Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

This is late as heck, because this morning Fun With Doctors joined Fun With Bureaucracy. I’ve been home all of an hour, and had to deal with all the stuff I should have done this morning… including feeding VERY STARING kittehs.

But one very brief foray into twitter this morning brought me across a guy screaming (and I’m doing this from memory and for comedy, so wording is not only not exact but exaggerated): “Damn you you maniacs and your immigrants eating pets memes! You caused Trump to repeat it and sound like an idiot. Damn you all to hell.”

Which caused me to chortle and move on. What is considered “sounding like an idiot” by the “elites”, is often just sensible talk. Take this mention from an article in powerline:

Reagan said “fascism was the basis of the New Deal,” and refused to back down while the media hounded him about it.

As he very well shouldn’t, because, other than hating the Germans, it is in hindsight patently obvious that FDR was a fascist.

So shocking and appalling the media, college graduates and leftists (BIRM) is no reason to think anyone committed a gaffe that will be judged as stupid by the rest of the country.

But more importantly, because we have every reason, in fact, to believe that Haitians are eating pets. There’s this video linked in yesterday’s comments. Which is being blocked because “fact checkers” say is wrong, but we all know that dance, no.

And there’s this about geese. And I’m given to understand there’s a ton others. These are just the ones I stumbled onto without looking much, because well, have been playing bureaucracy and doctors all morning. (New from Hasbro, the hot new game for sixty year olds.)

In fact, there this going on, which of course has nothing to do with the poor town getting hammered with feral* illegals.

Do I know Hatians are eating pets? Well, no. But I know this dance quite well. Other people know it too. There’s already a meme:

The truth is that the left howls racist or white supremacist because — as usual — they confuse race with culture. Frankly, if we’d got Ukrainians in the middle of Holodomor in the same circumstances these Haitians were dumped in Ohio, they would likely do the exact same thing — and most Ukrainians are far paler than I.

Race means nothing. Culture means everything. And Hatian culture is horrible, coming from horrible circumstances and a horrible history. In fact, things have been bad for so long in Ohio that even attempts at turning it around are impossible. And would probably fail. The island has been a wreck and a charity case so long that there is no memory of a productive existence, anymore. (No, it’s not race. The Dominican Republic has the same racial composition and is not the same mess.)

Haitians are as close, at this point, to feral humans, as it’s possible to get. Worse, they’re referalized humans. Humans once civilized who have been forced by extreme circumstances, to shed their civilization. Which is much worse than being “just” savage or feral.

Now, they could be salvaged, and if there’s a place they might have hope, it’s the US. But the way to do that is NOT to bring them in through wide open borders, with no background check, and dump them on a small Ohio town that you deem should be punished because– I don’t know — they voted for your opponent or something.

The way to salvage these poor, traumatized human beings would be to bring them in with extensive therapy and acculturation lessons. And then separate them in family units, throughout the country, so the old culture has no hold.

Now whether that kind of extensive charity on a national level is in our best interests is a good question, and as a libertarian and a nationalist, I’d say no. OTOH if charity organizations, not the government wanted to spend the massive amount of money to do this, it probably should be allowed, even if the first generation would never be even halfway acculturated. (But their kids would be okay-ish, and their grandkids would be American.)

BUT again, this is not what’s being done. Instead they’re either trekking in or being flown over at taxpayer expense and dumped into small towns throughout the nation. Then jobs are found for them at very low wages, and they are awarded full welfare while they proceed to be feral and terrorize the neighbors and eat their pets.

And the local government denies it’s happening just like Paste Eating Polis denies that Aurora apartments are taken over by Tren D’Aragua. Because you’re supposed to believe their autoritah and not your lying eyes or your lying neighbors. And if you don’t you’re a racist who racists or something.

Look, again, race is bullshit — at least in the American definition of it — but culture is everything, and before we allow anyone into our nation we should look at their culture. And we should tell them “there is bullshit up with which we will not put!” so to put it. And for more extreme cases, there should be orientation, counseling and checking on them.

For instance, I very much doubt the immigrant from a remote area of South America who had never seen a flush toilet and tried to drink from it knows what to do when set free in America. Things like credit cards, bank accounts and groceries are probably beyond her experience, and she’s most likely to fall into slave labor or be sex trafficked.

In the same way, these immigrants, even less feral ones, coming from less starved areas than Haiti, are likely to interact badly with Americans on one of the most sensitive cultural areas: pets. (The other immediate clash points that come to mind are: behavior of and treatment of females, and definition of and treatment of children. There are others. Private property left unguarded is a big part underlying all clashes.)

Not every place in the world is as potty about pets as America. In fact only the other Anglosphere nations seem to be. Even French or, well, Portuguese, Spanish and probably (though I never looked closely) Germans are far more pragmatic about pets.

Of these the countries formerly occupied by Moors — Portugal and Spain, for ex. — are the worst. In Portugal a significant portion of the population throws their cats and dogs outside and leave them with no provisioning whatsoever while they take month long vacations. If the pet is there when they return, great. If not, well, they get another. They’re free, right?

My family, being Odd seethes over this, and even mom who is not a pet person will feed a bunch of these “abandoned” pets every summer.

The same happens when someone dies. The way to deal with it, according to most people in Portugal, is to throw the deceased’s pet, even if it’s an indoor cat, out in the street to fend for him/herself.

This attitude is closer to much of the rest of the world than to America.

And then there are the regions with actual food insecurity. Where pets become either covert or overt sources of food. And since there’s no sense of private property, a pet who is — or can be coaxed into being — loose is just food on the oof for “sensible” Hatians.

But you ask, why can’t they go to the store and use the EBT cards they were given?

Well, first because most food will look really weird. It did to me, and I came from a western country — but not one that at the time had real supermarkets. Carnicerias, sure, but not supermarkets — second because they probably have no clue how to use the cards.

Think about it. You’re handed a piece of plastic and told you can get food with it…

And sure, America is jumping with food, from squirrels to raccoons to deer which no one will cry if you eat (Oh, the idiots will cry about deer) but by and large that food is hard to get while the pets are…. tame and easy. As are the park geese and ducks.

These people are utterly pitiable. Not least because doing this and being allowed to do this is not acculturating them to America at all. And is setting them up to be the flash point for when America has had enough and the convulsion starts.

The left either doesn’t see that, or hopes if the dance starts that it will be the racial war they’ve dreamed of since the 70s. Mostly because they think that 50% of the country is black, but also because they think people who tan are magical and much more “savage” which they view as good and therefore would win walking away.

