Sitting by the Sick Bed

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I don’t know if this is as universal as I perceive it, but my feeling is that when you get to be my age, or even your forties, everyone in my generation has passed a day or a week of years.

And you know exactly what I mean by that. Someone you love very much is in the hospital, struggling between life and death, and final plans have been mentioned, and you’re there…. unable to do anything and waiting. It’s arguably easier if you can be with them, the way Dan was with me when I almost died giving birth to #1 son. Second easier, as bad as it sounds, is when you are in the hospital though not allowed in with the person. You’re in the waiting room, reading the same page of the magazine you have no interest in ten times, drinking the stupid mostly acid coffee and wondering if it will drill a hole in your stomach. You’re pacing the halls, trying to accept this THING that fell on you.

But even that is better than being away. Trust me on this. When you’re away, you have to pretend to live normal life; you have to carry on as though nothing happened. You can’t be there, and hold their hand and influence it in some way. And your mind keeps drifting to your worry, so you don’t get much done, and what you get done is sloppy. And you feel like you’re ill yourself, on the verge of a major illness. You might cry for no reason, or spend a lot of time staring at something. You might eat what you know you shouldn’t. You might not have the will power to do things you know you should do like exercising.

And you can’t do anything. You can’t influence the result even a little.

And all of this is multiplied if it’s unexpected. Even if you know the patient has been ill a lot, or even fighting cancer. If things seemed stable, and there’s a sudden crash, and they’re between life and death, it guts you. Once Dan and I spent a weekend crying and sleeping instead of writing, because our friend who’d been fighting cancer had a sudden crash and was between life and death.

And yes, I’m quite aware I’ve been the cause of that kind of wait for many people over the years. Even for some of you, the last time it happened. I know why you panic when the blog is down.

Until one of you in the comments said this is the state we were in, it hadn’t occurred to me. I’m not giving credit because I don’t remember who, and I’m sorry. I slept like 12 hours, and need to go work (good news. I got ALL my IP back from Baen. So, there’s a lot of cover planning/editing (I don’t have the edited files, and anyway, it wouldn’t be legal to use them, and besides there’s a bunch of things I want to reconsider including, which were taken out on edit and such. So, lots of work.) in addition to finishing the current books.

We knew the republic was ill. Some of us who come from socialist/communist/leftist countries have been screaming for years the elections were rigged. But we didn’t know how badly the left was cheating. (Look, I’m not going to argue. Some people are still in denial. But go here and after the Monster Hunter Bloodlines announcement, read the last three posts, in reverse order.)

Hell, even I didn’t know the extent of fraud until I STUPIDLY became a poll watcher in 2012. So much fraud it’s almost unbelievable, all from the left. (And the precinct still went GOP. Think about it.) It was literally a miracle 2016 happened. Which gives me hope. But miracles are…. slippery things and not ours to perform.

And even knowing how bad 2012 was, this year, the brazenness of it took my breath away. And I’m sorry to all the delicate violets who say revealing the fraud is worse than committing it because it loses faith in the republic.

I’m not going to examine what is wrong with your head, if that’s your position. I’ll only say your major dysfunction is widely shared. But it’s very much the equivalent of telling a cancer patient with perhaps 15% chance of surviving to give up those harsh therapies and take up aromatherapy instead. It’s saying “Let the republic die happy, instead of risking all to maybe save it.” Some of you are friends, and I want to remain your friend, but your judgement isn’t sound. You’re not well. You’re cringing away from the suffering so much that the patient dying seems preferable. Kindly shut up. And straighten your spine. Go pace the halls for a while if you have to. But do not discourage us or the patient. You’re not helping.

And us, the rest of us. Take a deep breath. This might be an endless month or months. And our chances are slim, but the patient is worth it.

But we can’t do anything. And keeping your eyes glued to every monitor, your ears tuned to every beep down the hall, standing up every time a group of nurses comes running is not going to help. You can’t do anything.

Son suggested I adopt the Heinlein strategy during WWII and read the news once every two weeks. It would be nice but I’m too neurotic for that. Still, reloading the few reliable sites is not helping anything.

And I can’t help behaving/feeling like I have a low-level illness myself. I’m sleeping too much (or not at all) and eating all the wrong things, and not exercising as I should. I’m unable to read anything of consequence, and writing wordcount has gone to hell.

That needs to turn around. Win or lose, the sewer has been exposed and we need to fight it. We need to fight it starting at the point of greatest corruption: the culture. It is the culture that has gifted us a corrupt enough bureaucracy to allow this to happen.

The relentless hatred of themselves and their nation has made people act like enemies within.

And that needs to stop. I can’t do it alone, but we need an army of culture warriors, from writers to people who “simply” engage in impossible conversations at the dinner table.

So we need to do some self-care. And yeah, I know, normally I view self-care as “being an utter sissy.” But we need to take care of ourselves, so we’re around to turn this shit around either way. We are suffering under chemotherapy as a nation, but that’s not enough. There will need to be a neutralizing of the cancer, on a permanent basis.

Be gentle to yourself. No, you might not be able to impose regular sleep hours. Do try to keep exercise going. (I’m up to one time out of three actually doing it.) Try not to go overboard with food or whatever your indulgence is. But if you must read very silly, mindless books, or if you end every day wrapped in a fluffy robe in front of silly tv shows (my sin is British Mysteries) do so.

You might not be your most productive right now. How can you be, when the republic is fighting for its life?

But be as productive as you can. Try to do whatever you can. Me, I’m going to go upstairs to write, and then try to figure out a concept for new Darkship covers. And find my outlines for the sequels. Oh, and the Shifters too. I will need to get new audio done, because the chick who read Athena didn’t amuse me. Mind you, they can continue selling theirs, but there needs to be a new one out. (And yes, I just heard some of you cheer.)

And I’m going to plan for the years ahead, win or lose. Because work must go on, either to restore or just heal (but not like the lefty “healing”) the republic. To restore civics and patriotism and an understanding in who we are, and why we are unique. And even if the republic dies (for now) there has to be hope of its returning. Soonest if possible. Otherwise I start looking for exit ramps, and the Lieutenant wouldn’t like that. Neither would my family for that matter.

So, understand where you are. And treat yourself a little more kindly than you normally do. But go back to work. It’s time to work as hard as you can building under over and around.

Just in case it all falls.

393 thoughts on “Sitting by the Sick Bed”

  1. Good to hear that you got the Baen Rights back.

    I want the Darkship “Angry Mommy vs Evil Daddy” book! 😀

    2. Hurray for a new reader for Darkship! Get someone who doesn’t make all the male characters sound like they have a brain injury. It’s fine for Fuse, but all the guys sound like Fuse. I’m not super fond of the gal who reads Honor Harrington, but at least she understands that male voices are deeper, not slack-jawed. Kim Niemi for the Shifters is decent; maybe you can get her again.

      Sometimes I consider trying to become an audiobook reader just so I can get them read “properly” — not that I have any acting or spoken performance training. I just want something to listen to while I’m diamond painting or crocheting or doing quiet home DIY (assembling furniture, painting, caulking, etc.).

      1. If you teach audiobook readers just one thing, I would vote for, “Yes, you really do have to check the pronunciation of that French phrase, because you don’t understand the rules as well as you think you do.” I am so tired of being yanked out of the story by mangled French words and phrases! Never realized how many of them English uses until I started listening to audiobooks.

        1. My biggest complaint with Allyson Johnson (who reads Honor Harrington) is her excessive use of accents to try to distinguish characters. It’s not a terrible idea, except that she assigns accents seemingly on last name nationality alone. Engineer Stromboli gets an Italian accent, even though she’s from the Star Kingdom like everyone else on the Fearless. Some of the Havenites get French accents, which is fine, except that it’s only some of them. Eloise Pritchard gets one, but not Thomas Theisman, even though they’re from the same planet. And then characters that are specifically described as having similar accents, like Sphynxians or Griffiners, don’t sound the same.

  2. Yep. Having done the waiting thing before, I’ve discovered that having multiple projects going at the same time helps a lot. I can bounce from one to the other when the brain gets fidgety. So, off the intertubes and back to editing! Walk later on.

  4. First: Congratulations on the IP!

    Second: anyone who didn’t watch it should go watch the Giuliani/Powell/Ellis press conference that just wrapped up a little while ago.

      1. I’ve seen a number of “conservative” sites posting columnists’ arguments that this press conference is harmful to conservatism and to Trump. I do not agree and do not wish to name names. I merely recall a saying attributed to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, that Israel refuses to commit suicide so that the other nations of the world will think well of her.

        I’ve looked for and not found the actual quote; it may be apocryphal. But that does ot make it meaningless.

        OTOH, I did find this quote:
        America is a great country. It has many shortcomings, many social inequalities, and it’s tragic that the problem of the blacks wasn’t solved fifty or even a hundred years ago, but it’s still a great country, a country full of opportunities, of freedom! Does it seem nothing to you to be able to say what you like, even against the government, the Establishment?
        –

        1. I can’t help but think that if Nixon had fought the fraud that caused him to lose to Kennedy, instead of concede the election for the “good” of the Country, he might have still lost, but it might have made things crystal clear that we need to be careful with elections, and make them as resistant to fraud as possible.

          Perhaps we’d be in a better political place today if this had been done; perhaps not. One thing for certain, though: we wouldn’t be dealing with this particular nightmare scenario today.

          An analogy to cancer is apt. It’s better to deal with it early, when it’s only in a couple of places, than it is to deal with it when it has spread to the lungs and liver as well, because you ignored the signs and didn’t want them to interfere with
          your comfortable lifestyle.

            1. Perhaps he didn’t want to win?

              I don’t know why that might be, but I wouldn’t need much beer to make the supporting argument. Start with the “failure” of ORCA, review his peculiar passivity during those debates, including letting a moderator play an active role in one. No, not even one pitcher.
              –

            2. Romney never intended to win.

              Neither did McCain.

              I’m honestly starting to believe a good selection of GOP candidates at the Presidental and Senatorial level enter with the intent to lose honorably and be liked, and rewarded, by the left.

            3. Also, there are already people peddling the idea that Romeny is the GOP frontrunner for 2024.

              Given the broader GOP’s reaction to open fraud, especially in my state, my old “Whig the GOP” plan that got me accused of being a false flag oh those years ago, is looking good again (at least to me).

              Assuming two unlikely things:

              1. We don’t have to shoot our way out
              2. We still have meaningful elections if we don’t shoot our way out anyway

              3. Oh absolutely please god no. He was so terribly unlikable, and stupid – I say that as someone who voted for him simply because I can not bring myself to not vote, nor can I vote for the left.

                The GOB Establishment has done a TERRIBLE job of recruiting decent, capable, functional yet likable candidates who can connect with the base. It’s no wonder the base needs to be fired up, there’s been no one to catch our interest. They’ve all been middle of the road, more than willing to participate in the ‘accidental’ slow slide to socialism.

                It’s going to have to be true groundswell, like the Tea Party and the Trump Party. Cuz the Trump party ain’t your daddy’s GOP (thank heaven above!!!)

          1. Heck, I’m old have arthritic hands and too many fingers subject to “trigger-lock” to risk injuring myself punching people in their hard bits.

            I do know how to employ a sock-full of sand … although if I’m in a foul mood I might just deploy the pungun.
            –

            1. For your own sake, I urge you not to go down that particular rabbit hole. It’s enough to shoot, garrote, stab, hang, and bomb the Marxists with grenades, artillery, and missiles (in properly legal warfare as declared by Congress, of course — wink, wink). No need to create nightmares in your own soul. -_-

              (And yes, I’m perfectly aware of the extensive use of napalm by America soldiers in Vietnam, Korea, and the Second World War, but they nominally used it to achieve difficult military goals and not for the sake of giggling with delight at the thought of mortal enemies shrieking as their skins sloughed off in gasping, terrible eternities of unendurable agony. What was that bon mot?

              “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster . . . when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

              — Friedrich Nietzsche

              1. I am a sadist. I have set people on fire, for mutual fun, already. I have beaten people.

                I am quite aware of what I am capable of. I keep a tight reign on it, but if “countrymen” insist on making us throw down I fully intend to unleash all the blackness in my soul on them.

