This is very much a state of the writer post, and the state of the writer is mixed. I seem to have hit some kind of respiratory allergy that keeps worsening, so I spend most of the nights trying to hack up a lung.
(Allergy, because it’s been going on for two weeks, and I haven’t given it to anyone, including my husband, and we kiss!)
It’s not a huge problem, as I don’t think it’s impairing my breathing. It’s just annoying because I’m not sleeping, which means I have a case of “don’t wanna.” I need to unpack, move furniture, set up rooms. I can do it. I mean, I’m not too tired to. I just don’t wanna.
Same with writing. I have a book — second Rhodes — almost done, and I’m awake enough to write, but I don’t wanna.
Meanwhile I’m ridiculously susceptible to online adds. At the moment I’m trying to convince myself I don’t need the Virginia edition of all of Heinlein’s books, even if they are $200 off. (Whines: but I just turned sixty. Surely I deserve a consolation prize. And I’ll never ask for anything again. I mean what would I even do with a pony. Answers back:oh, shuddup.)
At any rate, it’s been five very fun days, not including my birthday which was mildly blah due to husband’s health and cold. But– Well, there seems to be a new pattern establishing in the country, since we were set free from the crazy General Tso Flu. (Or since we started ignoring them and they reluctantly agreed we didn’t need to be under house arrest. I think we’re mixed on that, and it was one or the other depending on areas of the country. We’re a very large country, and there was a variety of responses. I happen to know due to friendships — yes, still — in the apparatus of state that the nesciis statists thought they could keep us hard-locked-down if not forever for a very long time while they implemented their utopian future. Until it became obvious orders wouldn’t be blindly followed.) It seems like suddenly (dare we say “unexpectedly”) a lot of us drive around within one or two days distance, where we’d fly in the past. I know Dan and I have flown not at all since the lockdowns, and have driven more than we did since our twenties.
What this means is that we get friends and family pinging or emailing to say “Hey, we’ll be headed your say on such and such a day.” And then we make arrangements for getting together for a meal or having them stay over. With the approach of thanksgiving there was a lot of that.
And thanksgiving was fun as we got the whole family plus younger son’s deadly-serious-girlfriend (meaning he’s very serious about her, and vice versa, not that she doesn’t laugh, which is not true at all.) So, it was a large and animated gathering, and we had much fun. Havey got his fill of pets.
I didn’t make quite so much food as in past years, and the kids took a bunch of leftovers, which means I actually (probably) won’t be eating leftovers for two weeks. (maybe.)
I really need to get my behind upstairs, and typeset A Few Good Men for re-release. As in I should be doing that right now, and not sitting here and typing…. Ah, whatever.
I dropped the ball, and didn’t schedule a new book sale for today or the next three days. OTOH I have scheduled three for sale on Monday, so there is that.
As a gauge on the economy, I always look at black Friday deals. This year they started pushing deals a month early, always a bad sign, but at least the deals on Black Friday seem to be real and not the contrived “truly a deal, I promise” as we got in the depths of the Obama economy. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, yeah, good that they can offer actual deals without going completely broke. OTOH perhaps they have to so anything moves. Friends in retail tell me it’s tighter than our clenched teeth.
Ah, well. We shall see. There’s a lot of ruin in a nation, and we’re going to probe the depth and length of it. Nothing we can do, except get ready for the rebuild.
And now I probably should drag my behind upstairs and go typeset. The last five days were indeed fun, but pretty much nothing got done. So, now to work.
Well, we got our butts in a bear trap and no mistake. Which is a funny thing to post about when I want to do a post on thankfullness.
But we’ve got our butts in a bear trap. And I don’t see any point lying about it. It certainly won’t make things easier, and it will make you distrust me, at which point my talking is useless.
So — we got our butts in a bear trap. And we must escape, even if it means chewing our tails off. Right now, still looking for solutions that free our tails. And having no clue how to do it. Still hopeful of a miracle, but the miracle needed is bigger than the miracle we needed this month, which didn’t happen. So not hopeful.
And yet thankful. Why thankful, you daft woman, when you have your butt in a bear trap, and are likely to have to leave your tail behind?
Ah. Well, first of all, it’s not just our bear trap. To an extent the rest of the world is in this bear trap. It was set by early twenty first century utopians, and reinforced by propaganda before, after, during and post the two world wars.
It’s a beaut of a bear trap, too, you know?
It came from the increasing ease of mass production and concentration of power in certain nodes in the early twentieth century. Mass production was faster and more efficient, so mass everything has to be the same.
And thus we came to hyper-centralized governments and orders issued from above for increasingly minutia and details to be carried out in the hinterlands.
Which of course got into the problem of knowledge. Because humans aren’t machines. And how things are done and what works are different district to district/county to county, let alone across the country.
Only the people giving directions and telling us how things are going to be done don’t know that. It’s an unknown-unknown.
And since the media went the same way, to the same level of centralization, and embraced the same bigger-more centralized-more-topdown philosophy, the media covered up the failures of the model — the more I read the more I think it started failing almost immediately — and made it seem viable and honky dory. And it entrenched more.
But there’s a limit on what you can run on what we’ll call the “Marxlite” model, though in practice it’s more corporatists-fascist, but the excuses are the same until you reach a critical level of failure, all over the world.
It’s reaching that now. And of course the Marxlitians are blaming “capitalism” and “nationalism” when the opposite is pretty much true. Because that’s what they’ll do, of course.
So — what is there to be thankful for?
We’re still us. No, please, shut up. The Doom Brigade on the right is bad as the left for not realizing how unique the US is.
Yes, yes, the founding fathers would already be shooting. Yes, but then again no. They put up with just as great or greater abuses for going on two decades, until it became obvious it couldn’t go on. And then they had to fight: from a position of weakness, with their butts in bear traps.
Americans don’t like war. Partly because we’re so good at it. So we’re slow to engage, because heaven help our foes when we do. Partly because we’re people who make and create things: art, yes, but new ways to make a widget, new ways to farm, a better gadget to do x when it’s needed.
We like our little lives. “Petit bourgeois” the French would call it with a sneer, but petit bourgeois is where the soul of America lives. We want to do work we by and large enjoy and are good at, while having families and raising fat babies who grow taller and bigger and more capable than us, and raiser fat babies, in turn, while doing the daily, unglamorous work of making the world a better place. Look, it’s nothing much. It’s just who we are.
We know that once things go kinectic that option is gone. It might not come back in our life times. Worse, it might not come back during our children’s lifetimes, and that’s much worse.
So we hold off.
Are we holding off too long? It’s always a danger, isn’t it? But so is going hot too fast. And you know it. And we all know it.
So, here in, the balance, we have our butts in a bear trap, and it doesn’t seem possible to get out of it without shooting our way out.
