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This was not the post I was going to write today, but sometimes — sometimes — an idea comes out of nowhere and whomps you between the eyes.

This morning I woke up to a text from one of you — you know who you are — and suddenly I had this great plot for a thriller in my mind. Yes, I know you’re laughing and of course I’m finishing the mammoth book first. I just want to ask your opinion of how plausible this story is, in your mind, okay?

The names used in this plot are just place holders, no resemblance intended to any person living or dead, despite Wretchard’s tweet which of course means he ate some bad oysters of something, right?

Imagine we had a president, let’s call him Bindy E. Weed who was always an extremely corrupt politician, and whose family is so deep in crime that every dictator and cartel owns a piece. He was elected in an election so fraudulent it could never happen in reality because among other things it required fooling other nations about the virulence of a released bio-agent, and I mean, why would other nations all fall for that. Wait, I’ll make it so that they too are fighting internal dissension that will upend long-held structures of power. That might do it, right?

Bindy is elected and immediately gets what he deserves. First, due to his guilty conscience he jumps at nothing and either he or someone in his orbit orchestrates a Reichstag fire, which fails to have the effect hoped for despite work over years to make it into the worst thing ever. His inauguration — this is pretty much impossible in America, okay — is behind barbed wire fences and beefed up guard, but despite incitement nothing happens to justify it. And then…. slowly, incrementally, the wheels keep coming off.

There had been signs of decline before, but they were possible to cover up. Except he gets much, much worse. Behind the scenes he’s puppetted by his wife, a Doctor of … oh, I don’t know let me see a completely useless degree…. We’ll call it Pedagogical studies, as a place holder. His wife…. d*mn it, need name, Tilly Weed, and his son Nimrod. Nimrod not only has acted for years as the family bagman, but is also an addict to several disparate substances and has subtly been emitting cries for help in the form of trying to get caught for years. There’s also a cabal of overgrown theater kiddies who love, adore and bow down to Tilly thinking she is a mondo genius. The most prominent of them are the triple A group around Bindy, who are frankly my weak point. I mean, why should they all have A names? It begs the question. I might change it in post. And make them Bs. I mean, they’re B class talent. Anyway, it’s not just them, of course. Tilly has the kind of suburban mom vibe that will appeal to broken kiddies of any age, of which there are a lot in this administration and the corrupt ideology that supports it. For instance the head of the secret service Howda Cheatam — yes, the name is too on the nose, I’ll fix it later — is a great friend of Tilly and owes her rise to Tilly.

Everything is going swimmingly. Okay, it’s not, because our little cabal in power is busier fending off attacks from other cabals within the very corrupt party that put them in power than actually governing. Also, they’re not that smart. Suburban and (I hate the term, but there it is) midwits. More sure of their smarts than smart. Mostly because they have credentials and are sure these must mean something.

One of the more prominent cabals is from hungry-for-power-yet-hapless vice president Succor Brown. So far she’s not been much trouble because she’s even less liked than Bindy and frankly utterly incoherent.

But then the guy they frauded the election away from, and the previous president (1 term, so still eligible) announces his run for the presidency. What do we call him? Um…. Let’s call him Jack Spades. Remember this is just a placeholder. I’ll come up with something more plausible later, okay? Anyway, the Weeds know exactly how much votes this guy got, and they’re terrified, so they try to take him down before the elections. By legal means, of course.

Dr. Tilly isn’t precisely stupid, but she is hampered by the fact she is essentially, culturally, a suburban housewife. She knows what would stop her voting for someone. She would never vote for someone who had been convicted or even credibly accused of crimes. Not because she’s Simon pure, but because she would never vote for someone who is on the outs. Think grown up high-school cliques. This is the level of her intellect.

So there is first a lawsuit on a tenuous “I vaguely remember being raped at a time I can’t remember, in a place that maybe we were both at” that awards the person making the accusation (another faded jumped-up suburban mean-girl) a lot of money. But that doesn’t work. So the suits multiply, they’re obviously coordinated by Dr. Tilly (I mean there are links back up to her. Obvious too, because she’s not too bright.) And Spades is convicted. Only what he’s convicted of makes no sense whatsoever, besides “evil bad” and frankly, it seems to bolster his popularity. I mean, the one time they arrest him, he makes his mug shot iconic. He has no shame, his followers have no shame, and Dr. Tilly is starting to get that feeling she often got in college when the professor would explain something everyone else understood, and she felt like they were speaking a foreign language.

Then the truly disastrous happens. Well, to be fair, Dr. Tilly has got careless, mostly because no matter how strange and obviously out of control her husband gets in public, the press does cover up wonderfully, converts all his gaffes to moments of genius, and in general convinces the low information voters that perhaps things aren’t going quite as he planned, but Bindy is a good man, and certainly much better than Hater McHaterson Spades who will put anyone darker than a Fitzpatrick 2 skin tone and anyone who ever looked appreciatively at someone of the same sex, as well as anyone who ever dressed up as the other sex for a school play, in camps.

