Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

One of the drivers of how scary everything feels is that we’re in an era of catastrophic innovation.

And I know as I type this that half of you are going to go “but from covered wagon to airplanes! Wasn’t that faster?”

Yes, in a way, but we’re talking about different areas of change. (As well as the fact that change builds on change.)

First let’s establish the rate of change humans are good for. It’s very slow, and measured in the pace of a human life. The new generation might expand the hunting grounds, or whatever, but by our middle years (which some scientists claim is around 25) we are set in our ways and pretty much just want our routine. We can shake it up in minor ways, but the major patterns are set.

Humans like their patterns “safe to eat” and “good grazing land” and “friendlies vs. enemies.” We want tomorrow to be more or less like today but a little better. And we want to raise fat babies who have fat babies. For that to happen, we have to know that tomorrow will be more or less like today but a little better.

This is our minds. Our bodies are even slower to adapt. See the rate at which lactose tolerance is disseminating in the population. Evolution is a slooooooow process. You see, it’s a hit or miss thing, and it’s based mostly on “Does it allow you to reproduce more, and produce more viable descendants.” Sure, being petite with violet eyes might make a gal super attractive, but unless it also allows her to have triplets for every birth and have 26 kids who each have 26 kids in her life time, the fact that gentlemen like anime girls is not going to give us all anime girls in two generations or fifty. Keep that in mind, because it’s important.

Second, sure, the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century saw an amazing rate of technological change. There was probably a non-insignificant percentage of people who made it out to the American West in covered wagons who were alive to see the moon landing. Looking back, this seems dizzying to us.

Was it?

Well, yes and no. Like a lot of the changes through the industrial revolution, it was astounding and mind-breaking and…. things that happen to other people either far away or in a much further up social strata.

Look, I was born in the early sixties in a small European country. When I was six we moved from one house to another using an… ox cart. I took my first flight at 17 when I came to the US as an exchange student. I was only the second person in my family to fly anywhere. This included immigrants to other continents who had taken the “vapor.” By which they meant boats. Not sure if they were steamboats, as the name implies.

The rhythm of life was still very much what it had been in the 19th century. Sure cloth manufacturing and clothes manufacturing was easier, cheaper and faster. But that meant some more mill jobs for local youth, and people dressed better.

Again, even when television became common in the seventies, the rhythm of life didn’t change much. The housewives now watched soap operas, as opposed to merely listening to them on the radio.

The difference in our current rate of change is that — mostly because government blocked the big changes that Heinlein expected — at the very personal, every-day life level.

When I moved to the states now almost forty years ago, contact with my family was cumbersome and expensive. It was a major line item on our budget to have calls to mom. Now it’s not only free, but I routinely get pics of grandnephew in my texts when I wake up. I can communicate to friends around the world. In fact, most of my friends, while in the US might as well live in Narnia. I never see them, we just talk every day.

But the … changes hit at every single level that involves information/learning/media. Which means they hit at every level for anyone who works or plays in those realms. Which in the US is almost every single person.

For me, at the professional level the change is particularly dizzying. I mentioned before that we’re just now about to run out of a set of stamps we bought in the early two thousands, expecting them to last a month. But submissions went online that month, and well, after that so went bill paying and most correspondence. We probably won’t use the six month supply of envelopes large and small for the rest of our natural lives. If you get a letter from me, it will have tape on the closures, because the glue is SO old.

Also, I went from trying to always have more than one publisher to publishing myself, and if you think that denotes a demotion, or that it must mean I’m making less, or– Well, oh, you sweet summer child.

And the whole thing is accelerating crazily. For people like me, the ability to produce entertainment that reaches the masses and/or to learn whatever I very well please, at this point is bounded only by my time and energy. (And the demands of this blog, which is– well. Its own time sink.)

Sure, but that’s entertainment. Even supposing that — bet you that — in two to five years I can produce animated movies of stories that rival what Hollywood can do, with minimal learning investment (I can do it now, if I am willing to spend three years to cludge together semi-functional tools, integrate them and LEARN them well enough to use off-label. My problem being I’m not willing to lose three years of not writing at all, and not blogging either.) what is that going to change?

Well, not much, but that’s the nature of my profession. I have friends in other professions, though, and … well…. it gets complicated.

If I’d stayed in my original path as a multilingual scientific translator, my lunch would be currently being eaten by automated translation tools, which, sure, still need human editors, but far less. (If I’d stayed on that path, I suspect right now the mathematician and I would be starting a retirement project of creating better automated translators.)

And I have friends doing work on better 3-d printing. And better machining, the kind you can do at home and used to require a factory. And I have friends working really hard to break all sorts of barriers in distance medicine, and diagnostic, and engineering, and–

As I said, it’s accelerating. Part of the reason it seems like governments have gone to war with their own people is that the “blue model” of centralized governance views the 1930s as its ideal time to be. Because mass everything was obvious and controllable, from communication to manufacturing.

Currently they’re running around screaming misinformation and trying to grow more fingers to plug the leaks in their information dam. And not succeeding. And that doesn’t count the myriad new manufacturing/robotics opportunities over the horizon just waiting for the boot to lift a little, not even be removed, to come into being.

To an extent, the “progressives” — never was a movement more strangely named — are suffering from shock and panic over fast change because of how wedded they are to “systems” that “explain everything.” People with that kind of mindset are not prepared to quickly change how they think, or to take new factors into account.

So even though all of us feel like everything is slip sliding away because of fast change to our everyday life, the left feels even more so.

To an extent their “invented” change, to the numbers of genders, or whatever, are ways to cope with their own cognitive dissonance, in the same way cutting yourself is a way to cope with change you can’t control. Also a way to accuse us of what they’re doing. “You only say that because you’re afraid of change!” etc. because they project like an Imax.

Also, tying in to that evolution thing, their attempts at keeping the new generations ignorant and incompetent, yeah, are going to hurt, but not in the long run. In the long run, humans are as creative and adaptive as they’ve always been, and the kids are finding ways to learn and innovate. The learned neuroticism only paralyzes them for a few years. That means they’re slower to get started, but not permanently crippled.

No matter what the left does, it only seems to feed the acceleration of change that escapes their control.

Which drives them crazier and leads them to do crazier things in an effort to control us.

Which in turn leads to us escaping them faster and in more creative ways.

Have I mentioned: Hold on to the sides of the boat. The seas will get choppier.

And also, remember RAH and keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

*Sorry about the lateness. There were wedding dress fittings, and I was only person available to go with. Threw entire day off. Also Havelock cat is ill which ate the rest. – SAH*

The blue model is collapsing all over the world.

We’re calling it the blue model after the American colors. And no, you don’t need to tell me that the left manipulated those because post fall of the USSR they thought calling themselves reds was too on the nose.

Or perhaps because they tend to think in patterns, they thought the communists were defeated because they were red, and they could rub some of that on us. Who knows? The many many ways they avoid thinking are tiresome and hard to fathom.

But I’m using Blue model instead of Marxian because the blue model at its root is honestly more monarchist than anything else. It’s the idea that the government should take care of you. That you are dependent on it, and lesser-than.

Marxism simply highjacked the structures left over from monarchy. Which is why the blue model was much deeper all over Europe which still had leftover structures and mental categories from monarchy. The idea that someone in the power structure to a degree owns you and you owe them allegiance while they owe you protection/whatever else goes back as far as feudalism. The idea that individual rights trump that is alien in most of the world.

It isn’t alien in the US, and it is in fact, despite everything, the default. Which is why the blue model took a lot longer to penetrate fully here, and it’s still not really fully installed. Yes, I know what you hear on the TV and what recent college graduates spout, but really: In 16 we voted for the guy promising to bring back jobs, over the chick saying jobs were a thing of the past and she’d give everyone welfare. Americans still would rather take care of themselves, given half a choice, despite everything FDR and his ideological successors did to try to break that.

BTW and this is important later, the monarchical model in Europe had its roots in feudalism, which was a system that made sense for its time and place. Division of labor of a sort, under constant attack from outside (moors in Southern Europe, Huns in the East, Vikings in the North.) It is a system that works fabulously when one is under constant attack and short on resources.

It ran into problems as the pressure let up. Contrary to what you’ve been fed over and over in school, revolutions don’t happen when things are intolerable, but when things get better. Actually, revision on that: they can happen when things are intolerable, but then they are far far worse and can often flip totalitarian.

So, what is the blue model: A centralized, “strong” government, run by “experts” who possess some quality the “peasants” lack (this applies back to monarchy, where they were believed to have been installed by G-d. In our era it’s the “they’re so smart.” Kind of the same, said another way.) This allows them to allocate resources and make decisions for everyone. What decisions? Well, those you are too stupid to make, peasant!

