(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.

I’m not going to make hard and fast promises. This should already be finished, but of course I am still unpacking and today my body decided it was a very good idea to wake up with a low fever. Probably auto-immune, but who knows?

I am still working on Strains of Earth, recast, as I realized I had the wrong voices, but a whole side line of “Elly sidequests” (It’s what the folder is called) suddenly appeared in my mind, mostly relating to Lendir Almar’s function as head of the fourth circle, which is the “justice” magicians, so mysteries. They will take place between the mainline books, and serve to explore some side-bits of Elly. Well, supposing the first one sells. It is profoundly weird and might ask too much of my readers to plunge into a mystery with strange artifacts set in a very weird culture.

I am hoping to finish this one sometime soon and publish it before I start working on the Christmas collection. It’s a normal novel, should hit somewhere between 70k and 85k words. The second Chronicles of Lost Elly book, which (sigh) is also beyond goat gagger in size will now be called Strains of Earth and probably come out Spring next year.

Trade Goods

Sarah A. Hoyt

Diplomatic message from Edmund Harrington Fairchild, Baron Thackray, to Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson

Public message:

Greetings,

I would like to consult on problems I’ve come across in my work as ambassador pro tem to the new protectorate of Elly. I feel your greater knowledge of the world and of the principal governors of its various portions will be of great help with some of my current issues.

Kalal Ad Leed, Countess of Allridge, has informed me that you’re awake and conscious. I realize your health might still be affected, but I am in great need of specialized information.

Edmund Fairchild, Baron Thackray

The message contains a series of dots, dashes, xs and other symbols, which seems to be a code used between the students of an exclusive military academy that both Thackray and Webson attended. Decoded, it reads:

Skip, please open the encoded message contained in this one. Use the name you give the King of Elly. Decoded, the enclosed message reads:

Skip, old bean,

I hear you’re in terrible shape, having almost killed yourself with power burn, which I understand is muy no bueno, as they say in Upper Hispania.

On the serious side, I realize there are reasons you left and didn’t immediately return. None of us are too sure of them, but the king turns to stone when asked when you’ll return, and I’m not stupid.

At any rate, I beg you to consider taking the post of ambassador as soon as possible, or at the very least to train someone more likely to do well at it. I’m serving because I was ordered to, and because after you – a long way down – I’m the person who understands Elly best.

But I don’t understand it. Not at an instinctive level. Despite being called male pronouns by the translator software, they seem to me to cycle between sexes very fast. I don’t understand them, and I never know if they’re merely going to disapprove of me, proposition me, or challenge me to a duel.

Again, I understand you might have personal reasons – moral ones – not to take the post, but I have to tell you that my being the only surviving agent of thirty sent to Draksah is a very bad reason to try to interpret Ellyans to Britannia and vice versa.

I have Britannian archeologists here, being nuisances. They couldn’t be kept off. They are important people and had her Majesty’s ear. I have Ellyans wanting to travel off world. The Draksalls are obtaining power weapons from somewhere and I can’t find out where, and I’m about at my rope’s end.

For charity’s sake, at least speak to me and give me some clues.

Your friend (I hope),

Edmund

Pro Tem

Edmund Harrington Fairchild, Baron Thackray, son of Gideon Fairchild, Earl of Darrow, pro tem ambassador to the protectorate of Elly:

Sometimes Edmund had trouble understanding how it had come to this. He sat in his perfectly comfortable office, in the royal palace of Eles, in the world of Elly. And all the words in that, after “office,” were a problem.

Oh, the comfortable office was a problem too, in the way all of Elly was a problem. It looked perfectly normal, a place of work. There were his bookcases, in a line behind his desk, filled with real paper books on the duties of ambassadors to new protectorates and the law on how to resolve various disputes.

They were in paper – expensive and cumbersome – because Elly, a barbarian world, could not be trusted not to alter sophisticated electronic records in a language they technically shouldn’t understand. It was the same reason Edmund and his secretary worked on paper, with ink – though the Ellyans were fascinated that he wrote with a pen and not a brush – because electronics could be, and often even inadvertently were, tampered with.

