*I first heard of King Harv coffees when Professor Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection gloated (not to strong a word) over having been sent one of their coffees as a gift, during a difficult time in his blogging/professional life.
I was briefly and wildly jealous. Wished I was a big time blogger. Cruised over to their site and decided that really, the family needed stuff, so I shouldn’t spend it on coffee.
Imagine my surprise when, towards the end of annus horriblis 2020 I was clearing my spam filter and there was an email from King Harv coffees. I wouldn’t have opened it — money wasn’t any better — but the title was “Are you Sarah Hoyt, the writer?” Well…. I am. So, the message offered to send me Mars coffee. Not being UTTERLY stupid, only mildly so, I said yes and sent an email. The coffee arrived witht he funniest insert I’ve ever seen. Completely geeky, too. With stuff about their coffee plantation on Mars. I mean, Heinlein would have loved these people. So I hoarded the coffee till I could see son-the-coffee-fiend with whom I shared it on Christmas. My review is here.
Well, in conjunction with the flight of Ingenuity, I was wondering how King Harv was doing and how they were hiding their coffee plantations. Luckily they sent me this guest post which answers all our questions. Yes, I know it’s an extended commercial, but the product is good and the commercial is hilarious. Remember those commercials for superbowl that we used to watch with jaw dropped because they were so much fun? This is like that And this fits neatly under my “support the good” which goes with the “not one red cent” campaign. Hey, anyone WILLINGLY associating with our lot is not only on our side, they’re also brave as heck.)* -SAH

Forbidden Coffee

The True Tale of King Harv’s Mars coffee plantation

(A guest post by King Harv Coffees)

Part 1:  The Beginning

There are many things mankind is not meant to know about.  One of these is the fact that Mars has been settled since 2002, specifically for the purposes of coffee cultivation.  King Harv’s Imperial Coffees Mars to be precise.  

It started long, long ago.  I am the son of King Harv, well known coffee tycoon and millionaire philanthropist. I was just a recent Chemistry graduate and Software engineer who had been tinkering for years on the topic of space travel.  Specifically with the use of the metal wires steaming out of the Army’s Hellfire missiles being used not for destruction, but as a dynamic bridge to the planets.  Now each missile has a wire capacity of about 2.5 miles.  The closest Mars would appear would be 34.8 million miles.  Hence with only 13.92 million Hellfire missiles, with the wires spliced together, they could make it to Mars.  Now, removing the explosive shaped charge of each missile, and extending the wire length accordingly, I figured we could get by with only 9 million Hellfire’s.  The next step was where to acquire or manufacture them. Or something similar to them.

This turned out to be much easier than expected.  By substituting strong fishing line for the wires, and utilizing solar wind for additional acceleration, we were able to construct a single shot fire and forget missile for under $87.00.  (We utilized used fishing line).  The budget did not allow for any testing, but we were confident.  We just aimed that sucker at Mars one night and “boom”, you could see the giant spool of line flying out faster than you can eat a bag of habanero Doritos.  Yeah, that fast.  So anyway, it turned out we “forgot” that little bit about celestial mechanics and planetary movement, so we were bound to miss mars by a by millions of miles… had we not fortunately got tagged by one of them there pieces of space junk from the top secret Mercury Blue missions of the 1960s.  Anyway, it hit us just right and targeted our little rocket straight to Mars, where it landed with a dignified womf and implanted its space anchor.  And the American flag.

So there we were, with a strong fishing line connecting Mars to Earth, and just King Harv’s Imperial Coffees knowing about it.  (it was a transparent fishing line.)  Well, our plan was for us to get some decent Harbor Freight line grippers and foot by foot pull up the used Russian submarine we had purchased and converted to a space habitat.  Seemed like a straight forward idea at first, but you always know something’ll come up, and it did.  Our Russian friends were all for us using their old submarine, and at a killer price, but at the last minute demanded a “nuclear royalty” due to us using one of their famously reliable nuclear power plants in the sub/ship.  Now by this time I was about broke, but realized that Russians like a few things in the world besides Rubles and Vodka. A dang good cup of coffee.  So we settled on giving them a perpetual 5% of our Martian coffee harvest.  Fair enough.  It is the red planet after all.

Now, thinking ahead, we knew that pulling that old sub foot by foot might take quite some time, and we figured out a way to speed things up.  Once we got the sub past the moon and into interplanetary space, we fired the aft two nuclear torpedos that for some reason were still left in the sub. (Come to think about that, there was a little alarm clock attached to them as well. Hrmmm…)  Anyway basic Newtownian physics, when force goes out one way, it pushes back the other, so our ship landed on mars in a matter of days.  We do apologize for for the destruction of the Hubble Space Telescope from the torpedo explosions.  No pain, no gain I guess.

One of the advantages of our nuclear submarine based habitat was that it could produce it’s own oxygen and purify its own water, provided we had a source of water.  And we did have a source, drilling down to a hidden lake 2 miles beneath the surface of mars.  After a few weeks, King Harv’s Mars Base 6 was fully operational.  Planting was only a few days away.

Now there were still a few little stumbling blocks to overcome.  The freezing temperatures, lack of nutrients in the soil, and our adamant refusal to use pesticides.  As with our other hurdles, these were overcome by sound thinking and realistic risks.  To overcome the issue of the cold, we chose coffee plants rated to plant hardiness Zone 2.  Not easy to come by, let me tell you.  Now for the radiation and all that other stuff.  Well, we figured that we can just ignore that for now.  Might as well leave some chores for tomorrow.  The last concern were all these primitive probes Earth was launching to Mars, clearly violating our territory.  But we are a friendly sort, and have not, and I repeat again not, had anything to do with the multiple failure of Mars probes from other nations. For the most part.  Now we all know they doctor the photos they take.  And for a while we just put up with that.  But with the landing of the Perseverance rover and launch of the Ingenuity Mars Copter, we felt it was time for the public to see the unedited photos.  The following photos are real.  Note that, contrary to public report, the Ingenuity Copter has already launched. Multiple times.  Doing King Harv’s Coffee work.  We know they will edit all this out, but for now, until they censor them, here are the true photos.

With regards to all,

David, #2 Son of King Harv, and founder of King Harv’s Imperial Coffees, Chemistry and Computer Guy,

Father of Zachariah, who is the master roaster, Filmmaker

My Uncle Steve, the Vice King, retired salesman, US Army Vet

And of course my Dad, King Harv. retired Teacher, Administrator, Sax Player. US Army Vet

www.kingharv.com

King Harv’s Imperial Coffees

1428 E. Semoran Blvd. #107

 Apopka, FL 32703

 www.kingharv.com

I was a pre-teen in the seventies, which means that long before I hit the jaded age of fourteen when older men tried to use it to get me to peel off clothes, I was used to hearing “we’re all naked under clothes.” (Later on I greatly regretted most of these idiots hadn’t read Heinlein so I couldn’t say “nul program.” So instead I had to say things like “We’re also all clean under our dirt, so I see you don’t intend to shower ever again.”)

There were other just as crazy aphorisms that passed for “deep thought.” I’m honestly not sure what caused this, whether it was more people than ever being pushed to higher ed they weren’t really qualified for, but that made them want to sound “intellectual” or that the Soviets were diligently working with their wrenches to take apart the ability to think of the new generation. Or perhaps for whatever reason mass media and TV just encouraged a ridiculous wave of aphorisms that not only didn’t mean much but that aimed to destroy rather than build habits, patterns and ways of life that led to success.

