Nekulturny

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

One of the perennial accusations from the left against us was — still is — in the term of the left’s beloved USSR that we were “nekulturny.” Which is to say without culture.

One of my favorite books — in fact the basis for the essay that got me into the exchange student program, without which I wouldn’t have known there was a place I belonged — is Farenheit 451. The words “I am Ecclesiastes” sends a shiver up my spine. Because in the context of the book it represents the thin thread of memory linking humans to timeless wisdom, to the intellectual heritage of our ancestors.

Hold those two threads in your head, please. I’ll be bringing them together in a moment.

The accusation of being without culture resonated within the right, even with me. Even though I knew, as far back as thirty years ago that the left dominated the culture not through some great feat of creativity or amazing intelligence, but because they wouldn’t let anyone else IN, I believed that the right lacked culture because of something innately broken in most. I will confess most of this was through exposure, as a young woman to my grandmother’s moralistic and stifling Victorian books. There’s only so many stories of good boys who grow up to be saints, and bad boys who grow up to be evil and punished you can read before you believe that it is wrong to inflict that on children. Or to be fair, on humans. Hold that in mind, too, please.

This was not improved by the few places where the right held sway being prey to a sort of bizarre need to preach. So, Christian houses instead of publishing things that emulated Tolkien wrote tales like the Victorian ones. Evil punished. Virtue rewarded. Faith in G-d is a vending machine and will reward you with material goods and a perfect life!

In retrospect, those places and those houses were caught in the same sort of trap that the left has caught itself. By wanting to be explicitly and … um…. heavily (like a hammer pounding an anvil) “Christian” they ended up writing to a choir of believers, and losing even people like me, who, while believers, want to read fun stuff with engaging characters, instead of lengthy sermons with characters.

Now, don’t tell me there are decent Christian writers. I know that. Though it’s not my favorite form of entertainment, I read them now and then. I don’t have many among my favorites, and don’t remember their names. (I only remember most author’s names when I see them. Unless it’s a handful I have re-read a lot.) I do remember reading a Christian author writing WWII books in the mainstream who was a delight and a wonder, and amazingly knowledgeable. I will just have to go search to find her name. Unfortunately I read her in KU so…. (I wish Amazon would keep a record of what you borrow. Honestly, the last two years, if I love a series I’ve started buying it. Even if I never read it again, it makes it easier to find it on the kindle, to recommend to someone.) Also Denton Salle’s Bears of God work is Christian allegory of a sort, and I’ve read those (before they were published.)

However, this was my view of it 30 years ago. Remember there was no Amazon. The only books available to me were those I found in the bookstore, and though I bought heavily from used bookstores (oh, let’s be honest, people, I often “shopped” the rejected bookshelf in front of used bookstores: a lot of gothic romances; some good books in too poor a shape to be resold; a 19th century medical encyclopedia set which unfortunately seems to have been lost in our first move in Colorado. (Probably “lost”).) So the number of Christian books I’d been exposed to were limited, and quite often were “free” books given away at our church. (A way to publicize for self-published or small press religious authors.)

So I accepted the Nekulturny accusation for our side, and embraced the dictum — by my late friend L. Neil Smith — that “you can’t fight a culture war if you ain’t got no culture.” In fact I’ve quoted it in here and urged you to go and make excellent culture. This imperative remains, perhaps more than ever. We need good artists — hi, Richard! Hi, Maggie! Hi, Caitlin! Hi, Jack! Hi, Cedar! — good writers, (too many of you in the audience, and many becoming better every day), good movie makers (there we still lag, not in content, but in tech and well… money), good philosophers (hello, Doctor Peterson!), good thinkers, good readers. We need them, not for the “right” but for humanity at this point. More on that in a moment.

Twenty years ago, I’d started suspecting that the “the right is not creative” slur was just that. I knew enough of “us” submerged and hidden, and had seen how the leftist gatekeepers would only let us through if we sang their message. How even the non-leftist house was hampered by a leftist distribution circuit. And I’d seen the amazingly good people who were unable to dissemble their political beliefs (yes, many on the right are religious, but not all Probably, honestly the same proportion as the general population. Believe it or not there are a lot of “religious” leftists. They just don’t understand how the doctrine has gotten substituted with Marx in their heads.) who were resolutely held out of publishing, even though they beat the inferior product the left was pushing into every store all hollow.

I had a long standing back and forth argument with Roger L. Simon — of Blacklisting Myself fame, mind — over this. He thought the left was genuinely more creative. To be fair Dr. Peterson thought that until very recently. Heck, for all I know he still does.

It’s very difficult to pierce through the massive gaslighting veil the over culture had/has become.

But by 2000 I had some awareness of it. Most of all I had some awareness of how bad — horrifyingly bad — the mainstream output was.

What I mean is, look people, I’m a reader. Reading is my main form of mind clearing. Listening to audio books is my main form of keeping myself on task while gardening or cleaning or other body-work that doesn’t involve the mind. I’m addicted to narrative, but even more simply to words strung together as some people are to cocaine.

I don’t remember the full Heinlein screed in Glory Road, but I’ll do my own: I’m addicted to the printed word. Let me go too long without, and I get twitchy and weird, and start picking fights for fun. I read while eating, while cleaning, while cooking, while walking, while sitting with friends. If I can find a way to read while sleeping, I’ll do that too. Before Kindles, which can be covered in ziplocs while cleaning or cooking, I had a class of books I either got for free or very cheaply, which I knew were going to end up bleach-stained, wet or covered in tomato sauce. In extremis, I’ve read old newspapers, instructions for machines I never used, inserts for medicine I don’t anticipate taking. The back of cereal boxes goes without saying. However, I’ve read newspapers and books in languages I barely understood by preference to not reading.

I don’t read while writing, but it would be glorious if I could do both.

I have nothing against movies. They’re okay when I’m tired and can snuggle with my sweetie, and do my crochet while I watch. I have a few favorites. But they don’t compare to books. Books let me inside other heads.

I don’t game. Either kind. RPG is too much like what I do while writing, and therefore by the time I found it it felt too much like work. (Though I sort of invented it in parallel to play back in Middle School.) And computer gaming is addictive but not …. rewarding for me. I don’t like the way entire years can go up the spout when I become obsessed with a game. At least books I can read a couple a day and still write.

Anyway, this is to say, you see how it’s my main form of entertainment, my way of easing the Weltschmerz of living in this workaday world, so I can get through and not be even more of an almighty termagant.

The problem was by 2000 I was having trouble finding books to read. Partly it was because I don’t like ideas pushed at me undigested — even those I agree with, as I say ahead — and don’t like to be preached at. By 2000 some of my favorite genres had enough preaching in them that I couldn’t avoid it. Science fiction and mystery for instance were soaked in the shibboleths of the day for the left. While I escaped for a while by reading historical, that was around the time that mainstream publishers — perhaps because others like me were escaping that way — decided that historical “just didn’t sell” and shut off that spiggot. (No, it wasn’t legitimate. First, because they really have no idea what sells. It’s almost impossible to figure out. No, not by design, but because the business is a kludge of 19th century practices and “clever fixes” that aren’t. Second, because by that time what sold was mostly what was pushed. So if they decided it didn’t sell it was a self-fullfilling prophecy.)

I escaped to romance for a while. But then even regencies were more and more unlikely sex scenes (I’m not a reading voyeur, but I’ll take it to get the story. However, see “unlikely” not to say impossible.) and feminist screeds (to believe these romances every woman in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century read Mary Woolstonecraft (bah. Talk about preaching) worked at women’s shelters, thought that the patriarchy was oppressive and longed to have a profession. Since this wasn’t even true in the so very patriarchal Portugal of my youth, where most women were quite contented with their lot, my disbelief got suspended from the neck until dead.

From that I ran screaming into popular history, but that too started getting invaded by the time indie came about and I realized that no, it wasn’t what people were creating. People hadn’t — all — gone stupid and Marxist and full of the latest “niceness” of the left. It was just what they chose to publish or injected in the books.

Indie put paid to the idea the left was more creative.

But more importantly, since about 2008 when they decided they’d won, and we were all socialists now (snort, giggle) the left put paid to that.

The books they push, almost enforce, are as strangely confining and stultifying as the stuff grandma read as a young girl in Victorian times. If you don’t believe me, read this review of one of the people they lionize, complete with the conceit that you can’t read anything unapproved because it contains “mind viruses” for which the only cure is death, because you can’t save the ones infected by bad think. (Thank you, Deedee for reminding me of this. You’re responsible for this post.): Message Received.

Most of the left’s output these days is simply unreadable. You can’t go three pages without stumbling on a just-so story, a lecture disguised as dialogue, or something so at odds with reality that you laugh out loud in the middle of a supposed serious scene. (Well, to be fair I can’t. I might be more sensitive than most. I grew up during the cold war under a succession of “socialist” governments. I have a cold war wound. It only hurts when I laugh.)

Their print runs show it. Though to be fair, all of traditional publishing is having issues because of the completely insane and getting worse system of distribution. If you want to know more about it, after I’m done here, look up “printing to the net” in this blog. Or “he beats me but he’s my publisher” which also speaks to what creatives went through and still go through in most of traditional publishing.

And so, the left has done what it always does. When communists can’t feed the masses, because government owned stores (Chicago, really?) and price controls (TrudCastreau, really?) fail to make food plentiful and available (Hey, morons, Marx was a lousy economist. In fact he wasn’t one at all. He was a propagandist pretending to understand economics. Since I don’t think any of you can read Thomas Sowell without a lot of effort, I recommend you read Eat The Rich by P. J. O’Rourke, to figure out what you’re doing wrong.) it must be the fault of hoarders and wreckers, and the black market still, somehow, feeding the people at great cost must be eliminated. Then their stupid ideas will work. In Hell.

Now they can’t get people to read their very boring and completely inane books. Their movies are becoming more and more like the books — collections of the latest wisdom from above spewed on the page, connected by a thin and unconvincing narrative, which often is not a narrative at all, just a meandering irrational “and then this happened.” (I suspect the declining quality is because the people in charge of selecting these books are now half-baked humanities graduates who really don’t read for pleasure or understand books, but want to be heroes of the revolution. You have to be very stupid or very timorous to conform to what most of the houses demand these days. Not, not so far as I know Baen.)

And because those horrible people won’t read their books, starting about 20 years ago, the “culture” of the left has gone to war with anyone greater than them. Again, I beg you to believe “greater than them” is not an effort. There are probably fourth graders who are greater giants of literature, though we’ll never find out since they do it with pencil, on composition books.

It started with fury against the past. I was somewhat puzzled back in the late eighties when I saw them demonize Heinlein — Heinlein! — as racist and sexist. This is enough to make anyone who read him laugh out loud. But they managed to convince people who never read him that to read him would put them beyond the pale.

Then it spread. These days anyone who is halfway competent, anyone who wrote more than 20 years ago, practically anyone who can carry a tale in a bucket has come under fire by the people who no longer remember how to think, let alone how to tell a story.

