Yes, I’m postponing the post on student loans, till I can write it, probably tonight. Because the weekend didn’t spiral INTO control and that post will take a while to write.

But because I’m still myself, I’m going to write about boomers, why a lot of us blame them for…. almost everything, why my generation (roughly 55 to 64) not only are not boomers, but tend to be the most vociferous in “D*mn it, I’m not a boomer.” Why I’m vaguely amused that millennials call everyone older than them “boomer.” And why I find it bizarre that my kids both hate millennials and identify as millennials, though they both are d*mn close to z and closer to z in attitudes. (And the younger one in date of birth, I think.) And why all this is unfair, because a marketing category is not an age group, and yet, perfectly fair in aggregate, because demographics is not destiny, but it sure as heck is economy. And economics shapes your life in a way you probably can’t think about too deeply without becoming enraged.

So, yeah, friends, in-betweeners, X, millenials and Zers, lend me your ears. I come not to bury the boomers and not to praise them, but to explain to everyone, including the sane boomers in the audience why the fractiousness exists, and to give — under the heading of giving perspective on the lives of others that we normally keep quiet about — an idea of how my non-generation (We certainly are not Jones. We don’t jones for anything that the boomers had. We just aren’t them) has gone through. Without blaming the boomers, because an accident of birth is not their fault.

First of all, and taking in account that I’m the one who says the population is not booming out of control, let me dismiss the idea the baby boom wasn’t real. That’s goofy. (To put it mildly.) You can argue the causes, but for about ten years — no, not the twenty five claimed. Marketing generations are not demographic generations — after World War II, families grew. Blame it on prosperity, which allowed one parent to stay home and raise the sprogs. Blame it on tax credits (it has been argued if the comparable applied today, people would have families of five or six too.) Sure, blame it on the move rural to city, which was tied to prosperity too, and the fact that the newly independent nuclear families didn’t have to put up with grandma’s critique of their child bearing or raising. Or blame it on the men having been away and the relief of the long war being over.

Blame it on whatever you want, but even without looking at the numbers, just by looking at family histories, families of five or six weren’t rare. And three was about average, I think. Four not anything to remark on.

But, you’ll say, that’s fairly normal for the past period. Sure. My mom, who was almost a boomer comes from a family of five (should be six, one lost in infancy) and dad from a family of four. And I’m almost sixty, and both dad and I were very late children. So, yeah “But that was normal before.”

Yes, it was, but now throw in prosperity, moves to the cities and… It’s not the babies who were born, you see, it’s the ones who survived. Even mom who was raised, for brevity of explanation, in a slum where going to your playfriend’s funeral, or more likely his infant sibling’s funeral was absolutely normal, had more of her friends survive than was normal for her parent’s generation.

To put it another way. Up until the late 19th century, women routinely bore 10 children and didn’t get to raise a single one to adulthood.

Even in the nineteenth century, women at the upper class level Jane Austen wrote about, routinely made two or three baby shrouds as part of their trousseau. Because that many deaths were expected. By my parent’s time that had improved — no, not medicine, sanitation. Better drains, a weekly bath, and washing your clothes more than twice a year — to the point that you would regularly raise about half of what you bore. (My family, having steel constitutions rarely lost a child. To compensate, we were always relatively low fertility.)

The improvement brought on by rudimentary sanitation and washing up was such that in the nineteenth century Europe burst at the seams with kids, which led to rapid invention, expansion, and yes, the adoption of a lot of half baked ideas. Because that’s the result of a lot of kids suddenly in a society. Baby busts… well, most of the Middle Ages, lead to slow innovation, a tendency to ossify the social structures, laws and regulations increasingly made by old men, for a world they only imagine exists. Stop me when this sounds familiar.

The baby boom happened at the intersection of the discovery of antibiotics and their popularization and also inoculation of school aged kids, both of which meant an unexpected number of children surviving childhood and surviving it in good health. And people having about the number of children their parents had. BUT — and this is very important — those children grew to adulthood and did so without any significant physical impairment.

What it caused was the same effect as if everyone alive had decided to have double or more the number of children. It was a massive demographic elephant moving through the societal snake.

To do so just as the society went mass-media and mass-selling was…. an interesting confluence, and perhaps evidence that whoever is at the switch has a heck of a sense of humor. (Kind that puts itch powder in your pressure suit.)

Because “generations” which had only been of interest to demographic nerds in the past, were suddenly a thing for marketers, who took a look at the elephantine youth-lump coming at them, and sat up and perked their ears.

I grew up, almost twenty years later, reading old magazines and comics and looking in wonder at the advertising displays of toys. Even as a kid, I could track the median age of the “boom” — the ten years of 45-55 — by what was advertised, starting with silly stuff, but ending up pushing fashions and “the hot stuff” for boys and girls of teen years. Admittedly, teenagers were invented for the boomers. In that while there had always been people 13 to 19, there had rarely been any point trying to sell to them. But now it was possible for a lot of them to have part time jobs. Or allowances. And to buy stuff from transistor radios to cheap jewelry to — were Hulla Hoops ever a thing, or was it just a fad created in retrospect?

You could read the more contemporary magazines and comics, (I did, when I had the money to buy one) and there was absolutely nothing comparable. Heck, some of them, when I was 13 or 14 were still clearly aiming their ads and marketing at people ten year older than me. Which meant that even thought hey were VERY unlikely to still be reading Disney comics, even 10% of them doing so was more profitable than 90% of people ten years younger doing so. Because you know? Elephant, moving through snake.

The unfortunate effect of that demographic elephant which really was tapering off by 56 and was approaching baby-bust by my time (partly because the older boomers married late, so that mitigated the effect. Again, prosperity and moving to cities, and breaking the pattern of marrying young to look after parents) coinciding with marketing breakthroughs, and mass media is that the boomers were the first generation for which the media created a definition and an image.

It will probably shock most people younger to find that most boomers never protested the war, never grew their hair, never engaged in bloody stupid communalism, much less communism. These boomers are justifiably enraged by the image of boomers as hippies, of boomers engaging in counter culture, of boomers being work shy till their mid thirties, etc. etc. etc.

Because it has absolutely no bearing on the life of most people who fall under the “boom” years. OTOH some of it trickled through: there was such a culture of pandering to one age group, such a belief that somehow their opinions had a disproportionate weight in the world, that a lot of them have that nostalgia of “in my time” and “my generation.” This is thoroughly unexamined.

And even the most conservative of them had some opinions and attitudes of the mass-media boomer trickle in, unnoticed. Like, the idea that there was such a generation gap between them and their parents, and that they were right in that gap, or that they had the right opinions and ideas compared to their parents and also to those who came after. That would be me and people like me, born late-fifties and early sixties. But mostly early sixties. People after the use of the pill became universal or close to, and cut the boom short.

We came of age in the eighties. (I consider myself blessed to be born with the shoulders that make quarterbacks cry. I never needed shoulder pads.) We came after. There weren’t that many of us, you see? We went to school in half-empty classrooms, often taught by boomer teachers. (Not all of them useless. My first English teacher, whose name I can’t remember, was of that generation and was excellent.) Our arrival in adulthood was unnoticed by mass media, who were then enthralled with series like “thirty something” in which the boomers discovered parenthood.

It was in fact universal, and not just media boomers that got married and had kids very late. There are a ton of reasons for that, including the first bloom of “must go to college” but also a culture that didn’t consider it quite decent for the woman NOT to have a career. Because if a woman wanted a career, she had to sacrifice early marriage and her most fertile years.

How do I know boomers actually married late, and it wasn’t just an image? Well, at 22 I went through infertility workups, and all of them were designed for affluent women ten years older than I (i.e. problems I could not/was not likely to have at my age.) And when we finally had older son, 6 years later, every year of his schooling we were the youngest parents, by about ten years.

Because demographics and when a generation comes of age matters, and the pill was widely available in 1960.

We came after. Which might be the best description of those born in the early 1960s. We came after. We were not the main show.

Yes, it’s completely insane to hold the boomers responsible for the feeling of resentment we’ve been carrying since our toddler years. (Admit it, guys.) It’s normal, and human to resent them, but it’s still not their fault. They didn’t pick when to be born.

Nor is it their fault that they were as propagandized as everyone else with the image of the “media boomer” and adopted some of that. Nor is it their fault they’re defensive. Wouldn’t you be?

It is also not their fault that the idiots in government and policy, apparently missing the effects of the pill on population, decided that from now on every generation would be a boom, and that everyone needed to cater to the youth’s ideas and opinions because they were “the future.” Nor, btw, that the USSR was propagandizing them heavily, so that a lot of the sixties culture and strange ideas that big government was the way to be free came directly from the Kremlin agit prop.

And let’s admit right now, NOT every boomer bought it. Just the ones that mass media chose to highlight and engrave in the popular consciousness and who, therefore, had a disproportionate influence on the policy and politics of the next… Uh… 40 years or more.

Part of the reason the boomers entered the job market late-ish (in general) is that the previous generation stayed vigorous and healthy longer. Not much. Maybe ten years. But it also means when the boomers came in, combined with “the youth is the future” it made for a relatively fast rise up the ladder. Particularly when combined with the diffusion of computing through business and industry and the fact that boomers were at the right age to learn new technologies.

Again, it wasn’t the same as portrayed in the media. Most 35 year olds weren’t CEOs. But demographics is economics in many ways. So, you know?

There was a boom in many businesses, because there were boomers coming of age, and a huge demographic lump coming through. So … there were jobs and money.

My generation came of age after the Carter contraction, which was worse abroad, because, well, everything is.

We went through high school and college being jeered at by older siblings and teachers and professors, because we weren’t “socially conscious”. We weren’t demonstrating. We weren’t cutting class. By and large we tried to comply with everything demanded of us, including the mouth noises about social consciousness. But mostly?

Going through school, most of my classmates didn’t do drugs (oh, there were a few dopeheads, but not as many as 10 years after us, when it was cool again.) But almost everyone had a brother, a sister, a cousin, who had been lost to drugs, to free love, to rudderless living and lack of taking up anything. Almost all of us had, in the family tree a tie-dyed hole, be it an actual death, or just someone who became a puzzling ne’er do well, of the kind the family had never seen.

