I have stuff I need to write to you about, but not right now, since my head is keeping tabs of about ten things that need to be done. So, I thought I’d post a snapshot of my day, so you get an idea, and also so maybe (if I survive this) in ten years I can look back and go: “wow that was effed up.”
We have carpet installers doing the hallway and stairs, right now. I’m sending out final questions before deciding on a painter. We just had faucets installed, which means I have a dishwasher again. (yay) So, there’s a load of wash going.
I have some stuff to do for my comics publisher. After which we’re going to move the glass table top from the van.
Meanwhile, I’m washing my painting clothes, because I managed to run out. After which I get to put bathroom #2 back together.
Then two donation runs in the van, which means son and I need to fill it. Then a storage unit run. And a post awful run.
And then if I’m still standing, I get to seal the shower stand.
I’d really like to post at instapundit tonight, but heaven only knows if I’ll be awake enough to do it.
Oh, yeah, also all my joints hurt right now, because going up and down in altitude drives the automimmune bonkers.
Tomorrow is about the same. I’ll try to find time for a real post!
*Jonathan says this was inspired by my post on unschooling oneself. I have to say that there was one signal occasion in which we all pooled our ignorance: my very first writers group. we really had not a clue. But fumbling together, we all became markedly better writers and eventually all were published. No, I don’t know how it works, but it works. -SAH*
Pooling Ignorance- A Guest Post By Jonathan R. Lightfoot
I don’t precisely remember when I first used my off-the-cuff catch-phrase at work over 10 years ago, nor whether I had seen it somewhere and adopted it or just created it myself. Original or not, it is the truth of it that is important. As long as it stays true it matters not whether I borrowed it or not (though I like to give attribution when due and known).
“Let’s Pool our Ignorance” It is a Paradox. When I first used it It was a seeming self-deprecation that was also a form of arrogance. No, I don’t know the answer, but yes I can get a good result, answer the question, find out what we need to know and do what we need to do — Without another set of credentials or series of classes.
It was also my way of giving the questioner buy-in to the situation. You are asking me a question, but you may already know more of the answer than you think you do. Let’s take what we both don’t know and come up with a working solution.
The deep dark secret within pooling of ignorance is that most of the time we know hardly anything about the subjects and issues we deal with on a daily basis, but this doesn’t prevent us from living successful and well-ordered lives where our ignorance always highly exceeds what we know.
So how does one Pool Ignorance successfully? It starts by taking a personal inventory of what you think you already know. Don’t be surprised if you know a lot more than you thought you did, and don’t be disappointed if you know a lot less than you hoped. Sometimes the big holes tell you more than the well-ordered facts.
This is followed by interviewing the other people you are pooling ignorance with, to see how much you have in common, what is different, and variations in what was presumed to be the same pieces of data.
I base my pooling on a world view gained through a liberal arts education and a liberal arts mode of thinking. Almost any thought, idea or fact I can find I can place it somewhere within the framework of the things I already know. This means that the great gaps of ignorance are a part of the great matrix of knowledge and learning that I have begun and will continue, for the rest of my life. I may look at sections of it in hindsight with a completely different perspective and conclusion than when I began, but I am able to build upon it filling up some holes, replacing some spans with new data, and make sense of what would otherwise be an often senseless world.
They say that one of the hardest things for anyone to say is “I don’t know”. But when you pool ignorance, you say this, freely, and without shame, all the time. When you pool ignorance you find other people fascinating as you gather what they know, and often help them understand better what they already knew as you discover great new answers, avenues and vistas.
Covid has turned may of our lives upside down. I have been unemployed for over a year, and during that time I have faced several unexpected projects at home. It has pushed me into the position of a general contractor on projects related to plumbing, masonry, carpentry, electrical, landscaping. I was told first off by a good friend that just one of those projects was too big to do, I should give it up. But I cycled through him and others, who helped and walked off, and I picked the brains of many others on what to do. Some of the most emphatic “you can never do it that way” type people were the greatest help, as I blazed forward after doing it the way they said it couldn’t be done.
I didn’t do all the work myself. My hands didn’t have the skill the physically do it all, but I was able to understand what had to be done in those cases, and find the people with the skills, not the ones who could say the right words, but the ones who could actually do the work.
And I had my failures here and there. But they were the greatest successes of all. What I learned from them was invaluable.
Pooling ignorance is liberating. There isn’t only just one right answer or way to do most things. There are many ways and opportunities, and you can try many of them. Now, when something is wrong it is wrong, but more often there is a multitude of right options to choose from.
