I was reading an article about the NPR debacle, when NPR defended itself by saying “look at all the skin colors in our staff.” And some of the “varied skin color” bearing individuals came out to defend it too because “there are people who look like me.”

It brought back to me again why I got so bent out of shape at idiot on twitter talking about how we need to have higher minimum wage, so as not to make our cities into slums, and so that young women can have children.

Even here in response to that we got all tied in knots over the “real” result of minimum wage or if it was a science of not (in large numbers, economics absolutely is a science, one that “laws” can only distort, not make to conform to politicians’ insanity.)

But the important thing is that the left is — as always — approaching things from the wrong end of the problem.

It’s not that the problem they’re identifying isn’t correct. More often than not there is a problem — though note the problem might be so small that it doesn’t register, or barely does, before they wade in to make it as horrible as possible — the real issue is that they look at the problem the wrong way, assume powers they — and often other corporeal beings — don’t have, and make everything worse by trying to fix the “problem” by forcing a solution that fixes nothing.

Take for instance the minimum wage problem: Yes, wages are ridiculously low, compared to cost of living. No argument there. And while theoretically minimum-wage paying jobs aren’t meant to be given to adults, in reality they mostly go to older adults these days, to supplement social security and other safety net payments. Why? Because laws protecting children from exploitation now make it functionally impossible to hire anyone under eighteen.

This not only has nothing to do with stopping the exploitation of children, it is in fact children and young adult abuse. It prevents young people from getting a functional education into what work means, and the relation between work and money. Look, it’s not like most of them are getting any kind of education in the schools they are forced to attend. And when you tell them all they can do till 18 is attend the make-work schools where boys are often treated as second class citizens and girls as neurotic basket cases who must be indulged at all costs, you are not preparing them for life. You are also not saving them from anything.

What you’re doing is releasing them to the world at 18, when they’ll be responsible for their own crimes, and capable of picking their own path, with about the functional maturity of a 12 year old 50 years ago.

They have never earned a dime through their own labor. Money comes as a hand out from benevolent older people. They aren’t sure where money comes from other than that way. They have been conditioned to comply with unreasonable and senseless demands of authorities they don’t fully understand, and to perform tasks that mean nothing. A lot of them — mostly young women and minorities. Sorry, but it’s a fact as schools try not to be accused of discrimination — have been used to having A for effort and being indulged in their maladies real or imaginary, including the “I had my feelings hurt.”

And now, with no job history, no experience of getting up when they don’t feel like it, to go work because that’s how you get paid, no idea of why anyone should be doing that in fact, we suddenly expect them to be functional adults.

We all remember the story Heinlein told to illustrate why mollycoddling young criminals then dropping the law on them was 18 is stupid, right: you bring a puppy home, never house break it, indulge its every whim, then when it is a full grown dog you take it out and shoot it.

Well, this is the equivalent. You bring a puppy home and tie it up and truss it and put it in a tube so it can’t move, while taking care of its every need. Then when it’s a full grown dog, and it can’t walk, you beat it because it’s not acting as a grown dog should.

However, the story falls short, because we don’t take that dog who has never had experience of walking, and make it get in debt. While at 18 we view these kids who never had a meaningful choice in their lives, and have the haziest ideas of what a “job” is, and who, to boot, have been lied to all their lives and told that they can be anything they want to (yes, it’s a lie. I could never have been an Olympic athlete, not matter how much I wanted it.) and tell them they have to go to college. Because all successful people go to college. How many even sign up for it, because school they know, but they don’t know anything else? And how many sign up after trying to find jobs and being unable to, because they have no job history and no idea how to apply? And then we encourage them to sign predatory laws from which the government doesn’t allow you to escape. And then when they finish, and are again unemployable, or employable at a very low level, the left screams we must forgive the loans, the right says “pay up deadbeats.” And the left wants to raise minimum wage so the kids can have kids.

Look, this is patently insane. Anyone looking at it objectively can see, no, it’s not the kids’ fault, but all this nonsense doesn’t help. Begin at the beginning: who in America thinks that kids are at risk of being put in sweatshops and worked night and day? So, why are we trying to protect say 16 year olds from getting a retail job, or assuming anyone who hires them to sweep the floor is going to chain them to a 19th century textile mill.

The laws relating to “child” labor need to be relaxed. And they need to be relaxed starting at about 12. Sure, fewer kids might go to college. But more might be literate and functional adults.

And for those clutching their pearls, a lot of us had jobs — part time, sometimes self imposed — starting at about that time. We are noticeably, not Dickensinian victims standing in line for our super, or twisted out of shape by our inhumane exploitation.

If people are too young to work, they’re much to young to be prisoners in public schools. Release them to the wild, where at least a few of them might learn that rocks to the skull hurt. (Note I don’t think the vast majority of 12 to18 are too young to work a couple of hours a day at least.)

But wait, there’s more. Other than the fact most 18 year olds have not been allowed to develop work habits and are therefore not worth whatever crazy minimum wage the government decided to mandate, there is something else holding wages down: lots and lots and lots of immigration, both illegal and targeted legal.

Targeted legal? Well, companies are allowed to import vast numbers of specialized personnel, from MDs to programmers, from pharmacists to engineers, whom they get on visas and therefore treat as indentured servants, including paying below-market wages and working insane hours. This makes it hard for in-country-trained people to be paid what they would normally be paid.

And since the avowed reason for this is that they can’t find people to do the work in the US and that’s patently false — they can’t find people to do the work at extremely cheap wages and while being totally controlled by the company, which is different — this is a scam, and should be stopped.

But at the bottom level, what is causing the low wages is that we opened the border, and got all sorts of unskilled labor into the country.

Our country is not early 20th century — as the left seems to think — and as I said before, we’re not going to open sweatshops (though I bet you there are some, and a lot more unsavory enterprises with all the minors and women brought over the border and effectively disappeared) that necessitate vast numbers of illiterate button-pushers or garment sewing people or any of that.

So what these people, desperate for any kind of work (though a lot of them are getting too many handouts to care these days) get is starting jobs that used to be done by young people: gardening, lawn mowing, entry construction work, basic retail. (I can’t be the only one who keeps running into cashiers who don’t speak English and get angry when you try to.)

They will take much lower wages, because they are living ten to an apartment. This in turn lowers everyone’s real wages.

And raising the official, mandated minimum wage does not solve any of these problems. It only exacerbates them. And gives more jobs to illegal workers, willing to work for less and under the table. Because the businesses can’t afford the crazy minimum wages and therefore will hire who they can, even if technically “illegal.”

Looking at the results and the desired results, and not what is driving the situation is the wrong end of the stick. It not only doesn’t fix the situation, it worsens everything.

It’s the same thing with “diversity” and the rest of the DIE (or IED if you prefer) panoply.

Is diversity useful? Not particularly, people have found, outside one, not really honest study. But it could be. Not diversity as the left identifies it but true diversity.

Suppose you’re opening a business that is supposed to serve everyone, but you’ll only hire people who have exactly the same life and work history as yourself (I don’t know, maybe they’re clones.) and therefore you all miss that, I don’t know, the pastries you’re selling have stuff small kids will choke on. Or that women will dislike because it will cover them in sugar. Or whatever. In that case having a woman who has raised children on the staff could help.

In the same way, if you’re a media or entertainment corporation, trying to report the news fairly, you should not hire only people who agree with you. Mostly because if you were suckerpunched by the election in 2016 and are continually stunned as to why Obama and Biden aren’t beloved leaders, you obviously don’t understand most of the country. And saying you understand everyone but the “fringe” only makes us wonder if you know where the fringe is. Kind of like if you think NPR only went nuts in 2016, you make us want to tell you to pull your head out or a smelly and dark place, because the problem was already far advanced. Which is why you slid insensibly into totalitarian behavior.

What I’m trying to say here is that the left looks around and wants to have people of many colors and body types, so they FEEL inclusive and accepting. But skin color doesn’t make editorial decisions. Brains do. And human brains are all white-pink and squishy. Also, please, no, I don’t want to see them.

