Yesterday there was a comment by someone here about how he wanted blood on the streets.

Sure. we all want blood on the streets. In a general and metaphorical way. Except some of us have seen blood on the streets. And those of us who have don’t want it.

Now is avoiding blood on the streets consigning ourselves and our children to the type of hell other countries have gone through for three generations?  I don’t know. It might not even be possible for people like me. It’s always a bad sign when I wake up strangling the bed clothes and shaking them, which is the reason I’ve been up for two hours now and it’s not even 8 am.  It’s a sign the anger is starting leak around the edges. And we’re nowhere at the level of oppression going on in Venezuela or even vaguely approaching the crap people put up with for 70 years plus in the USSR.

However people who lived in the USSR and people from Poland, say, might very well tell you it was worth to keep their heads down and quiet until they could be free again. After all if you’re dead you’ll never see freedom again anyway.

Which is fine, but being a live lamb might not be possible for most Americans in this day and age.

This in turn brings me to why we’re angry.

We’re angry because this is a gross violation of our country as constituted, our country as we’re committed to, our country as a country of laws.

Read that paragraph again. And realize that the fashionable habit these days of adopting a pose of the “the republic is gone, gone, gone” is bullshit.  The only people who can think that are people who have never lived in another country as one of them.

I know. I did. And I remember thinking Americans were completely insane. I remember it as through a glass darkly, from the other side of acculturation. But that person and I did share a brain, and I remember my utter bafflement at the American people being mad at taxes — because well, every country levies taxes, right? It’s the price to pay for civilization? — and at American people being furious that the government wanted to take their guns away — what is it with Americans and guns, anyway? The government always takes people’s guns away, to keep them safe! — and at Americans getting all hot under the collar at the idea of a national id card, and…

I also remember coming to the states and being baffled and astonished at people leaving stuff outside, just lying there, and no one stealing it.  And at the way you didn’t bribe the police at a traffic stop. And at the amazing amount of civility in everyday life.

Eventually I realized those were two sides of the same coin.  The respect for the law in the US, specifically the respect for our fundational law of the constitution is woven all the way through.

Which is why places like Chicago of St. Louis, or other places where corruption is naked and in your face are jokes and bywords here. In the rest of the world with the exception of certain anglophone parts of the world, they’re “Saturday Night.”

And it’s why we’re outraged, frothing mad, chomping at the bit.

Look, let’s level set: I’m waiting for the boss over at instapundit to tell me I stepped over the line with my intimation that I want everyone who was/is involved in this attempted coup (against we the people who voted for Trump as president,) to be hanged, cut down while still living and their entrails burned before their eyes.

For those who didn’t get the reference, it was actually the Elizabethan punishment for heresy/treason, since the two were enmeshed in that era, and as such it fits the crime against the most basic beliefs that make us a nation.  So, yeah, as graphic as that was, it was a reference joke. And I was being a nerd.

On the other hand, the reason that joke was made was that a part of me is frothing at the mouth furious and has nowhere to put it.

Because the guy who jacks your car might be showing a lack of respect for the law, but he’s not in elected office, and he most likely hasn’t sworn to defend the constitution. BUT most importantly he’s probably not doing it in the full light of day. His reach is limited.  The assclowns in government right now, however, are screaming from the rooftops that they’re no longer our countrymen and they don’t want to live by the very same constitution they swore to protect.

And we’re not stupid. I’m no dumber than the next person.  The immediate reaction is to view them as enemies, domestic. Which they are.

The anger has been building too. It started during the Obama administration with Fast and Furious, with Benghazi, with Hillary walking free after sharing state secrets with the Russians, with people not fully realizing the enormity of the Iran deal which might meet the definition of treason.

So, Sarah, given you’re as angry as anyone about this, how come you tell us we shouldn’t start the dance.

Because once the dance starts you have no idea how it will go. You might think you do, but you don’t. You might think that you have all the guns, and sure you do, but do you have all the indoctrinated youngsters willing to commit unspeakable crimes for you? Because the left does. And sure, most of those are useless, but not all. Psychopaths always thrive in this type of situation.

So, I’m a coward then?

No. Not for myself. I am a coward for the republic, and for future generations.  And don’t tell me the republic doesn’t exist anymore.  Do you think that it’s EVER existed as intended?  Do you think men suddenly became angels and behaved perfectly according to the law?

If you think that the current abuses — egregious as they are — are the first of their kind against our laws and founding, you either don’t know history, or you really believed the unified mass media all through the 20th century.

Find contemporary writings and read them. More importantly analyze them.

The violations against the Republic, big and small, have been going on since we were founded. And yes, we came back from most of them.

We are now at the very beginning of a very LONG course to come back from the bullsh*t perpetrated upon the nation by Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

Look, just because we’re a constitutional republic, we’re not immune from the trends of thought and technology of the time we live in.  And in the twentieth century the way of the future was a big centralized government with the power to plan everything.

Woodrow Wilson and FDR were “modernizing” the country to “compete” against the behemoths of the day. They thought.

What they did was nearly annihilate the republic.

But the only reason you know that, the only reason you don’t revere their memories is because the times they are achanging and you have access to other means of information.

The fact we’re this angry, the fact that the shampeachment has lost any and all hint of legitimacy to the point they’re now thinking of not sending it to the senate because reasons; the fact that the stand off in Virginia is a powder keg; the fact that we want heads on pikes is paradoxically proof that the Republic still exists and that things are getting better.

Before you become a Boojahideen, consider that fifty years ago, with the information that would be available to the people then, Obama would be considered a national hero, who had brought us summer of recovery. It would be in school books and no one would even doubt it.  Consider the Shampeachment would sound very important and real and we the few who doubted it wouldn’t dare open our mouths for fear of being thought crazy.

The culture war takes time. Frankly, we’ve come so far so fast that I’m shocked. I’m shocked that I’m not alone in my anger.  At the same time I’m even more shocked that people in Europe, who I thought were so far gone as not to have a sign of self determination, are rebelling against their internationalist socialist masters.

Our anger against the current outrageous abuses demands simple, immediate solutions. Heads on pikes. Blood in the streets.

But that’s the way to lose simply. It’s the way to make the whole context: who is more ruthless, determined and has better weapons or can get in foreign mercenaries with better weapons?  Not: who can govern best under the law of the land?

First of all if the dance starts say hello to the Balkans, because it will burn long enough and hot enough to destroy everything you love. It might last way past the time a memory of the Constitution remains.  It will also be seized upon as a reason the Constitutional Republic was a failure.  Just as any aggression initiation on the right will be seized on as a reason for complete repression. (What are you guys? Stupid? Why do you want to do what the left keeps praying for every time there’s a mass shooting? Why do you want to be a “right wing terrorist?”)

No, this doesn’t mean being quiet forever. No it doesn’t mean we’ve already lost.

Impatience is not a civic virtue.  Those who yell about the first revolution don’t seem to realize how LONG that fuse burned. Nor that a great part of the legitimacy of the revolution was that they’d TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE. They’d been reasonable and trying to reign back abuses for DECADES.

Americans are slow to war. We’re a people of law. Also we’re hells own bastards when the war starts, so it’s well that we delay.

Yes, the current abuses are egregious.  Perhaps not the most egregious ones (trust me on this, okay?) but the most nakedly so.

The idiots and their shampeachment and their socialism-gargling candidates are nakedly, in the full light of day, trying to destroy everything we are and everything we believe.

Understand they’re doing that, because they’re desperate. They’re insane with anger. Baffled that what they’ve always done is suddenly not working.

And they’re losing. They’re losing at pretty much everything and showing themselves as incompetent ass clowns in the bargain.

Taking this thing hot now is to give them a dignity they don’t deserve. Do you remember the end of Princess Bride? Let them stay alive and listen to the laughter of derision, and know the Republic lives past them, and that we’re still Americans. Let them know they failed.

Now, should the elections go sideways with truly massive naked fraud; should they try one of their clever idiot tricks to put say Nancy Pelosi in as president, well then… the situation will be different then.

But we’ll have done all we can to preserve the Republic, first.  And then if we lose it, it remains only to keep the idea alive till another generation can pick it up.

Take no counsel of your anger. It is not a wise counselor.

As much of the Republic of Laws as is lost, it was lost before I was even born.  And yet, even flawed and maimed it is the best thing humanity has ever created.

Take no counsel of your fears. They’re lousy counselors.

Yes, there will be reverses, there will be battles lost, but we’ve turned the corner on the culture war. It is as yet a small and tentative corner, and most of our youngsters are still indoctrinated into oikophobia and socialism.  But it is changing.  In something as big as a culture, n a country as complex as the US, it takes time to change.

Speaking out is not glamorous.  And yes, it will cost you many things.

But before we consign the last best thing on Earth to the chancy flames of revolution, don’t you feel we should give the current cultural revolt a chance to succeed?

We can always have heads on pikes tomorrow. But once we’ve set the country on fire, we can’t get it whole again.

 

There is a lot of talk about Toxic Masculinity. No one ever talks about Toxic Femininity.  Though every woman who is a functional human being knows about it, as does anyone who has ever lived or worked in a predominantly female environment.

So, why does no one talk about it? Well, mostly because the left believes that “designated victims” TM are sacred and must never be called on their own bullshit, no matter how smelly. Hence also the bizarre idea of racial “privilege” that tells you holocaust survivors should be attacked for “white privilege” but the Obama girls raised as the creme de la creme, and never facing a day of privation in their lives don’t have any privilege and are victims.

But there’s also other stuff going into it. To an extent — to the extent that historically for biological reasons men dominated public life — the fact that no one talks about the bad side of female modes of being in society is the result of patriarchy.

Men are ridiculously, idiotically, insanely blinkered about women. They don’t really see women as they see other men, but through rosy glasses as much better than men.  The “oh so smart” former president with the depth of a rain puddle in Colorado told us that women are so much better than men and that the world would be better under women.  Which means he’s basically a bog standard male who has never given the matter a thought, and is going on what “everybody knows.” (It occurs to me this man, if he’d been born to an ultra conservative Arab family in one of the ultra conservative Muslim countries would also be telling us that women’s hair emits seductive rays. He’s a suit that speaks. Or an empty chair, if you prefer.)

Of course it is right evolutionarilly that men should feel that way about women. It keeps the species going. It is also bizarre though, and leaves men curiously defenseless now that women view themselves as an aggrieved class and are trying to take over public life and exclude men.

In fact it leaves as the only defense in society that most women — even the feminists who pretend otherwise — unless completely and extensively broken and indoctrinated know what other women are and therefore will not trust any of them.  As they shouldn’t. I can’t imagine a worst hell than what Obama is proposing.

To lay my own biases on the table, in the family it was normal for both my mother and grandmother to talk about men as if they were somewhat daft children in large bodies, and yet endearing.  At the same time, men would laugh at women’s notions of what was important and what was noteworthy.  As a child, I saw both sides.

My feeling about it was this: there are things at which men are superior. There are things at which women are superior. Both will look like idiots to the other when outside their domain.

But in a society in which tasks were strictly divided by sex this was not a big deal. Women and men competed only against others with the same social modality. Note, I did not say this was a better way to organize things. Hell, given contraceptives and medical science it might not be possible now, absent total culture destruction.

That’s not the society we have anyway.  And the disparate abilities of men and women make them naturally regard the other as an idiot. But only women, due to the Marxist social bias of ALL our cultures in the west, are allowed to complain and voice the problems with the other sex’s way of behaving.

Only women are allowed to talk about a toxic way of being and say it should be eliminated from society.

Worse, women are better at seeing the defects in men more clearly than men see the defects in women.

So, the problem is this: right now, men, due to their illusions about women are curiously defenseless against women in public spaces. As a result, and in many ways masculinity itself is being exterminated.

First, before I go into this, let us establish that like every other possible human trait, masculinity and femininity are on a continuum.  There are men who act more like women than women themselves in the social sphere (and btw, through having had to work with them, they are the most toxically feminine of all. And no, I’m not calling them gay. I have gay friends who are intensely masculine, and most gay men are men. In fact the most toxically “feminine” men I know in social style are straight and act masculine. They just don’t present masculine in social style. But once I describe the primary mode of female society, you’ll probably come up with half a dozen of them from your own experience.) And there are women — particularly those not neuro typical — who act more like men in the social sphere.  Which means they couldn’t take a social clue if you hit them with it and put nails in. And they grow to hate and despise the subtle hints and rumor mills of female social groups. (Why, yes, I do have a mirror. Though I’m not so far gone I can’t see normalcy from here.)

So, with that in mind, and the understanding that archetypes only exist as abstractions and that statistics don’t describe any human being who lives in the real world, let’s talk about “the female mode of making society hell.”

