On Our Way To The Stars

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yes, there will probably be memage later, supposing I don’t get distracted by food (I’m highly food oriented, sorry) or watching the sacred musical, but until then, I woke up this morning with a weird thought, because I read a headline last night (I no longer remember what the headline was) and the back brain fermented it, somehow. If I get distracted, you get memage AND promo tomorrow. It’s a bountiful day.

This is what I realized: I’m not going to say “diversity is our strength”. Diversity as presently understood is a weakness. That’s the old Marxist game of dividing people into separate and mutually hostile groups which compete for benefits from the bountiful teat of master government.

That type of diversity is the polar opposite of the focus on the individual and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that our declaration promises and our Constitution ensures (if followed. Look, that’s been a struggle since before the ink dried.)

But besides those secured promises which of course shall remain and be true, even if the sun and the stars pass away leaving the universe in utter darkness (In this I am an absolutist) this country has achieved something quite wonderful and new in the history of the world, something you might not be quite appreciate, unless you were raised abroad and saw how nationality and culture works abroad.

What America managed, before the Marxists got a hold on our institutions, was to seamlessly integrate people of vastly different cultures in two or three generations with barely a hiccup.

Note that what I am speaking of isn’t even what WE consider different races, but what everyone else has considered different races, and definitely since the founding of this country (and before.)

I was reading a story from the settling of the west, and the notable thing was how Swedes, Germans, English, and Americans met, worked together and the foreigners gradually (and sometimes very fast. I mean I’m not unique. Sometimes it happens in a couple of decades for the original immigrant. Leading to our sacred liberties being loudly defended in weird accents) became as American as anyone else. It wasn’t that people were blind to differences, but that they assumed EVERYONE could be American and would become American, because of course that was the superior way to live.

On the way there, Americans acquired the best habits, words and ideas of the foreigners, while subsuming them and using them in the service of being AMERICAN. This happens nowhere else. Or not easily. When I traveled on European trains in my teens and young twenties, you could still not only tell the independent cultural groups, but also there was considerable animosity between them. I don’t know how it is now with the EU, but when I visit I still see the old divisions and animosities. There is no melding together into one people. Which it still happens here, almost without notice, provided we get the Marxist hold off the heads of the “educated” and the laws and institutions of our nation.

This sets us apart from the history of humanity, and makes us something quite new and wonderful, a promise that humans can eventually go to the stars however many and from wherever we need to be, and form a new polity, or more likely be absorbed into the new polity of America In the Stars.

In a hundred years, let’s look forward to the fireworks display to celebrate the historical independence of the Mother Country and the establishment of the Declaration and the Constitution, those words that set people free. This is why people all over the world want to be Americans and either try to move here or adopt a dog in the manger hatred of America that’s not even plausible, much less realistic. They love us, they hate us, they obsess on use continuously, and can’t believe we never think of them at all.

We never think of them, because we’re busy with more important things. To wit, we have great things to do. Because the future comes from America.

Americans: A people on the way to the stars.

It’s already great and it’s going to be glorious!

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84 thoughts on “On Our Way To The Stars”

  1. Mel Brooks wrote Blazing Saddles, and I think we all know the scene that culminates in the line “…Oh, alright, the Irish too!”

    Even the Johnsons can be unified with their hereditary enemies.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Flashback to a comment from a college English professor in the 80’s. He was on a train in Europe. A German and a Frenchman were arguing about something. They deferred to him not because they trusted an American but because they trusted him over each other. Come to think of it, that sums up NATO. Or it did at one point.

    Liked by 3 people

  3. Yes.

    We’re sitting in a family camp on a nameless base in the Northeast, and it is comforting to hear, at the stroke of 8 a.m., the national anthem playing over the loudspeakers. And keep an eye on the sky – I don’t know where the guys were going, but we had an impressive fly-by over the local flea market this morning, including B-1s and B-2s. Did occur to me that having all these flyover here,there and yonder, might have the added effect of giving our cities informal air cover…

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Looking at what’s going on in the State Fair in D.C., I would have liked to be there for the fireworks, but also to see the scheduled 10:36 PM B-1 flyover, using the afterburners. However, I don’t like big crowds, and that is a REALLY big crowd.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The Bone is loud when it’s not in burner. It’s really really loud when all four go levers are full forward.

        The recent Super Bowl flyover had a B-1 as lead flying sedately so the fighters flying close parade could keep up (heh) but it also had a trailer B-1 who just happened to go full burner and then pull up into a climb over that stadium, spraying ‘mercun freedom loudness all over the place. I could hear it way across the valley from the stadium.

