Category: Uncategorized

Like most people here who read science fiction growing up, I was raised on the idea of the world-nation.

By the time I was in my twenties, I knew that wouldn’t work. Acculturating more than once (back and forth, really, after my year as an exchange student) had made it clear that countries don’t actually want to merge, no matter what idealists and crazy people want.

And yet, somehow, I managed to believe the “open borders” part of libertarianism well into my thirties. I really have no explanation for this other than “I wanted to believe.”

Look, the problem with the idea of open borders all over the world — which effectively means no countries, if you don’t get that, because you can’t keep governance cohesive nor honestly any traditions nor regional culture, is that the worst cultures prevail.

No, seriously, go back in history. Any time a more civilized nation is invaded by utter barbarians it becomes barbaric for generations. This is not because the barbaric behaviors are better, but because the bad drives out the good. If you’re predatory, those not being predatory get shut out. In a high trust society, enough predatory behaviors change the society.

I eventually got it, when I understood the importance of CULTURE.

Look, I do get the Libertarian philosophical position, and as a philosophy it is correct: individuals should be free to seek their best life, regardless of national borders.

The problem is that this is incomplete. It leaves out what nations are.

Nations are, roughly, a group of people inhabiting a region and sharing a culture. Nations have a right to determine their own best interests too. And their best interests might go against that of the immigrating individual.

Or put it another way: A nation at its most basic is a group of individuals with roughly the same idea of what makes a good life. And those individuals have rights too.

The other problem no one takes in account is culture.

But that’s because all of the modern age seems to be a really weird exercise in ignoring culture.

Yes, the rights of individuals are paramount. They have to be or we get the fun house of totalitarian ideologies.

BUT individuals have cultures. And cultures are weird, and no one has studied them very well. Cultures are the other half of “what makes a human.” Sure, nature. But culture is the other half. Culture is nurture. And humans being social apes you ALWAYS have culture.

And culture is tricky and complicated.

Take it from someone who has MOSTLY acculturated. There’s always five percent you will fight the rest of your life, because it’s stuff embedded at the back of your brain when you were an infant or barely more.

The problem is that not all cultures are equally functional. There is a balance between the individual and the group that most cultures have chosen the side of the group on. Which not only makes them vulnerable to tyranny, but also weak on innovation, creativity and the other motors of prosperity.

You can’t import a lot of individuals from one culture together without importing the culture. And it takes time to integrate them into your culture.

So, open borders are a suicide pact.

As is open trade, to an extent. Sorry. Don’t throw things at me. We cannot, cannot, cannot be dependent on trade with slave states. You can’t have FREE trade with slave states.

Our relationship with China the last 20 years illustrates this. And no, we don’t know if China’s turn to the authoritarian over what they already were was mitigated or DRIVEN by free trade with us.

Until we know how to navigate that we can’t do it.

Until we figure out this conundrum, I remain philosophically for free trade and free individual movement. And deeply aware how impossible that is right now. Because philosophy shouldn’t be a suicide pact.

I think there is a path to where we can have the philosophical good. But it’s going to be a long, long time.

Until then we need to protect our own, in our country. And each country has to look to its own best vision. Not some mocha-choca kumbaya the whole world is one bs.

Look, Heinlein believed in one world government, at least in his early books. Every writer of the period did.

The thing is that his one-world-government was essentially “America everywhere.”

Would that work? Yes, yes, it would. If we could export America everywhere it would work. Because America is ridiculously tolerant of different origin, different religion, and — unless handicapped, which it’s been the last few decades — very good at assimilating the stranger.

But the problem is that we can’t assimilate the world.

Or rather, we can, but it involves conquering it and killing everyone over the age of three. Which is a monstrous idea.

After his tour of the world Heinlein himself understood this and the emphasis on world governance in his books shifted.

Philosophically, I long for a world in which both open borders and open trade are possible. It is literally the best for mankind.

In this workaday world of ours, I know that culture and tradition, and the “nurture” that is half of what makes us human makes them both impossible. Or at least deeply dangerous for our country, the last best hope of mankind.

So — I’ll work towards a world in which the rest of the world is more like America. Incrementally. Slowly.

And not destroy the hope of tomorrow for the inflexible philosophy today.

Blogs are a weird thing. No, look… When I was young, I wanted to be a journalist. I’ll wait till you stop hissing.

The thing is, I wanted to be a real journalist. And because I grew up with all sorts of books set in the thirties and forties, I both believed that journalists would tell the truth and that they had a pathway where they came up by doing obituaries and flower shows and worked up to investigating homicides and crooked politicians.

Weirdly interning for a newspaper over three months, as part of my journalism class in high school didn’t dissuade me. I worked in the morgue where I did research for people, basically. And that was fine.

It was becoming more aware of newspapers, and how slanted they were, and also the interview where I was told I was politically biased and they couldn’t hire me, when in fact I was politically un-biased that dissuaded me and shut that door.

Just as well, since journalism was probably never what I thought.

But the weird thing is that in a way I’m a journalist now, though more of an editorial opinion writer. In a way that I couldn’t have figured out when I was young. No, seriously, much amusement is derived from mentally writing a skit in which I go back in time and explain it to young me. “No, no, you won’t work for someone. You just get on the computer and you have your own site where you blather and anyone can read it.”

It is beyond my creativity to imagine explaining to young me the idea of my readers enjoying my typos. (And that’s a smack on the hand with a ruler for every misspelling, Miss Almeida is how I grew up. And let me tell you remembering which way the little accents were supposed to lean was more than tone-deaf me could tell. Of course they’ve now modernized and got rid of accents. When it’s no good to young me. The bastiches.)

Anyway, I think bloggers provide a service people like. Or if they don’t, they have no readers. Our audience is — like the audience for indie books — the purest form of market there is. “I either produce value or no one reads it.”

Given the audience on this blog (I get fewer pings, dropped over night. Seems to be a google counting this.) of around 4k a day give or take, whatever the heck I’m doing (how would I know?) seems to have an audience.

Now if I were doing this for a newspaper, first of all, I wouldn’t be doing a column a day, and second it would be a regular paycheck. I could be entirely deceived on this (why not?) but the impression I had of such jobs is that they paid decentish middle-class type salaries.

Here’s the thing: blogs don’t pay like that.

Blogs pay one of two ways: by having people donate money, or by advertising products. I do some of the second, but honestly, it makes about enough to take my husband out to eat once or twice a month. I do the promo posts because it helps people, but Amazon doesn’t pay bounties on books by and large, so….

Anyway that’s fine. I choose to write the blog. And I didn’t stop even when it paid nothing.

However, I think we can agree that it is a service that has a value. What the value is is up to the readers to determine.

