The Still Small Voice of Trumpets Again

166 thoughts on “The Still Small Voice of Trumpets Again”

1. c4c

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2. On the student loans, I think Hollymathnerd has the best idea. Pay 120% of the original loan amount, and you’re done. That makes it work more like a fixed interest mortgage than a revolving credit card and both allows and encourages good behavior in paying it off.

   As to trad pub (spits), I had my fill of them long ago. I may get the chance to talk the brother of a friend out of going for an MfA when I’m in Chattanooga. We’ll see.

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   1. Lloyd Biggle’s “Monument” is worth a read. How to destroy “them” with the law.

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      1. In order for that to happen, the law would have to be enforced against ‘Them’. I am…not confident. ☹️

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         1. You shouldn’t be. Selective enforcement is baked into any Democrat regime. The latest example is from VA’s gun laws.

            Democrats were singing a different tune just six years ago, when they passed a law that explicitly demands judges accept motions to dismiss filed by commonwealth’s attorneys unless there is evidence of bribery or certain forms of unlawful bias against a victim. 

            While Cole wasn’t in the legislature at the time, Sen. Lucas was, and she was a “yes” vote on the measure giving prosecutors unfettered discretion in charging violations of the law. Of course, back then the issue was progressive prosecutors refusing to enforce marijuana laws, and Lucas owns and operates a cannabis-related business. From both a personal and political perspective, she had every reason to support prosecutorial discretion. 

            Still, it’s more than a little hypocritical for Lucas to suddenly change her position now that we’re talking about guns and not ganja possession. 

            https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2026/06/16/virginia-dems-threaten-retribution-for-prosecutors-and-sheriffs-who-wont-enforce-gun-ban-n1232875

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   2. The issue is with all these IDR plans the govt allows payments under the amount of interest. Even a credit card wouldn’t. The standard plans do have a fixed interest rate, amortization tables and so on. They do tell you that you will pay more over the life of the loan. But because of these IDR or “public service” forgiveness packages the rules of the game change with every administration and political winds. Non-capitalizing interest would help folks that need to get deferments but even setting the minimum to interest + 1% of principal would serve to prevent the runaway interest cases.

      The evil here isn’t the rate or the fact that it is collected, it’s the exorbitant cost of college driven by the free money and the decision by Congress to create this perverse incentive.

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      1. That’s certainly true that the government totally f***d the student loans due to a few over-reported stories back in the late 70’s about students deliberately filing for bankruptcy as soon as they graduated to discharge their loans. The idea was that the hit to their credit would only last a few years while they weren’t making much money anyway. The gov’t’s first “fix” was to make student loans non-dischargeable via bankruptcy, making the opportunity for exploitation by universities as huge as Jupiter. their next “fix” was to take over the whole thing, becoming the student loan banking system. Meanwhile the colleges went running around shouting, “Free Money! We get Free Money!” making tuition exorbitant and using the money to create multi-hundred K make-work jobs for commie fellow-travelers.

         I had a wonderful time and am grateful for a great education I got in the 70’s in college. They actually taught me how to think, but never what to think, but I will never contribute anything to what has become a monstrous blood-sucking leech on our nation. (Not that they’re any worse than all the others).

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         1. My kids tuition — they’re three years apart — doubled between one and the other.
            Also every time administration changes or congress gets a wild hair, much more than reported TERMS and interest rates change.

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            1. In the twenty years of paying for grad and undergrad the only changes I have seen to any of my loans has been Kung flu and ITT tech related stuff (Biden found a lever to absolve loans and was not discriminating; yes I benefitted but was still paying the same rates and amounts as I had agreed to 15 years earlier).

               Now maybe I was mostly grandfathered but the jerking around I am aware of has always been the various non-amortized repayment options and forgivenesses. All the repayment programs whose rules included “the secretary shall decide”.

               College cost has ballooned because it became required, easy to pay for, warehoused those that could not or would not be employed, and was a good source of kickbacks. They released a market glut of certain careers, drove bottlenecks of others, and the various stupidities of DC’s economic grip as well as certain innovations are serving to create this failure to launch.

               Im not a fan of the financialization of the economy, but simply saying that interest rate shall be zero after a certain date and allowing it to be paid in inflated money or wiping it away will just be the foot in door for destroying all other forms of lending and I’d like a house without having to pay with a case of greenbacks. If we uprooted the whole federal student loan system root and branch I could agree with this all but the Empire of DC will never do that.

               Amortize the loans. Max the amounts that can be taken to restrain the schools. Break the cartels and let the kids launch.

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               1. I’m a fan of taking the loans out of the hands of the government, letting them be dischargeable in bankruptcy, and requiring that they be held by the loan originator for several years into the repayment term.

                  Loans would CRATER and the universities would have to follow suit.

                  Now, if we could reverse that ruling that said that companies couldn’t administer ability tests to potential hires, so that HR could no longer require a college degree as a means of getting in the door, that would help a lot too.

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                  1. Not just student loans causing the problem. But schools also count the money where students are there on their military service benefit dime. Something they’ve earned 100%. But still the college counts on it. Raises rates because of it. Same with grants, and scholarships; unless scholarship and grant coming from the college in question. Son got a 50% scholarship offer to a private small college in Arizona. The other “half”, just his freshman year was $30k, which did not count books or transportation home. He chose the local state college instead (local-ish).

                     The reason why hubby and I were able to pay off our ’70s college loans was the government wasn’t mucking around with them. No interest until 6 months after graduation or quit school. Fixed rate. Never saw an amortized table or full disclosure of total owed, with interest, like one has to acknowledge when getting auto or home loans.

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                     1. Making the universities co-signers on student loans would help that. Right now they have zero skin in the game – if their piece of paper is zero or negative value in the job marketplace, who cares, they already got paid, and in the worst cases, used that tuition to pad their tax-free endowments.

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                        1. You can’t make them co-signers. You can refuse to grant the loan unless they co-sign, in which case the loans will just go away because no institution is going to sign up to supply loans to students whose study habits, work ethic, and honesty are not known to them.

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                           1. So what does their student body look like, from a race checkbox perspective, after they refuse to co-sign any and all student loans, making students loans disappear, keeping in mind that Title VI is still on the books?

                              How can they afford to take that risk?

                              Heck, I don’t understand how universities have blankly accepted the vast difference in gender ratios between society as a whole and enrollment given Title IX. Seems to me the disparate impact department should been verrry interested in looking for discrimination practices and hostile environments which yielded gurls outnumbering icky boys by so much in recent years.

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                           2. When they are on the hook, they will find a way to avoid.

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                           3. And this would be fine. For one Universities will learn to be lean or die.

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                     2. I was able to get an Aerospace Engineering degree from University of Washington between 1984 and 1989 without taking a single penny in loans. My parents helped a little, I applied for bursaries and scholarships, I lived in the dorms and ate dorm food. I worked in the dorm cafeteria which got me free food, and I drove a fifteen year old car. Good luck to any kid thinking that plan would work today.

