According To Hoyt

A Blast from the Past originally at: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2024/08/26/why-dont-you-come-back-to-the-war/

Yesterday I stumbled on this post by Devon Eriksen on Twittex.

For those who don’t wish to follow through, he claims there were no real fat people in the fifties/sixties, when mothers cooked for their families, etc. It’s one of the those things of “he’s right and wrong” because he’s much younger than I and I can assure him the having home cooked meals was not universal, or even close to it, food was already processed by the time people bought it to use as ingredients, and there were indeed fat people (though very rarely as abnormally fat as now, but you do see those throughout history too. And I can go into that if anyone wishes me to write on fat, and why our society is exceptionally “fat”. It’s a number of circumstances, including that we’re as a rule older (the very fat people of the past were usually very wealthy, meaning they could live longer with serious physical issues. Like Henry VIII with a debilitating, never-healed leg wound) and that … well, the pictures that Devon uses to illustrate the “there were no fat people” are part of the problem. Because those pictures of the sixties and seventies show people who were by and large on extreme diets due to the worship of “thin.” We do know there are serious metabolic consequences to whip-saw dieting — trust me, I’m a case study — and to early-life anorexia, as well as to extreme dieting while pregnant, which screws up the baby.)

The post is still worth reading, and I’m very glad it can be said. It’s just his being younger than I, I think, and also falling into the writer trap of “there was a master plan.” This is usually true in novels, never true in reality.

Sure, there was a short of prospiracy of cult devotees of the communist manifesto in places of power in entertainment and mass communication which led to the poison of “Marxist feminism” inserting itself into the dynamic and making everything objectively worse.

Note henceforth I can refer to it as simply “feminism” because “feminism” in modern society is Marxist. But there was, before that nonsense, a sort of sensible feminism. It curbed the greatest excesses of societal oppression of women (which happened because women are the most precious resource of any society. Do I need to unpack? You don’t let the people who can literally give your tribe a future wander off on their own and be captured by the enemy, for ex. This leads to curtailing the movements of women, historically) and advocated for stuff like a widow’s ability to manage her own household and money, without needing to return to her parents’ home or be subordinate to her inlaws. My grandmother was a feminist in that sense and at points it was opposite what is considered feminist nowadays. How opposite? Well, you see Victorian feminism was for women and children. So, it actually encouraged a woman to have children, treat her children well, stay home with the children and have no other employment, if the husband could at all manage to support her.

This was most often not possible, btw. The mid 20th century ideal of the housewife who stayed home and did nothing but watch her kids, cook for the family, decorate and maybe garden is the ideal of a very wealthy society. As such it was probably transitory and illusory, both. It was also, and Devon is absolutely right on this, aspirational and amazing. Because if you can afford to do it — and are temperamentally suited to it — what is better than to spend your life making the life of your family and community better?

It is particularly suited — center mass — to most female personalities. Women tend to be more social than males and like to perform acts of service for the community. It’s not that we’re saintly, it’s just what evolution selected for in females probably from the time we climbed down from the trees, if not before.

While women’s work tends to be indoors and non-dangerous, most women throughout history worked. And I’m going to lay down a marker here that I’m not even sure most women watched over their own children, in the sense we tend to think of it, the sense of the mid century housewife doing everything for her own kids. (And here, as with my thinking those very thin people of the sixties and seventies — I have my own pictures and honestly it looks odd, because people a generation before and after were if not “fat” more “normal”. I think that thinness and all the dieting are reflection of “listening to experts” who indulged their own fancy — being the seed of weight problems later, that housewife having nothing to do but mind her kids seeded the boomers neuroticism.)

While people tended to raise their own kids, and certainly (as I’ve said many times) the societies (upper class Victorian, Roman) that outsourced the raising of kids to hirelings did NOT fare well long term, child raising was more… flexible in the past.

I still caught the edge of this, to an extent. I mean, my mother, like my grandmothers, worked from home in her own business, and minded me in the sense that mom — and grandma — were there and provided meals at set times. But to be honest, from the time I was four or five, I played with other kids in the neighborhood for entire days. They played at my house too, sure, but that meant mom watched us all maybe one day out of six (Sunday was for extended family.)

More importantly, going back to former times, the children were expected to help with household work at about four, and often were apprenticed/had jobs/were in serious school (how serious? Well, people often entered university in their pre-teens. And don’t tell me they didn’t learn as much. They didn’t learn the same, but the amount was maybe more than we do as preparation) all day, etc.

It is a mistake to look at the middle years of the 20th century as “the way things ought to be.” To an extent we were already seriously off course.

To the point of fat and there not being a fat gene, etc. True. But at the same time there are things that break the system and predispose people to accumulate fat.

I’m not going to defend pre-packaged food, which is a thing regulated by the government and therefore by “experts.” Like, the ones who decided in the eighties that fat was bad for you but sugar just “got used up” which is a metabolic misunderstanding of epic proportions. For me and my family I always preferred to cook from scratch, because it’s healthier and often cheaper. But let’s face it, the diet of our ancestors wasn’t particularly wonderful, between lack of refrigeration and often being limited to what grew locally. Sure, they got limited amounts of protein, which might be good in a way, but which we’ve also find stunts growth and perhaps brain development.

Go ahead and cook from scratch and local if you can, but the fat epidemic is probably more related to see saw dieting in an attempt to reach the standards of thinness the experts said we should have, and the fact our health care has gotten good enough people survive with serious illnesses. My metabolism has never been the same, for ex, since I was put on strict bed rest for six months with first son. It is likely at a less wealthy time I, myself, and my son would both have died of eclampsia.

However, there is one contributing factor that absolutely can be blamed on feminism and that Devon hit on, though glancingly: the fact that all of us work, and work ridiculous hours.

Someone else mentioned that Americans define themselves by their job, as if that justified our existence. They’re not wrong. I figured that out in the aftermath of 2018 and being let go by the two main purchasers of my work. I realized I was suffering from middle aged unemployed man syndrome, as I’d defined myself by my jobs, even though they were in many ways crappy and stress filled.

And it’s interesting that Devon pointed out corporations jumped all in on “Women should have jobs” because it expanded the workforce and therefore lowered wages for everyone, because my friend Bill Reader had tentatively told me the same a few weeks ago. As in “Was it all a ploy like importing a lot of third worlders? A way to depress wages?”

I don’t think it was a “ploy” as I don’t think it was calculated. I think it was partly, sure, the communist manifesto at the back of a lot of influential brains, but also the fact life had got so good. Women not only could stay home, but were under-utilized. Look at recipes from the fifties and these people weren’t really cooking from scratch, but buying a series of canned things and combining them, with the result that a meal that would normally take half the day to prepare (Still does to me, if I’m doing something big from scratch, which is why nowadays it’s so hard, because we don’t eat that much, and it seems a waste of time.) And cleaning the house had gotten exponentially easier with machines (Seriously. I washed clothes by hand. You don’t have any idea how much time it took.) Women found themselves seriously under-employed, and therefore started casting their minds to what else they could do.

Now, if that prosperity had hit fifty years later, when there was an internet, there would have been a flourishing of work-at-home jobs, and I still think that’s where we’ll end up. But in the sixties, seventies and eighties, what it caused instead was bored women to start ENVYING their husband who got to go out and have jobs. (The fact most men’s jobs were no longer difficult and arduous helped with this. Women are still not hankering to be construction workers, truck drivers or trash pickup workers.)

Did corporations step on the accelerator and aid and abet this ethos? Yes. But corporations are served by university graduates, and the universities had already come up with the narrative of the oppressed woman freed by work.

And this in turn depressed wages, which in turn made it absolutely necessary for everyone, male and female to be “married to the job.” Because there’s always someone who is willing to work harder/make more sacrifices than you.

