Will things get better, or worse?

As a science fiction author, I spend a lot of time imagining what the future will be like. Though, I suspect the implied causality of that sentence is flipped. Because I spend a lot of time imagining what the future will be like, I became a science fiction author, is perhaps more accurate.

Most SF visions of the future fall into two categories: Utopias and dystopias. The world either gets much, much better or much, much worse. Utopias aren't lacking in conflict, nor are dystopias lacking in their rewards. The Star Trek series is essentially utopian. People have come together and worked out their differences more or less peacefully and banded together on a shared goal of intergalactic exploration. Technology has gotten cleaner and better. There doesn't seem to be a lot of poverty. The Star Wars series tilts toward dystopia... there's an evil empire that goes around blowing up planets that challenge its authority. There does still seem to be a lot of poverty, and more than a little racism, or at least speci-ism, with comments like, "I'd sooner kiss a wookie!" And, apparently, it's still possible to be sold into slavery on the black market. Yet, even against this backdrop, the people don't seem to be miserable. There's still music in the bars. People get together and watch pod-racing. They master they world they live in and endure, even thrive.

So which direction are we trending? By "we," I mean all of humanity. Is the world getting better? Or are we racing toward misery?

Trends that hint at a brighter future:

1. The growth of knowledge. This is a powerful one. As a species, we are simply better informed today than at any point in history. We've figured out the basic fundamentals of biology, chemistry, and physics. We know more about fighting diseases than ever. We know more about growing crops. We know how to purify drinking water, and move goods and services and people around the planet, and we have all these wonderful information technologies that let us move knowledge around the planet in seconds. Knowledge is a powerful tool for fighting human misery. It seems almost fated that, as more and more people learn more and more things, life will get better.

2. The spread of innovation. This is an outgrowth of the first one. In the last two centuries, innovation and invention flowed from a few hotspots--America and northern Europe. For whatever reason, all the life changing technologies like electricity, vaccines, telephones, computers, automobiles, planes, etc. were coming from a fairly limitted geographical area. They say that neccessity is the mother of invention. I suspect, however, that the true mothers of invention are education, wealth, property rights, and good patent and copyright laws. A relatively small portion of the world's population enjoyed these things over the last two centuries. Toward the end of the twentieth century, we began to see innovation spread to places like Japan and South Korea, as they took things like cars and stereos and television and began to find ways of making them better. Now, we're on the threshhold of truly world-wide innovation. Wealth and education are spreading to places like India, China, and Brazil. American's are going to keep buying oil to run our cars as it rolls up to 200 dollars a barrel. We're invested too heavily in the infrastructure of oil. But, countries like Brazil are already shifting their cars to a biofuel economy. By developing later, it's easier to move to better technologies without being tied to older ones. It similar to places like India leapfrogging over building a network of landline phones and just moving directly to cell phones. I was listening to an NPR report about how advanced cell phones are in places like India and South Korea when compared to American cell phones. They have better networks and more features because they aren't laying the new technology onto an network build decades before.

The point is, we aren't going to depend on a small handful of countries for innovation any more. We're going to see it becoming global.

3. The decline of war. War certainly hasn't gone away. Many places are still wracked with internal conflicts and civil wars. But, it seems like the full-blown invasions where one country decides its going to roll into and take another country are on the decline. Invading armies were commonplace throughout the twentieth century. Japan invaded China and Korea. Germany invaded France and Poland. Russia grabbed the Eastern Bloc and Afganistan. Iraq grabbed Kuwait. And then... it stopped. Many countries are still occupied by their old invaders, but the wholesale scramble of countries grabbing adjacent territories seems to have slowed to a trickle. The one big exception, of course, is America's "liberation" of Iraq. That went so well, however, that it may truly be the last true American war. The political costs have been so high that it's difficult to imagine a president in the next half century launching a similar adventure. And, the economic costs of this and other things are on the verge of clipping America's wings. We won't be able to invade other countries because we won't be able to afford it. And, I think this is going to be the true end of full blown war. At some point in the last few decades, it simply stopped making economic sense. Invading neighbors has been politically and economically ruinous for the invaders time and time again.

Trends that point toward misery:

1. The embrace of ignorance. Here's a curious trend: As knowledge has grown, and technology gotten more complex, it feels like the world has become increasingly dumber. There are a few people who understand their cars, their phones, or even their televisions. They can operate them, but they can't really understand them. There is also a fall off in basic knowledge. American's are trained universally how to read and write, and the fundamentals of math. Most people have basic training in science, history, civics, and economics. When I look at the things kids are learning in thier text books these days, I feel like they are certainly being exposed to a vigorous and wide-ranging base of knowledge. Yet, it seems like by the time these kids reach adulthood, all this knowledge evaporates. They could read, but they don't, and the ability to communicate by writing and reading withers. They could do math, but they don't, and lose the ability to figure out a 15% tip, or figure out the square footage of a room. On my day job, I do a lot of things that require some basic math, and I find that people have just lost the ability to understand numbers any more.

I sometimes wonder if television, computers, and calculators haven't somehow crippled us intellectually. True story: I spoke to a woman on the phone a few days ago who couldn't find our store. She was following a GPS device and our address wasn't coming up when she programmed it in. So, I tried giving her directions. My work is really simple to get to: It's right off the interstate. If you can find the interstate, and read exit numbers, you can find us. But, she sounded almost panicky as I tried to give her the very simple directions. She kept getting stressed that her GPS didn't show a shopping center off the exit I gave her. It was as if, if her GPS didn't believe we were there, then she couldn't believe we were there.

I have no hard data. I'm not even sure how you would test something like this. But, it feels like people are becoming less knowledgable as knowledge technology improves. Once we have machines to do our thinking for us, we seem to embrace ignorance. The main purpose of the mind ceases to be the pursuit of knowledge and becomes instead the constant quest for distraction and entertainment.

This seems dangerous in the long term for two reasons: First, people no longer seem able to judge the pronouncements of their political leaders. We start to base our decisions on who looks better on television and who is funnier in a debate rather than on who is actually better informed. Once the population loses the ability to judge our politicians, it seems we are fated to drift toward a government that more closely resembles the Star Wars dystopia than the Star Trek utopia. Secondly, the world is so interconnected that I worry that the stupid decisions of a few could wind up dragging us all down. The mortgage crisis is a good example. People were taking out loans they didn't understand. Now, everyone's home value is likely to decline, and responsible homeowners with good credit such as myself will wind up paying more for our next mortgage because we'll be paying for the losses of people who made foolish, ill-informed choices.

2. The rise of complexity. As technology spreads, and innovation spreads, it's going to become increasingly difficult to keep track of everything. There was a time when the study of radioactivity was relatively unregulated. I have comic books from the early 1940s where kids could order radiactive elements, including uranium, as part of a home laboratory. Fortunately, we figured out in a reasonably short period of time that this stuff was risky and passed regulations that kept us from poisoning ourselves with these dangerous substances. A similar response was called for with DDT and flourocarbons. We've been able to identify the dangers we are creating with our technological advances and nip the more harmful ones before the damage becomes permanent. But, this was when the world was much smaller. It wasn't that hard to band together to regulate DDT and flourocarbons. The manufacture was controlled by countries based in North America and Europe, places where representative governments have incentives not to kill off their populations. But, the next environmental threat to arise from our own cleverness could spread much more rapidly than these previous technologies, and be manufactured in more locations, and in countries with more authoritarian governments. Here's an completely imaginary scenario: Some bioengineered virus thats supposed to attack some obscure wheat fungus could be invented in South Korea, be in use worldwide five years later, and two years after that we start hearing reports about the world wide decline in earthworms. We take five years to argue about whether the bioengineered virus is the cause, but even when the consensus in most of the world shifts to thinking it is, political action to ban it is nearly impossible because a few non-democratic regimes insist it's safe. Ten years later, 90% of the world's worms are gone and we're seeing famine of Biblical proportions.

This is, of course, a highly unlikely scenario in its specific details. But, the broad categories I think are plausible: An innovation with an unsuspected consequence spreads rapidly with catastrophic results, and political action to fight the threat is nearly impossible because the knowledge has spread to places without the proper checks and balances of the American and European systems. Here, companies might halt the manufacture of a dangerous substance even without waiting for government regulation because they fear the effects of lawsuits. (Though, there are certainly many products, such as tobacco, where this hasn't proven true.) And, due to patent laws, if the company that invented the technology shuts it down, it shuts down. But, in places like China where patent law is almost non-existant, and lawsuits against a harmful manufacturer unlikely, what are the checks and balances that will prevent irreparable environmental harm?

In my more optimistic moods, I think that the good forces of knowledge and innovation will always stay a few steps ahead of the risky forces of ignorance and complexity. Problems will arise, some created by our own cleverness, and we'll solve them, and move on to the next problem. It will be a never ending cycle of innovation that leads us to an ever more utopian future. But, the pessimist in me can't help but think that, while the good forces must maintain constant vigilance to show true improvement, the darker forces only need one victory to knock everything down. We need only slip up once on an global environmental threat to create world-wide famine and misery. The laws of unintended consequence are going to forever result in people of good intentions unleashing threats to the health, wealth, and peace of their fellow men.

If you want the utopia, don't sit back and assume others are going to build it. Stay educated, stay engaged, and stay vigilant. If enough of us do this, perhaps we'll have a long, happy run on this planet.

Under Construction

Whateverville is no more! For a long time, I've been worried that my blog title was too close to the title of science fiction author John Scalzi's much more popular blog "Whatever." I was unaware of his blog when I named my blog "Whateverville," and, since he probably gets 1000 hits for every 1 I get, I didn't want people to think I was trying to leach off his glory.

There is already at least one blog with the title "Jawbone of an Ass," but it updates only once every few months, so I doubt I'll be accused of trying to steal his readers.

Why "Jawbone of an Ass?" First, I like the image of Samson standing in the middle of 1000 philistines, smiting them with a donkey-bone. Occasionally on this blog, I rail against forces that outnumber me by an insane ratio. I write about atheism in the midst of a nation that thinks of itself as Christian. I write Liberterian manifestos in a nation where the Libertarian party routinely draws under 1% of the popular vote. I feel like the fabled lone voice crying in the wilderness. And yet... I still believe in the power of words. Despite much evidence to the contrary, I still hold out hope that words can change the world for the better. I may be surrounded by Philistines, but I intend to keep swinging.

