Category: Uncategorized

(Originally posted here: https://twitter.com/JeffGreason/status/1860439949100896479?mx=2)

2025: A Moment Of Opportunity In Space by Jeff Greason

Since 1969, a ritual of American politics is the re-examination of American space policy with each change in the presidency. A panel, commission, or task group gives recommendations. New initiatives are announced—to be mostly forgotten. The focus often shifts from the Moon to Mars or vice versa. Very little of this results in lasting change. While it is often said that “personnel is policy,” and certainly, leadership (or its lack) matters enormously, changes to the structure of policy matter more. The structure of the bureaucracies that carry out space policy in the U.S. and the incentives with which they operate matter immensely.

We are now at a moment of tremendous opportunity in space. Years of wise policy, combined with good fortune and the ability of U.S. business leaders to raise the capital needed for private ventures, have placed the U.S. back in a leadership position. SpaceX dominates world launch markets, and competitors are rising to chase after them. This superior position will not last if the US makes unwise policy choices—as Heinlein wrote: “The laws of physics work as well for others as they do for us.”

Goals should drive policy choices, so what are our goals in space? We want the U.S. commercial space industry to continue to lead the world. We want it to provide the industrial base for our defense needs in space. We want to lead the setting of norms of international behavior in space—rules-based international order with relationships between nations that create mutual benefits. We want the U.S. to lead discoveries of natural resources and phenomena in space, and put them to economic use. We want U.S. citizens and U.S. companies to pioneer the space frontier, free to innovate, risk, and thrive—and free to fail when risks exceed our grasp.

Achieving these goals requires us to foster the development of markets for new commercial space ventures, remove regulatory barriers that slow the pace of development of U.S. space-related businesses, provide a predictable and supportive legal and regulatory framework, and enable the U.S. Space Force to ensure the freedom of navigation in space and protect our space assets.

Lasting solutions require more than wise administrators; we need wise policy that survives even in their absence.

Five executive orders

First, I recommend moving the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (OCST) out of the FAA. Give OCST back to the Secretary of Transportation, where it belongs by statute. Placed within FAA by an executive order by Clinton, it can be removed from FAA by executive order. Unfortunately, the Part 450 regulation of space launch and reentry was a step backward—the U.S. should return to a more performance-based regulatory structure. After decades in which every launch and launch site license has received a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI), we should either seek a categorical exclusion, like we have for aircraft, or change to a “shall issue” structure where the government may deny a license application for cause, but, if it takes no action, the license is approved by default.

The experimental launch permit regime could have been used to cover Starship flights 1-5 with a single approval. If additional regulatory work is needed to revitalize the experimental permit regime, do it. Rather than adding staff to solve licensing backlog and delays, reduce the number of staff hours it takes per application by making greater use of existing authority to allow one application to cover multiple launches.

Second, a core tenet of U.S. space policy since Eisenhower is that space-based reconnaissance is a stabilizing capability, we thrive in open societies without secrecy , and taking pictures of the Earth is not a hostile act. As such, eliminate all licensing requirements for space-based imagery. No one should have to ask NOAA for permission to take pictures. If the commercial satellite imaging capabilities become as good or better than those of government satellites, we maintain access to the best imaging systems in the world. An executive order could direct NOAA to immediately approve all applications for Earth observation licensing, regardless of how good the imagery might be. Then, change the legislation so the requirement for licensing cannot be easily reinstated by a future administration.

Third, the U.S. space industry labors under tremendous disadvantages due to ITAR. The “technical assistance” category for ITAR control requires government review and approval for something as simple as describing a product on a website. Eliminate this category completely to restore freedom of speech to U.S. citizens—speaking about space capabilities is not a criminal act and attempts to make it so are unconstitutional. Note: This has nothing to do with keeping government secrets, which are governed by secrecy agreements, clearances, and the like. Instead, if companies want to talk about their products, or engineers in private industry want to talk about their work, let them. This is necessary to ensure the U.S. maintains a culture of technical leadership and finds markets for made-in-the-USA products. At a minimum, some kind of financial relationship needs to be in place before the U.S. government can claim speech constitutes “technical assistance.” An executive order could immediately redefine technical assistance to ensure the regulations do not infringe on free speech. Then, change the legislation.

Fourth, the FCC has expanded its own authority, making licenses for radio transmitters contingent on compliance with additional conditions imposed by the FCC that have nothing to do with managing the radio spectrum. The FCC’s domain should be to manage radio spectrum, not space debris or other aspects of what US commercial companies do in space. An executive order could eliminate this overreach immediately. And since the Supreme Court ended Chevron deference to such things, these rules are unlikely to return without congressional authorization.

Fifth, U.S. obligations under the Outer Space Treaty call for us to provide “authorization and continuing supervision” of our commercial space activities. Within the space industry, there is reasonable consensus that the Department of Commerce should take on this role, because a regulatory regime is not warranted yet. Instead, we need a mechanism for deconflicting potentially interfering uses. The Biden administration encouraged consultation among many agencies with none empowered to say “Yes.”

