Category: Uncategorized

But I’m catching up on a lot of postponed scruff and ruff.

Post tomorrow. ;)

For years now I’ve opposed the term TWANLOC (Those Who Are No Longer Our Countrymen.) I understood why it was used, but America is a nation of belief, and beliefs change, see one Saul of Tarsus.

It took a discussion with a group of friends, where one held out that even our elites have imbibed the essentially egalitarian ideals of America, while the other one said no they haven’t for me to see it clearly.

I have some experience with these elites. I have a disturbing number of still friends and even more former “friends” who graduated from ivy leagues and come from what my mom would call “the best families.”

Families have cultures, the same as nations do. And most of these families were so far up the eugenics movement that if a German maniac hadn’t started killing people in batch lots, they and their ilk on this side of the Atlantic might have.

In face, coffs, there were sterilization programs, and worse.

And before that there were a lot of those families who thought Europe was so much better, because the “best” people got to rule.

In fact, most of our families that had power throughout the twentieth century were or became of the opinions above.

And then the kids were sent to schools where they were taught America hating. Yeah, in some cases they are also taught to hate themselves as white Americans, but you know that’s not better, right? because then they try to redeem themselves the only way possible, by becoming and ally. I.e. a Marxist that tells minorities how to be proper minorities. And this again feeds the sense of “I’m the best one.”

So, in what sense are they our countrymen? In what sense did they ever learn or internalized the founding principles?

Today Trudeau accused America of fomenting the Canadian trucker rebellion. Of course this is not true. What is fomenting it is Justine’s (int.) crazy drive for power over things she doesn’t understand.

I suspect though that our so called elites agree with him. Because Americans are JUST the worst with their belief in the individual and refusing to do what they tell us, from their all-knowing goodness.

The fact that none of these people have even the amount of practical knowledge to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel or to organize a bonk in a brothel is just the icing on the cake. They are the apex and consummation of Duning Kruger, and have been told all their lives how smart and educated they are, while being too stupid to realize they know nothing about the real world.

There are many ways this can end. But I have to tell you, if it ends peacefully, we’ll have proven that America is indeed a miracle nation. In the rest of the world, I doubt it will be peaceful.

Yes, there are very few of them compared to us. No, this doesn’t make anything easier.

Yes, it would be better if they realized they’ve lost, and there is actually no Victory condition for them, and just left to the socialist paradise of their choice.

But see where the piss-pouring is an impossible dilemma to them. (And our own idiots running around black pilled don’t help. Because it gives the idiots the impression they’re winning.)

I would very much like to avoid a butcher’s bill in America. The rest of the world is going to get very bad. Here…. If it must come, make it swift and short.

But that is a prayer, rather than a certainty, much less a hope.

Let not “You shouldn’t allow your children to be taught to hate you to gratify the self-esteem of never do wells” be the cautionary tale for the generations. Though, yeah, it needs to be learned.

And let this cup pass from us if it’s possible.

But meanwhile, keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark and brace.

This is gonna hurt. But it’s been on the way since before even the oldest here were born.

Be not afraid and work as well as you can to minimize or avoid the butcher’s bill and to keep those you’re responsible for safe.

Go work.

Most of the rest of the world, but particularly Europe, seem to have a bizarre funhouse vision of America.

Part of it I’ll admit is our fault, or at least “our fault” in the sense that every place in the world has idiots and crazy people, but some we’re the only country on Earth who make those people celebrities and stars. And also that no other country’s movie industry specializes in showing the worst possible about their own country, including making up stuff.

However, it leads to completely surreal experiences. Let’s say there is no resemblance between our country and what people abroad believe we are, except perhaps that we occupy a certain landmass and speak English (and even those. They routinely underestimate both.)

I have on various occasions had my brother try to “broaden the American’s experiences” by saying things like, he knows we only have one kind of cheese (from a country where maybe six kinds are available at any time) or offering to send me a book on history (which I’d read a year before from the History bookclub — so this was pre-Amazon.)

I’ve had the distinct, er…. pleasure…. of being in a store that had bars in every window, in a place where even nice areas have window bars and metal drop shutters on residential homes, and being told by the lady that America sounded nice, but she didn’t want to live with the danger of that much crime. … at the time I lived in downtown Colorado Springs which — at the time — was safe as houses. I routinely left my car unlocked and — often, being scatty — my purse on the floor. (It’s more dangerous now.)

Sometimes, more rarely now, I find myself in late night discussions with various people abroad who…. well, some of them think we have shootouts on the street as a matter of course, others think the average American is starving. The most common ones think that we have a race war going on (which is very alarming, since they think we’re divided 50/50) and almost all of them think that we die on the street corners for lack of health insurance.

This last group falls under “your governments are herding you by telling you lies about freedom.” Which is why it’s so pervasive. Our media lies, their media amplifies it because it’s useful.

Yesterday a blog tried to link to my blog — for no very clear reason — and I always follow the link before approving.

I will confess that this one annoyed me by being wordy, confusing and white letters over a busy background.

The gist seemed to be “America is falling apart because of its fatal flaws” only all the flaws they mentioned are ten times as bad in Europe, particularly France where — for reasons — I suspect this blog originates.

It did the double reverse leap of reasoning about our sexual morals too.

It accused us of being too bound by tradition/what will the neighbors say and blamed, of course, the puritans — I don’t know about you, but I don’t seem to have any guys with tall hats in the neighborhood — and it claimed we’re peculiarly infantile because we always give in to our basest urges and have an “ubiquitous availability of any kind of sex and drugs.” To which we always give in.

And therefore systems that are based on the individual are bad evil wrong, and true morality is collective and also reee.

The fact that they seem to be for more traditional morality than the SJWs doesn’t mean they’re not precisely the same thing, since “collective morality” and a society focused on “the good of society” and not the individual always ends the same way. I’ll grant you certain traditions get there faster, but enforced, collective morality only works in religious orders and isn’t perfect there, where everyone enters volitionaly.

I’ve come across this opinion before and I remain utterly unimpressed. Look, I am an extremely boring woman, married and monogamous and edging towards “grandma aged.” The only drug I do consistently is caffeine. I drink like 4 times a year, which is why my drinks cabinet keeps overflowing since unless I use a liquor in cooking, I rarely use it up. I like alcohol, or at least the taste of it, but I don’t like it enough to drink alone, and husband doesn’t drink and sons drink very rarely.

