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This is not a post about writing (except insofar as it is my work.) even if it seems to be so at first.

Over the last twenty years I’ve mentored maybe 30 people. Now the quality of mentoring went to heck 10 years ago, because of life. But usually I try to read at least a few pieces by people I mentor, and try to figure out what is holding them back. Because that’s what mentors do.

When I was younger and took raw newbies, one of the hardest things to get them to see — and something that drove me nuts because I struggled with it myself, back in pre-history — is that you can’t have character in solitude, aside and apart from plot.

Sure, I said I get characters for free — a lot of newbies do — but that means I know who they are, how they talk, their strengths and weaknesses; their fears; their sore spots.

That’s great so long as I want to have imaginary friends I take out when I’m alone to play with. But if I’m writing a book with these characters, I have to give them something to do.

What I first wrote (though perhaps not that bad, because ADD, and I bore easily) and what these people are writing is this: Peter the Paladin gets up in the morning and shaves. Then he exercises his horse, goes for a walk where people cheer him for his outstanding courage. Comes home where his wife tells him she loves his unwavering morals. Goes to the palace to get a commendation for his bravery.

Well, good for Peter, but I was yawning while his wife was praising. And that’s not in any way a story. And why are all these people saying things for which there is no evidence whatsoever?

Because, of course, for Peter to prove he’s a Paladin, and to make him interesting at all, he must do the work of a paladin. He must get up off his exquisite chair given to him by Sir Grateful in gratitude for saving his daughter from the Dread Dragon and do something to prove he still deserves the chair. Or at least we must see him fighting the dread dragon.

Okay, so how is this not about writing. It’s not, because it’s about us, and the times we live in.

In a private group, a friend who has sudden piercing insights asked how it would affect society that we took people out of work for a year, smashed their routine with a hammer and set them adrift.

I immediately panicked, because I have reason to have extra insight into this kind of situation.

Look, much sh*t has been talked about millenials. Don’t wind younger son up. We’ve had screaming arguments with me defending millenials while he condemns them. I won’t say I don’t get it, because part of it was going through public school in a high-left area.

I will say though that from the things no one talks about, like the real voting pattern, not the one ascribed to them, the people I meet on the street and coming to my house to do work, and a million other little things, they were shaping up d*mn nicely. Or as I express it “the kids are all right.”

The point being that if you come out of the continuous indoctrination factory and face the real world, in a halfway healthy nation and economy, you’re going to lose a lot of the indoctrination. The ones that don’t are usually the wealthy ones (it’s no accident the most strident lefties are pampered females) or those who are too smart to think their way to reality.

BUT…. 2020.

I do have some special insight into this, because in the mid seventies the Portuguese economy went…. odd. I won’t say it was wonderful before — hey, it was national socialist and all socialism kills. Fast or slow — but it was predictable.

In the mid seventies it became completely unpredictable, with the government arrogating to itself the right to promulgate rules for prices, salaries, and how many bottles of oil you could own. (Frying oil. It’s a precious commodity in a Latin country, particularly one were natural gas — the main fuel for cooking — is going through the roof, so baking is a rare and precious luxury.) And hyperinflation struck.

Remember I was a kid. My range of interests was even more limited than other kids, because mostly I read. So how hyper was the inflation? Well, science fiction paperbacks went from the equivalent (look, I don’t remember the prices in escudos anymore) of maybe $2.50 to $200 in a period of six/seven years. No, the prices weren’t in dollar, and the exchange rate wasn’t that. But if you visualize an asset taking that kind of hike (yes, I’m afraid it will be all too easy in five years) you can see what I mean by hyperinflation.

Which brings us to…. uncertainty. In that climate, who the heck is going to start a business, when any minute the government could regulate you out of existence and/or your need for materials/machinery might hit at the wrong time in the cycle and strip you of all your capital?

So, while a brave souls did start or continue jobs, there were very few new jobs, and a lot of companies/factories/etc shut their doors.

This means a generation (the one before me) left school and found themselves adrift, sometimes for years, before they could find a job. (Incidentally this is one of the reasons — not the only — I ended up in languages and teaching, despite a complete and utter lack of interest in the actual work. I’d seen what prolonged unemployment did to people. I figured that as Portugal opened to the world, and started to recover from the hammer to the gears, languages would pay well (they did) but until then, or if things went pear shaped again, I could teach, because there were always jobs for teachers. Yes, my dears, when you make plans, G-d laughs.)

Now a lot of people started businesses of some kind, and whether they were flipping houses, starting crops on abandoned fields to sell on the black market, or making crafts to sell on the black market (the black market or at least grey was everywhere. Either you knew someone, or people set up stalls on the street corners that were foldable into a bag, so they could run away when the police showed up. My first independent purchases, be it for gifts or for myself were from such people, usually selling groceries, clothes, and seriously IP violating books.)

I daresay those people were okay long term. Well, maybe not, because the work is…. different. But looking back there was an explosion of creativity and artistry among young people, and I bet a lot of them are fine.

OTOH a lot of them had no interest in arts and crafts and couldn’t do much. Oh, there was a lot of teaching/tutoring/ doing this one job “under the table.” But nothing regular or sustained.

I know several people who went through that later situation. And the ones who were excellent workers, dedicated, driven, emerged from the experience curiously maimed. (For the others you couldn’t tell.) In the end, when jobs came back, they did the minimum necessary, because the habits of their time out of work had shaped them. And most of them never went anywhere.

Now this is nowhere near the level of — pardon me — f*ckery the country just endured (the world, actually.)

Look, it’s closer to what happened to me. I used to do six books a year, without much trouble, while tutoring my younger son in one year. And then–

My health went South.

The amazing thing is how fast you lose habits that enforce productivity.

None of us likes working. Well, no. That’s not precisely true. I love my job, and I enjoy working. The problem is that I don’t enjoy working productively EVERY DAY. Sometimes — say twice a year — an idea strikes, and I will wake up from bed and write something, from 2k to 30k words, at one go. And that’s great. But one doesn’t make a living that way. Nice, hobby you’ve got there…

Getting up, rain or shine, brain fog or worry about a kid, a friend or a pet, and sitting down and writing is difficult. Okay, not as difficult as dancing on a broken ankle, or going to work in the sleet and the rain with chest congestion and worry about the bills. I’m not making myself a victim or a martyr. I’m quite aware I have it easy.

My biggest difficulty is grabbing myself by the ear and making myself produce words. And since my work habits were hit with a hammer twice — first by health, then by a very complex move — it’s been hard, bordering on the impossible. Not the writing itself, but sitting down to write. On time. And producing the required words.

Guys, the me from fifteen years ago, despises the me now, and wants to kick her butt.

But a habit that’s broken is very hard to get back, just like a muscle that withers has trouble getting back. (And sometimes can’t.)

And we just put people in enforced idleness for a year and change. They’ll go back to work when they need to, but will their productivity ever be what it was?

My experience suggests not. You see, productivity is an habit, too.

I’ve told here, half in jest, about how I started taking a laptop on our big glitzy weekend vacations. (It’s a joke, folks. While raising the kids, our great vacations were two and a half days in Denver — we lived in Manitou and then in Colorado Springs — where we haunted museums and Greek diners and painted the town a mild pink. If we were lucky, we had three and a half days. I still remember those.) My husband, understandably had a “don’t work while on vacation” rule, made all the more important as at the time I was either not getting paid, or I was getting paid peanuts. And working like a madwoman. So, of course “leave the laptop at home on vacation.”

The problem is I had an habit. Only slightly less demanding than the reading habit. You see, when the younger kid was in school (his being the important one because pre-school was only 3 hours) I sat my butt on the chair and wrote. Produced pages and pages of words.

Then when they came home, I was mommy. Though I might be plotting the next scene in my head.

(Some of my most productive years, btw.)

Saturdays were different only in that our writers’ group met at my house at 3. And our writers’ group was composed of insane people. At least in 95, we decided that novel or no novel in progress, to remain a member in good standing you had to bring in a short story a week.

Well, I normally didn’t do that during the week. Because I was doing novels. So, on Saturday, I cleaned 1800 sq feet in a couple of hours (took that long because kiddies) and then sat at my computer and pounded out a 2k to 6k story in an hour or three. Did spell check, and threw it at the group. (It’s amazing how many of those, de-typoed, sold.)

The problem while on vacation, is that characters and ideas for shorts showed up right on time either Friday night or Saturday morning. I wrote many a story on hotel note pads, napkins and even toilet paper. (Started novels, too, because my brain has no sense of proportion.) Until Dan sighed and told me I could bring the laptop. Which I MOSTLY used to pound out a story before they woke up on Saturday.

I no longer get the story of the week. (Which might be a habit worth getting back, as it would improve my numbers greatly.) In fact, I’ve limited the short story invites I accept, because writing a short can take me the better part of a week, as I’m no longer in the habit.

It’s not that I don’t try. It’s that I’m no longer used to sit at the keyboard and concentrate. And trust me, it’s a matter of habit.

The monasteries of old, being communal living amid people raised in more violent environments that most of us, kept the whole thing harnessed tight with habit. “At this house you do this. At this hour this.” It’s a trick borrowed by boarding schools and heck, even public schools. And yes, definitely factories.

For most people work is not a “career.” It is “That which pays the bills.” The actions of working (as I was prepared to accept with my degree choice) aren’t in themselves pleasurable, or even overly interesting, but you do it the best you can, and you earn a living. And habit lubricates that and makes it easier. I mean, I didn’t want to write a short story on vacation, but the habit compelled me to.

What happens when you have most of the world broken of the habit of working?

I know — because I’m struggling with it — how hard it is to rebuild the habit, so that you can work at your best when you’re supposed to. (And working from home is not necessarily “work hours” but the hours that you need to work.) So that you’re not fighting yourself just to get to the desk/workbench/whatever and do what you have to do.

Because there’s always other things that need doing. There’s always distractions.

In addition to throwing a massive wrench of uncertainty (and almost for sure hyperinflation to come) into our economy, the last year and a half has destroyed work and study habits of a vast portion of the population. Can they get them back? Will they even realize they need to? Or that they’re not working at their best?

Breaking an habit is the easiest thing in the world. Building a new one…. not so much.

This might be the biggest damage from the covidiocy. And it will blight more lives than the virus ever could.

Other than the fact it’s a textbook example of why government needs to be small, starved and limited, what can we do about it?

I don’t know. I know what I can do about me, and about everyone I know who is having issues. And that’s encourage you to form new habits as fast as you can. To harness yourself tightly to work standards, and to struggle to regain the habit of productivity.

Because regardless of natural gifts and abilities, if people don’t get that habit back, they’ll be very poor.

And so will society.

Go to work. I’ll do likewise.

Book Promo And Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  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. ;)*

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Sleeping Duty: Waking Late

Gilead Tan and Andrea Fielding survived their stint in the military, got married, signed up to emigrate to a terraformed colony world, and went into cold sleep for the journey from Earth. While they slept, the starship went through the wrong fold in space and settled for a different world, a wild world.

Three centuries after the founding of a colony on the uncharted planet, Gilead awakens to find humanity slipped back to medieval tech and a feudal structure.

Worse, the king who wants Gilead awake won’t let Gilead awaken his wife.

FROM CRAIG W. STANFILL: Terms of Service: Subject to change without notice.

1984 meets The Matrix in this riveting science fiction novel about corporate totalitarianism, personal freedom, and one brave character’s journey to reclaim her humanity from an oppressive regime.

