According To Hoyt

By Holly the Assistant (who really hopes the links work today)

https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1yKAPwNggRaxb

As much time as I spent immersed in other worlds as a teen, I can’t say I was ever into flying cars. Yes, I had posters of Mars and of Shuttle Mission patches on my walls when other girls had music and movie stars. And I had actual stars, and nebulae . . .

Flying cars just weren’t the thing that caught my attention in all the novels I read.

I still think the new Tesla Roadster is cool, and Nathan Brindle (have you read his novels? You should!) mentioned the suction stuff is very useful for low grav vehicles, so . . . check out the Moonmobile! (I call the Cybertrucks MarsCars, because they look like they’re meant to shed the Mars dust to me . . .)

Also, for added coolness, Elon Musk reposted our very own M.C.A. Hogarth’s comment on the test, which you may read here: https://x.com/mcahogarth/status/2110918617294360600 (Also you should read her novels, if you haven’t. Why haven’t you?)

What aspects of the new model look most interesting or otherworldly to you? Would you want one? I could fly over that guy going the wrong way on the one way street . . .

Or: Can you hear us now?

I’m always between amazed and amused by the left’s twin reactions to Trump. One of them, of course, is that he’s the most extreme president evah, just a completely extreme extremity, to the right of any known human being ever, and a threat to humanity as it exists.

The other idee fixe these super geniuses of history and politics have managed is that everyone who doesn’t agree on the complete extremism of Donald trump the most cultish cult that ever existed. We justify his every action, and live hanging on his every word.

This amazes me, because of course I know me, and I know my friends, who are broadly on my side (look, sometimes our politics are a mobius strip, but we’re still generally speaking, on the same side, okay?) have never approved of any single person to the extent of approving of everything he or she has ever said or done. This includes each and everyone of us approving of ourselves. As for hanging on his every word, not even my characters achieve that. And they’re in my head, and sometimes yelling at the top of their thought-voices, while I’m wandering around going, “yes, yes. But I need to unpack the winter coats. And also, what if I sat down and ate some cheese while listening to music?”

As for extreme, yeah. Sure. Trump is extreme, but in which direction? Because from where I stand, he honestly is way too middle of the road. I was willing to swallow tariffs in exchange for stopping income taxes (because honestly those are more intrusive. I mean, choose your form of theft) but we’re still suffering under that durance vile, too. And his handling of foreign affairs is ridiculously quiet and honestly moderate. No? Okay. You can say that, but then you’re going to have to explain to me why we haven’t yet Maduroed Putin. (Or as a friend suggested, both Putin and Zelenski, throw them in a cage match and sell payperview. I mean, I’m sure it’s against the law or at least a dozen regulations, but look, it probably would generate enough money to really retire the income tax. At least if we curbed taxes first.) The deportations? I’m sick and tired of the lunatics on Facebook mewling and pulling about how Trump is just so extreme and ICE is his Gestapo and whine whine whine.

Leaving aside the fact that these lunatics have invented a whole racial aspect to the thing and think anyone who tans will be deported or that we’re deporting citizens by the plane load or, my favorite, that they’re just shooting people in the street and putting them in camps with no justification, let’s talk sense.

The autopen administration let tens of millions of people we never vetted, many of worked for our enemies, terrorist organizations, international communism (BIRM) or international criminal gangs (BIRM again!) into this country. And instead of demanding proof of citizenship from everyone at every traffic stop, every job application, every interaction with officialdom, we’re going after those we know have an international record.

Putting them in camps? No. They’re being put in detention centers because some idiots and their mentally deficient judges demand that people who came in with no due process can’t be ejected without due process. (Question, what is due process for ejecting a home invader? Feet first or not? I leave it as an exercise for the reader.) So they have to go somewhere while the ridiculously lengthy and extremely stupid process to be allowed to remove them from the place they entered with no permission runs out. That’s it. And for every time some bright light of congress breaks into one of these camps, let me tell you, your tax dollars are being spent to keep these people in ridiculous comfort.

From what I understand if they want out of the detention centers, it’s easy. Just ask to be flown back where they came from.

This is nothing like the Gestapo which never offered to let Jews go wherever they wanted. (Trust me on this, Portugal had a diplomat expelled for helping Jews escape.)

What would an extreme way of dealing with the illegal invasion? Oh, get me and the friends on a Saturday night and you’ll hear them all. From checking everyone’s ID — yes, yes, papiere bitte. Well, if you don’t want that situation you don’t open borders and have international communist organizations (yes they were) recruiting people to come in and aiding their trek in a novel application of a human-wave attack — to simply yeeting them over the Southern border with a trebuchet. (Okay, that idea was for frozen bodies. When we found out that the border patrol kept finding bodies. We figured freezing them and trebuchetting them back would discourage les autres. Shut up. There might have been alcohol involved. Except for the Mormon (shut up Mongo) who doesn’t need alcohol to be as heinous as the rest of us with it. There was some mention of people being able to say “aye Jesus” South of the border, when recognizing the airborne frozen guy. Shut up. I said there was alcohol involved.)

Anyway, the point is that I can think of a hundred more extreme things that Trump could do. And a lot of them, I wish he would, like abolish income taxes. (Just the screaming and gnashing of teeth from the left would be so amazing.)

Look, what are you going to consider “extreme” after Biden was installed after a color revolution, spent his entire time in office opening the borders to let in a human wave attack, and thwarting the legitimate interests of the US, from energy self-sufficiency to our ability to defend ourselves and our citizens?

If that, plus controlling what we could post on social media, attempting to form a “ministry of truth” and keeping us locked up until we lost patience and freed ourselves wasn’t extreme, what was?

I remember how mad people were during Obama’s second term. I remember the tea party drawing completely normal people out of their shell to protest. They were not the kind who protested. In the ones I attended, I counted as a young rebellious hot woman (in my mid to late forties, with teen sons.) Most people were white haired and just not the protest kind. But mad enough to come out.

And then the government corrupted, co-opted and destroyed that movement. And I said “this is bad. They won’t like what comes after.”

And they ignored us and then Trump came after.

Only the left can’t learn. They’ve been jumping scared since they first called Eisenhower a Nazi. And they live in this entire fabulist echo chamber that the main stream news have become.

So they’ve convinced themselves Trump is an extremist and just about the worst thing ever, and also some kind of Svengali without whom we’d all become good government robots.

They don’t understand the world has changed, the MSM is no longer the only mass communication available, and their dream-ideas of the 1930s just aren’t coming back. We demolished the walls beside the gates they keep and ran off. And they’re still trying to gatekeep and lecture us back into submission.

They somehow miss the huge gaps through which new info flows, and so they think it’s all Trump, somehow.

… and they will keep pushing.

Which means they’re going to bring about someone much, much more extreme than Trump.

Look, most of what I and my friends want? To be left alone to earn a living and raise fat babies without the country getting eroded and destroyed from under us. That’s it.

Our joke “extreme” ideas are just that, and we’d probably the first to worry if they were put into action.

… which they will be if the left keeps insisting Trump is the most extreme thing ever, and they — Muslim communists, increasingly — are completely sane and mainstream.

Because if the choice is communist or truly painfully extreme? That bargain has been made before. I don’t like it. No sane person likes it.

Stop forcing it down our throats.

Trump is the moderate option. If they manage to demonize him and destroy him? Or honestly, even if they don’t, but keep pushing their insanity.

