Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

As we watch the fireworks and the dizzying dismantling of the overgrown, twisted brambles of the deep state, a thought keeps coming up in all our groups and chats: Why hasn’t this happened before?

People have asked why Reagan didn’t do this, even…

Guys, this literally happened the earliest it could. The absolutely earliest it could.

Look, when FDR set the train rolling for the strangling of liberty and the ever-increasing state and power of the state over America — Did he think he’d keep that power forever? Was his plan never to die? Or did he actually think that an all intrusive, overarching government poking its nose into everything would bring about paradise? Who knows? Who cares? But it is a puzzle. Well, since he loved the Soviet Union maybe he really did think it would bring about paradise. — he did it by subsidizing friendly press, subsidizing artists and writers to write laudatory things about his progressive state, and in general by stopping the mouths of anyone who might have denounced the process with wads of cash. (Note I’ve gathered this from a lot of places, including biographies of artists and writers at the time. It was all task forces this and groups of development that, but ultimately it was propaganda, subsidized by the US government. For the most basic understanding of how bizarrely dirty FDR — progressive saint — was, read The Forgotten Man, by Amity Shlaes.)

As we know that boondoggle, the flowing of government bribes to those that supported it has gone on. And I don’t think we’ve seen the half of it, yet. USAID was the easiest to get a lot of fraud in, and they kind of volunteered for it by defying orders. But I will bet you they’re not the worst. The outrageous waste and misuse of taxpayers money is going to keep getting discovered. For at least a year, maybe more. Maybe all four years, if we’re lucky and win 26.

It’s all through. We’ve wondered for years and years how come the left was overflowing with money for all its pet causes, able to spend millions, year after year, on movies that went nowhere; able to produce TV no one wanted to watch, able to have entire publishing companies publish books no one wanted to read; able to have magazines, and newspapers, and glossy, beautiful displays that sold less and less every year.

Meanwhile, the right was scrambling and scrounging, fighting for every sale, for every subscriber. Now, sure, that made us better at our jobs, because we were always looking for an edge, for the ability to get ahead. BUT still, it seemed so strange, particularly since 2000 when, with the internet, we had some visibility into how much they actually sold, how many people actually watched them, and then… Well, we assumed someone was financing them. Lefty billionaires, perhaps. Or perhaps foreign countries.

Now we know. We were paying for it, us. Even the infamous Tides Foundation, George Soros’ toy was being financed from our taxes, via USAID.

The thing is there was no way to know it until recently. Do you know why the left is so upset at Elon’s ‘kids’, the computer geniuses running DOGE’s searches on the corrupt and constipated bowels of our government? Because they have the tech — yes, AI assisted — for the first time in the last forever, to find the fraud and waste.

You see, the fraud and waste is threaded all through, with a few hostage-puppy legitimate charity and helping of the helpless salted through so you couldn’t touch the fraud without the entire captive press jumping in tandem like trained monkeys.

And do you really think Reagan could have looked into it while stopping the left’s game to give it all away to the Soviet Union? Do you?

He did an end run on the poisonous press by talking directly to the people on TV but that was the extent of his reach. The press still had full mind share on the press and entertainment. They could have stopped any attempts to turn off the money spigot.

And meanwhile, of course, we got Clinton, and GWB who couldn’t fend off an Enquirer attack, and then Obama whom the propaganda apparatus practically canonized.

…. Look, guys, it took an uptick of dissent. It took Rush Limbaugh, against all odds managing to become popular and widely heard. It took the internet’s growth starting in 2001. It took us scribblers desperately flinging low-paid words into various sites. It took blogs, and Facebook (I have the facebook jail with oak leaves cluster decoration so many times) and yes Twitter, and those of us willing to dance right up the suspension and banishment, and yeah, sometimes going too far.

It took the ridiculous presidency of whoever was running Joe Biden. It took their tone-deaf of every possible extreme left cause hatched in out-of-touch universities. It took their showing the American people not only didn’t they have our best interests at heart, but they hated us and wanted us to die.

And then it took us miraculously beating the fraud and electing Trump. All of us, including the Amish who came in at the last moment to save the day.

Now, at this moment, with distrust of government finally deservedly built up, with the AI tools ready, with Elon resenting every penny spent that doesn’t go to getting humans to Mars, with Trump furious at being cheated out of his legitimate win in 2020…

Here we are.

In this perfect storm for the deep state, this perfect moment in history.

This is happening the earliest it could happen.

It’s been a long time getting here, but now it’s happening. And it’s glorious.

We might still lose, of course, but I doubt it. The tide has turned. And in this perfect moment, we’re winning.

We have a chance — all we ever wanted was a chance — of restoring the republic.

Because this is the right time. We have the right tools.

Even us who are just killing false narratives, encouraging people in the trenches, making sense of it all.

Let’s get to work.

The Lesson of Robespierre – by Charlie Martin

It can be sourly amusing reading what liberals say. Lawrence Tribe is a perpetual source of amusement — this guy is a law professor? Seriously? — but it can be really sort of depressing reading what some conservatives say.
Too often, conservatives don’t think out what they’re saying, and so use fancy words without thinking out what they mean.
Now, one of my pet peeves is “treason”. It’s a tough one for a lot of people because it’s very specifically limited by the Constitution, for reasons James Madison laid out in Federalist Paper number 43:

“But as new-fangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free government, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the convention have, with great judgment, opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger, by inserting a constitutional definition of the crime, fixing the proof necessary for conviction of it, and restraining the Congress, even in punishing it, from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.

