Este parte, aquele parte – This one leaves, then the next e todos, todos se vão – and all depart forever Galiza ficas sem homens – Galicia you’re left without men* que possam cortar teu pão – who can scythe your wheat
Tens em troca – In exchange, you do get órfãos e órfãs – orphans tens campos de solidão – lonely abandoned fields tens mães que não têm filhos – You have mothers who lose their children filhos que não têm pai- children who have no fathers
Tens em troca – In exchange, you do get órfãos e órfãs – orphans tens campos de solidão – lonely abandoned fields
Viuvas de vivos mortos – Widows of living-dead
Que ninguem consolara – Whom no one can console.
*The North of Portugal, like the tip of Spain above it, are both Galicia/Galiza.
Just found myself singing in the shower, and getting tears in my eyes. And this is odd. Because I’ve not that done that for the 36 years since I left. (Leaving my mom and more importantly my dad, if not with no children reduced by one. Which out of two is noticeable, rather.)
I won’t pretend there were no regrets on leaving but they were tempered by the fact that Portugal already resembled the stupidest time line back then, and I kept going “I can’t believe” on everything from how food is served or available, to how roads are laid out. Also, frankly, my attachment was to grandma and the village, and that is pretty much gone (Except for grandma’s grave. And that’s still important to me.)
I miss dad, I hate that I can’t go to my nephew’s wedding, but as dad put it last time I saw him “that’s a very old pain.”
So why the fresh bout of pain that comes out in song?
Well, leaving Colorado will do it, and I swear if it were not for the altitude, I’d not have. I’d have stayed and fought for it.
Colorado was the homeland of my heart, the place I tacked to for 22 years before we finally moved there, and then we lived there for 30. Our friends are there, the places the kids grew up, the places we’ve loved for thirty years are there.
Sure, it’s occupied by communists, but I deduce from the fact that they won’t let anyone audit the election that it’s just occupied. It hasn’t actually changed that much, even with the invasion.
But for now, for right now, given the effects of the altitude on my body and given how very stupid the establishment is, it’s time to go.
This one is going to hurt like a mother. But I’ve done it before. I can do it again.
However living is dying a little, to those left behind, as they die a little to us. There is a break never to be healed. And mourning to be done.
We now own a house in another state. Then it’s back to Colorado for two to three weeks, to get house up for sale, and then we move for good.
The View From Rural Japan – a Guest Post By Francis Turner
As the real wuflu pandemic fades away, even though the control freaks try to keep the fear alive, it’s probably useful to look at how the wuflu affected places not covered by the news. As it happens I have had a ground floor view of how the wuflu and associated covidiocies affected rural Japan because I live in Shimane prefecture – in Western Japan.
Shimane Prefecture circled
Compared to many places Shimane has been barely affected by the wuflu in direct terms. I think we’re still at way under 1000 cases (~800?) and 2? deaths. In other words more people in Shimane have died from house fires or traffic accidents than the dreaded wuflu. Looking back to early 2020, Japan was where we saw the first wuflu cases in a controlled non-communist place – to whit the Diamond Princess. Possibly as a result of that experience, possibly as a result of other, things Japan has generally speaking had a remarkably low number of wuflu fatalities and not that many cases. Shimane (pop 650k), has as I noted above, effectively no cases with cumulative infections in the 0.1% range and serious illness/death being a rounding error. Japan as a whole isn’t much worse: deaths are currently around 15,000 total which works out at a bit under 10/100k population and total cases are about 1 million which is under 1% of the population. I know a handful of people outside Japan who died of/with the wuflu and more who have had the disease badly enough to require hositalization. I know of no one in Japan that has had a positive test.
One of the key differences between Japan and most other countries is that most things did not “lockdown”, and to the extent that there was a lockdown it was either short-lived, local or both. This doesn’t mean that widespread covidiocy has not occurred (and is not still occurring) but the national government has not ever told the entire country to cower at home the way governments in Europe did. To the extent that the country did “lockdown” in April 2020, with almost all schools, restaurants and bars closed (along with various other offices), it was temporary and did not last beyond mid May. It may have been slightly more than “15 days to flatten the curve” but it wasn’t more than 45. That national kind of lockdown has never been repeated and the lockdown as a whole has been a lot less that that seen in other places such as Europe. Even in regions where “states of emergency” have been declared – Tokyo and environs, other urban prefectures mostly – most people worked most of the time. People have been encouraged to maintain “Soshiaru Distansu” and to “Terewaak” where possible, so the hordes of Salarymen (and women) commuting to the office has dropped dramatically. The floods of salarymen going out in the evening with colleagues to get drunk together on expenses has shrunk to a trickle, and in fact large chunks of the travel/hospitality sectors are on life support, but factories, warehouses and so on have generally remained at full activity, so Japan has not see the massive drop in GDP etc. that we have seen elsewhere.
In late March-May 2020 most (all?) schools in Japan closed for a few weeks (though April was also the spring vacation so the total time closed was probably three weeks or so) but sanity prevailed and they have not generally shut again – some individual schools that have been the center of a “crustaa” of cases have partially or completely shut for 14 days to cut out the cluster. Here in rural Japan
..the whining schoolboy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school
has been a constant after May 2020, just as it was in the past. Admittedly now the schoolboy (or girl) will typically be wearing a face mask (often around his or her chin) while creeping like snail but that is about the limit of the impact. School and after-school activities like baseball or band practice have continued, exams have taken place as normal and so on. This year graduation ceremonies took place (with spacing and a lack of parents to applaud). Last year key inter-school competitions like the national high school baseball championships were either cancelled or took place in a much reduced form. This year, despite a recent rise in cases, the events are taking place more or less as normal though I believe there are limits on the numbers of supporters allowed to attend.
In other words, and this pretty much sums up Japan’s general reaction to the pandemic, the wuflu has only been allowed to nibble at the edges rather than take over the entire culture.
Personal Experience
So what does that mean to someone living here?
Mostly little change beyond the universal mask wearing virtue signalling and related pointless sheets of vinyl/perspex everywhere. Every business has a bottle of alcohol to spray over one’s hands as one enters and many people take advantage of it. Many public places also have an automated temperature taker thing at the entrance and you get a bing as you enter. As with the alcohol rinse this is semi-optional in that I’ve observed people skipping the scan and not being told to go back and do it, but most people comply. I think a lot of this is communal virtue signalling: the business shows that it cares not to infect its customers and the patrons show that they don’t want to infect the business or other patrons.
Masks are universal in public places but discipline in general is sloppy and getting sloppier. The local Kuroneko Yamato delivery bloke (delivering Amazon etc.) has his mask below his nose if not around the chin and he doesn’t care that the person he delivers to has no mask on at all. People walk around shops with their mask below their nose. People take their masks off when they are served the first drink in a restaurant and never put them back on until they leave. Last year people out hiking in the mountains often wore a mask, or put one on when passing another group of people, this year we just say “konichi wa”. And so on. Masks were worn a lot more seriously 12 months ago, now it seems like most people are just going through the motions, which is something that outsiders won’t realise when looking at the statistics.