Pending legislation, an executive order could designate the Department of Commerce as the responsible agency for in-space commercial activities, just as Reagan made the Department of Transportation the responsible agency for commercial launch before the Commercial Space Launch Act codified it. Such an order must make clear that no permission is required from the government. Instead, the DoC would maintain a registry and check to confirm that a proposed activity doesn’t conflict with other registered activities or treaty compliance, such as no weapons of mass destruction. In the absence of a conflict, the activity is registered. When reviewing launch licenses, the Secretary of Transportation can check that the activity has been registered with DoC– that’s all that is needed. “Continuing supervision” can be maintained by requiring parties to update their registry when they change the nature of an activity. This process would create clarity for the space industry and provide the first steps towards a system of recognizing that entities operating on celestial bodies are entitled to do so, can expect to continue to do so, can transfer or sell their operations to others, and that others should not interfere with peaceful space activities.

All these measures have negligible impact on the federal budget.

NASA’s role

Other more challenging aspects in U.S. space policy have to do with NASA and are not free of cost. Since Kennedy’s redirection of NASA to go to the Moon in 1961 and the end of the Saturn V production in 1968-1970, we have struggled as a nation with the questions, “Why does the U.S. need a civilian space agency and what it is for?”

A detailed discussion of the purpose of civilian space agencies would be a much longer article, but in brief, the U.S. established NASA for three main reasons:

· To set the precedent for peaceful uses of space and be a leader so we can set norms of behavior. (In 1958, this was most urgently about creating the precedent that space reconnaissance and overflight of territory in space were peaceful uses.)

· Improve the technology for air and space vehicles to ensure that the U.S. industrial base was the most capable. (This was essentially a continuation, in space, of what the predecessor to NASA, the NACA, had done for aircraft.)

· Learn more about space, what is up there, and how we can benefit from it.

Kennedy repurposed NASA into a mission-conducting agency. NASA would conduct a high-profile, very expensive and complex mission—sending humans to the Moon and back—so as to forestall Soviet claims on the Moon and to ‘win’ the arena of perception of the U.S. as a leader in space.

Now, unfortunately, the mission-conducting elements of NASA for human spaceflight and space science missions consume the bulk of NASA’s budget. The original purpose—maturing technology to support the U.S industrial base—is underfunded. Human missions became ends in themselves, and a constituency in themselves, so that we pay for effort not results. Science missions also became their own constituency, conducted for the benefit of the science community alone—not to mature technology or to learn about the things in space from which we might derive economic benefits.

To forestall any claims by China, we have an urgent need to return humans to the Moon and on to Mars, and to support the peaceful use of space by like-minded nations, signatories to the Artemis Accords. A shift is needed from “pay for effort” to “pay for results.” To improve the performance of air and space vehicles, we need NASA to mature technologies, an activity that conflicts with its mission-conducting efforts. But, NASA’s technology development effort is focused on “technology needed for NASA missions,” and paradoxically, NASA missions are selected on the basis of “what can be done without any new technology.”

Either NASA mission selection and design needs to be subordinated to maturation of space technologies that benefit parties outside of NASA or the maturation of such technologies needs to be assigned to a new entity, funded and chartered for this purpose. If a new entity, note that the U.S. Space Force as well as U.S. industrial partners are likely customers for such technologies and should share in the development of roadmaps that describe the technologies that need maturation.

While it may be a step too far to reform NASA, the rest of these measures are policy changes, have negligible cost, and most can be commenced at once by executive order. The opportunities for accelerating U.S. efforts in space are greater than ever, and I hope the incoming Trump administration will take note of the opportunity.

So, Sarah, why don’t we have a promo post today?

I meant to do a promo post, I did. I’ve been sitting here for hours, and mostly my big battle has been “stay awake.”

So, what have I done that was so tiring? Nothing much.

But yesterday we had a Hun meetup at the Cosmosphere and dinner at the Carriage Crossing in Yoder, KS. (I don’t announce them here for a reason. It’s too open as it is too open/exposed. If you are on Facebook joining the diner will get into these, though I don’t know when the next one will be. We’d like to do it more often, but–)

Anyway, there were a lot of people — for me, at this point I’m mostly a recluse — and apparently it made me exhausted.

I kept thinking “I need to do this” AND I had a list, but falling back to “Don’t fall asleep.”

I thought I was just being lazy, until I saw myself in the mirror and I’m almost as pale as my white sweater. So, clearly there’s something physical going on.

Probably a combination of still recovering from the big illness (I had an appointment this week and was told if I’m good I’ll have recovered by the end of the year) and introvert exhaustion.

I have a guest post for tomorrow and will try to do the promo post in the afternoon. I’m sorry the schedule is such a mess. This too, hopefully, shall pass.

(PS – Thank you John S. for the chocolate. It arrived fine, and we’re eating it VERY slowly, because each of them is super-special. I’d email back, but I don’t know which of the three John S. is you, so please accept my undying gratitude. Dan’s too, because he’s “helping” me with them. – SAH)

By Holly the Assistant

As you can probably infer, there will be no meme post today: Sarah has gone with family and friends to celebrate having triumphed over her enemies (mainly pneumonia, bronchitis, high altitude, city sewer backups, and stress, but not excluding a leaking washing machine hose and an oven) for another year of life.

Wish the party well, please, and if you must food fight with cake in the comments, I expect YOU to clean it up. Especially the fan housing! And please don’t allow the kitties any sugar: they’re quite hyper enough, thank you!

