According To Hoyt

Lies, Truth and Rats a blast from the past from August 2014

This post is late because I have an outdoor not-my-cat who loves me. He brought me something that squeaked for breakfast. He brought it back very fresh. In fact, he brought it back for me to kill. Fortunately I was in the kitchen and he was in the outdoor mudroom thing we call the airlock. I stood in the kitchen, listening to the squeak-thump and wondering if I should intervene, but the chances it was a bunny are minor. Sounded like a rat. And the chances of a desperate rat in the kitchen were really high.

Eventually Greebo (He’s just a big softy) grew disgusted with me and carried of his victim breakfast to enjoy elsewhere.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with the post this morning. I mean, I could twist myself into pretzels and come up with something, but I’m not going to and instead I’m going to plunge head first into the post.

Imagine everything you’ve ever been told is a lie.

No, seriously. Close your eyes and picture it.

This kind of ah epistemological upheaval is very difficult. I’m telling you this as someone who found out about half of what she knew was a lie. What? Oh, little things – the first flight across the Atlantic was NOT as I’d been taught Sacadura and Cabral. “I regret I have only one life to give for my country” was not said by one of the assassins of Dona Inez de Castro before his execution, no matter how much my history book said so. (It might have been said by him TOO, but I suspect someone just thought it sounded good and stole it.) If you take more than an aspirin at one time, you won’t die. (I remember standing frozen in the kitchen when I’d complained to my host mother of a headache and she said “Just take a couple of aspirin, honey.” I thought “She’s trying to kill me!”) Other things that aren’t true that I “knew” were true: if you take a bath before it’s an hour after you last ate, you won’t die. Oh, and if you wash your hair every day it won’t fall off. Also, the entire street won’t turn and laugh at you if you go out in last year’s fashions. In fact, fashions are different in different countries. (And in the US, different parts of the country.) Things I found about the US, like for instance, it’s not all paved and built over, and Americans don’t ALL live in skyscrapers, was a different thing. You expect to find new things about a country when you go to a new country. You don’t expect to find out new things about how the world works.

Even the aspirin thing? Blew my mind. “Why did my mother tell me I would die if I wouldn’t?”

Of course, the answer is because someone told it to her. (Also mom hates meds. ALL meds. She wouldn’t even take vitamins, because she was sure it would kill her.)

I understand it was much more difficult for people like the inhabitants of the former soviet block to come out and find out that everything was the other way around. In fact, anyone who comes from a repressive and self-aggrandizing society gets a shock when coming to the greater world. For instance I’ve heard of Arabs stunned to find out they DIDN’T win the six day war.

So, why am I talking about this? We are not in a repressive society, or not that kind of repressive society. News leak in around the edges.

Except we sort of are. Our press is not in collusion because they think that the dictator will punish them (unless you mean not inviting them to parties.) But they are in collusion in order to be thought of as “beautiful people” and “good people” and smart.

And it’s amazing how much of that crap you end up buying. I mean, everyone behind the curtain knew their news lied. It was just the AMOUNT of the lies that was unbelievably large. They thought some things would be true. Same with people coming from Arab countries. I bet you if we kidnapped someone from North Korea and exposed him/her to the real world, they’d be shocked at how little their great leader occupies our consciousness day to day. Because that’s probably the part they believe. That he looms large in enmity or alliance in the west. In fact, I’ve read stories of transplanted Arabs and the part they didn’t anticipate was how little people in the west think about Islam and Muslims day to day. How their neighbors were neither resenting them, impressed nor spying on them due to their origin/religion. (Most of the time the neighbors think they’re South American :-P)

I don’t know how much we’d get “The truth” when transplanted to another country, but I’ve noticed that British newspapers (even sometimes the Guardian) sound terribly “right wing” to me. I know they’re not. It’s just compared to our press.

But American media looms so large in the world we tend to drag the rest of it at least partially with us into madness.

Still, I wonder what when we emerge from this mess – we will, though it will take a while and feel like we’re swallowing live frogs. (I’m almost sure Greebo didn’t bring me a frog.) – will be completely upside down from what we imagine.

This is relevant for what we talked about yesterday. Because I read a lot I knew of the horrors uncovered in communist countries after the fall. It shocked me – still does – that people not only still go around, proudly proclaiming themselves communists, but also that the schools are still teaching communism as the better/more moral alternative and always coming up with false equivalence soviet-style “we have homeless too.”

But what you have to remember is that MOST people didn’t sign up for the epistemological upheaval. And most humans are REALLY bad at that sort of thing. REALLY REALLY REALLY bad. As in, most can’t, not after adolescence. And some not then.

Even when I was an exchange student – a self selected group – I was one of the very few ones who socialized/had my best friends outside my linguistic group (British and Japanese, actually.) Most people would go to their linguistic group or the next one. Portuguese would preferentially associate with other Portuguese, then Brazilians, then Spanish, then Spanish colonies, and so on.

I mean, even while they were in the US. This is because that spare-time association allowed them to reaffirm at least some of their world view and to say “Americans think this, but—”

I chose to go off without this protection because I wanted to know what was true/true and what was agreed-upon true.

BUT I’m abnormal. I run towards that which scares me. (Not a survival skill.) [Okay, unless what scares me is the possibility of allowing a rat in the kitchen. And that’s not so much scares me as “ewwwww”]

For most people maintaining the imagined integrity of their world is worth being wrong. Even being wrong in significant ways.

Because of Soviet Agit Prop, the “communist” view was “popular” and “cool” in the west since the seventies and counterculture, at least. (It was popular in intellectual circles before that.) It’s probably hard for you young kids to picture, but even stalwarts on the right assumed that communism was somehow more “moral” even when it failed. They disapproved of their curtailing of freedoms, etc, but it was ASSUMED it would have better results than capitalism, if allowed to continue long enough. The right merely objected to the cost in human capital.

