Monthly Archives: March 2013

Warning! Political/Social Rant Ahead (as inspired by works of journal-ism I’ve been reading)

In many ways, I’ve sheltered myself from the world at large and all its absurdities. Because of this, some people have mistaken my neutrality on others’ lifestyles as naivety. For example, well-meaning Christian people used to mock me, under the guise of protecting me, for befriending a single welfare mom from our church. I would babysit her children, or give her family rides to medical appointments in my enormous Oldsmobile, or hang out and chat. The government had cut back her food stamps, which forced her to be more particular about how she shopped for groceries. Often, she would call me and ask for instructions on how to cook staple foods. My mother had taught me necessary life skills; her mom hadn’t taught her anything except how to become a single mom.

Who would think Christians would mock somebody for helping a mom with a brood of fatherless children? But that’s what happened. I was declared ignorant, blind, naive. Didn’t I know the woman was a no-good, druggie leech? I didn’t, to be honest. She never left paraphernalia such as crack pipes sitting out, nor did she exhibit the appearance or behavior of somebody who took hard drugs. No doubt, she was a pot smoker, but still I didn’t have the evidence to condemn her for smoking an herb that ought to be legal, anyway. So my stance was one of neutrality. If the woman needed somebody to write a list of her sins, or otherwise to cry at her, “Repent thou heathen slut!” then God would have had to find somebody else to do the dirty work.

Occasionally, the truth I suppress in my soul rises to my brain: my neutrality springs from my desire for others to leave me the hell alone. I want to be in charge of my own destiny and, therefore, I want the same for others. You could say that my libertarian politics are also an extension of my controlling nature. I don’t see any reason why adult individuals can’t make decisions for themselves so long as their decisions don’t involve harming others. This is my ideal. I understand that it’s a simplistic ideal, but I’m not much of an idealist, nor do I enjoy writing complex political arguments. [Liar. Of course I do. I don’t enjoy losing friends or listening to the vacuous silence that follows my political arguments.]

My continued residence in the land of neutrality is frustrating my soul, however. I’m not ignorant. I keep up with sociological forces such as dating lifestyles, as well as population stats. I’m distressed by the libertinism of young people in the dating world today. I’m distressed by the materialism, the seeking after self that leaves no room for bearing the next generation, or that puts off childbearing until it’s too late. Being a libertine is not the same as being a libertarian, although the two may overlap. Libertarians may allow for amoral behavior in their desire to preserve individual freedom, yet if they’re honest, they’ll admit that hedonism is harmful to everyone, especially when there’s no longer a foundation where the chaos can settle after inertia’s set in. For clarification, I already know that hedonistic cycles are normal in the history of civilizations. Don’t remind me, or I’ll send you, through my screen, what my daughter calls my “INTJ death stare”. Our modern nature is no different from that of people in the past, but our society has a glaring problem that societies lacking ready access to birth control didn’t have. We’re quickly losing the stable foundation of people who work together to support their children. Even the most famous historical libertines, such as the Lord Rochester of the 17th C, did their duty to secure a future for the nation by marrying and producing offspring.

Here is a basic truth: If we, as a society, don’t settle down to procreating, we won’t have anybody to care for us when we’re old. We won’t have enough people to keep the economy going or to prop up the welfare state. I may have gone out of my way to shelter myself from the world–I’ve never, for example, lived the dating lifestyle. I’ve been with one man, who happens to be the father of my children. I’m not naive, though. In fact, I’m beginning to think the naivety belongs to everybody else, primarily to those who demand we support the welfare state by providing free birth control to everyone. Isn’t this cognitive dissonance at its finest? Am I wrong in claiming we’ll need a new generation of worker slaves to feed the system?

And what about those who have mocked me? Christians who believe it’s not worthwhile to support a single mom, whose children are now entering the dating pool, have got to possess a level of naivety I’ve never touched, even while sheltering myself from the world and all its absurdities.

p.s. As an afterthought, it’s important to understand that the native U.S. population is not reproducing itself at the replacement level. We’re barely at the replacement level if you add in births by immigrant women. Immigrants, then, are saving us from ourselves, except….their birthrates typically fall below the replacement level after one generation here.

p.p.s As another clarification–due to conversations I’m having on facebook–I’m not against birth control. I, personally, don’t want to have ten children. But can’t we strike a healthy balance? Sigh. Humans don’t tend to. And if they do, it never lasts very long. 🙁

I Cry Logical Tears

The internet has provided me a means to press my finger to the pulse of the nation. I feel it. It thrums like the faint but quick pulse of a dying bird. And that dying bird is speaking loudly and clearly. Our once great nation is for the birds. How shall we peck ourselves back to greatness? That’s a finely constructed question, and I’ll answer it with the most logical tears I hold, which hang suspended from my tear ducts.

