Category: Uncategorized

It’s getting increasingly difficult to talk to Europeans. Or read their books. Or–

And if you’re going to say “Why would you?” Well, because I’m related to a lot of them. Or they are dear friends from either so far back in childhood that they’re basically family, or from my misguided youth. I’m not fond of Europe, but I like the people.

Until recently, this was an easy circle to square. I just didn’t talk about politics, or really lean too hard into their preconceptions. And usually when they started on a tirade, say about our high crime rate, and I just sat there and looked, really looked at them, they’d stop and go “Well, at least that’s what I heard.”

As for their fiction and their attempts to give us what can only be called “helpful hints” which usually had nothing to do with who we are and how we live? Mostly I rolled my eyes and skipped, as I do badly written sex scenes.

This… er…. has changed.

Look, i got a hint this was coming during my trip to Europe last year.

It wasn’t just that — prior to the election — these people were doing all but offering to air-lift me out if Trump should win, or that my mother — who speaks not a word of English — was sure she knew Trump was “low IQ” because of “the way he talks” (Yeah, I looked at the translations. We adjust to Trump’s funny speech patterns, but they don’t need to be translated to toddler level.) I mean, she was shocked when I pointed out she doesn’t speak English and can’t tell, really. But then she was “sure.”

She was sure because everyone around her is sure of the same. And apparently she doesn’t remember that everyone around her also thinks socialism is the way of the future. Eh. But–

But. The media there is doing one hell of a job to portray everything Trump does as “just like Hitler.”

Part of this is easy. No, really. Listen to me.

It’s on the level of “Hitler also drank water” okay? It’s just that there’s a set of behaviors/beliefs that Europeans are taught from the cradle on are very bad and basically fascism. That they have nothing to do with fascism, and no, didn’t bring about the long war of the 20th century never occurs to them. Because all of them were told/taught this. ALL OF THEM BELIEVE IT. (I believed it till well into my thirties. I just have a way to want to figure out if things are true and go poking. And we have a ton more sources of information than they do. And did, even in the nineties.)

One of them is nationalism. They’re absolutely convinced that nationalism brought about WWI and WWII. HOW they can believe that when WWI was caused by the European attempt at growing various empires and their bizarre set of internationalist alliances, I don’t know. It goes something like “People fought for their countries, therefore evil bad and war.” Even though they themselves admit it was sold as “the war to end all wars”: the most internationalist goal of all.

As for World War II, well, Hitler talked a lot about loving Germany (while strip mining it, but never mind) so nationalism causes fascism. ELEVENTY!

The fact that the British too fought for dear old England apparently doesn’t mean they were fascist though. BUT if they loved their country now? Total evil bad fascism. Because, reasons.

Another is militarism/military preparedness. Trump actually is far less war-like than any of his predecessors. Something I approve of, provided he doesn’t destroy the military. Because he is a business man, his approach to keeping other countries in line is to hit them in the face with a bag full of money.

HOWEVER he’s not running around saying “military bad.”

The USSR sold Europe on the idea that America was Imperialist, because we had a military. And our military could beat theirs every day of the week and twice on Sunday. And they knew it. It never seems to have occurred to the European hit-on-the-head bunnies that our military was their military. In the sense we protected them. No, no. We were militarist and therefore fascist.

Then there is the whole immigrant issue. I can’t blame their press too hard, I guess, because it starts in our press. These arrant idiots don’t seem able to distinguish between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants. Or, for that matter realize that illegal immigrant isn’t a RACE.

This shouldn’t surprise me, since in the last quarter of a century I found out all sorts of things were race: religion for instance. If you said anything bad about Islam, or for that matter voodoo or tree worship, you were told you were “racist.” Language was also racist. If I objected to the school trying to force my kids to attend classes in a language no one in our family speaks or has spoken for generations (Spanish) I was suddenly “racist.” If I made sounds of gagging when I got an advertisement in Spanish I was racist. (No, no I’m not. I’m Hispano-lango-phobic. It’s an awful language in most accents. I’m fine with the people. I just hate the sounds. There are other language sounds I hate. Press one for a list that will keep you rive– Are you stupid? Stop pressing.) DISAPPROVING OF VAGRANTS was also racist. I once wrote a post here about how the homeless were turning the library in downtown Colorado Springs unusable and the usual babble brooks of the left called me racist. I was so surprised I actual sat the family down and asked them what color of homeless they’d ever seen, and then SPECIFICALLY when they’d seen a non-white homeless in town. (We all thought there might have been one or two some years ago, but we couldn’t remember. Yes, that’s changed now. The whole town has changed out of recognition in the last four years.)

And because they’re not here, not shopping where we shop, not attending cons here, not … living here, it’s easy to believe that Trump is rounding up everyone who tans — citizen or not, thank you to our media for all the cases of publishing false stories of citizens deported! — and deporting them.

Then there is the fact Trump is fighting race preferences. (As he should, because hiring or promoting people based on ANYTHING but competence degrades competence, and we’ve done enough of that, thank you. Also race preferences is basically titles of nobility. We’re preferring you because you were born to these parents. This is specifically against our founding.) But of course, the idiots over there think what this means is that we’re going to discriminate against anyone who isn’t blue eyed and blond. The whole jeans advert thing is probably playing right into that, despite the fact almost all our top models are some flavor of tan.

No, the Europeans who frankly never saw any reason not to discriminate for conditions of birth are going to interpret this as a preference for Aryan characteristics. (True, there are a LOT of Indian H1B Visas. But we’re not all Vivek R. and we don’t think they’re superior.)

Of course, without question, and despite the fact that your average man-on-the-street European is way more racist than any American except perhaps the three non-FBI members of the KKK remaining, racist equals Nazi.

And from those three points they hop skip and jump. They whisper about the long night of fascism falling on us. They cry about they know how people felt looking at Germany in the thirties. They try to give us “warnings” about “tyrants” who “stop our ability to speak” and they talk about … defending our borders and sending back interlopers (most of whom are being supported by the welfare state to some extent, btw) as though we were building camps and were about to start gassing people in batch lots.

If you try to point out they’re completely off their tiny little unstable rockers, they pat you on the shoulder OR back away from you in horror and say something like “I didn’t realize you were a good German.”

PEOPLE.

Yes, I do check. I check all the time. If we were about to go Nazi I’d want to know. I’m in my sixties now, and running around the mountains totting an AK-47 doesn’t look appealing anymore, but frankly there are other ways to fight tyranny.

If the current administration is trying to suppress speech, they’re going about it all wrong. Unlike Biden, they have yet to even attempt to install a “disinformation tzar” (How come the left is obsessed with tzars? You are what you murdered? Is that it?) The attempts at debanking people stopped cold (Though strype needs to clean house. Part of the reason I haven’t arranged to monetize this blog yet. WordPress, also, goes through strype.) Throws hands up in the air. It’s like they’re not even trying.

Then there’s the racism thing. The left and PARTICULARLY Europeans keep telling me Trump is racist, sexist, homophobic. AND definitely anti-Semitic. I’m looking at his administration and having serious trouble buying this line. I mean, look at these people. Worst Nazis ever. True, true, his VP married a true Aryan. But all the same.

As for anti-Semitic, this administration aren’t the people pushing to recognize the rule of Hamass as a state. Yes, yes, I GET it that these days support for Israel is the true antisemitism or something, but surely you don’t expect me to turn my brains into that kind of pretzel. That just doesn’t work. Antisemitism is antisemitism. I.e. it is discriminating against Jews. You should see the expressions I get when I inform Europeans that Trump in fact has a daughter who converted to Judaism and he has grandchildren being raised Jewish. This just breaks their brains. So they deny it and go back to screaming. Or mutter darkly about Hitler being Jewish. (Maybe? or maybe it was a rumor. But at any rate not “was Jewish” but “might have had some Jewish ancestry” which, dear Bob EVERYONE does. Because yeah, mobile minority gets around. Deal.)