That’s probably true for the rest of the world. And what comes after for them might very well be worse than what they got. But– We are still America.
Yes, I should stop saying that, except I don’t think any of you individually or collectively have any idea what it means. Oh, maybe some. It takes living abroad. It takes living abroad as one of them. Then you see the differences starkly.
The entire world is in this position. And I can very well see the rest of the world defaulting to their historical position of getting in a king by any other name, and defaulting to being subjects.
Frankly, I’m not sure that most of them should ever have gone non-monarchical. Because, yes, it leads to abuses. But in cultures where the only loyalty is personal loyalty, you really can’t do the same with an impersonal “state” entity. You need the personal loyalty.
But that’s neither here nor there. Monarchy is not in any way shape or form an ideal state for mankind. Though perhaps better than the impersonal “international” state.
Fortunately for us, our country is too big, too populous and too diverse (in ways of living/landscape/wealth) to fit well with central control. And that’s become increasingly obvious to everyone for decades. Expressions like “Good enough for government work” didn’t come out of nowhere.
Secondly, fortunately for us we’re armed to the teeth. No, not those teeth. The back teeth too.
Look, I like guns, and I’m okay with one — something I’d never thought I’d say — though I need practice. It’s been. Busy.
But y’all outright scare me when you start gun talk. Dear Lord. I don’t think gun experts in Portugal know as much about guns as someone here, just pulled off the street. And y’all LIKE them. I mean, it’s like a mother talking about her newborn, or me talking about cats. Your eyes lit up, and you discuss mayhem dealing weapons like they’re your pride and joy.
And I love you for it, even when I sit there, gaping going “uh. How?”
Because even if no one on our side — thank Heavens — has yet started shooting, there is that knowledge that if they send people to round us up for the cattle trains, they can’t be sure we WON’T. And that if the shooting starts it will be visible from orbit.
Yes, they’re trespassing, increasingly openly and daring us. But they’re not doing half of what even Canada did openly and in our faces, let alone what places like China do. Because they can’t know where it would be safe, and where it would — literally — blow up in their faces.
And that has kept us relatively safe in the middle of the central state going rabid-badger-nuts.
Also fortunately here is where the internet and the commentary of the political kind took deeper and more irreverent root. I don’t know why even in the rest of the Anglosphere it’s somewhat stunted, and in the rest of world it’s rare as hen’s teeth: but here, online, you can find independent news reporting, commentary and political yelling as nowhere else in the world.
And that’s a good thing because that gives us perspectives the rest of the world lacks into what’s really going on. (Though the sources of information are so corrupted no one can know for sure.)
This is both because of and feeds into: we have different hardware in the head. There is no king of America and there never was. Yeah, yeah, English kings, but it doesn’t fit right atop of our matrix.
So there is no family we default to “just do what they say and we’ll go back to the best of us.”
Oh, the left tries — the Obamas, really? Get over yourselves racist lefties. Being black doesn’t make them special, and they’re such a depository of rabid evil and vapid — but it doesn’t take, because Americans don’t really have the concept to slot into.
And yeah, they project, and think we want Trump as an emperor. It doesn’t help we joke about it, but hey, liability of having a sense of humor. But he’s not, really in any sense. He’s our battle standard, our flag of dissent waved in their faces. They take it down we raise a new one they hate even more.
Because we don’t have a natural “we’ll obey this person.” But we do have a boatload of “No.” And “hell no.” And “You and whose army?”
And we’ll stand by that. And the more we’re pushed, the more we put both feet in the ground and become mule-like.
Yeah, yeah, the covidiocy got under our armor. Partly because people trusted Trump. But it’s a trick they can play once. Here. In the rest of the world they’re going for a reprise, this time with feeling.
But not here. It won’t work here.
Because we are a mule-like people, resentful of anyone ordering us, proud of being able to defend ourselves. We’re ornery and already thumbing our noses at the self proclaimed aristos in myriad ways.
And the more they push, the more my mule-like people will get a boatload of “no” up their noses.
For this if nothing else, I’m thankful.
We have our butts in a bear trap, but we are willing and able to chew our own tails off to get free. We’re trying other things now, in tiny, obnoxious ways. But — well, if it comes to blood, it comes to blood.
It’s an awkard as heck moment, poised here, hoping for the best, expecting the worst.
We live in a very contentious world with constant, angry arguments online and it feels like people don’t even know how to deal with disagreement in a healthy way anymore. Disagreement is a part of life, though, and we have to know how to navigate that. You could just ignore the disagreement, but that seems wrong when you have a strong belief. Instead, you need to learn how to correctly engage with someone who thinks differently than you.
What to Do When Someone Disagrees with You
Get to know the person. When dealing with disagreement, what you need to do is understand the other person’s perspective. So, find out all you can about this person. Check all his social media. Look at his old tweets. Whatever you can find.
Understand his interests. A big part of what makes up the perspective of each person is his hobbies and his job. Find what clubs and organizations he’s a member of. Especially find out who employs him. Then call them up to find out more, saying things like, “I want to tell you what this person you employ believes and see how that fits with this company. Is this something that makes you happy about his employment or makes you rethink it?” You’ll learn a lot this way about whether these organizations could be a source of the thinking that led to this disagreement or whether they might view things differently.
Appeal to those he respects. Another big thing that influences someone’s beliefs and may be a source of disagreement is who he confides in. This could be his friends and family. Seek them out and find out what they think. “Did you know your friend has this belief?” you can ask them. “Do you really want to be associated with that?” Again, you’ll find out a lot about who you have a disagreement with by who sticks by him and who becomes more wary.
Try your argument out on others. Maybe, the problem with the disagreement is your argument. You should test it by trying it on others. A good way to try it on a lot of people is social media. That way you can tell thousands at once what this other guy said and see if they agree it was a terrible thing and you are right. If you have the better argument, you should be able to get a lot of people to back you up — a whole mob maybe — who will help you in tackling the disagreement.
Meet the person face to face. To make your argument sincere, it’s best to make sure you’re delivering it face-to-face. Perhaps, though, the person lives far away. For that situation, you can post the person’s home address to the mob you found of like-minded people. Maybe they can visit this person with the bad opinions and confront him face-to-face with better arguments and or fire.
Agree to disagree. Now, if you’ve followed all these steps, the person who disagreed with you should be fired from his job, isolated from his friends and family, and is now being confronted by a mob while his house burns. But perhaps he still looks at you defiantly and says, “I disagree!” Sometimes, despite trying your best, disagreements persist. There’s nothing now to do but to agree to disagree. So what if he wants to continue to mistakenly believe that Die Hard isn’t a Christmas movie? I guess as long as no one employs him or talks to him and he lives in a box, that’s fine.