In fact they’re setting up everyone from my level of tan upwards, or who has even a slight accent (Hi. Moose and squirrel.) to be massacred. Which includes me, my kids, and a lot of my friends and ducttape nephews and nieces.

They are setting them up to be the victims in a spasm of violence that will leave America broken, but not in a way the left will enjoy.

All because they have rats in their heads about race and are completely ignorant of culture. Oh and because they engage in fantasies of the Gramscian kind, which is just the Noble Savage in Marxist war paint.

Their fantasies are driving us to a point when the butcher’s bill will be a stain on America’s soul as most of the dead will be objectively innocent victims.

Let’s hope that those who victimized them by making them the tool of lefty fantasies also get what they’ve earned if it comes to that.

May G-d have mercy on their souls. Because if they get their wish, no one else will.

Yes. Yes. You are in fact getting a bonus post. And today of all days. (I never function at my best on 9/11.)

Why are you so blessed, you might ask. Well, I have certain skills. Skills that make me more adapted than the rest of you to live in our present all propaganda all the time now.

Last night when I went to bed my group of people who were paying attention to the debate was mixed on the result. As was the consensus of the net. It was all “Trump could have behaved better” and “Kamala was good.” (Spoiler Que Mala wasn’t good. She smirked and made faces like a bad actor at a community theater audition, lied egregiously and needed the help of the two moderators not to implode. But she was better than Biden’s debate, which I think is what many people were expecting.)

But this morning, the right blogs (granted my sample leans heavily DeSantist — and would you lot get over it. No, Ron would not have done better in that incredibly rigged scenario. Again, I question his political judgement in running at all this year.) were in full Doom! Gloom! Abandon all hope!

Since it’s 9/11 and I’m mildly depressed and — yes, thank you for asking — still dealing with dual country bureaucracies, I kind of settled down to not read politics today.

But then…. but then something was working at the back of my head.

Last night in the PJM liveblogging, it was taken as fact that Kamala was winning because her team was already demanding another debate. This didn’t make much sense, except under “oh, she wants to rub his face on it” maybe. But even so–

It wasn’t till this morning the full stupid of this hit me.

So, Kamala managed not to Biden it on stage. Great.

And yes, she, personally, might be stupid enough not to realize how much help she had from the mods and likely from her little friend in her ear. And think it would be fun to do it again.

But Que Mala’s team isn’t Que Mala. I suspect they treat her about like Biden’s team treated him. And they’re the same people.

They know she’s not that great. And they know that in the primaries in 16 she imploded in the debates. They’ve been carefully keeping her away from any opportunities to interact with press or even the public. And please keep in mind they allowed BIDEN to mingle. So, this is their estimation of her intellect and ability.

And yet, despite a supposedly HUGE bump from the debate in the polls, a bump such as puts her out of reach…. She’s asking for another debate, and apparently pressing the point.

People! I raised children. The kid who follows the other going “I demand a rematch!” is not the winner. Ever.

Period.

At the same time, regardless of what Nancy Grey Goose Pelosi says, you know Trump is not a coward. Heck, we have photo evidence of it. If Kamala really were that far ahead in the polls from the debate, Trump’s team and frankly Trump would want a rematch. Also, Trump, right? He’d be spoiling for a fight, going “I demand a rematch” even if his team were trying to hold him back. Say what you will of him, if he ran from a fight he wouldn’t have thrown his hat in the ring this year, despite everything they’ve thrown at him. Or he’d have quit after the failed assassination attempt. And his ego is big enough if he had bombed, he’d want to show how great he really was. And again, his team would really just have to get out of the way.

Instead Trump is saying “Only on Fox and with my chosen moderators.” I.e. he’s putting CONDITIONS on it.

Guys?

This is not how a loser acts.

In fact, the roles are reversed and require not just that Kamala be brutally stupid, (which I’ll buy) but that her entire team also be too stupid to remember to breathe out after breathing in. And it breaks character for Trump.

So…. As during the covidiocy, what do we do when what people are DOING doesn’t match what we’re being told? Well, we weigh what they’re doing more, because that is more consequential, right?

Which brings us to: Who won the debate? Who lost?

First, admit that we’re not normal people. None of the commenters are. And most of my blogs are people who are functionally over-educated and can’t help interpreting things in the way the university class does. (And they almost all fell for the covid mania too.)

Are they/we interpreting the interaction properly? Are they seeing what normal people saw? You know, I rather doubt it? Just …. I listen to total strangers talk. It’s a writer thing. Also a PTSD thing. I like to be aware of my surroundings. And in one quick trip to the store…. the impression I got is that people really found the moderators over the top assists telling and almost comical.

Second, we know campaigns have internal polls that are more accurate than the ones used for propaganda. Like in 16 we all thought Trump was nuts for acting like he was going to win…. but I’m sure he had internal polls.

…. All I can say is the internal polls must be LIT.

Now, could I be wrong about all this? Sure. Trump could have had a personality transplant from Mitt Romney and Kamala could be handled by people so dumb they can guess the day of the week two times out of three. COULD happen, I suppose.

But somehow I don’t think so. Even in clown world there should be some congruence between reality and words. If there isn’t, look to the actions, not the words.

The words are usually propaganda.

Twenty three years ago, I watched TV commenters (through the world’s grainiest reception ever because we lived in Manitou Springs, and didn’t have cable) tell us that everything had changed.

I didn’t quite believe them. It was horrible, of course. But everything changing?

But I can see it now, tracing backwards. Without 9/11 and the situation of permanent crisis it introduced, we would not be where we are today.

No, I don’t think 9/11 was fake. I happen to know that fire does in fact soften steel enough for the horrors of that day. And I doubt George W. Bush knew or planned it. For all I am very disappointed in him, and have been for a good long while, I don’t think he chose that path. He wanted to be an education president, after all.

Did no one in our government know? Waggles hand. Next your going to ask me if no one in our government knew about the Trump assassination attempt.

I don’t know. I want to tell you those conspiracy theories are crazy. I’d tell you those conspiracy theories are crazy. But these days the difference between conspiracy theory and reality is about 2 weeks.

And the incompetence was astounding, and the opportunities were there in both cases, so maybe there was no collusion, but who knows? Our three letters have been corrupted for a long time. Either that or more useless than soggy toilet paper. (Waggles hand again.)

