Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

*Sorry this is so ridiculously late. WordPress and Amazon weren’t talking to each other, and it was driving me bonkers. Took me three hours and I had TWO books in. So I gave up. Yesterday it was still buggy. Now it’s working. My own books will go on sale next week and continue the rolling sale through New Year’s. – SAH*

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 JERRY BOYD: Deuces Wild (Bob and Nikki Book 52)

Bob and the crew are trying to relax in the Holler. That’s never going to work out. There’s always someone who thinks they’re better than Bob at running things. Come see Bob and the crew explain their errors to them.

FROM DON HOLLWAY: The Last Viking: The True Story of King Harald Hardrada.

‘The Last Viking is a masterful and pulse-pounding narrative that transports the reader into the middle of the action.’ Carl Gnam, Military Heritage

Harald Sigurdsson burst into history as a teenaged youth in a Viking battle from which he escaped with little more than his life and a thirst for vengeance. But from these humble origins, he became one of Norway’s most legendary kings. The Last Viking is a fast-moving narrative account of the life of King Harald Hardrada, as he journeyed across the medieval world, from the frozen wastelands of the North to the glittering towers of Byzantium and the passions of the Holy Land, until his warrior death on the battlefield in England.

Combining Norse sagas, Byzantine accounts, Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and even King Harald’s own verse and prose into a single, compelling story, Don Hollway vividly depicts the violence and spectacle of the late Viking era and delves into the dramatic events that brought an end to almost three centuries of Norse conquest and expansion.

FROM KYRA HALLAND: Source-Breaker (Tales of Tehovir)

After twenty-seven years in the trade, Kaniev the Source-Fixer has suddenly lost his ability to repair magical Sources. He decides it’s time to go home and take up fishing, but first, one more repair job lies ahead of him – Source Chaitrasse is experiencing problems. Kaniev’s depleted finances and self-confidence demand that this time, he get the job done right.

Fransisa always thought she would be the next High Priestess at Source Chaitrasse, but now her career has come to a dead end. She’s struggling to hold on to her place at Chaitrasse when a wandering tradesman appears, claiming that the Source has a problem and he’s the one who can fix it. He looks more like a brigand than a powerful wizard or wise scholar, but with an important ceremony coming up, Fransisa decides it can’t hurt anything to let him take a look at the Source.

Kaniev’s disastrous attempt to repair Source Chaitrasse leads to a sorcerer who is conducting dangerous experiments with magic. Caught in the sorcercer’s schemes, Fransisa and Kaniev must overcome their past failures and their differences to stop him before the Sources of magic and all the lands around them are destroyed.

WITH A STORY BY KEN LIZZI: Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume

This is the ninth volume in our popular Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy series of anthologies in the footsteps of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and other pioneers of the sword and sorcery genre.
The stories and authors included this time are:
The Cold Maiden by Eli Freysson
Assassin Eternal: The Memory Eaters by Andrew Darlington
To Raise the Shining Walls of Irem Once More by Tais Teng
Fulgin the Grim: Retribution by Ken Lizzi
Snow in Kadhal by Jaap Boekestein
Voyage to Vancienne by Gavin Chappell
A Pathway Forward by Lyndon Perry & David Bakke
The Left Eye of Phun Margat by Scott McCloskey
Sorcery in Nekharet by Steve Dilks

Artwork by award-winning artist Jim Pitts

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Firemaster and the Flames

Jan well knows that it is an honor to serve the king as a firemaster.

Even when it means leaving the lands where firemasters are known and common, and traveling to where they are feared and hated, bringing with her the foundling she is raising, to fight a strange manifestation of fire.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet (Family Law Book 2).

In the first book of this series “Family Law”, Lee’s parents and their business partner Gordon found a class A habitable planet. They thought their quest as explorers was over and they’d live a life of ease. But before they could return and register their claim Lee’s parents died doing a survey of the surface. That left Lee two-thirds owner of the claim and their partner Gordon obligated by his word with her parents to raise Lee. She had grown up aboard ship with her uncle Gordon and he was the only family she’d ever known. Him adopting her was an obvious arrangement – to them. Other people didn’t see it so clearly over the picky little fact Gordon wasn’t human.
After finding prejudice and hostility on several worlds Lee was of the opinion planets might be nice to visit, but terrible places to live. She wanted back in space exploring. Fortunately Gordon was agreeable and the income from their discovery made outfitting an expedition possible. Lee wanted to go DEEP – out where it was entirely unknown and the potential prizes huge. After all, if they kept exploring tentatively they might run up against the border of some bold star faring race who had gobbled up all the best real estate. It wasn’t hard to find others of a like mind for a really long voyage. This sequel to “Family Law” is the story of their incredible voyage.

BY HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox

To save the future, sometimes you have to reach to the past to change it. And in the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.


Cataclysm

Unlucky jerk Tom Beadle was on watch at NASA when the collision alert sounded: a new asteroid, bigger than the dino-killer, headed for Earth. Big problem, but that’s why we have NASA, right? Except, after decades of budget cuts, NASA has no way to shove it off course. That job has to be contracted out. Will the private sector company his best friend from college works at succeed where the government option failed? Might be best to have a backup plan, just in case…

Heisenberg’s Point of Observation

Thomas Sutton was not your average fourteen year old, not even in an Ark City. Born in one of the three refuges of the last remnants of life on earth, deep underground, he knows his history. A century after an asteroid shattered and struck the earth, they have been trapped below by volcanic eruptions, toxic gasses, and radioactive dust. But what if he could…change things? What if he could reach the past, to prevent the asteroid’s impact?