You know, crazy stuff like “What difference does a piece of paper make to whether we’re married?” (Other than meeting potential obligations to potential children, and getting the buy in of both sets of inlaws and recognition of society that protects well…. mostly the woman who puts more biological investment in the relationship, none, really.) And “If it feels good do it!” and– Well, a lot of you are old enough to have heard all this cr*p growing up. And the younger ones, trust me, the current spate of crazy is well anchored in a barrage of crazy — to my certain knowledge — from the sixties and seventies.

I fell for some of them too. The unflappable Miss Almeida was not unflappable when this stuff came at her from someone she respected. So for a long time I bought my brother’s “romance is the opium of womanhood” long before I realized where the origin of that nugget came from, or that my brother — never having been a woman — was in fact assuming that without having romantic notions to encourage her to care about attachment and feelings, young women would be as “free” and sexually available as men wish they’d be. Of course now we know that’s the rankest and most absolute bull excreta, and that in fact women have — surprise! It’s not like we evolved to be the caretakers of children or anything — a different set of sex related hormones that encourage attachment to sexual partners and incidentally children.

But the excreta of “pseudo-profound-social statements is now everywhere, and yesterday I was hit in close proximity by two bits of crazy. And suddenly it hit me “And what is the alternative, precisely?”

One of them was in an otherwise unexceptionable animated movie that husband was watching (in the after-matter, which husband always watches, we found the people who created it were exceptionally woke, but fortunately what they thought was “African-American” culture was in fact just American culture, and if you didn’t know they were all borderline crazy, the movie is touching and cute. Oh, it’s total theological bug f*ck nuttiness with an extra side of nuts, but it’s so crazy that it doesn’t even pretend to have any touch with traditional religion, and so it didn’t offend as much as more “plausible” works, and less than most depictions of the after and pre (!) life in movies, even from the forties.

So about halfway through I got hooked, and put aside the post I was supposed to be writing, and took up my crochet.

But there, in the middle of it, the main character is talking to a high school student, and quotes someone (I want to say Marcuse, but I spent all day yesterday on three hours of sleep, so I’m not going to make any promises it is right) about how schooling is how the upper classes keep the lower classes from committing violence.

I was not in a good mood, partly because of lack of sleep, so my answer was “No, it’s not the upper classes, which is Marxist bullshit. It’s the culturally dominant classes. And yes, it is, but it’s stopped working, which is why the capital is surrounded by barbed wire and filled with an occupying army.”

Of course, the people writing the movie consider themselves the “lower classes” while the upper classes are some prototypical villainous Victorian male, probably twirling his mustache as he puts them down. We’ll leave aside this charming illusion of the crazy Marxists, though I’ll be glad to expound on the inner mechanisms of it in another post, if you guys want. It needs a whole post, though.

Instead, and leaving aside the fact that the leftist cultural dominance tracks with extreme attempts at suppressing violence, probably because they like quiet and obedient widgets for “subjects” of their experiment, let’s instead think about the alternative.

Look, all of human civilization has been an attempt to suppress inter-personal violence, or at least keep it within bounds that don’t prevent us from assembling in numbers larger than clan or tribe. Almost any reading of the records of older cities will quickly come to the conclusion that people used to be a lot more interpersonally violent. They just were. Even in early modern England, well…. Let’s say men died young because they fought over the most stupid things.

And that was already a state-nation, where people identified with the nation was though it were a race, and had not only forgotten their early tribal affiliations but their micro-kingdoms (the regional association, which given travel in that time probably had a lot of genetic backing) before it was unified into “England.” So the fights were rarely tribal or regional (though there were family feuds.)

Even families, as such were a lot more violent. And yes, I know, I’m a proponent of the swat to the butt, at least for kids who don’t respond to anything else. However, if you read original sources, getting beaten into the ground was considered fairly normal for kids being raised oh, before the 20th century. And well into it depending on time and place. And it was in no way considered abuse. (Part of it was much larger families, and parents who lived so close to the bone they really couldn’t take time off to supervise your every move until you were rational.) And yeah, a lot of us have mothers whose families were considered weird because their husbands didn’t beat them. Or at least the family tradition was not to beat your spouse, and if you were beaten, your husband was shunned. But this was enough of an exception to be considered “strange” and occasion remark. Oh, that beating your children, might extend well into adulthood, so no one would think badly of a fifty year old father who clouted his 30 year old son, though the opposite would cause extreme shock.

Take that last sentence: even in much more violent pre-modern societies, there were boundaries to the violence and an hierarchy. And sure, you can consider those who got beaten oppressed by comparison to those who did the beating. I’m not even going to argue (though I could) but the point was keeping violence within boundaries acceptable TO THAT SOCIETY.

Look, humans are not angels. We are corporeal beings, and not particularly nice ones. I’m not going to say “ree, we’re exactly like chimps” because we obviously aren’t. Even when my idiot friends were sure we’d only split from chimps 250 thousand years ago, I wanted to say “We’re still not them because they surely haven’t come half this far in that time.”

But we are built on a template of great apes, and the remains we find of hominins and other man-tribes show that their lifestyle was in fact close to that of great apes everywhere. And do you know what you call a baby chimp found by a genetically unrelated band? Snack.

So, sure, let’s assume that education — public or not — is a way for a culturally dominant “elite” to suppress generalized violence.

What is the alternative?

The left is assuming violence is justified and on their side, because of course their idea of social dominance, and the model they implement is to take control and rob everyone. But throughout history they are an exception, in fact. Even the “bad old kings” were trying to do the best they could for their tribe or micro nation. They often screwed up and followed their own desires, because human, but the idea of noblesse oblige is very very old in humanity. And most people at least try (Unless they’re all ‘et up with Marxism and self-righteousness, because bullsh*t means never having to say you’re sorry.)

Instead let’s look at it as meaning what it says “education” (by which we can mean everything we do to tame the toddler-beast and up through specific knowledge of how to get ahead in life) is a way to suppress inter-personal violence.

Well, yes. And we’re all naked under our clothes. And wearing clothes isn’t natural, maaaaan.

But what is the alternative? The civilizational process of mankind, from band to clan, from clan to city, from city to nation, accomplishing things that could only be accomplished by many people cooperating without violence is a process of suppressing unnecessary violence and waste of human life.

What is the alternative? A world in which everyone’s hand is against everyone else? Well, we know what some of those look like. I’ve read enough stories about current day Afghanistan which read like the worst nightmares of ancient Greek playwrights. The women and children always get it worse. Yes, sure, the young men also get ferociously winnowed down. But if you’re a woman or a child, or an elderly person, you’re fodder for horrible death.

In the same way, later, while doing my instapundit link rounds, I saw an article about how 2 + 2 is colonial thinking imposed on non-white populations, and are alien and evil, compared to their native ways of knowing.

After I got my eyes from under the sofa, I took a deep breath and asked “What’s the alternative?”

Because, you know, I’ve heard this before, but I never thought about precisely what their nonsense would entail.

Sure, we’re giving up the internal combustion engine, bridges, anything better built than a hut made of rough stones, and probably — let’s be honest — crops. The horrendous thing is that this might be completely acceptable to them, since they don’t realize what supports their ability to live in relative comfort.

Let’s instead explore what this means at the interpersonal level and how much eschewing simple math would make living with other human beings impossible.

No?

Well, you try going to Walmart, or the local farmers’ market, for that matter, and handing in four one dollar bills to pay for $50 worth of something. When the person getting the bills looks at you, tell them that according to your native way of knowing you, that morning, decided that 2 plus 2 equals fifty.