Anyway, we are stuck now in a conveyor belt of insanity. The events after 9/11, the ramping up totalitarian instincts in our so called “elites” and the technology, all combined to create the illusion in our would-be technocrats that they could control all and make us do everything they said and, you know, own nothing and be happy.

But they’re finding it hard going and they keep ramping up their insanity in response. Like deaf people, they think that the problem is we haven’t got the message, and they keep making it louder and more obvious.

I don’t have a crystal ball, I don’t know what’s coming down the pike. And I’ve been kind of under the gun on personal stuff this year, so I have not, in fact, even given the elections much thought. Besides I’m fairly sure they’ve got it rigged. I just don’t know what happens next. Or maybe before.

And they can’t stand resistance even passive of the “make me” kind. So they’re going to get even crazier.

When you consider 2020, ramping up from that crazy is bad.

There was a meme making the rounds of facebook last night. It is this:

On this night…23 years ago, 246 people went to sleep in preparation for their morning flights. 2,606 people went to sleep in preparation for work in the morning tomorrow. 343 firefighters went to sleep in preparation for their morning shift. 60 police officers went to sleep in preparation for morning patrol. 8 paramedics went to sleep in preparation for the morning shift of saving lives. None of them saw past 10:00 am Sept 11, 2001. In one single moment life may never be the same. As you live and enjoy the breaths you take today and tonight before you go to sleep in preparation for your life tomorrow, kiss the ones you love, snuggle a little tighter, and never take one second of your life for granted.

As you guys know this week I got a reminder of the brevity of life, the unpredictability of the span of days we are given. I actually got three. I only posted one here.

And you guys know I’m writing the crazy novel (I really need to finish it, now bureaucracy agogo has slowed down. I’m SO close.) partly because I realized I was sixty and didn’t want it to die with me. (And of course, it spawned six more, the …. gah.)

No human being knows how long they have. I certainly don’t. And in these ridiculously dangerous, slippery times, we literally don’t know what tomorrow will bring, nor how crazy it will get.

What we do know is this:

1-Prepare, prepare, prepare.

2- If you feel there’s something that will be on your conscience for eternity because you didn’t do it now, do it now. Provided it’s not killing other people, or robbing the mint, if it’s not hurting other people or taking their stuff, do it now.

3- Do something you love every day. Tell someone you love that you love them every day. Enjoy your life while you have it.

And keep moving forward. It’s not over till it’s over.

Don’t lie down till you’re dead. And make it hard to kill you.

Trump’s Worst Mistake – by Tom Kratman

So where did Trump really screw up?

I am reminded of something Bill Buckley once wrote, “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” Just keep that in the back of your mind for the nonce.

Trump’s not an eloquent man. That’s not the problem, although it does tend to explain some of his addiction to Twitter, where no one is eloquent. He’s said some stupid things, here and there, which have cost him some support he could and should have had. But then weigh those factors against some of his undoubted successes.

We had a gangbuster economy for four years. Even COVID and lockdowns couldn’t kill it.

We were energy independent, as much as we cared to be, and were for about two years. Did you imagine the eco-nazis near and at the core of the Democratic Party were going to let that continue? (If so, I have this bridge…) We didn’t open any new campaigns in either the unwinnable, because we refuse to win it, war against radical Islam nor any more silly-assed interventions on behalf of the goodfeelz of ICOTESCAS, the International Community Of The Ever So Caring And Sensitive.

Illegal immigration had near enough stopped. No, he didn’t get a wall built from sea to shining sea, but he got enough of it built and, as he promised, he got Mexico to pay for a more effective wall…right on their southern border. And the Mexican La Migra, boys and girls, does not fuck around.

His trade rep, Robert Lighthizer, had browbeaten the rest of the world, such of it as matters, into submission. NAFTA is effectively dead, replaced by the more favorable USMCA.
In short, he did what he promised to do, or as much of it as political realities allowed, and then some.

I know a lot of people – some of them close friends – don’t want to see any good or any effectiveness in Trump, largely over any number of the dumb things he’s said, but I’ll ask them to consider just how cogent and eloquent they would be, in Washington, not just friendless but with everyone but your wife and kids turning on you like rabid dogs, where your every word, movement, everything becomes fodder for what is perhaps the most concentrated and concerted efforts at libel and slander ever launched at an American political figure. Sure, terrible things were said and made up about Jefferson and Jackson, Adams, Lincoln, and many others. But it wasn’t from everyone, nor all the time.
I don’t think Trump ever understood, going into this, that he would be quite so alone and abandoned as he was going to be.

And that leads us to the one consistent, horrible, repetitive failing of which Trump truly is guilty; he has perhaps the worst record of anyone but the early Lincoln for picking shithead subordinates, incompetent, unreliable, arrogant, stupid, cowardly, ungrateful, entitled, and treacherous.

Why is that? Well, one thing stands out; again and again Trump went with establishment figures who were – generally quite mildly – seen as something other than pure mainstream. Well…if they weren’t quite mainstream establishment, they were STILL establishment. So of course they turned on him; he was attacking their establishment.

Now go back to that second paragraph, above, the quote from Bill Buckley. You see, Trump did have friends, tens of millions of them. They were the common people, the workers, the natural allies of a revolutionary executive against the aristocratic robber barons, plutocrats, and their running dogs in the establishment.

And that was Trump’s huge mistake; he kept going to those 2000 names of the Harvard faculty…or Yale…or Columbia…or Annapolis…or West Point, when those should have been bars to even slight consideration for his cabinet. Instead, here’s Buckley, again, he should have been looking for the 2000 common folk of talent. No, not me; I want nothing to do with DC. Others.

They could hardly have served him or the country worse.

*For those interested in Colonel Kratman’s fiction, he has a substack, here. – SAH*

This is a post I didn’t want to write for at least another thirty years, or possibly for the rest of my life, since Holly was only a year and change older than I, and she might well have outlived me.

I found out yesterday, from Suburban in comments that Holly Lisle had died of cancer. She died on the 27th of August, according to Wikipedia.

The last time I thought of Holly Lisle, a friend/commenter on this blog who is also a friend of hers asked if I’d heard from her because he hadn’t and the blog hadn’t been updated in some months. I told him I’d also not heard — in fact my last two emails had got unanswered — and I thought I should email her, but then it got lost in the shuffle of trying to organize a wedding overseas.

Which is why yesterday hit like an anvil.

