Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I almost named this post “You are not psychic.” And I swear I already have four or five by that name, because the left’s favorite thing is to tell us what we’re really thinking when we say something. And what we’re really thinking is what they want us to think, so they can revile us.

This is how crazy sh*t became enshrined in their credo like “everyone to the right of Lenin is racist.” Because if you say anything — and I don’t mean remotely close to race — they don’t like the explanation is always “You’re saying that as a secret dog whistle.”

But this is more serious than the left’s belief that we all meet down at the ol’ conservative lodge (I can’t find one in our town) and agree on secret code words which we’re going to use to hide our racisssssm sexisssssm and homophobia.

I mean, that’s completely insane, because honestly the right has jobs and couldn’t meet every week if you promised us free beer and chocolate.

BUT the left believes it, with a gut-deep belief. Other things they believe: that the biggest problem in the US is white supremacy. That white supremacy can be multiracial (arooo?) That if you’re on time to work, are efficient, can read well and know how to do your job, you are a white supremacist.
The list goes on. In the end — because the left ARE racists — they equate whiteness with competence and intellect and the white supremacy they’re so scared of is “people doing their job minimally well.”

And it’s not being psychic. They don’t actually claim to read our thoughts. They just “know” what and how we think because they were taught to believe this is true.

So, to begin at the beginning, the left are the “good boys and girls.” I honestly don’t know if this was always true, even back in the 1920s when Agatha Christie treated communists in her books as misguided, fundamentally good people.

We have this idea of the leftist revolutionary, not afraid to stand out for what they believe, etc, but we get that from the media and entertainment which has been in their hands for a century.

Having grown up in an old-style country, most of the hard left ping the same spot that the religious fanatics ping. Look, a lot of them, in Portugal, changed from insane Catholics, to insane Communists when communism was the “ruling” ideology. I’m not absolutely sure this isn’t true for a lot of the left in families that were…. how do I put this? “System religious.”

System religious is the type of person who does all the observances to the point of ridicule, but who cannot understand the larger picture, or that there is ANY give in the system.

The same type of older girl who would accost me outside mass and tell me I was going to hell because I’d turned away coming from communion and turned my back on the sacrament two seconds too early (and cause major collisions in the line) two years later was a communist and telling me that unless everything was redistributed to the penny, society was “unjust.”

This is because it’s the same type of mind. There are people who get confused by interaction with individuals, and annoyed by individual differences and preferences. So, instead of trying to figure it out, they try to find a system that explains everything. Bereft of one, they will build one. This is one of the stages of the development of teens. They build “explanation systems” for just about everything they are likely to see in daily life. It won’t take everything into account, or fit everything, but it fits their limited place in the world and experience, makes interacting with others less scary, and lets them function.

In the course of growing up, the system breaks. You meet people who don’t fit the matrix you created. You are exposed to more and more complex situations. Eventually the system is abandoned, and sometimes you — me for sure — look back and go “uh. I had everything upside down and sideways.” (The same can be said for my first three years in the US when I was desperately trying to find a clue and a way of acting that would work. I would take stray comments as gospel, etc.)

The problem with Marxism is that it’s adolescent system with DEFENSES. Also that it’s so pervasive in the media, education, news, etc, that most people don’t know it’s just a system of cobbled together explanations that don’t really work and have never worked anywhere. When you hear someone say something like “Oh, but Marxist analysis is really good for–” theory of music/literary analysis/historical study… whatever, it’s already too late, and that person might never break free. Marxist analysis is only good within the system because the system has defenses built in. Most of them are lies, distortions, or, more and more, outright crazy cakes. But if you don’t look outside the system, it appears to be “good”.

This is roughly the same as if the only way you had to judge the quality of a fiction book was a tape measure. Bigger books were held to be better. Awards were given by measuring the book. You never actually opened or read the fiction book (Or in the case of Marxist analysis used it for its intended ludic purpose. Yes, all fiction books have a ludic purpose, even if they also have a “message” or some redeeming social critique. Look, even if you’re reading a book in a foreign language to get proficient, there has to be enjoyment in it, or you’ll give it up. I have in my library a copy of Dandelion wine, with the cover encased in plastic [because it went everywhere with me for six months] and pencil marks above the words I didn’t get, with the Portuguese translation. If you met me at fourteen, you probably saw me with that book in hand and a pencil behind my ear. But, you’ll say, if I was reading it to become proficient, why desecrate Dandelion Wine? Why not read one of my brother’s engineering books, in English? Or my SIL’s medical books also in English? Because as much “eating live frogs” as the first three months of reading the book were, the story pulled me forward and was engaging. And the last three months, I was reading at almost normal speed, with sometimes total stops while I got out the dictionary. )

And if I told you “But that’s a stupid way to analyze a book” you’d say “No. All the fattest books win the awards, so the tape measure method works for literary analyzis.” That is what you’re seeing.

Look, every adollescent system has defenses too. That time we told younger son we were going to take him for ice-cream and he shrieked we hated him and ran from the room, that made sense in his system. (No, I have no idea how. Maybe he thought he was too fat. At the time he could walk between drops of rain without getting wet, mind you. Or maybe he thought the system worked by separating from us, and since we wanted to go out with him we were evil.) His defense against questioning the validity of whatever crazy-cakes system he’d concocted to explain his world was to decide we must hate him and run screaming from the room.

It helps if you see a lot of the left’s attempts at psychic-powers as being exactly the same. In their system, we’re required to do things for certain reasons. Because if we have other, rational reasons for doing things, the simplistic Marxist system of viewing the world breaks. And that can’t be allowed, so each of the positions has a further retrenching position.

Take the kerfuffle over the plastic rocket, for instance.

As most of you know I have a degree in Literature. Comparative literature, for my sins. Nothing that could be done about it. In the antiquated system I worked with, having a degree in languages necessitated one in literature.

I knew that objectively and by the experience of most of us who read a lot since childhood (it’s an addiction) the quality of the books winning the plastic rocket was in free fall. It’s not just that the use of words is somewhat lacking. It’s that the ludic enjoyment of such books has gone down to close to zero. (The two aren’t linked. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a hot mess on the word level, but his stories are fun.)

So when we went charging in on more balls than brain, I expected their defense to be on the uncouth level. “The things you suggest are uncouth, and you don’t have the refined palate to appreciate the things we love” (said the aesthete while smearing shit on himself, not like those uncouth clothes the peasants wear.)

Since I have been fighting attempts to make me act the class I was born into — or to quote mom “give myself my own respect” — since I could toddle, I was prepared for that.

What I wasn’t prepared for was being called racist, sexist, homophobic. Or being told I was “afraid of change.”

That later one is actually extremely revelatory if you view it as a psychological defense mechanism, which it is for the people of system. “If I defend the system, I don’t need to examine it, which would make me uncomfortable.” I hate to say this but at some deep level, they don’t want to change, and therefore, change is bad. So you must also be afraid of change.

The change we were afraid of was SPECIFICALLY that we were afraid of women and people of color taking over our field and doing better than us. Since three of the people in the group were and remain women, I have no clue what that was supposed to mean. Also whether I’m another race or not seems to depend on the department of the government and, oh, yeah my political beliefs. (That multi-racial whiteness, ya know?) I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about.

I particularly couldn’t figure out what they were talking about because I’d broken in 15 years before, and started attending conventions as a new writer. A newly-broken-in male writer was a rarity. A youngish male editor was even more of a rarity, and if he existed he was almost for sure gay. And most agents were female. Yes, most of the field was white enough to reflect an SOS to the stars. No, this wasn’t being helped by taking the field into a “academic” direction rather than an entertaining one, which was already happening back then.

In the times I had attended award ceremonies, 90% of the award recipients were either female or gay or legends of the field which yes, usually meant fairly old. That might reflect past dominance of the field by males (though only partly. And mostly because science fiction wasn’t “respectable” oh 50 years ago, and women care more about that sort of thing.)

But again, when I came into the field, it was mostly female. And yeah, there were a few darker faces in the crowd. (About as dark as mine if I get a tan.) I was almost the only one with a non-British accent, though. Not that I cared much, except when people couldn’t understand us in crowded rooms.

So, what “change” was I supposed to be afraid of, precisely? Same as it ever was.

In fact, progressivism has been in increasing control since I was born, (before that, too.) So, assigning winners and losers based on group you belong to? Always a thing. Being prissily supportive of the left’s ideas? Needed to get ahead and signal you had an excellent education and were “smart.” etc. etc. etc.

There is no change in that.

Yesterday someone posted a cartoon, in an Heinlein group of all places, with a heavily armed cammo guy standing in an intersection with muslims, a rabbi, gays holding hands, black people and it said something like “What is he so afraid of.”

In defense of the idiotic cartoon the poster brought up that people have guns because they’re afraid of change, or some like idiocy.

And my reaction was, “No, mostly because I’m afraid of idiots like you, feeling righteous and running in possession of a “system” that explains everything, provided you don’t look outside it. I have been alive a long time. In my entire life, I’ve never seen anyone run for a gun at the sight of the Village People, and mind you, they’re older than I am.

Now the left uses “minorities” and “Advancing minorities” as a way to impose its system and feel morally virtuous. It always amuses me to see the inherent racism in their positions — not psychic, they are necessitated by their positions, though Zhou Bi Den talking about poor kids being as smart as white kids doesn’t help anything — and that they don’t see it.

For instance, they need to help women and minorities achieve. They need to give them awards (in my field and others) and assign them the plum roles, because otherwise they will get discouraged (apparently in their world only white people are capable of persistence in face of adversity.) And they need to eliminate these requirements to be on time and be effective, because otherwise people who tan can’t succeed. (Listen, there is a cultural thing in Latin cultures. We’re not supposed to be organized, exact or on time. That’s CULTURAL not genetic. I learned. I learned to punctuate (on the blog? Oh, please. I don’t proofread) which is optional in Portugal, if you’re “creative.” I learned to be on time. I learned to format manuscripts. If you believe people who tan can’t learn these things, you are the racist.) We have to claim that 2+2 can be anything, so we’ll have more women in STEM. We have to–

The truth is that society has had incentives to achieve if you can tan the entire time I’ve been here. The truth is that if you’re consistent and capable, and know how to do your job, no one cares if you’re a woman or a minority. The absolute worst that will happen is some people will assume you’re an affirmative action hire/promotion, until you prove yourself capable.

The left acts as though this were circa 1950 and 1950 as seen in the movies: everyone is white, and everyone dresses and looks alike, and if the stranger comes in everyone is terrified.

I wasn’t alive in the 50s. And I sure as heck wasn’t in the US. It’s possible this was true? Maybe? Some places. I don’t know. All I know is the movies and the books, and at this point I don’t believe in any of them.

The truth? I don’t care about the color or sex of a writer. Never did. No, seriously. I’d start reading a book — still do — based on the book’s description, and if I’m enjoying it a lot, halfway through I’ll turn to the cover to see who wrote it, and — now — might sit at the computer to see what else they wrote, and probably buy it.

I have a lousy memory for names, so when you had to go and buy at the store, half the time I couldn’t remember which authors I’d enjoyed. I’m pretty good at remembering word choice and voice, though, and so after say three books I enjoyed by the same author, I’d write his/her name on a little piece of paper I kept with me for when I went to the store.

THAT was the amount of interest I took in the writer.

Now there were people who rose above. I found myself with some writers — male and female — I’d grown up reading, in a mailing list, and was completely silent for six months. If I’d ever met Heinlein, he’d probably think I was a life-like sculpture.

So, do I care if more people of color are winning awards? Well. Not noticeably. For one, I don’t pay much attention to what people look like. (Which I understand is ALSO white supremacy. Look, I saw a blond for the first time at six. I was terrified for days, and I had nightmares about him for years. You see, his hair and skin matched, and I thought he was a plastic doll come to life. So, really strange might do that. But you know, at this point it would have to be purple with pokadots.)

And that’s my big issues. The people of system are trying to institute their socialist/communist system (At this point the difference is degree. And you can throw fascist in there too. Yes, I know the definitions are different, but in action there ain’t a millimeter of difference between them. Beyond the rhetoric of the system.) Being good boys and girls, having been exquisitely educated and BELIEVING everything the authorities told them they believe that system will bring about the equality of the sexes and races (never did. Never will. Societies in stress and living close to the bone are hard on women and minorities, no matter how many ridiculous lies the NYT prints.)

Being people of system, they can’t figure out how to step out of the system and evaluate the system itself. If you challenge what the system says it wants, it must be because you’re against their objectives or because you don’t like “change.” And when you show them it’s not change, it’s what’s been in place for decades, they say you’re isssst and phobic, like a thirteen year old running away from the dinner table. Because they can’t let you break the system. This is also why in professions they take over they first destroy institutional memory. It might also be why they feel the need to destroy the past, including their bizarre fear of sculpture. Yes, even statues erected by freed slaves show how long ago that was. Why there’s no one alive who remembers it first hand. And the freed slaves could erect statues, that long ago. Well, that destroys their vision of themselves as forever storming the barricades on behalf of all that’s right and good.