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  4. My wife has traced her entire North American lineage to predate the United States, sometimes by generations. She married a guy (that would be me) who personally knew all of his immigrant ancestors. When our daughter went to senior prom, her crowd rented a stretch limo for the six couples, and there among these teens were couples of every mixed ethnic grouping possible. Those first and second generation teens weren’t looking to preserve ethnic divisions. They were all striving for excellence and, on that particular night, to have a good time with friends.

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    1. My husband’s family got here on the second boat after the Mayflower. His ancestor of the same name was an under age enlistee with the Connecticut Volunteers, following George Washington from the beginning of the revolutionary enterprise. His tombstone reads “Daniel Hoyt, revolutionary.” (Interestingly he married a Sarah, which we didn’t know when I changed my name.)
      He married me. My kids simultaneously qualify for Sons of the American revolution and are first generation American. They are also, both of them, VERY AMERICAN. Religious USAians you could say. The fourth of July is the major holiday the family celebrates, usually with massive party. And it always concludes with singing the star spangled banner. (Very badly, because I can’t sing, but with ALL THE FERVOR.)

      Liked by 4 people

      1. Applegates, paternal through great-great-grandfather, have not only been in the PNW since 1843, but on east coast since 1628 (? Didn’t make the local family gathering June 27). Not the first or second boat, but one of the early ones. One of George Washington’s young aid (too young for drum, or piper) was the youngest brother. Parked there because the older brothers were enlisted, and no one to leave the youngster with, or safe to leave, on the frontier homestead. No “first natives”, that we know of (although the joke was “How’d they know? So many kids running around, might have snuck one in.”)

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          1. I have a Revolutionary War ancestor on my mother’s side. Probably more than one, but this one applied for a pension. My late friend, Pat, would have signed me up but I never got around to it and now that DAR is all-out, at least in some chapters, for showing allyship with “trans women,” I’m not much interested.

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      2. My wife is a descendant of the Mayflower’s Richard Warren. But since there are well over a million other people descended from him, that’s not saying much other than lots of sex and lots of luck surviving infancy for his descendants.

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        1. Same with the Applegates. Hubby jokes “who isn’t a cousin?”

          At least the ones who came west, most the children survived childhoods (two lost on trail west, in the Columbia). Not all had children, but they survived to. Even the women. Jesse, and his wife, ended up raising grandchildren, when their daughters died young.

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      3. My dad’s dad came over at some point near the turn of the 20th century from a little village in Hungary, eventually bringing his girl over, but on my Mom’s side there are ancestors who lived in New Amsterdam before the Brits took it over in 1664, and given ages and kids they arrived fairly close to the New Amsterdam colony founding in 1624, so only a few years after that Mayflower charter that dropped the Pilgrims off a bit further north in 1620.

        Of which I had no idea until I started messing around with online genealogy software, as my Mom never talked about any known stuff in her family history past where her grandparents were from. The family lore I heard was basically “mostly German, with various sources sprinkled in.” She was certainly never a DAR type, even though her family qualified given I see plenty of ancestors serving on the revolutionary side. Basically it never mattered all that much to farmers.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Hey we’re probably cousins! I’m descended from Jorge & Catalina Rapalje’s 4th child Julia. They married a few days before the ship left Amsterdam and had their first bun cooking by the time they landed. They have a million or more descendants. In today’s world, they would be on the ship for the Mars colony.

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          1. Okay, looked it up, definitely distant cousins: I see Joris Jansen de Rapalie (or Rapalje once he left the Spanish Netherlands), baptized in Pas de Calais, who married Catherine Jeronimus Trico in the Spanish Netherlands in 1624, then bundled her over soon enough to have their first child, Sarah, in 1625. I am descended from what appears to be their sixth child Catharyn, who married one Hans Bergen, a shipwright.

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            1. Joris and Catharine had Sarah in Fort Orange, New Netherlands. Some records say 1624, some say 1625.

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        2. Same here with the Dutch New Amsterdam ancestry. They were Huguenots who got expelled from France on pain of death, hung out in Holland for a while, and then scarpered for the New World as soon as they could. Owned most of Staten Island at one point, then sold it for peanuts and moved farther west (wash, rinse, repeat…the family history is not filled with great financial decisions). Makes me wonder if that M in your handle has anything to do with the M that begins the last name of that branch of the family…

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Oh, and speaking of links to the Founders, I just found out that I’m related to THREE signers of the Declaration of Independence: John Hancock, Roger Sherman, and Samuel Huntington. (Peripherally, or I’d have already known about it, since my mom has followed our direct family tree way back…but still…) So a European mutt mix with links to Greatness. :)

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          2. if that sale happened fairly soon after 1667 when the Royal Navy sailed in and announced the residents were now all subjects of the King of England, or after the brief reconquest by the Dutch in 1773 when they were all Dutch again, but were all then traded in 1774 for what is now Suriname and a draft pick to be named later, whereupon they were all English again – that might have been the new authorities voluntelling those previously-Dutch-previously-Huguenot property owners to sell that land to some Brits with more pull back at the British Court.