I never met Holly in person. Because I’d read her for the first time in the 90s I thought she was ten years older than I or so. Nah. She just started going and stuck with it. And of course I tried to rewrite the one book no one in trad pub would buy…. 8 times before I got a grip on reality.

I was surprised when we “met” online to find she was not quite two years older than I.

I’ve been breaking my head to figure out how we “met” online. I think I’ve reconstructed it mentally. I had read one of her stories and wanted to promote it. Because of the nature of this blog, I wasn’t sure if she wanted to be associated with me, so I tried to find her email so I could ask her permission to mention her. (Either here or on MGC? I don’t remember.)

At any rate I couldn’t find her email, so I just mentioned it or promoted somewhere. At which point she emailed me. Having noticed an uptick in her Amazon sales, she searched and found my mention. She sent me a bookfunnel copy of The Longview Chronicles.

Which revived my love for space opera, which had been lost for a while.

After that we corresponded. I didn’t always agree with her ideas on why some of her marketing hadn’t worked, but she was trying to figure things out.

During the horrible year of 2020 she was one of my reality checks and online mental health supports.

After I moved and things got a bit crazy for a while, we weren’t in as frequent a contact. But she sometimes dropped into my email or into the comments at MGC and was always a class act.

Through Holly I found that my experiences in Traditional Publishing weren’t that unusual. And I borrowed a lot of her courage (she had enough to spare) to get used to the new, exciting world of indie publishing.

Last we talked she was genuinely excited for her Ohio novels, and trying to figure out all the ins and outs of how to make it a big success.

I’m so very sorry she slipped out of this world while I wasn’t looking.

But in another way, she will never be gone. Her books will continue to be read. Her lessons online — I hope her family keeps them on line — will continue to help new writers figure out how to make the story in their heads the story that enthralls someone else, in their heads.

Yesterday, as I frantically tried to confirm her passing, I came across a blog post that might be her very last gift to me. In it she spoke of breaking into publishing and how important it was to write the stories that are uniquely ours.

Which I am in fact doing now. I only hope to have enough time.

Farewell Holly. I know you didn’t agree with me on the afterlife, but as Heinlein said of Theodore Sturgeon, whatever else is true, I’m sure a spirit like yours couldn’t be entirely extinguished.

Nothing is lost, nothing is created. You’ve only changed and are for the moment inaccessible to me.

You were a writer to your fingertips and a battler who didn’t know how to give up.

Somewhere, you are creating and seeing very clearly. And someday, out of time, we’ll meet again.

Until then, fare thee well my friend. I’m looking forward to discussing everything you’ll have learned, created and figured out.

When we meet again.

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 JEFF DUNTEMAN AND JAMES R. STRICKLAND: Drumlin Circus / On Gossamer Wings

A starship malfunctions and strands its 800 passengers on a planet eerily like the Pleistocene Earth, complete with prehistoric mammals including woolly mammoths, dire wolves, and smilodons. And something else: tens of thousands of abandoned alien machines consisting of a bowl and two pillars that respond with drum-like sounds when touched. Tap 256 times on the pillars in any combination, and…something…coalesces in the bowl. It might be a spoon or an axe or a twisted lump of silvery metal. These artifacts (dubbed “drumlins”) help the unwilling colonists survive, but there’s something a little weird about what comes out of the “thingmaker” machines. High-pitched sounds sometimes make drumlins twitch and combine into more complex things. Stranger still, what drumlins do seems to depend on the thoughts of nearby humans. Wish hard while you whistle just so…and something amazing may happen. 260 years on, the castaways have created a civilization resembling late 19th Century America, based in part on coal, steam, iron, and hard work–and in part on the mysterious drumlin artifacts. Both short novels in this volume are set against this background. Drumlin Circus: Every spring, Bramble Ceglarek takes Pretty Alice’s Wonderland Circus down the dirt roads of the west country, dazzling townfolk with clowns, acrobats, calliope music, and trained animals — especially trained animals. His wife Julia trains them with a drumlin whistle, and they obey with peculiar precision. The cultlike Bitspace Institute, hoping to train animal assassins, sends agent Simon Kassel to steal the whistle. Unknown to him, Kassel has been set up to fail by his Institute rivals who want to be rid of him, and after Julia and her apprentice Rosa are abducted by Institute thugs who attempt to kill him, Kassel switches loyalties and joins the circus as a very scary clown. He returns to Institute HQ to rescue Julia and Rosa, only to discover that the training whistle is much more than merely a whistle: a mysterious “function controller” that compels animals, human beings, and even the alien drumlin artifacts themselves to obey its bearer. On Gossamer Wings: From out in the dry rye fields of the west, rumors have come to the Bitspace Institute that someone has drummed up something valuable from the alien thingmakers: a large sphere of pure iron. Institute agent Hiram König rides out to investigate, and discovers the strange, mute young woman who has done the drumming. He also learns that the Big Ball of Iron is just the beginning of the previously unknown drumlins that she has discovered in the vast “bitspace” of the alien thingmakers. Despite the slow progress of technology in the Valinor colony, where steam locomotives and the first primitive hydrogen airships are state of the art, Natalie Bishop is using her talents with the thingmakers to seek out the drumlin parts she needs to build a heavier-than-air flying machine. For her, the flier is her masterpiece, the work that will prove her worth to the people she cares about. The race is on for König to extract Natalie from the pressure-cooker of a small town that is her home, before it blows up around her and before she takes the dazzlingly risky final step and tries to fly.

FROM SHANE GRIES: The Big Dead One (The Line)

The best place to be in an Apocalypse is inside a thirty ton Bradley Fighting Vehicle grinding rotting bodies to paste under your tracks or using an Abrams 120mm canister round to turn a horde of undead into a pink mist. Here’s the thing though … tracks and guns and the people who operate them wear out, even as the living corpses keep coming at you.

After a brutal summer of combat in the plains and cities of the Midwest, the First Infantry Division is conducting a fighting retreat back to the Pacific Northwest. Both the winds of Fall and the howls of the undead are echoing in their wake when they’re re-tasked to take Denver Airport. Along the way they have to safeguard thousands of civilians who are following in their armored wake, and one mistake can turn them all into a ravening horde.

For Staff Sergeant Mark Foley and his tired mechanized infantry squad, it means diving once more into the hell of combat against both raiders who will shoot you dead for a gallon of gas and infected that will send you to a special kind of living death.