If this was true on the right, imagine on the left. Do you wonder that the journalists didn’t report the true horrors or reported them with exculpation. “If it weren’t for embargos against Cuba, it would be a paradise” is still believed. And as for Russia… Well, truth be told if we hadn’t sent them wheat they would have starved, but instead you’ll hear about how our insane capitalist arms race kept THEM poor.

But more importantly, once the exculpation and the nine days wonder was over, and the snide laments about the good guys losing, it was back to acting as though communism had never fallen. In fact, over time, that has mutated to a denial that all the times communism has been tried, it was in fact communism, and an insistence it’s “never been tried.” This is combined with eructation about Marx still being “right” – mostly they insist he’s right about things like literary criticism (and no, even there Marxism isn’t of any use. It’s like trying to measure elephants in light waves. It’s just that most people don’t care enough about these niches to go and show them they’re wrong, so they can protect their epistemological certainty wrapped around themselves like a blanket.)

This is typical of people under stress and whose world view is under attack to such an extent they can’t cope. They erase whatever challenged it and place it outside the discussion, and go back to repeating the cherished platitudes.

You can see the embryonic effect of this in a kid who has done something disastrous that threatens his view of himself. “I didn’t break the dish. Aliens flew through the window and broke it.” Is the first defense. The next is to pretend it never happened.

You can also see it in the white house, as our red-diaper baby president stumbles around breaking things, but can’t process it, because it would mean upending everything he’s been taught and his vision of him as “smart” for believing these things. He’s a normal human or possibly a normal incurious human. He didn’t sign up for this kind of upheaval. So he keeps stumbling around, pretending he didn’t do things, pretending things are different. Hence the insistence that removal of troops from Iraq was the former administration’s fault despite recordings of him bragging about doing it.

The problem is this: due to effects of a super-abundant society where people are not close to the bone – in fact are so far from the bone they haven’t seen bone in years – and the dominance of the press and academia by the far left, people’s view of reality is at least as skewed as that of people behind the iron curtain in the bad old days.

This corrupts everything, even those of us who are awake. What sounds right and plausible is twisted 25 degrees from reality. Western society is a giant bubble and a loud enough bubble that even people outside the bubble believe it. And a lot of the things propagated by the bubble are antithetical to the west and fossilized old communist propaganda, because the denial-reaction of our “elites” has enshrined that as “smart” and “cool.”

Will it take a crash to correct?

I don’t know. I think a crash might be inevitable, but whether it would correct it or not, I don’t know. The magnitude of the crash that would correct it scares the heck out of me and might not be possible, due to see how far from the bone we are.

I think what will correct over time is that technology is changing too fast for centralized anything. They’re losing the plot in each field it hits. And because of their mismanagement (Centralized is always more inefficient) the fields it’s hitting first are the ones they most control: media, entertainment, education.

We can hear that epistemological “reset” in the voices of the publishing industry’s execs as they say over and over again that their houses are better for authors because covers and editing and publicity, as though saying it made it true.

It’s possible things will right themselves as the generation that is most heartily promoting its epistemological error passes from this world. (Not long before I do, so I can’t verify that.) Kind of like the generation of the desert had to pass before the promised land could be entered.

Or it’s possible it will happen faster, as technology will change very fast. At least it seems to be on a track of not so much rapid change but “rapid change that makes a difference to normal human beings in every day life.”

It’s unlikely to stop.

And they simply can’t adapt.

This is going to make the times ahead as interesting as those thumps and squeaks from the mud room. (See, I told you I could tie it back!)

But we are at least semi-awake. So, whether we’re flexible or not (and a lot of us are, being Odd) the shock will be lesser to us.

In the end, we win they lose.

For the last ten years I’ve been watching somewhere between alarm and disquiet, as conservatives went all in on: “No college! Trades!”

I’m not going to argue with you on college. I feel some great changes are coming that way, anyway, in the next ten years or so, though remember that for about ten years you’ll still need that piece of paper, though perhaps increasingly less. And ten years can mean 12 or 15 or 20. These things aren’t exact.

I think the loss of need for a college degree will only come when companies are allowed to test their own employees, and I don’t honestly know what is in the way of that, but I’d guess a forest of petty fogging rules and anti-discrimination lawsuits.

My guess is before college degrees are completely useless too, it will have to be understood that no, they don’t even guarantee the student can in fact read, much less learn.

But these things take time. Yes, at some point we’ll it “Then suddenly.” But on the way to “then suddenly” there will be a lot of “first slowly.”

And a lot of professions will always require college or its equivalent: medicine, engineering. Possibly law.

Here is the thing though, yes, the trades and manual work I impervious to challenges from AI. Yes, they really are needed. But if you push everyone into them, they’ll become as bloated as college once was. And also, some people simply aren’t designed for manual labor.

Look, I love the skilled trades in theory. But I don’t have the combination of hands and mind that would make me good at one of them. I like heavy labor, but more the kind like farming, which requires strength and endurance.

Oh, in another time when Journalism was a skilled trade you trained into out of high school, by being put on flower shows and obituaries, and the like, I’d probably have done okay at it.

Am I saying you shouldn’t put your kids into trade school? Well, no. Absolutely, if the kid has the type of talents and inclination for it, it is a way to make a living.

However, don’t go thinking it’s the One True Way. For most of them, in the end, it’s still working for someone else, and furthermore I expect in the great innovation wave (if we can avoid giving power to the leftists for ten or twenty years, at least) of the next century or so, most of those professions will be automated or otherwise rendered obsolete.

In fact that is the most important thing for your children — for everyone’s children — in the next few years: They must be prepared for a world in which innovation changes everyone’s lives and work at a rapid clip. Which means that they need to be fast and nimble on their feet.

It is the most important thing, not just for them, but for the nation.

Look, both tech and the current innovation climate means we need a lot of… small entrepeneurs. I’m going to lay down my dust right now that we’re going back or at least going towards — I don’t know how much of it was a pipe dream back then — that beloved standby of late 19th century and early 20th century science fiction: the genius in his garage, making something that turns the world on its head.

The combination of information on the internet — all of humanity’s knowledge at our fingertips — and increasingly affordable and accessible automation is making this possible as never before, or at least not in the last 100 years.

