Book Promo

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FROM EDWARD THOMAS:   Unfair Advantage (The Troubles of George McIntyre Book 1).

George McIntyre has a problem.
He caught a nanotechnological disease that turned him into a ten-foot-tall monster. He has scales, fur, horns, big teeth, claws, a face like a pony and a barbed tail. He got an upgrade in strength, speed and intelligence that is so profound it is terrifying him. But that’s not his problem.
He’s been shot, stabbed, blown up and thrown in jail. But that’s not his problem.
He’s created an intelligent robot assistant. But while she is proving to be a lot more than he bargained for, she is not his problem.
There is an alien machine that is trying to turn every human alive into a mindless, remote controlled zombie. That’s his problem.

MACKEY CHANDLER:  April (Paper Edition)

April is an exceptional young lady and something of a snoop. After a chance encounter with a spy, she finds herself involved with political intrigues that stretch her abilities. There is a terrible danger she, and her friends and family, will lose the only home she has ever known, and be forced to live on the slum ball Earth below. It’s more than an almost fourteen year old should have to deal with. Fortunately she has a lot of smart friends and allies. It’s a good thing because things get very rough and dicey. They challenge the political status quo, and with a small population the only advantage they have in war is a thin technological edge.The “April” series of books works towards a merge with the “Family Law” series set further in the future.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN:  Called to the Council: Shikari Book .

Auriga “Rigi” Bernardi-Prananda wants only to do her duty as wife and mother. The Staré natives of Shikhari call her guardian, Healer, and one of the Wise. With the leaders of the people divided, more and more lower Stamm Staré look to her for guidance.

A hunting trip turned war forces her hand. Trapped by Shikhari’s ancient enemy, Rigi must lead her people to safety. But who are her people? And how can she protect her children, both Human and Staré, from an enemy that hunts from shadow?

Rigi must call on all her resources as secrets in high places combine with low treachery to endanger the world she calls home. Artist, mother, huntress, Wise, Rigi navigates interstellar intrigue (and sibling spats, and wildlife with a dreadful sense of timing.)

FROM MARY CATELLI:  The Book of Bone.

A novelette of curses and journeys.

Avice’s dreams of settling at Clearwater are dashed. The lawsuit had ended, and the lands were made over to her, but a bone wizard lays a curse on the land, and blight begins to spread. All will die before the curse as it spreads.

Neither her family nor her king are willing to help. She is left alone with only the knowledge that the mysterious Book of Bone may have the lore that she needs — if only she can find it.

FROM JULIE PASCAL:  WYRM

“Complete your tasks and you will be released. We have summoned you and you must serve us.”

“Never.” The word caught against the fangs in her lengthening jaw and became a growl. She looked down at her tormentors below her and knew them. Fox ears and cat eyes.

“Never!” She bellowed defiance that started deep within her scaled body and expanded with her to fill the sky.

 

 

I woke up today with the flu (but not the Kung Flu, because you know, I haven’t even ordered Chinese take out in the last six months, because low carb. Um…. wonder if the Chinese restaurants are feeling the bite) having done a you turn and run me over again.
So, I’m going to do some writing and maybe some intensive napping, because I’m really low on sleep and have been.

It would help, truly, if my immune system did anything besides attacking ME. If anyone knows how to communicate this to it, tell me.  At this point I’d probably be better off without one, as insane as that sounds.

I do wonder how the coronavirus will play out not as an illness, but as an economic impactor.

One of the things to consider is that most illnesses that originate in the third world, and even those that create considerable panic/high death rates (which if China is reporting even semi-accurately* this one isn’t REALLY doing) tend to fizz out when they reach developed countries, because even the basics of washing yourself/your hands and disposing of bodily waste with some consideration to not causing illness seems to make a lot of difference.  While on that, let’s remember that the population explosion of the west in the eighteenth century was mostly predicated on improvements in hygiene.  A sub-though on this is whether the “progressives” (they name themselves by opposites) bringing medieval hygiene to our sidewalks are trying to eliminate the West’s immune advantage.

Anyway, as an illness this would seem to be a non-event being LESS lethal than normal flu, at least in the West. *In China we have to go with the caveat that they lie or massage the truth ALL THE TIME since their concept of reality is not the same as ours. So, who knows. It could be very bad there, but how much will that affect our economy?

Which brings us to: Does the Wahun virus give the left the edge they need to propagandize us into a recession, which in turn will place a commie in power?

Other things running through my sleep deprived brain include “Does G-d give us extra challenges when we’re main characters?  And does being main characters mean our payoff will be better, or has He become a dystopian literary writer, and does it mean we just die more meaningfully?”

That last thought is probably insane, and I probably should go to bed with two aspirin.

Anyway, see you tomorrow. Just wanted you to know I’m really not dead. I have just off and on wished I were, in the last 12 hours.

 

Yes this post is in homage to Bribem’s crazy utterance int he 2012 race, which by itself should disqualify him from the presidency, because he’s either stupid or thinks other people are when he says to black Americans that “The Republicans want to put you back in chains.”

This is so much bullshit it only makes sense from standpoint that the left always accuses their opponents of what they want to do or are actually doing.

Though in fairness to leftists, it is not just American blacks they wish to enslave. It’s all of us. They want us chained to an all powerful centralized government who will decide what we need, what we can say, what we can do, what we can eat and what we can think and how we should spend what lives we have, and when those lives will end. And it’s not even just Americans. They just think the resources they’ll get if they take over America will help them take over the rest of the world, till the seething, purposeless pile of humanity ahs a new purpose: to provide those at the top (and they all think they’ll be at the top, Uncle Joe with some justification, given his life experience) with all their dreams and desires, no matter how crazy or perverse.

Historians will one day be baffled by how the mass education/entertainment/news establishment of 20th century America (and therefore of much of the world) managed to neatly turn two issues in which the left was soundly defeated — slavery and racism — into issues they hung around the neck of their political enemies, who in America are always distinguished by wishing to increase individual freedom.  It’s utterly baffling how young people believe it was Republicans (the party of Lincoln!) who were for slavery and against civil rights for everyone.  All I have to say is that it took a complete lock down on public communications and several movies and book series that put that in, offhandedly as a throw away background.  Without that complete and utter ownership and propagandizing of all storytelling in the society the bizarre and completely disprovable “the parties changed sides” they use to hide the obvious lie when it’s discovered wouldn’t hold for a second.

This will one day be studied along with the Marxist alternate realities created by the same control in several countries (the ones where, say, the rest of the world was starving, and the USSR as bad as it was had the best lifestyle. Or the one from the Nazis where the Jews were responsible for everything bad that had happened to a crazy-imperialist country.)  It is no coincidence that all these lies are created by believers in totalitarian systems.  (Right? Left? Let’s call the whole thing off. They’re statists and totalitarians, and wish to put all of mankind in chains.)

But there is an additional sting in the tail of this insanity. The same people who pretend they were always for the “downtrodden” and claim to themselves the crown of liberators are in fact putting those people in chains, right here, right now.

Not just black people or — puts hand in air and waves it wildly around — people who can tan and might have an accent.  I mean, those are probably their first and easiest victims. By claiming these “minorities” are being kept down and therefore need the left to “liberate them” the left simultaneously undermines any chance these people have at success, and claims they need continuous and permanent help from an ever glutting state.

I don’t understand how other people don’t get the insult implied in this attitude. I did and still do. As an immigrant-of-tan I was told all the time how I couldn’t make it in America unless “liberals” (leftists) defended me and came to my help and made special laws to make sure I got a fair shake.

Look, I even fell for it for a while. (It would be hard not to when some people were stupid enough to convey that a) I was obviously Mexican b) I was both stupid and untrustworthy because of it. I.e. my first boss in the US.) But not for long. Because I saw what it was doing to my friends.