And Edmund had a desk and a proper office chair – his price for remaining and serving, such as it was – but the properness ended there. Across from his desk were not chairs, but what looked like formless beanbags of colorful fabric overlaid in fur blankets. He’d tried to explain that his guests and the people working with him would want chairs, but he’d got back owlish stares and blinking. They were willing to consider Edmund’s chair a sort of throne, since he represented the Queen of Britannia, but the seating for guests would be movable and practical, and therefore these gigantic pillows, filled with wool. Which were… movable and practical, for Elly.

But that was minor. What bothered Edmund most about Elly went beyond cultural misunderstandings and the stubbornness of barbarians who knew one way to do things, and therefore it must be the proper way. The only way. That was to be expected in any newly discovered society.

The bigger issue was found only in Elly, and was exemplified right then as Edmund’s secretary slipped in, carrying a teapot and a cup on a tray with a sugar bowl and a small milk jug.

His secretary, Seren Hassamar, was probably just a little younger than Edmund himself. Edmund had a vague memory he’d been told Hassamar was twenty. Hassamar, because to call him Seren would court a duel even from Seren Hassamar. Seren Hassamar, who was tall, very slim, pale blond, distractingly beautiful and sweet to a fault.

Which was its own kind of problem.

Ellyans were hermaphrodites. Fully functional hermaphrodites.

How they’d come to be so had to be prefaced with a disquisition on the twenty-first century and its pathologies. In the late twenty-first century, when the process of translating a whole ship from the orbit of one world to the orbit of another was in its infancy, its designers had ignored the temporal variable. Which meant that ships could also get flung through time, to the past or the future. With no control. By the time they’d controlled for the time variable and started traveling space reliably, humans had found lost colonies, some of them with civilizations older than Earth’s, though their colonizing groups had all left Earth in the twenty-first century.

Elly’s human occupation was probably around ten thousand years old, the ship having been flung back in time and crashed. And the expedition that seeded it had left in the early part of the process, when more than half the ships disappeared. Which meant the people who’d founded Elly were fanatics on a mission. They believed they were fixing the “flaw” at the heart of humanity. What flaw? Having two sexes. Edmund still couldn’t understand the reasoning, but there were recordings and documents. The people who’d designed their descendants as functional hermaphrodites had done so in the conviction this would make them cooperative and non-aggressive and enlightened.

Edmund wished he could show them their descendants ten thousand years later. He wasn’t a cruel man, but Elly brought out a sadistic streak in him. The founding idiots deserved to see the scrappy, insane, fighting mess they’d created. Though they’d probably say it was the Ellyans’ harsh history – their war with Draksah, which had often invaded and enslaved them – that had distorted them. People were good at excusing their own failures. And at any rate, the founders of Elly were long dead and couldn’t answer to Edmund’s anger, the cowards. Though maybe they hadn’t died just to escape him.

Ellyans didn’t look hermaphrodite, though, not exactly. What they looked like was very flat women. At least that was what most of them looked like to Edmund. The translator nanos in his head rendered their single pronoun, applied to all humans, as “he,” but that helped nothing.

There was a range, of course. Lendir Almar, captain of the royal guard, was taller than Edmund by almost a head and built like… well, built like something designed for strength and endurance. Perhaps a long-distance spaceship. When he flexed his muscles, other muscles had to get out of the way. This was very comforting, because despite his soft, beautiful features, Almar didn’t disturb Edmund in the least. He pinged “pretty-faced bodybuilder,” and Edmund would be fine going out for a pint with Almar. Not that he did, because he didn’t drink if he could avoid it. At least while on Elly. He had a feeling that if he started drinking, he’d spend the rest of his ambassadorship blotto.

Because—well, many reasons, but take Seren Hassamar. Please. Someone do, because Edmund certainly wasn’t about to.

Hassamar was pretty. As in, he’d have made a very pretty female. And he was delicate, and he was graceful. And right then he was wearing an ankle-length tunic, cinched at the waist with a braided silver belt. A blue velvet tunic, embroidered with silver flowers, which matched his silver slippers embroidered with blue flowers. And Edmund wouldn’t lay a bet against Hassamar having embroidered both.

