The Survivors (Space Prison) and prediction **Spoilers**

As the Beloved and I perused the Falling Rock Café, I ran across a 1960s vintage print of Space Prison by Tom Godwin.  Interestingly, I also ran across a much newer print of it as The Survivors on the other side of the store.  The name rang a bell, though it was a week later while discussing "The Cold Equation" with friends that I remembered why I knew that name.

    I recently heard a person point out that a person born in late 1890s America saw transportation technology advance from horse and buggy to supersonic transatlantic flights and lunar landings.  Yet at the same time, their telecommunications device remained the same rotary-dial telephone service (Thanks, FCC and Ma Bell!  Way to crony!).  Meanwhile a person born in the 1990s saw the end of those transatlantic flights, while telecommunications have advanced to the point that Dick Tracy's wrist communicator is an actual thing.

    I think Space Prison is a product of that phenomenon.  But first, the plot.  Spoilers ahead.  As in, the entire book.

    Earth has gotten into an interstellar war with the Gerns, a race of aliens that are remarkably like humans, presumably due to convergent evolution.  A colony ship is a month and a half away from a new planet to settle and rebuild when they are overhauled by a Gern ship.  Lacking the weaponry to fight back, the ship's remaining officer surrenders.  The Gerns pick who they can use as slave labor and strand the rest on Ragnarok, promising to come back and pick them up to be reunited with their families.  The planet is thoroughly inhospitable with carnivorous critters, a virulent fever, and 1.5G.

    The rest of the book is how the survivors cope and plot their revenge.  It's pretty depressing.  Of the 6,000 or so initial people dropped off, over 1,000 die the first night.  When it becomes clear that the Gerns aren't coming back, the leaders decide that they have the technical skills to build their own ship, as long as they can find sufficient metal ore.

    Unfortunately, there's no metal ore within travelable distance.  They decide that their best bet is to write down all their technological lore--including all they know of Gern weapons and ships--and concentrate on building a society that will be sworn to vengeance, no matter how long it takes.

    Several generations ensue.  The population falls to as low as 250 before the surviving people are resilient to the conditions they are under.  They find iron ore, but it's insufficient for a ship.  It is sufficient to make a basic radio transmitter, but not a hypertransmitter, so they start transmitting their coordinates by basic Morse code, hoping to lure a Gern ship back to ambush and take themselves.

    Along the way, they discover and tame a species of telepathic groundhogs to serve as communications equipment.  They also manage to come to an arrangement with the carnivorous cat-wolves and more or less domesticate them. 

    Eventually, they get impatient and melt down the radio transmitter and the rest of their metals, primarily the old guns, to build a hypertransmitter.  They lure a Gern ship to the village.  The Gerns, expecting a primitive civilization, open their doors and send a small squad out.  The Ragnarokians shoot out the search lights with their crossbows, kill most of the landing party, take their guns, and storm the ship.  Then, they fly to the planet the original ship was bound for.  They take along one surviving Gern officer, who taunts them that they are so outnumbered, they will be easily killed before they can accomplish anything.

    What the Gern officer doesn't realize is that having evolved to live and work in a 1.5G environment, the Ragnarokians can disable the maneuvering safeties of their ship and pull tighter turns than the Gerns can.  The Ragnarokians quickly take another ship, and the book ends with the Gern officer realizing that his species signed its own death warrant by placing humans in a harsh environment that would make them harder.

    Now, the 1.5G thing is brilliant.  I really like how he did that and how it makes an ironic finish to the Gerns' hubris.  

    Buuuuut...

    Something like six generations have passed, and the aliens haven't had a single significant software update?  I mean, in my first 25 years, Apple went from the IIc to the iPad.  This story spans ten times that long, and the aliens' OS is still recognizable from manuals written with charcoal?  Not to mention that while modern firearms are still using the same "put boom powder behind ball" that they were 250 years ago, what really are the odds that a time traveling Revolutionary could pick up a M4 carbine and actually use it effectively while actively under fire?

    When you consider the historical context of the book, though, it makes absolute sense that a man seeing explosive (ba-dum-bum) growth in rocketry would assume that field would continue to advance at a consistent rate until interstellar travel was achieved while looking at the near-stagnant field of computers and assuming they would continue to advance merely incrementally.

    And this is why I enjoy old books, especially futuristic science fiction.  It allows you to look back at the fears and hopes people had for their technology.  Movies do this, too.  The pre-Code Frankensteins had a zombie reanimated by electricity.  In Night of the Living Dead, it's suggested that a returning probe with cosmic radiation is the culprit.  Fast forward to Resident Evil, and it's biotech.  People look at technology that's being developed and assume it's heading in a particular direction.

    And it injects a big old shot of humility into your life, as you realize that the trends people of previous generations thought were clear and inevitable turned out to be completely wrong.  

    Or at least, it should.

    In 1894, the Times predicted “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of [horse] manure.”  But along came Henry Ford.

    On the flip side, in 1954, Lewis Strauss of the AEC said, "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age."  And while some of that came true (especially the lack of famines, thanks to my hero, Norman Borlaug), the plentiful electricity that nuclear energy promised ran afoul of NIMBY.

    Even in my own life, I've seen a technology stall.  When I was a wee little X-Phile, I read a book based around Mulder and Scully taking on mutated nanobots.  It was scary because it was plausible.  But today, nanotech just means engineering macro-level materials on a molecular scale.  The chase for white-blood-cell-sized self-replicating robots to augment (or cripple) the immune system is all but over.  And I think the current freak-out over AI is going to be similar (a cynical man might suggest that it behooves researchers to fan the flames of fear to get grants and entrepreneurs to make wild claims to pump their stock prices).

    This is why real, hard science interpolates, not extrapolates.  When I have a patient result that is outside assay range, I do not simply say, "Well, it's going to be X mg/dL if I draw the curve out that far."  No, I have to dilute the specimen until the value falls inside the curve, then multiply it to get a reliable result, taking into account the significant figures so that I report it to an appropriate level of certainty.  And this is for good reason.  

    I once had a CRP  that flagged above assay range with a result of 18, which was fairly close to the upper assay limit of 15.  It should be fairly close, right?  But when I diluted it to within the assay range, the result was 12*2=24.  Quite a bit off.

    I'm not allowed to draw a 3cm line with a 2cm ruler, and anyone who does has left the bounds of hard science and has entered the domain of conjecture.  And that's fine for entertainment.  It's even fine for individuals to try to predict the future through their investments.  If a person is wrong, well, he may go broke, and maybe his business, but the damage is limited.  But agitation--or worse yet, coercion--for society at large to do things en masse--can and often does create problems far beyond what the original trend would have.

    Because the same ignorance occurs in societal predictions.  At the time of the American Revolution, the Founders were concerned that the citizenry had not the moral fiber required to build a Republic, and well they might:  in 1774, a visitor to New York noted at least 500 publicly practicing prostitutes.  Almost 3% of adults had parented at least one illegitimate child.

    And then came the Second Great Awakening.

