Back tomorrow at least with a guest post. We’ve been having a veritable “health events” carnival this week, and I’m starting to suspect…

Well, in Giovanni Guareschi’s Don Camillo stories whenever something happened where the priest might do or say the unadvisable…. the phrase goes something like “The good Lord sent a fever that prostrated him for a week, so he didn’t even know what was happening.”

It’s not that bad, but there’s a bunch of things we can’t figure out have have to be pursued right now. And maybe there but for the grace of G-d go I.

Bolstered by that sense, I’ll post a religious snippet that has actually brought me comfort in dark times. Note it doesn’t promise ease or fun…

From The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton:

“The gates of heaven are lightly locked,

          We do not guard our gold,

          Men may uproot where worlds begin,

          Or read the name of the nameless sin;

          But if he fail or if he win

          To no good man is told.

          “The men of the East may spell the stars,

          And times and triumphs mark,

          But the men signed of the cross of Christ

          Go gaily in the dark.

          “The men of the East may search the scrolls

          For sure fates and fame,

          But the men that drink the blood of God

          Go singing to their shame.

          “The wise men know what wicked things

          Are written on the sky,

          They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings,

          Hearing the heavy purple wings,

          Where the forgotten seraph kings

          Still plot how God shall die.

          “The wise men know all evil things

          Under the twisted trees,

          Where the perverse in pleasure pine

          And men are weary of green wine

          And sick of crimson seas.

          “But you and all the kind of Christ

          Are ignorant and brave,

          And you have wars you hardly win

          And souls you hardly save.

          “I tell you naught for your comfort,

          Yea, naught for your desire,

          Save that the sky grows darker yet

          And the sea rises higher.

          “Night shall be thrice night over you,

          And heaven an iron cope.

          Do you have joy without a cause,

          Yea, faith without a hope?”

Don’t ask me what came over me. I get a strong feeling ONE of you out there needs to read this. So…. (Shrugs.) It could be a funny picture saying “this post is not a post.”

Back with real fare tomorrow.

Beyond the Red Rage Horizon:

Fighting Well on the Inner Front

by Analytical Engine mechanic

We passed the Rage Horizon a few weeks ago.

— Ian Bruene, ATH comment, Jan. 11 2021

You just passed Beyond the Red Rage Horizon, sounds like.

So welcome to where much of the rest of America has been for months now.

— “Cecilia Gray” c/o this writer, ATH vignette, Feb. 5 2021

Once upon a time, in a far-distant world we called 1980, Frederik Pohl came out with a novel called Beyond the Blue Event Horizon as the middle book of a trilogy. (I’ve not yet read it, actually, but surely one of the catchiest book titles ever. So, stolen.)

And if, like our regular commenter and that vignette character, we think of ourselves (and our country if not our whole world) as having recently passed through some sort of political or historical event horizon (a surface which by definition can be crossed only once moving forward in time), we wouldn’t likely be far wrong.

This was true (for many of us) just about two years ago, when the fraud went from a sneaking ugly suspicion (or even an “oh crap, not again!” moment for Americans from places like Venezuela), through a slow-motion train wreck of revelations and failures, on to a vague but powerful clarity that some vital things were very rotten indeed.

(And, for anyone “just visiting” here who believes there is “no evidence of election fraud from 2020” — please, do some homework and get a clue. Jovan Hutton Pulitzer. Antrim County Michigan. The Navarro Report. The Deep Rig. Atlanta bloody Georgia. 2000 Mules the book and the movie both. On and on and on. It might take you a few weeks to work through it all, but eventually you’ll get the big picture. And finally stop being an ignorant election-fraud denier.)

It was (again for many of us) as if we’d “walked around the horses” and ended up in some bizarre alternate-world variation of the country we thought we knew. And not a good variation at all; often like one designed to provoke anger, or far worse, despair. (For anger, at least properly channeled, stored, and used, can be a wonderful fuel.)

Well, now it’s 2022 not 2020, and many ways at least it seems… here we go again!

Again.

Once things that should have been impossible have happened anyway; once things that should have been dependable or necessary or simply inevitable have not; and most especially if we’ve “taken the red pill” (in the odd but durable symbolic language of “The Matrix”), even we did it “only” one more time in one more way — we really can’t go back to being and seeing as we did before.

We’ve passed (so many of us) Beyond the Red Rage Horizon, never again to return.

Even if that’s mostly because our talent for willful self-deception can only go so far.

This guest post isn’t so much about our very real and utterly significant “fight” (or if we’re less lucky, literal fight) in the material, objective world, to save and restore our country and its governance and its political and social culture from those who want to “fortify” it into a sad, Marxo-fascistic, dysfunctional, and thus doomed travesty of itself.

It’s about the counterpart of that fight in our inner, psychological, spiritual realm.

And the reason this “inner front” is directly relevant to that “outer front” is simply, or even critically, that our outer struggle, “fight” or maybe even “war” against losing all the most important and successful things about “our” America — can be lost there. One person at a time.

That tired old sweepstakes line “you can’t win if you don’t enter” truly does apply.

The worst and most hazardous open border is between your mind and their “think.”

There’s a line from an old Scottish (and Gaelic) protest song, about people trying to recruit colonists for the British (as in Canadian) side of North America, that fits here.

Thig iad thugainn, carach, seolta, gus ar mealladh far ar n-eòlais.

They come to us, cunning, deceitful, to lead us astray from what we know.

They want to disconnect us from our own inner knowing and our own inner personal and cultural strength. They want to lead us (going back again to the song) off into a cold land gun ghual, gun mhoine, without coal and without peat; with no (apparent) means “To Build A Fire” (as Jack London once said), no warmth there for us to find or to make for ourselves, only their endless inner empty Marxlandish space-cold chill.

So we freeze ourselves in place to suit their ends; or run in queasy circles till we die.

Please do note well, here, that if they can do this to us, inwardly, or even “better” get us to do it to ourselves or each other for them, they don’t even have to bother to do any more, outwardly. Mission accomplished. With or without “gender affirming” cuts.

(And I hear once again Capt. Mal Reynolds saying, “I aim to misbehave” instead.)

Even more importantly, human nature means we cannot refuse to participate. In an atmosphere of active psychological “influence operations” and propaganda served up as “news” or “fact checking” — or even outright dis-information designed and deployed to counter and neutralize our genuine, verifiable data, and logical conclusions that would in any normal, objective way flow from that — we either have to see through and resist this constant, dragging downhill gradient of imposed inner force… or fall prey to it.

On that inner front we will each either win or lose; there is literally no running away.

And the single most important factor in our combat effectiveness on that front, one where (again) by simple virtue of being human we are always inescapably exposed each moment of every day, is: do we know we’re in a fight here, and are we ready to go?

As (many of us here) introverts, creators, “Odds” as Sarah puts it so often, we tend to be more vulnerable in these ways; we “live closer to the unconscious” as Carl Jung used to say, being closer, indeed, to our own inner selves than many other people are.

But of course that is a source of strength too. These past few days in the immediate wake of Election Day (Week? Month?) 2022, I’ve seen so many people get carried away with the rush of events — but more importantly, carried away from themselves too.

People who ought to know better, even who most of the time do know better, but all of a sudden, in the heat of the (nasty, ugly, shocking) moment… do not.

My Republicans lost! How dare they, the losers, they were supposed to win for me, and save me and our country for me, so I didn’t have to help do it much or any myself!

They had the wrong message, the wrong strategy, not enough money, too much…

Guys, that’s all too much (don’t think of me here as a “nice guy” who will lie to you to spare your feelin’s at any cost, I’m not) like the suddenly-widowed wife of a policeman blaming her husband for not shooting the perp before he could shoot the love of her life dead on the spot. He didn’t kill himself; the bank robber pulled the gun and the trigger.

Never mind how real and searing her grief and her loss truly and genuinely are.

Valid as feelings, as emotions, yes. Very. As objective conclusions? Not so much!

Thinking with your emotions is like feeling with abstract mathematics. Right?

(And no, I’m not excusing RINOs and defeatists and collaborationists with ‘R’ after their names, no way no how. I’m asking you to ask yourselves, rather pointedly see just above, if you ought blame your allies for losing in a rigged game to a bunch of cheaters. Where, without the cheating, they most likely would have won barely or hugely big.)

So many — certainly not all — now in their grief (and it is genuine) blame their allies, or even worse, themselves; anyone but the bad guys who really brought this to pass.

Which isn’t correct, isn’t right, and for dead-certain sure is not helpful to us at all.

