Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I come not to complain about employment problems, but to try to figure out why “everything is broken.”

Most of us worked sh*tty jobs coming out of college, or while in college, or just starting out if we didn’t go to college. This is part of the American work experience. It’s like living in the stupidly cr*ppy student apartments or starting homes. (I actually lucked out on those, which I suspect is compensated for by older son’s first apartment, where what should be a corner cabinet in the kitchen was just a space filled with dirt. We didn’t dig in the dirt. For obvious reasons. This was also the apartment where the doorbell rang if you flushed the toilet.) It’s a bragging point for older adults, including parents and grandparents. “Oh, lord, remember that apartment where if you touched the stove the smoke alarm went off?”

And the truth is, because of the culture, most people are really proud of their “I ate frogs” period. It’s America, not other places, mind you.

Yes, you do get snowflakes complaining that they have to work at all, but if you go back, you’ll see the same going back for decades. The snowflakes they shall always be with us.

But the nature of jobs itself has changed, which the culture itself hasn’t adapted to. This is normal. The culture lags reality by two or three generations. That’s why we’re still seeing movies and books where the “grandparents” (objectively about my age or a little older) disapprove of women working. In fact, by the seventies pretty much no one under forty disapproved of women working. By the nineties, when I could stay home to mind my infant and try to break into writing, I was looked at askance for NOT having a job outside the home. Also in the nineties, I shocked a younger woman when she found out I had a post-graduate degree, because SURELY no woman smart enough to have a degree would be a stay at home mom. (Even if I was trying to break into writing.)

So, culture lags reality. In the late eighties, when Dan was talking to a company near his parents, my MIL advised me if they were serious (they were, though we turned down the offer for various reasons) they’d want to meet me and have a dinner with me and the other spouses of people in the department. This was apropos of the fact I had brought no “good clothes” up, only jeans and t-shirts. Dan and his father worked at similar levels. Apparently 20 or 30 years earlier companies vetted spouses? Anyway, the whole concept was completely bizarre and I accepted that was her experience, but I didn’t even know what to make of it.

By the eighties we heard tales of corporations that “looked after you.” You were hired for whatever frog-eating position was available, and then there was a ladder. As long as you were decent, honest, and a hard worker you’d be promoted.

I’ll be honest, I have no idea if that was ever true. In Portugal it kind of was, but Portugal runs on Roman models, and it’s all patronage and vassalage, all personal.

If it was true, I suspect what changed it was the huge elephant of the boomer generation moving through the snake of the system. Because there would be a glut of employees, so it was a buyers market for employers and they would need to offer less and could be more demanding. (The laws of the market apply to everything, yes. More than you’d think. A glut in supply means the demand gets more finicky.)

I know our experience of the job market is you found something, and then if you ever wanted a raise or a change in status, you went looking. And then again. And for a while there in the nineties, when Dan worked for a large corporation, there were annual layoffs and you never knew who would be cut. So we’d spend a month holding our breath as the ax fell and fell and fell again.

The good side of that kind of job market was that while it was almost impossible to advance within a corporation (unless you had certain markers that had nothing to do with your competence) it was fairly easy to get a job just off the bat by applying. Oh, you still had to send out hundreds of resumes, but you’d likely get something.

This changed after the great crash of 01-03. Suddenly the only way to find a job is to know someone. Same as in Portugal, in fact. I’m not sure why, but I’d guess something about unemployment or laws relating to that has changed, so people are less willing to take a chance on a wild card. It’s usually what causes these dramatic shifts.

At the same time, we started seeing bachelors being required for the most trivial of work. We’ve all seen advertisements for managing a coffee shop: must have bachelors.

Now, we know perfectly well where that comes from. I mean, I have read essays from college freshmen that I would have been ashamed to turn in in first grade. But the thing to understand is that it’s not the kids fault. To get to the point of people being so completely unable to express themselves in writing, a LOT of effort has gone in to PREVENTING people from learning. This is yet another finger pointing at our broken education system.

And part of the problem here is if you get someone non stem with a bachelors, they’re not likely much better at expressing themselves in writing.

Also even if they are better, they have no way to let it be known. The fact that jobs are deathly afraid of giving competence tests for fear of lawsuits is causing this nonsense, and making it almost impossible to get a job, because employers can’t trust anyone to be competent, even with credentials.

Meanwhile those who are employed are working their behinds off. The best way to signal that you can do a job, is that you are already doing a job. And then everyone wants you. Almost everyone I know who isn’t a free-lancer — I know a lot of free-lancers — and who is a mind-worker has two or three jobs and another gig on the side, because they were given an offer they couldn’t refuse.

All this while the “”Scrabbling bottom” who are mostly young and without connections are … scrabbling. Usually in retail and food service. Where they are treated as having already failed, if they’re there, and are given ridiculous job hours, etc. And then called lazy if they quit that and…. go home to tend to their kids or whatever. Oh, and if they get promoted, they usually take sniping from above and below. Because retail is a crab bucket, as is writing, and other places where there are a lot of eager widgets for a smaller number of positions.

“But there aren’t enough people applying!” you’ll say. And that’s true, probably. Maybe. Absent HR monkey games. But again, culture takes a long time to change. And this was formed when there was a vast pool scrabbling to get in.

It is clear and obvious that whatever is going on in our work force, is not conducive to getting the best people hired, or even to getting the work done once you’ve been hired.

I’ve floated several ideas of why this is, including, of course HR games and our broken education and event he fact that our workforce is tipping increasingly female, except in a few select professions. (And that means that the social mode of female applies and females — at least those who haven’t been taught to act male in work — have their own social games, which interfere with modern workplaces (though they are amazingly well suited to serraglios or the harems of proto-hominids. Go figure. Possibly workplaces resemble more the friendly competition of the hunt.))

Over all of this is government and litigation nonsense. Certain people must be hired, due to characteristics that have absolutely nothing to do with their performance of the job. And the DIE (die, die die!) nonsense is just a codifying of that. I will say, yes, there are women and people of various shades who are as or more competent than the palest of the pale. I flatter myself I’m one of those. And this is why no good is served by hiring for “has vagina” or “can tan” because that only encourages the random hiring of people with those characteristics, not those who are as — or more — competent. Anyone with an ounce of competence at their job should despite the DIE nonsense. It is a poison pill to the work marketplace.

How do we change from that? I’m not sure. It’s only clear that we have to change. And again, the left’s crazy rush to cram even more of the “doesn’t work” down our throat will only accelerate the change. Because it will accelerate the crash. Right now almost all the workplaces I have visibility in to barely work, except for the heroic work of one or two out of a 100 or so employees. The exceptions are small companies, and tightly knit groups, where things still more or less work. (And I suspect those companies, like those individuals in the bigger companies, are pulling disproportionate weight.) Add more of the dross and staffing of “widgets that look like this” and a collapse will happen, which will hasten a rebuild.

What the rebuild looks like, I have absolutely no idea.

I will only say that no, I don’t hold it against anyone, young or old, caught in this mess who decides to “lie flat”. My own experience of a broken marketplace for labor, with traditional publishing — it was broken when I came in, and it kept breaking more. There was no ladder up. There was no ramp. It was a sinkhole, and I kept myself from sinking for twenty some years by sheer, stubborn will power and refusal to die — is that it breaks you after a while. You take too many kicks in the teeth, and you can’t get up. You get the football taken away at the last minute one too many times, and you just can’t motivate yourself to run for it once more.

