Years ago, when these things were notional and far in the future, my father in law asked me to give his eulogy. He’d just read a memorial I’d written for my grandmother, because I’d never got to say goodbye to her, and I can only grieve — or do most things to be honest, being fairly useless by nature — in writing. And he thought he’d like to be remembered like that.

He was then younger than I’m now, probably by ten years or so.

Time does go by very fast.

I met my in-laws when they served as my liaison to the local AFS (exchange student program, now called something else) chapter. I used to go to their house, because my future mother in law (though neither of us knew it) let me play with ceramics and paint. And besides, I used to hang out in case Dan came from college. I could never figure out when he’d drop by, but if I stayed long enough, MIL would ask him to drive me home. (Yes, it was like that, though it took us four years to figure it out, because we were 18 which is a sort of disability of its own. Like a certain kind of teen romance trope, we argued a lot.)

Dan’s dad was a very gentle man, but with an imaginative streak. If you got him to talk about technology or what the future might hold in computers, or strange, far out theories of the world, his eyes lit up, and he could talk forever.

When I got engaged to Dan, it was a relief to finally call his father “Dad” because well…. he was. Sort of a distilled essence of dad.

We didn’t see him too often in the next years. We moved a lot, and finally moved across the country to Colorado, where they only visited three times.

But when I heard he had died, things came to mind.

Whenever he visited us, he spent his time organizing and cleaning our house. I’m by nature clean (bleach is a SACRAMENT) but not organized. He also used to help me wash up after dinner.

I remember him in our kitchen, in Columbia, South Carolina, teaching me to sing “They’re coming to take me away.” Trust me on this, he voluntarily exposed himself to my singing. Greater love has no man. We were so loud that Dan came to see what in heck we were doing (Which gives you a measure of my singing) and ended up joining in.

Later, when we visited, I came out of the guest bathroom at their home, after putting a beauty product on that briefly (very briefly) turned my face green. I actually startled him enough he sort of screamed (I didn’t know he was out there) and then teased me about being secretly an alien the rest of the visit.

When Dan went on work to France and dropped me on his parents for two weeks (I couldn’t drive, and we didn’t have an extra car anyway, and staying alone for two weeks in a city where I didn’t yet know anyone wasn’t even safe, let alone pleasant) we stayed up late into the night — of all things — designing these ideal houses with all sorts of ways to go off the grid. We’d stay up till late in the night, until my mother in law came and chased us upstairs.

When he visited us in Colorado, he went to a parade of homes with us, and I found out that he and Dan have exactly the same sense of humor. Some of the decorating choices, not to mention floor plans loaned themselves to entire impromptu skits about weird families.

When we bought our house he reserved the front bedroom which we used as a TV room as “That’s my room when I need to stay with someone.” Well, it didn’t happen that way. When he needed it, he didn’t want to move that far from his friends and his church.

After that life got complicated, and yes, we feel guilty how little we visited. I think the last time we spent time up in Ohio was when my brother in law died. We went up for the memorial, but also for that first very difficult Christmas, and my father in law got to spend time with his grandsons.

He liked that we’d given Marshall his middle name, and was flattered when Marshall started to go by it. He was very proud of his youngest grandson.

The last time I saw him was at my mother in law’s memorial. He spent the entire service holding my hand. He told me that for so many years I’d just been a voice in the phone, and it was good to know I really existed.

Afterwards we visited with him for some hours, and I petted the little mini poodles he loved.

We meant to go up again. We did. But the last two years have been fraught, between moving and health issues.

Dan did go up, but we couldn’t manage the money/time combination.

His passing hit me very hard. There are a lot of unspoken stories, a lot of things we could have air-dreamed about. And just time to sit and pet a fuzzy while being silent together. Time ran away from us. In retrospect, it seems so fast, even though I know it wasn’t.

I’m sorry dad, that we didn’t spend more time together. I will miss your gentle humor and your kindness.

Perhaps we’ll meet again in eternity, with time and better understanding, and a fuzzy or two for company.

Goodbye dad. Until we meet again.

Away from Keyboard, en route to a friend meetup.

Will be bringing back kittens for us and younger son.

About to run out of connectivity zone. Might or might not update tonight. Will try to but there’s this dinner thing.

While you’re at it, Sunny comments here as Holly, and she’s… um…. she could use some financial help, honestly.

Yes, we have donated, though anonymized. Will probably donate again, once dust settles and I know how much I have in hand.

Helping with health insurance deductible for unforeseen issues

Anyway, don’t worry about us. I slept horribly, and I’m sort of punch drunk, but husband will be driving. And I’m almost over the virus. The death in the family was expected, and a release, but for some reason still walloped me like a hundred ton weight.

Not sure if it’s good or bad we are set to see friends this weekend. Fortunately they have a broad tolerance for “Weirder than normal.”

Take care of yourselves, and hug your loved ones. More posting tomorrow, if it all goes well.

In The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein, Mycroft, the trickster sentient computer that joins the revolution because he’s bored and wants friends, (I figure he’s their Benjamin Franklin figure) tries throughout the book to figure out humor.

In fact, his “first human friend” Manny finds out that Myke has woken up because Myke plays a joke. He pays someone about 100 times what he should be paid.

Part of Manny educating Myke is “funny only once.”

Now part of the funny only once is self defense. Manny can’t have Myke playing big, noticeable, system breaking pranks that will lead to either killing everyone and/or people finding out he’s sentient.