The third volume of Shane Gries’ best selling, “The Line” series.

FROM MARY CATTELI: A Diabolical Bargain

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry. When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives — but all the evidence points to his having made the deal. Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Out of Contact

Radmir Gagarin is not an Exec, he just does the job of one. Working for the richest man in the Alliance, Lord Diomid Devi, is not easy, even though he’s retired. And it gets a lot harder when the Plague strikes the World Lord Diomid purchased as his personal retirement home. And then the invasion . . .

As the Three Part Alliance crumbles, it’s every world for itself, and even a man so rich he can buy an entire parallel Earth to retire on, can find himself in a lot of trouble!

BY MANLY WADE WELLMAN, REVIVED B D. JASON FLEMING: Sojarr of Titan (Annotated): The Classic Pulp Planetary Romance

When the spaceship crashed on Saturn’s largest moon, the pilot adventurer died. But his infant son did not. Raising himself in the wilds of an alien world, Sojarr survives, and thrives, discovering a strange tribe of gypsy humans, and battling roving bands of monstrous natives…

Until the day another ship falls from the sky and threatens to throw two worlds into chaos!

• This iktaPOP Media edition contains a new introduction giving the novel genre and historical context.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Highway to Tartarus

Insanity seems to run rampant in the immortal population, and Hades seems to be the one the Fates tap to contain them all; however, this time, Hades, and Kyra, the former goddess of War from Atlantis, have to find and catch the one who’s gone dangerously insane: Deshayna, Kyra’s identical twin, and the former goddess of Death.

Along for the ride are a pregnant Persephone, Hel from the Norse pantheon (and Hades’ and Persephone’s lover), Tyr and Thor, and Kyra’s adopted daughter Rowan.

The seven of them follow rumors, leads, and death-god connections around the world in an RV that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside, while trying to maintain a bare semblance of normalcy despite the chaos of never knowing when or where their Fates-assigned mission will end…or if it will end them.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Bound into the Blood – A Virginian in Elfland

Book 4 of The Hounds of Annwn.

DISTURBING THE FAMILY SECRETS COULD BRING RUIN TO EVERYTHING HE’S WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD.

George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is preparing for the birth of his child by exploring the family papers about his parents and their deaths. When his improved relationship with his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, is jeopardized by an unexpected opposition, he finds he must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a god.

He discovers he doesn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did. His search for answers takes him to the human world with unsuitable companions.

How will he keep a rock-wight safe from detection, or even teach her the rules of the road? And what will he awaken in the process, bringing disaster back to his family on his own doorstep? What if his loyalty is misplaced? What will be the price of his mistakes?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Sound of One Child Crying

Who is the child Reza can hear crying every time she goes to the new addition to the Royal Library? Her boss insists there is no child, that it is nothing more than her uncanny sensitivity to the unseen world making a nuisance of itself.

Worse, searching for answers gets her angry rebukes about respect for the dead. The further Reza goes, the more certain she becomes that someone is hiding an ugly secret.

It’s a secret that traces back two generations, to a dark period in this land’s history. A time most people would prefer to forget, not caring that denial doesn’t make a problem go away.

The truth may set you free, but not without a price. And Reza fears that death itself might turn out to be an easier price than the one demanded of her.

THIS WEEK WE HAVE A SPECIAL TREAT: FROM OCCASIONAL ATH COMMENTER AND ACE OF SPADE HABITUE SCOTT, HIS FIRST PUBLISHED STORY IS FREE HERE: The Waystation Incident

And if it gets enough votes, it will be printed in an anthology. So go and read, and if you enjoy it, support it.

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: PREMIUM

I is said that science changes at the speed of filling graves.

Thing is it’s not just science. It’s the world. And actually, no, it’s not that fast.

Also, the hacks that fill graves faster, like fascism and communism DO change things fast — I suspect this was the realization of the totalitarians of the 20th century that led to all the mass graves “if we kill people, we kill institutional memory” — but they lose a lot of he things that make the world work, along with the things they’d like to lose.

The problem is that you aren’t precisely you. You’re, as I am, as we all are, partly creatures of our time and place, and partly have bits embedded from what “everyone knows” in our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Then you realize they had things embedded too, and some of that might have passed on.

How far, you ask? Well– The word pecuniary probably is related to one of the oldest words archeo-linguists have found: pecu. Which means long haired cattle. Pecuniary, for those of you behind on your word-of-the-day calendar means relating to money.

So even though theories of eugenics throughout the ages have failed, and even though by the time I was born the Germans had got their *sses kicked so hard that it was hard to find their heads almost 20 years before, there is an assumption that tall blonds are somehow more put together or efficient somewhere at the back of my mind. (No, I didn’t marry one.) Why? Because it was at the back of my parents’ minds. And at the back of the minds of a lot of people of their generation. Germans were just more efficient and orderly, you know? There is probably a similar belief in Europe about Russians being more organized and capable now, born of communist propaganda in the last century.

It’s not that I BELIEVE that Germans or tall blonds are more organized and efficient, mind you. Not rationally. As I said, Germany had got kicked hard (twice) by the time I was born, and I despise all half-assed theories of genetics that think skin color correlates to anything other than ability to tan and high or low incidence of skin cancer. I’m not stupid.

It’s that with the kids in school I caught myself trying to help/push them, because by virtue of being my kids they were at a disadvantage versus the mostly blonds (strange thing, that) in their classes. Once I realized I was thinking it, I stamped on it, because it was stupid and also crazy, but it was still there, somewhere at the very back, whispering crazy things.

And that is because my parents/grandparents/great-grandparents automatically assumed Northern Europeans were smarter and more efficient. (PFFFFFT. I have IQ tests that– Never mind. The kids certainly do.) And that was in the air all around as I was growing up. Never examined. It was just what “everyone knows.”

I suspect this is true also, for most of the mid-century-modern kids. (Not boomers, precisely, but born ten to fifteen years either side of the middle of the century.) Because it was there, in the back of the heads throughout the first half of the century.

This too by the way explains ideas about central “organized” power being best and about a time when everyone “agreed.” (They didn’t. the agreement was faked, by one side having full control of the media.) Not to mention the time of great respect for laws, etc. The truth was that the mid century was a very peculiar time, due to both the sudden sundering of the long war of the 20th century which left a lot of kids either parentless, or being raised by someone far busier with something else (like the war or rebuilding after the war.)

