Common Ground by Maryh10000

One of the main problems conservatives have in getting the word out about our actual beliefs is that the legacy media refuses to portray us fairly. And the media that do portray us fairly are automatically assumed to be lying by people who don’t actually know us. One of the problems with this is that certain groups are sure they have to stay with the left, because “everyone knows” that the right is worse. People run into actual racism or homophobia on the left, and since “everyone knows” the right is even worse, they’re stuck.

This came up in a discussion where someone mentioned the video of an interview with a number of queer shooters, including Chris Cheng of Top Shot. They all agreed it was much riskier, socially, to come out as gun owners to their queer friends, than to come out as queer to their gun friends.

This shows an important difference between left and right. Conservatives who disagree with your lifestyle choices are safer than leftists who agree with it. Tolerance means the ability to actively disagree with someone else’s choices without needing to make those choices matters for legal action, disrespect, or shunning. A conservative’s reaction to finding out a fellow gun lover is gay is likely to be “sure, whatever.” Or even “me, too.” After all, some conservatives are gay, we have gay friends and family members.

But the interesting thing about the refusal of leftist governments to protect their citizenry is that more people are buying guns, because they are unsafe and they know it. 2020-2022 saw a huge influx of new gun owners, many of them from the left politically. They mostly bought their guns at shops that were run by conservatives. They are mostly being trained by instructors who are conservative. And these are conservatives of every racial group, both sexes, and various sexualities.

Which means that finally, some leftists are coming into contact with real conservatives. And finding out that no, we don’t want to kill gay people or beat them up. We might think you’re wrong or weird, but mostly we figure people are people and adults are adults. Don’t make us bake the darn cake, or perform your weddings in our churches, or make out in front of us, and we’re good. Really.

On the other hand, there’s an increasing list of things you can’t disagree with on the left, because there is no tolerance on the left. Look at the attacks on any high profile racial minority who disagrees with any part of the left agenda. Look at the attacks on Andy Ngo, a gay man, for covering Antifa. Look at the very term TERF. Even being a radical feminist doesn’t protect you if you deviate at all.

The left is scaring more and more people. I believe that the only thing that’s keeping many of the rank and file in line is believing that if their side has bad people, we must be worse. When it clicks in that they’re wrong, that could be a tipping point.

Maybe gun rights is the common ground that could help save us. Because the less safe people feel, the more they buy guns. And the more people buy guns, the more contact they have with real conservatives, not the leftist media version. And the more contact people have with real conservatives, not the leftist media version, the more they realize that there are real alternatives to the left.

The picture is from a week and a half ago. We won’t have new ones till we return on the 1st or so. That expression is because I called her name, while she was asleep (trying to get her to look at the camera.)

We had a phone call at about nine thirty from the veterinarian ICU nurse (and yes, again I passed out and slept since. Sorry to be so late letting you know.)

Tiny Helena is improving, still by tiny little bits. Improved enough she’d pulled out her catheter overnight, and also sitting up and holding up her own head most of the time. Her eyes are clear, and she’s aware people are there. She is still not eating, so they’re still feeding her.

So, the anti-viral is working and she is improving. Not fully out of danger (till she’s eating on her own) but almost there.

Thank you for the prayers and please keep them up. I promise to send pics and video of her when she’s okay and we’re home. (Which at this rate will probably be at the same time.)

It’s going to hurt money wise, but I don’t care. There is a chance I get my tiny pretty back.

Dominion Voting Machines, Insecure by Design – by Francis Turner

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice

Required reading for all Dominion engineers and product managers

I have, from time to time, been interested in the question of trust in voting machines and processes. That goes all the way back to the early 2000s and the sloppy Diebold machines in use then. At that time it was notable that Diebold, who also made (make?) ATMs, seemed to have invested a lot more time and effort into making their ATMs secure than making their voting machines secure.

Well anyway there’s only so many hours in a day and only so much outrage I can summon up for sloppy work so I moved on to other things like glowball worming. Anyway given the US 2020 elections and now the 2022 elections have been rife with allegations of vote rigging and other shenanigans I’ve started to renew my interest in the current state of the art.

The bad news up front

Dominion’s 2020 era voting systems and infrastructure are, if anything, easier to hack than Diebold’s 2000 era ones. To that end, despite Dominion settling with Fox for $megabuck$, it seems likely that Dominion is in fact guilty of making systems that have design choices that seem to be deliberately chosen to make fraud easy and then not testing to see if there were possible problems let alone making any attempt to fix them. Then, to add insult to injury, they have created machines that implement these poor design choices that are easy to hijack. Finally, needless to say, they have relied on “security via obscurity” and what a British politician called “being economical with the acualité” to disguise these design choices.

That’s what I get from the analysis by Professor Alex Halderman into the Dominion systems used in Georgia

Your vote is this QR code. Or is it?