Because the system must be preserved at all costs, no matter what ridiculous distortion and lying is needed to assure it. Without this system they internalized the world might as well be chaos.

Therefore–

Therefore, as the system breaks before their eyes, because the technological change is changing everything, and their attempts at holding things still, like the covidiocy, just end up changing things more, these are people in increasingly greater distress and anger. And they don’t know what to do with it, except attribute their feelings to us. Which is why they’re clamoring for “vengeance”.

It’s going to get very rough. And when it does it’s going to escalate quickly.

Meanwhile those of us who aren’t people of systems, and who wouldn’t recognize systems if they bit us in the ass must learn to work over and around.

Because weird as it seems, in the end, civilization depends on us to rebuild and to adapt and to make it work again.

Fortunately most of us handle change pretty well.

Sometimes I hate what Sabrina Chase named “the mass industrial entertainment complex.” Mostly, you know, the news, movies, book publishers, the whole blind kitten (caboodle) litter of them. (Only blind kittens are cute.)

They have this irrepressible need to reduce everything to the minimum common denominator. I don’t know if it’s because their education was lacking or because since WWII our family structures have been more and more “off” and our kids more and more raised by strangers, or if it’s the need to sell concepts that don’t work really well with marketable buzz words in a corporate setting, but we often have to look at it and wonder if these people are actually human, or if they understand any of the fundamental concepts that have hemmed human lives since forever.

So, you know, once the industrial entertainment complex go hold of oh, love, it didn’t take very long (20 years maybe) for the concept of love of be submerged on a tide of “it’s really good sex.”

Look, I have been married 35 years, and I have absolutely nothing against really good sex (on the contrary.) Really good sex can be a bonding exercise, and it can take you through some pretty stressful times. I’m not that fond of reading about really good sex, but that’s mostly because… well, I’m not a voyeur. Some things are to be enjoyed, not described.

Romances used to be fairly clean, a kind of emotional porn (which by and large works well for women.) In the late seventies (well, I read a lot of older stuff) things became more explicit. Sure, whatever. Unless something emotional and important happens during the sex, I kind of skimmed it.

But around 2015, most Romances were becoming actual erotica, and if I skimmed the sex parts I could read a fat romance book in an hour.

Worse, there was no emotion. There was this weird, bizarre concept that if you had really good sex it meant you were in love, and it would last forever.

This is kind of the equivalent of saying that if you really like chocolate, you should just eat chocolate, because it means it’s what your body needs to survive. Or worse, it’s what your soul needs to survive.

I find myself annoyed by it, because stories — in turn — form people and give them an idea of what the world is like. And if you think really good sex is the equivalent of love, when you hit a time in your life when you’re too stressed to feel as much as you normally would, or when you’re sick and can’t have sex, or a myriad other circumstances that arise in a long marriage? You’re going to think the sex isn’t great, so you must not be in love anymore. And that can corrode a relationship from the inside.

I’ve seen this happen among younger people, raised on this.

Frankly, it’s not the only weird notion they’ve come up with. And they’re all sort of insane. Their notion that the books are supposed to be some kind of (mostly Marxist) uplifting influence on society translates to younger people having this totally distorted idea that victims are somehow holy.

I find myself trying to mentor young writers who think the way to create an admirable hero/protag is to have shit raining on him/her day and night, without his doing anything to solve the problem, until suddenly, automagically people realize he/she is oppressed and THEREFORE they must be admirable and celebrated. The heck? How? I mean, I know this was the structure of everything my kids got assigned in school, but seriously?

THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS. No wonder these people keep becoming cry-bullies, since the highest form of heroism is to play the victim.

However, perhaps no concept has been so profoundly abused as the “Strong woman” concept. Apparently the retards of Hollywood (apology to mentally handicapped people) and the morons (ditto) of publishing could only think of a way out of the rather vapid pulp heroines (well, some of them. Some were fine. And some were even strong, but yes, there were a number of them who were basically “what men fight for” and very sketchily drawn as characters, particularly in the 20s or early 30s.) and that was: let’s make woman strong.

Nothing wrong with that. Every protag and supporting character should be strong. A villain is only as big as the villain and vice versa, and why would you write “small” books? (and hey, the same people who created our “strong” women would think this means I want to read 600k word books)

Except that most of these people are either privileged or maimed (or both, of course) and have the emotional maturity of toddlers. So to them strong woman meant “urr durr strong woman beat up men.” Which is like thinking Great Sex is LOVE. Sure. It can be ONE of the aspects. BUT it sure as heck isn’t the thing and the whole of the thing. And thinking it is breaks things. Well, people, mostly.

Someone the other day asked if it was even possible these days to make a series about an action hero who is male and which isn’t based on older properties. In traditional publishing or Hollywood? Probably not. I’m fairly sure Die Hard would never happen now.

The insanity of this is that while women can beat up men in a straight fight, if you go for an extremely strong woman and an extremely weak (or perhaps handicapped) man, it is not the normal thing, much less the predominant thing. Certainly not among assassins or trained spies or vigilantes.

It’s still possible, of course for women to beat up men, but it’s most likely to happen to if the woman takes the man by surprise and fights very very dirty. (I’ve won some battles that way. Mind you, I had the advantage of a 10 year older brother who was built like a brick shithouse. I learned early that fighting fair just meant I ended up crying.)

Once you realize that women OLYMPIC records match the high school athlete records for males in your average US highschool, you realize that this entire emphasis on women’s PHYSICAL strength is insanely stupid. And raising girls to think that’s the sort of strength they have or can have is– I don’t know. What’s a stronger word than criminally insane?

I realized this some years ago when a female childhood friend of my older son’s, at a party, told him, with absolute confidence, that she could beat him. Older son at the time was, I think, 300 lbs (and not really fat.) She was maybe 90lbs. He told her that. She said she was “90 lbs of get back” and tried to get him to “fight” with her.

Fortunately older son (both sons, really) because they were always outsized and much stronger than they should be at whatever size, had been trained not to hurt anyone smaller than him. But I kept thinking of this girl doing that to a less civilized man and the horror that could result. And I’m sure it’s happened to women raised with this bizarre idea. More than once.

Then last week as I was watching the thing with Gina Carano play out, I realized it’s not just that they reduce “strength” to physical strength. They seem not to recognize true strength when they see it.

Most strong women are exactly the same the same as most strong men. No, not physically. I mean, I’m fairly strong (or was) for a female, but my 14 year old son was stronger than I as I found out when shopping for cement.

But …. There is a strength that transcends the physical.

Off the top of my head:

Strong people live for something that’s bigger than them. This can be their religion, their nation, their family or their dream. Or, yes, all of the above.

Those things are important enough not to allow the person to be swayed this way and that. Important enough to make sacrifices for. Important enough to keep working for, even if you don’t enjoy it, even if you think you can’t, even if it takes everything else in you.

Strong people have principles they will not betray. You can, metaphorically, offer them all the kingdoms of the world, but they won’t do what’s wrong in their eyes to obtain it. Even if this means they lose everything, they will not bend.

Strong people don’t give up. They are what Dave Freer calls battlers. They can get pounded down, but you know they’re going to rise up again, and try. Again, and again and again. (Think of Inigo Montoyal, in Princess Bride, in pursuit of his revenge. Though what strong people pursue can be wholly constructive instead of reactive. In fact, it often is.)

Strong people will endure terrible conditions to make sure what’s important to them survives. They will often, themselves, live when they should have been dead, to complete the task they feel is more important than life.

Now, strong people make great heroes, but it takes a better writer than most of the people who write for Hollywood these days.

That said there is a type of strength that is peculiar to women. I don’t know where I read that women “glory in sacrificing for their families” and that might not be precisely true.

It’s more that strong women can make the exact same sacrifices as men but hide them better. I watched this with my mother and grandmother suddenly being “not hungry” and just eating a couple of bites when someone in the family was sick or had worked physically hard and needed the protein, when there wasn’t enough money to go around.

A strong woman can do the same as a strong man, but self-efface, and make the person who needs to think of himself or herself as the hero do so. It’s not always a family. Sometimes it’s a cause.

Casablanca resonates for a reason. She gives up love, because saving the world from totalitarianism is more important.

But at least growing up, mostly we saw it in family context, because that’s where most of us saw things up close and personal. Like the way my mom made the most work in the household for the first ten years of her marriage, but when dad was home she acted like a housewife, and never let him know she was doing two hard jobs, so he could do …. well, the equivalent of a training job, and get good at his own career (engineering.) Eventually his earning eclipsed her exponentially. And then she made jokes about the years that she kept us fed and clothed when he made barely enough for his work attire. BUT in those years, when it was so, even when they were arguing, this never crossed her lips. Not once. Because he needed to be built up, so he could do what he had to do.

So, I guess a strong woman is exactly like a strong man — in every way but physical — but can do it with grace, quietly, and build others up in the process. (Yes, some men can do this too. The personality type is just rarer. Again, every characteristic is a continuum.)

Or at least most women have the capacity to do that, unless an entire cultural complex is devoted to make them value their physical strength above all else.

And then once they find out they don’t have much of that, they’ll feel put upon and inferior.

Perhaps of course, that is part of the plan, creating permanent victims.

Because neither Hollywood nor traditional publishing have any idea what to do with real strong people, men or women.

I’m so old, I remember when the Soviet Union fell. I also remember what happened afterwards.

I suppose it makes sense for me to be beset with this sense of deja vu right now, because we live in a truly bizarre time. I honestly feel like we’re watching someone trying to build the USSR after the Berlin wall has crumbled and as everyone is escaping in every possible direction, and some imaginary, in cars that were more or less made of cardboard and spit, and which they drove until they couldn’t drive anymore, which is why Portugal was littered with Trabants.

I know why I’m having that sense of double vision. I keep running into people who talk about our current Junta as though it were an empire for the ages.

Which it would be, if you didn’t take in account a) the quality of the people who have staged and are running this travesty of a farce of a comedy or a f*ckup. b) their knowledge of how society works. Or, you know, in what general direction reality might lie, up to and including where their food comes from, what humans CAN survive on, what it takes to run a technological civilization, etc. ad nauseum. With bells on. They know none of it, and don’t even know what they don’t know. And if you tell them, they’ll tell you it’s an aggression of some sort. c) that the regime they’re trying to install is not one that can survive anyway, not in a nation that is the economic engine of the world. d) that in their crazed efforts to install it they have in fact castrated or perhaps put a stake through the heart of those fields they control, including but not limited to education, Hollywood, the performing arts in general, traditional publishing…. pretty much, yeah, everything they control. some of these fields were already dying, and some would die anyway, but they accelerated that demise.

Put it another way, the system they are trying to erect — not the utopia, yeah, I know that never worked — the total surveillance/controlled information/collectivist/everyone in cities/everyone living or dying at the say of the government never worked very well. In exceptional circumstances and after a major trauma, like say WWI (there is no substantial difference between this partnership of would-be oligarchs and industrialists and that of Germany, except for national versus international. BTW, the international version is insanity of people who never even talked to foreigners outside a university and who don’t realize how little power they actually have.) And yeah, I don’t need you all to tell me that Hitler also had, at best, marginal contact with reality and resembled these twits to an almost frightening degree, from vegetarianism, to paganism, to bizarre hollow-Earth theories. And yeah, that lasted 12 years, but only because it first consumed the majority of its own wealth, and then the wealth of conquered nations. These ass clowns couldn’t conquer Mexico if they tried. Hell, they couldn’t conquer Canada. It’s highly doubtful they could conquer Tim Hortons, even if it’s owned by an American company. Even if they managed to get our troops to go to war and invade our nearest neighbors, they’d become moored down in fairness and hearts and minds, and who knows what else. Between all the time they’d have to spend making sure that our soldiers weren’t mean to left-handed Canadians of fluid gender, and trying to decide under what flag our troops would march, invading our nearest neighbors isn’t a thing. But if it were, what would these countries give us, that would keep the country going for any amount of time? Yeah, pretty much nothing. In fact they would take more from us than we’d get from them.

There simply isn’t enough wealth in the world to keep the giant going, once it collapses. So no, they’re not building the kingdom of a thousand years.

Now mind you, if they hadn’t had to employ the crazy measures they did all through 2020 to break us enough to pull their massive scam, this probably would have lasted ten or fifteen years, by which time we’d have been seriously broken and broke, and rebuilding the republic would be probably impossible. We’d probably have ended up as many separate countries, and maybe closer to Mexico than Canada in lifestyle, productivity and general creativity and stability. (Not that Canada will be much better than Mexico if it doesn’t have the giant to help support its deficiencies.)

But they had to try for something extreme. They had in fact to shut the world down to attempt to bring us to heel. That they had to do that tells you the level to which they had already lost.

It doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. As I’ve pointed out before, there is nothing quite so dangerous as a wounded and dying wild boar. And these would-be oligarchs are closer to that than to any group of humans.

In fact the problem is they’re creating a lot of destruction, and the destruction will bring them down.

