Still here, and rocking you into your new Build Under, Build Over, Be Around, keep chill, check your ammo and count your canned!
Once, I woke up in the middle of a hurricane, (Hugo, in Charlotte, NC) looked out the bedroom window and a tornado was crossing our backyard. I thought “I’m dead” and went back to bed and turned on the radio. This came on. I fell asleep to it. I didn’t die. And neither will we:
And from exile with love and longing and loss…
For all of you (and sorry for using my clanker stuff… but you get the point):
All right. We had our various pity parties–or not–time to find our boots and lace them up again and get back to work.
Now, there is no easy route. There is no Great Leader who will wave his magic wand and make everything right. There’s no Chosen One who will assemble his followers and fix the world. It’s a lovely trope in fiction. In reality, that isn’t how it works. Never has been. Fixing anything is messy and it’s a group project, and we all hate group projects. (And I’d wager that every one of us has ended up doing everyone else’s work at least once.)
On the bright side, though, it’s a project that breaks up in to small bits really well, and your bit can succeed without relying on everyone else’s bit being done correctly. You can make real progress.
On the down side, you will get attacked. For those still raising children, or not financially independent, you need to be more cautious. (I’ve watched the attacks happen to a local friend of mine running for local office. Relentless, and at least one went viral nationwide, which didn’t actually fix the slander.)
Snelson had some great suggestions in the comments yesterday. If what he’s doing is something you can do, go forth and do. If you can show up to local party meetings–and I don’t care which party–and get involved, annoy people, keep them on track, get them off track, go do that. If you can run for a down ballot office, my hat’s off to you, and please be braced for impact.
If you can copy HSLDA’s tactics for your local city council, or your state legislature, or your school board, and run a news list, and tell everyone who really cares about issue XYZ when they should show up, call, email, write, about that issue, do that. I mean, if you can find a passion for . . . deregulating food from home kitchens, get a group of people together who care about that issue. Or for allowing hens in city limits–you can definitely get a list for that. Or for improving county election security. Or, there’s a nascent movement I spotted for, how was that phrased, “The other twenty-nine kids’ right to learn” about de-mainstreaming disruptive children. That’d be a good issue to be involved with.
If you have the pocket books to hire the lawyers and sue, and you find standing, go you forth and do just that. I suspect that certain big figures from the MAGA movement have attorneys combing everything today.
If all of that’s too public, I want you to think of whisper campaigns. Not actually whispering–that would defeat the purpose. Not shouting either, that’s rude. But comments that seed doubt. “Funny how everything that passed and everyone who won in our state is something China cares about, isn’t it?” “I don’t know anyone who voted for X, do you? Do you know why they did?” “Why hasn’t that guy resigned from his megachurch position? Is he a Christian Nationalist?” You’re just asking questions. Totally reasonable questions. Look at the person, or the issue, find what the other side would just ask questions about if they weren’t in favor of, and ask those questions. That’s how that game works. I’ve had good luck with persuading perfectly normal Democrats against mail-in ballots before by asking why abusive spouses should get to vote their victims’ ballots. “I mean, if he’ll hit her for cooking his steak wrong, then he’ll definitely force her to vote the way he wants.”
Now for your own family, I want you to start thinking practically. We’re all (almost) preppers here anyway, right? I think this is the biggest conglomeration of “Actually this is how to survive a week long power outage” people that isn’t a dedicated prepper website. So make sure that’s in order. Make sure you have what you need if your bank account gets hung up for a couple days-we had an internet outage here a couple years ago that shut down all the banking in town, my credit union stayed open on the honor system but most simply closed doors, only stores that could deal in cash and checks and had cashiers who could do math stayed open. Make sure you have what you need if your power goes out–we know corrupt government is associated with lack of basic services–see South Africa for details. Make sure if the garbage trucks don’t come for a month you have a plan so you don’t get rats. Not apocalypse, just . . . lack of services on schedule. My in-laws get city water only occasionally, so they and all their neighbors yell to each other when the water comes on and fill all their storage containers. Basic big city third world stuff. Charge your phone battery and your backup battery when there is power. Not Mad Max, Kinshasa on a Tuesday or Johannesburg on a Wednesday. If you normally rely on a big freezer, be prepared to cook and can without power if you don’t have backup power for it.
Make yourself a network of people. Who can come over with a chainsaw if there’s a tree down in your yard? Who can you go over to with a chainsaw if there’s a tree down in his yard? Networks are vitally important when you’re in a low-trust situation. You have to know who will help and who will steal. You need to know who will give you a reference to a real roofing company. You need to give references to your mechanic, your roofer, your driveway paver, and you need to give business to your network’s references. Don’t hire based on “I did an online search and got quotes.” Hire on “I know a guy.” Not least because the fall-out of failing as a “known guy” is no more jobs, not dissolving the company and starting a new one. This is not the American norm, but it is the way most of the world gets people who do things. And our unassimilated immigrants are doing just that–giving work exclusively to people in their trust network, while we’re . . . not.
Yes, this means you-YOU!-have to talk to actual human beings.
We didn’t pick this, but we’re here.
There’s no man coming on a white horse to save you. But you don’t need one of those, anyway. Get your saddle on your own horse and ride.
For two weeks now I’ve been driving my family and my close in fan group insane with “They’re going to steal the election. I can see all the battle space preparation signs.” And them telling me I was insane.
After last night, I don’t think a lot of them speak to me.
And yet–
“But Sarah, the right lost fair and square!” “The people want Islamic socialism!”
Look, the numbers are — on the face of them — bloody unbelievable. The democrats had presidential-turn-out-or-better, suddenly, in a mid-term. Which, given how many of the voters were deported– Never mind. Not enough, probably, to make a big difference.
But what we saw at the polls heralds the type of sea change that goes “everyone hates the president”. And… I’m not seeing it?
Sure maybe in some super-blue enclaves this is obvious and in your face, but… even so. Opposition that strong shows. Where is their viral “Let’s go Brandon!” moment? Where is their run away success fictional series where the good guys win? Where are their massive demonstrations saying “the king is a fink?” The No Kings movement had to use photos from a year ago or two years ago. Because they couldn’t even commandeer their usual 12 people on respirators in a corner.
You know what else a big sea change movement of this kind doesn’t do? Steal signs. Across the country there was an epidemic of leftists stealing signs. Not one or two, not their petty, usual vandalism, but “I can’t keep a sign for my guy up, because it gets stolen.” That’s… battle space preparation. Not for a fair vote, but for fraud.
You know what else is funny? Well. A lot of things. But one of them that is clearly, blatantly, obviously funny is that the Democrats outperformed the polls.
“But Sarah, Republicans outperform the polls all the time.” Yes, but that’s like me saying “There is a flock of turkeys flying north” and you saying “So, geese do that all the time.”
The culture we live in, Democrats announce their preference loudly. Hell, they’ll run you down on the street to tell you what they think. They will not be phone shy. Ever. And all the polls are skewed left anyway, if you look at the internals.
Another weird thing: This time the cities reported first. Normally they report last to account for how many votes they needed. Not last night, no siree bob! They reported first. Must be because there’s no fraud in the cities any longer. Stop laughing.
“But Sarah, where’s the proof?”
And there you have me. DataRepublican exposed their talk of color revolution. Of what they’d do to secure the gains if the President tried to call them out on it. How they’d expose him as a tyrant.
What does that hinge on? No PROOF of the steal. Or no easily provable proof. Because if we can point at it and say “but they obviously stole it, this way” then the color revolution fails.