250 years in the future, artificial intelligences control every aspect of Kim’s life – from what she has for breakfast to who she is allowed to have sex with. Living in the northeast province of what used to be the United States, she is a rising star at The Artificial Intelligence Company, training and managing sentient beings called “AIs” in the enigmatic parallel universe of Virtual Reality. 

When a seemingly harmless lark sends Kim’s life spinning out of control and the AIs begin to go mad, Kim launches into a journey of self-discovery and chaos that threatens to tear down society’s corrupt powers, and possibly civilization itself.

For fans of classic dystopian literature like Brave New World and ground-breaking TV shows like Black Mirror, Stanfill explores the lurking dangers of a surveillance state where privacy is dead, corporations have unlimited power, and even using the word “I” is forbidden.

FROM J. L. CURTIS: Rimworld- Into the Green

After a chance encounter with Dragoons and Traders turns a routine planet exploration into a rout that kills his team and his career, Lieutenant Ethan Fargo, medically retired, wants nothing more than to hole up in the backwater Rimworld he’d explored and enjoy a quiet retirement far from people or problems.

Unfortunately, he’s about to find out that he’s not as retired as he wants to be, and that his new home system comes with dangers, politics, and Dragoon sightings of its own. What promised to be a boring retirement will turn out to be anything but.

FROM M. C. A. HOGHARTH: Who Is Willing

Alysha Forrest is looking forward to her assignment as the Songlance’s newest lieutenant, particularly when it gets her placed as the liaison to the ship’s water environment crewmembers. Interfacing with the mermaid-like Naysha and the alien Platies who serve as the ship’s navigators is an exhilarating experience, and all the other officers on the crew are eager to welcome her into the fold… all of them, except one.

Mike Beringwaite, the overbearing ensign who ruined their leadership retreat years earlier, has somehow made lieutenant too. When a routine problem in the water environment throws them together, Alysha has to decide how willing she is to forgive him for what he did, whether she can work with him again, and most importantly, if she can trust him–with her life.

The disaster at the leadership retreat is nothing to the one they have to handle now. If they can….

FROM ROBERT BIDINOTTO: WINNER TAKES ALL: A Dylan Hunter Justice Thriller.

A MURDEROUS CONSPIRACY FOR ULTIMATE POLITICAL POWER

Engaged to be married, mysterious journalist Dylan Hunter and CIA security officer Annie Woods are desperate to put their violent past behind them.

But then an investigative reporter is brutally, mysteriously murdered.

A visionary presidential candidate is targeted for destruction.

And a horrific day of unspeakable terrorism rocks Washington, D.C.

Soon, Hunter’s investigation puts him in the cross hairs of a power-hungry billionaire and a cold-blooded assassin. Camouflaged by “fake news,” a deadly conspiracy of Russian spies and American traitors aims to install their puppet in the White House.

And these predators will do the unthinkable to bring America under their total control.

The stakes — political and personal — couldn’t be higher. Because to stop them, Dylan Hunter must make an irrevocable choice. He must revert to his dark, secret life as a violent vigilante, waging a one-man war of justice against the corrupt and untouchably powerful.

It’s a decision that will, finally and forever, seal his fate … including his future with the woman he adores.

But for now, only one thing is certain:

In the tidal wave of political violence raging through the blood-soaked streets of Washington, D.C., the final outcome will be … WINNER TAKES ALL.

FROM ELISE HYATT: Dipped, Stripped and Dead.

A Dyce Dare Mystery
When she was six, Dyce Dare wanted to be a ballerina, but she couldn’t stop tripping over her own feet. Then she wanted to be a lion tamer, but Fluffy, the cat, would not obey her. Which is why at the age of twenty nine she’s dumpster diving, kind of. She’s looking for furniture to keep her refinishing business going, because she would someday like to feed herself and her young son something better than pancakes.
Unfortunately, as has come to be her expectation, things go disastrously wrong. She finds a half melted corpse in a dumpster. This will force her to do what she never wanted to do: solve a crime.
Life is just about to get crazy… er… crazier. But at least at the end of the tunnel there might be a relationship with a very nice Police Officer.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Flight of Miss Stanhope: A Short and Sweet Regency Romance.

Marianne Stanhope is in trouble. Her family is urging her to accept the attentions of a most odious suitor, so she turns to a gentleman of her acquaintance for aid. But Mr. Firth has his own reasons for assisting Miss Stanhope, and it falls to her childhood friend Mr. Killingham to convince her that she’s made a dreadful mistake.

FROM C. CHANCY: Gateway to Fiction.

THE LONG AWAITED WORLDBUILDING BOOK!

Do the Research, Keep the Shiny! A writer’s guide. Want a good story? Choking on yet another sparkly cinematic production that has all the flash and explosions yet no real people in it? If you want stories done right, sometimes you’ve just got to do it yourself. But how? Roll up your sleeves, we’re going to cover it all. No preaching; no “but thou must follow steps X, Y, Z”. Just, here’s some ideas, and some examples, of how it can work. From getting over that first hump of pen to page, through getting ideas and characters from point A to point B, all the way to how to keep breathing when the whole world’s crumbling in. There are links. There are tropes. And there’s a sober explanation of why fanfic has always mattered. In your mind’s eye there’s a world no one else has seen. Here’s some tools. Worldbuild away!

FROM ROBERTO JULIANO: Cry Bullies Protecting yourself against social muggers and victimhood aggression

Cry Bullies…How to spot them, who they pick to bully, how they fight, and how to fight back.

FROM GEORGE PHILLIES: The One World.

Amazon warriors against musketeer hordes!

The Holy Musketeers have found another continent to loot. The opposition? The primitive natives have no muskets and no cannon. Their cowardly men send their women to fight.

FROM DAVE LEWIS: Moira And The Two Nathans.

Immuration. She’d known the definition. Now she knew the meaning, in all its drawn-out horror. She didn’t know how long she’d been immured, only that she was nearing her end. Then, like a miracle, there was someone to free her, but — who was he? Where did he come from? Why did he know her name?

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: FUZZY

Maybe it’s just me, okay? I mean it’s possible.

This morning I am writing this late, because I had to go to the thrift store. The thrift store because I’m the world’s cheapest human being and — sigh — I gained weight through 2020-to 2020 Won. Not because I — particularly — stopped moving around or working out, but because when I stress and the autoimmune goes nuts, I gain weight. I have no explanation for this, it’s just a thing.

Anyway, we JUST got to the point I need short sleeves. Unfortunately what this means is that most of my blouses and shirts are either exposing my mid-riff or …. stained, and have holes because I was doing a bunch of house stuff last year.

Anyway, our favorite thrift store (ARC) is never…. great at hanging things in the right places or…. Other things. We used to have so much fun laughing at weird-placed things…

But now? Seriously? They had more employees out than I’ve ever seen, but ….

Okay, let’s put it this way: If the isle is marked Short Sleeve, Knit Tops, size XL…. I expect it be mostly correct. I don’t expect that 50% will hit one of those attributes, but none of the others, and the rest will hit none of those.

Again, they’ve always had some issues, and some of them might or might not have been customer re-hanging. But this was next level.

And while yes, I do understand that visually making sense of the difference between L and Xl is difficult, and I often browse both isles, these shirts had tags saying S or M. I found more XLs in the M isle than any of the others. And as for knit… well, it shouldn’t be an arcane concept….

Anyway, again, it’s always been sort of like that, but today it took me an hour, much to younger son’s exasperation, because I had to walk every isle including children.

And yes, I know, people are having trouble getting employees to come in and work but they actually had more employees, or perhaps volunteers than before.

So, what gives?

I don’t know. Search me.

This is not the only place I found this. Some of the mistakes in grocery stores, I assumed were “making the gaps less obvious” but seriously? Since when isn’t Spaghetti sauce under Italian, but two isles away under Mexican? Or why is the paper goods isle stacked with…. bleach. Or–

Meanwhile my friends who work retail are being pulled about by crazy bosses who make their time at work living hell.

Frankly, though of course, my boss is me (and she’s a bitch) all bosses seem to have lost their minds.

Why the heck?

Well…. we’ve all gone a little crazy.

This is something never talked about in stuff like 1984, where humans behave like good robots, and just do whatevs, but ….

There is a price to pay for irrational fear mongering and non-stop propaganda, compounded by contradictory orders, compounded by demanding we do things that make no sense, compounded by demanding we swear allegiance to “totally not stolen” election, compounded by unequal application of laws and demanding — literal — genuflection to their crazy priorities.

The price is that even for those humans who nod and go along, and don’t want to make waves is that your back brain knows something isn’t quite right. And you can get angry. And then they keep wanking you around and the anger keeps growing.

And then….

And then you don’t perform to spec. You become obsessed with stupid things, like “But what color should my shoes be?” or —

Anyway, humans don’t behave well under extreme stress. I’ve seen more people I’ve known for years suddenly and bizarrely go from zero to ree over nothing than I’ve ever seen in my life before. Or people who declare a ridiculous position and then stick to it buckle and tongues. Like the guy on a friend’s wall who kept repeating “But the news are supposed to be the truth” over and over and over again. In this time. In this place. And calling names to everyone who refused to knuckle under.

So.

We’ve all gone a little mad.

And it’s only going to get worse. To the stuff the government locusts destroyed, just so they could steal the election, add in the fact that even people trying their best are working while their back brain screams “RUN. You’re getting contradictory signals. You’re in danger. RUN.” And so things will get…. weird.

What do you do about it? I don’t know. Other than remember we’ve all gone a little mad.

Like the other things in this crazy time line, we’ll have to endure. Until the other side.

When I put the thing about hard times not creating strong men, (though they do create hard men, but that’s not always in the sense we think of as strong,) a lot of you came back with “shirt sleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”

I don’t need to tell you that’s also not a universal truth, right? Not even close. It might seem that way in America (and we’ll go into it) but when you have an history as long as European countries, you quickly realize “families colonize niches.” Sure, some rise spectacularly and fall again just as spectacularly, but most families have kind of an “Area” they move within. Which is not particularly surprising given that your spouse usually meets in the same circles, and has the same general characteristics. (This is not true in America, btw, for obvious reasons.) I think it is at the back of the European notions of class and also that if no one in your family ever did x how dare you aspire to it?

My family is a bit of an outlier, because men in my family tend to marry weird. Not necessarily badly, mind you, they just tend to prefer their women to be interesting in some way, which involves (most of the time) marrying outside their circles and often very strange indeed. (That I know there is no genetic connection between Dan and I. I mean, we did look, since a lot of the same characteristics run in our family, and yes that is one of them, though frankly my husband — judging by past dating history — likes his women dangerous.)

So my family does tend to go up and down on a cycle, but the cycle seems to be more five generations. And frankly part of it is that the society doesn’t fit the family very well. As in, everyone seems to have artistic inclinations but also do well academically. Since the arts don’t pay well in a tiny and frankly odd country, people either become craftsmen or go into a bureaucratic position in which they die by bits, while excelling and living lives of quiet desperation.

We’re five generations removed from business acumen and I’d say those were outliers, since most of my family cannot sell ice cubes in the desert. They’re good at saving, mind you (thank heavens) but suck at selling at a profit.

However most people, if you count extended family, settles into bureaucrat or teacher, and rumbles along. And has done so as long as we know, which is very long indeed.