School may not make us memorize lists by rote, but practically it does make us learn the one way, the right way. Get out of that mentality, and find the freedom in an ignorance that knows more when it knows less and takes advantage of what it does not know to leverage a better future.
There has been an image in my mind which I unfortunately can’t find to illustrate this (well, not free) of a line of refugees by the road side, with all their possessions in a wheelbarrow.
This might be because it seems like 80% of my friends are moving or trying to move in the next few months, usually across states. It might be because on a recent trip to Home Depot for varnish, I found that only about 3 in ten cars even have Colorado plates. And a lot of those are temporary tags.
Or it could be a deranged conviction is growing in me that if we don’t get out by mid-September, we’re not getting out. And as the list of tasks multiplies, this gets very depressing.
Perhaps it is simply that I haven’t been able to write, and am going slightly mad.
It probably helps not at all that I’ve been listening to Amity Schlaes The Forgotten Man and slowly realizing that all the crap we’re going through has the sticky fingerprints of FDR and his “brain trust” (mostly commies, to be honest) all over it.
Like, take how fucked my field is…. Well, they paid writers to write what amounted to propaganda pieces some of them supposed fiction.
In fact, other than prolonging the misery and the great depression, al the New Deal did — and did well — was propaganda to sell themselves as saviors.
Of course that gadget is broken. If Obama had had mass media and total control, we’d think of him as many still think of FDR.
This brings to mind what is creating this big movement — the so called elites who would plan our lives have no clue, by the way. They are actually trying to ignore all the moves because it confuses them — which is the fact that if you take control of even a state’s government by crooked means (Colorado, if the elections were fair, the asshats would be eager to have them examined, not try to hide them. Also, I’m sorry, there’s no way the elections are fair) you can control people’s lives with dictator-like powers and make the state unlivable, in pursuit of the little twinkling sounds in your brain, or something.
You can for instance decide that you’re resettling refugees, when you’re turning the state into a vast illegal camp; or you can decide that the expensive convention center in the capital is now a homeless shelter; or you can allow homeless to camp all over Denver after the people defeat that in the polls; or you can make it impossible to earn a living in a state; or–
The possibilities are endless.
However, when a state, a region or a country become a source of refugees, the reason is always the same “too much power in too few hands.”
When people arrogate to themselves the right to decide everything for everyone else, because they believe they know how everyone should live, the result is always refugees. There is no reprieve.
And don’t get me started on allowing a stolen election to stand, and a traitor (lending aid and comfort to a declared enemy IS the definition of treason) to destroy the country on his say so and the say so of his merry band of crazies.
And if you’re going to dispute that traitor thing, here is the list of equipment and other stuff left behind for the Taliban (not to mention tens of thousands of potential American victims and hostages):
Here is a more complete list (Forbes) of US-supplied and left behind equipment list now controlled by Taliban. Makes our efforts look almost minuscule. At least the guys we supported knew SOMEBODY here … gave a shit.
-2,000 Armored Vehicles Including Humvees and MRAP’s
-75,989 Total Vehicles: FMTV, M35, Ford Rangers, Ford F350, Ford Vans, Toyota Pickups, Armored Security Vehicles etc…
-45 UH-60 Blackhawk Helicopters
-50 MD530G Scout Attack Choppers
-ScanEagle Military Drones
-30 Military Version Cessnas
-4 C-130’s
-29 Brazilian made A-29 Super Tucano Ground Attack Aircraft
=208+ Aircraft Total!!
-At least 600,000+ Small arms M16, M249 SAWs, M24 Sniper Systems, 50 Calibers, 1,394 M203 Grenade Launchers, M134 Mini Gun, 20mm Gatling Guns and Ammunition
-61,000 M203 Rounds
-20,040 Grenades
-Howitzers
-Mortars +1,000’s of Rounds
-162,000 pieces of Encrypted Military Communications Gear
-Administration Encrypted Cell Phones and Laptops ALL operational
-Pallets with Millions of Dollars in US Currency
-Millions of Rounds of Ammunition including but not limited to 20,150,600 rounds of 7.62mm, 9,000,000 rounds of 50.caliber
Will that ammunition be walking over the wide open border to kill Americans? You betcha. Did a lot of that end up in China, to be used against us? You betcha.
What are the idiots thinking?
Nothing, except that they hate America because since the New Deal, we’ve been resisting their attempts to remake us completely. So they hate you and we must be destroyed.
