Sometimes while I’m here, in the evening chair, in the family room, writing my blog post and doing instapundit, my husband watches a movie. Ranging on what the movie is, this can range from distracting because I watch it or parts of it, to infuriating.

Elysium was the second kind. in fact, it was so bad that about halfway through I went upstairs to bed because otherwise I was going to just start screaming at the TV and not stop. The reasons were many from worldbuilding — LA looks like the bad parts of Mexico city, there’s nuns who raise orphans who aren’t orphans, everyone speaks Spanish, except the designated oppressors who speak Africans or English with a South African accent, and who also inexplicably seem to always know where the hero is, or something.

ANYWAY, moving right along…..

Perhaps the thing that infuriated me most was the harping on the “overpopulation” and how there are so many of us that we’re destroying the planet (and that’s why the rich moved to a space habitat.)

It infuriated me for several reasons:

First, even demographers are finally talking about “catastrophic population crash” taking overpopulation as gospel is insane. Yes, I know the movie was done a few years ago — I don’t know how many and I’m too lazy to look it up — but even then they should have had an inkling of a glimmer of a thought that perhaps the “population bomb” wasn’t precisely coming true. For one, because all the predictions Ehrlich ever made about it (or anything else) failed. In fact, a good way to predict the future is to look at whatever Paul Ehrlich says and believe the opposite. In that, he might be invaluable.

Second, Population exploding to the level they posited in a still recognizable future might be — for real — impossible for the simple reason that people who don’t exist can’t have kids. I note they had some inkling they weren’t seeing this gigantic population explosion around them, hence why everyone in the overgrown LA favela spoke Spanish. Also probably the reason for the nuns. I didn’t understand the Spanish (I could have, but would have to slow it way down) and they didn’t translate it in subtitles, but I wonder if the nuns were there to give the idea of those horrible Catholics who reproduce like rabbits. At any rate, not only is this idea that Spanish speakers (Or Arabic speakers, or–) are reproducing like rabbits and that if they keep it up they’ll destroy the world one of the oldest lies of eugenics, but the premise is also almost certainly completely wrong.

It’s hard to tell, because no one does accurate numbers not even us, and we’re practically autistic in our obsession with numbers, but everyone who pokes closer panics, because population does in fact seem to be falling worldwide, and people of all races and creeds are having fewer and fewer children.

Crappy cultures seem overpopulated only because they are so crappy they can’t provide even for the few young people they have.

Third – All the problems they attribute to overpopulation are not overpopulation, but the problems of crappy cultures. In the brief snatch of world-in-action, few have jobs and there is no societal trust or respect for private property. There’s nothing to an “overpopulated area” that causes that. Yes, in the seventies it was believed it was inevitable with higher population densities to get out of control crime, and lack of security and– But Rudy Giulliani and others proved it was not inevitable. It was a choice. It was Democrat culture choosing to mollycoddle criminals and punish the law abiding. Apparently the Democrats love that choice because they are making it again. But again, it has nothing to do with population density. It has to do with crappy government and crappy culture, and encouraging the worst in humans.

Just because you set the world on fire again and again and again, it doesn’t mean the world is particularly flammable, only that your beliefs make the world burn.

Now, why did the population thing get under my skin to that point? Well, mostly because it is probably the most important fight of our time.

All the problems we used to think were caused by overpopulation: the loss of wealth, the inability to feed everyone, etc. are in fact problems in low population. Because the highest resource of humanity is humans. We are clever apes, who can engineer our way into anything.

Oh, as a side note, before I go on with this, the movie made much of the fact that Elysium — the space habitat — didn’t allow the Spanish speaking, favella-dwelling poor in. This was of course evil and racist. But in fact if the culture of the poor was what was shown in the movie, the habitat couldn’t let them in. Because they’d just make it the same as they’d made of the Earth, and nothing would be improved. So this whole thing was an argument from pointless and counterproductive compassion.

But to return to population and our real issue, which is a lack of people. And since people create resources, by finding them or producing them, a lack of resources with it. The economy doesn’t work when the next generation is markedly smaller and the one after that even smaller than that.

There is also a psychological side. Humans work for the future. And the future of humans is other humans. Part of the reason socialism kills slowly is that the generations rely on the state, not each other, and while young people think “why bother” and don’t have kids, but kids are needed for the state to provide for the old, and more importantly, to give adults a sense of the future.

I think if we survive this bottle neck, we’re going to find that our subconscious has a need for a certain number of kids just around in the environment, kind of like I found out through the lockdown that I needed to see strangers. That the one day a week Dan and I drove around and did museums/zoo/went to dinner with friends made a huge difference and foregoing it made me spiral down into unending, bottomless depression, because something in the ape brain, something inarticulate and possibly inarticulable (Pshaw, totally a word) made it so I had to see a certain number of strangers every so often or I’d think that I was alone in the ice floe, left to die, or something.

In the same way, I think we’re going to find we need to see a certain number of young people/children. And we need to live with/around a certain number of young people and children.

If you think of when our instincts were set and what child mortality was set, I suspect that number is fairly high.

And this morning, while talking to an online friend about cats and why they are so necessary to so many of us, and why their deaths hit us so hard, I realized that’s an indicator.

It’s not disputed that cats have kind of hacked us into taking care of them — or we hacked them — by changing their features and sounds so that they mimic the look and feel of an infant to our back-brain.

Cats have always been with us, and some number of us always found them irresistible. But it’s also undeniable that their popularity is growing all over, and that people not only have larger numbers of cats, but treat the cats increasingly like children and get more and more attached to them.

I realized to my discomfort sometime last year that I need young cats around to feel even vaguely optimistic, in fact.

Well, think about it, in the times when our back brain was programmed, I’d be, if not dead then the tribe matriarch, whose main value would be to mind the kids while the parents hunted and gathered and to impart to them my dubious wisdom.

So I probably need sixteen or seventeen kids around all the time, most of them the toddling ages — too old to be carried by mommy while gathering too young to help and not run away.

The cats are perfect for this. And if it were just me, since I don’t want to open a daycare, they’re the perfect hack. And I’m from one of those weird families that always adored cats. (Also a consistently relatively low fertility family, which might tie in.)

But more and more of humanity’s sanity might be riding on their fuzzy butts. And no matter if Engineer-Indy is engineer, cats are not the future of humanity.

We’re in deep, deep trouble. And evil pieces of propaganda blaming more humans for all ills possible — but mostly imaginary — just push us deeper into trouble.

Maybe it’s time our overculture got — or was given — a clue, and stopped killing us softly with their bullshit.

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 LILANIA BEGLEY: Star Bright : A Sweet Western Romance

Snow is sweeping across the plains, and Cande finds herself caught in its path. She needs shelter, first of all. Secondly, she needs the sky to clear if she’s going to have a once-in-a-lifetime chance at the comet she is tracking. What she finds in the midst of the storm is something she couldn’t have anticipated in the form of a man who shares her snowbound cabin.