Now are there families where it is shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. Yes, mostly in America, honest (or was when mobility was freer) though I know of two in Portugal as well, and mostly what I call “flash in the pan” wealth. It can be very large, but usually luck was involved in forming it. (Other than that, vast fortunes are usually amassed very slowly. As in husband’s family, 150 years to amass a fortune, four generations to lose it. Though not completely. I just married the youngest son of the youngest son of the youngest son. Makes a difference.)

And what that family did when getting rich was go directly to treating their kids as though they were scions of old, wealthy families. As in, families that have been rich as heck for generations and have so secured their income in land and investments that they can afford to wrap their kids in cotton and treat them like precious gilded china.

I met some of those, and unless the fortune is indeed vast, incredibly secure, and there is no catastrophic innovation to upend its security, that family is indeed going to tumble into poverty very fast. Faster if the guy (it’s almost always a guy, though there is the rare woman) who made the fortune and who is a bit of a sport, if you look at his ancestors, marries unwisely. And in the case of men, most of them do. They marry for looks, and often people of terrible inclinations and habits. And their kids devolve to the gutter.

As I write this it occurs to me some of you are going “eugenics” and “treating people like race horses.” You’d be wrong. Sure, there’s genetics involved, because you inherit psychological traits from your parents, as well as physical. If I’d ever doubted that, I can’t when younger son is my father’s slightly taller clone, down to the type of woman they’re attracted to.

But those traits are not, in themselves, what makes you capable of succeeding or failing in society. For instance, in Portugal I’d probably be a housewife, with poems stuffed in my desk drawer. Oh, I might also have taught. Because society can’t afford professional writers. So, in other words, I’d follow the family path.

Maybe.

Because I have most of my traits from dad’s side (where the business acumen pops up every five generations or so but dutifulness and intellectualism are consistent traits, so that they usually end up as middle managers, professors or well, doctors and engineers. Or carpenters. Or mechanics. Because if you look at it those professions are all actually using the same traits. What they don’t end up as is (normally) entrepreneurs, top managers, or charismatic figures. Why? Well…. because they’re very …. self-effacing and while not lazy don’t want to exert too much effort on things that don’t interest them. What usually interests them doesn’t pay.

Then there’s mom’s side, who are mostly decayed aristocracy. (VERY decayed, as I’ve shared some stories of her childhood.) But the thing is mom’s family is ODD. They throw sports all the time. And the sports are either startlingly UNsuccessful or well….. astonishingly successful. And you can’t predict it because the trait for wild creativity seems to be at odds with stick-to-it-ness. IOW I think mom’s family is mostly ADD (AF) and few have the discipline to overcome it and stick to it long enough to be successful.

So, you know, (As Jordan Peterson points out) it’s not just a matter of being intelligent enough or smart enough to be successful in life. There are other traits that go into it, such as persistence, (both in learning and in working in a field) and creativity and, oh, yeah, ability to work with others (most people in dad’s family are introverts. I think the worst ones go into teaching, because it’s very top-down in Portugal) which Peterson calls agreeableness. There are other traits he doesn’t touch on like charisma. Mom’s side has oodles of charisma. It oozes off them. So they often end up as leaders even if they’re in no way qualified to lead a kitten out of a wet paper bag. And often make it stick on charisma alone.

I’d like to think that even if I’d stayed in Portugal (looking back that is wildly unlikely. Though it was by no means sure I’d end up in the US, or at least not right away) I eventually lost my mind and started writing books in English, and that even if I put those in the drawer, I’d have now published them indie. And probably done very well. (Keep in mind the “very well” is about 2/3 lower in Portugal. In Portuguese terms I’m making as much money as MDs. So….)

Would I have? I don’t know. Depends on how much my upbringing could overcome my inclinations. And frankly, on how much I needed money.

Which brings us back to the old conundrum: genes or upbringing? I don’t know. And you can’t either. Each family has a culture that gets passed along with the genes. It’s probably not a coincidence that in demeanor and action I feel more comfortable with/resemble dad’s family the most, as they were the ones that brought me up, so I got that culture. Even if I also have some wild flashes from mom’s side.

At any rate, the way to do shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations is to get someone who is a wild outlier, amasses a vast fortune, and decides his children SHALL have everything they want, plus the pony. No one will ever speak to them in anger. They not only won’t be spanked, every pain will be spared to them.

This usually creates an absolute wastrel, who might coast through life on daddy’s money, but whose kid will have to work to GET BACK to “shirt sleeves.”

This has society wide implications, which is why if people squint really hard that strange thing about hard times creating strong men “feels” right. But it isn’t.

It would be more accurate to say that discipline and a strict upbringing creates strong people. This might or might not be a “hard” upbringing. And of course, if taken too far it creates broken people. As hard times tend to.

In the end we come back to Heinlein’s saying “Never ruin your children by making their lives too easy.”

Now, what is making your children’s lives too easy? I don’t know. You’ll have to calibrate it and sometimes you’ll be wrong.

There are certain things that seem universal, such as you should get your kids to do at least some work for their “extras”. How lavish the basic is is up to you. I mean, you’re supposed to furnish a minimum by law, but after that, you think about it.

My family didn’t give me many extras, either because they couldn’t afford it, or because mom was engaged in saving as much as possible (having seen the results of the opposite) which btw included depriving herself. In my case too it was complicated by the fact mom refused to understand there had been an episode of hyper inflation between myself and my brother, because of the long span (to be fair, she refused to recognize the hyperinflation at all for decades, which I think is similar to some people from the depression era here. As in, the equivalent of someone nowadays running around going “But the cheapest shoes are $5 at Walmart. OUTRAGEOUS. I should be able to buy an entire outfit for that.” Which meant we lived well below our means, while she lamented every day of how life was ruinously expensive. That’s fine.) Which meant what she gave me for school lunches bought me an espresso at the cheapest price (discounted school coffee shop.) It also meant that clothes, books and anything else came out of my pocket. Which was mostly empty because I didn’t get an allowance.

Now this isn’t necessarily as bad as it could be, because mom retired when I was 12 (medical, due to her heart condition and her tendency to brink deadlines) which meant after that clothes designing and making was her hobby, so as long as I was willing to wear whatever struck her to make, I was well (for Portuguese version) dressed and didn’t need to buy any. Except that I liked jeans and t-shirts for every day wear and she wouldn’t make or buy me those.

Anyway, what this meant in practicality is that though I think naturally — genetically — I’m like dad’s family and not likely to get really daring or entrepreneurial, I had to figure out early on how to make money for the extras. It mostly meant stuff like publishing a neighborhood paper at 12, or later tutoring.

Which caused me to develop initiative.

In the same way, though I am naturally ADD (AF) I had to learn to stick to studying long enough to have good grades (interestingly enough this involved rewarding myself, which I have to learn again.) because failing was just not possible. No, I don’t think my mom would kick me out, but in my head she absolutely would. Besides dad would be all “more in sorrow than in anger” and that was unbearable.

So, do soft times create soft men? Well, no. But a soft upbringing DOES create adults who just go with their genetic/family culture inclinations. And few of them are the kind that lead to success. Since humans are a scavenging species, if children internalize that “times are good” and they’ll be fine no matter if they don’t work, or if they give in to every destructive impulse, then the scavengers “time is too good. Have no children and laze about” kicks in. Because otherwise scavenging species get too large and the next generation starves (in nature.)

Obviously this is controllable, and obviously the “old, successful” families of Europe have managed to control it, by instituting rigid rules of conduct for their children, which in turn create or promote certain traits in the children. (In England this led to notoriously spartan living conditions for boarding school children, for instance. It seemed to work? At least better than now.)

And there is a hard/soft parenting thing that cycles. Let’s remember the Victorians succeeded the footloose and fancy free Regency. Those aren’t hard or soft cycles in money terms (though they were for many families. Because many people blew through family fortunes in the regency) but more soft/hard cycles caused by the fact people recognized the defects in their own upbringing and brought up their kids differently.

I want to point out here that both extreme hard upbringing and extreme soft upbringing both have problems. In the first, you risk creating someone too timid to succeed, and in the second the kind of hedonism that makes it impossible to ever do anything worthwhile, or even know it’s possible to.

On the other hand, all of us being human, it’s almost impossible to hit the happy medium (who won’t be very happy after you hit her.) You’re going to err. But most small mistakes are correctable. And sometimes you’ll make mistakes without realizing it. Or the kid’s innate tendencies will defeat your best efforts, because kids are human too, meaning self-willed.

Now hard times can force that kind of “come to Jesus” moment, where people realize that they need to treat their kids with more …. stern supervision. Or trigger the conditions for it. I’m sure the fact that mom’s dad drank away the family fortune was responsible for her “must sock away every penny” which in turn made me shift for myself in ways she didn’t probably even realize (like photocopying classmates’ school books so I could do the home work. Or doing it very early morning borrowing a friend’s book. Because mom refused to believe university books (come from England) could be that expensive.)

That’s undeniable.

However it doesn’t follow that good times must perforce create soft and spoiled, “decadent” men. (Competent men in each civilization are different. Spoiled scions of the elites, though, are all the same across the ages, and seem to partake the same vices with minor variations.)

It’s all on how you treat them.

Part of the problem we’re in is not that people who came back from WWII tried to give their kids the best of everything, and raise them as much in a bubble as could be managed. (By and large. There’s always exceptions.)

Rather it’s that the culture as a whole wanted to “study war no more” and also had hit one of its goofy cycles of “romanticism” and nature worship, which in child upbringing means “Let’s all believe Jean Jacques Rosseau knew squat about raising children. Let’s believe if we set no boundaries or limits, we’re creating angels, and that children only learn violence if they get a swat on the behind, and without it are natural pacifists.”

Look, I understand the temptation as far as the Germans of WWII were believed to be the culmination of the Prussian way of life, which was also believed to be very rigid and stern. (Look, none of these things are 100% but that was the popular view of it.) So, they tried to run the other way.

But unfortunately this also happened at a time when “mass everything” was at its apogee, as was centralized dictating of “how things are to be done”. This led among other things to schools of education who enshrined Jean Jacques Rosseau artsy fartsy nonsense as holy writ, taught generation after generation and made worse every generation because when it doesn’t work it must be because we’re still too harsh and demanding.

Which has us in the year of our Lord (maybe. not absolutely sure how much the Lord is involved in this) 2021 dealing with a top-down educational establishment and culture trying to force every kid to be raised like the spoiled scion of a noble family.

This discourages child bearing (as the only way to still make the kids functional is for the parents to treat child rearing as a full time job, which few families can afford.) It also — if parents don’t fight it tooth and nail, without running afoul of the law — creates a generation of useless wastrels, addicted to their pleasures.

To the Millenials credit most of them are NOT like that. But are they soft? Well, yes. Far softer than they should be, because the parents weren’t able to do much to make them work for their extras. (We managed it by living so tight that well, they had to.) And somewhat confused about their abilities, talents and what they should use them for, because in its latest “self esteem” incarnation the insanity of the establishment praises them for everything they are even vaguely competent at.

Yes, most of them need to be tested and hardened. Again, to their credit, at least in the US, most of them improve vastly over their first decade of paid work, and develop the discipline they were never taught. The rest of them become socialists, of course. Which, yes, is a problem. But I want to emphasize (whatever my younger son says) those are a minority. (A lot of them pay lip service because the establishment will destroy them otherwise.)