I know a lot of you are homeschooling kids and I approve of this. And if you’re doing that, you’re uniquely placed to give your kid the most important last finishing touch: Encourage them to start a business when they’re about sixteen.

What the business is doesn’t matter much. It should be something that interests the kid at that time, but it doesn’t mean it’s their lifetime vocation. Whether that’s 2-D printing, beading, computer repair, it really doesn’t matter at all. Whatever is within your means to stake out (I have a dream. We’ll see how this year goes. But I’d like to start $500 grants for kids to start businesses.)

It doesn’t matter if the business never makes more than allowance-money. And it doesn’t matter if it fails.

It matters that it be taken seriously, and the kid should be encouraged to do so, and to learn to establish his business as a legal entity, to keep accounts, to calculate prices, to figure out how to promote, to create business plans.

That and the experience of working steadily towards a goal is what the kid will take from having run a business. That and understanding that “the one thing” isn’t a thing. that you’re not FATED to do this or that. That the future is not written in stone. That you can fail and fail and fail and still come out ahead, as long as you get up once more than you were knocked down. Understanding themselves and the variety of their raw talents, and the limits of what one can do with sheer talent and work, the play of luck into even the most carefully planned business, etc. All of this will be invaluable to the kid so when they’re launched into the world they won’t be afraid to be entrepreneurs and innovators. If they end up getting a chance at that. And we need entrepreneurs and innovators by the score.

And what if they end up wanting to go to college? Well, let them, and help them in the measure of possible. Having learned how to run a business won’t hurt them in that.

However, don’t shy away from civics, history and politics. If the kids end up in college, they’re going to be submerged in a lot of crazy ideas. Make sure they know those are crazy, even if they have to parrot them for a while to get a grade.

Don’t send your kids down the “one true way.” I actually only know half a dozen people who are working in the field they studied for. And some of us you have to apply a lot of latitude. I’m sure my professors would be shocked if they knew what I’m doing now. (Given ages, most of them are dead. Which is probably for the best.)

Prepare them instead to pick paths, and to make the most of what they can do at any given time.

And for their sake, and the sake of this nation as we head to our third century? Teach them to be self-starting, self-bossing innovators, and unafraid.

It’s the best you can do.

Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections)

From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.

Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.

Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.

From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.

Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.

With an introduction by Holly Chism.

This has a bunch of pre-published short-stories, but I figure even the most fanatic of you has missed one or two. And the one from Black Tide Rising — Do No Harm — for good and sufficient reason, because I either never got the guidelines OR forgot them and given THAT year it could be either, was only half-published. This has the other half.

Anyway, the stories are: Honeyfall, Scrubbing Clean, Last Chance, Great Reckoning in a Small Room, Horse’s Heart, Do No Harm, Dead End Rhodes, The Knights of Time and Done with Mirrors.

Oh, and Holly Chism was good enough to give me an introduction.

I’d also like to thank Toni Weisskopf for permission to use Do No Harm.

How this collection happened: Well, I got the Elephant Sat On Me and couldn’t finish Witch’s Daughter. Heck, writing for this blog was a stretch. BUT–

I intended to do Witch’s Daughter late Jan and Done With Mirrors Late February. instead I split the difference and this comes out on Valentine’s Day. It’s up for preorder.

I was markedly better today and signed two short story contracts, for Baen, one of them for Chaos and Consequences, edited by Jason Cordova and featuring Brundar and Skip. (It’s something from The Worlds of Men, but different POV. Um…. The Worlds Of Men — third book. Not written, but already in my head.) As well as clearing a ton of what Dan calls Administrivia.

I’d have written, except the cats sat on me and I napped. (Alternate garden of Eden story, where there is no serpent but there’s a cat.)

Tomorrow should be better. (And yes, there will be a post. This one is just because the link is finally working for Done With Mirrors.) Which is good because I was on the verge of going to war with Amazon.

I will say Amazon, even with new craptastic software “improvements” is about as bad as the other places to sell indie writing. BUT it is a much bigger gorilla, and one I can’t do business without, and that makes me a lot more volatile and angry at it.

Anyway, the link works now.

Having caught the illness some of my younger fans are calling “And then the elephant sat on you,” I’m glad to report that I’m feeling better. Like, markedly better enough I actually gave some thought to going to church, until a coughing fit doubled me in two and stopped the nonsense.

But except for the lingering cough and some residual “tired” I’m much better.

Which doesn’t explain this weird combination of tiredness and boredom.

Except perhaps it is tiredness: from being ill. And boredom: because we’ve both been ill and more of less penned inside the house for two weeks straight.

When my husband says he has to go to the pharmacy, but has no intention of getting out, just going through the drive-in and I say “wait for me” because it would be good to confirm the world still exists, things aren’t precisely normal.

Thing is normally boredom doesn’t affect me. Yes, I am extremely ADD and so boredom is a fact of life, but normally, in the Portuguese expression “I can set off the fireworks, enjoy the show, and run for the dropped canes.” (The last was something boys in the village did. I didn’t even realize how unsafe that was to my forties.)

By which I mean when I’m bored I can normally create fiction and amuse myself. Or of course read someone else. I have been reading someone else a lot, but it’s somehow not enough. And as for creating any own amusement….

Part of it is that I’m tired. I write two pages, and I feel like I’m all done. These blogs are testing the limit of my endurance, and they ain’t that long.

But worse yet, when it comes to fiction, or even to serious topics here, is that I feel I have …. werewolf problems.

Okay, I’m not sure how to explain this, and I once described it to my older son and alarmed him so thoroughly he was sure I was having a stroke. I’m sure that’s not it, because it’s a normal symptom for me when getting better from upper respiratory issues.

No, I don’t think I’m becoming a werewolf. It’s more that nothing feels right. My teeth feel too long, my skin feels itchy. My clothes fit me funny.

This is annoying enough, but the problem is I feel I can’t evaluate literally anything.