Let me start with the most basic. In Georgia always, in other states under certain circumstances, voters use a machine to make select their voting choices and these choices are then printed onto a paper ballot that is then sent to another machine for counting. That ballot has a QR code (the box of dots like the one above) which contains the choices the voter made and some checksum for integrity. That QR code cannot be read easily by the voter (you don’t just need a smartphone with a QR code reader, you need some special software to read it and then you need to be able to map the docoded output to your choices) so the machine also prints a human readable version. However there is no checking anywhere that the QR code corresponds to the human readable version and the QR code is what the voting tabulators use to count.

Does the QR code match the text? how can you tell?

Halderman’s report notes both that it would be easy to have the QR code be different to the human readable part because there are no audits done that check that they correspond and that it would also be easy to change the output of both the QR code and the human readable print out on the assumption that most people will not check the print out.

The first case requires special audit equipment to detect and you would need to be very sure that you could actually trust that equipment so getting it from Dominion would be contra-indicated. The latter case would make it impossible to detect vote rigging via audit if the voter failed to raise the alarm at the polling station.

If you look at the sample above the human readable printout does not seem like a model of clarity (all the extra “vote for”s which add verbiage without adding clarity for example) making it easier to hide a fraudulent entry. Of course voters are likely to check the top of the ballot (i.e. their presidential vote) so changing that might be risky, but changing the votes lower down in the more obscure county level races is much more likely to escape notice. You have to wonder why they made it hard to read.

But that’s not all. Similar QR codes seem to be generated by other voting methods too such as the vote by mail web app which voters then have to print out themselves and mail to the county. What this means is that the 2000 mules sort of vote by mail fraud is made extremely easy.

And it gets worse.

Despite claims that the QR code data is encrypted, it isn’t. Once you know the proprietary format you can decode the data and see what choices the voter made. But wait there’s more. There is a checksum created using a shared key to detect accidental tampering/misprints etc. but that shared key turns out to be very easy to obtain and each vote from a particular county (or possibly multiple counties or part of a county depending on implementation) is indistinguishable from any other vote from that county/region no matter which voting machine (or vote by mail method) was used.

The consequences of a lack of encryption or serial number

This makes printing a few thousand additional votes very, very easy and almost impossible to catch. Halderman discusses a number of ways to modify or print additional votes including sticking a raspberry pi in the printer, but these are kind of incidental, the key point is that there is a clear weakness in the vote printing process that can be exploited in all sorts of ways; these ways would be hard to detect and once detected it would be impossible to detect which ballots where illegitimate so the only recourse would be to run the election again.

Moreover, as he explains later, in the tabulator (ImageCast Precinct or ICP) the scanned images of the votes counted are stored. Gaining access to the tabulator (running an embedded linux version dating from 2007!) means you can simply edit the counts and put the correct number of images in the directory to match. Short of hand checking all the actual print outs with all of the images the machine has stored it is impossible to confirm that the machine’s tally is correct. The only way to detect that the tabulator is lying is to build your own trusted one and rescan all the ballots.

Halderman did not spend much time looking at the tabulator but he identified that the tamper evident shields to block access to USB and Ethernet ports seemed to be easy to bypass in the unit he was provided with. What he doesn’t directly point out is that if an authorized person opens up the machine and installs malware the tamper evident seal can easily be replaced by another one. Even better, if the malware install is part of a scheduled firmware update the tamper evident seal is completely pointless because there need be no detectable difference between a USB stick containing a legitimate firmware update and one containing malware.

In summary

This design choice, with a machine readable QR code that is not readable by a human, seems to be a deliberate choice to make voter self-validation hard. The lack of public/private key encryption and a unique serial number per vote makes adding or replacing votes completely untrackable once they have been inserted into the system somehow because there is no audit trail possible.

The CEO of Dominion recently whined to TIME that even though Fox settled rather than going to trial, Dominion was likely to go out of business because their brand was irredeemably tarnished. I found this quote from the article to be deeply ironic:

As for Dominion’s future, Poulos is taking it one day at a time. The company is still focused on providing trusted voting systems to clients, with Poulos emphasizing that Americans do not have to trust Dominion blindly because of its commitment to transparency and its existing capability of producing paper ballots. But that defense may come too late.

Given the design decisions it made I find it hard to read “Americans do not have to trust Dominion blindly because of its commitment to transparency ” without laughing. The QR code is anything but transparent to the voter while being exceedingly transparent to the knowledgeable fraudster and the lack of easily verifiable audit trail is disturbing if you assume that the company wanted to make a “transparent” and trustworthy system.

The interesting questions though are

1. whether the sub-optimal design choices were made from incompetence or malice?
2. how many other voting solutions are as bad?

So how would you fix it?

I thought about ending the post there, but then I figured that opens me up to the charge of complaining without coming up with an alternate solution.

So what would I do instead. Obviously junk the QR code. But more importantly I’d want to come up with a system that allowed for a couple of basic validation checks

First voters have to be able to read what the machine outputs and confirm that it is what they voted for. That means no QR code. It also means a form with a more easy to understand output. Something like this:

The Checksum would be the data of all the other fields encrypted using the private key that is the pair to the public key in the document. The tabulator and any auditor could use the public key to decrypt the checksum and confirm that it matched the ballot.

