Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Sorry this is so late, but apparently I had to write the world’s longest post for Mad Genius Club.  I needed to do it because despite the award this has been week from hell, and the only way to explain things I’ve chosen to do (now) and say without besmirching the innocent is to give the whole history.  Also I’m tired of people trying to “defend” me and making things much worse.
I don’t need people to defend me, because even though I made mistakes, they weren’t KNOWING mistakes.  For the rest, such as the quality of my writing, I make no claim.  How do you judge quality but by sales, anyway.  I writes a bit, though, and intend to continue.  Anyway, if you want to read this post, go here.

I did not forget Stephanie’s post, and it will be out tomorrow.  I would not post it this late, because I owe her better.

That post above is the example of a niche within our world today.  KJA used to say that only writers understand other writers, because by every metric the business if fucking nuts.  It is that.

I’m sick and tired of people sending me typos, critiquing my choice of cover OR my choice of audio book reader on the traditional published books.  I can’t fix the typos, I don’t get a say on either cover or reader, you’re complaining to the wrong person.  Ditto for “why did you change your name” and “why are you writing mysteries now.” Over twenty years (this month.  20 years from my first novel sale) I’ve done what I needed to do to stay published.

But I remember being “just” a reader and not getting it either.  Because it’s a niche. Very few people traditionally published in the long scheme of things, and it’s a very secretive (and a wee bit crazy) business.  Only writers (and editors, though sometimes I DO wonder about that) know what’s going on.

The same applies in time.  Part of the reason the idiots on the left call everyone nazi and march in the streets beating up people who don’t attack them first, is that they live in the niche of a rich and secure country and have never actually met a real Nazi.  They don’t understand the ethos of rising eugenics and national socialism which infected even the US, or how misunderstood Darwin led to the regular person on the street thinking that eugenics “made sense.”

A middle class writer — not particularly right or left — who wrote The Green Man of  Graypec in the thirties decried how our civilization had fallen, in his future history, for lack of “eugenics hygiene.”  He didn’t follow it to its ultimate conclusion, which yeah, kind of involves ovens.  He probably didn’t think of it.  But treating people as widgets in groups leads to dehumanization and from there to ovens it’s a straight line and the skids are greased.

The children who were maleducated in history live in a niche where Marxism is the way and always wins.

But everyone is in a niche.  This morning I was reading a mystery set during the blitz and written during the blitz.  The author had later added an intro in which she talked of setting up a meeting place in London, at the restaurant, or if it’s not there, at the movie theater.  If that’s gone, at x hotel.

I was born 17 years after the end of WWII and to me it was already history.  And I already knew we would win.  I have no idea what it’s like to grow up under the threat of what seemed from the outside the all-conquering German army. Like my kids have no clue what it is like to grow up during the cold war.  And you can’t make them FEEL it.  You can give them some idea, with stories and history, but you can’t take them there, not really.

This is the tragedy of history and why we so often repeat our mistakes as a species, fast or slow.

The glory?  We survive.  More or less functionally, humans survive.  And honestly, Heinlein was right.  With some disgusting intervals at certain times or places, the future has been better than the past.

So go to the future.  It’s better there.  And help build it the way you want.  Oh, and survive.  Never give up, never surrender.

It’s all you can do.

Yes, I now, this is a weird post to be writing the week I won the Dragon.  But other than that win — and it’s not QUITE real yet — it was a profoundly sh*tty weekend.  We were away to write, and I got semi-ill (long story) and couldn’t sleep and therefore didn’t write much.  I did jog the novel out of a flat spot, but honestly, 5k words all weekend sucks. And I’m not even sure what I wrote is useable.  I just know it’s a path out of the place I was in that wasn’t working.  Even if I end up re-writing it.

Meanwhile the wave of weird breakages, both electronic and mechanical continues.  Which is weird by itself.

It’s not the first time in our lives things don’t work as we planned.  Of course it isn’t.

All of traditional publishing is an exercise in things going not as planned.  I fact, there was no relation between how much work I put into something and how it did.  Well, that might be all of publishing.  I have several indie friends who tell me that the books that sell best are not the ones they thought would/worked most at/like best.  It was just more so in trad, because no matter how much heart and soul you put into a book, if it doesn’t get enough of a print run/isn’t available/doesn’t get to the shelf (and that’s not even JUST publisher malfeasance.  The entire system of distribution had a lot of fail points.) And there’s nothing an author can do.