I don’t know how you voted. I mean, the mechanics of it. I voted in paper. I was such a small minority that the only wait in our polling place was for the machines. No wait at all for paper. And until five minutes ago (It’s five am, btw) I was patting myself on the back over it.
I filled a ballot, then I approached a machine. A nice poll worker helped me put it in the machine, the ballot was pulled in, and the screen lit up “Your vote has been counted!”
Very nice. Who was my vote counted for, precisely? It can’t tell me, of course, the nice poll worker would see it! And besides the ballot is right there! They can count it again. (I presume.) Sure. BUT I’m NOT THERE TO WATCH IT COUNTED. … and most people voted by machine.
You know the rule, don’t you “Don’t trust your vote to anything you wouldn’t trust your cash?”
Let me know when you’d be happy and excited if your bank account had no way to audit your deposits and withdrawals. I know I’d practically pee myself with happiness! Who wouldn’t? I put a thousand dollar check, the ATM flashes “Your deposit has been accepted” and then…
Look, I’m increasingly looking askance at AMAZON because I hadn’t looked closely at what one of my releases was doing in years, but when I looked at No Man’s Land — I also had never had an indie release that sold numbers worth watching like a hawk, to be honest — anyway, I saw it do impossible things. Like my sales numbers went backward without returns. That was… special. More than once. And I’m looking askance at it, because “what’s my control?” and “What’s my recourse?” And in both cases the answer is “none.”
Now look at your voting apparatus which just did a … if not impossible truly bloody unlikely thing. What is your control? And what is your recourse?
Yeah, yeah, enclaves of foreign workers in Texas and Islamics in Michigan and…. Are you for real? In two years? It changed that much in two years?
No bloody way. What we just saw was expert fraud preparation and then the pay off.
There AREN’T any organic, on the ground signs for this shift. And suddenly dems are poll shy? People. These critters haven’t been shy about their idiotic opinions since they emerged screaming “Marx” from their birthing person’s wombs.
Yes, yes, a lot of their candidates were smooth articles, who practically claimed to be GOP. BUT Talarico? The homunculus? Like Beto but gayer? Was that really what Texas was waiting for? And across the board, too? Not just the big profile campaign?
One thing I’ll tell you is that locally, they stopped handing out the little slip of paper that you had to hand back to show how many people voted. You see, it had been badly wrong in 20, so… People, ah ah, just forgot to hand it in. But it worked in 24. And now it was gone, without a blink.
It stinks. To high heavens it stinks. Before you start ripping into your fellow citizens, look around. The reason you’re not sleeping (Ah!) or beating your head against the wall is that none of it makes sense. A friend last night said “AI could make the hack into the voting machines smooth, without sudden hockey sticks.” But of course, that’s nonsense. These systems that are all connected to the internet are as secure as big, commercial refrigeration systems, after all. A hack would be preventable, obvious. And it’s not like, oh, open AI or Anthropic have a vested interest in getting someone in who will destroy grok! Or in getting idiots in who will “regulate AI.” Not a chance.
It’s a black box. Your vote goes in. Trust me, bro! comes out. And you trust it. Of course.
Oh, you don’t? Well, what are you going to do about it? In 2020 with the fraud blatant, in front of our eyes and in front of G-d and everybody, we couldn’t convince the vast majority that we’d been color-revolutioned. Now? Now with this smooth operation? Are you kidding me? A quarter of you are in a full out tantrum and saying I’m making up shit.
I’m not making up shit. Our election systems have gone from wobbly to fully mythomaniacal. And you know what is a bad sign? A bad sign is DataRepublican talking about ways to power around the vote system and the elected rep system. And one of the reasons it’s a ridiculously bad sign is that those don’t work. Not really.
Oh, yes, you should be fully ungovernable and make it as hard as possible for them to do onto you. No one is asking you to be good Germans.
BUT– Look, it’s obvious the left got an infusion of cash and expertise. Looks at Europe. Looks at Brazil. Hell, maybe even Israel, though every politician there is so bad one can come up with excuses. But then one can come up with excuses everywhere.
For something like sixteen years this depressive has been telling you to have hope; this hothead has been saying “don’t go hot.”
Now the ballot box has failed us. Conclusively.
Yes, I just heard, across the internet, as a hundred thousand of you dragged the ammo box across the floor.
For years now, I’ve told you “When it’s time, I’ll tell you.”
Is it time?
Not yet. Don’t stomp your foot. It’s unbecoming for a fully grown ungovernable American. I didn’t tell you never. And no, I won’t keep saying “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
I’m not even saying “trust the plan.” If you remember in 2020 I was the one who never trusted the plan. I was beating myself like a fly in a tarbox because I didn’t trust the plan.
I’m saying take a deep breath. Go back to bed. Sleep. Eat. Bide your time. They’re expecting resistance right now. They’re prepared right now.
What’s more, maybe some portion of the DOJ isn’t entirely taken over by the deep state. (I know. I’m so funny!) And they were supposedly ready for this, right?
Give it a month. Give it at least a month See what happens. A month isn’t so much, is it? Put that ammo box back under the sofa. And the bed. And in the closet. And — (Look, guys, someone brought her dowry in ammo in my family, and I don’t think the rest of you are so different.) — don’t forget where it is.
The program is subject to change depending on what happens. Keep your eyes peeled. (The man with an overcoat is an enemy.) And I’m praying really hard that a miracle occurs and we don’t have to shoot ourselves out of this. Right now, the most dangerous move is the premature one. Make sure you’re not getting in the way of something that obviates your need to move. The next most dangerous move is trusting the guy who’ll drive you to the criming. And the person saying you need to go hot right this minute, and they have everything to help you do so. Don’t do any of that.
I’m begging you with tears in my eyes, don’t do the dangerous. In fact, don’t do anything right now. Isn’t there a rifle — or a dozen of them — you want to clean? And you know that the price of ammo is going to go up. And wasn’t there some ruling recently making body armor legal for civilians? Go shopping this week. Figure out the money.
Do all of that. I half joke about “sell your cloak and buy a helicopter” but metaphorically speaking consider it.
Also check your canned. Check your water storage. Make sure you have the right meds stocked up. Take your pets to get their vaccines you’ve been putting off. That surgery? If you can have it done asap and be okay in a month, now is a good time. Take out cash. Better yet, buy silver, both coin and jewelry. (Gold is for the big things. How many houses do you plan on buying? Cars?) Make sure you have clothing for winter, and back up means of heating. And a good first aid kit. And make sure your family has a rendez vous in case the house is not there. Or not reachable. A bolthole might also be a good idea, if achievable. (These days, it might be hard.)
Don’t go off half cocked. And give it time. Who knows? Maybe the pig will sing. I’ll grant you it’s unlikely, but G-d looks after fools, drunkards and the United States of America. Looks up at ceiling fan: Now would be good, Lord.
You feel you just were massively cheated because — signs are — you probably were. Almost certainly. All I’m seeing is perception management and a number that defies even the perceptions.
Take a deep breath. This is not your sign. But it’s closer to your sign than it’s been in almost two decades.
G-d have mercy on us all. But in the end, we win they lose. There is no other option. Because ours is the only hope for mankind.
Be not afraid. Deep breaths. Plan, plan, plan. No, plan more than that. And give it time for a miracle first.
Stay frosty. Stay ungovernable. Stay American. Don’t give them an excuse to enact the second half of the coup.
Go count the canned again. Contemplate what we’ll lose forever if we have to act. (All I wanted to do was to write my little stories in peace and make enough to live on. And to have children and grandchildren, fat babies to hold and sing to. That’s all I ever wanted.)