I’m not sure what to do here. If you read and enjoyed the first one, I don’t feel like I need to sell you very hard on this one. The characters you love from Hellbender — Doug, Bryce, Lulu, and Charlene — get into further misadventures, while I also expand on the lore from the first one. Are the people in charge really demons? What happened in the Last War? Well, there are more answers and more questions in the sequel — you know how it works.
If you haven’t read the first one, it seems like I should just point you to the blurb for that novel. I mean, I made my best attempt at explaining the story in that one. It’s a post-apocalyptic comedy. There’s a mercenary gang of loveable losers (called Hellbender) in constant conflict with more powerful forces out to destroy or oppress them. And Satan — or a guy who says he is Satan — is involved. It’s intriguing, and it’s funny.In this one, Hellbender faces an indescribable horror, a terrorist group that just enjoys terror and makes no demands, and a bunch of nuclear weapons. The gang is in way over its head again, and it’s going to be fun. I am excited for you. You know what? If you haven’t read the first one, just go ahead and jump into this one and read the first one later — consider it a prequel. You can call this book Hellbender and the previous one Hellbender: Origins.
Well. That had to be the world’s most blah milestone birthday. Though to be fair Dan and I and I myself are cursed. He’s not. He always manages to have a decent birthday for his milestone birthdays. Mine…. something always happens and our anniversaries… don’t get me started.
For mine, Dan wasn’t feeling… well, for health reasons, he couldn’t do much of anything, which kind of torpedoed my idea of driving out on a grand excursion. And of course it was too cold to even take a long walk outside. So the only thing I could was cheat on my diet and gain 5 lbs. How I don’t know. It’s not like we ate five pounds worth of food, even combined. OTOH I did walk past a pastry display case, and you know how that goes.
I’ve been kind of down since. Not depressed — well how do you tell from the background depression of now being sure we’re in for a hard landing, and just waiting for the shoe to drop? — precisely. Just sad and very tired, suddenly.
Part of it of course is the milestone. Very old people in the village when I was little were in their sixties. Granted, my family in general lived longer, but being the youngest child of almost the youngest child, I didn’t consciously meet any of those. Consciously the first time I met an eighty year old I was in my teens.
But no matter how much I tell myself even my MIL who was known as an anti-health fanatic (not on purpose. She just had issues keeping to diet and exercise) lived past eighty. My father and FIL are both in their nineties and ticking away, as is mom in her late eighties (and her genetic lottery is far worse than mine. I take (thank heavens) after dad’s side.)
Yet, still, in the back of my mind, “sixty is old people age”. I’m starting to understand why part of the rejuv therapy in Heinlein’s stories was hypno therapy. I mean, blood test results (still pursuing one very strange anomaly, but probably not fatal even at worse) I am now in better health (by far) than I was at 40. Coming to low altitude has apparently resolved the pre-diabetes thing, so even though I’d been trifling with corn chips and fries, I was still not even close to pre-diabetic. Pretty much center range.
The weight is ridiculous, but I’m dealing with that.
And yet the pall remains upon the mind. Sixty. That’s old people age.
And here I want to reassure everyone there is not even the slightest idea of laying down and dying. I have books to write, and the sense of purpose will keep me going regardless.
As I’m dealing forcefully with the irrational parts of our minds, I started applying it to the country’s situation.
Look, I expected the fraud. What I didn’t expect was the right to accept it, and roll over. I guess I have better opinion of my fellow pundits than they deserve. Though of course, I’m also working for myself, and even I thought it would be risky, in terms of losing readers to come right out and say “it’s fraud.” Imagine how much worse it is when your outfit (and I think all of them did) said “you can’t say that.”
Meh. I’ll tell the obvious truth — unless you want to believe that yeah, Biden is so beloved he won with more votes than any other president and lost the fewer seats in the mid term. Sorry boys. Say that with a straight face — and shame the devil.
Also the steady drumbeat of “You can’t keep harping on that, you’ll lose readers” reminded me of “you’ll starve in the gutter without me” every time I left an agent or publishing house.
Bah. That’s not how I work. Never was, won’t start now.
But in a way, for those of us who are awake and aware and have seen the fraud and the roll over, there is also “well, nothing we can do now. Just go hide and lick our wounds” or “erase all traces of my opinions and move to Timbuktu.”
It’s not like that. Just like I turned sixty, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to do a Buffy vampire, turning wrinkly, then dust. That’s what the mind jumps to, because the mind is an idiot.
But yeah “you can vote yourself into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out” is true mostly. Most countries also don’t vote themselves in. Socialists and communists don’t care what you voted for, they’re going to fraud themselves in. As for shooting ourselves out…
We are better equipped for that than any other country ever.
That is perhaps our most salient difference. And yea “but if we don’t use them.” Well, that would be the best use of them. All those nightmares y’all keep having? Yeah, if we weren’t armed to the teeth it’s highly likely that they’d already be rolling relocations, if not cattle cars.
The consciousness they’re dealing with a heavily armed population is keeping their depredations to what they can still lie about/keep from the general public.
And even then, things leak out.
I said above that the chance at a soft landing is gone. It probably is, for a completely soft landing. There is going to be unpleasantness. I just don’t know to what degree or where or when. Probably not all over the country. Probably initiated by the other side, under the belief it’s their last chance at a real win where they get to do to us as they’re afraid to.
But–
But there’s still a chance at a softer landing. Part of this is exposing how bad the fraud was, and getting people to understand the machines/early voting/mail in are soft traps, that lead to more fraud. We need to turn public sentiment against those, and fast. It’s been turning, but not fast enough for my taste.
The other part of it is to be prepared.
You don’t know where or when the shoe will drop. If it drops on you, be prepared to survive.
It’s like sixty. Rumors of our demise are grossly exaggerated. We’re a singular nation, and the proceedings from here on will be unlikely.
We’re in uncharted territory, and it’s scary. But it means we’re not dead yet.
Like with sixty, I’m going to shrug my shoulders and keep battling on in every way I can, as long as I can.
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
*IF YOU’RE DOING A SALE FOR CYBER MONDAY SEND THE ANNOUNCEMENT TO THE EMAIL ABOVE AND PLEASE DO PUT “CYBER MONDAY” IN THE TITLE. I INTEND TO HAVE A PROMO POST HERE AND AT MGC. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT YOU SEND IT RIGHT NOW. I’LL BE RUNNING MY USUAL SALE BETWEEN MY BIRTHDAY AND CHRISTMAS STARTING THIS WEEK.*IF YOU’RE DOING A SALE FOR CYBER MONDAY SEND THE ANNOUNCEMENT TO THE EMAIL ABOVE AND PLEASE DO PUT “CYBER MONDAY” IN THE TITLE. I INTEND TO HAVE A PROMO POST HERE AND AT MGC. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT YOU SEND IT RIGHT NOW. I’LL BE RUNNING MY USUAL SALE BETWEEN MY BIRTHDAY AND CHRISTMAS STARTING THIS WEEK.
