When I was a little girl and an history nut (now I’m an old woman and an history nut) I found out about the (supposed) at least Spartan standard for whether an infant lived or died. The baby was brought from the birthing chamber and put at the feet of his father. If the father took him up, he was a baby, a son of the household (or a daughter, but this being Sparta, sons mattered more.)

The books I read treated this with some approval. The father inspected the baby for defects, and would of course know if the baby was illegitimate, and thus only the fittest survived. The eugenics thing was still strong in Europe. Probably still is. And in Portugal it made perfect sense for the father to be the one deciding because he was, after all, the one expected to pay for the kid’s raising.

I thought it was unspeakably barbaric. And I’d like to ascribe this to my being so enlightened and smart, even at eight or nine, but really, it was probably because my family provided the ribbing about how any sane father would have rejected infant-me, born extremely premature and very hard to keep alive. And how this was why I was still a weakling and caught every disease possible and some impossible. The idea that culling would apply to oneself, like hanging in the morning, sharpens the mind something wonderful.

Anyway, I was very grateful to live in a civilized time when keeping me alive, at least in the measure of the possible, was expected by both society and law. After all, I was a lot, both personality and health, and it was for the best that drowning me in the bathtub or abandoning me in the woods wasn’t acceptable.

Some — dear Lord — 20 years ago, Libertarians who were friends of mine became very alarmed that our standard for who was human and a life worth keeping had changed. Now, it had effectively become “You’re human if mommy says you are.”

No? Look at when a pregnant woman gets killed. Whether the child gets counted as another homicide depends on whether the child was wanted or not. A lot of states have not only abortion till birth but, like Colorado — COLORADO! — you’re allowed to kill the baby for some time after birth with no consequences.

You’re human if mommy wants you.

If mommy doesn’t want you, you stop being human even as labor pains start. She can say “My body, my choice, I want the fetus terminated.” If mommy wants you, on the other hand, she’ll send your sonograms at two months around with “Look at my baby. He has my nose.”

And that decision can change in a minute. Sometimes on a dime.

This is not tenable. It is particularly not tenable for a secular humanist society. (Religious societies have their own answers to abide by. That’s different.)

It’s not tenable because “humanist” rests on “humans” and if what a human is depends on the whim of the woman (and usually a woman who is stressed, hormonally off-ballance and possibly exhausted and ill) the foundations of the society crumble.

My generation — forgive us — were lied to, with a lie we couldn’t personally disprove. We believed that until some time (12 weeks, I think) the growing baby was “a tube with no feelings and no brain” and no human characteristics. This is also untenable in the time of more and more developed sonograms. My older son looked like a peanut in the sonogram at 10 weeks, but now you can see features, little fingers.

So you fall back on ever more specialized definitions of why it’s okay to kill this person whom society says is not a person if mommy says he isn’t. The excuses are amazing. The relationship broke up and mom can’t afford him/her. The mother is mentally wounded somehow, and the birth will hurt her mental health. The baby has this or that defect. And of course, the baby will need complete support to stay alive after birth. (Like all of us did.) And of course, until x or why stage of development they can’t think as we define thinking. Etc. etc. etc.

But all of these definitions are thin when you consider “till birth and sometimes after.” Or for the “too expensive” “too much work” “too weak” “not compos mentis” …. we’ll all hit these at various points in our lives, and sometimes we recover from that, and sometimes we don’t. That standard will allow us to kill most of the disabled, most of the ill, and 100% of the aged. Looks towards Canada. And don’t think it’s not been noticed. Hell, when I was in the hospital, at 33, with pneumonia, I was told I should allow them to do the procedure that was almost guaranteed to kill me because I was a “drain on my family” and would probably always be, and did I want my husband to lose his job because he insisted on staying with me at the hospital? I mean, the old and the sick in general don’t even have mommy to stick up for them. In fact, according to various cases, at that point it’s “you’re human if your spouse/children say you are.”

It sucks. A society built for humans should have the broadest possible definition of human. Not “you’re disposable scrap unless someone else vouches for you.” and “You’re not even human unless your mother says you are.”

Look, I had a friend who had been very abused in childhood and who said that being wanted was a great standard. Otherwise the child would end up abused. She was a little taken back when I told her she was wanted. Her parents needed a child to abuse. Also “wanted” changes. Don’t believe me? Go to craigslist or facebook marketplace and see all the expensive-breed dogs being given away at 2 or 3 years of age, because they’re no longer wanted. Or, more heartbreakingly, all the old dogs and cats being given away because they’re no longer pretty, fluffy, compliant and CHEAP. As the vets bills mount “wanted” changes.

As for “But unwanted children won’t be happy”: poppycock. Beyond the fact that happiness is a terrible way to judge someone’s life and achievements (I am not permanently ecstatically happy. Are you?) by that standard both Dan and I — he was wanted by his mother, but as a GIRL, and I was never wanted by my mother. My father wanted more children, not my mother — are unhappy, suffering souls. And you know, despite illnesses and various issues, I don’t think we are. I really don’t think so. In fact, in the general order of things, and despite a lot of tight squeezes, we’ve been damn lucky and happy. And I don’t think we’re alone, as unwanted children.

In fact, there is absolutely NO justification for the Mommy Standard of Humanity. And the excuses grow thinner as we learn more about biology and human development.

It is a corrosive, crazy way of deciding what is human and what isn’t, what is to be protected and what is to be killed.

Birthrate drop? Ah! That would be lucky. People wonder about the deranged tick tock mommies and “we’re all Lindsey” nonsense. But why should they wonder? You gave mothers the right to decide who is human and who isn’t. Why should that stop once they’re out of the womb? Or in the crazy states out of the womb for a month or so? After all children can become inconvenient, expensive or simply trying and brainless-acting at any point between birth and eighteen. (And after. Hence my lamentations about “I’d smack you upside the head, but I’d need a step stool” which still happen, sometimes, and the boys are well, early middle age at this point. But I can’t say I’m responsible for them.) Why should they not have the right to do away with any inconvenient child they’re responsible for? After all, their sleep patterns are interrupted! They have to look after these small humans! Do you hear them crying? And just keeping them alive as toddlers is a full time job. Shouldn’t the mom have the right to personal fulfillment?

Roman fathers used to have the right to have their kids executed for anything including talking back. (How many of us would survive that?) Then we became more civilized…

In the ancient world, children got exposed in batch lots. Yes, for defects and maybe infidelity, but really for parents’ convenience. There was a Father’s standard. You’re human if he says you are. (Though if you think the women couldn’t give birth in secret and send the kid to be exposed, you’re an optimist or a fool.)

Christians were considered odd because they raised all they bore. If you think that had no impact on the advance and ultimate taking over by Christianity, you’re also a fool.

So, now, in a post-Christian world, we’ve reverted. And yep, birthrates are in the crapper.

But more importantly, the increasingly more obvious Mommy Standard of Humanity makes each and every one of us very aware “I’m only here, because I was allowed to live.” And “Society can change that permission at any time.”

Right to life? Don’t make me laugh.

But Sarah, you can’t be saying that every human is human from conception! Any number of pregnancies end, unnoticed, in spontaneous abortions.

