According To Hoyt

As you know…. probably…. I’m on my way to Liberty con. This year I decided not to drive myself and others insane trying to charge the laptop in the car. It draws too much power and the results are at best frustrating.

So I decided to challenge you with the painter who launched a thousand memes…. of himself.

Joseph Ducreux was a French painter active in the latter part of the 18th century — he was a portraitist in the court of Louis XVI and continued his career after the French Revolution. But Ducreux is increasingly remembered for his series of self-portraits that were surprisingly informal for the age in which they were painted. To contemporary eyes, they almost seem to have been painted for use in memes, a purpose for which they certainly have been used.

You know him for this one here in a goofy take on lyrics:

BUT he did so much more. And most of it silly.

They just about cry out to be memed, but I can’t do it. Could you guys give it a try? That way I can enjoy the results when I get to the hotel:

And of course the template for the well known one:

See you this evening!

I call that picture “the moment before the crash”. Or perhaps “Really? That’s where you’re going to sit while I have breakfast?” And yes, before you say anything (you wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings, and he’s reading over my shoulder!) that cat is a little chonky. Mostly because I’ve been feeding Havey whenever he demands it (twenty one and losing weight fast) and he has one or two bites, then leaves the rest for his accomplices. Who are getting rounder by the day. This too shall pass, right?

That vase is the successor of my beloved Koi vase which rests in pieces until I have time to kintsugi it. This one was purchased for two reasons only: It’s blue and white AND it’s heavy as the dickens, so the little terror hasn’t sent it careening yet.

And if you take in the previous two paragraphs, you’re probably asking yourself: Sarah, why do you put yourself through this?

There are many, many answers. Older son suggested “masochism” and several people — particularly considering the advent of the hyper-smart, very people engaged, full of mischief Misoites (Indy, Circe and Muse) in my life — have answered flat out “insanity.”

But it’s not, you know? They are a calculated addition to my life, one that keeps me what passes for sane around these parts, and more importantly, keep me getting up in the morning and doing things, including writing fiction (And writing this blog.)

But Sarah, you say, how can three (not so) little cats keep you writing? What do they even have to do with you getting up in the morning? Don’t you have a husband and sons for that? And a house that needs cleaned? And started novels that need finished?

Well, yes…. And yet–

Let’s start from where I am: I am a chronic depressive, forever skating on the rim of a deep crater of depression. Sometimes going one or two rings inside, which is where the writing stops and the curling up under furniture starts.

I don’t want to be medicated. Partly because either I’m very different from other people, or other people tolerate side effects that floor me with absolutely no problem, but the fact is I’ve never taken a medicine that doesn’t have some sort of “what now?” symptoms. Adderal makes me b*tchy enough that even I don’t want to live with me. Vyvanse is great, but it turns off the writing, as though it were a switch and it just goes “click” off. Oh, I can still write these posts. But the fiction dies before being born. Then there’s various anti-histamines. I’ve found one — finally — that makes me sleepy but allows me to write: xyzal. (My allergist found this report interesting, as according to him it’s a “cleaner” versions of allegra, which still, like all the other ones just turns off the WORDS. Not the writing. I still have stories. I just can’t put them in words. it makes posts very hard too.) But heck, even your humble ibuprofen seems to have weird effects if I stay on it. (Mostly it makes me incredibly sleepy. It acts exactly like sleeping pills. It makes no sense.) So, I’m not about to try to fix the depression with medications. Heck, I’ve been known to avoid pain killers after major surgery because I resent what they do to my mind.

That means I manage it. And because I’ve been managing my depression since before I had words to call it that, you could say my entire life is designed around it. It’s part of the reason that — arguably — we’ve always bought houses a little above what we rationally should have. One of the weird things I only recently identified is that I must have AT LEAST one room in the house that I love; that makes me happy just going into it. And why I actually spend precious time decorating and trying to make things look purty. And did, even when I had two toddlers and was trying to break into writing.

But that gets into who I am: I teeter forever between being over-managed, ie having a life that runs like clockwork, and trying to stave off chaos with unavailing and frantic activity, while my life falls apart around me.

Of the two I much prefer the first, of course, which is where I tend to fall, once I’m up from the latest illness, and not preparing for a con (Or actually while preparing for a con. Yesterday I cleaned and organized, because the house was getting to me.)

The problem is that left to my own devices I arrange things so that they are incredibly organized. Like…. so organized in terms of my life, that I get up at the same time, eat the same thing, do exactly the same actions every day.

If you’re going “oh, bliss” you might be slightly on the spectrum. Which, I will grant you so am I, which is why I tend to that. BUT–

But at some point you get up and are going through your routine and realize all the joy has drained out of your life. And you don’t know why.

When this happened, the kids were still living at home, but were both in college, both self-sufficient adults (except for the inevitable “mom, I thought we still had cereal?”) And my life had become a clockwork, ticking beauty of scheduling.

We all know the thing to do for that, right? Add Toddler. Let’s say that the time of life wasn’t conducive for that, besides my having the fertility of a small rock. In the Sahara. At the peak of Summer.

… At the time I added something else, which took away some time but helped in other ways.

BUT when faced with the same issue a few years ago, I added the current crop of cats. Look, cats are ideal for adding just a slight sprinkle of chaos — okay, the Misoites might have meant overshooting — because they are mobile, cute, get into things but aren’t going to — for instance — eat a sofa, and will make you smile with their insanity.

It doesn’t have to be cats, though. During a particularly stressful part of my life, having derpfish on his tiny aquarium on my desk, glaring at me because “where are my food pellets, hooman?” was immensely cheering and took away from the sterile quality of an over-ordered life.

For that matter, my husband spent ten years tending a cantankerous (And now enormous) cactus in a corner of his office.