Don’t think, even for an instant, I’m suggesting that you “stuff” your feelings or set them aside, somehow — that’s not only not what I mean, except in the very immediate present and where vitally necessary, it’s the near-perfect opposite of what I mean.

What I am saying is that you need to be “in touch” both with your reason (and all the information it needs to work on) and with your emotions (and all the power they can, if properly “met” and felt and understood, embody and release). Intuition helps, too.

That way, your emotions do not (see above)… lead you astray. Do not lead or tempt you to “think” using your emotions — which, although it can seem natural or obvious at times, really does make about as much sense and work about as well as yelling in rage to solve a mathematical-physics problem, or “debugging” your misbehaving program by throwing its code listings across the room.

But likely even more important, that way the energy in your emotions — which in the case of fear and grief for your family, our country, for our very civilization, can be vast and deep indeed — becomes and remains available for you to actually, practically use, in specific ways that can advance your goals according to your chosen strategy.

So you don’t simply burn it off like a pile of lit gunpowder, but instead make it shove the piston down the cylinder, or even the ball down the barrel. (Speaking inwardly and metaphorically and psychologically, of course.)

Some of the left-side’s techniques, gambits, mechanisms are very powerful indeed; it’s just that they’re seldom or never very sophisticated too. That means if you can step back and look carefully at things (and here I’m talking about them trying to crawl inside your head, not the more direct real-world attacks through jobs or social life or lawfare or regulations or… all the other evil crap they’ve been up to for awhile), without getting sucked into ‘thinking’ only with your feelings (also known as not thinking), most of their ploys do tend very definitely to shrink to a manageable size or simply fall apart.

(Of course, like a lot of things, this is hardest to do just when it matters the most.)

And one of the best ways to start that analysis (‘taking things apart’) is to ask what the Romans suggested: cui bono? Who benefits, if I… blame Trump for losing, or whatever.

Who benefits, if I blame Trump for losing in 2020, “he should have done a better job of running” or whatever? Not him, not the sane and patriotic subset of the R-Party, not the cause of resisting the ever-nuttier Rodent Liberation Front squirrels with the D’s.

Who benefits, if I decide to despair that we will ever “take back” our country, or even the House or the Senate? Who benefits, if I decide “all our elections are hopelessly and permanently corrupted” and I don’t even bother to try to vote anymore? Surely not the people I used to be in league with, who now have to go on without me. (Or quit too.)

Who benefits, if despite your determination to resist the ever more overtly Marxist rot and malignancy, and starkly insane policies like “no more drilling” and “an end to coal” without any viable replacements — and to take back our schools, our culture, our way of life — your sudden, hairpin-turn policy shift is to end your relationship with the one major current political figure who has proven that he can get elected on a ‘MAGA’ agenda, fight the swamp decently (only decently) well, turn out huge crowds from both old and new constituencies within the electorate, raise and spend money in a way that end-runs the RINO-riddled Party apparatus and steers it toward supporting (mostly) solid real-conservative candidates and actually gets many elected, and even start up his own social media platform to compete with Big Tech Left? Do you know something the rest of us don’t (yet), about the New Guy Du Jour? Or perhaps instead it’s the old Never Trumper Bug, that’s (once again) going around?

And doesn’t that plan make about as much sense as shutting down all our coal plants before their nuclear (or whatever) replacements even start construction?

Who benefits, if one simple half-stolen election (this one less effectively so than last) sets those who oppose the Friends of Good Old Marksy to pointing fingers, flinging poo (figuratively), throwing shade and blame at each other? Surely not friends of liberty.

Notice that I’m really not (despite possible appearances) trying to support Donald Trump 2024, or anything like it; officially he’s not even running yet, and it was only at the very last minute I decided to go his way in 2016. (Then, he was an untested largely unknown quantity and a self-promoting reality-showman too. Now, we know more.)

Instead, I’m suggesting you think, logically and dispassionately, what am I really doing if I think and act this way I feel, or that I now feel is right? By your own lights.

Am I being a stalwart true American, here, or a careless upset super-spreader of doom?

Also note well and carefully, none of the above is aimed as any sort of criticism of anyone (sane and patriotic and civilization-affirming ones at least), here or anywhere else, for saying things over these past days since Tuesday evening. That’s not only not my purpose in writing this, there’s a deeper point that applies.

The above kind of analysis only works on and for half the functions I’ve been talking about — the half that has to do with deciding, logically, how to understand what you do know (or even what you don’t), and what you think might be best to try to do about it.

The other half is the part where you feel — what’s inside you, what it’s doing to you, what’s been done to you. All the fear, despair, rage, and everything else, must be seen.

And comments, for that matter even original posts, don’t necessarily only pertain to the “analytical” half alone — they involve the emotional half too, which (usually or even eventually) must be brought to consciousness and treated respectfully, in some way; or else bad or worse is likely to come to you in time, from your ongoing inner neglect.

Some of us would say good clear writing means you make that distinction between how you see things and how you feel about them; but of course, you have to already be clear on that, first, in order to write that way. Not all of us always are; actually, being naturally imperfect human beings, none of us always or perfectly are.

But my final point here is actually a current one. Election tampering,  interference, fraud, “f*ckery” or any other name you might put to it, is by its nature also a psy-op. It isn’t only that corruption is associated with many of the D’s (Peter Schweitzer has done multiple detailed books on that, including “Profiles In Corruption”). It’s also that this kind of foolery involved in election tampering, by just about any means — buying votes or harvesting them, stuffing ballot boxes, rewriting totals through “algorithms” built to cheat, re-scanning selected ballots multiple times, creating rivers of counterfeit ballots using vote-by-mail-fraud, or whatever — has the effect of and works by corrupting the entire process. And thus also everything “downstream” from that process, too.

So it doesn’t only corrupt the official “count” of votes, as it mis-decides who “wins” and will be installed in office; it also corrupts the signals that vote count would send to the voters and the whole electorate and the public at large. It mis-states, in one or more ways, what the desires and choices of the voting public, as sampled by this election, are this time around. It’s not just, effectively, stealing a term of office by violating the trust we place in the human and inanimate “machinery” of our election; it also mis-uses that trust (as long as we still have it) to authoritatively lie to everyone about what we said in the election, collectively. Even bogus results can look legitimate because we trust them.

Typically, or at least traditionally, this sort of information closes a sort of feedback loop — candidates who do really well, even if they don’t win, tend to be back. Ones who do very badly, unless they’re from diehard fringe parties that just keep on trying, often never try again. Which means that this indirect effect, reasonable and even useful as it typically is as long as the process is honest and gets its arithmetic right, gets corrupted as well — just about exactly as badly as the fraud compromised the election itself.

This kind of corruption doesn’t only affect who wins now, it affects who runs later. It especially can affect what sort of contributions candidates might get in the future, too.

It affects the conclusions that voters and others draw about the parties, the issues, how they think and feel about those and politics itself — all based on a judicious lie.

And it (naturally, almost inevitably) affects all those things in the same direction: the way the steal and the lie were originally crafted to drive events. It substitutes not “fake news” but a “fake election” for at least part of the real one. Impersonating the truth of one of the processes that is most central, essential, and necessary for a representative, democratic republic like ours to function, or really to exist as such at all.

It steals the power of the machinery of government; then tries to gaslight one and all into believing that we not only deserve what we’re about to get, we actually asked for it.

We can’t really change or correct the results of an election; not the official totals, not who gets to be sworn in, certainly not as individuals. But what we can do, by ourselves on our inner front, is refuse to be easily or quickly duped by election “results” that look too good or too bad to be true. We don’t have to descend instantly into the kind of hard and ugly self-criticism that flows from credulously swallowing a (possible or likely) lie.

We don’t have to assume that just because previously-questionable election results, especially ones from or including those notorious “blue counties” or “fraud hotspots” investigated in previous (problematic or highly-suspect) elections, say we’ve lost big or that there was next to no “Red Wave” or that many of our fellow citizens just don’t care about America’s future or want to happily lap up the latest socialist gruel — it’s true.

We don’t have to greedily swallow “black pills” that real fraud might be setting us up to receive — we don’t even have to react to even credible election news as someone else would expect or like us to do. “Reality testing” is important, especially to more realistic people, yes; but you need to run the tests on good equipment with proper calibration.

We can wait a bit longer for the newfangled electoral “fog of war” to blow away, for instance, on the metaphorical battlefield. Last I heard (secondhand), Kari Lake, Blake Masters, and Mark Finchem in Arizona were still expecting to win, given the nature of the late votes they’re supposed to be counting. Just from this one example, that’s one set of “losses” (Governor and Senator, Secretary of State) that might really be all wins.