See how far that gets you.

Or let’s say you contract for the delivery of something — these days, mostly, office supplies, for us — you’re supposed to get 20 reams of printer paper, but you get four. And the delivery people explain that 2 +2 CAN be twenty, and how dare you disrespect their native ways of knowing?

“Seven years as a shepherd Jacob served, Laban father of Rachel, beautiful shepherdess” but at the end the father decided to give him his oldest daughter, because to his way of thinking the 7 years to acquire his youngest daughter’s hands MUST be 14. Hey, now, it was his native way of counting.

Humans have partly got this far, and now enjoy untold prosperity which had practically eliminated famine (until of course the covidiocy starved the third world) because “colonial thinking” defeated that of isolated tribes.

Or perhaps more cogently: those who won a clash between two populations generally (there are exceptions, like Greece and Rome and to an extent India and Great Britain, and perhaps to an extent America and Japan) imposed their mode of life on the defeated. Though they might culturally appropriate that which was worthy in the culture of the defeated.

Look, it makes sense from the POV of the survival of the species. If you go back far enough, those tribes, groups and cities who conquered the others had superior knowledge and therefore a superior culture. (Evolution and selection are very slow, so you have to think of this in Paleolithic terms. Almost all the exceptions are in fairly sophisticated levels of development, and mostly they’re the result of the older/defeated culture having become decadent. Which means conquest probably saves them from going extinct slower and in more interesting ways) Or one better able to survive.

It is no coincidence that most of the advances come from densely packed areas, where clashes were inevitable and absorptions and counter absorptions of cultures a constant.

Is 2 +2 a colonial way of thinking? Oh, probably. But that was probably way back when the colonization of the homo sap by the Neanderthal (culturally, that is. Well, that seems to have been the direction) occurred, because we have trade going that far back, and trade can’t survive without counting.

In fact, even though the concept of zero is also fairly sophisticated, we’ve come across very few tribes that don’t have a concept of counting, or a concept of numbers over 5, and those are usually highly isolated and tiny tribes. Because arithmetic is a darn useful skill, as is everything we’ve built on it from accounting to architecture.

And what’s the alternative? People walking around “Sensing” the numbers? Be real. That’s not native to anyone but the crazier tribes of Homos New Agicus, a tribe who uses cannabis in such vast quantities they’re sure to become extinct.

The alternative is never “death or cake.”

When idiots run around with blunt aphorisms, demanding you dismantle civilization, ask them what their alternative is. And stop them when they start talking of rainbows and unicorn farts, and ask them the exchange rate of the unicorn fart to the rainbow. Because if it’s a civilization, we have to know.

You want to eschew controls over violence? Basic arithmetic? Clothes?

Well, sure. I believe you’re ultimately free to do what you want, as long as you pay the price.

You’re free to take all your clothes off, and take off to the forest with your buddies, where you can live as though 2 plus 2 equals 20, or potato, or chicken.

We don’t care. Heck, you probably won’t live long, but if you do, you’ll be a fascinating ethnology-experiment.

What you won’t be and can’t be is able to shame us out of living our lives as civilized human beings, who have enough to eat and can trade a known quantity for a known quantity. Because you know, there really is no alternative. Not an alternative that allows humanity to survive.

And if you hate humanity enough you don’t want us to survive, I have an easy solution: You go first. After which the existence or non-existence of humanity stops being your problem.

As for me, I’ll call out the crazy every chance I get. And until you present a viable — note viable — alternative that uses your “ways of knowing” I’ll slam the register closed and tell you, “No sale. Go fish.”

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Simple Service: Science Fiction Colonization Adventure (Martha’s Sons Book 1)

They’re stranded beyond the known stars. Will his treacherous mission on an unforgiving world end in death?

Twenty-year-old Peter Dawe has learned to keep his mouth shut around his father. So the super-strong, genetically modified, human hybrid keeps his focus on his strict parent’s bidding to recover his family’s weapons. But after barely escaping a manhunt, Peter encounters real trouble when he runs into his self-indulgent brother.

Forced to take the vain and reckless fool back into danger with him for a second attempt to retrieve the remaining blasters, Peter fears his sibling’s undisciplined ways will get them both killed. But as the colony begins its descent into tyranny, treachery and betrayal could be far deadlier enemies…

Can Peter survive a desperate plan that puts a target on his back?

Simple Service is the first book in the immersive Martha’s Sons science fiction series. If you like gripping action, insurmountable odds, and alien worlds, then you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s rugged adventure.

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Tanager’s Fledglings.

When the starship’s captain died midway through a run with a cargo of exotic animals, the owner gave first mate Jem one chance, and one choice. The chance: if he successfully runs the trade route solo, he’ll become the new captain. If he fails, he’ll lose the only home he’s ever known.

And the choice? He’s now raising an old earth animal called a basset hound. Between station officials, housebreaking, pirates, and drool, Jem’s got his hands full!

FROM TED LAPKIN: Righteous Kill: An edge-of-your-seat WW2 military thriller.

October 1940: a raiding party of elite soldiers arrives in Nazi-occupied France on a mission to change the course of history.

Their task is simple – ambush Adolf Hitler’s personal train and kill everyone on board.

But these soldiers have a secret. They are modern-day Israeli special forces operators armed with lethal 21st-century weaponry and dispatched eight decades into the past by a genius physicist who cracked the secret of time travel.

They are ready to sacrifice everything to save millions of lives that will otherwise be lost in the maelstrom of war and the Holocaust. 

Yet even if they manage to pull off the most extraordinary commando raid ever conceived, there’s no guarantee they’ll make it home again…

Written by a former Israeli army officer, RIGHTEOUS KILL takes a daring premise and weaves it into a gripping, action-packed military thriller. It’s the perfect fit for fans of Vince Flynn, Andy McNab, Eric Flint, Harry Turtledove and John Birmingham.

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: The Blood Ladders Box Set, Books 1-3: An Heir to Thorns and Steel, By Vow and Royal Bloodshed, and On Wings of Bone and Glass

Mannered society meets the realm of epic fantasy in this trilogy of dark sacrifice and redemption. Philosophy, witty conversations, undead armies, sociopathic elves, and vampire genets… there’s a taste of everything in Blood Ladders. The box set contains all three novels:

An Heir to Thorns and Steel
Morgan Locke, university student, has been hiding his debilitating illness with fair enough success when two unlikely emissaries arrive bearing the news that he is prince to a nation of creatures out of folklore. Ridiculous! And yet, if magic exists…could it heal him? The ensuing journey will resurrect the forgotten griefs of history, and before it’s over, all the world will be remade by thorns and steel….

By Vow and Royal Bloodshed
Restored to a working body, Morgan Locke has returned to Troth to seek the legendary athenaeum at Vigil in the hopes it will produce a solution to the enchantment binding the elves. But elves are not the only creatures now stepping out of folklore: the demons are coming, and they bring with them the armies of the dead. If they do not want to see their world consumed, Morgan and his companions will have to find the answers, whether they come from books… or bloodshed. Time is running out….

On Wings of Bone and Glass
Evicted from Vigil and faced with the impending descent of demons, Morgan Locke and his companions must unravel all the mysteries that are barring them from the salvation of their country and their world. Can they unbind the curse and free the magic to the hands of their allies before the dead rise again? And in the aftermath of that epic battle, what will become of the world they’ve always known? The adventure doesn’t end when the last sword is swung. There is a great deal to be done. Join Morgan and his friends in this final book of the Blood Ladders trilogy and see how they conclude their epic journey out of folklore and back into ordinary time.