No, on the serious side, the problem is that when the current form of the blue model was installed, it was believed that experts really had more knowledge and could see clearer than the average person, including into that person’s daily life.

No? Dudes: WHY THE HECK do we have a recommended daily nutrition? Particularly as we’re finding out how different people/metabolisms are, why do we have someone telling us what we should eat, every day? (And am I the only one who has found that a lot of our dietary diseases only showed up since we’ve had that?) Why is there someone telling you how much you, yes, you, should weigh, for that matter, when humans are completely different, and in the US we come from ethnic groups with widely varying body types? Why do we have regulations on what insulation your house must use, what type of stove you can use to cook your food, what your kids must learn, how your work must be performed, etc. etc. etc. etc. for everything you do every day, from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed.

Well, “experts say” and “they know better” of course.

If we cut the federal government back to what the funding fathers thought were the functions of the federal government, we’d get rid of 99% of it. Guard the borders. Negotiate with foreign powers. Prevent war between states. I believe that’s it, unless I’m forgetting something.

Everything else is the blue model. Everything else is “Experts say you should wipe your butt three times, using paper of this thickness, folded twice.” EVERYTHING.

And it’s double that abroad. And they give a lot more credence to experts than even our dunderheads do. I remember watching in awe as my parents allowed their electrical panel to be changed with one that would crash at a lower usage to “save the environment” because…. experts said, so there were the government goons going door to door, doing this. And everyone thought this was okay. (Head>desk.)

So, why is the blue model crashing? Well, first because they are now openly against their own countries. Took a while for that to actually sink in, but slowly it’s penetrated. And people will actually defend themselves when they keep getting attacked.

Second, because it never worked and it can never work, beyond a very small population under high pressure.

After all, its idea of the obligation to and from government is based on Feudalism, which was exactly that. Feudalism broke under the twin impacts of the Black Death which — not because it was smaller population, which is what the left took from it the ijits — because it was a massive population CRASH created a surplus in a society that never had it before; and a population explosion following, which caused people to fan out and colonize beyond the immediate reach of the Lords/government.

This type of model, where the government imposes all sorts of dictates on things it has no business touching, only works as long as the government, whether your local lord or your local kommissar can dictate what you believe/talk about and what you do/how you react.

This means it doesn’t work very well in a distributed, spread out society. It does even worse with a from-a-distance, ignorant-of-local-conditions society. It does even worse when the people running it are infected with Marxism and think both that people are widgets and that people will respond to laws as though they were laws of nature. And it does even worse if the people running it are utterly in thrall of “experts” and “Studies” in an era when most of those are falsified. (Because financed by the government.)

But most of all it doesn’t work because it’s centralized, top down ordering of everything. It is particularly clunky in our continent-sized country, but frankly it doesn’t work very well even in the kit-kat sized countries like Portugal, where you need a passport to swing anything above a newborn kitten. The central planners not only can’t see into the needs and desires of people who live distantly/differently from them, but also the bureaucracy itself is optimized for ass covering, so all failures are excused and all data fudged.

The end result is failures no one will acknowledge, which snowball into really big failures.

The central administrative state never works very well, but it gets worse each year, because failures roll bigger and bigger every time, like the dung pushed ahead by a dung beetle.

To make things worse, of course, the stupid fools are INTERNATIONALISTS and aiming for the largest possible of all states. I honestly don’t know if this is because they’re Marxist or because they’ve tweaked accountability and good information are harder the bigger the nation is, which gives them cover, or if they truly believe that the long war of the 20th century was due to nationalism. (If anything it was due to aggregating all the tiny principalities and satrapies of Europe into large nation states who then collided over their macro policies.) However they all want these big aggregates and ultimately a world state. Which is stupidly insane. But anyway, their internationalism and conviction that people are widgets is causing them to a) import vast masses of third worlders into the west b)try to enforce some form of racial social justice that means the natives of the West have no rights.

And to compound their problems, they no longer control the communications, so their failures are becoming impossible to hide. The internet, even faltering and hampered as it is outside the US makes their bias and hooliganism obvious.

So, the blue model is falling in plain sight. The world is on fire, with the people of every western country at all but open war (from what I gather from reading the increasingly panicky “Stop doing that” communiques) with their governments.

How long? I don’t know. I know even here we’re tap dancing on a powder keg, and our idiot Junta keeps playing the music faster and faster.

I know anything could set it off. Britain had had horrific events before without fighting breaking out. And the poor bastages aren’t even armed.

At the rate things are breaking down it’s going to get sporty all over, and accelerate.

Make your final selections before flight, and strap in.

We’re about to encounter turbulence.

*I will continue the post on the bind we’re in, but tomorrow is a really busy day, and someone asked for this. So, here is my post from 2015 on acculturation. – SAH*

Prepare to be Assimilated a Blast From the past From November 22 2015

Yesterday I was surprised when Dave Freer sent me a post that echoed almost exactly what I’ve been thinking.  In a late night (for me.  He has temporal privilege, living in Australia) conversation last night, I found that we agree in more than one thing, including how nasty things are going to get if we don’t get at least a partial course correction soon.  That is a post for another time — how the fact that the left’s escathology and the belief history comes with an arrow and that they are the inevitable “end of history” (a belief that’s religious in nature because no rational principles lead to it) has caused them to be blind to the fact that silencing opposition is NOT winning — but for now it remains scary that both of us are worried about the same things.  Why scary?  Because I’ve known Dave for… twelve? thirteen? years and the man has a gut feel for the future. Even when you really wish he weren’t right, he tends to be.

But today I want to talk about assimilation, or, in sociological terms, acculturation.  I, and Kate Paulk, and Dave Freer, and a ton of the rest of us are immigrants who went to another country with the intention of living there the rest of our lives and who had incentives to fit in and be part of that country.  (In the case of two of us, husbands. And in my case a philosophical belief in the principles the nation was founded on.)

But even then, with the best will to fit in, it’s a HARD thing.  Really hard.

It’s not just in your head either, though it is there too.

Humans are tribal, and living in a multi-ethnic society doesn’t make you less tribal.  This is why people keep looking for racists under their bed, because you know, it’s baked in, and they know they’ve “discriminated” at some point.  Only this isn’t the racism of the progressives.  Minorities can be (often are) as racist or more racist than the majority.

But more importantly, in a multi-ethnic society that tries as hard as it can to eliminate racism, you get a different kind of “racism” that has nothing to do with race.  You get tribalism that fastens onto odd things.  It’s best expressed in “Ya’ll are not for around here.”

What you might not realize if you have never immigrated and acculturated is that the way you move, the way you speak (absent accent), the way you eat and the way you walk (not to even mention handwriting) are ALL culturally linked.  Most of it is not identifiable at a conscious level, either.  Most of it is so deep that all it does is trigger the “ya’ll are not from around here.”

I know I’m fitting in better because it’s been years since people stared at me while I went about my daily business and before I opened my mouth came up to me and asked “Where are you from?”

(And btw, the reason I stopped resisting identifying as Latin is because other people are making that identification for me, usually people who have a grudge (and who, bizarrely, manage to think I’m Mexican.)  My kids came to the same decision for the same reason.  It’s one of those “you say that I am” and it actuates even when my hair is colored light brown — it has no color of its own anymore — and I’m pale from a combination of lack of sun and illness. SOMETHING is triggering this response in people.  I don’t know what it is.)

Now, when you don’t fit in, for whatever reason, you’re going to find that some people — often not the sanest people in the world — are going to have issues with you and often be hostile.

Remember this as we go through the stages of assimilation.

It starts when you find yourself in a completely different land and you realize there’s no going back.  I came over after Dan and I discussed our options and decided where we were going to live.

The choices were here or there or between and wherever, a sort of multinational, above nationality existence.

We chose the US for several reasons. To begin with there was that philosophical belief set I had which conformed best to the founding documents of the US.  Then there was the fact that Dan could never be REALLY Portuguese, even if he moved there, learned the language and acculturated completely.  He’d still be a foreigner living there.  Being Portuguese means sharing ancestry.  Our kids would be considered mestizos.  Our grandkids would probably bear “the Americans” as a nickname.  Our great grandkids might too, and by the sixth or seventh generation, THEN they would be Portuguese (and might not remember why they had that nickname, and might think it was just some ancestor who liked American movies.)  Then there was HOW we wanted our kids to grow and the options we wanted them to have.  We decided the US was our best bet.  There were no doubts our kids would be Odd and the more free the society the more outliers thrive in it.

