According To Hoyt

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Over the last month a number of you sent me books for the promo which did NOT get included in the promo. And then sent me increasingly frantic/angry emails. Sorry, I was moving and the email was misbehaving. If I overlooked your book, please send again next week. Thank you- SAH.

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH

FROM KAL SPRIGGS: Courting Power: A Regency of Aeliana Romantic Fantasy Novel

Book one of a five part fantasy regency romance series.

Five daughters, one season, and fortunes, magic, and love at stake.

The five Priddington daughters have arrived for their Presentation, to win love and husbands in the Empire’s Capitol. Descended from a powerful bloodline, each of them presents a prize, where a perfect marriage will increase the power of the happy couple… and one misstep within Society can mean ruin.

Miss Patricia Priddington would not be surprised if one of her sisters were so fortunate. Only a rakish Prince seems to keep catching her when she falls. As love blooms, however, the Queen seems to oppose their budding romance, another would-be suitor is found dead, and it seems that the Prince is the prime suspect.

What is a proper noblewoman to do except get to the bottom of things, hopefully without bringing down scandal upon her and her sisters? Because while she is looking for a perfect match, others suspect that she is only courting power.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Max Berezin Collection (Chronicles of the Fall Book 26)

Snapshots a character’s life.

One previously published short story, plus nine new stories that give brief glimpses of a budding Mentalist Lord as he survives ambitious relatives, brief romances, interesting assignments, and vacations . . . Balancing family duties and work while doing what’s right . . . even if it might not actually be legal . . .

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Books, Barns, and Songs: Familiar Generations Book Twelve

Words have power. Books change lives, and songs bring healing. But words can also wound.

Return to River and Devon counties, and places farther afield, with characters both new and Familiar.

Claire Tainuit discovers that excitement doesn’t always stay in stories, or in the spell circle.
Simeon and Vladimir take on trouble … and memories.
A young Hunter and sorcerer labors to fit into two worlds.
Arthur Saldovado sorts books and wonders if the plots can get any worse. He shouldn’t tempt fate …

In a Familiar world, barn art carries power, books inspire magic, and some novels really are that bad.

Six short stories.

FROM DALE COZORT: Exchange: Book One of the Exchange Universe

It’s called Bear Country, an untamed alternate reality where humans never evolved, but saber-tooth tigers and suspiciously intelligent little green monkeys did. Random chunks of Bear Country are temporarily swapped—exchanged—with Earth, bringing a risk-averse, bubble-wrapped society unimagined threats, from giant bears to the hazards of unknown bacteria. They also bring opportunity for anyone brave enough—or crazy enough—to settle there.

Computer guru Sharon Mack prepares to evacuate when she finds out her town is about to be Exchanged . But when her crazed ex-husband kidnaps their autistic daughter, dragging her into Bear Country, Sharon has no choice but to go after them, find her daughter, and escape before the Exchange reverses, cutting her off from her own reality forever.
Flash floods and giant bears aren’t the most dangerous thing in this wild frontier. Bands of escaped convicts, with nothing left to lose, roam freely in a land with no laws but survival of the strongest. Then there’s enigmatic Leo West and the secretive Sister West cult, determined to claim Bear Country for their own. And there are those willing to kill to hide the true secrets of the Exchange.

Exchange is the first book in the Exchange universe. The second is Devouring Wind, available now.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: GLADIATOR’S LUCK: A Science Fiction Novel

Sixteen-year-old Komani is a gladiator, genetically engineered to be the perfect fighting machine, fast, tough, and strong. Gladatorial combat is illegal on most worlds, so Komani and his manager Jonan travel from solar system to another,, eking out a living and trying to stay one step head of the law. The future seems bleak until a master criminal hires them to help rob the treasure-planet Hylaea. Komani, eager to participate in the robbery, is completely unaware of what lies in store for him in the depths of Hylaea’s rainforest, where he will face hostile elements, a criminal double-cross, and the truth and his relationship with Jonan… Note: Barriel Takatura previously appeared in ‘Underworld’.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Gnawing the Bones of the City

Tikhon Grigoriev has a problem.

He’s a member of the civil police, but has come to the attention of the political police. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, that is a very dangerous situation. He’s hanging on by his fingernails in besieged Leningrad, and he has a family to think of.

Worse, he has reason to believe that something uncanny stalks the frozen ruin that is a besieged city in subarctic winter. But as a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he is not supposed to believe in the supernatural.

How can he keep his head in this impossible situation?

A short story.

Note: includes intense scenes that may be disturbing to some audiences. Reader discretion is advised.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: I’m the Beautiful But Evil Space Princess Who Rules A Galactic Empire But Really Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone!: Volume 5

Imperial Princess Regnant Alice has lately discovered herself to be with child.

This doesn’t stop her usual grind of duties, of which she has also discovered quite the backlog since returning from her honeymoon with Prince Daniel. With the help of both Daniel and her private secretary Lady Candace, and of course that of her loyal maids, the Princess Regnant powers through audiences and public appearances and even the unending round of lavish soirées thrown by the rich and noble of Capital.

As always, though, her life is bound to have problems tossed into it…much like grenades. An ancient frigate appears in Capital space, from a sector a hundred thousand light years away, normally a 12-year one way trip. Of course they bring news of a problem. But their means of arrival may also spark the biggest war seen in the Galaxy since the Wars of the Dispersal…

The fifth volume of the BBESP light novel!

FROM BECKY JONES: Chaos and Disarray: A Collection of Short Stories

When you mix animals, magic, friends, and school… it can be quite chaotic at times.
A boy finds a hellcat on his back patio. An entire middle school is transported into that weird place between worlds. A wandering cowboy encounters more than he bargained for in the wilderness. A young man must prove to his djinn father that he is worthy of respect. Ten stories of friendship, growing up, and family make up this collection of unpublished and previously published stories.

FROM SUMMER GRAYLING: True Colours

Jan Van Der Vaart is a legend. The focus of his magical Talent is pain, and he’s spent years in the military, then as a mercenary, making terrorists, cartels, and governments fear him. Finally, he carved out a safe haven for other Talents, and tried to retire… until one last job, cracking a black lab snatching Talents off the streets, went sideways. He’s left staggering down a rainy coastal highway, thumb out and hoping he’ll catch a lift before the kill team realizes they missed…

Aurelia Brinati is on the run. Having escaped five years of hell as an unwilling lab rat, she has a stolen car and a plan to hide from pursuers by taking passage on a cargo ship headed anywhere else in the world. When she picks up a stray sailor headed the same way, she rapidly discovers she’s out of her depths… and safe in the heart of the storm.

The entire world fears him… except her. Powers are gathering to recapture Aurelia, but they’d best beware. Jan and his friends will do whatever it takes to keep her safe… whether it’s murder, mayhem, or last-minute shopping runs to find something called cream of tartar for her snickerdoodle cookies.

Protective Hero ✓ Hidden Magic ✓ He Falls First ✓ Found Family ✓ Runaway Heroine ✓ Psychic Powers ✓ Hurt/Comfort ✓ Damaged Heroine ✓ Touch-starved Hero ✓https://link.amazon/B0bfvFueo

FROM MICHAEL NICHOLS: Fatal Abstraction: Revolutionizing Strategy and Innovation for the Age of AI

In an era where AI is accelerating disruption and uncertainty, traditional business strategy is dangerously outdated. While innovation professionals adapt rapidly, many established organisations remain stuck in slow, mechanistic planning cycles. Fatal Abstraction argues that to survive, leaders must learn to govern at the level of uncertainty they face―rethinking how strategy is conceived, executed, and evolved.