We’ve had other weekends before too, where we were supposed to JUST write, but that didn’t happen, or almost didn’t happen, including but not limited to when an old friend was taken to the hospital and tried to die during one of those. (When not on phone for news, we mostly slept, that one.)

In fact, we’ve found there are some hotels so deeply associated with family holidays and fun that I can’t work while at them.  All I want to do is go to the zoo, go for walks, and generally goof off.

There is ONE hotel in the Denver area (so far) which is JUST for writing weekends and so has a higher success rate. But even that isn’t infallible

And then there are all the other plans.  I swear we gave up on staycations, because if we plan a week at home, going out to eat and not doing anything we don’t want to it never fails that we have a disaster or three that forces us to do mostly unpleasant things for a week.

And yet, we still plan.  We have to. If we didn’t plan, I’d never get anything done.

This year has been a year of plans: short range, long range and incidental blowing apart in our faces.

Which makes the year very difficult.

But since the world insists on not playing along with what I want and not behaving the way I like, there’s nothing I can do but dust myself off, pick myself up, and try again.

And sometimes, yes, the unplanned is good, like the Dragon (and before that the Prometheus for Darkship Thieves.)

So pardon me for this very late and weird post, while I dust mysel foff and get back to work.

It’s too early in the morning.

What winning the dragon did was effectively short circuit the last day of away-writing.   Also we went wild and crazy and had a whole scoop of ice cream.  Carbs these days have an effect similar to a hangover for me.

So I’m not going to write a blog post until I’m home which should be early afternoon.

Ya’ll can wait that long, right?

Good.

See you on the flip side.

UPDATE: We’re home safe, much later than we thought.  So, post tomorrow?

For this announcement:  Kevin J. Anderson and myself won the Dragon Award for Alternate History 2018.

For

Yesterday I only had facebook.  And today I have no access to email, so I can get neither the word for the challenge nor your books.  I think we’ll have a book pimping Tuesday or something.

We’ve been having breakfast at a place called Wendell’s.  Writing has been happening.  I will have a real post tomorrow.

And here’s a picture for a writing challenge.

Amanda’s post will be tomorrow, unless I’m incommunicado.  More on that later. She didn’t have it ready, because Real Life attacked her.  So…

Anyway.

As some of you have noticed, I’ve been writing a lot more for PJMedia.  Partly this is to try to cover the monumental hole left in our finances when the college decided younger son wasn’t eligible for more loans (because he’s taking two majors and three minors.)  Yes, he could graduate in one, but at this point it would take the same time because of administrative stuff, so instead he made a plan to graduate in one and a half years.

The problem is one of his minors — aerospace engineering — has a lot of graduate level classes, which hurt the pocket book even more.

The other problem is that my income is irregular.  As in, yeah, sure, I get a decent income, but I’m at the mercy of things like the book publication being delayed; when royalties come; etc and meanwhile tuition is due every semester.

Also, honestly, there’s a bunch of things we need to do on the house.  We bought it as a short sale, which means maintenance had been neglected for years and also they let their cat pee everywhere (which we didn’t notice for various reasons.  Mostly because the house smelled so much of pot you couldn’t smell anything else) and our cats are making those spots a massive problem (hence last week’s painting jag because if you killzee the marked walls, they leave them alone (so the issue is not OUR cats as such.)

So, I’ve been pushing on the PJ to the exclusion of fiction.  The problem is two fold: it doesn’t hit the “writing” to me so I am having “vivid fiction dreams’ which btw is not easy to sleep through.  And I’m sacrificing long term money (fiction pays more in the long run) for short term gain.  I’m also losing fans of the fiction for not continuing series/etc.

Also, honestly, 3 to 4 posts a week is too much.  One or two is okay and I don’t even notice (and it’s exposure) with the occasional 3 when I have something to say about something that really riles me.  But I can’t support another almost-daily blog. I’m not quitting PJ, I’m just going back to a more relaxed schedule and prioritizing my fiction.