So I came over and set out to acculturate.  Part of this involved watching a lot of old TV because it gives you the catch-phrases, the “feel” of things.  I also read a lot and pretty much everything, which helps, though what helped most was reading auto-biographies and NOT by famous people, who are presenting an image, but the sort of “my grandma wrote an autobiography and we printed a hundred copies and donated one to the library” candid shots of normal people you can get in those.

Even with the best will of the world, even wanting more than anything to fit in, it’s very hard.  Not just in America.  America might be one of the easiest places in the world, because it is multi-ethnic and a country of immigrants.

But even so, people catch the subconcious signals of “something wrong about you.”  They stare.  They don’t trust you.  Sometimes they think you’re stupid, because “smart” in a society is not an IQ test but a series of signals a lot of them subconscious.

I muddled through, but sometimes there there were days I felt so homesick that I’d give anything to never have set out on this course.  And people treated me oddly, and it’s very easy to use that as an excuse for failure.  I learned not to do it because, through friends who did it constantly, I identified it as a trap.  I chose to ignore it.  But I still knew it was happening, and it made me long to go back to my tribe, to the place I belonged.

Some number of immigrants do this.  It gets to be too much for them.  They run back “home” where “things make sense.”  I might have done it but for that philosophical conviction.  That’s how hard it is.

At this stage many people make plans to retire in the “homeland” or at least to go back after death.  I guess it’s a comfort.

And I still had that option, six years in, because the hoped-for kids had failed to materialize, so if something happened to Dan, or simply if it got to be too much for me, we could always “go to Portugal.”

Only then I had Robert.  And the most important reason to live here and stay here came into being.  And if I was to raise this child American, I certainly wasn’t going back, even if a tragedy happened and something happened to Dan.

This is the point at which you’re most offensive to natives, btw.  You know just enough of your new society to see all the warts, but not enough to see the good side or necessary side of the warts.  And you’ve been far enough from your native society for a while so it creates this glow of nostalgia.  You know you’re “trapped” in the new place, which creates resentment.

This is when the words “In my country” — meaning in the old country — come out of the mouths of immigrants.  I was lucky to watch a Turkish immigrant in a group we belonged to alienate everyone with this behavior, so I didn’t do it.  I thought it, sometimes, but I didn’t DO it.

So then came the serious-fitting-in part, helped, btw, by dad.  We took Robert back to meet the family after he was born and dad who, btw, longs to see me every year, told me not to be running back for every important event in the kid’s life.  “Don’t be like those immigrants from France who raise the kid to be Portuguese, while in France.  You made your choice, now make sure your kid knows his place. Raise him American.  We’d love to know him, of course, but he’s American and that’s where he has to fit, and live and thrive.”  This was much like Dave Freer’s FIFO advice yesterday.

So… I made my choice.  And I really started trying to fit in.  This did not involve changing our diet so much, or my clothing choices (I’m odd, okay) but a closer observation of people.  I’d have got rid of my accent, if I could.  Though being a mother helps with this too, because unconsciously you start picking up speech patterns and gestures from your kids.  I might still strike people as somewhat odd, but it wasn’t as in your face anymore.

I also stopped reading in Portuguese, because when I do that a lot, it affects my word choices and rhythm of language in English, and I was trying to get published.

And at some point, I stopped being stared at when I was at the grocery store, and I stopped feeling I stuck out as a sore thumb.  I still couldn’t write people who grew up in America.  (I still can’t write people who grew up NORMAL in America, but that’s something else.)

I don’t know when that happened because I was busy just living.  Somewhere along the line I stopped thinking of Portugal as “home” and Portuguese as “we” and instead changed that to America.

Then came the shock of going to Portugal after a five year hiatus and being in a foreign land, rubbed wrong by the way these people moved, the way they talked, the way they prepared food, a myriad little things.

Now, be aware I’m not an “ugly American”.  I’ve been to other countries (neither America nor Portugal) and reveled in the differences particularly in food and dress but also architecture and just ‘different’.  That’s the point of traveling, I think.  But it’s also easy to enjoy the difference when you know in two weeks or whatever you’ll be back home and have things your way.

It’s harder when the back of your brain remembers doing things that way and — this is hard to phrase, but it’s something like — is afraid of relapsing and of getting “trapped” in the old place.  It’s a feeling of being in a foreign land that is nonetheless eerily familiar, and yet not familiar enough that you could survive in it on your own. Because of how familiar it is, you see the warts.  Because you’re now acculturated elsewhere, it’s easy to see the solutions too and you find yourself saying “Back home we do it this way” then stop, aghast, realizing what happened.  And it’s a relief to come back to your adopted homeland.  And you feel guilty it’s a relief, because you love the people you left behind, and they would be hurt if they knew how much your prefer your new place.

This is where I’ve been for at least 15 years.  It’s where I’ll be the rest of my life.  There will always be little things that aren’t “right” about America, things I learned so far back that they’re not conscious.  Nothing big or philosophical, but the little ways of doing things.  Sometimes I can’t explain to my husband why I hate an area he loves, or vice versa (this is important while house hunting) all I can do is wave my hands and say “No, just no.” And I know I give the “indicators” of class and intelligence all wrong.  (Not REAL class or intelligence but how those markers are perceived in the US.)  I KNOW that was part of my trouble in the field.  I also know that my “I’m getting really, really angry” is mistaken for shyness or fear here, which has led to some in retrospect funny situations.

I will never fully belong either place again.  That’s okay.  It’s a choice I made. And of the two, I belong here the most.  Say I 90% belong here, opposed to 10% in Portugal.

But the process to get where I am was neither easy nor unintentional. And it involved consciously NOT romanticizing where I came from, which I find is a big temptation for immigrants of all types and colors.

So…  So this brings us to taking in refugees from a culture so different from ours as to be mind-boggling, (and you wouldn’t get HOW different unless you’d lived in one half way there), from a religion that considers itself at war (physical, not just spiritual) with us and modernity, from a place where tribe is primary above all…

Do I understand why they want to come here?  Sure.  Even if half the reason is probably wrong of the “streets paved with gold” variety.  They want a better life (or a life) for themselves and their children.

Will it be an easy road to acculturation?  No.  For one, our culture ACTIVELY DISCOURAGES acculturating.  It’s considered a “betrayal” of your “native” culture.  I was accidentally  in the room yesterday (I am ill, okay) while someone watched an episode of Dr. Ken, in which his wife accuses him (a second generation Korean) of being a lapsed Korean and brags about how she has passed on “her culture” (she’s second generation Japanese) to her kids.

The entire episode could serve as a cultural dissection of “the crazy years.”  These two people AND THEIR KIDS are AMERICAN.  That’s the only thing they are.  Yeah, okay, they come from elsewhere, as do most Americans.

BUT the message heard, loud and clear, is that you’re supposed to hold on to all this culture from an imaginary homeland, even when you marry someone from elsewhere, and pass this entire undigested baggage to your kids.  The message is that not only is there no escaping your roots, but it’s somehow bad to want to.

This is the message these new refuggee-immigrants will get, though TV, through movies, through social workers.  How important it is they hold on to their all vital tribalism.  Not just in food and clothing, but in thought.  How it’s somehow “racism” to demand they fit in into their new homeland.

Remember I’m saying this as someone who’s been there.  Acculturation HURTS.  Even when you want it, it’s a very painful process.  Think of the worst days of your teenage years, and multiply them by five or ten years of consciously dragging yourself through this process.

It’s hard enough to do when you chose this, when you love it, and when your tradition doesn’t demand you hold yourself as an enemy of your new land’s ways.  (And btw, I think that’s why it’s considered “racist”: acculturation and pushing for people to assimilate hurts people.  Bleeding hearts don’t understand that sometimes hurt is part of the growth process.)

I can’t even imagine trying to do it when immigration was forced on me, when going back was never an option, when my habits, culture and religion both encouraged me to be suspicious of my new countrymen and caused them to suspect me.

Hard?  Rather say impossible, or close to.  And then add to that telling you that you’re not SUPPOSED to assimilate.  And you’re supposed to raise your kids in the old culture.

People who have never acculturated, people who are frankly quite ignorant of what “foreign” or “abroad” means, beyond their easy, lazy, fluffy headed vacations talking to other people like them abroad, call those scared of such an influx of people in that bind “ignorant.”  I guess because they lack a mirror.

Is it scary?  It is very scary.  Can it end well?  Of course it can.

But the way it ends well is where our society cheerfully smiles and says “fit in, or f*ck off.”  We’ll embrace little Achmed and little Fatima as our countrymen, but NOT if they go around demanding Sharia, telling us to stop eating pork, and that we can’t write/make stupid parodies of Allah, as we do of every other religion/belief in our culture.  Sure, they can roll their eyes at the stupid parodies, or write outraged blog posts about our disrespect.  But they don’t have the right to try to curtail us by law, or to bring their f*cked up culture, which caused their problems to begin with, here.