Hassamar set the tray down and – handling the china as if it were precious, which it was, since it had come from Britannia – poured Edmund’s tea, put in exactly as much milk as Edmund liked and two teaspoons of sugar, and set it, reverently, in front of Edmund. Then he looked up, and his blue eyes widened. “Lord? What have I done wrong?”

Edmund realized he was glaring at Hassamar and hurried to say, “Nothing. I was thinking of the archeologists.” Which was a good excuse, because he always glared when thinking of the archeologists.

“Oh,” Hassamar said. Then, brightly, “Do you wish me to take down a letter for them, milord?”

“No, no. Not yet. I’ll have my tea and think. You may go. I’ll call you back when I need you.”

Hassamar smiled and bowed slightly, then left, the skirt of his tunic swaying with his walk.

Ellyans didn’t walk like women. Or men. In fact, the design of their hips gave them a distinctive gait that allowed the trained eye to pick out interlopers in Elly. But as in everything else, there was a continuum. And Hassamar swayed his hips rhythmically as he walked. He probably wasn’t doing it on purpose.

No, make that he couldn’t be doing it on purpose, because the last thing he’d do would be to imitate a woman, since the chances of his ever having glimpsed one were vanishingly small.

Edmund sighed and took a sip of his tea, which was perfect, and which annoyed him for reasons he’d never be able to articulate.

The problem wasn’t that he was a man attracted to women, stuck alone on a planet of people who weren’t women. They weren’t men either, and the difficulty hadn’t seemed to present itself at all to Scipio Hayden, who was attracted to men. In fact, Skip had hurried off the world, leaving the ambassadorship in Edmund’s hands, presumably to escape an affair with Elly’s king.

No, that was probably wronging Skip. He’d probably left under the belief he was being noble, leaving the king free to pick a more suitable sworn lover, the Ellyan equivalent of a spouse. Except the king hadn’t picked anyone else. The king wasn’t picking anyone else. The king was looking like a shade of himself. And Skip wasn’t answering letters.

Edmund found he was drumming on the desk and made himself stop. Skip seemed to have assumed – without even thinking about it – that everyone here was close enough to male, and since Skip was attracted to males, his problem was of a different kind than Edmund’s.

Edmund’s was mostly loneliness. Few Ellyans pinged male enough to be just friends, the kind you just talk to, unguardedly, and the only two he knew were very busy: one was head of the royal guard, and the other, Glar Sirihar, was governor of a division called Lirridar.

Every other Ellyan, including the young king and his sire the Archmagician, called from him responses somewhere between the abashed appeasing of a matriarch and the protective, vaguely flirtatious – or at least aware of la difference — manner one used with a young and attractive female. Neither of which was remotely appropriate to the proud and prickly Ellyans.

Edmund felt he had to keep himself in check every waking minute of every day. Oh, and the sleeping ones too. He’d started setting up sensors and alarms around his bed that woke him up, wide awake, if anyone stepped past them. He might be paranoid, but he’d heard the king had insinuated himself into Skip’s bed at the start of their relationship, and if someone misread Edmund and got into his bed under the amiable belief he could be seduced, the resulting shock, horror and dismay would probably end in a duel.

It was enough to give him a nervous breakdown. And that was without considering the other side of Elly’s inherent differences from the rest of humanity. The one, in fact, responsible for giving Elly a high functionary known as the Archmagician.

The colony ship had crashed into the frozen portion of the world, known as Erradi, and lost ninety percent of the adults on board. And the same people who’d decided humanity’s great flaw was having two sexes had decided that the way to ensure their descendants survived was to create highly specialized nanites which, given energy, could manipulate matter interdimensionally. Apparently they’d thought these nanites, interacting with brain structures they’d designed into the embryos of their descendants, would give them the normal range of mythical psi abilities.

They had done that, in fact. There was some measure of telepathic communication, teleportation and telekinesis. But there was also healing, the creation of portals that allowed travel between places on the world and to other worlds, and shields, and flares of power. In fact, the entire system had come to be called “magic,” or at least that was how the translator nanos rendered it. And how even Britannians had started calling it magic. Except the scientists, who called it something mind-breaking and tongue-twisting. But no one cared about that.