Husband, who is my minder has noticed all this.  We’ll figure out a way around the financial crunch (of course these things come at the worst possible time) but my main focus is to do fiction from now on.  To initiate that, I’m going away for a writing weekend this weekend.

I’m going to a remote area and I might or might not have phone service.  Reports are mixed.  If I have service, I’ll put Amanda’s post up tomorrow and the regular Sunday post.  If not Monday evening I’ll let you know how it went.

Meanwhile, I think husband is right.  This falls within the law of “day jobs” ie. in my case, take a day job when needed, but no one that interferes with my ability to write, because long term that’s what has paid/is likely to pay for me.

It’s easy to lose your long term priorities in the fores of “must do now.”  It’s time I reset.

Hopefully the weekend will do that.

Let that be a lesson to you on how easy it is to get out of track without even noticing.  Keep an eye on your goals, or they’ll vanish beyond a false horizon.

Sanity Check by Thomas Kendall

Am I the only one weirdly relieved by the allegations against Trump?

Look—the Left has been digging into Trump so intensively from every angle for so long, something semi-real was going to come out eventually. I have a strong suspicion that one of life’s dirty secrets is that nobody makes it to the level of president without some skeletons buried somewhere.

Still— could be a lot worse, if this is what they’ve got. I mean, let’s say Trump paid off a porn star and some other girls on the side? So who gives a damn? I’m not even going to parse arguments about, oh-technically-his-lawyer-paid-them-and-Trump-paid-his-lawyer. That’s where the campaign finance argument comes in, but honestly, that’s a sideshow and it’s obvious it’s a sideshow. The Left wouldn’t play it up or really care at all, except it’s new fodder for a ten-second hate. Enough of these, they figure— enough tying random bits of yarn between the various push-pins that mark the locations of all their other Trump-themed cry-a-thons— and the resulting cat’s cradle will magically weave an attractive tapestry. I presume of the socialist paradise we’ll all unthinkingly head for—maybe it’ll be Ocasio-Cortez’s [Tom, if you insist on misspelling Occasional Cortex, I won’t let you do any more guest posts. – SAH]  slasher-smile and slightly over-protuberant eyeballs. Nothing like some natural charisma, eh?

I can’t help but notice how conveniently this latest waterfall of tears gives them an excuse to pretend to be high-toned and principled while actually pearl-clutching—and trying to encourage pearl-clutching—over the idea that he paid off women he slept with. Because forgive me my doubts, but we’re talking about the party that ran Hillary “Pay-To-Play” Clinton, who was all but handing a pricing menu to foreign leaders she met with before the 2016 election. I have trouble taking Democrats seriously when they find a sudden new respect for campaign finance laws. But muh illegal activities! Said the people who let Hillary Clinton skate on breaking so many laws regarding national security with her bathroom server, she could have temporarily rebranded her campaign as a 24 hour-a-day, 7 day-a-week show called “Hillary on Ice” (Not to be confused with the Left’s immigration, for want of a better term, plan, “Democrats off ICE”). But then if Hillary Clinton can dodge FOIA requests, well, that’s probably best for the Democratic party, and pretty much everyone who knows that that’s likely why she did it, also, shall we say, appreciates that political reality. Don’t even get me started about supporting the federal government in doing some of the most blatant election tampering in favor of the Democrats – maybe the worst perversion of the electoral system this side of the 3^rd world. Law has a special meaning for Democrats: it’s another word for “institutionalized political warfare”. Going after Democrats with it is therefore nonsensical, and by the same token, we haven’t got a lot of reason to respect their opinions on it.

So it ain’t about that. But that’s okay, because as I said, it was kind of transparently obvious. So, okay, fine, Democrats. You want to talk ethics? You want to delve into the “what won’t he stoop to” strata and see what’s there? Okay, lets do that. Pull out that backhoe. I’ve always wanted to listen to moralizing about conduct with women from the party of Bill Clinton, JFK and Ted Kennedy. I mean, Seriously? And speaking of that last one, say what you want, Stormy still has a pulse. And she got paid, not just threatened and intimidated the way Bill Clinton’s old flames did. Even in scandals, Trump manages to look better in a side-by-side comparison, for Christ’s sake. Being a high-ranking Democrat’s ex-bit-on-the-side is less lucrative and more dangerous.