But part of it is accurate for everyone. I know a lot of people here grew up with Star Trek and are impressed by Kirk’s “this one simple trick.” It was impressive, of course, in the context of the show, considering they were going from planet to planet, so funny only once worked, since it was a new audience every night. To an extent, the Saint is the same thing, (the TV series) with the flaw that it’s not a new planet every night. (If anyone does Saint in Space — concept not name — please tell me, I’d love to read it.) I mean, you watch the series to see how he pulls off the trick and double crosses the unrighteous (his name for the bad guys.) But you willingly have to suspend disbelief, because at some point people would notice and know, and start knowing when they see him coming…..

And this is part of the problem that our “governing classes” and self styled “elites” have. Much of what they’ve been pulling is world breaking.

It works once, partly because we can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to pull that. It is a stupidity so big that we can’t believe anyone would do it.

I mean, look, locking up the entire world over a bad flu, and scaring people half to death just so they could steal the US election? It’s not a clever trick, unless you consider breaking the dome protecting a space colony clever.

But is is so monumentally stupid, requiring that people be unaware or uncaring of where food comes from and more importantly that trust once broken can’t be recovered overnight, that most people refused to believe that anyone would do something so monumentally stupid and psychopathic.

In fact, it’s how psychopath narcissists manage to pull half the stupid sh*t they do. Normal human beings can’t understand the depths of non-human thought that allow someone to use others as pieces in a game.

The thing is that once you see something like that pulled, no only is it funny only once, because you won’t allow it to be pulled again, but it allows you to see all the other “this one simple trick” requiring monumental chutzpah and stupidity to pull off. And once you start seeing it, you can’t unsee it.

No, most people still don’t fully know what to do about it, but let’s face it, despite cooked polls and the koolaid drinkers being special all over social media, this one simple trick, as it unravels further destroys what remained of trust in the media, and government, and “scientists” and… well, the entire structure that allows the left to stay in power, and that in fact allowed them to steal the election.

Even better, by involving the entire world in this, they finally broke the Europeans. Europeans are starting to doubt their “experts” and “smart people.”

Yes, there are pockets that haven’t. But overall, not only was it funny only once but, contrary to what they took from the whole experience, it made their chances of pulling it off again very very small.

Right now, people know they’re being duped, and no one trusts much of anything they’re told that they haven’t experienced by themselves, with their own lying eyes.

This is good, because part of what has allowed the tyranny to grow is a trust in experts and “scientific” governance over the last 100 years. We need people to start trust themselves and (with limits) their neighbors.

It is bad, because as institutions collapse it makes it harder to change and rebuild without it all collapsing or tipping into “blood up to our ankles” type situation.

But this one simple trick was funny only once. And it’s already broken their structures of power. We can pray for a miracle that allows us to cross to new structures and more freedom without massive violence. And we should.

Because most of the casualties happen after victory.

On the other hand, we already won. And they lose. There is no victory condition for them.

We win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

When I’m sick but starting to be ALMOST well it’s a very frustrating time. I feel like I’m well enough to work, and should in fact be working, except I know anything I write in that time will be strange and lifeless. Sometimes it can be revived in revision, sometimes not.

In the last week, the fact I didn’t feel well enough to actually do things like typeset old books and adjust covers was a good indication I should not mess with works in progress. (And oh, yeah, have a got a story for you on that.)

So instead I was doing what I normally do when I should be working. Reading true crime stories (From the investigators side, which is still depressing, but mostly gives me ideas for books.) and taking weird drunkard walks through internet weirdness.

My still being me — you do remember that part, right — this often devolves to truly weird stuff like seeking out ideas of previous civilizations (Most of it is new age and funnier than heck, which is very cheering, particularly when I’m not feeling well.) And similar “weird stuff.”

This time, for reasons, I tried to look up “Accidentally walking between realities.” You know, the thing that might be a brain glitch where you suddenly remember something as being completely different up to this moment. Instead of deja vu, it’s never-vu. You stare at your car going “I swear my car was blue when I went to bed last night. When did it turn red?” And your family looks at you like you have three heads and they’re all speaking in sanskrit, because the car has always been read.

I think we’ve all had moments like that, though perhaps not as dramatic. My younger son had so many of these one year that after that it became a joke. If he woke up and I’d just changed something in the house, his opening gambit would be “I come from a world where you don’t have a line across the laundry room to hang clothes that can’t be dried.”

Some of the most dramatic ones, of course, are dreams, where you dream in a self-consistent reality in which you don’t remember the current world, but everything makes sense. I had one of these, about 4 years ago, in which I had teen DAUGHTERS and was cleaning their bathroom, after they’d gone to school and I wondered if boys would have been as messy. It was such a weird, self-contained dream that it was like I’d been in a different world.

Anyway, I was looking for that, but I accidentally stumbled onto something else.

Apparently there is a fad among mostly teens, of sending their consciousness into a “desired reality.” For a lot of them it appears to be Hogwarts (?????).

They have an entirely constructed theory of why this works, though meh, it doesn’t stand up to true scientific knowledge. It at best stands up to speculative and therefore unproven hypothesis.

The idea being that somewhere in the universe whatever can happen happens. And your mind being multi-dimensional is able to perceive everything. So it’s a matter of changing your consciousness to perceiving your other reality.

In the meantime, you leave something behind in your body, an automated version of you, living out your life in this reality, for the time you’re absent.

At its most involved, this shades into tupalmancy, the creation of a shadow self.

And of course, what’s actually involved, at least most of the time — I’m not going to speculate on if what they think is happening is actually happening, I’m just going to say I find it unlikely MOST of the time — is creating a lucid dream. What gives it away, btw, is the idea you can script this experience ahead of time. You can’t script a reality because other consciousnesses — other people in it — have a say.

