Category: Uncategorized

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

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Barbarella: The Center Cannot Hold #1

BARBARELLA IS BACK IN A NEW STAR-SPANNING EPIC!BARBARELLA SETS OUT ON A DESPERATE MISSION TO STOP INTERGALACTIC WAR BETWEEN GODLIKE BEINGS!Beyond the edge of known space lies…the Unnamable. Myth? Gods? Malevolent force? No one knows. No one but the one force in the universe that can stand against the Unnameable: the Architects, hidden guides of our galaxy for untold eons.Enter Barbarella, on a desperate quest to find and convince the Architects that a war with the Unnameable will spell the death of Every. Living. Thing.Get ready for tension, excitement, espionage, and the secret of how to defeat an empire. Fun, romance, and cosmic adventure beyond the furthest reaches of the galaxy!

FROM LAWDOG’S PRESS AND CONTAINING PEOPLE LIKE C.V. WALTER AND CEDAR SANDERSON AND JL CURTIS ET AL: Space Cowboys

There’s something about the Cowboy that speaks to us all. So it only makes sense that, as humans expand into space, they’re going to bring their Cowboys with them.Join 10 authors as they explore what Space Cowboys would look like, why we love them, and how they deal with the livestock that travels with humanity.

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: Who Is Willing

Alysha Forrest is looking forward to her assignment as the Songlance’s newest lieutenant, particularly when it gets her placed as the liaison to the ship’s water environment crewmembers. Interfacing with the mermaid-like Naysha and the alien Platies who serve as the ship’s navigators is an exhilarating experience, and all the other officers on the crew are eager to welcome her into the fold… all of them, except one.

Mike Beringwaite, the overbearing ensign who ruined their leadership retreat years earlier, has somehow made lieutenant too. When a routine problem in the water environment throws them together, Alysha has to decide how willing she is to forgive him for what he did, whether she can work with him again, and most importantly, if she can trust him–with her life.

The disaster at the leadership retreat is nothing to the one they have to handle now. If they can….

BY HENRY OYEN, BROUGHT BACK BY D. JASON FLEMING: Gaston Olaf (Annotated): The classic pulp adventure western

When big, boisterous Gaston Olaf François Thorson first set eyes on Havens Falls, it was just a little lumber settlement, like many others. Riverfront saloons, a dance hall, just the sort of place he needed after too many months in the woods alone with his buddy Tom Pine.

What he didn’t reckon on was meeting Rose Havens, or the changes she would inspire within him. He also didn’t reckon on Devil Dave Taggart, owner, by hook or by crook, of almost all the timberland within a dozen miles.

Least of all did he reckon on himself, Gaston Olaf of all people, becoming a force for law and order in a town that sorely needed it!

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

FROM TOM VEAL: Strange Tales for Strange Times

If you think you live in strange times, these tales will show you what strangeness really is

• A down-on-his-luck pastor gets the miracle that he prays for and has to live with its consequences.A resort makes romance literally inescapable.On the universe’s last-born planet, its greatest thinker must choose or reject immortality.A being who dwells in the region beyond the Moon changes the Earth forever.The Presidential election of 2016 – but, no, that was indeed stranger than fiction. Here you can read a commonplace version (well, not quite).And then some book reviews, though the books in question were never written.And some more.

When you finish, the world around you will seem normal, if not outright dull.Introductory Special: In case you’re nervous about paying money for the work of a guy you’ve never heard of, you can get Strange Tales for Strange Times for just $1.49 – half its regular prince – from now through the end of February.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: His Terrible Stall: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure (Martha’s Sons Book 5)

On a lost and stranded colony world, with his brother’s family at risk, Peter Dawe will do what he must to protect them.

A lost starship’s settlers turn one valley on an alien planet into a terraformed replica of Earth. The rest of the planet offers only hardship and madness. Despite the oasis First Landing provides, the ship’s crew fled decades earlier with their fabricators, spacecraft, and knowledge when those controlling the valley threatened their freedoms.

The ship’s crew founded a separate colony on the southern plains. From there they spied on their former passengers, always fearful that the richer valley would come to take what they had. Even after a generation, the loathing persists.

A man in exile—

Peter Dawe faces an arid existence in a brother’s secret northern outpost. His work there has meaning and purpose, but when asked to journey to the southern settlement to help recover stolen weapons his brother needs, Peter has to defeat his own belief he shouldn’t expect too much from life.

A brother’s quest—

Determined to find the missing rifles, Peter works his way through supposed friends and allies to catch the real thieves. But can he overcome the prior generation’s ruthless plans to stop him when his own life hangs in the balance?

His Terrible Stall is the fifth book in the gripping science fiction colonization series Martha’s Sons. If you like driven heroes and strange worlds, you’ll want to throw yourself into this one.

Pick it up now to join the hunt!

https://amzn.to/3Sw2p5jFROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202301 Classified Struggling

A collection of the events of January 2023, interspersed by news headlines that are just as depressing. We’re still going down and there is no ground floor, so what are we going to do about it?

I’ve polished and edited the pamphlets I published this month, organizing the subject matter to cover the virus/vaccine, the insecurity our rulers have for classified documents, the various economic crises, describing our rulers and their anti-culture attitudes and whatever’s going on with foreign countries. I’ve even interspersed a few essays on pop culture, but keep that to yourself.

The B-side of the book is short but unusual. I’ve actually been creating comics on Paint, simple propaganda covering the struggle each of us is facing every day. The first fictional art I’ve created in years and this is what I’m stuck with? That’s the world we live in. We need to change that.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Sound of One Child Crying

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

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

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

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

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion and the Lizard

Thirty years ago, Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., AKA The Lion of God, had a pretty exhausting week.