Drawing on philosophy, mental models, and first hand experience with hundreds of ventures, author Michael Nichols offers a bold framework for mastering disruption. This timely work equips entrepreneurs, executives, and investors with the tools to navigate AI-driven change, build resilient ventures, and revolutionise strategic thinking in the modern age.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Day My Phone Got Hacked (Living as an Adult in the 21st Century Book 6)

At the International Cyber Defense Expo, thousands of hackers, defenders, security researchers, and technology companies gather for the annual competition known as the Gauntlet.

Daniel Mercer has been doing infrastructure engineering for thirty-five years.

He has watched punch cards give way to mainframes, mainframes give way to client-server systems, servers become virtual machines, and entire data centers migrate into the cloud. Now, surrounded by young hackers, AI security startups, zero-day hunters, and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, Mercer arrives with something that looks hopelessly out of place:

An old Android phone.
A battered wooden case.
A few blinking LEDs.
And a honeypot.

The younger hackers laugh. They think they know exactly what they are looking at.
They are wrong.

FROM ELISE HYATT: A Fatal Stain (Daring Finds)

TABLE FOR HOMICIDE Some antiques have history. This one has a body count.

When furniture refinisher Dyce Dare picks up a bargain table at a garage sale, she expects the usual suspects: water rings, cheap veneer, and questionable taste in stain colors. What she doesn’t expect? Human blood hiding beneath layers of amateur polyurethane.

Now Dyce has questions. Inconvenient, potentially life-threatening questions. Whose blood decorated this dining set? Is the previous owner currently occupying a grave or just really bad at DIY first aid? And most pressingly—does the person responsible know she’s discovered their crimson calling card?

With her wedding to Cas Wolfe on the horizon, her son E insisting his imaginary llama named Ccelly can solve the case, and her friend Ben offering “help” that mostly involves creating more problems, Dyce’s plate is already full. But when strange incidents suggest someone is watching her workshop, she realizes she needs to find both victim and killer before she becomes the next stain on someone’s furniture.

A Fatal Stain – Sometimes what’s under the surface is murder.

(Note: No actual llamas were consulted during this investigation. Ccelly tried, but let’s be honest—imaginary camelids make terrible detectives.)

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Muddle

By Holly the Assistant

A couple-three days ago someone at a major media outlet noticed this: https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-issues-final-rule-hold-all-colleges-and-universities-accountable-low-earning-programs which you’ll note is dated June 29, proving that the MSM is a tad slow on the uptake. Three months is not hardly news speed.

And of course the realization that the fine arts programs by and large do not graduate into paying fields hit the internet like a freight train.

First of all, we’ve got to exclude the B.Ed. degrees in the arts. Lots of arts majors are smart enough and capable of putting up with public schools enough to get the B.Ed. Those programs will be unaffected: they make as much as any other ed degree holder. The jobs are scrambly and often require midday commutes from one school to the next to the next, but they are education jobs. They pay well, like every other public education job, with good benefits.

No, the degrees affected will be the degrees like mine, a Bachelor of Arts in Music. This degree qualifies me to do exactly one thing, which is, go apply for a Master of Arts program. Had I done so, that would have qualified me to apply for a Doctoral program, the graduates of which are then eligible to compete for the very few professor of music jobs.

As it happens, I have a now-local friend who is, oh, about four or five years older than me, who did exactly that. She has a pile of student loans, and is paying them back on a professor salary, which is not nearly as well compensated as it used to be. Still not bad, but not what we’d call high paying.

I do not and am not. I was an academic full ride student, and could study anything I wanted as long as I kept my grades up. And I have spent the last decades working as a freelance musician, a little of this, a little of that, some weddings, some funerals, lots of teaching, some decidedly non-music-related gigs (points at Sarah), and that is very typical of my classmates, including those who did go on to get more degrees, including those who borrowed money. Dr. Professor Friend is, in fact, up for tenure this year, which is to say, she has just barely been a professor long enough to be eligible to apply. She will probably have her student loans paid off before she retires: she’s very frugal. Her first decade or so out of school she took whatever part time gigs she could get. It is a bad field to go into.

These degrees are demanded by the institutions for a look-in at the professor jobs, and there are more of us who would like to work professionally in the field than there are jobs available. Many more.

The Arts, with this rule, will become the property of rich kids and full ride scholarship kids, and the closure or reduction of most college arts programs, which means there will be no choir or theater for students in other majors to participate in. I do not like this. I think it will be bad for Art, and make the fields even more self-referential and nonsense-prone. I think the entire point of college was to expose students to a broad variety of information, and closing the arts departments will remove a large amount of human endeavor from the curriculum. (Especially since it looks like History is also in the same position of non-paying degrees.)

But I very much more dislike seeing my friends, my colleagues, kept in poverty, scrambling to pick up odd gigs, trying to make ends meet, when they would have done better to not have that mountain of debt, and would still be working at the coffee shop, the hardware store, the grocery, and performing and teaching on the side.

I think we have need of a great deal more educational reform, and that probably eliminating all federally backed student loans would be a good start, but as a prologue, this will do. It will slow the bleeding. It will help stop the old lie that if you study what you love the money will follow. Maybe it will help us get some reform into the high schools. That’s probably too much to hope for, for something that will affect only four or five percent of college students, but it might start the process.

Take what you will from this, and use it for your arguments with well-intentioned and naive folks, who haven’t and don’t work in the Arts, or who worked in the Arts two generations ago when it was a different career. Please.

When we first moved to Denver, East Colfax Avenue was a little unsavory. Nothing too crazy, but you know, we tried not to go to Pete’s Kitchen when we had a bunch of suitcases visible in the back of the car say. And if Dan went in to pick up take out, I locked the doors in the car, and grew eyes in the back of my head. There were just enough “shady” characters around to be wary.

I mean Pete’s Kitchen itself was perfectly safe, by the simple expedient of giving free meals to policemen, so there was always at least one large table occupied by Denver police, at all times. (Considering that in the seventies Denver Police ran a burglary ring, this might not always make things safer, but in the early nineties it did. Enough that we felt okay going there with a toddler by the hand and an infant in the sleeping basket/car seat.) We just weren’t stupid about it, and minded our six.

By the 10s the vigilance wasn’t needed and by 2015 you could see women alone walking their small dog at 10pm, which is my gold standard for “this is a safe neighborhood.) When I mentioned it to a friend who’d lived in Denver in the seventies, he said “you’re kidding” because apparently in the seventies and eighties, it was… not safe for anything not large and male, and even then… I caught echoes of this, before we discovered Pete’s Kitchen (remember, we lived in the Springs, and when the kids were little our trips to Denver were usually day trips to hit the mystery bookstore (Murder by the Book) and maybe go to the natural history museum. It was only when the kids were older, like elementary/middle school age that we started spending weekends and actually exploring.) which we did when oldest was three or four. I read a series of articles in the paper about large men who could hold their own forming “Angels on Colfax.” Trying to extricate victims and people in trouble. I have absolutely no idea how that worked, btw, just the vague memory of articles several decades ago.

Anyway, the gentrification I’d seen seemed to me — I’m simple that way — a good thing. I liked all the little shops and eating places that sprang up once the place was mostly safe. Later the places became pricey, but I enjoyed being able to walk along, hit the Tattered Bookcover, meet friends from out of town at Pete’s without giving them full instruction on how to protect themselves, etc.

So imagine my surprise when late night browsing brought up a video on how the gentrification of East Colfax was the worst thing ever, because it pushed “low income people” out.

