Month: February 2023

I’m digit-dyslexic. I’m word dyslexic, too, mind you. But words, though I can sometimes spell them very weirdly — like by phorgetting the letter f exists — I can usually figure it out the next day and sometimes spell checker can.

While with numbers, 365 is the same as 563 as 635. This means that no one should trust me to cut a piece of wood. And that when I was doing flooring in houses past, I often made paper patterns of the piece I needed, as though I were making a dress. Because that worked better. Also why I refinish furniture but rarely build it from scratch.

And therefore it is immensely funny — maybe — that I’ve always been intensely aware of “basic kitchen math.”

Like, you know, if you only have two eggs, you’re not going to make that souffle that calls for six. If you only have an onion, and you’re using half, you’ll only have half left.

And of what I call “basic economics.” Everything makes a living, from the littlest bacteria to the largest whale. You have to do things that put food in the mouth. Enough food for enough energy to “earn” the next meal.

I’ve always been aware of basic economics, because it’s just basic arithmetic. And I’ve always been aware of basic arithmetic because I used to have three or four methods of checking my work to make sure I hadn’t transposed digits. So, you know, I memorized the multiplication tables (took forever, as you’d expect) but I also became a champion of adding numbers very fast to make sure that 6×6 was indeed 36, not, by some freak 63. (Okay, I never confused that one. I knew 63 would require it to be more than 6, but you know what I mean.)

And I’ve been aware that sitting down and wishing you had a million dollars doesn’t make more than one dried up mushroom, a handful of flour and a mushroom suddenly appear in your fridge, since that’s exactly what we had left at the end of a month when we were careless as newlyweds. After that we were… more careful.

You can’t get blood from a turnip. You can’t get money from a stone. And you can’t override reality with your words.

Which is why parasitic systems like socialism and communism can only survive if there is a bigger, stronger system they can leach off of.

They can talk big. They can send balloons provocateurs over the territory of their notional enemies. They can also drive huge tubes all over the landscape and convince the superpower that they’re equals or bigger.

They can bribe, beg, cajole, blackmail a livelihood out of the productive countries.

But they’ll never survive by their wits alone.

The USSR lasted as long as it did because it was a conquering imperialistic society, on the mold of Rome. (Which is why it was hilarious they accused us of being the Roman Empire. It was pablum for their masses, the idea that we were “Rome in the decadence” and a way to explain away our greater and visible prosperity.) The first thing they did on acquiring power over a country was to steal everything not nailed down, and corrupt systems to feed them.

And even then, they were a miserable place to live, and bearable only because they were a country of serfs to begin with.

China has lasted as long as it has because they convinced the greatest consumers in the world to buy from their slave factories. Since we’ve soured on them — not even officially, just by people doing things like noping on things that announce they were made there — they’ve been facing increasing difficulty.

The socialists in America have lasted as long as they have by pretending they want to take over the country, while contenting themselves with taking over certain, deeply effed up places, and feeding off the healthy parts.

But the last oh, 12 years or so, they’ve lost all sense of proportion. Their fourth generation inheritors, who are idiots chosen solely for their politics, and with not a shred of competency or real world knowledge, think they can wish paradise into being, and that their total victory depends only on destroying everything that works.

Look, it’s no wonder that these are the people assuring us that math is racist and that 2+2=4 is white supremacy.

Because the only way their arithmetic works is if they can somehow come up with an extra five or six or ten out of wishing for it really hard.

And honestly they aren’t wrong. Because the problem is they’re running the schemes that have taken states down — subverting the voting, destroying the economy, graft and theft and total destruction — without realizing that it can’t work long term on the national scale.

It can’t work because the US has no one we can bribe or threaten to feed us. Because no one can. If we go down, the world starves. (And we won’t be all that comfortable, but we probably won’t starve.)

They’re not aware of this. They suck at kitchen math. (Also, frankly, at history. I’ve heard them attribute the great buildings of Europe to “socialism” because they have no concept of European history being longer than ours. But that’s a rant for another day.)

And this is why we have already won. Because all they can do is run around taking hammers to the knees of the economy, under the bizarre assumption that we’re the USSR or maybe Cuba or even China, and if they break everything we will suddenly become communist “forever.”

They might also have been counting on the help of those great states, Russia and China, who have in fact been bribing/buying much of the left. (Oh, Russia isn’t communist? Sure, but Putin pointed out they’re “social democrats” which is a polite term for socialists. They and China are fascist, ultimately. Which isn’t as much difference as the idiots on the left think from communism.)

They might have thought those “great powers” could come in and “pacify” us. In fact, the left’s China-worship is almost embarrassing and has been for 30 years.

Seeing Russia take an arrow to the knee on the public stage has to have scared them. And China’s latest gyrations must have put some fear in them as well, which honestly might be the real explanation for the Potemkin balloon. Which in the end just showed their puppets are their puppets and made the rest of us lose a little bit more patience with them. (And isn’t this the Junta to the ground? A plot to make them seem bigger would reveal how stupid and small they are.)