What I’m going to say is that I’m immensely familiar with the creation of a vivid lucid dream that goes on from day to day, as well as with going through life as a barely conscious robot.

I’d say that was most of my life from about 12 to 18. Oh, there were moments I was there, but most of the time, I was in a world inside my head (the world in fact of Schrodinger worlds, that is actually a bunch of worlds.) My notebooks at the time are a bunch of codes for what was happening in various imaginary worlds, maps and physical plants of places that don’t exist. Genealogy trees for non-existing people, histories of non-existent empires.

How is that different from now, you ask? Well, now I know which world I’m in. I KNOW WHICH VOICE IS MINE.

I got lost there for a while. The danger of a vivid imagination is that you can get lost in it. You can become a living shadow in your real life, while living in another one.

Curiously — or not — the deeper I went into it, the less I produced in the real world. The less I wrote, the less I learned, the less engagement I had with real people.

At seventeen-eighteen, for whatever reason, I woke up. And decided to stay out of the dream-world, or at least to stay out of it, while dreaming it. Be aware of it, and “go there” but as a visitor. Know where I was and which voice was mine.

Which is when I started establishing interests and relationships, and re-started writing again.

Because the world couldn’t live for other people till I came out of it and could communicate it.

It was as hard as quitting any drug addiction. The dream world was safe and interesting, even when bad things happened. But to live in it was to ignore reality. You can’t live in the dream world. Because you’re not made of dream. Making yourself into a meat robot won’t keep you safe. Reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop paying attention.

I always thought of this as a particular problem of being a larval writer. It NEVER in my wildest moments occurred to me it could become a general problem.

I have guesses as to why, starting with 2020 and ending with clownworld.

BUT to anyone who is aware of their kid doing this, or who — despite our ages — is tempted by it, let me enjoin you to stay in reality. Day dreaming is great. I still do a lot of it. It’s why and how I write.

But a wise man — PTerry — said to always be sure what voice is yours. To that I add, always be sure what reality is yours.

It’s been 42 years, since I decided to live and create in the real world. It hasn’t been a bowl of cherries, but it’s real. It’s …. I can grow and love and create in here.

The dream world is a sort of fairyland. You can perceive it and dream in it, but nothing is real.

When you try to choose your reality, all you do is turn your back on what’s real. And in the end, you’ll die without ever having lived.

I have lived through curious shifts, some of them due to the fact that I moved to a country, where things were already shifted, and then they shifted more.

Portugal is still in many ways way more “sexist” against women than the US.

When I was a kid it was openly so. Women were just believed to be a lesser form of human. Period. full stop. Even when you were a female acknowledged as not being lesser in some characteristic, this didn’t absolve you from the flaws of your sex.

I could whip most men in mental contest with half a brain tied behind my back, but I was often congratulated on keeping my emotional nature in check, or considered fragile emotionally for reasons that were, more often than not, baffling to me. I was also of course congratulated on being “unusually smart FOR A WOMAN.

Rest assured I wasn’t injured by this. Perhaps it is a factor of being Odd, but mostly it amused me no end. I collected funny disparaging comments, not because they were hurtful but because they were funny.

The country and the culture has changed, under the influence of feminism, but here’s the thing: culture doesn’t really change. Not that fast. It changes very slowly if at all. The external forms have changed, and women are now expected to excel above men in school, same as here (part of it being of course that the game is rigged) but women are still expected to excel in female accomplishments, from cooking to crafts to child care. The result is overburdened women, and men who still are expected to dominate all public life, other than specialized professions.

That’s fine. They’ll change, or not, and it’s their problem.

But here–

Ah, here. By the time I came over, women ten years older than I were convinced the world was against them. By the time I came over, in the mid eighties, it really no longer was. Absent some bizarre pockets and strange sub cultures (which exist, given how huge and widepread this country is) women in the eighties were already expected to excel in school and business, and sometimes non subtly given legs up by “affirmative action.”

I didn’t realize how crazy things had got till my kids entered public school in the mid-nineties.

In the early to mid-nineties, when I joined the MOB — Mothers of Boys, of course — there was a already a surplus of women wanting to birth only girls.This is very much a US phenomenon and back then it was pushed hard in sitcoms and movies, where a pregnant woman referred to her “daughter” while the husband wanted a “son.” And even back then, this was viewed as chauvinism on the MAN’S PART.

This entire interplay baffled me. In Portugal there was a preference for boys, though after two or three both parents might want a girl. But if anyone wanted a girl, it was usually the dad. So, the idea that each parent wanted to reproduce only his/her kind, that there was some kind of competition was BAFFLING.

And then my kids entered elementary school.

And it quickly became obvious boys were treated as a kind of defective girl. Which got worse and worse until it culminated in puberty, where boys — later developing than girls, were asked to keep pace with them, even though neurologically they were incapable to do so.

We see a lot of victims of the trans fad pushing on people immature enough to not know what they are and believe they really can change and be fertile as the other sex. (Believe it or not they’re telling kids this will soon be possible.)

And we’re aware of the girls who have their breasts cut off. Of the hysterectomies. Of biological men displacing women in sports and other fronts.

But few people are aware there are just as many — maybe more. I don’t know how exact the statistics are — males who get castrated, sterilized, given medical problems for life by being “transitioned” when they are too young to even know what male means.

