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 M. C. A. HOGARTH: In Good Company.

Trust Your peers….

…unless, of course, one of them is a rogue flouting Fleet’s already lax regulations. But stowaways are the least of the Stardancer’s issues when they are assigned to investigate a mysterious area of space at the behest of an alien allied power. What will the Stardancer find in the depths of the Sargasso? And will it give them reason to dedicate themselves to Fleet’s military mission, as their captain hopes, or to decide that defending the Alliance is someone else’s responsibility?

In Good Company, the sixth Alysha Forrest novel, returns to deep space and the adventure of finding new worlds and new discoveries. And if there might be an AI or two… what’s the Alliance without its many peoples?

FROM JOHN R. FOSTER: Morning In Havana

Is Fidel dead or alive? No one knows, but reporter Kate Swanson is risking her life to find out; has Colonel Blanco finally succeeded where so many others have failed? From the jungles of Angola, to the streets of Havana, and into the depths of Cuba’s coastal waters, Morning in Havana is a relentless quest for riches, revenge, and redemption in an island nation turned upside down…

FROM J. W. KERWIN: Slow Death in the Fast Lane: A Brendan O’Brian Legal Thriller.

If you hate the IRS, you’ll love this book!

Years of creative accounting have landed Harvey Berkowitz in court, charged with criminal tax fraud. The government has a mountain of incriminating evidence and what appears to be an airtight case. But Harvey has Brendan O’Brian, an unconventional defense attorney with a reputation for winning seemingly unwinnable cases.

O’Brian turns the tables on the government, putting the Tax Code and predatory IRS practices on trial with strategies that create a circus-like atmosphere in the normally staid federal court.

Chaos reigns outside the courtroom as well. O’Brian is mugged twice in less than a week, shadowed by a man who is officially dead, and harassed by local cops. But his biggest distraction is news that his wife has hired someone to kill him.

Surrounded by a cast of unforgettable characters, including a seemingly senile law partner and a colorful client nicknamed Eddie the Skunk, O’Brian must determine which events outside the courtroom are connected to the Berkowitz trial, an unrelated case involving a ruthless politician, or his wife’s contract on his life.

Although a work of fiction, the book discloses some very real truths about a government agency that has recently been embroiled in controversy. For example, at one point in the trial O’Brian details the workings of a little known IRS sting operation that targets small businesses.

And in the particularly entertaining chapter entitled “Dean Wormer must be running the IRS,” an expert witness uses the “double secret probation” scene from the iconic National Lampoon’s Animal House to explain why the Internal Revenue Code violates constitutionally mandated due process requirements.

On the surface, Slow Death in the Fast Lane is a fast-paced, entertaining and frequently amusing legal thriller. But read between the lines and you’ll find a damning denunciation of a government agency that many people believe is far too powerful.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Fair Trade: An Alien Invasion Story

Most of my writing is in a series people seem to enjoy but there is a constant small crowd who say: I’d really like your take on an alien invasion story. Well this is for them. The bulk of the aliens come to Earth stories assume their vast superiority, sometimes invincibility. Sometimes they suddenly appear on the white house lawn dictating terms. I have yet to see one with them appearing at the Kremlin or Canberra which seems rather parochial. Other times they are so advanced they quarantine the Earth or Solar System without discussion because we are such barbarian slime-balls. They may alternately be impossible to talk to and attack without mercy. All these assume they come with a plan and the means to carry it out. Our own age of exploration showed things happen much less orderly. Islands and natives were happened upon while seeking someplace else or even because a storm or miscalculation left the ship lost. In that case there is no plan but survival with the assets at hand. As with any game remember that turnabout is fair play.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: 202203 Daily Planet

Covering current events as always, most notably the Freedom Convoys, the supply crisis and the Russia/Ukraine issue. Earlier drafts of most of these essays were included in the last several pamphlets I’ve published but now I’ve included more news headlines and formatted like one of my normal books. This is my latest contribution in the fight for freedom.

I’ve also included a few essays on history since I’ve been working on that and one or two comments about pop culture. This time, the book is just whatever I’ve written in the last month in chronological order.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: A Kingdom of Glass: A Novel of The Garia Cycle.

Zara hasn’t seen her family in eleven years, but she doesn’t mind. They sent her to live in a neighboring kingdom when she was small, and she’s adopted her foster parents in their place. She lives the life of an aristocratic Garian girl- riding her horse, shooting her bow, exploring the castle with her friends- and she has nothing to wish for.

Until she’s summoned home, to a prospective marriage she doesn’t want, family she doesn’t remember, and a poisonous royal court that threatens everything she’s ever known. The East Morlans are nothing like Garia, and Zara struggles to find her place among the scheming Morlander aristocrats. Along the way, she makes new friends, meets enemies, and falls in love. But secrets abound in the glittering palace, and Zara must discover who she can trust as she fights for her life and freedom in a fragile, beautiful, kingdom of glass.

FROM TONY ANDARIAN: Prologue to Chaos: Dawn of Chaos.

“This society is decadent beyond redemption. It is time for it to be purged in fire and rebuilt from the ashes.”

The royal family of Carlissa struggles to guide their land into a new age of enlightenment. But when a radical professor of magic is targeted for heresy by the Inquisition, they end up caught in the crossfire. And when that violent confrontation spawns political infighting in the kingdom, it leads to the return of a dark and ancient threat thought lost to the legends of time.

Prologue to Chaos introduces the vast world and cast of characters of the Sanctum of the Archmage saga. Aron and Gerard, princes of Carlissa, race to stop the rampage of an arrogant mage targeted by the Inquisition. King Danor navigates his government’s factions in a struggle to reform its archaic laws. Orion, a scholar, prepares for his first day as an instructor at the academy, while Randia, a talented bard, looks forward to a life of music and theater with her beloved consort.

They do not know it yet, but each of them will be called upon to fight or die in a desperate battle that follows the opening of the Hell Gate.

Prologue to Chaos finally brings the world and story of the award-winning Sanctum of the Archmage role-playing games to the world of fantasy fiction. Get it now and don’t miss this exciting start to the saga!

Note: An earlier version of several chapters from this book appeared as part of the novel Dawn of Chaos, published briefly on Amazon several years ago. That book has now been re-written and expanded into a series of six novella-length installments.

FROM DAVID WELCH: The Day of the Deputy

Stanton Brunner has always lived in the shadow of famous lawmen. His father is a respected town sheriff, his grandfather a legendary, retired U.S. Marshal. But Stan never wanted to have it out with the bandits of the world, and was content to live the quiet life of a frontier town gunsmith. This comes to a crashing end when Bloody Brit Talmadge and his band of outlaws ride into town. Talmadge is a hardened killer with a cruel philosophy to match. He means to rule the town and surrounding valley with an iron fist, and that requires eliminating all who might challenge him. When tragedy strikes Stan’s family at Talmadge’s hands, the young man finds himself with a choice: slink away and do nothing, or take up the badge where no one else will. If he stays and fights, he faces seasoned killers who have him outnumbered, and have the townsfolk running scared. Stan, on the other hand, has never shot at a man, never enforced the law, and never really been in a serious fight. Beyond his inexperience, he’s also torn between a duty to see justice done, and a seething, justifiable desire for revenge. About the only thing the man has going for him is courage, and soon enough that courage will be the only thing standing between a small town and complete annihilation.

FROM THOMAS DOSCHER: The Vixen War Bride

With the destruction of their home colony, Captain Ben Gibson and his Army Rangers have nowhere else to go.

Six months after humanity’s victory in Earth’s first ever interstellar war, a group of soldiers are tasked with running a convoy refueling base in a rural part of the occupied enemy world. When they arrive, they find the local village has been abandoned in anticipation of their arrival by the panicked residents. Fearing a possible humanitarian crisis, the troops have to go into the alien wilderness to find them, reassure them that the humans are not the savages they’ve been taught they are and bring them back.

And it won’t be easy. They will have to overcome language barriers, a fearful and hostile population, cross-cultural miscommunications, almost no support from the Army, and their own demons to succeed. With no idea where to start, it looks nearly impossible until the sudden arrival of a dirty, disheveled priestess who confesses to a host of war crimes and demands she be executed for them.

FROM BILL ADAMS:The Unwound Way

A century ago, Evan Larkspur was a promising young playwright who never imagined he would one day be regarded as the Shakespeare of his time. Disgusted by the growing authoritarianism in his elite circle, he joined a Naval Survey for a relativistic run that never returned.

But now he is back! Or is he? His fragmentary memories—sabotaged ship, cold-sleep malfunction, miraculous escape—seem like a madman’s fantasy. His valuable Survey data, if real, would make him a target, so he remains in the shadows as an actor and a smuggler, trying to tie his memories of the past to the repressive society he sees now.

He is blackmailed into impersonating a government bureaucrat overseeing an extraterrestrial archaeological site, an important key to a bitter feud between two rich and powerful men. He soon finds that there is more beneath the surface than he expected.

BY ERIC FRANK RUSSEL, WITH FOREWORD BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Great Explosion

The invention of the Blieder Drive opened the galaxy to humanity, and humanity exploded out into it. Every group of like-minded individuals, from religious groups to nudists, got together and took off to their very own planet. Without bothering to ask anybody’s permission.

Four hundred years later, the bureaucrats of Autocratic Earth and its government have decided that enough is quite enough, and are mounting an expedition to return the Children of Earth back to the fold of good, right, proper, and highly controlled government.