And when you’re hiring people who know they’re being hired for their skin color, you naturally select people who think skin color is the most important thing for diversity of thought. Which means you select for racists leftists, and for people who likely all think along the same patterns.

This obviously is not going to give you any “diversity” advantages. Whether your job is book publishing or political reporting, it’s just going to crash make your audience appeal more “selective.”

One of the articles I came across yesterday was with subscription services for video content being baffled that their subscriber number are falling. Well, part of it is that they are chasing the wrong end of the stick. And when people don’t like what they produce, then then obsess on race even more, because it must mean the public is racist. When in point of fact it’s the story lines and characters that suck, and race has nothing to do with it.

It’s all chasing the wrong end of the stick.

Are fewer women having children? Raise minimum wage. But what the heck does that have to do with anything? Having children is not merely an economic decision, and people throughout history had children when far poorer than our poorest.

The right end of the stick would involve figuring out why people are marrying late or not at all — and without feminist blinders, please. Perhaps figure out that part of the reason is this artificial division and hatred we’ve put between the sexes — and also if regulations and government hokum have made child raising too onerous. (Answer: yes. They’d already done it in my day. Mostly by trying to save children from horrible situations that 99% of the population would never inflict on them.)

The right side of the stick is to figure out why things aren’t working, not to assume we know the cause and trying to make a quick fix.

Of course, that would require the left to realize that laws and regulations aren’t magical. They don’t do what you want them to, and nothing else, ever. That things have second, third and fourth order consequences.

And sometimes the solution is to take the chainsaw to previous rules, regulations and laws which not only didn’t do what they were supposed to but worsened everything.

And sometimes the solution is to follow the law, like, by having a border.

Neither of which will happen until we hit bottom on our addiction to government, and then it changes.

We’re not at bottom yet. But it looks mighty close.

Be not afraid, brace for impact, and don’t be distracted with short term solutions.

Chainsaw, baby, chainsaw.

Liberty and Safety a blast from the past from August 2013

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is a bad thing – a very bad thing – to make Sarah berserk out over breakfast, which is why most sentient species, some invertebrates and some single-cell life forms have learned to avoid it.

No, this doesn’t mean Dan and the boys are in trouble.  No, that’s fine.  What happens is this – after week from hell, I was running around with a headache so bad I could barely think through it.  In case it wasn’t obvious from the rate of typo to word in the last few posts, I also could barely write through it.

As happens we found a hotel that met our low-price-to-low-flea rate and Dan and I ran away so I could get work done on the overdue Baen novel.  (It is unique in writers that our vacations involve the chance to write MORE.  Shouldn’t be a great shock, though.  Our “let’s go out to dinner” nights involved “I need to work out a novel plot.”

This was particularly needed because on top of the situation with our friend Alan – who should go home from the hospital today and start a new course of chemotherapy, so that’s good news – my kids are having beginning of school year issues.  Since it is written (I don’t know where, but if I ever find out, I’m setting fire to it) that nothing the Hoyts do can be easy or simple, they’re both adding second majors and weird ones at that, and giving the bureaucracy hissy fits.  This for some reason causes them to run into my office at the rate of a kid every five minutes, to p*ss and moan.  So, the office gets impossible to work in (also smelly.  The cats hate competition) and I lost two entire days to this.  Which also added to my blazing stress headache.

So we ran away for three days and two nights to “get writing done.”  So far so good, right?

Yeah.  Except that breakfast is included in the room special promo sale.  Which is why we stayed here.  Have breakfast latish and you don’t need lunch, so that’s one meal less to pay for.  (Hey, we’re writers.  We’re cheap.  Also, largely poor, our days of being rich beyond the dreams of average – sic – having crashed at the same time the towers turned to rubble and the tech boom collapsed.)

So we went down to breakfast.

Just when you thought it was safe to go down to breakfast…

We were in a little isolated table but separated by a curtain from a large group table.  I heard the words “They can’t expect Obama to fix everything with one measure.  I mean, things were so bad it doesn’t have a quick solution,” and I told Dan “Right then, I’m going to order an omelet, before I start ranting.”

When my calmer half said “I don’t know.  I’m kind of hoping they make you start ranting.”

So I went down to get the omelet, and I came back and sat down.  The large group of unmitigated stupid seemed to be talking lower – at least.  If I said the multiplication tables backward in my head, I could tune out the occasional break through sentence like “What we need is more business regulation.”

And then, zero to nothing, I heard something, and I started shaking – painful body-long shakes – trying to suppress the berserker.

The phrase was “the problem is we have too many liberties in this country.”  Like that.  Like that, I found I was putting my head through the curtain and saying “If you discuss politics in public, I’m going to intervene.”

I want to point out that when I’m fighting the berserker, my voice gets really weird, and my eyes get this bizarre “one step over the line and you’re dead, Mister.”

I’ve been known to make postal workers run away (true) and airline employees bend over backward to give me anything I want, while I’m being perfectly polite and suppressing the berserker.

But these people were wrapped in an invincible mantel of stupidity.  They said – I swear to Bob – “What?  This is a public space, we can talk about anything we want.”

I said “Absolutely.  And I can correct you any way I want.”

At that point the better half who is a New England gentleman intervened. “Yes, it’s a public space,” he said.  “And we’d like to have breakfast without your politics intruding on it.  Can you keep it down, please?  Particularly if you insist on being ill informed.”  (When calmer half feels the need to put in the knife, imagine what my excitable self was feeling.)

And so I downed as much warm coffee as I could, because if you can’t find alcohol, warm liquids will help, and eventually the shakes subsided.

Too many liberties…

There are three things to take from this encounter: first, it is polite and proper, if sharing a public space with other sentient beings, to try not to say anything offensive out loud.  I tend to discuss the latest scientific developments, a novel I just read, anything innocuous.  I’ve gone to dinner with PJM colleagues at election time and not discussed politics loud enough for the other tables to hear – and shut up when the waitress approached.

Look, guys, there was a reason that Englishmen who had servants said “not in front of the help” – it wasn’t just to avoid gossip.  It was also to avoid making another human being, not in a position to retaliate, uncomfortable.

Good manners and all that.

So, if you have politics to discuss, keep your voice down or save it to your room.  UNLESS you’re sure that the entire room is taken up with your coreligionists.

Another thing is that these people looked fairly normal.  I didn’t see any badges of the little Satanists for Stalin or anything of the kind.  This scares me beyond belief and I’m trying not to be depressed.  They really think Obama is fixing “this mess.”  I… Look, go over to the Zero Hedge guys… just read this.

A tiny excerpt:

#1 When Barack Obama entered the White House, 60.6 percent of working age Americans had a job.  Today, only 58.7 percent of working age Americans have a job.

#2 Since Obama has been president, seven out of every eight jobs that have been “created” in the U.S. economy have been part-time jobs.

#3 The number of full-time workers in the United States is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.

#4 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers now make less than $30,000 a year.

#5 40 percent of all workers in the United States actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968.

#6 When the Obama era began, the average duration of unemployment in this country was 19.8 weeks.  Today, it is 36.6 weeks.

#7 During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000.  That far exceeds any previous four year total.

There is more.  Oh, yes, there are 33 of these facts.  But the mainstream media won’t report it, and those who are dumb beyond the dreams of average swallow it, hook, line and sinker.  And what can we do?  I’m serious.  WHAT can we do?  This is sort of like before the French Revolution when people demanded Necker be returned to power because when he was borrowing and spending everyone was doing so well.  There are no words.  To paraphrase Heinlein, stupidity is the only capital crime.  The punishment is always death.  Unfortunately when it’s public stupidity, the death often falls on those who weren’t stupid.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it and take the rest of us along for the ride.