Take a deep breath. Go to sleep. Give it at least a month.
I actually doubt it will hold that long. Gut feeling is it won’t. Not every one reads ATH. Not every one will go count the canned and go back to sleep. Not everyone will give it a month. And some will go off half cocked. I suspect some are being wound up to do so even as we speak. And we can’t control them.
So be prepared for that too. For when the sea tosses you and it’s all you can do to keep your head above water. That’s where your preparation comes in.
G-d have mercy on us all.
Your lives, your fortune, your sacred honor. Did you think it would be easy? Did you think it was a game?
First of all go vote. We’re going as soon as we get up and I drink enough coffee to be functional, because we’re getting reports of lines. Maybe tomorrow will be the exception to that, but hopefully it won’t.
Vote to give us a chance to get better representatives. Vote to give us a chance to escape what’s happening in Europe.
I do believe we’ll survive, anyway, but on the way to survival there is a never end of pain we’ll be inviting if we let the bastards have even one house. Go vote. Vote against socialism. Vote against subjection. Vote so blogs like this can continue to exist.
And speaking of what’s happening in Europe, yesterday in my close-in group (The Chinchilla of Hope gang) someone asked why the store shelves are bare of essentials like toilet paper. We quickly determined this is country wide, so it’s not a fear of storms.
I don’t think it will move this fast here. For one the votes won’t be tallied by tomorrow night.
BUT Bill Reader in a rare phone call a couple of days ago told me that he expected things to go hot almost immediately. That win or lose (please let them lose) the left is going to go hot ASAP. … well, even if they win (particularly if they win) it wouldn’t be the first time that they took this as the go signal. It wouldn’t be the first country either. And if they go hot here it’s probably the sign for the world to go hot-ter which would explain the “warnings”.
So– On your way back from voting, go see if you can get whatever you need to round up your supplies. And yes, I am very much including ammo. And axes. you can never have too many axes. (Okay, fine, I can never have too many axes.)
Go forth. May the Lord bless you and keep you, may he may His face to shine upon you and give you peace. (And strength.)
And as always, keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
I have bad news: This is not going to talk about the Heinlein novel. Yes, I will resume my reviews, soon-ish. Right now the ETA for this place unpacked is “before New Years” mostly because novel keeps pulling me away from the packing (Weird that.) So the reviews might not resume before that, but they will review. Besides, me, reviewing Heinlein amounts to “Squee, squee, squee!” and you’d all be reaching for your adjustment knob and this blog ain’t got one.
The further bad news is that I’m going to inflict Slopcore on you, which is apparently the term for generated music with this kind of “catchy” non demanding tune and this figure. Before I do, it’s okay if you don’t watch it. The story is ten bad ideas, five really inadvisable decisions, and a strong burning core of hope all rolled into one. From further videos, I suspect the people producing this channel are Libertarian Socialists, which are weirder than anything the founders of Elly (in No Man’s Land) cobbled together. Fortunately it’s an ideological chimera, not a biological one. Unfortunately, it can only live in a world where the laws of economics have stopped applying. And since the laws of economics are tied to basic humanity, getting there — as for all socialism — would imply exterminating humanity. (And if you just said “Oh, that’s why!” Yep. That’s why the green everything, the purposeful immiseration, the loathing of mere humanity. For Socialism to live, humanity must die.)
Anyway all the same, the slopcore is catchy and there’s something there, which I will explain. (Beyond and beside the stupidity.)
The stupidity is obvious. It starts with “voted to share what the robots made” — economy doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that — UBI is second only in stupidity to the idea you can take billionaires’ wealth and make everyone rich forever. If you have UBI in some amount, then every price immediately goes up by the measure of the UBI. Also, for the love of screaming Bob, robots will belong to real, live people ( probably a lot of them retirees counting on their funds to live.) They will need maintenance and replacement. Nationalizing robots is the stupidest thing imaginable. Supporting people without work is the stupidest thing imaginable. There’s a reason the scions of very wealthy families become Hunter Biden. Man — and woman, and those who looked in their pants before going on — was made to strive. Remove the striving, and it all collapses, everything that makes us human. Which is one of the fundamental mistakes of socialism. Giving people things doesn’t make them happy with those things as it does earning them. And the ultimate penalty of socialism is the loss of the will to live. It manifests first with stopping births. Then killing the elderly in the name of compassion. Well before people are being supported in absolute comfort.
It seemed to me we didn’t need the socialist experiment, frankly. We already knew what happened to retirees who had nothing to do, no drive. And we knew what happened to very rich kids. But did anyone ask me? No. Partly because I hadn’t been born yet, which seems to me like a poor excuse.
Anyway, I did not miss that this is two generations of single mothers. Look, I’m also not kicking too hard at that, because there is such a thing as clean storytelling, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a guy there for the birth scene and mention dad lost his job too. Hey, maybe mom and dad have different jobs.
The core of hope that makes this story cheery despite the galoomphing stupid: The abundance it promises is real. Radical, soaked through, endless abundance. And that’s… well. That’s a tide that lifts all boats.
It won’t stop human civilization, though some people WILL fall by the wayside — look, it’s as easy to kill with joy as with grief, and who told you human evolution was done — but as with AI used properly, it will free those with the drive and the will to push on to do the things that matter.
Like this: Yes, a lot of jobs are going away with AI — and even more with robots, though if you tell me you don’t have a dream of a housekeeping robot (I’m going to name mine Jenkins, and if you get it, you get it. AND if I can make things work out as I want, this January you’ll understand why this is funny enough to laugh shooting coffee out of your nose. You’ll see.) you’re a rank liar. Science fiction people, I’ve found, writers and readers alike are lousy housekeepers. We spend too much time in our heads to do otherwise. I try to be the exception, but I’m losing that battle as I get older.
BUT as the Little Pickle said last night “Heaven’s sakes! There will be other jobs that appear. Jobs don’t go away without new ones being created.” Which means that if I die before there are grandkids old enough for me to yell economics at, they’ll still be fine.
Because she’s exactly right. If every job currently being done went away tomorrow morning, humanity would find new needs. If every dirty, dangerous outdoor job is done, men don’t become obsolete. They will find their danger and dirt exploring far flung worlds, designing and testing the machines to get us there… all of it.
And if every indoor, boring, repetitive job went away tomorrow, it doesn’t make women obsolete. They’ll find they can plan their household better, and have the androids execute it. People who had servants didn’t stop working at the household. (Well, some did… but… See evolutionary pressure below.)
To an extent we’re already there, already past that inflection point. No? Compared to even the nineteenth century we’re unimaginably rich. As a culture, sure, but even as a species. Do you know how our ancestors would have felt about “The only time there’s a famine is when we let ourselves be oppressed by horrible rulers?” Famine was the rule of human existence since an ape stood up, thought of the past and dreamed of the future. This is literally unimaginable for the generations of our forefathers who sleep in the dirt.
This shows in the small things too, everyday life. Cleaning, cooking, the most basic tasks of housekeeping for anyone not wishing to live in rank filth, are so ridiculously easy now. (And we still fall down, and yes, there are novels to write, and I’m going to blame those, okay?) And it keeps improving.
And yet, we’re busy. Busier than ever, at least some of us.
This is what I was saying, about evolutionary pressures. There already is an evolutionary pressure in place. Right now it’s a little mixed if I’m honest. Those who are given everything, have no ambition and are basically non-functional SEEM to have an evolutionary advantage. I maintain that’s illusory. Yes, they reproduce more, but the children live ephemeral lives and a lot of them die without reproducing. On the other hand, those with drive and purpose, who design and plan and build are suffering a different pressure: by the time we’re done training and establishing ourselves — unless you’re as crazy as Dan and I were and take the plunge early. Our infertility was the fault of my auto-immune, not of our waiting too long — we don’t have the ability to produce children. Which brings the spiraling population numbers into focus, of course.