Mass events (theatre performances, sports events) have mostly resumed in 2021 after being cancelled in 2020 – some (e.g. baseball) resumed in September/October of 2020 and despite waves of increase in 2021 most have continued to occur with an audience throughout 2021, though not in places like Tokyo. In fact that’s been typical. More spectator events take place in smaller towns than in larger cities. One notable example was the Olympics where events in Tokyo had no spectators but those in more distant locations (e.g. the marathon in Hokkaido) did. This is actually logical given that the Wuflu has spread much more in the larger conurbations and is an example of the Japanese government’s general decentralization of health to prefectures and municipalities. Shockingly Japan has figured out that rules for densely populated Tokyo (16,000p/sq mile) make no sense in Shimane (<50p/sq mile) and has in large part left it up to the local governments to decide what health/quarantine measures should be applied.
Beer girls on duty at Mazda Stadium (Hiroshima)
Back to mass events. Typically these mass events have a reduced audience with one seat in two kept open to do the social distance thing and everyone has to have their temperature taken by one of the scanner gun things on entering. Inside everyone in the audience wears a mask (when not eating or drinking) no matter whether the event takes place in a small auditorium or a large open-air baseball stadium. The singing at sports events has been stopped, which is a pity, but at times/places without a specific state of emergency, that, the masking and the limited capacity are the only differences to pre-Wuflu. At baseball, the beer girls still deliver and despite the pleas to not crowd, fans leaving the stadium are just as packed together as normal. Some events insist that you give contact details which I’m pretty sure only have maybe 50% compliance with regarding an accurate name/address etc. I’m not sure what the Japanese equivalent of Mickey Mouse is but I suspect he’s been attending a lot of events.
There have been zero supply chain issues for daily goods, after the brief toilet paper panic in early 2020 (February) and the subsequent mask shortage (March/April 2020). Some more specialized goods are harder to get (e.g. certain bicycle components and frames are not always available, just as is the case in other parts of the globe) but we aren’t seeing any obvious inflation or increases in prices. Having said that though, gasoline and diesel have gone up in price after being unprecedentedly low in 2020. Prices at my local “gasoline stand” are now ~150Y/liter which is a significant rise off their lows a year ago of around 120Y/L and slightly higher than they were in late 2019 (IIRC ~145Y/L)
Really in Shimane, the main difference between now and 2019 is the lack of tourists which brings us to…
The Leisure Sector
Travel, hotels, restaurants, bars and so on are the sector that has really been hit hard by the wuflu. Basically package tourism stopped dead in April 2020 as did business travel and most business entertainment and none of that has come back in the year plus since, with the partial exception of a few package tour trips briefly between waves of wuflu. A number of leisure sector businesses, mostly ones run by elderly proprietors, shut in April 2020 and have never re-opened. Many bars/restaurants have come up with takeout menus and local craft breweries and sake makers have aggressively moved into online sales. Many larger establishments are also struggling and have cut employees. Both JAL and ANA seconded a number of their ground staff at local airports to other organizations and the local Matuse area bus/taxi/rail company Ichibata has had big problems and may eventually go bust because it has seen its tour bus and other tourism related business fall off a cliff. I’m sure other companies that I haven’t seen in the news have also had problems but the large hot spring resorts (e.g. Tamatsukuri Onsen in Matsue) were in the news last the winter noting their lack of customers.
To their credit the government, both national and local, have realized that there is a problem and come up with ways to try and soften the blow. The main thing they did last year was provide various ways to subsidize people going out and eating/drinking/staying at hotels. The schemes have differed in precise implementation but essentially as a customer you buy several thousand yen of coupons with a discount of somewhere between 20% and 60% which you then spend at the leisure establishments of your choice. Interestingly some schemes have had two discount components. First you get a discount purchasing the coupons or booking online using special booking codes, then once you arrive at your destination you get a few Y1000 vouchers (the number depends on the campaign and the amount of the booking) that you have to use before midnight the following day. The vouchers are usually redeemable at the hotel/ryokan for drinks or souvenirs (omiyage) and may also be used at other places too such as (some) local convenience stores, souvenir shops etc.
I have no idea how well this has worked generally but it certainly incentivized the wife and I to do more weekends away than we might have done otherwise and from observation we are far from alone in so doing. We’ve also tended to go up market a bit (e.g. we went to a posh Tamatsukuri ryokan in February which would normally be well out of our price range, but with the various subsidies was now nicely affordable) and in total have probably spent more money on domestic tourism and entertainment than before. On the other hand I’ve had zero business trips and zero foreign business/leisure trips so we’re probably still spending less in total.
As I understand it various local governments have also spent wuflu funds directly subsidizing the salaries of some travel company employees by having the employees seconded to their tourism bureaux. Unlike countries such as the UK where people have been paid to stay at home, in Japan these seconded personnel have had to do things. Some of it may be a bit make-worky (e.g. tarting up a local airport) and the work may not be quite as strenuous but overall the principle has been that you have to show up and do something to continue to get your salary.
Overall I think this approach has been pretty good. I know there have been establishments that have fallen through the cracks; for example the large chain izakayas for example have generally reduced their numbers of employees because even with the incentives to eat out they haven’t seen enough custom to make up for the lack of business boozing, but no scheme can be perfect. However in general the schemes have kept the majority of the leisure sector alive and the incentives have been well targeted to keep most people in the sector doing more or less the same job they were always doing at more or less the same wage. As a result, combined with the fact all other businesses have continued as normal, there has been no need for secondary fixes such as eviction moratoria for lack of rent payment because almost everyone has still kept their job and thus the ability to pay rent. I’m sure a number of tour bus drivers have taken jobs driving delivery trucks and I have no doubt that a number of people that worked as waiters or similar have redeployed to deliver food and, as noted above, there are certainly a fair number of small establishments that have gone for good but there hasn’t been the mass dislocation that I understand to have occurred in other countries.
From the news (I can’t personally confirm) it seems that people are now flying within Japan in fairly large numbers for the first time since early 2020. This is a difference between now and early May. Then we had to attend a funeral in Tohoku at short notice and, despite it being “Golden week” – normally a time when every flight / hotel etc. is fully booked – we were able to book flights, rental car and hotel with no problem at all despite the lack of notice. If the funeral were occuring now I suspect things would be rather different.
Vaccines and Recent Developments
Unlike the UK, USA and Israel, Japan has been fairly slow to vaccinate. It has, however, followed much the same strategy of vaccinating the healthcare sector and the vulnerable elderly first and then moving on down the age cohorts. Although things got off to a slow start for any number of mostly bureaucratic reasons, the organization seems to be pretty good and the program is now chugging along solidly. Since this is a public health matter implementation has been local. This has led to some differences in speed of vaccination. For example the town my in-laws live in vaccinated essentially the entire population of the town by the end of May, while the city I live in has yet to vaccinate most people under 60. As far as I can tell Japan as a whole has now vaccinated pretty much everyone in the health/elderly care sectors and everyone who wants a shot who is over 60. It’s probably more like everyone over 55 and it looks like it everyone over 40 or so will have had the opportunity for at least one shot by the end of August and be fully vaccinated by late September.