The third point though…

There are few things you can say that are so HEINOUS that they send me into automatic “Must suppress the berserker” mode.  Look, guys I’ve got through entire dinners with communists without getting there, and without looking speculatively at the silverware and considering how to kill someone with a fork.  (Okay, I lie about the second one, but all the same. Thoughts are, thank you, private, and my hobbies are my own.)

But that “we have too many liberties” got under my shield and went directly to the “attack” and immediately as well to the “you can’t go berserk in a public space.  No, really.”

How can anyone think we have too many liberties?

Oh, I know.  They think that because they believe in the myth of the “superior man” who will take care of them.  The man on the white horse who knows better than everyone, and who can run everything so that no one is ever afraid or poor or sick or marginalized.

In other words, they dream of the ideal childhood.

The rest of us know that never in the history of the world, not even the calmest, has there been a time when a leader could guarantee safety, health and contentment to everyone. There will always be poor, unloved, suffering people.  You can’t help that.

You behave in a way you help those around you and you try not to be a burden, but even then at times that will fail.

Those of us who are religious believe a time will come when we will live like that, in perfect harmony and contentment with a superior being watching over us.

But last time I looked, neither king, premier, president, emperor or satrap had the power to look into the hearts and minds and judge everyone perfectly.  And no, the NSA spying ain’t it.  And none of the above were the creators of the universe.

They are all, in fact, fallible men, usually fallible men attracted to power over others, who want to run you not for your own good but for their own internal satisfaction.  And since people who crave this sort of power tend to be more broken than writers, their internal satisfaction might be something that even they don’t understand.

There is no man on a white horse.  There is, always, an old trickster, coming to town and promising eternal peace.  If you look carefully, you can see the horse is a mule that has been painted white.  And the man is just using the same old promises the human brain is wired to crave, but what he wants is quite different.  And even if he truly believes what he says, he can’t deliver.  He’s just a man.  He can’t know what each individual wants and needs.  Only each of you can know what he wants and needs.  And sometimes not even that.

Clearly the people on the next table would like to believe in the man on the painted mule.  I would too.  The idea someone will look after you perfectly is SO appealing.  But I’m grown up.  You can’t go back to kindergarten.  And even my kindergarten teacher had no clue how to handle me.

I’ll handle myself, thank you.  Even to the point of making sure I don’t berserk out at the breakfast table.  It can be done.  It’s just not easy, or comforting or pretty.

It’s a horrible way to live.  Except for every other one.  I’ll keep my liberties, thank you.  You want to give yours up, I can give you a list of destinations willing to oblige you.  It starts with Cuba.

No kings, no queens, no lords, no ladies.  We won’t be fooled again.

So minimum wage came up on Twitter. (You know if I insist on visiting that site I probably should go on blood pressure meds.)

But anyway, when minimum wage came up, I did my standard “You can’t legislate wages any more than you can legislate the weather. The real minimum wage is always zero.”

I trust I don’t need to unpack this for the people here, but supposing I get a lot of newbies or such: You can’t legislate minimum wage, because if businesses can’t afford to pay the set “minimum wage” they go under. Or fire employees and automate. Or fire employees and hire illegals under the table. Or–

So the real minimum wage, i.e. what your work is worth, is always zero. If government regulation prices you out of the market, you will be getting zero.

I’m explaining all this because I immediately got a lunatic telling me 0 was not getting paid and therefore not a wage, and I shouldn’t confuse things with linguistic mush. (I really should go on blood pressure meds.)

But then the real crazy hit. I have a few screenshots of his comments, though not all of them. (Seriously. I couldn’t capture all of them. For one they make my head hurt. I’m mostly putting them here so you capture the ah… full flavor (bouque garni de sewage) of his brain workings. And also so you guys know I’m not making him up. Because I’m not sure I’d have believed he existed without reading him.

He was defending the fact we absolutely needed a minimum wage, and a lot of this is “tell me you never ran a lemonade stand without telling me you never ran a lemonade stand.”

Dudes and dudettes: this guy is the real deal, the hundred percent brain dead, absolutely no understanding of economics.

There is the blaming of not having children on the fact we’re not raising the minimum wage. The crazy-cakes assertion that people who would take a low wage wouldn’t make good citizens. As I said I couldn’t capture it all. Somewhere he had a “cute” one about my preferring small government and large corporations. NOTE I’d never mentioned corporations, and this is actually and for real insane, since big government and large corporations go together like syphilis and madness. Government makes it impossible for anyone but the big corporation to comply with insane regulation. AND big corporations incentivize the government to create more regulations to eliminate competition.

He also told me that all western economies regulate minimum age as if that were a defense to lack of minimum wage causes infertility. I mean, talk about lack of mental connection.

AND he accused me of wanting everyone to be self employed or in a corporation. I don’t even know where he got that or what that means. Other than the voices in his head.

And don’t even ask me what the heck he means in that first one by my appreciating hierarchy. I THINK he means some kind of class system? Probably? Later on he went on about genetics and people being born to money. Most of it so incoherent I had no clue what he was implying. So I stopped engaging because the alternative was calling him and asshole moron over and over again.

And I’d already done that.

The point is that he was arguing from some unexamined assumptions in his head that dictated stuff like ‘smaller government means bigger corporations.’ Or ‘People aren’t having kids because they’re poor’ not because taxes are too high and the rules around keeping small kids in a house insane. And I couldn’t pierce his certainties, to the point he was actually arguing with what he thought I’d said and meant, not with anything I’d typed.

Part of the truly lunatic stuff was his telling me he was no commie, then telling me the poor and working class are somehow responsible for all the crime, because apparently poverty causes crime. Marx would love him.

But at the base of it was a complete lack of understanding of why employers pay wages and what sets the level of pay.

He seemed to assume that we were in a basic communist system where you were offered make work. at some pre-set pay, and therefore we had to accept it. Or something.

He failed to get that employers hire people not to be charitable but because they need some work done. And that work is worth some amount of money.

Take my business. For a long time, it’s been stuck at a certain level, unless I can pay contractors to do things. I’d love to have my assistant work for me full time, and I PROBABLY (with difficulty the first year) could pay her a very low salary which would nonetheless, since she works remote, be a great addition to her family income. What I can’t afford is the paperwork, regulation, and mandatory contributions that go with it.

But let’s suppose that you’re hired to flip burgers or check out people in the supermarket. And this is worth oh, $10 or so to the people hiring you. Why would you think that arbitrarily telling people to pay employees $20 would work?

People are likely already paying the highest they can, because that gets them the best labor they can get. (Particularly in a relatively tight labor market, which we have if you don’t count illegals.) So, if they’re not paying $20 dollars an hour it’s because it’s not feasible for their business right now.

You force them to pay that, and workers will get replaced with robots, companies will close, companies will fire legitimate workers and hire illegals, etc. etc. etc.

One of the things it will do is make it much harder to get that first, all important job and thereby worsen youth unemployment which is already bad enough. Or products will become so expensive that people can’t afford them.

When raving idiot went on about how if you pay the workers too little they can’t afford to buy things, he forgot if the employers have to pay too much for employees, then the product will be more expensive.

I swear these people think that employers are out to “exploit” the workers, just for funsie. Judging by his excursion into rage-envy of inherited money I’m going to assume he really thinks it’s two separate classes and no one who is rich ever had to get a job, or work up to a better job. This is by the way not only NOT the norm in the US but so far from the norm it’s ridiculous.

He also had a moment of rage about how if we don’t raise minimum wage it all goes to the 1%. As I said, I can’t actually discuss economics with someone referring to his home universe where the sky is made of green cheese.

What I can say is that you can’t regulate the price and wages. Or rather, you can, but all you’re creating is unemployment, government dependence and a black market.

The problem is not this lone crazy on twitter though. The problem is that years ago I looked at my kids’ economics text books.

They were all about “given that all these workers are equally qualified, would you hire the divorced mother, the handicapped worker, or this minority.”

And that’s wrong. It’s utterly and completely wrong, in the same way this man is wrong. It’s approaching business as a sort of social responsibility. “I’ll pay x because it’s good for society.” It ignores that businesses have to make a profit, to pay for labor and more products, and make it worth the owner’s spending money on things.

