Thomas was not a small man, but was glad none of the trees lying on the ground were huge. Indeed, most of it was broken limbs, windfall and such. It was the usual mixture of pines, elm, birch, linden, and so forth. The pines were used for pulp, and he stacked them separately from the rest. He was allowed to keep a few pieces of hardwood for his own stove.

The little cabin was sparse, a summer vacation hut typically rented, but there had been no visitors this year. It was more than sufficient for his needs. There was a small table with two chairs in the near corner. A hotplate on top of the counter, and a small refrigerator under, and a small sink set in the counter next to them. Open shelves under the counter held a few dishes. At the far end of the counter was an odd little washing machine which also dried the clothes, and used no soap or other additives. Above it was a fold out drying rack nonetheless. This was all in the area on the right of the door.

To the left was a small bathroom built into the corner, just a shower and stool with a few shelves on one wall above a towel rack. His hosts had provided a stack of ragged old towels. Because the cabin was on a slope, the bed sat on a sort of loft about a meter higher, at the back of the cabin. There was a short stairway just beyond the bathroom, but everything else was wide open. On either side of the bed was an open hanging rack and shelves built into the wall.

The wood burning stove was more or less in the center, just below the bed loft. Because it was summer now, he seldom had a need to light it, but kept himself a pile of wood against one side of the cabin just in case. If he stayed into winter, that pile would have to be much larger.

Between the ax, several sizes of old saws and a set of splitting tools, he could whittle down and drag out most of the logs and limbs he encountered. He estimated it would take all the way up through autumn to make much of a dent in the first section of forest. That was the immediate goal. Staying longer depended on too many variables.

But Thomas was more curious in the much real task which his non-conscious mind knew was here. So far, the semi-nightmares ending with the Osage wise man’s face always came with a change in direction, and an important job with one or more people. People were the only thing that mattered to Thomas. Or rather, bring truth into their lives in some special way always more obvious as situations moved and morphed around him.

Thus, lunch time found him sitting on the porch, leaned back against the post. His left leg dangled off with his foot on the ground, his right stretched across the porch deck. Today was a special meal for lunch. He had run across a gypsy wagon in town a few days before, offering, off all things, Mexican food. So far as Tom could tell, it looked and smelled about the same as the stuff from the taco stands back home, only better quality. He had purchased a half-dozen burritos and froze them. Two had been thawing in the sun all morning, and were just about warm.

But no hurry. First he poured a cup of coffee from the carafe. The cabin sat facing the old road used by the tractors which came and dragged away the logs Tom hauled out of the forest. It didn’t matter who came to get it, since there was only one old sawmill in the area. It was actually a large saw in a small shed, with a sliding rack. No power equipment could enter the forest, so he pulled the wood out into the open. His host had just finished tying up the load from this morning, and walked over to chat with Tom a minute.

He pointed out on the road coming up from the village. A lone figure approached, rather uncertainly. The first thing Tom noticed was the long, almost white hair tied back and flapping in the breeze. It could have been female, but walked with an androgynous gait.

The old man announced, “Her again. She is crazy, you know. If you feed her, she will never leave. She hangs on like an octopus, acting strange and frightening the children. You would do well to make her leave.” With that, he turned and mounted the tractor and drove off down the hill past the figure. Neither the man nor the girl acknowledged each other’s presence. It was clearly a rather small, skinny female. As she drew closer, she stopped, frozen for a few moments. Her eyes stared at the roof of the cabin. Her mouth moved as if talking very quietly to someone next to her.

She was not old — obviously younger than Tom. The skin of her face was pale white and still smooth despite exposure from being homeless. The hair was tangled and slightly matted, and a little dirty. Her clothing was also rather dirty, though rather carefully composed. Thomas thought the coat was too heavy, but remembered he had been working six days per week for two weeks already, and his metabolism was very high. So if the old man wore long sleeves, a homeless woman might wear a coat. It had once been a rather bright orange and red, contrasting with her dark blue sweat pants. Her feet sported battered old hiking shoes with mismatched laces and socks.

She walked up and stopped a couple meters from him. Tom thought to himself she might even be pretty if she didn’t look so anorexic. She paused there for a long moment, then fixed her eyes directly on him. Her gaze was intense, yet utterly empty, without the slightest emotion.

So this is why he was here.