But as much as I don’t hold it against people, work is a necessity to live or even “merely” to survive. Most of the problems we’re having come from the fact that young people aren’t getting their foot on the ladder. Can’t even see a ladder. And are burning out caught in the sinkhole, while the cost of getting into the sinkhole gets higher in education and time.

Again, I want to point out I’ve experienced this in publishing where by the time I came along breaking in could take a decade, but once in you were treated as a lottery ticket to be disposed of if you didn’t bring a disproportionate pay off. It’s a matter of supply-glut.

And yet, we hear employers are hurting for employees. But the way the market is behaving is “we have a glut.” Could be hangover from the boomers. Could be. Or it could be something else and I can’t guess what.

The problem with corrupted statistics at every level is that it gives a high confidence we know what’s going on, while we lack even minimal understanding into what’s actually going on.

At this point it feels like we’re on our way to losing vast portions of two generations to “failure to launch” which affects everything from marriage to…. well, another generation. And whatever the officials are seeing must be dire as they’re now insisting we need the open border so we don’t run out of people. Think about it. All while the market behaves like it has too many people-widgets applying for jobs.

Can I tell you what to do to fix it? No. I can tell you to get as many abilities and as much knowledge as you can, and keep pushing. I suspect there’s a big…. crash (an earth-shattering kaboom?) ahead, and we’ll need everything we have to rebuild.

But lacking a crystal ball I can’t even tell you the shape of it. Just to keep pushing. Yes, I know it’s hard. The times that (to quote grandma) my heart broke, so I fashioned my gut into a new heart and kept going are more than the fingers of one hand. I know. My hair didn’t get white all by itself.

However, I do know we’re going to need a lot of capable people in the future. Not just for us, but for civilization. Keep trying.

In case you thought that my rant at the educational system was the worst you’d see about what faces the new generations — and frankly has been going on since I was a young kid, but it’s worsened significantly — you were kind of wrong.

The working situation is completely broken as well. Not just for kids, but for them it must seem bizarre.

Recently at one of my groups, someone asked if anyone had ever had a job where they weren’t either cheated on money or time…. The silence was deafening, except for one whose main work experience was abroad.

So–

Work is broken too. Not just at the lowest “entry” levels, but all the way up. We’ll get into how and some ideas into why, both cultural and economic. BUT the main thing we’re going to examine here over the next few posts is “Why are people not working?” or rather “What’s with all the help wanted signs since the covidiocy?”

I know, yes, the standard, routine answer on the right. It starts at “They are paid for not working” and if you hear that in the voice of an old man yelling at clouds, you’d be absolutely right. Partly because it’s the easiest and most stupid of answers. (These two are often combined.)

My friend Tom Knighton over at Tilting at Windmills has done an article on the ridiculous levels of welfare benefits in some states, and he’s not precisely wrong. Though what you should take from that is not “Wow, people choose to be on welfare rather than work” but rather marvel at the number of people who will break themselves in two in sh*tty jobs rather than go on welfare.

As I said, one of the most heartwarming things in 2016 is that Trump was running on bringing back jobs so people could work, while Hilary was running on “We’ll pay you to say home and exist and people voted for Trump in overwhelming enough numbers to overcome pre-planned fraud.

I’m not saying the welfare state isn’t crazy, or that the temptations not to work and just be paid for existing aren’t there.

No. My point is WHAT HAS CHANGED SINCE THE COVIDIOCY?

And if you’re going to yell at the clouds that “Well, they were giving money for staying home” you’re not particularly well informed on the particulars. Yes, a ton of money was handed out, a lot of it, of course, embezzled or otherwise misdirected, because well, it’s a government project.

BUT individually people didn’t even get enough to keep them comfortably through the lockdowns, much less all the way to now. Yeah, people have benefited from “Student loan payment suspension” but the only ones who could take that and not work were probably already not working.

Trust me on this, I know a lot of people in service industries, who were locked out of work, and who were scrambling — often finding other (sometimes better) jobs — during lockdown, because it didn’t cover even partial expenses.

And not all states froze rents, etc. But the “Worker dearth” is nation wide.

So, what is going on?

Well, part of it is something none of us can understand. Yes, we have talked about want ads for show only because they hope to hire foreigners.

But why would restaurants and grocery stores have signs saying help wanted, and you drop off an application and never hear from them again?

No one seems to know. Mind you, going in and dropping off an application gets you better results than applying via website or chain-website, and that might be HR or simply “bot” issues. But even dropping in an application, and even for the older set, around my age, who no, are not going in drunk or dressed weirdly (I’m anticipating the easy excuse, see) the rate of response is nowhere near what you would expect from all the visible “We need help right now” signs.

Oh, and before you mention people who work retail or food service a few days then quit without collecting a pay check: I have bad news for you. That was going on when I worked retail in 86/87. Sometimes people worked two weeks, then never showed up to collect a pay check. I never understood it, and still don’t. Even if the amounts at the time were ridiculously low (I think I made something like $80 a week, on a good week with lots of hours) it was money I’d earned, and if it were me, I’d go back for the paycheck. But hey.

And I have no idea. I can’t explain it. It has occurred to me that since business is also down (the recession, but also the fact that probably a bunch of people learned to cook in lockdown) this is an excuse to limit the number of tables and/or days one is open and therefore save some money. “Downsize without appearing to” in other words. I don’t know. But it’s possible. At least for restaurants. No clue as to stores.

The other part is that I think — and there have been articles hinting at it, mostly from the irate “erasing gains” perspective, then they go suddenly quiet — a lot of women have quit work to go home. Particularly mothers, tired of the school nonsense. (And that’s another thing, as there seem to be more people homeschooling than official figures account for. Which considering that schools get paid per capita. Well…)

But the thing to remember is that many young or newly wed women work in the service industry, particularly retail, so I’d expect that sector to be hardest hit by female defection. Which seems to be true, at least apparently.

I don’t know if other young-female fields are equally affected, because I have no insight into administrative and clerical jobs of various kinds.

Though I’d expect a lot of people in offices to have decided they’re not going back to in-person work, too, and have either found other jobs or simply figured out how to consolidate to a single salary per family. Not to mention, and there were any number, the young singles who moved back in with mom and dad, because of the lockdown, and who now are reconsidering their life path/training for other jobs. I know any number in that situation as well. And that affects both males and females.

The thing is that there has been a wild dislocation caused by the lockdowns. The left thought it would accelerate some sort of “paid for existing” thing in which people would just love to be locked and fed through a straw for the rest of their lives.

Because they really don’t understand humans, to the point we sometimes wonder if they’ve ever met any.

Instead, they have precipitated several situations they find distasteful: parents deciding to raise their own kids; various workers deciding they prefer working from home/moving away from the big cities; women deciding that they are paying for working fairly menial jobs and would rather not, and “female advancement” be shafted. Etc.

In fact, people took the lockdowns and the fall out and used it for greater liberty and personal choices, which as usual has baffled our would-be rulers.