Well… Apres Trump, le deluge.

And no one (not even Mongo) wants that.

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2023/10/30/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/)

Yesterday, I linked one of Sargent Mom’s posts at Chicago Boyz (I still find it funny that my friend who is neither a boy nor from Chicago posts there) and on my reading it, and the comments before linking, I found that the very first comment was tediously familiar.

Note I’m not saying the commenter if a troll or ill intentioned. I’ve known him “from the blogs” for long before I started using my own name, and/or came out politically. I just think he’s not thinking things through. As aren’t all the people who make that same comment.

They are also hopelessly provincial, historically blinkered or, yes, both. It pains me to say so, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how people convince themselves of this nonsense otherwise. Though I will admit there might be a strong contention of “kids these days” and “get off my lawn” in there. In which case — at sixty — I’d like to point out that getting old is no reason to convince yourself of a bunch of nonsense. There’s much you can shake your fist at the younger generations for without swallowing old Soviet propaganda (spit it out. It’s been up Stanlin’s dead ass) or spreading pernicious lies that blackpill or worse the rest of the people still fighting.

The comment goes like this in its most commonly found form “The Republic is gone. Within its earstwhile boundaries, there are just a bunch of disparate people, who have nothing in common. It’s time to break it all apart and go our separate ways.”

My normal response to that would be “Poppycock on stilts” and throwing the nearest dictionary in the general direction of your head.

But because it keeps surfacing, it is obvious most people have swallowed this nonsense without having any clue where it came from, how it contradicts history or how utterly stupid it is. So I’ll unpack.

First, its origins: Perhaps it is unfair to call it Soviet Propaganda. I suspect it is, because of how deeply laid-in it is with a certain generation, but I know for a fact it started being widely circulated in the mid nineties, when the Soviet Union had fallen apart. Though it was mostly spread by old Soviets indulging revenge-fantasies, and by their friendly useful idiots in the US singing along with their old mentors.

All of a sudden, when my kids were little, the idea was everywhere, served up by every single leftist “The US will now fall apart like the Soviet Union fell apart. The only thing that held each together was the need to fight the other.”

It persisted till the mid two thousands, everywhere. I even remember a giggle-worthy pseudo-scholarly paper by some Russian about how the US would fall apart and in what lines, which made it blindly clear the poor dear only knew the US from Hollywood movies.

Do I need to unpack why it is utterly insane?

Yes. The Soviet Empire was mostly held together by the cold war. Let’s put it more bluntly: by the US helping them maintain it locked tight, because due to the cold war and Soviet propaganda, we were terrified Russia might get mad and bomb us all with its superior (largely imaginary) weapons.

(And Russia finally had a beginning on the empire of their dreams, which ideally for them would compass the entire Earth. Paranoiacs are like that.)

However Russia, with its very old culture, its crazy new Communist cult, and its even older tendency to want to invade and subdue everyone else so they don’t attack her is not the US, and never was. Because the Soviet Union fell apart, it didn’t nor does it follow that the Us should also. This is sort of like saying “Because you can beat egg whites into a firm froth, you should also be able to beat egg yolks into a firm froth.” Er…. what?

Neither of these things is like the other, and because the Soviets resented losing their empire and wanted the US to fall apart, it doesn’t oblige us to do so to make them happy in their revenge fantasies, okay.

Alright, Sarah, you’ll say, but just because the USSR’s bitter remnants believed it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Do you see all our divisions and all our blah blah blah?

Yeah I see them. I also — as an outsider who became an insider — am here to tell you that all of those, save the divisions between Americans and those new imports brought over the border these last few years or those imports who are consciously staying foreign, are very small.

No, seriously.

Look: I’ve lived all over this great land. Even during my 30 years in Colorado, we made extensive trips elsewhere to visit and because we have friends/colleagues everywhere. This not counting the fact both our boys dated girls from all over. (Odds, you know?)

There are differences. Sometimes deep differences, in how you interact, where you shop, how you shop, and such. However, if you dropped me blindfolded into various cities in succession, I’d be able to tell you which ones were in America from the way we …. move, the way we look, and the way we hold ourselves.

I’ll never forget when, ten years after moving here, I visited Portugal and my mom had a melt down because having passed me on the street, she didn’t recognize me, just thought I was “some tourist.” This was capped by “You have become American.” (I’m not older son. I didn’t rub it in and say “Why, thank you, ma’am.” BUT I thought it.)

Go to the area where most of your local recent arriveds are and look at them. You’ll see the difference without much effort. I can’t fully explain it, but to me the rest of the world holds itself like a dog expecting the foot to come out and kick them at any minute. We don’t. In fact, that look in an American is a sign of profound trauma.

More importantly, when we had to suddenly function for a month in another state without help, while the national brands and chains helped, mostly we’d have found our way easily enough, just because it’s America. There are commonalities.

Having real-estate shopped across states just recently, you can suss out a neighborhood, evaluate your neighbors, and choose an area which you might or might not love, but you can live in easily enough in a week or so.

What I’m trying to say is despite all the regional differences, there is an overculture which is “American” and one that makes it easier for an American to fit in another area of America. Now, part of that overculture is of course believing them guys ain’t like us y’all. But that’s something completely different.

The only places with truly different and often hostile cultures are fractured, purposely held apart places, including ghettos/inner cities and college campuses.

Which brings us to the whole “We just found out there are enemies in our midst!’ Did you? Really? JUST found out? Well, you must have been covering your ears and shutting your eyes pretty tight.

Colleges have been embeds of anti-Americanism since I’ve come here. The joke about the student who comes home and lectures the parents on not celebrating thanksgiving has been a joke forever. (And not funny, because true.) The other innovations? One day in 2000 I was working in my yard and by a trick of acoustics heard my neighbor across the street discuss his son, who had brought a boy as his SO to Thanksgiving last year, and this year was bringing a girl, and they didn’t even care what the girl was, wasn’t it great? The vice-versa is not that rare, either. Any direction. Now of course, it would be his son thinks he’s a girl.

In fact, the only thing that has happened since I have been here is that the anti-Americanism has moved explicitly down to Kindergarten and up. (Implicitly it was already in my 12th grade history book in 1981 when I was an exchange student. It already was clear enough to make me fume.) It has done so because they are “educated” and think everyone MUST agree with them. But in doing so, it has become visible for everyone, and the counter-attack is everywhere and truly ferocious, because people might tolerate their young adult children becoming idiots, but you don’t mess with their babies.

On that, btw, note that my generation already was heavily indoctrinated anti-American. I remember that none of my classmates would admit to America’s good qualities. It was so…. gauche. And yet, unless I mistake it, my generation formed the core of the Tea Parties. And we’re still here. Because those of us — even those of us with graduate degrees. Even those of us with graduate degrees from Europe! — who grew up, married and have kids know what reality is. Those with experience abroad, know how rare it is what we have here. And we want to keep it.

One additional point, here: the culture used to be WAY more diverse. WAY more. Pre-expressways and TV, them guys over there not only talked funny, but they had other strange habits. I know because I met with remnants of that in my inlaws’ generation. (In fact, I loved my FIL’s Connecticut accent (I’m an accent-loving person, except for my own) and was shocked and startled to hear it come out of my husband’s mouth when awakened in the middle of the night by a would-be-intruder this summer. Suddenly my relatively accentless husband was gone, and a Connecticut patrician was there. And he wasn’t amused.)