What believing that everyone around is trying to keep you down does to you is give you an excuse never to learn from failure.

And since none of us is perfect, and all of us learn best by failing at whatever we’re trying and then redirecting, what this belief that “everyone is naturally against all minorities” does is destroy people’s ability to self correct, at the same time embittering them, turning them against the freest, best society in the world, AND “putting them in chains” by causing them to support and vote for policies that will reduce both freedom and prosperity.

The smartest minorities get this too. But by the point they’re fully under the boot of the left, they hate the US and everything it stands for and are willing to suffer if it makes us suffer along with them.

If you can envision how horrible that state is, I submit to you that even physical chains — and keep in mind I hate all restriction — would be easier to bear.

When I turned my back on that neat package of propaganda, I turned it know that yes, some people are racist. And even back in the eighties many people believed Latins were another race. And yes, some people hate immigrants. And yes, some people hate women.

In a free society, you can’t get rid of all the assholes. People will think all sorts of strange things. Heck, a lot of people discriminate against me because I’m married and have children.

So what? Unless you are in a profession wholly owned by a mono-culture (not anymore. Thank G-d for indie) in which case, have a plan of escape, you can always find a way to evade and get around the racissss, sexissss, homophobes (the real ones, not the ones our fellows on the left gift with those names.  The real ones, btw, are both on the right and the left, and many times are just plain defective.)  And usually getting around is more rewarding.

The thing is, the lasso that the leftist propaganda has thrown against their “victim minorities” (which now includes not only everyone with same sex attraction, everyone who likes to cross dress — let alone being really transsexual. They’ve completely blurred those lines — but also every female. Since females are in fact a majority, this is some feat) is so strong, that even the rare member of those who fights against the sense of being done wrong, and learns and climbs the ladder can be sabotaged by policies of racial preference (which cause “quotas”) so no matter how meritocratic the system they climbed, no matter how praiseworthy their achievements, at least half the people (who’ve met others raised by fiat) will assume they’re ineffective or dangerous incompetents. (Ask me how I know. Or don’t. You can probably guess.)

These chains are near unbreakable. Because it’s impossible for one of the designated minorities not to have met someone who really does discriminate against them.  And those who are actually strong and capable know how many people treat them like incompetent lay abouts.  And all this reinforces the lie.

In the end the only way to break free from this — and the very real pathologies, both social and mental — it brings, is to set yourself free.

It’s to accept that yes, sometimes you’ll be discriminated against — everyone is. Some just more obviously than others — because in a free society prejudices are allowed and can’t be eradicated. But that this is not worth it, and never will be, putting yourself and others in chains, and destroying freedom and prosperity, while giving power to people who have filled society with lies for the purpose of keeping you under their control and doing their bidding.

A society in which all agree (or pretend to) is a totalitarian society. And none of those — NOT ONE, regardless of what they tell you — was good for minorities, of race or orientation, or really any other, or even for women.  In societies where the the “enforced truth” must be repeated, there’s lots of room for the vilest of tortures, the basest of humiliations under the rug and behind the (iron) curtain. And they always happened, with stomach-churning frequency, to the point that getting to a book on, say, the real history of communism, takes someone with a good stomach a long, long time. You need to pause in between. And sometimes scream and punch something.

The only thing that can break people out of chains is for them to decide to break them. To believe in yourself and others as individuals. To hold yourself both harmless and immune from whatever was done to people in the past who might have looked somewhat like you.  To ignore the bigots and work so hard and be so good at what you do that  most people — sometimes even the bigots — will go “Oh, no, he/she is completely qualified.”

Yes, it’s very hard to do that right now. Yes, the game is rigged against you in ways that people who aren’t you won’t even see.

So?

Do you think other people glide through life on rose beds, while being fanned by obsequious serfs?  If you do, you are wrong. Even leftist privilege doesn’t whisk away every obstacle.

Being human is to fail and to struggle, to fall and to get up again, to be wounded and to heal. None of us is what we really want to be. None of us is born knowing how to achieve what we aspire to.

The trick is to keep trying, to aim high, and to get up one more time than you’re knocked down. That’s all it takes, just one more time.

They can’t put you in chains when you shed them and refuse to wear them, and keep on keeping on.

Because you can’t enslave a free man. You can only kill him  (And yes, the same applies to us with vaginas. Whatever the grammar abusers tell you.)

Get up one more time. Come on. I believe in you.

Freedom is vile and hurts and stinks and you’ll never get as much credit as you deserve.

It is also completely worth it.

Give it a try.

 

We have no clue what Odd is, we just know we are it.

It doesn’t seem to correlate particularly well with intelligence, not that any of us knows precisely how to measure intelligence ( which has been used to disqualify all IQ tests and is stupid. Treated as “aptitude” tests, and not used as a guide of human worth — because high IQ is not — we should be able to use them for hiring and higher education. Which might clear some of the fug.)

There is some indication we’re more creative, but it depends on what you mean by creative. Look, I know some of our people who can’t draw a straight line, never wanted to write a line of fiction, couldn’t design a new anything if their lives depended on it.  Though I’ll admit they are exceptions and there might be a reason for that. Hold on to that thought.

There is a temptation there to go down a really deep genetic rabbit hole too, because with genetic sequencing, we’re finding that most of us are heavy on the Neanderthal. (It seems weird that only 20 years ago reputable scientists argued that homo sap and Neanderthal had never interbred.)  But I want everyone to remember that genetics at the level we’re now doing them is a relative new science, and that the only reason to think Neanderthals were more creative is that we’ve found all the “inventive” primitive camps were theirs. But we’re probably dealing with a really SMALL sample.

What we do know is that “we who stick out” — Odds for short — are the sort of kids who get singled out in kindergarten/elementary, when instinct is at its strongest. I got on okay, because I was huge for my place and time, and built like the proverbial brick sh*thouse.  But I aggregated to me the small, the lame, the halting, everyone of them also singled out and everyone of them Odd.

Humans are an amazing thing.  No, seriously. One of our strange abilities is to identify things for which there is no sane definition.  Take art. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

To some extent the same is true of “Odds” and the population correlates pretty closely — creative or not — with what I’d call “Geeks.”  I’d call it that, before Geekdom took over the culture and we were surrounded on all sides by pretend geeks.

Geek if you extend it “Obsessed with subject or mission he/she has devoted life to” is a pretty good cognate for what we are. I used to be a language geek, and now I’m a writing geek. I geek out on ways to write things, new tricks, ways of creating story so it fools most people, etc. etc.  Recall — if you’ve been around a while — Foxfier saying in comments that Pope Benedict was a “religion geek”?  It’s like that. You can be a geek for anything, you can have multiple areas of geeking, and your geeking might change over time. BUT WHEREVER you’re interest and work at the time lies (and work can be a hobby that is really really important to you while work is just how you pay the bills) this is the important thing to do.  You’re a Geek. Or an Odd.

“But Sarah,” you’ll say “Doesn’t everyone care most about the thing they’re supposed to be doing, whether it’s a hobby or work, or whatever it is? Isn’t that what companies, hobby groups, jobs are all about.”

Sure, you’ll say that if you’ve never worked with other humans or, to be fair, if you’re a very nice person who tries to ignore and/or excuse what everyone else does.

Because, no, it’s not. Whenever two humans (or more, heaven help us, more) who aren’t Odds get together, the mission stops being “the thing” that is supposed to be the mission, and it becomes “Monkey power games.”  (Yes, I know we’re apes. Shut up you.)