Eric Frank Russell’s The Great Explosion is a science fiction comedy that explores the purpose and necessity of government with his typical wit. In 1985 it was inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame, an honor reserved for classic libertarian fiction.

FROM AMANDA S. GREEN: Designation: Frejya (Augment Wars Book 1).

I was five when they came for my brother. I was thirteen when they came for me. At twenty, they sent me to war, an AI embedded in my brain make sure I didn’t remember my past or question my orders. Not that they told me that part.

And that was their mistake. They might have enhanced me, trained me, but they didn’t break me and, with Menhit in my head, I am about to become their worst nightmare. . .if they don’t kill me first.

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: WHIMSICAL

I’m not a terribly organized person, or — easier to put it — I tolerate disorder better and longer than my husband does. Or perhaps a different type of disorder. (He’s okay with piles of boxes. I’m okay with the cabinets not being precisely organized and divided, so long as things are more or less in the right place.)

HOWEVER I’ve found that trying to do anything in this house with the state of still-packed disorder takes three times the effort, and I have books to finish.

So I’m unpacking and cleaning kitchen and dining room.

After which I will write but PROBABLY not a blog post.

Just wanted you to know I’m okay.

I have a method to figure out how to vote in a national election, if I’m completely lost. I ask my brother whom to vote for, then vote against.

My brother is well intentioned, though not an idiot, so it might seem weird that I apply the Heinlein trick to him. But really, since he gets his information via the mass media of the country and the French mass media, with occasional input from the BBC, what he gets from the US is ILL-intentioned idiots, so what he thinks he knows is the opposite of the truth.

In 2000 he chilled me to the core by telling me that really W or Gore was basically the same thing. I mean he thought Gore was a very intelligent man (Which means he had a hell of a translator, and also that my brother doesn’t keep up on science any more. Or yes) and W was not as articulate but “they’re both ultimately technocrats, so you’ll be all right.”

I ran screaming into the night (metaphorically speaking) and voted for Harry Brown. I still contend that might have been the “first do no harm” option, and yes, I know he was an embezzler. But at least he talked about firing the entire Federal government, which, sure, would have caused chaos, but more or less chaos than we’re facing?

Because, please understand, while rule by real technocrats would be terrifying — for context I want you to understand the idiot who came up with the Great Reset is a mechanical engineer — because most science people are iffy on “people” and don’t get that when it comes to human behavior 2+2 might equal banana, rule by FAUX scientists is far, far worse. And that’s what we actually have. People who are convinced they “Know” and don’t actually know anything, or know a lot of things that ain’t so.

Part of this is the remnant of power by the MSM and the other leftist disinformation organs (including schools) blaring cover up and narrative to cover how spectacular their failure is. For instance like the newneo, I‘m getting sick, and mostly tired of hearing the newly red pilled throw tantrums about how this is all Trump’s fault because his administration was so bad, without paying attention to the fact he was constantly under attack by forces external and internal to it, and by his underlings desire to be seen as “so smart” by betraying him. (Bill Barr, you’re a florid dumb ass, and so are all the other idiots who decided to make Trump look bad and get in “good” with the establishment. That would have been a great move fifty years ago. But we’re not fifty years ago, and you’re all morons.)

And part is the structure in which most of us were taught to see the world. If the whole structure is wrong–

I — and most of you — was born to a world of centralized power, a world of “science” ascendant, where humans supposedly knew how to engineer everything, including themselves.

By the time I was in my teens, though, this “humans can engineer everything” had started eating itself. Yes, sure, it was USSR agit-prop in the west, but it was everywhere: We were running out of oil, we were poisoning the environment, there were too many of us, we should just all die out.

The “science” that had run the west for so long — since WWI, really — had turned on itself, by action of propaganda, and become a doomsday cult.

You have no idea how much effort and what mental fortitude it took for Reagan to stand against that tide. And you can only imagine how pissed off normal people were to elect Reagan. I know. I was here for his campaign. Despite Carter’s magnificently stupid governance, the culmination of an era of “progressive” presidents of both parties (Progressive and technocratic are the same. It’s the bizarre idea that one man trained mostly in shaking hands and kissing ugly babies can lead us to the future with unerring hand, by listening to “scientists.”) everyone knew that Reagan would get us killed, and that anyone who “knew” was voting for Carter.

But Reagan exploded all these shibboleths, like Trump would do later. By being reality-aligned, they managed to perform miracles.

However cults don’t react well to disconfirmation. They usually just double down. Which is precisely what the left did. With the USSR collapsed, their dream in ruins, they re-oriented to the twin deities of the environment and race. Which comes with a whole lot of bizarrely weird things attaching to it, like the obsession with gender (because it’s the only way a white person can claim to be good, when the myth makes them super evil) and the systematic dismantling of science in the name of science (because science and the west and progress caused all the issues for everyone, including tribes in Papua New Guinea, right? Because Gramsci says so.)

Which brings us to where we are today, where true ideological colonialism — the importing of the Wests bizarre obsessions — is ruining small nations, where most of the world locked down, masked and distanced — and ruined economies, agriculture, etc — by following a science fair project of a middle schooler who happened to be friends with W’s family.

As any parent knows science fair projects, by and large aren’t science. They’re wishful thinking, half assed experimentation, and a lot of persuasive writing. (Also trips just before 10 pm to hobby lobby the day before it’s due. But that might be only my kids.)

Which is precisely what technocrats like. Because that’s the science they understand.

Let’s establish some thing right now: I have a lot of friends who are scientists, engineers, and people involved in real life “tech”. The real ones, the good ones, really don’t want to govern anyone or anything. They want to do their research and experiments.

Because money for research is within the government’s gift (And guys, we really need to change that. Like, right now. Yesterday if possible. Because he who pays the piper calls the tune, and if you think money doesn’t corrupt science, I’d like to give you a tour of some swampland in Florida, never you mind the gators) most real researchers have had to learn to politic. They’re very bad at it. I mean, they’re okay within their communities, but they suck in the outside world.

Most of them running for anything, even things they know how to do would make the rest of the world recoil, and possibly want to kill them. At best they come across as snake oil salesmen, because peopling is a late-acquired skill. Mostly they care about the science.

So, who are these “technocrats” in charge of government, everywhere from dog catcher to president, and incidentally infiltrating every possible bureaucracy?

The elected ones are the people who were elected king and queen of the prom, while you were attending science class. The bureaucrats are the people who majored in “Studies” and “business” and “administration.” I.e. the people who were really good at bullshitting their way into things. Remember how sometimes one of them got stuck in your science class and failed so hard it made you wonder how they could walk and chew gum at the same time?

And before you say this could be solved by making sure everyone learns basic science…. we had that. (And a complete ignorance of history.) In the aftermath of WWII, and when science was going to conquer everything, they put such an emphasis on science that…. it corrupted science completely.

When I say things like “I’m afraid a falling population will leave us bereft of people who can run the tech” I mean it. I don’t know which percentage of the population can do science and tech. I know it’s relatively small.

I’m one of the people on the edge, and if I had figured out I was digit dyslexic, not stupid, I might have beat my brain into place for engineering (Supposing mom let me take it, which she didn’t, because she was sure the only reason I wanted to take engineering was the hot guys. Which just shows you mom didn’t know many engineers despite being married to one.) I might have done it, anyway, except for mom’s hangups.

But it would take effort, and re-engineering my own brain. And in the end I’d be an expert in a small area of engineering, not “all of science.”

Because that’s the way these things work, see?

It’s sort of like I can write anything, but what I can write, in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and even romance is a small slice of possible stories. It is a common error of young writers to come up with stories they couldn’t possibly write. So they can’t finish them, and they think if they had enough persistence. It takes years to be able to say “I can read that type of story, but it’s not mine to write.” For instance, I love Prince Roger, but if I wrote its like (okay, I am, but long story) it would be with a diplomat, or a geek in the main role, (it is) because I can’t write a military structure convincingly. I get the culture, it’s the ranks and habits that confuse heck out of my mind. (I’m rank dyslexic. I mean, I grew up reading military biographies, but I scramble ranks like a pro. And don’t get me started on procedure.) I have a military fantasy underway (waves at #1 ducttape son) but I need a collaborator, or I simply can’t.

Exact same thing with science.

Heck, husband has worked at the narrow edge of math and computers for his entire professional life, but the other day I had the bizarre experience of watching younger son explain some new technology to his father.

Because our knowledge has grown so complex and confusing that we can’t possibly keep up with everything even in our own field.

And minds only bend a certain way.

There is nothing wrong with having the sort of mind that doesn’t bend to science. We do need people trained in languages, and history, in philosophy and diplomacy.

What we shouldn’t be doing is telling these people that what they’re doing is based on “science” nor should we be giving power to bureaucrats with either a pseudo scientific background, or a decades out of date scientific knowledge. (Fauci — have they found him, or is he still hiding? — is a bit of both. Medical training isn’t exactly science, though please I implore you not to call your physician a “well educated witch doctor”. — they tend to get upset — Ask me how I know. It’s half peopleing and some “this worked with this person so it might work with this other. And a whole lot of irreproducible studies.)

And we shouldn’t be electing people who think they know what “science” tells them to do.

Because the policies they implement are always the same and they have nothing to do with science, but more with the appeasing of the gods of “the environment” and “Race” which somehow always leads to making energy ridiculously expensive and freeing predators to commit crimes. (Most of those predators are white, because white people are still the majority, but yes, the left thinks this is race or economics related. Remember they think crime is a response to poverty and that poverty is mostly race based.)