The other part of this is what this blog is.

It’s not as…. bad anymore — for the times they are achanging — because there are things like indie publishing for my fiction, but also because there is a turn of some sort going on in the culture.

But it is still counter-cultural, and against the overculture imposed by the self-proclaimed elite. Who still control much of… everything.

There are signposts on “how crazy is it for me to be doing this?”

The weird stuff attendant on our having to leave to Colorado (or the timing. We were leaving because of the health already, but if we could have taken a year to move it would have been less costly and traumatizing) has never been fully explained.

The fact we were once denied renter insurance because the agent looked at my blog, and said it was too risk…

But most of all, you’d best believe there was a price: in lost work, lost opportunities, and the danger thereof for both me and my family. Even without considering anything more melodramatic.

If you go against the established, loud beliefs of “the good people” you’re either crazy or dangerous and probably both. People hiring you or associating with you might hesitate to do either.

Sometime ago I got in a fight on twitter with someone who disapproved of Glenn Reynolds of instapundit doing fund raising because he’s a law professor and takes expensive vacations. Therefore he “doesn’t need it.”

But that’s not the point, is it? It’s not need. I did one fundraiser in need.

The others? I do because I provide a service every day. I get up and I have to post. or I’m working till midnight on a post the day before. One or the other. Every day. (And you should ask my husband how much he approves of this.) Including on our recent trip. I’d be typing in the car, or late any night in a hotel. No vacation unless I get enough guest posts to take a break.

And the thing is, as well or as badly as us, bloggers to do right of Lenin, do in our day jobs (well, it should be easier now that I’m over the nine month sinus infection with attendant cough that kept me awake at night. How bad was it? I had to sleep with a cough drop in my mouth and woke up coughing when it was gone, then put another one in. Yes, like that. For nine months. I should be able to get books out. That’s my dayjob.) I GUARANTEE to you we all missed opportunities because our politics are known. We ALL even the boss at instapundit have to work much harder than we would to do well at our day jobs if our politics were secret or left. All of us have paid the price for sticking out our necks.

Most of us can’t or won’t give you specific instances. Some of them I know only through gossip, and can’t substantiate. Others… well…. you have to guess what happened by the negative shape of things that should have happened.

But all of us have these. And if you compare histories the pattern becomes d*mn obvious.

Because you see, there is a price for sticking your neck out, for breaking the chorus of approved opinions. For being the nail that sticks out.

Now, you’ll say, that was our decision. You’re not obligated to compensate us.

You’re right. You’re not.

Heck, for years I took the entire cost of it because it was my choice. I refused to do a fundraiser. Until I realized it affected my family too. And while they never complained, it d*mn well wasn’t THEIR choice.

The point is, though why do a fundraiser rests on two things:

1- is the service worth it to you.

2- do you think it’s worth to compensate people who take the risk to stick out, so that not everyone has to sing the same song from the same “approved” songbook?

The idea of the lost opportunities, the stomping down on those who dissent, is to make them examples, to prevent them from being perceived as someone to emulate.
If you’re okay with that, you should do nothing. If you aren’t, you should do what you can to compensate those who dare stand out.
That’s all.

Now, my particular fundraiser: I know I’m dismal at follow-through on rewards, though arguably that is mostly due to wretched health these last few years. That HAS been getting better though, and I will try to do better going forward.

Yes, I am aware I still have tuckerizations to do, and they are coming, though it needs my writing books with “normal world” names. Which are planned.

And I have plans for the substack.

However, the options this year will be much clearer and easier. We’ll go into that on the fourth. Not today.

For today I’m just sticking to explaining why bloggers fundraise. And how I view it.

And that’s it.

Not an emergency, and I don’t wish anyone to hurt themselves to contribute. But if you can, if the service provided is valuable to you, consider contributing anyway.

And no, not starting today. Will start on the fourth. This is more a “think about it” for now.

Good Morning. Happy July. Are you ready for the High Holy Holidays?

I am giving the house (back for a little while) a good drubbing, because that’s what I do before the 4th. On the 4th I just go for fireworks with friends, watch Independence Day and generally relax.

The other high holy holidays, the celebration of Valley Forge and the crossing of the Delaware that involves a fast and all, broken on Christmas Even starting with hessian soldier cookies (you bite the head off, of course!) and a freedom tree (It’s a little artificial oak, that gets decorated in American flags.)

Before you ask, yes, I might be completely insane.

On the BBB I have this to say, and Elon frankly should be saner than this: Cutting taxes is not spending money. Cutting taxes is mitigating the amount of stealing the government does.

NO ONE EVER has grown the economy by keeping taxes high or increasing them. In fact, every time we cut taxes the amount of taxes collected GROWS. Which is good and bad. Good only if we apply it to reducing the debt.

But in any case, to calculate the budget we is doing it wrong. Cutting taxes is not and never has been a debt-increasing move. The Congressional Budget office needs a rolled newspaper taken to it. And as for the parliamentarian they need to eff right off. Never in the history of ever have illegals been entitled to Health Care or Welfare. TBF no one is THIS IS NOT A CONSTITUTIONAL FUNCTION OF OUR GOVERNMENT. Let private charities take care of those in need. Robbing from Peter to pay Paul is always and has always been a bad idea that leads to destruction of society, morals and productivity.

However I can see how one could “sell” the need to take care of our own. But if we’re going to rob our citizens to look after the world, we’re going to bleed out and the world will be no better. Which is what’s been happening.

Oh, I do understand how we got here. I almost started this post with “The whale is a fine fish, and the tears of it are wet” because yesterday on Twitter I came across a tweet that encapsulated what the younger generation have been taught and how bizarrely stupid it is.

I’m not going to reproduce it, but if you’re on xeet, you’ll find my answer in my timeline, likely. I’m not going to reproduce it since I suspect the original post was made by a hard core racist. And it’s sad to say this but “the racist had a point.” Mostly the point the OP had was that no, slaves did not build our infrastructure or — it was unclear — much less that of the UK.

One of the lies that has grown, as tenacious and stupid as the idea that the USSR won WWII for the allies, is the idea that the west is wealthy and safe etc. because enslaved Africans built everything. This is utter and complete nonsense.

I don’t know if England used slaves for construction — it’s to be fair possible, though unlikely — but even if they did their work would not be the main portion of it. The US really didn’t. Most slaves were employed in farming.

And while on that, slavery is so fracking inefficient as an economics thing, that … well, slaves might cost more money than not, as we’re finding out by relying on China’s effectively slaves for our labor. Because while slaves can produce a lot of things cheaply, they both produce things CHEAPLY (meaning the labor isn’t very good) but also delay and discourage innovation/better processes/higher efficiency.

