I believe I owe this man a beer

Not wanting to repeat what others have said about this, so the title says all I have to add. Listen to the whole thing and note the lack of booing.

If you voted for Obama...

If you think dissent is only patriotic when you and your ideological comrades are doing it...

If you don't see anything wrong with the government seizing control of pieces of the private sector...

If you would rather limit or eliminate the rights of your countrymen than have to deal with your fear of anyone you can't control being armed...

If you seek to limit the rights of fellow citizens in any way...

If you believe we should give amnesty to illegal aliens and don't care about the dilution of American culture and ideals...

If you think we should surrender any of our sovereignty to a multi-national body...

If you wish those who oppose your views could be forced to simply go along with them...

If you want dissent silenced...

If you are always sure to fashionably badmouth the country of your birth...

If you see no problem with surrendering control of your health, and everyone else's, to the government...

...and have no problem making other people pay for it...

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom,...

...go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Just because I can

Taking a bit of a breather from the Sisyphean task. Probably just for ten minutes or so. Not long enough to write anything terribly meaningful, instead I will spout random facts.

1. There is a loaded .45 next to my computer right now, and has been every time I've written for the last few years. Strangely, it has never risen up and killed anyone.*

2. I can type somewhere around fifty words per minute most of the time. When writing in 'the zone' I can get up into the high sixties. Despite this, when done with a writing session, the day's word count divided by the number of minutes spent working on it usually come out around five.

3. There is a special 'relativity free zone' that follows authors around.

4. According to Luke 22:36, Jesus is a fan of the right to keep and bear arms.

5. The political elite currently at the reins in D.C. really do believe that we are as ruthless as they are. A certain level of concentrated evil tends to distort the perceptions of those present.

6. The Recession is over (yay!), Obama said so, any lingering effects are simply lies and elaborate hoaxes of the Teabaggers. (That's where all the money they were supposed to be paying us went)

7. A Fabrique National 5.7** is the ideal weapon to hunt large, dangerous game.

8. Dissent is no longer patriotic. Update your plans accordingly.

*I'm only admitting this now since Breda admitted to doing the same.

** Notice the itty, bitty muzzle? Yeah, me too.

Entropy wins again?

Much like Africa always does?

I'm something of a history buff, especially regarding the early history of Western Civilization. In my various studies, and frequent arguments with professors, I've noticed a trend. Not some obscure historical fact, I'm sure many Americans are thinking on this very trend right now.

Civilizations are cyclic.

Let's take the origins of Western Civilization, the ancient Greeks. The rose to completely dominate, sometimes, the Mediterranean, had colonies and influence in parts of Africa and reaching up North into Europe. Eventually, there were a few nations that rose and were similar enough to be grouped into Western Civ, but Greece remained at the forefront. There was Thermopylae, Marathon, Troy, and the conquests of Alexander to tell us that no matter what you think of the Greeks these days, their ability to make war was no mean thing.

Then they fell. I'll not get into all the causes of their fall, or that of others, as they are still debated widely, but the root will be the same throughout.

Next rose the city of Remus and Romulus, Rome. Growing from its humble origin as a town astride a trade road, Rome grew to dominate the ancient world. With outposts ranging from the shores of Africa, to halfway up Britain (clearly marked where Hadrian's wall was) and out East into modern day Turkey.

And they declined, fractured, and, finally, fell. Others rose up to take the reins in Europe eventually, but the true successor to Greece and Rome was the United States, starting somewhere around the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine.-

Now, with the decline of national identity resulting from rampant illegal immigration (if you don't know what I'm talking about, take a trip to SoCal), the government trampling the will of the people, seizing control of major industries, attempting to seize even more (no, forget that, from now on I'm calling it what it is, stealing. The word seize when used in conjunction with government action can impart a veneer of legitimacy), stealing more and more of the fruits of our labors in order to fund vote buying schemes and economic power grabs, and actively seeking to suppress dissent(!) many people are, quietly mostly, wondering if we're circling the drain ourselves.

