What seems like centuries ago, and was in fact in the last century, after the fall of the USSR, I watched as the wheels came off Science Fiction short stories, in a sort of mini-fit-of-insanity.

I kept bouncing between being horrified and being amused, all of it worsened by my being pregnant/nursing/raising toddlers which, for those who have never experienced such a state is its own form of altered reality.

So, what happened from my POV was this — note that things might be different from how you remember it, due to how I experienced things.  This is not to say (THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT) that reality was different for me, only that I experienced things in a different sequence due to spending some of the time in another country, and coming back and experiencing as new things that had gone on here for a while —

When I fell in love with SF/F in Portugal there were no magazines available in the language, and the books were available in jumbled ways.  This is because Portuguese publishers always published things in such tight batches that — like now — older releases (particularly) by popular authors disappeared. Unless you could find them in used bookstores, in forgotten tobaconnists in tiny villages you were passing through (how I found Glory Road) and/or in the back of your friend’s grandfather’s closet, while helping people clear the house.

This means that not only didn’t I have a clear view (still don’t except very vaguely) of trends/currents in sf/f, but I came it all at once, from pulp to new wave, and read it all uncritically and without knowing which was more recent. (What this did to my science education and my understanding of world history is something different. You should have seen my teacher when she realized I thought WWIII (nuclear) HAD happened “about fifty years ago.”)

But I HEARD of science fiction magazines.  And though this wasn’t my plan, exactly, on coming to the US and finding the little town in Ohio where I was an exchange student had an entire shelf of Sf/F, that I could buy Heinlein books I never heard of at the local(ish) Waldens, and that ZOMG Analog still existed and published every month, I immediately subscribed to Analog, Asimov’s and possibly others (look, it was 40 years ago and I’ve been busy.)

My months became determined by when those arrived in the mail. I.e. I’d grab the magazine from the mailbox and lose the next day as I read it cover to cover, which means I learned to do my homework early/late so that I could work around it.

A lot of the stories I read in those magazines were of the “the Soviets win the war/we destroy the Earth” nuclear war variety, and then we have to live/survive.

It didn’t strike me as wrong, precisely. I mean, we were “all waiting for the hammer to fall” right? I was a little upset there weren’t a ton of space operas and colonization stories, simply because I had enjoyed those, but not enough to be really upset.  Just a “oh, I wish.”

At the end of the year I went back and after an epic bureaucratic battle with the college system in Portugal (they really aren’t set up for stepping out of the system for a year) I went to college, and taught part time, and developed a social life.  So, things got rather busy.

Four years and a bit later, when I got married and came back to the US, I again subscribed to SF Mags, and at the time got irritated that all of the stories had a slant of “the west loses out”.

Okay this isn’t true and is a gross simplification, but I found myself little by little not reading those very expensive magazines, because they all seemed to me to paint a picture of the future amounting to “the future is worse than the present. Also rusty.”

There were still stories I liked, but not enough for me to remember this much later.  (Though some of the authors stuck and I found their novels later.)

Over the next six years and fertility treatments (talk of hormonal insanity) I popped in and out of reading sf/f as the spirit moved.  Some friends recommended epic fantasy series, but this was never precisely my thing, and I also found a lot of books I didn’t know were decades old and enjoyed those, while at the same time also reading a lot of mystery.  Oh, and history. And– whatever.

But I remember the years after the USSR fell, because I had a kid that year, and another 3 years and change later, and we moved to Colorado, I joined my first writers’ group and subscribed to Writer’s magazine and Writers’ Digest.

These events are tied together because getting pregnant meant deciding not to work outside the home, moving to Colorado destroyed my nascent translation business (look, here’s the thing, pre-internet it was local contacts, which I was JUST forming) and anyway, I HATED translation (don’t ask. I don’t actually hate the work. I just hated doing the work necessary to establish as a freelancer.  And it wasn’t QUITE my thing.  I like puzzles, I just don’t LIVE to solve them. I’d met other translators and become aware I was an odd one for the profession.) and my husband had said “Well, you always wanted to write for a living, so why don’t you try it while the kids are little?” (It SEEMED like a good idea at the time.)

We won’t go into how green I was. Very. Let’s say that.  So the ideas that you should a) first break into short stories seemed logical (it wasn’t) b) buy magazines to figure out what they published was mind-blowing (because I’d been raised with the idea of the genius around whom the world conforms. S, if I were good enough, I’d be published, no matter what the publisher wanted.)

So somewhere, while pregnant with #2 son I re-discovered sf/f magazines.  (We’d also just popped out of a phase where we could barely afford to eat, and finally had money for mags.)

And–

Dear Lord, what was I reading?

What I was reading was the same stories I’d read as an exchange student, now with a very thin veneer to explain why the nuclear war had happened and the USSR had won.

I remember being somewhere between horrified and amused.

It all culminated in a short story called The West Is Red, which was very well written and I THINK (I can’t be assed to look, actually) won all sorts of awards, and whose central conceit was that economics in a parallel world worked differently and therefore the Soviet model worked better.

I read the story — it was well written — and then sat there, mouth half open, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

And decided the field had suffered a psychotic break.

Look, economics COULDN’T work differently, because economics, while a science, is a science influenced by a bunch of other sciences and the reality we live in.

While I can see that SF/F does that a lot, and have done it myself, with say alternate history, because history is too complex to say “if this didn’t happen that that would.” (There are always a million factors, some of which we don’t even know.) So we write high-level and ignore the details and dance really fast before they see what we’re dancing in front of….

Positing that top-down planned economies would be superior in another universe demanded…. a lot of things, starting with a species so different from humans that we wouldn’t understand them period. It also demanded different arithmetic and mathematics, all of which (behavior and math) are parts of economics that cannot be changed without changing the very fabric of the universe to such an extent you couldn’t have A story, let alone that story.

But I understood why the story appealed, and why it had become popular (besides being well written.)

I had at around that time come across something that said that after 45 people don’t change their fundamental view of the world, and I understood that was the problem.  You see, the generation before mine, the boomers who were then in charge of cultural institutions and academic institutions had grown up not just convinced that the USSR was superior, their economy better than ours, but that they WOULD WIN.

This was true on both sides of the isle, which is why eve republican presidents tinkered with price controls and regulations, but didn’t change the system. One way or another, planned economies won out in the end, right? The future had less freedom. The USSR won. It was all a matter of how we got there.

And then Reagan. Reagan and his crazy ideas, which if you remember, couldn’t work.  But did. And the USSR fell. And we found what a hollow, sad thing it had been, because PLANNED ECONOMIES and central control don’t and can’t work.

Only the people who’d bet their lives on it, the cultural vanguard of the generation that made “come the revolution” a saying couldn’t change. They were too old and had bet their entire lives on this believe system.

So instead of changing they found various excuses for why reality was wrong, history was wrong, and they were still going to win.

That short story, now that I look back, is perfectly emblematic of that psychotic break, that primal scream of irrationality.

They took the fight to watermelon “ecology”and bizarre implementations of language controls which were supposed to become thought controls.  They came up with the idea of making Marxism apply “of course, not to macro society and economics, but to specific fields” and applying Marxist analysis to literature and art and all sorts of crazy things.

And they raised their kids, the echo boom, that way.

In many ways, locked in their primal “but it can’t be true” scream, they started an attack on reality itself. And taught their kids that reality was optional.

Of course it’s not.  Which is why every field they controlled then is now in a state of total collapse, or being replaced.

But they haven’t given up because they — and the kids they raised to be quite literally reality-denying-psychotics — can’t give up.  To give up is to admit their view of the world was wrong. They can’t do that. And their kids couldn’t find reality with two hands and a seeing eye dog, because they’ve been told it doesn’t exist, and if it did, it would be oppressive.

Which is why we find ourselves facing people who tell us that math is oppressive and colonialist.

And also attempting to institute a system of apartheid and racial castes under the impression these are civil rights.

None of it makes sense, unless you realize that the “luminaries” of “intellectual” life might as well be locked in a padded cell screaming in a non-existent language at the oppression of reality.

The entire insanity that is 2020 was foretold by the fact that the science fiction establishment saw nothing wrong in positing that economics could work differently in another universe, so that they could have been right all along.

They’re not the majority.  They still, largely, have control of the “official” culture, though frankly they’re so bloody incompetent that we’re starting to do things under/over/around that actually count for more.

They’re also not really effective, in any way.

But they have enough power to give everyone the impression the universe is coming apart at the seams.

It’s not of course. THEIR universe is coming apart at the seams, because it was never the real world, but a construct of pseudo-intellectual-superiority, unearned smirking and USSR agit-prop.

