Sorry to be late.  I had doctors appointments.  One of them was a test with the audiologist and despite the fact I can’t use the cell or the headphones on the left side (because it’s like someone is whispering) I was told I have normal hearing on both ears.  I don’t actually, having been diagnosed with mid range loss in my twenties, so I’m sure something is weird (again.)  But never mind. I’m not even going to speculate.

Which brings us to other things I don’t want to speculate about:

Why are some people desperately interested in other people’s business?  No, seriously.  Of course, we have a whole party of them.  In the sixties and seventies, the left loved saying that they didn’t care what you did and weren’t moralist prudes, but really,that only applies to sex and MAYBE drugs anymore.  Maybe drugs, because, honest to heaven, there’s more and more things they think you shouldn’t take, and they’re on the vanguard of the “make everything prescription” wave.

In neighborhoods…  Well, for reasons known only to the psychiatrist he doesn’t have my husband reads NextDoor obsessively.  I signed up and then never checked it again.  If there’s, you know, a killer flu in this expected-to-be-colder winter, I’ll want to check who needs help or whatever, but other than that, it would only encourage me to put a foot through the monitor.

So I get the crazy second hand.

In our particular street where there are maybe six kids, only audible in summer when they play outside, and even then not much, because being middle class kids in the US they’re booked solid every spare moment, someone complained about “children shouting.”

Our next door neighbor has a very large, elderly dog who likes going walkabout.  Unless I’m refinishing and afraid he’ll get hurt, I let him come and visit.  In the reports this has morphed into “vicious dogs roaming the neighborhood unimpaired.”

Then there is the crazy even we can’t escape.  Before one of his medschool exams, older son went out for a walk around the neighborhood.  Now, older son is like a mini Larry C.  Not as tall but proportionately built like Larry. He also has very dark hair and a (generally trimmed) beard.  He wears button down shirts, nice slacks, and if I remember properly at the time it was blustery, so a nice wool overcoat. His normal untanned skin tone is somewhere between mine and Dan’s.  He tans darker than I used to be able to, but he’d been spending months indoors, studying.

So…  as he came back from his walk, Dan was outside raking leaves.  Robert and he exchanged a few words, and in Robert went through the garage.

Not two minutes after, this woman slightly but not markedly older than us comes to Dan with the air of super detective dog, and tells Dan that a large, swarthy male, probably Latin, just got into our house. When Dan failed to be alarmed, she started piling it now.  Now our son was a large, swarthy male who had been walking the neighborhood and trying the handles of parked cars.  This is even crazier, since a) yeah, no, I can’t see Robert trying the handles of cars for any reason.  b) there are NO parked cars in our neighborhood during the day.  I’ve noticed this because the only one out during the day, normally, is my terminally unsightly 20 yo truck, and I’m surprised no one has complained of it yet.  There’s no rule against it, but most people on the street are childless, so the cars are either in the garage, or out at work.

This woman just kept trying to panic Dan even though Dan told her several times that the suspicious male was our son.  (Yes, for the next several weeks his name in the household was “Large Swarthy Male.”  When it wasn’t “Car thief.” What else?)

When told, Robert said he thought there was a woman following him, but he told himself, nah, she’s only out for exercise.

The problem with this kind of crazy is that it leads to “there ought to be a law” to correct the “packs of vicious dogs” (I’m sure there’s a law, but the old pup is a sweety, and we just ignore his jaunts.) Or the children shouting.  Or large, swarthy males ambling around to clear their heads for medschool exams.

It also leads to its opposite.  If my son were a — snort — delicate flower, there might be laws against racist assumptions.  There are de-facto regulations against it in fact. The most poisonous part of motor voter, in which you register people to vote without asking for proof of citizenship is just part of this.  You can’t ask people — even people like me with an accent you can cut with a saw — for proof of citizenship, because it offends them.  In other words, it hurts their feelings.

Look, guys, I EXPECT to be asked for proof of citizenship.  Yes, I do get almighty tired of being asked where I’m from, and if I’m feeling testy, I’ll tell you I’m from Denver, or from our particular suburb, or from Colorado, or if I’m really testy, from North Carolina (I was naturalized there, after all.  So in a way I started existing there.) OTOH my accent is like having a big red growth on my cheek.  People are going to ask how I came by that.  Meh.  It doesn’t hurt my feelings.  I just get tired of it, and frankly might not be in a mood to engage with human beings face to face that day.  (Maybe the day ends in y.)

However my franchise is a good I don’t want diluted by people voting who don’t have a right to.  As such, I’ll endure the questions, because I can answer them and have proof, and don’t want non-citizens voting.

So, proportion.

And we weren’t so much offended by this crazy woman thinking son was a car thief, as somewhat alarmed at her (lack of) mental health and her inability to process “he is my son” (granted Dan is shorter than son and a very different build, but then…)

Next door neighbor isn’t upset either when we call to say “Can you keep Joe inside?  I’m refinishing and there’s stuff drying in the garage with the door open.”  He just goes “Oh, that d*mn dog is roaming again?”

I am aware that we’ll never get rid of every busybody and every delicate flower.  They’re human.  Hell, sometimes even those of us very opposed to crazy legislation, say “there ought to be a law.”  For instance I… No, wait, I can’t remember any instances, certainly not recently.  But hey. I probably could, at least for five minutes.

But there is absolutely no reason to give them power.  Either legislative, executive or judicial power.  Or even power over our neighborhoods, our businesses, or you know, our pets, our sons, or our streets.

For too long we’ve run on “If someone squawks loud enough we’ll do that.”

It’s time to stop it.  The wheel isn’t even squeaky.  It’s just making noise to get attention.

It’s time to weaponize “So what?”

“I don’t like your car/dog/kid/business/idea/book/etc.”  The answer to that, the civilized and decent answer should be “so what?”

“You culturally appropriated your book/music/dress/food”  “So what?”

Unless I’m materially harming someone, if they squawk the answer should be so what.

We’re getting “good mannered” into tyranny.

Would-be totalitarians piggy-back on both busybodies and delicate flowers and if we let them will control every aspect of our lives.  (See, France, our leader in this.) Our main defense, perhaps our only one is “So what?”