Again, I said this before, and I’ll stick by it, there’s an implosion coming somewhere between six months from now and two years from now.

No, I don’t think we can avoid violence. I don’t know if their fall will actually be sped by violence, but I suspect so, because they can’t leave well enough alone. They can’t be like other kleptocrats, fill their pockets and let us do what we can. No, they want to destroy us. Partly because they’re terrified of us. I’ve got absolutely no clue how bad the information is they’re trying to keep quiet, but it must be a heck of a doozie, because they’re convinced if we figure out what they’ve been up to these….what? 10? 20? 30? 50? years, we’re going to come for them.

They’re not precisely wrong, I bet you. I bet you, too, that the information will come out, and it will come in circumstances where they’ve done enough damage to the rule of law that instead of orderly trials, which might give them a chance to escape and live off the fat of the land in some third world republic, it’s going to get ugly.

How ugly? I don’t know. Look, until about a month ago I couldn’t “sense” anything ahead except a big break. And if you’re going to complain about that verb, no I don’t think I’m some kind of prophet, except I’ve read a lot, I’ve thought a lot, and I know — more or less — the shape if not the size of the corruption and scams these people have been running. All of which depended on a captive and UNIFIED culture, where all the information was fed from the top and where all the dissidents thought they were alone.

That’s broken, and the repeated unforced errors — of saying the quiet part aloud — these idiots indulge in is a sign of how terrified they are. They keep telling us we need “truth commissions” or truth and reconciliation commissions, and informing us that we all need to believe their dictated truth.

But there is a terrible quality to genii. Once we found out we weren’t alone, once we found out that after their massive “get orangemanbad” campaign orange man bad still beat them so handily they had to fraud obscenely, in plain view and in the light of day, none of us is going to believe we’re alone again.

I’ve said before, they can’t win.

The crash is coming. six months to two years, and I doubt we go to two years, though I think it’s going to start with isolated and spaced out incidents. “First slowly, then very fast.”

And they won’t win. In fact, they’re tarnishing their brand to the extent that “leftist” or “marxist” will be terms of opprobrium within this decade. The mush heads and loud mouths will turn on a dime. I’ve seen it before.

The problem, and what you guys might not even be seeing, is that every industry, every profession, every … routine of life has been infested by these people. Lefty insanity is a positional signal that the “upper classes” use to distinguish themselves from the peasants.

Yes, to a great extent this means they’ve made vast portions of our professional hierarchies and our industries and our fields of knowledge non-functional.

On the other hand, there is a hierarchy and humans live by hierarchies. And when those collapse….

It won’t be the first time. It won’t be the last.

But it will leave a vacuum of power. And more importantly, it will leave a vacuum of trust. And a vacuum of information.

Our likelihood of coming out of this a constitutional republic is still high. Why? Well, because societies under stress become more themselves.

I remember when the USSR fell. And out of the ashes Tzar Putin emerged, who is despicable, but not particularly out of keeping with Russian monarchy.

So, yeah, the pull of our culture will be towards the reestablishment of who and what we are and were: a constitutional republic.

But on the way…

Look, I remember when the USSR fell.

The people in the USSR knew they were being treated like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed on crap. They knew there was truth in Pravda. But they were used to having certain information, and interpreting it.

And there is something worse than reading the news in totalitarianism. You can get used to interpreting the news, and knowing the shape of the hole of what they’re not reporting.

But once you realize it’s all nonsense, once the coherence of the news breaks — and it’s doing so now, earlier than I expected, with the Times article, with the New York Times admitting the protesters at the capitol didn’t kill the police officer — once there are holes, but they’re not consistent, or they’re consistent, but then contradicted; once the narrative changes almost by the week, to the point it can’t be ignored, that’s the dangerous period.

I know I joke that by the end of this year I’ll have to apologize to the lizard-people conspiracy theorists. But the problem is that the lizard people conspiracy theorists can acquire respectability and a strange new respect. Or something even crazier. Heck, a lot of crazier things.

To an extent the 9/11 troofer conspiracies, which yes, are crazy and also anti-scientific were our warning shot. That they flourished and that to this day a lot of people believe them means that there was already a sense that the news made no sense, that there were other things going on behind the scenes that we weren’t aware of.

It’s going to get far, far worse than that, as the actual elites, the top of various fields fall like struck trees in a thunder storm. There is a good chance that authorities you rely on for your profession, or just for your knowledge have been compromised. A lot of our research is tainted by china paying to get the results it wants, for instance. And there’s probably worse. You already know most research can’t be reproduced, and that’s not even recent.

As all this stuff comes out, the problem is that people won’t stop believing. Instead they’ll believe in all and everything.

I don’t know how much was reported here, as the USSR collapsed. but I remember what I read in European magazines and journals. All of a sudden it was all new age mysticism and spoon bending and only the good Lord knew what else.

And that’s what we’re going to head into. So, when you find yourself in the middle of an elaborate explanation that someone constructed, well…

First find the facts. Pace Heinlein: Again, and again what are the facts. Never mind if your ideology demands they be something else. Establish the facts to the extent you can. Facts and math don’t lie. (Statistics do. So be aware you can lie with them. And any metrics that involve intangibles, like intelligence or performance much less sociability or micro anything? forget about it.)

From the facts, deploy Occam’s razor. What is the simplest explanation?

Then remember that humans run at the mouth, and the more humans in the conspiracy, the more facts are likely to leak out somewhere.

And while we’ve seen a lot of Omerta among leftists, note that they’re all afflicted by evil villain syndrome. Sooner or later, they brag about how clever they were in deceiving us. So, if your conspiracy theory requires perfect silence forever, it’s probably not true.

Above all and more importantly, remember there are no simple explanations. Yes, we got here through Marxism, but to get where we are took almost a century of small steps with a lot of crucial slips and stupidity. (Like the elites buying into just-so stories that make them feel superior.) It also took the crushingly fast technological development of the 20th century, which both drove the growth of Marxist dominance and, ultimately undermined it.

And whatever happens remember physics don’t change. Not for me, not for you, not for anyone else. So, yes, jet fuel does in fact cause steel to bend if the heat is concentrated enough. And spoons don’t get bent by your mind, no matter how much you wish them to. We don’t advise using jet fuel to bend them either, mind. If you really want to bend a spoon, we recommend using pliers. But mostly we recommend you leave spoons alone.

It’s going to get very scary. And what will make it scarier is the fact that the barrage of false information from the top that we were subjected to all through 2020 is going to be joined by streams of information from every side, much of it incomplete, corrupt or outright crazy.

Take a deep breath. There are — probably — no lizards among us. (Yes, I know, that’s what a lizard would say.) I do realize the evil incompetence we’re subject to can make you suspect that there must be aliens bent on our destruction.

Well, maybe there are. But what would be different if there were? or if all we see were merely the incompetent malice of humans trying to be good social apes while the fabric of life twists and racks under them?

So, deep breath. Try to get the facts. Don’t rush to join any new and shiny theories.

Keep your head on a swivel.

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

*VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: BOB IS A BUG OUT BAG.

*Also, yes, it’s long. You don’t skimp words or preparation. Also Doug Wishes me to make clear this is not precisely his, he just compiled it from various places — SAH*

Foreword: I started compiling ideas and source lists for emergencies some years ago. Not all of the material below is from my own research. Some of it is from other sources. I didn’t keep track of the sources at the time, since this was primarily for my personal use.

If someone claims this is their work; fine. I’ll split the proceeds with you. You can have half the zero amount I got. OTOH, I would note you as a source then.

The Absolute Minimalist BOB

The minimalist BOB is something you can chuck into your trunk and forget about until needed. It is for the family member who is resistant to the idea of a BOB, or meant as an extra bit of smart packed into each of your car’s trunks to augment a basic BOB.To assemble it you will need:

Several quart sized and one gallon sized Ziplock type bags.

A lighter. Fire is our friend.

One flattened roll of toilet paper with the cardboard tube removed. Toilet paper is also our friend. Once flattened, place in appropriate ziplock bag, squeeze out all the air and close Ziplock bag.

A pocketknife, preferably a Leatherman Supertool or something similar that is high quality. This is without a doubt incredibly useful. You shouldn’t even put it in the bag unless it is a spare, put it in your purse or on your belt. This isn’t a pocketknife, it is a toolset. It is a can opener, a knife, a saw, a file, an awl, a bottle opener, a pliers, a wire cutter, a crimper, a flathead screwdriver, a Phillip’s head screwdriver, and both a metric and English ruler. This ain’t your Daddy’s Swiss Army knife. Spyderco also makes a gadget knife with a blade so sharp you could do surgery, so check it out as well. http://www.SPYDERCO.com

Five Maxipads. This is optional, but in addition to their accepted use, they are very absorbent and sterile, so they can be used as pressure bandages in case of an accident. Put in Ziplock and squeeze out the air.

2 pint bottles of water. (optional).

2 or 3 power bars. If you can, get the horrible kind like they put in military combat rations, the dreaded MRE (Meal, Ready to Eat), these bars will last longer than commercial counterparts.

A flashlight. They now make small disposable LED keychains that are extremely bright and run off of a watch battery. Normally these things run under $1.00USD, although some places charge more. While this is good from a size standpoint (they are about as big as a quarter around), and from a weight standpoint (maybe a quarter ounce), they are not terribly rugged. Mag-Lite makes a very small flashlight that uses AAA batteries called a Mini Mag-Lite that is very bright and about as big as a man’s middle finger. All Mag-Lite flashlights can be used to kill or injure a grown man, so look at getting one of those. It is more expensive, but wow! Tough as tough can be, water proof, and they come with a spare bulb in the base. Leave the batteries in their package and stick the light into a ziplock bag with at least 2 extra batteries.  Other light sources are http://www.MAGLITE.com, and http://www.surefire.com  

If you have these items you will be set for the vast majority of life’s little curveballs. The Leatherman or a similar tool alone will solve the majority, but the others really do matter.

Take the stuff and put it into the gallon ziploc bag. Express the air and zip it shut. You can then take the second bag, place the full bag into the second so that the zipped portion is put in first, express the air, and zip the second one shut. This will provide a lot of moisture protection.

The Basic BOB

The Basic BOB is meant to be carried every day, and is geared towards an urban or suburban environment. This is something that, since it is meant for everyday carry, must be comfortable, rugged, and useful in daily life.

The bag itself. We suggest something inconspicuous and easy to carry,

but with an appreciable load capacity. A medium sized briefcase will suffice, but try to get a North Face or Jansport type bag that college students use as book bags. The bags will have extra external and internal pockets which will come in handy for little things you need to get to quickly such as toilet paper or food. The bags often come with Fastex buckles which allow the bearer to externally attach other items allowing the user to customize his carry.

A Leatherman Supertool or something similar as mentioned in the Minimalist BOB.

Spare glasses. If you wear glasses get a spare set and put them in. If you wear contacts, get a pair of glasses and store them in the bag. In an abrasive or caustic atmosphere you can seriously damage your eyes with contacts, and you may not be able to clean your hands enough to replace dirty or lost lenses. So, glasses it is.

One roll of toilet paper. Never be without at least one roll of toilet paper. For ease of carry remove the cardboard tube and smash it flat. Then take it and put it into a ziplock bag. Express the air from the bag and seal it tightly. If you’ve ever in a position where there is no TP, you understand the necessity for this one.

A multifuel lighter (zippo-type) or an unopened drug store butane lighter. If you don’t smoke you may never need it, but fire is man’s most basic tool, so get it and have it. If you get the Zippo, remember extra flints and fuel.

Food. Have some power bars or some cookies. The best way to figure your needs is to miss lunch, then see if one or two packs of Oreos or a power bar or two takes most of the edge off. The prepackaged cheese and crackers snacks for kids are a good idea also. Plan on a 48 hour period of relying on your BOB. Have six very small meals, each in its own ziplock bag. Eat them once a month and restock so they don’t go bad on you.

Water.  Have a minimum of 4 20 ounce bottles. If you can stomach warm Gatorade, get that instead. Most hunger pains are actually thirst, so try drinking a half a bottle of fluid with each mini meal you eat.

Medicine. Be absolutely certain you have any daily meds you take. This may be something you have to put into and remove from the bag each day, but don’t forget them. If the medicine you take is not easily perishable and not a controlled substance, get your doctor to write an extra prescription and keep a spare bottle, that you rotate out monthly, in the bag at all times.

Space blanket. There are emergency blankets that fold up to about the size of a sandwich. They are inexpensive and very warm. They are also usually waterproof. Get one or two. http://www.SPORTSMANSGUIDE.com

Toothbrush and toothpaste. This is optional, but performing personal hygiene can make you feel worlds better in a bad situation. Put them in a ziplock bag together.

Money. A spare $100.00 is a very good idea. At the very least get a roll of quarters for vending machines since they may work in the absence of electricity. Be aware that money may not have much value in a true SHTF situation. Money is a good idea, but it only works in a civilized paradigm. 

