There comes a time in the life of every writer when, not matter how little inclined, in the name of human decency and health, some efforts must be made at cleaning.

With my faithful friend, squirrel, and what appears to be a… nutria or maybe a chinchilla (the cats are obviously off camera) I am engaged in that at the moment. (Indy is probably disassembling the vacuum as I type this, judging by… sounds.)

Do not be alarmed by massive cloud of dust rising from not-Colorado. It’s just me dusting the bookshelves. If you look closely, you’ll see cat hair is mixed with the dust.

And now let me go rescue the vacuum. Back with memes tomorrow.

*Note that was too pessimistic. Maybe. I thought just the lockdown would cause famines in the US. It just pinched us a lot. The rest… I stand by it – SAH*

Cures and Diseases – a blast from the past from 3/24/2020

Cures and Diseases

I’m sorry I’ve been largely absent from my own blog. The truth is that I’ve been largely absent from my own life.

It is a form of depression, but one I hadn’t wrestled with before. I’ve never before been THIS angry. Angry enough I had to shut my entire ability to work — including non fiction and short pieces down — in order not to live in a state of near-berserking.

And I’ve never before felt so impotent that it feeds into the depression. Of course I’ve never before watched the imposition of Cuba-style socialism on the bastion of free men (yes, women are included in that, and if you think I need to mention this every time you’re part of the people destroying civilization without realizing what you’re doing and one of the people I’m no longer in the mood to give consequence to.)

It doesn’t help that this dropped on top of other worries that were ALREADY consuming my life before: I appreciate the world’s and politicians attempts to distract me from a couple of things I’m waiting to drop to make sure the boys DO graduate this year, and from my fears the boob thing will be cancer by going completely insane. I particularly want to thank my state governor for attempting to crash the state economy in tandem with all the other crazy state governors, in what (if they keep it up) guarantees a famine event by next winter. I think HOWEVER you’re going overboard a little.
Maybe it’s time to back up?

Okay, to be clear, the chances that the Chinese Virus was ever going to wipe out 1/10th of our population, let alone more, were very, very, very low.  HOWEVER when this started out, we didn’t know that. We just didn’t. And the sh*t coming out of China, including the crematoria running day and night were terrifying.

The virus is still horrible in China. PROBABLY. I mean, the Chinese are still dying and a lot are still locked in. But is it the thing that has many names but which started out as COVID-19?

No one knows. No one really knows what is going on in China. Partly because, as a friend of mine who loves the culture and has lived in China put it “It’s not that they lie. It’s that they don’t really have a concept of the truth.” Some Arab cultures have similar issues. You see, truth that can be verified by other people, truth that is “scientifically testable” is not only not a given for humanity, it seems to be a really difficult idea. Judging from oour plague of irreproducible results, it’s really difficult for US too and being lost here. It might be something that came to the west, or solidified in the west with the scientific revolution.

In China “truth is what serves our purposes.” For everyone. Which is why medicines made in China might be full of plaster. If you’re lucky.

Anyway, the point is no one knows what is going on in China, and though we know that people are dying in droves, and that we’re not being told the truth, we don’t know that it’s caused by this virus.

In fact there are tons of reasons to believe it isn’t, including the fact that the virus isn’t that lethal anywhere else.  And before you say “Italy” — Italy is cooking the books, including counting anyone who dies of anything else and had this virus onboard as dying of the virus — besides the fact that Italy has other, systemic problems, just as China does.

There were always those of us who suspected that some purging of political dissidents was going on behind China’s facade of virus attack, and some of it might be true. But there are a lot of other things going one. One of them is that China was hurting — badly — economically.  The 8 years of Obama’s Summer of Recovery had put a dent in how much “cheap crap” Americans were buying. There were already parts of their economy dying. They compensated by stealing patents and frauding more (remember they have no concept of fair dealing, along with no concept of the truth. And no, this is not racist, though it might be “culturalist” but I don’t know how, unless you believe all cultures are exactly the same, in which the technical name for you is “idiot.” And yes, I know there are a ton of you out there who were taught that. You were mis-taught. There is no value judgement involved. Cultures are different. I think ours is more suited to survival and thriving of the human race, but that’s me. However, if you’re going to be dealing with other countries you have to be aware of the differences. This, BTW doesn’t mean diddly about the character of people of Chinese origin. It just means that people who grow up in the Chinese culture might have blind spots which aren’t ours and which make business affairs cross culture difficult.)

But then came Trump’s sanctions and attempts to stop our bleed out of jobs and currency.  And no, he wasn’t wrong. But it put the hurt on China, MAJORLY which is why all our press — who knew they were in the pocket of the Chinese to that extent — squealed like stuck pigs.

The thing is it might have caused FAMINE in China.  China has a veneer of modernity and western civilization, but it is not.  The average peasant in China still lives in conditions our 19th century ancestors would find primitive and stark. They might wear t-shirts, but they’re living in primitive, and close to the bone conditions.

When the sanctions cut into them, crematoria running night and day might be a sign of anything, including widespread famine.  And Wuhan was particularly impoverished due to hosting the Military games, which means the government emptied parts of the city and destroyed people’s livelihoods uncaring of what happened. There were APPARENTLY a lot of people on the edge of starvation.

Which, yes, makes them more susceptible to disease.  Or just dying of hunger.

On top of which, there have been rumors filtering out of a new bird flu, and worse of locusts in unprecedented numbers eating their crops. This comes on top of a swine flu that killed or caused them to kill most of their pigs, to the point rivers ran red.

So, you know, what happened with the virus and China is not a sign of anything.

But when I first became aware of this in January, I was briefly very worried. It looked like it would be bad, very bad indeed. And like everyone else, I kept thinking “Would China react like this if they didn’t have way more deaths/it weren’t way more severe?”

Well, yes, because as I’ve explained there are a ton of other (very bad) things going on in China, and blaming the virus is not as embarrassing.

Since then, despite various attempts to stampede us, from the incredibly stupid computer model, to the numbers in Italy (note that only 12% of death certificates that show Covid-19 as the cause are plausibly even close to true.), to our own authorities doing testing only on people showing severe symptoms, and publishing the number of infected as though it were growing and not more people being tested for it, to as far as I can tell, hospital administrations assuming when we first tested is when people were first infected and having decided (PFA?) that the thing has no asymptomatic infections, but that most infections “take 16 days” which is why the surgeon general (medical degrees apparently don’t mean you can examine assumptions) thinks this week will be “the worst yet,” the truth is that this virus is probably one of the greatest panics incited over absolutely nothing in the history of humanity.

In the magnitude of delusion compared to the actual effects/danger, it is the elephant that birthed a mouse.

I’m not saying people won’t die from the infection. We’re humans. People die from a hangnail. People die from getting too much sun. People can and do die from sinus infections. It’s just not common.  Every year, I guarantee, several people die from the common cold. I once tried to die from a really simple virus my two year old shrugged off in a week.

