What Nature Does Best!

I've been subscribing to The New Yorker for years for a variety of reasons, and my latest rant / wonkout is based on an article by Gideon Lewis-Krause in the February 24, 2025 issue called "The End of Children."  (LINK)

It's about the current seemingly universal worries about the current world-wide demographic decline, which is very real.  Basically, almost every country is in the minus growth for population: fewer babies are born than can replace the population as a whole, and a lot of people are freaking out about that. Especially male white conservatives in the Western Industrial Nations seem obssessed with "The Great Replacement Theory":  that this is a nefarious plot to get rid of white people and replace them with black / brown / Asian / Native people.  

But, even if there is such a thing going on, then why is South Korea and Japan's replacement rate worse than ours? And in almost every country, even with added incentives, there's a steady drop in childbearing. So why?  What is going on?  Who is doing this?  Is it sheer modern selfishness (we've all heard the latest gender war where "selfish childless cat ladies" refuse to procreate in a society that needs them to have more children), or is something else going on?  

Well, while I'm waiting for someone to reveal the eugenicist who is in charge of the GRT and how they've kept it secret for so long, I will tell you what shouldn't be a secret to anyone: the biggest eugenicist of all is Mother Nature.  One of the things Nature as always excelled at is Demographic Apocalypse, and she's got all the best tools for mass murder.  

First of all, some statistics: 

CLIMATE IN HISTORY 

Yes, Virginia, things change.  

100,000-18,000 BCE - Last Glacial Maximum (i.e, end of the major Ice Ages)

68,000 BCE - World population cut to around 12,000 people probably due to the Toba Catastrophe, a super-volcanic eruption in Sumatra, Indonesia. (Sumatran volcanoes are dangerous:  we'll run into them again in 1816, when Mt. Tambora exploded and caused a year without a summer.)

Caldera of Mount Tambora

12,700-10,800 BCE - Late Glacial Interstadial, which is a fancy term for a BIG warm up. 

10,800-9,600 BCE - The Younger Dryas; a sudden huge plunge in temperature, along with another major die-off of humans 

7000-3000 BCE - Holocene Climatic Optimum.  A time of wonderful weather, and the Neolithic / Agricultural Revolution and the rise of a few major civilizations. (We'll get into more of that later.)

535-537 CE - Major global climatic catastrophe. No one is sure whether it was a small asteroid / meteorite / volcanic explosion, but historians like the Byzantine Procopius noted that the sun's light was dimmed like the moon, and Chinese scholars described eerie, colorless skies, unseasonable snowfall and mass starvation. There were world-wide famines. It launched the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536-560 CE. The weakened populations were further ravaged by the Plague of Justinian (yersinia pestis, i.e., bubonic plague), a deadly pandemic that swept through the Byzantine Empire and beyond. 

950-1200 CE - Medieval Warm Period (Climatic Optimum).  Wonderful weather, that led to exceptional crops, Viking explorations, the colonization of Greenland, vineyards in England, and Cathedral building all over Europe, as well as the 1st-4th Crusades, the Mongol Invasions and other fun events.  NOTE:  Increased food production and increased wealth often leads to increased war.  We are a quarrelsome lot.  

1200-1300 CE -  Cool Down including another probable volcanic eruption(s) from 1257-58 with heavy rains and extreme famine.

1300-1470 - wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production.  

1470-1560 - Warm Spell (The Renaissance and The Reformation in Europe) 

1590-1850 - the Little Ice Age (including 1816's Tambora explosion redux)

1850 to now -  continuing warm up, much of which was launched and is fueled by the Industrial Revolution.  And for quite a while, we have been in a period of wildly unpredictable weather with wildly unpredictable crop production that shows no signs of letting up.

***

One thing I found fascinating in Mr. Lewis-Kraus' article was where he said, with what to me is a faint whiff of distress, 

"In about 1805, we crossed the threshold of a billion people. That had taken the entirety of human history. Our next billion took just a hundred and twenty-three years."

Meanwhile, our population has climbed from 2 billion in 1925 to over 8 billion of us on this planet today. That's 6 billion people in100 years. I don't consider that demographic collapse in any way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, during that "entirety of human history," humans saw tremendous civilizations of great sophistication, urbanization, with great cuisines, irrigation, flush toilets, waterwheels and windmills, seafaring ships, barges, canoes, massive food production, art, music, dance, sculpture, ceremonies, religions, and fireworks. Also, wars, weapons, gunpowder, and genocide. From ancient empires like China, Egypt, the Mesopotamian and Indus civilizations, as well as ones we're only now discovering underneath the jungles of Amazonia, Indonesia, etc., and on to Classical and Late Antiquity, the Renaissance, the "Age of Enlightenment" - it's pretty amazing (and sometimes horrifying) what you can do with "only" a billion people on the planet.

And on a purely irrelevant, personal matter, I think most people looked better in clothing like this:

 

(Vermeer) or this:

 

(Rembrandt)

than today's casual culture:

So, what are we so afraid of with a demographic decline? Losing all our cheap goods, cell phones, entertainment, transportation, food, and instant gratification? Probably.

Well, as I said before, we struggle to build up civilizations, and Mother Nature slaps us down with regularity.  

Around 66,000,000 BCE, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event caused the mass extinction of three-fourths of all the plant and animal species on earth.  Scientists believe it was a massive asteroid - 6-9 miles wide which slammed into the earth in the Yucatan, creating the Chicxulub crater.  

Meanwhile, there's 2024 YR4, an asteroid about as big as a football field, which is lined up to swing by, visit, or crash into earth around 2032. There's a supervolcano in Yellowstone, and there's always Mount Tambora, Mount Vesuvius, and a whole lot of Iceland, which are all still smoking.  We still haven't figured out a way to undecline our demographic from something like that.  

***

But Mother Nature has another dirty secret up her sleeve:  and it's in our own biology.  Back in June of 1972, Dr. John Calhoun watched as a four year utopian experiment ended in total demographic collapse:  the Universe 25 Experiment.  

He had set up a world in which four mouse couples were given a "veritable rodent Garden of Eden - with numerous “apartments,” abundant nesting supplies, and unlimited food and water. The only scarce resource in this microcosm was physical space.

As population density began to peak, population growth abruptly and dramatically slowed. Animals became increasingly violent, developed abnormal sexual behaviors, and began neglecting or even attacking their own pups. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out.  (LINK)

BTW, Richard Adams, in Watership Down, pointed out that among rabbits, does can and do absorb embryos when hard times come, when there’s insufficient food, or in cases of overcrowding.  Mother Nature, culling the herd from within.  And we are mammals. 

Sounds to me like we're already in Universe 25...  

Oh, the Stories That Will be Written...