I don’t see it happening, at least not while our current multi-culti elites are in power.  Which means what we’re doing is importing trouble for later.

Further more, what we’re doing is being horrible to these people and ensuring they’ll never fit in, either place.  And not like me, not 90%/10%.  No, we’re talking they will fit about 30% either place.  And because not self-selected immigrants, they’re probably not odd, not used to NOT belonging.

Of such discontent is strife and war born.

UNDERSTAND this is not what i want, not an expression of my desires.  It is what it is, and how the human animal works.

It is impossible to have this deranged belief that culture is genetic and that people can’t and shouldn’t change (a belief belied by history) and a multi-ethnic society.  At the end of that road is a war none of us wants to imagine and a far more restrictive society than any of us would like.

The only ways out of it are to either take no immigrants, certainly no immigrants in a large group (which makes it harder to leave the old country and its hates and loves behind) OR to hand to every refugee a little handbook.

The cover would say “Fit in or f*ck off.”  And the inside would explain “At home we did it–” is banned, that it’s gauche to try to pass the culture you left behind to your kids.  Oh, food and attire are fine, no one complains of that, but do not try to pass on “we hate x because in the 11th century, they”.  And the only way to stop passing that on is to be American as HARD as you can.

Which hurts.  It hurts like hell.  The generation that immigrated will never fully heal from it, and their kids will still bear scars.

But it’s the only way to make good on your choice of America.  It’s that or go back.  There is no other choice.  Making your new country fit the old is the WRONG choice.  Else, why did you leave.

Fit in or f*ck off.  No, this doesn’t mean becoming the Borg.  America is the society on Earth with the greatest tolerance for oddities and outliers.  BUT you do need to fit in minimally to succeed.  And you need to start thinking of America as “we” and not holding yourself up above the rest of your countrymen.

This goes double and with bells on if you were born and raised here.  Stop imagining there is a perfect society elsewhere and that you somehow belong to it.

Life is in great part the art of adapting to the flaws in reality that don’t match your desired state.

Sometimes all you can do is Fit in or F*ck off.

Of all the weird problems for our age to have oikophobia is probably the most bizarre.

Throughout history humans called their tribe “human” and everything else “the others” and bizarre ceremonies/sacrifices/rites developed out of keeping that distinction clear.

Our people hurray-good. Your people not even human. This is the beginning of human associations, and the basis of tribalism, which to an extent is the curse of mankind.

For all that I’m the first to say things like “Government, what is it good for? Killing its own people and enslaving them!” and loathe the over-extended nation-empires of the 20th century, the truth is that things are complicated when it comes to nations and empires.

Nations as a thing, governed by a distant centralized government suck rotten fish bits. But then again, it’s better than tribalism.

The dumpster fire that was the Roman Empire on many levels, with all its brutal colonial policies was much better than the tribalism before, and for that reason alone the Romans should be blessed, if nothing else. Because they invented nationality that transcended tribalism.

But how did we get from nation states where the leaders might perhaps be a little too proud of and chauvinistic about their own nation and their own people to governments — most of those in the West — that loathe their own people and want to destroy them?

Well, the short one word answer is “Marxists” which is actually hilarious because Marx loved Britain and was actually a nationalist.

Except that Marxism, being a totally effed up theory keeps going through a series of retcons to make it sort of work. And one of them was the Soviet retcon. As in “We’re international socialists, but international really means Russian.”

As the Soviet Union was the beau ideal of their fantasy, they thought of course it would lead the world to communism, and they idolized and wrote paens to this barbaric country at the edge of Asia. For… reasons. Their own countries must be run down and unfavorably compared to the splendors of the Soviet Union.

The wedge between reality and their love affair with Russia (the Soviet Union was a convenient mask Russia wore) just kept widening, but they kept clinging to it like a teenage girl with her first crush.

And when it all fell apart, they retained fury at Reagan who caused their beloved to fall. (As in the reason Obama wanted to be the Anti-Reagan, and said so. He managed it too, the traitorous little bastard.) AND they retained the certainty their own countries were evil for causing Russia to collapse. (“The good guys lost” being the catch phrase through the mid 2ks.)

They fanned out into the colleges carrying their open hatred and disdain for their countries, and taught it to a new generation, which was pushed into positions of power and–

Now, the oikophobia was there before. I know because I grew up with it all around me, directed at Portugal, and I saw it in the early eighties in the US, where everyone who was a leftist was anti-America, because America was the enemy of the USSR and therefore evil, and also so inferior to their ideal country.

I come across references, sometimes, in books of the era. And it’s startling. Like on a book talking about stargate, (the American psychic-research conducted by the military, not the TV series), apropos nothing, in the middle of it, the author tells us about this pill of some kind of natural compound that the USSR issues to all its citizens, which has been proven to extend life. Heaven alone knows if that was even true — I mean, if they issued a pill to all their citizens, let alone I’m sure the supply wouldn’t support that –and what it contained, but it was an article of faith to the bien pensant of the west at the time that the USSR not only could but would do this kind of thing, out of the goodness of its heart, for the good of all, while the US wouldn’t, because it was “capitalist” and “backward.”

You catch it too, in a lot of science fiction books of the period, that weird certainty that the USSR was more advanced and prosperous.

It is to our very great shame that we never publicized how bad things were behind the curtain when it fell. We thought of course the truth would out. Forgetting that the pictures of the concentration camps were essential in exposing Nazi horrors, and that without them the denial of what happened would be even more rampant.

Also we were hampered by the fact that by the time the USSR fell, the institutions of the west had been taken over by USSR sympathizers.

I could, here, adduce many reasons for this. There is the fact, for instance, that Marxism, as a simple, just-so story appeals to the type of sheltered, intellectual elites who don’t fit in very well in the real world but know they should be in charge because they’re “so smart.” Marxism with their “the intellectuals will lead the revolution” feeds their sense of unearned superiority. In that sense “who goes commie” is very similar to “who goes Nazi.”

But most of all, and overarching everything is the fact that commies hire only commies. They will forget everything else, and hire the ideological comrade (eh) over competence, over minority status, over connections, over in fact everything. That kind of selection bias, played hard, will replace all positions of any importance with the factor selected for more rapidly than you can imagine.

So, by the time the USSR fell all the centers of communication in the west were controlled by USSR-devotees and if not communists, communist sympathizers. This led to the misery behind the curtain never being exposed, but also to the utter fury of that class against their own countries for destroying their precious, which is how they experienced it.

As a result, what we have is elites who now not only favor a foreign country (or as they view it “internationalism”) but also hate their own countries and want to punish them.

This has led to their encouraging the outright invasion of their countries (the Gramscian retcon of Marxism said that third worlders are righteous and natural communists) by what they perceive as the dispossessed of the world. But which are in face the result of dysfunctional cultures. And also to their trying to curtail energy supply to the industrial societies of the west, because, of course, if they are rich other countries will be poor. (Amid the many sins of Marx his bloody stupidity about economics is paramount. That shithead never understood that it was not a finite pie.)

So, they need and want to achieve control of their countries, and then seek to destroy them in revenge.

This in turn is growing a strong nationalist trend, which is good and bad.

No, I don’t want us to get to the point we take no immigrants. In the US, at least, we will attract any number of people who WANT to become Americans. We should always choose the best of those, not by color or even perhaps formal qualification, but by a perceived willingness to work to be Americans. The “how to decide” can be solved by demanding they have some period of waiting and not requiring help before they become citizens. (We had all of those. They are fudged in various ways.) And by requiring assimilation. No Oprima dos para Espanol. Just… Fit In or Fuck Off. And weird as it might seem to you guys, there are people who consider themselves “naturally” some other nationality. French, or Italian, or English. And before the “refugee” bs, those countries had hard enough entry requirements to work on that.

I definitely don’t want humans to get to where if you’re another tribe you’re not human. Tribalism is a scourge.

But I also think internationalists are enemies of humanity. Some of them idealistic, unwitting, enemies of humanity. They don’t understand and never processed “culture” as anything more than colorful clothes and different food, and maybe skin color, which they think is somehow connected to all of that and language (which they don’t understand, most of them being linguistically slow and weird.) So they think it is possible to treat all cultures as “equally valid”, the ones that stone gay people and the ones that permit gay marriage, the ones that allow women to study physics, and the ones that insist women wear sofa covers all day everywhere, the ones that encourage people to experiment and learn how the natural world works, and the ones for whom knowledge consists of memorizing the accepted passages of a curated holy book, the ones that consider all humans as humans, and the ones that treat humans as “only those who are related to me” and everyone else should be exterminated.