I’ll resist petting this peeve at length because I already have last month and I don’t want it to get spoiled. There’s little worse than a spoiled peeve.
The Federalist Papers — and for that matter the Anti-Federalist papers — were doing was arguing what the limits on government power should be, and the Constitution was written not so much to say what the government can do, but what the government may not do.
With treason specifically, Madison was saying was that treason should be very limited because there were too many examples in English history of the Crown using “treason” for damn near anything, including a very conclusive form of divorce.
But that was hardly the only abuse of government power to which the Constitution, and even more so the Bill of Rights, was addressed. in fact the first eight amendments in the bill of Rights addressed specific ways that the Crown had abused its subjects.
One of those, sure enough, was arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. “Arrest them” comes up every so often whenever there’s someone daring to defy someone in power, but it seems to have gotten really popular recently because some Federal judges have been issuing some, shall we say questionable orders. (For an example of the most egregious of them, see this thread.)
And a whole lot of people have posted “arrest him.” But when I ask “on what charge?” they either come up with some vague thing about denying a presidential prerogative, or — my favorite, for some special interpretations of the word “favorite” is “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.”
That phrase has been bandied about quite a lot. Some people link it to Abraham Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War. I haven’t found any real specific quote, and I wonder if he would have bothered, since the Constitution provides explicitly that habeas corpus can be suspended. Article 1 Section 9 Clause 2:

“The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

I’m pretty sure that the Civil War was a rebellion. Someone who is a better Civil War historian than I will undoubtedly be happy to correct me.
But the earliest reference to it that Grok and I found was

[W]hen Justice Robert H. Jackson used a variation of this expression in his dissenting opinion in the case of Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949). Justice Jackson wrote, “There is the danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

Something that may not be obvious there is that this was a dissenting opinion — not even a majority of the judges agreed.
This is closely related to Madison’s argument about treason: overly-expansive powers of arrest have been used throughout history against opponents of whatever party is currently in power.
There’s an example of this that occurs to me often: the history of Maximillian Robespierre, who seemed like a true friend of liberty at the start of the revolution, but dealing with kings and counter-revolutionaries saw Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and thousands of others, executed on the guillotine.
There’s a lesson here. The Lesson of Robespierre is simple: it they can do it for you, they can do it to you.
So now we see calls to arrest and presumably imprison people who act against what the Trump Administration is trying to do.
No matter how desirable things Trump and Elon Musk are doing may be — and I think they are very desirable — if we’re going to start arresting people simply for dissent, especially district court judges and the like, it’s a dangerous game we shouldn’t start.
The Founders had good reasons for limiting treason, for enshrining habeas corpus, and for the Bill of Rights. They were entirely too aware of what the Crown had been able to do to their subjects.
Eventually there will be a Democrat administration again. We need to remember that. And yeah, the Constitution is not a suicide pact — but that’s not a reason to murder it.

I had no clue what USAID was. Like perhaps most people, I thought it was a way for the US to do “charity” abroad.

I had a ton of philosophical problems with it, obviously. For one, I don’t know what the purpose of a government, which takes money from is own people via taxes, but foreign charity is not it. I mean, there’s nothing in our constitution that says the Federal government has the right to take our money and do stuff they consider good abroad, for any purpose, including because they think it someone obscurely benefits us.

For another, because I have noticed for a long time now, that everything the left does abroad is something that will benefit someone else, and preferably is bad for us. Everything including war, the left does for the benefit of someone else. And they like it better if it’s bad for us.

So, on those principles, I disapproved of USAID. But even I was shocked when the full can of worms was open, and they all came crawling out. First because I didn’t know the amounts of money they’d spent in the US and there are things like the fact they funded the Tides Foundation which in turn funded BLM — meaning in essence we paid in taxes to have our own cities burned — which just stick in my craw. But then…. then i found out how it was founded, and why.

Apparently having read The Ugly American JFK was so impressed by it, he started USAID to do good abroad and that way counter the efforts of the Soviet Union.

That sound you hear coming through the monitor is the sound of my hitting my head on the desk, really, really hard.

Note, I don’t have any proof of the theory I’m about to lay out. But at the same time knowing the people involved and the time involved I don’t think there is any way this didn’t go the way I deduce it went. In fact, it is almost inevitable.

So, when JFK funded USAID, I don’t think he intended as a slush fund for corruption.

I think he actually intended it as he said he did: as an agency that would do good abroad, and which would by showing how caring and respectful of other cultures they were, and well, giving them bunches of money.

Now please remember that while JFK was “anti-communist” for his time, that just meant he was against USSR type communism, but he was — EVERYONE IN POLITICS WAS AT THE TIME, including Republicans — convinced the victory of communism was inevitable, because planned economies were so much better and after all they had no poverty or unemployment or– excuse me, I need to pour mind cleaner into my ear. How could they not have realized that what they thought they knew about the USSR was just the cooked data of a totalitarian system. Sometimes I wonder what was going on in their heads.

Anyway given that, it is almost an inevitable step that the “causes” they were helping was what the USSR too would have viewed as needing to be helped.

In fact, I suspect — though I have no proof, but I wonder if some of you could get it? — that a lot of its early work amounted to “community organizing” for the leftists abroad. Guns and proto-revolutionary groups in South America given money. African groups fighting against “colonialism” and bringing in the Soviet Union. you know, that kind of thing.

Guys, if I am correct, not only did our tax money go to pay for people to burn our cities, but our parents and grandparents paid to subsidize the cause of international communism.

It makes one wonder how much less painful the cold war would have been if we hadn’t been financing it, doesn’t it?

(It also makes me wonder, because at this point I’m a suspicious b*tch if those two authors were incentivized to write that book about the ahem relative cultural sensitivity of the Soviets (coo-eee!) and how we needed this sort of thing, and how that book got hyper pushed to be so big. Of note, for something that was a smashing bestseller, I not only never read it, but it wasn’t even mentioned in my American Culture or American Literature classes abroad. In other words, was it a planted piece of propaganda to manipulate our Glitterati president? Maybe I’m too conspiracy minded, but having seen that kind of play in our day, I do wonder. Don’t you? Maybe one of you has read it and will tell me it’s a piece of transcendent prose, who knows?)