There is a feeling you get before a storm. A sense of something about to break. And I’ve got a pile of things to do, so that I don’t have to run in the middle of the night, pushing a wheelbarrow.
We all have lots of things to do so we don’t all of us become refugees as the land of freedom stops existing.
Most of them consist of preparing, getting to a safe place.
And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
Go ahead. Ask them. I was in a discussion the other day that ended up on the topic of asking questions of teachers, lecturers, speakers, etc. And it was brought up that many people never asked questions, even on topics they didn’t understand, because they figured that they were the only one in the audience or class who didn’t understand the topic. That is simply untrue.
I used to tell my students that the only truly stupid questions were those which asked about whatever I had just said. For example, me: “The exam will cover these topics <list of topics>.” Student: “What’s on the exam?” That’s a stupid question. Asking me for clarification, definition, further explanation, background, history, etc. Those are not stupid questions, even if you assume you are the only one in the room who doesn’t get it. I emphasized to my students that if they asked what they thought was a basic or stupid question that I could guarantee about 80% of the rest of the class would be thinking “Oh, thank GOD you asked that! I had no idea what Professor Ornery was talking about!”
Asking the “stupid” questions applies to our current political and social situations. The CDC and its attendant sycophantic media outlets (i.e. mainstream media) have decided that the horrifying, frightening, xenomorph’s evil twin delta variant is GOING TO KILL US ALL!! Based on this latest freak out, I have some questions and you all should too. These questions must be asked out loud, so that those freaking out, and those pushing them to freak out, are forced to actually provide answers. I’m not saying those answers will be accurate, true, or even useful. BUT the point of asking out loud is to force the issue into the middle of the room. If you don’t ask the questions then those who use the panic of citizens to fuel their power will assume you are in agreement and are suitably cowed with panic.
It is up to us, the recipients of the panic to stop panicking and ASK THE STUPID QUESTIONS. Make people explain things. Make your coworkers, friends, and family members explain things. One thing that the CDC cannot explain is why they used a non-peer reviewed article that was originally rejected for publication as the basis for their decision to reverse course on masks. Why are they using this bad information/bad research?
Could it be because they require panic in order to maintain their status as “experts?” Could it be because they don’t actually know what they’re doing? Could it be because they’re all little bureaucratic Napoleons who get mad when people don’t pay attention to them all the time?
So, I’ve come up with some questions that everybody needs to be asking out loud. Remember that “out loud” part.
Why is the CDC using that non-peer reviewed report?
Do the vaccines work? If not, why not?
If the vaccines don’t work, why are we being pressured to get them?
If the vaccines don’t work, why are you thinking about forcing us to get them?
If the vaccines do work, why are people still getting sick?
If the vaccines do work, why are you going back to masks?
Why do “experts” seem to think that “highly transmissible” and “more dangerous/lethal” mean the same thing?
Why do “experts” get upset when us hoi-polloi go to their websites and get their data and run our own analyses?
Those are the ones I came up with for the WuFlu. There are others I have for our political elites (bear in mind, I have ideas as to answers, but these are questions that need to be asked out loud and in public):
Why does Jen Psaki still have a job? Why does Fauci?
Why are BLM or antifa protests fine, but protests against current/proposed policies deemed “superspreader events” before they even start?
How is it that no one in the White House recognizes Alzheimer’s when it’s right in front of them?
What makes you think we don’t see the dementia?
Why is Harris the VP when she couldn’t even make it to the Iowa caucuses?
Why do you think that our freedoms are something the government gave us?
Just so we can prepare…what’s the next crisis you’re going to dream up?
I know there are more questions that people have. So, start asking! Don’t be afraid. Even if you have a job that you think may be jeopardized, these questions can be raised in an innocent I’m-just-seeking-information kind of way. The trick is to make the person lecturing you (for your own good of course) explain their lecture. So, when they’re telling you about masks, ask where the CDC data came from. Ask where your coworker/friend/family member got the information, ask for links.
Keep asking. Restate their comments back to them – “So, you’re saying…” If they get angry, ask why they’re angry. If they ask why you won’t mask or vaccinate, that’s your cue to go back and ask where the data comes from. Ask them how many people they think have died from delta variant. Ask them to examine their premises and assumptions.
Ask, ask, ask.
Don’t be afraid to ask the “stupid questions.” It’s even better if you can do that in front of an audience. Like in my classes, I can guarantee that a large percentage of your audience will be thinking “oh, thank GOD somebody asked! I didn’t understand that either!”