I mean businesses are in business to make money, which then allows the owner to take the money and invest it in other businesses to make more money.

This incidentally employs more people and gives people more products to buy. All without the benevolent hand of government planners. And yes, sure, minorities and divorced mothers, and all that should be able to work. But again, to be honest, while there will be bigoted employers, the successful ones won’t care about the employee’s personal life, unless it relates to the business. Instead, they will get the best employee they can for the best price they can. Because that’s how they make money, so they can invest it in more businesses.

I was assured by mental guy on twitter that my liberal (I think he means libertarian) theories of economics don’t work. But I wasn’t expounding any theories. I was simply explaining that economics is a science and things you do have consequences.

Sure, we all wish everyone could make a lot of money, but I don’t think legislating that you pay people a lot of money just because is how you get there. Mostly, what you’ll do is create a society in which few people work legally and those few have to pay for a massive number of welfare cases.

It’s time to respect economics as a science. You cannot legislate price and wages anymore than you can negotiate the weather. Which, of course, the crazy leftists also would like to do.

Thing is that wishcasting always loses to reality. Reality always wins, regardless.

And economics is very much reality.

But not very hard. I just don’t feel a post today. Nothing to do with the eclipse. We just have a ton of stuff to do and I have chapters to write.

Book Promo

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

FROM JERRY BOYD: Thus Shook Zarathrustra (Bob and Nikki Book 45)

Sally has finally cleared the new planet. Surely that means it’s ready for people to come and check out, right? Our shepherd still gets a vote. Come see how much effort it takes to get a good, used planet into livable shape.

FROM MARK BOSSINGHAM: Chasing Naomi

July 1969. Clive, Iowa, Earth. Sixteen-year-old Allie has a big decision to make: Watch the lunar landing with her mom in their run-down double-wide trailer or boost to the stars aboard a grumpy, sentient deep space exploration vehicle (DSEV-424) buried in her backyard for 5,000 years.

Accompanied by Gem, a dead space captain, now a glitchy hologram, Allie stops on the moon and surprises Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard the Eagle lunar lander. (Neil never mentioned the encounter to Houston).

With Gem as her guide, Allie survives her first space battle and drops Gem off at a military regrow center in the middle of a spaceport casino. The teen’s adventure lifts off at a military space academy, where she faces danger, makes friends, battles enemies, and discovers her own surprising abilities.

Along with Rin, Sky, and Gem, Allie sets out on a mission to locate and defeat a rogue fleet led by Naomi, a mad-as-a-hatter warship, all while navigating the complexities of growing up and finding her place in the galaxy.

FROM AMANDA S. GREEN: Surtr’s Fury

Twenty-five years ago, the world changed. Rifts opened around the globe, releasing rogue magics that changed everything. Creatures once believed to exist only in movies and books were now real. People who once believed themselves “normal” found their latent paranormal abilities awakened and amplified. The land and creatures nearest the rifts were forever changed, whether for good or ill remains to be seen.

Either my parents had a warped sense of humor or they were forewarned about what my life would be like living as close to the North Texas Rift as I did. Why else name me Ripley after the main character in their favorite science fiction movie? Then they were gone. A basilisk killed my dad and Mom disappeared while investigating reports of rogue werewolves. At least that’s what I’d been told, and I never had reason to doubt it.

Until now. Someone attacked my home and my friends. When I discover who, they’ll learn it is never a good idea to mess with someone who plays with fire, literally as well as figuratively.

My name is Ripley Walker, and those responsible for hurting my friends will soon learn the error of their ways.

FROM ROBERT WENSON: Murder at Minstrel Manor: An Edwina Hackett Mystery

“Killed! As in murdered?” With these words, Edwina Hackett launches herself into trouble. Wealthy and reclusive inventor Sebastian Oldfield is found dead in his study on a stormy winter night. There’s no doubt it’s murder: the wounds in his head and the bloodstained paperweight testify to that. And Edwina, who has come to Minstrel Manor to paint Oldfield’s portrait, will let nothing stop her from following the ensuing investigation.

For newly-promoted Detective-Inspector Mallow of the East Fenshire Police, this is his first big case. He finds himself up against a plethora of suspects: the butler with a shady past; the dead man’s enigmatic assistant; the ne’er-do-well nephew who is deeply in debt; and the tenant farmer who had been summarily evicted.

And then there are the questions. How did the murderer get into the study? How did he get out? What is the significance of the illiterate note left under the body? Who has been forging Oldfield’s name? And what role has the mysterious and elusive Barnabas Merryweather been playing?

FROM J. D. COOPER: The Companions: The Bond

In the mist of ancient time, a time long forgotten by most, the Sidhe ruled Ireland. They were small folk, no higher than a mushroom, but they could work mighty magic. Each one was gifted in a unique way. Together they created beautiful works of art and magnificent structures, engineering beyond many modern marvels. Crops were blessed and harvests were bountiful. There was little suffering in Sidhe society for they cared for each other and used their magic to help their fellow Sidhe. For eons past, peace and harmony had reigned throughout the land, even since the foundation of the earth, for the Sidhe arose as an overflow of the creation of their island. Their magic emanated from Ireland itself. There was no Sidhe word for war.
Then, the Milesians came.
Eons passed as the Sidhe were diminished and began to lose their magic. According to an ancient prophecy,, a Sidhe who could make light would restore the Sidhe magic and allow them to live free from fear.
Jayspark was born into a world of diminished Sidhe. His family hid from the bigs until one fateful day when he met a lonely human boy. The two became friends and their bond created a magic that would finally allow the Sidhe to face their oppressors.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fire and Forge (Modern Gods Book 3)

Long after their worshipers are forgotten, the gods are still holding up a corner of the bar at the Godshead Tavern. Some have learned since their stories became myths, some never did, and some are still finding old curses coming back to haunt…

Poseidon wants Artemis to lift Medusa’s curse so he and Medusa can resume relations, while Chronos seeks another chance to be whole and get to know his kids.

Meanwhile, Ares falls head over heels for a mortal half his size who manages to kick his ass not once but twice, and Loki’s son is trying to rebuild his life (and his credit) after a short marriage to Pandora.

Life and love runs smoothly for no one, god or mortal. And another disaster is brewing…

FROM MARY CATELLI: Curses And Wonders

A collection of tales of wonder and magic.

A prince sets out to win his way to the dragon’s lair.

A woman fights a curse on her lands.

A man returns to his castle, bringing a magical sword, and worse things.

And more tales.

Includes “Dragon Slayer”, “The Book of Bone”, “Mermaids’ Song”, “Witch-Prince Ways”, “Sword and Shadow”, “Eyes of the Sorceress”, “Fever and Snow” — and “The Emperor’s Clothes”, which is not sold separately.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Spiral Horn, Spiral Tusk

A unicorn’s horn for the king, a medal for the admiral — but what for the lass who makes it possible?

Rissa possesses the dolphin-singer gift, which saved her life when the thief-taker found her. If she can guide the fleet to the white whale with the spiral tusk, she might win back her freedom.

But first she must return to land — and the sea has become angry at her betrayal…

A short story of the Ixilon universe

Originally published in Beyond the Last Star: Stories from the Next Beginning, edited by Sherwood Smith.

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: MARVELOUS

Yesterday I did something I used to do more often, and looked into the latest discoveries in paleontology and archeology and such.

And shortly after remembered why I no longer do it every month.

Apparently the latest, greatest news is that — yo, this is amazing — they’re finally not studying pre-history through the eyes of racism and sexism, and as such have determined that pre-historic hunting parties were as much as 80% female.

This is a discovery that of course makes perfect sense. No doubt the males were all back at base camp, chest-feeding the babies. Thereby freeing the pre-historic girl bosses to go and hunt them some mammoth.