Yeah, I’m aware of that. None better, since early miscarriage is the form my infertility took. So? Many lives end to, at various points before whatever arbitrary age. Does that give us the right to go around killing people, because so many people die of natural causes by their age? The standard is flawed.

I don’t know — and can’t think of any — standard for determining “What’s human” unless we go “is of human DNA, is alive, and if no one kills him/her has a good chance of growing into an independent autonomous human. Maybe not worth spit, (hell he might even grow into a communist) but definitely human.

If society is going to rest on the measure of the human and humanity, then human and humanity needs to be hard rock, something never questioned. The right to life of humans, all humans, must never, ever come into doubt.

Because that’s the price of the right to life for all of us.

The mommy standard sucks. Even the best, sanest of women have moments of idiocy and insanity. Trust me on this. I’m a woman and I try to be sane, but there are times… If her idiocy or insanity can cost the lives of other humans and this is legally and societally approved of? No one is safe.

“But you’d police every pregnancy.” Take a chill pill. I was born in a society where abortion was strictly forbidden by law. And yet it still happened. In fact, many women used it as their main method of contraception. In fact, it’s probably the only way to keep it safe and rare, because everyone involved knew they’d be in trouble if caught.

But they’d be in trouble if caught. Society as a whole held that human life was precious and not at the whim of either of its creators, father or mother. Society as a whole, though it wasn’t codified, held that humans had a right to life.

Liberty and the pursuit of happiness are pretty hard on the Mommy Standard.

It’s making everyone more than a bit insane and insecure.

I suggest that we’re not Spartans (thank heavens. They were closer to Cuba than to us) and most of us are not insane. It’s time to face up to the Mommy Standard and rethink the whole thing.

Before civilization is completely gone.

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2016/09/26/a-vast-wasteland-of-prosperity/ Additional Note from Holly the Assistant: Sarah wants me to let you know that Monday afternoon Dan had a medical false alarm, with the result that their local hospital is going to make a good deal of money off their insurance, and Sarah and Dan are recovering from the effects of spending most of two days and a night in a hospital, a battery of tests, and him being discharged with “Everything looks great, we have no clue, follow up with your PCP,” which all of us who have done that routine knows means they’re dead tired because no one lets you sleep in a hospital.)

Yesterday my husband threatened to drown himself in the shower, if I didn’t stop ranting about the stupid things people believe about history. It’s not that he disagreed, mind you, but that he thought it was too much to endure a graduate-level lecture with side-excursions into various examples he’d never heard about before even getting his pants on in the morning.

I sympathize.  It’s been a long time since I became aware that when that darn, mobile soap box finds me and gets under my feet, I get really really fast-talking and sometimes drop details.

Weirdly, this fit wasn’t prompted by the commenter who came back to an old post yesterday to lecture us about how stupid it is to expect dem poo’ peoplez to be able to retool and find new jobs, once technology dispossesses them of the old ones.  Weirdly, it started because he was telling me about a TV show and something said in the TV show.  (Beginning of digression. I watch second hand TV.  Whenever you guys see a reference or a quote to popular culture, I acquired it by listening to Dan talk about it.  At least most of the time.  No, I don’t know why I don’t watch TV.  What’s worse, I find most of the people who say “Oh, I don’t watch TV” are the sort of prigs who are bragging of their moral superiority.  I’m not morally superior, and my inability to sit still in front of a television, unless I am ill or engaged in some complex project that involves most of my head and hands, is almost as my dad thought a “handicap”.  It isolates me from the culture.  But it is also true.  I think it’s because I never “got used” to watching TV, like some people don’t get used to reading for pleasure.  Most of the time I was growing up, Portugal had two channels, and one only operated on the weekends and evenings. End of digression.) Dan, as he puts it, watches TV so I don’t have to.

Anyway, he was telling me about how terrible conditions were after WWI, and I started pointing out they weren’t.  Not really.  Sure, some people (a lot of domestic servants) were displaced.  Sure, immediately after, a lot of men came back and found their jobs were gone.  Veterans went around the country side, selling booklets and stuff.  You see this in Agatha Christie.

Unspoken is the fact that a lot of these Veterans were actually not quite right in the head, not that you can blame them after the trench war.  BUT even in Britain, which did itself no favors by prolonging the same kind of rationing, etc, it had had during the war, the economy recovered.

Again, if you read Christie, who was unaware of writing history, since she wrote these books contemporary to the events, you see a lot of new houses being built, of factories being started.  Sure, the old families and the old houses never quite recovered.  But that wasn’t because of the economy.  It was because of punitive taxation.  If you had a death in the family, the estate would be lost.

“But Sarah,” you’ll say.  “That’s why the economy recovered and they were able to live better.”

Really?  You’re going to go with that?

I know that was the theory back then, and we really can’t hold it against them, I think, but no, the state doesn’t “invest” in the economy.  Or “ease transition.”

Mostly what the state does is create more and more bureaucracy.  Of course to the extent that that pays a salary to some people it does SOMETHING (I found out, and was shocked at the racism of it, that this is part of the reason democrats support the endless growth of the state.  They think there are a number of people — specifically black people — who cannot adapt to new tech, and therefore must be employed by the state, ad infinitum, in a sort of work fare program.)  I suspect though, having seen the make-work and endless nonsense of bureaucracy in three countries, what it does do is retard the growth of the economy by removing capital from useful purposes.  Oh, and retarding the prosperity of the employees, not to mention their mental health, by keeping them chained to ultimately meaningless work they know it’s meaningless.  A lot of those people are in the position of soviet citizens.  They pretend to work and we pretend to pay them.

Without the galumphing bureaucracy, these people would have shifted and adapted.

How do I know that?  Because they’re human and I’m human.  Yeah, okay, there are differences in IQ range, but you know what they are not that pronounced amid the whole species.  Oh, sure, our dumber friends annoy us, but they’re still smarter than any other thing this planet has ever seen.

And our species thrives on change and strife.  Our species are cunning apes, who keep finding new ways of doing things.  Which drive progress, which shatters the status quo, which in turn causes people who were forced to change to look for more cunning ways of doing things, which…

Yeah, I saw the arguments of our visiting Luddite.  I have also read people who say we were much better before the invention of agriculture.  But what I know is that before the invention of agriculture we lived as individuals maybe 30 years, and as a species occupied certain zones of the globe, and lived in family groups of maybe 15.  There was a total number of us of maybe a million.  Maybe.  Now we cover the face of the earth and as individuals we’re healthier and more longer lived than we’ve ever been.

And while I sympathize with my fellow libertarians who think agriculture brought in a tiered society, I’d like to say poppycock.  With raspberries on top.  It’s not that you don’t get history (archeology is uncertain, and confused at that level.  Agriculture brought greater prosperity, and that made some tombs much less equal than others.  Also, the tombs we tend to find form the nomadic period are all chieftains or their equivalent) what you don’t get is human nature.  You’re engaging in the same form of fallacy the leftists engage in “Humans were perfect, and then an event–”  Bullshit.  I’m human, they were human. I know exactly their degree of perfection.  And as for thinking some kind of egalitarianism prevailed pre agriculture, those of you who think family-bands are egalitarian have never lived in a family with a tyrannical matriarch (or patriarch.)  It can be (not my family, we were never that organized) like a miniature totalitarian regime but even closer and more in your face.