Sometimes literal fire. I used to be an habitue of libraries, because, well… you really can’t support my habit (before KU) on a middle class salary, and I didn’t marry a millionaire. And there were only so many used bookstores I could ransack for book rejects.

In the last ten years I’ve been less and less interested, and the last two years, after moving, I didn’t bother to get a library card. Libraries have taken to a) only stocking books approved by the (leftist) review system. b) getting rid of books older than a couple of years. c) stocking a lot of commercial movies and music. The openly communist head of the librarians association is not an aberration. Like all gatekeeping, it was taken over.

The left has gone quite literally on book dumping sprees of all books in libraries and school libraries and well…. anything they can reach that don’t conform with their bizarre anti-reality vision.

They’ve started rewriting the people they couldn’t completely get rid of. Not only Roald Dahl (not a right winger, but my kids liked his YAs particularly Fantastic Mr. Fox when they were in elementary) and Agatha Christie (among many others) but also Don Rosa’s Disney comics have come under the re-write sentence, which is worse than burning, because it distorts the past, so people will think they know it and know only lies.

They’re even attacking statues and plaques, because anything in history, anything REAL in culture is a threat to their nekulturny views.

In fact, because their views keep changing and they demand you forget the past ever existed (hey, morons, 1984 was not a manual) they must continuously rewrite the past to conform with current views. This means they can’t tolerate history.

Because they can’t carry a story in a bucket, they must destroy all writing that can.

Because they think what causes people to consider and think (and sometimes disagree. As much as I love Heinlein, I’m sorry he fell for Margaret Mead’s hoax) when they read a good novel, they are sure there are mind-viruses and therefore this infective literature must be destroyed.

Because they no longer can see reality through their just-so stories or perhaps just their terror of being thrown out of the in group, they have become convinced that our “leaders” are somehow hypnotizing us, and not that we’re believing reality over our lying eyes.

In the end result, and even if — as far as I know, but I pay so little attention to TV I wouldn’t know — they aren’t enthralled by the endless, meaningless soap opera that consumed people in Farenheit 451, they have made their own culture as transitory, as meaningless, as unappealing as that endless soap opera.

Our culture is shaky. I don’t like that we rest on Amazon for distribution, particularly since, like most of the tech enthralled of government money, they go crazier by the month. (Though to be fair, some of it is just “brilliant ideas.”)

I also think that to reach the larger culture, which thanks to our craptastic schools has trouble reading well enough to read for pleasure, we’re going to need movies, and for that we need better tech to compensate for the lack of deep pockets. We also need less explicit preaching, but that’s something else. And the tech is coming along, just if you’re someone who can, please work on hurrying it up.

And we need more culture-makers on every level, from art to music. And we need them not to preach and not to become a mirror of the left, but to make genuinely good art.

Trust the woman whose would-be-fluffy space regency will probably qualify (though who knows if it will even be nominated. I’m not campaigning this far out) for a Prometheus, your beliefs will come through. Don’t worry about that.

Even maimed, just starting to be able to put stuff out and work freely as we are, we have more culture than they do. You can only call us nekulturny if you think all culture is on the left.

And that becomes more difficult every day. Even explicitly leftist writers are coming under fire because…. well, they wrote more than 20 years ago and they SOMEHOW the current left can’t understand, captured the lightening in a bottle of good story. Therefore, they must somehow have mind virus. Making it worse, they also dared — DARED — not to explicitly support ideas the left itself never considered before recently. (Like trans. Or the idea that we must discriminate racially to stop racial discrimination. Or–) So they must be memory-holed. Along with all the past.

So the left has no culture. The left has gone Fahrenheit 451 and takes great pleasure in burning.

Go and read as widely as you can. Collect the classics of genre and of mainstream in their original form. If you can bring out forgotten, our of copyright classics in paper so others can collect it. Oh, and memorize if you can. (I can’t anymore.) After all that is the ultimate repository. (I recommend the founding documents. You know why.)

And go and create. Go and write, and draw, and paint, and sing. Go make culture that stands on the shoulders of the giants of Western Civ and doesn’t piss — or axe — downwards.

The future of humanity depends on it.

And the future is ours to win.

404 thoughts on “Nekulturny”

  1. Some where I saw a headline about “whites have no culture”.

    Didn’t bother reading it.

      1. Knowing your mother, there was a pithy and biting response that cut the principal down a notch or two.

        1. Heh. I believe she said something along the lines of “Wanna bet? I’m almost pure Celt. How’s about I get naked and paint myself blue and lead a screaming horde of invaders?” (Probably in slightly less pointed terms than that, but…he definitely was glad when she left.)

                1. You would be more than welcome, and I’d be happy to drive to Denver to collect you if the puddlejumper from Denver to Laramie falls through (it often has problems, and often isn’t worth the extra cost, lol)

                2. You would be more than welcome, and I’d be happy to drive to Denver to collect you if the puddlejumper from Denver to Laramie falls through (it often has problems, and often isn’t worth the extra cost, lol)

    3. “Whites.” Hah. By this do they mean Germans? Or perhaps Italians? The Finns? Greeks? Russians? All are some degree of pale yellow or light tan (not really white).

      Real racists are easy to recognize. They’re proud of it, and think everyone should agree with them. They’re also found in about every culture I can think of off the top of my head.

      types, deletes 457,283rd screed on “race does not exist.”

      1. Poul Anderson in one of his time-travel novels had a campus “guide,” written in the 70s which described every race as , “Called (Insert capitalized color here) for the color of their skin, which ranges from brown to ivory.”

        1. Title was “There Will Be Time”.

          The main character (the time traveler) had brought that campus “guide” back from the 1970s to his regular time (around the 50 Read Scare time frame).

            1. It was: “Withit’s Collegiate Dictionary”, which he brought back from the ’60s/’70s to the early ’50’s, and caused his (step?)father’s head to explode. Excellent, as were most of Poul’s.

    5. This is the point where I want my copy of the Durant’s “History of Western Civilization” bound in steel…so I can smack these idiots all the harder for it.

      (Backstory for those of you who haven’t read it – the Durant’s work is one-stop-shopping for Western History. Not just places and people, but culture, economics, some technology. It’s a masterpiece. If you want the mother lode of Heinlein’s philosophy, you will find it here.)

      1. It’s called “The Story of Civilization.” He also goes into others besides western. I have them in hard copy and also found them in pdf on the net 5 or so years ago, and put them on my tablet.

          1. It’s been a number of years since I downloaded them. I got all 11 at one place, but can’t recall where that was.

    7. I have literally read someone saying “white people have no culture” in an article — telling us to rip off white people’s culture only for our folklore to use in stories.

  2. The left has no culture, their religion requires that.

    In other news, Texas has just declared they have been “actually invaded.” Let’s see how that flies in Sodom on Potomac.

      1. They is no way now that we won’t see massive attacks by illegals in the coming months. Just utterly razing neighborhoods. That island in Italy is doomed.

        The left will spin this as “vote for us if you want the attacks called off.”

        2. I am really trying to think of a neighbourhood outside of deep blue white suburbia that is disarmed enough for that to happen.

            1. I realize that the Left is insane, but IMO while they might attack their “people” they’d also attack (or try to attack) the Conservative areas.

              Note, during the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Communists purged people fighting on their side against Franco because those people weren’t “pure enough”.

              So I can see the American Left attacking fellow lefties that aren’t “pure enough” but as I said, they’d attempt to destroy the “Evil Conservatives”.

            1. Some east-coast US State attempted a “buy back” of “evil assault weapons”.

              They didn’t get many back even from deep blue white suburbia.

      2. Between the Feds and the State? Or between the State and the residents of Colony Ridge?

        (insert obligatory “Why not all three!?”)

      3. I strongly doubt the Feds will do anything that looks like fighting. There’s no way those guys stick their necks out like that. (I can see Washington -telling- them to do it, I just can’t see them doing it.)

        Illegals rushing the fence? Mexican cartels firing on the TX National Guard? Mexican cartels firing on massed illegals to make them rush the fence? I can see any/all of that happening.

        Feds will come along days later and do an after-action report from a safe distance.

            1. I suspect the Man Behind the Curtain has a very sharp crease in his pants… Of course it isn’t just Obumbles, he is a low grade midwit and lazy to boot. T\ His people got the taste of control and they like it.

                1. Iran, China, and whoever else is paying. Biden’s regime of misrule is terribly inconsistent, I think there is more than one person at the levers of power.

            2. Consider I grew up, like most Europeans, using a bidet. The temptation to call them bidetites is almost too much.
              But yeah, they say Obama, but Obama was a puppet himself.

        2. Phantom, Biden has already had CBP take down the razor wire TX put up. That’s the article I linked. Now Abbott is having the TX National Guard put it back.

          I bolded National Guard for a reason. When Civil Rights era governors tried to use the units of the National Guard associated with their state, the Federal response was to call that state National Guard contingent into Federal service, and then the President issued them Federal orders to stay in barracks, on pain of being executed for mutiny. That was legal as part of the laws governing Federal funding of the National Guard.

          That’s what I expect Biden / SecDef Austen will try next, btw,

          If Abbott had used the Texas State Guard, it would be different. The State Guard dates to WWII. Texas constituted State Guard units that are funded by the state and can’t be called up to national service. The State Guard could only be stopped by actual force. https://tmd.texas.gov/state-guard

          Both National and State Guard units are being used for Operation Lone Star for border enforcement, under the Texas Military Department. If Biden does order the National Guard to stop, Abbott will have to decide whether to use State Guard or DPS to put it back, and whether to order them to stop any removal.

          I think that Biden is hoping for either a blue-on-blue, or for the increase in tension to trigger civilians to shoot at the Feds. Either way, it will be presented as an “insurrection”.

          2. Biden would have to activate the NG before he can issue them orders. He would also have to pay them.

            1. You’re missing the point, which is that this is a step Biden can take that has precedent. Precedent is important, because it allows people to say “Oh, this is justified. You didn’t resist the last time.”

              And he’s already spent money we don’t have expanding the government payroll; what’s a few billion more?

              1. I am aware of the precedent. I also used to serve in the Tennessee Army National Guard and am aware of how these things work. It is questionable that Biden could activate the TX Guard just to tell them to return to barracks. That would end up in the courts as that is not “federal service.”

            2. Actually, no. “Stand down and disband. Secure all issued arms in the armories. Go home.” is quite valid order for POTUS and doesn’t require a paycheck.

              Been done, as stated.

              1. To stand down means Federal Service has ended and it returns to state control, and Biden is right back where he started.

        3. Given that the Feds have been cutting the wire that Texas has set up, I could see an instance in which Texas LEO catches them in the act, attempts to arrest them, and gets resisted. We might see shots fired in that situation.

          I think we should otherwise be okay on that front for now.

      4. Nah. First we get the lawyerly gladiatorial combat matches. Several dozen lawyers are currently seeking medical attention for a condition lasting more than four hours.