                There are two reasons. The first, is they have shown repeated they believe that is what we are and want to experience it, or think they do. Second, horrors are done to win wars and it is best for my side if those of us who already know our darkness and ability to do it are the ones to do the horrors instead of letting people with better souls stain them learning how.

                1. Heh. I put something very like that in a story:

                  “We’re not done yet, and then…better I do it. I’ve got no innocence left to lose.”

                  1. From Sherman to Hiroshima to Agent Orange, the American way of war has not valued innocence. It was valued what it takes to win, even if the pols behind the wars have not.

        3. The ‘problem’ of the Blacks was on it’s way to being solved with the Civil Rights movement…before the Fascist Left mucked in. Oh, there would have been stumbles, and there will ALWAYS be bigots, but the Left twisted ‘equality before the law’ into ‘equality of outcome’ AND turned urban minority schools into chess pits of incompetence. There is no pit in Hell deep enough for any of those pious babblers if they had any idea what they were doing.

          1. The Democrats have been the party of slavery, racism and hate for 180 years. They never changed. They hate us for winning the Civil War, and setting their slaves free. They still see them as their freed slaves, their property running loose, not as free citizens. Every baffling aspect of their ‘social justice’ and political correctness makes sense when viewed from that perspective.
            ———————————
            There are a lot of idiots in the world that believe sticking a politically correct label on a thing will make it what they wish it to be, instead of what it is. They are full of shit.

            1. I’m not completely convinced it’s that simple. Yes, there is a continuity, but I think it’s a case of one work-shy would-be elite being infected by the remains of a previous one. In the United States this is the would-be elitists of the ‘intellectual’ class being infected by the remnants of the old Planter families, in opposition to the Moguls of the Gilded Age (who, for all their elitism and tendency toward authoritarianism, actually built stuff). In Europe the same ‘intellectuals’ were infected by the remnants of the various Aristocracies, in opposition to the Industrialist Moguls of Europe.

              This makes me wonder if, once the Fascist Left has passed into ineffectuality, whatever self-nominated Elite spines up next will make common cause with the remnants of the Moguls, if any.

  5. I’ll add my congratulations on the return of your own.

    Yeah; been there; done that.

    And somebody’s gotta feed the cats and dogs (and pay the property taxes), so yeah, back to work.

  6. “You can’t influence the result even a little.”

    There’s always something you can do — ease their pain, encourage their efforts, succor them or even just distract.

    Not that it helps very much. But it might make all the difference in the world.
    –

  7. If started doing music again. I’m cycling between The Star Spangled Banner, and the Foggy Dew, which kind of says something about my perspective at the moment…

        1. Bite your tongue.

          God bless gallant Pearse and his comrades who died
          Tom Clark, MacDonagh, MacDermott, McBride,
          And here’s to James Connolly who gave one hurrah,
          And faced the machine guns for Erin Go Bragh.

            1. Patrick Sarsfield Mulligan, the man from Mullingar.

              they came with tanks and armored cars
              They came with all their might
              Them peelers never counted on old Paddy’s dynamite
              on the fourteenth day of April, he blew them to July
              And the name of Paddy Mulligan took half of Irelands’ pride.

            2. Based on some of our allies, I’m worried it’ll be more “Roland, the Headless Thompson Gunner”.

              If so, those allies need to remember what the Headless Gunner did.

    2. 4th Verse of the Star Spangled Banner please:

      O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation! Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,” And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave

      pardon me it’s a bit dusty in here…

      1. The fourth verse of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, the actual fourth verse instead of the modern bowdlerization:

        In the beauty of the lilies
        Christ was born across the sea,
        With a glory in His bosom
        That transfigures you and me;
        As He died to make men holy,
        Let us die to make men free;
        While God is marching on.

        1. Herbn I love that verse and yes no bowdlerization please Leave it as Mrs. Howe wrote it. There is an 8 part SSAATTBB arrangement of the Battle Hymn which has much of that 4th verse in the TTBB men’s parts including the 1st tenors sailing up to a B flat or C (can’t remember which) at piano volume that sends thrills through you when sing it. There is a lovely performance of it by the Air Force academy chorus somewhere but darned if I can find it.

  8. I still think that we need something like what Piper had in “A Planet for Texans” where “Proper defense of the Constitution” (more or less) was an affirmative defense to murder.

  9. My perspective is a little…different. I started paying attention to politics shortly after Jimmy ‘the compromise candidate’ Carter was elected. Back then it was pretty much just assumed by everybody but a few cranks (like the staff of the still vibrant National Review) that Big Government was the inevitable way forward, that handguns would be banned soon and most long guns eventually, that productivity had peaked, and a long litany of other Progressive predictions. And I soon learned, by digging, that most of the dearly held Progressive ‘solutions’ were utter twaddle. When President Carter proposed a broad swath of new hydroelectric projects, the ‘environmentalists’, who had previously been loudly in favor of hydroelectric as one of their pet ‘renewable energy’ solutions, did an abrupt about face and opposed it. Whereupon I formulated the definition of ‘renewable energy’ as “any form of electrical generation that is in no danger of being practical”. I have seen no reason to revise that definition since.

    Carter was a disaster, and paved the way for Reagan, who labeled Big Government as part of the problem, which resonated strongly with the general public and drove the Washington Elite to frenzy. Regan’s successor was a disappointment, but President Bubba found that he had to play triangulation with the Reagan playbook. The people, bless their black hearts, were sick of Big Government, and it had to be carefully sold.

    In the meanwhile, several things undermined the Progressive vision. Gun owners fought back, successfully, and put ‘gun control’ ( read; disarming the public) into heavy retreat, in spite of the Washington Elite being passionately for it. The USSR collapsed, as did many of its nastier satellites. The computer revolution gained momentum, eventually becoming a new social phenomenon that the Washington Elite had little grasp of.

    Through all this the Progressive Narrative shifted from confident offense to confused defense. They came up with many explanations as to why their world wasn’t really falling apart. They did their best to sweep all their blather about the superiority of the Soviet system under the rug, but I noticed that few people really bought it, at least few of my own age.

    We ARE sitting at a deathbed. It is the deathbed of the Progressive/Socialist/Fascist Left. It is the deathbed of the nasty old uncle that only a minority of the family liked. He still holds a lot of the family assets, and can do a lot of malicious damage before he finally flatlines, But he is dying. We may be in for some very messy fights, for the next few years, but the Fascists cannot win. They are too exposed. If they move to make the 2022 elections more fraud friendly they will have a bitter fight on their hands. If they try to impose a National lockdown, they will find that the populace is in no mood for it. They haven’t stopped moving yet, but they are dead.

    The fight over 2020 has just begun, and based on the desperate squealing from the Left, it looks to be hopeful.

    This is good. I’m in so-so health, my Lady is worse, and I have few excess resources. I must depend on people with greater energy to fight for me. But I see no shortage of such.

    The Left thought they had this election sewed up. They didn’t even come close. I suspect, but cannot (YET) prove that even in their strongholds the actual tally of votes scared them badly. The populace is restive. The populace is armed. The Left is in Cheyne-Stokes breathing.

    Do. Not. Despair.

    1. I really like your take. I’ve been praying that when justice gets served, we become an example to the rest of the world. The push back is already starting in Europe. I choose to be optimistic and say it’s not too late for them.

      1. There’s a lovely line from one of my guilty pleasure movies (REVENGE OF THE NERDS), “We have news for the Beautiful People; there’s a lot more of us than there are of you.”

      2. If the fall of the Iron Curtain proved something, it’s that it’s *never* too late to push back.

        It just gets a *lot* harder, depending on how far the rot has gone.

      1. There was already a tiny hint of change in the air. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, and the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 were all long-term bipartisan bills that somewhat decreased the regulatory morass in the transportation sector, but it took nearly a decade for them to actually be passed. Homebrewing was federally legalized in 1978, after being outlawed in 1919 by the laws implementing Prohibition.

      2. Ah, yes.

        “Everybody knows…”

        That loosening gun laws will result in more crime (never happened)

        That integrating schools would improve minority test scores (never happened)

        That ‘Reaganomics’ wouldn’t work(huge boom)

        That the USSR would never fall (*splat*)

          1. Of course not! I mean without price and earning controls, all those price and earning bureaucrats would have to WORK for a living and the Common People would get up to ALL KINDS of untaxable naughtiness.

    3. I really hope you’re right. If Trump prevails, the Demicrats *ought* to be in very very poor repute for most of the country. I’ve had a few imaginary conversations in which I say things like: “oh, you’re a Democrat? The party of voter fraud? How do you reconcile that with your personal morality?”

      2. No reason you shouldn’t use that line even if Biden pulls it off. The Fascist Left stole or tried to steal this election. We must NEVER let them forget that we know.

        1. Yup if Biden is ultimately inaugurated on Jan 20th I shall refer to him and his running mate (once she takes over) as “His/Her Fraudulence” henceforth. The devil can not stand to be mocked.

          2. “Usurper Joe” is the one I settled on, but there’s no reason for us all to use the same one. We’re not the Left who take marching orders from centralized authority and all show up to protests with identical pre-printed signs. We’re all individuals. (And guess who’s yelling “I’m not!” in the back, there.)

      3. When it comes down to it, their only morality is one-way loyalty down the chain of lowerarchy to the Throne of Noise. Anyone who found out about Biden showering with his daughter and still supports the man has revealed their character.

        -Albert

    4. A major part of my hope is a hope that gun rights will turn out to be a leading indicator, and also (in a somewhat bittersweet way, because I druther not open the 4th box) the massive firearms and ammunition sales numbers of 2020. I remember when people mocked Florida for going shall issue CCW.

      On the topic of the original post: How might we convince the Left (or at least part of it) to “Surrender. Let go. Allow your Deep State of America and your Socialist-Progressive dreams to die a quiet death.”

      Because if they’re trying to convince us to surrender without a fight, we darn well ought to return the favor.

      1. There are a lot of people finding out how much of a pain in the tukis the “reasonable restrictions” on home schooling are, too.

        To the point that those are a better target for “why we couldn’t do it” than attacking homeschoolers– then you can justify it (emotionally) with “those guys got lucky, but these rules are stupid!”

    5. But we have to be watchful. It’s when the enemy is nearly dead that he becomes most dangerous – he has lost all fear, and will enjoy taking EVERYONE with him.

        1. They’re playing their ‘Revolution’ narrative in their solid biscuit heads, but they’ve entirely failed to provide several of the important prerequisites:

          They have failed to disarm the public

          They have alienated law enforcement

          They don’t have an outside military threat on national soil, or the disruption of a recent war on national soil

          Also, they don’t understand tactics and strategy as applied to a conflict where the other side is not obliged to play nice. Antifa/BLM may be trained Marxists (or have a core of same) but the tactics that give them control of the streets where they have been rioting will not work if their targets are prepared to respond to deadly force with deadly force.

            1. Given this so close to the standard description of how psychopaths view everyone else, I would think there’s a convergence here between the functional psychopath career choice in C-suite management and the lurch to the left of the TechLords and their captive minions in Silicon Valley.

              It also explains their otherwise unfathomable decision to openly censor, suppress, and cancel all who express opinions they do not wish to be in the manipulation mix – only their ideas are allowed to be available as inputs to those programmable widgets.

              And they are arrogantly confident they can also control and direct those politicians to avoid things like re-regulation or antitrust actions given how captive the bureaucracy is to their side.

              But given the number two career choice for functional psychopaths is politics, those TechLords should be careful – they are seen as widgets by those politicians, and in the end as they would agree, all widgets are disposable widgets.

            2. A common snark I make about progs is that they let the voices in their tiny overheated heads tell them how things are/what the people they hate are “really” like/etc. Sometimes I wonder if I use it too much, then I run into a prog that makes me wonder if I use it enough. 😮

              1. Jonathan Haidt showed in the lab that conservatives understand liberals, and liberals don’t understand conservatives.

                I have literally seen a liberal claiming in public that liberals understand what conservatives are REALLY like, they were just lying to Haidt.

          2. BLMtifa’s tactics don’t even work against non-deadly force. Pretty much any time the cops don’t actively move against any group standing up to them, BLMtifa gets kicked to the curb. And there are numerous videos of this sort of thing online where a group of troublemakers go after the wrong target. They’re jackels that think that they’re lions.