    On the flip side, in 1940, Robert Heinlein wrote If This Goes On--, a work centered around the US's inexorable slide into theocracy.  And with the Depression bringing on a religious fervor that would see religious participation in the US peak two decades later, he had every reason to think that.

    And then came the '60s.

    The human brain is the greatest predictive machine ever made, and computer scientists still struggle to remotely compete with it.  But even it cannot truly see the future, even in large groups (as the 2016 election betting odds saga proved).  

    So if you're reading the news, or even a science journal, and find yourself fearful of the trends and implications, well, it just might be useful to read a good old scifi book.

PSA

Grassy square

Dad:  "Hi, if you're like me, you grew up loving the classic teenage detective series, and you enjoy sharing them with your kids.  But recently, my daughter expressed concern with how often Nancy spends 'blacked out'."

Camera pulls back to show outside of gothic asylum

Dad:  "That's why I was so glad to learn about the Adolescent Literary Detective Concussion Research Institute and Assisted Living Center in Bayport."

Camera cuts to lobby

FWD: "Hello, I'm Franklin W. Dixon."

CK: "And I'm Carolyn Keene. Over the years, we've chronicled the many adventures of your beloved literary detectives, and we trust that they've provided hours of quality reading."

FWD: "But today, Frank, Joe, Nancy, Biff, Ned, Chet, Bess, and the rest of the gang need your help."

CK: "While much research has been done in the sports fields on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the danger to fictional teenage detectives has been largely ignored."

FWD:  "And while we all know the dangers of concussions, even getting choked out or suffocated can cause permanent hypoxic brain injury."

CK: "And that doesn't even begin to include the number of poisonings!"

FWD:  "Indeed. And victims rarely seek prompt, definitive medical attention--even when the chronological setting allows for CT scans and MRIs."

CK:  "And all this impact on young, developing brains.  And more:  chronic chloroform exposure causes cancer and kidney disease."

FWD:  "The average teenage detective will be rendered unconscious at least twice in any three given volumes.  And with upwards of 60 books per series rehash, the sad truth is, most teenage detectives are practically vegetables by the third reboot."

CK: "Everybody complained that I dumbed Nancy down starting with the On Campus series to make her more relatable, but that was really just what happens when you take that many shots to the noggin."

Camera cuts to Nancy in a wheel chair as Ned tries to feed her porridge.

NN: "You know, I always loved Nancy, even during the off and on phase we had during the Files. I was always taking care of her in the old days."

Hand tremors, and he drops spoon.

NN: "But the simple fact is that with 46 concussions of my own, I simply can't do it all anymore."

Orderly in white coat appears to clean up and take over feeding.

NN: "That's why I'm thankful for the Adolescent Literary Detective Concussion Research Institute. Here, Nancy can get the full-time care she deserves after all her work."

Middle-aged man walks by.

NN: "Hey, Chet!"

CM: "Hey, Ned."

NN: "Here to see Frank and Joe?"

CM: "Yep."

NN: "How's your sister? I bet Joe would love to see her."

CM, stiffening: "She's dead, Ned.  She died in the Case Files."

NN:  "She did?  Oh, man..."

CM:  "Yes, Ned, I tell you this every time."

NN, crestfallen: "Oh, I'm so sorry. I forgot again."

CM: "Yeah, well, so did Dixon in the next reboot."

Camera cuts back to Dixon and Keene wearing strained smiles.

CK: "So please donate to the Adolescent Literary Detective Concussion Research Institute and Assisted Living Center today."

FWD: "And help us crack the case on degenerative neurological illness."

Jeep Ownership

Well, it only took me eight months after Theseia's return to get her running.  And approximately 30 minutes of driving to have her back in the shop.

    /sigh

    In my defense, my actual work time was limited.  Most of the time, she sat in an acquaintance's shop while I had other, more pressing tasks to do.  I worked on her when I could.  Two months were eaten up by an electrical issue that was super easy to fix once I figured out my error (note:  cylinder number does not equal firing order).

    Along the way in my troubleshooting, I noticed that the gas was truly filthy.  Even after I figured out that the failure to turn over was an electrical issue, I decided I should probably replace the fuel line and fuel sending unit anyway, just to be safe.

    I was half-right.

    Off to O'Reilly's to order a fuel sending unit.  Except they couldn't order one in-house, so there was no telling if/when they could get one.  Fortunately, my friend who helped repatriate Theseia to her new home had a brand-NIB unit for his Scrambler that he wasn't using any time soon. 

    I dropped the tank, drained it (because naturally, I had filled it before realizing the issue), removed the old unit, and washed out the tank.  I shoved my little ShopVac's hose into the corner and sucked out all the rust flakes.  Then I installed the new fuel sending unit, bolted the tank back in place, and ran new flexible fuel line to the in-line filter I had installed years ago.  Then I called it a day and washed the gas off me.

    All that was left the following trip was replacing the manifold to Y pipe gaskets, and I was ready to drive.  I had the Squirt with me, so I buckled him in and took him across the highway to our home.

    I should have quit while I was ahead.

    Instead, when the Shieldmaiden returned with the girls, I buckled them into Theseia and took them over to the shop for cleanup detail.  They had fun sweeping and playing with the kitty litter.  When we were done, I loaded them back into the jeep.

    At this point, I should probably note that "fixed the electrical issue" is a relative term.  After six years in the woods of da Yoop, the dash is one big mouse/squirrel nest, and the wires are chewed.  I'm currently hotwiring her under the hood to get her started.

    I fired her up, then closed the hood and jumped in the driver's seat.  About the time I was throwing her in gear, the engine idled down and died.

    Well, [redacted].

    I opened the hood and found what I was half expecting:  the inline fuel filter was completely plugged.  Fortunately, I had new cores for the filter, so I cleaned it up and swapped out the core.

    No dice.  There was nothing more than a tiny trickle getting through.  And a rust-colored one, at that.  Presumably, the filter in the tank is clogged.

    Fortunately, it turns out that new OEM-style gas tanks are a whopping $70 on Amazon.  So as long as I'm dropping the tank, I'll just change it out for one that's not (apparently) still shedding rust.

    But, hey, the kids have officially been introduced to how Jeep ownership works!

Flannery O'Connor

 I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

After that I liked jazz music.

Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.

-Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller

With the exception of a four-year stint in New Hampshire, I was born and raised in Tennessee.  All told, I spent the next best thing to 30 years there.  I also spent a couple weeks in Mississippi over the years (one of which was gutting houses after Katrina, so perhaps not the greatest time to be there), and several months working in Georgia.  Despite that, I never understood the appeal of the southeastern US.

    But since this week’s book was Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find and other stories, I can now officially say...yeah, I still don’t get it.  Everything east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixson is still the armpit of America, IMHO.  I’ll stick to the plains, the Rockies, the Great Lakes (except Minnesota), or New England, thank you very much.

    Nor, frankly, do I get Flannery O’Connor.  Not on a visceral level, anyway.  And I really wanted to.  I mean, lots of my favorite authors and musicians love her works.

    Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, she reads like a South Park Goth kid moved into a Cumberland County trailer park and converted to Roman Catholicism.  I’d add “while smoking kitchen sink meth,” but all the kitchen sink meth smokers I ever had to deal with were way more upbeat.  As were most of the oxy addicts.

    Of course, I suspect I’m reading her wrong.  I think you’re supposed to buy the book and read one short story every other year.  Instead of binging them all at once because you have to return the book ASAP because it’s an interlibrary loan.  On further thought, that’s probably why I can enjoy even the more depressing Matt King and Tyler Childers songs:  they’re short and interspersed with other songs.

    Now granted, O’Connor had lupus and was therefore on steroids for much of her career.  More than likely, prednisone, which is known in our household as “[redacted] in a bottle” for its effects on the Beloved on the occasions she’s had to take it for respiratory and joint problems.  Seriously, that [redacted] will [redacted] you up in the head.

    Still, I finished half the book and found myself wanting to shop for black nail polish, mascara, and razor blades.

    I don’t deny her skills.  Her descriptions absolutely nail the human condition in general and the Southern, in particular.

    

    But while I appreciate unflinching looks at the pathologies of existence, I also appreciate hope.  As mentioned in the Chucky review, I’m a bit burned out on nihilism.  Whenever I run across it, I want to just say, “Look, if life’s really that meaningless, then why not just punch out and have done?  Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

    My favorite works are those that not only contain true evil, but plumb the depths of the motivations of the bad guys to make them understandable.  Only then can a work force the reader, listener, or viewer to confront the evil that lies within.  And I like my anti-heroes, too, because seeing a character do the right thing but for mixed reasons also forces one to examine one’s own life.

    But I also like there to be a glimmer of hope somewhere in there.  The idea that we may live in a crapsack world, but that it’s still worth living and working to improve.  That’s why I like there to be actual heroes, even if they’re side characters, because they present something to be aspired to.  As much as I like Harry Dresden, I prefer the books that have Michael Carpenter in them, as well.

    Flannery, on the other hand, never really presents any heroes. On a couple occasions, you think she might finally take pity on you and have one story with a happy ending, but instead, she consistently snatches cynicism from the jaws of optimism. She almost had me going with "Good Country People," but by that point, I was pretty well jaded.

    Of course, perhaps the reason people like her is that they contrast her works with her personal life.  Perhaps the appeal of Flannery O’Connor is that she could take those unflinching looks at human depravity and existential dread and still hang on to a hopeful lifestyle...even with her own health affliction.  She wrote and edited and lectured and worshiped despite her suffering and death sentence.

    I just wish the hopeful part came out a bit more.

Ransomware

Full-time economist and part time troll Walter Block is infamous for arguing that many things society regards as evil are, in fact, good.  Well, maybe not good, but better than the alternative, at least.  Probably the hottest of his hot-button issues was arguing for child labor as better than child prostitution.  In 1976, he wrote Defending the Undefendable and followed it up this year with Defending the Undefendable II: Freedom in All Realms.

    One of the more interesting cases made is that of blackmail.  The basic argument is that under the current system, if someone stumbles across sensitive data, they have only one legal form of profitable recourse:  publishing the data, usually through a tabloid.  As a result, the victim has no options to prevent the data from being disclosed, other than to try to kill the blackmailer.

    With legalized blackmail, however, the victim does have an--admittedly expensive--option.  He can pay off the blackmailer.  Under such a system, if the blackmailer were to disclose the material, or later demand payment in excess of the agreed upon amount, the victim would have legal recourse to sue, based on breach of contract.  Of course, going to trial would disclose the information, but if you’re suing for breach of contract, well, then the material is already disclosed, now isn’t it?

    The other salutary effect that legalizing blackmail would arguably have, especially on public figures, is to make people more cautious what behaviors they engage in.  If it’s perfectly legal to take pictures of a politician and his mistress, well, then said politician might think twice about having one.

    Maybe.

    At any rate, it’s an interesting thought experiment.

    Recently, the Colonial pipeline was shut down by a ransomware attack.  More recently, the country’s largest meat packer, JBS, has also been hit.  Both attacks have caused large-scale economic harms.

    I find this amusing, because a former employer of mine was hit by a ransomware attack.  A coworker making up the month’s schedule downloaded a free Microsoft Word template.  

    Never trust a .docx file.

    The result was that the entire system was encrypted the next morning.  I don’t know how much Bitcoin was demanded, because they didn’t pay.  The IT security guy at the time was exactly the sort of obsessive paranoid you want in an IT security guy, and had the servers backed up every 24 hours to an icebox.  As a result, he was simply able to scorched-earth the servers and reinstall everything.  There was maybe six hours of data lost.

    In my opinion, that is just basic security, and that any large infrastructure firm does not have such a plan in place is frankly guilty of malpractice.  If a tiny [redacted] on the [redacted]-end of Nowhere, MT, has an effective plan for ransomware attacks, a multi-state pipeline should, too.

    Colonial reportedly paid $11 million to the hackers to unfreeze the data, the bulk of which has been seized by the FBI.  Of course, anyone familiar with civil asset forfeiture in America knows that the FBI ain’t giving that [redacted] back.  So essentially, Colonial paid $11 million to the FBI to...do what, exactly?  Wreak vengeance on the hackers, I guess?

    Here’s the thought experiment, though:  what if we legalized ransomware attacks?  Up to a certain amount, that is.  Say, $1,000 for individuals, $10,000 for small businesses, and $100,000 for large businesses.

    Now all of a sudden, you can’t depend on the FBI chasing down the hackers and twisting their arm to give you your data back.  Now, it’s all on you to take the appropriate actions to secure your systems.

    And news flash:  it’s all on you anyway.  Sure, if you’re a large corporation whose data lock is going to cause sufficient disruption to get John Q. Public to scream, the FBI will come into the picture long enough to make themselves look like they’re doing something.  But for everyone else, you’re just not worth their time.

    The underlying assumption is that the government exists to provide a credible threat of violent reprsal against evildoers, thereby deterring their evildoing.  But if they did provide that credible threat, then why did the hackers hack?  Now, we can argue whether the threat is not credible due to incompetence, misdirection, and/or lack of resources on the FBI’s part, or that the hackers were just too insane to appreciate the credibility of the threat.  However none of that changes the fact that the threat failed to achieve its desired effect.

    With legalized hacking, however, every hacker would be constantly attacking every major business looking for any hole possible.  As a result, every company would be incentivized to take appropriate steps to secure their data.  And much like how a human’s normal flora outgrows pathogenic microbes, the small-time hackers would likely find those holes before the handful of truly malicious actors do.

    Granted, this is a top-down solution.  And like all top-down solutions, it would likely have unintended consequences.  How would small businesses who can’t afford a full-time IT staff get by?  What if a large corporation decided it was cheaper to pay a $100,000 ransom every so often rather than $250,000 a year in competent IT staff?