If you’re staring at the screen with dropped jaws, I haven’t gone insane. I know this is utter and complete nonsense. It’s not my fault that the people running all our intellectual institutions, including research are morons studying to be idiots.

Applying the Heinlein filter for the actual reason they have to believe that up to 80% — 80%! — of pre-historic hunters were female, i.e. “Again and again, what are the facts?” we get that they found one grave — one — where the DNA of the remains are female (and here we’ll keep quiet about the strange idea that 6000 (I think) year old DNA is easily extracted, non-contaminated, etc. We’ll pretend we don’t know all the times they walked back “new species” because the DNA amplification techniques CREATED those discoveries.)

Let’s assume they’re correct and this was a female, buried with hunting implements. Sure, maybe she was a hunter. There will always be one or two in a large enough band, for the reason that in primitive societies some women are brought up as male: lack of a son, need to support the family, etc. (It is rarely a sexual thing, or because the person WANTED this. In fact it’s often decided for them before they are weaned. In fact, in primitive/ancient societies including the ones of our ancestors that we know about in detail, there was remarkably little room for self expression, self-conception or self interest. When you live close to the bone, such things are subjugated to the needs of the family, the clan, the tribe, more or less in that order. Because survival is hard.) We’re also informed, in BREATHLESS tones that it’s now thought that spear throwers were used to make sure women could throw spears fast enough! That’s why they exist.

But spear throwers are made and used by males, the world over. Go look at the tubes of you and you’ll see videos of people making them and using them, and they’re all male.

Further there is no society today of the ones still surviving more or less in a stone age way that has that kind of distribution for hunters. More importantly, there is no record of them, going as far back as we can.

Maybe this is because yes indeed, the past (being much closer to the bone, and therefore less willing to indulge in story telling) viewed things through a racist and sexist lens. Why not? After all I grew up in an intensely patriarchal society that still hadn’t adapted to the idea of women taking any hand in intellectual pursuits. And yes, that was unwarranted sexism. And every society is racist against every other (Actually culturist, but it’s often couched in terms of race.)

But still… You’d think that here and there there would be a race of valiant Amazons, whose men stay home and pound the taro while they go out and hunt, right?

But the truth is that if you put this notion to the remaining stone age people, they will laugh till they pee themselves. Yes, I know, I know, they internalized sexism from the evil white colonizers whom they’ve met three times in the last 100 years. That’s how powerful and evil whiteness is.

Or, listen, okay? I know this is just crazy talk, but maybe males and females are different and have evolved to fulfill different reproductive functions. And the reproductive function of females is more onerous than that of males. Women in our natural state, and unless something has gone seriously wrong — which of course makes us of less use to the tribe — spend most of our lives pregnant, nursing or carrying for children too young to care for themselves.

I know for well nourished women of the 21st century who are maybe pregnant once or twice in their lives this might not seem incompatible with being a mighty hunter, but please, try to realize that there is no such thing a consistently well fed hunter gatherer. Not in our terms. They might be well fed for some time period, but not over their entire lives. And for women nutrition is very important, because we grow entire other humans inside us, and our body has a way of leeching thing we need to give them to the baby.

You might think that “losing a tooth per child” is an old wives tale, but I did. Because in childhood I didn’t have enough milk or dairy products (Mom being convinced they were a trigger for eczema. They weren’t. Sugar was. But… culture.)

Now imagine people living at stone age level, where eating organs is necessary to get vitamins. And women…. Well, most women were not in great shape. In most primitive societies the world over, in all of recorded history women and children eat last.

This is not sexism, it’s “men need strength to walk for days in pursuit of an herd.” Now, if women were hunters… Yeah, that. They would walk for sometimes three days straight, while on the verge of giving birth. Give birth, then walk back three days. Carrying the baby and the dead animals, of course.

This is nonsense on stilts as any woman who has ever given birth will tell you. Yeah, yeah, Chinese peasants gave birth and went right back to work. Well, it was the Cultural revolution and they didn’t want to be killed, so some/many probably did. But this was not good for either mother or baby.

And in the end this is what is driving me bonkers about this drivel. If women want to have fantasies about great female warriors or leaders in pre-history, what harm does it do?

Oh, yeah, there was also the fact a great pre-historic ruler in Iberia was FEMALE. (If you heard that in breathless tones, that’s how I heard it in my head too.) She was buried with SYMBOLS of kingship! She was obviously a great war leader! And this means women had far more of a role in leading these societies than we thought!

Or you know, it could mean that she was born to kingship or clan head, because there were no sons, and that her role was like that of many warrior-queens in history who did strategize but not actually fight. (Most rulers didn’t. Male or female.) Or she could be all that and a rare exception. It still doesn’t show that “women” had a greater role. Only that perhaps this woman did. And doesn’t erase the fact that in most stone-age societies recorded by other civilizations women didn’t take such roles unless the society was in such trouble that they had to and they were the only ones available.

Because women’s normal role of producing the next generation and keeping them alive was more important. Because without the next generation there was no future for the tribe, when the current generation aged out. And no one to look after the elders.

So, what harm does it do to let educated women of the 21st century have their little fantasies? If it makes them happy to think history was girl bosses as far as the eye can see, why not give it to them?

First of all, because it’s a lie. Lies have a way of corrupting everything they touch. It is impossible for humans to know the truth of everything as far back as it goes, but it is important to try, and to at least not tell lies.

Second, because it creates hatred between men and women, which in turn destroys our future. If women were always equal or superior even to men, in pursuits we view as male, then the only reason this was obscured in the recent past is because of men oppressing women. And that must mean it’s some sort of war, instead of a co-operation.

Third, because it creates in women an expectation of what they should be able to do that’s completely insane. I felt guilty as heck because I wasn’t up and functioning normally after giving birth, because “peasant women in China did” — which was probably a gross lie, but even if it weren’t didn’t mean it was good for you. (But also led insurance to deny care after 24 hours, which had its own issues.) — I routinely feel guilty because I need to sleep 8 hours, because I was raised on “the driven artist” myth. If young women are raised to think that their foremothers walked three days straight through while in the third tri-mester, they’ll feel pampered and inadequate and do themselves violence.

Fourth, because it erases womanhood. I know what they think they’re doing is showing how powerful and strong women were, but what they are actually doing is saying the only roles that matter are male, and therefore if women are to be important they must have filled this role that — until yesterday — we knew mostly men fulfilled. Having children, child care, and child birth are suddenly unimportant. Cooking — which in those days was far more difficult — and keeping the shelter from leaking/keeping the tribe covered, curing pelts, looking after the aged and the sick, none of that matters. Gathering supplemental food that keeps the tribe from starving when the hunting is bad? Doesn’t matter.

Walking for days after an herd and driving them over a cliff and/or making war on neighboring tribes is the ONLY THING that matters, because it’s traditionally considered a male role. And the only good women fulfill male roles.

This is bad crazy.

Anyone with any knowledge of biology, anthropology, or you know… how humans actually work, knows this is nonsense. Anyone who has lived in any way close to the bone (even if still in incredible abundance by pre-historic standards) knows this is nonsense.

But it’s being published in scientific magazines, because our intellectual elite produced by an educational establishment incapable to teaching people to read fluently and devoted only to indoctrination, is so poisoned with story they think they can wish cast the past into existence.

They completely ignore that the reason we can and have overcome racism and sexism to a great degree is because we live in a time of incredible abundance.

And they’re willing to throw it all away for a feel good story that doesn’t pass the laugh test. Even if it hurts the future.

I learned at an early age that anyone who claims to speak “for the people” or do things “for the good of the people” is usually wrong.

In fact, the honest and earnest zealot who thinks he’s improving everyone’s life by doing x y or z if more of a danger than your average, run of the mill venal corruptocrat who merely wants to line his pockets and move on. (Note the current crop of corruptocrats are different. They explicitly seem to want to destroy everything while lining their pockets. I have theories about why this is is, but expounding on them would explode the post to five times its size.)