The point is that it’s something alive with the potential to give you at least tiny surprises, and which pulls you out from the tendency to over-order your life.

Left to our own devices, being slightly on the spectrum and very work focused, Dan and I would create utterly sterile lives, where we get up at the same time, eat the same things, work at the same desks side by side, eat the same dinner, go to bed. There’s reassurance in that too, but after a while it starts feeling like you’re just a cog in the machine the day has become.

Now we have some critters who will make us take unscheduled breaks because the belly must be petted (like the spice must flow, but warmer and more fuzzy. Okay, find, and chonky.) And this morning I found that, the dry food having run out in the dispenser, Indy had unplugged it both at the plug in and from the wall. (Why he thought that would help is another question. Or maybe he was just mad at it.) Which is annoying, but also amusing because WHAT EVEN?

And minutes ago Circe was walking around talking to herself, which she does on the regular.

Now, yes, if you’re of an age and situation to do this, kids do the same and are, arguably, more rewarding. But kids will also worry you more. (I know. Mine still do.)

Cats — though note I’m side eyeing Indy who is reading this over my shoulder as I type — rarely grow up to be ax murderers — lack of opposable thumbs — and you don’t worry about their careers and their relationships and what are they doing now? They’re just cats. As long as you keep them from chewing electrical cords, removing child locks from cabinets (I still have no idea what he did to the lock for the under-sink cabinet) and attempting to fix your computer (okay, that’s just indie) they are a safe outlet for chaos, and something you can love too. Because you want to love the thing that bring chaos.

And chaos is absolutely necessary, at least if you’re some sort of a creative. Because otherwise life becomes clean, ordered, and profoundly sterile.

This post comes from the confluence of two completely unrelated events: people wondering why the men of Great Britain haven’t risen yet (with pitchforks and torches) and the fact I’ve been reading a British mystery series set in WWI, which to my eye (as a former European) has pretty accurate inter-class relationships.

First in defense of British men, I have to say that you can’t judge them too harshly, because you have absolutely no idea what they’re doing to resist or how hard they’re doing it. And won’t actually know until and unless the whole thing tips into the pot. Which, as with us a few months ago, and with us again should the left manage to cheat their way into power at midterms, I hope it doesn’t do for their sakes. And I hope it gets corrected another way, for their sakes. Look, vengeance is extremely satisfying… in theory. In reality it hits a lot of innocents, and leaves those who exerted revenge coarser, tired and guilty. And the last will come out in various truly awful ways, because humans express guilty by doubling down so as to retroactively justify their misdeeds.

But the truth is we don’t know what British men are doing. Can’t know. The same veil of secrecy from their government that keeps most of them from knowing how bad things actually are, keeps us from knowing what they’re doing. To understand the veil of secrecy, cast your minds back just four years ago, when you could get your account shut (like Out of Darkness) on Facebook and Twitter for posting a lot of anti-lockdown memes. And you never got it back. This was a time when I — I who am pretty far down the blogging ecosystem — lived in fear of both debanking and IRS shenanigans. (This last was actually tried, not very expertly, but tried.)

They live with this, but taken to eleven. You can actually get arrested for sharing the mildest of the memes I share here on Saturdays.

The thing is this type of control doesn’t actually suppress dissent. What it does is suppress the knowledge that every person on the verge of losing their mind with rage is not in fact alone. Which makes it harder to have any kind of collective action. It was working here, and it’s working there. People, even people who know the controls on expression or how corrupt the vote is, default to assuming it’s all hunky dory. I keep seeing people talk about how NYC voted for a Muslim communist, or how California is voting for this or that, when the most trivial analysis will show that fraud is so thick on the ground their votes are immaterial. And sometimes the people saying they “voted” for this are the very same ones who denounced the fraud before.

Anyway, the problem with this control on opinion, on movement, on money, doesn’t actually indefinitely suppress bloody uprising. Instead it delays it and makes it inevitable that it will be an indiscriminate blood bath. And then people are very surprised and “never saw it coming.”

So we don’t know where on the pressure cooker scale Britain is, and we should do its men (and women. Oooh boy, the mothers should be boiling) the grace of assuming their acts of dissent and resistance are being kept in the dark.

BUT the whole thing of the abuse of girls by migrants is a puzzle to Americans. Both why the men haven’t boiled over, and why the “elites” allowed it to go on with a wink and a nudge. Same with the whole looking down on the people who are ACTUALLY THE NATIVE PEOPLES OF GREAT BRITAIN and treating newcomers and welcoming them as the most important social project ever.

This has layers. And the first is again, please to look in the mirror. There are entire areas we don’t talk about in the US. Yes, we do get very upset at migrants causing deaths of Americans (when we hear about them) even when by surname those Americans are the same ethnicity as the illegals that killed them. But beyond that, we — and by this I mean various ethnic groups — turn a blind eye on continuous murder and misbehavior because it’s worse to be considered “racist.” And thereby we cause the most racist result of all: that in which minorities aren’t expected to behave like civilized people and black on black, hispanic on hispanic, and for that matter black on hispanic and vice versa, crime happens continuously and no one pays attention, because apparently we don’t expect people who can tan to be fully functional human beings. And before you air your uneducated and eugenics-inspired nonsense about certain races not having the ability to behave like civilized people, let me point out the race — by actual genetic race markers — of most American blacks is Caucasian. Yes, they are that diluted. And also that before the great re-enslavement of the welfare state destroyed their families, their crime statistics were about the same as poor whites (as far as we can tell.) Also that as El Salvador is showing, Latins can behave in a civilized way, if you remove the small percentage of animals from their midst and lock them up. The fact we refuse to do this and that our elites preen themselves on not being “racist” by refusing to do this is one of the worst blots on us as a nation.