Reality is that which doesn’t go away no matter how much you wish it to or scream at it, or denounce it as evilracistpatriarchaloppressive!

Which is why in the end we win, they lose.

But dear Lord, the screams and the literal poo-flinging is getting irritating.

‘

So, in a stunning demonstration of lack of reading comprehension, some rando left me a comment on one of the posts this week. It had a million (highly insane) links, give or take, so of course, it wasn’t approved. Besides, I think it was a first comment, so it was pending anyway.

In the post I mentioned I don’t think it will be as bad here as it will be in Europe. In the context it was obvious what I meant is that I don’t (at this point. More idiotic lockdowns or whatever these crazy people come up with next) envision us having actual starvation in the US.

The reasons for this are obvious: look, we are a continent-wide nation and also have some of the most productive farms in the world. In fact we can feed ourselves and most of the world. The fact that international trade has stalled and international charity is difficult in the middle of the aristo-imposed covidiocy doesn’t affect our food supply.  Food distribution might be something else, but Americans are actually contrary to various rumors the most generous people on Earth. Also, the most adaptable.

Most of us have been making arrangements to ensure we don’t starve (we really don’t expect much of government) and those who haven’t will probably still be taken care of.

Anyway, the first shock of this comment was the fact this person was disputing that America was better off (in the matter of feeding everyone) than Europe, because “no one accepts American bonds as collateral, not even for overnight loans.”

Uh, besides the fact that I know this is bullshit (yes, okay, our monetary system is jacked up. So is most of the world right now. And we lost less to covidiocy than… oh, Germany) because if it weren’t — if the world really stopped keeping dollars as world-currency — we’d already have collapsed completely as far as monetary value, the idea that he was disputing food or lack thereof with monetary system was almost awe-inspiring stupidity.

He then went on to reassure me even the poorest EU countries had access to cheap loans.  What? Are these people such complete nincompoops and children that they don’t understand the concept of “things money can’t buy”?  As in, if there isn’t enough food to go around, I don’t care what you’re offering for food. There isn’t any to buy.

Apparently the AOC school of economics now not only thinks you can print money indefinitely without affecting the value of money, but that money itself is food.  Government is like onto the Lord himself, able to pour Mana down onto them. In fact no one needs to toil. Things will just rain down on them.

Which probably would still have gotten approved (I know how much you guys love chewtoys) except for the very last paragraph about how he/she/it had a friend being taken care of by some sort of socialist national health boondoggle who “would have died inn the US, since she’s unemployed and doesn’t have insurance.”

I’m sick and tired of this article of faith on the part of various Europeans. We keep telling them it has happened to no one EVER in the US. In fact, most of our ICU beds etc. are taken up by people who not only can’t pay, but who aren’t even citizens or even legal residents of this country. In fact, a great part of why healthcare is so expensive in the US is that we treat anyone who crawls over the border, no matter what medieval diseases they’re carrying.

At one time, when my then nom the blog (took her out in the woods, shot her in the head. She was threatening to take over. Never name a thing) was on some site, I think Free Republic, we discovered that a bunch of Europeans commenting believed this, and we started yannking their legs.  I think we were all the way up to “live in a cardboard box, in the middle of the highway, drink a cup of cold poison, polish the dirt” before they started SUSPECTING we were pulling their legs.

It’s not their only bit of insanity, mind you.  A good number of them — despite the fact that their own mental health policy has saddled them with the same issue — believe our homeless are homeless because there are no jobs, and no charity organization will look after them. Instead of mentally ill people who resist or are refused treatment, criminals, and people with substance abuse problems. (Or some overlap of all three.)

And we won’t even get into the fact they believe our crime is much, much worse than theirs.  For that I blame Hollywood, mostly, because I remember believing the same. it was still a surreal experience to sit in a Portuguese shop whose windows had medieval-thickness iron bars, in a country where even nice houses in good areas have bars on windows and tall walls, and have the shopkeeper tell me — back then living in Colorado Springs, downtown, and often forgetting to lock my car or my front door, and more than once accidentally leaving my purse in the car for a couple of days, with no untoward incident — that America seemed like a lovely country, but she didn’t want to live with that much crime.

But those at least are not part of government propaganda. The health care thing is. I’ve caught programs while I’m visiting about how bad healthcare is in the US and how, without nationalized health, they’d be left to die, like in America.

Now, I have been watching Foyle’s war, and the last season they crawl up an ideological hole and die there.  The first episode is about how much NHS was needed, and how people were just left to die if they didn’t have money, and–

I have no idea. England right after the war was a strange place, and I can’t say I’m proficient.  Maybe it was true.

But I know what they say about the US and all my hackles rose.  Besides, I know that in Portugal in the 60s for those not covered by Universal health (long story) healthcare was expensive as heck. My parents often say that they could have built another house, twice as large, for the money they spent taking care of my various ailments and pulling me through childhood. I believe them, though most of the “being rushed to the hospital to be given oxygen” was before the age of 6 and therefore fuzzy.  However my parents who were more or less broke, were never turned away at the hospital (save that I was denied incubator space, which honestly I think it’s because I could have messed their statistics.)

I know they sometimes went into debt, and paid it off, but were never turned away.

So I have serious doubts about the heartlessness of pre NHS British hospitals. I mean, it’s possible, the past being another country and all, but at this point I’m not even sure we could find out if it was true. Because all sources have pretty much been corrupted.

But still, you might ask why a program in the 20tens (I don’t remember the exact time) needs to harp on how much NHS was needed, how bad things were before.  And why the continuous barrage of “if you were in the US you’d be dead,” even though it’s not in any way shape or form true. AND why they feel the need to come to OUR blogs and tell us that, as though, you know, if we were dropping like flies we wouldn’t know it?

The answer is simple, and what I shouted at the TV “at last pre-NHS no one actively prevented you getting treatment, if you could get the money.”

I.e. the more their system circles the drain, the more they feel the need to invent “how bad it was before stories.”

But our reasons to oppose a universal payer system are very simple. Besides the obvious throttling of innovation, besides all other issues, there is ALWAYS the main problem (which has infected some of the US system since Obamacare.)

If you’re not paying your own way, you’re not an asset, you’re a liability.

I.e. in the US if you come in even without money, if you agree to pay for treatment, you’re an asset. Eventually, you’ll pay (over three years, completely broke us paid 20k for first son’s delivery bill.) They will do what they can to take care of you because, ultimately, you’re taking care of them. The doctors are not slaves. They’re being paid for their work. It might be delayed, but they’re being paid.

OTOH when you are part of an universal system, you become “one more liability.”  “Sure we can save this person with marginal health, but they’ll just get sick again and cost us more money. I say we put them in the (what was it?) Liverpool (?) pathway. Humane death for them, no more trouble for us.”

Now for those idiots who want free housing, free college, free everything: the same inexorable logic applies to all of it.

When you are reliant on society to provide everything you need, you’re a liability to society.  You are going to be evaluated in terms of what you cost versus what you can give.

Imagine that, if you will.  How much can you give back in terms of creating houses or degrees or whatever for others, as you age?  And if you’re just receiving from everyone, why should they give you the best/keep you around?

Honestly, it’s easier to believe that tasty, tasty Euros will feed the Europeans through the winter ahead than to believe that society is going to love you and look after you in every possible way through a useless (or merely expensive) lifetime.

The reason socialism/communism always kills, either slow (no births, euthanasia, etc) or fast (the mass graves of communist dictatorships) is that in the end humans become ciphers in an endless accounting book.

And beyond those who love us and whom we love, all of are, after all, a lot less trouble and expense when dead.

So the all caring state ultimately makes sure each of its subjects gets to the grave fast enough not to cost too much.

And that is what the “free shit” brigade here and in Europe should think about.
Not that they will, since they don’t know history. And thus, as Heinlein pointed out, have neither past nor future.

*So, what surprised me about this post: other than the fact that it’s still pretty much on point for what we need to do, is that now the left is helping us, by accellarating innovation and shutting down the institutions they took lifetimes crawling through.  Not that they think it’s what they’re doing. We have an entire briar patch situation going on.  And yet, they ARE helping us, and it’s a great opportunity to shape the future.  You know, it’s time. Go to work. Now. – SAH*

Arise, You Sons Of Martha – A Blast From the Past From November 2012

First, let me explain that right now my reading is full of French Revolution, for the second book of The Earth Revolution: Through Fire. Second that I have a cousin who was raised in France.  His parents came back briefly to see if they could establish themselves in Portugal when I was nine and he was three.  (It was a forlorn hope, and they went back and only came back to Portugal when he was in his twenties.  Fortunately for them he married a Portuguese woman and so they have the family nearby.)