I doubt there’s anything about my life, or even my attire and general attitudes that would set this kind of twerp off. But I don’t care. My disagreement isn’t with their moral beliefs (those are so different in my friend group that it doesn’t bear speaking, anyway) but with their idea that the community should be able to make decisions about what I get to do when and impose them on me.

I remain convinced that so long as I’m not doing it on the street and scaring the horses, they can put it in their pipes and smoke it. (Well, I’m not going to.)

I also remain convinced when a society becomes convinced that “morality” “justice” and other virtues are collective ones, they’ve already chosen the slide to hell and are merely, busilly, rubbing goose grease on it.

However, it wasn’t till this morning that the idea that we all run around having sex with everything and doing ALL the drugs really percolated. And I’m caught somewhere between laughter and crying.

Uh…. I know this won’t convince anyone, because you’ve seen ALL the movies — ALL THE MOVIES — but seriously, little strange foreign dudes and dudettes….. you’re out of your barking minds.

Hunter Biden or Jack Dorsey or Bill Clinton for that matter aren’t representatives of Americans. No. Seriously.

You can’t at the same time accuse us of being ultra-repressed and having sex with the horses on the street. (Though in a country of 300 million yes, we probably have a few of those, but then so do you. You just don’t put them on TV.)

You also can’t accuse us of working too much — like the evil capitalists we are — and then turn around and think we’re shooting up, snorting and screwing our way through life. Yes, I know the movies show that, but that’s the magic of camera cuts. We are, indeed — thank you for noticing — amazing, but even we can’t lead two totally all-absorbing lives at the same time.

Well, you can, but you risk making even less sense than normal. You also risk our falling on the floor laughing so hard you can feel it across the Atlantic.

To level set, I am a member of the science fiction community, where a collection of odd people gather. I have friends who are in polyandric and polygamous relationships. I have friends of various attractions and inclinations. …. I don’t have any friends who just have sex constantly and on command. For one, because it would get in the way of writing, or studying the craft, or researching.

I don’t know what substances my friends indulge in, mostly because it’s none of my business. But I know most of them — not being Hunter Biden and therefore working for a living — don’t go through life in a drugged-out haze.

The only Americans that fit your description are Hunter Biden and his ilk, and a bunch of homeless, shooting up and fornicating (and killing each other) on sidewalks. And if you think that’s an effect of our society, you haven’t looked at your own streets. It’s the result of the law against public vagrancy not being enforced. No more and no less.

Every society has mentally ill and addled people We just make them celebrities, or turn our cities into dumps for them.

However, as for the “ubiquitous” drugs and sex making us infantile, all I have to say is buy a mirror. In my trips to Europe I see just as many if not more thirty-something year old enfants terribles. And France has always — seemingly — or at least for the last 200 years had issues with the idea that refusing sex is somehow awkward. And yes, I do get that from your media and magazines. Oh, not accurate? Desole. Perhaps you should take a hint.

As for the US falling apart, you only wish. Probably because you’re jealous of all the sex and drugs we AREN’T in fact having. Sure, we have issues, but nothing like yours.

And as for your diagnosis that our problems are rooted in excess individualism, and your decision to jump up the ass of collectivism once more, in search of some kind of grand morality, let me just say once and for all: Next time you’re on your own. Neither my sons or the grandchildren I hope to have, or my ducttape-adopted children and their children should shed a drop of blood or a single tear over your inability to learn.

Look in a mirror, get over yourselves, and realize everything you think about us is a lie. The clues are there, in that you attribute to us wildly contradictory qualities.

Consider that you might be getting lied to, and ask why.

And then dig yourselves out, because Americans are tired of helping you out, and then becoming your punching bag.

It’s time you moved out of our basement and got a life, and stopped obsessing about how much sex we’re having.

And that’s very much my moral, individual opinion.

No, I’m not actually complaining. Most of the time natural means someone like me would have died in infancy if not before. And I don’t dislike wearing clothes, not having to kill my own meat and not being limited to eating what I can grow. (Particularly in Colorado, where I couldn’t grow much of anything, partly because I’m not the best gardener, partly because the soil was like cement.)

But it is important, sometimes, when reading/talking/writing about the past to realize that we live profoundly unnatural lives. Which need unnatural solutions or experiments sometimes. Or just reality check.

For instance, in reading historical books, I’m getting sick and tired of everyone in their twenties who is an orphan having parents who were killed “in a carriage accident.”

No, actually seriously. This is the go-to for all the young writers, who have absolutely no clue how many ways to die there still are, all over the world, much less in the past with no anti-biotics.

Seriously, I keep hearing people telling me that no, the life expectancy was about the same, if you survived childhood. Leaving aside the fact we don’t really have good enough records to claim that (other than for the very upper classes, where we do, but those were a different ball of wax, okay? and even they died younger and uglier than we do) it’s poppycock.

In pre-antibiotic world, you could die of a blister that infected. You could die of accidentally stabbing yourself with a needle. (One of the reasons my dad was obsessive about disinfecting my childhood cuts and scrapes.) You could die of a trifling cold. You could die of medical treatment (Okay, in that, you’re like moderns) and you definitely could die of child birth, hunting accidents, and just “an illness” that was never identified and that could be any of a dozen viruses we no longer even think about.

Sure, childhood — and old age — were particularly dangerous, but trust me, you arrived at sixty looking what we now think of as 80, because all the illnesses took a toll. (It’s still so in most of the world.)

But we live profoundly unnatural lives.

I remember being little and looking at people in their sixties, after the kids left home. They basically sat around waiting for death, with occasional outbreaks of grandkids visiting. It wasn’t like that for my parents, 20 years later. It’s not that way for us.

But that’s not normal or natural.

Which is why as older people we find ourselves fighting old age tooth and nail. That’s also not natural. But we must — so as not to be a burden on our kids, but also because some of us have things to do — create, produce and work, at much older ages than our ancestors did.

So we must take unnatural solutions to our unnatural problems: whether that’s specialized diets, or medicine, or simply strict regimes of exercise and health-monitoring.

And then people say “But that’s not natural. Our ancestors didn’t do any of that.”

No. Our ancestors died young. Often ridiculously young. And often lost years to illness.

Is that the natural way? Sure.

