Month: September 2025

I’ve been very disturbed by various “mental” health initiatives and attempt to codify declarations of madness into law.

No, I don’t think Trump is evil or Hitler. Yes, I do think mental health is a massive crisis in this country and we need to do something. I just want so many bumpers and padding on that “something” that it’s not even funny. And I’m absolutely sure whatever we do, the left will weaponize once they get power again.

Weaponize? you ask?

Well, you see, every communist country committed their opposition to madhouses, sanatoriums and rest homes for being mentally unwell. I remember in the late eighties going to a lot of talks by poets and writers from anywhere ranging from East Germany to Russia, who had spent years in various kind of mental health hold ups and sometimes heavily “medicated” for their crime of not being communists. How they were treated was a sliding scale of how well known they were abroad. If they weren’t well known at all, they got the harshest treatment.

And the most horrifying, scariest part about this is that in doing so the communists (yes, they called themselves socialists, mostly) weren’t being hypocrites. They really thought it was mental illness. Particularly the ones who’d gone through various college programs. They were taught the full on “weird Christian heresy” tale, including that humans in the beginning shared everything and there were no hierarchies or private property. And then property and hierarchy appeared, and that twisted humanity. (Yes, it’s Eden and the fall dressed up in red clothes, with a little hammer and sickle.) So communism restored sanity and allowed humans to be sane. And to reject communism was a mark of insanity. (Curiously, being insane was also a mark of being an opponent of communism. They had the courage of their delusion.)

How do I know this? Well. I read a lot of AMERICAN psychiatry manuals in the seventies, and they — as usual for academics — had bought the entire story from the Soviet Union lock, stock and barrel.

Part of the push for the de-institutionalization of the mad — something given full court press, from A Flight Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to various stories in all the sf mags, to oh so many biographies from “feminists” claiming that promiscuous women were treated like mad and institutionalized because they were “just” trying to live naturally (There are various reasons why promiscuous women should be institutionalized. NO, not ALL promiscuous women, duh. BUT there are forms of mental illness and self-abuse that manifest that way. The fact these stories blur the distinction between “likes sex and likes men” and “can’t control herself and sleeps with people who might kill her, and has caught three venereal diseases this week” is your first warning they’re unsound — was because the Soviet Union’s sincere belief they were doing the sane and logical thing bled over here.

And if you’re going to say “Sure, but people here will never be convinced that people who disagree are insane” you’re whistling past the graveyard. The well intentioned ones on the other side already do.

That is the people who used to be friends, who know I’m not evil or stupid, or uneducated think I’ve gone “peculiar” which is British for raving mad.

And they’re utterly serious about it, and utterly honest for a change. Which is where the danger lies, to be honest.

The truth is that when your entire concepts of the world are completely opposed, it’s impossible not to end up thinking these other people must be crazy. How often do we say the other side is mentally ill?

Which is the danger of this whole thing.

Is it a danger insofar as putting the homeless in institutions where they can be looked after? Well… no. Not if restricted in certain ways. BUT the problem is that once the bureaucracy is in place, you can’t restrict it that tightly.

Look, I fully understand that we can’t go on the way we are.

And in the same way, I’ll say — about the full court press above — that yes, I’m aware that mental health accusations and commitment were improperly used in the past. Because mental health is hellishly difficult to diagnose. You know something is very wrong, but … there’s a spectrum?

People today make fun of the idea that people in the past thought the mentally ill were possessed. Having found myself attempted-cornered by a homeless guy, and looking in his eyes seeing nothing human, I’m not sure the middle ages were wrong in every case.

Were they wrong in some? Well, we diagnosed a vast amount of physical illness as mental, because it’s all connected. Epilepsy was considered a form of madness, for instance.

Also, the “village madman” who died committed to a madhouse was probably only suffering from a case of a recognized syndrome that comes in the aftermath of a stroke (I can’t find the link now but was horrified when I found it) where you decide some part of your body doesn’t belong to you, and will not look after it. Unfortunately for this man he declaimed ownership of everything below the neck. So when his mother failed to force him to dress (He was a very distant cousin, and built like my kids, while his mom was a normal-sized Portuguese woman) he’d run through the streets of the village mother-naked and screaming “it’s not mine.”