Get Trouble in Twi-Town for the special release price of $2.99! Regular pricing begins in December.
In a solar system that never was, in a future that never will be, Trouble always finds Travis Barrett.
If Barrett turned away every troublesome person who darkened his office door, he wouldn’t have any clients. And Tina Tate, the Asteroid Belt’s very own glamour girl, has trouble written all over her. Taking her case means a trip to Mercury and incurring the wrath of the richest man in the Belt – Tina’s father.
On the border between the necropolis of Colma, home to over two million dead souls and 1,794 somewhat live ones — and the gritty industrial working-class town of South City —
At 1015 Crestview, little seven-year-old Reynaldo cowers under the escalating abuse hurled by an adoptive mother who now sees him as a burden.
Allen, a workaholic Silicon Valley techie, seeks relief from domestic conflict by slipping away to sample the sweet brews at McCoy’s, a mysterious pub and Hell’s Angels hangout.
Up the street, young adults Rad and Tawny drift between the worlds of skateboarding and community activism, free love and commitment. Sampling Buddhism and squabbling with the relatives, they avoid thinking about the 15-foot Burmese python in their garage.
Does evil exist? Is it still with us? How would it manifest in modern life? This genre-bending novel of alienation and betrayal suggests that evil, as well as redemption, can come In the Shape of a Man.
Don’t touch another person except with the flat of your hand Don’t touch a living animal You must be married as soon as you are fertile You must leave home when your mother becomes pregnant
And never leave the women’s settlement, where nothing changes. Ever.
But when Tirzi finds a way to sneak into the forbidden woods, secrets start to spill out.
As she matures, the clock ticks toward a bitter choice. Is there more to life than silence, and blind obedience?
If she wants to survive and get answers, she must leave the sister of her heart, and all hope of family.
But before she can find happiness in an unexpected friendship, she must contend with a past that will not let go.
Follow Tirzi’s story of courage in Child of Antaris today, the first book of the Antaris Cycle.
Something or someone is killing shape shifters in the small mountain town of Goldport, Colorado. Kyrie Smith, a server at a local diner, is the last person to solve the mystery. Except of course for the fact that she changes into a panther and that her co-worker, Tom Ormson, who changes into a dragon, thinks he might have killed someone. Add in a policeman who shape-shifts into a lion, a father who is suffering from remorse about how he raised his son, and a triad of dragon shape shifters on the trail of a magical object known as The Pearl of Heaven and the adventure is bound to get very exciting indeed. Solving the crime is difficult enough, but so is — for our characters — trusting someone with secrets long-held.
Looking for adventure? Try this easy-to-read version of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. Extensive quotes from every canto, synopses of important points, annotations and light-hearted commentary keep the action going. Don’t get stuck a third of the way through this masterpiece, reading only about Hell. Travel all the way through Purgatory and Heaven with an amazing poet and his companions.
This book is meant to be a first pass through the entire Divine Comedy. It tries to remain faithful to Dante’s own idea, that the first step in reading a great work is to see the literal meaning of the words on the page. And the literal meaning here is a fantastic journey begun in darkness and fear but ending in love, beauty, and joy. Many people never get past the Inferno, but Dante himself said that he only wrote about the terrible things there so that he could tell about the wonderful things that happened afterward.
American secret agent Gary Martin was given a task: hunt down the rumors of a warrior princess and her plans to rally the nomadic tribes of East Asia to begin a war of conquest, discern how true they were, and put a stop to it if it was real. The fact that Imperial Japan had already sent their most effective spy in the same direction was worrying.
What Martin did not expect was to find himself in the middle of a lost civilization, captive of a warrior princess who was in love with him, and realizing she had access to terrible ancient technologies that could ruin the world!
This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new Introduction giving historical and genre context to the novel.
Agnes Rawlins would never dream of showing a melancholy face to her brother’s guests. She may be a spinster, and treated little better than any common housekeeper, but she is responsible for bringing Christmas cheer into the dark and rambling Blackheath Manor, and she does not shirk her duty, even when she has little reason to celebrate.
William Marlowe, Viscount Claridge, has reluctantly accepted an invitation to spend the Christmas season at Blackheath. It’s not his first choice- how anyone could wish to spend time in the gloomy manor house is beyond him- but when he meets the kind and gentle lady of the house, he finds that Christmas at Blackheath might not be so bad after all.
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.
For reasons of something burning like cities in my wake.
I am both outraged that sixty years of age could happen to a nice girl like me, and very conscious that there was only one other option.
So, there is that.
BUT I’ve started the traditional sale — what you didn’t know it was traditional? — between my birthday and Christmas. Yes, it will include newer stuff. Yes, you can buy each of these (if you want) and have it delivered to someone’s kindle on Christmas morning and think of the savings.
(Be not alarmed. Yes, still dealing with health things, but nothing critical just now. It’s just that I have posts to write but they’d take the stuffing out of me to write today, and I have books to write. -SAH)
Shaking the Kaleidoscope A blast from the past from December 23 2012
Clifford Simak’s City contains a device built into a kaleidoscope – you shake it, and look through it, and it alters your mind and your perceptions.
This is not a post about Simak, or City or Classical Science Fiction, but I’ll say in passing that the device – perfectly sensible way for a writer to dramatize the changing of minds necessary to take everyone out of Earth and into space – both fascinated me and made me uneasy. The uneasy is because I don’t approve of any kind of mind-control. Heinlein’s mind-engineering does the same to me: that creepy feeling at the back of the skull. It fascinated me because I had never seen a kaleidoscope and well… I like shiny things. (In fact I just realized I don’t own one, which is a little odd.) The other observation in passing is that Simak throws out more ideas under the guise of McGuffin or plot device that could be used for short stories or novels and that I mean to – supposing I get the time – mine a lot of them. I mean, a pattern of shiny lights that can change minds? That is an entire story – an entire novel. That would turn society upside down (and not in a good way, probably.)
So, this brings us to…
A kaleidoscope. You shake it and suddenly you see things in a completely different way. That is how I woke up this morning, and it is an inconvenient feeling, uncomfortable and prickly, like clothes that don’t fit quite right or scratch the skin.
We’ve been talking about the death of Western Civ. I still think there is a wound in our consciousness, something that is slowly destroying our spirit.
But back up. No, back up further. Take the long view. The longer view. See it from very far away. This is what we do as science fiction writers. Okay, fine, this is what science fiction writers are supposed to do. In the last thirty years or so, they’ve mostly obsessed over the trendy cause of the moment: pesticides! Global cooling! Global Warming! Women’s equality! Squirrel!