This is why the South where most enslaved Africans were was for a century or so after their manumission poor, backward and economically distressed. Yes, yes, the reconstruction and carpetbaggers and all that might have driven poor Dixie down, but poor Dixie was already vulnerable and not very economically viable due to a reliance on the inefficiencies and shoddy labor of slaves. Kind of like yeah, pneumonia might make you very ill, but it only got an in because you were already overworked/stressed.

So the OP was wrong in saying that it was amazing how Africans could build all the infrastructure in the West, while their own lands didn’t rise above grass huts.

There is a built in racist assumption in that — that the “not rising above” grass huts has something to do with innate capability — but it’s not wrong on the substance.

Of course the reason most of Africa doesn’t “rise above” grass huts is that grass huts are perfectly suitable for the climate, and no more is required. I remember driving across a substantial portion of African (dear Lord, I’m old) almost 50 years ago, and seeing what looked like 19th century illustrations of native villages, but they had cars parked around, and antennae on the roofs of the huts for television reception.

It’s just that like the unheated/unairconditioned houses of my youth were quite sufficient to the Portuguese climate — while in most of the US they’d be death traps — grass huts are perfectly fine for most climates in Africa. And humans tend not to build/create more than needed.

Whether Africans who move to Europe or America are capable of building better has to do with the individual African and how much of Africa’s short-term thinking and tribal culture they bring along with them.

BUT the answer to that OP was even crazier. Some guy — British by the wording — said the reason that the Africans hadn’t built the infrastructure in their nation was that “someone keeps nicking their stuff.”

I’d be wondering what he meant if I hadn’t read my kids’ school books. If I hadn’t seen it printed out that the reason other continents/the third world are poor is because we stole their “raw materials.”

This is stupidity on stilts. I answered in my normal calm fashion by pointing out this guy is an idiot. Because

a) Africa is not a country, but a continent. The genetics are more varied in it than in any other region of the world. And the climates and cultures are very different too.

b) No one nicked their stuff. When the Marxists try to explain how we “stole” things it’s all on the power differential of industrial states trading with tribal states.

c) Africa is still, in natural resources, the richest continent on Earth. (I remember, as a little kid, hearing relatives who lived there talking about how you could LIVE from a one acre plot, because you got FOUR crops a year. Etc.)

d) what holds Africa back is tribalism. Until Africa conquers tribalism and other holes in the head caused by culture, it will remain backward. (And is now exporting its backwardness to Europe. Because Barbarism, like Slavery is an infectious disease of the human mind.)

The problem is that people were taught this. Just like they used to be taught that whales were fish. And most people don’t look at what they were taught and analyze it for mistakes.

So a generation raised on the idea our wealth exists because we stole it — I remember a friend’s kid, coming back from a religious mission to Africa, telling me how guilty he felt that we were so rich at their expense. I don’t know if I convinced him this was bs. I don’t know if it was possible to — thinks it’s only right we be despoiled and reduced to the same wasteful misery as the rest of the world, to somehow atone.

Which is what giving welfare to — and for that matter opening the border to — the multitudes of the third world seems just and right to a lot of people, some of them very religious. (Some of them even my religion.)

It’s bullshit. Our making our lands into hell won’t make theirs into heaven. Or even improve for a moment their wretched lot.

In fact, it will make them poorer and more wretched as right now the US is the engine of innovation and improvement in the whole world.

So, the BBB — which I’m told just passed by the skin of its teeth — if flawed, yes. Very. We really need to get all these financing the third world boondoggles out for our sake and the sake of the third world, frankly.

BUT as is, it might be the best we could do. And it is NEEDED.

Guys I think we’ve passed the event horizon when we could pay off the debt through austerity. I think we passed it somewhere in the reign of the autopen.

The only way we save ourselves now is by growing the economy. And that means honestly reducing the tax burden on this nation, and reducing as many regulations as humanly possible, and set us free to grow and produce and innovate.

So. Let’s do that.

And while on it, and because you’ll be wondering — yes, I’ll be doing the annual (hopefully the only this year) fundraiser. Because of the traveling, it will start on the fourth this year.

Tomorrow I’ll explain why I’m doing it — not the need, but the philosophical reason — and also how I intend to make up by how poorly I treated my substack subscribers this year. That was mostly due to illness and I’m glad to report this last round of almost-anti-human antibiotics seem to (caveat I only finished three days ago) have vanquished the NINE MONTH LONG sinus infection. Which means I can sleep without coughing. And there should — truly — be an earc on substack this week, and I’ll reinstate the memberships of those who lapsed because they’re entitled to the earc, since they paid for a year already.

I’ll also have a simpler financing mode this year, etc. BUT I’ll explain that tomorrow.

For now: We have our butts in a bear trap as a nation. The bear trap is debt and senescence and the corruption of relying on tyrannical states.

The only way we escape it is by working really hard and being massively creative.

Fortunately both of those are basically what Americans do.

So go build under, over and around. And get ready to take the weight when the conventional structures collapse.

Go do it.

Bunk Costs Guest Post by Ian Bruene

In the AI posts recent the off repeated refrain / questions about whether any of this is economically viable came up. Usually when I’ve heard people make that objection I pay little attention: the facts they cite tend to be questionable and cherry-picked at best, and all too often outright fraudulent. Nothing new here, same old same old for the topic. More fundamentally pointing out that a huge amount of money and resources have been poured into a new technology which is getting better at an accelerating pace and it hasn’t paid off yet is………. not a particularly interesting observation to make.

This time I decided to do a bit of figuring up, and it turns out that you can just do math, and no one can stop you. I’m going to talk about three different types of model which are the most relevant, and which have people raising the most questions about their viability.

But first an important distinction must be made for those who are unfamiliar with these: running a completed model and training the model require vastly different amounts of compute. It might take hundreds or thousands of GPUs crunching data for a month to train a new model, but when that is completed a single GPU can keep up with constant usage from multiple users.

Also I am going to limit my discussion of valuable usage to cases where there is a fairly solid and definable value proposition. Because once I’ve laid out the math there, everything else is just gravy. And I am mostly not going to talk about the detail of how the money flows: I’m just going to cover whether X amount of value is generated vs the training cost.

Large State of the Art LLMs

These are what everyone knows of for services like chatgpt or grok. They are the big boys which have massive datacenters built to train and run them. Information on what the more recent models have cost to train has not been published, but we can still make some educated guesses. Estimates put GPT-4 around $60-80 million, but Altman has stated that it was “over 100 million”. There is even less information for -4o or o3, but a figure of $100-200 million for -4o is likely.

Can this recoup costs? Is there anything valuable enough which these can do to pay for that?