But there seems to be something else going on, and for that we’re going to have to dive into what the heck is going on with working life, and why everything is broken there too.

We’ll do that tomorrow and the next couple of days (I’ll probably do something different on New Years, because.)

For now “Are there too few workers or too few jobs?” seems to be best answered with “yes” and it’s not all a mismatch either.

More tomorrow.

Here at According To Hoyt we like to Book Promo All The Time. We’re savage that way. I just had to wake the internet hamsters because they got a wee bit soused on port wine last night. They’re bad like that.

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. – SAH

FROM ALIDA LEACROFT BUT REALLY DAVE FREER: Georgina

I’VE READ THIS BOOK AND IT’S AMAZING. IT’S LIKE FINDING A LOST AGATHA CHRISTIE, WITH A BIT OF HEYER! GET IT. YOU WON’T BE SORRY.

April, 1836: Her missionary parents dead, Georgina Ross comes back to an unfamiliar England that she had left as a child. Alone and impoverished, she seeks shelter with her estranged grandfather, on his estate in rural Hampshire… Except it is not a peaceful refuge. She finds someone has attempted to murder her grandfather. He has suffered a head injury which has affected his memory, and left him unable to identify his attacker. Georgina becomes entangled with not only arson and robbery, but also the second son of the local squire, and a debonair, fashionable cousin she never knew she had. Struggling through uncertainty and present danger, Georgina must find her way, and her love.

FROM KAREN MYERS*: Broken Devices: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 3)

Book 3 of The Chained Adept

CHAINS WITHOUT WIZARDS AND A RISING COUNT OF THE DEAD.

The largest city in the world has just discovered its missing wizards. It seems the Kigali empire has ignited a panic that threatens internal ruin and the only chained wizard it knows that’s still alive is Penrys.

The living wizards and the dead are not her people, not unless she makes them so. All they have in common is a heavy chain and a dead past — the lives that were stolen from them are beyond recall.

What remains are unanswered questions about who made them this way. And why. And what Penrys plans to do to find out.

*WHOSE NAME I’VE BEEN MISSPELLING FOR 10 YEARS. I’M SORRY. I’M DYSLEXIC. YOU SHOULD HAVE SAID SOMETHING!

FROM MICHAEL WENBERG: The Morning Star

Fisherman Nick Savitch pops in to see his friends the nuns at a monastery on an island in remote Alaska, only to find them all dead … except for a mysterious ageless woman with striking green eyes and a young girl willing to go to any lengths to protect her. It turns out some of the scariest folks on earth are after the woman also known as the Morning Star, and their chase takes them from islands in the Gulf of Alaska to the heavily guarded confines of a Moscow hospital. This story has got all the historical intrigue of The DaVinci Code (without the deep detours into church history) and all the fast-paced action of a Jack Reacher story–only with richer, more interesting characters.

FROM JP MAC: How to Run a Marathon in 13 Years: How Hard Would You Fight for Your Dreams?

“. . . a real, raw, beautiful journey . . . . “— Coach Kate Martini Freeman, ultramarathoner, Ironman finisher, co-founder of Coyote Runners Training Group Injured while training for a marathon, distance runner JP Mac learns his knee is wrecked. He’s finished for good. Or is he? Discovering a revolutionary new method of running, Mac attempts to reinvent his form. But over time, fate unleashes a series of cruel challenges.Knee surgery is followed by shoulder surgery. Mac is diagnosed with cancer. A new form of cancer strikes next. Massive weight gain balloons him above 270 pounds. Mac plunges into a Marianas Trench of depression. He battles self-destructive urges. But the hope of running another marathon will not fade nor “go gentle into that good night.”Part training log, part diary, this award-winning, non-fiction memoir relates Mac’s incredible journey from washed-up marathoner to reborn runner. If you’ve ever been injured in a sport, this astonishing story is for you. If you’ve ever watched a dream slip away, this breath-taking tale is for you. Learn the amazing power of perseverance and mental toughness. Buy this book and discover the wonders that await when you allow your reach to exceed your grasp.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202211 Take Thanks

This booklet is an edited collection of the pamphlets published throughout the month of November. It covers the ever-worsening times we live in nowadays because our rulers demand it. As always, it covers current events with some observations of leftism and tyranny, with a bit of pop culture here-and-there.

We need a resistance movement more than ever. That’s basically what I’ve been aiming for in all the books so-far and it’s not going to stop until I do and so does everyone else.

FREE FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Vulcan’s Kittens (Children of Myth Book 1)

Linnea Vulkane is looking forward to a long, lazy summer on Grandpa Heff’s farm, watching newborn kittens grow up and helping out with chores. That all goes out the window the night Mars, god of war, demands her grandfather abandon her and return to Olympus for the brewing war. Now Old Vulcan is racing around the world and across higher planes with Sehkmet to gather allies, leaving Linn and an old immortal friend to protect the farm and the very special kittens. But even the best wards won’t last forever, and when the farm goes up in flames, she is on the run with a daypack, a strange horse, a sword, and an armful of kittens. Linn needs to grow up fast and master her powers, before the war finds the unlikely refugees…

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: doll

Click here or on the image below to download a (mostly) cleaned up collection of this year’s Christmas stories.

“We had a great civilization going, and we’d have made it, if only it weren’t for those darn kids.” Or perhaps you prefer “we are in a time of declining decliney decline, and nothing can save us from declining till we crash.” Or perhaps “Kids these days don’t want to work. In my day–“

I hope you’re happy repeating USSR agit prop, because that’s what all of those were at their origin. To be fair they fit in very well with the idea of the heroic parents who walked uphill both ways to school, in snow up to their knees, and whose children are pampered little flowers who ride the school bus. And both are what’s known as “prevalent and ineradicable bullsh#t”

However, if you haven’t caught on yet, the idea that our civilization was declining, that we were in decadence “like the Roman empire” and that children were corrupt hedonists were indeed propagated by the USSR. As was the sixties “rebellion” and the idea of a righteous generation who, of course, believed all the communist bullshit. The boomers, as depicted in the media, and as we know them in the humanities are indeed “kids these days” destroying civilization into their 70s and now complaining about the younger kids, as they tantrum their way to the grave. On the good side, they didn’t get their way on their own, it took pervasive and unified propaganda, of a type that’s now hard to deploy on younger generations without the mass industrial means of communicating.

The people who swallow the MSM hook line and sinker are now mostly older than I, not “kids these days.”

But… They have it too easy!

Define too easy. Go ahead, do it. Because what you’re seeing is where your challenges were mitigated for them, not where they have new challenges you never even thought of.

Take for instance me. Yeah, my dad walked five miles to school each way, rain or shine. I had it easy, as I mostly rode the train or the bus.

But my dad, though he grew up under a socialist regime too (we both did. I just got hit by both, national and international socialism, and the instability in between) had a certain amount of stability and of knowing what to expect.

My challenge? Curriculum could and did change sometimes three times a year. School might or might not convene. A teacher might teach us what was on the curriculum, or he might have us paint a revolutionary mural…. None of which helped with the fact that in 9th grade a placing exam happened, which I had to answer whether or not I’d ever been taught.

Not only didn’t my parents see that challenge, but they would both berate me for not knowing things they knew at my age — not only had no one taught it, but I’d been kept busy NOT learning. Honestly, without Summer vacation, I’d be illiterate — and tell me how easy I had it and why was I complaining.

