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I don’t feel up to writing a post, mostly because my head isn’t “fully on” yet, (I’ve managed to be jetlagged for two time zones at once) and I’m not up to writing the Witch’s Daughter chapter that’s ridiculously overdue.

I’ll try to do it tomorrow or tonight, around the promo post which, yes, I’m aware is ALSO overdue.

Look, the last two weeks were excessively 2020, okay? I’m trying to recover.

So I’m going to tell you what I was thinking of, apropos nothing (as far as I know) this morning.

I was thinking about Faustina, the elastic lady.

Uh?

Well, it goes something like this: my family has a tradition of scaring unruly children into behaving.

I’m sure it will shock EVERYONE here that I was an unruly — though more pain in the neck, rule lawyering — kid. Actually that’s how I managed to get kicked out of kindergarten. I kept rule-lawyering the teacher, and not just about my issues (I was actually fairly well behaved, as I’d hide in a corner and read) but everyone the teacher tried to punish. Mostly because she had a tendency to pick on kids who didn’t know how to defend themselves.

After bribes of candy (I hate hard candy, and that’s what she offered) and a glow in the dark rosary (who can resist that you ask? Well, I did) had failed, she took me by the hand, walked me back home, and handed me to grandma with the words “Next year, we’ll have to take her. Until then the law doesn’t say she has to be at school. Keep her at home, please.”

Anyway, as you can imagine, since I was — mostly — impervious to bribes and kept coming up with creative ways to argue why I should be allowed to do whatever I wanted, my family had to come up with something that would …. oh, make me go to bed on time, or shut my mouth for a minute or two.

And that something was Faustina, the elastic lady. The weird thing is that I remember nothing about this woman.

She was one of the peddlers who made the rounds of the village one day a week, and sold — I presume — not just elastic and lace, but probably other sewing notions. I presume like the other peddlers she did the rounds of other villages on the other days. (On Sundays we got the fun peddlers: cookies, candy, soda and potato chips. But during the week we got the Olive Man (who also sold oils) and the fish vendors, and probably others I don’t remember at all. I remember the olive man, because his donkey wore a hat, and because if I had been good I got to give the donkey a carrot. And the fish man because if I had been good, I got a half dozen clams to cook on top of the wood stove. Look, life was very boring, okay?)

BTW it’s a measure of how much my life has changed that I can’t IMAGINE how someone could make a living, no matter how small, selling sewing notions (and I presume elastic was the greater part of her business, since she was called Faustina dos Elasticos.) Maybe fish, or oil since both were major components of our diet. BUT elastic and notions? I can’t picture it. Yes, things were more expensive, and buying these from stores involved going to the city,which cost bus or train fare (and my mom did, because she was a professional, but even she bought from Faustina of the elastics now and then.) But still. This woman was on foot, and sold only what she carried. How can she have made a living?

It’s unsettling to realize that my worldbuilding might suffer from not really understanding/being able to picture such limited economies.

I have no idea why Faustina scared me. I’m going to presume she did, or my family wouldn’t have seized on it, nor invented such an outrageous story about her. But I don’t remember her at all. It’s possible she had a squint, and a half a century later, I have the impression she had a weird hamster voice.

Kids are merciless about “strangers” — which is why all the stupid stories about how babies are racist are ridiculous. Of course children shy from strangers. That was part of remaining alive and not becoming dinner when humans lived in family-bands — and find things strange that wouldn’t even register for adults, mostly because they have such a limited experience of the world. They don’t know how weird things and people can be and still fall in “the range of normal reality.” (Now I think about it, that’s the problem with all the woke superannuated children. Having been raised with a narrow idea of what’s normal, and carefully indoctrinated to distrust anything and anyone new, they can’t imagine the different without assuming it’s “evil.”)

One thing I’m almost sure of, (though I can’t verify it unless I call mom, and if I call her out of the blue RIGHT NOW and ask her to verify it, she’ll think I’ve lost my mind, even more than she already thinks it): is that Faustina walked with a weird gait, probably because of having one leg shorter than the other, or perhaps she’d had polio as a child, or something.

Why am I sure of that? Because I think whatever she looked like/moved like scared the heck out of me, and I started hiding from her.

Having glomed onto this my family — honestly, probably mom because she’s the only one I remember telling me that — told me that Faustina had legs made out of elastic, and could stretch to any length, and that she specialized in reaching into houses and grabbing naughty children, which she took away in her sack.

I remember being terrified of her, to the point that mentioning her name would get good behavior from me.

I don’t remember when I stopped being scared, or when she stopped making the rounds of sales (though I think it was before I was six or so, when we moved to the new house and the lady down the street opened a newspapers/magazines/notions and tobacco store operating out of her front window. (I can’t remember her name, but her village nickname was “of the tobacco” and her virtue was that she sold whenever you knocked on her window, so during the hours the general store (which sold tobacco) was closed.

And I can honestly say I didn’t think of her again till this morning.

Which is how kids grow, I suppose. I mean, we scared older son into compliance by telling him if he didn’t behave the trashmen would take him away. This was after an incident when we’d forgotten to put our trash out, and the collectors banged on our back gate and screamed and cursed, scaring the little two year old playing in the yard.

For the next three or four years, we could get compliance by picking up the phone to call the garbage collectors. I don’t know when he stopped being scared, but my guess is when he was rational enough that we could argue for compliance without having to scare him (and we only scared him when he was a danger to himself, the pets or his brother.) And unlike what our friends told us, he’s not scared of garbage collectors, and is perfectly civil and well behaved to them.