Is this the ideal way to raise kids? Oh, heck no, and I suspect in the wake of whatever is heading for us we’ll head the other way. Possibly too far. (And no, I can’t give exact dates or nature. I can just feel it, like a massive break in the timeline and culture. I still think it starts next month, though the early incidents might not be recognized as such. After that it’s all in the air. I still think “Brief” but is brief months or years. I don’t know. Also note, I’m not a cult leader. I could be wrong. Particularly on the timing. It’s just a sense from the “feel in the air.”)

So I see where people get that impression. But mostly it’s the way kids are raised, not how “good” times are, that creates softness or hardness. And it’s possible to be raised “soft” and fairly wild in bad times, too, particularly if distracted parents are fighting too hard to survive to keep an eye on the little so and so.

If you can at all, don’t have your kids raised by strangers. And make them work for some of their extras. And the rest will take care of itself.

The thing to remember is that as hard as it is to discipline our kids or deny them harmless pleasures (and if you’re not a parent yet, trust me on this, it is) if you are too soft and indulge them too far, you end up making it impossible for them to succeed.

And if you have the supervision of a bunch of kids and don’t discipline bad behavior because “he’s just wild, not a bad boy” you’re going to ruin everyone. Perfect justice is not your purview. Enforcing acceptable behavior is. Otherwise you’re teaching a kid to be untrammeled and, yes, cruel (all humans are cruel if not checked. All that varies is the degree) and the others that people can impose on them and there is no justice or safety.

It’s important to know that in the end the worst thing you can do to people is to set no boundaries, no limits, no expectations, and give them everything they want.

That will not create soft men, per-se. It will often create monsters, and the rest of the time create wastrels.

It’s bad enough when the institutions go that path. Don’t add to it.

Self Care, Sanity, and Einkorn Thumbprint Cookies by Dorothy Grant

How are you doing? Oh, don’t tell me you’re fine. I’m a woman; I know full well just how vast and unhappy the spectrum of “fine” can be. It’s been a crazy few years, and at some levels, like national politics, the forecast is calling for 100% chance of more crazy. (It’s the rising percentage in the forecast for boogaloo that worries me more.) However, right now we don’t get to armor up for the zombie apocalypse or break out the metal colander mask and the thunderdome. Right now, we need to keep going, and not let the crazy break us down.

In aviation, we say to passengers, “In the even of the loss of cabin pressure, put your own oxygen mask on first.” There’s a reason for this: by the time you get through an OODA loop after loud noises, sudden shocking cold, completely unexpected turbulent motions and the chaos of things falling and flying in your face… you barely have enough oxygen left to remember to take care of yourself, and if you spend that trying to do something else, you’re not likely to make it. Down here on the ground, the need for self care is rarely so sudden… but it’s also rarely so immediately obvious, and by the time you realize that you are a complete wreck, well, you’re a burned-out complete wreck, and that’s really, really hard to crawl back to sane, happy, and healthy from. Why not start taking better care of yourself right now, so you don’t hit that in the first place?

So, treat yourself like someone you’re responsible for helping. (Hail Lobster! He has some really good ideas.)

And that’s going to involve making sure you eat healthily, and get some sunlight and some sleep, and stop spending so much time on social media. National politics isn’t going to stop being stupid if you take a few days away from it, I assure you… but you might sleep better if you’re not grinding your teeth and dumping a load of cortisol into your system.

Speaking of cortisol, I lift weights three times a week, in part because I cannot breathe well enough to do the things I want to do – but also because it lets me burn the stress hormones out of my system, which makes life a lot more chill. You don’t even need to go to a black iron gym like I do: if you cruise over to youtube and hit one of the bodyweight exercise videos, I’m pretty sure there’s something you can find that you can do, at whatever skill level you have. Or do like a friend and go bang on sheetmetal in the garage and build medieval armor. Or whatever makes you happy, as long as you’re moving.

As for sleep – you do have a blue light filter like f.lux installed on your computer and your phone, to cut the blue light after dark, right? Because there’s no point in making it harder on yourself to get some sleep. As even Count Rugen advised: Get some rest. After all, if you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.

And then there’s getting sunlight during the day. Yes, yes I know – a goth is telling you to go out in the sun. However, it really does help, and we need all the bits of help we can get. Jen Satterly mentioned this one either in Arsenal of Hope as part of the treatment modalities for complex PTSD and self-care when living with same, or in the supplemental material on the All Secure Website. (Which, if you have, or live with someone who does, I cannot come up with enough adjectives and adverbs and expletives to express how strongly I recommend you check her book out.)

She recommended, among many other things, getting a handful of minutes of daylight, sunlight if possible, every single day. And it’s not just the Vitamin D, though we’re all pretty deficient these days. It’s also that being out and around green and growing things, and away from the same four walls, is healthy. My garden of potted herbs is actually doing really well this year, because if I’m going to be outside, I’m going to water them and check on them. (Interestingly enough, some kinds of migraines actually respond to green wavelength light. Which means my coworkers can tell if it’s a headache or a migraine by whether my desktop background is pulled off the Hubble telescope or from the botanical gardens.)

Getting sunlight actually helps sleeping at night. It also helps my mood, and makes dealing with panicked people easier. Some of you lovely people only have to deal with panicked and stressed people on the freeways and on the intertubes; I get to deal with them every day as part of my paycheck. Which… is nothing new, really. Never, ever, walk through the pax side of the airport with an ID badge showing if you can help it, even if the employee cafeteria is closed for remodeling. You don’t get your food; you get a steady stream of panicking people wanting to know where Gate A34 is (hint, you’re in C terminal. It ain’t here.) and where their husband is (like I would even know? I’m not that kind of woman!)

And then there’s fixing your food intake for reduced inflammation and increased nutrition. Which I’m going to say… do what works for you. High carb does not work well for many people, myself and the Beautiful But Evil Space Princess among them. But people are highly individual, and you get to find what works best for you, not what works best for me. Personally, I need a much higher amount of protein in my diet than our lovely hostess, but as we mentioned above, I weightlift for exercise and relaxation. I can also get away with more carbs than she can, though I try to keep that in check other than at meetings of the North Texas Writers, Pilots, and Shooters Association. Which, if you’d ever had LawDog’s Chicken Spaghetti or Jim Curtis’s shrimp and grits with tasso gravy, you’d know why I’m not even going to think about sticking to low carb while beta reading a chapter and bouncing ideas off the others.

What I can’t get away with is eating wheat without suffering the consequences. I claim no trendy diagnosis, only the sad fact that cutting out wheat for a couple weeks made it painfully obvious that eating that ingredient makes my arthritis flare. Yes, sourdough bread is made of utter delicious foreboding that the pain is going to hit… and some days, it’s worth it.

Because taking care of yourself isn’t about living a strict life of no joy and no fun; it’s about reducing inflammation and pain while also deciding where and when it’s worth it to cut loose, and making sure that you enjoy the heck out of cutting loose when you do.

On the other hand, as I’m human, I’m eternally searching for the cheat mode that lets me have my cake and eat it too… or at least eat the cake and not hurt so badly afterward. And this is where einkorn comes in. As a grain, it fell out of favour in the early Bronze Age, as our intrepid ancestors worked hard at breeding more corns – more grains – per stalk, in order to increase food density per acre.

Which means that it’s stupid expensive compared to the end result of five thousand years of selective breeding and experimentation in wheat… but it’s really fascinating to bake with, and cook with, and realize the limitations on rising and proofing and dough structure that they had to work with. I no longer wonder why ancient breads were depicted as disk-shaped; the gluten is so weak that it’s hard to get it to rise instead of spreading. On the other hand, unlike modern wheat, it doesn’t make my arthritis flare. So while it does up my carb load… I get pain-free proto-bread!

Today, I upped the game: I made thumbprint cookies. And what cookies they are! It’s always awesome when you find something that’s actually *better* than the recipe it’s replacing. In this case, the nutty flavour of the einkorn (it’s definitely not domestic wheat) pairs well with the butter, the richness of the egg yolk, and the bright notes of the lemon juice to create a thoroughly flavourful shortbread cookie base. Better still, the weak gluten that makes it so hard to turn into bread or pasta shines here, because you don’t have to worry about overworking the dough!

As for the filling: I pulled a sunrise jam from the local farmer’s market (apricot, mango, and other stuff), and a strawberry-rhubarb jam out of the fridge, where they’d been languishing on the shelf as too good to throw away, but never spread upon the dearth of bread. Polishing them off in good conscience leaves me with more fridge space and delicious cookies. I had one cookie left to fill, so I tried some orange marmalade. That one disappeared in a haze of happy noises and buttery crumbs!

My Calmer Half sampled a cookie, and promptly helped me make a bunch of the batch disappear – but they’re filling enough we still have 3 left in a tub for snacking overnight and into the morrow. This does not contain live bobcat, will make again!

Einkorn Thumbprint Cookies

1 stick butter

1/4 cup sugar (52 grams)

1 egg yolk

1.5 teaspoons lemon juice

1.25 cups all-purpose einkorn flour (145 grams)

1/2 tsp salt

jam (or marmalade for more awesome!)

1. Preheat oven to 350

2. Slap some parchment paper on a baking tray

3. In a large bowl, stick the butter in the microwave to soften. Mine half-melted, and came out fine.

4. Cream/Mix the butter and sugar together, then add in egg yolk, lemon juice, and salt. Mix until smooth.

5. Break out the kitchen scale and tap in flour if you do weight. This stuff is finicky enough about moisture I actually do that. Otherwise, scoop and dump the flour and whisk it all together (or use a mixer; whatever floats your boat. These are not supposed to be stressful to make.)

6. Grab a spoon and dust your hands with einkorn flour, then start rolling the dough into balls. At the size I rolled, just under ping-pong sized, I got 11 cookies. Remember they are going to be smashed, and then spread further while cooking, so leave space. Re-flour your hands frequently to prevent sticky dough sticking.

7. Keeping your thumb dusted, make a…  thumbprint. Or a cross. Or whatever design kicks over your gigglebox, as long as it doesn’t make the bottom of the jamwell too thin for cookie integrity.

8. Spoon jam into the depression, in quantities just small enough it won’t overflow.

9. Bake for 12-19 minutes, until golden brown. If you like tiny cookies, 12 will do. If you like large cookies, just keep careful eye on ’em once past 14 minutes.

10. When you pull them out, set the timer for 8 minutes, and do not, no matter how tempting, give in to poking the cookies before it goes off. You just pulled boiling sugar out of the oven, and it’ll stick like napalm to the roof of your mouth with great burnination if you don’t let it cool!

11. When cool enough, grab a drinkable and enjoy!

If you were hoping for a calorie or carb count, you’re missing the point of having fun. Make your treats actually treats, and don’t detract the joy by worrying about it!

Link to Arsenal of Hope: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R6NJJMH/

I think part of the problem with “culture” and understand “culture” is that we cram a bunch of stuff under that poor word.

Like when people say we need to “take back the culture” they mean arts, entertainment, news, the stories, however told and by whatever means, that tell a people what they are; inform each individual what they’re part of, and what role they’re expected to play in society. (Different for everyone, but narrative should play a part in telling us where we can find a role. Roles are important because the human mind compasses millennia, but human life is brief. Part of what is destroying us is that the left has taken away everything humans could with honor consider themselves part of and leave for the future.)

