According To Hoyt

I’ve been having a heck of a time getting down to work. Okay, there are many reasons: tiredness being the foremost, and also how much of the place still looks like a moving truck vomited all over it.

I had thought, originally, that this would be ready for a house warming party about now, but the truth is we’re barely at the “functional” stage and don’t yet have a dining room (which is important since the kitchen eating area is only big enough for two.) A lot of it was because stuff like putting new flooring down took double the time we expected, and was on top of painting taking double the time. (Painting was probably frivolous, but due to both cats and my breathing, the carpet had to go. And you don’t want me to live in dark green and dark grey. What is with younger millennials and their hatred of color?)

So there is the hangover from moving, the “where the heck is “x” where x is a normal object of every day life that you swear you packed in a properly marked box, but which has done a vanishing act without your permission. Yesterday I cleaned and set up the entire master bathroom because I was tired of brushing my teeth with one of those cheap toothbrushes hotels give you when you forgot your own. We’ve been at the house for a month now, and I wanted my re-fargin toothbrush. That meant unpacking and setting up the closet because the boxes for the closet were piled in the bathroom. Because the boxes for the linen closet were in the master closet. Because the boxes in the linen closet…. you get the point. Those are now in the future piano room, and therefore we have a linen closet, a bedroom closet and a bathroom. The toothbrush was in the box before last. In my defense, it was marked “Open immediately.” Eh.

Also I found I have opinions on drawer pulls — disco ball like things should not be bathroom drawer pulls! — and glass shades on ceiling fan lights (they shouldn’t be frilly white flower like things in the office. No.) Finding out I have strong opinions on such subjects after a near sixty four years (turns out I’m turning sixty four, the Mathematician assures me. Eh) of an unexceptionable life, is a bit of a shock to the system.

Also being extremely ADD I have trouble working in environments that make no sense. Which is why I have to finish unpacking the office, probably tomorrow, but–

There is more to it than that, particularly since the next book of Elly has retitled — Now Strains of Earth because I kept typing Orphans of the Sky instead of Orphans of the Stars, and I’m not crazy enough to steal Heinlein’s title, no — and clarified, and is all but erupting from my forehead, and a short (eh 80k words) Elly mystery (Trade Goods) wants to be written this week pretty please. And I’m having trouble sitting butt in chair more than five minutes and alternate between optimism and despair and wanting to chew on my nails, except if I start it will go all the way to the elbow.

The elections? Undoubtedly that’s in there, somewhere, but … it’s more than that. It’s this feeling of wrongness, of being twisted into an uncomfortable position and not being able to get right. Like… you know your left shoe is half a size too small, but you can’t verify it. Like… you woke up one morning in your beautiful bright green room, but you’re sure it was yellow last night, and you’d like to know how it changed. And is it going to change back?

This is not a new feeling and it accounts a lot for how distracted and strange I’ve been even on this blog. It’s been going on for six years… give or take.

Things like 10/7 didn’t help it at all. It is, with the lock downs, a moment when the world fractured.

It wasn’t even the atrocities, though those should be unthinkable for anyone not living in the Neolithic, but the reactions. As with 2020 the way people acted, the people who–

Look, I was talking in my friends’ group online tonight, and other people pinned it down. It was 2020. It was 10/7. It was a dozen other small events along the way where the same thing happened.

What happened was this: The masks were pulled off.

Some of us who are by nature paranoid and who furthermore worked in fields where the left lunatics were thick on the ground; those of us who stayed quiet through lunchroom discussions but heard a lot; those of us who can read social context, knew we were surrounded by leftists, and that a lot of these people were, by all the norms of civilized people, functionally insane.

But we didn’t expect the soft pudding heads to be raving lunatics, too. And we didn’t expect people nominally on our side, some of whom we thought well of until the crisis hit, to also have massive holes where their logic apparatus should be.

2020 scared the heck out of me. Seeing who went Nazi, so to put it, but more importantly, who said, “No, no, stop talking, not so loudly. Pretend to be a Nazi” scared the piss out of me at a very deep, fundamental level I’m still not fully recovered from. I’d always thought I was cynical and pessimistic about human rationality. Oh, brother!