Which is part of the whole thing. Look, in this type of thing, we say race, they say class. The problem — and reading this mystery brought back almost forgotten memories of growing up in Europe — is that the upper classes in Europe treat the lower classes the way Americans — pardon me leftist Americans — treat black or latin Americans (even the ones born and brought up here): as a sort of troublesome pet whose behavior can’t be controlled, so we let the pet do it and get mad at anyone who points it out.

This is what was in Europe before the “migrants” started arriving by the boat full. The educated, technocratic class, more snobbish than any nobility of birth, looked at the lumpen masses of manual or service workers, and assumed they were a whole other class of humanity, not quite capable or willing to make an effort to be “civilized” or “educated.”

And yes, class really exists in Europe, in a way that Americans can’t process. I’m always highly amused when Americans write ANYTHING that involves nobility of birth, because there is subtle dissonances and an almost glaring inability to get it. The truth is it goes all the way down. Assumptions are made about people based on their class, treatment is completely different at an almost instinctive level, and people put up with things they shouldn’t because they know that’s what they’ll get based on their class. There is no ethics involved, because no one thinks about it. It’s sub-rational.

As an example, I like to point to our trip to France, in which the organizer, correctly, btw, though it would be more fun to travel from Paris to the Riviera by train, so we could see the countryside as we crossed it. So far so good. We paid for a first class, air-conditioned carriage. Only to find out minutes into the the hours long ride that the carriage’s air conditioning system was not working, the windows couldn’t be opened, and there were no blinds on the windows. As the temperature in the carriage rose to the hundreds, older people started passing out, and employees circulated giving us free water bottles.

Which is when I lost my mind. I and another American (might have been a member of my party or not. I don’t remember) got up and each stood at one end of the carriage holding the door open. Which rapidly cooled it to normal levels. Most of the people in the carriage — French — just stared at us. We spelled each other standing the doorway.

We came to find out that carriage has had broken air conditioning FOR YEARS and not only haven’t they taken it out of service, apparently no one ever thought to send employees to stand in the doorway keeping the air circulation going, even though the temperature in the carriage was at health endangering levels.

Why not? Well, because most of the people in the carriage are either lower or middle-middle class. Most probably middle-middle, giving paying for first class. The government has very little concern for them. They’ll get what they get and be happy. And they’re so used to it that it never occurred to them, spontaneously, to figure out a work around.

We get this a lot from the minorities who have long been pets of the left. They have become convinced they can’t solve things themselves, barring a massive overturn in the system. So it all becomes “the government should do something about it.”

In the same way, this was the situation in Britain before they started importing migrants by the boatload. The locals had become convinced over years — generations, just in the 20th century — of oppression by the governmental and functionary elites that they would be treated a certain way and there was nothing they could do about it. And meanwhile the upper classes and anyone in official authority got used to pushing people around and treating them like they’re the scum of the Earth (the mystery I’m reading.)

In America, even a filthy, obviously spaced out guy on drugs is a ‘gentleman’ and even a lady of the night is a “lady” in address. This shocked me profoundly when I was new here. It is not so abroad, practically anywhere else. (Maybe Canada, but they don’t mean it.) And yeah, even when said ironically, those count.

There is a different TEXTURE to this abroad.

And that was the situation before the migrants came in. I don’t know if this has been identified as a social phenomenon but the thing is the newcomers have no status in the society. While the lower classes have LOW status. So the migrants are immediately above.

Also, the upper classes in Europe are profoundly disappointed with the rest of the people in the country in a way that doesn’t echo in America. Look, sure, our “elites” (snort giggle) think badly of the rest of us and those on the coasts look down on the entire middle of the country. BUT that’s not by monolithic class, partly because we have enough church that the children of the middle of the country routinely become coastal elites.

I see this will need unpacking. Sorry, I’m fuzzy today. So, one of the conceits of the left in the twentieth century was that everyone would be educated and thereby become one of them.

Here, because of status churn, and people moving around and changing status constantly (it’s a very large country, and alas leftism is a positional good. Partly because of the assumption above) the leftist “elites” have the illusion this is happening.

In Europe, they’ve given up and of course as always when the plans fail, the fault is of those lower class yobs who refused to be uplifted. So there is resentment there, and hatred. Meanwhile, with the migrant newcomers, the “elites” don’t know that they too will refuse to be uplifted. They don’t KNOW there’s something intrinsically wrong with them. They “know” that about the native population.

So the migrants are immediately above and the native lower classes will get punished for attempting to break the hierarchy.

Layer on top of that the fact that ideological crap from America gets filtered by their newspapers and magazines and taken far more seriously there than it ever is here. (Another case of when America sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia.) As we found out through the BLM insanity, they drank up the academic intersectionality theories and are trying to apply them there. (This has led to Portugal developing an absolutely bizarre relation with gypsies of instance.)

And because leftism is a positional good that denotes you’re “well educated” this means that the elites are ALL IN on it. It’s how they prove their upper class status after all. Which means that those rubes on the lower seats trying to hold the poor migrants accountable for anything are just being prejudiced.

On top of this nauseating soup there’s the fact that multiculti requires you to tolerate if not approve of child marriage, polygamy, mistreatment of women and all the other “vibrant” cultural characteristics of the imported scum.

I have on twitter simultaneously read Indian accounts saying Suttee was a lie invented by the British (It wasn’t. There are first person reports from people of all nationalities) and that Suttee was a beautiful cultural practice we had no business disrupting. The flummery is palpable, but they can’t see it, because being “upper class” depends on NOT seeing it.

And therefore right now, the upper classes in Britain, who consider themselves scientific and technocrats, but are actually mostly jumped up functionaries and middle-managers with “excellent” educations, is now engaged in a to the death attempt to make the real world obey the insanity they were indoctrinated with, layered on the assumptions of their class-ranked society.