People will die. But in terms of who dies of Chinese Virus, we’re learning they’re the people who would die of …. well, anything. Most of them will be seniors who would have died in less than year anyway.

And when you type that people call you unfeeling and tell you how would you feel if that were your mother, or your grandmother.

The answer is DEVASTATED. Very very sad. I’ve said in the past, and it’s true, that I’d give years of life for the ability to have tea with grandma once more, in her kitchen.

But my mother is eighty five. My father is eighty nine. Both of them are adults and cognizant that they are MORTAL. They certainly wouldn’t want western civilization destroyed to save them. Particularly because when global economy crashes, they won’t survive, anyway. Nor will anyone their age. Hell, it’s unlikely anyone my age will survive very long, because we get the maladies and the things that don’t work very well. People are only living to their eighties and nineties because we’re wealthy and stable enough to give them medicine and think nothing of the cost. And because they can be well fed, clean, warm.

The proof that this virus is probably less lethal than the common cold is hard to come by, partly because we’re still only testing people who are showing symptoms. And we haven’t tested that many people, as is.  And as proven we can’t trust numbers from China or Italy, and knowing the games they play with numbers for infant death and murder, I’d be very careful trusting numbers from the EU.

So, we lean heavily on the numbers from the Diamond Princess, because it’s a closed test case. Iceland might also be trustworthy. And South Korea might be more or less straight up.  And there are studies surfacing of what is really going on that confirm THE VIRUS IS NOT A BIG DEAL.

COVID-19: the unwarranted panic

COVID-19: interesting data from Korea and from the Diamond Princess

COVID-19 – Evidence Over Hysteria

Don’t expect the media to tell you this. They benefit from the panic directly. Their almost gone influence has been revived. You see, most people don’t actually read news online. They learned to distrust the media from talking to friends at lunch/diner/office. Those are gone, and bored and scared people have the news on. And they BELIEVE them. So don’t expect the media to EVER give the all clear.

All the more so because they’ve seized on this to create a state of panic that will allow them to push their favorite political prescriptions.  If you think your lefty friends saying that we’re adopting Bernie’s program is hyperbole, it’s not.  The media has stampeded us into an horrendous recession, and the left is taking advantage of it.

The left will also never ever give the all clear. They’re seizing on the panic to create their socialist paradise by fiat.  The fact it looks a lot like Cuba or Venezuela hasn’t hit them yet. And they might not mind, anyway. Most of them would rather reign in hell.

But I still think they have NO clue of the devastation they’re precipitating. Most of them are urbanites, work in offices, and have a degree in the soft sciences. Some are even extremely competent and successful in their own fields, but they are complete idiots when it comes to how the world works or what the economy is.

There are signs they are completely delusional. One of them is the charming illusion they can keep people in lock down for 18 months, and all that will happen is they “save lives” and “socialism.” Another is their uniform support for The Green New Deal, an underwear gnome solution based on wishful thinking and astonishing ignorance.  Yet another is how they think printing money will compensate for everything. Yet another is an article I saw yesterday about how we recovered from the 2008 recession by 2009. Apparently someone REALLY believed those cooked numbers and the headlines on “summer of recovery” and didn’t have highly qualified friends unemployed for half a decade at a time.

And that’s the problem. It’s not so much the “enemies, domestic” though of course, it is a major problem. As is the fact these mal-educated emotional children have political power.  I mean at the level of functionality and divorce from reality they’re the nobility of pre-revolutionary France. (And it would behoove them to remember how that ended.)

But the really, really major problem is that they have NO clue how their actions impact reality, other than what they want to see. It’s entirely possible they don’t believe reality exists. (College-educated people in possession of half-digested philosophy are apparently more dangerous than a buffalo in a china shop.)

What we have grown-size toddlers, walking around a room-sized computer, randomly smashing circuit boards with their hammers and giggling.

You see, they know the more functionality they take down, the more chance that Orange-man-bad who told them they couldn’t have whatever toy they wanted will be taken out.

BUT THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY’RE DOING is causing IRREPARABLE damage, and that it might never be repaired.

If they understood the economy and its complexity they wouldn’t be socialists or communists. Because the reason socialism and communism destroys economies and kills people is that it ignores the complexity of economy and people.

They confuse symbol with reality (In this as in everything else, btw) so they think printing money creates value. They think that they can lock us in the house for eighteen months, and as long as they keep us in money, everything will be fine.

They miss not just that food/other necessities still need to be produced, but that they need to be transported. And that for them to be transported, there needs to be oil (no, please, this is not the time to have dreams of tech we don’t actually have) available to fuel trucks, and truckers willing to take to the road. They miss that just handing people money doesn’t mean they can buy food, even if it is available. They miss the interweb of value and interchange that keeps economy going, from building maintenance to paying your rent, to keeping the lights on.

They fail to understand you can’t stop the complex, chaotic system that is American economy and have it restart again.
They are pampered and confident, and they have no clue there can be a world with lates, let alone a world without beans.

If this goes on, we’re going to have a massive famine sometime next winter. Massive. People will die. Not just the very elderly people that the Chinese Virus targets, but people of all ages all over the world.

Even if we’re still producing enough food — we might be, America is a wonder, but I wouldn’t bet. Farmers needs seeds, fertilizer, maintenance for their machines, replacement parts, etc. — there won’t be a distribution network in place.

The stock market is not the way people who are very rich get money so they can build a money bin and swim in it. It’s the engine of the world. It supplies a way to move value around, so that farmers can borrow to buy seed, so that they can have tractors and other machinery. It is what allows trucking companies to operate. It is what keeps food on your table, clothes on your back, and the heat on.

Every part of the machine is interlocked. And what is happening is taking the wheels off. It’s smashing into the center of the economy with a hammer.

BTW when I say there will be famine and people will die, I mean in the US. PEOPLE WILL DIE.  Of hunger. Of lack of heat. Of lack of medicine. PEOPLE WILL DIE.  And not all of them the insane people who are instigating this.

In fact, most of the power mad governors will be just fine. And one can only hope that the idiots roaming facebook and saying this is their chance to smash capitalism get to FEEL what they’re encouraging. Dying of hunger ain’t pretty.

In the rest of the world? If people starve in the US, the rest of the world will starve worse.  Russia thinks it can be resurgent. So does China. They’re going to find mostly they die. Their despotic systems only work in an hyper abundant world.

But what this whole thing adds to is that the Chinese Virus was not the problem.  The people imposing crazy quarantines and measures are.  The idea that you can shut the country down for two weeks is bad enough. The people trying to stampede us into doing it longer, are ignorant of the realities of economics, or indeed of reality.

Should you wash your hands and not slip tongue to total strangers? Sure, but you always should. Antibiotics have made us cocky and banished a lot of the social distancing and care of the past, but not only do they not work on viruses (viri) but are losing effectiveness.