So not only did some extremely not true things get passed on, unquestioned, but a lot of things that should have been passed on aren’t. My generation has spent a lot of time trying to figure out “how things are done” because after the boomers’ massive student revolt tizzies and their demands for changing curriculums, my generation wasn’t taught a lot of the stuff everyone had been taught for a century. (The change was stark. My brother took Latin and some Greek, for instance, but I didn’t. Our math was watered down. And heck, I had to use a procedural trick that involved my parents, to be allowed to learn English. And don’t get me started on how simplified and bowdlerized the History I got was. I was blessed because I had my brother’s school books but not everyone that that.) There were also a lot of things our parents didn’t pass on, either because they were too busy or because it was assumed to be obvious. Stupid stuff, mostly, about say, how to clean house, or how to cook this and that. Pre-internet I spent a not inconsiderable time trying to figure the lost knowledge out.

So, it was a weird time. There was just enough knowledge not passed on to foster a lot of illusions about what was possible or even should be attempted.

To an extent you could say, even now, what we’re seeing are attempts at recovering from and rebuilding the deep fractures of the 20th century long war. Oh, sure, the overwhelming majority of people who fought in it, or were even alive at the end of it are gone. But enough remains embedded in the back of people’s minds that it affects us all.

Change happens. But it’s not fast, it’s not simple, it’s not easy.

It’s never easy.

If only I were sure we’re not going to revisit another set of the 20th century errors before all this is said and done.

But nothing for it. All we can due is continue and fight today’s battle. Even if our foot is in the cement sack of the past.

Because the truth is, contrary to an idiot’s often proclaimed idiocy, there is no “what can be unburdened by what has been.”

We’re all burdened by what has been. Erasing it only dooms us to repeat it.

I almost called this Teacup in A Tempest. Because the whole thing is being talked about upside down, sideways and tiltawhirl. And in the end it’s just what it always is, the same old games played in the same way.

In case you missed the tempest in the tiniest of teacups: This far-right influencer who liked to talk about how everyone else was controlled by Jewish money was named in a Justice Department indictment for taking millions of dollars to run a Russian influence operation on YouTube. And Everyone on the right with an audience is a Russian asset 2 months before an election, says the Biden DOJ. And Tim Pool: My statement regarding allegations and the DOJ Indictment. And Dear Vladimir.

There now? Up to date on this very serious, never to be recovered from ELECTION INTERFERENCE by Russia Russia Russia?

Cool. Now let’s talk like adults.

First of all whatever the f*ck this is it’s not in fact “election interference.” Oh, the Russians probably think it is, or social engineering or something. I’m not exonerating the Russians. But Putin is an old KGB horror playing old KGB games, and he doesn’t GET the US. He never did.

The whole purpose of this is apparently to “sow dissension.” Only if you believe it’s needed, it works, and it makes any sense, I have some swampland in Florida you’ll adore. We Americans dang well can sow their own dissension. As the periodic brouhahas and donnybrooks in the commentariat here prove, we are a fractious people, and can fight over the stupidest things.

I was irked, in the Tim Pool link above, by the usual idiots calling him a traitor and saying he’d be raped in prison. Not just because this is the left’s favorite fantasy (no, really) but because it’s so mind-bogglingly stupid.

I don’t care if the Justice Department did a big bad press release. NO CRIME WAS COMMITTED. NOT A SINGLE ONE.

Oh, mind you, the person handing out the cash on behalf of the alleged Russians MIGHT have been laundering money from other operations, in which case some money laundering laws might have been broken. That’s way above my pay grade.

What I will say though is that in the “pay bloggers to say bad things about Jews” or “pay bloggers to praise Putin” or “Pay bloggers to say my eyes are pretty” stakes, no crimes were committed.

If they were, most of the traditional media would be in jail.

None of this is election interference. Not even a little bit. None of it compares to the media’s operation to “fortify” the election in 2020; to various NGOs introducing non-existent voters in rolls; to the campaign by various state AGs to keep Trump off ballots; to the retired spooks lying about Hunter’s laptop; to the left convincing various social media platforms to deplatform those who disagree with them. THAT, any of those, are election interference.

Some vatnik paying a lot of money — no really, an amazing amount of money. How were these people not suspicious? — to vloggers to…. well, Tim Pool says to change nothing, but let’s say it was to praise Putin, give Trump the side-eye, and maybe, because it comes from Russia throw some hate at the Jews (Dudes! The left does it FOR FREE.) IS NOT ELECTION INTERFERENCE.

And if it were, it wouldn’t be actionable.

Look, other countries try to influence our politics all the time. China-linked ‘Spamouflage’ network mimics Americans online to sway US political debate. And All In Cognitive Warfare.

Why do they do this? Well, they’re too broke and unorganized to go against us in the field of battle. No, way more than we are. (I say, and I’m not joking, that WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones.) And messing around on the internet makes them feel they’re doing something, and it’s easy and relatively cheap. It also doesn’t have much effect, however bombastic announcements by our DOJ sure make them feel like it does.

HOWEVER FOREIGNERS MESSING AROUND TRYING TO INFLUENCE OUR OPINION IS NOT A CRIME. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s obviously not a crime IN THEIR COUNTRIES. And we can’t precisely go to their countries and drag them to our courts without going to war — real war — with the countries. Yes, I know that we charged some Russians with “election interference” about 2016. Yeah. We can indict a ham sandwich. Nothing changes. It’s still not a crime for them. And for us it’s at most annoying.

Oh, but surely, as those leftist vatniks slavering after how Tim Pool would be raped in prison know what they’re talking about, right? Isn’t it TREASON for American bloggers to take foreign money?

I’m sorry. I’m giggling so hard I had to take a break from typing.

TREASON TO WHAT? To their readers/listeners, maybe, but that’s not the kind of treason they put you in jail for. We don’t take a blogger oath. Heck, if we took a blogger oath to not write anything against American interests, the left blogsphere would shut down tight.

We are not government agents. I mean, maybe Russians think we are, and thought they were big-time entrapping people. It would fit with their misunderstandings of us. But our DOJ d*mn sure knows better. Even under Merrick.

So what was the big release about? Well, a) Kamala is in trouble in the polls and owned self pretty biggly with the Arlington cemetery thing. This will distract from that. b) Also the governor of NY has had Chinese agents in her inner circle, so it’s time to gin up some Russia! Russia! Russia! panic.

