Month: August 2019

*Two days ago I was talking to a friend about how we’re better off despite/because of horrible experiences, and remembered this post of Cedar’s from her blog.  She very kindly gave me permission to reproduce it here. – SAH*

Kintsukori – by Cedar Sanderson

I often touch on social issues, and occasionaly very personal ones, on this blog. Earlier today I did this, writing not only on behalf of my children, but of every child of a disrupted family that has ever overheard adults dismissing them as worthless and hopelessly damaged because of it.

My dears, it simply isn’t true. Disruptions can come in many forms, whether they be the death of a parent, the deployment or other long-term job assignment of a parent, and of course, divorce. But hear me, children. You are not broken beyond repair.

When a potter is creating a bowl, he may drop it and break it. If it is unfired, the clay is put in a vessel of water, mashed up, and remade. This can’t be a comfortable process, if you are the clay, but healing is possible.

There may be scars, and a case of utter abandonment by a parent is doubtless a pain that will never entirely vanish. However, there are also many families that are re-shaped larger, odder, and with perhaps three or four loving parents rather than just two.

However,the children need support, not snide sniping at those parents who are trying to make the best of the situation as it is. There are few ideal outcomes in this world. As someone said to me recently “I realized that twenty years of bad marriage was doing more harm than cutting loose.” Sometimes life takes a left turn, and a family has to talk, try to keep communications open, and they will heal.

There is no broken beyond repair. I know I am defying some accepted truths: that a person cannot change. I do believe it is possible. I think that trust can be re-formed, and extended perhaps into something that is even more beautiful than the orginal, as the Japanese art of kintsukuroi shows. When a broken pot, which would would ordinarily be discarded as hopeless, is healed with gold to create a work of art.

We are art forged in the fires of pain. It is our choice to take that pain and create something beautiful with it, or something ugly and vindictive that wants to create an unending cycle. Just because your background was unpleasant, is no need to apply that to everything you see around you.

Dream, my children, and fly on mended wings. You are kintusukuroi, and you are loved by many.

 

I was going to write something completely different — sorry Phantom, again — but last night just before I went to bed I saw the beginnings of another Amazon panic. Again.

Look, I understand this. We’re dependent on and at the mercy of Amazon, and the more money we make, the more we fear what they can do to stop it.  I GET it.

But this case is even flakier than former panics.  So, stand by.

There is a whole thing making the rounds of all my writers’ groups involving a writer who was banned from Amazon for life because “he had too many KU reads” an answer that supposedly took him months to get.

None of this makes any sense, and I don’t mean the reason given. Yes, that also doesn’t make any sense, but the “nonsensical” Amazon actions usually have a certain logic this lacks.

So let’s go into the story AS I HEARD IT — and keep in mind I haven’t watched any of the author’s videos. I SERIOUSLY dislike listening to and/or watching videos on the computer, so I don’t do it if I can help it. That’s my first caveat.  However note that I’ve heard this story now from like 10 people, and they agree, so…

My NEXT caveat is that this is going to be a very long post.

So, TL/DR: There are enough holes in the story that I can’t regard the supposedly wronged author as truthful. So, this obviously is a big problem.

His experience with Amazon is entirely contrary to mine, and I have reason to believe they banned him FOR OTHER REASONS than what he chose to divulge, though what he chose to divulge is probably partially true.

IOW be not afraid. Amazon might go insane, but I have reason to believe this is not it, or even the beginning or it.

I’m not looking for a fight. I’m about to go away on a writing-and-cuddling weekend for the first time in over two years (almost three years) and I don’t want that ruined by an online fight.  But I’m tired of watching people run around with the pants on their heads on fire.  So I’m delaying departure to say this. (And yes, my husband is THRILLED. Why do you ask?)

FIRST and because I know some of you have caught Amazon-derangement from the left (heaven knows why, since you don’t trust the left on anything else. And yes, the left hates Amazon and would love to see it crash. TRUST me, I still lurk, unnoticed in a lot of writers email groups where the average politics are “Stalin or Mao?”): I neither trust nor love Amazon.

I don’t trust Amazon because I have now 21 years experience  of traditional publishing, and my last illusions about trusting anyone associated with my books (other than me) were destroyed over the last year.

Trust might not be POSSIBLE for me under these circumstances. If tomorrow Robert, Dan and Marshall, formed a company and offered to make an animated movie of one of my books, I’d immediately start suspecting them of skullduggery.

As for loving Amazon, I love the CONVENIENCE, particularly of overnight delivery or sometimes same day delivery.

But to say I love Amazon itself would be like saying I have a mad pash for Walmart, which allows me to buy cheap bras and panties when I forget to pack them for a trip.

Both companies, btw, have boards/owners that are at least soft left and occasionally hard left. Both have arbitrarily banned merchandise because those idiots at SPLC say it’s evilbad.

Not in love with either of them. Amazon is more efficient than B & N and Walmart is cheaper and less crazy than Target, but that’s praising with faint damns.

I do HOWEVER have experience with Amazon both as publisher and as customer. As customer, they have the best customer service EVER.

As publisher, they occasionally throw bizarre, mind-boggling wobblers which take sometimes up to a week to resolve. Important note on this: Their wobblers are never unjustified, though sometimes it is “How programmers think publishers work.” (Like, not letting me publish my collection because it had “bits stolen from other books.” because they didn’t get that short stories revert to the author after a year, per industry standard. Or take the problem LitRPG people had last year, where Amazon was pulling their books because it was afraid that their games were violating game-makers copyright.  The authors were justly incensed “It was a made up game.” BUT they failed to see the other side. There was logic. The logic is that SOMEONE used a real game, the game maker bitched because it was violation of copyright and threatened to sue Amazon. Amazon pulled anything that sounded real, or to close to real games for comfort.  Yeah, a wobbler, but there is logic.  And as far as I know, most of them eventually got solved)

Their wobblers are always solvable, even if it sometimes requires more time than I can give it in a day (hence the week.) I can get this stuff resolved by going on the phone. ME, with my accent and the voluble Latin temper. I’ve never had any other company ignore those as Amazon does, and still solve the problem.

Now, to this author’s specific case as I’ve seen it laid it out:

1- The most successful indie author ever. This should ring SO MANY alarm bells in the back of your head. No, seriously.

Why? Because how would he tell that? It’s not a claim you can even make. There is no way to tell, unless he’s been the #1 author on Amazon since indie was allowed. And even then, we know things other than sales influence the ranking.

So, how does he know? It reminds me of another figure who kept saying that he was about to publish the three “Biggest writers in SF/F” and couldn’t figure out why I was backing away fast.

Look, when there is no way anyone can know this, that kind of brag smacks of hard sales, and — at the very least — a looseness with the truth that should set off alarm bells.

I also know how Amazon treats high-selling indies — and you don’t need to be as high as you think, for that — and I have friends who are that. Not only do you get vouchers for stuff for free, but you have access to the highest ranks of Amazon often in personal visit, paid for by Amazon itself. So–

Not conclusive, but this type of sales-talk makes me doubt anything else the author has to say. Also to level set, the top tier of indie authors is making … millions, multiple. Keep that in mind for what he’s claiming.

