Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

When I was a kid, I used to get completely and thoroughly panicky before any big or meaningful test (and my idea of big and meaningful was somewhat skewed, looking back.) You see, no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I studied, I was never perfect (now, there were several physiological reasons for this, including undiagnosed ADD and sensory issues. But of course I was never going to be perfect, anyway.) And then I would get back a test with an A which always shocked me. I felt like I’d pulled a great con on the world.

The truth of course, was that the teacher didn’t expect us to do everything perfectly. She had mental benchmarks for us to hit. (At least in elementary. After that we entered a crazy tiltawhirl where curriculum changed every month, and…. yeah. The indoctrination went on though.)

And when I first got married, I kept panicking at everything that needed to be done to keep the house running, and being sure I was about to mess up and it all would come crashing around my head. You could say that my expectations for myself were unreasonable — they were — because things never crashed and burned, though sometimes the laundry pile at the end of the bed is where we got all our clothes. (There is still a laundry pile. These days it’s mostly stuff waiting to be ironed or have a some mending done, though.)

And when I first had kids, I had persistent nightmares that I forgot to feed the infant and he died. (In that case, I should have run screaming for ADD meds, but hey. It was a subconscious self-diagnosis.) And there were days, like when I found older son eating croutons from the bag, because I was writing and forgot to make lunch; he was hungry and that’s what he could reach in the pantry. He’s 30 and married and living away from us, though, so I didn’t fail COMPLETELY.

I just always feel like I fall incredibly short of my standards.

Yesterday, while talking about something else, I told younger son I try very hard not to lie. He said “true, but your self valuation is so bad it’s an actual lie. Particularly of your own work. You write this incredible stuff, then act embarrassed because it’s not very good. It’s a lie, even if you’re lying to yourself.”

And maybe he’s right. I’m probably not the 12 year old trying to bluff the adult world that I feel I am.

Partly because most of us feel that way. Partly because we know how imperfect we all are.

Someone in the comments yesterday said that he feels as though a few very competent individuals are keeping civilization going. He’s not wrong. There’s a metric and ratio and a name for them.

According to the Pareto Principle:

More generally, the Pareto Principle is the observation (not law) that most things in life are not distributed evenly. It can mean all of the following things:

20% of the input creates 80% of the result

20% of the workers produce 80% of the result

20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue

20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes

20% of the features cause 80% of the usage

And on and on…

(More at the link.)

This also means that 20% of what you do creates 80% of the results you see. But don’t drive yourself nuts looking for it, because it might change all the time. I remember something Glenn Reynolds said, which I overheard and which made a huge difference in my life “How did I get into being instapundit? By accident. Like most things in my life.”

Because, you know, that’s my experience too. There are things that require a crazy amount of work, and where I push like an insane person, and they fall into a hole and disappear forever.

And then–

Well, I got published (traditionally) because a friend talked me into taking a workshop, where I met an editor and pitched a series and–

I published Darkship Thieves by accident, too. You see, I had written it thirteen years ago. I’d sent it to every possible publishing house and agent and been rejected. Then I sold something else completely different to Baen, and they gave me a conference in the now defunct bar. And I did free content for my fans. I ran out of stuff on hand, started serializing the novel, and either the novel or the reaction of the fans meant Baen bought it.

Meanwhile there were years of seriously sending that novel out/trying to sell space opera and getting every door shut in my face.

Then there is this blog. I’m not yet sure if that’s a win, but it’s become a significant part of my life, and it was never something I wanted to do. It just started because an agent pushed me to have a blog. Of course she didn’t know sooner or later I’d write about things I truly cared about, which meant we parted ways which meant…. well, here we are.

Most of the big breaks in my life are not intentional. Even though I’m working in a targeted way towards something, something I do almost incidentally will bear more fruit and sometimes take me in another direction.

But yes, in the macro level it’s easy enough to believe that 20% of the people are doing the important work.

The thing is, these aren’t necessarily the people who work hardest/longest hours/most targeted. Sure, most of the time they are. And sure, competency matters a terrible lot, and there’s a dearth of it.

But it’s not necessarily so. And all those drones working madly along always think they are the ones holding up the world.

Actually part of the problem we have is that 80% of people are so maleducated they can’t be competent whatever they set out to be. They don’t even know what competence looks like. So they roam the world lecturing people about invisible privilege and the made up history of critical race theory, and then become convinced they’re really, really helping, that somehow, at a molecular level (so to put it) they’re making the world a better place.

Sometimes it’s enough if they’re not making it worse.

I am convinced that the left has read — or rather skimmed, as they usually do — about the Pareto principle and became convinced that they don’t even need 80% of workers, or that workers don’t need to work, because the other 20% can support them. AND of course that they and only they are qualified to decide whose work is essential. Then they decided to use a virus panic (which I think was organically created from China’s agit prop and the left’s desire to crash the economy and make everyone miserable, so they’d vote for their zombie.) to implement their brilliant system.

Which can’t work because they’re morons with illusions of competency.

The whole point of the Pareto Principle is that you can’t decide who re the 20% being effective. Or where the important work is being done. It’s an uneven world, you can’t make it even (or as the left now calls it, in their habit of changing terms, “equitable”) or manage it. Even you only 20% of your work is effective.

So, you know, this is a complete refutation of communism, socialism or even “managed economy.” You can’t manage because from the top you can’t tell what is effective and needed. All the workers look equally busy and sometimes the drones look way more diligent. And anyway only 20% of your managing bears the right fruit and does what you want.

The problem is the left will never admit that and will keep pushing buttons at random to try to make themselves the most powerful people who decide who gets to work and who gets to eat.

Which means they are making the world collapse….

Around us….

And only 20% of us can do anything about it, and only 20% of the time.

Well, there might be ways to increase that ratio, or at least make your work more effective.

1- Try to work with a purpose, and be aware of where you’re putting your effort.

2- Learn. Learn as widely and effectively as you can. Even if 20% of that is ever needed, you don’t know what 20%.

3- Be willing to try new work/do different things. If you’re lucky, when the main thing fails, one of those will catch you up.

4- Be cheerful in the certainty you are not in control. No one (human) is in control. Control is an illusion, and ultimately destructive.

Now go and work as hard as you can towards perfection. You won’t reach it. But 20% there is good enough.

To keep the world running.

One of the most amusing things about the left is their absolute certainty that they know better than everyone else and that if only they ran the circus, everything would be perfect.

I’m not 100 percent sure where this insanity comes from, except for saying that it’s common in philosopher-kings. I.e. people well enough off that they have no idea how most people live, where food comes from, etc. Take one of those people and cram their heads full of theoretical knowledge. Particularly if you tell it to them as the revealed truth (as science is taught in most of our schools) and voila, someone who thinks they know everything and how everything should be done.

Which gets us to the left’ present attempt to choke Western Civilization which, granted, has been as evil and murderous as EVERY OTHER CIVILIZATION IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND, but has excelled on the good side of human civilization: namely, getting everyone fed, clothed, and living with a modicum of dignity. Not perfectly, of course, and there have been some truly disgusting periods, but by and large Western Civilization has made the world better.

However, mind you, it’s not perfect. It’s also not entirely contained within the cavernous emptiness of the average lefty’s mind. So, of course, off with its head.

And the left is absolutely, thoroughly convinced that it can “build back better.” That the system in its mind will translate perfectly into the outside world and run amazingly.

Well, as we have found in the last year, the left literally doesn’t know where its food comes from; can’t understand, oh, the relationship between rent and home ownership; between GDP and currency, between– None of it. They know so little about the real world they just don’t know what they don’t know.

We live in an amazing era. If I wanted to build a house with my own hands tomorrow, there is enough in youtube for me to go for a reasonable facsimile.

And yet, I guarantee to you that anything I built would have some major problems, simply because I don’t know what I don’t know, so I don’t know where to look for specific details of construction.

And mind you humans know pretty well how to build houses. We’ve been doing it for a very long time.

And yet any socialist/communist country manages to build houses that crumble while still under construction. I’m not even making this up.

Yet, our left in possession of a Marxist ideology that has no contact with the real world and confers nothing beyond unearned superiority, thinks it can take down the most complex interconnected web of civilization the world has ever known, and “build back better.”

Because these people, who can’t understand that we see them partying without masks, or that voter fraud was obvious to anyone not blinded by partisan faith, think they have the knowledge to not only redesign world civilization but make it perfect.

We all read the story of the garden and how humans were tempted with the idea that they’d be like gods. I remember thinking that was completely insane.

I was right. I’m seeing it happening before my eyes, and it’s completely insane.

There are many versions of this story. None of them ends well. But the willfully blind philosopher kings will not see.

Hold on to the sides of the boat. The water is going to get choppy.

