Awakenings

     A lot has been written about “the living Earth,” “the spirit of Gaia,” and similar notions. Common to them is a conception of the inanimate as animate: a world alive and aware, not only of itself but of all that dwells upon it and in it. It’s a thesis I’ve touched very, very lightly in In Vino:

     The others hung back as Ottavio directed Fountain to the vat of unclarified Malbec. The Monti vats were made of aged wood bound in black iron bands. They were smaller than those at Broadhead. Their bases rested flat on the villa floor. The room was filled with the aromas of wine, yeast, and fermentation.
     Fountain imperceptibly took command of her host. She urged him close to the vat, took his hands and set them against its surface, moved to stand behind him, slid her arms around his chest, and rested her chin upon his shoulder. They stood thus in silence for perhaps half a minute. Within her embrace, Ottavio Monti trembled as if his strength were being tried to its limits.
     “What is it you feel?” she murmured against his cheek. “Tell me everything.”
     “Wood,” he said. “Rough, warm wood. And...the wine. And...” His voice dropped most of an octave. “And life.” He trembled in her embrace. “It is alive! But the vat is two hundred years old and the wine is grapes crushed to a sauce! How can this be?”
     “All things are alive,” Fountain whispered. “All things are aware. What else do you feel?”
     “I...” His tremor intensified.
     “Tell me, Ottavio Monti.” She squeezed him gently. “It is safe. It is right.”
     “Love,” he whispered incredulously. “Your love. And mine.”
     “All things know love,” she said in the voice of an oracle dispensing a mystical revelation. “And all things respond to love and return it in equal measure. Do you love the wine?”
     “Si, molto.”
     “Then tell it so,” Fountain said. She laid a hand over his heart. “From here, Ottavio. Use any words, any language you like, but tell it that you love it and listen for its answer.”
     The vintner of Villa Monti closed his eyes and bowed his head. Fountain held him snugly.
     Larry, Trish, and Domenico Monti stood transfixed. Ray murmured the Lord’s Prayer under his breath.
     “Gran Dio!” Ottavio whispered.
     He pulled his hands from the vat and dropped to his knees. Fountain released him, ascended the steps to the vat’s rim, took up the dipper that hung there, extracted a cup of wine, and descended. She knelt before Ottavio and offered him the dipper.
     “Taste it.”
     He did. His eyes brimmed over. He handed the dipper back to Fountain.
     “Now do you see?” she said.
     He smiled through his tears and nodded.
     She rose, brought the dipper to the others, and bade them taste it. They did, in turn.
     “Wow,” Larry said.
     “Oh my God,” Ray said.
     “As good as Broadhead’s, maybe even better,” Trish said.
     “Gloria a Dio,” Domenico said.
     Fountain nodded serenely.

     Now and then, I’m blind-sided by the idea. I certainly was when I wrote the above.

     If it’s true, which I doubt, we have no evidence of it. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be true someday. David Brin’s novel Earth toys with that possibility. It’s thematically related to his other “Uplift” tales, in which nonsentient creatures are “uplifted” to sentience through genetic engineering and selective breeding.

     No, I’m not saying I expect it. But the notion itself is appealing. A world alive and aware! What would it do? We worry about extraterrestrials finding us and proving unfriendly. How much worse an enemy would a living, sentient planet be, were it to weigh us in the balances and find us wanting?

     Hey, I’m a writer. Ideas like that one are both the tools of my trade and toys for my imagination. And I have to admit, the idea of uplifting the whole planet is more than moderately ambitious. One must ask who would see it as worth attempting, at what risks and at what cost.

     Anyway, the idea of awakening the Earth itself, calling forth the Weltgeist (or giving it one), found a remarkable expression in melody that I’ve only recently discovered. Hearken to the incredible, angelic voice of Ekaterina Shelehova:

     Did the souls of your ancestors cluster about you as you listened?

     Mine, too.

New For 2026!

What do you think, Gentle Reader?