With precise UK English uncommon for the area, she spoke in rather flat tones. “Could I have some food?” At least the emphasis and tone were correct, but there was no apparent emotion in any part of her facial movements. Without taking his eyes from her face, he reached back with his free hand and picked up one of the foil wrapped burritos. Extending his right arm over the left hand which gripped the coffee mug, he held it out to her with a mild, but unsmiling look on his face. There was no sense confusing her with unnecessary inputs.

Instead of simply reaching for it, she first moved and took a seat opposite him on the porch, just a short distance from the foot resting on the deck. She sat rather bolt upright without leaning or curving her back. Once seated with legs crossed, then she reached out and took the offered food. He watched her, but not intently.

She unwrapped the foil covering, holding the burrito in her left while managing to fold the foil neatly with her right. She placed it carefully halfway between them on the deck of the porch. Straightening back up, she held the burrito horizontally and precisely in the fingertips of both hands, a foot or so from her face. She paused, staring at it, then made a few of the small mouth movements, as if whispering to it. She closed her eyes tight for a few seconds, then suddenly bit into the center of it, not quite deep enough to sever it in two. Tom unwrapped the other burrito partway and ate from one end, while casually watching her.

She chewed with her eyes closed, making no other movements at all. After swallowing a couple of times, she sat again, motionless. Then she opened her eyes and bit again, this time breaking it in two, each hand spinning it around like a baton. She closed her eyes again while chewing, now holding the two parts vertically in each fist.

It was a fluid motion which surprised him, but he didn’t flinch. Without a word, she passed the portion in the right hand to the left, and reached out in an impossible stretch over her folded legs, taking his coffee mug from his fingers. He didn’t react at all, simply watched as she took three sips quickly. Then she reached back and returned it where she got it. He simply gripped it again when it came back.

Then she returned one half of the burrito to her right hand again. Another pause with eyes closed, then she nipped a small bite off each piece. He noticed her teeth were very well kept, unlike everything else he could see about her. This pattern of behavior continued, until after a few more sips from his cup, which he kept at least half full, her burrito was gone. He finished at about the same time, folded the wrapper like hers and laid it on top.

Looking up, he said with his own rather flat tones, “I’m Thomas. What should I call you?”

Before she answered, a well worn toothbrush came from somewhere and she scrubbed carefully every tooth from every angle possible. That explained the nice teeth, at least. She grabbed his mug again, took a larger mouthful. She held it while swishing it around. Swallowing, she took another sip, then placed the mug back in his hand. The toothbrush had disappeared again. She wiped her coat sleeve across her mouth, then announced in that same flat voice, “Lana.”

Pushing his back off the post, he rose, telling her, “I’m going back to my work, Lana.” Then he walked back uphill toward where his tools waited in the forest.

Having been awake again for just a few minutes, Thomas remembered the dour Finns didn’t snicker much about anything. One of those dour faces approached him with two cups of coffee and sat next to him on the couch.

Thomas did his blinking best to be civil. “Thank you, sir.” He grabbed the offered cup and sipped while he thought of something else he might say. The man beat him to it.

“I just wanted to thank you for volunteering to help our community last night.”

So far, so good. Thomas needed only smile and see what else was coming, since the man obviously had something on his mind.

“It’s a very lucky thing you aren’t involved in our silly politics.”

Okay, so it looks like maybe another job ahead?

“I was wondering if you were looking for more work. My brother could sure use some help with a rather difficult situation over in another village.” The man pointed in yet a new direction Thomas had not planned to go.

The man continued to explain how the conflict between national and local laws, and yet again with private rules for land use. There was a forest near this village which was loaded with deadfall from a bad wind storm. With all the tangle of laws and rules, no one was allowed to clean it out. They could sure use the wood, what with global economics making other forms of heat so very expensive. The man was pretty sure a foreigner with no connections could “volunteer” to at least move the dead trees and limbs out of the forest where someone else was then permitted to haul it away and cut it up.

Of course, no power tools were permitted in this forest.

Thomas became freshly aware of the monumental stiffness. He also remembered those summers in his youth when he helped clear some of that hunting lease where he stayed until his forced departure.

While the old man drove him in a battered little station wagon to the next village, Thomas decided this was what had called up the image of his old Osage friend. The Indian man, good as his word, had arrived that Monday at Tom’s trailer and sat on the old log laying out front. He never knocked or said anything, just sat peacefully and at ease, waiting for Tom to come out.