Which gives me problems with simple things, like, cooking dinner. “What do you want for dinner?” “I don’t know what do you want?” “We’re only one person, you don’t get to ask me that.” Or with reading books “Is this mystery making no sense, or am I ill and not able to track?”

And it’s much, much worse when evaluating our current political moment, say, or my own writing. “Did I get that idea across? Do I sound like I’m speaking from a parallel universe?”

This is far worse for fiction, because I can’t tell if I’m hitting the notes I’m aiming for.

So, what is this other than an extended whine?

Well, it is an extended whine. I mean, nothing like a fine whine when one is out of sorts.

On the other hand, it’s also a lesson for the rest of you, sort of a “we’re all humans.” As I knew that some of you are having issues with their own black dogs.

But more importantly and quite beyond all that, it’s sort of trying to remind myself that just because it’s been two weeks it doesn’t mean I’ll never be able to write again.

It’s just a tantrum by the body. Which unfortunately affects the mind. This too shall pass. (I hope.)

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, by clicking through and buying (anything, 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.– SAH

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Tomato Wyrm.

Cecilia Duringhurst never expected to inherit anything, much less her estranged great-uncle’s country manor. It’s in a bit of a sorry state, coated with dog hair and staffed only by Jock, the old gamekeeper… but it comes with a greenhouse, large gardens, and the hopes of escaping city life.

Determined to save Hendre Court from ruin, she finds an unexpected ally in Greig MacDougall, Jock’s grandson and her new gardener. Together, they are swapping city life for muddy boots, endless weeding, and the fragile hope of turning heirloom tomatoes and cut flowers into a sustainable future.

As they dig in side by side, unearthing old secrets and new possibilities, Cecilia senses the estate holds more than soil and stone—something ancient and watchful that is tied to the Duringhurst line, and rooted to this hill.

Secrets and seedlings will burst forth in the spring… and just possibly, despite the frosts of misunderstandings and chill winds of finances, a relationship that will entwine all of them and blossom.

FROM ROSS HATHAWAY: Nothing Happened and This is The Report

IMAGINARY PROBLEMS ARE THE MOST DANGEROUS KIND.
That’s why no one is supposed to notice them.
Hidden inside the federal bureaucracy is a quiet agency tasked with handling things that must not be acknowledged, because the moment they become real, they become powerful. Cryptids, buried histories, unexplained phenomena, rumors that refuse to stay rumors: the Bureau of Imaginary Problems exists to ensure these things remain effectively imaginary.
Most days, that means paperwork. And cake. And pretending nothing happened.
But when a routine investigation uncovers connections between old legends, polluted creeks, forgotten civilizations, and creatures that refuse to stay in one story or one timeline; the Bureau faces its worst fear: a problem that keeps being believed.
As cryptids negotiate their place in the modern world, Time itself pushes back against containment, and oversight committees demand answers they don’t want, the Bureau must do what it has always done best: smooth reality, bury the truth, and protect the public from stories that could make the world unmanageable.
Because belief creates meaning.
Meaning creates agency.
And some problems can only be solved if everyone agrees they were imaginary all along.
Darkly comic, sharply satirical, and unsettlingly plausible, Nothing Happened and This Is the Report is an urban fantasy about myth, memory, and the dangerous comfort of not knowing—where the greatest threat isn’t what lurks in the shadows, but what happens when people start paying attention.
After-action paperwork pending.

FROM JESSICA SCHLENKER: Excessively Attentive

Elizabeth Bennet harboured few expectations for her trip to Kent. Primarily, she was to see her dear friend Charlotte, which necessarily entailed tolerating the odious Mr. Collins. Perhaps, if she were truly fortunate, she might even gain an introduction to the great Lady Catherine — whether she wished it or not. She promised to fill her letters home to her father with faithful recountings of any absurdities thus encountered; he almost promised to write back.

But when a revelation prompts Mr. Bennet to arrive in person, Elizabeth is drawn into the center of a long-buried family mystery. A single portrait holds the key, and the truth it unlocks threatens to upend everything she understands about her past and her expectations for her future.

Excessively Attentive is a Regency-set reimagining of Pride and Prejudice that remains faithful to Jane Austen’s wit, social precision, and moral insight. Thoughtful, character-driven, and richly grounded in period voice, this novel asks what it means to belong — not by birth alone, but by character, courage, and choice.

BY ED LACEY, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Dead End

Two big-city cops.

Bucky was young, strong and ambitious. Doc was older, smart, knowing all the ropes. They were partners — on special assignments and all the graft, including the favors of a red-hot blonde. And then came the big case, a kidnapping, and they wound up in a shabby, smelly hideout, with a million dollars in cash, and no place to spend it!

The iktaPOP Media edition of Ed Lacy’s classic noir novel includes an introduction by D. Jason Fleming that reflects on possible influences on the novel from Lacy’s life, with a digression into why it would make good material for a low budget film adaptation.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: THE GLOAM DOCTRINE (Science Fiction Singles)

The most dangerous weapon in the war is considered obsolete.

Captain Samuel “Sammy” Jackson was once destined for the most prestigious cockpit in the fleet—until he questioned the doctrine behind it. Now he flies the XN-47 Gloam: an ugly, slow, outdated two-man interceptor assigned to the men no one else wants.

The Gloam cannot dogfight.

It cannot outrun anything.

It cannot compete on paper.

But while sleek autonomous fighters vanish in perfect, inexplicable ambushes, the Gloams keep coming home.

Their secret isn’t superior technology. It’s inferior technology—manual switches, crude sensors, mismatched components, and human backseaters who don’t follow algorithms. The enemy’s artificial intelligences can predict every optimized system in the war. What they cannot model is stubborn, inconsistent, deeply human decision-making.

As victories mount and official credit vanishes, Jackson begins to understand the truth: the Gloams are winning a war no one is allowed to admit exists. High Command wants their chaos replaced with elegant automation. The enemy is already learning their patterns. And the only way to survive may be to fracture the fleet itself into something no machine can comprehend.

In the darkness between stars, speed is irrelevant.

Beauty is a liability.