2- Also went over to BN and took a look at his books there. What struck me first was there is no preview, at least not on my Mac. The second was file size for some of the books. The first one I checked had a file size of 3 MB.

It took several tries to find one under 1 mb.

Which means he either includes a hell of a lot of images or he is padding the books somehow–and that is something Amazon will get you for. If he’s not padding, he’s a damn liar.

He can’t be doing four of those a month. Hell, he can’t be doing one of those a month, not without hiring out a lot of it.

Look, this is ME saying it. And yes, I know John Ringo. There is a limit to what you can do, even when you have graphomania, which arguably I do.

For those who don’t know what those sizes mean: Witchfinder which weighs in at 170k words, meaning about two “normal” novels is approximately the same number of pages as the book I looked at. The file size for witchfinder is 1126 KB. He doesn’t seem to have pictures except for top of chapters.

So… what is going on? I don’t know, but it’s weird. And weird will get attention from Amazon programmers, period. Also it makes me suspect some kind of code embedded in the book to make each page count as more (Look, I haven’t heard of this, but LitRPG and anything bordering on erotica — supposedly this author always does harem — are always the leads in this kind of “how to game the system” innovation.)

3- The reason he gives makes no sense. No, bear with me on this.

Dark Sarah writes in a field where I usually sell NOTHING but make all the money in KU reads. I haven’t been very active the last year, so my money is down to nothing.

But at one time I was making most of my money from those, and it was ALL KU reads. No one even cleared their throat in my direction.

In view of the above, I presume 3 books a month or more this guy puts out are “Harem Fantasy” — so the same kind of thing — while Amazon might have an algorithm for “alarm bells, look at it” I DOUBT they’d pull his books, much less remove them and ban him based on an algorithm.

At most they’d send him a note going “Uh? What is happening, call us/email us.”

Now there is the possibility of those emails going astray, yes, and that causing a mess, but I DOUBT it would be instant. And a first step, I think, would be kicking him out of KU. NOT out of Amazon. Also, as me, sometimes I don’t check my emails for months (until recently, it wasn’t even close to my main income) so it’s entirely possible to get in big trouble. BUT again, you call, and eventually it gets solved.

5- He’s had books on Apple since 2016.The books he had banned, he had on Amazon on KU. Are those the exact same books? Because it’s possible to go wide and be on KU, but it’s very difficult, and 20% of content needs to be different.  Is it, or did he do what many people do and just put on Omnibuses on other venues, and hope KU doesn’t notice?  Mind you, even then the most they do is bann you from KU, but it is a violation of TOS.

That’s if they are the same books. IF they’re not, it makes his output even more unbelievable.

It’s not impossible nor criminal to have a “writing factory” of colaborators, and putting your name on the edited material.

But not telling your readers that is at the very least a “certain looseness with the truth.”

6 – His actions make no sense.  No seriously.  Keep in mind, he’s been making a bazillion, if his claims are true. And suddenly it’s cut off.

I don’t know about you, but my main source of income goes away, I’m going to try to replace it.

Banned for life? Sure. But see YOU are not the same as an entity with another tax payer number.  And if the ban somehow mentions that? I’m sure he has a wife, a cousin or a close friend who could become his publisher.  He’d have to change names, and lose income momentarily, sure.

BUT if he can write as much as that, it’s no big, and anyway, it’s only while he resolves things.  Now he might have done this and not be divulging it, but it sure doesn’t SOUND like it.

Also, again, remember he has a ton of money.

You guys more or less continuously get confused over Amazon.  Let me make something clear: you can get banned from Twitter or FB with no recourse.  BUT AMAZON IS NOT SOCIAL MEDIA.

Amazon is BY DEFINITION a public market place.  There are laws against those banning people because “oh, well, we felt like it.”

It seems to me the kind of lawyer he could hire with the money he has made would be making a federal case out of it.

LITERALLY.  Probably headed to the supreme court.

And that kind of case would be in EVERY paper.  We’re talking someone blocked from making MILLIONS of dollars.

It wouldn’t be some guy screaming on you tube and running a fundraiser.

Something doesn’t add up. It just DOESN’T.  There is no way to make this stuff make sense, and I mean his side of it, not just Amazon.

7- What I suspect he ran into is “the many ways to violate KU” AKA “Stealing KU money from other writers” but the perpetrators never view it that way. Given that he has to be loose with the truth (see claim of bestselling indie ever, also see the diddoonuffin on how they gave him no warning, whatever, also see claims of how much he writes,) if not outright lying, I don’t feel too bad about suspecting this, but I still feel somewhat bad.  However Harem and LitRPG are infected with more fraud than any other field.

The non-charitable thought is that he hired “bots” to read his books. Yes, this can be done. Yes, this will get you banned, because Amazon deals with Russians and Chinese doing this ALL THE TIME.  The pattern is discernible by programing, and if serious enough it damn skippy will get you pulled without warning and banned-for-life.

The charitable view, and it has happened to people before, is that he got hit by accident with a “the bots also looked at my books to throw off where they were from and whom they were favoring.”

This happens every so often and there have been half a dozen cases, including a well-known Romance writer.

It takes a couple of months to solve, because Amazon has to be SURE you didn’t contract the bots.

I don’t even know how you DO that – my guess is programming forensics to figure out what the bots were doing and where they came from, etc – but there has to be a way to do it, because all the cases of this I heard of before have been solved.  Yes, the writers lost a couple of months of income, but the cases have been solved.

8- That’s it. I have one version of it I can’t get to make sense, and the beginnings of the usual “Amazon has gone insane” panic among the usual suspects.

I’ll point out if Amazon has gone insane, it’s still less crazy than trad pub.  And yeah, Amazon NEEDS competitors, and I understand your fears. I have them too.

OTOH this is one of the flimsiest causes for panic I’ve ever even IMAGINED.  So you will forthwith (all of you, not John particularly) calm your bujungies and untwist your variform underwear.

Add to my reasons of suspicion that this guy is trying to cause just such a panic and stamped public opinion, instead of getting on with making a living, while solving this on a personal and if needed legal level.

NONE of it makes sense.

Amazon can be weird, but there is usually a rationality in the weirdness.  This has none.

Take a deep breath and see what happens next.

And now I’m off. All my bags are packed, etc.  There will be guest posts tomorrow, Sunday and Monday, and my presence here will be, G-d willing spotty.

Amuse yourselves.  (This post is duplicated at Mad Genius Club, should you want to have fun there, too.)

 

Humans aren’t rational. This is something that’s really hard for me to accept. I mean, I know it’s true. Is there anyone who doesn’t? But I don’t like it.

I mean, we’re not totally irrational. We can chivvy ourselves along towards more rationality too. But if I were wholly rational, I’d be doing a novel a week. I can write that fast, the problem is getting myself to sit down and persuading myself to produce instead of either going into brain lock or leaving in search of more interesting things to do or, if I prevent myself from leaving the office/desk, taking off mentally on chains of thought that have nothing to do with anything I’m doing, and emerging two hours later going “Uh, what? That much time?”