Look, we have joked about annexing Canada and Mexico, yes. (I wonder how much of this is done to drive Europeans bonkers, actually.) And no, of course, we’d not do it. Mostly because it would be like cleaning out slum housing.

But until we actually put boots on the ground and head to Toronto, I’m not going to be all jumpy about our invading Poland, EITHER.

On the serious side, I keep tilting my head, but I just can’t see what they see.

Is Trump more authoritarian than I’d like? Well, yes. But then traffic cops are more authoritarian than I’d like. I have a baked in, intractable “leave me the heck alone” streak. I’m willing to accept minimal government but alas our crazy mess of a government isn’t minimal. (I want a government small enough to fit in the Constitution.)

Is Trump Hitler? Well, they both are/were air breathing mammals who drink water. So, yeah, I can totally see a resemblance.

Seriously. This would be rich and all the hints about the oncoming Nazification of America very stupid (because we heard it about George W. Bush, for crying out loud) if Europe were SIMPLY its normal elitist, regulated, stultifying mess.

But no. They’re pointing at us and screaming fascist as they codify things you can’t say on the internet, not even as a joke; as they ensure parents have fewer and fewer rights over their children; as they codify precisely which incoming cultures and skin colors have more rights than the others. They’re pointing at us and screaming, even as they’re all upset we didn’t frog-jump and put boots on the ground to fight Russia. They’re pointing at us and screaming even as we can no longer be sure if we visit we won’t go to jail by telling them to put one of their pronouncements up their arses on twitter.

It’s like being in a fun house mirror.

Even as used as I am to the IMAX like qualities of the American left, seeing this amplified all over Europe (and Canada, and probably Mexico) is … horrifying.

Sure, when the rest of the world disagrees with you, sometimes they’re right. In this case, though, they’re mainlining mescaline and tripping balls.

And we really can’t do anything about the blue air-breathing squid they’re trying to fight. For one, they’re not real. For another we are tired of hearing them scream about the blue squid engulfing us, while they’re the ones getting tangled in tentacles.

It’s sad. And it makes it likely I won’t see my dad in this world again, which makes me very angry.

But at this point, and until such a time when they choose to snap out of it, I don’t know what else to do.

When I first came to the US as an exchange student, during an otherwise unexceptionable trip into Pennsylvania I saw a sign on an hill side that shocked me to my core.

The sign said “US out of the UN. UN out of the US.”

You guys truly can’t imagine how much this shocked me. In Europe, growing up, it was all the UN this and the UN that, and the UN keeps us safe from another world war, and Unicef and Uni whatever.

I didn’t realize it, but I was living in a time capsule, or rather, a propaganda capsule. I didn’t know it but my view of the UN mirrored the great hopes with which it was created.

It has never, ever lived up to its imaginary wonders and benefits. Never. In the annals of ever.

It has neither promoted peace, nor helped the poorer nations, nor done anything — ANYTHING AT ALL — people thought it would do.

The UN was — from what I understand — supposed to be the precursor to a one-world government.

And it suffered from everything a one-world government would suffer from: too large, too cumbersome, too bureaucratic, too corrupt AND a handy instrument to every tin pot dictator and ideologue.

What was so amazing about my being shocked by that sign was that by that time I already knew that the UN had lent itself to such mendacious USSR propaganda coups as “The rights of man” or “the rights of children” half of those rights being either irrelevant or crazy, but giving totalitarian horrors the ability to say that the free countries were “also” failing.

Yes, the UN was supposed to be a deliberative body where nations could solve conflicts without having to war over them.

Only really? In what world does that make sense?

The US has had some authority to stop wars, because other nations know we’re the 800 lb gorilla and we’re willing to pound them into sand. UN peacekeepers are most notably dangerous to minors under the age of consent, which are the only thing they do in fact pound.

What they do, in fact, is lend unwarranted credence and consequence to a passel of sh*tty little nations who are self-inflected poor.

WHY are we in a deliberative body with and treating as equals nations that are still engaged in slavery, not to mention other, disgusting practices.

And while we’re at it, yes, there are attempts to “replace” the UN. This makes as much sense as replacing the League of Nations with the UN.

Look, here’s the thing: It was the fact that travel took a very long time and people had romantic ideas about other countries. Today, in the era of instant communication, we know what other countries are, how they live. And we don’t want — and shouldn’t want — them to have any say in how we live.

Take the boondoggle of carbon control and Climate Change. It’s mostly a Russian ploy to keep selling the only asset they have: oil. I say let them starve in the dark until they stop being crazy.

Certainly better than US dying in the dark by following their idiotic ploys.

And therefore….

I say US out of the UN, UN out of the US. And no replacements.

Sure, the UN will “fall to China” if we leave. Bull pocky. The Chinese won’t pay for the circus if they can’t use it to bully us. Also China won’t pay for it, because they can’t. In fact, no one but us can pay for that.

And ask yourself, is it a good use of our money?

Sure, the UN apparently has sub-groups that do things like set aviation standards. Cut those particular organizations loose and let them work on their own.

Keep such international organizations to the absolutely needed and what can be verified and tested. No more airy-fairy “world peace.”

Aviation standards, cool. Peace on the shipping lanes, cool

And yet, OTOH, think about it — who is going to be enforcing such standards? I.e. in ultimate instance, who is going to pay? Who is going to put boots on the ground? Why in fact does the US need “international organizations” more than a snake needs galoshes?

UN out of the US. US out of the UN.

Fumigate the building in NYC and sell it as luxury condos. Still an eyesore, but less malicious.

The UN is a dream whose time has passed.

It was always a nightmare, anyway.

No Man’s Land (all three volumes) is up for pre-order.

And I suppose because I’m me, and I write what I write, you’ll ask yourselves: But is this a libertarian system of government in these worlds? Or perhaps a revolution against a tyrannical system?

Well — squirms — no. No, it’s not. Though it is, in one case, a liberty-inclined system.

Look, I remember people getting very upset at me over Witchfinder, because a libertarian shouldn’t write a monarchy much less a monarchy with hereditary ordained monarchs, where the land and the king are one.

Head thumps desk. I pointed out this was a magical monarchy. I mean it’s supposed to be from King Richard, okay. Magic is how they roll and–

Look at ceiling. Kicks pebbles. Well, that sort of does it, doesn’t it, because No Man’s Land has not one but TWO monarchies. And neither of them is magical, not really.

The libertarians would drum me out if there were a small l libertarian party and frankly if the individualists could organize long enough to excommunicate me.

Or, on the other hand, hold up a little. Because all that is not as it seems.

Because, well — waves at the crowd gathering around. Marks the rocks they’re holding. Raises hands in the look ma, no hands pose — look, at least one of the monarchies is not one as such.

No, never mind, neither of them is.

Take Elly — please, no seriously, how did a nice woman like me end up with this crazy world? — while technically one of my main characters — Brundar Mahar, King, Healing Magician, rescuer of babies, eater of sweets — is king of the whole world and probably a couple million souls, the truth is things are… complicated.

Right at the beginning of the book, you find his sire talking about ambassadors, and if you’re like me when I first got this world in my head, you tilt your head kind of sideways and go “Aroo? Isn’t there only one polity? Okay, and the enemy? As far as these people are concerned, where are ambassadors coming from? Before the guy from the 25th century drops in?”

Well, it’s complicated. Brundar is king. His line has been kings for … a few thousand years. But… King is perhaps a bit high flung for the job.

You see, Elly is barbarous. Brundar’s ancestors have been “kings” because that’s the only system they’d ever seen, while enslaved by the enemy — Draksalls — but for thousands and thousands of years there were so few people actually settled — most were nomadic hunter gatherers and drastically … individualistic. Their largest unit of normal residence if the family. But they have bonds to those of their blood, which I chose to translate as clans. And clan leaders, by virtue of being able to call for help for you if you get in serious trouble, have certain rights of negotiating for your and such.