The Archmagician, Eerlen Troz, who had started life as an Erradian nomad wandering the frozen wastelands of the world, was a very powerful mage and the leader of the group known as the Brotherhood of Magicians, which sat in a spiral but called each of its winding curves a “circle.” And each circle had a specialty. First circles were just hell-of-scary people who could do anything “magic” could do. Second circles were experts in war and the lethal uses of power. Thirds were healers. Miraculous healers. They could cause their patients to regrow body parts in some circumstances, even. They could do anything except cure infection. Fourths were… well, justice. They served as an informal police force, or at least the closest Elly had to one. Fourths could investigate a crime scene, call back what had happened with varying degrees of clarity, and generally determine the guilty party in serious crimes. Since most serious crimes in Elly – being a barbarian world – were punished by death, once the culprit was determined it was the duty of the head of fourth circle – Lendir Almar, also known as Lord of Justice – to take the head of the guilty in clean, immediate punishment.

Then there was the fifth, whose head was known as the Master of Distance. Fifth circles were portaleers, which was strange, as a single one of them couldn’t even open a personal portal. But ten of them working in concert over a month or so could open a portal and set it, so that it became permanent, and so that people born without the structures to harbor the nanites that created magic could still use it. Then the sixth were masters of creatures, doing for animals what the third did for humans, but also having some control over the animals’ behavior. Sevenths were masters of time. They mostly created stasis. Stasis containers were used all over Elly to preserve food, and they could be permanent or temporary. Temporary stasis containers were cheap, but the permanent ones, huge boxes that people used as sort of refrigerators but not cold, were very expensive.  Edmund had a feeling the Seventh Circle power might have other sides. He’d just never asked, because the whole magic thing gave him hives.

And that was before dealing with eighths. The head of the eighth circle – whom Edmund privately thought of as the king’s baby mama, since he had given birth to the king’s sireling, for now the heir presumptive to the throne – Selbur Deharn, was… slippery was one way to put it. Edmund got the feeling he thought too much and said too little. And his circle was known for illusions, able to fool people into thinking their surroundings were quite different from what they were. Which could be the most deadly ability of all. The fact that Edmund was naturally immune to it didn’t help. It only made it more obvious he was an outsider.

And Elly wasn’t actually alone among the lost colonies in having this magic. Not anymore. Not for the last several millenia. Through interbreeding, they had given the ability to the Draksalls, their mortal enemies. Since its discovery, Draksah was also a rogue world, outside the bounds of civilization and allied with forces fighting the free world: the Earth Federation and Britannia on High’s star empire. Which meant that the enemy of free humans had magic.

For the ambassador of Britannia, Draksalls – infiltrators, subverters, spies – were another facet of the headache. Though at least Draksalls had women, his mind said, and Edmund shushed it loudly. It helped nothing. They had men too. A corrupt culture was a corrupt culture, even if they were a dual-sexed human race, like most of humanity.

And he realized his loud shushing had interrupted Hassamar, who stood in the doorway, having come in – knocking was a skill Edmund despaired of teaching Ellyans – and was saying, “Milord?” in an alarmed tone.

Edmund sighed. “Yes, Hassamar?”

Hassamar fidgeted, shifting his weight from foot to foot, causing the hem of his tunic to sway over his slippers. “It’s the archeologists, Lord.”

Of course it was. The archeologists were Britannian, but they were not the sort of people Edmund would have wanted to have a pint with. In fact, Edmund was starting to entertain serious doubts they were people at all. Robots with a single-minded program would be more accurate.

Except that… no, they were human, and high-status Britannians, obsessed with archeology and the history of the various newly discovered colonie. As soon as Elly had been discovered, they’d started lobbying to dig in Elly. And because they were high born, the Queen had allowed it. Six of them, with special permissions and guarded by Ellyans. And they were to minimize interactions with Ellyans not their guards. Well, their guards too, outside formal interactions.

