February 10, 2013
to be posted on nobabies.net
Neil Gaiman
http://neilgaiman.com/feedback/index.php?to=neil
Dear Mr. Gaiman:
I was given a copy of American Gods. You must be proud of a masterful accomplishment. I am impressed with “Let’s you and him fight.” Yes, that is totally American. Password accepted. Countersign: America’s principle idol is the Statue of Liberty. It is neither a woman (it’s a thirty year old man by pose and physique) nor liberty (who wears a soft triangular cap) but is Apollo, who wears a crown of radial spikes. If Megiddo can be rendered Armageddon, then Apollo can be rendered Apollyon.
If we are still talking, I wish to extract a promise from you. Do not go noble on me and try to save the world with what I am about to say. A few have tried. The results have been unfortunate for them. I am not sure but I suspect it is like a man attracted to a dazzling woman; when he finds he cannot control her there is trouble. Of course there is no need to control her, but try to tell your inner infant that. Talk about it seriously and you will elicit bad reactions, which you do not deserve. This is for fictional purposes only. Not that it’s secret. It’s on my web log under December 21, 2013.
The observation is: When people forget their gods, it is not the gods who die; the people die. You know that’s true. Where there is traditional religious intensity, there are many babies. In the rich non-worshiping parts of the world there are so few babies populations are dying. Putin, sensitive to the demographic catastrophe in Russia, worships daily. Augustus Caesar was also master of a super power that could not produce babies; he said as much. But the mighty religions, do not provide babies. Only tiny traditional ones do.
The reason, and a look at that web site will give you ample data, is that a large – say over a few hundred – social pool cannot sustain itself genetically. There is or are one or more biological mechanisms to prevent it. A major function of religion is to be repellant to outsiders. You have to give them points for effort on that one.
I have little expectation that the biological facts will become sufficiently well known to alleviate the demographic crisis the rich world now faces, but there might be a story in it or a rogue character or maybe just one more thing to gross out readers. I offer this freely with nothing expected in return. What do you think?
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
(This is to page viewers, not Gaimon.)
There have been 56 visitors since I started using googleanalytics for statistics. That’s kind of odd, isn’t it? I mean two days ago the number was 58. Can it go down? Can people hate this site so much they go back somehow and get their visit erased? You’d think I’d at least get some hate mail. On top of that, back last year the traffic had kind of stabilized at about a hundred new visitors a day. Now it’s like one or two a day. And the change happened exactly with the change in the statistics. And there were periodic spikes in numbers of pages viewed; that seems to have vanished at the same time.
I have no idea which version is the truth. I am based at godaddy.com. They sold me a site analysis program that was paid up for almost ten years into the future. Then they suddenly said they were ending the program. There was no automatic help getting a way to continue but after many (many) phone calls to technical support I finally got googleanalytics going but of course they are free, hence nobody to scream at.
In brief I can’t give you the foggiest idea of how much traffic there is. Sorry. I’ll continue to tell you what they tell me. I hope any other news you get today is no worse then this, eh?