Please forgive me, I’m still battling Through Fire and can’t get my head away.  Except there will another chapter of To The Dragons in subscribers area sometime this weekend, because the whole thing has downloaded itself in my head.  I think the plan now is after through fire take a couple of weeks and finish the d*mn thing, and see if Toni wants it, and if not bring out on my own.

Yeah, I should be writing The Haunted Air (sequel between WF and RM) and finishing my books for Baen.  Now you know why the muses used to be thought to drive people mad.  Getting the idiot in the Greek robes to get the needs of business is beyond me.  If someone has an idea, let me know.  For now, I’m keeping To The Dragons quiet by throwing bits of chapter at it, so it will let me work on what I’m supposed to.

Part of the reason almost nothing happened on Through Fire this week is that I got very sick.  The problem is between my being allergic to something in this neighborhood (reminds me of when we lived on the west side and the neighbor’s yard was full of ragweed.  Every time they mowed, Dan’s face swelled up.  Took us forever to figure the link.) I live in a baseline of “somewhat stopped up” and this illness was gradual, so I was just getting mad at myself for wanting to sleep all the time, and not getting anything done.  Until I realized a) I was feverish b) friends scattered throughout the state had the same symptoms.  I’ve been using the inhaler, for the first time in months, but I AM feeling better.

I’m now almost well, though this is why I slept 12 hours last night.  I’m now going to get more tea and actually sit down to work.

Because stuff must be written.

And yes, there’s other stuff going on, which I’ll report later, maybe.  It’s not bad and it’s a personal thing.  (And no, I’m not knocked up, though if any of you wants to pray for a miracle similar to oh, the parting of the sea, go for it.) We shall see.  We’re starting a new venture and there’s plans crackling about.  Depending on how it goes you’ll hear about it later.

Now, having saved the worst for last, Cyn Bagley’s husband passed away from cancer.  If you’re praying people, please keep her in your prayers, as her health is far from good, and she needs strength through this time.  She’ll be moving to be near family and away from the net for a few weeks.  I told her to let us know if she needs anything, and that we’ll be here when she comes back, because she’s family.

And all of you, go and hug your loved ones right now.

 

 

As I’ve admitted here, I’ve been reading an awful lot about psychopaths and mass murderers. At least all of it I can get on the KULL program. (It’s not that I don’t need to read the other kind, particularly the way investigators get clues, but it’s not urgent, and for now this is just something to read “while working.”)

Anyway, one pattern stands out whenever the victims are transients or the downtrodden, like the women Jack the Ripper killed, there’s always… How to put this delicately?

I’m not saying the women deserved to die. Of course, they didn’t. Most of them were, apparently, fairly inoffensive.

But it still strikes me how weird it is that even in those days, under much worse circumstances for society as a whole, women and men who ended up in the East End (or its equivalent. I’ve read other historical stuff) were alcoholics or otherwise had behavior-control issues. Now, some of the alcoholism, at least, might have been attempts at self-medicating. And some of the behavior issues were almost certainly due to undiagnosed mental illness.

It was, in fact, the same mix we find with our own homeless/marginalized people. They might have had bad luck, and they might have been very mistreated. But in the end, almost always, it’s their own personal behavior that got them where they were.

Perhaps because I’ve been mainlining these books, while working, I really saw it when I hit the sentence in today’s book about how this poor woman, like all Jack the Ripper’s victims was an alcoholic who had left her husband and how it was almost like this place was a pocket for society’s rejected women.

Immediately, I wanted to say “Society’s rejected women. My. How posh that sounds.”

Look, I’m sore some SJW or other has written a dissertation on how what brought women to that extremity was the Victorian repression of women’s sexuality or what have you. And to an extent they were right, in the sense that a woman who transgressed and was discovered couldn’t hold up her head in that community again. (At least for a while. Having grown up in the same type of environment, I know that society had a convenient case of amnesia if the incident wasn’t repeated.)

What modern authors/academics tend to underestimate is how comparatively big and opaque that world was. Move away from that area; change your name (which all of these women seemed to do just like our transients seem to have five or six aliases) and you can start afresh with no issue.

