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 PAM UPHOFF: Out of Contact

Radmir Gagarin is not an Exec, he just does the job of one. Working for the richest man in the Alliance, Lord Diomid Devi, is not easy, even though he’s retired. And it gets a lot harder when the Plague strikes the World Lord Diomid purchased as his personal retirement home. And then the invasion . . .

As the Three Part Alliance crumbles, it’s every world for itself, and even a man so rich he can buy an entire parallel Earth to retire on, can find himself in a lot of trouble!

FROM HELENA D’ARGENTO: Monster

Don’t really know what I’m writing this for. Maybe for you. Maybe for him. Or maybe just cause I don’t want it resting on my soul alone. God knows I’ll never forget it. Don’t seem so good at forgetting things. And I don’t reckon I’m a bad man, not really, but I’m not a good man neither. Wickedness and vengefulness come easy to me. And I’ve done these things for what I saw as good, but I was happy to do them, I enjoyed every bloody second.

Giorgio Mezzanotte has never led a normal life; from childhood, he has possessed peculiar skills, but he cannot explain why. He has lived a life on the outskirts of society, but when he finds himself falling in love, he is forced to confront the present in an effort to understand the past.

Monster is the story of men: of lovers and fighters, of poets and politics, of psychological warfare, sin, and seduction. Set in a world much like our own, it casts a different light upon an election which changed our perspective and pursues justice for those wronged in the creation and maintenance of the systems which rule us.

FROM DOUG IRVIN: A Spaceship For Joe

Joe has a problem. It’s summer vacation, and all his friends are unavailable. One moved away, another is
sick and the others are all gone for some reason or another.
In desperation Joe looks for his uncle, who makes a suggestion that he build himself a fort, and even
volunteers the space and materials for it.
But Joe has other ideas. He doesn’t want a simple fort; he wants a spaceship!
There’s just one problem with that. He built it too convincingly ….

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: She Dreams Day and Night

Nancy White they called her, a good, solid name for a troubled girl. But she knew her father had called her by another name, before he disappeared through the gate into another world of strange stars and stranger moons. No matter how hard the staff of Hildred House try to force her to forget, she remembers. And longs to reopen the gate, to rejoin her father on that alien shore where cloud-waves break.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Faerie Gifts

A collection of short stories about the intersection between over- and under-hill, between human and faerie.

FROM NATHAN BRINDLE: AI Is Love

The Japanese word Ai (愛) means “love”. The English acronym AI means “artificial intelligence.” But they both use the same two Roman alphabet letters…and the author loves making puns.

Thus, AI 愛 is Love is a collection of 65 images made using Artificial Intelligence tools and methods. Each image is the author’s loving re-imagination of his wife at various stages of her life, using old photographs and digital models and post-processing software, not to mention plain old-fashioned skull sweat coming up with prompts to feed the MidJourney AI in the first place. While the author cautions his readers that his wife actually doesn’t look entirely like the lovely ladies depicted (mostly because they all have long straight or wavy hair), he does wish to make clear that all of his love for his beautiful lady wife has been poured into the present book, which he humbly recommends for your consideration.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: Hartington Abroad

Jeriah Hartington is far from home. Born into a wealthy family, he is now reduced to poverty. In desperation, he signs on to a ship headed for the planet XKF-36. Their mission? To search for colonists who’ve been lost nearly as long as Jeriah has been alive.

Jeriah fully anticipates an adventure as they travel into the unknown wilderness. He never expected to find living people, eager to tell the tale of their sufferings. But their hair-raising account could be the downfall of everyone on the planet, even their rescuers. For a villain lurks within the ship’s crew, and no one can say who he might be.

FROM CELIA HAYES: That Fateful Lightning: A Novel of the Civil War

There wasn’t much of an outlet for an ordinary American woman with ambitions in the 184os; marriage and family was as good as it got back then, for most women … But Minnie Vining wasn’t an ordinary woman. A spinster in her forties, of a respected old Boston family, possessing an independent income and an education worthy of any man among her peers. Minnie took up a noble cause – campaigning for the abolition of slavery. The matter of slavery roiled political and social life in the United States for more than thirty years, splitting apart families, friends, comrades … and eventually the nation. And when the war began in earnest, Minnie followed her heart and her calling … as a nurse, tending to sick and wounded soldiers … but at what personal cost?

FROM CAROLINE FURLONG: Contact: Angeles

While removing a prototype sensor from the prow of her new Alliance battleship, the Ausa, Captain Elizabeth Goodwin and her crew encounter a setback when one of the engineers sent to remove and stow the device is injured in an accident. Before the other engineer can help the man, the two are surrounded by amoeboid creatures which seem immune to the effects of vacuum.

Thought to be hallucinations experienced by early spacers who had been alone in deep space too long, these creatures – known as “angel fish” – startle the crew by their sudden appearance. Despite her misgivings, Goodwin allows three of the aliens to be taken aboard for study. But less than an hour after the aliens have been brought on the ship, one of Goodwin’s men is killed and another is seriously wounded.

Her search for both the murderer and the escaped “angels” soon leads to a disturbing revelation. Eventually, Goodwin must decide which threat is greater: an old enemy of the Alliance, or the fabled “angels” encountered by the first explorers from Terra.

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: CONDEMNED

It is an accepted truism that we’re going to hell in a handbasket. The “We” varies, but if you consider it “the US” or “The West” or “Human civilization” it still applies.

Now part of the reason it applies, of course, is that the world has been going to hell in a handbasket since there’s been a world, and if there were writings left by trilobites, they’d be screaming at kids these days who wear their skeleton on the inside, and what will become of the world in their tentacles?

So, some of the perceived flames and speed of the handbasket are always — and always will be — that things are changing in a way that we who are older don’t like and can’t fully process.

And while there are identifiable problems, which I write about here on the regular, it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of our dissatisfaction with the world, the younger generation, the way things are happening is just that every human has a set image of the “ideal” world, explicit or implicit in our subconscious, and that a lot of it will be based on what we internalized as a good thing as kids. So, with longer lives and the acceleration of technological change, we’re all feeling more and more like everything is going wrong and bad and evil.

Not all of it is an illusion, of course. Partly because of technological change, and because suppressed voices are finally being heard in the culture, we are aware of how far away we’ve fallen from the Constitution — and that’s important — but also that right now most of our institutions, including the formal institutions of our country, are being used against us by a cultural group (they’re not even a cabal) who hates us and our system and wants to destroy us.

And this is actually going on worldwide, because leftism could only keep up the illusion of working when it had complete control of information dissemination. And it has been losing that control since the fax and the typewriter, but it accelerated with the internet and blogs.

Their reactionary — in the proper sense — and counter-revolutionary — again in the proper sense — efforts to keep control are making things horrendous and insane and are giving the illusion that other things are going to hell in a handbasket, but in fact the change is being pushed from above, and not taking very well with the masses.