Just saying, as hills to die on go, Democrats picking this one is one step short of accusing Trump of being too focused on centralized projects managed from Washington. Oh, you can make the case, but if you were literally the party of giant Washington-managed projects, maybe it wouldn’t be your best play, right?

Anyway, even on a practical level, look, forgive me, I just don’t see a whole Hell of a lot to get exercised about here. Breaking news! Wealthy playboy billionaire playboys around and then pays women off not to talk about it using wealth! Also dropped rocks fall to the ground! And water makes things wet! We are making some exciting, totally groundbreaking discoveries here today!

I don’t feel myself suddenly wanting to rob the rich to give to the politically connected at this news, but who knows, maybe that’s just me. One of the most confusing things about the American electorate sometimes is that it’s not always particularly predictable. To me, the argument there comes down to: “Oh, Trump practiced marital infidelity. Thank the lord there’s an alternative party with equally bad problems with marital infidelity but way scarier problems regarding how they’ve managed it. Sign me up for huge taxes again—the economy will soon be so stagnant I’ll pay very little either way. That’ll show him! I’ll starve to death if I have to. Won’t that make him feel bad!”. From where I stand it all sounds stupider than trying to eat grilled rocks. With a plastic knife.  And no other utensils. Who knows how it plays on main-street, though. The press hopes it plays well.

But Democrats, let’s just suppose, by some tragic long shot, it doesn’t. Whatever might go wrong? Well, I’ll make this easy for you. Let’s just dispense with the idea there’s any serious journalism anymore regarding Trump. Hey, you. Yeah, you, in the audiovisual department of the Democratic party. You want to really damage Trump where I’m concerned? You might want to show examples of him supporting, well, your policies. Or really just any bad policies. I mean, honestly, there’s more air between he and I on the subject of protectionism than anything as is. If the “trade war” ends up being just a trade war, and not a complicated play to force re-negotiated trade agreements out of China—and if China doesn’t re-negotiate more favorable trade agreements, then, well, de facto that’s what it is—I can see how he could be fairly criticized for that. Not saying it’ll make me vote for Democrats—that probably won’t happen for a while, depending on how long it takes your party to get a mass prescription for anti-psychotics, put down the socialism and back away slowly. It’d make a Hell of a lot more progress towards that goal than you’re making right now, though.

But criticizing his personal conduct? Honeychild, you have no room to talk on that subject anymore. I don’t know if you’ve had room for a couple of decades now. Certainly not when you’re still actively having feverish wetdreams of how you almost elected the most corrupt politician maybe ever to hold office, if it hadn’t been for that meddling Trump and his little voters too. In any case, I voted for Trump to be president, not pope (though given what we have now—but I digress). I’m not asking him to be a moral and spiritual leader. Given where Washington has brought us already in terms of limiting freedom, increasing regulations, raising taxes and raising spending, I have more important things to worry about than Trump’s little black book. As long as Trump looks like the most viable way of stopping all that nonsense—and there’s no contest, really, when you stand him up next to someone like Ocasio-Cortez—he’s  still going to have my support.

And I don’t think I’m alone.

*For those putting his up at home, this took installing a different browser and pasting as text (after already copying and pasting as plain text on a text editor) under the html tab.  I hope this is not the new normal, but if it is, at least I know how to do it. – SAH*

Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano, Part IV, A Vulcanology Primer By Stephanie Osborn

Excerpted from Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano, © 2018

http://www.stephanie-osborn.com
Images in this article are public domain unless otherwise noted.

Geological History — Known Yellowstone Eruptions
There have been 3 known “Yellowstone” eruptions with detectable welded-ash (which forms a rock called “tuff”) strata, all of which occurred in approximately the same location:
1) Island Park/Huckleberry Ridge
2) Henry’s Fork/Mesa Falls
3) Yellowstone/Lava Creek

A map depicting the ash bed strata for all three major Yellowstone supereruptions, along with the Long Valley eruption’s Bishop ash bed, and the Mt. St. Helens ash fall, for comparison.
Credit: USGS.