And then they run to the media and their spokespeople to paper it over, so they can do it once again.

Except every time they get to try their idiocy it becomes more obvious it doesn’t work, and it was always nonsense.

We might be at the end-point of that cycle. They had to cheat their way in, and they’re worse than anything else that’s been done to this country. Or the world, to be fair.

Which brings us to something I heard from someone who kind of maybe has insight into Putin’s circle. Putin is just spinning his own reality. He thinks by yelling and commanding he can make reality whatever he says he is. And he gets rid of anyone who contradicts him.

Our left is attempting the same thing through a combination of yelling and cancelling people.

Neither of them is having any marked success. Rather this is the failure mode of concentrated power.

Look, in the beginning of the twentieth century, it was already too late for mega states run by super-concentrated power. There might have been a time for it — I don’t know because history has been corrupted — but by the 20th century knowlege and industry were already too complex for it. Fortunately — ah — they had the media to paper over their failures and pass them on to education with bullshit like FDR saving us from the failures of capitalism, aka the Great Depression (which he caused.)

Now? There is more knowledge, it is more highly specialized, and trust me, no man can really govern even a small country, much less something like the US. And most of the experts they can call on — heaven knows Trump tried — are either corrupt, or themselves unable to know their area as well as they think they do.

For a long time, leftists were obsessed with the idea of the US breaking up, mostly because Russia wanted us to.

I always said that’s not likely, and it’s not. Look, just like the EU, no matter how they try, will never be a polity, because there’s some really old divisions of land and blood, the US can’t be separate states or even regions, because we are one polity. We all move around, intermarry, have kids everywhere.

What we can do, what we need to do, and what will happen, either fast or slow, either explosively or incrementally, is a return to what the US is meant to be: with governance devolving to the lowest possible level: the state, the city, the family, the individual.

Abominations that put all the power of “science” or “education” or “environmental protection” in the hand of a federal agency need to be done away with. Because, no, there is no science whatsoever behind most of it. It’s fads all the way down. And all of these things have failed, over and over and over again. Only there’s an information problem, and the failures are swept away as meaning nothing, and the same nonsense is doubled down on.

Until a critical amount of damage accumulates. (And boy, has it.) And then it all blows up.

Which is where we are.

What’s coming — and each day makes it less likely that it will be incremental — will blow away our institutions. Blowing away the thinking that these things SHOULD be centralized, or that there is scientific justification for a lot of the nonsense will take longer. It can’t take too long, though, or there will be no civilization left.

So, first change your mind, then change the minds closest to you. Expounding on the catastrophic failures of the technocratic mind set will help.

It will also scare people, so they’ll try to stop you. Eh. It’s the price you pay.

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And be not afraid.

There is only one way out of this and it’s through. Let’s roll.

(Mostly) Indie 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 BLAKE SMITH: The First Adventure of Sir Garamond de Crecy

Sir Garamond- Gerry, to his friends- has been knighted for less than a month, and he’s already found his first great quest: saving the beautiful and helpless Princess Alyssia of Ollandra from the dragon that is holding her in dreadful captivity. Or so he thinks…
A lighthearted short story.

BY MAX BRAND, INTRODUCTION BY D. JASON FLEMING: Wooden Guns (Annotated): A classic pulp western adventure

Big Jim Conover has a reputation back home as a very, very dangerous man, and one of the fastest draws ever to live. Folks don’t know he’s now partly-paralyzed on his right side, his gun no better than a wooden gun. So when he comes back to take charge of the family that adopted him as a boy, people expect trouble.

Doctor Clinton Aylard has dreams of restoring the proper social status to the once-great Aylard name in England, but finds himself out west, engaged to a girl named Jack, and accidentally in possession of a reputation as a quick draw with a dead aim. A reputation that only he knows he does not deserve.

Conover is on the wrong side of the law, with a sterling character despite his upbringing. Aylard is on the right side of the law, with a conniving, deceitful character, despite his “good breeding”. When these two men meet, even with both carrying “wooden guns”, bullets will fly!

FROM KEITH HEDGER: Moving Target (Burn ‘n’ Karma Cycle Book 1).

Breeze should have know the money was too good…

It was supposed to be one last big paycheck at the end of the war. Jacob was handling the communications while she sat on a pontoon boat on Lake Michigan, freezing in the winter wind. Then they got the order to fire.

When she made it to shore, Breeze found a hit team standing around her ride out. Soon after that, she discovered her crew were being hunted, and the hunters were hot on her trail.

She wondered if she would make it out now that they had made her a moving target.

You’ll love this cyberpunk thriller with high tech mercenaries surviving in the lowest places.

FROM MEL DUNAY: Shadow Captain (Star Master Book 1)

His one chance to escape slavery could trap his brother in a terrible fate!

Jetay has been on the run with his brother for a long time, hiding his psychic powers from the evil Red Knights. Living as a slave on a star freighter, Jetay dreams of freeing himself and his brother, and of wielding his powers openly.

On a frontier planet, Lady Lanati of the Partisan Alliance seeks his help for a secret mission. It will take him across the stars to the edge of a black hole, with a Red Knight chasing him every step of the way. He might finally get a chance to use his powers for good.

But the price of that chance may be too high, putting his brother in grave danger. Can Jetay save himself and his brother without sacrificing Lanati and her friends? If he can’t find a way to save them all, the battle against evil may be over before it begins….

FROM H. NARCISSUS PETIT: Eden Will Be Destroyed!: A Very Short Story That Explains A Whole Lot

The Bible tells us mankind originally lived in the Garden of Eden until the Serpent tempted Eve who led Adam astray and they were all cast out to suffer and toil in the dirt. But what if that version wasn’t strictly accurate? What if the true story was distorted through generations of oral history, then edited by dead white men employed by an imperialistic dictator with a history of failed relationships and an unhealthy fear of snakes? Wonder no longer. Herewith, the true story of the Fall of Mankind and the Loss of Eden. Well, sort of.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Phoenix in the Machine

Dreams come true in cyberspace — but so do nightmares.

Roger remembers dying in a fire on the launchpad. He’s reconciled it with being alive again. However, being an infomorph in a simulated environment has been a difficult adjustment. Toni tells him he went mad the first time he awoke, and she had to crash the computer.

Now he helps her playtest the games her employer designs. But cyberspace outside Toni’s local area network is a dangerous place. A disastrous experiment in Bangladesh left the world in a moral panic about AI and machine consciousness.

When a careless connection betrays him to those who cannot distinguish between an AI and a post-biological human being, he and Toni must flee. Their cross-country journey will either destroy him or deliver him the spaceflight he’s awaited for a century.

BY CHARLES ALDEN SELTZER, WITH INTRODUCTION BY D. JASON FLEMING: 3 Men of the West (Annotated): A pulp western omnibus of: Riddle Gawne, Beau Rand, and West!

iktaPOP Media brings you an omnibus of three classic westerns by Charles Alden Seltzer, featuring Seltzer’s characteristic western heroes, each with his own unique nickname.

Riddle Gawne

Jefferson Gawne has a low opinion of people, and an even lower one of women. After his brother was murdered by Watt Hyat, in complicity with his brother’s wife, Gawne followed Hyat’s trail across the west.

But the trail went cold, and Gawne, nicknamed Riddle behind his back, found himself the guardian of an orphan girl, and the only man in the territory who dares stand up to Hame Bozzam, founder of the dirty and lawless Bozzam City. Bozzam is too smart to challenge Gawne directly, and Gawne is too honorable to act against Bozzam without cause.

So an uneasy truce has held between the two men. A truce that is about to be broken, with the arrival of the beautiful Miss Kathleen Harkless. Every man wants her, and the men of Bozzam City don’t particularly care if she wants them back.

Beau Rand

Amos Seddon has a secret and Beau Rand knows it.

When someone starts rustling cattle, it doesn’t take long for the whispers against Rand to start. To save himself and his young son, Rand has to prove his innocence and find the real rustlers.

West!

Josephine Hamilton’s first impression of the west was stopping the hanging of a supposed horse thief. From that moment, she decided that the west needed her principles imposed upon it.

And the man who personified that west, and most needed dominating, was Steel Brannon, a man who was merely amused that she stopped him from giving justice to a horse thief. And intrigued by a woman so willful, and so misguided.

This iktaPOP Media omnibus includes Introductions and Afterwords by indie author and editor D. Jason Fleming, putting the novels into historical, cultural, and genre context.

FROM KATRINA LEGG: Some Like it Bot (Noir Good Deed Goes Unpunished)

When the blonde bombshell walked into his office, Deputy Corbin was certain he’d seen this show before.

Then she asked him to solve her murder.

Deputy Corbin will have to follow a convoluted trail of lust and madness to save the tragic starlet… and he might not be in time, even if he figures out who did it.

This is a long short story, not quite a novella, and should not be mistaken for a novel.

FROM DAN MELSON: The End of Childhood (The Politics of Empire Book 3)

The die is cast.

The Empire has caught the fractal demons marshalling troops for assault, and there is no avoiding the decisive Armageddon between humanity and the fractal demons. Both sides have their strengths and there is no certainty about the outcome. While the Empire is free-falling towards open war, Grace is tasked with nudging the odds a little bit, ferreting out traitors to humanity, bribed with the seeming of the most precious gift possible but with a nightmare catch.

Then at the moment of the first skirmishes, personal tragedy strikes, clearing the way for a long-delayed impulse, which results in horror and more personal tragedy.

