No, Virginia, vaccines are not safe

As I keep pointing out to little avail, to claim that vaccines are either intrinsically safe or intrinsically unsafe is to miss the point entirely:

Mexico’s public health system has suspended infant vaccines after two babies died and 29 were sickened in an impoverished community.

Six of the 29 babies are in grave condition after receiving vaccinations for tuberculosis, rotovirus and Hepatitis B, which are generally administered between 0 and 6 months, according to a national schedule. The cause of the adverse reactions is not known, the Mexican Institute for Social Security said Sunday.

The institute said it stopped vaccines nationwide on Saturday as a precaution.

To even attempt to discuss “vaccine safety” as a single, uniform subject is blitheringly stupid. I am neither an “anti-vaxxer” nor a “pro-vaxxer”, I simply believe that each vaccine, each combination of vaccines, and each vaccine schedule need to be considered separately, and to take the age, size, and risk profile of the recipient into account. People seem to understand that holistic “car safety” is a not a meaningful subject when contemplating the difference between the crash tests of an old Pinto and a modern Humvee, so it’s bizarre that they insist on lumping a single tetanus vaccine for a 200-pound adult in with a series of shots given to a 12-pound infant under the single topic of “vaccine safety”.

Why kids hate nerds

Vanity is seldom popular, but it is considerably less bearable for the average person in those who are more intelligent than the norm than in those who are more beautiful than the norm. At least with the physically vain, one has only to look at them. With the intellectually vain, one is far too often subjected to lectures in which the primary purpose is not to educate, inform, or discuss, but merely to demonstrate the knowledge and intellectual superiority of the lecturer.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don’t smart kids make themselves popular? If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn’t matter much. Kids didn’t admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn’t want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn’t want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.

I would go so far as to say that most smart people are considerably more vain about their intelligence than most beautiful people are vain about their beauty. And because intelligence is less easily perceived than beauty, they tend to go further out of their way to ensure that others know about it. In fact, one could even go so far as to suggest that the primary purpose of “nerd culture” is to foster nerd vanity by publicly staking an implied claim of superior intelligence that otherwise might go unremarked.

The vanity theme is supported by the observation that modestly smart people are far bitchier and hateful to those of genuinely high intelligence than the pretty girls are to the beautiful girls. As we’ve so often seen here, there is no one nastier on the subject of intelligence, or more dubious about the validity of IQ, than the +1 SD midwit whose illusions of intellectual superiority have been shattered.

The highly intelligent don’t want to be smart. It’s merely a simple fact of life, to be utilized or navigated as necessary. We are entirely accustomed to meeting with blank, uncomprehending faces practically every time we open our mouths without consciously dialing down our thoughts. (The befuddled response of the File 770 commenters to my simple reference to Aristotelian rhetoric is a good case in point.) The fact that we might occasionally use our intelligence to torment annoying midwits should be no more surprising than a beautiful girl using her looks to outshine a less attractive, self-appointed rival who has been relentlessly talking about her behind her back.

Should we, as adults, be beyond this things? Perhaps, but it’s readily observable that we are not. I daresay that even inside a Buddhist monastery, the same hierarchical social patterns can be readily observed.

I have to admit, I never got into nerd culture outside of its overlap with games. I didn’t join any of the defensive little nerd posses in school, although it is interesting to look back and observe that my three best friends from first grade were all National Merit scholars or semifinalists who went to RPI, Stanford, and Bucknell. Like tends to attract like. To this day, I still prefer to eat alone so that I can read while I’m eating. But I don’t dislike nerds either, except when they get intellectually insecure and start posturing and pontificating in defense of their easily wounded vanity.

It’s rather amusing, really. Any time I see someone going on and on about my supposed obsession with intelligence, I know exactly where to place him. The highly intelligent are much more inclined to shrug and say “so he’s smart, BFD, who isn’t?”