Second, well, I can be something of an ass, and I like to use my jawbone. I don't go out of my way to be polite. I may occasionally use derogatory terms like "idiot," "inbred," and "Republican."

I'll be making several changes to this blog and soon to be announced companion blogs over the coming weeks. There's a lot of stuff I need to update. For the rest of the month, consider this site under construction.

Laura and the flowers

Last night I bought flowers. Today I'll drive out to the grave and leave them, in memory of the second anniversary of Laura's passing.

I bought tulips. They're red, but the edges of the blossom are wrinkled a bit and streaked with orange and yellow. None of the petals are perfect. Some are drooping out a bit too far, others are curled up a bit too tightly, as if they are shying away from thier breathren. One of the flowers has edges that have formed little spikey outgrowths. In size and shape, these spikey bits resemble a cat's claw, but yellow, with a red core. This one flower hasn't fully bloomed... it's still bound up tightly, more secretive than its vase-mates.

Laura wasn't perfect. She was assymetrical, wrinkled, and scarred. Life had left her with creases and dents, and more than a few spikey edges.

And I, I loved every square inch of her, from the tip of her sometimes bald head down to the bottoms of her toes. She was like a complex book that rewards your continued study, always revealing some new subtlety, some new hidden story. I cherished reading between her lines.

You'll know its love when the wrinkles become the reason. You'll know it's love when you trace the scars with your fingertips and remember the stories. You'll know it's love when you serenely fall into the flaws, and all the bumps and scuffs and ragged edges are more beautiful than a field of flowers.

Atom-huggers

Okay, in my last post I came out as a global warming skeptic. However, here's some good news for those of you who worry about our carbon emissions: we have a safe alternative that produces no greenhouse gasses.

I've been googling this evening trying to find the total percentage of American carbon dioxide output that comes from coal. Unfortunately, I'm finding wildly varied numbers--anything from 35% to 85%. I can't believe the internet is giving me fuzzy information!

Whatever the actual figures are, I can tell you this: your house has a bigger carbon footprint than your car. We think of electricity as "clean" energy. If you have an electric furnace and an electric water heater, stove, etc., you might feel pretty smug about the fact that your house has no chimney. In fact, though, most electricity in America is generated by burning coal, and the emissions from that coal equal far more carbon than is being put out by all the automobiles in the US. Again, I keep finding different numbers--as low as 9%, as high as 25%.

We can't all stop driving in the next decade. If we switch to electric cars that are recharged at home, we'll be pushing the pollution from a tailpipe to a smokestack, but if we're still burning coal, it does little in the long run to reduce CO2. And, even if we perfect the electric car, we aren't going to perfect an electric airplane anytime soon, and all those big trucks on the highway are still going to be rolling on diesel. Electric cars might make acceptable short range commuter vehicles, but we are a long ways away from having a battery that would propel an 18 wheeler five hundred miles on a charge.

Fortunately, oil has jumped to $120 a barrel and could go higher. (Fortunately if you believe in global warming, that is.) This means that price alone is going to change people's driving habits. And, I predict that as $4 gasoline sets in, you're going to see more and more cars in production that are real fuel sippers. The Honda Insight hybrid gets almost 70mpg. I predict we'll see a 100mpg commuter car hit the market within the next 5 years. Maybe that's overly optimistic, but right now you can count all your 50mpg choices on the fingers of one hand. Give it five years, and you'll need both hands and some of your toes, too.

So, higher fuel costs will eventually cut down carbon emissions from vehicles. But, as noted, this is, maybe, 25% of the problem. The big target has to be those coal powered plants that are currently the backbone of american electricity, and, thus, the backbone of our economy and our way of life.

The technology exists to shut down the last coal fueled powerplant within the next twenty years. We just need to get over our irrational fear of nuclear power plants.

A few posts back, I talked about American's inability to judge relative dangers. Nuclear power is one of the victims of irrational fears. Let me be blunt: Nuclear power isn't safe. People can die working in nuclear power plants. The nearby cities can be endangered by nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants produce dangerous wastes. However: Every one of these statements is equally true for our present coal-based energy generation. Far, far, far more people have died mining coal than have ever died from nuclear power. US department of labor statistics show about 50 people die a year in mining accidents. Many more people die each year from a disease known as "black lung." Burning coal produces polution that some people estimates contributes to 10,000 cancer deaths per year, though I'm skeptical of such a round number. Still, it's inarguable that coal based power plants push a lot of bad things into our atmosphere... and, if you think that carbon dioxide is one of those bad things, then the environmental cost of coal is almost immeasurable compared with the environmental cost of nuclear. Coal also has pollution effects beyond just burning it... mining it currently strips away whole mountains and is a major source of ground water pollution.

The number of deaths attributed to nuclear power plant failures in the US is pretty low. The worst nuclear accident ever in America, Three Mile Island, killed exactly zero people. Yes, there is risk with this. If we converted to a completely nuclear electric economy, and had 1000 nuclear plants online instead of 100, we'd be increasing the risk of eventual catastrophic failure. But, again, you have to weigh this against the known risks and dangers of coal. Currently, if you compare the pollution and risk footprints of the 100 nuclear plants in the US against the pollution and risk footprints of 100 coal plants generating a similar amount of power, I believe you'd find that nuclear is the most responsible choice we can make for the environment.

As for waste, yes, nuclear waste has special challenges. There is a NIMBY response to its disposal. But, if you are a believer in man-made global warming, then you have to be more afraid of coal than nuclear. Nuclear power isn't going to make the oceans rise 30 feet. Carbon... maybe. I doubt it. But everything is a trade off of risks.

By the way, for proponents of wind and solar: Yes. Go for it. If you live in Arizona, solar may well be a better option than nuclear. If you live near an ocean or someplace that generates a lot of wind, put up the windmills. A windmill in my immediate vicinity would be mostly decoration... there's just not that much wind here. Solar panels are fine. We can cover the roofs of our nuclear power plants with them, but the technology isn't there today to have it completely replace coal. Nuclear power is ready. It's been ready for decades. It can save the world from coal, if we just have the good sense to use it.

Environmentalists are frequently called tree-huggers. Count me in the ranks of the atom huggers. I believe in power of the atom, by the atom, for the atom (at least when those atoms are arranged into the shape of me).

What would it take to make me change my mind?

I was at Ravencon in Richmond, Va on Friday and Saturday. It's a great con. Very well organized, good attendance, and I thought the panels had interesting topics. There were plenty of actual science panels to go with the writing panels and gaming panels, etc. As a science fiction writer, and a science geek in general, I like being in the company of people who know what they are talking about.

On Friday, I moderated a panel on Global Warming. I went into the panel well prepared to make my argument that the case for man-made global warming isn't the slam-dunk, no further arguement needed conclusion presented by folks like Al Gore. I anticipated being a lone voice of dissent on the panel, so I tried to gather as much data as possible before going into the room. Instead, out of about 30 folks in the room, it turned out that fewer than five thought that man-made global warming was a reality.

I was actually somewhat bothered by this. Anytime I find myself on the side of a majority opinion, an instinct kicks in that makes me start questioning my own beliefs. And, beliefs is the operative word here.

One of the panelists who doubted global warming kept referring to scientists she knew who thought that man-made global warming was BS, so, ergo, it was BS. But, while I like talking to experts, I dislike relying on faith in experts as a foundation for my beliefs. To me, this is more faith than reason. Plus, it leads to the standard media "news" treatment of dueling experts. "My authorities are better than your authorities" begins to pass as reasoned debate. People no longer listen to evidence--they listen to "leaders," and this strikes me as a risky way to run a world.

I'm human. I have limited time and limited resources with which to judge the world. On a lot of important issues, it really isn't reason that guides me, but gut. I suspect the same is true of most people, and I don't find this a particularly bad human trait, as long as people retain the ability to listen to reason when they hear it, and follow reason instead of thier guts if needed. Over the years, I've found that I keep asking myself one simple question about my beliefs. As long as I know the answer to it, I feel that my beliefs are reasonably ones for me to hold; I'm not just being dogmatic to believe in evolution, or libertarianism, or whatever.

That question is: What evidence would convince me that I'm wrong?

As long as you are open to evidence that your beliefs are wrong, then you know you've still got a sliver of reason guiding your guts.

So, if you believe in God, what evidence would it take for you to believe that you are wrong?

If you don't believe in God, what evidence would you need to see to doubt that you were right?

If you believe in global warming, what evidence would make you think that the theory didn't have merit?

If you don't believe in global warming, what would it take to convince you that it's real?

Here are a few of my core beliefs. Here's what evidence I could encounter that would make me pretty sure I'd been wrong:

1. Atheism. This is simple: If I were to witness the rapture, I'd just sigh and say, "Well, I called that one wrong."

2. Evolution. This is also pretty easy: If we were to discover, clearly, repeatedly and predictably, human fossils through all geologic strata, then I think there's be a good case that humans were seperate creations from the rest of the world's biology.

3. Global Warming. This is a tough one, alas. I don't think you could gather enough data over a human lifespan to genuinely document a cause and effect relationship between the current warming trends and human emissions. You would need centuries of hard data; right now, the numbers before the last few decades are somewhat muddy. We're documenting changes of tenths of a degree. Today, we have thousands, if not millions, off hard data points from all over the globe, measured with digital instruments that are accurate and calibrated against all the other instruments. Unfortunately, we are comparing our increasingly precise numbers against data that was gathered for much of the last century by somebody looking out a window at a red-line on a thermometer and writing down the number it showed.

Still, I can think of one thing that could persuade me: As we get better data from Mars, if we were to document a multi-decade cooling trend there, or even temperature stability, while at the same time documenting a warming trend here on earth, then you could make the case that the warming isn't due to natural flucuations in the sun. Right now, though, Mars is showing a warming trend as earth is showing a warming trend. Of course, again, the data for Mars for more than a few decades isn't great data. Still, if I must form an opinion on this in my life time, then that seems like a good starting point. If Mars cools or remains stable between now and 2020, and earth warms over the same time span, then I think I'd swing over to believing in global warming.

