I know we disagree on a lot of things. We live in troubled times, and many of you are scared for the future. I can see it in your eyes. I can hear it in your voices.
There’s a very real temptation now to glory in victory, or to swear vengeance and foment revolution. But that only perpetuates a cycle of hatred. The people who opposed President Bush were not all unpatriotic. The people who opposed President Obama were not all racists.
And so, I offer you this. I mean it sincerely.
James Comey will resign.
Obamacare will collapse and be repealed within the year. We will not move to a single-payer healthcare system. There will be chaos in the short-term, but healthcare costs will go down for most people.
Black Lives Matter, which was always a front for the nationalization of the police, will drift into irrelevance.
Washington will stop backing the so-called “moderate” rebels in Syria, and the proxy war will come to an end. ISIS will be swiftly defeated.
President Trump will appoint a special investigator to the Clinton scandals, and HRC will ultimately face justice.
Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court will be another originalist.
Within three months, we will learn that the United States is officially in a recession. When President Trump takes office in January, we will learn that the economic numbers are far worse than the Obama administration led us to believe.
Not all of President Trump’s protectionist policies will be enacted, but enough of them will pass to depress global trade even more than it has already been depressed. This will be compared to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, and Trump will be blamed for the subsequent collapse.
Unfortunately, the global collapse is unavoidable at this point. It is rooted in our flawed post-Nixon Bretton Woods monetary system, which is already coming apart. However, the Left will use the crisis as an opportunity to pin the blame on Trump, and the Republicans will pay a bitter price politically.
Riding the coattails of Trump’s movement, radical nationalist parties will sweep Europe in the 2017 and 2018 elections. This will lay the groundwork for war.
Obama will try to pardon Hillary Clinton or otherwise grant her immunity, but will fail. She may attempt to flee the country.
The Clinton scandals will drag on for several years, ultimately surpassing Watergate in sheer breadth and scope. Democrats will circle the wagons for a while, but the insiders and moneyed interests will abandon her, and she will ultimately fall. This will do nothing to unite the country.
With Clinton gone, the civil war within the Republican Party will resume, and expand to include Independents and even some Democrats. There will be a massive political realignment, and individual fortunes will dramatically rise and fall. The current two-party system will pass through it intact, but the parties that emerge on the other end will have little resemblance to what they were only a decade ago.
In the next six months, DeutscheBank will fail and Germany will fall into a recession. Germany will bail them out, but this will sound the death knell for the European Union. There is a very good chance that the EU will collapse before the Brexit negotiations are complete.
The US economy will temporarily rebound as the rest of the world collapses faster than us, sending capital to our shores. However, neither Trump nor the Fed will correctly interpret the indicators, and will not prepare us for the coming storm.
Within 5-10 years, the dollar will collapse and the United States will default on its debt. This may or may not happen on President Trump’s watch, but he will fail to adequately prepare us for it. The middle class will be utterly gutted, paving the way for the resurgence of the radical Left in 2020 and 2024. They are already sharpening their swords for that day.
We have about 1-2 months of schadenfreude/mourning (depending on which side of the aisle you fall), followed by two years of breathtaking political upheaval. After falling briefly into a recession, the economy will temporarily rebound before SHTF in a way that makes the Great Recession look like a walk in the park.
In other words, the election just gave us four more years to buy guns, gold, and food storage. Never say I’m not an optimist.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
That is all.
A couple of weeks ago, Kobo came out with some new terms and conditions for their Kobo Writing Life program. Under the new terms, the list price for a book (not the sales price) cannot be higher than it is elsewhere.
This throws a kink in the works, since the only way I’ve ever gotten traction on Kobo is by taking advantage of their promotions, like the half off box set sales or the 30% off monthly sales. The problem, of course, is that Amazon has the same clause in their TOS, and if you undercut the Amazon price they will 1) match the lower price, and 2) send you a nastygram threatening to close your account if you don’t change your prices to comply.
(This is also the reason why my books are not on Google Play Books. Google will arbitrarily drop the prices of your books, sometimes setting the price to free without any prior warning, leading to a loss of income on Amazon when they price match your books.)
Until now, the way I’ve gotten around that is by pricing my books a little higher on Kobo so that I can drop the price for the promotional sales. But it does feel a little weird to have the same product at a different price on different sites. If I were a Kobo reader, that would turn me off (hence the change in their TOS).
At the same time, it’s come to my attention that unless your book has an ISBN, Kobo will not distribute your books to the many local ebookstores that they partner with. You can still publish on Kobo, but your books won’t go any further.