            1. “They’re jackels that think that they’re lions.”

              Worse than that, they’re the donkey from Aesop’s tables who thinks the lion is afraid of it and decides to chase after the lion to show it who’s boss. We all know what happened next.

        2. Just remember, we can outlast them.

          …No, really, we can. We’ve had to do it all our lives. We just have to grit our teeth and keep inching along the edge of the cliff, while they go over like lemmings.

          Easy? No. Not at all. They’ll try to push us with them, and there’s limited room to dodge

          But we got this far. And one of the pieces of advice when you’re in a desperate survival situation is, don’t try to think too far ahead, or the overwhelming task will paralyze you. Think about the next few steps. Do one. Repeat.

          That’s how a guy who fell off Everest survived.

              2. And I’ve just published again! (Yes, it will be in the next promo.)

                Though for Amazon silliness: the UK print version says it’s “JXG-Women Classic Fit Solid Long Sleeve Round Neck Knit T-Shirt Tops.”

                2. I got about halfway through while nursing and stuff last night. I think it would take very small print to fit all of it on a shirt.

                3. According to Hoyt:
                  300% more likely to have you contemplating “how to hide several hundred page’s worth of text on a shirt” than the next most likely blog.

                  Maybe micro-printing on some of those color-flip sequins?

    7. Ever since I gained an awareness of politics, I have said that the worst thing about the Apollo Program was that it succeeded. It ‘proved’ to everybody that gigantic government programs were the way to get things done. Space travel was ‘too big’ for private enterprise. And so we have been plagued with gigantic government programs ever since, and private space travel was placed off limits for decades.

      What, really, did the Apollo Program achieve? We spent $26 billion — the equivalent of nearly $300 billion today — to build rockets and landers that let 12 men spend a few days each on the moon and were WORTHLESS for any other purpose. It was, in the end, a gigantic publicity stunt.
      ———————————
      If a business tries something that doesn’t work, they either stop doing it or they will go broke. If the government tries something that doesn’t work, they just keep shoveling our money into it forever.

      1. I’m not generally a supporter of big government or big government programs; however, I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was worthless. Sure it was expensive, but I think we learned a lot from the effort. That science has value. I don’t think private corporations would have gotten us there because there was no way to monetize the effort.

        NOW however, I think we are getting to the point where (if allowed) private corporations WOULD be able to monetize space exploration. It’s time for the government to step back, and out of the way, and let loose the dogs of Capitalism! There is, reportedly, an asteroid out there that contains more that the GDP of the entire WORLD’s worth of resources. Declare open season on that thing!

      2. Ok, a couple of points;

        I don’t like Gigantic Government Projects either, but they hardly started with Apollo. Think of the American effort on the Panama Canal. Or Rural electrification. Or any one of dozens of hydroelectric projects. Apollo may simply be the last one that worked.

        Also, the moon landings may not have produced a lot of obvious and direct benefits, but I would put forward two arguments: A) Direct benefits would have necessitated building infrastructure on the Moon, and the same people who now complain that Apollo produced no direct benefits would have foamed at the mouth and fallen down in fits. B) The technological developments made in the process of getting us to the moon include enough things we now take for granted (remote medical sensors, computers smaller than a refrigerator) that the idea that the money was ‘wasted’ needs serious examination.

        Oh, and C) Given the counterproductive and downright toxic ratholes the government pounds MOST of the money down, are we SURE we don’t WANT that money to be wasted?

        1. All of our space resources were channeled into ONE project to achieve ONE narrow, impractical goal. No ‘diversions’ from The True Path were permitted. And then, once we’d achieved that goal, we were done. Our space program was left without a purpose, and a President who resented it as Kennedy’s legacy. And those laws that prohibited private space programs remained in place, and The True Path is so deeply ingrained that nobody can think outside it.

          Vertically launched disposable rockets are not an efficient way to get into orbit. They were the quickest solution for that one narrow goal of sending a couple of men to the moon for a few days, but impractical for regular use. Where would commercial air travel be if we had to spend months building a new airplane for every flight?

          There is a way to get partially out from under Tsiolkovsky’s Rocket Equation — while your spacecraft is in the atmosphere, surrounded by oxygen, USE that oxygen! Use jet engines to reach 30,000 meters altitude, and at least Mach 2.5. We did that in 1961, we can do it today. That provides not only oxygen (which makes up almost 90% of a rocket’s propellant) but reaction mass you don’t have to carry and accelerate.

          We could build a spaceplane that could reach low orbit, return and fly again for little more than the cost of fuel. Unfortunately, ‘everybody knows’ that vertically launched rockets are The Way It’s Done.
          ———————————
          When the government tries something, and it works, they will expand and bloat it until it stops working.

          1. I recently had the pleasure of re-reading The Right Stuff via audiobook (a very well performed reading by Dennis Quaid, too.)

            A critical theme of the book is that we were developing a space plane out at Edwards — consolidation of efforts into the Mercury-Apollo program was disastrous for that. It converted a serious weapon-system development project into a propaganda stunt. But as a propaganda stunt is was tremendously effective.

            The fact that we had no second act is hardly something for which to blame the Apollo project. Put that on the heads of the “statesmen” responsible for developing US policies. Of course, many of them were distracted by the war in SE Asia, the Civil Rights contretemps in America (remember: the last and worst riots were in Los Angeles, Detroit and Boston — hardly redoubts of Jim Crow nor defenders of slavery.)

            But if you are going to condemn vastly expensive government projects for being successful and thus legitimizing government’s intrusions then it seems only fair to observe that our winning of WWII served the same purpose, yet I suspect few here would therefore decry it. To borrow a phrase from The Right Stuff, the problem here is not pussy, it is monkey.
            –

        2. The fact that the left hates the space program so much is reason in and of itself for its continued existence, albeit with much more prudent management and of facilitating private sector, rather than government, ventures.

          1. The Left may hate the space program, but I bet they would squeal like pigs being put through a shredder if anyone suggested making NASA back down significantly on its regulation of space flight.

            I have, BTW, had for decades an answer to the Left’s “ Why should we spend money on space when there are still so many problems here on Earth!”,

            “Because the problems of space exploration are technical, and therefore can be solved, whereas the problems on Earth that you speak of are largely human problems and thus not subject to solution from the top down.”

            1. Leftoids, squealing like pigs being put through a shredder…

              Now there’s a thought to brighten the day. May we see it soon, and often!

    8. My wake up call came when I read the Gulag Archipelago and then listened to some TV authority solemnly proclaiming moral equivalence between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. with the implication that they were probably better.

      That disconnect between my lying eyes and What All the Acceptable People prefer has never gone away.

      1. The Marxists love to diddle our heads with their made-up moral equivalencies. I have a simple response for them — “Try to justify this, you scuttling, murdering, subhuman vermin!”

        1. The
          Left hates, Hates, HATES anything that smacks of American Exceptionalism…except that they always reach for it to justify trying here a political system that elsewhere ends in mass graves.

  10. I’ve been doing my exercises pretty well! So I can sit now, and even drive. Mostly.

    Which… actually should make comics a lot easier. I haven’t been able to do any Simon Jester stuff. But Mama Bunny always comes like a firehose at least >.>

    WOO HOO on rights!

  11. I’m glad you got back your IP, things are going to be bad and you’ll need all the resources you can muster.

    I have to agree about self-care. I’ve put my head firmly into the sand and haven’t looked at any news, outside financial prices, since the election. It was making me sick and causing issues in the family — a raving lunatic husband screaming at the television is not conducive to marital harmony. Further, cutting out that huge time sink has given me back a massive block of time and I’ve been trying to do productive stuff with it.

    My hope is in their inherent dishonesty and self interest. They want to plunder the country not to break it. I

    1. As with so many other areas: When you’ve been warned you’ll break something and nothing happens, why would you stop pushing?

      1. 1. Elephants child. Yes, we do deserve to be spanked.
        2. .It feels good. Mostly. But you have to keep pushing more to get the same rush.
        3. You didn’t build the thing that might break and don’t think you need or want it.
        4. You, in fact, WANT it broken.

        You asked.

  12. I got ALL my IP back from Baen.

    *happy dances*

    Yay! That gives me hope in their working-to-be-good– I can buy new copies of the Bahzell books!

    1. Is Baen Darkside? I was under the impression they were reasonable people. Maybe I am reading too much into that statement.

      2. There were indications they were tilting that way, but I’m willing to consider this evidence of the mommy-chain pressuring them to that, and Baen resisting.

  13. And your mind keeps drifting to your worry, so you don’t get much done, and what you get done is sloppy.

    When the Contessa was in the baby-ICU, nobody let me drive to go see her. I was dropped off in the morning and picked up in the evening.

    In theory, because of the C-section …. in reality because I was NOT in a state to drive.

    The nurses made sure to tell me, and my husband, to look out for it.

    1. Looking back to back up is particularly nasty after abdominal surgery. Twisting. Even two weeks after. . . .

      1. I think it may depend strongly on the build of the person involved, and how they turn– I am basically an inflexible brick, so “turning to look” has always included a lot more hip-action than people seem to expect, especially when I’ve had a chance to make the bucket seat much less bucket-y.

        That said, the side effects of an accident, and the drugs usually in your system, and all the trained movements you make, make it a not-that-great idea.

  14. I have come to the same place as that advocated by Sarah’s son, which is the same as I followed back in March-April when everyone else was glued to the three-letter-news: I cannot sit there passively watching nothing happen while know-nothings yammer 24/7. I can check in on my schedule when convenient with non-blood-pressure-raising media outlets. I don’t need any extra sitting-looking time – I need to go do something where I can see the results of my efforts.

    Back in April that was keeping the lawn cut, getting tomatoes started and into pots and venturing out on empty streets to get cars smog-checked during the worst of the uncertainty when CA DMV was too busy hiding under the bed to just push back due dates. Now there’s writing to be done (progress!), plenty of Christmas decorations to get put up, and plenty of things on the neverending-joy-of-home-ownership needs-done list. And oh, yeah, day job too, but that’s slacking a bit*.

    But the balance is key – I have found my sanity depends on making sure no one thing consumes all my energies, and that balance can be tricky. But I am doing what I can to keep my keel even, and my free advice is all and sundry (Hundry?) should do the same.

    *Foreshadowing of the first China Joe Recession? In spite of the Senate and House results I would not be surprised. Day job does tend to get our work on a bit of a looking-forward basis, and the market in aggregate is very smart.

  15. Congrats on the IP rights.

    I’ve cut back greatly on the news. I primarily look at two of the local TV/radio station news sites and some of the local talk radio station to see what is going on locally. Have been avoiding the national news, but enough leaks through so I’m not totally cut off. Do not watch any talking head pontificating on TV. Change the channel of fast forward. I find I feel much better mentally.

  16. And even knowing how bad 2012 was, this year, the brazenness of it took my breath away. And I’m sorry to all the delicate violets who say revealing the fraud is worse than committing it because it loses faith in the republic.

    I’m not going to examine what is wrong with your head, if that’s your position. I’ll only say your major dysfunction is widely shared.

    Isn’t this what the United Federation of Planets did, pretty much constantly?

    “Hey, yeah, you’re evil and really obviously violating the agreement– but! Agreement! Must have the agreement! So even though the Romulans and Klingons barely pretend, and the Cardassians just kind of stand there and go “really? REALLY? You’re not going to do ANYTHING? What about if we do this?”, we’ve got our agreement so it’s all cozy!”

    1. 1MC: “Foxfier report to the Ships Counselors treatment and detention space: Foxfier report to the Ships Counselor for remedial counseling immediately.”

      1. Foxfier’s relatives would’ve been out of Federation space so **** quick that even Worf’s little brother (the one he was raised with) would look on and go “Wow!”

      2. I assume you’ve heard the theory, so I won’t go into great detail here, but I love the internet theory that Star Trek and Blake’s 7 are in the same universe, just told from two different sides of the political divide. TNG et. al. are the propaganda for the Federation and ship’s counselors like Troi are just more nicely-named political officers like Tim Curry’s character in Hunt for Red October or the one-episode-long installment of a political officer on Babylon 5.

        1. Tim Curry was the doctor. The zampolit was named Putin (heh) and was killed in the first 15 minutes. The doctor was just the only officer not in on the defection.