Okay, I had a retro post all set up and ready to go, because I have a deadline for something else that I'm working on, but then came two news stories that I found necessary to share:

Exclusive: US intel shows Russia and China are attempting to recruit disgruntled federal employees, sources say

"Foreign adversaries including Russia and China have recently directed their intelligence services to ramp up recruiting of US federal employees working in national security, targeting those who have been fired or feel they could be soon, according to four people familiar with recent US intelligence on the issue and a document reviewed by CNN.

The intelligence indicates that foreign adversaries are eager to exploit the Trump administration’s efforts to conduct mass layoffs across the federal workforce – a plan laid out by the Office of Personnel Management earlier this week.

Russia and China are focusing their efforts on recently fired employees with security clearances and probationary employees at risk of being terminated, who may have valuable information about US critical infrastructure and vital government bureaucracy, two of the sources said. At least two countries have already set up recruitment websites and begun aggressively targeting federal employees on LinkedIn, two of the sources said." (LINK)

AND

Exclusive: Hegseth orders Cyber Command to stand down on Russia planning

"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions, according to three people familiar with the matter.

"Hegseth gave the instruction to Cyber Command chief Gen. Timothy Haugh, who then informed the organization's outgoing director of operations, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Ryan Heritage, of the new guidance, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity."  (LINK)

Philip Kerr died way too soon...  

Then again, we still have Mick Herron...  There's a lot of stories to come from these two together.

***

Meanwhile:  

"Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace." - Agricola, ostensibly quoting Calgacus.

"Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children." – Alexei Navalny, Prison Diaries

"Scream at God if that's the only thing that will get results." - Brendan Francis

"HELL IS EMPTY AND ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE!!!!"  

                            - Shakespeare, The Tempest

More Notes for Horatio

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
— Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5.

First, some BSP - Back in 2017, I wrote a SleuthSayers post on Fort Mountain, Georgia, and the Cherokee legend of the Moon Eyed People with whom they lived and fought and eventually… drove out. Maybe. (LINK) Anyway, Neal Burnette, a writer and director of documentaries, read it and found it interesting and interviewed me for a documentary on the Moon Eyed People. (The video is at the bottom of this post.)

So, I had a few more thoughts on the whole thing (as if I don't always have a few more thoughts on everything...).

First of all, my general approach to history is and has always been to look for the patterns. Because they're there; they're always there. History may not repeat itself, not identically, but it sure does rhyme. I would always try to get that across to my students - there are patterns to revolution, to war, to missionaries, to education, to just about everything.

And the same with legends. Every legend has a germ of truth in it. Often more than a germ. Often it's blaring at us, except that we know it has to be a myth. thanks to the common fallacy that time is an arrow of progress, and we, we who are living here and now, are the purpose and pinnacle of it all, and we are the most brilliant, educated humans who have ever lived. All our ancestors were inferior to us, and they lived in darkness. (This was the whole point of the collective Renaissance strut during their stage of time.) Now that's complete and utter bull hockey, and we can prove it by looking at, if nothing else, the Pantheon in Rome, the bronze vessels of the Shang Dynasty, and the Pyramids. Geniuses and artists have always been with us, along with dictators and monsters, since... well, since the earliest records we have (back to say, 3,000 BC). And before. Check out Gobekli Tepe some time.

But back to legends and myths.

There is an amazing similarity among stories world-wide of "the little people". The canotila in Lakota a/k/a wiwila in Dakota who live in the Black Hills and Badlands, the sidhe in Ireland (commonly called fairies in the British Isles, and very commonly called the Good People in Ireland) and others who appear in every indigenous culture around the planet. All are humanoid, but most are much smaller than most humans. Some live in the forest, some in caves in the woods, but the stories told make it clear that they live in another dimension that intersects with ours. They have their own roads, places, habits, work, hobbies. Some little people have been said to reside in the Pryor Mountains of Montana and Wyoming. The Pryors are famous for their "fairy rings" and strange happenings. Some members of the Crow tribe consider the little people to be sacred ancestors and require leaving an offering for them upon entry to the area.

And the legends of the sidhe are endless. I highly recommend a book called "Meeting the Other Crowd: the Fairy Stories of Hidden Ireland" by Eddie Lenihan and Caroline Eve Green for just a few of them.

BTW, by and large, they're not that interested in us. Sometimes they will take children to their world, sometimes for pity (especially an abused child - very common among the Native American legends) or a replacement for a sickly child of their own (most of these stories are European in origin), or for who knows what reason? Some adults have been invited to the sidhe's world, where they find hallways and royalty and a warning (from other humans who have been taken there) that if they eat or drink anything there, they'll never be able to go back. And it's always hard for a human to return to our dimension. Thomas the Rhymer was supposedly carried off by the Queen of Elfland and returned to earth with the gift of prophecy, but then had to return to Elfland when he was summoned back by a milk-white hart and hind. Washington Irving's fictional Rip Van Winkle slept and woke up after almost everyone he knew had died. But there were earlier stories from the German Peter Klaus to ones that are at least a thousand years older, Ranka from China (Link), and Muchukunda from India. Basically, if you eat or drink with the fairies / elves / sidhe / immortals, and go to sleep, if you ever wake up, it will be whole lifetimes later.  

Now to me, this is very interesting. The leap from Klaus to Rip Van Winkle is fairly obvious. But how did the ancient Chinese legend of a woodcutter who runs across a pair of immortals playing a game of Go, eats some of their food, and who falls asleep for so many years that his axe handle turns to dust make it all the way to Peter Klaus in Germany? But then, there are stories of Cinderella, Blind Kings, and deals with the devil in every culture...

There be giants in every culture, and dragons…
But that's another blog post.

Another note, all the stories about them say that if you treat them well or do them a good turn, they will reward you, sometimes very richly. But if you do them a bad turn, they will do you harm, perhaps life-long... In fact, you would do well to appease them or move away, quickly.

Meanwhile, all of this made me do a rethink of the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin Town. Now it's pretty obvious that it's tied to the bubonic plague, because Hamelin is swarming with rats and the Pied Piper gets rid of them. But then the Hamelin leaders refused to pay him, and he gathers up all the children (except for one that was blind, one that was deaf, and one that was lame) with his music, and leads them out of town... and into a cave in a mountain, which promptly closes behind them. BUT... the oldest version of the legend is as follows:

On the back of the last tattered page of a dusty chronicle called The Golden Chain, written in Latin in 1370 by the monk Heinrich of Herford, there is written in a different handwriting the following account:

Here follows a marvellous wonder, which transpired in the town of Hamelin in the diocese of Minden, in this Year of Our Lord, 1284, on the Feast of Saints John and Paul. A certain young man thirty years of age, handsome and well-dressed, so that all who saw him admired him because of his appearance, crossed the bridges and entered the town by the West Gate. He then began to play all through the town a silver pipe of the most magnificent sort. All the children who heard his pipe, in the number of 130, followed him to the East Gate and out of the town to the so-called execution place or Calvary. There they proceeded to vanish, so that no trace of them could be found. The mothers of the children ran from town to town, but they found nothing. It is written: A voice was heard from on high, and a mother was bewailing her son. And as one counts the years according to the Year of Our Lord or according to the first, second or third year of an anniversary, so do the people in Hamelin reckon the years after the departure and disappearance of their children. This report I found in an old book. And the mother of the Dean Johann von Lüde saw the children depart.