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              1. Hmph. 1624 founded. 1667 RN sails in and announces Englishness, changes name to New York. 1673 Dutch Republic reconquers, you’re all Dutch again, changes name back to New Amsterdam. 1674 Dutch trade New Amsterdam colony to UK via treaty for what becomes Suriname, name changes back to New York, you’re all English again.

                No wonder they sold.

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      4. Johnny-come-latelies. . . .

        My first ancestors on this continent were a century earlier — in Quebec — at least by the records.

        Up the Acadian branch, there are few brides who appear, in the records, out of nowhere, on their wedding days — so possibly much older.

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      5. Descended from one of the few women to survive the first winter in Plymouth.

        Descended from crazy Irish rebel Protestant convert Mason guy with good tiling skills.

        Descended from German Catholics. Descended from Scots-Irish farmers. Descended from French Jews. Descended from Indians (probably).

        Descended from just about everybody in Western Europe (probably), and related to even crazier characters with weirder backgrounds.

        All-American, just like lots of other people.

        Liked by 2 people

      6. Dad’s side (Welsh/Irish) first got here in the person of a 16yo girl in 1876. She gave birth to Great Grandpa that year. He made it to ’69; I remember him as a child. Deaf as a post but still came out to the porch to smoke cigars. Mom’s side (Budapest for Grandma and and Ruzindol, a village near Trnava in Slovakia, for Grandpa) came after 1900.

        Physically I favor Mom’s side of the family. Somewhat ironically, when I worked at Central Connecticut State back in ’11-’12, many of the Polish immigrant community in New Britain back then would take one look at me and immediately start rattling away in Polish. I felt bad having to break their hearts and tell them I was Slovak/Magyar and couldn’t speak a word of Polish beyond “Dzien dobry, pano.” :-)

        My family is mostly what used to be called Blue Dog Democrats back when those were a thing. I’m probably the closest thing to a religious USAian in the whole shooting match.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. I had always believed that my family had shallow roots in this country with my mother having arrived in 1958 and my father’s family mostly early 20th century. I found out recently that I’m eligible to join the sons of the revolution through one, sneaky line of descent. I knew I have ancestors who fought with the French under Rochambeau and at Savanah— he was in Clare’s Regiment Irish Brigade right mess that was. THat would be the Cincinnati but that’s primogeniture and my descent is through my mother. I didn’t know about the Connecticut family who all fought in the war and later left a daughter who bore my great Great grandfather.

      Liked by 4 people

    3. Continuing the family tradition of mixing bloodlines, my daughter is married to a proven Mayflower descendant. Her two sons happen to be named after two of most legendary kings of England, for reasons having nothing to do with them being kings of England.

      Although as preschoolers, either of them would probably do a better job than the current king of England.

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    4. My earliest ancestors in the U.S. came over on the Mayflower, the latest was a great-grandmother from Denmark.

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    5. One branch of the paternal line is descended from John Marshall, the chief justice, which means we are related to … half of the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress, at least. The rest of that part of the Boykin line were indentured servants, or Scots who came to do ship building. There’s also some Dutch, possibly got to England with William of Orange in 1689, but YMMV. Maternal side? A mixed bag of Jews, French, people fleeing conscription from Strasburg, Scots-Irish from Ulster who were sent over as indentured servants and kept rolling west, Cajuns, and who knows?

      Moggy, that’s me!

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  5. One of my favorite statements of diversity is by L. Neil Smith, when he referred to a character as “John Smith, Individual, Unique Product of the Universe”.

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  6. ”Cut it out! Cut it out! Cut it out! The hell’s the matter with you?! Stupid! We’re all very different people. We’re not Watusi. We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A’, huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts!”

    Here’s to the next 250 and per ardua ad astra!

    Liked by 5 people

      1. “We’re soldiers, but we’re American soldiers! We’ve been kickin’ ass for 200 years! ….. All we have to do is to be the great American fighting soldier that is inside each one of us. Now do what I do, and say what I say. And make me proud.”