          But yes, telepathic/ telempathic political officer … sounds about right.

          1. Thanks for the correction. It’s been a while since I watched it and I must have conflated the two characters.

        3. Familiar with it, don’t accept it.

          My headcannon is there are a lot of unaffiliated planets, many of them doing religion. Most of them, the Federation ships don’t visit.

          Plus, lots of traders. Given humans are involved, probably majority half-something or children of the same…..

          1. I’m trying to think of any “Yeah, no thanks – we moved out this far to get away from you frelling Feddies” colonies in any of the shows, at least any that didn’t end up with the morality lesson learned that you should just embrace the collective and submit to UFP “protection”.

            1. They didn’t show them, but Worf’s brother was a walking scandal for visiting unapproved worlds— and the Marquis were only noted for being former Federation citizens who didn’t go along with the program.

            2. I can’t find Eddington’s villain speech to Sisko, but it was pretty bad, and Sisko had no defenses from it. He’d never been exposed to the ideas, even though his dad is a borderline right-wing-crazy for a Fedder.

              That suggests that the Federation is rather careful about not exposing their people to corrupting ideas.

              1. There were a number of worlds where the locals weren’t even ‘rubber forehead’ aliens, they were entirely human-looking. Many even had cultures blatantly drawn from Earth’s history.

                My guess is that they decided that claiming to be alien was the best way to keep the feds from deciding that they were Federation by default.

                -Albert

                1. Not an episode, but “How Much for Just the Planet” by John M. Ford was an excellent look at a group, including Starfleet personnel who had left the Federation. Just remember to belt yourself in before reading or you will find yourself on the floor.

                  1. Two things to always remember. 1) coffee for McCoy, no matter what; 2) no peppermint milkshakes for anyone. No. Matter. What.

              3. Found it! Well, in blog format.

                I know you. I was like you once, but then I opened my eyes. Open your eyes, Captain. Why is the Federation so obsessed about the Maquis? We’ve never harmed you, and yet we’re constantly arrested and charged with terrorism. Starships chase us through the Badlands and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we’ve left the Federation, and that’s the one thing you can’t accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You’re only sending them replicators because one day they can take their rightful place on the Federation Council. You know, in some ways you’re worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You’re more insidious. You assimilate people and they don’t even know it.

                https://the-american-catholic.com/2020/09/08/for-star-trek-day/

                Keep in mind, the weasel word there is that they didn’t attack the federation… this guy took a running leap at the kind of terrorism that had Kira willing to die because she was so upset she’d done it, as a kid, against invaders– but Sisko didn’t have something J Random Housewife (OK, teenage fangirl, but that doesn’t make it better!) could have come up with.

                1. I often wondered if this was more prophetic than people want to believe. Eventually, someone is going to figure out how to leave this mudball and the technology will get out. Imagine, humans… Americans… ODDS! flying off into space in search of a new home where we can be free of overbearing government intervention.

                  Do you really think they would let us go?

                  1. *looks at the Federation, and the notable lack of a single crazy guy wearing power armor, which at today’s tech level can be seen at any mid-level fan convention*

                    I don’t think they’d get many chances to say no; more likely, they’d “drive us out.”

              4. After realizing that the Federation wasn’t the good guys, the TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror” had a completely different meaning for me.

                At least in the mirror universe, people were trying to throw off the jackboot of the Federation. Not everyone wanted to live in the New Socialist Paradise.

    2. “Let’s see. You (the Federation) have an agreement with the Romulans and the Klingons that states that they can have cloaking devices for their warships but you (the Federation) can not have cloaking devices for your warships/exploration ships.”

      “Yes, that the agreement.”

      “There’s No Intelligent Life In The Federation.” [Sarcastic Grin]

        1. Not really.

          That Federation Treaty made No Sense At All.

          The Iran Deal can be explained as “Obama Thinking “I Have To Out Do George W By Getting A Deal When He Didn’t Get A Deal” not realizing that George W rejected Stupid Deals”. 😦

          1. That is (too) kind. Obama was always about “making fundamental change”, plus he thought he was always the smartest person in every room. He decided that, since the US was the basis of every world problem, that the way to stabilize the area was to follow the Carter pattern of betraying our allies while adding US weight behind the Shia, in order to “stabilize” things by countering the weight that the Sunni wielded (note past tense) due to their oil wealth – kinda ST:TOS “Balance of Terror”, except with the US backing both sides. After bowing to the Saudi King on the Apology Tour he was now bowing to the mullahs and stabbing the House of Saud in the back.

            I know, “Balance” was the US-USSR Cold War, but Obama is convinced he’s always the smartest person in any room, and he was certain his Clever Plan would be turnip-grade clever.

            That’s why in spite of backing all the flower revolutions to overthrow our allies, he explicitly did not back the same thing in Iran. He’s too clever to fall for that.

            So to boil it all down: Naked Hubris.

            1. Obama was very clear that he wanted to undo everything that had been done since Reagan had taken office. That desire applied to not only doing all the changes to domestic policies, but also foreign policy, including undoing the result of the Cold War. Obama is of the ilk that thinks the wrong side won the Cold War and that it was his mission to turn us into the socialist state that in his view we should have become. He thinks history has an arrow that leads to communist utopia and that his mission was to point is in the direction of that arrow and push us along it.

                1. How people ignored it is simply mystifying to me. He was very open back in 2007 and 2008 in stating that he thought that “America had lost its way the last thirty years” and that “America has been on the wrong path for over thirty years”.

                  30 years at that time of course was back to 1977 and 1978, which includes the latter part of the Carter presidency, where he approved the B-1 bomber program and started to do some rebuilding of the military, as well as confronting the Soviets over Afghanistan.

                  Thus it was clear the he not only wanted to undo the domestic policies that Reagan started back in 1981, he also wanted to undo the entirety of what we had done militarily and policy-wise in confronting the Soviets. I am sure that he was also distressed by the peace deal between Israel and Egypt. Note that it was the Muslim Brotherhood that assassinated Sadat and it was the MB who was feted with praise by Obama on a regular basis. He even facilitated the effort to put the MB into power in Egypt. Obama’s Middle-East policy showed on singular consistency; his support of those inimically hostile to Israel and Jews and who vowed to destroy it and “push the Jews into the sea”.

                  1. It would a cool story idea if someone did push the Jews into the sea and the Jews come back with awesome tech and undersea bases and end up controlling all the world’s oceans. “You should have stopped when all they wanted was Israel, you idiots!”

                    2. That would be genius. I’ve always wondered why so many SF writers quietly erase Jewry from the future. I get that modern SF is run under the assumption that all religions are just more or less attractive hokum. So it figures that modern beliefs will be replaced by some sort of generic mishmash or new pantheons. But the based on millennia of evidence, the Jews as a people will still be there.

                    3. It seems like all the (functional) Western philosophies get erased– I’ve even seen some Hollywood Buddhism type stuff, but the only place the rest show up are in caricature form on alien planets.

                      *mildly cynical, but based on how painfully ignorant most media is about obscure faiths like Judaism, Catholicism, etc*
                      Maybe those who actually know even the basics don’t want to draw attention by showing it?

                2. Even I got a clue when he started babbling about ‘making a fundament5al change’ to the fabric of America.

            2. Obama was always about “making fundamental change”

              That was the proof, to me, that Obama did not really love America. Try that on your significant other: “Honey, I love you, which is why I want to fundamentally change you.” Sorry, honey, I don’t think so.

              1. What he sought to do was even worse than fundamental “change”; he wanted a fundamental “transformation”. Remember “we are five days away from the fundamental TRANSFORMATION of America”, which he said 5 days before the 2008 election. Funny how not a single reporter asked him what he meant by that.

    3. I’ve been in a crazy place now, when I haven’t been busy. So, I’ve been turning over bits and pieces of story ideas.

      One was a variant of ‘Star Trek as intractable bureaucratic mess’, and you have me wondering if the ‘consensus uber alles’ model of the UFP is one I want to try to graft on.

        1. Noted, with sneers:

          Whoa: Nearly a Third of Democrats Believe the Election Was Stolen From Trump
          [SNIP]
          According to a Rasmussen poll conducted November 17-18, nearly half of likely voters, 47 percent, believe the election was stolen from Trump. If Joe Biden is ultimately certified as the winner, there will undoubtedly be a big fat asterisk on his presidency. This should be very concerning for Joe Biden. President George W. Bush had the 2000 election cast a dark shadow over his presidency, with many Democrats to this day refusing to acknowledge his presidency as legitimate. If Biden is confident in the legitimacy of the results as they stand now, he should be willing to let the process continue, and should publicly express his support for this.

          But, Joe Biden’s problems are not simply because many Republicans believe the election was stolen. It’s true that the poll showed a significant partisan divide on this issue: 75 percent of Republicans believe it is very likely (61 percent) or somewhat likely (14 percent) that the election was stolen from Trump. But, according to the poll, while 69 percent of Democrats say it is not at all likely (61 percent) or not very likely (8 percent) that the election was stolen from Trump, 30 percent of Democrats believe it is very likely (20 percent) or somewhat likely (10 percent) that it was.
          [END EXCERPT]

          Nothing in the reporting indicates what percentage of those Democrats thought this a wrong thing to have done.
          –

    2. Hum, so now President Trump is not only (open scare quotes) “Literally (close scare quotes)” Hitler, now he’s Jim Jones as well.

      Sounds like Yulanda Williams maybe drank at least a wee bit of the koolaid back in the day.

    3. Like the National Popular Vote? Only without a vote at all? Sounds about right for these people.

    2. And reportedly somebody official at NYPD said they have better things to do with their time than enforce Cuomo’s edict, and they trust citizens will act sensibly.

      1. That’ll last until somebody Karens on a neighbor. We’ve a neighbor who used to have a bunch of cars parked along the street every football season Sunday, having friends over for watch parties. Mildly annoying but tolerable to us. But it would be very easy for anybody bearing a grudge and desiring to exercise it to drop a dime. And we’ve one neighbor don’t care to speculate who has apparently thought it appropriate to complain to the city if anybody’s lawn isn’t up to spec, so we already know some in the neighborhood have no reservations about complaining to teacher.
        –

        1. And?

          So they call the cops. The cops ignore them. There have been many videos of Karens shrieking at cops who won’t arrest on demand.

          1. And? So they call the cops

            –
            Come on already. We can’t get police to come to an a robbery scene. “It’s here are where the forms are. Fill them out. Send them in. Get an active case number. Turn it in to your insurance.” They MIGHT show up if you hint the robbers were searching in the back pond where you had your canoe accident to see if the the silt was disturbed, at least 15 years ago that was true. Now? Probably not. An active break in? Maybe, if someone is actually showing a gun (if it is you … don’t call, or call & hang up, repeatably like you are getting cut off). Dinner? Not a a chance. No matter who the screaming Karen is. AND, I’m in Eugene. There aren’t enough city, county, or state, cops to respond to Holiday-Scape.

              1. Colorado Springs was like that in the 90s

                –
                Eugene probably was too. We didn’t have first hand knowledge until Jan 2006.

            2. If you call 9-1-1 and tell them that somebody with a gun is breaking into your house, they will send two cops in 10 or 15 minutes. If you tell them that somebody is breaking into your house and YOU have a gun, they will send 10 or 15 cops in two minutes.

              1. If you call 9-1-1 and tell them that somebody with a gun is breaking into your house, they will send two cops in 10 or 15 minutes. If you tell them that somebody is breaking into your house and YOU have a gun, they will send 10 or 15 cops in two minutes.

                –
                Sounds about right.

  20. Congrats on the IP return and everything else. I’m just hoping this isn’t due to a fear that somebody is going to either buy them or the company they work for (I keep thinking at Baen is the vanity plate/”independent” publisher of one of the bigger book companies) and they want to get IPs out before they come in and the authors can’t get them back.