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                        1. Thank you for ending that story with the way it’s changed since then.

                           So very much of this dialog is from folks older than me talking about how Kids These Days just need to do a thing which wasn’t an option when I was a kid, much less when I would have been going to college, and has accelerated in the wrong direction from there.

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                           1. So maybe darkly hilarious, but I am almost your age, adn there was this one thing that I knew could work in my cohort, but the schools would have mattered hugely as to viability.

                              Anyway, I do not encourage anyone to be blind in dealing with anyone in these tertiary schools.

                              They can eat up so much time and money, and leave a person surprised and disappointed.

                              At least one of the ‘here is how it can work’ cases I can discuss starts with ‘first, fail to start a career, and fail to use your degree’.

                              I am a bit too black-pilled on the conventional idea.

                              The alternatives that I philosophically prefer, may objectively be me preferring worse options because I do not give myself credit for being tolerably okay in what I actually did do. IE, personal insanity.

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                        2. My kids were just as frugal, and both worked what gigs they could, lived at home, didn’t really have a social life because that cost money. And yet….

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                        3. “Good luck to any kid thinking that plan would work today.“

                           –

                           I know.

                           Here is the ironic part. I know given the current college and loan costs, we couldn’t have pulled off what we did for our first degrees and my career change, let alone son’s degree without going into debt deeper than the marina trench.

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               2. Note twenty years. You were before the UTTER FUCKERY. Yeah. The urologist told us his year, fifteen years ago, was the LAST sensible year.

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         2. Grad school tuition went from (in state) $100/hour in my first year to $1200/hour my last on-campus year. That was seven years. No, I did not observe any improvements in my classes or book availability that would justify that kind of increase. Books stayed around $400/semester, more when I had to take science courses.

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            1. it’s like the DC denizens. Give someone an endless supply of money and ‘costs’ will grow to fit the supply.

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               1. This. There is no downward pressure on tuition, because student loans will grow to match. And EVERYBODY has student loans now.

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            2. When I did my Masters at Berkeley, grad fees (not tuition, exactly) were about $250/quarter for all the units I could eat. (Still on quarters in 1977) So the U got about $750 for the education, and I bought student athletic ticket packages, and had an apartment. Not many books, oddly, for the grad program in Library and Information Studies.

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               1. University of Florida did the same thing the first few years I was in for undergraduate degrees. Meant my $400 grant covered tuition and most books, and pinching pennies until they screamed did for the rest.

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                  1. And people in the nineties could do medschool on waitressing jobs. (The medschool was down from our favorite eatery and our waitresses were often medstudents.)
                     The problem is the most vociferous people against student loans being an issue are people who did this. “I worked, why can’t they?” Well, younger son would need to make around 40k clear a year by the end of his college career AND still have time to attend school. yeah.

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      2. So, no. That isn’t it. The rate does change. There are ways they do that, and sometimes they just do it without warning. EVEN IF YOU’RE PAYING REGULARLY.

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         1. Gee, it’s almost as if we should have a government watchdog agency like the FCC or the FTC to protect consumers from being scammed and cheated by the government.

            Oh wait…!

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   3. Sure. BUT again, it’s already been inflated away. At this point it’s just feeding the beast. If you want restitution beat it out of the universities, which need to go down hard anyway.

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      1. Well, most of them *will* be going down soon enough one way or another. But that’ll be due to the demographic collapse. Fewer eighteen year-olds means fewer people applying for college, which means fewer people paying tuition fees.

         That which can’t go on… won’t.

         Hopefully this means that schools will start to get lean in order to become competitive where tuition is concerned. Foreign students will take up some of the slack, but there are only so many foreigners who can afford to attend school here, particularly with the high tuition rates that the schools are charging.

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         1. Online and mixed universities are starting to do that. No “university experience”, no social and professorial indoctrination.

            It won’t replace Oxford “tutoring”, but it will cover much of the real need.

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            1. And online universities don’t have course critical classes that mysteriously only ever seem to be available at very inconvenient times.

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      2. “…restitution[,] beat it out of the universities…”

         Yes. One thing people arguing the ‘fundamentals’ of the so-called “loan crisis” often miss, is the way they assume that students got full value received, for their (often madly overpriced, but still “essential”) degrees. But many students, especially later as the madness deepened, got as much or more of an indoctrination and a misinformation than a true education… though I suppose the practical experience of camouflage and role-playing (of e.g. suitably doctrinaire Marx-oids) ought to count for something too.

         So, yeah, often and increasingly a “Learing Center” sort of scam, just not as obvious. Now add this to a basically “I owe my soul to the company store” mode of operations, and to a sole-source (government) monopoly on these (so widely accepted as normal) loans, that tend to calibrate as about as sensible as a making a $600,000 mortgage loan to someone making $15,000 a year, and you do get a real monster. Maybe one fully capable of swallowing a generation.

         One of the things that makes all this hard is the variation in time and space, of just how much a given degree program or academic department is still teaching and learning vs. being a nest of wokery or collectivism or outright Marx-iolatry — so even two students who went through the same deparment at different times, or different departments of the same college at the same time, may have gotten widely varying proportions of rice, and sand and gravel, in their academic rice bowl.

         (And I do mean “nest” in the full “It’s a nest!” sense, a la Buckaroo Banzai. Yes, that bad.)

         The bigger unsolved problem is, when all these chickens have come home to roost, and drop their droppings, how do we, the encompassing civilization, preserve and continue the actual learning that the college and university systems were designed to spread and keep and enlarge? Some things are best learned from person to person, not just from reading, say, 100-year-old papers by Riemann or Einstein. How do we isolate the knowledge from the mad wokery and ‘critical’ theory, when the public finally starts boiling over toward “there will be a great simplification” on my dime?

         That, I don’t know. But we’d better find out. Or else bad, for many who come after.

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         1. It’s time to consider apprenticeships.

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            1. Apprenticeships. Small academies, 1800s-style (but possibly for Internet values of “local”). All of this is included in that early-colonial-Mars setting — along with household heavy 3D printers etc, which is how you can have a brand-new crop of guns spring up overnight.

               LIkely this could be in our near future here on Earth too. (I should also point out how the graduate student/thesis-advisor system at some colleges in some fields has worked remarkably like an apprenticeship system, as do the post-graduate vs. journeyman systems, ask me how I know.)

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               1. Honestly, if we knew what was ahead, Dan and I would have homeschooled and apprenticed the boys to both of our trades. They’d be far ahead of where they’re now. Yes, even the one with the post graduate degree.

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                  1. Same…except that my profession requires a corporation to hire you. (Well, there is freelance marketing/sales writing, but as best I can tell, that market’s mostly been eaten by AI now.) Daughter went to college, double-majored with a high GPA, even got an award at graduation as the department’s most outstanding student that year. Has any of it helped her actually get a job? Nope. Not in either of the fields she majored in, nor in any other. Her significant other, also with a college degree, is better off only for having been able to get a job in retail (which is slowly eating her soul). Daughter can’t do that due to physical limitations, so she’s still unemployed, and it’s eating away at her sense of self-worth.