But I don’t really care. I don’t want to live forever (the idea is appalling.) But I have places to go, things to do, and things to work on.

If nature comes for me, it best be armed, because I’m not going without a fight.

Recently I’ve been doing a deep dive into pre-history, the aceramic period and that stuff that lies beyond the invention of writing, or at least our knowing it was invented, which is not precisely the same.

As a digression: One of the things that has me highly amused is that, having bought a scattershot of books on the subject, as I always do at the beginning of a “reading-crave” I find those even from the nineties are grossly outdated as new discoveries and studies invalidate them. And all discoveries and studies seem to push the “invention of x” further into the past. So, we’ll see.

As a second digression: yes, this is probably for writing, though I doubt the fruits will be this year. This kind of obsessive reading on a subject usually — unless it’s for a known series already started — takes a year or so to come to fruition. I suspect it’s related to my sword and sandal fantasy and also possibly — sideways — to the multiworld saga that would start with (I’ve posted bits) “Jump, the mirror said.” Because it involves ancient/lost multiworld civilization.

Now back to the topic at hand.

The left, and some libertarians, have the bizarre idea that going back to the time before civilization will somehow bring about a paradise with perfect health, no crime, no private property, and everyone living in harmony.

Granted the libertarians put that on “the nomadic past” i.e. the time without governments. I yield to no one in my hatred for government and politicians in general, but making the assumption that nomadic groups didn’t have despots is a bit of wishful thinking. Of course, they had, if nothing else tribe/family leaders. What we have found already — and I want to point out here the reason it flips so much decade to decade is that what we’ve found is at best a minuscule portion of all the deposits from the time, themselves a minuscule percentage of what humans might have lived at the time –dispels this idea very thoroughly.

Turns out that humans were still humans, even in pre-history, and weren’t in fact the stuff of angels. And btw, those who say they were healthier…. No. They died younger. The oldest we’ve found are in their early sixties (ESTIMATED. I suspect they were younger) and most are much younger. The ones who are older were the creme de la creme of resources and being taken care of.

But what got to me, and caused me to put aside the book on the normadic cultures of western Eurasia/Eastern Europe until I can cope with it better was the casual disregard for humans as individuals. And for human life.

I don’t think any modern can fully understand how thoroughly your life as an individual didn’t count in those days, in that place.

Take the horrors of the 20th century and then make the disregard stronger.

What got to me was the kurgans of scythians. The level of wrong.

Look, I understand killing the wives/concubines of the great chief when he died, and burying them with him. Yes, it seems cruel to us, and the British banned it in India, and that’s good on them, but think about it, will you? In pre-historic conditions it was probably merciful or probably started that way.

In brutal conditions, where body-strength matters, widows and abandoned women are prey. Widows of an influential leader some of whose power can be acquired by marrying them are doubly so. Absent dying “with their Lord” these women would have had a sad and scary life for the rest of their days. Unless they were very very lucky.

(And for the foaming at the mouth types, since I’m finding a lot of them among the young “But why did women and not men suffer this way.” Because biology. Testosterone, upper body strength, etc. give men advantages you can’t every match in “normal living”. When I was young and in good shape, I could still be beaten by any teen boy, no matter how couch potatoey, okay. You can’t revolt against biology. You can try, but you’ll only be lying to yourself.)

For the record, if it needs to be stated: I disapprove of widow sacrifice. But I can see where it was at one time, perhaps — or at least considered — the merciful thing to do.

Less understandable is the killing of horses and dogs, which I understand aren’t human, but are, as Heinlein put it “animals who were brought up to think they are people.” Those got killed in big wanton lots, and considering they were wealth and rare wealth at the time, they also break my heart.

But worse was the ritual one year after the great chief’s burial, in which 100 young men (not slaves. Not that their being slaves would be better, but at least as strangers it would be more understandable) were selected AND KILLED with 100 prime horses, and their bodies assembled with the horses, so they appeared to be riding in an honor guard around the Kurgan.

I can’t come up with a reason for that. NONE. Each of these young men was a living, individual human being, brought to maturity at a time when that was a difficult battle because of illnesses and accidents in a harsh time.

And they were killed, for display….

When I got to the process of preparing horse and young man corpse to mount as a rotting statue, my brain glitched and I imagined a craft board in the 21st century. “Hi, we’re working on the Kurgan of great king Blah Blah, and we found if you empty the horse’s bellies of all viscera and pack them with herbs and spices, it makes the whole less smelly, and retards the rotting, so the horse stays up longer. Now, the stake you put through the horse to hold the rider in place: you should put it through–“

And that’s when I closed the book to let it chill a while.

But…. What you have to understand is that this is “the natural man.”

The natural man considers other men over whom he has authority as disposable for…. demented displays.

It has taken over two thousand years of civilization, and a little known (at the beginning) religion from a small tribe in the middle East to change us, so that we flinch at that description.

A bit of our squeamishness has bled through to other cultures, and yeah, China and other radically non-Western cultures could still see making the above display for any reason or none, but at least they try to hide it, because they have some sense us, silly westerners, would be squeamish about that wanton waste of human lives.

But make no mistake, that particular beast, the natural impulses of man, are always there, seeking to break through.

The first use we made of the ability to keep good records, have good transportation, and mass processes of any sort, resulted in the abatoirs of the 20th century.

The only — ONLY — bullwark we have against crafts with corpses we killed for display is Western Culture, what remains of it.

The left, in their vocal lust for collectivism and to abolish Western Civilization in all its forms thinks they’ll bring about paradise, when what rides at their heels is hell.

That too is a very old temptation, a very old betrayal.

Ladies and gentlemen of the blog, people of good will, this is why we fight. We fight to learn, pass on, transmit and uphold the much maligned Western Civilization.

Yes, it had ridiculous and horrible episodes, but not compared to everything else.

And thus we fight, on boards others have rotted, over an unimaginable abyss. We try to rebuild as we fight and not to slip on the fallacies accumulated by past generations.

Because the abyss is indeed that deep. So deep and dark, finding the way back up would take millennia.

So, fight my friends, and look up, not down.

It’s a long, long way to fall.

Fisking Anton – by Ian Bruene

== BREAKING NEWS: Journalist maintains high word-to-knowledge ratio! More at 11… ==

A couple weeks ago an article was posted by a certain Michael Anton which contains one true and interesting point, drenched in enough manure to solve the coming phosphate supply issues before they ever get started. I meant for this to go up much sooner, but was busy and then caught Xi’s Death Rot.