But out of the disaster, a new Grace emerges – one ready to stand on her own, fully realized as a potent force in her own right.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: An American Thanksgiving

It is Thanksgiving Day, 1865, and Margaret Browne isn’t feeling very thankful. The war is over, and her grown-up sons have returned from the fighting, but her beloved husband remains absent, last seen a captive in a notorious prisoner-of-war camp. The Browne family muddles through their uncertain path, lost without their leader, but when everything begins to go wrong all at once, Margaret must hold together the farm and her family, and turn a disaster into a true day of thanks-giving.

FROM DAVID COLLINS: Prelude of Fate: The Obsidian Valley

This is not the standard Isekai story of “average guy, sent to other world, somehow changed into macho dude doing mega violence getting all the girls”.

This is NOT that story!

Ok, he does get sent to a different world, and he will meet some “very interesting” characters, and many of them will be females.

The problem is, “He” is the primitive, he has no magic or cheat abilities and he really has no clue what’s going to happen.

This is the story of a man, ripped from normalcy, and dropped into a world populated by several very different high tech aliens. This is his struggle to adapt to the new world, and try to make friends with the alien that at first seem like monsters.

In the new world, there is no universal translator, there is no magic, or a box plug in and in 20 minutes you speak a new alien language. He has to learn the new common tongue the old fashioned way, by studying.

Jake tries to adapt and to learn to live in the new world, but he finds out that not everything is what it seems.

Sometimes the monsters are real. Sometimes the really scary monsters are the ones we hide with us. Sometimes the ones that are outwardly monsters can become your best friends.

FROM TONY CARDEN: The Sorcerer’s Lackey

How could Tony be so dumb as to choose a hopeless Hero for this story? I mean, really! Everyone knows that playing around with a dragon is playing with fire.
Hapless, an unsuitable Hero with not a shred of the usual qualities. Dragged – unwillingly, it must be said, by his foster mother – into being the sorcerer’s lackey, he is sent by his master to collect some unmentionable ingredients for his magical experiments.
His trip to “Here Be Dragons”, it does not quite go to plan.
The story is, they say, … is … well … complicated … confusing … chaotic … comic…
A hopeless hero…
A ruthless villain…
A rabble of helpers…
What could possibly go wrong?
What could there be not to laugh over?

FROM DAVID SUTTON: Longest Run

Longest Run is set in North America a thousand years after nuclear war has knocked the tectonic plates off the table. Ecologies are in flux. People are trying to cope with the mess they have made. Since that mess includes humanity’s own genetic instability, Brand Levin is willingly engaged in a live-or-die wilderness proving trip; at stake his right to become a parent.

BY J. ALLAN DUNN, WITH INTRODUCTION BY D. JASON FLEMING: Turquoise Cañon (Annotated): A Classic Pulp Western Adventure

Jimmy Hollister just lost everything he had in a stock market crash. After a life of polo and caviar, he cheerfully starts building up his life again, eventually following a girl to Arizona and starting a goat ranch. But hostile neighbors want to make dead sure he never learns the secret of Turquoise Cañon!

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

(Yes, there are three links from D. Jason Fleming. Apparently my email has been eating his promos. Hungry hamsters indeed. – SAH)

CHALLENGE

As we all know, this is the strangest timeline.

I invite the writers and humorists among you (Yes, I KNOW it’s often the same person) to give me one or two paragraphs of an hypothetical (you don’t have to write it) novel’s opening, that starts with a pithy summary of where we are (for pithy you’ll need to choose, trust me) and then takes a leap into the unknown with the strangest “what happens next” you can think of.

Example (and no, it’s not the strangest I can think of, but bear with me, I need to shower, finish installing shelves in the office, and work on Bowl of Red, which really needs to be done this week, since it’s as we know cursed):

We thought it was all a conspiracy theory. No, seriously.
Sure, they locked us down for two years. They terrorized us and treated us like cattle. They made up entire policies to hurt us and impoverish us.
But who the heck could believe there were really space lizards trying to drive humanity to extinction?
And then they took off their masks. On camera.

What is the operative word in Fiat Currency?

Fiat.

The full faith and credit of the United States of America.

To an extent it was always bullsh*t that your money was safe with the government. To be fair to an extent it was always bullsh*t (apologies to Orvan) that anything was safe in the hands of the government, starting with your kids’ education and ending with…. well, everything. Because humans have a knowledge gathering problem, and the bigger the organization, the bigger the knowledge gathering problem and the bigger the knowledge gathering problem, the greater the chance of being run by gossip, innuendo and fad.

But the thing is, we now have better knowledge of what the government is up to than we did back when FDR set the value of the dollar to gold according to his lucky number.

Which means we now know we shouldn’t have faith.

Other reasons we shouldn’t have faith — or give credit — is the soft coup we watched happening before our very eyes. And while a lot of the people are still closing their eyes and going “I see nothing” I will note that when I say that we had massive fraud for years, people have stopped fighting back. And these days no one sane says “We need voting by mail/multiple voting days/no signature verification.” The left says it, but their sanity is questionable, and they are obviously interested in incentivizing and facilitating cheating. Ten years ago people still told me “But I need early voting, because I can’t take the day off. I have to make money.” And “there is really no fraud.” Now, no one does. Or no one sane. Which means that needle has moved considerably.

And the needle has moved to “We don’t trust these guys.”

Then add to that the Covidiocy, where it’s becoming more and more evident not just the US government but EVERY government in the world, to an extent, cooperated in pushing crazy bullsh*t on everyone because they could, add the confiscation of Canadian truckers funds, add the confiscation of Russian citizens’ funds.

What do you have? Well, at this point the indicator on Fiat is approaching zero.

Yes, okay, so the confiscation of Russian funds is at least technically an attempt at getting the Russians to get rid of Putin. And the Canadian fund confiscation is in response to inflammatory press reports claiming they were several kinds of “ist.”

Sure.

But you know what we didn’t do, when Iran declared war on us? Confiscate their citizens accounts. We froze them.

Same way in the past, various governments (rolls eyes in “Dude, I knew about this before it was cool”) have frozen citizens accounts, but not confiscated them.

(Okay, there’s an exception. Between that and “we will control the industry without expropriating the owners, the imposition of medical experimentation on populations without their consent, and the obsession with genetics and eugenics, the current leftist bozos have Hitler laughing in hell, in between bouts of being f*cked with a pineapple.)

And then the stock market started unraveling, in a way that at least Zero Hedge (waggles hand) thinks is catastrophic.

They give good reasons for this, but honestly, as I’ve talked about here before, I think there’s others.

Like, for instance, the fact that I suspect population is imploding in most of the world. The fact that dumbasses in possession of the levers of power made like a monkey with a stick in a China factory on the world economy for two years. Like the fact that the “big government” model was imploding long before that. (Errors accumulate in any human system. The longer it goes on, the more errors. When it possesses a self-multiplying bureaucracy, more errors accumulate.)

But the central thing here for me — I’m an information/communication person, not an economic analyst — is that the left isn’t adjusting well to “Everyone can see what we’re doing.”

So their response to plummeting fiat is to do more things that break the faith.

And then expecting us to literally put our lives, the fruit of our labor — because that’s what money is — in their hands. And then being surprised we don’t trust them.

The operative word is “Fiat”. What do you do when the trust is gone?

What do you do when the money is gone?

What do you do when everything implodes because it’s in the hands of dumbasses who can’t seem to realize we SEE them?

The sense of having to brace for a crash of all sorts is very intense. And all we can do, individually is prepare and be ready.

Add some precious metals, alcohol, baby formula, medical supplies to your planning. (I should add baby formula, if it has a long expiration date. I’ll never use it for bargaining, because I’m too soft-headed for that. BUT it might be needed by family or strangers. While babies can survive like dad on water from boiling rice, or like our own Dr. Monkey on water from boiling carrots, most of them don’t.)

And be ready.

For years we’ve said “what can’t go on won’t go on” and we’re now hitting terminal “can’t go on.”

Be ready. Stay as calm as possible. Do what you can.

UPDATE:

Go read: https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2022/03/courage-to-change-what-must-be-altered.html
ALL OF YOU. It’s important.

Kurgan Culture, Yamnaya Culture, or Aliens? Old Europe and Indo-European Speakers by Alma T. C. Boykin

So, a few weeks back, a commenter argued that the peoples of Old Europe were more or less egalitarian and possible matriarchal until the people of the Kurgan Culture appeared and imposed a horse-riding patriarchy on everything. I admit, as soon as I saw “Kurgan Culture,” I knew the well-meaning individual was not current on the state of research concerning the two groups involved. So what is the state of research, and what the heck is this all about anyway?

The area centered roughly between the Tisza River in Hungary, the Dniester and Dnieper Rivers to the east, the Polish/Slovak Carpathians to the north, and the Iron Gates of the Danube to the south, is where a series of cultures that archaeologists lump together as the Danube Culture or “Old Europe” developed. There are a number of sub-groups within this Old European culture, and the ones I’m the most familiar with are the late-phase pair known as Cucuteni-Trypillia. Cucuteni is found in Transylvania and adjoining parts of what is now Romania, and Trypillia was on the eastern side of the Carpathians, in the Dniester and Dnieper River watersheds. The timespan for Old Europe is around 6000 BC/BCE to roughly 3500 BC/BCE.

