Abbreviated Elements of How Democrats Have Ruined Everyone’s Political Prospects

by Bob the Fool

The fundamental issue is that the Democrats have deeply screwed themselves and everyone else over when it comes to dispute resolution.

Succession to a kingship becomes a more fraught issue a) the more power that the old king had b) the more that people fear that one of the potential new kings will be a crazier asshole to them.

The purpose of the American election system and the American formal legal system is in part to avoid all of the eternally returning ills of succession wars.

There are four ways that the current mess screws over everyone.  A.  Making the formal legal system look credible in terms of criminal conspiracy to defraud the public.  B.  Publicly impeaching the credibility of the elections, and making addressing issues seemingly impossible.  C.  Frauding in a shell of a man, who can additionally be seen as a democidal psychopath.  D.  Attempting to deny citizens of any recourse from the caprice of the tyranny.

JFK may well have stolen the 1960 election, but he was less obviously malicious towards Americans then Biden seems to be now.

Every element of this smells of communism.  Communists are zero sum-ers, who see destruction on every path to their goals.  They have no peace in them, and they give outsiders little hope for negotiating an end to communist depredations.

Basically, this is outside of the scope of what the constitution was designed to resolve, and is able to resolve.  Constitution was designed to help resolve disputes of a just, moral, and religious population.  A large enough sub population that is amoral, unjust, and outside of religious practice as the founders understood it is outside of scope.

There are basic questions of security in lives and property in this dispute, that create uncertainty about how little people have left to lose, and to how much they will retain even if they submit.  Policies involved include covid, gun grabbing, climate change and ‘environmental’ constraint of food supply, protection of domestic terror soldiers, importation of foreign terror soldiers, and being investigated for terrorism for speaking criticism of school operations.

This amounts to a dispute between two or more sub-populations each with deeply internalized views.  The communists are troubled by Christians, Jews, etc. not jumping to comply the way that the Outer Party does.  The Christians, Jews, etc. are troubled by the pointless destruction and efforts to interfere with practice of faith.  The Christians and Jews pray.  The communists look for ways of ‘expressing power’ that will make the Christians and Jews turn away from the God of Abraham, and bow down to wind up golden statues.

There are still more available potential remedies than violence.  But it increasingly seems like violence might be a remedy worth its costs, compared to costs of not seeking remedy by violence.

There are two problems essential to remedy by violence.  One is that once continuing violence starts, it is unlikely to end before sufficient communists are dead.  Two is that it will necessarily anger people, inspire more dispute, and then that it may be difficult to come to a peace deal agreeable to all survivors, which all parties will deliver on.

Democrat impeachment of Trump makes the theoretical powers and responsibilities of the presidency even more central to the meta dispute.  Miley’s potential interdiction of Trump’s communications means that we cannot have complete confidence in the total mistruth of the Democrat claims.  We can be confident in partial mistruth of Democrat claims, because Democrat claims are incompatible with the Constitution, and with any reading of Lincoln vs. Davis that is not a pro confederate reading.  In particular, if a state of insurrection existed, the Presidency’s executive power can be used to authorize the unorganized militia to act.  There was no insurrection, and it is unlikely that Trump tried to or wanted to authorize the organized or unorganized militia.  Miley makes it impossible to be confident in this conclusion, because of the precedent of Lincoln authorizing the organized militia through the Department of War.  If Democrat claims are partly true, then the Democrats who voted for Pelosi on Jan. 3. 2021 for the 117th Congress should have been barred from being seated during the 118th Congress currently in session.  This creates significant ambiguity of law, that can only partly be mitigated by Trump serving another term as President and thus by his actions confirming a lack of intent to suppress insurrections on January 6th.

It is quite possible that peaceful courses of remedy may be sufficient to address these matters.  However, a great many persons in a great many offices have contributed to mishandling events.  Peaceful resolution going forward is likely to involve a great many persons, in some of these same offices, carefully and slowly over many years not further violating the norms and not further undermining trust.  Some of these ‘offices’ of ‘power’ or influence are private or semi-private offices, that are currently apparently being held by idiots and destroyers.  Replacement of these persons is a goal that a suitable president would not substitute for.  Changing these persons for other persons is sometimes still open to the public, whether by formal or informal means.

The presidency has some applications to peaceful remedy, but is one necessary element of one of the violent means of addressing the dispute.

If the remedy is one of violence authorized by a president, of hanging many communists, then the public will expect a reinstatement of peace, which will involve resignation by politicians which have taken responsibility for carrying out the executions.  A presidential candidate who is adequately prepared for current circumstances is also prepared to have a fairly early end to their political career.

So, there are basically a few more obvious possibilities with regard to current Republican candidates, based on their plans.

1. Establishment, is planning to resolve things by selling out to the Democrats, and is a moron who fails to understand that nothing delivered to the Democrats will satisfy the Democrats, or stop the Democrats from hammering at people.

2. Is planning to resolve things purely by peaceful means.

3. An actual potential second Lincoln.

Baked into this round of seeking nomination is that a) Democrat perseceutions and censorships mean that no potential Lincoln would be tolerated running on being a second Linoln b) establishment selling out means that many candidates are reasonably suspect as establishment sell outs.  Furthermore, failure to understand that calculus of points 1, 2, and 3, and of public expectations, would itself be a fourth and disqualifying level of planning and preparations.

The Democrats are not willing to let Trump be, he is riding the tiger and cannot get off.

Every other contestant has that strike against them, that they could wait, and the strike of not being able deliver on the Trump third term element of peaceful resolution.  If they do not see those two strikes, too stupid to qualify.

There is a critique of DeSantis, that for one test of making the replacements to allow for peaceful remedy, that he has not yet replaced at least 5 of the 6.  I infer that he is thus establishement.  The defense was made of DeSantis that my preferred level of remedy seeking is currently necessarily politically suicide.  My feeling is that ‘political suicide’ is currently an inherent risk of presidential scale politics, and that a seriously risk averse politician should be willing to wait and let Trump take some of the damage by serving another term first.

The fifth plan is to let Trump go first, but use the opportunity to sharpen him by pettily holding him to account for all of his screw ups.

The cost of this plan is that it would be four more years of opportunity for new governors to make progress towards peaceful resolution, as well as for a potential Lincoln to better position themselves for that. It is immensely costly in opportunity for any governor who currently seems relatively good, but who also has establishment ties and perhaps sympathies.

A politician whose plan is more establishment selling out is the only one who fails to take a great deal of scrum into account.  Planning for such scrum includes pricing Trump comments into things.  Appeals to ‘muh gravitas’ are inherently invalid for any of the plans besides establishment sell out.  Thus, those who are already appealing to ‘muh gravitas’ can go frustrate themselves.

Trump’s comments are because DeSantis is using proxies.  The choice of proxies to me sounds a great deal like the ones an establishment candidate would choose.  See ‘Mike Miller’ at Red State.

Peaceful remedies are preferable.  Constitutional remedies are preferable.  It is not clear that they are possible, nor will it be theoretically clear before the remedies are actually in place, and the disputes are again mostly resolved.

Post Script on the Intellectual Forecasts

I am greatly frustrated by all of the theoretical discussion which fails to give appropriately measured weight to a) Democrats have pretty badly screwed us by creating a difficult situation b) there is absolutely hope and the theoretical status quo is badly bankrupt, because many of ‘our’ theoretical spokesmen got us into the problems by being willfully blind.  Any given theoretical explanation of a specific remedy is suspect. 

Additionally, we should not first be taking counsel of trust in theoretical models, because the opposition is a cult of theoretical models.  We should not first be looking to aggregate scale type answers, because the opposition is a cult that drives themselves nuts by obsessing about aggregate conclusions or guesses.  One of the first steps to dealing with opposition information warfare looks a lot like ‘seeking spiritual remedy’ or ‘trusting in The Lord’, because we internally search for the Enemy’s hooks in us, try to remove them, and try to understand reality in light of having removed those hooks.  The results of this industry are emotional, and become quite difficult to express in terms of purely intellectual theory.  When you do express them in those terms, they very easily become a trap for the unwary.

Fundamentally, tertiary education is a major center of gravity here.  Something like 60% have bachelors degrees, 30% have masters degrees, adn 2% have doctorates.  The insane and out of contact with mainstream American culture producing the ‘scholarly’ results foundational to one side of these disputes is at the very most 2% of the population.  In practice, it is a great deal fewer than 2%, because of a combination of discrimination in hiring faculty and in awarding tenure, and because of self selection by scholarly minds, who may conclude that either studying their problem of interest makes sense outside academia and no sense inside of academia, or that they will never be hired and retained for any faculty position, so that trying for such career is stupid.  (The idjits who whine about 1% or 2% of wealth, and who are cheerfully silent about rule by a 2% of formal education can go frustrate themselves.  (Modern tech has allowed, even when limited by leftist lawfare, a great and unusual amount of wealth, which combined with wealth of information makes independent scholarship far more practical than it previously was.))  The general assumption is that you invest, or waste part of your life on, a formal education, and then it ties you to a career path, the one it lets you start.  Establishment theory intellectuals may be rote, have probably gone to university, may consider themselves deeply tied to the ‘conservative intellectual’ career path, and may be frightened of losing that career and of having to start another from scratch.

These would be the last people to have an accurate explanation if they have screwed themselves over by too obviously collaborating with Obamist Democrats to preserve the Bush faction inside the Republican Party. 

Appendix: Notes on questions considered too briefly.

