The Death of Society.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Victor Vasnetsov

The death of a society is an ugly thing. The end of the Roman Empire, first in the west about 476 A.D. and then the drawn-out agonies, lasting well into the second millenium, of the eastern Empire, Byzantium, make this clear.

The Empire stopped expanding and began to contract. Men bemoaned Roman rule. The weight of Roman taxes weighed heaviest on the poor, and made small farms and home industry untenable. The methods of collection were mean and miserable, yet fortunes were made by tax farmers and the Empire lost about thirty percent of its potential revenues to peculation. Garrisons were withdrawn, troops went unpaid. The roads fell into disrepair. When the Britons asked for Imperial assistance, they were released from their oaths and advised that no help could be forthcoming and to look to their own security. Fifty or a hundred years later, Britain—Roman Britain, had ceased to exist and the darkness closed over her bones.

When Barbarians invaded, Imperial authority conceded the loss, adopted them as allies, and eventually as new levies for the armies, and admitted new kingdoms where the conquerors, the Caesars, had once planted their foot.

The past is a foreign country. We may never know what really happened, but scholars have argued that the burden of taxes in the Empire was kept deliberately low, so the aristocrats could siphon off the profits of prosperity. Society failed because too many individuals failed, or simply could not cope with its harsh conditions. The rich got richer right up to the bitter end. There were still aristocrats when Empire died its much-deserved death.

Whether or not economic mismanagement happened in ancient times, it sure seems to be happening now.

We have some modern parallels. When the McGuinty government delisted chiropractic care for ODSP clients, that was a withdrawal of service. Not an enhancement. It caused suffering, it did not alleviate it. When the federal government stopped building low-income housing, that was a retreat. It was a failure of purpose. It was an abdication of responsibility.

State propaganda always stresses the positive. The real question is why anybody would believe it.

Governments are setting up for-profit prisons, and yet the injustices and abuses are well-known. They have private armies now. They’re cheaper than a national standing army in all of its complexity—and cost. They are also not nearly so professional, for what that may be worth.

The modern government would prefer not to take responsibility, for anything under government auspices is subject to close scrutiny, and rightly so. A private company submits to no such scrutiny. In Russia, they seem to get this, that’s why a strong-arm like Putin can make headway.

It’s not so completely alien to them after serfdom and the appalling social load imposed by nobility, which is of course a completely false concept. Merit is conferred by actions and not by birth.

The right to govern is conferred by the people.

When the government of Ontario takes $469.00 a month from 300,000 disabled people and then tacks $100.00 onto the cheques of 114,000 Ontario Works clients, then those disabled people will almost inevitably end up on the street and in homeless shelters, none of which are prepared or can be prepared for the huge numbers that are coming. Our local shelters have maybe a hundred beds between two shelters, one of which is not properly zoned and a thorn in City Council’s side. People are not going to like 500 to 1,000 homeless people a day (or more) being booted out into the streets and their neighbourhoods. The ‘not-in-my-backyard’ syndrome will become downright hysterical. Yet who will speak up for the disabled and help to prevent this tragedy, this ‘social cleansing?’

Not one member of the bourgeoisie will speak out, that’s my guess.

Where the other estimated $1.025 billion the province plans to rip off per month from ODSP clients is going is still a mystery, but in my opinion it will be used to buy another election by bribing Canadians, Ontarians, with their own money—money which the government has just stolen from their own sons and daughters in the name of fiscal responsibility and deficit-reduction. It’s true, ladies and gentlemen—the government believes the disabled can pay off our alleged deficit, last pegged at $11.9 billion. This is much-reduced according to discredited former Liberal Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, last seen furtively boarding a banana boat to Panama.

The disabled should be able to pay that off for you in about a year. Will we get our pensions back then?

Never. Never, and they know it, we know it and you, the reader know it.

Incidentally, the government claims the ODSP and OW programs cost $8.3 billion per year. Their numbers are always untrustworthy, which is unfortunate for Ontarians. This government claims the Conservatives left them a $6 billion deficit, which the Conservatives hotly deny. How are we to know the truth?

Here is an interesting graph. It shows the ratio of debt to capital, i.e. a deficit of $37.5 billion.

My question for this government is first, why can’t you pay it off? It’s your deficit. Also, why in the hell should we do it? We are forced to live within our means, or pay a very steep price. Otherwise we end up in the street.

This government will not live within its means, and it would prefer to shove disabled folks out into the cold rather than accept responsibility for their own excesses, their own failures, and their own abdication of the trust of Ontario voters.

And they go on closing schools, doubling the price of electricity over ten years and the pay of police officers over fifteen years--but then I guess they understand that they are going to need them, especially their political loyalty. This government doesn't just have the power to give 22 year-old cops a starting rate of $156,000 a year, it also has the power to tax. If only it could tax someone other than those least able to pay.