This kind of illustrates the issues with mental health. This was HIS ONLY quirk. He was calm, biddable, would still work, was not a danger to himself and others. Except he wouldn’t wash or dress below the neck, because it wasn’t his.

It might be “just” the result of a stroke and physical, not mental, but what the heck do you even do with it?

The village mothers decided they couldn’t have this giant guy randomly running mother-naked through the street and went to the city fathers and got them to take him and have him committed.

I don’t know how he was treated in the mental hospital. Look, yes, bad mental hospitals existed. It wasn’t all propaganda. I figure the percentage was the same as bad old age homes or bad care for disabled children (because dealing with the helpless.) Which is WAY higher than bad normal hospitals.

And maybe that’s something we can do something about, though G-d help me, the government would make an ash of it and I don’t know any other institution that will reliably supervise and not make it worse.

I used to think the place the man was committed was one of the good ones and well run, but then in high school I met a young man who had been committed between 12 and 14 due to some emotional breakdown when his mother died, and during those two years he was raped countless times, which screwed him up more. So it was, at the very least, poorly supervised at times? (And I do realize administrators are human.)

So yeah, there are horrors, and there’s a responsibility towards making sure people who are committed are at least as well treated as prisoners in minimum security wards?

On the other hand, you know, what we have is untenable. Because schizophrenics for instance, can be controlled with medication. The problem is making them take the medication. And if you want to read fully on how cruel we are being to the mentally ill by letting them live on the streets, read My Brother Ron. (Yes, that, as all book links on this site are linked to my associate account and I get a tiny portion of the purchase at no extra cost to you.)

To make it even more cruel, there are predators and just regular bad people who hide among the homeless and are neither mentally ill nor disablingly drug addicted. I found this out by spending time in a downtown area with lots of homeless and hearing the talk. A lot were what I call “homeless by choice” and thought we who insisted on having jobs, paying our bills, etc. were idiots. A not insignificant portion of these preys on the mentally ill homeless.

And then there’s yet the other side. The people who owned small ma and pa shops in downtown Colorado Springs that ended up closing because the mentally ill would chase their customers around yelling stuff, or come in and pee on the merchandise, or menace them and passerbyes downtown.

Homelessness, as practiced in 20th century America (and all over the west, because we exported the damn psychiatry books) is not a victimless crime.

I’m wary and horrified about talk of involuntary commitment. Because I know it can become a horrifying weapon against political dissidents or (merely) the very Odd (like most of us.)

On the other hand, I’m also aware a significant portion of the “unhoused” (I love how we keep concentrating on that, like THAT is the relevant part. “Rebarbarized” would be a better term.) are a danger to themselves and others. AND by giving the predators a hiding place, are making our cities (and a lot of small towns and villages) frankly unlivable.

So what is my solution. I don’t know, short of “Sure, we do need to reopen mental institutions, with a lot” A LOT “of safety bumpers” including in what meds can even be administered, because a lot of these can kill people either by using too long or on the withdrawal.

Because we can’t go on as we’ve been. At this point it’s like embodied mental illness, spread to the whole of society.

On the other hand it’s almost impossible not to worry about how it will be weaponized and used in bad ways.

You’ll tell me the left is quite capable of doing it to us without us doing it onto them first, and fair point. In fact, if Kamala had won, people like me would be in the crosshairs of “We must institutionalize these poor mad people now.” They were leaning that way for a long time with all of their “disinformation” bs.

And perhaps actually that’s a reason to do it now, and to build in as many safeguards as possible. And hope they hold for a little while at least.

Sometimes the best you can do is the best you can do. “And let the devil worry about the rest” as mom would say.

The problem is that the devil (in the non-metaphysical sense) is very inventive. And I fear what hell do about the rest.

Covers are a funny thing, you know. And by that I don’t mean funny ah ah.

It’s one thing to do a cover for another person. I only really need a blurb, pick out central elements and mood, and I very very rarely go wrong.