Recently we found ourselves explaining to both sons that yeah, though in very different jobs, we too worked 18 hour days in our late twenties and up through our late thirties. It’s what you have to do to establish yourself. And to be honest, because of increased longevity “establishing yourself.” and gaining credibility in your field, no matter what it is, takes longer and longer and longer. I mean, Dan is still working way more hours than he should be, and he might still (I haven’t checked) be considered “the kid” in his office. (Even if he works from home.) I know I suddenly crossed from “Raw beginner” to “Old woman of science fiction” somewhere in my mid fifties, and I’m still working raw beginner hours.

As I tried to tell my parents at one time — with marked lack of success — that Americans aren’t overweight because we’re lazy but because we work too much. It’s just most of our jobs are so all-absorbing.

So, in the essentials — aside from quibbles on the “fat” thing — I’m in accord with Devon that feminism has caused a break in American life, and by extension destroyed the family in our health.

It’s more that feminism was not so much an intended thing as a trend that picked up after World War Two.

Part of the problem is that all reproduction is a war between men and women — or in the animal kingdom males and females — in that each sex tries to have the most babies with the least expenditure of energy and effort, so at the expense of the other.

If you study evolution, this is how some species ended up with things like…. well, eating your mate right after copulation, or completely atrophying and becoming a pimple on your spouse’s side, but a pimple that can still impregnate her.

That kind of war is all very well, but the point of it is that it leads to more children.

This broken situation where each man and woman is an independent and competing economic unit is not leading to more children, or even a healthy and connected life.

Instead, it’s led to a life of anomie where humans have value only as economic production units, and can be discarded when no longer (or not yet) functional. Where it’s a shame to not be “employed” and “producing.”

This type of life is obviously completely compatible with communism/Marxism, in which the individual only matters so long as he produces, and where he’s a widget who is the same as everyone else.

And like all forms of Marxism, it leads to death and unhappiness. (Not necessarily in that order.)

The bitterly funny part of it (more bitter than funny) is that the entire left blames this on “capitalism” and doesn’t realize their version of feminism does nothing but feed all humanity into the maw of faceless corporations.

It would be funny if we weren’t living it and at risk of dying laughing.

(Note from Holly the Assistant: last night, Sarah lamented “I’m tired and I want to write Vic,” and I replied “Let me run a Blast from the Past tomorrow and go write Vic.” Vic being Skip’s mom, and a very interesting character.” So, in favor of getting a few words of the next book written, the blog gets a rerun today.)

Is it just normal life? Is it “Now we know better?” Or is it … the times we live in?

Can every other generation, every other person catalogue loss of innocence, loss of trust in the world in general — all of the world — through major events?

Something said this week reminded me of the nineties. I’m not going to sell you a fairytale and tell you I was deliriously happy. I wasn’t. I was writing my heart out, sending out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript and getting back standard rejections. And Dan was working at a job he loved that was slowly becoming a job he hated as the organization changed. We were always short on money, overworked, and raising toddlers.

Happy? Yes. I mean, I’ve always been happy since Dan was foolish enough to marry me. How could I not be? What were the odds? (And 41 years last week, thank you so much.) But deliriously, fairytale happy? Well… You know? I was nervous, wrecked, always short on money and extremely tired. I went to bed with a list of tasks I hadn’t accomplished that day in my head, and then added more to them every morning.

And somehow — the things you do when you’re young — I was pounding out a short story a week, writing two or three novels a year, keeping the house spotless and… well, I was always tired.

In many ways, though, in the normal things of life, I’m happier now. Okay, not right now, because I’m throwing all my energy into packing and unpacking and trying to keep the writing (including this) going is hard, because my body gets very tired. BUT in normal life.

I mean I miss the remote-away kid, and heck, I miss the nearby kid when he doesn’t come by every other day. BUT Dan and I are finally getting over the “what do you do with an empty nest” as we pivot to our respective work, which fortunately both of us have always been interested in/liked. And of course tech gave me indie and is giving him the opportunity to do the work of a small coding shop just by himself. Once the move is complete, we’ll be in a place where we can walk every day (the area we used to walk here is public and turned… dicey by two years ago.) and where the physical house-plant is easier for us. (It’s still two floors, it’s just arranged so the rooms we use the most are near each other. Oh, and the church is so close even I can’t be afraid to drive to it (or walk, depending on the time and weather.) Yes, me 10 years ago is giving me the stink eye, but things have changed and right now that’s a great comfort to me.

Which brings us to how things have changed….

It is weird, given the relative positions we were in/are in now for me to get misty eyed at the thought of the nineties. I mean we had friends who are now dead or… not friends, sure. Our life became far more restricted, socially in the oughts, partly because the kids grew up and made up a lot of our social interaction. Why have a writers’ group when you have one every evening around the diner table? But also…

If I look back, the first blow to that misty-eyed golden glow is 9/11. Half of our group went… weird. Weird is a good term for it. (Did you go crazy or did you report, on that day they wounded New York — Leonard Cohen) From truffer illusions to the certainty we’d brought it on ourselves because colonialism (like any human breed ever, and frankly the US less than most, but never mind.

And once the fracture set in, it widened. Ten years later we were polite strangers, keeping up polite chatter when we accidentally met somewhere.

Okay, these things happen. Yeahbut. That was also the first blow to my world view. I’d lost friends before. I mean, you move across the ocean and acculturate, the people back where you came from will find you AT BEST weird, and at worse resent you as a traitor. But this was different–

We all like to think we pick decent, reasonable, smart people to be our friends, right? I mean we might know some of them aren’t too bright, or not as bright as us, but they’re still in every day parlance smart, and definitely decent and reasonable or what’s the point?

What broke me around that time, I now realize, was not losing friends, which happens. It was the first instance of what I would later call “I remember him/her when he/she was sane” which has now grown to hundreds. I.e. it was the way my friends embraced the craziest sh*t rather than simply revise the airy-fairy ideas we had in the early nineties. (Mostly that individual cultures could be overcome and the world could become one large happy, free family. We didn’t put it that way, but that’s what we thought.) they embraced weird, impossible conspiracy theories that involved the west being extra-special evil and therefore needing to be destroyed. Heck, most of publishing did, but that didn’t upset me, as I already knew most of them were at best unreconstructed Leninists and at worse fundamentalist Stalinists. My friends, though? We’d raised our toddlers together. I thought they were…. reasonable people.

Which brings us to all the shocks since, because doing a deep dive into why 9/11 had happened, I arrived at my current perception of culture as an almost living entity that will not be ignored or superseded by wishful thinking and good will. What we drink with mother’s milk, absent a great effort at acculturation (and even so, see for instance how I’m dealing with the concept of being “old”) surfaces in all sorts of ways, good and not, ways that are hard to counter as most people aren’t even fully aware of them.

Then there was schooling. Seeing my kids go through school, arguably as boys of tanitude but still boys (I understand unless you’re outright black, and even then, unless you’re an aggressive black male, all these problems are the same.) Seeing how they were treated and the efforts made by a culture (Micro culture, in this case, the education culture) that had decided driving boys down was the way to make females rise (never was, never will be. That’s not how any of this works. Two halves of a whole) and was willing to destroy any number of innocents for the crime of being born with a penis broke me. Deeply.

I almost prefer the honest cultural stupidity of Latin machismo. At least they’re not doing it on purpose to destroy one of the sexes. It is just what they believe, probably because of deep cultural legacy from the Muslim invasions. At least when I pushed back the reaction wasn’t “must pound harder.” (Or else it was and I didn’t notice, because G-d bless the ’tisms. And since mom and grandma were the same, no problem. by my late teens I’d realized the culture I was raised in was not exactly standard Portuguese. The way my schoolmates interacted with their families would probably have driven me to homicide. Never mind.)