What we’re supposed to do, however, if truth be told is take the long view, look at history, visualize things as they could go/would go/would be. In a way if Science Fiction is anything more than fantasy with machines and engineers it is the ability to shake the Kaleidoscope and see things as if we weren’t ourselves and gain a new perspective on how things move and what is really going on, even when it presents in a way that seems totally different.
So imagine you’re a thousand years in the future, and you are learning about European history. This is important. European. Remember that.
The first glimmer of an European identity was Rome. Rome was the first European entity to look beyond tribalism – yes, yes, barbarians, but all the same, they considered these people, at least after a while, as potential Roman citizens. That was a huge step, and why every large polity in Europe since harks to Rome and tries to imitate or revive Rome, consciously or not.
We fall victims to this too. We think of ourselves in terms of the Roman empire. I wonder how much of this is the Soviet Union’s doing. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the one thing they’re really, really, really good at is propaganda and the rewriting of history, partly through commanding pet intellectuals.
They loved comparing us to the decadence of Rome. Partly because it made their people feel better about living in caves and eating acorns – sorry, that was how the Romans of the republic seemed to view virtue. Yeah, I know, the Soviet Union was somewhat better. Maybe. Most of the time.
The funny thing is that we are in no way in the mold of Rome as an Empire. The Soviet Union was closer. (Which again, from the distant future would make perfect sense. The communists were the Red Tzars – tzar being a corruption of Caesar. These things aren’t hard to seek.) Like Rome it was an empire which relied on loot to make the life of its citizens back home better (it wasn’t as successful as Rome.) Like Rome it had a populace on bread and circus (though again, at least if history is semi-accurate, not nearly as successfully) while the people who ran the society lived lives of unimaginable luxury. (Unfortunately still rather lower than the lifestyle of our middle classes, except for power over other human beings.)
The rest of Europe is not that much different – no, please, listen, I’m not doing Europe down. We come from them, and to an extent they were the best example of human civilization until we came along.
But all amity between colony and mother country(ies) aside, let’s keep in mind who and what we are. We are the dregs, the rebels, the rejects of Europe.
The people who stayed behind are those who fit into Europe’s pattern, which again, comes from Rome. Yes, yes, Rome fell. Yes, yes, we lost technology. But the Roman pattern was preserved, brought back. And to an extent that was good because the Roman pattern transcended tribalism which makes Europe different from the rest of the world. In Rome you could be a citizen no matter who your brothers, your cousins, your parents were. This is not true anywhere else.
Europe, to an extent, ported the same pattern of citizenship, of a state that is larger than the tribe. Of a civilization that is larger than tribes, than blood, than that kind of loyalty.
Now, view it as a journey. Europe conquered Africa and the Americas not because it is uniquely colonialist or imperialist but because it had transcended tribalism. Look, when conquered the “new worlds” we were slightly more advanced in weaponry than the natives, but not by that much and not by that far. But the furniture in our heads was different.
Time and again, I read stories of colonization where the natives acted in the way that had always worked in tribal warfare: they killed everyone in the colony in a horrible way. If they were facing a tribe the size of normal tribes, this would make colonizing their land too expensive. It would stop colonization cold.
Only they weren’t facing a tribe. Reports of the atrocity in European Newspapers brought the wrath of all Europeans on them. The end was always the same.
(We’ll pretend here that I explained that Christianity hooked on top of Roman citizenship to eliminate tribalism, and that also European colonization was aided by germs and blah blah, blah. Not germane. We’re a thousand years in the future, the details have softened.)
Now look at the last century. The two world wars, not as world wars, but as the wars of European Unification. The decision of who gets to run western civ. Then expansion, always expansion because the old European model is the old Roman model. You go abroad and you get good things to bring home.
Only they’ve lost the plot a little (because of the horrific long civil war of the twentieth century) and they forgot that model implies conquest and despoiling.
On the other hand, the European model is going everywhere: India, China. Yes, yes, it is our tech they use, but it is the European model of civilization. They’re still expanding.
And that brings us to where we are. The war with Islam is just the front in the current European Expansion. Europe is, of course, expanding its form of government, its mental furniture, to the lands of Islam, and Islam resents it. They are the ultimate tribalist society.
Then there’s us. We are the other front in that war.
You see, we are part of Western civilization, but not part of European civilization. Even our parent, Great Britain, is only half digested into Europe. We are the castoffs, the redheaded step child. Part of them, but not.
Part of their resentment of us over intervention in the two world wars is the resentment of parents whose kid intervenes in an argument – particularly if the kid was right. If you view the long war of the twentieth century as a civil war, they resent we came in and settled it.
And they’ve done a lot of projecting – aided by Soviet propaganda – they call us imperialist and war mongers, because they can’t bear that in themselves.
And also they have no clue what makes us work, not really. They don’t know why we innovate more than they do. They don’t know why our consumer society is what is softening their politics advancement into the rest of the world. They know it’s true, but they resent it.
We are of them, but we are also the others. And being the others, we must be absorbed, and we must be brought in line. There can be no competing mental furniture, as Europe takes over the rest of the world.
Which brings us to where we are. Since the early twentieth century, they’ve been conquering our intellectuals, our universities, convincing them the European way is better. (And look, they’ve changed from monarchy to “democracies” of various kinds, but the same people are in charge. The bureaucrats that have the real power are the same people – often from the same families.) They’ve been telling them about the soft power of redistribution, of socialism, of an entrenched bureaucracy, set to encompass the world.
Intellectuals – and bureaucrats – like that. It’s the sort of power they understand and the sort of power they crave.
And now intellectuals and bureaucrats are in power. Europe is trying to swallow us.
It won’t work. Of course it won’t. They don’t understand the reason the soft imperialism has worked is because we remain free to create wealth that can redound back on them in more ways than one. (Not just aid, but us being the main consumer of the world’s goods – the engine of the world’s commerce.) They don’t understand that, because all they understand is the old model: wealth comes from elsewhere and makes the people at home prosperous.
They don’t understand that without America it will have to be back to Roman-style (or Soviet Style) rapine and everyone will be a little poorer. All they understand is that we make their model look bad and we must – must – be brought into line.
So – that’s where we stand. Islam is a front in European expansion (and they’re completely dysfunctional and have nothing to oppose it, so they turn on… us – because it’s our gadgets and our wealth that are dismantling their poverty and ignorance from within.) Curiously, we have to fight them too.
But we’re the other front. We’re under assault by Europhiles who think that if they just bring us under control, they’ll be in charge of the world. A sort of empire of the paper-pushers.