This gives me great empathy with “kids these days.”

Yes, they grew up with more “material goods” and greater ease than most of us did. Not all of them, mind you, but the average. But the question is: does that really make their lives easier?

I noticed early on, and remember my kids are in and heading for their thirties at speed, that the kids were being kept busy with busywork. And graded mostly on busywork. You could have straight As, but you didn’t turn in the worksheet, or you colored the flowers on it the wrong color (in 10th grade) and you’d fail.

They weren’t being TAUGHT anything, but they were being kept very busy with make work. And my countering it, often ran into the stone wall of “but we don’t have time” — because they were scheduled after school, too.

And it got appreciably worse in the same school system three to four years later, when younger son hit it. For one, all the halfway decent teachers had quit or been run up the ladder to administrator.

Look, I come from a place where my ancestors lived for a very long time. There are things we know about the family line. “Will eat History for breakfast and ask for more.” “Usually good at math, but might transpose digits.” and “Will learn languages, whether naturally good at them or not.”

So when my kids couldn’t — not wouldn’t. COULDN’T — learn French I became concerned. And did a deep dive into their class.

They weren’t being taught. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is that they were being kept so busy NOT learning that they couldn’t learn even accidentally.

They were given French teen magazines and told to cut pictures, and make collages. They were taught to sing French songs. What they were never given was the basics with which to decode those things into language- learning experiences.

“But that’s because it was easy on them.” Well, actually no. It was easy on the teacher. I mean, she could have fun and be the kids “friend”. Unlike my favorite languages teacher who gave us vocabulary sheets every day and tested and corrected every night.

The kids, meanwhile, felt like failures because they weren’t learning. And everyone told them how easy and fun this should be. They thought it was their personal failure.

Let this fit in as a micro cosmos for “Children these days.”

Our kids are stressed — you’d be shocked to know how many, particularly girls, are on psychiatric drugs by prescription — and unhappy, and running in place, all the while being told how easy they have it, and “pull up your socks, young thing.”

Kids aren’t raised only by the schools. They’re raised by a culture. As broken as ours is — and it is. They are the generation being raised by the generation that was raised by the boomers, who were raised by the lost children of world war II — it retains that “Grandpappy lived in a wood cabin, in the snow, and he made good. So, look at all I have, I should do better!”

Only…. it’s almost impossible. It starts in the schools. And btw, of course, I’m sure there’s exceptions, but let me break in here to say both boys and girls are being broken in peculiar and different ways. And are being denied what they most need, while being told it’s all THEIR personal fault.

My kids were 12 or so when I realized in every class the boys were falling behind. There’s a reason for this. Boys were being asked to do the impossible for them.

You see, boys and girls mature at different speeds. In general, boys of 12 have no sense of time or scheduling. Girls do.

By 12 the “button counting” had got to “Must deliver work on this day, in this way, without being reminded.” Now both kids are ADD (AF) but still. They were being asked to do things they couldn’t do. They sort of managed, because they were more afraid of me than … well, anyone. BUT it left marks in anxiety, depression and self-loathing.

Meanwhile the girls were excelling in school, partly because at this point the process is pretty much designed for the average female.

Remember men and women are different, at the nervous system level. We were shaped by evolution. Men are good at short-burst, difficult, competitive tasks. Women are good at indoor, repetitive tasks involving a lot of boredom and conforming to senseless standards. Which is what schooling has devolved to. Mostly because almost every teacher is a woman, but also because it minimizes work for teachers. The fact that it also renders politically-correct results, in that the boys give up and all award-winning students are female, is just icing on the cake.

So, girls are being told they’re so smart, and they can have it all, and why would they throw themselves away on a family and children. Note, this was already true in my day. In the 80s I was shunned at every social occasion because I stayed home and tried to write. It was just an excuse to be a housewife, and my being such meant I was both stupid and lazy.

This is the pressure the girls are under. They are taught to deny perfectly normal instinctive longings in favor of “having a career.”

And of course, mostly people don’t have a career. They have — at best — a job.

Now, at least most girls are leaving schools and colleges with credentials and usually have an easier time than boys finding jobs. The problem comes after, because their “ladies A” schooling didn’t in fact prepare them to do the JOB. Which is why when they go into the workplace, the “real” job must be social justice, or something like. Because they can’t actually do the job.

And then there’s the boys and men in their parents’ basement. Or working at making a game. Or whatever. Why? Because most young men with degrees or not (And graduating requires more than it did of you, trust me. Doesn’t mean they learn more, but they have to jump through some insane hoops) are having a heck of a time finding work.

We’ll go into this later, but a lot of those “now hiring” signs seem to be something else, because people can’t actually get hired. And at a corporate level, they prefer to hire foreigners on work visas. Chances are high your hospital is being taken over by China-trained physicians, for instance. Which will end in tears, because the training is not the same. But there we are. In the same way, they’ve started showing up even in engineering jobs where clearance is needed.

Why? Well, they’re cheaper. And also since the schools aren’t producing enough people with the right credentials to take the jobs, the leviathan of our government is making it easy to import what looks like from the credential side the same type of thing.

BUT to every family, the kid who is unemployed or under employed; the girl who has a job but is increasingly more neurotic and unhappy; the family that breaks apart; the kids that never are born is a private tragedy. Each family feels a deep sense of shame and failure over these.

I only know because I know several of them, at a lot of socio-economic levels, and across the spectrum of many many ways to fail.

The liberals have an easier time of this. They can say it’s systemic this or that, or that their kids is some special form of disabled and therefore just can’t do this.

BUT the conservative families eat themselves alive. Because they tried. They tried so hard. And they have standards to which they held their kids and —

It took me till the middle of last year to go “You know, if it’s one kid here and there it’s a personal failure. If it’s everywhere, all at once, and most people in this age range are failing…. it’s the system that’s broken.”

This was particularly funny because I’ve seen this before. As a writer, I came into a field where they’d publish your book, on a smallish print run and put it in the book store. IF IT FAILED TO BECOME A BESTSELLER OVERNIGHT IT WAS BECAUSE YOU WERE A BAD WRITER. And of course, most books failed to become bestsellers, given they had no publicity and people didn’t even find them till they were out of print. But each writer was assured it was his or her fault, and lived with the shame of failure, and tried to do better while being paid less.

This kind of abusive system destroys people. And it’s everywhere right now, but it’s particularly in education. They’re preparing and training kids to a world that doesn’t exist, and then blaming them when they fail in the real world.

Now, yes, most kids try, and probably about half find some kind of job and start clawing their way upward. But most of them are extremely under paid (the boys) or extremely pushed (the girls) and finding no time to marry and have kids, or even to plan to purchase/own a house.

They’re flailing and drowning, and throwing them anvils while saying “In my day we knew how to swim” is not helping anything.

Education as set up is eating the seed corn to keep education majors happy. This can’t go on.

Fortunately there’s indications it won’t. The covidiocy sent people home to teach their kids.

Is it too little too late?

Might be. Might not. The future is a very long time. Right now I’m just saying what’s broken. Because half the fight is knowing you (or your kids) aren’t alone.