Making It Clear

     Every now and then, someone will post a rendition of the following sort, somewhere on the Web – typically, these days, at X:

One year ago, I publicly came out in support of President Trump.

I had absolutely no idea how severe the backlash would be.

The Left tried to destroy everything good in my life.

My job. My family. Our safety.

We lost more friends than I ever could have imagined.

Politics is…

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) February 15, 2026

     Please read it in its entirety, Gentle Reader. It’s worth your time.

     The story isn’t a new one, of course. We’ve heard similar accounts before this. The commonalities among them are striking. But the differences among them are just as important. It’s worth noting them for general consideration.

     Matt Van Swol describes himself as “Former Nuclear Scientist for US Dept of Energy.” So we must suppose he has a few working brain cells. Despite that, it came as a surprise to him when those that he regarded as friends before he announced his support for President Trump turned against him as a person. Hadn’t he noticed the pattern? Or did he think it wouldn’t apply to him?

     Then there’s this part:

     There’s a specific kind of grief that comes from realizing people didn’t just disagree with you… ...they re-categorized you as "unsafe." Someone once told me that, in person. "We don't feel safe with you." Like you became a different species overnight.

     Now, in point of fact, Matt’s former, left-leaning “friends” don’t feel “unsafe” around him. They’re not worried that he might hurt them, steal from them, or kidnap their children. As an intelligent man who consciously changed his opinions, the threat he presents is to their assumption of righteousness. That’s the core of the Left’s appeal to its adherents: “Just adopt this political posture and you can preen yourself as being smarter and more moral than those Neanderthals in the Right!”

     This too is part of the pattern. It’s been on display throughout the Twenty-First Century… but one must see it to acknowledge it. And it speaks volumes… but one must hear it to comprehend it. Many people, including some highly intelligent ones, fail to do those things.

     This is not a major new revelation. Thomas Sowell covered it in detail in his masterpiece The Vision of the Anointed. Nearly every other significant aspect of the Left-Right divide flows from it. On June 28, it will be thirty years since the publication of that book, yet far too few people have read it.

     But I don’t mean to make heavy weather of that facet of things. Rather, allow me to note one more thing about Matt’s “transition:”

     We went to church for the first time ever, with our kids.

     Just twelve words. A simple declarative statement. But it says more than one might think upon first reading it.

     Conservatives tend to be practicing Christians. Religion of any sort mixes dubiously with politics, but the correlation between conservatism and Christianity among persons in the Right cannot be denied. Note that Matt and his family went to church “for the first time ever.” That’s a haymaker… but for the full impact one must ask “Why?”

     Allow me a snippet from an old Heinlein story, “The Man Who Sold the Moon:”

     "Ever read Carl Sandburg, George?"
     "I'm not much of a reader."
     "Try him some time. He tells a story about a man who started a rumor that they had struck oil in hell. Pretty soon everybody has left for hell, to get in on the boom. The man who started the rumor watches them all go, then scratches his head and says to himself that there just might be something in it, after all. So he left for hell, too."

     I have no doubt many of Matt’s family’s friends were practicing Christians. But he’d had no interest in such things… until he noted the correlation between conservative opinions, decency and courtesy in treating with others of divergent views, and Christian faith. He saw, and he wondered. Maybe he thought that there just might be something in it, after all.

     It’s happened before, hasn’t it?

     Spread Matt’s tale around, Gentle Reader. It has more punch than many thousands of my own words.

Valentine’s Day

     I got nuthin’, as they say, so have a few words about the saint whose deeds inspired this day:

     Saint Valentine, officially known as Saint Valentine of Rome, is a third-century Roman saint widely celebrated on February 14 and commonly associated with "courtly love."
     Although not much of St. Valentine's life is reliably known, and whether or not the stories involve two different saints by the same name is also not officially decided, it is highly agreed that St. Valentine was martyred and then buried on the Via Flaminia to the north of Rome.
     In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church removed St. Valentine from the General Roman Calendar, because so little is known about him. However, the church still recognizes him as a saint, listing him in the February 14 spot of Roman Martyrolgy.
     The legends attributed to the mysterious saint are as inconsistent as the actual identification of the man.
     One common story about St. Valentine is that in one point of his life, as the former Bishop of Terni, Narnia and Amelia, he was on house arrest with Judge Asterius. While discussing religion and faith with the Judge, Valentine pledged the validity of Jesus. The judge immediately put Valentine and his faith to the test.
     St. Valentine was presented with the judge's blind daughter and told to restore her sight. If he succeeded, the judge vowed to do anything for Valentine. Placing his hands onto her eyes, Valentine restored the child's vision.
     Judge Asterius was humbled and obeyed Valentine's requests. Asterius broke all the idols around his house, fasted for three days and became baptized, along with his family and entire 44 member household. The now faithful judge then freed all of his Christian inmates.
     St. Valentine was later arrested again for continuing to try to convert people to Christianity. He was sent to Rome under the emperor Claudius Gothicus (Claudius II). According to the popular hagiographical identity, and what is believed to be the first representation of St. Valentine, the Nuremberg Chronicle, St. Valentine was a Roman priest martyred during Claudius' reign. The story tells that St. Valentine was imprisoned for marrying Christian couples and aiding Christians being persecuted by Claudius in Rome. Both acts were considered serious crimes. A relationship between the saint and emperor began to grow, until Valentine attempted to convince Claudius of Christianity. Claudius became raged and sentenced Valentine to death, commanding him to renounce his faith or be beaten with clubs and beheaded.
     St. Valentine refused to renounce his faith and Christianity and was executed outside the Flaminian Gate on February 14, 269. However, other tales of St. Valentine's life claim he was executed either in the year 269, 270, 273 or 280. Other depictions of St. Valentine's arrests tell that he secretly married couples so husbands wouldn't have to go to war. Another variation of the legend of St. Valentine says he refused to sacrifice to pagan gods, was imprisoned and while imprisoned he healed the jailer's blind daughter. On the day of his execution, he left the girl a note signed, "Your Valentine."

     [From Catholic Online.]

     Happy Saint Valentine’s Day, Gentle Reader. Be with someone you love today. And may God bless and keep you both!

“Self-Government”

     Just recently, I stumbled upon this:

     If those percentages still hold, then once again we’re in the mystifying position where an overwhelming portion of the country is demanding a policy change that Congress is resisting with every trick at its disposal. Senate Majority Leader John Thune says one thing but does another. Several GOP Senators have pledged to oppose the SAVE Act anyway, so even were the filibuster barrier to be overcome, it probably wouldn’t garner a majority of the votes.

     Of course, it’s not the first time. A strong majority wanted Obamacare repealed; remember what happened to that? A strong majority wants federal taxation and spending slashed, the troops brought home from wherever, and Jeffrey Epstein’s porno-pedo clients hanged. Given those precedents plus what we know about the dynamic of power, the probability is that the SAVE Act – i.e., the act that would require voters to present proof of citizenship at the polls – will die aborning.

     Yes, that will allow the Democrats to steal future elections with fraudulent and otherwise illegal votes. Likely it will also cost the Republican Party both Houses of Congress in November. But so what? This is “the system.” You know, that nebulous but supremely important thing Pam Bondi has told us will collapse if Epstein’s associates are indicted and tried. Apparently that’s what Pam Bondi has sworn to protect.

     It’s out in the open, now. “The system” will defend itself and its allegiants a outrance against the nation itself. There’s no pretense of anything else any longer. “Self-government” has been revealed as a joke, an empty notion that regime propagandists have foisted upon us to pacify us. We are ruled by men whose aims run counter to our well-being, and they don’t care who knows it.

     Don’t mind me, Gentle Reader. I’m having “one of those days.” I’m sure that I’ll soon be numb enough to get back into step with the thing. I’ll get back to writing these screeds as if the details matter. It’s just that for the moment, I can’t believe any of it.

     Have a nice day.