So Dr. Tilly thinks she’s safe in putting Bindy on a debate stage with Spades. Well, to be fair, she has reason for it. After all, they get the questions in advance, and practice saying things that will set off Spades notoriously volatile temper, so even if Bindy is a little incoherent, it will be overshadowed by Spades’ getting angry and ranting incoherently. They can then play those clips over and over and totally obscure the fact that Bindy is a few roots short of a full clump.

However, Spades keeps his cool. And Bindy is more incoherent than even Dr. Tilly could have anticipated.

Suddenly their own ideological faction, which — having lost its philosophical appeal for reasons that I’ll fill in later, like, oh, their historical model has been catastrophically disproven over and over again, to the point it’s hard to obscure — is best described as a bunch of rabid rats in a sack, each determined to survive all the others, is demanding that Bindy step down before he destroys their side utterly. AND Spades, incredibly keeps climbing in the polls. The praetorian media has him in a cone of silence which has worked for candidates before, but is not working for him. Somehow. And Tilly feels like she’s in a movie, where you fire at the monster and he just keeps coming and coming.

It’s time to — metaphorically speaking (or not) — pull out the big guns, and to destroy Spades and replace him with someone controllable.

Dr. Tilly knows or at least like everyone else has heard that other factions on her side have gotten rid of inconvenient people. There is that famous guy who died in jail and who didn’t kill himself. And as bad as that “suicide” was botched and despite the list of that guy’s clients never coming out, it’s held, hasn’t it?

And she has the power that Bindy is no longer able to hold. I mean, it’s good to be queen.

She’s not so stupid as to involve the three letters, because, well, she probably tried to give them hints in the past and was looked at like she’d lost her mind. And that was that raid on Spades’ resort Ocean Large which was supposed to have shown he was a danger to national security but the only three letters group that would listen to Tilly were themselves not the brightest and despised even within their agency. So the setup had started to leak almost immediately, and THEN the fact that Tilly’s husband had done worse had come out. Seriously, she could have spit. It wasn’t enough that the old goat had not been able to keep his hands off young — some very young — women but he also had done things so stupid even she didn’t know about them. So that entire thing had unraveled, and didn’t look to go anywhere. And hadn’t affected Spades’ polls the slightest. Except perhaps to make his numbers go up.

Now, I’ll admit I’m a little hazy here, because I’m ninety percent sure that no three letters were involved. Even in these, our debased times, it’s hard to sell anyone on the idea that they would in fact be this stupid, let alone be unaware of the foibles of guns or shooting, the fact that connections would start coming out over time. OR stupid enough to lend themselves to Tilly’s plot, particularly after the Ocean Large thing.

I don’t know, these things usually solidify when I write the actual book, so let’s say that Dr. Tilly knew of this kid through his parents, who are therapists of a sort who probably worked through the pedagogical establishment. Or perhaps Nimrod knew him through the drug dealing scene? The kid did after all work in a medical center. Or– Well, we can establish a million things.

Now, for all I know Dr. Tilly has another wounded child in her orbit in Nonesuch Agency who combed through records for her and found the kid. Whatever.

The question — the only question — is how hastily can I have it be setup and still be credible. Since it’s a half assed movie like plot dreamed up by a suburban woman, I think five days is enough. Interestingly, the same person whose tweet sparked this has another….

Okay. We’ll go with that. Five days, uh? Totally doable, if you pick a kid who is just enough on the spectrum he has no social media presence and no friends. This is essential otherwise he might tell someone about his great mission, etc.

You must pick a kid isolated and closed-in enough that he will not speak in the very few days left in his life. AND he must be smart enough that you can cater to his sense of being smarter than his surroundings and capable of more than he’s achieved. While he must be innocent enough of the world and well, let’s be clear, autistic enough to believe the movies are life. I should be able to write a kid like this — except for crying on the keyboard — because frankly that’s what most of us were to an extent or another.

If Dr. Tilly has enough low cunning — and she does — his parents or at least one of them actually support Spades, and the kid — just in case he shies off or escapes — is told he’s actually somehow helping Spades. Say he’s convinced Spades is not himself but an evil double, and if he kills the double…. OR he’s convinced that this is really a false flag to help Spades’ numbers.

Or of course the kid had been told for four years that Spades is actual Hitler, and who wouldn’t kill Hitler before the ovens got going?

Anyway… Meet with the kid a few times, convince him of his great power. Have him set his van to explode as a distraction, so he can “get away” even though, of course Dr. Tilly probably has someone else set to off him.

Oh, this is easy, because of course she has Howda Cheatam. Without Howda, Dr. Tilly could not possibly pull this off, but Howda knows to whom she owes her position, and besides, she admires Dr. Tilly in a soppy, not-very-bright-female crush on another not-very-bright female who made good. Dr. Tilly is everything Howda wishes she was, so smart, so well dressed, so down to Earth and so “sensible.”