Yeah, yeah, paleolithic diet and people were so much healthier and stuffs.  (Rolls eyes.)  While some of our metabolisms don’t seem to have caught up with agriculture (almost everyone I know who has issues with carbs has a relatively near ancestor from a nomad/hunting culture. Say no more than six generations off.) and while I myself eat very low carb for health reasons, the whole idea that people became LESS healthy with agriculture is a little mad.

Sure, and if you looked at graves from the village, from the time mom was a kid and my time, you’d find modern medicine, vaccinations and antibiotics had wreaked devastation on a healthy population.  This is because people died younger/less battered in her time.  Also infants tend to sort of vanish into the soil, so you wouldn’t get the great culling that happened before 3 years of age.  Only the strong survived.  In my generation, OTOH almost everyone survived, including the halting, the lame and those with chronic conditions.

Yeah, okay, so no progress comes without a cost.  Sure, some things will get worse, if only for a little while.  Yes, I read Christie (as I said.  One of the amazing things about mysteries, because grounded in the quotidian, is that they are a good record of how life really was, not how historians interpret it) and I read a lot about “pre war” (first) quality.  And it’s true there was a quality never again encountered except now, at high end craftsman created threads and clothes and furniture.

But the industry of the time would never have supplied the masses of humanity that progress allowed to live and thrive.

So, technological progress causes some losses, sometimes for a while.

What it causes, mostly, is disruption.  And the older you get the more you feel all disruption is for the worst, and the world is coming apart.  And if the progress happens too fast (say the first 50 years) people have trouble adjusting their MENTAL PICTURE of the world and some depart reality altogether and when this happens, (the last time I can think of is the industrial revolution, which more or less opened with the blood of the French revolution and closed with WWI.  If it has closed) it ends in blood.

Yeah, it’s scary out there, and things are shaking loose.  But a lot of the things that are shaking loose are undoing the mass-industrial-entertainment-news complex, and the idea that one size fits all.  Some of what is shaking lose is the inability for any of us to reach a mass audience without intermediary “gate keepers” who have long been taken over by the long march of Marxists (speaking of people who have left reality far behind.)

Technological progress — or even change — hurts.  But so does iodine.  It still allows us to live better and longer than our ancestors.

And the one thing you can count on is that we, cunning apes that we are, will continue engaging in it, and adapting to it, and fighting over it.

Those people who are all concerned about you losing your way in this heartless society?  Those who try to cushion you and put you in a safe space?

They’re not your friends.  They’re afraid of what you do if you and your creativity were fully unleashed.  They have achieved a certain domination over their society but are afraid if anything more happens they’ll lose it.

It’s not you, but them, they seek to help.

Ignore them and build.  Build under, build over, build around.  Anticipate technology.  Build technology.  And ignore them.  It’s the only way to deal with them.

Housekeeping Note:

Yes, we realize getting moderated is a pain. Yes, it is automagic thanks to WordPress. Yes, we can blacklist certain words, IP addresses, etc (you might recollect we had to block a whole chunk of a certain foreign country some years back?). NO, we canNOT whitelist you. Not by IP, not by handle. It is NOT a feature WordPress offers. Believe you me, if we could, we would, because for whatever reason there are half a dozen known regulars who get spam trapped regularly. Compared to the actual thousands of spammers and trolls that WordPress traps each day, it’s not bad.

Neither of us, as much as we love you, can spend all day at the computer letting comments through. We try to make sure one of us checks at least twice a day to let your brilliance through. And you really don’t want Sarah sitting here all day, because then you don’t get stories. Me, you don’t pay enough for that job: I’m one of those multiple-small-business-women, and you’d need to replace the rest of my income. But you can submit bids, if you really want to.

By Holly the Assistant.

(You may have noticed that Sarah and I swapped last Friday for this Tuesday. This was intentional, be not alarmed.)

The nature of being a musician is that I know a lot of teachers. My students play in school groups, my performing peers are often school teachers, their friends are teachers . . . a good amount of my local social circle is spread from Kindergarten teacher to tenured professor. And my parents were professors, so the overall multi-generational social circle . . . anyway, teachers everywhere.

And the thing is, they all mean well. They have good intentions. They want what’s best for their students. (I know there are ill-intentioned teachers, because humans, but I don’t know them personally. Well, except for two who . . . but that’s a different story for another time, and I’m absolutely sure those predators thought they were in the right all the way to prison.)

Which is the problem. Wanting what is best and actually knowing what is best are two very different things, and having the right to decide for another person is an entirely separate matter altogether.

Our educational system, by its nature, is central planning oriented. One teacher plans the classes for her many students, one principal plans the policy for her teachers, one dean directs her college. So conformity is a valued trait, by the nature of the system. To get employed and stay employed the teachers jump through hoops. (And tenured professors more than others, because PhDs are a dime a dozen and if you don’t conform you don’t get tenure, and you probably won’t land another position, at least not easily. It quickly becomes habitual, and habits stick.) If the person at the top of the hierarchy has decided that recess is good, teachers conform to that. If she’s decided that peanut butter is bad, teachers conform to that.

People who mean well who are selected for conformity. (And of course have a preference for students who match their own characteristics, and encourage students’ characters in that direction.)

That’s the educational establishment in this country.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: if the thing being conformed to is good, then it’s a very good thing indeed. But if the thing being conformed to is bad, then it quickly becomes very bad. Take Zero Tolerance, for an example. Zero Tolerance of bullying is a very good idea on the surface. No one wants bullies tolerated. They should be disciplined until they reform. In practice, though, it’s the victims who get disciplined when they finally retaliate. Why? The simplest explanation is that no one actually notices until the victim reacts. Often, though, there’s good evidence that the teachers did know, and ignored the bullying because the bully was of a group deemed to need extra help and support. Giving extra help and support to kids who need it is itself a good thing. Tolerating bad behavior because the kids need extra help and support is the opposite of good, but if we allow the common prior that people behave badly because of bad circumstances, it follows that the kids will just be good if helped and supported enough, so the victim who retaliates is actually the bad kid because he is in good circumstances and yet acted badly in retaliation. (Rationalizing FTW? Humans.)

And there we see the slow application of pavement of good intentions leading right to hell.

There’s yet another case of a teacher secretly transitioning a kid in the news. I guarantee you that teacher believes that she is doing this thing in the kid’s best interest. The state agrees. The parents don’t. It’s before a judge.

How do we decide what is best? When do we have the right to decide what is best for someone else?

The traditional answer goes something along the lines of conforming to the general society in ways that lead to successful survival is what is best, and that the head of the family/tribe/clan has the right to decide for the people within the group.

The religious answer is something like obey God, even if it leads to failure of personal survival, is what is best, and the head of the family/tribe/clan decides for the group, but the individual within the group is right to rebel if the order is against God’s law.