Well, we're not. At least, I don't think so. If another generation or two had passed before our current contretemps that might not be the case. Today, however, as the injuries and usurpations against the free people of this country mount, people are beginning to discover that they are indeed the descendants (spiritually if not genetically) of those who screamed, "Give me liberty or give me death!" and, "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Everywhere, people who never stood up to a bully in their lives are finding steel in their back bones and reserves of righteous indignation they never knew they had.

The people are pissed and are fighting back. Is it possible that the America we all love will never make a return? Yes, it is, but by all that is good and right, the bastards will have more of a fight than they can stomach.

A free people are hard to subjugate. A free and well armed people are a nightmare.

I must be a caffeine/nicotine achiever

I said yesterday that if writing got frustrating, I'd post a blog.* Obviously, that did not happen. I, happily, reached a point where I needed to expand the protagonist's role instead of deleting sections and doing snippet style editing. I actually got to simply write again.

Thirteen hundred words worth...in just under four hours.

I also, in that time, drank a large pot of coffee and smoked twelve cigarettes. That sounds bad enough, but when you take into account that I've been averaging between five and eight smokes a day and trending downward, that's a heck of a lot of cancer sticks.

Oh well, it's been like a month or so since I last 'got in the zone' while writing, so I'm not lamenting too much, but still. Damn.

*I know how silly that looks, but it really is a lot different.

The conquering hero has...

...certainly not returned in the person of yours truly. I haven't been doing any conquering and I'm definitely no hero. Heck, I never did get this new electron box entirely squared away to my liking. I simply decided that I had hit the point where it was no longer worth trying to get my new Vista machine to act like my well and truly tweaked old XP one. I may still, at some point in the future, install a different OS, but I just don't feel like messing with it anymore.

As for the book? Ah, such stories I could tell...which I think is the point. I'm not sure anymore. Somewhere in the midst of trying to write the final battle sequence from several dozen viewpoints, as opposed to the three from the rest of the book, I realized that I had gone way over the thirty thousand word goal I had set for myself. Not just that, but the battle had only just reached the point where the plan falls apart.* In other words, it was only just getting involved. The problem is that each viewpoint character has a role throughout the entirety of the battle, so I didn't want to just skip one viewpoint ahead while the viewpoint is covering another angle.

Well, that particular method of reading about a battle may be the joy of historians attempting to recreate an entire battle, it's not such a good way for a novice author to tell a story. I am sure anyone reading it as it currently is (I'm not even close to finished fixing it) would quickly become bored with reading about the same event, over and over, but from different viewpoints. It only worked in Vantage because; one, each revealed a good bit of new information and two, there were only a few viewpoints, not dozens.

So I've been fixing it in segments, deciding what events can simply be summarized afterward, likely by whatever poor bastards lived through them, what should the protagonist be aware of, what can be revealed by one-off viewpoints (like a narrator or a bad guy), and what to just pare away as excessive (probably a lot).

In other words, not the best of times as far as writing goes. That's okay though, I think I'll maintain sufficient motivation simply because I'm so close to being done. Then I get to start on the next one having already learned everything I did from this one. Hopefully, that'll help me avoid the problem I'm having currently, without which I think I'd be done by now and well into editing.

Oh well.

I have a few posts planned out regarding current events. I might even do them today, but that depends on how frustrated I get with writing. So, if I end up burning up the intratubes, it means I've gotten frustrated. In any event, I won't say watch this space.

*I suppose that could be a spoiler, but I doubt anyone who reads through the rest of book would be even a little surprised. The characters sure aren't.

Poetry Corner, audio-visual edition

I'm gonna break with own poorly established tradition and post an instrumental instead. A recently composed one at that, I believe in 2000, which just goes to show that there are still composers out there doing good work in that area. Howard Shore is another good example, he did the music for the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Anyway, find six and a half minutes to just sit back and enjoy. The name of the piece is Lux Aeterna, but is more commonly known as Requiem for a Dream. Either way, the nom de guerre fits this haunting piece.



It starts out just barely audible and picks up just a bit under thirty seconds in.