Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Sound the tocsin. Mayday. Mayday. Sauve-qui-peut.

If you heard those cries in the night, what would you do? Would you turn over and go to sleep again?

If someone rode to your door, their horse all a-foam or their car boiling over and screamed “the English enemy is coming” would you fluff your pillow and think “I’ll just give them a warning and call them back from the ledge. They’re stupid and misguided. Once they are informed, they’ll be fine” and go back to blissful sleep?

And no, not us: THEM. Our side is prone to its own mental issues, mostly depression, so we actually — like Zero Hedge — have predicted a hundred out of zero instance of the left actually trying to herd us into camps (note I didn’t say wanting. I said TRYING) and a hundred out of every one instance of them jailing us on political grounds. (Used to be zero, but hello January sixth 21.) Hence what I think is my curious calling: a profound and unremitting pessimist who has the duty and honor and (shakes fist at sky) G-d given mission of reality checking for conservatives.

I’ve never believed in Freudianism. Not really. I find it mostly a foundation of just-so stories that only fitted one extremely disturbed individual.

But a friend recently reminded me of the old joke “Freudianism is when you say something but you mean your mother.”

I’m not fond of that “This is what you really meant” because I’m sick and tired of the left pulling that nonsense. They seem to have forgotten that to psychoanalyze someone you need to have a set of data that makes sense, or, for that matter, a set of data that’s applied equally. Instead, they just decide that we “really” are racists, sexists and homophobes (there is an epistemological reason for this, but it is rooted in their philosophy, not ours.) And when we fail to sound/act/do anything as racists/sexists/homophobes, and in fact are much more tolerant than their side, and more interested in helping individuals of any shape and color and inclination, they decide we must be speaking in code and that it’s a “dog whistle.” It apparently never occurs to them that communicating such codes and dog whistles would take a 24/7 effort, a vast network and…. oh, yeah, individualists following a plan. My friends on the left, je suis desole, and I agree with you that this is frustrating as heck, but the individualists always fail to organize. You’d actually know if we had a code book, and dog whistles, not because you’d intercept them, or because you’d have to look for them, but because all over this great land of ours people on the right would be shouting at each other in offices, getting in fisticuffs on the street, and hair pulling in supermarkets and the great sound going up would be “Damn it, Bob. I told you Purple Ant means immigrant. Why do you insist on thinking it means gay?”

The only reason I can imagine for them not to perceive that is that they are locked in a philosophy that denies the validity of all other philosophies. Or if you prefer, in a cult.

Any philosophy that says “and it’s invalid to disagree with us. And if you express an opinion/idea/analysis contrary to ours you are a hater who hates” is a totalitarian philosophy. It might not have armies or the control of governments (spoiler, it does though in the US…. well, you’ll see) but if it had them it would already be stacking bodies several deep. And in Europe, where they rule in a velvetish way they’ve taken apart a centuries-old civilization and are in the process of killing entire countries slowly, through denial of care to the elderly and discouragement of births. Because nothing must exist outside it.

You see, their philosophy tells them that destroying civilization is CARING and that after they do that, everyone will be free, the environment will be perfect, we shall study war no more, and it will be paradise. How could you be against that? (Kind of like the puppy kicking morons who thought the only reason we could oppose the craptastic shit they’ve been giving awards to is that we oppose the “inclusion” and “diversity” of the awards (which mostly translates to white, well-off females, sometimes with an Asian female, a white female in a bad perm and fake tan, or a guy in a fright wig) and are afraid for our “privilege” as “White males” — since only one of us was a white male, none of us ran publishing houses and only one was a best-seller, you’d think they’d see the problems: we had no privilege, and frankly I’d like a hell of a lot more diversity than their stultifyingly white and Marxist circles promote. But I’d like it naturally, and for good writing. Good writing doesn’t even enter the equation for them, because they’ve been told that “good” means “Preachy” and “diversity of authors.” Bah.)

Again and again, even as they control society and for the last 20 years at least have been brutally ruthless about suppressing anyone who disagrees with them, they tell us the only reason we disagree with them is “privilege.” And since we have no privilege and they know it, they are now desperately hunting in the weeds for “systemic privilege” which is an invisible thing that only they can see. If they could they chuck us in ponds, and if we drowned we wouldn’t have privilege. (But still be dead.)

Anyway, so I tend not to believe in “coded messages.” Or saying one thing over and over without realizing you’re doing it. Life has very few messages from Fred.

But there are some. And holy hell, I can read print when it’s six feet tall and written in indelible ink.

Which this is.

Look, they’ve gone rabid since 2016. They didn’t see the loss coming. They were planning for everything to go smoothly, as the narrative in their head (The future belongs to them, you know) and what they’ve been taught told them it would. And then…. WHAM.

I don’t know if they realize that the internet totally changed the game. I suspect not, because if they did, they wouldn’t run around doing the world’s stupidest shit while trying to control it.

I suspect they know something has changed, but they have no idea what. And I don’t think — at least consciously — they know they’ve pushed too far, or that they’re at the edge of a massive preference cascade, or that the more they push now — and 2020 was already an excess of panicked pushing — the worse it will get, the faster the flip will come and the harder and more violent it will be.

Subconsciously. Well, there is a reason for a while there they were running around on social media trying to keep the word Romania from being mentioned, or the flag of Romania from being posted.

And that’s what this post is about. The left KNOWS. Subconsciously they KNOW. They’re getting more and more scared that they are about to get a Ceaușescu Christmas gift.

But because their conscious can’t process the threat — because they know — know, I tell you — that they have the majority of people with them; that the youth particularly is theirs now and forever; that those of us who oppose them are poor, ignorant and stupid as well as very old (we’re also rich, machiavelic and full of power. No. Don’t ask me how. Shape shifting?); and they know they’re the good people, and if they question any of those assumptions they’ll stop being good and will be shunned by all the good people — they are acting like rabid weasels in a trap and snapping and pushing ever more loudly, like that will save them.

Save them from what? I don’t know. I mean, the crap that Hunter was up to, in and of itself is bad enough, but one gets the feeling as panicked as they are, there must be far more terrible things hiding in the shadows, things that if they came out would rob them forever of credibility and power, if not outright get them that “Christmas gift.” (Honestly for them losing power and face is worse than death.)

And so–

And so looking at their actions gives you a curious double vision. I said before that I feel like they’re trying to establish the Soviet Union as the Berlin wall is coming down. That’s still true, but everything they do is like that.

Look, they believe they have the majority of people, and yet they massively rig elections. Then they run around telling us we can’t investigate, because that will weaken belief in elections. Yeah. Because “shut up peasant and believe the impossible numbers” builds confidence. They locked the entire country down for a severe flu, on nothing much. They are trying to get everyone to take a vaccine that is not needed for most and makes little sense for anyone but the most at risk (and maybe not for them, since I suspect we already had herd immunity); they are destroying the cities they hold; they are amping the indoctrination in schools to the point even suburban parents finally see it. They are demanding loyalty oaths and Maoist struggle sessions in corporations.

They are what can only be classified as completely and thoroughly insane.

But their subconscious keeps sending out signals. They rigged Jan. 6th but they still were really scared. Scared out of all proportion by a group of patriots carrying flags and signs. At the same time they were also using it for propaganda. I’m sorry, I’m using meme pictures because it’s easier. Also because yesterday a friend posted this meme:

And someone said “Who is taking the pictures? If they were that scared, how come the photographer wasn’t?”

Again, it’s a duality of mind. Their own side was using this for propaganda. For propaganda the representatives needed to be scared. And they were scared. Particularly the ones on the supposed right, which is amazing (and probably means they know better than anyone how pissed their constituents are). But at the same time the photographer wasn’t, and this meant nothing to them.

Because their terror has nothing to do with a group of people they knew were inoffensive and set up for a fall. It has to do with the reason they felt the need to set up a fake “attack” at all. Because they are scared. They are terrified. Despite their philosophy that tells them they can’t lose, they know their loss is inevitable, and are insanely, haphazardly, in a panic, trying to delay it. When each attempt backfires, the panic and the double vision increases.

This all became clear in my head today when I saw this meme:

Ignore the joke. Okay, you’re allowed to giggle. But ignore the joke. I haven’t received the dire warning yet, but all my friends have (yes, I know) always on the “right wing” content.

As far as I can tell, having seen some screen caps my friends have done…. the wording is spot on.

Look at that wording. They admit enough people are angry to warrant this warning. ANGRY. And they of course put disappointment in there, because since we’re pre-ordained to to lose, we MUST, of course, be disappointed, right? That’s their sop. But they know we’re angry. Angry enough they’re trying to silence us.

Look, our side has been coming out of depression — partly because the depression needed the continuously reinforcing push from the information entertainment industrial complex. We’ve largely escaped that and found each other. The reason the gaslighting was so needed is that look, guys, there was never a reason for collective depression, because we’ve had two transformative presidents in the last 50 years: Reagan and Trump. And the left never recovered and will never recover — and the first stage of coming out of a deep, suicidal depression is (TRUST ME ON THIS, chilluns) raging anger. I’m seeing the most quiet and sweet people posting things that even the hot heads didn’t post five or six years ago.