The left meanwhile thinks that culture is food, clothing, language and what kind of music you like to listen to, and quaint holiday celebrations. They then proclaim all cultures the same and all subsumed to the great socialist project, (Workers of the world amalgamate! If you like your quaint sheep eyeballs dish you can keep your quaint sheep eyeballs dish.) or you’re a racist, yo. In that last accusation there’s also the accusation that culture is genetic and cannot be changed. They are in a way right while being so wrong they’re not even wrong. Oh, and at the same time they claim trying to change what they conceive of as culture as being “racist” they try to change deep inlaid culture with governmental, top down regulations and incentives, in their deranged and destructive pursuit of creating the new socialist man. Because consistency happens to other people. Oh, and as people in the EU have found out, no, you can’t keep your quaint sheep eyeballs dish. Okay, I made up the sheep eyeballs, but the socialists of the EU have been almost as crazy in Portugal to the point that you’re now only allowed to celebrate the RELIGIOUS aspects of the Saints “festas” (which happen every weekend somewhere not far off, no matter where you are, from Spring to Fall and which used to be one of the binding points of any community.) and that only until the Covidiocy, of course. The little fairs that used to be held at the same time — since…. well, since written memory. I suspect it was going on before Christianity, for that matter. The fairs sold regional goods, there were booths serving local specialties, and there were toys sold at these fairs that I swear had been made by the same families since the middle ages. I’m willing to grant that roller coasters, little airplane rides, bumper cars and also cotton candy were of much more recent vintage, but I’d also bet you there were fun equivalents before then. And look you, I’m the first person to admit that much of what is traditional in Portugal could benefit from being rubbed down with (boiling) lysol, or at least that’s my kids’ opinion of it. But making the place characterless and bland is not in anyone’s best interest, and in my opinion is the cause of “people forgot how to make babies.” (More on that later.)

The problem of cultures is that though we know they change and adapt, we have no idea how to do that to them intentionally. The left THINKS they know how to do that, but they also think humans are infinitely plastic, so you now, they are, what is that word? Oh, yeah, idiots.

The other problem of cultures is that to study them you need accurate recordings done at least week to week, moment to moment being better, and you need to be able to catalogue all the influences on a given culture, and what caused it to go this way or that.

If we had a time machine, or at least a time scope, and also AIs with infinite time and patience, then sociology could become an actual science.

As is, we can study certain aspects of culture with relative clarity from a certain point on. Like, say, from the 1700s. Most of what we can study with no prejudice are physical and economic conditions. And even those, you have to cut through the modern interpretations, mostly Marxist and crazy and go back to the raw numbers. For instance, Dickens — and Marx — howled about the dark satanic mills, and people talk about how WWI destroyed the working class in Europe. But if you actually read contemporary records, or look at similar processes in the world now, you find that the industrial revolution lifted people out of the direst poverty and expanded their horizons, and that — you don’t have to go very far, read Agatha Christie — the complaints of the upper class about the lower classes post WWI is that those dang peasants were no longer willing to go into domestic service for a crust of bread and a corner of the kitchen to sleep in, but were scarpering to the city for factory and shop jobs. Which btw, is a complaint of the upper classes going back to the industrial revolution.

There’s other and more inescapable records: like the fact that people grew more, fatter babies to adulthood. And famines slowly vanished from the west unless brought on and caused by gross governmental malfeasance.

I mean, in historical terms, everyone has been fat, lazy and decadent since America’s settling, at least.

Look, part of why I object to that “good times makes soft men” is because…. How do you tell? No, seriously. Yeah, no. Military enlistment is not a good measure, because we can’t tell why people aren’t joining the army. Sure, it could be because they’re soft pansy-asses. And you’ll find documents saying exactly that.

But here’s the problem: we don’t know why people stop enlisting. I can give you some clues, though. For instance, I’d bet you right now enlistment numbers and quality are falling. Like as of RIGHT this year.

Is it because the amount of soy in our food increased drastically? Or because we’re all so fat and calm and happy?

Well, no. It’s because no one would trust Joe Biden not to send their sons and daughters to fight on the side of the enemies of civilization. And that’s without counting intolerable impositions on the beliefs of the troops, and all sorts of violations of people’s ability to simply be and serve. Which anyone sane can see are starting and already on the menu. In fact, I’ve heard more than one person who’s served with honor and is close to retirement saying that they don’t advise anyone to enlist right now.

But let the left win (They won’t. Please, stop posting walls of text in the comments saying that sure, commies can totes feed themselves and build a thousand years of communism, because it’s bullshit. At best they can take civilization down to the neolithic, and I suspect that’s only in local areas. They don’t understand either human psychology or economics, and economics is a stone cold bitch) and history books in a hundred years will talk about how the decadence and soft living of capitalism took America down, and look, their own sons weren’t willing to defend her.

We can’t know. History is mostly written by twits, and mostly by upper class twits, and often by twits with an ax to grind.

Yes, we all laugh at the complaints from the Romans yelling about how people were decadent because life was too soft. We should. Only the uppermost crust had a soft life. Trust me on this, because I lived in what amounted to Roman culture with a few 19th century refinements, and life is only soft if you think that having to go outside to the bathroom night or day, or live with excrement in a pot under the bed is “soft”; that having to wash your clothes by hand on stone, winter or summer is “soft” and that growing most of what you eat is soft.

Now, thanks to the magic of antibiotics, I didn’t lose as many classmates as mom did, and I guess compared to grandma, who grew up in much tougher times, or even dad, who describes days of “vegetable soup” as the only food, we had it “decadently easy.”

But I think we’re conflating things that have nothing to do with one another. Starving and lacking the werewithal to live; surviving on crusts of bread and having to hoard rags so you don’t freeze, etc. etc. don’t make people strong. Physically they make them small and measurably dumber. And emotionally, it seems to mostly breed serfs.

Yeah, I know “the frontier.” Yes, people at the frontier underwent all those hardships, and it did breed a strong generation or two. But you have to look at that as most of them CHOSE to undergo those hardships. As we saw with the expansion west, in almost living memory, that makes a big difference.

Someone who has more time and has the ability to spend years on the project should sift between colonies created by force — like when they swept London of whores, beggars, travelers and criminals and shipped them to West Virginia, of all places — and those that came willingly and paid to come, and compare the outcomes, both in intangibles (“How are their descendants doing today?”) and in sheer numbers. How many died? How many survived? How productive were those who survived. Even in a country as modern and documented as America, this might be almost impossible to figure out though. Why? Mobility. And people lying. A lot of people lying.

So, while my opinion is just my opinion, and it might actually be impossible to verify — though you can probably “prove” it to the degree that anything of the sort can be proven, absent magic, or a way to see into the past or parallel words. I mean, I could probably have proven it, if I’d been chasing numbers and writing down exact facts for all the decades I’ve spent reading history books. Alas, I haven’t — I’d like to suggest that cultures have a life of their own, and that they react almost like living organisms.

While changing cultures is possible for individuals or small groups, it gets harder the larger the group is, because it’s then more of a self-actuated organism.

And I know I’m explaining this badly, okay. But I’ve undergone culture change, voluntarily, on purpose, on my own. For the individual acculturating feels like going insane, and being asked to do it twice in a life time would probably drive the most grounded of individuals nuts. Unless, of course, the incentive were massive. And even then, they might just pretend. Yes, I have seen (am related to) emigrants who returned and integrated (sort of) in the life of the “motherland.” But I don’t think they’d ever really acculturated besides trying some new foods, learning the language, and maybe wearing their clothes differently. Most of them emigrated as family groups and with intention of returning. (You can tell when people return “before the kids marry in the new country.”) Even then, I’ve been there for some odd and bizarre cultural stutters that they stumble upon without meaning to.

Anyway, you can do it alone. You can even do it as a family, if you decide you’re really going to do it. A lot of people who came here between and after the long war of the 20th century did just this: “We speak English” and “We’ll celebrate the holidays of the new country” and “We’ll fit in as well as we can, even if we really can’t.”

You can do it as a village. Sort of. I’m told that entire Italian (or Irish) villages emigrated en-masse and colonized blocks of New York City. But in that case the culture will change very slowly, and only to the extent young ones move away and marry outside the community. And even then it will take some generations. (And this is why there is no ethnographic difference between mass immigration and invasion, and why we still don’t know if there was actually an “invasion” of the Western Empire of Rome, or a fast trickle of barbarians moving in. Look, yes, I’ve seen the paintings, but I’ve also read the “overwhelmed by mass immigration” books. And, lacking a time machine, I can’t tell you what the truth was, but it could be either or both.)

Things will survive, still, in family culture. And hear me, I don’t mean cute clothing and great food. Only the left thinks anyone would mind that. I mean ways of speaking, and ways of emoting, and what you do when the worst/best happens. For instance, for some reason my husband had no idea he had any German blood. I knew he did, because one of his ancestresses was runaway Pennsylvania Dutch. (She had the same name I did before I changed mine, so MIL told me about her.) But in the …. ah strange constructions that MIL would inflict on English and passed on to my husband, you could still see the German influence. Also in diet and a dozen other habits. My host family was of Italian ancestry, and trust me, even though their parents tried to raise them with no trace of Italian culture, when they got to arguing you’d hear it. And see it. My kids don’t speak a word of Portuguese (okay, maybe a dozen words, mostly swearing. I have a foul mouth when I burn/cut myself in the kitchen) but if you see them arguing, they do not sound like normal Americans, much less like his dad’s Connecticut ancestry. In fact, I used to be afraid the neighbors would think a knife fight was about to break out and call the police. And as we tell older son every day and twice on Sunday “if you’re going to be that fatalistic, make your grandparents happy and learn to sing fados.” (To be fair, he’s very good at singing the blues.)

But those survivals are small and on the whole unimportant, because by all major measures (and it would take a whole other post or ten for me to explain this) we are still an “English” culture, possibly more English than England (which makes perfect sense, when you consider that colonies are always more conservative than the mother land. In fact, that’s how you determine which is a colony and which is the mother land if you find them as shards in the archeological record. And by “conservative” in this case you should read “faithful to the fundamentals of the culture.” For instance, the English tend to be king-killers. The French did it once and got a bad rep, but the English do it cyclically. And we seem to have inherited that.)

Of course, make the mass immigration mass enough and it’s an invasion.

And interesting things happen in invasion.

Look, it’s possible in the future we’ll discover that “culture” is just as much part of being human as the fauna and flora in our gut is part of us being human. This being the case, and culture being very difficult (though not impossible, particularly for individuals) to change, how did we come this far from the fertile crescent, or Gobleki Teppi, or whatever far, far location you choose?

Well, mostly there’s a cultural evolutionary process, known as war, conquest and survival of the fittest culture. (Not without survivals, just like you still have a photo-sensor under the bones of your skull. But that doesn’t affect you, and doesn’t wreck your chances of survival.) I mean, after Romans, Germans, Franks, Moors, Crusaders, Franks again the area of Portugal I come from still celebrates St. John with bonfires and merry making on the street, and in fact reading of the habits in certain areas of England/Ireland makes me giggle. Oh, and the fairy tales, the really old ones where the moral is murky? Are the same in Ireland and the North of Portugal. I’m not saying every contact leaves a trace. But I’m saying when cultures collide, the one that loses still passes a little bit to the future. Mostly through the women.

Look, most of those things we associate with “decadence” mostly because we compare it to the decadence of Rome have zero to do with how hard or soft life is. What they have to do with is the culture having lost confidence. Either because they’ve been “conquered” physically or intellectually.

If you think about it, the evolutionary process for the culture to be taken over by the one that proved itself superior by winning the war (more on how that’s been corrupted, later) is beautiful. Most of the men died in the war, of course. What comes after is that most women become sluts and men become drunkards (or gay. Or bi. Or whatever means they’re not fighting the invaders.) In a generation or two, all the kids are the kids of the invaders, and though the mothers might have taught them one or two words of the old culture, some fairytales, and maybe some songs (which sometimes survive in girl children longer) the culture has BECOME the winning culture.