    2. I debated writing on that but “I’m biting my nails” makes a lousy blog post. So I did this. Will do the other tomorrow.
      Actually called “the Climate Jungend is too late”

      1. Yeah. I feel like the late Romans with the tribes coming over the border. I suspect it was much like this is and not the military marching you see in all the old pictures.

        FYI, the area in Staten Island that had the protests is all Russians, they’re not the most tolerant people on earth — just sayin. I don’t know if the people arrested were from the neighborhood, but it is still cop and fireman land. It’ll be interesting if Adams can find enough Stasi to fire on their own family and neighbors. Probably will, the senior brass are mostly DiBlassio appointments and like the Obama creatures in the military basically cowardly scum.

          1. Huh. Found a bunch of old termite damage when I pulled out the downstairs tub surround a few days ago…so if you wanted to get allegorical, I guess you could say I’m repairing leftist damage to the framing of my house? And although they both have suffered from past neglect, at least (unlike our nation) the house isn’t currently infested. (I hope…I’m pretty sure…)

            1. What they build is useful to no one but themselves. And it requires destroying that which other found useful.

              Leftists are the Illustrious Termites of Civilization.

      1. That’s what he cited. Article 1 Section 10 Clause 3. The article prohibits the states waging war on their own unless “ unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”

        Interesting times.

            1. They would CHEAT!!!11! Just like they’re cheating now, because not ALL of those immigrants are morons, and not ALL of them obey the overseer.

              Once upon a time in the 2010s I had an interesting and lengthy conversation with some random heavily tattooed Mexican guy at a low rider car show… about the US national debt and how things were looking ugly as far as he could see. But he was staying because Mexico was worse.

              Immigrants aren’t stupid. I should know, I’ve been one.

              The opposition just lies faster and harder, that’s all.

            2. That point already sort of got touched on last Saturday with the “If the illegal immigrants were all thicc Latinas and petite Asians…” meme.

              😛

              The other one I’ve seen bandied about is, “If the illegal immigrants were all lawyers…” 😀

              1. Another popular one among the stupid left is “if black started carrying guns, Republicans would instantly support gun control”. The medical term for that is “projection” — very obvious if you remember that victim disarmament started in the South, under Democrat rule and particularly to protect its terrorist wing the KKK from armed self defense by its intended victims. It also ignores the fact that most gun enthusiasts gladly welcome new students of any background. Consider the amazing success of Erin Palette’s “Operation Blazing Sword”.

          2. I had an interesting, horrid thought.

            Abbott has declared a state of invasion. So he gets to raise troops. The next step is to invade Mexico. Volunteer army…but like the Crusaders who drove the Moors out of Spain, they are paid in conquered territory.

            It just might work….

              1. We don’t even want Mexico, let alone need it. We’re good. They can keep it, and should.

                Also should, I dunno, do something about the rampant corruption, cartels, commiescum socialism that’s driving the corruption, cartels, crime, and so on. It’d be nice to have a sane, solid neighbor there that we could trade with.

                Be good to have said neighbor as a border guard against the craziness down South, not gonna lie.

                Of course, it’d be nice for the rest of the world if we got our act cleaned up. So much of the world depends on the US. Very few seem to know it, and even less acknowledge it. As a country, we’re governed by malicious idiots right now, and it shows.

                1. I suspect that Mexico like many long standing kleptocracies would be a VERY hard fix it is so severely broken. In terms of empire building they have nothing we particularly want. No we are NOT an Empire, but that is the only way to even vaguely justify invading, and like I said, they have nothing we particularly want, and lots we don’t. Put up the blockades and lets get back to dealing with our own kleptocrats before we are as screwed as Mexico or Venezuela…

                  1. The only way to do it would be kill everyone over the age of 3, and I ain’t got stomach for that. Besides, I have friends there (who aren’t rushing the border) who read this blog.

                    1. I don’t know if it needs to be QUITE that drastic, but whatever it is almost certainly beyond the pale of what we could consider doing and still be sane. I’d say it’s up to the people of that country. That said, is there an historical example of a country digging itself out of kleptocracy? I can’t think of one though many of the absolute monarchies failure modes were very similar, but getting out of them was often ugly and in fits and starts

                    2. Indian Schools. Less bloody than killing them all, totally politically incorrect… But it worked at the time.

                      Teach ’em civilization. I might’ve suggested something along these lines for the abused children of brain dead progressives before. It’s the one case where “for the children” is actually honest for a change (or one of the few, I think there’s others).

                      Because cutting bits off them and pumping them with hormones is not cool. Kids need mentors, teachers, good examples of proper maturity. Not drag queen story hour.

                2. “Also should, I dunno, do something about the rampant corruption, cartels, commiescum socialism that’s driving the corruption, cartels, crime, and so on.”

                  Declare them hostis humani generis and empower everyone to kill them wherever they are found, no trial necessary.

                  Like pirates and slavers should always be treated.

                3. From a tactical perspective, there’s a good case for taking Baja California in toto, and pushing a mile or two on the south side of the Rio Grande. Use that as a buffer – a secure zone where we plant mines to our heart’s content.

          4. We’ve been invaded for 2 1/2 years and he’s ‘declaring an invasion’ now? That would be like the French waiting until 1942 to declare an invasion.

            That could be a bad example…

            1. Americans are always slow at this stuff, that’s one. The other is I think he’s been preparing the ground. Sending them to NYC, getting them riled up, making others feel the pain, etc.
              You can’t just rush in half cocked. As much as I’d like to half the time.

        2. Article I, Section 8, Clause 15:

          [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; . . .

          Too bad nobody in Congress has the cojones to do their damn job.

    5. I read that Eagles Pass, TX has declaed a state of energency over the influx of “migrants”. A small city of 28K people which, recently, is getting a thousand or more border crossers a day while NYC — a city of over 9M people — gripes about 100K over several months. Well, buckle up sanctuary cities, there’s thousands more on the way.

  3. I’ve saved lots of money and time by never playing computer games.

    This is not virtue – I’m horrible at playing them, because in game-space I have no sense of direction. I can’t find the airport to land, I can’t find resources and then get back ‘on mission, I’m just lost.

    I’m better here in meat-space, but not much. Maps and map programs Are My Friends.

    But this creates a lack of some part of ‘culture’. My 10-year-old grandson does not understand why I don’t play games on my phone or computer. To an annoyingly large extent, his life is Minecraft.

    At least he reads.

      1. That we do, Fearless Leader. Gaming currently has a MASSIVE disconnect between the folks at the big studios creating the AAA games and the playerbases. So you get stuff like Battlefield V rewriting history to have one teenage Norwegian girl be the hero of Operation Gunnerside, like Starfield requiring you to enter pronouns (and Nexus Mods has just announced that they will ban anybody trying to upload a Starfield mod to take them out), like the last Spiderman game putting pride flags everywhere (and again, you not being allowed to mod a SINGLE-PLAYER game to take them out). Gamers are still a predominantly young male demographic and they are not taking kindly to having THUH MESSAGE shoved down their throats at every turn. Witness the crazy backlash to The Last of Us 2’s transgender murderer semi-protagonist that was so stunning and brave she became the most hated character in the series.

        Then add in the fact that with online distribution and big business, every game is now released as a buggy piece of crap and takes months to get fixed, sometimes only in paid DLC, and the fact that most AAA games are nothing more now than ways to push microtransactions and paid cosmetics–looking at you, Electronic Arts–and that gaming “journalism” is even more woke than the studios. BUT MUH GAMERGATES.

        1. Someone did put a mod up on Nexus Mods for the pronouns. A person who tried it out before it was banned by the site admins reported that the mod made it impossible to pick gender-linked pronouns, which caused the game to default to “they/them” instead. So the Nexus Mods admins ended up banning a mod that was probably closer to their way of thinking than that of the people upset over the pronouns.

          ^^;;

      2. Test? Is the Internet being extra wucky today for anybody else? The blog just ate a very long comment I wrote to your point regarding “we need game writers.” WPDE.

      4. With respect, no. We need MODULE writers.

        There are plenty of RPG systems out there. A ton of rulebooks. The problem is that the average gaming group consists of one person capable of writing new material (who carries 80% or more of the GM load), one person who might do something new on occasion (carries 15% of the load), and the rest of the group (who might handle 5% of the work between them).

        Sooner or later, that one GM creating new material burns out. The only option is to provide the other players with store-bought modules that they can run. The creative spark is scarce, but running someone else’s creation is fairly easy.

        Which is how AD&D monopolized the market. They had module support.

      5. Personally, I suspect that there are a lot of anti-Prog game writers. And you don’t even have to turn to Eastern Europe to find them (as I did for the wonderful “Black the Fall”, which was written by a Romanian team, and has you decide to escape from a communist hellhole inspired by Ceaucescu’s Romania; you start the game on a bicycle, and your government-issued job is to peddle the bicycle to generate electricity). The problem is the developers, who are going all-in on this stuff. Deal with the developer problem, and the game writing issue will solve itself, imo.

        1. Actually, I misspoke. The problem is largely the publishers, which – obviously – have a great deal of control over what gets published. For a small team, the developer and the writer are often nearly synonymous. It’s only when developers get larger that this duty starts to separate.

        2. I played an anti-communist game called Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love. It’s from a Polish studio and it’s point and click adventure style. The Poles have excellent cause to hate communists.

            1. I don’t hate them; that’s bad for my hopes in the afterlife. I just want them all dead. Preferably at each others’ hands, Kilkenny cats (or crab bucket) style.

    2. Haha. I clearly am easily addicted to games. I was obsessive over Adventure for a few weeks until my future wife called me on it. Fortunately, pong was too much hand-eye coordination, and Pac-Man cost money. Whatever memes I don’t know I learned from younger acquaintances who were willing to indulge the old man.

      BTW, the cake is a lie.

              1. Snickerdoodle Cake

                1 cup oil
                2½ cups flour
                1½ cups sugar
                1 cup milk
                1 tsp. vanilla
                3 eggs
                ½ tsp. baking soda
                1½ tsp. baking powder
                ½ tsp. salt
                2 tsp. cinnamon
                1 large box (5 oz.) Of instant vanilla pudding

                Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

                Grease and sugar (mix 1 tsp. cinnamon and 1 tbsp. sugar together [1:3 ratio]) two large loaf pans or one large bundt pan. Pour batter into pans and sprinkle with more sugar mixture on top. Bake one hour. Let stand 10 minutes before removing from pan.

                Option 1: Add 1 cup chopped nuts and/or ½ cup raisins, coconut, or chocolate chips.
                Option 2: Substitute lemon juice and lemon pudding for vanilla extract and vanilla pudding.

                This is lovely just as it is, heavenly with some vanilla ice cream and sliced strawberries.

                My new BiL, Windwalker, says it’s great with a cup of coffee.

            2. What Sarah said. My baking may be the worst of my cooking skills, but a good cake recipe must be shared for the good of the species.

              Every human being should be able to cook if they have the physical ability to do so. And if you cook for yourself and loved ones, it should be good.