And most of us learned by the negative example. To quote PJ O’Rourke, we ignored the sit ins, cut our hair, put on the the business suit and the tie, and went to work. We were the generation of Dress-for-Success. We were the generation of “preppy” being a good thing (except in movies.) We were the kids who came of age to a great dearth of jobs, and sometimes invented them JUST to get our foot in.

Through no fault of the boomers, their late coming of age and our early coming of age created a large number of educated adults with nowhere to go.

I will hold against them — but not too hard. They were propagandized within an inch of their boomy lives — that they were “generation clannish” and we were definitely not their generation.

I have related here that in my thirties, when I was trying desperately to break into writing, I read an interview with a major magazine editor, saying that no one under forty had the ability to write fiction worth a damn. Not enough life experience, you see.

And yes, ten years later they reversed themselves, and were looking for “young writers” to appeal to the “the youth” (who by then largely wasn’t writing, due to a lot of editorial stupidity and marketing idiocy, not to count the Thor power tools governmental malfeasance.) You see, by then some of their kids were in their twenties, and they wanted to help their kids. Human. But annoying as all get out, when you’re part of a demographic elephant.

It was pretty much like that. We came after. We came into jobs or professions where we were treated as kids and juvenile (though we weren’t) because we were 10 years younger than most people there. We were “the kid” and we hadn’t had the same experiences.

And thanks to even more breakthroughs in longevity and long-health, most of us were there till about give years ago when the boomers actually started retiring.

None of this is their fault. But it makes those of us ten years younger grit our teeth when we’re called boomers, and aggregated to the elephant who stomped on us growing up.

It’s not the boomers’ fault, but the marketeers. But it still pisses us off.

To explain how squeezed our generation was: my older son’s class we were BY FAR the youngest parents. The “kids” who amused the other parents. However, FOUR years later, with younger son? We were the OLD parents, ten years older than most parents with kids in his classes. (Part of this was because through no fault of our own, we had kids late, and so straddled a weird jointure. But still.)

And of course, every step of our careers, we’ve faced the beginning of a bust. A bust that was perfectly predictable by demographics, but no one predicted, because marketers aren’t demographers, and just think “this way forever.”

And demographic busts, echo in economic busts.

That means most of us are poorer, have moved more, have been hit with more insane regulation, and less resources than people ten years older than us. Our careers were distorted. We spent a ridiculous amount of time being the kids, the apprentices, the ones doing the donkey work and being ignored. And over the last ten years, suddenly, we find ourselves catapulted into the “the old man or woman” role. The ones who have institutional knowledge. The ones who know where the bodies are buried. The ones who know how things work, because we say them from the downside for so long.

We made do. By and large we’re okay, even if we have about half the wealth boomers had at our age. Not their fault, guys. Again, demographics is economics.

Dan and I were amused at figuring out recently we’re finally in our peak earning years. Which should have been 10 years ago or so. And he’s eligible for retirement in 2 years. Not that we intend to retire, not really. Which will make the current generation’s life more difficult and we know it. Fortunately there aren’t as many of us as there were boomers. Unfortunately there aren’t many of the young ones, either, much less young Atlas’s yearning to lift the world on their shoulders. And the fact demographers lie isn’t helping anyone, either.

It’s all a comedy of demographics, arranged by scientific breakthroughs at the worst or best possible time. We’re just along for the ride.

My age group, of 55 to 64 or so growls when called boomers, because that was not oure experience. That’s not who we are. We came after.

But it behooves us to realize the injuries we suffered weren’t the boomers fault. If you want to blame someone, blame mass marketeers and mass communications, and government.

And the unfortunate conjunction of the demographic elephant moving through the civilizational snake.

Now, the combination of birth control and life extension is likely to propagate this down the line. In fact, we’re seeing it with millennials not marrying and having kids, because frankly most of them can’t afford it. Student loans, sure, but also a contracting economy (whatever the demographers and the stock market says. I heard foreigners stopped buying houses in the US, so get ready for a drop in real estate value.) I think the idiots in charge opened the border to try to fix the demographic issues, not realizing that culture matters and humans aren’t widgets. And therefore further damaging the ability of younger generations to survive, let alone establish themselves.

Part of it is that there is still enough mass media, the expectations for everyone are those of media-boomers. CEO by 30. But that’s not how the world ever worked or is ever likely to work.

And birth control and life extension, even if mostly through antibiotics — not being sick all the time results in longer healthier life — and better nutrition are disruptive technologies. Even before the internet and all the other stuff are done with us.

So, hold on to the side of the boat. Exceptionally rough times ahead. And let of of resentments based on marketing generations.

Those of us who are sane and see the problems need to get our shoulders to the wheel and start helping mitigate the effects of all this disruption.

The kids — the few of them there are — are by and large all right but dealing with a world that is actively hostile to them. Let’s not add to their resentments.

They’re young, they’re not stupid. Telling them to do what you did won’t work, because between demographics, baby bust and tech, nothing is the same. And no one is catering to them, even if the culture still pretends to be youth culture. Mostly it’s catering to imaginary 50 year olds living like college students. Which makes the economy worse because there really aren’t many of them.

Let’s give the kids a hand up.

They’re young. Their target acquisition sucks, and the more everyone older than 30 yells at them, the more they’ll gun for all of us. And I hope it’s metaphorical. They have excellent sight. Let’s not encourage them to hunt us with rifles.

Because, yeah, they are the future. And right now the future is broke, lost and getting very tired of being treated like teens when they’re about 30.

Go and snatch brands from the fire. Don’t pile them on.

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 BLANE MCCANTS: The Hands That Rock the Triggers

On an alternate earth where England’s George III choked to death in 1767, the next couple hundred years played out far differently.
In 1992 sniper Sergeant John Smith—in the face of personal and professional heartbreak—bids adieu to a nine-year career in the Royal Marine Corps. Three years later, he is hired by corporate buccaneer Jean Lafitte to find out what happened to several of his executives, who have gone missing. Smith discovers that East Coast dames are deadlier, the films are tawdrier, and that revenge is a dish served in calibers larger than even he was used to throwing downrange. It’s a far cry from the relatively civilized criminal scene of his hometown, Ft. Detroit City. The deeper Smith digs, the more mysteries he unearths. Before he knows it, he is up to his eyeballs in out-of-this-world drugs, court-martials, Imperial Russian Spetsnaz, and romance. Two things he learns for sure, though: Miss Eva Braun is not much of an actress and the Corps, in the person of his old pal Gunny Scarbutt, still has his back.

FROM JOHN DAVID MARTIN: Charis Colony: The Landing

Dr. Raj Mondal had it all. Born to one of The Landing’s founding families, he had a high-status position with the Colonial Medical Administration. He implemented the Colonial Governing Council’s eugenics policies, which meant he decided who was allowed to have children and who wasn’t, who lived and who died. He was a reliable, loyal citizen of Charis Colony. Until his patient, Mr. Singh, disappeared. Suddenly, Dr. Mondal was suspected of aiding a defector. He and his wife, Shirin, now found themselves in the crosshairs of a vindictive Chief Inspector from Colonial Security. Fleeing for their lives, they seek the help of the very people they were taught to fear most: The McGuire Point Rebels. But how far does the reach of Colonial Security extend? And were the rumors about the violent and barbaric people of McGuire Point true?

FROM MARY CATELLI: Winter’s Curse

Who but a fool would linger after Zavrien laid his curse? Ill luck can kill — and all the more in Zavrien’s enchanted, endless winter, haunted with ice giants and frost fairies.

When the soldier Gareth is cursed, the young wizard Perriel learns how dangerous lingering can be.

But she can hold out a sliver of hope for breaking the curse — if it doesn’t break them first.

WRITTEN BY MAX BRAND, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: 3 Trails to Freedom: A Pulp Western Omnibus

Three rip-roaring western action novels from adventure master Max Brand!

The Long, Long Trail

When outlaw Jess Dreer, on the run for avenging his father’s murder, met Mary Valentine, the town flirt of Salt Springs, it changed them both. It changed others, too, and not always for the worse.

But a change in character means nothing to a clan that’s been crossed, and even less to a sheriff who has spent years in single-minded pursuit.

Regardless of character, regardless of good deeds or noble sacrifices, bullets will fly and justice will be done at the end of the long, long trail!

Wild Freedom

Tommy Parks followed his father over the mountain ridge with a blind faith and love. But his father hadn’t counted on the last winter storm. Now twelve-year old Tommy was alone, in the frontier wilderness, with only his wits and the remains of his father’s supplies to survive against nature, grizzly bears, and the most dangerous creature of all — man!

Jim Curry’s Test

Jim Curry was a loafer, but never did anybody any harm. Until his gun accidentally went off, and killed the most beloved old-timer in the area. It was an accident, but the sheriff wasn’t overly sympathetic, and when Curry breaks the sheriff’s jaw escaping, the townsfolk decide that due process just won’t do…

BY JOHNSTON MCCULLEY, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Rangers’ Code (Annotated): The classic pulp western

Cactusville needed cleaning up, Sheriff Tom Thomas knew that. But the deputies he kept sending to do the job always turned up dead.

Until ex-Texas Ranger Dick Ganley took on the job, at least. Or so Ganley claimed would happen. He would not only take out the gang running Cactusville, nor would he stop at identifying and bringing to justice the shadowy head of the gang, the “King of Cactusville”.

No, Ganley had his own score to settle into the bargain, and it was a score that could only be settled by blood!

This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the book historical and genre context.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Bound into the Blood – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 4)

Book 4 of The Hounds of Annwn.

DISTURBING THE FAMILY SECRETS COULD BRING RUIN TO EVERYTHING HE’S WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD.

George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is preparing for the birth of his child by exploring the family papers about his parents and their deaths. When his improved relationship with his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, is jeopardized by an unexpected opposition, he finds he must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a god.

He discovers he doesn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did. His search for answers takes him to the human world with unsuitable companions.