The birds speak: Some claim the vast majority of women are too pretty to take part in the political process, ergo our nation’s problems. Some claim the majority of men are too male to take part in the process, ergo our nation’s problems. The rest disparage whatever might be left of humanity–those who are neither male nor female and who are, ergo, the biggest problem. Because of this consensus, it has become imperative to test the incumbency, most notably because the weight of it is leaning heavily on my shoulders, and the pressure is killing me. Don’t preoccupy yourself with determining the best way to remove the burden. A problem solver isn’t what’s needed, or, as a great poet once said, “They’ll need a crane.” But, aside from using large machinery, I have an idea that’s so crazy it just might work.

I have culled a series of questions from our great academies of learning to filter out those who may not be logical enough to rebuild our civilization. Tears such as mine–logical ones–at one time created a picture of society so beautiful that those crying cried louder and longer until some hoodlums came along and smashed the image, leaving the peaceable ones to piece it back together as a complex mosaic of modern art. And so, I’m offering you a sampling of my questions that are assured to filter out those who should no longer take part in politics. Because the greatest logicians of our time have offered them up, they’re foolproof. Essentially, there are two ways to pass the exam: a) choose the correct answers or b) cry beautifully logical tears over the questions.

Sample moral question:

1. If a rooster’s wife is in labour, and he needs to find the fox who sits in the elegant armchair in order to learn to trust and obey what he can’t defeat, what should the rooster do?

a. fly south for the winter
b. sacrifice his wife and baby to the elegant fox
c. nothing
d. earn the size of his comb and be true to his hen

Sample graph analysis question (graph removed to prevent cheating):

2. In the graph, the eating habits of the American people are shown as changing drastically over a period of time between 2000-2010. Vegetable eating has grown at a rate of 10% over ten years, or 1% per year, while consumption of Cheetos has grown at an exponential rate of y=x^2 per year. Sugar consumption has been inversely correlated with the reduction of HFCS, with sugar consumption peaking at 3,000 lbs per person per year by 2009, and flattening over the year 2010. What does this demonstrate about shopping trends?

a. more and more American vegetarians are shopping at Whole Foods
b. more than ever, American consumers are purchasing bio fuels
c. Americans have become health-conscious shoppers thanks to My Plate
d. less filling, tastes great

Sample history question:

3. Read this excerpt and answer the question: “During the feudal system years of Europe, the peasants were happily protected from enemies, thanks to the feudal lords who acted as protective patriarchs of their blessed underlings, who in turn tilled the land in the glow of golden sunrises. The peasants were happy to allow their gracious lords to own all the land and weapons, as well as to sacrifice the best of their flocks for their lords’ feasts.” What can modern men learn from the feudal system?

a. a peasant’s life can be mathematically adapted to a musical score
b. a sword in the bush is better than two birds in the hand
c. a bone well cooked feeds a family of five
d. peasants make the best soldiers

As an incentive for you to share my so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea, a prize package awaits you if you answer all three questions correctly and/or prove without a doubt you cried beautiful tears over the questions. Tears may be collected and sent to my laboratory for analysis at P.O. Box 369 Panhandle, OK, 76902.

Bruno Solar System’s First News Now Reporting on the Planet Sardon

In recent Solar System news, the National Treasury of the Sardonian people has been unsealed, not for its yearly accounting, but for a printing of new funds at a volume never seen before.

“The underground presses were literally glowing with warmth,” our National Treasury correspondent, A. Fraser, reported by interplanetary wire. “The smell of newspaper and ink was overwhelming to the senses. I swooned. It was as if great works of literature were being churned out by the millisecond.”

As we’ve reported before, the Sardonian economy is kept afloat by scraps of official paper fibers over which words are printed in special government fonts. Being an extraordinarily complex system, only three economists understand the full spectrum of values the currency possesses. The average Sardonian simply attempts to keep up with the effect of market forces on those words found most frequently in his vocabulary. For example, the poorly educated comprehend all too well that articles, conjunctions, and other insubstantial one-syllable words are of little value (even if they don’t know exactly what the current low value is), while a confusing handful of one-syllable words contain such historic significance (e.g. tongue, horse, and moon) that they are priceless and, consequently, also of little value to anyone but esoteric historians.