    Of course, this would also open the market for solutions like ransomware insurance and a bigger gig economy for IT security for small businesses.  And while $100,000 is less than $250,000, once word got out that a company had made that decision, it would quickly become a target for multiple hacks a year.  So those problems might be mitigated.  Eventually.

    A better bottom-up solution would be for companies to voluntarily offer rewards and blanket non-prosecution agreements for hackers.  I’ve watched enough DefCon videos to know that contracted red teams are usually hamstrung by their contracts against doing anything truly effective.  A blanket bounty system for anyone, on the other hand, allows the security system to be truly tested by a large body of hackers that aren’t restricted by terms.  I mean, this is basically the entire concept behind open source code for security projects like Signal.

    Again, it’s an interesting thought experiment.

    So remember, kids, get a VPN, back up your data to the cloud and an icebox, don’t open strange emails, don’t look at USB drives you find in a parking lot, and use a USB condom when you’re charging at the airport.  Because you’re on your own.

Review of Chucky

Despite having more time on my hands than just about ever, and despite a long-standing enjoyment of all things schlocky, my movie watching over the past several years has been sadly limited, mostly by budget.

    So it was with great happiness that I noted recently before turning in that Child's Play has gone free on Amazon Prime Video.  So I did what anyone in this situation would do:  got buzzed on boxed wine* and messaged commentary to my fellow horror/scifi friends.  

    IJS, if you shoot a serial killer, and he vows eternal vengeance, then starts chanting, and a bolt of lightning strikes the toy store you're in, the proper response is to blow up the building, then soak what's left in gasoline, set it on fire, then blow it all up again.

    Pretty self-explanatory.  I'm a perennial skeptic of supernatural claims, but still, when one sees something clearly supernatural, one should react accordingly.  Especially if the consequences for failing to do so could be that an immortal killer is going to have a blood feud against you.  It reminds me of a line from my recent read, The Ball and the Cross, by the always-entertaining G. K. Chesterton:

    When James Turnbull saw this he suddenly put out a hand and seemed to support himself on the strong shoulder of Madeleine Durand. Then after a moment's hesitation he put his other hand on the shoulder of MacIan. His blue eyes looked extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful. In many sceptical papers and magazines afterwards he was sadly or sternly rebuked for having abandoned the certainties of materialism. All his life up to that moment he had been most honestly certain that materialism was a fact. But he was unlike the writers in the magazines precisely in this--that he preferred a fact even to materialism.

    Besides, the toy store just got struck by supernatural lighting, and there's a killer's body inside.  You can totally cover up your Bolshevik Muppet act.

8yo [sic] rides around on the El during school hours, and no one comments?  That's some hardcore free-range childhood.

    We try to free-range our kids.  These days our two girls spend most of their days riding bike at the parks near our house.  They aren't trained not to talk to strangers, though they are trained not to go anywhere with them, nor to take anything from them.  That last part is mostly about our oldest's peanut allergy, though.

    But a 6-year-old boy rides around on the Chicago MTA all morning, on a weekday, gets off in a bad part of town, and no one thinks to maybe ask him where he's from?  Really?

    Then again, it is Chicago.

Okay, the kid gets committed for talking to the doll, and she keeps it?

    I mean, what's her plan here?  Give the doll back to the kid when he gets out of the hospital?  Let's take the naturalistic explanation that the kid is just having a psychotic break.  It was obviously associated with the doll, so maybe at least tossing it in the trash would be appropriate.  Maybe?

    Granted, if she had, the thing could have snuck up on her at its leisure and killed her in her sleep, so I guess it was a good thing she kept it close.  Friends and enemies and all that.

    Also, this kind of goes back to the first point.  The kids claims the doll is alive.  Sure, I can buy that you wouldn't normally believe that, but there were footprints of that size in the spilled flour on the counter where the friend was before falling to her death.  If you'd listened to the kid, you would have seen the flour on the doll's shoes.

    And once she's realized this, the proper response is overwhelming violence.  By approaching the doll hesitantly, she telegraphs that she knows while giving it plenty of time to come up with a plan.  Moments later, even after revealing its true nature, it plays dead (inanimate?) to get her close enough to attack.  The smart move would have been to rush it, toss it in the fire, slam the spark cage down, and torch it.  Right then and there.  To borrow another phrase from classic literature, the slave Demetrius gives his master Marcellus some excellent advice in The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas:

    "When one picks up a nettle, sir, one should not grasp it gently."

That said, cast iron ovaries on her for chasing after it.

    She does deserve mad props for chasing after the thing after it nearly kills her.

I need a trench coat.

    I've always wanted a trench coat.  Probably from watching the X-Files growing up.  There was that short phase after I watched The Boondock Saints where I wanted a pea coat.

This had to be an absolute riot to make.

    I've always wanted to do practical effects for a schlocky movie.  And also stunt work.  Sadly, the closest I've gotten is being redshirted in a novel.  /sigh

How did the couch not catch on fire?

    One of my dad's stories from his time as a USAF medic on a domestic SAC base was of an airman admitted after falling asleep on a couch with a lit cigarette.  It didn't end well.  If an ember can (and often does) light up a couch, certainly a flaming plastic doll can.  I'm gotten burning plastic stuck to my hand before.  That [redacted]'s like napalm.

    On the other hand, I suppose this was the days before CGI, so that was most likely a practical effect, and so there was a real couch that really got exposed to real flames and didn't light up.  But somehow, I can't imagine that a financially struggling single mom has the money for high-end flame retardant furniture.  Not to mention carpet.  Maybe the husband's life insurance policy was that good, but then, why is she sweating the $100 for the doll?

    Also, maybe she should have moved out of Chicago when he died.  Money goes a lot further in rural setting, and it would have prevented this whole mess.

Maybe move one's head *away* from the door the knife is randomly coming through.

    'nuff said

Just a reminder, "when you need it" is not the time to develop marksmanship.

    I mean, cut her some slack.  She has to shoot him in the heart to kill him.  The average size of an adult human heart is 5" tall by 3.5" wide, or 17.5 square inches.  If the heart is roughly proportional to overall size, then with a height of 29", Chucky's heart is 2.27x1.59" or approximately 3.59 square inches.  That's roughly half the surface area of a credit card.  And it's moving.

    But the point still stands that having some more practice in would have helped tremendously.  That or a shotgun.

    Then again, she's in Chicago.  Just knowing how to get one shot off and hitting with it is doing pretty good.  Which brings me to the next observation:

Also, it is a cautionary tale of firearm maintenance.

    The wounded detective gives her his ankle gun to go after Chucky.  She gets a round off, hitting Chucky in the leg, but the gun jams before she can fire again.  Now, obviously, the aforementioned training time would have been helpful, assuming she had spent some of it on practicing immediate action drills.  And maybe she was limp-wristing the gun.

    But I think a more likely explanation is that the detective probably didn't maintain his firearm properly.  It's his ankle gun, after all.  A small pistol that is meant to be carried often and fired seldom.  It probably hasn't been cleaned in forever.

One of those animal control nooses-on-a-stick would certainly have been handy.