So when did we go from funding international communism to communism at home? I suspect we always funded some communism at home. Oh, sorry “progressive causes.” It is the nature of the beast that people who ran this were educated in the “best universities” where they drank deep of Marxist bullshit, so they’d see a crying need for it at home, in order to bring about the inevitable utopia a little sooner.

But my guess is when it became actively poisonous and turned against this country specifically was when the Soviet Union fell.

It’s the last time I remember seeing the left in as much disarray as the last three weeks They really had thought the Soviet Union was Wonnerful, you know, even if it wasn’t. What I mean is, even if it was less prosperous, they thought it was more just and its triumph was inevitable, and they’d get to be komissars, anyway. And then it fell and was revealed, as all communist nations, as an ugly, corrupt kleptocracy.

For a moment there, a year? two? It looked like the left would give up. Only they couldn’t. Too many years devoted to hating the West to admit they were wrong. Too much of their identities tied to their grand leftist plan which made them both “smarter” and “more caring” than their neighbors.

Since they were at the helm of USAID, I bet you they immediately turned to financing things like the green movement (watermelons all) and weaponized feminism, and racial division, and and– Basically all the things we now know they were funding and puppeteering.

Which is why communism didn’t die, but instead encysted itself in our intellectual institutions, our universities, our arts, our news.

I wonder how much will remain without it, and if we’ll finally see the de-communistification of the West which we should have seen when the Soviet Union fell.

It’s a hope, isn’t it?

And no, USAID is not the largest nor the greatest disbursement of our funds to the cause of leftist subversion and hatred of the West at home and abroad.

BUT it is the one I suspect has been fighting against us from day one of its implementation. No wonder the left is screaming like stuck pigs at the money flow being stopped.

Once more I wish to apologize to the young lady whose name I don’t even remember, who came to a Huns dinner at Pete’s and insisted that the left was mostly left for pay. I thought she was exaggerating. I was wrong.

Of course, I don’t know where this will end, but for now, for right now, it’s like watching the wall come down all over again. And I intend to be right here, and help bring it down. (Pass me the hammer, friend.)

At the same time we, all of us, need to turn our minds and hands to building over, building under and building around. Because you know d*mn well that these people have hidden the few worthy things they do — feeding the occasional child, or vaccinating against malaria, or what have you — amid flows of subversive and corrupt money.

Eric S. Raymond called it the Hostage Puppy strategy, in which you don’t dare cut the vast amounts of waste and fraud, because then you’ll hurt the little puppy they’re also providing for.

It’s not a valid strategy, besides being morally repugnant: the equivalent of what the Hamass does when they place terror tunnels and ammo depots underneath hospitals and kindergartens. But the puppies still need to be fed. And these evil people have strangled all the charities that used to do it.

So, there will be a great realignment and things will be taken care of, eventually, just in another shape. Meanwhile look after each other and those you can help.

And continue to break pieces off the wall of bullshit that has encased us all. At least in terms of explaining what’s actually going on for the public at large. The Doge guys can’t do it all.

Put your back into it. For the first time in my entire life victory is possible.

Be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose.

And how.

P.S. Website note from Holly the Assistant: Huns, we are quite aware that WPDE has been stupidly updating, and thank you for your efforts to inform us. There is not a darn thing the webmaster can do to fix commenting at this time: WPDE screwed up their code, and they are going to have to fix it. Sometimes it works on some browsers, sometimes it does not. Please possess your souls in patience, and we’ll look forward to seeing your insights when WPDE gets their code working again.

I have a post about the USAID funding/what it actually did right from the beginning percolating, which in turn might give some clue of what’s to come in the other agencies, but I need time and a clear mind to do it, and today isn’t it.

Mostly because I woke up late, and it’s already been a very strange day, so–

Instead let’s talk about assumptions and PTSD. In this case reading PTSD.

This morning, while sitting and waiting for something, I decided to browse Jane Austen fanfic on my kindle (Look, it’s calming, okay?) and ended up downloading something that is based on Persuasion, one of my favorites and rarely used for fanfic.

Anyway, I opened it and started reading the foreword, then returned it.

Why?

Well, because at one point the author says “I know it’s pure fantasy that a nobleman would marry a bi-racial woman from the colonies.”

At which point I knew what would follow. These, being literary fanfic are normally written by either women my age or college girls. The college girls tend to signal in all the “correct” ways.

I will never forget the one where Lizzy (It was a price and prejudice fan fic) was the one who protected and took care of this wonderful black couple who–

Or the one I actually read where Lizzy and Jane lose everything and are living with the underclass in a slum and I swear it took me several chapters to realize the author thought that everyone in the underclass was black. In England. in the 18th century. I have no words, but could those of you with young kids make sure they understand the world is not America and that even in America the belief that the poor are all black or that black people are — obviously — poor is…. what’s that word? Oh, yeah, racist, regardless of what their idiot teachers told them?

So I reacted. Was my reaction accurate?

I don’t know. I like to give books the benefit of the doubt. As someone who often gets stuck with gay characters (and is upping it to a bio-engineered hermaphrodite world) I’d like to think people will trust me not to go all weirdly fetishy and sexual on them (This book, I’m assured is “Weirdly wholesome” LOL) you’d think I’d give someone more grace on something that reads iffy.

I later was telling Dan that I’m not sure that 15 years ago this would have been enough reason to automatically wall the book, but the last sixteen years have beaten us over the head with racial everything and virtual signaling over racial everything, and I just couldn’t tolerate it.