Her world was invaded by time-traveling soldiers, she was nearly turned into human toothpaste by an experimental dimension jumper when she went to find her parallel “Dad,” who just happens to be able to borrow a Space Force fleet to come and take out her world’s invaders . . . and then she found out she was considered by those same invaders to be a saint in their odd religion, and one of the targets of their invasion. If that wasn’t enough, she nearly fell completely out of the universe into a time rift, being saved only by the skin of her teeth by her parallel “Dad”.

After all that, learning she was going to be the one to bring universal healing and long life to the human race in her particular timeline was just the icing on the proverbial cake.

Anybody else would go home, turn off their phone, pull all the blinds, lock all the doors, and take the rest of their life off. But Ari isn’t “anybody else”. And her cult of admirers across two timelines won’t take “nobody home” for an answer.

Fast-forward thirty years. Scientists have detected radio transmissions in an unknown language from several hundred light years away. And now she’s been asked to use her special “saintly” skills as demonstrated on her last “mission” to make first contact with whoever they are.

And that’s only the beginning.

Looks like Ambassador Dr. Ariela Rivers Wolff, M.D., Ph.D., is going to have another pretty exhausting week. Or six.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Fall of Empire (Fall of the Alliance Book 8)

Igor’s back!And his Cyborg Buddy Murphy is in trouble.As the destabilized Three Part Alliance totters, Igor, AKA Axel Vinogradov has to decide whether to shore up the edifice, or complete the collapse. In the meantime there’s a couple of cross dimensional raids, a kidnapped class of teenagers, marooned women on a cross dimensional Tropical Paradise . .

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: The Guardian Cycle, Vol.1: In Dreams and Other Stories

A man whose debts must be paid by vengeance. A woman desperate to save her husband. A grieving father finding a young enemy soldier on his veritable doorstep…

These fantasy and soft sci-fi stories wonder whether or not heroes need families. Are we not told that families slow the hero down? Is it not typically implied that they get in the way of the adventure? Are they a burden, or truly the greatest strength from which the hero and those he loves can draw?

Six tales in this collection center on family, faith, and self-sacrificing love as men and women fight for the ones whom they hold most dear. Whether the enemy is inner turmoil, a nightmare, or a demon really does not matter. If the threat seeks to harm a member of the family, it is going to pay dearly.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: A Capital Whip: A Pride and Prejudice Sequel

An invalid for much of her life, Miss Anne de Bourgh has precisely one accomplishment: carriage driving. She is proud of her skill with reins and whip, and justifiably so.

But when another young lady moves into the neighborhood, and challenges Anne’s place as the most accomplished driver in Hunsford, Anne must prove to herself, to her beloved horses, and to her family that she is worthy of the name de Bourgh, and she does not shrink away from a challenge.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Bowl of Red

At the top of a tall mountain, there lives a dragon. And the dragon is the master of all animals.
Okay, let’s rewind that. Tom Ormson is a dragon shifter, the scion of a line that was created to rule both Chinese and Norse dragons. But he doesn’t want the job. He co-owns a diner with his wife, Kyrie, who is about to deliver their first child.
In fact, they just got married, when the entire shifter-world, which centers on their diner goes insane.
You see, it is a time of Ragnarok, which means all of the shifter clans are in turmoil, with changing leadership. And the lion clan, to which Kyrie belongs has just lost its leader. Poor Rafiel, too, is tormented by very strange dreams and premonitions. Also, the Queen of the Norse dragons has woken, and wants a word with the Great Sky Dragon.
Hold on to your hats. A wild ride is about to begin, with Tom, Kyrie and their friends at the center of it.
When it ends, the world will never be the same again.

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:fortunate

I was going to write a blog post on how discriminating against a minority paradoxically weaponizes it.

I was also going to finish a story. But then my husband needed to have a long talk with me. And it was an important talk. (No, nothing bad. On the contrary, but still a long talk.)

And here we are. And I haven’t done any writing….

So I thought I’d lay low for a while and pretend nothing was late, but then again, I realized that I might as well face the music and tell you what was going on.

Now that’s done, I’m going to try to submerge and finish work. And do real posts next week.

See you later! (I don’t have to finish that, right?)

We all know I’m often followed by a black dog who tells me everything I do and everything I am is worthless.

Honestly, I’d be nothing and do nothing, and probably lie curled on the floor of my room for eternity, if it weren’t for another canine in my menagerie.

We’ll call him The motivator.

The motivator snarls and growls at my heels day and night. He’s like the slave that stood behind Caesar at the triumph, reminding him that he’s still nothing, but with a side of sharp teeth and slavering mouth.

When I was writing and no one would buy me for over ten years, I knew that I would be happy if only someone accepted one of my short stories.

Well, that happened, and that same afternoon, after enjoying success for like ten seconds, the dog started growling and biting my heels, and telling me I needed to be professionally published.

I think I enjoyed the check for my first professional sale for an hour or two, as the dog snarled and growled I must immediately start working on selling a novel.

And so it goes. I mean, for winning the dragon I got fried ice cream, so I enjoyed it for…. 15 minutes? (In my defense I was in Meeker, CO that weekend, and there really wasn’t much more available in the way of fun.)

Right now the dog is mad enough with me — February has been…. difficult to get anything done in — not even sure why. There have been very minor health flukes, but …. very minor. It’s mostly just me, being stupid, I think — that I feel like I’m at risk of being eaten hole.

The dog stresses me, and makes me run when I could rest. He makes the idea of retirement impossible. The idea of resting on my laurels highly unlikely.

But looking at my colleagues who just gave up, oh, sorry, were happy after one short, one book, one award (or even nomination) I both envy them and bless the dog.

Because without the growls and snarls, I’d be closer to what the black dog says I am: worthless. Never did anything. Never will.

Now, if I can finish the stories I have on hand before my heels are gone, that would help. And if I could get the dog to stop snarling I need to be cleaning house while I’m writing, or that I’m wasting time when I am actually cleaning house because I should be writing, that would help too.