                     Is this really what it’s come down to? A college degree as the ticket to menial labor in a fucking department store? It’s possible that we just got unlucky, but I don’t think this is an isolated case; it’s happening to young people everywhere. (You probably already know that I’m on team burn-it-down, and this is only one of many reasons why.)

                     Both of the kids are highly creative storytellers and talented writers, so my new plan is to see if I can motivate them to produce (i.e., trick them into producing) some stuff we can publish. They’re both a lot like me in terms of not seeing themselves as someone who does the money-making thing (I could’ve got into tech writing in my early 20s when Novell and WordPerfect were still hot stuff, and they’d apprentice people who showed aptitude; could’ve been very well-off and comfortably retired by now, but no, I didn’t *do* desk jobs back then, and I was only thinking how much I hated my English classes…sigh…), so any suggestion that they could make money doing this thing they love is automatically met with “it wouldn’t work/I wouldn’t like it anymore.” BUT…what if I could entice them into cowriting/co-creating with me on some of my own ideas that I don’t have the juice to complete? Maybe then…

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                     1. No. It’s normal. I’m only surprised girls are also going through this. It’s bog standard for boys. All of younger son’s friends — ENGINEERS — who have no contacts in the field are working retail. Well, one managed to get into the IT of the store he worked for and is doing better. Son is an editor and found he loves it, so there’s that. Doesn’t pay much, but there’s potential for more.
                        BUT this is H1B visas. Even older people are getting kicked out, because indentured servants are cheaper and more compliant.
                        IF I could go back, I’d have taught them to write.
                        And Dan would have taught them programming. (He can’t teach math. No one normal can follow it. Though younger son can learn math on his own anyway.) And we’d have encouraged them to start businesses straight out of high school.
                        Oh, also your kids sound depressed. Younger son went through that….

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                        1. Depression seems to be a common pain response to the situations inflicted on the kiddos.

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                        2. The kids absolutely are depressed. Even if it didn’t already run in the family (they get it from both sides), this’d probably be enough to do it. I wish I knew how to help them shake some of it off…

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                           1. Both of mine went through bad periods. One is mostly through, the other — as you know — is still mired. We do what we can.

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                           2. Mine would be depressed, given job situation. As it is, all he can do is laugh. Biggest determent is lack of insurance. He needs to get on that. As it is, he makes more money doing what little he does with his own investments (Roth, 401(k)-IRA rollover, and external investment*), he is making more money than he would if he had an outside employee type job.

                              (*) When your expenses are limited, and for 14 years, you make $22 – $24/hour, most that time working 70 hours/week (there is a reason he changed jobs to one with “better hours”, including limited overtime), and payout of 2+ to 5+ weeks of earned PTO (earned per hour with no limit unless hit max without payout or using) instead of taking it, there is some money for investments (discounting what we’ve given him to drawdown for inheritance** reasons).

                              (**) If the Oregon “End the Death (state) Tax Act” (Initiative Petition 51) gets on the ballot and actually passes, that we won’t worry about. As it is, our estate shouldn’t be hit, even with the house, vehicle, and every little piece of furniture, etc., values. But why chance it? No, a trust does not protect an estate fully.

                              (Dang greed grubby … share the wealth’s … We worked for every single penny. Started with nothing. No inheritance. Grouse. Grump. Humph. Get off our lawn!)

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      3. The Obamacare bill included the takeover of student loans because they wanted the interest to help pay for the subsidies included in the bill. For the government it doesn’t matter if the money has been inflated away they want the interest.

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         1. which is why we should take it way. Starve the beast!

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      4. “Gee, I happen to notice the absolutely huge endowments just growing and growing tax free – hey, what if we take 75% of all university endowments and use that to pay off any student loans?”

         Hm, I should go do the math…

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   4. That sounds fair enough, though the edge cases of folks who the system has lost how much they’ve already paid in would become a headache. (I have heard of this from multiple folks.)

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      1. Seems to me that in the cases where the government has lost your records, you don’t owe them anything.

         Espceially if you’ve kept records of your payments.

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         1. would be nice…. but no.

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         2. You know, everyone I know in this situation has said the same?

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         3. Depends on if you’re willing to push it to court, and if you get a rational judge. I know of a situation from the 2008 housing crisis where a man whose house was being foreclosed on, insisted on the his “creditors” showing their ownership in writing.

            The housing loan and building market would have collapsed (and not so severely) years earlier because the government had mandated loaning to people with bad credit. If your loans didn’t have the right color mix, you were guilty of discrimination no matter if you could show equal treatment (insisting on good credit) for everyone. Credit worthiness as a criteria was right out.

            To stave off the crisis of giving out obviously bad loans, some Wall Street genius invented derivatives, bundling thousands of mortgages together and selling them (frequently to the Chinese, thanks to the Democrats outsourcing all our labor and exporting our money to them). Sometimes the derivatives switched hands multiple times.

            When the man insisted that those who wanted his house produce the legal documentation that they owned his mortgage, the judge looked at the hodgepodge pile of papers instead of a deed, he ruled that the foreclosure was void and pronounced the man owner of his own house free and clear.

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            1. Hasn’t happened with current loan, which is almost 15 years in. But prior loans, including the first one, were “sold” before the ink was dry. Before first payment was due. Mostly comes under “do not care.” They can’t change the terms no matter who holds the loan. Would say maybe we have a “reputation” because we have refinanced the house a lot. But anyone with any financial savvy would go “duh”. Went from 13.5% adjustable down to 3.365% fixed. Our loan is likely not sellable now. After 15 years of inflation, any profit to the bank has been inflated away.

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               1. Bravo!

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            2. That was another Autopen thing – they had been clanker-signing documents in their systems and didn’t have the originals nor could produce the document chain when the homeowners clever lawyer said “prove it”.

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         4. Government rarely works that way absent a court order… and sometimes not even then.

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3. I’ll admit, I had to do a double take at ‘spicy letters to Analogue’. Then I realized this is Hoyt: spicy means fire, brimstone and the impending wrath of the Gods of the Copy Book Heading…

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   1. In my case I was correcting a fool on history. A proto woke fool.

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      1. John Boardman called me a fascist back in the day because of a letter I sent to The Alien Critic. Sent it snail mail, and everything.

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         1. Oh, I just pointed out that Chinese aren’t “natural communists” and never were.

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            1. Nobody is a ‘natural communist’. They have to be brainwashed, or forced at gunpoint.

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               1. I know that, and you know that but this fool had guzzled Gramsci from the hose.

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                  1. It is, however, striking that every stripe of Chinese political philosopher is Utopian. Even the Legalists.

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                     1. They are a weirdly utopian culture.

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               2. Imho, no nation or race are “natural Communists.” But individuals, certainly.

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                  1. Meaning some people are naturally larcenous and work shy? Sure.