FROM HENRY VOGEL: The Princess Scout

Separated from their classmates during a drill, Scout Cadets Anne Villas and Christine Montide find themselves stranded on a previously uncharted world. By pure chance they’ve discovered a lost human colony that wants to stay lost, and the rulers of this planet will use all the power they have to keep it a secret.

Anne is not just any cadet, though. She’s “The Princess Scout” — the daughter of David Rice, the Scout Corps’ legendary hero, and Callan, indomitable heir to the throne of Mordan. With the might of a whole planet against them, can Anne and Chris find a way to not merely survive, but win?

The Princess Scout mashes up space opera excitement with the dangerous atmosphere of a Cold War thriller, resulting in the latest standalone hit novel in Henry Vogel’s best-selling Scout series. Read it today!

FROM JAMES TOTTEN: Retaliation: Breaching Ain’t Easy.

Unmanned Combat Drones, Russian enforcement battalion tactical groups, and Artificial Intelligence compete on the modern battlefield. What happens when the drone drivers are cut off? How can you hide over 200 new T95s from spy satellites? The 49th Armored Division meets the 4th Guards Tank Division on the steppes of Russia near Kursk. Russia launches nukes again. Will the new Johnny Five save the day? Need someone to say, Let’s Get Ready to Rumble.

FROM MEL DUNAY: Shadow Captain (Star Master Book 1)

His one chance to escape slavery could trap his brother in a terrible fate! Jetay has been on the run with his brother for a long time, hiding his psychic powers from the evil Red Knights. Living as a slave on a star freighter, Jetay dreams of freeing himself and his brother, and of wielding his powers openly. On a frontier planet, Lady Lanati of the Partisan Alliance seeks his help for a secret mission. It will take him across the stars to the edge of a black hole, with a Red Knight chasing him every step of the way. He might finally get a chance to use his powers for good. But the price of that chance may be too high, putting his brother in grave danger. Can Jetay save himself and his brother without sacrificing Lanati and her friends? If he can’t find a way to save them all, the battle against evil may be over before it begins….

BY ARTHUR O. FRIEL, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Explorer (Annotated): The classic pulp adventure

To ride the white rapids, to plunge into the throbbing depths of the Orinoco jungle into the forbidden land of the poisoned arrow Indians — all this Hammond would dare, in the full confidence of youth. Experience he had absolutely none.

Of course, there was his new companion Thomas, but then, he was only a trader.

• This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving historical and genre context.

FROM J. L. CURTIS: The Short Stories: Volume 1

These stories were written for various anthologies I’ve appeared in, so there is a large variance in the tone and type of stories. I hope you enjoy this collection, and thank you for spending your hard earned dollars on it! There will be links at the end of the book for each anthology. You might want to check them out, as there are some great writers in them!

FROM LORI JANESKI: Raven (The Carter Files Book 2)

Revenge is a dish best served in space.

Dozens of children across the Interplanetary Commonwealth have disappeared from their homes. There are no motives, no ransom demands, no bodies, and nothing to connect the victims to each other – except the kidnapper’s signature, a single raven feather left at each scene.

With no progress on the case, it has been reassigned to Special Agent David Carter and his new team of Division 7 agents. Together with his wife, retired agent and profiler Veronique Carter, they must race against the clock–and obstacles within their own agency–to find the missing children before it’s too late.

But the closer they get to the culprit, the more it appears his real target might be them.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Technoserf

The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby’s homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will.

Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he’s offered a chance to fix it.

Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters’ metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?

FROM SPENCER E. HART: Fire in the Andes

Pulp-Noir meets Sci-Fi. A short adventure. The Year is 1949, in a timeline not quite our own.

A missing atomic engineer. A lovely but sad senorita. And another assignment for Bert Henderson, this time to the mountains of Argentina.Did the engineer defect to the other side? And what’s with all these Germans?

Will Bert survive long enough to uncover the mystery? Or will he succumb to the Fire in the Andes?

FROM ILENE KAYE: It Had To Be Yuu

Only Yuu could manage to get himself kidnapped—on a planet in the middle of a blizzard, no less—and not even know it. It’s up to space survey pilot Audra Marin to fly to the rescue, but when she gets her childhood playmate home alive, she’ll make him pay.
Only Audra could stumble into a fraud investigation and mistake it for a kidnapping. Trading company heir Yuu Ra-Dezan has to find a way to keep Audra from complicating his efforts to find an embezzler. “She’s my fiancée” seems like the best cover story—but when did his childhood nemesis turn into the hottest woman in the galaxy?
When his host’s robots try to hold them at blaster-point, Yuu and Audra trip over each other to foil a plot to steal the fastest ship in the galaxy. The only piracy these two will accept is stealing each others’ hearts.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Entanglement

In the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.

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.

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: TRAIL

Under The Surface a blast from the past from December 6 2021

Last year, in our escape from lockdown Colorado, we visited a riverboat museum near Kansas City, and that was….. bizarre.

No, not the fact we went to the museum. Given how starved we were to see human beings, how addicted we are to museums, the weirder the better, and the fact I grew up on Mark Twain, it was almost guaranteed we’d go and poke about the museum.

The museum itself was also not bizarre. It was an interesting snapshot of life just before the civil war. (We incidentally found that one of my husband’s collateral ancestors (they were the only family of the name, in the town, but the name is not in his ancestry, so a brother or cousin of an ancestor) was bringing guns into slave states, in boxes marked “bibles.” Which frankly is no more than we expected. It’s rather annoying we have no idea what happened to that young man.) However, I grew up in a house that had been in the family for generations, and among people who never threw anything away that could still be used. So a lot of the dishes and the glassware looked like the stuff I used every day as a kid. Heck, a lot of the shoes and such looked like stuff you could find poking around the attics and outbuildings of the area in which I grew up. (And of COURSE we did. We were kids.)

I mean, it was interesting, but not startling or revelatory.

What was startling and revelatory was where the boat, which had sank some 150 (? I’m too lazy to look it up. Bear with me) before discovery was found: In the middle of a wheat field.

Apparently rivers, in the great flatlands of America have a tendency to meander wildly. Okay. I kind of get that. But the fascinating part is that no one had noticed. The boat sank in a time of newspapers, and reports, and writing and more importantly property records. And people have been looking for it pretty much since it sank. BUT THEY WEREN’T LOOKING IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

The family that owned the wheat field in which the riverboat was buried, had no clue it had ever been anything but a wheat field in living memory. A river deep enough that a floating palace was lost with all its contents (but no lives, save for a poor mule left tied up) just changed course slowly enough that…. well, it sort of became a wheat field.

Now, I understand that due to modern engineering this doesn’t happen anymore. Or at least it’s not supposed to. But all the same, bear with me a moment.

One of my favorite blogs was casting doubt that the republic still exists.

This is a little…. How do I put it? I love the blogger, but d*mn if you’re more depressive than I am you need to start reality-checking obsessively. (I do.)

The republic is sort of a schrodinger thing. If we’re going on “We only have a republic if it obeys the constitution as written”…. it probably ceased to exist twenty years in.