Had they done that? Ooh, boy. Apparently archeologizing – he stood by the neologism – came with going to fairs, sampling food, asking people rude questions, and interrupting Edmund five times a week with some fabricated emergency. At least he hadn’t heard of any of them bedding an Ellyan. Edmund only hoped that meant they hadn’t. They were all middle-aged married males, by the Queen’s requirement for entry to Elly, but the same spirit that had them trying fruits they’d never seen before might extend to other experiments. Edmund said a silent prayer that they’d keep it silent, if so. Silent and not fruitful, please. “What do the archeologists want now?”

Hassamar swayed his tunic’s hem in a dance of hesitation. “It’s not them, Lord. I mean, it is them, but… You see, Lord Sirihar would like to talk to you about what they’ve been up to.” He did a little dip, as though his knees had gone weak at the thought of Sirihar in a mood, which frankly Edmund wouldn’t even blame him for.

“Oh, no,” Edmund said, or to be fair, moaned in extreme dismay.

“Yes, Lord. He’s here, and would like a word with you.”

Edmund drank the rest of his tea. It had gone cold in the cup, and it didn’t matter. He spilled half of it onto his shirt. “Send him in, please.”

He stood to greet the Ellyan, who came storming into the office, glaring. Not that standing did much, since Glar Sirihar was taller than Edmund by more than a head, taller even than Lendir Almar. And he had much the same build as Lendir Almar, meaning his muscles had muscles, and those muscles were thinking of acquiring more muscles. Seeing him stomp into the office made Edmund think he definitely should ask Britannia to send him a set of weights to train with. And platform shoes.

He bowed to Sirihar. “Milord. I’m sorry if the Britannian archeologists—” he felt the nanos translate that as “diggers of history” “—have been causing you problems.”

Sirihar, who was still soft-featured enough to be considered a very pretty male, was pale skinned, with dark hair down to the middle of his back. In fact, all Ellyans of any consequence wore their hair long, short hair translating to “manual laborer or ruffian.” All except Lendir Almar, at least. He apparently relished the idea of looking threatening.

Sirihar’s clothes were blessedly free of embroidery. He wore suede pants and what looked like a rough-spun linen tunic to his waist. As he strode in, his expression of anger resolved into one of pained confusion. “They are problems,” he said. He had a comfortably mid-range voice, not the high, musical voice of most Ellyans. “But I don’t suppose that’s your fault. The king says we have to endure them, and I suspect your king also told you to.” The nanos didn’t understand any other gender in the Ellyan language.

“Yes, milord.”

“Yes. Well, the problem is they’re digging in my home farm.”

Edmund blinked. Sirihar was the Lord of Lirridar. Elly had a single supercontinent, but its divisions were inaccessible to each other by land without portals, mostly because the center of the continent lay over the arctic and very high, a frozen high desert whose weight would eventually unbalance the world, or cause the breakup of the continent, or whatever it was geologists said was likely. Edmund knew less about geology than he knew about archeology. And at least no geologists had insisted on coming to Elly, which was a point in their favor.

But when it came to archeologists, Edmund was sure the king of Elly and the Queen of Britannia had agreed they’d be let into Erradi, with limited access to the Cave of the Ancients and the surrounding regions, because that was where the colony’s spaceship had initially crashed.

“How did they get to Lirridar?”

Sirihar’s lips twitched. “I assume the normal way: via portal, Lord.”

“No, that’s not—why?”

Sirihar flung himself onto one of the gigantic pillows, allowing Edmund to sit down, and made a sound at the back of his throat. “Apparently they are very interested in dating how long the Draksall occupation of Elly lasted, before Amissar liberated us, and they say the remnants of what was their headquarters are near my palace, in my home farm. To be precise, between my apple orchard and my barn.”

“How would they know that about the Draksall occupation?”

“Ah.” Sirihar made a face. “I presume they talked to someone. Likely at the Feast of Gold.”

“The—”

“Feast of Gold. The harvest festival in Lartoar. There are butter and cheese competitions, and a cattle market.”

Of course there were. Lirridar was known for high, grassy plains full of cattlemen. To be fair, Edmund mostly knew this because of all the jokes about Lirridarians, “beautiful enough to make you weep,” sleeping with their cows and goats and sheep. Which he didn’t think was true, but it was one of the clues to what the division did.