But for me, it gets complicated. Usually it gets complicated because whatever I’m using to do covers can’t do what I wanted. I had Musketeer problems until AI got good enough to do Musketeers.

And the clanker has real issues with Ellyans, because, well, if it gets them right our hypersensitized eyes see “trans.” And that on a cover would not be really good to sell. Not for me, at least. Besides having the major problem that the people who bought it for the cover would really, really hate it with a burning passion.

So I had a cover and I was happy with it. It conveyed the duality of the worlds, and while Brundar (the Ellyan) looked a little odd, it wasn’t wrong.

And then Dan hated it. So I tried to do another figure….

Look, We Don’t Talk About Covers.

They looked okay before I uploaded them, and then I wanted to claw my eyes out because after processing by Amazon and in thumbnail, they looked horrible.

I should explain, lest you think it’s ignorance that I was DELIBERATELY going for a late seventies early eighties feel to the cover. This came about while talking to Foxfier and Holly F. who were my unwilling cover sounding board.

I had come up with more modern covers, but they either gave the feeling of “mil sf” which it ain’t or “YA sf” which it CERTAINLY ain’t.

So the two juvenile delinquents (look, they’re in their forties) said “the problem is that nothing like this has been published since the early eighties.

And my brain flicked. The unofficial name for this cover is “That seventies cover.” It’s not ideal, nothing is, but it’s the best I could do for the feel. (The cover before last of the alternates was ALMOST perfect, except all the colors were too dark and believe it or not that immediately gives the feel the book also is “dark.” So.)

If it sells really well, there will be an artsy cover, probably centering on a hand holding the power ruby, and there will be interior illustrations too. BUT that’s if it sells really well.

So, we don’t talk about covers…. And last night, just before the gate clanked shut, I looked at the covers on the side of the site, because my web person hasn’t been able to change it (Because I kept changing them. some lasted hours) and realized I still like it best of all. So were back to the first cover, and we don’t talk about covers.!

Meanwhile, of course, on Sunday as I was trying to figure out how to do a promo push (do you see a promo push? I don’t see a promo push!

Yeah, I gave it to a bunch of people with blogs, and hoped– But that’s fine. if people don’t like it, they don’t like it.

I know some are still reading, and a couple got back to me with “wow, just wow.” Which is highly gratifying. But I still don’t know how to do promo.

I’ve done very strange little videos, and some even capture the dual nature of the critters.

Like this one, of Nikre Lyto, Archmagician in waiting. (Can’t remember if I’ve shared before.)

Most of them, though are just… odd. Midge has the certainty that what you really really want is a sword. or at least it does that in MY videos. “Nice family breakfast!” “Why did someone pull excalibur out of their pocket and brandish with intent? But anyway….

I found Uncle Lar’s blurb for No Man’s Land (it really is just a blurb) and since I’m all out of crying I can do it now:

It’s an open secret that I do beta reads, copy edits, and some subject matter research for a small cadre of indie authors.
Mostly SF, but I’m a pushover so western and even Regency romances have been slipped in front of my red pen for a quick scrub.
So when Sarah asked me to take a look at her latest of course I agreed as I always have since millenia ago when she first delved into independent publishing.
I am not writing this bit for her fans or those long time readers of her works. All y’all already know what you’re getting. This is for the readers looking to pick something interesting up by an unfamiliar author. My message is simple, dive in and stick with it. First ten pages or so I felt like walling the thing out of frustration. Things were not adding up. By a quarter through I was disgusted with myself for failing to properly appreciate her skills in foreshadowing and the planting of suggestions that would take full flower later in the tale.
Now done I’ve gone back and reread the first several chapters just to chastise myself for missing so very many hints.
Sarah tells me she was inspired to write this in response to Left Hand of Darkness, and that certainly makes sense, but for me I caught a definite whiff of Keith Laumer’s Retief stories.
A word of general caution, even though my review copy clocks in at 275 pages do not expect everything to be wrapped up in a bow and settled. The title is after all No Man Volume 1.
My recommendation, buckle up, dive in, and enjoy the ride.

