Has anyone seen my brain.

The neighbors thought that 6:30 am was the time to start demolition work this morning. I’d gone to bed at one. If my kid reads this, yes, I’m aware I’m supposed to be in bed by ten, but a chapter hit. Mistakes were made.

The result is that I’m walking into walls, bumping into cats, and Dan had to explain to me the very simple remote for my treadmill, because I was in tears, insisting it was broken. (Oh, yeah, bought a tiny treadmill that fits under the desk.)

There are things I want to write, but they are… confusing and difficult, mostly relating to the “no, we’re not in a civil war yet. We’re no worse than the sixties were” (and in many ways better because the left is repeating by rote what they did then, but the situation on the ground is completely different.) “Pray we don’t get to a civil war.” But as you can tell, it’s a difficult and fraught topic. And it won’t happen today, when I couldn’t figure out where the power button for the treadmill was.

There will likely be a nap later today. Likely.

Meanwhile consider this an Open Thread for discussion. I’m sorry this week is so scattered. It’s probably going to be a little glitchy till the end of October, when we come back from Portugal (no, we’re not there yet, but… it’s needed. The whole country makes me itch inside my head, but it’s needed. I want to see my dad once more on this side. And while he might last years, and I hope he does, that’s not the way to bet, and mom’s death proved it can all be too sudden to go over then.)

I realized yesterday I couldn’t give you the second chapter, because it TOO has spoilers, if you haven’t read part three.

I’ve been receiving…. best way to put it… snippets of things in Elly (the ever growing file is called It Came Through the Portal In Head)

I think this one inflicted itself on me because Nikre Lyto is one of the view point characters for book two.

This is a story about three years after his adoption. (In the second book, the character he’s stuck traveling with keeps calling him “sireling of a king” in a scathing tone. And is going to get himself shivved. Or worse. MUCH MUCH worse.

Anyway, this is narrated by Eerlen Troz, to use their term “Archmagician” which means he leads all those who can use “power” which…. let it rest. It’s part of the easter eggs in the book proper.

The ruby is the memory and power control for the whole thing, and is always worn by the Archmagician. It also has a personality and a logic of its own.

Oh, and though Ellyans are hermaphrodites, they have no breasts and therefore I chose “he” to translate their “people pronoun” which is genderless. (they have genders in the language but only use them for animals.) I didn’t want to use one of the neo-pronouns, because they were always a distraction, and these days they’re likely to be an annoyance, also.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about: Ellyans are the bio-engineered human breed in the lost colony in No Man’s Land. I’m not going to do a hard sell, or any kind of sell on it. Just read the reviews.

And now, if you’re bored, here’s the snippet that came through the Portal In The Head.

I need to finish typesetting the third volume to put up. Which is what I’ll do after a nap. (The hammers have stopped. Maybe they’re at lunch.)

Child of The Ruby

Eerlen:

It was impossible to look at Nikre for any amount of time and not feel angry. Not at Nikre. Nikre was a beautiful child. Brinarian, and therefore smaller and darker than most children in the royal palace: his skin an even gold, his curly hair dark brown, and his eyes a deep, dark amber that seemed to change with the light and his mood.

But beyond all that, he was a quiet child, attentive and pliable. He never complained of anything, to the point that it was imperative to watch him at all times, in case he had any difficulties. Because he’d never tell you. In fact he’d endure any discomfort and pain in an attempt not to cause trouble. And he had archmagician level power, though he was nowhere near the stability where he would be ready to inherit, and at any rate archmagician was not just a matter of power but of learning. And on that, Nikre studied hard, and never complained or asked for a day of rest.

Which is why it was impossible to look at the child and not get angry. Not at the child but at the circumstances under which Nikre had come into Eerlen’s life.

Eerlen had heard rumors of a child with archmagician power in a small fishing village in Brinar, where no one else had magical power.  If he’d known what was happening, he’d have gone the same day. As was, he had to go and investigate because non magicians and an archimagician child – whom reports said was variously two, three or four years old – could spell trouble. You never knew when the child would start using magic, and if he wasn’t linked to the ruby where he would find the power. Highly gifted children could kill by accident.  And did.

As was he’d gotten there just in time. It wasn’t an unusual situation. Nikre’s body-parent had died when Nikre was two years old. His sire had almost immediately sworn a new lover. After which they seemed to have, between the two of them, decided to dispose of the toddler, so that Nikre’s sire could gift his new sworn a brand new fishing boat which Nikre had inherited from his parent by line right.

They’d tried starving and beating first, anything that would, quietly, cause the child not to thrive and die, in a way the small village wouldn’t blame on them. When that failed—

When Eerlen arrived he was told the child had been taken out to fish with his parents. But the neighbor who told him of it was suspicious and told Eerlen the family situation and they’d never before had spent any time with the child, willingly. In fact, the small, poor village had been feeding the child, quietly, behind his family’s back, and they all felt something was very wrong.

So the neighbor had taken Eerlen out in his own boat. They’d still been a long distance away when Nikre’s sire and his new sworn had thrown the three year old – as Eerlen had found later – overboard and into the sea.  If Eerlen hadn’t been a magician – if he’d not been the archmagician – Nikre would have been dead.  As it was, it had taken throwing his power, encircling Nikre, and pulling him – coughing and sputtering and streaming seawater – into the neighbor’s boat.  Eerlen had sent Nikre with the neighbor, to dry and warm at a fire, and waited to meet the criminals.

“What did you do with them?” Myrrir had asked when he had time to speak to Eerlen, after Eerlen, covered in blood, had dragged the child in during a formal dinner. “Precisely? I take it not a mere magical killing? Judging by how your tunic looked…”

Eerlen had shaken his head. He had, as clan leader and as archmagician, killed before. Of course he had. But this was different.

They’d been sitting on the cushions in Myrrir’s room – their room, since Eerlen slept there, though for formality sake, he had a small room adjacent – and Myrrir had touched Eerlen’s tunic over his ankles. “Did your wicked little knives take action?”

Eerlen sighed. “It had to be done. In front of the village. It had to be known it would not be forgiven. I did mind-ask head of fourth for consent. I had after all witnessed attempted murder. As had the neighbor.”

“Very correct,” Myrrir said, his mouth quirking on the right side, and the kind of amusement in his voice he often showed about what Eerlen did, though Eerlen rarely understood what was so amusing. But then Myrrir’s expression clouded. “I would not have been, Eerlen. I’d have strangled them with my bare hands, and hang the fourth circle authority over attempted murder.”

Eerlen had laughed, because it was impossible not to, and leaned into Myrrir. “Not gory enough.”

That night they had decided that Nikre would not be put up for fostering in the brotherhood, that he would be adopted by the Archmagician and the king of Elly, themselves. Eerlen would be his adopted parent and Myrrir his foster sire.