I am aware if I do, it will be due to the snarling dog. Almost all of us who achieve anything or do anything have one of these puppies, from the same litter.

It would be wonderful to produce in a burst of ecstatic self-confidence. And maybe some people do that. I don’t know. Never met any.

For the rest of us, we curse and bless the snarling dog.

Without him, we’d be happier. But without him we’d accomplish nothing.

Humans are really bad at forecasting what is going to happen, and what the consequences of their actions will be. I don’t know if this fault is worse in humans who want to take power and force everyone to obey their grandiose plans, or if it’s simply more obvious in them because the rest of us aren’t displaying our lack of foresight for the entire universe.

I came across an article, recently, complaining that the price of commercial real estate is plunging. And they don’t know what it means, or why this could have befallen commercial real estate.

Meanwhile a lot of us are sitting here, looking at it and going “There was a significant number of jobs that could already be done outside the office. By locking people down, you forced them to do so, and proved to companies that they could do that. For most companies, having the workers working from home saves money. This is particularly true for those in overpriced, increasingly unsafe cities.

But apparently these people who think of themselves as great planners were completely blindsided by this development.

The same is true for the world class brains who were doing their usual little game of letting the ferals depreciate commercial real estate in places like NYC and Denver, only to clean it up and bring in their friends and cronies to buy the vacant places in a couple of years. And all of a sudden people — including companies — are just living for places that aren’t completely insane.

And it’s a surprise! Surprise!!!!

I wouldn’t believe it, of course, but I suspect it really is a surprise. You see, I spent ten years so far hearing publishers going so far as to rig polls (Well, Publishers’ Weekly did) and obscuring statistics to tell themselves everything is fine, and ebooks and indie publishing were a fad that was sure to disappear. For all I know they’re still telling themselves that.

Whistling past the graveyard.

Because they can’t believe that things that have always been will change. And it’s particularly hard to believe that when power is getting ripped from you.

And as it doesn’t work. It particularly doesn’t work when you keep whistling long after you passed the graveyard, and everyone can see what you’re doing.

That is the case of those lists of “best books” that try to convince us some woke tripe is the bestest thing ever, while ignoring the true masters’ of the field.

When the things they try to push as the bestest, most wonderfulest ever are not just mediocre, but stuff so ridiculous that no one — not even the woke — reads it, what they’re doing is p*ssing down our back while screaming, begging and imploring that we believe them.

And when we don’t, then they accuse us of being scared of losing our privilege. Which would be remotely plausible if we’d ever had any privilege.

That is past whistling past the graveyard and well into tantruming past the graveyard demanding we believe them, not our lying eyes.

And in the end all it does is emphasize how much they’ve lost control of the information stream and the ah… mass-industrial written (and other) entertainment.

All they have left now is whistling past the graveyard. And the whistle sounds sadder and thinner as it goes, rolling away into the night of the final loss they can no longer tell themselves won’t come.

In the end, the only people they fool are themselves.

This one is going to hurt and badly, but in the end we win, they lose.

Be not afraid.

First and very importantly I want to make all of you aware of this site: Glorious Meme Commissar of Proletariat.

It is run by a friend of this blog, and collects some great ones. These first few memes come from that. (And we refuse to explain the one about the secretary of transportation. Deal with your disappointment. Whatever possesses you, though, DO NOT LOOK IT UP.)

The next few are memes found in the wild that he hasn’t corralled yet:

And these are more personal but still true. The top one is how a lot of us feel about our fandom.

This is absolutely true in this house. Every time you fight Dan tooth and nail to get a cat. Who does the cat love, adore and OBEY? Dan.

Oh, and in these difficult times, it’s really important to combat a tendency to become an alcoholic. Not only am I taking this challenge, but I understand that Stephen Green (AKA Vodka Pundit) is joining in. We should all support him in this difficult challenge.

First, let’s specify that is an honor and a privilege to be an American citizen and part of this grand experiment in self governance.

Even now, with all the fraud and… ah… weirdness, we’re still the best country in the world. More, we might manage to extricate ourselves from this without landing in the dystopia of the Davoisie’s dreams, and that’s pretty much us, in all the world.

Long ago, before embarking on this wild adventure of marrying and raising a family, my fiance and I discussed it, and realized we’d be poorer (relatively) in America, but this is where we wanted our children and grandchildren to be raised.

Surely this great a privilege must come with duties, right?

Sure. One of them is to exercise franchise with care and thought (or ask a well intentioned idiot who they’re voting for, then vote against.) Another is to understand history and try to speak out to keep our experiment to the intended Constitutional course. Another is to serve in the military, or otherwise defend your country in any way you’re called to, in time of danger. To that purpose, you’re supposed to keep yourself trained to take part in the militia that all citizens are supposed to constitute.

You know what’s not part of those duties? “Pay taxes for the privilege to vote.” For one, because our privilege of voting right now is not worth a plugged nickel, since legitimate votes are being flooded out by the dead, the non-existent and the non-citizens. (No? Prove otherwise. Keeping confidence in the vote is the duty a legally elected government. They’re supposed to do what it takes to reassure us that the voting is legal and clean. You know what doesn’t do that? Yelling at us and telling us it’s legal. You know what would? Permitting investigations, in fact demanding them, encouraging states to clean up the voting rolls, and stopping the use of dodgy machines, as well as stopping motor voter and demanding proof of citizenship to register to vote. Demanding people register a month ahead of voting and show ID to vote would be a good start. But not anywhere near enough.) For another because that’s called a poll tax, and rightly or wrongly it’s been specifically disallowed. Which if you think on it, makes sense, since, right now, if you needed to pay taxes to vote about half of the citizens couldn’t.