Had not the old man’s Cadillac not made noise on the gravel drive, Thomas would not have known he was there. Glancing out the window, his anticipation buried all the other thoughts he might have had. He hurried out the join the man in the cold wintry air.

The ancient man ignored his offer of coffee or other refreshments. When Thomas fell silent, the old Indian waited a few minutes longer. “Expect everything; expect nothing.”

Tom decided this was the kind of thing where it was best to simply wait and absorb whatever was coming, precisely as the man had said. “Let nothing surprise you, because anything is possible. You have already met Death. He is your friend, now. Nothing else can happen you haven’t already faced.”

And so it went. It was not religion, per se, as Thomas had first expected, but nonetheless truth of a divine quality. It was all new, all ancient, and all familiar at the same time. Tom had no idea how long they sat there, as the Osage wise man mapped out a new reality for him.

Three days each week for the next two months they went through this same drill. Sometimes it seemed the Indian was repeating himself, but not quite. Rather, he was knitting things together into a fabric, weaving a tale of Tom’s future course of life. Not in specific detail, but in how Tom was to look at reality, and how he was to live it. In the hours between each visit, Tom could hardly chase down all the threads. Instead, the threads entangled his awareness, overwhelmed him.

While Thomas continued leading the church music program, something he could have done standing on his head because it was so instinctive, he found himself coming more and more to life. The music had its own meaning, speaking to Tom with a message not always precisely the same as the words.

It ended all too soon.

For Tom the truck company manager, politics had all been regulation and taxes. All the rest he ignored. Suddenly, it would be ignored no longer. Another major terrorist incident struck somewhere in the country, and all Hell broke loose. There were troops everywhere, even in his little hamlet in flyover country. Churches were compelled to offer certain types of information, and were warned to avoid certain other types. By this time Tom had been studying the Bible with a couple of new friends, and it all made sense in light of what the Osage man taught him. It also demanded Thomas not play along with this new program.

The old Indian told him a week ahead of time to pack one bag and prepare to flee. Tom was torn. He knew better than to doubt this warning, but was just getting his life in some semblance of useful order. So he met for two last hurried Bible studies with his friends, then told them he was ready for a new calling. They agreed this was their last meeting, as they were all sensing the same calling.

That night, as Tom sat staring at his rucksack, now ready to go, his cellphone rang. He didn’t recognize the number, but did recognize the voice. It was someone in the church, a retired county deputy. Thomas and his friends were facing arrest warrants. The church building would be seized that very night, and Tom needed to be gone when the police arrived.

It was all so new, so impossible, yet ancient as mankind itself. Almost unconsciously Tom set the cellphone down without closing it. He was already dressed, so it meant only shrugging into the backpack and getting started. He left the door unlocked; no sense in making it more expensive for his cousin than necessary. He hiked over the back roads and into the night.

As the memories faded, Tom found himself now standing before a very old gate, the car which brought him receding in the distance. That rucksack had long given way to a sea bag, and some of the contents had changed. Yet here, another dour old man strolled toward him with an equally old dog following stiffly off to one side.

Thomas smiled peacefully, expecting nothing, everything, anything.

It was bad enough he didn’t quite remember where he was at the moment, but was shaking off the semi-nightmare of bad days long ago. A decade before, he sank deep into depression. He couldn’t remember how it started. Going straight from high school he worked the freight docks at night and took a few college classes during the day time. Before he reached thirty, he had that degree and was working in management. Trucking was still a growing industry where he lived.

Then, all of a sudden, it didn’t matter. Nothing seemed to matter much. His boss advised him to take that long neglected vacation. He came home and never went back. He felt like he was in some kind of prison. Sometime during that period his wife left him. The one corner of sanity left in his mind at the time could hardly blame her. She remarried and he never saw, nor heard from, her again. The house, cars, everything was gone.

His cousin loaned him an old travel trailer, sited on his hunting lease. Tom could never remember what kept him from committing suicide, but one cold night after his indifference to everything in general saw him nearly freezing without any heat, he was shaking too much even to feel bad. He walked up to the convenience store and decided to have some cocoa.

As he sat sipping and still shivering at the table, he realized it was Christmas. He found himself involuntarily humming first, then singing one of the cheesy old songs from a long forgotten movie. One of the customers heard him, and asked Tom something he didn’t catch. Blinking, he came back to himself enough to look up at the old woman.