Now in Rome, arguably, they’d been intellectually conquered by Greece oh, and Egypt and heaven knew what else. Or at least their elites were as oikophobic as ours. So their elites at least behaved like a conquered culture. Hence “decadence.”

On the ground? The people? Depends. I think in urban areas, with a high influx of mass immigration, the story the people told themselves about themselves became incoherent long before the “fall” and caused some of the same issues. In the far flung colonies? Well, let’s say there’s some debate on whether Rome fell. My dad, if you catch him unawares, still defines himself by the culture of the Roman Republic, at least as understood and transmitted over the centuries. (SO sanitized, btw. Going through the Pompei exhibit, it was like Portugal when I grew up, but sexually insane. I mean, who the heck has a painting of children being screwed by monkeys in the living room. Outside our wealthiest elites, that is? So, in case you wonder, yes Christianity does make a difference.)

We’re kind of experiencing that, because our “elites” that control the mass media have been conquered by socialism for 100 years. Which is why we’re bearing a lot of the markers of a conquered culture, but honestly? It’s not how well we live. It’s the fact we’re being told to deny everything we think/feel/the way we do things in favor of the conquering culture.

And yeah, socialism can survive for a while. Though it too, like the terminal form — communism — can’t really feed itself/create anything. Without an America to cannibalize, Europe would be a lot poorer/more f*cked up. But still, they are, par excellence, the “conquered culture” with all the syndrome. Oh. One thing I didn’t add: if the men aren’t all dead, birth rate (and marriage rate) plummets. It did so even before contraceptives, and no one knows why. It’s possible there was rampant infanticide. Or that it’s some psychological mechanism that turns off fertility.

Again, look, when cultures clash the normal thing is for one of them to become non-functional and become subsumed to the “winning” culture.

Which is why socialists/statists are playing with fire. Let’s face it, even here, for 100 years, people have tried to impose cultural attitudes/deep beliefs/ways of living from above, and change them arbitrarily. (And for the mentally handicapped, no I’m not talking of the civil war. I’m talking since the beginning of the twentieth century with the mentality that we could have “scientific” governance. People were yanked about on what to eat, when to sleep, what to do. And mass media facilitated massive distribution of these decrees from on high, that applied to the most minute parts of individual life.)

I think our back brains understand that as “We were invaded, it’s time to die.”

To the extent America has a fighting chance at all, it is because we’ve always been fairly contrary and because the blogsphere gave us the ability to know we’re not alone.

And the problem with letting the “top down” culture win, is that socialism is death, either fast or slow. It’s “being invaded” forever, and just causes people to give up and die.

That’s what we’re facing. That’s what we’re up against. They can’t win in the sense of “last” but they can win in the sense of destroying human civilization more utterly than the imagined apocalypse of nuclear war.

And this ladies and gentlemen is why the idea if we just endure hard times we’ll emerge stronger p*sses me off. I don’t think those two things are even on the same axis. Correlation is not causation.

I also don’t know if there is some relation to fast rate of change and “symptoms of decadence”. It’s possible we’re changing our environment too fast for even us. Note that what I said above about clash of cultures seems to be designed to minimize the time of instability and achieve a new normal. That might not be possible with constant innovation and change, even if good. And no, I don’t know what that does to the back brain or the culture.

Frontier societies are a whole other ball of wax, and self-select to a great extent. Do we need one? Probably. Heinlein thought we did, and who am I to argue. (Also biologically all organisms extend their range or die.)

However the decadence imposed by seeming arbitrary dictats from above, about which the individual can do nothing will get in the way of our next leap to the frontier, because that one needs civilization and scientific knowledge.

So, let’s concentrate on what needs to change, and what needs to stop. And if y’all want to make it to the stars, that is certainly not “comfort” or “ability to treat diseases” or “babies growing to adulthood” or “people being largely well fed.”

What needs to change is us being treated like a conquered people. And responding like one.

The so called elites are stupid. The system they want to impose doesn’t work and has never worked elsewhere. Their claim of being “scientific” should (if nothing else, and you weren’t paying attention before) in 2021 be laughed out of the public square.

Let’s tell them where to put it.

Causes by John Smith

As inspired (or triggered, anyway) by Sarah’s post “Everywhere”…

Sarah said: “Causes leading up to…” [electric boogaloo II, the releasing of the Kraken.] [Leading up to Romania – SAH]

Yes, yes indeed. Causes.

Item: went out to do some business today, stopped for sushi, went to Home Depot to get a lawn chair.

At the business, I had to call the company and have the person I was seeing come out into the parking lot to get me. Then I was escorted to a boardroom through empty halls, and seated across from the gentleman I went to see, separated by a large sheet of Lexan thick enough to stop a bullet. Masks mandatory, of course. This is Ontario, you know.

Left there, went to Fortinos supermarket to get sushi. I waltzed into the store, chose my meal, paid for it and left, as normal. Masks, of course.

Went to Home Depot. It was one of the only stores open in a sea of Big Boxes with empty parking lots. Only the outdoor section was open, the rest of the store was closed off with crime-scene tape. No lawn furniture in the outdoor plant section, of course, so wasted trip.

This shit has been going on since March 2020. Even the dumbest hick in the world can see that if I can shop freely at Fortino’s and Costco, keeping Home Depot mostly closed is lunacy. Closing other “non-essential” stores is double lunacy. Even the most ridiculous Karen out there can see that a sheet of Lexan in the middle of a boardroom table will do exactly nothing to stop an airborne virus.

Item: vaccines. Canada doesn’t have any. We are not making them here, and there are no plans to make them here. Really. Meanwhile, you can’t turn on a TV or a radio (or drive down the road, there’s electronic signs) without having a GET VACCINATED!!!!!!!11!!!! message screamed at you.

Item: immigration. While screaming that people are ignoring the lockdown rules and blaming the public for the continued spread of WuFlu, and braying that Double Mutant Indian WuFlu is a thing… the government is letting flights from India, S. Africa, Europe and etc. land in Canada with no testing of passengers, no quarantine, no nothing. But a Canadian flying back from Florida? QUARANTINE!!!! The dumbest hick in the world can see that’s insane.

Item: doctor friends in Florida say the WuFlu is not much of a thing there. Florida is God’s Waiting Room, remember? All the old geezers in North America go to Florida.

Item: housing prices. Most expensive in North America, right here in Canada. Higher than Silicon Valley. Higher than London England. The federal minister in charge of the housing portfolio admitted, on TV, that Canada will keep seeing these highest ever prices, because they want to encourage foreign buyers to buy shit in Canada. So rich guys from Germany and Arabia and China load up on Canadian real estate while Canadians are priced right out of the market.

Item: fuel costs are going up-up-up here in the Demented Dominion. I see ever-increasing numbers of rural houses with impressive wood piles out here in Hooterville. Mine’s not impressive, but I have one. What do you think it means for a society like ours when people start going back to burning wood for heat? Are those guys feeling optimistic about the future?

Item: In the Toronto Sun today, this little thing here.

Bill C-10, currently before the House of Commons, would give the government the power to regulate any content you generate and post online. Your video ranting on Twitter, dancing on TikTok, or pontificating on Facebook would be treated as a radio or television broadcaster.

 Yes, the Trudeau government’s answer to all of the above is to shut down the ability to comment on the Internet.

Fix the vaccine situation? No. Make The Phantom shut up about it? Yes. That’s what they’re going to do.
I suspect that this bill is directed at Rebel News, which has been exposing and embarrassing Trudeau and company for quite some time now. They managed to get Sun TV kicked off the airwaves, but it turned into Rebel on the internet and the CRTC can’t get them there. But they will come for The Phantom Soapbox soon enough.

Item: Have you guys looked at the Nebula and Hugo nominees? NK Jemisin’s entry basically calls for the elimination of Whiteness (that’s being generous, she may really be after the elimination of Whites.) There’s a few more equally bent in the nominations. Meanwhile they’re ripping down billboards advertising Harry Potter because JK Rowling mentioned that women are women and men aren’t.

Sarah said: “And the problem is because they have captured the centers of information that they, themselves listen to and believe, they are completely unaware that the rest of us are looking at reality and going “you’re out of your minds.””

I’ve been looking at gun control since Kim Campbell’s bill C-17 in 1991 and saying that they’re out of their minds ever since I started. It is the finest in head/ass insanity, propped up by lazy assholes lying with charts and calling it “science.” I’ve caught them at it so many times I don’t even try any more, there’s no point. You can’t have a scientific discussion with a deliberate liar.

I’m late to the party. Barry Goldwater was screaming about this shit in 1964.(Side note, nobody ever said anything about it in Canada until lately. The control of the media here is 100%.)

But here we are, 2021. Now Joe Average Canadian, the biggest, thickest hick in the world, finally sees what Goldwater was screaming in 1964 and what The Phantom has been saying since 1991. The government acts always and only for the convenience and prosperity of… the government. Joe Average Canadian finally understands that he is a SUCKER and has been played his whole f-ing life by a bunch of scammers. Played like a Stradivarius.

Joe Average Canadian is pissed.

But he’s not going to do shit. He’s going to sit there, angry, and do nothing. Until he gets hungry, and it is cold out, and there’s no fuel for his furnace, and there’s no food at the store. Then he will finally get off his huge pampered ass and go complain.

Oh and by the way. In case anyone didn’t know, or forgot, and for all you -idiot- Lefties out there who lurk here at Sarah’s: Michael Foucault was a PEDO and child rapist. A prolific one. No, you don’t get a link, Lefties. Look it up.

I’m getting sick and tired of that quote “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” G. Michael Hopf.

I’m not calling the author stupid, mind. I mean, he has to be leftist enough to have gotten push from the establishment trad pub, and insane enough to write post-apoc fiction, but he’s obviously a marketing genius with that quote. The quote, however, is dumber than hell.

Worse than dumber than hell, it’s fatuous and the kind of dellusion someone will acquire when he looks at Roman history from A LONG WAY OFF and then decides this is some kind of law of nature. It is not a coincidence that I have seen the idiotic pronouncement attributed to Edward Gibbon, because that’s exactly the sort of person who’d make up that kind of pronouncement, looking back on a civilization he mostly got partial accounts of, and a lot of it through the descriptions of the lives of its prominent citizens, a lot of it done by the equivalent of our yellow press.

And right now several of you are staring at the screen in wrath and shock and going, “but Sarah, how can you deny that great wisdom.”

Very easily, and if you think about it, you will too. Part of what our side is resting on, when believing that fresh piece of bull crap is “WWII was a tough time, as was the depression, and it built men who went to the moon.”

Sure. Go ahead. cherry pick the data to fit your assumptions. What are you? A leftist?

Human societies and humans themselves are complex, difficult things to analyze. NONE of it is easy. And none of it is short and pithy enough to fit that kind of sentence. It is not a coincidence that the man writes post-apocalyptic fic, which, in general, is one of the most wanking branches of science fiction.

Yeah, I know, Americans talk about the depression and are like “we were forged in fire.” But you guys, who rest your understanding of the world on American history and that kind of hazy, unfocused idea of Roman history that comes from a great distance and scholars poring over it have no clue.

Yeah, the great depression was terrible, and it left scars in the collective psyche. Tell me, though, how many hundred thousand died in that famine? In fact, since Jamestown, how many Americans have starved to death or had to resort to cannibalism?