FROM ELLIE FERGUSON: Witchfire Burning.

Limited time price drop!Long before the Others made their existence known to the world, Mossy Creek was their haven. Being from the wrong side of the tracks meant you weren’t what the rest of the world considered “normal”.
Normal was all Quinn O’Donnell wanted from life. Growing up on the “wrong side of the tracks”, she had been the only normal in the family. The moment she was old enough, she left and began life as far from her Texas hometown as possible. Now she has a job she enjoys and a daughter she loves more than life itself. Their life is normal, REALLY normal, until her daughter starts calling forth fire and wind.

Quinn knows they must go back so her mother can help five-year-old Ali learn how to control her new talents. But in Mossy Creek nothing is ever simple. Quinn’s mother has gone missing. Secrets from Quinn’s past start coming back to haunt her.

And the family home is more than a little sentient.

Can Quinn keep everyone — particularly Ali — safe? And will she ever get back her illusion of normalcy?

FROM BLAKE SMITH: A Kingdom of Glass: A Novel of The Garia Cycle.

Zara hasn’t seen her family in eleven years, but she doesn’t mind. They sent her to live in a neighboring kingdom when she was small, and she’s adopted her foster parents in their place. She lives the life of an aristocratic Garian girl- riding her horse, shooting her bow, exploring the castle with her friends- and she has nothing to wish for.

Until she’s summoned home, to a prospective marriage she doesn’t want, family she doesn’t remember, and a poisonous royal court that threatens everything she’s ever known. The East Morlans are nothing like Garia, and Zara struggles to find her place among the scheming Morlander aristocrats. Along the way, she makes new friends, meets enemies, and falls in love. But secrets abound in the glittering palace, and Zara must discover who she can trust as she fights for her life and freedom in a fragile, beautiful, kingdom of glass.

FROM ALLEGRA DRAKOS: Nibiru’s Child, Book 1: Who Killed Cressie Moonchild?

Can Samantha Survive?Samantha Fitzhugh leads a quiet wall-flower life in the genius class of her high school. She never knew her father, and her mother is off in Antarctica absorbed in a career as an archaeologist.A series of freakish events in the school have her on the verge of being expelled. Out of the blue, the hottest boy in the class invites her into his family to stay until her mom returns.There she finds warm and loving parents, even if they are abit strange — a professor father with profound arcane knowledge and a psychic mother who reads minds and casts spells. They believe that the vestiges of some inherited power is starting to emerge from her. They caution her that high school is a hormonal time. If she wishes to go down this road, she must retain her chastity.Meanwhile, a mad artist is spontaneously producing paintings of Samantha that have become a focus of worship for a gang of crazed meth-dealing bikers. They believe she is the descendant of Inanna, an ancient Sumerian goddess from the lost planet Nibiru.The gang leader is a former college professor with a murderous thirst for vengeance against those who drove him out of the profession. He believes in Samantha’s magical descent and her link to a planet with a 3,600 year orbit that will bring it smashing through the earth’s solar system.He wants her and intends to possess her, no matter who he has to kill.

FROM ANDREW FOX: Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction.

Science fiction is NOT a safe space!

In this companion volume to Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction, fourteen stories by Ian Creasey, Andrew Fox, David Wesley Hill, Liam Hogan, Claude Lalumière, and other writers from around the world push the boundaries of what is considered taboo in science fiction. From a society where telling an insult joke is a capital crime to one where letting your faucet drip may cost you your head, from a utopia where inequality and want have been abolished to a hostile planet whose isolated colonists must deal with the aftermath of a sexual assault among their own, these stories pull no punches.

With an introduction by award-winning author Barry N. Malzberg.

FROM KARL GALLAGHER: Storm Between the Stars: Book 1 in the Fall of the Censor.

Niko Landry and his crew thought a routine hyperspace survey would be easy money. But when the barrier separating their homeworld from the rest of the human race opens, they seize the chance to go exploring . . . finding an empire more dangerous than they imagined.

EDITED BY ROB HOWELL, WITH STORIES BY SARAH A. HOYT AND ALSO DAVID WEBER, LARRY CORREIA AND D. J. BUTLER: Songs of Valor

Fifteen tremendous authors. Fifteen extraordinary stories. One outstanding anthology.

It is a time of high adventure! A time for heroes to say “No!” to the evils that will befall their families and friends if they don’t rise to the task at hand…even if they don’t want to! If they won’t take up arms and spells on behalf of their people, civilization will fall.

Fifteen exceptional authors have spun tales of reluctant heroes—people often like you and me, who didn’t think they were worthy, needed, or even “the right one for the job.” Sometimes all they have going for them is that they’re the wrong person at the wrong time. When there’s no one else, though, a hero must do what’s necessary, whether that’s fighting demons, the undead, or an unconquerable enemy.

Songs of Valor focuses on heroes rising to the challenge presented them. An untrained human facing an ancient dragon. A necromancer fighting a demon in the land of the elves. A dragon rider well past her prime coming back to protect the ones she loves. An over-the-hill fighter who does what he must to stem the tide of evil.

Inside are fifteen incredible stories of heroes rising to the occasion. Their willingness to brave the peril, though, doesn’t guarantee their success. If their valor should fail, all indeed will be lost! Will they succeed? Step inside and find out!

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: REFLECT

When I was fourteen, my parents took me on the first vacation I remember having, and dad and I went rock climbing.

Okay, it wasn’t that formal. It is that since I was six or so, our way of enjoying the beach was to walk by the ocean, and that kind of morphed into climbing cliffs because the sea shore in the North of Portugal is very rocky. (Mom liked just sitting with her friends and talking or knitting (on a beach!) but I’ve never done well at sitting still. Even with a book, I preferred to sit somewhere away from people to read.)

The vacation was in the Southern most tip of Portugal, but it was still rocky, and we would get caught up in “I want to go THERE because it’s difficult” moments.

In a way it was just a morph of our walks in the woods around the village, trying to see things few people saw and/or do difficult things/push ourselves a little further. Only the walks by the sea had fewer tadpoles and dragonflies. More baby sharks and crabs, though.

Anyway, because these expeditions were improvised and often not exactly well thought out, we once found ourselves atop a cliff, as the tide came in horribly fast, and … Well. I can’t swim. So we were stuck until the water went out again. And we just talked for however many hours.

It wasn’t my favorite thing, but on the other hand, I got to hear a lot of stories of his childhood that he’d never told me before (like playing wild west in the woods outside the village) and ask a lot of questions that didn’t normally come up.

I’m not sure why this came to mind today, when I thought about what to write, so I’m trying to make sense of it.

Look, that enforced immobility — there were maybe six feet by four feet up there — is completely against my character. I like to be moving. And it got a bit cold as the sun set. And yeah, we had no cell phones, so mom was getting frantic.

But worrying about all that didn’t do us a whit of good while stuck up there. So we just tried to figure out how to while away the time not unpleasantly and not hurt ourselves trying to get back when the water was too deep for me, and also too deep to see the rocks under it.

And for a while there, on top of that cliff, we wondered if the water would ever go down, if there was any point to waiting anymore. Maybe we’d dreamed of our path here? — Yes, the ocean can be very disorienting.

In the end the water went down enough we made it to the shore never going higher than our knees, and we were only minutes late for dinner, which was good as we’d missed lunch.

I think in a way that’s where we are as a nation.

