The last century hasn’t actually brought about great “scientific” improvements in governance or the condition of man. It has brought about better production and better commerce, which was enough to stop the periodic famines which plagued our ancestors.

Famines and scarcity subsist only where pernicious central governments stomp on human liberty and individual freedom. And they need to stomp pretty hard. We haven’t managed it. But there are rumors out of China and Venezuela. And of course Russia managed it, just as they did the near-starvation of “never quite enough.”

However, all those advances in material culture didn’t bring about similar advances in centralizing government and “sculpting” the new man.

Humans remain human. And the more centralized, over a larger area, that government is, the more inefficient it is. Even — fortunately — at creating misery. Government that requires certain results gets certain results reported. Even if they have nothing to do with reality.

Sure, the Soviets didn’t have nearly our nuclear arsenal. But the people at the top there MIGHT very well have thought they did, at least after a while. Because the underlings had to report it was done. or else.

All of you repeating the nonsense about boiled frogs, and how their sloooooowwww plan has worked perfectly are just buying into the same juvenile, retarded lie. NONE of their plans ever worked perfectly. Their history is littered with five year plans that worked only in someone’s imagination.

So why would their plans work better in a far away place they never fully understood? With a people who are notoriously averse to obeying?

Of course they didn’t. They don’t. You can convince yourself they have, particularly if you listen to the left and ignore all the times they got stomped on, got smacked, got their cookies taken away.

Look, their plans at changing THE PEOPLE and the people’s beliefs worked so well that despite their total control of federal democracy, two presidents that broke the script, almost 40 years apart, were enough to wreck all their illusions and control. Reagan and Trump, amid a train of uniparty parrots were enough to destroy the left’s certainties and “control.”

This is because their control was always — and still is — largely not real. It’s an illusion created by the mass-industrial communications complex. Here as in Russia, they don’t control ANYTHING but the narrative. The narrative is how they keep telling you to give it all up, because, look, their plan worked perfectly, and now your children are theirs and mwahahahaha.

In true fact, they’ve broken their teeth on America. They’ve managed — with propaganda — to take over the sectors that are less in contact with reality: academia, the arts, the rarefied heights of corporations. (Those aren’t really business. They’re to business what MBAs are to running a lemonade stand. Having worked for corporations, the large ones have more in common with massive, inefficient states than with commerce of any kind.)

The rest of us? We have not surrendered our guns or our minds. Yes, the propaganda machine keeps pushing those who have, but that’s the only thing the centralized state was ever good at: propaganda.

But if their plans were working perfectly, “Let’s go Brandon” would not have gone viral. That one proved not only that the majority of people aren’t with the left, but also that the majority of people see the media manipulation. More importantly, do you remember what the “Let’s go Brandon” was all about? Right. There were spontaneous flash mobs forming everywhere screaming “F*ck Joe Biden.” I’d known about them for months. They were forming everywhere, including in New York City. That one was just one that was caught on camera. (Because of course, the media never showed those.)

If their plans were working perfectly, each of their “let’s ban guns’ would be having an effect.

If their plans were working perfectly, their attempts at grooming people’s kids would be ignored or applauded.

If their plans were working perfectly, they wouldn’t have needed federal agents in twitter, to make sure the narrative didn’t break. They wouldn’t need armies of Chinese and Russian commenters in blogs, trying to paint the idea America is what it isn’t. (They’re very distinctive too. Russians will never understand we’re not as racist or anti-semitic as they are. Their idea of America is just Russia, but with more territory. Their view of us and what they think they’re playing to is as obvious as their screwed up syntax. As for the Chinese, they just tend to be repetitive and extol the virtues of China. Much big, so strong.)

If their plans were working — I remind you they’ve been at this for A HUNDRED YEARS — twitter as it appeared to be would be the real America. The real Britain. Etc. But it’s not.

If you think any of those are aberrations, you’re falling for the narrative: for what the media pushes and showcases.

This isn’t going their way. They have the levers of visible power. They have the big megaphones. They have the narrative.

We have…. everything else. And the more they push things that will outright kill us, like idiot fuel bans, the less their “levers” will work, because people have a self-preservation instinct. People will want to stay alive, and will do it by any means possible. Which means, largely, ignoring the “official power.”