As we tell the trolls who come here to chide me for bad thought, or those who try to get me to stop saying/doing/thinking whatever I’m doing by following me obsessively and complaining about everything: don’t like it, don’t read it.  Or as mom used to say “don’t like it? Put it on the side of your plate.” It’s not like I’m going into the houses of my lefty colleagues and forcing them to read me at gun point.  Even if I COULD, I wouldn’t because I don’t care that much about what they do/read/whatever.

Sure, sometimes a particular piece of crazy falls under my eyes and I bitch/make fun of it.  But I don’t follow them around obsessively, and certainly don’t read them extensively just to be outraged.  And I never said they don’t have the right to be stupid-and-crazy say whatever they want and think whatever they want.

I mean, how could I prevent it anyway? They don’t make anti-psychotics that strong. And Marxism is a defect in thinking and character that no medicine can cure.

I just wish they extended our side the same courtesy and — except for occasional fits — they left us alone because life is too short and there’s better things to do.  (Maybe they’re intending on living forever?)

I propose peace through ignoring.  Except for not letting them get their hands on the power to force them, rolls your eyes and go on.  And if they won’t do the same, roll your eyes, point and quack.  Eventually they’ll learn to behave like human beings, at least most of the time.

Don’t like it? So what? Go and do/read/be what you like.  This is — still — mostly — a free country.  And we aim to keep it that way.

I’m sorry to have missed yesterday, but Dan and I were figuring the layout of wood floors and buying a table saw and … other stuff.

How many of you remember that we bought this house partly because of a library with a wall of shelves going floor to ceiling 14 feet tall and eleven feet wide?  Good, Good.  This is why we held on through thick and thin on a short sale that went south four times before miraculously coming back onboard.

… which I thought was really good when we figured out it took everything, with one of the spare bookcases for my remaining fiction-on-paper (mostly signed volumes, and a few books not yet in electronic) and a couple of shelves for my brag shelf.

That is, until younger son moved and needed to store things in our garage and we went and got the remaining unopened…

WHY did the movers put FORTY boxes of books in the garage.  And, dear Lord, they’re all research and I can’t just donate them.

For the last year and a bit, the library has been unusable, with piles of boxes blocking access even to what is already shelved.

Since I’ve been wasting three weeks in Home Improvement TM (from the POV of writing, of course, a waste.  Maybe?) and since the library is actually REALLY important in a household of writers, three of which tend to the historical and sometimes need quick references, I started browsing craigslist for ANYTHING.  What I was willing to take was really tall bookcases to replace the loose ones we have, so they MIGHT take most of the books and then I’d do another cull.

What I found was a library system of matched bookcases that hook to each other and to the wall.  They’re eight feet and a bit tall, and fourteen feet of wall space.  Of course, they’re not real wood (we couldn’t afford them if they were.)  OTOH their not being real wood means I can paint them white, so while they don’t match our wall-library, they’ll kind of blend in.

The problem is painting over paper veneer TM is hard because it bubbles up.  So I have them a coat of shellack, sanded, then a coat of white paint to about half of them.  I’m hoping to finish the others today and be able to write afterwards.  Thing is, if we get them downstairs I can indenture sons when I catch two of them in the house, and get things set up.  Older son’s lovely future bride can help me shelve them rationally, since she wants/needs the use of the library anyway.

So, is this writers’ block gone insane?  Um… no  This stuff has needed doing since we moved in two years ago, and we’ve been putting it off because I lacked energy. But the longer you put these things off, the worst chaos multiplies.  So… Taking care of them.

Weirdly a side effect has been that I’m positively hungry to write for the first time in years.  Husband things that I needed a break from just writing, writing writing, and since a lot of the house remodeling TM has required my creative strengths, I’m still using my creative mind but not in words, and that unblocked things.

The urgency is finishing before the snow flies, not just for better ventilation, but because I’m using two bays of the garage to work in, and cars with ice/snow are not a good thing.

But except for today it SHOULD be evening/Sunday work from here on.  Which is good, actually.  Evening work gives me some exercise when I’ve been sitting on duff.

The bad side?  I was so happy to be done with refinishing crap, to have left all that in the past.  The good side?  Oh, boy.  To begin with, Dyce gets “Death In Marble” and “Maquetery Murder” and “The Body In The  Painted Library.” They’ve been writing themselves in my head, so when I finish A Well Inlaid Death, there’s those.

I won’t lie too, that it’s a good thing for this work to keep me away from the news, as I’m gibberingly insane with fear of the elections.

Look, by the mood of the electorate, the left should lose big.  But…

But motor voter has eroded our votes for decades.  Not just by registering people who have no right to vote, no.  Also because it gives a LARGE pool of people who are unlikely to vote and who can be exploited by impostor-voting or vote-by-mail.  Since some of our states are mandatory vote by mail… well…

And then there’s funny schemes like West Virginia Vote-by-phone.  While a warm body a vote is not the best thing ever, it’s better than what we have, which is one name one vote, regardless of whether the name is entirely fictitious or someone else’s.

But the nation schools, media and entertainment have — against all examples from the rest of the world — convinced a significant portion of the nation’s women that they live in an oppressive patriarchy and everyone is always out to get them and keep them down.

It’s a perfect form of gaslighting, because it goes like this: You don’t feel oppressed?  Your mind has been colonized by the patriarchy.  THAT’s how oppressed you are.

Women have been encouraged to consider their every failure a fault of the “the system” and to obsess over every slight, every look, every peel of laughter (whether directed at them or not) and every maybe, perhaps, half remembered grope.

I watched these shabies become convinced that Kavanaugh was somehow responsible for that boy in fourth grade who either kissed them or didn’t kiss them when they didn’t want want it or wanted it, and who SOMEHOW was a patriarch.

Yes, most of them are incredibly funny, including their obsession with bad-porn Handmaiden’s Tail Tale. And yet, there’s a lot of them, their vote counts as much as mine or yours, and they’ve been convinced a vote against Republicans is a “brave” and courageous thing, which means something that will give them good feels.

Yes, they’ll vote themselves and their menfolk into shackles for the feels.  They’ve been propagandized into imbecility.

But the media isn’t reporting the left’s crazier words and most corrupt actions. Or the physical attacks on political opponents.  If they were disgust would be universal.  But they’re not.