The sidhe are known for being handsome and well-dressed and excellent musicians...

And now for the documentary! Enjoy!

Stories To Help You Cope. Or Not.

In case you haven't noticed, there's a lot going on right now.

We at SleuthSayers are trying to set up a BlueSky account – and have – but are still working out some of the kinks, as in who the **** can actually post something on it. Right now you can join, and you can follow, but we haven't been able to fix the administrator problem, which sounds so much like modern politics it's scary.

There is a small risk of a small asteroid – 2024 YR4, which has an "interesting orbit" and could hit the planet sometime in the next decade. It's about the same size as the Tunguska asteroid which, in 1908, flattened trees over an area of about 1,250 AFTER it exploded in the sky above Siberia. (News) Party time!

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow Sunday and predicted six more weeks of wintry weather. I swear, we have got to stop depending on captive rodents for our weather forecasts.

In Greece, a 2,000 year old statue was found in "an abandoned garbage bag" (NEWS). Not sure why anyone would want to throw this out:

This one makes me sad: "Last 4 escaped monkeys are captured in South Carolina after months on the loose." If you remember, I mentioned that 43 macaque monkeys had escaped from Alpha Genesis, a facility that breeds them for medical research — known to locals as “the monkey farm.” They were lured back "with food and were given peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and “monkey biscuits” — a high-protein Purina Monkey Chow specially formulated for the rhesus macaques."

And here I'd hoped they'd make it out there, populating a whole new macaque breed in the wilds of South Carolina. Well, you tried, little monkeys, you tried! (News)

This is a headline that proves that these days, you can never tell what's the Onion or for real. Yes, this is for real:

Italian soccer club Lazio fires falconer for posting photos of his penis implant. (News)

Not so surprising REAL headline:

Pro-RFK Jr. letter to the Senate includes names of
doctors whose licenses were revoked or suspended.

Lots of them.

BTW, in case you're wondering why Mexico and Canada (our two biggest trading partners, our only two neighbors, and constant allies) got slapped with 25% tariffs:

Prove me wrong.

Also, objective view: to anyone who thinks Elon Musk is selflessly working for the country as a “special government employee,” who is "not paid a salary", all I can say is you really need to think about how Musk got to be a billionaire in the first place. He knows where there's money to be made.

Rule #1 of life: Never, ever, ever, EVER trust a trust-fund baby. Sooner or later, they will screw you over.

Two men went out into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, located in the southwestern part of Washington state, to hunt for Sasquatch. They died of "exposure, based on weather conditions and ill-preparedness." So, if you're going Sasquatch hunting, prepare for the trip. Remember, "there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing."

BTW, my favorite part of this story is "In Skamania County, harming Bigfoot is punishable by a $1,000 fine and can include jail time, a law meant to protect the mysterious creature and to prevent hunters with large beards from accidentally getting shot." (Link) (Jason Kelce, be careful out there!)

Also,

"Ancient predatory worms have scientists
rethinking the history of life on Earth"

"500 million years ago, the world was a very different place. Basically all life lived in the water, which held a lot of animals that looked pretty different from the ones we recognize today. One of these was a group of predatory worms with throats covered in spines, hooks and teeth to trap their prey. They built tubes around themselves and lived inside of them, waiting for their next victim to crawl by." (Link)

1. Ugh.
2. Are we sure they're extinct?

---

In the meantime, always remember:

"Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

"This too shall pass; like a kidney stone, but it shall pass."

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

!!!HUZZAH!!!

Our first SleuthSayers anthology, Murder, Neat, is one of the six finalists for the Derringer Award in the new category of Best Anthology!

Available at Level Best Bookshop or, of course, Amazon.

What Can be Done with Words...

First of all, there have been some fabulous posts written lately about words, language, etc. Thank you all for giving me something to look up to.

Secondly, thank you to Fred Clark, writer of the Slacktivist blog, for his marvelous "Trap Streets, Mountweazels, and Made Up Words." (Link is above) What you read is his, with a few notes of my own. So, let's get going!

I love this story from the Guardian, “A whimsical new exhibition assembles a range of books that don’t exist.”

This exhibit is just so much fun. It’s people both having fun and creating fun by designing and presenting editions of these “books that don’t exist.”

That includes several categories here, including “lost books” (real texts for which we have no surviving copies), “unfinished books,” and — my favorite section — “fictive books.” These are “books that exist only in other books”:

This includes Rules & Traffic Regulations That May Not Be Bent or Broken, a driver’s handbook mentioned in Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, which looks much like a traveler’s manual from the 1960s. Or The Songs of the Jabberwock, bound in purple and printed backwards, “pretty much as Alice found it sitting right inside the mirror”, said [Reid] Byers. A copy of Nymphs and Their Ways, glanced by Lucy on Mr Tumnus’s shelf in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, decorated with a Romantic-era painting of bathing women. And a maroon-colored version of The Lady Who Loved Lighting by Clare Quilty, who was murdered by Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita – though, as Humbert Humbert is a famously unreliable narrator, we don’t really know if he even existed. It’s a unique specimen of the collection – “a book written by a character who does not exist, even in the book of origin. So it’s doubly imaginary,” Byers explained.

Oooh. This is like a library or book-shop version of my ever-growing playlist of songs that exist only in other songs (“The Tennessee Waltz,” “The Monster Mash,” “Night of the Johnstown Flood,” etc.).

But anyway, Adrian Horton’s article on this exhibit also taught me a fantastic, new-to-me word:

Imaginary Books is, as Byers will concede, a true and sincere gag, down to its listed “sponsorship” by the Mountweazel Foundation in Faraway Hills, New York. (A mountweazel being, of course, a term for a fake entry in a reference work, usually planted to catch copyright infringement.)

The etymology of “mountweazel” is just wonderful:

The neologism Mountweazel was coined by The New Yorker writer Henry Alford in an article that mentioned a fictitious biographical entry intentionally placed as a copyright trap in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia. The entry described Lillian Virginia Mountweazel as a fountain designer turned photographer, who died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine. Allegedly, she was widely known for her photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris, and rural American mailboxes. According to the encyclopedia’s editor, it is a tradition for encyclopedias to put a fake entry to trap competitors for plagiarism. The surname came to be associated with all such fictitious entries.