But there is a brand of “the people” that tends to get under the defenses of our side of the political spectrum aka those to the right of Lenin.

That brand is “the people don’t want freedom, they want to be looked after.”

Um… okay. Cozy belief you’re parroting. But why are you parroting it? And where did you get it? And didn’t your mommy never tell you not to put things in your mouth that you don’t know where they came from?

I know that right at this point some of you are inflating, puffer-fish style, ready to blow me out of the water with “history shows that people mostly want a leader on a white horse.”

Does history show that? Does it really? And have you accounted for the different conditions of those epochs, and the way the story was recorded?

Yes, history in general is a parade of various dictators and pseudo saviors, and some of them seem to have been beloved by the people.

Were they beloved by the people? Were they really? Even for the last 100 years mostly we know they were beloved by the press. Before that? How do you know?

Also, until recently in historic terms, people assumed those who were born with the right to rule them would rule them, and the best they could hope for was a semi-decent human being as leader.

Let’s leave history out of this, because at most it shows us what people are willing to tolerate, and not what people want. And history also has the tendency to hide the circumstances of people quite sternly opposing things that they’re supposed to be quite happy with. Not only is history a threadbare cloth over fractious peasant revolts, but those peasant revolts happened at all levels, from local to national.

I.e. people aren’t willing to put up with as much as you think they are. It’s just they didn’t tell you when they could sweep sometimes quite bloody revolts under the rug. Guys, I’m a student of history and until about three years ago, I wasn’t aware of the fact the Dutch had eaten their prime minister. And if you say “Yes, Sarah but that means you didn’t study very far” bah. I’ve spent years reading up on the history of Europe, sometimes under the color of research, and sometimes just because I wanted to. You often don’t stumble on these things unless you’re looking at some specific year or some specific and often odd incident.

So, history while in general an indicator of things that failed spectacularly, is not a good indicator of what people want or fail to want. Just of what they put up with, and the range of the possible at that time.

After that, how do you know? Well, sure, surveys, polls, etc. etc. etc.

But mostly — hear me on this — you “know” the common people want to be ruled by their betters because that’s what you’ve been told.

Because honestly the times we live in, it’s no wonder the price of gas is so high, they are gaslighting us 24/7 with the light of a thousand galaxies. I.e. if you believe 34% of the people in the land love them some FJB brand of governance, you might want to put down the pipe and stop toking. Yeah, he does have some who “approve” of him. I suspect around 24% of the people who are crazy or otherwise benefiting from his grift. It might be impossible to go below that.

If you believe that everyone likes and adores beloved leader, you probably also think that he got the most votes in the history of presidential elections. You might also have failed elementary school math.

Look, the truth is that since Obama they’ve been desperately trying to keep up the facade of “everyone loves this person.” And failing.

The reason they’re failing is that they already have lost control of the narrative. Their narrative is so stupid and bizarre that the only way they could push it is when they had control not only of all forms of mass news dissemination, but full control of the academia, and full control of entertainment with all the storylines following what the regime wants.

The truth is that it’s always been that way for totalitarian ideologues (and ours are as fully totalitarian as those of the old USSR, just not as coherent and not in command of the armed forces.) The old horrors of the USSR were brought down by fax machines and typewriters. Think about it a moment.

Now, while blogs and our little discussion groups on line seem totally ineffective to us, they are enough that under the greatest effort at mass brainwashing — the covidiocy — and with all the celebrities shilling for Joe Biden and accusing Trump of horrible crimes, people hunched their shoulders and went out and voted for Trump in such numbers that they ended up having to fraud at the last minute, implausibly, and in front of G-d and everybody.

Our blogs and our little discussion groups are enough that Facebook is banning images in the sharing of my blog and I remain throttled on Twitter. (TBF I believe Musk that if he tries to dismantle the architecture of censorship the whole thing will fall apart, but Mr. Musk, it’s time to get doing with a parallel architecture you can switch the service to. Build under, build over, build around!)

(For that matter not having a social media platform under their complete control is so scary that overnight they switched from Musk fans to trying to make him the world’s worst arch-villain.)

Our blogs and our little discussion groups are enough that the would-be masters of the universe of the WEF rated censorship as their vital necessity right now.

Let’s face it, guys, we: the hobbits, the deplorables, the contrarians are winning this fight and the other side is on the run.

Even in Europe, with their almost complete control of the news and information structure — they’ve managed to keep ebooks and self-publishing unobtanium and blogs out of the question, through mostly draconian speech laws — they are facing mass revolts of farmers and working people.

Do people want “freedom” as some abstract ideal? Maybe not, because “freedom” as an abstract ideal can be pretty insane. (Look at Oregon recriminalizing drug use.) “Freedom” can be interpreted as a total absence of police, for instance, which might sound great, until you find that this means citizen patrols have to learn the three Ss. (And are, in places in this country, I bet you.)

But people do want the freedom to go about their lawful occasions, defined as earning a living, establishing their own livelihood, raising families, determining their own fate.

Every person does. And once the “ruler” interferes too much with that, you get revolt.

Sometimes you get the loud in your face revolt. And sometimes you get wearing your mask with the nose hanging above it. Or leaving every other pew in church empty by ADDING EXTRA PEWS between the existing ones.

And in either case, you won’t hear about it, more than likely. If you hear it’s likely to be the first one not the second. In your face, not hooves firmly affixed and refusing to do as told. But most of the time you won’t hear at all, outside the small group be it region or professional. Even when you hear about it, you don’t hear when the rebellion wins. (The trucker revolt in Canada. They got all their demands met. Yes it cost them horrifically. Because liberty is so valuable, it must be dearly bought.)

Yes the people want freedom, or at least individual liberty. No, they don’t want to be ruled and commanded. They want liberty enough that the left is going to hurt us very badly trying to fight their final rearguard action to stay in control.

If you believe only the enlightened, or educated or whatever want liberty and everyone else wants “security” or “to be ruled” you are victim of a deception that plays on your sense of unearned superiority.

And your parroting this nonsense plays into the enemy’s hands. Because it is foundational to Marxism that the workers are too stupid to know what they want or need and must therefore be led by intellectuals.

Stop picking up opinions you find lying about and putting them in your mouth because they taste so good.

You don’t know where they’ve been, or where they’ve come from.

And most of them are poison.

When my son was in the choir, he told me when you didn’t know the words, or if you’d lost your voice just before the number, or something, you could pass by just mouthing “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon” and no one will know, in the choir that you’re not actually singing.

I feel like I was hit over the head by a writer stopping a choir so he could sing WATERMELON at the top of his voice. This, of course, is a craft error and I covered that here. It is a writing mistake. Which is why I did that on that blog.

But on top of that I found myself thinking “Do you think?” — meaning the author — “In any sense of the word? Or are you just signaling with things you memorized and that you’ve been assured it’s what every smart person thinks? And even if you thought your lecture was on point and the matter is super important, what do you think it would achieve?”

I’m not going to tell you what the book or the author was. You can read the background details for why I started reading this book in the first place.

I hit a substantial portion of the book, and the character is making fun of the names developers give to developments and how they make no sense. It could be a good funny thing, but the writer couldn’t help himself and had to say “And that’s why when developers became politicians they lied so much.”

Uh. Look, guys, until that point I thought I was reading something 20 years old at least, but at that point I went and looked at copyright and, son of a bitch, yep 2020.

And you know what? That dig didn’t need to be there, and it totally threw me out, because why would someone 100 years in the future obsess on Trump? But TDS is a hell of a drug, so fine, whatever. I continued reading.

This kept on until in the middle of a tense situation and apropos nothing the character muses on where he could retire and decides that he couldn’t possibly go to the beach, because it “would be underwater by then.”

At which point I hit my first “do you even think?” because how many times have we been assured the beaches will be underwater? And yet it isn’t 100 years from now, and yet it would be in another… 12 years? What the heck?

What this told me is that the author was just “watermeloning” and not realizing that what he was saying didn’t make any sense in the book. It was a lack of respect for his character and his story.