I’m not particularly scared of people who sell elastic, either, I must say. Or even lace and notions.

BUT I realized that in a weird place in my mind, there is this dark figure carrying a sack, who shambles down the old village street at twilight, before jumping up on elastic legs, to snatch a naughty child through a second floor window.

And yes, I realize she must appear in that guise in some future story, poor woman.

Absolute Truth and the Death of Turpitude by Cedar Sanderson

Riots, looting, shootings in the street. Get woke, go broke, believe all women except that one, and that one… You’re only black if I say you are…

Where did all of this violence, hatred, and sheer greasiness come from?

The death of truth and morality. When philosophers replaced the concepts of absolute truths with the idea that everything is relative, and it’s all what feels good, man! When those who did not fully understand relative truth began to use it as a justification for destroying the foundations that upheld the concept of turpitude, civilization as we knew it began to totter.

John Macfarlane in his paper, Making Sense of Relative Truth, wrote:

“Relativists often try to meet this challenge by giving a definition of truth that makes its relativity plain. If truth is idealized justification, then it might reasonably be thought to be assessor-relative, since ideal reasoners with different starting beliefs or prior probabilities might take the same ideal body of evidence to support different conclusions. Similarly, if truth is defined pragmatically, as what is good to believe, then it might also be assessor-relative, insofar as different things are good for making sense of relative truth different assessors to believe. But although these coherentist and pragmatic definitions of truth capture the ‘relative’ part of ‘relative truth’, I do not believe they capture the ‘truth’ part.”

He goes on in this talk to the Aristotelian Society to discuss the methods of ascertaining the relativity of an asserted truth, and comes up with a very useful ‘commitment to truth.’

“Here are three things that might be thought to constitute the ‘commitment to truth’ one undertakes in making an assertion:

(Withdraw) Commitment to withdraw the assertion if and when it is shown to have been untrue.

 (Justify) Commitment to justify the assertion (provide grounds for its truth) if and when it is appropriately challenged.

(Responsibility) Commitment to be held responsible if someone else acts on or reasons from what is asserted, and it proves to have been untrue.

Everyone should be able to agree that assertoric commitment includes at least (W). Imagine someone saying: ‘I concede that what I asserted wasn’t true, but I stand by what I said anyway.’ We would have a very difficult time taking such a person seriously as an asserter. If she continued to manifest this kind of indifference to established truth, we would stop regarding the noises coming out of her mouth as assertions. We might continue to regard them as expressions of beliefs and other attitudes (just as we might regard a dog’s whining as an expression of a desire for food). We might even find them useful sources of information. But we would not regard them as commitments to truth, and hence not as assertions.”

He concludes, finally, that “the weakest form of relativism about truth would seem to be true.” So, looking at MacFarlane’s commitments, we can judge just how weak relativism is, against absolutes.

Commitment to withdraw an assertion in the fact it is untrue: fact-driven reality. If the statement is made ‘the sky is green’ and it is backed by evidence, or data, then the statement need not be withdrawn. The statement ‘the sky is blue’ is indeed a relative truth provable only under clear, daytime conditions. Green skies ahead of a tornado also exist.

However, to come back to turpitude… the statement that riots are necessary to effect change is a truth relative to what? That it is demonstrably true, as they have caused change; the statement was ambiguous in that the change was not desirable to anyone who was not enriched by their own looting.

A commitment to justify the assertion if and when it is challenged. If you state ‘businesses destroyed by looting and riots can simply claim insurance’ then you must give grounds for the factuality of that statement as it is demonstrably untrue in absolute terms. And then you must honor the first commitment, to withdraw that assertion. If you state that the President called soldiers ‘losers’ and you expect this to be accepted as veracity, you must be able to produce evidence of your assertion.

Finally, a commitment to be held responsible if someone else acts on what is asserted, and it proves to have been untrue. For a hundred years, it was asserted that forest fires were bad (demonstrably true according to those who live in their path) and everything possible must be done to stop them. In tandem, logging was decreed to be bad because it disrupted the environment and the wildlife through removal of those trees the forest fires also threatened. Good for the woods and wilderness, yes?

As a result of those twinned assertions, wildfires are raging on the west coast of North America. Not only will they kill people, animals, and destroy property. They will also kill the forests the assertions were meant to save. It has been shown (an absolute truth) that proper forest management through controlled burns and logging saves the trees that are killed when an out-of-control unnatural fire burns so hotly as to destroy all life. Even trees that would survive a more controlled, routine burn as they did for long before the environmentalists came along to ‘save the trees.’ However, far from being held responsible for their relativist and untrue assertions, the ‘truth’ being espoused now is that controlled burns are bad (as are the wildfires they cannot control) as they release carbon into the atmosphere and provoke climatic change. Which means the wildfires that are so devastating will continue, and human lives will be lost while forests die.

The crimes collected under the legal term ‘moral turpitude’ have been defined as “acts of baseness, vileness, or depravity in the private and social duties with a man owes to his fellow men, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between man and man.”