Perhaps it hadn’t been the best for the child. Or perhaps it had. Perhaps what Nikre had endured as a very young child had already made him who he was.  Though Myrrir threatening anyone with death who so much as looked at the child in a wrong way couldn’t have helped. It had taken a good two years for the children of the palace to approach Nikre or play with him.

But at six he did play with children now and then. Mostly he played with Brundar Mahar, Myrrir’s three year old child, and, that day, with Kahre Sarda, Myrrir’s sireling by the late governor of Karrash. Kahre was a year older than Nikre and was visiting that day.  From Eerlen’s seat, on one of the stone benches, he watched the three children play near the Koi pond.  Kahre and Nikre were trying to teach Brundar to play with dolls, but Brundar’s idea of playing with dolls was to undress them and then fling them at one of his play companions. Which was fairly normal. Little Brund viewed dolls as projectiles. Though the undressing was a new thing, and he’d have to tell it to Myrrir who doubtlessly would make it into a funny story to tell all visitors.

Other older children might have lost patience by now, but Nikre would pick up the doll, and Kahre would dress it, and they’d bring it back to Brund, and demonstrate how to hold the doll.  He couldn’t hear what they said, but the older children must have been speaking of why dolls should be held and not thrown, because he caught the words “Baby, Brund. Baby. You don’t throw babies.”

Eerlen was fairly sure between now and his late teens or early twenties Brundar would work through to that idea. Hopefully. Otherwise the court would be very shocked indeed.

As he stretched his legs, he watched Brundar do what he did, lie down on the grass and go to sleep, thumb in his mouth, with the suddenness of very young children.

The older children settled down to play with the doll and Eerlen was lost in his own thoughts, until he felt someone sit next to him, and looked. Kahre was sitting on the grass rocking the doll and singing something that, from this distance, sounded like a lullaby.

Eerlen looked to his side, where Nikre had slipped to sit beside him on the stone bench.  “Didn’t you want to play?”

Nikre shrugged. “It’s Kahre’s doll,” he said. Then hurriedly, “He’d share. But the doll has a name, and—” He shrugged. “He gets to be the line parent.”

“You could bring out your own doll,” Eerlen said. And realized immediately that he’d said something wrong, because Nikre gave him a quick look, then blushed and shrugged. And Eerlen realized they’d never given the child a doll. And of course, he wouldn’t ask. Most of the time he followed Eerlen around or pored over his studies of magical formulas. But–  That quick longing look had said enough. Eerlen would have to figure out where the best dollmakers were. Long ago, Eerlen’s parents had made him cloth dolls, but Eerlen didn’t have the time.

Nikre had got off the seat, and leaned against Eerlen’s shoulder. He looked at the Archmagician’s ruby over Eerlen’s tunic. “He says I’m his.”

Eerlen blinked.  “He?” He removed the ruby over his head and held it in his hand, his idea being to keep the child away from it. The ruby was… strange and impaired in ways Eerlen didn’t understand.

Nikre pointed at it.  The ruby shone.

“Don’t,” Eerlen said. “Don’t touch it. What did it tell you? How did it tell you?”

Nikre looked up, his eyes amber and concerned. “He. He’s a person. No… not a person… but he talks.”

Eerlen nodded. “He does. What did you hear. Was it words?”

Nikre nodded, solemnly. “He… it said that I need to study hard because…” He looked up, and Eerlen realized there were tears over the amber.  “It says if you die I will have to be the archmagician and … and wear the ruby. And… and be master over the brotherhood.” He sniffled. “But I don’t want you to die.”

Eerlen put the ruby on, and slipped it under his tunic, then gathered the child in his arms. “Nikre. Wearing the ruby and being the archmagician is a big responsibility, and it is not fun, but when the time comes I’m sure you’ll do a wonderful job.”

Nikre shook his head. “Not that. I mean, I’ll try.” He looked up and the amber was drowned in tears, “But I don’t want you to die.”

Eerlen thought of many things. Birthing was perilous. And war was perilous. And Eerlen needed to do both. He could die at any moment. But there were times to tell children the truth. And times not to. Or to tell it in a different way.

He pulled Nikre onto his lap. The child was small. Brundar was already almost his size.  “I can’t promise not to die,” he said. “But I’m going to do my best not to.”

The little hand clutched at Eerlen’s tunic. “You promise?”

“I promise. Not for a good long time, not until you’re older than I am.”

Nikre sniffled again. “An Myrrir won’t die either?”

“Not for a good long time. Not until you’re all grown and don’t need us.”

Nikre said something in a whisper. Eerlen said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that.”

“I’ll always need you,” Nikre said, and clutched desperately at Eerlen’s tunic.  Eerlen rocked him until he was asleep. Kahre had fallen asleep next to Brundar, clutching his doll.

All was peaceful in the garden.

And Eerlen felt suddenly that though perhaps they weren’t the family that Nikre should have had, they were his family. And it was good.

I’m so tired of people writing things about the current, not very good, pretty bad, etc. state in the country, and diagnosing the problem pretty well in saying we have an educational establishment indoctrinating people to hate America; and information/entertainment educational complex that lies about the past on the regular and stirs up idiot group grievances with neo-Marxian fervor; corrupt politicians; power concentrated in the hands of a well connected elite.

And I’m following along, nodding, completely agreeing, and suddenly they start on their solutions. And my head hits the desk so fast I give myself concussion.

Because the solutions are always things like: invite your neighbors to a barbecue. Join a neighborhood group. Turn off the internet. Touch grass. Shop only locally. Listen only to local news.

I think part of the problem is that I’m not nor have I ever been a conservative. It’s a peculiarity of America that “I’m for the most individual liberty” shoves me firmly on the right. And I read way too much history to try to destroy all structures in the belief the new ones will be perfect. Because you know, I might be temperamentally a Sans Culotte, but I know what happens when Madame Guillotine is well fed.

So, since I’m not allowed to burn things to the ground and play fast and loose with society — mostly because I was raised with a sense of history and morality — I instead am half in love with the future, and forever studying the trends and the technologies for the ways they can be used for liberty.

And guys, guys, guys? We live in an age of wonders, an age that promises to give back to us what the Industrial Revolution took away, but better, and deeper, and more interesting, and with us having longer and healthier lives to do things in.

Look, yes, I could give a barbecue for the neighbors, but what the actual hell? This idea you have of neighborhoods where everyone has kids about the same age and brings them to the barbecue, and they all have similar interests is probably from your parents’ childhood, transmitted in their stories and the stuff you read as a little kid.

This type of thing made sense when there was one big industry in the area and people worked at certain levels, and lived in stratified neighborhoods. It is prime industrial age mass living.

You’re now sulking and telling me that it was a happier and better time.