1. JFK’s margin of ‘victory’ includes states where the Democrats may have been murdering to suppress the Republican vote.  JFK ran on a pro segregation platform, to appeal to people who may have stolen elections by such means.
2. The mainstream narrative is that the parties ‘switched places’.  It is not clear that this ever actually happened.
3. Modern historical narratives are carefully curated to ignore that the Democrats who implemented Segregation and Jim Crow had a massively partisan grudge against the Republican Party, and understood those policies as serving a partisan goal.  The story often told is purely of racism, and no other motivations for the political actions are provided. 
4. Even if the murders with official sanction had ceased, people may have believed them still possible, and might have thus not cast a ballot for a candidate of their choice. 
5. The integrity of the 1960 election is in doubt.
6. Soviets may have murdered JFK.  Possibly to try to kill the space program. 
7. I’m angry about many of these basic questions of security, and more.  I may have more to say in other essays in the future. 
8. Civil Wars suck.  They really really suck.  Once started, very difficult to start a really binding peace again. 
9. The test applied to DeSantis may be expanded on later, in another essay, for incumbent Republican Governors.  This is about the letter signed by many Law School heads on January 12, 2021.  Paul Caron, a Republican I now realize to be Establishment, bragged about signing this letter as a head of a law school.  This was one element of my becoming extremely disenchanted with the Establishment Republicans, and becoming convinced that they are backstabbers, who would cheerfully see us all murdered.  The theory of professional liability in this letter seems novel; Law faculty would have been widely condemned if in the aftermath of the Rodney King Riots, they had proposed that lawyers would refrain from defending blacks for fear of inspiring riots.  The failure to also mention Marilyn Mosby’s misconduct (similar to the alleged misconduct) makes the ‘bipartisan’ letter a deeply partisan document.  Furthermore, while as lawyers they may not realize this, they are likely not competent to know the facts of any electronic system’s security.  (Without sufficient physical security chain of custody, verification of hardware and software security can be impossible if hostile state actors may be involved.  Failure to ensure physical security directly made election integrity impossible to verify.)
10. Another element was following several Republican Party aligned activists on Twitter.  In particular, baseballcrank, and esotericcd, who are lawyers.  I came to understand that their political messaging operations were a side gig, and always secondary to their ability to make a living from practice of the law.  Which primarily depends on having judges willing to listen to you, which requires that you very carefully curate all of your statements.  This is a problem when a major political question involves case law that is a result of a consent decree that restrained one point of view, and allowed the opposing point of view to operate through an officially sanctioned proxy.  This consent decree was also improperly premised.  (The parties switched places, my ass.)  Additionally, covid lockdowns were effectively a criminal conspiracy.  Additionally, the restraint on police force by Democrat Mayors, DAs, and Governors in relation to the violence by BLM and anti-fa seems to be effectively a criminal conspiracy.  Many Republicans would prefer to accuse judges of criminal conspiracy, well in advance of being able to prove that conspiracy in criminal court.  Especially in combination with an industry attempt to blacklist provision of services to these views, the attempt by lawyers to remain credible to judges can seem to Republican laymen like a willful and dishonest betrayal.  This impeaches the credibility of the courts in being able to formally resolve these disputes.  The courts will be properly looked upon with skepticism until the case law provides a clear and equally available ability to contest suspect elections. 
11. Nancy Pelosi was daughter of a mayor of Baltimore.  The Democrats whose use of power she would have grown up admiring, most likely included Virginian Democrats and other Democrats who may have been approving of white supremacist terrorism.  The ‘switched places’ narrative is not sufficient given her leadership of the Capital Police, that the Capital Police allowed the scaffolding to be readied outside Mitch McConnell’s office, and that 2020 was perhaps the most concentrated terror campaign in about forty years when it came to burning black neighborhoods.  The MO of 2020’s riots seems to be extremely similar, and might have instead been carried out under Woodrow Wilson. 
12. The academic experts are wrong, and have been avoiding criticism by sticking to curated places of discussion. They may have made themselves extremely vulnerable to counterargument.  It is early days yet, and too soon to call every roll of the dice. 

Before I post this, I’ll not that I’m not holding THE OFFICE in Colorado as guilty. Maybe, but this was, at least until recently, the most conservative small suburban town in Colorado. It might have changed, but their elections were scrupulously clean before. In fact, my DIL worked for them in 2018 as a temp and was impressed with how thorough they were, for vote by mail. In fact, our younger son’s signature got flagged while living there because he had done something stupid to his hand and signed with his left.

Now, I don’t know if that particular office is still that scrupulous. But even if it is, all it takes is one person going through old voter records and reviving a few.

The staging for this: BEFORE LEAVING COLORADO, acutely aware of how corrupt our voter rolls are, and that vote by mail is essentially vote by fraud, and while knowing it meant nothing in the vast sea of fraud (people dead forty years are still voting in Colorado Springs, of all places and we won’t talk about the machines.) However, let’s say that I didn’t want it to be done in my name, so I carefully withdrew my voter registration and made sure there was no active registration for me a few months later, when they had a local election. There was no record for me, it was absolutely clear.

So, imagine my surprise when I received this amazing email yesterday:

Note, I’ve thoroughly anonymized this email, because I’m assuming no malice on the part of the office itself. I’m assuming this was some clerk deep in the bowels of the bureaucracy, not the office itself. And I don’t wish to dox innocents. That’s not the way to proceed.

Note also that there’s a reason I call this thing “fraud by mail.” They obviously sent at least a ballot to the house after I’d cleared the voting registration. Probably for 2022. It was the right-hand marine’s assessment of the buyers that they weren’t leftists (he did this whenever anyone moved to the area. That’s what he did.) So, being not-leftists, they sent the ballot back to the office with “doesn’t live here anymore.” Why it took them this long to contact me is something else yet again.

At any rate, being placed on inactive status is not the security you might think, because what it actually means is they don’t mail the ballot but someone can show up with a fake ID or a bill addressed to me at that address — and note the later is trivially easy to do — (or perhaps the ballot can be harvested. I don’t remember if they now made that legal) and vote that ballot. It’s actually more reliable for fraud than mailing it out and risking an honest new owner.

The first thing I did, of course, was go to the site (no, not by clicking. The address seems legit and all, but I wasn’t born yesterday) to search for and withdraw my registration. This amiable intention was thwarted by the fact that proving my identity requires me to log in with my Colorado Driver’s license…. Which I no longer have.

So far I’ve sent back the following response:

Attached find the notice I received today.

Be aware that not only have I been residing outside the state for almost two years, but – before leaving – withdrew my voter registration and made sure that it didn’t show in the searches.

Having received this today, I can only conclude it was fraudulently recreated for the purpose of electoral fraud. I am neither amused nor tolerant of this nonsense.

On visiting the indicated website to withdraw my registration – again – I found that I cannot do so since I – obviously – no longer possess a Colorado driver’s license.

I hope this flagrant attempt to create a fraudulent registry is deal with forthwith, and look forward to your assurances it has been. After which I will search the site to ensure it was indeed removed.

Sincerely,

Sarah A. Hoyt.

I have not heard back, but then again it’s only about 10 am in Colorado and it’s entirely possible they have a massive batch of these, and the area doesn’t keep a lot of clerks. It will hire a lot of them just before the elections, of course, temporarily, but not now. So it’s entirely possible it will come later. If it does not, I will call them tomorrow, and try to resolve this. If I don’t receive an answer or receive a scathing one, then it will be time to post about this again, perhaps with slightly less anonymity.

In their SLIGHT disfavor, my attempt to anonymize my registration, so it doesn’t show in searches and it didn’t reveal my then address, was thwarted in 2019 because even though it’s a slight fee, you have to prove there is a need. While they were sympathetic to a blogger being at risk, the particular employee — one hates to judge by appearances, but blue hair, nose ring — refused to believe a registered GOP voter, and therefore a “right wing” blogger could be at risk. After all, we’re the Man, you know? We intended to come back later, but then I got what was almost surely the first wave of wu-flu which floored me for a month, and just as I emerged from it, the lockdowns slammed shut.

Anyway, note how completely, bizarrely insecure our elections are. This has been a point brought up often. See Francis Turner’s article here. The fact that they’re not supposed to make you feel bad or excluded (this is ridiculous for adults, btw) has morphed into not asking for proof of citizenship when your ID is a foreign passport, for instance.

In fact, being as insecure as they are, the only way to prevent fraud — yes, in enough numbers to sway elections — is for 90% of the people to be saints. And by saints I mean the sort of people who would not take a twenty dollar bill, left on the pavement when they were in dire need of a meal. (A thousand dollar bill a lot of us would balk at, that’s evil. We might take it to the store or bank and let it be there for someone asking for it. Have done it. Once they even called to give it to us after a month, as no one had claimed it.) Because the fraud is built in and throughout.

All it takes is an unscrupulous home-owner who votes the previous owner’s ballot. A mother who — yes, there have been cases — stands over the adult children living at home, to make sure they vote the “right” way. A caretaker who votes for the demented elderly.

While I’m sure some of this goes both ways, the overwhelming majority of such cases, or at least the ones who brag about it on social media, but also the cases we all know of — my house in Colorado Springs, downtown, the first elections, I received voter cards for some improbable number of people, all registered D (I want to say it was 90 people, but you know, it’s been 20 years.) The previous owner had been leftist and in fact an activist — are leftist.

This by the way makes perfect sense. For the right at least right now, politics is a nuisance rapidly becoming a life-threatening one. Most of us, in every election, vote not for a messiah — and for the leftists reading this, no, Trump is not and never was my messiah. He is right now, IMO inevitable, but also probably the one most instrumental to my purpose which is to metaphorically put a stake up the deep state’s tuchus because rule by bureaucrat is beyond the pale — but for the least of all evils. We pinch our nose every d*mn election.

Meanwhile, the left is convinced that they’re one messiah away from that perfect communism where they can all live off their “not for sale” art or poetry, or smoke pot to oblivium, or whatever. For the older and more proactive, they’re one election away from showing us all how STUPID we are for not appreciating the genius of the Marxist crap they’ve been spouting since they were 12. (And some of the later are older than I.) So, to them it is vital — vital — to harvest every vote and fraud every possible ballot. They are absolutely sure the invalid or absentee voter would vote their way if they were in their right mind or “educated.” They’re only doing it for the person’s own good after all.