Since no ballot could be made at the same time from the same machine the checksums would be almost certainly unique (there is a very slight chance of a collision but it’s extremely small) and in the case of a collision it would be possible to decrypt the two checksums with the different keys to confirm that they were in fact unique.

The private/public key pair would be created on the voting machine in a secure subsystem that would never reveal the private key but would encrypt anything passed to it with that key (this is a standard piece of hardware). In order to make some attacks difficult I suspect the secure subsystem would need its own clock and it would need to print out the date / time when it made an encryption as well as, of course, using that date/time as part of the data encrypted. That would make it easy to detect anomalously fast voting.

This checksum would absolutely stop the replay and copy attacks that the Dominion system allows. The human visible table allows the voter to do verification and in fact the voter could be given a copy of the checksum (and public key) so that if desired the voter can confirm on a different machine that the votes were cast as intended.

By doing this it becomes possible to create an auditable system that is much harder to fraud. There is probably a way to make it work for mail in ballots too (a browser session or smartphone app would create the page which could then be printed off and mailed back) and in fact it might allow for remote electronic voting because all that happens in that case is that the app prints off the vote in a central precinct instead of at the voters computer.

There may well be additional lacunae that I haven’t thought of. I can see, for example, that the desire for a private confirmation number would make it possible for others to see how you had voted (great for audits, not great in terms of voting privacy/secret ballots) and I’m not entirely sure how to fix that – though I guess making keeping the number optional would do. Perhaps an abbreviated “Proof of voting” checksum could be created that didn’t include all your votes.

Picture of Helena on my knees from last week. She nestles there, past my laptop.

Okay, she’s not well YET (keep up the prayers.) but they put her on an anti-viral last night, and today she was sitting up and raising her head. Not for long. She doesn’t have the strength to do it for long, but for a little bit.

And therefore they’re now leaning to a type of neurological virus that’s literally imbibed with mother’s milk. Most cats who have it, have it dormant, hers just activated suddenly. They are testing, and might also put her brother on anti-virals though he’s fine so far.

Anyway, continue praying. She MIGHT come out of this all right. Let us hope so. It’s going to be ruinously costly, but I don’t even care if I get her back okay.

That picture above is Helena-kitten sleeping on my shoulder and effectively pinning my left arm down.

I’m hoping very much that’s not my last picture with her alive.

We were always going to board the older cats. They need meds, and we couldn’t leave them in the house alone. And we’re gong on a grand tour halfway across the country for a solid two weeks, before coming back home. But we were going to leave the two younger kittens in the house alone for three days with a ton of food (everyone will be gone for three days, including our local friends) and then have people feed them the rest of the time.

As time drew near, though, both Dan and I started getting…. feelings. And the feeling was: Board the littles too. So, Friday I called and booked them in.

Tuesday we gook all the cats in just before noon. And went back home to pack without “help” and clean before leaving early on Wednesday.

…. I was woken at seven thirty by a very shaken vet. I thought Havelock, because he’s old and overweight, and keeps getting into the kitten food.

No. It was Helena. When they came in at 7:30 am, Helena kitten was collapsed in her cage. They suspected cardiac issues.

We said “Do everything to the limit of the possible, no expense spared.” Yeah, I know we’re idiots, but …. she’s so tiny and pretty and affectionate. I’ll just have to work MUCH harder this year.

She’s been in kitty ICU for 2 full days now — yes, that one is going to hurt badly monetarilly, don’t care – and she’s stable. They have her on IV feed and an antibiotic JUST in case.

She might be improving, but it’s fractional. Yesterday, she raised her head. And she seems slightly more awake.

While they’re waiting on a cardiac panel, at this point they don’t expect it to be her heart. They think she got into something, probably weird, at our house. I’ll be honest, we’re pretty good at kitten proofing, but the two disasters have learned how to open the closet in the craft room, and I don’t even KNOW all that’s in there.

They think it’s poisoning and since it didn’t kill her outright and she’s improving, they think it will a waiting game.

I pray they’re correct. I didn’t sleep very well, and kept having nightmares.

If I act distracted at Liberty con, you will know why. It’s not you. It’s that I’m worried about my tiny-pretty. And if you see me crying ugly…. Well, let’s hope you don’t see me crying ugly.

Please, if you’re the praying kind, pray. I don’t want to be grieving for the cutest and sweetest cat I’ve ever known. She and Indy-Pol pulled me out of deep depression. If she goes it …. I don’t know.

If you’re not the praying kind, pray anyway. The novelty of it might surprise Himself enough to move Him. PARTICULARLY if you don’t believe he exists. I know what authors are like. An unexpected character poking Him will get his attention.

I’ll be at Liberty Con. Nothing I could do anyway, since she’s in ICU. And honestly, the only reason to go back would be to say goodbye.

We stopped on the way to say goodbye, just in case. I don’t want that to be our last time with her.

Anyway, if I’ve seemed a bit out of touch, it was that, more than the trip. It was worry.
I’ll try to be human at LC anyway. And hope for the best.

Equal – by Bill Reader

The Left does not use words the way that you use words. We say the same things. We mean different things.