Look times really are achanging and the worm really is turning.  It’s all over the world, including Brazil — BRAZIL!  — and it’s a definite noticeable new trend.  Something, to quote Wretchard, has finally woken and is fighting back against the forces of dissolution.

But we who fight for it are at an incredible disadvantage, even with the little help the new media gives us.  The left has almost swallowed the world entire.  We are fighting without the use of our legs and with one arm pinned down.

Our victories are AMAZING.  (Kind of like my averaging two books a year while so hypothyroidal that I couldn’t remember little things like most of my first language.)

But we’re still at a disadvantage, in voting, in reporting, in education.

We need room.  A lot of room.  Like 25 years worth of room.

We will get it, but in snatches.  Because the other side will score wins too.  But their wins, even if brief will be devastating and things could get very rough. How rough?  Well, consider the violence already happening, and social media already shutting dissident views out.

I hope this is not one of the defeats.  The man we have as president besides being not-ideal (who is) is a deal maker, and if he gets the opposite party in the legislature…  Well, think about it.

And the left really, truly, is crazier than I’ve seen it in decades.  They remind me of the left in Portugal at the worst times.

So, it’s good I’m away from the news.  Tough after today, I need to buckle in and work towards the elections.  There’s insty, there’s PJM and there’s this blog.

Small potatoes, at least the last two, but every pebble causes a ripple.

And that’s the best I can do.

If we lose it’s not the end, it’s not even the beginning of the end, it’s not even the end of the beginning.  But it’s a set back and it will cost us in wealth and lives, and make the fight even harder for us and our children and grandchildren.

Let’s try not to lose.

I have a treadmill desk and at one point I used it religiously four to five hours a day.  Then I started having asthma attacks, and had to stop using it.  Now it feels strange, and I have trouble actually thinking to write on it.

But it’s all a matter of habit.

There are habits that come with twenty years in the traditional publishing sphere.  Mostly habits of stress and fear.

Because once the book leaves your hands you’re completely at the mercy of the publishing house, and because whatever the results of what they do will be imputed to you, you become used to fear.  Constant, pit of the stomach fear.

I learned this lesson early when a series in which book had earned out was yet deemed to have “failed” (one wonders what the house had intended for it to do.  One also wonders about what lies were told in expense reports, and whether much publicity was ascribed to the poor books, who got their ONLY publicity from me (which pretty much ate the first two advances)) so badly that no other house would touch me.

It’s not what you do. It’s not anything you can control. But your career could fail utterly at any moment due to even mere inatention (not even malice) of someone at the publishing house. Or you know, not even that, they could just “deem” you to have failed according to standards never communicated.

That was five years into my career.  It’s been another fifteen now.

Sometime around 2005 (I think) when actually the issue was hypothyroidism, I was having so much trouble concentrating, sleeping, motivating myself, or really giving a hang about whether I got out of bed in the morning, that I bought a book on overcoming burnout.

This was before I went mostly electronic. Electronic is good.  I can just return the stupid ones.  This book’s first chapter said that burnout was composed of overwork and lack of control.  Without the lack of control you don’t get the burnout.  So, first they advised changing companies, and going to one where you had more control.

If you’re a traditionally published author, what company you work for is ALSO NOT under your control.  So I walled the book.  And I kept on.

Fear of the other shoe falling — an invisible shoe falling from an unknowable height — does burn you out, though, even if I had something organic wrong with me.  Over time, slowly, it grinds at you.

For me the main symptom was my imagination going “arid.” (I find it weird of all the people I described it to, John Ringo is the only one who got exactly what I meant by arid.)

It’s not gone.  And you can still write carefully pre-scripted books.

It’s just if you’re a writer like me, you’re used to your bare bones plot being enriched by “grace notes.”  Characters who become unexpectedly multi-faceted.  Subplots that grow around who the characters are and what they want and which emphasize, contrast or otherwise make the main plot better. It’s… for those of you who’ve never written a novel, kind of like tasting the soup you made from recipe and going “Oh, just a touch of mint (or thyme or rosemary.) would make this awesome.”  You can still make soup without it, it’s just not as flavorful.  Just like you can grow crops in a parched land, but they will be stunted, barely surviving.  (Hence arid.)

It wasn’t even deadline stress.  It was just stress.  Each new book was like a hostage delivered to the hands of fate, and after a while it was hard to create new hostages.

So, a year ago I decided from now on I’ll be mostly indie.  Why aren’t the books pouring out?

First, of course, there is the fact that the last year has been fraught not just with worries, but with things that “need to be done right the frack now” so I end up being a construction worker (or furniture refinisher) for 17 hours a day, which even if I had energy to write, leaves no time for it.  But that’s minor-ish. I’m finishing the “last big to do.” Left is re-flooring two rooms and then nothing more till Spring. It would be wunderbar to have made enough money from indie by Spring that I can actually pay someone else to destroy their knees to do the rest of the house.

Second … second is something more insidious.

Humans are immensely adaptable creatures.  We adapt to everything, even things that are bad for us. Older son tells me that if you are overweight too long, or have high blood pressure too long, or any other thing like that, your body “remodels”.  I.e. it develops structures to support the incredibly unhealthy thing you’re doing and being.  Some of these remodels are worse than the thing itself.

I’ve learned to associate finishing novels with pain. So my thoughts of publishing come with flinching away from pain.

There is only one way to fix that. Yes, you’re right losing weight. :D.  No, that’s just the peculiar obsession of my past PCP. Seriously, you could crawl in with pneumonia and he’d tell you it was because you’d gained ten pounds. Is it weird that I’m finally losing weight under a physician who thinks my weight goals are crazy.  (They probably are.  I was unhealthily thin when young.)

Habits can be superseded by new habits, subconscious expectations by new expectations.  I’ve promised myself that publishing a book — just publishing — will lead to our going away for a weekend of writing (yes, I know that sounds funny, but Dan and I love our writing weekends.  We write and talk story, and take interesting walks, and do fun research.)  That way, regardless of how the book does, I’ll rush to finish with an expectation of something fun.  Yes, it will be tight.  But hopefully only for the first few books.

But habits are hard things to break. Even those that are counterproductive and you know they are.