    Chucky if far stronger than your average doll.  He's able to stab a kitchen knife through an interior door.  That said, when engaged in hand-to-hand combat, the protagonists repeatedly overpower him.  He does appear to still be subject to standard physics.  He's easily flung across entire rooms.  His only kills are by ambush.

    Most importantly, he does not appear to possess (ba-dum-bum) any shape shifting abilities that would allow him to lengthen his arms.  This movie would have been very short if instead of the detective, the hero was the local dog catcher.

    Or call LawDog.

I will say, I appreciate the 1980s main-characters-survive optimism.  Refreshing change from 2000s everyone-dies nihilism.

    Probably the biggest reason I gave up watching horror movies is the 21st century's obsession with "artistic" angsty endings where either everybody dies or if they don't, are subjugated into the evil they are fighting (looking at you, Midnight Meat Train).  In the 20th century--with notable exceptions like the original Night of the Living Dead--at least some of the protagonists would overcome the antagonist.  Sure, plenty of people would get killed, but there was always the final girl who would outsmart the killer and banish him.

    I think I blame Shrek.  Shrek made it cool to subvert norms, and now every film feels the need to.  Which is stupid, because that just makes a new norm.  So now, I'm looking forward to a new crop of films that subvert the subversion and once again...y'know, let the hero(es) win.  

    I just hope I don't have to wait until the 22nd century.

*Don't judge:  it's been a rough year.

Meet in the Middle

    The latest Jeep ad for the SuperbOwl is all about meeting in the middle.

    About that.

    I find it fascinating and heartwarming that they chose a 1980 CJ5.  Theseia is a 1976 CJ7, but I would have gotten a CJ5 myself for the shorter wheelbase if my legs weren't too long to fit behind the wheel.  As my kids are all on the smallish end of the height scale, though, I may still be able to buy some for them.

    So let's talk about the classic Jeep and why it's an excellent pick for a vehicle to represent America.

    The Jeep transcends parties and political ideologies.  While obviously not an AMC CJ, FDR was often photographed in Jeeps throughout WWII:

    But of course, his near polar opposite, Reagan, was also a Jeep fan.

    And beyond politics to the larger culture, the classic jeep was just as at home getting muddy on a trail with a coal-mining redneck behind the wheel as it was carrying some hippie and his surfboard to the beach.  This guy

and this guy

probably don't have a whole heck of a lot in common, but I'd bet a considerable sum that if they passed each other on the road, they'd both wave.  Unless in the past near-decade that Theseia has been down, Jeep culture has become another tragedy of the politicization of everything good and holy.

    The Jeep has always been a canvas its owners project their own interests onto.  Some more advisable than others.

    Theseia has always been intended to be a middle-of-the-road all-purpose Jeep.  I'm not going to make her a crawler, but she does have a good set of 33"s on her, and until the anti-reverse went out on her old Warn, she sported a decent off-road recovery kit.  She's a jack-of-all-trades jeep, reflecting my generalist attitude toward life.

    I think generalism is the soul of the Jeep, though.  My dad always told me that his Baja Bug could go places his CJ5 couldn't.  And then, of course, there's the Toyota FJ which famously "Out-Jeeped the Jeep."  There's always the Blazer, Bronco, and Scout snobs lurking around the trail to tell you all about how those are better, too.  And, well, they're right to some extent.

    But the classic CJ taps into the mythology of America like no other vehicle can.  It's the modern descendant of the horses of Wayne, Stewart, Eastwood et al, after all.  You've got one extra seat to rescue the schoolmarm, but there's no meaningful provision for other passengers.  Yeah, sure the CJ5 put a "bench" in the back, but anyone tho's ever gotten in it knows that's a complete afterthought.  It's one step removed from a motorcycle in its projection of the individualism of the owner.  We can certainly argue the pros and cons of that individualist attitude, but it's undeniably part of the American zeitgeist.  

    What I find most interesting, though, is that the CJ5 Jeep chose to represent America transcending politics is a vehicle that can no longer be made or sold in America, because of politics.  The nanny-state impulses on both sides have resulted in vehicle standards that make it impossible to get such a vehicle to market.  The simplistic engines that endears it to shade-tree mechanics such as myself would never pass emission standards.  And even sacrificing that still leaves you with a vehicle that would never pass safety standards.  As a former EMT, I get it, of course.  Going 75 mph in a tin can with a hard-mount engine and a high center of gravity is just not a good idea.  Theseia is for in-town and off-road use only.  But that should be a personal choice.

    Recently, of course, Mahindra found a way to bring the classic Jeep back by marketing its Roxor as an OHV you could just happen to buy a street light kit for.  It was a brilliant play, tapping into an underserved market.  For half the cost of a modern Wrangler, one could buy the CJ one really wanted, anyway.  There were even aftermarket grill kits that--while careful to avoid the trademark seven-slot grill--closely mimicked the classic CJ look. 

    So of course, Fiat Chrysler promptly sued.  And both parties were silent.  Democrats, because they're in hock to Detroit's organized labor, and Republicans, because "OMG, furrners!"  Eventually, the case was settled, shockingly in the big "American" (Fiat Chrysler is owned by Stellantis, a Dutch company) company's favor.

    So Mahindra responded in a very humorous way...making all new Roxors look like the classics Toyota FJ.

    Well played, sirs.

Food coloring

Recently, the city of Baltimore has announced that it has extended its COVID policing policies indefinitely.  In the effort to control the spread of the virus, Baltimore decriminalized a large swath of previously punished behavior including:

    [Drug] possession

    Attempted distribution [of drugs]

    Paraphernalia possession

    Prostitution

    Trespassing  

    Minor traffic offenses

    Open container

    Rogue and vagabond

    Urinating/defecating in public

They also:

    Dismissed 1423 pending cases considered eligible by COVID policies

    Quashed 1415 warrants for the aforementioned offenses

    Reduce[d] the prison population...[with] the early release of 2000 people

    Of course a Broken Windows Policing Law and Order type looks at such things and immediately assumes the end of civilization as we know it.  But the BWPL&O type are not overly familiar with statistics since various places in Europe have decriminalized such things without resulting in the second coming of the the Visigoths.

    For those who are familiar with recent history, the results out of Baltimore are completely unsurprising.  Violent crime is down 20% over the year and property crime is down 36%.  If it weren't for grocery store brawls and home break-ins over toilet paper stashes, I daresay those decreases would be even greater.

    "But wait," you say, "Everybody was stuck at home, so of course crime went down over that time period!"

    Except crime went up in other major metropolitan centers.  And not just the ones where the citizenry were burning them down in protests.  Baltimore was an outlier among cities of its class.

    This has played out in our family's life as well.  When I was my children's age, I was dealing with parents who were...unwell.  We had lots of rules, but for various medical and mental reasons, the enforcement of those rules was quite arbitrary.  Much like most American adults today who commit by one estimate three felonies a day, we constantly lived at the mercy of "prosecutorial discretion."