And so here we are.

I’m not telling you the times ahead will be easy or simple. They’re still taking hammers to the knees of our economy. Though people are ignoring them/tuning them off in a lot of ways. They’re still frauding their way to power, under the belief that solves everything.

As Bill Whittle — my fellow chronic depressive — said a while back “We’ve already won. It’s just that you usually take most of your casualties during the mop up.”

Things are going to get bad. But stop imagining a civil war rank on serried rank. None of that works the way you think it does.

Things are going to get hot and sportive in some times and places. They already have. But their shock troops are useless anywhere where those in power don’t feed them/encourage them. They can’t even take the suburbs, much less rural areas.

They have a vague intuition America is not like other places they’ve taken over — they understand, or think they understand, psychological factors, but not arithmetic — which is why they’re importing what they think will be willing serfs.

Except there’s something weird with that picture. I think mostly they’re importing criminals and transients, because honestly? serfs don’t stay if there’s no work. And their criminals and transients are no match for Americans, outside of compliant cities. Obama caused la grande salida. And I suspect as people lose patience and welfare loses the ability to feed them/encourage them, this salida will dwarf all salidas. I’ve wondered if the flying of “refugees” all over (before it was done by sending them to sanctuary cities) was not a scheme to destroy voting integrity (they can do that with made up people!) but to take people away from the border, so they can’t simply get back out. It reminded me of Kenya’s attempt to shove Maasai in model villages, which they abandoned at the earliest possible moment.

And at any rate, the serfs are not going to have an easy time as the economy disintegrates, they’re only going to disintegrate the economy and get hurt when things fall. (Not that the left cares.)

Thing is “We’ve already won.” And no, I don’t think we are going to end up in a dictatorship. Look, again, dictatorships are a way to go poor fast. And in this country, if you’re broke, you ain’t going to control much. Heck, even if you aren’t.

I’m not going to say it’s not going to get bad. In some places it’s going to get really bad. Any place with intense antifa activity, if you’re there, please leave. You’ve been warned.

And we might even fall apart. For a little while. Maybe.

But it won’t last.

The left is so mad they keep reviling the Constitution and the Independence and the Founders. And frankly people are looking around and saying “I don’t know much about those, but if you *ssclowns hate them, they have to be good.”

So, in the end, we will be okay. The economy might crash, but in fundamentals we’re okay. Even manufacturing is reviving, even if it’s doing so in American fashion: fewer workers needed, less expense, more production, more profit.

We will be okay. Might “crash” in externals and structure for a while, before coming back, though. Same with the rest of our symptoms.

But we’re the majority. And we’ve already won.

The mop up is going to hurt like a b*tch.

But be not afraid. We got this.

In the end we win, they lose.

Because 2+2=4.

To write a post. But there are ADD squirrels in my head just now, and I can’t. Also, things going on. Not bad things, just busy.

So….

Post tomorrow.

And because I know you guys:

We don’t have access to the paths of power, the official support, the institutions, the easy money, the wealthy supporters.

That’s the bad news. The other bad news is that those things are all corrupt and extensively corroded. This is bad news for society as a whole, even if we’re locked outside it.

Look, one thing is for the hand that has money and power to tilt slightly in favor of the still more or less good performers but ideologically balanced to the left. That I understand is what was going on in the forties, fifties, etc.

Oh, the president — FDR (ritual spit) for instance — could be a loon and choose winners and losers according to the color of their socks or whether he liked their accent. Or you know, because he had a pash for commies. But in the tiers and ranks below, even in the most biased fields — writing, television, movies, newspapers — you would get a leg up and be expedited on your way to success if you were known to be red, but still quite decent.

Sure, perhaps not the best one could find, but competent, and at least with a marginal spark of talent. (But Sarah, red scare. People were against communists. Yeah. Right. Pull the other one. It plays jingle bells. Some people were publicly and obviously ostracized by the other communists in the field, but those businesses were already thoroughly left by then, and everyone was in on it. McCarthy wasn’t wrong. He was profoundly late. (Alas, Trump might have been too.)

Still, they produced watchable stories, wrote watchable stories, threw their money behind projects that might cement most hierarchies as lefty controlled but were also massively successful, thereby creating more money. And more disciples. To an extent. The amount of soft lefties who are so because of all the “of course” leftism implied in the world building of old shows and books became their unexamined premise. It’s just that the soft sell takes a long, long time. And mostly creates decent people who are reflexively left but still able to be shocked of it, and use their damaged thinking processes to think themselves away from the poison. (A lot of us.)

However perhaps the slowness rankled them. Or perhaps it is simply the decline of any hierarchy that relies on ANY OTHER REASON THAN COMPETENCE for hiring and promoting.

It doesn’t matter if that hierarchy is skin color (any) or likes my kind of music or is a communist or is one-legged or is related to me. Over time any hierarchy, any field, any arts, any crafts and most definitely any science where hiring happens due to reasons not related to competence, dedication and devotion to the field/thing itself, becomes a clown world of idiots, virtue signalers and slackers.