But be not afraid. I’d bet us, or for that matter my cats against these “world encompassing intellects.”
At least my cats can tell their food dish from their litter box.

Be not afraid, but be prepared. The crumbling is going to be sudden, short and horrific.

And afterwards? Well, we’ll build back. Better? Without philosopher kings. That’s for sure. But with human hands, which means flawed, and with problems and–

Let’s make it the best we can.

That’s all anyone can do. Make it the best we can, with respect for the individual, and the understanding that we are not gods.

Until then, keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And stay alert. The life you save could be your own.

If Mr.Boyd hadn’t been a perfect bastard, Sally would never have had a close encounter of the third kind.

No, wait, we’re telling it all wrong.

If Sally hadn’t dropped her keys right in front of her door, she’d never have seen the giant green spiders.

Of course, the reason that Sally dropped her keys is that she was practically sleep walking, and honestly shouldn’t have been driving. And that was because Mr. Boyd was a bastard who kept trying to make his programmers deliver on what the sales people had over-promised the clients of his computer company.

In fact, as Sally walked down the hallways of her dingy apartment house, she’d been muttering to herself “Midnight code? We should be so lucky. At Boyd’s and Boyd’s we write four am code. And then get up two hours later and spend most of the next day undoing the mistakes we made while half asleep.” She was so sleepy she didn’t get into the mystery of why the firm had an extra “and Boyd’s.” As far as she could tell Mr. Boyd had no family and had never been married. But she supposed it was entirely possible Boyds reproduced by fission.

And then, blessedly, her apartment door ws in front of her, and she reached for the keys from her purse….

Perhaps it was some movement in the shadows of the dark hallway. She’d never know. But she dropped the keys and bent to pick them up. And saw the two giant green spiders hiding around the corner of the hallway looking at her.

Okay, so she couldn’t see any eyes, but she knew — just knew — they were looking at her, and sort of jiggling in anticipation, like kids who have set up a prank and are waiting for you to fall for it.

And then she was running, screaming, down the hallway and towards the door of the building.

Which is when she collided with a large, dark male. Though at the time she didn’t know he was a large dark male, or in fact even human. She thought in fact he was a spider.

“Ow,” Craig said when hit on the head with Sally’s shoe. Fortunately women no longer wore high heels to work, but the tennis shoes stung when it smacked across his face.

Which is when Sally realized Craig — though she didn’t know he was Craig — must be human, because she couldn’t imagine a spider saying “Ow.” Well, Sally wasn’t a particularly imaginative kind, even if she was a very good coder.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “There were giant green spiders at my door.”

Instead of recommending a good alcoholism-prevention program, Craig shuddered. “At my door too. And they were holding ray guns.”

Sally blinked. We said she didn’t have much imagination, remember? “The spiders were holding ray guns?”

Craig rubbed at his eyes. “Hell, I think so, but I’m not even sure. You see, my boss, Mr. Banderas, is a perfect bastard, and he keeps promising code that can’t be delivered in the time he gives. And then he works us until we deliver it anyway. I don’t think I’ve slept eight hours in the last ten days. Cumulative.”

And Sally laughed because she rarely met a guy who even knew the word cumulative. Particularly since it seemed she spent her life writing midnight code. “You live here? In the building?” she asked.

And sitting on the floor of the dingy apartment house, Craig realized that Sally was really very pretty despite the dark rings around her blue eyes, which matched her glossy dark hair. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s weird we never met. But I blame it on Mr. Banderas.”

“No. Some of the guilt must go to Mr. Boyd,” Sally said. “Trust me on this. Your Mr. Banderas can’t be worse than Boyd. He’s a perfect bastard. I mean, he calls his firm Boyd’s and Boyd’s but there’s no indication there is another Boyd. Possibly in the whole world.” She allowed Craig to help her rise, and leaned on him while she put her shoe on.

When they went back to her door, there were no spiders visible.

They said goodbye at the door with smiles, because this is not that kind of story. But the next night, when Sally came stumbling in at 4 am, Craig was also stumbling in at 4am. It was none of Sally’s business that he’d been lurking in his car for half an hour so they could stumble in together.

And after a few early mornings of stumbling in together, Sally had said “We have to stop meeting like this and go out for dinner or something” which was very bold of her, since she had never even had a date.

And Craig said, “Let’s do it.” Which was very bold of him, since he’d once thought the best solution to romance would be to write himself a girlfriend program. Only he couldn’t ever get the AI right. The technology was just not there yet.

But anyway, their first afternoon off, after two weeks, they went to the zoo, and then out to dinner in this tiny, quaint Greek diner.

After a few more of those afternoons — and a glorious evening — they started looking for different jobs, where the managers might be slightly less bastard-like. Or at least, perhaps, imperfect bastards.

As it happened Craig found a job paying double what he’d made at Mr. Bandera’s. Which allowed him to ask Sally whether she wanted to marry him and perhaps have beautiful kids who’d be perfect coders.

She said yes, of course. She was socially awkward. Not stupid.

On her wedding day, while her mother told her how unlikely it all was, she thought, “And mom doesn’t know the half of it.” Since she’d never told mom about the green spiders.

In a bar across the galaxy, amid many other strange life forms, there is a table around which several green spiders sit, drinking something pink and foaming from little steins.

And frankly, if you can’t picture that, your imagination is as bad as Sally’s and we can only hope you’re as good a coder.

“Mike,” one of the spiders says to the other in spider language. (And if you can’t imagine either a spider language, or a spider named Mike. We’re sorry for you. After all, phonetically — mīk — is a very easy sound to make, and why shouldn’t a spider be named that?) “We’re going to be so rich. This Mating Human Geeks Program is a hit.”

Mike hoisted his glass of beer and nodded. “Isn’t it weird they never search their apartments of the cameras we hid earlier?”

“Nah,” the spider named Bob — what you’re going to have problems with a spider named Bob, really. Phonetically ˈbäb is even easier than Mike — who was the camera man of the group said. “I’m very good at hiding the cameras.”

“And guys, this is not just curiosity,” the Spider named Uotty’rq (are you happy now.) said. “Without us contriving it, it is possible most Human Geeks would never meet. And they’re a beautiful subspecies, well worth preserving.

I got this post in my head, fully written. And I don’t want to type it, because typing it in makes it real.

I do not know where it came from, except perhaps from the fact that over this last year here and on various private groups I’ve seen a lot of you surface. Because you were in one of those marriages where you always cancelled each other’s votes. And it didn’t matter. Because you still agreed on all the important things. Or sometimes, it wasn’t a marriage, but your kids, or your parents. Or your best friend. Or your sibling. As long as you didn’t discuss politics, you pretty much got along great. And if the other person insisted on discussing politics, you could deflect. And then you laughed about it, and went on.

Over the last year, apparently, this has been breaking down.

Weirdly I feel better that it broke down way earlier for me. Some of those break downs — like a friend of decades insisting that I had to listen to her rant about how George W. Bush was going to put all gays in camps or I didn’t “respect” her — propelled my coming out of the political closet with a bang because I couldn’t take the insanity anymore.

And some of them came after that come-out. And specifically after SP3. At this point if I have some remaining friendships on that side of the isle, it’s because I don’t talk to them and they don’t talk to me.

Why do I feel better it broke down way earlier? Well, because most of them don’t know where we live. And I’m no longer on their radar.

Because what I’m hearing about this year from people–

Okay, so here’s the blog post I don’t want to write.

The next American Civil War will be fought in a lot of places, in sudden flare ups and unexpected bursts of rage. But where most casualties will occur is in the home.

America’s civil war will be fougnt many places, but mostly in living rooms: siblings against each other, parents against children, children against parents, husband against wife, wife against husband.

If you live with a convinced leftist, how safe is your life, should the balloon go up?

And before you say “The first civil war was also between brothers!”

Sure, it was. There were mixed families. Mostly upper crust mixed families. But the war was largely a regional war, the country riven on regional lines.

Now? Bah. Now it’s a war of ideology. A war of beliefs.

And a lot of people are sleeping with the enemy, hanging out on weekends with the enemy. Visiting the enemy. Having lunch with the enemy.

At this moment a lot of you are sitting back there and going “My wife/husband/elementary school friend is not an enemy. Sure, he/she/it drank the Marxist koolaid from a hose but in every day life, in our normal interactions, in non-political things, we are very close, the best of friends.”

And maybe you are. Maybe you can trust them with your life.

But I will remind you we live in a nation where the capital is surrounded with razor wire to defend themselves from people who voted for the guy. I will remind you there are troops occupying our capital and that our secret services have so far been corrupted they keep inventing internet conspiracies (or probably referring to their very own black ops) to justify it.