“You have a really nice voice, sir. Do you sing in a band or choir somewhere?”

Thomas wasn’t sure if he actually shook his head deliberately or was still shivering, but she must have taken it as a “no.”

“My church is looking for a song leader. We sure could use a real singer, since so few of us can carry a tune any more.”

Tom smiled, an almost forgotten reflex. He did have some training, but it was mostly from his old school days. The music teacher had considered him talented and organized enough to help direct the school choir. Something inside him stirred at the memory. His hands twitched under the table as they recalled independently of his volition the pattern to beat the time to the music playing inside the store. Why not? “I suppose I could,” he said tentatively.

“We can’t pay a whole lot, but we would sure be glad to have someone who knows music up front for once,” she gushed. Juggling the thin plastic t-shirt bag with her purchase, she fished in her purse. Producing a card, she placed it on the table. Thomas recognized the address as just a half-mile away on the old highway. Then she handed him a twenty dollar bill.

He stared at it, lost, as she shuffled out the door without another word. Maybe he could use the money to refill the propane tank. He was singing again as he put the money in one of his pockets. The world was suddenly an alien place, but it wasn’t so bad, after all.

It’s not that he got religion, as his cousin teased him, but the people were just so darned nice. He showed up that next Sunday, clean shaven and early enough to find out about the situation. There was a piano, and a very old gentlemen was there practicing. He looked up. Thomas was dressed decently, but felt a little awkward trying to decide how to introduce himself. The old gentleman beat him to it.

“You must be Thomas!” His voice was broken, not into cracks, but a million soft shards which rasped. That would explain why the pianist wasn’t directing singing.

“Yes, sir.” After a pause, it started coming back to him. “What songs do we have for today?” He began flipping through one of the old hymnals. It was almost instinctive. Had it not been, Thomas could have done none of it. In a short time, the songs were arranged and Tom knew he could sing them well enough to do okay.

During worship, the singing was enthusiastic enough, but a little country church half filled with retirees was not at all like his school choir. He decided it didn’t matter. There was almost no pressure at all, just him singing the songs and them trying. But they gushed over how much better it was than before, and he felt really comfortable. That is, except with the half-dozen offers for lunch. He just wasn’t up to that, yet.

After they were all gone, the last parishioner coming out was by far the smallest, most dried up old man Thomas had ever seen. The dark, lined face and fine decorative beadwork the man wore made it obvious he was Native American. He stopped, and turned his wizened face up at Thomas.

“Go home and rest, Thomas. You have very, very far to travel. I will come to visit you tomorrow. Be ready.” The voice was both soft and commanding.

It never occurred to Thomas he was in any position to argue. Instead, it gave him something to anticipate, something which softened the emotional downslope after so much excitement. The old man waddled away and got into an old Cadillac which had pulled up in front of the door waiting for him.

Thomas still saw the image of the old Osage face when he struggled to sit up on the couch. Looking around, he dimly remembered this was the anteroom of a coffee house. It seemed midday, and how many customers might have come and gone and seen him there was but a slight worry.

He only ever saw the face of the Indian wise man in his dreams when it was time to change course.

The breeze was light, sun warm. Very nice day for this far north. Thomas leaned back against the post at the corner of the cabin, closed his eyes as his head spun with the memories of how he ended up somewhere near the coast of Finland, near a town they called Sauvo.

The whole world was falling apart, but not the same pace in every place. It was all a jumbled mixture of government edicts, hiding and clandestine meetings with Bibles, dogs barking in the night and travel. Then it was a long string of trucks, flat rail cars, woodland trails, wading through swampy river bottoms — it was all confused. The only good part was he had only himself to worry about. His wife and left him years before.

At some point Tom ended up on the East Coast in a bar full of fishermen and the like. He remembered distinctly singing Christmas carols as some sort of defiant act, and getting the patrons to join him in rousing choruses for which most could hardly remember the words. It was literally singing for his supper, but he was careful not to take all the offered drinks from the merry men.

He ended up on a cargo ship. Hardly capable of seaman duties, he worked in the kitchen, taught classes on anything he thought he knew better than the crew, and sang at dinner whenever they asked. Tom had been careful to sing songs he could get them to join in, because his voice was only passable. Aside from the singing, it was his ability to fix the battered old computers and some of the electronics on the ship which made them glad they had dragged him along. He never told them it was mostly intelligent guessing, recalling what he could from what had been a major hobby in his youth.