First I was shocked. Then I was incoherently angry.

I’m seeing parts of the city I live in now making the same trajectory, and also some of the smaller/cheaper/ethnic neighborhoods starting to attract outsiders and become “kitchy and interesting.” … Honestly, the later since ICE started shipping bad hombres out and curtailing cartel activity. And I haven’t looked but I’m sure there is the same sort of lamenting documentary out there about this.

There are posters anti-gentrification, for sure, and I catch conversations of people throwing fits over it, and–

And it makes me see red. As red as if someone waved the hammer and sickle in front of my eyes, which is never a good idea.

Why angry, you’ll say? Because the people who want to keep areas “authentic” and “affordable” for poor people seem to think that poor people want to/need to/are happy in high crime environments. It’s like “be raped and murdered, you dumb proles! It’s what you deserve!” You can add a soupcon of racism, since in most cities the “proles” being pushed into those areas are also ethnic.

Okay, you’ll say, but Sarah, if people can’t afford to live in a place that’s not crime ridden, they are homeless.

Meh. Only because when a place first becomes gentrified there’s a inrush. And because there is a premium on safe places. Trust me, I know. Part of the dance of the houses we engaged in was to ensure parts of our family were not in a rapidly-becoming-unsafe area. There were other reasons, too, but that was one of them. I’ve felt the safety tax directly in my pocket this year.

But if most places are decently safe, then some will of necessity be cheaper. It’s not like we’re making more well off people in a factory to take over the gentrified places. Places that are less fashionable, or less convenient to fashionable/convenient spots will naturally be cheaper. Smaller places, too. Little working-man cottage type neighborhoods aren’t bad places, if you don’t have to worry about the meth house next door, and you’re not afraid a cartel will shiv your kids.

Look, I know this. I grew up in a place of no great comfort which was not fashionable at all (It no longer exists, having disappeared under countless cement stack a prole apartments and an influx of outsiders. Also a few turnpikes.) The old village, as was, and its surrounding areas had an accent so interesting — interesting — that the first time I opened my mouth in college, in a linguistics class, the prof made a face like he’d sucked on a pickle, and said “Ah… Aguas Santas.” For the rest of my time in that class I was known as “the young lady from Aguas Santas.” It wasn’t a compliment. But by and large it was safe. Your clothes might get stolen from the line. (And occasionally your chickens or rabbits from the backyard pen.) But there was very little interpersonal violence. People could walk around late at night alone. Heck, mom would send me to the store on the corner, with a handful of coins to buy a pound of peanuts in shell, on those long Summer evenings, so the family could sit around snacking, having lemonade and talking. From the time I was five or so, it was perfectly safe to send me, alone. The only drawback was that I might get lost (yes, it was a straight shot, but trust me.) NOT that I’d get hurt. Also trust me on this, the housing wasn’t expensive. I suspect some of the smaller, older houses, rented for “I let you live here, and you do daily cleaning woman stuff for me.”

It’s false logic to say “if we make a place safe, it will become expensive.” That only happens because we let places be ridiculously unsafe and hell on Earth.

Look, I understand there is a balance between justice and mercy. It’s impossible to make the world a perfectly safe place. It’s impossible to make a city perfectly safe. Even a 99.9% safety is impossible without taking enforcement measures that are unpalatable to a free citizenry. I know that. Again remember I come from a country where, once upon a time, the police could arrest you for swearing in public (note I only know this from mom reenacting of scenes she’d seen. She was very funny and she did voices. By the time I was old enough to swear, that law was a thing of the past. or I’d have lived in jail.) Or for going barefoot. (The later was actually important and it was to curb the spread of TB in a country in which it was endemic and people spit on the ground a lot. But still. Police. Looking at your feet. Arresting you if you’re barefoot. Again, not by the time I was an adult, and occasionally went barefoot (usually because I’d broken a shoe heel or because I had a blister, but still.)) I don’t think Americans would put up with that. Even with good reason. Also for people like me it would have an immediate effect of making us want to speak only in four letter words and walk around barefoot with our toenails painted stop sign red. And that would be weird, particularly for the straight males among us.

But not policing people’s language is not the same as letting people shoot up on the corner, follow or menace strangers, camp on the sidewalk, defecate on the sidewalk, or the never end of unsavory shit (literally) that we’ve seen in the last ten years.

There used to be a concept of “basic law and order.” And while the lawless elements will always live among us, and some people will be violent, it doesn’t mean giving the violent the right to do as they will at the expense of others is the right choice.

I’ve lived in a lot of places where the basic right to be secure in your person while going about your lawful activities was degrading, and the pattern is almost always the same. Some politician, some mayor, some police chief, decide to be “compassionate and understanding” to the insane, encroaching and violent. They’ll call standing on the corner, weedling on yourself and shouting profanity like some sort of tourettes machine “a victimless crime.” And are “understanding” with the perpetrator who is, nine times out of ten, drugged out of his mind, and the tenth time floridly insane.

But to say it’s victimless is to ignore the business that people are no longer patronizing, as they take a WIDE path to avoid the crazy and who knows, potentially violent person.

In the Springs when things started to get out of control downtown it went from there being virtually no crime downtown and a ton of little mom and pop shops to places closing because the free-floating “homeless” would go into the little delis and threaten customers, go into the used bookstore and piss on the books, rob high school kids at knife point, etc. etc. etc. rinse and repeat. These places then got replaced by bigger/better financed places who could afford to guard the entrances and keep scary people out. A lot of them expensive bars and restaurants, mind. I think that trajectory has reversed now, but I haven’t lived there in ten years so I can’t swear to it.

The problem of “unsafe neighborhoods” is that they don’t have to be. The decay in basic order; the toleration of the violent (often connected with revolving door arrest and release), the toleration of property destruction: all of it has been proven to be a choice. Giulliani cleaned NYC by going after basic disruptions in law and order pattern.

So why are we tolerating it? Other than the fact that politicians imagine this makes them look good? Or that they’re being compassionate? Or that it creates places that “people can afford?”

WHY should poor people be forced to live in unsafe and violent neighborhoods? Who profits by it except idiots consumed with nostalgie de la boue?

We’ve tried this “Let a million crimes flourish and it will get better.” It doesn’t work. Abolishing the police and “social working” and understanding the bad elements just makes things worse.

No, I’m not making a plea for a policeman in every corner making sure you don’t swear and are wearing both shoes.

But people who are dangerous, people who commit crimes, should be arrested, and arrangements should be in place whereby they can be kept away from law-abiding humanity who just wants to walk to the corner store at 9 pm, unshivved, you know?

Yes, I know that shades into a lot of things, particularly mental health. So?

It’s high time we rolled up our sleeves and made a concerted effort to make our cities safe again. Safe for the well off, sure, but also safe for the people who just want to rent a cheap apartment and save to maybe one day rent a slightly bigger cheap apartment.

We’ve tried being only compassionate. Kindness to the cruel is cruelty to the kind. It’s time to bring out the cudgel, too.

Because if this goes on much longer, what comes after is everyone open carrying and shooting anyone who steps out of line. And frankly after the last ten years, it’s starting to sound really good. Even though I know it wouldn’t be.

So, let’s roll up our sleeves and start by shoving the politicians “compassionate measures” up their noses.
Maybe it will reach their vestigial brains.

Sorry to be absent yesterday and to do this late, but yesterday was the last of the wholly dedicated days of helping family move, which is the other half of our move, and it’s been a lot over the last three months, and I kind of folded.