If socioeconomically, white people are found to be doing better in one area or another, the Left will shout white supremacy. We understand that to be an accusation that we believe white people are intrinsically better. The Left simply regard it as a tautological statement—that is, if the system is resulting in more successful white people, it is a system which favors whites. Having determined that that is always bad regardless of cause, they then go searching for causes. When they fail to find secret Nazis—and can’t manufacture any, must be said— that’s when things get funny. That’s when you get them beclowning themselves creating pamphlets where they say an expectation that people show up to something at an appointed time, or work hard at a task they’re being paid for, is white supremacy.         Because they saw a system resulting in different outcomes. They searched for actual discrimination, and couldn’t find any because there was none. So then they looked for any difference at all that caused people to be treated differently. And those, they found, so QED, that the culture favors the things that the white people are doing is the problem. What the things actually are is immaterial. It doesn’t matter if those things happen to be predicated on respecting others and their time, doing what you’ve agreed to do, and other basic behaviors that minimize strife and maintain social trust. As a matter of faith we are told to accept that the world would be better if people didn’t hold these behaviors as models, and we’ll go ahead and ignore that history has to date been a long journey specifically away from human cultures where people didn’t hold these behaviors as models. That their codification has slowly and painfully elevated humanity out of what resembled Hell on Earth is immaterial; as it results in disparity at certain places and certain times, we must accept that Hell would be preferable. Reason be damned, I want this fence down now!

Yet for all that, the people who say so will not move to the neighborhoods where a majority of people abide by those rules, probably reasonably as they wouldn’t last the night. Oh, well, they’ll say, everyone there is so impoverished, you know, there’s a lot of crime. “Poor but honest” isn’t a characterization to the Left, it’s a paradox. And this makes a great deal of sense besides, as famously, people in such places who make a great deal of money almost inevitably become paragons of virtue once their impoverishment is alleviated.

They also effectively argue that those things are intrinsic to white people, that they’re baked in and immutable. The way they view the problem is: the rules favor these behaviors, and these behaviors cannot be taught to group A, and are intrinsic to group B, so the group B will always win. The only way to make the groups equal is to discard the rules entirely. Which is to say, they isolate and analyze the problem exactly as Hitler would. They believe, in full agreement with Hitler, that there are irreconcilable differences between races (this despite the fact that neither he nor they can actually define what a race is because it’s an extremely artificial concept, but I digress). They even concur that these differences are actually an existential threat to society. They consider themselves superior solely because faced with the same set of beliefs the lesson they’ve taken from history is that society will just have to go. And in the resulting new society that will emerge after, they imagine, they will be discriminated against, and that will be fair turnabout. In fact, they’re lining up to self-discriminate for brownie points now, and advising their fellow “whites” to do the same. The official anti-white-supremacist statement is thus that society will and should inevitably be taken over by non-whites who will reduce whites to chattel. Curiously, as near as I can tell, that appears to also be the official white-supremacist outlook. And obviously the only rational thing a self-identified white person could do, presented with those options and no other information, is side with the people willingly submitting to be subjugated.

And that’s how it has to be, because obviously traits aren’t teachable. If these were teachable traits, it wouldn’t matter that society favored them even if they were entirely arbitrary (and as discussed above, they aren’t). Non-white people would simply learn them and that would be the end of the problem. The only impediment would be, say, if non-white groups had malignant subcultures that encouraged people to resist learning ways of approaching the world that help them to get ahead, and punished people so severely for not fitting in with the group that, even if they would otherwise have made productive progress by rejecting the group’s ideology, they are pulled down into the crab bucket if they try. But such (purely hypothetical) cultures, you would not be allowed to displace because that would be favoring a “white” culture over a “non-white” culture, because per the Left’s definition, the only authentic non-white culture is a dysfunctional low-trust culture that punishes people for doing things that will improve their lot and the lot of the people around them. Remember, that’s the official stance of the self-proclaimed anti-white supremacists.

Behold! These are the so-called thought-leaders of Western civilization, on the one hand restating Hitler’s central and most destructive thesis, on the other claiming to oppose what they imagine is the incipient rise of Nazism. Here, naked and glassy-eyed, stares the core philosophy of, *ahem*, “anti-Nazis” and “anti-fascists”— Mein Kampf in Birkenstocks. All the same dumb, dead-end ideological poison, but now it’s suicidal, rather than homicidal, so everything’s better.

The Left says all the time that they think they don’t communicate their message well. I thank the good lord they don’t communicate it more clearly. If people actually heard and believed them we’d probably have the race war they seem to so desperately desire. Instead the world has the Patriot Front (Group), and other less-organized random groups of “Nazis” who curiously are never followed and identified when covered by the same media who track down and personally threaten any and every ordinary conservative who gets in the way of the Left’s agenda.

Because it doesn’t profit a journalist to delve too deeply into the affairs of intelligence agencies.