There has been a certain amount of vaccine skepticism. The Japanese have historically not been very trusting of vaccines and this has spread to the Wuflu ones. One of the reasons why vaccination took so long to get started was that the government insisted on additional trials in Japan (another, allegedly, was that the Japanese companies that make the needles and syringes, after making sure that no unreliable Chinese needles would be used then failed to ramp up their own production) but take up among the elderly has been very high. It looks like, as with other countries, take up amongst the younger generations will be lower.
Happily there does not seem to be a serious push for mandatory vaccine passports or mandatory vaccinations (an optional vaccine passport for international travel is available). In fact overall the Japanese government bodies have treated their citizens as intelligent people who can make their own mind. Data on cases, deaths, hospitalizations etc. have been made available and there are a number of good governmental places with collections of statistics. Most are in Japanese of course but Tokyo, thanks to it’s relatively large population of foreigners, has a nice English language site with most of the relevant stats for Tokyo. The treating of the population as grown-ups is probably another difference between Japan and most other places and it is, I believe, the main reason why the current round of states of emergency in Tokyo, Osaka etc. is being somewhat ignored.
The reason is summed up in these graphs above from covid19japan. Despite an ongoing rapid spike in cases deaths remain under about 20/day.
Aside: It is worth considering how Japan compares with other countries. Japan is now seeing ~15,000 cases a day. This is 10/100k of the population more or less and yet is the worst it has ever been. Compared to almost any other country that is exceptionally low as in about an order of magnitude lower than other places. For reference the UK, having recently seen a large FALL in cases, reports (according to the official gov.uk website) about 270/100k
Back to Japan. If you dig into the Tokyo numbers you see that the same disconnect between deaths and cases also applies to hospitalizations.
Tokyo reported infectionsTokyo hospitalizations for Wuflu
Hospitalizations have slightly more than doubled since the start of July while new infections have risen eightfold. A similar metric applies for “Patients with severe symptoms” which have tripled to a massive 150 out of some 35,000 people currently considered to be infected.
Another graph (from Tokyo, but in Japanese) shows the breakdown by age decade and week (up to the week including July 27).
The yellow (and black) are the over 60s to over 90s. In April these ages were about 15% of the total infected, by the end of July this fell to about 5% and a graph I saw on TV but can’t find online had that number dropping even lower in the last 10 days or so. Since the over 60s are also (as with other countries) about 90% of the seriously ill and dead, if the numbers of over 60s who are infected remains low then so do deaths.
It seems to me that the Japanese, particularly the younger Japanese are basically done with Covidiocy. Yes they’ll conform to social norms and wear some kind of mask when out on the street, but in a more private setting like a favorite bar or karaoke box, they discard the masks and the norms. Given that these places tend to be precisely the places that are ideal for the virus to spread (enclosed, crowded, poorly ventilated…) it is no surprise that cases are increasing. But since the elderly are vaccinated, even if they are catching the Wuflu they aren’t generally getting seriously ill or dying. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that the majority of susceptible individuals (i.e. the elderly) have been vaccinated and I suspect that the younger Japanese have consciously or subconsciously figured this out.
Lessons from Japan
Some people may look at Japan and draw the conclusion that masks work because masks have been universal. I’m not sure that is necessarily the case, but I think the attitude behind the (original) universal masking may have been key. That attitude was basically to avoid the three Cs in the illustration below
Also my personal observation suggests that people who worked around the elderly were particularly rigorous in avoiding potential infection and they did test/self-isolate if they thought they might have been infected. They also appear to have taken hygiene and disinfection really seriously. They sanitized surfaces, the washed hands, they took care not to cough on their charges (or indeed anywhere in the vicinity) and so on. Relatedly, unlike New York (or the UK), old people who tested positive were hospitalized in isolation units and kept there until they were either dead or recovered instead of being discharged back to a care home or similar. In fact hospitals isolated all wuflu cases and took great care to not have the infection spread in them too. Thus, although elderly people did catch the wuflu, the infections were one-offs and did not lead to mass infections of other elderly.
In other words (see the graph above about Tokyo infections by age group), everyone tried to keep the elderly from getting infected and most people tried to limit spread by not hanging around in places where the virus could spread.
I do think that there are probably other reasons too. Japanese people, including elderly Japanese people, have fewer comorbidities than others. They tend not to be fat, diabetic or other health issues that are known to be predictors of serious wuflu infection. Indeed Japanese are on the whole more active and spend more time outdoors than other places I have lived so being low in vitamin D is rare. I suspect that the Japanese diet may help too. The wuflu has tended to kill people with “one foot in the grave”. Japan has more centenarians than other countries and way more healthy active old people and comparatively fewer with “one foot in the grave”. I suspect that these are related to the lower levels of wuflu infection.
It is possible, likely even, that the Japanese total infection rate is higher than the statistics report. However I suspect that while there may have been asymptomatic cases, I suspect that because of all the hygiene and 3Cs avoidance, most of these hypothetical asymptomatic cases will not have spread the virus to anyone else. Although there have been a few cases of senior politicians etc. breaking their own wuflu restrictions, in general neither they nor anyone else did break the guidance last year. The government didn’t ram through unconstitutional lockdowns and it didn’t issue hysterical ever-changing guidance. Instead, it asked the Japanese people to think of others and, in very large part, the Japanese did. There may have been a fear of being shunned for spreading the virus to help incentivize voluntary compliance but Japan is a very high-trust society (yes you can lose your wallet on the street and get it back with all its money in it) and so people have been able to trust that everyone around them has been following the guidance.
Conclusion
I do think that the current rise in cases is because people have simply stopped following the guidance so strictly and I think the reason for that is that there has been a general realization that if they get ill they won’t kill grandma anymore. I also think that this realization is essentially correct because we’re seeing very much the same sharp rise in cases without similarly steep rises in fatalities or hospitalizations elsewhere too. If the politicians have any sense (and evidence to date suggests many don’t) they’ll announce that restrictions are no longer necessary and try and get ahead of the crowd.
In every move — and this one will be an epic move, across state lines always is — there are tales that become engraved in an individual’s and a family’s memory. Forever.
Sometimes they’ll be told in a “be grateful you weren’t there way” — you know, be glad you aren’t covered in chicken poo! — sometimes they’re told in a funny way — remember the time we had two u-hauls and three cars break while going from Charlotte to NC? Boy that was a night! “And then, when the wheel feel off” and everyone laughs. And sometimes they’re told in an epic way, and younger members of the family gaze in wonder at the heroes of the tale and regret they weren’t there. In our family this usually involves “And we painted the entire 2k sq feet house attic ceiling to basement floor in 24 hours. We were hallucinating by the time we finished, but by gum it was done.” (And in our family we would add, “and that’s when we found Marshall, who was only eight at the time, had painted the sidewalk in a checkerboard pattern. It made me cry, because it meant I had to come in next day to apply industrial cleaner and hose it off, but he was so proud….”)