That’s from the Wikipedia entry on “Fictitious entries,” which makes me wonder if Wikipedia itself has any. That entry also mentions “trap streets,” a form of fictitious entry that I’ve been fascinated with ever since I was a kid on a bicycle.

Back in middle school, my friends and I went everywhere on our bikes. We usually just wandered, but sometimes we planned long journeys using a road atlas of Middlesex County. That’s how we learned about trap streets.

Our journeys usually began from Doug’s house. He lived on Rosewood Drive, in Piscataway, a short street that ran between two dead ends, like the crossbar on a capital H.

but it’s not what our county atlas showed. That atlas included a street that didn’t exist. It had an “Elmwood Drive” connecting those two dead-end streets south of Rosewood. We were confounded by this mystery. We took the road atlas and pedaled down to the dead ends of both Glenwood and Redwood, confirming with our own eyes and feet that no such thing as “Elmwood Drive” existed where we stood. It was still all just scrubby woods with bike trails that we avoided because that was where the Big Kids hung out. (Avoiding the Big Kids is an important rule during the summers when you’re in middle school.)

We presented this mystery to Doug’s dad, who explained to us about “trap streets” and how map-makers had to invent and include small errors to defend their copyright against plagiarists who might try to steal their work. We were fascinated by this idea — particularly after he suggested that there were probably small, deliberately false details on every page of that road atlas.

Eve's Note 1: I have literally driven through small towns that don't exist on the road map, and I'm sure don't show up on GPS. Why not streets? Some great ideas here, fellow-writers!

Eve's Note 2: My favorite word of all in this article is: “[E[squivalience.” which is a made-up word meaning “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.” This needs to be spread far and wide.

Eve's Note 3: Imaginary books have been written about long before the Guardian article Fred mentions. In Colette's My Apprenticeships she writes about Paul Masson, writer who worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the Catalogue Department to stay live. One time Colette saw him working on a list of titles, and she asked what they were. He told her they were titles of books that the

Bibliothèque Nationale did not have, but should have and was putting them into the catalog. When she asked, "But why? If the books don't exist?" he replied, "Ah! I can't do everything."

Ah, indeed.

2025 and A Wee Bit of Nostalgia

You have to admit that 2025 started off rough: the terrorist who drove a truck through a large crowd on Bourbon Street, New Orleans, and killed 16 and counting. The army vet who blew up a Tesla truck (with himself in it) in front of Trump Casino in Las Vegas. And the gang shooting in Queens, where 4 gunmen shot 10 people (who thank God survived). All on New Year's. I think that's enough to make Baby 2025 go off and put bourbon in the baby bottle.

We didn't have it that easy here, either. In Sioux Falls, we were greeted on January 2nd with the news that a meth head in Yankton had killed his girlfriend and then beheaded her. (LINK here for the gory details.) They had been having a meth party - 

WHICH IS NO EXCUSE FOR BEHEADING YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER, FOLKS! - 

which isn't that uncommon. It's one of the reasons that I laugh as hard as I do at Kathleen Madigan's bit on meth labs:

The truth is, we all know up here that meth is everywhere (here in Sioux Falls it's either meth or fentanyl or heroin and for all I know they're mixing them up together). And there's some small towns that are just one giant meth lab. There are also some small towns that don't want any strangers coming in, through, or by them. I don't know what the Venn Diagram is of that, but I am willing to place a few bets...

And, right now, we're going through a bitter, bitter cold snap, with single digits overnight (if lucky) and barely in the teens, then the 20s. With a wind. Every joint I have is hurting, and the rest of me doesn't like it much either. I'm getting too old for this! I rail at the universe, but the lottery money hasn't come yet. Will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, I do remember when we moved up here to South Dakota. I was 36 and still able to do 99% of whatever I wanted to do, and considered winter a challenge. I drove twice a week at night in the winter to finish my Master's Degree in History down at USD in Vermillion. I remember one night, after a good thick snow that wasn't going anywhere, it was a full moon, and it was so bright, reflecting off all that snow, that I turned off my headlights and just drove without them for a couple of miles. (Don't worry, there wasn't anyone or anything else out on the road with me.)

And I remember taking hikes at the park, and taking pictures of the ice and the snow and wonder of it all:

Looking up, one cold Christmas day:

A picnic area frozen tap, turned into the Ice Walker:

I had such fun. It was good while it lasted.  Meanwhile, I think I'll go mull some ale...

Welcome to the Dirty 30s

Recent statement cropping up on a lot of social media about the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare Insurance over some other social media posts lionizing Luigi Mangione:

"A healthy society doesn't lionize vigilante killers. 

But we don't live in a healthy society."

My response:  Really?  We don't lionize?  Kyle Rittenhouse leaps to mind.  I remember members of a certain party saying, "I want him to be my Senator", and urging him to run for office, even though he took a semiautomatic rifle (a Smith & Wesson M&P 15) out of state (from Illinois to Wisconsin) to a BLM riot. Seventeen year olds don't do that unless they're looking to shoot someone and he did. Daniel Penny, just acquitted for using excessive force in killing a homeless mentally ill man who was yelling at people on a subway, was taken to the Army & Navy game where he sat with President Elect Trump, VP Elect Vance, and Elon Musk.  Seems a little like lionizing to me...  Not to mention the long, tragic, on-going tradition of lynching.  

Here in America, it's all about who gets vigilanteed. And it's assumed that some people are untouchable. And we all know that.

BUT – The simple truth is that there comes a point where the "common man" has had enough of being ripped off and used, and... crap happens. Let's use the Way-Back Machine and go to the Great Depression (1929-1939), when the most common folk heroes were bank robbers. 

A little history first:  The banks in the Roaring Twenties had invested a tremendous amount of money - too much money, most of their customers' money - in the roaring stock market.  So when the stock market crashed, they closed, a polite term for went bust, collapsed, went bankrupt.  And as those banks failed, people tried to withdraw all their money from both the collapsing and surviving banks, which only made things worse.  Banks liquidated loans and other assets.  800 banks in 1930, 2100 in 1931, 9000 by 1933.  

And there was no FDIC - which was created by FDR and which federally insures our deposits to this day - so if a bank failed, people who had any money in those banks lost it all, with no hope of getting it back.

MY NOTE:  Certain people in the post-January 20, 2025 world want to abolish the FDIC because...  reasons...  No history, but "reasons"...

Meanwhile, there were a lot of small rural banks which were unregulated. (Again, times have changed.) They'd grown up after WW1, when the world needed a lot of corn and cotton.  As farmers bought more land, real estate went up.  As real estate went up, farmers took out more loans. As the economy tanked, these banks called in their loans, but farmers didn't have the money.  And the Dust Bowl hit - the "Dirty Thirties", which was a severe drought (up to 8 years in some areas) exacerbated by "deep plowing" which led to soil erosion. Crops failed. No money. Result?  Foreclosures, foreclosures, and more foreclosures.  The banks took the farms, booted out the farmers, and then sold the land at a nice profit to someone else - anyone else.  