Literally to the death. Because when the picture in your head is completely at odds with reality, reality always wins. ALWAYS. It’s a tiresome thing but inevitable. And the longer and harder you try to impose the fantasy, the worse the breakage will be.

So, pray for Britain, if you’re the praying kind.

And keep an eye on us, because though we don’t have classes as such, we’ve let the “some people aren’t as capable as others” bullshit creep in. Which is a disservice to everyone, but particularly the “minorities” affected. And that means we’re ripe to let the same kind of nonsense reign. In fact, it’s started already.

Always remember you’re Americans: if the government is trying to boil you in a carriage in the sun, with windows that can’t be opened and the air-conditioning broken? Stand up and keep the doors open so air flows through.

Metaphorically speaking.

The lives you save are almost certainly everyone’s. Including yours.

The idea that with a little more effort we could breed the perfect humans seems to be a persistent defect of the human mind.

It’s of course part of all other attempts to make humans perfect, including “if only we change society this way.” (You will be forgiven if you hear a very old voice saying “you will be like gods, knowing good from evil.”)

What most Americans our generation are not aware of (I think. And note that our generation is those born about 20 years after the end of world war II) is how prevalent eugenics is in the thought and mental scaffolding of the generation just before and the generation that went into WWII.

Germany, sure, took it to an insane, by the numbers “let’s kill everyone we think shouldn’t reproduce” level because that was part of German culture at the time. They’d put themselves to such great effort to come up from behind on industrialization that organization (they used to be considered sloppy and backward in Europe, then they remade themselves) that they became a bit autistic about it, and since everyone agreed the way forward was eugenics, they just powered ahead, past all sanity and instituted those in their very own way. Which ended up with 12 million dead.

But “everyone” agreed the way forward was eugenics. It’s hard to overestimate how prevalent the ideas were, low level, in everything. If you read any writers of the period from the latest 1800s to the beginning of WW II it’s impossible not to trip on it, unless you too are dulled to the idea because it’s in the water you drink. And you might be, because it’s still prevalent in our midst.

It’s an old, old, old idea. In Sparta, the father could reject any infant for any or no reason and the kid would just be flung from the top of a rock. There is thought that maintains a lot of the sacrifices to Moloch were children who were defective and would need life-long care and/or children who were born either out of wedlock or to parents who were too young or too poor to support them. “Sacrifice him/her to the god” gave an honorable way out. My family jokingly told me that if my father had been ancient Greek, a puny, not fully formed critter like me wouldn’t have survived the hour. (Of course, that posits a world in which dad wasn’t terrified of grandmother which means a world that didn’t exist.) I’m fairly sure they were just joking, but the exact same reasoning is used to deny care to children born disastrously premature in most of Europe. And weirdly it’s not even — though it partially is — because the kids would take too much time, money and effort to allow them to survive. Mostly it’s because they still have a high chance of dying and would mess up the government’s health care numbers.

However you see support for that even here and it will be stuff like “well, if the baby is that weak, he’ll be a sickly adult and consume resources all the time.” And, yeah, I do realize I’m not the best the showcase against this, given that I’ve spent approximately 70% of my life sick, and most of the time in a way that can’t quite be pinned down. As in “probably auto immune.” At the same time, I’ve been fairly productive in my life, as well (though not always in a monetary sense) in a way that people who were born full term and in ruddy good health haven’t been. Meaning there’s more to a human than being healthy or not, full term or not, unimpaired or not.

Sure, good health and a strong body help, but there is way more to being human than that. And if you start making health the be all end all of what makes a good human, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with a herd of very healthy animals who cannot create or think or do much of anything innovative. Because those who do noteworthy things are so often impaired in other ways that in popular imagination being sickly or outright insane has become a requirement of genius. I think this is because if you are very smart you are almost certainly “neuro-atypical”. I mean intelligence is qualitative not quantitative, and the quality is weirdness, in general. (Bodies as weird as their minds, as Kate Paulk put it about Science fiction fans.) Partly because if you are very smart but your primary value is to fit in with the herd you’ll manage it. It’s what humans do. Change themselves to fit in. We’re infinitely plastic after all.

Then there are those still who fetishise “IQ” or intelligence, in whatever form. The ones who take IQ measurements of peoples where the majority is illiterate or subliterate as being accurate would be funny if they weren’t so horrifying. For the record, if those IQ measurements were real, i.e. meant the same as those applied to children in our own country, most of those countries would be full of corpses within days. Because people that dumb could not live, let alone live well.

There is a difference between IQ — which is relatively accurate for the possibility of academic success, given people who have come through broadly the same type of Western schooling — and intelligence. And that’s not a call to water down the IQ tests in our country (Though, LORD are they doing that, including their talk of multiple “intelligences.”) For what they were designed to do — predicting success in a specific type of educational or work environment — IQ tests perform admirably. They still have some blind spots, like missing the extreme of genius which often tests like the extreme of moron particularly very young (and for the idiots scoffing, no that doesn’t apply to me. I test technically “genius” but not extreme and I’ve never texted extremely low) which gives us the whole idea of idiot savant. But anything trying to measure humans will have blind spots. Which is part of the reason we can use measurements to figure out how best to employ the talent we do have, but it should not be used to advocate for death or other forms of disbarment (“too dumb to teach” say) for any group of people. Or really any individual.