Throwing all humans together in those conditions is a recipe for the most barbaric to come out on top and for the rebarbarization and retribalization of humanity. And it is precisely what it is doing, in reality.

Also, the internationalists never understood seemingly that one government, far away, who cares nothing for local conditions, is a recipe for disaster. Heck, the US is too large and too diverse for that, and we need to get back to a primacy of local authority tout de suit if we want to survive and remain civilized. The world as a “nation”? Bah. It’s a fantasy for stupid, illiterate children.

So that is the onslaught the West is under. Each nation is under the control of an “elite” who, for all intents and purposes, might as well be a hostile foreign group.

The good sign is that people, on the ground, are starting to wake up and fight back. And though it’s not widely reported, they have the “elites” treed and cornered in many places, and even here, we’ve been able to stop some of their worst excesses.

Can we win this?

As grim as it looks, yes, I think so. In fact I think it’s inevitable. The only question is how much of a mess we’ll allow them to make before patience is exhausted to the point fighting back is palatable, let alone inevitable.

Look, technically, the USSR should never have fallen. It was being propped up by the elites in our country, and they never lost faith.

And yet it fell.

Because their own system was so completely messed up that it would fall, sooner than later. With just a little less propping. It is the same now, nationally, regionally, locally.

And the push back has begun.

The only question is whether we allow nationalism to devolve to tribalism and factionalism. And how far into it.

It is my (and your) unenviable task to keep treading that fine line, and try to keep the ricochet from hitting too hard because a hard ricochet will only set us up for the next turn.

Steady as she goes. Love your country, but be aware other people are also human.

Keep at it, and be not afraid.

We are in such a complete and accelerating chaos that most of us are suffering from confusion and just wanting to know what comes next, or have SOME sense of normalcy.

I have bad news. It’s not going to happen.

This is because the chaos has at least three different sources. I expect this will be a series of posts, and this one I lay out the types of chaos we’re facing.

1- We are under a governance that loathes the nation it governs. Partly I think, because they are well aware we didn’t vote them in.

As such, it’s seeking to maximize wounding of the nation, which means maximizing chaos — by design or not.

This is primarily accomplished through open borders and giving in to fanatics who want to destroy fossil fuels.

Open borders because in the current state of the economy, we can’t absorb vast hordes of untrained migrants. War on fossil fuels because … well…. the society runs on energy. Control the energy and you might not control society or economy, but you’ll make it very odd.

But that’s not the only two factors of chaos they introduce, of course. For years now I’ve had the feeling they’re running around actively trying to start WWIII (I have ideas on why) and let’s not forget the entire covidiocy ride and their attempt to restart it since.

Then add all their strange ideas of how things work, and the fact they’re not half so smart as they think they are, and most of what they try to do has weirder and weirder effects that reverberate and ricochet around.

2- We are coming to the end of what we’ll call “the blue model” of governance. Or what was called in the cold war the “Mixed system” (One of my teachers was so proud of Portugal having a mixed system. Some sewage in that wine! Chef’s kiss.) This was the “Communism is more efficient and generally better at economy, but look at the human cost. So we’ll do soft communism/socialism with a human face”. People still get to have property, etc, but the state like a benevolent parent stands over them and redistributes property, makes sure everyone is playing nice, etc. etc. etc.

Like hard communism, it never really worked, because it’s broken in the fundamentals.

But for a while, it could pretend to work and even be successful.

Part of what contributed to its success was that though America has been bitten by the virus since FDR, we took in less of the poison. Much less than Europe. This meant we were still relatively free to innovate and create. The Free Market is so amazing that a small percentage allows you to do wonders.

However, socialism always kills, fast or slow. The soft socialist societies failed to reproduce, and the people on top are trying to create a pan-world society and–

It’s coming apart. It’s coming apart everywhere at once, and when it starts (Narrator voice: It had already started) in the actual, fizz bang way, it’s going to propagate all over, because people have had about enough.

BTW this is not just immigration (though that might be the fuse) but is mostly economics. The born again internationalist societies like the EC, not giving a d*mn about any particular country have become playthings of the tiny and blinkered “international elite”.

It will need a full post to go into. But picture Europe and people not being able to live in the places all their ancestors have lived because they can’t afford it. Heck, it’s true here in NYC, in California, in a lot of places.

It’s just here love of specific place — as opposed to love of country — is less common. But in Europe, not being able to live where your ancestors are buried for 10 or more generations?

The burning would already have started if they had more young people. And yet, even so, it might very well be beginning.

3- Technological innovation.

We’re living in a time of catastrophic technological innovation, which both makes the above chaos worse, and feeds into it. Note “Catastrophic.” I’m not saying the tech innovation is BAD but that we are getting it hitting closer and closer with no time to adapt, even when the results are good.

I was talking to friends this morning and I mentioned we don’t realize how fast innovation is. Not even looking back. I just realized we’ve been living for twenty some years off the mailing supplies I had just bought and which usually lasted me a month, when suddenly all magazines went “submit by mail.” It was so fast that the supplies I had on hand to circulate 60 short stories have lasted me this long. I think last year we went through the last roll of stamps.

Think about it: How did that affect envelope makers? The USPS? Etc? We don’t know, because it’s like we’re pretending it didn’t happen.

And this is a very minor corner of a very widespread effect.

Why does it make everything else worse: well, this ain’t the time to be importing people who don’t have very specific, very needed skills, for instance. Our own people are going to have a heck of a time adapting their skills to the new environment. Imagine trying to ride the bucking horse of catastrophic technological change WHILE also adapting to a brand new culture/language/etc. Shudder.

And as for governance: All intrusive governance distorts the market. But the market right now is unreadable, so the distortion has that much more chance of twisting/destroying the beneficial.

On top of that there is an eager chorus of dunces, casting confusion and doubt on real innovation. Whether that’s by thinking AI can do all sorts of things it actually can’t, or by day dreaming that we’re now post fossil fuels, they cast enormous confusion on what is actually happen, and have the potential to make things immeasurably worse.

So, reading the tea leaves?

Keeping an eye open and seeing what is happening might help. Yes, history teaches lessons, but you have to shed the bias of the recorders, and also account for what is different this time around. Few people are able to do it. None can do it perfectly.

I don’t know what’s coming, but it will make very interesting chapters in future history books.

We’re in for a heck of a ride. Prepare, hold on tight and hope for the best.

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

FROM ALMA BOYKIN: Wheels of Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Nine

Water driving wheels driving danger.

Without bread, hunger stalks the people of Jerwood. The old grist mill burned and a new one must be built. Count Ealdred of Jerwood hires Harald Tolson, called Halfpaw, to construct a larger, modern mill. A mill that the count will own.

Harald and his journeyman walk into trouble when they enter Jerwood’s gates. Why did the mill burn? Who doesn’t want a better, larger mill built? And what lengths will those people go to in order to get what they desire?

Harald finds himself battling the elements, suspicion, and danger in order to complete his contract. But his opponents underestimate how stubborn and determined a millwright can be. The Wheel always turns, something Harald knows full well.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil
(I was beta reader on this one, and like it – SAH)

When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…

Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?

With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.

from M. C. A. HOGARTH: An Heir to Thorns and Steel (Blood Ladders Trilogy Book 1)

Morgan Locke, university student, has been hiding his debilitating illness with fair enough success when two unlikely emissaries arrive bearing the news that he is prince to a nation of creatures out of folklore. Ridiculous! And yet, if magic exists…could it heal him? The ensuing journey will resurrect the forgotten griefs of history, and before it’s over, all the world will be remade by thorns and steel….

Book 1 of the Blood Ladders trilogy, an epic fantasy with sociopathic elves, vampiric genets, and the philosophy students mixed up in the lot.

FROM LINDSAY PETERSEN: Pleasures & Perils (The Reluctant Chrononaut Book 1)

Imagine waking up from a stimulating massage and finding yourself in a stranger’s bedroom in 1824. What do you do? What can you do?

All your skills, your expert-level understanding of work-arounds and pop-culture references? All useless. Your vast knowledge of the cyber-world is mocked by steam-age reality, and you can’t ‘predict’ the future because your recollection of historical happenings since 1824 is … unreliable.

You do have one asset, though – you’re a beautiful woman with a ”modern’take on sex. In any era that will get a woman far.

Kate Thomason, twenty-first century healer, is snatched from an eight-handed clone massage in twenty-ninety-seven by H. G. Wells’ time machine. She awakes in Wells’ bedroom in eighteen-ninety-seven, wearing only a sheer peignoir. Whatever could Wells want her for? He tells her he can’t send her back; what can she do in a world wholly foreign to her? She has ideas.