I mean, look, I’m not even saying the Russians were in cahoots with the Justice department. They don’t need to be. This stupid crap is what Russians do by default, and my guess is they’re about as hard to track as an elephant with muddy feet crossing a white tile floor.

There is no there, there. The DOJ release is just a way to say “Hey, look over there!” And “Evil right wing bloggers.”

In fact, Tim Pool was right. Whether he got paid or not, he was the victim (the other people are not on my radar/are obnoxious anyway.) Even if it was a self inflicted victimhood.

The only people hurt by this will be in order 1) the bloggers who took money and who — even if they didn’t change anything about their reporting — now will have to win back the trust of their listeners/readers. 2) right wing bloggers in general, if nothing else because for the next month we’re going to have to put up with a lot of stupid comments (my assistant will likely spam them) asking how much we were paid (my disclosure is below) and such. 3) in a minimal way all of the countercultural blogsphere, because this will make people suspicious of alternate media. This is very minimal, because as the laughing wolf link above points out, most of you know that most of us couldn’t stay bought if we tried, even if someone offered us money which they don’t. (Again, my statement on my undue influences will be at the end.)

In fact, as far as I can tell, other than a handy distraction, what the DOJ is hoping to accomplish by this is to discredit anyone on the right who has an audience.

I have only one more thing to say, before my statement on who has paid me with what on this blog: DEAR LORD BLOGGERS TAKEN IN BY THIS (and for various reasons I think there’s layers and layers well below Tim Pool) DIDN’T YOU GET THE SLIGHTEST BIT SUSPICIOUS?

There is no money on the right. Or rather, there is, but it’s nickle and dime money, the thing my fundraisers rely on. I and others run the cringe fundraisers, because there are no big one-shot donors on the right. We can’t just put at the bottom “Paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation” or whatever. The millionaires, by and large, are lefties, because it’s a positional good. They are lefties the same way former plutocrats built libraries or in Europe churches. IF YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT BLOGSPHERE AND SOMEONE GIVES YOU BIG HEAP MONEY be scared. Or as my grandma would say “when the handout is too big, the beggar should be wary.” BE WARY. Yeah, the money might be sweet, but be aware what you’re selling is your appearance of integrity and independence. And you’re hurting the causes you purport to support.

As for me? Well, I do get offers in email about every other week. Mostly, I’ll admit, Chinese, though there have been a few Russian-sounding ones. I spam them. Because, listen guys, I’m mildly on the spectrum and extremely paranoid. I sort of assume they’re all either phishing or the call of Cthulhu.

NOW AS PROMISED MY STATEMENT ON WHO PAYS FOR THIS BLOG: You do. All of you who decide to. (Not that you have to, and I don’t want any of you to hurt yourselves.) Most of it is nickle and dime stuff, and the ones who aren’t are still not telling me what to write.

HOWEVER I do admit I’m kept in coffee by a shadowy coffee company that claims extraterrestrial influence. I gladly publish their propaganda pieces, and have done the occasional review, even. To be fair, they keep me awake to type these blogs, so I figure they deserve it.

No, this post actually has practically nothing to do with conventional religion. It has a lot to do with worship and the vision of religion.

First of all let’s establish what politics is, from my POV. I don’t like politics, unlike what you might believe from reading this blog. I do watch it, though. Because if I turn my back on it, it might decide to take an interest in me. I learned that early, you see.

So I watch it obsessively and try to guess what it’s up to, not because I love it or think it is the salvation of mankind, but because I think government is one of the most dangerous forces known to men, arguably made more so by Marxist philosophy and the super-sized countries made possible by mass communication and incentivized by mass production. And politics is the language spoken by government, the way it telegraphs its intent, and the way it is sometimes controlled — but mostly not — by the will of the people it governs.

Second of all, I think government by and large is not a force for good. In fact, I think the larger and more powerful the government the less of a force for good it is.

I’m not going to say government is unnecessary, but its ability to interfere in the life of the citizens should go down the farther away and larger it is. Like this: your local government might be able to give you some aid in case of trouble or tell you to move that pile of trash from your yard already. However your national government has no business doing either, since the local conditions might be totally opaque to it.

In fact, national governments should be able to do little more than negotiate with foreign governments to (hopefully) prevent war. And command the defense forces in case that’s impossible.

But Sarah, you’ll say, what about the ultimate safety net for families and children? What about ensuring our food supply is safe, our medicines real, and our environment clean? What about some basic over-arching measures to ensure industry isn’t exploiting workers? What about–

Yeah. Dig into any of those and you’ll find your national government is in fact doing more harm than good and in point of fact destroying the country’s ability to feed itself, medicate itself, or have enough energy to subsist. Let alone making it impossible for Americans to have A manufacturing industry of any size and sending all our stuff-making abroad.

What does this mean?

It means that politically I’m going to incline to the politician running who wants to do the least stuff. Yes, I’d be ecstatic if someone were actually running like Milei in Argentina, who wanted to take a chainsaw to our federal government. If someone promised that, and I believed him to any extent, I’d be the first one in line to vote for him. Heck, I might be ringing doorbells for him from the moment I woke up to when I dropped in bed.

Which brings us to the important question: If such a person were running, would I think he was a new messiah, and worship him, or belong to a “another Milei” cult? Would I think he was amazing in all things, and every word that came from his lips sacred?

Don’t be ridiculous. I’d be working for him because he would be my instrument. No more, no less. And I might be very protective of him if he were the only one promising chainsaw-licious government cut backs. Which is not the same as thinking he’s perfect, just that right then he’d be the best we had.

Also I want to make a point here that if one side running are outright communists, talking wishfully of getting rid of the constitution and redistributing wealth according to “oppression” (which is an hereditary quality and linked to race and other characteristics in their eyes) and the person running against them is the emissary of hell, I, like Churchill, will at least say something nice about the devil. Because old scratch can be gotten rid of with prayer and holy water, while communists have to be gotten rid of with lots of blood, and often leave a country in no shape to survive. (And in the case of the US will destroy the whole world as they starve us, because we feed the world. And provide innovation to the world, too.)

There is nothing — NOTHING — that pisses me off more than being accused of being in a “cult of Trump”. Not because it hits “too close to the truth, uh?” as idiots will claim, but because it’s like being accused of being secretly a unicorn. It’s both terrifying in revealing how out of touch my opponents are, and insane to a level that makes me sure our polity is headed to hell.