If you sincerely believed you could usher in paradise with one (or a thousand) fraudulent vote(s) wouldn’t you do it? If you were absolutely sure? Think carefully, because I myself am not sure. Not if I KNEW absolutely that by doing it I’d make the world utopia.

My only defense against it is knowing that paradise is impossible, and there is no messiah that can save us from our mess. Oh, and that perfect systems never are, because humans aren’t perfect.

Anyway, I want to take a little cheer from the fact that, with vote by mail and SO MUCH baked in fraud in place, they’re still scrambling for more fraudulent registrations. They really are panicky and “couldn’t pass a bean.”

Which is — I think — good and bad news, since the wounded beast is the most dangerous.

But there’s no way out but through. Buckle up, buttercup. There’s fuckery afoot and we must cope with it.

Or in other words, everything is proceeding as I expected and may G-d have mercy on our — but particularly their — souls.

On their other attempt at fuckery: I will NOT wear a mask, part two.

I’m with him. I will not wear the mask. I will not be shut down. I will not be shut up. I will not move to your 15 minute hellholes, I will not eat the bugs, and I will not submit.

Or in other words, dear left FAFO. …. And being unable to learn, I’m sure you will.

I’ve been wondering about the undeniable prevalence of “pedophiles in high places.” Undeniable because underneath everything there is still the fact that our “elites” not only aren’t interested in destroying networks of trafficking, but are openly hostile to any attempts to expose their existence: as their screams at Sound of Freedom showed. It’s not a good look.

It’s puzzled me, because such a fixation is by its nature anti-evolutionary and it’s a weird thing to be coveted by those who achieve money and power.

I mean, yeah, it happened throughout history, but lots of things happened throughout history that don’t happen and are unthinkable in the Western. However this seems to be something those in (at least the left) circles view as the ultimate delicacy and reward.

Sure, the forbidden, something not of mere mortals, blah blah blah. However this fixation and the attempts to make it “normal” seems…. bizarre.

I even understand ephebophiles, those who are attracted to the very young but who have passed puberty. (Note, understand, not approve of, particularly in our society when true maturity is delayed– not to say withheld by various societal mechanism — till the mid 20s or later.) Evolutionary males are attracted to very young, but fertile women. (And yes, gay guys once that mechanism misfires, are attracted to very young, post-pubescent males.) Absent mental control, the “legal” age becomes just a number, and the groin wants what the groin wants.

Epstein’s island from what I understand was not all ephebophiles. Oh, well, technically all had begun puberty, I suspect. But really, what sane male wants to consort with 12 or 13 year olds? What sense does it make.

It was a (very creepy) puzzlement, until I read a completely unrelated article about the actress (non-gendered names for things that you use your body to perform are bullship) in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves woke magical creatures. And it clicked with something in the back of my brain that has been grinding for a long time. Since I was in my twenties in fact.

The article which is here for those interested is about the son of the designer for the original Snow White animated feature disapproving of the new vision, as any sane person would.

But in the middle of it there were comments by the hapless actress Zegler about how they’re folding, spindling and mutilating a German fairytale which was always about the transition to adulthood and its relationships including, yes, marriage. When I read it it, something at the back of my brain clicked, including a lot of really bad advice I received (and ignored) in my twenties. And suddenly pedophilia as a creme de la creme temptation made perfect sense. Sick, twisted, but perfectly clear. Here is the passage:

When asked if the prince would even be in the film, Zegler answered, “We have a different approach to what I’m sure a lot of people will assume is a love story just because like we cast a guy in the movie, Andrew Burnap, great dude.”

Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen in the upcoming live-action adaptation, interjected, “–She’s not gonna be saved by the prince.”

Zegler then affirmed, “She’s not gonna be saved by the prince and she’s not going to be dreaming about true love.”

Zegler elaborated, “She’s dreaming about becoming the leader she knows she can be. The leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, brave, and true.”

“And so it’s just a really incredible story for, I think, young people everywhere to see themselves in,” she concluded.

First, i want to point out, yes, it’s an incredibly dysfunctional story for people to see themselves in. I’m so very tired of the new Disney fixation on every woman and every little girl becoming “a leader.” And note they always find this power “within” themselves, with no effort, no growing, no practice, no misses and stumbles and getting up again. It’s all there, within themselves.

The advice it tied to was when I was … 24? Dan and I had been married a little over three years, and we were … um…. derpish. There were some issues of course, because different cultures. And we had discovered the child thing wasn’t likely to happen. Which brought a certain tension. BUT overall? We were young, stupid and stupidly in love. (We just argue like we do everything. Intensely.)

My SIL divorced her husband, and when I was talking to my MIL at one point she told me if I divorced, I could come live with them. And I was like “Uh” and she went on about how much I could grow and reclaim my power. And I’m going “The power to be alone and lost?” I think I just stared at her in horror. (I never had her approval after.)

I’d like to say my MIL was insane, but if so, she was representative of her generation all the way to women ten years older than me. I had variations of this conversation, every time a woman found out — after we moved to Colorado and we could (by the skin of our teeth) live on one salary –Dan had given me the great gift of being able to pursue my writing. Look, it’s not like he didn’t want to do writing and music. It’s that my one attempt at making enough for both of us had failed, so…. (And also we didn’t know how little writing would pay, once I broke in, but that’s another story. Most people not IN writing don’t know. And yes, there are exceptions. I wasn’t one.) I kept being told I needed to work so Dan didn’t have “power over you.” Some people decided he was an abuser, trying to gain “power over you.”

And there — yeah, this is crazy feminist stuff but the thing is, it’s in the whole culture, corrupting everything — is the crux of the problem.

We’re no longer allowed to “dream of true love” and men aren’t allowed to “rescue women” or have any power over them. While women are told they have to have “power” and be “leaders” all the time.

This is impossible and untenable. Particularly when coupled with “you don’t learn anything to do this. It’s just inside you.”

Both men and women are looking for ways to have power in a relationship. Because in deranged Marxist terms everything is about power relationships. Oppressed and oppressor. EVERYTHING. Even the most intimate partnerships humans yearn for instinctively. (Shut up. We’re not Bonobos. It’s a flawed model.)

So–

So, it’s power. And who do you have more power over than a helpless child? Particularly one imported from the third world or otherwise powerless?

Hence this has become the sin of choice of our so called elites. And btw, they think everyone is doing it.

It’s abysmal, horrendous, filthy. It’s the sort of thing that calls down the vengeance of heaven in the Bible.

It’s also the result of our very twisted mechanisms of thought and emotion. The result of not being allowed to simply be lovers and partners who raise a family.

It’s the result of the same insanity that bubble headed feminists like Zegler spout.

And there will be hell to pay.

I have good news. And then again bad news.

Because in history there is never unalloyed good news. Or if you prefer, the enemy always gets a vote. And sometimes their vote is stupid, cruel, full of malice and destruction. And when they know they’re losing it’s worse.

The good news, and I’ve said this for sometime, is that we, the lovers of liberty, are winning.

This is so shocking that people my generation and older have trouble seeing it or believing it. You see, for most of our childhood, not to mention my parents’ youth, it was assumed by all the educated people — and all the experts for which there was no counter because social media didn’t exist, and mass media was tightly controlled and suborned — that communism eventually won.

It was assumed a centralized economy was more efficient. It was assumed they had better answers to the problems of poverty, education, discontent and lack of connection of the industrial society. It was assumed that people liked it better, living under tyranny.

This was all assumed because in a way we too lived in a kind of tyranny, not so much governmental (thought that too was more controlled than now. Some of us remember the idiocy of price controls and the thought they somehow “helped”) but of news and communication in general. Because of the centralized nature of the industrialized society, mass communication took place through a narrow pipeline. Which means– Well, what you expect. Since the universities, the bien-pensant and the controllers of the gate into media and the arts, were all infiltrated (or outright in the pay of) communists (mostly Russia though it might be laundered through their satellites, notably the DDR) of course the idea that communists were so caring and had the moral high ground not to mention a better answer to perennial human questions was everywhere. And accepted. (Okay, I didn’t accept it, but I was born contrary.)

By the seventies, the gilding on the lie wasn’t even particularly convincing. But because it was what everybody knew, you couldn’t dissent without being thought crazy.

And the one thing the left is right on, is that if the lie comes from every direction at once, and you can never voice dissent you end up doubting yourself, and kind of sort of accepting it. My default was “Communism sucks and is dehumanizing. It will probably win and enslave mankind forever. But at least I can go out fighting it.”

Judging by all the doomies, I think some of you are stuck there, but it’s time to spit out that black pill.

I realized we would win, of all things, in the depths of the covidiocy, when at long last I did the math. (Maybe that’s why they wish to teach us that 2 + 2 = 5.)

Mathematically, they cannot win. They cannot. They can’t even hold on.

You see, communism (or socialism) is not an economic system. It’s a parasitical form of human organization. It can’t survive on its own.

In that it’s far far worse than the feudalism it comes to resemble, because feudalism was held up and enforced by an idea of Christianity and eternal life. You can live like dirt here, but if you fulfill your obligations and do what you must, you will live like the king in heaven, because your worth before G-d is like the king’s. So, while hierarchical society and um… innovation discouragement led to impoverishment (not as great as we were sold on, mind, and in some places not bad at all) it wasn’t unsustainable. in fact, the best thing about feudalism was a certainty of stability, and of knowing your place in the world, even if that place sucked. (Not as great as has been painted. I don’t want suburbanshee to smack me, but still.)

But communism is not Christianity. In fact, the heresy replaces G-d with the state, and removes all hope of after life. It also removes anyone’s investment in society with it. There is simply no point to anything much. It covers human ideation and imagination with the same sort of uniform grey it covers its buildings. Which– Well, you know?