A romantic steampunk adventure, first in a series. An earlier version was released as The Reluctant Chrononaut.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Red Star, Yellow Sign

Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad.

It’s 1934, and the assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad’s Communist Party chief, has rocked the Soviet Union. When an up and coming young Party official is assigned to investigate, it looks like an open and shut case.

The further Nikolai Yezhov looks into the case, the stranger things become. Mysterious entities lie beneath the swamps upon which Leningrad was founded. Because he has stumbled upon these secrets older than humanity itself, Yezhov must be eliminated. But first he must be led to commit acts that will ensure that history will forever remember him as a vicious criminal.

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 I. M. LERNER: The Secret Under the Staircase (Under the Staircase – An Economic Adventure Series for Kids)

“So, you’re the ones…”
A mysterious package appears just as Maya and Nate start helping in their grandparents’ store. Inside is just one book: a faded copy of Free to Choose. In a race against time, they must decipher a series of cryptic messages to discover the secret under the staircase. But can a bunch of kids really solve the centuries-old riddle? Can they save their beloved town before it’s too late?Under the Staircase™ Books
A mystery and adventure series that teaches treasured values: personal responsibility, individual liberty, and economic freedom.Psst! Parents & Teachers: The first book in the series introduces a variety of Milton Friedman’s concepts—the Power of the Market, the Tyranny of Controls, What’s Wrong with Our Schools?, and other topics—using examples from kids’ day-to-day lives in school, with friends, and in familiar situations.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Treachery And Spells

Two novellas of magic and adventure. . . Caught between pirates who would force him to use wizardry in their aid, and a king who would force him to spy, Alik will need every scrap of wits and wizardry to forge his own path. A curse of ill luck leaves Perriel and Gareth trapped in an endless winter, with only the faintest hope of breaking free.

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: THANKFUL

I’m tired. I’ve been up since six thirty am. Didn’t sleep very well. And the morning has been a long slog, save for feeding and petting the tiny kittens.

The older cats got in the office supply closet. No, you don’t want to know.

But please, do take into account I’m tired. I’m very tired.

Part of what I’m tired of is the American right’s obsession with “electability” “Dignity” and “acting presidential.”

Trump is apparently listening to “consultants”. Heaven knows why. You can tell, because the right is all praising him for being “presidential” and saying he “learned.” You can also tell, because the left has put him in the same cone of silence it put McCain and Romney when they were running.

If you’re very connected and linked in on line, you’ll hear echoes of the fact he’s still speaking at rallies and events. But other than that? He might as well have vaporized for all we hear of him.

Apparently this is called “being presidential” and it makes for photo finish losses. Or losses that are so due to fraud, but can be spun as real, because who hears of them.

You see, someone convinced Trump not to do “mean tweets.” After all, those acting like a cat laser forced the left to cover him during the sixteen election. And heaven knows, we wouldn’t want that debacle of a victory again. The establishment was all ready to give everything up to Hillary, and Trump spoiled it.

No, no, no no, no. Let’s lose with dignity, like gentlemen! We know how to do THAT.

If anyone here has a line to Trump tell him to fire up the mean tweets. Look, we’re probably going to lose this anyway, to fraud. WHY make it easy for the left?

If there hadn’t been a potshot at him, would you even know he was campaigning?

Having worked on THREE republican campaigns now, there’s only one thing I can tell you for sure. Consultants work for the other side. The only people who believe them are “right wing pundits.”

And speaking of right wing pundits: I’m also very tired of all the right wing blogs saying the “surge” for Kamala is real. Oh, sure, the left is jumping and screaming in glee on command. And the “polls” show her winning!

Of course the internal of the polls show something like plus seven for the democrats. Which does not accord to any demographics, except perhaps white house staff.

“But the unskewing of polls in 2012 proved to be a lie. Obama really won by that much.” Yeah. Let’s talk about 2012, the election that told me how deep the fraud goes in the US. You see, I was a poll watcher. In Colorado Springs, at the time considered safe republican. And yet, 1/3 of the people showing up to vote were told that they’d already voted. People in their thirties and forties. WEIRD incidence of Alzheimers, no.

And of course, they were appeased by being told they could do a provisional vote. They never told them the conditions under which that vote would be counted. Because it wasn’t. The vote was in. They couldn’t find it and remove it. And they COULDN’T PROVE IT WAS ILLEGITIMATE.

So, they stole the election for Obama. They also managed a bare majority in Colorado (which is amazing, and tell you how few they were, when you consider that in Denver fellow poll watchers told me it was 2/3 showing up and being told they’d already voted) which allowed them to make Colorado all vote by mail. To save money on elections, you see, because Democrats are all about saving money. Weirdly no state that goes all vote by mail EVER goes republican again. It’s just a coincidence, I’m sure. (Salutes the fallen.)

I’m tired of the bizarre religious martyrdom obsession of the American right too. Guys, listen up: It’s me speaking, okay? I AM religious. A lot more religious since 2020, fairly inexplicably, considering the locked churches, etc.

But if I hear one more of you tell me that the world doesn’t matter/everything is doomed/but you got Jesus, I’m going to come through your screen and beat you to silence with a fluffy slipper.

Does the parable of the talents tell you to bury the talent and sit back, because He comes back, and He’ll take care of everything? No? Gee, I wonder why.

Look, people have been saying He’ll surely return now, because the world is already lost since shortly after He left. He still hasn’t.

Sure, work on your salvation, however you think it is. And prayer never hurts. But don’t be so sure the end is coming soon. You DON’T KNOW. And you’re not SUPPOSED to leave it all to Him.

He gave you two good hands and a brain. FIGURE OUT HOW TO STOP THE DOOM or at least make it shorter. Praying helps, but that’s not ALL you should be doing.

Unless, of course, you’re a refargain gnostic who thinks the material world is a trap. In that case, carry on, but let me tell you better and far more religious people than I got much, much angrier than I am at that heresy.

While at that, stop yelling at young people. No, I mean that. “Kids these days” “I paid my way through college” “Why aren’t they getting married” “I had a job wiping weasels asses. Why are they whining about their beginning jobs.” etc. etc. etc.

I have two kids. They’re not that young anymore, actually. Over ten years out of high school for both of them. They’re working, and making okay money, which is unusual for their generation. I mean, to have both of them have jobs.

And no, it’s not for lack of trying. Kindly remember the circles I run in. My friends are neither low-achieving nor do they lack drive. But their kids are a wasteland.

And it’s not because they were coddled either. We’re not that kind.

So, what is going on? Well, those jobs wiping weasels asses are now either banned due to environmental concerns OR they require a doctorate. And even then you’ll be lucky to get it. (And no, STEM isn’t a guarantee of jobs. Mostly connections are a guarantee of jobs.) Yeah, you paid your way to college, but that was before government took over the financing and prices went through the roof. At one time (paying half the tuition for each kid, back then) we were paying around 40k a year. In a state school. With the kids living at home. I imagine what other people’s kids are in hock for.
And even those who have jobs, even decently paying (much more than minimum wage) jobs are barely making it. Guys, we’re feeling the pinch of inflation/prices/etc and we’re in many ways in our peak earning years. We don’t eat as much as we used to. We have most of our essentials (more than that) including clothes and books. It’s horrendous for the kids.

And most of them never had a first job till mid to late twenties, unless they got skilled training, and even then…. The early jobs are just not there. And all the “child labor laws” mostly protect people from being adults till they’re legal adults. When everyone is competing for the same barely pay jobs.

Statistics can lie, but these are being buried, so they probably don’t. Most kids are not moving out. They’re living with mom and dad into their late thirties. This includes married couples. I know this. I remember it from Portugal. In my parents’ generation multi-generation households went away, (except for my family, kind of, because my parents wanted to save ALL the money before they bought the house) in my brother’s generation they came back, because no one could afford to move out. Because there were no jobs.

So before you say “kids these days” walk a mile in their house slippers. Those doing best among them are the ones inventing their own jobs. And that’s, as always, a minority.

Stop shaking your fist at them, and lend them a hand. Yeah, you had it hard. I had it hard. But the kids have it hard too, and because of the times we live in, it’s all too easy for them to drop out and go into a depression of computer games and computer chats. Forever.

Thank heavens movies suck, otherwise it would be another way for them to disappear. Most of them weren’t even taught to read comfortably enough to get “stoned with books.” Help them with that too.

The kids are all right. Most of them want to learn/do well. They really do. But they’ve been betrayed by society at every level.

And while at that, stop thinking you live in a movie. No, seriously.

I’m having people tweet charts at me, showing that the US is doomed and will cease to exist because the debt is so high.

People, are you actually and for real insane, and how do you type in those straight jackets?