But beyond all that, we have men being raised being told from the youngest age possible that they are defective because they are male. That they need to be punished because they are male. That their deepest instincts, to pair-bond and protect a woman are wrong and evil and bad. That wanting to father children, wanting to father sons, is wrong and evil and bad.

They are told that women were oppressed for six thousand years because of males. (Not that everyone was differently oppressed because of biology.) That they are guilty of all that, somehow, though their entire life they’ve been discriminated against — hard or soft — for being male. They’ve had to learn in environments not tailored for males. They’ve had to excel — if they do — despite being taught by women who believe the only reason women aren’t perfect and perfectly happy is that males exist.

…. And then people are surprised sperm counts are down. That men aren’t engaging in family formation. That more and more young men are become psychological basket cases, unable to engage in real life. And they’re ridiculed by it. The term incel is applied almost exclusively to men. And there’s assumed to be something wrong with them, if they aren’t out there, spreading their seed irresponsibly.

We see female fantasies on the screen all the time. And in books. Romance novels are female fantasies. But James Bond was a pure male fantasy. And those early movies, literally could not — COULD NOT — be made today. The Ree of sexist, etc. would start one minute in.

The problem is that none of this is the way that idiots in charge assume it is. Societal organization and status is not a a zero sum game.

You don’t elevate women by destroying men. You don’t elevate men by destroying women.

Willing or not, we are yoked together, as partners. Even single people function better in a society where men and women are individually able to chose their profession, and their course in life, and be their best selves without men being told their defective women, and women being turned into sort of men manque, which their biology doesn’t suit them to.

And no one is happiest being told that their sole and most important focus should be their career. Yes, some very driven or very crazy individuals will focus on their careers to the exclusion of a family life. These tend to be what you’d expect: scientists, doctors, artists, writers. (I mean, I’d write, anyway, even if I had half a dozen kids, because I had to write.)

But for most people a job is not a career. It’s simply a way to earn your way, so you can live. And what gives meaning to life are relationships: familial, marital, parental, amicable.

All of which require a healthy relationship where men and women can each pursue their happiness without crazy people telling them they’re doing it wrong.

So, you know, the people who want to be housewives and mothers? So what? What business is it of anyone else? Seamstress is mostly a female word? So, what? There are gifted ones, as there are in any profession. The people who want to be corporate raiders? So what? There are more males than females who want to do that? So what? What business is it of anyone? More boys want to be engineers than girls? So what? More woman want to be romance writers than men? So what? More men want to write science fiction than women? So what?

The world is not a game of proportional representation. Who you are and what you do is determined by more than your sex, your skin color, or for that matter who you like to sleep with.

You are not a widget with certain characteristics, and you shouldn’t be aggrieved if people who share one or two of you characteristics don’t do as well in x or y as people with other characteristics.

If you want to do the thing, and people like you traditionally don’t? So what? Yeah, some people will look at you funny. If you can’t withstand funny looks (oh, the micro-injustice) the problem is with you, not society. Your answer to that type of thing should be “Shrug. So what?” And then do what you feel you must.

And stop paying attention to number games.

Right now we’re destroying both men and women by the numbers.

And society cannot survive this. Because society is not a number game, but a chaotic system of individuals, each striving for individual happiness.

Stop destroying the future. By the numbers.

Hark, What is this Abomination Monday Two Weeks Late 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. – SAH

SOME AUTHORS AND THEIR SELF PROMOTION:

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Barbarella: The Center Cannot Hold #3

Having met the Innumerable and joined their cause against the Architects, Barbarella must clandestinely return to the home of the Architects in order to retrieve Vix, left behind when Barbarella was extracted by an agent of the Innumerable. See? We’ve come full circle! As is often the case, it’s not what you see that’s the danger, it’s what you can’t see, and Barbarella sees plenty of that wherever she sees an Architect. And lest we forget, there is the small matter of the Unnamable out there…

FROM DAVID COLLINS: The Second War (Wars Without End Book 2)

After leaving the medical chamber, Keith thought the long war was over. He had united two warring factions and identified the culprit behind the earlier devastating war. A xenophobic race that was out to destroy all the other races.

The problem was that they didn’t like that he had uncovered their deception, and they were out for revenge.

Then the Earth sent their “secret weapon” out to him. Something that could possibly beat the Meduala at their own game. Unfortunately, her daughter insisted on coming out too.

Much of his earlier success was based on help from the AI on his patched-up former delict spacecraft. Getting it updated seemed like a good idea. Adding more processing power to an unlocked AI should make it even better. That was the idea. What could go wrong? (he soon finds out)

Then they went out exploring the area in the new and improved ship. They found some unexpected aliens. And then some different aliens found them. They discovered that the Meduala were terrified of the new aliens.… It turns out that they had a reason to be…

FROM BONNIE RAMTHUN: The Stone of Excellent Luck: Book Three of the Centerville Chronicles

Saving the world just got tricky

Ray knows he has to save the world this coming summer, since he’s supposed to be “The Shining One.” But then the mysterious new bully in town, Finn, tells Ray that he’s the true one of the prophecies, not Ray. Finn has taken the Stone of Excellent Luck from the deadly caverns underneath the town, the first magical artifact needed to stop the Awful Solstice.
Finn is now after the great sword Excalibur, and once he’s got it, he’s going to be unstoppable. Worst of all, Finn doesn’t want to save the world. He wants to see everything fall apart!

Ray and Clancy must brave the deadly traps in the caverns, find Excalibur first, and convince Finn to play a desperate game of winner-takes-all. Their adventure takes them to the windswept moors of Scotland, the oceans of the Caribbean, and a final confrontation that will give them a way to save the world, or lose their chance forever.