And sometimes…. Sometimes those stories become horror tales passed generation to generation, to curdle the blood of those yet unborn when the events occurred.
So, first I’m going to tell you the tale of yesterday’s doings in that way. Then some passing commentary and head scratching.
Sit back my children, and listen to the tale of the U-haul of the damned, or perhaps The Flying Dutch U-Haul.
It was a smoky Colorado Summer, when a young man set out to rent a u-haul, in order to haul about half a house’s worth of furniture to the charity store. Mostly because this was good, solid furniture, and his parents remembered being dirt poor newly weds whose furniture was made of spit, snot, and discarded cardboard (but mom put a nice veneer on it.)
To be fair, there was a curse on the whole thing already. If only big blue hadn’t died, these runs would have been made with no problem at all, since the carvenous maw of the Expedition could fit the furniture for an entire one bedroom apartment.
However, Old Blue died suddenly and horribly just before the cursed lockdowns of two-oh.
It should be said the young man had done this before, many times, for his own moves. And he had no reason to expect anything to go awry.
The u-haul was rented with all possible expediency, no signs were given of the dread fate to come, and the young man — with hired help, since his parents were busy and also tired — filled it to the rafters, half to donate and half to run to the dumpster.
Now we do not know if it was some curse laid on him. Some say he blasphemed the dread Fauci’s name, and others that being asthmatic he refused to wear a mask, but the truth is the gods of postmodern intervened at this point, to make the whole thing sillier and sillier.
At the first charity store, they took the falling-apart-painted white pressboard shelves earmarked for the dumpster. Also the sofas which were in bad shape when his parents got them (for free.) But they refused the good, solid wood armoire, and the beautiful cherry china cabinet (too large to take to another state.)
Our young man scratched his head and pressed on.
In the next five hours, he went to five cities, and countless charity stores, but not one would take the good wood furniture.
The last he hit said they’d have taken it, had he but come earlier.
Bewildered, late for returning the u-haul, the young man made for home, where his father and mother helped unload, and contracted a trash service to come and remove the good furniture that no one wanted.
Then his father joined him to return the u-haul while his mother saved what she could from the wreckage.
But upon returning the dread u-haul, they found every road blocked — Greek Choir — You couldn’t get there from here.
Legend has it they roam still, the wilds of Colorado, from pass to peak, and there is no one that will take the u-haul. There is no port for these lost souls.
IN TRUTH: they finally made it home at 11:30 and we had dinner in the only still open place in the neighborhood. For the second time in my life, I had the situation of being hungry but too tired to eat.
Passing Commentary:
There is a story in Don Camillo of vandals cutting down vines, and Don Camillo, whose father was a vineyard owner grieving for the cut vines.
My grandfather was a carpenter. I know wood, and have what my husband describes as an unnatural fascination with “good wood furniture.” The other day I saw an original, antique Duncan phyfe (I know, because I refinished one once, by hand.) someone was selling, painted white and black, and my heart recoiled at the beautiful, now-extinct red mahogany covered up that way. (Also white is a bitch to get off wood. If you do that, do a favor to your grandkids who will want to remove the paint, and give it a coat of shellac underneath. Otherwise it gets in the pores. I have a tiny, gorgeous, carved-cherry colonial desk, from which even a lot of work never removed the green paint in the pores.)
Imagine how I feel about solid wood, well built armoire and cabinet being taken by a company that literally reduces the to sawdust for transport….
The worst part: If I spray-painted them black or white, the stores would have eaten them with a spoon. I just didn’t have the time.
Yes, I know, tastes and fads. I know. But for a long time the only good thing about the current era is that each year took us further from the seventies.
And now the seventies are rearing their gloomy head, with dark finishes everywhere, and heavy, ridiculous, depressing browns, greys and blacks all over everything.
And I know the tide will turn again, but meanwhile, how many great pieces are destroyed forever.
Never mind me, I just grieve as my grandfather would, who was a carpenter.
Meanwhile we must cut down on furniture, and frankly on everything and lighten our load. One of the things I’ve cut back drastically on is hobby materials and the like.
It’s become very clear to me, over these very busy days, that what I need to do is write, finish, publish, repeat.
Oh, I’ll probably still paint gourds and make flowers and stuff from discarded (not by me, discarded/discarded, as in rescued from a dumpster) books. On the weekend. To relax.
But those days are at least two months in the future.
For now, I’m going to discard some more, and pack some more.
And polish up my tale of the U-Haul of the damned to curdle the grandkids blood (should I have bio grandkids.) I might invent an uncle they never had, so that I can say he’s still driving from town to town in Colorado, with the back of the U-haul full of furniture no one will take.
I’ve never consciously seen gaslight, which seems almost impossible, frankly, since when I grew up lighting in Portugal was a patchwork of various methods of making it light when it was dark out.
If you think it’s hard wiring Victorians on wood frame, imagine that to wire (or plumb) a house you’d have to go through sometimes foot-thick stone walls. So, people would have wiring in the living room, sometimes the kitchen, then the rest of the house, you’d have candles, or oil lamps or whatever. In fact,t he electricity service was so unreliable, that even if your house was fully wired, like my parents’ (built in 68) you always ended up having a back up system (mostly oil lamps, though sometimes candles. Depending on the ability of oil.)
But I don’t think Portuguese houses were ever plumbed for gas lighting. They’re not plumbed for cooking gas. Instead you get the “tanks” delivered. Propane, like what you use for your grill.
Anyway– So I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, but I imagine it was much the quality of oil lighting or wax candles, i.e. illuminating a highly targeted area (and not very well) and leaving the rest of the room in worse-than-darkness, with multiplying and overlapping shadows.
This is why gas lighting is such a good metaphor for what the assholes in the self-proclaimed elites have been doing to us for … almost two years now. (And trying to for of course much longer than that.)
I gaze in awe at the bizarre things that cross my feed on social media, and I wonder how many people are falling for it. Like, you know, how the Delta Variant is on the rise and it’s the most scariest thing ever: what they’re not telling you: the tests don’t distinguish between Delta and any other variant of Covid. Yes you can tell the difference by DNA analysis, but no one is doing DNA analysis for every case. If you catch it, they just tag it as “delta.”
Oh, also apparently the tests aren’t very good at distinguishing between flu and Covid-19, which explains what happened to the flu, don’t it? And that one is a puzzle, since we have flu-specific tests, and we thought the Covid-19 test is also specific (if really unreliable, for the most part.) But no. The CDC says it also flagged flu as Covid-19. Which…. well. Much brighter light made, right?
Also deaths aren’t going up. They’re just not. So the China Flu is following the path of every other virus in the history of ever and becoming more widespread, easier to catch, but less lethal. Uh. Uh. Like every single cold and flu, so what’s the big scare?
Oh, but there was a segment from Fox news…. about how our hospitals are getting overwhelmed. Overwhelmed I tell you. — hands over a lighter — Light your hair on fire, and run around screaming, right now. No?