Larry A. Bauer
aka Uncle Lar

I’m going to miss him terribly, and can’t believe this is the last book in which he’ll be in acknowledgements. Maybe Mom has found him and is trying to organize him. (For some reason the idea amuses me, even though it would drive him to distraction.)

Anyway, when I got word mom died, I’d just discovered (via my kid) a site where I could put lyrics and it wrote music and “sang” it for me.

I don’t know if it was finding it out right then, but I got stuck writing lyrics and putting them to music and having AI sing it to me. Every style from sea shanty (son’s favorite) to Celtic metal. I might not be totally sane just now.

Anyway, I am going to share, but you’re not obligated to hear them. Mostly I’m doing this post today because it’s easy and because I am starting to stress over not doing promo.

So, I started with songs FROM Elly, two of which are quoted in the book. The first one is their culture hero story (Amissar (Missa) Mahar.) Or as Foxfier calls it “the cowboy murder suicide song.” (I honestly don’t know why cowboy.) It sounds subtly “off” because it’s of course a translation. And though their voices run the gamut don’t for the love of your sanity imagine this sung by a male.

Oh, for those not having seen that, Elly is populated by humans genetically modified to be hermaphrodites. It is the longest waiting book in my head, as it appeared there when i was 14 because I read Left Hand of Darkness and decided I could do better. I couldn’t, of course, but the irritation the book sparked led to this world and to my learning to write.

It’s in two parts, because it is in two parts, though usually sung together in Elly.

Missa’s Confession.

Missa’s Lament.

Another song, in volume 2 is Master of Illusion, so of course, I did it too: Master of Illusion. (Eighth circles are … um… the lowest power in the brotherhood of magicians, but also they have a knack for people and creating illusions and have a reputation.)

And for a palate cleanser, this doesn’t appear in the book (other songs do) but it will appear in book two, and it’s a parent singing to his future eighth circle child. Because eighth circle’s have a reputation, they’re called “snakes” which they tend to embrace, though not complimentary. So this is: The Snake’s Lullaby.

But then I got caught in making …. well music to advertise the book. Something might come from it…. or not.

Anyway, lookit (They all have slightly different lyrics. Lyrics mine, the rest AI with some… okay a lot of direction “I created a monster” quoth younger son.):

The Ballad of Skip Hayden.

The Ballad of Skip Hayden — Power Celtic Metal version.

I did a lot others. How many? Well, younger son likes sea shanties and…

HOWEVER I’ll just share two more. Dan’s favorite: Skip Hayden Goes Kpop.

And mine: Skip Hayden’s No Man’s Land.

So, yeah, I’m done with that now, before it becomes “We don’t talk about songs.”

If you want to read the first chapters of the first book, it’s on my website which is mostly unbuilt, but hey. And you get to see the problem with covers, since it has the second cover we came up with: https://www.sarahahoyt.com/shrodinger-worlds/

Anyway, all this was in the name of promoting, so I’ll end in a link, and I promise to have a real post tomorrow when hopefully I’ll write something other than… lyrics? What even?

No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

In All Nations, Raise the Colors, a guest post by Bill Reader

I have written before in this blog about the value of nationalism. But this moment in history has both clarified some points of my argument that I have struggled to articulate, and motivated me to once again attempt to put these points forth so that they can be understood—even if not wholeheartedly adopted— by any good faith reader.

I realize now that I need to begin this article by stating explicitly certain things I consider to be true. If you disagree with these points, you will likely disagree with all I have to say beyond this point. I consider this to be a fair trade off, because if you disagree with these predicates, then from my perspective, your outlook on reality is so warped that reasoned discussion is going to be impossible on a wide range of points.

I believe fundamentally that things which are immoral for an individual to do, do not magically become moral when a group of individuals does them. I believe fundamentally that things that are damaging, dissipative, or foolish, when done by an individual, do not magically become healthy, productive or wise when a group of individuals does them.