Sure. I didn’t say it was hell. And your great grandparents would tell you stories of tiny villages where, after work, the villagers got together and sang hymns. Think of all the togetherness! They were exhausted, underfed, probably by our standards filthy, but they had TOGETHERNESS.

Well, excuse me, I lived in a village growing up. And while I miss some things, sometimes, if you think for a little very Odd kid it was an ideal environment, you’re out of your ever loving mind. In fact, it wasn’t an ideal environment for anyone, judging by the epic fights and factions. Because people in point of fact had very little in common, and were together by utter necessity, which means that the group enforced absolute conformity and you couldn’t escape.

Then the industrial revolution came in and ratcheted things harder. Because mass production requires standard consumers. And it requires people who live all concentrated in one location. And if you don’t think conformity was enforced and would kick at any of us who are a little different, you are looking at it with the eyes of childhood.

Sure, there were good things going, though most of them were because the culture remained from previous eras and the vile progs hadn’t started working at it yet.

However, opportunities were… lacking. You could have any color provided it was the color they sold. You could read what everyone else read. You could watch what everyone else watched. You could work in the neighborhood factory.

But the real poison was that you could read and watch whatever they wanted you to.

What you’re feeling now, about the current era is due to the fact we’re in the middle of catastrophically fast change, and everything is unstable. I will give you that humans don’t like that.

But the really bad things, like the current situation, have nothing to do with that. They have to do with the evil being spread by the vile progs through the mass-communication things they still control. Including education.

They wanted to change society to their own deranged template and by gum they almost managed it. Until the internet broke their little — eh — red wagon.

Without the internet, without distributed information, Hillary would just have finished her second term, and we’d be under the boot of some horrific commie mediocrity.

Without the internet, the young wouldn’t be able to create their own paths to success, escaping the channels the left poisoned and the institutions and the industries they corrupted.

And without the internet, ladies and gentlemen, I probably would have given up and be dead.

Sure. The group that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was in was crazy. Many such cases. Sure, those people need to get out of their crazy surroundings.

But here’s the thing: even in the good old days crazy people found each other. Look up follie a deux and find out how many criminals were activated by their lover, their friends, whatever.

Modernity isn’t terrible. The new technology gives us the opportunity to find those who get us. And to create our own paths to success.

It is inverting the damage of the ever centralizing 20th century (And wasn’t that a time of hugs and kisses. Do you want me to give you the butcher’s bill? And yeah, it had pockets that were decent, but the way it was going sooner or later the butcher would have come for each of us.)

The good old days? Were good in spots and if you fought to make them good.

The bad new days? Are good in spots, and if you fight to make them good.

The good new days have the advantage of having a lot more tools at our disposal; of greater health; of more freedom to innovate.

You want to go and touch grass, go. But don’t forget to check your favorite blogs for the news. Or x. Or–

And yes, you can have barbecues with the neighbors (I think mine are feds! No, seriously.) if you want to. I’m not a raging extrovert. I’ll have my local friends for dinner, but not the neighbors. They’re the ones who asked if our son was our servant when we moved in. (He tans. Really dark.) In their defense they (the non-feds) are about 90.

But don’t throw away the blessings of the modern age.

Be aware of possibilities opening up. And don’t curl up in the fetal position dreaming of the old days.

The new tech is the best thing that could have happened to liberty lovers. It single handedly stopped the boot that would have stepped on the human face forever.

Sure, there’s still work to do. But we can do it.

Don’t hate the tools. Learn them.

Then make them serve the future you want.

Welcome to the good new days.

We had a routine medical appointment and Dan swears I’m misremembering this, but I SWEAR the receptionist was the sloth from the DMV in Zootopia… We were supposed to be out by eleven, noon at most. We didn’t even get in till three.

I’m so sorry.

Anyway, so here’s what happened today. First the good news: Volume 2 of book 1 is out. And if you’re very good sometime very soon I’ll give you the second chapter of book 2. (Because the first chapter gives way too much away for those who didn’t read the earcs, that’s why.)

No Man’s Land: Volume 2 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

No Man’s Land

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 2

Skip thought he’d figured out the rules of survival on Elly.

He was wrong.

Now his potential allies from the Star Empire are turning up dead, one by one. Spies and saboteurs have infiltrated every level of Ellyan society, and Skip is running out of people he can trust.

As he races to save the king and archmagician—his only remaining allies—disturbing secrets about Elly’s culture emerge alongside buried truths about his own family’s past. One moment he’s explaining the bewildering concept of binary gender to confused Ellyans, the next he’s making impossible choices that could strand him on this world forever.

His last gambit is reckless. The odds of success are slim. And failure means losing everything—his mission, his allies, his only way home.

But some fights are worth the risk, even when the deck is stacked against you.

Sometimes the most dangerous enemy is the one you never see coming.

And since yesterday I gave you the songs (I typed it the sins, first) of Britannia, these are the songs of Elly, which both the two-part one and the other one, show up in Volume 2.

The first set, Missa’s confession/lament is the story of their culture hero. Let me see if I can find the text…. Ah, yes, here’s the snippet: Skip, from Volume 2:
The day after that, we had an eighth circle cast illusions. Brundar had to do something to my mind so I could see it, and I understand from what he said that it was always a little thinner for me than for most people.

The story done was Amissar Mahar. And it was exactly like a mersi, except you weren’t in the mind and body of the character, but an invisible spectator, in the middle of the story.

Even so, it was powerful to see Amissar Mahar, an Ellyan slave, fall in love with his Draksall master and have his love reciprocated, so that the Draksall had taught Amissar magic and got him inducted into the Draksall brotherhood. It wasn’t until the brotherhood refused his oldest child and confirmed the child as a slave that Amissar fought it, creating a rebellion that allowed him to lead about half his people from Draksah back to Elly, and seal Elly against Draksalls for a hundred years. In the process, he’d killed his lover, who was the Archmagician of Draksah.

After establishing the Elly brotherhood and kingship, he’d killed himself by jumping into the sea in Lirridar, and the ruby teleported to his middle child, his apprentice.

The whole thing brought Missa’s Confession into sharp relief, and I could have done without Brundar performing it immediately after. Particularly since Brundar had explained “I let our souls become one” meant “we swore.” Which was part of his confession since at the time it was culturally frowned on for Ellyans. By the end of it, my tears were as abundant as everyone else’s.

And now, the songs/videos. As an aside, Dan badly wants a movie of this, but judging by how hard it is to render Ellyans so they don’t look WRONG (Part of the issue I had with the cover and then with this) …. I don’t think it’s possible.
Oh, this cycle: Missa’s Confession/Lament is usually played at swearings (their equivalent of weddings, if you haven’t read the first.) Also, as above, family/clan reunions. (For those who’ve read the e-arcs, the singer (eh) in Lament is Kahre Sarda, Myrrir’s Lord of the Land Sireling (One of them.) Still not willing to shell out for software that will do lip movements. Maybe it will get better. I mean midje. They’re always improving.