BY MAX BRAND, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Jim Curry’s Test (Annotated): The classic pulp western

Jim Curry was a loafer, but never did anybody any harm. Until his gun accidentally went off, and killed the most beloved old-timer in the area. It was an accident, but the sheriff isn’t overly sympathetic, and when Curry breaks the sheriff’s jaw escaping, the townsfolk decide that due process just won’t do…

    This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving genre and historical context to the novel.

BY CHARLES ALDEN SELTZER REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Men of the West (Annotated): A pulp western omnibus of: Riddle Gawne, Beau Rand, and West!

iktaPOP Media brings you an omnibus of three classic westerns by Charles Alden Seltzer, featuring Seltzer’s characteristic western heroes, each with his own unique nickname.
Riddle Gawne
Jefferson Gawne has a low opinion of people, and an even lower one of women. After his brother was murdered by Watt Hyat, in complicity with his brother’s wife, Gawne followed Hyat’s trail across the west.
But the trail went cold, and Gawne, nicknamed Riddle behind his back, found himself the guardian of an orphan girl, and the only man in the territory who dares stand up to Hame Bozzam, founder of the dirty and lawless Bozzam City. Bozzam is too smart to challenge Gawne directly, and Gawne is too honorable to act against Bozzam without cause.
So an uneasy truce has held between the two men. A truce that is about to be broken, with the arrival of the beautiful Miss Kathleen Harkless. Every man wants her, and the men of Bozzam City don’t particularly care if she wants them back.
Beau Rand
Amos Seddon has a secret and Beau Rand knows it.
When someone starts rustling cattle, it doesn’t take long for the whispers against Rand to start. To save himself and his young son, Rand has to prove his innocence and find the real rustlers.
West!
Josephine Hamilton’s first impression of the west was stopping the hanging of a supposed horse thief. From that moment, she decided that the west needed her principles imposed upon it.
And the man who personified that west, and most needed dominating, was Steel Brannon, a man who was merely amused that she stopped him from giving justice to a horse thief. And intrigued by a woman so willful, and so misguided.
    This iktaPOP Media omnibus includes Introductions and Afterwords by indie author and editor D. Jason Fleming, putting the novels into historical, cultural, and genre context.

FROM MARY CATELLI: A Diabolical Bargain

Growing up between the Wizards’ Wood and its marvels, and the finest university of wizardry in the world, Nick Briarwood always thought that he wanted to learn wizardry.

When his father attempts to offer him to a demon in a deal, the deal rebounded on him, and Nick survives — but all the evidence points to his having made the deal.

Now he really wants to learn wizardry. Even though the university, the best place to master it, is also the place where he is most likely to be discovered.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Love in the Time of Campaigning

As Frank Correra brings his family to a lunar settlement to get them away from a worsening political situation on Earth, he reminisces about how he and his wife met.

Frank had always dreamed of the skies. As a clone of an astronaut who subsequently became a US Senator, Frank thought he had a clear path ahead of him. But when it comes time to apply for the Air Force Academy, it is an election year. His ur-brother can’t promise a nomination until he’s won another term, and this year promises a hard race to run. When the other side puts up an ugly attack ad, can Frank find a way to discredit it before it destroys his ur-brother’s chance of re-election, and with it Frank’s slot at an Academy appointment?

A Gus on the Moon story.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WERNER: 202303 The Ideas of Marchhttps://amzn.to/3mjyVMx

The monthly booklet, collecting essays on current events and whatever else comes to mind. Mostly current events but that’s natural. The masters are pushing down on us harder and harder and making our lives worse. Like many other people, I’m trying to fight back and inspire others to do the same. How long will it take?

The B-side is a collection of The Struggling comic strips I made this month. Just random jokes and observations that are essentially the sort of thing I write about on Side A, but hopefully more entertaining. This booklet is an edited collection of the previous month’s worth of pamphlets so now you can read it twice!!!

FROM FRANK HOOD: A Hearth for Ulysses

The sky was blue, and snow covered the tops of the mountains. Jack Burns hadn’t realized until he saw it how much he’d missed snow–real, honest-to-goodness, earth-water snow. Even the cement under his boots felt good. Things had changed however. Houses were creeping up the sides of the Andes. The small launching area had turned into a huge spaceport, complete with enormous corporate buildings and a mammoth city to surround it. “Is this the house that Jack built?” Burns thought but couldn’t bring himself to laugh at his own joke.

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: HAMMER

To those who believe in living after death, to those who walked across the sea dry shod from slavery to freedom and to those who (just?) believe in Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness which no government can thwart: Go live and build and refuse to let evildoers thwart you.

I’m taking the day off. Promo tomorrow.

*I’m finally feeling more or less human. Not well-well, but way, way better. Let’s just have some memes, shall we?*

AND BTW, NO LIE DETECTED:

AND NOW LEAVING BEHIND THE FILTHY POLITICAL STUFF, AND FOR MORE FUN STUFF. THOUGH THE FIRST IS STILL CLOWN WORLD.

*It seems like there’s a need to repeat this every April. Not sure why. Perhaps, to mangle Jorge Luis Borges, the idea must return every spring as return the numbers in a periodical cypher. I just felt a need to remind myself of this. And perhaps you have a need too. – SAH*

But The Lizard Will Surely Die -A Blast From The Past From April 2021

Yeah, okay, so we’re back to Rango.