I will remind you that your favorite progressive has allowed himself to be moved from “strong welfare net” to “we need full on communism, with favored races” within the last 12 years (or was indoctrinated into that state in schools.) I will remind you — and the conversations related back to me don’t help me think otherwise — that your favorite leftist thinks you’re racist/homophobic/evil. NO MATTER HOW MANY indications to the contrary.

And I can hear you sniffling: “But I love him/her/it/fuzzy.” Well, yes, and ten years ago that would have been me. I had very good friends I just classed as political idiots. I don’t wish the last 10 years on anyone, but at least they’re not living with me, 90% of them don’t know where I live. And I’ll be out of here in hopefully no more than 4 but maybe ten months, and maybe we have that long. Also, most of my close friends/acquaintances aren’t likely to cause any damage, being…. not the type. On the other hand two dozen of them (easy) are friends with people who WILL.

Now to be clear: do I expect all of you in mixed political families to be in danger?

No. Any number of your spouses, relatives and friends are leftist because that’s “what good people are.” And they will turn on a dime, too, if half the crap about what the left has been doing for the last couple of decades comes out unvarnished and unspun. (The left knows it too. They’re perhaps more scared of these people than they are of us.)

Others are leftist and might hate your guts if things go hot, but simply don’t have it in them to hurt anyone. These are the “slippery” ones, because if you had asked me, even two years ago, if the media and the left (BIRM) could spin these people into wishing death on someone for not wearing a mask, when the person is not sick; there’s no proof of asymptomatic transmission (there’s reports from China but NOWHERE ELSE); and the actual disease (it’s not hard to find) might be a little more lethal than the flu but only at ages past about 80, I’d have said “no. They’re politically insane, but not stupid.” However they are “group oriented.” Turns out the type of gaslighting we’ve been enduring works really well on people who life for other’s opinions. (Which explains whey Southern Europe is still mired in the fricking crazy. Uniformly. And why women in general are more susceptible to the completely irrational gaslighting than men.) And they already believe a bunch of crazy crap. the reason that they think QANON is right main stream, it’s because it’s the mirror image of their actual main stream.

Are you sure they’ll remain inoffensive if the ballon goes up and the gaslighting switches to “If you know a Trump voter, he/she is dangerous?” How about “Turn them in, so they can be sent somewhere nice for their own protection?”

Look, guys, I hope none of this is ever needed. I still have friends on the other side, I’m just not in touch and we work on the very long finger. And there are people I no longer consider friends but whom I like very much who are buying into the entire insane bull excreta of “attempted coup” and evil “white nationalists.”

But like Peter Grant, I think we’re way past the ballot box, and just waiting for a precipitating incident.

Gun and ammo sales say we’re not the only ones.

So what if the balloon goes up. Some of you, even in TX, are trapped behind the ultimate enemy lines. The ones with comfy chairs and kitchens.

So?

Well, there are several things you can keep an eye on:

If your pet liberal starts bringing up politics and not letting you avoid it, chances are they’ll be a danger. This is more so if they accuse you of racism/sexism/homophobia, etc.

If your pet liberal actually starts taking an interest in violence, from advocating it to finding or learning to use the implements of violence.

If your pet liberal thinks he/she/it would be in paradise except for people like you, personally.

I realize most of you don’t WANT to leave, and a good number can’t. But keep a close eye on the situation particularly for escalation of animosity. Keep an eye on the media they consume too. Be aware of how rapidly they are being “weaponized” to destroy anyone who disagrees with them.

What you do then, should you decide that when the balloon goes up you’ll be in present danger ranges from the very simple to the almost impossible.

If your pet liberal is a friend/acquaintance/work friend make sure you have a bug out place they don’t know about. Could be a second house, a friend’s basement, or a rented studio in a place they wouldn’t expect you. Or you know, if you moved recently, get a drop box and be cadgey with where you actually live.

If it’s family it’s more difficult, but we still advise a bug out bolt hole they don’t know about. (Unlike most people, I expect the frenzy to be short lived. Trust me. It points to that.) The bolt hold must be accessible at all times, so if it’s a friend’s basement/spare room — get the spare key, and make sure your pet liberal doesn’t know about it.

If you’re like most of us, you still love your pet liberal.

So if you can’t do either of the above, I recommend you think really hard of ways to neutralize them that won’t permanently hurt them, should they come for you.

Because no one wants to think of the other choice. Me, least of all.

But be aware that the uneasy detente won’t last forever. They won’t let us live and let live. If nothing else 20/21 should have put an end to that illusion.

Sooner or later, the balloon will go up. Be prepared to save yourself, if you can’t save them.

Don’t let your loved lefties jeopardize your survival. And above all don’t let yourself become someone you won’t be able to live with after.

They have a very infantile idea of war and of political cleansing, and they probably aren’t aware most of these were done — in the 20th century — under the guise of “turn in your loved one, so the state can keep him/her safe and reeducate him/her.” I even agree despite their often infantile raging, they mean well.

But we know what the way to hell is paved with, right?

And trust me, people in war, people in unstable situations, and particularly indoctrinated people act in ways you can’t imagine.

Look at the evidence of 20/21 and be prepared. The life you save might be your own.

I didn’t want to write this post, but I had to. If it saves even one life….

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: A Capital Whip: A Pride and Prejudice Sequel.

An invalid for much of her life, Miss Anne de Bourgh has precisely one accomplishment: carriage driving. She is proud of her skill with reins and whip, and justifiably so.

But when another young lady moves into the neighborhood, and challenges Anne’s place as the most accomplished driver in Hunsford, Anne must prove to herself, to her beloved horses, and to her family that she is worthy of the name de Bourgh, and she does not shrink away from a challenge.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Doctor Inferno.

Even Superheroes and Super Villains grow old, eventually.

But when a retiree from a nice retirement facility has an encounter with a young scientist of somewhat dubious experimental ethics …who picks William N. Furnace as an unwilling financier of his rejuvenation experiments . . . Doctor Inferno is back!.

And the Department of Superhuman Monitoring and Detention springs into action . . . blaming various odd things on Doctor Inferno . . . when they ought to be looking at other possible causes.

With the help of his old AI (who’s been running without supervision for decade) and couple of kidnapped DSMD agents, a Superhuman who is more Chaotic Good than Evil sets out to save the World, whether it deserves it or not!

A not very serious romp into the Superhero Genre by an established SF/F writer.

BY ILENE KAYE: It Had To Be Yuu.

Only Yuu could manage to get himself kidnapped—on a planet in the middle of a blizzard, no less—and not even know it. It’s up to space survey pilot Audra Marin to fly to the rescue, but when she gets her childhood playmate home alive, she’ll make him pay.
Only Audra could stumble into a fraud investigation and mistake it for a kidnapping. Trading company heir Yuu Ra-Dezan has to find a way to keep Audra from complicating his efforts to find an embezzler. “She’s my fiancée” seems like the best cover story—but when did his childhood nemesis turn into the hottest woman in the galaxy?
When his host’s robots try to hold them at blaster-point, Yuu and Audra trip over each other to foil a plot to steal the fastest ship in the galaxy. The only piracy these two will accept is stealing each others’ hearts.

FROM FRANK J. FLEMING: Superego.

From Book 1: Rico is a psychopath.

That’s why his job as an intergalactic hitman for a massive criminal syndicate suits him so well. He gets to do what he does best: go planet to planet and wreak destruction. He enjoys his work.

But Rico’s latest assignment isn’t what it seems, and after inadvertently thwarting a terror attack, he finds himself playing the good guy. Stuck pretending he’s a cop, he gets paired with some lady detective who is more than a little suspicious of him. To make matters worse, he starts to have new feelings toward her, feelings he’s never felt before. Love, maybe? That’s stupid. What is he supposed to do with that?

And this job isn’t fun, as it soon spirals into secrets, betrayal, and a whole planet out to kill him. Well, it’s a little fun. Still, Rico may have finally found himself in a situation he can’t shoot his way out of.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t try.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Out of the Dell.

On the planet Nwwwlf, in the lost colony of First Landing, the original settlers carved out one sylvan valley, a lone outpost where humans flourish. But their bright hopes and best intentions devolved over centuries into a rude replica of medieval feudalism.

Gilead Tan, who had been held captive for centuries in his sleeping cell, survived treachery and pain to free a small group of sleepers. But he and his friends now face the perils of life outside First Landing’s sanctuary–without their powered armor, their tools and technology, or anything else they need save for a few chickens.

Gilead must establish a safehold for his crew, but the alien environment does not welcome them and petty bickering threatens their meager resources. He hopes that a trace of smoke – spotted above a distant ridge – beckons them to a better place.

It doesn’t.

FROM T. L. KNIGHTON: Bloody Eden (Soldiers of New Eden).