Only when we internalize that, can we start fixing things.

Everything Is Broken – Riding the Catastrophic Change Wave, Part I

This is going to one of those posts that’s Multi- Part because it’s actually impossible to even delineate everything that is wrong with our economy and cultural situation in one post, without defaulting to simple answers.

In our situation, simple answers are mostly stupid. At best they explain a percentage of what’s wrong, but very often they don’t even explain that.

In my defense, this started with something that cost me most of the morning yesterday, and pushed publishing the short story to the last minute.

It started in the Huns discord group, with someone saying that people don’t want to work anymore because they are staying home and being paid for it.

This is completely wrong, particularly if viewed as “what’s happened since 2020.” The Covid payments were always limited, and the people they “helped” were a small number. It actually and for real explains nothing.

Yes, there might be a person or two in the three hundred million who is not working and is getting paid for staying home on the sofa. And we wish them and their trust funds good luck.

But it doesn’t explain all the restaurants with signs saying “Help wanted” while at the same time people, including some here, are desperately looking for work and finding none. It doesn’t explain, further up the skilled ladder, the scamalia (totally a word) of bosses who think they purchased slaves, and are paying workers minimal amounts for maximal output, while increasing the workers’ discomfort, it doesn’t explain … well…. much of anything.

So, let me lay out what we’re looking at under “everything is broken.”

• Our education system is broken. We are increasingly known for schools that don’t work. This is survivable when those schools are primary or even secondary and the rest picks up the slack, but we’re now in a situation where let’s face it our colleges also don’t work
  While it’s still possible to get an excellent education and graduate in a timely manner, no, it’s not millenials being lazy. Schools try to maximize the time it will take for anyone to graduate, and push as much irrelevant stuff into it as possible. Even people with prestigious degrees admit — if you get them in private — that they learned most of what they needed for their job once they went to work, and that they were not in fact taught much of anything.
  
• Our distribution is broken. This is the bastard child of “just in time” by “let’s maximize our profits by contracting all production overseas, sometimes to literal slave-states.” All of it coated in “Fossil fuels bad.” Until Flu powder is developed, there is in fact no way to transport production without using fossil fuels.
  
• Our production is broken. Look, yeah, sometimes things can be done cheaper/more efficiently overseas, but you pay for it in other ways, including being tied up in cultures that just don’t work and not being able to trust what you get. You also pay for it in a vast number of purposeless population. Only socialists would think it makes any sense, to pay people for existing. In fact, it robs life of interest. Man was born to strive, and woman doubly so.
  Thing is, with tech now, we probably can bring most of that production home and do better. In the nineties I toured a plastic goods factory. This is the sort of thing that in China would employ 100 hard working slave-laborers. In the US it was run by a guy who turned it on, and kept an eye on the machines.
  Now, that was the nineties. I bet it’s more so now.
  
• Our commerce and service industry is broken. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the customer is always right. And that’s great, except that you also need to protect your employees from abuse, and strike a happy medium (she won’t be happy after you strike her.) You also need to be sure the schedule and work makes SOME sort of sense, and remembering your employees are humans helps.
  
• Our thinking jobs are broken. Most of them seem to be run on the same model as trad pub which implies that their biggest way of retaining employees is to browbeat them and keep them so stressed they don’t look for work.

Now into all this throw the lockdowns, which unleashed a wave of change from change in locations to change in how work is done, the likes of which has not been seen in this great land since the migration Westward. And that our “governing” classes are mentally damaged morons trying to run this according to the always idiotic philosophy of a guy who died at the edge of mass industrialization.

They’re not seeing what’s happening, much less what needs to be done.

And most people are just looking for ‘those darn kids’ type of explanations.

Meanwhile the pieces are starting to reassemble in profoundly interesting ways. And it’s time to look at what’s happening, how and why.

The picture is too chaotic for a single explanation, but if you understand the trends, you’ll be better able to survive and thrive.

Be not afraid. Come deep dive with me.

*First, I’m profoundly sorry at missing two posts last week. I do have a business post that must go up soon, and also at least a short story, but …. We had to go see family for various reasons. Getting to play with the baby of one of the readers was a bonus. :) I’ll be (a very tone deaf) Bach, but for now let’s deal with the delayed promo and vignettes. Cracks whip. On, internet hamsters! On Sluggish, on Confused, on Glitchy, on Typo,on Meme, on Spam, on Server Update, On very PARTICULARLY today’s internet Hamster “can’t display images” GRRRR. We have stuff to do. SAH*

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. – SAH

FROM HEATHER STRICKLER, (According to Hoyt’s Own Bard!): Lift High the Candle (Wyrd Rhymes)

When the storm rages onward
And the world comes tumbling down
And there seems no future forward,
And you’re deep enough to drown.

Some times a simple song uplifted
Can ease the burdened soul.
So here a book has drifted
With rhymes to ease the toll.

FROM JEFF DUNTEMAN: The Camel’s Question

FROM SABRINA CHASE: Red Wolf: Exile Part 1

Same map, different world.

Nic Duncan must prove she has what it takes to follow her uncle into the Special Forces. To get his backing she infiltrates a lawless area of postwar Asia posing as an adrenaline-junkie hiker. Checking out a newly discovered cave follows naturally as part of her cover.

But in that cave she encounters a strange artifact—and when she emerges, the world she knows no longer exists. While the terrain remains the same, every sign of civilization has disappeared. No road, no power lines, no GPS, nothing.

Starving and desperately searching for a way back, Nic discovers the relics of the past have vanished too – and the pre-technology people she encounters either terrified of outsiders or ruthless killers.

Can Nic find any safety in this strange yet familiar world … and what must she sacrifice to get it?

FROM LIANE ZANE: The Draka & The Giant: Book Three in the Elioud Legacy Series

With supernatural stakes never higher, everything rides on her.

Three years ago, Alžběta Černá, an officer in the Czech military intelligence, learned that she’s got angel blood. In fact, she’s one of the Elioud, the hybrid race tasked by Archangel Michael to protect humanity. A lone wolf, Beta ignores her newfound ancestry. She suspects she’s not cut out for the Elioud mission. Worse, she has to team up with András Nagy, a Hungarian Elioud warrior who drives her wild with exasperation—and desire. After András saves her life during a failed mission, Beta’s entire existence is upended. And she’s not the same woman she was. Something dark has descended upon her.
So she flees. From her best friends and their Elioud mates. From András, who’d given himself to the taciturn Czech, body and soul. Back to the VZ where she’s sent on a years-long deep-cover assignment that subsumes her.

Heartbroken at Beta’s untraceable disappearance, András becomes a stone-cold Elioud killer. Just in time to face the growing Dark angelic threat: emboldened daemonic hordes attack humans throughout Central Europe. András tracks a particularly nasty band of daemons one night to Prague where he picks up a trace of the woman he’d loved and lost—only to realize that they are now on opposite sides.

FROM RICHARD F. WEYAND: The Favor (Agency Book 2)

Bert Mangum, an operative for the secretive Agency, is back on the Crossroads space station waiting for a new assignment when Detective Elina Stavros of the Crossroads P.D. asks him to do her a favor.

Could he help her figure out how the dangerous and illegal drug RDT is getting onto the station?