And the future belongs to the ugly ships that refuse to be understood.

For fans of hard military science fiction, aviation history, The Right Stuff, The Forever War, and character-driven space combat grounded in real doctrine and politics.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Last History-Keeper: A Liquid Diet Chronicles Tale

Imagine what it would be like to remember all of history.

Justinian doesn’t have to imagine. He’s the last of a nearly-lost line of vampires, the last keeper of history, hunted by tyrant and monster alike, alive only because of the grace of God, and the luck of having an early pope hide him from those hunting him. He’s been in the catacombs of Vatican City ever since, hidden and safe.

But now…now he’s needed. Vampire, priest, visionary, historian, he’s been sent forth into the world, to walk it once again.

His ordained path leads him to…Manhattan, Kansas. To a brand new nest, filled with orphans and outcasts. And the journey takes him into the path of those who need his help: a six year old girl with an unmanageable memory, and a brand new line with gifts that terrify.

https://amzn.to/4qaAAyCFROM NATHAN BRINDLE: The Lion and the Lizard (Timelines Book 2)

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Thirty years ago, Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., AKA The Lion of God, had a pretty exhausting week.

Her world was invaded by time-traveling soldiers, she was nearly turned into human toothpaste by an experimental dimension jumper when she went to find her parallel “Dad,” who just happens to be able to borrow a Space Force fleet to come and take out her world’s invaders . . . and then she found out she was considered by those same invaders to be a saint in their odd religion, and one of the targets of their invasion. If that wasn’t enough, she nearly fell completely out of the universe into a time rift, being saved only by the skin of her teeth by her parallel “Dad”.

After all that, learning she was going to be the one to bring universal healing and long life to the human race in her particular timeline was just the icing on the proverbial cake.

Anybody else would go home, turn off their phone, pull all the blinds, lock all the doors, and take the rest of their life off. But Ari isn’t “anybody else”. And her cult of admirers across two timelines won’t take “nobody home” for an answer.

Fast-forward thirty years. Scientists have detected radio transmissions in an unknown language from several hundred light years away. And now she’s been asked to use her special “saintly” skills as demonstrated on her last “mission” to make first contact with whoever they are.

And that’s only the beginning.

Looks like Ambassador Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., is going to have another pretty exhausting week. Or six.

FROM KAREN MYERS: To Carry the Horn – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 1

AN ENTIRE KINGDOM BUILT AROUND A SUPERNATURAL NEED FOR JUSTICE, ENFORCED BY THE WILD HUNT AND THE HOUNDS OF HELL.

What would you do if you blundered into a strange world, where all around you was the familiar landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but the inhabitants were the long-lived fae, and you the only human?

George Talbot Traherne stumbles across the murdered huntsman of the Wild Hunt, and is drafted into finding out who did it. Oh, and assigned the task of taking the huntsman’s place with the Hounds of Hell, whether he wants the job or not.

The antlered god Cernunnos is the sponsor of this kingdom, and he requires its king to conduct the annual hunt for justice in pursuit of an evil criminal, or else lose his right to the kingship, and possibly end up hunted himself.

Success is far from guaranteed, and no human has held the post. George discovers his own blood links to the fae king, and he’s determined to try. But Cernunnos himself has a personal role to play, and George will have to sort out just why he’s the one who’s been chosen for the task.

And whether he has any chance of surviving the job.

I DID TOO PUT A COLLECTION OUT: It’s up for pre-order, but for now Amazon won’t let me monetize the link. However, if you can’t wait: Done with Mirrors.

And meanwhile, you know, No Man’s Land is back at the end here like a cat that keeps showing up at dinnertime. And honestly? Same energy. Always gets food from this…. Why? I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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: color

The educational establishment of the US owes black Americans — and white too, but principally black — an apology, on their knees and with bent head.

Who in fucking hell thought it was a good idea to teach black people in the US that their people were the only ones enslaved, ever? That white people invented slavery because they hated other races so much or were somehow so racist (unlike the rest of humanity who kill each other batch lots for not being cousins.) And don’t fucking tell me that’s not taught in school. I’ve seen the books. I’ve also seen the results. More importantly I was told by an education major in the nineties — I SWEAR she survived the experience — that the idea of this was to “empower” black people. Because of course making them feel that people like them were uniquely oppressed and despised in the history of mankind is “empowering.”

Wait these are the same people who think having sex with a dozen men a night is empowering for a woman. They’re excused. Their definition of “empowered” is not accurate. It’s also not sane.

Two days ago on Twitter, some black guy posted a picture of a lynching and said that just apologizing wasn’t enough and that white people wouldn’t be forgiven for this, ever.

To which Colonel Kratman replied by pointing out that the people who did that are dead, and no person alive today bears any guilt for it.

He’s right, but more importantly: What in Mohammad’s left testicle does this person think he is? Someone descended from heaven, immaculate and with no human stain? Does he think his ancestors never did anything reprehensible, ever?

First, his being American and black, means he’s technically — unless his ancestors arrived from Africa last couple of generations — what’s known as Caucasian. No, really. Not only are there no pure-black ancestry black Americans, but the difference is obvious if you look at things like the picture of the mayor of Los Angeles junketing in Africa. Your first question is “Who is the white chick and why is she there?” He is descended from an awful lot of white people, and no you can’t designate half of your ancestry oppressors and the other oppressed. That’s not how this works. If there’s hereditary guilt he’s at least as guilty as the rest of us.

Second, slavery has existed, as far as we can tell, taking in account it’s really hard to tell from say cave remnants, but having observed chimpanzee bands and the like, well…. it seems like slavery or an equivalent thereof has existed since humans were humans, or perhaps even before.

Chattel slavery? Which is what the left tends to ask, to make the American slavery system uniquely horrible. Oh, please. That’s like saying communism and fascism are different, because one the state expropriates all the property while fascism lets owners nominally keep property while telling them how to use it. PFUI. Romans had to at some point establish laws that made it illegal to kill or maim your slave. This was always illegal in the US, because they were human and therefore it was murder. Yes, the law got complicated form there, but there it is. Both systems allowed the slave to be sold, separated from family, etc. Both took a human being and made him or her a convenience.