And then there is the eugenics in breeding. Oh, dear bob. You really don’t want to dive down that insanity, but it’s there. Not so long ago people were lamenting that most people coming out of ivy leagues weren’t reproducing, which they were sure meant that the human race would become dumber. At the time I snorted so hard I almost gave myself an aneurysm. To some extent, yeah, sure, there are some people who get into the ivies for merit (fewer and fewer every year, seems like, since it became a DEI swamp) but having attended some mingles on the prospect of their recruiting sons, let me tell you, most of what they were evaluating for is “Are they of our sort dear?” (We weren’t which was so obvious even we knew it.) And it has nothing to do with raw intelligence. Perhaps a sort of “social intelligence” if you allow for the multiple intelligences (snort giggle) theory. But, yeah, no. You don’t take an IQ to test to enter an ivy league school, and if you did it would be so far down the evaluating criteria it might as well not be there.

However, the laments, and the persistent return of the “lives unworthy of living” because they’re sickly, or young, or old, tells you eugenics is still with us.

It’s no longer out and proud, beating its chest and screaming how important it is that we cull the less “fit” members of the population. It hasn’t been that since the Nazis showed the world how ugly and stupid that was in practice, but it’s still there, lurking under “Of course it would be better if.”

It’s still feeding Moloch all the premature or “not quite right” kids in Europe, and all of those who have a dubious (they’re all dubious though some more than other) pre natal diagnosis and get aborted there and here, and all the people who are chronic depressive or have some bizarre auto immune condition, both here and in Europe, or those who are old and whose heirs get a case of desire to inherit.

And it’s no different really than the stuff that went on before WWII, all the “They shouldn’t reproduce” and “they’re just taking resources” and–

In the end, I suspect we’ll never get rid of the eugenics thinking in humans. Thinking of ourselves as better than others is part of being human, and from there to “how dare they go around breathing and everything while being so useless” is a small step. (I’m bitterly amused by the people who try to say it would be better for unwanted children to be aborted. As an unwanted child married to an unwanted child, I want to tell them to shut up, because being wanted and growing up to live decent lives, and even happy ones don’t co-relate. Some of us — looks significantly — mature past the emotional age of two where being unwanted hurts a lot.)

It might be impossible to eradicate. After all eugenics and the idea humans could be bred for perfection is what fed the entire idea of nobility and the sacredness of kingly lines. (And led mostly to the Hapsburg jaw and far far worse.) Blue bloods were considered the best of the best because they came from the best lines, after all. Whatever was thought “best” at the time.

Again, it might be impossible to eradicate the thought and the bits of hating whatever group is considered inferior in mind or body. However, what we should never, ever, ever, do is make it official by giving the government the power to act on it.

While Germany managed to discredit wholesale genetic culling in batch lots and by classification numbers, governments still keep trying to do it.

Partly because we’ve made governments the payees and grantors of such things as health care, which means suddenly the government has an interest in whether your baby is healthy or your 70 year old is still productive.

People, that’s the way to hell, on greased tracks, in a flaming handbasket.

Once government pays for you to stay alive, government can decide when it should unalive you.

The new incarnation of eugenics is relatively new, yet it’s old as time, and it’s already racking up impressive numbers and piling on impressive injustices in Europe and Canada and some even here.

Whether you call it assisted suicide or therapeutic abortion, it is eugenics and I say to hell with it.

You — yes, you, gentle reader — are descended from geniuses and morons and barely smart enough to survive. You’re descended from athletes and cripples, from the strong and the weak. There is a thing in genetics known as regression to the mean meaning that the extremes tend to breed towards the middle, or if you prefer, geniuses or morons, your kids will tend to be middling. There is also a never mentioned, but any of us who grew up in a village with a long memory knows this, fact that any line no matter how moronic, will throw off the occasional genius. And vice versa.

Ultimately we are all human. Humans are very bad at measuring humans. Much less at deciding who should live or die.

Was it Penn Gillette who said something about being against group justice because that always ended up in picking on the weird kid, and he was always the weird kid?

I think most of my readership are the weird kid. I know I was and am. Giving anyone — particularly a governmental body — the right to kill part of the population not only always ends up in massive numbers of dead humans (almost at random, honestly) but always and forever, it ends in the weird kids being killed.

As weird kids, we should fight against it with all our might.

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 DENTON SALLE: Sailing the Clouds of Morning: Avatar Wizard Book 7 (The Avatar Wizard)

The sorcerer shook himself and glared at Jeremy. “You challenge me to a duel, boy?”
He flared his nimbus, so a sphere of greenish-black power surrounded him.
“I’ll drink your life, and your body will be my puppet.”

Once, the volkh ruled the world like gods. Then, the Dark arose and the war shattered the world. The northern Empire finally triumphed and survived at great cost, losing its golden capital and many of its people. The southern empire, Fabled Sheba, fell and lies in ruins to this day. Mighty relics and artifacts remain there, lost in the destruction caused by the last queen’s final spell.

Jeremy and his companions, with Gerasim’s sister Nataliia and the volkva Tanya, must first travel to the ruins of the City, then to Sheba to fulfill the quest laid upon him. In addition to recovering the rod of power, he needs to return the crown of Sheba to Master Eyasu, lest the tensions in the Sheban diaspora erupt into civil war.

Fly with him in the rebuilt Hawk Ship as they travel south to a city ruined by the desperate acts of opening a hellgate. Then cross the Inland Sea with its wonders to an ancient land, destroyed by a desperate spell. A spell so powerful that, while crushing the Dark’s southern hosts, the land remains cursed to this day. Join with them as they risk their lives and very souls in a dead city, and then risk more dangers to find the secrets hidden in the City of Bees.

Meanwhile, unable to go with him, Galena has to cope alone with her mother’s plots to prevent her marriage to Jeremy. Which may mean reaching out to the scariest person she knows. The lily of the volkhvy, the mightiest sorceress in the world, Vasilia Still-heart.

Click now to return to Jeremy’s world and travel with him on the Hawk ship to the ruins of the City and beyond, where heroic deeds and wonders wait.