But the more they dig, the more they find, until they’re facing a cluster-wide drug manufacturing and smuggling operation.

Worse, if they shut it down, Crossroads will go under and the economy of the cluster will go with it.

Mangum, Stavros, and Sam, with help from Gloria Dent and Claude Portnoy, have to find a solution before the economy of the cluster falls down around them.

FROM PAUL BAHLIN: Connections: Power Play (Tom & Suki Book 1)

Seal Tom Lincoln and his Belgian Malinois war dog, Suki, left the Navy together, planning on a new beginning in retirement. Fate finds him running from a righteous but questionable Samaritan act. On the run, and unable to engage law enforcement, he finds himself in a life and death struggle to save the country from shadowy terrorists and the corrupt elites that back them.
As he connects the dots on the terrorists, state police are connecting the dots from his past and the elites are connecting dots from his present. It’s a three way race against time, between him, the good cops that want him put away for a questionable crime, and the elites that want him dead.
With only his friends and his dog as allies, he has to bring down the terrorists to win the race. If he doesn’t win, he goes to jail, Suki is destroyed, and the country suffers an attack far worse than 9/11.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Simple Service: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure (Martha’s Sons Book 1)

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: Cart

Why does the dumpster always catch fire when I’m away, and in this case busy getting a family-and-baby fix?

On the Poor Widdle Russia. Screw it, it isn’t, and it never was. Any time you are proposing to repeat FDR’s mistake of making several states slaves to another state’s paranoia, you’ve gone too far. FDR was not a good guy, in any way shape or form, and if he didn’t create the cold war all by himself, he certainly set the dominoes up, and it was only by the grace of G-d we didn’t end with the world enslaved to a system that didn’t work. SOCIALISM doesn’t work, in either “social democracy” or “communism” form, but he set things up so it infected the whole world. And he propped up Russian paranoia and imperialism.
Was the USSR always a potemkin state? Looks like that, yes. Was it true? Probably more true than not.

On the other hand their government believed they were a real threat. And governments tend to believe each other. I don’t think our intelligence was so much lying, as not being prepared with states made of lies. They still aren’t.

Does this mean I’m on the side of the EU and the internationalists? Oh, please. The EU is a mistake that should have never happened, and is going to kill people as it goes down in flames. Again, it’s part of the blue model that FDR popularized all over the world. It’s a center out top down big polity. I know because I was present at EU discussions in the late 70s early 80s that the Europeans looked at the US and decided the reason we were more successful is that we were bigger and more centralized. Poor rats. They’re going to pay for it, too.

Does it mean I’m on the side of the Junta? Put down the hooch. The Junta isn’t even really supporting Ukraine. They claim they are, but mostly they’re lining their own pockets under the massive Aid Bills.

Does it mean I’m on the side of Ukraine? Sure. I’m on the side of anyone being invaded by a power whose justification for war is that we took away their buffer states. Also our own foreign policy is less fraught without a crazy Russia. Maybe they’ll fund fewer “green” groups. Could happen.

So Russia getting smacked on the nose? Fine. None of our business. We shouldn’t send our boys to die over there, and we shouldn’t pass massive aid bills most of which money goes to democrat pockets. We wish plucky Ukraine the best. We have our own fights to fight.

Do I like the conclusion I’ve been coming to over the last three years that the Cold War was mostly self inflicted? Heck no. I will remind you one of the minor skirmishes of the Cold War hit my own life pretty hard.

Were we always wrong? Would the USSR have collapsed earlier, if we’d pushed harder? Almost for sure. Krushev himself admitted in internal documents that they had NOTHING. If we’d pushed they were scr*wed.
Did our people know that? No. Heinlein who was a shrewd, if initially leftist thinker, fell for the whole thing hook line and sinker.

In fact, it was impossible to know until the USSR fell, I think. But now we know. And treating Russia as though we learned nothing from the USSR is …. bad. Whether you want to admit it or not.

So — dumpster fire — we know, because we’ve had regulars go zonkers in the comments before. If these are new commenters, I ban. If they aren’t, I ask, and I’m asking NOW please stop the fight. It’s generating heat, no light.

There are dragons to fight. These aren’t it.

Russia is a bully. It doesn’t need our help. It needs a spanking and put in the corner. It’s getting that without our help.

I wish the plucky people of Russia all the best. I wish their leaders to get spanked hard. Our leaders too.

Actually worldwide leaders of the Marxist persuasion, which right now are pretty much all of them, all need a spanking and put in the corner. Stop defending one set against the other.

Bah.

In the left’s definition of “fascism” Musk is making Twitter fascist by “allowing hate speech.”

The problem, really, is that there is no hate speech. There is only speech. “Hate speech” or “misinformation” are terms used by people who hate free speech.

As you can tell from my post yesterday, I’m very fond of the first amendment which I hope will keep us from having to put the second to the purpose for which it was intended (the prevention of tyranny.)

But there’s other reasons for free speech.

Most importantly, to hear things that hurt.

Look, I don’t like being hurt or in pain any more than the next person, and the next person cries when threatened with being beaten with a wet sock.

And I have an older brother, and am the youngest of a group of cousins, then went into school as a bookish girl whose mother quite literally dressed her funny (there’s an entire series of posts on this. It was well-intentioned, we’ll just say that.) If you think I don’t know that words can hurt, you probably haven’t thought things through.

In my case, words really can hurt. Why? Well, because I have a tendency to take every criticism to heart even when totally crazy. Like you guys know my tendency to not go to the doctor till almost too late? As in, Dan throws me in the back seat of the car when I’m passed out and drives to ER? (At one time without rinsing the soap off me. They didn’t let me get up for two days. It itched. He just wrapped me in a blanket and threw me in the back of a car.)

This is because when I was a kid, faced with my bewildering (even to me) autoimmune, mom just assumed I was making it all up. So I tend to assume I’m making it all up, until I collapse.

And don’t get me started in on how much stupid criticism delayed my development as a writer. Because I believe everything said against me. (For people like me, it makes sense to have at least ten first readers, and take a problem as such only when three people who don’t otherwise know each other independently come u with it.

So yeah, “bad speech” with intent and malice OR NOT can hurt. It can hurt feelings, it can hurt people’s understanding of the world, it an hurt the development of entire countries that go careening down “green energy” illusions, when no such thing is possible and the result is their own people freezing in the dark.

Yeah, there is real disinformation abroad, a lot of it foreign. There’s a reason both Chinese and Russians invest more money in propaganda than in their vaunted (paper tiger) military. Because disinformation particularly when supported by the local satraps (his serene majesty Vice Roy Zhou Bai-Den, emissary of Xi the Pooh is all in on the Russian idea that we should not under any circumstances drill our own oil.) And don’t get me started on the Chinese nonsense with the Covidiocy.

But you know what the remedy for disinformation and hate speech is? More speech.

Because when there’s a big argument, people bring forth the reason they think that, and other people get to see both sides. While when government can run around suppressing “disinformation” it ends up being the idea of some crazy coot who simply told everyone that was the way to think. Like, at one point Fauci had recommended MASKS to stop AIDS, he was just riding his hobby horse, again. And no one even knew this, because the “expert” said to mask. And everyone who went and looked up the history of masks got silenced as “misinformation.”