IF you can work from home, you should work from home. If it’s possible to home school, you should home school. BUT I ALWAYS THOUGHT SO.  And you shouldn’t go and lick doorknobs. Or shrines. BUT again, you never should.

Other than that? We need the restrictions lifted. Yesterday, if not sooner.

Listen to me, and start besieging your idiotic political leaders.  WE MUST LIFT THE STUPID HAMMER FROM THE ECONOMY.

It will still hurt like a mother. Oh, it will hurt. The next two-three years we’re going to get hyper inflation, unemployment and it’s going to be really hard. But I trust you guys. You’re battlers. Build under, build over build around.

However the president is right. The cure is far far worse than the disease. In fact, the “cure” deliberate or not is an attack at the heart of the economic engine of the world. Which is to say it’s an attack on humans’ ability to lie at all.

And before the greens crow about this, oh, please. This type of thing is not GOOD for the environment (whatever that means. You guys are high on semantic stupidity.) The humans who survive are going to give fuck all for your precious “ecology.” They will do what they have to do to stay alive. Which means the end result will be like something of your worst nightmares, with wood fires everywhere, forests burned for the rich soil beneath, animals hunted to extinction.  And yeah, there probably will be enough humans left to do really bad damage. Not that I care, because you see I’m for team human. I want humans to survive. But you idiots, who hate your own species, probably do care. And be aware you lose. In the end, you lose big.

If we continue with this stupid shit, and allowing marginally elected, probably with the help of fraud and disinformation ignoramuses to mandate where we can eat, where and when we can work, where we can walk, and what we can do, will only guarantee that millions die of starvation and disease within the next couple of years. And that’s JUST in the US. World wide hundreds of millions will die.

I beg you, with tears in my eyes, stop being afraid of the virus and start being afraid of the statists destroying our liberties, our economy, our society.

If we can save what remains of western civilization, in the end we win they lose.

They know that. They don’t mean to lose. And they have no idea that they can’t win.

They don’t know what they’re playing with, nor what they’ll unleash.

So, it’s 2024, and we know — we know — it’s going to be a hell of a year, unless several miracles occur.

But frankly, the way it’s been stacking up, and the way things have been going for 3 to 4 years (yes, before that too, but it’s been weaponized since) this was going to be a bad year either road: the increasing incompetence of the “elites”; the increasing panic of the “elites” as the system they’ve been relying on fails, the increasing insanity of their “solutions” and simply the culmination of a hundred years of having the “men of system” in charge, and their having way more control over the dissemination of news and ideas than they ever should have had.

Most of us who keep track of such things, and even those who don’t have been getting that bad feeling at the back of the head, the feeling of something wicked this way comes, and something is about to pounce out of the dark.

Actually most people who saw the rapidity with which the power-seekers moved to lock us down and the intensity with which they hate every smidgen of human freedom and enjoyment — truly. Who could have imagined under the excuse of a communicable virus they’d arrest people surfing, alone on the beach? Or the signs on the highway, directed at people in their cars, ALONE, saying “safer at home”? — are expecting things to go very very bad, very very fast at any minute.

I know I am. And if I tell myself not to think about it, it just means my subconscious worries about it, and it comes out in technicolor nightmares, which are always fun.

I’ve told you to prepare. I probably didn’t need to. I mean it might help someone who wanders in, unannounced, for the first time. But most of you have been on the edge of the seat and following this the same way I’ve been. Someone who shall remain husband asked me why I’m stocking up food in the basement if I don’t intend to eat it. Ah…. I wish I had that unsuspicious a mind.

Anyway, I was talking to a friend and I told her the happiest years of my life, in retrospect were in the late nineties. We weren’t swimming in money, but we had got out of the “can’t buy a paperback, or I’ll starve this week” phase. My stories had started getting accepted, and I was making about enough for a weekend in Denver a year. We had a group of friends and even we all had different politics, it didn’t seem to matter. The kids were small, and though the school could be annoying it hadn’t yet been fully weaponized against boys. We liked the house we lived in, even though I was rebuilding it from inside out while living there. And our first batch of cats was alive, so we hadn’t yet faced the fact they live such short lives and leave us bereft.

And then I said that despite everything we’re in what is starting to feel like that sort of halcyon times again. We have a little group of friends locally. I’m starting to write regularly again (having dealt with some long term health issues, which, probably, in retrospect were brought on by living about 20 years too long at high altitude, judging from when the symptoms set in.) The house ain’t ideal — we moved fast, and well, at the time no one was doing close inspections — but I can deal with most of it, a little bit at a time. And we’re not so old yet that I can’t deal with that stuff, and we can’t take the occasional weekend and go explore a museum or a thrift store, or just find a nice place to walk. The boys aren’t both close — which I’d love, but you know, they have their own lives to live and their own adventures to have, and it might be possible, maybe, but on the other hand, it might not. I have in mind the gentleman who used to comment here and who spent half the year with each son, in different states — but right now, they can sometimes both travel to our home for holidays, which is a special sweetness and joy.

If it weren’t for both of us working too much, and the looming sense of impending doom, we could be very happy right here and now. And I said how happy I was that at the end of the nineties I didn’t know 2001 and the complete mess of politics were in our future.

… And then she said, at the same time it occurred to me, that we should cherish the good times anyway.

And you know? She’s right. It’s not a pollyannish thing. We should still prepare, and we know there’s howling winds and snow ahead.

And I know that many of you aren’t experiencing halcyon times, or at least not most of the time. I know some of your struggles and I know what the job market looks like — yeesh — but–

But even in the middle of slogging through hell, while your galoshes get eaten by pesky duck demons, there are moments of peace and contentment and at times even joy. I know because I’ve gone through these times myself.

2018 between getting “fired” twice on the same day, and house repairs that let us strapped and much bigger than that troubles that are not (and were not back then) for public consumption, came very close to being annus horriblis.

But I had Greebo, you see. And in self defense, I started a prayer life. I’d start the morning by praying for half an hour to an hour. It was time alone, time to organize my thoughts, time to reach for something bigger than myself. It helped me face the rest of the day.

And I don’t remember how it started, but Greebo would come as soon as I was awake and praying, and sit by my knee, very still, not moving, just being warm and being there with me.

In that year of horrors, those hours in the morning, with my cat and praying became distilled sweetness, golden drops of happiness in a world that seemed grey and full of spikes.

Cherishing those brief moments, before the day’s slog began, gave me the strength to slog through the meatgrinder, and come through the challenges almost — practically — intact.

So… learn to recognize the good times. Even if it’s a few minutes with a cup of coffee, in a ray of sunlight, on your back porch. And relish them. Enjoy the heck out of them.

Even if you know they’re brief and limited and going to end permanently soon. Perhaps more if you know that.

Don’t mourn them ahead of time. Don’t anticipate the evil.

Sufficient onto each day the troubles, etc. Find those moments that are golden drops of sweetness and hold onto them, and enjoy them in and of themselves.

If they’re things you can make happen more often, at little sacrifice, do so too. Collect as many of them as you can.