Entanglement

Tom Beadle only volunteered for NASA’s neighborhood watch program when his department said it would maybe help him get tenure.None of them counted on the Neighborhood Watch becoming a mortifying political liability when a malfunctioning probe accidently reveals an asteroid hiding behind the larger outer planets, setting off impact alarms– and politicians looking for blame. When their answer is to defund the Watch program and fire all involved, Tom’s only chance to save the earth is to lie through his teeth and try to deflect the asteroid under cover of harvesting rare not-of-this-earth elements. And even that may not work.

KAREN MYERS: Second Sight: A Science Fiction Short Story

A Science Fiction Short Story

BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S PERCEPTIONS FOR A POPULAR DEVICE CAN ONLY MEAN COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. RIGHT?

Samar Dix, the inventor of the popular DixOcular replacement eyes with their numerous enhancements, has run out of ideas and needs another hit. Engaging a visionary painter to create the first in a series of Artist models promises to yield an entirely new way of looking at his world.

But looking through another’s eyes isn’t quite as simple as he thinks, and no amount of tweaking will yield entirely predictable, or safe, results.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Wolf and the Well-Tempered Clavier

With the coronation fast approaching, the Cathedral of St. George the Dragonslayer cannot afford trouble. But come it does, while the cathedral choir director is at the Dragon’s Breath Organ, practicing the anthem he wrote at King William’s own request. While explaining some technical terms to his understudy, the choir director decides to show off a little.

In the process, he releases an ancient menace from long before humanity came through the worldgate to this place. An entity that strikes him blind, and threatens further harm to anyone who tries to play the Dragon’s Breath Organ.

However, they dare not disappoint His Majesty, not on the most momentous day of his reign. Someone must cleanse the Dragon’s Breath Organ of this malicious entity, and the choir director cannot. So the task falls to Miss Anne Teesdale, understudy organist.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: End of Debate

Covering the last year or so of current events, focusing on the senility and coup of the 2024 election process. Side B is thoughts on scripture.

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: pest.

For years now, I’ve been thinking that Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight was sort of an anthem for those of us on the right. Like, the last ten years or so. (Made all the better by the fact the artist is hard core stupid left.)

You know….

Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been
It’s all been a pack of lies

And never more so than the last four years.

I realized how far I’d come from trusting anything or anyone in the “public health” establishment (And guys, given the quality of care I tend to receive I was ALWAYS afraid of going to the doctor. Yes, I’m a zebra, and that’s part of it, but the other part is that there is a stereotype of the Latin female coming in to the doctor and if anything I’m the opposite, which means they’re reading me wrong. It’s probably not a coincidence the best care I’ve had were either doctors I already knew socially — at one time Mensa — or who are foreign born and don’t “read” me as “Latin.”)

Even ten years ago if you’d told me something like “They’re all corrupt and the entire FDA is full of things that are outright harmful to public health” I’d call you insane.

Now, I find myself reading articles on how RFK is going to take down this hallowed American institution and I think “you Absolute Lawn Flamings!” (Thank you Judy Frost.) “You can’t take off the mask and show us the hideousness beneath and have us FORGET what we saw.”

I remember how they told us that ivermectin wasn’t effective. I remember the manipulation of the number of hospitalized, the number of beds available, not telling you that 100% full beds is NORMAL for flu season, I remember the pushing of a vaccine that did nothing and was insufficiently tested, I remember the mask nonsense. I remember the lock downs.

MORE IMPORTANTLY I remember trying to make Vitamin D prescription. There really wasn’t even an excuse for this. Vitamin D made it less likely that people would die of COVID and therefore lessened the panic.

And these monsters wanted people to die, because they needed the panic to steal an election. Yes, it really is that ugly.

Perhaps a bit too of “there are too many people” because, well, because like Paul Ehrlich they find crowds unaesthetic. “So what if they die.”

Seven years ago, son and I went for a walk in the old neighborhood, and we met next door neighbor whose wife had been battling cancer. And in chatting he came up with the old chestnut of “We have drugs effective against cancer, but the FDA won’t let us use them because they want to make money out of all these horrible treatments.”

Back then I thought it was lunacy. I still think so. I mean, if there were a universal cure for cancer (which is not an illness but many) think how much money it would make.

But given what I’ve seen during the last four years, would I have been so 100% sure the neighbor had gone nuts? I don’t know. I mean, for money, maybe not. Holding back some drugs in hopes of population reduction? For Gaia? Well…. I know what these people were taught. A lot of them went through school just before me, or just after.

More importantly I know how bad EVERY STUDY is, and how they seem to publicize those that are things they like.

And this is an extreme case, because until these last four years I tended to listen to the research/medical establishment.

Now I put an extra step in, of running the claims against what I know of biology. Because you can’t trust anything.

RFK Jr. will destroy the federal “health” apparatus? Good. Perhaps this too should devolve to the states. If California wants to ban vaccines, let them. Yes, I think it’s a bad idea, but laboratories of democracy. Let’s see what works. And what doesn’t.

And if I feel that way about a part of the federal government I actually trusted, imagine how I feel about the rest…

So, every time they moan and run screaming with their heads on fire claiming some Trump appointment will destroy this or that portion of the boot on our collective necks?