Leaving aside the ‘squishiness’ of such a broad and sweeping definition, you can see how relativism would be the downfall of turpitude. So what specific crimes are we talking about here? Including, but not limited to: fraud, arson, blackmail, burglary, embezzlement, extortions, malicious destruction of property, fencing stolen goods, bribery of gov’t officials, perjury, counterfeiting, tax evasion with intent, harboring a fugitive, abandonment of a child, assault, bigamy (see comment on adultery below), grow indecency, kidnapping, lewdness… there are more. But you get the drift.

What is notable that we are seeing both in the recent past, and current societal drift (as portrayed by mass media) movement toward decriminalizing, and normalizing, moral turpitude. Adultery, as I noted above, used to be in that list, but has already been legalized and is seen as so normal as to barely cause comment. Movement toward legalizing bigamy (polyamory), incest, and contributing to delinquency of a minor (sexual) is very much in evidence. The attitude toward looters in the current unrest (see burglary, theft, and assault) is one of positive sympathy in the news. Nothing about that societal duty which a man owes to his fellow man comes up. Not even when minority business owners are the victims of ostensibly persecution-based looting.

The social contract, the one once based on the relative truth of “love one another as you love yourself” is being fed into the shredder. The loss of the concept of an absolute truth: “This statement is always true” was only the beginning. Relativism has its place. The statement ‘this is beautiful’ is relative. On the other hand, stating ‘This (riot, fire, logging) is harmful’ may not be relative, and once the assertion is made, if attacked, grounds can be found to justify the true statement. However, if the argument for truth is not allowed, if the assertion is made that all truths are relative, and therefore nothing can be absolute, then we move to the place where duty to fellow men and responsibility to the truth of your assertion can be abdicated. This ground is where we stand with it can be said with a straight face ‘my feelings trump your facts’ and ‘children can consent.’

All manner of evils spring up from what relative truth taught wrongly has sown in this ground.

So, obviously this was not quite a normal day blog wise.  Sorry.  Truly, tomorrow everything should be back on track.

And there was no big issue today.  It’s just that I woke up and realized it was important for our garden not to look QUITE like a jungle tomorrow.  So I spent the morning mowing and weeding the front, till I ran out of battery on the mower.  Which means I forgot to charge it after mowing last time.

So, I plugged the battery in, realized it would take three hours to charge and went “if I stop now, I won’t mow the back.”  So I cleaned the house.  Which is more of a lick and promise, since the place still looks like a cross between a storage unit (with all the displaced stuff) and a construction zone (with the flooring stuff.)  But it will do. And it doesn’t smell.

Meanwhile I found another reason to miss Greebo.  Apparently he was helping Havey with basic hygiene.  Washing my bedspread every day is getting old.  We’ve shaved him back there, but apparently we need to shave him more…. by the time we get to the point he can keep clean, he might be a cornish rex.

Other bits and pieces of straggle-business pretty much took till now.

So I’ll glancingly mention some other stuff, while I’m at it:
I have a ton of guest posts (thank you) which I’ll be running once or twice a week, as — for various reasons, it’s kind of important I use this month and a half to work for PJM as much as possible.  And to finish novels.

The thing with facebook — i.e. their ability to ban forever anyone who’s been banned even once — means I might be gone from facebook, and with it the diner.

If this happens, or at least in preparation, I’m going to make a point of being on MeWe more.  There is a diner there.  I got tired of going there because not only do I have a ton of friend requests, but people use different names there, and I don’t know which requests are legitimate.

If you want me to friend you on MeWe contact me some other way (FB included and tell me if you sent me a request and under which name.)

Also, I mentioned this in the comments before: there will be scraps of flag available.  If you feel this will help you getting through what might very well be very dark times ahead, I don’t judge.  Just send me an email (or PM) with your snailmail address and I’ll get them to you, at least while supplies last.

And now, ladies, gentlemen, dragons and strolling minotaurs, I’m going to vegetate. Tomorrow there will be a post. Might be a guest posts.  Depends on how the spirit moves me.

 

After a much longer trip than we expected, with 5 days added on for not the happiest of reasons.

The funeral was simple, and we saw family we haven’t seen in years. Also on the way back, we got to see friends we normally see at Liberty con, so that was good.

And at home we found Havey has made himself hoarse from crying while we were gone.  At last I assume this was so, since my going to the bathroom upon coming home occasioned a bizarre fit of crying outside the door…

We rolled into Colorado this evening, with smoke in the air and a blood red moon.

It’s a bitter-sweet homecoming, filled with the knowledge our time in this, my beloved state, is coming to an end.  Not today, not tomorrow, not this year and possibly not the next, but almost for sure 2022 will see us packing up and leaving the mile hi city, something I’d never thought I’d do.

No, it’s not the politics, though that’s not helping, as it’s already changed the texture of life in Denver beyond recognition, particularly in this fucked up year of our Lord, the year when the mask mandate dropped the remaining masks.

It’s not even the persistent back of the head niggling fear that we’re going to get stuck behind the lines.  (And being by heritage Portuguese I’m assured by friends who scarpered from various places that when the Portuguese leave it’s already too late [seems to bear out by the number of relatives who came crashing into our lives with only the clothes on their backs and their lives all through the seventies.])

It’s the undeniable effect of high altitude and low oxygen on our systems as we age.  So, that’s about it.  Against biology, even Odds strive in vain.

This trip — the longest we’ve been away and not flying — just made it very clear.  There is no way to wind up our affairs and appurtenances here in under one and a half and likely two years.  But after that, barring death, the death of the republic, open war, or other disaster, we’ll be on the move.