Later I was talking to Dan about this acquired PTSD and realized there were other reasons for my reaction, reasons I didn’t even think about consciously, and which probably mean I will not reconsider, on a day when I feel more up to face the nonsense.

There is, for instance, historical ignorance.

Look, yeah, they viewed race as super important. What they didn’t do was view race the way we did it.

Depending on what people looked like, the fact that someone was half-another-race might be a non event, or no more consequential than if they were, say, half Portuguese or half French. And money could cover a multitude of sins.

Most of the time if a girl was, say, half Indian it would barely warrant a mention. Half Carib might, depending on her features and the size of her dowry. And yes, the notoriously profligate noblemen would absolutely marry them.

Now, yes, they were a rarity. (Not as much as they would be, say, in the middle ages, but rare. And would be talking about. And if they did anything even mildly notable, their enemies would call them bad racial names, but that’s par for the course.

Part of it is that there weren’t enough people of a different race in Europe to warrant a prejudice. It would be more likely that they would be prejudiced against an Irish or Scottish bride.

The fact that the author is imposing today’s racial ideas (starting with the term bi-racial) on the story tells me that I probably wouldn’t enjoy that.

I’m sick and tired of this. Sick that we can’t teach kids the current obsessions are fleeting and the current social distortions very much on the way of passing already, and that fiction is supposed to center on more substantial bits of the human condition.

I wish I didn’t have to examine assumptions. I wish the last few years hadn’t given me PTSD.

And while at it I’ll wish for a million dollars, which is as likely.

And now let me see if I can write a coherent post for tomorrow.

Book Promo

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

BY EDMOND HAMILTON, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Hidden World (Annotated): The science fiction classic

Sudden, brilliant towers of light emanate from the Earth at three different points on the Equator, at specific intervals in time! Dr. Kelsall has a theory, that they come from a world inside our own world, and he takes his three comrades to the South American jungle where he predicts the fourth light will appear. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared the men for the alien menace they were about to face!

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the book cultural and genre context.

FROM TIMOTHY WITCHAZEL: Noah and the Great Flood: A Poem in Alliterative Verse

A retelling of the story of Noah and the Ark in the style of Anglo-Saxon Alliterative Verse.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Dragon Slayer

The dragon must die. It haunts the land and strikes with fire and death without warning.

Prince Baudouin knows the perils, and how other knights have perish. Still, he is confident that he can slay the dragon. All he has to do is forge through the burnt wasteland about its mountain, and slay it.

All.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love

Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: The Cross-Time Kamaitachi (Timelines Universe Book 5

I did not land here as a warrior, but a warrior I so soon became . . .

One moment, Dr. Yukiko Yamaguchi was in her high-tech singularity research lab in California, busily adjusting an electronically-leaky fitting playing hell with her instrument readings.

The next moment, she was falling through space, and landing hard in a wilderness area she would quickly discover was her family’s ancient stomping grounds in Japan – but with an apocalyptic twist.

A hundred years later, there would be legends of a great yōkai, a demon, whom some called a kamaitachi – a sort-of whirlwind, weasel-like creature with blades for claws, which catches up unwary humans and slices their skin. But this kamaitachi is no ordinary yōkai – rather, she is

The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Lunar Surface Blues

The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.

Four years ago, Molly’s parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she’s earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem — she’s been given the worst possible EVA partner.

A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.

When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Let Us Tell You Again (April Series Book 13)

The continuing story of April, Jeff, and Heather after they conspire to rebel against North America and their efforts to find friends and a safe haven in the stars. Continuing to close the time gap to the later Family Law series of books.
Heather and her peers impose a ban on armed ships beyond L1 in the Solar System and a prohibition for explorer ships going interstellar heavily armed. There are continuing stories of future characters still stuck on Earth.
Heather has a lot of help from her friends but it isn’t easy being the queen.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Broken Devices: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 3)

CHAINS WITHOUT WIZARDS AND A RISING COUNT OF THE DEAD.

The largest city in the world has just discovered its missing wizards. It seems the Kigali empire has ignited a panic that threatens internal ruin and the only chained wizard it knows that’s still alive is Penrys.

The living wizards and the dead are not her people, not unless she makes them so. All they have in common is a heavy chain and a dead past — the lives that were stolen from them are beyond recall.

What remains are unanswered questions about who made them this way. And why. And what Penrys plans to do to find out.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: A Kingdom of Glass: A Novel of The Garia Cycle

Zara hasn’t seen her family in eleven years, but she doesn’t mind. They sent her to live in a neighboring kingdom when she was small, and she’s adopted her foster parents in their place. She lives the life of an aristocratic Garian girl- riding her horse, shooting her bow, exploring the castle with her friends- and she has nothing to wish for.

Until she’s summoned home, to a prospective marriage she doesn’t want, family she doesn’t remember, and a poisonous royal court that threatens everything she’s ever known. The East Morlans are nothing like Garia, and Zara struggles to find her place among the scheming Morlander aristocrats. Along the way, she makes new friends, meets enemies, and falls in love. But secrets abound in the glittering palace, and Zara must discover who she can trust as she fights for her life and freedom in a fragile, beautiful, kingdom of glass.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Darkship Thieves

Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space.

Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships.
You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help.
But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive….
A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.

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: Structure

Or, In Which I Laugh At My Own Unreasonable Hopes.

For the first time in three weeks, today I woke up (late, because apparently recovering, but want you guys to know I’m still improving) and skimmed the news on my phone and had an instant big mad.

I mean, yeah, okay, Trump is trying to abolish taxes on tips, and social security, and bring back tax breaks for the middle class, and–

And excuse me, but this is so much bullshit. SO MUCH FRESH BULLSHIT.