Well, turns out no indeed, because our hospitals aren’t even at the 98% capacity they hit at peak flu season.
But …. why would they hit that? Because ER beds are EXPENSIVE. They’re designed to be almost completely full at flow season, and be rotated out of as soon as possible so the next batch of people can get in.
But isn’t that stupid? No. Not really. I mean, in socialized medicine they’re designed to be ALWAYS full. Because ER beds are EXPENSIVE. Which is why Italy and Spain and such routinely run out of beds during flu season and just let the elderly die. It’s like eugenics on the installment plan.
Anyway, the US has a deep-backing of resources, so if this had been a real death-flu we’d have had several regional centers converted overnight, the hospital ships would be operating, there would be tents set up by charities, and oh, yeah, the Denver convention center, set up for casualties/cases wouldn’t now be full of homeless and virtually destroyed at the order of governor Fumbduck, who is apparently Louis XIV and therefore can dispose of public property as if it were his own personal play budget.
So, if the hospitals aren’t at 98% capacity, with quick rotation of patients to less critical services/home care? Yeah, it’s not an emergency. Which I tried to tell everyone a year ago, and got called names for.
Yep, they’re running the greatest hits again.
Complete with China “closing down” and “having high casualties.” Which you’ll fall for if you are virtually brainless, and think that they actually shut all that much for all that long, and didn’t just run a “get the dissidents under cover of Chinaatchu”. Which means you didn’t look at their trade numbers for last year. I’m waiting for the videos of people collapsing and dying on the street. They’ll probably be recycled, and it will be tracked in ours.
Meanwhile governor Fumbduck is stomping his little foot and demanding we mask in all public spaces. I’d say compliance runs 5% in the more credulous parts of the state.
The rest of us have had just about enough.
You know what stops gaslighting? Flipping on the switch for the electric light. Suddenly all those shadows vanish.
Well, shadows are all gone, governor Fumbduck and the ludicrous and buffonish criminal conspiracy of kakistocrats we call the Democratic party are floundering around in the full light, like cockroaches on the kitchen floor.
We can SEE YOU!
And the light shows us the shadow show you used to scare people before.
No more hiding now.
You’re in full view, and still trying to scare us.
Do you know why gaslight was replaced by electricity as soon as possible, most places? Besides the fact you can see better with electrical light?
Because gas light has a tendency to explode.
Don’t look now, but it’s happening. All over your face.
You’re already almost at the point you don’t recover from. We see the little man behind the curtain.
And we’re pretty mad at him.
Keep trying. The trash heap of history waits you and your seedy, grifty philosophy.
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. ;)*
Journey through the crystalline surfaces of short stories, that for the briefest of moments , reflect the light and shadows of what it means to be human. Just beyond the brightness of what we know, lurks the shadows of what we don’t yet know or understand. We pretend we stand on solid ground, turn on the lights, and perform rituals to ignore the horrors that surround us. When in truth, the greatest darkness lies within us all. But also, the greatest brightness. Like crystals we hold both. Turn us one way, and we know just how to kill. Turn us another way, and we know just how to love, a love that transcends both time and death.
What facet will speak to you? Rattle your brain, eat away at your heart? Haunt your dreams, disturb your peace? Make you smile, even laugh? Make you promise to live better? Comfort you just a little, teach you how to build a fire to burn away the night?
Come, take a break and read a story. Short stories for those short spaces of time when a novel is too much. Pull away the curtain, take a peek, and see what is reflected in the facets of your own mind.
Facets is a collection of 24 short stories of various lengths for a total of about 69,000 words. Also included is an author’s note at the end with comments on writing and on some of the short stories. They are organized by length, from shortest to longest. These stories do not as a whole fit any particular genre. However, I suppose one could say that most every story has a “strange” aspect about it. I consider myself a storyteller and I find labels only end up being argued about anyway. So, I’ve just decided to use the word “strange” and leave it at that. Some of these stories (not necessarily the same ones) might be enjoyed by those who look for science fiction, fantasy, and/or horror. And I think some don’t even fit into any of those genres. Like I said, I just tell stories. If you end up putting a label to any of them, fine. Just don’t tell me about it. It will most likely only confuse me. And I don’t need any help with that. I’ve successfully confused myself for years already and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
Three years after becoming the magical protector of Paladin University, Dr. June Porter is ready for the latest adventure…marriage. But it’s just a wedding. What could go wrong?
Elias Mach had given humanity the stars with his invention of the wormhole drive. In return, he was accused of treason and sentenced to death. Thus began a journey to clear his name, which would take him further from Earth than anyone had dared. And there he would discover the menace that was developing the most powerful weapons in the galaxy. Weapons that would soon be trained on Earth. To survive Earth would need Mach back.
If you like a fast-moving story, characters that never give up, and science with a sense of wonder, this is for you.
“Mach’s Mission” is set in the future (2390s) and is the second novel in the Future Chron Universe. If you enjoyed “Mach’s Mission” consider reading the next story in the series “Open Space” for more Hard Science Fiction – Old School.
See the author’s website futurechron.blogspot.com for more information including a recommended reading order and free stories..
What do ninjas, devout Christians, and Navy SEALs have in common? On the streets of Southwest Detroit, they’ve had to join forces in order to combat and, hopefully, defeat a vampire infection that’s unknown to the population and that could also end up taking down the planet.
Once the wealthiest city in the world, Motown in this dystopian future is a metropolis laid low by economic circumstances and a seemingly endless series of COVID panics, making it ripe for the taking by the master vampire and his sinister human familiar. Only two of Japan’s finest ninja warriors, four devout Christians – including a Baptist minister and a good Catholic girl — and a supersecret six-man team of SEALs from the US Special Operations Command are left to engage in the ultimate battle against the vampire horde and their human allies.
The fate of Detroit, the United States, and the entire world hangs in the balance because of the vampire scourge, and if humans lose, a nuclear holocaust, imposed on Motown by the US President and carried out by the shadowy Brushfire Organization, could be the end result.
If you like Stephen King, vampires, and the faithful Christians that fight those evil creatures, if ninjas and martial arts combat intrigues you, if Tom Clancy is your ideal for a military story, and the amazing things US special operations personnel do on a regular basis is what you’re looking for, then this fast-paced novel is the one for you.
Miss Anne de Bourgh was delighted to receive a letter from her cousin Georgiana, explaining that she would be spending the summer by the sea, and requesting the pleasure of her company. A glorious few months of balls, shopping, and walking by the sea awaits- a wonderfully diverting holiday for Anne, who has rarely left Rosings before.
But Anne is a de Bourgh, and life is never simple. Before long, she finds herself caught between the attentions of two very different men, and must choose if she will follow her heart or disoblige her family. One must be disappointed, and Anne has never been very practiced in the art of disobedience. Must she give up everything she has ever known, will she find the strength to search for happiness elsewhere?