The Fermi Paradox And Other Conjectures

     He who writes science fiction is regularly embroiled in certain arguments about what’s possible, what’s impossible, and what might be coming soon to a planet near you. He who writes far-future SF invariably resorts to “handwavium:” the postulation of imagined developments that would make possible the sort of events he wants to write about. One of the developments that’s frequently hand-waved into fictional existence is very rapid interstellar travel: i.e., travel at speeds faster than that of light.

     When I decided to write Which Art In Hope, I resolved to avoid postulating faster-than-light travel. That first volume of the Spooner Federation trilogy does a little hand-waving – e.g., it postulates developments in the biological sciences that would extend an individual life to span many centuries – but it does avoid the FTL premise. (Yes, the latter two volumes do “go FTL.” That was forced on me by the themes I sought to explore.)

     There’s much talk among SF writers about whether we’ll ever encounter other sentient species, or extraterrestrial life of any kind. Some make probabilistic arguments; others simply say “yeah, we’ll see.” But if our knowledge of physics today is accurate and sufficiently complete, we might never know.

     If we omit all hand-waving, what remains are the speed-of-light limitation and the problem of lifespan. For travel of any kind rests on two factors:

• The risks involved in undertaking that travel;
• The ratio of the time it will require to a human lifetime.

     For creatures with human-like longevity, interstellar travel is a non-starter. Let’s say Smith boards a vessel bound for Proxima Centauri, or any other “nearby” star. He will die en route. Perhaps descendants of his will get there; he won’t. And he will know that ab initio. So what’s his motivation for boarding?

     Yes, Smith could be under the pressures that motivated the Spoonerites. He’d know that he wouldn’t live to see the destination, but he might undertake the journey to perpetuate “his people.” Would any other motivation suffice?

     The enthusiast now waves his hands: “What about suspended animation?” Well, we don’t know how to do that just yet. “What about relativistic time dilation?” That would require propulsion of a magnitude that’s beyond us today and possibly tomorrow. Besides, where’s the reaction mass to come from? Newton’s Third Law can’t be suspended by Congressional decree. So present conditions continuing, Mankind will likely be confined to the Solar System.

     This makes me sad. I’d love for Mankind to “go interstellar.” The adventures our progeny would have are beyond anyone’s imagination. But physics will have the last word. Unless some currently unborn or unrecognized genius can break the lightspeed barrier, or can extend a man’s life to many centuries in length, we’ll be “staying home.”

     But let’s imagine that there are other sentient species in the universe. Might they be equal to the challenge, by virtue of extreme longevity? A species whose members expect to live a millennium or two would look at the matter differently, especially if they could solve the propulsion problem. Yes, it’s hand-waving again, albeit of a different kind, but that desire to believe in interstellar travel, galactic confraternity, and so forth is very strong. Maybe, rather than humans going to them, they might come to us.

     Maybe. The famous Green Bank Equation suggests that there’s life elsewhere in the Milky Way – if we set its variables to the “right” values. But we’re hand-waving again. How would they get here? What would they necessarily be able to do that we aren’t, to make that possible? Given the costs, the risks, and the difficulties, what would their motivation be?

     We don’t know enough to be certain of anything. We don’t know whether there’s a way to slip past the lightspeed barrier. We don’t know whether there are methods of propulsion superior to what we possess today, or whether Man or any other sentient creature is capable of living long enough to survive an interstellar journey. Even if the trip should become possible, we have absolutely no idea whether there’s a reason to undertake it other than sheer curiosity.

     The Fermi Paradox is summarized thus:

     The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.

     That “paradox” is only worth consideration if:

• There’s another sentient species “out there;”
• There are ways to communicate reliably over the intervening distance.

     But even communication over interstellar distances is dubious. Ultra-collimated, ultra-powerful lasers? Modulated gravity waves? Using the resonant frequencies of stars to encode messages? It’s all hand-waving. Physics as we know it today says it won’t happen.

     But what if we “know differently” somewhere down the timestream? What if the lightspeed limitation is just a misunderstanding that some future Einstein will dismiss with a grin and a wave of his whiteboard marker? What if we manage to “cure death,” or extend human life far beyond what’s currently possible? Don’t get me waving my hands. I write this stuff for the entertainment value!