I’m not sure what the overlap is between “autistic” and “odd” and I don’t think anyone else knows either, honestly. I think a lot of us who are odd would get diagnosed as autistic (the psychologists who have studied sf/f conventions say we have autistic cuing, etc.) But here’s the thing, I don’t think it MATTERS. Because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my brain, or anything inherently organically wrong. I can and do perceive emotions (often better than the normals) and read the mental states of others just fine, thank you so much, with ice cream on top, please.

The thing is that normally I DON’T BOTHER and could care less.  Not because I don’t care about people, but because I’m obsessive about “the thing we’re supposed to be doing.” And mostly the monkey games just annoy the living crap out of me, because they get in the way of that. So I tune them out, and my behavior becomes close to “on the spectrum.”

I’d guess for most odds this is the case. We’re interested/fascinated/working at the THING THAT MATTERS so much that in the end we let the monkeys-games stab us in the back and block us from “the thing that matters.”

And that is part of the problem. Whether it’s organic or not, most of us read as “threat” to normal human beings.  We read as threat on two levels: we ignore the monkey games, without even acknowledging them, much less responding/parrying.  And this scares them, because it means we’re unpredictable. Also, we are obsessed with THE THING and they don’t much care about the “thing” and are afraid we’ll steal a march on them and look better.

Or of course, we get in the way of the plans they have to use the work on the thing (without ever doing what they’re supposed to) to get more group power.

This is evolutionary and part of the way humans just are, having been built on a frame of great (or at least pretty good) apes.  The group cohesion and group power trump everything else for normal apes. Which makes a certain sense when you’re a band of naked simians roaming the savanna, but sucks when you’re supposed to be a technological civilization building and achieving new things that help the species survive and get out of this mud ball, so we’re secure as a species.

And this is the point at which I find myself screaming at the ceiling (I’m usually indoors) “Lord, WHY apes? Why not, say cats.”  Answer there comes none, and I’m sure there would be other drawbacks. If you believe in Him that is, and not just that random chance picked us poor apes for intelligence (whatever the hell that is) and sentience.

At any rate, one of my friends was listening to Dr. Peterson (the fact that the left has identified him as “right wing” is one of those things that tells you they’re just monkeys trying to beat down the odd. And he is ODD.) and said something about a something or other ratio, where in every enterprise 20% of the people do 80% of the actual work.

This holds right, but what he isn’t saying is that those 80% aren’t just passively standing by. They’re actively trying to make the work more difficult and take down whoever is doing the work. Because Odds are threatening.

And of course, right now we live in interesting times, my friends. Very interesting times.

You see, even though it allowed great advance (by allowing judicious freedom to those who could do stuff – though not necessarilly top spot –) the era of mass manufacturing also allowed Monkey games on an unprecedented level.  I.e. it allowed those who are really power-oriented to get power like never before. Power to control what people say and even what people think. Power to change the language so that people can’t think clearly.  And of course power to “broadcast the one truth” so that all of those who disagree are “crazy and heretics.”

Only while they were playing their…. copulation-copulation games to make the power permanent, the people who cared about The Thing (And who usually when successful, yes, get browbeaten by the power monkeys and start spouting the same inanity.) created stuff.  Stuff they weren’t expecting (I mean, they did block off space, so we couldn’t escape, but they never thought of the net as a danger.)

And now things are tilting/shifting, and various fields they made non-functional are changing so much they have no power and no control.  Or are losing what they have.

Which, of course, makes them much more controlling and much more likely to try to destroy anyone who ever had an original thought, ever.

Which brings us to where we are.  We who are Odd by nature as well as by politics.  (Yes, there are a lot of Odds on the other side. A lot of them become scared and just want the attacks to stop. Others willingly join, because they want to “belong” and think this will give them — finally — a large group who loves them. Paradoxically when that doesn’t work, they become more convinced and work harder at getting everyone to knuckle under.)

Which puts us all in a bind. We who are for the cause of human freedom, individual dignity and real progress (not the bastardized use of the world.) We who are of the tribe of Heinlein and want the future to be better than the past, and also who are loyal to the human species, because they’re our species. (We hold no malice towards slime molds, provided they’re not in our way, but we will not commit suicide for the good of slime molds.)

Most of us are being hemmed in and beaten on all sides, no matter what our field of endeavor.  And it’s not that our kind was ever popular. We were after all the ones who stick out. It takes desperate times to bring us to positions of leadership.

And I understand, guys, I DO understand, those who want to go kinetic.  They see the games being played and they’re tired. They care about “the thing.”

But sometimes you need to pay attention to the games.  Not only should you yeet before you art yoten upon have we already lost; not only is the result in either case going to be “the same, with a different mask” and more monkey games than you can imagine, BUT the truth is we haven’t tried everything before that.

Our magnificent Odd President (What? You haven’t looked very closely, if you don’t see that.) has shown we can still fight with words, and speeches, and organizing. He has shown the enemy has gotten so used to winning monkey games that they’re in many ways a paper tiger.

I hear your frustration. Dear Lord, I even share it. Part of it is frustration with our peculiar moment, and part of it is frustration of having been beaten and hemmed in my whole life, and the attempts to control us getting worse every day.

But if you care about liberty and the individual, if that’s one of your things, you have to focus on the monkey games at least a little, and figure out when they’re stampeding you towards what THEY want you to do, while making it sound it’s what you need to do.

This is a critical moment. There’s many ways to fail, only one way to win.  Look, the monkey games, powered by the crazy Marxist theology which is all Monkey Games, have gotten to such a point that many of our institutions and enterprises are doing the opposite of what they should be doing.

If we don’t win this, the dark falls. And it falls for a long, long while.

So what can you do?  Well, you care about many, many things. And almost all of them are threatened by uber-monkey-games right now (Even knitting. KNITTING.) So you need to fight back.  You need to concentrate on the thing you do, and make it so much obviously better that even the monkey games can’t take it down. Look, I hate to say it, but Trump is showing the way.  They scream and they fling poo, and he does the things he cares about. Ruthlessly.  (While periodically hitting them where it hurts with his words. Learn to do that. Good Lord, they HATE to be laughed at. And they have no defense against it.)

Whatever you are, you Odd Geeks, you mass of strangeness, you nails that stick up, you goats amid the sheep, you are needed.

It won’t be easy, and it won’t be pleasant, but we need you to build. We need you to fight to stay in the game, and build and write and do.

You are the yeast and the leaven. Without it, humanity is just monkeys playing games, and sinking more and more into the morass of conformity.

Sure, you’ve been beaten so much you have no confidence. You’ve tuned the rest of the idiots out so much, you don’t even remember your way back to giving a f*ck.

But if you care about civilization, it’s time to make an effort. It’s time to fight. For you, or for the future, or just for humanity.

Fight with words, with art, with tech, with what matters.

Be not afraid. If we actually try and stop being scared and depressed, no one can stop us. The monkey game players know that and it’s why they work so hard at stopping us.

Don’t let them.

 

*Forgive me for running blasts from the past on both blogs today, but for various reasons — okay, mostly cats and doctors. Someday I’ll tell you the story, it’s hilarious — I only slept 3 hours last night, which came on top of spending the afternoon/evening very worried.  Then today (Tuesday, late night) was a round of doctors. I managed to finish ONE grossly overdue short story, which is nothing short of a miracle as exhausted as I am. Tomorrow I finish the LAST overdue short story and can at last return to the novels. So forgive me for this one, but honestly it’s so old you probably don’t remember it. -SAH*

Earth Needs Women – a blast from the past from November 2010

No, this is not the obligatory ecological post. Today, in the car on the way from dinner (not cooking at Thanksgiving is logical when you have only four people) I was talking to the kids about a book I read when I was maybe 12/13.