              1. If I’m not trying to cook for you, this is a good indication that you should go away. Far away.

              1. And mock turtle soup is a description of how the chef prepares it. The chef would have to be French of course–see Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

    3. I’ve saved lots of money by playing massive multiplayer on-line fantasy role playing games. But that’s because I can’t hear people talking in a bar environment, I like to drink, and I dislike drinking and driving. Add to the fact that TV programming is leftist cultural programming, and I gave that up. So that’s one of my major social outlets and prime non-reading entertainment. The other social outlet being involved with local politics, and that’s not nearly as entertaining.

    4. MINECRAFT! It’s a great game for young minds. Totally freeform, open world. Gather resources, use them to build things and fight monsters, make automated contraptions that gather resources for you, etc., etc…

      Heck, young minds? Playing Minecraft with my now-adult kids (who introduced me to it years ago) is one of my favorite things to do. My wife’s, too. I never really played video games before; I suck at most of them, and the effort-to-reward ratio is low.

      Minecraft doesn’t really feel like a video game to me. It is one, but it’s different. You’re just out there in the world, and you can do whatever the heck you want…although if you’re not careful, “whatever the heck you want” might get you killed by monsters instead. 🙂 I like building things. My own kingdoms. Replicas of historical buildings, like Blackrock Castle and Beaumaris Castle (as it would’ve been if finished).

      If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it. Maybe it won’t strike a chord, but even so, I bet your grandson would be thrilled beyond belief if he got the chance to play Minecraft with his noob grandpa and show you how to survive. (My son had to teach me how to eat, a fact that still amuses both of us.)

      Anyway…thus endeth my screed.

    5. I played a few games when I was young — yes, I got myself eaten by a grue — but not many. I generally like more or less control. Less control, I read a novel. More, I write one.

  4. So I read the other day that there is a school library that has removed all books printed before 2008.

    Let that sink in for a moment.

    As the librarian and technology support person for a very small middle school, I am appalled.

    I see it as my sacred duty to encourage students to read as broadly as they are able and willing, and to pass the knowledge of the ages to our students. Using technology if needed. It is the information that is the important bit. No doubt the transition from scrolls to books was seen as a sign of the end times, and people blame computers now.
    But it’s the humans denying access to the information that is the scary part. And there are lots of ways they do it. Technology is only one. Purging print books written before a certain date is one of the more evil things of which I have heard.

    But trusting Scholastic, or the National Library Association to have appropriate reading lists for students is also fraught. As is blindly buying books that have won children’s literature awards.

    Unfortunately, in many places students don’t think reading books is a good and fun thing to do because they have never read a good book. The absolute crap that is out there, especially the bilge they recommend for minority students, would turn anyone off reading.

    But you all know this, so carry on.

    Just know there are a lot more school librarians holding the line on the degredation of culture than the media would have you believe.

    1. There are our own everywhere, hiding, and doing what they can. Remember that everyone, because I think this ride is about to get bumpy. I’d prefer that we lose as few good people as possible.

    2. They didn’t just remove the books, they threw them out. They didn’t sell them, or donate them. The eco-freaks got on their cases, so they ‘recycled’ them all, but the point was that the books were no longer available to ANYONE. Couldn’t risk that the kids might grab a couple and take them home for anyone in the household to gasp read!

      1. Hasn’t something like that happened before? In the early eighties with children’s books because of lead or something?

      2. This offends me on a fundamental level. They’re books. If you don’t want them, someone else definitely does. Books exist to be read, shared, and to increase the civilization of the human world. Even if you don’t agree with the content, something can be learned from it.

        Yes, even from Marx and his ilk. I’d rather those things be out in the open, and known so that when idiocy rears its misshapen head it can be confronted intelligently and its supposed brilliant points countered rationally and intelligently in the moment.

        Also, the concept of a time and place where I can’t get anything to read terrifies me. Reading is so much a part of me I wouldn’t be me without it.

        1. TBF I am making paper flowers and the like of discarded books. HOWEVER these are either the multiple unwanted copies of lefty politicians biographies (They’re unreadable, most of them. Also there are SO MANY millions copies.) OR books too far gone to be read (like several portions missing or destroyed.) So making their corpses pretty is all I can do.

    3. Yes, that school is in the Peel school board, and it is right here in Ontario. Mississauga, as it happens. It is one of the largest school boards in Canada. It was decreed that books published before 2008 were wrong about everything in life that’s important (namely CRT), and so they were all REMOVED. Because Equity, you know.

      https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/peel-school-board-equity-cull-books

      The Provincial Minister of Education has intervened and told them to smarten up, but according to the article the local Peel Region landfill is hiring more guys to deal with the book influx.

      In other news this week the Canadian Forces rolled armor in Toronto preparing for the Million March for Children yesterday. M’kay?

      1. That kind of cr*p right there is why I have my own home library, both for reference and pleasure, as well as the education of Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson.

        1. Home Schooling is The Way now. They’re not kidding with this crap at Peel school board. They’re deadly serious.

          Also not being well received, as we’re starting to see vandalism of Rainbow-themed whatnot by the student body, and I think there was a walkout by students last week over boys in the girl’s washrooms. That one might have been Canada or USA, I can’t recall exactly.

            1. Some guy who was wanted in India for terrorism related to Khalistan, (the Sikh version of Israel, super shorthand version) got assassinated in the parking lot of a Sikh temple (gurudwara) in BC. The Shiny Pony, in his infinite wisdom, said that the Indian government pulled a Mossad and whacked him in Canada. He wasn’t even a Canadian citizen, but the Pony and company are currently pretending he was.

              The Indian government, in their own infinite wisdom, has chosen to start expelling Canadian diplomats and refusing Canadian visas.

              This is like the weak-sauce Canadian version of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

              In other news it was revealed today, in the middle of the Pony vs. India ruckus, that the RCMP has suspicion/evidence that China whacked some Chinese Canadian guy in BC. Because it seems that factions inside the RCMP and the wider “Canadian intelligence community” as they style themselves, do not want China dropping off the front page. China has been so naughty.

              Thus, if you think your country is a f-ed up mess run by a superannuated house plant with droopy Depends, well, it is. But all you have to do is look north and see that yes, it could be worse.

              1. Further to the Shiny Pony/India issue:

                https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1704908310816997549.html

                “Bill Blair “no commenting” when asked if India might have TRIED TO SABOTAGE THE PM’S FUCKING PLANE. The near-instant panicked clarifications from DND press people told us all we needed to know about that brain fart. Blair himself walked it back later in the day.”

                Mr. Blair is the current Minister of National Defense and former Chief of Police for Metro Toronto. That’s the type of geezer running this place.

                  1. At the time I recall commenting Shiny Pony could fly home on Air Canada like the rest of us.

                    But then the MINISTER OF DEFENSE says “no comment” to sabotaged aircraft question?

                    Who are these idiots?

              2. Why BC?
                (I had the chance to visit Victoria via ferry, but wasn’t sure I could find four hours of amusement until the return trip. Maybe that was a good thing).

                1. https://tnc.news/2023/09/22/police-shut-down-victoria-march/

                  This is why BC. You have to read between the lines a bit, but the same government that “accidentally” lets the “counter-protesters” rush the Mom and Dad protest (the counter protesters are all public sector union astroturfers, don’t forget, bussed in) and then create an “unsafe environment” so the cops have to regretfully shut down the legal, licensed, registered protest… is the government that lets Indian and Chinese secret agents run around and do whatever the f- they want. Including shoot guys in front of temples.

                  Because it would be -racist- to make Indian and Chinese agents register with the Canadian government. (They really did say that. The Canadian officials, not the Chinese and Indians.)

                2. Dorothy, you would have no problem finding 4 hours; you could find at least 4 days worth. My wife and I had our honeymoon in Victoria in 2001.

                  The Empress Hotel. It’s a nice hotel. Rudyard Kipling lived there at the end of his life and there’s a Kipling Museum in the basement,
                  On the northern part of the Island, there’s a thing called a Booktown. in Sydney.

                  https://visitorinvictoria.ca/booktown-sidney-book-stores/

        2. They have LAVs (made in London Ontario!) and some 4 wheel armored cars, some MRAP trucks. Tanks? No. Not really.

          Also, very interesting, I can’t find any news coverage of those armored cars on Google right now.

          Regular civilians, doing the job the media is supposed to do but won’t.

          1. You’re probably right, the Leopard 2s probably aren’t there. The tracks would tear up the asphalt. Also, given that they’re MBTs, they’d be much more difficult to move (you can’t drive a tank a long distance, you have to haul it instead), and there aren’t all that many of them to begin with (about six dozen).

      3. Hopefully IED’s have been deployed to deal with the thugs obeying the tyrant Trudeau and all his ilk.

      1. Whatever you do, don’t look under their affiliates in other countries with different copyright / public domain dates. That would be WRONG.

    6. My local library used to have the Charlotte MacLeod mysteries; both the Bittersohn and Peter Shandy series. I loved them, but didn’t have the cash to buy my own – you know how it goes.

      About 5 years back I walked in wanting to borrow one again – and they were gone. All gone. “We use a book rental company now”.

      Like What the Heck is a library supposed to be for?

        3. It’s Efficient! It’s Cost-Effective! We automatically get the New, Best Books instead of keeping all those musty old things nobody reads! We can be Relevant! (I am now suffering from a surfeit of sarcasm. But I’d bet this is at least part of the official justification).

  5. “…my disbelief got suspended from the neck until dead.”

    A perfect phrase, truly uttered by someone as addicted to “words strung together as some people are to cocaine.”
    More after I finish reading, but I just had to say that before I get strung out on the substance of your post.

  6. So, for me this is rather ironic as I just dropped a letter to my long time friend (yes, real paper and stamp and everything) and we’ve both been haunting the dusty back shelves of our local libraries finding “old” books to read. While the purge is indeed going on, I still find some gems on the shelf. Along with that, the delightful Mrs. and I were just discussing current TV programing and she is watching the old “I Love Lucy” half hour sit-coms. Her observation and my agreement is that the “new” stuff just does not stand up and isn’t really funny or engaging. I’ve also found myself watching old versions of “Gun Smoke” and old western movies.

    Can you see some of the crap creeping in even back then? Yes, but it was a lot more restrained and there were actual stories and good production/writing values. I just read “With The Old Breed” and it was good history. Some ‘non message’ fiction I ran across was about WWII by a guy named P.T. Deutermann. I’ve also checked out books from the new shelf and while they seemed promising – several I have not finished beyond the first few chapters as the message was the book and the story just wasn’t there. I figure it’s free for me to explore some of these new authors by using the library but I am more often disappointed than I would like. I have cards for four libraries in two counties so I’m really trying to find something. We also have a Half Priced Book Store nearby and I’ll stop there and dig through the shelves for older publications and on occasion find a nice book or two. The big box store (B&N) I’ve been to but have not made a purchase there in a long time.

    The last dozen or so actual book purchases have been Kindle versions and they are all authors who are independent – several of them I’ve found from here and one I just read has dedicated a novel to our wonderful host. These are the authors and creators that are producing good stories and providing a fun read and I enjoy supporting them. While I’m not so good at creating, I will support and help those that are – up, up and away!