But the one thing which endeared him to the ship’s officers was his imposing size and dislike for getting drunk. A good bit bigger than average, Thomas had been a football lineman in school, and had stayed in decent shape through his adult years.

There were a few port calls, and too frequent trouble from a small portion of the crew, and Tom was always sent along to ride herd. They insisted on staying out way too late in Helsinki, then tricked Thomas into getting on the wrong bus. Instead of the port, he woke up in Sauvo. He didn’t even have a passport, and knew better than to request one at that point. US embassies had become forbidding places under the new regime back home. But he got directions back toward the coast. Maybe he could find a fisherman to take him out the ship, which wasn’t scheduled to leave for a week, yet. It was a long walk and he was nearly out of Euros.

There on some lonely road just outside a tiny village, as the sun was going down, he saw the skid marks leading off the pavement and into a shallow but steep sided draw. There was still patches of dirty white and snow banks here and there in the higher elevations. In the bottom the truck sat just short of some old gravel road, buried up to the tops of the tires in snow, a pool of half-melted white protected by the deep shadow of the draw. Where he stood at the edge of the road was just about even with the top of the freight trailer.

The Finnish chatter meant nothing to him, but it seemed no one was really interested in getting the rig out. Finally, he decided to ask in English if he could help, simply because it would help him pass the time and forget his own problems. Maybe he could get a meal or a ride out of it.

Near as he could make out, there was a general strike of some kind. Since there was no loss of life or serious injuries, there would be no emergency services. The only towing rig available was an old farm tractor, too small to handle a loaded truck and trailer. Apparently the load was a major supply run for the area. The driver was not involved in the strike, but the only other people around were mostly retirees and the like. This was vacation land, and still sparsely populated that time of year. Yet, even the unloading of a truck was covered by union contracts.

But Thomas wasn’t.

It took him a few minutes to hike around to the small gravel road down near the truck. He stashed his sea bag in the limbs of a nearby tree, then waded out to the back of the truck. After a bit of haggling with the truck driver to avoid outright payment for services, he opened the tailgate and proceeded to look over the freight. He knew his late-middle-aged muscles were going to hurt an awful lot tomorrow, but he had done plenty of such work in his youth. Eventually, between him and the truck driver, the freight was off and stacked on a tarp in the middle of the gravel road a few meters away. It was midnight, but the old man with the tractor had waited, watching in amusement the heavy work. Then it was time for the shovel work, making less abrupt the slope on the side of the gravel bank.

With a lot of careful maneuvering between the old tractor and the truck, eventually it was hauled out upon solid ground. By dawn, he was nearly dead, but the truck had been reloaded and was trundling slowly down the gravel road. Tort liability laws prevented him riding the truck, but it was going in the wrong direction for him, anyway. Only a small part of the load was coming off here in the village. The driver did leave him with a “donation” at least.

It was all he could do to keep from laying down in the snow under the tree where his bag was stashed. Tom had hardly pulled the bag all the way out when an old woman signaled him from the pavement above. She said in the odd lilting English of the Finns something that included the word “breakfast.”

That was all he really needed to understand.

On my other blog, I offered a spiritual discussion of where my stories come from. In short, they are sanitized versions of what comes out of my internal fantasy engine. I don’t much care about power and wealth, so my fantasies are typically about people and places, and things I simply wish I could do.

Light Switch takes a look at the process of internal operations of the soul.

I missed this nugget the other day, until it showed up on an investment website:

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edison’s patents for the motion pictures, it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North American east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent….

The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the Internet into a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers.

By far, I am not the only one who sees TPTB want to turn the Internet into another one-way content delivery system. Right now, it’s a world of equal ends, and only the speed of your connection limits your output. And anyone anywhere on the system can read your content, so that it stands on its own merits.

Which brings up an odd thing: Yesterday my traffic here spiked to 600 hits. Most Sundays it’s less than 100. I’m guessing either someone visited a selection of my pages and hit “reload” a bunch of times, or the same group of folks visited a large collection of my posts, because I’ve got a ton of 5-hit counts. But then, that’s after they taper off from some 40 hits on my home page — exceedingly rare. I’m waiting to see what today brings. I seriously doubt I’ve suddenly become famous, but it just goes to show what’s possible.