I built this guided notebook originally for my own use, to help me create, document, and track characters as I write my novels. It has space to help you imagine and document up to 12 three-dimensional characters, including:
Names, nicknames, and aliases
Family trees
Major life milestones
Physical features
Dress/clothing styles
Personality traits
Skills, abilities, and talents
Occupations and finances
Possessions/properties
Social identities
Habits, tics, and pet peeves
Interests and hobbies
Conscious aspirations
Unconscious needs
Journeys
Archetypes
Thematic roles
My Character Tool for Novelists also includes workspaces to brainstorm and list all your novel’s character names, making it easy to keep track of your characters as you dream them up (and to avoid using names that are too similar!)
My attention to character-building is a major reason that I recently won a first place Incipere award for my novel “Once Upon a Flarey Tale.” Characters engage readers. They enrich plots. They make novels come alive.
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.
What if we’re not even asking the right questions?
Look, I yield to no one in pointing and laughing when the left believes that their beliefs determine reality and try to do strange-ass things like levitate the mint.
There might be discontinuities (there are) and breaks in reality and times and places where the impossible happens. But whatever it is is, it’s not controlled by human brains, I’m sure of that. Because if each human brain could alter reality at will we’d live in what has been one of the consistent depictions of hell: no physical laws, no directions, everything changing moment to moment: a place where yesterday might be a color and tomorrow a musical note, and where your hunger could be a gale or–
Sure, sure, “but if we all believe” — no. However it works, it doesn’t work like that. And I’ll be honest, I don’t think human minds are in control. It could, I grant, be the sum total of every human mind that ever existed and will ever exist, but a) how would you know? b) I don’t know about you (tovarich) but I know humans. the chances of more than three of the critters agreeing on anything would be– never mind.
One of the short stories I actually liked in Asimov’s around 1994 (?) played with quantum and with the idea that for things to exist they must have an observer. So it had G-d as the universal, ever present observer, and played with the idea of “What if G-d blinks.”
Now, I don’t think that’s in Himself’s repertoire. And I’m not sure he’s at the switch of reality either. (Or at the reality switches.)
Enough people have observed something a little “off” with the nature of reality. So we get things like “We’re a computer simulation.”
I’d take that one a lot more seriously if it weren’t for the fact that every age imagines that reality/the universe is whatever new tech it is impressed with. So, you get stuff like the Elizabethans thinking that reality was clockwork. And in the industrial age, the universe was a factory. And– Never mind. Probably Grog thought the universe was made of flint that Himself chipped to shape.
Also, I’d take it a lot more seriously, if the answer weren’t “well, what difference would that make?”
Which brings us to: there are things that make differences. There are differences all of us have noted. Sure. A ton of that can be bad memory. I’m becoming intimately acquainted with the power of bad memory when combined with ill health. Yesterday for the first time since…. oh…. 2017? I emptied the bottom of the linen cabinet. And Dan said “I didn’t know we owned that vacuum.” Well, I didn’t either. It’s a yellow vacuum, bright yellow. As far as I’m concerned, the aliens dropped it in there. I mean, I might have the vaguest of memories, but it’s very faint.
Then there’s the cleaners/toothpaste/toiletries put under some cabinet and forever forgotten. I probably won’t need to buy shampoo for the rest of my life.
Note it’s particularly bad in this house, because when we moved in I had three warring illnesses/issues all of which were taking the ADD through the roof. So I got stuck in things like “Oh, I need shampoo” Buy shampoo every time I go out for two weeks. Put it under sink. Forget it because sink is too full. Buy shampoo. Put by side of tub. Use that. Forget that shampoo under sink ever existed.
So a lot of what we call the Mandella effect is that. And a lot falls under media malfeasance, such as when Dan and I compared our experience of the climate in the 70s with what the media claims now.
Note a ton of the Mandella effect are things “at the edges” like how you spell a word. Or if someone famous you’ve never actually met has died or not.
The human memory is an uncertain tool. I tend to remember the events of my life clustered around age 3, age 8 and age 14. Usually I find out that age isn’t right. Like I apparently had small pox at 2 not 3. (Almost 3, I guess.) And human attention is an uncertain tool as well. If you didn’t see it, or pay attention, to you it never happened. (Like Pratchett’s character, I can lose my keys in a completely empty room. ADHD is a superpower.)
But still. There are weird and strange and uncanny things that happen to all of us and for which there is no explanation.
Parallel worlds? Perhaps. I mean, I routinely dream I get a phone call from my 39 year old son. The one I had when Dan and I got married four years earlier than in this world. Which would be fine, if the entire family didn’t dream of him (mostly phone calls, though he visits in dreams, too) and didn’t all agree on what he looks like (like younger son, but taller and lighter skinned. And he has blue eyes, which is weird but not impossible in this family.) He’s a gym bunny, and he wears button downs and ties all the time, like older son used to. Oh, and he’s a patent lawyer, which makes perfect sense, if you realize how this family’s minds work.
Would I be very surprised if I woke up (these shifts always seem to happen in the middle of the night) and I had an oldest son who is 39? Not markedly. Startled. Briefly. Then I’d roll with it. It would be considerably worse if I woke up tomorrow and Dan and I had never had kids. That I don’t think I’d get over.
Granted that would be a pretty massive change, compared to other changes that have happened in my life/history, which are usually a little bigger than your average Mandella effect but not that bad.
Like cooking something I’ve made a dozen times, and the guys being bowled over by this new dish they’ve never had. Uh.
Stuff like that.
BTW the weird thing that would lead one to think this is a physical thing, is that abilities port. So, in this one world you learned to type? You can type in this one too, even if you’ve never done it before. I wonder how much that kind of thing is responsible for “naturals.” Anyway, so get all the knowledge and abilities you can.
More disturbing to me are the times reality blinks.
Oh, not literally.
Or perhaps literally. A couple of times. It’s happened twice now, in the presence of younger son once, and the second with someone else (and I can’t remember who.)
This is where I was sitting, and suddenly, reality winked out. For like a micro-second there was nothing. I half expected a giant 404 to show up, and even that would have been relief. There was just…. nothing.
If I hadn’t been with someone, and if we hadn’t both gone “Wow, that was–” and then figured out we’d both experienced the same, it would have been…. I’d have assumed I”d had a stroke or died for a moment or something.
That is not a parallel world thing. That is a “What the heck?” thing.
In the same scary way, and yes, we went for the tech explanation was when I was walking with someone along a downtown area, and we realized we were seeing the exact same cars and people on a repeating loop. Then the other person said “D*mn, the CGI is broken, let’s go home.” And we did.
More parallel universe are the times when things shift then shift back.
Like when I — admittedly with a fever and therefore not fully processing — suddenly found my office in the tower of a seaside Victorian we’d considered buying ten years before. Or like when I heard my family downstairs, including my voice. (I didn’t go down. Eventually it went back to normal.)
But other people experience this stuff too, like opening the door to a known place and it’s different. And then you close and open again, and it’s what you expected.
A lot of this got recorded in our myths of course. And maybe it happens mostly to a peculiar type of person, so it’s easy to classify as “so and so is just fanciful.”