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. I ALSO WISH TO REMIND OUR READERS THAT IF THEY WANT TO TIP THE BLOGGER WITHOUT SPENDING EXTRA MONEY, CLICKING TO AMAZON THROUGH ONE OF THE BOOK LINKS ON THE RIGHT, WILL GIVE US SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY FOR PURCHASES MADE IN THE NEXT 24HOURS, OR UNTIL YOU CLICK ANOTHER ASSOCIATE’S LINK. PLEASE CONSIDER CLICKING THROUGH ONE OF THOSE LINKS BEFORE SEARCHING FOR THAT SHED, BIG SCREEN TV, GAMING COMPUTER OR CONSERVATORY YOU WISH TO BUY. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*
AN ADDITIONAL REQUEST: I ASK EVERYONE TO SHARE THIS ON FACEBOOK, SINCE I’M IN FACEBOOK JAIL FOR BREAKING THEIR STANDARDS. Since their standards are pro-Taliban and anti-America it’s a fair cop, but Facebook is to blame. So, for now it’s up to you to make it go wide and free.
Mystery abounds on the planet Camelot, and it’s up to Barbarella to unravel it all in order to save a secretly enslaved populace in what’s supposed to be a literal paradise. Answers will be forthcoming, but getting there will be half the fun—at least for you, gentle reader! And those answers may just bring down paradise…and lead to an even greater galactic evil! Love, lasers and liberty—this one’s got it all, courtesy of acclaimed novelist SARAH HOYT and visionary artist MADIBEK MUSABEKOV!
Kaelin knows an alien when she sees one. The trick, given her eyesight, is actually getting close enough to see them. She might as well wish upon a falling star!
Against all odds, one just walked right up to her and introduced himself as Roger. He’s on a mission from Molly, the friend she’s traveled half-way across the country to see, with news of her alien ever after and a shopping list. Apparently, the best technology in the galaxy isn’t stocked with hair conditioner…
When their hands touch, everything changes. Kaelin has a chance to become everything she ever wished she could be… but it will cost her everything she currently is.
Prince Serogero has found the perfect match in an imperfect woman. When he catches her during a seizure, everything he assumed finding his mate would mean is turned upside down. His people’s technology can help her, if she lets it, but at what cost to her, and to him? When his duties and her safety conflict, can they create a happy ending?
When an ancient sorcerer pursues an enchanted blade at any cost, only one man stands in his way.
Archaeologists uncovering a lost Mayan city unearth a magic artifact. An earthquake disturbs the operations of neighboring narcotraffickers. An ancient sorcerer and his mercenary henchmen arrive to claim the artifact.
When these three factions converge, Karl Thorson, ex-Special Forces, is thrust into action.
Dexicos Megistos, a nigh immortal sorcerer, wants to retrieve a mystical jade dagger. Alejandra Matamoros-Lopez wants to smuggle narcotics through the tunnels beneath the ruins, avoiding the notice of rival cartels. Professor May Chen wants to see if any sparks remain from her relationship with the head of the archaeological dig.
Karl Thorson just wants to do his job, and maybe have a cold beer.
Can he safeguard the archaeologists, especially the lovely Professor May Chen? Can he defeat a murderous band of narcotraffickers? And can he deprive the sorcerer Dexicos Megistos of the jade dagger?
Don’t miss the first book in the Semi-Autos and Sorcery series. It’s the kind of Urban/Contemporary Fantasy fans of Larry Correia and Jim Butcher are hungering for.
“A fast-paced fantasy romp which is not anything like Indiana Jones, though you might be forgiven if you notice a similar feel …It is a fun ride, really.“–Steve Perry, NYT Bestselling Author of Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead
Wounded in body and spirit after the fall of her kingdom and loss of her lover, the knight Kaila has one last duty to perform before dying: seeing two orphaned children home to their clan in Bringanzo’s Desert.
But all is not lost. When the shaman of Three Mountains Clan takes Kaila on a smoke quest she learns Kreg is still alive, fighting his way across the lands to her. She will raise an army to free him, though hell shall bar the way.
And once they’re united, not even the beast men who overran Trevanta, shall keep them from taking back their land.