In the last thousand years or so, their efforts at convincing people to settle (they’ve been settled for thousands of years) have started gaining momentum. More and more people are farmers, and merchants and there are leagues.

But their model (their founders erased all history and started them as tabula rasa) is nomad clans. So they have… guilds. That’s a name. Guilds and associations, and argle-bargling associations. All of them filled with highly individualistic, prone to argument and duel people.

The king is actually, mostly, a warlord. He leads the armies against the enemy, ably assisted by four other people/lines who have also been settled and working at the civilizational project for millennia. Getting troops and supplies for those, and keeping their world from being invaded, keeping them from being enslaved again is the most important, if not the whole job. (The secondary job is keeping duels down. And minor wars between clans, associations and such. I mean, otherwise he’d have no population.)

For these he must argue, discuss, convince, beg, seduce and sometimes duel clan leaders and heads of other groups.

So he’s basically the head of the circus. Or the main lunatic in the planetary madhouse. (I suddenly have a much higher appreciation for Brundar, brat that he is. And his parent who was insane. I think this would make anyone insane. What a job!)

No they are not representative. To be representative, they would need to be way more organized and collectivized.

How they got there was sometime in the 21st century (Wanna speed it up Elon? I figure you’d have something to do with it) someone comes up with a way to teleport through space. I’m not going to call it worm holes, because I don’t think it is, but you’re free to think it is whatever you want.

It took spaceships, getting to orbit, and then… the ship could translate…. elsewhere, by coordinates and … well, the first ships didn’t take time in account as a coordinate. So sometimes ships simply disappeared.

People being people they nicknamed them schrodingers. Because no one knew what happened to the people that went up in them and… disappeared.

Well, you’re saying, and crossing your arms, (and I note you’ve put the rocks down. Thank you. I realize a lot of places stone lunatics. I’m glad you’re refraining.) NO ONE WOULD GO UP IN THEM IN THAT CASE.

Oh, are you for real? Of course people would go up in them. I mean, you have a fifty fifty chance. Maybe more. Maybe the other ships get … somewhere.

Of course assembling a group and taking everything you’ll need to start a civilization is expensive. So mostly what you’re seeing are … very rich eccentrics. Because when you’re that rich, you’re not merely insane.

The people who started Elly had a bee in their bonnet about humanity having two sexes, and they thought that making everyone the same would set the world up for equality and community. Uh uh.

Being radically able to be self-sufficient didn’t turn out that way.

BUT then there’s the crazies who started Britannia on High which eventually became the center of the Star Empire.

To be fair, they didn’t go out in a Schrodinger. They only left in the 22nd century, after the time variant had been stabilized and everyone knew where the Schrodingers had gone. Those that disappeared. Forward and backward. In time. The oldest they found still functioning are ten thousand years in the past, but there are schrodingers that show up in the 26th century and are slightly salty at the now cheaper, easier space travel.

Britannia was started…. um….

It is TECHNICALLY a monarchy. Because I’d been reading a lot of crazy people saying that to start space colonies they’d need to be “communism”. And no, they’re not.

But the people who put up the money for everyone else to immigrate (And Britannia was originally three solar systems, where the inhabited worlds range from two very Earth like worlds (Earth and anti-Earth, say) to some large satellites of a gas giant, then …. well, there’s a lot of earth-enough worlds) wanted to create something that had an echo of the golden age of the British Empire “as it should have been.”

So, of course, they made themselves Lords and kings and…. yeah. Cool. Whatever. What they are were the people who sustained all the expense of settling and if needed terraforming, etc each area. Most of them have been substantially bought out, but retain a lot of investments in their world or portion of a world (this is not related to the titles. Some worlds have less land area.) And other worlds, by marriage and inheritance, of course.

If you view them as magnates more entrepreneurial than political, you’re not wrong.

Their constitution is surprisingly close to the US. Most of the power of the nobility is ceremonial, though the Queen’s power is real as much as any constitutional monarchs. They have … some political power (again within the realm of a constitutional monarchy) BUT they can be voted out. And sometimes bought out as well. (Particularly if they’re really bad managers.)

Monarcho-capitalism? Radical constitutional Monarcho-Capitalism? I don’t know.

Look, it makes my head hurt. It does.

What it does have — actually both places meet in this — is a culture of service for the “nobility” kind of like again it’s supposed to have existed in the hey day of the British Empire. (Ideally. In theory. Well, some families definitely did. In this case, in Britannia — and Elly for other reasons — most families do.)

As lost colonies are found, Britannia and Earth emerge as “the empires of free people” which in turn means each are a group of various worlds, growing the nobility of Britannia and the parliamentary turmoil of the empire of Earth.

On the other hand they face an empire that has decided to dispense with its people and had them all made into cyborgs. And what can only be described as a syndicate of criminal worlds that cater to everything horrible, plus.

Oh, yeah, and the world Elly is battling is actual for real slaver cannibals. I mean….

So how much is this book about liberty? Well, my archmagician of Elly (okay, roll with it. No. It’s not fantasy. Mostly not) takes high offense to the idea that he’s settled. He still views himself as a wild nomad, free, by himself.

Which tells you where their heart is.

And because I’m despicable and made of silly, have a movie of poor Skip, from Britannia.

When you get lost between New London and lost Elly, the last thing you should do…
Is get horizontal with the natives. They’ll drum you out of the diplomatic corps, court martial, execute you, reanimate you and do it all over again.

For sure!

First let me lay two things out before I even start the post.

1- I’m not a feminist, not in the sense of reacting to insults on “feminism”. Did I ever call myself that? I don’t know. If I did it was in my early teens before I realized it was just a flavor of Marxism dressed in a pretty skirt and bows.

2- There is right now, in the US, a movement among the right, which for the purpose of this post is defined as “to the right of Lenin” that if it continues will fashion it into the Left’s idea of the Right. And will make it non-viable as a political movement, thereby giving the left its much needed next burst of energy.

The problem with this is that the left as it exists and the right as the left is working to refashion it — yes, I’m convinced it’s infiltrators, and people repeating nonsense without thinking — are neither viable, useful to humanity movements. From both of them will come nothing but death. Oscillating between the two will destroy civilization, and lead to a long, slow crawl from tribalism again. (If we make it. Most cultures stay stuck in tribalism.)

The right the left is trying to make ascendant — which is what they always thought we were, but now know at some level we aren’t, and that terrifies them — is just as authoritarian as the left, and is what the left keeps accusing us of: sexist, racist, homophobic.

Today’s post points out how we’re slipping into the first, and what’s fundamentally wrong with that. Honestly, the terms of engagement on that are so wrong they’re not even wrong.

But, again, please realize at the start of this, I don’t react to things that are maybe too broad in saying “Women do this” Or “women are guilty of this.” Because most of the time I can see that a lot of women are. I might say “Not all of us” but then I move on.

Also I am one of the first to admit there is such a thing as toxic femininity. I’d say our business world is choking on it and it’s destroying it. (A lot our institutions, including the Supreme court, to an extent.) BUT it is not what the skinsuiting right identifies.

In fact, the attempts at pushing us into sexism are so wrong they’re not even wrong. Which is why I’m always shocked and appalled to stumble on them repeated by people on our side. Note I clipped the name from the screenshot, because I don’t want the person mobbed. I think he’s roughly on “our side”. He just swallowed a lot of sh*t and is regurgitating it all wrapped in his hopeful-not-thought-of stereotypes.

But my reaction to his tweet was immediate and visceral. Because he was trying to make me, and every woman sin-eat Marxism. He was making us into the scapegoats who could then be safely subdued and kept infantilized, and that would make it all right.

I’m going to paste the tweet now. Note he uses “feminine” not “feminist.” (Using “feminist” would be wrong because it would be a small portion of Marxist evil. Using “feminine” IS evil.)