I acknowledge there are many ways of successfully existing in the world, but I in no way concede that they are all of equal merit. I explicitly favor those ways of existing that first contribute the most to the survival, both short and long term, of the individual, to their comfort, to their safety; and also to the survival, comfort, and safety of those around them, in descending order of priority beginning from those most cherished by and related to themselves.

Those who maximize the first with no regard to the second trend towards sociopathy and—at any rate— rarely are successful in the long term when the game is iterated long enough. Those who maximize the second, while admirable in their own right, at the logical extreme will do too little to ensure their own survival, and grind the corn to feed the poor today that might be planted to feed a hundred times more people tomorrow. I do concede that the full extent of the best mode of being is not fully understood, and that its expression is in dialogue with the circumstances of a person to some degree (EG- you can be a good Christian in a church and on a battlefield, but what specific actions that belief is instantiated in will differ greatly).

I believe, therefore, that people are due grace regarding their differing approaches, in direct proportion to their good faith and reciprocal good will. And as a final and pragmatic point, I believe that all these truths are intrinsic properties of humanity and the world it inhabits— which is not to say that I believe humans cannot delude themselves, even in large numbers, into treating these points as untrue. It is however to say that when they do, their fundamental opposition to reality will bring them to ruin, fast or slow, but whether they destroy people who recognize the nature of the world and set back the progress of humanity before they destroy themselves is ever an open question.

From this I derive the duty and mission statement of this blog against the opponents of civilization— for in the long run they will always fail, but it is up to us to secure victory so their failure does not take the world with it.

Having laid out these premises I want to turn to my thesis. It has been time, it remains time, and by the grace of heaven I hope there will be yet some time tomorrow, for people of all nations to abandon the mad sickness of globalism and re-embrace nationalism. Not just Americans, the English, the Australians, the Argentinians—people of all places and all creeds.

I have stated before and I will state again that Europe took the very wrongest lesson from World War II in one particular.

In looking at the sins of the National Socialists in Germany, they attributed all of their sins to the Nationalism, and their leaders began to seek, from that moment forth, to eschew nationalism, while embracing socialism.

In this folly they had no small help from propaganda originating in their erstwhile allies from the Soviet Union. The cold war came, pitting these same people against their very way of life. They persisted in foolishness. The Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its inefficiency, inhumanity and brutality. But its roots had grown too deeply into European hearts and minds for them to regard the implications. The interpretation of “the right wing” as being wholly defined by its nationalism— with socialism not just in name but fully embodied in policy, laughably excepted as inconsequential to the political alignment of a party— was accepted without thought (it could hardly be accepted any other way). Why? Because nationalism was nominally the difference between Stalin and Hitler. But of course, in practice, it was no such thing. Stalin was every inch the nationalist that Hitler was. It’s self-obvious from looking at his modern successor in Putin that the Russian Left is steeped deeply in Nationalism.

Globalism as preached by the USSR was a way of getting other countries to abandon their national identities in favor of a new Russian hegemon. It was always a weapon. They never meant a word of it.

How then can I advocate nationalism, if I begin by stating that two of the world’s most rightly-reviled ideologies were nationalist?

Because their sins did not arise from their nationalism.

Hitler and Stalin seized control of, both directly and indirectly, private industry large and small within their countries. That is the action of a socialist, not a nationalist. Hitler and Stalin disarmed their people and suppressed their speech— you have to do one to effectively do the other. That is the action of the socialist, not a nationalist. Hitler and Stalin confiscated the private property of their people for redistribution to their favored groups. They took from them everything up to their very lives for the primary crime of being effective opposition. They sought to control the people they ruled, and to expand their rule to all people. Every one of these actions is motivated by and wholly justified within the philosophical constraints of socialism, independent of nationalism. Every one of these actions is done today, to a greater or lesser degree, by every socialist country in the modern era, to include the so-called enlightened lands of Europe. Socialism is inextricably an oppressive, totalitarian ideology— and hence as a place becomes more socialist, its leadership becomes more totalitarian.

It has never been otherwise, because it cannot be otherwise. To build a government large enough to tabulate in detail the output and need of every citizen is to build a surveillance state. To justify the taking of a majority of the fruits of a person’s labor by the state, with or without their consent, is to make peace with theft. To justify the state control of their business is to make peace with slavery, howsoever gilded the cage that results.