And when they’re over, tuck them away in memory.

It should be considered part of preparing. We don’t live only in the rational side of life.

Stock up on happiness and joy, and carry it with you. Because we all know the road ahead is dark and dreary, but taking warmth and light with us will make us reach further.

And perhaps come through this more or less intact. And ourselves.

Why AI Art Sucks – by Killbait

This conversation is not going to get into any legality issues revolving around the various model sets. If that’s what you’re here for, move along.

What I am going to talk about is why AI art sucks, and why it doesn’t. Get ready, this is going to offend some folks…

AI art sucks because it’s too convenient and makes things easier for both mass production artists and those with little to no personal skill. It removes the ability for people to suffer for their art. It also creates situations where some people may feel like they do not need to personally improve, to simply allow the machine to do the majority of work and then fix any errors.

This last point is probably the only one I can see truly being bad, and yes, the rest of the points were meant to raise hackles. Because all of the complaints coming from artists today against AI have already been dealt with and proven nonsense. Thirty years ago. Yes, that’s right. This problem is thirty plus years old and has already been solved and done with. Anyone remember Photoshop? What about Autodesk Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max? Yes, I know some of you won’t because you weren’t even born yet, way to make me feel old…

I remember when I got into digital art how much time it took to complete a single piece of work. You could draw something by hand, tape it to your screen, and try to use your mouse to draw the image as accurately as possible, but in the end, you’d have to zoom in and make manual adjustments for hours. And then there was the shading. Use of dithering allowed you to shade reasonably well, but it took soooooo long, especially when compared to shading on paper (scribble scribble, done). Then we got graphic tablets, man did that change things; that’s also when the real arguments against digital art started up. Why? Because it made things “too easy”. People who had spent years honing their skills were suddenly outshone by a new group that didn’t have to go through all the same effort the old group had to in order to make good quality products.

Physical artists complained that it wasn’t real art, but in the back rooms the real reason was they knew digital artists had a significant advantage over them. Make a mistake in digital art? Undo or reload the previous save. You might lose a little bit of work, but you didn’t have to start over from scratch. Want to try a new technique, maybe adjust the overall warmth of the image? Create a copy of the file or a new layer to test it on. Did you like that one? Make a copy of the settings and quickly and easily apply it to another piece of work.

The same complaints being hurled at AI art today are the exact same complaints thrown at the release of those programs and graphic tablets, about how horrible this new digital art and computer animation would be for the art world. How it made it too easy for anyone to become an artist. How it would destroy the effort required to be a successful artist. How it wasn’t real art. Sound familiar?

Toy Story killed those arguments really quick by showing what could be accomplished with an effectively used tool and good writing.

Oh yeah, do a lot of the people complaining about AI art understand that most animation (digital and computer) isn’t done by humans, and hasn’t been for decades? See, animation companies figured out fast how useful it was to only need to draw a few frames and then let the computers fill in the rest for them. That’s all this big kerfuffle over AI art is complaining about. You feed it the starter images (again, not going into any legality issues here) and it spits out the filler.

And plain old computer animation, not to be confused with digital animation, is even “worse” in that skeletons are rigged to the characters, start and end points added, and then they fill in all of that extra data as well (oversimplified, but you get the idea). Heck, the programs will even handle most of the lighting and shading for you once you set up a couple starting points; change the viewing angle, completely change how the lighting/shading looks and you didn’t even have to change files. All that work was taken out of the artists’ hands, making the job far too easy for people.

In the end, AI art is a tool just like any other tool. It is going to open up a world of options for smaller groups, or individuals, to complete work that never would have been possible before. Think of all of the complaints about AAA game studios churning out junk games while independent small studios release games like Palworld and outsell them in a week. Imagine how a tool like this is going to positively affect the gaming industry, or the animation industry, giving individuals the chance to release episodes and movies at a fraction of the budget or time it would normally take them. The innovation so-called AI tools can assist in is astronomical.

And that brings me to my last point. These tools that have everyone up in arms over? There is no artificial intelligence there.  The intelligence involved is humans, directing machines to complete a task with a set of plain language terms instead of some deep knowledge of programming languages. It is no different than a person directing a mechanical arm in an automobile factory.

I often wonder if any of the folks complaining have really paid attention to who is publicly on their side of this argument. Hollywood and companies like Blizzard, Wizards of the Coast, and EA; they’ll go “oops” if they get caught using it, but you know they like it and will continue to use it to their advantage. Because people don’t like these companies, they’ll look at them using AI tools and think the tools are even more evil. That’s cost savings though, and if those companies can control who has access to it that also means no competition. They’ll tell you to your face that they stopped using it, but in the background, you know it isn’t true. Again, it’s just a tool. The same as any other tool, it is neither good nor evil, it just is.

Assuming the world hasn’t crumbled to dust, for completely different reasons, in another thirty years people are going to be looking back and wondering what the big freak out over “AI” tools was all about. Hopefully I’ll be around to see it, so I can say I was there for two major technological advances in the arts and the day that a few big companies controlling the entertainment of the world came crumbling down.

Sometimes while I’m here, in the evening chair, in the family room, writing my blog post and doing instapundit, my husband watches a movie. Ranging on what the movie is, this can range from distracting because I watch it or parts of it, to infuriating.

Elysium was the second kind. in fact, it was so bad that about halfway through I went upstairs to bed because otherwise I was going to just start screaming at the TV and not stop. The reasons were many from worldbuilding — LA looks like the bad parts of Mexico city, there’s nuns who raise orphans who aren’t orphans, everyone speaks Spanish, except the designated oppressors who speak Africans or English with a South African accent, and who also inexplicably seem to always know where the hero is, or something.

ANYWAY, moving right along…..

Perhaps the thing that infuriated me most was the harping on the “overpopulation” and how there are so many of us that we’re destroying the planet (and that’s why the rich moved to a space habitat.)

It infuriated me for several reasons:

First, even demographers are finally talking about “catastrophic population crash” taking overpopulation as gospel is insane. Yes, I know the movie was done a few years ago — I don’t know how many and I’m too lazy to look it up — but even then they should have had an inkling of a glimmer of a thought that perhaps the “population bomb” wasn’t precisely coming true. For one, because all the predictions Ehrlich ever made about it (or anything else) failed. In fact, a good way to predict the future is to look at whatever Paul Ehrlich says and believe the opposite. In that, he might be invaluable.

Second, Population exploding to the level they posited in a still recognizable future might be — for real — impossible for the simple reason that people who don’t exist can’t have kids. I note they had some inkling they weren’t seeing this gigantic population explosion around them, hence why everyone in the overgrown LA favela spoke Spanish. Also probably the reason for the nuns. I didn’t understand the Spanish (I could have, but would have to slow it way down) and they didn’t translate it in subtitles, but I wonder if the nuns were there to give the idea of those horrible Catholics who reproduce like rabbits. At any rate, not only is this idea that Spanish speakers (Or Arabic speakers, or–) are reproducing like rabbits and that if they keep it up they’ll destroy the world one of the oldest lies of eugenics, but the premise is also almost certainly completely wrong.