Let’s dive straight in:

Regime propaganda is so ubiquitous that even if, like me, you make no effort to seek it out and even take steps to avoid it, you can’t help but notice that our masters have fastened onto a new narrative: the coming “civil war.”

This was the crux of all the maudlin, dishonest January 6 retrospectives, of several “think pieces,” and at least three new books: America is facing a second civil war and it will be started by the Right.

These first two paragraphs are the true and interesting part. The Enemy does indeed want a war, and wants us to fire the first shot to provide them with their casus belli.

But this is not new. Anyone who lived through or has read history of the 80s and 90s remembers the hysteria which was stirred up about “right wing militias”, where every policy and action seemed tuned perfectly to piss off the barely stable loose cannons on the right which the Enemy was *sure* existed in large numbers.

This eventually culminated (with the help of some political existence-justification on the part of the ATF) in the Waco massacre. Followed by the Oklahoma City retaliatory strike, even though that came not from the “right”, but the even more unusual breed of libertarian terrorist. After a while this cooled down, and with the changing administration, cultural shifts in the generally accepted view of the 2nd Amendment, and 9/11, this all sunk into the background.

Later upon the ascendancy of His Resplendent Imperial Majesty Obama First Of His Name there was a renewed push to categorize everyone who failed to bow on command as a potential terrorist, now with added infrastructure left by the response to 9/11. Fortunately like the inevitable final gun ban to end all bans after Sandy Hook, it all came to nothing.

Later still when Trump won when he wasn’t supposed to, and then didn’t pre-emptively surrender the way Republicans are supposed to, The Enemy decided that the problem was that they hadn’t gone far enough: no longer would Americans be treated as a declining minority of the population, doomed to irrelevance. Now at least half the country would be openly treated as the root of all evil, to be broken or destroyed. Which brings us to the present day. After Horus stab-, er, after Brandon’s Most Comprehensive Fraud Organization in History finished Fortifying Their Democracy(tm) they started back on the old plot thread, updated to $CURRENT_YEAR, and it has continued unto this day.

Really? With what? In one of his more lucid moments,

Oh dear… this is nose-diving fast…

Joe Biden himself noted that the disaffected on the Right have no chance of taking on the United States government without F-15s and nukes.

Mostly because Lord Brandon, Most Senile of His Name, is and always has been an imbecile who failed to learn a single military lesson in his entire political career despite ample opportunities (frequently caused or helped by him).

Like the blind squirrel finding a nut, the old man was onto something.

Mostly the location of the nearest young girl, but that isn’t relevant to the subject at hand.

The government’s overwhelming advantages in technology,

“Captain! The $TECH is being $TECHed by the $ALIEN_TECH!”

“Divert the $AUXILIARY_TECH to the $OTHER_TECH Mr. Plot Point!”

“Technology” is a rather wide net to cast. Care to specify, or are we just treating it as magic?

firepower,

What firepower advantage? Small arms are close enough to parity as to not matter, and may be easily supplemented where that is not the case.

Heavy weapons on the other hand require a supply train and crews to keep them operating. There are few military situations which suck quite as badly as having your supply train completely surrounded by enemies.

And if you somehow solve that impossible problem, good luck trying to *use* any of those toys without racking up levels of collateral damage which will drive the rest of the country against you within about 12 hours of weapon release.

manpower,

We can add Arithmetic to the list of subjects you don’t understand.

The US population outnumbers the military well over 10:1. Even if we assume shockingly low numbers of restorationist resistance you quickly lose all hope of getting the kind of force ratios necessary to have any confidence in victory.

money,

‘s ok; we have printers too.

transportation,

Just how much transportation do you think is needed? If there is one thing that most of the non-American world agrees on it is how we have too much independent transportation infrastructure.

supply networks,

On the one hand we have a massive government logistics bureaucracy. On the other hand we have millions of people each solving their supply problem at the local individual level.

Economics is pretty clear on which one of these curbstomps the other.

surveillance tools

I guess it is a good thing the government is run by perfect incompetents who can’t help broadcasting their every move.

And while you may have spy software everywhere we have Weaponized Autism, which has amply demonstrated it’s overwhelming superiority in recent years.

*happy thoughts about the 4chan airstrikes on ISIS*

and much else would be so lopsided

That’s true enough…

as to make the military buzzword “asymmetric” a grim joke.

Add “asymmetric” to the list of concepts you don’t understand.

Except that unlike the Goatisexuals we actually believe in weird concepts like “aiming”, and “fire discipline”.

Think, instead, Bambi versus Godzilla.

Hmmmm. Something so difficult to see from the towering hulk that it may as well be invisible.

I like this comparison.

To fight a civil war, you have to organize.

Add “Americans” to the list.

But organizing is all but impossible for those who genuinely dream of taking on the state.

Explain the organizational infrastructure of one guy who is pissed off and decides to setup with a 6.5 Creedmoor half a mile from a government building.

That’s the main killing power behind what you are fighting. And we are still ignoring the demonstrated competence of The Enemy…

The U.S. government is incompetent at many (most?) of its assigned responsibilities.

My apologies: you did have some truths left to speak.

But it’s quite good at keeping tabs on any hint of “right-wing” “insurrectionary” impulses. That task is made much easier by the fact that there is so little such activity to monitor—so little, in fact, that the feds increasingly feel compelled to incite it.

So close and yet so far…..

The reason there is “so little” “right-wing insurrection” is because almost all of what is considered that — the stuff which isn’t just “he has an opinion I don’t like therefore terrorist” — are people who are only barely connected to the right except by the vaguest similarities. An important tell is how many of them are hyper-collectivists, which also is key to understanding how they can flip-flop between apparently-left and apparently-right so easily. Secondly, the people we are talking about tend to be the dumbest members of any room they are in. And as you (correctly) hint, they are 90% glowie anyway.

But this question also depends on what you consider “right wing insurrection”. If you are talking about a half-dozen fruitcakes with an underpants-gnomes plan then no there won’t be many. Mostly because troublesome fruitcakes are a very small problem no matter what the subject is.