I swear on the current endless edit that if I hear one more supposedly smart, normally thinking person talk about our being a nation of “blood and soil” I’m going to go on a rampage.

Now my rampages usually involve a lot of words and explaining to people why they’re out of what passes for their minds, so it might already be too late.

I think part of the problem with this is that we have two camps that are absolutely convinced that the US is “blood and soil”: one is foreigners who have never been here, and have actually not the remotest clue what the US is like, what it looks like and what actually happens here, other than the portraits in our utterly bonkers media; the others are Americans who either have no clue what blood and soil means (I’ve had some explain it to me as having a border and people having died for our territory. Rolls eyes.) OR who don’t realize what profound bullshit “blood and soil” is in ANY modern nation, but PARTICULARLY in the US. Or how dramatically different the US is from every other nation.

So, first let’s speak to the foreigners: you don’t understand the US and won’t unless you move here, and ACCULTURATE at least enough to see what’s around you not through old-country eyes. Put a pin in this, we’ll return to it.

Second, yeah, we are a nation with soil and multiple generations have bled on it. However we are also a nation who pragmatically bought a huge portion of its land, which is not a thing normally done for a blood and soil nation. (Yes, Israel is an exception.) Our best model really is a theocracy: a nation informed by beliefs, which sought and obtained land to be faithful to its beliefs in. Put a pin in that, and we’ll return to it too.

Normally blood-and-soil implies that your ancestors lived there, their bones and blood are mixed with the land. Etc. etc. You are of the land, the land is of you. It also implies — which is what Americans don’t get — that you and your ancestors are part of a genetic, lumpen heritage. That everyone in the country is cousins, so to put it.

This is very rarely true in modern nations. Unless nations are really tribes (and here I don’t know if any of those still exist, because I don’t know enough about Asia and the weirder parts of Africa.) Okay, this is the part Americans born and raised here don’t get:

Nations of unified ancestry are practically non-existent anymore. No, really. Just in Europe, regardless of what the claimed ancestry in, there have been so many continent spanning wars with troop movements, rape, colonization in some form, etc, that there is no “pure” anything nation.

The people here claiming we’re really Anglo-saxon and our heritage of freedom is because of that make me giggle hysterically. Because while there were Anglo Saxons back there, they were already pretty diluted (celts, Romans, heaven knows what, but apparently Iberians — probably Celts) by the time the Norman invaded, and after that… No one shares a nation with another breed for centuries without becoming more or less hybridized. And the answer is always more.

And no, don’t go waving a 23 and me kit in my face. I know what mine says, but what you have to understand is it compares to present day populations and to what people report themselves as. I love making fun of Fauxahontas as much as anyone, and to be fair, her genealogy really seems to be a tissue of lies. BUT her genetic test isn’t proof of anything. Most of you who have Amerindian blood won’t show it on 23 and me, because Amerindians were genetically overwhelmed and tribal leaders don’t encourage members to test, because even they have very little that can be identified as such. Which means almost any Amerindian that shows in a 23 and me test is from South America. (I have…. an irrelevant amount, but more than Warren. I figure great great great great grandad was a traveling man.)

It’s like this: yes, most people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. In peace time. But this discounts war time, armies, refugees in time of famine. Traveling — forgive me — salesmen (mostly sailors and selling expeditions) who might live and die near where they were born but spread their seed with a high dispersion tip. It ignores traveling mendicants, crusades (yes, Portugal and Spain were once crusade territory and were mostly liberated by Proto- French.) It ignores nobility and their marriages and the fact that while Prima Nocta was made up, men with money and property sleeping around wasn’t.

I’ll let you cast a cursory glance at European history and then come back and tell me, with brass face that Europeans are distinct blood-per-nationality nations.

Now we get to the tricky part, though. The tricky part is that THEY THINK THEY ARE. There is a distinct effort ongoing since about the 14th or 15th century where European nations really pushed on thinking of themselves as breeds (before that the divisions were smaller and more complicated) and spent a lot of capital on propaganda to make their people think of themselves as such. There are books, poems, paintings, etc. etc. ad nauseum extolling the “so and so race” where the “race” is the name of the nation.

And it works, kind of. It works, because it slots into the part of the brain who wants to live in a family band like our hominin ancestors. And the problem here is that it’s exactly what modern day Americans are falling for as well.

Now for the European nations believing they are a “race” (I refuse to tell dad about my 23 and me, because he keeps going on about the Portuguese “race.” Friends of mine, I have more Spanish than Portuguese, and both of them are less than 50% together.) is a survival necessity. They have nothing else to hold them together, but their history, their shared sense of a past and this idea they’re all cousins.

Except– It makes it very hard to assimilate other people. And it is part of the reason the idiots importing the rest of the world by the bucket full are doing stupid ass shit like making movies where there are black nuns in England in the middle ages and they’re unremarkable (people, Portuguese, who were commonish immigrants into Great Britain since…. ever were called “Blackamoors” because my level of tan was “black” and remarkable in Northern Europe. (No, it’s not a contradiction. No nation of Europe is pure anything, but the imports might make the tan level slightly darker, but not enough to count as mediterranean unless it were a full blown invasion, as it arguably is now. Think about it, the English messed around in India forever, but Indians aren’t suddenly blond and blue eyed. That’s not how genetics works.) ) or where there is black nobility in regency England, or… They are trying to create the idea that multi-racial society is normal and claiming otherwise is suppression.