The Pressure

     The technophiles and space-travel enthusiasts are moderately agog that Elon Musk has shifted his focus from colonizing Mars to colonizing the Moon. For my part, I’m pleased. It was always the more sensible first step, if less glamorous. It’s also a necessary one: the Moon is the low-gravity resource base from which to continue on to the rest of the Solar System.

     But questions have arisen, with this one front and center: Why would anyone want to live on Mars / the Moon? A lot of people appear to be entertaining it, which suggests that there’s been a fall-off in Americans’ imagination and drive.

     I can think of two reasons to remove my elderly carcass from this ball of mud:

• The sheer adventure of the thing;
• To live in freedom.

     While I’m no longer of an age or fitness to go adventuring in the classical sense, neither were a lot of the European migrants who populated North America. They went anyway, often entire clans at a stroke. Some of them believed that the choice was between migration and extinction. In the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, for some of them that was demonstrably the case.

     But is that the case for anyone today? Are there subpopulations for whom the hardship of Lunar living would be preferable to remaining in the grip of an implacable fist that’s threatening to squeeze them to death? Perhaps we should ask the dwindling Christian populations of the Islam-dominated hellholes of the Middle East.

     We of the Western nations have begun to sense similar threats. Hostility to freedom is the central forward pressure of the Left. The elimination of all resistance is its aim. And it will never relax or relent.

     Eight years ago, I wrote:

     For a while I was cheered by the rapid development of privately owned and operated orbital transport. It seemed that free enterprise had at last accepted the challenge of taking Man to the ultimate frontier from which the U.S. government had retreated. And indeed, companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have made considerable strides toward more economical (albeit still too expensive for a holiday weekend) access to Earth orbit. Perhaps, in another decade or two, we’d see construction begin on space habitats, and perhaps on some persistent human-occupied installations on the Moon.
     Maybe...but more likely not. The principal customers for orbital access are national governments. It would be in those governments’ interest to squash any private effort to colonize space or any of the other bodies in the Solar System. They could do so rather easily, either by terminating all contracts with the company that tries it or by invoking “national security” laws to forbid the effort altogether. Of those two paths, the latter is the more likely. Any government with a “national security” statute could claim that its “security” depends on not being bombed from orbit – and never mind that the owners of a privately-operated space station would have neither a reason nor an incentive to do so.

     The political dynamic continues to operate in its time-honored fashion. Power still attracts the worst members of our species. Governments are still inherently totalitarian: “Oh no, there’s no law against it. You just have to get our permission. It’s just that there’s a little red tape to get through. Please be patient.” They don’t like competition, and they don’t like for anyone to get beyond their reach:

     On the morning of the fourth day, also, a delegation of high-ranking government officials, including a three-star general from the Pentagon and a gentleman from the President’s office, called on [Spacecraft CEO Theodor] Deane.
     The gentleman from the President s office was brief and to the point. Deane was forbidden to undertake any venture whatsoever in space without the permission and control of the Federal Government. To do so would be a violation of national security equivalent to treason. Injunctions would be issued at once if Deane so much as lifted a finger to put an unauthorized satellite into orbit.
     “Do I understand,” Deane demanded, “that a law has just been passed to that specific effect?”
     “Don’t talk foolish, boy,” the general said. “We can make the existing security laws fit you like a straitjacket. Try us and see!”

     [J. W. Schutz, “The Bubble”]

     SpaceX is now racing the clock. Colonizing the Moon is far more feasible in the near term than colonizing Mars. You can bet the rent money that the cleverer folks in Washington know that too. Unless SpaceX establishes a proprietary Lunar colony before the power-mongers in D.C. can get their forces mobilized, the federal government will make such a thing impossible.

     The same pressure that propelled the Puritans to board wind-powered wooden vessels to reach the New World is at work today. The possibility of colonizing other worlds is the last remaining hope for human freedom. Many of us, young and old, would risk all that we have for the chance to be free. The States of Earth will not be pleased should the Moon become a place where we can go to escape them.