Then I spent three hours in the night wide-awake, which is what tells me I’m actually worried about the midterms. Yes, I know. On X, Cynical Publius, whom a friend calls “The only decent one of the Roman Statue guys” says that the whole idea the democrats will sweep the midterms is a psy-ops.

Look, he might very well be right. After all, when is the last time you heard of the GOP being “well ahead” before an election (except maybe locally.) And perhaps it is just my impression, but I think the “The GOP is losing badly” polls get more certain and exaggerated every election cycle. I mean they learned from 16 — ish. They’re no longer saying absolutely no chance but that the left takes all. But they still are, just more low key and sounding more intellectual.

So, it’s entirely possible the left is dead in the water, knows it, and is doing the “We’re totes going to win” out of reflexive attempts to demoralize the right.

The thing is, for my money, it was never an attempt to demoralize us. Look, which of you won’t vote because the left tells you all is lost? You vote harder and with an FU, right?

I think the polls and the triumphalism was ALWAYS to hide the fraud. Because if the polls were accurate and the left didn’t convince us all it was going to win anyway, people would look more carefully at the fraud.

“But Sarah, the fraud can’t be that gynormous”. If it weren’t they wouldn’t have fought so hard against the SAVE act. They wouldn’t have been so crazy as to push every state they can towards vote by mail. And coming from one of those states, let me tell the fraud was already massive before that. Now, of course, Colorado is in the grip of Sauron till the abomination of fraud by mail is defeated.

So, how reliable are the polls? Even internal ones?

I don’t know. Therefore I don’t know how much gravity to lend the story that the GOP is now running adds in locales that should be safe. I honestly have no clue.

We have things going for us, including la grande salida (this time for real) which is where people leave rather than worry about ICE. Or leave because it’s harder for them to suck the benefits teat. (It’s really not possible for them to live here, at the wages paid to illegals, without also massively imposing on the social safety net.) But that doesn’t matter much. Why not? Because the registrations of those that registered will be there, and someone will vote in their name, particularly in “loose” and vote by mail systems.

Then there is … the machine. Just the machine of fraud and deception built since Clinton passed the Motor Voter act.

How efficient is it? How much of its founding has failed? And how much will the people involved in it pay heed to all the hunting down and persecuting of those involved that has taken place more every year? I don’t know. And neither do you.

I do know that the steady drum beat of “The economy is the worst it’s ever been” is affecting the young, who at any rate for a variety of reasons, most of which are “progressive” dominance, from anti “child” labor laws to failing schools to the massive not-dischargeable-in-bankruptcy loans, are finding life very difficult to get foothold on.

Is the economy bad? I don’t know. In our region, the gas is not as bad as it was under Biden, and we can afford eggs, which were once upon a time unobtanium, and which we were called “treatlers” for complaining about. (Only the democrats could make eggs too expensive to afford. Apparently the repeat of a trick first performed by FDR, at that.) Looking around I won’t say things are hopping. I don’t see the big take off we saw under Reagan. But then again, even under Reagan the take off was not instant, and I beg to note that Carter didn’t as comprehensively destroy the economy as the auto pen did. Partly because he started with a relatively stronger one.

I know that despite our town being very friendly to homeless (Grrrr) the infestation seems to be receding apace. (I wonder how many of those were illegal, or how many of the addicted-and-crazy were being ignored due to all the support going to illegals. It’s probably a “yes”.)

I also know that in this safe seat, the only ads I see are crazy — and I mean crazy — attack ads against the GOP. There are no “this is our program and it’s so much better.” There are also no GOP ads. So– Does it mean anything? I don’t know.

And what the heck is with the caravan of “migrants” (Yes, invaders) from Honduras winding towards our border? What do they thing they’re going to accomplish, when the border has been sealed since Trump took over?

Achtually I have a theory. I think the left thinks it can’t lose on that one.

First you have to remember that they drink their own ink and they’ve been going on and on about how people are very, very upset at Trump for all the deportations and sealing the border. They’re right actually. The people are very upset about the deportations being so slow. But the logistics of it always dictated they would be. Though that’s not why the left thinks we’re upset. They have seen all the movies. They’ve made all the movies. You know, about how the innocent illegals are being shot down on the street. They’ve written and read all the articles about how even citizens are being shot and deported.

They’re spitting mad and appalled. And they lack a theory of other minds, so they figure EVERYONE is mad and appalled.

So they figure they send a massive caravan at the border. If the border patrol resists the invasion, people will get shot — the left will make SURE a pregnant woman or more get shot. It’s the playbook! — and people will be furious at this administration and sweep the left into power in a wave of righteous indignation.

Or… the caravan is just turned away, they mine the sad stories, and the people are heartbroken and sweep the left into power in a wave of righteous indignation.

I’m not worried about that. In either case. It’s the left thinking in movie plots, in which “All the people” rise up in response to whatever the crazy thing is that they’ve dreamed up to be mad about.

OTOH we also think in movie plots. The post Holly shared yesterday I was surprised that I expected greater fighting and leftist violence if Trump won, despite the fraud. (And I didn’t expect him to win because of the fraud, which is why I went to bed at 3 am election night. I don’t expect the election night this year to be better.)

Now, Trump’s going after their funding sources stopped some of that. Definitely. This is why we haven’t had another Summer of Burning Love. (Though I wouldn’t put it past them to be saving for 2028.)

OTOH I was scared and I guess I too tend to think cinematically. I am, after all a story teller, and “They they gradually adapted to this as the culture slowly changed, until opposition…” is not a great plot to fit into a novel. Not even a massive novel, like No Man’s Land.

I take my fear as a picture of just how fraught things felt back then.

Which is why I would much rather not go back to it. By the time a piddly league pundit like me is worried about debanking and conceiving stratagems to get around it? Things are very fraught indeed.

Did we do enough to obviate the fraud? Who knows? Crystal ball cloudy. Ask another day. Mid November, for choice.

It’s not very cinematic, but we’re just going to have to vote against the commies (even if there’s no one to vote for in our area) and keep on keeping on.

Sursum corda. Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

In the end we win they lose. It might just take a while.

(A Blast from the Past from https://accordingtohoyt.com/2024/09/25/pebbles-and-votes/ Just about two years ago.)

As some of you know I watch very little TV. Even very little SF TV. I’ve assumed for QUITE a while this means I’m extensively broken and not normal. I mean my father used to tell people I didn’t watch TV in the same tone that you warn someone your kid has a handicap. It’s not exactly wrong. I work around it just like I work around the driving phobia.

Mostly, if a series makes enough impact, you guys will eventually tell me all the highlights and important points with references over time. But also eventually Dan will be in a hard project — coff, the last five years — which doesn’t leave him mind space to do anything after work, but sit vegetating in front of the TV. These days, with streaming available, he usually catches up on old tv series. All of them. At once. And I sit in the next chair, usually doing blog posts or reading. So, I kind of get a bit of it and some visuals. Sometimes I get enough for the politics to p*ss me off. Other times, as with Star Gate, I get a general impression of it, but would be hard pressed to name a character, much less an episode.

Anyway, for a while there, I’ve heard a quote going around. “The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.” – Ambassador Kosh (Vorlon on Babylon 5)” Straczynski J. Michael.

Note, I only figured out it was Babylon 5 when I looked to attribute. I thought it was some commie. (Looks at Hollywood politics, snaps mouth shut.)

You see, there are two versions of history and how it happens. There is the “great man” version of history. And then there is the “popular movement” version of history. I was taught both, because the culture in Portugal is “Great Man” or if you prefer “People are born special and fated to lead and they change history.” And I was raised in the sixties and seventies, and after the revolution it was all Marx all the way down, so I was taught a lot of “The inevitable forces of history, blah.”