And 10/7? Just as bad. The idiots, the pudding heads, the weak sisters “You must admit that Israel–” I admit nothing. Israel is a civilized nation beset by barbarians, and far too good for this world. Because if they weren’t on 10/8 they would have taken to killing everyone in Gaza in batch lots. Women and children? Sure. We saw how they cheered! They indulged in behavior that from the dawn of time has seen tribes eradicated root and branch. And they have the nerve to scream “genocide” even while their numbers increase. And the pudding heads, the sob sisters, the envious, the evil, are willing to go along with it and pile on. Because, you know, feeding someone’s face to the crocodile keeps your own face safe. Or because they want to feel special. I don’t know.

And then… all the little breaks along the way. All the psy-ops that some people in our side insist on falling for.

It’s like…. Indulge me in a metaphor: An hostile alien invasion happened, decades ago. The aliens are very good at pretending to be human. Some percentage of them live among us. You probably have one or two in your groups. Maybe one or two in your family. We suspected it, at least those of us with more sensitivity than an anvil.

Then, something happened, and they removed the mask, showed us what they were, demanded we allow ourselves to be herded into quarantine camps, take a shot of their weird mixture, whatever. They ran around forming ministries of truth, cancelling people, and showing that really they would prefer we were all dead.

And the horrible thing: they weren’t just who we suspected. They were the babysitter, grandma, the lady around the corner who brings us a slice of cake when she bakes. All suddenly revealed fangs and red eyes, and screamed they want us dead.

Then they put the mask back on and went back to being themselves. More or less. Until 10/7 when again, they revealed their fanged and horrible countenance and their hatred of Western civilization and longing for barbarism. And it wasn’t even the same set of people. Oh, it was mostly overlapping, but that second uncovered other stragglers that we never suspected.

And then they go back to pretending to be normal….

I don’t know how many of you read Robert A. Heinlein’s Puppet Masters. If you haven’t, it’s the story of an alien invasion in which the aliens are “half a pound of tapioca” in appearance, but they can completely control any human whose nervous system they can attach to. Initially, they ride between the shoulders and you might only see a slight founding of the back. Your only clue.

Until the main characters make it impossible to doubt they’re there, there is a period where they control substantially entire cities, but keep up the pretense of normal human life. This time is called “the masquerade”

There are tells. Closed swimming pools at the height of summer. Men wearing coats. But they’re not massive tells. Our hero, who already knows what is happening visits a city in the masquerade, trying to figure out who is hagridden and who isn’t.

You can read the book yourself. It’s one of my favorites.

BUT that’s what it feels like. Particularly since 2024. It feels like I’m living in the masquerade. People act normal, but there are tells. And I can’t be sure, but all of this daily life and peace feels like an act.

Is it trauma from the years before? Oh, likely. But the question is: is it also true?

I think this is part of what’s feeding the doomerism about the midterms. I think it’s also part of how many of us creatives seem to be glitching. And it’s part of why I’m having trouble settling down and writing.

Nerves.

It’s probably just nerves. But nerves don’t explain 2020 or what followed.

I want it to be just nerves.

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/10/31/i-dont-believe-in-aliens/)

I don’t believe in aliens but I profoundly dislike Woo Woo. And Aliens at least aren’t woo woo. Or they weren’t. It could be argued that when everyone on the left started running around talking about UFOs being some kind of psychic phenomenon, (circa early seventies) it was a sign of true cultural rot or perhaps a sign that my (tongue in cheek, I think. I THINK) theory below is true, of course.

I don’t know how many of you remember this, but UFOs and aliens didn’t use to be in the same category of belief as elves, fairies, ghosts, weird spirit messages and the thing called “Earth changes” that has sneaked back in under the scientifist guise of “Global Warming” on the left.

UFOs were a sign of something physical out there. Of possibly more scientifically advanced but not supernatural aliens. Maybe very bad aliens. (Looks at Puppet Masters.)

And then it changed and became part of the new age circus. Which is when I gave up on it, though I always had trouble believing in aliens, which is why they don’t exist in my fiction, even when they seem to. (More on that later.)

Yesterday in a group, a friend said what is obvious about the left is that they seriously oppose human reproduction and longevity. Ultimately human life, I guess.

Here’s the list as to why:

NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:

1) Pushing to maximize abortion

2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality

3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting” b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies– allowing limitation of IVF, and also e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)

4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de-facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink

5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY

6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids

7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider

8)Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID

9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)

And then this:

Whether they intend this to be a coordinated effort or passively want us gone, at some point you realize

The Democratic party? They’re the aliens in Independence Day.