Fortunately not every one of the purposeless produces children that likewise lack drive. And the ones who have drive are the most likely to survive.
Also, fortunately, this dream future of robots that seems actually within our reach, is going to lift the onerous cost of training and establishing oneself. Or it should. It should be easier than ever to plunge from late adolescence into comfortable, if now ridiculously prosperous (though maybe by OUR standards) adulthood, and children without a problem. (Either that or figure out how to extend fertility which, instinctively, seems to me will be the harder puzzle to crack. But maybe no. I’d like to say I’m here for it, but even in pie-in-the-sky scenario chances are low. I have, on the outside, if everything aligns, maybe 30 years, after all.)
What I think this … let’s call it radical abundance, will do is that we will have those who don’t want to do anything, if it’s not needed for them to survive. They will… wither away like retirees without a mission. Which means the children of those with drive and purpose will inherit the Earth. Yes, some of those, maybe most of those, will be purposeless and will also just wither. Look, the majority of humanity is designed to be lazy. That was the evolutionary pressure in pre-history. Man who hunted mammoth while mammoth was rotting at the camp, just starved and his whole tribe with him. Which means the “selection for drive” will refine over the next, oh, few thousand years. But that’s not our problem. It is simply what it is.
The point though is that this future gives humanity a chance at the stars, a chance at lives that transcend the everyday chores, the boring, all physical stuff, the fear of hunger, the fear of disease, and maybe if we’re very lucky the humiliating descent into senescence at the end of life. (I don’t expect, or want, to live forever, but the decline and loss of ability should be manageable, if we’re going to live lives even as long as we have now. It’s a pity to waste 1/3 of your life to diminishing ability.)
It will bring with a lot of new and fresh problems, yes, like: Yes, what about people who just want to sit and eat cake (or do drugs, or whatever) till they die? And what does marriage become in an age where you live a long time, vigorously? How many marriages survive? And what becomes of families when the longest time you’ll have with your children is with them as adults? (This we’re already facing.) And what about people too dumb for the new economy? (Ah! Caught you. That one is Bullshit. There will always be things people can do, at whatever level. No? look at history.) And what do we do when obviously stupid ideas seem to suddenly make sense? (Like this video. Chill, they still don’t.) And what do we do when we go beyond the need to write words? And– And we’ll burn those bridges when we reach them. But I’d rather be fighting in such a state of abundance that Humanity can’t starve if it tries than otherwise, okay.
This future of radical abundance hinges, to a great extent on how these elections go.
If you just snort giggled, don’t. I mean, I’m not stupid, and I think this future, this radical abundance, is inevitable. The question is… How far in the distant reaches of future time? Because it could be very far indeed.
Or it could be in the next 20 years, within our children’s lives. It is honestly, right now, so close we can touch it with our fingertips.
And yes, sure, your GOP congressman is a fiend, or if you live in Alaska, an idiot. And some of them are demonstrably in the pay of China.
But there are more people in the pay of China on the left. More importantly the left, elected mostly by fraud (trust me on this) doesn’t give a good damn for what you want. You have no pressure you can bring to bear on it. Look at NYC or Denver. Seriously. They don’t depend on voters, and can shit right on your wants and needs. And call you names on top of it.
However, if the left — let alone the red-green alliance — takes over, we’re done. The only question is for how long a count. AI will be regulated to a fare-thee-well, which means the current, impossible to monetize models will be the only ones, and it will quickly become a rich man’s toy. (I’d hate that, because it has become one of the best series-Bible keepers I’ve ever met. And instead of spending three days leafing through three ring binders to find a reference (I always sucked at wiki format) I can simply ask and be told. And verifying that is way easier than coming up with it fresh. Also, honestly, that frees more time to write. I need to experiment with publicity via AI too, because I sure can’t do it on my own.) Humanoid robots will come, but it will be to literally take your job. However, don’t worry little buddy, the government will create a job corps, digging and filling in ditches. (They never understood why this was idiotic. So they’ll do it again.)
These regimes collapse in about 70 years, but they either mutate into hardcore fascist (hi, China!) which is not an improvement or they leave an awful hangover for a long time.
That future we can ALMOST touch? Could be gone within a year, if we hand our legislature to people who are even more ignorant of economics than you average politician. (And that’s a lot.) It could stay gone until no one on Earth remembers our names, not even as a line in some record.
Arguably worse if the green part of that alliance takes hold. I am all for freedom of religion, but without a radical reformation to make it safe for the world, Islam will stop all progress cold. HARD. Because it’s a religion with a political component that is rigid and rigidly enforced, and which is attuned to the desert of Arabia circa the seventh century, countries that fall to it stop progressing in knowledge and civilization and often regress HARD.
Oh, the future will still come, the super-abundance that’s baked in in our tinkering genes. But that would be…. How does thousands of years sound to you? Because a lot of it will need to be re-invented. From first principles.
Yeah, I know. One of the lines the slopcore hit right was “the year when everyone was afraid of the future” and a lot of people are. It’s running too fast. It’s making the world too unstable. Hit a pause button!
As with puberty (sorry) there is no pause button. There is only something that will hurts seriously and has a small, outside chance of killing us prematurely.
I’m begging you with tears in my eyes. Do not try to hit the pause button. The future will hurt. But not as much as trying to stop it.
Go out and vote for your GOP crook as opposed to your DEM madman. It’s important. They’re all stupid and venal, but the GOP is slightly less so, because it still depends on getting out the vote and also because at its core it doesn’t hate America. Or humanity.
Vote for the crook. It’s important.
And maybe there will be time for the stars in the near future. And, yes, even time for love.
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
The hour is late. The bottle is low. The lightweights have gone home. What’s left is the stuff that burns going down & the stories nobody tells until everybody sober has left the room .
Eleven stories. Eleven wars. One question nobody wants answered.
A survey scout stranded on an ocean world follows something enormous through the water, and finds out whose nightmares he’s been having. Two British privates break through the wall of a trench in 1916 and find what’s been taking the bodies out of no man’s land. A Union major and his Confederate cousin stand back-to-back in New Mexico because the dead Comanche in the valley below don’t care which uniform you wore. A frozen squad at the Chosin Reservoir learns that the thing killing them can be hurt–by noise. A Navy senior chief sits in a courtroom that’s just been cleared of its jury, and finally tells someone what came out of the fog at 25 degrees north.
From the Western Front to Korea, from Katanga to the Bermuda Triangle, from a deployment gate cut into the earth at Oak Ridge to a Warsaw schoolhouse full of things that shouldn’t have a body, these are soldiers doing the job in front of them while the rules quietly stop applying.
Thirty years gone. He wasn’t supposed to come back. The mission wasn’t supposed to change.
A signal comes out of the Belt, and the first person to recognize it hasn’t been seen for thirty years.
Jack Merrill and Francene Tailer get the call on a Saturday — Dr. Lisa Chen wants to talk about that vacation they keep putting off. What she actually wants is to send them out as supernumeraries aboard the Kuiper Belt Explorer, approved, built, and crewed for a different mission entirely. Chen scraps that mission and re-targets the ship at the signal’s coordinates instead.
The crew gains one more member: a man Jack and Francene haven’t seen in thirty years. He’s been places, done things, kept up with things — and answered exactly none of the questions that mattered. Chen doesn’t know and doesn’t ask — she trusts.