First published in German in 1810 and never before translated into English, Julius von Voss’s INI: A Novel from the 21st Century is a long-lost classic utopian novel. The setting is the world of the 2090s as imagined by an author writing nearly 300 years before, when the Industrial Revolution was just barely getting started. Teams of trained eagles pulling balloons, whales harnessed to a floating island, a gigantic umbrella sheltering an entire city… the marvels keep on coming. INI is also a love story, as the hero spends the novel striving to make himself worthy of the title heroine in the most literal way. Much of the novel is a tour of the world of the future: after traveling through Europe and then North America, the hero meets with disaster in the Arctic and finds himself marooned at the North Pole. With its detailed vision of history and science for the next three centuries, INI is considered by some to be the first German science-fiction novel. While a product of its time for better or worse, it is sometimes whimsical, sometimes eccentric, and always imaginative. Long hidden behind the language barrier and known only by its title from a few scattered references, INI is now available in English to science-fiction historians and others interested in early fantastic fiction. Includes vintage illustrations as well as historical and translation notes that put the story in context.
This collection is from ten different Texas authors. There was no ‘world’ or set up for the stories. It was up to the individual authors to write their stories, so you get a wide variety! Vampires, dragons, werewolves, enchanted swords, runaways, SciFi, and cowboys… Stories for everyone in this collection of Texas authors!
Alma TC Boykin- Pigmentum Regium; Monalisa Foster- Caliborne’s Curse; Dorothy Grant- Business not Bullets; Kathey Grey- The Invisible Train; Pam Uphoff- Runaway; JL Curtis- A Favor Owed; Jonathan LaForce- Knights and Dragons; Peter Grant- Starting over; Lawdog- Bad Night in Falls Town; John Van Stry- They Only Ever Just Send One; Wayne Whisnand- For a Child.
This is the result of that collaboration- May I present Tales Around the Supper Table- The Anthology.
Sarah has studied as a demonologist with the Church ever since. Along with her friend Beau and her magical guardian dog Merlin, she trains to put her unique psychic gifts of reading and manipulating energies to good use.
But investigating evil is wearing on everyone, and a trip for Sarah’s friend Lizzy’s wedding provides just the vacation they need. It’s even in the beautiful inn she and Lizzy went to summer camp at when they were little.
She had so many good times at this place. So why are memories straight out of a horror movie popping into her head?
Sarah knows nothing supernatural is going on, she’d see it, she’d remember it, but when guests start disappearing, everyone’s left questioning their reality. What could fool Sarah’s powers, Beau’s faith, and Merlin’s senses?
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.
(I want to apologize for the whimsical bolding and link capture, but in addition to doing this in a moving car, WordPress has been making this difficult for months, because WordPress is as’ho’e.)
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
I’ve been accused of being a class traitor, something that amuses me as much as being called a gender traitor or any other kind of traitor to something I never swore allegiance to. And something that, in one case, is a diseased chimera from the useless brain of Karl Marx. And in the other is not exact science “the contents match the can” the left thinks it is.
What I was accused of, particularly, was of not liking the Dinosaur-my-love idiocy because I “identified with the working class.” Which … not really. Not in the sense the idiot means by “working class.” Which is itself a deranged abstraction but in the case of the Dino-abomination seemed to mean “louts who hang out in bars and beat up people because it’s Wednesday and there’s nothing good on the telly.”
Actually that story is a good example of what I wish to talk to you about. There is a — for lack of a better term — class or if you prefer category of people who really have no clue how the other half lives. What that woman poured into “working class” was some kind of emulsified crap from reading regency romances (the gin!); the eructations of Marxist professors; and the fear of those who aren’t like them, and who must wish to murder them for being so open minded and smart. Or something.
I’ve seen this so many times it’s no longer a surprise, even if that one was particularly vile.
Revolting, yes. Surprising? no. People with a college degree try to depict people whom they consider beneath them socially, and it quickly devolves to white-trash stereotypes and insanity. (Of note, many people (if not most. I don’t think anyone has done a survey) in trailer parks have at least some college. But none of these people think they can even read or write.) And the things these people can do, often complex jobs (don’t ask me to install faucets or do anything with drains. You won’t like the results.) are dismissed as “things dumb people do.”
Which brings us to where we are.
Our current difficulties have been described as a class war. Yes, in that sense myself (and husband) would be class traitors. Or as a friend of mine calls himself “new class traitors.” We are both (hyper, alas) educated, and (him more than me) have the sort of background that should make us eat all that internationalism with a spoon. Our work with words and numbers (me/him. We divide labor that way) should make us prone to abstraction and convinced we can rule the world from our desks, with a wave of our unblistered fingers.
And yet, we insist on siding with those people that the self-proclaimed elite classifies as “hobbits.” And about whom they joke.
And about whom they know bloody nothing.