We didn’t see the tide coming in. That it’s a tide of madness doesn’t make it easier. Well, I saw it coming in, which is why all of 2020 I didn’t sleep much.

But it is not a lasting tide. This is more of what we called a maré viva when I was little. It’s hard to describe this effect, but it’s comparable to a mini-tsunami because there is an Earthquake somewhere hidden.

When I was little and playing on the beach we had to be aware of these, because in like three/four minutes, the entire beach would be full water, which would then drain just as rapidly.

As a kid, you just ran to high ground, while the women and men picked up the stuff off the floor of the little rental huts and held it aloft to keep it dry. I just did a cursory look to find out what it actually is, but the search was swamped by “Viva Mare” restaurants, etc. In fact, all I caught were some weird hints that this might be due to under-water geography along the coast, which also makes the North of Portugal — now — a surfing Mecca.

It is kind of like that. A false tide, caused out of order by … well, some very corrupt people, who’ve had the run of things for far too long and can’t afford to be exposed or deposed.

I guess those are tides too. We’ve seen them elsewhere, like the fall of monarchy in France, or the truly bizarre spasms of various other societies as the industrial revolution up-ended everything.

But they aren’t…. permanent. They come in, they swamp everything, and they recede

The more so here, as I don’t’ think any of them realizes capturing America doesn’t serve their needs. Without America, the totalitarians starve. And capturing us means making us like them, which I don’t think they realize except for the things they WANT.

But we thought, or at least we hoped we had longer. Another ten years or so. And we certainly didn’t expect it to be quite this insane. I mean, destroying the country’s economy in an attempt to subjugate us to their crazy international agenda? Do they understand consequences, forget “unintended” ones?

We’re stuck here and for right now there’s no much we can do.

…. but we can talk, and we can prepare. And yes, some of the preparation must be mental and emotional. Some, more material things.

Use this time to think of things you might want/need that might not be available with ease. Sure, okay, yes, cleaners. But also perhaps computer parts or — Think about it. Make an outlandish list. Then reduce it to what you can actually afford right now.

And keep calm.

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

Once the tide of madness breaks against the shores of reality — and it’s already starting to — it will recede very quickly, and there will be much work to do.

Get ready for the work. And take a deep breath.

Waiting is hard, but sometimes you have to.

The tide of madness will go down. Perhaps not as fast as we’d like it to, but it will. And then the shore will be easily attainable. Meanwhile, don’t beat your mind against what can’t be. Keep calm. Be not afraid.

In the end, we win, they lose.

*Let’s face it, if this bunch did high tea, it might very well look like that.

At any rate, I FINALLY have a repaired dryer (long story) and therefore I need to do some quick cleaning I haven’t done in two weeks, and change my sheets and towels, so the auto immune attack will stop ramping up. (Probably cat hair, to be fair.) So, I leave you to a guest post by Mr. Kipling. It’s time. It’s been a while. And heaven knows these are rounding outside the door – SAH*

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

*If you want to skip the part where I argue with myself you can. Frankly that reads nutty even to me. Then again I was mid the third of three interim moves when selling the last house, my life was in boxes, and I was quite ill, so…
In other news, I finally set up a newsletter, after a year or two of fighting with a service I thought would work but didn’t. I promise to write/post at least twice a week, and this will be strictly about my fiction. There will be occasional freebies, opportunities to purchase e-arcs and other benes. It’s free, though substack has the ability to charge. I might make the ones with “opportunity go buy earcs” premium posts and charge, because that’s a way to handle payment, right? Anyway, we shall see. For now, it’s just a newsletter which I’ll try to make fun and rewarding. Because right now we all, including me, need it. Link here, though the sidebar link to schrodinger’s path should now be live.)

Men – and Women — of Iron A Blast From the Past from March 8 2016

*This is where I admit that I have no clue where this post came from.  In my — mild — defense, I am running a low grade fever and have an upper respiratory thing going on.  Con crud, from a con with people from around the world.  And I was very tired when I wrote this last night, even though it wasn’t late.

None of which fully explains the post.

Do I expect conditions to revert to what my mother grew up under?  Frankly even if say Bernie won and we went Venezuela we have a lot of infrastructure that doesn’t disappear magically.  Even in the seventies, in Portugal, with infrastructure severely neglected, the worst we got were cholera epidemics in summer.  And I don’t think ANYONE died, just people got very sick and had to go to the hospital.

Antibiotics are not likely to go away, though they might become scarcer and are becoming less effective.

Do I believe we’re about to revert to a time when half the kids — or three in one — die?  No.

Sure we might get a small pox attack — I’m a bit surprised we haven’t yet given how Russians keep samples “safe — but I suspect it will be contained to an area or a region.  If it isn’t, it makes for an interesting SF novel, since I’m one of the youngest people to have immunity to it.  Maybe my kids have some partial immunity, since I actually had it.  But otherwise, it would be a world of old people and an interesting novel.  But a danger?  I’d rate it possible but unlikely.

There could be other pandemics, perhaps antibiotic resistant, but even those would be a one-shot not the kind of walking with death our ancestors did.

So I have no clue why I wrote this.  I haven’t even re-read the Black Tide novels recently and I haven’t read the anthology yet.

I have in the past written posts — and books — where I felt as though the push were coming from elsewhere.  But this one came from nowhere.  Perhaps the fever and tiredness just set my subconscious free.

I’m not going to remove the post, but I want it said for the record that my awake and slightly less feverish self disagrees with it.

And yes, now you’ve seen everything.*

While I was at TVIW Speaker looked it up for me, and I found that I did have small pox as a toddler, or at least it ravaged through the area at that time.  (I wasn’t sure because the common word for small pox and chicken pox is the same, in Portugal.  There is a name for small pox, but it’s a little odd and not normally used in speech.)  However, the mortality rate — it killed the majority of the kids under 6 (i.e. under vaccination) seemed to indicate small pox.

Weirdly, it occurred when I was two, not three, which means the vivid memories I have are either not real or I was forming clear memories earlier than I thought.

Anyway, it didn’t occur to me growing up because it was just part of the background.  I knew my aunt had lost a daughter my age, I knew the farmer across the street had lost her only daughter.  I have a vivid flash of memory of a funeral with a tiny coffin, carried by hand, and about a dozen relatively young people walking behind.  I have a vague memory I saw that from the window in grandma’s upper floor, as I was starting to recover.

But because I was so young, I had no memory of these children who died as ever being alive, and by the time I met these people they had lost their children long ago. Well, years ago, which when you’re five or six is a long time.

I was born in a time of antibiotics, and while we still had a couple of cholera epidemics when I was a teen, we didn’t experience the child mortality — or even the adult mortality — that were part of my mother’s and grandmother’s lives.

I don’t remember any stories of lost childhood friends from grandmother, but I did from my mom, because she grew up in what could be charitably called a slum.  Her stories of childhood would sometimes end with “he died” or “She died at ten.”  And one of her stories that has remained with me is how a friend of hers died while she was watching him, and she noticed because a fly landed on his open eye.

This came to mind yesterday when a student at a university in California was caught with a tiny pocket knife and, immediately, counseling was offered to those who witnessed it or heard of it and were “traumatized” by it.

Was my mother’s generation traumatized by it?  Was I traumatized by all those empty desks in my elementary school?

Possibly.  My mother more than I.  As I said, I don’t remember any school friends dying.

The question is: are humans supposed to go through life untraumatized? Is there some ideal state of humanity where we never encounter anything unpleasant, are never frustrated, never hurt?