My reaction to this, in the Discord group in which it was posted was to immediately answer with “Fuck you, no. I’m not your sin eater because I was born with a vagina. Fuck off with that shit.”

I don’t know how much people here know this, since the few times I do swear is on the blog, but I don’t swear. My characters sometimes do, but it takes really life-and-death situations or truly punch-in-the-gut emotions.

My visceral reaction surprised ME so I had to unpack it.

First of all he’s right about the process of weaponized empathy. He’s wrong about EVERYTHING ELSE.

Also he’s tweeting this in reply to some ass saying he wants socialism now. Femininity and feminism have nothing to do with this, except in the sense that feminism is a small portion of Marxism (yes, it is. It was from the beginning. Fighting for equal rights under the law is not what “feminism” is, nor is “feminism” aiming for that at any time.)

What in heaven’s name made him jump from “socialism” to “femininity”? There are some rats in head there that have been carefully planted at a guess by mobis pretending to be on our side.

Let me make it very clear: Marx was NOT A WOMAN. Communism is in no way feminine. In fact, using women to advance their purposes was a brilliant move for destroying the west.

Just as weaponized empathy was.

But let’s begin at the beginning: WHY ATTRIBUTE WEAPONIZED EMPATHY TO “feminine”? What sense does that make? Has this man ever met a woman? Or let me put it another way, has he ever met a woman who wasn’t pretending to be sweetness and light? Has he ever let himself be in an unguarded enough situation with a woman to realize she wasn’t a Victorian upper class stereotype?

Because that’s what he’s using: Victorian Upper Class Stereotypes. Women as sweet, gentle creatures who don’t want anyone, even enemies to suffer.

This wasn’t true even in the Victorian age or even in the upper classes. As you’ll find out if you read any biographies or auto-biographies of women in the Victorian age. Hell and damnation, people, even Victoria herself wasn’t like that, despite all her pretty language.

I have spent most of my professional life fighting this idiotic, completely anti-reality stereotype ON THE LEFT. Because the left/feminists have swallowed this hook, line, sinker and tinkling little bell at the end. Even though they are the embodiment of “this is wrong.”

You know this stereotype on the left because it leads to the never end of dreary feminist SF in which the solution to all of humanity’s issues is to eliminate males. And then women, sweet, caring, gentle women rule the world as the angels they are, with no war, no strife, and everyone cared for and looked after PERFECTLY.

I was very lucky to have been raised in a milieu that was a patriarchy, but where women weren’t dissembling. Most of them were working class too, which means under the gun, under fear, under oppression (real oppression. When a married woman needs her estranged husband’s signature to work to feed the kids and there’s no divorce, that’s oppression.) and nakedly themselves.

And then I was sent to a magnet school that was girls-only. Oh, dear Lord. if you want to see true war and carnage, by all means, make it a “country of women.”

I might be killed by a group of masked women, in the dark, for giving away club secrets (I’m joking, I’m joking) but guys, women are far meaner than you, more ruthless and at many levels utterly immoral. Or at least amoral. (And for those of you who are protesting even now. No. I don’t mean we are like that normally. We’re thinking beings. But present a man and a woman with the same unbalanced conundrum “kill a hundred innocents to save your newborn child.” The man will hesitate. Half the man might not do it. No woman will pause to think. She will gladly kill all hundred, as they plead for mercy. If she’s a good woman, she will feel guilty after. But in the moment, she will do it.)

We are creatures of bare claw and fang. We have to be. We live at the hard edge where life meets death. Each of us has, if not in fact, the potential to produce life and that life appears in the world as a completely helpless, mewling creature. We risk our lives for them. They are, in a way I can’t explain to any of you not a mother, for the rest of their mortal life, a portion of us. Arguably the most sensitive portion of our anatomy. Even as adults. Even though we know they’re not perfect.

I heard it described as having a piece of your heart forever in someone else’s body. The most important piece. They’re not wrong. (And in ways it meets the uncanny. If those pieces of my heart are troubled I can sense it and it affects me.)

Even those of us who try to be good have to work at it. I’ve had my kids in difficulties that could be solved by murder, and I had to be talked down from it. Even though I knew it would destroy my family. (This was the famous scene “Honey, if you don’t want this to devolve into the type of scene where they find five heads in the toilet and never find the bodies, you’re going to have to take time from work and go to the Middle School. Because if I go, I don’t answer for my actions.” … and he, a sane, rational man in time crunch at work heard that and immediately left to deal with it. This is what women are. He gets it. Be told.)

Don’t take my word for it. You don’t have to.

Go read historical accounts of the life in seraglios and what happened to other concubines when the son of one of them inherited. (Or worse, the other concubines’ children. SHUDDER.)

Go read unvarnished biographies of female rulers. Bloody Mary gets called that because the protestants won, or we’d have blood-soaked Elizabeth. They were just as bad as each other. Ruthless.

Go read, closer to home, how the women of plains Indians tortured prisoners. In fact, in any tribal area, the women are the ones torturing prisoners. And the men will turn away, horrified.

Go read Kipling’s Female of the Species.

Or just, you know:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
   An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Women are not kind, gentler. Women are creatures of overkill. Why? Because we’re weak. We know that if we don’t utterly destroy the attacker, and he limps up and comes after us again, we’ll die.

Or holy hell, our kids will die.

Frankly the most amazing thing about Judeo-Christian morality and law is not that it conquered wilding males, but that it got women to more or less human, and to AT LEAST pretend to virtue and altruism. (Oh, we have plenty of altruism. Real one. Most of us would die or starve for our mate and families. But extending outside that group? Nah, brah. Not without a higher faith.)

So his first point is wrong. And from that everything else if wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, miles and miles of wrongitude. So wrong it is not even in the same universe as right.

And you’ll say “But Sarah, we’ve seen women pleading for all this. For letting criminals go for–“

Yes, yes, you have. And this is where we get to the truly frightening bit of what women are (Girls, you can beat up behind the bike shed later.)

Women are enforcers of the status quo. Women are the unifiers by obeying what they perceive as high status opinions and ideas.

This is inevitable, because we’re creatures of evolution. For most of human (and probably pre-human) history, women were traded between tribes, captured, stolen. This went on into the twentieth century when the tribal cultures the west interacted with stole women of the west. (And still goes on, look you — glances meaningly at England.)

This happened not because all men are evil (Rolls eyes.) Because what women are and what they can do is so precious that barbarous men fight over them.

Without us there is no next generation. No more future. For any primitive tribe under the edge of starvation and war, women are the ultimate resource.

So women got sold, traded, given away.

And if you’re bristling, men were also not valued as individuals. Just as members of the tribe.

It’s just most men never left the tribe they were born into. If their tribe — or band — were ambushed they were killed. The end.

Women on the other hand had to learn to survive and thrive while changing cultures, climbing the hierarchy.

Part of the reason autism in women is far less diagnosed than in men is because women seem to have a sixth sense that allows us to figure out what the “high status” posture and position is anywhere. (Some of us just choose to oppose it anyway. But it takes a while to work up the courage, to be fair.)

Because our ancestresses that could climb very quickly and ensconce themselves in the heart of the ruling clique had more daughters who survived, this is an instinctive thing to us. It takes thought and effort not to do that. (Though like all instinctive abilities, it has levels, of course. And Odd women are most likely to break it.)

So you hear a lot more women than men flap lips on the weaponized empathy that the Marxists loosed on the west in order to destroy us, because it is perceived as the high status opinion.

How could it not be? It’s pronounced from the pulpit, from most “expert” seats. From the ranks of academy. All the “good” and “smart” people proclaim it.

And women are the enforcers of tribal unity and the status quo. It is women who perform female circumcision in Muslim countries — and are vocally for it — and it was women who found their daughters feet.

But the problem is not WOMEN. Women are just reacting to their instinct to fit in well with society (though even that is breaking.)