How will he keep a rock-wight safe from detection, or even teach her the rules of the road? And what will he awaken in the process, bringing disaster back to his family on his own doorstep? What if his loyalty is misplaced? What will be the price of his mistakes?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania

A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Bite Sized (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 1)

Meg Turner has been a vampire for twenty years. Her favorite food is rapists. Which is how she met Andi Donahue, her new best friend/ girl Friday.

And then the nightmares start. And the bodies start showing up–bled out and raped. Just like Meg was. They don’t have a whole lot of time to stop the killer before he strikes again, and only one way to stop the killer.

But how can Andi help Meg stop a killer she can’t even see?

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: To the Court of Love: A Peltedverse Collection in the Fallowtide Period (The Fallowtide Sequence Book 8)

Sediryl Galare’s first official function as the formally invested heir to the Eldritch Empire is to open the summer court, on Escutcheon and on the world of Chalice. But behind every big event are a myriad of stories—some smaller in scope, and some enormous in implication. Join the Eldritch and their allies in this Fallowtide collection for a glimpse into those everyday stories. Who are the musicians of Ontine? What happened to the nobles of Asaniefa who didn’t care to fight the Empress? Will Jeasa and Haladir ever come to an accommodation? And how are the social changes sweeping the world affecting those who wish they hadn’t?

This reader-commissioned collection includes stories written by the author at reader request. Come home to the Alliance with seven tales of hope, renewal, romance, and change.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: A Kingdom of Glass: A Novel of The Garia Cycle

Zara hasn’t seen her family in eleven years, but she doesn’t mind. They sent her to live in a neighboring kingdom when she was small, and she’s adopted her foster parents in their place. She lives the life of an aristocratic Garian girl- riding her horse, shooting her bow, exploring the castle with her friends- and she has nothing to wish for.

Until she’s summoned home, to a prospective marriage she doesn’t want, family she doesn’t remember, and a poisonous royal court that threatens everything she’s ever known. The East Morlans are nothing like Garia, and Zara struggles to find her place among the scheming Morlander aristocrats. Along the way, she makes new friends, meets enemies, and falls in love. But secrets abound in the glittering palace, and Zara must discover who she can trust as she fights for her life and freedom in a fragile, beautiful, kingdom of glass.

SOME WRITERS AND THEIR INCESSANT SELF-PROMOTION:

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Barbarella: The Center Cannot Hold

At last, the secrets of the Unnamable are revealed! Having travelled beyond our universe to reach the home of the Unnamable, Barbarella and her stalwart companions may have the answers they’ve been seeking, but they’re very, very far from home, and very, very vulnerable. Can a war between universes be averted? Will the Architects sacrifice our universe in the name of victory? Can we possibly fit in all the answers we’re promising here? One thing’s for sure, our universe will never be the same again. Learn more in this final chapter! 

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: BEWILDERED

We’re in a heck of a time. Our communications are thoroughly broken.

When I talk of what’s going on with the student loans, a lot of you think I’m being immoral for saying they shouldn’t be paid back. There’s been a ton of nonsense about “on the backs of the middle class” but none of that is remotely true. There’s a lot of things you’re assuming that have no basis in reality. They would, of course, if reality were even vaguely logical and if our system weren’t error piled on folly piled on sheer insanity.

I’m working on a post for Monday, this supposing I get Sunday to work on it, of course, but while working on it, I myself found how many of my assumptions of what’s going on there are wrong. (And not in favor of “make them pay” or “if they don’t the middle class does” to be clear. There is literally nonsense going on supporting Obamacare in the middle of all that. We should never underestimate the ability of the left to self-serve while creating even more slaves to the state, right?) Which is why that post will take longer. (And again, I want to point out that this is not in favor of Biden’s plan. That’s at best cosmetic. It’s not even putting a bandaid on it. It’s putting a bow on a bleeding wound, and with that buying the loyalty and the votes of the stupid young who think if they keep voting left, one day they’ll be free.)

This is not the place for that discussion. This is just an example. You get to yell at me on Monday, when that post goes up.

But the main point of this post is this: We’re a lot of us trapped in vicious systems/places from which we can’t escape except by quitting, but unable or unwilling to communicate what is going on.

In the case of people on the right trapped in student loans that make no sense, it’s shame. “Well, I was stupid, and I signed that contract, so it’s all my fault and I should suffer.” So they don’t even correct the misconceptions when they see it. But it’s not just that. People in professions where they have to hide their politics don’t want to talk about the mess in their professions, because it might be traced to them.

In its simplest form, for years I didn’t complain about my writing “career” to the point that I lied to fans of a book series when it was cancelled and told them I’d “lost interest” or wanted to do something else now. What was I going to do, really? Tell them I didn’t sell very well. Or that I sold so badly that the publisher made me change? But then the publisher will get letters and get p*ssed because I talked about it.

I once found myself with three other “right wing” authors (the others not SF) and we were having dinner, and one of us — might have been me. I honestly don’t remember — let it slip how low our advances and royalties were. And then the others shared theirs, and we were all about the same. And it was both horrifying and very freeing. For that moment, I wasn’t crushed in shame of how I was failing. All of us were. And I knew the other people were good. In fact, we had become friends because I was a fan.

Or, you know, my statements were so horrifyingly low that I was afraid to give them to my lawyer, so he could draft a letter asking for reversal. Ironically, he was the one who looked at them and told me they weren’t low, so much as they were absolutely impossible: the same exact number, down to the single digit, for books that were out the same time, even in different fields/publishers. (Weirdly? Not dishonesty so much as a formula. As I explained, publishers don’t have any idea how much each individual title sells. Yes, it can be figured out, but it would take a lot of work/trained accountants, which most publishers probably can’t afford at this point. Maybe. I know even electronically, it took my husband years of perfecting a program to do it. And he can’t sell the program, because enough things change every period, that he has to use it/adjust it. He does this for pay for a medium publishing company and it takes a bizarre amount of time and work. He gave a workshop at Liberty Con (And he’s willing to talk to anyone wanting to know more about this, but no, he’s not taking any more clients.) So publisher’s have a formula. If you’re a mid-list author, take your initial lay down and divide by the number of years it’s been out, or something like.) So, you know, I was embarrassed into silence by numbers that aren’t even real.

This is going on with a lot of us. Particularly those of us who know we’re “smart” and “competent” and yet our results don’t seem to support it. We know what the problem is. Or at least we think we do. But what if we’re just using this as an excuse.

Such a silence is particularly effective against the right, because we have a “do or die” ethic, and most of us were raised with “no excuses. Just do.” So when we keep failing again and again and again, we might know that what’s causing it is beyond our control, but that sounds too much like whining.

This is not even just in professions. There are any number of “romantic age” males and females on our side, desperate to form a family or at least a relationship, who have no clue how to find someone else, and are afraid to confess how little they’ve dated/how unsuccessfully. And all the structures existing are not “leading to marriage.”

Actually this is a good example for the problems with communication and knowledge in society, because the captured means of narrative — both ficiton and non fiction — have been thoroughly captured by a left who doesn’t want to know the truth, but to sell their view of how the world should be as truth, adding to the confusion.

So, males, isolated in their loneliness, unable to figure out how to even reach out — complicated by the fact that in professional situations both men and women not of the left often have to at least keep quiet, and often outright pretend to be on the other side — think that women are all as portrayed in the leftist media, so they’re into the hookup culture, or they only want rich men, or never want children, or whatever.

Meanwhile, the women trapped in same, think all men just want sex, have no interest in a relationship/marriage and all the rest.

And each of them, too scared or unable to talk about it, assumes that everyone else who is happily married have taken everyone who is like them. And everyone else is having wild sex all the time.

This is not helped by the propagation of “Surveys” whose internals are often bizarrely corrupt, but that’s not what’s shown.

And so, isolated, each person thinks they’re uniquely failing, and everyone is against them, and that they’re the only ones. Which leads either to despair or maladaptive “solutions.”

It’s pretty much like this, everywhere.

And if you think that is by design from the left you’d be ALMOST right.

They’re not doing this to silence you. They’re not doing this to shape you. They’re not doing this to enslave you. Those are happy bonuses.

No, the problem is that the left QUITE LITERALLY believes that “narrative shapes the world.”

I’m not making this up, difficult as it is to believe, but yes, they SERIOUS AS A HEART ATTACK believe that if you don’t have a counter narrative, and that if everyone believes the narrative, then it is true.

Part of this are half-baked New Age Philosophies, rooted in affirmations and the like. Part are fundamental misunderstandings of quantum (and science in general.) Part …. insanity?

I confess the phenomenon scares me and it took me forever to accept they do indeed believe this. It’s at a the root of their war on “disinformation” and their war on opposing speech in general.

If we all clap for Tinker Bell Communism, it will be real.

And of course, it’s not true. All the imposed narrative does is add bad information to lack of information, and means that all the solutions are increasingly corrupted, leading to — eventually — the whole system collapsing.

It doesn’t prevent the system collapsing — USSR, for ex — what it does is prevent the implementation of useful or effective solutions.

You can believe you’ve produced ten tons of steel. It won’t cause steel to appear. What it causes is trials of the saboteurs who stole the steel. Because a scapegoat must exist, or else you’ll get punished.

This is what we’re living with right now.

And the only possible solution is almost impossible: We need to start talking.

No matter how embarrassing it is. No matter how much we feel it’s really our fault and we’re just making excuses. We need to talk. I’m open to stories. I can anonymize them.

We need to know what’s going on in all these little fiefdoms where the leftist stupidity has bound everyone in darkness and silence.

We need to know who is not being stupid, but struggling against impossible odds. Who has to go along, to literally keep body and soul together.

We are all making a lot of assumptions about groups and professions and situations that aren’t ours. And because our only news and even our mass entertainment that shape our images of each other are in the hands of the left and even our personal sharing in places like Facebook is tampered with, our assumptions are often completely wrong.

The messages are flying but the network is down.

It’s time to rebuild the network. What do people say about you/your situation that’s completely wrong and burns you up? If it has a basis in regulation/law/structure we need to know.

Let’s talk.