    (However much that I don’t like David Gerrold these days, the fact that the War Against The Chtorr novels are stuck in this IP hell where the company that has them won’t publish the next books because they can’t make enough money to justify it-but they won’t sell the IP back to him because it is making some money…)

    Dad’s having this issue, and it happens in waves. Lot of cops have serious long-term issues that really only start to show up and get worse from their ’50s up. A lot of the moved out of California and to places where medical care beyond a clinic or paramedic is either a two hour drive to the nearest big city or medical helicopter evacuation. And, they either can’t or won’t want to move closer to the cities where they might have more access to higher-end medical care. Throw in the heavy male-style culture of police work (you don’t complain about issues of some kinds, you button your shirt and put your belt on and get out and work-there’s your fellow officers depending on you), a lot of them thought their issues weren’t bad or thought they could “push through” them.

    So, we have a wave of, it seems, every few months where more people than we care to think about die that Dad knew. Throw in the Crow Flu and the causality numbers are getting higher when each wave happens.

    I would rather not be paying as much attention to the shenanigans going on, except maybe once or twice a day. But, the Parents watch CNN, local news, daytime talk shows almost exclusively. It’s hard NOT to listen. And, the sheer level of cognitive dissidence that all of these sources have is…disturbing in the sort of way you wish you had a “I Love Me” jacket handy. The same people that were claiming (with a straight face, no less!) that Putin jacked into the Matrix to make sure that Trump won are now yelling with the same sort of conviction that there is no way whatever that there is any election fraud. That all of the protest violence was due to Proud Boys/white supremacists and not BLM/ANTIFA. That because Trump isn’t locking everybody in their house, he’s wanting to see people die from the Crow Flu. The same flu that in the start of the year, the very same people said wasn’t a problem.

    We’re now living in two parallel worlds that bump each other, painfully. And, the snap-back in either direction to a single world-line is not going to be pleasant in any way, shape, or form. Especially if Trump can win-the other world-line has invested so much in the OrangeManBad narrative and that they were going to beat him this time that losing is going to cause quite a few of them to break bad.

    Very few of them want to believe that a Trump win is the best thing to happen. A Trump loss, at best, will mean seeing the Tea Party on steroids going to Congress in 2022. A whole lot of angry, first-time people that have blood in their eyes, ropes and daggers in their hands, and absolutely no interest in working with Democrats that have called them fonts of evil for at least twelve-plus years. Especially if they have a veto-proof majority from a Biden/Harris veto.

    Worse starts with massive self-defense violence against BLM/ANTIFA, especially if the police are called upon to defend BLM/ANTIFA “protesters.” And going from there and up, quickly into the sort of violence more common with English civil wars.

    Fingers crossed.

    1. Gerrymandering and court redistricting mandates based on civil rights claims make it essentially impossible for a veto proof majority (2/3rds) to be reached in either house. One big concern is that while there are more Republican legislatures to do the next round of redistricting, Harris/Biden will control the DOJ which will sue like crazy to impose districts that help Democrats, using the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a pretext, and aside from the Democratic Party activist judges there are far too many John Roberts squishy ones on the bench as well.

      Add the use of sue and settle and UN agreements to get around Congress and Harris/Biden can do a huge amount of damage, even in just two years; and that’s if they are unable to fraud their way to a Senate majority. They get that and they will wreck the whole system and essentially end the republic.

    2. So that’s what happened to Cthorr. Well, Mr. Gerrold certainly made an asterisk of himself during some of the Sad Puppy action, but I would like to have Cthorr finished. Although the last book was darned annoying in spots…

        1. Disney needs to be shattered as a company and have all of it’s older IP enter the public domain.

          1. Why do you think they keep making live musicals of older IP. 1) it’s easy money 2) it puts something NEW with a new date so that the copyright extends further.
            They also pushed for many of the copyright changes back in the 90’s. The Mouse is seriously evil.

            1. They also were early lawfare fans. “Yeah, we know the SCOTUS said parody was protected, but we don’t see your filk as a parody. Let’s take a trip through the court system that we can make as expensive and inconvenient as possible so you can PROVE it’s a parody.”

              1. Yeah they have always been VERY touchy about copyright and similar issues. I heard a story (perhaps apocryphal?) about these kinds of issues. In the long ago DEC had a users group DECUS that met yearly at various venues. At some point in the late 70’s or early 80’s (before 1983 when I joined) there was a DECUS held in Anaheim where Disneyland lies. One of the new things was the VT125 which was a VT100 terminal that had extra video planes and so could display graphics via either Tektronix 4010 compatibility OR via DEC’s own ReGIS command set. Some clever dude (or perhaps dudette) had generated a simple picture of a rather famous rodent to be displayed as the Show site was near to Disneyland. At the set up Saturday/Sunday this was playing on ALL the vt125’s in the hall. Sometime before the show officially opened on Monday Disney had threatened DEC that they would shut down the show if this EVER was displayed. DEC complied although the ReGIS sequence certainly was well known within the halls of DEC, although getting caught with it would get you a reprimand and showing it ANYWHERE public verged on a firing offense so afraid of the Mouse were DEC’s lawyers.

    3. One good thing about Chinese-virus shutdowns, at least David Gerrold isn’t prowling the conventions for young men…

        1. Oh, hell, we’ve seen Bill Nye troll for college co-eds. It’s just as nauseating.
          This is why my kids had t-shirts that said “jailbait, touch it and die.”
          Though they said “my mom is Sarah A. Hoyt” worked better than anything else.

          2. It’s been a forever issue. I remember Isaac Asimov showing up at my alma mater for a talk. And yeah he was cozying up to the CoEds in the pre talk and after talk period. This was hard work as it was an engineering school in the early 80’s and there was a 7-1 ratio of men to women.

  21. We walked my Dad through five years of pancreas cancer treatments. He was 79 when he got it. He finally died at 84. I sat hospice with him.

    In the larger sense, everyone who reads Sarah’s work is being called up. We’re being called up as part of a larger plan that needs each individual one of us to heed the call. Like Esther, we are called “for such a time as this.” You’ll know what the next right thing is to do when you find that quiet place in yourself; you’ll just know.

    Since we are body, mind, and Spirit, take care of these things. In order. Eat well, hydrate, and rest. If your body is ailing, take care of it. Keep your mind clean with meditation or whatever tool you use; keep it energized with excellent stories and information. Many of us know what keeps our minds from chattering on overdrive; we can share that with you. My tool bag is filling rapidly (’cause it has to!) Your spirit needs love and affection. When you feel fear, hug yourself and talk to yourself: say what you’d say to a scared little kid. “Baby, it’s ok to be scared. Come here. I’ll hold you tight and won’t let you go. Nothing’s coming in here.” Sounds crazy but it works.

    If you’re an artist like I am your work is essential; you’ll go full Apostle with the baseball bat if you don’t continue to create. Share your work. Work at something new, and fun. Go chop up that tree that fell in the high winds–cleaning and organizing are balms for the spirit.

    Our purpose now is to not only find meaning in all this, but to strengthen ourselves and our resolve. When we stand, our lights will fill the room, the city, the nation. This is the fight of our lives. And we were chosen for just such a time as this.

    p.s. My temperament can sit Shiva, hospice, or anything like that with relative ease. It’s not like I’m any great shakes, I’m just built to to it. I can talk about death, dying, diabetes, all that stuff. This reminds me I need to offer the service more. It’s a kindness to many people to die with someone in the room.

  22. What’s been going on with Baen? I had always sort of liked them as a not-amazon e-book seller that hadn’t totally gone under. Have they been mistreating their authors?

      1. And they seem to want to be liked by the Big 5 (or whatever they are now). So instead of being independent/ non political as they were under Jim they seem to have started the roll left and die process. I wonder how long before they decide Col. Kratman is persona non grata.

        1. I think it is tough being an upstart in a dying industry – as innovative as Jim Baen was, he didn’t have to face the tradpub end times. If Toni Weisskopf was facing the 1990s publishing and distribution environment I’m sure she would have been able to carry everything forward and maintain the status quo, but with the tradpub apocalypse staring her, and more importantly her distributor S&S, in the face, she gets to manage things downward through the turbulence.

          1. Jim had the advantage of having been in the Trad Pub Sauna and getting out — it always helps when you know the strings they’ll attach to every single benefit they do for you.

            As for the Rigellian ‘s question about Col. K — I think the better question is how long Ringo and Correia can be tolerated to bear the Baen brand.
            –

            1. Those two sell a lot of novels just by putting their name on the cover (makes me curious how the Monster Hunter Memoirs series sold in relation to ILOH’s own MH books). Baen probably treats them nicely given the amount of money that they respectively bring in.

              Though I haven’t seen anything regarding a new Ringo novel in a while (someone did post something about a collab with him on his Facebook page recently).

              1. The latest John Ringo book was ‘Gunpowder And Embers’ with Kacey Ezell and Christopher L. Smith in January.

    1. There’s a joke in there where it’s also a Chinese ladder, but the EU blames that on the Trump administration, but I can’t get the joke to converge for me…

    2. I fell off a thirty-foot ladder yesterday.

      Wow! Looks like you didn’t even get scratched.

      I fell off the frst step

    3. Well, the coronavirus made him cough, and fumble, and fall off the ladder. It WAS the cause!

  24. And congratulations on the rights – with production and distribution becoming minimal and mostly moot, IP is THE major thing. Your stuff being yours is the best case scenario.

      1. So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that someone buys one of the books that you wrote for Baen right now (Kindle edition – and not including the Monster Hunter novel). Do you get the money? Or does Baen get the money? And if it’s the latter, is there a time at which it changes to the former?

        1. Right now, I get about 10c on the book, but honestly, I’d prefer you wait til I re-release.
          It will change when I reissue. Which means different covers (for the layman.)

  26. good news. I got ALL my IP back from Baen.

    So, pretty much Full Throttle Indie from here on out? That sounds great. And if that happened today or (especially) yesterday, what a birthday present!

    In World War II, except for radio and papers, everything came in at newsreel speed — and maybe that was a better pace for us on the Home Front. (If I had to use reason, intuition, and all together, I’d have to say this current situation is about the equivalent of the Battle of the Belgian Bulge… almost the last gasp of the Bad Guys and all their reserves. On the other hand, the Allies could’ve lost that one, too.)

    And one really good thing about your association with Baen: it’s where I first heard about According To Hoyt!

      1. A more appropriate Patton scene would be one in which they have him making his suggestiong about letting the Germans run all the way to Paris, and then cutting off the base of the Bulge, trapping them all.

        😛

    2. It actually happened end of October but we haven’t been to officeish as we used to, as it’s pretty much central Denver and so it’s getting dangerous except early morning.

      2. Sad Puppies. (1? 2?), giffy post, linked from ILOH.
        Came for the laughs, stayed for the love of liberty. 🙂 The whole people are not widgets concept, you articulate really well. That’s been a mite formative. The conversations in comments didn’t hurt either. It’s been very fun to spectate those.

      3. Like many other of life’s serious problems, it is all ultimately Kevin Anderson’s fault.

        Once upon a time, I was a young boy innocently reading the likes of Rosemary Sutecliff, Joan Aiken, the Babysitters Club, and Jean Craighead George.

        Young Jedi Knights and Junior Jedi Knights. Eventually moved on to adult Star Wars books, Star Trek books, and adult science fiction in general. Might not have if not for Anderson’s work in the EU. Star Wars got me reading Tim Zhan, Mike Stackpole, and Aaron Allston.

        Allston I followed to Baen books. Authors like Kratman, Ringo, and Drake. Weber and Spoor got me into Doc Smith, who was hugely influential in various ways.

        Started following Baen’s Bar. Then, I didn’t keep logging on after one of the software upgrades. Didn’t want to visit with folks on Fashboche. Might have also been depressed over the Obama administration. Eventually got to hanging around here and MGC.

      4. I think *maybe* I first came here via an Insty-mention(?)

        My reasons for coming back again and again are much like AmyB’s. I will add: Mrs. Hoyt’s “was-an-outsider” view of America and Americans can really help get the *thinking* going!

        Thank you, Encourager of Hoydens!

      5. The Kitteh Dragon, may she rest in peace, posted a link, on the Bar, to a political article Sarah wrote way back when she just came out of the closet. That was I believe on PJ, at the time Sarah was not writing politically on her blog yet, or rather was just starting to occasionally and the blog was mainly still writing only oriented.

  27. Congrats on the rights reversions! I look forward to being able to purchase your books where the money will actually flow in accordance with Yog’s Law.