Even if they succeed — and they’re well on the way there — all they’ll manage is a brief period of time of increasing misery and then (and in this the Roman analogy is somewhat apt) an age of darkness. (No, don’t want to hear it. Yes, yes, the middle ages were not as dark as painted. And yet, for the average peasant, they were. No, life might not have been as blood-soaked as some parts of Roman history could be, but it was still brutal and nasty and short. Yes, I know the works to the contrary. This seems to be part of the European project. As in the Soviet Union, it’s the past that keeps changing.) And then probably a repetition of the pattern all over again.
If they eliminate us, as the new model, their model will still be the best thing in human civilization. And when civilization comes back again, it will be in their model.
I have only one question for you guys – are you going to let them get away with it?
Okay, I lied. About there being no post, I mean. Though the title is obviously a lie too.
Yes, I can hear a lot of you huff “prove there was fraud” and “It was womyz/those darn kids/people who tan! The evil bastages! Not fraud.” Then there’s the subset of Libertarian crazy — they’re my people, doesn’t mean I don’t see where they’re insane — who assumes that the country is their own personal circle and huffs “It was those darn socons pushing soconny things.”
Frankly? You’re all full of sh*t. It was the fraud.
Do I have evidence? Really solid, can bite into it evidence? Well, no. Fraud well done, or “customary” as ours is leaves traces, but those are covered up so fast that you can’t find “solid evidence.” Though there is, of course, but isolated. I just don’t have time to do a crawl on it for this post, because I have an alleged real life that, at least allegedly, means I have to write fiction, unpack rooms and assemble furniture. Also, those “This county had x” gets dismissed out of hand as “oh, that doesn’t matter. It’s just a blah blah blah and not enough to explain the results.” Which is bullshit, because there’s such thing as cumulative evidence. In this article I’m going to allude to things I remember, which you can find with minimum google fu. Diving into them would be a full time job. I can’t do it. (Though I’m trying to brainstorm a systematic way to identify instances of fraud and their impact, but not with this whole group, and not right now. Yes, there might be something afoot. Or we might be nuts. We’ll find out, right?)
As with covidiocy, I can’t tell you all the exact numbers from everywhere, but I can go on horse sense and tell you you’re absolutely wrong on your “but it was just–“
Sure, if women didn’t fall for propaganda (fewer and fewer every year, but hey) and if young people were indoctrinated by Marxists in our educational system, and if a lot of people who can tan weren’t sold on some version of CRT (largely in the same system, btw) then EVERYONE would vote rationally. Or at least 75% of them. (The idiots and crazy you shall have with you until the end times, I’m afraid.) In which case… well…. if we don’t give the Democrats time to ramp the fraud up, we might win enough to clean up the electoral system. It’s possible. If we gave them time to ramp up the fraud, though, we’d be in the same position, with people trying to come up with excuses why this happened. So, yeah, the indoctrination into lies of a vast majority of the population is a problem and a contributing factor. Not THE factor though.
So, let’s dispose of the “it was” in turn (Note I’m ignoring most exit polls, because they haven’t been super reliable the last few years. Being accosted outside your voting place, are you going to admit to having voted a way you think your buddies will hate? Probably not. Someone said I make my assumptions unverifiable by dismissing the “evidence”. Maybe. There are other things to support the idea, more solid than “evidence” that is by and large tainted/unverifiable/irreproducible. And no, you can’t be more mad about that than I am. A rational society needs solid data. We no longer have that, and it was never that solid, even in the past.):
1-Women. Eh. Some. I mean, women have always broken more for the dems. And yes “abortion.” Now I don’t have numbers on this (other than the fact that abortion numbers fall — in the absolute — year over year, for the last 3? decades. Look it up) but I can tell you, having lived as a woman in the US for almost 40 years, the most fervent “abortion as a single issue” vote is mostly the province of women about 10 years older than I, who were told liberation came because of abortion (it was contraception, but never mind) and that without it, they’d be Victorian women. Also who on average had a lot of abortions, as a generation. Those women are now in their 70s, which correlates with a group no one blames but is more likely to be the biggest blame other than fraud. Other than the professional protesters of the left — did you see a lot of public outrage from women? Other than auntie nut and cousin big mouth screaming? Women have always broken more dem than men. AND there is a group of them that is becoming redpilled at speed due to what’s happening in schools.
So did women on average vote more dem than rep? Sure. Probably. But probably by a slimmer margin than before.
2- Those darn kids. Perhaps I’m strange here, but at the eve of my sixtieth birthday, I have a startlingly clear image of when I was one of those darn kids.
In retrospect, though I didn’t vote that way and always considered myself anti-communist, I’d swallowed so much of their premises and assumptions that the only reason I remained anti-communist was sheer stuborn horse sense, and an idea what they were selling was too glittery to be wholesome.
Zs and Ys are doing exactly what every generation before them did. When the preponderance of them hits mid thirties, they’ll break to the right of Lenin, because life will have beaten the shiny indoctrination out of them.
I want to note however that it’s actually factually impossible for there to be more of them than there were of us AS A PROPORTION OF THE POPULATION. (And given very flawed censuses and all.) This is because people are in fact living longer and our population is far more “aged” than it was when I was one of those durn kids.
To the extent they are a measurable slice of the population it’s bolstered by “immigrants” who are “children” – most of which actually aren’t, and have no business voting in our election.
So, proportionately they’d have a much smaller impact in the election. Because logically if there’s a proportionately larger “older person” group, they have more influence.
3- People who tan.
Yeah. Though have you noticed this is no longer a universally safe assumption to make. And I mean safe from the POV of reality agreeing with it, not “socially safe.”
And we’re well past the “if x and y abandon the dems, the dems don’t have a chance.”
So that’s not it. No, they can’t bolster it with young voters. Not enough of those by percentage.
5- It’s all the socons If you think that, you MUST get out of your circles and go talk to real people. Yes, they’re icky. They’re also the vast majority.
Look, I was for gay marriage before Obama. I don’t care what drugs you do. It’s your body. I think abortion should be safe and rare, but I think if we settle on European norms and then work on making it unthinkable for most of the population, culturally.
I AM A RAGING LEFTIST compared to most people in America. Get out of your university campus, your sheltered “highly educated” (bachelor counts) clique. Get out of the “work with my mind” class. Go talk to real people. Even those of no organized religion (no aspersions considering how far left most CHURCHES including mine have gone) are …. uh.
No they wouldn’t gay bash, but they really, really, really don’t approve of homosexuality and think if you just have will power and aren’t crazy, you’ll be hetero.
Their wife might have an abortion, if there’s absolutely no other choice (more likely their girlfriend, TBH) but most of them just welcome the kid. (And keep it. Even when adoption would be better.) And they are not going to approve of late term abortion. Even if they think it’s sometimes needed, they’re not going to vote FOR THAT when their pocket book is screaming and they can’t afford fuel. That takes dedication. The general public isn’t dedicated to abortion.