This is not about me — for once — or not about me right now. I’m not here, now. I was here… well, more than once, starting at about 2003.

The last time, I woke up, in 2019, staring at the ceiling, and thinking “I could retire. It’s a thing I could genuinely do. Sure, this was never a traditional career, and I never made that much, but I could shutter the blog, close all the writing, turn the office into a craft room. Hit the local farmers’ markets and craft circuit.

Obviously I didn’t follow through on it, and there’s several reasons why not. And I’m glad I didn’t, because I think I might not be alive now. Or at least I might be on the way to not being alive.

There is a very old belief in uh…. cultures that believe in a gift from G-d or from the gods. Cultures that believe some things are divinely willed for humans to do/be. Let’s put it that way.

The belief can be summed at “The price of the extraordinary gift is to do it.” (Pratchett mentioned it more than once in his books.)

There is Dr. Peterson’s “If an artist stops creating, he starts dying.”

You have to be in an artistic/sy field for as long as I have to have seen it. It happens. It’s bad. It often manifests as a “lose your mind” type of illness, and then the body follows.

I have ideas of how that happens, but first I want to say it’s not just for artists, which is what Dr. Peterson missed, perhaps having encountered it only in artists, which these days, in our culture, are practically the only people allowed to have vocations that aren’t explicitly religious.

However, if you feel a strong pull/need to do something for years and years and years and you can’t/won’t allow yourself to/give up on it? You end up dying.

Look, we live in a very broken world. I knew for instance that the student loans things were messed up. Bad messed. And that Universities were bad messed. But when I said “I need to write on this,” and started digging and people started talking to me? Oh, mama. You have no idea how bad messed those things are. I had no idea how bad messed they were. That we’re still getting more or less semi-functional graduates in any field out of our current system is a miracle to a level I can’t begin to explain. It is that bad.

And it’s not just that. It’s any system I dig into. I’ve known about writing/publishing for years, and sometimes, it’s all I can do to not scream at people who think it is as portrayed in movies, or that “write a novel, become fabulously wealthy, if it’s a good novel” is a thing. It happens. Sort of. Sideways. And it’s always a miracle. Every single time. Because the system is optimized for it not to happen.

But a lot of you are in other fields: Building, engineering, various medical avocations, mechanics, physics, other stuff not coming to mind.

And I get emails that say “It’s the same for x.” And you tell me the very basics of it. And I don’t dig. I don’t dig, because I’m already horrified with what I know.

When you dig into any pocket you find there is a war on things that work, and a war on people that want to do the work. Yes, a lot of it is because of the Marxist infection. A lot of it is because of successive “fixes” applied by government. And a lot of it is “stupid stuff universities teach” like how to manage large, interconnected enterprises in ways that will never, ever, ever work, but will maximize misery. And some is simply because for a hundred years we’ve been running vast systems, with concentrated points of failure.

The “Vast systems” with “concentrated points of decision/control” were a result of the modes of industrial production that started in the 15th century or so, and came to full flower in the early twentieth. Large machines, concentrated in one place, requiring huge investment and massive amounts of raw materials, so best all of these in one big city, etc. You see how it would happen. What’s more/worse, the mode of thinking of “concentrated and standardized is best” propagated to everything else, from manner/modes of being in the world to government, to news reporting, to ‘art.’

Which is a lot of the root of our trouble. I’ve covered that in other posts recently.

In this one I want to talk about the human with a vocation/with a need to do something. The something exists in the world. They can theoretically do it.

Then human meets the broken systems. Which I don’t think are YET at peak broken, but are heading there.

As I said, I’ve seen it happen in writing, in art, in teaching, but I’m seeing it a bit everywhere.

You try, but no matter how much you try, how hard you work, or what you do, it seems like everything is against you. And because no one — no one — talks about it it openly, most people who are failing badly think they’re alone in this, and that everyone else is WILDLY successful: writers, artists, mothers (particularly of boys), teachers, etc. etc. etc.

You think “the system is broken? Or is it? Am I just making excuses for myself?” And you try harder. But since the system is actually designed NOT to work, (and you’re mostly seeing the successful people who are either flukes, a well polished facade, or people who are having transitory success and will be shredded later) you keep getting beat. Sometimes you have a little success first, but it all breaks apart later.

Another way to “fail” is to have a very strong brand, do very well with it, and then…. well, it falls apart. Either because you changed, and don’t do the thing the way you did it initially, or because — for artists, though I’m sure there’s parallels in other professions — your public changed. Or changed the way they see you.

Let’s say you’re to the right of Lenin (or these days, Stalin) and you’re a writer of science fiction and fantasy (or certain types of romance; or–), working in the indie side, you might very well build a huge audience, who run screaming when they find you’re one of those “evil right wingers” or who at least can’t withstand a loud and sustained cancel campaign. It’s happened to several of us. And then, of course, you start wondering why you feel called to do this, when you have political opinions so at variance with the “community who reads this” (Or at least the loud parts of the community. And this one is complex, because it’s hard to find readers, anyway, and if all readers think sf/f is left, a lot of people who would otherwise enjoy it don’t even try it out. Kind of like I keep running into “Science fiction is porn” which apparently is from…. guess? Oh, you’ll never guess. Clan of the Cavebear, which is neither science fiction nor porn, but some readers of a certain age associate that with both. That will change, as indie makes a dent. Takes time, though. I mean the association of SF/F and “left”.)

Okay, so…. Never mind why your heart broke. One day you wake up and you think “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s been my driving force since…. ever. But I can’t. I can’t anymore.”

What you’re experiencing, unless it’s your very first failure — and it usually isn’t — is … well, I call it a broken heart, but it’s actually ptsd and burnout.

The first time I hit burnout I had no idea what it was. So I bought a lot of books about it, and the conclusion was “burnout” and burnout caused by complete lack of control over one of the most important areas of my life. I’ve described my experience at the time as “having a lot of babies, and turning them over to people who just burn them to death, without even looking at them.”

The prognosis I got from the books was “You must change your work, so you have some control over it.” Well, it was 2008, and that was plain impossible. I should have walked and gone fully indie in 2011, but that’s something else. Paths not taken, and there were reasons of loyalty and friendship (I thought) not to do that. Water under the bridge.

The thing is, it didn’t get better. Writing became harder and harder. I did less and less of it, because well, you like to avoid the experience of getting kicked in the teeth. At least if you’re normal.

Slowly, slowly, I disengaged. I still did the work, if absolutely required, but I’d isolated it, made it so it wouldn’t hurt so much. And after 2015, I did very little of it.

That should have solved it, right? Except– it didn’t. The pain didn’t go away. The PTSD would still kick up every time I tried to write (of course, there’s PTSD. Again, getting kicked in the teeth hurts. Sane people avoid it.)

But the pain didn’t stop. There was never enough “quitting” and “Hiding” to make it better. What it did instead, is that I also didn’t want to do anything else. I’d have a transitory hobby crazy (would you believe carving eggs?) but quit as soon as I could do it somewhat, and never tried to market. Heck, cooking wasn’t happening. the house wasn’t getting cleaned. There was no garden work. After stopping writing/trying to stop writing, everything started going away.

A way to think about it is that this thing you always wanted to do/this vocation/this need is a part of you. When you decide to give it up, you’re killing a part of you. You can’t live when a part of you is dead. Little by little other parts of you follow.

It might just be psychological and “profound depression.” BUT little by little this changes the body too. You don’t walk. You eat whatever you eat when you’re depressed (in my case? bland and vaguely sweet, like, say crackers or popcorn. Other people eat ice-cream.) At the end, it kills you.

So, what do you do if your vocation/love is impossible? How do you live?

Subversively. No, seriously. Look, there are always ways to do things. If you can’t make a living from it, then find something else, make a living from it, but keep your hand in. Keep doing the thing, at least a little. And think of other ways to do “the thing.”

This weekend, when I thought I’d poisoned Indy, the local vets including emergency vet were either closed or “walk in” which in a thing of urgency is not helpful. So I went on line, and found a place where for $5 a month you can ask questions of vets (other specialties too.) And the vet answered in five minutes, and it turned out (when we got hold of a local vet who answered the phone) her answer was absolutely correct.

Now, I don’t know who this woman is, if retired and just doing this for cash, or if she had a vocation and got noped (veterinary medicine is another of those professions y’all email me about. Oy vey) and is doing something else, but keeping her hand in. I could conceivably seeing it being that.

What I mean, is there are ways to do things. Sometimes they are weird/bizarre/ strange but they exist. You can teach on youtube or in a blog, or in one of a hundred services that help you do that. You can fabricate things and put them up for sale. You can–

There’s a million ways to exert most vocations. Granted, not all. Some you’d have to be really, really creative (and possibly illegal.) But most.

So, what would I advise? If you’re burned out and exhausted and out of it? What if you stopped some time back?

Start small, with a task you can accomplish quickly or break into segments. Like, if you’re a writer, set a goal of writing 200 hundred words a day. Surely you can do that. They don’t have to be good. They have to be sequential and on something you’re working on for that time. Just 200 words.

When you’re done, do minimal editing (I’m using writing as an example) and put it out for sale. Don’t pay attention to the sales. Not yet. You’re working on “your success is putting it up.”

Keep going. You’ll find success builds on success. The only way to vanquish the broken heart is to do and keep doing. When you train the back brain in “I can do it” the brain changes. It starts identifying what you do as fun, because you get endorphins for it.

At the outset, don’t try to think how to be innovative, how to build a new thing, how to find a new pathway to the audience/customers. Just do small, succeed small.

Later, when you’re not quite so fragile, you can figure out how to sell gizmos to the masses. How to answer physics questions for pay. How to– whatever. Right now, just get some small wins to save your life and see you through.

Here is an addendum that’s for writers only, and I don’t know if it applies to everyone or not. If you’re a writer, you should read this. If you’re not, you might want to read it and see if it applies to your own journey.

This is the secret no one else will tell you: There is no career. The career is a lie.

The career is a product of all those movies when then guy spends 20 years writing the perfect novel, and it comes out to huge and never ending success. After which his career is going around and being thanked, fetted and acclaimed as a genius.