And that is the tip of the iceberg. Because the left’s grand-unified-plan to steal all the things involved destroying the economy and giving us more than enough reasons to be righteously pissed — IF WE HADN’T BEEN BEFORE — so the anger I sense, just off common people on the street is… well…. the very quiet and eery calm before the storm.

Which is why the left is trying to… stop the signs of anger. As though that would stop the anger. Because we can’t be angry at them, right? They are the GOOD people. And if they just do this one simple trick, and don’t allow our simple minds to realize we’re NOT the only ones angry, this will all pass.

They can ignore the screaming outside the window, the bells ringing in the distance, and the smell of fire, and turn over, and go back to sleep. And it will all be all right, because their win in the end. Their philosophy says so.

Wait! It’s not working? They must tamp down on the signs of anger from those very stupid people harder and with more force, and explain their philosophy louder, and make up “lying but true” stories about out history, so that the stupid people will see the invisible demons they’re seeing.

There is only one, very narrow path in which they don’t get a (probably early, if I’m honest) Ceaușescu Christmas gift. One that, yeah, sure, will destroy them, but will also leave a scar in this nation’s psyche that will take centuries to wash off if ever.

And that’s to shock them enough that they realize their philosophy isn’t inevitable, their victory isn’t fated, and that at this point they need to stop being “woke” and actually wake up and engage with the rest of the nation on equal terms, and actually talk.

Before I’m accused of blowing smoke up y’all’s asses, no I don’t think it’s possible. Someone here described the reaction of his autistic son to having his lefty beliefs questioned. But it’s not just the autistic. This is the reaction of cult members. They can’t question because if they do they lose their identity as the “good” and, oh, yeah “the smart” people. And they can’t face that. Just can’t. Or at least most of them can’t and won’t.

Maybe. I mean, they are very scared, and there is a point at which programming breaks. We know that from doomsday cults.

Yeah, okay, it’s a million to one chance but miracles do happen.

And anyway it’s the only thing we can do right now, when the birds have gone silent and the clouds gather in the horizon.

I wonder if humans were always so prone to thinking “if we can control everything from one central point, that will save time and money and make everything perfect” or if where we are is a deformation from generations taught this fallacy which is at the heart of socialism/communism/totalitarianism.

As much as I like blaming everything on Marx (the fact that there is no dedicated pissoir installed on his grave is a reproach on our civilization) the truth is that there was this kind of insane idea at the back of minds going back as far as I can read. You know, the idea that it’s all mechanical, and that most humans are interchangeable widgets who can be controlled by the ‘superior beings’ in the center.

I’m going, however, to assume that it got worse with the industrial age and mass production. Because humans are very good at reasoning from one incident and creating a whole category/class/order. Arguably this was largely responsible for our survival and ascendance to dominant species. Because we learn from very little, and extrapolate whole classes.

We don’t go “Grorrg went into the forest alone and all we found was a mangled hand and a bit of his liver. It’s an isolated case, and we can all totally go to the forest alone.” No. We go “Very bad things in the forest made this happen. Don’t go into the forest alone, particularly at night.”

Of course, half the time this is a misfire. I mean maybe Grorrg was a complete ass who was having affairs with half the women in the village, and he didn’t in fact go into the forest alone. No, he went into the forest followed by every man in the village, plus Mkrog’s pet tiger, and he got no more than he deserved.

But “Don’t go into the forest alone” still makes sense, since we know there are things there that could eat us, except for the little bit of liver.

So, because we are prone to doing that, it’s common to think and say things like “I did this, it worked for me. You do this.” In fact, half the people in the world go around pissing off the other half on any given day by doing that. Only, of course, you know, the halves switch regularly, so it’s impossible to catch all the assholes and beat them with the two by four with the nails in it. Sometimes we are the assholes.

But why is that incredibly annoying? If something works for someone, why wouldn’t it work for you?

Well– yeah. Okay. Look my best friend, growing up, who was closer to me than any sister could be, was very good at ballet. Fortunately she had known me from birth, so she never told me “well, if you need to relax you should learn ballet. I always feel happy and energized.”

She didn’t do that, because she KNEW me. She knew I had two left feet, no spacial visualizing ability and no memory for movement. Which means even in normal aerobics classes (which was the gym classes we had, by and large) I usually looked at what the teacher was doing and then executed it backwards, sideways and tripping on my own two feet at the end. In fact, it should be impossible to mess it up as badly as I did, and most gym teachers refused to believe I’d done it accidentally and instead insisted that I was mocking them…. Add to that that while she was this lithe, elfin critter, I was taller than most men by 12 (for those who met me, yes, Portuguese men were tiny back then) and had shoulders like a lumberjack.

In the same way, knowing she was desperately dyslexic, I never told her if she wanted to know the end of the story to something I’d started, she could d*mn well write it herself. (No. I’m dyslexic too, but …. something happened to things that went in her head and needed to come out on paper.)

So my solutions didn’t work for her and hers didn’t work for me.

We all have had relationships like that and understand that. It’s just when you go from there to characteristics that are…. less tangible, like will power, ability to concentrate, ability to memorize, or even — just — ability to keep interest, we forget we’re not all the same and attribute the worst possible motives to someone — including ourselves — when the good example fails to stick.

Look, take me (please. Most of the time I’m very tiresome.) I’ve been blessed with more talents and opportunities than I ever believed possible. Particularly when I was crying every night before gym class. So, if I am so smart, why ain’t I rich?

Well…. many things. In theory I know what to do so we can be debt free and doing very well indeed. In theory I know what to do so my career takes off, too.

The devil is in the fiddly bits. (Not those fiddly bits. Take your minds out of the gutter.)

For instance, sure, I know the theory of how to save money and invest, and…. but my brain finds investments all too risky. And besides, it rather have food and things, so we have them if we need them.

As for the career….

I figured out part of the problem — besides ADHD etc. — yesterday, because I was talking to younger son who said something like “Portugal is choc full of talent. Choc full of people who can perform miracles with inadequate materials and training ONCE. Then abandon whatever they just did and go off to try more difficult things.”

Not only is he right, but holy hell, did it hit hard. You see, as I’m packing my hobby materials, and realizing some I’ll never do anything with ever again (and getting rid of them) I realized that I tend to buy/find things to do and be obsessive about them till I do them well. And then lose all interest. Worse, I don’t really have any interest in the things I make. I just want to be able to do them. (Hence the strange saga of egg carving. Don’t go there.) Now this was part of son’s pitch for “Since you’re going to make weird crap, let me sell it” but you know, temperament is in some measure inherited, and–

Well, you see, that’s the problem with writing. Writing is very easy to succeed at if you do the same book over and over, with minor variations on a regular schedule. So, of course, I need to write in multiple genres, and my books CHANGE because well, otherwise I get bored. And….

Now the second is semi-controllable. I have after all managed to write sequels. And I’m working on it, because unfortunately professional success passes by series these days. But it took forever to discipline myself enough to approach it this way.

Hell, it took forever to even understand it about myself. And the dime only fully dropped this week.

You’re probably going to say most people are not that complicated. But I really think that most people are. They just appear simple from a distance.

So “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need” sounds great…. from a great distance. But who determines what each needs, when some of us take years to figure it out and have to make mistakes to find out.

I mean, look, how would I guess I was an introvert who needs to see some people every day? I should have been happy in the suburbs. I love not seeing other people from my windows (or not that many people.) I like well tended gardens. I — I go berserk and put myself under house arrest, because when I walk out it’s like walking through blasted land, with no human beings in sight. And the back of my brain panics and goes nuts…. and then depresses me, because it’s obviously not safe out there — where is everyone? — and so I shouldn’t go out either.

Now try being a central planner, planning for millions and millions (or if the one-world-government ever got their way) billions of people.

To do that, you have to imagine people as spherical balls, all alike. We know if we roll them down a slope of niches, most will end up in one, right?

Humans are not like that. Humans are like pieces of a very complicated, intentionally designed to deceive puzzle, so it’s impossible to tell if you’re looking at part of a sofa or a cat’s tail.

You make it impossible for humans to find their own niches, do what they want, and adjust to their peculiar brains and circumstances and you’re going to have unending misery, uneeded death and terrible suffering. Or as we call it: communist countries.

You give humans the same basic start and conditions: like, you know equality before the law, and stability and let them act each in his own self interest and boy, howdee, you have miracles of tech, more food produced than could ever be needed, and a world full of wonder.

No, people won’t all end up in the same place. How could they? Not only do they all have different abilities and capacities and problems, but they deal with them differently. So, yeah, some people will be a lot richer than others. But the point is, in a free society, “poor” is what middle class is in a lot of the other world.

Oh, sure, there will be the very poor and dysfunctional, like the homeless. But there is a level of damage at which you can’t really make people function and work in society. At best you can ensure they don’t starve to death, which mostly the free world manages.

But you can’t save every one all the time. Horrible things will still happen, because humans aren’t all the same, and some are completely messed up, whether it’s their fault or not. (And we can’t know.)

It’s a terrible thing to accept, if you’re halfway competent, but no. You can’t bring everyone up to even half your level. Best you can do is look after yourself and those you love. And even then, sometimes, you fail with those you love best. Because humans are complicated.