And Dr. Tilly is not asking her to do anything actually illegal, right? Only take most of the security detail to protect Dr. Tilly at her impromptu appearance — so important. I mean, the first lady is better than some skivvy candidate who has been CONVICTED, right? — nearby and oh, keep her agents off the most logical roof to shoot from. Which is only safety. The roof is PITCHED after all.

So, the poor kid goes off to save the nation…. He makes sure his boss knows he only needs a day off.

There are still questions and points where my plot is weak: How did they prevent the secret service from acting and at least immobilizing him in the 50 minutes they would be aware of him? Why would his parents be so alarmed by his being late — he’s a 20 year old after all — or just not at work, that they called the authorities? I mean, I know those happen, but not how or why. Never mind. It will fill in later.

In fact, I’ll start this book with the kid being shot. And then fill it in backward.

Look, the thing about idiot plots is that they have a way of unraveling.

Now not splattering Spades’ brains all over kingdom come? That I need to invoke a miracle for. That is one of those things that is truly unbelievable, and I’ll have to call in my “one miracle.” You’re in general allowed one miracle per plot. But I need it for the setup to work. Because if the candidate is dead, it’s a whole different book, and I’m not writing the story — even fictional — of America unraveling and descending into chaos.

But after that? Look, the three letter agencies — who know they’re going to be blamed for this — might be corrupted by the corrupt ideology in power. They might be penetrated and at war with themselves. But they’re not as stupid as Dr. Tilly. (Few things above nematodes are.) And particularly they’re not as bound by the suburban zeitgeist. so they’ll see the holes she doesn’t see in her plot. And they’ll start poking.

Three days? That is enough for them to figure out what actually happened, and who did it. At that point, frankly, they’d be terrified. One thing is to have rapacious and conniving plotters on top, who can stay seated with carefully targeted assassinations. But Dr. Tilly is a clown show, a danger to herself, others, the nation, and frankly and more importantly, the three letter agencies. Not just their lives, but more importantly, what remains of their credibility. She’s already caused them to take body blows. At this point, even another Spades administration — and they can deal with him quietly, later, probably — is preferable to the sooper genius plots of Dr. Tilly.

They have the goods. They need to go to someone almost as stupid as Dr. Tilly but with boundless ambition, and the one most likely to take over if Dr. Tilly falls. So they go to VP Succor Brown. There would be a big confrontation in the halls of power four? Five days? after Spades survives.

Also the three letters would make sure Dr. Tilly knows they’ve got the goods and the proof.

Suddenly Bindy who said he’d never step down unless the Almighty told him to, comes down with a bio agent x infection. And says he’ll step down if the doctors say he should.

Now I’ll admit I don’t know how I finish the book. Ideally Dr. Tilly would get her comeuppance, but I’m not sure how to make that seem real. Likely neither do the Three Letters. And heaven only knows what their further plans are and if they had plans to deal with Spades before Dr. Tilly’s genius stylings.

What do you guys think? Does the plot so far hold together? And what do you think comes next to remain true to this book?

And what do you think of titles? Told by an Idiot, harking to Dr. Tilly’s essential stupid. Or The Boy Who Would Kill Hitler. Or perhaps Decision at Dumb?

I don’t know, but I’m sure you will. It is essential that people reading this think very carefully through it, and let me know what they think will happen next. I’m all curiosity. And who knows? Perhaps we can turn it from tragedy into comedy.

So… how was the fundraiser this year?

So far about half of last year. That’s half of what last year’s was for the two weeks of fundraising.

I’d be scared this meant I was losing readership, if it weren’t for the fact that the people who donated are about the same as last year, but their donation was a half or a quarter of last year’s.

And I get it. Things are tough for everyone. I remember when $200 of groceries was a very full cart. Now, to be fair, that was 20 years ago, so it might be I’m old. But still you wouldn’t believe how much stronger I’ve gotten. I can lift that with one arm.

And then there’s the fact that the times being tough for everyone means we all are donating to more people, and tend to prioritize giving to those who need it.

Then there’s the fact that this blog has four thousand subscribers, but I know most of them don’t receive the email. How do I know that? Because of the number of you who tell me you finally found weeks of posts in your spam because this site is tagged as “dangerous” and “disinformation.”

Which — shakes head — tells you how desperate the left is. They have nothing to sell, all they can do is prevent our side being heard.

Now, the truth is the fundraiser this year was also marred ON MY SIDE by a bunch of things.

The normal, at least until I can get in for a sleep study and get a new machine, which will be probably end of August, because that’s the earliest they could get me in on an emergency appointment, is that these posts have all been very late, due to me waking up in a panic and staying awake middle of the night. (It’s probably the machine. Unless it’s a touch of foretelling, which I hope not.)

Late posts get fewer hits, even on the throttled rate.