You see, when I was sitting here (minding my own (or at least my characters’) business), what caught my attention FIRST was the owls saying “But the lizard will certainly die” as the poor domesticated chameleon is running through the desert facing a million perils.

There is something…. awfully familiar about those owls.

Oh, yeah, okay, Greek Chorus — though I’ll note those didn’t always predict misfortune, sometimes they predicted great honor, which is I guess next door to it, as far as ancient Greeks were concerned — look, I grew up with the classical forms, to the point that when I first wrote a novel I couldn’t remember any of the novels I’d read, not structure wise, but I remembered the tri-part structure, how scenes were defined, how acts were defined. Oh, and that I needed catharsis. To be fair, I still think you should have catharsis in a book. I’m forever amused by people who tell me their books shouldn’t have feelings. Or the ones who complain of “internal monologue” in first person. Yeah? You think you don’t have internal monologue going on 24/7? What do you think that voice behind the eyes is. Being ADD (AF) all I try to do is prevent my characters thought stream from interrupting itself. Sometimes not particularly successfully. (True story: Copy editor: you can’t end a thought with a dash. The character wasn’t interrupted. There’s no one else there. Me: The heck. You’ve never interrupted yourself?… I guess it should have been an indication I wasn’t QUITE normal.)

Anyway, beyond the Greek choir, it was familiar because — honestly — I’m getting sick and tired of the “Abandon all hope” stream. No, seriously. If I wanted that, I’d be hanging out at Zero Hedge or other sites known to be Russian dizinformazia.

(Gee, I wonder why Russia — or China — would want us to give up, buckle under and just give in to the current invaders’ demands and/or kill ourselves in despair. Either or– I mean the insanity of the left was being capable of believing that Russia would back someone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” HOW fricking stupid do you have to be about how nations work, and history to believe that shit?)

Even people who know better write long articles about how China is going to win and be the big hegemon forever, world without end. And now that the left stole — remember, they HAD to cheat — their way into power, we’re going to turn into China, and woe, woe, woe.

No matter how often I tell them — and I’m not alone, and frankly like looking at the Diamond Princess numbers when the “pandemic” started, this is only sense — that yes, that’s what China thinks. It might be what the left thinks too (the dumber ones, at least. The smarter/not crazy/not stoned our of their minds ones are just trying to get rich and run out the clock and not get a la lanterned). But their thinking it doesn’t MAKE it so. Yes, that’s what their moves trend to. BUT have you seen their idea of reality and how far it is from, you know, real reality? What makes you think that what they think is the perfect move is in fact a perfect move? They’re not playing 3 dimensional chess. They’re playing 3 dimensional tiddly winks on an invisible chess board that exists only in their minds, while using live frogs as tiddly wink pieces.

Sure, China is going to be the world hegemon forever…. In defiance of their very long history of in point of fact not having a clue other cultures EXIST or that other people are different from them. An history that, back when they were the most advanced people in the world meant they often turned tail and isolated themselves, rather than deal with those icky, icky foreign devils who were so utterly irrational.

But let’s go with that. Tell me, oh, wise ones, how does China feed her people, once they take down the US? Because without us buying their (mostly crap, TBH) products, out of our abundance of wealth, and feeding them with our cheap agricultural produce out of our abundance of production, China can’t in point of fact support itself. It collapses very fast and goes into one of their warring states periods.

Can that happen? Yeah, sure it can because Chinese blind spots mean they don’t understand they can’t stop the wheel of the world’s production and innovation and go on their merry way. They’re the Middle Kingdom. They need no barbarian power, and life would be much better without the barbarian power.

So yes, China will try to grind our bones to make their bread.

But my guess is LONG before they get to the point we’re there, they collapse. However, that’s neither here nor there. The truth is if they try to do that, they collapse.

And what are we doing then, under their heel? Sitting with our thumbs up our butts? Because why? We suffered a paralytic stroke? For one, once the left stops getting loads of Chinese monopoly money, THEY collapse. And probably run away, though you know what, I wouldn’t put it past them trying to rule from a bunker. They almost are right now.

This is the same with “It’s 1984, and the left will rule us forever.” What? Like all the other great totalitarian regimes in history, which within years couldn’t feed themselves? Sure, they’ll rule us forever, because we’re going to live on air and unicorn farts.

Also I’ll remind you that we’re bigger in landmass than Germany, bigger in population than Russia, and that even there the resistance in the form of a black market and various f*ck-f*ck games not only existed but arguably were the only thing that functioned.

I mentioned that I’d watched Le Roi Danse, in French for the love of heaven — though not precisely true. I watched various parts of it — and part of what struck me was that the insane man — he invented bureaucracy, you know? — was trying to build the model of the industrial totalitarian state. Except things weren’t to where he could yet. And now they’re well past it.

The 1930s were the ideal world for 1984. Since then? Not so much.

Yes, sure, But spying devices, they know everything about us, and reeeeeeee.

I know, I know, running around with your head on fire is great fun isn’t it? And believing things are hopeless absolves you from trying to do anything.

But if those spying devices/ubiquitous data gathering were so d*mn effective, they wouldn’t have NEEDED to fraud at the last minute, in plain view.

One thing the left can never process is that other people lie to them. It’s part of their conceit of themselves that they are the smartest people in any room, so they know they can lie to us, but us? Effectively lie to them? That’s not possible.

The other thing that none of the people running around with their heads on fire get is that no tech, none can process the masses of information these ass clowns are gathering.

Information gathering ALWAYS exceeds the ability to process it. Sure, they can process more now, but they can gather exponentially more. I recommend you watch The Lives of Others to understand this discrepancy.