  28. What’s getting to me are the Jewish people on my Twitter feed who recognize the antisemitism of many Democrats and STILL do the, “Trump’s just a big baby, he ought to concede gracefully and work on cementing his legacy. There is no fraud, this has all been debunked, and he’s doing real damage to our system,” thing. Very much like the left-leaning friend of one person here who dismissed all Larry Correia’s flags out of hand.

    They truly seem to dismiss the man who got TWO Mid-east peace deals and THREE Nobel Peace Prize nominations in favor of someone who boasted about having the best voter-fraud organization in the world. At best, Biden is not competent; or it was a Freudian slip that ought to give anyone pause, or he has a very bad idea of what constitutes a “joke,” or he was simply stating a fact.

    What ever happened to that whole, “appearance of impropriety,” thing? It used to get applied to Democrats at least once in a while.

      1. Fighting back against those who are wrecking the system doesn’t damage the republic. It is not fighting back that does. And the Democrats have openly proclaimed their goal of wrecking the republic as they seek to “fundamentally transform America”.

    2. I think he meant to say they had put together the greatest anti-voter fraud organization in history, but got confused, again, and the truth slipped out. We’ve certainly seen enough evidence of that over the past two weeks.

      Oh, and Trump supporters have been taking to the streets, in numbers to dwarf the Democrats’ Brownshirts.
      ———————————
      You can’t have the government take away the freedom of only the people you hate.

      1. Nah, the Dems don’t care about voter fraud. They’ve always, in my adult life, insisted it was an excuse for suppressing votes.

        I think he was trying to say that they were going to be fighting false accusations of voter-fraud, maybe it was supposed to be a big zinger about how Republicans think it’s vote fraud every time (sympathetic legal voter) votes, and he just flubbed.

  29. Congrats on taking back your rights! A good omen for our country (at least I will take it as such).
    This past month my coping mechanism has been praying the rosary every day, while walking. Prior to this month the last time I prayed the rosary was when I was a teen and had to coz my mom made us.

    1. I’m hoping it’s a good omen that this year of my life will be better and productive, yes. I mean, I got it on my birthday.
      I’m praying so much, it’s ridiculous. And I was never a regular prayer person before.
      Now, if orangecatbad the stray son ALMOST caught showed up and let us adopt him (Donny for short) it would be a really good omen.

  30. Congratulations on getting back the IP. Does that include Shifters? That was an interesting series and seemed like it needed to go further.

  31. I thought Baen was the good publishing house? Still, they’re your books and you should be able to get the rights back if your publisher isn’t using them properly.

    My coping mechanism has been sitting down and thinking up ways to cause a complete and total economic crash that will hit the cities the hardest while allowing those of us who have our heads on straight to survive and thrive.

    1. They didn’t want to continue the series. And I didn’t want to continue them while it gave them sales on the old ones so they wouldn’t release rights.
      So, you know, it was a battle of stubborn.

  32. What’s helped me through these times is doing the following:

    1. Toss out the news outlets peddling black pills and outright lies.
    2. Find a new set of independent sources that aren’t pushing you to give in.
    3. Take stock of what you have influence over and don’t worry about the stuff you can’t control. Are you on the Trump legal team? If yes, then go all out and push towards victory. If not, then don’t carry that burden on your back. You will just hurt yourself.
    4. Pray for those who can fight in the courtrooms on our behalf. They are receiving threats now from people who don’t want the truth revealed.
    5. Notice that Kamala Harris has not resigned her Senate seat. It’s like she knows she doesn’t have any place else to go.

    I take solace in one final fact that hasn’t been mentioned a lot. The ultimate classification and declassification authority at this time is Donald Trump. Legally he could declassify any government secret he wants and nothing could be done about it because that power is his. He’s also the boss of every IT worker in the government and steward of every email server that every previous administration used for their private communications.

    If he wanted to he could declassify every dirty secret of the democrats and all their cronies and post it to the Internet. And it would all be legal. Then the incoming administration could take control of a house of cards after all their enemies were just handed industrial fans.

    No matter what happens, we have already won.

    1. I’ve been watching Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Jeanine Pirro. They’re fighting, and getting the information we need out. Other people have to be watching, because they’re the most popular news shows in the world.

      1. “… they’re the most popular news shows in the world.”

        The other shows are anti-news shows.

        Right now it seems to me that there is far more evidence for 2020 vote fraud than ever there was for 2016 Russian collusion but you’d never know it from the coverage. I trust the Media Research Center is compiling the comparative tallies.
        –

  33. Congrats on the return of your IP!

    I know that has to be a huge relief! It’s one of the major bad things that publishers did as a matter of course that I found unpalatable about publishing.

  34. Byng headline: Trump Broadens His Efforts to Overturn Election Outcome

    Yahoo headline: Tensions escalate in swing stayes as Trump subverts process

    The bustards aren’t even trying to portray any impartiality, quelle surprise

    I apologize for any unfortunate imprecations on the character of certain avian species.

  36. Do not, repeat do not, read anything set in ancient decaying Rome. Exactly the same. Hope outcome is not the same…

    1. Oh, for the love…..
      ONLY if you look at it from very high up.
      Their system wasn’t the same as ours. Their tech wasn’t the same as ours. ETC ETC ETC.
      FYI dad was teaching me about Rome before I could read. Trust me, the parallels are from ignorance. Well, that and the fact the USSR tried to push hard that we were JUST like decadent Rome.

      1. That and the eastern part of the Roman Empire lasted a very long time after the fall of the Western part.

      2. But you see, there was corruption in Rome, and there is corruption here, there is only one possible result with corruption ever! Also older and wiser heads complained about the youth in Rome, which has never happened at any other point in history except now. Face it we are doomed! DOOOOOOMED!

        2. But there was no corruption in the Soviet Union and there’s none in the CCP.

          It says so, right here in the User’s Manual.
          –

            1. Are you saying you couldn’t see through them?

              It was the MSM operating the gaslight to prevent reflection.
              –

  37. The near-death experience (not really, but felt like it at the time) back in July finally cured me of compulsive (especially political) news chasing for good. Much healthier for my soul and I keep just enough ear out through y’all and a few other sources to know when something is going to affect me enough to need to look into a story. I still went through election season fearful, and I’m not sanguine about what comes next, but without taking that step back I’d have gone all the way to paralyzed.

    I’ve thrown myself into the new job for now, which helps despite the crazy pace, as it keeps me from having time to brood, and I get to go home most days knowing that at least *some* of my patients’ lives are better for what I’ve done that day. (OTOH, it means my already sporadic comments are almost non-existent, no great loss 🙂 ) Since my illness, I’ve had this very strong sense that my current calling is to keep a light burning in my little corner of the world, no matter what the cost or what the rest of the world is doing.

    The self care part is huge. I’m good on the exercise bit, and I at least lie down to sleep on a schedule, whether sleep cooperates or not, but harder to avoid digging into the bad habits that are simultaneously a comfort and a danger. Those of us whom He made caregivers have to stop and be kind to ourselves as well and that’s contrary to the personality type I think. Which makes it extra important to carve out the space.

    Sorry, rambling. On top of everything else, both my parents and my sis are all into their own Wu-Flu bouts and while my head knows that statistically they’ll be no worse off than if they’d picked up this year’s strain of flu, I am still going to worry until they are through the most likely crisis days (Sunday I will be able to take a breath, I think).

    Sarah, congrats on getting those rights back! It’s good to own and control your creations again.

    1. It’s good to hear from you. Your experience has been a guide for me, and I ‘ ve passed it on where needed.

      1. It’s good to hear it. I just got really tired of all the doomsaying. I’m doing great now, none of the lingering issues that the press would tell you I’m supposed to be having. I’m just really busy right now so online a lot less than I used to be. I do read everything that’s posted, but rarely have time to engage.

  38. “It’s time to work as hard as you can building under over and around. -Just in case it all falls.”
    And buy rice. And Beans. those two together are a complete amino protein profile that will sustain you pretty much indefinitely, with a few oils thrown in (Bacon anybody?)
    Or, If you are sufficiently paranoid by now, you can use this:
    https://foodstoragemadeeasy.net/2009/03/09/long-term-food-storage-calculator/
    It is amazing how much food it takes. Fam of four for three months would consume 50lbs of rice and 30 lbs of beans, and that’s just one thing, you still need a buttload of other stuff.

      1. Though they do say that fasting is good for diabetes, and that might be easy to find 🙂 It’s harder to come up with long term food storage with diabetes…and a hatred for canned vegetables. Jerky and pickles, maybe…

      2. This. Even without the metabolic syndrome risk, my reactions to the milk-like protein in legumes make this plan for survival… unworkable. If it comes to a SHTF scenario, I’m going to have to rely on fish, most likely. Fresh or otherwise.

        1. Acorn flour is at Korean grocery stores. Bunch of other weird stuff, like potato starch. Also, you can make noodles out of starch – the thin glass kind, but noodles. A lot of the Korean grocery store ones also use corn, but you can look for sweet potato, green bean, konjac, etc.

  39. Governor Hypocrite here in California has declared a curfew. Starts this weekend. 10pm to 5am. That won’t impact most people since everything’s closed anyway. But it’ll hit house parties. And I’m wondering if he’s planning to see whether he can expand it for holidays…

    1. Of course he will. So will the other Dem governors. They intend these lockdowns to last through January and beyond. This is only the beginning.

      Needless to say it will be selectively enforced, so that those Dems like will not have the rules enforced against them, and those who don’t will be mercilessly persecuted. It will be used to target people for retribution and “re-education.’

      Think this is far-fetched. They are already talking about the need to “deprogramming”, i.e. to “re-educate” Trump supporters . We KNOW what leftists mean by this.

      https://lidblog.com/deprogramming-trump-supporters/

  40. “normally I view self-care as “being an utter sissy.””

    That’s what Dresden said to Butters’ warning about the effects of the Winter Mantle. Just because you don’t feel anything doesn’t mean there’s no damage occurring.

    We’re in a marathon, not a sprint. Yu can’t run them the same way. Ignoring incipient weaknesses won’t get us across the finish line, neither will declaring we’ve solved “most” of our problems and quitting. Just as the Augean Stables say – there’s a good name for a political blog, free for the taking!) didn’t get full in a day our elections didn’t get crappy in a single year. Unfortunately, diverting a river to wash the [horse biscuits] out won’t work because there are no rivers sufficient for the task. We can take steps – we’ve already discussed many – to restore legitimacy to our elections but they need to be implemented and they need to maintained.

    Protecting our election process is more important than just about any other task, because if we do not do that then none of our rights is safe, and none of our arguments about what those rights are mean a thing. Happily, the arguments for defending the franchise are in many ways the same arguments for our rights.

    More important than Trumps reelection or even a 2024 return to power will be his dedication to cleaning the stable stalls our voting booths have become.
    –

    1. There’s only one river large enough, but it only works for a time and costs too much for most folks.

      1. I have noticed subtle shift in the propaganda. For decades the mantra has been, “There is no election fraud!” but now that has morphed into, “There is no *widespread* election fraud.”

        1. They HAD to go “No Widespread”, when the last several years have been full of fraud convictions, and lo, it be 99% leftoid (and I think the “rightwing” one I recall was dropped)
          A bit tell here is the “flipped” votes. If they were based in reality (stop that look, stop it!) they’d be concerned that maybe their pollsters WERE right, and BIden was WAY out ahead, and well, hand check with a representatives of the Republicans, Dems, Libertarians/greens/taxpayer’s, etc all doing a visual count of the ballots, would give them the devastating Blue Wave™ they claim. All they’d have to do was do an honest hand count and show the rest of us that no really across the board they did win all those House and Senate seats as well as Biden getting 90 million of the votes, if only Dominion et al hadn’t flipped votes at random.

          1. They’re trying to say as little as possible because they KNOW what we’ll find. Fraud as far as the eye can see.

            I watched that hour-long analysis of the Dominion voting machines, and one thing jumped out at me. Votes are stored as floating-point numbers. Why?

            Votes are Boolean values. You voted for each candidate, or ballot proposition, or you did not. Yes, or No. The total number of votes is an integer; there is no such thing as half a vote, or 7% of a vote.

            No competent, honest programmer would process Boolean and integer values as floats. Doing that would get you a big fat F in Programming 101.