Where, only G-d knows, since this is the only place I’ve ever wanted to live since I was eight.

I’d say — having sang with Kansas all across Kansas — it was apropos that as I drove us — I drove more highways this trip than I’ve ever done prior to that.  Enough to break the fear? probably not.  But it’s not a panic fear anymore at least — into Denver we were singing along with the Eagles “After the thrill is gone.”

But it’s not.  Every time I roll into Denver, there’s that closing of the throat, that prickling of the eyes, that certainty that I am home in the place that’s been part of who I am — if only in dreams — as long as I can remember.

So, tomorrow I clean and unpack.  And then it’s back into our routine, (and regular posting, though I’ll use guest posts a lot the rest of this week,) but now with the long term plan of consolidating, fixing, getting rid of excess stuff, and planning an eventual move.

Into whatever adventure comes next.

Hi guys, I am alive, but I haven’t even had time to put up a guest post, much less the promo.

Be patient with me!

Have a picture to amuse you and keep us in mind tomorrow for the funeral and Tuesday and Wednesday PARTICULARLY when we’ll be driving down and across most of the US on the way home.

Driving yesterday was…. Odd.  Every time I got behind the wheel it turned into a kind of “crazy driving training video.”  If Dan took the wheel it was fine and boring.

In no particular order I got “car next to me letting its towing rig drop so that it was getting flames from friction on the ground” (Everybody move to the left!), HUGE German Shepherd loose on the highway.  (I would have stopped and rendered aid if I were confident I could get across five lanes of traffic to the berm, AND then run back and forth on the highway, to capture the creature without being hit.)  As it was I avoided hitting him (twice) and prayed really loud he’d stay on the grassy berm toward the exit.  No idea where he came from, but I hope he survived. Looked like a nice pup, though probably part great Dane. I mean, a kid could have ridden him.  Even though he looked EXACTLY German Shepherd), “tiny red dumptruck merging at 40 into stream of traffic at 70 trying to merge six feet in front of me, while I have an eighteen wheeler on my left.  Followed by, crazy traffic, construction, deluge, direction dyslexics marking construction (left, right left, no, we meant right) in the two miles leading up to it, while playing leapfrog with eighteen wheelers.)

Dan would take over, and it was a beautiful, calm drive.  we finally gave up, so I drove maybe 4 hours to his 6 or 6 and a half.

So, whoever was pulling that off, stop it, just stop it.  I CAN drive, but I don’t enjoy it, and in the middle there I almost had a heart attack.

Dan SWEARS there was no rain of frogs, no plague of blood.  Bah. I know what I remember.

Anyway. Be patient if I don’t post much till Tuesday or Wednesday.

 

Remembrance and Determination by Amanda S. Green

Nineteen years ago, this nation woke to a tragedy unlike anything it had seen since Pearl Harbor. We were under attack. Four commercial airliners had been hijacked. Two flew into the Twin Towers in New York. Another crashed into the Pentagon and the fourth in a field outside of Shanksville, PA. That last plane crashed where it did because of the heroism and sacrifice of the passengers and crew onboard who refused to let their flight be used as yet another weapon against our nation.

To say the country was in shock as it reeled from one event to the next is putting it mildly. We were stunned, hurt, angry and so much more. We watched as first responders risked their lives in an all too often vain attempt to rescue those trapped by the terrorist actions aimed against all of us. We watched in horror as people jumped from the Twin Towers. We couldn’t believe it as the towers came down. It was the thing of nightmares.

But something else happened that day. In cities and towns across the country, neighbors and strangers pulled together. There was a sense of need–to act, to help, to cope–that joined us. People in areas immediately impacted by the crashes opened their doors to those trapped in town because routes away from the Twin Towers and the surrounding area were shut down. They donated their time, their food, their money.

In towns like mine, so far from where it was all happening, we did our best to pull together as well. Within an hour and a half or so of the second plane hitting the Towers, I was standing in line at the local blood bank. It was the only thing I could do right then. I was surprised by the number of people already there. The blood bank wasn’t even officially open and there were already close to 75 people in line. It didn’t surprise me to see the doors to the center suddenly swing open. Employees had come in early, without having to be asked. And not just those who were set to work that day. Those who were off, as well as at least two who no longer worked there, came to do what they could to help.

Within another hour, at least another 100 people stood in line behind me. The blood bank had a line that extended down the length of the center and around the corner. One of the employees came around and told us the line was about to turn yet another corner. Finally, with something like 200-plus people waiting in line before 11, they sent a worker out to talk with us. He had a pad and pen and was asking if anyone wanted to leave their name and number and come back the next day or two. There was simply no way they could process anywhere close to as many people as were there.

No one ahead of me volunteered to come back. I didn’t either. Why? Because I needed to do something. We all did.

It took time, but they finally whittled the line down to about 100-125. And man were those techs hustling.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

The sandwich shop next to the blood bank also opened early. It opened its restrooms to us and offered us free water and soft drinks. Someone, and I never did learn who, brought up a TV and several radios so we could listen to what was happening. Other people who lived nearby brought some lawn chairs for those of us standing in line.

Albertsons, one of our local grocery stores, sent their manager and several clerks with half a dozen or more ice chests filled with drinks, ice, etc., All free of charge. We wouldn’t even have known who they were if someone in line hadn’t asked. They came in their personal cars and didn’t wear anything to identify their employer. They simply wanted to help.