SJW summarizes SJWism

At File 770:

Gully Foyle on May 10, 2015 at 9:52 am said:
Dynamo, just shut it. Tolerance does not demand that one tolerate the intolerant. The open minded need not embrace those that would destroy their society.

Tolerance does not demand toleration. Inclusivity justifies exclusion. Did Orwell have them pegged or what? Black is white. War is peace. We have always been at war with Eastasia. And notice the claim that it is “their society”. Not ours. Not the moderates. The SJWs.

CrisisEraDynamo’s response was very good:

Now we get to the heart of the matter. Define everything you don’t like
as “intolerance” and poof! No silencing, even when boldly declaring
there’s no place for dissenters.

Child Protection Stasi in action

This abuse of government authority has got to stop, and stop immediately.

Police seized 10 kids from their rural Kentucky home after receiving an anonymous tip to investigate the family’s “off the grid” lifestyle.

Joe Naugler happened to be away with eight of his children when the authorities arrived on the scene. Nicole Naugler, who happens to be five months pregnant, took their oldest children with her to drive away, but the authorities stopped her and took took them. She was arrested for “disorderly conduct and resisting arrest,” but she claims she was arrested after not allowing the officers to take her children without a “fight.” Officers told her husband he needed to hand over the other children or face felony charges, and he complied.

Pace Ellsworth, a family friend, said he believes the Nauglers were targeted because the government disagrees with their “free” lifestyle of “unschooling,” which focuses on learning through life experience and each child’s individual strengths.

The children have been placed in four different homes in four different counties that CPS chose. On Friday morning, officials inspected the Naugler’s home and concluded that they did, in fact, have good living conditions.

The Nauglers are hopeful to get their kids back. The family will find out the specific reason their kids were taken at an upcoming court hearing, but it’s hard to believe how EASY it was for the authorities to take their kids. This was all based on a baseless, anonymous tip.

There is absolutely no excuse or justification for this sort of thing.
Every policeman and CPS agent involved should be arrested and tried for
kidnapping. Whatever happened to Blackstone’s Formulation and the principle “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”?

The Child Protection Stasi aren’t protecting children. They are abusing them.

We’re not fighting fire with fire

We’re fighting fire with artillery. Joshua W. Herring claims that we don’t understand moderates like him, while at the same time completely failing to understand the Rabid Puppies or our objectives:

That completely misunderstands the reason that we (that is, those of us who have some sympathy for the Sad Puppies but almost none for the Rabid Puppies) advocate tolerance for the SJW crowd.

We are not under any delusions about how SJWs act. We’ve seen all the same evidence you have. It’s QUITE clear that the a great many feminism and/or “diversity” and/or gay rights activists don’t give a fig about tolerance or inclusiveness. Tolerance and inclusiveness are just tools they use to get what they really want; they aren’t virtues for them.

Thing is: they are for us.

It’s always the same problem with Vox. He claims to want to live and let live, but there’s never any evidence of it. And it’s always the same excuse: “they” won’t play nice, so why should he? This is sensible enough if reserved for extreme cases, but when absolutely every post on his blog that deals with SJWs is about the need to deny them a seat, the line between their tactics and his becomes impossible to draw.

Here’s the rub: if somebody doesn’t start playing nice, it just never happens.

And here’s the question: do you think it will be the SJWs who start playing nice? It won’t. We know that from all past experience. So, as the addage goes, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

If you want tolerance and inclusiveness, you start by being tolerant and inclusive. It’s not that it doesn’t matter that “they” aren’t tolerant and inclusive, because obviously it would be nicer if they were. The fact that they’re not makes our job a lot harder. But our job is still to get to a community that’s tolerant and inclusive, and you just can’t do that with purges.

Who said anything about tolerance or inclusiveness? Our job is not to get to a community that is tolerant or inclusive. Our job, our duty, our calling, is to destroy SJWs and SJW ideology. We are not part of the Worldcon community. We don’t support tolerance of SJWs. We don’t support the inclusion of SJWs. We intend to destroy their influence and their ideology and to render the latter as popular and as viable in science fiction as National Socialism in Israel today.