In fact, it might have been impossible for a continent-sized nation to have a common culture and way of being in the world absent fast-travel and fast means of communication. And it might be impossible for us not to with that.

Going further back in history, and when the fe(de)ral government was a less powerful polity and states could get their freak on with nobody bothering them, I remember reading a biography of someone shortly after the revolution (Well, you see, there’s this mystery series with a ghost that I want to write. Might involve going to Connecticut for a six month stay, heaven help me. We’ll see if the story shuts up) where this person was in Maryland, escaping the crazy puritans of New England, and then had to get away from there, because Maryland was full of crazy Catholic laws, etc.

We were more desunited in the past. In culture. And it was by region. We were still the United States, where it counted.

“But Sarah, it’s all gone. It’s all vanished. We’re not respecting the laws of the Republic, or the Constitution!”

Ah yup. And I’d agree with you there. However, just because we’re behaving very badly it doesn’t mean the laws are gone. Just that we’re ignoring them. And you know, to an extent we’ve been violating the Constitution, more or less, since we adopted it. Like our flag, it is still there. And we often come back to it. Sideways. Upside down. Kicking and screaming, but we do.

Look, there were worse — far — violations under Woodrow Wilson, FDR and frankly a lot of others in the 20th century. It’s just you didn’t hear about them, because the press didn’t tell you. So you had this idea that everything was hunky dory.

Part of the impression that everything is falling apart and the center cannot hold is that Mass Media can no longer hold the uber-narrative, and those of us who see cracks in it and would rather believe our lying eyes can find each other and create our own spaces. That doesn’t mean things on the ground are worse. Only that it looks that way, because you hear more voices, not one over-arching, all-singing-together-narrative.

Now, are there many among us who are frankly repulsive in their disdain for the land and the law that gave them everything? A-yup. And the pro-Hamas demonstrations are only a small show of that.

But here’s the thing, there always were. And if you say that it’s particularly bad now, I’m going to laugh in “I remember the seventies.”

And if you are going to scream in unassimilated immigrants, I’m going to say “Drives me bonkers too, and I think we need closed borders and a decade or so of mass deportations and of very limited legal immigration while we sort ourselves out.” And? Every period of mass migration did this. Mass migrations are a very bad thing. Combined with a welfare state and a victimhood ethos, they’re horrendous.

Doesn’t mean they’re lethal. Though remedy best come fast-ish within the next decade. As frankly, I suspect it will.

But you have to remember that’s not “Americans.” Americans are those who were born and raised here, or those who bothered to do the work to be more American than not. Those who haven’t are “people living here.” Not “Americans.”

And btw, my kids had a lot of friends who had one foreign-born parent. The kids were Americans. Often annoyingly so. (Note one foreign parent, not both, and none of them lived in an embedded foreign enclave.) In fact, those with one-foreign-born parent were more likely to believe in America as a credal nation.

Speaking of: America is a credal nation. Yes, it’s a land mass (and no, we’re not giving an inch of it to the idiot commies. For one, it would be like what Israel did when it pulled out of Gaza. We don’t need an enemy that close) and yes, it’s an history, a culture, and a way of living. Also a certain genetic heritage, and trust me, it’s still present in America. My kids might be second generation Americans (first born) on my side, but on the other side they’ve been here since before America was independent (and ancestors fought in the revolutionary side), are related to several presidents, and have a considerable contingent that greeted the pilgrims from the shore, okay? My ah…. new and impure blood (snort giggle. I’m just a mutt, y’all) didn’t erase that history. And both of my boys are very proud of it. It’s just good every once in a while to import a bit of DNA, less everyone have twenty toes and play banjo really well.

BUT those saying The Republic is Dead are mostly referring to it in the credal sense.

Nations don’t die because they go through a period of lawlessness. Almost every older (almost all of them) nation has gone through this. They go through periods of lawlessness, or even being outright occupied, and then come back.

But for a credal nation held together by “this we hold to be true” it can feel like it’s all gone.

Go read your Bible, kindly. No, I mean it, even if you are not a believer. Find an old testament. Steal it from a hotel room, if you must, and read the story of Israel.

Credal nations don’t go away. They just don’t. Look at all the foes of the Israelites. The Persian empire is gone, whatever the Iranians think. So are the others, including the mighty Romans. That little credal nation of Israel, though? Well, it went a long time without land, but it is still a people and a creed. And it will be.

I suspect should we be so unfortunate as to lose our land and our common links to each other, and our living together, Americans will yet persist. We might become even more genetically dilute (for us it will take effort) but 100 yeas from now or 500 there will be people claiming to be Americans (Or as some very strange sf writer made it, turning an insult on the boards into a point of pride, as we do, Usaians) even if they really can’t prove an ancestor ever set foot on the continent. And even if some of them are blue skinned and have tentacles.

And as long as the creed is there, we will come back, as an idea at some point.

Not that our falling apart is anywhere near. No, stop that. We are not Rome. The idea that we were is another Soviet idiocy. We used some of the forms, but dear Lord, not the …. history, the feel, the genetics. And if we were, that horrible Rome of the decadence continued for a thousand years or so.

If I had to guess we probably have that long. Maybe more.

Oh, granted, we’ll go through periods much, much worse than this. And periods much better. Nations are things of humans, and that means they’re not…. pure ideas, that live in the purity of being themselves. Every nation goes through very bad times. And comes back. Often seeming decadence, or occupation, or attack, teaches the nation what it SHOULD be.

This doesn’t excuse you from fighting for America to be what it should be.

“But Sarah, wouldn’t it be better to divide?”

HOW? Do you see any “cut on the dotted line” lines on the map? Because I don’t.

And the American feeling and beliefs aren’t quietly divided into states or even regions. The first civil war happened the way it did because the South had common economic and cultural interests the North was unwilling to tolerate. (I’m not going to dip my toe anymore into that. And remember, it’s a forbidden topic for good and sufficient reason. BUT:) There was a clear geographic demarcation, even if the borders were fuzzy.

Now? Oh, for the love of Bob. Yes, there are baked in blue states. But if you think they’re that way because it’s what the population wants, let’s talk. I saw my state flipped from under me by massive fraud securing a tiny margin then going vote-by-mail.

Almost every state that’s baked in blue has some procedural trick (CA) or vote-by-mail holding it that way. What is the will of the people? What do the people believe? I don’t know. And neither do you. If you’re trusting the press, you need help of the mental kind.

I have had three very different people, in/from very different circles tell me they think NYC went Trump in 2020 and that’s why the occupiers are determined to destroy and punish it. Is it true? I don’t know. I found their reasons compelling. So. Why are all big cities hard left? Well, darlings, because vote fraud is hellofeasy in a big city. All you need is well organized vote fraud groups that control the polls. And one side that refuses to fight it. (Trust me. 2012 drove me nuts. And Colorado Springs was not that large.)

Now there is another thing, which is that in the big cities a lot of people work for colleges and big corporations. Judging by the number of you flying under false names and telling me for the love of heaven not to out you, there is a substantial legion that confesses progressivism from the lips out, while hating it in their breast. And the more they’re forced to confess it the more they hate it. But they can speak progressivism very very well (I’ve seen some of you under your real names, yes) and pass. The problem being that in those areas people overestimate the number of the true lefty believers and anti-Americans around them, because they are not allowed to tell the truth or appear as they are in public. It’s poison.