If you reflexively respond to any hint that one considers taxation theft, or that just changing the means or our fleecing will not change much, with “That’s unAmerican” and “you owe the taxes for the privilege of being American.” congratulations. You’ve been successfully brainwashed by New Deal Politics and have a massive confusion between your country and your government.

Let’s leave aside the fact that Taxation is in fact theft: you don’t get the right to say no, or even to argue. As someone who has had attempts to dun her for money not only not owed but “wait what?” back when, you argue with trepidation, and always aware that these bureaucrats, on a whim, can take everything you’ve worked for and destroy your life.

“But Sarah,” you’ll say. “You just need to reform it.”

No, you see, because once you establish the government’s “right” to take from you on threat of prison or worse, you can’t reform that. How can you? The people it attracts are the kind who love the crazy money and power. And it is not just the IRS but people in government in general. They’re attracted by large amounts of money that no one tracks very well. All the subcontractors to the government know they have to spend every bit of money. If you save money, you get punished by not being given the money you need next year.

What kind of crazy system is that? And that’s not counting all the politicians who hire family; those who divert “shovel ready” money to things like opera; and those who spend money preaching to Middle Eastern youth “gender” nonsense that makes Kansas farm boys laugh till they cry.

In fact, throughout the 20th century, in the full bloom of theft from the people, drunk with money, the US government who covered itself in the “defense” fig leaf (defense expenditures are something like 3% of the budget) has done only two things well: arranged to kill its own citizens and arrange new ways to steal from us.

The things it did badly are innumerable: it has destroyed our social fabric with mandatory discrimination against males, particularly males of a pale complexion; it has destroyed our schools with bizarre ideas hatched in Marxist struggle sessions; it has destroyed our science by sloshing around mad money for results it approves of; it has destroyed our transportation with its dreams of non-pollution and its fears of an end to gas; it has destroyed our families by paying women to kick men out; it has killed our babies in batch lots by demanding no limits to abortion; it has destroyed our arts by turning our artists into prostitutes; it has destroyed our military in a mad rush to make it kinder and more sensitive. It is now well on its way to destroying our ability to grow food and keep ourselves warm in winter.

If you like all of that, please let’s go on as we are. But might I perhaps suggest that if you like all of that, it might be cheaper to pay a discreet dom to whip you, call you names and feed you dog sh*t? And it will be easier on the rest of us.

You cannot stop the crazy train by “reforming” it. What are you going to do? Tell it that it can only steal so much and no more? Have you heard of honor among thieves? When? Not in humanity, that’s for sure.

So, what can you do?

Well, it is time to start questioning the very paradigm all this rests on.

It is time to realize taxation is theft. There is no other name for taking money by the force of arms, whether present or implied.

Oh, wait, yes, there’s another name. It’s Armed Robbery. But theft is shorter and easier to write, so I’ll continue using it but you may assume I mean armed robbery under threat of assault with a deadly weapon. (Whether the US army still qualifies as that, I leave as an exercise for the reader.)

Taxation is theft, and citizens of a free nation should be duly outraged to be subjected to it.

So–

Let’s stipulate that the government needs some money — oh, not the sloshing vast quantities of money it has — but some money.

We are a vast land, and it is probably right that our ambassadors don’t do their work part time, while teaching languages in local colleges by day (though what a glorious idea that would be. Talk about dedicated public servants.) We probably do need an armed forces (though note that the founders didn’t like the idea of a standing army) and we need (in fact very much need) weapons research, because I’d rather pay now for high-level killing devices than in American blood later on. (Hey, you know, the DIL and DIL in training might at some point give us grand-spawn, and at any rate, I have ducttape grand-spawn. I would prefer those don’t die, particularly since we can’t guarantee the Commander in Chief in 100 years won’t be a screaming Fraud Plant like Bai-Den.)

At any rate, some money is needed, though it shouldn’t be anywhere near the quantities that it is.

How to extract it without theft?

Well, believe it or not, the American people are the most generous people in the world, known to open their purses for good causes all over.

But yeah, I can also see that running the government from the charity of the governed isn’t a wonderful thing. Mostly because you can’t plan. You can’t count on it. (On the other hand, maybe not allowing these cartoon characters to plan would be a good thing?)

I’ve suggested a national lottery. Or rather a series of them. “Ooh, the lottery for Defense is up to a billion this week. We should buy two tickets. We can dream large, on that.” “Oh, you know, we haven’t bought the lottery for medical research in a while. And I’m not going to until they get rid of Fauci-clones.”

It puts the onus where it belongs. The government asks for our money, not the other way around. The same with oh, annual fundraisers, and what not. You want it? Ask the people for it, and show us what you’ve done to deserve it, or at least show us you’re not assholes stepping on our liberties.

I’m open to other suggestions in how the money should be collected to run the government.

There are some hard and fast things I’d not compromise on (not that I get to do as I want, of course, but I’m doing my duty as a citizen by pushing discussion of this.):

-No reaching in and taking money from people’s pay checks. Payment due must be paid at a time and place. You stand in line to give in your hard earned cash. And you see how much you’re giving the idiots

-No corporate tax. Why? Well, because corporations don’t have any money of their own. No, seriously. Their taxes are paid by increasing the cost of products. They’re paid by the consumers, and it’s a hidden tax.
However, also, no money given to corporations. Ever. The government is not Robin Hood stealing from everyone to give to their friends. We’ve gone a good long way towards Fascism (Real fascism, which is crony capitalism on steroids) and it’s time to throttle the heck back. If corporations have a contract with the government the terms of the contract should be publicly disclosed and available for anyone to look at/make a stink about. ALL the terms. Nothing hidden.

-Granted that we’re going to have to finish paying social security to those people in serious trouble. But social security should be means tested. And you should allow people to opt out of it who are just about eligible to receive it. (Like me.) You also should not sign any more young people to it.
This disbursement should be paid from a tax that sunsets in oh, 20 years. And everyone receiving payments should know it sunsets in 20 years.