Anyway, for that year, while his parents went back and forth to France to do legal stuff, he lived with us almost full time.  Among his accomplishments at three was the ability to sing the full La Marseillese.  The song impressed me immensely with its opening “Allons Enfants de la Patrie.”

The verse translated as “Arise” (or less grandiloquently) “Come on” “Children of the Fatherland.”

Of course, in English it has a very off-putting sound and for Americans it makes no sense at all.  This land is not our fatherland.  It might have molded our people, starting with showing the Pilgrims that if you don’t work you’ll die, but it’s not been the place where our DNA culled, filtered and mixed for thousands of years.

Anyway, this all came to me while reading Roger L. Simon’s rather dispirited article after the election, where he more or less says it’s all done, we’re no longer a center-right country.

As much as I like Roger, I’ll beg to disagree.  Even if that were true, we wouldn’t be a center-right country by less than one percentage point.  And if after more than fifty years of school indoctrination, media control, entertainment filtering, the left has only that advantage, it means at the very least that we’re a people with a hard head and that most of us find the way out of the plantation sooner or later.  This is confirmed by the fact that what gave the victory to Obama was the legions of (unemployed) under thirty years old.  These are people who, like him, are ignorant of business and the facts of life (I don’t mean sex.  That they know as much as previous generations, though they think they invented it.)  To him his rhetoric, the cooked unemployment numbers, the whole nonsense of needing more time because it was so bad makes sense.  They haven’t broken out of indoctrination yet.  And a lot of them want to be part of what they perceive as the “cool kids” (which at that age inevitably is the ones that curse more, have tattoos and have no visible means of sustenance.)  Most of them will grow up.  But the age group will be replaced by yet more indoctrinated youth.

Which means Roger is right about the causes: we must take back education, entertainment/arts, and the news.

I’m not sure he’s right about the solution.  His idea is that we need to go back, infiltrate, start our own long march through the institutions.

I have two problems with that.  The first is that it’s been tried.  Roger, as a recent convert, might not be aware of this, but the right didn’t give up on these fields.  Some of us even tried to infiltrate them by doing what we called “stealthing”  (which can be defined as “walk like one of them until you’re secure.”)

I still have acquaintances and friends (some of whom would surprise you) doing just that.

There are two problems with this approach – one is that the left, being a mystery religion, has so many signs, counter signs and symbols that it’s very hard to imitate the whole unless you believe it OR want to bring about their result.  The second is that they demand constant tests of loyalty.  It’s rather like infiltrating a criminal organization.

I might flatter myself that I had as good a chance as any, with my background, but I couldn’t do it.  Art is to a great extent a thing of the subconscious and things broke through without my meaning.  I also wouldn’t undertake the tests of loyalty, such as writing a book on how America had ruined my life.

The right let themselves be infiltrated because at some level the right had bought the left was the future.  It wasn’t that the people coming in weren’t obvious, it was that their bosses shrugged and sighed and said “Apres nous le deluge.”  Which left us in this fine mess. But the left thinks we’re evil.  They fight our infiltration with all strength.

The other objection to the scheme is that all of those fields are falling apart.  I think Hollywood lives, these days, mostly on foreign sales.  Part of it is that entertainment and the news are creating product no one wants.  (Which means I’m convinced that most people are still center right – where it counts.  Their wallets.  A lot of them just don’t consider themselves political and still buy what “everybody says” – never mind, the tribulation that’s coming will fix that.)

The other thing that’s hitting these fields is a wave of technological innovation that demands they adapt and innovate, something they’re UNABLE to do.

All of us in writing have watched with almost awe as again and again the publishing establishment balks the challenge and tries to force things back somehow to “business as usual.”

And this is because they can’t do otherwise.  It’s not in their makeup.

This is not cheap pop psychology.  It’s merely the result of how people become hard left, or anything to the right of Lenin.  Hard to center left don’t have to do anything.  They’re the good boys and girls.  They receive “wisdom” in the schools and they know by parroting it they’ll go far.  They never doubt, never stray, never go out on a limb.

I’m not saying they’re dumb.  Some of them are brilliant.  Some of them are even true artists and their product gives their spoutings the lie because their subconscious knows better than they do.

I mean, they are more creatures of the group.  Social approval is important.  They never strayed.

So their ability to innovate is limited to “improving on how things are done.”  When faced with the type of catastrophic change hitting  those three fields right now, they are flabbergasted and most of their reaction amounts to hands over ears and screaming lalalalalala.

Then there’s us.  If I had a dime for each conservative who starts with “I used to be liberal, but—“  Now the left trolls try to mimic this with “I am a lifelong republican” and that’s bs, and we all know it, because that’s not how things work.  But we all start more or less liberal, at least those of us under 60.

Heck, I was always anti-communist, but I didn’t understand why guns shouldn’t be regulated or why we shouldn’t have universal health care, or why–   Heinlein cured me, though it was a slow cure.

For most of us, coming to our present beliefs involved one or more Damascus Road moments.  (For those of other traditions, that was when St. Paul on his way to persecute Christians met with the resurrected Christ and changed completely – and no, I’m not as pious as I sound.  I was raised in a country where Catholicism is a course from elementary through High School, though full disclosure, my dad got me dispensation in High School because the priest who taught it couldn’t put up with my arguments anymore. He was a liberation theologist and I’m not a good person.)

A Damascus Road experience of the political kind involves suddenly trying to integrate an event or a circumstance that just won’t fit your mental map, being unable to, and then starting to examine all your received wisdom until you realize it’s all – or most of it a lie.  (I’ve had three, and yes, 9/11 was one of them.)

It involves walking around for about a year, wondering if you’ve gone completely insane, because “everybody knows” and yet…  And yet you can no longer believe it.  This gives you an impression of brokenness and loss of faith.

Those of us who survive it and stay the course are independent cusses.  People who are independent cusses socially tend to be creative too.  Or at least we are so far out of the box that we can’t find it.

This makes it easier for us to adapt when catastrophic change sets in.  And because the status quo establishment hates us, we HAVE in self defense to take to the new tech.

We’ve been doing so.  In droves.

However, Roger L. Simon is right and it’s not enough.

It’s not enough because the inmates just got four more years to run the asylum.  And with tech and society changing as fast as they are, these people have set the course to the 1930s, this time with more bizarre multiculti which also endangers us from abroad.

Guys, this ship is going to go aground and go aground HARD.  My friend Charles says that he doesn’t know what happens when a democracy implodes, but we do know: Empire.  Yeah, it’s possible that by being a different type of democracy we won’t get it, but I think it’s more likely we’ll just get a different type of Empire.  (Which, BTW, Soviet Russia WAS.)

We don’t have time to wait for them to die off and us to replace them.  IF we can keep the republic, we must accelerate this buggy.

Hence the title, which is actually from a Kipling poem, The Sons of Martha.  Again, if you don’t want to click through, it’s based on the New Testament story of Martha and Mary sisters of Lazarus, who are entertaining Jesus and his disciples.  Martha is bringing out the food and doing all the work while Mary sits and listens.  It’s in there to illustrate the difference between active and contemplative devotion, but that’s not important right now.  The important part is that Kipling picked up the tale and wrote a poem to extoll those who do real things in society: engineering, creating…

I think most of those who call themselves Sons of Martha in modern times are Engineers or scientists.  BUT it extends further.  They’re everyone who creates – everyone who works hard, breaks the mold, brings forth innovation.

We’re the sons and daughters of Martha.  And we must take up our heritage.

There’s not much point infiltrating the dying model.  It’s difficult, if not impossible.  It stains the soul, till you don’t know who you are.  And in the end there isn’t enough time for that.

But just playing with the new model isn’t enough.  We must consciously and vigorously push the new model forward in all ways possible.

I’ll propose some points, upon which you may enlarge at will and pass on to your several groups, which will enlarge them and in turn bring them back to us.

1 – Entertainment:

TV/movies: there is STARTING to be stuff on youtube that can compete with the commercial stuff.  This is not my arena, I don’t know what to do, other than wish I were twenty years younger and had time to learn animation.  The tech for that to be a solo thing is almost there but not quite.  However, this is not my area.  Those of you who are in the field, look to it, and come up with ways to go indie.

Books: Yes, I know tons of us do that, but a lot of us do it almost passively because it’s there.  Well, it’s time to put teeth in it. Accelerate, innovate, improve.  Let your beliefs through without preaching.  Write more.  Write better.  LEARN covers.  Help each other.  Make the traditional stuff look like the gray goo it is. Go.