            They also found a hidden ‘weighting’ feature buried in the ‘SmartMatic’ software used in Dominion and most other voting machines. Coefficients that can be set for each candidate, so that a vote for Candidate A will register as 1.0 vote, a vote for Candidate B will register as 1.2 vote, and a vote for Candidate T will register as 0.8 vote. They all round to 1 when displayed individually, but when added up the totals are 20% off. If Candidate B got 100,000 votes, and T got 130,000, the totals will show 120,000 for B and 104,000 for T. B ‘wins’!! — and 6,000 votes mysteriously vanished. Sound a lot like what’s going on with the recounts?

            That’s why they had to shut down the machines in the middle of the night. The numbers were skewed because they were shorting Trump more votes than they were giving to Biden, and Biden was STILL LOSING! They based their coefficients on the polls, which turned out to be very wrong. They had to throw in hundreds of thousands more votes to fudge the totals.

            The software was originally written to fix elections for Hugo Chavez. Now it’s widely used. How did that happen?
            ———————————
            There’s statistically improbable, and then there’s ‘violates the fundamental prinicples of the universe’ improbable.

            1. Recounts are also utterly meaningless if the recounts include the same fraudulent ballots that were included in the original count. A recount without checking the voter rolls, the signatures, etc., are simply kabuki theater to give the illusion of a genuine investigation of the election fraud.

              1. and some of the counted votes are not actual ballots.
                and who watched the counters counting the votes? Most places NOT anyone trustworthy, because they were kept away from even seeing the ballots let alone who the ballot was cast for.
                Kabuki is too kind at this point.

          2. “I think the “rightwing” one I recall was dropped”

            No. That would be North Carolina’s ninth district, I (am too diffident to check, so I) believe. The election was thrown out and re-run. The “winning” candidate dropped out after it was discovered that he had hired a (formerly) Democratic “campaign consultant” who attempted to harvest ballots for his Republican employer as he had previously done for numerous Democrat candidates.
            –

              1. There’s a case going on here in TX (involving a recording made by Project Veritas) showing a woman who, while volunteering for a Republican candidate, was actually a Democrat activist of long standing concocting fake votes for Biden and several other candidates. When she got busted, there was an attempt to paint this as “Republican” vote fraud that died quickly in the face of the video. 7000 votes were involved.

                Republicans need better background checks on volunteers.

  42. Sorry to repeat myself but the more and more each day the American Left resembles Cersei Lannister, which is good because she was inherently self-destructive, but bad because her stupidity destroyed everyone else around her.

  43. Congratulations on getting ALL your IP back from Baen! I for one am looking forward to more Shifter books. 😉

  46. There’s metaphors here … sigh.

    Not just COVID: Nursing home neglect deaths surge in shadows
    By Associated Press
    [SNIP]
    As more than 90,000 of the nation’s long-term care residents have died in a pandemic that has pushed staffs to the limit, advocates for the elderly say a tandem wave of death separate from the virus has quietly claimed tens of thousands more, often because overburdened workers haven’t been able to give them the care they need.

    Nursing home watchdogs are being flooded with reports of residents kept in soiled diapers so long their skin peeled off, left with bedsores that cut to the bone and allowed to wither away in starvation or thirst.

    Beyond that, interviews with dozens of people across the country reveal swelling numbers of less clear-cut deaths that doctors believe have been fueled not by neglect but by a mental state plunged into despair by prolonged isolation ̶ listed on some death certificates as “failure to thrive.”

    A nursing home expert who analyzed data from the country’s 15,000 facilities for The Associated Press estimates that for every two COVID-19 victims in long-term care, there is another who died prematurely of other causes. Those “excess deaths” beyond the normal rate of fatalities in nursing homes could total more than 40,000 since March.

    These extra deaths are roughly 15 percent more than you’d expect at nursing homes already facing tens of thousands of deaths each month in a normal year.

    [SNIP]

    Chronic understaffing at nursing homes has been one of the hallmarks of the pandemic, with a few homes even forced to evacuate because so many workers either tested positive or called in sick. In 20 states where virus cases are now surging, federal data shows nearly 1 in 4 nursing homes report staff shortages.

    [SNIP]

    In the end, 59 residents at Gurwin would be killed by the virus, but Best’s mother never contracted it. She died instead of dehydration, her daughter said, because the staff was so consumed with caring for COVID-19 patients that no one made sure she was drinking.

    “My mom went from being unbelievably cared for to dead in three weeks,” said Best, who provided medical documents noting her mother’s dehydration. “They were in over their head more than anyone could imagine.”

    [SNIP]

    The nursing home trade group American Health Care Association disputed that there has been a widespread inability of staff to care for residents and dismissed estimates of tens-of-thousands of non-COVID-19 deaths as “speculation.”

    [END EXCERPT]

    “In over their head more than anyone could imagine.”
    –

    2. I have no doubt that those deaths are counted as CCP VIrus deaths so they can avoid accountability for neglect.

      1. I have no doubt that those deaths are counted as CCP VIrus deaths so they can avoid accountability for neglect.

        –
        BIL’s mother passed away late September/early October. The PTB suggested C19 be listed on her death certificate. He & his sister both said “NO, absolutely not!” loudly.

        The PTB were insisting that delay, due to CV19, in moving her to the more intensive memory care facility was a factor in her death. The siblings disagree … to a point. It may have been a difference of weeks or days. Not like they were treating other medical problems anyway.

    1. The wife snitching on her husband to the police because he was walking the dog was the worst part of that. That poor man and that poor dog.

    2. “… they can get away with this is because they disarmed the populace first.”

      … they can get away with this is because they believe they’ve disarmed the populace first.

      Fixed it for you.
      –

  48. And the Evil Space Princess ™ is back to lead the hordes! This horde needs to study for a test on Sunday. Trying not to watch too much news because watched lawyers never boil.

    1. “Trying not to watch too much news …”

      That shouldn’t be much challenge — there’s scarcely any news being permitted, although there’s plenty of flack being spewed.
      –

  51. Whomever the Bob was here a few days back lamenting that his friend was smarter than him and that he disagreed with her, after having gone round and round with her in the three posts over at Larry’s mentioned here, I would just like to say to that Bob (I think it was a Bob) – there’s no way she’s smarter than you.

    She sauntered into those threads overconfident as bloody hell, and slowly began to change her tone when running up against resistance to which she is CLEARLY unaccustomed. The quality of her arguments didn’t improve at all, but she cleaned her act up real quick. Her arguments all follow the standard lefty tropes and formulas.

    The only competence she even remotely displayed is the ability to present herself as smart without actually demonstrating it. Don’t be fooled.

  52. Oh, shit. Now I’m worried about my own mental well-being. I’m getting this enormous feeling of déjà vu. Didn’t this post already appear earlier in the year? Mrs. Hoyt? Anyone? What’s happening? Help! O_O

    Oh, well. If I’m slipping ineluctably into a shadowland of reality, so be it. This is still a good post even if it leaped into today from an unknown yesterday. I’m not giving up on Mr. Trump, but I simply can’t shake the feeling that the Deep State is simply too powerful and that the fraud mechanisms are too advanced to be defeated in the courts. A darkling cloak of resignation is settling over my hopes for the overwhelming electoral victory that now seems to have been murdered by a thousand small cuts.

    We’re yet to meet the savage strikes of Doom, the end of days, but it does mean in effect that only true memetic networks will permit success. And my life has been a shabby tapestry of personal failures. Is it possible still to bring to fruition the decades of thought on business models, technical frameworks, and human psychology that went into constructing a radical replacement for much of the existing Web, such as search engines like Google and walled-garden social media companies like Facebook and Twitter? I do not know.

    But it’s still a hope for the future, an anodyne technical development with immense implications that don’t immediately leap into the forefront of political and cultural warfare. I have still that myself even if y’all might not know about what the hell I’m talking. o_o

    In any case, please do ignore the mumbling of an arguably overcomplex mind. Humans have always had a grimly amusing ability to make life complicated for themselves. That’s the quiddity of humanity. -_-

    (And yes, I used that word on purpose to make you look it up. Might as well have a spot of humor, ja?)

    1. “I simply can’t shake the feeling that the Deep State is simply too powerful and that the fraud mechanisms are too advanced to be defeated in the courts.”

      I too have the feeling that this will only be solved through the fourth box but if we have to resort to violence to defend our rights so be it, there are far worse things. Still, it’s not an easy thought, two nights after the election when my anxiety was so high and my stomach roiled so badly I couldn’t get anything down other than chamomile tea and had to take melatonin to sleep I had an intense vivid dream about a mob of bloodthirsty SJWs on a university campus out for the scalp of anybody who even thought about supporting Trump in turn being crushed and killed by some heavily armed Proud Boys/boogaloo types who had finally had enough. I woke up with my heart acting like it was a hummingbird was trapped in my chest and feeling that this was *more* than just a dream and shortly afterwords started prepping. I admit fully I could be total wrong (in fact I HOPE so) but I simply don’t know.

      1. The last time I used melatonin to help with poor sleep, some years back, it resulted in vivid, disturbing dreams that would have inspired Hieronymus Bosch to add a special visual frisson to his artistic interpretations of Hell. Ugh.

        1. Never had that symptom with melatonin before, but I had never combined it with such extreme anxiety either, that was the only time that awful week that happened though, at least that I could remember.

        2. I’ve read that it can cause weird dreams when taken with alcohol.
          I have. Can’t say I’ve noticed.
          Then, Reality is weird to me by default, so…

    1. Even if it sinks in, if it isn’t addressed by the Georgia runoff, Democrats will fraud their way to both Georgia Senate seats, declare the wins a “mandate” and then aggressively pursue their “fundamental transformation of America” policy. They will pack the Court, add Democratic Party Senate seats and make elections so manipulable by fraud that elections will be as meaningful as those held in the Soviet Union. Indeed, they will assert CCP style control of every aspect of our lives and will actively punish any who disagree, not only then, but all who have disagreed in the past

      https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/11/20/a_realistic_primer_on_georgias_senate_runoffs_144695.html

      1. Yes, if the enemy wins a major victory they will have won a major victory. Tautologies work that way.

        Not sure what that has to do with what I posted.

        1. It is that a broad awareness of the existence of vote fraud and that the election was stolen won’t mean a thing if that awareness is not translated into stopping the stealing of the Georgia Senate seats through vote fraud.

          1. I think you didn’t bother to read what I linked.

            It isn’t an awareness of voter fraud that is dawning. It is an awareness that we are by far in the majority in this country.

            1. Being “by far the majority” doesn’t stop a determined minority from stomping on that majority for decades; see South Africa, the Bolshevik Revolution, Nazi Germany, and so on.

                1. I disagree. No need to add the obnoxious “Do I have to spell this out in small words” which presumes that I disagree with you because of ignorance or inability to get your point. I do, I just disagree with it.

                  1. I’m sorry…

                    The last couple weeks has consisted of endless people refusing to see simple facts right in front of their faces.

                    “wHy dOn’T thEy ShOW eVidEnce!?!?!?” being the prototypical statement.

      1. Yes…. part of why I posted it.

        This becoming common knowledge is both a vindication, and makes the information useful because people can act on it.

    1. Also, note how Democrats spent four years demanding that the military disobey Trump because “his orders were illegal” while they are now having a fit over sheriff’s and other law enforcement officials refusing to enforce their unconstitutional lockdowns and private gathering limitations?

      It may not be the veterans who start the Starship Troopers ball going, it might be LEOs.

  55. Good to hear the good news regarding IP and not needing to aim double-barreled lawyers or such at Baen to get things set right. Naturally, I am looking forward to more Shifters (what, me biased? Like a class-C amp!). I suppose I ought to start re-reading such and compiling a bit of info about them (will not be fast.. this time it not that ox slow, but ox up to his withers in Preparedness Issues.

    (FWIW: Local store HAD been up to ears in tp & pt, but now is limiting to one paper-product/disinfectant “per family” again. Gov. Vidkun Quisling {‘Walz} is ‘locking down’ again – no dine-in, etc. for ‘four’ {riiiight} weeks. And… it’s like a Winter Storm is coming…. every day.)

  56. One question, Sarah: exactly how do you propose to “change the culture” under absolute censorship? I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not actively trying to dishearten the patriots to keep them from fighting back. However, I will say that you do not really know America.