There will need to be a tax levied to keep our commitments to our veterans, too. Because it was a contract, and it will not be abjured. While on that, though, those disbursements will be audited, because I understand we’re not giving our fighting men (and women) the very best. Not even close.

-Most federal departments should be disbanded. Yesterday. Government needs its frigging nose out of education; medicine; the environment; food production; etc. etc. etc. The government needs its nose whacked hard with a baseball bat before it gets it cut off with a guillotine.

-Any taxes levied for special purposes, should be temporary, sunset, and have no possibility of being extended. Ever.

-There will be no taxes levied and no federal funds available to illegals entering our border and being winked and nodded at by a government not keeping its fundamental duty to guard the borders. No services either. You want to come into our country trailing five or six kids who might be yours or kids you kidnapped along the way?

Fine and dandy. Well, not really. Defending the borders is something that the Federal government should be doing, and I’d gladly contribute to that. However: if I can’t prevent you coming in, I should not be responsible for treating your medieval disease caused by filth or bizarre alimentary habits, or your drug addiction. I should not be responsible for educating your kids. And I most definitely will not feed you or house you in the style you hope to become accustomed to.

You want handouts? Go back to where you came from and demand them from you local tyrant. Our local tyrants need a leash around their necks that tightens when they try to buy a new people with our money.

*******************

Now, yes, I’m fully aware that I don’t have the ability to enforce any of this. And most of it might be a pipe dream until the system crashes.

The thing is, the system is crashing, and will crash hard. Both because it is out of control and now it’s mostly doing more harm than good. It is also running headlong into a population crash of the productive. I’m half-sure that the importation of people over the Southern border (oh, now the Northern too) is just because the idiots in power don’t realize humans aren’t widgets and are amiably trying to import people to keep population numbers up. But there is a difference between the productive and the parasitic, and a country can’t subsist on the second kind. (I’m going to say too that while not every import is parasitic — not even every illegal import — the government largess showered on them on entry doesn’t lend itself to their becoming productive or striving to be so. Humans respond to incentives.)

Also our thieves, drunk on money, are trying to make us obey more minutely and in more insane ways, which will only crash everything harder and faster.

What I’m doing here is my duty as an American citizen. When it all crashes down, remember this failure was baked in.

Handing money to a bureaucracy in batch lots, money that is largely untraceable and uncontrollable by the true owners of this country, is how we get here. Money in huge, untraceable quantities attracts the corrupt, the corruptible, and those who want power. Because money is power, and the power to tax is the power to destroy.

Whatever is designed after must be done in the understanding that taxation IS theft. There is no “fair tax” the only fair tax would be a tax decided by each citizen, individually, and carefully. And that might be impossible given the size of the country and the complexities of collecting.

However the knowledge that taxation is theft should be beaten into any and every governmental stooge. Even supposing theft might at times be necessary, it should be limited, undertaken only in the most exigent of circumstances, and limited in time. And if possible, as much of government as possible should be funded voluntarily, be it by lottery or other means.

Think about it. Because handing money to a bunch of drunken clowns who are throwing it in a dumpster fire is NO part of being a good citizen.

And given sufficient untraceable money, you’re almost always going to attract drunken clowns into government and permanent bureaucracy.

And a nation ruled by drunken clowns cannot survive long.

I’m getting very tired of hearing people mindless repeat that the future is “plant based foods” Or “The future is meat free” or whatever the unholy idiocy they keep spouting.

The idiots who are spilling milk in the UK grocery stores — thereby of course, raising the demand for milk, because people still have to feed their kids! — the idiots who sit in front of shelves blocking access to milk — yeah, I note that it only happens in places where people are too civilized to get three strong guys to come, lift them and toss them out of the store with enough force to make it hurt — and the idiots who assemble at DAVOS to plan how to stop animal husbandry are all of a piece: idiots.

They’re the kind of lack brain who might own farms, but has no clue how agriculture, let alone raising animals actually works. The kind of mental midget who accepts numbers — population numbers, in this case — from the UN and never asks how those are gathered, or how the interests of the people gathering them run. I mean, do they wish to report high population or low population? Because you know there is a reason to go through the effort of reporting something.

Also, and by the way, there is no way that South Elbonia, who consists of a few farmers, two large cities in a state of war, and the rest more or less nomadic pastoralists, and whose GDP consists of painted clogs and three buckets of rice (that can be tracked. I mean, obviously the people have more, but they sure as heck aren’t volunteering to pay taxes on it) and whose officials get rich only one contributions from the IMF (“Loans” no one ever expects to be paid back) is able to count their population. Even if they wanted to. And FYI no they don’t want to. They want to report an explosive population increase, because that’s the way they get more money (per capita) to feed all those non-existent people, but really to make the president for life and his cronies very rich.

Look at these numbers from the UN and you see the problem of population predictions very clearly: Take this UN-number-based nonsense.

You don’t have to be my younger son, who can’t look at numbers that don’t add up without feeling pain and starting to growl out all the ways in which they don’t add up. You can poke around and see all the supposed “births” are in countries that are net recipients of aid.

More importantly you can poke around and realize we have — even with their numbers — a massive dearth of women in child bearing ages worldwide. So they expect the population to continue increasing…. because they expect non-existent women to give birth.

Beyond all that if we are anywhere near six billion — let alone eight — I’ll eat my hat without salt and pepper. The big floppy straw hat I use while gardening. Why? Well, because it’s not just the fact that developing countries make up numbers out of the clear blue sky. “There are three farms within walking distance of here, and each of the farmers has 10 children. That’s three farms in two miles. How many square miles does the country have? Obviously we multiply that by three farms every two miles, and number of families with ten kids.” (And I’m being generous. It’s not nearly that scientific. It’s more “How many people did we report last year? How may do we need to get more millions to steal? Okay. Let’s add that many.” It’s also the fact that countries immigrants come from continue counting them as living there, and often collecting payments for them as unemployed. Ask me how I know that. Come on, ask me. And take in account this was standard operation procedure in Portugal, which was always almost first world. Imagine what goes on in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Brazil or in the depths of Africa.