We’re well into that now. We have entertainment that doesn’t entertain, military that can’t defend us, a Junta that is in the pay of our enemies, fiction writers who sound like the most boring of Elizabethan preachers (apparently under the belief people will be fined for not filling the pews) and “scientists” who bring in non-reproducible results. And that is not counting the “scientists” and people who “f*cking love science” who rage, rage that math is racist.

ALL THE HIERARCHIES ARE CORRUPT AND BROKEN AND FALTERING.

And most of our politicians and a lot of our universities are being paid by China, apparently not having realized Chinese money is basically monopoly money backed by the “faith and credit” or totalitarians. They could print it in their basement and achieve the same effect.

So, everything is broken, things are going occasionally and bizarrely sideways in ways even I would find unbelievable ten years ago, and we — the bad kids — are locked outside the whole thing.

Well, there’s good and bad in being the outsiders.

The bad is of course that normal career paths of growth are closed to us. Hearing a soft-left friend not nearly as published/with as many fans as I have talk about movie deals, and money to hold properties for possible movies, and how he’s talked to so and so about a TV series made me want to cry. I knew I was giving that path up when I came out of the closet. It’s still disheartening to know it’s as closed to me as if there were a concrete wall at the very beginning. Unless a cataclysmic event occurs, and Hollywood turns upside down, I’m out of that game.

The good… I’m going to sound like a hippie, so forgive me, but the good is that we have each other.

As times become more unstable… more people need help. But it doesn’t take a huge benefactor. It takes a hundred (or a thousand) little ones. And we have that, because we have the numbers. (Which is why we need to budget what we do in that area, so we don’t bankrupt ourselves.) It’s not easy, it’s not flashy, it’s not easily visible, but it works and often flies below the radar.

I have been telling you for 12 years, give or take, that it’s all going to fall down. It’s rotten through and through. And we have to take the weight when it falls, when it blows. We have to be ready to step in and take the weight of civilization, and keep our people alive, and make sure what comes after is sane.

Honestly, if I didn’t know you bunch of weirdos, as it becomes obvious the rot is larger and worse than I thought, I’d be worried.

But I know you. I know us.

My directive to you is “find a way.” I don’t care what the community you’re involved in is or what project: find a way. If possible, find a way to make whoever needs money more “solid” (training, redirection, direct employment) so they don’t need help again. And help them in the direction of making them more what they want to be (not what you want them to be. Alas, neither son married/is marrying a web designer.)

As you’re building over, building under, building around, do try to be creative. Sometimes the extra mile between “I helped my buddy survive” and “I helped my buddy find a new sideline that he can do or needs just a little instruction for and which will be the beginning of a new career” is very fine, and not a lot of money. Sometimes of course, it’s more than that.

Consider too your time. That two hours you spend watching cat videos? There’s a lot of learning videos on you tube.

I’m not telling you what you should be interested in, mind you. Not my job. I’ll just say I don’t think civilization will fall all the way to pre-industrial or medieval, let alone primitive. Venezuela and Cuba still have electricity (ish. Most of the time.) But if what makes your heart pound is forging metal armor, go for it, maybe there will be something it’s needed for in the future.

However, more likely? Oh, soap making. Candle making. Bread making. Clothes alterations. Car repair. Dishwasher repair. making stuff out of scrap wood. Things that will pay out right now, but will really pay out in a disrupted society. Making natural cat food (Buy taurine to drip on it.) Whatever.

I’m a very useless person and conscious of being so, so what I’m noodling on is “ways to sell my books if Amazon falls.” And writing ever more compelling stories. I haven’t however lost sight of ‘teaching writing, because I’ve learned a few things and might give someone a leg up. I’ve just been slowed/hampered by years of well…. apparently of being high altitude, but I didn’t know that.

There is a wealth of information out there. Things that the scholars of the past would have killed themselves to get. You can learn anything. If you can try to make it useful, but don’t underestimate the chances things will be unexpectedly useful.

Just stay alert and be creative.

What can you do today to support one of us who are excluded from the structure? What can you do to build or solidify a network? What can you do to help someone go a step further? (Ye, I hear you “yelling at Sarah to finish books. I’m working on it.)

Think about it, stay active about it. Because we really really really are going to need all of us and all we have to survive this and to survive the collapse of the structures.

As I said, looking at you bunch of weirdos I’m not even worried. A little confused of how it will work out, but sure it will.

Be not afraid. Just keep working. We got this.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, 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. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. – SAH

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: Haley and the Town of Refuge (Haley and Nana Book 6)

A girl, a town… and a final choice.

Spring is just around the corner when the town of Refuge is at last asked to confront the Trial’s true challenge, an event that kicks off a furor in its population. But for Haley Landry, level 9 Questgiver, the challenge is more personal. After nine months of working with the alien system and overseeing the growth of her tiny town, a questline brings her to a crossroads, not only for herself, but for Refuge as well.