It’s hard to tell, because no one does accurate numbers not even us, and we’re practically autistic in our obsession with numbers, but everyone who pokes closer panics, because population does in fact seem to be falling worldwide, and people of all races and creeds are having fewer and fewer children.

Crappy cultures seem overpopulated only because they are so crappy they can’t provide even for the few young people they have.

Third – All the problems they attribute to overpopulation are not overpopulation, but the problems of crappy cultures. In the brief snatch of world-in-action, few have jobs and there is no societal trust or respect for private property. There’s nothing to an “overpopulated area” that causes that. Yes, in the seventies it was believed it was inevitable with higher population densities to get out of control crime, and lack of security and– But Rudy Giulliani and others proved it was not inevitable. It was a choice. It was Democrat culture choosing to mollycoddle criminals and punish the law abiding. Apparently the Democrats love that choice because they are making it again. But again, it has nothing to do with population density. It has to do with crappy government and crappy culture, and encouraging the worst in humans.

Just because you set the world on fire again and again and again, it doesn’t mean the world is particularly flammable, only that your beliefs make the world burn.

Now, why did the population thing get under my skin to that point? Well, mostly because it is probably the most important fight of our time.

All the problems we used to think were caused by overpopulation: the loss of wealth, the inability to feed everyone, etc. are in fact problems in low population. Because the highest resource of humanity is humans. We are clever apes, who can engineer our way into anything.

Oh, as a side note, before I go on with this, the movie made much of the fact that Elysium — the space habitat — didn’t allow the Spanish speaking, favella-dwelling poor in. This was of course evil and racist. But in fact if the culture of the poor was what was shown in the movie, the habitat couldn’t let them in. Because they’d just make it the same as they’d made of the Earth, and nothing would be improved. So this whole thing was an argument from pointless and counterproductive compassion.

But to return to population and our real issue, which is a lack of people. And since people create resources, by finding them or producing them, a lack of resources with it. The economy doesn’t work when the next generation is markedly smaller and the one after that even smaller than that.

There is also a psychological side. Humans work for the future. And the future of humans is other humans. Part of the reason socialism kills slowly is that the generations rely on the state, not each other, and while young people think “why bother” and don’t have kids, but kids are needed for the state to provide for the old, and more importantly, to give adults a sense of the future.

I think if we survive this bottle neck, we’re going to find that our subconscious has a need for a certain number of kids just around in the environment, kind of like I found out through the lockdown that I needed to see strangers. That the one day a week Dan and I drove around and did museums/zoo/went to dinner with friends made a huge difference and foregoing it made me spiral down into unending, bottomless depression, because something in the ape brain, something inarticulate and possibly inarticulable (Pshaw, totally a word) made it so I had to see a certain number of strangers every so often or I’d think that I was alone in the ice floe, left to die, or something.

In the same way, I think we’re going to find we need to see a certain number of young people/children. And we need to live with/around a certain number of young people and children.

If you think of when our instincts were set and what child mortality was set, I suspect that number is fairly high.

And this morning, while talking to an online friend about cats and why they are so necessary to so many of us, and why their deaths hit us so hard, I realized that’s an indicator.

It’s not disputed that cats have kind of hacked us into taking care of them — or we hacked them — by changing their features and sounds so that they mimic the look and feel of an infant to our back-brain.

Cats have always been with us, and some number of us always found them irresistible. But it’s also undeniable that their popularity is growing all over, and that people not only have larger numbers of cats, but treat the cats increasingly like children and get more and more attached to them.

I realized to my discomfort sometime last year that I need young cats around to feel even vaguely optimistic, in fact.

Well, think about it, in the times when our back brain was programmed, I’d be, if not dead then the tribe matriarch, whose main value would be to mind the kids while the parents hunted and gathered and to impart to them my dubious wisdom.

So I probably need sixteen or seventeen kids around all the time, most of them the toddling ages — too old to be carried by mommy while gathering too young to help and not run away.

The cats are perfect for this. And if it were just me, since I don’t want to open a daycare, they’re the perfect hack. And I’m from one of those weird families that always adored cats. (Also a consistently relatively low fertility family, which might tie in.)

But more and more of humanity’s sanity might be riding on their fuzzy butts. And no matter if Engineer-Indy is engineer, cats are not the future of humanity.

We’re in deep, deep trouble. And evil pieces of propaganda blaming more humans for all ills possible — but mostly imaginary — just push us deeper into trouble.

Maybe it’s time our overculture got — or was given — a clue, and stopped killing us softly with their bullshit.

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 LILANIA BEGLEY: Star Bright : A Sweet Western Romance

Snow is sweeping across the plains, and Cande finds herself caught in its path. She needs shelter, first of all. Secondly, she needs the sky to clear if she’s going to have a once-in-a-lifetime chance at the comet she is tracking. What she finds in the midst of the storm is something she couldn’t have anticipated in the form of a man who shares her snowbound cabin.

FROM HENRY VOGEL: The Princess Scout

Separated from their classmates during a drill, Scout Cadets Anne Villas and Christine Montide find themselves stranded on a previously uncharted world. By pure chance they’ve discovered a lost human colony that wants to stay lost, and the rulers of this planet will use all the power they have to keep it a secret.

Anne is not just any cadet, though. She’s “The Princess Scout” — the daughter of David Rice, the Scout Corps’ legendary hero, and Callan, indomitable heir to the throne of Mordan. With the might of a whole planet against them, can Anne and Chris find a way to not merely survive, but win?

The Princess Scout mashes up space opera excitement with the dangerous atmosphere of a Cold War thriller, resulting in the latest standalone hit novel in Henry Vogel’s best-selling Scout series. Read it today!

FROM JAMES TOTTEN: Retaliation: Breaching Ain’t Easy.

Unmanned Combat Drones, Russian enforcement battalion tactical groups, and Artificial Intelligence compete on the modern battlefield. What happens when the drone drivers are cut off? How can you hide over 200 new T95s from spy satellites? The 49th Armored Division meets the 4th Guards Tank Division on the steppes of Russia near Kursk. Russia launches nukes again. Will the new Johnny Five save the day? Need someone to say, Let’s Get Ready to Rumble.

FROM MEL DUNAY: Shadow Captain (Star Master Book 1)

His one chance to escape slavery could trap his brother in a terrible fate! Jetay has been on the run with his brother for a long time, hiding his psychic powers from the evil Red Knights. Living as a slave on a star freighter, Jetay dreams of freeing himself and his brother, and of wielding his powers openly. On a frontier planet, Lady Lanati of the Partisan Alliance seeks his help for a secret mission. It will take him across the stars to the edge of a black hole, with a Red Knight chasing him every step of the way. He might finally get a chance to use his powers for good. But the price of that chance may be too high, putting his brother in grave danger. Can Jetay save himself and his brother without sacrificing Lanati and her friends? If he can’t find a way to save them all, the battle against evil may be over before it begins….