Missa’s Confession:

Missa’s Lament:

The next one is Master of Illusions. I did an earlier rendition of it, but the clanker does NOT understand that you don’t shake babies.

Um… what you need to know…. Their power bends (not levels, though they correlate to levels AND abilities) Eight Circles, in their brotherhood of Magicians (which sits in spiral “circles” is people good at illusions and mind manipulation.
Ellyans are barbarians, living close to the bone. Babies take a huge toll on the birthing parent, to raise till weaned (usually one or two years, though most people go longer.) So they cull defective children, and the occasional single sex sport is “defective” because it won’t fit with Ellyan society. The directive is enforced with varying zealousness by the elders of the clan. (More enforced if they don’t like you.)
This is the story of an eighth circle who was very, very good at illusions, not very well liked, and pays the ultimate price to save his female child when the clan elders catch up to him just as the babe is weaned. (Yes, I know it says “he” because they only have one pronoun for humans. And I chose to render that “he” for reasons of mental image and lack of breasts.)
Inexplicably — to me at least — they mostly use this as a dance tune for a very fast dance.
Anyway, without further ado, Master of Illusions:

And now I’ve showed you my pretties, I’m going to try to finish the chapters for Witch’s Daughter. Needless to say, having spent the day in the doctor’s office, I feel like I’m coming down with something.

Why am I doing this? Because I made a pretty and I want to share. I’m SORRY. (Also, because, to be bluntly honest, my brain is still not up to working)

I couldn’t get it to do bagpipes. Or rather, I could, but the clanker thinks “bagpipes” means “jaunty, happy tune.” SIGH.

Anyway, look, it’s my world, and I love showing it off. And aren’t the tools AMAZING?

THIS is the relevant part of the first chapter:

When I woke two weeks later, they told me that Father was dead, but I already knew.

I wore the blue uniform with the half-cape once more, on a freezing winter day, in blowing snow, as I stood in the family cemetery next to the Earl’s palace of Aeris, and watched Father’s coffin lower into the grave, while space force captains and countless infantry stood at attention, wedged awkwardly between statues of angels and spacemen, of kings and imperious women holding aloft wreaths of victory.

There, in a deep hole, they buried what remained of the most important person in my life to that day.

When it was done, they let loose a twelve-cannon salute, Earth cannons, the kind not used in battle since Old Earth. Then a military band played the sweet, haunting “Home of the Spacer,” consigning Father’s memory to the stars.

I stood at attention there, and then I stood beside Mother and received the condolences of a grateful Empire. The Queen herself, with frost-blued fingers, pinned the Wreath of Valor upon my chest, the big one, in gold, with the replica of the first colonizing ship in the middle.

I removed it after the funeral. And then I removed my uniform. I sent my resignation to Her Majesty.

And then I lost myself in the fleshpots of New London, the Empire’s capital city.

UPDATE: Of course, my husband made me do this, because he says they’ll need this kind of high flung ideals to see them through when everything goes wrong. (This is Strains of Earth, and it’s only referred to in part three when Skip is contemplating his own funeral.)

And THIS is a bit of an inside joke, which those who read the first volume might or might not get, since Skip’s self-threats in internal dialogue get more outrageous as the story goes on. No, no. it’s REALLY not that kind of book. BUT son found this hilarious, because of the hyperbolic, impossible threats, and husband finds it hilarious because of earnest guitars, so you’re stuck with it. (And I’m not fixing the sword. What, you think I’m made of credits?)

The left keeps throwing around the word “Hate” and defining ITSELF as being against haters.

As in so many things, from outside it looks like they’re projecting like an IMAX.

To make it clear: I’ve been accused at various times of hating this or that group. This is actually and for real insane. “Hate” has a precise definition of wishing the worst on others, wishing to harm, kill them, obliterate their existence. I’m saved from it, even when really angry, by the fact I’m extremely lazy. Most of what I want is for the people I’m supposed to “hate” to leave me the heck alone and go play with themselves. (In any sense you wish to take it.)

But I do hate some THINGS. Hell, (the Capulets!) and Marxism, for instance. Note I hate the ideology — justifiably, as 100 million graves cry to the heavens against it — not the people holding it. I don’t pray for them to be obliterated, but for them to abjure their inhuman, evil ideology and to join the human race in spirit as well as in biology, once more.

At my worst, I wish people would sit ALL THE WAY DOWN and shut the heck up till they grow up.

But I’m not a good person — I’ve mentioned that, right? — and my dark humor is a load bearing structure, so I do occasionally joke about Pinochet and helicopters. And pray it never comes to pass we’re pushed against the wall (I speak advisedly) that this becomes a thing.

BUT to my knowledge, Charlie Kirk never joked about Pinochet or giving people halfway helicopter rides. I’ll be honest, I thought him a little optimistic and soppy, kind of like my kids are sometimes, and thought he’d eventually see some things and get over “reaching across the isle.” And at the same time hoped he wouldn’t.

Well, they did prove him wrong on some thing. A lot of them proved and keep proving they are not rational actors and can’t be reasoned with. And I hope he was right and a lot can.

But I’m sick and tired, and a bit beyond, of hearing him called “Hater.” I don’t care how much propaganda you were fed, and if you bring up the New York Times, I’m going to shove Walter Duranty whom they never disavowed down your idiot throat until you vomit up all the Marxism, exorcist-like.

Charlie did believe Marxism was wrong; he believed coercion and tyranny was wrong. Yes, he was Christian, which meant he didn’t believe people should engage in homosexual acts, or “transition” into the appearance of the other sex (or none.) This did not mean he hated the people doing it. In fact, he argued that gay people should be welcomed into the movement.

(Me? I don’t actually care what people do unless they do it on the street and scare the horses (Or to the horses, who can’t consent.) But I hate the lies the “trans” movement rests on. I know I have trans fans, and those seem to have some brain cells, but most of the people in the “movement” seem to believe that they will become REALLY and not just cosmetically the other sex, able to reproduce as the other sex, because “science.” That’s a lie. It’s a horrible lie, and people who tell it need to stop already. The only change available is cosmetic. IF adults, in full understanding of this are willing to trade the functional for the cosmetic, I wish them well. No one beneath the age of reason should do this. Ever. And no one should do it based on lies.)

And while Charlie might have hated the fact we put someone in the Supreme Court of the US who seems to have so little brain that when she turns her head a certain way music plays as the wind whistles in one ear and out the other, and that we did so because the walking corpse of a corrupt Senator installed by fraud as “president” had promised to nominate a justice based on color and sex, he never said anything against black people in general. Mostly because opposing someone being nominated on race and sex is ANTI-racist and ANTI-sexist. And not hate of any kind.