At this point I had some trouble convincing myself to continue reading. I realized it when I found myself not wanting to pick up the book in the morning.

Still, even though it wasn’t rocking my world, the characters were not obnoxious and the story was at least somewhat interesting, and he had four more books in the series, and I didn’t want to go look for another series to start.

And then in the middle of a chase scene — A chase scene! — the character worries that his electric car is going to be stopped for the daily Earth hour.

The. DAILY. Earth. Hour.

He doesn’t even try to hide that this comes from the ravings of a autistic Scandinavian Teen. Okay, he didn’t mention that she was autistic and borderline illiterate, as well as a massive fraud — eating food that have to be flown in — when away from the cameras or thinking she was away from the cameras. But then again if he fell for the little Greta Mountain of Tuna act, how smart is he, anyway?

But in whose adult head does it make sense that this “great idea” for “slowing global cooling” came from a kid who is not a scientist or honestly — as anyone who hears her can tell — particularly smart. The only reason anyone paid attention to her was leaning hard on the myths of the holy child, who speaks for the gods, which is something that goes back to probably pre-history. But rational sense? Not a wit.

And then, beyond the massive disrespect for his own job of entertaining us, we get into the internal contradictions of this nonense.

He goes on about how stopping air conditioning or heating for an hour won’t hurt you, and it’s for the good of the Earth. Oh, come on. Do these people actually interact with reality, at any level?

Let alone that stopping your car in the middle of something can and will put people at risk, even if it’s a regularly scheduled event, because if all cars suddenly become disabled for an hour, you know there would be people who were caught in the middle of a traffic jam and delayed, or something, and in the middle there there would be an ambulance. People would die every day for this piece of nonsense.

But let’s go into the helping the Earth thing. HOW does stopping everything for an hour help the Earth? Cars are still going to go on their merry way, and use the same energy they would have used anyway. It’s not like people will go “Oh, oops, stopped for an hour. Won’t take that trip now.”

And the heating/cooling…. Good Lord. It’s the perfect “mouthing watermelon” but accomplishing nothing “solution.” In other words, it’s the same bullshit as all the “green” solutions that have us washing our dishes three times, and using at least twice the water we’d have used otherwise. Or having to buy plastic bags, because they’ve been “banned” and in the process using twice as many bags, because those are now crap. Or sucking a drink through a paper straw, even though all the plastic pollution in the ocean is a) grossly exaggerated. b) from third world countries.

BUT the heating and cooling…. What planet is this author from? Does he not realize that if you stop the heating or cooling, you’re going to end up using more energy to get it back up/down to temperature than if you kept it at a constant, which is how modern systems manage to save energy over older ones, by keeping a constant circulation, and giving it little jots now and then to keep it even and comfortable. I mean, who does it help, if after your “holy” Earth hour “Every day!” that you get massive fines for violating, you’re going to use MORE energy to catch up again?

This is why hotels who have to put in that green-signaling scam of putting the room key in the unit to make air-conditioning run, have just started as a matter of course to give you a card to keep in the unit. Because they’re not stupid and don’t want to increase their heating/cooling bills. (Unless they’re in Europe where apparently people don’t do math.)

Look, it would be okay, if this were, say, a romance, or even a contemporary mystery, but this was science fiction. I expect authors of science fiction to be minimally acquainted with science and how things work. Or to have first readers who are.

However, more importantly, holy heck, this author is at least ten, and I think fifteen years older than I. He has to remember the “we’re all going to freeze” hysteria. Has to. Absolutely has to.

He has to remember when it pivoted smoothly to “we’re all going to bake” over one summer. And he has to remember how it’s always twelve years away.

By Al Gore’s phony prophecies we should all already have baked. There should be no snow anywhere, etc. etc.

Instead, as far as we can tell, outside urban islands, the Earth has gotten if anything a little cooler, and we have a better chance of flipping to ice age than boiling. And if we do, it has zero to do with our tech or our “decadent” western lifestyle or any of that crap. If we do it’s mostly likely because of some cycle we don’t fully understand.

Most importantly, really, how can a science fiction author have missed the fact that nuclear energy would solve all of this without phony “Earth hours” and teenage recriminations, and there’s no logical reason not to use it, unless the goal is to take down civilization, not to cool the Earth?

But on top of all this? WHAT DID HE THINK HE WAS ACCOMPLISHING?

Did he think by doing this paen to “OMG the Earth is Warmering! We must follow St. Greta Mountain of Tuna and have a Holy Earth Hour every day to appease Gaia’s chafed vagina!” was going to convince a reader who, up till then had heard this same song sung in a million books, all school books for the last 40 years, most comic books and movies, popular songs, and of course Gretas Autistic Greatest Hits Tour and now, now, in the middle of this book which is not about St. Al Gore the Manbearpig, or the Prophecies of the Tuna Mountain, now, this skeptical reader — and let’s face it, that’s me — was going to stop and go “Oh, now, now that this character from an imagined future is telling me how important this bullshit is? Now, I’ll totally believe that 100 years plus another 12 in the future it will all come to an end if we don’t live like Neolithic farmers!

Pardon me for this rant. Unlike Bill Reader’s incredible post of yesterday, this is not carefully reasoned, or historical analysis. This is just me being so fricking incredibly tired.

I’d be okay if we were having an honest exchange of ideas, an argument on different paths humanity could take. I even understand some concern on the environment, because though I think they grossly overestimate our ability to affect complex systems like climate, I don’t think we should say put a shade between us and the sun (just to mention one of those ideas from the left) without carefully considering all the pros and cons.

But dear lord. The complete lack of originality and thought in someone who is supposed to be a futurist! It’s infuriating and more than a bit scary.

My religion forbids me from assuming that some percentage of humans are really NPCs just put in to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise thin and threadbare narrative.

But sometimes… Sometimes the temptation is overwhelming.

Because here we are marshaling our best arguments, making sure we have the facts right and making sure the lecture is appropriate wherever we put it, and then double checking everything we say.

And there they are, apropos nothing, breaking into things where it makes no sense, and shrieking at the top of their voices: WATERMELON.

Only Nazis by Bill Reader

Only Nazis would oppose the systematic rape and murder of Jews.
Only Nazis would oppose people who want to exterminate all Jews.
Only Nazis would oppose people who want to subjugate the entire western world, especially America.
Only Nazis would oppose segregating people by race.
Only Nazis would oppose treating people of one race as inferior with no reference to their merits or character.
Only Nazis would oppose censorship.
Only Nazis would oppose covert surveillance.
Only Nazis would support the individual right to bear arms.
Only Nazis would oppose arbitrary expropriation of property from enemies of the state under color of law.
Only Nazis would support election integrity.
Only Nazis would, in particular, demand that election laws not be altered at the last minute by illegal means.
Or ask for an audit when suddenly election tabulation happens in a way it has never happened in the past, resulting in multiple objectively implausible upsets at the last minute.
Only Nazis would question a vote where the poll observers were kicked out in the middle of performing the count.
Only Nazis would advocate for objective reality over the ever-changing whims and fantasies of the party and the state.

All these things and more you are told only Nazis would do. Of course it makes no sense. It’s not just untrue, it’s the opposite of true, like serving a person a cup of flaming gasoline and calling it ice-water.

It is time and long past time to speak truth. The Democrats are the Nazis. In every meaningful respect they are a 1:1 reflection—they are viciously anti-Semitic, power mad statists, no better than the ones America put down 80 years ago. History will eventually view it as an indictment of the breathtaking gullibility of man that the successors to the Nazis waltzed so easily into the corridors of power simply by insisting at every turn that they were not what they plainly were.

I will repeat again how this simple and stupid ploy managed to play out this way, in the prayer that maybe this time the signal will be heard. The “U shaped” political spectrum is a lie. It has always been a lie, and it’s a lie that serves the interests of the Left every time you repeat it.