I was particularly disturbed because I can read tea leaves for the future passibly well from cultural trends, and THAT one… Nothing good comes from this path, as we’re seeing in decreasing marriages, fewer children, and pervasive all penetrating patina of loneliness and anomie.

There were other shocks. Poll watching in 2012 was one of those. The absolutely staggering scale of fraud. The fact this goes on and we tolerate it…

Then there was… well, 2020. Electoral shenanigans, color revolution, DC surrounded by razor wire. The evil treatment of the people who took a guided tour of the capitol on Jan 6, the arrest of harmless pro-life demonstrators, the fear of being demonetized just for speaking my mind, the bizarre certainty that if this went on I’d end up shot at the back of the head and in a mass grave. (At least I’d have company, amIright?)

And then the amazing 2024 and since. Which you’d think is great.

To an extent it is. I’m no longer afraid of being demonetized. We can buy eggs — EGGS — without breaking the bank (I won’t lie, it left me broken a bit. Right now we have 3 dozen eggs in the fridge, which is loony. I need to make a few souffles.) We decided to put a knife deep into one of our saving accounts so we could provide the younger set of kids with a safe place to live and so we could move to a place where we don’t have to pay a small fortune for (one acre) yard care, since we found out I’m allergic to everything outside. (Not even kidding, yo. There isn’t a plant or tree I’m not allergic to. Well, maybe grapevines? I seem to be okay with those. But even Colorado wasn’t safe because of pine trees. I’m deathly allergic to EVEN PINE in woodworking form (as I found out recently, while making a “lady’s work table” to keep my crochet and cross stitch safe from the cats.) This new yard (not in that house yet, but–) Dan claims he can handle, but he’s still going to train the electric sheep to do most of it. These are good things. As is finding out I was celiac my whole life. There is less pain and I have more energy. Fortunately. Otherwise I’d already have died, last week and would certainly die these next three (after which we should be okay.)

On the other hand…

All the fraud, everything Data Republican unearths is so floridly evil it shocks even me. And then there’s the conspiracy theories on our side which we thought were crazy cakes, and…. behold their being proven right. At this point I wouldn’t even be shocked if Big Mike proved to be true. Okay, I would be shocked, but not the shock something like that deserves. Because, holy moley people! Crazier more involved things have proven true.

Including… yeah, the Fauci testimony which is in the process of breaking me yet further. Oh, not because he is a vain little shitweasel. Somewhere in the mountain of posts in this blog, from around that time, (I probably in addition to the acculturation essays which my assistant is editing should make a collection of the Big Break of 2020) are posts saying he was a little nerd dazzled with his own celebrity. BUT I am shocked that what I suspected and was afraid to believe seems to be true. Yes, it was just a flu. Not even a particularly bad flue. All the extra deaths including the abandoned in old age homes in Spain are the result of the panic this evil gnome induced.

And at this point not fully in the open, but I’m absolutely sure of it, I am certain — sure certain — that the entire thing was a ploy to drive the economy down and make the color revolution of 2020 plausible in people’s eyes. Because I remember various writers (and therefore lefty) groups I lurk in, forgotten, ringing their hands about how popular Trump was early 2020 and wishing there was something they could do to tank the economy.

Knowing what I know of electoral fraud, I know they still didn’t win that election fair and square. BUT the ability to pretend they did was enough.

And for that, they locked down the world, traumatized a generation, terrorized older people and the unstable, destroyed the economy and for good measure terrorized everyone in the US (which the rest of the world tried to ape) with memorex race riots, so that the courts would be afraid to reverse their electoral fraud.

ALL OF THIS, all of it, because they wanted power. With no thought of consequences. (I’m half sure the rest of the world locked down because they ape us and are stupidly dependent on their press which makes ours seem honorable. The other half is suspecting this panic was encouraged by our shitweasels for verisimilitude. Note that it only happened in the west. In Africa, India, etc. the Covidiocy wasn’t even a thing.)

I think this last break is the worst. I don’t want to become cynical about the world and people in general.

Listen, you, I never thought that most people were fundamentally good. My husband does because he is. I’m not. I’ve got a broad streak of darkness I fight all the time. BUT–

But… I didn’t know that so called civilized humans could be so… indifferent to the welfare of others and so willing to kill other humans in batch lots, by psy-ops means, to make old people die alone, to interdict funerals even to those people for whom funeral is the final consolation.

And I might never forgive the churches in the west for locking down, obediently. THEIR RELIGIOUS ANCESTORS RISKED DEATH IN THE CIRCUS TO CELEBRATE THEIR RITES. But they locked down to avoid…. a flu. Or being scolded. Whichever. I mean parking lot masses were judged too risky by the church in Colorado. (They remained locked down for a year after we moved. And when we moved the church here was NORMAL.)

This break, this feeling of never being able to trust anything again, of being on unstable ground, and having to be ready to revise every assumption at a minute’s notice? It makes daily life…. fraught.

I wonder if that’s how we become old. Not the aches and pains or the diminished energy (for me that picture is mixed, since I was desperately auto-immune always, and anyway, the energy is better since I cut out wheat) not the occasional forgetfulness… I wonder if what makes you old is all these breaks, all these sheddings of illusions.

And if our generation (broadly all of us who are adults and alive now) is worse than those in the past, because there was such a big lie maintained in the 20th century, affecting every aspect of life, and it’s breaking now, so in a way it’s like all of us moved to a different country and culture. At once. And that’s tough for acculturation. Tough for sanity.

I don’t know. what I know is this: of everything I lost I miss my illusions the most.

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 PAM UPHOFF: Profit & Freedom (Chronicles of the Fall Book 23)

The disruption of the attack on the 300, and then the invasion has left twin sisters unsupervised . . .

Noeme and Juna Jaeger, at the age of fifteen, might have put a toe over the line of strict legality to make sure they stayed safe . . . then they helped a couple of their friends . . .

And then . . . why not? Why not turn it into a business? Save some other kids, and make money doing it! What could possibly go wrong?

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Fen Dead (The Groundskeeper Book 6)

In the misty fen on the edge of town, a murdered man refuses to stay buried.

Chloe Brandt, groundskeeper of Belleview cemetery and reluctant apprentice mediator to the dead, has been called in to help. The deeper she digs into the strange killing, the more she realizes some bindings run deeper than any grave.

Armed with a glowing jar of restless oil, a crew of sectretive gnomes, and more confidence than caution, Chloe must navigate deceptions and dangerous liminal spaces before the fen claims another soul. In a world where even the dead keep secrets, the only way forward is to get your hands dirty.

FROM KEN LIZZI: Long Gambit: Book Two of The Twilight Galaxy Series

The Long Gambit is the second book in Ken Lizzi’s Twilight Galaxy — the ongoing saga of the free trader Long Gambit and the crew who keep her flying through a slowly collapsing galaxy.

Captain Pyater Welloons is one missed payment from losing everything. His ship is clamped to the pad for unpaid moorage fees, his accounts are nearly dry, and the only job on the board is a humanitarian rush run: twelve million doses of medicine for a plague-stricken backwater called Owming.

The catch is that Welloons has to source the drug himself — on Ixtpa, a planet where nearly everyone is chemically modified and the automated factories run themselves while the population drifts pleasantly toward oblivion. The one compound he needs has been bought up to the last ampule to treat a cattle plague on another world. So Welloons does the only thing a man in his position can do: he plans a heist.

What follows is a working-crew space adventure with teeth — a midnight break-in through an automated underground, a street ambush, a slow-motion brush with suffocation when a part nobody replaced finally fails, and an ambush by two pirate ships that knew exactly where the Long Gambit would be. The crew’s best hope turns out to be a piece of bargain-bin junk the captain told them to throw out.

And when the ship finally reaches Owming, Welloons discovers that delivering the medicine and getting it to the dying are two very different problems — and that the people who ordered it may be the last ones who want it to arrive.