Ten years after a nuclear war forced Jason Calvin to fight his way across Georgia and through a brutal warlord, life has settled down a bit in a town called New Eden. As the town sheriff, Jason keeps the peace. After saving a family from a horrible fate, that peace becomes threatened when a sadistic military man shows up, claiming the family are fugitives from his draconian justice system and they’re coming back whether anyone in New Eden likes it or not…and maybe some of New Eden’s own as well. Unfortunately for him, Jason isn’t about to just let something like that go. “Bloody Eden” is the action packed sequel to the hit novelette “After the Blast”.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Three Matches.

What can you do when you find out you’re a fox shifter, and your mom keeps thinking you want to make a far more socially acceptable admission?
Rya Stevens runs away, and gets caught in a terrible Colorado snow storm. When she runs out of gas she hopes for angels.
What she gets instead are …. alligators and dragons. Oh, my.
This short story takes place in the Shifter Series between Gentleman Takes A Chance and Noah’s boy.

FROM DAVE FREER: TOM

Tom is a cat in trouble. The worst possible kind of trouble: he’s been turned into a human. Transformed by an irascible old magician in need of a famulus — a servant and an assistant, Tom is as good at being a servant as a cat ever is. The assistant part is more to Tom’s taste: he rather fancies impressing the girl cats and terrorizing the other toms by transforming himself into a tiger. But the world of magic, a vanished and cursed princess, and a haunted skull, and a demon in the chamber-pot, to say nothing of conspiring wizards and the wickedest witch in the west, all seem to be out to kill Tom. He is a cat coming to terms with being a boy, dealing with all this. He has a raven and a cheese as… sort of allies.
And of course there is the princess.
If you were looking for ‘War and Peace’ this is the wrong book for you. It’s a light-hearted and gently satirical fantasy, full of terrible puns and… cats.

FROM RD MEYER: Homecoming

Earth. The mere name has had an almost talisman-like pull on the human race since we were driven from our homeworld over 6,000 years ago. Mankind’s ancestors ran from the genocidal threat engulfing them, fleeing like intergalactic refugees towards a new home that would allow us to flourish once again.And flourish we did. From a ragtag group of just over 12,000 survivors, humanity has grown to create a proper empire of nearly 900 billion spanning two galaxies. But we never forgot our home, so we waited and we planned. Now the time was finally right to return to Earth and take back what we once had no choice but to abandon.Although the military campaign, as well as the alien races between humanity and our birthplace, were the primary concern, they turned out to not be the only ones. You see, Earth itself, despite crawling with the vermin that nearly eradicated us, was far from free of surprises, both physical and historical. Unanticipated challenges waited for the people of the Terran Confederation, including notions that would shake the very foundations of what it meant to be human. Our legends had defined us, but could those legends withstand scrutiny? What if everything we’d come to believe about ourselves and our world had been carefully crafted to cocoon us for our own good?A story meant to be about our return to Earth expands to cover our journey both across and within the realms of known space, from long lost colony worlds where mankind has morphed into something else, to the edges of an intergalactic war between implacable enemies…enemies that now had the incentive to turn their attention towards humanity…

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: OBTAINABLE

Sorry. I didn’t get a post up yesterday and today is insane. Don’t worry, I’m alive. Just really busy.

I’ve always been a sucker for short stories whose ending can be summed up as “We came from elsewhere, both of us. But we’re one of a kind.”

It’s part of the reason I love Clifford Simak’s Werewolf Principle. Oh, it has a lot of flaws, or perhaps not flaws but things that were part of the time it was written in. But that ending still redeems all of it. In a way, of course, that’s what I was going for with Darkship Thieves. I also love, though at the moment (sinus infection and my nose dripping like a faucet) I can’t remember a single title, stories in which the weirdling, the person who doesn’t fit at all finds she fits perfectly with a group of people far away. That she is in fact one of them. She might be a cuckoo’s egg, but there’s a whole colony of cuckoos somewhere. And she (or he) can fit in there.

It is of course no mystery why I — or a lot of you, or to be fair, a lot of people in the science fiction world — feel that way. I stuck out like a sore thumb as far back as I can remember. And yet, I found a home for weirdos like me. And someone who also came from somewhere else, but who is one of mine.

The home I found… I know what you’ve been told. I know what all of you have been told. And sold: in tv, in movies, in education, even the news. The gaslighting didn’t start in 2020. And it’s bizarre.

Not only have all of you in America been told that America is the most racist/sexist/homophobic/intolerant place in the world, but also that the only hope of tolerance, acceptance and feeling like you’re part of something is to go hard left. That this is where tolerance and acceptance of differences exists.

This couldn’t be more wrong. It is in fact upside down and sideways. You could even say:

The left in America and in fact around the world is one of the most intolerant, hidebound movements ever. Sure. Before they have absolute power over something they pretend to celebrate everyone who doesn’t fit in. In fact, they pretend to celebrate them. This is by the way of seeking the help of every oddling in order to destroy the host culture, so they can take full control.

Also, guys, let’s be honest. We who grew up as odds know damn well our kind — no matter what reason they stick out, or what reason we’ve been the pink monkey ever since earliest childhood — is more vulnerable than any other group of people to power-mad abusers.

Because we are social apes, our need to be accepted drives us to find that place where we belong. And then we want to continue belonging, which means we’re open to manipulation and abuse.

The left, being just that kind of psychopath, intuits this. Right now they’re in the phase of “you’re special because you’re different; your difference should be celebrated.” But here’s the dirty little secret: you have to be different in exactly the way they dictate. You have to believe exactly what they believe your group should believe. These things change on a dime, on a dictate from above. and I guess your position of “specialness” an change on a dime too, because — as leftist feminists are finding out — you are not as special as men who proclaim they’re women. (Note this has nothing to do with true transsexualism. Particularly when it’s undertaken for fame and and fortune/college scholarships in sports. It’s transexualism de convenience.)

And always, always, you have to think as your group has been dictated to think. Think another way? You’re out. “If you don’t vote for [Joe Biden] you ain’t black.” And BLM has made it explicit you have to be a Marxist for your Black Lives to matter. And you know, women who believe in the equality — or hell, in some cases superiority of women — but don’t believe in a controlled top down economy? They ain’t feminists.

This is as all of us oddlings who have been like this our whole lives know damn well an abusive relationship.

And we who don’t fit in are very prone to falling into that trap, because the instincts tell us we got to belong.

Then the trap closes. The left really values walking in lockstep. They’re starting here, because they think they’ve won. Step out of line, you’re not of the body. Even if you didn’t know there was a line.

If they really won (they haven’t. Or at least it won’t last. They are simply riding the tiger) all of those oddlings are going to find — fast and ugly — that the free market and the free human interaction allowed by it, and particularly the American spirit, with its unique tolerance of different cultures and attitudes was the best they ever had it. If you think “communism” or any of the totalitarian societies of the world are more tolerant, you’ve been sold a bill of goods. Find out what happened to gays or people of a different race in the USSR and what happens in Cuba and China.

You see, top down, controlled societies can’t allow variations. Every variation could be the beginning of realizing the orders are wrong/could be the beginning of rebellion. I know you’ve been told other societies — even Muslim societies, heaven help us all — are more tolerant. Pardon me if I laugh my head off. You have no idea. And no, visiting as a tourist everyone is super polite too is not a valid idea of what these societies are like.

Almost all the eccentrics who think they’ll find their home abroad are sorely disappointed. If they are very lucky, they’ll be alive at the end of their disappointing experience.

Unless of course, your particular oddness is that you’re a woman who wants to be draped like a sofa when out in public, a gay man who wants to have walls pulled down on him, or someone who wants to do that to women or gays. You can find a home in most of the Middle East. Or you’re a person of color, or any kind of difference, from dressing strangely to being attracted to the same sex and wants to be sneered at, told you’re crazy, or at the very best laughed at behind your back. Or of course someone who wants to do that to those people. The world is your oyster then, but I particularly recommend old Europe. You’ll be right at home, chum. And you’ll get socialism as a bonus.

Is the US really that different? Yes, it really is. And no, I can’t explain it to you unless you experience it.

Sure, we also have pockets of intolerance, hidebound families and communities. And places you must fit or die. None of them is a country-wide culture, except for the nascent goose-steppers of the left. Who frankly are meeting pushback at every turn.

Why? I don’t know. Seriously. I don’t know. If I had to guess I’d guess it’s because we’re a nation of such varied immigrants. We had to work together or die. I talk to mom about my friends. I don’t mention a large number of them are Mormons, and quite a few are Hindus or Buddhists. She’d be shocked enough to find any number of my closest friends are protestant, let alone that. I also don’t tell her about my friends domestic arrangements. I think there are like a dozen that would pass muster, but most of them…. no. And it could be such “innocuous in the US” things as “Have cut their parents out of their lives.” Unimaginable in my culture of origin.