The modern American answer is actually pretty unclear about what is best, but pretty solid on as you choose for yourself, provided you are in fact an adult.

The whole debate right now is focused on who decides for non-adults, and exactly what is a non-adult. Is a sixteen year old a non-adult unless she wants an abortion? Is a twenty-five year old a non-adult if he’s on his parents’ health insurance? What constitutes mistreatment of a non-adult that terminates parental authority over the non-adult and moves her under government guardianship? Is the government automatically guardian over all non-adults within it’s jurisdiction? Do the parents have to pay if they have no authority over the non-adult? Is everyone actually under government guardianship and has freedom to act only with governmental permission?

This is on the ballot in a number of states this November, in various forms. When you read the propositions-and look up and read the actual text, not just the ballot summary, don’t just think about that particular issue, think about the broader principals of who decides what is best for another person and in what situations.

Among my personal friends are a family with a child with a rare genetic mutation incompatible with life, long-term. They are part of a foundation of families supporting the researchers working towards cures for this class of mutations. Which is to say, one-off genetic engineering on a living person, which cannot be tested for safety with double blind studies . . . who decides on taking the risk of trying the genetic engineering on the child, if the researchers get to the point they think they may succeed?

And then for adults, we’ve recently seen a couple whistle blowers over organ donations intended to be taken from living, responsive, adult humans, who would have been killed by the donation. Who decides what is best?

When your relative is too old to decide for himself anymore, who decides for him? Who decides he is too old? What’s in his best interests?

The perfect person who perfectly knows what is best for everyone else doesn’t exist, and would be overwhelmed with sorting out the entire world population if she did, anyway. Given that, letting the individual figure out what he thinks is best for himself, and letting the closest kin of those who cannot decide for themselves, however we decide who cannot decide for themselves, determine what is best for them, is the route to the best results for the majority, even though there will always be those individuals who make bad choices for themselves and for those they have control over among us.

Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, as someone much wiser than I once put it.

People are really odd sometimes.

Okay, so the preliminary to this, and the reason my substacks have been dead, my books are late, etc. is that I spent the last two weeks working on clearing the rest of our former house. Once more, this would have been much easier with Dan’s help, or over a few months. And — for various reasons — we could have taken a few months, but the months we intended to take weren’t possible through a concatenation of adverse circumstances. So … I could choose to take yet more time, now, or to put myself through two weeks of hell and then finally be able to write again.

Is it all done? Aw, no. But if Dan helps next weekend, it should be, and that’s the plan right now, because frankly I can’t just keep pushing pushing pushing. I’m BEAT. How beat? Well, instead of doing anything vaguely productive today (other than finishing setting up the kitchen which is kind of essential and took about 2 hours) I sat on the sofa careening through youtube, hitting on recommends for talks, podcasts, interviews. But good news, it wasn’t watching videos of a guy watching through cemeteries, so I’m not at that level of depression, nor becoming sick again. I’m just exhausted, a malady for which we know the remedy. The plan for the week, is to do maybe an hour or two mornings, then write in the afternoons. Walks, yes, death marches, no.

Anyway, one of the videos I watched, by a commenter I won’t name because I’m still semi-miffed at him for dismissing my opinion on something for which I presented supporting evidence and don’t want to turn this into a war, (I generally respect his intellect and opinions) left me open-mouthed with shock.

Because he’s not stupid. And he’s been looking at politics, particularly politics in the US longer than I have. But his contention was that Barrack Obama started a revolution and that we’re now in a counter revolution.

He’s right we’re now in a counter revolution. But Barrack Obama? Really? He even names Clinton as being part of the previous, decent equilibrium. You know, Clinton. The man who sneaked through Motor Voter and set the stage for our current voting mess where we don’t actually know if people are voting for socialists, or if it’s all fake votes.

He seems to think of Bush and Clinton as the happy, stable times, and I want to scream and bang my head against the desk (except I’m writing this on the sofa (surrounded by cats) because he who has a nine to five job hasn’t set up my desk (yet. He’s working on it. He promises.)

The truth is that the “democrat socialists” are not something new under the sun, and Obama certainly didn’t usher them in.

Obama was, in many ways, the crowning achievement of what started as an infiltration and subversion movement by the USSR. In many ways, he explicitly — like Putin — wanted to bring about a new flowering of the USSR. He explicitly said he wanted to undo everything that Reagan did. (And those of you who don’t think it’s funny he did this while Rome had a pope who was the antithesis of John Paul II is funny fail to admire the sense of humor of the Author.) Obama, like all the red diaper babies, thought that the wrong people had won the cold war and he stompy foot, stompy foot wanted a recast and re-film of the movie. Without really understanding much of what happened or even what’s possible.

Ruinous, yes. Disastrous, yes. A revolutionary leader? Tickle me and make me laugh. He was in fact — and still is — The Little Man Who Wasn’t There. He was in it for the adoration, the perks of celebrity, but he was — and is — no mastermind. His ascendancy was only possible because our voting systems were already corrupted (am I the only person who remembers OFA bragging of making up 2 million votes for him?) His presidency was horrendous because he hates us. But not because he had a super-master-plan. In fact, most of what he tried to bring about either didn’t work or backfired spectacularly. Despite Fast and Furious iodicy, the 2A advocates went from victory to victory, for instance. He could destroy, yes, but not create anything.

And neither can his cohort. The creepy crawly socialists coming out of their holes are products of indoctrination who are in this because they think if they don’t strike now the time will pass. This is a ghost dance, not a victory dance.

Obama never had the following, the strength, the glazing (including after leaving power) that Clinton had. He’s not revered as Clinton is.

Why? Because while we are in a counter-revolution, it goes far deeper than Trump. It started before him. Heck, it was probably existent as feeling and resentment before the internet gave us voice and a place to meet.

The truth is that the attacks on the US and our constitutional republic from a socialist flange have been going on for 100 years give or take. I’d say 113 years, actually.

Heinlein said, during World War II that communists had already penetrated and substantially controlled the Democrats. I’ve seen nothing to show me he was wrong. They certainly had already penetrated academia and the arts.

But now we’re fighting back. Obama isn’t revered like Clinton was for a good 10 years after his presidency, because the media is no longer our soul form of information.

Trump was elected because people already knew how to find information the media won’t give us.

Before the counter-revolution, there was an earthquake. An earthquake that took place in how people live, how people perceive the world. An earthquake in reality itself.

Now, not wanting to discount what Trump has done, particularly in his second term. But his second term wouldn’t have happened if all this were playing out in the 1990s.

None of which is to say we’re not in grave danger. In fact, I’ve been fighting off the heebies all day, though that might be because I’m so tired and this always makes me anxious and depressed.

Yes, the midterms are dangerous. We could do without the Iran war, but I’m sure Trump’s hand on that was forced. Whether it was forced by a real danger of a nuclear Iran of by lying reports of such, none of us can know.

Our only hope is that the defanging of the Democrat money machine will have a considerable effect. That, and if you’re the praying kind, prayer.

Not that a reverse will stop the earthquake, and the counterrevolution it engendered, but because it will set us back and make us fight from a position of greater ruin. And we’re already in such ruinous mess. (The Biden-puppet was surprisingly effective at destruction.)