Sure, the debt is scary. It’s also not what it looks like. The main creditor of the US government is …. the American people. They have borrowed from you, your kids, your grandkids. The main way it’s being paid for is RAMPANT inflation.

The numbers in the budget right now, are mostly passing around of tokens.

Look, macro-economics isn’t real, no. We can’t make a coin that will pay the national debt.

OTOH — and knowing BGE will hit me in the comments (I’m not that stupid) — our economy isn’t REAL either. No, seriously.

It’s a fiat economy, guaranteed by the faith and credit of the US government — can we tell them, or can we tell them? — and the current debt is to China, who doesn’t DARE collect, or even cast doubt on it, even if they had real force to do so with (they don’t.) And to the American people. What that debt is doing is making us pay more at the grocery store, the gas pump, etc. And making investment harder.

Is that good? No. Is it the end of the US?

SNORT GIGGLE.

Guys, how the heck can you even believe that — and stop all tweeting the same chart. What are you? Leftist bots? THINK — for a refargin minute?

Argentina. No seriously, Argentina. How many periods of crazy high inflation/can’t survive this has it gone through before Mr. Chainsaw ascended? There’s still an Argentina.

Unlike Argentina, or other places, people in America WANT to work. In 2016 they voted for the guy promising to give them jobs over the chick promising them free money in such numbers they gave him a surprise win.

And our land is rich in resources and ingenuity.

Heck, most of our people still believe in individual rights that transcend the government. It’s the government that’s the problem, and the excess regulations not to mention blinkered ones.

And that it’s a single point of failure. For the other side. All it takes is an election.

Can we win the election? Well, probably not. Not that we won’t win it. We will. We won 2012 and 2020 too. For all the good it did us.

But we can’t win the fraud. And knowing the right that is all too willing to lose — with dignity — those of us who point out it sure as heck is fraud will be told we’re crazy. No, no, it’s those damn kids/women/people who tan who voted for the socialists.

Not just losing with dignity, but alienating people on our side. How is that for a win? Very presidential. Tres dignified. Ten out of ten stars.

Look, I told you I’m short on sleep. And sick and tired of the bs.

Is there anything you can do? Sure there is.

First, on the cone of silence. Hit social media. Yes, I know most of you want to go and hide in a hole till after the elections. About half my regular commenters no longer comment, and have told me it’s because they’re “Staying away from politics. So depressing.”

That’s nice. That’s beautiful, really. Particularly when you encourage me to do the same.

It’s not that I like it here in the muck pit. I ain’t sleeping any too well, and I’m trying to finish a book, but hit a wall every time the scene demands any sort of energy or strength. Because I’m so tired. And angry, but mostly tired.

But at the end of that “I’m going to tend my garden” road is the stupid lefty bumperstick “what if they gave a war and no one came?” well, then the enemy wins, by default. Which, I submit to you was the point of that bumpersticker. They wanted the USSR to win, and that was only possible if we stopped fighting. That one was of a piece with all the unilateral disarmament crap, and all the push for US to give up nuclear weapons, and then we’d have “peace.”

The only guaranteed peace is that in the grave.

Going under the socialist boot won’t give you peace. Or them. Because some of us ain’t going down quietly.

The election is PROBABLY lost, but no more so than in sixteen, and that one was miraculously won.

And all we have is to get lucky once, then clean it up — now we know the extent of the problem — while they have to maintain control every time.

So, what can you do? You can engage. You can stop the dooming even when you want to doom.

There are indications that we’re being subjected to a psyop and indoc machine by our own three letters. You don’t have to let them in your head. Take off the overcoat and examine your own back.

Want to doom? Go doom at the cat. Go yell at the squirrels. Tell them all is lost. Even better, tell it to the raccoons. Maybe the fat bastages will believe you.

Go to a Trump rally? Make a twitter account. Post about it. Even better, post a recording. If he’s decided to be dignified, we can be undignified for him. And anyway, we can do mean tweets at will, because we’re not him.

Hit facebook, even if it’s a cesspool and they tell you this photo is fake:

Is it “undignified” for Trump to point out that Kamala Harris has changed races three times? (Born white, claimed Indian, now claims black.) I don’t think so. And it’s not undignified for us. She wants to wear black face, she’d better be ready to explain her earlier identifications.

Is it bad to unskew the polls? Well, don’t call it unskewing. Just show the internals.

Be loud, be obnoxious, be there! Give each person who sees you the sense they’re not alone, and no, the right doesn’t come pre-defeated.

There’s more to the future than the boot stomping on the human face forever. That was the vision of a depressed, disillusioned socialist.

If we free people find ourselves in that position, we’re going to bite that d*mn boot off. And then start on the foot.

Be not afraid. Be not meek. Be not dignified. And BE NOT SILENT.

Are you tired? Hell, how do you think I feel?

Have a sip. And then come with me. We’re leaving the trenches and running at the machine gun nest today.

Sure, it’s sure death. Then again, there are indications that machine gun is CGI so maybe not.

And after all, isn’t the uncertainty exhilarating?

The future isn’t scripted. Let’s write it ourselves.

Pardon me. I wasn’t going to write a post today, but this has been bugging me all night. I’d wake up, think about this, go back to sleep.

I have a headache, feel like I have a hangover — which is very bad, since I haven’t had alcohol in months (no, not on purpose, but I don’t like drinking alone, and husband doesn’t drink, so since the boys moved out I practically don’t drink.) –and am in a mood. So, you’re surely going to have to excuse me.

(Steps up to the stage. Turns the huge picture of Heinlein to the wall, so he won’t hear anything she’s about to say. She respects him too much for that. Rolls up sleeves. Takes off a shoe, and puts it next to her on the podium. Like every Latin woman she was trained in the fine martial arts of the chancla, and it will visit your head if you don’t stop being an idiot.)

Okay, now.

First let me tell you the situation, as I see it. Of course, I could be wrong. I often am. Just not as often as paid professional analysts, campaign consultants and their ilk.

I’m not black pilled — because I think we’re winning the culture war. Which means we win this. The only question at this point is the level of utter destruction we’ll have to dig out from, and if a counterfeit of freedom will be sold to us in the form of a “strong” government before we get our freedom back — but I also don’t expect us to win the elections in November. Or not cleanly. And I don’t expect a revolt afterwards, just a lot more Irish democracy.

To be clear we don’t need a revolt, and a revolt if it happens — and it might, I just don’t expect it — will kill the good with the bad, because our side has LOUSY targetting ability, will destroy things and people we actually need to rebuild, and will throw us into what I’ll call The Latin American Loop. The Latin American Loop is increasing instability, “solved” by bringing in men on a white horse to “solve” it. Sometimes, like one in ten, you have a decent leader who will actually let the country prosper, but really it’s just dictatorship and class structure and– bah. Go read the history of Rome in the Empire. It’s just Rome. Rome not only never fell, but is infectious. Which is why importing Latin culture by bringing in large, unassimilable batches of Latin culture people is wrong and bad. And yes, I am aware that I came from one of the Rome Never Fell countries. Gorram, people. If I wanted to bring the culture with me, I wouldn’t have bothered immigrating to a country where I had no connections, no padrinos, no one to lend me a hand on the way up. I wanted rid of it, save for my abilities with the chancla (very useful for kids) and the due respect paid to the family still abroad who have no intention of immigrating. I came to America because I wanted to be American. That means living in American Culture, not Mexico-American-WTF. What part of that was unclear?

Simply increasing resistance to the insanity from above to the point it collapses and we can topple it and restore the Constitutional Republic will do it. Possibly not in my or yours lifetime, but that’s, if not irrelevant not the most important thing. History is slow. It doesn’t move at the pace of human temper.

Now none of this is what I want, of course. I want it to topple fast. I want for our voting to be restored to a semblance of sanity — if it takes purple fingers, one day of voting, paper ballots? So be it and about time — and for us to kick the small minority of cultural invaders (Marxists. The illegal incomers are a large minority) raping our polity to be thrown down and their illusions of superiority cast into the trash heap of history.

There is a very small chance. A miracle. And we can do it.

If there were no chance, they wouldn’t have taken a potshot at Trump. (Uh Uh. Just a lone nut. Yeah. I’ll buy that. Except no, I don’t. As one of my writer friends put it, the only way to get not only that much incompetence but total lack of interest in investigating is if it was orchestrated. Sorry not sorry.) If there were no chance, they wouldn’t have replaced the corpse with the puppet on the ticket (and I still say Biden will die in October. I’ll explain why in a moment.) And they wouldn’t be Cone-Of-Silencing Trump so hard. AND they wouldn’t be working their fear and despondency brigades quite so hard, either.