But obviously, there is an alternative to all of this stupidity. Americans are better, and more critically, American culture is better than these race hustling halfwits. The man beside me is equal to me before God. He ought to be equal to me before the law, and one day, God willing, he will be. Communities that are already struggling don’t deserve the scourge of having their worst offenders released back into their midst with barely an acknowledgement of wrongdoing, again and again and again. Justice is still blind— to race, to political party, to everything except the question in the balance of her scales. Americans understand that and respect justice. But counterfeits abound, sullying everything they touch. “Racial justice” is just racial supremacy for browner brown-shirts. “Social justice” is socialist tyranny, returned in its most wretched and contemptible form: a patronizing but demonic voice telling society to kill itself for its own good. These so-called forms of justice refuse to be blind, cannot accept that men are equal, and their judgments are accordingly perverse.

Well, fie on them all. We beat the Nazis when their leader was named Hitler. Now their stupider and more depressive successors have chosen Ibram X. Kendi as their leader, and we’ll beat them again. And we mortally wounded communism, but we didn’t finish the job. That was a mistake. This time we ought to learn the lesson we knew from the movies as kids, and not turn our back until the monster is definitely dead.

American culture is the ultimate inherited treasure of Western civilization. It is thousands of years of lessons on building the best, most productive, safest, most trustworthy human culture. It allows for cooperative coexistence of people with a wide number of harmless variations, broader than virtually any other culture, and well it should, for this treasure is the rightful inheritance of every American, of every race and creed, be they born here or abroad. Shared properly it is both more valuable than any redistributed wealth— not least because it is a source of ongoing success rather than the disbursement of stolen goods— and more durable than any material thing in this uncertain world. Embody it and teach it to your children. There will always be tyrants, arguing for why now, today, this time, one group or another is special and should be treated differently. But they are wrong.

               All men… all men… are created equal.

America’s Healthcare is not the worst in the world, but that’s only because the rest of the world is further along on the road towards socialism and everything centralized.

Since 2008 and the increasing centralization of everything, ours has gotten halfway to as stupid as the rest of the world except Canada which outright kills people and China, where they come to your house and kill you if they feel like it.

Thursday we had a doctor’s appointment and both of us got prescriptions which are urgently needed, not to say vital. We are leaving town tomorrow, on a trip we’ve nicknamed “The Grand Tour” that will keep us out of the house for two weeks.

…. and we’re trying to get the prescriptions for a week.

This is partly the doctor, partly the pharmacy. Somehow, when I asked the doctor to send my Adderal to the one store in town that had it on hand, not only didn’t it get sent, but I got transferred there. So I kept waiting for a call from my pharmacy to pick up the prescriptions…. and nothing. A call on Friday late resolved that.

And then the Pharmacy. So, the Pharmacy finds out from the insurance that our prescription isn’t covered, and they SUPPOSEDLY faxed the doctor. In a year and a half not a single one of those faxes has got through. IF they’re actually sending them, they have the wrong fax number. BUT never mind. (We have reason to think they never arrived, because the doctor was genuinely shocked at us still being without a prescription after a month.)

So we call the doctor. The doctor is trying to get things that will be approved. After… oh, an entire day of one of their people working on us non-stop, we get a call at 8 am today saying that we can have these alternatives. Note both alternatives are retarded. One is a different brand of something I tried before, which doesn’t work, and raises my cancer risk. BUT I have to try three of these, before they re-approve the med I was on for 5 years that worked, before our prescription insurance changed. Since we don’t want to spend $700 a month, we go “sure, we’ll try it. Get it out of the way.” THE OTHER ONE IS MAYBE $100 dollars cheaper than the prescribed, in a thousands of dollars med. WHICH IS URGENTLY NEEDED BY MY HUSBAND MORE THAN ME. I’m still waiting on a prescription from the replacement for Adderal, and that’s the doctor’s office, but they’re swamped, because, well, they’re dealing with the life saving stuff.

So, with that resolved and sent across town because our pharmacy can’t get it in before midday tomorrow, when we won’t be here, my husband calls on his prescription which was originally the same as mine that got refused. (Note that mine the substitution makes a little bit of sense, but none whatsoever for him. PLUS the pharmacy had told him it was “getting filled and would be ready Tuesday.” So he didn’t worry, and just called in case it would be easier at the other pharmacy where I was picking mine up. So he calls, and he gets told the pharmacy has “faxed your physician”. NOTE THAT THEY HADN’T TOLD HIM THERE WAS ANY PROBLEM WITH IT AT ALL. IN FACT, THE PHARMACY HAD TOLD HIM IT WAS “IN PROCESS” AND WOULD BE READY TODAY.

I can now pick up my modified prescription. So we tried to transfer Dan’s. We got the same “Your old prescription is being processed. We’ll call you when it’s done.” At this point I’ve been on hold with the doctor for over 40 minutes. I suspect they’re calling the pharmacy.

Look, this is all because of the bureaucrats in the middle. First it’s because medical insurance, which started to get around a fine bit of bureaucratic meddling “maximum wages” has morphed into an hydra of stupidity to the point that instead of being “insurance” it’s just a third party payer, which like all such distorts the market so you can’t afford to be without it. At the same time, of course, the government tried to “fix” healthcare by expanding insurance, because Obama is of course a foreign (In culture, I couldn’t care less where he was born) communist. And to him this makes perfect sense.