Marija Gimbutas did intense research on the Danube Culture, and published in English. She also wrote several popular archaeology books about the Danube Culture. She proposed that the lack of obvious markers of social rank, the lack of apparent weaponry, and the prevalence of female “deity” images meant that Old Europe had been matrilocal, matriarchal, peaceful, and egalitarian. They had farmed and had done well for centuries. The end of Old Europe came at the hands of the horse-riding “Kurgan Culture” nomads from the steppe, who were warlike, nomadic, and patriarchal. Gimbutas, like many activists of the 1970s, felt that the peaceful, woman-led Old European culture had been far superior in many ways to the aggressive, hierarchical warrior nomads who buried their dead with weapons, animal and human sacrifices, and lots of gold and silver. The nomads erected hills, called kurgans, leading to the term Kurgan Culture.

Fast forward to the year 2014, when I inadvertently started doing research into the Cucuteni-Trypillia phase. I was actually trying to learn a lot more about steppe nomads in order to do some comparative work for an academic paper. I ended up with sources for the Cucuteni-Trypillia people as well as what I wanted. In 2019, I started digging deeper into the Cucuteni stuff, and discovered that a lot remains unknown, and what we do know is very odd, in the sense that it doesn’t match a lot of theories people have developed about how societies change over time. It also doesn’t match Gimbutas’ early work, either. She has been discredited in many ways, although she remains the pioneer*, and her term Old Europe is still in common use.

The rest of this little essay can be summed up as “we don’t know much yet, but what we do know is Odd.” It also reflects my personal interest, and is not in any way a survey of the entire 3000 year period.

Cucuteni-Trypillia started out as a single cultural group. People lived in villages of up to several hundred people, and farmed. They had domesticated sheep and goats, but also ate a lot of deer, some beef (probably very old animals), rabbits, squirrel, and other things. They gathered nuts, berries, and other wild foods in season, and had some domesticated or wild apples and possibly plums. Maybe. They gathered wild grains to augment their domestic grains. They also had very highly decorated pottery, and made items from copper and some very primitive bronzes. Houses came in three general types, wattle-and-daub, log houses, and semi-subterranean. The Old European people are considered Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, bridging between Neolithic and Bronze Age.

We have no idea about their language. It was not Indo-European. The Danube peoples migrated up from Anatolia around 5500 BC/BCE, before Indo-European languages developed. It is thought that some traces of the root language can be found in Greek and Sardinian, but that’s still open to debate. The western groups seem to have had some sort of written symbols, perhaps a form of writing, but thus far no long inscriptions have been found, and no way of translating the tablets and seals exists.

We also don’t know anything about who or what they worshipped, or their government. The Trypillia Large Settlements (TLS) seem to have a major building or two near the center of the settlement, and lots and lots of smaller houses built into groups, almost neighborhoods. A wall of some kind seems to have encircled the TLS, as was common for settlements. No sign of status markers like obvious palaces, or caches of goods, or graves with lots of stuff, have been found. That isn’t to say that some won’t be found, or that non-durable status goods didn’t exist. Textiles were a high-demand trade good, but very few of them survive from pre-history. Without written documents or obviously high-status places, we can only guess as to how the people of the TLS organized themselves. They could have indeed been an egalitarian matriarchy. Or an egalitarian patriarchy. Or they could have been rigidly organized in castes and commanded by priest-kings or Brahmin-like priestly castes. Or something no one has thought of yet. Status might have been based on access to food, textiles, animal products, or things that were destroyed upon the death of the owner and scattered into the rivers.

To make modern researchers even more puzzled, the last century or so of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture left almost no graves, either in Romania or in Ukraine and Moldova. Low numbers of graves from earlier eras have been found, leading to some speculation that cremation or exposure (like the Parsi do with their Towers of Silence) was used to dispose of the dead. The last century or so? Nothing, or as close to nothing as can be found. Without graves, it is hard to determine social organization, the presence or absence of disease and warfare, the sex ratios of a culture, and so on, since there were no written documents.

The Trypillia side has gotten the most attention, because of those large settlements. As in, up to 15,000-20,000 people large. That alone is very unusual. Each house had a built-in oven, and probably a grain-storage mini-house near-by. The buildings had a second story, a loft or storage space, that was reached from outdoors by a ladder. The houses were wattle-and-daub with clay over the outside. Each house was about the same size. None seem unusually large or small, and all that have been excavated had similar internal features. Perhaps the houses had small shrines inside, and each family worshiped clan deities and totem animals (all the bull-headed things that have been found), as well as venerating sky and earth deities as a group? Perhaps worship was done away from the houses, and only small tokens kept as reminders or for personal devotions.

The houses, walls, storage buildings were all burned to the ground every 60-80 years or so. The entire settlement went up in flames, deliberately burned. People either tidied up and rebuilt on the site, or moved to a new site. That’s unheard of. Was it a ritual of some kind, a communal death and rebirth and sacrifice? Since some items seem to have been “killed” before the burning, that’s one thought. Another is that so many vermin and so much garbage piled up that burning the place down served as a public health protection.

The Cucuteni people didn’t have such large settlements, although they seem culturally very close to the Trypillia people, based on surviving artifacts. They too burned the settlements, rebuilding on the same site.

So, what happened in that last 150 years? Did the nomadic horsemen from the steppes (the Kurgan, or more accurately Yamnaya Culture) attack, burn, pillage, loot, enslave, rob, and generally beat up on the peaceful matriarchy until it vanished, leaving Europe to the Indo-European speaking barbarians? Um, probably not. One suspicion is that a shift in weather patterns favored the newcomers as weather in the area turned cool and moist, then colder and drier. This was great for grass and grazing, but not great for farmers. Questions about the exact timing of the cultural contacts relative to the weather shift are still open. Another very recent speculation, based on the genetic analysis of the few late-phase bodies found this far, hints that disease might have moved ahead of the steppe peoples, as happened with the Plague of Justinian and later waves of disease. Again, timing and transmission mechanism are still hotly debated, and I’m one of the sceptics.

What we do know is that the TLS settlements went away, the Danube Culture disappeared or was absorbed by the Yamnaya Culture (the steppe people) and with two exceptions, Indo-European languages filled up Europe. Basque is one exception, Maltese is the other. Horses grazed where the Danube peoples had farmed, and the Bronze Age had arrived.

I borrowed a lot of this for my Familiars novels, added a generous dollop of Handwavium and speculation, and turned the end of the TLS into a cautionary tale about making very bad bargains with forces beyond your control. After all, I’m a lazy writer. I steal good ideas from history so I don’t have to think up new stuff for myself.

Sources:

Anthony, David. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language.

Ibid. The Lost World of Old Europe (an exhibit catalogue with papers and photos)

Haarmann, Harald. The Mystery of the Danube Civilization  (excellent IF you have some background in archaeology)

Müller, Johannes et al. Trypillia Mega-Sites and European Prehistory: 4100-3400 BC

Menotti, Francesco Et al. The Tripolye Culture Giant Settlements in Ukraine. (this one is focuses just on the Trypillia Large Settlements.)

Olsen, Birgett Annet et al. Tracing the Indo-Europeans (a collection of papers. Updates Anthony, but can be very technical.)

For a good website article about Old Europe:

https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/old-europe?s=r

*This is Sarah speaking, not Alma who is a gentle soul.
Isn’t it curious that Gimbutas, Mead and all the rest are found to have made up stuff wholesale, but remain “respected” and — like Marx — we get told “but it still has applications, even if it was wrong.”? Meanwhile, anyone dissenting from the narrative of the left is considered “thoroughly discredited” if they once got a word wrong.
Be the unicorn, my friends. Puncture that nonsense. Why else the razor sharp horn?

Okay, this is weird. No, stone cold weird. I guess you guys really are living on your nerves, or my mail has decided I don’t need to hear from you.

There were no books to promo. This is the second time — 2, in however many years of promo — that this has happened. It has me a leetle on edge.

I could go hunting, see if some of you forgot to send me listings, etc.

But I’m building bookshelves. Yeah, I SHOULD be writing, but I guess– rolls neck — I know how you’re feeling. So, I’m building bookshelves. I’ll write this evening.

So, you have until Wednesday, when I’ll run a promo, (So I guess you have till Tuesday Night) to get me links to your Amazon-published books.

Until then, here is the vignette challenge, to take your mind off things.

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: Pleasure

The image above was made by a friend as the election loomed and we were sure that Donald Trump was a moby. The “Unicorn Cavalry” is Larry Correia’s term for the Libertarian Party. Or was, when the party adhered to, you know, Libertarianism.

Unfortunately 2016 was when they epically misread the tea leaves, or perhaps consulted the world class brains of college libertarians and decided what libertarianism actually should be is “just like what Bernie Sanders is emitting out of his mouth hole.”

Liberty suddenly meant not liberty to pursue happiness with no hinderance, but liberty to pursue happiness because someone else was paying for your necessities. I.e. your liberty required the enslavement of others. (At least their fractional enslavement for tax payment, but that sort of thing always progresses and places like the Soviet Union had functional enslavement, in which you had to work at that which you were assigned. (For which the slaves rebelled as they always do, by merely pretending to work.) And this they called freedom.

Facebook kicked it up the other day as “a memory” because being designed for grandma’s to show off their photos, or people to post pictures of their lunch, they think it will bring a misty-eyed tear to my eye.

What it did was make me stare at it a long time and go “You know, the Libertarian party isn’t it, but we REALLY are the 16th division of the Unicorn Cavalry, us.”