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4. If student loans aren’t going to be dischargeable in bankruptcy, there’s an argument that they should be less onerous in other ways. Frank’s/Hollymathnerd’s idea is worth considering.

   Beyond that, though, I wonder how many people get deep in student loan debt by taking every dollar offered as opposed to every dollar needed. I have no data either way on this conjecture; I’m just curious about it, having been offered far more in student loans than I ever needed.

   The same phenomenon arises in mortgages (and that’s partially why I’m curious about student loans, too): my wife and I were deemed “qualified” for ridiculously more than we’d ever consider spending on a house. We like to live comfortably but beneath our means as an aid to saving.

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   1. So, it’s not that the every dollar offered. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, if your parents aren’t making around a million a year, you’re going to end up with a mortgage worth.
      Even if you’re living at home, your parents are paying your exam fees (around 2k per) and buying your books (Average 20k a year.) Which was cheaper than half his brother’s tuition undergrad at a state school where we paid 40k a year.
      Those were the years every cent I made that the taxman didn’t take went to this stuff. (we paid half each of their undergrad.)
      Ask me how I know. g’on, aask me.

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   2. Now I’ll grant you Colorado was going utterly insane then, but still.

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   3. I don’t know.

      I have some anecdata, and also basic situations are wild.

      The universities can have a lot of fingers in the pie of applying for, getting, and spending the money. To some extent, it can be set up to automatically get certain amounts, and spend it on university dorms and food plans, etc. At those you can sometimes intervene, and adjust it down to sensible numbers, but good luck estimating if one does not already have some skill or information somehow.

      With the effective/possible ban on student jobs during highschool, going directly from highschool to university ensures one does not know the value of money.

      And, well, some of the university faculty also legitimately honestly do not know. They think a doctoral degree is more valuable than just a masters, but, even real honest historical information does not predict if the future economy has weird enough hiccups.

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      1. >>>student jobs during highschool<<<

         ‘Tis worse than that. I *think* I had to get a “work permit & physical” when I took a summer job at McD’s in 1969. To run a register, cook fries, and wash the hardware. (Almost makes sense, wouldn’t want to spread disease…) Not sure I had to repeat the hooraw when I got an after school job at the hardware store. (Generally more dangerous, partly due to leaky bottles of fun garden chemicals.)

         Similarly, my summer after Freshman year in college, I was working where my (late) father had, doing office type stuff. Yep, another physical and work permit. I suspect it was a county requirement. Two years later, I interned at Big Local Electronics Company. Different county, no gubbage. And I was still under 21. (And screwups could have been painful to fatal. Forex, beryllium ceramics don’t want to be hit by a YAG laser, or at least the operator doesn’t want to be in the area.)

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   4. I think that the universities are more or less designed to create crazy people, and designed to get the Luigi Mangiones, the Tyler Robinsons, the Cole Allens. They are designed to produce crazy murderers who ‘prefer’ communism.

      The fortunate thing is that they are still very bad at it.

      But, lots and lots of little choices at the margins of university policy? Yeah, the place is intended to be a sewer, and is intended to pull gullible literalists and murderous psychos into communist terrorism by why of ‘mental health care’.

      The loans are a cherry on a crap sundae.

      They also serve the purpose of, in addition to federal DoE, civil service, and trade union, helping ensure that the primary and secondary schools are bad, and produce vulnerable kids for the tertiary schools to do more with.

      Not sure how this connects to OP, but off topic is I guess fine to.

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      1. Argh, careless again.

         I meant the second comment as a direct response to Sarah.

         mea culpa

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      2. I say this to everyone willing to listen: The USSR won the Cold War. Our education system is now producing Homo Soveticus even as the USSR is (technically) no more.

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         1. BUT they did not. Partly because it was impossible. What the universities are doing is destroying themselves. And it’s accelerating.

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         2. They are attempting to do so.

            It’s a little funny because I’ve been having folks scream at me for my entire life, because they never stood up and did anythign effective…and now they want me to take all the risks they wouldn’t, and magically make it effective, going back before I was born.

            And it’ll still all be my fault, for being a woman/younger generation/white female/ fill in the blank.

            But yeah, it’s totally the kids who absorbed the USSR worldview….

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            1. They could work the Homo Sovieticus project right up until enough people started to notice they were working the Homo Sovieticus project. The bet they made is that they’d produce enough before enough people noticed; I think that was an unspoken piece of “Everyone needs to go to college!”

               Now the demographic cliff is here, the tuition and NGO money is drying up (as well as state allocations, particularly in red states), and the game is just about up. One good “tell” that an industry is just about tapped out is a spate of mergers & acquisitions in that industry, as well as weaker players being driven to the wall…and what are we seeing in higher ed?

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               1. Interestingly, just today I was looking at the actual births for the United States.

                  Our demographic cliff is the deep darkness of…the late ’60s.
                  If you go by actual births. Rather than “Births per estimated woman of reproductive age in the population.”

                  https://x.com/FoxFier3/status/2067691947360174260

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                  1. https://t.co/MiLGyV3UCp pic.twitter.com/EmNwVACi1P

                     — FoxFier (@FoxFier3) June 18, 2026

                     Hm, see if this makes it show up correctly….

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   5. Beyond that, though, I wonder how many people get deep in student loan debt by taking every dollar offered as opposed to every dollar needed.

      Hard to define “need,” though; I know a lot of people spent more because the college would not schedule required classes in a manner that allowed finishing the degree, and you must have a set amount of credits to not have to start paying on your existing debt.

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      1. oh, that. yes. Younger son.

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      2. I never quite ran into that for my MS, but since I could only take two courses per quarter AND pre-requisites were close to nonexistent, I could dance around the schedule. The only thing that frosted me was the U claimed they had a course in C programming, but in the 3 years I tried to get one, they only offered Pascal. (IMHO, the shining example of a Bondage and Discipline language. Almost entirely, but not completely useless to me. HP did one application where I needed to fix a bug. One bug.)

         Finally got the C course from a UC Berzerkly Extension unit. Learned Perl by RTFM, never got (nor needed) C++. There’s a Python application I’d like to fiddle with, but so far, life is too short to learn it and the Gotta Do list is too long. Maybe when I’m post-op in ?? weeks.

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      3. I didn’t hit that exactly, but I took prerequisite math classes at the ,ocal junior college for my Master’s and

         then found out the university wouldn’t accept them.

         As it happened, the university classes were completely different and considerably harder than. The Jr college, so they probably did me a favor.

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         1. That happens here too.

            Worked in reverse for me for statistics. Jr college wouldn’t accept Biometrics as a statistics class. Rather rude of them. Biometrics was the same class as mathematical statistics class, except we spent 5 weeks learning the concepts and formulas, then the rest the term using the concepts and math on, oh I don’t know, biological statistics. Practical usage.