Communism, the perfected (snork) form of socialism, has managed what nothing else — not poverty, not famine, not slavery, not plague — managed: it made humans stop reproducing. This achievement is so “great” and so bizarre that it gives you an idea of how anti-production and anti-future the mind set it fosters is.

Which brings us to the fact that it will never survive on its own. It is to our great shame, as the most free and arguably wealthiest nation in the world that we let, no enabled, the communist system to survive WWII and conquer half the world bringing with it misery and destruction.

Then again, it’s not really our fault because by the end of WWII we were mostly occupied by the system ourselves. And while they couldn’t impose it fully on use — though it took large bites of several systems — they could control our government and our media (stop me where this sounds familiar!) The people were not complicit, and in fact were sold the gigantic lie that the USSR was our co-equal. (Some of us even now are shocked at how great the lie was, as Russia uncovers more and more of what was beneath it all in their deranged quest to recreate the USSR.)

Anyway, the only reason communism survived is that we allowed it to invade and/or control country after country. And because Russia is a relatively small (in terms of both population and wealth, not landmass) country, it could swallow vast parts of, say, Africa and live on what they pillaged for a while. Oh, not well. Our homeless live better than party pets in Moscow in the heyday of communism. But okay. Not die. And not be overthrown. Also, you know, they followed the Tsar’s regime, and the Tsar’s regime during wars, so by comparison if not much better they were okay. Even a modicum of industrialization, even run by communists, was a little better. Enough not to have a revolution, and to project a much better image to the world. Oh, also we fed it. Sometimes directly with food to keep them from starving, more often by sending food to those countries they controlled, under the guise of various humanitarian proceeds. Most of this, or at least the majority of it, ended up in Moscow.

But the thing is that when America said no, and stopped letting the USSR swallow more and more countries, and because America kept the prosperous countries of Europe from being swallowed, eventually the whole thing collapsed. (And then we gave them more aid, because you know, we didn’t want them desperate. Which caused the pathologies you see today because the regime fell, but the culture wasn’t rebuilt.)

So, in the depths of Covidiocy, I realized that it couldn’t happen here. Not with the forever and ever component. That our victory was baked in, though things might get very bad in between. No, worse than that.

Which brings us to… Since the implementation of the hapless — would be hilarious if it were happening somewhere else, far away — Biden regime, it’s become obvious they’re already collapsing, before they could even get the boot fully seated on our faces, which I honestly expected them to for a decade or so. (As did all the others who had experienced the tender mercies of weaponized socialism. After the election one of my friends who has, announced she would no longer mention politics on social media, in protection. She’s rethought it since, I think. Or at least she’s not been so quiet after all.)

They conducted the most pervasive and insane campaign to destroy the man who won an election from them, they distorted the bureaucracy of state, they ginned up a false plague, they implemented a complex mechanism of election fraud combined with riots and burning to scare the Supremes, and at the end they frauded in front of G-d and everyone, only to lay this rotten egg of a regime.

A regime that was so snake-bit from the beginning (they know, you see how big the fraud was. Sing me not of margin of fraud. From their behavior I’d guess it was around 75% and I’m only half joking.) that they surrounded themselves with state guard and barbed wire for the first half year of their “administration”. A regime that so lacks confidence in the people being “with them” that they enacted a program of censorship in the media and social media that would make Woodrow Wilson proud.

And yet they failed. Their goal — and it was these regimes advanced, covert footsoldiers who implemented it. Trump’s biggest issue was not wanting to trample state rights or overstep the advice of supposed experts, not to mention the “opinions” and work of his “loyal” vice-president. I admire his restraint even as I curse — was to implement the lockdowns and then keep us locked down forever. Their goal was to implement the most thorough degree of tyranny known to man, one that is probably impossible and certainly impossible given the physical plant and culture of the US. They wanted the dystopic dreams of the WEF, the level of control only seen in post war Russia or the more insane periods of Chinese empire/administration. They wanted to move populations around, to pile us all into their probably unworkable 15 minute cities. They wanted to keep us confined to the house and unable to talk to anyone outside of he controlled social media.

I’m not absolutely sure if they wanted to kill us all in the ensuing famine, or if their little fevered brains actually believed that it’s possible to feed people who don’t work and don’t produce from concentrated chow de bug. I suspect they at least try to believe it, so they don’t see themselves as Bond Villains. In the same way I think they try to believe the Earth is boiling, so they can sleep at night, despite all their crimes and plans for more crimes.

At any rate, it didn’t take.

Yes, some places were highly locked down. We know. Our little suburb of Denver certainly was, though not as locked down as downtown Colorado Springs (thank heavens we’d moved by then.) We could go for walks, stop to pet neighbor’s dogs, talk to neighbors in our front yard, watch the neighborhood kids run around in a vast rowdy band the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I was a kid myself. We still couldn’t go to church (I think eventually there will be reckoning, not of man, for the churches rolling over on that), shop most places, or go out to eat. But we could and did go to random drives when I couldn’t take it anymore. Often late at night, but that was our preference, rather than necessity.

But I was fortunate to have to do a cross country drive in the late summer of 2020. Even before leaving Colorado, there were signs by the highway “Such and such town is fully open for your business.” This in a state that was actively suing bar owners and restaurants for allowing no-mask access, or access at all. At a diner, still in Colorado, we discovered absolutely no masks. Just normal people eating. Thank you. I don’t remember your name, but thank you to that diner’s owners, staff and the cheerful — packed — customers. You might have saved my sanity.

And from then on we encountered patches of lock down and patches of cheerfully ignoring the mandates. Not where you’d expect. Some cities or parts of cities in blue states were completely ignoring the nonsense, while some rural places were obviously convinced they were living through the bubonic plague.

But the point is, we didn’t, all of us, head home and stay home. Despite the pervasive propaganda, the majority of places cocked a snook at the fear and giggled at the propaganda. Heck, Europe didn’t fully obey. (Though way more than we did.) And some places (Sweden! Who had Sweden on the bingo card?) ignored all and vexed the authoritarians.

They couldn’t proceed with their plan. Their admitted attempts at implementing “the new normal” failed so pathetically that after admitting it in public several times, they’re now pretending they never had such intention.

Several things broke in their plan. Despite their control, their terror tactics failed. The vast underclass didn’t rise for the riots (they keep trying this, as though they can’t believe it doesn’t work. The first attempt was OWS) and instead, they were stuck with the usual psychopaths, psychotic female followers, and the rent-a-rioter crowd, which could not be deployed outside certain cities.

Even worse, when someone stood up against them — if he does nothing else, for the rest of his life, the Kennosha Kid has earned his place in the history of our times — and killed some of their foot soldiers, they tried to destroy him, but the right didn’t abandon him. It was that, the right’s refusal to roll over that scared the heck out of them for the first time. (Though I think they were genuinely discomfited earlier because we did not, like dystopian novel characters, roll over and let them lock us in forever.)

They’ve been snakebit ever since. Yes, the vax is horrendous in side effects and it’s possible some of them, or most of them knew it. However, I don’t think administering it was a plan of population control. I think it was a plan of “I don’t want to be lynched, and would like my hoary head to go untouched to the grave.”

Because once the lockdown didn’t work forever, and each scary variety elicited more and more derision, not to mention their amazing disconnection from reality causing supply shortages and distribution problems (they never remember people still need to eat) they needed a way to dismount. The vax, for which they thought everyone would be grateful, gave them a way to dismount. Not only did it make lots of money for the compliant and complicit pharma companies, but if everyone took the vax, they could attribute the lack of deaths to it, and go back to normal with their prestige enhanced. No one need ever know how contrived the emergency was, or how little purchase it got in hearts and minds. Certainly the city elites that they mistake for the country, would praise them and be theirs forever. The side effects were bad, but they weren’t concerned about them. After all, the people taking this would be conservatives, who are compliant and also would be very scared of the disease since they are all very old. (Yes, the left really believes this. They believe because they call us “conservatives” we fit the dictionary definition, instead of us wanting to return to the Constitutional Republic of our founding.)

Since then there have been almost cartoonish moments when their plans go awry. As a measure of not getting hearts and minds, the viral spread of Let’s Go Brandon, which came about because people were having impromptu F*ck Joe Biden rallies at every place it was likely to get on camera, was one such. While the original might be profane, it was hilarious watching the bien pensant maintain that Let’s Go Brandon was shocking and shouldn’t be said around children.

Then there are things you know they’re sitting on, which aren’t reported. Like the fact that suddenly our work force is much smaller gets mentioned but not why. Yes, there have been retirements, but that doesn’t account for the shortage of people in pink collar, young and highly female fields. I can’t tell you this is true for real, of course, since all my knowledge is anecdotal, but I’d estimate a vast amount of women decided working wasn’t worth it, and they actually liked family and neighbors. The evidence for this are the strangely waspish and upset articles you see about how staying home with your kids is betraying womanhood, and how being traditional wives is the worst thing ever. They write about it as a vast movement when complaining and trying to convince young people to stop it, at the same time you see nothing about it in the news media. It’s ….. curious for those of us who learned to read pravda in English, so to put it.

Also friends who homeschool report almost shocking growth, that would indicate in some places homeschooling is now the default. Don’t expect to hear about it officially, because the spice must flow…. I mean, money must continue going to schools and teacher’s unions.

But we are seeing those parents whose kids must remain in school rebel against what they realized was not school at all but little pioneer indoctrination camps, with an added dose of pedo grooming which is frankly baffling (Unless you look at other things.)

There is also, I’m sure much to the consternation of Chinese-bought Joe Biden and co, a turning away from China as a trading partner in droves. Yes, I do realize this is terrible for the Chinese people, but feeding that horrible regime is also. There is a quiet re-industrialization of America, and also working with countries not as floridly insane.