There’s not much I can do to prevent the Net becoming a fancy delivery system for smart phones and tablets. If that’s what folks want, let them eat cake and rot their teeth. I’m praying the folks who actually know how all this stuff works will keep the doors open for those of us who have something to say.

The one who associates with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm. (Proverbs 13:20 NET Free Bible)

In other words, if someone hangs out with fools, they will hardly be any different from those fools.

If your children and teenagers spend most of their time only in the company of each other, and only a handful of adults, just what sort of influence shapes their values? As for that handful of adults — I’ve worked closely with them and I find the majority of them are not at all wise. That they work in that setting usually proves that.

In ancient times, children learned at home until they reached the ability for concrete reasoning (typically eight to ten years of age). They then learned to read, often in a religious setting, for only a few hours each day at most. Whatever else they needed was taught by their parents, to include numeracy. Those most talented and interested were allowed to continue their education, but it was the same setting as those who did not: They were apprenticed to someone.

Here in America, it could hardly be worse. Our entire system is the product of communist unions. The schools of today bear only the most faint and superficial resemblance to the independent frontier schools of prior centuries. The unions decided early on their greatest advantage was limiting the work force to gain the highest wages. So they kept out blacks, Indians and anyone else they felt were lesser creatures, and kept out kids. It was entirely a union idea to keep kids in school past age 15. At the end of what we now consider 8th grade, kids of old were more literate and better able to function in the real world than those today with more than twelve years of modern education.

The point being, children were encouraged to hang out with wise adults who could show them how to deal with the real world, particularly in a work setting. Most of the time they were in the company of adults, not vast herds of other children in a setting they would never again see in their entire lives. Modern mass education is an entirely artificial atmosphere. It is hardly different from a prison, as the social dynamics are almost exactly the same.

I’ve worked in both schools and prisons, so I know they are the same.

My Dad was an abusive and hateful man. He came by it honestly, as both his parents were that way. I suppose it was just part of the hard poverty background. At any rate, my Dad’s overuse of intimidation gave me a very fearful childhood, replete with nightmares every time I fell asleep, and all sorts of other neuroses.

You have to understand how a person can love and despise the same person all at once. The Principle of Propinquity makes us care about people, even if we are ready to kill them, simply because of physical proximity over time. A portion of you realizes their welfare is your responsibility on some instinctive level, even when it all conflicts with your own sanity.

Sanity does not require you banish all compartmentalization. Otherwise, a great many more people would have died by murder and neglect than is already the case.

At some point, I decided to use my spite for Dad to reject copying his ways. That didn’t prevent me having some of the same reflexes, but it did prevent me ending up like him. To this day, I am certain he does not think he was abusive. Not quite psychopathic, but he never understood empathy, never had any. By contrast, I am burdened with excessive empathy, which is precisely how I remained so fearful so long. My sensing of human emotion was overwhelming and I had no filtering mechanism. I remained emotionally swamped long into my young adulthood. I also learned to act to cover it all up.

At some point, I found out where to turn it off. At first, during my adolescence, I could only turn it off all together, so as to perform some acts which remain tender scars on my soul even now. But with time, I learned some fine control, and how to avoid bumping old wounds most of the time. The coping mechanisms are now pretty strong, and the skills to act on the resolve to do good for others has grown to a satisfactory level.

The hardest thing is letting stuff go because I simply cannot do any good with it. Stupid can’t be fixed.

I live in close proximity to someone who can just barely function because she can’t differentiate between major and minor. She will obsess over things which simply do not matter, will pick over them endlessly, making all Creation wait until she’s satisfied some utterly insignificant detail is fixed to her liking. That’s not as much hyperbole as you might think, because it borders on OCD. You may have seen the video of the guy you can’t let the fringe on his floor rug get out of perfect combed alignment. He spends hours dragging his fingers across the edges of his rug because it drives him mad to see the threads not perfectly straight. He can’t control this, so far as anyone can tell. This person I deal with can control it, but gets angry and takes it as some grand personal insult when you suggest these little things are not a priority. The OCD guy knows it’s crazy; she rejects the truth.