Those who will wail and say “but that destroys law and order” aren’t precisely wrong. but they aren’t precisely right either. Americans have a very strong instinctive grasp on “legitimate authority” and seem to bounce back to it when the illegitimate one is disassembled.

They aren’t winning. They’re dangerous as heck, don’t get me wrong, because they keep insanely grabbing things and making them not work, both to try to save themselves and frankly to punish us for not loving them.

It will hurt. But they’re losing.

The image you should have of them is not of the careful planner in the shadows — they ain’t that. Look at their luminaries — but of the falling monster, grabbing at chunks of the building to prevent his fall, and inevitably breaking things.

It’s going to hurt. It might even take decades of pain. I don’t think so, because America is not that patient.

But their control is breaking.

If it weren’t they wouldn’t need ever increasing levels of fraud just to keep control of the bureaucracy and the “obvious” power.

The problem is they keep thinking they’re masterminds. Their self conceit is staggering. But in everything else? They’re petty small people, each of them obsessed with his tiny fiefdom, and willing to knife their best friend in the back to keep it.

In fact, they are the current incarnation of a very old evil. An evil we keep defeating. An evil that America stomped on very decisively just with its founding.

They’ve grabbed hold of us again — spits on the graves of Wilson and FDR — now and then. But we always punt them. Because they’re not natural here. They might not be natural anywhere in the West.

They’re a disease. And we have an immune system. Even in the rest of the world, they’re in increasing trouble — though you’ll never know it from mass media — because they don’t work. They never have. All they have is the narrative. And the more distant the narrative is from reality, the more obvious the break is.

Be not afraid. Don’t fall for the narrative. The way to defeat them is not to try to follow them into their house of lies.

The way to defeat them is to ignore them, and build what works.

Build over, build under, build around.

Be not afraid.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that I was born less than twenty years after the end of World War II. It hit me as an anvil the other day that when I was bumming around Europe with an Eurorail pass in the early eighties, the people I ran into had been children in World War II. Like my dad, who, back then, was in his late 40s. Or even adults, for the older people.

Those guys in the back of the bar in Germany, saying nasty things about the American tourists? It’s entirely likely they’d fought in the German armies.

It didn’t feel that way. You see, World War II was long ago. Done and dusted. It had happened in the world of old movies, where everything was in black and white. And World War I, of which my grandparents had vivid memories (as children)? Well, that was… that was at least as far away as the French revolution. As old as a belief in the divine rights of kings. Done and dusted. Sleeping with the ancestors. No more affecting my life — perhaps less — than the edicts of Roman emperors or that Portuguese king who planted pines to slow erosion.

But it’s not that way. Of course not.

We’re all born into a world of ghosts, and raised with things no one ever says, because — well, it’s not even because we don’t want to. It’s more that it’s so obvious to us, who have been around a long time — it never occurs to us to mention it.

My parents mentioned being little and having government people come around to glue a film on the windows. In case of bombing, so it wouldn’t cause more death and destruction. (Yes, Portugal was neutral. Which was actually a really bad place to be when you’re a small and poor country. As was pointed out when I was little “well, if Portugal weren’t neutral, Spain would have invaded. The end. Unless it went in on Spain’s side and then England would have bombed it. The end.” So Portugal sent food to both sides, starved its people and apparently played brinksmanship games.) Mom talked of going hungry, and how expensive food was. Dad… well, his family always grew the food they needed, but there wasn’t much extra for anything.

But that’s what I heard of. And dad had books of military history and a lot on World War II. But I never realized it was that close, that it was not just living memory but “vigorous adult” memory. Until a few years ago.

I bet you my kids feel the same about the Cold War. They have no concept of growing up knowing at any minute the bombs would fly, and destroy all life on earth, and send the survivors to the stone age. (That this was never plausible or the truth, but another Soviet propaganda operation is something else.)

I was talking to someone slightly older than I about everyone being scared of nuclear war, and us sitting here, going “first time?”

But there’s more to it than that, of course. That thing I said above? “That was never likely?”

It was never likely. We know nukes don’t have the sort of range and effect we were told they had. We know nuclear winter was a crock dreamed up by people who wanted the west to voluntarily disarm.