It was almost 5 by the time they got to me. As they took me back to a chair, another local merchant arrived. This time, it was a local restaurant. They had coolers and hot boxes filled with food–meals–for the workers and for those of us still there. Again, no one wanted recognition. They simply wanted to help.

In the nation’s hour of tragedy, people pulled together.

I look at that and then I consider what is happening in our nation today. We are in a different sort of war now. It’s not a war waged by an external enemy—although we have plenty of them who are more than glad to cheer on our internal adversaries and offer them aid if needed. No, this is a war waged by those who live here and who have decided it is time to destroy the very foundations of our nation.

It is bad enough that we have “mostly peaceful” demonstrations that have led to destruction, injury and loss of life. It is worse that we have politicians who refuse to take steps to protect the citizens of their towns. But, worse of all, we have those who actively advocate the suspension of not only our civil rights but our constitutional rights.

We have a presidential candidate in Joe Biden who has all but threatened workers and business owners who do no support unions coming into their shops. His running mate is more concerned with being seen with the victim of what she terms police brutality than she is in making sure the woman who has accused him of a crime has a chance at justice. But there is no hue and cry about it because the current narrative is all about how police are evil and should be abolished.

We have a Speaker of the House who not only proved she has no regard for the law, but who had no problem setting up one of her constituents for doxing. Worse, Pelosi claimed victim status for herself because she just had to have that hair cut before her interview with Vice—where she extolled the need to continue the mask mandate, business shutdowns, etc. When faced with proof of how she ignored local Covid-19 regulations, she claimed ignorance and the said she’d been set up.

This is the person who sits in the line of succession to the presidency and she didn’t know 1) she should have been wearing a mask and 2) that beauty salons IN HER OWN TOWN were not allowed to open for anything but outside work?

There are so many other examples of steps being taken by both foreign and domestic enemies of this nation. Too many to set forth here. But here’s the thing. They don’t have to win. This battle, much less the war, isn’t over. Our nation has proven time and again that it can overcome obstacles, be they economic or constitutional or even military. But we have to want to win.

I challenge each of you to remember those first days and weeks after 9/11/2001. Remember not just the desire but the need to make sure our country came out of the attacks stronger and better than it was before. Now put that same desire, that need into play today. Do not go gently into the night.

Do not sit at home on election day.

Do not let your voice be silenced.

Do not forget our history and do not consign our children and grandchildren to a future we can’t be proud of.

I want to leave you with this. I was proud of our nation on 9/11 and on the days following. We proved we could pull together when we need to.

And, by all that is holy, we need to do so now.

As Todd Beamer said, “Let’s Roll!”

 

Good morning boys, girls and dragons. It is sweet to see your glowing morning faces.

What time is it at According to Hoyt? You’re right. It’s heresy time!

My husband has long ago learned that there are places it is not safe to take me, because he just ends up dragging me out while I’m still trying to get a last zinger in at the speaker.  Yes, that has included churches. We don’t attend there anymore.  But mostly it’s lectures or movies or theater performances, where the person in charge believes we’re in need of hearing just a little more of that ol’ time (what? He’s been dead a long time. And most of his adherents are either fossilized while living or brain dead, so….) Marxist religion.

Yesterday we almost added museums to that list. It came this close. You could smell its tail when it went by.

You see we thought it was safe to go to a WWI museum.  And as you guys know I’m interested in the era. Partly because I think that’s when the wheels came of Western culture and we started skidding on dangerous ice. Without wheels. Downhill. And there’s fire at the bottom of the ravine.

In a way the visit was good — the exhibits are excellent, and we might go back because I didn’t get to look at all the guns as I would have liked to. I’m not an expert, no, but the national variations on light machine guns are fascinating, and I still have to write World War Dragon — because it solidified a) what went wrong. b) why lately — like the last three years — the history has been “tasting” as if it rhymes with WWI.

My talking back, though started with the introductory movie.

I’ve told you guys before the causes I was taught for WWI, which included fervent nationalism, militarization and idealization of the military, as well as Germany coming late to industrialization and feeling hemmed in.  That last is probably true, btw.  Though at this point I’m in no mood to give consequence to “historians” infected by Marxism and therefore prone to running headlong down stupid blind alleys towards brick walls.

I have bad news.  In the forty years since they’ve pounded that arrant nonsense into my head, they’ve added more.  To that list is now added “Social darwinism” (Talk back “Did they confuse it with the SECOND world war?”) “Which believed that evolution applied not only to organisms but to cultures and that the fittest culture would survive!” (Talk back “And you don’t? Why not? What the hell do you believe? Or are you confusing culture with race again?”) Income inequality (Talk back: “As compared to what fluff brain? ANY time before that the inequality was greater.”) And the terrible treatment of the working classes in cities (tb: “Again, compared to what? Have you been asleep while India and China industrialized?”) which led to socialism (TB: “I too love to blame socialism for just about everything. But for world war I it’s a step too far.”) which was sweeping the masses, so practically every worker was socialist (TB: Snort, Giggle “No, butt-brain. The intellectuals were socialists, and it’s not hard to recruit petty criminals and useful idiots to swell your ranks. But no. Most workers were not socialist.”) AND THEN the one that made everything click: “Imperialism. Those darn hyper nationalistic states of Europe were going to Africa and Asia and creating colonies.”  And it clicked.  Particularly since the next point in their description was about how the Balkans didn’t like being under the heel of the Austro Hungarian empire.  (Not that I blame them. I mean, for a brief time Portugal was too, several centuries back.)