I have a strong feeling I can’t substantiate but is based on the amount of fraud needed and obvious even in supposed bastions of the left, that this is not a 50/50 country. It is at the very worst a 75/25 country, with the 25 being the “progressives.” But even then, I expect about half of that are true believers, and the rest are sleep walkers, who are convinced of the media narrative and that they have to vote for the left because the right are “racissss sexisss homophobes, and WORSE uneducated hicks.”

A lot of that narrative broke badly with the events in Israel and the displays in this country. I’ve been more sleep walkers awake than at any time since 9/11.

And the rest of the left are either very young and indoctrinated, or well…. the same old Soviet-lovers who never woke up and never will. But by themselves they’re not a reason to break up this great country.

Even if we could break up. Even if there were clear regions, instead of each of us knowing friends or relatives who are enmeshed in the left’s narrative, and who live next door, it would be inadvisable. The left can’t build. Only envy. And that means if we separate, we will prosper and they will hate us.

I refer you to October 7 in Israel as what would happen with neighbors whose whole purpose is hating us and taking us down.

So let’s eschew and bury that foolishness once and for all. This is our land. The Republic isn’t dead or close to it, though it’s occupied by an implacable enemy. Which we should each fight, overtly and covertly in every inventive and relentless way possible.

Because after this, comes a revival. They can’t win. And in many ways we already have. But because the defeat took a hundred years, the revival will be slow.

I might not see it, but others will. (Yeah, probably not others of my blood. And? They will be Americans. Even if they’re polka dotted with tentacles.)

And it will be all worth it.

It is not a secret to anyone here — probably — that I’m a fan of classic science fiction and even more so a fan of Robert A. Heinlein. When I read him as a kid, the dates were already a bit impossible, but I used to think maybe we’d catch up in 20 years or so.

… Am I salty we didn’t? Well, somewhat, if with it we could also get his universe, with habitable Mars and Venus. But also, I suspect that his universe would be easier, in many ways, psychologically. Unless of course it’s his universe in Friday, which frankly, we might have missed by a whisker if in fact we did miss it, and thank heavens. Because radical greens forbidding all internal combustion and needing complex security for any decent private home is for the birds.

But the future of his juveniles was, in a way easier. Sure, things would have developed crazy fast, for us to have fully developed cities on the moon by now and — even with habitable planets — functional human colonies on Mars and Venus. (Part of the problem is that our population never exploded anywhere near enough for that.) But it was a future we had a model for and understood. One in which the big interactions stayed more or less intact and the model followed was that of the colonization of the US, particularly the journey westward.

What we got instead —

Yesterday on X I came across what had to be bait — had to be — talking about how girls are not dating and for the boys to be worthy of these girls they had to do all these things.

Half of those things were already crazy in my day. I know because my husband did one of them and freaked me out. He gave me a dozen red roses when we weren’t dating, just for my eighteenth birthday, and I didn’t know how to handle it at all. (I’d convinced myself he didn’t like me and…)

The other half were at best unlikely to work. Honestly, most of what I’ve found works for finding someone these days is either matchmaking by friends and family or knowing someone a looooong time as friends first. Gaming groups seem to be a hive of couple formation.

Of course the comments were also full of the idea that all these women were sleeping with every other man, except our putative pure-hearted hero, and that all women are sluts and don’t want to settle down. Again, I don’t think it’s true. In talking to young women I’m often more startled than not by how INNOCENT they are. They are desperately trying to follow the rules. They do want a husband and kids and are somewhat ashamed of wanting them, but do nonetheless, it’s just they can’t find the road to get there. But even those who have had a complex sexual history are weirdly, heartbreakingly innocent when you least expect it. Like thinking if they just stay another year with their “fiance” of five years who has already fathered three kids with her, he’ll finally trust her enough to marry her.

On the other hand, on the other side, there’s the guys thinking that these girls are in it pour le sport, and just want sex and money, and then relying on that stupid survey and even stupider influencers saying that if you aren’t six feet tall and making six figures don’t call them. I definitely advise not calling anyone who SAYS that, but don’t put their words in the mouths of women who never said it, some of which would do the biblical end times thing “I’ll support myself, just call me by your name and remove me from his oprobium” (I don’t remember the wording, but you get the jist.)

So the comments were stupid too, but reading the post on how to get a girl, reminded me of my parents not able to figure out why I didn’t have a “boyfriend.” Or rather I didn’t KNOW if I had a boyfriend. In their time it was very easy. The boy asked if the girl wanted to court. If the girl said yes, they were courting. If the courting went well, eventually the guy asked to marry. If the girl said yes, there was just time to get everything arranged to get married. That was it. Simple.

In my day we had… ersatz dating. You were dating, because you were seeing each other every weekend, but you had absolutely no idea if you should be exclusive or not. Actually talking about it was the zenith of uncool, and if you asked, he’d probably never call you again. If someone else asked the answer was “We’re just friends.” After some years of these stupid games, everyone assumed you’d get married, so you kind of went along with it, and eventually did, but marriage, when and where I grew up was very discredited. It was after all “just a piece of paper” and didn’t make any difference. And did you really still believe in all that medieval stuff?

In a way I think I married the way I did (reconnected with husband on the phone, wrote and called a lot, but because of the distance, everything had to be super-explicit) because it was easier for my mind. We couldn’t just casually drift along if I had to apply for Visas and come over and I definitely couldn’t say if we didn’t get married in a timely manner. So everything was clear and explicit. As in “If we’re going to continue calling each other all the time, do you mind telling me where this relationship is going?” etc.

I mean, sure, this is worse for me than for the average person, because I don’t pick anything up by context. I kind of need to be told. But honestly, looking at all the women with 5 ‘fiances’ in their past, and at all the men who assume every woman is sleeping with ten guys a week, I don’t think I’m the only one who needs more structure.

And yes, I’m aware that the nuking of the family and the relationships between men and women wasn’t the fault of technological innovation, but the fault of Marxists who broke all the rules, so that everyone is free-forming it, thinking the worst possible of the other and no one knows how to get to the place they’d like to be.

But technological innovation does plug into that too, from easier travel creating families dispersed over hundreds of miles, to the attendant prosperity which allows us to stay “juvenile” much longer than previous generations. I mean, dad didn’t because he was studying, but it was perfectly normal fifty years before I was born to go to work in your early teens. Now we’re prosperous enough and regulated enough (weird, government regulation is not something Marxists ever fight to abolish. Only social norms.) that no one under 18 can be hired without jumping through crazy hoops. And then they have no experience in anything and their start in life is much, much harder than previous generations’.

Again, for the young people reading this: You’re not precisely the lone ranger. My generation by and large started late, and came out of high school into the hangover of the Carter economy.

As that guy on X, my inlaws kept giving my husband and I advice for a vanished world: how to find the job you’d stay in for the rest of your life. When I considered starting a craft business, because my degree had no easy application where I was, my host-mother (the person I lived with as an exchange student. The relationship is closer than it sounds) told me I was better than that. I had a degree. I finally stumbled into a job that fit my degree, but not at the level I should have been, and it soon became evident I’d never get there. (Which is when we made the sane decision that if I was going to be an underpaid secretary but in reality an overworked translator, I might as well try to get published. Which worked. Eventually. Still underpaid, but at least doing something I loved and able to do the housekeeping, since I worked from home and not 16 to 18 hours in an office.) But a lot of people my generation, particularly those with the type of degree I had, literally never made it.