It hit me yesterday though that we are precisely on the side we should be.
Forget classes in economic or even educational terms. Marx is dead (and I feel fine). Though he had something going when he talked of workers. Not much, of course, because the man was a dumb grifter. So when he thought of workers being a separate class, he thought of it as his leading the hobbits to paradise. (Rolls eyes.) The man who was raping his kitchen drudge though he was a natural for leading workers. Sure. (You know what if I get a time machine, I might or might not kill him but I AM going to give him a Persian blessing. I.e. spray him repeatedly with cow urine. He needed it. And it’s a pity no one ever did it.)
But still, making workers a separate thing made sense. Oh, not in the “owning the means of production” because for some of us those are our minds, and I work very hard to own it, thankee ever so much.
You see, it’s like this: People who make things (even useless luxury things like yours truly) think differently from people who DIRECT things and tell you how things should be made.
This has shadings, because there is an entire preening gaggle that sort of makes things, but not really
For instance artists who live off the public dole, or the academic grift don’t make things. They serve their masters. The work is not tested. It doesn’t have to satisfy. It just has to repeat what you heard. And the flawed, broken parts will be taken as “very smart.”
While artists and writers who are public-oriented i.e. who write for money are a completely different kind of thing. They are people who work. This is why you could always tell Baen writers in the old days. They looked and acted in completely different ways from the other houses. Mostly because by and large we weren’t trying to impress professors.
In the same way, indie writers tend to be more like Baen writers were. People who work, and make a living with the sweat of their brows (ow, my arthritic fingers.)
And of course, anyone who makes clothes, paints walls, grows things is someone who works. Because they have to do things and do them to a certain standard or it fails. You can’t cover flaws in construction up with pretty words: the missile won’t fly, the bridge will collapse, the novel will never “close.”
Yesterday I was watching people install granite counters (I was supervising guy making our internet work…. He didn’t, btw) and when it all came together, the young woman in the crew said “I love it when it comes together” and it hit me it was the exact same feeling as when I navigate a difficult plot point, and bring the novel to a satisfying conclusion. I.e. I can’t just stop mideway and say I don’t know what it means but it’s commentary on something or other. I.e. I’m more kin to that young woman (I was highly impressed. Like me, at her age, she could do the physical work of a man. It’s rare, but it happens.) than to university professors explaining the symbolism in the use of punctuation in a novel.
The problem you see is that the people who never do anything, never build anything that has to be made to certain specifications, have no clue — none — of limitations.
Why not? Well, because they’ve never met them. In the realm of ideas, in which they build abstractions, the result is always right, and who are you to question their vision?
In the real world we learn that the stain won’t go on evenly (I will finally have an actually, for real workshop) despite your best efforts, and then you have to fix; that the bookcase you built should take that dictionary, but in fact it just collapsed, that….
You learn that there is a reality, and that it pushes back on you, and it’s not all shaped by your mind. The stain didn’t blotch or the varnish crocodile because of systemic racism. Preaching to the drains about systemic oppression won’t make no never mind. You need to do the work, and do it so it works.
Unfortunately, the profitable path in our society for almost a century has been to be pharaoh’s supervisor, ordering the slaves to make brick without straw.
Which is how we get to the embassy in Kabul being very very concerned with pride month, but not so much with getting their people out safely.
All of which… leads to where we are. There’s a group of people who can’t find the real world with two hands and a seeing eye dog. And they hate, despise and fear those who can, because those people refuse to fall in with the beautiful abstractions of the shit-spinners.
And they keep trying to control everything. Partly because then reality can’t sucker punch them, I think.
If we let them go on with this, they’ll kill us and destroy civilization.
I think we’ve realized this, which is why we fight. And I’m right on the side I should be, even if the things I make are in the long run rather useless.
This is a war of the workers/those who make and build and create things, against the useless supervisory class, who just tells us how things SHOULD be made: completely divorced of real world materials/specifications/market.
They’ve been driving us to a point we can’t do anything but fight back.
Heaven knows we’ve been trying to do it with words/ideas, not with steel.
But one way or another, we’re almost at
Holla ye pampered jades of Asia! What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?
They said the world would end in fire next time. But no one said the fire would be set when a bunch of buffons de derriere were running around with matches, misinterpreting everything, and claiming we had to listen to them because they’re experts.