So, that particular handbasket and who is in it is important to examine. I’ve seen so many — mostly by older people — articles about how the culture is hopelessly corrupt, and no one knows their sex and blah blah blah, cue the end of the world. But none of this is true. The young are wounded — wouldn’t you be, raised in the middle of this battle royale for the culture? — and often susceptible to crazy manipulation by the left — teach your kids well — but I’ve seen them turning to the “old ways” (which are older than I, since my generation already wasn’t taught) and trying to learn the “proper way” to do things, and even in some ways longing for tradition more than my generation ever did. Sure, they are often having to find their way to the “way that works” by trying everything else first, but that’s a process that’s been going on since my generation was young. And what did you expect, when we threw them into a world where every law and tradition had been stomped flat and deemed irrelevant or evil? (And by “we” I don’t even mean my generation. We were thrown into a world half like that already, and never learned a lot of the “way things are easier to do and should be done.” Partly due to technological change, partly social, partly due to the long war of the twentieth century.)

The kids are by and large all right, or struggling mightily to be all right. And the people are largely all right, or struggling to be all right. All of it against a shitlib overculture trying to push everything to destruction and chaos.

You can tell the people are all right, and the people are winning, because all over the world the cry of the elites is “We must suppress the peasants attempts to communicate.” This is not the attitude of an “elite” that’s winning the culture.

But the other part of the basket to unpack is the genetic one. Look, if we don’t examine that basket and see it for what it is, not only are we going to be unnecessarily blackpilled, but we’re going to neglect what we absolutely need to do.

So, let’s talk about Idiocracy. Let’s talk about it, because it needs to be talked about. I’m sick and tired of seeing people say “We’re living in Idiocracy!” because that movie is idiotic and elitist, but also because genetics doesn’t work that way, ever, and also, no, we’re not.

The latest one to put a bee in my bonnet was a right wing commenter losing his mind at Sheila Jackson Lee’s version of the solar system. And claiming this proves we are now in Idiocracy.

I’m not going to name the writer claiming this is Idiocracy, because I have no beef with him. This idea is so pervasive on the right that it’s just in the air. And ooh, boy, is it dumb.

First, let’s talk about how the movie is dumb, shall we? If we’re going to talk about stories saying ‘we’re all breeding ourselves into stupidity’ The Marching Morons did it better and scared the crud out of me as a young kid. In fact, if you want to make sure that your kids want to have tons of kids, expose them to The Marching Morons. They won’t know enough about genetics to realize the time spans involved in this actually happening are just not possible in 50 or even 100 or 200 years. And they will of course assume they are the intellectual elite, and must reproduce to save humanity. Not only did it work that way on me, but also on other friends my age who read science fiction.

The thing to understand about The Marching Morons, though is that it works better than Idiocracy for two reasons: the society it shows is not actually genetically stupid. It’s obviously (“Forgive me Freud for I have neurosis”) indoctrinated/misseducated into stupidity by a pervasive and evil government. And the idea that it’s genetic is sold to us by the main character who is a highly specialized moron himself. (I.e. he’s a brilliant salesman but in many ways a dumbass. As proven by the ending, which I won’t spoil.)

Idiocracy, OTOH is … Okay, guys, I continuously rant about how most of the movies and tv shows trying to portray the very smart fail, because they’re created by midwits, according to their idea of geniuses. Which usually aren’t.

This is the opposite effect. This is a movie created by midwits, trying to portray the “dumbs”. And it fails in exactly the same way. Most of what’s depicted is not “stupidity” but “ignorance”. And stuff like…. the tv shows, say? Or the way the president is some sports star? That’s midwits sneering at those they perceive as being beneath them, and it’s classist and stupid and infuriating. It’s also not how any of this would work.

But the premise itself is flawed and wounded.

Nothing about the worldbuilding works. It’s impossible for the species to breed itself into stupidity that fast. I mean, sure, let’s assume dumb people are out-breeding the smart (actually no one is breeding much, we’re importing a vast underclass, and I’ll go into that in a moment.) Eventually it will drop the IQ of the species. But assuming it will do it that fast is exactly like the climate change panic. I mean, perhaps humans really are heating up the planet (it’s possible, though we have no actual proof of it.) But the amount can be trumped by one good disaster, and it’s so incremental we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of years to see a result. It’s something that should be of interest and concern to scientists who would meticulously measure and compare data. It is instead being screamed about and the change expected in “twelve years.” And has been for 50 now.

It is the same with genetics. Even assuming a replacement of the smart with the dumb, it would take at least a few thousand years, not a hundred or two. And the change is debatable.

There is some credence to it, in the last fifty years or so, because more “intelligent” (very hard to define) people tend to train for longer periods which lowers their fertile years of marriage. Add to this that in the last thirty years or so we’ve weaponized education to keep men and women from marrying and the more educated are indeed reproducing less.

We also of course subsidize — via welfare — the reproduction of the “less capable” in society. And because we have anti-biotics and semi-competent hygiene few of their children die.

From a thousand feet up, this looks like a situation that could lead to “Idiocracy” — only it wouldn’t, because it would be simply impossible to support that complex a civilization with people that dumb — except…

Except that the tendency of the high achieving to train forever is already starting to reverse, because the rewards aren’t there.

Except that while disease doesn’t weed the children of the poor down, drugs and gang warfare do. Lives still tend to be shorter and not particularly productive of children that survive. (Or why we are importing an underclass.)

Except that being high-achieving in society is not the same as being very smart. On the contrary. True geniuses tend to have issues functioning, let alone succeeding economically in a “normal” society. The highest-achieving economically tend to be mid-mid to slightly higher than average mid-wits. This has been proven by study after study. They need to still be in touch with the vast majority of people to succeed in a society composed of them.

And being low-achieving in society similarly has nothing to do with being an idiot. My brilliant grandfather would totally have been a welfare case for reasons of being emotionally cracked, as would his family have been (And a branch remains that, now) if there had been a welfare state.

Point being that what we tend to classify as “dumb welfare cases” can and do often throw out brilliant offspring. And the high achieving…. guys, have you paid attention to Chelsea Clinton? A young woman so dumb that not all of her parents’ money or influence can buy her a career?

Okay, so since I’m so smart, how do I explain the sheer stupidity of our politicians and our “underclass” not to mention the increasing ignorance of our middle class and incompetence of…. everyone.

Oh, very easily. You see for about a century now, worldwide, parents have been less involved in raising their own kids, “experts: have dictated education, the government schools have been run for the benefit of the government schools and to push a vague “nice” leftism which keeps getting dumber and dumber, in an effort to make everyone perform the same, and also stay in their lane and not interfere with the growing power of the bureaucrats.

Thing is, humans are strangely and bizarrely adaptable. And while genetics don’t change that rapidly, culture absolutely does. And most humans, being social apes, just want to fit in.

The politicians are dumb because — eyes Sheila Jackson Lee who I think is old enough to be my mother, so definitely not the result of breeding down — they have been pushed on the people not as being competent (though that was faked for a while, via a controlled media) but as being their color or culture. “Looks like you” is what they’ve sold politicians to populations as “and therefore understands you.” This is the whole point of redistricting.

And when you hire anyone for any reason other than competence, you degrade competence. This is inevitable, and should be put in math, honestly. A sustained regime of hiring for any reason other than competence will usher in ultimate, world-breaking incompetence. No degradation in IQ needed.