Of course it didn’t. There are…. meanderings and latitudes given and necessitated by the fact that we’re humans and that frankly tech innovation has thrown us a few curve balls that our founders, also being human and therefore fallible, no matter how amazing, could never have anticipated.

The biggest curve ball, though was mass production, mass communication and generally mass everything, which might have been a logical step in the industrial revolution, but the level to which it went was definitely had to see from centuries before.

The Mass Everything Age almost necessitated the antithesis of the constitution: centralization of power, power in the hands of an unelected bureaucracy, all of it aided and abetted by the press covering it up.

If the republic is gone, it has been gone since at least the 30s, probably the 20s. Sorry, but nothing we’re seeing, from political prisoners to outrageous treason of both the People and the Country in the seats of power is new. FDR did it. Woodrow Wilson did it.

What is new and revolutionary is that we’re no longer in the “Mass Everything” age.

The left, who are the natural people — hyper social, power-craving, etc — to ascend that type of hierarchy are in control of the commanding heights of mass communication and bureaucracy, etc.

Their problem is that this is increasingly less relevant. And every time they make a major power grab, like the psy-ops we call the Covidiocy (NOT the virus. Yeah, the virus exists. It’s a severe flu, that fortunately kills very few people under 80. BUT the measures taken around and supposedly because of it, and the fear mongering in the mass media) loses them power. I’m highly amused in the grocery store by the — I’m sure corporate-enforced — announcements coming over the loudspeaker thanking us for wearing masks for “everyone’s safety.” Mind you, there’s usually ONE person in the store in a mask. Someone whose eyes look perfectly deranged and who is often dragging a masked toddler (poor thing). The rest of us at this point are treating it as “Something only crazy people and corporate entities believe is needed, anymore.”

And it will be hard, if not impossible to gin up the next panic. (which is why I’m sure the next grab will be a world war. But that’s something else.)

At this point everything those who belong to the old structures and long for centralized, massed power and communication can do only turns us against them and their obsessions. It’s sort of like…. a vaccination.

Look, America is an idea so powerful that though honored mostly in the breach, it has changed the world. Granted the echo-revolutions abroad were mostly crazy. But the fact that even the worst regimes have to FAKE being elected tells you the power of the idea.

It won’t perish. And we have a chance to ah…. really …. I hate it to say this but we have a chance to build back better, closer to the infrastructure the founders gave us, one better suited to a world of fractured production and communication.

Look at the people who supposedly have power. Note the trail of flames from their hair. No one who is winning is that scared.

But Sarah, you say, then why haven’t we revolted already.

Well — ask anyone on the left — we are revolting. Okay, jokes aside, we are rebelling. In a hundred different ways, we are turning our backs on the idea that “the best people” have our interests in mind, or that even if they did they could be trusted to carry them out, or any of that.

It used to be the institutions no one would doubt were the medical establishment that flew under the flag of ‘public health’ and public schooling. I mean, we screamed, yelled and pointed to abuses (and slow ratcheting thereof) and got told it was still mostly good. Oh, yeah, and the collection of statistics. Even when it was obvious they were lying, they were still used to slap us into silence.

I won’t say that’s a thing of the past but it’s becoming so. And it will become more so faster, the more they struggle.

Most of this type of movement is invisible, until it isn’t.

Today someone shared a meme lamenting that the right doesn’t just have right wing stations, etc. but is creating their own separate structures for information and commerce. Well, duh. The fact this is a surprise for them is amusing. For most of us, though, it’s news. We know we need it, but the movement is as yet slow and if you’re not looking in the right place you’ll never see it.

But it’s like that. This is how society changes. Not from above with fiats. That only distorts it. But slowly, from the bottom up. First almost imperceptibly and then all at once.

And then we forget that there was ever a wheat field there, and return to thinking that things are “as they ever were.” But they’re not. And you can see the signs if you look. The left is looking and getting scared. And scared people make stupid moves, which unfortunately affect us too.

Look, after a hundred years of psy-ops to make us feel isolated and small and like theirs was the inevitable future win, the surprising thing is that the worm is turning at all, not how slow it is.

Yes, we went along to get along, because we really thought we were small and isolated and because in the absence of alternate structures, we had to earn a living in their world.

For many of us it’s still that way. But the water is shifting. The silt is moving in to what was once river bed. Culture is on the move.

And there are far more of us than there ever were of them. And we’re an ornery bunch. Had to be to stand looking at mass-communication, mass-education, mass-entertainment and mass-bureaucracy, and plant our hands on our waists and say “No, you move.”

We’ve got this. It’s slow. Infuriatingly slow, because we’ve been standing (we thought) alone so long. And cold is the brotherless back, as our Dave Freer tells us.

But it’s changing. And it will heal over the break, and function again, at least for a while.

America is not dead. It is asleep. But it’s stirring. And it’s opened one eye. The rising will be swift and startling.

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark. And be not afraid.

Faced with the disaster of the fall of the USSR and the multiple disasters communism and socialism have engendered across the world, since, the left had to discover something very wrong in the free market.

And as usual when they can’t find anything, they invent something. And then try to convince everyone it’s a huge issue.

I’m always puzzled by the duckies who immediately fall for it.

For the last… oh, thirty years, they’ve been screaming at the top of their lungs about “inequality.” (Oh, lack of diversity and inclusion too. But sit down and wait the turn of those craptastic concepts. We’ll get to the full DIE IED that they’re trying to bomb our culture with soon enough.)

If you think it hasn’t been that long, you ain’t thinking. Actually all the way back in the eighties, as the right (ish) started to fight back, they started howling about how we were becoming a society of the “haves and have nots.” I remember this scaring the living spit out of me, as Dan and I were both kind of hanging loose, on our own, trying to make it by the skin of our teeth, me in a country where my hard fought-for credentials meant nothing, he in a job where no one he knew or was related to could give a boost. And both of us could expect exactly no financial help from parents. (Though over time my parents did help, here and there, where they could, and particularly with things for the boys, like their first cars.)

Weirdly, the doom they forecast didn’t come upon us. Yes, there are people who are ludicrously rich and people who are very poor. But to the extent there is any injustice to that (and there is, mostly for the young because they hit a world where the ladders had been pulled up before they got here) it is not because of the free market but because of government rules, regulations, tariffs, taxation, the left’s blinkered attempts to FORCE the unwilling into unions and oh, yeah, the vast importation of cheap labor without a by your leave or any legality. If you removed all that, there would still be vast gulfs of inequality, sure, but here’s the question: WHY DO YOU CARE?

I’ll wait while you finish gesticulating and sputtering, shall I?

No, there is no obvious reasons why you should Give A Rat’s Ass (GARA.) The image the left — knowingly — conjures is something like South America, where people wallow in massive riches, while others live in abject poverty, with no running water or toilets or electricity. But the countries where that happens are inevitably under the boot of a form of socialism or another.

In America… well, we’re different, you know? I heard the media publicizing that some mean billionaire who is mean said that making only 400k a year was a shame, and he couldn’t understand how any man could endure such a thing.