This is as much bullshit as “our country is a race.” And it is for Europe, lethal, destroying bullshit. They are equipped to cope with admixture in very small numbers, until they forget it ever existed. Nothing else. Anything more, and they tear themselves apart. Remove the idea that they’re even supposed to be one thing and they…. well, they die, which most of Europe seems to be trying to do, though people are still fighting back.

Which bring us to America. America has never defined itself as “we are all one thing.” Go and read biographies from the time before the revolution. There were enough Germans that it is arguable whether they’re mostly ‘English’ (under which Irish and Scottish often hid) or ‘German’. But there’s also, because the colonization happened at a time of great turmoil, a lot of French (And a lot more were added at the time of the revolution.) Some Spaniards, and I’m sorry, if you are from New England, a lot of Portuguese. Entire villages of them. Mostly because the Portuguese fight, eat and make Portuguese so that they routinely bust the restraints of their altogether too small allotment of land. (Or used to. These days the colonization seems to go the other way.)

Anglo-Saxons? For the love of little fishes. Not a chance. People who thought they were, while everything else had fallen in? To an extent.

Mostly, ultimately they were a stew of Europe. What made them different is that even in fairly intolerant times, the Founding Fathers, within being men of their time were “tolerant.” There were Jews who fought for independence, and at a time where Catholics were the debil, one signed the declaration of independence.

The nation they created is a culture, a creed, and VERY TOLERANT of appearance discrepancies or religious nutbaggery. (Mostly because we’re all religious nutbags. Even the atheists are very vehement, more so than anywhere else in the world by and large. But we’re all nutbags of a different kind.) One of the things I can’t hope to convey to the family is that I have friends from every national/racial background and worse of every possible religion and some fairly impossible ones. And we don’t fight about it. We might pray for each other in the privacy of our hearts, etc, but mostly we just take people for what they do/are, and don’t hang too much on the differences of religion and color. This despite the left’s push to make us care only about it, mind.

Here’s the thing: faced with an invasion of people, facilitated by the leftist nuts after their color revolution, who care nothing for and do not even understand our culture and our basic national beliefs, people are rebounding by screaming “blood and soil.”

This is wrong. Specifically this is wrong for us. What holds us together is our civic religion, our culture, our ability to be a nation despite all superficial differences.

It might be right for Europe where most nations can claim “Our ancestors lived here, and their bones and blood mixed with the soil. We are the land.” Yeah, sure, it’s not even close to as uniform as they pretend, but it is their SOLE REASON FOR EXISTING AND OCCUPYING A PLACE.

Now, are we just a creed or a nation? We’re both. Our nation is where we can exert our creed in peace. In that we are closest to a theocracy, and might in fact be one, albeit a theocracy without a theos. (We wouldn’t be the first or the last in history.) Our borders matter, our soil matters, because without them we can’t live the way we believe we should. Our culture matters, because diluting it by too-fast import of people not in the least interested in becoming of us will destroy us as a nation.

However what holds us together is not a real, or imagined genetic heritage. Most Americans, knowing or unknowing, are mutts. And we’ve lived here too short a time and have too weird burial practices for us to say we live in the remains of our ancestors, as it were.

Going down that path is just stupid. First of all, even if you go by “must have had ancestors here at the time of independence” if you also say can’t have immigrants in the last three generations, you’re going to exclude everyone but three people, who have 15 fingers a piece and love to play the banjo. I mean, my husband and my sons both fail to qualify, despite qualifying for the daughters of the American Revolution scholarships.

If you try to kick 99% — or let’s be generous and a little crazy and say 80% — of the population out of “America” you’re the one who will end up stomped and ignored. So, on the practical level this is crazy.

But let’ say you managed it. Are you going to tell me we have a higher Anglo-Saxon component than England? Some guarantee of liberty-in-the-blood.

The sad news I have to give you is that there is no genetic inheritance of liberty. Liberty is not natural to humans in a state of nature, and we must struggle for it every step of the way.

The good news is if you don’t go looking for it in the blood and soil, you are allowed to say “Our nationality is the culture, so fit in or fuck off.”

Which is also a good counter to the idiots who claim opposition to invasion is “racism.” No race, all culture. Changing cultures is difficult, mind, but it is not impossible, and it should be the basic demand on any immigrant.

Don’t accommodate their language, their quaint customs, their…. Sure, take what you like (food, mostly. Some clothing) but don’t take the rest, and don’t encourage them to keep it. They want to be of us, they have to become American. I’m here to tell you it’s possible, if not painless.

The really good news is that America, as it is, is the only possible model for out-of-Earth colonization.

Yes, I know, science fiction is full of “nation planets” but that’s not how it will work out. Due to the cost and the need for high skills, space colonies will draw from everywhere. Which means a culture like America which believes specific things, but is able to tolerate differences in color, creed and other such discrepancies is the best possible model for a culture that will conquer the stars.

Don’t fall back into Europe. They have nothing we want. Our home has always been in the future, and we’re going there.