But central planning doesn’t solve that problem. It solves the problem of making sure that all identical spheres end up in identical places.

And because humans aren’t identical spheres, it tries to grind, shave and shatter the irregular puzzle pieces into spheres.

Which works about as well as you’d expect. In the end you have useless pieces, and a complete mess.

It’s time we start proclaiming loudly that humans aren’t identical widgets. And refuse to oblige them when they insist on shoving the cat into the sofa.

Somewhere, in a notebook from when I was maybe 12 or 13 which, if the fates are merciful, has gotten eaten by Portuguese rats (last found in the potato cellar at mom’s house, with a ton of my other stuff from that time. In a box. Note I didn’t bring it with me. No complaints) was a phrase penned with great solemnity by adolescent Sarah: The important thing is not to be happy. The important thing is to be useful for something.

Now, look, it wasn’t even a bad idea for a creature caught in a vice grip of hormones to fixate on. I mean, not so long as I only applied it to myself (and I only did.) It gave me something more useful to do than focusing on what made me happy, particularly since at 13 happiness is a moving target, and a thing of passing state of mind. Something that doesn’t last, and has nothing to do with what adult-me comprehends as happiness.

It was also a key to … becoming who I wanted to be. After all to be useful, you have to have practical skills, right? It probably led me into languages, when I could easily have studied something I could do in my sleep, like philosophy. Mind you, languages haven’t been impressively useful in my life, but that’s because I took a sharp sideways turn and chose another fate. If I’d stayed in Portugal, it was a practical and useful degree. (Even if I didn’t like it.)

It also led to things like learning to keep house (more or less in the face of mom’s baffled protests, since I was on a college track and college track means “never having your hands in dishwater.”) and cook, and how to make at least some things.

No, the problem with that maxim is when you take it out of the real of trying to shape your own character. Or of course when you take it to excess. (Excess, me? Don’t be ridiculous. Moderation is my middle name. My very occluded middle name. Spelled in invisible ink. At midnight. In an alien alphabet.) When you take it to excess, you’ll torture yourself trying to be useful, get upset when you have to take a day off because you’re sick/tired/depressed, and generally treat yourself like crap. Maybe it’s better than being useless, but speaking for a friend — a very close and personal friend who shares the space behind my eyes — you’d have to look at it from outside. Because being a neurotic mess who routinely fails at self-care has its own price. As do my occasional total depressive shut downs when the bitch who runs my subconscious decides that writing isn’t important and won’t change anything, and I’m a useless waste of breath, because that’s all I know how to/can do. (And no, the bitch isn’t amenable to my pointing out that on various occasions books — written by others — have saved my sanity and once or twice my life. She’ll just sneer I’m not Heinlein or Pratchett or any of those other “real” writers. They might be good for something, while I’m mostly good for occupying space.)

However the real evil of it is when you turn it outward and start applying it to… well, everything else.

Today I read one of the most shocking headlines I’ve ever read. “What are pandas good for?” And then the entire article went on to evaluate how each species isn’t or isn’t good for the “environment.”

What in the name of holy fandago is that shit? pardon my Scroladian. First of all, when has the “environment” become something away and aside from the species inhabiting it, and some ‘scientist’ or idiot with too much time on his hands and a bureaucratic job gets to decide what is good for it or isn’t? It’s like they imagine themselves priests of the “environment” interpreting its needs.

Which is the other side of this: when you or anyone else in power decides what is good for something, and what is good for nothing, it’s going to end in tears. When the purpose of everything — particularly living things — has to be justified, it means the default mode in your head is non-existence, and everything that exists has to justify its existence.

It means that your “environment” ideally is nothing. Not even rocks, because rocks exist.

At which point I have to ask…. Where precisely do you come from? The void, without form or being? May we request you go back there, then?

The worst regimes of mankind came from people who decided who was useful and what they were useful for.

In the entire sorry history of tyranny, mass graves and suffering caused by such regimes, there is one thing that was never recorded: a decision that made sense or was justified by its results. Unless of course, the results desired were death and “void without form or being.”

It doesn’t matter what they considered useful, or preferable, or what philosophy they used to justify giving someone the power to choose, the result is always death in batch lots, both for those slotted to die, and for those who die later, because those people knew how to do things like raise food, and int he dark ages that come after the massacre, no one knows that.

Utilitarianism has been applied to people for my entire life. And those of us who know history and have more than one functioning brain cell, have screamed against it. Because sometimes, someone’s entire life might seem like a waste, until that crucial moment when their being there keeps a car from running over the much shorter kid they’d never see; or their lending a helping hand keeps someone alive another day, who in turn keeps someone alive another day; or their lending a ear makes someone’s life burden a little easier, and allows the other person to create something that improves lives for millions.

The world and life is a complex tapestry. There is no one who has perfect knowledge of it. And no one who can decide who needs to be here and who doesn’t, who is useful and who isn’t.

Heck, we saw during the covidiocy that the decision on what was essential and who was essential were a comedy of errors. The dairy plants were essential, but the factory that made the essential filter to make that milk legal to sell wasn’t, for instance.

How much more difficult is it to decide if someone should be alive at all or not. And why should anyone?

Over a lifetime of arguing with friends who are abortion advocates, the most hilarious of arguments adduced by their friends is that it’s better for an unwanted baby to never get to be born, because they’d be unwanted, which means unhappy and probably criminal and destructive. (My husband and I would very much like to show you our middle fingers. We have TWO complete sets. Sure our life is not unalloyed bliss, but by and large we do better than most. And better than a lot of extravagantly “wanted” children.) Coming down on “these people aren’t useful because they won’t be happy” is perhaps the most hypocritical weasely position in the history of weasels. Who are you to judge who is happy? Or what leads to happiness? Or even what is happiness for someone else. There have been times when sitting on a sunny chair by the window and reading a not totally repulsive book was happiness to me.

But applying that to entire species?

I’m used to the insanity of applying it to humans. “Humans are bad for the environment” say the half educated morons, as though humans weren’t natural creatures and as such part of the environment. (Yes, natural. Last I checked I’m not even a tiny bit unnatural. No preservatives or colorants went into making me, last I checked.)

But now apparently the crazy idiots (do they still call themselves greens? I don’t think they like plants very much) who want to kill the environment in order to save it are extending this to other species.

I will make a prediction that before another year passes we will see articles on how some species should be “eliminated” to “save the Earth.”

And of course it will be species like pandas which are cute, and relatively inoffensive. Though I suspect they’ll start with apes first, because they’re most similar to humans, and we know these asshats hate humans most of all.

We’re going to swing from “ALL SPECIES AND THINGS THAT LOOK LIKE SPECIES MUST BE PRESERVED AT ALL COSTS” to “ANY SPECIES THAT ISN’T USEFUL MUST DIE.”

I have no idea who they think they are to decide whether a species is needed or not, or whether in the vast, unimaginable panoply of the Earth or even the Universe it might not be a panda, or a naked mole rat, or perhaps a sloth who provides the final piece of the puzzle, be it psychological or physical that propels humans (and with it all of Earth life) to the stars, perhaps filling a desolate and empty universe with life and purpose.

I suggest next time they start intoning in polysyllabic words about how a species is or isn’t “necessary” for “the environment” we take them to the nearest zoo and tip them into the tiger pit, thereby allowing them to attain their highest purpose in life.

And if there is no zoo in your area, a landfill will do. The rats are small but very industrious.

Or at least I suggest we take them to that location and suggest this could be their utility. Make them wake up before it’s too late.

Because the poisonous idea that one person, or even a group of them gets to dictate what person, what animal and what rock has purpose, and what should be destroyed is obscene.

And it consumes everything till nothing remains. Because in the end, in the vastness and emptiness of chaos, nothing is useful for anything.

Sure. Perhaps they are tools, and as such only good for one thing. But anyone else, including pandas has purposes they can’t even guess. Even if it’s (just) sitting in a patch of sun, gnawing on bamboo, while a little kid watches them enthralled.

Before we get off the ground on this post, let’s establish that no, no one creates anything ex nihilo. Or as one of the prime examples of the people we’ll be talking about said “you didn’t build that.” (Turns out he’d stolen that phrase from one of our current afflictions as is, and she’d probably stolen it from someone else. Which is rather a telling point.) That phrase is in fact at the crux of the divide in America and probably a bigger problem than any other, because I think the others flow out of it.

None of us creates anything out of clear nothing. For instance, in my work I use words, and that’s before getting to the computers and networks that allow me to distribute it. Maybe there was a pre-human somewhere at the dawn of time, who made up the words so he could tell a story. Maybe. I find that somewhat hard to believe. Language tends to come by accretion and use. Not “Hey, look, I created a whole new language and you’re supposed to learn it.” (In fact, I’m fairly sure that’s a mental illness. Or a sign of being a very gifted young kid. My sons tried this trick a number of times.) Particularly if there is no concept of language.

But all that is to our purpose nothing. Given that we start out as humans with language, and that there is a fund of stories we were told and on which we can draw for inspiration and structure, there is a vast amount of creativity you can employ in writing a story.

It can be — and sometimes even is — something completely new (if written with no known structure, these are also usually very bad. Not always, but usually.); it can be something that is new of its kind; or it can be a rehashing of a story that’s been told a million times, this time with a big difference; or a small difference; or no difference at all, just told anew.