Deodorant. Very optional. This only applies if you are from the US. Other countries don’t seem to want it.

Spare clothing.  This is optional, but not a bad idea. At the very least you will want some spare socks sitting snug in a ziplock bag.

Personal protection. Get the strongest pepper spray you can find and rotate stock every six months or so. If the button gets pushed, get rid of it. The can will leak.

Firearm. If you live in a free state, get a concealed carry permit so that you can carry your weapon without fear of arrest. If you are in a state where the rights of all people are not recognized, rely on the pepper spray. For a BOB firearm, the suggestion is for a something reliable. It has to go boom every time the trigger is pulled. A compact lightweight revolver such as Taurus or Smith & Wesson makes may be the ticket. Firearms are a very personal sort of equipment, and if you don’t know anything about them, get help and get good teaching.  At the very least get a small semi-auto .22LR pistol and learn how to use and maintain it. Keep it in a holster or case so the sights and trigger can’t be bumped. Any gun is better than no gun when people around you lose their minds.

Feminine hygiene. Get some maxipads. Remember they can be used as pressure bandages.

Pencil and paper. Being able to write a note can be very necessary at times. You may need to write down a license plate or a description for the police, so get a small wire bound 3”x5” notebook and put it in a ziplock with a pencil.

Band-Aids. Always a good idea. Stick 10 or so in a ziplock bag and seal it tight.

Radio and batteries. A cheap transistor radio can be a big help. If nothing else it can tell you if there are road or bridge closings or if there is a shelter nearby. Make sure the radio isn’t a flimsy headset design that will break with rough handling, and make sure it is a RADIO, not a CD or an MP3 player when you buy it. Put the radio and batteries in ziplock bags.

A flashlight. Just as described in the minimalist BOB, get a small AA or AAA battery using Mini Mag-Lite or a LED keying. 

A respirator. This is optional. Lowes, Home Depot, and other hardware stores stock painter’s respirators that run about $15.00 USD. They use replaceable canister filters that are really very good for what they are. This isn’t a gas mask of course, but if there is a lot of stuff in the air these cans will help keep it out of your lungs, especially dust in the event of a nuke or radiological “dirty” bomb. A respirator doesn’t weigh much, is about as big as a fist, and is cheap insurance. Get one and put it into a ziplock bag.

Soap. One or two bars of hotel sized soap can help with cleaning hands before eating or for just getting yourself a little cleaner. This is especially helpful in the event of a small wound. It may hurt to wash a scrape or cut, but it is the best way to avoid infection.

A fork and a spoon. Eating with your hands isn’t just bad manners, it is a health hazard. Remember the Four F’s of Food Sanitation: Fingers, Face, Flies, and Feces. Getting food poisoning when you have no ready way to care for yourself can be very problematic. Even freshly washed hands can carry enough bacteria to make you ill in dirty conditions, thus poor personal hygiene coupled with a failure of civil sanitation is a recipe for trouble.  If you have a regular metal fork and spoon, you can sidestep this large potential problem. Put them in a ziplock so they won’t get lost and put them in the bag. You can make a cup if needed by cutting the top off a plastic pop bottle, or by using your can opener on a soft drink can.

Intermediate BOB

Now we move on to something a little more substantial. Since cold weather is the most difficult thing to deal with, this section is geared towards people who travel in rural areas and who may experience unpleasant winters. This is a BOB you will fill and put into your vehicle, opening it only to rotate stocks every so often or if you need it.

The bag itself should be larger. We suggest a medium sized rucksack with or without a frame. An internally framed ruck is better, but it is not necessary. A cheap solution is a medium sized military issue ALICE rucksack. ALICE stands for All purpose Light weight Individual Carrying Equipment. Leave it to the military to come up with a 7 word name for rucksack and then an acronym to shorten it. The ALICE ruck’s design was employed in numerous conflicts and to the best of my knowledge no one ever complained about the rucksack except to say the frame was somewhat flimsy. The frame is aluminum, and will bend if abused by being sat upon or in some other fashion. If it is used in its intended fashion, it will last a lifetime with no care at all. Read some reviews on the ALICE here-www.trailspace.com/gear/review/00002483

Another alternative is a gym bag of tough construction, preferably with 4 or 5 external pockets. Several sporting goods places on the web offer “range bags” or “shooter’s bags” that are made of very strong stuff and have many external pockets. Get one with good sewn in handles and, if possible, end handles as well as the standard top handles. Good quality gym bags can be found at most retail outlets like Wal-Mart.

If you drive a truck with no back seat, try to get a gym bag with a bottom width the same as the floor with the seat moved to the rear. If you have to put the bag in the back of the truck, try to avoid putting water in the bag as it will freeze and burst the container.

Consider this list a continuation of the basic BOB:

Clothes. Put in a spare set of jeans, a shirt, socks, spare boots or athletic shoes, a scarf, a balaclava or a ski mask, good gloves, a lightweight waterproof parka or windbreaker, and some long underwear. Put them separately into plastic bags and seal them as best you can. That which will fit into a ziplock, put into a ziplock. As always, get the air out of the bag before sealing.

Fatty, salty, and sugary foods. Get a can or two of Spam, yes Spam. I said Spam and throw it in there. A can or two of Dinty Moore stew should go in there as well as junk food like chocolate chip cookies, etc. A good rule of thumb is if your kids whine for it, you will want to carry a little of it for any potential on foot impromptu camping trip. Get also a few packets of dried noodle soups like Hot Ramen or Cup A Soup so that you can drink stuff to warm up. Hot chocolate packets and instant coffee is also recommended. The General Foods International coffees are about half sugar and come in a sturdy tin, but beware, after drinking a cup you may feel compelled to start talking about your feelings. When the temperature drops and you have to walk through snow and ice you need to eat and drink horrible crap like that. The drinks and noodles will warm you, fat will feed you, and the salt will constipate you. Constipation is good because who wants to stick their derriere out and squat in 10F weather?

A small pot. Get a 2 quart, preferably iron, pot for melting snow or heating water for drinking or making soup.If you feel that a 2 quart pot is too much to carry, there are alternatives. One may choose to go with aluminum cookware, but it may be damaged or crushed if abused in some fashion. It may also make your food taste nasty and is unhealthy from a long term perspective. Another suggestion is titanium cookware which will only crush your wallet.

Get a small camper stove. This is optional. They are simple inexpensive affairs of flat stamped metal that you can build a small fire under and put a pot on. Alternately you can have a small propane stove with a cylinder of gas.

Maps. Don’t forget the map if you have to ditch your vehicle. Try to avoid going out without one. You will want that piece of paper if you are unfamiliar with the area, and you will want it if you are. Things look different at 3 miles an hour, land marks won’t pass with that familiar tempo.

Yes you have a map function on your phone – how well does it work when the battery is dead?

A tent. Get a small inexpensive pop up tent and put it in your bag. A $20.00 USD tent will be more than enough to keep the wind off of three huddled people, which can be the difference between life and death in a nasty winter storm, especially if wet.

Candles. Get two or three emergency candles. You would not believe the amount of heat these things throw off in a confined space. Try it out. Get in the tent sometime, seal it up, and light a candle. You should have to start taking off clothes within 10 to 15 minutes. A note about clothes. If you are cold with your clothes on, try taking some off or opening them up. The cold may just be there because your sweat can’t get away from you. Dry is warm and warm is dry.

Sleeping bag. Get a decent bag. Try to get one that goes into a “stuff bag”. They compact the best and are easiest to carry.

Poncho. Get an army surplus or, better yet, a new poncho. We wouldn’t advise wearing one because they will make you sweat, which will make you cold, but they are great to rest a tent on. Also, they make a great hasty tent or sleeping bag. You can find quality stuff at http://www.rangerjoes.com.

GPS and a compass. This is most likely unnecessary except in a blizzard, but hey, be prepared. Get a moderately priced GPS with preprogrammable waypoints and an expensive compass. Preprogram your waypoints along your most traveled routes. Never be lost again, right?

Spare fuel. There are emergency fuel packs sold in Wal Mart, K Mart, Auto Zone, etc. These are “trunk safe” containers of mineral spirits that can be used in a pinch if you run out of gas. One or two is a good idea. If you have a diesel, cooking oil can serve as an emergency fuel, so keep a couple of gallons of vegetable oil in your vehicle.

A small can of red spray paint. This is optional. If you need to mark your way whether by marking trees or by leaving a directional arrow in the snow, have this item.

Water. If it is snowy, you have water. If it isn’t you need at least three 20oz bottles per day. Figure to have on hand a 3 day supply. Gatorade is better, but have something to drink.

A charcoal hand warmer. These can be found at sporting goods shops. Have one and extra fuel. Store them in ziplock bags. This item can be the difference between losing and keeping digits in a frostbite situation. If you can, get two so you can warm your hands and feet at the same time.

Personal protection. I know I am repeating myself here. Carry pepper spray. There are bad people in the world and you don’t want to get to know them. There are good people on the road, but that’s not the expectation you should use.

Firearms. Get a quality pistol and get good with it. Stick it in your parka pocket and zip it shut when you walk. If you have it on a holster it might show and people might not slow to help you. It will also be more difficult to get to under a parka. If it is in the pocket you can keep your hand in there and no one will notice. They will assume you are just cold. Make certain you zip of button you pocket when you walk as to prevent your weapon from falling out.

Advanced BOB

Oh dear, it finally happened. Some jackass nuked half a dozen major cities simultaneously, the food and petroleum supply has been disrupted, there is a plague that makes the Black Death look like a head cold and we can’t fight it, or Mike Tyson is in an elevator with you. Whatever it may be, it is time to haul ass in a big way, and you have a long way to go. This isn’t just getting home due to a bad hair day, this is Bosnia for a Croat or Rwanda for a Hutu time. It is time to “Run Forrest, run!” or “Run Luke, run!” depending on how grandiose your self image is.

When you go you know that travel may be uncertain. There may be roadblocks as is routine in rural Africa when there is one of their periodic disease outbreaks, there may be civil unrest like the Rodney King riots, there may be martial law declared so you can’t use the roads. Any way you slice it you have to maximize the chances of getting yourself and your family safely to safety, and this may involve transition from wheels to feet in order to get there.

Before you can even consider this level of planning you need to consider the goal. If you wish to go to Grandma’s farm 300 miles away, you need not one plan, or two plans, you need several alternates. What takes 5 hours by highway may take weeks with a family in tow on foot. Write down the plans in a notebook and have the appropriate maps. If you catch some Apache’s arrow, the rest of the family will still need to make it there if they can.

Consider the size of your family and their ages. This will be a major indicator of what needs to happen with regards to provisions.

Never try to carry any more than 50-60 pounds per healthy adult male, and never try to go 25-35 pounds per woman or teen.

Always plan for the worst. If you have 3 kids and a wife make every plan as though it would be made over land without roads and carrying at least one member. Figure that if you can go 15 miles a day with a family on foot, you are really doing well, so 300 miles equals a minimum of 20 days of travel, with a realistic expectation being 30 days. And an angry, dirty, whining, X Box withdrawal group of unhappy campers they will be.

This list is a continuation of the above BOB lists. The first two lists were just for a single person. Do the math. Multiply where you need to, more tents, ponchos, etc. Figure a roll of toilet paper lasts an adult male a week when he eats regularly, so multiply rolls times people times weeks. Family of five going 300 miles? 5 people X 4 weeks is twenty rolls of paper, which is a lot of volume, so everyone carries their own TP in their personal ruck. Another thing, get the roughest TP you can get. It wipes off the poop better, it stores better, and the women won’t use as much.

The bag or bags. Go to a dive store, that is a place SCUBA divers shop, not a store with cheap beer and cheaper women. Get one of the large dive bags they sell. These bags are designed to hold heavy and bulky stuff in harsh environments and are extremely rugged. Don’t forget to buy individual rucks for those who don’t have them. They make good book bags for kids, so tell them that is what they will use them for. It will get them used to carrying them.

A shovel. You will need to bury your poop and scrape a fire pit.  You may also need to bury someone. If you have to bury someone, mark the location in your GPS. It may be important for you to return later. Bring at least a military issue entrenching tool. They are small, inexpensive, light, and they collapse.

A water filter. You cannot expect your wife or kids to drink ditch water. Get a reverse osmosis filtration pump with an iodide filter. An inexpensive backup that you must have is regular household bleach. 3 to 4 drops per gallon is all that is needed to make water safe for consumption, so get a small medicine dropper and fill it with bleach. Add the bleach to the water, stir or shake vigorously, and let it sit for an hour. It will then be drinkable. Try to avoid ingesting any sediment.

Binoculars. Have at least one pair. You may have a need to look at things at a distance. Don’t go cheap on binos, this is one area where expensive is good.