This government should be shoved out into the street. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of Liberal policies in the Province of Ontario.

***

When you think about it, the penny was the last coin made of precious metal. The penny has been discontinued in Canada. It cost 1.4 cents to make a penny.

By calling in all that precious metal, the federal government has made a premium of forty percent on that currency. How badly they needed that money they will never tell.

The Roman Empire devalued its coinage many times over its decline. People knew that, and preferred not to do business with them any longer.

My guess is that the federal government is still in denial, although it should be intimately aware of just how bad the economic picture is. They have fallen into the trap of believing their own propaganda, and have no choice but to lie to Canadians and to themselves.

To tell the truth would be their doom and they know it.

Those Pesky Pen-Names.

Morguefile.

by Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff



I’m in the mood for a rant but I’ll leave that for another time.

Those pesky pen-names. It doesn’t take very long to realize that with four or five pen names, something is going to suffer. One pen name has been publishing stuff every two months or so.

Well, he’s got nothing on the go right now, because all of his time is spent developing the social networks for all those other names. None of them can possibly be as active as he (I) used to be on Twitter, where I used to tweet out relevant links, the sort of thing my audience might be interested in. But now I have five different personalities, who might tweet out to five different audiences. Those audiences require unique content to fit with their needs or expectations. Just finding and reading that stuff before it got tweeted out would be a big enough challenge.

The bigger any one audience gets, the more attention it merits and the more time it takes to serve it well.

I can’t really write one generic blog post and put it up on five blogs. For one thing, the opportunity presented by five different audiences is a stupid thing to waste, and secondly, it might not make much sense in terms of that particular pen-name. My erotica writer would have no reason to blog about the state of the economy, and her audience can find far better stuff elsewhere anyways.

What happens is that I tend to devote so much time to getting each and every one up and running. But then results begin to skew. My erotica writer has almost a thousand friends on Facebook. Yet another pen name has struggled to get a hundred, another has maybe two hundred, and the latest one has yet to get his first half-dozen. All this doesn’t even really ask or answer the question of whether being on a social network actually helps to sell books or any other product.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that it does, and some of the biggest names in the business are on social networks, blog regularly, et cetera.

The erotica writer gets dozens of friend requests a day. She confirms them unreservedly. She gets that chat box opening up as soon as she does something that registers and pops out on the wall. She can’t talk to three or more people at once, every time she goes on there. That one is a source of frustration, and yet she gave away eighty-seven copies of one title from Smashwords this month and we haven’t seen that with any of our other names, at least not for a while.

The analysis is fairly simple. She clicked on someone that was presented to her, and they are from another culture. And they told two friends…

A white woman, a pretty one, is more than they can resist. In their culture, there is restricted access to women, who would never be tagged, ‘available.’ Or worse, ‘single.’ That’s an untouchable person for a respectable young man over there. They have arranged marriages, or strong restrictions of a faith-based nature on the relations between unmarried young people.

You want to be careful who you talk to and how you talk to them in that culture.

Why did she click on that person or type and group of person/people? For one thing, setting up a new pen name needs a new e-mail address to set up on your publishing and social platforms. There has been no traffic through that e-mail address. The pen-name has no friends and family, no contacts, no list. When you skip through that part on Facebook, when opening up a new account, it presents some hurdles. There will be a list of ‘do you know?’ sort of people presented on Facebook. Being young and eager for success, I think she just basically started off by clicking unthinkingly on a few names and now we have to live with the results.

Now, trying to produce new products for five pen-names, with new titles coming at regular intervals, is another challenge. In addition to five blog posts a week, there is the need to create new material.

Inevitably something (or someone) is going to suffer. On the plus side, a couple of the pen-names are selling small numbers of books. One author gave away eighteen books and has not sold a copy on any platform, and as for the newest one, so far nothing. He’s had eleven samples on Smashwords and is linked in one library, which may or may not translate into a sale sooner or later.

Now, Smashwords founder Mark Coker regularly states that Smashwords authors will sell ninety percent of their books through the Premium Distribution Catalogue. My guys have been making it in with no problems although some minor fixes, which I found myself without waiting for the human vetters.

Once all those new titles, ten or eleven of them, dribble down through all the distribution channels, the next challenge is when, or how often, or especially how, to promote each individual author on each individual platform, whether it’s Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or iTunes, whatever.

One of the things I can safely say is that I have never sold a book in Japan, or in Brazil. The challenges of exploiting the distribution system as it exists right now are many, and all we can do is to continue experimenting and of course making new books, new stories and new products.