And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
Well, I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
And I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord, oh Lord

When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before
Robert A. Heinlein

Some of you are looking at that and wondering what in heck is going on in my head. “Is this something to do with the Trump Train?” Well, yes, in fact. Kind of. Sideways.

Don’t expect me to remember where, but sometime this weekend I came across an article saying how strange it is that it is actually a good thing the left frauded themselves a win in 2020. The author of the article as kind of fear of saying it, and though I fully agree with him, let me tell you right now that that night in 2020 if you’d told me that the fraud was a good thing because of what it would set up, I’d have said you were insane. Okay, I probably would have straight up shivved you because 2020 was a difficult year and tamping down the berserker was so much work. But–

On the political side, a lot of what Trump was trying to do in his first term, we weren’t yet ready for. It wasn’t just the deep state resisting him, but the fact that what he wanted to do — what he was elected to do — seemed loony, probably even to himself.

To explain, in 2016 — and 2020 before the fraud — though a few of us were starting to intuit it, we really didn’t have the full idea of how rotten everything was, how corrupt, how counterproductive: from the architraves of our governance to the step stools of our professional organizations.

It took a lot to show us how bad it was, because it is the nature of humans to do what they’ve done and which has worked before. We can take minor innovation at a time, which over time will change things utterly, but that’s not what we need right now.

Our entire structure of “modern life” largely put into place in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and made pervasive in the FDR imposition of top-down rules and regulations and concentrating of power in DC, is rotten. Like Terry Pratchett’s throne of Ankh-Morpork, it is a beautiful gilded structure that looks imposing and impossible to defy, but which is, inside, rotted and will fall at a touch.

Well, we didn’t know that. We knew there were failures. That’s what led to the Tea Party and then to electing Trump when that failed. But we couldn’t imagine the rot and the corruption. We just couldn’t. Why the throne was so golden and shining….

Who could imagine they were founding research to create lethal diseases in an enemy land, or that they intended to release one upon us, to steal back their power, or that they would lie about it, when the disease was not as lethal as it promised, or that they would cause people to die, just to scare us into a lockdown — all over the world — so they could fraud elections here. Who could imagine the courts one after the other turning a blind eye to glaring corruption of our system? Refusing to even look at it on procedural grounds? Who could have imagined an AMERICAN inauguration under guard, with barbed wire around our capital? And this being treated as normal? Who could have imagined a mildly spicy demonstration being treated as the equivalent of 9/11? Who could have imagined an outgoing president being persecuted on crazy grounds, anything to keep him from running again?

This is the stuff of the USSR not the US.

Who could have imagined giving money and weapons to our enemies? Who could have imagined abandoning our people to die in Afghanistan? Who could have imagined opening the borders to the poorer, most criminal portions of the world, indiscriminately? Who could have imagined burdening us with regulations that dissolved the economy like water into sugar?

Who the hell could have imagined the last four years? And the choir of trained seals from the traditional media, even those we thought still had a shred of integrity?

Richard Fernandez said what they’d planned for us was what we see unrolling in Great Britain, the fear stalking everyone who posts anything on social media, the trials without a chance to face your accusers: justice system by Facebook moderators. And the freezing in the dark to change the weather. The sacrificing of the vast majority of us to their implacable Earth goddess and the vague ideas of “niceness” instilled on them by the “good people.”

It’s not going to happen. Not yet, at least. We have stopped that. For now.

And it’s time to railroad. Even the normal people have seen how rotten things are. Even they got scared enough, by seeing the path we were on.

If things can change it is now. The right and the left — but not the institutional commies of the supposed right and left — are both terrified, and putting their differences aside in order to fight the monster state, the monster structures that almost devoured us.

In the desperate fight for survival, I’m willing to trust RFK Jr. to take apart the rotten core of the FDA. I don’t know if he’s willing to trust me in anything, but I suspect he’d agree with my desire to tear it all down and build smaller, more local, more individual.

And at the same time, the technology is there. We can now have private space companies, unimaginable in the sixties or seventies. We can now do a lot of things with distributed computing, distributed fabrication, and new materials that were impossible even ten years ago.

Free the people. Remove the boot of government from their pockets and their minds. Allow people to learn outside the rigid structure of the educational system that has made people stupid and blind (which arguably it was destined to do.)

Let our people go, and watch them go. There are a lot of things coming together. In four years, we could well be on Mars. Could well be. Though I don’t know where the innovations and industries would come from to make it that fast, I’m sure they are just waiting to spring up.

Stop feeding our money, our blood, our brains and our love into a machine that beats the life out of us and our country. And free the bureaucrats too, so they can do something useful for once.

We can’t know how. We can’t know from where. But we know as the barriers fall, America will rise. And the rest of the world might just watch and follow.

We’re here. We’ve been given a chance, and a little breathing space to work.

Each in your own space, tear a bit of the old, build a bit of the new. And ready your shoulders, because the world is about to drop on them. And you must not shrug. This time you must not shrug, until others grow learn and come relieve you.

Now, in this blessed time, things are coming together, half felt, in the dark, that can lead to the birth of a new and as yet unimaginable world. All it will take is blood, sweat and tears. And that we have. That we have in plenty.

Don’t look. Running along our side is an abyss so deep it would swallow all of civilization. Don’t look. Just lift up your shoulders.

It’s time to railroad. Everything is coming together. Everybody railroads.

Through virgin intellectual lands. To our future in the stars.