Let me explain: In 2016, those of us who had had enough stuck our horn up and pierced the contented fundaments of the establishment. Since then they’ve been running around with saws trying to cut the horns off, but only succeeding here and there, temporarily, and causing more unicorns to appear amid the newly woken. Half the time, the left has resorted to tying pillows to their behind (the idiotic barbed wire and guards in DC, etc. But that only shows their fear.

But Sarah…. unicorns? We’re not air dreamers. In fact, we’re the ones who are in touch with reality.

Sure, sure. But imagine how the left feels. Unicorns are supposed to be non-existent or very rare. And suddenly, there they are, everywhere, chasing them with sharpened “let’s go Brandon” horns and with “We don’t believe you won the election, your fraudsters” horns, and with “no, I won’t believe anything you say” horns. (Which in this case is what “horny” means. I suppose it would be better as hornery, but eh. The pun is funny.) And everything they do to make the unicorns rare, only makes them come back in greater numbers.

Worse, unicorns are basically purity detectors. Yes, I know. “Virginity.” Meh. There are a ton of medieval stories in which being a virgin was not the point, being pure/good was.

And yet, we’re rising up against people who consider themselves pure and good.

And we’re the 16th because we started in 2016.

I’m here to make a sincere, heartfelt plea that you — quixotically, to the measure you can do it — join the 16th division of the Unicorn Cavalry, and sharpen your horn to a razor point.

It’s a rhetorical horn, because most of us are indeed “keyboard commandos.” Not — I emphasize this — because we demand we start a war, or that others shed blood on our behalf, but because most of our work is ideas and words.

And it is desperately needed. And yes, we might already be much too late.

Let me explain?

I have said before, (And Bill Whittle, who is at least as depressive as I am) agreed, that we’ve already won the war against the current wave of Marxist globalists.

We have won, because reality fights on our side. As it’s been increasingly obvious, these people don’t understand how anything works, beyond perhaps academic politics, and they keep trying to bring to life models that can’t and won’t work.

The problem is “We” and “Won.”

We, who are not globalists are winning and will ultimately win. A great fracturing is taking place. And the big conglomerate of the left will try very hard to impose their nonsense on us and fail.

But what comes next is not won. In most of the world, it won’t be the American model as it’s supposed to be. They never understood (and don’t wish to understand) our Constitution, for instance.

Will it be a return to a constitutional republic here. Well, one can hope and fight for it, but the chances are actually vanishingly small.

At this point, the overwhelming chance is that we’ll fall to the nationalist empire form. We’d already started to with Woodrow Wilson, accelerated with FDR and the movement that way has continued, slowed down by two notable presidents.

At this point, gut tells me, Starship Troopers is the best case scenario. And that, if you look at it, is ultimately globalist, just not short term. Because a society that oriented towards the military (lip service to other forms of service notwithstanding) will become an empire.

Honestly? I could live in the Starship Troopers universe. (Shrug.) It ain’t wonderful, and it will be war-inclined and tend to ossify and restrict improvement. But it could be much worse and probably will be.

That is the part — not the “they will impose world wide communism” or “The current elites have it all sewn up” — where I’m genuinely pessimistic. Yeah, we might change it, but it will take a miracle, or an army of unicorns.

Why? Because I know the rest of the world. I know Europe, know people in Africa (yes, including tribal members), and have a passing touch and go knowledge of central and South America (look, my cousins there are scary, okay? Mostly I get reports third hand.)

We’re thoroughly penetrated and corrupted by Marxism here. Even people on our side, gaming what happens next tend to default to the models they’ve seen in entertainment and read about in history books…. mostly written by Marxists.

I keep coming across bizarrely weird glitches in people who are otherwise rational. Like, someone will be analyzing the Regency in England and suddenly will say something like “Well, people were being forced to work in these horrible factories and live in horrible conditions in cities.” At which point I want to collectively grab them by scruff and bitch slap the indoctrination out of them.

In fact, if you read books written at the time, not by crazy Marxists like Dickens, or pay attention to the industrialization taking place in real time before our eyes in the third world, you’ll know that the Marxist bullshit about the Dark Satanic Mills was, like everything Marx made much of, basically bullshit and hot air.

People were having trouble holding onto tenants on their land, and servants in their manors, because conditions int he city were better. And working in factories was both less work and less demeaning than being a domestic servant. (Don’t believe me? Read biographies. Even the best make some passing reference to stuff that makes your hair stand on end, like the fact that your employer had a say over who you married.)

Of course the upper class also loved the Dickensinian portrait of cities and mills, because it might convince Millie-maid to stay in the manor, even though she gets up at 4 am to sew the master’s newspaper (trust me on this) and goes to bed at midnight after blacking the stove, and the master’s son is starting to get handsy with her.

But the fact that Marxism has penetrated that thoroughly means everything that the industrial civilization is built on is corrupted. Everywhere. (Yes, Europe too.)

It turns out the horrible things happening to the culture are not the result of decadence, either.

Okay, so Russia/the USSR is only ever good at one thing: propaganda and bullshit.

Mind you, they were never that good, but they had every writer, entertainer, journalist and academic on their side by the early-to-middle twentieth century, each one doing his part, in complete accord (a prospiracy, not a conspiracy) to help sell these narratives. And the narratives are simple. Once you have the outline, you can help build it without any profound understanding. (Which is why it’s also full of contradictions, and at war with reality but if you have enough adherents you can cover that up because none of them want to wake up. Waking up means losing friends, sometimes family, and becoming one of the pariahs. One of the “stupid.”

So, what the propaganda has done is sell the idea that a lot of things are “decadence” when what they actually are is the reaction of an invaded culture to having another culture imposed from above. Remember the idiotic mouse-habitat experiment, in which all these terrible things were the result of overpopulation and abundance? Turns out it was rigged (I know you’re shocked.) What it actually is is the result of individuals losing defined roles in society. Adjusting from mice: The women become whores, the men become thugs, babies become eaten, and adolescents develop all sorts of pathologies.

What you’re seeing, when you complain of our decadence has bloody nothing to do with decadence. It is the result of a foreign and very strange cult imposing its will on us, and therefore causing a loss of “role” for most people in the society.

The left attacked the idea of… well, everything that competed with dictates from the state: religion, marriage, family hierarchy, normal friendship, and on and on and on.

And humans can’t survive without a defined role and a defined purpose. We’re creatures who must see ourselves as part of the story.

The left’s idea was that everyone would buy into the great communist future and our role would be to bring that about.

Except since the USSR fell, most sane people know that’s bullshit, and only the terminal neurotics embrace that shit unironically with the kind of fervor reserved for death cults. (Which it is.)

And that’s the biggest thing we’re fighting against. The left’s grip on the culture is crashing. But there is nothing else for people to embrace. From the bizarre way even some anti-left people embraced masks and not-a-vax you can tell anything will do.

These are drowning people, trying to reach for something, anything.

Well, I don’t know what will happen in the rest of the world. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

But in the US it is imperative that we both mock and deride the left, before they can add more crimes to their toll. The ones they managed during the Covidiocy were enough, thank you so much. (Unless you call mass Gerontocide not a crime. And we won’t mention the cognitive impairment of a generation of babies and toddlers. Again, this is my training. Most of you might not realize that if you don’t form language before three, you never will. For a vast number of these children, the impairment is permanent.)

At the same time we need to push the model that works: The US Constitution.

It’s funny, you know, because in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, the Professor says that the Constitution was for an agrarian society and wouldn’t work for an industrial one. He was wrong, though I could see Heinlein repeating the “wisdom” of his generation. The Constitution would have worked fine, had it not been abandoned for the sexier centralized models of governance from Europe.

More importantly, the Constitution is much better suited than the centralized model (which is what is collapsing now) for a post-mass-manufacturing society. As both information and manufacturing diversify and individualize, the constitution is the answer to what ails us.

The rest of the world won’t embrace it — probably — but you know, not my circus, not my monkeys. We can at least provide a model and be a shiny city upon a hill.

So, what can you do? Be the unicorn cavalry. Be the keyboard commandos.

First of all, keep making what you think and feel known, to the measure of the possible in your position.

Look, even if all you do is show other people they’re not utterly alone by putting a “I did that” sticker on a gas pump, you’ve done good work that day. Steve linked this article in comments, and it made me giggle. Go read it, and then I’ll tell you what’s so funny. I don’t know if that gas station manager is a lefty or just congenitally stupid. (The answer might be both of course.)

Ready? The really funny part is that the writer echoes the managers sentiments without realizing how bloody stupid they are.

First, he says one or two people have “complained about the stickers.” and made his life miserable. But he’s scraping five to six off the pumps every day. Um…. that tells you how sentiment is running, but he doesn’t seem to realize that. (Unless he’s really, really deep.)

Second, he goes on and on about how Biden doesn’t shop there, so why are you doing this.

My giggle became a guffaw at that point. And that’s why I suspect he’s a leftist. He thinks any demonstration must be to attract the attention of and plea with/complain to the person in authority.

In fact, this one? is about letting other people we see what’s happening to the gas prices and we know whose fault it is. Considering the way the Brandon Junta and the mealy mouthed press report it, you’d think the rise in prices is inexplicable and strange, and not the fact of his stopping our oil independence on the first week in office.

It is important for other people to know they’re not the only ones who see it. You are supporting other people, some of them deep embeds who can’t speak. It’s an act of mercy and defiance both.

Defiance? Well, yes, because you’re countering the media narrative. And of course Exxon doesn’t like it and tries to repress it, because they are, of course, convinced that the future is on the other side, and that only hicks are against the globalists.