But actually at least myself and some of the people I know who have this stuff happen to them, are not fanciful at all. we tend to try to be rock-hard evidence-and-reality-atuned, precisely because we’re aware of the slipperiness of the whole thing.
Maybe it’s a certain type of brain. Almost everyone who experiences these things are what I call “Gateways.” I.e. creatives who get the product — art or music or writing — whole in their heads and just have to “tune” to it and reproduce it. It’s hard to explain. I can tell when I’m getting static in a novel, and trying to fix it.
Sure, I can write novels whole cloth (A lot of the historical ones, some contemporary ones) but sometimes I think I’m doing that and am stopped with a “No, that’s not what happened. Tune better” only it’s a feeling, not words.
And some of the d*mn things — AFGM! — are dictated. At speed. Very loud and clear, and I can barely keep up.
Perhaps they are transmissions from other places/times/possibilities. Perhaps I have a defective brain not fully in contact with the rail of “reality here.”
Now, does it make any difference? I don’t know. Probably not. I mean we all live our lives forward and in the reality we’re in. I’m grateful and annoyed (Yes, both can happen at once) by my gift to get “dictation” from elsewhen and elsewhere, but really, it wouldn’t make a difference to the world at large if I didn’t.
I mean, other than my potentially ending up with an extra son (And when is he going to get married and give me grandkids? Yes, I’ve nagged in the dream-phone calls even when I’m aware it’s a dream.) And that would probably also make no difference to the world at large. (Well, he’s moving to TX so that might make a difference to some Huns out there. In that world. Not ours.)
Yeah, sometimes unreality seems to break through in a mass way.
My grandmother witnessed “the miracle of the sun” from Fatima. It echoed that far away. No, I still don’t understand what it WAS. And I’ve talked to a number of people who’d seen it, and read a lot of books (some of which led to Deep Pink.) “The sun danced in the sky” doesn’t make a lot of sense. And we know it didn’t happen literally. I mean, it couldn’t.
And I’ve got friends who’ve seen ghosts, or UFOs or whatever. They don’t talk about it much, and the core of it might be incomprehensible. (I haven’t seen ghosts. Well, not precisely. Visits by the honored dead are not ghosts.)
And there have been recorded “mass” experiences of the sort. They can’t all be hallucinations. They simply can’t. But the explanations we come up with make no sense, outside religion, whether it be Catholicism or New Age Woo Woo. And some of these things are clearly NOT religious in any way.
(Someday I’ll tell you about the lady in green, riding an impossibly green car, who knocked at my door, wanted to know if I was nursing, and wanted to see the baby. Oh, and had teeth like a rat’s. If you’re thinking “What the fairies needed a nursemaid?” that’s what I thought too. But it probably isn’t that, or not precisely. Good thing saying “No. You may not come in.” works, right?)
So what gives? I don’t know. Maybe we’re all a holographic projection from beyond the stars (stooooop. Just stop.) Or whatever.
It only makes a difference for two reasons:
What if it cracks? What if suddenly reality cracks for everyone? Because this last year that has started to become scarily plausible.
What if this is an effect/force/event out there we don’t even know exists, and we can figure it out and crack interstellar travel? Okay, I’m hopeful, but you know….
Oh, and a third reason: I’m profoundly aware I’m not in control and things are not necessarily what they seem. So, I try to stick with science fiction, versus fantasy, and keep my mind on the real side of the street.
This post started as a pondering of conspiracy theories. As we all know, conspiracy theories are broken. So many of them have been proven true, that now all we can do is come up with new ones. And frankly, we’re hitting the realm of truly bizarre and strange ones.
I mean, unless I miss my guess our own government is desperately trying to sell us on UFOs. This wouldn’t be that bad if the current government weren’t democrat (and the deep government always is.) They never have interesting, scientific aliens. Instead they have woo woo aliens, here to sell us on the latest democrat fad and astral projection too. (Why must it always be astral projection?)
From there, I jumped, in the way my mind works (“works”) to the fact that the current bullshit being pushed on us seems tailor made to keep us stuck on Earth, and maybe to make us devolve to a pre-technological level. So, if there are actually superior species, they have agents here working overtime to make sure those pesky humans don’t make it to space and disrupt their great star empire or something.
Now, of course, rationally, I don’t believe that’s true. However, I have a bad track record with conspiracies. I can only see them when they’re obvious such as potemkin campaign = they already have rigged it to win the election, no matter how we vote. And even then I only saw that because I had seen the MASSIVE amounts of fraud in 2016 in a right-leaning area at that (and the fraud was all left.)
So, you know, I don’t believe it. I believe it’s a case of ESR’s lizard people not real lizard people. More on that later. But anyway, I wouldn’t even be surprised. Simply because the facts are so damning.
Look, everything pushed as enlightened or the way of the future since the early 20th century is not only — often — bizarrely stupid, but it seems designed to destroy humanity as a whole.
Let’s see: population must be reduced; we must go back to living “simpler” (reading shorter, more inconvenient lives); women must have careers (not can have, must have) and not raise their own kids; nationalism bad; people must fit into this mold, and can have no individual thought…. and on and on. All of it leads to mass death, destruction and horror.
Weirdly — or not — from the early twentieth century on, most of the big programs, which — with exceptions — both sides of the isle agreed on have been florid disasters. From welfare to subsidies for higher education, to — well, all of it. It consumes more and more tax dollars, and the returns on it are actually negative.
And meanwhile the increase in tax dollars sucked women into the work force making families dysfunctional and cratering the birth rate. (I have nothing against women working. Obviously. But this being the default mode for families with kids is a bizarre “choice”. And as we keep finding out, not a particularly functional one.
Even the things we can all agree on, like racial integration or giving women a shot at jobs got distorted by the top down insane bullshit of quotas and “affirmative action” and actually slowed down the integration already happening and made women…. weird.
And all these governmental rules and theories have now become detrimental and civilization unmaking, or what a friend calls “a war on things that work” now going to a war on the production of food humans actually thrive on.
Of course, I don’t think it’s the lizard people. I think it’s two twin factors. Since the early 20th century we’ve passed the horizon of need. I.e. any famines occurring are engineered famines, created mostly by governments. And at the same time, not coincidentally, knowledge and innovation are accellerating.
I think people in power can’t deal with that. They need to be needed, they need control. And most of them can’t cope with changing technology. Or changing ideas.
They locked into the bizarre Marx-adjacent idea that humans are liabilities, not resources, and the even more bizarre romantic idea that humans by existing HURT nature (because we’re robots or something.) And with those twin principles, how could they avoid hurting people and taking their stuff.
Note that there have been glimmers of hope, when someone dares push back on government’s war on people.
Note also that it’s not all government. It’s 20th century “technocratic” the experts know better government.
Look…. We can’t afford it. They aren’t aliens making war on us, sure. But if they were, what would be different?
We can no longer afford this insanity. In the last two years they’ve proven they’ll destroy civilization and humanity if given half a chance.
Well, we can’t give them half a chance.
Let’s go back to a government when individual right have primacy and I don’t care how many degrees you have, you can’t tell me how to live my life.