    1. If you haven’t tried them, the original Wild, Wild West half-hour eps were delightfully fun.

      1. Yes to the wild, wild west! I also ran across some old Man from UNCLE shows and they were a hoot.

        1. “You ‘very got the Mafia and I got Lucrezia Borgia. We’re in great shape.” -Illya Kuryakin, from a “Man from UNCLE,” movie I suspect was stitched together from a couple of episodes.
          The first season had a lot of episodes that worked out to, “Intelligent woman longing for adventure gets recruited for one mission and learns home and family have their good points.”
          Why yes, my roommate dragged me into UNCLE fandom in the 70s, how could you tell?

            1. So does David Weber. One of the multitude of minor characters in the Safehold series is named Lahmont Cranstyhn, a scout whose nickname is, “Shadow.”

              1. Now how did I miss that? I enjoyed that world although things got a bit laggy at the end. The Shadow I was introduced to by my Dad and a set of Readers Digest mono records that had all sorts of radio programs. For example Fibber Mcgee, Amos and Andy (good luck finding that anywhere), The Shadow, Green Hornet, Various “live” news reports Like the Hindenberg and early reports on Pearl Harbor. And of course excerpts from Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds.

                1. Local radio station growing up played, “The Shadow,” and, “The Green Hornet,” on Sunday afternoons.

                2. If you want a real hoot, find David’s “How the Safehold Series Won’t End” article about the future of Safehold; everyone from Alicia DeVries and Senior Fleet Admiral Ninhursag MacIntyre to Bahzell Bahnakson, plus a Bolo Brigade, shows up in a fleet of Dahak-IV planetoids to deal with the Gbaba (also known as Achuultani in another universe). Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I found it, but it might have been on his website.

                  And he swears he wasn’t smoking any prohibited substances whe nhe wrote it… 🙂

                  1. A Mr. Webers equivalent of Larry Nivens “Down In Flames”. Like Niven’s ending Weber will Never do it. Hell originally Honor was supposed to do a Nelson and go down in At All Costs. Eight books and a bit later she is still around 🙂 .

    3. I don’t see why one couldn’t create one’s own private lending library if one were so inclined.

      Go to a bunch of estate sales, snatch up the books no one else wants for a song – I got some excellent technical manuals this way – and lend them out to people who actually want information.

      Maybe even keep a card catalog with actual cards in it.

      After all, who says that only the public libraries can lend books?

          2. One of ours, even if he only revealed it when almost dead. He’d be on this blog were he alive and my age. Heck, he might have his own blog, and we’d do guest posts for each other. (Oh, and the hurt from the left when that landed. If they’d READ him, properly, they’d have known.)

  7. For a good Christian author I’d recommend David Gemmell. Short, entertaining fantasies with flawed human beings struggling against darkness without and within. Definitely more of what I’d term “Johnny Cash Christianity”.

    2. Dean Koontz does similar stuff with his “spiritual thrillers” and horror novels (and just plain thrillers). Speaking of memorization, let’s see….

      Holy men tell us that life is a great mystery
      They embrace this truth happily
      But some mysteries bite and bark
      And come to get you in the dark.

      I’ll look it up later and probably find I misremembered most of that. The other one I like is:

      “I’m Nobody! Who are you?
      Are you – Nobody – too?
      Then there’s a pair of us!
      Don’t tell – they’d banish us, you know

      How dreary to be Somebody
      How public, like a Frog
      To spend one’s day, the livelong June
      Singing to an admiring Bog.”

      Though I think I misremembered some of that one, too. :sigh:

      2. I am Somebody.
        As in somebody needs to work late. Somebody needs to clean up. Somebody has to mow the lawn. And everyone’s favorite, Somebody needs to donate.

        1. Won’t somebody clean up this mess? Can somebody calm this irate person down/restrain them till the cops show up? Will somebody come in after hours to take care of this emergency? Can somebody drive four hours one way to pick up our stranded employee? Is there somebody that can fix this broken thing?

          …yeah. I’ve been somebody before, too.

      3. I am Somebody.
        As in somebody needs to work late. Somebody needs to clean up. Somebody has to mow the lawn. And everyone’s favorite, Somebody needs to donate.

    3. I’m not even a Christian, but when I used to work at a big chain bookstore back in the day, the selection of Christian fiction was awful. That was the heyday of stuff like Left Behind which was just objectively badly-written. I mean, making the Book of Revelations boring and mechanical? That’s almost criminal. When a customer came in one day looking for Christian books and said that he specifically didn’t want LB, I was relieved.

      1. I read only one and didn’t read another. I’m a dispensationalist and could not stomach them at all. I just finished reading the first out of courtesy.

      2. I went on a Left Behind rant to my poor longsuffering Kid, realized halfway through that I was now plotting my own Book-of-Revelation series and DID NOT HAVE TIME FOR THAT, and hastily shut myself up. 🙂

      3. I went on a Left Behind rant to my poor longsuffering Kid, realized halfway through that I was now plotting my own Book-of-Revelation series and DID NOT HAVE TIME FOR THAT, and hastily shut myself up. 🙂

    4. Zenna Henderson
      Cordwainer Smith
      Christopher Stasheff
      Gene Wolfe
      Jagi Lamplighter
      John C. Wright
      Hyperspace Demons short story (brain glurge on author)

      Let me think a bit – I know there’s more, but these are favorites.

      I do find myself getting impatient with writers who I know are Christian who nonetheless write characters who never pray in foxholes. I know it’s a genre convention, but it’s a stupid one.

  8. ‘Memorize’.

    This is a skill rapidly being lost. Kids these days do not memorize their times tables. They are not required to memorize passages of poetry or our founding documents.

    My great aunt would recipe the Highwayman to me when I was a little girl. The way she would tell it fascinated me, launched me into the story. A subtle hand motion, a change of inflection, would alter the mood, the feeling of any given scene.

    When I was in my teens I decided to memorize it myself.

    (Bit of back history, I have a learning disability that boils down to I have no short term memory, so if I want to remember something I have to get it into long term storage. This resulted in me memorizing all the things without really realizing it until much later.)

    So I memorized The Highwayman. The whole thing. (This made me very popular in the Medieval History club in college, though we all knew it wasn’t period.) That only took me a week. So I did The Owl Critic. I memorized passages of scripture to impress the teachers in sunday school. A couple of years ago I got invited to a Mad Max version of burning man called Wasteland Weekend, so for a lark, I memorized The Shooting of Dan McGrew, in case anyone needed late night, ’round the bon fire entertainment. (I need to write that story about a person who works at the censorship office and memorizes poetry and novels by day and then dictates them to underground rebel scholars by night to keep the old words alive.)

    This is definitely a skill we need to reintroduce to the rising generation. Not only is it useful, in case you are caught without your phone (or with a phone with no charge), but having those words ready to go at the drop of a hat is surprisingly impressive to most folks these days.

    1. Okay, in the second paragraph there’s a ‘recipe’ that is supposed to be ‘recite’. Don’t ask me how that happened….. blond typing, take 3.

    2. Clearly you are one of Bradbury’s “books”. If you come to Son of SilverCon, I’d love to hear either or both of The Highwayman or Dan McGrew. I’ll pay for the beer.

      1. So, I actually performed The Highwayman for LTUE’s GoH dinner, lo these many years ago. (The Medieval History club was the most easily recognizable group on campus and we did a self-catered feast [9 courses and 3 hours of entertainment for $25, no better date night around!] as our annual fund-raiser, so we weren’t surprised to be asked to do entertainment for the dinner.) I actually made the GoH cry, but in a good way he told me, because I had reminded him of how his own grandmother used to recite that very poem for him at bed time.

        I don’t particularly like being the center of attention, but I love seeing the lights in peoples’ eyes as I catch their imagination.

        I don’t generally do Cons, far too many people to be honest, but if I ever make that one, I’ll take you up on that. 🙂

        1. Actually since this is the first Son of SilverCon, there won’t be many of us. It’s just outside Las Vegas (Nevada, not New Mexico), so convenient enough to me, but geography may be other people’s stumbling block.

    3. Irish on me sainted Mother’s side. Everyone on her side of the family memorized poetry. Including us kids. Before my stroke I used to have 100’s of poems by heart. It was a great way to entertain the kids in the car back in the day when there were no phones or DVD players.

      We’d have recite offs. “Okay everyone, do a Kipling…now we each do a nursery rhyme…now Poe, now a sonnet, any kid’s poem, a poem that has the word apple in it. Etc.

      Great fun. My husband thinks my family is nuts but he’s German so they don’t know what fun is. And really, is it so different from people who learn the words to every song on the radio?

      I’ve tried to learn them back but alas!

      1. It’s rough when the software gets scrambled that way. Have you tried cards with the first word of each line, to prod your memory? Kinda like when you’re singing hymns in church, you only need a glance, oh, right, this verse, not that one….

        2. I have tried lots of things, including flash cards like you suggest. The connections are just too wonky.

          But sometimes, if the conditions are just right, I get some back for a while. I was watching my little granddaughters this summer and out of the blue I remembered and recited for them several of their mothers favorites from when she was a little girl. It was great fun and they enjoyed it immensely.

          The next day, no luck at all. But, since poetry wasn’t going to work for me that day we read tongue twister books by Dr. Suess and that was also great fun.

          You just have to roll with the punches sometimes.

      2. “His harp was carved and cunning,
        His sword prompt and sharp,
        And he was gay when he held the sword,
        Sad when he held the harp.

              For the great Gaels of Ireland
      Are the men that God made mad,
      For all their wars are merry,
      And all their songs are sad."

        G.K. Chesterton

        1. ‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves
          Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe.
          All mimsy were the borogoves
          And the mome raths outgrabe

          Beware the Jabberwock, my son,
          The teeth that bite, the claws that catch!
          Beware the Jub-jub bird and shun
          The frumious Bandersnatch.

          Lewis Carol

          When the Himalayan peasant
          meets the he-bear in his pride
          he shouts to scare the monster
          who will often turn aside
          but the she-bear thus accosted
          rends the peasant tooth and nail
          for the female of the species
          is more deadly than the male.

          When Nag, the basking cobra
          hears the careless foot of man
          he will sometimes wriggle sideways
          and avoid it if he can
          but his make makes no such motion
          where she camps beside the trail
          for the female of the species
          is more deadly than the male.

          Kipling

                  1. Well, while none of them would admit, the Tanu and the Firvulag were related. 😉

        3. There was movement at the station for the word had passed around
          That the colt from Old Regret had got away
          And joined the wild bush horses. He was worth a thousand pounds
          And all the cracks had gathered to the fray …

          “The Man from Snowey River” A. B. “Banjo” Patterson.

            1. I don’t know why Mary Renault went out of fashion, especially since many of her characters were gay -I mean, she specialized in classical Greek historical fiction. But in her last novel the narrator (a straight guy, for a change) commented that a young athlete who had won an evening with Athens’ finest hetaira was learning more about how to manage his javelin than he’d ever imagined was possible.