Anti-Libertarian Propaganda???

I recently read a column on Snope.com where the "real" libertarian agenda was published. I did some googling, and as near as I can tell, it started as a blog post at Caleb's Column. You can read the original post here.

A few highlights of the evil libertarian agenda:

1. Replace public schools, which are required to be somewhat religiously and politically neutral, with right-wing Christian fundamentalist academies which indoctrinate students with ultra-right ideology, and are run to make profits.

5. Remove all social programs which aid the poor, including Social Security, Medicare, Workplace Health and Safety, Unemployment Insurance, Drug Treatment Programs, Student Loans, and the Department of Labor.

12. Rewrite history to make Communism worse than Fascism.

16. Rewrite history to make Senator Joe Mccarthy into a great American hero.

17. Remove all public knowledge that Socialism and Communism ever had a mass following in the United States. “Who controls the present, controls of the past.”

I must confess, as a person who has vote with the Libertarian party for the last 20 years, and as a hard-core atheist, I was somewhat shocked to discover I'd been working all these years to push kids into right-wing, Christian Fundamentalist schools. That wasn't in my indocrination kit at all! Well, I'm tearing up my member card right now, boy, I tell you what.

Or, maybe not.

My first reaction was to argue with this article post by post. Some of these agenda items actually sound like good ideas to me though. I would love to see cuts in social security and medicaire... those are a big part of the reason we are currently a debtor nation to the tune of 10 trillion dollars. If fairness, I want to cut defense spending as well, and whatever trivial percentage of our budget is currently being spent on the War on Drugs, or in trying to catch governors spending their own dough on prostitutes. Other items in the post seem strange... I'm not sure one needs to rewrite history to make communism worse than fascism. On sheer bodycount, the commies win. But, "worse" is such a strange qualifier here. It's like saying that lung cancer is worse than stomach cancer. Can't we just agree to lump it into the list of things that suck, and move on? It's not like any libertarian I know thinks that fascism was the way to go.

The last two items I listed because they seem so contradictory. If libertarians are engaged in an effort to puff up Joe McCartney (???), then wouldn't we want to promote that he was right, and that we were absolutely overrun with internal commies, since this was his big claim to fame? And, of course there were once big communist and socialist movements... most libertarians will tell you they still are, they just relabeled themselves as democrats and republicans.

But, the most mysterious thing about the column to me is, really, why bother to slander libertarians? There is no chance in the world we're going to take over congress or the presidency any time soon. You don't need to misrepresent our ideas to have people reject us... people reject our actual ideas without much prodding, thank you very much. And, since he's framing this as a libertarian/communist dichotomy, I would point out that libertarians have never really held power anywhere in the world, while commies have controlled about 1/3 of the world's population. It just seems like a very strange thing to view libertarians as a threat to the great historical march of Marxism.

I might also do some yardwork...

Pale morning clouds mute the lighting
on a fresh Saturday fit for writing.
I'll labor all day,
just typing away,
on scenes where my dragons are fighting.

Debate Debates

I didn't watch the debate between Obama and Clinton the other night, but I've heard Obama whining about the "gotcha" nature of the questions. I've got two gut reactions to this.

First, Obama has forfeited all right to complain about a tough press, in my opinion. Obama has been treated for the most part as if he's the second coming of Jack Kennedy and Ronald Reagan combined, the most talented politician to have emerged in America since the founding fathers. He's been running on fluff, talking about hope, working together, changing the world, etc. He does have positions and policies, but these are distributed through his website, they aren't the stuff of speeches or debates.

For the most part, media reports about Obama resemble celebrity gossip. Even the stuff he's getting smacked around on now is gossipy--did you hear what he said? Did you hear what his friend's said? He's risen to where he is mostly on chatter and charm; unfortunately, if chatter lifts you up, it can also drop you. It's especially dangerous for Obama because his resume is so thin. When negative stories hit McCain, McCain has a track record of decades in the senate that he can point to as evidence of who he is and what he does. He's shown a willingness to take stands unpopular with fellow republicans and, on the matter of the war, with pretty much everyone. No one agrees with him on everything, but it's not important, because, agree or not, he's clearly demonstrated that he's someone who puts some thought into his opinions and goes with what he thinks and feels, not with what is most politically convenient. Obama's most famous vote is one he never made--he didn't vote for the war, but since he wasn't in the senate at the time, we'll never know how he would have behaved if he'd actually been put on the spot. And aside from that non-vote... what else? Where are the bills with his name on them? Where are the instances where he took a stand against his own base and voted in a way that showed any political courage at all? If Obama want's to run on a substance free platform, he can't gripe about substance free debate questions.

My second reaction to Obama's complaints, though, are that he's absolutely right. As something of a political junkie, I stay at least vaguely aware of what questions are getting asked in debates, and, for the most part, this entire campaign has been almost entirely information free. The questions, again, have a high school popularity contest feel to them. Candidates for the presidency deserve better questions than, "Do you think people like you?"

My favorite question of all the debates was the one on whether illegal aliens should be given driver's licenses. It's a good question because there isn't a clear cut, easy answer that will make everyone happy. No is a good answer, because, what part of illegal don't you understand? If an illegal alien walks into a DMV and applies for a license, why not slap handcuffs on him instead of taking his picture? But, yes is also a good answer. Illegal aliens are here. They are a part of our economy. And, they're driving. Encouraging them to have driver's licenses deals with a pragmatic reality... they are on the roads anyway, they should at least prove to a beaurocrat somewhere that they know what a stop light means and how to parallel park. Clinton got chewed up by basically answering with both the pros and cons and then not saying what her position was. She was evasive. But, you know what? While it was my favorite question of the debate, it was also one that a presidential candidate really didn't need to have thought about in great detail because the federal government doesn't issue driver's licenses. Still, I liked that she at least showed an awareness of all sides of the argument.

Obama has hinted he's not going to do a debate in North Carolina. I hope he changes his mind. If it will help, I'll offer to moderate. I'll even give my questions in advance:

1. Do you know what the current federal debt is? (Rounding off to the nearest trillion is acceptable.) Do you regard the debt as a problem to be tackled by the next administration, or as one that can safely be left for future generations to deal with? Is a debt free America a realistic goal? If not, what would your target be for the debt load of America, as expressed as a percentage of GDP?

2. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Should this be a guiding principal of American imigration policy? Or is this mearly a quaint 19th century platitude that must give way to a 21rst century policy of giving preference to the energetic, successful, well-educated elites of other countries who come here to drive our high-tech industries? Should the Statue of Liberty's text be replaced with an H-1 visa? And, do you feel our current imigration targets are well calibrated, or should we be allowing more legal imigrants? Less? Should the number be doubled? Halved?

3. Do you know how many countries US armed forces are currently stationed in? How many countries do you perceive as potential military threats to American's on American soil? Do you feel that a military presense in Europe, Asia, South America, the Pacific, the Middle East, etc., has done anything over the last fifteen years to make American's safer? How many nuclear bombs do you feel American must possess in order to maintain an effective deterrent? What is your position of testing these nuclear weapons? What is your position on a military presence in orbit?

4. Do you feel prayer is a legitimate approach to problem solving? You've both (Obama and Clinton) spoke of feeling the guiding presence of the holy spirit in your lives. Would you follow the guidance of that holy spirit in crafting foreign policy? Social policy? Economic policy? Would you feel comfortable appointing a catholic to the supreme court? A jew? A muslim? A scientologist? An atheist?

5. Of current the supreme court justices, are there any you feel you agree with more often than others? Are there any you feel have a fundamental misunderstanding of the constitution? If so, what would that misunderstanding be?

6. If oil remains above $100 a barrel, do you foresee any potential benefits? Do you feel the government should have a role in determining the price of commodities (as is already done for a lot of agricultural products) such as oil, drugs, and houses? Are there any products that you feel the government should never regulate in price, but should always be left to the whims of the free market?

7. Do you feel, twenty years after it was declared, that the war on drugs has been a success? What stratedgies and tactics would you alter should you continue the war? Would you be willing to continue the war for 100 years if neccessary?

Other questions are popping to mind, but this will do for now. If Clinton or Obama give me a call about moderating, I'll be sure to let y'all know.

The Ten Trillion Pound Gorilla

Sometimes, I'll be listening to NPR talking about the political supression that goes on in other countries. The Russians, for instance, have horrible supression because Putin's party keeps all but a half dozen minor parties off the ballot. In Iran, all the candidates must meet the approval of the all powerful mullahs. In Egypt, candidates who are "radical" are disqualified from appearing on the ballot. And NPR reports that the citizens of these countries still support the ruling parties, and speculate it's because the media is controlled by the government. NPR. A news media created by an act of congress, is decrying state run media.

Which of these conditions isn't true, at least in parallel, in the US? Can you imagine going into a voting booth and having SIX parties to choose from? Here, the religious mullah's may not select the candidates (though some would argue that James Dobson and Pat Robertson certainly try), but the media mullahs decide early on who the serious candidates are and who the jokes will be and shape the race by reporting on it as a popularity contest. Money mullahs also have their say, though this time I was pleased to see that, on the republican side at least, money didn't prove to be the decisive factor. As far as disqualifying candidates from the ballot, I'm currently listed as "unafilliated" because the Libertarian party was decertified for failing to get 10% of the vote. But, why should any party or candidate get decertified? It's an electronic ballot these days. Does it seriously take that much more electricity to put ten candidates on the screen instead of two? The reality is that powerful people decide in advance who we get to vote for, and our choices wind up between corporate approved candidate A and corporate approved candidate B.

I mentioned that the election is reported as a popularity contest. It has to be--the differences in the issues between the "mainstream" candidates is trivial. They squabble around the edges on the nuances of who is more opposed to gay marriage, or illegal immigrants, or whether we should be using military might in Iraq, or whether we should have gone into Pakistan to get Bin Ladin. Our elections hinge on whether someone has a nervous laugh, or is too old, or attends church with a bigot. It's like we never get past the voting patterns of our high school class presidents. The candidates there might take a position on school lunches or allocation of parking spaces, but everyone knew they would have no genuine power to change things, and the election was going to come down to who was the most likable.