But even so, this year’s fundraiser two weeks were extra gifted. About a day before it started my laptop keyboard died.

I still have a desktop, but I try to keep the social media on the laptop, so that I’m not tempted to it when I’m upstairs. So, the laptop going out before a campaign I conduct mostly on the net was…. fun.

We fixed it by putting a keyboard on top of the keyboard (since it’s on my lap, I can’t put it in front of the keyboard) which in turn gave occasional fun times of “the computer is possessed” as the keyboard on top pressed keys on the bottom. Keys like the space bar or the cap lock. (SO MUCH cap lock.) This made the posts still later, and occasionally very odd, as I had to figure out where the text had accidentally moved and such.

We have resolved this by giving me Dan’s laptop which he was “barely using” and his taking my old one to see if he can replace the keyboard and have it work in any meaningful way. (The keyboard was for some reason really hard to replace. He’s done this before, but this one is weirdly attached.)

But we resolved it only two days ago, because there was a lot of transferring disks and data.

Anyway, as though that weren’t enough, I spent most of it with a mysterious RAGING allergy attack which — please hit me — was resolved when I remembered I am deathly allergic to feathers and there was a quail in the guestroom. (There are reasons for this. The quail was injured, and the other two coups are occupied. So we put her in the brooder in the guestroom while she recuperated.)

This image is wrong. We weren’t randomly hosting a quail on its tour of the States. The quail recovered and was moved outside, but not before my eardrum had ruptured.

ALSO the last four days…. well, you guys know what my head has been since Saturday, but also Havey-cat developed severe dehydration during the weekend. Since he’s a kidney patient, we finally took him in, and they gave him subuctaneous fluids, which we’re now supposed to give him every other day.

That accounts for my forgetting to link the fundraiser on the last day of the fundraiser.

The other stuff? It accounts for my forgetting to link it almost every day, and ending up linking it in rewrite, which doesn’t go out in emails.

So, perhaps this fundraiser was cursed. Or perhaps it will trickle in over the next few months, as, weirdly, it did last year, taking it to (I THINK) higher than asked for. (Depends on whether I understood Dan correctly when he did the accounting?)

At any rate, the fundraiser is now officially over. Which doesn’t prevent you from hitting the donation links on the side. The give send go link replaces the Paypal, for obvious reasons. And, you know, anytime you have cash or chocolates (what?) you can’t use, you’re welcome to mail them to: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.

In the works are a podcast of sorts — delayed start, because the allergy made me so hoarse I’m only now recovering. (To quote younger DIL “Where did your voice go?”) — and arranging for a paid membership here for those who might wish to do that (WHAT? look, it will be the fiction, so you don’t have to. But some of you have asked.) Also getting a reliable t-shirt source that I can link on the side bar. (This has been very much requested.)

And maybe I’ll follow MCA Hogarth’s lead and start a shopify thing here too. Who knows. (Not yet, though, because I get too much from Amazon.)

There might also be a comic, if I can get my behind in gear.

Some of these will be overtime, clearly not tomorrow.

And in late November, if no one in my close in circles desperately needs it more than I might have a secondary, auxiliary fundraiser. Because a little amount twice a year is easier than a big amount once a year. (TRUST me, I know this math.)

Anyway, for now it’s done, and I’m celebrating being done. Now I’m going to have some ibuprofen (blinding headache over the eyes. And no, no quail in the house, anymore) go do cat boxes and write books to put up. Oh, and share them to my substacks. (I HAVE been writing. It’s just the last two weeks…. You know?)

Because, as grandma would say, of my sitting here and doing retrospectives on the fundraiser, instead of working, actually, “This life won’t lead to sons, nor bearded grandsons.” Which I guess is a goal. I mean, I hope for grandchildren. The bearded…. can wait many years. And I don’t insist on male. (Though, let’s be fair, if the girls have my genetics male won’t be needed for a close relationship with hair-removal implements. Mediterranean people uber alas!)

Anyway, I’ve been silly long enough. Don’t set fire to the dungeons, and don’t go fishing in the dragon pond. I have the world’s largest* book to do a first edit on.

*That was written by me, and isn’t a goat gagger fantasy!

This is a post I should not have to write. Mostly because it’s self-obvious. But it took ME a while to figure it out, so– Here it is.

First let’s dismiss the entire “it’s an hoax” because that’s just the left (broadly defined as to the left of Lenin) being their usual lunatic selves. I’m not even going to respond to the self-proclaimed surgeons or the self-proclaimed ballistics experts on twitter. I’m going to say that if they had even minimal contact with reality they’d realize that even fragmenting ammo does not fragment in contact with ear cartilage (not enough resistance) and no, having a bullet graze you doesn’t mean your head explodes. I don’t actually know whether to advise them to put down the crack pipe or stop watching Merry Melodies. I feel like someone should tell them safes don’t randomly fall out of the sky, nor pianos from upper-story windows, but from the ones I’ve seen on twitter they’d fight us tooth and nail on that too.