Seriously? They didn’t know Afghanistan, a place that is like our primordial tales where parents are served a stew of their children, a place that not only has never been civilized but relishes barbarism, would fall that fast. And now there are Americans — not all of them aligned with the idiot chauve-souris de la lune — there, exposed to the barbarism and the horrors, and America can’t help them. Which btw, is going to make our enemies sharpen their teeth and think we’re ready to fall, when it’s just the idiots at the top who are…. well, idiots.
Meanwhile the Junta has its hair on fire over Covid, or at last that’s their pretense, to get us to look away from their craven failure.
Here’s the inside scoop on those “overloaded” hospitals. It’s true. They’re overloaded. Oh, not because Winnie-the-flu is that terrible, particularly not the “dreaded” Delta variety. It’s because many medical personnel chose to exit rather than take the vaccine as condition of employment. So “I’ve got weasels in my pants” Joe’s attempt to fix it by making all the nurses take the vaccine means–
Come on, guess it. Go for it. I give you three guesses and the first two don’t count.
EVERYTHING is STUPID.
And do you know why everything is stupid, boys and girls?
Oh, sure, Socialists and Communists who’ve lied so much they don’t know where truth is anymore are running around and ordering things in the way that makes sense to them. (Spoiler: it didn’t make sense to anyone else.)
But they are the symptom, not the origin.
The origin is the idea that “experts” have special magic and should be given control of everything.
Now, that virus bit sometime in the early 20th century.
Sure, if I want to build a house, I’ll find an expert. But if the expert is building a house with the roof two inches above the floor, I can tell him to go soak his head and have it fixed.
And that’s the way things used to be. People were judged on accomplishments not credentials.
Sure, after WWII, probably because of the GI bill, we became very hot on credentials, but that was not terrible, because people were still judged on what they did.
And then– And then in the eighties, sometime, everyone started worshiping “expertise” by which of course they meant credentials.
It had nothing to do with ability, just “knowing the proper procedure” and having the right manner, and saying the right words.
And things that had never before been under the “proper procedure” protocol now fell under it. Business. How to dress. etc. etc.
There were “ways” to do things.
My problem, of course, is every time I looked into those procedures and “ways” and established modes, at least in any field I had the slightest bit of expertise, I found that it was all smoke and mirrors and buck passing.
It’s probably not coincidental that worship of the experts ran hand in hand with leftist takeover of fields and institutions. After all, they don’t want to be judged by their results, do they? Who of them would escape a whipping?
So they default to tab a, slot b and didn’t they teach you to use the right term?
I remember being yelled at by a bunch of undergrown brains on this blog because I questioned their teacher. How dare I? She was the ‘expert.’ I had to respect her.
She was an English teacher, whose corrections on my son’s papers led me to believe that English was her second language. The first was dumbass. (Turned out I was wrong, btw. The first was cannabis.)
And that was my warning that everything was stupid. And getting more so.
From now on, in the wake of Fauci — whose insanity led to people dying of AIDS 30 years ago, because he was sure it was airborne, so people were neither warned about dangerous sexual practices, nor was our blood supply secured nor, btw, were the poor people dying of it get family support, because it was “airborne” and “anyone could catch it.” Now he’s led the country into a rathole, destroyed the economy, and is preening and posing, demanding fascistic rules and restrictions on citizens. — I suggest a new rule. Which is in fact a very old one.
By their fruits thou shalt know them.
And the fruits of these experts are all rotten and filled with death.
I say we shall have a great Simplification. (The first one to get the reference gets a signed book of his choice. Though he/she might want to remind me of this mid-September.)
No more experts. Question everything. Apply common sense. And keep an eye out for obfuscation and passing the buck.
A man with a (mental) overcoat is an enemy. You know what to do. (What? A book for that one too? Okay fine. just remember to remind me in September.)
Build under, build over, build around. Because she’s gonna blow, and we — heaven help us — we! are the last best hope of mankind.
Be not afraid.
Hearts on high.
Yes, some of us might very well die of this. But dying isn’t the worst fate. There are much worse things. Like being abandoned in Afghanistan by your government run by “experts.”
No more experts now. Just us.
We might not be the ones we were waiting for — I was expecting someone taller and less tired — but we’re the adults. And it’s time the adults came home.
“Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:” – KJ Bible.
Was a choice ever made? Do we ever think about it and go “Yes, I want to change everything about me, and become part of this other people/this other nation/ this other way of living.” Do we even change? Or do we just find the place we want to be, the place that is like us.