Undiscussed

     I was maundering over the rising White Identity movement, and the fierce resistance to it on the Left, when a memory from long ago returned to visit.

     The year was 1967. I was a senior year in high school at the time. There was a scholarship available to seniors who’d expressed an interest in becoming teachers. My school submitted me as its contestant. The award decision would be made by a committee of three, after meeting and conversing with all the contestants as a group. The get-together was held in New Paltz, a “college town” in Ulster County, New York, on the western side of the Hudson River.

     There were a dozen contestants. There were three on the award committee. I was the only one from a “downstate” school. I was also the only male present.

     Needless to say, I found the atmosphere somewhat intimidating. What was I, a mere male, doing among all these women? Conversation among the women, young and old, continued freely for over an hour without anyone addressing or even looking at me. Finally one of the committee members turned and addressed me directly: “What about you, Fran? Don’t you have anything to say?”

     I can’t remember what I said. No doubt it was something bland. I don’t remember what followed. About fifteen minutes later I was on my way home.

     Though I didn’t participate, I do remember the thrust of the conversation. It was about dealing with “colored students.” Everyone in the room agreed that they were a taxing problem, both pedagogically and behaviorally, and were becoming ever more so.

     I suppose I should include that all of us present were White.

     Now, that was what we of today fatuously call “the Civil Rights Era.” Which is to say: We had been propagandized out of our natural rights, such as freedom of association, in favor of “civil rights” defined by legislators and courts. We didn’t grasp the implications of having politicians tell us what our “rights” would be. We would find out soon enough.

     But “civil rights” or no, the eleven “upstate” young women in that discussion group were tacitly unanimous that educational institutions’ problems with non-Whites were real and rising. They had no solutions. Their unstated premise made a solution impossible. It was just something, they quietly agreed, with which future teachers would have to cope as best they could.

     Most of that was indirectly expressed, sotto voce. Yet there could be no doubt about the consensus. It bewildered me somewhat, but then, there were only three “colored” out of the two thousand students in my high school. The problem had yet to become visible in Rockland County, New York.

* * *

     Nothing reveals group differences as effectively as forcing disparate groups together. Fifty-nine years after that group talkfest, the quiet prognostications of those young women have proved accurate. America’s “public” schools have largely been reduced to daytime housing for minors, some of whom are determined to fight with others and abuse the rest. White kids in such an environment are in peril throughout the day. Many don’t make it home unscathed.

     But let’s leave the disorder and violence problems to the side. In an attempt to achieve some education, at least, the schools have steadily “dumbed down” their curricula. What was fifth-grade material a century ago is now being taught in high schools. The scandals about schools where no student meets grade literacy or numeracy standards, and about college entrants being unable to read, write in cursive, or do simple algebra, are legion.

     The few “colored” with a real interest in learning are intimidated out of it by their fellows: “Why you actin’ White?” The important subjects are to which gang you belong, how to deal with the members of other gangs, and how to treat the White kids. Better take those subjects seriously; the tests are frequent.

     But hearken to our political class! Do any of our Establishmentarians even hint that there might be a problem with all this “diversity?” Not to my knowledge. But let anyone mention the rising White-identity movement, and the condemnations are immediate and plentiful. Apparently the worst thing one can be is White and proud of it.

     If the cries of “Racist!” and “Xenophobe!” are losing their effect, it’s not yet evident from their frequency of use. Demographic-geographic trends tell us that some Whites are “voting with their feet.” An unfortunate number of us are pinned in place by occupational or familial considerations. These must be prepared to cope with being members of a shrinking community.

     Fifty-nine years ago, a group of young women in their senior year in high school could clearly see what was coming. Their voices were soft. Their words were measured. But their opinions were unanimous and clear. They foresaw what would happen to the trade they sought to enter.

     Those that are still on the sunny side of the sod would be in their mid-seventies today. I should remember to pray for them.