Before I go on, and so you understand my perspective, I must explain how I came to my opinion about taxes.

When I was very young, I came across a line complaining about taxes in a science fiction book, probably Heinlein and was literally flummoxed. I’d never HEARD anyone do do that.

In fact, when I was little my dad had shown me the deed to grandma’s house which said “by the order of the king” and amounted to, the crown owned all of Portugal, and was giving great great grandma the right to use that land. From what I understand — I could be wrong, I haven’t seen any for decades — today’s deeds are the same, but with the Portuguese Republic granting you that right. And I wasn’t even mad. First because I was about three years old. Second, because I thought that’s how the world worked.

In the same way I’d never heard about anyone complaining about taxes. I mean the taxes for this or that being too high, maybe, but not the idea of having taxes. Because, you know? Taxes were just “how the world works.”

However, perhaps because I didn’t fit in there (I bought Stranger in a Strange Land on the TITLE because that’s what I felt like every day of my life till 14, which is when I bought it) after the bafflement subsided somewhat, I immediately felt like I liked America’s ideas and would like to subscribe to her newsletter.

Because this just made instinctive sense to me.

Of course, then I became American, and found that tough we complain a lot about it, the consarned income tax is seemingly impossible to get rid of.

And, like sand if you go sea bathing au naturel, it gets into everything, chaffs and creates an almighty mess.

It probably costs our economy trillions of dollars just by suppressing the creation of small businesses because — trust me on this — at least in the beginning , it costs you more in time lost and anxiety in preparing taxes than in the taxes themselves. To the point you might have a great idea, but think of how much time you’re going to lose to tax preparation and just give up on the spot. Particularly if you’re doing it on the side after your day job.

Even “just” income taxes if one of you is self-employed can consume months of your life.

It’s horrendous, and evil, and it distorts the economy by making you change what you would naturally do, just to avoid sending all your money to people who deserve none of it and who apparently are sending it to the Tides Foundation, which in turn sends it to BLM to burn American cities. When they’re not sending all the money you earned to the Taliban, that is. Or to Gaza, supposedly to buy condoms, but really to plan and execute “fun” excursions like 10/7.

Is that all they do with our money? No. Though I’m starting to think, if the other places are even half as corrupt as USAID that it’s the majority of what they do with the on average a novel worth of earnings that I send them every year.

I think our founding fathers in 1776 — after that some of them got confused — would consider it intolerable tyranny.

And the fact the taxation is progressive, amounting to the idea that people who work hard and do well inexplicably OWE something to those that didn’t, and should therefore pay more taxes is just repulsive, and should set everyone good American’s teeth on edge.

I am fully willing to admit that it’s possible some form of taxation MIGHT be needed to fund the government. I don’t like to admit it, but I can see it MIGHT be possible. But does it need to be this infinite prying into everyone’s business, this assumption that every American must be assumed to be guilty of fraud, and therefore must keep receipts to prove he isn’t? I do realize the Deep State views all of us as reflections of its own ugly soul, but still.

Point being, I’m not nearly as Libertarian as I used to be (I’m still way more Libertarian than the Libertarian party) so I’m willing to concede that something like a federal sales tax might be needed. I don’t like it. I still think it’s theft. BUT in some cases the best you can do is, while still reminding the government that it’s theft, choose the least harmful type of theft. Which is like choosing the least lethal form of cyanide, but I digress.

My big mad today was therefore caused by waking up to news that President Trump has moved to find a way to stop taxing tips and social security and to restore middle class tax cuts.

I don’t at all object to cutting SOME taxes, though the whole “middle class” thing is annoying, because he should move towards universal tax cuts.

BUT he PROMISED or at least said he would ABOLISH the IRS.

So my first and very immediate thought was “Aw, Mr. President! Don’t do us like that. Don’t go bait and switching on us.”

My husband and some of my saner fan/friends have argued that this is just the start, that he needs to be in a position where he’s shown those still asleep the crying need to repeal the 16th amendment; that if he just abolishes the IRS and income tax in favor of a federal sales tax to be administered by the states, the next Democrat administration will bring both IRS and income tax back under some “national emergency” if they have to kill a lot of bats to get one of those.

And okay, fine, maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s Trump’s reasoning, who knows? It’s probably good reasoning.

But I’m still not happy. I don’t want reasoning. I’m flat out on the floor, kicking and screaming Democrat style. I WAS PROMISED an end to the IRS’s endless intrusion in individuals’ lives, and the random stealing of years of our lives (both in what it took us to earn the money and what it takes us to prepare taxes) in order to send it all to…. apparently the enemies of America.

I don’t think we should have this big of a boot on our backs JUST so we can fund people who beat us, burn our cities, attack our allies and on top of that malign us and try to gaslight us.

Enough is enough. Mr. President? Don’t do us like that. Abolish the IRS and make taxation as non-intrusive as theft can ever be.

Let us leave the idea the government can take whatever it wants from you where it belongs: in Europe, which most of us or our ancestors left well behind.

What a time to be alive!

If you have missed it, I can’t even track down all the tweets, but let’s say that for the last week or so, Elon Musk has been catching USAID, skinning it, anatomizing it, and hanging its ugly, diseased entrails out for the world to see.

If you miss all of it, you can probably start here and here and poke around to see the rest. As far as I can tell, USAID whom the idiots on the left are trying to protect by saying their budget is only 0.7% of the government’s fantastical carnival of corruption and waste, has been funding all of the mainstream media, from the New York Times to Politico and everything big and small in between. (To be fair they also got money from other agencies and departments.)

And though not fully exposed yet, once we follow through the links of stalking horse NGOs, there is reason to believe the USAID — and doubtless other parts of our government — have been funding Antifa, BLM, ANSWER International, and most ratbag commie movements here and abroad.