Amazon is exceptionally buggy today. In fact, the entire internet has been weird since last night. I have fought to put up the promo post for hours, but it does the weirdest things from refusing to let me copy and upload cover images, to refusing to give me associate’s link…. and I’m about to give up.

I will either post it late today or tomorrow afternoon. Sorry.

And I’ve spent so much time on this I can’t write a fun post now, so…. up for discussion: we know LLMs are just LLMs, not real AI but a sort of more sophisticated auto complete. (So their threatening humans is just all the bilge the liberals have put online coming back at us. It’s the idiots who polluted the internet, not the LLMs we should worry about.)

BUT we all know computers themselves are sentient. The question is, are they also malevolent, or merely impish?

Most of the time we look at a landscape, particularly if we live in it, and we know exactly where the road or the walking path is. We know that if we set off from here, we’ll walk that way, and…

And then there’s snow storms in Colorado, where I lived most of my adult life.

Colorado is not, as most people who know it only from TV think, a place where it snows early in Fall, and it stays covered up till next Spring. That’s more a thing of Ohio or Pennsylvania. I mean, there are places in Colorado — the high ranges — where it’s definitely like that, but that’s not most of it. Most of it, you have sun and snow, and days that are completely dry, and then days you are buried. There is no guarantee what type of day you’ll have. Some days you’ll wake up to a beautiful sunny day, then find yourself buried in snow by nightfall. Once in Manitou Springs, it was sunny in front of our house, and snowing in the back.

And then there were the sudden snowstorms that covered everything. Once or twice they caught us on the road, and even WHERE the road was became a matter of opinion. Obvious (and dangerous) if one side goes down a deep ravine, but the other side? Yeah, you’re on your own. It’s uncharted flat white.

We find ourselves kind of like that in our current political landscape.

You see, there has been a storm, a bad one, and it flattened everything. But in its wake, we are left in a changed landscape, where the usual sign posts don’t apply — except for the ravines, of course. Those are still there and hellofdangerous.

I probably don’t need to elaborate for this audience, but the storm was the stolen election, and its threat that we’d never again be free to choose our path, that — from now on — we were in the hands of the international oligarchs, and that at most we could carve our tiny little paces of semi-freedom, but we’d never be a free PEOPLE — or by extension, a free species (most of the species is. The West even is iffy. The US remains the last, best hope of mankind) — again.

Yes, I know, I expected differently. Because like with the Diamond Princess and the Covidiocy, I did the math. They can’t win. it’s impossible.

But even I expected a long period of darkness, or a blood bath in the way to our being free again. I prayed otherwise, but….

Well, on election day we got our miracle, a culmination of at least two previous miracles. And here we are.

And everything has changed. The problem is that the if you really look at it, the storm has been a succession of storms, starting about 100 years ago. And throughout it, it looked like there would be only one road, and only one way to move, and it would all end up in a prolonged darkness, which the sun of freedom might never penetrate.

But these things are never as they look, and beneath the snow cover, things were moving and the landscape was changing.

To be precise, the industry was changing, from one where large and central had all the benefits of being more economic and more profitable, to one where — not fully yet, but we can see it from here — distributed everything, and largely automated factories with minimal human labor are the future. And what a future it is. The same tech allows distributed communication, and it allows information to travel from those who have it to those who need it in almost no time. (Seriously. I once fixed my vaccum in no time by looking at a few you tube videos. You can also learn just about anything from those. From practical skills to languages, to history, to–). Even though there’s some resistance (including from Musk, sigh. It’s his reflexive liberal. It’s not fair to work from home, since not everyone can. Poppycock.) obviously distributed, from home, from your small town, a bit from everywhere working (and living) is the future. And it is a future that also allows women to work/pursue an avocation while looking after their own kids. This is leading to revolutions in teaching and in… well, just about everything else.

The world simply isn’t the same as when civilization started getting frosted over, and we assumed the future was the world of 1984 or Brave New World, and the most we could do was delay it a bit.

Paradoxically while that world seemed to be driving to a super state across the world (which FYI is inevitable tyranny) the fact we can communicate effortlessly across borders and across the world, perhaps by making us aware of cultural differences is fueling a drive towards nationalism. Which, contrary to what you’ve been taught in school is not fueling a drive for war, or Hitler like racial purges or whatever the crazy. WWI was caused by INTERNATIONALISM, i.e. by the royal families of Europe getting ambitious and trying to establish multi-continental empires. Being governed small and closer to home is always better for freedom. If those in power know you can come to their house and isekai protest them (like truck con protest them) they tend to behave a bit better. (Or, put up barricades if they’re Jarred Polis, whose conscience must be the deepest dark dingiest hell on Earth.)

Anyway, in this new world, a few things become not clear. Like, sure, RFK is still a commie (well, his dad was one TBF) but is he a bad person to be in charge of the FDA? Consider what the FDA is and what it’s been up to. What we know for absolute sure it has done is bad enough. I’m sure there’s stuff we don’t even know about. As long as he doesn’t try to fill it up with stranger and more strict requirements for… everything, why should we mind?

Tulsi Gabbard is still at the very least commie-adjacent, but she was victimized by the security apparatus by being put on a no fly list. Sure she might just reverse the polarity of the abuses. But she might also have seen the elephant and, in the light of the new day, seek to put the brakes on the overstepping. It’s worth a try.

Things like tariffs…. well, I ain’t no fan of them, but you know? The president has to at least be able to threaten them convincingly, so I’m willing to leave his elbow free. And I don’t know. I don’t like tariffs, but I hate taxes, particularly since they eat months of my husband’s time in calculating what all my strange little businesses owe. Maybe, just maybe we can swap them for tariffs, or come up with a yet more creative solution to finance the essential functions of government.