So what you’re doing too is slowly chipping at those assurances implanted by the universities in the minds of educated people. Do it enough and their fear will swing the other way, and they’ll start putting the stickers on themselves, to try to appease the majority of people. Because that’s how craven managers act.

Heck, do it enough and maybe they’ll ignore Brandon, tell him to take a hike, and drill, baby, drill before the children are crying for food in the dark. It’s unlikely, but we can hope.

I need you to be the people who don’t exist: Believers in life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and our Constitution.

I need you to join the Unicorn Cavalry, and explode marxist myths, media narratives, and the evil, dark doings of the global cabal.

I need you to produce pithy sayings, interesting memes, narrative-stopping polemics, and rude gestures.

I need you to step up. Yes, it will take a miracle. (But then we’re only mostly dead.)

And who best to produce a miracle than us, mythical and Odd beasts who aren’t supposed to exist?

Sharpen your horn, lower your head.

Hands comfortably on the keyboard?

It’s time to charge.

This morning I’m having loving thoughts along the lines of Heinlein’s “The Year of the Jackpot” but you know in the end SMOD always leaves us waiting with sandwiches by the phone.

Mostly to be honest I’ve had about enough of pudding heads. It didn’t occur to me till I perused the comments after doing righteous battle with the laundry this morning (Or “why is this so late. Laundry. piles and piles of it. I’ve tried to convince husband to be nudist but he pointed out then we’d have to wash upholstery, and he’s not wrong. Sigh.) that I am in a very weird position, not just because of where I grew up but when I grew up.

As Tom Simon pointed out — and the reason I keep screaming my generation and his are not boomers (never were, regardless of the boomers attempt to integrate us, so they can claim not to be older than dirt.) I remember when boomer stopped at around 56 and the real boomers called MY generation mean things and basically spoke of us as they now speak of millenials.

Look, the boomers by and large fell for the Soviet/commie lies. This was, in no small part the fault of the Greatest Generation (a name bestowed by boomers to appease their memory of how they treated their parents. Sigh.) The boomers were children of veterans who came home in horror at the war and also probably — at least the thinking ones — having trouble justifying our alliance with Russia while putting down the Nazis. (This apparently is because FDR liked the USSR and thought they had great ideas. And before you tell me we couldn’t have won the war without the USSR, let me point out given how communists operate and how effed up the USSR was, you might as well say we couldn’t have won the war without our foot in a bucket of cement.) So they were soft on communism, and allowed our already thoroughly infiltrated universities/Democrats (Heinlein said communists were in control of the Democrats already. I have no reason to doubt him) to indoctrinate their kids with the glories of communism. (Partly because our own CIA believed it. Question, were our intelligence agencies always working for the enemy? Don’t answer that. I like sleeping at night.)

And the boomers (no, not all) grew up with the idea that there was some kind of moral equivalence between us and the communists (at best. Those were the “right wingers” or center right.) And that in the end some kind of soft communism was the answer. Hence shows like Star Trek, which btw is what our idiots are trying to implement with their Great Reset. (The number of idiots on FB saying “Communism could be like Star Trek”. Yeah. Except it never is, because it can’t actually be. And yes, I liked Star Trek as a show, but I choose to believe it was just the military that operated that way. Frankly, until they ran their mouths on stuff like “There is no money” decades later, that’s how the show came across, because even in a show the idiocy in the writers’ minds wouldn’t work.)

No, not all the boomers. But generational culture has its own gravity, and that was the understanding at the back of the boomers’ heads. No big surprise they embraced various forms of chemical escape. Or at least the less moral did. Because I mean, what else were you going to do until perfect communism arrived and you became kind of symbiotic to a universal brain?

Note this is at a the back of a lot sf books of the time, and the only one that has an explicit rejection is Heinlein.

Our kind? We grew up when the summer of love had turned into the winter of STDs, when the pot smokers had turned to the harder stuff and become their families’ tragedies, or the world’s greatest hypocrites, who cleaned up during the week, but were still totes hippies on the weekend. We saw the devastation of collectivism lite, in the US under well, everyone from Kennedy to Carter, and in the rest of the world more so, with boots on.

So, much to the boomers’ shock and disappointment, we cut our hair (or permed it), put on nice clothes and went to work. We laughed at the communes, ignored the sit ins (or in my case once started a riot to end one. Shush you. I told you there were a few of those.) We rejected the leftist philosophy. Some of us were convinced by our teachers and universities that there was a “third way” of a little bit of socialism (akin to just putting the tip in, or perhaps “a little pregnant.) Or at least we pretended to to pass college. And some of us just grew more mullish and tired of the bullsh#t every day.

Add to this that I grew up in Europe. More than that, I grew up in Europe in a country being manipulated by the USSR.

Was the ancien Portuguese regime a horror? Sure. But honestly, most of its crimes were throttling the squid farms on Mars. As in, they destroyed potential and those with potential. (Or mostly they sent those with potential running to other countries.)

Mostly they squatted on the economy, preventing it from getting a breath, encouraged the predominance of the “old families” that were in their pockets, and kept the rest of us very very poor, under the excuse of keeping the foreign influences (and ungodly ones, too) out.

I.e. standard fascism (actually in the FDR mold, without the protections of a US Constitution. I swear to you Salazar cribbed FDR speeches. I know because I found old magazines and papers.) But without a military component and enforced in the usual haphazard Portuguese way.

Mostly we were very, very poor. Appalachia might have looked down on us.

On the other hand, there was worse in Europe, even in the sixties. Like the Soviet prisoners. And the USSR needed control over Portugal.

Oh, not for Portugal. They took a bunch of our stuff, sure, but mostly they wanted the African colonies.

And I watched how they went about it. And I saw how the US fell for the “But the African colonies just want to be free.” Which might have been true, of course. Some surely did. But they weren’t organized, and they had no idea how to be free. So most of the “movement” was by communists who were, yes, agents of the USSR, whether cognizant of being so or not. (And most of the African ones were cognizant.)

So when the USSR succeeded in their revolution (mostly, alas, a revolution by the Portuguese deep state, who were being cut back by Salazar’s successor. Not cut back enough, because that would involve shortening them. The man was no Trump. But he was kinder, gentler, and wanted Europe to like him. And thus the deep state was upset at losing a little bit of power, and hey! Communism. We could be kings. Yeah) in Portugal, it meant that Africa went from being colonies of the Portuguese to being saratrapies of the USSR and Cuba.

The hell of the seventies in Portugal was that Russia didn’t even really want Portugal. They just wanted Africa, and therefore were willing to pervert the Portuguese wish for freedom to get control. I was shot at as a sidebar in the history books. Gives me the warm fuzzies, it does.

But at the time, of course I didn’t understand any of this, partly because no one talked about it. I did understand stuff like science fiction books going up 500x in price. I did understand the store shelves being empty and us being told that it was the fault of hoarders and wreckers. I did understand that. Yes. I also understood forbidding opposition speech, while making speeches about Freedom. I did understand that my teachers worshiped the USSR while talking about internationalism. I did understand that they talked about the US being imperialist while Russia had an actual empire.

And other things, like noticing that the same slogan and even the stupid red carnations were the same in a lot of revolutions around the world. And that Jimmy Carter got his speeches word per word from the same writers that wrote the speeches for Portuguese communists.

Which means I look at Putin and I don’t see some kind of nationalist hero and defender of Christianity, as pudding heads do, but as a KGB man, deploying the same old, same old KGB tactics, and pretending he’s a nationalist and a hero of the faith. DO keep up. Some tanks going into Ukraine flew the old Soviet flag. That tells you where Putin’s heart — as far as he has one — resides. His speeches often let drop his continuing butt-hurt that the Soviet Union lost. Because he imprinted on the Soviet Union as a young monster, and he wants to restore it as an old monster. He’s still and will always be a monster. The closest he comes to loving something bigger than him, it was a corrupt, miserable empire that enslaved half the world.

Now does he deserve a US intervention? Sure, but which US?

Look, we have problems, right here in Libertyville, okay?

Boy, have we got problems. And for once, thank the good Lord, we have these problems in common with the rest of the world.

I’m not thankful that we fell enough for the communist lies to have the same issues. I’m thankful the rest of the world is finally joining us in “No, I won’t.” Sure took them long enough.

But they are, finally joining us. Partly because the communist/socialist/collectivist/centralist lies have finally become florid enough to be obvious.

Partly because they grabbed the US, so the US isn’t helping as much as it used to. And socialism is not self supporting.

Put it another way: They’ve been living in our basement, raiding our fridge, and daydreaming about how great their hippie commune would be if we let them move there.

Only now, we’ve run off to join the hippie commune, the fridge is empty and growing mold, and the basement is starting to look dirty. And they’re starting to wake up.

Or rather, the working class, the people who make things actually work — to the extent they do, in Europe — are starting to wake up. And they want the fricking college professors to shut up and hand back the economy.

It sort of makes you wonder how fixed the elections have been in other places for generations. Not as obviously as here, but I don’t think they needed to fraud as openly as here, because different cultures.

The truth is in most of Europe the normal people can no longer afford to live, and it’s getting worse every day. And the covidiocy revealed that the smile on the face of the tiger is just the better to eat you with.

They might not understand that socialism is a lie, but they do understand that globalism is. And that technocracy is and that “rule by experts” is long on the “rule” and short on real knowledge.

From what I understand even Russia is having problems with the real workers revolting.