Games: Those of you who know enough to supervise a team, create a pitch, put it on Kickstarter, see if you get enough to hire a team to make the games for you.  Again – GO, you have work to do.

2- News:

We have pundits aplenty.  Here and there a bit of news breaks through.  BUT believe it or not journalism is a craft, even if not practiced any longer.  There are ways to gather, test and filter news.  I was trained for it so long ago that it’s useless now.  At any rate, I think I’m more of the integrator/pundit.  Though I wouldn’t mind knowing how to do it.  If any of you know, teach the others.  Let’s start a blog or more of news-gatherers and (local) reporters.

We NEED that.  And if you have a face made for TV (well, let me lose another fifty pounds.  Am losing again, on new hormonal regime.  I MIGHT be presentable, unless all my skin sags and stuff… :-P ) do your news in video format.  Make it professional.  GO.

3- Education.  I confess here, I expected to have more time and for tech to develop more.  It’s there, it’s coming, I expected my grandkids to be learning at home/online/self directed.

We won’t have that time.  Some of the entertainment and news have to cover for education.  I’m thinking a YA detective series set during the American revolution might help…  YA romances might help too.  (I don’t think YA erotica helps anything, but maybe I’m a prude.  But there’s sweet-romance, i.e. without sex, and let’s admit it, 11 yo girls dream of their wedding and the great love.  There’s a market there.)

However, for parents like me who can be home with the kids but lacked the time to properly homeschool, we need … Online homeschooling leagues?  Online schools?  Online resources that can help de-indoctrinate kids who went to public school.

We need this, and we need it to be good.  My expertise in the field is now so rusty as to be useless.  At best I can glimpse what it SHOULD be.  But there are many of you with training and expertise.  It is your duty, for the sake of our republic, to figure this out, get together, form groups, explore forms, work like h*ll and create serious competition to the state’s indoctrination machines.  Now GO!  You have work to do.

If we succeed this might be the weirdest revolution of mankind, but it WILL be a revolution.

Arise, Sons and Daughters of Martha.  Our only chance to keep our republic is to claim our individuality and work around the stifling government that would herd us back to the nineteen thirties.

Go.  Innovation is in your blood.  Creation is your heritage.  Claim it proudly.

Be not afraid.  Go forth and bring us the future.

See this:  Longer Lockdowns Associated with Much Worse Economic Outcomes.

And this: How Did Spending on Health Care Plunge During a Pandemic?

And definitely this:  The Virus Doesn’t Care about Your Policies.

Now we know — of course we do — that our “elites” aren’t smarter or more competent than the rest of us.  In fact since the intellectual and… credential-granting elites in this country have been taken over by the socialists at least 4 generations, we’re suffering from the socialist 4th generation rot that comes from hiring, promoting and giving accolades based on ideological purity, instead of merit.  To put it mildly, most of these people couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel.

Though of course, some of the more competent older generations remain.

At any rate, we know they’re a bunch of incompetents, blinded by their Marxist cult. But–

But even for them this bizarre bonfire of destruction of global wealth and American wealth (Europe did worse than us out of this. People are already starving in third world countries. America, as usual is doing better. We probably won’t starve. But it’s going to be a mighty close shave most places in this country. And if you want to know how much wealth is being destroyed daily — not reported — look at people whose businesses are closing, or take a stroll through stuff like craigslist or letgo for your area.  I’ve never, not even in the depth of Obamanomics saw so many households in the “free” section, with “have to move.”  Yeah. People have to move when their livelihood is taken away.

So…. what is with the entire world jumping on the “let’s burn everything and destroy wealth” bandwagon when it was not only completely unproven, but it’s been obvious for two or three months now it does nothing?

I’ve been watching Foyle’s war. I think the last time there was this kind of wealth destruction, immiseration and destruction of the links between people, or civil liberties and free market was during WWII.

Nota bene. Every time that communism has been imposed, it is after this type of disruption. More importantly, every time that socialism, like what grips Europe and has a foothold here, was imposed on societies, it was in the wake of this type of disruption.  Even FDR needed the Great Depression, which he worsened and prolonged.

Also note that from the fitful and incoherent revolt in France, to the voting going against them in England, to even German farmers rebelling against their globalist Green Slavery masters.

The peasants had to be put in their place, but how? They need to realize how much they need their benevolent masters. They need to be convinced socialism and internationalism and the power of the state are their only salvation.

Well, they had great hopes Trump would start a war, with their needling countries everywhere to oppose us. That didn’t happen, and at any rate, they weren’t sure it could cause fast and vast destruction. After all, Trump has shown an ability to actually govern that Obama never had.  Oh, yeah, Obama did his best to destroy world economy and convince the ungrateful peasants socialism was the only salvation. He’s still trying, but the little man who wasn’t there was about as good for their purposes as for everything else, except enriching himself.

Thereby they — it remains to be known if China was the mastermind or implicated. Judging from Dr. Fauci’s ties to the Wuhan lab, I believe so. Though it’s hard to say which is the dog and which the tail — started the psy-ops operation we know as the Covid-19 crisis.

They leveraged the power they had remaining: mass media. And they kept people tied to it with lockdowns. And they convinced people to let the government dictate whom they can associate with, under what circumstances, and whether or not they can earn/make a living.

And it worked, so far. Magnificently.

How does it go from here? Well, ignore the riots. They are not the revolution. They’re kabuki theater.

As we all know Cassandra didn’t get half the kicking around she deserved.  However, my prediction is that they’ll largely unlock in September. Then when the normal colds and flu start, they’ll all be Covid-19, and they’ll slam us in lockdown again. And people will go along “out of consideration for their neighbors.”

And then, regardless of who wins the elections, by the end of next year, they’ll have a nation of beggars. Beggars who — they think — will be ready to take the yoke of their redeeming socialism again.

They forget several things, including the fact that socialism really is NOT new and untried. And that this crisis was so obviously ginned up that people know. Enough people — I think — remember and will remember.

Also, although these are the plans of second and third generation socialists, the ones executing them are fourth generation. Again, not able to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel.

I’m going to guess it will all go sour on them, and what results will be nothing like international socialism.

But with all that, given the people who think the way out of international nationalism is national socialism, those who think that the opposite of forcing women and minorities into upper positions is forcing them into lower, those who think that the opposite of caste system is a different caste system, just because they will lose, it doesn’t mean we immediately win.

What it means is that they’re going to make things hard, very hard for those of us who thirst for freedom.

These next few years will be centuries long for all of us. And I don’t know how many of us see the end of this.

It is as they used to say, “cultural and social forces.”  It’s not quite, but there is a reason that the crash is coming now. Several reasons, including the fact that the new tech doesn’t favor them, and that they’re suffering form 4th generation rot.

It is just our luck to live at this time. It is also our privilege.

Prepare. Resist. Real resistance, not the usual leftist theater. Protest. Spread the word of what this is all about. Make predictions, over and again.

And in September, make whatever final preparations you can, for yourself and those you can help.

We — any of us — might not make it to the end of this mess. But–

But our beliefs will.  And that’s the other thing: make your kids competent. Make sure. Make sure they work for everything, make sure they learn and work. Make sure.

Because in the end we win, they lose. It’s already started. But it’s neither going to be easy nor simple.

We’re in this because they’re losing. But they’re going to put us through hell on the way there.

Well–  And why not? Someone has to fight back.

Head up. be not afraid!

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 JEAN RABE:  The Dead of Jerusalem Ridge A Piper Blackwell Mystery (Piper Blackwell Mysteries Book 4).

Sheriff Piper Blackwell’s three-day vacation with old Army buddies ends in tragedy. At the same time, a vile hate crime along a county road enrages her department. Their forces divided, Piper and her deputies must solve both cases before tensions boil and threaten the rural fabric of Spencer County, Indiana. Only eight months on the job, the young sheriff must weave together clues to uncover both a killer and a secret that could scar her soul.