This is why, ultimately, totalitarian states are ineffective and starve. Because their terror is ultimately always arbitrary which personally scares the crap out of me, but it doesn’t mean it scares the crap out of me HISTORICALLY. Sure, their random bullshit could kill me and mine. Meh. We all die sometime. But America will come back and go on. ALMOST for sure.

Look, we’re in a pickle and no mistake, and the bullshit we’re letting these idiots get away with is going to make my great grandkids (if I ever have any eh) work ten times as hard to have a decent life, and innovate.

But you know what? We don’t have an America to bail us out and enable us in our stupidity. By our sheer size, and the fact we’ve been the engine of the world for so long, if we fall nothing replaces us. Which is good, because it means we can’t go on playing at socialism while someone else grows the wheat and sends it over to feed us.

In the end, America will have to unf*ck itself, because there’s no America to come bail us out.

Or, you know, we go down into the stonnnnnnne ageeeeee forever. REEEEEE.

Except that’s never happened. Ever. Correction: It’s absolutely possible, if you’re a small tribe, and your place gets covered with a volcano. But with a world-wide civilization?

Bah.

The Lizard will surely die, yeah.

Just like it was surely going to die when the “hammer” of the Soviet Union fell. Except because the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, its might was mostly smoke and mirrors, and could only persist so long as people like Jimmah Carter enabled them because they were so scared of this “vaunted might.” And the fact the Soviet Union would “inevitably” eventually win.

I grew up with this shit. No one who lived through it can imagine how all the serious people stroked their chins and told us about the great efficiency of the soviet union, and how they were going to win the cold war, or send the whole world into the stone age.

And then Reagan stood up to it. And told them “We win, you lose” and the whole thing crumbled, like the rotten illusion it was.

So, having been there? This whole “China will ruuuuuuuule us foreeeeeever” is awfully familiar.

Look, the lizard in the Diamond Princess is sunning itself on deck and laughing, while you run around screaming of doom. Just as they were back a year ago. AND YEAH I TOLD YOU SO.

But yeah, we’re in trouble and no mistake, with a Junta having taken over and hating us with a burning passion.

And? It’s not even the stupidest thing we’ve ever done. Tell me another country who ever banned alcohol. ALCOHOL for the love of Bob. And another government who went around poisoning alcohol.

FDR was a greater menace than these assholes. His every instinct was totalitarian and thanks to mass media, he was not even suspected of the shit he puled and thanks to the perilous knowledge/control of history he fooled a good 85% of the people. And those he didn’t fool thought they were alone.

Yes, yes, yes, I know. The Lizard will SURELY die. But not today. Probably tomorrow, by slipping in the shower. Maybe.
But you know what? Yeah, every human civilization is mortal.

But we’re not ready to be eaten by a hawk, or even a blinkered dragon yet. And we won’t be.

Unless, of course, the lizard convinces itself to lie down and die.

In which case, China still won’t win and certainly not forever. The left won’t win and certainly not forever.

But we can CHOOSE to lose.

The question is: WHY WOULD YOU?

F*ck that noise.

To quote President Reagan: In the end we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

Today I’m going to do something incredibly distasteful. I’m going to teach you to be paranoid.

It’s been obvious to me — well before it was to anyone else — that while not living precisely in the Truman show, we lived in a carefully manufactured reality.

Oh, it’s not a conspiracy, though it contains conspiracies. It’s a prospiracy. Meaning that everyone having been indoctrinated in the same “verities” (which ain’t) and taught to see the world through a Marxist lens (if I had a dime for every journalist whom I heard say their job was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted! I’d never worry about money again) they all want to be on the side of those they perceive as angels, and manufacture consensus “truth” like one manufactures sausages.

Oh, they have to maneuver around some hard shoals of truth, because it’s hard to tell the empty belly it’s full, or the unemployed that he has a job. But they come up with excuses for that to protect presidents they love. They couldn’t make Obama’s misrule into a great new beginning or an era of plenty, but they tried. How many “Summers of Recovery” did we have, with even the Wall Street Journal joining into singing hosannas? And how many times did they make excuses, based on the state of the world, and what Bush had done, and this and that and the other thing. And now he’s in the rearview mirror they’re little by little burnishing his memory, talking about how great he was at this and that. In twenty years they’ll have it in the history books that his presidency was a time of joy and plenty, with the country united, and the only hardships were caused by Trump, who of course, knew nothing of management or money. No? Watch them.

If we continue lending them credence, that’s exactly where they’ll have us.

I’ve been aware of it since at least Carter, when I watched not only the press explain away the catastrophically high gas prices he inflicted on the country by saying we were coming to the end of oil, but the science fiction community, even, swing into step, and instead of bright futures of space exploration, start to write of miserable futures of scarcity and rust, where everyone behaved like villains. Because when the president is a miserable failure who shoots cats for sport, the only way to make him look good is to make every Jack and Jill a villain.

And then I watched the burnishing of the Carter years in the rearview mirror, the same as I watched them painting the Reagan years as miserable years of want and struggle and greed.

They lie to us, because they lie to themselves. Because their cult demands they be right, and history must be adjusted to fit.

As they used to say in the Soviet Union, we always know the future, because it’s dictated by the party and it’s the glorious dictatorship of the proletariat, ahem you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. It is the past that keeps changing, to retcon history to make the idiots in control always and forever heroes, instead of the scurrying rat villains that they are.

Their power is diminished now, this is true. The only people still reading the increasingly detached from reality newspapers or watching the official news (and don’t fool yourself that Fox isn’t converged) are people who are very busy or very old and usually the very busy are at least my age.