BY ARTHUR O. FRIEL, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Explorer (Annotated): The classic pulp adventure

To ride the white rapids, to plunge into the throbbing depths of the Orinoco jungle into the forbidden land of the poisoned arrow Indians — all this Hammond would dare, in the full confidence of youth. Experience he had absolutely none.

Of course, there was his new companion Thomas, but then, he was only a trader.

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving historical and genre context.

FROM J. L. CURTIS: The Short Stories: Volume 1

These stories were written for various anthologies I’ve appeared in, so there is a large variance in the tone and type of stories. I hope you enjoy this collection, and thank you for spending your hard earned dollars on it! There will be links at the end of the book for each anthology. You might want to check them out, as there are some great writers in them!

FROM LORI JANESKI: Raven (The Carter Files Book 2)

Revenge is a dish best served in space.

Dozens of children across the Interplanetary Commonwealth have disappeared from their homes. There are no motives, no ransom demands, no bodies, and nothing to connect the victims to each other – except the kidnapper’s signature, a single raven feather left at each scene.

With no progress on the case, it has been reassigned to Special Agent David Carter and his new team of Division 7 agents. Together with his wife, retired agent and profiler Veronique Carter, they must race against the clock–and obstacles within their own agency–to find the missing children before it’s too late.

But the closer they get to the culprit, the more it appears his real target might be them.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Technoserf

The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby’s homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will.

Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he’s offered a chance to fix it.

Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters’ metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?

FROM SPENCER E. HART: Fire in the Andes

Pulp-Noir meets Sci-Fi. A short adventure. The Year is 1949, in a timeline not quite our own.

A missing atomic engineer. A lovely but sad senorita. And another assignment for Bert Henderson, this time to the mountains of Argentina.Did the engineer defect to the other side? And what’s with all these Germans?

Will Bert survive long enough to uncover the mystery? Or will he succumb to the Fire in the Andes?

FROM ILENE KAYE: It Had To Be Yuu

Only Yuu could manage to get himself kidnapped—on a planet in the middle of a blizzard, no less—and not even know it. It’s up to space survey pilot Audra Marin to fly to the rescue, but when she gets her childhood playmate home alive, she’ll make him pay.
Only Audra could stumble into a fraud investigation and mistake it for a kidnapping. Trading company heir Yuu Ra-Dezan has to find a way to keep Audra from complicating his efforts to find an embezzler. “She’s my fiancée” seems like the best cover story—but when did his childhood nemesis turn into the hottest woman in the galaxy?
When his host’s robots try to hold them at blaster-point, Yuu and Audra trip over each other to foil a plot to steal the fastest ship in the galaxy. The only piracy these two will accept is stealing each others’ hearts.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Entanglement

In the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.

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.

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: TRAIL

Under The Surface a blast from the past from December 6 2021

Last year, in our escape from lockdown Colorado, we visited a riverboat museum near Kansas City, and that was….. bizarre.

No, not the fact we went to the museum. Given how starved we were to see human beings, how addicted we are to museums, the weirder the better, and the fact I grew up on Mark Twain, it was almost guaranteed we’d go and poke about the museum.

The museum itself was also not bizarre. It was an interesting snapshot of life just before the civil war. (We incidentally found that one of my husband’s collateral ancestors (they were the only family of the name, in the town, but the name is not in his ancestry, so a brother or cousin of an ancestor) was bringing guns into slave states, in boxes marked “bibles.” Which frankly is no more than we expected. It’s rather annoying we have no idea what happened to that young man.) However, I grew up in a house that had been in the family for generations, and among people who never threw anything away that could still be used. So a lot of the dishes and the glassware looked like the stuff I used every day as a kid. Heck, a lot of the shoes and such looked like stuff you could find poking around the attics and outbuildings of the area in which I grew up. (And of COURSE we did. We were kids.)

I mean, it was interesting, but not startling or revelatory.

What was startling and revelatory was where the boat, which had sank some 150 (? I’m too lazy to look it up. Bear with me) before discovery was found: In the middle of a wheat field.

Apparently rivers, in the great flatlands of America have a tendency to meander wildly. Okay. I kind of get that. But the fascinating part is that no one had noticed. The boat sank in a time of newspapers, and reports, and writing and more importantly property records. And people have been looking for it pretty much since it sank. BUT THEY WEREN’T LOOKING IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

The family that owned the wheat field in which the riverboat was buried, had no clue it had ever been anything but a wheat field in living memory. A river deep enough that a floating palace was lost with all its contents (but no lives, save for a poor mule left tied up) just changed course slowly enough that…. well, it sort of became a wheat field.

Now, I understand that due to modern engineering this doesn’t happen anymore. Or at least it’s not supposed to. But all the same, bear with me a moment.

One of my favorite blogs was casting doubt that the republic still exists.

This is a little…. How do I put it? I love the blogger, but d*mn if you’re more depressive than I am you need to start reality-checking obsessively. (I do.)

The republic is sort of a schrodinger thing. If we’re going on “We only have a republic if it obeys the constitution as written”…. it probably ceased to exist twenty years in.

Of course it didn’t. There are…. meanderings and latitudes given and necessitated by the fact that we’re humans and that frankly tech innovation has thrown us a few curve balls that our founders, also being human and therefore fallible, no matter how amazing, could never have anticipated.

The biggest curve ball, though was mass production, mass communication and generally mass everything, which might have been a logical step in the industrial revolution, but the level to which it went was definitely had to see from centuries before.

The Mass Everything Age almost necessitated the antithesis of the constitution: centralization of power, power in the hands of an unelected bureaucracy, all of it aided and abetted by the press covering it up.

If the republic is gone, it has been gone since at least the 30s, probably the 20s. Sorry, but nothing we’re seeing, from political prisoners to outrageous treason of both the People and the Country in the seats of power is new. FDR did it. Woodrow Wilson did it.

What is new and revolutionary is that we’re no longer in the “Mass Everything” age.

The left, who are the natural people — hyper social, power-craving, etc — to ascend that type of hierarchy are in control of the commanding heights of mass communication and bureaucracy, etc.

Their problem is that this is increasingly less relevant. And every time they make a major power grab, like the psy-ops we call the Covidiocy (NOT the virus. Yeah, the virus exists. It’s a severe flu, that fortunately kills very few people under 80. BUT the measures taken around and supposedly because of it, and the fear mongering in the mass media) loses them power. I’m highly amused in the grocery store by the — I’m sure corporate-enforced — announcements coming over the loudspeaker thanking us for wearing masks for “everyone’s safety.” Mind you, there’s usually ONE person in the store in a mask. Someone whose eyes look perfectly deranged and who is often dragging a masked toddler (poor thing). The rest of us at this point are treating it as “Something only crazy people and corporate entities believe is needed, anymore.”