The problem, at its root is Marxism. Including the nonsense idea that criminals are “society’s fault”. It is high status male weaponizing the women.

Fight Marxism wherever you find it, and most women will turn on a dime.

Marxism is a problem, not “feminine energy” “entitled” or not. What the hell even is this “energy” bullshit? Are we New Agers now? Or Muslims? Are you going to be blinded by my hair-rays if I’m not veiled?

Make no mistake, that cute little screed above leads exactly to women in burkas. And that’s the GOOD result. He’s not saying that because he senses it would be a step too far, but he likely believes it.

Because if women are such kindness and light that they will coddle the enemy who is destroying their sons or will destroy their potential sons? Well, the only cure for that is to confine the silly things, treat them as unthinking toddlers, and cover them up so they don’t tempt other men, and and and–

THESE ARE MY MIDDLE FINGERS. I’m not your sin-eater for Marxism. I’m not your scape goat for the evils of the last 100 years. And while I have no daughters, I have daughters in law, and I might have granddaughters. You’ll put any of us in a burka over my fucking dead body, you assholes.

Turn back now, while you can, and think about the type of ideas you’re falling into.

Yes, the last century was horrible, but none of these assholes was a woman:

Nor was Mao, or Pol Pot or Castro.

There is toxic femininity that is the morality of the serraglio. Me and mine above all.

Most of us, civilized, try to be good, women can control our most base impulses. But none of our impulses are towards forgiving enemies and letting criminals out. They tend to be more along the lines of “Do they make pencil sharpeners I can stick this person who is threatening my kid into feet first?”

Oh, sure, a lot of us lie about it to men. At least men who aren’t our husbands and who don’t get to see the beast in full rampage.

This might be a mistake. They get these illusions.

See this gentleman going on about masculine fire and female grace. Where the hell is this coming from? Are these people human?

HAVE they had mothers and sisters? Have they met a woman… EVER? (Do they actually think the stripper loves them? Don’t answer that.)

I’m going to guess I wouldn’t meet the definition of “grace”. For sure not physically. I trip over my feet while standing still.

And emotionally? Oh, I’m quite capable of grace and mercy. Because I am a Christian and believe in forgiveness as I hope to be granted forgiveness. But I won’t give it till I am sure you’re not going to kill me. Because I’m a woman, and weak, and know I won’t survive a second attack.

Again, stop this now. Stop this nonsense of adopting the Victorian Upper Class — and the left’s — view of women. We’re not creatures of light and sweetness who should either — for the Victorians — be protected at all costs or — for the idiot left — be put in charge of everything.

I don’t care if the right is more inclined to protecting — while blaming us for all the horrors we did not create or inflict — it’s still not considering us full human.

Humans are creatures of primal shadow and desperate survival. Yes, we can be kind, even gentle. But that is the wonder of Western civilization.

It is not natural. It’s not free-floating energy. And women’s “natural state” is not kind, gentle and peaceful “grace.”

If you’re not man enough to face that, you’re not a man, merely a little boy who stopped soiling his diaper.

I’m demanding you grow up now.

Or things are going to get very bad. For men, for women, for the whole human race.

No one but the totalitarians win from this delusion.

Book Promo

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. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

No Man’s Land
Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 1

The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

FROM RUSS THOMAS: Operation: Valkyrie

On our 40th day in Immersion the phone rang just after noon. We were being summoned to High Command in Berlin for a conference.
We were suddenly reminded why we had spent the last five and a half weeks in this trailer. Who we really were. That we had a mission to complete. We had history to change. And then back to our real lives in the distant future.
The plane they sent arrived on schedule—a Junkers JU52. We spent the next five hours getting jostled around its interior. When we landed, we walked out the door to the sound of the Deutschlandlied, the German National Anthem. I returned the salute of the crew. It all felt unreal. Things like this didn’t exist.

FROM JOHN BAILEY: Mars Defenders:: 12 Tales of 2050s Mars and Asteroids.

Mars Defenders: 12 Tales of 2050s Mars and Asteroids

In the dust and shadow of the 2050s, Mars is more than a new frontier—it’s a breeding ground for corruption, sabotage, secrets, and quiet resistance. In this gripping anthology, twelve interconnected mysteries unfold across Martian colonies, mining outposts, terraforming labs, and asteroid corridors.

Follow Kieran O’Malley, Zara Chen, Malik Torres, and a network of determined colonists as they uncover the dark truths buried beneath red soil and beyond orbit. From rogue corporate sabotage to ancient alien artifacts, sleeper agents, and black-market conspiracies, each tale unveils a new piece of a sprawling puzzle threatening Mars’ fragile future.

Mars Defenders delivers classic mystery thrills in a hard sci-fi setting, perfect for fans of The Expanse, Murderbot, and Asimov’s Robot Mysteries. Smart, fast-paced, and richly atmospheric, this PG-rated collection weaves together suspense, justice, and quiet rebellion—on a world where truth is as rare as water.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: A Fox in the Henhouse (Timelines Universe Book 2)

Delaney Wolff Fox is a spy. A cute spy. A deadly spy.

A spy you want at your back when stuff gets real.

From a palatial office in Johannesburg, to a fancy whisky bar in Sydney, Australia, to a beautiful private beach in southwest Florida, to the great and wild city of New Orleans, Captain Delaney Fox, United States Space Force Marines (Intelligence Division) finds herself beset by assassins at every turn, while first saving an alien government’s valuable artifact from the South African cartel that’s stolen it, and then being assigned to guard said artifact while it completes a world tour, on loan from that same alien government.

But like the proverbial fox in the proverbial henhouse, you can count on Delaney to complete the mission and come out with the prize, intact and in hand – even if the “farmer” isn’t all that keen about her doing so.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Cataclysm

The end is coming.

Unlucky jerk Tom Beadle was on watch at NASA when the collision alert sounded: a new asteroid, bigger than the dino-killer, headed for Earth. Big problem, but that’s why we have NASA, right? Except, after decades of budget cuts, NASA has no way to shove it off course. That job has to be contracted out. Will the private sector company his best friend from college works at succeed where the government option failed? Might be best to have a backup plan, just in case…

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 ROBERT A. HOYT: Cat’s Paw

What if the doom of the universe or its salvation didn’t depend on humans?
What if cats were far more than we imagine?
What if—
But enough of this: At the end of the universe there is a Mountain. Every thousand years, a bird flies to strop its beak on that mountain. When the mountain is worn to nothing the universe ends.
The mountain is down to a few grains of sand.
The only hope of survival for the entire universe rests in the grubby paws of an alcoholic alley cat, a fluffy cat with not much brain and a bookish cat who thinks Guinevere is a male hero’s name.
The universe might have run out of luck.
Or not.

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: Spiffy

For those of you who just dropped (possibly on your head!) in here, this is what I’m doing and why.

Sorry to take so long between these posts, but mmm. Yeah. It’s been weird out here, with a bunch of traveling around and being sick and stuff. If you want to see the previous posts, search “future of the past” in the search bar.

Also, add to “why did this take so long” that this is an Heinlein title. From the time I moved to the US and could secure all of Heinlein’s works (the juveniles were hard to come by when I was in Portugal, most having been published while I was far too young.) I re-read Heinlein about every year. Sometimes every two or three years, because life intervenes.

But, anyway, I’ve read Heinlein a lot, so it’s hard to give the same type of “looking at it with fresh eyes” perspective I give on stuff I’m re-reading after a long long time, or perhaps reading for the first time.

This is the copy of The Man Who Sold The Moon I bought for this. Interestingly, I’m sure I read it as a kid, in Portuguese, and also I’m sure that it was JUST The Man Who Sold the Moon. In the US it’s of course a novella and sold in various bundles. (In audio I have it in a future history collection.)