            Otherwise, the only math classes I retook for the computer degree that I had for my forestry degree was first term calculus, and linear-algebra/discrete-math-2. Which I kind of needed. While I can do math, I don’t retain concepts unless I use them, regularly. It had been 10 years … As it was math almost sunk me because when I was taking them, it was one class per term, and I had to get through 6 math classes before I could take the computer concept classes … All while I was already programming, but I didn’t have those dang degree “letters”. Then ironically to finish the degree, my last class wasn’t a computer class, it was a dang math (upper division) class.

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      4. Daughter ran into this scheduling stupidity too. Cost her an entire extra year in school–paid for partly by us, mostly by student loans, because the scholarship only covered four years–just to get the final two classes that every anthropology major was required to take.

         I worked in higher-ed for 20 years, and enticing young people to attend a university was my specific job for over 15 years…and this is what they ended up doing to their students. Like any large institution, they had their problems, but they weren’t always like this. (No, I’m not angry about it, not at all.)

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         1. TWO years for younger son. It’s ridiculous.

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   6. “Beyond that, though, I wonder how many people get deep in student loan debt by taking every dollar offered as opposed to every dollar needed.”

      Just an anecdote, but I knew a law student who reported his classmates were living large on student loans. The logic was that they were already going so far into debt that a bit more for nice food/housing/partying didn’t matter. I don’t know if that’s common.

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      1. I know downtown Oxford, MS is very upscale, by my standards (University of Mississippi).

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      2. I suspect that part of the intended reason for the large loan offers is to enable students to live off whatever part of the loans are not taken for tuition and fees, rather than making them work.

         So one that live on campus would have the loans pay for their dorm and cafeteria fees, and ones that live off campus would use the loan amounts to pay their rents and such.

         … this presupposes a much larger degree of financial literacy and discipline than your average 18 year old is going to possess.

         The one time I did peer advice for an incoming freshman, I advised him to take the absolute minimum in loans – only enough to cover tuition – and to get a half-time job (not work-study!) on campus for his living expenses.

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         1. Due to needing ADA accessible housing and not being able to drive, on-campus housing/dining was my daughter’s only option, and let me tell you, that’s a fucking racket. Even in a town where the average rent was borderline extortionate, it was a bad deal.

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            1. On university housing, on or off campus, is a racket. What helped with son’s off campus, was rent and food wasn’t due with tuition and the rest at the beginning of the term. Housing was split into monthly, and we could use bulk buying for meals (i.e. we bought, he raided). I was saving for his rent the month before. Writing last rent check was a huge relief on the household finances.

               Middle sister, her four all eliminated the housing costs; they went to in-town university, so they lived and ate at home. Kind of why I can’t address the difference between rent in college towns when I went back to school. Already had housing.

               Younger sister’s three also went away to college. One difference with their children, they had the option for state college 529, too, but it had two options. Along with tax free on the money, options were: 1) No tax on growth or used. Or 2) Bank credits at then current prices. Didn’t cover fees, books, or room and board. They were able to save some money on room and board with their oldest two, for a few years. They could get one apartment the girls could share. Or if they shared a house or multi-room apartment with others, they could share a room. By the time their third was in college, both girls were long out.

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            2. My idiot boys insisted on not paying for parking, because it was so expensive, and so were parking in the “they’ll shiv you” park and walking a mile and bits AT NIGHT in not the best area of town, until I caught on and paid for their parking.

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               1. Son had to have parking since he was living on campus, at least first two years. Apartments were close enough to walk. Parking passes were no more than a license to park. No guaranty, there would be a parking spot. That didn’t change between ’70s and ’00/’10s.

                  I took county park & ride bus, in Eugene. I did NOT go on campus after dark. Latter had a detrimental effect on most group projects. Most, because not the only “older than 22, student, not living on campus”. While they did park on campus, they weren’t thrilled with parking on campus and walking across campus at night, either. We all grouped together anytime groups were self organizing. Our house became the gathering place, we not only had parking (house), we had a large plywood tennis table to park multiple computers and printers on, inside (something dad made when I was a kid).

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5. I’ve been doing a grand resort of my household, since my daughter bought her own house for herself and Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson. Mainly – I can move my office/work area/computer/professional stuff to another separate room entirely, instead of a corner of the master bedroom … and anyway, one of the things that I unearthed was a whole folder of rejection letters from various agencies, back when I was giving it an honest try at the trad-pub route.

   Gads, am I glad that A: I never did have any luck pitching my first two novels with trad-pub/agencies, B: That it soon became possible for small print runs through digital printing (rather than traditional big-run litho printing) and C: Amazon developing the Kindle eReader and opening up a market for anyone who thought they had a good story to tell. as they wanted inexpensive content for them. I have had so much fun and even earned a little money and local fame through writing by books…

   I also found the extra keys to the car that I sold fifteen years ago, three military challenge coins, a key to the barracks room that I lived in during my first overseas, (The building and room number are stamped on the key) and a pair of crocheted gloves that I have been looking for for ages, as they are perfect to go with some of my period outfits…

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   1. We’re going to be moving in about a month, and I’m looking forward to functional closets!

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      1. You guys move like you’re taking advice from Satchel Paige. “Don’t look back. There might be someone chasing you.”

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   2. Gads, am I glad that A: I never did have any luck pitching my first two novels with trad-pub/agencies, B: That it soon became possible for small print runs through digital printing (rather than traditional big-run litho printing) and C: Amazon developing the Kindle eReader and opening up a market for anyone who thought they had a good story to tell.

      So many things you said. I wonder if I should write up the way things were and when and how they changed before I, and the rest of my generation shuffle off this mortal coil. After all, my first book was a collection of all the “old man” stories I used to tell my software engineer colleagues about my career. Maybe it’s time for a writing bio to go with my software career bio, but I should wait until I have some success at selling my books.

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      1. Do eeetttt. Write it now, when you’re needing to write but the main project isn’t flowing.

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   3. Having moved like a million times back in the day, I will be taken from Chez Phantom feet first if I have my way. [knocking on wood]

      On the other hand, -children- moving and taking all their crap out of my basement is fabulous. ~:D I love that!

      Currently here at the Phantom Northern Command we are having a bit of landscaping. I managed to get my chainsaw to start after it being idle since 2019 or so (Husqvarna, she fired on the second pull). So now I’ve been cutting up deadfalls and “trimming” (destroying!with extreme predjudice!) the ludicrously overgrown shrubbery out front. (I’m leaving the deceased tree corpses on the lawn for a couple of days, so the rest of them get the idea. Growing up is good. Growing out gets you a visit from Mr. Chainsaw.)

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6. Would things like all the cozy fantasy varieties, the translated urban fantasies (Asian cozy fantasies for example), urban fantasy in all its various flavors, and so on have developed if the gate keepers had kept their politics out of business? I’d wager not, because once Amazon et al developed into a functional publishing system, people could write all sorts of things, and find a market. It might be darn niche, but it’s out there, for good or ill. The “Tsunami of swill” as one publisher put it has changed the market. For a while, the big publishers actually said that first you should sell a lot as a self-published author, then come talk to them.