Is there speech that is objectively bad/calls for bad things? Sure there is. And the best thing for it, unless they are credibly planning harm (and if they’re doing it in the open I question their sanity) is to tell them it’s crazy and explain.

The problem when some speech is considered beyond the pale (Some speech in some places or to some audiences is always beyond the pale. No, you don’t need to read or show porn to young kids, etc. But that’s different.) to all audiences, at all time, is that THAT speech might be what you need as a course correction for seriously bad stuff.

Look, we’re social apes. As such we tend to want to agree to the consensus. We’ll want to be on the side that “everyone agrees with” — which is how you get stuff like deciding cats must be killed because they cause the plague, and thereby unleashing the rats that really cause the plague, or the idea that the best way to counter a respiratory virus is to lock people down in their houses, or the idea that socialism is a great idea and everyone needs a little bit in their economy — but sometimes you need to hear the dissident opinion. The one that says “Yeah? then why do all socialists eventually starve in the dark?” Or “Socialism kills, fast or slow, depending on whether it’s the fast form (communism) or the sow one (“democratic” socialism.)

It hurts to hear that, because well, everyone “agreed”. But when speech is abridged, when saying something on a public forum, something wholly unrelated to your employment, can lose you your job, your house, your kids, your ability to bank, you end up doing truly stupid things as a civilization. Great Leap Forward stupid. Ban the internal combustion engine stupid. Shut down the economy for two years stupid.

And yeah, I know, the first amendment only covers what the government does. However, as we’re finding from the twitter mess, there isn’t as much of a separation between government and big corporations as one would think. Once it became possible for government to give big corporations everything they want, why would they not obey the sugar daddy?

So, yeah, here, on my blog, which I pay for, and where I allow comments simply for the entertainment of myself and my commenters, I do ban commenters, though not nearly as many as I could or perhaps sometimes should. This because RES told me if you let the drunken uncle take over the wedding, you’re ruining it for everyone else.

I do not, however, run around preventing people from writing blogs that disagree with me. Many do. I don’t seek them out, and frankly I don’t much care what they say, unless it’s funny. (The white Mormon male thing never gets old, that’s all.) And I’ve been personally banned on some blogs, including some on the right, because I don’t have any kind of monopoly on communication.

But But But “your words could hurt the vulnerable.” Yes, they could. And if the vulnerable are going to be on the internet, they’ll have to grow a tough skin sooner or later. And if they can’t, their loved ones or friends are going to have to protect them, just like my husband doesn’t let me read bad reviews for my books. Because I’ll believe them.

But you don’t get to declare who is vulnerable and who gets to be protected. Treating someone like a tinpot god who can’t be questioned turns them into tinpot gods.

At some point we all say painful things, or hear painful things, and at some point we’re all vulnerable. It doesn’t matter.

Life is pain, princess. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something. And trying to silence those who tell you that that gold bar is just yellow painted mud.

The truth often hurts, it’s still the truth. Lies are often pretty while being lies. The fact that vice-versa is also true just means you can’t get lazy.

If you can, if you’re not going to lose your job, your home, your bank: TALK. Make a loud noise. Counter what you view as lies.

It’s the only hope the Republic has left.

Having grown up in a time and place where electrical supply was unreliable and people had an uncertain grasp on how to work with electricity anyway — yes, the once and future time, what can I say? — so that you might very well have to take a candle with you to bed (HOW I never burned the house down trying to read till all hours is a minor mystery) because the electricity was out, again, or where people thought nothing of replacing that darn fuse that keeps blowing with a penny, I grew up with a very real fear of house fires.

Having spent some time living in the curious level of apartments best described as “student housing” (where not only might the wiring be wonky, but the cabinets might be so low over the stove that a small oil spill can turn into “oop, there goes half the kitchen”) did nothing for this fear. In fact, this is the first time in thirty some years that I haven’t had a fire extinguisher in the kitchen, and that only because I haven’t been in a place to buy one at the same time that I had money to buy it, but it’s on the list.

Add to this that both mom’s and grandma’s tales of the village in their lifetimes involved a manor house going up in smoke overnight. (Look, Portugal still has some structures that probably started life as Roman farmhouses. Knowing how much crazy I’ve found in Victorians where each new owner added a twist on “this will work for me, because” and then hid it in the walls, the amazing thing is how many Portuguese houses don’t burn overnight, even if most of the materials are stone and cement.) And in mom’s case, being a vivid storyteller, it involved the tale of six kids caught in a house fire while their parents were out, and being brought out as corpses “looking like roast goats.” Nightmare fuel, I tell you.

So, I have a healthy respect for fire.

If I could banish all danger of fire by not thinking about it, believing that fire didn’t exist, and disabling every fire alarm, I’d already have done that.

Why haven’t I done it? Because my thoughts and words, or even alarms don’t control reality. And my banishing fire from my thoughts wouldn’t make me less vulnerable to it, but more.

And not precisely a change of subject, but remember the late seventies, when Communism was the most stable and successful societal form in the world, and in the future — as every intellectual assured us — we’d all be communists? Heck, even the so called free countries recognized they had to add a little bit (or a lot) of socialism to their mix just to survive. Why! It was only sense, right? Planned economies were just more efficient. What kind of lunatic would build a house without a blueprint? How much more necessary was a blueprint and efficient top-down control of the build for an entire economy.

Just look at all the racial strife and economic suffering in the US with their pure free market (yes, I know, but bear with me) system! Do you want that? No. You want the stable, equitable, efficient Soviet Union’s system. Duh.

If you don’t remember this, you didn’t grow up in Europe (Or, curiously, in political and intellectual circles in the US) where what I stated above was not even vaguely controversial. Or in fact worth arguing, because everyone knew that.

Most of the people (unless geniuses and cranky) who opposed communism opposed it on the basis of its jailing prisoners, treating dissidents like cr*p and other moral issues. On that basis a lot of people “on the right” wanted “socialism with a gentler touch” or if you prefer “democratic socialism” (Strange ice and hot snow. They vote to despoil us, and we’re supposed to accept it because theft by the majority is somehow moral. And that’s not counting vote fraud, which is endemic in every socialist country, because of course those in power don’t wish to lose it at the whim of the unwashed.)

And yet, when people in power in the US said “Screw that, we don’t believe you, and we’re not going to appease you” the entire system of terror behind the iron curtain crumbled like a sand castle hit by waves, like fog when the sun shines.

Because of course none of it was true. The USSR wasn’t stable, efficient and prosperous. (The fact that Putin wants to revive it tells you what world-class intellect he ain’t.) It was a shambling mess, where people pretended to work where others pretended to pay them, and where you lost half your life to standing in line for goods, even goods you didn’t want because you could maybe, perhaps trade them for something you might want at some time. And if the supply issues weren’t enough, there was every single other issue. The medical care was worse than third world; the service economy was non existent; their defense industry was mostly smoke and lies; and their people were skilled in the art of double think. In fact, even with the black market they allowed to exist because it was often the sole source of food, I suspect they’d have lived in permanent famine conditions without overt and covert aid from the US. (Not to mention our letting them swallow up vast portions of South America and Africa, from which they extracted tribute.)