At the risk of sounding insane, the entire 20th century is sounding more and more like the empires doing these plays to keep the crowd quiescent so they could continue ruling, centrally and very badly.

I hate to sound like the mid century communists — who were saying this for other reasons — but what did WWI actually accomplish? Well, getting rid of young men of a bellicose disposition. WWII also, to an extent. Also, allow governments to grasp more power than they ever dreamed of. Both wars gave centralized governments more power. In the US it pretty much shredded the constitution.

And the cold war? I didn’t even know this till I went through the Cosmosphere, which considering how much I read is amazing, but the soviets had nothing. THEY HAD NOTHING. In the fifties and sixties, when Heinlein was worried about nuclear war, in the seventies, when we were sure we were falling behind, what they had was mostly very long metal tubes, which they drove around the country to give the impression that they had missiles.

What do they have now? I don’t know. Do you? But one thing I know for sure: it’s in their best interest to pretend to have more than they have, and to have it in good shape. And as is, they’re not being incredibly convincing.

And why did our intelligence believe it? Well, now. Of course, more threat from the enemy meant more funding for our intelligence services. It meant more power to them and their masters. Why blow the illusion.

And that is part of it. I was talking to a friend today and he said pretty much everything is broken. All our institutions, all our professions, all our interactions. They’re all broken.

Now to some extent all human society is always broken. We’re not like unto gods, acting perfectly. Of course we’re not.

But it’s also that the more centralized something is, the less it works. And anything that tries to control a large area is just screwing up by the numbers. And any agency, any government body that gets paid to find threats, will find threats. If they have to create them themselves.

What I said above, about the 20th century being a play to keep the masses quiescent. Sure. but it wasn’t a centrally coordinated conspiracy.

It was more that when the idea that governments should be centralized, that EVERYTHING was more efficient centralized and standardized, had taken control, what followed was inevitable. Because once you create bodies to pretend to control everything, they will. They will also try to increase their control. And if it kills people, so be it. It’s for law and order or something.

This nonsense started with the industrial revolution and the idea if centralized production of widgets was better, then governing humans like widgets was just the ticket.

Only it doesn’t work. It’s never worked. It kept failing, and every time it failed, it grabbed more power to hide the failure.

Wars between powers? Well, they do help keep the population quiet don’t they? Not to mention getting rid of young men, that troublesome demographic. And also allows the central government to squelch dissent. You wouldn’t want to aid the enemy, would you?

Round and round it goes, growing and growing, and less and less capable of doing anything properly every time.

Till now.

Now most centralized governments competencies are two: killing their own people and stealing money. (Not saying that some people don’t try to do good work, and that some isolated institutions/professions/disciplines don’t work. A lot of us are still trying to do good work while engulfed by morass. And a lot even work for government, which keeps grabbing more and more areas, anyway. What I’m saying is that it’s not only not the best way to do things, but it’s actively counterproductive.)

But there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the big centralized institutions and industries. And they’re fighting tooth and nail to survive; to have the institution survive.

Only… Only there’s so far you can run before everything is not just broken, but visibly so.

And we’re there.

The system is broken and can’t function.

What comes next, no one knows. Nor what the crash will look like, except there’s a good chance it will be first very slow, then very fast.

But all we can do is be aware of what the situation really is: not the destruction of some ideal system, but at worst the destruction of the patches to “centralize everything” applied during the long wars of the twentieth century.

Systems that never worked that well, but could pretend they did.

It’s up to us to build better. We’ll never build perfect. But let’s try to make what comes next scaled to the individual and local.

At least when we fail it will be small crashes.

Shoulder to the wheel. Let’s make what comes next better.

*I swear I did a promo post. Took me two hours. Then…. Well, then I went to make the house safe for Kittinity. Imagine my surprise when I found out the post had no content. WordPress Delenda est. And once more into the promo, my friends – SAH*

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 MAX BRAND, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Jim Curry’s Test (Annotated): The classic pulp western

Jim Curry was a loafer, but never did anybody any harm. Until his gun accidentally went off, and killed the most beloved old-timer in the area. It was an accident, but the sheriff isn’t overly sympathetic, and when Curry breaks the sheriff’s jaw escaping, the townsfolk decide that due process just won’t do…

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

FROM JL CURTIS WITH STORIES BY MONALISA FOSTER, CEDAR SANDERSON, TOM ROGNEBY, DOROTHY GRANT, AND OTHER MISCREANTS WHO SOMETIMES HANG OUT HERE: Twisted Tropes

Things are never what they seem, and on the other side of this cover, what you know isn’t so!