Now layer on top of this that we are now more aware of how unbelievably stupid politicians and other “experts” are and can be, because media control has been pierced.

And add to it that a lot of this Kakistocracy is intent on destroying things through malice, because they imagine this will allow them to escape punishment. (And that’s not counting how many of them are so incapable of abstract thought they really believe their meddling “improves” things. Because they’ve been told so.)

Then add to it that an increasing portion of our “underclass” was imported yesterday, or to be fair over the last 40 years. First of all, the fact they need to keep importing people directly into welfare — even illegals who have jobs still usually also are welfare cases. Look at it from their point of view. But a lot also get trapped in welfare — dispels the idea that the underclass is reproducing and taking over the world.

Second, the people we’re importing might be stupid … or not. No, seriously. We know that most of them come from societies without advanced tech, or really much tech, at least at their level. And that they’re grossly unprepared for a technological society. And by technological society, for a lot of the illegals imported under Obama, this apparently includes “knows what a toilet is.”

That is enough for them to have every appearance of being dumb as rocks. Because they are in an utterly alien world, and isolated for linguistic reasons, and not precisely aware of HOW to get on.

But even those who think they have some idea and speak the language a little are going to present as dumb compared to natives.

Look, I’m slightly smarter than the average bear. I’d consumed American media and literature from a young age. I was fluent in English on day one. I have a post graduate degree.

And yet my first ten years in this country I operated at “F*cking stupid” levels on everyday things, from grocery shopping to buying a house, to which jobs I applied for. Because I couldn’t “read” the social signals at all and wasn’t aware of the substrate of a lot of what was going on around me. I’d say I was “winged” for the first fifteen years or so, and looking back is full of cringe. But it was part of changing cultures. Which is always difficult for an adult. Not impossible, but difficult.

Given how difficult it was for me, less prepared people might be lost and fishes out of water for the rest of their lives, and given the “education” we’ll provide their kids, and the habits the kids will inherit it will take a couple more generations before they’re at “average.” REGARDLESS OF IQ. (IMHO it’s the reason TPTB import them. Easier to keep them down.)

Yeah, it means we live in clown world and that everything is stupid.

But it doesn’t mean that it’s genetic, or that the people themselves, as individuals, are stupid.

And this is very important to know.

Why?

Because humans are maleable and almost infinitely adaptable.

If the decay were indeed genetic — it really is impossible, over the three or four generations things have decayed over. Just.Not.Possible — the handbasket to hell would be on greased rails and there would be no way of stopping it except perhaps a coerced breeding and sterilization program that would make the Nazis blush.

But it’s not that bad. It’s just humans doing stupid human tricks. And it’s mostly culture.

Doesn’t mean we’re not headed for a crash or that it’s not going to hurt like a mother. We’re running on stupid so those two are inevitable.

But the cure is at hand and has started being implemented already. People are more and more mistrustful of government schools and tertiary indoctrination, as they should be.

Now it’s going to take a generation or two to turn this around. Or maybe three or four.

But it can be turned around.

Teach the children well. And build a culture that will facilitate intelligent behavior. Even from the objectively dumb.

I was reading an article about the NPR debacle, when NPR defended itself by saying “look at all the skin colors in our staff.” And some of the “varied skin color” bearing individuals came out to defend it too because “there are people who look like me.”

It brought back to me again why I got so bent out of shape at idiot on twitter talking about how we need to have higher minimum wage, so as not to make our cities into slums, and so that young women can have children.

Even here in response to that we got all tied in knots over the “real” result of minimum wage or if it was a science of not (in large numbers, economics absolutely is a science, one that “laws” can only distort, not make to conform to politicians’ insanity.)

But the important thing is that the left is — as always — approaching things from the wrong end of the problem.

It’s not that the problem they’re identifying isn’t correct. More often than not there is a problem — though note the problem might be so small that it doesn’t register, or barely does, before they wade in to make it as horrible as possible — the real issue is that they look at the problem the wrong way, assume powers they — and often other corporeal beings — don’t have, and make everything worse by trying to fix the “problem” by forcing a solution that fixes nothing.

Take for instance the minimum wage problem: Yes, wages are ridiculously low, compared to cost of living. No argument there. And while theoretically minimum-wage paying jobs aren’t meant to be given to adults, in reality they mostly go to older adults these days, to supplement social security and other safety net payments. Why? Because laws protecting children from exploitation now make it functionally impossible to hire anyone under eighteen.

This not only has nothing to do with stopping the exploitation of children, it is in fact children and young adult abuse. It prevents young people from getting a functional education into what work means, and the relation between work and money. Look, it’s not like most of them are getting any kind of education in the schools they are forced to attend. And when you tell them all they can do till 18 is attend the make-work schools where boys are often treated as second class citizens and girls as neurotic basket cases who must be indulged at all costs, you are not preparing them for life. You are also not saving them from anything.

What you’re doing is releasing them to the world at 18, when they’ll be responsible for their own crimes, and capable of picking their own path, with about the functional maturity of a 12 year old 50 years ago.

They have never earned a dime through their own labor. Money comes as a hand out from benevolent older people. They aren’t sure where money comes from other than that way. They have been conditioned to comply with unreasonable and senseless demands of authorities they don’t fully understand, and to perform tasks that mean nothing. A lot of them — mostly young women and minorities. Sorry, but it’s a fact as schools try not to be accused of discrimination — have been used to having A for effort and being indulged in their maladies real or imaginary, including the “I had my feelings hurt.”

And now, with no job history, no experience of getting up when they don’t feel like it, to go work because that’s how you get paid, no idea of why anyone should be doing that in fact, we suddenly expect them to be functional adults.

We all remember the story Heinlein told to illustrate why mollycoddling young criminals then dropping the law on them was 18 is stupid, right: you bring a puppy home, never house break it, indulge its every whim, then when it is a full grown dog you take it out and shoot it.

Well, this is the equivalent. You bring a puppy home and tie it up and truss it and put it in a tube so it can’t move, while taking care of its every need. Then when it’s a full grown dog, and it can’t walk, you beat it because it’s not acting as a grown dog should.

However, the story falls short, because we don’t take that dog who has never had experience of walking, and make it get in debt. While at 18 we view these kids who never had a meaningful choice in their lives, and have the haziest ideas of what a “job” is, and who, to boot, have been lied to all their lives and told that they can be anything they want to (yes, it’s a lie. I could never have been an Olympic athlete, not matter how much I wanted it.) and tell them they have to go to college. Because all successful people go to college. How many even sign up for it, because school they know, but they don’t know anything else? And how many sign up after trying to find jobs and being unable to, because they have no job history and no idea how to apply? And then we encourage them to sign predatory laws from which the government doesn’t allow you to escape. And then when they finish, and are again unemployable, or employable at a very low level, the left screams we must forgive the loans, the right says “pay up deadbeats.” And the left wants to raise minimum wage so the kids can have kids.