This is dismaying to a regime for whom China was their beau-ideal and who thought they could replicate here people locked in apartments to starve, people in camps for being “infected” and people shoved into incinerators alive. Not to mention the digestion of Hong Kong, to which we’ll come back later.

The most clear sign that things are changing though is the rats leaving the ship. There has been a steady trickle of leftists — sometimes vociferous leftists — leaving the left. At this point it’s no surprise. We have a name for it “getting red pilled” and we assume — naively — they’re coming to our side because they’ve seen the light.

While a few have, or have been turned against so hard they fled to our side for protection, the truth is most of them haven’t changed. Not intellectually. This was brought home to me while reading an article by Naomi Wolfe about Trump. While admitting Trump is not the devil she’d believed, it’s all obvious none of her mechanisms of, for lack of a better term, thought have changed. This was particularly brought home to me by her being offended on behalf of all women, mind, by Trump saying Occasional Cortex didn’t know much. How this in any way means he doesn’t think highly of women is a mystery of the Marxist mind, where humans exist only as sex, race and orientation or professional affiliation categories, and you can’t malign one without maligning all others.

This woman hasn’t changed. She hasn’t even remotely started to think. She is what she’s always been. A go along. A “I want to be one of the good people.” A “I want to be on the side of victors.” That last might be the strongest. A vast component of left wing followers are people who are terrified of being killed or even of being called bad names. The left’s “arrow of history” gospel convinced them — as it did most of us, to be fair, but not that late in the game — that communism was inevitable and would win. They’ve been rolling over and showing their soft underbelly to every leftist loon and criminal since.

Also, these people are for lack of a better term, highly social and compliant. And, this is important to realize, they’ve got exquisitely fine tuned feelers for where the majority is. It’s almost an instinct. They sense where any group, any country, any association is. And they try to match. I suspect it is a function of the dinosaur brain, an instinctive component, like the one that makes me uneasy if a majority agrees with me.

They are a type and their movements have been known through every turning point of history. They are the regime’s most faithful servants, until things start to change at which point these people — not the big wheels, though some are medium — turn their coats so fast it creates weather systems.

Here’s the thing — this only happens when things are more than half turned. And yes, I’d missed this too.

The way this type of regime — where they have the outward mechanisms of power (the shell if you will) unsteadily set atop a restive population, particularly when they still have media control — breaks in the way a dune moves, through the mechanics of a sand pile. The grains on the bottom move first, and the whole thing on top looks solid until suddenly it’s elsewhere.

It’s always first slowly then very fast, and the big open displays are always a shock, like when we woke up one morning to the Berlin wall being hacked to pieces. One night you could get shot for trying to cross over that wall, the next day a cheerful crowd was tearing the whole thing down and people were getting in their ladas and travantes and driving west till they hit the ocean.

I’d just somehow missed that not only have the sand grains been shifting, but it’s accelerating. And it’s not going the other way. Sure, there was seeming movement in 16, but not really. those people didn’t shift positions or opinions, which were always “the left will win, but not so fast.” And in their case it’s because they can’t do math and thought the glorious revolution was forever. They will be the last to come over again, and only in extreme and immediate panic. Though I’d bet sphincters of those more sensitive to opinion are, in the colorful Portuguese expression, “too tight to pass a bean” now.

I expect to see some major movements soon. Some of the more precariously placed are hearing the Tumbrils in their dreams and starting to make noise. But it’s still not really visible.

So that’s the good news. The bad news…. are about as bad.

The digestion of Hong Kong and the destruction of the island’s economy was because the Chinese regime was unstable. They’d rather kill the goose that that laid the golden eggs they desperately needed than allow the leaking in social media, communication and other anti-regime chatter through the island. They then proceeded to gin up the covidiocy, yeah, maybe under the impression they could kill us, or at least our economies, but mostly to control the internal dissent.

That’s what a regime desperate for control and knowing it’s losing it does. It’s not pretty and it’s very dangerous.

Our own idiots have tried to start a nuclear war because that is a way to control the populace under war powers and war hysteria. They were thwarted mostly by the fact that Russian maintenance on nukes apparently sucks. (No, I don’t think Putin held his hand. Though he might not have nuked us, but Ukraine. The show of force would be enough for our idiots to do what they wanted. Alas it didn’t work, like so many of their plans.)

People that desperate will do anything. In fact, right now the ball is firmly in their court. Despite their attempts to get us to “rise up” in an easily put down and demonized uprising, we’ve balked them of it. Partly because their ideas of how to get people to rise up are mostly from movies, and nothing works that way in real life.

With the entire apparatus of agents provocateurs at their disposal, they manage, sometimes, rarely, to start a group of five or six to plan something stupid — and four of those five or six will be FBI agents — but nothing ever comes to scary fruition. They are stuck with demonizing an actually peaceful demonstration where the only dead were unarmed protestors. And no, despite the wet and twisted panties on the right, it’s not working, except with the very old, or those already on the left. Convincing people white haired mee-maw was there to kill Pelosi is a stretch. Also, none of the actual violent people, who apparently are known from Antifa (knock me down with a feather) have been arrested.

However they can’t be underestimated. Regimes desperate enough to want to emulate China are terrifying.

Also, the script they’re attempting to follow is combination of Woodrow Wilson, FDR and the Russian and Chinese Revolutions.

They’re not very good at it, and America is far larger, more varied, and more fractious than they expect, so you know, it won’t be as bad as they want to make it.

But it will be bad. I would bet their plans involve both famine and war. (Apparently Biden, the wonder fraud, has been depleting our petroleum reserves at Chinese orders, for instance.)

It won’t work, but I would be surprised, and it will be a sign of extraordinary divine favor, if we don’t lose a couple of million or more. And yes, it might include me and many of the people commenting here.

As for when…. well, the election is a nexus. Already they are trying to break fraud mitigation measures. They probably know frauding again is very dangerous, but what are they going to do? They don’t want to die, and more importantly they don’t want to lose power or give back the uncountable millions they’ve stolen. And the way the world is going chances are they can’t get asylum anywhere. So they must fraud.

And the thing is, though I think we will know it’s fraud, I don’t think we will rise up at frauded results. For one, they’ll be ready then. I think it will be their panicky, terrified reaction to no one taking their “win” seriously that will cause them to go insane.

And their insanity…. well, if we’re lucky they only break things and impoverish us. If we’re lucky we get through this losing only a few million. Under 10% of the population, say.

That’s not the way to bet though.

They’re already losing, but the next ten years or so are going to hurt very badly.

Prepare, prepare, prepare, including moving where you perceive to be safe. (Note there are no guarantees. Do your best.)

And be not afraid. The worst they can do is kill some of us. There are far worse things.

Hold on to the side of the boat. The water is starting to get very rough. But there in the distance, there are calm seas, and sunlight, and fruitful shores.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Twist of Fate (Fall of the Alliance)

Yuri Egorov is a Intel agent on a distant World. His main problem? He inherited the family home–a serious wreck–from the uncle who disliked him. The solution? In the Troystvennyy Soyuz–the Three Part Alliance–a brutal form of slavery, enforced through mandatory brain chips. So, however unsavory to Yuri, buying a worker should be no problem.
But this worker is . . . not standard.
Then a cross dimensional invasion puts his own problems in perspective . . .

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Castles, Creatures, and Nights: Familiar Generations

Strange things stalk the nights. Especially nights when the land remembers …
Christmas brings surprises both welcome and otherwise for Jude and Shoim. Can they survive the peak of baking season, or will Shoim finally end up in a pie?
Mike and Rich find themselves over their heads, assigned to observe delicate diplomatic negotiations in a haunted—perhaps—castle. Abyssal beasts might be easier to survive.
Deborah, Hiram, and Art try to prove that they are grown-up magic users. Their parents disagree.
How does a Hunter say what he cannot speak, mourn when tears are forbidden?
And more!
Jojn the next generation of mages, sorcerers, Healers, and Hunters on a wild trip through nights silent and otherwise.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Visitor, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That

A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for That

THE VISITOR – Felockati is anchored to his permanent location underwater and misses the days of roaming his ocean world freely.
But something new drops out of the sky and widens his horizons — all the way to the stars.
YOUR EVERY WISH – Stealing the alien ambassador’s dagger is a sure thing for Pete — just what he needs to pay off his debts.
Until he starts talking to it. There has to be a way to get something for himself out of the deal. Has to be.

FROM DAVID COLLINS: The Giant War

The Earth Space Force Military has a huge problem. The massive alien Ogre that they fought was only an immature little one. The full-grown ones had found some derelict starships and were about to find one with an FTL drive.
Keith and his crew must sneak in and destroy the derelict with FTL before the Ogres can find it. To do that, the Meduala sent a living weapon to assist with the battle. One that the Meduala has spent thousands of years trying to deal with. Is the new weapon more of a problem than the Ogres?
The Ghost Ships that contacted Earth and requested this mission are hiding something critical. They also insist that this mission only uses old low-technology ships that they provided. As soon as the mission starts, all communications are unexpectedly severed. There is no phoning home for rescue. The Ogres spot them almost as soon as they arrive. The small arms they were permitted to carry are no match for an 18-foot-tall Ogre in an armored spacesuit carrying a 350-pound battle exe.