For instance, I wrote for so long while listening with most of my attention for the sounds of kids in the floor below (when the noise stopped it was a problem) that for years after they entered high school and were more or less self-sufficient and trusted (at least not to water the piano, draw an entire landscape on their sleeping brother’s back, pull dressers down on themselves, build elaborate structures that obstruct their ability to leave the bedroom or other such adventures) I couldn’t settle to write.  Took me years to figure out that the problem was I was listening for sounds of little kids and panicking wen I didn’t hear them. (Silence was always bad.)

So, can I learn to live without the fear? the overhanging the stress? the listening for the other shoe to drop?

I’m going to try.

For most of the last twenty years I’ve been on a treadmill.  Movement was forced by movements I had no power over.  Series started and were declared dead at seemingly random. Proposals were written and the least likely was bought. Dates were set not by me.  In the middle of the next book, revisions would come for a book I finished over a year ago, and I had to wrench myself from one and into the other.  I’m not whining, that’s just the way the business worked.  But it’s hard when you write in as many different times and series as I do.

So… I need to learn to step down and write while standing on a firm surface (not physically. There I need to train to the treadmill again.  Ah, the irony.)

I need to figure out the best way to do things, and do them.  I need to set deadlines.  I need to reward myself for doing what I should (which is hardest of all. The reward thing.  I’m just not used to them.)

Habits. The problem is that we’re not creatures of will, we’re not creatures of mind and spirit.  We’re creatures of mind and body, and the physical body (even parts of the brain) run on habits which are hellishly hard to change.

But it will be done, because I’m a creature of mind and spirit too.

This analyzing what is holding me back is hard, and I don’t want to do it.  It’s still better than the treadmill.

And so it will be learned, and it will be done.  It is being done as we speak.  Because habits can be changed, and are not in charge of me.

I’ll stand or fail on my own.

This morning I’m very cranky.  For reasons I know but don’t want to get into (it’s a post in itself, and one I don’t want to deal with) I was up at two am and couldn’t sleep till four thirty am.

This morning I’m cranky and out of sorts and debating whether I should shower before getting in painting clothes and finishing painting the “decent looking but paper veneer library system” we bought last week, or just shower afterwards.  Because I will need to shower afterwards.

Because I love showers, you know it’s just crankiness, and not wanting to relax (though admittedly if I relax I might never do anything, because I’m tired and cranky.)

Yesterday read myself into place on novel in progress, which has been dragging since January.  There have been reasons for it, and I understood fully the reason I haven’t forced it.  The last chunk was forced (eight weeks ago) and I realized I had three blind alleys in it, which had completely destroyed the plot I planned and left me floundering.

I’ve written … well… I’ve written and published something like 35 novels, not a bad reaction to them, unless politically motivated.  So, it’s not lack of craft.  As I told a friend this week, the craft never leaves you.  And my subconscious knew I’d gone wrong in pushing and going to weird (and unexpected) twists, because … well, because none of it worked.

I don’t often go down bizarre sidelines that end in cul de sacs when plotting or writing.  And my unexpected twists usually just add subplots or depth.  So the book has been dragging because I haven’t been fully functional.  (Even today, despite the tired, I’m more functional and less depressed than I’ve been in years.  Maybe in 10 or 20 years.  Part of this is the treatment of apnea, which I’ve probably had that long [it’s not even really weight related, though the weight doesn’t help.  I have the lungs of a 5 year old child, due to infantile TB.  So when you add lying down and even a little overweight — I’m more than that now, but wasn’t for many years — my O2 levels crawl in the basement. The apnea has only been treated for about 7 months, so the final recovery is still setting in.)

Frankly I haven’t been fully functional for twenty years.  And that was the hypothyroidism.  The entire span of my career has ranged from “profoundly difficult to write” to “okay to write but so tired.” Keep in mind this affects all action scenes because you can’t write them if you can’t live them in your head, because so tired.  It affects other things too, like complex relationships.

Look, maybe that was a good thing.  Up till 20 years ago I had a tendency to plots so complex you needed an ax to cut through them.  Perhaps it was my puny craft then, or perhaps a mind that turns in on itself that made those impenetrable to readers.  Who knows? At least the last twenty years have given me craft.  I had to have it to function.  But craft isn’t enough when you’re dragging, and I have built-in controls that stop me pushing when I’ll destroy the book if I do.

Anyway, now I see the problems and I think I can finish it, and get back on A schedule, hopefully relatively fast.

I can’t tell you why since January, since a lot of this is not mine to tell.  (I know, but it’s still true.)  And the parts that are would be of no interest at all to most of you.

Let’s say each year has its character and 2018 has been a year of “everything goes wrong/emerges me in turmoil/miraculously turns out WAY better than expected.”

Look, it beats 2015, the year of everything goes wrong and stays wrong and everything I need to do will take ridiculously long.

However a lot of it HAS been emotional turmoil.  A lot of you will ping me expressing sorrow I’m sick, but I haven’t been sick as such.  I had only one major infection, and that was May.  Mostly I’ve been plunging into autoimmune due to stress.  But I found a doctor who is helping me manage things, and I’m losing weight for first time in 10 years, which also helps.

Of course, losing weight takes time, because if I don’t walk 5 miles a day I don’t lose.  Yes, I should learn to dictate, but so far I’m WAY too self-conscious and sound like a loon. OTOH I really am getting healthier.  “Everyday in every way I’m getting better and better.”  It’s actually true, I just had a long way to go.

Anyway, one of the hardest things to get over right now is “the years undone.”  I wish I could have worked for the last twenty years with my full mind and my health.

Maybe things would be very different.  Then again maybe I’d never have been published.  Who can know.

Which is why I need to let go of the anger and make the best of what I have.

It’s not so bad. As a friend pointed out, I could be seventy and just coming out of the funk.

So… make the best of what you have.

And while at it: we were born, most of us, even those in their seventies, into a world infested with Marxist theories which lead to socialism national and international.  This is bad enough, but they also corrupt the foundation and base of civilization.

It’s only in the last ten or twenty years we’ve had the means to start fighting back.

When you guys express despair, you’re doing what I’m doing when I say “but I lost close to twenty years, and I’m so old now, and exhausted by the fight of fiction.”

Take no counsel of your fears.  It’s not our fault how the world got before we were born.  A lot of it was the form of technology — mass manufacture — leading to mass production, mass reporting, mass entertainment.