I will not “live and let live” with SJWs for the obvious reason that it is not possible for anyone to live and let live with them. You cannot live and let live with anyone whose ideology is totalitarian, who genuinely believe they have a right to tell you what is, and what is not, okay for you to think, write, and say. You cannot compromise with anyone who believes they have a self-appointed right to dictate what others read, what others write, what others review, and what others publish. You cannot be tolerant of those who claim the right to decide what is “problematic” and what is “unacceptable” and what “there is no place for” in science fiction.

They have, somewhat successfully, established an Index Informatorum Prohibitorum that declares what ideas there are “no place for” in science fiction. You cannot teach them by example, any more than you can apologize to them and expect them to take it for what it is and accept it rather than take it as an admission of weakness and use it as a weapon against you. The Index, and its inquisitors, must be destroyed.

We will relentlessly oppose them. We will ruthlessly humiliate them. We will harry them and make their miserable lives even more miserable until they completely abandon their totalitarian ideology. Because they cannot leave others alone, we will not leave them alone. And we will win in the end.

We will never play nice with them. We will destroy every last vestige of their pernicious ideology. I have no problem with writers of the left who wish to write anti-X, but I am at war with SJW writers who claim that there is no place in science fiction for anyone writing X. And I don’t care what X is, substitute the intellectual bugaboo of your choice there, whether it is racism, communism, misogyny, misandry, anti-Eskimoism, Eskimo supremacy, or anything else.

Like all moderates, Herring completely fails to understand how to accomplish anything but Noble Defeat and Losing the Right Way. Tolerance of totalitarianism is not a virtue, it is surrender. Accepting the inclusion of SJW entryists is not virtuous, it is submission. And while tolerance and inclusiveness may be virtues in the eyes of the moderates, we view them as little more than necessary evils that are not always possible.

The significant point is this: SJWs ARE the extreme case. Which is why the Rabid Puppy position is the sensible one.

As long as SJW ideology is accepted in mainstream SF/F and SJWs are welcome in their castle, we will besiege the walls. The non-SJWs in science fiction can either go down fighting us in the interest of a cause they theoretically oppose or they can cast out the ideologists and return to the Ellisonian concept of SF being a place where dangerous ideas are welcome again. All dangerous ideas, no matter how offensive they are to anyone.

And they can’t cast us out because we reject their community in its presently diseased state and want no part of it until the SJW cancer is excised. An SJW is anyone who believes that the quality of a message’s delivery vehicle can be judged primarily by the content of the message. An SJW is anyone who believes that any idea is intrinsically “problematic”, “not okay”, “unacceptable”, or that there is “no place in science fiction” for a particular idea or individual accused of harboring that idea.

An SJW is an individual who fundamentally rejects the Ellisonian vision of science fiction as a place that welcomes dangerous ideas. All dangerous ideas.

For example, if you think there is no place for racism in science fiction, you are an SJW. It is no different than if you think there is no place for atheism or for women in science fiction. Either all ideas, however controversial, are welcome and legitimate, or the science fiction community is engaged in a straightforward power struggle to determine whose morals will be imposed on everyone else in the field.

Science fiction can either reject the SJW ideology and abandon all the imposed diversity thought-policing or accept a long and vicious war over which moral code shall be law. Rabid Puppies is presenting the SF community with two choices: either embrace and defend the idea of complete intellectual freedom in science fiction or fight us over the shape of the Science Fiction Code Authority of the future.

And everyone should understand that we Rabid Puppies will never, ever accept, under any circumstances, the ongoing SJW attempt to impose their code on everyone. That is not an option.

SJWs attack Open Source Software

Paging ESR… paging ESR… ERS, please report with your weapons loaded. We have an SJW breach in OSS. #OSSGATE operatives, please report to your activation nodes.