Of the two, I’d say the first is more correct. The second is typical Marxist autism, trying to reduce humans to widgets and history to economic pressures. Something like “Given 26 inHg of economic pressure per capita, the people all together, at once, rise and blah blah blah.”

Some of it takes in account things like propaganda which then puts the cart before the horse and assumes Nationalism and Militarism caused WWI, instead of WWI required a ramp up of nationalistic and militarist propaganda. Particular kudos to the idiots who convinced us that fashions that imitated military uniforms led to WWI. Instead of their being inspired from the Napoleonic wars and– (BTW WWI was the LEAST stylish of ALL wars. So no.)

Note I said the first is more correct, not that the first is correct. There needs to be what I’d call the “one guy who had about enough” version of history.

Note even we fall into the Great Man version when talking of the founding fathers. And indeed, they were cultured, and relatively smart and– But the thing is, for their time and place they were only slightly above average. People just thought and studied a lot more, partly because they didn’t have as many distractions, to be fair but also because life was harder, and you needed to be better to survive it.

But to an extent the American revolution happened when a few guys (and gals) had had about enough. It was never the Marxist “if only everyone.” And it was never just great man leading. Apparently 3% engaged in fighting, and they were probably supported by 15%, opposed by double that, and the rest of the people were trying to survive in the maelstrom.

Not that I’m saying we’ll get a second American revolution. That is not where likelihood lies if people don Hawaiian shirts and organize a big luau. Most revolutions consume themselves and end badly.

But there is something building, all over the world. And the quote above keeps coming through my mind.

A friend this week told me that something seems to have changed in Israel — which weirdly has more bleeding hearts than even we do, despite the proximity to danger — with 10/7 and the response to it. Something material. In the past, they would have stopped in response to the usual ginned up “international outrage” about nine months ago. But they’re not.

I told him I think it’s because 10/7 rubbed their noses in the fact that it’s fight or die. And it might be both, but at least you have a chance.

Mind you, for all that, they’re still being civilized people, who aren’t killing indiscriminately and take care not to destroy more than they must. In fact, almost unearthly careful in waging their war. (And brilliant. The page thing. Chef’s kiss.) It makes me think of the motto of the kosher hotdog brand (National Hebrew? I think?) “We answer to a higher authority.” (I prefer them, because I like hotdogs, but most give me heartburn.)

ANYWAY…. The rest of the world doesn’t answer to a higher authority. America sort of does, to the extent we’ve internalized our founding documents. I don’t know how many of us have.

But… bear with me. This is the feeling I get. You can hit me with cudgels later.

For a hundred years, and a little more, the “elites” and “the educated” have been trying to shape a future that made sense with the story in their heads. You know that future as well as I do, because it was the thing of all the early SF: centrally controlled everything by enlightened rulers, with people who are “educated” en mass to all behave like polite automatons. A world government. Humans being almost superfluous while machines do everything for them.

Yes, 1984 and Brave New World were the dark side of this, but most of the books sold it as the desirable thing, or if not desirable inevitable.

Communism — mostly the USSR — piled on top of that, because the ethos suited their politics to the ground.

But the problem is, like communism, none of it works like those fantasies. The “international elites” are not actually educated. They go to important schools that accept them because daddy has money. In fact, most of our “big schools” internationally were taken over by communists very early (There is a reason for this. Psychologically communism appeals to slightly autistic idea people.) They teach, but other than practical things, most of the teaching is not for this particular time line. Or reality. It’s stuff you learn by rote, which lets you signal you were very well educated.

The “International elites” are ultimately rich and connected elites who do not understand even slightly where food comes from, or how a huge, chaotic world keeps functioning. They think they can direct what you eat — eat the bugs! — what you drive — bicycles — and what you own — nothing — without realizing if they inflicted that on the masses their own world would break.

…. And they’ve been running with their program for about 100 years. Listening to the “experts”, reading approved books, and running in possession of bright ideas. (Which are much more dangerous than scissors, if left unchecked.)

Which means right now the world is on fire. If you think we have it bad here, you haven’t looked at the rest of the world beyond the headlines.

I fully expect our government junta to hold on by fraud, because people like them, the delusional elite, have been doing that everywhere in the world. Fraud or force, from Brazil to France to Venezuela.

The problem is that they can hold on, but they can’t do anything functional. At this point, I don’t think they’re even trying to. They know their ideas don’t work, and are breaking everything (“We can’t afford four more years of this- Tim Walz”) but they are trying to stay in power to avoid the reckoning AND to avoid being PROVEN WRONG. Because that means their entire life was in vain. People will do anything to avoid admitting that.

The other problem is that the longer they stay in power, the worse things get, and the more a lot of common guys get close to saying “Screw THAT.”

I think most of the world is really close to a final snap, like what happened in Israel. I think the US is more so, due to our scheduled supposed to be peaceful revolution this November.

The problem with being in this state is that it can last forever or seem to. Look at the last forty years and Israel. But eventually there is something that just snaps it. There always is.

Here, the way I see it, and trust me, I hope I’m wrong — not hoping for any of this — there are two potential breaks and then we tip in the pot.

One, they fraud themselves in, then feel super-confident and do what Brazil or Venezuela have been doing: start randomly rounding up people in batch lots. People who talk against them. People related to people who talk against them. Random people they don’t like, like say Jews (particularly observant Jews) or Catholics, or PTA moms, or homeschoolers, or well, yes, bloggers. But in the end, when you get to the “batch lot” stage these things are always more or less random. (Even in Nazi Germany they swept up non Jews as Jews, and some Jews managed to avoid attention, the same way that they also rounded up random Catholics, gypsies, Poles, etc. etc. etc.) And yes, I’m aware there are people under unjust arrest right now, and that they’ve been arresting pro-life people almost at random. Just not batch lot stuff yet.

It’s just I predict they’ll be even more jumpy if they fraud themselves in this time, partly because they’ll know the REAL numbers. And that’s a heck of a lot of jumpy, considering last time they had barbed wire and National Guard units. So I predict batch lot rounding up AND weaponizing the people they brought in to “demonstrate” and commit violence. Sort of a combination antifa and illegals. Because that scares them, so it will scare us.

If they do that, it will tip in the pot. Not right away, I think. It will take six months for the outrage to penetrate and pile up. And then it tips in the pot.

Or they don’t fraud themselves in, and Trump wins. And they activate their antifa brown shirts and incentivize illegals to cause mayhem. That tips in the pot overnight, because I think the result will be so much like 10/7 in a significant number of town — and I don’t mean just sanctuary cities like NYC or Denver or Seattle or …. — I mean I’m not sure MY town will be safe, because there’s been an increase in obvious third worlders homeless, hanging around.

Keep in mind this doesn’t work as they expect. The third worlders aren’t an army. They’re not even a rabble in arms. They’re a bunch of mutually warring groups. It will be rape and pillage.

And that happens almost immediately if Trump wins.

I suspect the response will be a lot of average guys just losing it, utterly, with the whole “elite” project.

After that…. After that I don’t know.

I suspect that if the US goes up like a Roman candle in that sort of thing, it will carry the world with us. Look at it this way, Israel already changed a lot of us. 10/7 marks a worldwide inflection point. The US will be more so.

If we’re lucky we’ll break the same way Israel did: remaining essentially ourselves, but relentlessly getting rid of the stupidity and evil we’ve tolerated for far too long.