It’s the hardest decision Haley has had to make, and no one can make it for her. But her choice will shape the future, inside her heart, and out of it.

Join Haley, Nana, and the residents of Refuge for one final adventure in this cozy LitRPG apocalypse. There’s a brownie recipe in the back, because no matter how heavy the material, that’s still the kind of series this is.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: A Gift of Koi

Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human?

Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn’t find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi’s side, he knows he’s found a kindred spirit.

But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: K.A.T. Antiques (Fall of the Alliance Book 11)

In a brutal cross-dimensional Empire where everything is about ownership and control, and the strongest mentalists rule . . .
Karl Traeger has a problem.

His elderly father has died, and sixteen-year-old Karl is going to be at the mercy of very unsavory relatives.
And since he’s the oldest of his generation—ahead of his cousins in the line of inheritance—he knows his uncle will never Present him: never allow him to demonstrate his fitness for the title of Lord. No, he’ll be one more brain-chipped servant.
But maybe if he moves quickly, before anyone knows his father is dead . . . he can save himself, then get to work saving the people he cares about—maybe even save his budding antiques business.

BY CLIFTON ADAMS, PUBLISHED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Law of the Trigger (Annotated): The classic pulp western

Once he had belonged to the stark and brutal days, days of manhunts and sudden violence. Now Owen Toller had a farm and a family, and not even the slightest interest in enforcing the law, especially since the citizens of Reunion had voted him out as Marshal five years ago.

Until the Brunner brothers came down from the hills — to murder and plunder, to write bloodier, more savage history than even the James and the Dalton gangs.

Suddenly, Reunion remembered that Marshals sometimes had to do more than sit in an office and cozy up to bankers.

This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving genre and historical context to the novel.

FROM MARGARET BALL: Salt Magic: A Regency fantasy romance (Regency Magic Book 1)

An enchanting heroine. A layered plot. Mystery, romance, intrigue. I had to prevent myself from looking at the end to see how it all turned out. You must buy this book. I want her to write many more in this strange and alluring world. – Sarah A. Hoyt.

Bookish and shy, Sabira has a perfect marriage of convenience to the elderly Lord Steinnland and his library, marred only by her family’s urging to trick her husband into releasing his claim to their island fastness. But time and tide bring the irritating, if handsome, Viscount Iveroth, and on his heels, scheming visitors who kill her elderly Lord and release a plague of sea monsters.

Now Sabira must travel to the city of Din Eidyn and fight to save her home and her people, with Iveroth as her only ally. But as they battle black magicians and drawing room politics, the hardest fight of all is hiding her growing feelings for the Viscount… and the fact that she’s not human…

FROM KAREN MYERS: Bound into the Blood – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 4)

Book 4 of The Hounds of Annwn.

DISTURBING THE FAMILY SECRETS COULD BRING RUIN TO EVERYTHING HE’S WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD.

George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is preparing for the birth of his child by exploring the family papers about his parents and their deaths. When his improved relationship with his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, is jeopardized by an unexpected opposition, he finds he must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a god.

He discovers he doesn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did. His search for answers takes him to the human world with unsuitable companions.

How will he keep a rock-wight safe from detection, or even teach her the rules of the road? And what will he awaken in the process, bringing disaster back to his family on his own doorstep? What if his loyalty is misplaced? What will be the price of his mistakes?

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Far Flung

In the very near future a seastead offers consumers a choice in governing systems. Navy Capt. Adam Tenney’s daughter takes that offer, but what can he do for her when pirates threaten the seastead, the U.S. refuses to recognize it, and he is trapped in a desk job on land?

A novelette.

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: The Guardian Cycle, Vol. 2: American Mage and Other Stories

It is said that war is hell. But what of the Prisoners of War, or the war orphans who grow up amidst the chaos, and what of those who escape their enemy’s prisons?

In Halcyon, meet a man who has been abused in a prison camp for so long that he has forgotten his own name – but not the desire to survive. Follow the adult orphans Warlock Ruthers produced in his campaign for power as they protect two children whom he seeks to murder to defeat a prophecy of his downfall in American Mage.

Meanwhile, Allan Kearney and Michio Oshika work on removing the demon tattoos from the former’s back at the same time they seek the means to end the persecution of Allan’s fellow prisoners. But demons do not release their prey without a fight, as the young Torránese soldier knows all too well. If he is to survive, let alone help rescue his comrades, first he will have to face the monsters clawing for his soul. It will be a battle that will require all his strength – and more…

FROM DAVID COLLINS: The Lord of Darkness (Rule of Darkness Book 1)

I always knew my real parents had to be complete assholes; why else would they name me something horrible like Vladimira Darkness. Now that I am in college, I go by the nickname, Mira.

Then a bunch of these heavily armed men-in-black types showed up and made me come with them. First in a Humvee, then in a Blackhawk helicopter, and then in a fricking spacecraft.

Apparently, my real mother didn’t die when I was a child; she only died a few days ago. I was told I needed to be there for the reading of her will.