Look, this is patently insane. Anyone looking at it objectively can see, no, it’s not the kids’ fault, but all this nonsense doesn’t help. Begin at the beginning: who in America thinks that kids are at risk of being put in sweatshops and worked night and day? So, why are we trying to protect say 16 year olds from getting a retail job, or assuming anyone who hires them to sweep the floor is going to chain them to a 19th century textile mill.

The laws relating to “child” labor need to be relaxed. And they need to be relaxed starting at about 12. Sure, fewer kids might go to college. But more might be literate and functional adults.

And for those clutching their pearls, a lot of us had jobs — part time, sometimes self imposed — starting at about that time. We are noticeably, not Dickensinian victims standing in line for our super, or twisted out of shape by our inhumane exploitation.

If people are too young to work, they’re much to young to be prisoners in public schools. Release them to the wild, where at least a few of them might learn that rocks to the skull hurt. (Note I don’t think the vast majority of 12 to18 are too young to work a couple of hours a day at least.)

But wait, there’s more. Other than the fact most 18 year olds have not been allowed to develop work habits and are therefore not worth whatever crazy minimum wage the government decided to mandate, there is something else holding wages down: lots and lots and lots of immigration, both illegal and targeted legal.

Targeted legal? Well, companies are allowed to import vast numbers of specialized personnel, from MDs to programmers, from pharmacists to engineers, whom they get on visas and therefore treat as indentured servants, including paying below-market wages and working insane hours. This makes it hard for in-country-trained people to be paid what they would normally be paid.

And since the avowed reason for this is that they can’t find people to do the work in the US and that’s patently false — they can’t find people to do the work at extremely cheap wages and while being totally controlled by the company, which is different — this is a scam, and should be stopped.

But at the bottom level, what is causing the low wages is that we opened the border, and got all sorts of unskilled labor into the country.

Our country is not early 20th century — as the left seems to think — and as I said before, we’re not going to open sweatshops (though I bet you there are some, and a lot more unsavory enterprises with all the minors and women brought over the border and effectively disappeared) that necessitate vast numbers of illiterate button-pushers or garment sewing people or any of that.

So what these people, desperate for any kind of work (though a lot of them are getting too many handouts to care these days) get is starting jobs that used to be done by young people: gardening, lawn mowing, entry construction work, basic retail. (I can’t be the only one who keeps running into cashiers who don’t speak English and get angry when you try to.)

They will take much lower wages, because they are living ten to an apartment. This in turn lowers everyone’s real wages.

And raising the official, mandated minimum wage does not solve any of these problems. It only exacerbates them. And gives more jobs to illegal workers, willing to work for less and under the table. Because the businesses can’t afford the crazy minimum wages and therefore will hire who they can, even if technically “illegal.”

Looking at the results and the desired results, and not what is driving the situation is the wrong end of the stick. It not only doesn’t fix the situation, it worsens everything.

It’s the same thing with “diversity” and the rest of the DIE (or IED if you prefer) panoply.

Is diversity useful? Not particularly, people have found, outside one, not really honest study. But it could be. Not diversity as the left identifies it but true diversity.

Suppose you’re opening a business that is supposed to serve everyone, but you’ll only hire people who have exactly the same life and work history as yourself (I don’t know, maybe they’re clones.) and therefore you all miss that, I don’t know, the pastries you’re selling have stuff small kids will choke on. Or that women will dislike because it will cover them in sugar. Or whatever. In that case having a woman who has raised children on the staff could help.

In the same way, if you’re a media or entertainment corporation, trying to report the news fairly, you should not hire only people who agree with you. Mostly because if you were suckerpunched by the election in 2016 and are continually stunned as to why Obama and Biden aren’t beloved leaders, you obviously don’t understand most of the country. And saying you understand everyone but the “fringe” only makes us wonder if you know where the fringe is. Kind of like if you think NPR only went nuts in 2016, you make us want to tell you to pull your head out or a smelly and dark place, because the problem was already far advanced. Which is why you slid insensibly into totalitarian behavior.

What I’m trying to say here is that the left looks around and wants to have people of many colors and body types, so they FEEL inclusive and accepting. But skin color doesn’t make editorial decisions. Brains do. And human brains are all white-pink and squishy. Also, please, no, I don’t want to see them.

And when you’re hiring people who know they’re being hired for their skin color, you naturally select people who think skin color is the most important thing for diversity of thought. Which means you select for racists leftists, and for people who likely all think along the same patterns.

This obviously is not going to give you any “diversity” advantages. Whether your job is book publishing or political reporting, it’s just going to crash make your audience appeal more “selective.”

One of the articles I came across yesterday was with subscription services for video content being baffled that their subscriber number are falling. Well, part of it is that they are chasing the wrong end of the stick. And when people don’t like what they produce, then then obsess on race even more, because it must mean the public is racist. When in point of fact it’s the story lines and characters that suck, and race has nothing to do with it.

It’s all chasing the wrong end of the stick.

Are fewer women having children? Raise minimum wage. But what the heck does that have to do with anything? Having children is not merely an economic decision, and people throughout history had children when far poorer than our poorest.

The right end of the stick would involve figuring out why people are marrying late or not at all — and without feminist blinders, please. Perhaps figure out that part of the reason is this artificial division and hatred we’ve put between the sexes — and also if regulations and government hokum have made child raising too onerous. (Answer: yes. They’d already done it in my day. Mostly by trying to save children from horrible situations that 99% of the population would never inflict on them.)

The right side of the stick is to figure out why things aren’t working, not to assume we know the cause and trying to make a quick fix.

Of course, that would require the left to realize that laws and regulations aren’t magical. They don’t do what you want them to, and nothing else, ever. That things have second, third and fourth order consequences.

And sometimes the solution is to take the chainsaw to previous rules, regulations and laws which not only didn’t do what they were supposed to but worsened everything.

And sometimes the solution is to follow the law, like, by having a border.

Neither of which will happen until we hit bottom on our addiction to government, and then it changes.

We’re not at bottom yet. But it looks mighty close.

Be not afraid, brace for impact, and don’t be distracted with short term solutions.

Chainsaw, baby, chainsaw.

Liberty and Safety a blast from the past from August 2013

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it is a bad thing – a very bad thing – to make Sarah berserk out over breakfast, which is why most sentient species, some invertebrates and some single-cell life forms have learned to avoid it.

No, this doesn’t mean Dan and the boys are in trouble.  No, that’s fine.  What happens is this – after week from hell, I was running around with a headache so bad I could barely think through it.  In case it wasn’t obvious from the rate of typo to word in the last few posts, I also could barely write through it.

As happens we found a hotel that met our low-price-to-low-flea rate and Dan and I ran away so I could get work done on the overdue Baen novel.  (It is unique in writers that our vacations involve the chance to write MORE.  Shouldn’t be a great shock, though.  Our “let’s go out to dinner” nights involved “I need to work out a novel plot.”