The result was that about 3.5 million people left the Great Plains - 86,000 moved to California the first year - trying to find a place and a way to live.  They weren't welcomed with open arms. They were called "Okies" and "Arkies" and treated as subhuman. (Is any of this sounding familiar?)  

Anyway, all of these people - and more - blamed the banks for taking their land.  They hated the banks.  And so when various armed gangsters started robbing banks, they became folk heroes. It didn't matter that they often killed people during their robberies. Bonnie & Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd (who allegedly destroyed mortgage documents when he robbed a bank), and many more were heroes, because they were fighting back against the filthy banks that had taken everything the common people had. They even (sometimes) gave (some) money away, just often enough to make them Robin Hoods in the public eye.

And these modern day Robin Hoods / folk heroes showed up, in legends and ballads like Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads, which included "Tom Joad", "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "Dust Bowl Blues". 

They also showed up in the serious literature of the day:  John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (published in 1939) Ma Joad told her son Tom Joad about Pretty Boy Floyd: 

"I knowed Purty Boy Floyd. I knowed his ma. They was good folks. He was full a hell, sure, like a good boy oughta be…He done a bad thing an' they hurt 'im, caught 'im an' hurt him so he was mad, an' the nex' bad thing he done was mad, an' they hurt 'im again. An' purty soon he was mean-mad. They shot at him like a varmint an' he shot back, an' then they run him like a coyote, an' him a-snappin' an' a-snarlin’, mean as a lobo. An' he was mad. He wasn’t a boy or a man no more, he was just a walkin' chunk of mean-mad. But the folks that knowed him didn' hurt 'im. He wasn' mad at them. Finally then run him down and killed 'im. No matter what they say it in the paper how he was bad – that’s how it was."

When it came out, The Grapes of Wrath became a bestseller that was banned and burned in many states, but also read voraciously.  And it won the Pulitzer Prize.  

Bonnie & Clyde, of course, got the full movie treatment, more than once - 1967's Bonnie & Clyde (directed by Sam Peckinpah) is the most famous. And there are a lot of songs written about them:  

Merle Haggard's "Bonnie & Clyde" (Link)

And here's one, in French, sung by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot.

And you can read Bonnie Parker's own account of their career in "The Trail's End" Here.

Meanwhile, John Dillinger probably has the most movies made about him.  Lot of people have sung about him, written about him (William Burroughs loved him and hoped he was still alive), and played him in the movies...  

The only folk hero (so far) who beats him is Jesse James.  I think Jesse James is proof that bank robbers have never been that unpopular among the "common man".  When I was a little girl, my grandmother would sing "Jesse James" to me as a treat.  I'll never forget her wavering voice singing the refrain, "The dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave."  You could tell where her sympathies lay.  Here it is, sung by Johnny Cash:  

BTW, in case you're thinking that this is a grim message for the day after Christmas, you need to read more Dickens.  First of all, Ebenezer Scrooge would be an obvious target for a folk hero's bullet - and was threatened with an ignominious death by the deceased Jacob Marley and the Ghost of Christmas Future.  And then there's Dickens' The Chimes, so bleak it makes Cormac McCarthy look cheerful. Yes, Dickens does supply the mandatory happy ending, but until then... it's a treatise on the ultimate result of Victorian economic theory and practice (pay the poor the absolute minimum and step on any of them who objects), and a legal system designed to eliminate the poor the hard way (lock them up if they don't starve first). This fun read for the holidays is available for free here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/653/653-h/653-h.htm

Or you could just take a walk down some of the poorer streets of your city... Talk to some of the elderly who are working at hardscrabble jobs to make ends meet, because their Social Security isn't enough. To some of the working class parents, both of them working two jobs to pay for everything, and always falling behind. To that woman, living in her car because she lost her job, the bank foreclosed, and she still can't figure out how it all happened so fast. To the elderly man who divorced his wife, not because he doesn't love her, but because she's in a dementia ward, and the only way to keep her there is to let the nursing home take all the money, while he lives in a little apartment on his Social Security and works one of those hardscrabble jobs to keep himself alive. To the family of the teenager who got meningitis/encephalitis and was in the hospital for almost a year and got smacked with $1 million in debt...  And that was AFTER a chunk of it was forgiven by the hospital...  

The #1 reason for bankruptcy in this country (66.5%) is medical debt.  

Sooner or later, something's gonna give.  

Jesse Walters, "United Health"

Quotes from Around and About

I thought I'd share some of my new (and a few old) favorites:    

  "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken 

  "To fight and proclaim hope is to actively fight against the death-dealing forces of the world." — Grace Aheron. 

  "He's the sort of man who'd push you in the water rather than have no one to rescue." — Cleggy in Last of the Summer Wine

The Last of the Summer Wine:  Foggy, Cleggy, and Compo

   "There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, and always to plead it successfully." — Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm.

Illustration of Orley Farm by Millais

   "The power of facing unpleasant facts is clearly an attribute of decent, sane grownups as opposed to the immature, the silly, the nutty, or the doctrinaire. Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can't have your own way; that if you do get what you want it turns out not to be the thing you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that in one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and the world will go on as if you had never existed." — Paul Fussel, A Power of Facing Unpleasant Facts

    "Life seems so short that people feel they must cram in as much as possible. For me, the most happens when nothing happens. Every day here is indeed a good piece of life. What is the value of a day in which there's no moment to reflect or to be able not to reflect at all? Life changes us little by little into beings who think only by halves, dealing in scraps like rag collectors of thought." — Andrzej Bobkowski, Wartime Notebooks, August 5, 1943 

    "The first thing a principle does – if it really is a principle – is to kill somebody." — Lord Peter Wimsey, in Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers 

    "Once you realize that "deep state" is code for "the rule of law," you can translate their gibberish into something more like English" — David Frum (May 19, 2017)   

    "DARVO is an acronym for "deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender". Some researchers and advocates have characterized it as a common manipulation strategy of psychological abusers. The abuser denies the abuse ever took place, attacks the victim for attempting to hold the abuser accountable, and claims that they, the abuser, are actually the victim in the situation, thus reversing the reality of the victim and offender. This usually involves not just "playing the victim" but also victim blaming."  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO)

    "People are all exactly alike. There's no such thing as a race and barely such a thing as an ethnic group. If we were dogs, we'd be the same breed. George Bush and an Australian Aborigine have fewer differences than a Lhasa apso and a toy fox terrier. A Japanese raised in Riyadh would be an Arab. A Zulu raised in New Rochelle would be an orthodontist. People are all the same, though their circumstances differ terribly." ― P.J. O'Rourke 

    "Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities." — G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World 

    "The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." — G.K. Chesterson, NY Sun 11/3/18 

    "Contrarian arguments are generally contrarian because they're bullshit." — Scott Lemieux

    "If there's anything that a study of history tells us, it's that things can get worse, and also that when people thought they were in end times, they weren't." — Neil Gaiman 

    "He didn't cry: orphan babies learn there's no point in it." — John Irving, Cider House Rules 

    "Don't be afraid of anything. This is our country and it's the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children." — Alexei Navalny, Prison Diaries 

Alexei Navalny in Court

Никита Баталов @nikbatalov Коммерсант ФМ
https://twitter.com/#!/nikbatalov/status/144145553075351553 "для Википедии
CC-BY-SA-3.0." - https://yfrog.com/hwnhaecj

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ah, Thanksgiving time!  Time to give thanks for so many things...