I’m open to what might come. I mean, today DOGE announced it’s hiring, but the job won’t be paid. Using American culture of voluntarism to cut the wasteful state? It’s amazing. It’s the most American thing ever. And think of all our retirees who just found a fun project for their golden years. (If I didn’t have books to write, I’d be volunteering myself. And if we had more money, my husband (and younger kid) would already be applying. Since they’re math geniuses, they probably could help.)

Meanwhile, yes, of course, the ravine stays. I will be watching very carefully and squawk at everything and anything that trespasses on the essential rules: The state should be small (we can start with smaller) and afraid of its people, not the people afraid of their state. And DON’T HURT PEOPLE AND DON’T TAKE THEIR STUFF.

Those are ravines indeed, and we’ve been driving with a wheel over that abyss for far too long. We might not know where the road is, but let’s get the heck out of the dangerous spot.

The rest? The rest is wide open.

Where a dark and dreary road the entire world was pushed into used to be, there is now a trackless wilderness. Into which we can cut paths, alleys, roads, delightful little gardens, and probably fly over it, or tunnel under too.

What is dawning is a day of great experimentation free of the “certainties” of the 20th century which, if we’re all lucky, is now dead and will soon be buried.

Let’s try to make stuff better. Some of it will even succeed. And let’s stop doing the stuff we already know doesn’t work. No, it won’t be different this time. Let 100 million eggs with no omelets be waste enough. Don’t add to it.

Go and create and figure out ways to do things: cheaper, better, with less hurting people and taking their stuff.

And take a deep breath of the crisp, cool air of the new world.

What a time to be alive.

It is one of the ironies of the world that leftist persons have always been highly money motivated.

Wait, I’m not saying “always” as in history, but “Always” as in my experience with them. Though do you really want to bet that if we dug deeply into the movements behind, say, the Russian revolution or the Cuban leftist take over, we wouldn’t find people frantically stuffing their pockets with the spare valuables? Because I wouldn’t.

In fact, things like the destruction of Venezuela by avowed commies seems to have — ultimately — been in the name of enriching a small, deeply corrupt group of leftists. (Honestly “corrupt” and “leftist” are practically synonymous at least in the current world, and I’d make no bets as to the past. Because a philosophy based on envy fosters a certain type of person. Also there is something about a profoundly materialistic outlook — note not all atheists are materialistic and many prioritize friendships or human connection. Like my friends/adopted siblings who are atheist — that ends up reducing people to just trying to grab material goods as reassurance that their life matters or something like that.) I do know that the French revolution — who were Marxists before Marx (eh. Not really, but the philosophies were if not the same very similar) — was all about looting the old, inheritance-locked estates.

This should surprise nobody. A lot has been done in history where the idealistic and true believers were used as cannon fodder for the greedy and cynical. Most of it, in fact. (And sometimes the idealistic and true believers were even sovereigns.)

The thing about the current left, though…. and important as we face the years to come, is…. how much of the culture is left for pay and looney for money?

The indications, more and more, are “Most, if not all of it.”

I have before talked about the time my accounts were broken into, and where I only didn’t lose control of my online life, including this blog because by the grace of G-d — I’m not being facetious — I not only didn’t go to bed at my then normal time, but was screwing around on line, in a kind of desultory “I don’t even know why I’m doing this” and therefore saw the hack happen in real time, and had time to stop-gap the still-untaken accounts (here, discord, a dozen others) but also to continuously wrestle my email from them, until we could call the phone company and stop the replicant THEY’d allowed. (Long story.)

(Here I have to explain because every time I say stuff like this, some idiot of the “newly right” thinks I’m alluding to secret services. In this case, and almost certainly in the baiting me to attend the Jan 6th quixotic (on our side) get together in DC in 21, I’m not saying there was any official involvement. There might have been. But for what I watched, militant left of the Blac Block/BLM or such affiliated groups, or Polis’ Russian mob backers suffice and are enough.)

Yes, I do have reasons to think the highjacking of my phone account was ideologically motivated, a left operation. (The attempts to highjack my email continue, at an amazing rate, compared to my other similar accounts which have only the “normal” background, probably automated attempts. The only difference is that that account is the one I give here and to anyone involved in politics.) There were indications in the investigation my phone provider made, as in we were more or less told that it was something like that.

Anyway, the interesting part in all of this is that while it seemed to be a politically motivated operated by those annoyed by my denouncing of the left, they didn’t manage to take over my accounts partly because they allowed themselves to be delayed by …. looking for money. No, seriously. They must have made a search on the words “money” “dollars” and perhaps $.

First, that account is never used for financial anything. It’s not linked to any of my publishing contract/work stuff. Second, it’s remarkably free of monetary discussions, except for a negotiation of a writing contract that happened to take place there, because all the editor knew when he first contacted me was my public address, and friends who are indie discussing their take per book/monthly.

Note that these must not have been understood for what they were by whoever was doing a frantic search, because they also — then — took time to send highly insulting, bizarrely racist insults to anyone who mentioned money in their emails.

Both of these indicated a view of the right as one where we’re casually and for no reason racist, and in which…. we’re paid?