Plunge into eight tales of that will feel familiar, only to careen through more twists than a country road at night, and stranger turns: From noir private eyes, to Fae battles, to the cookies of the dark side, you’ll find a surprise in every story!

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Last Pendragon (Legends Book 1)

“The last thing I expected when I went to grieve in the mountains was to get chased by werewolves, kidnapped by a dragon, or meet a legend. But that was exactly what happened.”–Sara Hawke

Sara Hawke, a highly-educated former PhD candidate in Linguistics, is plunged into a situation that strains her skepticism: first she meets a pack of werewolves while camping on the night of the full moon, then she’s rescued by a man the werewolves seemed to fear. Her rescuer then decides that she’ll be good company until he decides to let her go. Then he tells her that she has the potential to be a sorceress, and offers to teach her.

Along the way, she learns that legends aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be, and are occasionally more than they seem…

FROM C. V. WALTER, CEDAR SANDERSON, JL CURTIS, BRENNEN HANKINS, BART KEMPER AND OTHER REPROBATES: Steam-Powered Postcards

Can you tell a story in exactly 50 words? The Three Moms of the Apocalypse went to Louisiana’s World Steampunk Exposition and Makers Faire in Lafayette, LA and issued a challenge.

Tell us a story that could fit on the back of a postcard. Use 50 words, no more, no less. We’ll provide the postcards.

The response to this challenge was huge!

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Other Princess

This time, they invited the last fairy to the christening.

Elise, uncursed at her christening, received strange gifts about castles and roses. With such good fortune, what more does she need? She grows up forever in the shadow of her lovely, cursed, tragic cousin.

Even when the curse falls, and Princess Isabelle lies in enchanted sleep, life must go on for Princess Elise. Despite the curse, the kingdom can not sleep itself, and neither can she.

FROM A. PALMER: Troubled Poems for Difficult People

This is a book of troubled poems
For difficult people.
The first of those people is me
I write them to myself
I write them about myself
But I don’t write them for myself.
If reading them helps, I am grateful.

“Troubled Poems for Difficult People” is a body of just under a hundred poems about philosophy, pain, and humility before God from a Christian perspective. It concludes with “Book of Weekdays,” intended as a meditation on mornings and evenings for each day of the week.

BY EDMOND HAMILTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Complete Interstellar Patrol (Annotated): A pulp space opera omnibus.

In 1928, Edmond Hamilton published Crashing Suns in Weird Tales magazine, at approximately the same time that E.E. Smith’s Skylark of Space was published in Amazing Stories, giving both men the distinction of creating the genre of space opera. Hamilton, however, was the first to create a series, writing further stories in his Interstellar Patrol Series in 1929 and 1930, then writing a final one in 1934.

Here in one volume is every Interstellar Patrol story Hamilton published, including the novel Outside the Universe. What the stories lack in characterization and scientific plausibility, they more than make up for in enthusiasm, spectacle, and sheer breakneck pacing.

    This iktaPOP Media omnibus includes new introductions that give the stories genre and historical context.

FROM KAREN MYERS: To Carry the Horn – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 1

AN ENTIRE KINGDOM BUILT AROUND A SUPERNATURAL NEED FOR JUSTICE, ENFORCED BY THE WILD HUNT AND THE HOUNDS OF HELL.

What would you do if you blundered into a strange world, where all around you was the familiar landscape of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, but the inhabitants were the long-lived fae, and you the only human?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Day the War Struck Home

Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She’s to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts — but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF’s. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.

It’s the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it’s the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

However, the intelligence proves incomplete — the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.

It’s a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.