I want to point out my title is unfair for two reasons: unlike the communists who separated East and West Germany so they wouldn’t lose their (literally) captive population to the free side, Mr. Musk didn’t put up this wall, nor is he the inheritor of those who did. Second it’s not necessarily his to tear down, but we know he has the ear of president Trump and who knows? it just might work.

We’ve been watching in horror as Britain and Germany tumble deeper and deeper into censorship and various forms of totalitarian nonsense. (The British confiscation of guns, knives, screw drivers and anything else capable of taking human life — we wait with bated breath for their confiscation of broomsticks, chairs and frozen legs of lamb — is part and parcel of this nonsense.) And we haven’t heard about the rest of Europe simply because we pay less attention to them. The things I heard people in Portugal think was wonderful being mandated by the EU would chill your blood. They chilled mine.

But, oh, they are independent and sovereign countries, and we can’t do anything about that, right?

Well, screw that. The US is the closest thing to a theocracy as you can get for a country that insists you should be able to worship whomever we want and almost demands its citizens have a religion. (Not really, but the whole thing works better when we do.)

BUT we are founded on our CIVIC RELIGION. We believe that the bill of rights are rights given to us by G-d (or derive from our G-d given rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.) We believe it is the duty of governments (All governments) to secure them. So why are we letting them get away with this nonsense of violating the G-d given rights of their citizens?

But Sarah, you say, what do you suggest we do? Invade them and impose our law from above?

No, though if we hadn’t had a practitioner of ANTI-American arts in the White House at the end of World War II more might have been done to encourage them to adopt our bill of rights as part of their constitution.

However we don’t need to do that. One of the items I linked at instapundit last night was about Germany trying to recruit troops they can’t afford to defend themselves about Russia. All of Europe is like that, eaten up with fear of the men of the steppes.

I think it is mental, because Russia has revealed itself to be a toothless dog, and I suspect always was, just using its information control to disguise it during the time it was pretending to be the Soviet Union.

But they’re scared. Terrified. So are a lot of people here, to be fair. I don’t get it, but I’m missing a lot of normal human reactions, and maybe this is a subconscious attavistic fear of the region that has spun up wave after wave of invaders. And heaven knows that Russians themselves believe they should conquer and rule the rest of the world. (Can we lay the new Rome nonsense to rest already?)

Anyway, the point is that of course Trump isn’t going to completely withdraw protection from Europe. It is also the point that for the last several decades American boys have stood on foreign land, ready to bleed and die to protect that land from the Russians and other unfree people.

… but why should we if Europe themselves are a population of slaves whose governments have placed themselves outside the bounds of legitimacy by denying, instead of promoting and facilitating the G-d given rights of their citizens?

Mr. Musk, please whisper in President Trump’s ear that he make it a condition to stay under the umbrella of American protection — an umbrella for which we’ve spent treasure and time, and lives, and bled and sweated — that the EU adopt the bill of rights and make it operative in every country in its jurisdiction. Then make the UK adopt it too: at frozen leg of lamb point if needed.

But Sarah, you’ll say, that means the Germans will have to drop their prohibitions on disseminating Nazi propaganda!

Yes, it sure does. Look, whose idea was it to make it forbidden anyway? I’ll note the Germans have a lot more serious Neo-nazis than we ever will, because they forbid talking about it openly.

Stupid murderous ideas should be openly discussed and PARTICULARLY mocked and ridiculed. In the US communism has become more attractive to the extent that, due to the speech controls, real or implied, in college campuses people were afraid to tell the practitioners of the idiocy how stupid it was. (I will not take a side excursion into what we should do about our colleges. Let that come later.)

Let the Nazis preach Nazi nonsense. And let free people point out their stupidity and, particularly, laugh and point and make duck noises. (No collection of stupidity such as Nazism or communism for that matter can stand the duck noises.)

LET EUROPE BE FREE. Really free. Let the European people talk and defend themselves from each other sure, but particularly from overarching, overbearing government.

No darkness of totalitarianism can stand the force of the first two amendments, let alone the others.

Tell the tyrants of Europe: “If you want our protection, let your people go. If not, well, you’re on your own and we wish you well. We’re even willing to send you shipments of frozen legs of lamb.”

Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump: Tear down that wall. You didn’t build it, but it is in your hands to wreck it. And it is time.

If freedom isn’t the answer, the question is probably stupid. The bill of rights will stop all the stupid social engineering Europe has been trying to do since WWI including the misguided, counterproductive globalism and internationalism.

It’s time to stop it. They want to be safe? Make them swallow the medicine of freedom.

Make them let their peoples go.

Sorry guys, still getting over whatever the thing I came down with was, and for reasons having to do with a story driving me nuts, I’ve barely been sleeping. Writing, including the blog have been difficult, and I’m in the middle of a very complex edit on the longest book I’ve ever written that is an actual book. (We won’t talk about the doorstop I wrote in 1993.)

Anyway, I simply don’t feel able to actually write a post.

So…. I’m going to give you a lot of very strange pictures, and I’ll be back tomorrow… (Oh, and if any of you wants any of the images, just take them.)