FROM KAL SPRIGGS: Valor’s Liberation: A Young Adult Military Science Fiction Novel (Children of Valor Book 10)

“The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” -Thomas Jefferson

The world of Century is under alien occupation, and their military forces seek to end it.

For two years they have built up forces, whatever they could beg, borrow, and even steal. And now they’re going home to kick the Culmor Empire right off their world.

No one has worked harder than Jiden Armstrong to make that possible. Only on the eve of the attack, she’s still recovering from injuries, she’s sidelined, and unable to help free her homeworld.

Except the aliens have a doomsday plan and they’re willing to bombard the planet from orbit rather than let it go. There’s one option left: someone has to lead a team to infiltrate the planet, to descend into a million-year-old alien facility, to awaken long dormant defensive systems, and to protect the world of Century.

Jiden is the only one with the right skills, the right knowledge, and the abilities to pull it off. What no one knows is that something awaits her, buried and waiting beneath the sands of Century, a hidden threat that will challenge everything she is, and she will need every bit of valor to liberate her world.

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 2 (I’m The Beautiful But … Wants To Leave People Ruthlessly Alone!)

Princess Regnant Alice and her companions, after a trip to Prince Daniel’s world Xeros, and a visit to Lost Terra and a meeting with Michael, the mysterious, ancient human, have been directed by Michael to travel to Mahoukai — a world of magical beings who will be able to properly train and guide Prince Daniel’s sister Alouette in the use of her inborn magical powers.

But a nagging question continues to bug both Alice and her father, Roger; what is really going on, back on Capital? Is a revolution brewing? Is the Lord Chancellor, Rupert, somehow involved, and at what level? Eventually they must bid a reluctant farewell to the Mahoukaian Great Mages of Antiquity, and end Alice’s six month absence from her Throne.

And what they find on Capital is far, far beyond anything they might have imagined from 50,000 light years away.

The second volume of the BBESP light novel!

FROM CLAIRE MERRICK: The Screaming Tree

Being a teenager is hard. Moving from California to a small town in the South is even harder. Cught in a supernatural war?

Hardest.

The Screaming Tree divides the town of Verity, Tennessee, east from west. Its two knothole “Faces” gaze out like ancient lords over the half they claim as their own. As long as the spirits remain content, the town thrives, but everyone fears what might happen if their feud spills beyond the branches.

When 13-year-old Bea Durant and her father move into their new home, they are presented with the Rules for their side of town: Never paint the house anything but green. Hang a wind chime to be warned of foul moves. No matter how loud or sudden, never investigate the Screaming.

Bea never considered herself a rulebreaker. She has better things to do like make new friends and fit in at a new school. But a reckless decision on a stormy night draws the spirit from the opposite side of town to her doorstep. Specifically, into her bedroom. She’s left with no choice but to shelter the injured mage…and hope his mortal enemy doesn’t discover them. To protect her new home, Bea might have to break every Rule that has kept Verity safe for centuries.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Whine in a Box (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 3)

Maybe chasing murderers wasn’t so bad after all…

Meg Turner, vampire, accountant, and investments advisor…is a political radical. By vampire standards, at least. She’s young, American, and wasn’t inducted into the unlife in the usual way. Which means she’s not a European feudalist. So, when other vampires started asking to move into her territory, she wasn’t sure how to react, other than to welcome some of them. She has a chance to shape an entire territory, if she wants.

(She doesn’t)

Her allies have other plans, though. And, between those plans being sprung on her without much warning, her nearest neighbor coming under attack (and sending his helpless civilians to her for shelter), her mother showing up on her doorstep, looking for answers to why she’d not gotten in contact in the last twenty years…yeah. She’s got a reason to whine.

And that’s not even counting the rising panic over a brand new virus…that shouldn’t affect her people, but will anyway.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Witch’s Daughter (Empires of Magic Book 2)

Some letters come from the living. Some come from the dead. This one comes with a formula that turns a rowboat into a miracle.

Seventeen-year-old Lord Michael Ainsling — youngest brother of the Duke of Darkwater, builder of mechanical marvels, survivor of fairyland — receives a letter from a man sixteen years dead. The inventor Tristram Blakley has not perished; he has been imprisoned by his own genius and begs the one mind in all of Avalon brilliant enough to understand his work to set him free. All Michael has to do is find seven missing brothers first and walk a magical path..

Fifteen-year-old Albinia Blakley has spent her whole life under her mother’s iron thumb — and her mother is a witch. The day Al finally escapes down a rope of knotted sheets, she lands in a world she doesn’t recognize, with no money, no magic kit, and no idea that the stranger who catches her is about to become her greatest ally.

Together, a girl with more secrets than she knows and a boy who builds machines that try to murder him must outwit a sorceress, navigate the treacherous courts of Fairyland, and unravel an enchantment years in the making — before a family is lost for good.

Witch’s Daughter is a gaslamp fantasy brimming with wit, warmth, and wonder, for readers who love their magic wrapped in velvet and their adventures served with morning tea.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Technoserf

The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby’s homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will.

Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he’s offered a chance to fix it.

Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters’ metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Affair of the Ambassador’s Comet (Inspector Matthias Veyron Stories Book 3)

Above Rigel 5, where the ancient Shepherd Comet blazes for the first time in forty years, diplomats from across the sector have gathered to renew humanity’s most important interstellar trade agreement.

Then Ambassador Corvin Halbrecht collapses at the gala reception — and the comet is blamed.

A rare neurotoxin. A convenient suspect. A cover story built from science no one will want to challenge.

Inspector Matthias Veyron arrives to find a station full of diplomats more concerned with political consequence than the truth, a young scientist wrongly accused, and evidence pointing toward a fraud that has corrupted the compact for two decades.

In a world of grand alliances and calculated appearances, murder is almost always about something smaller.