I think I’ve alluded to this in the past: Portuguese is a very …. expanded language. It takes more words and more difficult constructions to say what you say in English. (One example of this was translating the wedding ceremony (younger son’s) including the sermon so the happy couple could understand, which forced me to translate partial sentences because you can go on for three minutes and it translates as “I want them to realize they should try to be happy even when they’re not.”) Anyway, this means that English sf was often translated as duologies or trilogies, unless the novels were very very short. Like… a canticle for Leibowitz was two physical books, and a lot of Heinleins were trilogies.

Anyway moving right along:

Robert Anson Heinlein was born in Butler Missouri in 7/7/1907. The always biased Wikipedia will have the basics of his life and career here.

On his life I’ll only say that Heinlein is a good example of iterate till success in everything, from marriage to career, and gives hope to the lot of us who have not been instantly successful, shall we say. (Though I lucked out on marriage.)

Wikipedia mentions that Heinlein was a hard science fiction writer, and of course for his time he absolutely was. However I’d like to enjoin all my friends and followers who write hard science fiction to study him.

Modern hard science fiction is hide bound and too scared of stepping wrong, while Heinlein’s magic came from melding absolutely hard science (of the time) with traditional story forms to create ripping good yarns with a solid science foundation.

The Man Who Sold The Moon is precisely that. It’s the romantic scoundrel, the adventurer, the explorer. Only the romantic scoundrel has an obsession a lot of us empathize with: he wants to go to space. Which at the time meant the moon first.

May I say, it’s weird to read this after the trip to the moon, and still feel the same surge of excitement as he sets it all up to reach his goal.

The other thing I’ll say is that, in particular compared to the writing of science fiction of the time, while The Man Who Sold the Moon has pulp-pacing it is much more realistic. The problems they face are not alien mind control or another evil scientist trying to steal the rocket, but sane, completely plausible bureaucratic and financing and engineering problems.

It is in fact a highly crunchy story which once you swallow the moon-obsessed multi-talented main character is completely plausible.

And Delos Harriman is impossible not to love. (The difference between him and our very own Elon Musk is that Delos is a salesman possessed of the common touch, which Elon seems to be lacking. He does what he can with what he has.)

The end sequences, where he remembers seeing Haley’s comet as a kid and wanting to touch it, I wonder if those were autobiographical?

Also, having finished the story, I’m struck by the fact that it is far more plausible — and immensely more American — than the way we actually got to the moon. Going tot he moon via government program and purloined German scientists was always an improbable plot twist, one that seems to be a result of the deformations induced on our system by FDR. In fact, I find it wholly implausible, and DD Harriman by far the better way of getting to the moon, and most likely one.

No wonder Heinlein’s version lead to sustained space exploration and ours didn’t. (Though maybe we’ll fix that.)

And here let’s hold a moment of admiration for Heinlein’s naming. Delos, of course, a worth descendant of Dedalus, a son whose wings — this time — didn’t get singed by the sun (or perhaps did, considering the ending.) And he did in fact harry man onto space exploration. We should all be possessed of the deep symbolism and ability of a Heinlein.

Speaking of which, that ending is one of two Heinlein endings that always has me in tears, no matter how often I read it.

It is sad, of course, but also wonderful because he got what he wanted.

I think that is all I have to say about The Man Who Sold The Moon, other than, you should definitely go an read it.

Oh a passing funny. I swear the author of the Portuguese translation cover put in a Heinlein look alike. Also, the woman in the background is pure artist’s imagination. This is one of the few Heinleins in which there isn’t really a love interest (unless it’s the moon.) Delos’s relationship with his wife hardly matters except as a complication.

Next up by Argonauta listing should be this:

The title in English is From What Far Star, and there are used copies available. Je suis desole, but I’m not buying it (Cheapest I’ve seen is $19.) If one of you has it or wishes to get it for me, that’s fine, though I highly dislike paper books at this point in life. (Eyes, mostly. E-ink is easier.)

However, before we do that, we’re going to take a circle-back and do David Starr, Space Ranger, by Isaac Asimov. (Thank you to Uncle Lar who insisted on sending me a copy.)

This is the Portuguese title and cover:

(Yes, Paul French is Isaac Asimov. No, I’ve never read the book, so it will be interesting. No, I have no idea why it was called Martian Poison in Portuguese.)

So, that’s next week.

Until then!

Okay, I’m going to need all of you to do me a favor, okay?

Learn when you’re being spun, and stop spinning.

This is absolutely essential if you’re going to survive this presidency. Oh, not because Trump is doing it — though he’s gotten better at doing spinning of his own — but because it’s all the left has done, and boy do they do it 24/7.

I first realized this is not just the left, but it’s in everything, when I wrote the article yesterday about for Mad Genius Club about owning ebooks. (You do, btw. But unless I put it in my own store (working on it) no other vendor is going to let you claim ownership. They can’t.

Before you take offense, the reason they can’t is not you gentle reader. The big guys are probably not terribly afraid of Americans setting up shop to sell infinite copies of the one book you bought. I mean, look, not race but culture. Certain cultures don’t GET copyright or IP at all (Portuguese were still iffy in the 70s) and these shops are global. Note I’m not being mean, almost every instance of “steal book, set up store selling it” is based abroad. And moves around.

Granted the ebook stores aren’t very good at security measures. But they keep trying and mostly annoying everyone.

The point is, though, that if I announce a new book, half a dozen people will tell me I need to go wide because they don’t buy from Amazon, because Amazon evil bad reached into kindle and took out book someone had bought.

It wasn’t till I wrote that post that I realized the two books to which this happened — Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 couldn’t be a coincidence. I would bet you money the person who complained the books were taken was the same or an employee of the one who put it up without having the rights, thereby setting up the situation.

The point is, any other store would have done the same. BUT this brilliant bit of spin attaches to Amazon only.

In fact in the comments someone (Becky J, I think?) said that Barnes and Noble does a rights grab in their contract, in which case I can’t go with them anyway. But do you hear anyone say “All stores” or — as I say — “Amazon is bad but the others are worse?”

Nope, because THAT WAS A BRILLIANT BIT OF SPIN.

In the same way, if you’re still spinning over Epstein don’t be. Look, it was OBVIOUSLY a planted spin because they knew Tulsi Gabbard was about to lower the boom on the Obamanation.

It came out of nowhere. It was based on a big lie: that Bongino and Patel had threatened to quit if Bondi wasn’t fired. Etc.

It was actually a brilliant piece of foofahrah to get the right going. It tapped into our deep distaste for sexual shenanigans (We’re not the prudes the left claims, but anything with minors is RIGHT OUT) and also in our frustration with Bondi’s first approach to the matter.

(And on that, like on the Amazon thing, yep, I’m sure she was set up. By someone in her office. Not a coincidence the big flop with influencers happened at the same time as a big event calling reporters to the white house. It was stupid of her, and I’m sure Trump read her the riot act. BUT if he replaced it, whoever he could get confirmed would be worse. Bet you. The left already have that warmed up.)

But for the love of little apples: It was almost entirely a twitter-storm. All the extremely online people were going nuts. No one else cared.

It’s not that people don’t care about pedophiles and stopping them. They — we — do. It’s that Epstein is dead. While it would be great to see justice on that front, I bet you whoever he supplied has been plentifully supplied from the accompanied minors over auto-pen’s open border.

Sorry, but the people know that to topple the admnistration is to invite the return of open borders and child trafficking on a grand scale.

And note the left that was righteously demanding Epstein papers releases never cared about that. Or about the Epstein files WHEN THEY WERE IN THEIR CONTROL.

All attempts by them at bringing up the subject should be met with “Where were you the last 5 years, dude?” And that should be the end of that.

Mind you, “that” seems to have ended anyway. Because without USAid money none of this is catching fire outside the net.