Will we be that lucky? I don’t know. Hence why I don’t wish for any of it. Also, I know, even if we’re lucky, those of us who survive will be different. Call it hardened. Call it bitter. Call it broken. An entire generation will bear scars, and the marks won’t pass away for at least a hundred years.

But–

What I know is that while the quote about pebbles voting is essentially right, it’s also fundamentally wrong.

Take Covid. I drove myself nuts, because I kept trying to find a way to stop the insanity. I couldn’t, of course. Some events are too large for an individual to stop or change.

But I flatter myself I kept a significant number of you sane, and perhaps alive. Not that I was alone in this, and that’s important, too. There were a number of us doing that work. And overall, maybe society came apart less than it would have. It certainly came together again faster than the “elites” expected. And has resisted attempts at locking us down again, etc.

So, the pebbles do have some vote.

There is nothing you can do about the macro event. Oh, vote, for the love of heaven. Even though I think war will happen faster if they don’t fraud themselves in, there is a very narrow chance we’ll escape it. Can we overwhelm the fraud? Probably not. But it’s worth a try given the alternative.

But that probably won’t do enough. We’re caught in things larger than ourselves.

However, we’re not insignificant. Keep yourself sane as possible. Keep yourself healthy as possible. Prepare to look after yourself and those you can help in circumstances that you can barely imagine.

Try to make arrangements to keep in touch with those who matter to you who are further away. Have a place to run to and go to ground if your area is one that goes up in flames.

Most of all, study history. Become as informed as possible about how we got here.

And if needed, if that’s the only hope we have? Teach the children well.

For now, keep clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

Be not afraid. These pebbles ain’t getting ground up.

The biggest delusion of the left is not that you can redistribute wealth and make everyone prosperous. That one is bad, yes, but not the worst. Heck, even their belief that wealth cannot be created, cannot be destroyed, can only be distributed is bad but not that bad.

Their worst illusion is that they can infinitely tweak humans and human societies to be exactly what they want them to be.

They believe, absolutely, at bone-deep level that humans and cultures are infinitely plastic. Which lays at the heart of their worst offenses against the west specifically and of how they’re taking civilization apart. (And why they hate us, they really hate us, because we don’t just obey, but that’s a side effect.)

If you read books written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, you find the roots of this confusion. You read a lot about various problems and how they could be solved “if only we had more education.” Education, and the proper formation of conscience, most often from a Christian perspective was the Great White (eh) hope of the time. And it is this very same class of people, disillusioned with Christianity and the Western ethos for a variety of reasons, of which WWI was not the only but also not the smallest, fell prey to Marx’s shiny ideas. And that whole new evangelism got aggregated to “we need to educate them/fine tune them/fix them.” They’ve been running on that track ever since.

Our own progressives were a strain of that movement. And remember that progressives included both GOP and Dems back in the early twentieth century. Both Woodrow Wilson and FDR tried to reengineer the United States, its people and its culture to meet what they thought was the inevitable future. (I’m so tired of arrow of history people.)

The progressives — I know, I’ve talked to them — of today point to early victories, like racial integration of society and the acceptance of women in business environments.

I’m not sure those victories are as great as they think, and I rather believe they exaggerated the triumphs of their ideological ancestors. The US tends to integrate after bigotry anyway, and bigotry only arises when having to integrate a large group. The separation of races was part of governmental policy and thus enforced. I suspect if that hadn’t been so, it would have disappeared after the civil war. (I’d like to see that time line.)

As for women in business, women were always there, in some form or another. Lower class women worked by their men’s side and upper class reared women with no other prospects often took jobs, and not just the normal governess, etc, but secretary, which could be very elastic and encompass a lot of functions we now consider separate, up to and including manager. Also women always owned businesses, etc.

What the progressive governance managed was “mandatory promotions for women” combined with an “education” program to make women, including yours truly when she was young and much much dumber believe that wanting to be a “wife and mother” was a sign you were stupid. And wanting to be a stay at home mom was the surrender of all your intellect. Heck, even wanting to work in more feminine areas was considered at best gauche and at worst surrender.

Did that work? Depends on what you consider working. Worked d*mn well in the sense of driving a wedge between men and women. Of making women resented and hated by anyone in business, because every man has a story of Mary-one-thought getting promoted above him because of what’s between her legs. Is this fair? In a lot of cases I’ve been “privileged” to observe, yes. In all of them? Hell no. Some women get promoted because they are competent and work hard. The problem is the other kind overwhelm that number by far, and also that the ones selected because “Has hoo-haa” tend to be the dumbest, most back-stabbing bitches in creation. (Kamala Harris might be their epitome. During the primaries in 2020 she shived Biden in the back in public, and then he still gave her the position because skin color and xx chromosome. Yeah. As for dumb, listen to her unscripted. She’s college dumb. Dumb who learned words to paper over the fact that she’s utterly uninterested in EVER having a thought.)

It also worked damn well to tank marriages and births. Which I suppose is a victory for the new “progressives” who JUST want humanity extinct already.

And that’s part of the problem. Can you “engineer” a culture. Sure, to an extent, if you take in account its basic tenets, its tendencies, its points of strain. Hence, “engineering” American culture towards integration of the races was easy in the early twentieth century. Because it already took the full faith and credit of the united states to keep them apart. Engineering American culture to give women a fair shake was easy too. Because the seeds were there in the Constitution where “Men” was, as every such word in an Indo-European language, meant to be understood as “women too.”

The problem is when the engineers a) don’t know their own minds. b) push too far.

You see, as it became clear that the workers weren’t rushing to the causes of the left, the left heeded the gospel of Gramsci as a retcon of Marx. Races other than white are the blessed ones who understand and will husher in socialism. This… uh… was interesting. What it has managed, particularly through the efforts of Obama, the Little Man Who Wasn’t There, or whoever had their hands up his backside. Like Kamala, he epitomized every man raised to a position he didn’t deserve due to his skin color alone. And that… well, that caused backlash throughout the land. No one listening to that man, unscripted, saw “Harvard” at all. And the tight hold on his grades and academic records just confirmed the resentment. He communicated to the culture his relentless racial hatred and divisiveness — which I’m convinced is actually his own, being deflected resentment for the African father who abandoned him but whom his red diaper grandparents didn’t allow him to hate — complete with the burning summer of love, in which black neighborhoods were burned by white college kids, in a rebellion that was supposed to represent black people. The result is that we’re more divided than we ever were, even if that’s not as much as the media portrays or people think in general.

Their efforts have now surged ahead to basically erase white as a race, make people feel guilty for being white, and generally shit on the principle of human equality (under the law and of opportunities.)

… Then there is the racial politics. Most people were okay with gay equality, though I’ve heard a few grumble if they knew what was behind it they’d have opposed it. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t what was behind it. It was what was coming regardless. The left had been trying to turn boys into girls and girls into boys on the lowdown for decades. Meaning they tried to push women into what they considered “male” positions (because they confuse male with powerful. Don’t get me started) and trying to guilt men into the caring positions. Turning their efforts biological was always going to happen.

And that was a step too far. For our culture. For any culture. Why? Well, because in the current state of the biological art you CAN’T turn men into women and women into men. At BEST you can produce facsimiles of various degrees of believability. Now, this might be enough for people who are genuinely gender dysphoric to feel better, and that’s fine. But the pushing of it into a trend, and infecting ditsy and dumb (a state of the stage of development) teens with it was a step too far. You’re taking away people’s hope for grandchildren. In any culture, at any time, that’s a step too far. (Says the woman who’ll probably never have them for other reasons.)

On top of that our entertainment is running on a “other races were always here, and they’re better.” Do NOT get me started on what Netflix is doing to Pride and Prejudice. And the erasure of history.