There is a much easier way to put their bizarre fantasies to rest: For the whole thing to be a carefully orchestrated false flag, you have to believe that Donald Trump — DONALD TRUMP — is as carefully self-controlled and obedient to choreography as a trained dancer.

I’ll wait till you stop laughing and then give you the graphic again, about how closely, and by a random turn of the head, America escaped a bloody civil war last Saturday.

But sure, cooly-oh, if you believe Donald effing Trump timed the turning of his head precisely, after the bullet had already been fired by an untrained 20 year old sniper…. Oh wait, if you believe that you’re probably jonesing to vote for socialists, so it fits.

As for “all an hoax” you’re requiring that everyone there, including the secret service which is not only controlled and assigned by the present administration, but who also are being dragged through the mud for malice and incompetence, be complicit on this. This includes the family of the man who died. If you really believe that, get out of here. You’re not serious and not only are you a f*cking infant, you’re a moronic f*cking infant. Shut up, child, the adults are talking.

Then there is the outrage and certainty that he should not have got up and pumped his fist, because “ree” he’s keeping his secret service in danger to grandstand. First, if the secret service can’t drag a 79 year old man (and themselves) out of danger (and remember their JOB is danger, their concern is supposed to be their detail) they need to find another job. Yesterday. Second… I realize that none of you EVER were responsible for keeping any group that was in anyway connected to you from doing the inadvisable. BUT–

If Trump hadn’t immediately got up and done that, we’d already be in a civil war. Before news that he was all right could have gone out, people would have gone hot. And listen, you have no idea. You really have no idea.

And no, it’s not a Trump cult. It’s a “if they could get him, they’re coming for me next” “Nothing to lose.” “I have plans in place for this circumstance.” Do I know anyone in the group that would do that. Not explicitly. But I have guesses about a rough three to four dozen of my acquaintance. And I know the psychology.

Look, even after he got up and pumped his fist, I found myself — I was cleaning the house and away from the computer. I have already promised never to do that again — calming people on texts with “No, from the video he’s not in danger. Stop worrying” until I gave up (my kitchen is still a mess) and got on the keyboard.

But speaking of psychology, we get to the important part of this post.

There is very little my colleagues in Science Fiction and Fantasy do that shocks me. Even the politics from the left side of Judas’s ass does not shock me. I’ve read (or at least skimmed) their books, and the flaws are right there, in the worldbuilding that behaves like no real world would behave ever, unless it were utterly contained inside the broken clockwork mind of Marx.

But there was a take that propagated like lightening through the left side of science fiction, echoed by some people who probably once had functional brain cells of a sort, that made me kind of rock back on my heels. This was based on the would be assassin’s registration (voter registration isn’t politics. My husband and I have different ones, and yet we’re about the same.) And it was…. ahem “Why should I care if Trump was shot at by a right winger?”

This was completely puzzling to me because, well… I can’t picture a scenario in which anyone who is broadly to the right of Lenin would try to shoot the candidate of the party opposing the Junta. Not vote for him, maybe. Shoot him? That requires a completely different level of passion and animus. Unless these people were completely insane, I couldn’t figure out why people otherwise capable of writing three coherent paragraphs would even say that.

But then I flipped it.

Look, is it believable that say, advocates for “Palestine” would shoot Joe Biden, for being insufficiently anti-Israel? Well, sure. Is it possible trans advocates would shoot Joe Biden because in their eyes he was insufficiently pro-trans? Or radical communists who think he’s a right winger? Sure. Of course.

But here’s the thing. We’re not the same.

Sure, the right has a broad tent. But it’s a tent. Meaning, there’s a ton of space, people move erratically within in — and sometimes get in hair-pulling arguments — but we’re not cohesive groups in close contest.

Why?

Well, because mostly the right in America wants to be left alone to live their own lives. With a few exceptions, what we want the government to do about our cause is “Leave us alone, and stop forcing me to act in ways that go against my perceived self-interest.” That’s it.

This means that while I think some of you people might be a little loonie on your hobby horses, it’s no skin off my nose. If you really want national currency to be gold-based, well, fine. Can’t be worse than what we have right now, though I think you’ll find it has similar flaws in the end. Or if your hobby horse is that you want to get rid of national parks… Whatever. If I were an avid camper and hiker, I’d already have groups ready to buy and maintain what I consider essential parts of them, should that ball drop.

And that’s leaving aside that I agree with many of your hobby horses. They’re not mine, but I’d go “Heck yeah”: like get rid of the department of education schools and turn education control over to the closest local level or stop dictating minimum wage at a federal level. Or “reduce bureaucracy” or…. anyway. Ahem. I don’t really have a hobby horse, per-se I have a stable, and it’s summed in Viva La Libertad, Carajo!

What I mean is reducing the federal government is not an endeavor that causes us to have MURDEROUSLY strong feelings about our leaders.