The Island Park/Huckleberry Ridge Eruption
The Huckleberry Ridge Eruption is the oldest eruption at the current location, some 2.1 million years ago. The caldera formed by this eruption is known as the Island Park Caldera; the stratum of tuff (also “tufa”; a kind of rock composed of welded ash — upon landing, the ash was still hot enough to be partly molten, and the particles literally stuck together, or “welded,” into a single rock layer; it is often porous, fine-grained, but may contain larger, pebble-like particles, especially close to the eruptive source) is the Huckleberry Ridge Tuff.

Etruscan paving stones composed of tuff from the Italian peninsula.
Credit: Patafisik, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6918192, public domain.

One of the world’s largest calderas, the Island Park Caldera is at a minimum 50x40mi (80x65km) up to possibly as large as 60x37mi (95x60km) and possibly up to ~0.6mi (1km) deep. This would have been bigger than the state of Rhode Island. The eruption was 2,500x greater than Mt. St. Helens.

Exposed Huckleberry Ridge tuff strata (there were several ashfalls in quick succession here) along the Gardner River near Osprey Falls, above Mammoth Hot Springs in WY.
Note vehicles for scale.
Credit: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/EPO/yellowstone2002/workshop/huckleberry/index.html

The Henry’s Fork/Mesa Falls Eruption
The Mesa Falls eruption occurred 1.3 million years ago and produced the Henry’s Fork caldera along with the Mesa Falls Tuff. The Henry’s Fork megacaldera is approximately 18x23mi (11x14km) in dimension, though some argue for a rounder shape, anywhere from 10-20mi (16-32km) in diameter.
This was “only” a VEI 7 eruption, but partly due to its density, and partly its overall size, it is considered a supervolcano eruption.

Exposed Mesa Falls tuff at south rim of the Island Park Caldera/Henry’s Fork Caldera overlap; near Ashton, ID. Note vehicle for scale.
Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesa_Falls_Tuff#/media/File:Ashton_Quarry.jpg

The Yellowstone/Lava Creek Eruption
This eruption is the most recent supereruption, and the only one dubbed “Yellowstone”; it occurred “only” ~630,000-640,000 years ago and produced the current Yellowstone caldera, creating the Lava Creek Tuff formation. The current caldera measures 53x28mi (85x45km). The current caldera rim ranges from some 100ft (30m) tall up to nearly a third of a mile (500m) high. This was without doubt a VEI 8 eruption.

Tuff Cliff in Yellowstone National Park, showing an exposed section of the Lava Creek tuff.
Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_Creek_Tuff#/media/File:Tuff_cliff_yellowstone_national_park.jpg

NOTE: It is essential to realize that the maps depict THE EXTENT OF THE TUFF STRATUM FOR EACH ERUPTION, and do NOT indicate the full extent of the ASH FALL. As aforementioned, tuff is formed when the falling ash is still hot enough to be partly molten, so the particles stick together when they contact. Ash can and does fall far beyond the extent of the formation of tuff — the ash plume from a Yellowstone super-eruption would be caught up in the jet streams and swept worldwide.

Other Yellowstone Activity
So. Three honkin’ big eruptions from the Yellowstone hotspot, huh? Well, really, that’s not a huge record. There’s not that much to worry about, is there?
Except for the fact that the Yellowstone hotspot has been busy. And it’s been around for MILLIONS of years.
Yellowstone hotspot eruptions can be tracked from their current location in the corner where Wyoming, Montana, & Idaho meet, all the way back in a southwest direction nearly to the northeast corner of California — as many as a dozen or more! The oldest known eruption dates to at least 16-18 million years ago.

Location of some of the previous Yellowstone-hotspot calderas, with ages indicated.
Credit: Kelvin Case at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29981303

A different version of the map, showing other areal features, including a few members of the Cascade volcanic chain, and the Columbia Flood Basalts, a trap eruption which may or may not be associated with the hotspot.
Credit: Lori Snyder, Department of Geology, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, via USGS
https://people.uwec.edu/jolhm/eh2/erickson/history.html

Also realize that the Rocky Mountains orogeny (mountain-building) ended some 55 million years ago, meaning they were already formed before the Yellowstone hotspot got to them…yet, aside from some resurgent domes, etc., there are essentially NO mountains in the hotspot track — at least within the megacalderas.
The mantle plume/hotspot is NOT moving relative to the Earth’s surface overall, nor with respect to the Earth’s core. Plate tectonics creates the appearance that it is moving, when it is really the North American plate moving across the hotspot. The track of past calderas punched through the plate is therefore an inverse record of the direction of movement of the North American plate. The North American Plate is moving roughly southwest to west-southwest, with slight changes in direction over time. This accounts for the direction and slight curvature of the caldera track.