Then there’s the fact that we’re rich. Very rich. Wealthy societies are more tolerant of difference. If it doesn’t pick our pocket or break our arm, we simply don’t care. We don’t have to.

When you live close to the bone, when everything someone does affects you you have to make them conform.

I got on this track this morning because my husband reads awfully silly books. No, seriously. I’d say he reads unimaginably vapid crap, but I have nowhere to throw stones from. I know why he does it — he’s been working 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and silly and vapid is the best you can cope with — and in same circumstances, plus a load of the black dog, I’ve been stuck reading Jane Austen fanfic non stop. Which is more vapid.

Anyway, he read this cute romance? cozy mystery? series, and thought the woman needed more publicity. So he contacted her and said his wife posted at instapundit, and would she be okay if I promoted her. Note that he only asked because I told him I would not promo unasked. Some people get very upset “our kind” like their books.

The answer was bizarre, and hysterical. Oh, no, she couldn’t be promoted in such a site. She had gay people and interracial relationships in her books! These people who read that site would hate her.

Let’s pause to goggle at the magnificent amount of gaslighting involved in this woman’s picture of the world.

Hell a cursory look at instapundit would have brought up the idea that we’re all for a world where gay married couples use their AK-47s to protect their pot plants. (Go with it, Bob. I don’t think pot should be illegal, even if I think it’s bad for us and society. Intrusive government is worse.)

And a cursory look at my work — look he gave her my name — or the comments on it should make her aware that I also have gay people in my novels. I don’t have any interracial couples — I think — but only because I don’t really attach much interest to race. I don’t think in race. Also, none of them have come tromping into my head. Though I do have inter-species couples in the short stories. It happens.

But you know, we’re to the right of Lenin, so we must be intolerant and evil and Reeee.

It’s a hell of a gaslighting job. And I don’t know how to penetrate these people’s heads. They keep imagining that we are the enemy, when in fact they’d find a home with us. It’s just we don’t harp on their differences, because we couldn’t care less. Our books have gay people, they don’t harp on how you have to be gay a certain way. Our characters are all the colors of the rainbow (really, a lot of us write robots, after all) and heck, we just don’t care. Just like we don’t care if our friends are gay or various colors, or more exotic differences, provided they are sane and decent human beings.

The gaslighted ones, the captives of “you have to believe as we say or we’re out” will continue sleep walking us into a society that tolerates no differences whatsoever.

And the only way I know to stop them is to change their minds somehow. This is why I have several pen names not associated with me. Because the only way to reach them is to tell them stories before the defenses trip up.

Will we be in time? I don’t know.

They are trapped in an abusive relationship and used to destroy the only society that tolerates them.

We come from elsewhere, all of us. But we’re not alone. And America is a welcoming home for the oddlings.

And I don’t want to lose it.

It’s worth fighting for. Even if we go down fighting.

It’s better than giving up.

Because there’s no other home for us.

Years ago, when I blogged more regularly at Classical Values than here, the blog had a post on the current war on things that work.

What things? Well….. everything: from pirex apparently no longer being made with the stuff that made it actually more or less high-temp impervious, hard to break, etc; to dishwashers that take forever to wash, where dishes must be put into already washed and which, even so, often manage a great redistribution of grease and grit all over the dishes;to toilets that are “low flush” and thus use more water than ever because you have to flush them about five times, and still they won’t work; to cars–

Never mind. it would be easier to describe the things the left has left alone, instead of going after them like Don Quixote tilting against the last functioning windmill in the land, the one needed to grind wheat for his bread. To my knowledge they have yet to interfere with– wait, wait, let me think about it…. Um…. Okay, they haven’t yet dictated that every morning I must get dressed by first putting my pants on, and then putting on my underwear. However, rest assured this is probably around the corner, and just a matter of them getting a bee in their bonnect about some virtue signaling they can do relating to “the order in which humans get dressed.”

Look, it took me a while to figure out things were going to h*ll. Mostly because …. well. I was raised in the 19th century, and some parts of it were not quite that advanced. Take toilet flushing: you take the full bucket in with you. Well, that’s how I first learned. I don’t know when grandma’s toilet had a flush installed if before or after we moved to my parents’ newly-built house which, d*mn skippy had a flush installed.

Except that even there, you know, it was an European flush. I honestly can’t tell if Europe is just more advanced than us on the war on things that work — my best friend growing up lived in a Victorian that had perfectly functional elevated flush tanks, with no problems — or if — since friend’s house was built by an English consul — most of Europe (and the world) just cosplays modernity without any clue how it should work. I do know that my parents’ flush was low water before low water was fashionable (in a region of the world that has problems rather with too much water and back then when our water came from a well and was therefore “free”.) So, you know, you still had a bucket standing by just in case.

Also, the dishwasher was high water (but low hot water, because that cost money) and got done as soon as I was done scrubbing and rinsing the last pan. Ditto for the washer. We had a tank outside. I actually love hand-washing clothes. At least in summer. In winter, when your hands become painful from going in the water and you find out what “instant arthritis” means, it’s not so fun.

So, anyway, you see, in the states any level of “this is easier” was an improvement. I remember a day in the late eighties, when I sat down and went “The dishwasher is going. The washer is going. And I have time to write.” It was like…. trumpets sounded, I swear.

My first exposure to the war was when we replaced a toilet in the house in Manitou Springs. At the time air assist wasn’t a thing, and it was almost impossible to find a toilet with a tank that took more than three espresso cups of water. I had read about this obsession to “save water” and I’d scratched my head and gone “okay then.” While it might (maybe) make some sense in Colorado, in most of the US “saving water” is a ridiculous idea. But I knew the greenies were very upset with the idea of water just being flushed down, without being used for anything else, and had been putting bricks in their toilet tanks forever.

Which was fine by me. If they wanted to have to take a bucket in, just in case, it was entirely their problem. But now they were bringing their problem into my life. I remember a day when it took six flushes to deal with the issue on the new toilet and I complained to my husband that I really didn’t need my new hobby of flushing the toilet.

That house, btw, had the best dishwasher ever. We bought it on day one in the house. The dishwasher was completely silent, and you didn’t need to pre-wash dishes. It had a grinder in the bottom, kind of like a food disposer, for any debris left in. So, with two toddlers, I’d just stick the dishes in — dried egg yolk, left over dough from baking, whatever — and they came out beautifully clean. I didn’t know that pinacle was brief-lived. In the next house, over 13 years, we bought and installed THREE dishwashers. Yes, three. They never worked very well. If I didn’t want grit on the dishes, I had to at least rinse them, but even that didn’t help a lot. We assumed it was something to do with the pipes or the water supply, because that house was so weird. And then we moved here. And, as usual, got a new dishwasher (someday I’ll buy a house with working appliances) because the other one was stealth leaking.

First of all, shopping for the dishwasher was a treat. Guys, do you know it’s difficult to find a dishwasher that actually heat-dries your dishes? Apparently the new hotness is it pops the door open to let the dishes air dry. Considering you’re washing the dishes yourself, before putting them in the dishwasher already, I guess the new dishwashers are machines for swooshing water (and old grit) over clean dishes, and then let them air dry. I think dish wracks are cheaper.

This is kind of the same evolution we had with our washers. We didn’t know any better, so when we moved to house before this on, we bought a top of the line front loader, low water usage. Well, we’re in Colorado, so water is expensive. Fine.

Several things started happening. First, the clothes weren’t, in any sense of the term, clean when they came out. And I knew it wasn’t just my problem, because the grocery stores shelves exploded in various “stink removal” products. Second, my eczema went nuts. Third, a load of laundry took forever.

When we moved to that house I had two pre-teen boys. Washing clothes also became a new hobby, taking up vast amounts of my time. The washer was always running and I was always behind on laundry. Loads were kind of small (well, you know, low water) and I had two teen boys.

At one point, my husband got upset at the lack of…. socks? underwear? and asked me why I never did laundry. I might or might not have started crying and Donald Ducked at him (You know, when your voice gets very high and you make no sense whatsoever?) In the aftermath, I explained that I did laundry from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed.

He was sure I was doing something wrong. He remembered loads used to take 20 minutes. So he went and checked. I’ll never forget his expression. “A quick load is three hours? THREE hours?”

Oh, and the machines broke down. continuously. In those thirteen years we had three sets of washer and dryer. They broke in weird ways, too. One of them — I swear I’m not making this up — the metal or whatever it was made of, in the frame, just disintegrated, bottom-up.

The last one died while we were between houses and paying mortgage-and-rent at the same time. Because we were beyond broke, we just got the circular for the next upcoming sale (President’s day, I think) and went “We’re going to buy the cheapest until we move to the new house, and then…
When we got to the store, we found that there was one even cheaper. So cheap it wasn’t advertised. It wasn’t on sale, but its regular price was under $300. Being that we were so broke we needed superglue, and that we didn’t know how long it would be till that house sold, we decided on it. Particularly when the lady told us “You don’t want to buy that. It’s very wasteful. It uses lots and lots of water.”