Strong feelings? Sure. That’s why our primaries are so disputed and why the left thinks we’re so scary. But frankly, we’re the people who eschewed the indoctrination of the schools, media, entertainment, to make up our own minds. We have strong feelings about breakfast cereal, let alone presidential candidates.

They’re just not the kind of strong feelings that leads to shoot them. (Presidential candidates, or breakfast cereal. The only thing I own I’ve ever considered taking to the range and shooting to pieces is my printer.)

Meanwhile, the left?

Oooh, boy. While they encompass many single-issue groups, their side is not a tent.

You see, what they’re competing from, because of their conceit of a central, and centralized government who can be all things to all people, is a finite budget and government-granted primacy. Money and power given to feminists doesn’t go to trans, doesn’t go to terrorism supporters, doesn’t go to terrorism importers, doesn’t go to parks, doesn’t go–

On top of which they believe in Marxism, which is to say, they believe in finite pie economics. Wealth can’t be created, just endlessly redistributed. And this leaks over to everything. So you know, you can’t have equal rights for women without taking some from men, otherwise women are insufficiently “equal” (no joke, when my kids were in college, email from the university. They’d achieved 65% female graduates in Chemistry. More work needed to be done to assure that females had “equality” in chemistry. And no they weren’t suggesting cutting that down to 50%. Equality for them apparently meant 100%.)

The left side of the isle is not so much a broad coalition of groups all going the same general way. No. They’re groups that resemble nothing so much as rabid weasels tied together by the tail presenting teeth and claws outward, but ready to turn them on each other at the slightest provocation. (Or imagined provocation.)

So, their candidate being shot by their own side? Absolutely believable.

What they don’t understand: We’re not alike.

On the right side, Trump being shot by a “right winger” or “republican”? is jaw-droppingly bizarre and unbelievable.

I mean, okay, there’s the never Trumpers. So, some young man was so inflamed by the immortal rhetoric of the Bulwark that he…. No. Some young man loved Ron De Santis so much that he– Barely plausible, except any Ron De Santis fan knows that’s not who would replace Trump, because the right doesn’t work that way. And Ron to his eternal credit has in no way stoked that kind of flame or demanded that kind of follower.

So, what? Are we to believe that the leaders who are genuinely snippy at Trump have that kind of following amid the youth?

Advance the Pierre Delecto Brigades, with their perfectly coiffed hair, wielding their combat roladex! Forward march.

Or perhaps: Up the Mitch McConnell volunteers, in their turtle armour….

It won’t wash. It won’t pass the giggle test.

We’re back again to “The left isn’t insane, but what they think they see on the right is just a mirror, reflecting them endlessly.”

Which sometimes requires more effort on our part to understand their “thought” than they put into those opinions to begin with.

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: Best Enemies (Chronicles of the Fall)

Hayden Jaeger, youngest son of the Chairman of the Council and Ambrose Vinogradov, the youngest son of the Founder, were thrown together by random chance as they were assigned to be dorm mate at the University. It was not an instant friendship.

300 years before the fall of the Troystvennyy Soyuz, the foundations of a secret society are about to be laid down . . .

https://amzn.to/4d2kT6IFROM KEVIN IKENBERRY: Bureau 42 (The Phoenix Initiative)

Peacemakers. The Galactic Union’s most capable enforcers and resolute negotiators, their name alone elicits fear and awe among the Union’s citizenry.

It doesn’t happen often, but when a Peacemaker can’t solve a case, it goes to the Peacemaker Archives, as all Peacemaker cold cases reside within “Bureau 42,” as it’s also known. Cases dealing with ghost ships, missing Peacemakers, mysterious killers, and even a few cases that aren’t even really cases can all be found in the files of Bureau 42.

Fourteen authors present thirteen all-new stories from the depths of Bureau 42. Take a look into the forgotten files of the Peacemaker Guild and find never-before-seen secrets, some of which herald the future of the Peacemaker Guild and even the Galactic Union itself.

These stories honor the threat, set the terms, and walk the knife edge between standing or falling. Step inside, Candidate, and see what our files hold…

FROM ROBERT ZIMMERMAN: Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8: The First Manned Mission to Another World.

It was Christmas Eve 1968. And the astronauts of Apollo 8 – Commander Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders – were participants in a mission that took them faster (24,000 mph) and farther from the earth (240,000 miles) than any human had ever traveled. Apollo 8 was the mission that broke humanity’s absolute bond to the earth: it was the first manned vehicle to leave the earth’s orbit. Confined within a tiny spaceship, the astronauts were aided in their journey by a computer less powerful than one of today’s handheld calculators. Their mission was not only a triumph of engineering, but also an enduring moment in history. The words these three men spoke from lunar orbit reverberated through American society, changing our culture in ways no one predicted.

FROM KEITH HEDGER: Tales of the E4 Mafia

They are specialists, corporals, and petty officers. They are the military personnel who have learned some leadership and gained expertise in their specialty. “Work smarter, not harder” is their watch phrase, followed by “If you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying”.