8 May 2015 Eve Braun (eve.t.braun@gmail.com) wrote: Two other things we implemented which aided the recruitment
process:

We followed advice which is quickly becoming the industry
norm. Never look at someones Github profile until you have made the
decision to hire or not hire them and do not let it influence you.
Github profiles tend to favor CIS White men over most minorities in
a number of ways. CIS white men often have more spare time or chose
to pursue building up an impressive portfolio of code rather than
women or minorities who have to deal with things like raising
children or instiutionalised racism. Some in the SocJus community
have even said that technically companies could possibly even be
breaking discriminatory law by allowing peoples github profiles and
publicly available code to influence their hiring decisions – watch
this space.

(More info: http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community)

We used Randi Harper’s (https://twitter.com/freebsdgirl)
blockbot to assess applicants twitter profiles for problematic or
toxic viewpoints. This may sound a bit extreme but some of the
staff here suffer from Aspergers & PTSD and our top priority is
to ensure that they don’t get put in triggering situations.Making a
wrong hire could present a scenario where the employee could be
triggered on a daily basis by another employee with an oppressive
viewpoint. Other than from a diversity standpoint, from a business
standpoint these sorts of negative interactions can cost a company
a huge amount of time & money in employees taking off sick
days. When all the employees are on the same page the synergy in
the office aids productivity.

Still think the anti-SJW crusade is an overreaction? There is only one answer to them, only one cure: relentless rejection. Look to #GamerGate and #SadPuppies for inspiration and ideas on how to push them back.


Notice that the SJW Eve Braun is trying to make a corporate virtue out of saving company time and money by not hiring “CIS white men with “problematic or toxic viewpoints”. Of course, SJWs always lie.

A commentary on the Two Puppies

Tempest in a Teardrop observes that while it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness…

Sometimes it’s easier to see with a torch. Five points for each member of the Evil Legion of Evil you can correctly identify.

It may be better to light a candle than curse the darkness, but it’s better still to make your way by the light of all the blazing stakes to which your enemies are bound.

Bad news for Boston

Tom Brady is going to be suspended by the NFL and Bill Simmons is going to be fired by ESPN.

Tom Brady will be the highest-profile player ever suspended in the 96-year history of the NFL. Roger Goodell’s decision is expected to be announced next week, and it is no longer a matter of if the NFL commissioner will suspend Brady, but for how long he will suspend him. In conversations I’ve had with several key sources who always have a good sense of what goes on at 345 Park Ave., there is little doubt that Goodell considers Brady’s role in DeflateGate a serious violation.

The NFL is convinced, according to sources, that connecting all the
dots of the evidence supplied by Ted Wells leads to one conclusion: Brady cheated.

Peter King made a good point about the fact that most of the evidence of Brady’s guilt is circumstantial: ex-Patriot Aaron Hernandez was recently found guilty of murder and convicted to life in prison on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Speaking of Roger Goodell, one imagines that he might have had a little something to do with ESPN’s otherwise inexplicable decision to rid themselves of The Sports Guy:

When Bill Simmons learned on Friday morning that his nearly 15-year-old relationship with ESPN was over, he responded with something uncharacteristic: silence. He
said nothing to his 3.7 million followers on Twitter. He did not pick
up the phone or answer requests for comment. His agent and publicist
followed his sounds of silence.

Simmons’s
decision not to respond to the announcement by John Skipper, the
president of ESPN, that his contract was not being renewed was
surprising. He had built an empire on having his voice heard, often
quite loudly, in a variety of roles: columnist, podcaster, editor in
chief of the website Grantland, television analyst, and one of the
creators of the “30 for 30” documentary series.

Simmons
seemed to have been blindsided by the timing of ESPN’s decision, which
came more than four months before his contract is to expire, at the end
of September. An ESPN executive, who was not authorized to speak
publicly, said Skipper had told Simmons’s agent, James Dixon, that a
decision had been made to end the relationship and that an announcement
was coming. But Skipper did not call Simmons before going public, the
ESPN executive said.