I don’t know if it uses lots of water, honest. It’s a very basic model and doesn’t have a selector for extra rinse, so I have to run two cycles, one with soap and one without, so I don’t get eczema all over worse than I already have it. But even with that extra cycle, it washes my clothe sin 45 minutes, which means I do laundry for a day, not 7 days a week. I’ll take it. I hope it lasts forever. Because I’m sure next time I go shopping for one, the top of the line will be a model where you put your clothes into, after washing them in the bathtub. It pours water over them, so that any leftover dirt can get on them. And then, it pops its lid, to let the clothes air dry. Or mildew. Whichever comes first.

I can see precisely where this is going. I’ll end as I began, doing everything by hand, and sweeping the carpets, because the very expensive vaccuums available for sale don’t suck up dirt, just spread it in an even layer….

But the fascinating thing is that the left has no idea it is actually in a war against things that work.

You see, it has to do with how their brains work. People here aren’t very group-oriented. You could say, of course, that those that frequent my blog are at an extreme point in that and you’d be right.

But those to the right-of-lenin in general aren’t very collective-opinion-and-fad oriented. And if you just said “duh” no. Yes, communism PRESENTS as being “other oriented” but I have yet to meet a single communist who wasn’t in it for all he could get. Over several countries, various movements that called themselves various things, etc, you’ll find the communists doing all the things they accuse others of doing: exploiting others, stuffing their pockets without regard to ethics, and generally being all red in tooth and claw, while talking about community and the greater good of their fellow man.

It’s another of those things, like creativity and being anti-establishment where the left is the exact opposite of what they claim to be.

So, how come that the right is full of goats who refuse to be good sheep and do as they’re told, and who are — increasingly — fed up with virtue signaling from the other side?

Well, because the left IS the establishment. So we came to our opinions alone. And often, frankly, convinced we must be crazy. I mean everyone else believed that other stuff, right? And yet, here we were, believing our lying eyes. This might change, with the internet and alternative means of being in contact with people like us, and the clear revelation that the International Socialist media just makes up shit. BUT for now, we’re the people who don’t fully understand why you would want to virtue or anything else signal. Society will take us as we are, or not at all.

So it’s hard for us to understand. But it’s a perfect storm of horrible factors. To begin with, the left is, generally speaking, more prone to want to pose as great geniuses, and incredibly brilliant. They need the adulation of the “the whole of society.” Even if, or perhaps particularly if, they’re mediocre non-entities.

And our modern society is built on science and technology.

Now I’m not going to tell you that no leftist has a talent for science. I know there are some, and there were more when teaching was better. What I’m going to tell you is that their personality type is more for social activity, for…. the management side of science. And that, thanks to the schools being infested with leftism, most of them don’t actually learn science. Now, in this they are most like the rest of the human race. I think the interest and talent in real science, in finding out, in getting the measurements really right is a minority trait. Might even be a recent mutation. Most humans — and particularly women for various evolutionary reasons — are most interested in…. humans. Not cold logic and facts.

But the way to be admired as “brilliant” is science.

Look, I understand the left in this. For various reasons, despite being space-struck from at least the age of three, when mom got me to pull through small pox by giving me a discarded clockworks and convincing me it was a piece of Sputnik, I didn’t take that branch on the road. It was partly mom — who thought I’d be pregnant in three months, if I went into engineering (instead of having sixty “brothers” each one convinced no man was good enough for me and determined to chase away any prospects, which is what would actually have happened), partly the fact that I was digit dyslexic and didn’t know it (if I had known it, there are work arounds) and partly the fact they made you choose your degree when you went into 10th grade. But the fact is that I’m woefully non-prepared in science.

I’m still space struck. And I read a ton on it. But I’ll never be at the center of anything having to do with colonization.

The left is like that with all science. But they want to contribute. Since they are unable to contribute on the science, they convince themselves that they must contribute by making science more “humane” or more “ecologically sound” or something.

So they will try to find something arguably wrong with machine or technology everyone uses. Say, washers. And they’ll go “Ah, it uses too much water.” And then, not having any clue how it works, how clothes get clean, or any of that, they make regulations demanding the machines use less water. And it works. Machines suddenly use less water. And they pat themselves on the back over their caring insight that is saving the world. And move on to break something else, completely oblivious to the fact that the “use less water” just means the machines have to “wash” for a lot longer, the rinse is never complete, and in general the machines don’t wash.

At some point in the future, they become convinced that machines should use even less water, and amazingly, it works! Until you know, the machines take four hours to “wash” a load, and none of it smells clean. But for the leftist, his unique insight has saved “the environment.”

This is made worse when they read “Studies.” First, because most studies are reproducibility. Second because the read the first paragraph where the hypothesis is stated and think that’s the conclusion. (Because you know, it is in humanities essays.) Which is why our detergents don’t work, either, to prevent algie bloom or something, which apparently has bloody nothing to do with the component the left banned.

Then there is a component of “the grass is greener” because the left is always convinced other countries or the past did it better. I can’t be the only one who (back when I had lefty friends) was forever flabbergasted by common, garden variety lefties refusal to use any or all of the following: dishwashers, washers, microwaves. (The other day, mind fried, looking at pictures of pretty tree houses (Adult tree houses, that people live in) I was between amused and horrified at one signaling that they lived a better life. The house had no shower, microwave, dishwasher or STOVE. I found myself blinking at this, since you know, showers are not any more wasteful than baths (which the house did have) and the house had heating but no stove. Go figure it.)

Then there is Europe-envy as so much of their stupidity is. Take the “we’ll put bricks in our toilet tank to reduce the water per flush. I assume they had vacationed in Europe and that they too wanted to have faucets that dribbled and toilets that trickled like a diuretic gerbil, and they didn’t know Europe had those because Europe is retarded in a special way, so they assumed Europeans lived like that because they wanted to, in pursuit of some higher ethical purpose.

Part of the problem is that for most of the later half of the 20th century and the first twenty years of this one, we let them get away with it. They said “the dishwasher must now wash with only a cup of water” and no one said “Sod off, Swampy.” Instead they buckled down and came up with a way to do it, even if it took forever and the dishes were more dirty than when you put them in. And so on with everything.

Time after time, we’ve been subjected to left wing solutions: in their ideal form, they make the problem worse while not doing — at all — what the previous imperfect solution achieved.

The covidiocy with masks, lockdowns and the wrecking of the economy of the world is perhaps the pinnacle of their achievement. They panicked at science they don’t have the knowledge to understand, and careened from arbitrary mandate to arbitrary mandate, preening at their caring and how much they loved everyone, while causing deaths and destroying everything without actually doing a single solitary thing to mitigate disease and death.

And I hope to Him who looks after children, fools and the United States of America that in the aftermath — and the aftermath will be a doozy — of this, the left’s gambit is exposed for what it is, and we send the others so inclined to play in theater and literature (note not storytelling, which needs some competence) and decor, and other things where their insanity will hurt no one. And we let scientists be scientists and engineers be engineers, and stop the war on things that work.

Because otherwise, we’re going to be living in caves, wiping our behind with leaves, and wearing a dozen masks before they’re done with us.

While most of them are older than that, they are in fact, in spirit Teenage Mutant Ninja Idiots, and if we let them continue to guide us by what they don’t know we’ll all end up living in sewers.

Some days ago, Michael Rothman posted — I think on MeWe — how the plot we’re living through was completely unlikely and it would/should have been rejected by the editor without a second glance.

Some of the things he said were of course giggle worthy, because that was exactly what he was going for. Stuff like “this virus is lethal, and everyone is locked down to avoid it, but you’re still encouraged to go to the grocery store.” Or “You have to wear a mask on entering the restaurant, until you sit at the table, and then you’re magically immune, and can take the mask off.”

But there’s a lot more he didn’t say. Which is even more insane.

I find myself routinely trying to talk my mom down from the crazy cakes sh*t they’re selling in Europe. Stuff like “America has lost more people in this virus than they did in two World Wars combined.” I told her I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the numbers. But if we did — so what? Our population at the time, now almost 100 years ago, was not that large. And the big difference was the population lost. In the two wars, it was mostly young, fighting age man. Now, it was mostly people who would have died within six months.

Or when she said “But the US has lost so many people.” And the answer is “Supposing the numbers aren’t doctored — and of course they are, since hospitals get more for treating Winnie the Flu than anything else, and were promised no audits and, well, when hospitals are semi-closed for anything else, how are they going to survive otherwise? — so what? There are three hundred million of us, mom. More than thirty thousand of us die in car crashes every year.” Because this is part of the problem, just like people in Europe can’t picture the size and breadth of our country, they also can’t imagine or picture the multitude we are. So they look at the raw and inflated death data, and think we’re all dropping like flies.