“Piper Blackwell is a smart and capable small-town sheriff, a thoroughly modern woman who leads a colorful cast of characters in this entertaining read. Well-crafted and suspenseful, THE DEAD OF JERUSALEM RIDGE adroitly threads the needle between Cozy, Procedural, and Action-Thriller. Jean Rabe’s fans⸺both old and new⸺won’t want to miss this one.⸺ Baron R. Birtcher, multi-award winner, and LA Times Bestselling author

“Rabe once again mixes the most colorful parts of a cozy mystery with the grittiness of suspense in THE DEAD OF JERUSALEM RIDGE, launching Piper Blackwell into the most personal, and potentially heartbreaking, intrigue of her career. Don’t start this story if you need to be up early the next morning!”⸺Janet Walden-West, GRW Maggie winner and author of The South Beach series

“Jean Rabe weaves a deceptively staid tempo of a tale in this new Sheriff Piper Blackwell novel that barrels into a starkly taut murder mystery. The main plot, supported by a riveting subplot, is masterly crafted with an intriguing cast of characters, a unique setting, and an ending that feels like a double sucker punch!”⸺Khaled Talib, author of the highly praised thriller, Gun Kiss

THE DEAD OF JERUSALEM RIDGE had me hooked from page 1. The characters were so real it felt like they could walk right off the page. Warning, once you start it’s next to impossible to stop reading until you reach the perfectly-crafted ending.⸺Angela Crook, author of Fat Chance and Chasing Navah.

(I want to point out after months of reading only Jane Austen Fanfic this series got me to read it. (Yes, I “read” other stuff, but it was audio books.)  I don’t know if it will last, but a series needs to be grabby to get me out of the P & P sinkhole at this point – SAH)

FROM MARY CATELLI:  The Wolf and the Ward.

A wolf wanders the land. . . .

Charity had thought it dreadful, being sent like a package to a man who might refuse to take her on as a ward. But when a wolf comes to look her up and down in the woods, and the man she is sent to greets her, making her wonder if she remembers something that never happened, she finds that there are problems far worse than that in the duchy.

FROM PAM UPHOFF:  Warrior At Large (Wine of the Gods Book 52).

Ice is back, and back in trouble! Fired from the Directorate, he’s working three part time jobs, and tripping over problems that a Warrior of the One can’t ignore. Spies from other Worlds and corrupt politicians is just the start

And with no one ordering him around, he’s free to deal with problems his way.

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: The Violet Mouse.

Trust me.
There are things in the lab no-one ever talks about.
Risk everything.
How far would you go to save a friend’s last hope?

Three friends, one fateful conversation. You can’t let your closest friends do something drastic, not if you can help it. When one of you has a a brilliant mind, another is a skeptic, and the last one is willing to be a guinea pig… should you stop them?

A short story.

FROM R D MEYER: Schism.

A single spark. That’s all it takes to ignite an explosion if the conditions are right.

Today in America, conditions are right for an inferno to engulf our nation. We no longer discuss; we screech. We no longer tolerate; we cancel. We no longer agree to disagree; we end relationships that have lasted years. In short, American society is on the edge of an explosion.

Schism is about all of our anger, all of our political rage, coming to the surface in a Second American Civil War. However, this one doesn’t divide us by northern states and southern states, but rather by liberals and conservatives, urban and rural, reds and blues. Spurred on by blog posts, news reports, and protests each side seems to participate in more out of opposition to the other side than any real principle, conditions for the spark grow more and more precarious, priming the pump of hate.

Beginning as what seems like a black and white case of terrorism, events morph into a political struggle over who steers the reins of power. One man seeking justice for his family spins out of control and drags our nation into the abyss while the loyalties of friends, neighbors, and even families are tested against the partisan rancor that pervades society.

Once events explode into a self-sustaining fire, cities burn. Journalists from varying outlets are executed for everyone to see. Power plants are shuttered to cut off each side from the energy our country has become so dependent on. And the whole time, as America is paralyzed in a struggle with itself, an ambitious military officer watches from across the ocean…

WRITING CHALLENGE

*For some reason I still don’t have a word for the challenge. Eh.

Write the opening two paragraphs of a story OR a two paragraph novel blurb based on THIS picture. SAH*

I am alive. I woke up feeling ill. I’ve been trying to write a chapter since 9 am. it hasn’t worked, though there have been naps.  I think I’m giving up.
Promo tomorrow morning and if I feel better, chapter in the afternoon.

BTW I’m not sure I’m ill. Might just be stress inducing auto-immune symptoms.

In the end, you know, Marx was right, but not in the way he thought he was, which is why the system he created is such a life-destroying sh*tshow and the world won’t be free or stop declining towards hellish living conditions in the spots invaded by it, till there are tickets sold for the annual piss on Marx’s grave gathering.

Seeing things, but then interpreting them upside down and sideways, btw, was bog standard for the angry, hirsute inkblot.

I went trough school with people like him. — and I’m sure you did too — These are people who are actually very smart. They’re just broken on their ability to understand things and take everything into account.

Some are control freaks who can’t understand that in real life, and human life particularly chaos gets a vote. They’d account for all the known factors and think they had the entire situation. (We see this in climate modelers, who discount things that can’t be controlled, like the sun’s variable output, and then pretend these don’t exist.)

Some are simply men of system.  Or women of system. They need a myth that “explains everything.” Which requires even more ignoring of inconvenient facts and ideas.

I suspect Marx was both.

I first encountered this type in a school friend in sixth grade.  She could read some passage, understand every word, but think it meant something completely different.

Something like “The sky was blue, the sun shone and the birds flew” and she’d come up with “He’s saying the world ended, and everyone is dead” and you’d scratch your head and go “The hell?” until she explained her thought pattern, which ended up sounding a lot like Marxist deconstructionism.

Oh, I forgot the third pattern of distortion, which Marx DEFINITELY had: the need to feel superior. If you see what other people have already seen and said, you are just one of them. You need to stand out and see something different and hopefully something that makes you more caring/superior.

Because our education has been taken over by crazy people who suffer from all of these and, to boot, worship in the church of eternal redistribution, there’s some bizarre idea that Marx was the first to notice the iniquitous oppression of the industrial revolution and/or speak out on behalf of the workers and that’s why his work is justifiable/important.

Please.

That’s like current idiots speaking out in favor of women in SF/F and thereby erasing ALL THE REAL PIONEERS. And the women who were in SF/F from the beginning. And reducing writers to their genitals/skin color. And ignoring personal inclination when it comes to writing sf/f. Or working in a dockyard. Or being an engineer.  (“You must do this for the sake of female liberation, comrade.”  “BUT I don’t want to do that.” “Doesn’t matter. You must be a slave to female liberation.”)

It’s in fact exactly like, because on top of all there was so much virtue signaling and currying favor with the ELITE OPINION of the time it’s not even funny.  Or do you think it’s a coincidence the elites EMBRACED Marxism (despite lots of attempts to claim the contrary?)

So, quickly: The industrial revolution was not a disaster to your average peasant. It was a disaster for landowners.

Yes, yes, the conditions in the factories were terrible. By our standards. The lifespan was very short. By our standards. The anomie of the big cities, yadda yadda.  When compared to what? Small villages? Ask those of us raised in them. Yes, there was child labor. As compared to what at that time? Other than the life of the upper classes?

Look, we don’t have to guess about this stuff. In India, in China, in other places that came to the industrial revolution very late, we’ve seen peasants leave the land where their ancestors had labored, to flock to the big cities, to take work we find horrible and exploitative at wages we find ridiculous.

And even if China has added “labor camp” and prisoner wrinkles to it, note that’s because China is a shitty communist country, not because the migration wasn’t there before. Also the labor camp aspects, as much as one can tell (and it’s hard to tell, due to the raging insanity of the regime) seem to have grown as the people grew more prosperous, as a result of the industrial revolution and thereby demanded higher wages, which positioned China more poorly as the “factory of the world.”

In fact, idealizing “living off the land” has been in place since at least the Roman empire, and probably before.  It’s also been MISERABLE at least since then and probably before.

Because pre-industrial revolution farming sucked. It sucked horribly. And it kept you on the edge of subsistence. It double sucked when you were subjected to a Lord.  Look, systems of serfdom, etc. didn’t come about because living in a Lord’s domain was so great, and everyone wove wreaths and danced around maypoles all the time, okay?

The bucolic paradise of a farmer’s life was mostly a creation of city dwellers, often noblemen, who saw it from the outside.

There are estimations that most people had trouble rearing even one child, and most of one generation’s peasants were people fallen from higher status. I don’t know. That might be exaggerated. Or it might not.

Even during the industrial revolution, it was normal for ladies bountiful to take baskets of food to tenant farmers because…. they couldn’t make it on their own.

And btw, the more the industrial revolution pulled people to the cities, the more the Lords and “elites” talked about how great the countryside was and how terrible the factories/cities/new way of living were.

A lot of artists and pseudo bohemians jumped in on this bandwagon and so did Marx, who was both a pseudo bohemian, by birth “elite” (Well, his family had a virtual slave attached to him. He impregnated her too, as was his privilege), and by self-flattery intellectual.

