Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Book Conservation, Daily Kos, Failure, Feedback, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, Guns, Health, Hospice, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Well, we didn’t make the “10,000 downloads before I turn 50” goal. Still about 225 shy of 10k. Which is OK. It’ll give me another reason to celebrate when it happens!
I did get a nice comment over on dKos in the cross-posted diary there yesterday:
Happy birthday Jim, read your book again the other day, liked it as much as the first time. When’s the prequel describing the fireflu and the sequal where we actually have contact?
As I’ve discussed here often, the recovery period from caring for Martha Sr is taking longer than I had initially expected, and as a result I haven’t been as quick to return to writing St. Cybi’s Well as I hoped. But that’s OK, too. I find that I am feeling somewhat energized by crossing the threshold* of turning 50. It has helped that we’ve got a lot of the household stuff packed up and sent off – now my wife and I can start rearranging things here to suit our preferences. It’s funny how little things can clear the slate, allow you that wonderful feeling of starting something fresh. It also gives me more focus and enthusiasm for finishing other projects – the ballistics testing website, working on the book about being a care provider for someone in the last year with Alzheimer’s, even just my conservation work.
So it’s an exciting time, a good time, even with the mild disappointment that I didn’t get all I wanted for my birthday.
Jim Downey
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*Threshold, by the way, was the original working title for Communion of Dreams, playing off not just the impending revelations of the reality of the universe and our place in it, but also on the idea of crossing the threshold of the dimensional boundary layer which has isolated us and therefore explains Fermi’s Paradox. Unfortunately, as I discovered, there were already several uses of that title in SF alone. Ah, well. I like Communion of Dreams even more – it’s more evocative, if less succinct. – JD
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Fireworks, Government, Heinlein Centennial, Religion, Society, Violence
(I was busy with the Heinlein Centennial last year for the Fourth, and didn’t post anything. I thought this year I would post something I wrote two years ago, and I hope you enjoy it.
Happy Fourth!
Jim Downey)
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Thoughts on This Day
One birthday, when I was nine or ten, I woke with anticipation of the presents I would receive. Still in my pajamas I rushed into the kitchen where my parents were having coffee, expecting to get the loot which was rightfully mine. My father happily handed over a small, wrapped box. I opened it eagerly, to find a little American flag on a wooden stick. My father said that since my birthday was July 4th, he thought I would appreciate the gift.
Horror-struck first at not getting anything better, then a moment later at my own greed, I guiltily told my parents that I thought it was a fine gift.
After a moment, of course, my folks brought out my real presents, and there was a fair amount of good-natured teasing and laughing about the little trick they had played on me.
That was almost 40 years ago, and I can no longer tell you what presents I received that day. But the lesson in expectations and perspective my dad taught me that morning always remained with me. My dad had been a Marine, fought in Korea, and was a deeply patriotic cop who was killed while on duty a couple of years after that birthday. I have no idea what happened to that little flag on a stick, but I do still have the flag taken from my father’s coffin, carefully and perfectly folded at the graveside when we buried him.
I’ve never looked at the American flag without remembering what a fine gift it really is and, as so many others have written, what it represents in terms of sacrifice. I love my country, as any Firecracker Baby is probably destined to do. You just can’t ignore all that early training of patriotism, fireworks, and presents all tied up together.
But that doesn’t mean that I am blinded by patriotism. As I’ve matured and gained life experience, I’ve learned many other lessons. Lessons about tempering expectations, living with occasional disappointment, accepting that things don’t always work out the way you plan no matter how hard you work, how good your intentions, or how deserving you are. Still, you learn, grow, and do the best you can. This, it seems, is also the story of America. I believe we are an exceptional people, holding great potential, with our best years still to come. But nothing is guaranteed. We must honestly, and sometimes painfully, confront our failures, learn from them, and move on. The original founders of our country were brilliant, but flawed as all humans are flawed. Some of their errors led directly to the Civil War, that great bloody second revolution of the human spirit. That they made mistakes does not negate their greatness; rather, it shows us our potential even though we are not perfect. They knew, as we should know, that only we are responsible for our self-determination. Not a king, not a God, not a ruling political class. Us.