So why did they appear so successful and stable that non-insane people in the West hailed them as the future? Ah, because they’d broken the fire alarms, banned all mentions of fire, forbidden people to even think of fire. Or you know, revolt against the system. And if despite all this someone still mentioned fire, then they were declared insane and locked up.

Which not only projected an image of complete control and prosperity abroad, but also meant that the leaders thought — at least most of them — that they had perfect control and at least a minimum level of prosperity.

Until everything came crumbling down, fast and irreversibly, because someone dared (very dared) to question the image, and kept asking the non-existent system to compete with our flawed, wasteful, compromised but still somewhat free system.

The analogy with fire should be obvious. Rebellion and revolt (or even the sort of sullen non-compliance that acts like some wires smoldering in the walls) destroy polities the same way as fire devours structures.

And the best way to defend against either is both efficient alarm systems, and rapid deployment measures of control.

And when you think “But communism had that” you’re thinking of the Prague Revolt, or Tienanmen Square or the swallowing of Hong Kong, and you’re not precisely wrong. Not really.

There is a level of countering the threat that will prevent that which no one dares admit exist. If despite all your best efforts to banish even the thought of fire, a flame erupts on your stove, and you have a fire extinguisher to hand, you can hit it hard and fast. And then you forbid mention of it ever again.

It works, sort of, except that of course, if a bigger conflagration starts it can destroy you overnight and you’ll never see it coming. (Romania, Christmas 1989) Or an external fire, intentional or not can consume you, while your people run around screaming “What is this strange thing?” (I expect this is the failure mode of today’s totalitarians, because there is a conflagration worldwide. They’ve been tamping down individual instances and preventing people talking or thinking about it, but there it is.)

In a healthy polity which ours used to be, you had systems to both inform you when the people were getting seriously p*ssed, and mechanisms for making us considerably less prone to sudden revolt, not to mention to letting the kind of “fire in the walls” smoldering discontent and revolt.

For one, we had free speech, which meant, that yes, you knew when people weren’t happy. But you know, like having fire alarms throughout the house, that might give you false alarms, but also means you can get up and do something about the lamp the cats knocked down in the living room and which is making the carpet smolder, by fixing the conditions making people p*ssed.

We also had voting, which meant that if the wall was consistently getting hot, we could get it open and the wiring repaired; or we could realize the penny in the electrical panel had melted, and remove it, replacing it with a real fuse. Rigged elections don’t do that, of course. They’re much in the vein of putting the penny in instead of the fuse, and wiring the switch on “on” so it can’t take the electricity down, and stop the danger.

All we have left now is fire extinguishers in the form of corrupt police and/or military and a lot of hysterical ninnies who claim a small kitchen fire was the worst catastrophe since forever.

And this has extended to all levels of our once-free polity. They stop people talking freely on social media. In groups and associations, you have to keep quiet about any dissenting opinions, lest you lose job and family. People actively falsify their opinions, in order to stay in the good graces of those they need to continue surviving.

The problem is like disabling the fire alarm, it does nothing to prevent fires. In fact it makes it more likely that a fire will happen, because no one is taking the most elementary precautions.

And you — and I look at it — and wonder what the heck is in their heads.

Well, a great part of it is they know their control is precarious (at least at some level they know it) and that people are fed up. So like children afraid of fire who silence the fire alarm, they think if no one talks about it there will be no revolt.

They’re right to an extent (unlike with fire) in that there will be no small, widespread, annoying contagion rebellions. Well, except for things like Let’s Go Brandon.

And of course, we can’t vote them out. Ah. They wired that panel on, dare and take them down that way!

BUT all that does is set up the ideal conditions for an all consuming conflagration.

And the conditions are set.

Part of it, of course, is that the left has this strange dysfunction where they believe if you control the words you control reality. No, I can’t explain it, but it’s obvious in their obsession with controlling language (which always evades them) and their refusal to talk about anything that makes them uncomfortable. It’s not all crowd control. If you watch them carefully, there is a certain primitive belief that thoughts and words control reality. (Maybe it’s that so many of them work — if at all — in a realm of thoughts and words. Or maybe it’s the New Age affirmations movement gone wild.)

Take the social thing. They suppressed mention of anything counter narrative. They’re going insane at Musk buying Twitter, because they’re honestly convinced if things are never mentioned they won’t exist.

But of course people know things. If they lie with numbers and say there’s no inflation, it doesn’t make our household budget any better. If they say there are no supply problems, it doesn’t put food on the table. And their eternal obsession with Trump might make him exactly into the super-enemy they think he is.

The most they can do is make each of us feel alienated and desperate. But reality — let’s go Brandon — keeps breaking through. People talk in all sorts of places, and you don’t want to hear what I hear in the grocery store. (Or at least they don’t.)

But even fragmented and seemingly alone, desperate people do desperate things. We’re not desperate yet, but the pressure is going up every day. And pressure has a way of blowing.

The other part of why they do this, is that even in relatively free countries, the left has become the refuge of those who by inclination or stupidity believe in top-down, center-out. Maybe they just want power, and of course each and every one of these deluded idiots thinks he’ll be the Great Leader, or the Great Leader’s favored lapdog, or maybe they believe that things work better that way (perhaps they have a lot of Soviet Live magazines under the mattress, or have never studied real economics, who knows?)

Any command and control top-down system is subject to ass-covering. Yes, even (particularly?) corporations.

I’ve seen it time and again. People have a project and everyone reports it is going swimmingly. Because, well, of course they do. They don’t want to be fired. This means the project leader and every level up from that “knows” everything is fine and every goal is met.

So it was in the Soviet Union. So it is in Cuba, Venezuela and particularly China. (In case you wonder why China talked itself into the arrantly stupid one-child policy and why it took so long to correct and not completely, yet.) So it is with our “Great Leaders” the Biden Junta, and their infantile belief in “Climate Change” (Caused by humans. Of course climate changes. We’re in an inter-glacial period, for instance.)and their belief in auto-magic clean energy that will happen when we need it.

Because every level reports up that everything is fine. And only each person knows he or she is lying.

Look at what they say at every level of life interaction! Even in craft or social groups, people are all progressive. Theirs is the philosophy of the future.

No, they’re not actually aware of how many people have quit in disgust, or are silent, and getting angrier.

Everything they see and hear reinforces their belief that everything is fine. Why shouldn’t they be confident in their eventual triumph?

Sure, some woke corps collapse. And the bottom line on movies they bet on is weirdly low. But hey, it just means that people are gaming more and movies are a dying industry now. Or maybe they’ve been insufficiently woke, and need more paint-by-numbers socialism. Look, I heard this for years as an explanation for why print runs were falling through the floor. It was all “people don’t read anymore.” Till indie happened, of course.

You think the big advances on lefty biographies and books are bribes. And they are. But at some level, I bet at least 90% of the people involved in the projects are baffled at their failure, because everywhere they go, everyone loves these people and causes. So…. why are they failing? Oh, yeah, people don’t read anymore!

They’ve effectively stopped every possible fire alarm, and if you mention fire, they’ll descend on you with all their fury.

So they know they’re safe.

But of course, that’s not how any of this works. If you permit me to change metaphors from fire to flood, this is how it works:

“But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea.”
― Plato, Timaeus and Critias

And the Earth is shaking.