Like all government “solutions” this insanity is more wasteful than it would be without it.

Look, I don’t care how expensive my meds are. Tying up me, the doctor’s office, the pharmacy and doubtless someone at the insurance for almost three days has to cost more than that.

And BTW if I have to hear one more time to a COVID advert while waiting to talk to the pharmacy SOMEONE is going to die. Through a killing scream on my part.

It’s the same as the low-flush toilets you have to flush five times and therefore use double the water. It’s the same as the dishwashers that have to be put on pot scrubber and take three hours washing and use tons of water to actually clean.

All these central measures to save money not only end up costing more, but also end up costing lives.

We need to stop the insanity. Because this has gone too far and people are getting hurt.

There is on the left a peculiar blindness which in a way speaks very well of the people who have it, in another speaks very badly indeed, and in other ways makes you wonder if they’re aliens.

When faced with anything from disease to poverty to homelessness, they always come up with material causes. From the bizarre idea of the “Bee sting” that if you are poor you run into so many frustrating things that you can’t do anything to help yourself, to their very strange idea that poverty causes crimes and wars.

So, we end up with them being very sorry for robbers and murderers because they couldn’t help but do what they did, since they were so poor. This always makes me think of the once upon a time friend who was kidnapped at gun point in a grocery store and taken from ATM to ATM to empty his account and give the money to his kidnapper, but who ended this account with “I’m blessed that I’m not so poor I have to do that.”

If your jaw just dropped, mine did.

We have been poor — not right, now so much, because the kids are moving on to their own thing — and — when older son was tiny — poor enough that we didn’t know where food would come from. (Literally. We missed some meals. We sat outside a soup kitchen, but didn’t have the courage to go in. So next money we had we bought 50lbs of rice, and lived on that, more or less.) I have to say NEVER in the history of EVER have we felt we should steal money from…. anyone really.

Look, the part about the left that means they’re better than we’d expect, as people, is that they think it takes extraordinary circumstances for people to be lazy or larcenous enough to be “poor” (Poor now isn’t poor in, say, the middle ages, or even the early 20th century), they think it takes extraordinary circumstances for anyone to commit a crime (which means evil people wouldn’t exist), so they themselves must be relatively decent, self motivating, hard working people. On the other hand they’re probably envious, and view coveting someone else’s stuff or situation as reason enough to steal or hurt others. Or at least they view it as reason enough for other people.

The part where they are aliens? They seriously seem to think it’s all material.

“People are poor. If we give them money, they’ll be better off.” This when speaking as to the rest of human history, our poor are living better than the upper middle class of other eras, and might be living better than kings. (No? Well. Availability of food at relatively cheap prices; modern medicine — yes, ER but you know, it ends being more or less free –; heating in winter, cooling in summer; in the west relative peace and security.)

It is entirely possible the reason we have so many poor is that they already have too much and are too comfortable — as in they are getting what the monkey-brain, which was trained for the paleolithic identifies as “More than enough.” So, no they won’t do extraordinary work/effort. Because, well, no motivation. (Even for those of us who are broken and HAVE to do something sometimes it’s hard to make the effort.) In many ways the issues of poverty on the welfare system is children, living in their parents basement, because they haven’t been kicked out to sink or swim on their own.

In the same way, the left looks at homelessness and decides the problem is that there aren’t enough houses. This, btw, requires refusing to see that subsidized housing developments quickly become hell on Earth or that with few exceptions, the “homeless” are an interesting collection of addictions and mental illness, which is the real cause of their plight, and not some imaginary lack of “housing.” Which is why the left keeps building more and more subsidized housing, and the problem grows instead of shrinking.

This requires being aliens who have never met a human being.

Me? Personally I resent the “poor equals crime and war” thing the most. Because, you know what? The village was d*mn poor. We didn’t realize it, because everyone was poor. But you know what? Most of us were ‘poor but honest’. And you could, as a little kid, walk down main street in the dark of night, even carrying something relatively valuable, like food and clothing, and not be scared, let alone attacked.

It is insulting to all the people I knew in childhood — all that weren’t the one family who stole clothes from other people’s lines, and chickens from their hen houses — to believe that they “couldn’t help” but be thieves and murderers or even whores. Because none of that was true. Most people lived “tiny” lives, very restricted and carefully counted that they earned by the sweat of their brow. And they would have been furious if you called them poor, let alone criminals. They were also, always ready to hand over bread and butter to someone in need, even if they couldn’t afford to give an egg or a piece of meat (but that too, when they could.)

In fact, many times, the equation goes the other way. Someone decides he or she is too smart to work, and starts trying to make a living in shady ways. It’s not that crime doesn’t pay. It’s that like communism — who, now I think about it is also criminal — it only pays for a select few, at the top. The others? yeah, they barely manage a living, and often fall into addiction and other issues. And once you fall into crooked habits, it’s very difficult to pull up out of it and into “honest work” again, particularly if everyone assumes the bourgeois virtues are evil-bad and being criminal means you’re a victim.

So…. you know, this is how the left has rats in their head, and keep trying the same thing, now harder, when it doesn’t work.