So, the election is going to come down to McCain and, probably, Obama. Neither of them has ever uttered a word about the biggest threat that America faces. They aren't going to. None of the mainstream candidates are going to. Because you can't get elected if you talk about the truth in America.

There's a ten trillion pound gorilla hanging off the great American skyscraper, and everyone is acting like they don't see it.

I'm talking about the Federal debt. Not the budget deficit, though this is related. The deficit is how much we're falling short each year in our tax collection versus our spending. The debt is how much we owe, and currently it's closing in on $10,000,000,000. Ten trillion.

Currently, we collect about 2.5 trillion a year in taxes. So, if we shut down the Federal government... we don't pay any federal employee salaries, we pay no social security, we leave our tanks sitting out in the desert and have our forces hitchhike home... and we still would need four years before we were out from under this debt.

Four years might not sound so bad, but the reality is that we aren't going to shut down the government. We're going to keep growing it. The interest on 10 trillion dollars ads up rather quickly. It's turned into a national reverse savings account. Since we run budget deficits, we are continuing to borrow money just to pay the interest payments on the debt. We've become a country that's akin to a household using its credit cards to pay its mortgage. If you were a financial counselor who saw a family doing this, you'd recognize that family was in a serious financial death spiral.

And you know all those billions we're spending "off book" to protect America by fighting a pre-emptive war? Well, if we went to war with China, or Saudi Arabia, they wouldn't need a single tank or bomb to bring us to our knees. They could just do nothing, and stop funding our debt. The real WMD's of the future won't be nuclear or biological, but financial.

You can look around at the supposed prosperity growth of America in the last twenty years, but we're more akin to the overdrawn families living in McMansions who've been living the good life by borrowing until they can't borrow any more. Then, someone loses a job, or an interest rate rises a point, or gas goes up a dollar a gallon in a year, and the whole facade comes crumbling down.

The longer we ignore the problem, the more difficult it will be to solve. And I worry we'll never, ever elect the people who would have the courage to solve it. To get back in the black, we have to do two things: Increase taxes and decrease services. Curiously, I don't notice any candidate running on that slogan.

Some modest proposals for increasing taxes: First, reinstate the estate tax at a newly draconian level. At heart, I'm a libertarian, opposed to taxing people just because they are wealthy. But, you know, sacrifices must be made. We're going for a decade with the estate tax slowly dwindling down to zero. The year you die is going to effect how much your family gets to keep--the longer you hold on, the better for them. So, why not keep this "changes by the year" philosophy, only instead of it going down, we spin a wheel January 1 to figure out the death tax amount for the year? And the wheel can have a lot of 100% slots and almost no 0% slots.

Second, we could have a "too much fame" tax. We could have a vote each year of the celebrities we're most tired of hearing about. Then, we'd just go and grab everything from the top ten folks on that list. Britney would be too broke to afford her brazilian waxes after a few votes. Rush Limbaugh could no longer afford to hire a housekeeper to score hillbilly heroin from. If you're a baseball player caught up in a steriod scandal at the same time you're closing in on a home run record, well, you'd better hope there are ten people more loathed than you are this year. If you do manage to get rich, you'd learn to keep your head low. The new rule would be, you can be famous, or you can be rich, but it's dangerous to have too much of both.

Cutting services: Step one, let's get rid of the military. Honestly, I have nothing against our soldiers. They've done a fine job. But, do we really need troops in a hundred different nations? In theory, the purpose of our "defense" forces should be just that... defending our borders. Making sure no hostile nation comes onto our shores and tries to grab, I dunno, whatever it is we make here in America. Our iced coffee drinks, perhaps. But we could do this with a much, much, much tinier military than we presently have. We just need to keep 50 nukes. Or even just say we're keeping 50 nukes, and we're not showing them to anyone, or saying where they're pointed. But, Portugal, if you mess with us... well, just don't is all.

As for our immediate borders, well, gee, the INS and border patrol are doing a bang-up job aren't they? I bet no more than a few dozen people slip over the border each year. What? How many? Oh dear. So I have an alternative to the current border patrol. We make it all volunteer. We ask patriotic American's to come on out to the borders and serve a week or two at a time patrolling. In return, they get to ride around in armed pick-up trucks and fire machine guns into the air while drinking beer. No terrorist in his right mind is going to face off against that. Mexican's (and the occasional Canadian) can sneak through now knowing that if they're caught it will be by professionals who will treat them respectfully and escort them back out of the country. With the drunken gun-toting volunteer force, who wants to chance it?

For the oceans, the deal would be similar, only it would be armed speed boats. Honestly, with the right recruiting posters, we not only wouldn't have to pay the volunteers, we could charge them a thousand bucks a week, and we'd still have all the manpower we need.

Obviously, my modest proposals aren't serious approaches to dealing with our problems. And yet, they are better proposals than anything I've heard from McCain or Obama or Clinton. They aren't talking about the debt because their fingerprints are on the credit cards. We were once the wealthiest nation on earth but both Republicans and Democrats have colluded to manage our finances in a way that would make even MC Hammer's business managers blush.

And, in fairness, while ten trillion dollars is a big number... trillions are normally not often encountered outside of discussions of astrophysics... the US economy is a creature of big numbers. Our gross domestic product is roughly 14 trillion. We owe a lot of money, but if we had to pay this debt, in theory it's not too late. But after 8 more years of a president who just doesn't talk about the problem? Where is the tipping point? If we don't take it seriously now, then when?

A Blogger's Question

Some no doubt wonder
Why's he stuck on these hiaku?
A blow to the head?

Well, no. To be honest, was writing an email last Sunday morning and noticed that a sentence I had just written had a hiaku rhythm,* starting and ending with a 5 syllable phrase. I went ahead an altered it to be a hiaku in that email, then wrote a hiaku about writing that hiaku to post on my blog. Since that hiaku ended with the line "I should put on pants," I had several people over at the Codex board write humorous hiaku responses about the horror and/or inspiration of me sitting around naked writing poetry. I would like to state that, for the record, I wasn't naked. I was in my underwear.

At a Starbucks.

Anyway, the hiaku have helped me set a personal record for this blog: I actually have at least one post a day. Admittedly, they aren't long posts. But, hopefully one or two raised a grin, and they fit into one of the topics I frequently blog about, musing about the writing life.

If I could, I'd write 1000 word articles every day. I like meaty, though-provoking posts. But, I really don't know that I have seven meaty, thought-provoking ideas a week. Probably I have something closer to one per week.

So, as a blogger, I have a question: Do readers actually enjoy these frequent mini-posts? Something fresh every day even if it's little more words than a fortune cookie fortune? Or do you mind waiting waiting a week for the longer, more chunky posts?

Also, does anyone have any strong opinions about the content? I would say that over the years, I've drifted into writing three main types of articles.

1. Practical writing advice.
2. Political rants and/or religious rants.
3. Stories of my personal history.

I also write articles about writing and promoting Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed, but I post these over at Bitterwoodnovel.blogspot.com.

So, does anyone absolutely hate that I waste my time writing one of the categories of articles listed above? Is there a type of article that you browse over here hoping to find? I seem to get the most links from other blogs when I write about writing. I get the most comments on a post when I write about my personal history. And I get the most emails when I write about religion and politics.

Currently, I write about just about anything that interest me. Even then, I edit the material I post here. The lives of my friends interest me more than politics, but I wouldn't post an article about them because I respect other people's privacy. Griping about my day job produces most of my verbal rants in real life, but I don't gripe about work here because I suspect most people would find it whiney and boring... and whiney and boring is something I only inflict on my closest friends! And, as a man, I would say that sex is right up at the top of the list of things that interest me, but I don't talk about sex here because it would be crass.

The point is, I already select the sort of stuff I write about from a much larger pool of things that interest me. Should I narrow my selection further? Or just carry one with the current mish-mash of topics?

*Rhythm is, like, the ultimate weapon if you're playing Hangman against an unsuspecting foe. They burn through all five vowels instantly, and are left with only two strikes. Really proficient players will instantly deduce rhythm once the vowels are gone, but less experienced players usually guess the "y" next, then strike again by guessing an "s", and then usually crash and burn guessing something really random, like a "w."

Saturday's Promise

Just after midnight
on a Saturday morning
ripe with potential

Friday's Agenda

bang out a chapter
then have a margarita
big as a fishbowl

Thursday's lament

Up at 4:30
Nothing written yesterday
save one sad hiaku

Wednesday Calling

Ah! The temptation!
To call in sick and stay home...
Here there be dragons!

Tuesday's Zombie

up till two A.M.
groping for one thousand words
makes a rough Tuesday

Why I'm not afraid of Muslims (or Christians, or Atheists, for that matter)

I wrote this rather long response in the comments section in the Darwn Fish post I made over the weekend. I'm modifying it slightly to make it its own post. I got bugged last week when I read an article saying that people who posted Darwin Fish on thier cars were narrowminded, bigoted cowards. The argument ran that we atheist aren't afraid to parody Christians, but we don't dare speak out against Muslims because we'd get our heads chopped off.

The main reason I'm more vocal against Christianity than Islam is simply a matter of personal experience. In my life, I've known hundreds, if not thousands, of Christians. I can count the number of Muslims I personally know on the fingers of one hand. If I scan my AM dial, I find several stations of preaching and gospel music. No hint of the Muslim faith can be found except maybe Cat Stevens playing on an oldies station.

I don't have any actual numbers to back this up, but, world-wide, I'm guessing that if you are the victim of a beheading, you are statistically likely to have been killed by a Muslim. And, world-wide, Muslims do seem responsible for a high percentage of terrorists acts. They aren't exclusively responsible, mind you, but still, if I heard about a bomb going off in a major metropolitan area tomorrow, I'd immediately suspect a Muslim was behind it, unless it turned out to be doctor's office, in which case I'd suspect an anti-abortion wacko, or a medical lab, in which case I'd suspect an animal rights nut. And, when Muslim fundamentalists get thier fingers into the governance of a country, that country is pretty much screwed. Stonings, beheadings, hand-choppings, and the horrible degredation of women become the law of the land... trust me, I don't want fundamentalist Islam holding any power at all in American politics. I'm deeply grateful for a constitution that prevents this.