We don’t need to talk about the male mode of making society hell. Or perhaps we do, since little boys are no longer allowed to be little boys, and you might never have seen the natural man in his natural state.

When I first entered elementary school we had two one-room schoolhouses side by side, one for girls and one for boys.

I remember looking over the fence at the boy’s play yard and giving silent thanks I wasn’t a boy. Because while I fought when I absolutely had to, all boys did was fighting and pounding on each other and acting like lunatics. Girls don’t do that. Boys don’t do that now either. They can’t physically fight for dominance. And that, in the end creates toxic masculinity.  The raw masculine creature is physically aggressive, tries to establish dominance that way, and tries to get what he wants that way.

If males never learn to control their impulses — say by not being allowed to be physical at all as children, and the curbed appropriately — they grow into toxic males, who will try to bend people to their will with their superior masculine strength.

The beginning of civilization was when the first man instead of pummeling another man into the ground with his club chose to hit him only once, establish dominance, and then make a pact of friendship.  You find something like that in almost every early saga of humanity.

You never find that among women. Women don’t fight for dominance and then become best friends. Because that’s not how female dominance works.

Look, we’re weaker — again on average — smaller, and couldn’t win a fair fight with any man. Which makes us more ruthless, more merciless and not at all fair. Or really physical.

You could say in many ways the female mode of being is civilization. Because it looks that way from the outside. But it’s not. Not if you allow females to compete with males and to take over all the institutions of society from science to politics AND YOU DON’T TEACH THEM TO CURB THEIR INSTINCTS.

So, let’s look at toxic femininity.  In recent life it’s mostly been on stage in, I THINK the first Democrat debate, when Kamala Harris took off after Joe Biden.

Look, I don’t care more for those two than for a bucket of warm spit. BUT if you look at that debate, when she attacked him (and briefly bolstered her repulsive self) you can see Joe Biden’s surprised shock.  Here is a woman he’s been friendly with, a woman he helped, who suddenly comes after him on personal grounds. This is something no male in the same circumstances would ever do. But toxic women give no quarter, seize every opportunity, will take advantage of every weakness, and don’t care if you helped them in the past.

You see, if you go back to what women and men did in the distant past before agriculture, the past that still shapes us because evolution is very slow, you’ll find that men hunted in groups, where the hierarchy must be absolutely clear, because you have to know who is giving orders, in a group that must coordinate their actions and might all die if they don’t.  Also you must be sure that the best/strongest/most agile man is in charge.

Hence males continuous testing “contests” with each other, but also the acceptance of the hierarchy thus established, once it’s established.

While women also have hierarchies (after all, the alpha female raises more kids) it’s more subtle.  Females, you see, gathered. They also watched kids at the same time.  Your goal is to be able to gather the most food, while losing none of your toddlers who wandered off and didn’t get watched.

Women try to have cohesive groups that from the outside appear to be smooth and loving because they are cohesive and do communal work (a lot).

Women’s work is traditionally safe, boring, social, and capable of being interrupted by kids.

This means the best of these groups is one that’s fairly homogeneous and minimizes personality conflicts.

This is usually accomplished by alpha females by enforcing a stultifying conformity and destroying the social credit (and sometimes the mind) of any woman who steps out of line or is just too weird.

In the primitive tribe this was best, because if all the women were more or less the same, they all watched every other woman’s kids, and more kids survived.

Unfortunately, as with men, there is always a contest of wills to see who will be the alpha female who keeps the other ones in line and apparent comity. And the alpha female has to be fairly ruthless at rooting out threats to her authority.

This usually boils down to “having something” on every woman in the group or making it up if she doesn’t. And being ruthless at using anything she has to pull other women back into line. When she loses that game, her reign is over and she becomes just another of the lumpen masses to be kept in line by the new alpha female.

While this form of being social works pretty well in extended families (which is all the earliest human groups were) with the matriarch keeping charge till she can’t hold it together anymore, and the other women — and often the new incoming women were kidnapped or traded from other tribes so had to learn the way of this one — being kept in line by her, it works like heck in the modern world of offices, laboratories and factories. Not to mention universities.

And because our society insists on being blind to the existence, let alone the dangerous side of female aggression, it destroys any possibility of accomplishment or excellence and in general makes the wheels come off whatever endeavor it is where women become ascendant.

Look, what I described above: any exclusively female, dominant female or female directed portion of society is a crab bucket.

Arguably, absent a toxic female lead, this is not bad for a large family group, within its very limited functions.

It sucks for a society, though.

You know when people wail that girls get discouraged from math or whatever?  And feminists attribute that to patriarchy?  They couldn’t be more wrong.  The people who tell women that liking math or science of wanting to be one of those weirdos who are passionately interested in building things is ridiculous or funny or whatever?  Females. Usually same age group females.  If you want to encourage girls to excel in science take them out of schools who group by age. Older women can intellectually encourage Odd females. But the same-age groups can’t. Instinctively the different is just “Wrong” and they want conformity. (And yes, females who love math and science are very often Odd. Not because women aren’t smart enough for those subjects, but because they’re BETTER at language processing and thus tend to prefer doing that.)

The problem with not admitting that women in a group default to the crab bucket, trying above all to keep each other in conformity is that this mode is allowed to go into places it should never go: into offices where women play office politics and rumor games to keep everyone in the same median mediocrity.

The personality games can get — often get — so toxic that what they’re actually supposed to do is forgotten in the “I need to take this challenger down now.”

Look, men had to curb the male mode of dominance to function well in groups. Sure, they established it in many ways, instead of having a good punch up (though from what I understand from books written in earlier parts of the 20th century, those might happen too, out of sight) including the inevitable braggadocio about girls. But most of all they were curbed by teaching men the “gentlemanly virtues.”  You know, don’t take advantage just because you can. Obey legitimate authority. Concentrate on doing your part, rather than using your power to overcome everyone else.  That sort of thing.

Note these virtues are not universal. They’re almost exclusively Western. Other societies dealt with dominance in other ways, including religiously or traditionally determined hierarchies. But for the West, the “gentlemanly virtues” worked.

We’re no longer really teaching them to men. And that’s a problem.

BUT WE NEVER TAUGHT THEM TO WOMEN.

Why?

Well, because women in the public sphere were rare enough that most of them learned them by osmosis from the males around them. And when they didn’t, they were usually ineffective enough, back when there was an actual patriarchy.  Even if men are blind to female aggression, it not being physical, even men can see it when it’s blatant and in your face.  And then they decide this one woman is a monster and all turn against her.

Women are now in public life.  Given the nature of work today, there’s no real reason they shouldn’t be.

But unless you want society to come apart in a sea of crab buckets, each pulling the other down, and for men to be run from society by feral, toxic females, we must start training women to be civilized.  Teach them to be “gentlemen.”  Teach them to be aware of their impulses, where they come from and what the consequences are.  Teach them to work in hierarchical groups without continuously testing for dominance. Teach them to compete without undermining. Teach them not to take advantage just because they can. Teach them to value the mission. Teach them not to be tattle tales and rumor mongers.

Daddy’s little princess is all well and good when all she’s going to do is eventually be the matriarch of her family.

When she might be the leader of a country, or the scientist in charge of a project, though, she must learn to pull in harness and not to try to change directions for her own personal advantage, rather than the stated goal.

And she must never, ever, ever be told that she is naturally perfect, with no flaw or bad impulse, and that society would be perfect if only she ruled it. That’s feeding the monster of toxic masculinity.  Teaching her every man is against her adds paranoia to the mix, which means males must be destroyed FIRST before she beats every other woman into submission with psychological games.

The way we’re raising women is a good way to create monsters who unmake society and end up — if surveys can be trusted (I’m agnostic) — unhappy, resentful and envious.

If you’re raising your daughter for the harem, go ahead. Tell her she’s the most wonderful thing in the world and all little girls are made of sugar and spice with no flaws.

If you’re raising your daughter to have any power in society, teach her to use her natural power wisely and in the service of building civilization.

Or we’ll all pay, and then something will arise that raises all daughters for the harem.

 

 

I confess I’m a violent-scene or horror scene wimp.  I don’t have any issue with the violence or horror happening, and generally can read it (if I am careful not to visualize it) I just don’t need to see it, because if I see it it’s with me forever.

It has been mistaken by some for my being a fragile flower of femininity, but the fact is that most of the time the scene is purely unnecessary.  And I’m a visual person who will dredge up yucky details forever.

In the same way, I’m easily disgusted.  You know those animated gifs people put on face book, with someone vomiting, or some animal pooping? Most of the time when I close an image or ask it be made invisible to me it’s because of something like that. It turns my stomach.  Yes, I know animals poop. I’ve raised kids, and kittens.  And when Havey cat gets an upset tummy my life becomes “Cleaning poo from interesting places.”

I can look at it when I absolutely must (to clean it) but I don’t want to look at it, if I don’t have to.

Needless to say I’m not a fan of what I call “raped by rotting zombies” horror fiction. For some reason, for a while at least, there was a tendency to dwell on the details of the rot, the smell, etc. making the horror not so much horror as nausea. At least for me. And it was everywhere, which pretty much got me to stop reading horror. (Not that I was ever a major fan. And when I write it, it’s a sign of depression.)

But I’d read a novel filled with raping falling-to-pieces smelly zombies and glistening serpents slithering through the eye sockets of meaty skulls than watch what is going on in politics/government in this country, right now.

Look, I’ll begin by saying that I’m sure worse has happened before. Again, if you want an education read contemporary accounts (by supporters even) of the Woodrow Wilson presidency.

It’s just that it largely wasn’t reported or credited. How could it be? To believe such shenanigans were going on at the highest level of the nation’s governance would be horrifying, wouldn’t it? Far worse than that noise from the front door when there isn’t anyone there, or the footsteps in the empty house in the dead of night.

Or at least it should be. More disgusting either.

It’s just that right now it is happening in the full light of shameless day. Or at least the full light of shameless blogging, where someone somewhere will ferret out what is happening, sooner rather than later.

This is kind of like the difference between knowing there is whoring going on somewhere in town, and coming out your front door to find all the wives of the notables doing it with total strangers in the middle of the street and stopping to wish you good morning as you walk by.

And yet… There is a tendency to look away, even now.

There is something to the human brain — I think mine is just over-sensitive in that regard, btw — that recoils from something evil or disgusting and looks away by forgetting it, erasing it, papering it over with a less disturbing narrative.

I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done the experiment of having something outlandish and literally unbelievable happen, and then interview people afterwards, but I’m almost sure all of us have seen this play in real life, particularly when we were little.  Or at least I did. Take, say, a child the adult favors, doing something utterly despicable, like spit in the common soup, or hit the baby.  If you take after that child and try to make him stop, the adults will often have ‘seen’ it reversed.  Though they were looking right at the two of you, they’ll see YOU as having done the terrible thing, because the favored one couldn’t have.

I’m also sure I’m not the only person ever to tell someone something and have them hear it completely backwards, because that’s what they expect.

It’s a form of looking away.  The mind can’t accept, therefore the brain rewrites.

We’ve had endless moments of looking away over years, as the democrats slowly ratcheted up the crazy, shameless and outright bizarre behavior right in plain view.

Calling Bush Hitler should have occasioned more shock, but I was desensitized by the fact they called Reagan Hitler, too. Though seriously: the most milk toast of not really conservatives and they called him Hitler and spent eight years making giant-head papier mache puppets of him with fangs and dripping blood. Because what passes for clever political discourse on the left is apparently kindergarten craft projects.

The fact that we didn’t really stare in horror, in fact the fact that behavior wasn’t particularly shocking tells you how long they’d been ratchetting up the crazy slope, presumably since the drug-soaked sixties demonstrations.  We’d come to accept we were dealing with spoiled children, who — instead of debating the actual issues surrounding national security — screamed “no blood for oil” and made papier mache puppets and THOUGHT THIS WAS CLEVER DISCOURSE.

We had to know that, otherwise everything would have stopped and everyone would have gone down to the corner to stare at the freak show.  No? Think about dropping one of those unhinged demonstrations of the Bush years into the middle of the 40s or 50s.

But the thing was we saw all that, and the crazy people they chose to feature on TV. We talked to friends who assured us that Bush was going to put every gay person in a concentration camp.

And then we watched political debates or even voted, as if none of this had happened.  No one ever said, “Wait, the party of the giant papier mache heads is nominating Obama?  This is not a candidate who has a clue about reality, obviously!”  No, even otherwise rational people talked about how smart the man was, even though both his intelligence and his political acumen joined invisibility to their other qualities. (Not that he was stupid, exactly. Just a middle-brow, indoctrinated into Marxism from the cradle, and not enough of a deep thinker to see the flaws, which is why he kept trying to implement the “recoveries” that Marx told him SHOULD work, and to make the rest of the world richer by making America poorer.)