FROM WILLY MARTINEZ: La Siguanaba

This version is in English and Spanish. La Siguanaba is a mysterious figure in Central American folklore that has captured the imagination of many. She is a supernatural woman figure who appears to men in the night, often with a beautiful face and long hair, but hides her true form behind it.
This version of The Siguanaba takes a different perspective. Somewhat of an origins story, this version takes place in the early 1520s during the Spanish invasion of Central America.The tale follows General Pedro De Alvarado. Pedro de Alvarado was one of the commanders under the direction of Hernan Cortez during the conquests of Cuba, the Yucatan Peninsula, and other parts of Central America.After recovering from a battle with the Pipil tribe located in present-day El Salvador, Alvarado embarks on a journey to find Xibalba or the underworld. What he finds is a horrific creature from the underworld itself – in true Xibalba style – in which the Gods present themselves to punish the humans for their actions.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Having a Pint

Meg Turner, vampire accountant and investments advisor, has plenty of living clients, but not many among her fellow undead. That’s about to change: she’s been invited to a regional business fair for her kind. She’ll get to meet and greet more bloodsuckers than she really wanted to (hopefully without having to suck up to any of them). than just the two Vampire cops she helped track down and stake her late, unlamented sire—and hopefully make some friends and answer some questions.
Unfortunately, she’s got a Line Progenitor who’s begun invading her dreams, and a serial killer stalking her future clients to distract her from growing her business. Throw in a sick roommate not long before the conference starts, a mafia messenger boy left on her front porch, and only one car to juggle all of her responsibilities toward her roommate and unexpected guest. And then on top of that, she has the business fair over an hour away that features vampire karaoke, nosy, pushy elder bloodsuckers, and one particular elder who’s friends with her unwelcome dream guest. Seriously, it’s enough to drive her to drink something other than coffee or blood.
Just why did she think this whole conference thing sounded like a good idea, again?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Shadow of a Dead God

What secrets lie beneath an alien world?

A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage — until the dreams started.

Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact.

Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants’ rule. Nothing will ever be the same.

A short story.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: THINKABLE

Most of you know that Dave Freer won the Prometheus Award with his excellent Cloud-Castles. (If you haven’t bought it, do. And as always you give this blog a tiny tip when you click through. It doesn’t cost you any more.)

What you might not know, is that Yours Truly is presenting the award, which is your not to be passed up chance to hear the accent that ate the universe. (No, I won’t say Moose and Squirrel. It’s not seemingly. It’s a serious ceremony.)

Since it’s via zoom, I promise I’ll try to get out of my pajamas. If I find my makeup I might even apply some in honor of the occasion.

On the serious side, it’s a richly deserved award and I’m honored and teary that I get to present it. Most of the reason this week has been crazy is my trying to write a speech. (I promise I’ll send it in ahead of time, guys! Even if it’s tonight.) Instead of doing my normal ad lib and forgetting half of what I want to say.

Anyway, the blog post explaining it is here:

Here’s the Zoom link to the 43rd Prometheus Awards ceremony Aug. 19, with past winner Sarah Hoyt to present Best Novel to Dave Freer and Heinlein Society/Trust leaders celebrating Heinlein’s legacy

Look, there might never be another Prometheus ceremony with dueling accents. Maybe, but you can’t count on it. So, you want to see it, right?

Also seeing me make a fool of myself is worth the price of admittance. And with luck, you might catch a glimpse of Indy hogging the camera, or hear Havey scream for pets. Yes, I could lock them out of the office, but then you’ll just hear them screaming and knocking so loudly you won’t hear me. So, in the name of Heinlein, you’ll deal with my cats. And like it. (Most of you actually will. Because you’re as weird as I am.)

Anyway, be (Virtually) there, or forever have to lie about being there.

Joy, by The Balloonatic

Dave Freer wrote a book called “Joy Cometh with the Mourning,” a cozy little murder mystery sold to raise funds for the Anglican church on Flinder’s Island, a small island between Tasmania and the main coast of Australia. The main character is a female minister named Joy who stumbles into solving a murder, with the title being a word play on a Bible verse. By the end of the book, Joy doesn’t only find whodunnit, she also finds herself and her place in life. When I think of Joy, this book is one of the things which pops into my head.

I think most of us, in this political climate where it feels like we are at war, sometimes lose sight of Joy. We get bogged down in the fighting between left and right, in the battle for our children, our lives and our country. In the fight to be left alone to live in peace and let others do the same. We see our childhood heroes and icons torn down – whether it’s our favorite comic book superhero who has now become a symbol of woke, or our favorite toy that is also pandering to the social spectrum that is being pushed on us.

As one of many who suffers from depression, joy felt like something that was just beyond my grasp, lurking somewhere that I just couldn’t reach, fleeing before I could get to it. I got bogged down by the struggle to survive and make ends meet, by a job I hated and an unhappy marriage. Instead of joy, I, as many, found anger and bitterness. The world became a dark place, where people are being pitted against each other – left vs right, black vs white, people of faith vs those of different faiths or no faith, the rich vs the poor, the straight vs the alphabet gang, parents vs those who want to be the ones to raise our children in social awareness, equity and “justice.”

And yet, I think it’s important, when it feels like we are walled in by enemies, strife and hardship to not just fight back, but to search for joy, even if it’s in small moments. To watch the awe and wonder as your nieces and nephews see fireflies for the first time. To pick up your son from his first time playing airsoft as he fills the car with the excited chatter of his day and the fun he had. To go to bed at night and be pounced on by a bundle of fur who says that it’s time for play and pets, and to have her snuggle next to you. To hear the good news of someone surviving against the odds when you thought they were lost. To find your favorite hen perched on top of the woodpile when you were searching the yard for her, sure that she had been snatched by something. To create something that you know will bring joy to someone else.

These are the things that our enemies are trying to take away from us. They are trying to pound us down into despair, where we feel helpless and alone. So yes, we need to prepare, to be willing to fight back, but in our mourning of the past and gazing ahead to the hurdles facing us in the future, we shouldn’t neglect to find joy and treasure those special moments in our hearts and use them to strengthen ourselves for the tough times ahead. As the saying goes, “Stop and smell the flowers,” but also plant flower seeds to bring joy to those around you.

Before we start this, let us get a few things clear: when I find myself seemingly on the side of leftists, I backtrack and do my homework. And I make d*mn sure I’m not running on either emotion or knee jerk or propaganda.

That’s number one. Remember that. It’s important. Because there’s enough emotion on both sides of this issue to make it a complete mess.

Number two: I am not actually on the side of the left. The left talks about “forgiving student loans” but none of the things they’ve proposed does that. Everything they’ve proposed from “we’ll forgive 10k” to “we’ll forgive the loans of those who’ve made $15 an hour for 20 years without breaks” affect maybe 1% of people in any way, shape or form.

They are however dangerous politically, when combined with the right’s knee-jerk reaction of “no. Make them pay” because it makes the left seem like the good guys to a lot of very desperate people who would otherwise scoff at being offered a fake salvation.

Number three: the right is also running on emotion. I realized that when “doctors and lawyers” and “making the work class pay for it” (neither of which are operative or true.) I BEG you to suspend your visceral, emotional reaction and think through what I’m going to present. If nothing else, because a lot of what you’re saying often has little contact with reality. Listen, okay? Just listen. And then think about it. After it you can still be against any kind of forgiveness, but you shouldn’t do it from your gut, or from the images you gathered from the media, a lot of it on the right and running on emotion and misinformation.

So, to start: if you’d asked me 10 years ago if I believed student loans should be forgiven, I’d say absolutely not. Or even seven years ago. Thing is, I didn’t know much about it. And hadn’t seen the insanity up close and personal. (Also it’s gotten markedly worse in the last 5 years.)

I would be running on the fact that Dan and I either had no (me) or paid off (his) student loans (which were piddly because he had scholarships.) And that we’d paid/intended to pay half of each kid’s school costs, leaving them with only half that in a loan. And that we were very careful not taking parent-plus loans. And that our kids’ were responsible.

But I admit to getting a twinge of “uh” when we found out the loans weren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy, unlike every other loan, ever. And that they were guaranteed by the federal government.

This twinge got far worse as I watched younger son — yes, it got markedly worse between the two boys — navigate syllabuses that forced him to stay on another year, if he hoped to graduate, and then play fast and loose with the courses offered, etc. This on top of the costs doubling every year just about. Here I will add that there’s a personality difference. Younger son tends to do things on his own and not ask for help. Older son avoided a couple of traps because we/our friends knew how to get around them. However, for these purposes younger son is more like people who are first in family to get in college, and have no connections, which means the ones most likely to end up with their butts in a big trap.

And then other things added in, including the first thing I said I thought the entire thing was a scam and victims of a scam shouldn’t be punished, people starting to come out of the woodwork to tell me their stories.

The first one to talk about it, before I even reconsidered, was a lovely young woman of Indian ancestry, who came to a Huns get together at Pete’s and who told me things I wasn’t prepared to hear. Including that antifa is big because it pays. And it pays cash and under the table. Kids caught in the vice-grip of loans and lack of jobs don’t have anywhere else to go. I didn’t believe her, and I apologize for that.

Meanwhile, the last six years or so, I’ve seen the “kids” of 30and younger struggle with that trap. The trap is real. And yes, it is far worse than what we went through at their age.

For those my age and younger, it is like boomers telling us that we could make a mint in real estate, and why were we strapped. Roughly, because taxes were cheaper when they were young, and regulations were more lax. And there were more jobs hiring the young. And for politico-social reasons, they had an easier time climbing the ladder.

For kids now, metaphorically speaking, the ladder isn’t there and it’s on fire. Yes, some kids are still doing well. They are mostly those with contacts, connections, and — AT LEAST — family knowledge.

I took exception to the article linked in comments referring to “pampered rutabagas” and i will point out it’s appeal to emotion. The pampered kids either didn’t have loans (our better off friends paid their kids’ tuition entirely. Because they could. We couldn’t. It wasn’t a matter of “sacrifice to pay”. You can’t get blood from a stone) or have mommy and daddy helping with a job and paying those back. (We have a plan to pay the kids’ back, so this is not personal. Younger son has a plan to pay his back. Older does too. But we have a plan to pay them also, and one of us should succeed.)

By and large the people in serious trouble are those who were reaching “above’ where they could afford, and whose parents had limited resources. Which contributes to their being stuck.