Yeah, if your desire is to have sex with lots of guys indiscriminately with no discretion and no consequences, you might have serious trouble, but at that time and in that place, I don’t think many women would want that. Look, put way your academic hat for a moment and think about this as a woman of the time: think of the hygiene, the conditions, the state of medicine where any infection could be fatal, and, unless you were sterile, the almost inevitable pregnancy. (For the morons who believe in the “herbs” you could take that acted just like the pill. That only works in fantasy novels. There were herbs you could take (and also stuff like lead.) but they weren’t contraceptives, they were abortaficients, and carried considerable risk, particularly over time.)

Maybe it’s being me, and judging on the hygiene and the medicine and the possible pregnancy, but let me say I’d be inclined, given the consequences that any woman still hot to trot with any and all strange men in those circumstances had to have something very wrong with her head.

Not saying it didn’t happen. Just saying what drove women there was more than “society.” It was either mental illness or, absent that, their own actions and decisions.

In the case of at least three of the victims of the Ripper, they were thrown out by their families for not giving up the bottle. In one case, she seems to have separated from her common law husband, and while it’s not clear whether she drunk or not, (she was said to be drunk the night she died, but there’s evidence she was simply very ill) she grifted from her daughter so much that her daughter had moved without leaving an address.

Now, once these women were addicted, could they have broken the habit like that? Maybe not. Particularly with the nasty rotgut stuff of the time, the only “cures” known were cases of sudden religious conversion. (Though those proved it could happen, given sufficient fervor.)

Now Victorian society did indeed set standards in a much harsher way. You were either a good woman or not. But in practical reality things got fudged, as they always do, among humans.

If you want to read a completely unlikely sexual history, read the free sample (if it’s on kindle) of Our Bones Are Scattered. I can’t remember the woman’s name (great book, btw) who appears in the book, and my copy is boxed, but there was a woman, wife of a military man, who had been married something like three times and shacked up in between and while her husband’s very proper (and noble) family didn’t like her, she was still a lady and certainly not “thrown away by society.” (And she didn’t start off a lady.) The poor creatures in East end were the other extreme.

How much of that was luck? How much behavior?

I’m going to risk saying that a lot of them probably had rotten luck, but that without their choices and behavior aggravating it, they wouldn’t have ended up where they were. They might be lower class and near to starving, but not in the East End, and not selling it for a living.

Look, for drunkenness to be a problem in the lower classes of the time, it had to be a really big thing. Most people drank more than we do, and if the lower classes of that time and place were like the lower classes of the sixties/seventies in the village, weekend drunken brawls and entire families drunk off their behinds weren’t considered abnormal. Abnormal was drinking so much you couldn’t hold it together during work/child rearing hours. I’d think from the histories it was much like that.

What kind of mother hounds a daughter (who from the depositions after, did love her) so much the daughter moves to avoid being bled dry of money?

Beyond the alcohol the other thing was how many of these women had had the price of lodging earlier in the day but either spent it or somehow did away with it.

Again, they didn’t deserve to die for this. I’m not blaming them for the monstrous fate visited on them. I’m not even exactly blaming them for ending up in the East End.

It was a different time, options for men and women were not all that great; there would be a lot of medicating for undiagnosed mental or physical health problems.

I’m not saying it was totally their fault. I’m just saying it’s time to do away with phrases like “Victims of society” and “Thrown away by society.”

In any society some people will thrive, some will fail and most people will be somewhere in between. Often, at least in the west the ones that fail share mental problems, addictions, or a lack of ability to plan.

Saying “poor creature was driven to this by her alcoholism and lack of ability to plan” is one thing. Saying “Society threw her away” casts blame upon the hundreds of thousands of people who never did anything against her; who would have helped if they could; and who did the best they could in an era more harsh than we can imagine.

It is a facile judgment for us to pass, and it condemns all those people in the past who weren’t like us.

Perhaps it would be as well to remember that our own, therapeutic, accommodating age will pass, and after us will come an age that might be more or less accommodating. What are the chances the disastrous ends of people of our time will be referred to as “the victims society enabled to self-destruct?” Believe me it’s not impossible. And it’s not impossible that what we do to help the less unfortunate might sometimes hurt them.