FROM EDWARD P. MOSER: THE OLD TOWN HORROR: Murder and Theft in America’s Most Historic Locale

A genteel Border South town not far from the nation’s capital is shaken by a series of vicious slayings at historic sites. These include a Civil War cemetery for escaped slaves; a burial mound of Confederate soldiers; a church associated with George Washington; and a museum on the Antebellum Era. At the same time, violent break-ins take place at venerable banks and townhomes connected with the lives of Washington, Robert E. Lee, and civil rights figures. The small city is already in the thrall of a frightening pandemic, disputes over the removal of historic statues, and nation-wide turmoil on alleged police misconduct.
Meantime, violent or offbeat characters enter the life of the town: an escaped jihadi terrorist; a neo-Nazi bomber; Woke demonstrators; a power-hungry FBI official; and a beguiling teacher obsessed with the afterlife. Fears multiply about killers on the loose. Law enforcement is baffled, until a relentless local historian and his intrepid, alluring lady friend start to uncover the horrifying truth behind the shocking crimes. They have grave encounters with a menagerie of villains who threaten to ignite a second Civil War. Leading to a showdown at a gruesome site symbolic of the town’s troubled history, and tumultuous present.

FROM RON CORRIVEAU: The Agent’s Daughter (Agent Series Book 1

Melina has been preparing for a future career as a spy.

She just doesn’t know it.

Legendary spy Evan Roberts always knew that his fifteen-year-old daughter
Melina also possessed the absolute lack of fear required of an agent.
Without telling her his real profession or his intention, he began to guide her
toward an eventual career as a spy. However, Melina’s world is shattered
after her mom is involved in an accident that leaves her mysteriously unhurt
but unresponsive. Her father’s plans on hold, Melina settles into life at a
suburban high school, immersing herself in a world of schoolwork, her
friends and a budding romance with Alex, the cute new guy in her class.

When Melina and her father uncover shocking new information about her
mother’s accident, Melina is pulled deep into her father’s shadowy world.
With Alex desperately trying to find her and only hours to go before it will
be too late to save her mother, Melina and her father work together using
their combined skills to find a way to reach her.

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: BOILING

This is a new trick of word press I DO NOT APPRECIATE. Took me two hours to do the promo post, and it ate it.

Sigh. Redoing.

We’re safe, kittens are safe, everyone is well.

We just let late, then had stuff to do when we got home.

I probably won’t post at instapundit till tomorrow, because I’m falling asleep on my face.

But I didn’t want you guys to worry.

Gathering of TX friends was FUN, but I’m glad to be home. Peopling is hard. However, I do feel better.

Okay, there’s only three of them. Helen and Pol, which we’re going to keep, and one for Marshall, little Harmony who look like one of those q-tips that’s starting to unravel and looks fuzzy.

This is Sweet Helen. We couldn’t get Pol to linger with us, though he played with Dan and let him tickle the little fuzzy belly.

Harmony was also really active, and didn’t linger, but I got a picture. She was determined to keep Cedar’s Toast stuck in a little Amazon box, so every time toast tried to pop up, she got smacked into cowering in the box again, which is very funny.

Here she was plotting how to steal the chicken treat from Helen. Um… she’s not bad but she’s very mischievous. She’s still a good and sweet kitten.

What surprised me was how tiny they were. I kind of expected them to be bigger from the pictures, but they’re not.

Anyway, since I’m in unreliable internet mode, I really cannot do the promo today. I’ll do it tomorrow, probably midday or something when I get home. We’ll be leaving very very early with kittens in the back. (Pray for us.)

Anyway, they were very cheering. We’ll see how the old sour pusses back home take to them. I expect Havey to be excited and adopt them, but Valeria might try to eat them, so we’ll see. (Again pray for us.)

See you tomorrow.

Years ago, when these things were notional and far in the future, my father in law asked me to give his eulogy. He’d just read a memorial I’d written for my grandmother, because I’d never got to say goodbye to her, and I can only grieve — or do most things to be honest, being fairly useless by nature — in writing. And he thought he’d like to be remembered like that.

He was then younger than I’m now, probably by ten years or so.

Time does go by very fast.

I met my in-laws when they served as my liaison to the local AFS (exchange student program, now called something else) chapter. I used to go to their house, because my future mother in law (though neither of us knew it) let me play with ceramics and paint. And besides, I used to hang out in case Dan came from college. I could never figure out when he’d drop by, but if I stayed long enough, MIL would ask him to drive me home. (Yes, it was like that, though it took us four years to figure it out, because we were 18 which is a sort of disability of its own. Like a certain kind of teen romance trope, we argued a lot.)