*Sorry this is so ridiculously late. WordPress and Amazon weren’t talking to each other, and it was driving me bonkers. Took me three hours and I had TWO books in. So I gave up. Yesterday it was still buggy. Now it’s working. My own books will go on sale next week and continue the rolling sale through New Year’s. – SAH*

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 JERRY BOYD: Deuces Wild (Bob and Nikki Book 52)

Bob and the crew are trying to relax in the Holler. That’s never going to work out. There’s always someone who thinks they’re better than Bob at running things. Come see Bob and the crew explain their errors to them.

FROM DON HOLLWAY: The Last Viking: The True Story of King Harald Hardrada.

‘The Last Viking is a masterful and pulse-pounding narrative that transports the reader into the middle of the action.’ Carl Gnam, Military Heritage

Harald Sigurdsson burst into history as a teenaged youth in a Viking battle from which he escaped with little more than his life and a thirst for vengeance. But from these humble origins, he became one of Norway’s most legendary kings. The Last Viking is a fast-moving narrative account of the life of King Harald Hardrada, as he journeyed across the medieval world, from the frozen wastelands of the North to the glittering towers of Byzantium and the passions of the Holy Land, until his warrior death on the battlefield in England.

Combining Norse sagas, Byzantine accounts, Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and even King Harald’s own verse and prose into a single, compelling story, Don Hollway vividly depicts the violence and spectacle of the late Viking era and delves into the dramatic events that brought an end to almost three centuries of Norse conquest and expansion.

FROM KYRA HALLAND: Source-Breaker (Tales of Tehovir)

After twenty-seven years in the trade, Kaniev the Source-Fixer has suddenly lost his ability to repair magical Sources. He decides it’s time to go home and take up fishing, but first, one more repair job lies ahead of him – Source Chaitrasse is experiencing problems. Kaniev’s depleted finances and self-confidence demand that this time, he get the job done right.

Fransisa always thought she would be the next High Priestess at Source Chaitrasse, but now her career has come to a dead end. She’s struggling to hold on to her place at Chaitrasse when a wandering tradesman appears, claiming that the Source has a problem and he’s the one who can fix it. He looks more like a brigand than a powerful wizard or wise scholar, but with an important ceremony coming up, Fransisa decides it can’t hurt anything to let him take a look at the Source.

Kaniev’s disastrous attempt to repair Source Chaitrasse leads to a sorcerer who is conducting dangerous experiments with magic. Caught in the sorcercer’s schemes, Fransisa and Kaniev must overcome their past failures and their differences to stop him before the Sources of magic and all the lands around them are destroyed.

WITH A STORY BY KEN LIZZI: Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume

This is the ninth volume in our popular Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy series of anthologies in the footsteps of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and other pioneers of the sword and sorcery genre.
The stories and authors included this time are:
The Cold Maiden by Eli Freysson
Assassin Eternal: The Memory Eaters by Andrew Darlington
To Raise the Shining Walls of Irem Once More by Tais Teng
Fulgin the Grim: Retribution by Ken Lizzi
Snow in Kadhal by Jaap Boekestein
Voyage to Vancienne by Gavin Chappell
A Pathway Forward by Lyndon Perry & David Bakke
The Left Eye of Phun Margat by Scott McCloskey
Sorcery in Nekharet by Steve Dilks

Artwork by award-winning artist Jim Pitts

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Firemaster and the Flames

Jan well knows that it is an honor to serve the king as a firemaster.

Even when it means leaving the lands where firemasters are known and common, and traveling to where they are feared and hated, bringing with her the foundling she is raising, to fight a strange manifestation of fire.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet (Family Law Book 2).

In the first book of this series “Family Law”, Lee’s parents and their business partner Gordon found a class A habitable planet. They thought their quest as explorers was over and they’d live a life of ease. But before they could return and register their claim Lee’s parents died doing a survey of the surface. That left Lee two-thirds owner of the claim and their partner Gordon obligated by his word with her parents to raise Lee. She had grown up aboard ship with her uncle Gordon and he was the only family she’d ever known. Him adopting her was an obvious arrangement – to them. Other people didn’t see it so clearly over the picky little fact Gordon wasn’t human.
After finding prejudice and hostility on several worlds Lee was of the opinion planets might be nice to visit, but terrible places to live. She wanted back in space exploring. Fortunately Gordon was agreeable and the income from their discovery made outfitting an expedition possible. Lee wanted to go DEEP – out where it was entirely unknown and the potential prizes huge. After all, if they kept exploring tentatively they might run up against the border of some bold star faring race who had gobbled up all the best real estate. It wasn’t hard to find others of a like mind for a really long voyage. This sequel to “Family Law” is the story of their incredible voyage.

BY HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox

To save the future, sometimes you have to reach to the past to change it. And in the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.


Cataclysm

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…

Heisenberg’s Point of Observation

Thomas Sutton was not your average fourteen year old, not even in an Ark City. Born in one of the three refuges of the last remnants of life on earth, deep underground, he knows his history. A century after an asteroid shattered and struck the earth, they have been trapped below by volcanic eruptions, toxic gasses, and radioactive dust. But what if he could…change things? What if he could reach the past, to prevent the asteroid’s impact?