Guys, PLEASE follow the bouncing ball as I unpack the situation: the only chance we have to bring this to a soft landing in my lifetime is to win in November. This is almost impossible due to fraud.

To win, the left doesn’t have to create real enthusiasm for Kamala (the left can’t meme. No, really. They’re trying to make coconut-pilled a thing. They’re …. impaired.) They don’t have to create anything bad against Trump (which Lord knows they’ve tried.) They JUST have to create the impression Kamala is gaining and now suddenly “unbeatable.”

This they can do mostly by removing attention from Trump’s MIRACULOUS survival and his iconic photo with the whole palace coup stuff. Then buying up more Kamala ads than I’ve ever seen in any campaign. Then putting a cone of silence on Trump, who, yes, is still campaigning all over the country, but you don’t hear a thing, do you? Just like you didn’t until he was shot at.

AND by hitting twitter to tell us how their latest campaign is working so well, and having a million bots talk about how we missed our opportunity to unseat the left because “everyone” hates Trump. They’re reviving the DeSantists too. The idiot on twitter yesterday said that we all vote by identity groups now and “we missed our chance in Iowa” alluding to picking Trump. As though DeSantis wouldn’t get the same “vote by groups” so that doesn’t make any sense. When I hit him with the reality he was working for the enemy, he came back with it was all lost, because DEBT and only DeSantis could have reined back the debt.

This is a propaganda operation, trying to revive resentment from borderline never Trumpers.

I have only one thing to say to those who fall for this crap: If DeSantis didn’t have the kind of fire in the belly and control of his campaign to achieve victory against Trump MUCH greater name recognition, then he didn’t have the fire in the belly and control of his campaign to defeat the cone of silence and the poisonous lies the left would have uncorked on him the moment he was the nominee. It’s neither here nor there if he’d have made a better president. He’d never have got within a stone’s throw of it. Because Trump is not a bigger adversary than the wholly controlled, lying media, okay?

Now to further unpack our situation: we now know that their candidate can be so damaged they KNOW no one would buy his winning the election. So they traded him for another puppet whom they can PLAUSIBLY say won the election.

Note this has nothing to do with her getting more votes — unburdened by what has been as she is — but with the fact they can LIE about it, and the RIGHT will believe it. The depressives on the right will join the chorus with “Oh yeah, stupid women will vote for her because she’s a woman. Stupid brown people will vote for her because she’s brown,” etc. etc. ad stultium, and when they fraud her in — 400 million votes for the win — they will do what they did and some are still effing doing with Biden and saying “Well, Biden won because people hate Trump thaaaaat much, because Trump is blah blah blah.” Or “Biden won because stupid women and minorities….” ONLY they’ll say it harder for Kamala.

Look, guys, ain’t no one voting for Kamala that wouldn’t have voted for Biden. And FYI women low-key hate women in power. That’s the real reason Hilary didn’t win. The “feminists” in public will talk a good game, but in the voting booth, they ain’t voting for no woman to have power over them. And as for “black” woman…. Most black people know she’s not black. And black men ain’t gonna vote for a black woman in power.

The important thing here — the absolute crucial thing — the ONLY thing you can do stop this nonsense is to keep pushing back. To point out, no, she’s not popular, the polls are cooked, and what they’re trying to do is cover the fraud.

And you have to be loud and constant. It might be impossible if they do manage to get Michelle Obama for her running mate. Not that the woman is popular, but because they can SELL it to the right as her being popular. (I very much doubt even her husband is popular now if he ever was. I saw all his books on the discount bin even while he was president. And her hyper-pushed memoir was kind of a dud.) BUT the right believes in her invincible popularity, and it might be impossible to turn the depressives around.

Note the left intends to keep up this continuous barrage through the DNC, and Kamala’s VP “selection” because by then Trump’s surviving his shooting, the fricking miracle and that photo we were given, will be “old news” and they’ll throw doubt on it with all sorts of stupid crap. And they’ll keep the cone of silence on him. And then in October Biden will die, and there will be elegies, and it will be forbidden to criticize him because morti nilsi bonum, etc. etc. etc. All of which will lend cover to their fraud because Kamala the horror will never be fully exposed, and “everyone” will love her and vote for her in memory of the great late Biden.

All of which means when the election happens, the right will go right back to its depressive “It’s because we picked the wrong candidate, and people really love socialism and–” NONE OF WHICH IS TRUE.

You–

(Gives baleful look at the back of Heinlein’s picture, defaults to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress mode.)

You rockheads! You deserve to starve!

But I don’t deserve to starve along with you, and you’re endangering my children, for which G-d have mercy on you, because I won’t.

THE ONLY CHANCE WE HAVE is to let them know ahead of time that the fraud will not be believed. That we won’t buy it. That the right will not lay back and think longingly of England.

THAT’s the only chance we have in the next twenty or thirty years or so.

But oh, no. It’s too much effort to stay off twitter with your depressive crap; not to turn substack into a depressive echo chamber; and to stop believing the worst of your fellow citizens.

It’s too much effort not to take the black pill much less to stop yourself from propagating it. It’s too much effort to remember that, yeah, sure, some other person might have been a better president, but Trump is the only one in recent memory that has managed to break through the fraud, and even in 2020 to make them fraud in such a way anyone with eyes could see it. Not that you have eyes, of course. They’re glued shut with your superior sense of grievance.

Holy Hel and her minions, people, how many of you are under thirty? Because the only people excused from knowing that every Republican is Hitler, and also mean, uncouth and stupid are people that young. The rest of us remember when Romney became Hitler and extreme right, and far too dangerous to elect. Romney. Pierre Delecto and the hairgel brigades, people!

WHY are you lending your voice and amplifying the psy war against us? Next you’ll believe that calling us “Weird” is really turning “normies” against us. Bob — Heinlein — help me, people, we, Oddlings and Strange ones that we are are the “normies” supposedly turned against the right by the apellation of “weird.” Like the rest of the culture doesn’t wear “weird” as a badge. Like anyone, anyone alive in America today is afraid of “weird” much less thinking two men, masculine enough to grow beard, on a ticket is “weird.”

This is Hollywood thinking and the idea that every hero must be gender swapped. And let’s remember how “well” those movies do. In fact, love it or hate it (Not my fave, and the movie had plot issues, but it was free) the movie burning up the charts right now is about MALE FRIENDSHIP. That’s not weird. It’s the rock bottom of civilization. (No, hear me out. Without it, or the concept of it men just fight each other to the death. In that milieu women are chattel.)

DO YOU THINK I DON’T HAVE MY MOMENTS OF DESPONDENCY? Those of you who talk to me privately know how often I hit those. For the love of Bob (Heinlein) I’m a chronic depressive. Do you think I live in forest with singing animals and go through my day falalalaling? I haven’t been able to work in fiction for almost a month because I’m watching your ninny behavior and feeling the sinking in my stomach as I know you’ll not only fall for the fraud again, but you’re happily running around making sure the left knows its lies are pre-bought. So its plan is gold.

Again: You rockheads! You deserve to starve!

So, this is what I’m telling you to do. I don’t expect you to follow it to the letter, because the individualists are incapable of organizing, but I expect you to try.

Hit the social media of your choice, and push back. Push back with humor. Push back with derision. Don’t be afraid to call Kamala names. Respect her position? Which of them? I don’t own a Kama Sutra. Mean to women? Not as mean as taking someone who slept her way to the top as the ne plus ultra of women. And as for respecting the position? That was always hogwash. If the person occupying it isn’t worthy of respect, the position means nothing. We don’t have nobility.

Make fun of her. Point out her mental shortcomings (It’s not difficult.) Remind people of the strange case of her race-change.

All of this is twice as effective if you’re a woman and can tan, but since the worst depressives are male, males pointing out the women of their acquaintance aren’t planing to vote for the Ho anymore than they were for Joe also helps.

And point out, always point out, that all they’re trying to do is make the fraud plausible.

Spreading fear and despondency is a war crime for a reason. Stop doing it unless you knowingly want to work for the enemy. In which case, you ARE the enemy. (Looks at picture of Heinlein.) The lieutenant wouldn’t like that. If you have to die, he’d expect you to go in a pile of spent brass and with a suitable escort. And that’s double if it’s metaphorical as it is right now. Do not let the republic die because you like whining!

Now, are you scared? Depressed? Bah. Welcome to the party, pal. I have told you for four years just about that the only way we win this is a miracle. The fraud is that big.

It doesn’t mean you need to aid and abet the fraud with your credulity. You’ll have your black dog moments, but I expect you to be an adult and keep those to yourself or a closed group, and come back to the fight ready to fight, or at least to pretend to be confident.

Now butch it up, Mary, and if despondency hits take a Valium like a normal person.

Fight! Fight! Fight!