All of these involve different levels of creativity. There is another level of creativity that is sort of down or sideways from there which is “Assembly story” or “paint by numbers” (though paint by numbers normally refers to following without much inspiration and can result in weirdly compelling stories, so we’ll call it “assembly story.”) This is more like creating a toy from a kit, or embroidering on a fabric that’s marked. There is work but no real creativity involved.

If you are saying “Ahah, Hollywood” ont he last three (from rehashing a story on) you’re not wrong. It’s also the vast majority of traditional publishing.

There might be a reason for that. And I mean a neurological level reason.

I know I have said that the left are the “Good Boys and Girls.” Understand I say this with derision and not derision at morality. They don’t really have morality. Or if they do it’s not traditional morality. They are guided mostly by “want to fit in” and “want to look good for Sempai.” So, they’re those annoying kids in school who were always “behaving exactly the way teacher said to” even when it made no sense or was annoying. Also, they were the ones who would turn on us when we expressed doubts or asked questions.

I never really thought about it, except for the (understandable for someone of my stamp) desire to give them a good thumping behind the bike shed. Not that I did, unless they really upped their game to tattle telling or physically messing with me or those under my protection. I’ve said it before, what keeps me from being a terror is that I’m too lazy. And besides, the schools never even had a bike shed. But I did sneer at them a lot, with curled lip, and took the opportunity — real, imaginary or created — to slipt he verbal knife in. Not that they cared. They were in it for Sempai. Or virtue signaling. Or self admiration.

What had never occurred to me before is: What if they’re that way because they can’t imagine another way of being? “Can’t imagine” being the operative words in that sentence.

You see, recently — take that as the last three years — I’ve been getting weirded out by one, very particular form of trolling. I see it on this blog, and most recently I saw it at another blog, whose owner, once wrote a novel (though that’s neither his profession nor his main thing in life.)

The attack goes something like this “Why would I believe your analysis. You’re a NOVELIST.”

In my case, they have been known to take that further to “you write fantasy.”

A friend says — and he’s not wrong — that they will use anything to dismiss a POV they don’t like. Yah. Sure, they do. And they have.

But that one is a particularly bizarre one.

Why would the fact that one writes fantasy for a living — or that one ONCE wrote a mainstream novel — mean that one cannot trust any analysis from that person, including number or sociological analysis?

If you dig down, what they’re accusing us of is this: You live in a fantasy world, so you don’t speak from reality.

This is bizarre, because of course we don’t live in a fantasy world.

Look, as most of my fans know, I prefer science fiction, even when it’s mostly so far in the future there is little “real science” because “it’s maybe possible in the future.” BUT that’s neither here nor there. I can write about people who change into animals. That doesn’t mean I THINK I CAN CHANGE INTO AN ANIMAL. I mean, sure we joke about it or play-tend about it in comments all the time, but we are not that. We do understand the rules of the physical world we live in.

Or take darkships. I am quite, QUITE aware we have neither flying cars nor some kind of energy weapon that performs outside known physics, nor anti-grav nor genetic engineering. I mean, dude, seriously. WHY wouldn’t I be.

Sure, I can sit down and spin out a world quite different from our own. And? That doesn’t mean I don’t know what our world is. One could argue I really need to know what our world is, and understand cause and effect really well before I know how to make a world that reads plausible to ANYONE.

And once I started thinking about it, I started remembering other instances of the left not seeming able to figure out what “creating something” means.

Like, you know, the idiot on the left who did a dive into my books and psychoanalyzed it as though my female characters were all me. (And for those who read me, yes, he thought both Athena and Dyce were me. Not to mention Kyrie, who is rock bottom practical.) He then proceeded to deduce what I wanted in a man from it. Like, because Kit and Thena have a telepathic bond, that is REALLY what I want. (Yes, it was useful for plot at that time and in that place. And I usually feel guilty when I use the convenient. OTOH, well. It’s part of the world building and is used later.) Or the fact that Dyce gets involved with a police officer means I really want an authority figure. (Seriously, dude, read some of the genre. It’s a trope.) And I don’t remember what his major dysfunction was about Kyrie, but you know, it was again stupidly based on the idea all my main characters — particularly the ones written first person — are me.

It never seemed to occur to him “why should they be?” or even that these three women are all completely different. (And apparently he couldn’t fit Luce into the picture, so he ignored A Few Good Men. Possibly because my being a six foot six scarred blond male was too much to understand, but it had to be me, right? because no one can make anything up, right?)

Then there was the leftist writer with whom I tried to collaborate some years back who had a collapsofit and became unable to work with me, when I couldn’t tell him about the real people I based my characters on (on account of they don’t exist.) I think he stopped believing me after that, so you know, all understanding was at an end.

Or take the “serious” analysis (Spoiler: it isn’t. It’s part a belief they’re psychic, and part relying on stupid tropes) they do on the Greats books that all assume it’s either “dog whistles” or hiding some deep desire for something or other, or reflecting the author’s life.

At the heart of it there seems to be the certainty no one can MAKE UP anything. That all we can do is spin and recycle, either the work of other people, or things we SEE AND THINK ARE REAL.

This is part of the reason they’re so scared of us, and so convinced we are insane. Because even our casual jokes about lizard people, they think we think are real. Must be, otherwise, how would we make jokes about them so off the cuff.

I want to point out here this has NOTHING to do with intelligence. I was in gifted classes most of my school life (for my sins) some truly aimed at the gifted and not the “notice me Sempai” smart enough to fake it to perfection. And yet, when there was a creative writing or art exercise, I found half of what my classmates turned in was rehashed what we read last week and/or at most a mash up of two things.

Now, I’m not a stunningly creative person. At least I don’t think so. Or at least, I trained myself to work within a certain framework. Part of everything I read is part of me, so it’s part of my work, in a way. But, oh, dear, miles and miles away, sideways and upside down of most people in those classes.

And of course, I get characters for free, and they tend to be their own persons. (Though I mined my kids for Dyce’s son, but that’s partly because I’ve actually not been around a ton of kids, so I lack range, but also because eh my kids were stunningly entertaining.) Not me. They want their own stuff and do their own stuff. I use friends and family for walk ons and sometimes very minor characters because it amuses me and pleases them, but the main story drivers I get for free.

But even this level of creativity renders me suspicious and scary to the left, who think I apparently walk through life having illusions about flying cars and dragons.

Suddenly the run of warmed-up reboots and sequels (“Stunningly different. Now with more victimhood”) from Hollywood make sense, as does the bizarre point-counting of traditional publishing. (One oppressed minority, ten points, one trans trendy character, twenty points, one rape, ten points, three pages of Marxist theory fifty points — I believe this one will get push and win awards!)

It also explains how they come up with their theories of society. You know “we pass a law and bad thing goes away/stops being done.” Or “police cause crime, because neighborhoods where police don’t visit as often have less crime.” Or ‘if we give kids tastless lunches we consider healthy, they’ll eat them and be healthy” or “if we give people mortgages, they’ll become worthy of mortgages.”

I’ll be honest people: these are people not only not capable of rebellion, but only understanding rebellion in terms of cosplay. They think we’re stupid, because we’re not doing exactly what the teacher wants, and there is no possibility that we think the teacher is wrong, because reality is consensus and the teacher dictates it. People who believe/create other things must be crazy and see things that don’t exist.

I don’t know what this means, or how to reach them. Or how they became that way. Perhaps they are the default human, and we’re in fact weird? Or perhaps they were made that way by something?

And in either case, how do we get them to believe we exist: as in we’re a different type of thing, and not whatever they come up with to explain us?

More later. Sorry. I forgot I had an eye appointment. We go to same doctor we have gone to for 30 years, which means Colorado Springs. And the roads are terrible and traffic worse. So I just got home and have a ton of things to deal with I should have done this morning.

Maybe more later, but for now, please forgive me.

Home

I am on a panel on writing totalitarian societies, and attempting to cause trouble on discord, but everyone else are responsible adults, alas ;)

*I think Frank’s Guest Post has enough validity to be published here and discussed here, but I have some quibbles with it. Not enough to be “disagreements” as such, but serious quibbles, so I am going to list them:

1- True a wall won’t keep TRULY DETERMINED immigrants away. However, most immigrants (unless bizarrely desperate) aren’t THAT determined. Most people — trust me on this — don’t want to go to a strange place and live there. We don’t need an absolute barrier, we need a DISCOURAGING barrier. Which is why Trump’s wall slowed immigration way the heck down. This is the principle of a fence around your house. Or a house alarm. As an alarm salesman explained “The sign alone will stop most would-be-burglars. It might be a fake, but it’s too much work.” This is what we want in place. For one, the people really determined and crafty enough to get in, have already passed a test of sorts.

2- It’s not Mexico. That open border is open to the THE WORLD. we can’t have the world here.

3- Soros wants one world government because he knows it will be a tyranny. It’s impossible to be responsive to everyone in that big a polity. we might already be too big, (but thank heavens we’re ornery.) A one-world-government will be an intolerable tyranny to 99% of it. Also, the most ineffective government ever. So.