That said, I just cannot see any plausible way that Muslims are a serious threat to the American way of life. This isn't to say they are NO threat. They simply aren't in the top ten threats to life, maybe not even in the top 100. Chalking up every single American death in the Iraq war to the actions of a Muslim fundie, that means in a 10 year period, Islamic terrorists have managed to kill about 8,000Americans.

In that same time frame, 430,000 American's died in auto accidents. 280,000 were killed by guns. 38,000 American's drowned. The general couch-potato, fast-food lifestyle of American's contributed to about 9 million heart failures in this time span. 650,000 people died of the flu. The flu! The flu is 80 times more likely to kill you than a Muslim terrorist if you're an American. The airwaves are full of people who think it's a good idea to spend a trillion dollars on a war to fight Islamic terrorists. No one is advocating for spending a billion dollars to make certain everyone single American gets a flu shot. (I'm not either, by the way.)

Americans seem to have no capacity at all to weigh risks and design appropriate responses. Large chunks of my fellow citizens are so terrified of the invading Muslim hordes they support torture, indefinite detention without charges, and generally bombing the crap out of people who share the faith of the 50 or so Muslims in America who've ever committed a terrorist act.

There are 8 million Muslims living in America. So far, the known terrorist conversion rate here is roughly 50 to 8,000,000, or about 1 out of every 160,000. Let's assume that there are sleeper cells, though, who are waiting to kill us and quadruple that number, to one out of every 40,000.

Somewhere out in America, 200 Muslims are going to sleep tonight with murder, mayhem, and carnage on thier minds. Frightened? That's 4 per state. Draw a hundred mile circle around you... are there any Islamic terrorists in that radius? Maybe. If you live in certain areas, bump the maybe into probably, even certainly. Scared yet?

Compare this number to the number of all Americans who commit murders each year--roughly 1 person in 20,000 is going to kill somebody. Assuming that murderers as a whole reflect society as a whole, then more than half of US murders are performed by people who self identify as Christian. This means that about 1 in 40,000 Christians are murderers--so, there are quite possibly 3750 Christians among us who are thinking of killing somebody tonight. Your odds of living within 100 miles of one of them is quite good. Just keep watching your local papers.

(If the notion that 50% of murderers would think of themselves as Christian strikes you as absurd, I'll direct you to these 10 year old statistics of religious affiliations of inmates in federal prisons... these number aren't, alas, broken down by crime, so I don't know how many of these are murderers and how many are in for tax evasion, or child porn, or whatever. But, 10 years ago, 84% of prisoners identified themselves as Christian. Read the numbers here. )

Obviously, I'm pushing these numbers to the point of absurdity. But, if you get murdered in the US, you are inarguably more likely to be killed by a person who was raised in the Christian faith than in the Muslim faith. A sense of perspective is required.

I would much rather live in a nation that's 50% Christian than 50% Muslim. I'm not trying to make the argument above that Christian's are dangerous; 39,999 out of 40,000 of them aren't murderers, after all. I work side by side with Christians. My whole family is Christian other than myself. I like Christians! It's just thier beliefs that drive me bonkers. But, the beliefs of many of my fellow atheists drive me bonkers as well. Christopher Hitchens, after all, believes in the Muslim threat and supports the Iraq war. A whole lot of atheists I know are also liberals, and seem to drink the kool-aid on every liberal cause that comes down the pike. I know so many who call themselves "freethinkers" who are anything but.

On the whole, though, I'm not terribly worried about any ideology killing me. I'm much more worried about the flu, and my worry level for that is somewhere down near the bottom of the list of stuff that keeps me awake at night.

I just can't get worked up about this grand muslim assault on our freedoms that the right-wingers keep jabbering about. The terrorist muslim in our midst strikes me as an overhyped hobgoblin, designed to frighten and distract us from the larger problems we could be tackling.

Monday Morning

Monday morning blah
I'd rather stay home writing
if only it paid

sunday morning author hiaku

chill april morning
drowsy fingers tap the keys
I should put on pants

Darwin Fish

I recently read an article at real clear politics where the author denounced Darwin Fish as a form of religious bigotry. You can read the article here. The author, Jonah Goldberg, basically says that displaying a Darwin Fish is an offensive, intolerant action, a PC form of bigotry. And, on top of all that, it's cowardly. He concludes by writing:

The Darwin fish ostensibly symbolizes the superiority of progressive-minded science over backward-looking faith. I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

His point being that the Darwin Fishers aren't afraid to poke fun at Christians, but don't dare poke fun at Muslims because we're afraid of getting killed.

His argument bugged me on several different levels.

1. It doesn't seem to understand the nature of parody. The Darwin Fish is funny only because the Christian Fish is a very, very popular plastic symbol for people to affix to their trunk. Really, it's almost the only game in town. In 30 years of driving, I've never once seen a star of david or a crescent moon and star affixed to the trunk of a car. Nor have I seen a little plastic Buddha, or whatever the hell a Scientologist might display. (A little UFO over a volcano?) The Darwin Fish only works because it's poking fun of something that's instantly recognized. I doubt most Americans would even recognize a symbol of Islam, let alone the parody of it. You can make a lot of money selling plastic fish in America. You can make a little less money, but still turn a profit, making darwin fish. But once you get much past that, the economics of the situation just falls off.

2. In the hundred posts that followed this article, a significant number were from Christians who testified, yes brother! that they took offense whenever they saw a Darwin Fish. I don't know the intricacies of copyright law that would allow me to cut and paste whole comments here, but you can read them under the article link above. Darwin Fishers are accused of attempting to "tear down society" and "demean humanity." To which, I must respond, What the hell? We're talking about putting a pit of plastic on the trunk of your car! I suspect society, and humanity for that matter, may endure. So, to all the people who may be offended by the Darwin Fish, I would advise you to learn some good anger managment techniques. Some people turn to prayer to handle these feelings, or so I'm told.

3. It was also implied that the Darwin Fish is displayed primarily to insult Christians. I used to display them; I went through three, in fact. They kept getting torn off my trunk and broken... I think the commandment to vandalize other peoples car symbols might be in Deuteronomy. But, the whole reason I displayed it was because the first time I saw one, I grinned. I really didn't stick it on thinking, "Man, this will humiliate and demean those Jesus fishers!" If Christian's got to display the logo of their team, why shouldn't I display mine?

4. Isn't there a commandment against making a graven image that looks like an animal (this is a retorical question... it's right there in those ten commandments that people are always jabbering about). Arguably, the Jesus Fishers are defying their own holy book by showing the symbol. But, this doesn't bother me, obviously. Still, if you turn your faith into a bumper sticker, it seems to me that it deserves all the solemn respect due any other bumper sticker.

Finally, on about a dozen of the responses, there was a theme that said, "You're only making fun of Christians because Muslims would kill you if you made fun of them." And, it finally hit me what underlay all this anger: Jealousy. Somehow, this tiny subset of Christians are sitting around seething because they don't get any respect. They think, "Boy, if we were more like those Muslims, rioting and beheading in response to cartoons, then no one would mess with us!"

Luckily, I'm pretty sure this represents a fairly tiny minority among the larger Christian population. Still, if you're filled with anger over the Darwin Fish, you're in luck: They make a trunk logo that shows a Jesus Fish swallowing a Darwin Fish. Go buy one and stick it on the back of your car. Then, if I get stuck in traffic behind you, it will be my turn to stew in bile and rage as I stare at this stunning denunciation of my beliefs, set eternally in plastic.

Or not.

Humans in Politics

Time for another political post. When I started this blog, I was writing about politics every other post, and now I can go months without visiting the subject. Part of the reason is, I gave my opinions early on about the big debates that never go away in politics--abortion, death penalty, gay rights, global warming, health care--and my opinions haven't altered much, so why repeat myself? This is why I could never be a talk show host or pundit. I have the potential to grow bored with repeating myself, while people like Rush Limbaugh make a living by essentially offering the same opinions day after day after day.

But, of course, the real people who have to repeat themselves well past the point that any normal person would grow insane are politicians, and especially presidential candidates. Obama, Clinton, McCain, and the dozen others already forgotten all had a stump speech that they had to deliver a hundred times or more. I can only imagine there's a point where it passes into surreality for them, where it starts to feel like the movie Groundhog Day, where the hero is trapped in living the same day over and over.

Which leads me to a few opinions on some recent candidate scandals that just don't seem all that scandalous to me:

1. Snipergate: Hillary got caught lying. A flat-out, no holds barred, no debate possible lie. She tells an exciting story about running for the cars under sniper fire; video of the event shows her walking off the plane and getting handed flowers. And I've now read pundits who say that this and other lies point to serious personality defects, and possible mental illness. But, this is nonsense. Ordinary people do stuff like this all the time. We routinely exagerate and embellish stories on retelling. A two pound shark caught in the surf at Myrtle Beach grows over time to a twenty pound shark caught in Cuba by reaching into the water and grabbing its tailfin and yanking it into the boat. Well, perhaps I exagerate about the degree which stories get exagerated. But, still, I sometimes listen to stories my friends tell, or to stories my family tell, or even stories that I tell, and find myself marveling at how the stories where I thought I knew what the fairly mundane facts were become, over the course of years, much more gripping and compelling tales with a few edits. Hillary isn't mentally ill for embellishing her story. She is, however, dumb as a rock not to know that someone was going to drag out the videotape.