On the other hand if you are talking about people who think most or all of the U.S. government need to be killed, I have bad news for you. A large swath of the country considers that question settled and are now concerned with the doctrinal issues of whether it is best to follow the teachings of St. Augusto of the Whirling Blades, or St. Tepes of the Artificial Forest.

It would be hard to hide a mass movement of people gearing up to fight a civil war. Do you see one anywhere? I don’t.

No..…

Nononono, *no one* is that oblivious. Even Cortez the Conservative Dream Girl isn’t that delusional.

You are in a country where, when the people get nervous, they gulp down the entire world production of ammunition for years at a time without even blinking. You are talking about a country who’s response to the collapse of the Soviet empire was to spend a couple decades buying up the entire contents of their armories, and then started complaining that there wasn’t enough.

And these days that doesn’t just include the fact that it is *normal* for individuals to have enough weapons and ammunition to supply a squad for an entire war. But in many cases the training to use them with frightening efficiency at all ranges, body armor equal or better to anything the military has (gets complicated when soldiers or their families are buying civilian armor to use in combat….), and state of the art night vision.

If there were one, don’t you think the feds would be all over it?

Hard to do when you are legally not allowed to just arrest anyone who has a gun and speaks their mind. That would be why the glowies are out and about; casus bellis aren’t going to make themselves.

Of course they would. And don’t you think regime media would be blaring about it 24/7? Again—of course. This is a classic case of a dog not barking. Silence is confirmation that nothing is happening.

Add the endless attempts at gun control to the not-understood list…..

Organization, like civil war, requires elites. Indeed civil wars, like all wars, are fought between two opposing factions of elites. Even backwoods insurgencies have leaders. Where are the elites poised to lead red America in a civil war? Who are they? There is Trump to be sure, and regime propaganda insists that he’s a modern-day Jeff Davis-Robert E. Lee hybrid. But this is the same Trump who spent January 6 tweeting. The real elites made sure that was his last day on that platform—and then impeached him for the second time. The real elites—Republican and Democrat alike—wish he would crawl into a hole and die. Trump may have tens of millions of committed followers. But a real civil war requires generals and colonels and captains and lieutenants and sergeants. Go ahead—name some. I’ll wait.

Add Ameri-, oh wait, already added that to the list. We’ll skip over that for now.

In your world no one has ever rose to prominence during a war. They all apparently existed fully formed beforehand.

Also we are Americans. We don’t bow before self-appointed kings you elitist piece of reptile shit. If war comes, it is precisely a war between Americans, and people like you. But don’t get too comfy and think this will be limited to America; the news from the rest of the world has quite the remarkable pattern to it these days….

Granted, some on the Right speculate about the possibility or desirability of a “national divorce.” But they are in all cases proposing a peaceful way out of the present impasse—a parting that would be, if not necessarily amicable, at least orderly and bloodless. It’s one thing to argue that such is not possible; that’s a reasonable position, though one I think weaker than its alternative. It’s another to accuse advocates of national divorce of advocating or wishing for violence. That’s simply a lie.

The National Divorce scheme is mostly an attempt to limit the tsunami of blood to the deep blue infestations and the border regions around them. No one in their right mind seriously thinks everything will be happiness and sunshine, at least not if they have the faintest clue of how totalizing ideologies such as leftism work. To some extent it is also an attempt to move the Overton window, but take note: just past divorce on that path is “I shot the guy in the face so he would stop hitting me”.

So what’s going on? Two things, I think—one conscious, the other less so.

The conscious effort is what’s known in national security geek speak as a “psy-op,” a.k.a., a “psychological operation.” These are coordinated efforts to use propaganda, disinformation, truth and half-truth, to influence the target’s thinking in ways favorable to those behind the op. It’s not simply propaganda; that is, not Tokyo Rose merely telling American Marines they’re destined to lose. Seemingly fact-based lies are an essential element to a psy-op. Think Tokyo Rose telling Marines about to hit the beach that an American carrier has been sunk when it hasn’t.

Commonly known as Tuesday in CURRENT_YEAR.

I’ve been curious for a while; how much do you get paid for work like that anyway?

Psy-ops can have many objectives, demoralization being the most common. But they can also be used to prep the ground for other operations, to create opportunities that otherwise might not present themselves.

Which is one of the major reasons why The Enemy is having so much trouble now. It used to be that they had near-total narrative dominance, and could push whatever idea they wanted. That dominance is *gone*. And they don’t know how to write narratives which will stand up to any level of scrutiny.

That’s what’s going on now. The regime wishes to crush all actual and potential opposition. To do this, it needs to criminalize dissent. But doing that runs against the letter and spirit of the great charters of American liberty, and against the grain of the American character.

The Enemy’s vaunted “Arc of History” has been tilting away from them for a while, and they have become increasingly desperate. Now all they have left is to try to cow the general population into submission through overt demonstration of power, which is just making people angrier.

To do what they want to do requires changing public opinion. Or, more specifically, it requires wearing down Americans’ inborn resistance to censorship and political persecution.

Sad to see someone understand it that clearly while they are also working to help it along.

But as much as Americans hate those things, they also hate and fear even the prospect of terrorism, civil strife, and domestic conflict.

Which is part of the reason Americans have tried to make as clear as possible that certain lines will get the line crossers shot. So that hopefully the warning will eliminate the need for the actual shooting.

And why do you think *that* poorly of Americans? That they will undergo any abuse so long as it isn’t civil war?

Here we come to another dog resolutely not barking.

*continous deafening brrrrrrrr of weapons factories is slowly drowned out by chants of Let’s Go Brandon which are themselves drowned out by an endless honking*

There is no terrorism, civil strife, or domestic conflict—at least not coming from the Right. Yet the Department of Justice recently created a “domestic terrorism unit” to target “those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.”

You’ve adopted The Enemy’s categorizations. And then set up the strawman that if the shooting isn’t in full swing it cannot ever start.

Read carefully that unusually candid statement. They aren’t going after actual terrorists or terrorist acts. I suppose they would if they could find any. But there aren’t any to be found. So instead they’re targeting motives, animus, and ideologies—i.e., ideas and feelings, not actual acts.

The closest thing they have is January 6—an unplanned, unarmed, inchoate protest in which the only victims of violence were protesters. The regime is trying to brainwash everyone that January 6 was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. But it’s not working—three-quarters of Americans think it was “a protest that went too far”—so the regime needs a Plan B.