They might maybe smoke a little weed on weekends, if they’re under thirty, but they’re absolutely sure in their heart of hearts those other people should NEVER touch it.
The average person not only isn’t devoted to laissez faire laissez passer, they certainly aren’t devoted to it in defiance of their well beings, pocket book and “being able to feed my family.”
YOU might think socons are disgusting, but for most of the people in this country, including the rapidly growing Spanish-speaking community, “If it was good enough for my pappy it’s good enough for me.” They’ll tolerate their gay friend, their pot smoking kid, and won’t throw out their daughter who had an abortion, but that’s personal. For the public realm, I’d say the public “temperature” is around 1958.
They might not go out of their way to forbid all this stuff, but they also won’t go out of their way to enforce it. And other real world considerations intrude.
5- And far more believable as a group, though that again overlaps with fraud:
Old people. No, seriously. Old people are almost universally left. And as a percentage of the population, there’s more of them than ever before.
There are reasons for this. Mostly that most of them grew up with news media they considered trustworthy and weren’t flexible enough to realize they no longer were, when that became obvious. So, of course, they cling to the TV and other sources that they grew up with/were adults with.
I feel like I’m just at the edge of the group that could realize the sources were tainted, though exceptional people up to ten years older than I have also see it.
Here the problem is not just that they believe the media wholesale and are to an extent — as every older person does — living in the past, the media they trust has also ratcheted uniformly further left, so that “to the left of Lenin” has now become “Maoist crossed with Green Fever Dreams.”
This switcheroo being universal and older people trusting the media (an being truly isolated from the workaday world) means they now assume the “truth” is well…. Maoist and Green Fever Dreams.
This accounts for my mom, who was always anti-government buying the covidiocy so wholesale she’s still taking “boosters.”
And it accounts for a lot of old people in the US thinking Jan. 6 was “worse than 9/11” or “treason” while being blythely unaware that Russia! Russia! Russia! about Trump was not only debunked, but utter bullsh*t.
Was it enough to turn the election? Well, I don’t think so, but honestly? More plausible than any of the others, particularly when you consider a lot of this demographic is in nursing homes, and no longer directly aware of the cost of food, rents or gas. I’m mentioning this, btw, because it is IMPORTANT to be aware of it. This demographic will only grow. We’re all headed there, if we live long enough. And it’s something that we’re not prepared for because our system was not designed at a time when an over preponderance of the elderly and confused was even a possibility.
This overlaps with fraud with vote harvesting. I didn’t have a problem so much with MIL being helped to vote democrat, because had she been in her right mind she would have. But the fact is by 2016 her opinion was about as valid as my cat’s (and maybe less) since high-sugar dementia had set in and she was never wholly sure of who she was, who her family members were, or if her husband was her husband or her father. (They look/ed nothing alike.)
Anyway, onwards, let me now list the factors that facilitate fraud, and I’m sure I’ll forget some, but bear with me, okay?
1- Vote harvesting. This is the nice young lady (coff) who goes around neighborhoods and promises to deliver your vote to you to the right station/poling box, etc.
This not only gets confused seniors, but also any number of harassed housewives who don’t follow politics. “Oh, good, I don’t have to go.”
Are they all above board? Well, no. In fact several have been caught making up votes wholesale. But it’s much harder to catch them when they are merely cross indexing, seeing your family is registered republican, and burning your ballot or “losing” it to the landfill.
There is also the harvesting in nursing homes, notably in the memory wards. This part is outright evil. Also in college campuses, where the students are often encouraged to dual register, and might not even know it’s illegal (in state of residence and college.)
Not to mention harvesting in ESL, recent immigrant, not citizen areas. You’d be amazed how many of these people have no idea it’s illegal to vote here, or that they’re not automatically “Americans” when they step off the plane/boat/ truck. Heck, a lot of American citizens are unclear on this. I still run into people who think I became a citizen when I married.
This is exacerbated by:
2- Vote by mail, particularly with the mailing of unsolicited ballots.
I’m not absolutely sure what the percentage of states is that does this (anyone know?) but I keep hearing of it being done in places we think of as voting in person, so my guess is “A lot if not most of the states.”
Do I need to outline the possible exploits from this?
Let’s say the LEAST offensive is what would have happened had there been Vote by Mail 40 years ago: My MIL would have voted for the entire household. She would have stood over husband and children, make sure the ballot was “appropriately” marked, and dropped them off herself.
Now, sure, I could do that too. I don’t and haven’t. (Though in 16 we all voted at the kitchen table, for solidarity, because we were sure it was going to end badly. I didn’t look at their ballots, though.) And the fact is people on the right are less likely (not totally unlikely. I know some tyrannical families nominally on our side) than people on the left. Because we believe in individual over the collective, and we believe in freedom of belief. The left, however has become a cult, and everything must be done to “win” and retain power.
But after that? the sky is the limit. For instance, when we moved into our moderate sized home in downtown col springs, we got … I think it was 89 notices of elections for 89 different names. None of which were names of former owners. Either totally fictitious people had been registered by the former left-hippie-dippy owners, or a lot of college students had been persuaded it didn’t matter if you voted both places, and here, you can use my address. My experience is by no means unique.
We have all heard of the hundreds of people registered to vacant lots, right? The ones you hear are the tip of the iceberg.
Then there’s the same games as with ballot harvesting. Things can happen to ballots from the “known to be republican” neighborhoods. Etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Oh, yeah, a lot of people also show up to vote in person and are told they already voted by mail. Yes, there are documented cases, not systematic, because how do you systematize that.
It is curious, don’t you think, that no state that has gone completely vote by mail ever goes GOP again?
This is worsened by:
3-Dirty Voter Rolls.
In Colorado Springs a lot of 145 year olds were voting. Pauses. Think on that for a moment.
More importantly, and to many people shockingly, you aren’t asked for proof of citizenship when getting a driver’s license, even if you show a foreign passport. You kind of have to fight hard for “motor voter” not to register you to vote. I should know this, since I have an accent you can cut with a knife. Never asked to see passport/citizenship papers. Apparently is so as not to offend immigrants. (rolls eyes.) Like I don’t know I have an accent.
Are there a ton of those? well…. maybe not per year, but it accumulates: exchange students, foreign university students, foreign journalists, people who work here for a few years. Most of them don’t even know that registering to vote is illegal. The nice people at the DMV do it automatically, so it must be legal and the thing to do, right?
More importantly, whether they vote dem or not (and they might, because they don’t know anything, and the news says….) they will, after they leave. It’s one more registration/mail ballot for organized fraud to exploit.
This is worsened by:
4- Insecure ID
I don’t need to belabor the fact that you need an ID to have a bank account, buy liquor or cigarettes, go to the doctor, take certain tests, enter certain buildings, get health or food benefits, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.