I hated being poor, and I don’t know anyone who loves it. It hurts the rest of us to watch, particularly for children or other innocent victims.

But, as with the kid in the basement, at some point you have to wonder if you hurt the poor and criminal (as a class) and even the just poor on welfare by making the ride too cushy and being so incredibly compassionate that we let the public purse be extravagantly drained (Now for illegal entrants into the country) and let communities — we’re looking at you, NYC — live in fear.

Because as someone or other said, to be kind to the cruel you always end up being cruel to the kind.

The few people who live in public housing because of genuine issues and disabilities get their lives turned into hell by criminals and drug addicts and barely human feral creatures.

And those who live in cities where our compassion just turns criminals loose live in fear or die needlessly because of that “compassion.”

And people who could otherwise start at the bottom and learn skills and become valuable members of society and rich even maybe, never get started because of the false compassion of our welfare which not only gives them the “minimum” but makes it hard to leave and strive.

People are people, and the poor and even the criminal have agency.

Let’s stop enabling and start demanding they act as human beings capable of thought and action.

*Sorry this is late and semi-disjointed. It’s been a whole day of fighting with insurance to get a prescription filled. I don’t even know if it worked, as of right now.*

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 CEDAR SANDERSON: The Case of the Perambulating Hatrack

She was trouble, and from the moment she sailed into his office in search of a PI, Soldagh Dennessey was caught in her wake.
In a city where the streets started mean and went worse, Soldagh had carved a relatively solitary existence out between the goblins in their dens of minty iniquity, and the gnomes who’d snitch on their own mothers for rent money. Rough as it was, he’d come from worse family, and had no intention of going back.
As the case grows tangled and terrifying, Soldagh is starting to suspect the past he’s been avoiding lies at the bleeding heart of the matter. And only the few friendships he’s made and an unexpected ally might be enough to save them now…

FROM CAITLIN WALSH: Mama Bunny #1: Comics and Stories

Parenting is tough, but it’s also rewarding. And occasionally even hilarious. Now collected for the first time, follow Mama Bunny and her family through this series of mostly-autobiographical strips and written stories as they navigate the ups and downs of dinnertime, chores, and all the other day-to-day adventures of a stay-at-home mom trying to raise and teach two children.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion in Paradise

All Col. Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., USSFM – the Lion of God – wanted was a little piece of paradise to call her own.

Being stuck on a desert world – even if she was the CO of the premiere battalion of the 1st U.S. Space Force Marines that was based there – was not getting her any beach time. Mostly because, without an ocean, there’s really no beach at all.

But she’s got a fix for that problem.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Highway to Tartarus

Insanity seems to run rampant in the immortal population, and Hades seems to be the one the Fates tap to contain them all; however, this time, Hades, and Kyra, the former goddess of War from Atlantis, have to find and catch the one who’s gone dangerously insane: Deshayna, Kyra’s identical twin, and the former goddess of Death.

Along for the ride are a pregnant Persephone, Hel from the Norse pantheon (and Hades’ and Persephone’s lover), Tyr and Thor, and Kyra’s adopted daughter Rowan.

The seven of them follow rumors, leads, and death-god connections around the world in an RV that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside, while trying to maintain a bare semblance of normalcy despite the chaos of never knowing when or where their Fates-assigned mission will end…or if it will end them.

FROM R. COOTS: Devour the Stars: A Dark Space Opera

He’s become the ultimate killer. Is it enough to make them all pay?

Fleet Warlord Syrus will never forgive the Empire for what they took from him. Pursuing his lifelong mission of vengeance, he’s startled to find two women in cryosleep on an abandoned planet and moves them to his ship. But his troubles triple when one of them wakes to discover she’s part of a harem and cuts down half his men in a bloody killing spree.

With alarms ringing in his head about the remote world and its lethal beauty, Syrus must quickly figure out the mysteries of this forsaken solar system. But when physical contact with the woman reveals an imposing secret, the disturbed commander will have to fight a mutiny and turn his quest for retribution into a battle for survival.

Can Syrus make it through the crisis alive and finally exact his revenge?

Devour the Stars is the explosive first book in the Devour the Stars space opera series. If you like brutal worlds, characters navigating trauma, and gritty action, then you’ll love R Coots’s dark tale.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Phoenix Dreams

In Greek myth, the phoenix is a bird that rises from its own ashes. Growing up in the city named for it, Toni knew the story well, and being a gamer made her used to death being negotiable.

During a visit to her grandfather’s ranch, she discovered a cache of books and videos from the lost golden age of space travel. Entranced by the enthusiasm of Roger Chaffee for his upcoming spaceflight, she was shocked and angered to learn the disaster that happened only days after his interview.

When she expressed her desire to get him his spaceflight, her family’s anger came as an even bigger shock. But she refused to forget, no matter how hard her parents tried to distract her, to prevent her from researching online.

Her determination would lead her along strange paths that would end in a desperate cross-country chase and the realization of a dream decades deferred.

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: The Hearts’ Enchantment

Heart’s Enchantment brings together 12 fantasy and romance authors to spin stories of love and romance set in medieval worlds. From retired warriors to spies and nobles, romance and love finds a way.