“Too far” is an odd way of saying they failed to leave a single piked head in their wake…

And that’s to sow disinformation of a coming “civil war.” Historians, philosophers, and survivors of civil wars all agree that they are the worst of all wars. Hence the desire to avoid them is understandably overwhelming, justifying (in many minds) almost any measures, including many that would be unthinkable absent the alleged threat. If the regime can stoke enough fear of an imminent civil war, suddenly all kinds of draconian measures that are presently out of the question will become possible.

It’s also the reason Americans haven’t started shooting yet. Because if there is any way to avoid it which isn’t worse than the disease it needs to be tried first.

For this reason, there is perhaps no more urgent rhetorical task right now than to demonstrate, repeatedly, the falseness and dangerousness of this narrative. In that respect (as in many others) Julie Kelly remains a national treasure.

Annnnnd after a couple somewhat reasonable paragraphs we are back to Conservatard Surrender Chants.

No. The correct way to deal with this situation is to make it as clear as possible to the enemy that if they try to start a war every single one of them will die horribly, either by American hands, or to provide extra organs when they go running to their CCP friends.

Typically, the first rule of a psy-op is that you do not talk about the psy-op. And that remains the case with this one—to a point. But interestingly, regime voices have chosen this moment not merely to acknowledge the existence of psy-ops but to praise and recommend their use to further regime ends.

And after all of this, with every action the regime takes going at cross-purposes to any sane goals, you still haven’t clued in to how incompetent and out of control they are.

That may be a coincidence. Or it may emanate from an uncharacteristic sense of self-awareness on the part of the ruling class.

The administration’s official position on current problems is Let Them Drink Margaritas. That is on top of the decades of projection.

We aren’t even in the same universe as the one where the lizards have self-awareness.

Certainly some of them believe the nonsense that the Right is yearning and preparing for civil war.

For yearning, it’s the projection, because their hellspawned chaos cult says that slaughter is how they get to utopia.

As for preparations, if the US weapons industry brrrrrrrs any harder it will crack open the San Andreas fault and push most of the problem into the Pacific.

But just as certainly, many do not. The second rule of a psy-op is that those mounting it must be able to distinguish truth from falsehood.

You clearly spent too much time in D.C. and it rotted whatever brain you once had. If you donate what is left to science we might be able to figure out why GOP politicians keep stabbing the country in the back once they fall under D.C.’s spell.

The Enemy can’t even distinguish today’s lie from yesterday’s, let alone the truth.

It’s possible that some who know they’re lying feel bad about it, at least on some subconscious level.

Lizards don’t have consciences.

It’s also possible, even likely, that many elites intuit that if a civil war were to come, they would bear the lion’s share of the blame: for despoiling middle America for decades, and then for demonizing decent, normal people for daring to object to their despoilation. One way to cope, psychologically, with the guilty conscience that may arise from harming so many for so long is to contrive rationalizations for why the victims are evil and deserve it.

Also known as “Leftism 101”.

The truth is that for the last 50 years, and accelerating greatly over the last 10, America’s elites have relentlessly divided the country, strip-mined its institutions, leeched its wealth, and attacked a large portion of its people. Those actions, taken together, may be said to be almost a recipe for civil war. Perhaps the smarter elites have concluded that such a war is now inevitable and they want to get a jumpstart on assigning blame.

Make up your mind. Either we are on a path with a realistic chance of civil war or we aren’t. You don’t get it both ways.

A cynical person (not me!)

Of course not. Cynicism requires at least the approximate intelligence and awareness of the world around you as is contained in your average anglerfish.

might wonder if civil war is not exactly what the ruling class wants and is trying to provoke.

Well you can’t have the Glorious People’s Revolution without a little prodding. Gorram workers keep failing to do a Marxism as they should….

We might therefore analogize every fresh provocation to those feds who apparently entrapped some very imprudent men into trying to kidnap the governor of Michigan.

Such a complicated case that one…… on one hand fuck the FBI, on the other hand fuck antifa (who the idiots seem to have been), on the gripping hand fuck Whitmer (not that way, ew).

“Why can’t they all lose?”

They want you not just to talk about civil war,

The 80s called and want their social developments back.

but to begin taking concrete actions

Now the 90s are on the phone yelling for you….. wait a minute….

that they can insist are preludes to war.

Dammit now you’ve got the 2010s yelling as well! We don’t even *have* that many phones!

Then they will have free rein to impose ever more censorship, surveillance, no-knock raids, computer and records seizures, asset confiscation, frivolous (but deadly serious) criminal charges, endless pretrial detention, and draconian sentences for misdemeanors and noncrimes.

On the one hand… Tuesday.

On the other hand if we are talking a full ramp up I guess it’s open season on the bidirectional shooting range then.

So my advice is: don’t give them any excuse. Be careful what you say and do. You may complain: “But it’s unfair that a stray comment might be used to throw me in federal lockup while leftist allies can loot and torch whole cities and get off scot-free.”

Indeed it is. But this whole system, this whole regime, is unfair—to you. That’s the whole point of it.

So knuckle under like a good little serf. Who knows! If you work extra hard to make sure the dinner is perfect and the kids aren’t a bother he might be satisfied with only slapping you a few times tonight instead of the full bone-cracking beatdown.

If there is anything you have proven in this bucket of slop, it’s that your life is run on the same setup as the Enemy: you completely disconnect from the state of the country, and then decide that if you don’t personally see something it doesn’t exist.

[This article only became funnier because of the delay, now that The Great Honkening is afoot]

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM D. L. CAMPANILLE: Fire’s Maiden (Clash of Honor Book 1)

Don’t mess with dragons. Especially cute little ones.

Princess Eloisa has an idyllic life. Plenty of fresh air, a beautiful old manor house, and an adopted family who adores her. That is, if she doesn’t think about living in hiding, a greedy murderous uncle, a father killed in war, and losing her mother soon after.

But now, with the secret arrival of an injured baby dragon, life is about to get… interesting. He’s trying so hard to be fierce, in spite of nearly dying.

Eloisa has been dragging home hurt creatures most of her fourteen years. How was she supposed to know this little guy was a real dragon? Or that his enemies would dwarf her own?

Add in an evil wizard, powerful Fae, and a very upset mama dragon.