To return to the premises we began with, what would we say of a man who spied on his neighbor’s every move; stole his neighbor’s wallet and took half its contents; helped himself to half the contents of his neighbors house or bank account; who inserted himself into the running of his neighbor’s affairs against their express consent? These actions do not become moral because a government does it, they merely become harder to oppose. Left wing thought always begins and ends, as I argued in one of my first essays for this blog, in the fundamental proposition that might makes right.

Countries that cast their lot in with socialism become evil even if they do not start obviously evil, because only evil men and women are comfortable with the mode by which socialism operates.

Moreover their conditions quickly worsen as the sensible citizen does not tolerate their idiocy. This is why every socialist country hemorrhages its best and brightest. Socialists raid their luminaries for their treasures, take a substantial cut for administration of their theft, and pass an inadequate pittance to their poor, with a promise to improve upon the pittance if re-elected. So the latter happens—but the prior, never. In consequence they end up inevitably with many more poor and dependent and many fewer rich and capable, and such rich as they do have must either not be the brightest (so as to not realize how badly they are robbed) or be so loyal to the country as to endure it out of love for it.

Only, of course, the latter is not allowed under the globalist regime, so perhaps you can work out what happens. The hangers on who believe in freedom but lack the means to leave endure oppression of every flavor from governments that, bit by bit, recapitulate every sin of totalitarianism in the name of defending against it. Europe’s final form, on the path it’s walking, is a man in a uniform, standing vigilant guard for any signs of a rising dictator… at the door of a dictatorship.

And what of nationalism? Nationalism is nothing more than the belief that your country’s ways are the best.

It is an earnest belief in one’s own language, culture, arts, priorities, morals, modes of thought. It has been a hallmark of every successful country in world history, whatever their moral valance. The Aztecs and the Spaniards were both nationalists of their own kinds. So too were the very people who actually fought the Nazis. Europe might have tried with some success to sell America on the idea of fighting on the side of “the allies”, but said allies were very much fighting on behalf of themselves. The French resistance was first and foremost a French resistance. It is not some inconsequential accident that the “Keep Calm and Carry On” sign is headed by the crown.

Europe didn’t have the luxury of being so stupid about this point until after the shooting stopped. Truly, how even does one articulate the desire of European powers to oppose Nazi Germany without acknowledging their justifiable fear that the Germans would wipe out their local customs in favor of their own? And what a tragicomic turn it is, therefore, that they went through all the effort of opposing the depredations of Berlin only to be willingly ravished in the selfsame manner by Brussels within the century (a tip that the Europeans would have done well to heed, and one well substantiated by the historical record, is that if you are going to be colonized by any country in Europe, pray to all the saints in the heavens that that country isn’t Belgium. They ought to have fought to the bitter end what they willingly acquiesced to.).

Why is this treated as some shock or surprise? Anti-nationalists are the kinds of people who would ask a man take a spouse but carefully never express any love for her.

They want the behavior of good citizenship while erasing the rights, duties and responsibilities of citizens. The individual version of the globalist philosophy is a person wracked by self-hatred not only at their own sins but at the sins of people they are merely descended from, sometimes so remotely that the sins of their fathers are practically the sins of everyone’s fathers. It’s a person incapable of asserting themselves to defend the most obviously innocent from the most transparently evil because some unspecified person somewhere in the dusty past with whom they might share a fragment of genetic code committed sins, and who then are they to stop a Muslim man from raping their countrymen’s children? No evil he can commit can ever make him not “oppressed” and no virtue of their own can ever make them fit to confront him.

You need not imagine this man, he is out in force applying his boot to his fellow’s face because unlike the people actually causing pain and distress in his country, he know his own countrymen will not fight back. What long term goal could he imagine himself to be serving except his own country’s extinction? And isn’t this, he thinks, in its final estimation, such an improvement on Nazism, to have all the horror of totalitarianism but turned entirely inward? For truly that was the problem with the Nazis, yes, the fact they believed in themselves, think the members of their police as they busily defend the violent third world antisemites who do to their citizens in peacetime what any European would be reviled for opportunistically doing in war.