(Also I’d like to point out that while those sound like big numbers, as far as industrial investments go they are pretty tiny.)

Well let’s look at something where we can have objective standards: it is a fact that there are programmers who individually can create $10 million in value. They can go much higher than that, but there are fewer the higher you go.

Also we know for a fact that a -4o class model is useful to an expert programmer. How? Because ESR has been working on a new project using AI for a few weeks now.

From his reports, we know that AI assistance for an expert programmer can multiply development speed by a factor of 2 to 3. It might go higher, but let’s go with a very conservative 2x multiplier. And we won’t include any of the ancillary benefits: just the time it takes the project form start to finish.

(And to head off what I know some of you are furiously pounding your keyboards about: those figures were while maintaining a high standard of quality)

So let’s put all of those points together:

If you have a developer who can create $10m in value and you give him an AI he can create $20m in value in the same period, for a gain of +$10m. While they are rare by general population standards, $10m value developers are fairly common for competent people. If you give 20 of them a -4o class AI, the AI will have generated enough value to offset its training cost.

Any additional $10m value developers who use the AI are over-unity, and the thousands of $1m value developers add to the pile on. We haven’t even touched any business case beyond making the very best programmers more productive and we’ve already demonstrated that the concerns – or perhaps concern trolls – about recouping the cost are full of nothing but wind.

But wait. It gets worse for that objection. It gets so very much worse.

Small LLMs

There is a wide variety of model sizes, all the way from 671 billion parameter behemoths like undistilled DeepSeek-r1, down to tiny models you can run on the cheapest raspberry pi. But a notable size range is around 7 billion parameters; there are a lot of small models which are about this size, because you can do useful things with that, and it can easily run on even the low end consumer GPUs.

The specific model which ESR uses the most at the moment is 4.1-mini. We don’t know exactly how large it is because “Open”AI are a bunch of secretive little twerps. But they have stated that it is in this general size range, and most estimates put it around 7-8b. This means we know that a model in this size range is useful to an expert programmer.

Several different estimates for how much it cost to train 4.1-mini put it somewhere around $1 million. Which in large corporation terms is extra money they found while cleaning out the sofa. Now consider all those numbers I went through before to see if -4o could be profitable at 200 times the startup cost, and compare them to a $1m investment.

Even if you try to rescue the financial-doomer position by saying they had to train 4o before they could get to 4.1-mini (which is probably true), that just leaves you with the 4o training cost which we already know can generate over-unity value.

ImageGen

Image generator models are much smaller than LLMs. StableDiffusion 1.5 is just under a billion parameters, as opposed to a 7b LLM being considered very small. Here we actually have some useful data; SD1.5 was trained for about $600k on an AWS cluster of 256 A100 GPUs and 150,000 GPU-hours of compute time. We also know that SDXL is 3.5b parameters, so all other factors being equal a naive scaling would put its training cost around $2.1 million.

Already we are talking about something much cheaper. But we can cut these prices down considerably. SD1.5 was trained on A100 cards. That’s the previous generation, most stuff nowadays uses the H100 (and the bleeding edge B200 is starting to appear) which is more expensive per hour but 3-4 times faster. Going by AWS pricing if you trained the exact same SD1.5 model on an AWS H100 cluster it would only cost about $200k.

But wait; there’s even more we can cut. AWS is the boutique GPU rental service. If you want something more in line with the market price for compute you can go to runpod.io. Using their figures, training on A100 cards would only be $300k, or using H100s it would be about $115k.

If we take these figures and apply the naive 3.5x scaling factor for the much more capable SDXL, that $115k works out to around $400k. Let’s be generous and round it all the way up to $1 million. Again; this is petty cash level expenditure for a larger company.

Future directions…

While I was coming up with figures for this post I asked o3 to work out an estimate of what it would cost to train a brand new 7b model, using runpod prices, and the current well known state of the art in training techniques but nothing exotic. The figures it came up with were on the order of $15-30k worth of compute assuming no disastrous failed runs.

At which point we are talking about something which the medium to large end of small businesses can do without wincing.

Or a well off hobbyist.

I currently have a janky AI “server” which I’m going to be rebuilding into a proper server with a 4x V100 nvlink board. The V100 is a couple generations behind even the A100 which is why I’m able to get them cheaply.

Just counting those with no additional GPUs, limiting training time to 1 month, and using current training techniques, I will be able to train a brand new 2 billion parameter model at home. If I did it in summer the power cost would be about $70. If I was smart and did it in winter the power cost would be only $51. That doesn’t count additional AC or reduced furnace needs.

Even if nothing else could pay off the cost of training models, once a given size of model is within the capabilities of a geek who doesn’t have a ton of money to spend on the problem your economic objections fly out the window.

Now tell me: what happens to old computer hardware when it gets old and stops being useful in datacenters?

[The image for this post was generated on my existing V100, 19 seconds @ 150W, or about $0.0001 in power]

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 HOLLY LEROY: You Kill Me – A Lt. Eve Sharpe Thriller (Lt. Eve Sharpe Thrillers Book 1)

One of the techs held up a driver’s license. “Her name is Rebecca Ann Walsh,” he said.
A shrill alarm went off in my mind, screaming for attention.
The M.E. looked down at the dead girl and then up at me, his face chalky white. “That’s. . . the mayor’s daughter.”
My heart slammed into my throat. In that instant, I knew that everything in my life hadn’t just changed—it was obliterated. Irrevocably. Forever.


LIEUTENANT EVE SHARPE should have seen the avalanche of trouble headed her way, but events had dulled her edge and crumbled her foundation of toughness. With the press and politicians all coming for her, Eve begins to question whether she is really a cold-blooded murderer or simply losing her mind. Was it an officer-involved shooting gone wrong? An honest mistake? Or something much, much worse? There’s one thing for sure: it has turned the Chicago Police Department upside down, and Lieutenant Eve Sharpe’s life along with it.

Perfect for fans of J.A. Konrath’s Lt. Jack Daniels, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Ann Voss Peterson’s Val Ryker, and Harlan Coben’s Tell No One.

FROM DALE COZORT: Snapshot: Book 1 of the Snapshot Universe

Alternate realities you can fly to.

For eighty million years, the Tourists have taken Snapshots of Earth, creating living replicas of continents. Life in the Snapshots quickly diverges from the real world, creating a universe where humans and animals from Earth’s history fly between Snapshots, exploring, fighting, and sometimes meeting themselves.

In 2014, the Tourists’ newest Snapshot catches Middle East Analyst Greg Dunne rushing toward Hawaii to join his wife, who just went into labor. The new Snapshot doesn’t include Hawaii, cutting Greg off from everyone he loves.