This book – whose name I (unfortunately) can’t remember – came amid a trio of “fairytale books.” At twelve or so, I decided that I hadn’t read enough fairytales and was trying to round out my education. This one looked like a nineteenth century book with woodcuts, was written by some unknown Portuguese author and the title was something like “The Foundling.”

It started with a baby girl found abandoned in a forest. She’s taken in by an older woman who gathers wood and who makes a good – if unloving – foster mother.

Half-bored, I felt I knew where this was going, but continued reading, expecting the more or less obligatory hidden princess story.

I was wrong. Though I no longer remember the details of the book – yes, I read it a good hundred times, as it became one of my favorites, but it was a long time ago and memory gets blunted – I know that the parentage of the girl is never revealed. The old woman dies, the girl is turned out of the house, she ends up working as a maid and some other menial jobs. Her work ethic and (what my friend Dave Freer calls) battler spirit get her through. She helps an old lady who is dying and whom no one looks after and, in return, is given an old book of recipes.

She starts her own little business selling cakes and pastries at fairs and meets a young man of very good family who – however – does not marry her because of course, she’s a foundling of unknown parentage. Eventually her little business becomes a successful pastry shop and later she meets another young man, a pastry chef, and this time it all works out and they marry and have a happy family and a successful business.

If you’d asked me at twelve, I’d have told you I had no idea why the story charmed me as it did. I only knew I liked re-reading it and it became one of my favorite books. It felt good and somehow “right” in a way that fairytales and romances didn’t.

Today, when I telling the kids about it, I realized why. It was because the character was a strong woman. Born with the ultimate disadvantage, the ultimate lack of support, she doesn’t – like fairytale princesses – either get rescued by a strong knight nor even by fate that reveals her to be a hidden princess. Also, she never complains; she never repines – she takes the situation she finds herself in and makes the best out of it, all the while looking out for those who are weaker or in more need than her. This last characteristic nets her the all-important recipe book (supposedly created by a medieval convent, which rings true for Portugal, and which had been lost for centuries.) When her romance doesn’t work because her very conventional suitor wants a girl of suitable family, she doesn’t go into a decline, she just goes on with life.

She is, in fact, what editors so often say they want “a strong woman, self sufficient, a good role model for growing girls.” Only, from my observation and reading, by this they usually mean mouthy, aggressive, foolhardy and complains a lot about men till one wonders if said character has an issue with being born female. There are exceptions, of course, but complaining about fate and men and being bitter seems to be obligatory.

And yet, it is true that the type of character in my long-lost book is not only a great role model for young women, she is the type of role model we do need. Earth needs women (yes, and men, but we’re talking women here) who take care of the weak and helpless. Earth needs women who don’t whine. Earth needs women who cheerfully shoulder the burden of what needs to be done.

Earth does not need women who complain about men all the while neurotically obsessing on clothes and jewelry to attract said men and pursuing the highest-status males they can possibly get. There is nothing wrong with these activities, in moderation, but when they become the focus of existence they create a generation of infantile harpies. [Earth needs even less — and how innocent I was — “Strong women” who want to destroy men in order to feel powerful – SAH 2020]  Now, I don’t think any women in real life are as bad as that, but almost all “strong” women characters in books and movies are just like that.

Young women who read/watch these characters end up feeling they must APPEAR like them or they’ll be thought weak. And this is wrong. Strength in women – and men – can be defined not as throwing weight around but in doing what must be done for oneself and those who depend on one.

Earth needs grown up women.

I very much hate to tell people what to do, much less what to be, but I wish we could set about writing – and living – role models for the women Earth needs.

One hates to disagree with the late great Margaret Thatcher, and I’m not doing so precisely, so much as expanding/repositioning what she said.

The greatest problem of socialism is not that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. The greatest problem of socialism, be it the soft pink, dilute kind, or the full on strong red kind that animated the USSR (which remember always called itself socialist. Just like the DDR called itself democratic. Never mind.) is that sooner or later any and all human beings become part of the “debit” column.

I was reminded of this — and that I meant to write on it — today by a friend posting that an ex-student of hers had put up that great old chestnut about “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Let us put aside the fact, that this might be a great motto for a small family or, stretching a point, an order of monks devoted to the greater glory of G-d but that no one, ever, in the history of humanity had the ability to tell what anyone else’s needs or abilities are. Certainly no state known to man, even given the ability to test every subject to exhaustion from cradle to grave can tell what every individual’s needs or abilities are.  And this is because, often, humans don’t know what their needs and abilities are.

We were also talking yesterday, in a group of friends about things that became our lives pursuits, at which we weren’t actually naturally gifted (when i say I made every possible mistake in fiction writing, uphill both ways and as recently as yesterday, I’m not joking. I’ve seen natural effortless talent. It exists. I don’t have it) but which we loved intensely enough to work really hard at.

(The last standardized test for aptitude I took recommended I become a dancer, btw, which is one of those things that make you stare at the results long and hard, because when I took it at seventeen I still tripped on my two feet while standing still and even now I cannot see someone do moves and imitate them. Much less transpose them. When I take aerobic classes, I stand in the last row, so I won’t distract anyone else, when I improvise or do it all backwards and sideways. Also, I can’t imagine enjoying either the grueling effort or the public display. I still have no clue how the test extracted that brilliant conclusion and suspect some prankster in the back office of having said “Gads, she’s useless. Just put down dancer.”)

As for needs…  I often say that Euclid cat was the cat we didn’t know we needed (He’s still alive, but lately he cries a lot. We’re going to get him pain meds and some of the good food tomorrow and see if that fixes it.) Because he was definitely an “unplanned cat.” But after 9/11 when we felt broken he was the constant companion, the completely devoted cat we all cuddled and he helped, though I can’t explain how, get us over the anger and the depression. Also, I have in mind one particular day, when I was scheduled for a business trip. I was very depressed, and didn’t even know I was, and my husband said “Come on” and pushed his work aside.  We spent the day at City Park in Denver, on a beautiful Summer day, and it was one of the best days of my life, completely dissipating the depression.  Did I know I needed that break? No. I was concentrating on getting stuff ready for the trip.  He knew, because he is close to me. Or perhaps he took a guess. Who even knows?

Which means, of course, no government can know either what you’re capable of doing (if you really love something) or what you need. Particularly when what you need has been invented yet. For instance, I get lost in my own living room, and in the eighties I assumed the price of going anywhere was to pull over and study the map every other mile (and my success was indifferent. I’m not a visual thinker.) Of course I needed a GPS. I just didn’t even know they could exist.  And I’m sure there are a million things being developed right now, which if they pan out will become indispensable to me in ten years or so. Only I don’t even know they’re possible.

So when your centralized government takes it upon itself to decide what every person under its purview needs and can do, the results would be hilariously bad, if they didn’t always end in famine, misery and mass graves.

The reason they end in mass graves is easy.  You see, the left mistakes the government for a parental kind of unit: a benevolent, hovering authority who knows you better than you know yourself. It is the result of their bizarre hair raising utterances, like apparently she of the very Occasional Cortex thinking white people don’t need bug out bags. Because, you know, she assumes the government exists to take care of everyone and the only reason she and her family needed bugout bags is because they could tan. Meanwhile that all pervasive entity was looking after it’s favored (white, of course) children.  Or the comments made at the Convention in what 12? “We all must belong to something, so we belong to the government.” Or “Government is the name for the things we choose to do together.” (Well, okay. Whatever. Next time tell the government to use lube. Also, when they were having kitten fits over the righteous killing of Al Suleimani, did anyone think to answer with “Hey, government is the name for the things we choose to do together”?  No? Pity. Someone should meme that.)