        Liked by 1 person

  7. I thought I remembered something, and checked, and sure enough, Ray Bradbury’s classic short story ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ is set one month from today, on August 4, 2026. The story was published 76 years ago.

    Based on current events, I think the prospect of Allendale, CA being nuked in the next month is fairly low. 😁

    Liked by 4 people

    2. There Will Come Soft Rains is a truly classic and moving story. In fact one that I cited in my panel at SoonerCon on the golden age of SF. Of course Bradbury also wrote The Toynbee Convector, where an inventor fakes the invention of a time machine and “comes back from the future” promulgating all the wonders and solutions future generations wrought and inspiring his contemporaries to make them happen.

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    3. I hope you’re right and the mullahs are out of the nuclear game, courtesy of a Spirit and a MOP.

      We’ll be coming home from Anime Iowa on August 4.

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        1. They’re never going stop. Somebody, probably the US, is going to have to put soldiers in harm’s way and kill a LOT of people over there before the world gets much older. Hopefully before the Mullahs murder a couple million people with a big mushroom cloud, not after.

          In totally unrelated news, I can’t help but notice that there’s a certain Very Big Gathering of Ayatollah lovers happening over there about now-ish. Sure would be a shame if something…happened…to them…

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          1. Exactly. They are not sane by any measure we can accept, and they are dangerous. They have to be stopped, and the only way they will stop is when they are dead. Pretending otherwise is delusional.

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  8. “On our way to the Stars”.

    I remember reading a Poul Anderson story where the “Not So Secret” rulers of Earth were secretly putting “road blocks” in the way of space exploration (especially involving finding Earth-like planets for humans to settle).

    This was for “our own good” as the so-called rulers believe that humanity would “mess ourself up” without their control and once humanity spread off-Earth, they couldn’t “keep their for our-our-good control”.

    [Very Big Crazy Grin]

    Liked by 2 people

    1. A lot of Anderson’s stories were like that. In most of them, the totalitarians won.

      At least he managed to do things like Virgin Planet and Operation Chaos before going mostly grimdark.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. My introduction to Poul Anderson was ‘Brain Wave’ in Anthony Boucher’s 2-volume ‘A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction’ anthology. One of his best.

        Each volume opened and closed with a novel: ‘Brain Wave’, ‘The Stars My Destination’, ‘The Weapon Shops Of Isher’ and ‘Re-Birth’ (published as ‘The Chrysalids’ in Britain). Also included ‘Waldo’ and ‘The Man Who Sold The Moon’ by Robert A. Heinlein.

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  9. Maybe instead, we should offload all the malcontent America haters to the stars? Perhaps, the closest one.

    Liked by 2 people

  10. The U.S. is planning right now to establish a Moonbase on or near Luna’s south pole — in about two to three years.

    A Territory can be established. The admission to the Union as a State can be made.

    Clarke County, Luna. Then what do we call the State?

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  11. Yes.

    We’re sitting in a family camp on a nameless base in the Northeast, and it is comforting to hear, at the stroke of 8 a.m., the national anthem playing over the loudspeakers. And keep an eye on the sky – I don’t know where the guys were going, but we had an impressive fly-by over the local flea market this morning, including B-1s and B-2s. Did occur to me that having all these flyover here,there and yonder, might have the added effect of giving our cities informal air cover…

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  13. More solar fireworks:

    SOLAR FLARE ALERT: Earth-orbiting satellites have just detected a X1.3 class solar flare at 04-Jul-2026 at 20:41:00 UTC. Check Spaceweather.com for updates

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    1. Note X class numbers come after one runs out of all the C class numbers and then all the M class numbers, so not a small one.

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  14. Well, I dreamed I saw the silver spaceships lying

    In the yellow haze of the sun

    There were children crying and colors flying

    All around the chosen ones

    All in a dream, all in a dream

    The loading had begun

    Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed

    To a new home in the sun

    Flyin’ mother nature’s silver seed

    To a new home

    • Neil Young, “After the Gold Rush”

    Sorry, that’s just what the illustration brought to mind.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. If there’s any song I want to sing at Karaoke Night at LibertyCon it’s that one. Plus, I couldn’t possibly be a worse singer than Neil Young. ;)

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Good grief, did Neil Young read, A Canticle for Leibowitz? Because that sound like the scene at the end, when the monks are loading the starship to save a remnant from Earth.

      Liked by 3 people

  15. To become a US citizen, you don’t swear allegiance to a king or even the mother country or fatherland. You swear allegiance to the US Constitution. I don’t believe any other country does such a thing. (Prove me wrong.)