Authors include Cedar Sanderson, Misha Burnett, Mel Todd, Nico Murray, and more!

From sweet to spicy, there’s something to satisfy any fan of fantasy, romance, or both!

BY J. ALLAN DUNN, BROUGHT BACK BY D. JASON FLEMING: On The Knees Of The Gods (Annotated): The Classic Pulp Fantasy.

Peter Brent, American, steps through a laurel hedge in Greece in 1939 — and is transported back to the days of the gods! But getting Zeus’s attention isn’t always the best idea…

• This iktaPOP Media edition contains a new introduction giving historical and genre context.

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: CLEAR

The other day, in my second-hand-tv watching (Husband is watching something, and I’m nearby, working or chatting with friends via computer) I got caught by a documentary on Octopi and how smart they are.

For the record, and so people understand… Well, I was going to type that Octopus is a delicacy in Portugal, but that’s not actually true. Portugal is — or was when I was growing up — a staple. You would get it if there was no decent fish. And mostly we ate fish — which thank you I heartily dislike — except Sundays when we might have chicken.

So– anyway, I was watching that documentary, and there was stuff about how smart they are, and we saw this little pink octopus tap out words and enjoy pets and stuff, and I was feeling pretty guilty about all of its brethren and sisteren I ate over the decades.

And then Dan segued into a documentary about octopi in the wild….

Well, look, they’re very smart, yes. And the adults will eat the new hatchlings. Even their new hatchlings.

Suddenly I was feeling much better. Sure, I’d eaten beings that might be sentient, but heck, they ate each other too.

Which brings us to: Yeah, so do humans. Which wouldn’t give me the warm fuzzies about something eating us, but still…

The point is they might be really smart, but that doesn’t make them moral creatures. Just like we’re not naturally moral creatures, no matter how smart.

In fact most of the world doesn’t share our morality. And by that I don’t mean “Don’t sleep with your sister” or “don’t enslave other human beings” or “don’t eat other human beings.” I mean, sure vast portions of the Earth still infringe the first two, openly or not, and the third still happens, though not in most floridly visible areas and not in ways Westerners see. I’m talking about more basic stuff, like don’t kill, don’t steal to the point it can’t be said you have any concept of private property. Most of the Earth doesn’t consider anyone not of their immediate group human. Not really.

Which brings to: Intelligence isn’t moral. And it isn’t admirable in and of itself.

This is important because we’ve lost track of that. When we talk of our best and brightest, we mean it in an IQ and knowledge sense, and we assume this will make them moral. When we talk of “Such and such civilization was so creative and look at everything they invented, we ignore the piles of skulls and rotting carcasses of their enemies. And their enemies often being honestly someone who pissed off their king.

When we make IQ the equivalent of all goodness, we forget the millennia that humans spent doing art installations with freshly killed young men and horses.

I don’t actually care if they had the swiftest chariots and the most wonderful palaces. We are better than they were because we are at least civilized enough not to kill people for decorative purposes.

This stuff needs to be said.

Over the last several decades we’ve been soaked in the idea of noble savage and the left’s insanity with their nostalgie de la boue. We’ve been told natural is better; untutored is better; doing what comes naturally is the only way; live as if you were a simple savage and you’ll be a saint.

All this is poppycock. Morality and the ability to learn in a civilized society require learning and teaching, and curbing your natural instincts. No matter how yummy my babies were, I never chomped on them. No matter how tired I am, we don’t actually live in our own filth. (Or the cat’s filth, for that matter. Though Havey distributes it liberally.)

Noble savages are a myth. Savages are just…. savages. And savagery — barbarism — means that the humans caught in it suffer. All of them. Barbarism shortens lives, and not just because your neighbor needed dinner and you looked tasty.

There is a lot to be said for this artificial lifestyle of ours: food relatively easily obtainable, lights at the push of a button. Showers at not much expense. Homes that are heated or cooled.

It is artificial, sure. And it requires the use of tons of artificial stuff, which is why the cultists of nature are sure it must be destroying something and killing something. Because…. it’s not natural.

And thank heavens it’s not natural. Enough of fetishizing natural.

Keep doing that long enough and you’re picking the bugs off your neighbors carcass before you roast him. And I don’t care what your IQ is, that’s no way to live.

Even if you have a shiny chariot.

I don’t suppose I’ll eat octopus again, or at least it’s not likely. I never liked it much, anyway. (I used to refer to octopus rice as spoiling rice with octopus, when mom made it.)

But if I have to I won’t feel guilty. They might be smart, but they eat each other. So I will not feel guilty for eating them.

Now when Octopus develop a language and a sense murder is wrong…. Then I’ll worry about it.

And while I don’t intend to start eating murderers, I’m also not going to brood and cry over the past civilizations and cultures that vanished. I don’t care what they invented. if they killed each other for sport, and ate each other? They were savages.

Raw intelligence means nothing. Applied intelligence that creates a society in which most individuals are relatively free and prosperous.

That means something.

And that is worth preserving.

Now go do it.