In the United States, ISBNs are insanely expensive. If you buy them one at a time, it costs $125 for each one. You can get them as low as $1.50 each, but you have to buy 1,000 at a time.
Until now, I haven’t really bothered with ISBNs. Most ebook publishing platforms don’t require them, and for those that do, you can publish through a distributor like Draft2Digital who will assign you an ISBN for free. The catch is that the publisher on record for the free ISBN will be D2D, but that doesn’t impact your publishing rights at all.
(Print also requires ISBN, but CreateSpace also gives you an option for a free CreateSpace-assigned ISBN, which is what I’ve been doing for print.)
In short, by publishing my books directly to Kobo without providing my own ISBNs, my reach is greatly limited. I can publish to Kobo via D2D and get the extra reach, but then I’ll lose access to the promotions tab, which is pretty much the only way to get my books in front of Kobo readers. But that doesn’t matter anyway, since I can’t price my books on Kobo higher than they are on Amazon, and if I drop the price on Kobo for a sale, Amazon will start sending nastygrams.
So here’s my new strategy:
The biggest downside I can see is that my Kobo royalties will be split between D2D and KWL. To offset this, I’ll have to publish a variety of Kobo-exclusive bundles. Here are some of the ones I have in mind:
So that’s the plan. I probably won’t announce these new bundles to my email list, since most of my subscribers are Kindle readers and I don’t want to be too spammy. But I will announce them here.
…it’s because I sort of have.
First, I went to Iowa to visit family for my birthday. Was gone for an extended weekend, and understandably, updating the blog was not a high priority. But I figured I’d get back into the swing of things once I got back.
Then I took a job that sucked up almost all of my time, making it difficult to write, much less post an update. Perhaps if I had something of a routine before, it would have been easier to manage my time and fit blogging into it. But since the job was only for a week, I figured I’d just soldier through and get back into blogging after it was done.
Then yesterday, I had toe surgery. And a motorcycle accident.
Since I don’t have health insurance (thanks Obama!), getting back onto my feet is going to be tricky. Fortunately, I’ve got enough saved up in the emergency fund to handle both. The toe is healing fine; it’s the shoulder that’s giving me grief. I think I reopened an old injury that never healed properly, which may be good in the long run but really really sucks in the short term.
Point is, I’m all right, but it’s going to take some time before I get back into writing and blogging regularly. Hopefully not too long, but right now, I’m just focused on recovery.
I’ll leave you with the trailer for The Man in the High Castle, which I’ve been watching as I recover. It’s a fantastic show—I highly recommend it.
So for this next story, I decided to buy a premade cover over at GoOnWrite.com. I think it turned out pretty well!
This story appeared in Perihelion about six months ago. It will be out as an individual short story by Monday.
A few years back, I read some advice on a writing blog that said you should never, ever, ever blog publicly about religion or politics, because that would alienate your potential readership. Well, it’s an election year and I’ve already blogged quite a bit about politics, so I might as well go all the way and throw some religion in there too.
I am a devout Mormon. That means that I attend three hours of church on Sunday, strive to make personal prayer and scriptures study a part of my daily routine, hold a priesthood, and worship at an LDS temple as often as I can (about every week or so). It also means that I don’t smoke, do drugs, or drink alcohol, coffee, or tea, and that I practice strict abstinence before marriage and fidelity within. Without getting too deeply into the doctrine, faith in Jesus Christ is at the center of everything I believe and practice.
So why would I say that God is a Libertarian? Aren’t the Libertarians those crazy political fringe guys who like to smoke weed and get the government out of everything? What does a straight-laced Mormon have in common with any of them?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Libertarians basically believe that individuals should be free to govern themselves with as little interference from the government as possible. All of the different schools of libertarian thought basically revolve around the proper role of government in society and where the line should be drawn, but they all agree that the power of the State should be minimal.
Because actions have consequences, however, the only way we can all be free is for everyone to be responsible for their own actions. For example, if a worker does a poor job, his boss should be free to fire him. If he refuses to work at all, he shouldn’t get a welfare check, because that’s forcing other people to support his lifestyle. If a woman decides to be promiscuous, she should pay for her own birth control, because the only other alternative is to force other people to pay for it, infringing on their freedom.
This is why the flipside of the coin of Liberty is Responsibility. If Liberty is the freedom to act without being acted upon, then Responsibility (or the ability to respond) is an essential part of that.