At the same time, it appears that a game and at least one Netflix series (I know you are shocked, considering the deal they had with the Obama’s) were also funded by USAID.

And I’m going to lay a small bet that various departments and agencies have also funded most of Hollywood and the large publishing houses. (Look at what Simon and Schuster does in giving every lefty quasi celebrity millions and millions for turgid half baked books no one buys.) Mostly I base this surmise on the simple certainty that no one — NO ONE — would continue to make product no one will buy unless someone else is paying them to do it.

Yes, I’m surmising and I could be wrong, but given what we’ve found out about the press, I don’t think so! As I say, I’m making a prediction and laying a small bet.

I’m just waiting, as Elon turns his attention to the rest of our government, the parts of bigger budgets.

I am both in awe of how far they’ve got in two and a half weeks, of everything they’re exposing, and in horror and disgust at what they are actually finding.

The picture I’m getting is as though each of us, without knowing it, had been paying $500 a month for someone to beat us up, slander us, and lie to us.

If I had this plot in a novel no one would believe it.

I was about to say the situation is so surreal that I’m not even mad.

But the truth is that I’m spectacularly mad.

And the bizarre thing through all of this is that the left thinks it can cow us into silence. It runs around making up nutbaggery about how Elon’s employees working on this aren’t qualified, and how they weren’t elected to see private information (as though normal secretaries and programmers got elected.)

They also scream that it’s some illegal and unconstitutional to take away their money tap and sinecures.

BUT do you know the most surreal thing through all of this? The one thing that has me grinning like a toddler on Christmas morning and not wanting to miss a minute of it?

The right doesn’t care! They scream, they call us names, they say they’re going to do terrible things to us, and we ignore them and go on.

It’s like overnight they’ve become completely irrelevant. Buzzing flies or laughing stocks, nothing more.

If you’d told me ten years ago, we’d be here today, I’d not have believed it. It is probably the greatest miracle of all this.

What a time to be alive!

Feeling Awful? Check Your Thyroid by Holly Chism

I’ve been fighting my own body for the past decade and a half, now.  Almost exactly, as of the middle of this coming May.  All from one itty-bitty gland not doing what it was supposed to do. 

My son is sixteen, now.  When I had him, I was warned that I’d be exhausted for a long time.  Well, they were right, but it went on a lot longer than it should have: the exhaustion should have passed within about six to eight months, especially since he started sleeping six to eight hour nights before he was three months old. 

Unfortunately, despite my first pregnancy having fixed several issues (too tight ligaments around one knee, a bad gallbladder, and reducing menstrual issues), it also triggered my immune system to attack, and kill, my thyroid gland.  Nobody caught it.  I went two years with my thyroid non-functional.  And then I fell pregnant with my daughter…and it got noted. 

When you attend your first prenatal visit, your practitioner will schedule a bunch of tests, mostly blood work.  One of the things tested is your thyroid levels.  Mine were…bad.  Really bad.  Bad enough she thought it was a typo, and sent me back—twice—to get the tests redone.

The way things work is that your body signals the pituitary gland that it needs energy.  The pituitary sends out thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) to tell the thyroid gland to uptake some amino acids, iodine, and cholesterol to turn into thyroid hormone (T4), which your body breaks down (T3, RT3) to use. Your thyroid gland does what it’s told, and everything’s golden. 

Mine didn’t.  It tried, but my immune system had more than half-killed my thyroid gland.  Autoimmune disorder.  It happens, and pregnancy can trigger it. 

So, while my thyroid was straining to comply and failing, my pituitary thought it wasn’t listening, and pumped out more TSH.  And more.  And more.  My TSH, when tested, was nearly 11.  It’s supposed to be no higher than 3.5. 

I shouldn’t have been pregnant.  I shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant.  Not with a non-functioning thyroid gland.  Shouldn’t have been able to stay pregnant, either…and could have lost the pregnancy (which I may have done before that one), or it could have led to really nasty repercussions for the baby.

But I was pregnant, I got treated, and I had a gorgeous baby girl who didn’t have any nasty side effects from my body dropping the ball…but I also had a thyroid gland that continued to fail.  And then to swell, and develop nodules. 

Backing up.  The TSH your body produces is inversely related to the amount of thyroid hormone you have.  If your body is not producing thyroid hormones, your TSH skyrockets.  If your body is producing too much thyroid hormones, your TSH plummets.  Ideally, your TSH should be between .5 and 3.5.  4 is subclinical hypothyroidism.  All that means is that your thyroid isn’t working quite right, but it could kick back off.  Your thyroid will slow down if you get really sick—it drains your energy so you sleep off whatever ails you.  Endocrinologists prefer to take a wait-and-see approach until your TSH eases up to 5. 

Here’s the fun thing: they can’t tell if your thyroid is working or not without drawing blood.  The symptoms are too diverse. 

So, what are you likely to face with a low- or non-functioning thyroid? 

1. Exhaustion.  You’re not going to have any energy to do the things you need to do.  You’ll sleep a lot more, and it won’t help. 

2. Weight gain.  No, it’s not just because you’re too tired to move.  It’s not because you’re eating too much.  Your thyroid runs your metabolism.  You’re shuffling everything to storage.  Not burning it.

3.  Hair, skin, and fingernail nonsense.  You start shedding like a nervous cat.  And it goes gray prematurely.  It’s dry—your hair dries out and conditioner doesn’t work. Your body hair thins—yes, everything from your eyebrows to the fine down of hair on your arms and legs.  Your nails soften and break.  When they’re not peeling.  Sometimes, they do both.  And your skin dries out, flakes, and you get itchy.  You can use all the moisturizer in the world, and you’ll still be dried out and itchy. 