In the middle of the sad, sad trombone solo, let’s hold a minute of silence for the WSJ who dirtied themselves beyond repair and might — even with an Obama judge on the case — end up bleeding money to publish the whole stupid birthday card bs. A “reveal” so profoundly stupid that if it were absolutely true would still mean nothing except “Trump asked his secretary, an English Major, to write some profound sounding drivel for the birthday of a guy who, back in 2003 wasn’t know to be anything illegal. Or anything, besides a rich playboy financier who frequented Florida resorts. Oooooh Stop the presses. Super-scary. And to make it worse, they did this just before the Gabbard bomb went off, meaning they didn’t even get to spin the very stupid and unaware.

(And guys if that’s the best they have? Trump once more shocks me by being cleaner than could be hoped for.)

Look, as we go forward, Trump seems intent on kicking over a lot of fire ant hills. When he does — or likely just before, because they have spies in the admin offices — they are going to spin like bright colorful tops.

Your job is to stop the spin.

Their techniques involve finding something the right cares for and using that to stir up outrage.

Say for instance, any day now “prices on food are still going up”.

At which point your job is to not get enraged but think “Yes, but much slower. Also, weren’t you calling me a treatler because I wanted affordable eggs?” And then ask them that. Make them justify their actions. Get inside their spin and stop it.

They also use mostly bot/foreign foreign-bot accounts on twitter. Anyone worth their salt should check the date the loudest screamers were created as accounts, and look at their page.

It’s stupid that people who are supposedly influencers don’t and continuously fall for these tricks and spin.

So, it’s up to us to lead the way.

When some big foofarah comes out of nowhere, stop, drop and think. Who is pushing this and why? Is it entirely too cutesy? — like the books Amazon took back — What are they trying to hide/distract from? Who benefits? And what did the screamers do about whatever they’re screaming about when they had the chance?

Oh, yeah, another one: Okay, so it’s a problem. Is it the biggest problem? And why is it so d*mn urgent this time.

Trump 47 learned what Trump 45 didn’t know. He’s become massively more based and able to fight back.

It’s time for us to do the same.

Know when you’re being spun. And stop it.

Canadian Non-Healthcare a Guest Post By the Balloonatic

A recent medical issue in my family brought the problems with Canadian healthcare to my attention again. My younger brother let us know in April that his wife had an appointment with a cardiologist. She has been having issues for years because one of her valves is opening the wrong way so blood going through is moving away from her heart instead of to her heart. On a positive note, she is now scheduled for open heart surgery at the end of June, which makes it seem that the Canadian healthcare system is moving quickly to take care of her – until you find out that she had to wait over 18 months to see that cardiologist. A quick phone call to one of my local cardiology clinics and their average wait time is 4 to 6 weeks.

This isn’t my first personal experience with how broken socialized healthcare is in Canada. This wasn’t something I noticed when I was younger. My only health issue was with migraines and I had no trouble getting into the doctor who did his best to try various alternative treatments, but there weren’t many of those available in the early 80s and I ended up falling into the trap of pain management with codeine causing an addiction with a feedback loop where my body started to produce more migraines to get more codeine. When I finally was able to break out of the cycle by finally quitting cold turkey, I was able to get the help I needed – counseling and trips to the emergency room for pain relief until I could find other ways to manage the pain.

It wasn’t until I came back to Canada in the mid 90s after an absence of almost 4 years while I studied in Australia that the problems of government run healthcare first caught my eye. While in Australia, I made my living as a street performer making balloon animals (yes, that’s where the nickname came from!). This was a great way to earn a good amount of money in a more limited time frame so I kept this up while finishing my BA in Alberta. I worked through various entertainment agencies, managed to get myself an annual gig at a big festival which covered a good portion of my living expenses for the year, and then busked at a local farmer’s market.

It was at the farmer’s market where I made friends with “Mary”, one of the market’s employees. Mary was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. She could only walk with the assistance of two canes/braces on her arms. We got to talking once and she let me know that the biggest issue was with her hips, where the joints had deteriorated. She had gone to several specialists and they let her know that the only option to help her would be to have both of her hips replaced. This doesn’t seem like a big deal sitting in my room in Ohio – hip replacements are fairly common. For Mary, though, this decision wasn’t just between her and her doctor or her insurance. It was up to the healthcare bureaucrats to decide when someone is allowed to have hip surgery. And their decision was that she didn’t qualify because she was too young. If she got hip surgery now, in her mid 20s/early 30s why she would need to have it done again in 30 years. So, better for her to wait until she’s older when she would only need to get it done once. I must say, that was a real eye-opener for me and brought up the problems of healthcare by committee when the focus is on saving taxpayers money and limiting healthcare rather than on putting the focus on treating and healing people.

This came home to me again several years later. In 1999 I was living in Saskatchewan, doing an internship program when I got sick – more sick than I had ever been in my life. I was aching all over, had severe chills and zero energy. It was all I could do to pull a pre-heated meal out of the freezer and microwave it. I finally called someone to take me to the hospital when I started having trouble breathing and began hyperventilating in panic and got admitted to the hospital. I recently found paperwork on this when I was cleaning up my attic and going through my visa applications to find that the doctors had admitted me for panic attacks. I spent a week in the hospital, hooked up to an IV while they had me blow into a plastic tube with a ping pong ball, and I couldn’t make the ball move up. That was the sum of their treatment. Finally, in frustration and desperation, I booked myself out of the hospital. My adopted grandmother sent me a plane ticket to come back to stay with her and her husband. I was so weak when the plane landed that I had to ask for help to depart, and they took me out in a wheelchair. My grandmother later said that she looked at me in the arrivals section of the airport and thought I was going to die. I was lucky, though – I had a great family doctor in Edmonton who saw me right away, got me in for x-rays and discovered that I had had a version of the flu that lead to a type of pneumonia which was viral rather than bacterial. She prescribed the right medications and while it took months, I did recover. This taught me that I couldn’t depend on a medical system or doctors to help me when I need it – I had to push for my own care and proper treatment, because the public system doesn’t want to make the effort to do more than the absolute minimum.

There are many more examples I could provide – my uncle, a quadruple bypass survivor ended up in the emergency department of a hospital again in the 2020s with heart problems. He went in on a Friday and didn’t get to see a cardiologist until the following Monday because the only cardiologist available at the hospital in a town of over 166000 people was on holidays and they had to fly one in from the nations capital to see him. My 87 year old father experienced a similar issue last year, when he went into emergency because he was light-headed and dizzy. He went in at night and it took 8 hours for him to see a doctor because they didn’t have any actual doctors in the emergency department at night – he spent that whole time sitting in the waiting room. At least he is more fortunate than one of his old buddies from work who developed cancer and spent the last three months of his life lying in a hospital room with 12 other men. Or the father of one of my childhood friends who also developed cancer and could not get proper pain management treatment so he chose to use the MAID program instead – which is a whole other blog post. Canada: where they would rather kill you than heal you.

The horror stories abound and are never ending. When I go in for my next annual check up and see my doctor, I will thank him once again for being available even at short notice when my son or I need to see him and for the way he does push me to get preventative care and go for tests to make sure that any health care issues are taken care of and not left to grow worse from lack of care. While yes, I may sometimes have bills that seem much too high (Thanks again, Obama!), I will take those bills over the alternative of a “free” system paid by higher taxes where the focus is on saving money over saving lives.

*ANNOUNCEMENT: I forgot to put this in yesterday evening’s post: If you have a blog and occasionally do reviews, or if you review for a professional venue, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com and I’ll send you the link to download the e-arc. Needless to say no obligation of a review. Also, for the record, soliciting reviews and help promoting, because frankly I suck at the marketing thing.)

My finally getting the books up for pre-order yesterday is not an isolated event in terms of writers who have been silent or nearly so suddenly having new properties. Mostly authors to the right of Lenin, mind.

I’ll confess this makes me a little uncomfortable. It brings to mind all my lefty colleagues in the early oughts claiming they couldn’t write, because they were so busy purging and tearing out their hair over the horrible reich wing dictatorship of…. W.