They are masters of avoiding work, getting up to shenanigans, and, when a mission needs to be completed or job done, it’s an E-4 that others turn to. They are the near mythical E-4 Mafia, and their ability to avoid work, solve problems, and create trouble is the stuff of legend.

Here are eleven stories of the E-4 Mafia in a variety of settings and situations that are sure to thrill and entertain anyone with an interest in military fiction, science fiction, a sense of humor and the curiosity to peek under the rug to see what got swept there when something needed done.

FROM CAITLIN WALSH: Mama Bunny #2: Daddy’s Home

Mama Bunny is back, and this time she’s got backup!

In this brand-new Papa-focused collection, follow the Bunny family as they perform unwise science experiments, operate heavy machinery, and disassemble anything that stays still for long enough.

Being a stay-at-home mom has its challenges, but with your husband at your side, anything can be managed—no matter how ridiculous.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Whine in a Box (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 3)

Maybe chasing murderers wasn’t so bad after all…

Meg Turner, vampire, accountant, and investments advisor…is a political radical. By vampire standards, at least. She’s young, American, and wasn’t inducted into the unlife in the usual way. Which means she’s not a European feudalist. So, when other vampires started asking to move into her territory, she wasn’t sure how to react, other than to welcome some of them. She has a chance to shape an entire territory, if she wants.

(She doesn’t)

Her allies have other plans, though. And, between those plans being sprung on her without much warning, her nearest neighbor coming under attack (and sending his helpless civilians to her for shelter), her mother showing up on her doorstep, looking for answers to why she’d not gotten in contact in the last twenty years…yeah. She’s got a reason to whine.

And that’s not even counting the rising panic over a brand new virus…that shouldn’t affect her people, but will anyway.

FROM DALE COZORT: Through the Wild Gate

Robinette Thornburg, the half-human daughter of ultra-rich Robert Thornburg, thought she was fully human, just weird, for the first twenty-one years of her life. She went to expensive private schools, then Harvard. On her twenty-first birthday, she learned that she was half Mangi, the result of an encounter between her father and a primitive near-human woman from the Wild, an alternate reality North America where primitive humans arrived half a million years ago, but no modern humans ever did.

That was the first she had heard of Mangi or the Wild, closely held secrets of the wealthy families who control Gates to it, but she finds out far more than she wants to about the Wild when mysterious enemies kidnap her and leave her to die in the Wild, naked and weaponless.

Robinette nearly starves before finding her way back to our world through an early, uncontrolled Gate. She vows revenge, but on who? She teams up with Eric Carter, a down on his luck private eye and former bodyguard to her father. The two try to figure out who kidnapped Robinette and why, a quest that takes them through the decadent world of the Gate families, the only law in the Wild. It also takes them back to the Wild and then to a final confrontation with, their lives and the fate of the Wild at stake.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Broken Devices: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 3)

Book 3 of The Chained Adept

CHAINS WITHOUT WIZARDS AND A RISING COUNT OF THE DEAD.

The largest city in the world has just discovered its missing wizards. It seems the Kigali empire has ignited a panic that threatens internal ruin and the only chained wizard it knows that’s still alive is Penrys.

The living wizards and the dead are not her people, not unless she makes them so. All they have in common is a heavy chain and a dead past — the lives that were stolen from them are beyond recall.

What remains are unanswered questions about who made them this way. And why. And what Penrys plans to do to find out.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Witch-Child and the Scarlet Fleet

Trapped in a pirate port. . .

Caught between pirates who would force him to use wizardry in their aid, and a king who would force him to spy, Alik will need every scrap of wits and wizardry to forge his own path.

https://amzn.to/3S7ugtRFROM LEIGH KIMMEL: A Gift of Koi

Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human?

Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn’t find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi’s side, he knows he’s found a kindred spirit.

But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

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: TROUSERS.

UPDATE: I REALLY suck at fundraising, don’t I? Today is the day before last, I promise.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*

*Before the post. Yeah, the killer was “registered Republican” — I was briefly registered democrat, to vote against Obama in primaries. And I only registered Republican (as opposed for independent) to vote in primaries. Primary registration means nothing. Who you donate to does. I… made a tweet about it, because it supports the “we deserve better psy-ops” joke, but really, I think it was a misseducated kid who thought democratic socialism was wonderful and Trump was Hitler. The only thing suspicious is “no social media.” That I don’t buy.

Now a few things: For everyone who says false flag.

And this: should be read. And this.

And oh, yeah, you’ll see pictures of clean cut assassin to bolster the “GOP supporter” thing, but…. Well, this is what he looked like (most photos have curiously been vanishing from online, so this was the best.)

Oh, this also has a photo of the assassin, as well as a good recap of the whole thing. Look at the photo and tell me that’s a “Republican gun enthusiast”!