In certain parts of the world, like the Dahomey tribe in Africa — noted slave traders, through which most of the slaves to America were traded — it was perfectly legal, moral and accepted to have your slaves sacrificed in batch lots, one after the other over the tombs of your ancestors because that was what you wanted to do. The ones that made it to the US had won that particular lottery already.

And yes, the Dahomey were black. In fact most slave owners and slaves are what we’d consider the exact same race.

This is not what the slave owners and slaves would think, mind. Slavery goes back to a time when the people five minutes away were “foreigners” and “not human.”

In places where war went on for a long time, but cultures were very different, say the Moors and Christians in the Iberian peninsula, the hunting of and rescuing of slaves went on back and forth so much that eventually they looked exactly the same. And still it went on.

I don’t actually care what race humans are; what skin color; what set of features: Whosoever you are, you are descended from slavers and the enslaved; rapists and the raped; kings and peasants; barbarians and scholars. In the long, long, long history of mankind each one of us has enough in his ancestry to beggar the mind of the most jaded observer. Everyone of us has famous, infamous, admirable and despicable ancestors.

Holding people to blame for the crimes of their ancestors would mean putting the entire human race in chains.

Yes, horrible things were done to certain groups of people in the past. The groups changed, and yet horrible things went on happening. Horrible things are still happening today.

Western Civilization didn’t invent slavery. It did however abolish it, partly through the means of the industrial revolution, which rendered the whole thing counterproductive.

It still goes on most places in the world, and it’s legal in a lot of those vibrant, global South cultures the left loves so much. (And why should proponents of a system that enslaves mankind to the state not want to enslave people?)

If you are terribly against slavery and want to slake ancestral hatreds, by all means, make it your business to punish slave owners. Slave owners who own slaves now.

It is great and difficult work, and I will applaud you heartily.

But do not try to smear others with ancestral guilt. You only paint it on yourself.

Ever since the deep-set organization and by-the-numbers programming to the circus in Minneapolis came out, people on the right have been blackpilling.

Well, you know my opinion on black pills. It’s two fold: You know exactly where it’s been, and nothing that’s been THERE belongs in your mouth. AND even if it all were lost, what could you accomplish by getting people to despair and give up? This last is why people in a war shoot those spreading fear and despondency, even if what they are seeing is right. Because Blackpill fights on the side of the enemy. And while you could argue someone like the Red Baron coming out with his certainty the war was lost before his death might have saved death and destruction (maybe) in our case that is never true. There is no surrender to communists. Communists are as my friend Eric S. Raymond reminded everyone on twitter recently, Hostis Humanis Generis, and therefore the only surrender they accept is death. Well, f*ck them very much. I was never going to go quietly and without making sure I took an escort with me to hell. Even if they were fated to win, I’d fight them for every inch, every breath, every micron of mind space, in hopes of planting a seed of freedom for future generations.

However the bizarre thing about all this doom and gloom is that THEY AREN’T WINNING. The situation is very far from hopeless, very far from lost, and in fact, barring our complete and abject surrender to a panicking foe, we will win this and send communism to the ash heap of history with its cousin, fascism. And that even if they manage to win you can count their victory in maybe years. Maybe. My guess is less than four, because four is all they managed before, and even then they couldn’t implement all their dreams. Or most of them.

This is important. They need all the organization to give the impression of support they don’t have; to push an image of an ideological upswelling that simply isn’t there. They need organization and financing, because THEY AREN’T WINNING.

Yesterday one of you, reading the post on carefully orchestrated demonstrations and protests got it into his head that the demonstration in which I found myself at sixteen facing machine guns was equally organized. Snort. Giggle. It was organized like the Tea Parties were “organized.” A friend told a friend told a friend. I say we had a phone tree, but the truth is we used phones as little as possible as we were convinced that our phones were tapped. (Were they? Who knows? Ours was. I know the tell-tale sound in a mechanical system. But then mom ran a pirate radio station, so what do you expect?) SOMEONE printed banners. At a guess someone who happened to own a print shop. But they were such novices at the business, they didn’t punch holes in the fabric, so in the normal mizzle and wind of Northern Portugal (if you read of Wellington’s campaigns you know what I’m talking about) holding that banner (half of it) about broke my arm. And the rain fell down the pole and down the sleeve of my anorak. (Anorhank, a symbol of holy abstinence, according to Pratchett and boy was he right.) There were very few banners. I think three in an immense crowd. And I happened to grab the end of that one as the previous kid holding it (It was specifically about youth) got tired of almost breaking her arm.

For display no one would pick me. I wasn’t a pretty kid, and in the anorak you couldn’t tell if I was a boy or a girl. And anyway, it was all organic and …. disorganized. I won’t say the right in Portugal are exactly individualists (they’re not) but they are individualist enough to fail to organize.

But that disorganization, those thousands upon thousands of silent people walking across town. (Had to be silent. We didn’t have a protest permit. But they couldn’t stop people just happening to walk together) brought down a government that thought it was on its way to full control.

In the same way, the tea parties while they couldn’t completely curb Obama unnerved him enough to stop a lot of the worst overreaches he would have attempted. And they BAFFLED the left, because they were what the left was trying to achieve with Occupy Wall Street.

They started Occupy Wall Street in the serene belief that all they had to do was astroturf the beginning and then the people would rise up and support them. But despite a compliant media reporting it that way, and swelling the movement in image they never achieved more than “boomers with oxygen tanks and mentally ill homeless pooping on cars.” And then the Tea Party came out of nowhere and blindsided them.

They look at us, and wonder how we’re organizing on the quiet. Hence the insane search for “dogwhistles.” Which make no sense because what moves us is not what they attribute to us anyway. And we look at their organization, know we can’t do that and think all is lost.

We don’t need to do that. We have reality and the fact we’re not trying to hurt people and take their stuff.