2. Preachergate: So Obama was friends for twenty years with a crazy, racist fanatic. He sat in the pews, he took his kids to hear the lunitic, he publicy praised the man. Now, a segment of the population is outraged--OUTRAGED!--by Obama's failure to denounce this fool. But, look, just chill, okay? I'm not going to judge any man by the words of another man. I thought it was classless for Obama to drag his grandmother into this debate, but I know what he meant. You have people in your life you grow close to that say things that embarass you, but you stick by them anyway because a person is more than just the five minutes of videotape of the most shocking things they said over twenty years. I was once closely associated with a person who, from time to time, would say things in public that just made me cringe. I'm going to be very careful here; I'm not even going to identify this person by gender--which means I'm going to use the gramatical consruction "they" to refer to them, sorry--I don't have their permission to talk about them, and I don't want to hold a friend up to public scorn. But, this person used to complain loudly about people who were trying to take the confederate flag down from public places. "It's our heritage!" they'd argue. Yeah, I'd think, a heritage of slavery and radical Christianity. If you ever read the constitution that the CFA intended to operate other, you would want to take up arms and fight for the Union, because it absolutely did NOT guarantee religious freedom, but instead stated bluntly that the CFA would be Christian. My friend wasn't a Christian, so revering the Confederate flag made no sense to me whatsoever. I was also baffled by claims of reverse racism. White people were discriminated against in the workplace. It's the law of the land! Doesn't anyone care about the plight of the poor white person? To which I would argue, if you're a white person in America and you can't go out and do whatever you want to do with your life, it's not the government that's holding you back. Take a quick glance at any place where powerful people gather--oh my god! White people! I don't care what the law of the land is: if you can't achieve your life goals here in America today, you aren't going to make it tomorrow if the supreme court suddenly waves its magic wand and POOF, affirmative action vanishes. (For the record, I don't think this is only true of white people... no matter what your skin color or gender, the real obstacles to most people's advancement are internal, not external.)

So, I knew someone who was racist in my judgment. Did I kick them to the curb as some sort of inhuman scum? No. Because this was, like, 1% of thier total personality. And, honestly, unless you listened to them when they got onto this subject, you would never have known. It wasn't like in thier daily life they were going around shouting racial epithats. I honestly don't think on an individual level they cared what color their friends, coworkers, dentists or presidents were.

If we had to go through this world rejecting the friendship of everyone who holds a politically incorrect or politically unpopular opinion, we'd all live very lonely lives. If anything, this preachergate scandal made me like Obama more. He could have pulled the full Judas and abandoned his preacher to the angry mobs. But he stood by a friend--I admire that.

3: Century-gate: So, a popular line of attack about McCain lately is that he's advocating the US being in Iraq for 100 years. Shocking just shocking. But, we've been in Japan and Germany for well over half a century. We have a history of not bringing out boys back home once we've fought a war. Still a century is a bit extreme, isn't it? Nope. We fought the Spanish-American War all the way back in 1898. We set up a little base in Cuba at a place called Guantanamo Bay. And guess where we still have troops stationed 110 years later? America is the house-guest that doesn't know when to leave. A century from now while we're still in Iraq, I'm guessing we'll be past the bicentenial for our occupation of Cuba. Of course, these bases are of vital strategic importance. If we hadn't had a long term presense in Cuba, lord knows what could have happened. The whole island could have gone communist if not for our vigilance!

Getting through the Mushy Middle

Codexwriters.com is currently having a novelwriting contest. One of the cool elements of the contest is that the writers earn "badges" as they make progress. They get a badge for writing more than 2000 words in a day, for instance, or if they make it 3 weeks in a row completing a chapter a week. I'm not taking part in the contest, but looking over the rules, I got badge envy! And the badge that really resonated with me was one for pushing on through the "Mushy Middle."

The Mushy Middle is something almost all novelists have faced. I've been involved with critique groups and networking with other writers since the mid-nineties, and the experience seems to be a familiar one. It's easy to start a novel, and get three or five or seven chapters into it. Then, frequently, the whole thing bogs down. The initial enthusiasm for the project wanes as some of the realities of writing a book begin to hit home. The first reality is, books don't write themselves. If you're a beginning novelist, this frequently comes as a shock. I was like many novice novelists years ago, writing mainly when I was inspired to write. Inspiration can carry you through early chapters. But, inspiration as an intellectual state is fleeting. If you can hold on to the feeling for more than a few hours you're lucky. Some folks can hold onto inspiration for weeks, perhaps. But, it seldom lasts the duration of a full scale novel, which can't be written in weeks, but is instead a project lasting months, even years. At some point, enthusiasm fades on any project, and this is where many beginning writers falter. I, personally, can't count how many novels I started in the 1990's only to abandon them in the quicksands of the Mushy Middles.

Yet, I eventually learned to get past them. I haven't quite yet reached the point of learning to revel in the Mushy Middles, but perhaps that day will come. In the meantime, I have two primary tools that carry me through.

The main thing that helps me get through the mushy middle is a deadline. The mushy middle is why my first three novels were all multi-year projects. I'd start them, then lose interest. Then, a few months later, I'd get an idea on what to do next in the abandoned novel, and return to the project, write a few more chapters, then lose interest again. I consider myself very fortunate to have completed one book, let alone three, using this start and stop method. On my fourth novel, Nobody Gets the Girl, I set myself a very firm 45 day deadline to write the first draft of whole book. I was active with the Odyssey critique group back then, so I set it up as a challenge with a few other participants, then posted almost daily updates of my progress. (The challenge came in early November 2000 that we would all complete a fresh novel before the "real" new millinium of January 1, 2001.) Since I had put out the challenge, and since a score or more people were following my progress, I felt like I had no choice but to slog on when I hit the sections where I was completely lost. And I discovered something interesting: Even though I felt like I was writing meandering, disjointed crap at the time, when I finally read the book a year later I discovered that some of my most random chapters were actually pretty good. (I wrote with the motto "never look back," so I never reread the chapters as I produced them.) There's a chapter five or six chapters into the book where I remember being completely stuck. I'm writing a superhero novel, with all these plot twists and hidden revelations and high stakes battles, and suddenly my mental batteries were all drained and I had no clue what these people and all their fantastic powers were supposed to do next. So, I had them go to the mall to go shopping. Only, instead of actually shopping, one of them uses her superpowers to steal stuff, trivial things like cinimon buns. When I wrote it, I was pretty positive my novel had run completely off the tracks. Now, I look at it as a great character building scene.

Dragonforge went the same way. All the teen chapters were written in the complete absense of inspiration. I spent months certain that my writing career was over, because unlike Nobody, this book was already slated for publication on a set date. I worried thousands of readers would read hit those chapters and just abandon the book, and never read me again. After the first draft, I still wasn't fully happy with those chapters... but, luckily, I had a second draft! A do-over. So I did a lot of them over. Then, after my wise-readers, I got to do them over again, and by draft three I was happy with the middle of my book.

So far my experience has been that plowing on even when my imagination is empty and my clever meter is sitting on zero always produces fruitful results. One of two things always happens:

1: I write something good while thinking I'm writing drivel.There's a scene in Dragonforge where Graxen and Nadala, two young dragons who are attracted to each other, meet in secret because the plot required them to meet each other again and fall in love at this point in the book. I had no clue what they were supposed to say to each other. In my outline, I had imagined I'd have Graxen spout romantic dialogue worthy of Romeo and Juliet, but instead when I reached the scene, all that came out was awkward, choppy dialogue. I slogged through, certain I'd throw it out later and write something better. But, when I went back on draft two, the awkward, choppy dialogue between the two characters felt exactly right, conveying thier true feelings better than the flowery, Hallmark card dialogue I thought I needed to make the scene come to life. Sometimes, writing when I'm not feeling clever manages to produce some of my most honest and heartfelt writing.

2. I write drivel while I think I'm writing drivel. Fortunately, drivel on the page is much, much better than nothing on the page. I can edit drivel. I can twist and tweak it, I can chop it out completely and write what I should have written, or I can discover that, while the scene I wrote might not be great literature, with a little polish and elbow grease it becomes perfectly functional prose. It moves the characters from point A to point B, or it has them pick up a plot key they need to put into a plot lock. While the dream is for every page in one of my novels to be brilliant prose that must have secretly flowed from an angel's pen, the reality is that sometimes good enough is good enough. As long as the story moves forward, I'm confident the reader will stay with me.

So, my two secrets for getting through are deadlines, even arbitrary ones, and experience. I've learned after completing seven novels that the Mushy Middles can be overcome just by sitting down and typing, and sitting down and typing, and sitting down and typing again, until you've finally slogged through them.

A God Paradox

I was reading in Discover some theories that might make it possible to explore the question of what existed before the Big Bang. There are three models that I won't get into to any great degree here, mainly because, I'll confess, I can follow high level theoretical physics only to a certain degree and then I admit, I honestly don't have a clue what's being discussed. As I science fiction writer, I only have to understand them enough to present higher level physics in a plausible way to readers who have no idea whether I'm right or wrong in what I'm talking about. One of the theories plays into the Bitterwood books--it's the notion that there's a higher dimensional space that an infinite number of universes float through. From time to time, these universes smash into each other in the higher dimension and the energy generated from the collision produces a big bang that forms a new universe. There are two upsides to this theory. First, it means that universes exists as part of an endless cycle of creation and recreation--the big bang isn't a beginning, just part of an ongoing process. The amazing thing about this theory, unlike a zillion other "before the universe began" theories, is that it's testable. If our universe was generated by the collision of other universes, the theory predits gravity waves that would still be detectable. We don't yet have the technology to detect gravity waves (which are also predicted by relativity), but this is mainly an engineering problem and one day we will, and can confirm or refute the evidence for this theory. A third upside to the theory is that I can play with this higher dimension "outside" of space by calling it "underspace" and letting my characters travel through it in fiction. I'm sure any competent scientist can explain why this is an absurd premise, but they can write their own novels.

The article introduced the idea of what happened before the Big Bang by discussing a monk who asks his monk-boss (this probably isn't the actual title the church uses), "What was God doing before he created the earth?" The monk-boss answers, "Designing hell for those who ask too many questions." This reminded me of a paradox that used to bug me when I was a kid in church.

If I asked how long God had been around, I was assured it was forever. God's timeline was infinite, stretching into forever both forward and backward. But, this creates a paradox: How long did God wait before he created the world? Forever. Which is the mental equivilent of saying he never got around to creating the world. You can imagine how this provided a certain level of consternation to me when I was ten.