4 – I don’t object to your method of making citizens. I would limit the velocity of it. There are problems with having mostly foreign-born people. Ask the Romans. And there is a problem with too many immigrants. TRUST me.

5 – A better solution, in my opinion and perhaps as practicable is to stop welfare to immigrants. ALL forms of welfare and benefits paid for by citizens, including but not limited to schooling and medical care (no worries. Some charitable organization will pay, but with more supervision than the government.) until two years after citizenship. (That last one might not be constitutional, so it can be “till citizenship” and make that a minimum of 7 years, by which point you’ll know if you’re going to want to go back.

That’s my quibbles and counter-proposal. – SAH*

How to Solve America’s Immigration Problem (and Save the World as a Side Effect) – by Frank

America has an immigration problem. Even those who want the world to have unfettered access to America recognize that our laws do not allow it, so we must either change our laws or change the circumstances. Unrestricted immigration advocates like George Soros would do away with the nation state in favor of a one-world government. How that government would be organized is an open question, so that is hardly a solution. Changing the circumstances is more difficult, but could go hand-in-hand with changing the law.

My wife, the chemist, explains that the root of the problem is entropy. If you pour a tea kettle of hot water into a bowl of cold water, pretty soon you have a bowl of lukewarm water. Putting a barrier (like a border wall) between the hot and cold water only slows down the exchange. Canada and America have very similar levels of economic opportunity. Hence there is no great rush of Canadians to America or Americans to Canada even without walls or even rivers dividing most of the 1900-mile border. The 1900-mile border between Mexico and the U.S., despite numerous lengths of wall and many law enforcement patrols along it, proves a much less hardy barrier. The economy and job creation level in America is just so much stronger than that of Mexico, that America proves an irresistible draw to much of Mexico’s impoverished population. Even at the lower rungs of the American economy, the opportunity is so great that Mexicans living in the U.S. sent 26 billion dollars back to their families in Mexico in 2017.

So how do we solve the root of the problem? Well one solution only proposed by those most impervious to criticism is to invade Mexico and fix it by reconstituting their government along American lines. No one who’s been there can realistically deny that if the Gadsen purchase had included Baja California, that region would be an American Riviera filled with huge hotels and resorts and positively booming with economic activity, rather than the lackluster backwater that it is. But changing the culture and mores of a country is not something that can easily be imposed by an occupying army. The former British colonies around the world show what a spotty record results despite a century or more of trying.

Demonstrably, more people want to come to America than currently live in America, and certainly more than the vast majority of Americans are willing to accept. So how do we change our immigration laws to, as President Trump suggests, let the right ones in? Sure we could just let in the doctors and engineers and such, but what about those poorer immigrants who have later so enriched our country? Do we want to close our doors to all of them? How could we convince ourselves that those we let in want to continue to support the great American experiment even if they aren’t credentialed yet like Anheuser and Busch or Carnegie? Well, we already have laws on how to become American citizens. What if we require that any non-American who wants to move to the U.S. learn English and pass the citizenship test before ever coming to our country? To facilitate this process, we will have to turn our embassies and consulates into training centers in English and the Constitution. Once a would-be immigrant has passed the citizenship test, he would be added to the list of eligible immigrants. At that point those on the list would be allowed in based on the order of their seniority of having passed the citizenship test and on how many immigrants America decides to allow each year. Maybe we could even make a big live TV show of the list announcement like the NFL draft. Of course we would have to be vigilant to make sure the citizenship test remains valid and fair and not allow lowering of the standard. Nobody said it wouldn’t take constant vigilance. Heinlein’s concept of requiring military service as a prerequisite to full citizenship might be a step too far, but how about requiring even native-born Americans to pass the citizenship test to be able to vote. They might be forced to learn something other than anti-Americanism in high school.

But, you object, there would still be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions who would go through the training, take the citizenship test, but still have to wait for years to get into this country. Exactly! And what would they do while they waited? Would they become impatient with the governance of their own country that led them to want to emigrate to America in the first place? Would they seek to make their own country run more like America in the respect of the rule of law over tribal and familial relationships or raw exercise of power by those holding government positions? Might we create a cadre of millions of wannabe Americans armed with the knowledge of how America came to be a country better off than theirs? Might it not occur to those people that they would prefer to make their government and economy in the likeness of ours while continuing to hold onto all their own cultural heritage? Wouldn’t it be great to have a world still made up of many diverse nations, but where everyone had the opportunity to be prosperous?

We were all drafted into wars we didn’t begin*. A war, that if you’re a believer of certain religions, might very well have started with a serpent in a lush garden, either literally or metaphorically.**

We are born into a place and time we didn’t make and our life will be influenced by decisions taken by others, far away and long ago. ***

Things are certainly not what your parents would want for you. Judging by myself and what I want for my boys, that’s flat out impossible, because I want them in that garden without defect, walking with perfectly compliant animals amid the lush and perfect vegetation. (And older son would lecture those poor animals on biology. no really.)

We are all born into terrible and imperfect times, and with our own imperfections, of mind body, and yeah, spirit. At least–

Okay, so when I was twelve, I used to yell at my mom “I wish you’d never have had me.” That didn’t last because mom is more appalling than I in frankness, and she would yell back, “I didn’t want to have you and when I wanted to correct the mistake, your dad stepped in. So, go yell at him.”

It was appalling — also truthful — but it stopped me on my tracks. What it didn’t address was that my argument was stupid and flawed.

Yes, I grew up in…. difficult times. I’ll be absolutely honest, being an Odd there were no good times to live in. **** Particularly since I was born in an extremely conformist country where sticking out from the norm gets treated like the nail that sticks up and will be pounded down, but also because compounding the issue, my Odd parents didn’t think I was supposed to be taught the norms, but expected me to respect the norms which I suppose were meant to emerge spontaneously from my naturally virtuous nature as their daughter. *****

But you probably know I don’t do things by half measures, so I was born under a National Socialist (but not fascist which is a very specific thing, and certainly not Nazi) system, and then it transitioned, suddenly and to my 11 year old eyes unforeseeably to international socialist with vague shades of Mao (and the Maoists in control for six months) and violence and atrocities. *⁶

Which is a terrible thing to do to someone who was born fighting, and has no intention of doing as told.

Yeah, I made my peace with it, and found my own way to a place where i could be free and not live in fear of transgressing the rules I couldn’t divine. But– Now they’re trying to take that away from me, and I don’t know what to do about it. Or I do. But I can’t get anyone to listen to me.

Recently a young friend said it’s not fair to have children now. They will be unwittingly recruited into a war not of their own making, even if it’s just a culture war.*⁷

I wouldn’t say anything, except that I expect that there is a lot of that generation worrying along those lines, at least on the conservative side. ^*8

It’s really just a more sophisticated version of “you shouldn’t have had me” but because it’s “altruistic” it might convince what are at heart good kids, who have been handed a very raw deal as to the time they’re born in. ^*9

The thing they don’t realize is that we are all handed raw deals when we are born, and some of us manage to make good things out of them.

Look, I’m not beating up on the young ones. Heinlein himself fell for this. His reason not to try for children with his wife before Ginny ^*10 was that “who would bring a kid into this fucked up world?” If he had had children then, they would be now in their nineties, around my dad’s age. And yeah, if still alive and having inherited a don’t tread on me disposition from daddy, they might be very worried about the road we’re on. But they would have lived through the age of greatest American prosperity, and have had the ability to make a very good life for themselves.

It’s still just a sophisticated version of “why was I born”. It assumes you grew up in the worst of times, with the worst of possible paths ahead, both of which are demonstrably flawed if not outright crazy ideas.

Look, I said above, I was born under national socialism. I was. It’s a fact of life. I found, later, I couldn’t live under international socialism, so I suited myself.

BUT here’s the thing: my parents were born under national socialism. Their parents were born during a brief Anarchists in power interregnum (I think all of them.)

They all had good lives. Okay, the lives might have been distorted by those in power above them. There was a reason grandad worked abroad most of his life, and frankly, I don’t know how long till mom started screaming if the revolution hadn’t happened. (Probably not long. She screamed under international socialism, even though they were — trust me — more crazy and intrusive than under national socialism.)

But beyond the distortions, all of them had good lives, and had kids, and raised their kids. Now, I don’t think I could have tolerated either regime as a grown up. But I’m me, and I fit weirdly anywhere. And mind you, I’m not complaining. Well, I am complaining, because the ranks are forming NOW when I’m old and unsuited.

In point of fact, the times I grew up in were much worse than now. But we survived. And I even have some very good memories.

You can’t know. You can’t know ahead what your kids are being born into. No one can. The one things we know is that they aren’t being born into paradise. (D*mn it.)

My box of regrets is full of things like ‘if I’d kept my mouth shut and written leftist, the kids would be so much better off.” But on the other hand, I wasn’t ready to sell my soul, even for them.

The thing is, any kids you have will be born into a war. So it was since the beginning of time. But here’s the thing: they’ll have to make their own lives, live their own choices.

None of my fans will like to hear this, but your kids might very well decide to be statist drones. ^*11 (In which case, it will really suck to be them, but that’s on them, not you.)