I’ve recently been accused of this by both pro-lifers — will you people PLEASE stop letting yourselves be spun by the left? Please? Half of the things you’re reacting to are the usual truncated statements. The others are just your wanting stuff that can’t happen, not yet, and for which the remedy is to continue fighting — and by the intellectual right who is very afraid any sign of supporting Trump will get the left to call them stupid. Apparently this is different from supporting W or Romney of McCain because reasons. Also Trump is so uncouth and speaks so loud, and has orange hair, donchaknow? And he didn’t even graduate from the ivy leagues, the dunce.

And yes, I’m quite sure of how I’m classifying these people, because these are people I KNOW and have known online for years. My sympathy in this case is with the pro-lifers, partly because they’re sick and tired of fighting. But I’ll remind them Trump allows them to continue fighting. The other side means millions of term-babies killed (Partly also because the economy will encourage more abortions) and also a lot more pro-life activists in jail. Neither of the sides is what you’d want. I GET THAT. But unless you have a raging Jones for martyrdom, vote for the guy that allows you to continue fighting for what’s right.

The people who are trying to signal how much better and more INTELLECTUAL than Trump they are can eat my shorts. They are the same old tired midwits terrified someone will find out they got good grades by kissing up to teach. Again, I repeat, they can eat my shorts.

Do I love Trump? No. There are things that worry me about him, particularly in this campaign. I do not like the alliance with RFK and Tulsi Gabbard. It might be needed, but so was our alliance with Stalin in WWII (maybe.) Doesn’t mean it won’t cast a long and very bad shadow into the future.

Does Trump say and do things that annoy me? Sure. But he also proved in his first term that my perception of what is possible and what is right is not always true.
I didn’t understand until I saw him fight Russia (who in case everyone else has forgotten, on the right and left, engaged in a lot of provocations and small scale attacks on our troops during Trump’s tenure. Just nothing on the scale of invading a country) in the way that really hurt them: with money. By securing the US energy independence, Trump could take away Russia’s main source of income. Also could threaten the Middle East with poverty enough to cow them. All of what he said about this, about immigration, about Europe seemed wrong, but it turned out he was approaching the matter as a businessman, not a politician. It was an untried option I’d never thought of. Did it work perfectly? Eh. But he did have some notable successes.

However, right now? He’s the best on offer. And we actually know how he would govern, because we know how he governed.

Was his tenure perfect? Oh, please. And yeah, there were missteps. However, a lot of what he achieved (peace in the middle east, US energy independence) I’d have thought UNACHIEVABLE.

If he manages to have as good a term as his first, it will go a long way towards recovering from the near-mortal blow of the Bidentia’s tenure. If it’s better than that, I’ll be the one in the backyard throwing up fireworks.

And if it’s worse?

It’s still likely to be better than Unrealized Capital Gains Que Mala and her racial game of spoils. And it’s likely to be far better in not totally revoking the Constitution.

When Kamala says things like this, casually, and seemingly without understanding how horrific it is:

Kamala Harris: “He [Musk] has lost his privileges.” Can someone please explain to her that freedom of speech is a RIGHT, not a “privilege”? Kamala Harris: “There has to be a responsibility placed on these social media sites to understand their power.” Translation: “If they don’t police content to conform to government-approved narratives, they will be shut down.”

And our system of vote is binary, I will vote for her opponent. And if I don’t bestir myself to actually ring doorbells for him, I will at least refrain from hitting him over every little misspoken word. And I will maybe say a few kind things about him, and praise him where he deserves.

Once he’s won, and the spectrum of Communism is banished for another 4 years (We need to fix our schools. Abolishing the dept of education AND teaching colleges is a good start) I will go back to nipping at his heels and complaining about bone headed moves. And pray for someone else not a communist in four years.

For now? A cult? You’ve got to be kidding me. When I make jokes about naming a cat Orange Cat Bad they’re that: jokes. (Though Indy taking apart his food dispenser might be worthy of being called that.) And that’s naming a cat, not a baby or a car even.

If your only explanation for your opponents not agreeing with you is that “they joined a cult” you might be in one.

Sure, I see lots of defects in the logic of the left, but I can explain what they are, and where they came from. And if I think that Marxism is a Christian heresy, I have more backing for it than “they joined a cult.”

And for that matter, when seemingly rational people I’ve known for years behave in a way I don’t understand, I look for an explanation, rather than assume they were snatched up by pod people. (I often don’t find them. Sometimes the explanation seems to be “X broke people badly” — where x is most recently 2020 — and I’m still sure they are wrong. But often I also can tell why they have this particular blind spot. Again, it’s not “joined a cult.”)

But Trump is not a messiah. He’s not even the best I could hope for. That might be Rand Paul, if he shed his internationalist delusions (he might have recently. I haven’t followed very closely. Mostly because the poor man hasn’t been the same since he was attacked in his yard) but it’s certainly not Trump.

Trump is at best the instrument the blind fury of the long-denied people grabbed onto. He was aided into his first nomination by his media-persona name recognition. And he’d probably have governed just slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton if the left hadn’t gone insane against him and aroused his spite.

His second nomination was baked in, regardless of what people thought could be, by his name recognition alone. I realized that when I had people come and install the fridge and chatted with them about the primaries. They knew who Trump was, like him or hate him. DeSantis was DeWho? And “Oh, he governs…. Georgia? Florida?” In fact my biggest question about the DeSantis run and how vicious his surrogates got was “What on Earth possessed him to think he could get the nomination this year?” Yes, it could be positioning for 2028, but dear Lord, surely he knew that the best thing for that would be what he’s doing now: being a good governor to Florida, who makes the left’s teeth ache.

So, he’s what we have. Sure, I’d prefer a chainsaw. But all we really have right now is this weed whacker. And the best we can do is use the weed whacker to advantage to at least clear some of the overgrowth of government and regulations.

Perfect governance doesn’t exist this side of heaven, for the simple reason governance is of humans for humans, and humans are not and can not be perfect.

Whether I live another year or another 30, I’ll probably die mid-fight for a smaller, more localized government, and taking authority away from the federal branch. It is the best I can do.

But until I die, I will fight against a communist take over of the US. And if that means voting for someone who is only slightly to the right of the other candidate? Sure. I’ll do that. I’ll even say nice things about them.

Can’t spatter me with mud more than doing that with W did, right?

So, do the best you can and pray for a miracle. I’m assured G-d looks out for fools, drunkards and the United States of America.

Let’s hope He’s not lost patience yet.