Today we’ve been gifted with a small box with a flag inside. A token of our history. Let us not take it for granted. Let us not think that the thing itself is more important than what it represents. Let us look on it and declare our own responsibility, our own self-determination.
Happy Independence Day.
Filed under: Book Conservation, Fireworks, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Fairly quick post.
Delivered the first substantial chunk of books to the seminary yesterday – they were very pleased, sent back with me another 85 books. With a little luck, now that I am recovering further I’ll be able to get these done and back to them in 4-6 weeks.
Things are in chaos here, and having my home disrupted this way is extremely stressful. Why the chaos? Because we’re now to the point where my wife and her siblings have sorted out who gets what of Martha Sr’s household possessions and things are getting ready to be moved out. Some has already been taken, but the bulk of stuff is leaving today for California – lots of boxes everywhere, furniture stacked up and ready to load. I’ll be helping with that this morning, then trying to get some order imposed on the mess following. I’ve been looking forward to having all of this resolved, so that my wife and I can really get settled in here, but going through it is just painful.
And tomorrow is my birthday (additional downloads this week have amounted to about 60, so we have a ways to go to cross that 10,000 threshold.) So I may not get much of substance posted for another day or two – though I do have a number of items bookmarked I want to write about.
Well then, have a good weekend, enjoy some fireworks. You’ll hear from me when you hear from me.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, General Musings, Government, NYT, Preparedness, Religion, Society
Here in the Midwest there is a real and significant problem with meth – to the point of paranoia on the part of both the population and government. This has led to laws restricting access to certain precursor drugs and chemicals, reports of environmental damage (meth labs tend to produce some really nasty chemical contamination), and the development of special task forces of local, state and federal police agencies to target meth production and distribution. It is the War on (Some) Drugs on steroids.
So it is fairly easy to see how something like this can happen:
Town Finds Drug Agent Is Really an Impostor
GERALD, Mo. — Like so many rural communities in the country’s middle, this tiny town had wrestled for years with the woes of methamphetamine. Then, several months ago, a federal agent showed up.
Busts began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.
* * *
But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s anti-drug campaign abruptly unraveled after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding-performing minister, a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.
Ah, yes, that is a bit of a problem.
Read the whole piece, and you’ll likely be astonished that this guy was able to pull off this con job for so long. He had no documentation. He claimed that he didn’t need a warrant to enter people’s homes and businesses. He got by on cop-like swagger, a black T-shirt that said “POLICE”, a cop-wannabe car, and a short haircut.
Oh, and on the fact that the local police and government wanted him to succeed for their own purposes.
See, this is the thing. Pesky things like due process and respecting the civil rights of people slows down drug investigations. Or terror investigations. This can frustrate cops at about every level, who see a problem and honestly want to fix it. Along comes someone who says that he has the solution, and it is easy to believe him.
This is what the Wars on Drugs and Terror have brought: a willingness to trust authority at the cost of civil liberties. A willingness to cut corners to ‘meet the threat’. A perception that we’re in a crisis, and only by extraordinary means can we survive.
It starts by recognizing a problem. Then, because identifying and targeting a problem brings with it increased budget and power for the agency/department tasked with dealing with the problem, there is a tendency to inflate the problem, convince the public that the problem is growing, or deeper than initially thought. Things spiral, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. Unchecked, this positive-feedback loop takes on a life of its own, until it culminates in stupidity and horror.
This is the basic mechanism of what happened with the Inquisition. With the Salem Witch Trials. With the Red Scare(s). And now with the Wars on Drugs and Terror.
Think that I am over simplying? Here’s what Bill Jakob’s attorney, one Joel Schwartz, said about how his client got into this mess:
“It was an innocent evolution, where he helped with one minor thing, then one more on top of that, and all of the sudden, everyone thought he was a federal agent,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I’m not saying this was legal or lawful. But look, they were very, very effective while he was present. I don’t think Gerald is having the drug problem they were having. I’ve heard from some residents who were thrilled that he was there.”