    And so, many years ago, my wife and I decided to "decriminalize" all actions except direct defiance (to include lying).  Ever since, we have found that our children have stopped testing boundaries and have turned into generally respectful, compliant kids.  Certainly more obedient that I remember being at their age.

    There is, however, one barrier from describing our parenting style as fully libertarian:  Prohibition.  And not of alcohol or marijuana.  Oh no, something far, far worse:

    Red 40.

    Back before 60% of our family developed dairy intolerance to some degree or another, I decided one day to introduce our children to Strawberry Nesquik.  I remember liking it as a kid more than regular chocolate milk, although I eventually grew out of that.

    So I bought a can of the powder and gave our three kids their first dose.  What followed closely approximated Reefer Madness.  Now I'm not saying that mind-altering substances cause crime.  But I will say that the number of assaults and property damage that night definitely increased over our normal baseline.

    There were tears.

    And of course, the 15g of sugar per serving probably didn't help.  But our kids had no issue handling regular chocolate milk.

    Of course, being a scientist, I insist on the repeatability of an experiment before accepting a theory.

    There were more tears.

    Apparently, there were sufficient tears from enough parents that in 2015 Nesquik removed Red 40 from its strawberry offering, replacing it with beet juice powder.  But, of course, now our kids can't have milk for other reasons.

    And so there remains a ban in our house on Red 40.  Or at least a strict limit.  Because apparently, our kids can' handle their [redacted].

The Cold Solutions **Spoilers**

I finally did it.  Curiosity got the better of me,  and I sprung the 99 cents for a Kindle collection of Don Sakers short stories that included "The Cold Solution."  It's the legendary solution to "The Cold Equations," Tom Godwin's classic 1954 SciFi short that for all intents and purposes is "The Trolley Problem" in space.

    For anybody who never took freshman Philosophy, the Trolley Problem is the classic justification for Utilitarian "Ethics."  You're standing at a switch that can send a trolley down the tracks to run over one person or multiple people.  The "obvious" answer is that you save the largest number of lives.

    "The Cold Equations" frames the problem thusly:  A pilot has been dispatched to carry a load of serum to a colony that is going through an epidemic.  En route, he discovers that a young woman has stowed away to see her brother.  The problem is, the ship only has enough fuel for a safe landing of the mass calculated by the flight crew.  If the young woman stays on board, the ship will crash, killing not only the woman and the pilot, but also all those who will die from not receiving the serum.  

    The colony does not have any ships to meet the relief ship in orbit to transfer more fuel or to take over transport.  There's no space suit, apparently.  The pilot can't jettison himself, because the woman doesn't know how to fly the craft.  Everything in the ship is welded down or essential to flight.

    Now, at this point, anyone with two brain cells will demand to know what the [redacted] kind of [redacted] dumb-[redacted] [redacted] [redacted] morons set up a flight mission with no safety margin?  Numerous writers and critics have pointed out that it would be utterly negligent.  

    Furthermore, Cory Doctorow observed that the characters in a story do not truly labor under the constraints of physical reality, but truly the constraints placed by the author, which is of course, the same complaint that can be made about the Trolley Problem, namely, "It's ludicrous."  In what sort of world are you going to come across multiple people tied up on railroad tracks?  For that matter, in what world is the switch open to public access?

    Of course, my biggest problem with the Trolley Problem is that I figure me and mine are usually the minority getting sacrificed for the majority.  And even if not usually, then almost certainly often.

    But, back to the story, after trying to figure out any way to save the woman, the pilot admits defeat.  The woman talks to her brother, then willingly walks into the airlock.

    For 40 years, people have rephrased the problem, trying to come up with a way out within the constraints of the story.  In 1992, Don Sakers tackled the problem, this time with a young woman as the pilot, and a 9yo boy as the stowaway.  Spoilers in...

5...

4...

3...

2...

1...

    In Saker's take, the pilot stands at the airlock door looking at the boy as he is about to walk into the airlock to be jettisoned, and thinks, "I'd give my right arm to save him."  At which point, she realizes that she has to throw out 25kg of body, but it doesn't have to be intact.  So she amputates the kids limbs and her own legs with her laser sidearm and jettisons them, then crawls into the pilot's seat and lands the craft.

    I really liked the solution because not only was it elegant, yet brutally ugly, it came at personal cost to the pilot.  The story ends with her going to see the boy getting his limbs regrown, but as an adult, it's hit or miss whether the limb regeneration treatments will work, and she may have to use prosthetics the rest of her life.

    I think that's what's missing from Utilitarian "Ethics":  the human factor that can think outside the box and discover solutions, even at personal cost.  The maxim of Utilitarianism is "The greatest good for the greatest number," but who defines what the greatest good is?  The current pandemic is a great example of this.  Many elderly people would rather risk an early death in the interest of continued contact with their families.  Others would rather trade a year or so now for the potential of 5 more years later.  Who's right?  Frankly, that's a stupid question.  The better question is, "Who has the right to tell either of them they're wrong?"  "The Cold Solutions" pilot decides to value her conscience over her own legs.

    And how do those making such judgments even know the outcome is going to be good?  The history of the last hundred-odd years is replete with Utilitarian decisions resulting in piss-poor outcomes.  Once upon a time, they thought it was "good" to purge the newly-founded national parks of wolves, because the wolves killed the ungulates.  But then the ungulate population exploded, overgrazed, and suffered more from illness than when wolves were picking them off.  To go back to the previous example, there's plenty of research to suggest that isolation is more deadly to the elderly than respiratory illness.  Worse yet, the combination.

    Utilitarianism requires actions to be judged by their outcomes, rather than their intent.  And for retroactive study, I'm all for that.  Let's absolutely judge the extermination of the Asian sparrow by the tens of millions of people who died in the famines it actually caused rather than by the tons of theoretical grain it was intended to save.  

    But let us also remember those gravestones when today's policy makers wish to justify their actions by their projected outcomes.

Nephrolithiasis Reviews

So what do you do when you're a hundred miles from home and too wiped out from fighting a kidney stone to work?

    Watch movies.

    Been a very long time since I reviewed a movie, largely because it's been a while since I've watched any.  But with nothing else to do, I pulled up the free movies on my Amazon watch list and binged.

    Zoombies is perhaps the perfect kidney stone movie.  A schlocky B-horror flick from the kings of such things over at the Asylum, it has precisely no real character development or plot.  Monkeys at zoo develop unexplained (beyond "enzyme in their brains") zombifying virus that can somehow infect other species, including birds, but not humans (yet?).  After the unprepared security team fails to contain them, our plucky band of disposable interns must escape the zoo while keeping the animals from doing the same.  Can easily be followed while on hydrocodone.

    Leave No Trace was a much less appropriate choice for the circumstances, but a much better movie.  Kindasorta based on a true story from the '90s, it's about a vet whose PTSD precludes living a normal life trying to raise his daughter in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.  Eventually, the park service busts them, and they have to try to adapt to a "normal" work and house life.  The solution they find at the end is elegant, and the general theme of the movie--that individuals should be allowed to live in whatever way suits them, rather than what society deems proper--resonates with my own experience.