Well, that’s changing and going smaller and more personal.  The appeal of Marxism will wither too.

Sure, sure, they still have strength and we still have bottle necks in communications.  But we’re ALSO still here.

Would I prefer we had got this ability to fight back earlier?  Sure. But then again, like my having been healthier through my career so far, what bad things come with that? Because I guarantee some will.

This might not be the best of all possible worlds.  It is the world we have.  And it could be much worse.

We could have an easier battle. We also could have a much harder one.

Be not afraid.  Go and build and love and create. Fight by being you as hard as you can.

Do the best you can NOW and throw away your regrets.

Take no counsel of your fears.  Ignore the gibbering voice that says all is lost already.  Nothing is ever fully lost, certainly not liberty and individualism so long as some people believe in them.

All you have is what you have now.  Make the best of it.

The Song of Lieawatha

By Tom Kratman

Part the First

Part the Second

Part the Third

I didn’t give credit for the inventions of Shabbies, when I used it (misspelled) in the article, because I honestly didn’t remember who had said it, just that it was a pivotal thing for me.

I remembered the person was on PJ TV and that he was suffering from a cold (a lot of the video involved him putting a towel around his face and inhaling steam) which exasperated him more than usual when dealing with an ubiquitous anti-war demonstration in DC. (Remember those.  Amazing how they stopped when Obama took power and sent our troops abroad like the Easter Bunny dispensing candy.  Or maybe not amazing because the left are Shabies.)

Then I mentioned it to a friend and he said “that was Alonzo Rachel and the old PJ TV”.

And suddenly I remembered him saying “They’re sheep, they’re babies, they’re shabies.”

Friend also shared that Youtube has throttled Zo’s views to such an extent that he’s now gone back to his former occupation of waiting tables.

Look, I didn’t agree with the man on everything, but his show and Trifecta’s were the reason I signed for and paid PJTV a subscription.

It occurs to me that PJTV killed their TV channel at the worst possible time, because now conservative pundits and speakers need a TV channel more than ever.  Maybe if they’d taken some time they’d have found it profitable.  But it’s not my money, and I’m not going to second guess them.

What I’m going to tell you is to go listen to the Zo.  Look, I don’t even know his position on Trump because he dropped off my radar, but again even back when I disagreed with him on tons of things, and still enjoyed his show.

And look at that “dropped off my radar.”  Be aware even if you subscribe to, say, Right Angle, you’re not getting notice when a video goes up.  Be more proactive in looking for them.

And if you have the money and the time (I have neither for the next 2 or 3 years, at least) consider what an alternative to YouTube would look like and implement it.

I do have an idea for an alternative to Amazon and a way to make it profitable until (almost inevitably) Amazon goes full potato, be it five years in the future or more. We MIGHT have the money for that, but we’ve been struggling for the time particularly “friends who program” time.

But we have to make time.  And we have to put the money where our mouths are.  Because otherwise we’ll consent through silence. And that’s not the world we want.

Build under, build over, build around.  Create and subvert and BUILD.  You’re nto alone, and it’s time.

I’m seedy and running a fever.  It’s self inflicted and it will pass in a day or two.  I had the booster on the shingles vaccine. But the reaction is kicking my behind five ways from Sunday. I wasn’t going to post today.  And yet a friend’s text early morning made me realize there’s something I SHOULD say.  To you, and to the world in general. My friend lives in a liberal enclave and is getting scared.  As you should be.

It’s not that there aren’t good people on the left.  Of course there are.

It’s that they’ve bee indoctrinated, spun and guilted into believing a lot of things that just ain’t so.  So many things that just ain’t so that the end result is that their attempts at fixing or improving things (particularly since they think so many things are broke that aren’t) result in profound disaster for everyone.

I’m not going to argue with a lot of you that the results they get are what some number of their leadership wants.  This is definitely true.  But the rest of them, and the overwhelming majority of the followers think they’re doing good.

It’s just that their education and entertainment and media has weaponized their altruism against them, so that they feel guilty for things they’ve never done, they feel like they should punish people who never did them any harm, and they think this will lead to a better world.

My beat down on the idiot woman in the Washington post did not have time to get into the worst part of this: they honestly think all men are guilty.  That there is some sort of patriarchy in which all men participate.  The idea is bizarre and impossible — even in real patriarchies, the women are part of what keeps the other women down — but they’ve been told it’s so by “very smart” (indoctrinated or propagandists) people and they believe.

They don’t expect the results they get, because their whole picture of the world is based on fables, part Marxist theocracy and part “things the media feels good saying.”  Obama might have meant to — did mean to — immiserate America, but he honestly believed it would make the rest of the world better off, because no one in his circles ever questioned the closed pie fallacy (for some reason my fingers wanted to type fappacy. Let it stand.) So he thought if America had less the rest of the world would be better off.

They are sincere, or at least some number of them are.

Which doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Giving them power would be like putting Martians in charge of our polity.

All this to say don’t get cocky.  Work and vote like your life depends on it.  It very well might.

People in the past were not callous monsters.  The modern leftist is not special.

Okay, one or two might be special (how do I know?) but they are not particularly and amazingly kind.  Throwing their weight around on twitter to show how much they care for the “underprivileged” (a revolting word that denotes that someone is in need of more private law applying to them only) doesn’t make them wonderful.  And their ancestors were not horrible because they verbalized their tender notions better.

The funny thing is that if they had verbalized what was considered an admirable sentiment in their time more, the left would probably hate them for it.

I only know this because not only was I raised in a society very different from the one I live in (though already unimaginably wealthy by historical standards) but I work in the past a lot.  (Okay, not as much as I used to, but we’ve already set the last two books of the Shakespeare series and the rest of the Tudor queens books on my schedule for next year.) This means I am aware of how the past is intensely different from the present.

Humans adapt to the conditions they live under.  We’re highly adaptable creatures.  And if you think that conditions in the past were always “more or less” like middle class America (I run into this a lot, mostly in books written by women a little younger than I) you have no notion how different even the early twentieth century could be.