We looked away.  We looked away and pretended we were dealing with normal, full grown human beings who simply disagreed with us.  Not with petulant children who hate us because we can’t give them the utopia that Marxism promises (but never delivers.)

Benghazi was the one that was hardest for me to look away from. Oh, there had been others, on the way.

Take Fast and Furious.  Fast and Furious is the kind of bizarre, insane plot you concoct if your understanding of the world is stuck circa elementary school and you have a theory into which you try to fit reality, instead of testing your theory against reality.  It went something like this: We said that most guns in gun violence in Mexico came from the US; We were wrong; Force gun dealers to sell guns to Mexican criminals; Guns are taken to Mexico and cause hundreds of deaths; Report those deaths back in the US with proof US guns caused the death; ?????????????????; gun banning in the US.

Seriously. It was that completely and thoroughly insane, and the fact they thought it would work means their sense of the world froze with Saturday morning cartoons.

But that was barely reported. And if you mention it to people who don’t read alternative news sites, they aren’t even aware it happened. Of course, I suspect if they find out, they’ll look away and forget they knew it.

Then there was Benghazi.  You had to know about Benghazi. Americans died. Just before the election in 2012. And the president sent out people to LIE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ABOUT IT. All indications is that people were left to die, rather than… I don’t know.  Why didn’t we send help? Would that have exposed some of the sewage we’re starting to catch glimpses of in our agencies and our government? Or did Obama imagine that it would jeopardize his cherished Iran deal (which was part of his dream of reversing Reagan. For mommy and daddy who hated Reagan.) WHY he thought the Iranians wouldn’t deal is beyond me. After all, when you’re handing people your lunch without their even having to beat you, they don’t normally refuse.

It became obvious immediately after the election.  And yet, most people looked away.  Sure, Trump won, but during the campaign no one hung “Butcher of Benghazi” or at least “liar of Benghazi” on Hillary’s misbegotten neck.  But they didn’t.  After all, at this point, what difference does it make, right?

We looked away. She was treated as a credible and reasonable candidate.

Then there was the election in 2018 and the unimaginable, naked fraud that gave them the house. In Arizona the polls were left open for weeks, under a provision supposed to be for when the polls had closed for a storm.  They remained open until the right candidate won.  or the left one, in this case.

And it wasn’t the only place. Plus we now know they did a never-end of vote harvesting.  Which btw people are so confused about I saw someone in a blog suggest we should harvest votes ourselves. Guys, what they did was go to nursing homes and hospitals and “vote” for people who can’t/shouldn’t/don’t know. They also “harvested” unvoted ballots from trash.  Those aren’t even LEGAL.

And then they spent years throwing a screaming tantrum that we should abolish the electoral college, because they can’t commit that level of fraud everywhere.  Oh, but they’re trying, they’re trying really hard. Look at them completing the fatal wound that Motor Voter Inflicted on us by now giving licenses to illegal aliens: when motor voter mandates you also register people to vote without asking for proof of… well, anything, including that that’s a real name. (Foreign documents are easy to fake, since most Americans at the DMV can’t read the languages they’re in. I got into movies at the student discount with my Portuguese bus pass for years (yes, I know, but young we were, and very broke and discount movies were our escape when we could find someone to stay with the guys while they slept.) Also every legislature the Democrats capture becomes extremely concerned with the expense of elections and goes vote by fraud mail. Because vote by mail facilitates ALL the other fraud, including getting unvoted ballots from dumpsters.

We know all this. Somewhere in our heads, we know all this. At least those of us who follow politics know all this. But even we… look away.

I hear people talking about how voters gave the dems the house “despite all their misbehavior.”

Really? Really, you’re going with that? No, the dems gave themselves the house and we… looked away.

We look away because admitting that half the nation has completely forsworn any allegiance to the country and the constitution, and are animated only by raw will to power, perhaps with a dash of hating everyone who refuses to just hand it over to them, is admitting that we can no longer deal with them as adults; that there are no longer two functional parties in American politics.  And also that a vast number of our co-citizens are completely insane, dysfunctional children.

How precisely are we supposed to go about our lawful occasions and planning for our future if we admit that?

So we look away.

And by looking away, we break the alarms that should be telling the left when they’ve gone too far.

They do crazy things like declare “sanctuary cities” for illegal immigrants, in contravention of federal law, or have minor judges block presidential orders or directives. Or lie shamelessly about the actions of Obama at the border, attributing them to Trump. … and we look away.

We look away instead of getting in their faces.  We look away.

We look away instead of becoming outraged and not shutting up about the law breakers from Hillary to Comey walking free on crimes that would put anyone else away for life.  We should scream that they should be subjected to the same laws as the rest of us, they’re not aristocrats. Our outrage should make the ground ROCK.

Instead, we look away. We swallow our anger. We go sullen. We look away.

The democrats run an impeachment on two articles: Orange man bad and orange man won the election and we don’t like it. They announce if Trump is not convicted and removed by the Senate they will CONTINUE IMPEACHING HIM.  And such an act of unbridled malice and insanity doesn’t get the majority of people to immediately shout “ARE YOU ACTUALLY INSANE?  DO YOU KNOW WHAT COMES NEXT AFTER YOU DESTROY THE LAW OF THE LAND?”

No, people shrug and look away.  And the Democrats never hear that bell ringing.

Take what’s been happening in Virginia. The governor, someone who SWORE TO UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION tried to gun grab. But people are already trying to look away. “Oh, there are sanctuary counties” — one of the mos strange tics of the left is not realizing that their clever work arounds will be used against them too — and “Well, the bill didn’t pass.”

They look away already.

The Democrats have fielded the most insane field of candidates ever assembled on a stage. A couple dozen ass clowns, each trying to be more socialist than the next and saying the most bizarre things, from promising free everything, including free health care for illegals, at the expense of those of us who pay taxes, to “Dark psychic force”, to accusing everyone plus imaginary people of being Russian agents, and PEOPLE LOOK AWAY.  They treat these people as though they have more credibility than giant papier-mache puppets and a guy on stilts.  They treat these people as though any of them would make a better president than Vermin Supreme or a random inhabitant of a downtown corner, complete with begging bowl and sob-story written with crayon on cardboard.

That’s looking away. That’s disabling the alarm.

After all it’s so loud, isn’t it? And it will only startle them. Poor dears, they mean well, don’t they.

No one who has rigged things the way they have, and says the things they do means well to anyone who stands in the way of their getting power.

But we look away. It’s too horrible. And the mockery they’re making of our laws and institutions — I didn’t even get to mention the mired-in-corruption FBI and the least said about the other institutions that rolled over and let Obama scratch their belly en-route to corrupting them into spying on his political rival — is certainly far more nauseating than rotting zombie rapists.

But we look away. We look away when we should be sounding the alarm 24/7. We try to be polite when the time for politeness is long past.  You can’t be polite with someone who hates you and wishes to destroy everything that you build your society on.

You have to speak out and loudly, before it comes to blood on the streets. Because if you don’t it will come to blood on the streets.

It will come to blood on the streets when they optimize their fraud machine (they’re already doing it. Look at all the felons who’ve had their voting rights restored in the last couple of years) and slip Hillary in under the wire as the “moderate” choice. Or worse, they actually run Sanders.  Are you ready for the first openly communist president of the US? What will he swear on? Das Kapital? And what will he swear to do? NOT defend the constitution. We do know that.

And it will come to blood on the streets if we actually rise up and vote in unheard of numbers and the fraud can’t catch up to us.  There will be blood. They’ll start it. (Which mind you is preferable to us starting it.)

The only other alternative is to start right now pointing out not just that they’re venal and obsessed with power (was it Lindsey Graham who said “And I hope to G-d you never get it?”), that their party is a sewer of politicians engaged in corruption which their media arm (which passes itself off as main stream media) aids and abets, but also that they are ridiculous. Their ideas ossified in the early twentieth century (along with their hairstyles), their bright suggestions would make us Venezuela within five years, but more importantly — because it hurts them more — they look like a bunch of neurotic plucked chickens throwing fits that would make a kindergartner blush.

Mock them. Point out how ridiculous they are. How dangerous they are. Never let them forget the venal, despicable, stupid and insane things they say.

Sound the alarm. Don’t look away.

No petty tyrant’s self importance can survive an encounter with unabashed humor and ridicule.  And in this case, dear Lord, were we blessed with ridiculous enemies.  Yes, they are dangerous too, but only because we keep looking away.

Don’t look away. Look on, full on and without flinching at the horror the left has become.

Because the alternative is snakes on meaty skulls forever. And the skulls will be yours and mine, and those of everyone we hold dear.

When Men Hoist the Pirate Flag a blast from the past from September 2013

I have bad news.  Men and women are different.  Oh, I don’t mean that – vive la difference, right? – I mean men and women are different in the way they relate to others, the way they relate to society, the way they present.

Is some of that culturally set?  Well, no sh*t Sherlock.  The “revolutionaries” and “daring innovators” of the sixties kept coming up with ridiculous things like you know, in some cultures wearing pants would make you non-womanly, and in Scottland men wore kilts.  Well, again, no sh*t Sherlock.  A lot of the external signaling of gender and the way people er… for lack of a better phrase, strut their stuff for the opposite gender (or the same) is different depending where you are.  (I had the d*mndest time convincing my parents that no, Dan wasn’t gay, because he doesn’t drink alcohol, or not a lot of it.)

Do these differences in the way gender is expressed invalidate the concept of gender and make us all tabula rasa? Can we raise boys to behave as women and women as boys and nothing at all will be different?

I’d ask how stupid you have to be to believe that except that I know most psychologists and sociologists practicing today were TAUGHT that – whether they believe it or not depends, I guess on how much exposure they’ve had to the real world.  And I know places like Sweden and Holland and Germany and other “enlightened” locations have swallowed this hook line and sinker, which is why we have “gender neutral” toys and the idea that kids get to choose their gender as adults, kind of like some “enlightened” parents let kids choose their own names “when they’re old enough”.  As though it were just some accoutrement, and not an essential part of who you are, formed and molded into muscle and thought and hormonal load from the time you were in the womb, and formed before that over millennia of evolution.

Yes, men and women had different evolutionary pressures.  There is a pattern to humanity.

Yes, yes, I know.  If you look hard enough you’ll find a tribe in Africa where, if you squint kind of sideways, the women hunt and the men look after the children.  Humans are very plastic and in unusual circumstances or due to some external reason, that pattern can emerge.  Yes, yes, there have always been women warriors, and I’m sure there have always been men who spun and sewed and looked after the kids, too, though those aren’t nearly as celebrated as the “warrior women.” Because in these enlightened feminist times, women who act like men are celebrated, but never men who act like women.  There is no worst chauvinist than a “feminist” for devaluing traditional female roles and valuing male ones.

HOWEVER those are outliers, whether tribes or individuals.  Throughout most of human history and pre-history, men did the outdoor/dangerous/difficult work and women the boring/annoying/indoor work.

It all comes down to men hunted and women gathered.  Neither work was – before I get jumped – easy or what we’d call safe, but they presented different kinds of danger and different kinds of overcoming it, which in turn led to very different group mechanics.

Men needed to trust each other absolutely; needed to know their place in the hierarchy; and allowed for innovation in the service of group success.  Women, on the other hand needed to have a cohesive group, meaning you had to behave like the rest of the group.  Sticking out was bad because it didn’t materially help the group – you didn’t have to corner berries together, or … And striking out on your own was bad because, if we see the patterns in the rainforest today, for instance, the berry-gathering group is also the child watching group.  Mothers like me, who rather preferred not to be submerged in a ‘mommy group’ would either have to be beyond very good, or they’d lose the vast majority of their kids, and thereby not pass on their genes.

More than that, when it comes to the relationship between men and women, it is marked by the fact that they outweigh us, out-lift us and out-run us.  We can outlast them both in effort and in longevity, for what consolation that’s worth.  BUT physically they’re stronger than us, even at the same size.  (I had a moment of shock when my then 11 year old son, who was still shorter and slimmer than I, could easily lift 100 pounds in a dead lift which I couldn’t do.)

This means in interactions between men and women – as adults and partners – men must modulate their strength and women must find non-physical ways of projecting theirs.  We see women doing this as far back as pre-history.  The wise counselor.  The advisor.  It’s in all our legends and quite a few of our histories.  The man goes home and consults with his wife.

I’d say our “civilization” – our road to being human – started when hominid males decided to court women rather than simply overpowering them.