The Affair of the Ambassador’s Comet is a gripping mystery of science, diplomacy, and quiet ambition — perfect for readers who enjoy Agatha Christie-style detection, atmospheric science fiction, and mysteries with genuine intellectual substance.

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 ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: IDEA

This week’s five, and links to past listings.

And the previous four.

The five before.

And the four before that… at the end of the long list of all of them.

And yes, thank you for asking. We are nearing completion. Probably 10 more. 15 at most. (CRIES.)

By Holly the Assistant

I’ve been traveling a fair bit to conventions the last couple years with my elderly mother, and have gotten to see a fair bit of our great country from the non-local perspective. By and large, hotels have someone of Indian subcontinent ethnicity or some African ethnicity at the desk, and the rest of the staff is in the American Indian-to-Hispanic range, and very much NOT English speaking. Whether we’re in the Big Midwestern City, the Small Midwestern Town, the Western Resort Town . . . but last week we ended up in a Small Western University Town, and staffing was very different.

This particular university town is one I’m pretty familiar with. It runs about 20,000 people when school is in session, and half that when school is not. The university also hosts a very large and famous festival during the school year, now honoring one of the major contributors to the school, but during his life, he attended right up until the last year (and I got to meet him). For two weeks in the winter, the entire world shows up. The local hotels are definitely not resort quality, but they don’t belong in such a small town, either. Other than that event and graduation, they look to fill their rooms by hosting whatever conventions they can attract, and they’re pretty good at doing that.

The worker population at those hotels reflects exactly the local demographics. European ancestry, that American Indian-to-Hispanic–but these are all native English speakers level fluency–and a small smattering of other. Front Desk/Housekeeping the day we checked in said she was in the Large Animal Veterinary program.

Americans will take these jobs, if they are allowed to. American university students will take these jobs. Americans who have every expectation of rising far, both in social standing and in income bracket, beyond this work, will take these jobs. They won’t stay there for thirty years: the young lady I talked to would much rather treat sick calves, but they’ll take them and work at them. Hard. That hotel was as clean or cleaner than any of the others, the breakfast prep area was clean (and they had the door open so we could see them breaking the eggs to scramble, unlike the other hotels), their computer system at the front desk was no worse, and they were pleasant and hospitable.

Meanwhile, my own young adult children have been working, not in hotels, but in similar types of low paying low prestige jobs, while working on their own plans for life improvement. Food, mostly. They don’t intend to stay there for a career, but it gets their bills paid (because they know how to be frugal) and builds their savings for the next step.

But I’m noticing that a lot of American parents are trying to protect their kids from those low-paid and unpleasant jobs. Not so much in my region, where half the population farms or ranches, and young adults work on a family corporation owned farm or ranch, or if old enough legally for the neighbor’s ranch. But folks in other regions. And more here every year. “Well, Matt can’t get a job because he has travel soccer.” Don’t do that to your kids, please. My oldest had ballet (which was more hours than his travel sports friends per week) and got a grocery clerk job at sixteen. They worked with him on scheduling. Mostly. And when they didn’t, he learned how to leave a job and find another.

You learn something from those low level jobs that you can’t learn from sports, arts, and other paid-for activities, that you can’t learn from school. Some of the most wildly successful adults I know came from families so poor their parents took their income for the family when they worked as teens, decades ago. The scramble, the hustle, the knowledge that if one job fails another can be found, showing up on time, when they have to pay you and for what, you can’t learn that from an activity your parents pay for you to be part of, or that the government mandates you participate in.

American teens and early twenties are willing to do those jobs, if they’re allowed to. Don’t say “We need immigrants because Americans won’t work.” That’s blatantly untrue. When they’re allowed to, Americans will work. (Americans will insist on being paid fairly according to law, and on safety, and on breaks, and you can’t keep their passport so they can’t leave, but we DO have laws about those things.) If you want young adults to not get into illegal activities to make money, give them legal jobs. Let the high schoolers have jobs even when they’re failing class: not working won’t make them care more about school, working will. Let them work on non-family-owned farms, which is currently illegal in much if not all of the country. Let the junior high and middle schoolers work. Sure, limit their hours, but let them have actual show up to and get paid jobs after school a couple days a week and on weekends. There is not one thing about running a cash register that the average twelve year old cannot do successfully and safely.

Get the government out of the way of Americans working. Get social class out of the way of young Americans working.

We’ll all be better off for it in the long run, and the kids these days will be better off for it in the very short run.

Remember mean girls? Or really the “cool kids” of either sex? Remember how they used to make your life a misery? No matter what you did, either trying to pass unnoticed, or trying to fit in could save you from their scathing looks and their expressions of utter derision. And you could never even figure out why they were doing it or what had triggered this particular attack. Their rules seemed to change all the time. The only rule was you were wrong, they were right, you were a loser and they were super-cool.

As an aside, know how any of the main culprits are doing now decades later? We’ll table that for a moment.

I was talking to Bill (Reader) the other day (incidentally pray for any conservatives under cover in the ivies. No, seriously.) We were talking about the peculiar experience our kind had through the Covidiocy and he said part of the reason most of us held fast even though the entire world was vying to convince us this was a world-ending emergency is that we had experience from school. Elementary and middle school and yeah, even high school. As in, most of us had been bullied or ostracized or looked down upon by people the establishment (teachers, employees) and most other students treated as minor divinities. And most of us couldn’t fit in or escape attacks even if we tried. So eventually we gave up trying and the lesson public school taught us was to stand with our arms crossed and feet planted, glare back and tell the world, “No. You move.”

Or at least it did some of us. Others broke, badly. But those of us on the broadly defined right — “to the right of Lenin” being how I define it — obviously didn’t break. Even if we might have gone a little nuts.