Entanglement

Tom Beadle only volunteered for NASA’s neighborhood watch program when his department said it would maybe help him get tenure.None of them counted on the Neighborhood Watch becoming a mortifying political liability when a malfunctioning probe accidently reveals an asteroid hiding behind the larger outer planets, setting off impact alarms– and politicians looking for blame. When their answer is to defund the Watch program and fire all involved, Tom’s only chance to save the earth is to lie through his teeth and try to deflect the asteroid under cover of harvesting rare not-of-this-earth elements. And even that may not work.

KAREN MYERS: Second Sight: A Science Fiction Short Story

A Science Fiction Short Story

BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S PERCEPTIONS FOR A POPULAR DEVICE CAN ONLY MEAN COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. RIGHT?

Samar Dix, the inventor of the popular DixOcular replacement eyes with their numerous enhancements, has run out of ideas and needs another hit. Engaging a visionary painter to create the first in a series of Artist models promises to yield an entirely new way of looking at his world.

But looking through another’s eyes isn’t quite as simple as he thinks, and no amount of tweaking will yield entirely predictable, or safe, results.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Wolf and the Well-Tempered Clavier

With the coronation fast approaching, the Cathedral of St. George the Dragonslayer cannot afford trouble. But come it does, while the cathedral choir director is at the Dragon’s Breath Organ, practicing the anthem he wrote at King William’s own request. While explaining some technical terms to his understudy, the choir director decides to show off a little.

In the process, he releases an ancient menace from long before humanity came through the worldgate to this place. An entity that strikes him blind, and threatens further harm to anyone who tries to play the Dragon’s Breath Organ.

However, they dare not disappoint His Majesty, not on the most momentous day of his reign. Someone must cleanse the Dragon’s Breath Organ of this malicious entity, and the choir director cannot. So the task falls to Miss Anne Teesdale, understudy organist.

FROM CHRISTOPHER WOERNER: End of Debate

Covering the last year or so of current events, focusing on the senility and coup of the 2024 election process. Side B is thoughts on scripture.

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: pest.

For years now, I’ve been thinking that Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight was sort of an anthem for those of us on the right. Like, the last ten years or so. (Made all the better by the fact the artist is hard core stupid left.)

You know….

Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been
It’s all been a pack of lies

And never more so than the last four years.

I realized how far I’d come from trusting anything or anyone in the “public health” establishment (And guys, given the quality of care I tend to receive I was ALWAYS afraid of going to the doctor. Yes, I’m a zebra, and that’s part of it, but the other part is that there is a stereotype of the Latin female coming in to the doctor and if anything I’m the opposite, which means they’re reading me wrong. It’s probably not a coincidence the best care I’ve had were either doctors I already knew socially — at one time Mensa — or who are foreign born and don’t “read” me as “Latin.”)

Even ten years ago if you’d told me something like “They’re all corrupt and the entire FDA is full of things that are outright harmful to public health” I’d call you insane.

Now, I find myself reading articles on how RFK is going to take down this hallowed American institution and I think “you Absolute Lawn Flamings!” (Thank you Judy Frost.) “You can’t take off the mask and show us the hideousness beneath and have us FORGET what we saw.”

I remember how they told us that ivermectin wasn’t effective. I remember the manipulation of the number of hospitalized, the number of beds available, not telling you that 100% full beds is NORMAL for flu season, I remember the pushing of a vaccine that did nothing and was insufficiently tested, I remember the mask nonsense. I remember the lock downs.

MORE IMPORTANTLY I remember trying to make Vitamin D prescription. There really wasn’t even an excuse for this. Vitamin D made it less likely that people would die of COVID and therefore lessened the panic.

And these monsters wanted people to die, because they needed the panic to steal an election. Yes, it really is that ugly.

Perhaps a bit too of “there are too many people” because, well, because like Paul Ehrlich they find crowds unaesthetic. “So what if they die.”

Seven years ago, son and I went for a walk in the old neighborhood, and we met next door neighbor whose wife had been battling cancer. And in chatting he came up with the old chestnut of “We have drugs effective against cancer, but the FDA won’t let us use them because they want to make money out of all these horrible treatments.”

Back then I thought it was lunacy. I still think so. I mean, if there were a universal cure for cancer (which is not an illness but many) think how much money it would make.

But given what I’ve seen during the last four years, would I have been so 100% sure the neighbor had gone nuts? I don’t know. I mean, for money, maybe not. Holding back some drugs in hopes of population reduction? For Gaia? Well…. I know what these people were taught. A lot of them went through school just before me, or just after.

More importantly I know how bad EVERY STUDY is, and how they seem to publicize those that are things they like.

And this is an extreme case, because until these last four years I tended to listen to the research/medical establishment.

Now I put an extra step in, of running the claims against what I know of biology. Because you can’t trust anything.

RFK Jr. will destroy the federal “health” apparatus? Good. Perhaps this too should devolve to the states. If California wants to ban vaccines, let them. Yes, I think it’s a bad idea, but laboratories of democracy. Let’s see what works. And what doesn’t.

And if I feel that way about a part of the federal government I actually trusted, imagine how I feel about the rest…

So, every time they moan and run screaming with their heads on fire claiming some Trump appointment will destroy this or that portion of the boot on our collective necks?

And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
Well, I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
And I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord, oh Lord

When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before
Robert A. Heinlein

Some of you are looking at that and wondering what in heck is going on in my head. “Is this something to do with the Trump Train?” Well, yes, in fact. Kind of. Sideways.