This is not how things work. If they ever did, I don’t remember hearing of it.

There used to be a career thing in writing, and some writers, older than I, have had a 30 or 40 year career in the same subgenre, under the same name, sometimes with ONE series.

But even then, it was the exception, rather than the norm. And after the publishers decided midlist wasn’t a thing? I suppose it could happen. I mean, I could win the lottery. It’s just very unlikely.

So what happens, instead of careers? What used to happen, under trad pub, is that you were accepted in whatever, and you ran with it. If you were sufficiently successful, even if your publisher dropped you, you’d be picked up by someone else. And the someone else could be a completely different career, because the field was changing. (The Heinlein of the juveniles, versus later-novelist, for instance. Or the Heinlein of the periodicals, versus the Heinlein of the book publishers.)

But more often, at least when I came on the series, what happened is that you wrote three books and then either the publisher dropped you, and you had to go trying to find another, which could mean completely different field/feel for another house; or the publisher told you to change genres/name. So, you know, I started with Ace in Literary Fantasy, moved over to Prime crime in Historical Mystery, moved over to craft mystery. One house, three names, three genres. Started over elsewhere with historical semi-literary fantasy. Started over elsewhere with urban fantasy, moved to space opera (fortunately no names changing.) Sold another historical fantasy on the side. Only it’s all jumbled, at sort of the same time.

But you sort of understood that it wasn’t a career so much as little careers. Your public for, say, historic mystery and space opera would be completely different, most of the time. (Though some fans would follow you.)

And you changed over time, too. All the moving around maybe. Or maybe people do.

I keep semi-joking I’ll go back and do the last two books of the magical Shakespeare biography. Could I do it? Sure. It would take a long time, because I haven’t worked in Tudor England for a long while. I could do it. I just don’t feel a drive to. Because in a way I’m not the person who wrote it, the person for whom it was very important.

Heck, even things I had planned and want to finish, like the more recent stuff, take work to get my mind back there. Worth it, because i still love the place and the people, but it takes effort. And there’s other things things I want to do.

Technically, there are several careers in there, and now I’m starting again, in indie.

But what if you were always indie? There is still no career. There are careers. There are things you want and need to do at certain ages. It’s who you are then. And if you find your public, it might trap you as effectively as trad did. “But I can’t do that. My fans will hate it.”

Some fans will. Others will love it And some will discover you with it.

Everything you write some people will love, some people will hate. Some people will come to discover you over it. And some people will abandon you over it. You can’t control it. Might as well not try.

So, what if you wrote/said something and all your fans left you?

Start again. This is not your career. Just a segment of it. Start again. Write what needs to be written, what you need to write. (Sure, don’t be precious. Don’t write things you know/suspect no one will like. Or do, but don’t expect it to sell. Writing incomprehensible stuff, say, is onanism, not art. And art is always communication. Art without an audience is onanism or a government contract.) Do it. Start small. Make the completion your win.

When you’re healthier, figure out how to reach an audience. (You might do it by accident.)

Do it boldly, unapologetically, subversively.

And if you’re not “the type of person who writes that/makes that” or “the entire ‘community’ is well, these days mostly “woke”. Or but I’m a person “of color” and “artistic” or “gay” or whatever, and “When they realize I’m not leftist I won’t have an audience.”

Don’t believe it. That’s the chains totalitarians forge to own you, body and soul. Pull them off. Ignore them.

Do the things that they say you have to be white/purple/left to do. Just do it.

Even if you never get rich, or as good as you want to get, the fact that you do it and are out there, doing it, pursuing it, is an example for other people who think they have to submit to group think to be “artists” or “creative” or whatever.

Do the thing you need to do. I’m not promising you wild success. I’m not promising your heart will ever be completely healed. I know it’s hard to work with a broken heart.

But if you do it, you get to live.

And you’ll show others the path of life.

Other than Viva La Vida by cold play, I’ve recently been captured by “symptom of being human” by Shinedown.

I could write an entire post about how that song, unintentionally hooks in to various parts of my history, but this, right here:

I’ve never been the favorite, thought I’d seen it all
‘Til I got my invitation to the lunatic ball
And my friends are coming too
How ’bout you?

Dan and I were singing in the car on our last drive to see the older kids (Son and DIL) and on those lines, we looked at each other with a rueful half smile.

Because what have the last three years been, but an invitation to the lunatic ball? Bob the Registered, a regular here, who used to be a froll and is now disturbingly sane (When the world gets weird, the weird go pro, I guess.) says no American is quite sane right now. We’re all deeply wounded, and hanging out at the edges of sanity — and to the edges of sanity — by our fingertips.

I suppose there would have been some advantage to not ever having fit in with any group of opinion. To being considered crazy by “normal” people.

That was never where I was. Oh, I was considered crazy by most of my field when I came out of the political closet, but that’s because in my field, at least those who share their political opinions, Obama was a right winger, and frankly Stalin was a moderate right winger. In that landscape, anyone who came out and denied they believed in Holy Marx was insane. Because of course I’m imagining things, and Marx isn’t everywhere, and no one does Marxian literary analysis. And also, it’s the most useful thing ever, Marx is all true and was a genius economist and a prophet of our times, and I obviously understand nothing if I think he was wrong and crazy and had the economic intuition of a small rock. (Apologies to ALL rocks.)

But in general, in the normal landscape of the world, I knew I was a little more aware of politics than the average bear, and I hung my hate at (small l) libertarian, or if you prefer Constitutionalist Minarchist. Or if you prefer “will vote Republican under protest, because I really hate commies, but most Republicans are too statist for me.

Oh, I still hang out there, philosophically. I’m just not sure if anyone is hanging with me, or if I’m hanging separately.

In the last three years, alliances have shifted. I’m now forced to read Glen Greenwald seriously, even when I disagree with him. And that, btw, is the least surprising of the people I find myself agreeing with. There is considerably worse. I’m not even going to go into who suddenly makes sense and makes me go “arrooo?”

At the same time people I thought were sane and made sense… well, it’s more than three years right? A lot of them went insane with Trump’s election and suddenly think that we actually and for real elected a communist with 81 million votes, and that his being corrupted and sold out to China is fine.

They’re willing to see the country destroyed, as long as Trump doesn’t get another turn at the presidency because…. because…. because …. I don’t know. He eats steaks with ketchup. And he talks with a bad accent. And he doesn’t agree to the polite fiction that both sides are the same and the left are just misguided idealists.

Meanwhile…. the rest of us….

We’re still in shock they locked us down. We’re not, outside the deep blue enclaves, in shock that everyone went along with it, because outside the deep blue enclaves no one really went along with it fully. Except the very left, very old and very stupid, which were often the exact same person.

But we’re in shock they locked us down and even more in shock that — it was obvious — they thought they could keep it up forever. It was “the new normal.”

I mean we knew they were evil and stupid, but can anyone be THAT evil AND stupid?

And then … well, it’s not gotten better since then. The hits keep coming. The massively frauded election. The fact that every time we dig into any system — yes, there will be a post about student loans. I’m waiting for an insert from someone who saw this mess from another angle. Yes, you can disagree with me. But most of you aren’t seeing the whole thing, and the horrific down-system effects, which frankly even loan forgiveness can’t fix (though it can mitigate. And maybe that will be enough for the rest to unravel. I confess this is more a hope than a certainty.) — ANY SYSTEM it’s a morass of evil being done for evil reasons and for the purpose of enslaving humans to the diktats of an increasingly crazier and out of touch government.

We’re reeling from crazy to crazy, and further continuously shocked by the news we see and by…. how do we put this? How fast the most ridiculous and scandalous of them disappear.

No, I’m not talking about the Biden-scandal-dense-pack with everyone around them protecting them.

I’m talking about crazy sh*t that you read about and I read about, and then we forget, because there’s so much crazy and none of it makes any sense.

Remember the guy who blew himself up in an RV in downtown somewhere Christmas day 2 and a half years ago? What was with that?

There were enough red flags there for a May Day parade. There never was a resolution or any sense made of it. It just kind of sank out of the public consciousness.

What about all the mass shootings, which, this time for sure, are a White Supremacist attacking them poor people of color, and then when it’s revealed otherwise, they just disappear. Are never heard of or mentioned again.

What about that guy with the U-haul that apparently contained nothing but a confederate flag in chains (?!) who supposedly drove into the white house fence, but really was in a park across the street? The guy was, if I remember, a Pakistani exchange student. And the flag was carefully posed on the ground for pictures, in another “white supremacist attack”

And then it disappeared…..

Look, I come from a time where we knew the news lied, but if you studied them, you could sort of infer the truth of what was really going on. They weren’t…. or we thought they weren’t, made up out of whole cloth. Now…

This is the bad thing, you know, you look back, and suddenly you’re not sure. The entire landscape of your life is altered, and you start wondering if you’ve been a victim of a propaganda operation since birth, and one that doesn’t even make any sense. Unless…. And suddenly here come the strange bedfellows.

Like when this started I was willing to say all anti-vaxers were crazy, and vaccines were perfectly safe. But I saw how they pushed the covid-shot, one with almost completely unproven benefits and hidden risks, while denying natural immunity to do it. And now… I still think most vaccines are safe. If I ever — heaven forbid because the situation would almost always be bad — have the raising of an infant, I’ll still have him/her vaccinated. But I might look more closely at the timing and the vaccines, because well, they’re now requiring covid-vax for school, which is mental. So I can no longer assume good faith.

And while I still think Robert Kennedy Jr is insane (like most of his family) and most of his opposition to vaccines is insane, it’s hard to regain the certainty I had, when I know he’s telling the truth about Covid-19.

See, I used to be fairly sure I knew what was going on. All those conspiracy theorists on the right? “They’re going to put us in camps!” (I still think they’re crazy, but due to logistics, not for lack of crying.) and the ones on the left “Wars are a conspiracy of the army and the industrialists. They’re not necessary. They’re designed to kill the young so they keep power.” Obviously just insane peacenick, nonsense, right?