Take the village I grew up in.  Yes, I know. I was born past the mid century mark.  Yeah.  But you see, I was born under a national socialist regime.  While the Portuguese regime – regardless of what you read in the news here, or the even the history books here – was not as actively lethal as even the Spanish and considerably less actively lethal than any other socialist regime of its time, it was still socialist.  Socialism kills.  It mostly kills by stopping initiative, effort and individual creativity.  Little by little it leaches the society it commandeers, making everyone poorer, and slowing down the normal march of innovation.

You’ve seen – I’ve recently seen – pictures from behind the iron curtain at the time it fell.  It’s impossible not to think it’s like a time capsule to the 1940s. Only dirtier, dingier, and falling apart more.

When I was a child, the place I grew up looked like a mishmash of the Roman Empire and the 1930s America.  (The Roman Empire only because Portugal was once a part of Rome, and … well, it’s sometimes debatable whether Rome really did fall in anything but the administrative bureaucracy sense.)

The most common crime was people stealing clothes from the line.  If you’re nodding along with that and going “Well, in certain parts of America people steal shoes and leather jackets”, you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick.  The clothes stolen were often not just home made and worn, but they were also often patched. They were still valuable to people who had nothing else to protect them from the elements.  This is almost unimaginable when every thrift store in America sells (sometimes new) clothes for pennies. We have no concept for it. It’s quite literally alien.

Or let me illustrate how close to the bone we lived in another way: mom’s business was to design and make (though sometimes she hired people to help with the making) entire wardrobes for wealthy people. Because – like writing – it was a business of peaks and throughs, she bought a knitting machine which she could use to knit sweaters for the not-so-wealthy when business was down.  Now, the people she knit sweaters for were wealthy farmers, people of some substance.  Only about half the time did she get new wool with which to knit.  The rest of the time, they brought her a sweater and expected her to take it apart, remove the most worn threads, re-dye it and knit it in another shape.

More? Sure.  Once you had gone through all your clothes to the point you couldn’t wear them any more, you either sold them to the rags man, or if they were canvas or some sturdier fabric, you cut them up, dyed them, and had the rug-weaver make a rag rug from them.  (For some reason my family ran on rag rugs so we usually did this.)

Yes, food was about the same thing, though fortunately no one recycled it.  We mostly ate what we grew (what Heilein so aptly described as “root, hog or die.”) and though my family was solidly middle class meat (as opposed to fish, which this being a Mediterranean country was dirt cheap) was a Sunday dish.

I’m not saying this to tell you how hard I had it.  Compared to my parents’ time, not to mention my grandparents’ time we were incredibly wealthy. We didn’t go hungry, and we had antibiotics and could afford doctors.

I’m saying this to say that having a glimpse – just a glimpse – into the past, I know how different it was.

The same thing applies to my research.  Granted, Tudor England was a little more turmoil-y than your average era, but one of the things I read to get the rhythm of the language was the diary of a woman who had three husbands executed for treason, and who only had two of ten children survive. The interesting thing is the insane amount of work this woman – a nobleman btw – did every day, which she recorded with scrupulous care.

Even for someone who had a cook and servants, the maintaining of clothes, making sure herbs and meat were preserved, and supervising things like baking, was an insane amount of work, which makes those of us who run a business and raised children feel like the laziest creatures imaginable.

Now picture living like that.  Ignore the political jeopardy, even (though it took up an enormous amount of mental cycles) because Tudor England was crazy.  Concentrate on a society where if you don’t make sure everything (including the water, which doesn’t come from faucets) is clean, your entire family can die of typhus, or worse, where if you don’t keep clothes mended your baby will be carried off of a chill, where if you don’t work as hard as you can, you’re going hungry.  (Which weirdly in Elizabethan England could still apply to some ranks of noblemen.  Elizabeth herself is said to have grown up hungry and ragged when out of favor.)

Did these people spend all their time worrying about the plight of “insert minority here”?  Nope.  The amazing thing is that as far back as we go, people were still charitable.  Okay, it might be a religious obligation, but at least from what we can find from primary sources, people still seemed to have the charitable impulses we have.  They didn’t like to see other people suffer, and they felt the need to help within their means.

Sure, a lot of them demanded at least some effort from those being helped.  The whole point of helping the “deserving poor” (it was much the same in the village, btw) and letting the “undeserving” go, which the left thinks is so offensive, is in fact essential when you have limited resources.  If you help the “underserving”, you’re going to denude yourself uselessly.  When these people are done, they’ll still be as poor as ever, while you’ll also be poor.

But – the left says – this means a moral judgement.  How can you judge?

You can judge very easily.  Chronically poor people, those who won’t help themselves or shift to improve their lives can’t be helped.  Yeah, sure, it might be because they’re discriminated against for other reasons.  Perhaps it is because they’re ill.  Perhaps micro-aggressions hold them down.

That’s nice.  A society that lives close to the bone is not going to care about all that.  They’re going to help those who can be helped and let the others go. Because when you only have a little to spare, you can’t afford to give it away to no effect.

What brought about this rant is that I just read a Pride and Prejudice Variation written by someone who swallowed Dickens hook line and barbed socialist sinker.

Dickens was an amazing writer.  What he was not was an historian or an impartial observer.  What he put in his books has tainted people’s perception of the past and encouraged the cardinal “socialist virtue” of envy.  It causes people to think those richer than themselves are callous bastards.  It teaches people to see the past through that lens.

This book was almost walled when the woman assured us that the middle and upper classes did not care about the disappearance of a serving-woman.

It wasn’t many years after that the murder of a series of prostitutes set Victorian England aflutter, and yes, that included the upper and middle classes.

In the same way she waxes pathetic about how death was common among the poor in the Regency.  B*tch, death was common in the Regency, period.  If your entitled, propagandized ass were plopped down in a society with no antibiotics and uncertain house-heating, you’d learn really quickly how common.  Young ladies in the upper reaches of society routinely made two baby shrouds as part of their trousseau.  They were expected to lose at least that many children.  And while we’re talking of children, yeah, death in child birth was really common too.  As was death in any of the male occupations which, as is true throughout history, took them outside the house. Even noblemen were around horses a lot, and spent quite a bit of time – if they were worth their salt – managing their own lands, fraught occupations in a time when any wound could turn “septic” and any cold could turn “putrid” and carry you off.

Yeah. The people in these close-to-the-bone societies didn’t give money to people who’d waste it.  They sometimes set conditions on distributing largesse. And they had definite opinions on what behaviors were “good” and which “bad.”