I repeat if we’re anywhere near six billion and you can prove it to me, I’ll eat my hat. Twice. Without salt or pepper.

And note that however many we are, the only famines happen due to explosive government stupidity. Every time, in the last hundred and fifty years or so, that any place in the world was starving, it was because government corruptocrats had come up with something special. They were either intentionally starving a sub-population, or they’d become enamored of some “brilliant” intellectual notion, like Marxism, and thereby redistributed land or the like, and sent their farmers to the desert, killing everyone with hunger.

The “green” delusion is a new way to accomplish this, but a very effective one, to look at Sri Lanka.

And it all starts with twin lies.

The first is overpopulation, stretching exponentially, until the universe is entirely composed of humans, not choking in vacuum because there’s no space for vacuum. There’s only humans.

The second is that any hunger in the world is due to our not producing enough food to feed the EXPLODING human population. — Which of course, makes perfect sense, since we don’t know how to grow wheat in vacuum — and therefore we need to optimize our ability to feed everyone, not by creating the most calorie-dense food possible, but by feeding everyone the bare minimum to stay alive and make more humans. Or something.

It is in fact Malthus’ old stupidity, almost instantly disproven, that human population would grow and grow and grow regardless of incentives. Like a total berk, having seen population in his time explode (largely due to reduced child mortality) he never considered that human beings, like every living thing on Earth, respond to stimulus, and decided women would continue to spend all their lives pregnant, when they would raise every one of the 14 or 15 kids, instead of — with luck — one or two to look after them in their old age. Because idiot. And fastening on one aspect of something, without realizing that there were more variables. He also didn’t take in account that humans figure out ways to produce more food when such is needed. No. He assumed two factors were all that mattered and would remain the same world without end. If he were alive today he’d be a climate “scientist” proving that we’re already all burned in our shell and have been for twenty five years, and ignoring everything to the contrary, including the fact we’re obviously not all dead. But then again, he probably would also be running the British models that said that Covid would have a close mortality to the Black Plague, with numbers pulled entirely from their posterior.

Anyway, all it boils down to is lies about people: that people are mindlessly reproducing automatons, and lies about food.

Not just that food is scarce, but also a bizarre idea that could only take hold in minds that have never been near anywhere that food is produced. As I said, I don’t fully understand how Bill Gates can own farms and not understand this. But I suspect he has gotten reports, and looked at them, and not correlated them with anything else.

I suspect they read Diet For A Small Planet and BELIEVED it credulously, with closed eyes and open mouths. (And the idea that created that execrable book had been in the air amid the hippies, I suspect because most of them hated the idea of killing moo cows and bah lambs and were looking for an excuse not to. I have some vegetarian cookbooks printed in that era. They’re great for lent and side dishes. But the idiots bought the idea that plant based food was good for us, or something.)

The whole thesis of Diet For A Small Planet was that we’d need to go to all plant-based food, because we couldn’t afford to raise cows on acres that could produce rice and wheat. Because we’d need every handful of wheat to feed our EXPLODING population. I mean Paul Ehrlich, a man who has never been right, ever, and yet gets paid money for his prognostications, did say we’d all starve by the eighties. Or was it the seventies?

Anyway, I remember reading Diet For A Small Planet standing up at a Walden books (I was waiting for my job at a mall store to start, so–) and snorting loudly enough for everyone to turn to me. Because it was painfully obvious that no one who wrote that book had any clue how food grew. They vaguely thought that food grew “Out there” where it was rural and backwards and stuff, but nothing more than that.

To explain: Animal husbandry takes place in a completely different area than grain production. In the US, but also in Europe, the land that cattle pastures in is land that is almost universally not good enough to grow … well, much of anything on. In fact, having cattle pasture somewhere is a good way — over time — to improve the land for agriculture. There might be a reason our ancestors were pastoralists before they were agriculturists.

However, the idiots deciding that bugs are better protein don’t know that. They think (And granted it happens somewhat, in factory-farms, but even then what the cattle eats is not what is sold for humans to eat) that cows eat the same wheat that could go to feed ‘the starving.’ And they think that cattle takes up amounts of land that could better be used to grow wheat or rice.

There is a name for these people. “Simple.” And that’s the polite word, and we used to put them in homes where they couldn’t hurt themselves, not in places of power where they could hurt everyone.

All their contortions, their railing against cow farts, and screaming about nitrogen, and their insistence you eat the bugs (which take up less space than cows per cubic foot, see) is all based on this idiocy.

The population is EXPLODING. If it hasn’t exploded on your block, it must be because you’re keeping all your neighbors in separate containers so they can’t reproduce wildly, or something. And the food production of the world is maxed out, and people are already staaaaaaarving.

This is bolstered by things like the fact they’re importing people from the rest of the world as fast as they can, and they all live in cities so they think “The cities are growing exponentially. We’ve got EXPLODING population.” (This is bs. The US has almost only grown by importing people for the last 40 years — yes, including me — and those people are coming from countries that are not overpopulated, and in fact often have a dearth of young people and are turning into vast old age homes. And keep in mind that even in Europe, they’re importing from the third world as fast as they can. AND they’re still vast old age homes with borders. Also, even with those massive imports, our cities are now dying. And our countryside was always mostly depopulated. It would help if these idiots drove coast to coast instead of flying.)

So, they want to use every possible space to grow food. And bugs are better than cows, because (though they eat way more) we can stack them to grow them.