“And the archeologists attended the festival.”

“Are attending the festival,” Sirihar said. “It’s still going on, for another two weeks at least.”

“And want to dig in your home farm?”

“They might be drunk,” Sirihar said. Then he sighed. “They’re scaring the cows.”

“Oh.” Edmund ran through his limited range of options for dealing with archeological intruders in a home farm, scaring the cows. “I could send a dispatch to the Queen.”

“Yes,” Sirihar said. “You certainly can. But before that, you can come with me and talk to the mad people digging up my apple trees.”

“They won’t listen to me any more than to you.”

Sirihar shrugged. “No, but you can try. And then I can go to the king and tell him I’m going to spear the intruders’ gizzards if he doesn’t intervene.”

“Right, right,” Edmund said. He was fairly sure Sirihar knew archeologists didn’t have gizzards. Probably. “Let me dictate a letter to Hassamar, to send to the Queen.”

“Oh, you can come tomorrow. They’re very drunk. It would do them good to sleep it off. I’m going to put guards around them so they don’t go and get more alcohol. I just wanted you to see the problem we’re facing.”

“I see the problem,” Edmund said, standing and bowing as Sirihar left.

Edmund called Hassamar. The young Ellyan had willingly taken the nanites so he could type in passable Britannian, and he could even use a computer – kept in his own cubicle, where no one else entered – since he was blessedly free of magical power.

He looked apprehensive and a little worried, though that was his natural state. His parent, Mardir Hassen, one of the royal guardsmen, had recommended him to Edmund. Mostly because Hassamar had been small, slight and sickly as a child, and was still too slender for his family’s hereditary work. So his parent – which in Elly meant parent of the womb, the other parent being called a sire – had wanted him in quiet work, in the dry. And the young person was indeed competent and careful, and willing to learn. But did he have to ping girl-in-distress?

Edmund held himself in check and didn’t smile reassuringly, or try to imply he’d protect Hassamar from the archeologists. For one thing, he’d like to be protected from the archeologists himself.

“You need to take down a communication to send to Her Majesty, Queen Eleanor, about the archeologists.”

“What… what are they doing?” Hassamar asked. “If I may ask.”

“Apparently digging in Sirihar’s orchard and scaring his cows.”

Hassamar looked shocked. “That’s very bad.”

“Indeed it is. Take this down: To Her Majesty—”

When he was done dictating, he asked, “I don’t suppose you know if our previous message to Lord Webson was read?”

Hassamar shook his head. “It either wasn’t, or was read under privacy.”

Lovely. Scipio Hayden, Viscount Webson, was either ignoring Edmund or pretending to ignore him.

“Could you possibly bring me more tea, when you have time?”

“Certainly, Lord.”

Edmund sank into his chair, wishing he could have a bourbon. But the last thing he wanted was to be in a state where he couldn’t fully control himself.

Tea would have to do.

Justice Wakes

Lendir Almar, Commander of the Royal Guard, First Magician of the Fourth Circle of the Ellyan Brotherhood of Magicians, Lord Justice:

Lendir Almar woke up.

His mind resounded with the echo of a brotherhood alarm. Unfortunately, it was a sound he knew. Specifically, it was the sound of one of his underlings in the fourth circle of the Brotherhood of Magicians calling him in the line of duty. As head of fourth, Lord of Justice, it was Lendir’s duty to respond.

Still sleep-fogged, he blinked. For a moment his bedroom looked unfamiliar, partly because it was. After he swore to Eerlen Troz, Archmagician of Elly and sire of the king, they’d been assigned larger quarters on the fourth floor of the palace, just below the fifth, where the king lodged. These new quarters were more spacious than Lendir’s old ones, with three bedrooms, not counting the adjoining nursery and the lodging for nursemaids. And the main bedroom, where he lay in bed next to a gently snoring Eerlen, could have fit the bedroom, kitchen and sitting room of his previous lodging. It also had two large, shuttered windows and a door to the balcony, which Eerlen insisted on leaving open, because the mild fall of the temperate climate was, according to Lendir’s sworn, “sweltering.”