Greg is thrust into the aftermath of a hidden, decades-old massacre, where Germans from a pre-World War II European Snapshot battle ranchers from a Korean War-era U.S. Snapshot,a fun house mirror version of the US cut off from the world since 1953.No Beatles. No Internet. No Personal Computers. No cell phones. No Vietnam War.But an endless new frontier.


The prize in this struggle: an ancient, wild Madagascar Snapshot. Whoever controls it can fly to Snapshots where dinosaurs still roam, Indians rule the New World or Nazis or Soviets control Europe.

Caught between powerful opponents, and joined by a woman nearly driven mad by her past, Greg struggles to survive in this cutthroat new reality, to remain faithful to a family he may never see again, and to find a way back to his original Earth.

Set in a unique universe and played out in the shadows of larger social and technological issues, Snapshot is a fast-paced story of power and revenge, and an intriguing speculation of what we might have become.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: One Last Homecoming

Sherry had planned a quick trip to her home town for her forty-year class reunion, to see the current classes’ Homecoming game. Instead, she arrives to find the high school just as she remembers it, complete with long-demolished buildings and long-retired teachers. It’s Homecoming, all right — her senior year.

For someone with happy memories, revisiting one’s younger days might be pleasant nostalgia. Sherry dreads the thought of being stranded in the past, forced to reassume the old roles after decades of independence.

How can she return to her own time when she has no idea how she got here? Worse, a hostile entity is making its presence known — and it may not want to let her go back. And the Homecoming game isn’t the one she remembers from four decades ago.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Certified Public Assassin

Molly McGuire: murder for hire…

Working as a Certified Public Assassin was, after all, the fastest way to pay down millions of dollars of medical debt. Between that payment and the student loans from getting her associates’ degree, she’s barely making enough to keep body and soul together, but the debt’s almost gone.

Except…she’s paid her student loans. Many times over. There’s something going on, and her handler can’t figure out what. Hiring a hacker to track whatever’s glitching in the student loans database and programming seemed to be a logical next step; however, it isn’t just a glitch. Somebody’s got it in for Molly…and for everyone that has a license to kill.

This has barreled from circumstance through happenstance, and straight into enemy action. But who’s the enemy?

FROM BLAKE SMITH: A Kingdom of Glass: A Novel of The Garia Cycle

Zara hasn’t seen her family in eleven years, but she doesn’t mind. They sent her to live in a neighboring kingdom when she was small, and she’s adopted her foster parents in their place. She lives the life of an aristocratic Garian girl- riding her horse, shooting her bow, exploring the castle with her friends- and she has nothing to wish for.

Until she’s summoned home, to a prospective marriage she doesn’t want, family she doesn’t remember, and a poisonous royal court that threatens everything she’s ever known. The East Morlans are nothing like Garia, and Zara struggles to find her place among the scheming Morlander aristocrats. Along the way, she makes new friends, meets enemies, and falls in love. But secrets abound in the glittering palace, and Zara must discover who she can trust as she fights for her life and freedom in a fragile, beautiful, kingdom of glass.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Neither Here nor There

This is a stand alone story unrelated to any of my other books or shorts.
So many scientific discoveries have been serendipity rather than a goal to which someone worked as a logical progression. Instead, it was a spill or a misplaced item.
An ingredient measured out in error or from the wrong bottle. Often, a mistake over which someone was bright enough or curious enough to say: “Oops, but that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Uranium ore left next to photo plates, adhesive that wasn’t as permanent as hoped for, but still usefully tacky, or foreign growths in a Petri dish acting strangely…
A major revelation could be a blessing indeed, or if it was big enough to be a life changing development, one might have a tiger by the tail. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: A Few Good Men (Darkship Thieves)

Ladies and Gentlemen, we declare the revolution!

He spent 14 years in solitary. Now he’ll ignite a revolt.

Born a prince among Earth’s fifty tyrants, Lucius Keeva emerges from imprisonment with a fractured mind and a deadly purpose. When assassins hunt him, fate delivers him to the USAians—secret keepers of America’s forgotten beliefs.

For 500 years, this underground faith has preserved the Constitution while awaiting their prophesied leader. In Luce’s madness, they recognize their messiah.

Now the son of tyranny becomes liberty’s champion. As the USAians rise from the shadows, their weapons of war finally unleashed, a broken mind and a fallen prince prove the perfect weapon against an unbreakable regime.

One madman. One ancient faith. One last chance to restore the republic from legend.

A FEW GOOD MEN —where belief becomes the ultimate revolutionary tactic.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY BAEN BOOKS.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: Same as the Old Hope

Coverage of current events leading up to the 2024 election. I was very surprised by the election results so that isn’t really seen in this book, so in a sense this is showing how impactful the results were, because I wasn’t the only one out there thinking this. But it turns out that we’re not the overwhelmed minority.

The B-side of this book covers popular culture. Haven’t had much to say about that for a while but here’s a few things about comics, music, movies and so on.

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: INSIDIOUS.

I had a disturbed night, mostly because we ate late which leads to heartburn. In the middle of the night feeling a bit exhausted and out of sorts, I gave up sleeping for a while, and tried to read a Pride and Prejudice Fanfic (because low braining function required.)

And then on page three it kicked me in the teeth.

Look, I’m quite willing and ready to wink at all sorts of anachronisms and just plain unmitigated stupidity in those because they’re usually an entry point to writing and so suffer all the beginning mistakes.

So, you know, I roll my eyes at everyone who dies young dying in “Carriage accidents” because the writers can’t imagine a world without antibiotics or how dire any cut or infection could be. Or how many people just “went into a decline” and died without people ever knowing of what.

I’ll endure the exploding carriages. Seriously, guys, what did they do? Pack the carriages with C-4? There’s not anything there to EXPLODE. Catch fire, sure, but explode?

I’ll endure Lizzy (the main character for those who haven’t read P & P) talking about taking psychological damage or being repressed or even her vital need to express herself. (That last is more subtle, but still not a regency thing, okay?)

I’ll even endure the fact that all the girls are in mad love with “A vindication of the rights of woman”, hate needlework and want to do estate management (A gross misunderstanding of the duties of the mistress of an estate. Her being both responsible for the management of a house with sometimes hundreds of servants AND the status of the family which hinged on friendships and social connections the woman managed.)

But I’ll be tied in purple ribbons and called Edna if I am going to tolerate someone who says “He could tell she was a widow because she was wearing a black armband.”

WOMEN DIDN’T WEAR A BLACK ARMBAND. WOMEN WORE MOURNING CLOTHES.