So, every day we have to tiptoe around her defenses and help her understand there are things she can’t fix. That is, they can’t be fixed without unreasonable effort compared to what difference it makes. The reason it’s a problem is she gets so tired working over silly stuff, she has no energy for things which do matter. So on the one hand, she makes everyone wait, even to the point of denying her children food for hours at a time while she picks over the silliest details of food preparation. Breakfast started at 7AM is finally ready at 9. This is not healthy. On the other hand, she never washes the dishes because she simply has too many other things to do. Her kitchen is counter is covered in dirty dishes, and you can’t find the sink. Dishes get washed when someone else does them.

The only thing worse would be involving the county child welfare, because those people are all far worse, the scum of the earth, psychopaths. They seriously need adult supervision.

But I can’t fix her problem, either. Yes, there has been progress. I limit what I work on with her, and let the rest go. I refuse to stop trying. It’s the same business of human character, following the impulses which drive each one of us.

Inside that whiny little boy I was, there lived a grand risk taker. Not in the sense of big, heroic deeds for all to see, but in the sense I’ll push myself to extremes. I like to hike six or more miles at a time, despite my knees and hip hurting. I ride my bicycle 20-30 miles over some very hilly terrain because it feels good in one sense, even though it makes my old leg muscles hurt. I’ll push until I drop, if there seems even a scintilla of a reason. It answers some deep, nameless need. I know it’s not trying to prove anything; I’m just having fun. My brand of “fun.”

I recall at age 12 playing in a sand and gravel pit on Saturdays when the workmen were gone. The sand was piled up like a massive mountain, but packed on top. They would pull from one side, building from the other, marching the whole thing across the open gravel bottom over a month or so, then back. I’d climb the hard packed side, then run and jump as far as I could off the cliff where they pulled it. Given the lateral distance off the face, I’d drop some 30 feet (9m) into the soft sand below, buried up to my hips from the momentum. Then I’d leapfrog, or roll sideways, the rest of the way down to the bottom. Repeat no less than a dozen times. It took a good bit of shaking and slapping to get the sand out of my clothes when I was done.

During the very worst period of my knee troubles, I was with a group of teenagers at a woodland camp during a winter break from school. The camp offered a High Ropes Course — a confidence challenge course with more than adequate safety measures. Our first event that day found us sitting at the foot of two massive hardwood trees. Between were a stacked series of small platforms. The objective was to climb a rope ladder to the first platform well over head height. Jump across some 3-4 feet (1m) to the other platform, and climb another rope ladder. Repeat as needed up to six levels. I was really out of shape, and couldn’t stand on my feet longer than some fifteen minutes at a time. I walked with a cane because my wheelchair could not navigate this place. But when no one moved to be first, I jumped up. I made it up three levels before I simply ran out of breath and got dizzy from the effort. The leap across the gap was piddling by my standards, and we were all connected to a safety line from above, but I was a fat wimp who needed his wheelchair. My measure of success got them going, and most of them cleared more than I did.

It’s the same personality that keeps doing the dishes for this crazy woman.

It’s not hard to understand. While I admire the heroics of blacking out the the entry page to numerous websites, the psychopaths will not be bullied. The language used by Chris Dodd should be enough to demonstrate these people don’t care about truth, facts, or humans. It’s all about power. They aren’t going to be turned away from it. If you brutally and publicly slaughtered Dodd, some other ugly SOB would put his face on TV seconds later.

Stop and think for a second. Did they take down MegaUpload without the benefit of SOPA/PIPA? No problem, just some extra paper work. Why them? Because they dared to post a video of all the “clients” of Chris Dodd’s criminal extortionist gang, clients who dared to advertise for MegaUpload as one of the greatest supports for their art. These people, who know the MAFIAA have them by the short-and-curlies, realize the best thing that can happen to them is for their artwork to escape the controls of the MAFIAA. The only people who could possibly be hurt by this is the MAFIAA extortionists. The logic of real Internet marketing escapes most people. So MAFIAA had to make an example of them.

And who would have guessed Anonymous would have responded? Weren’t you so surprised by that? But this isn’t the core group, of course, because it was nothing more than punks with a DDoS. We all know the real core of Anonymous would actually crack into the servers, not simply swamp them with traffic. But the punks who pretend they are hackers are by far so predictable, are they not?

This is precisely what Dodd and friends knew would happen. Now we have a valid excuse to push through SOPA/PIPA without any modifications. Problem solved — two at once, in fact. Sometimes you wonder how much this reflects simple infiltration at 4chan.