Therefore the factories were the worst thing ever, the men who owned them, aka capitalists were terrible, terrible people — mostly because Marx wasn’t one, and probably because they laughed at him — and the proletariat they exploited horribly would rise up and–

All bullshit of course. Later on his fiction needed retconning by Anthony Gramsci who, having the sense to realize the “workers” weren’t rising up, just getting wealthier and escaping the clutches of the “elites” more made the “proletariat” a sort of “world proletariat” centered on poorer/more dysfunctional countries. This had the advantage of making the exploited masses always be elsewhere (or the supposed exploiters) and therefore made it easier to pitch group against group to the eternal profit of rather corrupt “elites.” Mostly political classes which are descended from “the best people.”

But Marx was right.

I mean, in one small thing. The history of humanity is a struggle between self proclaimed “classes.”

It just has absolute ZERO to do with who owns “capital” and who “works” all of which are bullshit class divisions.

The struggle is between those who want to outfit humans with saddles, so they can ride them like ponies and those who escape being ridden.  And both tendencies appear to be cultural.

If you’re culturally descended from the romantics, who found living in the countryside great and the industrial revolution a tragedy, you might be an idiot. If you’re not an idiot, then you’re probably identifying with the rulers who, looking from the outside, thought that living off the land was great, and the famines and struggles, honestly, probably more than those dirty peasants deserved. I mean, the rebellious masses never tug the forelock enough amiright?

Most of Marx’s most vociferous followers in the present, including Sandy of the Occasional Cortex and Bernie are of this kind.  “The masses need to be ruled, and I’m just the person to do it.”  They might use the environment or the land, or whatever to justify why their way is best, but what they mean is “These people should live in poverty, so I can have my inevitable place as their ruler.”

If you’re culturally a bourgeois, you’ll be accused of all sorts of horrible things. They’ll throw stuff at you, tell you that you want to exploit people (they project like an imax) and call you unimaginative, a stick in the mud, conformist, and whatever else they find.

In fact, you’re something quite new in the world.  You neither want to be ruled nor to rule.  You want to rule yourself. You apply the virtues of thrift, self control, and planing, to stay out of the clutches of the would be nobles in government, and you don’t have any interest in paying for those who refuse to follow those virtues either (though you’re unreasonably generous, often, to those in genuine need.)

The Marxists hate this so much they made bourgeoisie an insult. They keep trying to justify the success that comes to those who observe principles of self rule as all sorts of “privilege.” They keep trying to show that those who just let themselves be ruled are much better off, but the lie only holds up as long as no one actually looks closely. I mean, look at the “ruled” cities in the US.

These are, broadly speaking, US. The people who neither want to lead nor follow, but want to tread their own path and earn their own way.

And in the US we’re still majority.  (The tell was when people in 2016 voted for the candidate that promised the jobs instead of those who promised welfare.)

The intellectual descendants of Marx HATE that, and keep trying to tell us the “struggle” is between wholly imaginary classes, “workers” “Intellectuals” “capitalists” or between races, or between sexes.  Anything to continue refusing to own up to the fact that they have all these lovely spurs, and we’re supposed to wear the saddle, so they can ride us.

And this is why though they have hundreds of countries who conform to their model, they must take us down. While we exist, we refute their beloved theory.

And it’s why we must fight like rabid wolverines.  Because we have nowhere else to go.

Keep fighting! Make the annual pissing on Marx’s grave festival a thing.

Do it for humanity.

Do it for the future.

Do it for the children.

 

(Posts on PJM this week (two are behind paywall. Should you decide to pay for them/membership please use discount code HOYT):

https://pjmedia.com/columns/sarah-hoyt/2020/07/28/were-seeing-the-death-rattle-of-the-revolution-not-its-birth-n722898

 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/sarah-hoyt/2020/07/29/be-not-afraid-in-the-end-we-win-they-lose-n725921

 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/sarah-hoyt/2020/07/31/the-lessons-from-history-on-masks-its-kabuki-theater-all-the-way-down-n727861

 

 

*We have a tendency to forget, but truly, this is a blast from the past.  None of this is new. It is just completely open now.  This is a new phase in a very old war — I’m so, so very tired — but hey, dropping the masks was not a smart move for the other side. Their deeds thrive in darkness. Be not afraid. Dropping their masks gives them no advantage -SAH*

Politics, Creativity, Loudness A Blast From the Past from September 2017

Lately I find myself wondering just how minority the vocal minority is, recently and more or less assuming “very minority.”

The vocal minority I’m talking about here are my colleagues who, uniformly and en masse, give the impression that every creative person exists in a spectrum between Lenin and Stalin.

Anyone, including myself back when I was just a reader or a beginning writer with not many contacts, would be excused for thinking that somehow being lefter than left and thinking that communism was a cute and unexplored idea correlated highly with wanting to write fiction, particularly science fiction and [even more so] mystery.  Part of my decision to stay quiet early on was because I was sure this was so and that I was a very odd duck who had somehow made it through with the contradictory characteristics of not being a lefty and wanting to write.

More or less daily I heard people, some of them the few non-left who’d slipped in talk about how the left was related to creativity, mostly because the left required original, contercultural thought, which in turn of course was creative and related to creativity.

I’ll be honest, since I am by nature a trouble maker and — as my mom said, only half complaining — prone to scratching up every newly painted wall to see what’s underneath, that’s when alarm bells started ringing in my head.

Yeah, I know, it is part of the mythos of the left that they’re countercultural, boldly opposing centuries or millennia of oppressive politics, etc.  It’s a cute self concept, and it allows largely conventional, privileged, often rich people to think of themselves as the oppressed hordes or at least the defenders of those. [You don’t have to buy their narrative.]

But let’s be blunt, because honestly, I’m in no mood to cater to their delusions: this hasn’t been a fact since I was born, and probably long before.

If you’re a reader of early twentieth century fiction, say Agatha Christie, you’ll find that even back then the communists were treated as rather cute pets, or something like “those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”  Further, they were often from the rich and privileged classes.

In fact, growing up in Europe, I can tell you that contrary to just about every movie and tv series and book NOW published, communists were not the struggling under class (they were sometimes their over-educated young, though) but more often were the sons and daughters of the nobility or the upper class.

Dave Freer might have a point when he says the “aristos” instinctively sensed a system (top down planning) that, in the name of the downtrodden, would undo the revolutions that stripped their kind of power over the last centuries.  He might be right, particularly because that top-down alliance, i.e. the king or upper nobility doing things in the name of the poorest people to keep down the bourgeoisie was routinely played in Europe from about the 12th century onward.  Heck, you could say the French revolution was the result of Louis XVI trying to play the game, being singularly inept at it and getting burned.  (Beheaded.  Same difference.)

Anyway, for as long as I’ve been alive, in all Western countries, the way to be respected or promoted or advanced in any artistic, news or otherwise intellectual field was to convincingly mouth the platitudes of leftism in its Marxist incarnation.  If you could add a genuine touch of Stalinist psychopathy, then you’d be considered genuinely righteous and advanced faster.

So that was my first alarm bell ringing on the idea of “but leftists are more naturally creative because they have to challenge the existing system.”  How did that work, when they were the existing system?

Then came experiences, like speaking out, getting publicly told I was crazy (at the time speaking out more or less in private, in private lists and about minor issues, like telling one of the luminaries of the field that no, George W. Bush (!) didn’t raise the postage rate to bankrupt her PERSONALLY as it made her efforts to sell her used books harder.)  The thing was that everyone would pile on in public, and then the avalanche of “I don’t dare speak because I want to work/have children/etc” “but I agree with you” started, a lot of it from people my age or younger than I, i.e. in my sclerotic field, what passes for “youth.”

And I started wondering “How small is the vocal minority?”

I’ve since come to the conclusion they are very small and very scared.  To put things bluntly, again: a triumphant, confident cultural movement feels no need to shut down those who dissent.  They might argue with them, but they don’t shut them down.  They know they are most in accord with reality, most people agree with them, and eventually will come to their side.

Confident cultural movements don’t try to shut down dissenters and don’t deploy antifa to tar [or in 2020 physically attack] anyone who doesn’t agree with them with the brush of extreme right wing.

It’s only movements who are afraid the opposition has a point and has more adherents than they do that feel the need to be that violent.

Meanwhile in the creative fields of today (and even in the news fields and intellectual professions), the order of the day is the screaming down, shutting down, soft banning of all dissent.  We are treated to people acting as though soft-right speakers were an armed invasion of our universities.  Friends who aren’t even right wing enough to be considered non-left are enduring soft black listing from their publishers.