    American Ultra was another good kidney stone pick.  The plot was obvious, the action over-the-top, and Jesse Eisenberg always makes for a quirky lead.  The plot centers around successor programs to the well-documented MK Ultra hijinks those crazy CIA kids did for twenty years back in the '50s, '60s, and '70s.  Eisenberg portrays a sleeper agent dropped into a dead-end West Virginia town (redundant, I know) that gets activated by the program supervisor who can't bear to see him bumped off by her colleague's competing program.  Cartoonish violence and other hilarity ensues.  It did make me want to try some medical marijuana for pain relief.  But I don't think Montana has 18-hour green cards.

    The Silencing was a decent low-budget thriller.  Set in Alaska (I think), the story centers around a classic drunk whose daughter left his car while he was in a liquor store five years ago and never returned.  His penance was to turn his hunting and trapping land into a wildlife preserve in her honor.  Meanwhile, the local embattled sheriff is trying to crack the case of a serial killer who appears to hunt girls for sport.  It also feature the always-excellent Zahn McClarnon (Matthias from Longmire) as, well, basically Matthias from Longmire.

    The Vast of Night was a very well-acted, well-paced, artistic film.  The story of a small midwestern town being visited by aliens on a night in the 1950s, it went all out to capture the atmosphere of post-war/cold-war American culture.  Think a Norman Rockwell painting that a UFO flies into.  Unfortunately, like most artistic films I've seen, the ending seems to be phoned in.

    And not a movie, but I watched the South Park Pandemic Special.  An excellent sendup up pandemic dissonance ("I'm not talking to you until you put on a chin diaper!"), it has everything good about old-school South Park:  biting social commentary served up on a bed of moderately perverted toilet humor.

    So there it is, the playlist for your next case of renal calculli.

Kidney stone 1

Thanks to a childhood spent rehabbing houses for the state of Tennessee with a crew that believed OSHA regs were something to be laughed at, I accumulated some significant potential asbestos exposure.  As a result, I started getting screening imaging about 5 years ago.  While going over my first CT with the radiologist (joys of small-town medicine), he pointed out a bright spot in the lowest slice,which had picked up the top of my kidney.  He assured me that I could go my whole life with it lodged in there, never causing any problems.

    On the CT I had yesterday in the local ER, that spot is no longer there.

    Supposedly, I'm in the worst part.  The stone is located at the junction between the ureter and the bladder.  Once it pops into the bladder, I should have relief (until the last leg, which I'm told isn't as bad).  It's going to pop through any minute now.

    Any.  Minute.  Now.

    In the meantime (16ish hours at this point), I'm getting 30-60 minutes of dull ache between 10-20 minute episodes of curl-in-a-ball, pray-and-swear, try-not-to-puke-up-the-pain-meds pain.  It's like taking the worst balls shot of my life every 30-90 minutes.

    And on the downside of small-town medicine, there's no 24-hour pharmacy, so I'm stuck with a "starter pack" of 6 Norcos to last until Monday morning.

For Want of a Bolt

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For want of a horse the battle was lost;

For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost—

All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.

    This past week, I spent several days putting a new engine into Theseia.  This is the second time I've swapped the engine in her.  The last was about 9 years ago, and was the reason she and I were separated for all that time.

    Theseia is named for the classic philosophy problem, the Ship of Theseus.  For those not familiar:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.

— Plutarch, Theseus

    When I purchased her, Theseia had the classic 258 inline 6 with a 2-barrel carburetor.  Theseia is a 1976 CJ-7, which raises an interesting question, because the 2-barrel carburetor was not introduced in America until 1979.  This means that at the very least, the original intake manifold had been replaced, and more likely, the entire engine.

    That 258 never ran right, so I decided to replace it with a V8.  I (like every AMC Jeep owner) toyed with the idea of a Chevy 350, but I decided instead to stay AMC and put in a 304.  Working for Tennessee Med Tech wages at the time, I had to scrape together all my savings and liquidate an asset to put together the princely sum of $650.

    Recently, I purchased the 360 that I am working on putting in and a backup 304 for $400, so make of that what you will.

    Anyway, the 304 I purchased had apparently been lowered a wee bit energetically when removed, and the oil pump housing was cracked.  I jumped on the Jeep Forum and bought a used one for $15 or so.  When it arrived, I threw it on the engine and promptly went out with my brother for a test drive.

    Unfortunately, I forgot to reassemble the oil pressure relief valve.

It goes right there.

    And so it was that my brother and I blew all the oil out of the engine all over the back roads of McMinn County.  We got about 20 minutes of use out of the engine before it started making funny noises.  By the time I figured out what had gone wrong, the engine was seized.

    I was out of discretionary money (indeed, shortly thereafter, we began to accrue debt after the Shieldmaiden quit her job to stay home with the kids), so Theseia sat.  And sat.  About 2 years later, we finally recognized that we couldn't make ends meet in Tennessee and moved to Montana.  The next year, Theseia made it as far as my parents' cabin in Michigan.  It took many more years until we could arrange to haul her out to Montana, and so she sat and sat some more.  All told, she's been sitting for the next best thing to a decade.

    All for want of 2 minutes' labor.

    Anyway, the new engine is in, though there's still a few more days of work to get it running.  More importantly, the brake system needs to be purged so that she'll stop.  

    But this time, I put the oil in and have been letting it sit for a week to make sure there's no leaks before I start her up.

Puddleglum's Wager

On the topic of Hogfather, I've gone down a bit of a Jordan Peterson rabbit hole recently.  What does that have to do with Terry Pratchett?  Mostly, that I find an interesting similarity in Peterson's arguments that mythologies are useful to controlling human behavior:

    “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

    REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

    "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

    YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

    "So we can believe the big ones?"

    YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

    "They're not the same at all!"

    YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

    "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

    MY POINT EXACTLY.”

    Death here is echoing Plato's "Noble Lie" in The Republic.  His belief is that in order for society to rise above Hobbes's bellum omnium contra omnes, humanity requires myths to stir their aspirations to higher ideals.

   This is similar to two of America's founders (whose identities escape me at the moment).  In personal correspondence, one mentioned that he was contemplating coming out as an atheist.  The other cautioned him against it saying that while he personally agreed, some form of theism was required for a society to function.

    What I find interesting is the comparison and contrast with another, older British work of fantasy:

    "One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things--trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say."

    The comparisons are obvious.  Both authors are suggesting that belief in a higher narrative is required for virtuous behavior, and can instill virtuous behavior, even if the higher narrative is false.  The contrast, of course, is that in The Silver Chair, there is a Narnia.

    Peterson seems to fall between the two.  He seems open to the idea that there is reality to the metaphysical claims of Christianity, but so far as I have seen, he never affirms it.  He seems more interested in the practical outcomes of Christian virtue, i.e. that the world is a better place when people love their neighbors as themselves, and if it's necessary to love God with all one's heart, soul, and mind in order to do so, then let's not dismiss that.  It's much the same as the many psychologists who say that if a ritual will make you feel calmer, then you should use it for its practical value whether there's any objective religious or magical "power" in it or not.