Because I don’t like Woo Woo, I jumped off from this to aliens:

If the hypothesis that appeared in a lot of pulp age SF that humans were “the old ones” of the Galaxy (or the universe) who lost a war, and whose remnants were sent to Earth in exile, and whose “leaders” are being manipulated by “aliens” to keep them from achieving high tech, specifically space travel again, what would be different?

Space travel?

Well….

1- Shortly after the moon landing, there was a concerted effort by the left to confuse, thwart and obfuscate all attempts at space travel.

2- the talk of UFOs and possible space travel was corrupted by an entire slew of “sightings” and ideas that made UFOs and aliens into a supernatural, woo woo phenomenology fit only for New Age circles.

3- NASA might have gone the way of all government agencies, so natural, but–

4- Every democrat president is intent on crippling our ability to travel in space further, and discredit the very idea we SHOULD aim for it or attempt it.

5- Even space opera with or without minimally believable science, which — if nothing else — kept the idea we can eventually travel to and colonize the stars was shut down hard, in favor of fantasy and HARD science fiction. (I have nothing, absolutely nothing about hard science fiction, but with very few exceptions, it is only exciting to people who know enough science to understand what’s being done. It’s not how you popularize the idea of space colonization.) And the old masters who were pro-space were discredited and attacked. Even Baen who kept space travel fic alive, kind of, ended up in the narrow mil-sf sub-field most of the time. The rest became one of those self-fulfilling prophecies of trad pub: Space opera doesn’t sell, so we won’t publish any, and what we publish we won’t promote, so it doesn’t sell, so space opera doesn’t sell, so we– last verse, same as the first.
Note trad pub did this even though space opera movies continued to do exceedingly well, even arrantly stupid ones.

6- our capacity to generate enough energy to allow for even thinking of space travel is under systematic attack, which

a) feeds into depopulation, or will this winter, but also

b) inexplicably nuclear is included in this and attacked twice as hard, which of course is at war with us going to space, interstellar travel and eventually FTL (yes, it’s “impossible.” Our species has an history of doing the impossible on the regular. It’s just incremental steps, which are being thwarted by cutting us off at the ankles.)

That second list is also not exhaustive and I’m sure other people can contribute more instances of “this just doesn’t make sense, unless….”

Now I said I don’t believe in aliens and I don’t. I mean, base level fundamental, either aliens are utterly incomprehensible to us, or we wouldn’t realize they’re sentient. I THINK. But at the same time, if our species is much, much older, the aliens could be us.

Maybe there’s a universe of space commies, and we’re the space Americans who’ve lost the battle but not the (final war.)

Look, no, I don’t believe in any of this. This is the process I go through to create universes. I go through the evidence, see if it’s coherent, etc.

But if this were true what would be different?

And mostly I say “aliens” because I don’t like woo woo.

On the other hand, if it’s aliens I can’t do anything about it. If however it’s activity by a well-dressed gentleman of wealth and taste whose expensive perfume can never fully disguise an underlying whiff of brimstone.

…. Well, I can pray.

Even if it’s the equivalent of looking for the car keys under the street light and doesn’t make much sense.

Anyway — I don’t believe in any of this. I think. But it was worth laying out to think on.

Cui bono in all these things? Cui bono?

My husband has acquired a new and strange habit of listening to podcasts while working. I completely understand this, as his work is mostly numbers and patterns and words don’t intrude. Yes, it plays havoc with my writing, which is why I have headphones and Sabaton.

Sometimes, occasionally, when I’m doing visual or animation work, though, I will listen to what he’s listening to. Not because of interest but by sheer inertial. If it’s not bothering me, I passively-listen, the same way I passively watch TV by catching bits of whatever he’s watching in between work and such.

One of the podcasts I thus consume was an interview with a figure on the right who is a Trump supporter, but almost exactly in the opposite way of how I look at Trump and his administration. This person is enthusiastic about everything the administration does, but horrified, appalled and even shocked at Trump’s “uncouth behavior.” Meanwhile, I look at a lot of things the administration does with a weather eye even when I agree with the objectives, because I can see doors being opened that terrify me. (And yet, I also don’t see a way around it.) On the other hand Trump’s oh, so rude, terrifyingly crass behavior? Meh. I think he’s a little salty and a tad-bit mouthy at times. So what?

Perhaps this comes from having grown up in a Latin culture, where you can call your best friend a mother lover at the top of your voice, and accuse him of having raped and murdered his own grandmother, and it’s all taken to mean “I’m really mad at you” and no more. By evening, you’ll be having dinner together in the best of moods.