Mom of course, also tells me they’re dropping like flies there. Are they? I don’t know. She says they don’t inflate statistics there. Do they? I don’t know. Which is our very first problem. But there are others. Many many others.

Cast your mind back, past the gaslighting insanity, to the beginning of this, about a year ago. We were seeing pictures of China, of people dying in convulsions from cytosine storms; videos smuggled out of people being welded in their apartments. Careful analysis done of how the crematoriums were running over time.

Was that real? Was it an amazing psy-ops? We don’t know.

We do know what we expected. As Italy — which as I said at the time has a completely different population and culture, so not the same — sank under the lack of hospital beds, our media and the left went insane, and became convinced we’d all die like flies, in the millions.

But you kind of need to unpack their back brains to understand the origins of their panic. You see, these people know a lot of things that just ain’t so. Their picture of the world has some contact with reality — maybe — in that I think they recognize things like air, and trees and sometimes even humans But when you get into why things happen and how, well! They might as well live in an alien world, as the picture has bloody nothing to do with ours.

Part of it is that most of them work in professions that involve the manipulation of symbols, but also that the way to get there is to go through college degrees and at least pretend to be indoctrinated. I don’t think the leftists were pretending. They are, as I said before, the good boys and girls. The respect authority kind. I think they bought it.

So, in their heads quite divorced from any real history they have this mental map in which people are healthier, happier and have better health care, the closer a country is to socialism.

Besides, a lot of them have been to Europe, and saw lots of well dressed, leisure-enjoying people in coffee shops. If those people, with their free health care for all, failed to save themselves from the dread plague, how will the US fare: MILLIONS OF DEAD. MILLIONS.

Hence the lock down. They didn’t look at the relative number of ER beds. They didn’t look at the fact that Italy has what is even compared to ours, a geriatric population. They didn’t look at the fact that any culture in Europe has a lot more physical contact between strangers than we do — yes, even Germany — because they use public transport a lot more; their bars and restaurants cram more people together, and oh, yes, they live in apartments more, which means often shared air, etc.

They also failed to take into account what now seems almost sure: that Italian doctors were doing strange and bizarre things in panic. Like the craziness with respirators, which also started here. You know, put the very elderly on respirators and shred their lungs, which simply don’t take well to pressure. Even here, the respirators don’t seem to help, and might hurt. And part of it is that apparently they’re hellishly difficult to set right, and that the tissues of the elderly are fragile.

Anyway, so they panicked, and they came up with “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Which was bloody stupid, and costly, but might actually have helped, if the virus had been what we expected from China. MAYBE.

But then they were afraid to open up.

You have to understand: as far as I can tell leftists have a pre-scientific mind. They’re moved by impressions, and deep set beliefs. And, because most of them really don’t believe in anything beyond their personal life (and I don’t mean supernatural, they also don’t seem to care much for what happens to other people or the world, after they’re gone. They might in fact not fully understand that one day, inevitably, they will be gone) the most important thing in the world is to keep their own personal life.

And they’ve never looked at numbers. And are unlikely to understand them, if they do. Their ideas of the world are formed on the penumbras of entertainment, the “news” and the system they were taught in school.

I remember, back when this all begun, I was screaming about the Diamond Princess numbers not being that bad, even when you count the fact that these people were all pushed together, that most of them were elderly, and that cruise ships are floating virus palaces. And I got told that those people got first rate medical care…. in a cruise ship. You know, those things where flu can actually kill vast numbers of people, and where diarreah runs rampant.

So here we are, a year of two weeks to flatten the curve. I don’t even know what our governors THINK they’re doing. I understand Polis, who must be innumerate and have trouble counting his fingers and getting the same number twice in a row, still thinks if he unlocks completely people are going to drop like flies, and 10% of the population will die. But I also think somewhere, in his walnut sized brain, a suspicion might be forming that when people are let out to live normal lives they will talk to each other, realize almost no one died who wouldn’t have died of anything anyway, look at what he’s done to our capital and our beautiful state, and that he’s going to be chased out of the state by Coloradans wielding torches. If he’s lucky of course.

And he’s not wrong. But what’s plan B? Keeping us locked up forever?

Why not, the amazing geniuses who used this plague of madness to take over DC seem to think they can stay there forever, if they just keep it surrounded by razor wire, and keep hunting “extremists” and “insurgents” under everyone’s beds.

That CDC thing, instructing the armed forces to hunt down insurrectionists in their midst identifies things like supporting the 2nd ammendment, thinking you have constitutional rights, or, you know, being anti-abortion as being “radicalized.”

Yes, you read that right. In the US, in the 21st century, believing you have rights as an American, the rights enshrined for us by the constitution, means that you’re dangerous, and a terrorist.

Oh, and communicating online is “escalating violence.” I swear I’m not making this up. By the lights of that briefing, I’m engaging in violence right now. Against whom,you say? Well, their cherished beliefs.

Look, I don’t think — or at least I hope — that most people on the left believe this, but at college level, at least, there are a lot of people who believe that your beliefs shape reality. This is why we get the left doing things like trying to curse Republicans and/or levitating the mint.

They are right in a way, of course. Their beliefs change reality…. for them. Because they live in a savage’s world of miracles and wonders, of portents and images that might or might not mean anything. Because they bought into a system that has nothing to do with reality, they can’t examine reality, or reason in any sense of the word. So, you know “people are dying under socialism” means “More people will die here.”

Which is the only thing that can make sense of their bizarre decisions: you know, why pot dispensaries are safe, but churches aren’t. Why grocery stores are safe, but fabric stores aren’t. Why we must all hide and wear masks to protect ourselves from something that, if we kept proper numbers, might not even be a bad flu.

And the problem is this: In the real world, out there, this is unmaking civilization, and destroying mankind’s ability to look after itself and to advance.

Already, connections, and the ability to get food — which the US grows the most of for the world — is breaking down in other countries. Already, even here, we have people in serious trouble financially, physically, etc.

Someone posted on farcebook a while back that the biggest hit from this nonsense will be this year. We’re going to see people die in droves because — having pre-existing conditions — they couldn’t wear masks to go to the doctor. We’re going to see people die in droves, because a lot of medical professionals — I swear I’m not making this up — are refusing to touch their patients while giving physical exams. A lot of people are going to die because they didn’t get needed tests. (I live with two people who are a year late on blood tests, because they’d have to wear masks while waiting, and that gives them problems.) More, a lot of people are going to die — are already dying — from despair and depression.

And here I confess I’m not doing very well myself. The only thing that can be said is that I’m working more than last year, aka the year the locust ate, but I have a good week, then get slammed down by depression for two.
The calculation on that is simple and frankly makes perfect sense. I realized sometime in my twenties that a lot of my hard-depressions could be headed off at the pass if I took at least a day a week, got out of the house, went to see people, and do something different in a new environment. I was most productive if on top of that we took a weekend every two or three months and went to something fun a little further away (Denver, when we lived in the Springs.) But I’m asthmatic. And I live in Colorado. Which means I have the choice of wearing a mask even at the zoo, or the botanic gardens (which is the most anti-scientific lunacy ever, since even if the virus were that lethal, it dies in the sunlight.) Yeah, mostly I wear the face shield. Which is still uncomfortable. But honestly, just driving around depresses me. Like last time we drove through town, there was a couple about our age, out for a walk. Both wearing masks. NO ONE NEAR THEM, except people in cars. They presumably live together. They’re outside. On a sunny day. Masked.

So I don’t go anywhere, except when I absolutely have to, which is usually the grocery store, and then I run through it like a mad person, to avoid screaming “Have all of you lost your minds? What are you afraid of? Do you see corpses piled on the street? It’s been a f*cking year. If you’re going to have it, most of you have already had it?”

So I stay inside the house for weeks at a time and I get depressed.

More depressed when someone in my conference says things like “What’s the big deal with wearing a mask. It keeps you from catching something that if you catch it will probably kill you.”

Probably kill you…. WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL. You have something like 98% of chance of surviving it. HOW will it likely kill you? Unless you’re over 90, of course. And even then.

And then there’s the mask lunacy. Don’t get me started on the mask lunacy. Because we’re going to lose people because of the f*cking masks. And we’re going to have people permanently impaired, too. If I had to work outside the house, I’d probably be disabled by now, because a mask is enough to bring serial asthma attacks. And apparently lung cancer — sudden and very aggressive — is on the rise, and one article I saw thought it was the masks, and rebreathing. The article disappeared, of course.

But all of this is on the background of the mask packages themselves saying they’re for “fashion” purposes, and don’t really deter infection. And hell, this was a known fact until this year.