In fact, nominating someone because she’s a black female is as bad as nominating someone because he’s a blond, blue eyed male. I want more qualified, thoughtful justices, not more “looks good on a poster.” And telling black people the only way they can be nominated is for their skin is quite possibly the most racist thing I ever heard. And wrong. I’d trade ten Roberts’ for one Thomas and call it a good trade.

But the left screams “Hate” and calls us “haters” while saying we must be killed, obliterated, destroyed. While demanding that our blood be spilled in the streets.

The baying demon of hatred possessing them seems to stop them understanding what people actually say and hearing what they, themselves are saying.

I’m not going to call for “lowering the temperature” because it would do no good.

I’m going to call for challenging them to prove that we “hate” them in any way shape or form. And to point out that hating their mistaken beliefs is NOT hating them.

Oh, they think their beliefs aren’t mistaken? Fine, then defend them, rationally, as beliefs, not as a part of their anatomy much less the core of it. Go on, engage in dialogue. DISCUSS things. And put away the knives and guns. Because you don’t want to shove us into a corner. You just don’t.

Guys, we have a really tough road, really odd-shaped boots to fill.

When Breitbart died, I — and a hundred others — took up his flag before it touched the ground. Talking, yelling, mocking?

Those are my core competencies. And I’m not alone in that, on the Odd Right.

But taking up Charlie’s role? That’s a lot harder. It forces us to believe what they’re fighting so hard to disprove: That they are merely misinformed. That they can be reasoned with. That they will eventually understand disagreement isn’t hatred.

On the other hand, if there weren’t a grain of truth in it, if he weren’t succeeding, they wouldn’t have whipped up their lunatics against him and got him killed.

So we should try. I don’t know how. You probably don’t either, if you’re one of my regulars.

But we should give it a good ol’ college try.

For Charlie!

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

HEY, YES, I’M GOING TO SELF PROMOTE. AHEM:

FROM SARAH A. HOYT, COMING OUT THIS TUESDAY: No Man’s Land: Volume 2 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

No Man’s Land

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 2

Skip thought he’d figured out the rules of survival on Elly.

He was wrong.

Now his potential allies from the Star Empire are turning up dead, one by one. Spies and saboteurs have infiltrated every level of Ellyan society, and Skip is running out of people he can trust.

As he races to save the king and archmagician—his only remaining allies—disturbing secrets about Elly’s culture emerge alongside buried truths about his own family’s past. One moment he’s explaining the bewildering concept of binary gender to confused Ellyans, the next he’s making impossible choices that could strand him on this world forever.

His last gambit is reckless. The odds of success are slim. And failure means losing everything—his mission, his allies, his only way home.

But some fights are worth the risk, even when the deck is stacked against you.

Sometimes the most dangerous enemy is the one you never see coming.

BUY THE BOOKS OR I’LL CONTINUE TO MAKE YOU LISTEN TO CLANKER-MADE MUSIC: Skip Hayden’s No Man’s Land

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Outer Tiers (Chronicles of the Fall Book 18)

And posted to an Outer Tier World with an orphaned guardian’s store–the official name of the oft rumored “Doomsday Cubes” so popular in cheesy spy movies.

He hadn’t counted on children in danger, buying a hundred race horses, or running head on into a corrupt colony government. But with newly acquired sidekicks, it’s full speed ahead to save an entire World as Plagues and Invasions hit the entirety of the Three Part Alliance!

FROM DALE COZORT: There Will Always Be An England II: Planet Ripper

A gripping blend of alternate history, science fiction, and military adventure set in a world where time travel, alien invasion, and World War II-era conflicts collide.

1944 Britain spent twelve grueling years in the Stone Age, leaving its World War II Allies to fight on alone and forcing brutal decisions: dispatching stranded US troops to ancient North America, while wartime factories crumbled to rust. When the nation snaps back to 1944—mere weeks after it left—it’s a superpower, boasting jets, nuclear reactors, advanced computers, and television, light-years ahead of the world.

But this Britain is a fragile giant, its defenses geared for Neanderthal raids, not modern warfare. As Nazi Germany eyes the vulnerable country, eager to exploit the chaos, an even greater peril looms: a huge, derelict artificial moon orbits Earth, self-repairing with each orbit. Whoever seizes it could dominate the planet—or doom it.

In this pulse-pounding alternate history, survival hangs on getting rusting equipment back in the fight while turning Britain’s advanced technology to war.

FROM ROBERT MULLIN: Forsake Not the Gods: Book Two of The Wells of the Worlds

For centuries, the ancient gateway between worlds has been kept a carefully guarded secret from the vampiric gods of the gray lands. But when its existence is revealed, it’s only a matter of time before the unthinkable happens and the exiled powers are unleashed upon the cosmos.

Honor and revenge, hope and despair, duty and sacrifice all meet at the crossroads of destiny in this thrilling sequel to Bid the Gods Arise.

Forsake Not the Gods is the second novel in The Wells of the Worlds, a dark sci fi fantasy series for adults and new adults

FROM HOLLY LEROY: Hostile Earth (Hostile Earth Series Book 1)

Terra Vonn is fighting to survive in a destroyed world, surrounded by unspeakable horror . . . and things are about to get much worse. After witnessing the vicious murder of her mother, Terra has a singular focus—exacting revenge on the killers. But before she can complete her plans, savagery intervenes and she is cast alone into a brutal post-apocalyptic world. As she trails the men south through a land filled with cannibalistic criminals, slave traders, and lunatics, the hunter becomes the hunted. Terra quickly learns that she is neither as tough nor as brave as she thinks she is. Worse, she may be the only one who stands between what little remains of civilization and destruction

FROM JOHN BAILEY: By Degrees: From Drift to Discipline in One Man’s Life

Raised in a house where even the thermostat testified to control, a boy learns to perform obedience without ever growing a spine of his own. Freedom at college exposes the hollowness beneath the manners, and a hard fall sends him home in shame, face to face with parents who are out of words and patience.

What follows isn’t a miracle turnaround but a painstaking rebuild: community college instead of prestige, small habits instead of grand vows, showing up before the fire starts. Momentum comes one ordinary decision at a time.

Work begins on the sales floor of a computer store, where he’s a terrible closer but a natural fixer; skills and empathy take root that no quota can measure. That stubborn, useful competence opens the door to a first real IT job—and to a perilous climb that wins praise while slowly costs him his marriage, his health, and his peace.

Then the diagnosis drops, and later—when he thinks he’s finally back on his feet—the layoff. Illness and unemployment strip away the old measures of worth, forcing him to find identity in endurance, honest community, and a quiet faith that becomes a lifeline. Scraping back is anything but cinematic, yet meaning returns in service, in telling the truth, and in the work of another ordinary day.