Of course, the fact “we’re still counting” days after the election… suggests some bad.

Finally, and most starkly unlike the outer front, in the end the only person who can actually fight for you on that inner front is — you. Surely you can have allies and friends and fellow-travellers, and some of us have spiritual support as well (perhaps amazing if maybe hard to believe, even hard to believe we deserve, support); but ultimately, it will be you who decides if you’re going to keep faith with your own inner resources, or with your family or ancestors or culture or religion or allies of any kind. Or else, instead, let others define your values, your beliefs, your way of life, or who you actually are inside; because they have their own system in mind for your world, and they’re willing and able to (if you let them) warp your inner world, by warping pieces of your outer world first.

Maybe they do have a lot of power. But maybe you’d prefer not to give them more.

Perhaps you, too, aim to misbehave; and inside your own mind most of all.

There are still “races” going on for the legislature. By which you might very well read “being stolen and taken away in a sack by the “democrat” election fixers”

You also forgot one important thing: no one pays attention to each individual race in the midterms, which means it makes the whole thing EASIER to steal.

Meanwhile, what is the right fighting about? Oh, yes.

1. “Was it fraud?”

We told you it was fraud. We pointed out it was fraud. We told you how the fraud would be effected. You told us it was harder in mid term elections, which might have been true when the fraud wasn’t automated and baked in through a million security faults in the system. So, from the top:

a) If you think the other side isn’t taking full and amazing advantage of a)vote by mail. b) same day registration. c)no ID required for registration or vote. d) no proof of citizenship required to register (motor voter) e)legalizing and sometimes making mandatory vote harvesting. f)early voting that extends for months. g)machines that we know are connected to the internet and count fractional votes or “enhanced votes”, you must think the other side are angels. You also have never paid attention to how they fight like rabbid weasels every time we try to take these fraud channels away.

b) Unless you can say with a straight face the following sentences: “Joe Biden had the most votes of any president ever elected, and the smallest loss of any midterm first term president ever. I guess he’s the most popular and charismatic president in America and all this time it was Barrack Obama holding him down” it was fraud.

2. “TRUMP OR DESANTIS”. There’s a fight going on. Choose NOW it’s super-important.

According to a video that I linked in the comments a few days go, and cannot now find, DeSantis started this war behind the scenes.

That makes perfect sense. Whatever you think of Trump, no, he didn’t go insane all of a sudden. He is instead responding to insult and attack the way he always does: brashly, and trying to drag it into the light.

Here’s the thing: I think worse of both of them for starting this now. Yeah, yeah, campaign people got to eat. But the campaign is futile while there’s fraud. And all this is doing is allowing the dems to get away with fraud because everyone is watching the special effects and not what is actually going on.

From the top and on theme “Oh, you rockheads, you deserve to starve!”

Meanwhile there is the ever-present “should there be a third party.” Because in fraudulent elections, controlled by one side, it matters if there’s one party or ten thousand….

(Judging by what their Junior division did, following Sad Puppies, to fortify those elections, they’re going hard on “ranked choice” next chance they get.)

And my problem? I’m being Cassandra again. It’s ALL TOO CLEAR. Blame it on going to school with a lot of these crazy people or their Portuguese cousins.

For these elections, the tattered, barely there fig leaf is that the womynz got on it mass because they loves them abortion that well. (Even though in Iowa a strident abortion campaign either pushed the state further right, or you know, the elections were clean and no one gives a fig about abortion. Or very few people do. Which accords with the polls.)

For 2024? Well. “Trump/DeSantis fans were so pissed off they stayed home.”

For 2026/28? “It was these third party spoilers. They divided the conservative vote and the left won.”

Note none of those are the real reasons. They’re fig leafs. But the fig leafs will work to keep the right directing their anger at whoever: women, Trump/DeSantis/third party.

Instead of directing it at the *ssholes who stole their country and keep doing so, as well as driving it into the ground with a steam shovel.

Do you want to keep looking at the special effects? Carry on. I guess it’s a distraction while you’re being killed.

Or do you want to sit down and figure out, from your own place and your own abilities, how to stop the fraud and take the fight to the enemy?

I never made much secret that my own abilities are lacking. I’m sort of okay at putting down words, that’s about it. But a lot of you have amazing talents, and extraordinary abilities and knowledge which will allow you to start digging the sand out of the monolith.

No, they can’t endure forever. I doubt they can endure much more than ten years. But you get to control how fast they fall and what comes after.

I don’t know about the lot of you, but I have children and might have grandchildren. Otherwise, I’d already be unwinding the blog and getting ready to write only fiction, instead of rolling this rock up the hill yet again.

But, hey. I’d rather I suffer than they suffer.

So I’m asking you: which is it going to be? Stay entertained by the irrelevant spectacle while the cyanide drips into the veins of the Republic, or sit down and figure out what you can do where you are, right now?

Even if it’s just yelling “It’s the fraud. Stop staring at the pretty colors, it’s the fraud”?

The ball is in your court.

FROM M. C. A. HOGHARTH: Haley and the Catfish Invasion: A LitRPG Short Story.

Haley and Nana return in a second heartwarming adventure! Having embraced her new meta class, Haley is ready for anything… except, possibly, a plague of seafood! It turns out it’s harder than she thought to sit back and let other people handle the problems she really, really wants solved….This second installment in the adventures of a post-apocalyptic world with a game system imposed on it by magical aliens contains yet another recipe, because (once again), that’s the kind of story this is. Curl up with some cornbread and watch Haley craft her way through another quick read!

FROM DAVID WELCH: Stained Glass Jaws

Tye Gallagher is a man on the road to fame and fortune. Born in the ghetto, he’s found a path to success through boxing. Blessed with an iron chin and rib-breaking body shot, he’s put up an undefeated record, and managed to fight the reigning champion to a draw. He’s preparing himself for his reign as heavyweight champ, and few think anything can stop him.

But fate is fickle, and Gallagher’s first loss sends the man careening into a downward spiral. Stripped of the illusions of fame, Tye finds himself facing a failing marriage, shifty management, unforgiving media, and an inner rage that has dogged him for most of his life. Lacking the security of a stable upbringing, he finds himself in a battle he’s completely unprepared for. The only friend he has left is, strangely enough, his former rival. Gallagher not only has to try to rescue his crumbling career, but decide what of type of person he wants to be after all the ego and bluster have been ripped away. And without any real examples to fall back on, it is the fight of Tye’s life to see if he can become anything more than just another also-ran…

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Ways of Winter – A Virginian in Elfland.

TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?

It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.

Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.

Welcome to the portrait of a paladin in-the-making, Can he carry out a rescue without the deaths of all involved? Will his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, help him, or just write him off as a dead loss? He has a family to protect and a world to save, and little time to do it in.

FROM MICHAEL MORGAN: Ladies, Fish, & Gentlemen

Ana’s mother always insisted on the proprieties for young ladies, but she never prepared her daughter for the snake pit of Los Cristobal. Political factions wrestle behind the illusion of a free city, each plotting to seize control for King and Country. Beneath the city, a secret society has begun unlocking the powers of ancient sorcery, but they lack something. Something secret. Something stolen from them by Ana’s father, and now they are coming to take it back. Sometimes, a young lady must do some very unladylike things to stay alive.

Ladies, Fish, & Gentlemen is a swashbuckling historical fantasy tale with magical realism undertones set in a pre-colonial North America that never was. Shamanistic ritual, the miracles of Holy places, and lust for the power of resurrected technologies drive men mad in the struggle to control the destiny of the New World. A footpad, a vampire, and the native Kiawah people may be Ana’s best allies against the coven of sorcerers trying to murder her.

“Pull harder Sofia!” Ana gasped in pain as the staves of baleen pinched the puckered line of new scar across her side, and squeezed her burned flesh.
“Mistress! Apologies, Mistress. Please let me loosen it,” Sofia begged in sympathy as Ana’s face lost its color.
Ana shook her head as she pulled in a slow breath. The strain in her voice was clear over the calm façade, “A knight has his armor, as do we women. Our battlefields and methods may be different, but both require the appropriate costume. My dress, and then my hair.”

“A small jump to her left took Ana out of the line of attack as her sword drew a crimson line that bisected her attacker’s ear. A step to the right lent her body weight to the tip of her dagger as it punched into the man’s side through the armhole of his polished back and breast armor. The hilt of the main gauche was torn from her grip as the man’s momentum took him through the doorway and the slope of the staircase took control of him. Ana raised her right knee and drew her dirk left handed as a third soldier entered the room.”

The Ladies of Los Cristobal series is Girl power at its best.