But it comes to that, then that’s what we’ll do. I’d just rather we were spared.

Meanwhile, win or lose, expect the left to go crazier and crazier and create crazier and crazier situations.

Clears throat: if you’re in a safe position, stay there. If your position looks unstable, find a stable one, away from potential falling debris. Be alert to the fact that a chasm can suddenly open under your feet and that bridges might have fallen.

It’s going to continue shaking.

And yet, it is preferable to the 1984-nightmare we were getting locked into before the shake-up. Far preferable.

Be not afraid. Work, think, speak, pray.

Build under, build over, build around. Prepare to take the weight when structures come crashing down.

In the end, we win, they lose.

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 BILL SACRAM: Burn It With Fire in Endless Battle Wyrd Warfare (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 80)

The hour is late. The bottle is low. The lightweights have gone home. What’s left is the stuff that burns going down & the stories nobody tells until everybody sober has left the room .

Eleven stories. Eleven wars. One question nobody wants answered.

A survey scout stranded on an ocean world follows something enormous through the water, and finds out whose nightmares he’s been having. Two British privates break through the wall of a trench in 1916 and find what’s been taking the bodies out of no man’s land. A Union major and his Confederate cousin stand back-to-back in New Mexico because the dead Comanche in the valley below don’t care which uniform you wore. A frozen squad at the Chosin Reservoir learns that the thing killing them can be hurt–by noise. A Navy senior chief sits in a courtroom that’s just been cleared of its jury, and finally tells someone what came out of the fog at 25 degrees north.

From the Western Front to Korea, from Katanga to the Bermuda Triangle, from a deployment gate cut into the earth at Oak Ridge to a Warsaw schoolhouse full of things that shouldn’t have a body, these are soldiers doing the job in front of them while the rules quietly stop applying.

Some of them come home.

FROM DALE COZORT: Through the Wild Gate

Robinette Thornburg, the half-human daughter of ultra-rich Robert Thornburg, thought she was fully human, just weird, for the first twenty-one years of her life. She went to expensive private schools, then Harvard. On her twenty-first birthday, she learned that she was half Mangi, the result of an encounter between her father and a primitive near-human woman from the Wild, an alternate reality North America where primitive humans arrived half a million years ago, but no modern humans ever did.

That was the first she had heard of Mangi or the Wild, closely held secrets of the wealthy families who control Gates to it, but she finds out far more than she wants to about the Wild when mysterious enemies kidnap her and leave her to die in the Wild, naked and weaponless.

Robinette nearly starves before finding her way back to our world through an early, uncontrolled Gate. She vows revenge, but on who? She teams up with Eric Carter, a down on his luck private eye and former bodyguard to her father. The two try to figure out who kidnapped Robinette and why, a quest that takes them through the decadent world of the Gate families, the only law in the Wild. It also takes them back to the Wild and then to a final confrontation with, their lives and the fate of the Wild at stake.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Light Up the Night

Dane Crockford is tired. Tired of the green energy crapping out and leaving his wife Rose gasping for breath when their air conditioning dies, tired of trying to hide his use of his own solar panels from the nationalized electrical company, and tired of worrying about his daughter and son-in-law, trapped in an abusive indenture program to pay off their student loans. He’s not the only one, either. Everyone in his home town is in a similar situation, many of them with their children doing dangerous jobs without pay to offset crippling student debt. So when his grandson Toby accidentally discovers an energy generation method that isn’t wholly owned by the federal government, he jumps on the possibility of building something that works, in spite of and around the federal monopoly.

But what the monopoly doesn’t realize is that their grip on Dane, and on his home town, is far less secure than they think. When they disconnect his house from the power grid, they have nothing to hold over him, to force him to work for small rebates on his monthly bill. The utility has unleashed the power of a cranky old man with a rare skill, and they’ve got no idea that they’ve tossed the pebble that starts an avalanche.

“Holly Chism is one of the great, unappreciated authors of our generation. Her work reminds me a lot of Clifford Simak’s.” – Sarah A Hoyt, author of Darkship Thieves

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Emerald Relay: The Jade Dragon Protocol, Book 2 (The Four Banners 3)

The signal was never supposed to be found.

When the survey vessel Tarashima receives a perfectly authenticated fleet order that Fleet Command never sent, retired intelligence officer Major Hiroshi Takamura is pulled from his fourth retirement—eleven days in—and into an investigation that reaches back thirty-one years.

Someone has built the Emerald Relay: a distributed communications network capable of transmitting authenticated commands to every installation in the eastern spiral simultaneously. There is no central point that can be identified or disabled. The theoretical framework was stolen from its creator. The evidence trails point at every nation at once—which means the evidence was manufactured.

The relay hasn’t activated yet. But the window is closing.

With Inspector Mina Park managing the four governments’ back channels, physicist Dr. Aiko Watanabe calculating how much time remains, and former Bureau analyst Madam Xiu Lian emerging from eleven months of solitary investigation with an archive no one knew existed, Takamura must find the relay’s physical archive before someone uses it to start a war—or to own one.

The Emerald Relay is the second novel in the Jade Dragon Protocol series: Golden Age espionage fiction set among the stars, in the tradition of John le Carré and Isaac Asimov.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: JACK CORBETT – SPACE CADET: A Science Fiction Novel

Jack Corbett appears to be a typical junior high student of the 1980’s. Appears to be, on the surface; in school the best the socially awkward Jack can expect is to be called a ‘Space Cadet’, something he can only avoid by Dreaming. The Dream – capital ‘D’ – is a complex fantasy where he is Jax Corbett, the mighty hero of the starlanes. Unlike his unhappy real life, Jack can control the Dream completely; in adventure after fantastic adventure the confident Jax Corbett never fails, never falters. Until now. Now the Dream seems to have taken on a life of its own, a life Jack can no longer control. The Dream eventually becomes so real that Jack believes he is going insane – until he is confronted by a stranger in the actual world, a stranger who somehow knows about Jack’s fantasies! What can it mean? The explanation is so incredible Jack has trouble believing it – until he finds himself plunged headfirst into the Dream, a dangerously real Dream with the stranger in pursuit and Jack’s own life hanging in the balance…

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Lunar Surface Blues

The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.

Four years ago, Molly’s parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she’s earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem — she’s been given the worst possible EVA partner.

A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.

When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM LINDSAY PEET: The Caliuga Setup (The Jaf Daskal Diaries Book 4)

Deserts, disasters, double-crosses… Jaf Daskal returns.

It all began as a simple scam; steal the treasure you’ve been paid to retrieve.
But you have to flee, and your airship is taken by a storm to a new continent.
You’re mistaken for emissaries of the Emperor to this long-lost land, and you live it up as Inspector General.
But some folks aren’t ready for the Empire, as they’re building their own, and don’t appreciate the loose rules of some folks.
Jaf Daskal finds himself in the middle of a struggle to define a land’s future, while coping with a new religion, a new aphrodisiac, and a new love.

The Caliuga Set-Up is Book Four in the Jaf Daskal Adventures, a rollicking tale of humor, farcical mischief, adventure and intrigue.