A wagon. Go to Lehman’s online catalogue or go to Lowes or Home Depot, etc. They will have very sturdy wooden wagons or metal garden wagons. The metal garden wagons typically have better handles, better wheels, better suspensions, and carry more, but they can be uncomfortable to touch in winter and they can rust. If you have to put an infant in one, you don’t want there to be a chance of instant frostbite just because he was fussy and flailing around. The suggestion is to go with wood. You can order a Lehman’s wagon with very large wheels for off road use. If you have small children who may need to be pulled, get two wagons. One wagon is for provisions and the other to carry rug rats. http://www.LEHMANS.com  These wagons can carry two or three hundred pounds easily, so these are not your old Radio Flyer.

Food.  Half a cup of dried rice is equal to roughly 1 ½ cups of cooked rice. That is a lot of rice per person, so no one should be very hungry. Figure a family of five eating twice a day is five cups a day times thirty days travel is 150 cups of rice.

With 16 cups per gallon two 5 gallon containers should suffice for a month’s travel. Get PVC buckets with pour spout lids.

Beans. Rice and beans twice a day for a month will cool ardor and may lead to acts of violence, but you will be pleased to see that they have plenty of energy to argue, since rice and beans will provide almost all the nutrients a body needs.

The question is, “How much of beans do we carry?”  If you plan on canned beans figure 60 eight to twelve ounce cans. If you get dried beans, figure ¾ a cup dried volume per meal, or a little over 3 gallons of dried beans. The drawback to dried beans is that they have to be soaked for 24 hours, so you will have to start soaking beans 24 hours in advance of each meal which is a pain.

While dried beans are better in the long run because the excess can be planted at your destination come warm weather, you may wish to opt for canned.

Fat.  Get a two gallon jug of Crisco. You will need it in order to cook wild game which is  always extremely lean meat. You may wish to  get a three pound block of lard instead. Lard would actually be better since it is a solid and can’t leak. It also tastes better, and takes up less space.

Salt. Carry a pound box of iodized salt. You will use it at your destination or for barter. Ever wonder where salt comes from? It most likely isn’t a local product. You will be sweating a lot on this trip, so you will need salt.

Meat. This will be provided by Mother Nature. Do you know the Iroquois word for bad hunter? Vegetarian.

Cookware. Bring a metal measuring cup. You need to measure that rice. Bring a cast iron skillet and a cast iron 2 quart pan with a lid. Get a metal serving spoon and a metal spatula. That should take care of all your cooking utensil needs.

An axe. Never be without a good axe. Get one with a hammer side if you can.

Soap. Carry a few bars. You need to bathe once a week, and daily hand washing is very important. Try to stock anti-bacterial if at all possible. Don’t carry liquid soap as it is heavier and can spill.

Radio. Get a hand powered radio. They will pick up shortwave, weather stations, AM, and FM stations. They don’t take batteries, so that is one more thing you won’t have to bring. Also consider getting some walkie-talkies. Have extra rechargable batteries and keep them charged.

Insect repellent. Get some suitable repellants for the older people and for any infants. You can’t use high concentrations of DEET on infants and toddlers because it can cause skin irritation and seizures. Remember, spray it on your hand and wipe it on the kid, don’t spray it on them.

Fishing tackle. You can make a fishing rig out of a bean can or a Coke can, some monofilament line, a float, and a hook. Fishing rods can get broken, so unless you are one of the lucky few with a Pocket Fisherman, you will have to improvise. They are available on Amazon.

Hammock. Get a cheap fishnet hammock for every member of your party except the littlest ones. The hammocks will serve as hammocks, naturally. They will also serve as a hasty stretcher and as a hasty fishnet with the use of saplings cut for poles. You can simplify putting them up and taking them down by tying a heavy duty D ring on the end ropes. You just wind the line around the tree trunk a few times and snap the D ring onto the rope to secure it. They are cheap and will roll up into a ball the size of a man’s fist. They fit easily into a small ziplock for carrying.

Rope. Get about 20 or 30 feet of stout ½ or ¾ inch rope. You may need it to pull the wagons or for some other unforeseen purpose. Learn some knots. A ready source (and free!) Is  A. Hyatt Verrill’s Knots, Splices and Rope Work, on gutenberg.org. If your Bug Out is by water, his “The Book of the Sailboat: How to rig, sail and handle small boats” might be handy. But regardless, knowing a handful of useful knots will always be helpful. A couple of hundred feet of paracord will always be useful. An older copy of The Boy Scout Handbook would be handy.

Firearms. Have a .22LR rifle at the very least. It isn’t much of a self defense weapon, but it will kill rabbits and squirrels. A 12GA shotgun is also strongly recommended with a variety of loads. A centerfire rifle is even more strongly recommended. Every able bodied member should bear a long arm on the trip, even if they don’t know how to use it. If you carry some slugs, some #1 buckshot, and some #6 shot, you can take deer as well as small game. Again, firearms are a very personal choice, so make yours wisely, and get some training.

Personal bags. Each person who can carry one should have a backpack of some sort. In addition to toilet paper, let them put whatever they want into it without comment when you leave, they will need that psychologically.

Medicine. Over the counter meds are strongly recommended if you have needed them in the past. Also make sure you get some Imodium for the treatment of diarrhea. Diarrhea can be fatal in kids. Children’s vitamins are also a good idea if they are already taking them.

A sewing kit. A good all purpose emergency sewing kit will weigh only a few ounces and take up less space than a pack of cards. It is good not only for suturing clothes, but skin as well in a pinch. Get one and a few extra buttons.

Gas mask. A gas mask, better called a protective mask, may be something an individual may consider not carrying at all. Protective masks are good for filtering out nuclear, biological, and chemical threats.
Lets talk about the three NBC scenarios.

Nuclear
They work best against a nuclear threat where they will act to keep radioactive dust out of your lungs. Since an area that has been bombed will lose most of its danger due to fallout in days, hours if there is a strong rain, this mask will be of limited usefulness. In fact, this degree of protection can be approxamated by breathing through a wet rag, and an almost identical degree of protection can be given by a cannister type painter’s mask. A promaks is a good thing to have in this instance, but the remotenet possibility of an nuclear attack along with the extremely remopte chance of your encountering it may not justify the purchase of this item.

Chemical
Chemical warfare agents are difficult to make, transport, and employ. They just plain old don’t work very well, and as a result it is almost an impossibility that even soldiers in a combat zone will ever encounter them much less a civilian.. A good quality mask will protect you from inhalation of toxic fumes for several hours to several days.

Biological
In the event of a natural or man made plague a quality pro mask will provide excellent protection. Virises cannot easily pass through, bacteria certainly cannot at all. The problem here is that most likely by the time you discover there is a danger of infection, it is too late to don your pro mask.

The problem with pro masks is that they provide temporary protection. You can’t live in one, so you must leave the area. Another problem is that if you have a family you may be able to protect your adult and young adult members, but infants can only be protected by “Gas Tents” that use battery powered filtrations systems, and retail for several hundred dollars each.

A good source for these items is http://www.APPROVEDGASMASKS.com. This is another place where expensive most likely means good quality. Don’t skimp if you buy one of these, it is a false economy.

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 BERNADETTE DURBIN: Minstrel

When a heroine in peril disguises herself as a minstrel to escape her treacherous, wrathful brother, she finds herself on a series of unorthodox adventures that raise from lowly minstrel to king’s advisor.

FROM S. L. BARON: The Scarlet Destruction.- FREE THIS WEEKEND.

Working as a barista at The Purple Bear gives Fiona Albright the quiet life she wants. She loves how she can forget the outside world—and the abusive brother she ran away from—as she serves up coffee to the people of Laurel Springs, West Virginia.

Then Gabriel LaCroix comes in with tales of an extraordinary existence he says she’s forgotten, one she must remember at all costs: her role as mother of the universe next to his as father.

Guiding her through their memories as they sleep, Gabe shows Fiona the lives she’s forgotten. Times when she and he created universes and times when they were pulled to them to fix the problems.

But the existence she’s forgotten comes with a dark duty. Fiona and Gabriel must destroy the universe when people turn against one another. And the people of sleepy Laurel Springs are turning against one another quickly…and bringing the rest of humanity down the same path.

FROM MARY CATTELLI: The Hall of the Heiress.

She knows nothing of the hall where she lives, alone, where sea serpents prowl the shore, except that it bears the name Hall of the Heiress — not even if she is the heiress it speaks of.

Any more than she knows her own name.

Or whether there is any escape from the hall.

FROM J. L. CURTIS: Showdown on the River: The Bell Chronicles Book 1.

Rio Bell is leading a cattle drive up the Goodnight Loving Trail to Fort Laramie. It’s his first time as trail boss, but with trusted hands and hard work, he expects to be back in Texas by late September though fire, flood, or rustlers bar the way!

He didn’t count on a range war.

They didn’t account for the Rio Kid…

And he sure as hell didn’t count on the girl showing up!

FROM CLAYTON BARNETT: Crosses & Doublecrosses

Unexpectedly stranded in the Dallas, Texas, airport, on her way back to Manhattan in the midst of the Breakup of the United States, attorney Silvia Fernandez finds herself suddenly enmeshed in the new internal security bureau, ExComm, of the emergent Republic of Texas.At once a selfish opportunist to advance herself into power, Sylvia at the same time seeks to lay the groundwork to put an end to a state-terror organization before matters advance from the crucifixion of criminals to a bloodbath that will engulf them all.

FROM DAVID L. BURKHEAD:The Chooser: A Tale of Modern Valkyrie

A Tale of Modern Valkyrie

Göll is a Valkyrie, a chooser of the slain. She takes those who die in battle first to Hel for judgement, then on to their final destination, whether it’s Valhöl or elsewhere. When her latest slain is an eight year old boy she finds herself facing a new challenge, one she had never before faced in all her centuries of serving the Lord of Battles.

FROM T. L. KNIGHTON: Hostile Territory

Tommy Reilly and the misfit crew of the cargo ship Sabercat just managed to make it off of the planet Ararat with their load, but that was the easy part.

Now they have to land on a planet completely controlled by a church many consider more of a cult than a religion, all so they can get their hands on some information, information that could free all the colonies from the control of the Earth Defense Command.

Unfortunately, a master criminal got his hands on it first, which means the crew of Sabercat have to get it back, then escape from a planetary government known to shoot first and ask questions later.

Yep. It seems Tommy has landed his ship and his new family deep inside hostile territory.

FROM ALMA BOYKIN: Four Dragon Tales.

If dragons walked the earth . . .

From a missing hiker (with really bad taste) in the Appalachians to WYRD and Drako’s Dark Roast all-night show, to a water-expert with a talon-t for trouble, and a search for justice, this quartet of stories explore life in a world where dragons and humans live side-by-side.

Short story set, 15,000 words.

Mischief, murder, mayhem, and music to rock the night away!

FROM SARAH A. HOYT (who yes, will get the sequel out soon!): https://amzn.to/2ZmUKeNDeep Pink.

Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go.
But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music.
When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell.
This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.

FROM SABRINA CHASE: Rogues and Heroes.

…with a young woman desperate to leave her dusty planet for space … a British boy determined to end WWII all by himself … a cop in a dark world willing to do anything for a good read… an old cowboy with a final, heavy burden

…and more, in this collection of short stories from SF author Sabrina Chase.

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: LAVISH

I swear I’m going to do a chapter of Witch’s Daughter soon.

Today is not that day. Mostly because I’m sitting here, debating between working, which I badly need to, and going back to bed, which is what I feel like.

I’m very late with finishing the current short novel, and I can’t be late, the schedule for the year won’t allow it. I should have finished it yesterday, I should. Only ten minutes into writing I found myself in the kitchen baking. And I have no idea why.

To explain, baking is what I do when the world becomes too much to deal with. The amount of baking I do has some proportional correspondence to how horrible what I’m dealing with is.

Dan has joked for years that my first week in any house I bake enough — cake, bread, cookies, whatever — to last a month. If the move has been unusually stressful, I will cook enough to fill a decent sized freezer and last us, in eating for six months.

I do not, btw, want to EAT the stuff — though the baking these days is still low carb, because we ill eventually eat it — I just need to bake.

There is no conscious thought, no “I feel bad, I’ll go bake.” No, what happens is that I’ll find myself suddenly in the kitchen and in the middle of a serious baking spree.

In 9/11, when the second plane hit the tower, I suddenly found myself in the kitchen making doughnuts. In fact, when I became aware of what I was doing, there were two dozen made. And then I made more. And more. And more.

So, you know what the level of “I baked all the things” discomfort? Chaos? Upset? normally is.

I have no idea why, having written a few words and being on track to finish the novel yesterday, I suddenly found myself in the kitchen, baking. Without ever thinking about doing it, btw.

Now if I had just gone to the kitchen and baked a loaf of bread, or even a loaf of bread and a tea cake, I’d just have gone “Okay…. I didn’t feel like writing and played hooky.”

Because one of the things with being low carb is that I do every so often (about once a week) bake a loaf of bread and a cake. And periodically, like one evening every two weeks, I make a batch of cookies. This is the stuff I have with my tea in the afternoon, or in the evening with a cup of hot chocolate, if I’ve achieved my writing goals.