At the time I thought this was truly bizarre. “Do they think that being paid is the only reason we oppose them?” I mean, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. They continuously accuse us of “selling out.” (Hint, as I’ve said here before, and my reason to smack people who say things like “I’d never donate to x blogger, because they have enough.” EVEN THOSE OF US ON THE RIGHT WHO DO OKAY or, in come cases, spectacularly well (Alas not me, but I’m trying. I’m very very trying.) are making maybe half of what we would have if we were establishment left. (Maybe in some cases 1/10th.) This might be changing. But for now it is that.) Which would mean we’re all mentally disabled and “selling out” for less money. They also continuously claim we’re paid. And they drink their own ink. By the bucketful. They make up lies, then forget they are lies and swallow them, themselves. (Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein. I guess.)

But I’m starting to think it’s not just that. I’m more and more convinced that they, once more, accuse us of what they do.

Look, raids looking for the money and money connections are old. I always thought they were intimidation tactics. But there is the raid on the owner of Polymarket.

Unless the FBI has lost its bloody mind — okay, but take a deep breath — and thinks crazy intimidation tactics will work on Trump, then what was this all about?

I think it was about finding money-corruption on the right, so they could smear Trump before he took power. (And if that’s what they’re doing, a lot of us are going to be at the pointy end again, of the leftist inanity brigade, as far as hacking, if not FBI raids, which I think are reserved for people worth millions or billions.)

I mean, suddenly their raid of the “My pillow” guy after he endorsed Trump makes perfect sense.

And apparently the reason they think everyone on the right is being paid is because… well, everyone on the left is.

Like, a lot of us have suspected that in fact the reason we’re not seeing the ante-fa paid mobs burn and loot this time is because they can’t pay them, since Kamala is now … 20? million in debt.

And apparently all the endorsements of Kamala, from Oprah to … Al Sharpton (really?) were pay for play. I wonder if those two are now looking at what she paid for stars (some of them mediocre) and wondering if they should have raised the price tag. Same for Taylor Swift. Is she upset she did it for free? (If she did it for free that is.)

Everywhere we look, all the “very sincere” Kamala boosters were being paid. And it makes you wonder about the past. It makes you wonder how much Obama paid for his “upsurge of support” and his semi-deification. (I mean, if I paid I’d want more than my pant crease praised, but whatevs.)

We do know for a fact that the “never trumper” “right” is raking it in as they never did when they were on the side of the right.

So, since the Soviet Union, and the demise of the true believers (heck, people older than I would say since the Hitler-Stalin pact and the demise of the true believers) I wonder how much international communism, including the ones flying under the flag of “Democrats” at home are really in it for the cash.

Thing is, you know…. Trump is good with money. He’s good at “waging war by money means.” And he’s quite likely to cut off all or most of their money supply. I mean the fact they lost big is already making people leery of throwing good money after bad.

What does that mean?

Well, if I’m right and most of the left is looney for pay it means that there will be a lot less lunacy this time around.

Sure, the pussy hatters were true believers (probably. At least the street level ones. Remembers her first sf convention after the 2016 win and winces) but the people spurring them on and driving them crazier sure as heck weren’t. Or at least I’d bet they weren’t.

If most of the left is in it for the money, what does it mean when they come to the end of cake money?

I can’t tell you. But I think we’re about to find out.

Buy popcorn futures!

Yesterday I had friends over, for the first time since the elections. Actually, for the first time since we went to Portugal, a month that just melds in my life in illness and anxiety, in a soup of anxiety and grave illness, kind of an encapsulation of the last four years in a very short time.

Anyway, as we were sitting around the table, after a meal slightly hampered by my oven having gone out in our absence (we just got it finally repaired this morning) talking and drinking port wine, this sentence — heaven knows from where — ran through my head “It’s so nice to meet here on the other side of midnight.”

And other than my sense of relief and contentment I had no idea what it meant, until I thought further, on how for years — decades — now it felt like we were being herded down an increasingly narrow and dark path towards a future that more closely resembled 1984 than anything in the 21st century. And now? well, we’ll win some and we’ll lose some. It’s the nature of the beast, but the fact we defeated what looked like a complete lockdown on fraud that wouldn’t allow us to change anything… well. Over the horizon, far away, there is a hint of light. May it be a new day and maybe it be amazing.

It ties in, I think with this post by Richard Fernandez, who often seems to be getting dispatches from the same unfathomable, and not very clear source:

His tweet, unclear to me at first, as unclear as that phrase — quote? — running through my head, was solidified in the comments as meaning now things will change.

And I think he’s right on that.

Let me clarify: I feel like the 20th century — that dark age of fighting between totalitarian ideas — has been unnaturally prolonged, partly because the totalitarianism we call left (objectively they’re both left), aka the international one, dominated every cultural institution and news reporting for so long that it could impose on us a narrative loop, in which “next time will be different” and somehow get to that magical land where the state withers away and everyone is equal and living costs nothing.

In fact, every one of its recursive loops, like heartburn on a scarred esophagus, got us closer and closer to the vision of the prophets George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. And the devotees of the cult were so blinkered they often seemed to think that was the utopia. And they were willing to do anything to get there. Mostly lie and cheat and steal. All of them in horrifying amounts.

So, to explain how we got there, the clashing totalitarianisms of the 20th century were the culmination of the philosophical flowering of the industrial revolution. Which yes fed and clothed the world, but brought with it the idea that bigger was better, centralized was less wasteful, and that the world ran more justly when ruled by “experts.” Both fascism and communism heralded themselves as “scientific” and rule by the “best” people and ultimately both thought the best were intellectuals and academics.