    4. Years ago, my wife and I used to go to storyteller festivals for folks who made money (probably not a living) telling stories to live audiences. They were great, the new incarnation of the bards of old.

    5. I had a marvelous sixth grade teacher who had his class memorize and recite poetry – we took home a mimeographed poem at the beginning of the week, memorized a stanza or a verse every night, and recited the next morning, first thing. The longest poem we tackled was Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam Magee” – which we recited entirely for a school assembly. We also memorized and recited the opening of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution. I think I have read somewhere or other that the brain of a ten or twelve-year old is perfectly situated for memorizing great chunks of material.

    6. This is a skill rapidly being lost. Kids these days do not memorize their times tables. They are not required to memorize passages of poetry or our founding documents.

      For generations, now.

      It TAKES WORK.

      Most of the stuff that is “kids these days don’t”?

      it’s high work investment.

      /homeschool mom who didn’t get taught this stuff

      1. Note, give it a rhythm and a rhyme? I can remember it and scare folks.

        I learned songs since forever, and I knew [shopmates] rap songs better than he did, after two listenenings.

    7. Even as a public education kid, I still had to memorize the opening to Canturbury Tales… in the original language.

      “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…”

      (Yes, I looked that up; I might be able to recite it, but there’s no way that I could spell it… 😛 )

      1. High school English teacher required that from the Seniors (as well as Jabberwocky, first verse of The Raven). Private, prep school in CT.

        Guy in the class ahead of me won a bet in a bar in New York with that bit of Middle English.

        I used to read Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad to my kids; never got up the energy to learn Greek. (I also have since acquired translations by Butler, Fagles and Green.) ‘And his armor clattered upon him.’

        1. Do you know of a good chanted audio version of the Ilead?

          That would be a heck of a thing for a long car ride.

    8. The Book of Eli.
      Denzel Washington as the MC who is the walking memory of the King James Bible.

      My suggestion? All of us memorize our Constitution.

  9. Humanity requires an anchor to function. Christianity provides that for many, and that anchor reflects a positive force that humans may be generally corrupt but we have good in us, and together we can bring that good out and improve the world. Modern Leftists beliefs used as anchors such as socialism, climate change, nth wave feminism and the like are all negative forces because they are used to destroy anybody who does not parrot their line.

    1. In college, I took a course on Soviet Science Fiction. Some interesting ideas snuck through, but it was hard to write an interesting story where “Socialism” is always the hero.

      1. Chuckle Chuckle

        I read a Soviet writer’s “answer” to the classic SF story “First Contact”.

        Nothing really happened as the humans were Perfect Soviet Humans and the aliens were Perfect Soviet Aliens. 😆

      2. In fact, the most famous Soviet SF authors, the Strugatsky brothers, began as true believers, but over time, simply in their imaginations, began to bump up against how socialism simply cannot work. And their “the Soviets will rule the universe forever and ever” future history began to include books like Hard To Be A God which subtly explored the impossibilities of the system.

    2. Christianity is far more than a societal anchor as it changes the believer as the Holy Spirit works in their lives to produce sanctification. The further society gets away from Christ, the worse it becomes.

  10. Re: people unable to read for pleasure, audiobooks take care of that. And a lot of people end up reading the classics that way.

    And if you can’t get an old audiobook or a canceled book, it is probably available as a podcast or video or some kind of file.

      1. Some of the recordings are wonderful, too. Bob Neufeld does a great reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I think he has a few more as well.

        My advice for LibriVox: Check to be sure a reading is completely finished, and that it is “solo;” that the reader does not change. It is frustrating to be several chapters into a book, only to have the reader swap to someone you can’t bear to listen to. Even if you can, it’s disconcerting. For similar reasons, I also recommend avoiding “dramatic” readings (these are by ensembles), but YMMV on that.

  11. The Left sort of has a culture. In the same way that mold and fungus are a culture…

    But seriously, the Left’s “cultural poles”-as it were-are this very strange mix of condescending French authoritarianism, bullying German paranoia, and massive self-loathing Judaic fear that the millennium is coming and they aren’t among the Select. So the punishing of everyone that isn’t them to prove that they’re among the Select starts to happen.

    I think that the “only the left is creative” happened because a lot of us creative people are…weird and odd…and the Left for the most part was willing to put up with us as long as we wrote the occasional hentai fanfic or drew some big-breasted futanari for their edification.

    (Don’t ask. I’m having this horrible fear that I’ll be writing a porn novel soon(1)-and it might outsell my “serious” works.)

    But we’re seeing the Red Guard/”the revolution is eternal!” generation come into power since the mid-to-late ’90s and everything has to be put through purity and heresy testing to ensure that only the Right Kind Of Stories are told.

    Which is why they all have the same consistency as wallpaper paste.

    I’m trying to preserve as much as possible, saving the old stories and the old skills. And if I have to teach at my local hobby shop how to write…

    (There is some hope. I suspect that we’re seeing the desperation flailing of the Political Writing class in Hollywood and I’ve got to write faster because I have all of these stories stuck in my head…)
     
    (1-Under a pen name, of course. Much SF and exploring the questions about what technology can and can’t do as we get a better understanding of the biology…)

        1. This is something that I’ve tried to explain to people.
          They do have a culture.
          It’s just a culture that needs to be thrown out in the trash and buried in the deepest part of a landfill somewhere, never to be seen again by mortal eyes.

          1. I think of it as a strange chimera of ephemeral fad culture, cult (fanatic religiosity, venerated figures , sacred/profane, sectism…), and political “rebellion” layered over a deep pit of corruption, fetishism, and mental illness.

            Deprogramming a cult this large will be a trial. But it is necessary. Much as I fantasize about exiling the worst of them, it is impractical at this time. And I know that I am least suited to do the choosing of who can be saved and who gets the boot.

            But for the innocents- the children, I mean. And those desperate souls caught in the middle, afraid to speak out lest they be eaten by the mob (perhaps literally. I put nothing beyond the progressives anymore), they should be welcomed with open arms.

            Because it is we that are the party of all. No matter your sex, skin color, age, or wealth, we want those who live to be free. Liberty is not safe, and oftentimes it is quite dangerous.

            But it is the best of all things. With it, there are no limits on what one can achieve, should they spend the sweat and time for it.

          2. To call a Russian nekulturny is a serious insult. Literally the word means “uncultured.” In application, as in this case, it means their culture is low and barbaric. That describes Putin and his fellow intel apparatchiks quite well.

            1. I know exactly what nekulturny means and why it’s used the way it is.

              My point is that they have a culture. It’s low, evil, and dangerous…but to say that they don’t have one is worse than pretending that it isn’t a threat.

                1. Agreed. As I understand it, nekulturny means “no respectable culture; even Petrie dishes tend to have culture(s). Come to think of it, that pretty well describes the culture of the Left…

    1. Foxfier, if you look at that list, it only shows what you currently have borrowed (10 books, in my case, and that was after I turned in and replaced a couple earlier this week). I’ve borrowed a couple of hundred in the last 5 years.

      1. Frack.

        Thanks, had baby on arm, was trying to use the pasting history and msut’ve picked the wrong one.

        https://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/ku/ku_central?ref_=nav_AccountFlyout_ku

        accounts @ Lists, Kindlke Unlimited, then drop down menu to show Returned….

        Issue being, especially since we KNOW that Sarah reads a ton and will pull questionable stuff because it may be interesting then return it, there’s going to be a zillion things she has no memory of if she’s lucky, and you can’t search it.

          1. The kindle unlimited history features are a joke. No Search as mentioned. You can do a browser search (ctrl-f) but your complete kindle history is not displayed. It only loads a chunk at a time as you scroll down. After a certain point it stops loading. I can currently see my entire history by selecting ascending scroll until it stops then do it again by descending. At some point it will no longer overlap and I will not be able to see the middle. I frequently find it easier to guess where I left off in a series and borrow each book consecutively until I find where I left off.

  13. For me personally, “memorize” works best with lyric and narrative verse. Practically all the devices of traditional verse that were tossed out with the fad for vers libre are mnemonic aids; once you learn to pick up on the metrical pattern in a poem it becomes massively easier to get it into your memory, whether it’s a limerick or an ode. So I’ve learned quite a few poems by heart, even one or two in foreign languages. I still learn the occasional new one; a couple of years ago, for example, I memorized Vachel Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” which I find moving even though I don’t share Lindsay’s theism.

    I don’t want to suggest that all vers libre is bad. But even with poems that I like a lot, such as Jeffers’s “Hurt Hawks” or cummings’s “she being brand,” I’ve never been able to get them into long-term memory without the aid of a regular metrical pattern. So I encourage you to take a look at verse forms and see if they help you memorize.

  15. Lots of thoughts I don’t have time to explore at length today.

    First, of course, you are most welcome, jiejie.

    Second, some of this post made me think of a hyper-leftwing author who wrote and indie published several books I genuinely loved. She had a brilliant central idea, several equally brilliant ideas that went along with it, but the series was… lumpy. First book was amazing, but should have been the third. Second book was a step down because she tried to do a bit too much in the story — but I admire the heck out of aiming too high, and loved the book for other reasons, too. The third book was weird and didn’t quite work, and the fourth book showed that she had a larger goal in mind for the series, and could have gone several interesting places thereafter. (Her main character had a revelation when she realized that other people could remember their childhoods. The character couldn’t remember anything clearly before five years ago.)

    Part of what made the books so good is that she genuinely wrestled with her woke ideas, to the point that in the fourth book, the main character basically becomes the villain of the story without realizing it. (And the metaphor of the rootless, knee-jerk leftist becomes so obsessive that she becomes a villain is, well, rather apt.)

    But then, this author signed with Tor. And “rewrote” the series at Tor’s direction. I haven’t looked to see how bad the rewrites are. But a smart and independent lefty willingly dived into the morass of Tor and the gatekeepers, and that’s just sad to me.

    Third, the Hollywood situation is arguably more complicated than it seems from the outside. There are a thousand and one ways a great screenplay can be destroyed before and during production, before you include malice in the equation. From producer-required rewrites that only make sense to the producer, to having even one role miscast, to a director not understanding what the audience wants from the genre, to a composer delivering a completely lackluster score, any one of these things can destroy a movie (and those are just the tip of the iceberg).

    But I freely admit, in the past few years, particularly in streaming TV shows, the writers also bear a great part of the blame. For example, the head writer on She-Hulk had never read the comics, was never a fan of comics in general, and had no experience writing comedy (a learned skill) or legal dramas. So she had exactly zero tools to put to use to make what she ostensibly wanted to make. And it shows. (Also evident: the narcissism of “writers” who got hired for diversity points, and how these boxwine single professional women always make their shows about their shallow concerns, and how the rest of the world should conform to them, rather than learning anything from their experiences.)