Look, the left largely hid what a shitshow places like Russia were by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. And they are very much in denial of what a soft, decaying shitshow Europe is for that matter. But the last four years of the Bidentia showed people what the left wants to do to them, personally.

Ignore pollsters. Ignore the media making big scary noises. The left is — to quote one of their own — a paper tiger. They have nothing, or nothing people want. And most people now know it. Unless people are very well off and willing to buy into boutique causes at the cost of sky high groceries and transport and no employment, the left has nothing for us.

Movements that are winning don’t work so hard at keeping illegals here and voting. Movements that are winning don’t work so hard at keeping illegals who have committed CRIMES here and voting. Movements that are winning don’t work so hard just to cause turmoil in ONE city.

More importantly movements that are winning don’t need a carefully choreographed danced to present a frong that makes them seem like many.

Stand down. Take a deep breath.

No, we won’t win tomorrow. Or the day after. For too long we let leftist bullshit infect our education, our arts, our media. Perhaps “let” is the wrong term. They were top down systems and once taken over we could do nothing against them. But they had them for decades, and we’ll suffer the results of that for decades yet. However, things will be improving all the while. Yes, there will be setbacks and we’ll lose very good people (salutes Charlie Kirk) but in the end we win, they lose.

Look, you blackpillers think that I’m counter-black-pill because I don’t see what you do. You’re so wrong you’re not even on the map. I see what you do. What’s more, I’ve been seeing it since I’ve been aware of politics, which is now close on to fifty years. (What can I say? Mom was political to her fingertips, and a force of nature besides, and if she’d been born in a civilized country, she’d probably have shaken the world.)

My time of despair was somewhere in the seventies when the left’s deadlock on media, government AND academia was iron clad and when I despaired of being able to topple it. But even then I refused to stop and I refused to shut up. Because no. Because I read Heinlein and I knew the Lieutenant wouldn’t like THAT.

But yeah, that was the time all the protest babes were on the left. They still organized. They do it naturally, I swear, but it wasn’t AS orchestrated and choreographed as now. They had more useful idiots. They could always get a PREGNANT martyr when needed.

Now? Now they are at very thin on the ground martyrs. They have to buff up those they have. They have to pay their protesters who aren’t extremely and glaringly mentally ill.

What did them in? Losing the lock on communication. Having people see the man behind the curtain, the sneering disdain for humans behind the leftist cry for the plight of “workers.”

And lest we forget Limbaugh started this. That is not a sign of strength for the left. One man, in an outmodded form of communication was the beginning of their doom.

How much more can you do today with better communication?

Yes, they’ll become louder, and more choreographed, and yes, alas, more lethal the less in control they are. That’s the bad part we have to go through. And we’re going to lose a lot of good people. And yes, we’ll lose some battles, too.

But think about it, with all their resources, they orchestrated the election of the corpse. They locked the entire country down. They surrounded DC in barbed wire. They’d won. They were in charge.

And now they’re a rump movement causing trouble in one city and even that mostly for the cameras.

The desperate effort they managed in 2020 is now out of reach. Can they fraud 2026? Probably. BUT IT’S NOT WRITTEN IN STONE.

The media lies. Polls are a tool. You’re not alone. None of us is. We are the VAST, overwhelming majority.

And things are going our way. Slowly but inexorably, we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

Give Them The Old Razzle Dazzle by Foxfier

Bright colored, sparkly, and moving fast even if it’s just flailing– all of that says look here. Know that ghost dance that Sarah’s always on about? This is that scene in Chicago where the court room is completely full of sparkle-covered dancers clad mostly with feathers that outweigh them. If you’ve been watching Paliwood for a while, this might seem familiar — all those girls are in red. Like the Mandatory Bright Colored Children’s Toys often are, although blue is a distinct second, with other bright colors in the running. The one guy in the crowd who has a on clean coat or hat, in a bright color, is also popular. If a production has something brightly colored and clearly different, they want you to look there. Guess what, that applies to protests, as well. There’s a very good tweet on the “layers” of a protest, here: https://x.com/LukeTaylorUSA/status/2011147517262774298 We’re looking at Layer 1, from a slightly different angle– these are the folks that they want to have as the face of their movmenent. If you look at old protests, this is where the cute girls or emotionally packed character sketch stood. Think the cute hippy chick putting a flower in the barrel of a gun, or the “I am totally not trying to look like a parody of Jesus” hippy dudes in similar moves. Those photos even help drive it home because the folks behind them are usually out of focus– now, the people behind the “pay attention to these ones” are usually in hoods, masks, or both. Now, if you go to the tweet that Luke was responding to, you’ll find a video that does the unusual thing of not being from the desired perspective. https://x.com/i/status/2011130745125826859 There’s two attention-grabbers there– the chick with the dyed red braids, and the guy in the clean jean jacket and red-brown glasses. Well, and the ‘found out’ who is helpfully literally wearing a day-glo jacket, but we don’t see much of him before he’s finished with the f around portion. For the rest of the group? It’s hard to tell who is law enforcement and who is a protester, and even if it wasn’t winter it’d be hard to tell if some are male or female, which is why they’re not made up to be targets for attention. It’s like all the other camouflaged herds, it’s harder to pick out a target to focus on when they all blend together. You can see a non-evil example of this in that video of the ICE agent that picked up a rose, and handed it to a female colleague, where without him pulling focus on to her it wasn’t obvious there was a woman in the group. Now, with that in mind… why do I see all this talk about how “all the protesters” are white women? People keep sharing photos of protesters where there’s three or four women right up front, yeah, bright colored in both meanings hair and all, but there’s a dozen often-masked mostly guys who outmass even the landwhales right there. Even after we have videos of definitely-males doing things like chucking a frozen water bottle at the cops and trying to outrun them (and failing)? They put the pale, brightly colored examples out front to get your attention. It’s not just visual, either. They put women as spokesmen for exactly the same reason that the military uses a female voice for their cockpit AI– it gets attention. Same way that performative anger or sorrow does. Quit cooperating with the stupid activist games, please!