For readers of working-ship, declining-empire space adventure in the tradition of C.J. Cherryh’s merchanters, Andre Norton’s Solar Queen, and Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper. Dry humor, a crew worth riding with, and a captain who keeps his word even when it costs him. The story is the point.

EDITED BY DAVID BADURINA: Pet Monsters: Ten Tales of Monsters and the Kids Who Befriend Them (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 78)

You were a weird kid once. So were they — right up until the monster showed up.A boy brings a rotten sandwich back to life and discovers the truest
friend he has ever had. A lonely girl pulls a crashed alien out of a cornfield. A grieving kid hides a fire-breathing salamander in his dead
father’s office. And out past the porch light, something with too many tentacles is looking up at the same stars — and quietly noticing the
marriage coming apart inside the house.Pet Monsters gathers ten original stories about the strange, misunderstood creatures
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authors. Ten monsters. One anthology about the friends we lose, the people we become, and the small impossible miracle of being seen.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: King of the Zombie Moonmen

Craig Holdren is a typical young slacker, until, thanks to an inheritance from his mysterious Uncle Jack, he finds his way into another world. It is a world much like his own, except for flying saucers, atomic-powered cars, rocket ships, unearthly zombies, renegade robots, giant spiders, ferocious rock creatures and an imminent invasion from outer space. Here Craig finds his true destiny when he takes Uncle Jack’s place as the legendary Flying Commando – the only man who can stop Retik, King of the Zombie Moonmen, from conquering the entire Universe!

FROM KAREN MYERS: Second Sight: A Science Fiction Short Story

A Science Fiction Short Story

BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S PERCEPTIONS FOR A POPULAR DEVICE CAN ONLY MEAN COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. RIGHT?

Samar Dix, the inventor of the popular DixOcular replacement eyes with their numerous enhancements, has run out of ideas and needs another hit. Engaging a visionary painter to create the first in a series of Artist models promises to yield an entirely new way of looking at his world.

But looking through another’s eyes isn’t quite as simple as he thinks, and no amount of tweaking will yield entirely predictable, or safe, results.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: A Huntress on the Rocks (Timelines Universe Book 4)

A young military intelligence agent. Hunting a murderous drug dealer across a floating city on a water world light-years from Earth – with only his name, and a vague description of what he might look like. Will she finally find her quarry and bring him to justice, or will cases of mistaken identity mean she’ll simply end up

A Huntress on the Rocks

(A Delaney Wolff Fox story)

FROM MARY CATELLI: Even After

Mirror, mirror on the wall — can I be safe when I am tall?

Rumpelstiltskin got the baby.

Rapunzel and her prince never again met.

Snow White still sleeps in the forest.

Biancabella, Snow White’s half-sister, knows that if she is more beautiful than her mother, trouble will follow again. Her appeal to the magic mirror only gains her stories of how hard it is to fight the evil sorceresses and wizards and witches who have banded together to bring unhappy endings.

But with her mother seeking to constrain her, Biancabella knows she may have no choice to use that knowledge to attempt to escape.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania

A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Evening Performance: A Novel of Theatrical Discipline and International Espionage (The Aurigan Conflict)

A retired accountant notices that the actors aren’t saying their lines correctly.

Four intelligence services notice something else entirely.

At the Grand Imperial Theatre, The Kingdom at the Edge of the World appears to be an ordinary theatrical production. But beneath the costumes, stage directions, and carefully rehearsed dialogue lies an international communications network—one that has operated undetected for years.

British Intelligence is watching. The Aurigans are watching. The mysterious Grey Office is watching. Several other intelligence services are watching.

And then there is Cedric Pritchard.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: structure.

*This post was made using an app created by the Mathematician who got tired of watching me painfully uploading them one by one, after of course saving them over the week. JUST the mechanical act of uploading took me two to three hours. Well, he didn’t like that, so he automated it. It seems to have worked. We’ll see how it works out, shall we? – SAH*

In fair America, where we lay our scene . . .

By Holly the Assistant

We’ve long known that the image of reality has diverged in the two parties. Not the actual reality–whatever your party affiliation it’s still possible to talk to you about the doe with the twinsies by the old egg farm, you can see her same as I can–but the image, the view projected by others and accepted by those not personally present at the scene of, of the reality.

This got exhibited just now on a perfectly innocuous State Patrol social media post about checking trucks for safety at the border (northern). The trucks are entering a state that goes from 900 ft above sea level to over 10,000 ft above sea level (though I sincerely hope none are scaling the peaks, and are staying to the more paved roads that top out about 8,000). A little double check of the brakes and tires seems appropriate. One group is praising the State Patrol–by far the majority. Two small groups think either that State Patrol should be checking for illegal alien drivers or that they are there only to harass poor innocent brown drivers. Somehow, I suspect that the legality of the drivers entering the USA is really the department of the border crossing guards just north of the State Patrol stop, and the State Patrol is probably about as brown as the drivers anyway.

But I’ve seen it everywhere. One group condemning President Trump for not sending firefighting help to Canada, the other group condemning President Trump for sending firefighting help to Canada so it’s not available to local fires.

One group condemning Congress for grilling that poor old hero Fauci, the other group condemning Congress for not jailing that old crook Fauci.

One group condemning parents for not getting their kids vaccinated thus causing the spread of measles, the other group pointing out that the current cases are vaccinated adults.

One claiming that Russia or Iran has won and the Ukraine or the USA are done for, the other claiming that the Ukraine or the USA has won and Russia or Iran is on the brink of total collapse.

One claiming that ICE is arresting and deporting Native American Tribal Members, the other pointing out that the photo is too blurry to make out if it’s ICE, there’s no evidence that the arrestee was deported, there’s no evidence of the legal status or tribal membership of the arrestee, there’s not even a name attached . . .

The award winning children’s book is banned! The smut is removed from the school library, go buy it online you nasty person.

A rational person would think these are fairly . . . reality checkable things? As checkable as the doe with the twins is? But they aren’t . . . that is, we ourselves cannot go there personally and look. Well, some of us have looked at the lack of aerial support in the timeline we would prefer to local fires, but it’s a bit harder to tell if that’s because the planes are stateside elsewhere, out of country elsewhere, getting repairs, or some other reason why reality simply couldn’t conform to our expectations.

We rely on reports from others, and those others have their own agendas. We trust that others have fact-checked or ask people we trust to fact-check if we don’t have the knowledge. Or we accept the reports based on our own biases and previous knowledge.

I don’t think my leftist acquaintances are going to be born out in the midterms in their belief that President Trump’s supporters are abandoning him over “starting a war in Iran”. I don’t see that in my right acquaintances at all. Maybe a little pissed off he hasn’t ended it yet, but no one thinks he started it. Far more likely that the right rejects some senators for not passing the SAVE Act, (or shenanigans at the ballot boxes cost some re-elections) and the left interprets that as Trump’s supporters abandoning him.

I’m pretty sure the Huns are the most political fact-checking prone community out there on the internet, but keep in mind your neighbors have different fandoms, and the folks who are most engaged in the fandom of which breed of sheep has the lowest parasite load in your local conditions, what the best drought condition supplemental feed is, and which herd dog breeding pairing would be best, might could use a heads-up on what that ballot proposition actually will do, or even a reminder of when the various elections are. Just try to keep your geeking out short enough they don’t zone out, please!

*Alike in dignity? Well, yes. Exactly. I didn’t claim either had any amount of dignity at all, did I now? And neither did Shakespeare, did he? Also, recollect the next two lines of the prologue, if you would please, and let’s try to skip that, thank you very much, in so far as it is in our power to.

There is a comment in moderation I haven’t yet decided to liberate. It’s from a new commenter and I don’t think he’s a troll.