FROM JL CURTIS: Country Boys (and Girls) will Survive

Shady Rest Mobile Home Park wasn’t anything much… Small, old, and butted up against the Okefenokee swamp, with an ‘eclectic’ group of tenants, it was the target in a long time feud.DK Thorne, a medically retired Marine, did his best to keep the place afloat, the tenants happy, and fight off the County. He was managing to do that until the local witch said ‘things’ were coming from the other side of the ‘veil’…And they did, but country boys and girls know how to survive.

FROM HENRY HAYDEN (DO YOU DISCRIMINATE AGAINST CATS?): Notebook: Write that Down! (So Sez Henry)

BY OTIS ADELBERT KLINE, EDITED BY D. JASON FLEMING: 3 Weird Tales: A horror pulp trio of terror!

Otis Adelbert Kline was an assistant editor on *Weird Tales* from its founding issue. He was also one of WT’s regular authors from that same issue.

Collected here are three stories first published in that legendary pulp magazine.

The Thing of a Thousand Shapes

Uncle Jim was dead. So what was that… thing… that was in the room with his casket? Kline’s first published story, and the very first (two-part) serial *Weird Tales* ever published, almost reads like a mission statement for that storied pulp.

Bride of Osiris

When Jim Buell’s fiancée was kidnapped right in front of him, in broad dayling on the streets of Chicago, even he could not predict his quest to rescue her would lead him to the center of a human sacrifice cult!

Lord of the Lamia

When John Tane rented that house in Cairo, he almost immediately became host to an unwanted corpse, and was made into a pawn in a game he had no wish to play. But before the game is over, he will turn the tables on the plotters that surround him, and become… The Lord of the Lamia!!!

    This iktaPOP Media edition includes new introductions giving genre and historical context to the novellas.

FROM J. ALLAN DUNN, EDITED BY D. JASON FLEMING: On The Knees Of The Gods (Annotated): The Classic Pulp Fantasy.

Peter Brent, American, steps through a laurel hedge in Greece in 1939 — and is transported back to the days of the gods! But getting Zeus’s attention isn’t always the best idea…

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

BY EDMOND HAMILTON, EDITED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Fire Princess (annotated): The classic pulp lost civilization adventure novel!

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.

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: Pear

One of the most charming insults since I came out of the political closet going on 12 to 14 years ago was that I was “a little peculiar.” It was said by a Britisher of course, and it was charming and almost endearing compared to the bilge, sewer water and outright maligning that’s come my way.

Weirdly I haven’t lost ALL my talent. That’s normally what happens first. But there are a few holdouts on that side (mostly those who have read me) who say I can still write I’ve just gone insane, peculiar or sold out. (Oh, that last is charming too. Like there’s money on our side. Okay, there is, but it’s from the public, not the easy, have a packet of cash from a supporting billionaire.)

OTOH I’ve been informed I’m retarded because I retain my accent (moved here after the age of 18, so it’s fairly normal) or because I typo like I breathe. (Dyslexic. In every language I speak.) Hilariously some of the world brains claiming that don’t realize I’m ESL.

I’m not saying this to complain. (TRULY) It doesn’t hurt. Not even when I laugh (and I laugh a lot.) But all of the above is the mildest that’s been thrown at me.

I’ve been accused of crimes real and imaginary, including of having been part of a tyrannical government that fell when I was 11. I’ve been accused of being a Nazi sympathizer as well as racist, sexist and homophobic of course. I have been told I hate Asians (how anyone who reads my books can think that is beyond me. I do, however, dislike dragon-shifter gangsters. Be aware of that.)

It got so bad that at one time my kids were playing online with their gamer group which is international — keep in mind they were under assumed names, as all gamers are. I think my kids have ten handles each at least — when they suddenly heard my name bandied around as this terrible horrible bigot person who wanted to hurt women writers and keep them from being published, and who was probably violent. They decloaked, beat the others around the room and left the group.

Again, not saying this for pity or to whine. At this point all of this is situation normal, as is the fact I have to keep my current address secret including the state I’m in (I figure it will come out in no less than three years. Enough people know the state and city and fandom TALKS. But I’ll keep it quite the next two years if I can.) Because some cartoon characters find SWATing funny. And because some cartoon characters with power and the dem illusion of invulnerability think cutting out the internet access of opponents is a great idea. (Here’s my middle finger, Polis.)

I’m used to this now. I wouldn’t know what to do if tomorrow I started being treated as everyone else. I’d probably check the obituaries to see if I’d died and not noticed.

The point is, and what’s important here: THIS IS THE PRICE YOU PAY TO BE OUT AS BEING TO THE RIGHT OF LENIN.

And this is as a 3rd light in science fiction and mildly amusing blogger.

But I’m educated (ooh, boy. And other useless things) well read, an artist (ah, not really, but a passable craftswoman) and an immigrant from a schrodingerly Latin country (It’s Latin when it suits them) so I’m obviously and clearly someone who should belong to them. Since I insist on staying outside the fence and doing a cha cha at the sheep within, it can’t be tolerated and everything plus the Elon Twitter sink must be thrown at my head.

Imagine how larger the price is if you’re someone who opposes them in politics?

Particularly if you’re a woman, black, a New Yorker, or someone who is rich and successful and has been submerged and passing his whole life as being on the left. (I’ve come to the conclusion Trump, like me, was in the closet for political reasons. It’s how you become that peculiar.)

I think the price is higher, and what you become, overnight, unbeknownst to yourself even, is much much worse.

And when I say it doesn’t hurt and I’m not complaining: It’s true now. But the first …. six years after coming out of the closet were rough. People I loved despite our different opinions suddenly and out of the blue savaged me. People I thought were friends stabbed energetically. Professional contacts complained of the pain and angst of working with such a terrible character (my favorite being the ex-Baen-proofreader who talked about how hard it was to proof my vile, politics laden books. She left before DST. So it was Draw One In The Dark And Gentleman Takes a Chance. Not that any of the others are politics laden, but I could see that there is a libertarian slip showing in the DST series. But…. SHIFTERS?) Just every morning was more or less “What fresh hell is this?” It’s still happening, now of course because I won’t swallow the fraud. Even people nominally on our side — who apparently believe that Biden got the most votes in a presidential election ever, and was the president who is so popular that he lost almost nothing in midterms and that all these years it was Obama dragging him down (think on that a minute. Say it with a straight face) — are now doing the “distance and throw things at her” some of them having started before the election (things that make you go “um”) –are still doing this now and then.

So, you know. it’s okay. I’m used to it. But dear Lord, I know and can sense how much worse it is above.

No, this isn’t a sympathy for Trump thing. You can have it or not, I don’t care. Until fraud is out your opinion — and mine — don’t matter. It’s a “Yeah, he’s peculiar. A lot of our champions are/were peculiar. AND WHO ELSE DO YOU THINK YOU’LL GET?”

Humans are social apes. Over the last 100 years the leftist pov was enforced so strenuously that to go against it was to step outside the ape-band. Or at least it was in everyone’s perception.

This might no longer be true, with the band itself, but it is true with any of those in the band that screech. All the media, all the entertainment, all the education, even political figures who are supposedly not on the left, will revile you, make fun of you, and discount your intelligence the minute you announce you don’t buy into the left’s beliefs and oh, yeah, you’re anti-communist.

(The inverse is true. Occasional Cortex, a woman who can find her own ass with two hands, a seeing eye dog and ass-finding GPS 2 times out of ten is universally applauded as smart and a trend setter.)

TO STEP OUT AT ALL you must be pretty peculiar, in the sense that you’ve stopped immersing yourself and trying to fit in with the other apes. You’ve stopped scratching when they do and howling when the etiquette dictates. You’ve had enough of it. Having thought about it and come to the conclusion you have to follow your own internal prompts, you have in a way stopped being part of the band. That’s peculiar for a social ape. In fact it’s downright insane.

It’s also useful when the band as a whole is determined to do stupid things (like the one child policy, or “green” energy or jumping off a cliff, or become whatever the current version of the dems is: Mao-eco-facist, at an approximation.) They need these peculiar, standing out apes to move them to a course where the band will survive.

But until the wheel turns completely, the ones who stand out and try to push us away from the precipice will be weird. They will have peculiarities other than “disagrees politically.” (Usually fairly harmless. Ted Cruz quotes science fiction movies and books and can’t read a room to save his life. Probably literally. It’s a wonder he survived this long as a politician.)

They will also not be great as politicians. Smooth career politicians are unlikely to step that far out of the “mainstream” even when the mainstream is running around with pants on its head making choo choo noises. Whatever else politicians are, they’re highly social. Now, there might be some geniuses out there, who are politicians and genuine goats and under cover, but probably not a large number of them..