I'm thankful for my husband of 46 years...  We're beginning to think our relationship might last. 

I'm thankful for all our children, godchildren, and dear, dear, dear friends, both here in South Dakota and all around the country, who are the great delights of our lives.  

PRO TIP:  Friendship [and books] will get you through times of no money [or any other crisis] better than money will get you through times of no friends [or books].  

I'm thankful for this crazy patchwork quilt of a country, with all of its variety of accents, faces, backgrounds, predilections, hobbies, obsessions, cuisines... all of it.  Any country that can provide samosas, pierogis, empanadas, tiropitas, pasties, and dumplings (steamed, fried, or baked) from every nationality is my place to live, but then I have never had enough stuffed packets of dough in my life.  I would hate to live in a country where everyone looked, sounded, believed, and acted alike.  

I am thankful for a warm house with central heating, working plumbing, and a solid roof in this, our first killer cold snap of the year.  Winter has come late to South Dakota, which means we all got spoiled rotten and seemed to think it would never happen...  And I'm so thankful that we don't have to twist hay to use as fuel.  Read Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter - nothing, I repeat, NOTHING is romantic about winter in the days before central heating.  

A log cabin in Minnesota in 1890, 

courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society (Wikipedia)

And I'm especially thankful that we don't have to burn coal.  

As I've written before, we did, back in the first house we ever bought in Bristol, TN. It was a dilapidated old place with closets made out of linoleum and few other amenities. As it turned out, there also wasn't a lick of insulation, but that's normal with "Southern" houses,  even if you are living in the Appalachian mountains.  To all those who say, "Well, winter's not too long and it all melts off soon", my response is "ALTITUDE COUNTS!!!!"  

And it came with an old coal furnace.  Well, we couldn't afford both a down payment and a new furnace, so we just laughed and said we'd find out what life was like in the 19th century, and we did. It sucked.  

For one thing, the coal wasn't delivered in relatively small lumps that you could shovel straight into the furnace.  Oh, no, it came in giant lumps, 2-3 feet wide that came down the coal chute straight into our basement, sending up clouds of black dust that, after decades, is probably still on the basement walls.  Every night my husband came home from work and (wearing kerchiefs on his head and face) smashed those lumps of coal by picking them up and throwing them on each other and/or the floor.  More clouds of black dust.  Then he'd throw some of it on the fire, and that would see us for about 3-4 hours.  Before we went to bed, he'd throw more of it on the fire.  Early in the morning, I'd get up and, carefully dressing myself in my oldest, dirtiest hard work clothes, rekindle the fire and throw coal on it.  I'd come back from work at lunchtime and put on more coal.  And after work, the coal furnace came first...  

And an old coal furnace without a blower means that the heat gently rises... which meant the house was always cold.  I remember that Thanksgiving we had a killer cold snap.  The furnace was providing just enough warmth so we didn't have icicles coming off of our noses, but that was about it.  So we set up a couple of kerosene heaters to try and get the temperature higher, enough so we didn't have to wear hats and gloves and scarves indoors.  I remember trying to levitate on top of them in an attempt to feel warm...  I failed, but I believe I invented some new yoga poses in the process.  

The house also came with a coal fireplace (i.e., a very shallow fireplace that is not very good for burning logs), so one night I had the bright idea to kindle a coal fire in it and maybe get warm.    

It worked.  Sort of.  It was smelly and sooty, just like the furnace (how on earth did any Victorians manage to not get lung cancer in a world of coal fires?).  And the Victorian home was never clean:  coal is dirty to handle and the sooty particles that come out of the vents or in the fireplace smoke stick to everything. You can't just dust it off, or even wipe it off - that oily smut requires scrubbing. It is the reason spring housecleaning used to be mandatory, and required fun things like lye soap and arms like a brickbuilder.

Come spring, we cleaned.  Oh, how we cleaned.  

And we cheerfully went into debt for a brand new gas furnace that had a blower and all new ducts, because all the old ducts were full of black smut.  Luxury!  Warmth!  Luxury!  

Ahhhh....  

And I'm thankful for the memories...  And so thankful we don't have to do them again.

May you all have a Happy Thanksgiving, with warmth and food and no coal!!!  

"But Where is Everybody?"

Internationally renowned physicist Enrico Fermi was walking to lunch one day in the 1950s with physicist friends Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil Konopinski, discussing recent UFO reports and the possibilities of interstellar travel.   

They all agreed that it was possible, but Fermi asked, "But where is everybody?"  It was a good question:  still is.  And there have been a lot of answers to it over the years:

Extraterrestrial life is rare or non-existent because it's hard to get life going. 

 It takes more than a warm bath of saltwater and a little electricity...  

Periodic extinction by natural events prevent it. 

 Think meteorites, gamma-ray bursts, massive volcanoes, etc. There have been many major extinction events on Earth that wiped out almost all life. And it could happen again.

Intelligent alien species who do exist haven't developed advanced technologies. 

 They're still in the Stone Age, or the Renaissance. Great art, no radio or rockets.

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself. 

 How can that be? Well, here on this planet, we're trying to navigate between nuclear annihilation, human-caused climate change, faulty (to put it mildly) AI, population explosion combined with resource depletion, global pandemics, oh, the merry list goes on and on and on...

It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others. 

 Huh? Well, you could say that all of human history is a history of wars and conquest. 

PLUS:   "In 1981, cosmologist Edward Harrison argued that such behavior would be an act of prudence: an intelligent species that has overcome its own self-destructive tendencies might view any other species bent on galactic expansion as a threat."

Civilizations only broadcast detectable signals for a brief period of time. 

 So far, we've missed them.  

The Dark Forest Hypothesis: 

 There are aliens, but they are both silent and hostile. (see Liu Cixin's novel The Dark Forest).