    Now I’m going to inflict poetry on you:

    Forward

    The suns roar on in howling hells

    their rage entombed in black forever

    Venus hides ‘neath a silken shroud,

    an acid-shrunk cadaver.

    The asteroids march stately

    past the dusty bones of Mars.

    The vultures circle Jupiter

    whose glacial hand withdraws.

    Earth alone reverberates

    with the energy of birth.

    We boldly strive to cage our chaos

    and send it flying forth.

    We forge our light into a spear

    and cast it into space.

    Yet even it may rust in flight

    without an echo of a trace.

    Who could lay blame should we despair

    and end it with a bang

    when even our dead sister

    above our cradle hangs?

    We’ll gnaw our foot off to escape

    this lonely dying place

    and go forth crippled but alive

    to meet a brother race.

    Our time has come, but must we rend

    and tear apart our womb

    to burst forth like Athena

    full-armored from the tomb?

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  16. Great to hear Trump’s speech last night calling out communists as the enemy. I hate to imagine what piece of tripe President Harris would have drunkenly cackled her way through if she had won.

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    1. It’s irrelevant. If Kackling Kamala had won, the 250th wouldn’t even be a side note and all official celebrations would have been canceled. By this point her handlers would be keeping her in the basement or on vacation, as they did Bumbling Biden.

      Liked by 1 person

  17. Clanker tune from Trek fandom relevant to some obscure Earth holiday happening today, plus, “E Plebnista…”

    I gather the various faces are supporter insertions, so good for them:

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  19. Common language, common religion (Christianity). Produced the opposite of balkanization. Diversity is our weakness.

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    1. The language wasn’t common, really, but people were encouraged to learn it. Until the left started believing language was a racial characteristic and people learning English was racist. Pfui.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Common language helps, but is not necessary. I’ve been told occasionally that people can’t really comprehend the Koran if they aren’t fluent in Arabic. You could apply that concept to any foreign language. But that would mean that nobody could understand Sun Tsu’s Art of War without being able to read Chinese (I didn’t have any problem understanding my English translation of it.) Or the Bible written in anything by Aramaic (What’s wrong with the King James version?) So, any declaration that you can’t understand and accept the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land without being able to understand English just doesn’t cut it.

        For purposes of citizenship and assimilation into American culture, by all means have the tests and lessons in English.

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  20. I wonder if those bunker busters come with a nuclear option? It seems to me that it would be difficult to dig through radioactive rock. But even if we don’t go that route, they can’t reconstitute without an activity signature we know to look for, and we just blow it up again.

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    1. The targeting and weaponeering stuff is actually a bunch of work in the other direction for WMD targets, slo as to not get everything irradiated/contaminated/cursed by the stuff of interest, instead burying it and containing it.

      Since the Persian stuff of interest that’s openly talked about is fizzy rocks, rather than chemical warfare stuff, biowar goop, or artifacts of the Old Ones, the volume immediately around the buried enriched stuff and enriching hardware is already radioactive. Making it more so would not likely be any more of a deterrent til the mullahs who want to dig it out.

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  22. Now the Leftroids are accusing Trump of embezzlement. “He’s stolen $2 billion!!”

    I suspect what has really happened is Trump’s businesses and investments have gained $2 billion in the last year and a half because the economy recovered and the stock market zoomed up. My investments have certainly done well since the exit of Brain-Dead Biden and Kackling Kamela.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. What part of “blind trust” is unclear?

        Of course, their work around is that he’s using his kids including Barron as cutouts.

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      1. My investments have gone up almost 22% since President Trump took office. If he had $10 billion then, I would expect him to have gained $2 billion.

        But now the Leftroids are accusing him of stealing $2 billion, all at the same time, using the same words. That is a coordinated campaign of defamation.

        How much have Democrat politicians taken in bribes and kickbacks during that time?

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        1. “expect him to have gained $2 billion.“

          –

          Even those with their money in money market accounts have earned money since DJT took office again (on paper, never mind inflation wipes it away).

          Wags hands, a sore point with what mom did: Pulled IRA from investments into money market. Bad money move. But good emotional move for her. She cannot handle the daily downs when they drop. She has enough to cover her minimum annual withdrawal requirements until she’s 98. Currently, every year, that *expands by a third to half a year. Plus she doesn’t need that money monthly, it just changes which money market account it goes into (household expenses emergency fund).

          (*) Yes, technically inflation is wiping that gain out. Not that mom “can visualize”. Which is for her piece of mind (and our sanity, thank you very much), is very much okay.

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