One of the ways that governments take away our liberty is by enticing us to give up individual responsibility for our own life decisions. Gun control? Don’t take responsibility for your own self-defense, just trust the government to take care of it. Mass surveillance? You’re innocent and don’t have anything to hide, so just let those government agencies police themselves. Socialized health care? No matter your lifestyle decisions, health care is a right (never mind that everyone else is going to have to pay for it)!
The LDS church is very opposed to all of this. It teaches that we should all strive to be self-sufficient, or in other words, responsible for ourselves. We believe in charitable giving, but not in the form of handouts. The church welfare system revolves entirely around teaching people how to provide for themselves and, through one-on-one help, bringing them to a point where they can accomplish that.
But the Mormon-Libertarian connection is more than just a practical one: it’s a doctrinal one as well.
According to LDS theology, God is our Father in Heaven, literally. If you call up the Mormon missionaries and start taking the lessons, one of the first things they will teach you is that every human being is a child of God—that God is the father of our spirits, and that therefore we are all spiritually brothers and sisters.
Before we were born, we lived as spirits in the presence of God. As His sons and daughters, He wanted us to grow up to become like Him and inherit everything that He has. But there was a problem. Evil cannot exist in the presence of God, and without experiencing evil, we could never understand or know how to choose the good.
So God proposed a plan. He would create a place called Earth, where we could experience good and evil and learn how to choose between the two. He would make us forget everything from our life in his presence, so we would have to walk by faith. That way, when we did choose good, it would all be on us. We would learn through our own experience.
Inevitably, though, we would make evil choices that would make it impossible for us to return and live with Him. But God promised He would send us a Savior, who would pay the price for our sins and cleanse us of them. This Savior was our elder brother, Jesus Christ. All we had to do was accept His gospel and follow His teachings.
Most of us rejoiced at this plan. It gave all of us an equal chance to learn and grow and become like our Heavenly Father.
But equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of outcome. When our brother Lucifer looked at the plan, he saw that those who rejected Jesus Christ would be damned, or unable to return to the presence of Heavenly Father.
So he proposed a different plan: that God would make him the Savior instead, and that he would save everyone. In order to do that, though, he would have to take away our ability to choose between good and evil. Instead, he would make all the choices for us, and we would never be able to learn from our own experience. He would take all the glory.
God rejected Lucifer’s proposal, because He knew that without the freedom to choose between good and evil, we would never be able to learn and grow and become like Him. So Lucifer rebelled against God, and decided that if he couldn’t have the glory, then no one could. He convinced a third of our brothers and sisters to reject Jesus Christ and follow him instead. That is how Lucifer fell and became Satan.
According to Mormon theology, Satan’s downfall was that he tried to create a perfect world by destroying individual liberty. Sound familiar? It should, because the war in heaven never actually ended. When Satan was cast out of heaven, he took his followers down here to Earth. Each one of us faces that war every day.
Satan doesn’t just want to spread evil all over the world. Evil, by itself, does not defeat God’s plan. No matter how horrible our suffering may be in this life, it will all eventually come to an end, and turn to our glory if we are faithful. Satan knows that the way to destroy God’s plan is to destroy our Liberty, and he seeks relentlessly to do just that.
This is why I believe that God is a Libertarian. He wants us to have the freedom to govern ourselves, because that is principle at the very core of His plan—the Plan of Salvation. He wants us to stand fast in that Liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.
So does that mean that President Jesus would legalize marijuana? Yes, I think he would. Remember, Jesus spent a lot of time among publicans and sinners. He didn’t condone their stupid decisions, but he didn’t condemn them to prison either. Why should we?
Would President Jesus legalize the death penalty? The man who said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”? No—not because capital punishment is morally wrong, but because the State shouldn’t have the power to exercise it. After all, just look at the corruption of the Sanhedrin.
Would President Jesus legalize abortion? Here, I’m going to depart from mainstream Libertarianism and argue that He wouldn’t, except in cases that threaten the health (including mental health) of the mother. By legalizing abortion, we have effectively granted the State to arbitrarily define what is and is not human life. Jesus had a profound respect for human life, suffering even the little children to come to him. I cannot believe that this same Jesus would grant the State that power.
(That said, there are cases where the taking of human life is morally justified. That’s why I believe a President Jesus would make exceptions for cases threatening the health (including mental health) of the mother. But for people who use abortion as a birth control method, who think they should have the right just because they made a bad decision and forgot to wear a condom? No.)
What about taxes? If the man who admonished us to render unto Caesar Himself became Caesar, would He raise our taxes? Remember, this is also the man who said that His yoke was easy, and His burden light. Would He want any of us to be yoked to the State? Even the wealthiest one-percent? I don’t think He would.