In an interview Friday morning, Skipper said: “I’ve decided that I’m not
going to renew his contract. We’ve been talking to Bill, and it was
clear that we weren’t going to get to the terms, so we were better off
focusing on transition.”

 I’m actually glad to see Simmons leaving ESPN. He’ll not only do fine without them, I expect him to be more interesting again once he’s free of the corporate leash. Don’t fear freedom, Bill!

UPDATE: This is apparently the phrase that sealed Simmons’s fate.

 I think it’s pathetic. Roger Goodell has handled so many things so
poorly that it’s reached a point now where you have something like this,
where it’s taken four months to release the report, and he knew
everything that was in it. He knows the results before the report is
released to the public, and yet doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to
do anything about it until he gauges the public reaction.

I’m wondering if it was less the criticism of Goodell and more the reference to manhood being a positive thing that more offended the ESPN executives who cut him loose. One thing is clear. They did NOT like him: “Ding Dong the witch is dead.” (That’s how one ESPN staffer describes the vibe in Bristol.) And it is perfectly clear that while his politics lean left, he is no SJW.

Sci Phi Journal #5

SCI PHI Journal #5 is out. This issue is particularly strong on the non-fiction, even the book reviews are fascinating. I particularly enjoyed THE PHILOSOPHY OF SERENITY by Anthony Marchetta, an excerpt from which is posted below.

SCI PHI Journal #5 is available at Castalia House in EPUB or MOBI formats for $3.99. It is also available on Amazon. SCI PHIL Journals 1-4 are also available.

From THE PHILOSOPHY OF SERENITY

“Joss Whedon is a famously virulent and ultra-feminist atheist. He is also, of course, an excellent writer, and, in my experience, good writers will tend to echo known truths about human nature even when they don’t necessarily want to face it themselves. You can see a lot of this in atheist Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide books are really about a man staring into the void and seeing nothing back. The only way to keep from crying in the face of such nothingness is to laugh. Adams recognized this, and it’s this philosophical underpinning that makes the series so brilliant.

“And so it is with Joss Whedon’s Serenity. The real theme of the movie is man’s underlying need for faith. Shepherd Book says it the most clearly when he tells Mal, “I don’t care what you believe in, just believe in it”  Of course, there’s something deeper going on with that line that Whedon probably never intended. He is literally saying that it’s better to believe in a lie than to look into the void and find nothing; it’s better just to make up a substitute to fool yourself.

“This isn’t only an atheist idea. C.S. Lewis explores this concept in the climactic scene of the fourth Chronicles of Narnia book, The Silver Chair. The character of Puddlegum is talking to the Lady of the Green Kirtle. The children and he are being enchanted to believe that the real world is only make-believe and the dark underworld they’re in is the only world that is:

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s a small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

“This seems to us like a radical line of thought. It’s practically blasphemous by modern standards. Lewis is literally saying that it’s better to believe in a lie than believe in nothing at all. But does Whedon really say anything different?

“Shepherd Book is supposedly a Christian. This entails belief in things like the Resurrection of Christ and the importance of evangelization and repentance. Mal is supposedly an atheist. Book’s number one priority, then, should be to convert Mal to Christianity. But that’s not what he does! For Book, being a Christian is of secondary importance to Mal leaving behind the black hole of unbelief he has fallen into. Book doesn’t care what Mal believes in. Like Lewis, Book recognizes that even believing in a lie is better than believing in nothing. Whedon, an excellent writer, senses this even if he doesn’t state the idea outright. Atheism as a worldview is ultimately dead; the only way to survive it is to avoid its implications.

“And so Serenity is really Mal’s story about finding a meaning and a purpose to his life in the absence of a God to guide him.”

That’s not going to happen

Cail Corishev observes the fundamental difference between the Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies this year:

Nice Guys believe that A) SJWs can learn, and B) compromise with them is possible.