Is it evolutionarily favored?  It would seem to be.  Women are more likely to raise to adulthood children willingly conceived.

Not to say that rape isn’t good reproductive strategy – if it weren’t, the Vikings wouldn’t have left swathes of blue eyed people all across the shores of Europe.  I’m just saying it’s not EFFICIENT.  Unless you’re going to make rape a way of life, and have a way to spread the damage across the world, then I wouldn’t recommend it, because I’d guess a lot fewer children conceived of rape reach healthy reproductive maturity.

So overall the men who courted won out over the men who raped.  Regardless of the whole culture of rape thing, very few men want to pursue rape as a reproductive choice.

But… women don’t understand this.

Heinlein had something in Stranger about men and women each being locked in his own way of being in the world and unable to understand the other gender.  This is not true at least for some of us who grew up with mostly members of the opposite sex, and who still have members of the opposite sex as close and trusted friends.

A while back there was a book about a woman who dressed up and passed as a man – I think it’s called Self Made Man – and the revelations she got this way.  The things that “wives can’t know about husbands” type of revelations.  By and large, she got me to blink and go “you didn’t know that?” or “You mean most women don’t know that?”  Because I already did.  But I might be a different case.  As I said I grew up around my brother and his friends, and they tended to think it didn’t matter what they said in front of me.  And my husband and I talk about just about everything.

BUT that said, there is a group of women, we’ll call them “the sob sisters” who are really really dumb about this.  They either view men as a sort of hairier woman with a penis, or they wish he were so.  These are the women who fight you tooth and nail on things like “Men are truly different” and “No, gender is not all ‘social construction’.

I never understood their psychology, though I’ve been interacting with them since Kindergarten.  They were the little girls who wanted boys to admire their pretty frocks, but didn’t want to play rough lest they tore the frills, and therefore demanded that boys not be “rough” around them.  (Which largely amounted to their not being boys.)

They don’t understand that the decision to court rather than rape is built in very deeply in a man’s psyche, layered by thousands of years of evolution and – yes – sexual conditioning.  It is a gentleness born of strength.  Men who know themselves to be stronger than any woman they want, discipline themselves to go slowly, to court her.

Even in the most primitive tribes, rituals are instituted to bend men into this civilized mold.  Because when the mold is broken, the result is that men abuse women, women abuse children, and the world goes to hell.

The sob sisters don’t get this.  They are gentle because they’re weak and this forces them into being gentle.  Hell hath no fury and ability to oppress as one of these weak, die-away sisters given some power, but every woman here will know what I’m talking about, because sooner or later you find yourself fin a group where one of these has got the bit between their teeth.  Their power is mostly gossip and back stabbing and unbelievable psychological abuse, but they use it to the hilt.

Which is why they think that if men aren’t using their superior strength, it must be because they’re weak, and the “solution” to society (they nurse in their black little hearts the hope of not just making women equal but reversing society and having women do all the masculine jobs and men do the feminine ones.  It’s nuttiness) is to raise men to be weak and not to know their own strength.  Hence the entire “rise of the sensitive male.”

The problem is this – you don’t reverse evolution in two generations.  Even if you could, it would be stupid, mind, since there are muscular and hormonal reasons for men’s strength, but the point is you can’t do it, anyway.

So when you educate children to believe it’s all a social construct and there’s no difference, you run up against the fact that there’s differences.

Yes, girls can sleep around as much as men, but since our endocrine system predisposes us to attachment after sex, this means the majority of women CAN’T do that and be happy… Even when they tell themselves they are.

And yes, boys can be taught to act weak and much like the sob sisters.  The problem is they aren’t.  Not even when they’re raised to act that way.

The end result is that they don’t know how to express their strength and they’ve never been taught to modulate it.

Men who have only been taught to “act sensitive” but have no other discipline, no other moral, no other idea of what it means to be a man, will in fact hoist the pirate flag.

Whenever a memoir surfaces from the sixties, the thing that always strikes me is how these men who were considered champions of women were in fact nasty little petulant creatures, taking advantage as much as possible.  Say, the story of Ayers raping a girl and then making her sleep with someone she had no interest in, by bullying her with the idea that not to do so would be unenlightened.

I often think that the people now controlling education were women who went through this, and therefore want to stop boys from being… well boys.  But what they’re doing in fact is creating more sociopathic males who will act as you want them to, but will take as much advantage as possible.

If they’re going to be considered criminals for being males; if none of their good qualities (their superior strength, their loyalty, their protectiveness) are appreciated; if they’re told they can only be this sort of inferior ersatz female… what is there for them to control themselves for?  Why not present the face the world wants and take advantage of women behind it?

Chivalry and the code thereof was the laying down of those good reproductive (and civilizational) rules that make for a functioning society that passes on its values to its young: men who put their strength at the service of the weaker; women who praised them and admired them for it; and children who were raised to do the same.

Tearing it down might seem like freedom, but you can’t remove the walls and wish the roof would remain standing.

This has nothing to do with women working (women always worked, at least in the lower classes.  And in the upper classes they often helped administer domains) though working outside the house is a new thing for both men and women, frankly.  What it has to do with is the relationship between men and women.

Men and women are not the same.  They are different at the sinew level, at the hormonal level, and yes, at the brain level.  Different signals of dominance and submission are baked into each of them by thousands of years of evolution.

You can’t upend it quickly or efficiently and the attempt is likely to reduce to rubble everything built since the first proto-human gave a girl a flower instead of throwing her to the ground and having his way with her.  You’ve been warned.  Disregard it at your own risk.

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. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

 

FROM ANNA FERREIRA:  Christmas at Blackheath

Agnes Rawlins would never dream of showing a melancholy face to her brother’s guests. She may be a spinster, and treated little better than any common housekeeper, but she is responsible for bringing Christmas cheer into the dark and rambling Blackheath Manor, and she does not shirk her duty, even when she has little reason to celebrate.

William Marlowe, Viscount Claridge, has reluctantly accepted an invitation to spend the Christmas season at Blackheath. It’s not his first choice- how anyone could wish to spend time in the gloomy manor house is beyond him- but when he meets the kind and gentle lady of the house, he finds that Christmas at Blackheath might not be so bad after all.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER:   No Early Birds: A Short Story – About Time

Four close friends and widows do things together. They visit the Waffle House, go on cruises, and hit the garage sales as a team. When the people leaving a garage sale ahead of them drop a time machine in the driveway, they try to return it. But being scrupulously honest proves to be surprisingly difficult.

FROM JL CURTIS:  The Grey Man- Sunset.

Whoever said retirement was quiet never met John Cronin…

The old man may have retired for the final time from the Sheriff’s office, but there are still cows to run, court cases to testify at, and consultation calls to tap decades of experience. And that’s not even counting the cold cases he’s still trying to solve…

With his granddaughter Jesse running the gun store and managing the ranch books, and her husband leaning how to fill Cronin’s shoes on investigations and arrests, John is keeping busy training the next generation, while settling a few old scores!

MAX FLORSCHUTZ:  Jungle

Jake, Anna, and Sweets are back in the long-awaited sequel to Colony!

Fresh off their mission to Pisces, the trio is looking forward to a well-deserved rest, and better yet, a fat paycheck after everything that occurred on the alien world. But all that comes to a crashing halt when they’re waylaid above Earth by their employer and find themselves with an extended contract, sending them right back out into space.

Worse yet, their trio has been split to best handle their new assignments. Jake and Anna find themselves attached to a scientific expedition, tasked as security escorts keeping the expedition safe as they investigate a new potential colony world thriving with a vast, vibrant jungle. Meanwhile, Sweets has been assigned aboard an UNSEC military vessel, tracking down the source of a pervasive cyberattack against their hardware.

But as both teams get to work, it’s clear that there may be more to their respective missions than they were led to believe. The cyberattacks are brazen and powerful, but simplistic and utterly untraceable. The alien world’s ecology defies logic and sense, puzzling the expedition team.

And above it all, the ripples of events on Pisces continue to spread through the galaxy …

MEL DUNAY:  Scapegoating a Hero (Ancestors of Jaiya Book 3).

Journey to the country of Jaiya, in a world not quite like ours. Here the humans wield magical powers and fight against an Empire which seeks to enslave them, but they share their world with insect people and trollfolk, and stranger things lurk in the shadows…

Anora doesn’t like having the ability to steal other people’s memories, but sometimes she has to use her power in her work as a spy. But when the sleazy Imperial businessman blackmailing her is killed, Anora’s husband Rijal is imprisoned. What started as a marriage of convenience will turn into true love, as Anora uses all her skills to free her husband from prison…but she has powerful enemies, and not all of them are human.

Note: Hero is meant as a standalone with a “happily ever after” ending. However, the heroes in the later books in this series are descended from Anora and Rijal, who are also the ancestors of some of the characters in the original Jaiya series. The romance is on the sweet side, but due to the situations the characters find themselves in, there is some gun violence and hand-to-hand violence, and there are also passing references to bullet wounds, etc.

 

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Winter

It’s been a bad week on the pet front out here.  Okay, we knew what we were getting into when we ended up with three of them being 15, 16 and 21.

we have another bad year coming up in five to ten years, since the “babies” are 10 and 11.

Except as those of you who are cat people know, we never actually chose this. They came to us, and we ran out of alternatives on finding them a home.

So far so good. Everyone still alive. But D’Argatnan cat possibly not for long. The fact he’s the worst patient ever doesn’t help. He refuses to eat the expensive prescription food, cheek pouches his tablets, and apparently means to go out as cantankerous and self-willed as he lived.

Euclid… well. I need to figure out if he screams because he’s demented or screams because he’s in pain, or just screams. To an extent we’ve been putting off that decision while his quality of life deteriorates, and of course, because they can’t speak making a decision is hellish. I’m going to feel guilty if I delay and guilty if I take him on that last, sad trip. What I’d like to do for him, which is make him a thriving 5 year old again is not given to human.

Greebo we might have with us a few more years, if the hyperthyroidism treatment worked. Sometimes, if it’s cancer, it doesn’t work. And we won’t know for sure for probably three months. Meanwhile he’s upset because he’s boarded away from me, until the law no longer requires us to store his poop. (No, I know, but I also don’t want to go to prison or on a no-fly list for putting radioactive material in the trash, even if the law is insane, okay?)

So I remembered that in happier days long, long ago there was a website I’d since lost track of in which the owner kept track of “bad pet” stories written in the form the cats or dogs would write them if they were kids writing something a hundred times.

Like this, the one entry I remember clearly for no good reason: I will not eat spider plants and then hallucinate and fight imaginary enemies behind the toilet.

There are others I remember for reason, including the entries sent in by a Catholic priest whose cat seemed to have a theological obsession.

I will not follow my keeper to six am mass, place myself in the middle of the isle and convince all the elderly parishioners I’m possessed by standing and sitting at all the right times.

and

I realize that my keeper can’t make my food into communion, so I’ll stop making him do the sign of the cross over my food before I eat it.

There were others, including very silly things about not recognizing his keeper in vestments, but I don’t remember them as clearly.

One of my own contributions was Miranda cat (top weight around 5 lbs), the kids’ bunkbed when they were little, and our ceiling fan set to go slow (and backward) in winter to help heat circulation.

The ceiling fan is not a carousel. I will not sit loafed on a blade and scare my little human brother who thinks I’m going to fall.

It occurred to me if you guys send your own bad pet stories to my book promo address (make sure the subject says Bad pet) I can make this an occasional feature when I have a million things to do and don’t want to think of a Saturday morning.

I’ll lead on with some of the current cat crop.

Valeria – Greebo is not the anticat and judging from markings he’s probably my brother. I will not sound the alarm at anti-aircraft levels when he comes downstairs in the middle of the night to eat some food.

Greebo – If mommy takes a break from writing to take a nap because she got up early to work, I will not attempt to put her glasses back on and herd her to the computer. I don’t pay her. And I’m not the reincarnation of a long-dead editor. (Probably.)

Havelock – I will not for the only time in my life develop an overwhelming interest in hygiene and start licking myself while leaning against mom while she’s a sleep. She doesn’t like being shaken, and I’ve only not taken flying lessons because she loves me.

Euclid – If I didn’t piss and poop wherever I happen to stand, I wouldn’t be confined. I shouldn’t lament night and day because it’s not going to help. Also, who are you? and Millennium hand in shrimp.

D’Artagnan – I will not pouch my pills in order to spit them on the kitchen floor. They’re the only thing keeping me alive, and mom doesn’t care if I self identify was a squirrel.