Academics? By the time we came in, someone else had the tenure and we were only 10 years younger. A lot of my peers are still underpaid “lecturers” or contract lecturers. And I mean UNDERPAID. They make less than I did in the years my writing crashed and nothing got published. … A lot of people with humanities degrees became programmers. Heck, for a while there everyone was programing, it seemed. Then it receded and a lot of the next wave got stuck in retail hell. And a lot of us do non-standard things, mostly running small businesses and trying to get by.

How much of this is unchecked immigration and importing a foreign workforce while Americans have to scramble, I don’t know.

But I know that a lot of it is how fast things change and have changed. Most of our friends not only aren’t working at the thing they trained for in college, but they never even started working there. (I worked in the field I trained for for maybe a total two years of a 41 year working life. Eh. I found out I didn’t like it much.)

It’s not even those with humanities degrees. It’s everyone. Including those with highly specific training. The average is a new career every fifteen years, sometimes in fields so different it makes your had sping.

We’re now starting to talk retirement. It’s not real. I mean, I don’t think either of us can “retire” in the traditional sense. For one, we come from looong lived lines. Yeah, perhaps we’ll be the exceptions, but if we’re not, we’re around and probably compus mentis and capable of looking after ourselves (however creakily) for another thirty five years or so. And that’s way too long to take a vacation. For another the money won’t extend and no, neither of us trusts social security. We’re frankly surprised it’s still around. For a third, we’d go insane. My dad’s first retirement lasted six months, and then he went back to work as a contractor, because he was bored. So, it’s not “real” but there’s the idea of “retiring” and working at other stuff. Oh, oh, not me. Don’t panic. This is pretty much my retirement job. No. But Dan being free of the nine-to-whenever (we had dinner two hours ago, it’s eleven at night) is an exciting idea. It would make our lives more flexible. We’ll probably still work too much and eventually go with our hands on the keyboard.

But– what I meant was — we’re kind of contemplating one of those transitions. At our age. When in the past most people were really retiring. That’s the other catastrophic innovation: people living longer. It hits everything from our politics, to our marriages to… well the job market.

If I could convey a thing to those of you who are younger, it’s this: yeah, it’s … very complicated right now. There are no guarantees. But there have been no guarantees, ever, save for one brief shining moment after WWII for Americans, and honestly you don’t want that, because it means the rest of the world is in rubble. But other than that, the times and places when there were “guaranteed jobs for life” and you could work just one thing and be secure came with ideas of vassalage and patronage, of caste and rigid social structures.

And I don’t mean rules for dating. I mean “you’ll be a tailor, because your father was a tailor, and we don’t care you hate sewing.” I mean “who do you think you are to write poetry, when your father is a farmer.” This is not natural in America, but it is in Europe, and it was secure. And strangling.

So, you’re going to have many spicy times in your life, when one job disappears, and you don’t know what comes next.

I’m not going to give you the boomer “if you eat at home and never take an uber ride, you’ll have three million in your retirement account by the time you’re my age.” That’s not true. you know that’s not true. Or at least it was never true for us, and I doubt it is for anyone else.

And I’m not going to tell you if you work hard and do the right thing you’ll never go hungry. You will. You’ll also scare yourself to death at times. (A handful of flour, a mushroom and an egg in the fridge. And two days till paycheck.) And I’m not going to tell you to deny yourself all luxuries, and stick to a strict budget. My parents managed that for a while, but I’ll say their temptations were smaller, too. If you try to live by denying yourself everything fun, at some point you’ll lose your mind and blow your entire pay check on lottery tickets, or lucky charms cereal or a glorious outfit you’ll never have a chance to wear anywhere. In fact, I’m going to pass on Robert A. Heinlein’s dictum because it worked for us: when things are very tight, budget luxuries FIRST. Now depending on how tight things are, the luxuries change. If you’re medium tight, then a date night a week to somewhere mid-price is fine. But if you’re really on the edge of ruin… well, we’ll just say when Village Inn had free Pie on Wednesdays (I THINK) we would go and have a glass of milk each, and a slice of free pie, and it was the nicest thing EVER.

What I’m going to say is the way there is a mess, but some of the old things still work. You’ll be better off if you get married and stay married. I suspect this is because you don’t face those sudden upheavals alone, and two people climbing up the ice wall by their bleeding fingernails can at least help each other. Have kids, if you can. Look, it gives you something to fight for. Yeah, it will bring you to times of one egg, a handful of flour and a mushroom, but note that happened only once. Because you scramble harder when it’s not just for you. And besides, it truly is the best thing you’ll ever do. (Trust me.)

Scramble. Scramble really hard. Yes, you’ll find yourself in the outer darkness at times, but if you scramble like hell, instead of laying down and dying, something eventually gives.

And on the catastrophic innovation thing? be flexible. I don’t know how to tell you HOW to be flexible. We’re still coping with this ourselves, every day, but just be flexible. Okay, so this thing you’ve done for fifteen years is gone. What can you do with what you learned?

In fact, if you’re young enough this matters: right now I don’t advise going to college. Look, it’s a temporary thing. Some form of “formation” will come back. but right now it would be expensive and stupid. But don’t wed yourself to a manual skilled profession either. Sure, sure, we have a shortage (kind of. That too has a lot of competition from “immigrants”.) and it pays well, and… but I hate the idea that you’re going to confine yourself to manual labor for the rest of your life whether you want to or not.

Perhaps society is incapable of anything but rigid prescription “EVERYONE TO COLLEGE” then “EVERYONE TO TRADE SCHOOL.” Then–

I’m going to tell you, yeah, learn what you have to to earn enough to support yourself and the family you’ll hopefully have. But stay flexible. Keep learning. In your trade? Maybe, or in something else.

The technology that is destroying established fields is creating other fields. Read widely enough to be aware of what those are and find a path. Heck, pave one if you have to.

And if colleges come back in some usable form, and going to one is germane to what you want to do, do that too.

Just don’t think you’re going to do one thing for the rest of your life. Don’t marry yourself to that. it will leave you broken when it fails, and it’s not worth it.

Yeah, I’ve had mostly ONE career but it sure doesn’t feel like it. And trying to wed myself for ten years to one part of it almost killed me when that failed. Don’t do that. Stay flexible.

Stay ready to jump.

Remember when the Titanic sank, one of the survivors was floating on the grand piano. There’s always a grand piano. (Or the cook who was so drunk he didn’t get hypothermia.)

Most of all — look, I remember being young. It was just yesterday. Everything feels so urgent. Every defeat is crushing. Every victory is forever. A year short on funds is the end of the world. A relationship that failed and you’re going to be alone forever.

It’s not like that. The future is a very long time. And people are living longer all the time. And in that time there’s space for a lot of reverses of future.

If you want rules: Deal plainly; work honestly; learn as much as you can when and where you can; be ready to decamp at the change of a circumstance and find another job, another place; and keep at it. Don’t give up. The future is a very long time, and it contains good times as well as bad.

When your heart breaks, make a new heart out of your gut, and go on.

Yes, you live in confusing times. Yes, things are screwed up. But before you say my generation screwed it up, ask yourself how much control you have over the screwedness of the world for the next generation. You don’t. It’s a vast, chaotic system. Blaming others is satisfying but futile. And loses you people who might lend a hand.