The result?

Well, you see, the left isn’t the creative side of this equation.  This is not because leftists are inherently less creative.  Saying that would be stupid, as only stupid people would maintain that creativity somehow relates to a political side.

It’s more because leftism is the establishment right now.  Which means they attract a whole lot of good boys and girls who want to be in the artistic/intellectual professions but who have never had an original thought in their lives.  If they’d lived in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, they’d spout blood-and-soil and genetic superiority nonsense because that was what would get them advanced.

There are still creative leftists (for the definition of left being socialism and communism) but they are usually pariahs along with me and everyone else to the right of Lenin.  That’s because then tend to defend their beliefs in non-standard ways and to find the good boys and girls of the establishment as awful as I find them.

Now, I think these people are wrong, and I often think they are morally bankrupt, but a lot of them are also extraordinary artists.

The good boys and girls of the establishment… aren’t.  They really can’t be.

Those of us who arrived at our political beliefs in defiance and iconoclasm, and who had to — back then — filter every item of news to find the truth beyond the narrative are creative by default.  You see, we had to reject so much of the entertainment fed to us, that we had to grind out own out of what was available.

So, as the establishment — LEFT establishment — clamps down ever harder on any dissenting thought, what they’re actually doing is destroying those few elements among them still capable of original creation.

This more than anything explains the slump in Hollywood earnings this year.  For how many years have they been milking the re-runs and remakes.

The publishing houses who demand a unified political narrative, put limits on imagination with cries of “cultural appropriation” and hire not by ability but by DNA are experiencing the same issues.  They might think it’s indie eating their lunch, and it is, but it’s only because they no longer have teeth to chew that lunch.  They abandoned their reading public DECADES before indie found it.  And they’re willing to go down with the ship rather than relinquish their political death grip on the product (again, not the sign of a confident cultural movement.)

As for academia… Good Lord.  Why do you think that liberal arts requirements keep getting added to STEM degrees?  What parent or even student would willingly pay for a field where Western history is banned because it’s “oppressive.”

The left, left to their own devices, would entirely dismantle Western civilization.  It’s always been their intent, partly because the USSR always considered itself “Eastern” and in communist propaganda, the perfect state was always an appendage of Russia.

But there are very few of them, and they’re stunningly non-creative.

The problem is that they have a grip on every accrediting authority, almost every publishing house, every museum, every cultural institution.  They acquired this by the long march and then refusing to hire/contract anyone not their comrades.

You must have a heart of stone not laugh like an hyena at the thought of a hundred years of long and slow march, and then indie, and blogs, and…

Are we at the tipping point, yet?  Not quite.  And make no mistake, we need as many hands as possible to the cultural war.  If you can you must write, or create art, or whatever.  It won’t bring you the same rewards, even now, as if you were a darling of the establishment, but the thing is…

The worm is turning.  The times they are achanging. We’ll have some losses (how not) but in the end, the cultural tide is with us.  The more the establishment clamps down, the more scared it looks, the more adherents it loses.

And their product is just bad.  In books, it’s becoming well nigh unreadable.  There’s only so long you can wear the skin of a gutted institution while demanding respect, before the putrefaction is clear and people turn away in disgust.

In the end we win, they lose.  Be not afraid.

 

 

And by us I don’t mean the right. I mean humanity, or maybe even warm blooded animals. Perhaps life itself.

There is a tendency to read any type of old, old myth and think “maybe that’s the memory of an old civilization.”  At least there is that tendency amid scholars, crazy people and science fiction writers.

Somewhere I have a collection of legends about the big flood from many pre-Biblical sources.  (These things are always published with much glee by a certain type of person who thinks that by finding these they “disprove” Judaism or Christianity.  It’s kind of infantile. To put it mildly. After all, let’s suppose there is a G-d and events related to Him, things He directly caused to happen on Earth. Do you know what the…. footprint of such an event would be?  I mean, let’s be real for a moment, okay? How many “pre-announcements/foretellings of 9/11 did we see in art and writing? as though an event that big projected back as well as forward.  How much more would something like a world-wide flood project.  Never mind. The type of mind that thinks that refutes world religions is the sort of mind who thinks “hey hey ho ho” is a policy refutation.)

Anyway, the book itself was interesting, but one of the stories in that book even I couldn’t imagine being a memory of an old civilization. It was how the flood was sent because humanity was too noisy and wouldn’t shut up, and some goddess or other got all upset and sent the flood to quiet them down.

I thought civilization ending PMS was just a step too far.  I’m no longer so sure.

Last week I came across a story — in much self-congratulatory tones — about how the shutdown had stopped the Earth vibrations.

Look, I have no clue if any of this is even real. These are the people who harp on and talk about vast flotillas of waste plastic in the sea, and make exhibits of it, but no one REAL has seemed to ever see one of these.  None of our friends who sail or cross the Atlantic have seen a single one. And you certainly don’t see it from planes. There aren’t any photos from people who just came across them and took a picture. None of that. It’s all just some article, some study, some denunciation.  And if you do the leg work, most of the pictures can be traced to some flood or tsunami that, of course, carried debris to sea.  This is not the same as being a litter bug and scolding us about littering and/or using plastic bags and straws does nothing to ameliorate the “problem” which at any rate is nowhere is big as they say.  Yes there is a problem with plastic waste — with all waste — off the coasts of China, but note, it is the West they lecture.

Anyway, so I don’t know if any of this is real, but the article said there were vibrations to the Earth caused by all of humanity moving and talking and driving cars (gasp, the horror.)  I have doubts about it, because it reads like all the crazy liberal bullshit “OMG too many people.”  I very much doubt our puny numbers are enough to cause vibrations or whatever, but you know, they believe it. And they were so happy it stopped with the lockdown.  Now, at last there was silence.

I’ve known they hate us for…. well, I think since I started paying attention, so probably around twelve or so.

It sticks out all over them. They hate humanity.  And to be fair to them (do I have to?) they are the inheritors of a long tradition going back to moralizing self-flagellating Christian writers, talking about how bad humanity was. They have learned from Rosseau on how bad humans are for rising above the animals. They fed on the Victorians and their moralizing tales of how animals were better than men (Was it Treasure Island that had the moralizing tale where man is judged and only dog speaks up for him?) And in the modern era, these early-weaned children of absentee parents who dumped them at daycare, were fed story after story of what I call hippie pap gone sour.  Because the age of Aquarius failed to happen, a lot of them went into talking about how bad man is, compared to you know, fish, or lichen or something.

You can find it in any zoo or museum exhibit. It’s that mainstream. The Cheyenne Mountain Zoo years ago had an exhibit that made me laugh until I couldn’t breathe.  They had tombstones of animals who’d gone extinct, starting, I think with trilobites. And then some half-baked ignoramus had topped it with a mirror for the kids to look into and underneath it said “you’re looking at the only animal who can cause extinctions.”

And, apparently, time travel.

This is one of the reasons my kids know how to swear in Portuguese. (Praying, swearing and counting are still done in Portuguese. No, I don’t know why.) After I managed to stop laughing, I swore. And then I explained that no, extinctions are caused by changes in the environment. Any animal can cause extinctions, including its own, by changing the environment.

I have talked here about the stupid “After us” program in which they worked out evolution into the future. I settled down with the kids, because I love dinosaurs and natural history. But it quickly became obvious this was just an excuse to scour humans from the Earth, and once humans were extinct in their imagination, then all mammals and then all warm blooded animals. This is the program that ended with intelligent octopi swinging from trees and chirping.

It made no sense from an actual evolutionary point of view, as any of the catastrophes they devised were more likely to kill…. anything else than us, adaptable, clever apes.  But it fixed some itch they needed to scratch: their hatred for us, and anything that likes us, and anything related to us, and–

It’s not self-hatred. The people who say they hate themselves first are wrong.  Sure, they live in hell. In a hell of their own making, in which they deny themselves any type of meaningful human life with love and kids and things built for the future. BUT it only looks like hell to us.  Hatred is addictive, and they’re high on unearned moral superiority. They see the bad, so they’re better than us. That.

They imagine themselves like gods knowing good from evil.  It’s a false vision, but that’s what they want: to destroy, to silence, to make everyone they deem bad stop existing. They dress it up in “for the Earth” but if we were gone, they’d go on to eradicate every other life form, who are after all “harming the Earth” by existing.

Their idea of paradise is a scoured clean empty globe, quiet at last.