The time is late. The danger is very real.

All our champions will be peculiar. And if you keep screaming at them with the rest of the band and saying “You’re peculiar” then you won’t get any.

I don’t mean to say we must run Trump. Again, who we run makes no difference until we get the fraud out. Certainly not for national offices.

BUT if we want people, particularly people of money and fame — howdy, Elon, hey — to stand up against the establishment, we must stand against the establishment. We must not revile them.

If they’re going to get bilge from both sides, why would anyone sane stand out? (Sane for a definition of can see the train coming at speed.)

It’s my theory if the times weren’t so bad and crazy, we’d have NO ONE with any power and influence. Heck, we might not have me.

This is completely different from the way the other side treats their weird (and considering how they’re the voice of the pack it’s amazing how many rank weirdos they have. And I mean rank) members: I submit Beto, the fake Latin, and Tank Abrahams the crazy fake governor of Georgia. Do they revile them? Even when they do or say the craziest things? Nope. They pet them, love them, call them George and suggest they run for president.

And this when their weird members have far less excuse both in a “stand outside the pack” way and in a “so stressful to have all your friends turn on you” way.

So… Put down that handful of poo, and think before you join the bien pensant in hurling it at the champions of the right. And give them room to sometimes be weird or say strange things (and in this I’m including Cruz, deSantis, etc.) without immediately turning on them.

Paranoia is a perfectly sane reaction to growing up surrounded by foes. But it can be exaggerated. I realize not giving people another chance to stab you is a good thing. But count out the first two. The first is happenstance, the second is coincidence. (And this doesn’t mean going after people on words said sometimes reported out of context, but on real, verifiable deeds.)

Stand down. Don’t kill the weirdo. He or she might be your only chance at getting out of this bind.

Post-Mortem by Thomas Kendall

               “To the MAGA diehards, I say: is this really what you want? A Republican Party that can’t decisively whip the Democrats even in an extremely favorable year?”

               Oh, for fuck’s sake.

               I wouldn’t describe myself as a MAGA diehard, and yet on behalf of people who still actually want to make America great again, whatever slogan is attached to doing so, allow me to respond:

               No, Rod. What we wanted was for the party to have our back when 2020 was stolen using possibly the most blatant fraud in US history. The party declined to do so, largely because establishment GOP leaders had always seen Trump as a threat to the gravy train. We were told it looked bad. We responded that elections that had more mail in ballots returned than sent out, elections where the counting stopped in the middle of the night to throw out Republican observers and allow the delivery of massive drops of Democratic ballots with no chain of custody, that looked bad. We were told there wasn’t enough evidence. So someone literally put up a website called “hereistheevidence” tabulating the evidence. It had no noticeable effect.

               We told the rest of the conservative movement way back then that the consequences of not going to the mattress when fraud was as obvious as it had ever been, and likely as obvious as it ever would be, given the operations were scaled hastily and the legislative moves to support them had been blatantly illegal, were going to cost us all more than we could possibly bear. The party shook their heads and took the easy way out, to preserve their precious respectability.

               And now you turn around, two years later, and have the unbelievable fucking nerve to blame this on MAGA?

               This blog predicted the midterms were going to be muted, at best. It predicted it even though basically the whole rest of the Right, including people who should have definitely known better, were predicting a mid-term drubbing for the Democrats. What magic crystal ball did we look into to tell this? None. We had eyes, we remembered what happened in 2020, and given that information, it was not difficult to come to the conclusion that this game, once rigged, was going to stay rigged. Oh, people tried to beat the house. The number of votes was at or equal to a presidential election in places (and plenty of voters turned out too!).

               I think I speak for all of us when I say we hoped we were missing something. We hoped that we could beat the margin of fraud. We hoped against hope that a miracle would happen. But we’ve had precious few miracles since 2016, and the last time we got one, the national party revealed their true monoparty biases and collaborated to do their best to undo it. Well, congratulations to the monoparty and its supporters, because it looks like you may actually have finally done it. But I’ll get to you sods in a moment.

               As for what we do about the pickle all this has put us in, honestly, this is one of those situations where all of the answers are bad, but fuck it, here they are:
               Option 1, and what seems to be the most popular with various sites right now, is easing Trump out and trying to move forward with candidates who carry forward some of the spirit of MAGA without the baggage. Am I capturing that plan properly? And on paper, given all of this context-free momentum around DeSantis, I’m sure this seems swell… except for some tiny details.

               Even if the establishment GOP doesn’t find a way to neuter him first, the Democratic fraud machine which has literally handed you your asses twice now is not going to let DeSantis win. Not if he remains actually worth voting for, anyway. His huge margin is in one of the few states that actually has cleaned up its elections. Part of the error here is thinking Florida is purple. It isn’t. In fact I know of no states that have done substantive work to fight voter fraud that have been purple since they did it, but can name two that have become reliably red—Texas and Florida. Whereas I can name states that have become purple or even blue by making voter fraud easier (sidebar: sorry about Colorado, Sarah; Arizona, please keep fighting!). The idea that winning on one of the only even playing fields in the US will translate to winning in a rigged system is breathtaking magical thinking. That said, I’ve been watching various blogs grooming DeSantis as Trump’s replacement since January. Now with 20 point margins under his belt, he’s a shoo-in. I’m not sure what it is you’re planning to gain by making this switch. I hear people saying he’s a better candidate for X, Y, and Z reasons. Maybe they’re right. DeSantis certainly doesn’t seem to make the kind of dumb-as-rocks hiring choices Trump did, although also, he did have Trump’s poor example to learn from. I think it’s kind of an academic question, though.

               On the other hand, I’ll admit, at this point, to a kind of fatalistic fascination with watching you try to get someone worthwhile into the White House. By all means, be my guest. In a strange way we have nothing but time at this point. We won in our Flight 93 election—but like Flight 93, the plane has still crashed. So sure, given we’re on the train to a socialist Hell as we speak, and I cannot imagine a way it will make things worse, why not do it to pass the time? You’ll have my support in the vote, for all the good it does. You’ll probably have the support of most of the party. Although, hilariously, having watched Trump, if DeSantis or whoever it is is actually worth their salt, I’m not sure they’ll  have your support by then. If the Democrats get scared enough, they’ll run the game they did with Trump on you. They’ll use out-of-context quotes and baseless accusations to build an evil facade around DeSantis—just as they did with Trump— make him the picture of Satan incarnate with independents—just as they did with Trump—and send you braying to the Hills for another worthwhile conservative to elevate and abandon the moment your enemies run the exact same playbook they run every time. Like it’s new. Like it’s never been done before, every fucking time. God above, they did this with McCain, they will surely do it with him. And speaking of, while I’m on the subject, we may as well deal with this now—

               When it doesn’t work…

               And you come back to us in two years blaming us again…

               When you come back—despite your snipes at the Bulwark and the pre-Trump GOP—  telling us that what’s dragging the Republican party down is all this MAGA stuff, and if we only ran a more moderate candidate…

               That’s when you’re reaching for option 2.

               Option 2 is that you actually find Republican candidates so non-threatening to the Left that they don’t try very hard to fight them. This is what the establishment GOP wants us to do very badly, and by 2024 or 2028—supposing the country lasts that long—what I’m predicting is that if you walk down this road, you also are going to be demanding it, just to get a win on the board. I am guessing that you disagree, but you forget that Trump was DeSantis before DeSantis was DeSantis (honestly for as many of Trump’s mannerisms as DeSantis has started parroting I almost wrote “before DeSantis was Trump”). I look at you now, throwing Trump overboard using the same pejoratives the Left has used against him all these years, and through that window I can see you in 4 or 8 years tossing out DeVilsantis in favor of your new flavor of the week.

               So this next part goes out to your future self, and the establishment GOP standing behind you, and to all misguided simpletons in the conservative party already harboring these thoughts in their dark little hearts and eager to really earn that “stupid party” moniker. I’m going to be brutally honest about a few things. First of all, this is the strategy the party has basically been using since Regan left office. In that time it’s given us such gems as two flavors of George Bush, both dubious and  the surviving one is getting more dubious all the time, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.  Speaking frankly, if I rolled them all up and squeezed, I might get enough actual conservative bona fides for a mayoral candidate in a medium sized conservative town.

               Second of all, you’ll notice that it had, even so, stopped working. The Left moved so far Left that they preferred to have people live under authentic Leftism rather than Left Lite. Left Lite barely squeaked in here and there, and eventually just stopped being able to. And they got called Nazis for 4 to 8 years for making basically the same decisions as Democrats except for occasionally acknowledged their own personal religious beliefs.