The grey light of very early morning came through that door and the shutters over the windows, painting stripes over Eerlen, who slept naked and uncovered. He was turned on his side, and his long blond hair had come loose from its braid and half hid his face.

Orienting himself took Lendir a few seconds, and the sound that wasn’t a sound still echoed in his head, urgent and unstoppable. He blinked again and sighed, because he had to obey the call of duty, however little he might wish to. Eerlen would be the first to tell him that. He concentrated, and thought very hard in the direction of the call, Yes?

Lord Almar? The mental voice felt very young, hesitant, tentative.

Yes. Who is this?

I’m Terem Karrovan, Lord Almar.

Terem Karrovan…

Clan Rovan, Lord.

Lendir ran through the list of his subordinates in the fourth circle and came up empty, which shouldn’t happen, because he knew each and every one of them. Rovan. Was that a Lirridarian line? Not that he knew all the lines – that was Eerlen’s domain, at least for lines with magic – but he had a foggy memory of seeing the name painted over a cheese and butter stall at a gathering. And most cheese and butter, though not all, came from Lirridar. Also, Terem, “golden butter,” was a quintessential Lirridarian name. Lirridarians often gave their children butter and cheese names and were baffled that the rest of the world thought them funny. I’m sorry, Karrovan. I don’t—

No, Lord. Lendir got the impression that if mental voices could shake, this one would. I am a fourth circle apprentice, Lord Almar. Clan Rovan.

An apprentice? Lendir sat up. Part of him wanted to yell and close the mental connection. The normal protocol was for an apprentice to reach the Fourth Circle’s Gate, the last in the circle, who was informally in charge of the herd of semi-trained adolescent apprentices.

But the transgression itself was so strange that he had to verify it was just a panicking half-grown child and not something worse. So instead, disciplining his mind to calm, he sent, What caused you to break formal protocol? Why come directly to me?

Now the emotion that came through with the voice was terror, confusion and embarrassment all together. Lord. I had to. It’s my clan. It’s my older sibling!

So a crime had been committed – presumably, otherwise why invoke the fourth circle? – and this child was overwrought. But no. He had been trained, after all. Lendir made sure apprentices were trained. He wasn’t just overwrought. Something was off. Had to be.

Take a deep breath and tell me what happened, he mind-sent, and found he had already gotten up and pulled off his night tunic. By the scant light, squinting, he cast about for the tunic, pants and boots he’d taken off the night before. He found his battle leathers first and shoved them aside. Eerlen had helped him untie those as he’d dragged in from battle shift. He remembered that, but didn’t even remember falling into bed.

He should bathe before going out. He’d been at the front, on duty, last night. No breakthrough, Maker be thanked, which meant no holding shields or— But you still sweated like crazy under battle leathers, even in the ice and snow of Erradi.

My sibling, the apprentice replied. Myret Rovan.

Myret? Oath of Giving. Odd. A child born shortly after a swearing, he presumed.

Yes, they say… that is, I found him hanging in the winter barn. Grief joined the rest of the feelings in the mind voice. I went in to see to the feeding and—

Dead? Lendir located his pants and pulled them on. Brown suede, and showing creases and—no. Eerlen would kill him if he went out in dirty clothes. Honor of the brotherhood, and besides he was sworn to the archmage, half crossibling of the king. Honor of the king, too.

Lendir dropped the pants and rushed to the bath next to the bedroom. It had a bathing pool, and the water was warm, so he could wash in minutes. He undressed and dove under the running water. It ran continuously, as all water in the palace did, pulled and warmed by some form of magic they no longer understood. Something from the ancients.

Yes. Oh, yes. His eyes were all—and his tongue—

You were the one who found him?

Yes. I cut him down. But I couldn’t make him breathe. I called a third—

Bad, but expected. Families would do it, even if it made reading the traces far harder. I understand it’s your sibling, but why call me?

Myret. Myret is dead and we don’t know—

Why the head of circle? He was already running through his list of underlings at the back of his mind, choosing whom to send to the case. Probably suicide. Maybe.

Lord of Justice, I think he killed himself, but there are traces of coercion, and my parent says he didn’t, and he wants to—he wants to duel Kyral Artel, and I can’t stop him.