The cult of the “acceptable source” has diminished. Or at least it has split to acceptable sources on the right and acceptable sources on the left. Oh, and perhaps still acceptable establishment sources, but that’s smaller.

However, it is important to realize all those sources are still influenced by the big megaphone of main stream press, and still come through if diluted.

Yesterday at Power Line (Yeah, I know. Note I rarely link them anymore) I found myself reading a baffling article in which they talked of how Chicago and Wisconsin and whatever the other race was had gone left, and analyzing the causes. As if causes beyond “the vote is rigged” made any sense. They immediately fell into line with the big megaphone of the left, and accused those “agitating against abortion” of being guilty for the losses. Which frankly is why the left keeps agitating for abortion. Not because it’s an immensely popular topic or that the right talks about it much, after being quietly glad the national mandate was overturned, but because it gives them coverage for the massive, rank, obvious fraud.

And our side knows there was fraud. Impossible not to know in 2020, and those who paid close attention to important contests in 2022 saw it too, the same impossible numbers cropping up, as the automated fraud kicked in from the machines.

But because the mainstream press keeps treating those elections as legitimate, we eventually fall into treating them as such, and looking for causes for them.

It made me feel like someone watching people look for their glasses with them on their faces. Or carefully ponder what happened to the eggs, and ignoring the frying pan and oil, and the dirty plates.

None of this is unfamiliar to me. I was fortunate, at a very young age, to be present at historical events, and then read them described in the press, and finding no resemblance whatsoever. I’ve also been fortunate to realize that whether I was there or not, and no matter the verisimilitude, people will remember the lie oft told over the truth.

In fact, I will tell you it was easier for my parents to see the lie when reading the press under the national socialist government which fell when I was 11 — because they knew it was a lie and under censorship, and knew to read “pravda” by reading its entrails — than afterwards, under the succession of socialist and one or two outright communist regimes, and the lies became even harder to discern later after 78, under supposed “freedom of the press” where it became a prospiracy as what we have, and the directives from above more or a “Of course we should talk of x to advance y.”

Do you remember when Alaskan cruises were all the rage, because the left wanted to kill the Alaskan pipeline, and so they must go on and on about this pristine wilderness that would be “destroyed” and take as many influential lefties as possible through it, people who never asked how the pipeline would in fact harm this natural environment?

Right now the rage is all in cool electric cars. Because of course, the left wants to push the carbon free bullshit, as though it were possible, and didn’t cause more environmental destruction — unless you don’t count Africa.

And for a while they were trying to push the poor, oppressed illegals, though I think they found it hard going. But these themes will be everywhere at once, startlingly, because all of them rush to be the “good people” the (im)moral crusader no one needs.

The fact that now their big thing is to teach children weird sex is both baffling and a measure of how out of control their message machine is.

At the same time it’s a massive distraction. You should of course be outraged about it. And about the fact they’re trying to careen us into war. And and and

But you shouldn’t lose sight of the important thing: They’re doing all this because they’ve corrupted our voting system.

The only way to fight it that doesn’t involve blood up to our ankles is to fight it on that front. To do everything possible and impossible to restore voting integrity. The big things like repealing that fraud machine, Motor Voter, must be done once in power.

Meanwhile, it behooves us to not use machines. To vote late and on paper. (And raise holy hell on all fronts if someone has already voted for us) and above all to sound the tocsin and remind everyone that there is election theft, and it will continue until made to stop.

At this point no election can be assumed to be clean. To assume so is to give them power and legitimacy they don’t have.

Sound the tocsin. Sometimes it’s all you can do. Refuse to forget the theft.

And when you read the news stay alert for “why is everyone talking of THIS now?” and stay alert to discontinuities in the story, things that made no sense. They will describe x as leading inevitably to y, but there is no connection, either in fact or even — often — in Marxist fables.

Take the current rise in crime. They will tell you it’s because people are poorer and therefore are committing more crime. But that connection only exists in the minds of Marxists. Poor people are not likely to steal because they’re poor. The crime rate is probably the same, rich or poor. It’s only the crimes that are different. However, the left letting murderers, rapists and thieves out of jail (or into the country through the wide open border) has indeed increased the crime.

When they talk of increased automation, and “AI” causing unemployment, remember they used the same excuse under Carter. It is no such thing, but their onerous regulations (Biden signed a boatload last week) and taxes and instability causing the economy to buckle.

Pay attention to those explanations that make no sense, to the events that disappear from the front pages or are never mentioned, to the lacunae and omissions or outright obvious lies.

By remembering the Diamond Princess Covid-19 numbers, I stayed clear-eyed about the rather minor impact of the virus and how out of proportion the response was.

What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Robert A. Heinlein

There is no truth in pravda, but there is truth in the lacuna, the omissions, the “wait a minute, that ain’t right” in the “it was there, and it was nothing like that.”

Find those. And hold them. No matter how tempting it is to forget and join the consensus. No matter how easy it is to think “I must be wrong, because they all say that–“

Find the facts, and hold them. And steer by them. We need people aware of the truth, as the gaslighting machine that our overculture has become spins us further and further from reality.

Because reality is that which will kill you, even if you deny it. Reality is what you must live with, even if you’re away with the fairies in your mind.

Reality is a stone cold bitch. It never forgives.

But if you live by her, if enough of us lives by her, there is a chance, slim but possible, that we can get through this and emerge on the other side as the free nation we were meant to be.

Again and again, what are the facts? Go find them.