Of course, the same paradox exists in the colliding universe theory... how much time passed before they collided? Eternity. But, with the colliding universe theory, new worlds are being made all the time, for no reason at all, just random collisions. With the God theory, nothing but God existed forever, then he made a planet and a universe for it to float in, then he's going to destroy it all and everyone will live forever in heaven or hell. So, there's a forever before the earth, a few thousand years of earth, followed by a forever without the earth, not by chance, but due to the willful decisions of an omniscient being. Somehow the intentionality provides a dividing line in my mind. One premise strikes me as plausible, while the other strikes me as absurd, even though they effectively provide the same results.

I'm writing this from Stellarcon in High Point, by the way, sitting in a lobby through which klingons, pirates, stormtroopers, and multiple Darth Vaders are wandering. Perhaps it's this strangely surreal setting that has launched my current round of odd musings...

Heretic Pride

Long time readers of my blog know I'm a big fan of the Mountain Goats... the band, not the animal. They just put out a new album last month, and it's the first album in ages that doesn't have a unifying theme. The last album, Get Lonely, was an album full of songs about an emotionally crippled man, possibly homeless, who spends a lot of time on the edges of society before finally offing himself in the final track. Before that, the Sunset Tree explored John Darnielle's personal story of his relationship with his abusive stepfather. We Shall All Be Healed was the story of a bunch of tweakers (meth users), and the whole trend of "theme" albums was really launched by Tallahassee, where John shed the low-fi sound of his earlier albums for higher production values as he told the story of an unhappy couple who stayed together only by staying drunk. Each of these albums were full of songs that were best understood in the context of the other songs, and everything worked together to form one overall story arc.

With Heretic Pride, the unifying theme is gone, but the ghosts of these previous albums live on. As I listen to this album, I keep finding myself plugging the songs into the story lines of earlier works.

"Sax Rohmer #1" would fit quite neatly onto the Tallahassee album; it's all about things decaying and spinning out of control as "every moment leads toward it's own sad end," yet the narrator insists in the chorus, "I am coming home to you with my own blood in my mouth." It easily fits into what John refers to as his "alpha" series, songs about a drunken dysfunctional couple.

"San Bernidino" reminds me of We Shall All Be Healed both musically and lyrically, while "Autoclave" reminds me of The Sunset Tree --"I am this great unstable mass of blood and foam and no one in her right mind would make my heart her home."

I wasn't a huge fan of Get Lonely, but my favorite track on Heretic Pride, "Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident" would be perfectly at home on that album with it's narrator telling a girl in a bathroom who has obviously just survived some horrible experience:

"Stay formless,

weightless,

blameless,

nameless."

It's an odd song that seems to offer hope in the fact that a human life is a rather ephemeral thing; our worst moments drift off into time little remembered or mourned, so there's no point for us to let them weigh us down. It's almost as if our very insignificance is a key to a type of holiness. Or, perhaps I'm reading too much into this. Of course, one reason I've been a fan of the Mountain Goats through a string of over ten albums is that John's songs possess that marvelous quality of seeming to be full of meaning--they reward listening and relistening in a way that lesser artist can't quite achieve. I've probably listened to The Coroner's Gambit album well over a hundred times, and every time I always seem to find some new poetic key that unfolds a new message. I listen to the mountain goats with the same faithful ferver that some men read the Bible.

Still, as much as I love the mountain goats, I was willing to pan their last album as mopey and overly produced. Hopefully my willingness to give them a thumbs down will give extra weight to the thumbs up I'm giving Heretic Pride. I've been listening to it non-stop since I picked it up last week, and I have a feeling that the next mix album I make of MG material will be heavy with tracks from Heretic Pride. As I type this, I'm listening to track 8, "Lovecraft in Brooklyn." What other songwriter could pull of a climax to a song like this?

Woke up afraid of my own shadow,

like, genuinely afraid.

Headed for the pawnshop

to buy myself a switchblade.

Someday something's coming

from way out beyond the stars

to kill us while we stand here;

it will store our brains in mason jars.

And then the girl behind the counter asks "How do you feel today?"

and I say "I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn!"

Ah, good stuff. And I can't think of any other album this song fits on. Ultimately, it's songs like this that really pull Heretic Pride over the line into greatness.

Does religious bigotry equal racism or sexism?

Since Romney withdrew, I've probably heard about a dozen pundits and read at least that many columnists who have said that religious bigotry is the last remaining predjudice. Americans are willing to vote for a black man or a woman, the pundits say, but they won't vote for a Mormon. I made the same point myself a few articles back. Having grown up in a Pentacostal church, I can assure you that members of that faith wouldn't vote for a Mormon--nor, I should note, would they vote for an atheist or a Catholic, a Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim. Possibly they'd vote for a Jew and most protestant denominations. Definitely not a scientologist.

However, polls show that vast majorities of American's won't vote for atheists. As an atheist, I'm more or less resigned to the notion that I have to vote for people who profess a faith. Still, I doubt I'd vote for a scientologist. Nor would I vote for a president who professed a disbelief in evolution, as Mike Huckabee has. Is this bigotry? Sure, as defined by the dictionary. It states that bigotry is the "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own." But, of course, under that definition, everyone is a bigot--liberals are stubbornly in opposition to conservatism, conservatives are completely opposed to liberalism. I suppose there are a few mushy people in the middle who are so devoid of opinion that they regard all opinions as equal. I HATE those people!

But does religious bigotry equal racism? It seems to me to be a very dumb parallel. You are born into your race. You have no choice but to live your life black, white, or some shade in between. (I will avoid a Micheal Jackson joke here.) Hating people based on their physical attributes is fundamentally unfair because they didn't choose these physical attributes. (I suppose there are some physical attributes you control--an intense dislike of all people who tattoo "White Power" on their forehead could be justified.) But, religion isn't like the color of your skin. As an adult, you have the power to choose your creed, beliefs, and opinions--and other people, I would argue, should be free to scorn you for these.

Please note, I'm not advocating or justifying violence between people of different faiths. If you're a Muslim and I'm an atheist, I still feel we can chat politely at parties, work side by side at most jobs, and educate our children in schools that stay neutral on the matter. I also agree that there should be no legal religious test for holding an office in America. If you want to take your oath of office on a copy of Dianetics, well, the law shouldn't prevent that. But the choices of voters are a different matter than a legal test. I see nothing wrong with deciding that someone who thinks there were dinosaurs on the ark, or that L. Ron Hubbard was tapped into a higher truth, shouldn't be president. Nor do I feel victimized that the majority of people think it's written into the constitution somewhere that this is a Christian nation and think that all atheists are tools of Satan. You're entitled to your opinion. Which is, of course, the ultimate beauty of America--we're all entitled to our own goofy beliefs, and free to regard those who've drawn different conclusions as idiots. And thus the great wheel of America turns....

More political blather

A few months back, I said that Ron Paul was the first Republican candidate I could imagine voting for. He's still in the race, but stalled at about 5% support, which is actually a lot better than I thought he'd do. And, there's a vague chance I might actually get to vote for him. If Romney doesn't drop out of the race, then the Republican nomination might actually roll on to the convention, meaning NC would actually have a voice in the primary process for the first time since I've been a resident of the state. Still, that would mean I'd have to register as a Republican, and I just can't see myself swallowing that kool-aid. And, while Ron Paul is very closely aligned with many of my political views, the has two big strikes against him:

1. There are charges, based on things that were written in a weekly newsletter that he used to publish, that he's a racist. The charge of racism gets flung around a lot in politics. Bill and Hillary are getting slapped the label, which shows how trivial the word has become. Still, I have read some of the quotes, and they are bothersome. Paul's defense is that he doesn't remember writing them, that he thinks they were the words of some staffer writing as him. I'll buy this... most politicians write very few of their own words. Still, that just puts Paul back into the "just another politician" camp and removes some of the edge from his talk about personal responsibility.

2. The whole gold standard thing. Paul is an advocate of returning to the gold standard. He feels that the value of money is completely arbitrary as long as its valued against other currencies instead of an actual, physical commodity. Which is true--except that it's arbitrary when valued against the actual, physicial commodities as well. Gold has no inherent god-given value that magically allows it to determine the true worth of a dollar. The value of gold floats on the arbitrary whims of humanity as much as the value of currencies float. So, I'm afraid I lump gold standard advocates in the same box in my head that holds flat-earthers and creationists.

One thing I will say in Paul's defense: He's anti-abortion, but at least he has the philisophical integrity to then also be anti-death penalty. "Pro-life" politicians who would fry half our prison population and who passionately advocate war drive me crazy.

However, all this talk about Paul is pointless in a way, because he's definitely not going to be a candidate for either party. If he runs as a libertarian, he'll pull down the cool 1% they normally get. Maybe his higher visibility might boost the take to 2% or, dare I dream it? 3%!

The all or nothing nature of the american political system galls me. I've lived 43 years and never once had a politician representing me, and doubt I will in the next 43 years either. The only thing that I can draw a little joy in is that a lot of the Republican chattering class is about to find themselves in the same boat. The most vocal elements of the Republican noise machine--the unholy trinity of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity, loathe John McCain. Coulter said this week she'd vote for Hillary before she'd vote for McCain. Assuming that they are too be believed (a dubious assumption, I know), then a McCain victory would be fun just to either see the mental contortions these vapid talkers go through to convince thier listeners that there were pro-McCain all along, or else see if they remain firmly anti-McCain and wind up blamed for a Republican defeat in the fall.

Finally, in a wierd instance of media bias this morning, I noticed two headlines stating that Clinton and Obama were now tied going into Tuesday's primary. But, when I looked at the actual articles, Clinton had a 4 point lead on Obama, 47-43. Now, sure, that's within the margin of error. But, it's not a tie. The headlines would be less biased in saying that Clinton has a slight lead.

A guest message from IGMS Editor Ed Schubert

To Readers of Science Fiction and Fantasy everywhere,

When you have something great, you want everyone to know. So you tell people about it. You share it. You pass it along to friends everywhere. Well, that’s what we’re doing with InterGalactic Medicine Show. We want to make sure everyone has had a chance to check out what we’re doing, so we’re offering up a sampling of our stories – for free.