Wearing all black for the reading of the will almost made sense. That it was heavy leather armor was a bit unexpected. Then I was given the traditional family sidearm pistol to wear.

Only this was a very special weapon made just for me. I was apparently the product of hundreds of generations of bioengineering to be someone that could use the weapon. It had a dial with settings from 1.0 to 3.0, and 2.0 was described as “explode dinosaurs.”

Why in hell would I need what was almost a handheld nuclear weapon? It seems that mother’s official title was “The Lord of Darkness” and that the succession would be the first, and possibly the last time I get to meet some of my siblings.

I had only one day to learn to survive what the future would bring. A future in a galaxy ruled by the fear of one being, me…

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: TRUTHFUL

Sorry. Was going to post, but woke up with a migraine-ish, then decided it was the excess cat hair causing it, so have been cleaning.

It’s that sort of day.

The problem with the struggles of our day: minimum wage; universal health; the perfect family; the perfect marriage; the perfect career is that people have forgotten that nothing is always an option.

No, seriously. Let’s take minimum wage for a spin on this.

People keep gabbing on about the “minimum wage” and “a living wage” as if the only reason people aren’t paid whatever it is they hanker for is the infinite greed of infinitely evil “capitalists.” I mean, I’ve seen them rage on line about how “capitalism” is the worst possible system. Because so much greed and materialism and no one is giving them i-phones for free. Or something.

BUT here’s the thing: I actually have run a business for well nigh on thirty years. And I have friends who are business owners and business managers.

I think I’m not paying enough to my assistant, my copyeditor, and I d*mn well know I’m not paying enough to my editor.

Is it my evil capitalist greed? Put a sock in it. Until I did the blog fundraiser (still figuring out delivery of rewards, and if I can’t I’ll put them out in public which defeats the principle, yes, but also makes sure they are DELIVERED. Except for mentoring and tuckerizing, because there are few of those, and they’re personal. I don’t like owing and not delivering. For next time I have…. ideas. Since I can’t use Paypal, anyway.) I couldn’t afford to pay them, at all. Every time I paid, it was money taken from the ability to pay for something else that I sorely needed. That was, if you remember, the whole reason of the fundraiser. And now I’m using that money (and will use this year’s however much it turns out to be) to push the fiction writing to earning its living. So I can pay my people “a living wage.”

TL/DR most business owners are very conscious of the debt they owe their people, up to and including having tabs in their back brain for “must give x a bonus when I’m making y level”. We know that our people, if they’re worth spit (and small businesses are very careful to only RETAIN the ones who are) are worth whatever we can pay them. And we’re competing with everyone else out there, including bigger and badder people who can take our people and pay them more. There are bonds of loyalty both ways that help, but I don’t expect them to hurt themselves for my sake. I really don’t.

We pay what we pay because it’s what we can pay.

For the longest time, I told people “Yes, I’d love to have an assistant. I need one. I just can’t AFFORD one.” Same for cleaning lady, whatever.

I still can’t afford a cleaner. What I can pay isn’t enough. So I don’t pay.

I’d have been willing, back in the day, to hire someone with a kid. They could bring the kid. They could help. They could get food or instruction in writing, or whatever alongside pay.

My mom always had a young woman who came and did dishes, in exchange for mom making them clothes. Not the same young woman. they tended to get married.

If mom had had to pay minimum wage, we’d have had unwashed dishes pile up. And the girl would have had fewer clothes of less quality and never have attracted eye of future husband, maybe.

So, you know, the person I maybe could have hired and contributed a bit towards that person’s family budget and a lot for his/her learning to write or whatever, in exchange for her/him coming over and dusting, vacuuming, doing the cat boxes, making sure bathrooms were less than gross, maybe starting dinner (though unlikely, as I usually do that early morning) never got that money/help. And I never got help and produced less. And got sick when I tried to shoulder house and writing and everything, because there are limits to the flesh.

But I couldn’t afford minimum wage, or contributions to social security. So we got nothing. Nothing is always an option.

In the same way, if your jobs at McDonald’s are mandated to pay $20 an hour? Mickey D’s will automate. And the would be cashiers will be unemployed. They get nothing.

I know that some special kind of idiot is out there rubbing his hands and saying “Good. Minimum wage stops exploitation. These people are better off on welfare. At least they have their dignity.”

Uh, do they? They also have no resume, no way to prove they’re worthy/able to hold a job. Which means it’s not just this first, low paying job they can’t get. It means when a bigger job comes along they also can’t get that, because they never learned.

But let’s game it beyond the individual: Minimum wage is decreed at whatever you need not to starve in NYC or LA. Let’s say $20. There, you showed those evil capitalist pigs.

This doesn’t mean that everyone who is working at the entry level now gets $20. It means half of them get laid off and get nothing.

No, not because of greed. Because the alternative is the business closes.

But even with laying off half, most businesses do need the work force. I think half the restaurants are using “labor shortage” as an excuse. They just can’t afford to pay for what they need. And as we’re seeing… well, it’s a spiral. fewer workers, longer waits less “fun” experience for clients, who start eating out less, because what’s the point, and then– It spirals.