This is late stage leftism attempt to engineer societies. They did it in communist countries by destroying statues and outright rewriting history. They try it here too. But they are also doing it by creating “race integrated” historical movies. The stupid, maleducated people will believe it if there’s enough of it.

Of course, the problem is that the project is starting to come apart. Alternate means of entertainment and mass communication are spiking their charges. And they’ve managed, G-d help me, to make white people conscious of the fact they are a race. And that’s in the US.

Abroad… Well, I wonder how much is happening that we never hear about. Though so far the turn to the right of Europe is the kind that seems to be more “American Right” than the traditional European jackboots left that respects national leanings and history. It’s both salutary and it scares the spit out of the left. As it should. A lot of what they’ve done this century and a half is to keep the “infection” of Americanism from overtaking the world. And I think they might have thrown a boomerang at their own faces.

I’m not in the business of gazing into crystal balls. The future I write about is just for fun, and predicting it is, as is, very difficult. Or if you prefer “Making predictions is difficult, particularly about the future.”

And no, I don’t know how the midterms will go. Maybe it’s all a psyops, maybe not. Americans are affected by presentism and I don’t put it past us to vote for communism because gas is too high. Kind of like the donor not donating because Republicans didn’t pass the SAVE act. Like he has a better chance of it from the left.

At the same time, for the left this is the THEIR flight 93 election. If Trump improves his position in the legislature, we are going to pass the SAVE act, and we are going to make their embezzlement strategy void. This would literally destroy the left. All they have is fraud and slushing piles of stolen taxpayer money. Even with all the money being on the left they’ve been losing the culture war by degrees (and getting more hysterical and desperate and visible to the clueless) every day.

They can’t afford to lose. They’re going to do that scene from zombie movies, where all the zombies pile on the train trying to stop it.

Let’s hope they fail, but it will be an all out effort, and they still have considerable money and fraud. (None of the vote by mail states are coming back from zombiedom until that is eliminated, for instance.)

And all we can do is pray. (I’m once more asking you to pray, particularly if you’re an atheist. I figure the novelty will get His attention. Even if your prayer is “Yo, if You’re there, we could use help with this.”)

But whether they win this midterm or not affects only how bloody and fraught our path will be, not the destiny.

They can’t win because what they have actually succeeded in doing by trying to engineer humans and society is breaking the culture. And cultures under stress revert to their fundamentals.

So the English will become more obstreperously English (And if you don’t think that matters, you haven’t studied history, or seen soccer hooligans.) The Germans will become more German (by the numbers, javohl) and the French…. oh, the French have been broken since the nineteenth century and heaven knows what they’ll do, though if there were a place to bet, I’d lay small amounts of money (I don’t GOT large) on their going hard-core religion and king. Yes, you heard me right, king. I expect by the end of the 21st century France will have an absolute king and be trying to convince the rest of the world to follow suite. Shrugs. Is France.

And America? America is about to go hard core, hard driving American. And that should scare the hell out of the left, because America, as laid out in the Constitution and the Declaration is the Anti-Marx.

I’d just prefer we don’t do it starved and tired, on bleeding feet and by our broken fingernails. I’m sixty four, and I can no longer pack for 12 hours without being comprehensively wrecked the next day (helping family move. Or why this blog is so ridiculously late.) I think I’m way to hold to run around the hills with a Kalashnikov, as fun as that sounded in my twenties. So I hope I don’t have to.

Anyway, the point is you can’t engineer humans, and you can’t engineer their cultures.

Or in the immortal words of Alex the Chick: Humans aren’t widgets. To which I’d add the immortal words of Javier Milei: Carajo.

Humans aren’t widgets, carajo!

No matter how much you educate them or in which principles, Christian, or Marxist, or Born Again Good Housekeeping, the venal ones will be venal, the honest ones will be honest, the competent ones will remain competent and the neurotic ones (hi!) will spin endlessly, chasing their own tails.

And cultures are not widgets. They’re structures of modus vivendi arrived at by evolution in much the same mode as biological evolution, to be the best suited to a people and their environment. Now a lot of them are poisonous, counterproductive or have passed their sell by date.

Which doesn’t make them any easier to change. They WILL change in response to new technology or new information, but governments and “intellectuals” putting their thumbs on the scale doesn’t change them. It only breaks them.

And cultures at the breaking point revert to their most fundamental. (Which we’re seeing with Islam, btw. They’re a problem not because they’re strong, but because they’ve hit reality and changed tech at speed and can’t adapt.)

Fortunately our fundament is, at bottom, decent and functional.

The way there though…

Hold on. Be not afraid. And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

Book Promo

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Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start. – SAH

FROM BECKY JONES: Station on the Edge: Rebellion’s Edge Book 1

Zeke Udinesi just wanted to spend his career as a station chief on a nice space station with a good pub. Unfortunately for Zeke, the best pub is on Glasvyr Station which sits on the line dividing the Core, the civilized galaxy, from the Edge, the very much less-than-civilized bit of galaxy. When the Republic of United Planets takes a sudden interest in Glasvyr Station, Zeke gets a very bad feeling. A surprise visit by a high-ranking VIP, a newly minted, bullying political commissar assigned to the station, trader captains fleeing the new regulations and restrictions, and a notorious military unit stationed on Glasvyr all point to increasing power moves by the Burokratika Senaat of the Republic.
Fueled by caffeine and spite, Zeke takes on the leviathan Republic vowing to stop it no matter the cost. Can he survive or will he be pushed into the Edge?

FROM DALE COZORT: Winston: An Exchange Novella

Winston looks cute, like a living teddy bear. He’s killed at least six people.

Gene Woodward just wants to finish his master’s degree and survive third shift at North Central Illinois University’s Exobiology lab. Not on his agenda: babysitting the smartest, most dangerous animal anyone’s ever pulled out of an alternate reality people call Bear Country. But when Winston escapes not once but twice, leaving no evidence on camera and no sign of forced entry, Gene realizes the bear isn’t just intelligent. He’s deceiving the humans around him. On purpose.

The truth is stranger than anyone expects: Winston has a strange language of his own, and he understands far more English than he lets on. That discovery should save him. Instead, it puts him and Gene’s daughter, Becky, the one person Winston trusts, directly in the path of the man who trained Winston to kill, and the federal machinery that would rather he simply disappear.

Some minds don’t announce themselves. Winston has been listening the whole time.

A standalone novella set in the world of Exchange and Devouring Wind.

FROM ERIC W. COWPERTHWAITE: Staying Human (Bougie Apocalypse Book 2)

The Cough is still loose and the road out of the swamp is no longer quiet. Faster Ones hunt in packs. Smoke rises on every horizon. And something far worse than zombies may be waking in the ruins.
Retired Army Sergeant Major Jack Harlan and his wife Raych keep the rituals alive. They brew real coffee on the Coleman stove, share hot meals around the vehicles, and hold tight to the rule that defines them: shoot the Walkers, then go back to the beans. With their growing family, Tom, Sarah, and young Mikey, they push north toward a mysterious hardened data center, hoping for answers.
The world outside grows darker and more dangerous with every mile. Walkers are changing, growing smarter and more coordinated. Old comforts feel farther away. Yet Jack and his people refuse to surrender their humanity, even as survival demands harder choices.
Another chapter in the Bougie Apocalypse saga, with new characters, asking the question “what does it mean to Stay Human?”. Serialized military-flavored post-apocalyptic pulp with World War Z grit, Zombieland humor, and an ironclad commitment to #StayHuman. Because even when the dead evolve and the road gets longer, a man still needs good coffee, hot food, and the stubborn refusal to become a monster.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Bite Sized (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 1)

Meg Turner has been a vampire for twenty years. Her favorite food is rapists. Which is how she met Andi Donahue, her new best friend/ girl Friday.