Would President Jesus build a wall and make Mexico pay for it? Well, apparently even Trump isn’t going to do that anymore, so enough said.
But you get the picture. If Jesus Christ reigned in power and glory on this Earth (and as a Mormon, I believe that He will someday), His government would look a hell of a lot more libertarian than the government we have today. In fact, it might even be so libertarian that people wonder if His government even exists, leaving room for the unbelievers well into the Millennium (and that, too, agrees with Mormon theology).
So there you have it. The book is blue, the church is true, and God is a Libertarian (just don’t go one-star all my books, please).
So Worldcon 2016 and the Hugo Awards happened over the weekend. It went down about how I expected it would: the award for Best Novel went to an outspoken racist, one of the most prominent female editors in the field lost (again) to No Award, and the TruFans and SJWs made the convention Safe for Diversity by silencing or evicting everyone who did not think, act, believe, or look like them.
In other words, it was a complete crapshow, and I’m glad that they didn’t get any of my money. Instead, I’ve decided to follow in the Grand American Capitalist Tradition by offering you an opportunity to give me your money instead.
That’s right: “Welcome to Condescension,” my Sad Puppies short story, is now available on all the major ebookstores. Check it out!
Worldcon 2016 is this week, and in honor of that, I’m releasing a new short story: “Welcome to Condescension!”
Here is the cover:
If you’ve been following the inanities of the Hugo Awards controversies for the past couple of years (and I can’t blame you if you hadn’t, since most SF&F readers don’t follow the Hugo Awards), then the puppy on the cover should make perfect sense. If it doesn’t, don’t worry: you can still enjoy the story anyway. And the puppy!
To be updated on when this story is available, be sure to sign up for my email list!
If you told the average person that you believed with near 100% certainty that intelligent alien life exists in the universe, they would consider you crazy. Yet the truth is that our universe is so incredibly vast, so full of Earthlike planets, that the odds that intelligent life only emerged here are low enough to be indistinguishable from zero.
Yet the near-certainty of intelligent life is, to most people, an unthinkable truth. It’s something that many people, perhaps even our entire society, just cannot accept.
Our world is full of unthinkable truths. Indeed, our society is built upon them. We can find examples of them in our taboos and social mores, or in the unspoken things that everyone “just knows.” In order for civilization to function properly, there are certain things we must all agree on, such as the idea that all men are created equal, or that we all have certain rights. It’s easier and more efficient to just program people not to accept some ideas than it is to encourage them to examine everything, and hope that truth prevails.
For Americans, one of our most unthinkable truths is the idea that our constitutional rights and freedoms are fragile, and can all be taken away. Those of us who were born in this country don’t realize that the United States is, in many ways, an aberration. We take it for granted that the world around us will continue the way it always has, and that our nation will endure. Anything else is unthinkable.
But how many nations have endured? How many republics have survived the crucible of history? Rome barely lasted a thousand years, and the republic was dead long before the empire reached its greatest glory. The Middle East is full of the bones of dead empires, from the Hittites and Babylonians to the British and the French. Even the most powerful dynasties ultimately fall into ruin, and the periods of relative freedom are the exception in history, rather than the rule.
I got into an argument on Facebook (yes, I’m back on Facebook, though I haven’t decided whether to stay back permanently) where the other person said, quite unironically:
We live in an Era in which our rights are secured by the free dissemination of information; not through the ability to send rounds down range… the fact that you can type those words is proof enough that [you don’t need an AR-15].
As a student of history, this argument strikes me as obscenely absurd. There are numerous countries in the world today that have access to “the free dissemination of information” via the internet just as we do, but are horribly repressive even by historical standards. In China, for example, political prisoners are held in concentration camps and harvested for organs. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS burns people in cages and carries off young non-Muslim girls as sex slaves. In Canada and Europe, you can be imprisoned or fined for merely saying things on social media that the government deems “right-wing.”
The mere existence of Liberty does not guarantee its preservation. The only way that any people have ever remained free is by cultivating a culture of self-sufficiency. Without the right to bear arms, self-sufficiency is impossible, because it forces people to depend on the government for their own self-defense and preservation of their Liberty.
I’ve blogged before about why I need a gun. This post is largely a continuation of those thoughts. It’s unthinkable to us here in the United States that our country may one day fall, but if history is our teacher then that fall is inevitable. It may not come for another thousand years, but it may also come within the next ten.
Truth prevails—even the unthinkable truth.