If a person had a professional or traditional publishing deal, they might be asked to go on social networks, or to blog regularly, or just feel it is a necessity. So I don't think the challenges are unique to any particular approach.

Other than that, the stuff you just read is a hell of a lot better than some stupid old rant.

Right?

Right.

Running pen names.

Setting up pen names.

How to set up a pen name.

My Sexual Memoir.

Spring is in the air and a young man's fancy turns to you-know-what. Even though I'm getting older now, I ain't exactly immune.

Right now I am putting off writing another science fiction novel. I know that I want to do more, but I have reasons not to do it right now.

One thing I really ought to write is another mystery novel. ‘Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery’ sells each and every month in a number of stores, including Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Sony, all of them really. I have one novella, set at free, and two mysteries involving Inspector Gilles Maintenon, i.e. ‘the series,’ which is known for selling long-term better than stand-alone works.

I need to do another one of those this year just to support those readers and build up the brand, in other words Inspector Maintenon.

I write what grabs me at the time. I need a plot. If I had a good science fiction plot I would be more enthusiastic about writing another science fiction book. The mystery is easier, (maybe) as I already know it must be a murder plot and the Inspector will be involved, it will happen in the thirties and all that sort of thing.

Much of the visualization work is done in a sense, and I learn more about the genre, the themes, the era, with every story I write in terms of mysteries. Theoretically that should get easier.

Pen names divide up the works by genre, so readers find it easier to get the books they think they are getting from authors they know and like.

So when I wrote some erotica, I assigned that work to a pen name. When a few books sold, much to my surprise, naturally I wrote more stuff. Now after a time it all starts to catch up. Each and every pen name needs to produce new works on some regular basis—just as I must produce another mystery within the year.

And yet I must write what grabs me, what I have the ideas for, and what I have a plot/no plot for…the reasons are obscure for writing any one thing. But they all add up.

All of a sudden I’m in a bit of a bind. I started something I first conceived of as erotica. It turns out it’s not so much erotica as literary erotic fiction, and it’s also kind of a memoir, and the whole consideration of what pen name to assign the work to or publish it under eventually came up. And maybe the thing isn’t really appropriate to Louis Shalako. And yet who knows? Maybe that’s what I should do. It does bear some thinking about. The problem is that it’s not really in keeping with my thriller/crime guy, nor my erotica girl, etc. It doesn’t fit with any of the existing pen names.

And if I do another pen name, it sort of begs further support if the book sells in any sort of manner (or at all.) How many freakin' sexual memoirs can I possibly make up? (That sounds like a lot of work.) I don’t have all the answers, but I won’t have the story done for a while yet either.

Hopefully it will come out around 25,000 words and then I’ll have my first literary erotica novelette. That would be so cool.

The protagonist is a guy called Devlin and he gets an anonymous note.

As for a title, I simply have no idea, but something will suggest itself.

It usually does.

The Hygiene Effect.

Dr. Al Jenny. Wiki.



The hygiene hypothesis is a simple one. In modern society, we are exposed to far fewer pathogens in the everyday environment.

Over the long term, this causes an increase in the numbers of people reported to be suffering allergic and immunodeficiency diseases.

Our grandparents for the most part grew up on the farm, and worked in the outdoors. Their city-bred counterparts lived in tenements, and less than exemplary conditions in the old country in the case of immigrants.

Our parents took us camping and worked in industry, and lived in cities and towns where the air and the water were poor. Back then, poor people might have had two kids in a room, or five kids all in one bed.

Very few westerners live that way anymore. Kids play indoors, on the computer or game-box.

They camp in a trailer park with showers and working toilets…they’ve never drank water right out of the lake, or from an old-style farm pump in their lives.

One of my fondest memories is of my four year-old brother and the neighbour girl sitting in the driveway eating dirt…just dirt. When I laughed and told my mom, he started crying and it all dribbled down his chin and neck…a priceless memory.

I never wore disposable diapers. My mother used cotton diapers. She rinsed them in the laundry tubs, washed them, put them through the wringer and then hung them up on a line in the backyard to dry in the wind and the sun.

Are these really new diseases? Basically what is being said is that these are not new pathogens—they’ve been around as long as we have, and as they mutate over time our defenses also adapted over time.

But now, in the modern world, there is an increase, and a steep one, in the incidence of these diseases. It’s not a new set of ailments, but it is a whole new environment. If thirty years ago one kid in a hundred was born with blue hair and nowadays it’s thirty-five out of a hundred, it’s not a new disease but a new phenomena…a new vector.

What about your mental health? In the past, weren’t these things talked about or reported, or is there really an increase in this type of health issue in the modern world? That kind of depends on who you ask, and what they are selling, doesn’t it?