Havey again – Mom’s robe belt is not a toy, and I won’t leap around like a lunatic trying to kill it, just because she hung it on the bed. Also dad’s hand while he’s a sleep is not a toy, and attempts to hunt down his fingers will get me thrown out of the bedroom. Also the computer cord is not a toy. In fact the world is full of things that aren’t a toy, and I will admit this. Someday.

Valeria again – Mom’s Wandering Jew Plant has no known nutritional value. And I’m not a plant designer. I’ll stop trying to nibble new shapes into the leaves that grow down into my range. Also given the name of the plant, mom is starting to wonder if I’m possessed by Corbyn.

D’Artagnan again – While sneaking upstairs to eat the upstairs cats’ food is lots of fun, I should understand it is in no way good for a kitteh in renal failure. I have to think whether the joy up upsetting Havelock outweighs shortening my life.

Greebo again – Mom is allowed to sit elsewhere than at her desk. Also, she can type on things other than novels, (even if she has no idea how I know.) Mom is now indie, so no one is paying me. I must stop amusing myself by being the author’s taskmaster.

Anyway… That’s it. I need to go clean.

 

 

Sorry to be late. Yes, Greebo is fine. This is just one of those weeks when I’m being nibbled to death by ducks. Which is delaying everything.

Of all the stupid ideas of golden age science fiction, the idea of one-world-government always struck me as the goofiest for adult human beings who have some idea of other nations/cultures to believe in.

I mean, most golden age science fiction writers were relatively well educated and many had been all over the world, met foreigners (and sometimes killed them.)

But they seemed convinced, holding onto the notion hell for leather, that not only would national states wither away, but that what came next was a world-government. It appears in ALMOST every single golden age SF book.

I usually roll my eyes, then give them that one thing, kind of like giving them FTL. It’s not possible, but it makes them happy. And most of the time it’s not central to the plot.

Until recently I hadn’t read a lot of new space opera. Mostly because I was having trouble finding decent space opera that’s non-military. (I have nothing against military space opera, it just tends to have way too much inside baseball for me. For perspective, I can read Dave Weber, and enjoyed the living daylights out of the Weber/Ringo Prince Roger series. I just wish they would pocking get the next one out again. [Poertena is my spirit animal.] So, there’s a level I can handle. Much above that, though, and I can’t “get in.”)

Now I’ve fallen into a groove of reading it (having realized that Space Opera always was and remains where my soul resides) and realized that this is the one idea that modern Space Opera authors LOVE and will hold onto buckle and tongue.

Gone are the perfect supermen (for the most part) and the robots who are just like humans but better (for the most part) and the government that is a supercomputer (for he most part) and all the other crazy notions inhering in Golden age SF.

But one-world-government? Yeah. That’s with us for keeps.

Which makes me wonder what exactly is in their heads; whether they understand what is wrong with the EU (or even that there is anything wrong); and also whether they understand the very concept of non-tyranical government.

Look, I can see empires (see Prince Roger) and even uh… commonwealths not only worldwide but extending to several worlds.  In the cat’s cradle universe (there are several worlds, and very different cultures) that Winter Prince falls into (as do a lot of other things, including Valhalla is for heroes, which was arguably the first SF I ever wrote. But never published. Now I know why and I’m scraping and rewriting from scratch) and which is now called Schroedinger Worlds (thank you husband) there are federations and empires of more than one planet. And the Earth is a one-government state.

The one world Earth is mostly because there are actually very few people remaining on Earth and because the Earth is an administrative district. As in the people who live here are all bureaucrats, regardless of culture. (Did I say it was a utopia?)

As for the multi-planet groupings, they are more what NATO was supposed to be. Even at the Empire level, most things are done at the various local levels, and it is only for things like yep common defense, sharing of technology, and trade that it’s considered one unit.

It is not a world government as we picture it.

It’s not even as strong as the Federal government now is.

Part of my reason to think the concept is insane is precisely the pickle we’re in.  This is not how we were designed to be. Our civil war, like the Punic wars to Rome, sent us down a side-spur, in our case into a strong central government.

But there are two or perhaps three things that happen when a strong government rules over too large and diverse an area:

1- They will lose accountability to the people, and actively do things to stop alarms going off that tell them they’re going SERIOUSLY wrong. I don’t think I need to explain that to anyone here, right? Including the fact that our government is now MOSTLY run by a vast and unaccountable army of bureaucrats? Europe put its head in a worse noose, probably because the EU is a bureaucrat’s dream to begin with. At the EU level, none of those people are elected. They’re appointed, with the usual horse-trading. Yeah. Fun for everyone. (Very chuffed over Britain finding its metaphorical testicles, btw.)

2- They will become mostly interested in impressing/responding to those people they see every day, from colleagues to neighbors. What this means is it ends up being “dictatorship by whatever region the government is located in.” Humans are humans, rule comes with an assumption of superiority. “We are much better than them,” type of thing. And if it becomes obvious that other people in other regions don’t agree with you, you think of them as rubes, ignorant, deplorable.

3- They will fall prey to absolutely insane theories and fads, because they live in a bubble who all approve of it.
See, our last few rounds of educational insanity mandated over the whole country, because we can’t let those rubes over there have their opinion; or open borders bullshit, because they want low price gardeners/nannies; or a ton of other utterly indefensible nonsense.

But mostly, mostly, the biggest problem is that the first and foremost human tendency when acquiring enough power — and any government over a very large area has enough power — is to disable the alarm system and make sure there’s no negative report on whatever we choose to do, ever. Everything else comes from that.

So, divorce yourself from the local level, surround yourself with like minds, who all agree with you, stop the press from saying anything bad about you: result, unchecked and unnacountble power over other human beings, which leads you to believe they’re all widgets and start treating them as such.

(One of the reasons to vote Republican, even in a situation where Republicans and Democrats field equally awful candidates is that our press being mostly corrupt, convinced leftists, they will report every time a Republican looks at someone funny, but they will not, under any circumstances, report even major fraud and corruption from Democrats. All else being equal, the Republicans are less able to disable THAT alarm system. Of course, the press is now disabling itself by reporting mostly on the contents of their own heads, but that’s something else.)

As is, we have it relatively easy. If you start with a government over that large an area, but created on very different principles and with no checks or balances the result is the USSR… or China. We have so far — knocks on head — and barring a president Sanders avoided the millions of mass graves.

Local government can be absolutely awful, granted, but they also live right there, where it’s hard to avoid the consequences of their mismanagement (unless they spend most of their time elsewhere, see Nancy Pelosi and St. Poopcisco.) And they can be yelled at at townhalls and interviews.  Not run off the plot and start responding, again, mostly to the other lawmakers who surround them, so they start doing stuff like trying to impeach a president for being elected and thereby make a mockery of self rule and the votes of millions of Americans.

The problem is that it seems to be human to be unable to process ‘different cultures are truly different.”

As one of those people — we the few — who actually acculturated ON PURPOSE, I have, perhaps, a more clear view of how different cultures can be than most other humans.

And a multicultural perspective that’s different from the “multiculti” being pushed in our schools.

No, I don’t think that most cultures are equally valid. That’s nonsense. A culture that routinely leads to stagnation and starvation is not the same as one which has so far lifted its poor out of poverty and need that people give free clothes and food away, and it remains unclaimed. (I’ve noted more and more people trying to do just this and failing.)

A culture that kills women for speaking out of turn is not the same as a culture that encourages them to pursue full and happy lives.  Etc.

BUT what a culture seems to be is an integral whole. As in, it’s really hard to work on just one thing. And also, most of the cultural habits and tendencies of long standing are there for a reason. The reason might be stupid and no longer applicable (desert tribes covered their women so as to discourage raids because some visitor from another tribe found them ravishing, for example.  Also women tended to be traded and be from other tribes. Until/unless they acculturated, they had to be controlled so as not to tear the tribe apart) but you can’t work on it and shouldn’t rip it out till you’re sure that’s the reason.  And even then count on the people whose culture you’re trying to change/design to resist as hard as they can.

There is a way to totally remake a culture, of course. It’s called invasion and occupation. Which means not only is it very expensive on the invader in time and money and people, because as the man said:

Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

He knew of what he spoke, and btw, anyone who thinks that’s a hymn to white supremacy or empire or whatever is not only innocent of understanding of world history and human psychology but probably completely and thoroughly virgin of comprehension of English.  Or these days maleducated and taught not to thing, but only to pile on because “our teacher said.”

There is also a price on the captives, because change something too far too fast and it seems there is a …. ah… pathway for the culture.  I call it “the disease of the conquered culture”: the men become self-destructive, the women become whores (often with the invader, but not only), there are no children or the children get killed, and everyone tears down the shrines and sacred places of the culture.  (And if that sounds familiar, I think most of the west interprets the imposition of socialism from above as “we have been conquered” at least in the back brain.)

And this why a one-world-government with common laws, or given the trend of large governments common regulations (we must regulate the curvature of bananas!) quickly devolve into abomination.  Or through sheer lack of understanding of how a region works destroy the ability of people in that region to function/survive. (Why the yellow jackets fight.) OR even through sheer lack of understanding of anything but how to impose your petty will on others, destroys the food supply and food production of… well, everyone, sometimes in favor of a crazy shiny new theory. See cultural revolution in France, or the war against farting cows that has dairy farmers in open revolt all over Europe.

Imagine a government that has to deal with China, with the Arab culture, with British, with Americans. Sure, everyone will get  an equitable fair deal, right?

HOW can really smart people believe this?

Well, they believe that this end wars, apparently having forgotten that the American Civil war was one of the most destructive wars of the modern era. And that’s not taking in account other, older civil wars.

They want to “imagine”.  And they believe humans and cultures are both infinitely perfectible.  Which is to say not human.

And they too must have completely tuned out that other people — let alone other cultures — have different needs.

What this points to is a need to reform our education system.

That we also need to reform our government goes without saying.  For really large polities, the government needs not only to be kept small and powerless, but the balance of power needs to always rest in the most local polity possible.  The city should be more powerful than the county, the county more powerful (over its own jurisdiction) than the state, the state more powerful (over its jurisdiction) than the country.

Let central governments be muzzled, that they don’t intervene unless in the direst need, and even then are kept lean and relatively powerless.

Stop trying to rule people by means of faceless entities that cannot be controlled.

Because just because you broke all the alarms, it doesn’t mean you’re not in danger.

We’re in the very beginning of a hell of a correction to internationalist dreams.  PRAY that it proceeds with a minimum of war and blood.

We might live in interesting times, but it’s better than allowing this madness to go on.

The future is likely to be far more humane and decent than the 20th century (yes, damning with faint praise, but baby steps, okay?) and we get to build it, one way or another.

Be not afraid.

 

 

 

 

First, sorry this is so late. We were up at 3 am for some family stuff, and didn’t get back to bed before 5:30. I then woke up at nine, and am only now more or less human.
Also, the family stuff started at 1 pm, which means I forgot to take my add medication, and spent the whole afternoon walking in circles in my own head and sometimes physically. It takes a lot of caffeine to fix the same issue, and I never had enough, because I wasn’t organized enough to.

No, nothing is gravely wrong. Well… one of the family cats is dying of renal failure, maybe, and getting an adequate diagnosis required two vets, one of whom was backed up (And we still don’t have it.) Then there was the human side of this, in that the cat’s human was having issues dealing with it. Yes, I know, but we do get attached to them. And our youngest cat is 10, which means the next few years will more or less suck.

Anyway, day before yesterday I found myself on a facebook discussion on Mediahog’s (I refuse to give him hits in the main post) latest grandstanding, in which commenters were fairly harsh to him. At which point one of the commenters who is leftist for my circles (and probably objectively, though not that insane, yet) complained. He didn’t chide us, but he said that he felt guilty speaking that way “of a child.” Mediahog is 21.

I heard the same thing about Greta, and I want to say, yes, she’s a legal child. Though most of what we said was about her pronouncements, not her, except for “I was a teenage mutant wokescold” which… sorry, is true.

Look, let’s talk about children, shall we?

Adolescents are hard to categorize. They’re hard to measure. All attempts to measure their “maturity” hit hard against the fact that the measurer tends to rate as “mature” opinions he agrees with, no matter how obvious it is the young person was indoctrinated.

But also kids mature at different rates. They just do. And they display adult/child behavior at different times.  And hormone-insanity (which weirdly is mostly not sex oriented, just results in extreme emotional behavior) hits at different times and for different periods.

And some day you’ll be surprised to see your teen kid, with whom you have knock out drag out fights over not wanting to do his laundry give his friends very good advice on how to relate to their parents.  The next day you’ll be back to laundry wars.

We have a lot of “data” saying the brain doesn’t mature fully till 25, in most people. It is used for all sorts of things, like to delay ability to buy alcohol to 21. (But not to delay voting till 21. I invite you to think on that.)