This self-satisfied attitude that we now have all the answers and the harsh judgment passed on those who came before would be less reprehensible if our results were better.

As is, let’s admit that some individuals will always be problems in society. That is a condition of their being individual. They’re not widgets that society maliciously – or generously – casts away or keeps. They’re people who make their own decisions for good or ill. Society can lend them a hand, but ultimately society can’t make them be other than what they are.

The right to do stupid things, insane things, and things that might hurt us is ULTIMATELY the most basic freedom we can have.  You take away that right, and you’ve given someone the right to decide what’s good for you.  It always starts like that, with laws preventing you to get drunk off your *ss, say, or laws (social security) dictating you must allow your betters to save for you.  Next thing you know they’re controlling your salt intake according to outmoded theories and poking their nose into your family life.

If you’re a “victim of society” then the people who are heroic or achieve extraordinarily become “privileged” as though what they do has nothing to do with the results, as though they’re widgets totally dependent on circumstances.

Societies that fully embrace this don’t end well.

These women met horrible, dehumanizing deaths. And yes, at least some of the decisions that threw them in the path of the Ripper were their own.

They were humans. They had the power of decision, including bad decisions.

Let’s accord them that dignity.

 

This is not a literary criticism post, but I need to go through it to get where I’m going. Bear with me.

So, I have a mild fever. I have no clue what the heck this is, but my entire family has been passing something back and forth. I thought it was allergies, but I have the cottony-mind of fever. And I get tired very often. I’m trying to finish Through Fire, so of course, this follows.

Yeah, I need to get out of this house. It’s too big to dust every day, and I’m allergic to household dust. Which let me tell you, is a curse for a working writer to be.

Anyway – while on that – because I’m finishing Through Fire I can’t risk being captured by anything like a novel. I read a novel on Sunday and it kept calling me back when I went back to writing. So—

I’ve been reading a lot of historical stuff that’s free on the kindle KULL. Right now I’m in the middle of a biography of Edward III which is most hilarious for lecturing us on the judgmental ways of past historians, while, of course, being judgmental.

Though I’ll say despite the inartistic expressions and the idea that the historians whose perspective we really need to counter are those of the Victorian age (ah! I should check when it was written!) he has some points, and calls at least theoretically for understanding the person in his time and according to the prejudices of his time.

One of the things he goes on about is how the Victorians criticized Edward III for his unnecessary wars, but viewed in his time, status and power were necessary.

I can see this being true under the heading of being “the biggest fish around that you don’t dare attack.” When most kingdoms were small enough you couldn’t swing a cat without a passport, and when “nationhood” was tied to personal allegiance and honor of the king I think he has a point.

Another point – and I want to emphasize right here, because I KNOW some of you are medieval historians – that I know next to nothing about Edward III, which is why I picked up this book to graze while cooking or waiting for something in between fits of writing. I mean I know where he fits in, and a wiki version of his reign, but that’s it that occurred to me is if the endless small wars of the middle ages were part of acquiring enough surplus to be able to create surplus. What I mean is, back then economies were stuck in what I call “the newlyweds dilemma” – if they could get just a little extra, they could use it to get to a state where they produce extra.

So, in a way, the endless petty kingship wars could have been the precursor to the industrial revolution. By which I don’t mean they were needed to achieve the industrial revolution but that they led to it.

That whole idea of an arrow of history and of something having to had happened so that we could be where we are (in the sense that it was somehow directed this way, even though people at the time couldn’t have known where it led) is one of the things that the historian is yelling about in this book.

I’ve also read a biography of Leopold, the hemophiliac son of Queen Victoria, and I read a lot of stuff about serial killers. It started with the Black Dahlia and it went from there.

Sidenote – I have clue zero what the serial killer reading is about, though since I’m going to write the serialized story from the creation of the Mules to the departure of the Je Reviens, and one of the three voices I’ll use is Thena’s father, I suppose it helps.