               Third of all, despite this fact, we know that you expected actual conservatives to continue supporting the national party—which was basically never Trump before there was a Trump to never— because it was, again, speaking frankly, the equivalent of driving off a cliff at 20 MPH rather than 100 MPH. I think I remember Bill Whittle actually making that comparison more or less verbatim, and I remember the days when it made sense. We figured that was how things had to be, since no actual conservatives seemed to be winning elections.

               Then 2016 happened. And now we know. The national party wasn’t and isn’t trying and failing.  They were trying to fail. And to their detriment, in 2020, as I said, perhaps finally succeeded.

               I have bad news, though. I can’t in good conscience collaborate with the experiment to force an unwilling country to go voluntarily socialist by not offering them anything else. There was a little window where we had an actual conservative agenda to vote for and the fraud apparatus was caught off guard and now we see the game, you understand?

               So the next time you elevate a Mitt Romney or a John McCain, don’t bother asking for my vote. You’re not getting it. You got it a few times and it was a few times too many. I let you, nominally in my name, erect the TSA and pass the Patriot Act. I let you, in my name, send corn-fed heartland kids to die because Democratic policies rendered our intelligence agencies unfit for anything except spying on Americans and getting directly and—do I have to specify this?—grossly inappropriately involved in federal politics. I defended your retrospectively retarded argument that the only solution was to build nations where no nations have, best as I can tell, ever successfully been built (given our commitment to teaching them the merits of urinal art-installations I can’t blame the natives). If that evened up the offspring score between the military-supporting right and the barren-via-abortion Left that was—certainly I’m sure to the Left— all to the good, and you were just the kind of patsies to take that bargain.

               Maybe, just maybe if you corrupt the concept of “conservative” enough you’ll find someone the Left will actually let you have a pyrrhic victory by voting in. I’d start by looking under damp rocks, that’s where I’ve seen the best establishment GOP candidates. And won’t it be a blast, watching the same perpetually failing socialist policies and government overreach be passed by someone with an R after their name instead of a D? I’m sure the Left would like a break from the accountability… such as it is.

               But you will not do it in my name. Whoever it is, I won’t back and I won’t pretend to back. I’ve seen through the game, and now I’ll vote only for people I would actually want to represent me, or failing that, don’t seem to actively hate me. And if there aren’t any, I’ll figure out something to write in as my protest vote. Because it’s a terrible thing to be forced to make a bad choice, but it’s corrosive to the soul to voluntarily acquiesce to things antithetical to your fundamental beliefs just to try to score a meaningless win in a battle between two groups that both hate you. Fuck all of you, on both sides, right back. Donald Trump was my first middle finger to both of you gangs of criminals. He was not my last.

               And, at long last, coming back to your present self, Rod, there is option 3. Option 3 is that you forget about candidates as your focus entirely, because at this point, who you feed into the meat-grinder is an incidental fact. Chasing the feedback from a system designed only to ensure you won’t win is a madness that can only lead to more madness. So instead, turn towards fixing the actual problem. It’s tentative, and I can’t swear it will work, but as I said, in a sense we have nothing but time, now that the party has driven us well and truly over the edge. We could at least try to do as I said in my last article, and begin cleaning up the elections in every place we have any power to do so. The Democrats have had us in a Leftward ratchet for a long time. We could stand to try building a ratchet of our own. We don’t have a lot of leverage, but on the other hand, did we have something better to do?

               Get the fix out. Or you will lose. And you will keep losing. You will lose when you should have won. And the only wins they’ll let you have will be ones that aren’t worth having.

Image by syaifulptak57 from Pixabay

I debated long and hard on whether to write this. By and large I like you guys. And also yelling at people might cause them to tune me out.

However, let us be absolutely clear: I write this blog to tell the truth as I see it, and give what guidance I can when I see it. If that causes people to stopper their ears, it’s none of my business. It is what it is. My writ, as far as I have one is to tell you the truth the way it’s supposed to be told. Whether you take it up or not, it’s in your hands. Whether you get made at me for it or not, it’s in your hands. NOT my circus, not my monkeys.

So… Sarah pulls off gloves, turns the picture of Heinlein to the wall so he won’t hear the worst of it. Picks up broom. Holds it like a Samurai sword.

We’ll open by quoting Wy Knot from The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by way of an opening: Oh, you ROCKHEADS. You DESERVE TO STARVE!

I’ve been wanting to say that for a day and a half. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get something else out of the way.

My groups have gone round and round on the election, and finally the gentle (AHEM) being who comments here as Ian Bruene (Sp? Hon, I can’t spell my OWN name half the time.) distilled and encapsulated better than I could.

So, I think this is my distillation of lessons from the midterms (written as speaking to a generic audience):

1. Iowa and Florida did the hard work to clean up voting. They had blowout victories.

2. Guam doesn’t have voting power. Thus not worth frauding. They had a blowout victory.

3. Iowa had tons of abortion, reeeeeee campaigning. The result was to turn redder.

From that we can make some conclusions:

1. It’s the fraud. Anyone who is taking the abortion talking point can kindly stuff it.

2. It’s the fraud. If you aren’t interested in doing the hard local work to clean it up, you aren’t interested in winning.

3. We have a mild win. Why are y’all casting it as the defeat to end all defeats? I don’t care how much of a losing fetish you have. If you must indulge it hire a dominatrix and do it in private.

Ian Bruene

To this I’d add two notes: there are contests still undecided. By doing the normal GOP and GOPe bullshit of going “Oh, this is perfectly legit with just a bit of fraud” you are ensuring those contests are frauded dem. And that we lose the Senate.

And the other note is: Isn’t it weird we got like ten instances of Trump attacking DeSantis in the last few days? Has anyone sourced and CONTEXTUALIZED THOSE?

Mind you I’m not putting it past Trump to say those things. He’s blunt and touchy. But he doesn’t do stuff like that out of the blue. Is there provocation, overt or covert? Because if you think DeSantis isn’t ambitious you’re nuts? Or is someone telling Trump there is?

It would be okay for you guys to assume he’s just crazy in 16 but NOW? You know better. Yeah, he was bombastic but not without provocation. So, before you cut him off as the left so desperately wants us to, and with it decide there was no fraud in 2020 or now, and go back to that well worn prison of the mind…. can you INVESTIGATE? Because you have to admit it is weird. And at the same time, the left has stopped attacking DeSantis. Things that make you go “Uh”

And yes, it was fraud. I’d guess from looking at numbers, 20% to 25% fraud. This is what they had prepared in 2020 (the biggest most inclusive fraud netowork.) but Trump won more votes, so they had to fraud at the last minute, openly.

This time it was SEAMLESS as planned.

AND I TOLD YOU ABOUT IT. I TOLD YOU THAT WE HAD TO TRY BUT IT WAS POSSIBLY USELESS. And you all told me they couldn’t fraud that many contests. WHY NOT? the machinery was ready.

Seriously, I do realize believing in that much fraud makes you feel helpless and scared. And Americans don’t want to believe that. But convincing yourself it was “just a little fraud” and “it must have been close” is the way to death. Comfortable death, in which you don’t have to do anything but death nontheless.

So, close the organ. Stop singing.

Because I personally am not ready to lie down and take it. If I die, it will be with an ax in my hands and a f*ck you in my lips. I’d never be able to face gggggggggrandma, the Viking bint otherwise.

So what can we do?

Well, you guys know I’m a depressive. And I guess I allowed myself to hope more than I should have that we could take the last exit off this highway to Venezuela. So, I’m still recovering and my vision is grim as heck.

I suspect this is the black dog talking: (WHO THE HECK TRAINED THE BLACK DOG TO TALK?) but I feel at this point Starship Troopers is the best case scenario. And that’s for us. The rest of the world… Do you ever feel like the timeline we’re in, someone came through and made sure Germany lost the war, but the timeline keeps trying to merge to the “main” untampered with one?
Yeah, that for the rest of the world.

So, if it’s that and we go all the way there (I really… there is a voice somewhere, in the back of my mind screaming we won’t.)….

Let’s start with the worst possible option: From the song I put up before: When it all goes to hell we swear allegiance to the flag, whatever flag they offer, with fingers firmly crossed, and teach the children quietly for someday sons and daughters will rise up and fight where we stood still.

We wouldn’t be the first people to do that. And the other is still going, when empires fell.

But meanwhile, there’s stuff we can do.

First, it’s going to get bad. It’s going to get very very bad. These dead alive coup-perpetrators want us all dead, because they were programmed in their youth by the USSR to take the US down. It’s already bad. It’s going to get worse.