During the month of February we are going to make one story from each of our first four issues available at no charge. Two stories will be set free on February 1st, and two more on February 15th. Just visit www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com and explore the table of contents; the free stories will be clearly marked.

Issue one’s free story will be “Trill and The Beanstalk” by Edmund R. Schubert, issue two’s will be “Yazoo Queen” by Orson Scott Card (from his Alvin Maker series), issue three’s “Xoco’s Fire” by Oliver Dale, and issue four’s “Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” by Eric James Stone. Each story is fully illustrated by artists who were commissioned to create artwork to accompany that tale -- as is every story published in IGMS.

“Tabloid Reporter To The Stars” will also be featured in the upcoming InterGalactic Medicine Show anthology from Tor, which will be out this August (we wanted you to get a sneak peek of the anthology, too). However, the other three stories aren’t available anywhere except the online version of IGMS.

It’s really quite simple. Great stories. Custom illustrations. Free. We’re pleased with and proud of the magazine we’re publishing; now we’re passing it along to our friends and telling them about it. We hope you’ll enjoy it and do the same.

Edmund R. Schubert

Editor, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show
www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com

Fever Dreams, or, my most rambling post ever

Thursday I came down with a cold. I went to work that day, but have spent most of the time since flat on my back. My most annoying symptom has been an inability to feel as if I have a "normal" body temperature. I'm either burning up or I feel like I'm buried in a snow bank. My covers have been piled on, tossed off, tangled and mangled in every way imaginable.

I can't look at any given 8 hour stretch and say I've slept. Instead, I seem to be passing out for a few hours here and there, then rising in a state of discomfort to read, cruise the internet, or jot out strange notes on the pad by my bedside concerning the plot for my third Bitterwood book. Snippets of dialogue keep popping into my head. Bitterwood burns a library in one scene (the sky-dragons have a love of libraries and books). Jandra is shocked. Bitterwood growls, "No good has ever come to this world by a book." Given his backstory of having been indoctrinated by the Bible-toting prophet Hezekiah, his attitude is understandable, though, I hope, still unnerving to the average person reading the book. Bitterwood is an interesting hero because he's so unheroic. In today's culture, it's pretty slanderous to call someone a book burner.

The book I was reading during my fevered tossing was "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. I probably would have ditched it midway through if I'd had the energy to get up and go to the library. It was a bit too much preaching to the choir for me; I already think that all the arguments for the existence of God, or for God's intervention in human affairs, are laughable. The notion that the universe was created for us by a being like us is absurd in the face of the astonishing age of the universe and this world, and the unimaginable size of the universe. Wouldn't an intelligent designer have made better use of his resources? If people are important to him, why put them only on one planet in nine around the sun? Why take 4 billion years to do it? If we took the "argument by design" seriously (which is to say, the universe looks designed, so there must be a designer), then we also have to conceded that human life is just a stray mark on the master blueprints. 99.999999999999999999999999999999% of everything that ever existed has no direct interaction with human life whatsoever.

Still, I'm glad I pushed through to the end of Dawkin's book, because that was where I found my biggest point of disagreement. He argues that it's a form of child abuse to raise children as religious, and especially to teach them about hell and a judgmental, vengeful god. I'm not unsympathetic to his argument. But, my gut reaction is, what's the alternative? If parents believe in these things, how are we to stop them from teaching their children? Pass laws? Take at risk children away from their homes? Then what? Raise them in reeducation camps? 90% of the atheists I know came from religious households. Despite Dawkin's understandable concerns, I just think there's a greater social danger in attempting to intervene in childrearing than there is in letting the children be raised as their parents wish and attempting to change the minds of the adults they become.

Finally, in a completely unrelated topic, I followed the SC primaries this weekend and was happy to see Obama win. I'm not certain I'm going to vote this year; the libertarian party has been decertified in NC. Yet, I'm still following politics closely, and the presidential races for both Dems and Republicans are fascinating to me. On the Republican side, it looks as if the nomination will boil down to selecting a candidate who is disliked by at least 60% of the party. In national polls, none of them are able to pull much above 25%. All face some core of rabid opposition. McCain is loathed by the part of the base that cares about immigration. Romney faces some opposition from religious conservatives who will tell you they oppose him for flipflopping on abortion, but who actually stay home and let Hillary Clinton into office before risking the wrath of God by voting for a Mormon. Guiliani is opposed by this same segment for not flipflopping on abortion and gay rights. And Huckabee, who best represents the core that most strongly opposes Romney and Guiliani, is rabidly opposed by the fiscal conservatives. I really have no idea how this nomination is going to play out. My gut says Romney is likeliest to win the nomination since he's got the most money and can stay in until the last dog is hung. But, if he is the nominee, I predict a third party run by some figure from the religious right that will peel off 2% or 3% of fundamentalist voters, leaving Romney to carry maybe ten states in the general election. (By the way, I do think a Morman could be elected president--but only running as a democrat, since fundamentalist christians aren't as significant a proportion of their base.)

But, I started that last paragraph talking about Obama, not Romney. If history is to be made in this election, and we do elect either a black president of a female president, it seems to me that the more honorable, uplifting historic change would be the election of Obama. His victory would be a clear message that any man, regardless of the color of his skin, can grow up to be president in America. With Hillary, the message simply seems muddier. It seems to imply that any woman can become president, assuming she marries a man who is president first. There are plenty of other female senators. If this was Barbara Boxer as a serious contender, it would seem historic to me. As it is, it seems like not so much that Hillary is going to make history as the first female president, as she is going to be pointing a path toward future strategies for getting around term limits. It's already common in the house for spouses to pursue the seats of departed members. I predict we'll see more and more political couples rise as a two for one deal--Bob and Libby Dole if they were twenty years younger, for instance. The candidate's pick of a spouse will be examined as closely as the pick of a running mate. Indeed, it doesn't matter who Clinton chooses as her "real" running mate. The true second person on the ticket will be Bill himself. This can either be an argument for or against electing Hillary, I suppose.

Free download of DEADSTOCK

Solaris has made Jeffrey Thomas's SF novel DEADSTOCK available as a free download to support the upcoming release of the second book in that series, BLUE WAR. I enjoyed the book last year and think it's worth checking out. The first chapter, which I believe had been available as a free download before now, was actually not the strongest starting point for the book. It makes sense in a logical, cronolical plot sequence as the opening, but is is weakened by the fact it doesn't introduce the protagonist, Jeremy Stake, who's the real selling point of this book. But, now that the whole book is available online for free, you no longer have to trust me on this. Just read the first two chapters. I suspect you'll either keep reading the whole book, or run out to the store and buy a copy. The link to download it is here.

I'm hoping that this is just the first of many books Solaris makes available for free from their back catalogue. Baen Books has been following this model for a few years now, and it certainly hasn't damaged the sales of their authors.

Laura's snow

It snowed today, the first decent snow this part of North Carolina has seen in two years. There was a little dusting of snow once last year, and a smattering of icy weather that sent cars off the road in Raleigh, but I'm not counting those. Two years ago, as Laura was in the final months of her life, we had a really cold winter--but no snow. One of the things she told me she wanted to see that winter was one more good, solid snowfall, something that would drape the world in white for at least an hour or two.

It never came. When it was cold, it was dry. When there were clouds, it was warm. January, February, and March rolled by, and I tried to encourage her, telling her that I'd seen April snowfalls before. But, of course, the only white on the ground in April were the flowers painting the spring fields.

Since then, any time I hear a forecast of snow, I can't help but think of Laura. I tried to be tuned in to her needs. Any time she expressed even a faint craving for some food, I'd hop in the car to go get it. When spring came early, she talked about wanting a new flower bed and her father and I made her one. But, snow was something I couldn't bring her, and it's tough to look out over the blanket of white tonight without feeling at least a little melancholly. This is the kind of snow she wanted to see.

It's a little peace and beauty settling over the world, a little tranquility, at least until dawn. I'm glad I've learned the right way to look at it.

Silent As Dust

My short story "Silent as Dust" went live this week at Intergalactic Medicine Show. It's my own rather stange take on a ghost story, and it is, in my humble opinion, perhaps the finest story I've yet put into print. IGMS is a paid subscription site, but individual issues only cost $2.50. You can read the first 500 words of the story for free by clicking here.

While you're there, be sure to click on the artwork for a fullsize view of the illustration. The detail is wonderful. Nick Greenwood is the artist, and if you follow the link you'll find other illustrations by him. Excellent stuff.

Bedroom renovation

Last year when I moved in, I renovated a lot of rooms, but ran out of time and money before I could work on the bedroom. It was a pretty bleak space. The walls were exposed cinderblock painted white, and the carpet was this dingey gray stuff that looked like it was probably 50 years old.

The white walls...
The bad carpet....

Since I have time off from work to work on the final draft of Dragonforge, I thought I'd go ahead and make a final assault on the place. I had originally thought about putting up more drywall, but while I was looking at paints, I kept noticing that there are a lot of paints made to give your walls a fake stone or masonry texture. I already had a real masonry texture! So, I decided to paint the room a brick color, brown with a hint of red (or, red with a hint of brown). The photo below doesn't really capture the color that well, since the flash makes it too light, and without the flash it looks too dark. But, you probably know what color most bricks are. It's that color.

The floor is laminate flooring I got for .69 a square foot at Lowe's. My roommate Duanne helped me put it down (also, he helped with painting). I'm glad I didn't tackle the task alone, because the laminate was a lot harder to install than it seemed in the store. Since it's locking together on the ends and the sides, you really have to lock in an entire strip at once, which might be possible if you're ten feet tall and have four arms. If my room had been any bigger, it probably would have required three people.

In any case, the room looks much better now than it did. Before it had sort of a prison cell vibe. Now it's warm and surprisingly outdoorsy... the brick color makes you feel like you're on the outside of the house. The room also looks larger.

Unless I put in an oven, this is the last major indoor renovation I'm planning for a while. Now I'll be focusing my energies outside.