And the back of my brain went CLICK.  And now I need to descend into heresy from everything you’ve been taught. Although note, I’m not going to rewrite history. I’m not one of THEM. I’m just going to challenge the way it’s been interpreted and force fed to generations of people.

There is a very stupid meme going around facebook that talks about how terrible it would be if Europe had ever been treated the way that Africa and Asia were treated, and partitioned and repartitioned at random by uncaring colonial powers.

It’s one of those that makes me faintly nauseous, (like the one that claimed the pilgrims had white privilege) because it betrays just how far our schools have gone into not teaching the kids any kind of history beyond “Europe bad” and “everywhere else good.”  It would be less criminal if they simply didn’t teach them to read and write (wait, that’s true!)

Because of course, not only was tribal, mostly pre-historic Europe partitioned more or less blindly by conquering powers: Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians. But it was then repartitioned again and again at the whim of invaders (Goths — yes, their horned helmets were all black. Someone bop the comedian on the head and drag him out in the alley, please — Ostrogoths, Swabians, Franks, Alans and only Bob knows what — he’s very learned Bob — else.)  In fact the “national” borders of Europe are no more “real” to the genetic make up of people’s than are national borders anywhere else.  They are mostly where they ended up.  The fiction that the things inside the walls are “races” or ethnicities is a creation of public schools and national poets and … well, fictionalizing historians. Something the left should be quite familiar with.

This is not to say there should be no borders — more on that later — but frankly if the rest of the world wants to have the same “inside border” cohesion as Europe what they need is not to redraw them and moan about colonialism: it’s a shameless and ruthless propaganda machine to convince school children of bullshit. That should be easy. Communists can do it.

Anyway, the point is that “colonialism” and the “unrest in the balkans” are not because of nationalism and “people becoming aware of ethnic differences” (I swear to Bob they said that. Do Historians nowadays know bloody nothing of history?) and dragging poor Darwin into that stew (fish stew. with heads in) is just purely mean.

Industrialization and the rapid change of ways of life does come into this because Man — and woman, child, infant and dragon — does not live by bread alone. Some wise Rabbi said that, and He was, as grandma would say, covered in reason (Hopefully the Reason of the Postrel era. It’s gone down hill.) I.e. men who can see time before and after their lives and whose lives are far too brief for their minds, need a narrative to fit into.

For a long, long time the narrative had been religion and a way of life.  “I farm, as did my father, my grandfather, his father etc. etc. etc.”  When you moved away from the village, where you could visit the graves of all your ancestors, you needed a narrative to be part of. Which is where nationalism and to an extent militarism fit in. (To the other extent militarism was always part of it, and now there were dime-novels talking of adventure, which is often in war or happens to military man.)

But there was real unrest at the time.  And while we know of a few where socialists spoke, etc, I don’t believe it was at all “socialist” or “Marxist” even.  I mean, look, I’m running on stories I heard from my grandparents who heard them from their parents (their being children during WWI.)  And other people’s grandparents, too, in other countries.

Oh, sure, the intellectuals loved Marx. They still do. They’re a very conservative constituency.  And the organized Marxists (which at the time flew under a number of banners, including gutting and wearing the skin of Anarchists. They also still do) were running as hard as they could to get ahead of the mobs that were getting pissy.

But the mobs weren’t getting pissy because they wanted socialism. Socialists just happened to be the only organized ones who could claim credit/responsibility/ stir things their way.

The unrest had more to do with a lot of dislocated people living in a large group than ever and running around without a narrative to fit their lives into.

But there were other things….

Glanced by in the presentation is the fact that most of the ruling class of Europe was related to Queen Victoria.  They didn’t talk about it, but here’s the thing, the other problem is that the vast empires of Europe had been vast for a long time, but not really centralized.  It’s possible Americans don’t know this, but large European countries (Sometimes you can swing a cat not needing a passport for the cat) were “one country” only in name.  The regional variations in everything from dialect to cuisine, not to mention the administration of local laws, and even local laws imposed by the local grandee made them effectively several tiny, locally-administered countries overseen/protected by an overlord.

In the nineteenth century that changed.  Not only was the ruling class running in possession of faster means of transport, and the wealth from the industrial revolution, but heaven help us, most of them had IDEAS.  (A lot of those ideas very similar to Marx’s.) They, by gum and golly were actually going to govern ALL of their holdings. Down to the smallest village.  (This had started with Louis XIV, may his name never be sufficiently damned, but in the 19th century they had the ABILITY as well as the desire to stomp on every peasant face forever.)

So what that presentation never connected (they had drunk too much Marx) but should is this:

Just before WWI people were rebelling against distant and often dogmatic rulers, who frankly didn’t know anything and cared even less about local needs and conditions.  This applied equally to European villagers and to Congo tribesmen.

And the European Elite, basically one family, was about as clued in and with it and insulated from the consequences of their bullshit as out would be world elites today.

So, yeah, they were having the equivalent of tea parties and yellow jackets outbreaks, which of course the socialists infiltrated and tried to claim — stop me when it sounds familiar — which explains what actually happened where the presentation used all sorts of passive voice “the respect for established monarchy was broken.”  Uh no.  People were sick and tired of distant rulers who didn’t get them trying to tell them how to wipe their behinds.