In fact, the mask cosplay seems to be around for one reason only: to continue to keep people scared. To delay the point at which the population at large realize they’ve been taken for a ride by their “betters” who in fact have no idea whatsoever how the world works.

And if you think that bad, think of how the world will feel, since they caught the panic from us, since normally our science is more reliable than theirs. And they’re going to starve. A vast portion of the civilized world is going to know hunger this year, for the first time in centuries.

The extent to which none of this made sense — though I knew it of course — dropped on my head in September, during our cannon-ball run cross country. Because every state enforces the madness differently. And some places are really mostly open, either officially or not.

So? So, there is no difference in their rates of infection or death. Which — again — for most people in working years, most people under, oh, 80, are negligible.

And no, no one is disparaging grandma. Except that I come from a society in which sixty was old, not the age at which you started a second career. And eighty year olds were so rare I saw my first one when I was 14. What allows grandma to be in the age group most at risk of COVID-19 is wealth. Which we are destroying, while keeping grandma locked down and making her waning years a living hell, to ward off a largely imaginary danger.

Michael Rothman wasn’t wrong. This novel isn’t very convincing. It reminds me of those novels of the seventies, written by authors on drugs, and accepted by editors on drugs, which strove to me “far out” instead of rational.

So far, it gives me a Phillip K. Dick vibe. The novels, not the movies, which inject some coherence.

Only Phillip K. Dick was chaotic, not malevolent. His novels didn’t seem to gloat over the inherent destruction of humankind.

And I’m getting a very strong feeling that’s how the novel ends. Humans, having run away from reason (perhaps driven mad by the very pace of progress) take apart the civilization that allows them to exist.

Right now I see two ends. One of them has the astronauts in the ISS trying to get Earth and getting no response, because the madness escalated, and everyone is dead.

The other? The other cuts 100 years ahead to cavemen scratching the soil amid the ruins of the civilization of “the gods” who came before them.

I don’t like either. I always thought those endings were a cheap cop-out.

It’s time to realize that the curve is more than flat. That what we face (and mostly now have herd immunity to) was at WORST a bad flu. That our supposed betters are a bunch of arse-monkeys who don’t even understand plain facts, let alone science.

Is it time for torches and pitchforks. Oh, more than time. Because unless the torches and pitchforks come out, those two endings are all that is left.

They weren’t fun or clever even in the seventies. They were exasperating. And eventually people got turned off from reading because of them. Because anything is better than irrationality that thinks itself clever.

It’s even less fun living through this. The seventies are dead. Stop taking hallucinogenics and look at reality. The danger was never what you were sold. Keeping insisting that we’re all going to die doesn’t make you clever or superior.

It makes you a caveman who is afraid because the shaman told him only the magical fabric on face can protect him from the wrath of the science gods.

And frankly the rest of us are looking up how to make torches, and there’s about to be a run on pitchforks, as we speak.

I don’t care if you want to hide under your bed forever and wear five or six or even seventeen masks. It’s your business.

But the business of life is living. And to provide for life, humans need to work. Magical money from the government isn’t edible. And neither is that mask.

Go and hide if you wish. Let the rest of us go free.

It will tell you something about how I’m feeling this morning (I think it’s allergies again, honest) that I spent considerable time looking at that title and trying to figure out how to make it more alliterative. Which can’t be done, or or at least not politely and without inventing new possessive pronouns, alas.

And yes, I do have far more weighty topics to write about. And a project that must be finished by Friday, and a load of “but I don’t wanna” that I don’t even want to talk about.

However I do feel this needed to be discussed. It really needed to be discussed. Because if not now, then when?

As you guys know I grew up in a society having a nervous breakdown. I estimate the nervous breakdown started when the king was deposed by people who were at best and kindest interpretation left-anarchists. This landed the country in bankruptcy and eventually ushered in national-socialism (note without a racial component. I’m getting tired of the left assuming any national socialism was the German variant. Look, the thing is despicable enough, like all socialism, without making it more so. In Portugal a racial component to any philosophy makes as much sense as in America. Or less. After all Hitler is said to have referred to Portugal as a mongrel nation. (Now that I’m American I far prefer mutt, but my 23andme seems to confirm I’m in no danger of racial or even ethnic purity.)) And when that fell in 74…. well. Yes, I know what the history books say. I also believe my lying eyes. It wavered back and forth at speed, various flavors of Marxism, which of course hated and excommunicated each other.

To survive, let alone thrive and do well in school, one had to be very alert to the social undercurrents of the movement that had the upper hand, or at least that had the upper hand in your group/school/region/at the moment.

Which helped when I came to the States, because I could read the…. substratum of social situations. I understood that though the President and SUPPOSEDLY the establishment were republican, the way to signal high social class, the way to be accepted in intellectual and arts circles, the way up in general was to signal left as hard as you could.

And it worked, even if felt awful.

In the same way, the way to signal “I want to write SF/F” was to signal left and “intellectual.”
I am for my sins capable of doing that, because I’m naturally interested in strange and geeky things, and I’m …. well….a geek. Always was. In saner times, and had I grown up in a saner country, I’d probably be an engineer.

BUT the signaling for “intellectual” was different, and heck, I knew enough about the left’s obsessions to do it too.

And then something broke. It started around 2003. Though it might have been a late-echo of 9/11 which had a profound effect on my ideas of the world.

2003, I’d written my Shakespeare trilogy and it had “failed” for values of fail that involve earning out a 10k advance a piece (keep in mind normal first timer advance back then was 5k, and is lower now) and getting taken out of print the day it earned out. And I didn’t want to write anymore of those. I had trilogy proposal out from before 9/11 which was in the same vein. “Literary” fantasy, if you wish.

But I wanted to write about– unexplored planets, strange species, daring men — and women — who are occasionally complete morons, but in believable ways. (More on this later.)

I can write literary. I enjoy reading (and writing) historical. But I couldn’t JUST do that, nothing else, forever.

I couldn’t get any agent to understand this. Most of them wanted me to do the prestige thing. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to write this weird stuff. Sure, it might sell, but there was no signaling (virtue or otherwise, in it — it was all “popular” shudder–.) In retrospect, the agent who took me then just lied, and decided to manage me by not submitting the “low” stuff and claiming she had. I mean, I sold DST on my own, and she tried to talk me out of it.

And then the proposal put out before 9/11 which not only required me to be literary but also to do a dance distorting my politics enough to pass (and it was totally cultural appropriation and couldn’t be published now, which tells you how far we’ve come.)

I think writing that broke me (part of the reason I haven’t reissued it.) It eventually led to my coming out of the political closet.

But there are more closets than one, and it’s not just politics.

The way to get ahead in the arts and writing, since forever is to sound erudite, to say the right things…..

Only that’s not who I am. I honestly doubt that’s what any of us are. We’re the odds, the goats, the people who stick out. Yes, our weirdness in general probably leads to our political weirdness, but we can’t just take things from on high and believe them. We have to go and LOOK with our lying eyes, and then…. believe those.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend of what I LIKE in science fiction. And I got all excited. Yes, Heinlein, of course, but more than that, I want to write….
A lot of you guys have read the Prince Roger series by Ringo and Weber. (If you haven’t, go look it, I’ll wait.)

The military aspects aren’t essential. The regency in space isn’t essential (though I have a few of those in the Schrodinger worlds) BUT the adventure, the exotic locales, the strange aliens, the…. adventure. I was telling her I wanted more books like that, and I was becoming convinced I’d have to write them, but it’s a bit like letting my freak flag fly.

And then it hit me: Why not?

Look, I’m 58. I don’t know how much longer we have, particularly with turmoil ahead and tech under attack. I’m fully indie. (In novels and shorts at least.) WHY shouldn’t I write what I want. Sure, it might not sell, but right now we don’t need that much. And weird things sell, anyway, like Austen fanfic.

So, why not just be who I am, drop the masks, live unapologetically?

And yes, I realize that’s not possible for a lot of you with your main job. I DO get that. I know how many of you are pseudonymous, under cover, and HAVE to be or starve.

But I bet there’s freak flags you can let fly besides politics.

You know how they say “Life is short, eat desert first?”

Well, life is in turmoil, and I’m battling a heck of a black elephant (I think it ate the black dog.) When it sits on me, nothing happens, either writing or anything else.

And I’m thinking: eating desert first is silly. I can’t risk the health issues. But…. you know what? I can write what I want, enjoy what I want, and not apologize if my tastes aren’t respectable or what “smart” people like.

<turns baneful eye on what “the best men/women” are up to.

You know what? I’ll be me. As hard as I can. I’ve run out of reasons not to do so.

And I know from when I came out of the political closet that deception twists the soul. So,forget it. I’m going to be me.

Hoists freak flag — it probably looks like several lol cats saluting the American flag, to be honest — grins and walks away to get work done.