Click ‘Buy Now’ and tumble headfirst into the chaos of Caliuga and Jaf Daskal’s life!

FROM MEL DUNAY: The Star Master Duology: Shadow Captain and Spider Star: A Complete Science Fiction Series

Jetay is a slave, and so is his brother. They crew a rundown freighter at the ragged edge of Settled Space, and Jetay hides the blade he can form out of psychic energy, because faceless men in red armor are hunting down psychics like him. Then Lady Lanati of the Partisan Alliance buys passage on his ship, finds that her rebellion has no officer available for a secret mission, and puts him in a uniform he has no right to wear. It turns out that he’s pretty good at this. The next thing he knows, he’s a free man with a military commission, standing between a self-crowned Pharaoh and a machine that devours psychics and destroys stars. Both books of the Star Master duology in one volume: 200,000 words of rotating-POV space opera with fleet battles, found family, an enemy captain you come to like, and a courtship that takes two books to reach one kiss. No explicit content. The complete story.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion in Paradise (Timelines Book 3)

All Col. Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., USSFM – the Lion of God – wanted was a little piece of paradise to call her own.

Being stuck on a desert world – even if she was the CO of the premiere battalion of the 1st U.S. Space Force Marines that was based there – was not getting her any beach time. Mostly because, without an ocean, there’s really no beach at all.

But she’s got a fix for that problem.

Now, if only the academics studying the problem of terraforming the exile world of al-Saḥra’ would get out of her way . . .

. . . and if only the religious fanatics who want their planet left as a desert, despite all the water from the planet’s former oceans being accessible only a few miles down, will leave the terraforming project alone long enough to see the good it will bring them . . .

. . . then, the Lion would truly be in Paradise.

But even in paradise, black clouds – and black ships – can herald danger for the Lion, herself, and for her daughters as well.

FROM RANDY BROWN: Assignment Day

In 2080 , senior year comes with one huge assignment: rebuild a dead person’s life from every digital trace they left behind, then upload them into VX, the virtual world every living person visits daily.

Corb Thomas wanted an exciting assignment, maybe someone famous, maybe someone who could help him win the ultimate prize: cash, cars, or an unlimited VX wallet.

Instead, he gets Ben Theige, a painfully ordinary rocket scientist who died decades ago. Or at least, that’s what the records say.

The deeper Corb digs, the stranger Ben’s life becomes. Missing data. Corrupted coordinates. A death certificate that doesn’t make sense. A mysterious student following him through VX. And an AI assistant who may know more than it’s telling.

With his girlfriend Kay and best friend Ruben pulled into the mystery, Corb starts to realize Ben wasn’t boring at all—he was hiding something big enough to break the most powerful system in the world.

Now a school project has turned into a race through secrets buried in both the real and virtual worlds.

Because VX doesn’t make mistakes. It doesn’t change the truth. And it definitely doesn’t erase the past.

Unless someone taught it how.

FROM TALEENA SINCLAIR: A Death in the Country: A John Recht Novel (John Recht Novels Book 2)

When John Recht goes to visit an old army friend he hopes to sharpen his estate management, not solve a murder.

Bale Janow is the man everyone hates. Cashiered for cowardice during a pivotal engagement with Waldbach’s long standing enemy the Horde, he has only one advocate, John Recht’s host Charl Wallend. Unhappy memories and dark secrets are brought to light when death rocks the insular community of the country estate.

John and his trusty valet Martin must discover who’s simmering anger is stirred to fresh action and is responsible for A Death in the Country.

FROM JAMES YOUNG: Missives From the Green: An Alternate History Collection

“Halfway down the trail to Hell, in a shady meadow green…”

Fiddler’s Green. A pleasant rest stop halfway to the Styx, the Green was originally accessed by nautical service to the English Crown. Alas, it has currently been infringed upon by those felled while mounted upon noble steeds both living and mechanical. This collection contains six “What ifs…” of military alternate history whose characters would certainly qualify as its eternal denizens:

• Ride with U.S. Army tankers as they rush their new Pershing tanks into the Battle of the Bulge in “Blackjack At Bastogne.”
• Stand on the deck of the U.S.S. North Carolina as she rushes to save an Arctic Convoy from Kriegsmarine raiders in “A Christmas Action.”
• Fly with American pilots as they desperately attempt to stave off the Luftwaffe during a Second Battle of Britain in “Londonfall,” a Usurper’s War short story.
• Join the 72nd Armored Battalion as it desperately stands against the Communist tide outside Pusan in “Mr. Dewey’s Fire Brigade.”
• Two decades later, witness VF-84’s Tomcats battle the North Vietnamese Air Force (NVAF) and its Communist allies over Hanoi in “Mr. Ford’s Cats.”
• Finally, for the first time as part of a larger collection, this volume also includes the Usurper’s War novella Pandora’s Memories.

So go ahead and empty the proverbial canteen and prepare to be regaled once more by a “Master of Alternate History.” There’s plenty of “sabers keen” and “fierce melees” to be found in this collection of clashes that might have been.

NOTE: These short stories can also be found in the Arc of Ares series edited by James Young. They are collated here for ease of accessibility and fiscal economy.

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: EXTEND

I almost forgot about 9/11 this week. Mostly because I’m so tired I’m barely walking (last day of packing at the old house G-d willing, and I’m starting late, because it’s been that kind of day.) and looking at the computer has been sporadic, so I lost track of the date.

It’s not because I forgot about 9/11, because I can’t. There are points in my life where inflections happened, dividing who I was before and who I was after.

Some of them are happy, like my wedding, or holding my baby boys in my arms for the first time, the day my first story was accepted. Some are sad and deeply personal, like the day my grandmother died, the day our first cat died (I swear before that we treated them as though they were immortal,) others too personal to tell. Then there are sad/tragic and universal. Not personal at all, because I wasn’t one of the victims, but the days changed my understanding of the world. I understand that Kennedy’s assassination was this for some of the people ten years older than I.

For me the two of those that stand out (we’re not going to talk about Portuguese events. Whole different ball of wax. I expect different things there for reasons that should be obvious) are 9/11 and 10/7.

Both were days when something happened far away to people I’d never met that broke me internally and made me into someone I couldn’t imagine a day before. (Though the full effect took time to play out, honestly.)

I will never again be the woman who got up on that clear, sunny day in September 25 years ago, dressed her kids, fed them, took them to school and came home to make coffee.

From the moment I answered the phone call from my then bff saying “Turn on the TV, turn on the TV” the world became a place I’d never have imagined before. And I became someone else to live in it.

For about a month after 9/11, I was so deeply traumatized that I had to engage in daydreams of being someone else completely different, just to go to sleep. I can’t quite make sense of it, but I used to day dream I was 15 years younger and a college student, born in the US. Why this was soothing, I don’t know. Perhaps the intuition that something had gone upside down, we’d tumbled down the wrong leg of the pants of time and it could never be fixed and everything I was and everything I’d done was now wrong.

I miss that mid-thirties woman with the young kids, the wide circle of artsy friends and the glib Libertarian opinions. I don’t know if she’d approve of me, though. And I know she’ll never come back.