By Degrees is a first-person novel about learning to live without borrowed scaffolding—about failure, effort, and the kind of resilience built not in leaps, but by steady, imperfect steps.

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: Theophany

Ten years ago the Savients took over Niban, forcing the independent inhabitants into poverty and despair. Bass White saw the careless cruelty of the Savients kill his mother and his father. When a resistance cell is discovered in his city bloc, the Savients seek to make everyone pay.

With his wife Amie, Bass races into the caverns to escape the Savients’ brutal enforcers: the Atrasai. The couple barely make it to the limits of known territory outside their underground city, however, before the Atrasai catch up with them. It would take a miracle to save them…

…or a combat medic robot.

Join Bass and Amie in this sci-fi story of healing, hope, and wonder. After a decade of fear and pain, even a little light can bring out the best in man and machine. But will the best be enough to heal?

BY FREDERIC BROWN, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Screaming Mimi (Annotated): The classic pulp serial killer mystery

A drunken Irishman named Sweeney — well, to be fair, he was only five-eighths Irish, and only three-quarters drunk — made a resolution. Sticking to it took him through murder, and blood, and tracking down a sculptor on the far side of nowhere, and delivered him right up to the doorstep of a serial killer!

• This iktaPOP Media edition has a new introduction giving the book genre and historical context.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Escape Velocity

An optimistic collection of six stories revolving around leaving Earth, or living (and making a living) further out in the solar system.

Xanadu–Sometimes, making a profit just needs an outside perspective for why it hasn’t yet.
Turing’s Legacy–It takes love to make a person. And maybe an accident.
Theory in Practice–Psychological care may well be more important in a closed environment.
Reasonable Accommodations–Microgravity could be an answer to some disabilities.
You Can’t Go Home Again–The effects of long-term isolation on asteroid miners explored.
Everyday Miracles–What could push someone to emigrate to a new off-planet colony?

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: An American in Iya (Timelines Universe Book 8

Over 200 years ago, a Plague overran the world, and 9 out of 10 human beings died.

In a small Japanese village on Shikoku, a group of American tourists found themselves stranded — and in grave danger of being murdered, merely for the sin of being 外人 (gaijin).

Luckily for them, their Japanese hosts took pity on their plight, and took them in as their own.

This is the story of their descendants — who still, more than anything, wish only someday to go home. That is . . .

. . . if they still have a home to return to.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Space Race Trilogy Omnibus: Time Slips, The Secret of Pad 34, Beach House on the Moon, Plus two exclusive new essays

All three books of the Space Race Trilogy, now together with two exclusive new essays.

Time Slips

What if our most treasured verities were in fact wrong?

To be selected for Project Mercury and be one of America’s first astronauts was a dream come true for test pilot Deke Slayton. But fellow Mercury astronaut Al Shepard kept telling old stories from his native New England, tales of monstrous entities like Cthulhu and Yog Sothoth. Earlier generations had viewed them as demons, but might they in fact be aliens, here long before humanity?

Soon Deke discovers evidence that something is watching the US space program. Something that begrudges humanity the stars and would put a ceiling on human attainment. Something that can manipulate time itself.

HP Lovecraft wrote that we dwell on a placid island of ignorance amidst the dark ocean of infinity, and that we were not meant to travel far.

What might the US space program have looked like in a cosmos filled with hostile eldritch entities? Would they notice us as playthings? Or as a nuisance to be dealt with?

The Secret of Pad 34

Who would put a ceiling on humanity’s expansion into space?

That’s what Gus Grissom wants to know. While fishing offshore from Cape Canaveral, he glimpses a mysterious undersea city of unearthly geometries, marked with a strange three-armed cross symbol.

His efforts to research it bring him veiled threats from strangers at his door. Trouble blights an exemplary career. However, Gus refuses to be cowed into silence, and pursues every lead he can find.

HP Lovecraft wrote that we live on a placid island of ignorance and were not meant to travel far. This is the Space Race in a world where the Soviet Union is not our only adversary.

Beach House on the Moon

The Moon is a dead world, airless and desolate. Emmaline Waite has known this fact since childhood, when she watched the Apollo landings.

But here she sits on the shores of the Sea of Tranquillity, looking up at the gibbous Earth as the waves roll in. What madness can this be?

She gets no time to contemplate that question, for she is not alone. She is about to enter a realm of love and fear, of mind-bending secrets that change her understanding of human history, and of self-sacrifice.

Her life will never be the same.

Miskatonic University in the Cold War and Contemporary Era

How would H.P. Lovecraft’s famous fictional institution of higher education have developed through the second half of the Twentieth Century and into the Twenty-first?

Space: Gernsbeck vs. Lovecraft

A look at the fundamental worldviews underlying the approaches of Hugo Gernsbeck and H.P. Lovecraft to the portrayal of outer space, aliens, and space travel.

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: Kick

Withe the book pimping email, and need to dress and go to church, so book promo after.

Meanwhile, OH MY GOSH, GUYS! THANK YOU:

And thank you, whoever you are who wrote this review. My head is so swollen I go through doors sideways now. This might be the BEST review of my lifetime:

And while I go dress and to church, yeah, yeah, I beat the clankers into a futuristic tavern video and….

People have been baffled as to why Jimmy Kimmel didn’t just apologize and avoid being fired. Also why a lot of the left is doubling down on what’s obviously the 20% side of an 80-20 issue, like…. Oh, standing for illegal immigration. or the 10 side of a 10-90 issue, like outright standing for more criminality.

What you’re failing to understand is that there is a strategy to it. It’s a defective strategy that no longer works, but it was such a good move for so long that it got deep-embedded in the left’s culture and they no longer know the reasons behind the action. They just do it because it always worked before.

At the same time that people were coining “Get woke, go broke” to show that wokeness was not in fact a bottom-up movement, I was coining “Roll left and die” but it actually should be more appropriately named “Roll left TO die.”

They’re not the same thing, but since they happened at the same time they’ve gotten conflated and the first kind of massively took over, because it’s a caution.

Roll left to die is more a description of what I saw happen over and over, primarily n publishing.

Someone who was hard left would take over a magazine. Over the course of his (or more commonly her) tenure, the magazine would decline to the point of dying. Just on the point of death, the person in charge would roll even harder left. The magazine would, of course, go down in flames. BUT before the ashes had cooled, this person would be offered a bigger, better job, with a bigger, better magazine. Where the process repeated.

This was also true of writers whose career was dying. Make sure your next book is redder than Mao’s Red Book, and even though it sells almost nothing, people will line up to give you big advances/support your future endeavors.