By extension, most middle class men happily languish in workaday jobs to earn two-syllable words, such as balloon, python, and monkey, which suffice as exchange for words that put dinner on the table. However, due to the plebeian uprisings of 3024, the two-syllable word marrow–which represents the staple diet of the people–has been downgraded to the value of a conjunction so that the impoverished may also feed their families by trading lesser-fonted marrow coupons for grade B vegetables.

Why are they printing so many new words? The economic fate of the Bruno Solar System seems to hang on this very question. We asked A. Fraser, and he responded, “For more than a century, the Sardonian women have suffered oppression under the Primogeniture Word Act. They’ve been forced to subsist off strict word allowances belonging to their husbands or supporting male relatives. It’s all color of law, but it’s been practically illegal for women to own words of any kind (for more, see A Social History of Gender Inequalities). After weeks of silent protest by the women, which involved doing nothing but playing hand signal games with their children, newly elected President Grayhall pushed a landmark bill through the senate to give women back their own kinds of feminine words.”

Our interplanetary wire being cut from too much congestion, A. Fraser sent us this late, breaking news by old-fashioned quantum telegraph: While the senate spends the next fifty years defining what constitutes a feminine word–almost impossible because the language, itself, has evolved morphologically in the neuter–Grayhall has, in less than five minutes, met with advisers to finesse his healthcare reform plan. Throughout his private advisement meeting, his personal security officers leaned out the upper story windows at five second intervals, throwing out buckets of newly minted words for the women below to catch in their arms.

“It was beautiful,” one security officer remarked. “They were like blooming flowers with their arms wide open, catching a rainstorm of petals.” After that, the officer shut up because he had used his entire savings account in that one poetic sentiment.

And it appears the government has not only used all its stored words, but has caused a debt bubble as big as the planet itself. Nobody can quite get an accurate figure of words printed, but the estimates have ranged anywhere from 8 billion to 700 trillion, not to mention the words printed in a rush at the end for the sole purpose of repairing the smoking presses, which are estimated at ρ 5,000,000 paper cost.

We tried to contact A. Fraser by wire again for a badly needed verbal update, but were unable to do so. We did receive one last entangled particle telegraph from him, detailing the Chief Governor’s theory that President Grayhall printed all these beautiful words because he hopes the women will use them in support of his healthcare reform plan. While this may seem like a bright idea, A. Fraser teleported, modern Sardonian women aren’t the idealized oracles of ancient times. How could they be? They haven’t had any practice at it. Some men have reported hearing nothing but female voices, tinny from disuse, wasting currency on cupcakes, but I would question such rumors. One man claims he had to lock up his wife in a silencing room because she wouldn’t stop muttering the word chocolate, which is one of the most expensive luxury words available. But, again, that’s, as yet, an unsubstantiated rumor.

Is the Chief Governor’s theory correct? As soon as more information arrives via telegraph or wire, we’ll have late-breaking coverage on the debt bubble, President Grayhall’s healthcare reform plan, as well as a few human interest stories on how the men are coping with hearing the new sounds of their wives’ voices.

First News Now.

I’m a Robot With Super Powers

After yet another sleepless night, I’m having trouble focusing on anything. In my defence, I may have suffered from chronic insomnia since childhood, but I can’t cope with it very well these days. I no longer possess my greatest superpower. My less helpful ones, which include a super sense of smell and super hearing, are still annoyingly intact. Due to my inability to focus, I’m thinking about my book rather than the 40-pg math packet I should be doing. Should is a relative term. It’s a test study packet–not required–but I’m OCD about completing math problems. If I once start, I will disappear into happy robot land and live there until I suddenly realize that, yes, food and drink are somewhat, though not altogether, necessary (especially when one’s husband takes the kids off to the Big City for the day, thereby temporarily removing the need to feed them or, indeed, school them).

My book. Yes, that. I have about 5 fans who keep bugging me to bring this thing to print, and 5 are enough to matter to me. I’m close; I really am. The book is finished and edited as much as I’m going to edit it. No, I don’t plan to hire a professional editor, and owing to that, I already had a young woman tell me (on facebook) that she was adding my name to her list of authors NEVER to read. I was sorely tempted to remind her that my generation, although poorly educated, was better educated than hers was, and, therefore, she would probably not notice the difference. Public education has an inevitable downward spiral effect–and who can one blame for it? One could blame numerous entities, but [this] one won’t.