BUT asking for an ID to vote is suddenly “racist” and a “Poll tax.”
The problem is not an isolated “someone voted in my name” it’s a “people bused around to vote repeatedly in names that never vote. This has been going on since the Republic was formed, but now it’s massively worse because a bus of people can hit most of the state, and sometimes surrounding ones. It’s crazy.
This is exacerbated by:
5- Same day registration.
Seriously people. Yes, some states have boundaries on that. Not all. Some you have to show proof you live there, but are you also voting in your old precinct?
I recognize there are — rare — occasions that make this needed. Like, you moved two days ago. But on the serious? WTF EVEN?
This would have happened to us if we’d moved this year, and if CO had vote in person or mostly in person vote. We’d not have been registered to vote here, and …. well, we might have cared enough for a two day drive back to vote, but it’s unlikely.
However, the legitimate uses of this are I’m sure MINIMAL. It’s a case of “If this happens I’m screwed, because the world isn’t possible.”
The illegitimate cases? Oh, baby baby. That bus you’re driving around? They can all register on the spot. Even when you ask for documentation that consists of a letter sent there? All you need is the name and an address in that precinct. Dudes, I could mass produce “evidence” including what appears to be cancelled mail. (No one is going to test that cancellation with chemical analysis, okay?) And that’s me, who am only one person and not particularly tech/graphics.
All of which is complicated by
6 – Early voting.
If you are a legitimate voter voting early gives the left the scope of the amount they need to fraud. If you’re not legitimate and voting in someone else’s name, the person will come in and literally be unable to do anything. You can’t find the fraudulent vote and remove it from the total. At most you cast a “provisional” ballot which won’t even be read unless the total of votes of the winner is less than the provisionals. And that’s …. including the fraudulent vote.
People allowed to vote provisionally are appeased, and never realize at best their vote will be 1/2 a vote. At very, spectacular best.
All of which is rendered moot/piled on top by
7 – Machine fraud.
Look, I have lived my entire married life with someone who works with computers. Electronic voting is inherently insecure and will always be.
Throw in companies that are notoriously opaque about software and the only way to make this seem even vaguely sane is to assume they’re installed by people who want to facilitate flexible fraud on an industrial scale. THERE IS NO OTHER REASON.
Yes, machines are convenient. You get older, your eyes are going, you take forever to vote, people in line need to go to work, etc.
Note, I have no problem with a machine that just marks the ballot and spits it out for you to verify (and reads those marks, not others on the back of the ballot) be it mechanical or even electronic. But we need the end result to be a marked ballot you can verify.
Now, those seven means of fraud…
MOST of which facilitate fraud on an industrial, unimaginable scale….
I have two questions for you:
1- Which side fights like crazy for each of these “improvements” and becomes rabid weasels at the suggestion one of them will be taken away?
2- DO YOU THINK THEY’RE ANGELS incapable of sin? Because that’s what it takes to believe given all this there isn’t some fairly large scale amount of fraud.
No, it’s not the 0.025 number optimists think. I’d be very shocked if it was as low as 10% at the lowest point. No one installs that many possible fraud points to not use them.
For years now I’ve had a gut feeling average was around 20%, not counting places where it’s all vote by fraud, or the happy lands of Chicago fraud.
The fact that the places that cleaned their vote — hi Florida — voted that much for the GOP seems to make that about right.
Of course I’m not hanging my hat on it. But the point is, if it were one or two points of insecurity in our elections, I’d go “Eh. Margin of fraud is probably minimal.”
But these are enough failure points to make it “The most extensive and inclusive fraud network.” To quote the turnip. This means that how you vote, and what the count is only bear a vague resemblance to each other by the sheerest and happiest of coincidences.
Now, they likely weigh how much they fraud by the local “temperature.” No one would believe a massive left victory in some states or counties. But still, they fraud ENOUGH.
And in the face of how fast things like “let’s go Brandon” went viral, or even the fact they had to fraud at the last minute in 2020 and act like people under siege ever since (the barricades. The red speeches, etc.), or a myriad other things, my suspicion is we not only have the majority, we have the overwhelming majority (except in certain pockets, but even in those be aware that preference falsification is a thing so at BEST we can say we don’t know about those specific pockets.)
If we did, how would you know?
Given the ability to make votes be whatever the left has (it’s always the left. Given the leanings of the media and a lot of the judiciary, if it were the right, we’d all know) HOW WOULD YOU KNOW HOW THE PEOPLE VOTED?
Unless you catch them by surprise, like in 2020.
So — It’s the fraud. No matter how crazy your old aunt Edna is, or that she sleeps in Biden undies, no matter how much your blue-haired niece who just came out of college kisses her Bernie poster, no matter that your wife gets drunk and votes straight dem, or that your neighbor who can tan is a fan of AOC, the problem is the fraud.
The fraud falsifies results to a point WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW PEOPLE ACTUALLY VOTED.
But you have to ask yourself: Why would the left work this hard at fraud, if it were for a tiny margin? And also: How come Trump managed to break through once, maybe twice, if it’s just all these groups who are locked into the other side? How come they spent two years telling us there was no Fraud? When it was the GOP being accused of fraud, they ignored the dems. They certainly didn’t threaten police action or worse? So, how come? Why the barricades and national guard in DC?
Look, I know you want to there not have been fraud. First, because then your vote still counts, and next time we get them for sure. That’s what held people quiet after 2020. Second, because you need to give up the idea it can’t happen in America, and that we’re unique and safe. Third because the only way back from this is going to involve all of us volunteering considerable time/money/skull sweat — no, not to campaigning — but to getting the fraud opportunities removed and Fourth, it might go kinetic if the spark comes too close to the powder barrel, and if you know there’s fraud, you’ll be conscious this is a high likelihood, and you won’t sleep well at night.
This is not my choice either. But it is reality. Reality has a way of biting you in the ass while you’re daydreaming.
And right now, though no plan for turning this around is available, knowing what the problem is is our pathway to coming up with plans. In fact, once the depression wears off (Oh, not at the results. I told you they would fraud. It’s at the three-little-monkeys reaction on the right.) I probably will start spitting out avenues for fighting back (not violently. I’m the least person to advise on those, being mostly a person who works with words, and has had no experience of violence in almost 40 years. (And that very one on one and artisanal, you might say.)) BUT before that we need to get our heads straight and start looking suspiciously at our fellow Americans.
Yes, you were robbed. Yes, you have reason to be angry. But not at groups of Americans (when did you start believing in collective guilt anyway?) rather at the fraud and the fraudsters who created the opportunities and exploit them.
It’s the fraud, stupid!
Get that through your head, and then let’s figure out how to get our country back.
According To Hoyt 