Because I don’t like things that make no sense, I analyzed the phenomenon and realized while it was a bad strategy for magazines/institutions, it was a great individual career strategy. How?

Well, the first thing you have to understand is that the left doesn’t give a d*mn about “the thing” whatever “the thing is”: science, industry, endeavor, institution, art. They don’t care about “the thing” that they just took over. The only thing they care about now and forever is revolution.

Add to that that by the fourth generation of dominating certain fields and hiring only on ideological compliance ALL OF THEM ARE ARRANT INCOMPETENTS.

Sure, sometimes, by accident, they find one of their true believers who has talent and sometimes even genius. But they tend to destroy those, because well, because their ideology views envy as a cardinal virtue. Be too talented and suddenly there will be rape accusations, or someone will have heard you mutter a slur, or… (These might even be true. As we learned this last week, the left are the most amoral sh*theads in existence. They don’t even know what morality is and can’t find it with two hands and a seeing eye dog.)

So the fact that you just destroyed the magazine/enterprise/institution doesn’t matter to them. They do that all the time themselves, often without meaning to. What matters is that before the thing died, you virtue signaled as hard as you could to the left.

That means that they MUST support you and give you a bigger position. They can’t allow people to think you might get fired for being hard left. So they have to do whatever they can to make you BIGGER.

This strategy worked for close on to a 100 years which is why people did the roll left to die as hard as they could.

Signs it was breaking down came when people like Keith Olberman or Don Le Lemon started having to “go to vlogging from their basement” to obviously no attention whatsoever.

And now a days it’s a crap shoot whether rolling left to die will get you more money, or just ignored.

But people like Kimmel whose career was dying anyway instinctively do it, because it worked so well so long that it just became “the thing to do” like some sort of deranged ritual.

They do it because the strategy solidified into ritual. And because they don’t know what else to do.

This btw explains the Biden administration too. Everything they did was a disaster and they knew it, so they rolled left as hard as they could, so they’d be seen as martyrs of the revolution and have cushy jobs/donations after. The fact that the Biden library is not getting funded at all and that Kamala is giving up on political — crazy cakes — aspirations, like governor of California, tells you it’s not working there either.

However, watch for it to happen more. The dying dinosaur rolls hard left to die.

Because its walnut-sized brain tells it that it always worked before!

Before you freak out, not I’m not doing a “both sides” thing and I’ll confess to more than a bit of glee at seeing Kimmel banished to the outer darkness where there will be gnashing of teeth and pathetic walking around the streets trying to get passerbyes to agree with him. Okay, fine, that’s Don le Lemon, but still. (But he was intending to retire. Yeah, yeah, more on that later.)

But–

Yes, I do know he outright lied, and that his shtick as a comedian is the same clown nose on, clown nose off we’ve known from Colbert and other such unfunny clowns. And I do know as well that he wasn’t fired due to government pressure.

Look, yes, Trump tweeted (Truthsocialed is so cumbersome) about how he should be fired. Yes, it might have caused it, but if so it’s not Trump’s fault but Biden’s (more on that later, too) and I don’t buy it anyway because Trump tweets the most absurd stuff and the most sensible stuff too, and the left does remarkably well at ignoring all of it.

Mostly the reason for the firing seems to be a revolt of the affiliates, which frankly is overdue IF they want to save their business (and might be too late.)

Still, I will confess it made me uncomfortable — even while gleeful — at the level of an itch in the back brain, so I’m trying to reason through it.

And part of the reason I have not to be overly disturbed by the Kimmel firing, besides the fact it wasn’t government ordered — as the silencings, firings, etc. under Biden. Remember the attempts to create a Ministry of Truth? — is that I don’t think it’s a market distortion so much as an overdue market correction.

Okay, fasten your seatbelts because this involves my explaining that I view pretty much EVERYTHING (except religion and family and love of country, maybe, though I could argue for those too) as an economic/market problem.

Most issues in society today, for instance, are caused by imposed top-down market distortions. And don’t get me started on that, or we’ll never talk about this specific issue again. But if you want to wind up the Sarah and watch her go, I can do another post (couple three of them) later.

But for our information market — from entertainment media to news media, to everything else, including education — from which people derive their view of the world, the case for market distortions is trivially easy to make.

Or maybe it is so only because I lived in the belly of that beast for so long.

I got so tired in the oughts of seeing people talking about how conservatives abandoned the market, yadda yadda yadda and coming up with all kinds of pseudo psychological just-so stories for why conservatives weren’t going into teaching, writing, journalism, art, etc etc etc. I mean people ON THE RIGHT came up with all sorts of reasons, from “Conservatives are more money oriented.” (Bullshit. Like. Total bullshit. I’ve never seen anyone as money oriented and grasping as a devoted communist.) To “Oh, conservatives are more concrete thinkers and want to work on things more easily quantifiable.”

All of this was utter nonsense on stilts. And every time I tried to explain people on our own side argued with me. EVERY TIME. Because what I said seemed soooo improbable to them.

You see, it’s nonsense to look for pseudo-psychological explanations for a field being totally dominated by one political side. There is no explanation in that case except market manipulation.

Okay, I’ll cop to our side having more autists and their side seeming to have more psychopaths. There are reasons for this, and they aren’t integral to the people. They are because their side has been a “social positioning good” for so long that psychopaths will latch on to it. And our side therefore collecting the people for whom social anything, not alone positioning, is a mystery. BUT the truth is that this is on the margins. maybe we have 10% more autists than they do and they have 10% more psychopaths than we do. But I’d be frankly surprised if it’s event hat start. It’s mostly marginal adjustments.

Mostly people are people. And just because “capitalism” (aka the free market pro freedom side) has more quantifiable benefits, it doesn’t mean it won’t attract any number of shiftless artists (raises hand and self identifies) even those who aren’t artists because they were promised it involved no math (they lied!) but those too.

Again, I’d buy a minor distribution difference on the margins, for psychological reasons. But the total dominance of entire fields by the left is evidence of one thing and one thing ONLY: market manipulation.

I’ve been the voice screaming in the desert so long that it’s always a surprise to see someone come up and corroborate it. What this lost soul is doing trying to break into trad pub in this day and age is a quandry, but the story she tells? Same, same. And bad news for her, it only gets worse. Both in terms of being discriminated against, and being held back and…. all of it. At this point trad pub will deliberately hobble you on telling a story that doesn’t accord with the woke shibboleths. And if you manage to find a publisher that takes it, the bookstores will play games with your books. And–

And it’s like that all over. For about a century now, not only is everyone to the right of Lenin discriminated against in broadcasting, news, entertainment (of which writing is broadly a part) and education, but the level and amount of distortion undertaken to keep people to the right of Lenin from succeeding in these fields while propping up the most absurd mediocrities of the left is– breathtaking. And usually locked in people’s heads, and people might doubt it themselves, even when it happens to them.