Yes, I’m fairly sure they are engaged in similar antics now over Trump. I don’t know for a fact, because I haven’t been part of their circles and email lists since oh 2015. I’ll be honest, I still belong to a few of their groups — those that haven’t imploded — under the principle that I lurk and am very quiet, so they probably don’t remember I’m there. The other side of this is that I don’t remember I’m there. I mean, guys, why should I, precisely? I can watch their histrionics in real time on twitter and facebook. And… I don’t. I stumble on them periodically and go “Oh, no. Not that again.” Because the principal emotion evoked through all this is “It’s all so tiresome.”

Which I think is more to the point than our purging and tearing out our hair over losing an election. No. The last four — arguably twelve — years have been silence-inducing for completely different reasons.

And it took me a while to figure out why, and a while longer to conceptualize it, but I think I should share the thoughts — still half formed — in my head as I grapple with this, because I think a lot of you who are not writers might be facing the same issue… with modifications.

The other day, in a small(ish) discord group I belong to, a friend mentioned something about the newest Strange New Worlds having a character fall on knees and pray and how unimaginable this would have been 5 years ago. She meant it as a “taking the temperature of the culture” thing. Which is correct, but it’s more than that. Put a pin in it; we’ll come back.

Her mentioning this made me realize how profoundly I’ve — personally — changed in 5 years. I haven’t become someone else. All the principal impulses were there five years ago. But the unthinkable happened, and I tumbled with it. And like rocks in a tumbler, it changed me in significant ways, making things obvious that were occluded and in a way making me possibly harder and smoother.

And what five years it has been. Guys, if in 2018 you’d told me that — I’m sorry, I still think this was the reason — as a ploy to make us all dependent on government and scared and tank the economy to “win” the 2020 election, the democrats would lock the entire country down for a bad flu and run a scam on how this was the next black plague that would cause Europe to also lock down and be terrified? I’d have told you that while weed was legal in Colorado, you should definitely put the bong down and go breathe some fresh air.

And if you’d told me that after all this they would still need to fraud the election at the last minute, visibly, in front of G-d and everybody? I’d have been hitting that speed dial for the men in white coats which no longer exist in our society.

And yet… And yet it happened. And yet, we were locked down, and people were terrified, despite the fact that numbers like the Diamond Princess were out and clearly demonstrated this wasn’t even an existential threat for the over 80 set, unless truly horrific treatment protocols were engaged. (And they were. Most of that group died of respirator setting.)

Because it was unthinkable, (both in here and in Europe, TBH) and yet it happened and kept happening, it broke things in our brains. And the fracture lines are still shaking up inside each of us, and in society as well.

On that pin: yes, a lot of people — self included — have become more religious. Note, I am still me. I think I have more atheist friends than religious friends. And I don’t engage in battles, anyway. Particularly not in what I call “beating over the head with Bible verses.” If they don’t believe, that will just make them puzzled or upset. I know, because my own particular branch of Christianity is often beaten over the head with Bible verses by people who think they’re “owning” us, while we have our own interpretations of those verses, so at best our reply is “First of all, rude.”

Which is what argumentum ad Bibliorum (Yes, that is in fact son of bitch Latin) is at the best of times.

But my tolerance for religion in my entertainment has gone up. Oh, you can still drive me bonkers with the average “Christian novel” because the characters stopping every fifty pages to pray, or wondering if G-d wants them to kill the bad guy feels phony and tacked on. However, a character, in an extremity of feeling falling to knees and praying? Yeah, I can see that. 2020, man. 2020.

To be fair, I always had a high tolerance for religious characters, whatever their religion, even if it was a fictional one. Sincerely religious people exist and their beliefs is part of how they process events. It’s just that few people write them/wrote them convincingly.

Will that change? I don’t know. I would suspect so, from internal changes and also how I see people around me changing.

But the change is not all, or even primarily religious. Though it is ideological, personality, enormous.

First there is the sudden doubt of everything experts say, but more importantly everything they’ve said over the last oh 100 years.

While this is good — “scientific government” has been a disaster for the world at large and filled over a hundred million graves — it is also bad, because some things are actually true, established, and can be scientifically proven (Say the germ theory of disease) but now face a much bigger cliff to convince people.

There is also high skepticism of institutions and elected — and even more non-elected — leaders. Look, you’re not going to get me to admit there is a downside here. I’m still a libertarian. An OWL (Older, Wiser Libertarian) sure, but still a libertarian (And I miss L. Neil Smith something fierce.)

Our institutions by an large have been so corrupted by Marxists and Marxism-light that we really need to topple them and replace them. The problem is that second. We really need to make with the replacing, because we still need their functions to work. Take higher education — please? I don’t want it — it desperately needs a complete overall, not in style but in substance. Yes, yes, the founding fathers, in a society that moved by ox cart, thought well of universities which were logical successors of monastic learning.

But in the 21st century? 99% or more of the learning done at universities could and arguably should be accomplished either long distance or by formal apprenticeships, with perhaps a year (tops) in localized learning and communal discussion. TOPS.

Replacing that properly (not just changing the ideological sign which will accomplish nothing) will require breaking our heads out of the mold of centuries. It might be achievable now, after the shocks of the last few years, but it will still take time and (arguably) hurt like a mother.

In the meantime, in upper education as well as everything else, frankly, everything is going to be adrift.

And each country in its own way is clinging like mad to its fundamentals. In the US that’s fairly decent but — looks sideways at Europe — guys, you know what Europe gets up to when we’re not smacking it on the nose…

The point being, though, everything is tumbling. Or to quote the great Leonard Cohen:

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won’t be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul

In the middle of this, those of us who write feel sucker punched, unable to hold onto a coherent vision of society long enough to actually write books.

Look, until last year I felt iffy about the shifter books because they take place in a diner and I didn’t know how to deal with the lockdowns. I still don’t, except mentioning them in the rearview mirror, honestly. And how do I deal with the fact that all night open diners now seem to be a thing of the past everywhere? (Something I will never forgive the bastards who locked us down for. There was nothing like coffee at two am in an urban greasy spoon (okay, fine, Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax) to plot and clear one’s head.) I still don’t know!

But I’d guess, because outside the books I still feel a bit punch drunk, that the rest of you are going through a version of this, that this is universal and contributing to strange events with strange outcomes that keep the feeling of everything tumbling going.

In a way we’re like someone married for 50 years who is suddenly served divorce papers and then finds their spouse has had two other relationships going the whole time. Finding out what was true, what was a lie, and reestablishing our sense of self is difficult and mind-breaking.

And yet, here we are.

I’m glad I’m writing again. For those still stuck, let me advise you might have to force it in the beginning — I did stating around February last year — and find a support group to cheer you on (thank you to the terrible triplets of twitter — all different ages and looks — who kept me going. And their auxiliary corps like Fuzzy.) And if you can, if your writing field allows it, go as strange and far flung as you can. Another world, for choice.

If you’re not a writer, my advice is what I said before, but still useful.

1- Be kind to yourself. I know it’s five years, but five years is not too long to get used to the impossible happening. Give yourself grace. Give yourself time. Do something for yourself at least once a week. Carve some place and time to breathe and relax if you can. And forgive yourself for stumbles. You’re punch drunk in a world of punch drunks. Slips will happen.

2- Start figuring out how to replace compromised institutions, processes, ways of doing things. I don’t know your field, so I can’t tell you what needs changing. But I seriously encourage you to approach it from a “Do we even need the way this has been done for centuries? What if I turn it on its head?” Yes, some of the things are still needed/valid. But the processes have all changed. So examine each of the precursors first.

That’s it. Most of all, truly, give yourself grace.

No, you shouldn’t have known how to cope when the world broke. No one expected the world to break.

Now that it has, glue yourself together as you best can, and keep going.

Secure your oxygen mask before assisting those near you.