I’m not going to rehash what happened immediately after. I’m not going to rehash how we got here. I’m sure the America of right after 9/11 would be horrified at commie Mamdani, though. Or maybe not. We were still clinging to the tolerant nineties then.

I’m not going to talk about the day, though you’re more than welcome to, though I want to remember the heroes of flight 93 that showed us we can fight back in the middle of horror, and as always I want to remember Rick Rescorla, both because we had friends in common (Weirdly some of my friends in the Austen fandom group owed their life to him) and because he’s a personal hero. G-d give us the courage to die like Rick, if the time comes for us, leading the helpless and lost to life, still trying, still fighting.

Which is my answer to those of you who are black-pilling. Yes, the “War on Terror” was botched, and honestly, was always going to be. Who we were on 9/11 couldn’t have got us a different result. Yes, the borders were open and there are a lot of outright terrorists among us.

But it’s still a minority, thank G-d. And we’re finally — finally — fighting back against the poison pill fed to this country all the way back to Woodrow Wilson.

Is it guaranteed we’ll win?

Eh. I think we already won, simply because their system can’t work and ours does. And because tech is actually going our way, from centralized to distributed. But that doesn’t mean victory is tomorrow. It doesn’t guarantee it’s in our life times, even. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee it will be quick and painless or no lives will be lost.

The world is going through major changes, and changes are always lubricated in blood and death. Note I’m not saying that I want them or that they SHOULD happen. Only that they always does. The industrial revolution caused the French revolution and all the blood and death of the twentieth century.

So the world won’t turn into paradise, and blood and death are part of the human condition. That’s something that young woman learned 25 years ago.

But heroism and the ability to fight back are part of the human condition too. Evil gets a vote but so do we.

And it is our right, our very great privilege, to stand in front of evil and say “Not through me, you don’t. Over my dead body.”

And to pay that price sometimes.

Say a prayer for the souls lost that day, if you are the praying kind. Take a minute and look at the (unbelievably clear and bright where I am) skies above.

Take a deep breath. Then go back to your own fight.

It’s what we owe the heroes of 9/11.

Maybe I haven’t had enough coffee today. Maybe I just woke up cranky.

Ever look at the news in the morning and think “Oh, look, it’s the corrupt blind leading the stupid, leading the stupidly blind?”

I’m looking at the AI psy-ops — what you didn’t think the whole “We don’t want no AI here!” was a psy-ops? Oh, you sweet summer child! — and thinking “This just keeps getting dumber and dumber. How can it not have imploded in an outburst of dumb?”

It started with AI Data Centers somehow being particularly evilbad and worse than all the other data centers dotted around this great land of all. There were all the claims of the data centers specifically for AI polluting the drinking water and taking all the power. (Yeah, it’s bullshit. This blog ran a series on it. Start with this post then the next: AI Data Center Contamination by Larry Good.) This somewhat worked because most Americans are still largely ignorant of what data centers, computers, and technology in general do. But it didn’t go as far as they hoped, and eventually cooler heads prevailed. (The left really is feeling the lack of USAid money.)

There followed a number of “AI escaped containment” posts that if you dug in were “We used security measures boomers would laugh at, and the AI escaped, oh noes.”

I honestly kept expecting “Our AI escaped containment, robbed a bank and toppled three South American governments.” Or “Our AI found a way to snort cocaine!”

In the middle of this, the ever reliably grifty Bernie Sanders decided to earn his Chinese paycheck by introducing a bill banning AI and establishing jail sentences for anyone who used them. In a way this was saying the quiet part out loud.

Then Anthropic, whose leadership is, I swear, mentally handicapped morons, dumber than any box of rocks you care to mention, decided to run the “Our employee quit because AI will kill us all” scam.

Guys… I’m sitting here pinching the bridge of my nose with thumb and forefinger in what Dorothy Grant named “The sinal salute.”

What is going on: Anthropic and all the other AI companies, but particularly anthropic, are mental midgets, who decided the way to make their companies profitable is to regulate any up and coming imitators out of play.

Why it’s not as stupid as it sounds: it’s largely worked in the past, which is why all our regulations should be struck down and then re-instituted AS NEEDED. Because right now most business regulations are designed to allow only people with deep pockets to play.

Why it’s absolutely stupid: American regulations don’t apply overseas, and you bet your beepy that Russia and China will be pursuing AI.

Where I’ll give them something: Without America the chance of innovation threatening the established AI companies is… none. Because Russia and China are not very good at innovation. But you know, there are other countries…

Meanwhile the people collaborating with them are a collection of old leftist boomers (BIRM) who can’t tell fiction from reality and are for sure convinced that if AI goes on we’ll get into a Skynet situation.

AND then there’s the old commies, paid and unpaid, who want to give their old allies in Russia and China a chance.

In the defense of all the old idiots involved: they do say your brain shrinks with age, particularly if you don’t use it, and leftism is a system for not having to use your brain ever.

But honestly, this psyops is so inordinately stupid and transparent that I am surprised ANYONE is falling for it.

It’s a dumpster fire in a moron factory, and I just want them to shut up and go away.

A blast from the past in honor of recent international news: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/09/26/double-edged-compassion/

Double Edged Compassion

Posted on September 26, 2022 by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve been reading about Jack the Ripper again. Yes, there was a reason for it, at least at the beginning, until I realized my research was a bit stupid, and what I knew was already enough, unless I can find an interesting way to incorporate all the theories into the story, and that’s unlikely. (Rhodes to Hell. Which will get written one of these weekends.)

Anyway, the current book had an interesting theory I’d not seen before, so I started reading it, because given how our secret services and how corrupt they are I could well believe the British secret service might well have been behind the Whitechapel murders.

Except… two thirds in, before he gets to why the secret service would even do this, he gives us a panorama of the world at the time, relying exclusively on socialist sources.

Look, I’m not going to say there weren’t terrible things happening in Victorian England. For one, yes, they were much poorer than us, which means their poor were far poorer than anyone today. But most of them were recognized as terrible and dealt with by non socialists. And the socialist press was usually at good twenty years behind. Amid the terrible things adduced to the “capitalism” of Great Britain was the story of a single mother abusing her little boy. The only way this makes sense as being the fault of the system is if one swallows the Marxist bullshit that capitalism is the cause of insanity, and that only socialism can bring about its banishment. Which is, of course, poppycock. Also the reason the Soviet Union treated opponents as being mentally ill.

I’ll grant you that the British empire was not merciful. Though I’ll note it left places in much better shape than the soviet empire did. I’ll also mention that colonialism is just what we call “Mankind’s drive to survive” often expressed at the tribal level. And that you can’t have one without the other, as we’re learning daily.

Anyway, this made me think of how socialism was brought in int he name of “compassion.” In the same way our socialists talk of the difference between rich and poor as calling for some kind of redistribution and vengeance, the author of this book practically foams at the mouth that there were rich people, while the inhabitants of the East End were so poor. And then foams at the mouth some more at the idea that the poverty of the East End was largely self inflicted.