Or perhaps it’s because I understand the dynamic between “Trump Mouth Eruptions” and sympathize.

Look, yes, a lot of what he says that sounds absolutely crazy is intentional. And a lot of it is clear to anyone who read The Art of the Deal. And a lot of the times when he’s rude it’s also intentional, to distract you — or at least the main stream media — from something he’s doing or working on.

BUT–

There’s more going on there, because some of his outbursts don’t help him, and in fact might hurt him. Or at least horrify a number of the more delicate flowers on the right.

Which brings us to why they happen, and how I understand him.

To begin with I’m going to quote Mike Resnick of blessed memory, at the beginning of the indie possibilities. Mike Resnick, a gentleman in every sense of the word, said, “If this works out, I’m going to be very rude to a lot of people.” Why would a gentleman say that?

To understand it, you have to understand the regimen of frogs that traditionally published writers lived under.

Traditionally publishing houses were — literally — the only game in town, if you wanted to bring your book in front of enough readers to make even “underpaid secretary” money. The. Only. Game. In. Town.

Staying employed over the long run, meant swallowing a lot of frogs even if you weren’t from a “cancelled” political persuasion, like me, which had other difficulties, like keeping your mouth shut while the editor you worked for kindly informed you that libertarians wanted to abolish the internal combustion engine. (No, of course not Baen. DUH.)

You had to, for instance, shut up when they told you the book hadn’t sold, which was of course your fault, or at best “genre isn’t selling” even though you knew they’d done the florid stupid with cover or release date or whatever. You had to stay quiet while you watched them do the florid stupid. After six or seven of these, you had to accept their verdict that you just didn’t have potential and were stuck as a low level scribbler. Etc. etc. etc. You had to see them ignore contacts from movie producers who contacted you first, and shut up because it wouldn’t get you the movie deal (the house controlled the right to negotiate that) but it would destroy your ability to publish anything ever again and not just with that house, because it’s a small incestuous field. You had to accept being sent to a conference for middle school teachers to promote your book that wasn’t remotely suitable for middle school. And accept being sent over your 40th birthday. And keep your mouth shut and not blow up when you came home to a notice that this book was being taken out of circulation, a decision made before the print. And through all this, you had to meet these people at cons, and act like they were your best friends. Because as a friend whom I won’t out, though he too is beyond their reach told me, “They see your expressions. They watch how you react and what you laugh at. And what you DON’T laugh at.”

I refer to it as a regime of eating live frogs. You swallowed a frog a day as a minimum condition of being employed, of practicing the craft you wanted to work at since you were cognizant it existed.

And before you say “Sarah, everyone has to do that.” Sure. Sure. BUT there are degrees. Of course the overworked retail worker doesn’t tell his boss to shove it. BUT if he/she did, all it would take at worst is a move to another town to find work again. While if you ran your mouth in trad pub, you were done. Because it was a small field and they all talked to each other. And you couldn’t go down the street and find a similar job. You were done-done. (In fact a lot of us tended to assume some favorite writer had died, when he/she had been cancelled for a minor offense, not even saying what they thought.)

But it was more than that. Recently someone commented that No Man’s Land has more “life” than all my other work, and why didn’t I do stuff like that while I was publishing with trad pub?

Well, because trad pub is the art of the possible. And No Man’s Land and the world it explores is weird. So weird that the only hope for it would be Baen AND EVEN THEN they wouldn’t have much clue what to do with it. Because they would have to sell it to distributors and stores and…. there was a good chance their own reps would think it was weird. (This is what pushed the conformity trend in SF/F, where changes and originality had to be in tiny dosages.)

So your very mind got invaded. Not just explicitly by the publisher saying “No. Ew. We won’t publish that.” But by your perception of what they would or would not take and were or were not interested in/hot for. All while keeping your mouth shut on the bad things.

It was tough. I mean, really tough. And you really had to act as though agents, editors, etc. were your besties. (I did like one of my editors/publishers. Well, and a couple of people in the house. Yes, you guys know which house. BUT I had to act like it for ALL houses, even the ones that I was actively becoming blocked on projects because the people were so hard to deal with.) How much did we have to “act” — well, recently while at dinner with younger son, he asked if he could taste my dessert. And I said “Why not. EVERY ONE of my agents and editors reached over and took food from my plate without asking, at a work dinner.” That much.