So even with businesses doing what they can to stay in business, and a lot of people getting nothing, all commerce structures spiral down. Businesses close. Farms close. Restaurants close. A whole lot of people get nothing, and we all get less: Fewer options, less enjoyment, fewer opportunities, less wealth.

“Good,” says the twit. “Welfare will provide for all, and when everything crashes, we get socialism, and then it’s utopia.”

Uh uh. First, it is already socialism. The government is already controlling the means of production that are theoretically owned by someone else. The means of distribution too, though Marx never got it. And that’s not utopia. It’s what’s strangling everything and ensuring we get nothing. Second, at the end of this lies NOTHING. Welfare might give you a check for a hundred million Somollians. Where are you going to spend it? The stores are closed, the shelves are bare. The farms have killed the cattle and shut down because they can’t afford the electricity and water let alone labor.

What are you going to do? Try to convince people barely cultivating enough for subsistence to give you their stuff? You’re going to need tanks. How are you going to get there? There’s no gas stations open.

But Sarah, you say: We already have minimum wage, and things haven’t collapsed. Why not raise it.

Yeah, we have minimum wage. And an illegal workers problem, because people can’t pay it. Also a growing and increasingly less capable welfare class. And we’re sort of tottering along. And money is coming from somewhere.

Specifically money is coming from thin air, spun by the Federal government. Which sooner or later crashes. We’re being protected by being the World’s reserve currency. Or IOW we’re being protected from our own folly because others are worse. That can’t go on forever. And if I understand correctly, the whole world is tottering on the edge of the abyss.

But we are getting poorer. We’ve seen it these last two years with all sorts of benevolent mandates and hand outs. The wealth ultimately comes from all of us. We lose discretionary spending. We lose what we need to do more than subsist.

We’re already on the path to getting nothing.

But the idiot-ignorants keep pushing. “Free universal health care” they say. Only like food, or an apartment, that requires others’ labor.

Yes, our doctors are paid more than in Europe. That’s because their training is twice as long and twice as expensive. So they kind of need the money. They have enormous debt and are starting careers in their thirties. Tell them they have to work for “X” and they leave the profession in droves. They already have over Obamacare and its senseless mandates. More will if they can’t pay their debt anyway. Better work at something with less stress. And then we import…. well, seems to be mostly Chinese (but also a lot of third world) doctors, who aren’t trained the same. Yeah, they’ll work for less. But you know, then we get nothing. Because we don’t get the medicine we are used to/what’s needed to keep living/be well.

NOTHING is always an option.

Women holding out for the perfect career, whether or not the have the training because they’re women, hear them roar. (Oh, men too, but–) In the end what they get is nothing. Nothing is always an option. Because getting where you want to go requires a lot of compromise, of trades, and of clawing onward on bleeding fingernails.

You demand the thing you want? Well, the world has no reason to give it to you. And even if the government mandates you get it it’s likely to turn to dust and ashes, because you haven’t learned, fought and worked to be ready to do it. (Look at the Naval Observatory and the world’s most visible diversity hire.) In the end, you get nothing.

Same, btw, with holding out for the perfect marriage mate, which is germane to this because some clever fools are agitating for the government to arrange marriages. (That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Because there are things the bureaucrats haven’t f*cked up still.) So, you know, beauty and competence aren’t hoarded.

Now these people are mostly spitting in the wind, and trying to wishcast, but then — looks at last two years — are you saying these idiots won’t seize on it as a benevolent thing they can do?

It’s important to remember, when we agitate for mandates, or more likely the young and stupid do, that yeah, people might be getting a raw deal. But the alternative to raw deal isn’t perfection. The alternative to raw deal is often nothing.

Sure, sure, there are actual greedy businessmen. They don’t partake of the nature of angels. There are greedy everything.

But here’s the thing: Most people aren’t “greedy”. Sure they want more than they have, but they’re willing to work for it. (And if you think running a business isn’t work, you’ve never done it.) And they’re willing to pay others to work for them, because at some point all businesses hit grow-or-die.

You break that, you tell them “you must pay x now” and most businesses die.

And if there’s one thing we know is that “government” isn’t even competent to wipe its own arse. Its two core areas of competence seem to be taking people’s money and hurting people. (Yes, I know, it also has prescribed functions, and I have no problem with them under the Constitution. But that requires taking a lot less money and hurting a lot less people. And I’m not saying they’ll do those things WELL just that sometimes it’s better than doing nothing.) So, no, the government is not going to look after all you stray lambkins when you get nothing.

NOTHING IS ALWAYS AN OPTION.

And nothing will break everything. Not just capitalism, but socialist dreams and civilization itself, eventually.

So tell all the idiots pushing for “living wage” and “free healthcare”: Nothing is always an option.

And in the end, you’re hastening the day of nothing.

That’s all. You get nothing.

Story is not reality. And fiction often takes liberties with reality.

While I find the injection of leftist politics or climate change “facts” into every possible TV series, it’s not enough to make me want to put a shoe through the TV.