One of the most enlightening things was reading Pratchett’s book (I THINK “Once more with Ceiling.” in which he talked about his process, and finding out it wasn’t very different from mine. His writing process included what I call “Chasing myself around to make myself write.”  His, because that essay was written long ago, included “Clean typewriter keys.” Eventually at the end of the day there was “sit down and write” and then of course “Write till early morning.”

This made me feel much better, as I’d thought I was weird.

I also confess to laughing with sick delight (and recognition) at Peterson’s recommendation that if you’re bad at bribing yourself to produce (I AM) you’re a bad boss and a worse employee (to yourself) and should fire yourself and find someone else to be you.  There have been times I’ve started to write a want ad.

All this to say, humans in groups have this exacerbated.  No matter how much you try to be rational, you are still a social ape. And you will feel collective uncertainty and anxiety run through your surroundings, be they personal or professional, and you will respond.  Your response will often be what your colleagues and neighbors are doing. And you won’t pause to wonder if it’s productive, because, well, you know, there’s safety in numbers.  That is, if a lot of people are having the same response to a stress factor, you disappear in the crowd, and the crowd bolsters you.  All you need in times of stress is to be fighting your own band mates, right?  And they will fight you or shun you, unless you accommodate and fit in, because social apes.

On the other hand, if you exacerbate whatever the group has chosen to appease its stress with, you will probably end up being a leader, or at least looked at approvingly.

Which is how you get things like the massive and bizarre hairstyles of the nobility (and to be fair the rich bourgeois, but that’s because they aped the nobility) in France just before the French revolution.

As the industrial revolution and various other shifts (including truly disastrous harvests) robbed those whose income came from hereditary landholding of their ancient riches and prominence, even while the court demanded a complex set of “dancing attendance” for royal favor (A policy started and encouraged by Louis XIV in part to rob the nobility of wealth and prominence, not to mention keeping their minds off rebellion) the nobility felt insecure.  The fact that its ranks were being penetrated by people come from the bourgeoisie, who married their children or “simply” franked the nobility’s lavish lifestyles, made the nobles feel they were losing control. Even though rank remained a thing of birth, they were in fact, in the real world, losing rank.

The response were fashions so extravagant that they make us go “Wait, what?” and must have given people headaches.

You can see where wigs came from and were fashionable, in a society without running water and/or decent shampoos. It was easier to keep your hair ridiculously short and wear wigs, which is why they’ve been part of human fashion since ever.

But it took the French revolution to come up with wigs on armatures (or hair extensions, ditto) and hairstyles that incorporated ships and, at one point, bird cages with live, singing birds.

To look at drawings or read descriptions is to go “uh, what? who ever thought that was attractive?” and also “Boy their heads must have hurt.”

Yet the competition for the most elaborate and showy hairstyle, no matter how insane, did not stop until those heads fell to Madame Guillotine thereby stilling forever their status anxiety.

I was going to write this blog about something completely different, but I had to hit FB to message someone, and the posts…

It clicked with something.

See, noblemen in France (in the rest of Europe too, but France’s old kingdom was special for how wide the disparity was) were used to being by far the richest in their surroundings.  And they were used to the peasants being less than dirt under their feet. Or their chariot wheels.

And then that changed, in what, is a cultural eye-blink.  Forget the crazy slogan. Humans don’t like change. Particularly they hate change that challenges their status. Unable to actually increase their net worth (within the prescribed realms in which noblemen could do such) or stop spending, the nobility instead went for displays of wealth.  Big and extravagant ones.  And the wigs were of those and… quite, quite insane.

So what does that have to do with facebook?

For a few generations, since the left captured the academia, entertainment and the industrial-news complex, aka, the opinion makers, to be a leftist has been synonymous with being smart.

And being smart, since the renaissance, but definitely since the world wars has been the greatest social “good” there is.

No, I’m not saying the left was smart.  Increasingly, most of them weren’t, because as it became a matter of social display, the easily led started imitating it.

No, I’m saying that to parrot leftist ideas was to be considered smart. Partly because of the left’s conceit that Marxism was “scientific” there has always been, attached to the modern left the idea that to believe as they do is “rational” and “smart” and that their opponents are stupid.

Not only did they hold onto this while their ideas were proven wrong by reality over and over again, but having captured academia, they pushed leftist ideas as synonymous with being educated.  I mean, if you’d attended an elite school, you received these ideas, and the way to signal you’ve attended the school is to parrot it. Thus leftism became the old school tie (mostly around the neck of our economy, but never mind.)

While they had full control of the media, be it entertainment or informational, they could reinforce the message, as well as revile anyone who challenged them as stupid, wrong and illiterate, and GET AWAY WITH IT.

With intelligence being the highest status-good in our society, the left had secure status. Forever they thought.

The change has been very rapid. The fall of the USSR and talk radio were the beginning, and since the internet took off, they’ve been trying to hold on to the tail of the comet, as it streaks away from them.

I’ve said it before and I maintain it. If Mr. Obama had been president in a country where the information tech was the same as in the 30s, all his failures would have been hidden, and people would believe him a staggering genius, instead of the little man who wasn’t there. Because that’s how the industrial-media complex presented him.

And then… And then they went all in for Hillary! They were “With her” 300%.

Unbelievably, it didn’t work.

I think they’d suspected, before, that things had changed. But they could still tell themselves stories, dismiss the opposition, preen on having all the power.  And then… it failed.

Since then they’ve been running scared with social insecurity.  They display their “brilliance” for all the world, and it didn’t work? Oh. Must signal louder, larger, crazier.

All the “Wokeness” over everything possible (and mostly imaginary) in the last few years?  That’s social signaling by a social group losing power and trying to regain it.

The less it works, the more extravagant it will get.  I am in premonitory awe over what will happen should Trump beat the margin of fraud in 2020. You thought the Democratic Socialist meeting was funny? You ain’t seen nothing yet.  They won’t be able to open their mouths without announcing “point of personal privilege” and their pronouns, and interrupting each other with every finer intersectional victimhood.

If you think having a woman who won an SF award malign the person the award is named after with a bunch of ahistorical nonsense, and seeing the institution cave within days was peak wokeness, you’re deluding yourself.

Soon and very soon the “Wokeness”displays will be the equivalent of having live birds in your hair.

Because in their subconscious, if they just signal loud enough they’ll regain their status as “smart” and “educated.”

Meanwhile, we’ll be buying popcorn stocks and saying “Is that a ship on your head, or are you that insecure?”

 

A friend of mine, on facebook, was posting the vexed question of why communists think nazis are right wing, and therefore accuse anyone to the right of Lenin of being fascist.

The discussion — as far as I could see of it — went all over the map, as it always does, but the question should still be fascinating: both of these are totalitarian regimes, both claiming to be in the name of the people (one, people singular, the other “workers of the world”) and both really favoring the well connected and/or powerful of one form or another (but neither of them much favoring the aristocracy, if one is in place when the regime emerges.)