Um…. our government locked all of us under house arrest. Or tried to. And thought it could keep it up forever. AND the army-industrial complex tried to keep wars going/restart them when the upstart business man would end them. If it’s not to kill young males, you could have fooled me.

And while their grand designs of replacing the population won’t work (there aren’t enough people willing to come in, for various reasons. At most we all become a little less American, which can be recovered from) it’s not for lack of trying.

And the FBI? Really? not just “somewhat corrupt?”

And the news, all of them, completely detached from reality now?

I’m like a woman who wakes in the night, puts her foot down on the familiar rug, and suddenly rug and floor move under it.

I wander around trying to figure out what’s going on from…. what’s on sale and what’s missing at the grocery store. What is expensive and what’s cheap at craigslist and facebook marketplace. The experiences of friends and contacts.

Because no other form of information can be trusted. And maybe it was all lying all of my life.

Some realities remain. Communism is bad and can’t work. Not because the news say so (they don’t) but because it makes no sense for humans.

The future will be shaped by those who have kids.

And the larger the government the larger the corruption.

All the rest writhes and changes, and I spend a considerable portion of my time trying to figure out what’s real and what’s a distorted reflection.

Here, in the lunatic ball.

YOU EXPECT TO BE PAID FOR THIS?!?!?! by Foxfier

I’m fairly sure we’re all familiar with the drumbeat of how newspapers are dying. It’s so expensive to print, people just aren’t buying, the websites are a sunk cost that never pays back on advertising no matter how obnoxious they make the ads or how difficult they make it to see a story without paying ahead of time….

What they generally do not point out is that the reason people aren’t buying the news papers is that they decided to cut costs by not doing any reporting.
Now, I really shouldn’t pick on newspapers exclusively. They are the most famous, but at this point probably not even the most common. This same issue shows up in information websites and even some blogs, although blogs are more likely to tell you where they got their information from, even if they don’t actually link it and might get the name wrong. Newspapers, you’re lucky to get a name that you can trace back and figure out that they are the spokesman–or sometimes one man founder, operator, and primary beneficiary of spending– for RELEVANT ACTIVIST GROUP, LLC, and the half-quoted statement is on their website.

My grandmother was a reporter, and my parents are down right obnoxious, so I always got told to go dig for the rest of the story. Or that if you couldn’t make an argument against a position, you were too ignorant to make an argument for it.

That, incidentally, is quite true. It is a variation on the observation made famous in Chesterton’s Fence, that if you cannot explain why a gate is there, you should not remove it.

Now, looking for cures to this– try to track down the source of a story. Figure out if your news is doing its job.

Sometimes this is relatively easy.

Say, banned books, including the “banning” of Maus. The Professor handled the specific banned book display in her article, so I’ll explain what I did with Maus.

You saw the story, probably, or at least the story about it being “international news” that “Tennessee” had “banned Maus.”

That sounded improbable, so I went digging…couldn’t find anything about what had actually been done.

Eventually went looking for what school or city had done so, which led me to the actual minutes of the schoolboard meeting, as well as some comments by parents in various local publications. Those told me the problems were switching contracted curriculum providers, a large jump in cost, that Maus was neither great material for 13 year olds (duh, it’s aimed at adults, that was the selling point) nor suitable as the sole document for teaching about WWII, and parents were upset because it violated the recent law that they got to see the curriculum.

Anyone reading here surprised to hear that the overview was heavy on fiction, and big-name publishers? Kind of thing that makes me wish we had some reporters to go actually report on why the curriculum was changed, and how the new one was selected, and how they plan to deal with that liiiiittttle bitty legal issue…..

So, that’s one that bites the left– how about one on reporting that bites the right?

We’re all familiar with the Adderall shortage, right?

Well, a trusted online magazine stated that the shortage was due to the FDA limiting the production of Adderall. (In spite of their links all being internal, they do generally have useful information.)

Cue the obvious grumbling about is there anything they can’t screw up.

That sent me looking for a primary source for the claim, which ended up at Reason Magazine, which claimed that their source for the FDA/DEA limiting the production of Adderall to meet demand was supported by a link. That link went to the Federal Register, specifically the one for dealing with precursors for manufacturing drugs. Seeing that, and knowing something about how “a bureaucrat did it” is extreme shorthand, figured that only activists had commented on the document and had pushed through a stupid reduction. Following the rules, example of folks failing to use the tools we have to leash the Feds, etc.

I was wrong.
Not about someone not doing their job, but about who isn’t doing their job.

The document records that the folks worried about not being able to get their Adderall type medication went and commented during the comment period, yadda yadda, the DEA took their comments (short version: WE CANNOT GET OUR MEDICATION, FIX IT) and went to talk to the manufacturers.

To quote:

The majority of the manufacturers contacted by DEA and/or FDA have responded that they currently have sufficient quota to meet their contracted production quantities for legitimate patient medical needs. According to DEA’s data, manufacturers have not fully utilized the APQ for amphetamine in support of domestic manufacturing, reserve stocks, and export requirements for the past three calendar years 2020, 2021 and 2022.

In English, the last three years they haven’t used the amount that was made.
In spite of that, they did nothing to the amount made…which is oddly sane, considering government.

Well, that makes for the obvious question: are these manufacturers stupid? Do they not like money? Why isn’t the drug being made?

Turns out the University of Utah has a site for that, ASHP dot org slash DRUG SHORTAGES.

They have a current page for the Adderall type drugs, which has a Reason Why section.

As of the time I clicked on that link, most of the manufacturers “did not provide a reason.” Mallincrodt “refuses to provide availability information”. A few were only filling contracts, a few had stopped making the drug that was under shortage, Sandoz was prioritizing filling existing orders and Tris Pharma had tablets and suspensions available.

Searching for company names got me one “we’re working to meet demand” and a bunch of “manufacturing delays,” and one I found a third party news story I’ve now lost that said they literally couldn’t get the stuff to package their drugs. Several more are “reorganizing” to deal with worker shortages.

So, the problem wasn’t “the FDA reduced how much precursor they were allowed to make, a year or two after shortages started.” It was, the manufacturers not making enough.
(Which can very easily roll into getting manufacturing back state side, and trying to identify if there’s specific problems there we can fix, but will absolutely not be improved by getting mad at the people who did not reduce the amount that has already not been used, and sadly has very little chance of getting used barring a miracle of manufacturing managing to burn through three years of backlogged extra and the reserve stocks for this year.)

Well, people not doing the job and wanting to be paid as if they did has branched out from reporting to manufacturing. How about something closer to home?

SHOP LOCAL!

Really, who doesn’t love ma’n’pop shops, which we all know are dying off because evil department stores uh walmart uh amazon uh… you get the idea.

Don’t we read it in the news all the time?

…well… what happens when you ask someone why they didn’t shop locally?

As it happens, I have someone to ask right here!

Foxfier! Why don’t you shop locally?

Well, I try.

There was a local “Five and Dime,” which of course was more expensive than even the mall in town but was right here, so I worked to make a family ritual of taking each kid to the store and they got to choose one cool thing on their birthday. With a half dozen kids, this was a pretty big investment.
Then kung flu happened, and they not only required masks, they banned children. While their 14 year old relative ran the register.
After things reopened, they kept masks, until about a year and change after everyone else had moved on, they had a big GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sale. At which point they had weekly five-ten percent jumps in the discount…and if you kept your eye on some items, you noticed that the price tag on them went up 10-15% with each discount jump.

K, well, that’s just one. How about the hardware store?
They’re actually really good, price on lumber is quite reasonable even if you’re not a builder with a discount, although we bought out their entire stock of spare keys for our primary vehicle. I got two made. It’s one of the most common key varieties in the area.

Maybe mechanics?
The small engine guy that can do stuff is booked, and the one that is at the auto parts store can’t find a part when you bring a print-out with the specific part on it. And if you bring it in, they’ll probably charge you as if they ordered the part. Although they refund if you ask with enough force.
The one automotive shop we found that claimed they could work on our vehicle…well, short version, heater still didn’t work and after them neither did the vent. The oil shop chain that was good to us when we first moved here and had an emergency identified that the AC controller module was halfway burnt out. They fixed it in three hours. Apparently the guys who specialized in vehicles like ours couldn’t figure that out, in a few weeks.

Home repairs! There’s something that’s obvious.
Well… we needed a shutoff valve. Because the water department declared that the one that was there was not their responsibility, but we needed to actually have a whole-house shutoff.
I got two disconnected numbers, one private number, three answering machines and one call back two weeks after I’d given up, called a regional chain, and they went “Well…technically you’re outside of our range. But I know that we have a plumber that lives in your town, and he takes his truck home with him every night, are you open to an on-call with him?” and put in the shutoff.

Do I know anybody who does their job?
Well, a few, yes.
My mom’s sister and her husband ran a paint and photography shop, and for years their place was kept in the black because they had an Amazon account.
The little old ladies, and the folks who wanted to order Amazon but didn’t want to have it possibly misdelivered, went to them– she’d order it, charge them an appropriate amount, and go along merrily.
A few farm supply stores that also try to make it easy to give them money. “No, we can’t get that, but let me be a subject expert and see about ordering it.”

Heck, the thing I like best about our state is that the traffic cops actually do their job— and so folks know that turn signals, following distance, and rules of the road EXIST!

Over the last several years, I’ve become aware as a society we’re not just devaluing boys. We’re destroying them and making it impossible for them to grow into productive men. Youth unemployment in general is fairly bad, because honestly not only aren’t preparing kids for work, but older people assume even kids who are prepared aren’t.

We’ve swung from a youth culture, of assuming children were always right, to a culture of assuming anyone younger than, well a little older than me, are mentally slow, stupid and lazy.

Perhaps it’s easier to understand that we never really had a youth culture, we had a huge demographic bump of the boomers (post war to oh, around 58 if you count the actual boom) moving through the culture distorting it. And now they are aged, so anyone younger than them is “stupid and lazy.” I and my generation suffered this, but it was less obvious when it was just us being young adults and striving. And society wasn’t as broken as it is now.