And my husband knows that if he insists on watching TV while I’m in the room, he will have to put up with my occasional commentary, when I look up from typing and hear something particularly egregious. My commentary is rarely profane. It usually is more like “Pshaw.” And “In your dreams that’s proven.” Or “What world are you living in?”

I find politics in entertainment products annoying, but I also know the left can’t help themselves.

No, it’s the other stuff that really gets to me, and often makes me shout, “Hon, you can’t watch this while I’m here. Not if you like that TV.”

Of course, we’ve been married a long time. When I say that he was usually about ten seconds from turning it off himself.

The other stuff? Yeah. the “of course this is the world and how it works.” That stuff, because it’s just part of the setup slides under the radar for most people. I don’t even know if I catch it because I have a writer’s brain or because I have a small Cold War Injury that only hurts when I laugh, and I ain’t laughing.

Stuff that gets to me: No one is clean. No, listen to me: NO ONE IS CLEAN. Not even the so called hero, who is often the most despicable of them all, but hey he kills bad guys, so he’s wonnerful.

However not only is everyone cheating, stealing and killing as a matter of course, but they’re also engaging in all forms of sexual depravity real and imaginary.

This is why btw in the left’s mind the worst crime is “hypocrisy” because everyone is the worst of the worst all the time, and pretending to be good is only done to make others feel bad. Because why else would you do it.

I often wonder if that’s why every lefty politician (or businessman) once you scratch the surface is a horror show. And which came first. Is it because they all are like this, or because they grew up thinking everyone is like this?

And the entire worldbuilding is bizarre and exhausting, when you bake that in. Look, I’m not the nicest person int he world, but where would I find time to have underage sex slaves? And where would I keep them? And who has the energy? EVEN SUPPOSING I HAD ANY INTEREST. Ditto with a drug habit. (Well, coffee, but–) Or the multiple affairs on the side. Or attending Satanist masses or whatever the heck I’m supposed to be doing according to the left’s perception of the world.

It’s like “Dude, I’m late on a short story and three novels. I’m going to have to pass up on the sex cult this month again. Sorry.”

Then there is the society. No, seriously.

First, the power brokers in the society are always white and what I’d call “Southern preachers” even when they aren’t. Heck, they’re Southern Preachers circa 1980, with the hair and the suits. And these will be corporate officers or whatever.

Have your female character get a job in a corporation and she’d either going to be asked if she’s a Christian, or treated like an oddity and like she’s overreaching herself.

I’ll be honest: I’ve been in the US for almost 40 years. NONE OF THAT HAS BEEN TRUE EVER. Even in the eighties the assumption if you were “smart” is that you were an atheist and any mention of going to church would get you made fun of. Because it was pushed in all the colleges that that was backward and “ignorant.” It was also pushed in all the entertainment even back then.

Unless a corporation is specifically I don’t know “United Baptist Books” (meh. I’m out of coffee. It’s best I can come up with.) You’re not going to get asked about your religion. And even there you’re unlikely to.

And all the characters somehow got brought up in this oppressive ultra-Christian, ultra-conformist society that might once have existed somewhere, in a small town in the South circa 1950 but I doubt it, because I grew up in an oppressively mono-religious little village, and even then there were dissenters and scoffers, and if they weren’t actually frontally attacking the majority they were ignored and tolerated.

AND despite getting brought up in that kind of background and acting shocked at the stupidest things, if a scene calls for them to talk about sex, they reveal knowledge of perversions I never heard about before, and note I learned about sex from Roman mythology first.

Then there are the …. Look, climate alarmism is a thing that in the provincial backwaters of academia and associated fields gets taken for revealed truth. Even though none act as if it were really true. I mean, look, if you really think we’ve passed the point of no return, and are all going to be dead in ten years why are you saving for retirement? I figure the back of their brains is much smarter than they are. But never mind.

But why is it that even the characters who don’t believe in it never laugh and say “that’s nonsense?” No, the characters always say things like “I don’t care if the world burns.” Like there is no room at all to question the nonsense. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the church of holy Gaia is obviously stupid. This is probably virtue signaling, or maybe the writers really being that dumb, but the result is that if you have a modicum of science training, you find yourself looking at the screen and going “They’re all mentally deficient” which adds another layer of horror to the setting.

And then there is the other “of course.” OF COURSE a white character is racist, no matter how they hide it, or even if they work tirelessly for racial harmony. OF COURSE a Muslim character has been bullied and treated badly (note, there is almost no incidence of this. At all. There are more hate crimes against Jews than Muslims. Also my laugh out loud moment was the Muslim guy who grew up in Denver talking about all the Christians putting him down. I was going “Dude, just DUDE. There are more open Muslims than open Christians in Denver, because big city and …. What?”)

The compound world of all these “of courses” is a horrible, nasty place, where every human is feral, women are more discriminated against than in the Middle East and oh, yeah, there is no way to get ahead except by thieving, murdering and defrauding others.