All you do is give them life, give them the opportunity to choose. Ultimately, they will make their own choices, and yes, some will be things you wouldn’t make UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. This is something that’s very hard to fit in your heads, until the kids are in their twenties or so, but every parent since that garden and that serpent has had to face that.

But why give them life if it’s not going to be perfect? Or at least good?

…. Because it’s the only thing that gives life meaning, in the long run.

No, I’m not saying that childless people have no meaning in life, though I think a lot of them think they don’t.

What I’m saying is that if you care passionately about anything: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, say, even if you’re not religious (particularly if you’re not religious, because if you’re religious you view this life as a short preamble) you must have kids to invest in the future. (Or get close to the kids of others and hope to influence them. Which is harder. And it’s about to get massively harder for the left.)

Because in the end, those kids you “draft” “unwillingly” are the only ones that can win the war of human liberty. Or life. Or the pursuit of happiness.

You’re not going to win it in the present. And if you leave the reproducing to people who want government to care for them like a mother or a father forever, then liberty is going to go down for a count (it will come back up, because genetics aren’t all) because the kids will be raised with that. Yes, some of them will defect to our side, like some of us will defect to theirs. But on the main, temperament and disposition have an influence, and they will tend to go the way of the family, in the majority.

So if you care about the future, you’ll have kids. And you’ll do your best to raise the little sh*ts so they don’t defect, and don boots, and go stomping on human faces.

Because that’s what your ancestors did. And your ancestors before them. World without end.

The alternative….

I was tallying how few people in my generation, that I KNOW have grandkids. Even those with enormous families have maybe one or two grandkids.

I can’t begin to emphasize how this is not normal. I’ve preached about population dearth, but this is population crash: assume the position and kiss your *ss goodbye.

And we don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what comes next, and neither do you.

I know a ton of you were propagandized that on the other side of this there’s rainbows butterflies, and we’re all rich. They’re idiot Marxists. Wealth isn’t something to be endlessly redistributed. It needs humans to create it.

Times of population dearth are hungry and horrible times. And that’s not what we’re looking at. It’s 10x worse than that.

Add to that all the people who are going to find that most of their age group has no kids and gives no fucks; that the majority of their age group believes neither in G-d nor man, nor anything beyond them, and it’s too late to do anything about it. ^*12 And a lot of them are going to flip into end-times bacchanalia and crazy.

Which will be biblical and epic. After which the Earth will go very silent, as the children (particularly adult children) who depended on others looking after them die. Those that survive such “end times” will start again, if we’re lucky not from pre-historic conditions, but that depends on how ugly things get as they come apart.

It won’t be very far up from that, though, because it can’t be. Because we’ll have enough (maybe) for small bands of people, dotting the landscape. How long can one keep tech going? When in the end times the hedonists will insist 2 + 2 = infinity and teach that to the scant children?

“But Sarah, if we bring children into the world, they’ll just have to deal with that.” Maybe. Or maybe there will be enough of them, and enough of them will be sane and functional to keep us going over the very rough spot, so that we can emerge on the other side, still civilized and functional.

“But I can’t ask that of them!” Every generation asks that of every other. Each generation has it in their hands to end civilization. Not having a generation, or having a generation that’s 1/10th of the past just guarantees that the few that exist will fight in vain against the fall. The more we have, the more likely we survive this.

No, we are not overpopulated. We never were. That’s a big government statistical lie. It’s possible for humans to be overpopulated. That usually leads to invention and expansion to other areas.

But we can get under populated. And like the cooling of the planet being a much bigger danger than the heating of the planet, under-populated can destroy humanity, or send us back to living in hunter gatherer counts for a very long time. (I believe this has happened before. Maybe many times. Hence it being built into every language that our ancestors were much, much better than us.)

No, I don’t see communism as the future, and I don’t see communism in the US. I think the current crop of arrant idiots, quite the dumbest set to ever run in possession of Marxism and red crap, will try. They will TRY. But they’ll fail. I expect chaos and almost for sure violence. (Yes, I expected the beginnings this month. I’m not sure we’re not seeing it. There have been a few events… Besides a sitting (if illegitimate) president threatening us with nukes. And since this is the second on their side to do so, you know it’s what they really believe.) I think the violence only hasn’t happened because our proportion of young people (real, not statistical) is low, and low enough they were taught a culture of safetyism. (Because they were the precious few.)
But I believe violence will come, because humans are not tame, and this bunch is cornering us.

But even if we don’t rebel communism is designed on Malthusian and other completely insane assumptions. We don’t have enough people for us to pretend it even works. And if they take out the country that feeds the world, there will be no one to subsidize the pretense. (Yes, I’m sure the idiots think China will, but I’m not at home to Communist delusion.)

So, whatever you think you’re having kids for, it’s not that.

What is it? Bobbed if I know.

My parents couldn’t have foreseen the fall of Communism. They like every conservative in their era thought communism would win in the end, and that the only virtue lay in resisting it as long as they could. Their parents might have thought the children they were having children for was endless European wars.

It turned out much better than they could have hoped. No, not perfect — duh — because it usually does.

The truly horrific things — the black plague — tend to be absolutely unforeseen. And unplanneable for. They just happen out of clear blue sky, unforeseen.

Yes, tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow the sun could go supernova, and what if you drafted — DRAFTED — a child to the unforeseen end of the world?

I hate to say this, because I realize it’s a retroactive rebuke at Heinlein. It is also a rebuke on the new agey pamphlet that I was handed when older son was born:

We ALL have children for uncertain times. The total idiots are those who think their kids’ lives will be lived out in candyland with sparkles.

And yes, for some it will turn out very badly. Contrary to the stupid pamphlet, you can’t CONTROL your kids forever into the future, and if you could it would be terrible.

For some it will turn out very well. Better than you could have expected. Or do you think that Leonardo DaVinci’s parents, having an illegitimate son in a dirty-poor village expected him to die in a royal palace and be admired four hundred years later?

The real question is: Would you rather not have been born? Do you know anyone who would rather not have been born, unless they’re mentally ill, or 12 years old?

We can’t even CONCEPTUALIZE not existing, because the essence of life is to live, and pass life on. It’s the most basic thing.

Do the thing, if you can. Pass it on.

The doom of civilization I foresee is probably wrong, as all foreseen dooms, but it has a better chance of happening than “We’re going to be fighting them from the Gullags FOREVER.”
There’s not that many of them. They’re not that powerful. They are a terrified minority, fighting like cornered rats.

Be not afraid. And if you can, bet in the future. Bet in the future in the only way that matters.

The future might not belong to those who show up. But if no one shows up there is no future.

Only silence and emptiness.

Forever.

(** Metaphorically and by modern interpretation, it always starts with a serpent in a lush garden. See Leonard Cohen “It is in love that we are made.” — and yeah, I woke up in a weird mood, then the day got weirder, and you’re inevitably going to have to put up with it.)

(*** BTW, I’m not going to whack the regular who preached this at me, because regular. But there are another three comments on this that I DID NOT approve, to the point I wonder if my post yesterday got posted on one of the whacker “Christian” sites. So, for the record, “You were beautifully and fearfully made” is true. It’s also true “G-d doesn’t make junk.” (And incredibly vapid.) That doesn’t mean that humans are perfect machines, or that they have to live with everything they are born with.
I, thank heavens, I was raised in a religion that whatever its other issues understands that creation is still subjected to the effects of sin, starting with the original sin, and that G-d respects the free will of humans, even free will that distorts his plan. He obviously respects the free will of other creatures because by the time we became humans we had some very interesting ancestral systems that work at cross purposes. Take my auto immune. Your immune system is forever on patrol against different proteins. This is how most cancers we get (and we all get like 2 a day) never survive and grow. Because your immune system whacks them. HOWEVER either mine is insane (possible) or I express proteins that are different (I’m above the highest for Neanderthal genes!) So mostly it whacks me, leaving me at danger for cancer and making me scratch my arms raw. But I’m just an extreme example.
I’m not being heretical. There is still a miracle there. My older son says it’s a continuous miracle that humans continue living and don’t self-destruct any of the million of ways we can at any time. So, that is a miracle too.
I do realize people are uncomfortable with treating things that if you squint and look sideways can be considered moral failings. Which was the whole point of my post. Sometimes you have to. They are not moral failings, but have their origin in well-defined physical issues.
I have said I’m “still at large” on depression because, unless something unforeseen occurs, I DO have it under control. The worst I got was when Hypothyroidism fought on its side. I try not to have to take treatment for THAT because I want to make sure what I think with is mine.)
HOWEVER I wouldn’t be here without medical treatment. I’d have died in early childhood. And the ADD? I had a choice. It is severe enough that I could not get anything done the rest of my life, now I don’t have editors calling and demanding work (i.e. I’m not exernally regulated) or I could be productive. I choose to be productive. Some people manage ADHD fine. Because they don’t have as severe a case, or because they’re better at managing it. I can’t.
To anyone demanding one manage everything without drugs because “you’re beautifully and fearfully made”: I have a distant cousin who has warring mental illnesses the least of which is schizophrenia. When he’s well, he’s around and doesn’t take his meds. And then things go wonky. He watches himself all the time, and when he thinks he’s at risk for killing someone, he commits himself and gets the treatment. Yes, he’s beautifully and fearfully made. It’s not his fault HIS ancestors married their first cousins more than mine did, and gifted him both a brilliant mind and a severely flawed brain. And he deals with it the best he can. And in eternity his CELESTIAL body will be free of those flaws. Or would you rather he accepted G-d’s will and killed people, starting with his very beloved mother? I don’t care if your crazy interpretation of the Bible says. My branch doesn’t engage in biblio-idolatry. G-d might be a pantser and have plans to rescue everything into His plan at any minute, but he’s not a puppet master and you’re not a meat puppet. He allows free will to run in the world, and that means the free will of your ancestors affects you too. And if that’s not what you believe too bad, so sad, but you’re not going to convince me by shouting at me.)