Lies kill. The lie that population is too high or that people are starving from lack of food, not excess government is creating other lies, including the idea we need to grow low-nutrition food everywhere, and forego the dense food that can eat brush and turn it into high calories to feed multitudes. Including the idea that bugs, one of the most voratious forms of life is better for those high-density calories than cows. Including the idea that if you make the West poor everyone else will be rich.

Malthus’ lies and Marx’s lies had offspring, and it is hideous to behold, as though it had come from the pit of hell.

Lies kill. And we need to fight them, every day of our life every way we can.

The more centralized government, the more a single lie can take hold of it — being only a handful of similarly-indoctrinated brains — and kill millions.

It’s time to stop centralized governments, centralized news, and centralized information. It’s time to stop the indoctrination factories that colleges have turned in two.

It’s time to stand on our own two feet, and with that human inventiveness that bedevils the mentally-slow one-factor or two-factor only prognosticators, make mockery of their predictions and confound all their directives.

Steak is delicious and cows can turn spiny oak brush into it. Chicken is a great way to turn bugs into food. Milk has allowed humans to prosper for the last 10000 years.

We will survive the idiocy — we’re already in the process of fighting back — as we survived the EXPLODING humans and lack of food before: by working around it.

If I weren’t allergic to chickens, we’d already have a coop. I’m not going to suggest you do what Portuguese do and use extra parking spaces for goat pens (though it might come to that) but if you can grow anything, even a balcony garden might help (Go for beans or other dense food.) And if you have a plot of land… well, in America even upscale suburbs have chickens now, and even the saner HOAs are turning a blind eye.

Grow your own as much as you can, and support your local farmers.

And laugh in the face of those who want you to starve or eat bugs. And ask them where the women to bear that massive population increase they predict are coming from.

Because barring aliens coming to earth to have babies with us, we’re in for a population crash. Which brings food production and distribution of a whole different kind, because non-existent people also don’t farm, or drive trucks.

So, prepare. This one is going to hurt like a mother.

But in the end we win, they lose. And humans will grow and multiply again. And eventually we will get to the stars and away from the centralized idiocy that would kill us all. Probably by our grand kids time.

Sursum Corda. Be not afraid.

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

As a side note, when you send me books to promo, do not send it with your own associate’s code. Obviously I’m not using that. Little as it is, the commission is my compensation for this work on Sunday morning. However, having your code there means I generate a link with your code, which apparently is what almost got my account cancelled before. So, let’s try NOT to dot hat, okay? I mean, I’d think it was common courtesy, but in case it’s not clear, DO NOT SEND ME BOOKS WITH YOUR ASSOCIATE CODE ATTACHED -SAH

BY MARGARET BALL: Shadow of the Crescent

Twenty-seven years after the fall of Constantinople…Caterina, Countess of San Florian, keeps a book of important things she’s learned, from poison antidotes to cosmetic recipes, from charms for toothache to ways of raising and commanding demons. Having a reasonable care for her soul, she has never actually tried demonic magic. Yet.Gian, captain of her personal guard, has an innate magical talent that does not rely on incantations, but warns him of danger and awakens him to opportunities. It makes him nervous.And Sultan Mehmed II wants one last great victory. San Florian would be an excellent base of operations for his army to attack Venice.On the run from Venice to Constantinople after the Turkish-aided takeover of San Florian, Gian and Caterina will need all their wits and every scrap of magic they can employ to escape, to survive, and to recapture their city.

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

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

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

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

BY STEWART STERLING, WITH INTRODUCTION BY D. JASON FLEMING: Down Among The Dead Men (Annotated): The pulp noir classic

Plenty of dead ones get dragged out of the dark, roily water that runs through the greatest city in the world. The Harbor Police take only routine notice. But when the cadaver comes in installments — a torso, a leg, an arm — that’s murder… There are lots of murders, sure, but what made Lieutenant Steven Koski do a double-take on this particular butchery was the gadget that came with the torso. In its own frightful little way it was a weapon — the kind of weapon that kills a lot of people kind of quick.

And Koski began to move — but fast. The murder marathon took him from a Coast Guard auxiliary vessel (cargo: one stunning blonde) to a waterfront dive. From a union leader’s hangout to an executive’s luxurious office. From a Chinese laundry to a ship being loaded with sudden death…

And all the way, a long thin shape, detestable and horrible, paced him. Koski drove himself frantically onward. He had to catch that thing — had to…

BY CEDAR SANDERSON AND VARIOUS: But Not Broken.

Fourteen stories of surviving and healing from cPTSD. Fiction has the power to give us an escape from where we are, and an ability to envision where we could be. None of these are easy stories, but all offer hope, and healing, for those who need to see a path through the fog of pain.

FROM TIM GILLILAND: The Djinn of Just Deserts: And other Stories

What would you do if you had a wish? One wish that could change your life forever. If you meet the Djinn of Just Deserts your life could change, or end depending on the choices you make. This is but one of ten tales of adventure spanning all the ages, and from the Earth to the further reaches of the Solar System.
A warning though, If you ever meet the Djinn,
Know wishes aren’t all that they seem.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Visitor, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That

A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for ThatTHE VISITOR – Felockati is anchored to his permanent location underwater and misses the days of roaming his ocean world freely.But something new drops out of the sky and widens his horizons — all the way to the stars.YOUR EVERY WISH – Stealing the alien ambassador’s dagger is a sure thing for Pete — just what he needs to pay off his debts.Until he starts talking to it. There has to be a way to get something for himself out of the deal. Has to be.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Shadow of a Dead God

What secrets lie beneath an alien world?

A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage — until the dreams started.

Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact.

Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants’ rule. Nothing will ever be the same.

A short story.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

I did not land here as a warrior, but a warrior I so soon became . . .

One moment, Dr. Yukiko Yamaguchi was in her high-tech singularity research lab in California, busily adjusting an electronically-leaky fitting playing hell with her instrument readings.