But now at long last St. George’s cross is once again rising above England, and the southern cross over Australia.  And while the destination is far from certain, in these embers lies a chance of rekindling the health and well being of these countries. In fact, on long enough time scales, nationalism taken to its logical conclusion could overthrow even socialism itself. The global Left, of course, believes that to be its intrinsic threat, but as discussed above, the global left fears the right thing for very much the wrong reason. Many of the “right wing” movements they revile are still heavily laced with Left Wing thought. They’re simply falling for old soviet propaganda. And yet, though they’ve done the math wrong, in a way they have come to the right answer in one particular.

Nationalism is rising at the moment because the leaders of nations are trying explicitly to destroy the health, happiness, and future of their own subjects. Where the USSR and 3^rd Reich were homicidal, Europe is suicidal. It happens, however, that many of the good people of England are not particularly interested in committing suicide. So too in the US, hence Trump. So too in Argentina, hence Milei. But so strong is the cultish fervor for suicide among the global Left that mere belief in one’s own country now evokes the ghost of Hitler (nobody inform them of Hitler’s flagrant habits of drinking water, eating, and sleeping; or actually, perhaps do inform them, but film it for me).

The Left is committed to putting down its marker as the people devoted to sinking the ships aboard which the whole world floats, and they will tar all who oppose them as every -ist, they will censor, fire, and slander anyone who tries to pry the axe from their hands. And of all the things we could ask for at this moment, perhaps that is the best.

Because, at the heart of nationalism lies a belief that one’s nation is good and is worth supporting. That implies in turn a belief that the long-term well being of one’s nation is good. And the people turning explicitly against the well being of their own nations are taking an opportunity at every breath to declare fealty to socialism. Even if it were not the fundamental reason for their totalitarian behaviors, the fact that it’s the preferred draught of these fevered madmen will, I hope and pray, make its toxicity obvious if only by pure association. Europe’s socialists held a gun to their own people’s heads, and there is some small, faltering chance that having been the people to do so brings the wisdom of their other ideas into question.

But I will make even bolder, because I want to make a further point.

Right now, I believe the world is suffering more greatly than is fully reckoned for lack of nationalism. Iran in particular is being oppressed under Islam, which a bit like if a stone-age madman came up independently with all the worst parts of socialism but imagined them through the lens of a crazed desert raider. In fact Islam is subjugating much of the world under its banner and making huge chunks of the world unlivable Hellholes in consequence.

The result of this is two-fold—people flee the unlivable Hellholes and bring the source of their misery with them. It would be better, much better, certainly in Persia at least, for them to reclaim the history that preceded this madness. The Arab world at large, meanwhile, could use a different variety of nationalism. Rather than the arbitrary lines that keep warring factions bound within artificial countries, they could use borders that reflect actual coherent groups interested in self-determination. While they would still undoubtedly engage in constant tiresome warfare, at the very least they would have less built in internal conflict. Even a soupçon of an improvement in stability, combined with a sterner immigration policy on the part of the Western world, might do much to quell the relentless torrent of third world predators washing up on our doorstep. The history of this influx is, it must be remembered, relatively recent, and the conditions under which it did not happen, not so terribly remote.

South and Central America have much to offer the world in culture and resources, but they must spit out the poison pill of socialism. Argentina has lead the way, giving hope I never thought I would see in my lifetime on this front. Will the rest of the continent be wise enough to learn the lesson presented by their neighbors? Will they take anything away from the predictions of doom that fizzled, from the material improvements where the experts promised a deepening of the destruction (as if that was even possible after decades of socialists looting the ever-diminishing treasury)? Will any of them get a glimmer that when a man says what he’s doing, how and why he’s doing it, predicts what its effects will be, and then turns out to be entirely correct, that that is not a miracle, a trick, a fluke, a  magic trick, but the man with two eyes coming to the fore in the land of the blind to don the crown? A cynic would say no, but an empty stomach, and an empty future, are as powerful of an inducement for change as any man in history has ever had. Call me a fool, but I harbor some little hope.