And then because it was the middle of the night and I wasn’t feeling well, my head started taking on roles. Specifically idiot feminist roles. The kind of idiot feminist who argues women were oppressed because they didn’t have pockets, and then go forth to make up just-so stories about how this was because men were afraid they’d have spells in their pockets… all from misunderstanding that women had tons of pockets. They were just portable and tied around the waist or the wrist. (Leaving women free to keep stuff in there when the clothes were in the laundry, incidentally.)

Anyway, I imagined a feminist screaming that men only had to wear an armband while women were forced to visibly mourn with their whole body and blah–

At which point I realized there was an actual point to this. Two, actually.

The first is that yeah, women wore mourning clothes, because women were NORMALLY peacock bright. Some men were also, but in the regency already there was a tendency for businessmen and middle class well to do men to wear all black NORMALLY. Or at least somber colors.

The black armband worked with this because even if it was all black, the suit would be wool, the armband satin and visible. Women, OTOH were NORMALLY very bright. While an armband would be visible, changing to all mourning was more obvious of their status.

And, listen to me here, the higher visibility was designed to protect women MORE. “But women don’t need more protection and–” Take a damper. Maybe they don’t. fashions in “feeling” come and go. But regency women were encouraged to be more “Feeling” creatures and more prone to emotional issues. It was yes the culture of the time, but perhaps influenced by the fact that most regency married women spent a considerable portion of their lives either pregnant or nursing. And let me assure you, gentle readers, hormones make you a lot more fragile emotionally.

Which brings us to that utterly artificial construct of mourning signs on our clothing.

When I was a kid in Portugal there were still very strict mourning rules. I no longer remember what they were in time periods, but if a close relative died, the men all wore black armbands and women would go into the deepest black. I know women were supposed to stay in black for a year, then start “relieving” it to “half mourning” with touches of grey, lavender and maybe white for another year before returning to wearing normal color.

In case you wondered — did you? — this is why old women in Mediterranean countries just wore all black after a certain age. You hit an age where a relative dies every year, more or less, and at some point you go “this is my life now” and just wear black all the time.

When I was a kid this was argued against because “true mourning is inside” and “The dead don’t care what you wear.” Both arguably true. But both quite thoroughly beside the point.

The point of wearing mourning clothes was for people to know you weren’t quite up to normal human interaction/decisions.

You know where they tell you not to make any big purchases, etc. after a major life-change, like say, losing a close loved one?

Yeah. The mourning clothes gave you an excuse to take time to adjust to your loss, while people were aware you’d suffered one, and cut you some slack.

It lubricated social interaction with remarkably little expense.

BUT of course, in our present day not only is that rebelled against but people will be upset women wore different mourning from men. (Let’s also not take into account that men’s suits were hellishly expensive and needed for work. So changing them all over to mourning might sink a family.) Btw if a woman couldn’t go into mourning, or wasn’t that close to the deceased as to be that affected, she went into “black gloves” instead of full mourning or an armband. (Have you seen the clothes of the time? For a while they were all short sleeve. It would be an armband on the bear arm. Sigh.)

The problem I have, as with wanting to have all women manage estates, not houses, or do account books, not embroidery, is that it’s historical ignorance compounded by Marxism.

It’s historical ignorance because in our current world the reasons people did some things (like wear portable pockets, or spend a lot of time sewing and embroidering) have been lost and superseded in the immense abundance of the post-industrial-revolution.

And because young people have been educated in Marxism and mostly in Marxism, their Marxist mode of thought dictates that it all be binary, that there be an oppressed and an oppressor.

Therefore if men wear an armband and women wear whole-clothes mourning, women must be oppressed, and also ree.

But perhaps, just perhaps, it was neither nor. Perhaps different times and the circumstances thereto dictated different solutions. And perhaps, as fascinated as I am with the past, and as much as it can teach us, for the purposes of outrage, indignation and pay back, we should just leave our behinds in the past leave the past behind us. And fix the now.

Look, women used to need to be domestic goddesses because housework was hellishly more difficult at all levels of society. This doesn’t mean all women need to go back to JUST doing household work now. (Though doing SOME wouldn’t kill anyone.) Because we have appliances that make the work much less painful and much quicker.

Just because the dead don’t care if you mourn (let’s suppose we established this. I mean, have we?) it doesn’t mean that mourning isn’t an observance that makes the bereaved feel better and gives others warning this person is not QUITE him/herself. (And if you want to wear an armband, sure. Though I’m not sure anyone will understand what it means nowadays.)

Just because someone is oppressed, it doesn’t mean there is an oppressor.

Take the whole thing of men running around the net screaming that men-only spaces were destroyed. They’re right and wrong. Right because they were with intent and malice. Wrong because… GUYS in what world is someone even my age responsible for stuff done in the fifties and sixties? The offenders are dead. Stop thinking all women are on the other side of that binary because they have vaginas.

I for one think men only spaces (with perhaps a little tolerance when one’s father wants one to be a member and other members roll their eyes and let it be. The kid will never be coming in alone, anyway — look, I speak from experience) are a great idea. And there are a lot of women in the same position I am.

The original offenders are dead.

You want men only spaces? Bring them back. If it’s taken to court, I’d love to have someone argue with a serious face that men TODAY have an advantage in business. I bet you that nonsense can be struck down tout de suite.

Thinking that of course all women will oppose this is… Marxism.

Marxism is all about the oppressed and the oppressor. If there’s an oppressed there must be an oppressor. It’s very binary and simplistic, which is why it appeals to a certain type of mind.

The truth though is that in the world often everyone is oppressed. And often everyone is oppressed in different ways according to who they are. Heck, if you read enough you realize even the nobility of the middle ages was oppressed.

I mean, never forget that Marxism was invented by a work-shy grifter making up reasons why he couldn’t succeed. Of course everyone “oppressed” him.

And if you’re on the right you owe it to yourself to extirpate that evil and ridiculous mode of thought from your brain. It was installed there very early, but keeping it on will destroy civilization.

Look, just because some women in the past did men wrong doesn’t mean that all women right now hate all men. THE WORLD DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY. There will always be women like me, married to a man and the mother of boys, who loves men. (TBF I loved y’all before that, being a woman that didn’t fit in well with women, and most of whose friends and work acquaintances were male.)

And just because in the past and present some men are oppressors and abusive, this doesn’t mean all men are oppressors and abusive. Just that some men are oppressors and abusive. (See, Marx, Karl.)

Stop with the group think and the binary. Sometimes the answer is neither oppressed nor oppressor, but complicated human situation.

Be not afraid and stop packing your carriages with c-4. When those things explode, one gets all kinds of nasty splinters in unspeakable places!

Seriously. Go and think before you attack a group target.