I have had people send me stuff and mostly I’m going to excerpt one of those people throughout. Because this reader writes the best of the ones who sent me stuff. And this person’s experience is close to universal in getting all the worst stuff possible. (Some people are lucky.)

WHAT WAS SOLD

What was sold, either for the young going to college or people — a lot of them in IT — whose job had disappeared or been farmed to a cheap HB1 visa worker, (a lot of that in 01 to 03) was a better future. Or later, simply the ability to get A job.

You can bitch and you can wrangle, but the truth is this: until very recently, and many places even now, you couldn’t get a job in retail management without a Bachelor’s. Even if you came in as an employee, you’d not get promoted without that piece of paper.

This is of course the result of our public schools graduating people who can’t read, and our laws allowing companies to be sued for giving competence tests. But note that all this pile of utter stupid is not the fault of the people trying to find a job.

Who are pushed into college in order to maybe, one day, have a job that isn’t a dead end.

HOW BAD WERE THE LIES?

Well, you know or perhaps not, that my degree is in English, with a minor in German, and a half dozen languages rounding out the degree. It’s not the same as an English degree in the US, obviously. That would be a Portuguese degree in Portugal, and my colleagues and I used to make fun of those people, back then.

But once I was in the US in 1985, an English degree, even a bit more than a Masters, is an English degree. Mostly people glanced at it and went “Oh, one of those people.”

So by the 2010s I was well aware of what an English degree was worth. And wasn’t.

Which is why I found myself arguing with a lot of young people not to take it. “At least take business. It’s just as useless, but it sounds better to employers.” Or “Gosh, take journalism.” “Take history.” ANYTHING but English, because I know those are a dead end. In fact, I threatened to disown either boy if they took English.

BUT AT THE SAME TIME I saw, not just commercials, but articles in newspapers and magazines talking about how HUNGRY industry was for English graduates, who had proven their grit and excellent language skills.

If I didn’t know better by then, and have a job, I’d have sent my resume to fortune 500 companies, thinking they’d leap on them with glad cries.

Of course a lot of people didn’t know better.

WHAT THE LOANS WERE LIKE. And here I’m excerpting from my reader (Reader’s stuff in Blue so obviously not mine.) I note reader started when loans WERE dischargeable in bankruptcy. That changed.

The student loan paperwork was not honest. I read the document I was signing. What I didn’t know was what I signed was only valid and binding on my side. The government just changed a law, and poof, their agreement was no longer binding. Queue up Vader from Empire Strikes Back, “I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further.”

When the government changed the agreement without my approval, where was the hue and cry? When they made company reimbursement for graduate school taxable income, but not loans, pushing graduate schools towards loans, where was the hue and cry? When they took away the bankruptcy option away, where was the hue and cry? When they changed the repayments from supporting other students, to subsidize ObamaCare, where was the hue and cry?

“I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further.”

When I grumbled, I was told to “pay your debts, deadbeat.”

NOTE that I don’t know if reader is correct that this was designed to pay for Obamacare, but it wouldn’t surprise me, because the government guaranteeing the loans WAS at about that time.

WHAT WAS BEING SOLD

Older son made it through undergrad okay. They made him go five years mind (with perfect grades) because one course just wasn’t available. And if he took only one course then he would have to start paying back loans, while applying to grad school. So, he took a second bachelor’s degree in that last year. Which was an insane option, and of course put more money in loans, but doable? And considering other people competing with him for grad school had Masters well…. it might have helped. (But probably not.)

Younger son, we should have taken notice of the fact that a lot of the courses he’d taken through the same university in a dual high school/college program were disallowed and he had to retake them (despite excellent grades. We should also have looked at the graduation rate for the local can-live-at-home will-save-money school. We didn’t. And I’ll point out we’re smarter than the average bear. And less trusting. Imagine how much worse it is for others.

Reader’s input:

No one talked about the insanity of low graduation rates at public colleges. The local one for me, had a graduation rate in the teens. As in under twenty percent graduated. Under twenty percent!

Public colleges learned real quick to take anyone in, and screw them over with ‘basic high school’ classes, before putting the student in college level. Then, weeding them out, saying, you just can’t cut it, loser! No hint, that there were specific games the colleges played to force failure on 2/3’s of the class.

Putting students in ‘make work’ classes, before even starting the curriculum, supplied the college a year or two of finances, before kicking the young and desperate to the curb. They land demoralized and under thousands of dollars in debt that doesn’t work like a regular loan.

Again, it’s not the connected who fall into that trap. It’s the hopeful and unconnected. Note that in our case, it wasn’t even pretended that son needed to take remedial classes. He didn’t. He obviously didn’t. BUT most of the classes we got ‘we teach them differently’. Because apparently calculus isn’t calculus isn’t calculus.

Note also that a lot of the classes were taught by people um…. imported from abroad, with accents that were well nigh incomprehensible. Or whose standards are bizarre because, not the same culture. Students with a clue, connections, or willing to ask for help, drop those classes. Others…. well, it adds to the cut rate.

Younger son’s college was definitely a cut-them-in-two-years college. So, you know, he wasn’t cut. He was in the minuscule number that stayed on. I think about 10% in his specialty. Cutting colleges have always been a thing, and valid. Provided that after the cutting, you’re dealt fairly with. This didn’t happen. Most of the time the classes were “Can’t get that this semester. Oh, this semester you can get the two classes you need. PSYCH. They’re at the same time. It’s okay, we will offer the second in three years.”

We thought at the time this was a unique combination of son and college. …. turns out from other people I know and hear from, it’s a common and absolutely normal experience.

You might feel, smugly, that the fact that students take 7 years to finish a bachelor’s (Seems to be the average time) means kids these days just ain’t working. But I urge you to think again. I urge you to look closer. It’s mostly scheduling tricks, requiring people take bonehead classes “to make sure you’re prepared” etc. etc. etc. Older son got through in 5, but had to get permission to carry extra credits every semester. And was only granted that, because he was straight A or A+. B students, or A/B students wouldn’t be granted that. Also, btw, taking more credits than normal (because labs, study groups, workshops, discussions, etc are mandatory but not counted towards hours) meant he really couldn’t work, not even part time, something we’d counted on to keep the loans down.
Dan and I worked through college. When we first moved to Colorado, and the Medical School was nearby, a lot of med students waited tables at Pete’s. We’d talk to them sometimes. You don’t see that anymore, because they’re crammed with make work and barely making it through. Undergrad too.

When EVERYONE is having trouble making it through in a reasonable amount of time, or even when a majority is, look at the design. It’s the design.

(Here I want to point out that’s not true for all states/all public schools. Just what seems like a solid plurality of them.)

THE LOANS ARE NOT NORMAL LOANS:

No, it doesn’t work like a regular loan. It’s not simple interest. It’s a weird amalgam of compound in six-month increments. I only have experience with government student loans. The private sector has some even more predatory ones, which frankly, are terrifying.

The latest ‘reset’, not the $10K, but anyone paying over 20+ years will have loans ‘forgiven’, isn’t ‘forgiveness’. It’s a fix outright FRAUD. I call it “Fix the Fraud”.

Lawsuits are already rolling in over the incompetence and mismanagement over the 20+ years. Payments lost, totals incorrectly calculated, steering borrowers to the wrong program to make it easier, and more lucrative, for the loan servicer.

When the Income Dependent Payment (IDP) plan came along, it was so hard to figure out, the workers just steered people into forbearance.  I was one of them. I should have been directed to IDP.

However, either way, the interest would still accrue. In both cases, the interest was just added to the principal every six months.

Which meant, the principal kept rising, because in both IDP, and regular repayment, INTEREST IS PAID FIRST, like a mortgage or car loan, before principal can be touched.

Any refinance, which the media is always pushing, resets the interest clock back to the higher levels.

In IDP, the payment didn’t even make a dent in the interest, with nothing going to the principal. Borrowers easily became overwhelmed with compounding interest. Compounding interest on an amount akin to a car, ending up the price of a house.

This may be fixed, or it may not. The link to what happened in June follows, but the details are so murky. I think, this is only for the first six months, then back to business as usual. I’m so gun-shy, I just hear “I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further.”

“Historically, when federal student loan payments were paused during a forbearance, interest has still accrued. And when the forbearance ends, all of that accrued interest would be capitalized, meaning added on to the loan principal. Interest would then continue accruing on that inflated balance, accelerating balance growth over time.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamminsky/2023/07/18/biden-rolls-out-new-interest-benefits-as-student-loan-payments-resume/?sh=616f9ff3274c

However, there is a “Gotcha”. To even hope of getting the new relief, a borrower has to consolidate. Then this happens:

“However, if you consolidate your loans during this time, any unpaid interest on the loans you consolidate will become part of the principal balance of your new consolidation loan.”

https://studentaid.gov/announcements-events/covid-19/payment-pause-zero-interest#interest-will-not-capitalize

When I went back to grad school, with company paying the tuition, my student loans were shoved into forbearance. I tried to refuse. I was told I could not. I tried to put the payments I would be making towards the unsubsidized interest and the principle. Heck, when I started making good money, I tired to pay one extra payment a year, to pull down the principle.

Each and every time, I was told “NO”. What I was asking for was impossible. This has since been fixed, but at the time, it was like this. Any payments I made, would be considered advance payments. The accruing interest could only be paid at the end of six months. This turned out to be a lie. It was just easier for the person on the phone to deal with the situation. My only other option, was to pay the Beast off in full. Which is what I’m waiting to do now. My retirement savings will take a hit, and it will count as income and be taxed as such.

If you’re looking at that and going “well, that’s a load of stupid.” You’d be wrong. it’s loads of stupid, one piled on the other. The things other people are dealing with are not quite the same. They’re sometimes easier, sometimes crazier, because it depends on WHEN and where you took the loans, what kind of crazy got thrown on top of it.