This was particularly needed because on top of the situation with our friend Alan – who should go home from the hospital today and start a new course of chemotherapy, so that’s good news – my kids are having beginning of school year issues.  Since it is written (I don’t know where, but if I ever find out, I’m setting fire to it) that nothing the Hoyts do can be easy or simple, they’re both adding second majors and weird ones at that, and giving the bureaucracy hissy fits.  This for some reason causes them to run into my office at the rate of a kid every five minutes, to p*ss and moan.  So, the office gets impossible to work in (also smelly.  The cats hate competition) and I lost two entire days to this.  Which also added to my blazing stress headache.

So we ran away for three days and two nights to “get writing done.”  So far so good, right?

Yeah.  Except that breakfast is included in the room special promo sale.  Which is why we stayed here.  Have breakfast latish and you don’t need lunch, so that’s one meal less to pay for.  (Hey, we’re writers.  We’re cheap.  Also, largely poor, our days of being rich beyond the dreams of average – sic – having crashed at the same time the towers turned to rubble and the tech boom collapsed.)

So we went down to breakfast.

Just when you thought it was safe to go down to breakfast…

We were in a little isolated table but separated by a curtain from a large group table.  I heard the words “They can’t expect Obama to fix everything with one measure.  I mean, things were so bad it doesn’t have a quick solution,” and I told Dan “Right then, I’m going to order an omelet, before I start ranting.”

When my calmer half said “I don’t know.  I’m kind of hoping they make you start ranting.”

So I went down to get the omelet, and I came back and sat down.  The large group of unmitigated stupid seemed to be talking lower – at least.  If I said the multiplication tables backward in my head, I could tune out the occasional break through sentence like “What we need is more business regulation.”

And then, zero to nothing, I heard something, and I started shaking – painful body-long shakes – trying to suppress the berserker.

The phrase was “the problem is we have too many liberties in this country.”  Like that.  Like that, I found I was putting my head through the curtain and saying “If you discuss politics in public, I’m going to intervene.”

I want to point out that when I’m fighting the berserker, my voice gets really weird, and my eyes get this bizarre “one step over the line and you’re dead, Mister.”

I’ve been known to make postal workers run away (true) and airline employees bend over backward to give me anything I want, while I’m being perfectly polite and suppressing the berserker.

But these people were wrapped in an invincible mantel of stupidity.  They said – I swear to Bob – “What?  This is a public space, we can talk about anything we want.”

I said “Absolutely.  And I can correct you any way I want.”

At that point the better half who is a New England gentleman intervened. “Yes, it’s a public space,” he said.  “And we’d like to have breakfast without your politics intruding on it.  Can you keep it down, please?  Particularly if you insist on being ill informed.”  (When calmer half feels the need to put in the knife, imagine what my excitable self was feeling.)

And so I downed as much warm coffee as I could, because if you can’t find alcohol, warm liquids will help, and eventually the shakes subsided.

Too many liberties…

There are three things to take from this encounter: first, it is polite and proper, if sharing a public space with other sentient beings, to try not to say anything offensive out loud.  I tend to discuss the latest scientific developments, a novel I just read, anything innocuous.  I’ve gone to dinner with PJM colleagues at election time and not discussed politics loud enough for the other tables to hear – and shut up when the waitress approached.

Look, guys, there was a reason that Englishmen who had servants said “not in front of the help” – it wasn’t just to avoid gossip.  It was also to avoid making another human being, not in a position to retaliate, uncomfortable.

Good manners and all that.

So, if you have politics to discuss, keep your voice down or save it to your room.  UNLESS you’re sure that the entire room is taken up with your coreligionists.

Another thing is that these people looked fairly normal.  I didn’t see any badges of the little Satanists for Stalin or anything of the kind.  This scares me beyond belief and I’m trying not to be depressed.  They really think Obama is fixing “this mess.”  I… Look, go over to the Zero Hedge guys… just read this.

A tiny excerpt:

#1 When Barack Obama entered the White House, 60.6 percent of working age Americans had a job.  Today, only 58.7 percent of working age Americans have a job.

#2 Since Obama has been president, seven out of every eight jobs that have been “created” in the U.S. economy have been part-time jobs.

#3 The number of full-time workers in the United States is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.

#4 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers now make less than $30,000 a year.

#5 40 percent of all workers in the United States actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968.

#6 When the Obama era began, the average duration of unemployment in this country was 19.8 weeks.  Today, it is 36.6 weeks.

#7 During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans “not in the labor force” soared by an astounding 8,332,000.  That far exceeds any previous four year total.

There is more.  Oh, yes, there are 33 of these facts.  But the mainstream media won’t report it, and those who are dumb beyond the dreams of average swallow it, hook, line and sinker.  And what can we do?  I’m serious.  WHAT can we do?  This is sort of like before the French Revolution when people demanded Necker be returned to power because when he was borrowing and spending everyone was doing so well.  There are no words.  To paraphrase Heinlein, stupidity is the only capital crime.  The punishment is always death.  Unfortunately when it’s public stupidity, the death often falls on those who weren’t stupid.

Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it and take the rest of us along for the ride.

The third point though…

There are few things you can say that are so HEINOUS that they send me into automatic “Must suppress the berserker” mode.  Look, guys I’ve got through entire dinners with communists without getting there, and without looking speculatively at the silverware and considering how to kill someone with a fork.  (Okay, I lie about the second one, but all the same. Thoughts are, thank you, private, and my hobbies are my own.)

But that “we have too many liberties” got under my shield and went directly to the “attack” and immediately as well to the “you can’t go berserk in a public space.  No, really.”

How can anyone think we have too many liberties?

Oh, I know.  They think that because they believe in the myth of the “superior man” who will take care of them.  The man on the white horse who knows better than everyone, and who can run everything so that no one is ever afraid or poor or sick or marginalized.

In other words, they dream of the ideal childhood.

The rest of us know that never in the history of the world, not even the calmest, has there been a time when a leader could guarantee safety, health and contentment to everyone. There will always be poor, unloved, suffering people.  You can’t help that.

You behave in a way you help those around you and you try not to be a burden, but even then at times that will fail.

Those of us who are religious believe a time will come when we will live like that, in perfect harmony and contentment with a superior being watching over us.

But last time I looked, neither king, premier, president, emperor or satrap had the power to look into the hearts and minds and judge everyone perfectly.  And no, the NSA spying ain’t it.  And none of the above were the creators of the universe.

They are all, in fact, fallible men, usually fallible men attracted to power over others, who want to run you not for your own good but for their own internal satisfaction.  And since people who crave this sort of power tend to be more broken than writers, their internal satisfaction might be something that even they don’t understand.

There is no man on a white horse.  There is, always, an old trickster, coming to town and promising eternal peace.  If you look carefully, you can see the horse is a mule that has been painted white.  And the man is just using the same old promises the human brain is wired to crave, but what he wants is quite different.  And even if he truly believes what he says, he can’t deliver.  He’s just a man.  He can’t know what each individual wants and needs.  Only each of you can know what he wants and needs.  And sometimes not even that.

Clearly the people on the next table would like to believe in the man on the painted mule.  I would too.  The idea someone will look after you perfectly is SO appealing.  But I’m grown up.  You can’t go back to kindergarten.  And even my kindergarten teacher had no clue how to handle me.