I’ll let the reader rely on their unspoken prejudices and provide their own answer, but first I would like to point out, that in the mental health sense, we live in a whole new environment, one that we arguably haven’t come completely to terms with.

Because in the good old days, no one went insane, no one went postal, and no one espoused an alternative point of view…right? Or maybe we’re being exposed to new kinds of psychological pathogens. I’m just saying.

When I write a story like ‘Lenny lays an Egg,’ or ‘The Second Coming,’ or ‘News from the Future,’ there are plenty of people who might object to those stories.

“Those are just crazy stories, Louis.”

Why in the heck would any serious writer do something like that?

I’m trying to poke and prod at your subconscious assumptions, your prejudices, (we all have them,) and your unspoken attitudes. I’m trying to arouse your objectivity, and force your critical faculties to adapt to the modern world, rather than rely on old, outmoded and archaic thinking, which in the end is merely a dogmatic incantation of the most superstitious sort—like how noble royalty is, and how indispensible for local politics in the global village.

I just want you to think about things.

One of the most troubling aspects of modern life is the tendency to try and make everything safe. Everything must make sense, serve a purpose, or turn a profit. Everything must be tasteful and polite, and inoffensive to all comers. It must be politically correct to be valid as art, and to me that’s just so much copulating nonsense.

You can get all that on Canadian TV. Right? It’s all they do.

First, it simply isn’t a credible goal or outcome, secondly, I don’t want any part of such a boring world as some may contemplate, where everyone is labeled for life by their economic status at birth, and all crimes of the mind are punished swiftly, and a difference of attitude is somehow criminal.

That is the difference between art and commerce, I suppose.

It’s like a delicate flower. They come for the honey and spread the pollen. The ideas bear fruit elsewhere and then they take on a life of their own.

I figure it’s my job or something to try and change the world.

Ceremonial Hockey Stick.




Nick5001

 





I often thought if I had to join a repressed minority group, I’d like to be rich.

Sarnia, Sarnia, what a town, gotta love it. Plug in your electric shaver and the streetlights get dimmer.

I wish I was like one of them people who had more money than brains, although some say in my case it would be about eleven bucks. Not worth it, I guess.

People tell me I’m losing weight, it’s not exactly a compliment though. Kinda skinny, you know. I sorta gotta run around in the shower to get wet.

I like thinking, I do a lot of it. Someone told me if I think too much it will wear my brain out. And then I’ll be an even bigger idiot than I am now. I don’t see how that’s possible, you know?

Middle age is a time of maturity. (How old are you, anyway? –ed.) (Fifty-two…and a half. My birthday’s coming up in August and I want blah blah-blah blah-blah blah…)

So like your typical middle-aged man I have the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy trapped in the body of a seventy-year-old. (Let’s not go down that road, keep it light. –ed.)

Um, um, oh yeah, when I was a baby I was so ugly my parents fed me with a slingshot. (Hey!) And, and, they had to tie a pork chop around my neck to get the dog to play with me. (Are you quite finished? --ed.) I have leadership qualities. (Really? –ed.)

People look up to me.

(You ARE unusually tall. Have you thought of getting an earring and tying a red hanky on your head? –ed. )

{Nope. –Louis.)

I saw a TV commercial where they said “Our national reputation is riding on a hockey puck!” (Your reputation is sliding headfirst into your own goal with the puck in your mouth and your stick--!!!) {Let’s not go down that road!--Louis.} (-all fouled up in your equipment. –ed.)

{Whew! Almost had me worried there. --Louis}

(You ain’t the only one. –ed.)

I don’t actually play the hockey. But since it is a part of Canadian culture I keep a hockey stick around the house for ceremonial purposes. It’s not a prohibited weapon.

As a Canadian, I enjoy the Easter, and the springtime, and the long speeches ever so much. It is such a jolly time to dress up in our colourful native costume.

(Which is what? Faded jeans, tacky running shoes and a plaid hunting shirt? -- ed.)

(Yes, --ed, that’s right. Oh, yeah. Don’t forget the dumb-looking hat…)

One more thing, if you are wondering why I don’t have a girlfriend at present, it is because I’m saving up for a real good one.

(You can’t seriously expect to buy a girlfriend.--ed.)

I expect to buy a Porsche. The girlfriend thing will take care of itself.

{And on that note I expect I best be going…--Louis.}

{ expect you best…better…aw, the heck with it. – ed.}

You're using my brackets. (Doh! -- ed.)

“As a man thinketh, so shall it be.” I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. And with a face like that, I’m going to need some kind of an edge. So I’m not really that shallow and superficial. It just sounds that way at first glance.

{God grant us patience…--ed.}

(--yeah, me too.-Louis.)

…AND THERE HE WAS – GONE.

Today’s special bonus link.

Vancouver knows how to riot.