Bah. We will never even come close to making that. And?

I presume someone making that leads a certain kind of lifestyle, which involves not doing a lot of things we do for ourselves, some of which we even enjoy (cleaning the house is my exercise program, for instance. And I like refinishing and repurposing old furniture. I’m finally getting a sewing area in order, to do other stuff, too.) And it involves not having the two-three hours together in the evening we have where I’m usually doing next day’s blog while semi-watching a movie Dan is watching. (It’s not a sacrifice. I fall asleep if all I do is watch a movie.) And it probably involves few walks in the park. Few home cooked meals. And a lot of travel. (I hate traveling.)

All of which boils down to, yes, he makes vastly more money than we dream of, but you know what? We have a snug house, which has the miraculous ability to keep us hot or cold depending on what’s needed, so we enjoy comfort year around. We have enough to eat and can even go out occasionally. And if it weren’t for various health issues could buy ready-prepared meals that are tasty and of decent quality pretty much all the time. We have appliances that make the house cleaning a trivial chore, instead of the monster that ate our foremothers’ days.

Lifestyle wise everyone but the utterly poorest Americans (and in those cases there is usually some impairment involved, either addiction or mental issues. Which frankly we could help with much more if so much chaff weren’t thrown into the air about equality) we live like the very rich of the early to mid twentieth century. Heck, in many things we live massively better. No money could buy things like new treatments for medical conditions, or being able to communicate around the world in the blink of an eye.

Yep there are people living massively better. But we have all the necessities and more for the amount of work and effort we’re willing to put in. And so do the vast majority of people who didn’t arrive in the country yesterday claiming to be dispossessed. (If you think those won’t be counted in “inequality” you’re an optimist.) So, why should we care about the rich?

In the nineties, I read a massively flattering bio of Eva Peron in some magazine, and one of her quotes baffled me. She apparently couldn’t rest knowing that there were rich people in the world. Her solution (like all socialists) was to rig things so only she and her cronies were allowed to be rich, of course.

Look, at the time I read that we were somewhat beyond broke. How beyond broke? Well, we were paying on two houses, having moved to where husband could actually get a job. (The wobble of 91.) But the job didn’t pay great, so we were coming up $200 short every month on fixed expenses. This didn’t, of course, include food or car repairs (both cars were terminal.) Among the fixed expenses were paying back for the emergency cesarean which happened on COBRA (And MIGHT have been cheaper with NO insurance.) The house we were renting was in Columbia SC, built in the fifties and HAD NO AIR CONDITIONING. With an infant in the house. Think on that a minute.

So, we were barely surviving; life was a miserable slog, and we didn’t know if we’d ever manage to crawl out of the hole.

…. to be fair, I still don’t know how we managed, except by very strict discipline (“You buy a paperback, we eat pancakes for a month.” (Actually rice with some spices. Rice is CHEAP by the 50lb bag, from Asian grocery stores. Yes, we gained 100 lbs each. Next?) and moving to Colorado, and working insanely hard.

That’s not important to the story. Important to the story is where we were at the time, with the black dog explaining we might never rise above that level.

Yet reading that quote BAFFLED me, because I liked thinking there were rich people in the world. And so so people, enjoying themselves, and people well off enough to enjoy beautiful things and places. Look, at the time our two major indulgences we probably shouldn’t have done but did, were when Dan blew $40 we really didn’t have to get me a large coffee-table book of Leonardo Da Vinci’s art. Why? Because looking at the pretty pictures soothed my soul, and he could see that. (I was looking at it in the store. I didn’t ask. He went back in and bought it.) And when we could scrape together money (mostly carefully husbanded birthday money sent by my parents) we would get burger king’s grilled chicken sandwich (I was dismayed recently by finding out they no longer have it. It’s been so long on low carb and never having fast food I didn’t realize) and then park our car in this beautiful neighborhood that had ornamental lakes and gorgeous houses, and eat our sandwiches while soaking in the beauty.

It’s not that I’m a saint, okay? Or don’t have any envy in me. I have sin-level envy of certain things, including but not limited to people who can take a few weeks by the sea every year. (Time mostly. Though money doesn’t help.)

It’s just that being in beautiful surroundings helped, and I liked that other people had the money to live there, so I could enjoy a little bit of it now and then.

To think everyone was as poor as myself, and the world an unending grind for everyone would make everything worse, and make me wonder why be alive.

So– Why is inequality a problem?

I can only conceive of inequality being a problem where it’s inequality before the law: The law treats you differently than everyone else. OR where it’s brought on by “Planners” from above trying to “make things equal” and screwing the vast majority of the population.

They always do screw the vast majority of the population, and it’s not surprising, because you really can’t make people equal UPWARDS. For one, where is the uncreated wealth going to come from? And why would those working very hard to create wealth going to continue doing so if they don’t get the rewards? You can’t add a foot to everyone’s legs. The best you can do is cut the legs of the tall person, and make everyone equally short, metaphorically speaking.

Because it is true that much greater wealth requires work. Even now, even when the state gives advantages to connected and “upper class” people. Oh, there are some lazy skating grifters at the higher levels, particularly the politically connected and venal (coff might or might not sound like “Biden”) because well connected and venal. But outside those circles, if you want to be rich, you pay for it.

How? Well…. the year Dan made a lot of money and we were “rich” we paid for it in his never being home (it was a traveling job) and my having the full care of two elementary school boys with no backup. And us going out to eat a lot when he was home because I didn’t want to spend time cooking when he was actually there. And us buying a lot of things I’d otherwise make/figure out because we didn’t have time. At the time he’d doubled his salary, but after all the stuff we had to do for it, we were barely 10k a year better off. It wasn’t worth it.

I will bet you even in a semi-free system, a lot of the super-rich are living what you and I would consider a crazy lifestyle, and not because they get all the wonderful stuff. Most of what you see on TV is a lie.

By and large, and despite all the efforts of those at the top to make it not so, people who are doing massively better are doing so because they work/do stuff for it. Now it might be stuff they enjoy and I consider unpalatable. (Like have meetings. GRRR. Or sell…. anything.) But that’s because we’re not the same.

And that’s the crux of the problem. If you have “vast inequality” and the system — like ours — is even minimally free? It’s because people are vastly different.

Now I do realize that our system has been changing and become increasingly more and more rigged — largely by those who claim they’re imposing “equality” from above. — and that in many ways we’re indeed becoming a society of the haves and have nots, while the vast majority strive — and FAIL — to get anywhere. But that’s not free market. That’s socialism imposed via a veritable cat’s craddle of regulations on everything from labor to how the labor is performed to who and how you can sell, etc. etc. etc.

The more regulations are imposed — regardless of the objective of the regulations, btw — the more it favors the wealthy and connected, while the poor, young and striving are left unable to do anything to improve their lot.

Take a “minor” thing of all the taxes, and how they’re calculated, and how stupid-difficult it is to calculate sales taxes, if you sell to people in multiple states.