   It is a lot harder to choke out a genre that the Powers-That-Want-To-Be think should be unpopular. Westerns, amateur detectives (a la Agatha Christi and Margery Allingham for example), all sorts of things are now once more going strong.

   The entire ecosystem of software, artists, free-lance editors, and so on that developed after indie-publishing became a going field is amazing. We support a lot of people, even if “just” part time on their part.

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   1. Yeah, my early circle of indy writers always giggle-snorted when it was reported that the Big Establishment Publishers would deign to take a look at your book if it sold like hotcakes. (To be fair, a small number of originally indy-published books have been picked up by the trad-pubs.) But honestly – I’ve always wondered why on earth, if you sold a kajillion copies of your book on your own hook – than why would you give up ultimate control of your own literary money-maker to a corporate entity? Just for the cachet of being able to say that you had a “real publisher”?

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      1. It depends. If the publisher likes you well enough, you’ll get extra perks. As I’ve mentioned here in the past, there’s a lot of stuff that Brandon Sanderson doesn’t need to worry about because Tor takes care of it for him. But for Sarah, all of that stuff devolves down to her. On the other hand, even if Tor were publishing Sarah, they probably wouldn’t offer her those same perks because she doesn’t sell anywhere near as well as Sanderson does.

         So if a publishing company offers you a basic contract, then the only thing you’re getting out of it is someone else to handle the publicity. And depending on how much you like dealing with that (and how much the publisher is prepared to invest in publicizing you), that still might be worth it.

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         1. You’re not ….. So, Sanderson sells that well, because they push him that hard.
            The highest determinant in how someone will sell is how big an advance they get. So it’s ultimately “Do they like you?”
            And I’m sorry, no, basic contract you don’t get any publicity. AT MOST you get an add in Publisher’s weekly in page with six other books. That’s it.
            You don’t even necessarily get on shelves because their reps don’t bother. There was a year I had six new books out and couldn’t find ONE in any store.

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            1. Sanderson is a good example of how they push the ones who don’t actually need to be pushed any more. Remind me: how many million dollars did he raise on Kickstarter when he said “I’ve got four books I haven’t managed to get accepted by a publisher, fund me and I’ll self-publish them”? My memory says it was something like $14 million. He doesn’t need Tor to push him. (At least at this stage of his career).

               Of course, that also means that if Tor doesn’t provide value for money to him, then he has the option of saying “Welp, I’m not going to sign any new contracts with you” and they’d lose quite a bit of revenue. So Tor has actual incentive to give him value for money, unlike the smaller authors that they think they’re safe ignoring.

               (As should be obvious, I do not have actual knowledge of any details of Tor’s contracts with Sanderson — or anyone else, for that matter. That should be obvious, but it’s worth saying anyway).

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               1. He didn’t even try to get those books traditionally published. He just said, essentially, that he got bored during shutdowns and wrote four books that weren’t under contract, anyone interested?

                  Yes, we have them. They are very pretty.

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               2. Of course they push him. They want to make sure that he knows that they do something for him. He can get up and walk away. They know that. So they *must* cater to him, or he’ll leave. And *every* other fantasy publisher out there will happily try and snap him up if that happens. If Sanderson were to leave Tor today and joke about signing up with a romance publishing company, there would be discussions at Harlequin that same day over whether they ought to consider opening a (very very small) Fantasy department.

                  I don’t know how the rest of the authorship at Tor is doing, but he’s got to be helping them out quite a lot.

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            2. To be fair, the guy is *good*. He’s on y “Don’t bother reading the blurb, just get the book” list, allong with Larry Correia, John Ringo, and Tom Kratman.

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               1. Never said he wasn’t good. But if he hadn’t got that support in the FIRST book, no one would ever have found it. And since it’s ALWAYS the writer’s fault, the first book not going massive would have been taken as evidence he wasn’t that good.
                  Trad pub ate its seed corn on the regular. BTW if he’d done that first book just ten years later, they’d not have touched it. He’s male and doesn’t have an ethnic name.
                  Same if he’d done it ten years earlier, when they were insisting you had to be forty before you could write a novel. So there was luck in timing. And ability in networking (Which I never had, to be fair.)

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         2. From every single less than 15 years recent author– they don’t do publicity.

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         3. The thing about it is, Sanderson started getting those perks with the very first book. He was an instant bestseller and never had to go through the struggling author grind, because he had a combination of good connections and luck. (I am sure that if he were even 5 years younger, he would have missed the window on publishers being willing to gamble on a white guy from Utah.) Most authors are lucky to get ANY publicity help, let alone that much, especially on a first book.

            But you are definitely right that it comes down to the wishes of the publisher in such cases. Which is why it’s nice to have more indie options, so good writers can sidestep the nonsense.

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            1. Sanderson finished Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. That gave him serious publisher (and reader) creds, so when he had his own first book ready, the publisher could be certain that he already had a name and willing buyers.

               All credit to Sanderson, he deserves all the boost and praise he gets. However, he had that advantage over John T. Author. And he hit a sweet spot in the market, when epic (fat) fantasy novels were very, very popular.

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               1. Sanderson had already published a few books when Jordan asked him to finish The Wheel of Time. His Mistborn trilogy (now Final Empire) was the first thing he got published. Mistborn wasn’t his first submission, though. He had earlier submitted Elantris and Warbreaker, but those novels were only published after Mistborn became a success.

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                  1. Wiki has Elantris published before Mistborn, FWIW.

                     Larry Correia described WoT as a 20-year boost to Sanderson’s career. He would have gotten there eventually, but landing WoT accelerated it in a big way. Good for him. I like what I’ve read of his work, and his big Kickstarter numbers make me smile.

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                     1. Elantris was his first book, and it was already a big seller. That’s where I first knew about him way back when. It did have a re-release years later, so maybe that’s what Junior is thinking of?

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                        1. No, it wasn’t confusion over the reprint. Apparently I was just mistaken. I am pretty sure that he had at least one book that was rejected before his initial novel, but Wikipedia says that he started writing Warbreaker the year after Elantris was published.

                           So now I’m confused.

                           Wiki also notes that Warbreaker has had several rewrites since publishing…

                           *scowl*

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                  2. Yep. He was a bestseller from Book One, and got there because he had already networked hard through literature academia and publishing. Most of us do not have the time, the opportunity, nor even the stamina to manage that. He did it as a young 20-something still in college and jumped straight to being a bestselling author, because the publishers made it happen.

                     Which isn’t saying he sucks. I’ve read some of his work, and while it’s not my favorite by far, I can see why a lot of readers like it. But he also benefited from the publishing environment and was willing to jump through hoops for them. Many of the rest of us are not willing to put up with the social drama of publishing to get to that position.

                     And also yes, he published many other books prior to WOT. I don’t think he would have been picked up for it if he wasn’t already a success. It just boosted his name further, but he was already a bestseller before that point.

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                     1. Sigh. Some of us were broke and had toddlers.

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                  3. Oh, yes, I remember an online discussion — not here — where a SF writer asked who he was on that announcement, and was told.