Evolution and history would seem to be screaming back a loud “NO.”  Throughout most of history the idea of someone being traumatized by knowing that someone near them had a really ineffective and small weapon in his pocket — which he’d never used to hurt anyone, or even considered using to hurt anyone — would draw a horse laugh.

ALL of us, even the most protected of the special snowflakes, are descended from war and disease, famine and strife, and an insane amount of work.  Because those were the conditions that led to survival in most of history, and we’re descended from the ones who survived, or at least from the ones who survived long enough to have children.

Unimaginably difficult conditions — for us — are very close.  Parents.  Grandparents.  usually not much further.  Someone went hungry more than two days, and not hungry int he sense that all they had was some ramen, but in the sense they had nothing.  Someone watched children die — their own children — and couldn’t do anything, couldn’t even hope to do anything but pray.

We’ve just been so incredibly wealthy, so incredibly blessed that we forgot the common lot of humanity.  Most of humanity still living today, let alone the humanity of the past, would translate to paradise.

So, are we happy and grateful, confident in our marvelous civilization, settling down to raise fat babies and praise our good fortune?

Oh, no.  We lost all confidence in the Western civilization that brought us this untold prosperity.  We are dissatisfied and complaining that things aren’t PERFECT.  Some whine they can’t buy everything they see on TV.  And a lot talk about the evils of capitalism and pursue some imaginary socialist paradise, because they blame capitalism for everything from the fact they don’t have a purpose in life, to the fact that they’re not as attractive as they wish they could be.

And I wonder.  I wonder if this radical experiment of raising kids without any traumas, any hardship is not the worst thing you could do to kids.

It used to be believed — and it was a popular theory in the sixties and seventies — that if you raised kids with absolutely no hardship they would be perfect; that if you raised kids with no violence they would be peaceful; that if you raised kids with self-esteem and praise, they would be confident and productive.

All of those seem to be wrong.  The girls raised to believe that they are as good as any man and actively lied to about things like upper body strength are not confident.  They grow into women who believe men have near supernatural powers over them.  They scream for safe rooms.  So do all the people raised with no violence and no hardship.  Instead of being able to endure minor shocks, they can’t endure any shock at all.

Those theories have existed a long time, and there was no way to test them.  Oh, sure, rich people didn’t endure the same things as poor people, but even rich people died of stupid things.  Even rich people lost babies and childhood playmates.

In the regency, in the very same social class Jane Austen wrote about, every woman who made her trousseau included two shrouds for infants.  Because they’d lose at least that many, and they had to be prepared in a time when everything, even a shroud, took time sew.

So it was easy to attribute the dysfunctions of upper class kids to “they weren’t perfect yet.”

But now, now that we’re all living better than rich people 50 years ago, we can see the result of people raised without any kind of hardship, any kind of trial, are not strong.

Raised in such an unnatural environment, they are weak and pliable, and afraid of the slightest hardship.

The good news — and good is qualified — is that our unnatural bubble of wealth and mollycoddling will shatter.  What can’t go on won’t and when most of the population can’t function as adults, the gods of the copybook headings are just around the corner.

The question is, can we be like those men and women of iron who survived things we can barely imagine to get us here?

Or are we going to scream for counseling sessions and safe rooms?

Now is the time to start prepping for what’s ahead, and I don’t mean putting cans in the room under the stairs.  I mean preparing yourself, mentally and emotionally.

Read biographies, read about other times and places not like ours, and work to be aware of what really was going on, what life was like back then.

Become aware that you are — even if you’ve struggled — softer and more pampered than most of the mass of humanity.  And that humans are, by nature, scavengers.  Scavengers adapt and survive anything except abundance and ease.  They’re not designed for it.

Prepare now, mentally.

If we get very lucky and we escape the crucible, then we’ll at least be more able to understand the past.

And if we don’t get lucky, we just might survive.

We might.

And we’ll have to be strong, because most of the world isn’t equipped to survive.  Soemone will have to be men and women of iron who carry others on their shoulders.

And that’s whoever is capable of doing so.

We’re the opposite of a hardened population.  Being strong is not just how you survive, it’s how your loved ones will survive.

Sursum corda.  We will survive this.

This wasn’t the post I was going to write this morning. Though I only had an hazy idea of the post I was going to write.

Then I wrote my weekly post at Mad Genius Club.

(I normally do them at night, but last night I was madly securing my various accounts, since the flaming crazy attempted to break in again. Btw, it must be sad. Because it stopped to send nasty emails that s/h/it thought would get me in trouble, it was five minutes too late on the attempt to download all my emails. So, those of you undercover who email me, your secret is safe, and now the entire thing is triple locked. To be fair it was tightly locked before, but one of the things we found is that this has been going on for at least a month and probably for months, which uh…. makes me reach for pants and suspenders. Now there is a higher chance I’ll accidentally lock myself out of my own account and never be able to get in again than actually get hacked.)

Anyway, so I did my post at Mad Genius Club, partly in frustration because as far as writing yesterday was a day the locusts ate.

And I had a hazy idea of writing about how you are your house’s keeper, but it’s not a part of you. I don’t even know if it’s a problem for most American women my generation, honest. I come from another century, in a way, as well as from another country.

But then I went to MeWe to share the MGC post, and there was a post echoing the CDC’s bafflement about why states and counties with no mask mandates have falling cases, while those with the strictest Branch Covidian adherence have the highest.

And someone posted in the comments “How come they never consider they might be wrong? Never reevaluate?”

And I realized this is true, and not just for measures against the highly over-hyped Chinese Lung Rot. They never stop, never reconsider, never examine what they’ve done and the results, and go “Is there another way to achieve this end?”

In fact, instead of revising the failed theory, Marxists keep concocting elaborate explanations for why it’s still true, it’s just been done wrong or with the wrong people (Like the Gramscian substitution of race for class) which is the antithesis of Occam’s Razor.

And pretty funny since — since Marx, who wouldn’t know science if it bit him in the fleshy part of his grifter ass — they call their theories of governance “scientific” which is kind of like calling a pig an eagle. It don’t change nothing and it annoys everyone who hears it.

So I thought deeper into it, and I realized they don’t reevaluate because they can’t.

Part of this is that for a century now, the left has “reproduced” via schools. They, by and large, don’t have kids, but they get to indoctrinate other people’s kids.

And part is that, leftism being a social signal of sorts, and a sign of being “part of the good people” plus a way to get material goods (no? Look at who gets paid for expertise on guns on TV. It ain’t our own Larry Correia. Not most of the time.) a lot of the left self-indoctrinated as adults.

Mind you these people are usually pretty broken and willing to do ANYTHING to belong to the in group (as opposed to the rest of us who are pretty broken, but hoist middle fingers HIGH at pressure to conform.) They refer to the process of self-remodeling into perfect Marxian bots as “mind killing” but don’t see anything wrong with it.

Point being, it is actually mind killing. It is killing the part of themselves that can reevaluate and re-chart.

Look, I started out pretty lefty — yeah. I know. anti-communist, but you know, I grew up in Europe. So much of this sh*t like say gun control is absorbed when you’re too young to even think — but have changed my mind, as facts didn’t fit. I kind of careened into extreme Libertarianism for a while, and now I’m … I don’t know there probably isn’t a name. Except that the skies and the stars shall pass away before a single comma is rendered irrelevant or inapplicable in the US Constitution (except should it be LAWFULLY amended or revised and even then I reserve the right to giggle at bullshit like the prohibition. Yes, like all works of men the Constitution is flawed, but it’s still the best thing our species has come up with.)