They weren’t tight-ass moralists, as the left imagines. They were following percepts and behaviors proven to lead to success.  Mostly success in staying alive.

They were poorer than us and in that measure they were a lot more realistic.

They had to be. The other way lay death.

Spitting on our ancestors for not obsessing about gender-fluid trilobites is in fact the ultimate expression of “temporal privilege.” The left is yelling at people poorer, unhealthier and less able than themselves.

And they’re proud of it.

Sunday Book Plug

FROM M A ROTHMAN:  (I recently “read” this, and yes, I’ve had fights with him on various things, but he’s an excellent writer and this is an excellent book if you like thrillers and hard sf with a bit of romance.  It’s not much to say that this book has best seller quality. ) Primordial Threat.

The year is 2066 and the world is oblivious to the threat it faces.

The fate of humanity lies on the shoulders of Burt Radcliffe, the new head of NASA’s Near Earth Object program.

He’s been rushing the completion of DefenseNet, a ring of satellites that are both part of an early-warning system as well as the means to eliminate incoming threats.

Yet Burt knows that despite the world’s best efforts, nothing can be done about the alert he’s just received.

Coming out of deep space is a danger that’s been approaching since the dawn of time. A black hole. An unstoppable threat that promises death for all in its wake.

Dave Holmes was a modern-day Einstein. As the original architect of DefenseNet, he’d had visions of this Primordial Threat before he disappeared, yet he’d left behind no details on how the problem might be solved.

Can Holmes be found, and if so, will his solution even work?

The world has less than a year to find out.

FROM PAM UPHOFF:  Cooking Hot (The Directorate Book 10).

Tenth Story in the Directorate Series

A Novella, sequel to Project Dystopia

Ebsa Cloustuone is back from a perilous assignment, and in a sort of quarantine that’s going to keep him on the Embassy World for a few months until the Empire decides it’s safe for him—and the other survivors—to finally go home.

And someone has to feed all these people, so Ebsa’s back to work, cooking and feeding anyone who shows up hungry.

Including Ambassador Ashe, who sees a number of opportunities in the presence of a Warrior with a cooking hobby.

A challenge leads to a Multi-world Cookoff, that devolves into a spontaneous city-wide fair. Should be fun, right? Right?

FROM ALMA BOYKIN:  Daughter of the Pearl.

Count Chang wants glory. Leesan dreams of marrying. Neither can foresee the power that awaits them—or the danger.

Cloud-dancers use magic to keep the world in balance. But the Great Northern River ails, and strange, twisted and evil things move across the land. The humans along the river cannot see the danger, but the Great Sky Emperor does. He grows angry. His wrath will remake the world and none of the cloud-dancers want that.

Count Chang hears a rumor of a Chosen One living far to the south, the only human able to heal the river. Instead he finds a corrupted naga and Leesan, the unwanted third daughter. Valueless, cursed, ignorant, Leesan would be better off dead, or so her father’s mother insists. Instead Chang claims her and takes her north, to train the gifts she unknowingly carries.

Chang detests the idea of marrying. Leesan cannot imagine a woman with value of her own. Together they must find the cause of the river’s ailment and heal it. Evil lurks in the land, and it will take all their power, trust, and strength to do their duty and save the world from the Great Sky Emperor’s wrath.

That is, if they can.

MORE ALMA BOYKIN:  Imperial Magic: Merchant and Empire Book Three..

The Great Northern Emperor Returns!

Ewoud Rhonarida needs experience, or so his father insists. Tycho sends his son east, to the trading center of Kehlibar vlee. There, Ewoud must learn to balance deference with duty. When he fails, it costs one man his life and endangers more.

But Ewoud attracts the attention of the Great Northern Emperor. This could be a boon. Or it could signal the undoing of the Galnaar family.

Tycho labored to remain unnoticed. Will his son’s fame be the family’s ruin?

FROM DAVID BURKHEAD:  Roaming the Universes.

Epic journeys through space and time

Whether exploring the solar system in the near future or venturing to worlds of magic and mystery, these fifteen stories take you on a journey to other universes.

Included are stories from the FutureTech Industries series, from the Knights of Aerioch, and an assortment of stand-alone tales.

The stories may be short of length, but they are not short of wonder.

So climb aboard and see what these other worlds have to offer.

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: violent.

* Sorry to everyone, but particularly Amanda for being so late with this.  I woke up late and have been trying to do wash which is very late, so it’s all my stuff, but you know…  my fault. – SAH*

Stop Mass Hysteria – by Amanda S. Green

Two weeks ago, the media was filled with so-called reporting, much of it demanding Brett Kavanaugh not be confirmed as the next justice of the Supreme Court. Anyone who dared question the claims of Christine Blasey Ford and the other women (and, by the way, isn’t that assuming their gender? Did the media mavens ask if they wanted to be called women, “she”, “her”, etc?) was labelled as sexist and misogynist. We were told it was important to always believe the woman, no matter how unbelievable her story might be.

I woke this morning fully expecting to find the media in an uproar about First Lady Melania Trump’s interview last night. After all, the press has made a sport of doing all they could to condemn or make fun of her. From her clothes to her accent to her stance on bullying, she has been one of their favorite punching bags. I haven’t seen the interview yet, but she must have knocked the proverbial ball out of the park because it is barely being mentioned this morning. Good on you, Mrs. Trump, good on you. I don’t envy you being married to a man who is not only the President of the United States and one of the most polarizing personalities around.

And that left me with what to write about this morning. As much “fun” as it was to poke fun at Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery, I couldn’t face reading more of it this week. (And thanks—I think—to Uncle Lar for sending me the entire book.) Real life has left me with little brain power for reading anything that needs much critical thinking. I wasn’t in the mood for another liberal tome, even if it would give much snark material. Honestly, I nearly contacted Sarah and said there’d be no post today because my brain had taken a vacation.

Then, as I was checking Amazon for something we need for the house last night, several “recommended” books caught my eye. One in particular had a blurb interesting enough that I downloaded the sample. It very well might become my next full review here. (Yes, I will get back to The Coddling of the American Mind. But that may have to wait until Mom’s able to do more on her own than she is now. To say I am exhausted mentally and physically is putting it mildly.