But you know…. that’s not what I did. When I was done, I’d made six different types of crackers and three sets of cookies. Why? I don’t know.

I kept thinking “Why am I doing this? I am late on the novel. I have stuff to write.” and then I’d start another recipe.

We’ll eat it. It’s all in large cookie jars. We’ll eat it over time. BUT why?

I have no idea. I wake up with the horrors a lot, and apparently I’m upset enough to bake up a storm.

So– what do I do now?
I’m going to try to finish the novel to go to my betas. That’s why. And I’d going to put up the short story and remaining novel of Kate’s con books with inkstain.

And then I’m going to find a cozy corner, and sit down and make a bible for the shifter series, so I can finish Bowl of Red.

IF i can get myself up instead of sleeping.

So next up are finishing the two shifter books, and then the two next Dyce books, while I edit Darkships for re-release.

In the middle of this there will several short novels to finish. And a bunch of them in the Schrodinger universe. The next one is Winter Prince.

But that’s, of course, supposing I don’t find myself in the kitchen baking enough for an army.

And I still don’t know what caused the bizarre attack of baking. Which worries more than a little.

So, over the last 24 hours, my feed and my online conversations have all been about Gina Carano.

I can’t begin to tell you how completely bizarre this is for the woman who never watches TV or movies. This is not a brag, by the way. It’s a combination of being ADD and not USED to consuming my stories that way, since we only got a TV when I was eight, and even then… well, Portugal didn’t have many hours of TV a day. I go through phases of watching series — usually British mystery, though it’s starting to get hard not to find them bizarrely and stupidly “woke infused” — but usually only when I’m sick or very depressed.

Normally I wouldn’t even have noticed this mess, except that my friends had all been into the new SW series, and were all very upset.

MOSTLY what they were very upset about was that the actress got “cancelled” for something that wasn’t even vaguely anti-semitic under any sane interpretation.

My first reaction was “Oh. Actress said something, and… they cancelled her.” Which is not only “day ending in y” right now, but also has been for a long time. Part of the reason I came out of the political closet is because I’d gotten tired of watching every word I said, and every expression I made in public. Because even a slight slip would have caused my career to be completely dead. In the nineties. As it was, I wasn’t perfect, they weren’t sure of me, which is why although they routinely f*ck every writer over, for me they brought out the Kama Sutra.

So, I was going “Yeah, only innocents who don’t realize what life is like in a completely taken-over industry would think this is surprising. All power to the lady, but I’m sure she knew what would hit her for stepping out of line.”

And then I came across a screen capture of what she said. And someone asking “how is this anti-semitic.”

Which is when I panicked.

Let me explain, okay?

I grew up in Europe, which in American terms is at the very least “soft left” which is what they consider “the right.” But on top of that, I was a “young lady who made good.” I wasn’t precisely working class, since dad has a degree, but we lived with dad’s dad who was a carpenter (and I was his apprentice until school interfered.) I wasn’t the first one in my family to go to college (though both dad and brother qualified for scholarships on that head… on their mother’s side and because dad’s degree was sort of in limbo, at the time. It’s a long story.) However, I came from a working class environment, from a one room school about 50 years behind the times. And I made it to college, which at that time and in that place was 100% meritocratic and mostly by examination.

What that required was adapting to a completely different culture. (You could say by the time I came to the US I had practice acculturating.) And the left in both high school and college, in Portugal, in the seventies, was at least as crazy as here. I’d say more Stalinist than the current American Maoists, but — waggles hand — I mean for six months the Maoists were the government (it’s survivable. Not for everyone, but survivable.) Since I was in a humanities degree, the political spin was particularly pronounced, though SIL’s psychiatry books in medschool were …. completely loony left. (Yes, I read them. Hey. They came into the house. I read them even in foreign languages. Because that was the deal. It came into the house, I read it. I never understood why it took the rest of the family so long to understand that.)

From experiences in Middle School I knew that I had to hide my politics, or I’d never make it to college. And in college I knew I had to hide my politics and fake their idiocy, or be flunked. (Look, I got so good I could make fun of their ideas while they thought I was supporting them. Unfortunately by the time I broke into writing, I was tired of that game. Something to do with having kids, maybe?)

What I want to say is that I lived for the first 4 decades of my life (at least) largely immersed in what you’d call “elite intellectual left establishment) on two continents. (Most of the people in my family, my generation, are still part of it.)

So, I have the same understanding, at gut level, of how leftists think/react as most people do of those people they’re most used to.

And this is why what Gina Carano said, and the reaction scared me sh*tless. What she said was this:
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views,” she wrote.

The only way, remotely, not matter how much you stretch it, that what she said can be considered “anti-semitic” is this:

The left believes the Jews were innocent. (This is correct, btw.) That what happened to them was shameful and terrible, and a dishonor on those who attacked them.

BUT they also believe it’s an insult to compare them to the people the left hates FOR THEIR POLITICAL VIEWS.

Because they think the people they hate for their political views — us — are really that bad, and really deserve everything the left intends to do to them. Which is more or less — in rough outlines — what the Nazis did to the Jews.

I mean, they have already talked of reeducating us, taking our children away, and they do in fact do think of us as not fully human.

Mind you, they have absolutely no idea who we are and what we believe, but they know we don’t agree with them, and since their hearts are pure, and utopia is their objective, we must be the very devil, and terrible on principle.

They’ve been exquisitely propagandized to the point they think the only American president with Jewish grandchildren was “anti-semitic.” They think that black people who don’t want to careen into ruinous and deadly socialism are “white supremacists” (the poor things swallowed Gramsci without chewing); they think other races aren’t hetero-normative; they think America is the most racissss, sexissss, homophobic nation on Earth…. and they will not listen to corrections of their appalling and atrocious ignorance of true history or foreign anthropology or…. really anything. Because anything opposing the indoctrination has been trained into them as an attack on their psyche.

So, they’re ignorant. They live in a political/social universe where if you oppose the completely insane leftist version of the world, you must be evil and “a nazi” which is to say the devil. They are so completely saturated in utter inanity that they call Israel “fascist.”

BUT one thing they know, and they know it at gut level: everyone to the right of Lenin — or perhaps Mao — are untermensch who will have to be utterly destroyed, so that the final promised utopia that they were promised since elementary school will come to be.

So, in their eyes comparing innocent Jews to their political opponents is experienced as an insult to the Jews.

Because in leftist eyes, we are evil, cockroaches and sub-humans whom they have to eradicate from society.

And they will not look in the mirror, or admit that what they’re engaging in is exactly what the nazis did, only with political beliefs instead of race. And it’s complicated. These idiots have simply decided that the real master race are black people. And that all evil comes from white males. But to be fair, it shades to people like me who have “internalized oppression” and are therefore “male.”

The Nazis philosophy wasn’t all that different. Sure. there was a racial component, but opposing them was a sign you’d been corrupted by “foreign” or “Jewish” ideas. And after that, the picture blends with our woke left.

In fact, our left is in the grip of the normal totalitarian illusion, that they’re somehow more perceptive than every other human, ever; that they’re pure and above it all and that if they only kill the sinful elements of society — you and me, my brothers and sisters — they will be like onto the angels, living eternally with no strife and no sin.

In fact, they’re made of the same human clay as the rest of us, only in the grip of a bizarre totalitarian cult.

And that means–

Well, these moments in history always end the same way. In this case, given the balance of numbers and weapon-owning, I’d say the backlash will come sooner, and be more terrible than their attempt at making us vanish will be.

Which doesn’t mean any of us, individually is safe.

It does mean we win, they lose. But the butcher’s bill, alas, will turn the oceans incarnadine.

One of the giggle-inducing effects of 2021 — like 2020 but this time we laugh, because it hurts too much too cry — is the whole “holding with diamond hands” of the wallstreetbets people.

For all I now, it’s actually a stock trading term. Maybe? I mean, stock traders have all sorts of strange terms.

But the way the stonk-buying kiddies use it makes me giggle all the same, “Diamond hands, bois.”

And this morning I woke up thinking “Diamond hands, it’s not just for stocks anymore.”

Look, 2020 and January 2021 signaled one thing: that America’s awkward phase has come to an end. But the liberty bell hasn’t rung yet. And if y’all are ringing your hands instead stop it. These things take time. It will take someone with a better socio-mathematical mind than mine — and, oh, it would take much more accurate records, which we don’t have. And if we don’t have it, the rest of the world is a total loss — to calculate the equation of revolt. But one thing I can tell you: it’s not instantaneous.

Particularly in a country like the US it’s not instantaneous. I was reading an article about how the Ficus (And the ho, and whoever is manipulating them) ruined America in the first two weeks of executive orders, and it was persuasive. But I haven’t really felt the effects yet. Things are more expensive, but not beyond fluctuation. And some things, like gas, are more expensive, but we haven’t felt it yet, because I’ll be honest, we almost don’t drive. In fact, if absolutely needed most of what we do by car, we could do on foot. I just don’t care to shop five times a week, so I can drag it bag in wheeled bags. Our drives were mostly church, entertainment and (husband) work. And you know, none of those are operative right now.

Sure the increase in energy prices is going to skyrocket the energy to heat (and cool. We have a piano that doesn’t take temperature changes well) the house and next winter is going to punch us in or about the fracas. Sure, this means that everything from beef to well…. everything because transport, is going to cost more. But that will take a while to percolate through the behemoth that’s our economy. And that will probably ALSO not sock us fully before next winter.

So, no, people aren’t rushing to the fourth box. Hell, some number of them are still thinking they can fix it all in the ballot box, in two years. (Which is why my timeline is 6 months — if they go completely and absolutely stupid and try to arrest people, starting with Trump — to two years.) But again, there isn’t an exact formula for this.

What I do know is that it’s at the intersection of rulers who are oppressive and crazy — yet inefficient (most totalitarians are — and incredibly annoying WHILE at the same time not having ruined things so much that EVERYONE is grubbing in the garbage for their food.

But you know, here’s the thing, chilluns, America is different. One of the ways in which we’re different, is that there is no one to save us. I don’t think we have realized that. When it sinks in the bell might very well ring.

The other way we’re different is that we’re the economic turbine of the world. No? Well, if you don’t think so, you have never lived abroad. Or you’re as economically ignorant as Xi.

But but but China makes all the things! And they have such a huge market. Why, the NFL and movies and all that are basically saying they no longer need America, because they have the huge Chinese market, and they’re going to be rich, rich, rich, mwhahahah.

Ah. Yeah. I’ve seen trad and used-to-be trad get ALLLL excited about China. And I giggled.

“BILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BUY MY THING!”

No, they’re not. But Xi, who is besides being an utter asshole, an economically illiterate one, might try to pretend it is, to get you to play on his team.

China is a paper tiger. And the paper is mostly IOUs.

Sure, they have a massive population: a massive (and uncounted, because if you think those counts are accurate I have some swamp land in FL I’d love to sell you. For one the Chinese idea of NUMBERS is different. For another, no totalitarian society has accurate counts of anything, even those things they want to count. They are by definition corrupted markets), illiterate, dirt poor population, living at a level that makes your ancestors in the 11th century in Europe seem to have lived like kings. (And that’s not counting the outright slaves of the state.)

China has a good thing going economically: They produce cheap crap, with a lot of error and sometimes outright poisoning of the customer (that too is cultural) but so cheap that they undercut every producer in the west. And the west, particularly as it plunged into socialism, needed cheap rap, because the actual spending money in people’s pockets kept decreasing.

Then Trump tried to balance the scales and stop us buying outright slave-made products. Not to mention stop China from buying our institutions with its ill-gotten gains.

Which is how we found out that Xi is as stupid as our idiot liberals, and as fracking ignorant of where money comes from.

Yo, Winnie the Pooh’s dumb twin, listen up: value is not raw materials plus labor. You genius always forget ultimately things are worth what someone is willing to pay for them. I guess Winnie the Pooh’s head is full of fluff and Xi’s is full of shit. Marxist shit, to be exact. We can’t blame him too much, so are the heads of most of our college graduates. It takes a lot of education to believe such dumb crap.

If you take America into your carnival ride of ruin — and you are — Americans won’t be able to afford even cheap crap.

The economic engine of the WORLD stops. Because America are the world’s consumers. As tight as things got in the endless Obamanian Summer Of Recovery, we were still the wealthiest country, where the common people have the most spending cash. We drive the demand for manufacture, for innovation, for improvement.

So, what these bright boys and girls in China and the US have done, by so cleverly fortifying us out of country is killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. But they won’t know till the golden eggs are gone, and they realize dead geese don’t lay.

So, while in this awkward phase, and waiting for the ringing of the bell, what do we do?

Sure, laugh at them. Gosh, that really upsets the humorless bastards and bitches. And rebel in minor and safe ways.

But I propose, bois and gels, that we perform a public service as well: I propose we show them what they’re doing in the only way they’ll understand.

Boys, Gels, Unicorns, Dragons, Minotaurs, and one obstreperous Wallaby: It’s time for our version of diamond hands. This time with our own money.