Am I salty about this? Weirdly, not that much. I have the temperament that blows up on very little, but then forgives and forgets. I mean, I’m describing how bad it was, so you understand what it might do to other people.

I don’t know if other people who ran to indie are ‘being very rude.’ I don’t have much interest in most of the field at this point, except “books I enjoy reading.” To me writing has become an intensely personal/freeing thing, where I work at what I’m passionate about, promote it as best I can, and that’s it. (Weirdly, for the first time in my life that’s pay. Still slightly underpaid secretary, but will improve once the move is done and I work more.)

The thing I want to show is: you eat a lot of frogs, the frogs eventually come up. You become …. very rude. Because you can be.

Trump’s working life, most of it, required being self-abashingly-subservient to a lot of leftists in the one-party rule of NYC. Worse, over his lifetime he probably saw the left become more narrow, more totalitarian, more incapable of leaving anyone alone, even in the privacy of their own thoughts/words. And he had to act like he was their besty.

Which explains why he hit the political stage saying the things that most of the public was afraid of saying.

And btw, the public being afraid to say things? That’s a sign everyone is eating at least one small tadpole every morning. And the pressure builds.

And then he endured four years, after what was obviously to anyone with the mathematical intuition of a tadpole (which is about my level) a stolen election, of being persecuted for whatever crime the left establishment could dream up, some of them improbable enough to give this fiction writer pause. Granted, he wasn’t as much swallowing the live frog as having it force fed at that point since they slapped various gag orders on him that would ruin him if he spoke.

So — Trump is rude. And sometimes thoughtlessly says things that sound weird or hurt people who don’t deserve to be hurt.

That’s fine. I don’t care. The frogs come up. The more you force people to swallow, the more they come up.

There are things to worry about with the administration, like the offer of 5k (just let us keep the 5k dudes!) and other weirdness.

BUT the “rudeness”? Stop clutching your fricking pearls. If you force people to swallow live frogs, sooner or later they have a belly full and the frogs come up.

Ribbit!

Whew, this morning has been exciting. No, that’s not a picture of the crimes that happened at our house. it’s a friend’s shared meme of HER cat.

Our crimes were different. because Indy can taste — and smell — sugar, we keep cookies inside ziplocs (the entire package is inside a ziploc) and atop the baking cabinet, six feet up. The criminal managed to jump up there and bat down cookies and crackers for his sisters. I was alerted by rustling and rescued Dan’s oreo ziploc with only one small hole. However I somehow missed that my gluten-free matzos (look, you have your food preferences, and I don’t judge them. I like jam on matzos. Deal. The gluten-free ones are Amazon only, though, and cost the earth) which I found the cats devouring, because they are utter weirdos.

This was annoying, but not surprising. These are our fourth set of cats. We’ve seen everything. Mind you, the Misoites (the present batch of Indy, Muse and Circe) are possibly the weirdest, with Muse’s obsession with peaches and potatoes and Indy’s love of all things sweet, including plain sugar, and Circe loving all bread… But we’ve had cats with weird food preferences before. And nothing, absolutely nothing can explain Havelock’s love of screws and thumb tacks or the fact that I found them in his poo and he never had to go to the vet for emergency surgery. (Guts of steel, brain of cotton wool.)

When we take the cats to the vet and report a weirdness, the vet will say “Oh, that’s not rare, the–” And we go “we know, we know” because there are thirteen urns on our mantel, and two more cats who disappeared and we don’t have the urns for.

I guess I must be old, because I’ve hit this with politics. And when you crazy kids complain about having to vote for the slightly less evil one, because it’s not voting for cake over death, just the common cold over pneumonia, or if you prefer Chlamydia over Syphilis.

And I, who started my voting career during the cold war is looking at you in “You think that makes you special? That you’re voting to stop the red-green alliance, even though the person you’re pulling the lever for is a disgusting RINO?”

Look, we voted for people who were objectively leftists, but who were LESS — not not, just less — likely to sell the free world to the Soviet Union, just to stay free a few more years. In Portugal I once voted for a socialist — yes, with the understanding that socialism is the path to communism — because the alternatives were open Leninist and Maoist.

(I didn’t like it, and I was young, which is why after that election, in Portugal, I voted monarchist. It was a protest vote, like voting for a small, local party in the US, because honestly, monarchists get 0.2% of the vote or thereabout. In the village it was me and the 90 year old. And when I moved and stopped voting there, he came to ask my parents if I was okay.)