So yeah, things were breaking down and the ruling hierarchy found something to distract the people: a long, and bloody war.  Although to be fair, they were probably trying to grab more territory to mis-administer from afar. It just all came together in a perfect storm.

And afterward the Marxists blamed….  nationalism and the free market.  And tried to force internationalism — aka more control from afar — on people and treating people as faceless members of nations, with the guilt and victimhood ascribed to groups, not people.  And when that blew up in WWII… they doubled down.

We’re now in the middle of a massive, new revolution (Call it the digital revolution, though I don’t think that’s exactly right) in the way people live and work, and the old narrative doesn’t fit.  Unrest is breaking out all over, and the socialists, who are now, by and large the ruling elite, keep trying to appropriate it, and ascribe it to the same old same old.

If we double down and prescribe more internationalism, which they do, it might kill civilization and humanity with it.

And to be clear I am for borders.  I see the point of larger countries (commerce and military mostly) but the administration must be as local as possible.  When it comes to government it should always be as small, local and personal/adaptable as possible. Because people aren’t groups, or widgets that fit into groups, be the groups race, cultures, or nations.  Or even villages (trust me.) And because if the local government is doing something particularly idiotic, you can go and have a talk with them.  While if — oh, at random — all of Europe is governed from Brussels, you can’t even vote the bastards out, much less go and have a pointed, finger to sternum, conversation with the worst offender

What we’ve been doing for 100 years now is doing the same thing over and over again (A war? Let’s erase national barriers, and have people governed by impersonal groups far away! That will cure it!) and expecting a different result.

And we all know what that means.

If we don’t break out of this loop, we’re headed to World War Three and afterwards the socialists will try to set up ONE government for the whole of the Earth, because that will stop wars (they never heard of civil wars, the idiots.)

Let’s stop this, shall we. Do not buy the narrative. Speak up, talk back, disrupt the “accepted causes.”

Disrupt the story of the accepted causes of everything really.  And keep talk back. Because everything has been infected with Marxism. And we must drive this heresy train all the way.

Good thing it has no brakes.

 

Two days ago we had news that my mother in law was put into hospice.  She has died today.

This means instead of being home on Sunday, we’ll be traveling across the country to the funeral.

Keep us in your thoughts, since this means I’ll be driving a lot, which frankly scares the heck out of me, but also that life is going to be  a mess for another week. If all goes well we’ll be back home in a week and a day.

If you guys send me guest posts, much appreciated.  And posting WILL be a little erratic.

I’ll try to bob up once a day, no promises on time, though.

I don’t understand whence comes the myth of the very efficient communist regime.

[Before I go on, let me get definitions out of the way: Communist, socialist, progressive, social democrat… It’s a continuum, but really at some level it’s like that Far Side cartoon with the two bathroom doors and a penguin picture on each and the caption “only they know the difference.”  And yeah, to the concern trolls who’ll come by to give me the idiotrivia about it. Thank you. I know. Thanks to your comrades in the 70s in Portugal I studied Marx in all my courses in middle school (BTW that was a bad idea. As a well-read 12 year old, who could do math, I saw the holes in logic, economics and psychology.) The point is that yeah, we can also tell which sex a penguin is by looking closely. The point here is that no one outside your group cares. Same sh*t, different name for the smell.]

Now that this is out of the way: there is a myth out there that the statists are incredibly efficient and smart.  They believe it, of course. I mean, it has been an article of faith with them, ever since I’ve been cognizant, that people on the right are stupid uneducated hicks.

[And for the sake of definitions, again, let’s make this clear: “on the right” to the left means anyone not of the body. they lump into one group the European “blood and soil” right, the national socialists (because not internationalists, therefore not of the body), the libertarians, the American “leave us the heck alone” right, religious conservatives, in fact any religious person, and basically anyone who doesn’t think Lenin had some great ideas. Hell, for a while there they tried to shove Maoists in here with us.]

This is the result of our education system having been largely taken over by the Lenin-fans.  They equate smart with “has the right answer on the test” and “has the right credentials” both of which really are the same thing. And when the curriculum calls for parroting Marx, praising Lenin and hating the free market the only ones getting good grades are idiots, mobis and submarines.  (I wonder if the left has any idea how many submarines there are.  I have a feeling they’re about to find out.  Let’s face it, even I, who am glass fronted, hid successfully for over a decade.)

So they think of themselves as super smart.  And their politico-religious beliefs requires they believe in central control, and that it can work and be efficient.

But…. excuse me? Why do the rest of you believe it?

I was reading a facebook post by Brad Torgersen about the feet-on-fire Portland guy, (Oh, you haven’t seen it?  Well…. let’s say burning man wasn’t completely cancelled this year.  More at the link, but get an oggle of this:)

Anyway, Brad linked this and someone in the comments said these are the Kopstone Komissars.  Which is when it hit me:
THEY ALL ARE.

The really committed communists, the ones who said “come the revolution” always were, and their murderous baby thugs are worse.

No, I am absolutely dead sure on this. Remember I’ve had a vast number of encounters with leftists my entire life — some day over drinks remind me to tell you in detail about the “demonstration guard thugs” who surrounded me, all pointing AK 47s at me and thought I would be scared. No, seriously. They were a for-real circular firing squad.  If I hadn’t pointed it out they might have let go, too. Okay, I told them, because I was afraid they might accidentally hit me. But having been on the receiving end of their expertise, having them try to shoot me meant I was probably the safest there. —  and none of them was playing with a full deck.