Six weeks each way. Seven people aboard a ring ship, headed toward something that found them as much as they found it. Whatever is waiting at the end of the transit has had a long time to decide what it wants to say — and even longer to decide who it wants to say it to.
So what is weirdness? In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare’s tinkering with a pocket watch using butter and a butter-knife definitely qualifies. But so does tinkering with people, or being tinkered with by outside forces. Weirdness is the sense of just such tinkering, evil or benign, with the living, the dead, nature, time, or reality itself. And just as the March Hare’s results can be horrible (for the watch), or humorous (for us); so too can tinkering with any aspect of reality result in horror, humour, or, in the end, be just weirdness itself.
The following writers look beyond the normal, offering thirty-six stories of strange tinkerings with people and reality, all of which represent new trips down The Rabbit Hole: Wastella Amanda Parker, H. Donovan Lyón, James Rumpel, Kath Kilburn, Helen Speirs, Sarah Oechsle, Robert E. Stahl, Taylor Hagood, Nicholas Samuel Stember, Philip S. Bloch, Z. M. Renick, Selah Tay-Song, GD Deckard, Murray Eiland, Dana Hammer, E.J. LeRoy, James Carraghan, Gary Battershell, Daniel Mahoney, Phil Baringer, Iain McGrath, Alistair Blackledge, Kathy Liddle, Mark Keane, Sarah Busching, Bonnie Stanard, Molly Schulz Kelash, Gio Clairval, Kate LaDew, Robert Miller, Peter Mangiaracina, Adam Stone, Colleen Morrison, and Tom Wolosz
In 2024, civilization was consumed in the Rebirthing fires. Ninety years later, Gerti Alvarez just wanted to survive the impossible task she had been assigned. Instead, she finds a scarred girl, a repair team trying to hold their town together, and a mayor hiding more than political ambition.
Scorched Earth: Volume 1 is a gripping apocalyptic adventure about loyalty, survival, and the cost of doing what’s right
Every hero in this book is absolutely sure he’s got this.
He doesn’t. That’s the fun part.
Hold My Beer Heroes gathers ten comic stories about the overconfident, the underprepared, and the magnificently wrong, and the glorious moment each of them finds out. Curated by David Badurina, this anthology celebrates the oldest joke there is: the guy who says “watch this” right before everything catches fire. And then, somehow, wins anyway.
Inside you’ll find:
A would-be insurance fraudster whose PowerPoint has no slide for “we grabbed the wrong guy.”
A London art-crime inspector who calls himself The Fox and investigates like a wrecking ball in a borrowed tuxedo.
A park ranger who knows every inch of the backcountry and nothing whatsoever about crime scenes.
A farmer at war with a chicken-thieving fox and a plastic owl that refuses to stay where he puts it.
A weekend sword fighter who has never failed to call a clean hit, until he meets people who aren’t playing.
A washed-up musician in a zombie-overrun Bronx with four hours to throw his son the birthday party of the century.
A barbarian and a sorcerer banished to the worst hell imaginable: an outdoor jam-band festival that never ends.
A ship’s janitor, a sarcastic AI, and a mop he swears is a prophet, stranded on a planet built from the galaxy’s garbage.
A cocky boxer who takes an easy-money fight and finds out exactly who bought tickets.
An Australian monster hunter with twelve laminated documents and one very large problem in the lake.
Crime capers, monster hunts, space comedy, sword and sorcery, and a zombie apocalypse with a surprisingly good pizza place. No lectures. No hand-wringing. Just ten heroes who fail upward with enormous confidence, and the deep satisfaction of watching them get exactly what’s coming to them.
Grab a cold one. Somebody’s about to say “watch this.”
As Paris Burns and Europe Crumbles, A Warning to the United States…
New York is broken. Rats own the streets. Cops are just another licensed gang and the socialist mayor treats the city like occupied territory. A man can’t walk from the subway to his own deli without becoming a victim.
Thomas Goodman has had enough. When a knife-wielding thug comes into the shop, Goodman kills him in self-defense. It should have ended there. Instead activists, the media and the mayor’s machine decide a white deli owner who fights back is more useful as a racist murderer. The DA starts building a case. Goodman opens his mouth once on camera and tells the truth: what’s happening is not migration. It is a takeover. Islam is eating the city like a cancer.
Then they rape his woman and burn her face with sulfuric acid before they kill her. The mayor’s office wants to pin it on Goodman and ride the story to election day.
The mayor, activists, the media … they made one tragic miscalculation: Goodman is an ex-mobster who just wanted to be left alone. Instead of creating a patsy, they created a monster. A monster with a thirst for revenge.
New York Hellscape is a riveting new thriller by Kurt Kellen, and a horrifying look at America’s future.
He came south for justice. He found his blood instead.
Assistant District Attorney Raúl Rodriguez left Queens with a broken heart, a sharp legal mind, and zero patience for small-town Southern hospitality. All he wants in Vicksburg, Mississippi, is a quiet drink and a case worth winning.
What he gets is Thea Collins.
Blunt, brilliant, and allergic to small talk, Thea is a local private investigator who does astrophysics in a bar, insults people in a dozen languages, and keeps a crossbow handy for anyone who annoys her. She and her cousin Jimmy are also persons of interest in the disappearance of a mysterious doctor, a case that just landed on Raúl’s desk.
One night of conversation changes everything. Raúl starts seeing things: strange lights, shifting faces, crowns that shouldn’t be there. When he tries to break his oath to the court, his own throat closes and nearly kills him. Then Thea drags him home to meet the family, and he learns the truth no one ever told him.
He is Fae.
Not glitter and wishes, but the old blood of Arcadia, inherited from a grandmother who gave up eternity for love. Now Raúl is sworn to an ancient Earl and bound by oaths that can choke him and debts that must be repaid within a year and a day. He has to learn glamour, combat, and the laws of a hidden world from the two people who drive him craziest. The training is brutal. The nightmares are worse. And in one of them, he sees his own grave, dated just six weeks away.
Then Thea is found beaten and poisoned with cold iron, the one thing that can destroy a Fae’s very soul. Raúl and Jimmy are arrested for the attack. With Thea trapped in a coma and sending him cryptic visions, Raúl has to clear his name, outmaneuver a deputy with a grudge, bargain with a Fae secret-keeper whose price is steep, and accept help from the last allies anyone expected: a motorcycle club of werewolves.
The clock is ticking toward the date on that headstone. And the person who wants Thea dead has Raúl in their sights next.
Full of Southern heat and sharp humor, with a slow-burn romance and a fresh take on the Fae, **Blood of the Fae** is the first book in the Cycle of the Eternals, a sweeping urban fantasy saga that begins on the banks of the Mississippi and reaches all the way to the stars.
Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?
Rook Nine is being written off. To keep the Mars outpost breathing, a maintenance worker must turn damaged power lines, shrinking reserves, and a twenty-one-sol proof window into a case no corporate office can ignore. The Last Colony Builder is a tense, blue-collar science-fiction novel about survival, repair, and the people who decide a colony is more than an entry on a balance sheet.
Who are They? They are shadows flitting across the desert in the moonlight. They are things you see only from the corner of your eye. They have haunted the Earth for thousands of years, inspiring endless tales of terror; They are the reason human beings have always feared the night. Until now They have made only brief forays into our world, but They have changed their plans; They now want the Earth for themselves. Young Aleksei Arbatov has discovered Their existence; he knows Their plans. He, alone, must face Them, with only a single ally – an ally that might, in the end, actually prove to be one of Them…
In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can’t afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.
Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer — and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.
Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don’t hold together.
Two people, one deadly secret — and an enemy from beyond time and space.
A novel of the Grissom timeline.
Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.
A quiet maintenance man with dangerous reflexes. A brilliant botanist on the run. And a dead asteroid that is slowly waking up.
She knows him only as Lael and thinks him to be a grim, silent mechanic who pulled her out of a dying space station before it went dark. He claims he’s just trying to survive. But a simple maintenance worker doesn’t move like a shadow, track like a predator, or carry a sealed data drive taped to his soul.
The only name she’s willing to admit is Sanda, and she isn’t a helpless passenger. Fleeing across the sector, their only refuge is a massive, abandoned asteroid mine swallowed by cataclysm of unknown origins. Trapped together in the depths of space, Sanda begins to strip away his guarded walls, finding a man who would burn the galaxy to keep her safe.
Five years after he defeated a tong queen, and found a bride, and went back to chasing down cheating husbands and wives, New York City blue blood and private detective Clark Griswold is back on a case.
This time, the Russian Mafia is involved. And a general in the Russian Army, stationed in faraway Xinjiang Province in what used to be part of China. And a South Chinese army wanting to take that part back. With Americans sitting in between them, trying to broker peace.
And a dame. Because it’s always about a dame. And this time, Griswold and his wife Becca have no idea what they’re getting into when the particular dame in question is
The monster is the easy part. Ask the guy who has to move it.
Giant Killer Kaiju collects ten brand-new stories about the biggest things that ever walked, swam, burrowed, or flew, and the people who end up underneath them. Not generals. Not superheroes. A circus roustabout. A dam engineer on the night shift. A salvage crane operator with a lapsed software subscription. A sanitation director handed an 80,000-ton corpse and told to make it look orderly before the evening news.
Inside:
• A Depression-era circus where the star lizard has hit breeding age and the ringmaster won’t let him go.
• A Gulf Coast salvage lottery where the crew draws the worthless tail and finds something still alive inside.
• A Bolivian salt flat where one tourist’s souvenir turns a sightseeing bus into bait.
• A Roman fort on the northern frontier , sealed shut against something with wings wide as the sky.
• A Colorado railroad tunnel, 1880 , where the drill crew keeps calling something out of the canyon.
• A city clearing a dead kaiju off the courthouse steps , while cultists chant, funeral lobbyists circle, and the corpse keeps roaring.
Plus a monster’s-eye view of waking up in a world that got very small while it slept, a steampunk sea serpent that is not what it seems, a dam built over something that remembers, and a detective on a far colony world tracking a sea beast with a very specific craving.
Ten authors take you from Roman Britain to the 1880 American West, from steam-age France to the Antarctic ice, from a Texas refinery to a colony world with three moons. Some stories will make you laugh out loud. A couple will make you wince. One ends with a sanitation director quitting mid-disaster and getting hired back at triple rate before sunrise.
Some of these monsters get killed. Some get outsmarted. Some just want to go home.
Big monsters. Real people–Ten stories that earn their roar!
WINTER HAS FORCED THE RETREATING ARMY TO STOP. WHAT’S HUNTING THEM HASN’T.
The march west was supposed to end at the Cascadia Redoubt. Instead, the passes through the Rockies are buried under snow, and Mark Foley and the soldiers of Bravo Company are ordered south, to wait out the winter in the one place still holding out: Colorado Springs.
They arrive expecting reinforcement. They find a city bleeding out.
The 1st Infantry Division links up with the scattered remnants of III Corps, only to learn how bad things really are. Ammunition is running low. Food is running lower. The perimeter is held by exhausted survivors patched together from a dozen broken commands. And past the wire, in the snow and the dark, something is moving that none of them have ever seen, undead who seem to know exactly how thin their lines have become. Facing starvation, plummeting temperatures, and a threat built to destroy them, the soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division dig in for a fight they didn’t choose and can’t afford to lose.
Book 4 of The Line is the next brutal chapter in a war fought as much against the cold and the clock as against the thing in the dark.
So what is weirdness? In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare’s tinkering with a pocket watch using butter and a butter-knife definitely qualifies. But so does tinkering with people, or being tinkered with by outside forces. Weirdness is the sense of just such tinkering, evil or benign, with the living, the dead, nature, time, or reality itself. And just as the March Hare’s results can be horrible (for the watch), or humorous (for us); so too can tinkering with any aspect of reality result in horror, humour, or, in the end, be just weirdness itself.
The following writers look beyond the normal, offering thirty-six stories of strange tinkerings with people and reality, all of which represent new trips down The Rabbit Hole: Wastella Amanda Parker, H. Donovan Lyón, James Rumpel, Kath Kilburn, Helen Speirs, Sarah Oechsle, Robert E. Stahl, Taylor Hagood, Nicholas Samuel Stember, Philip S. Bloch, Z. M. Renick, Selah Tay-Song, GD Deckard, Murray Eiland, Dana Hammer, E.J. LeRoy, James Carraghan, Gary Battershell, Daniel Mahoney, Phil Baringer, Iain McGrath, Alistair Blackledge, Kathy Liddle, Mark Keane, Sarah Busching, Bonnie Stanard, Molly Schulz Kelash, Gio Clairval, Kate LaDew, Robert Miller, Peter Mangiaracina, Adam Stone, Colleen Morrison, and Tom Wolosz
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.
One of the young men in the family (pursuing hard science degree on the cheap, living at home) had the experience for the first time in his life of calling for a tow. I’m kind of amazed, given what he drives, that he hasn’t had to previously: mostly probably based on being cheap and sharing rides, someone else called the last several times. (The old beater decided that oil was better on the outside of the engine than inside. This is widely acknowledged as contrary to continued operation.)
Things you don’t know how to do til you do it.
We raised our kids pretty country. They all learned to shoot a gun, butcher small livestock and/or game, fish, cook, clean, garden . . . it’s how both of us grew up, on opposite sides of the world. A lot of people haven’t had the opportunity to have those experiences, to learn those skills, even poorly.
We could have a long discussion about what people should know how to do: Robert A. Heinlein put in Lazarus Long’s mouth the words “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” I suspect most of us are missing at least one off that list due to old injuries if nothing else.
But the bigger thing is that people don’t have a chance to try, and we live in a society that says “leave it to the experts” for most of those things, and makes it cheaper to have it done by someone else than to do it yourself. And for children, well, if you’re in class for seven to eight hours a day, followed by extracurriculars, no matter how good those extracurriculars are, you’re not going to have time to learn to do very many things. Especially if they are things that have a long lead time–you probably aren’t going to go down to the market and buy a live cockerel and take it home to butcher, at least, not in most of the USA today. You’ve got to buy a chick at the feed store and raise it for several months first. Which you do learn a good deal more from doing, but you’ve got to have the several months. Also most urban areas, I hear, frown on slaughtering in your front yard.
This is why we keep getting young folks who very much know things that just ain’t so. They know what they know from what they saw or heard, not from what they did, and they never were exposed to the actual things they’re hearing about or seeing at a nice, sterile, electronics mediated remove.
For us adults, there’s also not enough time in the day to do all the things. We might take a first aid class now and then, but we don’t practice the skills regularly. We might in theory know how to change oil but not have done it in the last four decades. It’s been a hot minute since I last messed with a spark plug, and I’d really rather pay someone to do that than try to figure out how the heck to get at them (I learned on a ’69 Chevy SUV, ok? It had a lot less stuff in the engine compartment).