I have this dream — for which I probably have no time, but I could carve out some — of making various fantasy stuffed animals and selling them. I have the materials, I could find the time (mostly a day a week. A change is as good as a rest) and I could figure out how to market them. What am I lacking? Well, my husband already does the taxes for my business, which eat the majority of his free time, or time he could be doing his own writing in. So– Am I willing to sacrifice more of his life on the altar of taxes? Well no. I still want to do it, but I’m holding back.

Now, for us, that money is not a necessity. And stuffed fantasy animals aren’t going to improve the world. But how many people aren’t building and selling widgets, or growing a crop of some kind in their backyard, (Shush. though it’s legal in some states. And yeah, the taxes make it impossible) or making crafts to sell, or whatever which would MARKEDLY improve their condition? And ours too.

BUT they can’t do it because of all the regulations, some of them well-intentioned, others just bloody stupid, which make it impossible to strive and work for a better position.

Then you really have a two-tiered class system, the “haves” and “have nots” and a VAST and deep gulf in between.

Every time the government tries to impose equality from above this is what happens: You get a TINY percentage at the top living very well indeed, and everyone else living in unacceptable conditions.

We’re not there yet. There are still paths to climb and strive. It’s just massively harder than it should be, and often takes a network of family and friends to get anywhere.

So, if you think inequality of results is a problem? Lobby to stop lawfaring for equality. Lobby to get rid of all possible regulations on labor and production. Lobby for much, much, much simplified tax code.

And then accept that the rich will always be with us. And the poor too. Because people aren’t alike.

It’s just in a minimally free system, everyone is richer, and even the “poor” live with endless bounty.

Apparently over the weekend a movie called The American Society of Magical Negroes bombed pretty badly at the box office.

The first I heard of it was that Hollywood was blaming the black population of America for not doing enough to promote it. Which, as one of you put it, is bizarre lunacy, because even if all 14% of America that self identifies as black were madly in love with it and pushed it, how would it have made the movie a blockbuster.

Put that in your mental tab for a moment. We’ll come back to it.

Today I stumbled on an article on it in Bounding Into Comics, and in it this curious quote from the director.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, when Grier, Smith, and Libii talked about their own “experience with racism,” Smith said, “It’s so funny because, as black audiences… as any marginalized person can attest to, we’ve had to find ourselves in white stories.”

“We’ve had to find white characters that we identify with for so long, and then now that we’re centering ourselves in these stories white audiences, for the first time ever, are being like, ‘Oh, like, like, now I have to find myself, even though no one in this looks like me. Like, I really identify with this protagonist.’ But that’s where empathy comes from, you know, that’s where actual movement comes from,” the actor asserted.

I was flabbergasted. The whole idea that there are black stories and white stories is bizarrely racist. There are human stories. There are cultural stories.

Most of the movies made in America, before the curious plague of woke, were simply American stories. They couldn’t be written or filmed anywhere else. The skin color of the actor playing it might matter, if the character’s back story indicated the character was black or of African origin, or white, or purple with polkadots. Or it might not matter at all. Men in Black (the first) would work just as well if both leads were white, or both were black, or whatever. It would not work if the characters were other than American.

The idea that skin color is somehow a culture is one that Hitler believed in. Your skin color, your level of tan, your ancestry defines everything about you, and you must think and feel and have a common culture and values of people of similar levels of tan. This is also self-evidently crazy cakes, if you’ve ever been outside the US where the northern European cultures span the gamut from England to Scandinavia to areas of France, and no, they’re not all the same, not even close.

Even more so, if you’ve ever been to or even studied Africa, you know that it’s not all the same culture. In fact, it’s a new culture every hundred miles or so, with completely different values, language, etc.

Seriously, it’s an idea so stupid and provincial, only our exquisitely educated entertainment elites could believe this. And that’s because they’ve been indoctrinated into believing it.

Ultimately, though, given the joy with which they take over those “white stories” like, oh, the life of Anne Boleyn (I do realize that was in England, but the overculture at this point is all the same crazy) or “the Little Mermaid” just by changing the characters to black, the truth is that I have to suspect they really are extremely shallow and only believe they can “see themselves” in the stories if they are played out before their eyes by people of the same exact skin color or close enough.

I can’t describe the level of shallowness of this, which makes it doubly hilarious to hear the director lecture the world on empathy. That’s just the chef’s kiss.

To be fair I started being furious at this with women who couldn’t read books — fantasy, science fiction, whatever — unless the protagonist were a woman.

This is just as childish, and a fatal flaw of human empathy and understanding of humanity.

I don’t think it’s normal either. I think you need to be indoctrinated to be that bizarrely incapable of functioning like a normal human being.

Because as an eleven year old girl in Portugal I could read stories of middle aged men in a future US and empathize with the heroes and dread the villains. The story didn’t need to have women, or people with Portuguese names or whatever.

Okay, Sarah, you say, but if you don’t need it, why not let them do the good stories with an all black cast? Why aren’t people going to it?

Well, you know the problem is… remember I told you to open a tab and leave it open? These people apparently believe that the black population of the US is about 50%. Mostly because that’s what they see in the movies and TV. And if they grew in urban areas, they might very well think that’s reality too.

But it isn’t. And this is why movies and TV shows that have entirely black casts tend to strike people as false. And even black people tend to bounce away from it, because it’s not real, and at some level they know it’s not real. At least black people that live in the real world.

You can tell a story with an all white cast, sure, because you can tell a story with roughly 75% of the population and it just incidentally doesn’t include any other parts of it. But telling the entire story with 14% is ridiculous and it feels forced and bizarre.

And what’s causing all this lunacy, including people thinking they can’t identify with other humans of different sex or skin color, is … well, propaganda.

Propaganda has convinced people that they’re widgets who belong only with other people who look exactly like them.

And it has driven deep rifts between men and women, between people of different tans (or not even that. Again a world in which Megan Markle is black is a world not in contact with reality.) It has brought us to the edge of destruction, with everyone thinking everyone slightly different from them is out to get them.

And it’s ridiculous. All of it is utterly ridiculous.

The people who bought into it hook line and sinker, and think it’s vital to propagate it in every piece of entertainment and every news item, and every possible mass communication, also expect to be rewarded for it with accolades and told they’re doing good.

And when it doesn’t happen, they’re baffled and angry because it must mean people are really out to get them.

And this is where we are.

The only way to back out of this, particularly now when they are so lacking into imagination that they can’t tell compelling stories that aren’t the equivalent of just screaming at the audience, is to replace them.

We have to tell stories that appeal to people. And keep doing it. And break all the stereotypes. And bring people together, instead of apart.

It’s nothing, right? So?

Roll up the sleeves and get to it.