And it will be hard, if not impossible to gin up the next panic. (which is why I’m sure the next grab will be a world war. But that’s something else.)

At this point everything those who belong to the old structures and long for centralized, massed power and communication can do only turns us against them and their obsessions. It’s sort of like…. a vaccination.

Look, America is an idea so powerful that though honored mostly in the breach, it has changed the world. Granted the echo-revolutions abroad were mostly crazy. But the fact that even the worst regimes have to FAKE being elected tells you the power of the idea.

It won’t perish. And we have a chance to ah…. really …. I hate it to say this but we have a chance to build back better, closer to the infrastructure the founders gave us, one better suited to a world of fractured production and communication.

Look at the people who supposedly have power. Note the trail of flames from their hair. No one who is winning is that scared.

But Sarah, you say, then why haven’t we revolted already.

Well — ask anyone on the left — we are revolting. Okay, jokes aside, we are rebelling. In a hundred different ways, we are turning our backs on the idea that “the best people” have our interests in mind, or that even if they did they could be trusted to carry them out, or any of that.

It used to be the institutions no one would doubt were the medical establishment that flew under the flag of ‘public health’ and public schooling. I mean, we screamed, yelled and pointed to abuses (and slow ratcheting thereof) and got told it was still mostly good. Oh, yeah, and the collection of statistics. Even when it was obvious they were lying, they were still used to slap us into silence.

I won’t say that’s a thing of the past but it’s becoming so. And it will become more so faster, the more they struggle.

Most of this type of movement is invisible, until it isn’t.

Today someone shared a meme lamenting that the right doesn’t just have right wing stations, etc. but is creating their own separate structures for information and commerce. Well, duh. The fact this is a surprise for them is amusing. For most of us, though, it’s news. We know we need it, but the movement is as yet slow and if you’re not looking in the right place you’ll never see it.

But it’s like that. This is how society changes. Not from above with fiats. That only distorts it. But slowly, from the bottom up. First almost imperceptibly and then all at once.

And then we forget that there was ever a wheat field there, and return to thinking that things are “as they ever were.” But they’re not. And you can see the signs if you look. The left is looking and getting scared. And scared people make stupid moves, which unfortunately affect us too.

Look, after a hundred years of psy-ops to make us feel isolated and small and like theirs was the inevitable future win, the surprising thing is that the worm is turning at all, not how slow it is.

Yes, we went along to get along, because we really thought we were small and isolated and because in the absence of alternate structures, we had to earn a living in their world.

For many of us it’s still that way. But the water is shifting. The silt is moving in to what was once river bed. Culture is on the move.

And there are far more of us than there ever were of them. And we’re an ornery bunch. Had to be to stand looking at mass-communication, mass-education, mass-entertainment and mass-bureaucracy, and plant our hands on our waists and say “No, you move.”

We’ve got this. It’s slow. Infuriatingly slow, because we’ve been standing (we thought) alone so long. And cold is the brotherless back, as our Dave Freer tells us.

But it’s changing. And it will heal over the break, and function again, at least for a while.

America is not dead. It is asleep. But it’s stirring. And it’s opened one eye. The rising will be swift and startling.

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And be not afraid.

Faced with the disaster of the fall of the USSR and the multiple disasters communism and socialism have engendered across the world, since, the left had to discover something very wrong in the free market.

And as usual when they can’t find anything, they invent something. And then try to convince everyone it’s a huge issue.

I’m always puzzled by the duckies who immediately fall for it.

For the last… oh, thirty years, they’ve been screaming at the top of their lungs about “inequality.” (Oh, lack of diversity and inclusion too. But sit down and wait the turn of those craptastic concepts. We’ll get to the full DIE IED that they’re trying to bomb our culture with soon enough.)

If you think it hasn’t been that long, you ain’t thinking. Actually all the way back in the eighties, as the right (ish) started to fight back, they started howling about how we were becoming a society of the “haves and have nots.” I remember this scaring the living spit out of me, as Dan and I were both kind of hanging loose, on our own, trying to make it by the skin of our teeth, me in a country where my hard fought-for credentials meant nothing, he in a job where no one he knew or was related to could give a boost. And both of us could expect exactly no financial help from parents. (Though over time my parents did help, here and there, where they could, and particularly with things for the boys, like their first cars.)

Weirdly, the doom they forecast didn’t come upon us. Yes, there are people who are ludicrously rich and people who are very poor. But to the extent there is any injustice to that (and there is, mostly for the young because they hit a world where the ladders had been pulled up before they got here) it is not because of the free market but because of government rules, regulations, tariffs, taxation, the left’s blinkered attempts to FORCE the unwilling into unions and oh, yeah, the vast importation of cheap labor without a by your leave or any legality. If you removed all that, there would still be vast gulfs of inequality, sure, but here’s the question: WHY DO YOU CARE?

I’ll wait while you finish gesticulating and sputtering, shall I?

No, there is no obvious reasons why you should Give A Rat’s Ass (GARA.) The image the left — knowingly — conjures is something like South America, where people wallow in massive riches, while others live in abject poverty, with no running water or toilets or electricity. But the countries where that happens are inevitably under the boot of a form of socialism or another.

In America… well, we’re different, you know? I heard the media publicizing that some mean billionaire who is mean said that making only 400k a year was a shame, and he couldn’t understand how any man could endure such a thing.

Bah. We will never even come close to making that. And?

I presume someone making that leads a certain kind of lifestyle, which involves not doing a lot of things we do for ourselves, some of which we even enjoy (cleaning the house is my exercise program, for instance. And I like refinishing and repurposing old furniture. I’m finally getting a sewing area in order, to do other stuff, too.) And it involves not having the two-three hours together in the evening we have where I’m usually doing next day’s blog while semi-watching a movie Dan is watching. (It’s not a sacrifice. I fall asleep if all I do is watch a movie.) And it probably involves few walks in the park. Few home cooked meals. And a lot of travel. (I hate traveling.)

All of which boils down to, yes, he makes vastly more money than we dream of, but you know what? We have a snug house, which has the miraculous ability to keep us hot or cold depending on what’s needed, so we enjoy comfort year around. We have enough to eat and can even go out occasionally. And if it weren’t for various health issues could buy ready-prepared meals that are tasty and of decent quality pretty much all the time. We have appliances that make the house cleaning a trivial chore, instead of the monster that ate our foremothers’ days.

Lifestyle wise everyone but the utterly poorest Americans (and in those cases there is usually some impairment involved, either addiction or mental issues. Which frankly we could help with much more if so much chaff weren’t thrown into the air about equality) we live like the very rich of the early to mid twentieth century. Heck, in many things we live massively better. No money could buy things like new treatments for medical conditions, or being able to communicate around the world in the blink of an eye.

Yep there are people living massively better. But we have all the necessities and more for the amount of work and effort we’re willing to put in. And so do the vast majority of people who didn’t arrive in the country yesterday claiming to be dispossessed. (If you think those won’t be counted in “inequality” you’re an optimist.) So, why should we care about the rich?