ANYTHING you need done on the house, try to get it done as soon as possible. (There will be a post on that later.) Anything you can do to complete your preparations, do it now, even if it pinches (it’s pinching us): You need food and fuel and passive and aggressive defenses for your food and fuel.

It’s going to be a bad winter, and either way it’s going to be a hard landing.

DO NOT BUY THE NARRATIVE. I noticed it was in all the papers. DO NOT buy it. It was a tsunami, which means that even with the fraud we made some gains. Keep your eyes on the disputed ones, and make a noise such that they will hear us from the future. Talk back at every possible chance. Explain. Explain again. DO NOT GO PASSIVE. The quiet road is the one to hell.

And then stand ready. These people can’t govern a mouse in a barrel. They surely can’t govern the US of A.

Things are going to fall apart. And then we need you to rebuild.

Be not afraid. Weary, tired, angry — oh, lord the anger* — but not afraid. And hold fast. They can’t win. But we have to ensure we don’t lose.

I was so HOPING for the miracle of a soft landing.

But we’re going to do it the hard way. We’re going to do it in hard and extreme mode. May G-d help us.

This will stay up as long as I can, and the light will stay on, and I’ll figure out other things we can do as time goes on.

GO prepare, and refuse to buy the mintru, and remain UNGOVERNABLE. You’re Huns, it shouldn’t be hard. If an authority told you to breathe you’d die of asphyxiation. This is your superpower. Go and use it. (But not like that.)

*The anger!

Yes, I’m all right, though irritated beyond belief. That’s not the reason for the radio silence though. That was a bunch of unexpected family stuff, and expected doctor stuff. (No, nothing wrong, at least not that we know of yet. There is much going on not understood and we’re pursuing it. Faint but pursuing.)

I’ll be back in an hour or so with a post, but just so y’all know this is what’s running through my head.

As well as “o, calm, dishonorable vile submission.”

As I write this late on the 8th, the tsunami is resolving itself into a wavelet.

Or rather, the tsunami has been overfrauded into a wavelet. And it might be frauded away to a Dem win before I wake tomorrow.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us who were awake and remember this:

And we know damn well it was a Trump landslide before that.

So for the Republicans to have picked up any seat, this was the tsunami to end all tsunamis.

I know the usual idiots are out there, already saying “It was abortion: the Womyns came out in force to vote dem.”

Are there women who are single ticket abortion voters. Sure. Most are older than I and are determined to make sure their actions and choices are validated a-postriori. They’re an ever dwindling minority. Married women vote more and more for the right every time. Single women? Who knows? But I suspect there’s been a shift in that too after the last too years. And most of them don’t see that career path ahead they once did.

Then there’s the other bs which is of course “The people don’t want to be free.” That’s bs. The people, every time they can express their displeasure do so. But having the vote taken away from them via fraud means THEY each individual thinks he or she is alone.

Things like “Let’s go Brandon” sweep the nation, but there’s no major legal or financial movement to protest the fraud, because each person thinks “I guess all these idiots are so beaten down they like beaten down, and I’m the only one who is angry.”

Meanwhile the perpetrators know what the people think, and erect barricades in DC to protect themselves from the anger they sense but can’t seem to bring out into the open.

Yes, we’re getting the house, and probably not the senate. Which means a good five/six seats fraud. I’m in a group right now with people crunching numbers, and the fraud is evident. The races the democrats cared out got flipped by turning just those votes for the dems. That’s the flexibility of dominion at work, and the way they can turn a vote into the other.

We have a massive, huge, bizarre fraud problem. This morning, in my red district, 90% of the people chose to vote on machines. Because it’s so much faster and more convenient. And of course, completely unverifiable and unsafe.

Frankly in the primaries, my husband — my very own personal husband — went in ahead of me, and when asked if he wanted paper or machines, took the machines.

Because of course he did. It was early, he was tired, work has been feral, and he wanted to vote with the least amount of fuss. So machines.

And he’s not stupid and lives with a political junkie, who has told him all the problems with the machines multiple times. And for heaven’s sake, he’s a programmer. He knows anything linked to the net can and will be hacked. Heck, around the election of 2020 he poked around what was going on and pointed out the only reason for the machines to be set up was they were had to be to facilitate fraud.

But two years later he’d forgotten and headed for the machines. How much more the people who hear about the machines, and are under the vague impression that has all been disproven?

Of course they assume their friends and neighbors are tyranny freaks who want to be stepped on so badly they don’t care if they’re starving and freezing.

I can’t give you the numbers. I’ll try to get a friend who is a number person to do a post for me soonest. But the numbers stink. Or to quote Larry in 2020 “Fuckery is afoot.” And how.

We have a serious fraud problem.

LET ME SAY THAT AGAIN: We have a serious fraud problem.

Which means we can’t vote our way out of this one. You know what? It was always a possibility, always baked in.

When you say “If it’s not close they can’t cheat” you’re forgetting the magical power of computers.

More importantly you’re forgetting the magical power of fraud by mail.

Yeah, Colorado is intent on getting rid of its last republicans. And it CAN by the magic power of fraud by mail and same day registration.

Same goes for California. Washington. Oregon. Hawaii now PA.

“But those are Democrat” you say.

Are they? HOW DO YOU KNOW?

I’d estimate that even Colorado is AT worst Purple. But fraud by mail.

Look at the way those places are governed, as though they had not a care for the governed. Why not? The fix is in. The states are completely controlled. There is no fighting free.

What I want to ask you is this WHY DID WE LET IT HAPPEN?

No, I don’t mean as citizens. When your state is swallowed, the only sane thing is to move.

As a nation.

Do you think those states are enjoying a Republican form of government? No? THEN WHY DID THE REST OF THE COUNTRY LET IT HAPPEN?

Where were the pundits, the opposition party, EVERYONE?

Colorado went vote by mail only by executive order “to save money” (After they frauded in a dem win, which I watched first hand.)

WHY did no one, from the courts on go “Uh, that’s not a safe form of voting. No other country does this. We wouldn’t allow a recently pacified country to hold their elections this way, because it’s rife for fraud?”

WHY didn’t vast groups of other states sue them?

Because their dirty house impacts everyone?

Because they were busy going “Those d*mn Californians” “Eh, Those hippie Coloradans. They’re all stoned.” “Oh, PA is ignoring the SC. Everything is fine then.”

WHAT THE ACTUAL H*LL?

Guys this is cancer. This is how cancer grows.

Every day your body throws out one or more cancers. EVERY DAY. A cell or two. But your immune system says “that’s wrong” and they disappear before multiplying madly.

Our immune system failed. Parts of our body politic are now permanently captured.

And cancer metastasizes. Other parts are now merely infected. Only the “important to the dems to hold power” races are turned. The others are allowed to be R, when the numbers make no sense.

Meanwhile our immune system goes “well, fortunes of war. Nothing to see here. I guess it was abortion. I guess other people like tyranny.”

And our pundits go a little more left to attract what they think is the center.

And our corporations follow suit. And we become more of a fascist corporatist state.

They can’t win. It’s all going to come apart, because they can’t govern. But they can prevent serious opposition if they convince us they won. If they convince us the future belongs to them.

Already today there were people talking about completely erasing their media presence, disappearing, etc.

That’s the wrong way. It is the actions of people who think they’re in the minority, that the dems won legitimately, even that they will rule forever.

Yes, I know, they will come after some of us. And try to make examples. But they’ve actually proven pretty drawers at carrying out large scale repression, the same way they’ve proven themselves drawers at large scale governing.

There is a danger of maybe horrible harassment. But the more of us who stand up, the more of a network we have. We’re here for each other.

Remember I did this before, in the bad old days of telephone trees. Remember too there were still dissidents in the USSR when it fell. And there are dissidents in Cuba, despite everything. They remain because they keep in touch with others, in and out of their countries, and it would make too much noise to take them down.

And we’re needed.

Lord help me. Lord love a duck. Do you know how much happier I’d be walking away from politics and writing my little stories, most of them not political. And some political but not in ways they’ll get. (Not even joking. In my most floridly Libertarian phase, I was accepted first by a communist editor. He saw things that weren’t there. And didn’t see others.)

But I’m standing here. And I’m going to continue standing here.

Why? Because I might be the only one yelling this, but I’ll continue yelling it: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. PEOPLE DON’T WANT THIS. THE FRAUD IS IMMENSE. NO. BIGGER THAN THAT.

I might be — I will remain — the only part of the immune system pointing at the cancer and saying “That’s not of us. This is not the American people. This doesn’t behave like the American people. This is killing us.”