Dan’s dad was a very gentle man, but with an imaginative streak. If you got him to talk about technology or what the future might hold in computers, or strange, far out theories of the world, his eyes lit up, and he could talk forever.

When I got engaged to Dan, it was a relief to finally call his father “Dad” because well…. he was. Sort of a distilled essence of dad.

We didn’t see him too often in the next years. We moved a lot, and finally moved across the country to Colorado, where they only visited three times.

But when I heard he had died, things came to mind.

Whenever he visited us, he spent his time organizing and cleaning our house. I’m by nature clean (bleach is a SACRAMENT) but not organized. He also used to help me wash up after dinner.

I remember him in our kitchen, in Columbia, South Carolina, teaching me to sing “They’re coming to take me away.” Trust me on this, he voluntarily exposed himself to my singing. Greater love has no man. We were so loud that Dan came to see what in heck we were doing (Which gives you a measure of my singing) and ended up joining in.

Later, when we visited, I came out of the guest bathroom at their home, after putting a beauty product on that briefly (very briefly) turned my face green. I actually startled him enough he sort of screamed (I didn’t know he was out there) and then teased me about being secretly an alien the rest of the visit.

When Dan went on work to France and dropped me on his parents for two weeks (I couldn’t drive, and we didn’t have an extra car anyway, and staying alone for two weeks in a city where I didn’t yet know anyone wasn’t even safe, let alone pleasant) we stayed up late into the night — of all things — designing these ideal houses with all sorts of ways to go off the grid. We’d stay up till late in the night, until my mother in law came and chased us upstairs.

When he visited us in Colorado, he went to a parade of homes with us, and I found out that he and Dan have exactly the same sense of humor. Some of the decorating choices, not to mention floor plans loaned themselves to entire impromptu skits about weird families.

When we bought our house he reserved the front bedroom which we used as a TV room as “That’s my room when I need to stay with someone.” Well, it didn’t happen that way. When he needed it, he didn’t want to move that far from his friends and his church.

After that life got complicated, and yes, we feel guilty how little we visited. I think the last time we spent time up in Ohio was when my brother in law died. We went up for the memorial, but also for that first very difficult Christmas, and my father in law got to spend time with his grandsons.

He liked that we’d given Marshall his middle name, and was flattered when Marshall started to go by it. He was very proud of his youngest grandson.

The last time I saw him was at my mother in law’s memorial. He spent the entire service holding my hand. He told me that for so many years I’d just been a voice in the phone, and it was good to know I really existed.

Afterwards we visited with him for some hours, and I petted the little mini poodles he loved.

We meant to go up again. We did. But the last two years have been fraught, between moving and health issues.

Dan did go up, but we couldn’t manage the money/time combination.

His passing hit me very hard. There are a lot of unspoken stories, a lot of things we could have air-dreamed about. And just time to sit and pet a fuzzy while being silent together. Time ran away from us. In retrospect, it seems so fast, even though I know it wasn’t.

I’m sorry dad, that we didn’t spend more time together. I will miss your gentle humor and your kindness.

Perhaps we’ll meet again in eternity, with time and better understanding, and a fuzzy or two for company.

Goodbye dad. Until we meet again.

Away from Keyboard, en route to a friend meetup.

Will be bringing back kittens for us and younger son.

About to run out of connectivity zone. Might or might not update tonight. Will try to but there’s this dinner thing.

While you’re at it, Sunny comments here as Holly, and she’s… um…. she could use some financial help, honestly.

Yes, we have donated, though anonymized. Will probably donate again, once dust settles and I know how much I have in hand.

Helping with health insurance deductible for unforeseen issues

Anyway, don’t worry about us. I slept horribly, and I’m sort of punch drunk, but husband will be driving. And I’m almost over the virus. The death in the family was expected, and a release, but for some reason still walloped me like a hundred ton weight.

Not sure if it’s good or bad we are set to see friends this weekend. Fortunately they have a broad tolerance for “Weirder than normal.”

Take care of yourselves, and hug your loved ones. More posting tomorrow, if it all goes well.

In The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein, Mycroft, the trickster sentient computer that joins the revolution because he’s bored and wants friends, (I figure he’s their Benjamin Franklin figure) tries throughout the book to figure out humor.