Or if we prefer, the Ramkin motto: What is ours, we keep.

I know I’d said that February I’d try to spend as little as possible. This is true. We are. Though something occurred to me: if you HAVE to spend (as in replace something major that died) do it now, this quarter, as fast as you can. Both because that establishes the proper curve to the economy (they’ll lie about it, but stink on ice is hard to hide) and because we can’t trust the quality of anything in a corrupt society and market.

And after that …. hold as tight as you can. Make that money squeal. And if you can buy in the down market (garage sales, craigslist, free swap, etc) DO SO.

So, some rules for diamond hands:

1- If you have to buy big (or have big medical, or anything on which the quality is essential) fast track that biatch. Have it done as soon as humanly possible. The quality is going to go down from here, and besides, you want the money curve to bend towards obvious ruin.

2- Those things you would buy that are mostly made in China: fabric, clothes, etc (even if you can’t do anything about medicine and such, but do try. You can often get it for less and more reliable without prescription on line. Not actually joking) buy used. If you can’t find it used…. Well. I’m going to look for fabric for t-shirts in thrift stores and failing that for too-large but newish t-shirts I can cut down.

3- food. Buy bulk and reapportion. Buy down the tree. We’ve been buying an awful lot of bulk, discount chicken. I actually seriously HATE chicken. But you know, a lot of ethnic dishes hide the taste of chicken (and any meat.) For instance, tonight I’m re-appropriating Vindaloo. (Revenge of cultural appropriation, this time it’s tasty!)
Anyway, you know your area better than I do, but let your watch word for groceries be “diamond hands.” Buy as cheap as you can that still fills your purpose. And if you can, buy local. (Wow, we’re gonna be like all those left wieners, locavores, upcycling clothes ;) )

4- If you have to buy and have a choice, and know a producer is conservative or at least to the right of Lenin, buy from them.
If you to sell… well, it doesn’t matter, but if you know someone is supporting the destruction, charge them double, stupidity should hurt.

5- Swap. If you can swap goods and services. We have a community here, right? Well, for instance (though for G-d’s sake not this month) I’m open to making covers in return for typo hunting. Or critiques in return for secretarial services (I desperately need someone to a) keep me on track b) do minor stuff like make sure blurbs are updated, books are redesigned and updated, etc. Son is doing some of it, but we have other projects we need to do.) If anyone wants to start a secret/membership only swap site or list, I’d appreciate it. (We’re doing the promo/list site for indie writers and it’s taking a while, as we’re cramming it around everything else.)

6- To the extent of the possible — and I know it’s not absolute — show the assholes what a world without its engine is. Diamond hands, bois and gels. Diamond hands. Hold on to as much of your own as you can. Diversify your income and hold on to your voluta (which contrary to rumor is not a sauce that goes well with liver.)

Yes, this will eat some of your time and nervous energy, but if you’re like me not being able to do anything and utter depression is eating more. And there is such a thing as “resting by doing something else.” For me, for instance, sewing is a rest.

Do what you can to avoid buying new. And EVERYTHING to avoid buying made-in-China. You’ll need that voluta. Though I wouldn’t advise you keeping it in cash. The totalitarians get funky with cash really fast. How you keep it is your choice. Real estate might or might not do well. Depends on its use. Metal is always useful, though the most valuable one is now in short supply. There’s other things.

Diamond hands. Keep, hold. Take it out of their craps table. Hold.

What is ours we keep. And what you stole we’ll take back: including our liberty, our voice and our vote.

The mills of American anger grind very slowly. But when they achieve full speed, they level everything. And that is still better than the world without America that they think they want.

Let’s give them a warning shot. Let’s show them the power of the goose they’re killing.

Diamond hands. SQUEEZE.

If it’s raining you put on your galoshes. You use an umbrella.

Well, ladies, gentleman, minotaurs, dragons, it’s going to rain. The long rains are going to come.

I expect in two years things will start to settle down. I expect in four years, the shape of our society will be completely different.

But–

I expect for the next two years things are going to purely suck.

So:

1- prepare. I don’t know what that means for you. I know for me some of the prep work is delayed, because we can’t really know exactly what we need or plan for what might go wrong until we move.

So, I can’t tell you what you’ll need. But you know the usual: A year of meds, if you can (and if they’re the kind that goes bad, vaccum seal them and throw them in the freezer. Unless they say do not freeze); spare glasses (I need to get on that.) Some bottles of water, enough to get you through a few days at least. Enough food that if you have to stay in place, or throw it in the back of the car, you can. Clothes at this time of the year for cold weather. Some thermal blankets.

It’s unlikely you need a go-bag unless you live where antifa gambols. And if you do, find a way out soonest. BUT these years have been so weird, keeping your essentials in a backpack or a duffel won’t kill you.

Have food and meds for your pets for at least a couple of months.

2- Weapons… don’t tell me about it. Just do what you can in the way of preparation. And remember, if threatened, fight like a cornered cat. We are in a war, even if most people are still in denial. There are no dangerous weapons, there are only dangerous men (and women. Particularly women.) Coming from a country where owning a gun wasn’t an alternative, trust me when I say you can do damage with an umbrella, a ruler, a shoe, a scarf or your bare hands. Keep your mind flexible. Even if Gen. Mattis turned out to decide to sell honor for approbation in the media and cheap “revenge” his advice isn’t wrong: be kind, polite and have a plan for killing everyone you meet. The defining nature of civil…. instability is that switch overs are really sudden. It’s a normal day, you’re going around the corner on the way to school/work/etc, and suddenly you’re in the middle of a fight. Be ready. Some people have already been sucker punched by this. Don’t let it happen to you. Situational awareness, sure. But also make plans in your head for various contingencies.

3- Work. Work as hard as you can, as fast as you can. While you can. Also, learn and be creative. And start multiple streams of income now. One of the things when societies change shape rapidly is that it’s going to leave some people stranded, or high and dry, with their former skills useless. It’s going to leave some areas of the country lagging, confused, with nothing to support their population.
It will be temporary, and a new shape will take place. But make it easy on yourself. If you have crafts/other things you’re interested in? Learn now, plan now, acquire the implements and materials now.
And if you establish multiple streams of income. It’s unlikely they’ll all finish at the same time.

4- Get yourself safe. Now, this obviously is more urgent if you’re in a big blue city that’s suddenly become East Berlin in the 70s but twice as dangerous. If that’s where you are, it’s time to move. Start your plans as soon as you can. If you own a house, you want to be ahead of the curve, so you can get some money out of it, at least.
But for all of us, a change is coming. No, I’m not being mystical.
A change has already come. A lot of us live where we do for work/school/etc. And for a lot of us that went away over the last year, and the entire country is wide open.
This is the geographical equivalent of multiple streams of income. Is there a place where you always wanted to live (that’s not a big blue city)? Is there a place you have RELIABLE extended family/good friends who’ll loan assistance if you find yourself unhorsed in the convulsions ahead? If you still have to work in person, is there a place your job is likely to be in higher demand?
I think we all have between six months and a year before traveling/moving gets…. confusing. So, look around now, and see if you need to change your residence.

5- Prepare mentally. When I say the next two years are going to be going through hell with no galoshes, I’m not joking.
Prepare. Bad things are going to happen to people you love. You’re going to lose friendships, friends, family members.
No, I’m not telling you there’s a way to make this be good. I’m just saying that like a fighter who braces for a hit, you should brace. The hits are going to come. Don’t let them be a surprise. Surprise will paralyze you. Some things you can’t prepare for. All you can do is grit your teeth and decide you’ll survive. Do so now.

6- Make connections.
MAKE CONNECTIONS.
Particularly make connections with people you can trust. BE trustworthy and show it, so they’ll trust you too. Make connections in person, on line. If you care about people, make sure you have a way to contact them if the net goes down.

7- Don’t trust any news.
No, I didn’t say don’t trust any leftwing news. For now everything is on the 48 hour rule, good and bad. And reality test everything, even what you WANT to be true.
Don’t react. Analyze, study, look at the facts. (Again, and again, what are the facts? – RAH)
With the covidiocy such a resounding success, more psyops will be coming your way. Now most will be stupid — for us — “the Earth is going to burn in 8 years!” or “Donald Trump eats babies for breakfast.” Whatevs. But a lot of them will be smarter, more credible. Be aware of the ones that use your decency against you, as Covid did. Expect them to be: if you don’t denounce/abjure/whatever our enemies, people will die! Practice saying “Not my circus, not my monkeys,” and make it sound good.
The good Germans REALLY were trying to be good. Don’t be a good German.

8- If you can in preparations and relocation, plan on friends who might land on you, at the last minute with no preparation. That’s the price of community. Just be ready.

Yes, for the next two years we’re going to go through hell. We can’t do anything about that. What we can do is put on galloshes. At least it will protect us from some of the mud, if not the lava.

And be not afraid. The worst that can happen is we die, and that’s such a minor thing, and eventually will happen anyway.

It barely warrants mention, while we’re fighting for the future.

Go.

Sometime ago I mentioned here the concept of corrupt markets.

You guys fanned out — as you will — across the web to look for the concept and couldn’t find it. I’ve had penciled in, on my wall, to write a post about it, so maybe one of you guys (I know at least one) who have a doctorate in economics or related disciplines can research it and do it up in proper format.

Yes I’m ABD but the papers I was taught to do was on literature analysis.

And btw my master thesis was on the intersectionof the biography of the author and the work they wrote. One particular author, of course, but that’s a long story to go into here, as it involved getting older books from the US. And I did it that way because at least when I went through — that was almost forty years ago, so it might have changed — the experts were adamant that the biograhy of the author had nothing to do with the work. That is, authors are widgets and what comes through them unbiden isn’t shaped by what they know or do. This idea strikes me as madness, and while I disagree with “write only what you know” I disagree equally hard with “the author doesn’t shape the work. Anyway, I still got the degree, but it’s important to note that this idea of the author as widget was out there, in academia, when I came through. By the time I broke into publishing it was in publishing, too, in the last phase of a corrupt market. And I became intimately acquainted with how corrupt markets work.

I’d seen it before in Portugal, as various governments didn’t give a hangnail for what people wanted and forced things on them from above. That too is a corrupt market.

In fact, if you really want to look at it this way, 2020 was the year we learned all our politics — governments, institutions, even our tech giants, have become corrupt markets. I was so horrified at the realization that my mind shut down, which accounts for the horrible year.

Let’s start with a definition, okay: Market is not just a way to make money (though it is that too.) Any human endeavor designed to facilitate human life is a market. Sure, you selling your apples to aunt Mimmy (I had an aunt Mimmy, G-d rest her soul) is a market. But you making regulations for your little town saying, for instance, no piles of rotten apples on the front porch is also a market.

Both succeed or fail to the extent that you meet the needs of the customer/community. If aunt Mimmy is violently allergic to apples, and yet you insist on selling her apples in a normal market you’re going to fail. If you insist on telling everyone they have to fill their front porches with rotten apples, in a functioning market you’re going to fail.

This is why politicians talk of “explaining” things to the people or “getting their buy in”. Well, used to. Because every polity has a Mandate of Heaven. Even absolute kings could be brought down by management so bad that people feel it. In Medieval Europe when things went very bad, kings built Cathedrals and did penance to restore the Mandate of Heaven. This had mixed results, unless the penance involved a copious amount of alms that stopped the famine, or whatever. If things continued going wrong the king was deposed openly or covertly.

But of course, feudal monarchy was to an extent a corrupt market, and there were violent revolutions and widespread famines to prove it.

In the same way, in the very early twentieth century, the publishers might sneer at the pulp flowing out of their pens, and they might — did, they were after all the educated “elite” — consider themselves above it all, but if the books failed, they didn’t eat, and so with some amount of corruption, the market toddled on. It was only after, when they divorced and insulated themselves from the failure of what they published, that the market became corrupted.

So, let me give you a definition: a corrupt market is that in which the supplier has divorced himself from demand by some means that allows him to continue supplying what he (she, it, whatevs) wants to provide regardless of what the demand for the product is: whether the market is books, apples, hamsters or laws and regulations, it doesn’t matter.

The follow on that is “there are no non-corrupt markets.” And I’ll explain why. The ideal market is one on one. I.e. you sell you apples to aunt Mimmy who can’t get enough of your apples. You know she can’t get enough of your apples, because she tells you so. So every morning, you harvest apples and bring them to her by the bushel load. And she pays you a good price because she loves your apples.

You see, a perfect uncorrupted market requires perfect information. You know exactly what people want, and you provide it.

To some extent that does not and cannot exist at a scale. Because your information is never going to be perfect. Btw, this is why the wise men who crafted our constitution made it so that the biggest power is at local level, where those governing can see the immediate effects of their governance and immediately feel the wrath of the constituents when they decide everyone needs a pile of rotten apples on the front porch. At that level, too, unless all your constituents are on hard drugs, you know when the voting (which is the currency in representative governments) is falsified. Because let me tell you, everyone in the village knew who the two monarchist votes were and in general what the trend of the voting was. You gossiped with neighbors, you knew what they thought of the asshole in chief. (If you are thinking this has to do with the Great Muzzling of 2020 give yourself a star. Or don’t. They will soon enough. And we won’t like it.)