We’ll know something useful was done when, as Vox suggests, we see personal details of the psychopaths’ lives released for publication at Pastebin. Or other, juicy revelations from actually getting inside the server networks of these thugs. It can be done; trust me. Whether it answers the need for Anonymous, or the rest of us, remains to be decided by those who can do it.

It’s the same as the government having the power to take down any site they choose, and arrest the admins and owners. They could have taken MegaUpload anytime since it came online. It has gotten easier lately, but what almost nobody wants to admit is how SOPA/PIPA won’t make it all the much easier. The Feds and MAFIAA simply want it on paper what they plan to do anyway, and the opposition wants to pretend not getting those laws is going to make any difference. The psychopaths already have that power; it’s just a question of how much paper work is involved. That it was announced at all was an open provocation.

Meanwhile, the only difference between our version of “democracy” versus naked oppression is the fun and games of manipulation.

Addenda: Okay, I forgot to mention the fellow behind MegaUpload (Kimble Schmitz, AKA “Kim Dotcom”) is a bona fide crook and probably an intelligence asset for someone. I’m not here to praise MegaUpload. What I wanted to point out was how patently silly it is to ignore the timing, as if it were simply an accident. John Young at Cryptome makes the case this was almost certainly done using military grade security tools — “counter-terrorism” — for a rather petty criminal case. Every time the government promises this is not what will happen, it has become the single primary use of the thing in question.

We aren’t cynical enough.

On 3 May 1999, we had a bit of wind and rain outside our home. That’s the facts, but not the truth. Okay, it’s only some of the facts. We had several days of tornadoes in Oklahoma, and on that day it passed within a quarter-mile of our home — a mobile home. Our yard was covered with debris ripped from all those fancy houses. What if the path had been over ours? But if I were trying to sell real estate in that neighborhood, I might not want to discuss Oklahoma’s tornadoes.

If I’m trying to sell other things, like ideas, I’m sure to leave out pertinent information in order to press the case I wish to make. So we have millions of dollars’ worth of prize photography from the likes of National Geographic, whose editors hope you buy into the UN dominated program which grants them full power to decide when and where you can go to the potty, among other things.

If I wanted you to think I’m not going to conduct warfare against Iran, I’ll tell you some missile drill in Israel with American troops was called off. Meanwhile, the majority of all Western nuclear powered aircraft carriers were recently moved within flight range of Iran. And of course, I would not want officials admitting publicly that if Iran simply dismantled every fragment of their nuclear program altogether, it would not change the plans to attack them, but I would have to come up with a new excuse.

But if I was trying to sell Global Warming and draconian controls guaranteed to make Ethiopian refugees look wealthy, I wouldn’t just cherry-pick the facts, I’d invent new “facts” and change all the numbers to suit my theories.

Human activity in the main is a broad mixture of good and bad. Sometimes the precise same small action is both. I don’t begrudge the crackers digging up information, but I wish they’d avoid breaking stuff and pulling out credit card numbers. Still, the overall effect is probably salutary. If Bradley Manning did what they say, he broke the law while making us more free. There are a lot of things we might not know about were it not for the habits of computer crackers, things we really should know. Or could, if we bothered.

The Internet has done two things. First, it democratized global information sharing and retrieval. Pictures of the tornado damaged mentioned above were available by TV right away, but the Internet saved a copy and keeps it available. It’s not just fast and cheap, but durable. Plus, anyone who was there could take their own pictures and share them, and not rely on some editorial staff to put it into their broadcast. So we can catch videos of that otherwise unreported murder at the hands of police officers in some pricey shopping district, and see it posted on YouTube in seconds after it happened.

Second, the Net has democratized sharing of passions. The problem is, passions aren’t always interested in truth, nor even facts. They most often attach themselves to lies, frankly. Now more people in more places on the earth can have their brains rotted by Lady Gaga’s filthy music videos. And more people in more places can absorb the National Geographic vile hatred for freedom of human choice, and all the various shills of evil power pushing their lies.

It also allows me to share my own passions, for whatever value readers find in them. I’m not sure I know the truth of things, only what drives me. I certainly don’t want control over others, nor their stuff. I can handle National Geographic, just look at their pictures and videos and ignore their message. And not contribute any money directly. I’m pretty sure the Climategate “scientists” deserve far worse than they’ll ever get, which is nothing new.

The means to communicate is always a double-edged sword.