The next moment, she was falling through space, and landing hard in a wilderness area she would quickly discover was her family’s ancient stomping grounds in Japan – but with an apocalyptic twist.

A hundred years later, there would be legends of a great yōkai, a demon, whom some called a kamaitachi – a sort-of whirlwind, weasel-like creature with blades for claws, which catches up unwary humans and slices their skin. But this kamaitachi is no ordinary yōkai – rather, she is

The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

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: AGREE

Will be AFK doing life stuff.

Don’t break the blog and please, please, please, I beg you, don’t feed Fluffy sardines again. You think it’s lots of fun, but I’m the one cleaning scale-balls all day long the next day.

Be good. Or at least don’t be google.

See you tomorrow.

As we watch the increasingly ridiculous and try-to-be shocking antics of the would-be leading edge leftists, one question keeps coming up: who are they trying to shock?

No, seriously. Look, guys, I’m sixty. That’s grandmother age, even if I’m not one except via duct-tape yet.

Yeah, sure, both my parents and Dan’s parents are still alive, but look, my mom is a boomer, okay? And so was Dan’s mom. And our fathers are only slightly older. They got married in the fifties, raised kids in the sixties, and though they might have projected a stern image to them, neither of our parents’ were particularly conventional people. (No, not science fiction. But I don’t think science fiction would have shocked them.)

Heck guys, I’ve read books written by people my grandparents’ age.

Pseudo-satanism on stage? Dear Lord, people. That would have been old by the 20s. The 1920s. The early Victorians were already into all kinds of insanely stupid mysticism often shading into satanism. Racy novels with lots of sex? I believe Agatha Christie mocked those in the thirties. And everything from sexual communes to drug use, to New Age to Witchcraft were already old hat in the twenties. Naked Shakespeare was tediously common when I was kid. Naked anything really.

The seventies … Well, for all you kids not born then, the seventies normalized a lot of things that are considered far more outre now than they were then. Including drug parties and orgies and– Well, you know, I hung out at the fringes of seventies parties, observing and not participating because even back then I had the idea a lot of these things were a very stupid idea. Which didn’t stop full grown men propositioning me, or trying to get my clothes off, because in the seventies it was thought to grow up healthy children needed to have sex early. It wasnt just the music that was bad, or the fashion that was laughable. The seventies were pretty much insanity all the way.

So when some young woman’s greatest contribution to “art” is to knit with string coming from a ball shoved her up her twat, she deserves the respect such “art”: to be laughed off stage, have her knitting get the “ew, this is soppy” it deserves, and to be sent to her room with milk and cookies until she has an idea worthy of attention by adults.

But no, our art scene is under the impression that they’re being “shocked” or “paradigm breaking” and that they are doing things “pour epater les bourgeois.”

The only people likely to be shocked by this are the exceedingly well brought up children of the left who have swallowed a lot of stupid ideas about how most of the country — particularly those people in flyover countries — are complete cardboard cutouts of morality, existing in an eternal 1950s that never existed, who will be completely shocked and surprised by all of this.

Instead, most of the world is only shocked by how unshocking and uncreative they are.

It’s kind of like in science fiction, where they decided what people like me — you know, grew up reading Heinlein, but also a lot of New Wave in the seventies (of course) — wanted a return to the “pulps” which were published in our grandparents’ time. To be fair, I did read a lot of pulp. But that’s because I read a lot of everything. And there were never enough books.

However, by the time I was reading science fiction, well…. there were some very strange ideas being floated. Some were strange in the Phillip K. Dick sense. Some were out there sexual ideas (Eh. The Left Hand of Darkness was tame) and those of us who were reading it as kids read all of it. (Sometimes in foreign languages, so our parents didn’t catch us.) In fact a lot of us had such strange ideas that we had no idea how disruptive our written assignments in middle school were to our teachers’ sanity.

I might want a return to science fiction and fantasy that have plots, and have more than screeds against whatever the current bette noir of the left is, but I wouldn’t want a return to the pulps. For one, as amusing as some were, most of them weren’t exactly very well written. I’m frankly more interested in “the new pulps” which take everything we have learned and done, and integrate it in new pulse-pounding adventures.

The illusions of the left that we live in these out-of-time, eternal, fictional fifties, make them see all of life upside down and sideways.

Hence their idea that my friends and I were also “fighting” to keep science fiction white and male. (Rolls eyes.) Let alone that most of us aren’t white and male, when I was attempting to break into science fiction in the eighties and nineties, most of the editors were already women, and most of the new writers breaking in, ditto. Generally speaking, the male authors my age had as much trouble breaking in or more than I did. (And I went uphill, in a snow storm, under fire from my own stupidity.)

Of course, you know, the left has a point.

Breaking real rules, becoming a real iconoclast, opposing the current powers that be? That’s dangerous. You stand real chances of shocking real people who have the power to cancel you and destroying your career. (Thank heavens for indie, no?)

At the very least, the establishment will try to side line you by ignoring you, shutting you out and deriding you. (Okay, so I was called a bad writer in Teh Grauniad, possibly the least credible source for literary criticism. And yet, I bet there are idiots who believe it.) It is not… profitable. It won’t get you the TV interviews, or the gigs teaching in University.

No, those are at the command of the people who attack the FAKE establishment and try to shock people who don’t exist. The real rewards are given to those who speak power to truth, and lave the feet of the corruptocracy with willing tongues. Giving themselves the palms of martyrs for truth and shocking revelations is just an additional perk. I mean, who would question them?

Other than us. And anyone not part of the corruptocracy. And anyone with two brain cells.

I just wonder if they — in their collective multitude — can ever admit that they’re not shocking anyone. And if the assembled multitude of them can come up with a single surprising idea.

Not even shocking. Just surprising. You know, enough creativity to fill a thimble sized for a toddler.

My bet is that they can’t.