Which is what Putin’s jolly war was supposed to help fix. The only provocation he had was thinking he could get away with it now, but maybe not next year. And the reason he thought a short victorious war would fix it all is because he thinks of the USSR past as “glorious” and “everyone was happy then” because he is also a delusional pudding head. Just one cunning enough and evil enough to be in power in the smoldering ruins the USSR left.

And the reason our pudding heads would love us to join in the jolly war against Putin is that this would give them a brilliant chance to stomp on domestic opposition too. (And the same for Europe. At this point there’s a great confluence of Pudding Heads.)

They don’t really give a damn about Ukraine. They don’t like freedom anyway, so why would they want it for anywhere? But a war of the powers would give them an opportunity to stay seated.

Yes, Putin is a horror. Yes, Ukranians should fight him with all their might. They know that. They know his kind. Yes, individual Americans are free to support it as much as they want.

Our pudding head Junta, which is in occupation of DC, should stay the hell out of it, and if they try to join officially should have their snout hit repeatedly with a 2×4. Made of titanium.

“But what if Putin nukes us?” Well, I wish I could say he wouldn’t, however note the Junta’s big worry — they’re honestly Pollonium Pudding Heads — is you keep your mask on in the bomb shelter.

However, there is a good chance that Russia’s nukes, like the rest of their military equipment is either defective or has walked away, or yes. And any improvised container nukes are likely to not be particularly efficient. (Because, you know, getting containers into our ports might take months. And a container headed for say NYC might end up anywhere else.)

But yea, we might lose a city or two (I wish I could say we won’t.)

Does that mean we should fall in line and go to preventive war?

Question for the class: Would it prevent the nuking or precipitate it. Yeah. Likely the second.

So, if we are nuked? First, if they take off DC (and I wish my friends nearby would work remote for a good long while) remember to send them a thank you note.

Of course, then thank you note should be on the tip of a missile that takes off wherever Putin is. (And if Russians are smart, they should take an extended vacation away from the old monster.)

Our answer to his bluster and screaming about nuking us should be “Don’t start none, won’t be none.” and that has a better chance of stopping the nuking for long enough till he can’t.

Till he can’t? See how the entire industrial world (I know nothing about Africa, but they only marginally fit that definition) is experiencing a workers revolt.

The oligarchs wouldn’t be acting this crazy if they didn’t know they’re in eminent danger of being toppled. And trust me, they have better sources of information than you or I or, of course, our very own pudding heads.

So, there’s a chance that if Ukraine lasts a little longer, the world will change. And very dramatically at that, in a reversal of the centralization of the 20th century.

Now, that means it will become an unholy mess, I grant you, because well, people don’t go rational all of a sudden. (Or often ever.) So lurching to a form of government that works will produce some terrible injustices, some horrors, and some reversals to the leftist model.

Here’s the thing: I hope the US can do this with a minimum of chaos, and that our defense and military will remain operational. I’m very afraid at this point we’re headed — at least temporarily — for a Starship Troopers model.

But I’m hoping we can avoid imposing it on the rest of the world. I’m hoping we can avoid sending our boys off to die for other people’s freedom.

Why?
Because that too is a centralized system. And what it does is give the statists of the world something to point the masses to as the source of their misery that isn’t the true reason they’re miserable. Because they’re not miserable, mark you, because of the US. They’re miserable because of technocracy, “rule by experts”, oligarchy, all under collectivist soft-Marxist philosophies.

The more they can get people to blame us, the less likely it is the whole Marxist illusion will drop into the midden of history. Where it belongs, if we’re to avoid mass dying.

Now, I do realize in a world with nuclear weapons, other people might feel we should intervene, etc. I don’t hate people who claim that. I think they’re wrong, but I do understand their concerns. And heck, I have more in common with them than with the pudding heads who think Putin is our fren. They are about at the level of the people wearing Che shirts, and they should examine who this person is. And realize what they think they know — unexamined — is just good old Soviet agitprop.

As I learned, in the Sad Puppies debacle, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy’s enemy, no more, no less. Unless they share your principles, and your honor, they are in fact more dangerous to you than an honest enemy.

Stop painting Putin in freedom colors, and finding justifications for him. He has entire departments to do that for him. And they send over enough trolls to do that on our blogs. If you pay attention (or have recently read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, you sometimes catch the weird word choice and syntax (though not as obvious as in TMIAHM, of course.) You might also note most of the names doing that are either new, or– Well, let’s say I didn’t approve most of them, which means either they have a work around (unlikely) or they’re part of their troop who changes their name to spew the propaganda du jour.

(Hey there, Gospoda and Gospaza, I hope ten cents an hour you get keep you warm in the coming nuclear winter. May G-d have mercy on your souls.)

Yeah, we have our butts in a trap and no mistake. The only good thing about it is that so do the “elites.” And their butts are likely to be more bruised than ours. It’s small consolation, though, as we head into a few very difficult years.

You know the drill. Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And prepare, prepare, prepare.

Sure, as an individual, if you are in a position to and are sure what you’re doing will help them, feel free to help the Ukrainians. Freedom lovers should help people fighting a big tyrant.

But as a nation? Smack the nose of the Junta before they make things unimaginably worse.

Expect the worst and pray for the best.

In the end we win, they lose. And if we’re lucky, we do it with a minimum of blue glass.

May G-d protect fools, drunkards and the United States of America.

He knows we need it.

There are many descriptions for politics, one of them being that it’s what people do, instead of smashing each other’s skulls open with a club.

For the record, I’m instinctively the club (wooden, heavy) kind. Partly because I hate and despise mean girls and their cliques. I think life would be much easier if people who have trouble with other people got in a fist fight.

I’m also aware that’s not the way to run a society, unless you have a codified way to go about fist fights, and their resolution, afterwards. Which societies used to, mind you. But that too is politics.

As much as some of our founding fathers imagined a revolution a year or so, there really is no way to make a society work with that, not in actual functioning.

People like to know the next day will be more or less like today (weirdly, no matter how bad today is, until it gets to the point of no return.) And that dictates all sorts of compromises and accomodations.

I suspect this is a way in which my brain is more hunter-gatherer than settled agricultural person. Besides the ADD, that is.

Which brings us to the fact that bizarrely I’m a politics addict, and follow it way more than is good for my brain and blood pressure.

This is precisely because I don’t fully understand it, and don’t trust those who engage in it. I’m not fond of politics (which is why we’re not at home to anyone insisting that I should run for office in any way shape or form.) I’m just …. um interested in it. Or at least accurately aware that it’s interested in me. I’ve been bitten by revolutions, uprisings and riots before, and now, like someone in an area with unstable weather, I refuse to look away.

I want to have warning to grab that club and or run away, you see?

But the one thing I’ve never done, until very recently, is let politics rule my life or my associations.

In college, where I kept my politics strictly under cover, my friends ranged from the preppy “right wingers” to the communists, and each group was absolutely sure I agreed with them. I was even part of the (in retrospect I think we impressed other people as mildly creepy, but I don’t care) hyper religious group who headed for the nearby church before attending classes. (Usually at 7 am, when the services were.)

Here’s the thing, I was friends with a small number of people in each of those groups, and they were generally people I could trust not to want to — much less do — bash my skull in.

I tried to maintain the same balance and stay in the closet politically, in my career. That didn’t work, because by then it had become absolutely necessary to vocally endorse everything of the left to stay in the good graces of the establishment. Oh, and those things changed. And we were supposed to change with them. We were also supposed to banish anyone who didn’t.

I don’t work that way, which is why I hate politics and politicians.

But because practically everyone on the left whom I’d considered friends banished me when I came out of the political closet (I was on the suspicious list, for insufficient enthusiasm before, mind.) I’ve been worrying lately that I let politics dictate my life.

I do, also, instinctively flinch away from people proclaiming certain politics, because I’ve found I can’t trust them. So I’ve been wondering if I actually have become a political fanatic and the mirror image of the left.

I’m glad to report I haven’t. And I thank the current international situation for doing the clarifying.

There are some of you who are friends as well as fans, and with whom I’ve found in the last week that I have a very significant political disagreement with.

You see, I have — malgre moi — become something of an isolationist. While I think that the US should have a strong defense, and a policy of “Don’t start none, won’t be none” Aka “Touch us and die” aka “So much blue glass.”, I don’t think we should be the world police. I think internationalism, in the form of very strange alliances has been the industrialized world’s bane.

That said, I do recognize the arguments of the other side, including “But they won’t leave us alone.” It’s the mirror image, in fact, of self defense vs. an active and intrusive police protection which can go sour on you.

While this disagreement with some of you is pretty significant, it is also completely irrelevant for the fact I still consider you friends and allies. It doesn’t affect my feelings for you.

While I have decided opinions on it (When don’t I have decided opinions) and am ready to talk your ear off in all conditions, I can see your side of it. I think you’re wrong, but only by a whisker.

The problem I have with the left, is that I can’t be friends with people who wish me dead, despoiled or permanently silenced.

Barring that, I’m open to discussion and argument. Mostly because politics is always interested in me.

But a large portion of the population has decided it’s my way or the highway, and we’re supposed to be obedient widgets, who own nothing and like it (That is to say, slaves. If you own nothing, you’re dependent on others for your very existence, and therefore can be absolutely controlled by government which even at its best is never made of angels.)

And that’s why we’re in mid-fall, waiting for the parachute to engage.

It very well might not. May G-d have mercy on our souls then.

All we can do is wait and see if it does, and then decide appropriately.

I feel a hard crash and the sort of scouring that will make me overnight a hard leftist, without ever changing my positions.

Brace. Times are about to get even more interesting.