Let me explain: I say “a great part I was stuck in mid list was because of shenanigans” I sound incompetent and resentful both. Even though I know it’s not true, I only know it’s not true that I’m making this stuff up because during the hard times I did a bunch of write for hire. And the most off-the-cuff, just-writing-this-because-kids-need-winter-coats books made other people’s careers. Or shot to the top and stayed there.

Now you could say “maybe the stuff you labor over is not as good.” Fair call, as coffs many such cases. BUT contra that, a lot of my books are also the most off-the-cuff, just-writing-this-because-kids-need-winter-coats books and none of them described that trajectory. (Why would I write those? Well, in trad pub you write what the gatekeepers will buy. Because baby needs shoes. And if you think the years I wrote six, ten, or twelve books all of them were labors of love, I have a bridge to sell you cheap. It kept us above water but it was sometimes brutal. (And if you’re going to say indies do those numbers all the time, cool story bro. Now try doing them on someone else’s schedule, with tons of interruptions thrown in by the process itself (revisions on someone else’s time, for ex) and these books being 120k words plus. And on ideas you might have submitted 10 years before and not only aren’t interested in now, but need to do all the research on again. And note I’m not complaining about that. Publishing is a business. The needs of the company paying you are…. the market under that scenario.))

And I still feel uncomfortable complaining. Other people? Much much more so. They (probably) most of them don’t have even that kind of internal proof.

When they tell you “No one likes you and you don’t sell” you shut up and go away. What else can you do?

I don’t know if it’s the same mechanics for teachers, but I imagine just the opinion of the teachers’ lounge might break you. On top of which I find it curious that more than one right of Lenin would-be teacher seems to have given it up when they got their student teaching assignment in schools dangerous to life and limb. It makes me wonder if the same prospiracy (not a conspiracy. That would be easy to nail) type of thing made sure those they weren’t sure were fully onboard with their insanity got the worst assignments.

And that’s part of the problem. The thing that kept the right out of these professions wasn’t a conspiracy. That would have track records and evidence. It was a prospiracy of like-minded fellow travelers helping each other. In publishing the code was “is one of the good people.” In other fields? I don’t know. (And I only caught that by accident, btw.) And how much of this was honest prospiracy and how much the cells of three of typical communist org, only the Good Lord knows at this point.

But it doesn’t take much reading of past publishers and journalists bios from the early twentieth century to see it in action. And they were naive enough to BRAG about it. About how they kept right wingers, therefore obviously evil and stupid, out of the field.

At the same time they were giving plum assignments, pushing, etc. people with not a yota of talent but singing in the choir.

Which is how we get to Jimmy Kimmel, a largely talentless unfunny comedian, who had a golden ride to success due to his willingness to tell any lie, smear anyone, etc. etc. (Not all deals with the devil are a contract signed at a crossroads at midnight.)

Note I’m shedding no tears for him. And while firing a journalist for lying does make me uncomfortable (much less a comedian) since it’s a grand tradition of the profession — and then again, who is to say what’s a lie? (Yes, I know it is a lie that T. Robinson is MAGA, but hear me out.) Are we going to start our own disinformation department? — at the same time, in the face of a thoroughly corrupted market, any corrections are going to look like violations.

You see, a corrupted market functions to keep itself in business more than anything. Just because their people suck, doesn’t mean you can outsell them, because the market is vitiated to protect them. Whether what they’re selling is bad information, corrupted medical studies, or lumpy pottery that comes apart in the dishwasher. Corrupted is corrupted and self-protecting.

So to correct the Chinese corrupt market dominance, tariffs might be needed to encourage companies to stop outsourcing.

And to correct the corrupt and monolithic information monopoly, the affiliates might need to put the fear of them into the station.

That’s the only way to do it, short of it crashing utterly first, and some things — like say our market of medicinal production, or news — we can’t afford to have crash utterly for national security and sanity reasons.

However it does feel like a violation. It is a violation. I mean, fish got to swim, some jornos will lie. If you stop a fish swimming, you can at least eat them, but stop some jornos from lying and you’re interfering with their ability to make a living. (And I’d never advise eating them. Don’t put that in your mouth. you know exactly where it’s been.)

So? We still have to break the monolith. Oh, and btw, that “he was going to retire” (I told you we’d come back to it) might be true or not, but it’s irrelevant in the end. These people never fully retire. There’s sinecures, accolades and teaching and– This scalp collecting was real. We won’t let his hoary head decline peacefully into the grave. Much delayed justice, etc–

…. Here’s the thing… Normally at this point I give a pallid scolding along the lines of “We don’t want to do what they did. We don’t want to shut out all other opinions till we’re as useless and stupid as the left which is unable to course correct and at this point completely unable to figure out what things mean. What things? Oh “hate” for one.”

Whoever said that faced with any pushback, the left goes down like a tribe that never met smallpox is correct. They isolated themselves so much that at this point they don’t even realize the things they’re doing and saying aren’t defensible.

But normally when I offer that, I’m mostly doing it in the hopes that someone 100 years on somehow finds this and takes note. Because, you know, fighting such an entrenched establishment takes time, and we’re certainly at no risk completely dominating everything to the point we become useless.

…. Maybe? I mean, that was my absolute certainty until last week.

Looks around.

Guys, it might be you need to remember that. Do not ossify into tolerating no dissent at all. And while it might be needed for a little while — Lord, you have no idea how this bothers the libertarian — to shut the worst of the left out of these professions (tbf the worst of the left is very bad at their jobs too. The job is never the thing. The revolution is the thing) remember that when you hire for any reason but competence you always degrade competence. There is no way around that. And we’re already in a crisis of competence because of the left’s insanity.

So while you’re prying Jimmy Kimmel out of the fortified tent that keeps us out — and the others too. So many others — don’t forget that our aim is not simply to reverse positions.

In the end the free market is best, be it in the flow of goods or in information. Which means we need to make this phase as short and thorough as possible, and break down the walls quickly, and oh, get rid of the old managers, no matter how much they say they’re now on our side. They only know one way to operate and they’ll be just as bad under the new regime. (See USSR’s heads becoming oligarchs and mob bosses.)

And then we need to go back to, in the measure of the possible, trusting the public (which won’t be trained into half a dozen “valid” sources, which a lot of the older and much younger population still is.) to find their way amid truth and lies.

Freedom must be our watchword and our ultimate aim.

And not having to give a damn what political opinions your writer of bubble gum fiction holds is a consummation devoutly to be hoped for.

After the tsunami.

Make sure you remember. Because in the meantime, it’s going to get ugly. And there’s nothing we can do to stop that. Market corrections are always ugly, even when not physically violent. This one will not be an exception.

Buckle up and hold on tight. Things are about to get choppy.