Guys, in historic terms, America should be the softest, most pussified country to ever walk the Earth. FROM ITS BEGINNING. Of course it’s not, and there’s a reason for that, that is a fair constant (can be destroyed, but Lord, that will take another 100 years) and has nothing to do with the pseudo-cycle above. (And yes, I’ll talk about it in a minute.)

In historic terms, all Americans have lived in “good times.” Most Europeans too, for the last 150 to 200 years, except for the long war of Europe.

I mean, let’s be honest and examine that quote in the light of the 20th century, shall we? Sure, Americans had the Great Depression and sent people over to die on foreign shores. Bully. Good for us, even if in retrospect, looking at it one wonders if WWI was a good idea. Once the dye were cast, sure, WWII was inevitable. It was really just the continuation of WWI and you could no more stop it, and stop us putting an end to it than you could stop a ball from rolling down a steep slope. And even if going over to fight and die in WWI was the result of a president who was, let’s face it, morally repulsive and authoritarian.

Meanwhile, France lost all its young men, twice. It starved. I mean really starved. We don’t have recorded instances of cannibalism, but I’d be shocked if it hadn’t occurred “a little bit, all over.” Its fields and villages were destroyed.

Do you know why every European man of the twenties and thirties smoked? Because everyone who fought the war in “Flanders” (and French) fields smoked to dull their sense of smell, so they couldn’t smell the piles of other young men rotting, just over the rise. Some of those fields, when you plow them still turn up uniform buttons and other metal bits with each plow full of Earth. Oh, and let’s not forget, whatever they grow on those fields is mostly grown on the results of decomposing human flesh.

Anyway Belgium got hammered too. Hammered so hard that according to a relative who lived there a long time, they have the genetic defects of extreme inbreeding. (I don’t know, never having researched it.)

So, you know, surely when WWII ended those two countries, where the kids on the streets starved, and saw death up close and personal were the toughest people in G-d’s green Earth, right? Snort, giggle. No. Really. Snort, giggle some more.

For that matter, if you look at countries where life is and has always been hard and people live on the edge of starvation: most of Africa, India, the vast ridiculous hell that is China, you would think it created really tough men who would build– No? Yeah, weird, isn’t it? Mostly hard times seem to create subservient, desperate people who will conform to whatever those in authority ask of them, without daring to say “boo” back.

Which is why the former East Germany is more likely to have authorities ready to stomp on your neck, Russia — a place where life has always been hellofhard — is full of peasants under whatever the tzar calls himself, and of all the countries who were put through the hell of communism, only Poland shows a little bit of a spine.

It’s almost as though hard times break people. Which is why totalitarian regimes bring hard times on as soon as possible. And soft times make people uppity and likely to talk back.

Um…. who would have thunk it? Only someone who has read history to any depth and is not going off the rose-colored glasses of conservatives who imagine the forties and fifties as some kind of golden paradise for America.

Look, sure, we were prosperous then, and it was an era of America dominance, but I’ll be honest with you, kiddies: It’s still an era of American dominance, and it will be as long as we want it. There are reasons for that. The fact that right now America is using its dominance to have protracted nervous breakdown and take the rest of the world along for the ride is not proof of anything, except that other countries will follow us, even when we lose our way. And we’re still prosperous. Though the Junta is trying to stomp that out.

We were going to have our lunch eaten, in order, since WWII by Germany, Japan and China. Except that none of those can or will supplant us as world leaders, because we are something quite new in the face of the Earth. What we are and what we do makes us capable of innovation, innovative thought, and incredible leaps of production (the Junta is having a hell of a time digging a hole even we can’t dig ourselves out of, and I’m not sure they’ll manage. For one, they won’t have very long.) And what we are and what we do makes us a threat for every old country in the world, which is why they try so hard to pull us down. (My guess is that all they’ll manage is to mutate us into something that scares them even more, but I am trying very hard to make sure it’s not something we hate.)

But for the record, the thirties, forties and fifties were not some great conservative wonderland. Just because the left claims it was, and keeps imagining they live in movie-fifties, it don’t make it so. They were in fact profoundly statist and regimented, and as close as America has come to communofascism: until now.

And all that quote does is convince people they’re caught in some great wheel of suffering, and must be punished for being “too prosperous” (in WHOSE opinion?) and too “soft” so their grandkids can be great. WTF, people? I was the one who was raised with fados. There is no predetermined tragic future, and if there were, there would be nothing gloriously tragic in it, and no virtue in enduring so maybe some time in the future — BRIEFLY — something great can emerge.

Your Dogma has thrown up Karma all over the carpet, and the fact none of it accords to lived reality makes me want to collectively bitchslap you so hard you taste next Wednesday. Which I guess is what this is.

And stop sniveling and coming back with adolescent bravado “Well, then, I guess history makes no difference.” Most of you have more degrees than college professors, and you’re not stupid.

Of course, history makes a difference. It shapes culture. But culture, like human evolution, is very slow to change. Oh, sure, it can change. And it changes faster than glacial-slow gene selection. (You are basically your ancestors, except for some very small differences. Your great grandfather, moved at birth — meaning he got decent nutrition and was raised here — here would be a normal 21st century man. So would your ggggggrandfather back in the eighteenth century. the culture has changed, not the genes.)

How slow does culture change? Well, as far as I can tell a lot of it survives even massive invasion and change in PEOPLE. For instance — and weirdly that’s what I was going to write about today, but it got tangled with this topic, so I guess I’ll do it tomorrow — the English are a violent people prone to civil wars and revolutions, and it’s amazing how much of that we’ve retained when at last half the people in the US at the time of the revolution had a good dose of non-English blood, and it’s gotten more so since.

The only really good way to change a culture is to take its people captive, change their language, forbid the use of their rituals. And yet, often, it still comes through, depending on the people you took and how strong their culture is. (Stares in Babylonian captivity.)

Yes, there are events in history that determine the character of the people. And they tend to reinforce each other.

But this idea that men are changed — rapidly — by their circumstances, and can be molded “soft” or “hard” depending on the times (and not the culture) is caca. It’s puerile. It’s unworthy of thinking human beings. It’s ABOVE ALL Marxist.

The Marxists believe humans are empty vessels into which upbringing and conditions (material conditions) pour everything, so that each human is a widget, and given the right (imposed from above) environment, the next generation will be perfect “Soviet Men.”

They’ve yet to manage it, though they’ve managed to break several generations, in several cultures. Arguably those that were already in a way pre-broken.

However, I will give the creator of that quote that he probably didn’t realize it was, in itself, designed to breed apathy and fatalism. And that he PROBABLY (maybe) knows it’s bullshit.

But it makes great sales copy.

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  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. ;)*

FROM PETER GRANT: Take The Star Road.

Nineteen-year-old Steve Maxwell just wants to get his feet on the star road to find a better homeworld. By facing down Lotus Tong thugs, he earns an opportunity to become a spacer apprentice on a merchant spaceship, leaving the corruption and crime of Earth behind. Sure, he needs to prove himself to an older, tight-knit crew, but how bad can it be if he keeps his head down and the decks clean?

He never counted on the interstellar trade routes having their own problems, from local wars to plagues of pirates – and the jade in his luggage is hotter than a neutron star. Steve’s left a world of troubles behind, only to find a galaxy of them ahead…

FROM MALCOLM JAMESON (rediscovered by D. Jason Fleming) : Bullard of the Space Patrol

After 60 years out of print, here at last are the classic tales of John Bullard’s rise through the ranks of the space patrol!

From his first posting as a cadet on the Pollux to the ranks of Admiral, enjoy the pulpy fun as Bullard battles dunderheads within his own officer’s ranks, as well as politicians and other poltroons… To say nothing of the outright thugs and dastardly villains of the enemy side!

FROM BLAKE SMITH: The First Adventure of Sir Garamond de Crecy.

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

FROM JAMES Y. BARTLETT: Year of the Sheep: A Novel of the Highland Clearances

Scotland 1805
The landlord has decreed that the people of the straths and glens must leave their homes to make way for the coming of the blackface sheep and their herders.
The people of the glens, who have lived peacefully there for almost a thousand years, do not want to go.

That was the central conflict of the Highland Clearances, a sad period in Scottish history. James Y. Bartlett’s sweeping historical novel about the Clearances in Sutherland in Scotland’s Far North, focuses in on one important—and historically accurate—fact:

Both the landlord and the people being told to leave were women.

Elizabeth Gordon was the 19th chief of Clan Sutherland, and was married to the wealthiest man in all of Great Britain. The clansmen she told to leave their homes in Glencullen were mostly women, as all the men in the village had been sent off to Europe to fight against Bonaparte.

But those women, inspired by the village shaman and healer, a white witch called Mute Meg; organized by the schoolteacher Anna Kenton; and led by the almost shape-shifting outlaw known as Billy Hanks, decided to make their stand.
Year of the Sheep tells the story of this painful conflict, from the beginning at the Battle of Culloden Moor, through the chaotic events of the French Revolution and into the peaceful glens of Scotland, where the fires unleashed by the changing times threaten to end a way of life that endured over many centuries.

In the hands of noted storyteller and novelist James Y. Bartlett (author of the popular Hacker Golf Mystery series), this story of the Highland Clearances comes alive. There are no happy endings in any tale of the Clearances, but Year of the Sheep will entertain, inspire and evoke memories of a way of life that has gone forever.

ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Elizabeth of Starland.

Stubborn as a mule? No, stubborn AND her mule.

Colonial Plantation LTD. abandoned ColPlat XI, writing the planet off as a tax loss after a series of severe Carrington-type events. Now, four hundred years later, Laurence V of Frankonia wants to write Elizabeth von Sarmas out of his kingdom, but like her Lander ancestors, Elizabeth refuses to roll over and die.

To survive, she needs to cross the continent, thread her way through a holy war, and find friends in the Eastern Empire—an impossible task for a sheltered gentlewoman. Or is it? Never underestimate a woman with a mission and a mule.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Witchfinder.

In Avalon, where the world runs on magic, the king of Britannia appoints a witchfinder to rescue unfortunates with magical power from lands where magic is a capital crime. Or he did. But after the royal princess was kidnapped from her cradle twenty years ago, all travel to other universes has been forbidden, and the position of witchfinder abolished. Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, son of the last witchfinder, breaks the edict. He can’t simply let people die for lack of rescue. His stubborn compassion will bring him trouble and disgrace, turmoil and danger — and maybe, just maybe, the greatest reward of all.

FROM JAMES YOUNG: Against the Tide Imperial: The Struggle for Ceylon.

Well, here’s to hope that my gamble is correct. For if I am wrong, I may truly regret this decision.—Vice Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, commander of the Kido Butai

July 1943. When the United Kingdom was torn asunder under a hail of German firebombs and nerve gas, the distant outpost of Ceylon was an afterthought for both Allies and Axis. Now, one year after King George VI’s death, the small island off of India becomes center stage for a titanic confrontation.

For Vice Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi, the Commonwealth forces on the island sit astride Japan’s sole reliable source of oil. With the Dutch East Indies’ refineries damaged during the Imperial Japanese conquest, Axis crude from the Persian Gulf and rubber from Ceylon’s plantations will be critical to the Japanese Navy’s ability to continue the war into 1944. Yamaguchi knows challenging Vice Admiral Andrew Cunningham may end poorly. Still, the Kido Butai is undefeated, and with good planning the Commonwealth’s Far East Fleet will have to face Yamaguchi’s carriers alone. With the Empire’s lifeblood on the line, the Japanese must roll the dice.