    You came from a borderline third world nation and were attracted to the IDEA of America, not the actual country that exists. From what I gather, most of your acquaintances are from the sf book world, which honestly is extremely eccentric and unrepresentative of the people of the USA.

    I have a nasty suspicion that you, deep inside, believe that normies are unreliable allies because they are so crass and uncultured. Why, some of them have been known to have sex outside of marriage and to abuse alcohol and drugs!!!! Obviously they are just waiting to join the party in which the USSA is founded. For you, libertarian sf fans are far better people than normies, who might—MIGHT–be a little better than leftist sf fans (at least until said leftists make a token agreement with you on some issue of the day).

    In fact, the normies are the backbone of the patriots in this nation. The United States may have started as an idea, but it is now a NATION. Millions of people have shared memories and traditions. And you have not, from what I can tell, made a real effort to LEARN those.

    It isn’t just immigrants who make this mistake, either. I would argue that Newt Gingrich was a disastrous Speaker of the House, largely because he, too, came from the sf fan community. He had the pseudolibertarian idea that Computers Will Free the Human Race! And who cares if we gut the Second Amendment (refusing to repeal the AWB, passing the Lautenberg Amendment), because the Singularity is just around the corner!!! And even if it isn’t, you can go make a fortune like Nicholas can Rijn and get the girls while you’re at it! (Yes, I am a recovering sf fan myself).

    Yet at the end of the day, this was all a fantasy. Gingrich fell from power because his grandiose visions did not appeal to his base. Yes, I know, the Left did a hit job on him–when don’t they?–but his vision did not appeal to the GOP base either. They didn’t want to use computers to bring about the Singularity; they just wanted to earn enough money to buy one.

    The unreality of Gingrich’s vision was further laid bare in the 2000 election. The “I’m cutting edge because I am a graphic designer” crowd went overwhelmingly for Gore. The Bush vote came from blue collar types who were mad as hell about the Clinton administration’s war on gun owners.

    There is a whole world out there of which you know little. There are a lot of really tough, patriotic, and courageous people out there who do not fit the National Review image of “you must be a potential Communist if you don’t wear a bowtie.”

    Instead of only having friends from LibertyCon, why don’t you go to a biker bar? Being a middle aged woman, you are not likely to be harmed physically, although you may become aware of minor victimless crimes being committed in the vicinity. Talk to people. Find out what those normies are like. Spoiler alert: most of them probably make you seem like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

    Because at the end of the day, this nation is not in the intensive care unit dying of cancer. It’s being dragged into a back alley and being MURDERED.

    And that’s not just figurative either. When Jennifwhore Rubin says “We have a list” and “the people have spoken” she is quite deliberately saying “Trump supporters are not people. Take this list and kill them.” The Left fully intends GENOCIDE. This is not about “our freedoms.” This is not about doubling the cost of a fishing license. It’s about infinitely powerful, infinitely evil literal bogeymen getting bored with their luxurious lifestyle and deciding to add a little kick to their sex lives by committing genocide against us.

    Put it this way: don’t think it as America dying. Think of it as YOUR SONS being murdered. Because that is what they intend. I don’t think you would willingly let them have your children, but you might put up a hopeless fight as a gesture. After which the Democowards would mock your deaths, making it useless even as propaganda.

    You need to get away from the sf world and start making friends among people who aren’t useless in a fight.

    Or you can hope the Singularity comes first. It’s your choice.

    2. Shorter Ken: “Argle Bargle Rar.”

      The IDEAL of America is where WE’RE headed; you can slink back under your bridge.

    3. under absolute censorship

      Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt! Fail. Either impossible or so loose a definition that it is meaningless.

      With a howler that early you now need to explain why I shouldn’t drop this entire wall of text in the drivel bin.

    4. I have no clue where all this SHIT came from. Seriously. Are you a leftist who attributes to himself mind-reading skills.
      I could dismantle your bullshit point by point, but I have paying work to do, so I’ll just say: Sod off Swampy.

        1. No. he’s from the stupid site. Everything is my fault because I wasn’t born here…… So of course I don’t get America or Americans. Because unless you’re born on the magic soil, you can’t understand the people. REEEEEE. He was the genius who thought because I typo, I’m thinking in Portuguese and translating….

            1. Because you presumed to read my mind?
              Because you decided I’m an agent of despair when I’m not?
              Because it wold take forever to dispel stupid notions you pulled from your ass?
              Or perhaps because you presume I don’t know the country where I’ve lived for most of my life? Or that I identify with a mythical ruling class? Or?
              Fuck off, twinkie.
              And yes, it was you. I should have banned you before.

            3. I’m curious as to why the hostility, though.

              *walk in*

              *slap people across face, accuse them of things only vaguely related to them*

              “Why so hostile?!?

              ***********

              Last time you got slapped for being rude, you were wondering why folks were “hostile,” too.

              1. Well, he’s right I grew up in another country (though for the 60s and 70s in Europe Portugal was about like the Appalachia here, or the poorer areas of Britain, so solidly SECOND world ;)) The rest he seems to have pulled from his ass.

            4. “I’m curious as to why the hostility, though.”

              Funny, that was my thought as I was reading your screed. (Yes, I did read the entire thing, and no, you are not entirely wrong about *everything*)

            5. So, Kenny, are you really too stupid to see that your comment might have merited a negative response?

              Long, apparently no content worth the length, fairly hopeless, /and/ demanding action on the part of the reader? When people are stressed, and drive by trolls are coming out of the woodwork?

              “Go fuck yourself” may well be kinder and more gentle than you really deserve. That isn’t me putting words in the mouths of other posters here, that was my initial reaction. Rephrasing it more tactfully was more effort than your comment was worth, so I held my tongue.

              1. It is a fact of life that some people simply need to be told to FOAD.

                I’m almost at the point of telling anyone still saying bUt wHErs tHE evIdeNcE!? to do so.

                1. If you can forgive me for being so lazy as to ask you instead of investigating properly — I plead week-old baby and paperwork, hence a degree of brainfog — have you seen the claim that several locations in Minnesota got listed in lawsuits about Michigan, and do you know if there is an actual problem there or just somebody talking through his hat?

                  1. I’ve seen some chatter, but I don’t know. It has reached the point where I can’t keep up with everything anymore.

                    The way I’d bet is “fake news”.

                  2. Sadly …

                    DO TRUMP’S LAWYERS KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING?
                    … I got an email today from a Minnesota resident, a conservative and a smart guy who is the CEO of a company, and later talked with him on the phone. He has taken the trouble to read the filings that have been made so far by Trump’s lawyers. He directed my attention to an affidavit signed by Russell Ramsland, a Texas resident who is an expert on cyber security. The affidavit was filed by Lin Wood in the Georgia lawsuit, but it relates entirely to Michigan, and it is a safe bet that it has been filed in one or more cases in that state as well.

                    The Ramsland affidavit is part of the Trump team’s case relating to Dominion. In paragraph 9, the affidavit states:

                    Based on the significant anomalies and red flags that we have observed, we believe there is a significant probability that election results have been manipulated within the Dominion/Premier system in Michigan.

                    What are those anomalies and red flags? Paragraph 11 explains:

                    Another statistical red flag is evident is evident in the number of votes cast compared to the number of voters in some precincts. A preliminary analysis using data obtained from the Michigan Secretary of State pinpoints a statistical anomaly so far outside of every statistical norm as to be virtually impossible. … There were at least 19 precincts where the Presidential Votes Cast compared to the Estimated Voters based on Reported Statistics exceeded 100%.

                    [SNIP]
                    Here’s the problem: the townships and precincts listed in paragraphs 11 and 17 of the affidavit are not in Michigan. They are in Minnesota. Monticello, Albertville, Lake Lillian, Houston, Brownsville, Runeberg, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, Kandiyohi–these are all towns in Minnesota. I haven’t checked them all, but I checked a lot of them, and all locations listed in paragraphs 11 and 17 that I looked up are in Minnesota, with no corresponding township in Michigan. This would have been obvious to someone from this state, but Mr. Ramsland is a Texan and the lawyers are probably not natives of either Minnesota or Michigan.

                    Evidently a researcher, either Mr. Ramsland or someone working for him, was working with a database and confused “MI” for Minnesota with “MI” for Michigan. (The postal code for Minnesota is MN, while Michigan is MI, so one can see how this might happen.) So the affidavit, which addresses “anomalies and red flags” in Michigan, is based largely, and mistakenly, on data from Minnesota.

                    This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn. Trump’s lawyers are fighting an uphill battle, to put it mildly, and confusing Michigan with Minnesota will at best make the hill steeper. Credibility once lost is hard to regain. Possibly Trump’s lawyers have already discovered this appalling error, and have undertaken to correct it. But the Ramsland Affidavit was filed in Georgia just yesterday.
                    [END EXCERPT]
                    –

                    2. Yeah, there’s no point in reading Paul Mirengoff. Seems like some of them can’t stand the uncertainty and are climbing on the Biden train just to avoid the quicksand. To mix a few metaphors…

                    4. True. Sometimes I would go straight to the comments and just enjoy the complaints. But now I refuse to even click on his appeasing nevertrumper bullshit.

            6. Gee, Ken, it’s probably because when you come in a place and show your arse a few folk are just naturally want to kick it.

              Me, I just reckon it is just a case of putting your best face forward. Being an innately polite wallaby I am inclined to ignore it, just as I ignore the noxious emissions you generated.
              –

          2. Well … there are plenty of people born here who do not “get” Americans, and I advise against going to, say, Miami, and telling folks that because they are Cuban-born they don’t “get” America.

            For that matter de Tocqueville, that French git, did a pretty good job of understanding us. So did Kurt Weill, but he had help.

            –

    5. One question, Sarah: exactly how do you propose to “change the culture” under absolute censorship?

      What “absolute censorship”?

      Censorship, yes, it’s obnoxious.

      It’s not absolute, because we’re here.

      Even when they had all the media, it wasn’t absolute. Hell, Range Magazine is a quarter of a century old, and it’s been making a living off of yelling the truth in the wilderness. (Well, flyover, anyways.)

      Quit sounding like the idiot “we live in a dictatorship” twerps during W’s time in office, sitting in the coffee shop and yowling about being suppressed.

      They’ve got some censorship.

      They suck at it. Yeah, it’s obnoxious, but your “one question” is “assuming they become all powerful, call competent and generally win, how can we possibly win?”

      False basis.

      1. Yeah, it’s obnoxious, but your “one question” is “assuming they become all powerful, call competent and generally win, how can we possibly win?”

        It is the same as “How do you lolbertards deal with the Infinitely Rich Man?”.

        Starting a question by defining any possible answer out of existence is boring.

  57. From a church newsletter/blog I read, and germane to the topic, as well as worth a chin-up:

    Os Guinness tells the story of a young Massachusetts scholar in 1843 doing research on the American Revolutionary War and the events which led to it. In his research he interviewed ninety-one year old Captain Levi Preston who had fought at Lexington and Concord, April 19, 1775. The young scholar wanted to know why Captain Preston had fought. What drove him to it? The scholar asked if the “intolerable oppressions” of the British were the catalyst. Preston replied, “Oppressions? I didn’t feel them.” Then Preston was asked, “Weren’t you oppressed by the Stamp Act?” “I never saw one of those stamps. I certainly never paid a penny for them.” The scholar asked, “Okay, but what about the tea tax?” Preston, “Tea Tax? I never drank a drop of the stuff. The boys threw it all overboard.” “Well then,” said the scholar, “I suppose you had been reading Harrington, or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty.” “Never heard of them,” said Preston. “We read only the Bible, the Catechisms, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.” The young scholar finally asked, “Well then, what was the matter? And what did you mean in going to the fight?” Preston replied, “Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: We always had been free, and we meant to be free always. They didn’t mean we should.”

    Thought this crowd might appreciate the reminder of what America has been, and may (God willing) one day be again in some fashion.

    1. Fascinating! Seriously, I can’t help but think that quite a few individuals even today feel like that as well. The question is whether enough Americans share that attitude to make a difference in the eventual, inevitable violent civil war between cultural Marxists and those who oppose them enough to take up arms.

  58. Pingback: Screaming at the sky versus sitting by the sickbed « Samizdata

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