In fact, his “first human friend” Manny finds out that Myke has woken up because Myke plays a joke. He pays someone about 100 times what he should be paid.

Part of Manny educating Myke is “funny only once.”

Now part of the funny only once is self defense. Manny can’t have Myke playing big, noticeable, system breaking pranks that will lead to either killing everyone and/or people finding out he’s sentient.

But part of it is accurate for everyone. I know a lot of people here grew up with Star Trek and are impressed by Kirk’s “this one simple trick.” It was impressive, of course, in the context of the show, considering they were going from planet to planet, so funny only once worked, since it was a new audience every night. To an extent, the Saint is the same thing, (the TV series) with the flaw that it’s not a new planet every night. (If anyone does Saint in Space — concept not name — please tell me, I’d love to read it.) I mean, you watch the series to see how he pulls off the trick and double crosses the unrighteous (his name for the bad guys.) But you willingly have to suspend disbelief, because at some point people would notice and know, and start knowing when they see him coming…..

And this is part of the problem that our “governing classes” and self styled “elites” have. Much of what they’ve been pulling is world breaking.

It works once, partly because we can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to pull that. It is a stupidity so big that we can’t believe anyone would do it.

I mean, look, locking up the entire world over a bad flu, and scaring people half to death just so they could steal the US election? It’s not a clever trick, unless you consider breaking the dome protecting a space colony clever.

But is is so monumentally stupid, requiring that people be unaware or uncaring of where food comes from and more importantly that trust once broken can’t be recovered overnight, that most people refused to believe that anyone would do something so monumentally stupid and psychopathic.

In fact, it’s how psychopath narcissists manage to pull half the stupid sh*t they do. Normal human beings can’t understand the depths of non-human thought that allow someone to use others as pieces in a game.

The thing is that once you see something like that pulled, no only is it funny only once, because you won’t allow it to be pulled again, but it allows you to see all the other “this one simple trick” requiring monumental chutzpah and stupidity to pull off. And once you start seeing it, you can’t unsee it.

No, most people still don’t fully know what to do about it, but let’s face it, despite cooked polls and the koolaid drinkers being special all over social media, this one simple trick, as it unravels further destroys what remained of trust in the media, and government, and “scientists” and… well, the entire structure that allows the left to stay in power, and that in fact allowed them to steal the election.

Even better, by involving the entire world in this, they finally broke the Europeans. Europeans are starting to doubt their “experts” and “smart people.”

Yes, there are pockets that haven’t. But overall, not only was it funny only once but, contrary to what they took from the whole experience, it made their chances of pulling it off again very very small.

Right now, people know they’re being duped, and no one trusts much of anything they’re told that they haven’t experienced by themselves, with their own lying eyes.

This is good, because part of what has allowed the tyranny to grow is a trust in experts and “scientific” governance over the last 100 years. We need people to start trust themselves and (with limits) their neighbors.

It is bad, because as institutions collapse it makes it harder to change and rebuild without it all collapsing or tipping into “blood up to our ankles” type situation.

But this one simple trick was funny only once. And it’s already broken their structures of power. We can pray for a miracle that allows us to cross to new structures and more freedom without massive violence. And we should.

Because most of the casualties happen after victory.

On the other hand, we already won. And they lose. There is no victory condition for them.

We win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

When I’m sick but starting to be ALMOST well it’s a very frustrating time. I feel like I’m well enough to work, and should in fact be working, except I know anything I write in that time will be strange and lifeless. Sometimes it can be revived in revision, sometimes not.

In the last week, the fact I didn’t feel well enough to actually do things like typeset old books and adjust covers was a good indication I should not mess with works in progress. (And oh, yeah, have a got a story for you on that.)

So instead I was doing what I normally do when I should be working. Reading true crime stories (From the investigators side, which is still depressing, but mostly gives me ideas for books.) and taking weird drunkard walks through internet weirdness.

My still being me — you do remember that part, right — this often devolves to truly weird stuff like seeking out ideas of previous civilizations (Most of it is new age and funnier than heck, which is very cheering, particularly when I’m not feeling well.) And similar “weird stuff.”