Across the Indian Ocean, Lieutenant Eric Cobb is  bewildered to be operating with the Commonwealth against Axis forces in Africa. Along with an Asiatic Fleet contingent that includes Captain Jacob Morton‘s Houston, Vice Admiral Fletcher’s forces set out to rampage from Madagascar to Mogadishu. Unfortunately for the Allies’ plan, the IJN’s unexpected attack forces them to immediately respond.

When established foes clash in a wholly unexpected location, brave men and violent execution will determine whether the Commonwealth holds Ceylon…or succumbs to the Tide Imperial.

Against the Tide Imperial is the third novel of the Usurper’s War series. As Allied and Axis warriors are faced with a completely different conflict than the one planned for decades, their actions will chart a new course for the Greatest Generation.

“Great stuff. Authentic, plausible, and action packed.”-Taylor Anderson

FROM CELIA HAYES: THE QUIVERA TRAIL

The Quivera Trail is intended as a sequel to the Adelsverein Trilogy,
 following the second generation and Dolph Becker courting and marrying Isobel Lindsay-Groves. Desperate to marry, Isobel and her personal maid, Jane Goodacre embark at Southampton for a new life in a new land — a place entirely alien, when compared to the gentle hills and established estates of England. Slowly but surely, the two women begin exploring their new country … and what they themselves are capable of achieving.

Dolph Becker’s uncle Hansi Richter, the ‘cattle baron’ as he is now called, has plans for Dolph and Isobel to establish a new ranch near the Palo Duro, in the
Panhandle region. Once the winter refuge of the Comanche, the Palo Duro
is now open to ranchers and settlers like their neighbor, Charles Goodnight. Dolph and Hansi Richter have an English investor for this new  property – but after a long-trail drive to get there and the labor of establishing it from the ground , they discover that not all dangers of the frontier are banished. The Becker and Richter families are soon embroiled in a vendetta with a vicious rustler gang.

Jane, meanwhile, finds a new outlet in teaching school – and a romantic attraction to Dolph Becker’s artist brother, Sam. She makes friends with Lizzie Johnson, school-teacher and cattle baroness in her own right, and with the formidable matriarch of the family, Magda Vogel Becker. Can  the friendship between Isobel and Jane remain unbroken in the face of these new possibilities?

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Pixie for Hire: Omnibus Edition

He’s a pixie for hire, and she’s just another job.

Lom is a bounty hunter, paid to bring magical creatures of all descriptions back Underhill, to prevent war with humans should they discover the strangers amongst them. Bella is about to find out she’s a real life fairy princess, but all she wants to do is live peacefully in Alaska, where the biggest problems are hungry grizzly bears. He has to bring her in. It’s nothing personal, it’s his job…

Lom lay dying. Bella was tasked with not only the job she never wanted, but the one she did. Could she keep Lom alive long enough for him to come to the rescue when their kingdom needed them? And what did Raven, mysterious trickster spirit and honorary uncle to Bella, want with them? If the threat was big enough to have the trickster worried, Bella knew she needed to have Lom at her side. Underhill might look like a soap-bubble kingdom, but Bella and Lom knew there was a gritty underside. Why else would fairyland need a dark man willing to carry a big gun and be the Pixie for Hire?

This omnibus edition includes the full text of all three books in the Pixie for Hire trilogy: Pixie Noir, Trickster Noir, and Dragon Noir. With a new author’s foreword, you’ll be introduced to the books and then plunge into the world Underhill.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Double Dragon.

Lieutenant Scarlet Magana was trained as ship’s crew, but it’s a good thing she also had dirt-side scouting training . . .

A distant planet. A damaged hyperspace colony ship. Lieutenant Magana and the rest of the crew discover that not only are they not the first arrivals . . . they may well be the third.

And then there are the dragons . . . and a serial killer.

FROM BECKY R. JONES: Academic Magic

Zoe has found her dream job at a small liberal arts college teaching the history of Medieval witchcraft and magic. Academic life is exactly what she expected it to be…until the squirrels stop by to talk with her and her department chair and best friend turn out to be mages.

Zoe discovers a world of magic and power she never knew existed. She and other faculty mages race to stop a coven from raising a demon on the winter solstice while simultaneously grading piles of final exams and reading the tortured prose of undergraduate term papers. But first, she must learn to master her new-found powers.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: CHIEF

Janet and John Edit RNA – by Francis Turner

A.k.a. John Ringo is a prophet and probably about as well appreciated as Cassandra and the various biblical prophets in their own country.

Mr Ringo did a speech/facebook post almost 10 years ago called “The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse”, which is depressing and which you should go read. I was reminded of that post when this UPI story popped up at Instapundit recently.

‘Universal’ coronavirus vaccine may protect against variants, common cold

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

An experimental COVID-19 vaccine could potentially provide universal protection against future COVID-19 variants as well as other coronaviruses — maybe even the ones responsible for the common cold.

…

This experimental vaccine takes another tack. Researchers genetically engineer E. coli bacteria, removing the parts that make people sick and adding the coronavirus spike protein target to the surface of the bacteria.

The bacteria are then killed off and injected into the person or animal, where the immune system recognizes it as an invader and mounts a defense. The bacteria itself prompts the immune response, rather than something produced by human cells.

“All that you need to do that is you take your bacteria, you grow it and then you inactivate it with a little bit of formaldehyde, and that’s your vaccine,” Zeichner said.

Genetically editing E.Coli is something I know a fair amount about because about 20 years ago that’s what the startup I was working for was doing. We modified the bacterium so that it created interesting enzymes that could be used to create drug pre-cursors and the like. If we’d known anything about viruses and the need to create vaccines we could have created this one just as easily. At the time it was a moderately fiddly process to get the modified DNA to work, our scientists were exceptionally able and got the process working most of the time. These days it’s something that can be done by a moderately competent lab tech with 95% reliability. More to the point the equipment needed to do the whole thing now fits on a single lab bench and there’s no need for complicated sterile environments and the like.

The article mentions that a 1500 liter vat could make correctly modified e.coli very very cheaply and that is absolutely correct, all you need is a bit of warmth, water and some nutrients (sugars and minerals) and a week or so for the bacteria to reproduce to eat most of the nutrients (but not all, if they eat all then they die prematurely and that’s NOT GOOD for QA). You then filter the bacteria out using a large coffee filter (well OK a slightly better grade filter than that but not much), add the formaldehyde to kill them quickly and bottle the result which you then store in the fridge. You could, almost as easily, create a continuous process that pulled out liters of concentrated bacteria every hour at one end while adding new nutrient at the other. Once you had this going the cost of the process would be similar to the cost of brewed beer (i.e. well under $0.10/liter in bulk and you’d be able to make several doses (10? more?) per liter so the raw cost per dose would be under a cent) and the cost of packaging and distribution would be greater by orders of magnitude than the cost of making the vaccine.

Assuming the vaccination bit works, this really is trivial to produce in bulk with today’s technology and given that killed whole-cell vaccines have been a thing for a century or so we know that it’s going to be safe (as long as you actually kill all the bacteria – see the Cutter incident with the Salk polio vaccine). In fact if you copy this for other viral families then this will allow us to create vaccines for most viral diseases. You just need to find the common bit in the viral family to express on the E.Coli outer membrane and the DNA needed to get E.Coli to reproduce with that change. Given that the E.Coli genome is one of the best known to science once the scientific research that explains how to create the Coronavirus spike protein has been published any halfway competent PhD student will be able to modify it to see how effective it is for some other viral disease.

In a decade or so, presuming this and/or some similar efforts work, I would therefore expect that most people will be vaccinated against most know viral diseases (from Ebola and Wuflu down to the cold) and the cost will be something like $1 per person for the lot.

That’s the good news.

But Mr Ringo was predicting bad things, and so do I or at least I want to warn about the possibility of bad things. So let’s think how things could go wrong.

There’s the obvious failure to properly kill the bacteria. Now, unlike injecting live polio, injecting live E.Coli probably isn’t going to lead to death, but it’s not a good thing and especially when we get to the point that the immunizations are given to children it’s likely to cause serious side-effects. It could also result in the GM strain getting out into wild where it could mix and mutate with other produce interesting hybrids.

This won’t necessarily be a problem in the developed world because the QA processes in place should catch this kind of failure before the vaccines get distributed, but in other parts of the world that is not necessarily the case and once a hybrid strain gets out it can (will) spread worldwide. Note that both the Russian and Chinese wuflu vaccines have been notably less effective than the four western ones and one wonders how much of that is due to QA not catching errors like the one in the US where some morons mixed the up AZ & J&J vaccine ingredients and thereby trashed several million doses.

But then that kind of accidental error is not the real issue – the real issue is a deliberate different modification of E.Coli. Recall that some E.Coli strains are a normal part of the microbiome in your digestive tract. The question to ask is not, how can this vaccine effort go wrong? but rather, what have Chicom/Russian/other research facilities already done to modify E.Coli? and what happens when those E.Coli are released? Someone who brought in a vial of live modified E.Coli stuck them in a 100l tank with the right heat/nutrients and then caused the output of that to be spread in the misters of various supermarkets could cause a lot of fun. Precisely what would depend on the genetic modifications, but while zombification probably wouldn’t be one, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

As I know from my own former career, it’s not too hard to create E.Coli that produces pretty much any enzyme you want, and quite possibly any number of non enzymatic chemicals. So you get this E.Coli living in your stomach and it produces some kind of slow acting poison or something that (say) converted vitamin A to something useless. Then you and everyone else exposed would gradually go blind. Figuring out that this was caused by a mutant E.Coli would be a pretty long term project and in the mean time you have thousands of people who need intravenous injections of Vitamin A.

That’s the subtle attack, but you could go for the less subtle version. If, for example, the Chicoms really wanted to get rid of the Uighurs the right e.coli distributed in the rations could do the trick nicely. As John Ringo notes, if done correctly, it could attack something that Uighurs are genetically susceptible to but Han Chinese are not.

But then there’s the problem of evolution and the related problem of accidental release of it where it wasn’t meant to be released. E.Coli is a remarkably adaptive bacterium and the targeted bioweapon is likely to evolve to one that is less targeted. So once it’s wiped out most of the Uighurs it might evolve to wipe out lots of other humans too. And this assumes that the developers of the mutant E.Coli got the genetic susceptibility right in the first place which is likely not as easy as the developers of such a mutation might hope for. What this means is that if someone develops a mutant poisonous E.Coli as a weapon it is likely to spread widely far beyond the target population. (See also rumors about the origin of Wuflu and note how THAT bug has mutated in the last year)

The final problem is what happens in another 20 years when the Moore’s law improvements to Genetic Engineering take the current lab bench sized equipment and turn it into something the size of a food processor. At this point creating your own strain of E.Coli is the sort of thing high-school students do as a final year project. And this is where John Ringo’s warning really hits home, because now we see the pretty much inevitable release of thousands of GE strains of E.Coli into the wide world where they can mix with each other and more normal strains to produce who knows what. Fun times.

The only good news is that the techniques that have led to the current Wuflu vaccines can be used just as easily to counter all the plots of the mad mullahs and other would be killers and that, as with technology in general, there are a lot more smart people on the good (or at least the “don’t want to kill everyone”) side than on the genocide.

*Francis asked I add this link:

Brazil rejects Sputnik V vaccine, says it’s tainted with replicating cold virus. – SAH*