But it’s never universal. I THINK I was unusually mature for my age… pretty much always.  Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I just knew a lot of stuff. Because… Odd.  Also, like most Odds I got accused of being emotionally immature, even while I was playing “mommy” and “overseer” to my friends in the same age group, to keep them from doing life-destroying stuff. I think what instigates the “you’re emotionally immature” is that we don’t react as people expect, while being obviously intellectually mature, so they lash out at us for the difference, not net immaturity.

ALSO we often refuse the indoctrination/manipulation that works on our peer group, which makes people upset. And they have to explain it away.

At eight I had massive arguments with dad’s communist friend. When he lost, he’d accuse me of being immature and “brainwashed.”  At the same time another of dad’s friends who was what can only be called a materialist wealthyist  [as in he believed people’s worth could be measured by their material worth (I later found out he got rich literally through an unpredictable stroke of luck, which explains A LOT.)] loved taunting me because my goals (at the time. They weren’t even well defined. Though honestly I’d still pick that way, above “comfort” level) were knowledge over wealth. He kept telling me I was choosing to be stupid and that meant I was dumb.

I was eight. Both of these grown men felt a great need to win arguments with an eight year old girl in pigtails. Both were vindictive and frothing at the mouth enraged when they lost. Both continued trying to do this till I was 12, when they gave up because I learned to answer everything with “Whatever.”

Mind you, society let them get away with this because I was a child and should learn from my betters. (Rolls eyes.)

Was I less emotionally mature than those two losers? Who knows. Given my age, probably.  Was I less intellectually mature than they were? Again, who knows? I had no great knowledge at 8, I had opinions, mostly from how things “felt.” I learned, though, because I had to figure out how to oppose their arguments. Both were probably responsible for my early reading of history and philosophy.

Did they treat me as a child? Only when convenient.  As in “She doesn’t know anything, she’s a stupid child.”

And that brings us back to the problem of adolescents.

Some people have said adolescents didn’t exist till recently, but that’s not exactly true. Adolescents with a lot of time on their hands didn’t exist till recently. But that could be said for every age group.  It could also be said that older people with enough energy to do stuff didn’t exist till recently. It didn’t mean it didn’t exist, here and there, in rare occasions. Just not as a group. And it doesn’t mean it’s not a real phase of development.

The apprentices in Shakespeare’s London, who often engaged in riotous behavior, were teens. The tendency was there.

But society, when going to work at ten or eleven was normal was a lot more repressive of acting out. And frankly, having a ton of time on your hands makes everyone unhappy.  Not having a purpose in life makes humans unhappy. We are born to strive. Lack of strife makes us … weird.

I think adolescents should be kept occupied with learning. I think our training of young minds should be a lot more rigorous. But society is going the other way towards SOFTENING their path, not making it harder and more competitive. I think that’s the wrong way to go. But I’m not everyone else.

And as a parent I confess it’s a struggle between wanting to make it “all better” for your kids, which of course you want to, because in some part of a parent’s heart they’re always the little two year old who skinned his knee and came to you for comfort, and knowing they have to brave the squalls before they harden enough to stand on their own.

And for a bunch of reasons, including extreme guilt over not giving them enough time (you can’t raise kids and have two successful careers. Both require more time than mere humans have) and concentrating all our eggs on one or two baskets, society has moved to “protect” and “coddle” the young way beyond what used to be permitted or possible. We now speak of mid twenties as “children.” We make no demands on them, at all, till almost thirty. And then we wonder what went wrong, and try protecting more.

What went wrong is in point of fact that we don’t let kids earn money, have any sense of independence, or be responsible for their actions, tastes and beliefs till they’re … well… sometimes never.

And our society is prosperous enough to allow it, but maybe not to survive it.

One of the strongest human impulses is to “keep our kids from taking the wrong path.” Even when the wrong path is something weird that wouldn’t bother anyone else. For instance, younger son is a hard sci fi guy and completely rejects space opera, which in our house sounded all sorts of alarms.

It can be that stupid. You expect your kids to make the choices you did. The HARDEST thing in the world is letting them choose. Even harder is letting them choose when you know they’ll hurt themselves. But you have to let them, or you’re denying them the right to be human.

So, how much should you protect your children? I don’t know.

I tried to do the minimum protection to allow the kids to still grow up. For instance, I’m fond of saying I never child proofed the house. We house proofed the children, which meant they were safe anywhere.  There were long graphic talks of what would happen if you stuck something in the wall socket, PLUS light slaps on the hand when this was attempted. (Long before they understood the talk.)  Yes, it required a lot of vigilance they didn’t even know was happening. BUT it also worked. Neither of them ever did anything unholy stupid like the visiting kid who flung himself head first from our upper porch (at  12. Thank heavens for the big leaf piles, is all I’m saying.) By ten I could trust them to go anywhere and not get hurt. Yes, it was a lot of work.

How about protecting them from unwholesome influences?  Well, it depends what you call unwholesome.

I had two things in my camp when I undertook raising the terrors:

The first, is personal. I grew up under a national socialist regime that censured every mildly salacious thing. I still came across a lot of porn. Why? Well, because I was on an insatiable quest for written material, which included exploring any shelves on houses we visited. Most porn violently repelled me. As in, crawl backwards away from it. Now this might have been because I’m a girl and girls aren’t into visual porn. Part of my interest in Greek and Roman myth is because of a prurient interest in sex by the time I was 8 or so and — physically — entering puberty-ish (as in had breast buds) (And yes, it gave me weird ideas. I mean, just Zeus’ adventures…)

Anyway when I was 11 the international socialists took over. And look, they always start with a lot of …. what I call moral corruption, to then get people to sign on to the full communist program, which cleans society.  (No? Look at all communist countries and their enforced puritanism.)

So, suddenly porn — from soft to hard — was everywhere, including magazines sold in the street.

Honestly, I didn’t notice any difference in consumption. Some guys were still addicted, but they were the same guys who would have been addicted in the old days.

Also people who got addicted to it were usually trying to…. Look, addiction is a personality type, but what you’re addicted to depends on how you manage it. And falling into something like that or drug addiction or other destructive habits usually means there is a huge problem this is self medicating.  It doesn’t mean it’s all right, but it means if that’s not available, something equally destructive will take its place.  Almost everyone I know of who has fallen that way had a massive trauma at the core of their being.  You don’t solve the trauma by banning one palliative. You solve it by addressing it.

The second experience that influenced how we raised our kids was that for reasons involving what we were doing at the time we became acquainted “acquaintance-friendly” with a family of extremely devout home schooling Catholics.  They were a lovely family. The oldest boy was about 18. The youngest girl was 2.  Smart kids, knew a lot of everything.

I once found myself at lunch at their house talking to the 18 year old who was college bound, and talk wandered over to my experiences during the revolution. (Some of which granted are weird, but I wasn’t even going there.) Which led to the French revolution and the guillotine.  At which point I realized two things: this well-educated 18 year old had CLUE ZERO what I was talking about. And his mom was giving me frantic signs across the room.

Afterwards I was told in a snippy tone they hadn’t taught him any of the horrors of history to “protect his innocence.”  THEY HADN’T TOLD HIM MURDER WAS POSSIBLE.  No, I’m not actually joking. They told me that way he wouldn’t have bad thoughts. (Did they expurgate Cain and Abel, or did he think that was the only one?) And btw that was the last time we were invited over/allowed to talk to the kids.

My first thought was to think they were morons. Very bright morons.

Because I could see, without needing glasses, that kid entering college and finding out everything he’d been protected from and not only having no defenses but NEVER trusting his parents again. Or retreating howling to a mental space of his own making.

I have no idea what the kid knew about sex, either, but I’m going to guess it had all been sanitized and expurgated.

So– our kids…

Well, when #1 son developed an interest in Roman history at THREE, for crying in bed, the more … accurate histories went behind glass, and locked. There were a lot of middle-grade, YA histories in their places as well as adult level histories about Roman history and architecture.

And though both kids had computers from age three, there was a limiting program installed till they were about 13 or 14 (I don’t remember precisely.)

Shows we watched that might have well, the occasional nude scene, got talked about before they watched. Same with violence of any sort.

And we talked about addictive behavior, because it runs on mom’s side and I have it. And how it’s possible to get addicted to ANYTHING and use it to escape reality. And how a little escape can be good for you, but if you live there it’s bad.

Long before they were given sex ed in school, we’d described the mechanics, (to choruses of ew. Nothing kills adolescent prurience like having mom tell you about it in clinical terms. Seriously. Highly recommended. It’s like giving them a sip of wine on the holidays. Makes wine totally not cool.) And we’d had long rambling talks — the best way to encourage this is to have them help you with some heavy repetitive work. Say, building a porch — about the psychology of sex, and why hook-ups can actually wound you (besides being extra stressful for Odds, because it’s like an endless audition.) Also about how real human relationships are. (This was often done with reference to books.)  Reading Heinlein in their teens led to discussions of why he thought group marriages would work, and why they were extremely rare (at least successful ones.) And how it was an attempt to square women-with-careers and child raising. And why it doesn’t work that way. (Because the caretaker will favor her own kids, duh, same as harems.)

Anyway, instead of narrowing their focus, we just discussed everything ad nauseum, (no seriously) including tough moral choices and how to defeat your own inner animal.

Yes, it was a lot of work. And yes, we sometimes wondered if we were doing the right thing.  And yes, sometimes “parental censorship” was invoked, like when younger son got addicted to neopets, which meant I couldn’t read neo neo con for a year, because we blocked the word “neo” on our browser. By the time he’d figured out how to hack out of it (good for creativity) he was over the addiction.  I think right now he’s addicted to politics, but like I can throw stones.

Did we succeed? Who knows? They’re no worse than the rest of us, which must count as a win.

Is that the only way to raise kids? I don’t know. I do know at some point you can’t protect them. They’ll find ways.

And if your kids grow up to be political and loud, they’ll take their lumps, at whatever age they do it.  At least if they’re not on the left, when everyone will simultaneously praise them for their “intelligence” as if the opinions were signs of that, and scream at you that they’re just children. Because they believe in oracles and magical children, but that’s just a sign of a culture in ghost dance.

What I know is that you can’t protect your child from everything, and then expect them to live free in a free society. A child to whom the very concept of murder is alien is a victim walking or a predator in the making. And his faith you worked so hard to pour into him will shatter the first time he realizes evil exists.

We tried not to raise children. We were in the business of raising adults, who would live in the real world.

And as for clamoring for the government to protect your kids…  Well, most of the aggression on your kids’ minds right now is coming from government, if not directly through the imbibing of the progressive doctrine that has made its way to the institutionalized, permanent bureaucracy.

Child protective services might remove your kid if you don’t agree to drugs and surgery on a minor who thinks being trans is cool and never showed any signs before last month. (Yes, they believe the kid was hiding. Listen bub, even younger son who is the master of secrecy couldn’t hide to that point. Parents, at least those who live with the kid know what they’re up to. … If they want to know.)

WHY do you think giving government that power will protect the kids? Or anyone?
I was born under a very controlling government. Stuff still leaked through. Both what I’d now consider objectionable… no, wait, most of it I’d consider objectionable. Dad’s friend was a communist. And had the highly illegal materials to support his point of view (Marx etc.) And if he hadn’t been such an unpleasant person, he might have converted me… at 8.  And this was a more repressive government than you can even conceptualize. And we didn’t even have the net, but this stuff was everywhere, and people knew where to get it. (Weirdly no one was passing around stuff on free market economics or personal responsibility, but to be fair I did get a copy of the Federalist Papers.)

Giving government more power is allowing them to send us further down the merry road to hell. Because they always use it to control you.  And until we get rid of the permanent bureaucracy they’ll control you only in ways that give them more power. Period.

In the end, we can’t save all the children. We can’t save all the adults either. In the end it’s down to personal responsibility.

We all have the virtues of our vices and the vices of our virtues.  Mom’s family has addictive personalities because they’re obsessive and fall down rabbit holes. Oh, there are other issues, but that’s the type of personality. I have it with bells on. I had to use “addiction fighting techniques” to get free of fanfic sites. AND I’m fighting a battle to control social media, made worse by being unable to abandon it completely. (I’m starting to win. Yes, that meant fixing problems in my life before I could. Since I had to fix them to get off the prednisone cycle, that’s just as well.)

But that means I can channel it, say to writing, or to learning things.

You can’t use government to create perfect humans or to keep humans from evil.  We’re humans. All of us have a broad streak of darkness within us. You can’t just deny it. And yes, some people will embrace it, no matter what.

But the best thing you can do is know it’s in there, shake hands with it, know who and what it is, and just how evil you could be, if you let yourself.