Or at least trolls rarely write wiffy-waffing walls of text that start by accusing me of either lying or being wrong (about an obvious point at that) and then proceeds to do the appeasing two-step ending in how he thinks we should have a social safety net. It reads in fact completely and bizarrely idiotic, in the way only a very smart person fed on disingenuous pap his entire life can sound stupid.

But the person self-identifies as a socialist and my assistant strenuously objects to freeing his comment, since she says no one practices the arcane art of the flounce, anymore, and we’ll end up having to block him. And because I am exhausted, I’ll defer to her. (Exhausted: turns out not just the last step on the marbelizing but the one before were a mistake. You see, having done the marbelizing proper (I’m good at painting marble-like substances) I found myself leery of doing the final step in epoxy, so I chose “layers of polyurethane instead” (Lacquer not indicated, since it’s a bedside table, CPAPs leak, and I occasionally slap my water glass instead of grabbing it.) Apparently high humidity and temperatures in the nineties mean that the polyurethane, being a plastic, remains soft. Since the intermediate steps involve sanding, and removing the mistaken coat definitely needs sanding, what happened is that I tried to sand and the whole turned into a gummed mess. I had to bring out the hot gun. In this weather! It’s now been scraped, sanded bare, and I made interim arrangements, so I can do both bedside tables at the same time since I’ll have to mix epoxy for the final step, and I only want to do it once. (I HATE working with epoxy. I can’t tell you how much.) Anyway, extensive sanding and heat gun left me beat.)

The mistake/lie he thinks I made is that “Socialists don’t want things to get worse.” Right. Lenin saying “The worse the better” was just a bleep. And by the way, don’t try to tell me communism isn’t socialism. The USSR called itself socialist, so did the DDR and so does every other tinpot communist dictatorship in the world. BUT if someone is stupid enough to claim Lenin wasn’t socialist, then they must think socialists are the word’s dumbest life forms, outsmarted by a paramecium because wanting to open the borders and bring in the third world, (I’m not saying people from the third world are bad. But they come from dysfunctional cultures and have no skills we need in our present society.) wanting to incentivize crime (not punishing crime is incentivizing it, unless you believe every criminal is secretly an angel. Also, for the love of Bob, this experience has been run again and again and again. The way to combat serious crime is to disproportionately punish trivial crimes, not the other way around) wanting to strangle energy and wanting to turn us into a command economy (again proven over and over again not to work) is to want to create disorder and destroy everything. I don’t care what pretty lies one tells to cover it up. That’s what socialists want.

But it was his soft landing of “We need a social net” that kept me awake last night. (And I really can’t afford to be kept awake just now.) It’s what people say when they want to appease the socialists. Hell, the mess we’re in, the whole welfare state and the bizarre “mixed economy” bullshit was an attempt to appease the socialists/communists so they wouldn’t destroy everything. It’s why the Victorians went soppy on “helping the poor and educating the benighted” and it’s why country after country has tied itself with velvet ropes, in the attempt to keep the commies from killing everyone and destroying everything.

It doesn’t work. Communists and socialists can’t be appeased. What they want is not what they say they want. What they claim worries them is not what worries them. Creating a social net is admitting that they’re right and the poor need the government to steal from those who have and give to them. Once you concede that, you’re like the prostitute who will only put out for a million dollars. You’ve already admitted what you are. You’re just quibbling on the price.

Quickly, what really — passionately — concerns socialists is that other people have more than THEY THEMSELVES do. Yes, they say they’re concerned about the poor. But talk to any one of them long enough, and the spittle-flecked rant comes out where they will scream that Elon is so rich, why isn’t he feeding all of Africa. Since only a fool or a knave will claim that someone can feed a continent indefinitely, it soon becomes obvious they just hate the fact someone is that wealthy. It bothers them. They’ll rant about inequality, etc. but what bothers them is that others have more than they do. And this is because the very wealthy can ignore them and evade their killing commands. And since at the heart of every statist is a dirty greed for power, this will not be tolerated. The rich must be brought down and they and the poor all made uniformly wretched and in need for the dole dispensed by government, which will, of course, be dispensed by our socialists. (In their dreams. In fact the most ruthless of them end up in power, and everyone else ends up in mass graves. But the dear socialists never see that. They’re blinded by their dreams of unlimited power over the lumpen masses.) Note the commenter that left the wall of text is going to object strenuously to it, and by doing so prove himself either disingenuous or deluded. Either a knave or a useful idiot. (I’m going to be on useful idiot, but I could be wrong.)

Now let’s tackle the whole idea of social net. I’m against.

Note this doesn’t mean I’m against “helping the poor.” Except at our most strapped, where $5 meant I didn’t know where the next meal was coming from, we alot money from our income for helping those who need it. Some of it we even do through extremely well researched charitable organizations. (Few. Look, organizations fall to organizational blinkeredness. Not only do they tend to be taken over by dear blinkered socialists, but they also don’t seem to understand the concept of different cultures. Look up the many misfires and stupidities of the Heifer project for elucidation.) Most of the help we give is personal, close-up and involves … well…. sometimes very strange things. Like, in the nineties Dan and I bought an average of a serviceable computer once every three months. No, our computers weren’t that bad. It was that when we heard of a friend who was a writer and either doing it long hand because they couldn’t afford a computer or whose computer had just died, we got him/her on. Sometimes we even gave it to them (when Dan knew he’d need to be tech support) instead of ding dong ditching by putting it on the door step, ringing the doorbell and driving away like some sort of deranged tech fairies. In the same vein, Dan would buy and repair computers, then put them in the classifieds (later craigslist) for a ridiculously low price, like $20. In that way, we furnished computers to single mothers whose kids needed them for school, to young couples who needed one for accounting or something, etc. (Why not put them for free? Because that attracted people wanting to get them to sell. We tried and found that out.)

We also of course offer more conventional help, like money for a month’s rent or moving expenses. When we can. Or a bag of groceries. Or whatever.

Look, when we needed help — we never went official channels because we suck at bureaucracy and also because I HATE government handouts, as they’re a trap — various friends gave us baby clothes, or a bag of groceries, or such. And that got us on our feet again.

I don’t say any of this to be thought a good person. I’m not in fact a good person. But I aspire to be someone Heinlein would consider a human being. And he said to pay it forward, so I do. Including, yes, making covers for friends, protegees and total strangers. And also when I can (the last few years haven’t been great) dispensing mentoring. Because in my head that’s just what a decent, not terrible human being does. As is all of the above.

But then, you’ll ask, why don’t I want the government to take the burden? Surely I know that I can’t help everyone, or even hear about most of the needs.

I concede the later, particularly since some people are like us and you’ll only find when the noose is tightening around our necks if you’re our close friend or we are in such trouble we let it slip.

And yet, even conceding the fact we can’t help everyone (but we’re not the only people doing this) I oppose the welfare state and utterly reject it and all its empty promises and all its false glamour.

But Sarah, why?

Well, first because the “safety net” is immoral.

How is it immoral? Because it is theft. The government creates no wealth. The government has no money of its own. Any money being used for “a safety net” was taken from someone with threats of violence. And kindly, don’t tell me it’s not with threats of violence. Look up what happens if you refuse to pay your taxes, or even the part of your taxes that you can infer go to “safety net.”

It is immoral, it will always be immoral, to tax an elderly lady who worked and saved her entire life in order to give the money to a young person who can’t find a job. (And note I have spoken sympathetically of young people who can’t find jobs. It’s not their fault. But neither is it their right to be supported by others by the use of armed robbery.)

Second, because the so called “safety net” is mostly a cage.