Alien Life May be Too Incomprehensible

 This seems to me to be the most probable (and is the whole theme of Stanislav Lem's Solaris. See also "The Devil in the Dark" from the first season of the original Star Trek, where no one can recognize that the Hortha are living beings, a silicon based species). After all, alien life forms might not be carbon based, or look like us, and might even have transcended the physical and/or actually live in other dimensions...  Who knows?  For that matter, maybe they're the viruses that currently inhabit most of us.

Earth is being deliberately avoided or isolated:  

We're too dangerous, we're a slum, we're a simulated universe, we're a zoo, we're contagious.  Who knows?  

We're invisible.  

Meanwhile, I have a few questions back:

Why do so many people want to see aliens / UFOs?  What are we looking for?  Saviors?  Killers?  Something new to fall in love with?  Something new to conquer?  Something new to have sex with?  Something new to kill?  

Once you have your alien, what are you going to do with it?  

Once you have your alien, what is it going to do with you?  

I have a feeling that you'd be better off with Siri...

SIDE NOTE:

Headline of the day:  

1 monkey recovered safely, 42 others remain on the run from South Carolina lab. (SOURCE)

Necropants for Halloween

by Eve Fisher

So how badly do you want a lot of money?  What are you willing to do to get it?  And I'm not talking about the standard stuff:  trying to win the lottery, or marrying money or just finding a sugardaddy / sugarmamma, or starting a Ponzi scheme, or other financial shenanigans.*  I mean strange stuff...

Welcome to the world of the Nábrók , a/k/a "necropants" or "corpse britches", i.e., a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead human, which are believed in Icelandic witchcraft/folklore to be capable of producing an endless supply of money.  

A replica of a pair of nábrók at The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft. At the right is the magical symbol that is part of the ritual and at its feet are coins. Bernard McManus from Victoria, BC, Canada - Necropants

Now you can't make a pair of these by turning into Hannibal Lecter or Buffalo Bill. No, it's both less criminal and weirder than that:

"The nábrók is obtained by first making a (mutual) pact with a friend that if either of them die, the other can use his corpse to make a pair of necropants. The deal is that, once one of them dies, after a decent burial, the survivor digs up the body, and flays the skin from the waist down so has not to puncture any holes. The freshly skinned pants must be worn right away, and it's said to grow on/into the person, until such times as he appoints to remove the pair in order to give to someone else." 

MY NOTES:  

This may be the worst tontine I've ever heard of.  So you're making a bet, with a friend, that you're going to live the longest.  So what stops you from offing your friend, or your friend from offing you?  Other than a distaste for graverobbing and flaying, of course. 

Where do you practice skinning a corpse? Is skinning a human like skinning a pig? (And no, I don't want to know how you know this unless you went to med school.)  Also, what does it smell like?  Is there a corpse smell or does it morph into you? 

Finally, the prurient among us obviously want to know if the winner's body is entirely in working order, and will Lilja casually mention to her neighbor Gudrun that 

"You know, it's strange, but ever since Einar died, Bjarni's thing has changed.  It's gotten... bigger.  Kind of.  And he's making this strange clinking noise when he walks...." 

Back to the facts: 

"There is no wealth-giving magic in the necropants yet, because in order to activate the charm, the person must steal a coin from a wretchedly poor widow, and this theft must be performed between the readings of the Epistle and Gospel during one of the three major festivals of the year (or "between the First and Second Lesson on... Yule, Easter, or Whitsuntide"). Then the person must deposit the coin into the pungur (translated politely as "pockets" but actually denoting "scrotum") of the necropants. Some say the wearer can also choose the time of theft to be carried out on the very next day after the pants are first worn. Afterwards the breeches will start collecting coins from the living, which the wearer is free to dispense with. However, he must be careful not to remove the original coin if he wishes to keep the magic effect intact."  

MY NOTE:  Robbing widows in church and scrotum pouches...  this is getting ridiculous.

"According to recent literature, a piece of paper inscribed with a magical symbol must be placed with the coin in the scrotum sack; this particular symbol being given the name "Nábrókarstafur".

"These pairs cannot be removed by its wearer until he is at his life's end, when he has to remove his pair and pass it onto another, otherwise, his corpse will be smothered by vermin and his soul will be damned."

MY NOTE:  You mean robbing a widow in a church doesn't damn your soul enough? 

"And a particular sequence must be followed. The wearer cannot simply remove and hand over the pants, but must do it one leg at a time. That is to say, he must first "doff" the pants off his right leg, and make his successor wear the right pant leg. At that point, his successor is committed to his fate; even if he tries to change his mind and take off the right pant leg, he will wind up wearing the left leg, regardless of his will."  (Wikipedia)

MY NOTE:  So basically, once you've made all the money and you're ready to die, you have to find a greedy schmuck and make them do the leg dance, but how the hell do you get that right leg off?  Is "doff" a secret code for flay yourself alive?  And think about the position you'd be in, with your successor has his right leg in your right leg's skin, which means... how is he going to get into your left?  

I'm sticking with lottery tickets.  

*Note that I did not mention robbing banks.  They don't have the cash they used to, there are cameras everywhere, and you're gonna get caught.  

BSP:

The latest Michael Bracken anthology, Janie Got A Gun, releases November 9 at the publishers HERE and, of course on Amazon.  In my "Round and Round", lifer Cool Papa Bell tells how Mildred, the penitentiary ghost, showed up for the holidays and took care of a lot of people's business... including a particularly nasty corrections officer.  

Happy to share space with Steve Liskow, Joseph S. Walker, John M. Floyd, Jim Winter and many more!

Also, coming soon, my "Lady With a Past" in Black Cat Mystery Weekly Issue #167!

"We’re back in Laskin, South Dakota, where police officer Grant Tripp is involved with the sexiest, most beautiful woman he’s ever known. But Megan’s a Davison, an ex-con is stalking her, and her ex-boyfriend wants Grant out of the picture. And then there’s the question of where she got so much money…"

Money.  It's always a problem, isn't it?

Sir Edmund Backhouse, or How to Destroy an Empire

by Eve Fisher

Back when I was first studying Chinese history, I kept running across two men who together wrote books that were almost impossible to obtain (pre-internet days), but were one of the primary references for many, many other books, especially textbooks:  

• J.O.P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse (1910). China Under the Empress Dowager: Being the History of the Life and Times of Tzŭ Hsi
• J.O.P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse  (1914). Annals & memoirs of the court of Peking: (from the 16th to the 20th century
• J.O.P. Bland and Edmund Backhouse  (1913). "Secret Annals of the Manchu Court 1. The Story of the Precious Pearl"

These memorialized the life of the Empress Dowager, Tzu Hsi (now spelled Cixi - 1835-1908), and the Manchu Court during her reign (1861-1908), a life of total power, decadence, curious ceremonies and customs, and fairly constant murder.  Fascinating.  Obsessive to those who read them back in the 1910s, because China was a closed country to almost everyone.  There were very few non-Chinese who could actually speak and read the Chinese language, and of those who could, most were eccentric British.  One of the most eccentric was Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944).