I’m not talking here of refugees. They go, poor things, in a rush, often pushing wheel barrows of all their possessions. (This image has been much on my mind recently.) And I’m not talking about economic migrants. They go where they can earn a livin, and most of them return. The ones who don’t…. some at least have found the place they were meant to be. Others stay because the kids now belong to this other place. The “wisdom” in Portugal is to return where the kids are raised, and before they can wife. Not that I ever intended that. Not that there anywhere to go outside America. Probably, strangely there never was.
It has been on my mind, in the way of sad recollections Operation Eagle Claw, when Jimmah sent men to die in a poor planned mission to rescue the Iranian hostages.
I was seventeen then, and my heart broke. Believe it or not all around me people gloated that the Americans had failed and been humiliated (I was in school. Most people at least pretended to be leftists.) And my heart broke. It broke twice: it broke for the people who’d died, and the pain Americans were suffering under an incompetent president. And it broke that I couldn’t be here, to share in the burden.
I think that’s when I knew whatever happened in the world, and in my life, I would end up here, because in my heart I was already one of you. I suffered when you suffered, I triumphed when you triumphed.
Later there were choices. I chose to marry rather than take a job offered because, well, I fell in love. That he was American just made things more convenient. Had I married anyone from any other nationality, I’d have to bring them here, and that might take time.
But those were secondary choices. The choice to become American wasn’t. It needed, even so, a lot of effort, to learn to live here, and adjust my mind to fit in. But you see, there really was no other choice. It was already the home of my heart, and I think the Bible also says wherever your heart is, your body will follow.
I’m one of you now. I wed the country as firmly as I wed my husband. My children are Americans. I’m an American. There is no other choice and nowhere else to go. There probably never was.
Oh, IF America falls — no, I don’t think we will, though I’m telling you it’s going to look a lot like it for a decade or maybe a little less — there still wouldn’t, in practicality, be anywhere else to go.
When America sneezes, the world catches pneumonia. We’re going to have it rough, which means the rest of the world will die in droves.
But of course, in the place of my origin, I have family and connections — strained and frayed, granted, but still there — and people who’d take us in, and it’s highly unlikely my family would ever starve. (They’ve survived anarchist revolutions, and national bankruptcy and…. there are ways, and they find them.)
Even so, it’s not a choice. I could not live there with my heart over here. It’s easier to suffer in the land you love, and with your compatriots than to be secure in a land where people gloat at the misfortunes of America.
I know every time I go over, to visit, I spend the whole time praying that nothing major will happen that will seal me off from coming back home. Because this is where my heart lives.
We’re going to have a rough time. There is no mistaking it. I don’t know when things will explode, but I can guarantee they will. And then…. And then it’s going to get very rough. Very rough. Pray, and stay alert, and keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. Be ready to melt like shadows or stand like men. At times both will be called for.
But at least we’re all together.
Remember you’re Americans. You’re the proud heirs of something the world has never before seen: the common man having a say in their governance, and power to go with it.
Never forget it. And don’t let it slip from you. Pass that flag, with the glorious stars and stripes unstained to your children.
Be not afraid.
None of us got a choice. Not you and not me.
But it is our very great privilege to live in a time when freedom is imperiled. It is our very great duty to protect it.
Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor. A price that was once paid. And might yet be required of some of us.
And it will not be a choice. And it will be worth it.
In the end, great stories are always about death and blood. Spend yours advisedly.
Stand as Americans. That is also not a choice.
Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; andwhere thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people,
Sorry for the protracted silence. The carpet was worse than we expected, so we engaged in a quixotic adventure to rip all or it out and zinzer.
Now on the way back to Colorado, to get that house ready for sale in two weeks (or less if we can,) while leaving people installing flooring under local friends’ supervision.
I’m so tired I could fall on my face, but not so tired that I missed the fall of Afghanistan, a needless non-forced error. We could have left without leaving hostages, and without burning our own flags, to avoid them falling into enemy hands. The last days of deranged regimes tell you what their real priorities are: ours are burning American flags, giving weapons to terrorists and leaving our hostages in enemy hands. Duly noted. Remember that when time comes to deal with the Junta.
Something changed with that fall, something material. I don’t know what. But the mood in the country is different. It’s not quite 9/11 level, but there is a sense of vital outrage. I think people who’ve never paid attention are now awake and watching.
May G-d have mercy on our souls. And may we get to sell the old house, and complete this move in safety. Yes, it’s selfish. I’m a selfish being.
There is a sense of a grinder heading towards us, perhaps one that will mill very finely indeed.
Once again, make safe what can be made safe. Get you and yours to a safe place.
This is your warning: Sauve qui peut.
And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
According To Hoyt 