***** And people wonder why Jean Jacques Rousseau is first on my kill list as soon as younger son builds the long-promised K’nex time machine.

^*6 Though you won’t find that in any history books, not even the mass graves found decades later. Hell, I don’t know if people in Portugal know about them. I don’t know how mom found out, though I verified it sideways and weirdly.
When I was telling a friend who worked for the State Dept. under Reagan about this stuff I started with “you’re going to think I’m crazy.” And he said “Oh, heck no, honey. We knew. We just couldn’t get anyone to listen.” And it was SUCH a relief.

_*7 Spoiler, I don’t think it will just be JUST a culture war. It’s been delayed due to the aging of the populations, but the blue model can’t go on. Their ultimate model, communism, has shown what it is almost half a century ago, and we’re running out of denial. And people are getting angry. It’s not a coincidence the FICUS wants to nuke us. They know. In fact, they’d never have cheated this blatantly or done the crazy things they imposed on us for a year and a half if they weren’t terrified out of their corrupt little minds.

^*8 The liberal side is still trying to figure out: what kind of genitals they have; what kind of genitals they want to have; what kind of genitals they’re attracted to; how to make babies in the middle of all this mess; whether the sacrament of abortion is more important than making babies. So, we’ll leave them out of this.

^*9 One of the things I like about Budhism and other religions that believe in Re-incarnation (The Mormons believe in Pre-incarnation, and I might or might not have known this at one time, but I no longer remember if they believe this particular thing) is that they believe the baby chooses the time and place to be born into ^*9*1 which absolves parents of that particular anxiety and responsibility.)

( ^*9*1 I don’t believe in that, but let’s suppose I did: did I have to choose such a strange time and such a backward place. If I believed that, I’d go around randomly whacking myself in the back of the head for being a dumb ass.)

( ^*10 Yes, she was a lush. But people have had children with lushes, and all of us have ancestors who are/were lushes. And yeah, he was sterile, in his fifties, when tested. MAYBE.
Because, look, they weren’t that good at determining that. We still aren’t. My best friend not someone to play around and besides her oldest is the spitting image of his dad was told her husband was basically sterile. She didn’t know it but when those results came back, she was pregnant with their first child. At any rate, due to Heinlein’s health issues, this might not have been true EARLIER.)

( ^*11 If only to piss you off or to be different. I mean, you guys know not all of my family is conservative. In fact none of them is for liberty, because they’re Europeans. But some of them are on the other side.)

( ^*12 For women there is a very specific end. Surveys suggest every woman who hits it childless wishes she’d had children. But hell, even women who had as many children as they planned, when it becomes impossible to have more, eat their own hearts out. Even those who tried to have more. Trust me on this. The saddest words in language are “it might have been.”)

Sometimes it’s important to know why you’re failing.

No, seriously. And it’s important to admit when it’s something, if not external to you, so intrinsic to you that you can’t do a hell of a lot about it.

Not as an excuse, but as an engineering problem. And so that you can figure out how to go back and this time not fail.

I have problems with this. My kids have problems with this. My husband has problems with this. Most of my friends have problems with this. This is why I decided to talk about it, even though it’s a bit cringey and it feels like I’m making excuses. I’m not. You need to admit what is making you fail, before you can do the thing and not fail. And even when it sounds like an excuse, it isn’t. It’s just a factor most people don’t have.

It’s been a shock to me as I get older to find that a lot of the issues I’ve struggled with since childhood are either physical or really bad training at a time when I couldn’t do anything about it.

It’s even harder to accept it.

Look, there are two problems here: one is that I often forget I have a body. My mental image of myself is fairly disembodied. I even think of physical tasks without taking in account the fact of my size, height or age. And feel vaguely guilty when I can’t reach the high shelves, despite that being something I can do nothing about.

Admitting that the body has other, more nebulous limitations: like ability to pay attention, or a quirky brain that scrambles digits between seeing them and writing them down …. that’s even harder, because I feel like I’m making those issues up and that I am at some level giving myself stupid excuses not to be perfect.

Nobody is perfect?

Well, that’s the second problem. I never really expect ANYONE else to be perfect, but I get very upset at myself for not being so.

And damn it, I know I’m smarter than the average bear. So there was never any excuse for not having perfect grades, when I was in school. Except that of course, I did all my studying and school work in short little intervals, followed and surrounded by vast oceans of time in which I roamed around in my own head. This might involve physical stuff, like taking notes, reading on something that I had no business reading on (up to and including rabbit holes of finding all the books by x in the house, and finding out if his characters all looked alike, as I vaguely remembered) or simply sitting with my brain doing the equivalent of having too many tabs open.

It wasn’t till 57 that I got treatment for ADD. Mostly what convinced the doctor is husband’s explanation that if I’m in line at the grocery and it takes more than two minutes, and I didn’t bring something to do, I’ll wonder off randomly, and leave the cart there.

This drives him — and me — insane. And all my life I thought I SHOULD be able to control it. Only of course, I couldn’t. Will power only goes so far, and as older son puts it “Mom, you’re not ADHD. You’re ADHD AF”.

Taking meds — which I hate, btw , but that’s life — gave me the range, and helped me see the difference between being on and not. This means when husband is trying to get me to choose something he’s showing me on the computer, or whatever, and I space out in the middle of his sentence I can point out the meds ran out, and I don’t want to have caffeine late at night. It’s not that he’s not interesting, or I’m not interested. It’s that my mind is flitting around like a cat on LSD. I CAN’T keep my attention on it, no matter what I do.

Is this an excuse? Well, I could use it as such. But what I actually found is that now I know what I was doing wasn’t normal, and where normal is, I can fake it for a time after the meds run out. And get stuff done. Tiredness though, means my will power goes to pieces, and that’s fine. At that point I can’t do serious, intellectual a follows b work, be it writing or buying something I need, by evaluating three different models. It just won’t happen. And if pushed, I revert to bad habits from when I was vaguely aware I wasn’t normal, but was trying to hide it, and pointed at one thing and bought that. (Don’t go there. No, really, don’t.)

Now I know it wasn’t normal, and I couldn’t make it normal by will power, though, I can work around. It’s like any other physical disability. You work around it.

Some disabilities are easier to deal with. Once I found out I was mildly dyslexic and PROFOUNDLY digit dyslexic, it started being easier to control both, and I worked out a great deal of tricks so I don’t confuse digits, or don’t measure twice and cut– Oh, hell did I do that again?

Sometimes knowing “thing” is there and working around it is all it takes.

The weirdest thing is finding out at 58 that a lot of the things I thought were moral failings are actually and for real physical issues. I could no more will myself to pay attention to something not fascinating to me for hours at a time than a deaf person can will themselves to enjoy symphonies.

There are other things, too. Weird food dislikes or avoidances that turn out to be the fact I have an issue with that food, and/or with a texture. And other minor stuff.

It’s a relief to stop beating myself and going “I have to try harder” and instead go “Oh, yeah, that’s because of x. Can I work with it? Do I want to?”

Does it make life easier? Yes. Is it a cop out? Oh, no. If I still want to do thing y I have to come up with a way to do it, despite and besides x.

But it means the reasons I fail are no longer “mysterious” given my status as brighter than the average bear. And it means that I can try again, in a different way, avoiding the definition of madness.

And sometimes I can even fake normal for long periods at a stretch.

Now do I wish I’d known this … oh, let’s be generous… 40 years ago? Damn Skippy I do. I’d have got so much more done with the time I’ve been given.

But you know, better late than never, and at least now I KNOW. And I want you to know as well.

Forgive yourself for what you can’t help, and work with, over and around things too. And yes, that also means your body’s sudden, irrational “I don’t wanna.” Find ways to bribe it to do what you want. Or get someone else to do it.

You’re not a floating brain bubble. And the ape must be appeased. And when you learn to appease it, the brain can reach much further.

Now stop beating yourself up, and figure it out. Even if it involves doing that ickiest of all things: forgiving yourself.

You know what garages are like. You keep things there. Things like weird old stuff, old car parts, empty computer boxes, chainsaws, corpses….

Okay. Probably not corpses. Except mouse corpses, which weird out younger son.

We still haven’t found a place to move to. We have found places we might/could but only if we have to. and we’re giving it till the fourth of July for the perfect house to come up before we settle for one of those.

But it’s time to get the h*ll out of Colorado — and good Lord, it hurts to write that. I’ve left a place I loved beyond and beside reason before. It’s not good — and we know it. It’s time to get this house ready to sell.