A Peek Into American Racism, or is it? by the Balloonatic

I finally decided to join the platform previously known as Twitter, now X almost a year ago. And it took this long for me to finally unlock the “Blocked by Raging Leftist” achievement. It happened when I was scrolling through my feed on my break a few days ago and casually commented on a political post where someone was replying to a post about Trump being racist by observing that Biden had idolized a KKK leader. Another left-leaning commenter countered that Mitch McConnell and a bunch of other Republican senators had also attended and spoken at the late Senator Byrd’s funeral, so I posted what I thought would be a drive-by comment that no true conservative supports Mitch McConnell. Boy, was I wrong. Almost three days and I’m sure hundreds of comments later as I’m writing this, the conversation is still going on.

It’s been an interesting conversation over all. My ADHD has been in full force the past week as I’ve been putting in 10+ hour days while still trying to keep up with the work on the house, the never-ending housework, trying to get some exercise in because I’m spending too much time on my butt in front of a computer and definitely not getting enough sleep. Today I broke down and had a 3 hour nap – something that usually only happens if under migraine meds or severely ill. I ended up exchanging posts with a young man who seems geniunely curious about where I’m coming from as well as a very angry young woman who has not yet learned how to have a civil discussion. I’m afraid that I let my sense of humor get the better of me to the detriment of the conversation, but I’ve always found it hard to resist poking bears. Internet bears, at least. Real bears are much more dangerous.

The discussion ended up scattering in many directions, mostly due to me getting distracted (squirrel) because when you get a chance to actually speak to someone who is listening, how can you not want to take advantage of it? But trying to have a good discussion when you’re limited to 160 characters at a time is frustrating to someone who actually adores writing essays and loved that part of university, even if they usually were written at the last minute or handed in late. We ended up discussing racism, poverty, culture and programs which are run usually by the government and large organizations that deal with the first two and ignore the third, which is why I think they almost always fail.

I think the first problem in discussing racism with other people, especially if they are a generation or two younger than you is that you will each have different definitions of racist. I am not going to deny racism is real. I’ve encountered it in several of the standard racist stereotypes, from the right and from the left. In some ways, I feel like the person in the meme that shows them slightly left of center, with someone to the left of them and someone to the right of them. Then the next image shows the person now being in the center, with the left moving farther left, and honestly, it should also show the right moving farther right. More time passes and the person who was left of center is now right of center, with the person at the left moving even further left, and the person on the right still far right. I think really, there should be a fourth person added, who was just right of the center line and is now in what would be the middle right. But I digress. The squirrels are still distracting me!

My encounter with the far right happened after my divorce. I entered the world of online dating. It was fun in some ways, but very eye-opening in others. It was a lot of chatting, sometimes talking on the phone, but mainly texting and getting to know other people. I was filtering for fellow conservatives, because politics can be very divisive in a relationship. There was one man I was starting to get to know, who seemed pretty nice and we were getting along until he asked a question that stunned me. He asked me what color my son was. When I asked why that would matter, he made a comment about not wanting to be in a relationship with any woman who may have had sex with a black man. He then accused me of all sorts of things and was quickly blocked. I was shocked. You hear about people like that, but you never really think that they exist, and they do. I’ve heard of the same happening in the reverse, so I am now under the impression that those stories are true, too.

The racism that I’ve seen on the left though, was different to that, but just as racist in its own way. People who know me in real life or on social media, have heard me talk about my neighbor. For the sake of privacy, I will call her Mrs. C, using the initial of her actual first name. When I first moved to my current home, I was quickly welcomed by my neighbors to the east. The neighbors to the west, Mrs. C and her husband, were an older couple and we really did not hit it off well to start. They introduced themselves by telling me that in the months before I technically took possession of the house in June until we moved in August, one of the oak trees on the side between our two houses had fallen down against my house, so they had it cut down and they presented me a bill for my half of the cost. Well. And then there were other issues. We had dogs, so one of the first things I did was hire a contractor to put up a fence and do some things around the house while my ex was back in Tulsa getting our previous house ready to put on the market. I quickly learned that contractors say one thing, but getting them to actually do what they said for the price they quoted is another, and ended up with a rather substandard fence that was definitely not dog-proof so the dogs were escaping out into the neighborhood. And then there were barking restrictions. And increasingly larger fines if your dogs barked for more than ten minutes at night. And someone was calling the police constantly on the dogs, and I was sure it was Mrs and Mr. C.

Why? It was election season, and it was obvious they were Democrats. Mrs. C is one of those nosy neighbors, always pointing things out, like lights left on in the house and the garage. What sealed my dislike for them, though, was that first Hallowe’en. I was trying to find out what the neighborhood normally did and was informed that Hallowe’en was Mr. C’s birthday, and they did not hand out candy any more because the neighbourhood was inundated with trick-or-treaters from the poorer area just north of us. Black kids. Not their kind. So I held my tongue and kept my distance. But oh, the horror when the young family two houses down from them ended up moving and a black family moved in. That made two black families and a mixed race family on our street! The Horror! They said their kids told them it was time to move. It made me wonder what they thought and how they were judging me when my younger brother came to visit with his beautiful, amazing three brown children he has with his Grenada-born wife. But I shrugged it off as their loss and kept my distance. I had seen that type of racism in my Ex’s family, too, when the rich white women would gather to talk about debutante balls and pat themselves on the back for being inclusive and allowing in black girls, while their black and hispanic maids cleaned their houses.

However, as time went on, I got to know Mrs and Mr C a little better. We began to build a bit of a friendship. I found out that no, it wasn’t they who were calling the cops every time the dogs barked. In fact, I found out that Mr. C had been sneaking over to my fence and giving the dogs treats. Turns out he likes dogs and missed having one. My regret now is that my military/gun-loving son didn’t get to spend more time with Mr C and join him at his gun club and talk about his time in the service. So after Mr. C ended up having to move into assisted living due to Parkinson’s and dementia, I tried to keep a bit of an eye on Mrs. C. And then covid hit, and people were being told to stay home, don’t go outside, don’t socialize with others. Isolation is not good for anyone, especially seniors. So one day I called Mrs. C and invited her for Sunday supper. And a tradition began. I think since early 2020 there may be less than a dozen Sundays where Mrs. C hasn’t joined us for Sunday dinner. We were there for her when she needed to talk to someone about how hard it was for her not to be able to visit Mr. C, to have to try to find his room and wave at him from the window. And we have continued to be there for her. And she is there for us. She went with me to my divorce hearing. She has been there to support and encourage me as I rebuild both my house and my life.

What does this have to do with racism, you may ask? Are you off chasing squirrels again? Well, the funny thing is that once you spend time with people, get to know them, treat them with respect and love them, they change. It is not an instant thing. It is sometimes a years long process. But it happens. Three Hallowe’ens ago, when I was getting ready for the trick-or-treaters, Mrs. C invited me over to join her other neighbours, as they set up lawn chairs with blankets, and a table full of treats for the kids. And Mrs. C started ooing and awing over the cute costumes and those beautiful smiles, and talking to those folk who live just north of us. A new tradition has been born. And a passing comment the other day – “Boy, that man who lives two doors down sure is doing a great job improving his house and keeping up with the yard.”