Soon she’s on the run, with few friends, all her enemies after her, and some allies nobody in their right mind could trust. At least she’s got her dog, all one hundred and fifty pounds of shaggy black loyalty.

If the little dragon will stop trying to roast him, and if nobody catches them.

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: Sword of the Alliance (Alysha Forrest Book 3)

War is a serious violation of the Alliance’s colony charters, so when the Stardancer is sent to investigate rumors of a conflict on the distant colony of Gledig, everyone is hoping to come up empty. They’re certainly not expecting to be mired in a web of deceit, treachery, and tragedy involving not just the colony, but pirates and a missing Fleet officer. Not only that, but the situation suggests that Fleet itself might have had a hand in creating the situation that inspired the civil war.

But while the conflict might have been decades in the making, time is running out for Gledig, and only Fleet can save the colony from the culmination of the forces working against it now.

The fate of a world hangs in the balance. Can the crew of the Stardancer redeem the honor of the Fleet… before it’s too late?

FROM DAVID E. PASCOE: Baptism By Fire

When a madman and a giant flaming thing attack James Lawrie’s Marine outpost, the medic and an explosively talented sergeant aren’t supposed to save the day. Life becomes no simpler when Petty Officer Lawrie returns home on leave to find federal agents investigating the disappearance of a young woman from his past. A young woman whose body turns up marked with eerily familiar symbols.

FROM PETER GRANT: The Stones of Silence (Cochrane’s Company Book 1)

The secret is out – the Mycenae system is the hottest new mineral find in the spiral arm. Now it’s about to become ground zero in a gold rush by every crooked company and asteroid thief in the galaxy.

Andrew Cochrane, with his crew of the finest veterans and cunning rogues, have an even better scheme. They’ve conned the owner into hiring them as a mercenary security company to defend the system. With no oversight but their own, Cochrane’s Company plans to seize the richest pickings for themselves.

But nothing ever comes easy. If they want to keep their loot, they’re going to have to outwit and outfight every smuggler, bandit and renegade after the same prize – and their boss, too!

FROM DAVE FREER: Cloud-Castles.

Augustus Thistlewood was an idealist. The youngest scion of a vastly wealthy family, he’d come to help the poor, deprived people of the strange world of Sybill III – a gas-dwarf world with no habitable land. The human population, descendants of a crashed convict transport, lived on a tiny, crowded, alien antigravity plate they called ‘the Big Syd’, drifting through the clouds in the upper atmosphere. It was a few square miles of squalor, in a vast sea of sky, ruled by the degenerate relics of two alien empires.
The problem was that the people of the Big Syd wanted to help themselves, first – to his money, his liberty, and even his life.
Only two things stood between them and this: the first was his ‘assistant’ Briz, – a ragged urchin he’d picked up as a guide. She reckoned if anyone was going to steal from Augustus, it was going to be her, even if she had to keep him alive so that she could do it. And the second thing was Augustus himself. He didn’t know what ‘giving up’ meant. Actually, he didn’t know what most things meant. As a naïve, wide-eyed innocent blundering through the cess-pit of Sybill III, he was going to have to learn, mostly the hard way. Some of that learning was going to be out in the strange society that existed on the endless drifting clumps of airborne vegetation, and the Cloud-Castles of the aliens who hunted across them. Most of it was learning that philanthropy wasn’t quite what they’d taught him in college.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Mistress of Animals: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 2)

Book 2 of The Chained Adept.

AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.

Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.

This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.

The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance (The Hartington Series Book 1)

Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Manx Prize

Charlotte Fisher lives under colliding skies.

It’s the second half of the twenty-first century, and mankind has reached Earth orbit but not much farther. Orbital debris is a by-product of the industrial activity, and it’s dangerous both to everyone up there and the bottom lines of the corporations offering a prize to get rid of it. Charlotte heads up a team chasing the Manx Prize for the first successful, controlled de-orbit of a dead satellite. To win, she and her team must out-think and out-engineer a cheating competitor, dodge a collusive regulator, and withstand the temptations offered by a large and powerful seastead.

The sky’s not the limit. It’s the challenge.

If you like hard science fiction, impossible odds, and a touch of romance, you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s Manx Prize.   Buy Manx Prize to join the race for space today!

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Family Law

People love easily. Look at most of your relatives or coworkers. How lovable are they? Really? Yet most have mates and children. The vast majority are still invited to family gatherings and their relatives will speak to them.

Many have pets to which they are devoted. Some even call them their fur-babies. Is your dog or cat or parakeet property or family? Not in law but in your heart? Can a pet really love you back? Or is it a different affection? Are you not kind to those who feed and shelter you? But what if your dog could talk back? Would your cat speak to you kindly?

How much more complicated might it be if we meet really intelligent species not human? How would we treat these ‘people’ in feathers or fur? Perhaps a more difficult question is: How would they treat us? Are we that lovable?

When society and the law decide these sort of questions must be answered it is usually because someone disapproves of your choices. Today it may be a cat named in a will or a contest for custody of a dog. People are usually happy living the way they want until conflict is forced upon them.

What if the furry fellow in question has his own law? And is quite articulate in explaining his choices. Can a Human adopt such an alien? Can such an intelligent alien adopt a human? Should they?

Of course if the furry alien in question is smart enough to fly spaceships, and happens to be similar in size and disposition to a mature Grizzly bear, wisdom calls for a certain delicacy in telling him no…

The “April” series of books works from an earlier time toward merging with the “Family Law” series.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: What I Learned

Side A is the closest I’ll ever get to autobiography, covering anecdotes and lessons from my ten years in the Army. Side B has the latest batch of popular culture insights and jokes. For the first time, I’ve done a book with a Side C, covering my recent mental damage.

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.

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.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Produce

I’ve been trying to do a post since 7 am when I woke up with a massive headache, on which NOTHING has worked.
I’m officially giving up and tabling the post till Monday.
I should be working and am being held hostage by a headache. I’m very, very annoyed.

Anyway, try not to break anything. I’ll be back.

I have to explain first that I have no idea where my sudden insights come from, or my sudden certainties. Most of the time — as with “covid-19 isn’t nearly as dangerous as we’re being sold” — I have to do a deep dive to figure out if they’re even justified.

I’m not infallible — by any means — partly because often what I “sense” coming is derailed by oh, law enforcement; a sanity pill to the responsible on either side, etc.