In answer to the above question: most of the mean girls whom I loathed and who made me miserable (they couldn’t hit me. I was massive. But ridicule and subtle derision and pranks are no respecters of size and strength) and whom I chanced to hear of — mom was never able to understand ‘went to school together’ isn’t the same as ‘are besties’ — have… not done great in life, honestly. About the most successful has a decentish mid-level career, but is on husband number 5? 6? and looks like she was run over by a train.

Now the crash and burn of these people might be/is because they had their glory days too early. Or at least I always thought so. But in thinking about our current cultural situation, I have…. more nuanced opinions.

You see, mean girls — in my case, literal. It was an all-girl school, but mean girls, really, can be either sex — are products of a certain set of circumstances.

Schools aren’t natural environments. They are centers of centralized authority, administered from above by people who don’t much care, but do a great deal of picking of winners and losers. (Winners and losers for reasons that have bloody nothing to do with the ostensible reason for the existence of schools: education.) In fact by people who are social-engineering and picking the winners they think are “good” for their goals. (Mostly of making them look good.) Also you’re locked into it, not allowed to escape. You have to be there every week day for a set of years. With the same people, in a closed and artificial system.

People who become “winners” in this game are mostly experts at socially manipulating circumstances to make themselves seem superior and put together. They congregate in networks that do not admit challenge, and work mostly to keep them ontop.

Once they get to the real world, people respond differently to their manipulation tactics, but more importantly, their networks are disrupted and people can avoid them/don’t need to be around them every day. I suppose some of them — the brightest — will adapt and learn to avoid the situation. But most don’t, from what I can see (not that I have done a systematic study, or have any intention of.) Because their entire power/lifestyle was built on DERIDING OTHERS to make themselves seem important, and because they didn’t even have any firm principles behind that but just “tear down anyone and anything that might be a threat to our power” they have nothing to build from or towards.

So, let’s talk about the present situation of the left.

We used to believe — still see this in comments — that the left (and their distant patron the USSR) were ultimately good at one thing: propaganda. And for a long time, they seemed to be so. They could convince people of the most ridiculous things and more importantly, they’d made leftism into a positional good. If you wanted to show you were high class you’d be as leftist as possible in public, all the way to communist.

Turns out though that this wasn’t in any way shape or form a natural system, any more than the public schools are. It turns out they could act superior, sell leftism as a positional good, and act like we were the baddies because they controlled critical positions in the information/art/entertainment industrial complex. They could therefore keep out anyone who disagreed with them, and act like all smart people agreed with the most outrageous idiocies of the communist mind.

The fact that the pipe line of this system often started with the leftist teachers/professors in schools is not a coincidence.

There was no way to tell of course. Not while they controlled the information system we were forced to use every day. In fact, like with school, we assumed this was just the natural order of things. See how even people on the right argued that the right just wasn’t as creative as the left, since all great writers/artists were leftist. (Even Jordan Peterson. And the reason he adduced was mentally deficient. In his mind, it was because the right is more rule prone and doesn’t want to change the system. Missing that the system and the rules have been leftist my whole life. That to be on the right is to be a rebel. Sigh.)

The fact their entire eco-system of “creatives” was being supported by our tax money via several NGOs just made them seem more popular and like everyone liked them, which of course reinforced their idea and other’s perception of superiority.

… but this is not the case anymore. And it’s becoming glaringly obvious it was all fake.

In fact, the more distributed the information system gets the more the left is becoming like the mean girls once they leave high school: bitter, vociferous, and attracting only the mentally ill.

I know one looks at the “socialists” winning tickets in our big cities and the one certified fascist in Maine and is tempted to believe they have some kind of power still.

They do actually, it’s called FRAUD. Note mostly these people “win” in big cities, which are always hubs of fraud (because it’s way easier to fraud the vote where people are largely anonymous and there’s a lot of them.) Hence the opposition from lefties (and RINOS) to the SAVE America act.

However, they are a rump (appropriately) movement at this point. Their strength is MOSTLY fraud. They’re not really convincing anyone. Or at least not anyone who isn’t indoctrinated and/or still captive of the artificial educational establishment.

They are ultimately mean girls. They didn’t work for their cultural ascendance, it was handed to them. And their entire power was based on tearing down, destroying and debasing their native culture. They can not create, build or uplift…. well, anything.

The reign of the mean girls is coming to an end. First slowly (these last 20 years) then suddenly, you’ll see communists and leftists in general being derided as the sapskulls with nothing but evil and vain gloating on their side.

Their fall will be sudden and terrible.

And glorious.

Yes, that’s muse the cat. In this case, she is indeed sleepy. This is her favorite place to sleep when I’m here, downstairs, probably because it’s very convenient for me to pet her while working on other things.

BTW my kids have taken to making fun of the poor little girl because she’s a little chonky. Like they have room to talk.

Anyway, in this case, non-literally, the truth is the writer is sleepy. I either need a nap or more coffee, and your bet is as good as mine.

I had a brilliant idea for a post, but it was the middle of the night, and I didn’t write it down, and now my mind is full of cotton wool.

It’s a relatively (Ah) low run-around day with only one brief medical appointment, to which I’ll leave in probably half an hour, and the work of refinishing the living room tables in abeyance, due to my not being able to find the mouse sander fine pads (trust me, that sentence does mean something) and therefore having to wait till Amazon delivers tomorrow. (Well, yes, I could in fact go to home depot, but that would make the chances of working on it today zero, since it’s all the way across town.)

So, if I can get a short nap in, it’s sort of an ideal day to write fiction after the (hopefully) nap. And I’m going to try just that.

Treat this as an open post, because there actually is a lot to discuss and my commenters are the most interesting part of this blog.

I’ll be upstairs, working on novels. If you need me, those of you who have my phone number, text.

If not, I’ll see you this evening.