So why call one “right wing” and one “left wing?”  Both are for central control.  Yeah, sure, communism theoretically expropriates the factories and gives “ownership” to the people, while fascism allows the owners to keep the property (or gives the factories to the well connected in their party.)  But we all know — we know. There’s almost 100 years of practice to look on — in reality communism too “gives’ the factories, or the profit of them to a handful of well connected.  The workers might theoretically own all of the factory, but they certainly aren’t taking weekends on their Dacha in the volga river, or shopping in the capitalist capitals of the world. No, those are for a few of the apparatchiks who are supposedly working tirelessly for the people, day and night.

They are two regimes more alike than not. And when you say that, people say “politics is a mobius strip. The opposites touch.”

Yeah, no. That is one of those things that was all over Europe in the seventies, pushing people towards the “sensible” mixed economy, which btw means private business retains theoretical ownership but is either commanded or hemmed in by the government. Aka socialism, various forms of crony capitalism, or even soft fascism.

So, why the left/right dichotomy?

My normal answer is that people who say fascism is right are relying on the European spectrum.  You see, in Europe the right is nationalist and blood and soil.  They can be (and at least in Portugal’s case, and probably in France’s ARE) as socialist as the left. But by gum, they make sure the fruits of the redistribution are given to people of the right genetic heritage, or at least people who can fake it. They are also likely to extol the homeland, and intend to defend it.

The left, OTOH is internationalist.  It turns out in its final phase this devolves to suicide through open borders and a pathological hatred of your own country (because that’s the only way to get people to agree to commit suicide.) but Marx, the father of most (even he couldn’t manage all) bad ideas thought workers of different lands had more in common with each other than with the “capitalists” of their own land, and therefore would unite across all borders and study war no more.

And if you believe any of that crap, I have a dacha on the Volga, free of ice two months a year, and you can have it for only a million dollars plus slave labor.

His successors, who figured out the workers weren’t going to revolt, at least not spontaneously, overlaid a patch of “ethnic justice” under which anyone from a shithole country is automatically exploited, and the revolution will come from them.  (It’s Magic Tan Human. Just add bigotry.)

In one respect, this theory fails. See, the right in Europe is blood, soil and G-d.  And the G-d in question is the G-d of the country.  Okay, yeah, they’re Christian, but still, the right wing in say Germany should be Lutheran.  In Southern Europe they should be Catholic. Etc.  Does this hold for fascists?  Oh, hell no.  Hitler invented a whole new paganism.  Mussolini was pretty hard on priests, (at least those who wanted to follow their religion), etc. Not very different than your average commie, in fact.

So, again, what is with the certainty they are so different?

To understand that, you need to go back to the beginning and how each theory sold itself.

You see: Marx thought he was creating a theory of scientific governance. The fact he couldn’t understand science if it bit him in the fleshy part of the butt is beside the point. THAT’s what he thought he was doing.

His system has all sorts of just-so stories — a friend told me Victorians liked making up these stories about everything, which is correct, but Marx still takes the cake — which sound logical and all encompassing… if you don’t pay attention to the fact that they don’t touch reality, ignore human behavior, and kick history around like an empty can.

But he thought he had science, and that scientifically we would end up in an earthly paradise brought about by the withering of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And that’s how it was sold. It’s early adherents and the “culture” of the belief was that they were all scientific and full of reason; that communism was the outgrowth of the enlightenment.  I believe this is part of the reason, still, that leftists consider themselves “smart” and that they say things like “We believe in science” (while in point of fact treating scientific hypothesis or theories as revealed religion, but never mind.)

It’s because their system was supposed to take them to “reason.”

This is also part of the motive for a system that can’t survive without continuous war, both to subdue internal issues and to pillage and rob what they can’t produce thinks of itself as “peaceful” and as having war forced on them by those dastardly capitalists.

It’s certainly why our left feels a continuous need to denigrate the military and claim that war is “right wing.” (I honestly don’t think that our left knows the reason for this. They’re just acting on passed-down culture and indulging their parrot instincts. And the idea they should attribute everything good to their side and everything bad to the right.)

The fascists and Nazis, on the other hand, sold themselves not as scientific, but as a rebellion against all that.  Not as the heirs of the enlightenment but the heirs of the romantic movement. They were going back to das Volk and the Volk traditions. Their very unreason made them pure. They would each become the noble savage, and live according to the dictates of that noble savage, each man in nature.

So, you see, the left thinks that this means the fascists are right wing. They’re not scientific and they don’t use reason.  So they can’t be on the left which is all about reason.

Except of course, the left isn’t all about reason. There’s nothing sane or scientific about the hells communism creates on the Earth.  It’s just as animalistic and base as fascism. It relies on malice and hatred and will to power just as much. It’s just that the communist sanctifies envy, and the fascist sanctifies pride.

They’re still both totalitarian and they are still both horrors. A hammer and sickle should be no more acceptable than a swastika.

And that’s without considering the evolution of the communists (We’d consider the evolution of the fascists, but thank heavens, as a system they died seventy plus years ago.) since the fascists stopped being a competing system.  Since then the left has brought in:

Ethnic pride.

A belief that culture is innate.

An encouragement to give in to your feelings over your thoughts.

Ridiculous, touchy-feely stuff like veganism and other fads that fly in the face of scientific fact.

In other words, since fascists vanished, the left has slowly converged with them in theory as well as in practice.  I mean, if you think the crony capitalism of China isn’t, in everything but name, the most successful fascist regime on Earth (And it’s not that successful. As Dave Freer told me more than a decade ago, it’s a beautiful lacquered vase. The lacquer hides the cracks.)

Why would this happen?

Well, because the campaign used to sell each regime was never the truth.  The truth is that they’re both reactions of shocked cultures to the dual stress of a generational war and rapid change in means of production/ways of life.

They’re the result of the hysterical reaction of normal people to look for the man on the white horse, and of the powerful or power hungry to gather more power.

There is no functional difference between them. Neither was ever “Scientific”.  They are and always were screams of panic of entire cultures, and lashing out of those who felt helpless in the maw of history.

As such they each aggregate the various appendages of unreason, including bits of folk religion, which is why a vegan who uses crystals to decide the color of socks to wear is likely to think him or herself “communist.”

Heinlein called them “Red or black fascism.”  You can also call them “Red or black totalitarianism.”

I’m not that enamored of color.  And the red turns black as the blood dries.

If we must use “left and right” and we’re stuck with it, since the left is so gosh darn proud of calling itself left, which it equates to everything good, let’s use it in the American sense.  Left is collectivist. Right is individualist.

In which case, the fascists are, logically, all theirs (and they’re welcome to their kissing cousins. Maybe they’ll both lose.) while you and me and ours have a future to build.

Let’s leave behind the blood soaked insanity of the 20th century.  It has filled enough graves.

Make the 21st the century of liberty. May it become our ruling principle.

Because it is the only antidote to totalitarianism. And it works.

I’ve tried to do this, I’ve paid the price. But it IS powerful. I’ve seen ideas make it from here, half formed, and out into the world. It is worth it.
I’ve found largely what he says here is true.
Consider it.

*Turns out my dereliction of duty yesterday matched your dereliction of publishing. So, no promo post this week. And I’m alive. The cats are still sulking, except Havey who thinks we MUST be mad at him, so he keeps coming over and snuggling-SAH*

Every time we say something scathing about the boomers, RES gets justifiably upset and protests.