About the closest you get to sane and competent are soft American left, and all of us have friends — and relatives — in that pool, so you know without my telling you that these otherwise sane people are ignoring all the contradictions and impossibilities in the bullshit they support. They have to be. Because otherwise they’d have a psychotic break.

From there on, the insanity just piles on.

I’m not going to say that these people are naturally stupid. Hell, I’m related to some of them. I’m saying the ones who are smart, or even competent in other things have…. cracks. Okay, we all have, but their cracks allowed this idiotifying (totally a word) cult-like “explanation for everything” to invade their brain, and that thing eats your ability to function and your common sense.  (Might be a thing of totalitarian ideology.  I have vague memories of people talking about naziism doing the same in the early 20th century.)

But the truth is when they’re running fully under the power of Leninist-love, they have lost most of their marbles, their competence is doubtful, and they couldn’t find reality if it bit them in the fleshy part of the butt.

Occasional-Cortex is about normal level of competence, and when people ask why left-wing mayors are destroying their own cities, I think it’s because they don’t think they’re destroying them. They are, instead, giving an opportunity for the downtrodden to take over them, or whatever. They are of course completely insane, but their cult requires them to believe this.

Obama didn’t mean to destroy world economy, for instance. He thought if he impoverished the US, the rest of the world would become richer, because insano Marxist economics requires that to be true, so it must be true. And he couldn’t process reality that went against the doctrine.

It’s like this all the way down with the left.

But then, you say, Sarah, how did they manage to have these plots, these illusions, to take control of academia, the media and entertainment?

Oh, that was because they had full control of them, starting with a lot of sympathizers in place before they got frisky.

They really can’t function with anything less than FULL control. They’re not competent. They can just project an ILLUSION of competence. BUT they need full control.

Remember in the USSR they had to install a ban on TYPEWRITERS and were finally taken down by that revolutionary tech, the copier.

And they think they can take control of the US and KEEP IT.

So, the series of prattfalls we’ve been watching this year? That’s the left when not in full control of the narrative. They’re always like that. the number of stupid moves they made in any country they got control of? Is almost all of them.

Yeah, they did this desperate covidiocy thing to regain their captive audience, but even that is breaking down.

We’re Americans, and you block us on one side, we go the other way. And as for means of communication?  Oh, brother!

The left trying to take over America are like a dog chasing a car.  If it catches it, then it will know what real trouble is.

Be not afraid.  In the end we win, they lose. If we manage to not die laughing.

A note from your friendly neighborhood writer (I know, I know, I’m not the only one!): Sorry about this strange truncated post, but it’s my husband’s birthday and I don’t feel like doing anything, and besides I didn’t promo yesterday.
Real post tomorrow, I promise.

Also FYI I HATE the new WordPress posting interface, which they make really clean by hiding ABSOLUTELY everything and then you have to poke around till you find it. And they don’t let you switch back to the class mode.

I can see where this would be way more useful for stuff like, oh, a store or a vlog, but none of the stuff that’s “new and cool” is stuff I need, and I can’t find any of the things I actually want, like how to center the pictures without figuring out pictographs they invented for the occasion. Grrr. Argh.

Meanwhile, kick back, consider one of these books, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

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 MACKEY CHANDLER: Who Can Own the Stars?

The Kingdom of Central’s sovereign, Heather Anderson, set L1 as a limit for armed ships to respect, de-militarizing the Solar System. Now that the Earth nations are experimenting with star drives they want to challenge this limit anew. The USNA starship, Constitution is intercepted violating the L1 limit and brings them to the brink of war again. Will Peer Jeffrey Singh be able to negotiate a compromise? Do the Earthies mean to bargain in good faith? The Spacers need to buy time but things on Earth are always so complicated…

FROM ELIZABETH BRUNER: Drawing the Magic

Can magic be a substitute for drugs? It sure seems like it.

Christopher Chevalier and Listrial, the Fairy Queen, are in Arizona searching for clues about terrifying monsters and the people who fight them and finding more questions than answers.

Winifred and her crew have been knocked for a loop, all their lives turned upside down, and they have a bad feeling about what’s coming next. When Izzy gets in trouble, all hell could break loose.

Dan Ben-David needs answers and he needs them fast. Everything is spiraling out of his control and he doesn’t want to ask for help. Instead, he’s trying to figure everything out on his own and it’s going from bad to worse. He’s in desperate need of help and a sandwich.

FROM JULIA BLAINE: Tea and Sympathy and Emus

A whimsical, quirky story. How could it not be with naughty emus and flying pigs?
On her own for the first time in years, Linda wants to learn to take care of herself again. She’s not doing a spectacular job of it.
Sheriff Deputy Dan Granger doesn’t like making mistakes, especially when he is on duty. He’s made Linda’s new independent life more difficult. When he tries to fix his mistakes, he can’t quite get it right. And it’s more and more important to Dan that he makes everything right.
Can he make this romance fly? Or will birds that don’t fly and pigs that do, get in the way?

FROM MARY CATELLI: Lifestone

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Cool as Ice

Ice is back. He’s got a job, a girlfriend, four talking horses, and now he bought a wreck of a house, hemmed with conflicting requirements of the Historical Society, building codes and fire regulations . . . He’s almost too busy to worry about the looming trial of a former president.