Now do I like it? Are you kidding? The red-green alliance is holding a gun to my head by forcing me to vote against them so hard that I vote for other people who hate me, just who hate me less.

And it’s bad for the country, because it allows the shitheads on the right to get away with things that they’d otherwise be punished for. But we can’t punish them because that would mean voting for people who want me shot on the back of the head. (And you too. I’m not implying you guys are voting to save my life, though if you are thank you.)

It’s what created both the myth that only RINOS like Romney or for that matter Nixon were “electable”. Because the decent people still voted for them, or rather against the commies, while the “we only Vote Republican because the Left is declasse” “right” only voted for the “moderates” (“surrender to the USSR, but slower!”) It took Reagan’s name recognition and amazing common touch to break that. And then we went right back to it, until Trump. Who had immense name recognition and derived immense power from the return of the repressed: I.e. from saying aloud what people had been thinking and scared of saying for years.

And of course, there is the psy-ops, the endlessly cycling psy-ops (psy-opsi? psy opsis? psy-oh-heck-not-again) from the left, the foreign enemies and–

The polls. The polls which are more unreliable each cycle, and who have never once predicted a right-wing victory. (Not initially at least.) And the others, designed to have the idiots on the right (We have as many idiots as the left, we just embrace them less) shun some group of a vast and unsteady coalition.) And the psy-ops that the economy is terrible, the most terrible ever. Guys, I was alive and awake in 1990. If you weren’t, find someone who wasn’t and isn’t stupid and ask them how Clinton got elected. (And even that took Perot. But the psy-ops that the economy was the worst since the Great Depression was part of it. Incidentally Ray Bradbury put himself beyond the politically correct pall by correctly saying it was a funny depression that went away when you turned off the TV and stopped listening to the sob stories.)

There are things that give me hope. The last two big run-by-the-lefty-media outrage psy ops were designed to make WOMEN afraid of voting GOP. This tells me that the left isn’t sure of WOMEN who frankly have been their most reliable voting block, both because they tend to be conformists to what they perceive as the most widespread side (something the media can make appear so) and because most women want to be “nice.” And the left has always painted itself as “nice.” (Which isn’t the same as good.) If they’re not sure of the women, the face of the upcoming election is different.

The other thing that gives me hope is that we’ve had no riots at all this summer. It’s not like they wouldn’t have done it, if they could. Oh, yeah, and that the demonstrations/riots/circus of anti-immigration-enforcement was so limited and fizzled. I’m not joking, the “big” demonstration against deportations in my town was the usual half dozen people and two who might have been walking past. (Per picture in the paper. Why it even made the paper is something else.) And they only found two idiots willing to get themselves killed, and neither was ethnic or a pregnant woman. That tells its own tale, because from the time I’ve followed leftists’ “martyrs” they’ve been able to get at least one pregnant woman. (Yes, yes, Kent State. You thought it wasn’t a setup? You’re funny.) I suspect in many cases shot down by their own side, if all else failed, and blamed on the other side.

Is this because Trump pulled the plug on USAid? Might be. Note the turn for the right in central and South America from that moment.

Mind you, they still have a lot of money sloshing around, but that seems to have been a knife in their primary funding.

So maybe we have a chance. Maybe. How much of the machinery of fraud is paid? I don’t know. And neither do you. But I’d guess at the very least half.

Turns out electing a president who fights with money might have been a brilliant idea.

However, nothing is certain, and I’m not sleeping well.

We’re not voting between cake and death, but we’re voting between being whipped and death. There’s only a chance some will think death is more merciful. And all I can do is pray.

Mind your six and keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

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

Book Promo

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

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

Book one of a five part fantasy regency romance series.

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

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

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

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

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

Snapshots a character’s life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six short stories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Gnawing the Bones of the City

Tikhon Grigoriev has a problem.

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

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

How can he keep his head in this impossible situation?

A short story.

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

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

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

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

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

The fifth volume of the BBESP light novel!

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

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

FROM SUMMER GRAYLING: True Colours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FROM ELISE HYATT: A Fatal Stain (Daring Finds)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Muddle

By Holly the Assistant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First I was shocked. Then I was incoherently angry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that happens almost immediately if Trump wins.

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

After that…. After that I don’t know.

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

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

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

But–

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

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

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

So, the pebbles do have some vote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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