And yet– And yet, even though I note he white washed the biographies of the murdered women a lot, even he records the fact that they were all — everyone of them — addicted to the bottle, and often also to sex with strangers (not just for money.) He foams at the mouth about their not having “the price of a bed” but in at least two cases records that they had it and drank it before night time. In fact, one of them is dying of alcoholism as she’s killed.

All of this is, somehow, the fault of the rich of people, as though — somehow — they were responsible for making sure their brothers and sisters didn’t drink. Or perhaps, had life so good and perfect they had no wish to drink.

I’m not going to say that alcoholism and drug addiction isn’t a disease. I suspect it is a form of mental illness, as are a lot of other things we do to our own detriment. Mental illness, to be fair, is very poorly understood. And I suspect a lot of what we call mental illness are simply impulses that helped our ancestors survive, but which are now out of favor.

Whichever way it is, I have sympathy with those addicted to substances, or for that matter to behaviors. I have a ridiculously addictive personality — I once got addicted to fanfiction to the point of barely functioning — and just about all I can do is avoid things I could be addicted to (there’s a reason my husband won’t let me have mahjong on any computer) and channel it to productive addictions (You could say this blog.) In fact, those who know I’ve barely been on facebook or other social media, know it’s a matter of avoiding addiction.

So, of course, I have sympathy. But sympathy is not the same as wanting to somehow banish the effects of addiction and self-destruction. On the contrary, when you enable addiction and self destruction, what you get is more addiction and self-destruction.

It’s now been a hundred years, more or less, since the socialists got their way, to some extent, in every country of the world.

A social net, administered by the government, and not at the mercy of random charities, and also not requiring any change of behavior from those it “helps” was build under most Western societies, where the free market is more and more restricted every passing year.

And yet, in the year of our Lord 2022, we have “homeless” lying in their own feces in the biggest and brightest cities in the western hemisphere.

They are the same type of people who ended up in the East End. (Not all. There were married East Enders on the way up, like most of the Jewish immigrants from Russia, malgre the socialist illusions of a lot of them.) Addicted, mentally ill, dangerous to themselves and others, and prey to every vice known to men.

As the lives of the prostitutes who were killed by Jack the Ripper exemplify, even then they were not starving. And a lot of them received charity from various sources, including those who got them jobs for a while. It’s just that any additional money went to drink as it now goes to meth or pot or other drugs.

And the more money they are given the more money goes to this, in the end creating a spiraling cycle of self-destruction.

We’ve tried it. We’ve tried taking from the rich to give to the poor, deserving and undeserving alike. We’ve tried propping up the self-esteem of poor strayed lambs so that they don’t feel the need for drink or drugs.

Except that it doesn’t work that way. None of it works that way.

Under the best possible circumstances, human life is tragic. Things happen to every one of us that tear the heart out of us, and the the will to live. Those are of different magnitudes, and the less suffering one has experienced the more one feels the slightest blow. Until one gets to “micro aggressions.” Note this is not a wish for more suffering, merely an acknowledgement that reducing suffering doesn’t mean less addiction or neurotic anguish.

Escaping emotional pain is very human. Some personalities are more susceptible to it than others, but all humans try to escape pain. Which leads us to addiction and alcoholism.

And then there is the fact that normal, not-broken humans aren’t diligent and persevering. Look in the stone age, if you killed more mammoths after you had more than enough to eat, you didn’t end up better off. You just destroyed the eco system in your area.

There is in normal human beings the tendency to do enough to be “comfortable” and not one gesture more. We who work, and like working, and like saving and differing pleasure are honestly more than a bit wrong in the head. It’s just that our brokenness fits with technology and has allowed us to give the world prosperity unknown.

Which doesn’t banish poverty, because most humans are not broken in that way. They will do enough to survive, and not a bit more.

In many ways, except for dying alcoholism and similar diseases, the East End poor were very sane. They were doing the minimal required to survive, even back then. And they did largely survive.

And our homeless (trust me, I used to hear them talk when I walked in downtown Colorado Springs) consider themselves the smart ones. No saying they aren’t either. They don’t do a lick of work, and live lives that would be considered lavish anywhere in the past. And by the way, also lavish in the Socialist Republic of the USSR. The rumored ad that said “Will trade state apartment in Moscow for sleeping bag in the streets of Los Angeles” is only a joke if you look at it another way. Look at it another way, and it makes perfect sense.

Socialists use compassion to get hold of all the levers of the economy. I’m not even going to say some of them aren’t really compassionate, though that becomes hard to believe the more each “experiment” in socialism produces nothing but suffering. However, the only way to avoid people killing themselves on the streets, in their own excrement, is to have a totalitarian state in which everyone is controlled and given so much they can do and earn.

And that, obviously, due to problems of information (and human motivation) always ends in “They pretend to pay, we pretend to work.”

Someone with a state apartment in the old USSR might be (marginally. Trust me, I’ve heard stories) more comfortable than the homeless in LA. But he was also completely unable to change his situation or do anything to improve it.

Someone on a sleeping bag in the LA streets, if not addicted to anything, and if capable of working, would be out of there relatively quickly, and in a trajectory that might have limits in wealth and satisfaction, but probably not relevant ones. And what’s more, their work would ultimately create wealth for everyone else.

It is rumored that Asian illegal immigrants, as well as a certain number of African and Hispanic ones don’t linger long in the homeless camps, even if they head there first. They come possessed of behaviors, and a brokenness that makes them work and try to improve themselves.

The later-day-Socialists we live with have recognized this. They now preach that “privilege” includes any type of education and a willingness to work or interest in creating anything at all.

Which means only that they are now trying to eliminate that, in pursuit of their world where the state controls us each and every one and where even the least susceptible of us feel a need to escape by drugs and self-destruction. Because they’ve become insane enough that to them this is “compassion.” Or at least no one can feel guilty for having more.

One would think at some point they would re-examine their premises and wonder if all accumulation of wealth is theft, and if in fact wealth can be created as well as destroyed.

Of course they don’t, because they aren’t aware of the philosophy behind their feelings. They simply feel that no one should be allowed to have more than anyone else.

Which is all very well, except that if they take down the US, they take down the source of wealth that has been keeping the more socialism-infected countries from starving. Already this winter, we’re going to see the fruits of socialism worldwide. And it will get harder for the next two or three years at least.

The funny part is that the socialists can’t understand why people are revolting against their “compassionate” rule. Which figures, because they also can’t understand why some homeless guy isn’t entitled to take, say, everything I own.

Well, I came to this country with a suitcase weighing 20kg (It was the maximum.) What I have I’ve made, saved and built (And I’m by no means a paragon. Yes, I could have a lot more.) And what is mine I keep, partly out of compassion, because giving money to the self-destructive only makes them destroy more. And entices a lot more people to the same vices.

The false compassion of the socialists is based on erroneous premises, and is about to bring down the very engine of prosperity that lifted humanity out of dire need.

What can’t go on won’t go on, and the burned hand teaches.

There are a lot of burned hands in the world right now. And they’ll bring down socialism worldwide, from the “compassionate” states of Europe, to the repressive ones of Cuba and China.

It is more than time. 100 years is a long time for humanity to spend destroying everything in the name of compassion.