    Secret Invasion was also a shitshow, and not only because of the writers. The show-runner admitted in interviews that he didn’t know or care about the characters’ histories, and the only direction he got was that Nick Fury should begin at a certain place and time, and end at a different place or time, and so long as those were fulfilled, he could do literally anything he wanted, because nobody cared about character or continuity. Yes, the writer bears responsibility there, but so does the producer who is supposed to be shepherding the characters and the Marvel universe.

    Are leftists more creative? Certainly not today. But I can see Jordan Peterson’s frequent point that “openness to new experience” is correlated with creativity, and with liberalism (though that is definitely distinct from leftism). Not being open to new possibilities would tend to make one’s stories boringly repetitive. (Which is a great way to get in good with professors of English, who love authors who stick to one story over and over, but is a terrible way to sell books to readers, at least if you want to sell more than one book to any particular reader.)

    1. “Authors who stick to one story over and over…”
      Paging David Eddings…
      And I enjoy a lot of his work. But he did use the same stock characters and his basic assumptions (conservatives are always backwards, most priests are fanatic/narrow, everyone is mainly motivated by money, and so on) in his work.

      1. I was actually driving at something a little different, the distinction between stylists and storytellers. Stylists, like Philip K. Dick, or Ray Bradbury, tell the same story (or small set of stories) over and over working on the way it’s told. According to professors, they are the only “real” writers. Storytellers usually tell a different story every time out.

        I’ve never read Eddings, despite knowing people who like his stuff, because he struck me as you described, more like Dan Brown than a stylist. Or, to a slightly lesser extent, William Gibson, who had one story to tell, one way to tell it, and then spun his wheels for close to forty years in increasingly less interesting ways.

          1. For starters, academics strongly prefer authors to be safely dead before they really embrace them. Saves them the whole embarrassing “No, you overcredentialed lackwit, I meant that the curtains were fucking blue!” situations.

            But you are correct. They will never embrace Heinlein (because he spent his last, somewhat debilitated years showing them up at their own game, with both hands tied behind his back and still doing cartwheels), and likely will never appreciate you, either.

            So, the coming fall of the university system is a very good thing.

        2. Gibson started his novel career with “Neuromancer”, which which used some of his earlier short stories as backstory. It had a strong plot, though just a single plotline. But his later stuff got weaker and weaker on the “plot” thing, until many of his later works were just people randomly moving around in a sort of social Brownian motion, and finally I’d get to the last page without ever discovering anything discernible as a plot.

          Not just harshing on Gibson; I’ve read too many recent books like that, not all in the SF genre. I guess it makes it easier to do edits, and from the drivel on TV and movies, I get the idea most people don’t actually expect a plot.

          1. I mean, at least in Virtual Light he stole a plot from Dashiell Hammett.

            But I have long, attenuated rants on Gibson and why he could never get past his one idea. I’ll spare you, for now. 🙂

      2. To defend Eddings – he made pretty clear that all of his corrupt priests weren’t actually religious (or were actively in the pay of the enemy) whereas all of his actually religious priests were good guys. And the Bear-Cult was hated by everyone who actually followed Belar.

        1. He had some that were fanatics -you could tell because they never bathed. There was a scene in one book where the priests at a remote shrine were trying to refuse to let Garion (who, after all, was supposed to be a hero to them) review an ancient record because he was not One of Them. (When they did, the priest went away muttering, “blasphemy.”)

      3. A one-off by Eddings, “The Redemption of Althelas”, has a priest as a core member of the party.

        My biggest issue with Eddings is that he’s a fan of protagonist-centered morality. None of his protagonists ever go evil, but they never seem to have any compunction about engaging in questionable actions.

    2. The trouble with “openness to experience” is that it doesn’t mean at all what it sounds like. I’ve taken two or three Big Five personality tests, and the “openness to experience” questions are about things like going to art museums, eating in restaurants that serve foreign cuisines, and reading literary fiction. I’ve never seen one that asked about bungee jumping, or orgies, or eating magic mushrooms, or hitchhiking in Brazil or Croatia, or diving at the Great Barrier Reef—you know, actual experiences. (Or moving to another country and marrying someone there. . . .) That dimension seems to be basically asking “are you part of the college-educated urban upper middle class?” It wants the common culture of liberal arts majors.
      And I get high scores on it, because I do a lot of those things. I used to say that I was a culturally leftist libertarian, back before the left became openly hostile to libertarians. But I don’t think that set of tastes and preferences is a marker of any special mental traits.
      My personal guess is that conservatives tend low on Openness to Experience; progressives tend high on it and on Agreeableness; but libertarians tend high on Openness to Experience and low on Agreeableness.
      Of course, psychologists themselves are nearly all part of the college-educated urban upper middle class, so those are the experiences they want you to be open to.

  16. I do remember reading a Christian author writing WWII books in the mainstream who was a delight and a wonder, and amazingly knowledgeable.

    Was that Heather Munn and/or Lydia Munn, by any chance? They’re a mother and daughter team (disclosure: Lydia is my mother and Heather is my sister) who wrote How Huge the Night, a historical novel about a town in France that rescued hundreds of Jews during WWII. It has two sequels, Defy the Night and Flame in the Night (the last one authored by Heather Munn alone, where the first two were co-authored by Heather and Lydia). A fourth book is in the final stages of editing, but will probably not be released until sometime in 2024.

    If that’s not who you were thinking of, then sorry for the accidental plug. But it sounded enough like my mother and sister that I thought they might be the ones you were thinking of.

      1. Your memory was correct after all. The book’s description says WWI, but I just grabbed a KU copy and opened the book, and the first chapter heading is “Brooklyn, New York, September 1943”. So it’s WWII, not WWI, and you were remembering its setting correctly.

    4. Oh. You said you read this author’s book in Kindle Unlimited, so it wasn’t How Huge the Night: I just checked, and the publisher has not chosen to put that one in the Kindle Unlimited program. I didn’t intend to plug my mother’s and sister’s book in an unrelated discussion, but WordPress doesn’t have a way to delete comments that I’m aware of so…

      Oh, and the reason I first thought you might be referring to their book(s) is because unlike so many Christian authors, they have managed to avoid being preachy. Characters are driven by their religious beliefs, because those are the beliefs held by the actual people the characters were based on, not because the authors wanted to shoehorn those beliefs into the story. Anyway, if I keep going on this will turn into a plug, and this isn’t the book recommendation thread, so I’ll stop now.

  22. The Left HAS no culture that they haven’t stolen. The current dearth of decent material out of Hollywood proves that. What’s being made are poor adaptions of old books, shoddy sequels, and second-rate remakes.

    So…cheer up! Draw your sabers and ride right through them!

    1. I noted recently how awful the summer movie season was this year. The only ok movie was Oppenheimer.

      But then I realized that there was one big DC Superhero movie this summer and one Indiana Jones movie. Both were complete garbage that I refused to watch and actually rooted for their failure. Yet in 1989 there was one DC Superhero movie and one Indiana Jones movie in what might have been one of the best movie summers ever.

      They’ve fucking ruined everything. God damn the left.

  23. I’ve been irked by how often what seems like a decent history or natural history book turns into a crie de cour about [trendy thing here]. Like the one on the mountains of eastern North America that turns into an elegy to a lost paradise destroyed by: global warming, acid rain, mining, bad forestry, and overdevelopment. The nature writing is top notch. The environmental hand-wringing got old quick. Or a history of Native Americans that elides over what they were doing to each other before the Europeans arrived (aka “Blessed Saint Indian”).

    I keep muttering that I should write a textbook. I could probably do a decent job, given the enormous library and note files I’ve built up. The cost of illustration permissions dissuades me.

    1. I have downloaded a number of Nova documentaries, and I cannot watch them straight through. No matter how interesting the subject is to me, there is an injection of some aspect of wokeness that has jack and s**t to do with the actual topic.

      One on testing Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” empirically… and the filmmakers seem to have purposely excluded as many white males as possible from interview subjects. Like, seriously, I know there are ethnic females in physics, but not that many. They had to work to get the selection they did.

      Another on the Nazca Lines in South America. It’s currently paused around the one-quarter mark because of a detour talking about the current native population “reconnecting” with the heritage of the people who made the lines through weaving or something. And there’s even an arguably good way to make that connection, it’s perhaps moderately relevant to the lines themselves, but no, it’s all virtue signaling, about how the conquering Spaniards erased culture (without really specifying how that happened with the Nazca Lines, because that’s not what happened as far as I can tell).

      Or an American Experience doc on L. Frank Baum. Covering his early life, and frequent failures is fine. Using all of that to decry capitalism, overtly, covertly, and sideways, not so much. One dude not liking being a salesman, and not being a particularly good entrepreneur (until he was) does not indict the entire system of free trade. And is inappropriate to the subject matter, unless they end up going with the “Wizard of Oz is an allegory about 1890s political battles because Dorothy had silver shoes” nonsense (still haven’t finished this one either).

      It’s so damn tiring.

      1. A few years ago, I watched a documentary on Human Sacrifices and of course, if you’re going to talk about that subject, you have to mention the Aztecs.

        Well, while they did an honest job talking about what the Aztecs actually did, they had to include some people who talked about how the Aztecs Weren’t Savages but were a Civilized People.

        I had to laugh out loud about that part. Yes the Aztecs had a city-building civilization but they weren’t people that you wanted as neighbors. 😆

        1. And the neighbors the Aztecs did have practically fell all over themselves in signing on with the Spanish to address that “civilized” Aztec society, as I recall.

          Kinda makes one wonder what a-holes the Aztecs were, where the neighbors deciding joining up with Spaniards who weren’t exactly concerned about “cultural sensitivity” was a rational decision.

          (Or it does for those whose heads aren’t full of rancid pudding, anyway. 😛 )

          1. On the Spanish and cultural sensitivity, somewhere I heard (perhaps in the documentary on Human Sacrifices) a local Aztec priest welcomed Cortez and his men by sacrificing a boy to these “gods from the sea”.

            These Spanish were not “nice guys” but cutting out the heart of a boy wasn’t something they’d do or like. 😈

      3. I’ve heard that sort of theory about the silver slippers. Unless they can show from Baum’s own writing that he was using that sort of symbolism in his books, I’m not really impressed with it.

        And the fact that Baum could make money but not keep it does not repudiate capitalism at all.

        1. And the fact that Baum could make money but not keep it does not repudiate capitalism at all.

          Only if you accept that individuals are responsible for their actions and the consequences that follow. Which the left does not.

  24. Couple things, first nekulturny and then Omelas.

    I learned Latin in high school. (I know what “semper ubi sub ubi” means.) I read the Lord of the Rings when it came out in paperback. I still have that copy here somewhere. I also read Lao Tsu, Chuang Tsu, Sun Tsu, the Yoga Sutras of Patangalee, the Book of Five Rings, and a frack-ton of science fiction and fantasy, and comics. The entire output of Marvel and DC for 10 years. My basement bulges.

    I bow my nerd credentials to no man.