JUSTIFIABLY but not necessarily accurately, mind you.

While it is entirely justifiable at being tied in to idiots you have nothing to do with but the age, [I was born the year after Obama, and I resist any intimation that everyone born in the early 60s is like the little train that couldn’t but bragged really loud.] there are more factors that go into “Why I’m not a boomer and will beat anyone who says I am to death, with a wet sock.”  And I’m not the only one who feels that way. And there are reasons for that too.

Look, RES is correct that boomers as we see them are largely creations of the media. They invented this “baby boom” generation who was somehow, automagically, going to make the evil nastiness of WWII (and WWI before that) go away.

In a way, what the opinion makers and narrative creators were doing was the equivalent of a young woman who gets pregnant out of wedlock, and freights the resulting infant with all possible good qualities and a grand, predestined fate.  I’ve seen this more times than I can count, to the point I started calling it “the fated infant syndrome.”

They were doing this civilization wide, and trying to will a “fated generation” into being.

It worked about as well generationaly as it it does individually. The fated kid normally beats all odds to fail at whatever he was “fated” to do.

And here is where we get to “not accurately.”  (Not that I’m tying RES to the dunderheads of his generation. Look, frankly we Odds aren’t typical anything.  But we still follow trends — all my sins remembered — and respond to peer pressure, which explains where my “generation” comes in and also the fate of the echo-boom (poor things) which ended the year older son was born.

Before we begin this, remember that generations are not as they appear on TV. Not only the dates of starting and ending, because it can be WAY more flexible than that, but that individuals are individuals. RES is right in that. And most individuals are not media creations, even if they are influenced by them. Also that none of us can do anything about the currents of history we’re caught in, and which are sometimes very odd.

And about generations not being the way they’re portrayed, note older son was born the last year of the echo boom. The designation echo-boomer seems to have gone the way of the dodo, but if they still used it, would older son fit in?  Well… no, because his parents weren’t boomers, and by the time he was born were, in fact, divesting themselves of vestiges of boomerhood (as described on TV, she says before RES throws something heavy at her head). So his most influential cultural unit had nothing to do with the entire idea of boomers.

Dan is an echo boomer, since his mother was born just after WWII.  In that he is like Obama (a year older than us) whose mother was also a boomer.  The resemblance stops there, as Obama’s mother, perhaps more than usual seemed to have lived the tv-boomer lifestyle and Obama chose to embrace it, while Dan was the child of an intact family unit, and even though coming to adulthood with a bunch of second-hand-tv-boomer attitudes, chose to reject them.

But I’m very much the child of children born during WWII and by the time I was 22 was shedding the boomer attitudes I’d acquired from my brother who is almost ten years older and completely embraced boomer stuff.

Confused? don’t be.

Numbering generations by the years of birth is a creation of the mass media, and therefore stupid.  Most “mass” things are stupid.  The idea of “normal” sizes for instance, and that “normal” cuts should fit everyone is loony if you look at the variety of human bodies. But mass production has had people starve, cut and rearrange themselves with compression to fit what the machines could produce in batch lots.

This created other mental artifacts, because if people all should fit one thing, by gum, there should be a recommended diet.

The one thing we’re finding out — though Dave Freer tells me biologists who specialize in other species have always known this, but it couldn’t be SAID about humans. Was Verboten — is that “ideal diet” is almost individual. For instance, if I eat lunch, I’ll gain weight, almost regardless of anything else. Imagine how much joy I get whenever health professionals or well meaning people enjoin me to “make a good lunch.”

In the same way I suspect how each person is influenced by the “image” of their generation, and which image they choose to embrace and how is unique.

However, the TV boomer thing had an effect.  And it wasn’t the fault of the boomers.  Not really.  Just like the child born out of wedlock, they were propagandized from birth. And there was no way ANYONE could have fulfilled everything expected of them: they were supposed to study war no more, and yet they were supposed to achieve everything, including the stars. They were supposed to break all rules, and yet harmony should rule. They were supposed to have free love and it would work automagically. They were supposed to learn painlessly and joyously, and yet they would be SO SMART and educated.

Then there was the cold war, and other stuff. Read the beginning of Glory Road. He said it better.

Here’s the thing, though. coming in ten years after, I saw the trend in the generation in my brother’s children books that I inherited.  From comics to the advertisements in magazines it was all “your generations is going to break all the rules and fix everything going all the way back to a sort of prehistory, but one where we’re all noble savages.”

It had an effect. Impossible for it not to. Picture how much that kind of propaganda has to penetrate that in a little village of a country that was neutral in WWII (mostly through being bankrupt) the baby boom sounded loud and clear.

Look, I’ve also read books written by the boomers’ parents.  There was a lot there that was “we can beat Hitler, we can do anything by the same methods.”  The fifties weren’t the fifties the TV has dreamed, either, but they were more regimented and “collective” than we’d stand for.  And these people, kind of in rebellion, dreamed up their children as noble savages.

The long hair, discarding of suits? The silly attempts at “free love?”

The world had seen them and been dealing with them for a long long time. Every so often…

The problem is this stuff all hit at the same time that the USSR was winding up its propaganda arm and the kids were perfect targets, and many people in the narrative-building arms of the society from education to journalism were being paid in Russian coin.

So Marx wound his sinuous and scaly body around a dream of Rousseau and went traipsing through the west.

Free love became rejection of the idea of matrimony, became “marriage is slavery for women.” The idea of free and idealistic poverty became “all capitalism is evil.” Etc etc ad definitely nauseum.

And unfortunately humans are social animals. Enough signals were taken in to ruin a whole lot of people.  Probably not the MAJORITY of boomers, who were by and large normal, functional human beings, but a good number of them.

More than that, it was enough to plant this idea of “revolution” as an expectation in the mind of a generation. And to make people disdain the past, because they’d been propagandized that it was all bad. They weren’t going to study war no more. Or as it turned out, Latin, Greek or history.

So even the decent boomers carried that idea forward into their kids.  They’d been convinced the IDEAL was this tv-boomer creation.  And by gum, their kids were going to be those all wise peace makers.

Did I mention that Obama, born a year before me, was the perfect embodiment of what my son’s classmates were trying to be?

And this brings us to a problem: generations aren’t simple. Just because you were born a certain year you’re not a boomer, or a millenial, or whatever. Those are media-creations.  Which I remind myself of when my kids act like typical millenials.

But they’re not. They just have… bits of it.  In their case, mostly, little ones, like older son can’t spell things most of the time, without looking them up, because NO ONE EVER TAUGHT HIM TO SPELL.  I tried, I swear, but the school would tell him it was okay “so long as we understand it.”  (Which is why younger son did copies of texts till his eyes bled, and spells much better.)  And they’re starting on adulthood kind of late, because, Obama’s economy, etc.

In the same way most boomers aren’t typical. But they do have the hangover of being raised as the generation that was going to make everything right. Which no generation can, nor should be expected to.

And we, who came after?  Look, we’re just trying to rebuild.

Which brings me to the fact that no matter when we were born, all or us, in this blog, are of the same generation: Generation rebuild.

Or generation pooper scooper, if you prefer.