However I’m more accurate than mere chance warrants.

I’d say the process is something like: Read everything (I have consumed 2 to 4 hours of “current events” every day for the last…. oh. 50 years or so. Granted most of those was MSM, so the most I got was “that can’t be true.” It often wasn’t. Anyway.) Throw it into the mulcher in back brain. From the mulcher, sometimes, at random, a certainty emerges.

I’ve been wrong. One of them was my conviction something would set something major off, in June of last year. It might have been personal anxiety ramping things up. Though to be fair, I did get a feeling it might be “the root cause” that happened that month. But I’m not even seeing that, in retrospect.

However, right now, through two different fannish networks (MY fans, so people with real jobs, okay?) I’m getting the equivalent of “I am a thirty second bomb.” Add this to the supply issues, and the alarm is going off at the back of my head.

I could be entirely wrong. Those of you who are in the diner on Facebook know there are personal factors at play too. (There might be a solution underway for that. We’ll see. But I don’t do well with time-sensitive things I can’t FIX.)

I can’t explain, and wouldn’t break confidence if I could, however this is the alarm bell I’m hearing, and I’m passing it to you wholesale:

Get any supplies you need to make sure you have one to two months at hand. Whether it’s enough, I don’t know, but if you need more than that, we’re in severe, severe trouble. All of us.

Make sure you have a fall back position and all your family/friends/dependents know where to go if they’re not there and things get rough.

Stay off large crowds and highways (long drives, not in city) unless it is important for you to do so. (Vital or purposes of cheering on, or support.)

Look, I don’t have time to do a deep dive and confirm the things I’ve been told. I just don’t right now, or for the next couple of weeks. BUT–

The Canadian truckers are having an impact. Their government is trying to be stupid in all the traditional lefty ways: police! Army!

If they set off anything that communicates here, OUR idiots are just as stupid (I think it’s impossible to be dumber than little Justin) BUT more self-confident and even more panicky.

Maybe this will pass us by without blowing up. Maybe the 30 second bomb is defective.

Maybe it isn’t.

Prepare for the worst. This is your alarm bell. Prepare so you don’t regret. If you live in a blue hive, planning to work remote for the month of March, if you can afford it, might not be a bad idea.

Again, I have a stress headache the size of the world, and this might be all internal pressure I mistake for external, but it doesn’t “feel” that way. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you warning.

Do not hurt yourself. I’m still hoping this is not the sh*t storm that looks like it’s building. But get ready to survive for a month or two. To the best of your ability.

And be not afraid.

When I was little in the playground, and started interposing myself between bullies and their victims — with the understanding one of those times it was interposing between my elderly teacher and the delinquent multi-times-repeaters boys in the school next door — I realized I was a coward.

How did I know that? Because every time I looked at the bigger foe rushing towards me, and I understood I WAS going to get hurt, perhaps severely hurt, I wanted to puke and run away. I was terrified.

But I didn’t run away, because I couldn’t. Because if I ran away, evil would win.

However, I had no illusions about my courage. I’m not brave. I still am not. I’m a coward.

When I started speaking out — and for those who only became aware of cancel culture recently, be aware that in most fields it was operational my entire working life, and speaking out against the left meant getting destroyed — I knew I was limiting my career both in terms of who’d publish me, in span (how long it would last) and in reach, (because movie deals, etc, don’t go to wrong thinkers.) I was terrified. I still am. But the alternative was losing my soul. So I had to speak out.

I’m still not brave. I’m terrified. I just live with it.

I am not a happy warrior. I hate confrontation. Hate, hate, hate. I have taken hits in my career and am now fully indie, partly because I don’t speak out against stupid stuff, and don’t want to hurt people I have an even half-cordial relationship with.

But there are issues that affect others, and are bigger than myself, and then, well, the turmoil of emotional confrontation is worth it, compared to letting raw, naked evil go on.

And so I must stand. And be not afraid. Or at least be less afraid of standing than not standing. Because not standing against the onrushing bully and evil doer is death, and not just for me.

Note, I am not saying that horrible things won’t happen from here on out. There will be horrible things, and some of us, hopefully not many, will end up somehow being part of that butcher’s bill. I pray, and I’m sure a lot of you do too, that it will be as few as possible.

It’s even possible a miracle will occur and the butcher’s bill will be taken not in lives, but merely in part-lives. Years wasted, years of anxiety that take time off our lives, years of poor health care as society restructures. But not whole lives.

The thing is, we’ve looked at the face of the collectivists and the centralizers trying to command us. It’s a hideous face. And we know what their ilk has done elsewhere. Mass graves, blighted lives, destroyed economy, destroyed environment, the cause of freedom often also destroyed in people’s minds, guaranteeing generations of darkness.

We have no choice — none — but to stand. Not if we want to keep our souls.

And you know, in most cases what I’ve found is that when I do brave the bully the hurt I take is much smaller than expected. I won’t say they run away. A lot of them don’t. But the hurt they can bring is much bigger in my imagination.

Right now, too, it’s much much easier to build up how bad they can bring the hurt, because, let’s face it, half of their actions make no sense at all and it’s easy to imagine they have a terribly clever plan. That they’ll get us in the end, and utterly destroy us. That our sacrifice will be in vain.

This is easier to believe if like me you grew up in the time when they controlled all streams of information and made themselves seem omnipotent.

But you know, there have been enough cracks in the facade, you know it’s not that. Sure, they have plans. But most of their plans are based on a universe that doesn’t exist, where Marxism has the force of prophecy and holy writ.

Make no mistake, they’re still going to hurt us. And some of us will pay the ultimate price.

To quote the bard: we all owe G-d a death. It’s not like by accepting the intolerable and kowtowing to evil we’ll live forever.

It’s a matter of what we buy with our lives. And what is worth it.

Be not afraid. Yeah, they’re going to hurt us. Yeah, we’re cowards.

But looking at the horrors people of their mental and ideological bend have already visited upon the innocent of the world, can you really afford to do absolutely nothing?

I know some of you are in impaired positions where, to keep a beachhead in enemy territory you have to keep your mouths shut. I understand that. Be aware and alert, though. Things can change very fast.

As for the rest of us? Now is the time. This is the place. At this time in this place, it’s us who have to stand for what is worth it.

In the end we win, they lose.

Sursum Corda. Be not afraid!