    In my not even slightly humble opinion, since 1999 onward Western Leftists have mangled and f-ed over every single intellectual property they’ve laid their hands on, including the ones they made up themselves like Star Wars. Culminating recently with the LotR television show that gave us gay elves, rioting MAGA dwarves and “fans” asking questions like “does Gandalf know the sun is a ball of flaming gas?”

    Gandalf was a Maiar, and sang in the choir at the creation of the World. He knows the sun is -not- a ball of flaming gas, and he knows who guides it through the sky.

    That’s why NPCs can’t meme. They’re ignorant.

    As to Omelas, when I found out our Nora did a story about it, I was profoundly not surprised to hear that she decided it was a paradise worth fighting for and went full National Socialist. Talk about not understanding the freaking point. Perfectly Nora.

    Not that good ol’ Ursula was any better, I hasten to add, it is one of my top five most hated stories. Yes, the wealth of the West is supposed to be provided by the slaves and sweatshops of the third world, so original. Yore momma, Ursula. The slaves are in CHINA.

    I included it in one of my books, a city that derives its wealth from demon worship. The young ladies and lippy combat spiders have a wonderful time blasting the ever-loving sh*t out of the place.

    2. “I read the Lord of the Rings when it came out in paperback.”

      Ah, but did you read them out of order and still finish the set? I got Two Towers first, then Return of the King and finally Fellowship. 1966, I think, and wasn’t my copy of any of them.

      Omelas is not one of my favorites, either.

  25. Huh. I haz a thought. On the last WriterDojo episode, Larry Correia had a brief side-rant about how the right completely fails at promoting other artists / authors / etc, while the left is excellent at doing their little incestuous promotion. He noted that large conservative folks will copy-paste GPrime’s cartoons, but never give credit and say “Hey, here’s this guy’s Patreon, check him out.” They’ll let you pay for advertising, but never spontaneously say “Hey, I liked this book, check it out.”

    So, by the Sunday Promo you do so well (thank you!), you’re actually filling a underserved niche of “Hey, what’s some entertainment from people who don’t hate me?” and beating back the “right isn’t creative”… it’s not A Giant Crushing Blow, but it is, over time, a very important undermining of their messaging, by letting the signal spread.

    Thank you!

    And I shall have to mention the things I like more often, myself. Because. spreading good news, joy, and fun… never hurts.

    1. …and following on that, sure as thought leads to thought, I wonder if that’s why you get targeted way above what you perceive as your cultural weight: that by providing links to books here and sometimes on instapundit, you inhabit the slot that in their world would be a queen bee tastemaker in the inner circle?

      After all, no one who’s not in the socialist inner circle would dare tell others who the current authors in and out of favour currently are without referring to some other list or authourity, lest they fall afoul of some fresh new dictat, and lose face…

      And they project like an IMAX, eh?

        1. Eh George Takei has been old and cranky for a while (like 30 years or so, before that he was young and cranky).

    2. On the last WriterDojo episode, Larry Correia had a brief side-rant about how the right completely fails at promoting other artists / authors / etc, while the left is excellent at doing their little incestuous promotion. He noted that large conservative folks will copy-paste GPrime’s cartoons, but never give credit and say “Hey, here’s this guy’s Patreon, check him out.” They’ll let you pay for advertising, but never spontaneously say “Hey, I liked this book, check it out.”

      ….. once again, I am a Nobody who Nevers.

    3. Oh, so this is where everyone on FB is now repeating this, and I’m going “DUDE I DO IT”
      I have intentions of starting a site to do this, but I need the site designed. I have a person to do it, it’s just us getting together and talking.

  26. I memorized a LOT of poetry when I was young, just because I read MAD Magazine and wanted to know what all those parodies were parodying. A friend of mine, now (sadly) very recently deceased, used to tell about how she came upon me in the Demicon consuite years ago, obviously lit up like a Christmas tree—and doing Poe’s “The Raven” as a rap. Perfectly. Word for word. She said that after that, she respected my depth of knowledge.

    As for “politically incorrect” modern literature—I like to point out that Gone with the Wind is not a “Moonlight and Magnolias” novel—it’s a deconstruction of the whole genre. In a real M+M novel, Ashley and Melanie would be the hero and heroine, and Rhett and Scarlett their evil counterparts. And Scarlett, herself, is very much a “strong female lead.” When she finds out she has to, she buckles down and becomes a successful businesswoman, even if her ethics are somewhat…lacking. Margaret Mitchell grew up listening to people who’d lived through that period and knew what had worked and what had not, and got sick of silly sentimentalizing. There’s a lot of stuff in the book that goes down hard for moderns, but it’s all from Scarlett’s own POV, and for all her proto-feminism, she’s a woman of her time.

    1. When I was reading Julius Caesar in English, Mad brought out a parody of the play. It was funny. The only part I can remember was part of a song sung to the Tune, “Home On The Range:”

      “Rome, Rome your just fine
      With that crazy SPQR sign
      Where the pizza is best
      But it’s hard to digest”

      Can’t remember anymore, but that harks back to 1968, and my concussions have started having an effect as I age.

      1. Ah, memories; My high school Latin class translated that and Jingle Bells (Tinnitus, Tinnitus, semper Tinnitus”) into Latin and serenaded the concluding banquet at the AL State Latin Club’s dinner in 1977. Our Latin teacher, Mr McGowan, is sitting up there with a “Who are these lunatics, did I really inspire this?” look.

        He was a wonderful teacher; our high school only offered two years of Latin as an elective, and we petitioned the school for a third year of Latin or a year of Greek so we could keep him teaching us.

        1. Though I never took Latin, I am currently wearing a T-shirt which says, in Latin, “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.” There’s a company that does them. (I don’t own it, but I’m rather fond of the one saying, “If Ceasar was alive you’d be chained to an oar.”)

          1. I want that one. The second one.
            Also want one that says in Latin “if I want your opinion, I’ll open you up and read your entrails.”
            …. I might have said that to the boys — in English — when they were teens and troublesome.
            It’s a wonder they’re functional. Well, that and they knew it actually meant “Run, she’s mad.”

            1. They used to have (and may still have), “If I wanted your opinion I’d read your entrails.” And a bunch of other comments. My beloved has, “Old age and treachery will always triumph over youth and enthusiasm.”
              They don’t have the company name in the t-shirt and I don’t have a Pennsic merchants’ guide with me. The web search has so far been unsuccessful- no, I don’t want t-shirts for Latinas. Sheesh. We’ll see.

              1. My beloved (more or less) high school history teacher had the “old age and treachery” sticker prominently plastered on her desk.

            2. Fiddling about with Google translate I get
              Si sententiam tuam voles, intestina tua legero
              though perhaps viscera or visceribus (viscera is more womb than entrails from what I can see). Also I removed “I’ll open you up” which would add
              ego aperiam te and likely et (for and) total would be

              Si sententiam tuam voles,
              ego aperiam te
              et visceribus tua legero

              Maybe a bit long for a t-shirt but a nice sentiment nonetheless…

        2. By the time I got to Hi Skool, Latin was being taught in only scattered places, and not where I went, alas.

    1. For crying out loud which dystopia haven’t they appropriated as a training manual?
      Farenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984, Logan’s Run, This Perfect Day, Hunger Games etc, etc ad infinitum et nauseum. If they start uplifting chimpanzees and other great apes I’m going to get seriously worried but not be deeply surprised.

              1. Loan Sharks, INNN SPAAACE!! 😀

                Actually, L. Ron did something similar in Battlefield Earth with the Selachii — intergalactic bankers descended from sharks. Alien sharks, presumably.

              2. Killer whales/orcas can’t help being apex predators. And the left might love them because they’re female-oriented; the males stay with Mom their whole lives, and when Mom dies her sons have a 30% chance of dying (from grief?) within a year.

  28. Nekulturny is one of the worst insults you can hurl at a Russian. It’s too bad that their head of state has been showing just how nekulturny he is.

    1. Hey, you gave me a — disquieting but very powerful — original painting, which will have place of honor in the library once it’s set up. You’re one of my favorite artists.

  31. Apologies if someone else beat me to this.
    Camping out the night before their set to with Igli.

    “The truth is, I’ve got a monkey on my back, a habit worse than marijuana though not as expensive as heroin. I can stiff it out and get to sleep anyway–but it wasn’t helping that I could see light in Stars tent and a silhouette that was no longer troubled by a dress.
    The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents’ worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I’ll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I’ll do without.”

    And Rufo hands Oscar a copy of Star’s grimoir for a bit of light reading.

  32. Just saw another post claiming that 0bama is secretly controlling the Biden* Regime.

    Why don’t those idiots realize that 0bama didn’t even control the 0bama Regime? All we’re seeing is the same ventriloquists with a different dummy.
    ———————————
    What we’re seeing in those Demokrat-ruled cities is not a whole lot more criminals; it’s just a lot more of the same criminals because nobody is doing anything to stop them.

    1. Bob Menendez just got indicted for more bribery than even a Democrat can tolerate.
      New Jersey always comes through ()

  34. And in other news, Ibram Kendi’s antiracism center is falling apart and he’s fired most of the employees. Some are complaining of being “exploited.” $30 million missing and no work to speak of….

    2. And as the rats leave the sinking ship they’re writing up tell alls. It is a shame its in Massachusetts the odds of any Suffolk or Middlesex DA charging Mr. Kendi with anything are slim and none. Otherwise it is a thing of beauty…

  35. The left says we have not culture because ‘we’ believe in the freedom to make our own choices (for better or worse), taking responsibility for actions, don’t use our faith (of your choice) as a club, actually understand science, and believe a rising tide lifts all boats. PLUS, we respect women and families. All of those things are an anathema to the left.

  36. Sarah, I have tried to find more modern Sci-Fi/Fantasy to read and gave up years ago. It is completely unreadable, pretty much being an exercise in “Modern world now” dressed up in the garish clothing of themes and mythos I loved. I do not even bother to look anymore, scouring the InterWeb and my local used books stores for classic authors that I know, enjoy, and can actual write.

    In terms of collecting books, I too have built up a collection over 50+ years, in some cases books that likely can no longer be purchased on the new/open market. I am working on getting thing such as the Loeb Classical Library works of Ancient authors in their original thoughts (the older translations are better; even the newer translations have a bit of “modern thought” in the introductions) before they become unavailable, which I assume they will at some point.

    We are reaching the point of Farenheit 451 except conveniently we do not burn books, we simply make them disappear.

  37. “Libraries have taken to a) only stocking books approved by the (leftist) review system. b) getting rid of books older than a couple of years. c) stocking a lot of commercial movies and music. The openly communist head of the librarians association is not an aberration. Like all gatekeeping, it was taken over.”

    Even the ones that do not appear to be odds are it is a pretense. However, in some cases they are legally or quasi-legally chained to that body of (now) sanctimonious parasitic censors (spits) the A.L.A.

    Ideas? State lawmakers banning ties to A L.A. Local boards axing the library leadership. Introducing an apprentice system and certification exams. Making a degree from any school accredited by the ALA after 2000 (or better yet 1990) disqualifying for leadership positions…

    IDK. It’s a mess.

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