To obtain a copy of Kiss Your Ash Goodbye: The Yellowstone Supervolcano by Stephanie Osborn.

I’m not dead or even asleep.
I’ve been fighting with this for three hours now, trying to post Stephanie’s post.  Even when I remove all pictures (I always have to do that anyway) and try to copy paste JUST the text, even when I rinse it though another text editor, WordPress interprets it as a broken picture.  In HTML view it shows the whole thing tagged as an image.
There’s no Earthly reason for this, and I’ve rebooted three times, and tried other computers and it ALWAYS does the same.
If I remove all tags, I have to format it all by hand and I simply am not in a state to do that today (I have some kind of stomach bug or food poisoning, and everything is swaying before my eyes.)
I’m going to do the MGC post and then return here, and see if I can get this to behave.

For years, being a conservative or — in my case — a libertarian (no step on snek) in the arts, in writing, in publishing, in any cultural enterprise was an exercise in going insane.

You knew what was going on in private, you knew how hard they could hit on what absolutely minor and ridiculous points, but the public in general was not aware of any bias, and if you complained, they thought you were paranoid.

This was particularly the case when you were small potatoes, or  when what they were doing was rejecting short stories or asking you to change your books.

Sure, I could sense the principles behind it, and how changing my books would make them say something I didn’t want to, but at the same time there was the weird feeling “um… is this true?  Or am I imagining it?  I’m a small-time writer, writing in a tiny-small-time field.  How could they possibly micromanage it to this extent?”

It was particularly hard for me because I grew up under socialist (national then international) regimes, with occasional outbreaks of outright Ocasio-Cortez er… I mean Communism.  This both allowed me to see the holes in it (no, truly, even at 13 or so, studying Marxism in five high school courses will cause you to see the holes) and, once I’d decided I was against it (I was actually fairly left, in the US meaning until my mid-twenties.  Couldn’t help being.  Young, stupid, and raised in a soup of leftists “facts”) I started seeing all the little ways the establishment — educational, cultural, arts — pushed people towards the idea of for lack of a better term “the inevitable certainty of Marxist victory.” The inevitability and echo chamber are essential, because Marxism is not particularly convincing if you look at it.  If you’re sure it will triumph, though you’ll pick up a vast majority of “the scared” (which are way more than the “convinced”)who want to be eaten last or not at all by adopting the philosophy now and being strident.

So, coming from that background, my “feelers” detected all sorts of things.

In my entire — 34? well, if you count hidden pen names and work for hire more like 40 novels, but never mind — I had very few edits.  Mostly the books get copy edited, not edited.

About 3 books were “edited” which amounted to “remove this scene, move that one” “I don’t think this sentence says what you think it does” and “this will heighten tension.”  Those were as far as I could tell very innocuous.

Only two books had rewrite requests, and both of those, had I followed through on the rewrite would have changed the books completely, in one case yeah, to fit with feminist and “race” narrative (they wanted the Masai woman from the first book to accompany the two white guys to India on the adventure because “she’s as good as they are” — which no one was disputing, though perhaps less equipped for yet another culture change — and when I objected that if we took her to India we would get into issues of Indian racism, I was told that only whites were racist), and in another case to have my character LEAD rather than oppose the future analog of the French revolution.  My refusal to do those re-writes, because then the books would say what I didn’t want them to say severely damaged, if not broke, my relationship with the respective publishing houses. (Yes, and I know some of you will recognize the book and go, “but that was… it can’t be.”  What you don’t get is that I don’t have that big a name, and that the house isn’t MAJORITY libertarian/conservative.  It just allows it and it depends on who you’re actually dealing with.)

But this was all done covertly, behind the scenes, and of course none of us could talk.  First because we’d seem like paranoid loons.  I mean, we’re complaining about things no one saw.

Second, because we would never work in that town again.