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               2. To add to what I wrote earlier –

                  Sanderson had successful published books out before Wheel of Time (I’d already read Mistborn by then, iirc). But the Wheel of Time deal likely gave him a *massive* boost in popularity. I don’t know whether he would have reached the level he’s now at even at a much slower rate if he didn’t get the WoT job.

                  I was also watching a video the other day talking about how his fifth Way of Kings book has fallen flat among many (including myself). A number of people in the comments claimed to have been fans from early on, but have started to sour a little more recently. Some claimed that his editing group is perhaps a little too in awe or respectful of him, and don’t call things out that should be. I don’t know whether that’s the case, and no references were cited, but I do know that I’ve recently thought a couple of his more recent novels were a bit disappointing.

                  He’s also a bit too willing to rewrite things that have been published, including the end of the duel at the end of his second Way of Kings book iirc less than a week after the book was released.

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      2. The value-add certainly seems to be dropping. There’s less of a centralized marketplace for status and prestige, tradpub is less of a gatekeeper for selling adaptation rights, and if you’re doing well at indie, by definition you’ve solved editing, cover art, and marketing to an acceptable degree.

         And the goal of seeing your book on a Barnes & Noble shelf gets a little less important with each successful ebook you bump into, for the same reason “influencer” is crowding out “celebrity” as an aspirational career for the younger generations. Sooner or later, status follows success, even in new forms of media.

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      3. Everything I’ve heard about the Big Publishers suggest that you’re expected to do the lion’s share, if not all, of the publicity, and eventually they stop doing any more than the bare minimum of editing. They’ll still take care of your cover design (even though there’s a reasonable chance that the cover they pick for your book will suck), as well as printing and distribution to whatever brick-and-mortar stores are still around. And for that, they’ll take 85-90% of the profits on your paper books and 75% on your ebooks.

         If you’re doing well for yourself in Indie, why the heck would you want to give most of your profits to these vultures? What precisely are they doing to earn it?

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         1. Running jokes with:

            • Dresden novels by Butcher: Dresden shown on the book cover in a large Indiana Jones type hat. Dresden does not wear hats.

            • Mercy on the Mercedes Thompson covers, her arms and legs are covered with tattoos. Mercy has one discrete tattoo of a coyote paw.

            • Don’t remember what the running fan joke was for Hunter’s Yellowrock series.

            Etc.

            Thus, not having control over cover art for your books is not necessarily a good thing.

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   2. No way would Beware of Chicken have gotten going.

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      1. Nor would it have acquired copycats. There’s one (whose title is escaping me), where the protag is some sort of alchemist in a wuxia world, that I got several books into before realizing it was a carbon copy of Beware of Chicken. At which point I kind of got bored with the series (even though I’d been enjoying it up to that point), put it down, and re-read Beware of Chicken instead.

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         1. I think I tried the first one in there, the MC was a bit too standard wuxia morality for me.
            (I find the personalities highly unpleasant.)

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7. Regarding politics and creativity: it’s easy to be creative if your creativity lies in destroying things or “trangressing” moral or social boundaries. No Man’s Land, Shikari, Shifters, Vampire Cons, Bolg and Storm Dragon all require a different kind of creativity, deeper, even.

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8. Lensmen.

   We need Lensmen.

   But I’ll be damned if I know how to contact Mentor of Arisia (well, maybe Chris Kinneson, since Mentor is retired and no longer in his universe), or even create lenses.

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   1. Boskonia is definitely in charge of way too many of our institutions.

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      1. “Hillary, speaking for Boskone.” 😧

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9. “I was struck by how much the one-armed harpers situation paralleled that of writers in traditional publishing.”

   Very similar, honestly. Middle class people trying to work and make a buck in a despotic tyranny run by IMBECILES.

   I must admit that I barely even tried the dead-tree route. A friend did me a favor one time and forwarded my first book to [company], where it vanished without a trace. Not even a ripple. So I said ‘fine, be that way’ and published on Amazon instead. I’ve got three books up now, plus a novella and a short story. Fourth one still hanging fire, I have initiation anxiety (totally a thing) and it shows up hard with posting books.

   My sales are in the same ballpark as your new author/first book from #DeadTreeInc. Which is to say, dozens. But, big big ‘but’ here, people have actually read my books. That would not have happened without Amazon.

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   1. As one of the dozens, I wonder about sending three guys named Guido to chez Phantom to encourage the initiation. Joking. Mostly. :)

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      1. “…three guys named Guido…”

         Thanks, I’ll put them to work proof-reading. ~:D

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   2. That reminds me, you sent me book five to beta-read and comment on something like two years ago, and I haven’t gotten around to it. I’ll go back and reread it, then send you some comments. Sorry, four young kids in the house do make for quite the distraction.

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      1. Thanks Robin. ~:D I only had two, four could be… difficult.

         Mine are big enough to fight for themselves now, they’re off adulting. Kind of nice, honestly.

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   3. As another one of the several dozens, any old time would be fine, but sooner is definitely better.

      Later is “still gonna be worth the wait” however.

      And (see comment below) it’s also nice to know that Book 5 at least exists already…

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      1. Book 10 exists. ~:D

         I am -very- bad at initiating tasks. But encouragement helps!

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         1. More incentive for me to get off my posterior and beta book 5 for you, then. Because I’m looking forward to seeing what other ridiculous antics the Monkey King and his entourage can get up to. And knowing there are at least* five more books waiting after I finish book 5 is pretty good motivation to get my part of the job done.

            * I wouldn’t be surprised if you get at least one more book written by the time I beta five books; certainly at the rate I’ve been going to far, that’s likely to happen.

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10. I dont recall if I said this here before but the phrase “I can’t breathe” has been sending a chill down my spine. It’s as if God is sending a clear message to the left. “Your lies are going to turn on you and destroy you.”

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    1. Yes. The whole Henry Nowak thing, like 10/7 has been SERIOUSLY bad for my mental health.

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       1. I must say that thugs/weirdos do not scare me. At all. Let’s go.

          But cops? That’s different. They scare the hell out of me. The terrifying grinding-down to nothing by sheer bureaucratic weight…

          This is very common here in Canaduh. I hear it from a lot of guys. It is not good for the cops.

          Thanks to official bad behavior, here in Canaduh we have “Toronto The Good” where police are being hit by cars, shot, assaulted etc. Toronto used to be “The Good.” When I first moved there we didn’t lock the front door. But now it’s Detroit. Happened since 2019.

          Recently a policeman was shot and k1lled serving a search warrant. SWAT tried the ‘5AM warrant service’ trick and Mr. BadGuy shot one of them. AND ESCAPED. That’s some excellent police work. No details of course, just propaganda. Mr. Baddie was ‘a young lad turning his life around’ you know.

          Turns out Mr. Baddie is part of what the media is pleased to call a “guns for hire” ring, when the local crime lords are hiring these pukes to do everything from sh00t at the US Embassy to whack rival tow truck drivers, to sh00t at synagogues. As one would expect the stupid little boys can’t aim, so there have been plenty of uninvolved casualties.