And all of this gets put in the back of people’s heads by not being part of the main plot, just “how things are.” Which means they will confuse it with lived experience.

When you wonder where the left comes from? They come from TVlandia, and it’s a terrible place.

They’re so convinced the world is like that that they can’t even perceive the real world. And that’s before you get to all the alarmism nonsense about climate or whatever is the thing today.

I wish there was a miracle to remove the blinders and let them see they don’t have to be miserable. But if it exists, I haven’t found it.

And I don’t know how to combat this dropping of sludge into the soul except by creating better worlds and keeping pushing them out there.

Under over and around. Because there’s no other way.

What Matters Most When All Is Said And Done – A Blast From the Past from October 2008

Thought out of nowhere — or perhaps not since I’ve “faced” this in many books and stories, from Tom in Draw One In The Dark facing the Great Sky Dragon and knowing there’s no way he walks out of there alive, to the girl in Something Worse Hereafter — in the Wings collection — who knows she’s dead, but there’s a second death and not how permanent, to probably countless others I’ve forgotten.

Those last few minutes fascinate me.  Oh, people die in their sleep, people die without knowing they’re going to die, but I suspect most of us are starkly wide awake for the end and we know there’s no return, that this time there will be no save.  We come into the world without knowing ourselves, and all the time we’ve known ourselves we’ve been alive.  How is it to face the undiscovered country?

This is wholly separate from religion, btw.  I’m one of those for whom faith requires and effort and a silencing of the mind.  I know what they say is on the other side, but is there?  Curiously I never doubt those I love or have loved go on, cats and dogs and people alike.  The world would have to be a nonsensical thing and life less than sound and fury for death to erase my beloved paternal grandmother, my flawed maternal grandfather or the childhood friend who died much too young.  It would have to be a strange place to have forever destroyed Petronius the Arbiter, cat from Hades.  No, somewhere I’m sure they’re alive and still integrally themselves, as is Pixel the “speaker to the humans” orange fuzzball I miss everyday.

But those people — yeah, cats are people too, got a problem? — were special individuals, in their own way saints of heroes or… bigger than life.  As for me, who am none of those, who can tell? I have a vague idea life continues in some form and hope there will be books and cats, if I’ve been very, very good, but the preferred outcome might be that there is nothing but oblivion.  Perhaps this makes me morbid, but my secret wish is that there is literally nothing on the other side.  Just… as though I’d never existed.  After life’s fitful fever (s)he sleeps well and all that.

Once I came  close enough to those final moments that it seemed a sure thing.  In fact, during an eleven day stay in hospital I came close to crossing that gateway at least twice.  (Might have been three times.  My blood ox was so low most of the time, that I don’t remember very clearly.  Brain damaged, I tell you.)  So… what was there? 

Well, like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, coming face to face with your mortality at 33 does concentrate the mind wonderfully.  There are so many things I want, so many things I think, so many things I am.  And then when it all came to the end, in the silence at the eye of the storm, it all settled down and simplified.  I regretted leaving my husband and was sure if there was something on the other side, I WOULD miss him; I worried for my boys, then one and five.  But above all, around all, I felt as if the novels and stories I’d never written — at the time I was unpublished and had only written five? novels — were screaming at having to die with me.

Yes, my life changed after I got better and left the hospital.  At many times and places people have told me I need to close the office door.  I need to keep the kids out.  I must swat the cats off the keyboard.  I can’t stop in midst novel to go cuddle my husband.  Pardon me but… poppycock.  What comes after is a mystery, but one thing I know and that is that if any form of awareness or thought or memory subsists, I’ll miss my family and friends.  I’m not a good person, but those I love — and not just in terms of sexual love, but my friends too, those I refer to as being “within the magic circle” yes, even my e-daughters and other friends that I’ve only met online :) — I love deeply and I enjoy their company and I will do so as long as I can.

The other thing is that I started taking the writing more seriously — without neglecting my family or friends.  It went from being a wishful, sort of hobby that might one day be a job, and it became a driving passion.  And the reason I write as much as I do.  I don’t want those stories to die unread, in my head.  Life is too important to waste, unlived.  And stories are born to be heard.

Other than that?  I don’t know.  I’ve faced it so many times in writing — what will it be like in real life, and how will I feel when it comes?  One thing I know — it will come.  It sounds like one of those sixties truisms, like “we’re all naked under our clothes” but life TRULY is a fatal condition, and everyone dies eventually.  To pretend otherwise robs our life of urgency and strength. 

All I can hope is that if I’m required to face it before I expect to, I’ll do so with courage, because whether there’s nothing on the other side; whether the dreary dust-world of the ancients lurks; whether resurrection and eternal life looms…  in all of those, I’m sure that for those left behind the manner of one’s death will count.  For some reason — probably the movie — I’m thinking of the Greeks at the Hot Gates.  The manner of their death sure as hell mattered.

And for the rest, I’ll leave it in the words of one of those men long dead who I’m sure is alive and vibrant somewhere, and probably still writing:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.