IT’S NOT DISCHARGEABLE IN BANKRUPTCY

So what happens if you don’t have savings, no one dies and leaves you the money to pay it off, etc?

It’s not like the Beast goes away when I retire! No, there are special rules on how to garnish it straight from my Social Security payments, including if I have other pension plans. Many people are now looking at retirement with a ravenous Beast over their heads.

No, they want me trickling out money to the Beast. In rough math, I will pay more than three times what I took out. THREE TIMES! Pay your de… ::spits::

How is that not fraud?

The IDP people, at least thought at the end of 20 years, the debt would disappear, so didn’t worry about the growing principal. Then, the discovery came out under an investigation, that the accounting of payments was lost between the different financing groups.

“Oops, me bad,” goes government, “Contractor messed up. We fined them, and they paid us millions in fines. What? You? You just keep paying for another ten years, and all will be good. Shut up, deadbeat.”

How is that not fraud?

Note that this reader who sent me this HAS a job. It could be much, much worse. Even my generation has a lot of people who’ve been in and out of jobs for 20 years.

NO ONE FORCED YOU TO TAKE THE LOAN. YOU COULD HAVE WORKED UNSKILLED

Have you looked around?

What do unskilled people do? Oh…. retail. That’s literally about it. The opened flood gates of illegals have kept even the wages in that really low. And the hours tend to be weird, I’m not sure if because management is sadistic, or because they just don’t care, or because there’s stupid regulations in the mix. Including if you have more than 30 hours they have to contribute to your healthcare.

A lot of other jobs which you could get trained for and have a career path are simply gone. They can get them done under the table. Or they can’t afford to pay all the benes the left passed to “help the workers.”

(And as a side note, miraculously younger son has a good job, and one he loves.That has nothing to do with what he officially studied. It’s a literal miracle, okay? But most people don’t get these. So, again not personal, though his experience made me see some things I hadn’t seen before.)

Yes, you can take technical certificates. I’m starting to look a little askance at how many people are taking welding, and wondering if there are jobs for all of them. I haven’t heard.

The truth is that against what’s said about them, a lot of these people, including people with unpayable loans have heeded the Mike Rowe call and headed for dirty, hard jobs. But they’re not as abundant as to soak up all of them. And no job pays well enough to allow people to pay massive loans and keep on trucking, okay? It doesn’t happen.

INSANITY PILED ON INSANITY

Have you wondered why during the Summers of Recovery colleges were doing great and had huge enrollments?

Well, one of the ways to PAUSE the student loan payments is to head back to school half time. When all else fails, you borrow more, and feed the dysfunctional system more.

Millenials might be the most educated generation in history on paper. Yes, it means that after a while you are taking degrees in underwater basket weaving, because you know, it’s the only thing you can take, while holding down a job and maybe having a kid. But that’s not how you started out.

As for fixing this, helping the college industry, this situation already is assisting them. What helps increase university enrollment? It’s not just the BS that everything needs a degree or some license. If you are enrolled part-time, that damn Beast is kept at bay. Some colleges, knowing this trick, changed their definition of part-time to one class per quarter versus semester. This attracts the desperate to keep the Beast at bay. (“Hey, I’ll take the fem studies, easy A, no real work, just regurgitate and the Beast is at bay.”)

DO you really think it’s a coincidence college enrollment fell while student loans were paused? Or do you think it won’t go back up again now?

This is what the system does: push more people into our dysfunctional, useless tertiary make work factories.

OKAY, BUT THEY SHOULD DO SOMETHING FOR US TO FORGIVE THE LOAN.

Oh, hi there. I didn’t’ realize AOC was a reader. WHY do you feel a need to indenture people to the government?

And don’t tell me they should enlist. The services are mighty choosy these days, for one, even if they can’t make numbers. For another, ask someone who is still or was recently in. You don’t wish that on anyone. And it’s still government servitude. And this government is…. well, fraudulent.

However, now you mention it it puts me in mind of “Doctors and lawyers” — the reason this argument is dumber than usual is because most doctors and lawyers go through another 10 years or more after high school and most of them don’t emerge after that to making crazy money. Most will aspire to about six figures, maybe, with luck.

And right now their massive loans are doing two things: A lot of them are working for the government. It’s their only hope of getting them forgiven in twenty years.

AND they don’t dare dissent from those in power. If you like lockstep doctors who don’t dare say boo to the latest insanity? If you like lawyers complicit with current abuses?

Keep the loans on them. That will teach them. And destroy our society with a bunch of debt-slaves who don’t dare dissent.

Envy of your ideal image of “Doctors and Lawyers” which is not even up to date, is not an excuse. Leave the politics of envy to the left please.

BUT IT’S NOT FAIIIIIIIIR

You’re right. It’s not fair. Fraudulent loans in any other medium, for any other purpose, you punish the fraudsters, not the recipient.

We don’t allow predatory credit card loans. Or home loans for swamp land in FL. And when we find them, we punish the lenders, not the recipients for being defrauded.

No, it doesn’t’ mean your mortgage should be forgiven. Or your credit card debt. Presumably you got what you paid for, with no tricks.

BUT that puts me in mind: when you took those loans, you knew and you know that if you run aground, you just declare bankruptcy. In most states your home and car is protected, even.

So, why is it different for student loans?

Well, the lender is the government. And oh, yeah,the fraudsters are the government, and leftist institutions aided, abetted and accredited by the government. You’re right. This is the fault of the loan recipients. Of course. After all they chose to be born now, under this government and into this totally effed up situation. (Are you for real?)

BUT THE MIDDLE CLASS WILL PAY

Will they now?

Looks interested. WHY?

I mean, I can see that someone crazy in the government would decided to raise taxes with that excuse, but then….. do they need an excuse?

I’ll repeat what BGE said in a comment:

I am a great believer that loans should be repaid, but I’m afraid the notion that the taxpayers will be stuck is not really true. It’s a sunk cost, it’s already been paid for. The vast majority of student loans are held as an “asset” at the Dept. of Education. Student Loan interest had been the third largest source of govt revenue after income taxes and mortgage interest.

Still, I’m afraid that it could be wiped out with the stroke of a pen and not have any cash effect at all since the bureaucracy needed to administer it eats up the proceeds. I suppose the bureaucracy won’t go away — it seldom does — but, and a I hate to open myself up to the accounting absolutists, government accounting is just BS. Most accounting is just BS. Cash matters, cash flow matters, the rest is mostly BS.

What he said. The money is already spent, and worked into your inflation, taking money out of your pocket every minute.

It’s already aggregated to a debt no one can pay. The middle class — and everyone else– has already paid for this bloody stupid mis-allocation of resources.

Anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or appealing to the politics of envy to perpetuate debt slavery. Don’t be that guy.

WHAT I THINK SHOULD HAPPEN

I think student loans should be made dischargeable in bankruptcy immediately. Yesterday if possible.

Further, I think we need investigations of lending practices and what is actually going on in colleges, and there should be lawsuits against many colleges for outright fraud. Hey, maybe some of those struggling lawyers can be given employment.

The end result if that could happen would be a complete reform of our educational system top to bottom, and maybe the building of something where if you can do it, you can get the job and enjoy the results.

Not college for everyone, no. But also not college only for those with the money to pay upfront. And not college that’s free only for illegals and designated minorities.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

Nothing. The left is in power, and this is feeding leftist indoctrination and the government. You can’t sue or investigate either.

The left will make some pretend moves. Poor saps will think their only hope of a life is voting for the commies. Youth will be unable to have lives, and will hate everyone older than them with the fire of a thousand suns. Expect us to go Canada with euthanasia.

BUT more importantly, the right will fall in its designated villain role, and make noises about “pay up, deadbeats” so the debt slaves will hate them more.

So, can I at least get you not to put both feet in your mouth? And if you think you’re not being manipulated into your reaction by the mass media, you haven’t THOUGHT.

Think about it. Consider this is a trap constructed by government. Ask yourself how much you trust government.

Do what you can, sure. Give someone a chance. Help them find a job. Offer some kindness. IF you can show someone in this situation a path out. I don’t know what the path would be, but try, okay?

And talk people out of going to or going back to college. It won’t do much, some have to. It’s that or make payments they CAN’T make. Figure out how to starve the beast.

BUT above all, do try not to sound like Scrooge in a modern production of Dickens.

Most people can’t pay the loans, because they were designed not to be payable back. Like everything else, they’re supposed to create a plantation where the slaves vote the right way.

And that’s bad for the slaves, for us, and for the Republic.

G-d bless us, one and all.

*Sorry. I know, I know, student loan post, but today is “not even time for post.” It’s been weird, and it’s been real, and it’s been real weird…. Anyway, I’m doing Winter Prince chapters, so this came across my feed, and I’m posting with permission. Froggy would ike us to know this was written on the fly and boy was the fly mad about it – SAH*

The Ballad of Fed the Fred by Froggy Bottom

Ear pieces, polo shirts,
Twill drive a man to drink!

Agitators, co conspirators,
Whence they came a mystery.
Oh for the love of Adams,
I wish we’d been taught some history!

Now, again, here they come
Trolling on the boards.
Isn’t it time, so they say,
They “get what’s coming for!”

Agitation, constipation,
Freddy is a’frustrate.
No matter what he says
We just don’t cooperate.

IP masking, user blasting,
But he knows no other way
To get us, street dancing,
Rioting all the way.

Poor Freddy, simple Freddy,
What a thankless task he’s given.
To manufacture, a public enemy
But we just won’t be a-driven

Too late, the Freddy finds
He is not alone.
Other names, loudest voices
Are close to him than home.

Pity Freddy, the simple Feddy,
In no group of malcontents.
Silly Freddy, all those around you
Are fellow agitants.

Wave at Freddy, confused Feddy
For we are over here.
Living lives, and getting by
While he’s consumed by fear.