I changed my mind about Trump, something the other never Trumpers don’t seem able to do. Oh, and weirdly after weeks of debating gun control in the first year of my marriage, both Dan and I changed our minds from “sensible control” (pfui) to “Shall not be infringed, biatches.” Which is weird, since we were both on the other side, but we did a deep dive into facts and…. well….

Actually, that’s the main thing. When something doesn’t fit my theories, I dive into facts, sometimes for years, and either change my mind (sometimes drastically) or figure out why it’s not working the way I thought (and sometimes it’s “because foreign people are buying the buildings in the city that should be losing value. Also, New Yorkers, who aren’t foreign but are crazy, particularly in the matter of real estate value.”)

So why doesn’t the left do it? Oh, they change positions, sometimes, but they change it from the top, and then claim they never held the other opinion. Like, on gay marriage, or the first amendment, or wars abroad, or…..

The word comes from on high, and then all of them repeat it, as though it had always been thus. And none of them seem to notice this.

I think I figured out how they get like that, but I don’t know how to break it.

Part of it is indoctrination. Some of it very young. To this day, if I drop bread on the floor, I pick it up and apologize (though I don’t know how to bless it) which makes no sense whatsoever, since bread isn’t sentient. But I was taught before I could read that dropping bread on the floor is evil and you must pick it up, apologize and bless it. No amount of rational thought stops that. And not doing it makes me so profoundly uncomfortable it’s easier to just do it.

So, a lot of the left is trained, not in any particularly principles, but to belong to the left. Which involves repeating what comes from above, unthinkingly.

And part of it? Part of it, they’re so terrified of being cast out of the in group, or perhaps of a sort of demonic possession (keep in mind they believe the straw picture of “evil right wingers” and think if they’re not on the left, then they will become evil right wingers) that they can’t allow themselves to think.

We’ve seen both of these with cults.

The question is, how do you deprogram a few million people?

How do you get them to listen to Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Because how high the butcher’s bill goes, and how much is destroyed depends on that.

And I don’t have an answer.

And then the new cat box got delivered. This is a big production because for years now we’ve used Litter Robot. It started with Pixie who was the best cat ever, except if the box wasn’t cleaned ten times a day he’d find an interesting place to go. We tried litter-maid but it didn’t last. Then we got litter robot. These last, except for the one before last which was a lemon and conked out at 5 years. Not that it completely broke, it just would go through weeks when it didn’t work.

I finally broke down and got a new one, which permitted me to eliminate that one AND the one that worked perfectly but was TINY which cats for some reason don’t like.

So I spent the morning cleaning the laundry room and getting things out of the way to put the new box in.

Now I have two boxes (one works fine but small, and one works unreliably but a tinkerer could probably fix it (I just don’t have the time, and if I ask basement son he’ll make it fly or something equally stupid. [What would martians do a litter robot]) I’m now divided between going outside and scrubbing them with bleach, so I can donate them, and doing that tomorrow. Meh. It’s cold out.

Anyway, that’s the dog that ate my homework. But hey, the box room smells nice. (Yes, of course I THOROUGHLY cleaned the box I’m keeping.)

Sigh. I have no sense of limits.

Okay, first an update on the …. not even identity theft, more of a stealing my phone number and using it for evil sh*t situation.

First let me reiterate that while I DO use hotmail, I’m not stupid. That’s my public email, not my FINANCIAL anything email. Even the buffered paypal (the account it’s linked to is used only for non-trusted web sites, okay?) goes through an email I never put out in public.

A lot of you also yelled at me about hotmail, but in fact the hotmail security is the same as all the others if you use two-factor authentication to your phone. They did in fact also break into my proton mail. It’s just since that’s encrypted, once you change the password, it “shreds” the contents.

I keep that hotmail account because it’s my longest, continuous account, which means I get uh… Let’s say my ping for a current job came through it, because it’s propagated through fan circuits and others. The footsy playing with the movie producer has also been conducted over that email. So, no, I’m not going to get rid of it, as I would lose potential work. Also, again, it’s my public email, and it’s everywhere. Its one defect is that it doesn’t show legitimate emails it decides are spam. But I guess I can deal with that, vs. spam traps. I also use outlook for the book pimping account, because it’s easy to establish and right there. Note that they didn’t break into that one, because no two factor authentication.

Anyway, so, that account is now secured (and off two-factor authentication.)

The phone…. The company is taking it very seriously. I think they had no idea I had any kind of platform, so they got a bit of a shock, stopped insisting it must have been me at the store, at ten pm my time, and are investigating it. And the police are involved.

We need to call today for an update, but they think — or did on Saturday — that the break-in was targeted for various reasons, starting with: they didn’t break into the email associated with the phone, but into an email listed nowhere on the phone, and continuing with they took the time to try to f*ck up what they thought were valuable relationships (well, they are, but not the way they thought, at least for two. Friends are valuable, but not lucrative) before moving on to breaking to dropbox (I guess they thought I might use it to store passwords? Weirdly, AFTER this sh*t I get a come on from Dropbox for their password storing system. NOT TODAY SATAN.) and coinbase (incomplete account because I screwed up something while setting it up, which is good, though to be honest I don’t remember why I wanted it, but it was probably to buy something stupid, like fabric from India. So I just gave up. But it was supposed to be something stupid and small, one time, which is why it was linked to hotmail.) And then devoted most of the effort to breaking into a chat program I mostly use to talk to family. Now that chat program I UNDERSTAND has salacious channels, and I think they thought that’s what it was. I kept wrestling it back, and they got it back 5 times, for a minute, before I finally changed the email for authenticating it (And we secured hotmail at about the same time.) Not that I have anything salacious there, but I also called family and asked them to kick me out of the chat room as soon as I got the compromise notice, because they don’t need to know who is moving, and who needs a job and–

Anyway, from their fascination with the chat program, I think they were mostly looking for ways to discredit me/screen capture…. I don’t know. My devoting time to Portuguese plans for world domination? (If there were any they would start with “reanimate Henry, the Navigator.” So, no.) Or perhaps my secret membership in Mediterranean People’s Uber Allas! (No, it doesn’t exist. And if it did it would be a big fight in a small room.)

So, right now everything is secure, except drop box, and the phone company, having figured out I’m a potential target, and they’re potentially in trouble if this happens again, have put in extraordinary measures to secure our account. Not that I’m using it for two factor authentication, anymore.

On things linked to the phone that held the line: Proton mail and Signal. So, if you want to communicate with me and there MUST be secrecy, use those. I advise a name on proton that has nothing to do with your name, too.

After the exciting Thursday/Friday, I was rather done in, and spent Saturday feeling lethargic, and yesterday painting gourds.

This has morphed into a story.

So, in the thirteenth century, there was the Benedictine Monastery (they work hard!) of St. Gourdamin. There is actually no evidence such a saint ever existed, and he might have been aggregated to the monastery because they did gourds. Anyway, it was believed that St. Gourdamin was buried in a giant gourd, and his followers honored him by growing various gourds, many of which were used for storing things.

During the excavation of the ruined part of the monastery (burned/destroyed under Henry VIII) they found gourds painted with snails, snails fighting knights, and snails fighting rabbits riding dogs, and all sorts of things. They also found fragments of chronicles, detailing the great Snail War of the 13th century, when giant space snails invaded. We’d have been in trouble and no mistake, if uplifted rabbits and dogs hadn’t also arrived — by time machine — to join the fight.