I talked to my son about his experiences while we were in the car together and he was able to confirm this. He attends a school where the majority of the students are black, so while they study traditional English stuff like Shakespeare, he also had some interesting assignments based on a lecture and writings of an African author named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on “Danger of a Single Story.” His essays on that and our recent talk led into a good discussion about how the racism he encounters is not like that man I chatted with online. That it’s more about judging people based on our own pre-conceptions, perpetuating stereotypes instead of learning about people as individuals and hearing their story, and that the same thing applies to how he is treated as someone who is white. That the only harassment based on color has been kids who are black making fun of those who are not black enough. So yes, racism exists in the U.S. in many forms. But in my experience, it isn’t limited to just one group or another. And it’s not as prevalent as people try to push. It’s more about putting people into boxes instead of getting to know them as individuals, something that everyone is guilty of. Most of us are just regular people who really don’t care what color you are. I’ll smile at you, and hope you smile back. In the end, we are all Americans, and that should be all that matters.

All over the world, the pseudo-expert elites are embattled and being challenged by increasingly more vocal masses who have had about enough.

In a way it’s a very recognizable landscape to students of history, and it will make you go “um…. I see it.”

Or at least it should be recognizable, because in the history of mankind there have been many such periods of equilibrium that finally break and lend to periods of extreme turmoil.

The turmoil isn’t always bad, and the result suddenly isn’t always bad, but while it’s happening, it feels like the world itself is coming apart, even in the places not afflicted by turmoil and horror.

In a way this is a continuing of the turmoil from the eighteenth century, even if the “nobility” is wearing a different mask. What you have to understand is that Marx, and his theories, and the thing they whelped were not revolutions, but an attempt by the “elites” to stop the the revolution and establish a new equilibrium where they could again ride mankind as though we’d been born with saddles. But the patch put on the software doesn’t work. The system is not stable. And it’s now obviously tearing itself apart.

Yeah, I see you looking at me with the look on your faces that’s best transcribed as “Arooo?”

Look, Marx glomed onto the somewhat cyclical nature of history (over the very, very long run) and decided it was not only a much shorter cycle, applicable to the problems of his time, but also that it was all going to automagically work to gratify envious grifters.

Then he wrapped it all in the words of superiority and expertise, and it’s been killing millions ever since.

But its one actual, appreciable effect was to mimic the end of a cycle. Or rather its devotees brought about extreme instability and mimicked the end of a cycle over and over again, in a sort of blood-soaked cargo-cult, thereby satisfying Marx’s idea of:

Instability — revolution –?????? — Utopia.

It hasn’t worked, not in the long run, because it’s not an organic cycle, it’s an underwear gnome on.

The first attempt at such a reset was actually pre-Marx and trying to mimic the organic nature of the American revolution (Which was the first fruit of cycle change due to unique circumstances, and yes, I’ll explain) and what it ended up doing after the revolution and the ???? was letting things go back to the way they were, but hitting just in time for the Marxist deformations, which means the “new” system patch on the old system worked worse than the old one even in disintegration.

Every other one since, as well as attempts to install part of Marx’s patch to avoid revolution which Marx assures us will come otherwise (here, most of the west, etc etc) only leads to the same weird mix of old and new, with the new being worse than the old, somehow.

So, to explain, humanity, over the very, very long periods of time goes through cycles which we’ll call diaspora. This means we spread out, colonize “new” territory (new to the group. We’ve been stealing land from each other from prehistory because land we could use and get to was limited and almost always had other humans on it. BTW the whole “the frontier is closed” is bullshit on the same order as thinking we live worse than in the fifties. In our 4x larger homes. Sure. There is no land anywhere where there aren’t some humans and which are not claimed by some potentate. And? The point being we can get to other hands very fast. What is happening with the idiots streaming over our border is that they think they’re conquering new frontiers. And I’m going to stand by idiots. Because they’re traipsing into the lion’s den and going “I’ll make this the dining room.” But that’s a whole other post. Except that again, it’s the “elites” attempt to turn back the tide and back engineer Marx’s revolution to their profit. It will end in tears. Of blood.)

These are relatively free times (and part of the reason that the American revolution was the much-advanced “first fruits even while the rest of the world was still going the other way.) Then something forces the centralization of authority, power, etc. And centralization (to whatever degree. In the stone age it might be merely to tribe level) proceeds driven by by the fact the humans who want power want more of it. The methods for keeping the masses under foot are refined. Humanity is bound hand and foot.

Until something breaks that control. In the past this has been a combination of new territories opening up and some technological break through or cataclysm.

I know I’m going to make Suburban yell at me, because this is not true in close analysis, but in macro, from a distance analysis, let’s look at feudalism.

It came about because of the threat of invasion from the coasts, mostly, by Vikings or Moors, depending where you were, and it ran on like that, with the system of keeping the serfs quiet and tied to the land refining its old, even as the “lords” became less and less useful for their original purpose, and mostly devolving to fighting each other.

The black death broke its hold on the human spirit, allowed people to create new types of society, etc. At the same time the hyper-centralization went on because the king allied with the new classes of clerks and lawyers (so, the innovation was writing things down and creating written laws.)

Then the centralization from the king started to become burdensome, and the clerks and lawyers started to tighten and tighten such rules, until they themselves became burdensome. And then there were colonies, but the power of the king followed colonists (because travel wasn’t that onerous, and there were those writs. Note, what they’re called.)

America is where the first fruits of the discontent of the people: the disbelief with the wet-paper efficacy of the aristocracy, the anger at the ever tightening rules, the belief in the inherent dignity of humans no matter what their condition at birth (a patch installed by Christianity) etc. all culminated.

In a way it was early. Very early. It was brought about by the fact the English monarchy had other worries at the time, and was over extended.

Left alone, the French mimicry would have run through its course, and gone back to a king and stayed that way, though maybe more in the manner of the English monarchy with some French twists.

Except the elites installed the Marx patch. No? Oh, please. As far back as you look, you can see the minor gentry and nobles head over heels for it. The “people” and “the workers” were the weapon they used. The battering ram. They were not the people who swallowed Marx hook line and sink. Marxism is a craze of the elites, who impose it from above.

Oh, it is supported by envious scoundrels of all classes, and powered by envy. But what it actually does is turn the righteous fury of the masses at the boot in their necks into a lot of blood, death and suffering and destruction of wealth ending mostly, in the long run, with the descendants of the “old families” mounted, booted and spurred on the saddles they install on others’ backs. Instead of into something like what we had here which manages to still work, even with the FDR Marxist patch. In the default more often than not, but still work.

Thing is the Marxism patch is failing.

To be fair, it always sucked. The only reason it stayed on at all is that the elites had full control of the press, and story is really powerful. In “news” “entertainment” and “art” they told the same story, which always pushed for the rule by experts, and “scientific” improvements to society.

All of them, pretty much, were crazy, from devaluing of humanity and humans to the point that we’re facing a radical de-population event and we have vast swathes of young people who… hate humans without ever asking themselves “as opposed to what?” To treating humans as widgets either according to “class” or “race” or whatever pseudo-scientific classification that fits no actual individual human.