The disassembling of Western civilization wasn’t the work of a generation.  If you want to be candid, it goes back to the French revolution.  Oh, not for toppling the king. No. For the demand of equal results, which is a virus that destroys civilization.

The only reason we haven’t collapsed is that there are builders, among the wreckers.

We’re all the same generation.  We build.

Sure, thanks to the media propaganda, and the idea that generations were uniform, a lot of the TV boomer bs has done a lot of bad stuff to our society. Worldwide, really.

Fine. They didn’t choose when they were born, and we didn’t either.  And thank heavens, thanks to new tech, the idea of generations designated by mass media will soon be a thing of the past.

And we builders will find ourselves and each other, in spaces like this.

Which is why I tell you to build.  Build under, build over, build around.

The structure is weaker than it seems, and someone has to hold it up when it blows.

Be generation Atlas.

And this time, don’t shrug. Your shoulders won’t be holding up socialism, but a construction of our own devising, one that will give us a more viable future.

Not perfect, no. We’re not perfect, and our world won’t be.  And our kids and grandkids will have to continue building.  But a world that takes from the past, the future, and affirms the importance of humanity and the individual.

Square your shoulders, now.  One, two, three, get ready to lift.

Sorry. Left the house so early that I didn’t actually feed the cats, which is terrible behavior for me (Ask the cats.)  I’m just now back, and don’t want to do promo post this late.  Will do promo and vignette tomorrow.

In haste:
Dumas said that you shouldn’t rape history unless you intend to conceive a bastard.  The left has taken this to heart and is trying to create a bastard that will rule us with a rod of iron.

It won’t take.  Just like the leftist/Marxist illusion is a child of the mass production era, that era is passing and ushering in more customized times, more individual times.

This is good, because honestly the era of mass production and mass behavior encouraged us to see humans as widgets. Humans are not widgets, and we haven’t done well under this regime.

The Twentieth Century was worse than the fourteenth for soaking the Earth with blood.

The left will have trouble putting their boot on our necks again, now we’ve tasted freedom.  They’re trying, but it’s the spasms of a dying beast and a dying way of life.

I’m not saying they won’t win temporary battles, but every win will only lead to greater defeats. That’s the way of changing times.

Be not afraid and neither be you nostalgic.  Instead, turn your minds to ways to hasten the change over to a more humane and individual-oriented age. There is work to be done.  The faster and easier the transition, the less likely we’ll have to wade through rivers of blood.

Let’s work each in our own way, even if it’s just helping the young — snatching brands from the fire — or writing, or whatever we can do.  Even cleaning the house (my work today, since it’s gotten insane) helps, because it creates a calmer environment for you and others.

And no matter how small the effort, remember it ripples.

Now go work. Be not afraid. They won’t snatch history. That’s an act of desperation.  And they won’t snatch the future away, either. That remains to be built, and frankly they suck at building.

In the end we win they lose.  Go.

Okay, I confess this is a phoned in post, mostly in the hopes of amusing you.  I’m not ragging on indie (scarily some of these weren’t even indie) or even on “writers who don’t do research.”  It’s more that in countries with universal public education, books available everywhere and more than a few historical movies (which are crap on the details, but not THAT bad in general) it’s amazing how little people understand of the way people lived just, say 100 years ago. Or 200. Which is not that far. Look, my grandmother remembered stories from her grandmother, and right there we’re at about 150 years. Granted these stories became complete hodge podges in my head, and I suspect grandma’s.  I think the Napoleonic wars were mixed up with the civil war, which in turn was mixed up with the deposition of the king.  But still. Enough came through I knew people lived very differently. Even if as a kid I had real trouble picturing doing dishes without detergent. And btw, having a regency maid washing dishes with detergent would be a MINOR violation for the stuff I keep running across.

Now, you’ll say, why does that matter?  Well, because without an understanding, at least on general lines, of history, people will believe crazy things, like roads are the result of socialism. Or your only alternative to communism is absolute monarchy. Or it’s the increasing erosion of individual rights that brings about technology. Or China is a successful state and people live well there. Or that our times are the most difficult and fraught ever.

That’s the real side of this post and “OMG, how idiotic has our teaching got?” and a wake up call for parents to try to give their kids a sense of what came before.

Now for the funny side.

When I first started making covers and my tools were limited, I subscribed to two or three stock photo sites, and mostly used the thing as was (you can still see it in the covers of Ill Met by Moonlight, etc.)

One thing I figured out very quickly: most of the people posting on these sites — who granted aren’t Americans. Most of them seem to be some variety of Eastern European — have no idea of history.  There is present day and then there is “middle ages.”

The middle ages searches will kick up dragons, witches, sorcerers and elves.  The illustration above came from a pixabay search for Middle ages.

Worse, the Middle Ages search will kick up everything THROUGH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Now maybe that’s just me who stares at these things in open-mouthed wonder, but what the heck.

As some of you know I’ve spent the last month or so, since things were busy and often weird, without the spoons to give reading “seriously.” For a great part of it I read mostly Jane Austen fanfic, but then eased into other historical mysteries and such.

As part of this let me give some errors in no particular order:

• No matter how much your teachers told us that “peasants” were mistreated by “noblemen: there is no way that at any time since at least the high middle ages, in England, a nobleman could kill a peasant for no reason in full view of other people and suffer nothing. Even in times of high lawlessness, at the very least he’d lose reputation.  More likely, he’d come under the purview of the law.
  In other times and places this might be honored more in the breach, and even in England people might not necessarily pay for the crime. There have always been corrupt lawmen and ways of evading the law if you’re rich and powerful enough (which is the whole point of noir mysteries) but it wouldn’t be “no one cares”.  Not in any Christian country, unless in the middle of a civil war or similar.
  Making this the centerpiece of your (trad pub, incidentally) mystery makes me want to scream. Or laugh. Or both.
  Peasants are not serfs, are not slaves. If you don’t learn the difference, you should stick to present day.
• Duchesses didn’t do their own shopping. No, seriously, repeat after me. Duchesses didn’t do their own shopping.  Not for groceries. And if for some reason (the rest of the house plague stricken?) they decided to go to the farmer’s market (!!!!) they wouldn’t drive themselves in the family carriage.
  And if they did this, they wouldn’t be called “a proper Duchess.”
• No one in the regency wrote letters on parchment. Unless, of course, they were very wealthy and eccentric (if they were poor, they’d just be crazy. Also, not able to afford parchment.)  At any rate, in the west, before paper became common, people were more likely to use velum than parchment.
  However since Shakespeare’s day (and that was roughly as far from the regency, backwards as we are forwards) paper was common, and there were PRINTED copies of books.  To have a young woman write a note saying she’s eloping on parchment is idiotic. I’d have thrown the book against the wall, except I was reading on my kindle.
• Horses are not cars. You’re unlikely to go from one end of England to the other riding one horse without stopping. For an education on this, read Dumas whose characters kill horses with fatigue with wild abandon.
  Seriously. You. Can’t. Do. That.  You also don’t park your horse and go gallivanting around. They’re animals. They need care.
• If you fought a duel in the regency and killed your man, you don’t just walk away. Killing people was illegal. You’d at the very least have to run off out of the country.  It’s not a “It’s okay, everyone does it.” Most duels were fought to wound, not kill, because of this.
• If you’re a regency miss, you don’t go around, half cocked with no chaperone. And if compromised you don’t just say it’s stupid, and carry on with your life. Society exacted a penalty.
• There was a war with France for most of the Regency. You don’t go over to France on vacation during the war. Not at the same time people are fighting Napoleon.
• A manor house (the P & P movie, which I ASSURE you doesn’t exist is confused about this too) is not really a farm and the daughter of the manor worth 2k pounds a year does NOT go around barefoot or help slop the pigs. (DO try reading Austen. Consider Mrs. Benet brags that her daughters have nothing to do in the kitchen, meaning they have help. She certainly wouldn’t tell the girls to slop the pigs.) The manor might include a “home farm” which would be tenanted by a farmer family and give the manor family some percentage of the produce, eggs, etc. Arrangements varied. But the manor house is NOT a farm.
• Peasants in the Middle Ages were no more likely to know how to read than they were to meet a dragon face to face (and let us be clear, there were no dragons. Ever, really.) There would be exceptions. Nota Bene Peasant is not the same as “not titled” and even in the middle ages there was a “middle class” for lack of a better term, which might well be educated and work as lawyers or accountants.
• In Shakespeare’s time lower middle class might read quite well. The number of people who could read for fun was calculated at about the same as the number of people who are comfortable reading for fun now.
• Cooking a meal involved a lot more than cooking a meal today. 1) They did not have refrigeration. So, no, they won’t have fresh meat in the house, just “put by”. The shopping has to be done every day. They might have preserved or salted meat, fish or vegetables, depending. You can at least extrapolate it.  2) I don’t have any proof of this, and I might be dead in the water here, but I don’t THINK that making bread was the duty of the least experience scullery maid.  Can’t prove it or anything. I just doubt it because it’s not that easy without mixers or packaged yeast, and it takes some finesse. I wonder why everyone thinks it is. 3) in the regency in a well to do family pastries would generally be purchased, certainly for a party. 4)In the regency courses don’t mean what you think they mean. What we call courses they called “removes.”
• Going to the bathroom was more complicated. If you must go there, remember there were no bathrooms IN THE HOUSE for most of the time until oh, the 18th century (very, very rare, and only for what we’d call cutting edge geeks, who were laughed at by normal human beings) and really until the 19th century going to the bathroom in the night involved chamber pots. In the day, and if it was safe (it might be shared by several households) there would be an outhouse.  During balls in the regency, (and particularly before, when women wore these unwieldy gowns, including padded hips and who knew what else) the way women relieved themselves during a ball was to go to a room set aside for the purpose and use these vessels that to modern eyes look like gravy boats (you can tell they aren’t because they don’t have a pouring lip and are more “rounded” there) which they stuck under their skirts, to pee standing up.  No, seriously. And you think your costume for dragoncon/comicon was a pain!
• Underwear is complicated, because it was all homemade, and might vary village to village or even household to household.  As might the wearing of it.  Some people say authoritatively that women in Shakespeare’s time wore no underwear, but when you deep dive into it…  well, it wasn’t always so. And as Foxfier pointed out there were things found that looked remarkably like bras from the 14th century. (And from drawings, there are suspicions of them among the Egyptians.)  So, yeah, you can get away with almost anything, provided you say it was this cunning design her grandmother had perfected/the local seamstress made/etc/etc.
  What you can’t do is have a man unzip himself.  Please. I mean, I don’t see a point in it, but even if I did, no. Just no.  In the regency it’s called a “fall” and it’s a panel in the front of the pants, which can be untied. Depending on time and fashion, it can be a narrow fall or a wide fall.  Going back further than that, you’re going to step into codpiece territory, and unless you really want to research that, just have the guy untie his breeches/underwear/whatever. Remember buttons, while older than zippers are relatively recent. You look at them and you go “it’s logical” right? Sure. But no. The Elizabethans had buttons but the concept of a button hole hadn’t occurred to them. So buttons were decorative, but everything was tied. [A friend who is a professional costumer informs me this is wrong. See, this is what comes of believing MY college professors. There was a course on garment construction and they assured us everything was tied on.  The inimitable Jonna Hayden tells me this is wrong, and I’ll assume she’s right. She said it’s “teaching from Victorian sources.  This makes perfect sense as vast portions of the college were still stuck in the Victorian era. The other half were hard core Marxists. Sometimes it overlapped.]
• And speaking of clothes: in a time and place where laundry was a production, beds were aired.  Were the sheets washed between guests?  Uh… I’d say it varied, and you know what, just don’t go there.  Just say the bed was aired.
  Also, because washing was difficult, clothes were constructed of portions that could be changed more often and portions that were worn over and over.  And a minor spill/stain might doom an expensive garment.
• Not everyone owned a carriage. Not even among the relatively wealthy in the regency. If you have carriages, research the various types.  I very much doubt you could pack a family in a high-perch phaeton or a curricule.  Not that this is my era. But anyway, don’t mess it up too badly.
• Remember that books like “A writer’s guide to x” is the beginning.  The internet is yours.  If it’s important to your book, RESEARCH IT.  If it’s not and you can’t find exact information? Soft pedal it.
• But above all, if writing about the Middle Ages? Lose the dragon and the elves.

Yesterday, at coffee with friends, the following words were said “the Democratic party became communists so quickly everyone noticed.”

I’m not sure this is exactly true. Millennials by and large neither know what communism is, nor what the inevitable consequences are, and are all for the democrats because — I swear I heard this as a reason for voting for Colorado’s disastrous governor “they elect gays and people of color [ever so much better than the bigoted “colored people”] and women.”

And the fault is ours, and if we spend the decade in sackcloth and ashes, begging pardon on our knees, or if in the coming unpleasantness we get a bullet to the back of the head, we brought it on ourselves.  Because younger son was right. We didn’t start it, but Lord knows we didn’t end it, or tamp it down, or even object to it much. We let them bring, for instance “political correctness” that corruption of language that has seen both genders of stage puppets referred to as “actor” (when the physical act of acting is quite different for male and female) and we’ve let ourselves be maumaued into not calling things by their proper name, or using an expression instead of another, just because we were being polite. Well, that and because the rabbid weasels of the left would already, even in the 80s have destroyed our livelihood and our way of life, if we so much as spoke up. The land of the free was already in the grip of something that would make Mao, who invented the term political correctness blush. At least the Chinese had to be forced to say what Mao wanted to hear at the point of a gun. But we did it to ourselves. For politeness, and because “aunt Maggy is really nice. She’s just a little silly.”  And then it came to the point where there’s real pressure to use sewist instead of seamstress. Even though there’s a perfectly good word for men who sew and that’s tailor.

And you’ll say “what does that matter? Why would you take issue with such a silly thing?”

Because this battle was composed of a million silly things, and we let it slid, because they were little.  Except the left was pushing — like all crazy messianic cults — towards an end state that was so insane we weren’t even aware of it.