Look, most of the people on Welfare who stay on Welfare have problems that can’t be solved by handing them money. That is not a safety net. That’s a safety prison, through the bars of which we regularly pass money. Even in the cases when the people on welfare didn’t bring about their own problems — being insane or handicapped is usually not something one brings on oneself, absent some of the crazier new age theories — what they need is what we can’t provide by handing them money: either psychiatric help or a concerted effort to find something they can do to support themselves or, for extreme cases, a way to live with dignity while being unable to provide for themselves.

There is no dignity in Welfare. It enables the state to poke its nose into your business, and also to make decisions for you. (And the end result of the welfare state is always the metaphorical gas chambers. ALWAYS. Look up what’s happening with assisted suicide in the “compassionate” states of the west. Because ultimately the way to help those who won’t otherwise be made whole is to kill them, which does solve the problem. Permanently.)

Third, because all government social spending ends up misapplied.

It starts as money for widows and orphans, but because widows and orphans are few in our present age, and the genuine widows find ways to provide for themselves, it ends up as paying people divorce and have multiple kids out of wedlock. It ends up being paying people not to see work. It ends up, in its ultimate international application as paying for trans operas for peruvians because someone sold it as resolving institutional problems or something.

The money, stolen at gun point from working people, creates such a massive fund (particularly in a country the size of a continent like ours) that it ends up attracting the kind of people who see it for what it is: a concentrated source of power. Those people, in turn, search out not those who can be helped and move on, but for those who will remain clients and give them that power. Which creates a need for the money they dispense, by regulation, by bureaucracy, by design, ultimately.

Fourth because anything administered by an institution as large as the government will change much too slowly and will perpetuate problems it’s trying to solve.

Even when trying not to, (and that is rare) the institutional solutions for the problems are the kind that perpetuate the problem. For instance, kids who can’t find a job will be told to apply and apply and apply, and capture the applications as proof they have done so. They might be put in training for conventional jobs, etc.

More good could be done in our day and age by providing them with a small stake to start their own small business, and having courses that teach them to do so.

But that is impossible because we’re in an area of catastrophic change and government regulations and understanding move very very slowly.

Even the best provisions to make Welfare useful and temporary are perfectly adapted to the early twentieth century and useless to us now.

Fifth because welfare in general and in the end will impoverish everyone is society.

When socialists spit-fleck their rants on making Elon pay for everyone in Africa, or in taking the money from all billionaires to feed “every hungry child in America” (A trick as there are almost no hungry children in America, barring those who are actively being trafficked and those on a diet. The surveys are nonsense.) they are, besides screaming at the top of their voices “I am an envious asshole who can’t stand the thought that people have more than I do” declaring their utter and complete lack of understanding of economics. (If their declaring Marx a genius economist wasn’t enough to tell you that.)

You see, they will also tell you “no one needs” x amount of money. And declare themselves capable of telling you what money people have in excess of needs.

(Sighs. Massages the bridge of her nose, to ward off a headache.)

G-d forgive me, but I’m about to invoke their satanic gospel against them. What they’re ignoring is “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Because of course, they think the government can see into those, and also that they’re competent to determine what each needs and can do.

And that’s the veriest, frothiest bullshit confection. They have visibility into exactly one set of abilities: their poor scrap of can-do. And into one set of needs: their own bottomless, gargantuan wish for more, more, more.

When they envision being “rich” or even someone like Elon their limited and blinkered imagination (No? Look at what Hollywood became as they ran off anyone even suspected of bad think) they imagine having money for everything they would like to buy and for the lifestyle they’d like to have. And above that they stutter.

I have yet to meet a single socialist who in their most secret of hearts doesn’t imagine “Millionaires and billionaires” as keeping their excess funds in a room or fortress. Whether they also imagine people swimming in the bills and coins like Uncle Scrooge is optional. (I suspect if they read comics as kids they do.)

What they don’t understand is that someone like Elon (and others, in a smaller way, but he’s such a glaring example) NEED that excess money. They need it to invest, to create new companies, to pay for research and innovation that will make all of us much richer.

If they can’t have that because they’re being taxed to their toenails, this impoverishes everyone.

Look, the very wealthy of the Victorian age contributed more to our world of extreme wealth and minimal true need than all the playwrights and novelists nattering on about the plight of the poor and downtrodden.

The reasons are too many to list, but some are for instance that people funding research into a process or idea that they want to use for their company or their ambitious undertaking tend to fund real science, not make believe.

Everyone with a brain should admit part of the problem in science right now is that the government pays for most of it, which means that they pay for the results they want. If you don’t see a problem with that, you might have other issues. What we need is for people who want to make more money by making better widgets or sending widgets to Mars. They don’t want faked results but real ones.

But also that people who know what to do and have the capacity for work can’t streamline processes, create better ways to increase crops (or lose less to pests) or ANYTHING ELSE if all their ‘excess money’ is being confiscated by government and mostly getting eaten by bureaucracy or misapplied to things that maybe might have helped someone in 1930.

And that’s where “their abilities” come in. I am — I flatter myself — a mildly decent futurist. I can see what’s coming down the pike when it’s written in letters of fire six feet high. Which makes me amazing compared to most “experts” and most governments.

So if I have that, why ain’t I rich?

Well, because the best I can do with my abilities is put it out here, on this blog or instapundit, and hope someone with more ability takes it on.

What I lack is not the intellectual ability (though I lack knowledge in some technical fields) but the risk tolerance. I couldn’t do what Elon does for half the time and twice the money. I’d be such a nervous wreck if I tried to start a company that I’d never start.

I also lack the capacity for work. I can work 20 hours a day for a while but I’m old and the body gives after a while. Some of the “millionaires and billionaires” are people who cheerfully work for 20 hours a day into their eighties. (Our president might be one of them.)

But what about the millionaires and billionaires that “simply” invest? Well, as Dan has taken control of our retirement funds and works at it, I can tell you that’s still an additional full time job, on top of his full time job. But beyond that, even if it’s “all” people do, because it’s their money and they’re interested in not losing it, they are more likely to invest it in things that grow and improve.

And the miracle of free trade is that what does well (absent governmental distortion, of course. BUT that’s not free trade) are things people want, things that improve their lives. Which in turn, by degrees, no matter how small, makes the world richer and better.

Still, given all that, you’ll ask what we’d do with all the genuinely needy. The halting, the lame, the congenitally incapable of striving for themselves shall always be with us. Beyond that, even those of us who are strivers and always on the go do at times hit a patch where we need help. And at any rate, all of us at some point will hit a place where we permanently need help. As I’m finding after making like I was twenty yesterday, your body changes and won’t let you go go go like the energizer bunny anymore.

I propose that we foster a culture of private charity. To be fair, this already exists and always has throughout the history of mankind. From people like us who help those within our reach, to people who are much, much better off and start schools or create programs, or HELP people we’d never event think of helping.

And there’s always churches as every major religion has a requirement for charity.

To let government usurp the rightful function of what is the basic requirement of being human is bizarre, and is made more so by the government’s war on religious charity (like the nuns who look after the dying in NYC or the Little Sisters of the Poor.)

You can’t say “But what if people don’t help?” Because people have helped throughout all of the centuries of mankind’s existence. Sure, often not lavish, but as we’ve established, from our perspective they were ALL POOR. And still doing what they COULD.

That is an a-historical piece of nonsense that is designed to incentivize armed theft administered by statists.

I can only conclude that socialists are either egregiously indoctrinated into a-historical nonsense, or judging everyone by the size of their minuscule souls and capacity for disinterested kindness.

I’ll leave it to their consciences to determine which.

I keep running into the idiocy that I’ll call “therapeutic approaches to crime.” Or if you prefer how my kids portrayed this on the regular, with extreme sarcasm, it went something like this:

“Hey, where are my comic books?”

“Don’t know!”

“What do you mean don’t know? They’re in your room. You took them without asking.”

“It’s a fair cop, but society is to blame.”