At this point, I’m waiting on my cover art. I was looking at the completed product yesterday, and I thought it was amazing: woman with dragon peeking around her shoulder. However, a friend who actually knows something about marketing pointed out all the reasons it was wrong for my genre. Sigh. So, at some point in the very near future, Anna and the Dragon will be available for my 5 fans, who don’t happen to be related to me. With my relations added, I might be able to pawn my book off on 10 people. For somebody who gave up writing fiction, I’m certainly stepping up in the self-publishing world. I must be using my super powers to my advantage. Oh, I just heard a footfall….wait….it can’t be! It’s my long-lost childhood projection of a successful Jill, here to help, stepping into town 4 miles away. I must have a few other unmentioned superpowers, being insane not one of them.

In Which I Am the Master of Definitions (and in control of nothing)

They both ate the oysters, but only one cried about it.

I would like to take this moment, in the middle of my Sunday lull, to address a comment from yesterday. I’m going to address it in a sideways manner, however. Although I expect others to be direct, I’m in no way direct in the way I think. To be fair, I try to be direct, but generally deluge people with information, instead. If I’m paying attention, rather than being my usual unaware self, I notice the glassy eyes of the people I’m conversing with. Sadly, I can’t see your glassy eyes and, because of that, have tended to write in the same manner I would speak. I will attempt, then, to be direct in a sideways direction and avoid my secondary mode of attack: rhetoric.

Due to Vox Day’s linking to my blog yesterday, my hits went through the roof. I’m the type of blogger who attracts forty readers a day if I’m on top of my game, so this was a pleasant surprise to me. I wasn’t, however, surprised to find that one of Vox Day’s readers homed in on my biblical patriarchy tag and left me a comment pertaining to that subject. Aside from the problems with reading a comment typed on a blackberry, I had no trouble with the content of the comment, but it left me contemplating, not only the reactionary doctrines of Christians these days, but the reactionary philosophies of men. I’m not going to write about Christian patriarchy right now; I’ve already done as much of that as I want to here, here, and here. Instead, I’d like to address the concept of the alpha male.

I’m not the enemy, as one of Vox Day’s followers called me. I’m a sceptic. I’m especially sceptical of men who waste time in reactionary rather than in fix-it or fight-for-it positions. Both men and women will waste precious energy being reactionaries, but it’s a great irony when eponymous alpha males spin their wheels reacting against the societal construct and, subsequently, fail to change it. You must be aware that the feminist movement wouldn’t have fully succeeded–the movement as we know it today–without the backing of alpha men who could predict the results of it. Pit men and women against each other with affirmative action, etc., and you will divide and conquer a society without having to shout about it. The truth is hidden in plain sight, as it were.

Back up a moment. For those of you who know me, let me assure you I haven’t changed my ideology one bit in recent times. I’m not at all claiming to be against feminism. I’m a full-fledged Enlightenment feminist, willing to support the dignity of women being who they are, and their right to educate and support themselves as the need or desire arises. But, at the same time, I recognize what history has taught us: that large and in-charge male rule is natural law. Because of their strength and aggression, men have risen to the top and have remained there, even in our egalitarian world.

Moving forward again, male rule may be natural law, but not all men possess the ability to be large and in-charge. Hence, we have the term alpha male, and we have a lot of frustrated men who want to be just that and, consequently, they create blogs where they can be ruler of the roost. They make noise and blame the feminist movement for their own weaknesses, which is the same kind of noise powerless women will make, except aimed in the opposite direction. No doubt, Virginia Woolf made noise, and she may have been right to do so. Perhaps, if somebody–a dead relative, maybe–had left her that one room of her own, she would have written better books. It wasn’t actually her fault, you see.

My point is this: real alpha men don’t shout on the internet in reactionary rants. They’re far too busy actually being in charge. In fact, I know a man like that, if I could only remember….oh, yeah, my husband. As I have a difficult time ceasing and desisting from analyzing and defining, I informed him one day that he was an alpha male by stealth. He immediately denied it, as many will do when their tactics are unveiled. And then he agreed that, yes, he took control of what he wanted to control without fuss. But I don’t want or need to control everything, he quietly reassured me. Of course he’s going to insist he doesn’t want that, as long as we’re getting everything out into the open. After all, he wouldn’t want to lose his charm.