As this started to change, so did the pressure on writers become more open and more obvious.

This case is… well, let’s say I’ve known more like this than not.  Houses are actually willing to lose money as long as they can micro-manage the message.

And boy, do they micro manage.  Yep, at that level.  None of their “intended” bright future can be questioned, not even the incidental bits, like “a female president wold be the best thing ever.” or “Leftists are always wonderful.”

And no, of course they’re not doing it on purpose, in the sense that they’re not trying to consciously push every little detail of the message.  That would be exhausting, and also require them to be super-geniuses (they aren’t.) I’ve known and been friends with a lot of lefties before the current frothing times.  Haven’t dropped them, though some of them have dropped me.  It’s not that they consciously police every detail.  It’s that they are immersed in this “vision” that includes every little detail of the socialist paradise and its coming, and they absorb the latest directive from the echo chamber. So when they see something against that, they flinch and want the painful part removed.  Like, in the French Revolution book, I suspect someone looked at how I was denying that equality of outcomes was a good thing, and got very upset “no, no, she’s supposed to be supporting these.” probably even considering what I had done an error, not an intended thing.

But that’s traditional, and look, guys, I have friends in journalism and in education, and I know they get the same exact pressures.  “No, no no.  You can’t teach that.  You must teach this.”  “No, you don’t want to report that.  Or at least remove this word.  Otherwise it gives people the wrong idea.”

Heck, sometimes headlines get changed and strange assemblies to discuss some current events get caught (so much of these when kids were in school.)

So here’s the bad news: our culture has been immersed for almost a 100 years in a cohesive, monolithic narrative.  A narrative that moved steadily left, with no relenting.  This is why those of us who are older than about 35 grew up in a world where voicing a dissenting — conservative or libertarian — opinion got you labeled “crazy”and “uneducated”.  If you were denying what everyone knew, confirmed multiply from unrelated fields like news, research (oh, so easily manipulated, particularly in the soft sciences) and entertainment, then obviously you were either crazy or uneducated or, yah, stupid.  This is how leftism became a positional good.

The good news?  The barriers are coming down, the doors are blowing open, and now we know we’re not alone, we know we’ve been lied to and manipulated.  Sometimes we don’t realize the magnitude of the manipulation which, yeah, can be staggering.

And yeah, I know, some people on the right are convinced indie channels like Amazon are out to get them.  We know facebook and twitter and yeah Google are.

I contend Amazon isn’t — yet.  None of the cases I’ve seen are convincing.  Also, when it comes to indie publishing, they can hit a few, mostly on covers and titles, but they can’t do this kind of micromanagement that trad pub does.  Why?  Because they can’t.  Because they’re not dealing with 10 or even twenty books a quarter.  To police every indie novel, every story that goes up?  I would take a massive work force, and not the third-world-country-uncertain-in-English one that Amazon hires.

Won’t happen.  Not saying that we don’t need alternatives, and yeah, we’re working on that.

But that’s exactly the thing.  PRECISELY.  In exact detail.  There are alternatives. Or there will be, once things become untenable.  And as the masks come off, as each corrupt medium and source goes full turnip, people shy away from it.  Not just us, mind you, but the Muddled Middle.  How many people think CNN is reliable anymore?  The crazier they go, the more they make their agenda obvious, the shakier they get.

And when they reach a certain point, alternatives become viable.  Even when we think they can’t.  Look at journalism, which we thought was immovable.  But it’s not.

The USSR had to regulate typewriters, because they were dangerous to its stability of uniform message.  So were copiers and mimeographs.  Mimeographs, which in the west caused only a ripple of really bad fanfic could bring the ability to control information down.  Then fax machines came in and it was goodbye.

The current technology has issues, but one thing it’s doing is making it difficult for the left to maintain the unified narrative and view of the world without which it CANNOT survive.

Sure, I won’t guarantee they won’t win some elections.  Given their amazing fraud machine, they might even win most of them.  And yes, I know how dangerous that is, because it can take us into actual blood on the streets and much much worse, a reaction-regime which is not America in any recognizable way.

But in the end, regardless of how rocky it gets, we win, they lose.  Because they can only survive where every voice repeats the same and logic never intrudes.  And that’s not the world our technology is shaping.

Be not afraid!