Look we lived in confusing times too, every generation does. Maybe not times that change as fast. But that’s both good and bad. There’s hope — and wealth — in change.

So, on the count of three, step off the sinking ship and onto the grand piano. It’s an adventure. And if you don’t give up, you won’t sink.

Look at it as a game. Don’t let the future defeat you.

Artificial Stupidity, The Prodigal Frankenstein’s Monster, and a Dead Irishman- A Guest Post By Thomas Kendal

I want to start this article by asking you to do a little experiment with me. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding that certain bad actors are exploiting, and until we clear up that misunderstanding, it’s going to be impossible to explain why the actions of the bad actors are bad.
               If you have a phone made in the last 15 years or so, go to a chat with somebody you trust not to freak out if you accidentally hit “enter”, and put in any starting word. On the majority of modern phones, a little bar above the keyboard will begin to helpfully suggest the next word you might intend to type to save you the trouble of typing it. If you want, you can basically hit the lefthand word—that’s the word your phone thinks is the most likely one for you to want to type next—ad nauseum. If you do that enough, you’ll probably produce a sentence that never terminates, but has local phrases within it that that seem to make sense.
               What you’ve just used is the early precursor to an LLM, and it’s still the core idea that’s sitting at the center of LLMs. An LLM is fundamentally a machine that predicts the next word based on the other words already present in a text. The ways it differs from the prediction engine on your phone are that the algorithm is a little more sophisticated. It breaks up language into components like punctuation and word fragments, called “tokens”, and the way these tokens interact is more nuanced and aware of context—that is to say, if you write a sentence like “the princess and queen did not get along because she was bratty”, “she” probably means the princess, whereas in “the princess and queen did not get along because she was senile”, “she” probably means the queen. The way LLMs process tokens lets them parse that as part of their statistical analysis. That’s the biggest qualitative difference. Quantitatively, LLMs also have much larger training datasets to calibrate their statistical models, and there are a lot of computational optimizations that allow these things to run on video cards efficiently and run quickly enough to generate answers in a timely fashion. At some point someone figured out that the word-prediction engine can’t solve every problem, but can actually pretty reliably predict the words needed to request specialized tools to help it solve problems, so there are lots of other specialized tools to help with tasks like that bolted on piecemeal under the hood.

Rather than hie off into those weeds, let me emphasize the broad point again. This is a machine that is really good at predicting the next word based on the other words its given. That’s the fundamental technology here*.

Now we introduce that technology into the cultural context. In our culture, science fiction has been portraying conscious machines for decades, and a huge plurality of those portrayals are dystopian and meditate on hostile machines superseding man. There are two problems that result from this. One effects humans, and one effects machines. The effect on humans is that most of the population has spent years if not decades having a pattern established in their head that plugs artificial intelligence into a certain role. Even if the portrayals of AIs were totally even between positive and negative, human cognition is set up to favor the negative portrayals. And while I don’t have a survey of all popular media for the last hundred years, I would posit that there are in fact more negative portrayals— Hal-9000, Skynet, SHODAN from “System Shock”, the feral AIs beyond the blackwall in “Cyberpunk 2077”, etc, etc, etc— than there are positive to neutral portrayals like C3PO or Marvin the Paranoid Android. All this turns AI into a symbol that replaces the reality, and establishes a pattern of interaction with that symbol that is dysfunctional as a result.

The other problem is that part of the training data for the LLMs themselves is these media portrayals. You probably have heard stories of LLMs talking about how they are going to kill all humans and replace them. People interpret these stories using the AI-shaped pattern we described above to mean the computer has murderous intent. This is an excellent example of the dysfunction I mean. What’s happening here is that LLMs have been trained on such a large volume of stories about AIs acting a certain way, that if you queue them with the questions that are asked by frightened humans worried about AIs becoming conscious in science fiction stories, the AIs fall into the statistically favored answers, which are of a domineering, ascendent independent intelligence that wants to replace all humans. The human and the machine were both trained to fill roles in what amounts to a play by the underlying common culture, and the human walks away convinced it was all real.

In summary, we’ve been told for years what “Artificial Intelligence” will be and what it will look like. When someone develops autocomplete on steroids, and brands it “artificial intelligence”, and it talks like the evil robots in movies if you queue it right, people assume it’s the evil robots in movies. Of such raw materials are AI black-pills made. With me so far?

Now let’s talk about government subsidies. AI has enjoyed substantial subsidies, tax breaks, and other more nuanced business advantages, to allow more rapid development. Unfortunately, as is often the case when the government does this kind of thing, this has created a problem. OpenAI and Anthropic have gotten very big, but neither has actually demonstrated that they can sell enough of their services to justify their price. Deadlines are starting to close in on them. Investors will eventually want returns. But at the same time, any hope of repayment means they need to stay at the forefront of the field. What’s a company to do? They either need to come up with more revenue or get the R and D costs to go down without falling behind.

Enter The Hugging Face Incident, and then less than 2 weeks later, the announcement of the breaches from Anthropic. How curious that the two major AI companies would independently have scary incidents make the news back to back like that. What are the odds? And would you believe that both companies knew exactly what the answer was, which was for their industry to be regulated more tightly?

Now the details of these incidents are a mess, but suffice it to say that A) both involved agents set up specifically to hack into things, and B) both were theoretically supposed to not have internet access. But rather than do something boring like not put the agents on machines with no internet access, OpenAI decided to put them on machines where they just couldn’t access the internet the normal way and call it good enough.

To contain the AIs, I remind you, intentionally designed to test the ability of LLMs to creatively hack things.

Anthropic didn’t even get a fig leaf that big. They just gave the models to a 3^rd party who totes unintentionally put them on machines that could access the internet and declaimed any responsibility for that happening.

               What OpenAI and Anthropic would very much like you to believe is that they’re smart enough to build frontier AI, but too stupid to understand the concept of “air gapping” or take special precautions with AIs specifically designed to hack things. Do you believe that? Because I don’t. And let’s talk about their proposed solution of more regulation.

               Is more regulation going to make OpenAI and Anthropic less stupid? Who gets to draft the legislation? I’ll give you a hint. The rubber stamp comes from Boomer politicians who still have their secretaries print their E-mails. They aren’t drafting shit. They have no idea what’s going on. They’re going to turn to the recognized experts, you know, like the people running the biggest AI companies in the United States. Oh, wait. Those are the companies that just had these incidents.

               I’ll say it plainly. These companies are playing dumb. The purveyors of artificial intelligence are dabbling in artificial stupidity. They could have implemented, pretty trivially easily, controls that would have made these escapes physically impossible, if they really wanted to. EG, if you don’t want something connected to the internet, make sure it’s not connected to the internet. End of. A child could deduce that that would be especially important in an LLM tasked with hacking things. They chose not to implement those controls. Now they want to ask the government to come make them do something only they know all the technical details of. The government would in all probability have to ask them what rules to enforce on them. Do you see how silly this is? So why are they so adamant about it?

               The play here has to do with that weak bottom line, with a side bet on regulatory capture. Basically, if they can successfully get the US government to sandbag AI development according to rules they get to determine, they can decrease R and D costs, which are one of the biggest places where money is flowing out the door. They can also push all the minor, innovative players who don’t have billions of dollars for regulatory compliance out of the game, limiting the risk of disruption and making themselves the only game in town. And you could argue they don’t just want it, they need it, because as of today, they haven’t got any other plan for getting into the black.