I’ll handle myself, thank you.  Even to the point of making sure I don’t berserk out at the breakfast table.  It can be done.  It’s just not easy, or comforting or pretty.

It’s a horrible way to live.  Except for every other one.  I’ll keep my liberties, thank you.  You want to give yours up, I can give you a list of destinations willing to oblige you.  It starts with Cuba.

No kings, no queens, no lords, no ladies.  We won’t be fooled again.

So minimum wage came up on Twitter. (You know if I insist on visiting that site I probably should go on blood pressure meds.)

But anyway, when minimum wage came up, I did my standard “You can’t legislate wages any more than you can legislate the weather. The real minimum wage is always zero.”

I trust I don’t need to unpack this for the people here, but supposing I get a lot of newbies or such: You can’t legislate minimum wage, because if businesses can’t afford to pay the set “minimum wage” they go under. Or fire employees and automate. Or fire employees and hire illegals under the table. Or–

So the real minimum wage, i.e. what your work is worth, is always zero. If government regulation prices you out of the market, you will be getting zero.

I’m explaining all this because I immediately got a lunatic telling me 0 was not getting paid and therefore not a wage, and I shouldn’t confuse things with linguistic mush. (I really should go on blood pressure meds.)

But then the real crazy hit. I have a few screenshots of his comments, though not all of them. (Seriously. I couldn’t capture all of them. For one they make my head hurt. I’m mostly putting them here so you capture the ah… full flavor (bouque garni de sewage) of his brain workings. And also so you guys know I’m not making him up. Because I’m not sure I’d have believed he existed without reading him.

He was defending the fact we absolutely needed a minimum wage, and a lot of this is “tell me you never ran a lemonade stand without telling me you never ran a lemonade stand.”

Dudes and dudettes: this guy is the real deal, the hundred percent brain dead, absolutely no understanding of economics.

There is the blaming of not having children on the fact we’re not raising the minimum wage. The crazy-cakes assertion that people who would take a low wage wouldn’t make good citizens. As I said I couldn’t capture it all. Somewhere he had a “cute” one about my preferring small government and large corporations. NOTE I’d never mentioned corporations, and this is actually and for real insane, since big government and large corporations go together like syphilis and madness. Government makes it impossible for anyone but the big corporation to comply with insane regulation. AND big corporations incentivize the government to create more regulations to eliminate competition.

He also told me that all western economies regulate minimum age as if that were a defense to lack of minimum wage causes infertility. I mean, talk about lack of mental connection.

AND he accused me of wanting everyone to be self employed or in a corporation. I don’t even know where he got that or what that means. Other than the voices in his head.

And don’t even ask me what the heck he means in that first one by my appreciating hierarchy. I THINK he means some kind of class system? Probably? Later on he went on about genetics and people being born to money. Most of it so incoherent I had no clue what he was implying. So I stopped engaging because the alternative was calling him and asshole moron over and over again.

And I’d already done that.

The point is that he was arguing from some unexamined assumptions in his head that dictated stuff like ‘smaller government means bigger corporations.’ Or ‘People aren’t having kids because they’re poor’ not because taxes are too high and the rules around keeping small kids in a house insane. And I couldn’t pierce his certainties, to the point he was actually arguing with what he thought I’d said and meant, not with anything I’d typed.

Part of the truly lunatic stuff was his telling me he was no commie, then telling me the poor and working class are somehow responsible for all the crime, because apparently poverty causes crime. Marx would love him.

But at the base of it was a complete lack of understanding of why employers pay wages and what sets the level of pay.

He seemed to assume that we were in a basic communist system where you were offered make work. at some pre-set pay, and therefore we had to accept it. Or something.

He failed to get that employers hire people not to be charitable but because they need some work done. And that work is worth some amount of money.

Take my business. For a long time, it’s been stuck at a certain level, unless I can pay contractors to do things. I’d love to have my assistant work for me full time, and I PROBABLY (with difficulty the first year) could pay her a very low salary which would nonetheless, since she works remote, be a great addition to her family income. What I can’t afford is the paperwork, regulation, and mandatory contributions that go with it.

But let’s suppose that you’re hired to flip burgers or check out people in the supermarket. And this is worth oh, $10 or so to the people hiring you. Why would you think that arbitrarily telling people to pay employees $20 would work?

People are likely already paying the highest they can, because that gets them the best labor they can get. (Particularly in a relatively tight labor market, which we have if you don’t count illegals.) So, if they’re not paying $20 dollars an hour it’s because it’s not feasible for their business right now.

You force them to pay that, and workers will get replaced with robots, companies will close, companies will fire legitimate workers and hire illegals, etc. etc. etc.

One of the things it will do is make it much harder to get that first, all important job and thereby worsen youth unemployment which is already bad enough. Or products will become so expensive that people can’t afford them.

When raving idiot went on about how if you pay the workers too little they can’t afford to buy things, he forgot if the employers have to pay too much for employees, then the product will be more expensive.

I swear these people think that employers are out to “exploit” the workers, just for funsie. Judging by his excursion into rage-envy of inherited money I’m going to assume he really thinks it’s two separate classes and no one who is rich ever had to get a job, or work up to a better job. This is by the way not only NOT the norm in the US but so far from the norm it’s ridiculous.

He also had a moment of rage about how if we don’t raise minimum wage it all goes to the 1%. As I said, I can’t actually discuss economics with someone referring to his home universe where the sky is made of green cheese.

What I can say is that you can’t regulate the price and wages. Or rather, you can, but all you’re creating is unemployment, government dependence and a black market.

The problem is not this lone crazy on twitter though. The problem is that years ago I looked at my kids’ economics text books.

They were all about “given that all these workers are equally qualified, would you hire the divorced mother, the handicapped worker, or this minority.”

And that’s wrong. It’s utterly and completely wrong, in the same way this man is wrong. It’s approaching business as a sort of social responsibility. “I’ll pay x because it’s good for society.” It ignores that businesses have to make a profit, to pay for labor and more products, and make it worth the owner’s spending money on things.

I mean businesses are in business to make money, which then allows the owner to take the money and invest it in other businesses to make more money.

This incidentally employs more people and gives people more products to buy. All without the benevolent hand of government planners. And yes, sure, minorities and divorced mothers, and all that should be able to work. But again, to be honest, while there will be bigoted employers, the successful ones won’t care about the employee’s personal life, unless it relates to the business. Instead, they will get the best employee they can for the best price they can. Because that’s how they make money, so they can invest it in more businesses.

I was assured by mental guy on twitter that my liberal (I think he means libertarian) theories of economics don’t work. But I wasn’t expounding any theories. I was simply explaining that economics is a science and things you do have consequences.

Sure, we all wish everyone could make a lot of money, but I don’t think legislating that you pay people a lot of money just because is how you get there. Mostly, what you’ll do is create a society in which few people work legally and those few have to pay for a massive number of welfare cases.

It’s time to respect economics as a science. You cannot legislate price and wages anymore than you can negotiate the weather. Which, of course, the crazy leftists also would like to do.

Thing is that wishcasting always loses to reality. Reality always wins, regardless.