The thing that has been hitting me through all of this – ALL OF IT – from medieval history to the Victorians to stuff from the fifties and sixties that are almost contemporary is … how different life was.

And no, I’m not going to talk about the great decay of morals (if you read about the underbelly of Victorian England or even Hollywood in the forties, you’ll realize we haven’t so much decayed as stopped holding up an ideal for fear of being hypocrites. I say we hold up an ideal, though it might be slightly modified and stop longing for the lives of the underclass, and things will be solved there.) I’m going to talk about simple, basic stuff.

Stuff like, how much cloth cost, leading to someone taking home a piece of fabric from one of the gruesome Jack the Ripper murders, for his wife, a seamstress. Think about it. At the time it wasn’t considered evidence. (They couldn’t do fiber evidence, they didn’t even have fingerprints.) And a piece of cloth, particularly a pretty one, was much too valuable to be left to rot just because some victim’s blood had spattered on it. (The cop’s wife’s idea was that it would be worth more as a curiosity so she saved it, but that’s something else.)

Another thing was not just how bizarrely painful, strange and probably counterproductive many of the “cures” for hemophilia were, as recently as the late nineteenth century. And what so many of Queen Victoria’s family ultimately died of, from her husband’s typhoid, to the type of diseases people in the village where I grew up only died of if they were very poor. Peritonitis. Whooping cough. Etc.

Also, when Leopold tried to have his residence (when he got married) improved to have running water, he was told it was too expensive.

What I’m trying to get at here is the following: in the last three hundred years or so, since the idea that “individuals” are merely cogs belonging to the family/tribe/sovereign has been fought back – not defeated, mind, but fought back – we’ve made such rapid progress that the past is not only another country, it might as well be another planet. Even in the forties, what was considered expensive and difficult are things we don’t even think about now – travel, books, etc.

Since we got rid of our overlords, who ruled “kindly” and from their “best judgment” and started allowing people of any birth condition and any ability to do the best they could (always realizing that of course there is more than intellectual prowess to how well one does) everyone has got much, much richer.

And those idiots who try to view the Middle Ages as a communist paradise are the same as the idiots who claim that people lived roughly the same time (not even in the sixties in the village. Yes, you had some very long lived people. That’s not the same as having similar life spans, and certainly not with the same degree of health) and the people who just want us to give it one more try and attempt to make us equal “serfs” (ah, proletarians, that’s what they call it now) under a wise “lord” (though it has many names from secretary to president.)

Yes, there were qualities that came with how harsh and brutal their life was: qualities of endurance and stoicism which we don’t have to have, and therefore don’t. Some of this can be remedied through education – and no, I’m not talking state’s education. I’m afraid for this you’ll have to roll your own.

But the qualities, the wisdom brought on by living lives of misery are not enough to justify bringing about equal misery for all. No, being poor doesn’t make you closer to nature, or happier, or more communal. Mostly it makes you hungry, desperate and ill.

Our environmentalists and airy dreamers can dream they’re better than their ancestors and those less fortunate people around them, precisely because they’re unimaginably richer and have never had their nose rubbed in reality. They can dream that third world countries are miraculous places because they never tried living there as natives.

Breaking out of the rule of the “strong lord” and considering that everyone not even how wretched has a value was a very unnatural thing for us monkeys – social animals with a hierarchy – to do.

Which is why nature keeps trying to drag us back and we – clever monkeys – keep coming up with new names and more interesting justifications for “rule by the chap who can decide life or death”: socialism, communism, fascism, fairness, social justice.

Then there are their enablers.  Those who think if they just let everything collapse a perfect “libertarian” state will emerge, instead of the same old thing we’re predisposed to by nature: rule by the one who can kill the most people.

Mother nature is a b*tch. She’s in everything and in us too.

But if we want to keep what we have an not go back to when running water was unimaginable luxury, we’ll tell her to call later.

Or give her a wrong number.

Sometimes the way ahead is to go ahead. Sometimes the way to deal with “unfairness” is to create even more wealth that people can howl is “unfair.”

And sometimes we have to tell would-be kings to rule themselves.