4. Temperature regulation.  You’re cold.  You’re cold all the time.  And you can’t get warm.  Your body temperature actually drops.  Remember what I said about your thyroid running your metabolism? Yeah, your body temperature is part of that.

5. Digestion problems.  Your thyroid malfunctions, your digestion slows.  All of it.  Oh, and you’re more prone to reflux, so enjoy that, too.  You can take acid blockers, but only short term—long term, they cause damage to other parts of your body and digestive system.  And the reflux is caused by slow emptying stomach anyway, because your digestion has slowed down. But when your digestion slows like that?  Guess what?  You’re eating less than normal, still gaining weight, and your body starts sucking the moisture out of what’s moving through you, and you get constipated.  Eating more fiber makes it worse.  Drinking more water doesn’t help.  Laxatives can, but that can cause severe, long-term damage. 

6. Reproductive issues.  Your libido tanks.  If you’re female, your cycle goes longer, gets heavier and more painful, and you lose more iron.  It’s harder to get, and stay pregnant, because all of your hormones are influenced by your thyroid levels.  All of them.  Some of the symptoms can be masked by birth control pills…but those will actually make the underlying issue of a non-functioning thyroid worse.  Because estrogen binds the bit of thyroid hormone your body is making into its permanently inactive form that your body can’t use.

7. Blood pressure/cholesterol.  Your blood pressure can drop…or it can skyrocket, because your body’s under a ton of stress.  Your cholesterol will go up.  Because your body’s not using it to make the hormones you need to live.  Doctors will push statins at you, but those will just make you feel worse, because the root issue—a non-functioning thyroid—is still untreated. 

8. Cognitive symptoms.  You get forgetful.  You can’t focus.  Your thoughts move at the speed of molasses in January, if they move at all.  You can’t get interested in anything, can’t maintain interest in anything.  You get depressed, and nothing helps.  Not sunshine, not antidepressants, not talk therapy. Nothing.  Everything’s gray, and life sucks.  And it’s not clinical depression, because it’s not caused by brain chemicals going out of whack.  It’s your thyroid…which no one will actually test for, even if you have presented with treatment resistant depression. 

9. Pain levels.  You get more prone to headaches.  Not sinus headaches, not blood pressure headaches, not tension headaches, not migraines.  Just…random, mild, run-of-the-mill headaches.  Oh, and joint pain.  Your joints will ache.  And you won’t know why, and not much will help…because there’s nothing that you’ve done to hurt yourself.  Your body is just being an asshole.  Oh, and your muscles will ache, but you won’t have done anything.  (Doctors will actually test you, at this point, for Epstein-Barr, for fibromyalgia, for a bunch of different things…but not thyroid.)

10. Eye issues.  Your vision will go wonky.  You’ll go near-sighted, and may develop astigmatism.  And it will worsen, and continue to get worse.

11. Nerve issues.  Low thyroid numbers can cause tremors and spasms.  Because like your brain needs thyroid hormones to function properly so does your nervous system.  If it’s bad, it can look like Parkinson’s.  But it won’t be. 

If you stand back and look for patterns?  There isn’t one.  Not really.  And general practitioners look for patterns.  Symptom clusters.  That normally tells them where the problem is. 

Unfortunately, your body uses thyroid hormone to regulate literally everything.  There isn’t a single system in your body that it doesn’t touch. 

The absolute hell of it is, TSH is an easy check.  Most doctors don’t know what it signifies, but it’s easy to keep an eye on.  If it fluctuates, there’s a problem.  And if it’s not functioning and not treated?  It can cause severe and worsening problems. 

Including cardiac issues.  You read that right: untreated or under-treated hypothyroidism can lead to heart failure.  And early death. 

It’s an easy test.  Ask for it, if it’s not in your annual panels.  Keep an eye on that TSH number.  Remember: you want it between .5 and 3.5.  Lower than .5, and you’re hyperthyroid (different set of symptoms and risks—mostly inverse), and higher than 5, you’re hypothyroid.  Both can—and should—be treated. 

You deserve to feel better than this. 

*Yes, Holly has been badgering me to see an Endo. Now if only I get the test results back and the doctor knows what to do about it… Holly is an author, and this is the link to her Amazon page. -SAH*

*For those of you worried about how late I am: My thyroid has gone a big insane again, in the sense of extremely low. Yes, tests have been made and blood drawn for further tests. I’m currently waiting for results so we can figure out how/where to start with medication. Until then, I’m back on aderal, simply because the alternative is being almost comatose. But I’m having trouble functioning and, as per aderal, go down many many rabbit holes if I’m tired. It’s like Super-ADD-SAH*

I don’t know if you guys are aware of this, so I thought perhaps I should write about it.

I know there are no tanks on the street, and that I know of, no TV station has gone solidly to playing Green Acres back to back and this was not what I expected when I voted, so it took till a couple of days ago for me to go “Dear Lord, this is a revolution.”

Let me unpack that sentence above because I can see several people taking it wrong.

So, let’s start with “this is not what I expected.” It’s not. I expected the first term all over again. This doesn’t mean I ‘regret’ it or “am upset”. I will capture a tweet from Jagi Lamplighter about that, because I can’t put it better than she did:

Now that we’ve established that, moving on: what I expected, in my wildest dreams, where somehow Trump got beyond the barriers that held him back in his first term was the roll back of some of the crap that made the US a basket case under Biden. You know, actual semi-effective border control. Maybe a few thousand deportations. Perhaps a reining back of the stupid regulations, and some drill baby drill.

But I didn’t actually expect revolution. A revolution that rolls back the now long established corruptions imposed on our system by the likes of FDR.

At first I was in shock at the speed and compass of the EOs and other work going on. And then–

Well, part of it is my health, but I’m having real trouble controlling this. I will read the news on my phone first thing in the morning, because it’s weird and exciting. And then I have to fight to work during the day, because I’m fascinated by this show which is more interesting than anything Hollywood has produced in decades.