And economics is very much reality.

But not very hard. I just don’t feel a post today. Nothing to do with the eclipse. We just have a ton of stuff to do and I have chapters to write.

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: Thus Shook Zarathrustra (Bob and Nikki Book 45)

Sally has finally cleared the new planet. Surely that means it’s ready for people to come and check out, right? Our shepherd still gets a vote. Come see how much effort it takes to get a good, used planet into livable shape.

FROM MARK BOSSINGHAM: Chasing Naomi

July 1969. Clive, Iowa, Earth. Sixteen-year-old Allie has a big decision to make: Watch the lunar landing with her mom in their run-down double-wide trailer or boost to the stars aboard a grumpy, sentient deep space exploration vehicle (DSEV-424) buried in her backyard for 5,000 years.

Accompanied by Gem, a dead space captain, now a glitchy hologram, Allie stops on the moon and surprises Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard the Eagle lunar lander. (Neil never mentioned the encounter to Houston).

With Gem as her guide, Allie survives her first space battle and drops Gem off at a military regrow center in the middle of a spaceport casino. The teen’s adventure lifts off at a military space academy, where she faces danger, makes friends, battles enemies, and discovers her own surprising abilities.

Along with Rin, Sky, and Gem, Allie sets out on a mission to locate and defeat a rogue fleet led by Naomi, a mad-as-a-hatter warship, all while navigating the complexities of growing up and finding her place in the galaxy.

FROM AMANDA S. GREEN: Surtr’s Fury

Twenty-five years ago, the world changed. Rifts opened around the globe, releasing rogue magics that changed everything. Creatures once believed to exist only in movies and books were now real. People who once believed themselves “normal” found their latent paranormal abilities awakened and amplified. The land and creatures nearest the rifts were forever changed, whether for good or ill remains to be seen.

Either my parents had a warped sense of humor or they were forewarned about what my life would be like living as close to the North Texas Rift as I did. Why else name me Ripley after the main character in their favorite science fiction movie? Then they were gone. A basilisk killed my dad and Mom disappeared while investigating reports of rogue werewolves. At least that’s what I’d been told, and I never had reason to doubt it.

Until now. Someone attacked my home and my friends. When I discover who, they’ll learn it is never a good idea to mess with someone who plays with fire, literally as well as figuratively.

My name is Ripley Walker, and those responsible for hurting my friends will soon learn the error of their ways.

FROM ROBERT WENSON: Murder at Minstrel Manor: An Edwina Hackett Mystery

“Killed! As in murdered?” With these words, Edwina Hackett launches herself into trouble. Wealthy and reclusive inventor Sebastian Oldfield is found dead in his study on a stormy winter night. There’s no doubt it’s murder: the wounds in his head and the bloodstained paperweight testify to that. And Edwina, who has come to Minstrel Manor to paint Oldfield’s portrait, will let nothing stop her from following the ensuing investigation.

For newly-promoted Detective-Inspector Mallow of the East Fenshire Police, this is his first big case. He finds himself up against a plethora of suspects: the butler with a shady past; the dead man’s enigmatic assistant; the ne’er-do-well nephew who is deeply in debt; and the tenant farmer who had been summarily evicted.

And then there are the questions. How did the murderer get into the study? How did he get out? What is the significance of the illiterate note left under the body? Who has been forging Oldfield’s name? And what role has the mysterious and elusive Barnabas Merryweather been playing?

FROM J. D. COOPER: The Companions: The Bond

In the mist of ancient time, a time long forgotten by most, the Sidhe ruled Ireland. They were small folk, no higher than a mushroom, but they could work mighty magic. Each one was gifted in a unique way. Together they created beautiful works of art and magnificent structures, engineering beyond many modern marvels. Crops were blessed and harvests were bountiful. There was little suffering in Sidhe society for they cared for each other and used their magic to help their fellow Sidhe. For eons past, peace and harmony had reigned throughout the land, even since the foundation of the earth, for the Sidhe arose as an overflow of the creation of their island. Their magic emanated from Ireland itself. There was no Sidhe word for war.
Then, the Milesians came.
Eons passed as the Sidhe were diminished and began to lose their magic. According to an ancient prophecy,, a Sidhe who could make light would restore the Sidhe magic and allow them to live free from fear.
Jayspark was born into a world of diminished Sidhe. His family hid from the bigs until one fateful day when he met a lonely human boy. The two became friends and their bond created a magic that would finally allow the Sidhe to face their oppressors.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fire and Forge (Modern Gods Book 3)

Long after their worshipers are forgotten, the gods are still holding up a corner of the bar at the Godshead Tavern. Some have learned since their stories became myths, some never did, and some are still finding old curses coming back to haunt…

Poseidon wants Artemis to lift Medusa’s curse so he and Medusa can resume relations, while Chronos seeks another chance to be whole and get to know his kids.

Meanwhile, Ares falls head over heels for a mortal half his size who manages to kick his ass not once but twice, and Loki’s son is trying to rebuild his life (and his credit) after a short marriage to Pandora.

Life and love runs smoothly for no one, god or mortal. And another disaster is brewing…

FROM MARY CATELLI: Curses And Wonders

A collection of tales of wonder and magic.

A prince sets out to win his way to the dragon’s lair.

A woman fights a curse on her lands.

A man returns to his castle, bringing a magical sword, and worse things.

And more tales.

Includes “Dragon Slayer”, “The Book of Bone”, “Mermaids’ Song”, “Witch-Prince Ways”, “Sword and Shadow”, “Eyes of the Sorceress”, “Fever and Snow” — and “The Emperor’s Clothes”, which is not sold separately.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Spiral Horn, Spiral Tusk

A unicorn’s horn for the king, a medal for the admiral — but what for the lass who makes it possible?

Rissa possesses the dolphin-singer gift, which saved her life when the thief-taker found her. If she can guide the fleet to the white whale with the spiral tusk, she might win back her freedom.

But first she must return to land — and the sea has become angry at her betrayal…

A short story of the Ixilon universe

Originally published in Beyond the Last Star: Stories from the Next Beginning, edited by Sherwood Smith.

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: MARVELOUS

Yesterday I did something I used to do more often, and looked into the latest discoveries in paleontology and archeology and such.

And shortly after remembered why I no longer do it every month.

Apparently the latest, greatest news is that — yo, this is amazing — they’re finally not studying pre-history through the eyes of racism and sexism, and as such have determined that pre-historic hunting parties were as much as 80% female.

This is a discovery that of course makes perfect sense. No doubt the males were all back at base camp, chest-feeding the babies. Thereby freeing the pre-historic girl bosses to go and hunt them some mammoth.

If you’re staring at the screen with dropped jaws, I haven’t gone insane. I know this is utter and complete nonsense. It’s not my fault that the people running all our intellectual institutions, including research are morons studying to be idiots.

Applying the Heinlein filter for the actual reason they have to believe that up to 80% — 80%! — of pre-historic hunters were female, i.e. “Again and again, what are the facts?” we get that they found one grave — one — where the DNA of the remains are female (and here we’ll keep quiet about the strange idea that 6000 (I think) year old DNA is easily extracted, non-contaminated, etc. We’ll pretend we don’t know all the times they walked back “new species” because the DNA amplification techniques CREATED those discoveries.)