Nazi is short for National Socialist German Worker’s party. They were named that because the Nazis were socialists—they were never, by any measure, excepting maybe the fucked up standards of Europe, “right wing”*.

The reason that “everyone knows” that the Nazis were “right wing” is because the main opposition to the Nazis in Germany as they were rising to power were “international socialists”, known otherwise popularly in America as communists—and more correctly and precisely, in their place and time, as advocates for Soviet hegemony of countries that communists organized in. In the years preceding World War II, what occurred in Germany was a fight between International Socialism and National Socialism. National Socialism won out in Germany proper—in no small part because Germans did not, in the main, want to become a Soviet vassal, and the Nazis were the most coherent opposition to that fate. But that wasn’t the end of the story, for two reasons. The most important of those was that Hitler and Stalin had a falling out. Their alliance up to that point, it must be emphasized, made perfect sense, because despite the fact that Hitler’s domestic political opponents had largely been pro-Soviet, the two totalitarian, statist societies had much more in common with one another than the Soviets had with any member of the allies. The other was that Germany was not the only place that far-left extremist groups had Soviet sympathies. Both Europe and the United States had the same problem, and such groups followed Soviet propaganda closely.

The standard smear that Soviet communists used against their opponents was to call them “right wing” (Like all Soviet propaganda the relationship to the truth was tangential at best— most right wing people did, in fact, oppose Soviets, but opposing the Soviets doesn’t at all imply that you are right wing. Note that modern day Leftists, by the old Soviet standards, would be considered rabidly “right wing” for arming Ukraine.). And shortly thereafter, American conservatives who opposed American Leftist groups that were heavily financed by, and compromised by the Soviets, began to be equated to the Nazis. That is why you may have heard Walt Disney accused of being a Nazi, for example—because Walt Disney opposed extreme Leftist union members who were not just Marxists, but Marxists with ties to the Soviet Union. In point of fact, Walt Disney was not a Nazi, and the accusation doesn’t even make superficial sense, but there was also no attempt to make it make any sense. It was simply repeated enough by Left wing groups that people assumed there must be some kernel of truth in it.

So of course your political spectrum looks “U” shaped. Both of its poles are left wing! That’s not some deep political insight: that’s you trying unsuccessfully to make sense out of competing propaganda. Nor is it an indictment of the “far right”, so much as an indictment of your historical understanding.

“Right wing dictator” in American terms is a contradiction in terms, a nonsense phrase. The joking tagline of this blog, “Taking over the world and leaving it ruthlessly alone” is exactly why.

To be a dictator is to centralize all power in the person and agents of the person. All dictatorships are statist in nature.

Yes, there have been examples of countries rocking back and forth between “Left wing” and “Right wing” dictators, but the latter are simply the effect from above writ large—a combination of unimaginative one-note Leftist attacks of Soviet pedigree, and people getting so tired of the Leftists presently in power that people who oppose them begin to call themselves “Right wing” without remotely resembling the American conception if it. In such countries, both sides end up cyclically redistributing each other’s wealth through and to the state, imprisoning each other’s leaders, and imposing overbearing laws targeting each other’s supporters. Those dynamics are best understood as competing factions of Leftists. Your precious “U shape” was drawn with only half the graph. A more accurate depiction would be:

 It was precisely because of the work of these groups that Europe went on to learn exactly the wrong lesson from World War I and II, embracing socialism and attempting to divest themselves of nationalism. Soviet-aligned groups—international socialists, remember—saw nationalism as one of the great obstacles to their success, and Europe fell for their bullshit, hook, line, sinker (rod, reel, fisherman, boat).

This despite the fact that both the socialist nation they stopped from conquering Europe by force, and the socialist nation they belatedly allowed to join the alliance to assist them in doing that, were examples of Hell on Earth—socially repressive, tyrannical, and eventually, genocidal (speaking of Ukraine).

That mistake has resulted in Europe as it exists today, lying on its deathbed, unable and unwilling to defend itself even as a war is raging closer to them than war has been in half a century. Their only pretense of defense is to whine that Americans are defending them inadequately—they will not shift a penny from the socialist state that they have built on, first, an ironclad belief in the accuracy of dusty Soviet propaganda, and latterly on simple corruption, cupidity, and avarice. Their farmers are strangling to death under the weight of repressive legislation and still their governments import every idiot third worlder with working legs to further overburden their collapsing welfare state.

None seems to dare admit the obvious— that on long enough time scales, anti-nationalism and socialism, as ideologies, are not survivable, nor sustainable, nor even meaningfully sane; as well they shouldn’t be since they are aggressor ideologies, meant specifically to ripen up countries to be conquered by an empire that ironically collapsed under its own weight decades hence. T

he violent third world Muslims who are toppling the old, sick, and weakened European countries pay no homage either to socialism or to nationalism, will certainly not practice “cultural humility”, nor will they care about the complaints of those who have turned such things into a secular religion. Europe’s “progress” will end in their lands and descendants beholden to the mores of the 7^th century, and all this they will tell themselves is for the best, because at least they didn’t repeat Nazism.

They will sacrifice all they have, all they have ever had, all they could have been, in return for a nod of approval from the ghost of Stalin. And the monsters that breed in their corpses will become the existential concerns of our children—but I digress.

Remember all of this. The person who calls you a Nazi online today is admitting implicitly that he or she is the inheritor of a party that was so compromised by the Soviet Union that it is still repeating its nonsensical slanders a century later. McCarthy was an optimist.

And Left wing puddingheads: don’t attempt to counter with laughable “white supremacist” groups that are supposedly right wing in the modern era.

The vast majority of these consist of three FBI agents and two men who are products of an American school system that isn’t even pretending not to be an indoctrination factory anymore.

There is an overwhelming chance that any “white” person participating in such groups has as many black ancestors as the average black person in America. (I remind you of the supposed kidnapping plot of a governor that, when all was tabulated and exposed, was composed of mostly federal agents).

The highest profile groups—like the very appropriately named Patriot “Front”—are almost certainly entirely composed of feds. To the extent that any of these groups are something besides yet another inappropriate and stupid use of Federal money, it’s a combination of ignorance about what Nazis actually were, and the same problem South American countries exhibit, cited above—namely, the Democrat party being so hostile, stupid, and evil, that some people actually begin to consider that an ideology that resulted in the death of millions might have a point, simply because the Left repeatedly assert that those are their opponents. Which is to say, that American Democrats self-consciously emulate the aforementioned suicidal ideology of Europe but lie more about doing it.

A gaggle of suspiciously crew-cut people in masks and professionally printed uniforms that by some strange coincidence include government-issue pants is not an example of Nazism, it’s an example of my tax dollars being wasted by an agency that stopped having a reason to exist after Prohibition ended. American college students coast to coast calling for Jewish blood in between advocating for Socialism—that is Nazism. That is obviously Nazism.

To my conservative readers, I will conclude with this thought:

2016 became, famously, the flight 93 election. I put it to you that this election is the Battle of Britain. We are going to decide in November whether the Nazis get to take over, by force, the bastion of freedom that they have relentlessly assaulted.

I invite you to consider it in that light when you are donating, campaigning, and voting—and to bear in mind that no incarnation of the Nazis, be they German Socialists or American Socialists, has ever cared much for conceptions of fair play or honesty. Do not assume, when you are making your plans, that such things will be sufficient. Leverage every ounce of power you hold over the Left, do anything you can to stop the corruption they are assaulting our system with. Be weary of dirty tricks, because they will certainly attempt some. You face a ruthless enemy who represent an existential threat.

But the horrors they will commit in the war are nothing compared to what they will do if permitted to win.

_________________

*That is also true of fascists, incidentally. Benito Mussolini was a socialist before deriving the political theory of fascism, which he saw as further articulating and perfecting of the principles of socialism. In fact the fasces (that’s fah-sees, not the plural of face), the eponymous symbol of fascism, is an axe with a bundle of sticks as its handle, chosen specifically because it symbolizes the strength of the collective bound together in service of the state.