    Of course, as any sophomore logic student will point out, this smacks of appeal to the consequences.  And to the extent that someone makes the statement, "__________ must be true, or else __________ will happen," it is.  It is absolutely irrational to say, "Christ must have risen from the dead, or else holodomor."

    But if one accepts that beliefs result in actions, then consequences are worth considering.  A friend of mine, writing on the occasion of a school shooting, said the question is not "Why does this keep happening?" but rather, "Why does this not happen more often?"  It's a good question.  If one is to throw out all metanarratives that would appeal to a higher story than the individual's existence, then you quickly find yourself in solipsism.  In such a worldview, other individuals are NPCs in your story.  And as a college acquaintance noted about playing Halo 2, "[NPC] teammates are just there as ammo drops."

    Why, yes, he was a bit scary.

Such violence

    During the Lump's short tenure in the local public education institution, she developed some struggles with reading.  Being a small school in a federally-designated "frontier," said institution lacked the resources to provide diagnostic and remedial action(s) unless the child in question was failing to read at grade level.  Since our children all have an abundance of raw horsepower, the Lump was able to compensate, and therefore was unable to get the assistance required to reach her full potential.

    "But wait," one might say, "Aren't their laws in place to require all children receive necessary assistance?"

    Yes, but unless everyone is willing to nationalize all teachers for military-style deployment regardless of the individual teacher's wishes, mandates will never be truly enforceable.  So instead the "necessary" in "necessary assistance" gets redefined to prioritize certain students over others.

    So the Shieldmaiden and I were on our own to troubleshoot the problem.  One of our first steps was to get her eyes checked.  The doc took a look and informed us that our daughter lacked the muscle tone to hold focus at a fixed distance.  Furthermore, she told us that she sees this quite often, because in the American on-size-fits-none traditional education model, reading is pushed at a younger age than is compatible with many children's eye muscle development.

    So we got her reading glasses, and she was suddenly able to read beyond her grade level.  Eventually, the Shieldmaiden and I pulled her out to homeschool.  We really should have done that sooner, and spared her some learning trauma.  Even home, though she still primarily stuck with larger-print books.

    Which brings us to violence in literature.  How?  Because this Christmas, we decided to try to help our daughter level up her reading by getting her a Kindle Paperwhite so she could blow up text and choose fonts to her heart's content.  She's probably swiping 6-12 times per actual page of text, but her reading has exploded.  The first book she tried was Robin Hood. 

    Howard Pyle's Robin Hood.  From 1883.  And written in pseudo-Middle-English.

    The Shieldmaiden and I take our kids' instruction and well-being seriously, and therefore, our movie selection for the kids up to this time has been pretty much 1950's-1970's Disney classics.  As a result, our daughter had only been exposed to the Robin Hood legend in the form of animated foxes.  So as my girls and I sat in the chair the other day perusing our respective books, the Lump spoke up and said, "Wow.  This is violent!"  Followed a few minutes later by, "So much violence!"

    The Dot just shrugged and said, "So?  I read Redwall books."

    The Shieldmaiden's Christmas book was Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett, who observes that all the classic stories are bloody.

Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had read them to children rather than the children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it’s being shed by the deserving*), and then wondered where all the stories went.

*That is to say, those who deserve to shed blood. Or possibly not. You never quite know with some kids.

    Indeed, I'm quite surprised by the sudden objection to violence, given that the girls used to take almost perverse delight in asking for the "gory stor[ies]" during our nightly Bible reading.  Second only to King Solomon's wisdom, and that was mostly because I read the climax in my best John Mulaney impression (NSFW&K).

    Of course, said desire for gory stories predated the short stint in the public education system, so perhaps that's what explains it.  The US public education system is rather notorious at this point for it's zero-tolerance policies against violence.  Indeed, when a kid can get suspended for how he eats his pop-tarts (and judges uphold that suspension), one might be forgiven for calling them zero-sense policies.  So perhaps a year and a half spent in an environment that eschewed any discussion of violence as possibly positive in any context is where this aversion to even thinking of violence (or physical contest, even).

    Of course, the answer is more adventure books.  Though the girls' current shared love of Nancy Drew might not be the best, since she has an alarming propensity for getting kidnapped.

Musing on honesty

Some years ago, my eldest went on one of her many, many book kicks.  In this case, it was the young readers subseries from the A Dog's Purpose series.  These were the halcyon days when she still liked me to read to her.  Not that she doesn't occasionally like me reading aloud to her (mostly from The Elements by Theodore Gray) any more, but these days most of our reading together is done silently, with me looking over her shoulder, the two of us racing to see who can finish the page first.  

    She usually wins.

    Anyway, I have no idea which book it was, but the plot appeared to center around a girl running away from home and staying with a variety of friends.  I say, "appeared," because I only ever read the last few chapters to her.  I picked up with the protagonist overhearing her latest friends' parents talking about how she wouldn't be able to stay with them any longer.  In order to try to get around going home, the girl comes around the corner and tells them that it's okay, because she's staying with her aunt next.

    At which point, my beloved daughter was very puzzled.  

    "I don't remember her having an aunt."

    "She doesn't," I replied.

    "She just said she does."

    "She's lying."

    "Lying?"

    "Yes.  I mean, I haven't read the rest of the book, so I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty sure she's lying to them so that they don't call the police or her parents and make her go back home."

    At which point, my daughter gave me a look that suggested that I'd taken leave of my senses, because obviously, no one would ever knowingly say something that was wrong.  Fortunately, before she went total BSOD from the illogic, she simply said, "Well, I guess we'll just find out," and I went back to reading.

    So the girl goes back to the house, the dog beats up the bully or something, and all ends happily ever after.  At which point, my child looks at me and says, "Huh, she didn't have an aunt."

    /sigh

    A couple of years reading Redwall books seems to have introduced her to the concept of deception, but she still doesn't quite get the concept as a practical matter, as evidenced by a semi-recent incident in which she was asked to cover up some misbehavior by a peer.

    Yeah...not the wisest pick of coconspirators.

    Of course, while it is useful to have a child incapable of deception, and obviously in the vast majority of situations, honesty has a greater level of morality, it does raise an interesting question:  what is the nature of virtue or character?

    Does it exist in doing right or not doing wrong?  Aristotle's Virtue Ethics would say that behavior becomes character, and so a person who cannot understand deceit would be at an advantage in developing honest character.  And of course, Kantian ethics would just fall all over itself celebrating the rigid adherence to "Do not lie."

    On the other hand, does character exist in the absence of temptation?  Most accept that one must be strong to be able to be meek:  it's not restraint to hold back from doing something violent if you lack the capacity to do violence.  And most also accept that if you do not feel fear in the face of danger, you're not truly being brave.  You may just be ignorant of the danger.

    It's a puzzling question that I'm not entirely sure can be sorted out.  For now, I'm just happy that there's one person in the world who will always give me a straight answer.