What book, you ask? Stop Mass Hysteria by Michael Savage. The subtitle pretty much says it all: America’s Insanity from the Salem Witch Trials to the Trump Witch Hunt.

I’ll admit I was skeptical initially. While Trump has, on the whole, done a better job than I expected, I’m still not a complete fan. I wish someone would take his phone away from him, deactivate his Twitter account and coach him better on when to keep his mouth shut. But he has managed to get a great deal accomplished, despite some of the most hateful and hate-filled Congress critters and their supporters doing all they can to stop him.

The blurb, once you move beyond the intro bit was enough to have me download the sample. What do you think?

Since Donald Trump’s historic ascendance to the presidency, American politics have reached a boiling point. Social and economic issues, even national security, have become loud, violent flashpoints for political rivals in the government, in the media and on the streets. This collective derangement has a name: mass hysteria.

In his new book, STOP MASS HYSTERIA, #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Savage not only deconstructs the Left’s unhinged response to traditional American values like borders, language, and culture, but takes the reader on an unprecedented journey through mass hysteria’s long history in the United States. From Christopher Columbus to the Salem Witch trials to the so-called “Red Scares” of the 1930s and 40s and much more, Dr. Savage recounts the many times collective insanity has gripped the American public – often prompted by sinister politicians with ulterior motives.

Dr. Savage provides vital context for the common elements of dozens of outbreaks of mass hysteria in the past, their causes, their short and long-term effects, and the tactics of the puppet masters who duped gullible masses into fearing threats both real and imagined. By shining a light on the true nature and causes of American mass hysteria in the past, Savage provides an insightful look into who and what is causing dangerous unrest in our lives – and why.

What surprised me is this book is published by Center Street, part of the Hachette Book Group. I guess they have gotten tired of publishing liberal drivel that doesn’t come close to earning out and that finds its way to the discount shelves in weeks, not months, after release.

Anyway, as I said, I downloaded the sample and started reading. I’ll admit to being pleasantly surprised so far. As much as I didn’t want to read another book praising Obama or Clinton, either of them, I also didn’t want a book that did nothing but fawn over Trump. The man is doing a better job than expected but he is far from a saint. So imagine my surprise to find, at least in the first chapter, a book that appears to be pro-Trump but not to the point of blindly following him. Better yet, Savage’s writing is engaging, at least so far, the topic is interesting enough to keep me reading.

I mean, who can begin a book with a negative attitude when it is dedicated to “the men and women in law enforcement who are on the front lines protecting the rest of us from the violent, radical, left-wing street criminals whose goal is to tear our society into pieces”?

Wondering if he would keep that tenor in the upcoming pages, I started reading.

Chapter One’s title is “We’ve Reached a New Mass Hysteria Inflection Point.” I think anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock in a deep, dark cave and who has at least a single working brain cell would agree. It’s been a long time since this nation has seen the likes of the antics we’ve witness since Trump took office. When you have sitting Congresscritters calling for their followers to all but attack members of Congress, when you have a former First Lady who also happens to be a former Senator and former SecState basically calling for open insurrection, you know fear and hysteria are in the air. Like any good carrion feeder, they smell it and do their best to drive the frenzy without thought or care for the consequences.

But what does Savage have to say?

Hatred, “the most accessible and comprehensible of all unifying agents” is “spreading like a virus into all-too-willing-hosts.” This hatred has unified many liberals, no matter what their differences. This is a hatred of Trump, of his policies and his followers. It isn’t the only case of mass hysteria in our country right now (look at #MeToo, for example) but, according to Savage, it is “likely the most destructive”.

He cites three examples, “three of the most malicious acts in living memory”, as having been carried out by the left.

First, AntiFA’s publication of the home addresses of ICE agents. Savage appears to have little use for AntiFA thugs (oops, did I just use a bad word?), calling them “that group of lawless, self-styled, anti-facist anarchists masquerading as ‘activists’.” Can’t say I disagree. Their actions put not only these agents but their families in danger. But that doesn’t matter, at least not to much of the media because of Trump and feelz and whatever other false justifications they can come up with.

Savage’s second example or, as he calls it, “obscenity was the odious suggestion by Peter Fonda. . .that Barron Trump, son of the President of the United States, be locked in a cage with pedophiles.” As Savage points out, the media was strangely silent when Fonda made his suggestion. Oh, there was some coverage of it but nothing like there would have been under the previous administration. Can you imagine the outrage, the demands for not only FBI and Secret Service investigation but Congressional investigations as well had Fonda said that about the Obama daughters? Yes, there is a double-standard and it is alive and well and living in our MSM.

As for the third example, it comes to us from that paragon (cough) of Congress, Maxine Waters. During a toy drive, and on many other occasions, she has egged her followers on to “push back” at the Trump administration, members of his Cabinet, etc. She has done everything but put guns in their hands.

As Savage asks, “Where is the outrage? More importantly, where is the humanity? Where is the decency?

“It is gone. It is lost in the sea of mass hysteria that dominates our world in a way and at a level that history has never before seen. Can it be stopped before we have an actual civil war? Can it be stopped before America is lost?

“The question is a real one.”

And it is a question that’s been debated here at ATH a number of times.

But don’t get the wrong idea. The book isn’t all about what’s happening now. Savage writes about contemporary and historical cases of mass hysteria in the book. One thing, however, is the same in all of those cases: hatred. He also notes that “today’s mass hysteria must end before it ends us.” Truer words haven’t been spoken, at least not for a very long time.

There is more, much more in just the first chapter of the book. As I said, it caught my eye and now it’s caught my interest. The next chapter is about the history and mechanics of mass hysteria. It’s followed by chapters on how mass hysteria is the secret weapon of anarchists, how mass hysteria forms and spreads, etc.

So, are you guys interested enough in the book for me to finish reading it and to do several post about it? Or would you rather I look at something else?

All I know for sure is I will be finishing the book or trying to. So far, I’ve seen nothing to warn that Savage is going to go off the rails and turn the book into a Cult of Trump sort of thing the way so many of the Left’s books are Cult of Obama or Cult of Hillary or Cult of Bernie books.

(All quotes come from the Kindle version, preview edition, first chapter of Stop Mass Hysteria by Michael Savage.)