I’ve said before, the only thing I really agree with Pope Francis on (Well, I’d also add basic religious tenets except I’m not sure he’d agree with those) is that the biggest problem facing the world is youth unemployment. Most of the young people — and young is now under 40 — I know are either making do with several gigs, working retail, or working several part time jobs, chained up to make do. There are exceptions, of course, but even the well-trained are treated like garbage by the system as is.

And before you say that you too walked up hill both ways in snow at their age. Well, we did too, my husband and I — He worked crazy hours till his mid to late thirties, just to keep his job. I didn’t break in till my late 30s and yep, worked crazy hours for no pay before then — but there is a difference. We were both working at our avocation, and granted I didn’t know if I’d ever “break in” but then again that’s normal (sort of. It was extended because of that demographic bump.) for artists. We were both gaining experience and ability at our professions. It took a little long for us to break in, because of obvious demographic bump. In that our experience was entirely genX.

It’s far worse for the kids, because most of them are not even working at what they trained for. Or if they are, they are working at a level as though they were never trained.

But there is a bigger problem: most boys start being treated as second class citizens around middle school. If you’re older than me, you might think I lost my mind. Heck, if you’re younger than me, and never looked closely at what your kids’ school is doing, or you have no kids, you might think I’m nuts.

Well, I might be nuts but not on this. Starting at about middle school, boys are treated as defective girls. Because women are the majority and treated like a protected minority, every school is afraid of not “treating them fairly” which means giving them primacy. Now just your boy’s behavior as a boy will be punished, but assignments are geared for how girls/women think (which means they also annoy the living daylights of atypical females like myself), they are oriented to group work (which by and large punishes males, though again, atypical females ain’t too happy either), and they’re geared to at least external compliance (which again is a female trait.) Most of the teachers are not just women, but they’re women indoctrinated in a system that tells them that male work is superior and that women are unfairly discriminated against for “being kept out of it.”

If at this point you’re puzzled over my referring to male and female characteristics, and to male work, let’s take the gloves off and speak like adults, instead of the mush most of us have been fed our entire lives.

While we’re rational, thinking creatures, and creatures with our own will power, and therefore can work on a lot of our characteristics and change them: there are differences between men and women. Innate, inborn differences, starting in the uterus with the “hormone baths” that guide development of different sexes. Period.

No real scientist would ever deny that, unless of course he/she feared for his/her job.

… and because we live in retarded times, let me explain that though our bodies and brains are completely different and run on two models, yes, how much that difference manifests is a spectrum. First, because development has glitches. I.e. some people don’t get the right hormones at the right time, and might outright have a brain that leans more the way opposite their body. This is very rare. It is also, btw, not covalent with gender dysphoria. It’s mostly 100% living frustrated by the rest of humanity and assumptions made. But there are other issues. Other types of characteristics might emphasize/mitigate/mimic the way of thinking of the opposite sex. Autistic females tend to think more like males (go figure) and ADHD women might appear to (though it’s not necessarily true.)

Also, like every gendered characteristic, there is a spectrum. Gender doesn’t exist on a spectrum (mostly because it’s a grammatical construct and those are very binary/trienary) but GENDER EXPRESSING CHARACTERISTICS do. Every adult knows tall, hairy men with deep voices, and slight, almost hairless males who are tenors. And every combination thereof. This without regard to maleness/fertility/orientation. And every adult knows vavaboom females that look like they should be painted on the nose of WWII planes, and tall, broad shouldered, practically no hips or breasts females and every combination in between. And these women might or might not be straight/fertile without regard to those combinations.

And yes, all of us know strong women and weak males, though testosterone unreasonably favors males from early development.

Humans are an incredibly complex mechanism, and a doctor friend tells me what’s shocking is not that our bodies go wrong/break in a hundred different ways. The amazing thing is that all of us survive the various potentialities or even actual “going very wrong” every day.

So the platonic ideal of male and female might manifest somewhere in this fallen world, but you’re likely to meet him or her face to face.

Each individual should be judged as an individual, and allowed to purse whatever avocation they wish to take on/are capable of. (And they should perhaps be discouraged from avocations they wish to pursue that are impossible. Though go easy on that, okay? Sometimes what you’re looking at is not someone who is very stupid, but someone who is profoundly depressed. Same with every other characteristic. And I’m sick and tired of people who think it’s a kindness to make writers quite because according to the judge “he/she has no talent.” That’s another post though.) Equality under the law, equality of opportunities should always, always, always be our watchword. Because without it, we’re destroying potentially very productive people, and by extension destroying society/the future.

However, that’s not what we have right now. Right now we have completely crazy people who assume that any difference in characteristics between the sexes is the result of discrimination/past oppression.

And mark me very carefully: while the expression of sexual characteristics exists on a spectrum FOR INDIVIDUALS, in aggregate it is no such thing: in aggregate, there are male characteristics and female characteristics.

This is important because we live in a society that looks at large groups, and if they don’t perform exactly the same, as it says on the envelope, assumes malfeasance or problems somewhere.

At some point someone, probably a doctrinaire feminist, infused with Marxism, looked at how certain professions fell mostly female and some professions were mostly male, and made the usual idiotic Marxist assumption of two classes: oppressor and oppressed.

Males were therefore oppressors, and females were oppressed, and looking at history, which mostly was written by the very well off, they assumed the same had to be true, forever. And by gum, they were going to effect REVOLUTION by turning this on its head. Mostly quietly, by subverting everything they had access too, though this means also changing books, both fiction and non-fiction, shows, news, etc.

We have since then be living under their deranged, poisonous, evil regime. And it’s destroying the future for both males and females: though males are suffering more invisibly (because assumed privileged. which is a Marxist idiocy I can’t begin to believe anyone — anyone — falls for.)

Before someone says physical and mental differences are based on how we treat the sexes, pardon me, biologically that’s completely insane. Yes we are people of brain and will, but we are creatures who live in a body, a body affected by hormones BEFORE WE ARE BORN. As any of us — females — priviledged to experience very different hormonal states from pregnancy to menopause, or any of us — most of us — who’ve gone through puberty know, hormones are SCARY substances, that affect everything from our bodies to how we think. Denying that might be comforting, but is also not reality.

we had someone, well intentioned, but obviously having drunk deeply the koolaid last time I broached this subject who was convinced that the only difference was nutrition and socializing. Besides the fact that her stereotypes were out of date by the seventies, when I grew up — boys were NOT encouraged to “eat hearty”, everyone was encouraged to be sylph thin and starve themselves — the statement is ridiculous on its face.

I’ve been privileged — ah — to look after two coveys of quail recently and for another week. And there’s reasons to believe we misexed males and females, which means we culled a lot of females and have five extraneous males. This was related to the fact that the eggs purchased were not the breed that arrived (I think) and some quail breeds are well night unsexable by PHYSICAL characteristics. What is not unsexable, though, is that males are murderous little maniacs (I now have two in isolation, one recovering from wounds, the other an insane rapist/murderer. (In isolation because they’re not mine, so I don’t have the right of high justice.)) And that females lay. Males also crow, though they might not choose to do it around you. Not any amount of preaching Marx at them will make males live peacefully with other males, and no amount of telling them they should be more like females will make them lay eggs, or be more docile.

Okay, humans are not birds. But our cousins, the great apes show sexed characteristics not just in reproduction, but how they behave in groups. No one expects a male to take the care of the young. No one expects a female to be combative with males. (Yes, it happens. very rarely. But not as an aggregate group.)

Hormones have consequences, not just in bodies but in minds.

Testosterone gifts men with the ability to think more directly, in chained thoughts. Women think more in clusters. We make connections between things men don’t make connections. If you think of male thought as a chain, think of female thought as a spider web.

In general this means that women are better at verbal skills, and men better at mathematical skills (in aggregate. There are female mathematical geniuses, and male mathematical morons. But the gendering shows in large groups.) Women are better in …. “uncertain logic” fields, which involve everything and anything working with people. Men are better at anything involving certain, established logic, and they work better with “things” that can’t reason/exhibit anomalous characteristics more often than “normal” ones. (Again as a group. Individuals are individual.)

Even within the same profession/interest group males and females tend to approach the task differently. Women pushed into “male” fields or even those interested in it, unless they’re incredible outliers, tend to gravitate to management and dealing with people.

Rebel against it all you want. Tell me it’s wrong wrong wrong. But why tell me it’s an “injustice”? What makes being male better than being female, inherently? Nothing. What makes “male professions” like, say, engineering “better” or “more prestigious”?

Absolutely nothing.

Males and females are not superior to each other. Each of them have a set of “specializations” that together allowed us to build civilization.

Countries and cultures that discriminate against one or the other mode of humanity are maimed and thwarted and not quite civilized. And regardless of what you heard from your idiot teachers that by and large has not applied to the West/Christendom since the middle ages. “Women were oppressed, always” is largely bullshit. By our lights until about a hundred years ago, everyone was oppressed: Oppressed by their own biology, by the lack of…. well, everything, and by a hierarchical/unyielding order. Yeah, women had more restrictions on public action than men, and if you consider going to and dying in war better than giving birth and raising kids, you’ll think they were oppressed. The question is of course, why — in the name of BOB — would you consider that superior?

No, women have not been chattel and property in the west for a very long time. Yes, terrible things happened due to evil men and inferior body strength. But terrible things happened to men as well. This doesn’t go one way. If you think it does, you were mistaught, missinformed and indoctrinated.

But you can find places where women were de-facto chattel and treated as property. Various periods of Chinese history for instance (China is always complicated) and a lot of the Middle East. While there were geographical and historical reasons for that, the end result is that those civilizations always fall short.

How could they not? They are running on a single mode of thought, and never allowing half of humanity to make an appropriate contribution, even at the level of teaching the young.

There are no examples of civilizations that treated men poorly. Oh, there probably are, to be honest. We have found hints. But they were destroyed. Partly because you can run maimed in a primitive society that mistreats females, and use superior male strength to beat other tribes. But there is no superior female strength. (Also for bizarre reasons every even intended matriarchy we ever heard of sacrifices babies. We’re no different.)