Since the eighteenth century centralization has been driven more and more, big government and experts given more power, etc. It was, after all, the way of the future, which — in the lefty view — would eventually culminate in a world government over a happy hive of human bees, none wanting more or different.

… The height of this was the seventies, when most people subscribed to that vision of the future, and saw it as inevitable.

Along the line, though, information contrary to the flow broke in. And America, the ultimate disrupter, elected Reagan who I suspect will be viewed as really tame and almost establishment in the future, but trust me, children, was a total break at the time. And showed us there was another way.

Other brilliant people — Rush Limbaugh — found a way to break the left’s hold on the culture with means of communication they didn’t see.

And then, perhaps in retaliation for being balked of space, the geeks created the internet and my generation — largely those born mid to late sixties — took to it like robot ducks to electronic water, even those of us who weren’t particularly techie.

There was a flowering in the US — the rest of the world doesn’t have it anywhere like us — of alternate opinion blogs and social media….

And we just saw the credibility of the old media crash and burn, leading to the change in governance which in turn — with some issues, mind because those are also there — has a chance, a bare chance, of turning into a new direction for the world.

I’m hopeful because as I’ve been saying for ages, the new tech leads to a world more suited to the vision of the founding fathers than anything since this nation was an agrarian backwater: a world of small and localized industry, where communication is easy and paradoxically worldwide, where an individual can not only create and make himself very wealthy on little investment, but also be heard and have his opinions disseminated with no gatekeeping and little expense.

It is a world that, freed of governmental shackles and bureaucratic fences, can and almost inevitably will, lead us to the stars, and…. well, and to a world unrecognizeable by anyone reading this blog, but likely with more liberty and justice for all than our poor minds can foresee.

Oh, there are stumbling stones on the way. And — sorry Elon — I wouldn’t buy your ticket to Mars just yet. But–

But it is possible. Before, particularly the last four years, it hasn’t seemed possible at all. all over the world — except Argentina, blessed Argentina — the forces of the twentieth century; the forces of “top down” “experts” were victorious, and the boots of the oligarchs stomped on the neck of those of us who just wanted to be left alone.

Now, the boot has lifted. We’re looking around, and we think there just might be a future. The future we intuited was being stopped by the forces that wanted to kill it.

There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. There’s shoals between us and the great shores of prosperity now barely glimpsed over the far horizon.

I’m sixty two, from a long lived line but prone to very weird wobbles in my health. I probably won’t see the end of this. Most of us probably won’t.

But over that far distance our eyes won’t pierce, the day of humanity’s future is dawning.

And it is glorious in the eyes of our mind.

Solving Foreign Policy by Ian Bruene

With a new administration, there are always questions and speculation about the details of its policies. Additionally there is maneuvering by various factions attempting to influence and/or gain position in the incoming administration.

In that spirit, as well as the spirit of the long history of independent proposals for solving weighty political issues (ref. Swift, et all), I wish to propose a solution to the foreign policy difficulties which now plague America, in a way which I believe will satisfy the stated concerns of all sides.

The Unified Weapons Proliferation Treaty.

* Signatories to this treaty shall be required to liberalize their weapons laws to at minimum the level required by the Second Amendment. Loosening them beyond that is certainly encouraged, but not required.

* Signatories shall be required to contribute to the enforcement efforts detailed later.

* Signatories which fail to abide by their treaty obligations shall be subject to an escalating series of penalties, the exact sequence to be determined, culminating in invasion and replacement of the signatory government.

* The Signatory Nations shall execute a continuous smuggling operation to distribute small arms as widely as possible in all non-Signatory nations.

* Signatory Nations which are in possession of military air transport shall additionally be tasked with air-dropping caches of small arms geographically evenly across all non-Signatory Nations.

* Any attack on the transport aircraft shall be considered an act of war by the attacking nation.

This treaty will solve nearly all geopolitical problems. First of all, it will dramatically increase the difficulty of an attempted invasion of any nation by any other, due to having an armed population. But the effects don’t stop there. Nations ruled by autocrats or dictators will have far less ability to play the game of a Short Victorious War to fix their internal problems by spilling over their neighbors, and will be facing an armed populace in any sort of crackdown.

Nations which try to play at faux-civilization on the other hand will be forced to step away from the overt tyranny which they have been dabbling in in recent years.

But the benefits don’t stop even there: nations which have internal issues distinct from normal politics can gain peace: in situations where a violent minority oppresses the general populace, that minority will quickly be brought to good behavior. Simultaneous with this, nations which have disfavored minorities benefit, as armed minorities don’t get genocided.

Admittedly there are some tragic situations which cannot be made peaceable. Some cultures are simply incapable of behaving in a civilized manner after all. In those cases ideally the culture turns in on itself with enough violence that it either disappears, or rapidly evolves towards more civilized behavior. Failing that if it tries to attack its neighbors, the difficulty of invasion applies.

As far as practically implementing this goes, the first step would be to bring all parts of the American polity in line with The Second, as they are supposed to be anyway. After that it is simply a matter of allowing the rest of the world to either choose to join voluntarily, or wait until the choice is made for them. The airdrops are meant to prevent issues of interception or uneven penetration of small arms into the non-signatory nation.

Fellow Americans, the Europeans are exerting their unearned superiority again.

They’re telling the Hi-La-Rious joke of “What borders on complete stupidity? Mexico and Canada.”