Don’t expect me to remember where, but sometime this weekend I came across an article saying how strange it is that it is actually a good thing the left frauded themselves a win in 2020. The author of the article as kind of fear of saying it, and though I fully agree with him, let me tell you right now that that night in 2020 if you’d told me that the fraud was a good thing because of what it would set up, I’d have said you were insane. Okay, I probably would have straight up shivved you because 2020 was a difficult year and tamping down the berserker was so much work. But–

On the political side, a lot of what Trump was trying to do in his first term, we weren’t yet ready for. It wasn’t just the deep state resisting him, but the fact that what he wanted to do — what he was elected to do — seemed loony, probably even to himself.

To explain, in 2016 — and 2020 before the fraud — though a few of us were starting to intuit it, we really didn’t have the full idea of how rotten everything was, how corrupt, how counterproductive: from the architraves of our governance to the step stools of our professional organizations.

It took a lot to show us how bad it was, because it is the nature of humans to do what they’ve done and which has worked before. We can take minor innovation at a time, which over time will change things utterly, but that’s not what we need right now.

Our entire structure of “modern life” largely put into place in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century and made pervasive in the FDR imposition of top-down rules and regulations and concentrating of power in DC, is rotten. Like Terry Pratchett’s throne of Ankh-Morpork, it is a beautiful gilded structure that looks imposing and impossible to defy, but which is, inside, rotted and will fall at a touch.

Well, we didn’t know that. We knew there were failures. That’s what led to the Tea Party and then to electing Trump when that failed. But we couldn’t imagine the rot and the corruption. We just couldn’t. Why the throne was so golden and shining….

Who could imagine they were founding research to create lethal diseases in an enemy land, or that they intended to release one upon us, to steal back their power, or that they would lie about it, when the disease was not as lethal as it promised, or that they would cause people to die, just to scare us into a lockdown — all over the world — so they could fraud elections here. Who could imagine the courts one after the other turning a blind eye to glaring corruption of our system? Refusing to even look at it on procedural grounds? Who could have imagined an AMERICAN inauguration under guard, with barbed wire around our capital? And this being treated as normal? Who could have imagined a mildly spicy demonstration being treated as the equivalent of 9/11? Who could have imagined an outgoing president being persecuted on crazy grounds, anything to keep him from running again?

This is the stuff of the USSR not the US.

Who could have imagined giving money and weapons to our enemies? Who could have imagined abandoning our people to die in Afghanistan? Who could have imagined opening the borders to the poorer, most criminal portions of the world, indiscriminately? Who could have imagined burdening us with regulations that dissolved the economy like water into sugar?

Who the hell could have imagined the last four years? And the choir of trained seals from the traditional media, even those we thought still had a shred of integrity?

Richard Fernandez said what they’d planned for us was what we see unrolling in Great Britain, the fear stalking everyone who posts anything on social media, the trials without a chance to face your accusers: justice system by Facebook moderators. And the freezing in the dark to change the weather. The sacrificing of the vast majority of us to their implacable Earth goddess and the vague ideas of “niceness” instilled on them by the “good people.”

It’s not going to happen. Not yet, at least. We have stopped that. For now.

And it’s time to railroad. Even the normal people have seen how rotten things are. Even they got scared enough, by seeing the path we were on.

If things can change it is now. The right and the left — but not the institutional commies of the supposed right and left — are both terrified, and putting their differences aside in order to fight the monster state, the monster structures that almost devoured us.

In the desperate fight for survival, I’m willing to trust RFK Jr. to take apart the rotten core of the FDA. I don’t know if he’s willing to trust me in anything, but I suspect he’d agree with my desire to tear it all down and build smaller, more local, more individual.

And at the same time, the technology is there. We can now have private space companies, unimaginable in the sixties or seventies. We can now do a lot of things with distributed computing, distributed fabrication, and new materials that were impossible even ten years ago.

Free the people. Remove the boot of government from their pockets and their minds. Allow people to learn outside the rigid structure of the educational system that has made people stupid and blind (which arguably it was destined to do.)

Let our people go, and watch them go. There are a lot of things coming together. In four years, we could well be on Mars. Could well be. Though I don’t know where the innovations and industries would come from to make it that fast, I’m sure they are just waiting to spring up.

Stop feeding our money, our blood, our brains and our love into a machine that beats the life out of us and our country. And free the bureaucrats too, so they can do something useful for once.

We can’t know how. We can’t know from where. But we know as the barriers fall, America will rise. And the rest of the world might just watch and follow.

We’re here. We’ve been given a chance, and a little breathing space to work.

Each in your own space, tear a bit of the old, build a bit of the new. And ready your shoulders, because the world is about to drop on them. And you must not shrug. This time you must not shrug, until others grow learn and come relieve you.

Now, in this blessed time, things are coming together, half felt, in the dark, that can lead to the birth of a new and as yet unimaginable world. All it will take is blood, sweat and tears. And that we have. That we have in plenty.

Don’t look. Running along our side is an abyss so deep it would swallow all of civilization. Don’t look. Just lift up your shoulders.

It’s time to railroad. Everything is coming together. Everybody railroads.

Through virgin intellectual lands. To our future in the stars.