Until now. Technology allows us to survive while blatantly discriminating against males, starting when male physical characteristics assert themselves (might be earlier, if your teachers are exceptionally well indoctrinated.) But it remains unclear how long we can keep civilization and technology going while doing this. Note please that we’re running aground already on a number of areas. And males around 30 and younger are in a world of pain and most of them have been rendered useless.

I realized, recently, while talking to other mothers, that several problems we faced and overcame, sometimes by the skin of out teeth are not abnormal. They are, in fact, how things are these days.

Boys are not only discouraged from excelling. They are discouraged from excelling at anything traditionally male. Because idiot Marxists think that traditional male avocations are “power.” Remember they only think in oppressor and oppressed, and if someone is more represented somewhere, they’re “oppressors.” (Oh, not everything. Traditional dirty, dangerous occupations are not deemed important for women to take over. Rolls eyes. Because most Marxists are upper class and stupid. That’s why.)

And if they manage their way in, they’ll be discriminated against all the way through University (remember, Marxists are classists too) and through the profession itself. Discriminated against in grades (no one wants to discourage female engineers, which means a lot of colleges give the ladies A. But the Ds have to go somewhere, and after all, they don’t need more male engineers.) Discriminated against in hiring. Discriminated against in promotions.

This was already so when I observed my husband’s career, but it didn’t work. I.e. males and females didn’t completely change places. Men still preferred certain occupations. Women still preferred certain occupations. So, it’s been ramped up to completely and totally insane.

Look, to level set: if you have a son, even a relatively high performing one, chances are he’s working under a level of throttling-down. And most boys are checked out. They no longer care. They’ve been told they’re oppressors and evil by reason of being born male from the moment they were conscious of being male. They no longer care. They no longer want to do anything. Burned out before they even start their lives.

And under it, because they’re males, with testosterone, there’s a level of anger that women will never understand, unless they live surrounded by males and really, really work at understanding. This means that this treatment of boys is creating that much ballyhooed “toxic masculinity” which idiots confuse with “being male.”

Yes, some boys are finding their way into professions the feminists have no interest in, and bless Mike Rowe, whatever his issues, for showing the way to a bunch of males.

But that’s not going to solve our problems as a society in general. Because, sure, we need machinists and HVAC technicians. But we also need engineers who are more fascinated with the “thing” that is the main part of their job, than with office politics. We need researchers who will work hard at figuring the problem, and not spend most of their time figuring out on whom to step to get higher. We need doctors who are gruff and not particularly good at “customer service” but view disease as an enemy to be conquered. (I could go for days about medicine. I’m not going to. But part of our favoring women in medical school is that we are importing most of the people involved in actual day to day doctoring — a dirty, unpalatable position educated women tend to disdain — from countries without the same standards of training. This is one of the idiotic consequences of denying biology in favor of bizarre Marxist social engineering. And not that, yes, I have several female doctors among the regulars. Yes, females can be good and passionate doctors. And several of them are. But those who read here are old enough they were admitted on an equal footing with males. No one was trying to make it 80% female, which is what I’m complaining about. That level of discrimination distorts everything down the line.)

We are INTENTIONALLY blocking males from pursuing their interests and talents, while pushing women to pursue what are traditionally male interests and talents.

This extends from professions to modes of behavior. Women are encouraged to join the hook up culture, with no emotional attachments and behave like BAD and IRRESPONSIBLE men of the 50s (or at least the popular image of those. None of us lived them. Wait. Some of you did. But I didn’t. And those who did as adults are, at this point, a minority.)

The only possible conclusion is that our culture has gone insane and thinks that male modes of work, and male modes of social behavior are VASTLY superior to females. And that females would normally behave like males, unless they were prevented. So, women must have been prevented for MILLENNIA. MILLENNIA. And now, we’re taking revenge for all those oppressed women, by making men behave like women and women like men. Ah. See how they like being oppressed!

Stated like this, openly, it sounds completely insane. It’s like these people are bizarrely misogynistic aliens, who never met a human. Which is largely true. They’re Marxists, for whom every human is a widget, interchangeable with every other human.

Sexual characteristics, both physical and mental, are a spectrum. But in aggregate real differences reveal themselves. By and large male work is more “thing” oriented. Female work is more “Person” oriented. And most male occupations are outdoor and dangerous. Most female occupations are indoor and boring. NEITHER IS SUPERIOR TO THE OTHER. BOTH ARE NEEDED FOR CIVILIZATION.

Both are needed for reproduction, too. Pretending otherwise is having some insane — literally — effects.

But at the root of our society are people so insane that saying “Males and females are different” is a bizarrely transgressive statement. (I got hit on this last time I said it. My courage rises with every attempt to depress it. No, it doesn’t mean I’m transphobic. The few people so body-dysphoric that living under the appearance of the other sex helps them are not a problem with this. The idiots trying to make every kid who isn’t a perfect stereotype believe he/she is the other sex are.)

They are trying to make the roosters lay eggs and the hens crow and think they’re building a more equitable society.

This is destroying both boys and girls, but it is killing boys silently.

Again and again, when I talk to mothers of boys, they think their kid is falling individually. “He just doesn’t want to do anything.” “Nothing interests him.”

Those whose parents make them might be working the bare minimum to survive, with a million roommates. Or in very small lodgings. But they’re not going anywhere. Just stitting there, spinning wheels.

Those in the middle class, are often just wasting their lives on games, and other palliatives.

They are not alone. They are not wrong. They didn’t get broken without a reason. This is the state of the puppy that gets beaten for existing, not just for biting or pooping out of place.

Most of them are scared, isolated, and see no way out.

And many of the guys doing better than that are laboring against the same feeling/the same anger, often self directed.

I’m going to ask you, each and everyone of you, to reach out. Reach out to young people. Yes, a lot of them will respond badly. Don’t reach from a position of patronizing. Reach out as a friend and an equal. Be aware of what they’ve been put through. Meet them where they are. Try to help them find a place where they’re happy and productive.

Treat them as individuals, not as oppressor and oppressed. Tell them it’s all right to be themselves even if who they are is “traditional” expression of their sex.

Snatch brands from the fire. We’re not eating the seed corn. We’re burning it.

We’re not just throwing the future away. We’re destroying it.

And we’re doing it to appease the mysoginistic aliens who think biology is optional and male everything is inherently superior and should be done by females.

Western Civ has become a madhouse with borders. It’s time to reach for sanity.

The life you save might be your own.

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

UPDATE: Yes, I blew a week of chapters on Chapter House. Now caught up with Witch’s Daughter, will catch up with Winter Prince 4 chapters today, come hell or high water. Then back to normal next week. Sorry. Turns out I’m not able to write and keep livestock happy at same time.

FROM ALENE R. LOWRY: Einarr and the Crimson Shroud: A young adult action-adventure Viking fantasy.

More than a Fortune-Teller’s Art
The corruption from the black-blooded monsters has finally been cleansed from the crew of the Vidofnir, but the events of the last several months have left Einarr with a lot on his mind. Ever since his encounter with the Oracle, time and time again circumstances have conspired to prove her right: he needs to learn to read the runes, or his calling will be the death of him. The problems are going to be convincing his father and finding a teacher.
But the mysterious elf, whose aid allowed him to conquer the Tower of Ravens, knows someone. Several someones, really. But they happen to be guarding an ancient secret. If there’s one thing that a Cursebreaker knows how to find, it’s trouble.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Gods and Monsters (Modern Gods Book 4)

Here there be dragons…again, damn it.
Deshayna has her sanity back, and forces older than the gods have granted her a new purpose. Chronos, his freedom restored, fights for his sanity, and with it, a purpose in helping Deshayna—now called Shay—with hers. The gods are starting to pull together more…and it’s about time.
Millennia after the last dragons to threaten human existence have been hunted down, they’ve started to reappear, hinting to the surviving gods that something more sinister appeared first: Tiamat.
Instead of a confrontation, though, the gods—major, minor, and genus loci—are drawn into a frustrating hunt for a predator that flees rather than attempting to strike.

WITH JOHN VAN STRY, RODNEY L. SMITH & MORE, FROM OUR FRIENDS AT RACOUNTEUR PRESS: Moggies In Space.

Since the first feline walked into the first human dwelling and decided they liked the staff, Cats have been going where they want and doing what they do. Whether hunting, lounging or deigning to grace their companions with company, cats will continue to do what cats do.

Which is anything they want.

Join these 11 wonderful authors as they explore how and where cats boldly go.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: A Gift of Koi

Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human?

Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn’t find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi’s side, he knows he’s found a kindred spirit.

But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Witch-Child and the Scarlet Fleet

Caught between pirates who would force him to use wizardry in their aid, and a king who would force him to spy, Alik will need every scrap of wits and wizardry to forge his own path.

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: An Exile Aboard Ship

ONE MOMENT QUEEN… THE NEXT, OUTCAST

Surela Silin Asaniefa was convinced she could rule the Eldritch people better than her enemy, Liolesa Galare, and for ten whole days following her coup, she made the attempt—and failed. Resigned to her death as a traitor, she was given a choice by the Queen’s newest protege, Reese Eddings: to be executed, or to accept a commuted sentence and attempt to rebuild her life and make amends for her crimes.

To die would have been the act of a dramatic maiden, and as a woman of more sense and years, Surela chooses instead to see what she can make of herself among aliens and mortals. But what begins with cargo runs on an old Terran freighter soon involves pirates and slavers and intergalactic war… and the actions of a traitor might be the salvation of the people she once wronged.

An Exile Aboard Ship kicks off the redemption arc of the villainess from the Her Instruments series. Can Surela earn her wings in the Alliance? Come and see…

FROM MARY HARE: Cloak and Stola

When the Roman legion sweeps through the farmlands of Syria, Sophie loses everything: her home, her family, even her freedom. Procerus is a soldier subject to the marriage ban recently instituted by Caesar Augustus. But after his legion wins a battle, he may have found a way to start a family anyway.

Procerus is looking for a “wife.” Sophie’s looking for a way forward. Neither are looking for love. But will they find it anyway?

Story of ancient Rome inspired by historical evidence of the de facto marriages of Roman legion soldiers.

Novella, approximately 18,000 words.

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: SHAKE