Backhouse was one of those who was a failure at home, but a roaring success in China.  Fleeing to China after a nervous breakdown at Oxford, he learned Chinese and became a translator for (London) Times correspondent George Morrison.  Morrison had been sent to report on a country whose language he didn't know.  (This happened more often than one might think, especially back then.)  This meant that Backhouse could feed Morrison pretty much anything he wanted about the Court and the Dowager Empress, especially if it was negative.   

Dowager Empress Cixi and women of the American Legation

NOTE:  No one in Britain really wanted China to have a strong ruler, for the simple reason that after winning the two Opium Wars, Britain had China in a vise.  The Treaty of Tientsin forced the Chinese government agreed to pay war reparations, open almost all ports to European commerce, legalize the opium trade, and grant foreign traders and missionaries rights to travel within China. It also gave the British the right to preside over the Chinese Customs Office (i.e., taxes and tariffs).  The British got the first slice of all that money, which meant a tidy profit, and no one wanted that to stop.

SECOND NOTE:  The British had long been propagandized about how primitive, barbaric, and decadent the Chinese, with their sophisticated 3,000+ years of culture, language, and civilization, were.  After all, it excused ramming opium down their throats, and taking all the land, power and money they could grab. Some of the other foreign translators contributed to the propaganda, most notably Karl Gutzlaff (See my old SleuthSayers article "The Drug Smuggling Missionary of the Pearl River"), whose writings and later speeches back in London (attended by Karl Marx) showed how desperately the Chinese needed missionaries and help.

Backhouse, who claimed to know many influential people in the Forbidden City, provided the Times with a Dowager Empress who was "a woman and an Oriental... on the one hand... imperious, manipulative, and lascivious" and on the other "ingenuous, politically shrewd, and conscientious."  And a lot of emphasis was put on the imperious.  For example, in The Secret Annals as the Dowager Empress and the Guanxu Emperor fled the palace during the Boxer Rebellion, the Emperor begs to have his favorite concubine, Precious Pearl, come with them, but the Dowager Empress has the eunuchs throw her down a well.  

NOTE:  There is no proof that this ever happened.  In fact, it's much more likely that it was Backhouse's retelling of the classic poem The Song of Everlasting Sorrow about the Tang Dynasty Consort Yang Guifei, forced to commit suicide by the Imperial Guard for her cousin's leadership of the An Lushan Rebellion.  One of the most famous star-crossed lovers stories in Chinese history, Yang Guifei's story has been told over the centuries as poetry, operas, plays, films, television series, and even a video game.

But we cannot forget the lascivious, either.  Backhouse's Empress had plenty of sex, and not just with other Chinese but with supposedly Backhouse.  In China under the Empress Dowager, Backhouse claimed she called him to the Forbidden Palace for sex "between 150 and 200 times.”  You will, I hope, not be surprised that it was thoroughly debunked, and its major source, the Diary of His Excellency Ching-Shan, was proved to be a Backhouse forgery.  Sadly, that did not happen for fifty years, and Cixi's reputation was a muddy swamp in Western eyes and historiography.  

He was also a conman. In 1916 he presented himself as a representative of the Imperial Court and negotiated two fraudulent deals with the American Bank Note Company and John Brown & Company, a British shipbuilder. Neither company received any confirmation from the Imperial Court. When they tried to contact Backhouse, he had left the country. After he returned to Peking in 1922 he refused to speak about the deals, and nothing apparently ever happened to him. (Wikipedia)

By WW2, he'd become actively fascist, collaborated with the  Japanese occupation, and hoped for an Axis victory. Sadly, he died before he could discover how poorly he had chosen sides.

Whew.

Forgery, fraud, fascist:  so why did his name keep coming up in the bibliographies and notes? 

Well, for one thing, by 1923 Backhouse had shipped eight tons of Chinese manuscripts to the Bodleian Library (the main research library of Oxford University). The Library described the gift: "The acquisition of the Backhouse collection, one of the finest and most generous gifts in the Library's history, between 1913 and 1922, greatly enriched the Bodleian's Chinese collections."  And since these ms. were in the Bodleian, they must be true, and so were repeatedly cited by other historians.  It took about twenty years for people to really question them, and it wasn't until 1991 that historian Lo Hui-min proved conclusively that China Under the Empress Dowager and the diary it was based on were Backhouse forgeries.  No wonder Western views of the Dowager Empress and China were so negative for so long.  

There's a long history of various diplomatic corps members sent to foreign lands to represent, negotiate, placate - whether they knew the language or not.  It still happens, leaving the diplomats in the hands of translators.  Who knows how much of the history we think we know was conjured up by translators who had their own views?  After all, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Ambassador to South Vietnam, did not speak Vietnamese.  He did speak French, which meant he could communicate with the South Vietnamese elite, but did that really give him the true picture of what was going on?  And George H. W. Bush spoke no Chinese when he was appointed Chief of the US Liaison Office in China (1974-75), which made him the de facto Ambassador.  

Oh, there's also the dicey history of missionaries' histories of places they went to convert.  Perhaps the most obvious one to question is that of St. Gregory of Tours (538-594 AD), Bishop of Tours in the Frankish Merovingian world.  He and one other person, Fredogar, are the only sources for Frankish history during that period, and what a period it was:  rampant violence, Arian heresy, regular miracles by true Catholics, constant war, fratricide, and of course, an evil queen, specifically Fredegund, Regent for Clothair II, who gives poisoned daggers to two clerics with which to assassinate Clothair's rivals, Childebert and Brunehild, and orders the successful assassination of Bishop Praetextus of Rouen while he is praying in his church.  She is evil, through and through...  Yes, The History of the Franks holds the attention:  but the question is, is it true?   

Meanwhile, time for some true BSP!

The latest Michael Bracken anthology, Janie Got A Gun, is available for preorder at the publishers HERE.  In my "Round and Round", lifer Cool Papa Bell tells how Mildred, the penitentiary ghost, showed up for the holidays and took care of a lot of people's business... including a particularly nasty corrections officer.  

Happy to share space with Steve Liskow, Joseph S. Walker, John M. Floyd, Jim Winter and many more!

Also, coming soon, my latest story, "Lady With a Past" in Black Cat Mystery Weekly Issue #167!

"We’re back in Laskin, South Dakota, where police officer Grant Tripp is involved with the sexiest, most beautiful woman he’s ever known. But Megan’s a Davison, an ex-con is stalking her, and her ex-boyfriend wants Grant out of the picture. And then there’s the question of where she got so much money…"