And then stop it. And watch it all the time.

I watch myself all the time. Particularly when I’m very angry and emotional over something.  All the time.

In a way it’s like making sure your kid doesn’t put his finger in the socket. It’s unpleasant, takes time, and is annoying.

But just like your kids will get around those stupid little plugs in the sockets (every kid I ever knew) and like my kid defeated the multiple locks on the door to run naked through the streets of downtown Colorado Springs, people will get around controls. They’ll just get around in distorted ways, often more destructive than the original.

Your inner beast will try to get around it too. One of the favorite lies is “This one is actually good.”  But it’s not. We all know of good intentions and the way to hell.

You need to know the inner darkness and control it. And know why you control it.

Because that’s the only way to be human and an adult.

And you have to allow others to be adult, even if they choose wrong and decide all they want to read is hard scifi. Or worse.

Why?

Because free will is the essence of humanity. Without it we’re not fully human. We’re animated puppets.

And free will MUST allow the option to fall.

 

There is a Leonard Cohen song that came out in the nineties. I want to say early nineties, but for much of that decade I had small children, so it all runs together. Also, I’m uncaffeinated and late and too lazy to look.

Anyway, the song is called “Everybody knows” and it’s a marvel of double-meaning.

What the song says explicitly is a bunch of stuff people like my brother — look, European, left — believed at the time.  Stuff like “Everybody knows the war is over/everybody knows the good guys lost.”

Bizarrely, before they went into hysterical denial of communism being the regime in the USSR and starting to call those seeking to re-establish it “right wingers” the left kept insisting the good guys had lost the cold war. Apparently we just look richer and more concerned for the right of the individual, but the evil Kapitalism of Amerika (it’s much more scary written with a K) kills more people than the Gullag and destroys everyone’s soul in the process. We’re just sneaky about it. So sneaky, in fact, that we don’t need to prevent people from leaving, we need to prevent people from coming here. That’s how sneaky we are.

Stop laughing. There’s a good chance your college student believes this. There’s also a good chance your college student is stupid enough to buy Bernie’s line that bread lines are preferable to our over abundance of food, because at least “everyone is equal.”  Someone should ask comrade Bernie about the State stores for very important functionaries that crop up everywhere that has tried the communist slimming diet (It is to die for) and which has goods comparable with what the low middle class in America can afford, sprinkled with a few gold geegaws which is the communists idea of classy.

Yes, I know, some pigs are more important than others. And some pigs work so hard for their money the state.

However, intertwined, in the song, alongside this litany of “everybody knows” is a very personal story of a faithless lover that “everybody knows” is faithful.

I can read print (though a lot of the reviewers couldn’t.)  It of course means that what everybody knows is mostly …. well… rumor.

And while in this glorious year 3 of the dropping of all masks, we’ve found that hearsay evidence is better than direct knowledge (if only the founding fathers had known! No more more confronting your accuser, when everybody knows.) it turns out rumor is often wrong.

Which btw should be obvious to anyone who has played a game of telephone as a kid. Or, you know, lived in a small village and learned everything possible about evil. An experience that shaped both myself and the fictional Miss Marple. But which has apparently left not only most democrats in the house, but most democrats, untouched.

On the serious side: this is why we can’t get through people, even with facts and reason. They reset for a minute, and then go back.

See, humans are setup to believe whatever the tribe believes. Therein lies safety.

The problem came in with mass media, which like mass production was useful and good for its technology, but was also possible to be captured by a small number of partisans.

Which means the reality disseminated from mass media might have bloody nothing to do with reality, and it didn’t matter, because most people never heard it. The media established the consensus.

Given they were a target of the long march, that will tell you how we got so far (left) so fast.  Particularly when they also had mass education and mass entertainment at their disposal, all blaring the same, coordinated nonsense.

It’s started to shatter. The story of the faithless lover is now woven in.  But ….

Look, I’ve just given you a shovel and asked you to clean the Augean stables. There’s a lot of sh*t in the way.

For instance, this week someone found out something like 80% of college freshmen believe the US INVENTED slavery and did it for racist reasons.  The report had a shocked tone.  Bah, I could have told them this was already true in the eighties amid my black friends then.  This is what they were TAUGHT and they were shocked and offended when I showed them slavery is the oldest sin of mankind and people of every color have been enslaved and slavers.  Some stopped talking to me, because I was somehow trying to take away the specialness they’d held onto for years.  (Why being a victim is special, I don’t know. Unless because our society is so rich, so immensely wealthy that people experience very little actual hardship and therefore claiming some is a treasure.)

The rot goes deep. It started well before we were born. And by we, I mean those of us tottering over the mid century already.

The fight back hasn’t started but maybe ten years ago. Okay, longer for some of us, but the voice crying in the desert did not have a wide audience.

If you want to know how much impact we’re having talk to an European. Even those of them who are fed up still know a litany of “everybody knows” which is insanely counterfactual.

Among other things, ALL of them know we live worse than they do; that we lack basic necessities and people die on the street for lack of health care; and that … well, once in a comment thread argument with a bunch of Europeans, we realized that we got up every morning, drank a cup of cold poison….  And it took them a while to catch on what we were doing.  Yeah.  They also know we all shoot each other on the street over a cross look.

It’s important for them to know this. At least from their governments pov. Or they might start thinking that socialism isn’t the solution for all that hails them, and that giving more power to corruptocrats is a bad idea.

The fact it’s not true is… a mere inconvenience. And the sheep need never know.

Here… Here we’re starting to make inroads.

Is it still in time to pierce through “everybody knows” and save the Republic?

I don’t know. And neither do you. But you should regard everything you hear from a lot of places at once as suspect.

Yes, there is Russian interference. Oh, NOT FOR TRUMP. If anything, they preferred Hillary, the successor of Mr. “more flexibility.”  But mostly, they wish to cause chaos. Russia, China, and various Arab potentates ALL wish we will either leap at each other’s throats and engage in a lengthy civil war, while they do what they want to the world.

For Russia and other oil producing countries, it is ESSENTIAL that we stop fracking, or else their entire economy implodes (as it SHOULD have years ago.)

They don’t have much time, and they’re desperate. They’re pouring large amounts of money into disinformation campaigns.

The good thing about this is that most of them don’t understand us. (That includes the democrats, thank heavens.) They are bound in their own “everybody knows” and most of their attempts at splitting us are “wait, what?”

But they’re testing stuff over at the chans and they’re getting BETTER. Or worse for us.

Anything that appears everywhere at once with no precipitating incident, no matter which side it purports to be from should be suspect.  The question should be “Why is everyone suddenly so obsessed with this, granted important, but not exactly something the government should meddle in, issue? What has happened to make it news of the day and the cause of contention everywhere?”

If nothing has happened, and this is suddenly all over (one example from the left is the whole trans madness) …. consider it’s a campaign.

Most of these are attempts to herd you. And most of the people herding want the US to vanish over a cliff.

Don’t be a sheep. Think before you leap.

And keep hoping we can avoid electric boogaloo until “what everybody knows” shifts enough that we can live together.

 

 

Sure, that thing above looks like a law firm, doesn’t it?

For those of you wondering, Greebo, my fuzzy editor is doing well. Apparently he ate well, hasn’t thrown up and greeted the vet tech with a long speech about something being wrong. She doesn’t know WHAT. I didn’t tell her it’s that he really wants to get back to work, and doesn’t trust me to put my nose to the grindstone in his absence.

He might not be wrong.

I’m having some trouble writing a short story, which is why I’m so late. It’s not that the story itself is difficult, or that I don’t have an idea (I do. It’s almost done.) It’s that I want to work on a novel.
The thing beneath is the beginning. Some of you will remember it from the old bar. You probably thought I had these ideas, did a chapter and they went away.

This wasn’t precisely true. By the time I do a chapter, I have the entire plot in my head for (in this case) a quadrology. Sure, the later books are shadowy, but first and second are firm, and I know what happens.

What happened was that I had well… obligations, both of the publishing kind, and of the kid kind.  Now I’m at the other end of both those tunnels, and I can do what I please, all this stuff is coming back.

I had to shove Alien Curse to the backburner for a little while, because there are TWO protagonists claiming that book. I’m now ALMOST sure that I finish the first book from the perspective of Art Arcana, and that the second book is from Ginny Thorncourt’s perspective. And then they alternate for the series.  But I need to let it chill a little longer, before I am sure.

There are other books, started and wanting to be written. But, alas, I only have one pair of fingers.  Dyce should be next. But right now, these guys want out, and it’s not worth it trying to tamp them down. In fact, trying to make them wait while I finish a short story is making me climb walls, and is no joy for anyone around me.

No, I can’t explain any of this. It doesn’t make any sense. If you look on a vocation for writing as a potentially lucrative form of insanity, it’s not the correct model, but it kind of works. Sort of. Sideways and backwards.

So, below is the first chapter of Winter Prince, first book of Seasons of War.

It has a cover but I can’t find it right now, so I put a generic picture of a winter landscape above. Because, well, they end up in a “Winter world” which is actually a hunting preserve for big game, and they don’t have adequate weapons, and… eh. It’s all there, and I want to write it.

Winter Prince

Sarah A. Hoyt

“…. perhaps the most notable thing about the initial settlers that departed from Earth in the early 22nd century, those that left when the Schrodingers were still thought to simply vanish with everyone aboard every other time or so were not desperate people, nor very poor people.

Of course, there were political prisoners: those too prominent or rebels against regimes too despised that simple massacre was impossible. Shipping them out was done under a cover of compassion, an appearance of wishing to give them the space to live out their anti-social fantasies without harming the common good of whatever despotism they’d been fighting. And if they disappeared, well, they had at least been given a chance.

But the strange thing was that the voluntary emigres were by and large the rich, the well-connected and the fanatical. People who believed in radical equality and wanted their offspring to grow up in a genderless or raceless world, and – conversely – people who believed their children should be engineered to fit a class, role or occupation and therefore have their happiness assured. Or alternately people who thought their children should be tweaked for minimal need of social interaction or maximal.

There were also people simply willing to create the perfect society, while leaving the genetics of their descendants alone. Men and women with a theory to prove, or a philosophy to validate.

Then there were the usual religious groups, from Christian to Marxist, seeking to create their utopia de novo in a new land.

Hence the strange landscape when we learned to control the translation engines for time as well as for space, the unfortunate Schrodinger nickname fell away from them, and re-discovered the universe this time with certainty. Those colonies that hadn’t arrived when expected and which had been instead flung back in time – the oldest being 20 thousand years in the past – had almost all changed from their intention. Sometimes changed into very strange societies indeed.

But perhaps the strangest of all were those that had held on to their initial intention.”

Sarmakand Semprus, Earth 3120 

 

I

 

They hurt you, my liege, and I was not there to protect you the words pounded through Lucrecia Lantos’s head as she rode the zoomer away from the palace, on the road between snow-covered fields. The sky was heavy, lowering, and only the distant glow of the spaceport lent color to the landscape – a red and gold magnificence against the sky, like a false sunset.

She’d changed from the reception gown she’d worn to her formal dismissal ceremony into the uniform she’d worn when actually defending Prince Nicodemus – fitted ankle-length dark-blue pants and equally fitted jacket, in silvery grey. Ornamental more than practical, but yet sparing her the need to ride side saddle.

The family licarge had stayed at the palace. It dated from her grandfather’s day, ornate and gilded with the family crest on the two – ponderously sliding — doors. It had been designed to carry her grandfather’s family of ten children, plus retainers. Inside, it was a comfortable salon, with seating for twenty and compact cooking facilities. Very useful for long trips, as it flew higher altitudes making the trip faster, and certainly more comfortable.

It took Jon Coachman with his years of training and a heavy flying license to operate it. Father had made her take it to the palace. It was proper.

But she wasn’t leaving the palace when expected. She hadn’t wanted to explain why she was leaving. She didn’t want to be observed. She wasn’t even sure why. She just had to get away from the formality, the oppressive air of both celebration and mourning, an unholy comingling.

What drove her was a feeling, not a thought. Her grief was too present, too immediate to wish to be shared. Instead, she’d taken one of the zoomers the guard had used while in service, which had been set aside for them. Sleek silver machines: two cylinders with a saddle at the joining point, and handlebars for steering. They didn’t float too far above the road cut for ground transportation – mostly goods – and they didn’t go the speeds of enclosed carriages but it was enough to be faster than horses and certainly than walking.

The downside is that you had to ride a zoomer sidesaddle in a court gown. And Lucrecia would rather be whipped than ride ten miles side saddle.

Hence the change in clothing, which allowed her to ride astride, leaning forward over the humming machine. She’d ridden like this often, with her fellow guards.