Let’s assume they’re correct and this was a female, buried with hunting implements. Sure, maybe she was a hunter. There will always be one or two in a large enough band, for the reason that in primitive societies some women are brought up as male: lack of a son, need to support the family, etc. (It is rarely a sexual thing, or because the person WANTED this. In fact it’s often decided for them before they are weaned. In fact, in primitive/ancient societies including the ones of our ancestors that we know about in detail, there was remarkably little room for self expression, self-conception or self interest. When you live close to the bone, such things are subjugated to the needs of the family, the clan, the tribe, more or less in that order. Because survival is hard.) We’re also informed, in BREATHLESS tones that it’s now thought that spear throwers were used to make sure women could throw spears fast enough! That’s why they exist.

But spear throwers are made and used by males, the world over. Go look at the tubes of you and you’ll see videos of people making them and using them, and they’re all male.

Further there is no society today of the ones still surviving more or less in a stone age way that has that kind of distribution for hunters. More importantly, there is no record of them, going as far back as we can.

Maybe this is because yes indeed, the past (being much closer to the bone, and therefore less willing to indulge in story telling) viewed things through a racist and sexist lens. Why not? After all I grew up in an intensely patriarchal society that still hadn’t adapted to the idea of women taking any hand in intellectual pursuits. And yes, that was unwarranted sexism. And every society is racist against every other (Actually culturist, but it’s often couched in terms of race.)

But still… You’d think that here and there there would be a race of valiant Amazons, whose men stay home and pound the taro while they go out and hunt, right?

But the truth is that if you put this notion to the remaining stone age people, they will laugh till they pee themselves. Yes, I know, I know, they internalized sexism from the evil white colonizers whom they’ve met three times in the last 100 years. That’s how powerful and evil whiteness is.

Or, listen, okay? I know this is just crazy talk, but maybe males and females are different and have evolved to fulfill different reproductive functions. And the reproductive function of females is more onerous than that of males. Women in our natural state, and unless something has gone seriously wrong — which of course makes us of less use to the tribe — spend most of our lives pregnant, nursing or carrying for children too young to care for themselves.

I know for well nourished women of the 21st century who are maybe pregnant once or twice in their lives this might not seem incompatible with being a mighty hunter, but please, try to realize that there is no such thing a consistently well fed hunter gatherer. Not in our terms. They might be well fed for some time period, but not over their entire lives. And for women nutrition is very important, because we grow entire other humans inside us, and our body has a way of leeching thing we need to give them to the baby.

You might think that “losing a tooth per child” is an old wives tale, but I did. Because in childhood I didn’t have enough milk or dairy products (Mom being convinced they were a trigger for eczema. They weren’t. Sugar was. But… culture.)

Now imagine people living at stone age level, where eating organs is necessary to get vitamins. And women…. Well, most women were not in great shape. In most primitive societies the world over, in all of recorded history women and children eat last.

This is not sexism, it’s “men need strength to walk for days in pursuit of an herd.” Now, if women were hunters… Yeah, that. They would walk for sometimes three days straight, while on the verge of giving birth. Give birth, then walk back three days. Carrying the baby and the dead animals, of course.

This is nonsense on stilts as any woman who has ever given birth will tell you. Yeah, yeah, Chinese peasants gave birth and went right back to work. Well, it was the Cultural revolution and they didn’t want to be killed, so some/many probably did. But this was not good for either mother or baby.

And in the end this is what is driving me bonkers about this drivel. If women want to have fantasies about great female warriors or leaders in pre-history, what harm does it do?

Oh, yeah, there was also the fact a great pre-historic ruler in Iberia was FEMALE. (If you heard that in breathless tones, that’s how I heard it in my head too.) She was buried with SYMBOLS of kingship! She was obviously a great war leader! And this means women had far more of a role in leading these societies than we thought!

Or you know, it could mean that she was born to kingship or clan head, because there were no sons, and that her role was like that of many warrior-queens in history who did strategize but not actually fight. (Most rulers didn’t. Male or female.) Or she could be all that and a rare exception. It still doesn’t show that “women” had a greater role. Only that perhaps this woman did. And doesn’t erase the fact that in most stone-age societies recorded by other civilizations women didn’t take such roles unless the society was in such trouble that they had to and they were the only ones available.

Because women’s normal role of producing the next generation and keeping them alive was more important. Because without the next generation there was no future for the tribe, when the current generation aged out. And no one to look after the elders.

So, what harm does it do to let educated women of the 21st century have their little fantasies? If it makes them happy to think history was girl bosses as far as the eye can see, why not give it to them?

First of all, because it’s a lie. Lies have a way of corrupting everything they touch. It is impossible for humans to know the truth of everything as far back as it goes, but it is important to try, and to at least not tell lies.

Second, because it creates hatred between men and women, which in turn destroys our future. If women were always equal or superior even to men, in pursuits we view as male, then the only reason this was obscured in the recent past is because of men oppressing women. And that must mean it’s some sort of war, instead of a co-operation.

Third, because it creates in women an expectation of what they should be able to do that’s completely insane. I felt guilty as heck because I wasn’t up and functioning normally after giving birth, because “peasant women in China did” — which was probably a gross lie, but even if it weren’t didn’t mean it was good for you. (But also led insurance to deny care after 24 hours, which had its own issues.) — I routinely feel guilty because I need to sleep 8 hours, because I was raised on “the driven artist” myth. If young women are raised to think that their foremothers walked three days straight through while in the third tri-mester, they’ll feel pampered and inadequate and do themselves violence.

Fourth, because it erases womanhood. I know what they think they’re doing is showing how powerful and strong women were, but what they are actually doing is saying the only roles that matter are male, and therefore if women are to be important they must have filled this role that — until yesterday — we knew mostly men fulfilled. Having children, child care, and child birth are suddenly unimportant. Cooking — which in those days was far more difficult — and keeping the shelter from leaking/keeping the tribe covered, curing pelts, looking after the aged and the sick, none of that matters. Gathering supplemental food that keeps the tribe from starving when the hunting is bad? Doesn’t matter.

Walking for days after an herd and driving them over a cliff and/or making war on neighboring tribes is the ONLY THING that matters, because it’s traditionally considered a male role. And the only good women fulfill male roles.

This is bad crazy.

Anyone with any knowledge of biology, anthropology, or you know… how humans actually work, knows this is nonsense. Anyone who has lived in any way close to the bone (even if still in incredible abundance by pre-historic standards) knows this is nonsense.

But it’s being published in scientific magazines, because our intellectual elite produced by an educational establishment incapable to teaching people to read fluently and devoted only to indoctrination, is so poisoned with story they think they can wish cast the past into existence.

They completely ignore that the reason we can and have overcome racism and sexism to a great degree is because we live in a time of incredible abundance.

And they’re willing to throw it all away for a feel good story that doesn’t pass the laugh test. Even if it hurts the future.