But now–

Well, now there’s a way to know what is happening and the narrative doesn’t fit.

And there’s a new frontier. Several, in fact. It’s ironic, but also illustrative of the process we’re going through right now that both the internet and work from home resulted from the elites attempts at getting a closer hold on the population: Arpanet, and the Covidiocy.

But trust me, as someone who moved from a technically fly-over area, but fly over where the elites play, to true “flyover” country, it is very much a new frontier, and land is cheap. (Though for various reasons we got very little.) New frontiers. All over. That people can leave the large, easily controllable cities for and where they can work and prosper.

The thing is once the system starts falling apart, once the critical innovation has been made, all attempts to flail against it bring about more decay and the establishment of the new system.

In a way this is a continuation of the 18th century revolution (in the US) for less centralization and more individual freedom. And in a better way we’re throwing off the Marxist patch, with its built in worship of the experts and its pseudo-scientific claims of infallibility.

Now, this is worldwide, because the technological breakthroughs are worldwide. And Elon Musk’s efforts might give our great-great-grandkids a new frontier, but before that — alas — there will be tons of internal new frontiers, as (did I mention it?) we’re facing a radical depopulation event worldwide.

In fact, those people streaming over the border, it’s my guess, are leaving behind areas in deep trouble, as they lose their (relatively) younger people. Now for kleptocratic political reasons, there might be absolutely no opportunity there for anyone under sixty. Because breaking down socialist systems are brutal on youth, as we’re finding here.

But in fifty years or so, we’re going to find vast portions of the world are for all intents and purposes depopulated.

You’d think that’s what our peculiar (I mean what I say) elites are doing, streaming the invasion in. But it’s not. They’re still trying to run the Marx patch. “Bring in the dispossessed and have them rebel and take things from the people here who refuse to submit.” Oh, it will work, here and there — it’s working like a dream in NYC — for a little while. Until it goes from bothersome to intolerable. What’s not tolerable won’t be tolerated. They forget they no longer have control of the narrative.

I’m a little sad, honestly, for the dupes streaming in and promised the Earth. The elites deserve what’s coming, and a bunch of them will manage to talk themselves out of it. But those poor saps are going to get hit hard. And there’s a danger for a lot of us who look like them, though we aren’t.

The Marx patch — international version — has stopped to work a good fifty years ago. But they’re going to keep trying to run it.

Some of their sallies and fights back against us — we’re called by so many interesting names, from deplorables to hobbits but they all mean “escaped serfs” — will succeed. It’s the nature of the beast.

And increasingly more and more of ours against them will succeed, or at least leave a deep mark.

Most of them, though, are battles. Not the war. The war is very very long. It’s been going on a long time. It will be a long time before it’s fully won. At least a hundred years, maybe more.

At the end of it, though, I am sure that the idea of infringing individual freedom will be unspeakable the world over.

Oh, the weasels will get around it. They always do, but there will be a period of lovely flowering in between.

Before it turns again.

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 LILANIA BEGLEY: Farmwife: A Sweet Western Romance

The big day is looming on the horizon. After everything Dev and Irina have been through, this should be the happiest day of their lives so far. Can they overcome the clouds of the past together? Is there hope for a happy ending in their farmhouse with found family around them?

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Wolves of the Woods: The Elect Book the Third

The Elect want nothing more than to live and let live. An all-too-familiar danger arrives instead, along with a stranger.

The Elect, the werewolf survivors and pack of Lord Gregor, slowly adapt to a world that passed them by. Gregor hires a museum designer, Joakim Davis, to help with a regional museum that might, perhaps, make life easier for the Elect and please the locals. But Davis has two secrets of his own.

Mara and Gregor remain cursed to take wolf form. As they hunt, they make two discoveries, one intriguing and one very troubling indeed. The blight they thought banished has returned.

When Gregor and his lady depart for Krakow, it remains for the other Elect, aided perhaps by this secretive stranger from America, to deal with the new evil that trespasses on their territory. Can they withstand this new threat, or will they succumb to the curse as they each did before?

FROM CELIA HAYES: Lone Star Blood: Another Volume of the Entertaining and Mostly If Not Always True Adventures of Texas Ranger Jim Reade and his Blood-Brother Delaware Scout Toby Shaw.

The Continuing adventures of Texas Ranger Jim Reade and his blood-brother Toby Shaw in the days of the Republic of Texas! A pair of eccentric English explorers ask for a guide into a dangerous country, seeking not a fortune … but something more! There is the mystery of a haunted house on Galveston Island to unravel, and the safety of a beneficiary to an unusual will — and more! The old wild west rides again in this continuing set of adventures from the pen of historical novelist Celia Hayes!

https://amzn.to/3vfk7mqFROM BLAKE SMITH: The Hartington Inheritance

Almira Hartington was heir to the largest fortune in the galaxy, amassed by her father during his time as a director of the Andromeda Company. But when Sir Josiah commits suicide, Almira discovers that she and her siblings are penniless. All three of them must learn to work if they wish to eat, and are quickly scattered to the far reaches of the universe. Almira stubbornly remains on-planet, determined to remain respectable despite the sneers of her former friends.

Sir Percy Wallingham pities the new Lady Hartington. But the lady’s family will take care of her, surely? It’s only after he encounters Almira in her new circumstances that he realizes the extent of her troubles and is determined to help her if he can. He doesn’t know that a scandal is brewing around Sir Josiah’s death and Almira’s exile from society. But it could cost him his life, and the lady he has come to love.

FROM MICHAEL A. HOOTEN: Till the Conflict Is Over

Peter Wright not only survived the most deadly space battle in US Navy history, he also managed to defeat the enemy as well. He’s hailed as a hero, and everyone wants to know his story, but all he wants is to avoid everything that reminds him of that day. Instead he endures interviews, cotillions, and the ever-surprising demands of being a celebrity. And also anxiety attacks, suvivor’s guilt, and funerals. Through it all, he wishes he could just be a normal sailor again.

Be careful what you wish for.

FROM RACONTEUR PRESS, WITH STORIES BY CEDAR SANDERSON, BECKY JONES AND LEE ALLRED: Moggies in Space: A Galaxy Fur. Fur Away

Here is yet another collection of tales about space floofs of the feline flavor. This compendium sports cosmic kitties doing more of what cats do, and entertaining us in the bundle: saving ships, crews, sometimes living together with dogs, and featuring at least one pesky litter that’s into everything and smarter than the grownups. Yeah. Total anarchy.

FROM SPENCER HART: Death on the Moon (Bert Henderson Adventures Book 1)

Pulp-Noir meets Sci-Fi. A short story adventure. The Year is 1949, in a timeline not quite our own.

Bert Henderson, ex-GI and ace troubleshooter for the Phillips Atomics Corporation, is sent to Roosevelt Base to solve the first murder on the Moon. But will the daughter of a top scientist distract him from his mission?

Can he untangle the web of deceit before he becomes just another victim of Death on the Moon?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: One Last Homecoming

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

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

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

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: DULL