But the problem is that the government is not your benevolent, just, all pervasive parent.  Not even under Obama, whom the idiots praised as “kind of a god.” (Oh, light bringer, son of the morning, how has thou fallen….) I think what they are thinking of when they say government is an actual divinity. And don’t get me started on when they imagine that an AI might be the ticket to that. As an old pulp fan I weep. Weep, I tell you.

What the government can be, at least while other people’s money lasts, is an INDULGENT, spoiling parent.  In that Thatcher was correct.  As long as other people’s money is around, the government can give people lots and lots of things.

Now, mostly they will be things people don’t actually want, and which don’t work very well, kind of like if Santa limited his Christmas toy acquisition to the dollar store, and went for bulk.

So, in the case of the idiots currently trying to bribe us with our money, you’d get medicare for all and as efficient as the VA, and you’d get “safe and comfortable housing” or at least housing, but not in single family model. In fact, the old soviet stack a prole apartments built quickly, with insufficiently cured cement which starts crumbling after a year, with a bathroom per four apartment floor, and doors that never close quite right, and of course, no decoration, because well… they’re mass built. But hey, they’re free.

In the same way, socialists start out by being permissive with behavior, which, btw, quickly turns that “housing” into hell on Earth. You can see this with every class now dependent on the government, from school children, to the homeless. If you’re a big enough pain in the ass they leave you alone, since no one wants to risk getting cut to stop some meth head from pooping on the sidewalk, or some feral kid from holding his class hostage with a knife or a violent tantrum.  The less offensive infractions will get severely punished, but the true crazies and bullies will be carefully ignored.  In the same way, while most people who are dependent on government health care, as in the VA, and who are well behaved will wait forever, the illegals and marginal charity cases will clog up the ER because they’re bored, and it’s a bit of a drama. And it’s not like they’ll ever pay, anyway.

Socialist states always start like that. They indulge everyone they are afraid of. This is partly because socialism/communist amid the educated classes is at least a little rooted on the very strange idea that communist revolution is inevitable and also that everyone who is civilized somehow is guilty of offending/mistreating the uncivilized.  Which means they feel guilty and scared of anyone who acts feral or aggressive enough.

So… it starts like that. The people who have for years or about a century idealized the “masses” and thought that once the masses — be they working class, or in the US various “victim” classes of interesting coloration, orientation, or simply in possession of a vagina — got socialism, and the government dolled out its shoddily built, completely inappropriate toys (A doll for every kid, from age one month to 18, regardless of sex! Yes, the doll is weirdly made and falls apart in a day, but you get a doll, for free!) they’d be grateful and behave like perfect angels, get disillusioned.  After all, regardless of their college students assuring them that crime is the result of victimhood, and injustice, and psychosis inheres from the inequality and oppression of capitalism, these people are behaving like savages, are not grateful at all, and don’t respect their betters. They keep demanding more.

This effect is easily observed, in microcosm by putting a sweet spinster lady who “loves children” in charge of a horde of normally behaved children who’ve just been filled with soda and candy. By the end of the day, when you come to collect the kids, she’ll be foaming at the mouth and screaming she wants the little darlings dead.

Which is fine. Because she’d never do it, and she doesn’t have the power to do it. But when the sweet spinster lady is the government, she can.

And usually the intellectuals who have seized control of the government in the name of the people get to that stage just as they run out of other people’s money, because, strangely, the millionaires and billionaires didn’t have that much, once distributed all around. Not even enough to, say, cover everyone’s student loans, let alone to give everyone housing or food.  And those companies you told had to operate on totally green energy which doesn’t in fact exist yet? Yeah, they left. For places where they can work.

And all the cows are dead, and the proles are demanding steak.

How ugly it gets and how fast depends on whether you’re dealing with people who have full control of the government and the populace, as in, hard, full on red, USSR (or Venezuela) style socialism, or pinker, more diluted socialism. Or even with the left side of something like our own country, where you can already see the ugly in potentia, as people refuse to play along with the left’s imaginings, like perfect little proles.

In full on communism, this is when they start killing the wreckers and the hoarders in batch lots, and suddenly you find that you too are a wrecker and a hoarder, even though the “wrecking” is that you failed to guess the job they wanted you to do before they told you, and the hoarding is that you have an extra piece of stale bread.
For the pink socialist, still trying to pretend we’re nice because though we have the ballot box sewn up with fraud, who knows, the populace might get frisky and give us trouble, it comes in the form of rationed health care, of take two aspirin and go home to die, no we won’t give you a CT scan, of your baby isn’t perfect, so we’re going to let him/her die humanely, rather than give him/her a simple surgery that might allow him to live.

Because you see, when you get to that point, human beings are ALWAYS in the debt column.  They aren’t making enough, they aren’t creating new things, and it can’t be your fault, because you’re giving the ungrateful little bastards houses and food and clothes and EVERYTHING. And why aren’t they happy? It can’t be your fault.

The government can’t guess your abilities, and it certainly can’t force you to figure them out on your own, particularly when the choices it gives you are like that test that thought I should be a dancer. And you can’t discover anything, or create anything, because there’s five layers of bureaucracy to get through and, anyway, not one would give you anything extra for working so hard. So you do the minimum.  Which means the government has no clue how to provide for your needs, and since everyone is doing their minimum, to comply with often unreasonable orders from above…. well, sure, you’re entitled to a new pair of shoes a year. And this year all the shoes are size two, because that was the only way the manager could make 3 million pairs, from the supply of leather he had, in the time allotted, and therefore avoid being penalized. So, take your size two shoes, comrade and shut up.

Or in the pink version, the doctors are overworked and get paid the same as school teachers, for years and years of training, and they don’t have access to the diagnostic equipment they need to figure out what you have. You know, CT scans are expensive, and we can only afford to have the machines in certain places.  Here, here is a pain killer (unless we’re all et up about opioids in which case you don’t even get that) and come back in a month, if you’re still alive. If you survive long enough, maybe you’ll be the lucky winner, and maybe the diagnostic will even be in time. Unless, of course, you’re old or we think you’re stupid or useless, in which case, what’s the point? You’re just another mouth to feed.

It always ends like that.

You can already guess it in the eructations of our left who, with no power, yet, with no ability to make their vacuous dreams come true, can say, in public and unashamed that if the Wuhan flu kills a lot of people, won’t it be a great thing for the environment?

These people, who among the thousands of them lack the financial know-how to run a lemonade stand, imagine that wealth is something that exists independent of humans. Their vision of the world is like that creepy book I loved as a little kid, where ice cream grew on trees and fried chickens ran around with forks on their backs for convenient consumption.

They think with fewer people there will be less debit. They don’t realize people do things, and make things, and without people there is also no credit.

Making and building and creating is not part of their mental map. They are eternal children, hands raised and mouths open waiting for someone to distribute the candy.  Sure, they want to be in charge of distributing the candy. But they have no idea that someone needs to make it, or even invent new candy.  They are, in fact, like the insufferable little kids running for president of the first grade class and saying that everyone will get recess all day and ice cream for lunch.

The kids have no idea this is impossible. And one gets the impression neither do the socialists. Because they have about equivalent ideas of the world.

But the socialists are aware that one way or another there’s  a limited supply of goodies.  And therefore, already, before they even have any power to put their hands in your pocket, they dream of gulags and eliminating people they don’t like. Because people have no inherent value. They’re just items in the debit column. They’re units to whom “Stuff” must be dispensed. And therefore, the fewer of them, the better.

After all, if all the wrong thinkers, and all those stupid people who actually do things with their hands just vanished, you and your friends could have a great party, forever, right? You and people like you. People who think right, know how to live and would never do anything to upset you or demand what you can’t give.

That club, unfortunately, in the end, tends to shrink.  The cannibal feast of socialists is always on, in many places and times literally.