Kyr what? Who is Kyral Artel?

My sibling’s sworn. They swore last month. And my parent says Artel drove Myret to kill himself and it’s as good as killing him, and Lord Almar, please. It will start a clan war. Ours against the Artels. Their lands are next to ours and—

Drying himself, Lendir thought very hard – though not in the child’s direction – that he’d like to say a long string of profanities. Clan honor and suicide and a parent who’d lost his line child were not things he wanted to wake up to. But the worst part was that the child was probably right.

Lendir pulled on clean pants and a knee-length tunic, shook his hair, congratulating himself on having cut it short despite all the social disapproval, and slammed his feet into boots.

He got the coordinates from the apprentice’s mind and sent a vaguely reassuring thought that he was on his way. Crossing the bedroom, he stopped at Eerlen’s soft voice. “Lendir, love?”

Eerlen was awake, sitting up. Lendir dropped to one knee to kiss him. “Suicide, maybe murder, in Lirridar. Parent taking it badly. Clan war threatened against the dead one’s sworn. I’ll go, I’ll cast to see what happened, I’ll be back.”

“Not alone,” Eerlen said, starting to rise.

“I’m head of fourth. How would it look, taking the archmage to protect me? Go back to sleep. I’ll be back soon.”

“Clan war is a bad bridge to stand in the middle of, Dir. Take backup. Guards.”

“No. Fourths. I’ll take my next two.” Meaning the two fourth circles next to him in power.

Eerlen paused, then nodded, giving in to the logic. At any rate, while fourth circles weren’t precisely inner circle, neither were they powerless. It would take a very unusual clan to subdue three of them together without their at least being able to call for help. And no clan was foolish enough to want to go to war with the brotherhood.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Lendir said. “Two at most.” Mentally, he called Ridar Vessan and Korlen Ossari. The Karrashan wool weaver and the Brinarian fisher were next to him in power, and so evenly matched that he didn’t envy Eerlen the choice of the next head of fourth, should something happen to Lendir. They were also, Lendir suspected, a couple. The fact that he sensed them in the same bed at the other end of his mind call wasn’t a surprise. But they hadn’t informed him; they hadn’t made it official by swearing, and it was none of his business. He gave them the details of the call and the coordinates.

Before he stepped out of the bedroom door, he felt his blue magician’s cloak drop onto his shoulders. Eerlen reached around to fasten it in front, then kissed Lendir’s cheek. “Don’t refrain from calling for help if you need it, Lord of Justice.”

“I won’t,” Lendir said, fairly sure he was lying.

He closed the front door of their quarters, shook his head at the sudden straightening and startled bow of the guard in the hallway, and ran down four flights of public stairs, ignoring the occasional servant going about some early business, and two of his own subordinate guards, off duty, coming back from outside, obviously the worse for drink and leaning on each other.

In the front courtyard, the guards by the public portal were fully alert, ready to keep track of any arrivals who might be a threat. That one of them was weaving, a long strip on a drop loom fixed to his belt and weighted with pebbles, was no detriment to that. Guards often used the downtime to weave. Lendir had been known to do it.

They looked curious but didn’t ask as he walked past them and into the public portal, the coordinates for his destination firmly in mind.

He walked out on the other side, at a dedicated portal in the middle of a plaza. It was a vast plaza, and around its edges converged the entrance gates of five farms. Doubtless each farm had arranged for a protrusion of land just wide enough for walls and a gate. Their lands would sprawl behind in quite different directions, but this allowed them easy access to a portal: a necessity for dairy families with no power. Or no high-circle power.

Lendir had instructions. He knew which farm gate to head for.

But he didn’t need them. In the sharp, chill wind of early fall in Lirridar, a wailing carried. A parent mourning his line child.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened was this: The masks were pulled off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerves.

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

I want it to be just nerves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the list as to why:

NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:

1) Pushing to maximize abortion

2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then this:

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

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

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

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

Space travel?

Well….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if this were true what would be different?

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

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

…. Well, I can pray.

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

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

Cui bono in all these things? Cui bono?