Which was Monty Python, of course, but also what I keep running into from people with various letters after their name who come up with justifications in all seriousness.

You know, like the special flower on X who was sure we could get rid of crime if we just increased minimum wage to $30. Or the even more special flowers who think that paying everyone for breathing would get rid of crime. Or the socialists/communists who are convinced that you should abolish the police and have social workers intervene instead. Some of these are actually evil and don’t mean anything of that, except where they could make society worse to destroy everything so they can then install their dictatorship of choice. But some are just stupid, and truly believe this. Partly because — of course — this is indoctrinated into everyone in school. Which is why you find “serious” books about Jack the Ripper’s victims talking about how they were victims of society, really, not just of a deranged killer. (Yes, I know they were victims, not technically criminals. Kind of. More on that later.)

Part of it is years upon years of people being told anything bad anyone does is “society’s fault” for “driving them to it”, partly it’s all the stupid tales of how evil mean our ancestors were for executing people for “stealing a loaf of bread”, part is the remnants of the old bizarre early twentieth century idea that if only people were “educated” enough they’d stop committing crimes. And partly it’s the sludge of Freud working itself through the culture.

It’s hard to remember but in the mid to late twentieth century Freud was not only taken absolutely seriously, but also as the explanation for everything TM. Learned people and experts absolutely believed his crazy cakes theories. (Turns out Freud was a brilliant psychologist, who absolutely diagnosed the problems with ONE patient. The patient was himself.) So, you know, every geek who hadn’t yet got around to even THINKING of sex was known for an absolute fact to be a mass murderer just waiting for his repressions to burst forth and kill someone. It was a fact TM.

Because of this there are a lot of softheads running around absolutely convinced that if we just give the poor troubled criminals a bit more love and understanding, they’ll be completely law abiding.

After all, we’ve come a long way from the time they hanged people for stealing a loaf of bread, and to quote Obama’s speech writer: “The arrow of history bends towards mercy.” Which is exactly the sort of patented insanity smeared with bullshit we can expect from the SCOAMF.

Because history never came with an arrow, and mercy is a luxury good.

What do I mean by luxury good? Well, the reason people used to get hanged for stealing a loaf of bread is that for many families that daily loaf was all that stood between starvation and survival. A loaf of bread, in terms of worth, both in cost of materials and work and for that matter of ability of anyone to buy it was a much more expensive and vital thing than it is to us.

The baker who set up a hue and cry when his loaf was pinched was not the evil man willing to send the poor orphan to the gallows for so little. It was because the money from that loaf was desperately needed by his own family.

Now, Sarah, the loaf of bread thing is probably just an exaggeration of silly Victorian writers. Perhaps. But you find penalties for things that are almost as silly. To us. People hanged for stealing a few shillings, or a cheap piece of jewelry, or perhaps a length of fabric. Or other equally harsh penalties.

Look, what you have to understand is that we’re unimaginably rich when compared to most human beings throughout most of history that we don’t sweat the small stuff. Until someone impinges on our ability to survive (and it takes a lot), we’re willing to let it ride and to try things that anyone with two grams of sense would know wouldn’t work, or only work in very rare cases.

But throughout most of history what criminals took was normal people’s ability to survive, and it was trivially easy. Because people lived close to the knife’s edge. So they couldn’t afford romantic ideas such as that someone became a murderer because his mom refused to buy him a teddy bear when he was 3. (Or gave him a sexy teddy bear when he was three.) What they could do is deal swift justice on those who impinged on their ability to survive. (And sometimes yes mistaken justice, and mob justice. Because humans. Scared humans.)

It wasn’t until the Victorian age that it became fashionable to feel sorry for the poor criminals and talk about how they couldn’t help themselves.

Which brings us right around to the victims of Jack the Ripper. Who were of course victims, and no one deserves to die that way. BUT on the other hand, most of them were petty criminals. “Sex workers” then and now inhabit a half world, where other crimes happen, and most of these women were petty thieves as well as prostitutes. But more importantly, most of them existed in that space where criminal and victim flow into each other. They might or might not have ever turned truly criminal, but they lived on the petty scale of not having honest work, prostituting themselves, drinking themselves stupid, and seemingly being unable to pull up.

It is people like this that the good liberals of the early twentieth century envisioning rescuing with “education” as though by teaching people things they could stop them being alcoholics or having basic effed up personalities. And they’re the people that the late twentieth century people envisioned rescuing by asking about their mothers. And the people our blinkered little socialists think are only effed up because “capitalism is an unnatural order that causes mental illness.” (In the sense that it allows people to live long enough and eat enough to worry about mental illness, they might be right.) They have this entire mythology of a garden of Eden without G-d where everyone shared and shared alike and there was no private property before a mysterious fall (variously ascribed to agriculture or other nonsense) when suddenly capitalism entered the world and everyone became victims or victimizers. Look, it’s a stupid religion, but I don’t fault them for their beliefs. I fault them for trying to impose their nonsense on reality and making us worship their fucked up gods. If they contented themselves with living in the monastery of holy redistribution, snarling at evil capitalism at the proscribed hours of the day, I couldn’t care less.

But as is, they insist on bringing their fantasies into my reality. They claim that police is evil not because they use force, not because — on occasion — they’re less than honest, not because — on occasion — they don’t catch the right guy. No. Police are evil, in the dear socialists little minds because they enforce established rule and “capitalism.” So far they are telling the truth. They hate law enforcement because it keeps the established order going, with the dear socialists occupying the space between lunatics and academics (BIRM). Where we let them exist because they’re impotent and we’re merciful.

BUT what they want is to occupy the space where they command all force. Where they’re at the top and enforcing the rules. To get there, they need to encourage disorder and riot, and get normal people scared. (Also they believe if things get bad they’ll automagically be on top.)

This is why the socialists with power try to convince everyone else (And convince academics and the indoctrinated (again BIRM)) that what we should send to the scene of the crime is not a policeman but a social worker. Not because it will help anything, but because they know it won’t.

And that is a problem.

You see, we’re immensely rich. We can afford to let people steal any number of bread loaves. We can afford any amount of illusions, like that homeless addicts who threaten the public are “victims of society” who are “unhoused” and just need a place built at the expense of the public. We can afford insanity like USAID and its distributions of money for Peruvian trans operas or whatever the hell that was. We can even afford to pay people to riot in and burn our cities. And survive.

What we can’t afford are socialists and their bullshit.

Because what they’re threatening is the idea of private property and the ability to keep that which you’ve wrested from the Earth by the sweat of your brow.

And if we lose that, as a society, we’ll be back to being so poor we have to hang the urchin that steals the loaf of bread, because that loaf of bread is the margin between survival and not.

Coddling criminals is a stupid indulgence. Coddling socialists is a potentially life-threatening one.

It’s too expensive. We can’t afford it.

Specifically the mistakes were made by me. It was one, and fairly boneheaded. I knew what today would be, and I should have traded days with my assistant, instead of being blithely convinced that I could do what I needed to in between two fairly lengthy appointments.

I was wrong. Also dumb. In my defense, I have been up since six, so we could make it to appointment in time.

First, do not be alarmed, they were NOT medical, but financial/money appointments. Also don’t be alarmed on that, though I might still be in moderate pain from it, but that’s because I’m what’s the technical term… oh, frugal. Or if you prefer a skinflint. (Look, I married a man from Connecticut. After a while these things transfer.)

In the approximately fifteen minutes between appointments I might have ruined the marbelizing on the bedside table I’ve been working on for two weeks. Okay, hopefully not, but there’s a big “hopefully” in there. Look, it’s too hot to be working outside (in a tent) with glazes, and I know that, but I had a visit from the good idea fairy. It was the imp of stupidity instead, and I should have known that.