Which is why for their own good we must — must — make sure they never get the power they want so much. Because they don’t see people. They see debits.

 

 

 

 

Like most of you I grew up as the weird one in any group. Which is weird, as this blog seems to attract a lot of those who never fit very well elsewhere.

Now, not fitting in is not necessarily wrong. I’m not one of those people who think that most human beings live lives of quiet desperation. I’ve grown up around a lot of “normal” people, and though they bitch as much as the rest of us (nosotros from the Spanish is such a useful word. Oh, you’re served notice, I don’t think I took my Adderal. I was talking to someone while taking pills, and I think I forgot it, but I don’t know (yes, marked pill box) so my thoughts tend to dig in like matryoshka dolls.) Nosotros would be a great name for a blog shared by the regulars here.) most people are pretty content with their lives. Because those who aren’t fight to build something different, and most people don’t.  I think what Thoreau meant by that was that most people didn’t experience the ecstatic joy of an infant on the mother’s breast, which is what I think he equated with happiness. That’s fine. Most of us — I think — don’t really want that, either.

However a substantial portion of us were rejected before we had the tools to analyze what was causing it. Hell, most of us still don’t know what caused it. Our first experience of a large group of kids, we just found out they didn’t want much to do with us.  I know that was the case with me, though eventually I used my imagination and extensive reading and basically invented LARPing, which made me very popular second through fourth grade in our tiny little school. Then I went to the larger school, and found out I was rejected and couldn’t convince them to spend their time off LARPing whatever I’d just read. Those two years, 5th and 6th grade were the hardest, mostly because I was totally isolated. I spent my days walking around the playground, trying to balance on a ledge, or reading books.  By the time I entered seventh grade, well…. people didn’t play, which is perhaps the phase at which we more resemble the monkey band. And I found a group of weirdos to talk to and was eventually (because the school had no clue what to do with us) shunted to a form made up of all the forms where people had been the best students in their form the year before. Which was great eighth and ninth grade. And then I chose liberal arts (long story. It wasn’t exactly chose/chose.) Most of my form went into sciences (most of them are now doctors, with a few biologists thrown in) and  there were only three of us in liberal arts, which means we couldn’t be a form as such, and so I was thrown in the middle of the normies again. And rejected again, as 10th and 11th grade was all about clothes and makeup. For various reasons (eh. I could tell you, but it’s a box I really don’t want to open) I didn’t dress the way it was expected, and didn’t really wear makeup except on weekends. And my dating was non-existent (Though I had a crush on this guy and wrote him 200 and some sonnets between 14 and 18. Stop me when this sounds familiar to many of you.  And no, we’d never have suited, and dear Lord, if I’d known how to gain his attention and had got it, we’d have made each other extravagantly miserable.)

And btw, I’m not implying not fitting in was a matter of being smarter than the rest. In a way, sideways, I probably was but I’m impaired in various ways that made showing that intelligence a struggle. One was ADHD and to until I got medicated recently, I had NO idea how much of a foot-in-a-cement bucket that was, doing anything from studying to writing.  Another is that I’m morally sure I had my younger son’s sensory impairment.  Not diagnosable, at the time, natch, but I had trouble writing on a line till almost eighteen, couldn’t color between the lines, and the slightest sound at the back of the class sounded as loud as the teacher’s. (I suspect in fact that that sensory impairment has affected almost everyone who became a carpenter or a mechanic in my family line because “they’re no good at school.”  It often correlates with what I call “the engineer brain” in the family.) And, more importantly I lived too much inside my own head, and read too much (yes, it was harder than for the normal kids whose eyes worked together, but I pushed, and therewere psychological reasons for that, never mind.)  So the smart might not even have come through.

And we know little kids reject other kids for all sorts of reasons: being outsize (which I was. Not fat. Till about 28 I had times of being too skinny more than times of being fat. But I was very tall. Enough that in the big school in the city, in the early grades, people assumed I’d been held back more than once because I stuck out too much)  dressing funny (mom liked making me clothes. They were lovely clothes just not… what you expected.) speaking funny, either in terms of voice or vocabulary (I talked like I’d swallowed a dictionary.)

As I said, kids and their playgroups are the closest we get to the ape band. By the time I was 7 or 8 I was aware that I was not only the pink dyed monkey, which might be excusable (since kids don’t kill those who don’t fit in, mostly because adults don’t let them) but I was the yellow monkey with big pink pokadots.

Yes, the “gifted” classes in two formative grades helped. I knew there were other weirdos out there, who didn’t fit in nowhere nohow.

BUT fundamentally? You see, the problem is that at the center of it, ape bands want everyone to fit in and nosotros (lit. We Others) get the sharp end of social and sometimes physical stick because we don’t. And we can’t, at some fundamental level. (I find it interesting most of my friends have WAY more Neanderthal than the average human being, btw.)

However, the most dangerous thing is that all of us want to have a band. We need a band. It’s part of being built on an ape frame. (I have an SUV built on a truck frame. It rides harder than those of the same size — and larger — built on a car frame.  My SUV is not a truck, but it has parts.  In the same way, we’re not quite apes. (Oh, we are philologically, but that’s not the point) but we have parts.)

This is a big existential thing, a brokenness inside our emotional selves, that can’t really be assuaged. It lasts our whole lives.

I’ve been lucky to find groups I fit into, these days a lot of them virtual, and to have married someone who is similarly broken, so “You’ll never walk alone” and to have found my profession (such as it is) among other people who ROUGHLY (if not precisely) match me.  Among a band of purple striped monkeys, the pink pokadots pass unnoticed, right?

And immigrating probably helped too, because though that’s not the cause, a lot of people assume the weirdness is because of that and discount it.

However, relating to others and belonging is a struggle most of us will have, all our lives, world without end. We both want it and tend to suffer when we try it.

Which brings us to when I was about 15 and had to face “laugh or cry?”  Though it is, more appropriately “love or hate” but …. not in a way that’s immediately obvious.

I had by then come to terms with my issue with groups, just not the why of it (as evidenced above, I still struggle with the why and “because that’s how humans are” is a great answer, but doesn’t help.)

I.e. I knew I’d never fit in with most groups and frankly I didn’t want to. What normal people thought and did was somewhere between infuriating and puzzling. I  didn’t want to be them. I just wanted to belong the necessary amount not to go insane and I had a small group of friends, so that was okay. But I still had to rub elbows with everyone else, physically and metaphorically to make my way through life.

Which is where the choice came in “laugh or cry?”  I honestly I think I made it subconsciously, because I tend to laugh at everything that annoys me. It’s a coping mechanism. But also because I could usually with thought figure out why people were acting the way they were and, look, humans are ridiculous.

But at the same time I saw a lot of nosotros (those I’d been in a form with) make different choices.  Some, the ones who could completely understand the “normal” people, learned to pass. I suspect most of them today don’t clearly remember not fitting in.  (My dad is to some extent like that.)

Those who didn’t, bifurcated.  None of us could take being immersed exclusively in a “normal” group. All of us still needed friends. Well, I had some. Usually no more than three.

But those groups, and the individuals can develop a self-defeating mechanic. We’ll call it the “cry” strategy. Though it’s really the “hate” strategy.  You hate all those “normal” people who fit in without struggle and never have to think about it. And you cry over your status as outsider.

A lot of people go on from that to become collectivists and authoritarians. They want a “teacher”, a government who will make others play nice with them. And failing that, or those who realize they can’t have that, they hate humans and want them killed in batch lots.  This is where you get the Bernie bros extolling the beauties of the Gulag.