Let’s call the technocratic bullshit off. Now. Yesterday. Before they kill us all.
If you went over to Mad Genius Club you’re going to go “uh uh. Sarah is on a tear.”
Yes, Sarah is. There have been a lot of things contributing to this tear. One of them was the superannuated infantile idiot who thinks that working for money is “slavery.” (And yet I would bet you money he claps like a seal and applauds the Chinese slave camps. Because, you know, those irredeemable minorities must be brought into the glorious world of communism, somehow.)
The other one I stumbled upon this morning.
So, I’m reading almost exclusively true crime these days. (Those of you who just dove for cover have it exactly right. When I hit this point I’m profoundly depressed and having serious issues pulling up.)
Most of the true crime I’m reading though is historical true crime, because it’s usually (though apparently not nearly usually enough) free of socialism and bullshit. Though mind you, you’ll come across it in books about Jack the Ripper and the injustice of the people who lived in the East end. Which, if you read it is mostly an “injustice” in the sense that these people are alcoholics, whores and have no self control and yet aren’t given everything, hand foot and help by other people who work for it. I would like every writer of that pious nonsense to realize they are promoting for real actual injustice: that those who choose to be parasites should have the same as those who create the surplus that allows parasites. Or if you prefer, my answer could be summarized with the letters:FYTW.
But today I made the mistake of starting a book on Lizzy Borden over breakfast, and suddenly the red veil came on. This was the entire 1619 bullshit. They claimed the revolution was so that the people of New England wouldn’t be stuck working to furnish raw materials to England “in which there was no future or wealth” and so they could establish the “trilateral trade.”
Yes, I like 1776 too, but we have to remember the musical was written mostly by leftists, so yeah.
Did the trilateral trade: slaves to rum to molasses, and around again, really happen. Sure did. Trade always seeks the route of taking what one place will buy and what one place will trade.
Was it the source of the wealth in the region? Oh, for f*ck’s sake. Only a total waste of skin like Marx could think that wealth wasn’t created, just eternally distributed in a game of f*ck-f*ck. Because that was the only thing his tiny mind and smaller soul could conceive of. Grifters got to grift, and they live with themselves by pretending everyone else is a grifter too.
New England was wealthy because they worked, in a fertile world, in land no one had worked before. The noble savages living here, by and large neither sowed nor reaped. (A few did, particularly in New England.)
They worked their asses off and scrimped and saved more than you can imagine. Yes, a few opened trade routes to Africa and the Caribbean, but it was nowhere close to the main source of wealth. The main source of wealth was factories. Yes, the factories worked with cotton grown by slaves. (To be fair, probably a lot less cotton than would have been grown by free and paid labor. Which is why the North was 100% behind abolition. Smart and ruthless businessmen. Sure, Christian too, so offended by slavery. But slavery makes no economic sense, not once there were better ways to do things. It’s a net drain on the economy. All the slave societies — China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — are far poorer than societies of free men. As it was said in the USSR “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
My husband comes from an old New England line. Yes, his grandparents lived very well by the time I met them, but talking to them I realized that event hey, even though coming from generational wealth, had been more provident than we were and scrimped and saved more than we did until they reached a point they could live better. And even then, his grandmother still darned the elbows of their winter sweaters rather than buy new ones, even though by that time they could afford to buy a sweater a day for the rest of their lives and not run out of money.
New England thrift is a saying for a reason. In the same way, btw, there is Yankee ingenuity. They made, they created, they worked. Which made the region prosperous. And btw, hit me if you wish, but the best thing that happened to the South was the abolition of slavery. If the iron heel of segregation and “reconstruction” hadn’t fallen on their necks, they’ve got where they’re now, because taking down slavery freed all the people. (Not that a lot of people in the South were there back then.)
But the idiots with their Marxist pap reduce everything to a round circle jerk of “I exploit you, you exploit me.” There is no new wealth and if you have more than your layabout neighbor, you obviously stole his. Only a mentally challenged infant can believe this.
As for the slaves, well, what you have to remember is that while slavery is an abomination to the Christian, freedom-loving west, it isn’t to the rest of the world. And those slaves could have been killed instead. They were sold into slavery because they had a value. Otherwise they would have treated like mankind’s defeated were, time out of mind: killed. Either for sacrifice (Hello, Dahomey) or for sport, or simply because they were in the way. And don’t cry too hard for them. They’d have done the same the other way, had they won.
But instead, they came to America, where yes, slavery sucked, but eventually freedom was earned at great cost by people of both colors, and now thanks to thrift and ingenuity, to work and the freedom to work, they can live better than practically anyone in the world. (No, I don’t want to hear it. You can take your socialized healthcare and shove it where the sun don’t shine. When Massa looks after the slaves, he chooses if they live or die, and it don’t matter if Massa is a government functionary. As we have proof daily (Hello, Cuomo.))
But what really made me see red and reach for the cleaver was this idiot writer’s regurgitated pap about how the mill workers “made workers work 14 hour days” (What? Opposed to the endless round of agriculture. Only an idiot would say that) and how they “Sowed suspicion between workers of different nationalities so they wouldn’t unite.” Holy mother of shitcakes and syrup. If this is what they teach in schools, the schools should be shut down, the school book writers whipped until the blood runs freely, and the students shaken until they can think again.
Dear idiots: Tribalism is the default mode of humanity. Nationalism is an improvement on that, because at least at times, for limited purposes, you can trust those people over the ridge, with their funny notions, because at least they’re scroladian like you. Even if they cook their Batla wrong.
Humans are tribal. We’re creatures of the band. Throughout our evolution, other bands were danger, and possibly hunters who intended to eat us. No one needs to sow discord among different groups. The miracle of America is that different groups will work together. And they do that because they think of themselves as individuals, not of classes, like that idiot Marx, who never worked a day in his life, thought they should be. Why would you have solidarity with someone else because they do similar work? Throughout most of history, that means they’re competition, not your besties.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re filling our young people’s head with bullshit, and expecting them to function. This has to stop.
There is work to do if we want to preserve civilization. Young people need to know wealth isn’t pre-existent. It’s earned each generation, sometimes with insane labor.
Young people need to learn no one gets wealth from slavery. Or rather, sure, the communist oligarchs get wealth from their enslaved people, but even they don’t get as much as they would from trading with free people. And the rest of the people are miserable and broken.
They need to learn that all of us have slaves in our ancestry. If you’re going to pay people who were never slaves by taking money from people who never owned slaves, you’re going to end up destroying the economy for nothing, because the pay offs never end. And if you’re going to beat yourself up because our society owned slaves for a brief period, do consider stopping slavery in Africa and China first. Oh, and free poor enslaved Cuba. And North Korea. Not doing that? Then stop giving yourself airs, you useless inheritor of people who bled and died to end slavery here.
And most of all, they need to learn they have to do the work. If they don’t do the work, all they’ll ever be is useless wastes of breath like Marx and his followers, who only product ever is mass graves and unending misery.
According To Hoyt 