Dan says we need to get done with all this other stuff because I haven’t been writing fiction for a while and I’m starting to act peculiar. The glaze thing was a symptom of that. “I can’t afford not to write” is the thing.

To compensate you for blowing today (Unintentionally) I’ll try to blog tomorrow.

And now I’ve been pinned down by the Muse, which you’d think would mean I was going to write, but it’s the other muse. This one.

Look, I can’t argue with her, so I’m going to nap, then HOPEFULLY work.

Posts will be late this week. This is because we have early morning appointments every single day, and I can’t stay up late as usual to write the posts, or I’ll never be able to get my behind off the bed at six. (Which is needed for the entire morning duty list, including feeding cats, before I leave the house at seven thirty or so.)

So, indulge me, okay? Just this week.

I’ve been reading a series of mysteries set in WWI which has been fine, except for a creeping realization that no one — not a single person — in that series is a decent human being. Momentarily, in the last book, I thought we’d found a woman who wouldn’t become an adulterous doxy at a nod and a wink. Until we find out this is because she’s actually a spy playing a part.

Meanwhile we’re supposed to believe that the main characters have these wonderful families and are honest and straight as an arrow, and you tilt your head sideways. Because by the third book you know they can’t be. The mind that conceived that universe cannot possibly believe in fidelity.

The problem is that this is more or less the default of popular entertainment. I don’t mean just infidelity. If that were all, we’d still be in relatively good shape, despite it being fairly horrifying. It’s everything else.

Dan watches a lot of stuff, and I kind of sit here on the sofa and blog and look at it now and then, and it’s like there isn’t a single honest or truthful or — worse– truly kind character. Even the main characters tend to be “practical” i.e. they don’t actually care, it’s just convenient.

It’s gotten to the point that if I’m reading something — oh, I don’t mean (by and large, though even there at times!) regency romances, or cozy mysteries, or sf — something historical, or something that has pretensions to being a little more intellectual; or if Dan is watching practically anything, if a character does something kind or appears to be an admirable person, I start to expect the big reversal.

Because there is always, lurking in there, somewhere, the manic rictus of “gotcha” or what I call the clever-fool bait and switch.

Look, hypocrisy exists. Adultery exists. Evil exists.

No one who has read my books can possibly imagine that I don’t think those exist.

It’s just that even in the worst societies, alongside them, there is heroism, bravery, kindness. And there are genuinely good people. I’ve met a lot of them. A lot of them have honored me with their friendship. One married me.

Look, I’m not calling for writing polyanna bright and shiny stuff. Actually I’m not calling for writing anything. I do that over at Mad Genius Club on the regular, but this is more a READER’s blog. And a thinkers.

What am I calling for then?

Well, I know how this trend started. If you’re used to stories going a certain way, the first time you subvert it, it’s a shock to the system and the person is likely to become famous. And the book too.

But at this point, encountering a decent person or an honest relationship is the shock to the system. I’m absolutely convinced that Friends became the mega success it was because they were…. friends. Not wonderful, not perfect — they were all sitcom characters — but they were and more or less remained friends throughout the whole thing. And also by and large (look, TV needs characteristics exaggerated. If those people existed, they’d all be in the loony bin) normal people, just trying the best they could.

The problem I’ve found, reading that series, otherwise well written, etc, is that it leaves a patina on your perception of the world. You start looking around at normal families and wondering who’s cheating on whom. I imagine if that’s all I saw and read all the time — I control the intake as it were — I’d become a lot more doomery and less likely to look at the future with hope.

One of the things that the world cup visitors kept saying was how optimistic, how confident Americans are. You know why? Because over there the darkness really is pervasive over everything. Europe takes itself a lot more seriously, and even the books they import from here are the ones from major imprints, by and large.

They live on a steady diet of doom gloom, no one is clean, no one is good. Of course it starts to reflect in the lives they live.

Honestly if I thought the would be oligarchs were half a turn smarter, I’d think they’d encouraged that kind of entertainment in order to rule over the dispirited populace.

It has become a funny joke for my fans who attend Liberty Con that I’m put on the dystopia panel. Yes, it depends on how you define “dystopia.” I like Black Tide well enough to have written now… four? five? short stories in the anthologies (the latest, whenever that comes out, has serious theological implications. Probably.) I like it because even though it’s post apocalyptic it’s a world where people are striving back. Striving back very hard, in fact.

And a lot of post apocalyptic stuff is like that. But not all. Perhaps not a majority. Either that or I’m seriously unlucky in the ones I first picked up which were reveling in the fall of humans and their civilization. And that makes me foam at the mouth. For that matter the “inevitability” of doom gloom, the end is coming soon makes me foam at the mouth. (Hence why you reprobates enjoy that panel so much. Because I TRY to be good but at some point it always ends up with me rolling up my sleeves, turning the Heinlein picture to the wall, and telling the truth in social situations.)

But the reason it annoys me so much is not (just) that I’m a depressive who carefully manages her interior balance and who thinks marketing doom is toxic, if not immediately then over time. No. The reason it drives me nuts is because it’s not logical.

It’s that whole “It’s too perfect.” Almost every history of “this is how civilization falls” requires you to swallow more coincidences and miracles than a rags to riches story. It’s too perfect, too constructed, and the good guys just disappear. The resourceful guys just aren’t there. Any luck is bad. And we’re not even in Russia!

As I said, I don’t expect stories to be all perfect and sweet and everything goes well. That’s not a story. (Though mind you in romances, everyone can be well intentioned and still screw up big time. In real life too.) But neither is it a story that everything is dingy and evil and no one can be trusted. It’s just an endless series of getting punched in the gut. And eventually you’re going to decide not to pick up a book by that person again. (And that’s not counting the unsubtle preaching.)

We shouldn’t settle for it. Now big publishing, and soon big Hollywood, doesn’t have all the control. We should seek out and actively promote and reward those authors who write books that make sense. Books that have, yes, villains, but also heroes. Evil, sure, but also good.

Because we’re not — thank heavens — communists. We’re not all dressed in the same dingy clothes with the same regulation stains.

Someone — P. J. O’Rourke? — said communist countries were landscapes bleached of color. I knew this just from footage from abroad, not to mention my parents’ tour of the East shorty after I got married. (To her dying day, my mom could do a skip on command, impromptu, which we will call “So many turnips.”)

I just realized while writing this that as the left took over the entertainment establishment they did the exact same thing to it.

I call it grey goo, and a lot of it, but even books that are readable and have characters still smear everyone in grey because in their minds good just isn’t realistic.

Well, I’m here to tell you it is. People still run into burning buildings to save strangers. People still try to protect innocents. And let’s not forget some years ago, in some Muslim hell hole, when the populace was getting ready to stone a woman who had been divorced/unmarried four years and turned up pregnant, even there her ex-husband came out of the wood work and said the baby was obviously his. And when they told him that was impossible, he brought up the sura in the Koran that says pregnancy can take up to four years. And rode away happily with the re-wived woman and the kid he’d adopted in the womb.

Was that man perfect? I doubt it. The culture wouldn’t allow it. And of course, because you’ve read and watched all the bilge they feed us, you’re now thinking he had a nefarious plan.

Well, maybe he did. Of course. It’s always possible. But it’s just as possible he was a decent human being who didn’t want his ex stoned to death for a peccadillo (or perhaps even for being raped). Isn’t it? Well, of course it is. Because decent people exist even in cultures where everything militates against their being any decency. Humans are tricksy that way. They’re not all one thing.

And yes, yes, if you write, you should beware the temptation to make everyone dingy.

And if you “just” read you should demand entertainment that gives you heroes as well as villains. Because it’s not a coincidence that as this type of dingy “entertainment” grew and took over everything so did the consumption of psychiatric drugs.

Demand entertainment that has light and dark, not just grey.

Stand for nothing less. The sanity you save might be your own.