And definitely do a modicum of research before writing P & P fanfic.

Two days ago, I ran across this on twitter:

Again, the “if you disagree with me” “you make me feel unsafe.”

It is on the face of it a totally nonsensical claim. I’ve hung out with plenty of people with whom I disagreed violently, as for instance the late Eric Flint and my brother, and I’ve yet to be attacked or killed by them. And I’ve certainly neither attacked them nor killed them.

It is possible to have completely opposite ideas of how society or life in general should be run and to be friends or friendly acquaintances or even beloved family members.

In fact that is the normal behavior of humanity, and the idea that being near or sharing a hobby with someone who disagrees with you or works with someone you despise or for a cause you don’t like.

Humans — adult humans — don’t just pound or hurt each other for no reason other than disagreement.

When I pointed this out in my share, people said they’re lying about feeling unsafe.

I don’t think this is true, because among other things to say you feel “unsafe” makes you weak. But also because it’s on the face of it a pretty bizarre claim for us here, in the outer world, looking at things objectively.

So, what is going on? Our very own Foxfier said it was an admission of guilt. The people on the left who scream they feel “unsafe” would in fact gleefully attack those who don’t agree with them, and since the model for how everyone works inside our own heads is based on us, they assume that we’ll gleefully attack them, instead of being grown ups and sane who just shrug and go “I think your beliefs are pernicious, but you’re not a bad person.”

That might be part of it for some of them, but I think it’s more visceral and basic. They say they feel unsafe because, hear me out, they feel unsafe.

But how can they when we’ve never even thought of hurting them?

I just did a dive through my archives and can’t find the — I THINK — guest post in which it was explained that our schools teach people NOT TO THINK. I don’t remember if it was a guest post or me, nattering about what I saw as my kids were going through. Heck, as I went through, because when it comes to leftism Portugal was ahead of its time.

It’s more or less like this: the schools claim to be teaching you TO think. They present scenarios, they stimulate discussion.

But it doesn’t take very long for students to realize — certainly while still in elementary — that through all this supposed freewheeling discussion, there is a RIGHT answer and all other answers will be harshly punished and held against you.

It’s the problem of the right square.

As a commenter put it not so long ago, it’s the equivalent of crossing a floor composed of identical squares, and suddenly, out of nowhere, you get hit, and get told it’s because you stepped on that square. Yes, that one there. And you should have known better. And your only salvation, the only way to make the beating stop is to admit you did wrong and stepped on that wrong square, even though it’s indistinguishable from all others.

Which means instead of thinking, people are trained NOT TO THINK. They are trained to avoid thinking. Because if they think and come up with the wrong conclusion, they will be cast into the outer darkness and their former friends will call them all sorts of bad things, up to and including Nazi. (And racisss, sexisss, homophobic.)

So people feel unsafe when around people who disagree with them, because if they listen to them and disagree with their “friends”/fellow cultists, they will be hurt. So they feel “unsafe.”

This is why we get the other side writing fiction in which wrong words MUST be suppressed, or else they will “contagious” somehow.

In that sense, we are “unsafe” and they feel “unsafe.”

Which, I’m so sorry, but it just means it sucks to be them. Their “safety” depends on “if only everyone thought the same.” And since it’s impossible to MAKE everyone think or do the same, they’re doomed to feel “unsafe.”

Unfortunately in the meantime they break fan spaces, friend spaces, and the regular places that people meet and talk and gather and where we decompress and are “simply” human.

So… What do we do? We get used to feeling disappointed in former friends and associates. And we must — MUST — build spaces we don’t let them take over and destroy.

There really aren’t that many of them. They’re just loud and don’t brook opposition.

So build under, build over, build around.

And be not afraid.

Sursum corda!

The Science is Unsettled by Torpenhow-Hill

There is an uproar in the science community at the moment over the budget cuts that President Trump is proposing.  Apparently all the colleges will be closing and people will die.  How bad is it?  A bit of AI fu (because I refuse to dirty my internet with MSNBC or that ilk) finds:

            “President Donald Trump has proposed significant cuts to federal research spending for the 2026 fiscal year, which begins on October 1. The proposed budget calls for a 37% reduction in funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and more than 50% for the National Science Foundation (NSF), marking unprecedented reductions for these major science funders.

 Additionally, the budget seeks to eliminate most federal spending on climate and ecological research and would cut NASA’s science budget by more than half, potentially ending major planetary missions.

The Trump administration has also moved to cap indirect costs for NIH research grants at 15%, which would reduce billions of dollars in funding for critical research aimed at developing cures and treatments for diseases. This policy has been met with legal resistance, as Congress has included a provision in annual appropriations bills since 2018 explicitly prohibiting such changes.

 The administration’s broader efforts to slash science budgets have extended to other agencies, including the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which would see a 14% cut to its budget, reducing it to $7.1 billion.”

Thank you AI for doing my dirty work.  Let’s see, National Institute of Health just formally cut funding for gain of function research IE the research that brought us COVID so that will save us a dollar or two.  Furthermore, even though he’s got a golden parachute that’s the envy of wall street, we’re not paying Fauci millions a year so there is that.  And Robert Kennedy has said that he’s going through the department with an ax to eliminate redundant positions.  What the private sector calls deadwood. 

I had to look up the National Science foundation.  Well, nsf.gov tells me that they support 1,900 organizations and 350,000 + teachers, researchers and entrepreneurs across the country.  What the website doesn’t tell me is if there is any oversight or if any of those projects are meaningful, useful or replicable.  Nor are we told if the taxpayers would have voted for them if given a choice.  I’m going to take a wild guess.

The budget seeks to eliminate most federal spending on climate and ecological research.  I’m going to point and laugh and move on.  For the DOE I did a quick abstract search using Arizona as a keyword.  Enjoy the results. https://pamspublic.science.energy.gov/WebPAMSExternal/interface/awards/AwardSearchExternal.aspx.  Then tell me which of these you want your tax dollars to fund.

Last but not least, NASA.  Who does not remember the glory that once was NASA?   I watched Neil Armstrong take the first step on the moon.  But not only were they glorious, they were the only game in town.  By law.  Between 1958 when The National Aeronautics and Space Act created NASA and 1984 when the Commercial Space Act provided a medium for private entities to attempt space it was NASA or nothing.  And for those of us who remember the great Ma Bell days or the USPS or Public Education, well we’re a might bit skeptical about federal monopolies on – anything.  And the shuttle program (IMO and I’ll own it) didn’t get shut down because of the mistakes that were made.  The shuttle program got shut down because the government is by nature risk averse when it comes to public optics and human lives.  (Except for the military but that’s another post.)  So, while I sympathize deeply with the NASA people, they’re doing, not much by order of their bosses. 