The problem with that strategy is that at the heart of it, deep inside, you come to hate yourself. Because some part of you knows your foibles and impulses are just as irrational if different from those monkeys out there.  And also the hurt because they rejected you and forced you to hate them remains. (You find a lot of these people making comments against hate in general while hating practically everyone. Because, you know, at the heart of it what they’re saying is “don’t hate me. Why do you hate me? What have I done to deserve this?) And then they hate themselves for being hateful, though they’d never admit it.

OR those individuals or groups (it’s harder but not impossible for groups) learn to laugh.  What, all your classmates in this rigorous, difficult language program are obsessed with dressing up and wearing makeup and maybe snagging some wealthy ambassador? Well, that’s funny, isn’t it? Using not inconsiderable intellectual power in the service of a Mrs. degree.  And then other things become funny: the makeup they like. Or how silly fashion is or the mean girls games they can’t help playing. (And you know, I went to an all girls’ school from 7th to 11th grade.)

You don’t laugh at them in a mean fashion, you laugh because you see the mechanisms and they’re so absurd.

And eventually you find you love these apes. Because it is human to love that which amuses you.

You still don’t want to be subjected to their authority or their political “bright” ideas, but if you choose to laugh you’re likely to be able to forgive them (and you) their strange (and your strange) foibles.

None of us are ideal. This is harder on the pink polka dot ( Polka will never die!) monkeys (Yes, I do know we’re achually apes, but monkeys is funnier), than on the rest of us, but even “normal” people aren’t as they’d wish to be, and they have their own struggles.

Laughing will get you through the hard times without hatred.  And might make you more likely to love Liberty.

Which is why as sons hit that age when all they did as complain about their “stupid” classmates, I taught them to laugh instead.

The good thing is that you can always make the choice. The bad thing is that you’ll sometimes relapse into the cry/hate mode. It happens to me, and I have to redirect.

But laugh is healthier than crying.

And what if those others who chose crying/hate put us all in the Gulags?

Well, I don’t think it’s that easy, or that simple. This is not a novel (one of the downsides of our people is that they for good and ill consume more “story” than anyone else, which means internally we expect things to work like in a novel or a movie.) and I think if we are yoten upon, the yeeting will get…. sportive.

But sure, it could happen. At least in certain places.

And then what you have to ask yourself is: Do you want to die laughing or crying?

Because laughing, and seeing humans as funny (even if the humor is very dark sometimes) might even have your survival. Because it gives you hope, rather than paint everyone and everything else in dark colors that mean they or you must die, and life isn’t worth living, anyway.

We do know those who survived horrible things throughout history and went on to live productive/happy lives had hope and retained a sense that life was worth it.

Laugh or cry, the choice is yours.  But which you choose might determine your end result.

 

 

First of all, I must apologize for no vignettes. I am sure the vignette team have given me the word but my hotmail is more gifted than usual.
In fact all of my communication means are more gifted than usual this week, up to and including the actual snailmail.  More on that in the forces of evil.

But for now the promo post.

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 LEIGH KIMMEL:  The Shadow of a Dead God.

While investigating an ancient ruin in a distant star system, archeology student Liu Shang discovers a mysterious pendant. When she examines it, she sees the past through the eyes of a woman whose choices will change a world.

FROM MARY CATELLI:  Curses And Wonders.

A collection of tales of wonder and magic. A prince sets out to win his way to the dragon’s lair. A woman fights a curse on her lands. A man returns to his castle, bringing a magical sword, and worse things. And more tales. Includes “Dragon Slayer”, “The Book of Bone”, “Mermaids’ Song”, “Witch-Prince Ways”, “Sword and Shadow”, “Eyes of the Sorceress”, “Fever and Snow” — and “The Emperor’s Clothes”, which is not sold separately.

ANOTHER EXCITING EPISODE OF THE WRITER AGAINST THE FORCES OF EVIL

The Forces of evil were exceptionally strong this week.  They came to my life with a vengeance starting Monday, with what we will call “The round of doctor’s appointments.”

Not only is it really hard to manage your time when you’re continuously being interrupted and having to wait and ….

Well, let’s just say The Writer lost an entire day, and on Friday was convinced it was still Thursday.
Which — let me tell you — was a moment of sheer horror, since I still had three short stories to deliver, and nothing had been done on the novels.

So there the writer was with the devil to pay and no pitch hot.  And she thought “never mind, I’ll just fight the forces of evil really hard, and get at least one story out today!

The writer did get one short story out and a good way towards finishing the next one, and she was determined to work all weekend.  And then…

News came that The Writer and The Mathmatician would have to pick up some mail at our remote, auxiliary office.  They immediately saddled up!

But the forces of evil were truly unusually active, and every possible trick, plus some, was deployed to delay and derail their (relatively short) journey.

To make things worse, the things that were supposed to be there and The Writer and The Mathematician were told were there…. were not in fact there!

So next week, The Writer and The Mathematician will have to track down a package and a check, AND they have another doctors round, though only one day (two days probably, with tracking down stuff thrown in.)

But The Writer and The Mathematician are united in this, and ready to face the challenges. Right now The Writer is going to get off the net and go finish a short story, and maybe even another, as well as do some work on Other Rhodes.

Wish them luck until next week!

More Prizes For Good Girls or a Letter from Sarah to the Political Goldfish – A Blast From The Past From March 2017

Yesterday I kind of lost my temper.  It was Facebook.  I got just one too many reminders that we were celebrating International Women’s Day.  And didn’t I want to show solidarity?  And celebrate women?

Look, it’s not my fault.  I was bit by a rabid International Socialism as a child and it’s the sort of thing that causes an allergy for life.  Oh, yeah, and International ANYTHING day is a socialist thing, because they never fully realized that they didn’t control the whole world.  Or they didn’t care and just wanted to make their rubes believe they were worldwide.  The Happy People of Brutopia celebrated whatever day they were ordered, and they marched in orderly ranks past the red draped stands, and Socialism would Conquer the WORLD.

Right.  So that was part of why I blew up.  I hate “International” this and that, and the idea behind it.  Whatever good it is supposed to do never actually works where needed, and it does very bad things everywhere else.

Bad things?  How can a day celebrating women be a bad thing?

It is a bad thing in many, many ways: first, what in particular are we celebrating about women?  That they’re women?  Woo Hoo, women exist! Great prizes for good little girls for existing.

Yes, I know what gets accreted to it: women who fought for equality.  women who still fight for equality in dangerous places (like say Afghanistan), women who’ve invented things, women who’ve done special things.

And that’s fine and dandy, but WHY are we celebrating IN PARTICULAR women who did these things?  It is impossible to avoid the feeling that it’s not normal for women to do these things, and that’s why they need to be PARTICULARLY celebrated for having done them.

I mean, I want to make clear that I do admire people who do admirable things.  I just find the implication that doing admirable things while female is not that unusual; that we are not, in fact, impaired children who need to be given special prizes for existing.  Why else would you celebrate WOMEN who do special things more than anyone else who does special things, unless it is because women are naturally inferior and can’t do special things.

So eventually I boiled over, and posted this on the book of faces:

“Women’s Day” is how you know we’re speshull. Or at least that society at large considers us short bus speshull. Treating any group of people as though they need special recognition is like saying “Well done! We didn’t expect you lot to do anything. We’re so proud of you.”
I’m human and I partake of human achievement. What actually is between the legs of the people being celebrated couldn’t matter less to me. Or what they like to do with said equipment.
Unless we’re celebrating sex gods or goddesses, this is just nonsense and giving the impression some animals are more equal than others.
I’m celebrating by hoisting both middle fingers aloft. Lookit my matched set!

I confess I didn’t follow all the answers, partly because I’m trying to finish a book, but two of the answers I got were sadly illustrative.

One was the inevitable man asking me if I’d give the finger to all the women who fought for equality and bringing up the inevitable example of the  young woman in Afghanistan who got shot for fighting for female education, and saying that “She should just have told those women they were whiners and should shut up.”