In the nineties, I read a massively flattering bio of Eva Peron in some magazine, and one of her quotes baffled me. She apparently couldn’t rest knowing that there were rich people in the world. Her solution (like all socialists) was to rig things so only she and her cronies were allowed to be rich, of course.

Look, at the time I read that we were somewhat beyond broke. How beyond broke? Well, we were paying on two houses, having moved to where husband could actually get a job. (The wobble of 91.) But the job didn’t pay great, so we were coming up $200 short every month on fixed expenses. This didn’t, of course, include food or car repairs (both cars were terminal.) Among the fixed expenses were paying back for the emergency cesarean which happened on COBRA (And MIGHT have been cheaper with NO insurance.) The house we were renting was in Columbia SC, built in the fifties and HAD NO AIR CONDITIONING. With an infant in the house. Think on that a minute.

So, we were barely surviving; life was a miserable slog, and we didn’t know if we’d ever manage to crawl out of the hole.

…. to be fair, I still don’t know how we managed, except by very strict discipline (“You buy a paperback, we eat pancakes for a month.” (Actually rice with some spices. Rice is CHEAP by the 50lb bag, from Asian grocery stores. Yes, we gained 100 lbs each. Next?) and moving to Colorado, and working insanely hard.

That’s not important to the story. Important to the story is where we were at the time, with the black dog explaining we might never rise above that level.

Yet reading that quote BAFFLED me, because I liked thinking there were rich people in the world. And so so people, enjoying themselves, and people well off enough to enjoy beautiful things and places. Look, at the time our two major indulgences we probably shouldn’t have done but did, were when Dan blew $40 we really didn’t have to get me a large coffee-table book of Leonardo Da Vinci’s art. Why? Because looking at the pretty pictures soothed my soul, and he could see that. (I was looking at it in the store. I didn’t ask. He went back in and bought it.) And when we could scrape together money (mostly carefully husbanded birthday money sent by my parents) we would get burger king’s grilled chicken sandwich (I was dismayed recently by finding out they no longer have it. It’s been so long on low carb and never having fast food I didn’t realize) and then park our car in this beautiful neighborhood that had ornamental lakes and gorgeous houses, and eat our sandwiches while soaking in the beauty.

It’s not that I’m a saint, okay? Or don’t have any envy in me. I have sin-level envy of certain things, including but not limited to people who can take a few weeks by the sea every year. (Time mostly. Though money doesn’t help.)

It’s just that being in beautiful surroundings helped, and I liked that other people had the money to live there, so I could enjoy a little bit of it now and then.

To think everyone was as poor as myself, and the world an unending grind for everyone would make everything worse, and make me wonder why be alive.

So– Why is inequality a problem?

I can only conceive of inequality being a problem where it’s inequality before the law: The law treats you differently than everyone else. OR where it’s brought on by “Planners” from above trying to “make things equal” and screwing the vast majority of the population.

They always do screw the vast majority of the population, and it’s not surprising, because you really can’t make people equal UPWARDS. For one, where is the uncreated wealth going to come from? And why would those working very hard to create wealth going to continue doing so if they don’t get the rewards? You can’t add a foot to everyone’s legs. The best you can do is cut the legs of the tall person, and make everyone equally short, metaphorically speaking.

Because it is true that much greater wealth requires work. Even now, even when the state gives advantages to connected and “upper class” people. Oh, there are some lazy skating grifters at the higher levels, particularly the politically connected and venal (coff might or might not sound like “Biden”) because well connected and venal. But outside those circles, if you want to be rich, you pay for it.

How? Well…. the year Dan made a lot of money and we were “rich” we paid for it in his never being home (it was a traveling job) and my having the full care of two elementary school boys with no backup. And us going out to eat a lot when he was home because I didn’t want to spend time cooking when he was actually there. And us buying a lot of things I’d otherwise make/figure out because we didn’t have time. At the time he’d doubled his salary, but after all the stuff we had to do for it, we were barely 10k a year better off. It wasn’t worth it.

I will bet you even in a semi-free system, a lot of the super-rich are living what you and I would consider a crazy lifestyle, and not because they get all the wonderful stuff. Most of what you see on TV is a lie.

By and large, and despite all the efforts of those at the top to make it not so, people who are doing massively better are doing so because they work/do stuff for it. Now it might be stuff they enjoy and I consider unpalatable. (Like have meetings. GRRR. Or sell…. anything.) But that’s because we’re not the same.

And that’s the crux of the problem. If you have “vast inequality” and the system — like ours — is even minimally free? It’s because people are vastly different.

Now I do realize that our system has been changing and become increasingly more and more rigged — largely by those who claim they’re imposing “equality” from above. — and that in many ways we’re indeed becoming a society of the haves and have nots, while the vast majority strive — and FAIL — to get anywhere. But that’s not free market. That’s socialism imposed via a veritable cat’s craddle of regulations on everything from labor to how the labor is performed to who and how you can sell, etc. etc. etc.

The more regulations are imposed — regardless of the objective of the regulations, btw — the more it favors the wealthy and connected, while the poor, young and striving are left unable to do anything to improve their lot.

Take a “minor” thing of all the taxes, and how they’re calculated, and how stupid-difficult it is to calculate sales taxes, if you sell to people in multiple states.

I have this dream — for which I probably have no time, but I could carve out some — of making various fantasy stuffed animals and selling them. I have the materials, I could find the time (mostly a day a week. A change is as good as a rest) and I could figure out how to market them. What am I lacking? Well, my husband already does the taxes for my business, which eat the majority of his free time, or time he could be doing his own writing in. So– Am I willing to sacrifice more of his life on the altar of taxes? Well no. I still want to do it, but I’m holding back.

Now, for us, that money is not a necessity. And stuffed fantasy animals aren’t going to improve the world. But how many people aren’t building and selling widgets, or growing a crop of some kind in their backyard, (Shush. though it’s legal in some states. And yeah, the taxes make it impossible) or making crafts to sell, or whatever which would MARKEDLY improve their condition? And ours too.

BUT they can’t do it because of all the regulations, some of them well-intentioned, others just bloody stupid, which make it impossible to strive and work for a better position.

Then you really have a two-tiered class system, the “haves” and “have nots” and a VAST and deep gulf in between.

Every time the government tries to impose equality from above this is what happens: You get a TINY percentage at the top living very well indeed, and everyone else living in unacceptable conditions.

We’re not there yet. There are still paths to climb and strive. It’s just massively harder than it should be, and often takes a network of family and friends to get anywhere.

So, if you think inequality of results is a problem? Lobby to stop lawfaring for equality. Lobby to get rid of all possible regulations on labor and production. Lobby for much, much, much simplified tax code.

And then accept that the rich will always be with us. And the poor too. Because people aren’t alike.

It’s just in a minimally free system, everyone is richer, and even the “poor” live with endless bounty.