And last but not least, how much better could China be if instead of Communism with Chinese Characteristics, it were Chinese with Chinese characteristics? The great con game of the CCP, to make their own knock off of Marx’s work and tie it by pretzel knot logic into their own national identity, has lead to misery, market distortion and stupidity of a scale perhaps never before seen in world history. China wants to be dangerous, and it certainly is. China wants to be ascendant, but it never will be, because in the current of history it tied itself to the boat anchor of socialism. The best it could have hoped for was to temporarily be the top of the heap as the other countries suffering under the benighted political theory fell. Now I’m not even sure I give them that much credit. How much better might it be if West Taiwan gave it a rest already, for everybody’s sake, and rightfully shucked the fundamentally European sickness they’ve contracted, stopped pretending Marxism was somehow perfected by China (behold, my perfectly polished cowpie!). I grant you Chinese history is a frustrating ring of déjà vu all over again up until such time as the Mongols beat some sense into them, but even that morass of slow learning couldn’t possibly be worse than what they have currently.

Let the world’s people once again believe in themselves, pick back up the threads of their histories and begin to act again in their own self interest. We have tried the alternative. Nowhere has it succeeded. It has failed the people of every nation, and left a power vacuum which has been invaded by collectivist and stone-aged ideologies whose first draft might as well have been written in the seventh ring of Hell. Enough. Enough. Enough.

To all people, of all places—abandon these unworthy nightmares, turn your thoughts back to the lands your fathers built before you fell into this dreadful sleep, and as the Brits are doing now—raise the colors!

Thank you for your comments, everyone.

To make things more confusing, we were away from home and had to drive back, and I was out of internet range for most of it.

We still don’t know if we’ll be traveling for the funeral. It’s a tiny country so they expect Wednesday and I don’t know if we can make it work.

I can’t see comments on Holly’s post (don’t ASK ME WHY. I’m the blog owner) on the back panel. And WP won’t let me comment from the front. But I have read all the comments, and you made me cry.

Mom was okay until 3 days ago, so it’s a bit of a shock. (Stepped wrong, broke either her hip or the head of the femur. (Family is unclear.) Got through surgery okay, but never came back fully. It’s a big ask in your 90s to put up with that kind of physical insult.)

It was surprising (Yesterday night they were still expecting her to recover) and I still don’t know how I feel. Particularly coming so close after losing Uncle Lar (not my real uncle, but very ductapped on for… 15 years?)

So I feel like I was smacked upside the head and still walking sideways, all while trying to prepare for the release of No Man’s Land.

Once more I must apologize to those who subscribe to the substack. Yes, serialization will resume, it’s been a crazy two weeks, with one thing and another. (I’ll tell you the story of the cover insanity soonish, too. Not sure I’m done with it, yet.)

I’m still not absolutely sure how I feel or how I’m coping. Sometimes I think I’m doing fine, then I find I’m crying.

Please be patient. Holly F. will keep you updated in the (looks unlikely) event I travel.

Right now I’m feeling very tired though I slept and Dan did all the driving.

Anyway, thank you all of you. I’ll post again soon(ish). Might post late tomorrow. Again, I’m SO tired. Or I might find I can’t sleep, so….

Good morning, Huns, Hoydens, and other Creatures!

Sarah’s out of pocket and I promised to accompany family to the Fair. So, please don’t panic if your comment stays in spam til after your bedtime today! I’ll get it later.

That said, can you all tell me how you first found Sarah’s writing? Where, when, and why, and what made you keep reading and come back for more? Fiction and non-fiction, both.

And also, check out the newly updated author website: https://www.sarahahoyt.com/ it’s very much a work in progress.

Oh. She says to tell you why she’s out. She just received an overseas call no one is ever ready for or wants to get. Please pray for comfort for her and her family, and for the repose of her mother’s soul.

Try and not burn more than two or three small dumpsters today, please? And I’ll see you all later. Holly