Eventually there will be a store and each painted gourd, cup made of gourds (not safe for food. pencil holder, maybe), and box made of gourds, and fragment of gourd shipped, painted with images of the great snail war, will also come with an appropriately charred and maltreated fragment of the chronicles. Because I’m not right in the head.

Anyway, taking a day to do something not writing seems to have helped, and now I have actual work to do.

Before I get to it, an Errata. Because I was kind of spacey and also because I’m absent minded, I listed the wrong Mackey Chandler book as a finalist for the Prometheus Award.

So: here is the updated listing.

FINALIST FOR THE PROMETHEUS AWARD:

From Mackey Chandler: Who Can Own The Stars?

The Kingdom of Central’s sovereign, Heather Anderson, set L1 as a limit for armed ships to respect, de-militarizing the Solar System. Now that the Earth nations are experimenting with star drives they want to challenge this limit anew. The USNA starship, Constitution is intercepted violating the L1 limit and brings them to the brink of war again. Will Peer Jeffrey Singh be able to negotiate a compromise? Do the Earthies mean to bargain in good faith? The Spacers need to buy time but things on Earth are always so complicated…

And so sorry about linking the wrong one. I’ve got excessive derpage. It was a strange week.

Okay, now return to your own massed confusion. Real post tomorrow.

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM BECKY R. JONES: Night Mage.

After fighting a demon in the middle of Philadelphia, Zoe O’Brien wants nothing more than to return to her normal, if stress-filled, life as an assistant professor of history at Summerfield College. But she’s an Elemental mage and that means when there’s potential magical trouble on campus, the squirrels come to her.

Who or what is the dark presence moving around campus? Why is it here and what does it want? Zoe struggles to come to terms with her mage powers and the leadership role her colleagues have given her. Complicating everything are all the papers that have to be graded, classes that need to be prepped, and most importantly, cats that require attention. Oh, yeah. She might actually have a boyfriend as well.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER — PROMETHEUS AWARD FINALIST BOOK! Friends in the Stars.

It’s hard living next to a giant, even a friendly one, much less a clumsy hostile giant. Earth’s unfriendly billions were an unpredictably restive presence. The Kingdom of Central was on the Moon, and the three allied habitats of Home were already forced to move from Low Earth Orbit to beyond the Moon, dancing around a common center in a halo orbit. That bought them some time, but wasn’t nearly far enough away. The Spacers knew it would come to a bad end. The only question was how, when, and would they survive it? The only refuge was in the stars where they had friends.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Rapunzel.

FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists. Young foreign service officer Hal Cooper faces real change with the arrival of an alien spaceship, but it means something else for Terrence.

A short story.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: A Dragon in the Foie Gras.

Captain Delaney Wolff Fox is back.

She’s just led her team on a months-long hunt through the penal world al-Saḥra’ (known otherwise by its semi-satirical name “Sanddoom”), looking for an industrial-sized illegal drug “kitchen” that’s been supplying colony worlds with various illegal substances via a network of involuntary migrant “mules”. That hunt ended satisfactorily, and rather explosively, with the destruction of the “kitchen” and hundreds if not thousands of personnel associated with it.

Now the team is heading back to Earth, hoping for some well-deserved shore leave . . .
. . . but it’s not to be. A long-sleeping foreign agent has been found in a stasis chamber in an abandoned Chicago warehouse, and it’s up to Delaney and crew to investigate the mystery, by traveling back to the year 2017 to find out why the agent was placed in stasis then, and why the stasis seems originally to have been planned to end in late 2020.

And when the sleeper wakes, asks for and consumes an entire pound of goose liver pâté, and asks for more, it’s pretty obvious they’ve got A Dragon In The Foie Gras

FROM NORMA SADLER: Krystal’s Notebook: Not a Romance

Krystal Ferraro’s boyfriend left her for her best friend. A high school junior, Krystal wants a boyfriend who cares about her, but is she willing to settle instead for physical involvement with a senior who says that he loves her? Is that the kind of caring and intimacy she wants? In her notebook, she covers her own experiences as well as what she discovers about teachers and other students.

FROM DENTON SALLE: The Genetic Vampire.

John’s life as an arson investigator was exciting enough, thank you. He really didn’t want any more surprises. So when an arson investigation uncovers an old murder, that’s more than enough.
Unfortunately, he got sloppy and found out he’s got this weird genetic disease. Vampirism.
And there are others with the same “problem” who are making offers he might have to accept.
What happens when the legends of folklore decide to visit you?

FROM ALLENE R. LOWERY: Einarr Stigandersen and the Jotunhall: A Young Adult action-adventure Viking fantasy.

A foiled elopement. A giant’s treasure. An impossible quest that will almost certainly get him killed.

Once upon a time, Stigander Raenson was heir to a thanedom. Until a curse drove him, his family, and his crew out of their homes. For years, they have all wandered the cold seas on the Vidofnir, Stigander’s prized ship, looking for treasure, glory, and a way to end the curse.

Now Stigander’s son Einarr lives a vagabond’s life on the Vidofnir, never giving much thought to the home he barely remembers. That is, until an unexpected squall and a pirate attack send them to winter at the Hall of his father’s childhood friend – and his beautiful daughter. The Jarl intends to marry her to an old man, but they only have eyes for each other.

A desperate gambit lands them both in trouble. Now Einarr has just a single season to convince the Jarl that he would be a worthy match for the Lady Runa, the Jarl’s only child. Will he return in one piece, or will the Jarl’s impossible quest be Einarr’s undoing?

FROM PETER ADAM SALOMON: Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds.

Over eight billion people died when the world ended. Two survived.L and M don’t know why they’re alive. They don’t remember what happened. Addicted to a drug that kills them for eight minutes and thirty-two seconds, they risk the end of humanity in order to learn the truth.

FROM KATE PAULK: ConVent.

The “Save The World” department really messed up this time: A vampire, a werewolf, an undercover angel and his succubus squeeze are no one’s idea of an A team. Or a B team. Or possibly a Z team. But then, since this particular threat to the universe and everything good attacks a science fiction convention — composed of people in costume, misfits creative geniuses and creative moron — , any conventional hero would have stood out. Now Jim, the vampire, and his unlikely sidekicks have to beat the clock to find out who’s sacrificing con goers before all hell breaks loose… literally.

FROM CELIA HAYES: My Dear Cousin: A Novel In Letters.

When Peggy Becker married Englishman Tommy Morehouse in San Antonio in the spring of 1938, her cousin and best friend Venetia “Vennie” Stoneman was her bridesmaid. After the wedding, Peg and Tommy traveled across the Pacific to Malaya, where Tommy managed his family’s rubber plantation. There they expected to raise a family and live a comfortable and rewarding life among the British expatriates in the tropics, while Vennie returned to Galveston to continue training as a nurse.
The start of the Second World War changed those comfortable, settled lives: Tommy Morehouse became a prisoner of war, Peg barely escaped the fall of Singapore with her small son, and Vennie Stoneman was a nurse in the US Army Nurse Corps, tending to battlefield casualties in North Africa, Italy, and France. In Australia, Peg waits out the war, wondering if her husband will survive brutal captivity by the Japanese, and Vennie risks her own life as an air evacuation nurse. Throughout all, the two women write to each other, of their lives, loves, of Vennie’s patients and comrades, and Peg’s children and the woes of running a wartime household among rationing and shortages of shoes for her children.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: TUMBLE