It never occurs to them that when a country the size of a continent makes these choices and they disagree it is POSSIBLY their lack of information, their lack of understanding of this utterly foreign country, their ignorance and smug stupidity.

No, it is always that we’ve disappointed them, and they’re very mad at us, because we’re stupid and ill informed, about our own lives and our own priorities.

And I wouldn’t understand it at all, I’d be even more disgusted with them, if I hadn’t just spent time in Europe before our election amid my largely (not every member but largely) conservative European family.

It’s hard to believe how utterly corrupted their information stream is. Take our entire mainstream media. No. Take the most lunatic fringe of MSNBC and assume they’re utterly right wing, then try to correct for it, and make the “news” right. That’s what their media is like.

Listening to my dad tell me that CNN international isn’t left wing (it’s more left than here) made my jaw drop, but it was nothing compared to the general idea that Biden is a nice, kindly, smart man, and that he only recently started losing it, which is why he, wisely stepped down. And none of it, none of it, compared to their idea that “no one is pushing transexuality in the schools in the US. It just happened organically.” and that “it’s neither a right nor a left issue.” One is afraid to ask about other things. They really honestly believe that a) our abortion laws are more restrictive than theirs (guys, throughout Europe pretty much abortion is capped at — I THINK — 14 weeks. Might be 16) b)religion is enforced in all our public life c)kids get shot in schools every day d) every shooter and terrorist here is “right wing.” e) white people are hunting black people on the streets and it’s legal. f) black people are actively discriminated against, and again, it’s legal.

It goes on and on. It’s partly our bizarre Hollywood making movies about realities that don’t exist and haven’t existed for at least 60 years and frankly in many cases forever. And part of it is that our news are completely untainted by reality. And part of it is that EUROPEANS AREN’T HERE. … and part of it is that America is a finger in the eye of the world. More on that later.

This ultimately is the last most perfect example of why “World Government” doesn’t work (and in a smaller point why the electoral college is essential. Most of the idiots on twitter telling me I don’t think I just follow Trump have no clue who the Trump voters are, have no clue what rural areas are like, have no clue in general. They live in an urban bubble made extra bubbly by the fact anyone dissenting will be cancelled and knows it.)

Even if statistics and numbers are not corrupted, they can be spun. They are not a dispassionate witness. It is is easy to twist things, such as claiming more of the rural areas are on Welfare, because they count military expenditures are welfare and government handouts. It’s like truncating politician’s utterances, or massaging others to make them sound coherent.

If you’re not in the area, you don’t know what you don’t know. And main stream information stream — here and abroad — has become concentrated in cities, and within cities in the “intellectual class.” (Note I don’t say the high IQ or highly educated. There are very well educated people who are not part of those who consider themselves “intellectual class.” Part of my current fights on Twitter are the left thinking that any woman voting for Trump is “uneducated” or “unthinking” the intellectual class think they’re a special class and that their leftist politics make them “smart.”) Which means they report what they think they know, but they don’t know anything outside their specialty/area/region.

I’ve said before, and there will be a post on this soon, relating to millennials because even the right makes that mistake there, that the vision of the world the media — entertainment and news push at us are at best outdated — like 100 years out of date, like the idea of “granny” is my grandmother, not me who was born in the sixties and who, if I’d had kids earlier and my kids had married earlier could now have teen grandkids.) — and at worse imaginary, like everyone’s idea of “the fifties.”

They don’t know what they don’t know. And when they “know” all their professors and everyone educated thinks like them, it must mean other people are stupid, and not seeing a drastically different side of reality.

Unfortunately these are the idiots reporting the news and making the movies, which Europe then assumes are accurate and–

I understand. I really understand. Everything but the unbridled hubris of thinking EN MASSE they’re smarter than us.

It also frankly means they ignore their own people, those not expensively indoctrinated for decades in the theory factories by the Marxist morons. For a view of this, note everyone in mind professions in Portugal seems to buy the “global warming” bs unalloyed, while the working people not so far back removed the stop-oil parasites from the street, broke their signs and called them rude names then went about their day.

But there is more to it than that. In a way the US is a finger in the eye of the world. We’ve always been. We don’t believe the “upper crust” has something we don’t or knows something we don’t. By and large we don’t believe in experts. (Since FDR the media has worked hard at building respect for the “ex-spurts” and it all crumbled down with 2020. Thank heavens.) We believe in our lying eyes.

They, by and large don’t. Even their working people by and large don’t. There are centuries in those cultures of “respecting your betters.”

We confuse them and appall them by not recognizing betters. It is all summed in my mother, when I explained why I was NOT getting vaccinated screaming at me I thought I was smarter than everyone else. Oh, h*ll no. There are people much smarter than I. But I understand enough biology to know those “vaccines” were at best ineffective and at worst a bad, bad idea. And given my autoimmune issues, hell no. (I also know enough math to look at Diamond Princess and go “this is not an emergency.”) I am no longer Portuguese, you see. Maybe I never was.

They look at this and see “anarchy” and from that to “they’re just stupid” it’s a step. A short and very stupid step.

The problem is their own citizenry is up in arms and realizing the last 100 years weren’t good. The entire world is in revolt. And they still don’t get our own revolt.

It’s going to be an interesting few years. If they get poked in the eye a lot, maybe they’ll learn to blink.

Buckle down boys and girls. It’s going our way. Let’s show the world how a nation can work and create prosperity, and lead the world to the stars.

They ain’t seen nothing yet.

What a time to be alive.