Like the idea there is no difference between men and women, when often men and women need interpreters to even know what the other one is actually saying.  No, seriously, being a woman and raised by males (well, females, too, but my brother and father were living gods, as far as I was concerned as a little kid) I often get thrust out into situations where I have to explain to some guy that no, the fact that some girl said the most heinous things about him doesn’t mean she really believes them, doesn’t mean she is a conspiracy theorist, and doesn’t mean she is irrational. It just means she’s really really angry and wants him to shut up.  Debating the accusations is useless, but if he explains what he actually meant/where the misunderstanding (if there is one) is, she won’t remember saying any of those things, and he shouldn’t.

Because you see, being weaker than males, and (statistically) smaller, women fight with words.  And when you fight with words, you give the beat down up front, so the other doesn’t have the social standing to come back at you.  But people who don’t understand evolutionary mechanics don’t get that.  And because they see fewer girls punch each other out (this is changing with grrrl power, btw, and I wonder how much of it is because the perception of having won a confrontation increases your testosterone. We do know that younger women have way more testosterone than our generation. Anyway, in younger son’s highly competitive high school the most common injury was from fights between girls. Interestingly and gratifyingly for students of history, this was of course mostly knife violence. In the school halls) they think women are more peaceful than men, which is where we get pages and pages of stories about peaceful matriarchies. In fact, trust someone who attended all-girls high school, an all-woman planet would be hell, but with more snide remarks and mocking (However if the story of a Chinese Empress (Look up “Human pig” and China, but only if you have a very strong stomach) and of a lot of queens and concubines who inherited from their husbands are to be trusted, then Hieronymus Bosch’s heartening vision of a demon sticking a pineapple up someone’s rear end is not out of the running.) Because men and women are different. Often very different, though neither sex are saints.  And some of us can interpret across the isle, which doesn’t mean we are free from the defects of our sex. (And some of the other. If you see me in Sarah-smash mode you’d never think I was peaceful. I do, after all, berserk, and that affliction comes from mom’s side.)

But we let them get away with all this, little by little, with language corruption. We let them get away with Herstory, a corruption that ANYONE who knows a word of Latin should wish punished with a pineapple. Same for Human.  And we didn’t tell them “This is crazy, you’re silly. Go home and try to put something in your head that’s not fertilizer.”

In effect we let a poisonous Christian heresy (no? Check your assumptions.  The paradise from which we fell by learning about private property? Check. The subjection of women by a conspiracy of males for six thousand years? Check. The final exegesis of the world when humans start being born as Homos Sovieticus, or whatever the crap they call them now — I suppose they don’t. Being immense racists, they just assume anyone who can tan is naturally this — the perfect collectivist, with not a shred of individual will or desire for property, check.) take over our body politic and indoctrinate our kids with vile Howard Zinn bullshit, that teaches them hatred towards the nation that has done more to eliminate barriers to equality before the law than any other in the world. We let our kids become convinced that we OWE the destitute of the world, because the way to become rich is not to have a less larcenous culture and government but to “steal.”  We let them be taught fake economics. And we stood by while they were told that if they are pale they are guilty of everything.  (Or even if they are merely tan like my boys.  I have to confess I tried and failed to have them form a band called “The Swarthy menace.”)

So, we’ll leave that aside, for now, but there’s worse. There’s much worse we did, though I want to tell you I fought it every step of the way, though not publicly, not where it counted, because baby needed shoes.

I knew when Clinton signed Motor Voter that it was the death knell for the republic. I really didn’t need to have it confirmed that they wouldn’t ask for proof of citizenship to vote. I knew they wouldn’t because “discrimination” and it might make someone with a tan feel bad. (As a person of moderate tan and who has an accent you can cut with knife, I’m upset that no one has asked me for proof of citizenship.) I didn’t need the stories like the Colorado Springs exchange-journalist who got registered to vote with a JAPANESE PASSPORT as ID, or my friend Francis Turner who practically had to commit violence to get them not to register him to vote with a British one.

And because civics are no longer taught, most Americans who haven’t gone through the process and don’t know anyone who has, think you become American when you cross the frontier. So even a lot of legal immigrants are innocently being told they have the right to vote.

Then there is vote-by-fraud -mail. I can’t even begin to imagine how something that not only violates the secrecy of the ballot, but is prone to forced votes by family members or roommates is constitutional. And yet it has spread everywhere.  Every time democrats gain even a little foothold, enough to do that, they go to all-vote-by-mail on the excuse that it’s cheaper (death is also considerably cheaper than life.) And people go along with it because it’s “convenient” as is the month of “early voting” before the elections that gives the left the number of ballots they need to “fake.”

And blatant, strutting fraud like the thing in Arizona last midterms? Is never challenged.

Which means we have no idea what support the left has.  I know it’s become fashionable to say we’re a 50-50 nation. But I don’t think that’s true. If it were, the left wouldn’t always be coming down, heavily on the side of facilitating fraud (and btw, they have perfect mental cover for that. They’re doing what’s good “for the people”and their work will eventually bring about paradise. Enough cover for all the useful idiot fluffy bunnies.)

The left has no idea what support it has either, but it felt secure enough in its mechanisms to secure election, that it thought it could unmask.  I want you to contemplate that.  The great unmasking started with Obama, and they’ve been sneering about putting us in camps ever since.

And they thought they could get away with it.  They might yet, in 2020. If we don’t start fighting back with everything we have.

Do you like a communist dictatorship? No? Sure, it will have a veneer of “they were elected” because those always do. Pretending to the will of the people is part of their cult.

Yes, their cult is receding. Even millenials will/are waking up and at any rate, a lot of them just keep quiet for the same reasons we did.  They’ve hit the high water mark. You can tell for all their mumbling about “populism” and their sheer rage and fury at 2016. You can tell by the clowns they field as candidates. Most of their nomenclature can’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel. Which is why all of their power structures are dying, and every field they’ve taken over is in trouble.

They might still secure an “electoral” victory. And then we’ll Venezuela until we get pissed, shoot our way out of it (why do you think they’re mad after gun control and red flag laws) and then the backlash will be unimaginable. Like, if you ever said something about a Dem not eating babies, they’ll shoot you or hang you from the lampposts.

I don’t want that. No, I don’t think there’s anything good about communism. But there are the maleducated, the well meaning, and the crazy. And going that way won’t be good for the republic.

Also, frankly, given my health issues, years of starvation and deprivation are bad, ‘mkay?

BUT–

That means we have to work now.  First, lie to the polls. Answer them and lie to them. Lie like a rug.  It’s important they don’t realize the number of votes they need to fake in advance. Remember how low DT’s numbers were?  Like that. (And don’t believe the polls after you lie to them, for St. Gell-Mann’s sake.  What are you? Dim?)

Second vote on the day and as late as you can on the day.

Third, destroy any ballot you don’t use. DO NOT THROW IT AWAY IN TRASH.  The dumpster-rats of democracy harvest those and use them.

Fourth, speak up.  You get there and someone has voted for you in advance? Speak up.  Make noise.  Make it clear that you will not sit still for this. Make it clear you’ve had enough.

They can throw their utopia all they want to, but they can’t force us into it.  We’re Americans. We’re proud. And we intend to continue being both.