Need I say that admire everyone who fought for equality under the law, and still fights.  And need I also say that International Women’s Day does nothing to advance that fight?  Thinking that declaring an International Women’s Day will make the barbarians of Isis realize that women should have equal rights is typical of the Disney generation, who thinks everything bad is just a big misunderstanding and can be resolved with a song and dance or a big demonstration of some sort, with painless virtue signaling from “enlightened” people.

And yet, the lowest US infantryman sent to Afghanistan did more to advance the cause of freedom and human dignity, and, yes, female equality before the law than all of the “International Women’s Day”s of the world.

This man’s posturing made me think of pouty Michelle Obama holding up a sign saying #bringbackourgirls, which of course did not do anything, and certainly earned no respect from the Boko Harum who went on, selling and raping and destroying the women they’d taken, completely unimpressed by Michelle Obama’s twitter posturing.  As they should be, since they come from a world of force and barbarism, where, to be fair, they never watched Disney movies, and were therefore never exposed to the awesome power of the photogenic pose.

Then there was the woman who informed me that she taught self defense to children and women (Good for her.  But why ONLY to children and women?) and that International Women’s Day was needed till the body count dropped.

That statement confused me, because it’s so stupid it’s not even wrong.

First of all, I’m fairly sure that anywhere not currently under active invasion by military-age refugees bent on treating their hosts like occupied people, the body count IS falling.  All body counts.  At least in the US and other Western lands, violent crimes have been falling.

However, pardon me if I ask WHOSE body count?  I presume from her statement that she teaches women and children to defend themselves that she thinks women and children die in disproportionate numbers from violence?

Look, one person, any sex, any race, any age, dead by violence is one too many, but in point of fact, most of the people who die by violence are men.  Always were.  Always will be.  Yep, they are more physically aggressive than females.  It’s the testosterone thing.  They are stronger than us, period.  They are also by nature protective.  Which means many is the man old and young who dies protecting his family. And the young men who have died protecting their tribe are countless, from tribal warriors to men who die in combat today.

That’s who men are.  And no, it doesn’t mean that if we got rid of men we’d get rid of violence.  I went to an all girls’ school.  Women are as capable of violence.  Different violence.  Women are more likely to hurt children (look at crime statistics) and women are more likely to kill by stealth and by poison.  We are by nature weaker, and our thought is less direct, but deeper, more interconnected and lending itself better to plotting and convoluted plans.

It’s who women are.  And it’s not all bad.  Throughout history women have plotted and connived and worked to keep their tribe safe.  Not just people like Elizabeth the First, many of whose actions were of necessity what a man would do, just with a different slant, but people like the legendary Portuguese baker who attracted the enemy one by one into her bakery (by baking bread, when both besieged and besiegers were dying of starvation) and killing them one by one with the oven shovel.

And it’s not all bad.  And those women who fought for equality, be it equality for themselves because women were despised, or equality for their sons and husbands, who were slaves at the time, were and are awesome and should be celebrated, no matter if they use their own means to do it.

But… where does International Women’s Day do that?

Where does it even keep a single woman or child in a perilous situation or an unjust land safe?

Teaching women and children self defense is admirable.  Getting them guns is even more admirable, because no matter how much you scream “equal” women and children are NOT physically as strong as men.  And so the very few bad men among the whole of them find them easy prey.  It’s impossible to make them equal.  But Mr. Colt did so.

What didn’t do so were soviet style strikes and calls for an International Women’s Day.

In a free society, in the west, all that does is allow the mean girls’ club to try to elevate themselves at the expense of other people, be it men or women who disagree with the mean girls.  That too is part of what women are, the social schemers and social climbers at other’s expense.  Oh, not all women.  Just the women who are the fair counterpart of the men who would abuse their strength to enslave the weaker.  (I tell you, those two sets deserve each other.)

And all it does is make men look at it — yes, and women too — and wonder why, if women really aren’t inferior we make such a big deal of acts of heroism and strength performed by women specifically.  I mean, if women are equally capable, shouldn’t we celebrate HUMAN achievement, male and female?

I do.  I salute those who worked for freedom, for justice, for equal laws for themselves or others: male or female.  I salute those who freed us from brutality and bestiality.  I ache for my brothers and sisters in societies where women are chattel, because even the boys and men are wounded.  You can’t separate the human species in two halves and hate one and love the other and not hurt all.  And that’s why I ache for boys raised in this lunacy where they’re blamed for crimes that not only they never committed but crimes that their ancestors haven’t committed, generations out of mind.  I ache for American boys held responsible for the crimes of barbarians living under Islamic  dictatorship, as though all men and all boys were interchangeable widgets.

And the goldfish?

Well, some friends of ours had a goldfish, in a bowl.  And every time the goldfish swam from one end of the bowl to the next, he’d look SURPRISED as though he’d never been there before and it were all utterly new.

The thing is, we’ve seen all this “international day for this and that” “Solidarity march for this thing and the other.”

Sure, it can work, properly targeted.  Notice that the Polish solidarity was not for political freedom for Poland “and everyone else in the world because we’re all equally oppressed.”  No, by directing the light of world outrage at a particular place, with a particular regime, it worked.  Or at least it helped the real fight on the ground.

So, you want to fight for the equality of women?  Shine the spotlight on Iran, on Afghanistan, on all the places in the world where a woman can get killed for talking back.  Name, shame, denounce.  Strip the mask for those who apologize for those regimes even among us — many of them “liberal” — and make them own the horrible things they’re allowing to be done.  Be ready for resistance from the victims you’re trying to save, too.  This is all they know, and our ways are foreign.  Yes, one or two will get it, but not all.  But fight there, where the fight is.  Be relentless.

But don’t say “And all the women in the west who are equally oppressed” because that’s bullsh*t and you know it.  Even the country I grew up in, which is objectively sexist (or was when I grew up there) in that every woman is considered inferior to every man, is not EVEN CLOSE to the hells where women get slaughtered for talking back, for learning to read, for being seen with a man not their husband.

As to the imaginary “micro-aggression” of American feminists, those are more often than not the excuse of power hungry females who have nothing else to recommend them, as to why they should be at a the top of the pile.  They have neither beauty, grace nor brains, but they have vaunting ambition, and use the plight of other women — real women, in other lands — as a springboard to arrogate to themselves unmerited accolades and power.

The only thing they have in common with true female heroes is that they have a vagina, and that’s not enough.  Heroic women, though methods tend to be different, have more in common with heroic men than with loudmouth, pampered women who give themselves airs, because they have a vagina.

And it is to those political goldfish I wish to speak: We don’t care what you were born with.  In fact your displays and tantrums, more and more, make the rest of society view you as inconsiderate brats who refuse to grow up. And yes, the rest of society includes grown up women doing grown up things.  But what you are doing is very dangerous.  In your effort to seize unmerited power and acclaim, you’re putting down every other woman, reducing us to a powerless and inferior group, at the same time that — frankly — you make sure no one wants to hear another word from you.  And they will think you’re typical women.

This is how real oppression returns.

Women in the west wouldn’t be where we are without many determined women.  We also wouldn’t be where we are without many determined men.  And without men agreeing with us that equality before the law is right and just.

Convince them otherwise, and you lose everything.  Your posturing and mewling of victimhood will win nothing.  And it could lose us all.

It is said that at least one Catholic saint spoke to the fish, and the fish listened.  I have no such hope with the political goldfish, locked in their blinkered “Wants” and who believe life is a Disney movie.

Fortunately they are a minority.  Most women, like most men, are decent human beings.

It’s type to stop listening to the loud mouths, and get to work.