For years, I’ve thought the mass graves of communism were an unintended consequence.  Now I’m not so sure. Even they can’t be that stupid.  And we do know they hate us, they really hate us.

It is our fault in a way. We let it go on.  I was all down with “humans are uniquely bad” in my early teens when I came across a Heinlein sentence that made me pause and think. (No wonder, they hate him.) It went something like (Many years ago. I’m sure I’ve re-read the book but didn’t memorize the sentence, and that first time is what made the difference) “I am for humans, because I’m human.”

It made me stop and think “Who am I judging us in the name of? I mean even that trial with the dog speaking for us and every other animal hating us, that was what some guy thought animals felt, not real.  I mean, for all we know, supposing animals had moral judgement, they’d go “Humans, yeah, good guys. They produce so much stuff we can eat.””  And then I thought of all the animals who voluntarily seek the sphere of humans. And how many — Chickens, cows, sheep — would long be extinct without us.

But the fact I was sixteen or so when I woke up to all of this… We let it go on too long.

We let the attitude of “Humans all bad, they lose in the end” become hip and cool.  We let culture makers, most of whom, frankly, couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel, run our entire species down in order to feel superior. And we let THEM teach this to the kids.

Environmentalism, sure, as it should be.  Teach the kids to look after the natural world as much as we can, remembering we are not gods (there was some kind of bird in the North East, early twentieth century that we tried so hard to save, but kept getting hit with things like plagues. And then we put them in a preserve, and it caught fire and they all died.  We’re not the only ones who can cause extinctions. And extinctions will happen even if we don’t want them to.)  There is no excuse for littering. No excuse for wantonly destroying life of any kind if we don’t need to.

But it shouldn’t be anti-human. We, like lichens and plants are part of the natural world, and we’re allowed to exist.

But we let the gospel of nihilism and human-hatred be preached to the kids.

And the results are all over. What it causes is actual real destruction. Of civilization, of life, of everything and anything bigger than the souls of the dunghill cocks proclaiming humanity’s irredeemable evil.

May G-d have mercy on our souls.

Meanwhile, pass the ammo and fight the culture war. Fight them on every front in every way: Ridicule them, disprove them and make them face their own petty insignificance.

Hold a mirror to them and tell them “This is who you are. The more you diminish humanity the more you diminish yourself. We are not impressed.”

 

Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again.

Today I was talking to Bill Reader, who is a little more discouraged than normal about the stifling climate of academia.  Mostly because, if what I hear of reports from the “inside” academia, like the arts, like writing, like news, like… well, the democrats, and all other places colonized by leftists, has gone farking insane. I mean, if you think that the NYU (?) study declaring that milking cows was sexual abuse is bad, you might not follow the giant pile of manure that is academia in our day and age.

Anyone rational would be fed up with it. And I’m sure a lot of people are.  I’m sure a lot of other mild-mannered lecturers in the liberal arts keep their mouth shut, and nod or pretend to nod, because (their) baby needs shoes, and they can’t afford to do a grand gesture of honor and leave their family starving.

And I pointed out something that came up in one of my private groups on facebook: the peak of leftist crazy has already passed. The wheel is already turning the other way. [By this I meant the peak of letting crazy leftist politics be mainstream and form society. As you can tell from the rest of the article, the remnants of the cult will only get louder and louder and more insane. Those of you in compatible religions, pray to Saint Dymphna. We’re solidly under his purview now.- SAH 2020)

You can tell this in several ways.  The first one was given to me by an older friend — who might now be gone, but we lost touch several list-groups ago — who told me in 2004 that the left was losing. They always get louder and crazier when they’re losing.

As a show of the fact they’re losing — not the election. They might pull that from the a…ir by virtue of extreme vote fraud. Which they work to facilitate ANYTIME they get any kind of power — I refer you to the fact that they’ve never been this completely insane.  But wait, there’s more.

The more is that they are pulling out the most bizarre and unlikely slurs. Look, the Russia thing didn’t have any legs. For one accusing the right of Russian collusion was the ultimate act of projection, after Obama’s “more flexible” comment. But beyond that: there.was.nothing.there.

Only the left doesn’t know how to back down anymore. Everything is a fight to the knife, and everything must be pushed to absurdity.  Take the nonsense around Kavanaugh.  They might have accused him of being skivvy around women and got along with it, but no. They had to go for rape, and the chick had to pretend to be so traumatized that she couldn’t fly (while having a vacation house in Hawaii) and then they had to accuse him of having a rape ring. And then…

In the same way they could get away with saying that Trump was crude in speech and manner towards women, and even emphasize the morals of work in the seventies were different from now, and leave him tarnished and walking wounded. But they had to go for the pee dossier and claim he really did grab them by the p*ssy and REEEEEE to 11.

Which pushes it past any pretense of being reasonable or believable.

#metoo could have flown if they’d made it a few, judicious cases, but their people have no discipline — and I’m not talking about the kids in schools and work. I’m talking about cases that get press — and when the press decides to run with George H. W. Bush molesting a nurse, in a description that anyone who has cared for an aged relative recognizes, empathizes with and realizes the man has no more control than does a toddler and only a fool considers that abuse, it’s insane and the movement is already burning itself.

This “and the kitchen sink” behavior is not the behavior of a movement that has any answers or any self confidence.

And as for the clown car of Democrat candidates… who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to pile on with “Health care for illegals, because health care is a human right and they’re humans?”  So is the rest of the world, but we assuredly can’t pay for it.  They are laying bare the idea that proclaiming something a human right that requires the labor of others is insane and a form of reinventing slavery. (The Dems? Slavery? Who’d have thunk it!)

Other things they keep signaling are how much they hate America and all of us. “Vote for us, peasant. We hate you” could only be a platform that appeals to an aristocratic class that has climbed so far up its own behind it’s forgotten what history looks like.

What history looks like, once aristocrats, or self proclaimed aristocrats get so out of touch is “Aristo, aristo, a la lanterne” and ça ira.  I recommend to the usual leftists reading this blog for things to offend them that they study the French revolution and realize once and for all that they are not the revolutionaries. They are the stodgy, entrenched aristocrats who have all the power. They got there via selecting for the kind of cant that at this point no sane person can believe. And so they’ve achieved in 4 generations what would take a monarchy centuries of inbreeding to achieve: either total lack of ability to think, or total refusal to.

Which brings us to… they survive because they really like power, and because they are protected by being on top.

Look, the institutions they control at this point are the profoundly conservative ones: news (prestige news) reporting, academia (the older and more established, the more leftist) the good old families, the people with money and power.  In fact, now becoming “woke” is the equivalent of joining a country club for parvenus to fit in, which is why people like Bezos and Gates trip over themselves to pay homage.

But the thing is, in every time and in every place by the time an elite controls all of that, the revolution is under way. If not a physical revolution with head chopping, a tech revolution, a new way of doing things that dethrones them.

The left is blind to that because it’s part of their credo to believe themselves eternal underdogs and revolutionaries. Writing that into our entertainment and news ONLY requires them to pretend they’re living somewhere circa 1950.  And not even the 1950s that were, but something from their own heads.  Which means…

They’re out of touch. Even those of them who can reason and think can’t do it without realizing the foundational lie of their ideology: that they’re in power while pretending to fight power.

Now they’re desperately trying to redact history to make themselves eternal victims. That never works well.

And meanwhile the real functions they hold are moving on, however shambling and imperfect. They have to move on, because the corrupt institutions can no longer perform. And a lot of these functions are needed (arguably even storytelling.)

More and more, the left holds a shell of power, while the real power moves on.

That’s the good news. When they seem most entrenched, they’re already falling apart.

The bad news is that they won’t go without a fight. And the fight is going to get bad. Both in overreach, because they are doing that, and not just with accusations. Consider proposals to make KG or preschool mandatory. It’s crazy overreach, an attempt at indoctrinating the kids who are somehow still evading them after 12 years.  Or consider California’s bizarre plan to make race studies (their way) mandatory.  Or– It’s all around. It’s all insane. And yet, they will continue doing it.

And then there is the fact they have an iron grip on vote manufacture, which means disinfecting our government might take … well… a revolution.

They’ve already lost where it counts. They’ve already lost the real culture and the “way things will be done in the future.”

What they still have, though, is the ability to make the next fifteen to 20 years very unpleasant, and, possibly, to ensure that what comes next is much, much harsher and more punitive than it would otherwise be.

Keep your hearts on high.  And if you’re a praying sort, pray.  Because the waters are going to get very choppy.

But given half a chance, we’ll turn this yet, and come out on the other side as America. Home of the brave and the land of the free.