*For those wondering why this is so frigging late: I went to bed at 10 pm last night, and woke up today at almost 1pm. The only times I remember sleeping like that before were after giving birth, or similar outrages. Or as I said “I didn’t even know I could sleep that long”. Worse,t here’s the likelihood of a nap in the horizon. BUT I am feeling better. And my brain obligingly gave me a blog topic while I was asleep. Note, I haven’t checked the news yet, so if the government fell or Europe was subsumed by the waves during my epic sleep, you’ll have to use the comments to discuss it, because I don’t know yet. – SAH*

As we’ve talked about before, one of the left’s strengths, perhaps its last remaining strength and the one that’s hardest to break is that for so long being a leftist was a positional good.

No? Well, even in the US wearing a Che t-shirt didn’t immediately identify you as an idiot who couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag and who knew no history to boot. It should have, but it didn’t. By the time I was in high school, now almost 50 years ago, it made you look cool, hip, daring and willing to question the establishment. Any Hollywood writer writing that student — Hollywood traffics mostly in stereotypes, since that’s easier to sell in visual format — would make him a deep thinker, concerned for the plight of the poor. This despite the fact that Che was a cold blooded mass murderer, one who preferred to kill people with his own hands, though he could also order it done, and despised…. well, everyone, but at the top of the list were students and the educated. Though the poor were there too, somewhere.

The “coolness” factor only increased for the next generation, as communism had fallen and the lefties and opinion makers (BIRM) of the generation before mine could say smugly that the good guys had lost the cold war, and pass on that bullshit to their kids with a side dollop of grand lost cause, like aging confederates moaning the glories of Dixie in slave-owning days.

By the time I came of age as an adult, and certainly by the time I became a published author at 35, one had to at least pretend to be leftist to be able to get on in any intellectual field. You could, yes, attack prominent personalities on the left, but you had to do it from the left. “I’m not sure Clinton is really committed to the cause. He’s just in it for the money and the chicks” was acceptable. “I’m not sure I can support of even tolerate a man who went to visit the USSR in his college days and remained a man of the left” wasn’t and would see you disgraced.

Positional good. “The lefter the better.” There were a never end of people declaring themselves communists in award speeches and such. And this only catapulted them to higher ground.

Which if you think about it is insane. “Yes, I am for a regime that murdered a hundred million. That’s how pure and wonderful I am, give me cash and contracts.”

Of course to maintain that several things were needed, but the most important thing needed was that the various circles be compartmentalized. Mr. and Mrs. average geek retained the power to be shocked by their favorite author or director or what have you chest-thumping his love of Stalin, but they never heard of that, because they were presented curated snippets in the media.

People like Ghandi and several others, are wholly media-constructions, their halo formed of a tightly focused lens.

And it used to be that this positional good status of leftist nonsense was the least of their weapons. it was merely the ability to make people falsify their preference, thereby giving the impression of far greater strength to the left. Oh, don’t mistake me: It was valuable. It allowed them to commit any amount of fraud and it was assumed as they put on the cover of Time magazine, when Obama was elected “We’re all socialists now.”

Which brings us to now. The walls have fallen. They were never as impermeable as the left pretended, at that. Despite their complete lock on the media, the news, the arts, the culture, and more importantly education, they could never get the majority to vote for them, requiring higher and higher amounts of fraud by less and less secret means. (No? Look, no civilized country has default vote by mail. It’s too stupid to even contemplate. But they were finally driven to it. After “voting week/month” after “lowering the voting age” after “no voter ID” etc.)

Now they can’t keep up the media barrage. And a camera in everyone’s phone means that anything that happens there are three or four videos or more and the truth is so to put it “Out there.”

And entertainment has so much competition — from the past, if nothing else, since indie movie/visual media isn’t yet a thing. Though we’re getting there. We’re getting there. Indie writing is of course competition — that they can’t force people to watch their stilted “entertainment.”

Their last defense; their last trump (eh) card is positional good. And ooh, boy, they’re playing it. Like the idiot who asked the sportsball coach tos ay something bad about America. Or the daily — daily, I tell you — challenges I endure, open and not to “say something bad about Trump.” to prove “You’re not a cultist.”

The only answer to that is the stone face and “no.” Just “no.”

Is Trump perfect? Oh, heck no. But perfect was not on the ticket. Kackling Kamala and the Retard Timwalz were. And anyone who thinks that we’d be doing better under that regime is sicker than I am, and should take two ibuprofen and go to bed till the desire to have civilization commit suicide passes.

Is he doing everything I wanted? Ah. Is the income tax abolished? Are all the fraudsters of the left exposed, tarred, feathered and run out of the country on a rail? etc. etc.? No. But I am also aware my rather radical wishes would create incredible turmoil and upheaval if implemented all of a sudden. He’s done more in the time he’s been in than anyone could ever imagine, a lot of it flying under the radar. I would vote for him again without a regret.

Cult? I think not. If Trump were killed tomorrow — almost happened, remember? — I’d cast about for someone who would make the left even madder and then throw all my support behind that. He’s an instrument, not a messiah. Yes, left, this is how much you’ve pissed off we the people.

America? The question of “What’s bad about America?” is “In comparison to what?” Because, yeah, America isn’t the Earthly paradise. Duh. And yes, we’ve been enduring a lot of rule by “enemies, domestic” which has caused several problems, including a lost, aimless and deeply wounded youth. But…. in comparison to what? Because it’s like that the world over and worse some places, and at least here we have an entrepreneurial culture that makes it possible for kids to make something of themselves: with immense effort, but there it is.

So, if you find yourself in a situation where they make it obvious that you have to say something lefty to position yourself as “once of us” refuse it. Give them nothing but the stone face.

This is all they have now. And if we neg it enough, they have nothing.

Oh, sure, paid mercenaries, and an organization inherited from the USSR and carried on by various political groups. And that’s…. inconvenient and difficult.

But it’s not the same as the creation of a vast preference falsification front that allows them to claim legitimate wins when in fact they win only through gargantuan fraud.

The stone face. It’s all they deserve. And it’s all you should give them.