          This is called ‘finding out’ after f-ing around for 20+ years with DEI catch-and-release plus mass 3rd World immigration. The combination allows things like “guns for hire” rings to flourish.

          (Dear Lurking Lefties, I know you want to scream RAAAAACIST! at me but certain parts of the world are crap holes because guns-for-hire types live in them. Russia, Somalia, India, pretty much the same, okay? Lots of dirtbags live there. The dirtbags don’t improve just because they came to Canada. Or America, as they’re finding out in San Francisco, where gangs from Honduras are running the street drug trade. You’re welcome.)

          So now, finally, officials in Canaduh are discovering that losing the trust and cooperation of the general public is a very perilous thing. This despite having watched it happen for 60 years all over the USA in Blue states and cities. It isn’t like they weren’t warned. And warned, and warned some more.

          To those Great Thinkers in high office, I offer the following thought experiment: Imagine the fun you’re going to have when the general public finally wakes the f- up and decides you’re the problem. Then it won’t be 47-IQ dirtbag teenagers who can’t hit a barn from the inside.

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          1. I’d a wired edge to me late last night.

             I figured because of some stupid fiction reading choices, which I have continued.

             I’m wondering if a few edge to my mellow today is actually, instead, reaction to the rupert lowe report.

             Specify that I have not read it, and that I also recognize that the dude has a partisan interest in representing things in certain ways.

             I was wondering if I wasn’t just too chill about it all.

             US is 4-5 times UK pop.

             Equivalent conspiracy here might have on the order of a million victims.

             I go, ‘How would I know it has not happened here’. I think about the public schools, and about the trans push.

             I think maybe it could have, for all that I do know.

             I think I may already have the possibility priced in.

             So I don’t think I am mad, and don’t think it has shifted much my sense of priorities, and what ought to be done.

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             1. Well, it kinda did, given the fraction of those 20 million Autopen border hoppers either children without parent or just juvenile female – work the fractions as you wish, but it’s really very easy to get to a million of those folks fed into the trafficking pipeline.

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                1. Yes, significant detail differences and the perps were not wholly imports, though the traffickers obviously were. Still.

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                2. There’s one important difference with the kids who crossed the border. Those weren’t citizens being abandoned and neglected by their own country. The victims of the rape gangs were.

                   What happened to the border crossing kids is still unforgivable. But the rape gang situation was even worse as the British government owed a stronger duty to the victims of the rape gangs.

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                   1. I generally agree, but I’d put my reasoning slightly differently:

                      The perps would not be there without conscious decision of the crown government to bring them in, and the duty to police unlawful acts falls on the same entity, the crown government.

                      British subjects are not traditionally serfs, so there’s the traditional transaction of rights and responsibilities both upward and downward in that structure. In this instance the crown government failed in their duty multiple times on multiple levels to the crown’s subjects.

                      Historically the crown itself was ultimately on hook (or the chopping block, actually) for the crown’s government actions. Of course the crown today is a fiction, like the unwritten constitution they are supposed to have over in airstrip one. Decapping Chuck would do nothing, and the crown’s government is doing the Humpty thing:

                      “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

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                      1. That, too.

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                   2. The rape gang situation is the type of event that cries out to God for vengeance.

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                      1. PRECISELY THIS.

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11. If you read/watch about how God destroys things that offend him, story after story, you begin to see patterns. He often lets evil people draw out the exact length of rope they need to hang themselves, (The movie the Prince of Egypt has a great and chilling scene illustrating this perfectly.)

    He re-uses symbols in a way that emotionally devastates those who love them. The Assyrians loved portraying themselves as lions, beasts that ruled the land and could do what they wanted to lesser beasts, they also loved hunting them, it was considered the sport of kings. The Israelite prophets saw what was coming those symbols before anyone else.

    God has a very profound and terrifying sense of irony. I can’t breathe indeed.

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    1. Any author recognizes the techniques.

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       1. And likewise (very like), anyone who’s ever looked closely at symbolism, a la Carl Jung.

          “The smell of Fate” is an eerie enough thing; but “Fate has your scent” quite another entirely.

          “Chills” is putting it mildly. (“All things work together for good, for those who love The Lord and are called according to His purpose.” All things; no reservations or exceptions needed.)

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    2. God gives us all enough rope to hang ourselves and some of us choose to repent. I’m still working on that myself; it’s a lifelong project.

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       1. I also still working on myself. At 63.

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12. Why our son took 5 years to get through undergraduate, and lost out on one specific opportunity. ONE class, it took 4 quarters to get into it. Not the only class this happened, but this one was particularly bad. Very frustrating. He took other classes to stay enrolled and not “dropped out”, that at the time seemed like would help (not so much), but not required. So yes, that (at $28k that last year) that is at least a year he (we) shouldn’t have had to spend.

    When hubby and I were in school, yes the scheduling was by last name (rotating). But by the time one was a junior you had priority for your major classes, senior status you had priority period.

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    1. Suppose to be a reply to Sarah up the list. Regarding not getting classes when needed.

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    2. It seems to me there might be room here for legal action. If you need one course for your degree, but you’re required to keep taking other courses for several years and pay for them your being held hostage and made to pay extra because the school wants your money.

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       1. That’s probably the point at which you go to your college’s dean, explain the problem, and ask if there’ any reasonable substitutions they can make for the class their scheduling has caused you to miss.

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       2. Probably take a class action to get around public entity legal protections.

          My point was, problem not new. But, seems it has gotten way worse in the last 10 – 15 years. Son’s class wasn’t just the lecture but ability to get the required lab class that goes with it.

          That is one huge change from late ’70s to late ’00s. When we had a 5-hour credit class, the scheduling including not only the lecture times, but the lab times; lecture spot guaranties the lab spot. The change linked the two as required co-classes, but a spot in one does not guaranty a spot for the other.

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          1. That’s idiotic. The classes I had that required labs were linked. I don’t remember if they split the lab sections into two groups (it’s only been 30 years), but they were directly tied to the class in question, because it doesn’t make sense otherwise.

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             1. Agree. Idiotic.

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       3. Back when we rode dinosaurs to the university campus for class in the 1980s, there was a priority system by class year for getting into any specific undergrad class. Lowest priority was sophomores, then in ascending priority freshmen, juniors, seniors, and “graduating seniors”, presumably for those who needed one last class to close out their tine at that state university.

          Now it’s probably by victim status score.

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          1. I couldn’t afford a dinosaur to ride to class. But, same.

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             1. Ah. Dinosaur. There weren’t any dinosaurs yet in Portugal. Some people tried to ride the early amphibians, but they were palm sized and just squished.

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13. And this is why if I ever get published, I’ll never use my real name. I don’t need someone from my past who didn’t like me try to do that kind of stuff to me.

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14. Late to the party but confused SSVOT – single-sweep volumetric optoacoustic tomography?

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    1. Still Small Voice of Trumpets.

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