The sum total of human knowledge is too great for one person to be able to even do it all as an amateur. If you tried, you’d never specialize enough in anything to make a living at it.
Let me encourage you to dust off an old skill or acquire a new one, though. It’s good for the brain, really, ask the neuroscientists, they get all enthusiastic. Several of my cello students took up music for exactly that reason. Maybe I’ll break out my spindle: I put it away when the first little someone figured out how to crawl and get into the wool, quite a while ago. It’s a nice, warm, indoors wintry sort of skill, and once upon a time I could even make even yarn. At this late date I’ll be starting over from vague memories and books. (Yes, I know there are you-tubes, no, my brain doesn’t work that way.)
What will you do?
Maybe don’t make it running a beater with the oil outside the engine, though? This one might get a touch pricey: we’ll find out next week if he pulled over fast enough or if we’re up for the learning experience of putting some other old beater’s engine into this old beater. It has been done before.
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about how we’re all “so divided” and we need to be in the center, and how America’s true political orientation is independent and how– BROTHER!
This was brought home — this was brought OFFICE — to me while I was at work two days ago, and Dan was listening to Joe Rogan. He often listens to podcasts while he’s working, because his work is numbers, so hearing words doesn’t disturb him. My work, unless I’m working on covers, well…. So normally I slap noise cancelling headphones on.
The headphones were out of charge, so covers it was, but after a while he told me he couldn’t listen because I kept arguing.
Look, Joe Rogan, normally, doesn’t disturb me that much. I’ll snort giggle at some of his stuff, but it rolls over me, and doesn’t take a bite…
But this… He was with Joe Manchin at some “independent” conference, and just about everything he said was distilled stupid. And everything Manchin said was self-serving pretending-to-be-stupid. And I was fit to be tied.
Now, I don’t do media critique, and Rogan is Rogan, or as someone put it a barbarian who evolved yesterday and came in search of fire and legends of other people. (Honestly, that’s half of his schtick.)
BUT this slotted into all the talk about how “we’re so divided” and “The biggest political affiliation is independent.”
Let’s dispose of that last one first: bullshit. People register as independent because the left are foaming-at-the-mouth rabid weasels who will cancel anyone they even SUSPECT of being on the other side. I was registered independent all the years that I was working for trad pub, because being found to be “one of those evil people on the right” would end my career, and baby needed shoes (and eventually college textbooks.) There are other reasons, but usually the strongest is “I’m on the right and I don’t want to be cancelled.” Very few independents are actually independent. Right now my husband is independent because he didn’t want to say GOP to the blue haired young lady registering him. (I OTOH did, and she said, “Oh, thank heavens. I wasn’t sure, coming from Colorado.” Which goes to show you.)
At any rate, is that everyone? Doubt it. You can be very embarrassed of associating with either party, without being a centrist or independent. Sometimes it’s all about which party you hate more when you vote, but you don’t want to say “I’m with them” because they’re a bunch of bozos, and you know it.
Second, even if “independent” were the biggest self-identification group, it doesn’t mean there’s a great hunger for the center or for reconciliation. Perhaps all the independents are people who want something else. Say, a true constitutionalist government, which, alas, isn’t on offer. It’s as likely as that they’re all “centrist” or that these “centrists” all agree on the same thing.
What made the program infuriating and brought out my political tourettes is that all the solutions they “offered” were bullshit that has been tried, a lot of which is responsible for turning California into a one-party rule, such as open primaries and first-past-the-post elections. Seriously. I could dissect the mechanism by which this “delivers us bound to our foes” but I don’t need to. Look over at California. Do you want that? No? Your ideas will get that. To pretend that this has never been tried is either dumb or malicious.
On the dumb side, Rogan was doing his caveman impression “Tell me about these things I never heard of!” But Manchin? Manchin is malicious. Why do I say that? Well, he pretended not to know why we stopped using coal for electricity generation. It’s apparently a deep mystery and not the green obsession of presidents he supported, like Obama. Bah. Yeah, he kind of distanced himself from the Democrats in the later Biden years, but not wanting to trans kids doesn’t make you a centrist. It makes you a moderately sane, non kinky human being, for crying in bed.
Then there is “term limits”. Term limits, in the year of our Lord 2026 when we know how deep and how evil the evil deep state is! For the love of little children and the apples they steal! No, seriously. Sure, let’s have an ever-rotating wheel of incumbents who don’t know what they’re doing so the deep state can march on unimpeded. Heck, the only reason we have presidential term limits is that evil bastard FDR whom Joe Manchin still adores.
And then came the, of course, Joe Manchin would like to be president. When Rogan asked about that, I could taste the hunger for power in the creature’s voice. (Waves arms.) GAH. I guess I hadn’t got that out of my system yet.
Do I like the two party system? Well. I’m not in love with it. On the other hand I experienced the “as many parties as want to be” system in Portugal and this is the problem: Honest human beings will divide into parties on the slightest excuse:
“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she is an adult, but no welfare.”
“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, but no welfare.”
“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, welfare for widows and orphans.”
“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, welfare for widows and orphans provided they’re legal residents.”
Etc. etc. You end up with fifty parties where the disagreement between them is very small. But you know who doesn’t divide that way? Socialists. Communists. I mean usually they divide from each other, though honestly, as with penguins, only they know the difference. (And no, it’s not the same as the theoretical difference. Crying out loud, I studied this in school. I know the text book definitions. BUT in practicality the only difference is the socialists going “I want that too, but slower so we don’t scare the rubes.” No? Well, ask yourself what the USSR stood for tovarish.) So in the end, the left wins. Because they’re not as worried about carefully defining anything, and they LIKE to march lockstep. (Also in their minds, when they win, it’s the other guys in the mass graves. Spoiler: it’s always them in the mass graves.)
Meanwhile the two party system has the drawback that any change — real change — is slow. Very slow. Because you have to take over one of the existing parties from within. This can be bad — we’re taking forever — but also, what? You want the DSA to take over the dems FASTER?
So do I like the two party system? As opposed to what? If the choice is cake or death, I’ll take cake, thank you, with chocolate sprinkles. But the choice is never between cake and death. It is at best between syphilis and gonorrhea, and you pick the one for which you have antibiotics handy.
And this is ultimately the issue. “Independent” isn’t a political movement because people who are “independent” are not a group. they don’t all agree on what they believe. They mostly aren’t sure which side will make them hold their nose LESS or, hear me out, they are on the right and afraid to declare it. And don’t underestimate the second group. For years, it’s been known if a public personality doesn’t ever mention politics? They’re on the right. Because only one side actually tries to punish your dissent. (Now this is known, so not speaking brings about retaliation, too. We’re almost a publish and be damned o’clock. I’m just glad I’m out of it.)
Second, “We’re all so divided.”
Yes. As opposed to? No seriously, think about it. We’ve always been divided. It’s just that while we were bound by mass media, which the left utterly controlled, people didn’t know that there were more dissidents from what appeared to be the only widespread opinion.
Even my priest at mass was lamenting, you can’t be in a hobby group without the hobby being political. Oh, yeah? And who made it so? I don’t mean the poor man, who is very young and seems to be unexamined college-left. I mean, the left has insisted that everything be political since I joined adult society, lo, over 40 years ago. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE NOW IS THAT WE’RE FIGHTING BACK.
I want to do this skit where people are having dinner while using other people as furniture, and it’s this idealized family dinner, and quiet and everyone is smiling. And then someone frees the “furniture” and a brawl breaks out and the former diners are going “Stop, stop. everything was so peaceful! How did this happen?”