When the downtrodden, outnumbered Hero finally gets the upper hand, he’s supposed to nobly offer a truce to his Enemy. His Enemy will be so impressed by his fortitude and nobility that he will gain a new respect for the Hero, and they will forge a new, better understanding based on mutual respect. Everyone lives happily ever after. Think of all the fantasy stories and buddy movies that are based on that kind of reversal.

So now that Vox has the SJWs on the ropes, he’s supposed to back away and offer them a draw, and they’re supposed to be so relieved and impressed that they turn over a new leaf. Then everyone can get along and just focus on good writing.

But as Corwin said to Borel outside the Courts of Chaos, this isn’t the Olympic Games. If the Hero offers a truce, his Enemy will only use that to prepare another attack on him — probably a knife in the back. The Hero has no choice but to carry the battle until it’s over and the Enemy is entirely vanquished (sometimes in the stories he learns this after multiple attempts at a truce fail). Nice Guys have a very hard time accepting that.

Apparently Aristotle was not a Nice Guy:

“Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”

Recall what numerous Gammas have told us is the core of the Gamma male: the relentless ability to lie to himself in order to make himself feel better. This means SJWs cannot learn and they cannot compromise. Any information, any evidence, that is laid before him will be immediately discounted and disqualified if it creates badfeels. Even if he accepts a ceasefire because he has been sufficiently defeated or frightened, he will learn nothing from the experience and will return to the attack as soon as doing so will make him feel better.

Scalzi is instructive in his regard. Hostilities went dormant after the 2005 exchange once I offered to review Old Man’s War and gave it a positive review. (Gamma goodfeels.) Then in 2010, when I criticized Scalzi’s most popular post ever, the idiotic “Easiest Difficulty Setting” post, (Gamma badfeels) hostilities were immediately revived and led quickly to all the RSHD accusations, the attacks on the readers here, the Guardian plot, and so forth. No learning ever took place. The hostility was there all along, it was merely in the Gamma’s interest to conceal it for a while.

Sad Puppies 3 failed in its primary objective because the objective was an impossible one stemming from a failure to apply the first half of Sun Tzu’s dictum: know your enemy. Rabid Puppies has succeeded to date, and will continue to succeed, because we apply both halves of the dictum: know your enemy and know yourself.

We do ourselves no favors by dismissing the enemy as idiots. Many are, but some are not. The SJWs will win some battles, they will succeed in discrediting or marginalizing or intimidating some of us. Puppies will burn out and drop out over time. And when we take hits, when we take damage, that is when we will find out who we really are and if we really know ourselves. Now, it’s absolutely fine if you’re not in this for the long haul. We have a need and a place for short-term shock troops. There is no shame in such status and you will have nothing but the gratitude of those of us who will remain on the field. Should you wish to return to the fight in the future, we will gladly welcome back the well-rested veterans of past battles.

But it’s important for each Rabid Puppy, each member of the Dread Ilk, to decide if you’re in it for a battle, a campaign, or a war. (The Vile Faceless Minions of the Evil Legion of Evil don’t need to decide anything, obviously, their Supreme Dark Lord doesn’t not-pay them to think, he not-pays them to rend SJWs limb-from-limb and devour them.) You don’t need to do anything or say anything, you just need to know exactly who you are.

As for me, you know who I am. And you know where I’ll be.

On a tangential note, M raises a good point about coordinating for Worldcon in August. I’ll leave the discussion to those thinking about attending, but feel free to make initial contacts and discuss ideas in the comments.

I live in Vancouver and am considering attending Sasquan to help support the sad/rabid puppies initiative with a physical presence at the event. Even though I’m on the west coast it would still be expensive getting there with accommodations and everything by myself. I’m hoping to connect with others in my area who would be interested in upgrading their membership and splitting travel and accommodation costs. If you know of anywhere that people like me can go to connect with each other and try and  make arrangements please let me know. Otherwise perhaps we should try and put the word out to everyone and direct them to a facebook group or something to organize? I think it’s important we have a good amount of supporters at the event.