That right there explains why and how these things happen. The way to stop them is well known: legal protection and due process. Those mechanisms were developed slowly over the centuries, with notable culminations in Magna Carta, our own Constitution, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We ignore those protections at our peril.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to UTI.
Filed under: Comics, Darths & Droids, Preparedness, Star Wars, Survival, Violence
. . . Darths & Droids previously, and particularly want to point to today’s strip. Why? Because of the commentary:
You can tell inexperienced roleplayers from experienced ones quite easily. Put them in a room that might contain traps or lurking monsters.
The inexperienced players will check behind the furniture, under the rugs, around the walls, etc, etc. The experienced players will check the ceiling. All the worst things are concealed on the ceiling. Really experienced players will have a 10-foot pole handy, specifically to poke and prod the ceiling, just to make sure it doesn’t have any lurking monsters, collapsing sections, more lurking monsters, cunningly concealed deathtraps, even more lurking monsters, rusty spikes that might drop on you if you so much as breathe, and, of course, yet more lurking monsters.
And you can tell veteran adventurers in most fantasy worlds by the way they keep glancing up every few seconds.
Or veteran veterans, for that matter. Or anyone who pays attention to the surroundings. It’s called ‘situational awareness.’
Jim Downey
Filed under: Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
OK, I know that it’s a bit tactless to ask someone to give you a gift. So I’m tactless.
Last time I updated the count on downloads, we were at 9,500 (give or take a few). That was June second. Since then, we’ve had 160 downloads of Communion of Dreams. I don’t know if it is the summer doldrums, or what, but that is a big drop-off from the previous months averages of 500+ downloads a month.
My birthday is July 4th. I will turn 50. And I’m asking for a gift: help get the download count over 10,000. All we need is 340 downloads. I’ve had twice that number downloaded in one day, previously, when someone somewhere posted a link on a bulletin board or some such. So that’s what I’m asking – just help spread the word. If you belong to a SF discussion forum, or blog about books, or whatever, help me cross that 10,000 threshold. It won’t cost you anything, and it won’t cost the people who want to download the book anything. Just a couple of minutes of your time. And I’d appreciate it.
I never really thought that Communion of Dreams would get so much attention – but now that we’re so close to 10,000, it’d be a cool thing to reach that number before I cross a threshold of my own.
Thanks!
Jim Downey
This piece in the NYT yesterday is the perfect compliment to what I was talking about in this post:
Here is the problem with family furnishings: they are never simply stuff. As hard as it may be to dispose of a piece of furniture you bought with the fellow who turned out to be your ex-husband, it is far more difficult to get rid of a piece bequeathed to you by a member of a previous generation, which carries with it not only your memories, but his or hers as well.
Even today, when so many people favor simple, modern décor, turning your back on a grandmother’s tea set or ornate settee can feel like betrayal. Admit to your family you’re thinking of getting rid of such a piece and you’re likely to kick off a family opera, with crescendoing wails of “How could you?” Quite likely, you’ll be torturing yourself with the same question.
Ambivalence and guilt, it seems, are central elements of furniture inheritance, the anchoring pieces around which everything is organized, like the sofa in a living room. Barry Lubetkin, a psychologist and the director of the Institute for Behavior Therapy in Manhattan, has observed this in a number of patients living with inherited furniture they hate. It’s an unhealthy setup, in which people become “slaves to inanimate objects,” he says. “Once you’re defining it as something you can’t get rid of, you’re not in control of your life or your home.”
There are many reasons it happens, he adds, including simple nostalgia. But it is also often connected to a primal anxiety: the fear of disappointing one’s parents.
Ayup. And one of the reasons why I am going to be pretty scarce around here when the siblings come to divvy up Martha Sr’s household possessions this weekend. My wife knows my preferences in the matter, and I don’t want to get in the middle of any family drama.
Jim Downey
*Title taken from a line in the story. Hat tip to ML for the story.
Communion Of Dreams 