And Prince Nicodemus.

Ten miles between the royal palace at Taurce and her family farm. She’d done the trip so often that she might have done it in her sleep. She’d come this way every weekend since she’d been selected to serve as the prince’s honor guard ten years ago, when she was just fifteen. And she often came alone or with Bruin – her neighbor – for her sole escort.

So long ago, she’d been selected to guard the prince. And she barely more than a child.

She’s a pretty thing, she remembered the major domo at the palace saying, his rough hand under her chin, pulling it up. And it’s not like the guard is likely to be anything but ornamental.

And so, he’d accepted a girl-child, barely fifteen, slim and small, whose only virtues were a pretty face and a certain quick facility of movement that in other worlds, or in another social class, might have made her a dancer.

That and her family pedigree.

The other five picked to serve as the young prince’s escorts were equally small and slim – perhaps so they wouldn’t dwarf their charge who, unlike most kings of Olympias’s past, was slender, with a quick, gracile movement, and an oval face surrounded by a shiny curtain of very straight dark hair, cut just long enough to swing in front of his eyes when he inclined his head.

Most people who knew him, and certainly the bodyguards who spent all of their time with him, were grateful when those eyes were obscured, otherwise — amber-gold and intent — they could give the impression of seeing past skin and bone and into the souls of those around him. And yet, more often than not, after his intent scrutiny, he would smile, a quirky smile, higher up on the left side than the right, as if to say that whatever peccadillos of yours he might have discovered, you weren’t so very bad after all.

They’d all adored him from the very first day, Lucrecia – whom he called Lucky – and the other two girls, Izzy and Myria, and the boys, Pete and Marcus and Bruin.

And he’d taken them seriously, not as play friends or even as servants, but as companions, serious, working companions. Even the girls. I have no use for an ornamental guard, he’d said. If you’re going to be my body guards, you’re going to learn to guard me. You’re going to learn blades and sonic cutters and projectile weapons too. And you’ll learn to use every shield available and to plan and mount campaigns. I wouldn’t be the first king of Olympias left to rebuild when only myself and my bodyguards are available to fight off insurrection and rebuild. So you’re going to learn all that. And you’re going to be capable of fighting and defending me.

And they had been. He’d got them masters. The palace guard had been picked over and officers chosen to whom the honor of teaching the prince’s guards had been vouchsafed, in such a way that they couldn’t refuse. Within a year, Lucky and her colleagues had become — without any of the older people, the ceremonial masters, the bureaucrats in the palace noticing it – as good at armed an unarmed combat as any of the trained military officers who guarded king Phillomenos. Lucky, perhaps a little better than the rest – in reflexes and thinking — had most often been chosen to guard his highness.

Yet, when it had come to it, she hadn’t been there, with him when she was needed. No. The king had not deemed the prince’s honor guard efficient enough to go to real war. And the prince had been captured by the enemies of Olympias. The enemy of all of humanity.

You were hurt, my prince, and I wasn’t there to defend you.

The words tore from her inner mind like a sob from her chest, made her breath catch on her lips, and she bent further over the zoomer, as if it were all an adjustment of her position, as if she hadn’t been about to break down and cry. Because Lucky didn’t cry. She was – as prince Nicodemus had often told her – an officer, a sworn protector of the crown in the person of the prince heir of Olympias. She was not, she could not be a girl like all other girls.

She took the turn off to her family lands without thinking, and rode at the same speed along the narrower lane surrounded by evergreens that gave it a shadowed appearance, a funereal green-and-black cast. Ancient trees, planted by her ancestors to provide shadow and comfort now seemed to her confining and dark.

Her family’s farm-manor loomed ahead, broad gate set between colonnaded pillars, on either side of which a wall stretched, eight feet tall and made of poured everlast – smooth like glass, strong like stone. Couldn’t be climbed or broken through. It spoke of more violent times, when the city states of newly-colonized Olympias had fought one against the other and every manor must be a fortified citadel. Those days were over many centuries ago. Olympias’ only enemies, right now, were external, and weren’t human.

She touched the bracelet on her wrist, which held the control to the gate. It swung open in front of her just in time for her to squeeze through at full speed and to ride down the lane, like a woman possessed, causing a man walking several dogs to step hastily aside into the grassed area amid trees. Lucrecia ignored him, as well as all other retainers who fled out of the way of the zoomer. Not something she did normally.

Her father had taught her that while some in Olympias had been designed by the gengineers and curated by the geneticists to be rules, and some to be servants, there was honor in both positions. A nobleman or woman worthy of his salt didn’t ignore those who served him, and whose work was just as vital.

Normally Lucrecia would have stopped to chat to each of the retainers, or at least smiled and acknowledged their presence.

But not today. No, not today.

In front of the main stairway which led up to the front door, one floor up, she dismounted and blindly switched off the zoomer, not even fully seeing the retainer who came out to collect it and take it to the garage.

Climbing the stairs, boots slapping against stone steps, she didn’t see her father loom in front of her until almost colliding with him., and was brought up short, stopping barely in time, and curtseying awkwardly, before looking up into her father’s lined face, to see worry in his dark blue eyes. “What’s wrong Lucrecia? What did they tell you?”

“Nothing new,” she said. “Nothing we didn’t know. The ceremony was just to dismiss the prince’s honor guard. Since they say we won’t be needed anymore.”

Since they say whatever the aliens did to him left him bereft of a mind, her thought continued, as good as dead, but she didn’t speak it aloud, because there was no point in it. Her father knew it as well as she did. It had been in the news over and over, looped again and again, since they’d recovered what was left of Prince Nicodemus. His body had been recovered and brought to Taurce, where it was being kept alive – as any other body wouldn’t be – until he could fulfil his royal obligation of giving heirs to the crown. Nothing more. The mind that had animated those amber-gold eyes and the quick humor that had quirked his mobile mouth into a lopsided smile, those were as gone as if his body were already entombed in the royal cemetery, beneath marble and snow.

They hurt you, Nicky, and I wasn’t there to save you, Lucky thought, and shied away from the thought – because she’d never called him Nicky when there was anyone else present. He was his Royal Highness and Prince Nicodemus and My Lord. It was only when they were alone, reading or playing chess that the boon he’d granted her long ago, over some forgotten bet in adolescence, of being allowed to call him Nicky operated. She was the only one who called him that, and the word had become a sweet balm for all ills that could befall them. But not this one. There was no cure for a world bereft of Nicky.

“You look disturbed,” her father said. “More disturbed than…”

“Then I should look?” she said. She shrugged. “I was loyal to him. He was my liege. I…”

Her father put his hand on her shoulder. He’d served Nicodemus’ late father and had been loyal to him in his own youth. The grief – and guilt – for his liege lord’s death remained with him these twenty years later.

And now, something of the understanding of the failure of letting one’s liege lord die, was in his eyes as he looked at Lucky. “I was ten feet from my Lord, when the assassin’s blade found him,” he told his daughter. “If I could I’d still go back and offer my life for his.”

Lucky nodded. And let her father think it was only that. Oh, it was partly that. She’d sworn to protect Nicky. She’d sworn to die for him. But the other part was that he was Nicky and that she, beyond being his bodyguard, was the closest thing the prince had to a friend. He’d sent her letters, through an elaborate subterfuge, after he’d left to command the royal force in space, against the invading alien. He’d sent her electronic messages that were bounced over half of Olympias before reaching her, but which were still unmistakably his.

They told her of the battles and of the enemy, and of what they did to those they captured. Nicky’s most serious – most disturbing – letter had been about prisoners who’d been recovered with their minds effectively destroyed, so that there was nothing left, and no hope of recovering them. He talked of giving them the only mercy that could be given, in the circumstances.

And she thought if that was what had happened to him, if they’d recovered him and given him swift, clean death, then she wouldn’t mind so much.

Oh, she’d still mind. Nicky was… energy and movement and thought, and without him a little light would go out of the sun, a little color would go out of the world, leaving subdued movement, quietness, sadness. Without Nicky and the purpose of guarding him, a little of Lucky’s life would be gone.

But what made the situation unbearable was the other thing. He was the carrier of the royal line of Olympias. The kings of Olympias were absolute in deed and will. Like every other person in Olympias, since the colony’s founding thousands of years ago, they’d been designed to be responsible and intelligent, and the best kings possible for the now one billion subjects.

It was believed only that could make a world government work and keep it functioning without quarrels. Everyone in Olympias was engineered for their station, designed for their role in society.

And it had worked. It had worked for two thousand years and counting.

But one thing the kings had no control of. Their reproduction – the exact genetic makeup of their heirs – was decided by the Archons – a council of ten geneticists who combed through all available brides before selecting one. Normally their selections were predictable. Minor nobility or major, or sometimes some prominent foreigner from worlds beyond the system. But when Nicky’s father, Prince Herato, had come of age, the Archons had decided the royal line needed something different. They had picked for him a young woman from a family of free traders – humans without world who traveled between the stars, and traded between worlds. A message had been sent, a dowry negotiated, and the woman had come down to Olympias – much to everyone’s surprise – to take her place as queen-in-waiting.

The result had been Nicky and only Nicky, since his mother had died when he was a babe in arms, and his father had been assassinated two years later. That left Nicky as the bearer of whatever the intent of the archons was for the royal line of Olympias.

“Why would they breed him, when his mind is gone,” she asked, suddenly, forcefully, and using barnyard language she would normally shy away from even letting her father know she knew. “Why would they do that? Why can’t King Phillomenos just remarry?”

“Because it is not the same,” her father said, looking surprised, or perhaps shocked by her words. “The blood of prince Herato was different. His mother came from a family that has no daughters, certainly no daughters of a similar makeup. Prince Nicodemus has a genetic makeup that is not easy to recreate. One the archons believe best suited to the challenges ahead, now that Earth has found us again, and we have to negotiate and work with the Federated Human Worlds. So they believe he owes the crown an heir before he dies.”

“They say he will be ceremonially married. Even though his brain is not… Even though he’s not…” She shook her head and could not go on. The idea was monstrous, horrible. It was defilement. It was using the body after it was dead in every sense.

“Well, certainly. You must see that. The prince heir must be legitimate.”

She nodded, but she didn’t see it. All she did she is that they were going to use Nicky as if he were a stallion, or prized bull. Not even that, since she very much doubted his body would be taking much active part in the proceedings. It would all be needles and tubes, chemicals and medtechs.

There was something obscene to the thought. Something horrible.

“I’ll be well, Father,” she lied. “I just need time to compose myself.” And bobbing a more composed curtesy, this time, she walked around him and up the stairs to her room.

Her room, on the second floor was simple. She hadn’t lived in it much, and she’d disdained the fashionable appointments, the tables and shares and books.

Raised as a fighter and a retainer, she had opted for only the necessary furnishings in the vast and bright room: a bio bed with a mattress that adjusted to her body and to the temperature, a bedside table, a desk, and a closet full of clothes she’d worn at the palace. Gowns and suits and exercise coveralls. All of which were a thing of the past. She’d been dismissed. Retired. She had a decoration, to show she had served with valor. Valor. Empty Valor that could not do its duty!

They hurt you, my love, and I wasn’t there to stop them. The sentence made her stop mid-step. It wasn’t that she didn’t know she loved Nicky, but that she’d never admitted it to herself, much less to him. And now she’d never admit it to him, because he was gone.

In front of her closet, she stopped and tottered, as her brain worked too fast for her body to follow. They were bringing Nicky to Taurce the capital of Olympias tomorrow, to be married to whomever the Archons had indicated. She’d been trained in shooting and in blade use. She’d been trained to stop assassins. She knew how to assassinate.

The thought riveted her to the spot. She’d never, ever, not in her lifetime, would have thought of killing Nicky, of stilling his smile, of shutting forever his observant gaze. But that was done. All that was left now was a breathing corpse, a corpse about to be desecrated in a horrible manner. In a manner she was sure would have repelled him.

She flung her closet open and pulled out a dull black stretch suit. In it she would look like a hundred anonymous retainers around the palace. She would need help. Pete and Bruin. She was absolutely sure they would follow her plan.

Opening the small case at the back of the closet she extracted a slim gun with a clear range of about thirty feet. It should be enough. It wasn’t like Nicky would be jumping around.

She understood the penalty for regicide was death. But there were duties that transcended life. She’d leave via the window and the tree next to it, though. There was no reason to alarm her father, and besides, she thought, as she twisted her waist-long red hair into a tight knot and pinned it at the back of her head, she wanted him to be able to deny knowing anything about her plans. She was risking her life, but not her parents’ or sisters’.

I am coming, my liege. To do what I must do.