BUT YOU ARE NOT ALONE. And America is alive and well.

They can’t win. But we can lose. We can let cancer eat us and leave us rife for breaking apart, or for turning into a weird patchwork of fiefdoms, none of us free, though some perhaps not incompetent.

For that we need to accept cancer as normal, healthy activity. We need to ignore impossible numbers. Giant fraud. We need to believe that states with all vote by mail are perfectly free of fraud.

We have to surrender to the cancer.

I’m not surrendering. I hope you’re not either. Tomorrow, particularly if we wake up to a Dem “win” you need to be out there, laughing at people who say it was the womyns or that people love them some tyranny.

You need to be out there putting spine into the idiots, and pointing out that they’re acting as if these idiots can govern forever, when things are already falling apart.

I TOLD YOU IT WAS GOING TO GET ROUGH. Did you think I was joking?

This is where you stand up. You hold your light up for the world to see. You say “I know it’s fraud.” And ignore the insults hurled at you.

Because it’s fraud. It’s cancer.

To fight cancer, you first have to identify it.

Your lives, your fortunes, your sacred honor.

Did you think it would be easy? Did you think it was just a game?

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s make so much noise, light such a big fire they will see us from the future.

And find their way to liberty.

The re-release this month is A Few Good Men. I briefly considered changing the name to Uprising, but since it was published first under A Few Good Men, well…

And no, the title isn’t Baen’s fault. It was the only title that came to me. Hey, I never claimed to be good with titles.

Anyway, Caitlin Walsh and I are planning (plotting) a comic book of a few good men. Well, a graphic novel, because I think it’s going to run to at least 100 pages to get even all the plot down. Might be 150. Hard cover, kickstartered. (Which means we’ll have to look up the prices, etc. to set the amount.) I think it fund and be fine. She is very talented, and I have started to get comic scripts. We’re going to do the first 20/30 pages, as soon as I get her a script.

For those who haven’t read my science fiction, this is the book of the USAian revolution at least in part of the Earth.

So, because today I’m torn between despair and hope more than usual, here is a sketch that Caitlin made, and a uh maybe a bit spoilerish but not too much for a book that’s been out ten years excerpt of AFGM.

My soi-disant father must have been very good at training servants, whatever else he might have been bad at. And perhaps that was not a big surprise, since after all he meant to make servants of every person under his rule.

What I mean is, they came in to clear the remains of dinner and didn’t seem even slightly discomfited that Nathaniel Remy appeared to have dissolved into thin air. Perhaps they thought I’d let him out without anyone noticing. At any rate, they were the least inquisitive people imaginable.

I’d lingered over fruit and coffee, thinking I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life, but unable to feel sorry for it. If I held out, I’d be holding out in the name of what? Not being a joiner? Being contrary to the end? There was nothing to gain by that, and so much to lose. I looked at the pile of gems on my desk, and thought that at the very least I owed it to all those dead people, those destroyed people, not to go without a fight.

I locked the gems away on my desk drawer, I called the servants to clear the table, and I went to bed.

And woke up with Nat Remy calling out, “Lucius? Are you decent?”

“What?” I was awake immediately, as I was whenever someone came into the room, but this seemed rather early for a moral enquiry. Goldie jumped on the bed, tried to lick my face and in the darkness, I patted him and pushed his hindquarters down.

“Are you dressed? Dressed enough to be seen by people?”

“Oh. Yes.” I was in shorts and a light shirt, and though no one would call it a formal outfit, I’d need to go to the most distant and strange parts of the Earth to be arrested for indecency.

“Good,” he said. And then “Light.” Lights came on.

He stood in front of the secret door, which was closed. Martha stood on his right, and Abigail, blushing, on his left. Why was she blushing, I wondered? She was very young, and maybe she’d never been in a male’s bedroom before. On the other hand, my bedroom was hardly indecent and I, sitting on the bed, patting the idiot dog, might be disheveled, but otherwise wasn’t even mildly titillating. Then again perhaps she’d taken in the implications of Nat’s secret passageway, in which case . . . it was none of my business. Surely she didn’t think it had been built in a week. Martha just smiled at me in a matter-of-fact way, then walked across the room and opened the door. Sam came in. By this time, I was feeling seriously alarmed.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked.

Sam shook his head, and it was he who spoke, “It was judged easier to have Abigail and I carry proxies for the other members of the twelve than to have all of us get together here, or have you flown elsewhere. Our intelligence gathering tells us there’s been a flurry of activity by Scrubbers. We’re not sure what they’re up to, and we are not about to take risks we don’t need.”

The other members of the twelve. The Sons of Liberty were all young hotheads. And Sam and his wife knew nothing of what their children were involved in. And I was innocent as a babe unborn. My house was not just filled with Usaians. It was filled with dangerous revolutionaries. And liars. And yet, I thought better of Sam for doing something about the injustices and crimes that crossed his desk every day, rather than sitting still and letting evil go on.

Sam had the grace to blush a little at my expression, then shrugged. “Sometimes, telling the truth will only endanger all those who depend on you, and to whom you swore to keep silent so they’d not be found out.”

I inclined my head and didn’t say anything. He cleared his throat. “Nat tells us . . . That is, he says you’re willing to admit to believing everyone should be assumed to have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental right. And that the purpose of government is to protect it. Before he left the meeting, previously, he secured people’s vote that you be allowed to join our organization on probation, if you professed such beliefs.” Was his smile totally ironic? “Of course, I suspect two or three of them, at the time, thought it was more likely for them to get hit by a meteor that had lain in ambush in an alley, waiting for them to walk by. But we got them to agree to your full induction, and we’ll do it before they can retract that. That way you’ll be a full member. And we’ll avoid another internal battle.”

Nat cleared his throat and I thought he had suppressed laughter and it occurred to me that if any members of the council thought that they were too stupid to hold office and perhaps too stupid to live. Nat Remy was not a honeypot, and he might be the world’s worst missionary. But he had inherited from Sam a kind of bullish gentleness that would keep bringing a point up, ever so gently but so continuously that the subject of their efforts couldn’t help but surrender.

I didn’t doubt that I’d been steered to this point. I’d need to be an idiot to not have noticed. But I was sure of one thing: Sam hadn’t cooked those records. Contrary to popular belief, a complex narrative spanning centuries was hard to create without leaving huge holes. Heck, it was hard to create a simple lie spanning hours. Which was why most novels were enjoyed despite the holes in the narrative. And those records held. Which meant, whether he’d arranged for me to ask for them or not, the reasons I was doing this were real.

“So,” Sam drew himself up straighter. “Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, do you believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness as individual rights?”

“Yeah,” I said and tried to avoid the three Remy siblings staring at me from my right side. They all looked rapt, as though they had no idea what came next.

“And have you read, and do you believe in, the Constitution of the United States of America, and believe, if followed, it would create a nation that would respect such rights?”

“Yeah,” I said. Because it was easier than to explain I thought it had terrible loopholes and flaws, but would create a state superior to anything else before or since—at least as far as my reading of history went—and infinitely superior to the stability we’d endured for three hundred years.

“Do you realize the Usaian religion is proscribed in most of the Earth and that, if revealed as a member, you could be summarily or publicly and lengthily executed?”

“Yeah,” I said, at which point it occurred to me that I was being asked life-changing questions, while I sat on the bed, with Goldie lying across my legs. It didn’t seem right. It seemed like it should take place in an elaborately decorated hall, with flags flying and bands playing.

“And are you ready, nonetheless, to become a member, and to work towards the reestablishment of a republic under that constitution, even if it should mean the loss of—”

I fished the answer from what I remembered of my reading. “My life, my fortune and my sacred honor.”

Someone sniffled. I thought it was Abigail. I hoped it was Abigail.

“And do you promise to keep secret and support your fellows in this fight to the limits of your ability, and not betray anything or anyone to the authorities no matter what persuasions are used?”

“Yes.”

“Then Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, welcome to the brotherhood of free men.” And then, to my profound and stunned shock, Sam Remy stepped close and kissed me on the cheek. And I’ll be damned if his children didn’t repeat the performance.

“And now,” Sam said, “that you are one of us, do you agree to let us use the seacity as the basis for the start of our great work?”

I nodded. I had realized, sometime while reading those awful gems, that I wasn’t going to be the Good Man by the end of this. Not if it worked. I’d be lucky if I still had my life at the end of this, particularly if we won. And yet it was worth it. If I had my life it would be enough, anyway. I’d never wanted to be the Good Man.

“Then, ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great joy to proclaim the revolution.”