Further            more we have problems.  Government spending on research drives out private spending. Not only does the government pull researchers from private industry, it then dictates what will be researched creating a monolithic worldview. The taxpayers have no choice as to whether or not they want to pay for the spending.  There is no oversight regarding the spending.  And we have a deficit the size of a hyperbolic stereotype.

There used to be private labs in industry, Bell, Westinghouse, and GE are the ones I know off the top of my head because I’m a tech.  Hospitals and colleges used to find funding from charities or businesses.  Even now, Saint Jude’s Childhood Cancer Center still pulls money from donations because societies tend to want to protect kids.  But providing tax breaks for research equipment got conflated by a specific subset of politicians with “loopholes, regressive tax policies, and corporate welfare” and not taxing capital expenditures for research became tax any capital equipment.  And the private labs became endangered species.  But the public pork kept rolling and became a secure source of funding.  All you had to do was-what you were told.  Awesome way to do science.  Much bold.  Very replicable.  Totes good for anything. OK not really. 

And oversight. Datarepublican could be working the rest of her natural life trying to find who is spending what on which programs and who ordered them.  They weren’t ordered by congress who are at least theoretically supposed to hold the purse strings.   And what science did we get?  Masks.  A vaccine that people are starting to sue for damages over.  In some cases successfully. Mutilated children.  And the deficit.  The interest on the deficit is larger than the budget for the armed forces.  And I’m over the tears and wailing.  We need to fix the spending and “science” especially what has been passing for it does not get an exemption.  I leave you with an NIH example from the Tweets:

We live in profoundly weird times, in case you haven’t yet looked out the window this morning.

And I don’t say this (only) because this post is coming to you as we careen through America’s big beautiful highways in excess of seventy miles per hour, with my laptop on my lap and my fingers making with the words as I look out at the unusually green Western US landscape.

I won’t be home for at least a week (what are we doing? We don’t know. We might be looking for a home, except for a reluctance to leave younger kid and DIL behind. But we miss Colorado terribly, and the Colorado we miss is no longer there, and sometimes we go poking around. Consider that — despite knowing the story behind it, yes — this is our song.) This has certain problems.

Mostly because when I’m traveling wars break out. Which is weird, but not as weird as the fact that this is inherited. My mom had the same problem.

I’m sorry. No. You can’t lock me in my house.

Anyway…. so, you know. Things will be interesting for AT LEAST a week.

Next as an exhibit of how weird this time is: When did “thank you for your attention to this matter” turn into another term for “FAFO?”

I was joking that this was like datarepublican’s ‘Hi, I’m datarepublican” when you’re talking sh*t on twitter (Everybody gangsta until they get the Hi, I’m Datarepublican) and it occurred to me…..

The problem — if it is a problem, not a bonus — is that this digital world of ours, this strange new world that is still being aborn and as all births seems to come with a lot of sh*t and blood, seems to be the ideal stomping grounds for our people.

Our people? Well, yes. People have taken to referring to it as autists and the way we operate as “the tisms.” I do it myself on occasion because I find it funny. Attending a graduation almost two weeks ago, in a field prejudiced FOR our people, I told the new graduate “it was a tisms parade, and you masked best of all.”

But it’s not. Or at least I don’t think it is, unless you widen it to the ridiculous point. I know most of our people — geeks, obsessives, ADD-compulsives — have bits that get called “on the spectrum.”

As my being an introvert was totally unknown to me until someone told me the real difference was that being out in public exhausted you, I never thought of myself as being “on the spectrum” or ADD. The ADD thing took effort, okay, because I’m so ADD that if I have to wait at a register more than five minutes, and I’m alone, I’ll forget I have a cart and wander off. (If I’m with Dan it just drives him nuts.)

Anyway, I realized maybe I wasn’t quite standard after dealing with quirks from my sons. Things like sensitivity to loud sounds/certain lights which affect younger son suddenly made me wonder if that’s why I spent all of fourth grade UNDER the desk, writing on the seat.

Other things, like the fact I can’t stand gravy or sauce. Any sauce. Mustard in small amounts is tolerated, but even salad dressing has to be on the side and the salad gets dipped in it, or I can’t stand it.

And yes, I eat anything not surrounded by bread (I’m okay with sandwiches) with fork and knife, because touching cooked meat is an unbearable sensation.

Anyway, I have issues calling it “autism” because the “on the spectrum” is so broad that the fringes don’t much resemble the other end.

There will eventually be another name for us: the people who understand text better than interactions, who are as likely to write long letters to people they share a house with as to talk to them; the people who learn how other people function like a rigorous discipline; and who manage, despite all the best efforts of our teachers and parents, and no matter how successful we are to do things in a way that normal people tilt their heads at and wonder where and how we got so weird.

Because of that, I call us Odds. We are ODD. We stick out Oddly. We come up with solutions that would never occur to anyone else.

We are Odd other ways, too. We acquire strange, often temporary obsessions and fall down rabbit holes no “normal” person would think of. Some of us are foremost experts in tiddlywinks. Others know every possible detail of imaginary spaceships in an imaginary world, better than the man who wrote them. And others turn these obsessions into professions.

But even those of us who pass — and like with being an extreme introvert, I “mask” passably well — do things sometimes that are so strange they either get us killed or become memes.

…. like finishing presidential announcements with “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

For various reasons, including technology, we’re in an age that is perfect for us. Let’s face it, most of the time in the past our kind didn’t even marry. Or if they did, they married perfectly normal people who, to be fair, probably knocked some of their sharp edges off. Now — looks at best beloved who is driving and making gestures as he listens to the first half of No Man’s Land read by AI. (And cackling when the AI for reasons inexplicable refers to Skip as Sheep. I checked. I never spelled it that way.) Now, we can marry our own kind. (This is either good or bad, people, we might speciate.)

And now, thanks to the net, and the ability to interact directly online our strange quirks can become memes instead of reviled.

Datarepublican, of course, has other issues which she overcomes with magnificent grace, and I’m so glad no one tried to eugenically cull her before birth or institutionalize her after, because she is needed and she was born for this time. She is magnificent and I’m in awe of her.

I’m only a little Odd. An Oddling. But an egg. But how can I cower when the president can close his presidential statements like a business letter? And when Datarepublican can collar liars with “Hi, this is datarepublican?”

I shall carry my Odd flag into this brave new world, and plant it where I think it needs to go.

In the future perhaps tyrants will cower and “Have a nice day” and armies will disband at “Anyone want some chocolate?” And perhaps “pull up your socks” will be the most motivational phrase ever.

Oddlings advance. Who’s with me?

Thank you for your attention to this matter!