It’s like “economic” (or any other kind) inequality. It’s not actually evil, unless it persists for centuries WITH THE SAME PEOPLE AT THE TOP AND BOTTOM. In which case the society is in deep trouble, as it is in much of Latin America. BUT not in as much trouble as societies in which almost everyone is equal, because the only way to do that is totalitarian, rigid control over people and the economy.
“Politics are so divisive” is nonsense. People don’t form political parties or join the political process to work on the things we all agree on. “We should wear hats on our heads, not on our left foot” is not a political position because most people agree with that, and the ones that don’t are locked up for their own good. (They keep slipping on that hat.)
Politics are supposed to be divisive. And a good brawl is how you know you’re still free. And I’m tired of the soft heads that pretend otherwise.
Let’s hope we can continue to fight back and stay free.
… keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
Note from Holly: this post is just shy of two years old now. I was looking for old posts on Art, in keeping with the theme of the week as it’s turned out so far, and the search popped this up, and well . . . it seems like a good reminder? Not sure what it has to do with Art, but search serendipity shouldn’t be ignored.)
Most of the time we look at a landscape, particularly if we live in it, and we know exactly where the road or the walking path is. We know that if we set off from here, we’ll walk that way, and…
And then there’s snow storms in Colorado, where I lived most of my adult life.
Colorado is not, as most people who know it only from TV think, a place where it snows early in Fall, and it stays covered up till next Spring. That’s more a thing of Ohio or Pennsylvania. I mean, there are places in Colorado — the high ranges — where it’s definitely like that, but that’s not most of it. Most of it, you have sun and snow, and days that are completely dry, and then days you are buried. There is no guarantee what type of day you’ll have. Some days you’ll wake up to a beautiful sunny day, then find yourself buried in snow by nightfall. Once in Manitou Springs, it was sunny in front of our house, and snowing in the back.
And then there were the sudden snowstorms that covered everything. Once or twice they caught us on the road, and even WHERE the road was became a matter of opinion. Obvious (and dangerous) if one side goes down a deep ravine, but the other side? Yeah, you’re on your own. It’s uncharted flat white.
We find ourselves kind of like that in our current political landscape.
You see, there has been a storm, a bad one, and it flattened everything. But in its wake, we are left in a changed landscape, where the usual sign posts don’t apply — except for the ravines, of course. Those are still there and hellofdangerous.
I probably don’t need to elaborate for this audience, but the storm was the stolen election, and its threat that we’d never again be free to choose our path, that — from now on — we were in the hands of the international oligarchs, and that at most we could carve our tiny little paces of semi-freedom, but we’d never be a free PEOPLE — or by extension, a free species (most of the species is. The West even is iffy. The US remains the last, best hope of mankind) — again.
Yes, I know, I expected differently. Because like with the Diamond Princess and the Covidiocy, I did the math. They can’t win. it’s impossible.
But even I expected a long period of darkness, or a blood bath in the way to our being free again. I prayed otherwise, but….
Well, on election day we got our miracle, a culmination of at least two previous miracles. And here we are.
And everything has changed. The problem is that the if you really look at it, the storm has been a succession of storms, starting about 100 years ago. And throughout it, it looked like there would be only one road, and only one way to move, and it would all end up in a prolonged darkness, which the sun of freedom might never penetrate.
But these things are never as they look, and beneath the snow cover, things were moving and the landscape was changing.
To be precise, the industry was changing, from one where large and central had all the benefits of being more economic and more profitable, to one where — not fully yet, but we can see it from here — distributed everything, and largely automated factories with minimal human labor are the future. And what a future it is. The same tech allows distributed communication, and it allows information to travel from those who have it to those who need it in almost no time. (Seriously. I once fixed my vaccum in no time by looking at a few you tube videos. You can also learn just about anything from those. From practical skills to languages, to history, to–). Even though there’s some resistance (including from Musk, sigh. It’s his reflexive liberal. It’s not fair to work from home, since not everyone can. Poppycock.) obviously distributed, from home, from your small town, a bit from everywhere working (and living) is the future. And it is a future that also allows women to work/pursue an avocation while looking after their own kids. This is leading to revolutions in teaching and in… well, just about everything else.
The world simply isn’t the same as when civilization started getting frosted over, and we assumed the future was the world of 1984 or Brave New World, and the most we could do was delay it a bit.
Paradoxically while that world seemed to be driving to a super state across the world (which FYI is inevitable tyranny) the fact we can communicate effortlessly across borders and across the world, perhaps by making us aware of cultural differences is fueling a drive towards nationalism. Which, contrary to what you’ve been taught in school is not fueling a drive for war, or Hitler like racial purges or whatever the crazy. WWI was caused by INTERNATIONALISM, i.e. by the royal families of Europe getting ambitious and trying to establish multi-continental empires. Being governed small and closer to home is always better for freedom. If those in power know you can come to their house and isekai protest them (like truck con protest them) they tend to behave a bit better. (Or, put up barricades if they’re Jarred Polis, whose conscience must be the deepest dark dingiest hell on Earth.)
Anyway, in this new world, a few things become not clear. Like, sure, RFK is still a commie (well, his dad was one TBF) but is he a bad person to be in charge of the FDA? Consider what the FDA is and what it’s been up to. What we know for absolute sure it has done is bad enough. I’m sure there’s stuff we don’t even know about. As long as he doesn’t try to fill it up with stranger and more strict requirements for… everything, why should we mind?
Tulsi Gabbard is still at the very least commie-adjacent, but she was victimized by the security apparatus by being put on a no fly list. Sure she might just reverse the polarity of the abuses. But she might also have seen the elephant and, in the light of the new day, seek to put the brakes on the overstepping. It’s worth a try.
Things like tariffs…. well, I ain’t no fan of them, but you know? The president has to at least be able to threaten them convincingly, so I’m willing to leave his elbow free. And I don’t know. I don’t like tariffs, but I hate taxes, particularly since they eat months of my husband’s time in calculating what all my strange little businesses owe. Maybe, just maybe we can swap them for tariffs, or come up with a yet more creative solution to finance the essential functions of government.
I’m open to what might come. I mean, today DOGE announced it’s hiring, but the job won’t be paid. Using American culture of voluntarism to cut the wasteful state? It’s amazing. It’s the most American thing ever. And think of all our retirees who just found a fun project for their golden years. (If I didn’t have books to write, I’d be volunteering myself. And if we had more money, my husband (and younger kid) would already be applying. Since they’re math geniuses, they probably could help.)
Meanwhile, yes, of course, the ravine stays. I will be watching very carefully and squawk at everything and anything that trespasses on the essential rules: The state should be small (we can start with smaller) and afraid of its people, not the people afraid of their state. And DON’T HURT PEOPLE AND DON’T TAKE THEIR STUFF.
Those are ravines indeed, and we’ve been driving with a wheel over that abyss for far too long. We might not know where the road is, but let’s get the heck out of the dangerous spot.
The rest? The rest is wide open.
Where a dark and dreary road the entire world was pushed into used to be, there is now a trackless wilderness. Into which we can cut paths, alleys, roads, delightful little gardens, and probably fly over it, or tunnel under too.
What is dawning is a day of great experimentation free of the “certainties” of the 20th century which, if we’re all lucky, is now dead and will soon be buried.
Let’s try to make stuff better. Some of it will even succeed. And let’s stop doing the stuff we already know doesn’t work. No, it won’t be different this time. Let 100 million eggs with no omelets be waste enough. Don’t add to it.
Go and create and figure out ways to do things: cheaper, better, with less hurting people and taking their stuff.
And take a deep breath of the crisp, cool air of the new world.