And then the nightmares start. And the bodies start showing up–bled out and raped. Just like Meg was. They don’t have a whole lot of time to stop the killer before he strikes again, and only one way to stop the killer.

But how can Andi help Meg stop a killer she can’t even see?

FROM KAREN MYERS: Mistress of Animals: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 2)

Book 2 of The Chained Adept.

AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.

Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.

This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.

The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: One Last Homecoming

Sherry had planned a quick trip to her home town for her forty-year class reunion, to see the current classes’ Homecoming game. Instead, she arrives to find the high school just as she remembers it, complete with long-demolished buildings and long-retired teachers. It’s Homecoming, all right — her senior year.

For someone with happy memories, revisiting one’s younger days might be pleasant nostalgia. Sherry dreads the thought of being stranded in the past, forced to reassume the old roles after decades of independence.

How can she return to her own time when she has no idea how she got here? Worse, a hostile entity is making its presence known — and it may not want to let her go back. And the Homecoming game isn’t the one she remembers from four decades ago.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: The Way Things Seem

How much trouble would you go to for an inheritance? How much would it matter what your estranged and disliked step brother and family thought of you? How much would you allow the dead hand of your distant father to influence you? Would it matter how much money was involved? And what if in the end, nothing you thought important at the start mattered? What if everything you believed wasn’t the way it seemed. Not only in your personal world but the wider reality you thought you knew. Could you deal with that? This is a stand alone story unrelated to my other books or series.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Tale of the Crane Princess (Timelines Universe Book 6)

Ordinary, everyday shopkeeper Horiuchi Tsurue is running a little general store and mini-café on a small island in Japan’s inland sea, two centuries after mankind was nearly wiped out by a virus.

One day, Yamaguchi Yukiko, the kamaitachi of legend ( The Cross-Time Kamaitachi ), and her daughter Mikoko, appear in front of Tsurue’s shop, and she invites them in for tea.

That’s when Tsurue discovers she is anything but ordinary. And in the end, the island she is sworn to protect will depend upon it.

FROM RACHAEL CRAWFORD: Droids & Dragons

Enter a world where technology & catastrophic reality collides with mythical creatures. This anthology of over 50 short stories and poems brings that world to life. It explores the lives of droids, dragons, humans, and other creatures through a variety of genres.

FROM RANDY BROWN: The Drop: Season Four

Twelve contestants. One flag. Twice the prize money. And this time, no one survives alone.

Hell.

It’s not what they thought.

The fourth season of The Drop begins with a brutal new twist, pitting players against each other for the first time. They quickly discover that the greatest threat on Hell may not be the planet.

On Earth, the people running the contest at Tanaka Enterprises may be playing an even deadlier game. Insider fighting escalates behind the scenes while a former business partner strikes like a dying serpent.

Repercussions from the game resonate across light years and the lives of the players aren’t the only ones at risk.

On Hell, survival is only the beginning. Winning may cost them their humanity.

FROM TED BEGLEY: Race to Arcturus (Scoundrels Incorporated Adventures Book 1)

Three friends. One scrap-heap starship. And a jump no one has ever made.

Jack, Kyle, and Adwin have spent two years turning a decommissioned mining scout into something that looks like it belongs in the stars. All they need is a working FTL drive. Then Uncle Duncan offers them a summer internship that is anything but ordinary—and a secret prototype that could rewrite the rules of hyperspace.

The catch? The patents have to be filed on Arcturus, thirty-nine light-years away. And they are not the only ones who know what the new drive can do.

Some races are won in the workshop. This one starts the moment they leave Earth. Race to Arcturus—where the only thing faster than light is three boys who refuse to stay grounded.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly).

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

FIRST VOLUME OF THE BOOK NO MAN’S LAND — this is not a complete story, it continues in volume 2

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: STRUCTURE.

Or, Not Tired Of Winning Yet.

By Holly the Assistant

A few days ago there was a kerfuffle, minor, with the general opinion among my friends being “HSLDA is going to eat them for lunch.”

Wait, let me back up a few decades.

You see, I was home schooled, back in the ages when it wasn’t legal almost everywhere, and was widely regarded as suspicious. Everyone had opinions on how uneducated home schoolers were, back then, and how stupid our parents were. (Mine had more and higher degrees than their critics.) There was a need, some attorneys who wanted to home school their own kids formed a legal defense group, and Home School Legal Defense Association was created. (https://hslda.org/) Where it was legal, no one knew what to do with us. I had two colleges I applied to send the wrong application information. (One of them got written out of my then symphony stand partner’s will over it. She’d really hoped I’d go there, and the college screwing that up? She was not happy. Lovely lady, she translated the Kol Nidrei’s words for me when I was playing that. The other college was one two of my cousins went to. They’d gone to high school at Interlochen, however, which was at least a standard option.)

By the time my kids came along, home schooling was legal everywhere, though still difficult to comply with in some places, (NY, PA, CA, looking at you particularly) and the complaint had switched from academics to socialization, usually after ten minutes of chatting with my articulate kids. We walked into driver’s licensing, said “Traditional home school” and were handed the proper forms. College admissions, “Traditional home school”, handed proper forms. There was no fuss, no drama.

By and large, it’s somewhere between a non-issue and “My grand-kids are home schooled” today. And a lot of that is due to HSLDA, a legion of motivated home schoolers and retired home schoolers who pick up the phones to talk to legislators’ offices at the first email notification (last time I called on a state bill I got a very weary staffer who said “For or against?”) and a LOT of court cases. For the low price of less than a tank of gas a year, we fund HSLDA, as a group effort. (OK, I have a 36 gallon tank, but still.) When I was a child, it was postal mail and a phone tree (talk about a coordination job!), now it’s an email list.

So we went from CPS taking kids from families to CPS rolling eyes when someone reports kids being home schooled, by concentrated effort over multiple decades. And now, when the headline says: Firefighter’s Home Schooled Diploma rejected (https://www.firehouse.com/careers-education/video/55406408/homeschooled-diploma-rejected-by-freemont-ne-fire-department) we confidently expect that should the young man desire, the Home School Legal Defense Association will sic an attorney or three on the city, and eat them for lunch. Because that’s what OUR attorneys do: they’re good at it, and honestly, they probably wrote Nebraska’s home school laws, or a good chunk of them anyway, and Nebraska home schoolers hassled and cajoled their legislature into passing those laws.

I understand from my firearms activist friends that they’ve done much the same thing, over many decades. I just appreciate living in a Constitutional Carry state, and knowing that whatever happens at minimum ten percent of the people around me are carrying at any given time.

How far we’ve come, from the days of not being sure if it was safe to play outside in my own yard for a break from school work, lest someone report us, to the days where we can confidently say “Oooh, they screwed up, they’ll be paying,” when someone discriminates against a home schooled person.

This is what winning looks like: a long, slow slog, dismantling legal restrictions put in place by our do-gooder ancestors, who were sure that if they just controlled things the right way they’d make all those shady newcomers from places like Italy and Finland behave like proper Americans. We know better now: we know we can’t let the institutions of government have that kind of power over We the People, because the people in charge use it to destroy individualism, which is the basis of America. It’s the work of lifetimes. The home school pioneers, those still alive, have spent their entire adult lives at it. Now we carry their torches forward.

Be not afraid. In the end, they lose, we win.