And in the middle of all this it was only a couple of days ago that I realized this is a revolution.

Well, you’re in luck, because I have a lot of experience in revolutions. No, not in leading them, unless you count “revolutions in a classroom” or something like that. And even then, I was usually too lazy to do anything.

BUT I have experience in finding yourself in the middle of a revolution where everything is changing and things you always thought permanent and immutable get yanked out from under you. Of course, this revolution doesn’t seem to be going in the way of things get worse, not in an overall thing (though they can be for individuals) so that’s an improvement over the ones I know.

But with that in mind, here’s some advice:

1- Don’t be scared. Yeah, I know, fast change, even fast change you wanted is always scary. And this is very fast change. But control it, okay. think clearly about what it’s happening, and what the consequences might be. This is very important.

2- First, it will allow you to NOT fall for propaganda, like the idiotic idea that they’re going to abolish social security, something even Trump said in his inaugural speech he won’t do. (I’m hoping they phase it out and stop taking separate taxes for it, so that in 40 years they CAN shut it down. I realize a good way to start doing that is means testing, and that that is likely to affect us, as we’ll never fully retire unless incapacitated. I’m fine with that.)

3- It will also allow you to fight back the fear that if we do this “they’ll do worse to us when they win.” If we do this right, when they win they’ll be a different party. We’re moving the Overton window at a fast clip. Reagan moved the overton window enough that the next time they won they were the “new democrats.” This demands a far bigger change on their part. Also, they did this to us pretty much under both Obama and Biden. Only not as fast/thorough because they couldn’t. They never succeeded in getting us to give up guns, so they couldn’t.

4 – Be aware there will be glitches and hard times. Look, if someone waved a magical wand and the federal government was suddenly within tight constitutional limits, there would still be bad consequences.

Sure, most of what the feds are financing is utter bilge, when not actively anti-American, and making things worse for everyone in the world as well as the US. (In fact, that’s the shock. Guys, this is me speaking, and I didn’t know how much of the leftover USSR bullshit propaganda and lies we were financing across the globe. Censorship, even.)

But some of it has little sub branches, and not immediately obvious connections to what you, yes, you do for a living. Like, you might have no hand in growing worse viruses to kill humans, but your lab might still be tied to federal funding (Partly because the government ran out/limited all other sources of funding.) In which case things will get lean for a while. And you should have prepared for it last year, but the next best time to prepare is now.

The same with apparently everything from game makers to magazines. They shouldn’t have been getting fed funds, but they were, and so you might be affected/find yourself temporarily unemployed.

And obviously a lot of people work in the bureaucracy who aren’t bad people, etc. And they will be unemployed. This is sad and in some cases tragic, but there it is. Things can’t go on, and change will hurt someone every time.

Now, if you are offered the 80k, take it. I bet you in eight months there will be other job opportunities. And you don’t want — don’t want — to be laid off instead.

But you know your situation better than I do. The point is, instead of being locked in “This is all terrible, because this terrible thing happened to me” you should be thinking through options and what to do to improve your chances of coming out of this smelling like a rose.

5- The minimum you can expect is supply disruptions, say on the level of covid lockdowns. People are being deported and self-deporting and there’s talk of e-verify. Just in trucking remember they MADE companies hire illegals. And frankly the empty factories gave me the pip. Yes, it needs to be done, because when there was a quarter in which NO ONE born in the US was hired, we have massive problems. Also it’s been used to depress wages. Also frankly mass immigration isn’t healthy for anyone, even those coming in. So it needed to be done. (And honestly they’re being very gentle, it’s just the propaganda is causing more self-deportations than they counted on.) Still, it’s another, even I hadn’t realized problem had got that bad, and therefore I now know there will be massive disruptions. Not because Americans don’t want to work, but because it’s illegal to hire them at under minimum wage. Also don’t worry too much. The money we save on the social services that permit illegals to work for almost nothing will reduce prices of some things, like medical care.
It will fix itself, but meanwhile be prepared for supply disruptions. As someone who tends to I’m telling you not to go overboard, but having enough essentials for a couple of weeks are a thing.

6- Be aware there will be opportunities and new enterprises and ways of doing things opening up. Keep abreast of what’s happening in your field. Don’t assume it’s all bad and get locked in depression. Even bad revolutions open up new (usually in that case counterproductive) job and enrichment opportunities.
In this case, if they remove the constraints on business even a little, I bet you there will be plenty of new opportunities and chances to work at whatever level and career you work.

7- Don’t be scared, but be prepared to throw your weight behind less-disastrous alternatives. Not only is this a revolution, but people are very angry. Such circumstances are slippery. I don’t think the people in charge right now are a danger, as such, but any disturbance, like, say the idiots on the left killing the employees going through records, and things could tumble completely insane.

So be ready to be the “slow down” voice and the one that tries to at least dissuade people from gallows.

8- At the same time, hold on to your principles. All of us will face difficult circumstances and choices because again, things changing very fast, and every time that happens opportunity and jobs appear and disappear, and you’ll have to decide what you can do, and how you can survive. Hold on to your principles. If at all possible to survive without compromising them, do so, because there is a price for compromising them. For you and for society.

9- Hold on to your hat. This year promises to be LIT and I’m not sure next year will be any slower. DO try to do at least some work, rather than spend the time trying to track everything.

I suggest you limit yourself to say half an hour of news reading, then go work.

And meanwhile, enjoy the revolution. Yes, we need a miracle for everything to go right, but we’re already in the middle of a miracle. What’s one more?

10- If you come here, and there’s a clip of the Green Acres opening, THEN it’s time worry.