So far we’ve been going through the areas where things were so piled we couldn’t get into them, partly to clear storage space to put things in them while — emergency plan 5 — we move our essentials to a rental and look for a place to buy from there. (As you guys probably still remember, we’re BAD at buying real-estate, mostly because we’re Odd and live in the houses Oddly, so they have to fit OUR purposes. Strangely, this is fairly normal for writers, who tend to buy bizarre houses. (If I could find one of those poured cement diners, in the shape of turkeys or apples or Shrimp, I’d buy it in a heart beat, if it were weather-tight and cheap, at least. Alas, no one has offered one for sale.))

Anyway…. The garage mostly contains empty boxes, parts for cars we no longer own, tools to fix cars we no longer own. Tools for me to do house remodeling (Younger son: Mom, do you really need forty hammers? And no, they’re not specialized. The movers in the last two moves packed them and– Okay, later.) LOTS of copies of my books, a few of which are water-damaged beyond repair. (Younger son had a good idea for those. Because the last book sale was a mess due to the need to keep track of who ordered what, and different postage and such. So he said we should sell “boxes from Sarah’s Garage”: like three signed books — if you have them, you can use them for gifts — and a signed con program, cover flat or piece of art. And put them at a price about the same as the cover price of the books, including postage. Flat fee.) Look, I don’t do that many cons. Administering a sale is time-expensive and I’d rather be writing, and younger son has more important things to do, also, so– And how many boxes do I have/ Well, enough to take up a 5×5 storage unit. which we’re not going to rent just so we can continue dragging boxes around the country.

So– Sometime in the next month there will be “Boxes from Sarah’s garage.” And we won’t include a mouse corpse. Unless your cats REALLY want them. (We have a 400 acre natural preserve behind us (around that size anyway) so mice are a given.)

But meanwhile, after son, in an heroic effort, had dug and dug and dug, and filled the back of my car with donation stuff….

We found at the very back (near the mouse hole) a stack of oh, probably five by ten boxes, which were apparently stashed in there by our movers, when we weren’t looking.

Here, I’ll interject that I hate moving. I’d done it precisely once by the time I got married, from grandma’s house to mom and dad’s new house (now 52 years old.) We moved in an ox cart (it was about a mile, and the ox cart was a loan from the farmer) and well, that was it.

Mom and dad haven’t moved either.

However in the eighties, and with Dan in computers, it became obvious we were going to move a lot. Before we had kids we moved every two to three years. Then we moved to Colorado when older son was 1, and we’ve moved four times since. That is, if you compress the last move into “one time” which it kind of was, but not.

Because we got it in our deranged minds to buy THIS house which was on a short sale, it took us six months to buy this house.

Since we were renting while getting the other house ready for sale, we ran out of lease waiting for this one to come through and we moved to another interim apartment before moving here. In the meantime, Older Son moved away to school and–

Well, all in all we had five more or less complete moves in a year, which is kind of nightmare scenario for me, since my own particularly “neuro ATYPICAL thing” is that I hate having my cheese moved. I will endure the most bizarre arrangements, just so long as I can keep my daily routine intact. When the routine is in flux, I get grumpy and depressed and out of sorts.

By the time we moved into this house, almost exactly 5 years ago (the short end of the time we expected to stay here, but we didn’t expect the state and the country to go howling insane, honest) I was not only grumpy, but also very ill with a combination of ill-treated thyroid, and sleep apnea. The combination is bad for me, let’s say.

We had once before had things packed for us. Well, once and a half.

When we moved from South Carolina, we packed as much as we could, to save time/money, but we had a week’s notice that Dan was getting the job and, oh, yah, must start in two weeks. So we didn’t sleep for a week, but we still had the movers finishing up packing the kitchen and the bedroom. (Which is why I got to experience Dave Barry’s “They packed a coffee cup with the coffee still in it.” Yep, they did. They also packed the contents of the bedroom TRASHCAN which is why 6 years later, unpacking the last box, we stared in horror at a USED fossilized (more or less) infant diaper….)

Then we had people pack everything in Manitou Springs, when we moved to Colorado Springs. This was needed because it was early-years of Dan’s career, relatively speaking, so he worked 19 hour days, and I had two school children full time, plus a nascent writing career (three books a year, that year.)

So we had someone come and pack, and because they were packing and transporting in increments, I had to go to the new house and leave them to pack.

NEVER do that. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER.

We were fortunate in the fact that they were really bad at identifying what was actually worth money, but I lost some tools and weirder stuff. (This was the move in which the weaponized umbrella left my life.)

It was however even weirder in the non criminal “What the hell” portion of it.

You see, they had given us an estimate for boxes that I thought was way too high, but they assured us that if the boxes came in under that count, they would — of course — only charge for what they used.

I was somewhat weirded out the boxes were the exact right amount, and I thought “they padded”. But I thought they padded by doing things like extra cushioning on dishes.

Oh, that would be rational and make sense, which is something I’ve found movers just.don’t.do.

The china was left half-wrapped, so we could lose irreplaceable parts of our tea sets, of COURSE.

No, in the boxes towards the end of it, what I found was that they had done things like fill entire, large boxes, with ONE SHOE and a lot of padding.

Though perhaps my favorite… You know those plastic lids you buy for cat food cans? The ones you use to cover the can, if you’re only feeding the cat half the contents (a violation of feline rights, but what can I say)? Yeah. Three of those in a large box. And a lot of paper. And the box was marked and delivered to… Master Bedroom.

So, we didn’t want to have movers PACK again, but I was very ill, and most of all very tired for two of those moves in a year. I was also dealing with stuff in my professional life that was taking ALL my attention and creating a shitton of stress.

So, husband convinced me to go with a packing service. This wasn’t part of the moving, but separate, and it has good reviews.

Okay……..

I knew there was trouble, when the lady doing the packing had a “hole” in a box and went looking for things the right size and shape to fill it. Sure. it saves boxes and money, but having kitchen cups in the middle of my office stuff is going to cost me time and aggravation on unpacking. I told her not to do that, but by then it was already too late (I’d been working instead of watching her.)

Then the movers did their thing. And you know movers, right? Regardless of what is marked on the actual box, if you turn your back for fifteen seconds, it will get put in the room or place nearest the truck.

Over the years, as we rearranged the garage, I’d found kitchen appliances, and — mostly, because they’re heaviest — boxes of books marked “library” (which is in the basement.) In fact, the library boxes were amiably distributed all over the house, as though they had no idea what a library was. (It has built-in floor to ceilin– Never mind.)

But we’d never made it to the most distant corner of the garage, partly because we THOUGHT those were all boxes younger son had abandoned with us when he moved. And because over time things that we were using to fix and improve the house (pallets of flooring, for ex) got in the way.

So, son has been making HEROIC efforts and clearing it up. There is still an entire array of shelves for Dan to go through, but yesterday I had fifteen minutes, so I went through and said, let me see anything that’s mine, and let’s see what’s in your boxes and if we can donate some.

…. The boxes clearly marked — by the movers — with son’s name…. well, no wonder he felt he had everything he needed and could leave them behind….

They contain my stuff, Dan’s stuff, some of older son’s stuff. Oh, and cat care stuff. What they don’t actually contain is any of younger son’s stuff.

Though one contained probably my entire “cleaning closet” and the mice had got into that, and… well, I hate to throw away swiffer pads and a hundred rubber gloves, but I’ll be d*mned if I’m going to try to use them with mouse poo and pee on them.

However, the two boxes that — so far, the day is young and we haven’t got to the storage room in the basement yet — take the absolute cake.

One of them says office supplies, and as far as I can tell, having opened it and looked in, it contains a table top water fountain, curlers, some projects in clay the kids did in kindergarten, and a proofread manuscript (which to be fair, is “office” broadly speaking.)

But the one I opened this morning was marked “Younger Son’s Room.”

Inside were… A Rex Stout novel I was re-reading at the time of the move. A portion of my silverware drawer, that I assumed had been stolen (including one thing with sentimental value and no particular value otherwise, but it looks good.) My good table cloths, including the Christmas ones, and the antique, embroidered and lace one that I normally use for Easter and hadn’t been able to find since the move (DUH) though I have all the (12) napkins. Stuff from my art room (art paper, mostly) and a package of printing paper. Some broken pastel crayons. …. Clothes pegs? AND the content of my card box where I kept story ideas, and which arrived empty. There’s a rubber band around the cards, so this was intentionally packed that way. (The box was in another box, natch. I gave up the cards for lost years ago. I glanced through them this morning. This is the Short-story-ideas file, so I might use a bunch.)

AND the entire contents of the “reservoir” of the pencil sharpener (which was not in this box and was unpacked in the first batch) evenly distributed to a one inch depth over the bottom of the box.

Honestly, I don’t even know what to make of that, or why she thought that should be packed. Or, if the pencil sharpener container fell out, why she didn’t just shake that into a trash bag. I mean, it’s jaw-droppingly insane, okay?

Onward towards our destination. I’m going to finish those boxes today, and hopefully start in on the library. And Bowl of Red is getting finished. And Rhodes will be on preorder soon.

And I promise not to send anyone any chain saws or corpses. Though at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if I find some of those in some boxes in the garage!