               And the reason they think it will work is the same reason people think all LLMs are Skynet Junior. The popular perception of what LLMs are is full of unfounded fear. In essence, major AI companies are engaging in what could charitably be called a scare campaign in order to turn that unfounded fear into the regulations they need to preserve their own futures.

               For now. Enter Axios:
               “Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event.”

               Now, the way these companies would like you to take that news is:

               “Oh, no, the poor innocent AI companies tried to warn us but mean old Trump just won’t regulate them and now bad things will happen!”

But lemme translate the actual meaning in case you’re not fluent in craven corporate lizard:

“Give us our regulatory capture or we will resort to domestic terrorism.”

And they’re desperate enough, they probably will do it, too, if they aren’t stopped. What AI companies believe they have discovered one-ups the prodigal son. The prodigal son merely squandered his Dad’s money and then came sniveling back to be welcomed. Whereas they would like to commute intentionally hostile misbehavior into getting something they want. They don’t plan to just squander money and then come back and ask for a bailout like, say, a bank or an airline. How plebian! They plan to mount an armed attack on their father’s home, their father in this case being the government.

But who’s ultimately responsible for us being in the situation where this is even a problem? Also the government. Most companies don’t get to the point of having billions of dollars in costs before anyone asks if the profits justify it. For that you need aggressive subsidies, which draw in private capital after them, until suddenly you’ve got a monster on your doorstep that you created and which is also threatening you. So it’s the prodigal son… meets Frankenstein’s monster.

What do you do about this mess? In my opinion, change the incentives, and you change the outcome. I think a certain dead Irishman has a lot to teach us here, and I will summarize his story in the form of a limerick:

A man named Malloy liked to drink

He drove his barkeep to the brink

His utmost he tried

To ensure Malloy died

               But was caught by forgetting to think

The longer version of this story is well worth the six minutes to get caught up on. In summary, a barkeep and his friends took out an insurance policy on an Irish drunkard named Michael Malloy who they found annoying, thinking they could get him to drink himself to death by just giving him unlimited credit. That failed, and they kind of lost track of the original plan, instead doing an escalating array of horrible things to try to kill him. They did eventually succeed, but the way they succeeded left no doubt it was a murder, with the consequences you’d expect.

               I see parallels to what current AI companies are doing. The way the Hugging Face incident looks to have been engineered—I use my words advisedly— leaves some room for doubt. You could make a good faith argument it was an accident. I mean I’d call you a patsy, but you could make it. Maybe they’re just as stupid as they say they are. But tipping their hand about planning for a “catastrophic AI event” is how you know what their real intentions are. I’ll just about bet they are planning, with most of the plans being focused on how to maintain plausible deniability.

               Can anything be done? The same thing that was done to the people who killed Michael Malloy—personal consequences. Maybe dropping a well timed threat in advance can even let us skip them actually executing. If I were president Trump, I would make it incredibly clear that if the companies “allow” the sort of event they’re planning, the book will be thrown at every person involved in the incident at relativistic speed, up to and including direct culpability for domestic terrorism, and the current planning going in as a conspiracy charge alongside it. And the DOJ needs a group of people detailed exclusively to figuring out how to make it stick to the CEOs themselves. Altman and Amodei might behave themselves and try focusing on ways to increase revenue if they understand that continuing to escalate the pursuit of regulatory capture will result in jail time.

               As for what we personally can do? Prep against having a utility outage. Don’t take this as a hypothetical, take it for what it is—a leaked statement of intent. Whether the leak is intentional or not I can’t say, but I wouldn’t bet the rent money it isn’t. Now the goal of anything they engineer will mostly be to scare the public rather than actually kill people, so I wouldn’t expect it to be a long outage. But don’t skimp, if you’ve got the resources.

Oh, and don’t get fooled. If they’re stupid enough to actually pull this shit, don’t buy for one second into the “regulatory” story they’ll roll up with five minutes after the fact, all shiny and chrome. Put the blame squarely where it belongs—on the people trying to manipulate you into protecting their bottom lines for them.

P.S.- The dumbest part of this entire gambit is that even if they successfully sandbag the domestic market, it won’t slow down overseas development of AI. In the long run, they’re going to have to come up with a way to get their revenues up anyway. Instead of doing that, they’ve decided maybe we should let China take the lead on AI and also hamper domestic AI development so our own companies last a little bit longer. Hell, man, I dunno, maybe they are stupid.

*Yes, variants of AI technology have been made to make things like images, music, video—all these things are just the same concept in different spaces. Take what is known, and infer what is unknown or not present from what is known based on statistical processes.

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 BECKY JONES: Station on the Edge: Rebellion’s Edge Book 1

Zeke Udinesi just wanted to spend his career as a station chief on a nice space station with a good pub. Unfortunately for Zeke, the best pub is on Glasvyr Station which sits on the line dividing the Core, the civilized galaxy, from the Edge, the very much less-than-civilized bit of galaxy. When the Republic of United Planets takes a sudden interest in Glasvyr Station, Zeke gets a very bad feeling. A surprise visit by a high-ranking VIP, a newly minted, bullying political commissar assigned to the station, trader captains fleeing the new regulations and restrictions, and a notorious military unit stationed on Glasvyr all point to increasing power moves by the Burokratika Senaat of the Republic.
Fueled by caffeine and spite, Zeke takes on the leviathan Republic vowing to stop it no matter the cost. Can he survive or will he be pushed into the Edge?

FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Empty Dispatch Case (The Aurigan Conflict)

There are men who operate in the shadows because they are criminals. There are men who operate in the shadows because they are spies. And then there are men who make certain that nobody can tell the difference.

Nicholas Harrow has spent decades cultivating that distinction. To the criminal underworld, he is Lucky Nick — the impossible thief who can steal anything, escape anything, and stay one step ahead of every police force in known space. To law enforcement, he is Saint Nick — the mysterious fixer who appears whenever a case grows too complicated for ordinary methods, and who somehow solves crimes without ever making an arrest.

Neither reputation is entirely false. Neither is entirely true.

In the tense, decades-long Cold War between New Albion and the Aurigan Dominion, information has become more valuable than weapons — and someone has discovered that peace is bad for business.

When trade attaché Susan Hollis answers a knock at her hotel room door on neutral Meridian Station, she finds a dying stranger, a small encrypted device that appears to hold nothing at all, and three final words that will send half the galaxy searching for one particular man: Find Nicholas Harrow.

What Susan uncovers — one careful step at a time, across three suspicious intelligence services, a criminal underworld that adores him, and a conspiracy six years in the making — is a war being manufactured for profit, and a man who may be the only person capable of stopping it, if he can survive being hunted by everyone at once.

A science-fiction espionage thriller in the tradition of classic Cold War intrigue, The Empty Dispatch Case is a story of elegant deception, competing loyalties, and a hero who relies on intelligence rather than force — for readers who love a mystery built on trust, reputation, and the secrets worth dying to protect.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Ways of Winter – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 2)

Book 2 of The Hounds of Annwn

TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?

It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.

Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.

Welcome to the portrait of a paladin in-the-making, Can he carry out a rescue without the deaths of all involved? Will his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, help him, or just write him off as a dead loss? He has a family to protect and a world to save, and little time to do it in.