So while perfectly uncorrupted markets are impossible, completely corrupted markets — those in which the consumer of apples, books or governance has no say — are things of absolute and total horror. In the case of apples and books they fail very hard, and if you’re lucky a new market develops and explodes. Well, in the case of governance, too. But before that happens utterly corrupt market for governance has a case of the mass murders, and most of the consumers end up in mass graves for failing to be the right market for the supply that those in power are SURE is the right one.

One of the first tells of a corrupt market is that the supplier couldn’t care less what the consumer wants. This is why I panicked when, a couple of years into my professional career, I found out that the publishers had no mechanism — other than sales, and that was corrupt in various ways I’ll explain — to find out what people ACTUALLY wanted to read. And the bookstores were in the process of aggregating their data (already corrupt, and yes, I’ll explain) into meaningless sets. Because large enough aggregates of data will tell you exactly nothing about each individual market. And for reading markets are very individual, having to do with the tastes of little hammlets, villages and small towns as much or more than with those of big cities, where many forms of entertainment are available that have nothing to do with reading, and where people are usually young, working crazy hours and socializing after, and not having much time to read. In fact one of my “Oh, sh*t” moments was when the publishers (when I had just turned forty) informed me they were trying to capture the 20 something market because people older than that didn’t read. It made me goggle at them, since I and all the moms with younger kids I knew read. There’s a lot of time spent waiting outside schools, or while supervising play, where you really can’t do much of anything else.

How did they know this? They didn’t. Someone in their marketing team had decided that younger people didn’t read as much and therefore they were a vast untapped market. And since their numbers were in a straight fall, this must be the market they needed to survive.

Because the publishers did no survey, no consumer research, nothing so simple as asking the readers what they wanted more of. (To the extent Baen resisted the rot longer, it was due to the Baen Bar, and publishers who paid attention. As imperfect and non-scientific an instrument as that was, it was better than absolutely no market knowlege and giving yourself a lot of excuses for failure.)

But Sarah, you’ll say, they had sales numbers! Waggles hand back and forth. Kind of, maybe? Sort of? The sales numbers are really good at measuring stunning success. I’d say stunning failure, too, but that can be obscured in a lot of ways. Like at one point they found out, in real numbers, after returns a fetted bestseller had sold four books.

How is that possible? Weren’t they paying out royalties? Well, sure. But the market was corrupted all the way through. Look, sure, they sort of knew how many books sold. Sort of because they didn’t even (forty years ago) know exactly how many books were printed. Apparently the machinery was of such calibre, that when you pushed “stop at 1k books) you might have 993 or 1012. With bigger numbers for large print runs. I’m not sure they know now, because a a publisher informed in 2003, “We’re really now all small batch print on demand.” Oh, and printruns of less than a hundred don’t get reported to the publisher.

So, it starts with “we don’t know how much supply is in play” and then it gets stupider (totally a word and appropriate in this case.) How much more stupid does it get? Oh, dear.

Well, because of the accommodations done for WWII and never withdrawn, all books are put in bookstores on consignment. In theory when they don’t sell, the front cover is stripped out of paperbacks, and they’re tossed. (In theory because in the eighties and early nineties, when it wasn’t print on demand, you found these for sale in every used bookstore, to the point they started printing warnings inside the book that you were reading what amounted to a stolen copy.) Hardcovers, in principle, get returned for full credit, and then put in pallets to be sent to those dollar bookstores.

Except there’s a lot of play in all of that. There is a large amount of shoplifting in books, as in all small objects. And then in the nineties the publisher decided it was okay not to return the covers. “Just tell us how many books you’re tossing.” Yeah.

But Sarah! There are counters on the point of sale that tell them exactly how much they sold. Sure there are. Kind of. You see, it is only in some bookstores, mostly in large cities. It excludes 90% or so of the places where books get sold in the country: Most indie bookstores, most supermarkets, most new-and-used bookstores, most military stores, most comic book stores.

So, say, you have a property that mostly appeals to the military? It’s going to seem to underperform the other books massively, even if that’s nonsense.

What the publishing houses do to pay you royalties (I SWEAR I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP) is take the point-of-sale count and average it out according to a formula over the entire country. This is why at one point I was getting royalty statements from 3 publishers, and the books the same age — say, had come out three years ago — though completely different genres, subgenres and voice, had all sold the exact same and completely impossible number: something like 176 copies per book. Which…. I live with a mathematician, okay? When he looks at numbers, be they royalty reports or election numbers and starts laughing till he cries it’s a BAD sign.

BUT counting what sold is only part of the problem. The other part is the book availability. One year — I THINK 2010 — I had ten books released. You couldn’t find them on a single shelf in the whole country. They were on Amazon. And given that, it’s shocking some earned out. BUT the casual shopper in 2010 was still largely a “walk in bookstore and browse” and for that, none of my books had a chance of selling a single copy.

“BUT Sarah, if they didn’t give you shelf space, surely they asked the store that told them they wouldn’t sell.” Sure. Except that’s not how any of this works. In 1995 — and it was the same sort of experience as the 2012 election for me. I realized the rot was very far advanced, even though I couldn’t quite process it. Or didn’t want to — I happened to be in Chinook bookstore in downtown Colorado springs, browsing a shelf when the book rep for a house (I want to say it was Berkley Ace, but I no longer remember clearly) was talking to the bookstore rep.

For those of you who never knew the Chinook, it was a lot like the Tattered Bookcover in Denver now. Upscale, a little nose in air, beautiful surroundings and hushed tones. So I could hear the conversation perfectly well.

The book rep had a catalogue of covers. And he was telling the store how many of which book they’d take. Take a deep breath, take that in for a minute. They were telling the bookstore how much of each book they’d take. The exception was a mega bestseller, whom the store wanted. Actually what the rep said was “You’ll want a hundred of book x, of course. We’re printing 150k,” (Or some equally absurd number.) Oh, and if the store wanted those 100, they had to take 20 each of three books that the house was going big on, and give them big displays. And then there were pages, and pages and pages that he said, “You may look through those and see how many you want.” The store manager flipped through quickly and sometimes ordered a couple of books for the shelf. But he didn’t have to, and the reason he did it might have to do with cover, name that caught his fancy, whatever. These people are what they call the “midlist” and when you hear that the “midlist just doesn’t sell” remember, this is how the midlist used to be treated.

The second part of my enlightenment was when I was invited to go the …. I have no clue what it’s called anymore, call it the Book Expo in Denver. This is where the book reps met with the BIG bookstore chain reps around 2002. At this place, I found I’d been invited because the book rep had actually chanced to read my first Shakespeare book, and was outraged it wasn’t getting more play. BUT the corollary of this? They normally didn’t read the books. They just took the “level of excitement at the house” usually translated by how many books the house SAID it would print. And from that they pushed “you want so many of these.”

As you imagine, there was plenty of money floating around, particularly since Amazon didn’t count for “how many books you sold.” And they could be attributed in royalty to “It must have sold x number.” Usually the books that appeal in big cities, college neighborhoods, ect. In fact, the same books the publishers and editors (who are usually graduates of good colleges with degrees in impractical liberal arts crap — I should throw stones, right –) prefer.

The market was so thoroughly corrupted they really had no idea which books had done well, and could attribute the “win” to the books they chose to attribute it. And then this reinforced their choices for the next batch.

Which is — ladies and gentlemen — the average print run has gone down from something like 100k to something like 7k since the seventies.

“But it’s a very different world. People have more options for entertainment. People don’t read as much.” Poppycock. As a reader, I had fallen through genre after genre, widened my net of “things I’ll read” and was still coming up dry most of the time by the late 90s. And I wasn’t alone. There are some number of passionate readers (not very high, but much higher than is met even now) whose needs were not being met. At the same time, the books that were being put out, and particularly those pushed, were unapetizing to 90% of those readers.

And yet, the information the publishers and editors received — particularly because of the people they talked to/lived among were mostly their colleagues and people of similar background — reinforced the choices that were making the supply more maladaptive to the demand.

BTW, one of the funny things — if you like dark jokes — is that the traditional publishers finally did a market survey. Sometime in the 10s they did a survey on whether people preferred ebooks or paper books, and trad or indie. It came back as a resounding trad and paperbooks….

Which is completely belied by the market. At a guess the surveys were done in groups and by show of hands. And probably on college campuses. (I looked at the internals at the time and they were skimpy. I no longer remember where to find the study.) Traditionally published and paper is the virtue signal. It makes you sound smart and up scale. But every author I know — of fiction, non fiction is different — sells ten times the number of ebooks to paperbooks Because they’re cheaper, and it’s instant gratification, of course.

But the traditional publishers believed that survey like gospel and set their course by it.

Two notes: they might have no clue how many ebooks they’re selling. While this is trivially easy (if opaque. We don’t see INSIDE Amazon’s book keeping, for instance) for self-published or single-author indie houses to know how much they sell, it’s almost impossible for houses with several authors. No, I don’t fully understand how or when, but when we were running a small publisher (which we’re doing again, because we’re insane) husband looked at the internals, tore out his hair, and built a complex program to keep track of the sales per author. He now uses it, freelance, to do books for small publishers (and is available for hire. Within limits. He’s working crazy hours at private job right now.) I don’t understand it, of course, but listening in on his discussions with a client: most houses have no idea how much they’re selling of what. The ebook money comes in and acts as a giant slush fund, which further corrupts the market by divorcing publishers from their disastrous choices.

Second, as far as we can tell, the tastes of readers haven’t chanced at all since the 1920s. No, I haven’t done a survey. Those are tricky and would need to be calibrated to discount virtue signal. BUT most of the people doing exceptionally well are telling pulp stories with pulp structure.

And I can’t be the only one who figured that out, as there’s a glut of books on “how to write fiction the pulp way.”

So, a completely corrupt market is one in which the information gathering means is so messed up as to be non-existent (in the case of books, for instance, the sales data is the only information, and it’s corrupted/messed up at every level.) This is the market in which you bring bushels and bushels of apples to aunt Mimmy and when she only buys half a bushel, you decide it’s out of your control, and the market for fruit is just tanking, and it’s not your fault, without ever asking her if she also would like some oranges or some berries. The end result of this is that other people start selling aunt Mimmy oranges and berries, and your market diminishes some.

HOWEVER, if you are a government, and your market is just as corrupt because you messed the elections with rampant fraud, say, and silenced opposing voices, you can make Aunt Mimmy buy five bushels of apples every morning, even if she’s allergic to apples, and the people next door would love it.

I knew there was rampant fraud in American elections after poll washing in 2012. I knew that the Republicans refused to fight it or even mention it. I didn’t know if there was enough fraud nation wide to sway a national election.

I realized it when they picked China Joe and the Ho as the standard bearers for the democratic ticket. I realized it when I watched the democrats debate, and they kept promising open borders and money and free health care to illegal immigrants, which is the equivalent of giving bushels of apples to Aunt Mimmy who is allergic to apples.

I knew it for ABSOLUTE sure when Zhou Bai Den was campaigning from his basement or not at all.

The only reason to run a potemkin campaign is that you knew you couldn’t lose. Even if a single American voted for you, you had it in the bag.

Let’s be glad, I guess, that their guess of the opposing party votes was too low and they had to fraud last minute and in plain sight. Not that it matters, since the corrupt system spit out the information.

But for what it’s worth, just like the publishers deciding that people really wanted more “literary hardcovers” from a flawed survey, our current Junta is really really bad at measuring the temperature of the country.

Which, in the end, might shorten our time in hell.

The problem is that when electoral markets are corrupted, all hell breaks lose. Particularly when it’s a big, central government that thinks itself invulnerable. And where people can communicate ONLY in their little cliques, never looking outside those, so their wrong information is forever magnified and reinforced.

Which brings us to…

Corrupted governamental markets bring about death. Lots and lots of death. There are no famines under a representative government, for instance, but they exist under every other market.

There is only one remedy: we must make this a representative republic again.

But there is only one way, long term, to make the government not become a corrupt market: most of the power has to devolve to small, local governments.

The bigger the government, the easier it is to insulate yourself from the consequences of your malgovernance and what you do to the governed. I guess this is why the left wants global government, which would be well-nigh uncorrectable. It would also have near no power at local level, and unleash utter anarchy, but the left doesn’t care about that, as they view themselves as Lords of creation.

So, whether it’s book publishers putting out stories only on the latest leftist preoccupations, or facebook pushing a new interface no one wants, or the government shutting down fracking and making energy “necessarilly skyrocket”, when a system acts as if it doesn’t care what the demand is, it’s because those making the decisions think that it doesn’t matter what people want. They’ll take what they get.

In markets, this usually leads to massive crashes and start-up replacements.

In government…. It usually ends in blood. Lots and lots of blood. Faster in the measure of how corrupt the market is.

Be not afraid, but be prepared.

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