This time, for reasons, I tried to look up “Accidentally walking between realities.” You know, the thing that might be a brain glitch where you suddenly remember something as being completely different up to this moment. Instead of deja vu, it’s never-vu. You stare at your car going “I swear my car was blue when I went to bed last night. When did it turn red?” And your family looks at you like you have three heads and they’re all speaking in sanskrit, because the car has always been read.

I think we’ve all had moments like that, though perhaps not as dramatic. My younger son had so many of these one year that after that it became a joke. If he woke up and I’d just changed something in the house, his opening gambit would be “I come from a world where you don’t have a line across the laundry room to hang clothes that can’t be dried.”

Some of the most dramatic ones, of course, are dreams, where you dream in a self-consistent reality in which you don’t remember the current world, but everything makes sense. I had one of these, about 4 years ago, in which I had teen DAUGHTERS and was cleaning their bathroom, after they’d gone to school and I wondered if boys would have been as messy. It was such a weird, self-contained dream that it was like I’d been in a different world.

Anyway, I was looking for that, but I accidentally stumbled onto something else.

Apparently there is a fad among mostly teens, of sending their consciousness into a “desired reality.” For a lot of them it appears to be Hogwarts (?????).

They have an entirely constructed theory of why this works, though meh, it doesn’t stand up to true scientific knowledge. It at best stands up to speculative and therefore unproven hypothesis.

The idea being that somewhere in the universe whatever can happen happens. And your mind being multi-dimensional is able to perceive everything. So it’s a matter of changing your consciousness to perceiving your other reality.

In the meantime, you leave something behind in your body, an automated version of you, living out your life in this reality, for the time you’re absent.

At its most involved, this shades into tupalmancy, the creation of a shadow self.

And of course, what’s actually involved, at least most of the time — I’m not going to speculate on if what they think is happening is actually happening, I’m just going to say I find it unlikely MOST of the time — is creating a lucid dream. What gives it away, btw, is the idea you can script this experience ahead of time. You can’t script a reality because other consciousnesses — other people in it — have a say.

What I’m going to say is that I’m immensely familiar with the creation of a vivid lucid dream that goes on from day to day, as well as with going through life as a barely conscious robot.

I’d say that was most of my life from about 12 to 18. Oh, there were moments I was there, but most of the time, I was in a world inside my head (the world in fact of Schrodinger worlds, that is actually a bunch of worlds.) My notebooks at the time are a bunch of codes for what was happening in various imaginary worlds, maps and physical plants of places that don’t exist. Genealogy trees for non-existing people, histories of non-existent empires.

How is that different from now, you ask? Well, now I know which world I’m in. I KNOW WHICH VOICE IS MINE.

I got lost there for a while. The danger of a vivid imagination is that you can get lost in it. You can become a living shadow in your real life, while living in another one.

Curiously — or not — the deeper I went into it, the less I produced in the real world. The less I wrote, the less I learned, the less engagement I had with real people.

At seventeen-eighteen, for whatever reason, I woke up. And decided to stay out of the dream-world, or at least to stay out of it, while dreaming it. Be aware of it, and “go there” but as a visitor. Know where I was and which voice was mine.

Which is when I started establishing interests and relationships, and re-started writing again.

Because the world couldn’t live for other people till I came out of it and could communicate it.

It was as hard as quitting any drug addiction. The dream world was safe and interesting, even when bad things happened. But to live in it was to ignore reality. You can’t live in the dream world. Because you’re not made of dream. Making yourself into a meat robot won’t keep you safe. Reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop paying attention.

I always thought of this as a particular problem of being a larval writer. It NEVER in my wildest moments occurred to me it could become a general problem.

I have guesses as to why, starting with 2020 and ending with clownworld.

BUT to anyone who is aware of their kid doing this, or who — despite our ages — is tempted by it, let me enjoin you to stay in reality. Day dreaming is great. I still do a lot of it. It’s why and how I write.

But a wise man — PTerry — said to always be sure what voice is yours. To that I add, always be sure what reality is yours.

It’s been 42 years, since I decided to live and create in the real world. It hasn’t been a bowl of cherries, but it’s real. It’s …. I can grow and love and create in here.

The dream world is a sort of fairyland. You can perceive it and dream in it, but nothing is real.

When you try to choose your reality, all you do is turn your back on what’s real. And in the end, you’ll die without ever having lived.