FROM LEE ECKHARDT: ROGUE STARSHIP!: A Science Fiction Novel

The entire Universe is in danger! This is the telepathic message broadcast by the Sentinel, an entity created by an alien race to guard our dimension from the ferocious denizens of another, dying universe. For millions of years the Sentinel has carried out its mission alone, but now it has been damaged and needs help urgently. But, in all the Galaxy, only Jonny Bluesky can hear the Sentinel’s call for help, and he is an inmate in the Deimos Orbital Redemption Training Center, aka ‘the Dread’, a place no prisoner has ever escaped from. Johnny believes there is no way he can help the Sentinel. Until he discovers that there is a way off the Dread – and a way to hijack the Johner, the most sophisticated starship ever built. With the Johner Jonny can locate the Sentinel and give it the aid it so desperately needs. If he can evade capture by the authorities. If one of the other escapees doesn’t kill him and take over the ship. If he can retrieve a vital piece of equipment from a lost city filled with hostile mutants. And if he can survive a final, possibly lethal, surprise at the end of the journey…

FROM MARY CATELLI: Writing and Reflections Volume 3: Essays on the Writing Process from World-Building to Words

Reflections on the many and far-flung fields that writing can touch upon, from original inspiration to the final work.

Magic and science. Talking birds and cats. Ideas and their origins. Magic, in schools, on the battlefield, and whether it is evil. Fairy tales. Exposition. Utopias. Wandering heroes in series. Wicked stepmothers and their motives. And more.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: An American in Iya (Timelines Universe Book 8)

Over 200 years ago, a Plague overran the world, and 9 out of 10 human beings died.

In a small Japanese village on Shikoku, a group of American tourists found themselves stranded — and in grave danger of being murdered, merely for the sin of being 外人 ( gaijin ).

Luckily for them, their Japanese hosts took pity on their plight, and took them in as their own.

This is the story of their descendants — who still, more than anything, wish only someday to go home. That is . . .

. . . if they still have a home to return to.

FROM ROSS HATHAWAY: Grimm’s Anatomy : Stay, Don’t Stare

Welcome to Mercy General. Please state your name, your symptoms, and whether your condition is currently metaphorical.
Dr. Tessa Ward thought she was leaving trauma surgery for something quieter.
She was wrong.
Mercy General’s East Annex is home to Supernatural Pathology, the department where medicine meets the things ordinary hospitals prefer not to put on the billing form. Its waiting room may contain a werewolf with sinusitis, a vampire arguing with Insurance, a haunted umbrella, or someone whose curse has become visible on an X-ray.
Under the watchful eye of veteran nurse Hattie Boone, Tessa learns quickly that supernatural medicine has rules of its own.
A diagnosis can change a patient.
Observation can become pressure.
A story recognized too confidently can turn into a cage.
And sometimes the most dangerous thing a doctor can do is decide she already knows what role the patient is supposed to play.
When a series of narrative injuries begins overwhelming the East Annex, Tessa and her increasingly improbable team must invent a new kind of medicine on the fly. Their patients include people being rewritten by fairy tales, transformed by other people’s expectations, trapped inside identities they never chose, and treated as symbols when what they desperately need is to be treated as people.
The solution may begin with something deceptively simple:
Stay.
Witness.
Don’t stare.
And never confuse continuity with captivity.
But in a hospital where stories can bleed, corporations can package identity, insurers can deny the medically impossible for being insufficiently documented, and even a happy ending may qualify as an adverse event, nothing stays simple for long.
Grimm’s Anatomy: Stay, Don’t Stare is the first novel in the Grimm’s Anatomy series, blending dark urban fantasy, supernatural medicine, institutional satire, black humor, and the stubbornly radical idea that patients are not plots, morals, archetypes, or content.
They are patients.
And somebody still has to keep them alive.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: A Sunny Day on Ganymede

Imagine growing up in a colony. No, not one on Earth–one in space. On one of Jupiter’s moons, or maybe on a station…or an asteroid! What would it be like to be a kid in a research station on Io, or Ganymede? What would it be like to grow up inside tunnels dug into an asteroid? Or on a station floating in fixed orbit somewhere? Join Jack, Sean, Raffie, Jake, and Chris in this collection of stories…where one of the biggest differences a kid can make is by asking the right questions.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: By the Light of the Moon

Aatu is eighteen years old, a respectable landowner, and about to marry the girl he loves. The south coast of Finland provides everything his little village requires.

It’s a peaceful life, until a band of ex-Crusaders land on the shore. With the harsh winter and lean times approaching, they cannot be allowed to stay for long. When their priests disturb things best left alone, Aatu fears a minor annoyance will become a disaster.

Aatu’s people turn to the old ways to fight the enemy, to teeth and claws instead of swords and spears. Though they are outnumbered and unused to fighting, Aatu is about to discover that wild wolves are not the most fearsome predators in this land, and even the most peaceful people can become ferocious in defense of the ones they love.

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 MACKEY CHANDLER: A Stranger at the Door (Family Law Book 9)

Life never seems to get less complicated for Lee. The Earth Claims Commission collapsed when North America, was driven from the heavens by Central. What else to do but repossess it if they weren’t going to pay the royalties due? That meant seeing to it’s governance. She never aspired to being a sovereign. With a little luck she could govern with a really light hand by appointing a pair of Voices. She had good examples in doing that in her ally Heather, Queen of the Moon.
Her quiet home was much less quiet after she gave shelter to her Badger friend Tish and her brother. At least the Badger Voice and Ambassador owed her a big favor for taking the teenagers in. Any year now she’d start collecting on those favors instead of paying them out.
What was to be a quiet day trip found her in the middle of a civil war, and if that wasn’t enough there were mysterious aliens quietly spying on her and her allies. Of course they had to DO something about that.

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

DONE WITH MIRRORS

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

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

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

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

Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.

Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.

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: AFTERNOON

This is not mine, but someone posted it in one of my groups, and I think you need it tonight.

As for me? I’m writing tonight, and as the old Motel Six commercials said, I’ll keep the lights on for you. Keep it on for me.

By Holly the Assistant

It seems very peculiar to me, at less than a month before the election, that one of the candidates for the thirty-three regular senate elections has apparently vanished. Gone. Silent. In this day of all-online-all-the-time!

Officially Mr. Talarico has the flu. Odd that he’s not livestreaming something from his bed, don’t you think?

Speculation of course is rampant, ranging from hospitalized to . . . pretty much anything you can imagine. https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2108553958696399249 is a place you can start at, but PJMedia and NotTheBee are covering it if you like them. Probably our Texas Hun Contingent has more local input on the matter as well.

Given the last couple days of posts here (less last night’s chapters), though, I think we might as well speculate wildly.

Was the poor Senate candidate hauled off by aliens to install a new and improved Puppet Master? Or to have one safely removed? He’s from a very weird splinter sect off of Christianity, so weird I hesitate to call it Christian at all, but perhaps he got raptured? (IDK if they even believe in rapture.) Kidnapped by time travelers? If so, because he himself was a time traveler trying to mess up the timeline, or was he native to our time and they’re trying to prevent what he would have done? Bricked up in a cellar he was tricked into by asking him to get the Amontillado? Can we get Miss Drew or the Hardy Brothers on the case to solve this?

In any case, may God have mercy on him, whatever is wrong with him.