– SAH*
This is an extraordinary meme post. We’re all unsettled and scared, mostly at the bullet we all collectively dodged yesterday. BUT we’re Americans, so we’re already making jokes.

Let the memes be lit. AND BE NOT AFRAID.

UPDATE: GRUMBLE I should add this. Two more days.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*

The last two weeks have been both enlightening and horrifying, and that enlightenment continued with last night’s pull-ups er big boy conference, so called.

Oh, not because I didn’t know the zombie was a zombie, shambling around and being directed by the extreme left. I knew that.

My mistake, though was one that us, old cold-warriors are prone to. You see, in our day commies might not have been any more competent than they are now (I maintain at least the western ones were still competent, while in the USSR they might be suffering from 4th generation communism, a virus that eats brains. (Not literally. And yes, I can explain.))but they sure appeared more competent. I don’t know how much of this was the effect of a complicit and fully in control of all information media. It might be impossible to ever know.

However, while I didn’t assume their plans would work in the long run, I assumed their plans were minimally competent. Like, not eating paste competent.

This was torpedoed by two things: letting the zombie get on that stage for the debate, and thinking it would work, somehow, at all. And all the hype beforehand, too, about how incisive and brilliant the zombie was.

And then the reaction on the left to the big boy pants conference. Not the conference, which was its own amazing disaster though perhaps, if I trust Stephen Green on it (Look, I’m not stupid enough to watch it, no) marginally less obviously presented by a zombie than the debate, no. The REACTION to it from the left.

It wasn’t their in one voice, trained-seal like clapping and telling us how cleveramazing Biden was. That’s… Look, they’re group oriented, they might even believe it. Because they believe whatever the group believes. Hillary’s slogan was almost right to define the left’s modus operandi, only it wasn’t “I’m with her” it’s always “I’m with them.” They believe that there’s safety and MORALITY in numbers that the greater number is always right and to an extent — remember, levitating the mint seemed rational to them — that reality is determined by consensus.

So once they realized they’re stuck with Biden, they would start seal-like barking how amazing he is, in the face of all sanity and evidence, because they hope this will shape not only opinion but REALITY.

But the stuff that leaked in around the corners is what was truly horrifying. I have a friend who is a mixed blessing because he insists on showing me things going up in Mastodon. For those who have forgotten, Mastodon is where the left ran for fear of free speech on twitter. So, while it’s absolutely horrifying, it’s also a good measure of things they just think make sense and are what everyone knows.

On Mastodon last night they were gloating about how what happened was that reporters thinking they were going to watch an explosion listened to a “well informed” and “brilliant” conference on Biden’s agenda, including foreign policy and domestic measures….

Oh, I saw some of those. Well informed and sensible, indeed. If your mind is full of Imagine, Give Peace a Chance, and the more ridiculous just so stories that the left loves to believe.

This is a world in which feeding the “starving” children of Gaza will miraculously bring peace about, instead of the money going to build more weapons and mount more attacks on Israel, while the children are taught it’s all the fault of the Jews and that killing more or them will bring about paradise.

But more importantly, this is a world, and a set of minds to which “National rent control” is a sensible solution.

And here’s the thing: the set of mind who believe this are the same set of minds that is manipulating Biden (self obviously) and who thinks these appearances and speeches will garner support.

Because polls notwithstanding (Don’t fully blame them there. They know they manipulate those, so they assume now we’re manipulating them, which, while in error is far more sensible than any of their other beliefs, because it merely rests in assuming everyone is like them.) they still assume what they propose is right and just, and what any sensible person will immediately perceive as right and just. They think the only thing they have to do is proclaim what they intend to do and most of all their wonderful intentions loud and clear, and everyone will of course see they’re just, sensible and wonderful and fall in.

Their opposition to them is two camps. One that is outright evil, and perhaps suborned (not very clear by whom, but they probably think “millionaires and billionaires” without realizing most of those are on their side.) The other are simply people who haven’t heard the Gospel of progressivism. Once they hear that loud enough, they’ll instantly convert and stop voting “against their interests” and there will be candy and unicorn farts for all.

The problem, the real problem, at the basis of it is that these are the children of Summer of Love by The Good People Lost. They are the third generation of leftover leftist hippies who refused to believe anything we saw during Reagan’s tenure. To them rent control still means rents are lower, and they never understood what we mean by “market distortion” nor processed the fact that most places with rent control are both hellish expensive and have decaying real estate. To them that’s just because landlords are greedy. To them minimum guaranteed income is just sensible, and the resulting inflation and lack of production are just a sign that rich people are greedy and capitalism is evil. To them government should control everything AND there should be no borders, because the experts should be in charge of everything worldwide. And if you, yes you, you stupid peasant, would just eat the bugs and live in walkable cities, Gaia wouldn’t be mad at us, and everything would be great.

Oh, and the USSR only fell because we are so evil we tricked “the good guys” into surrendering. And no, there wasn’t anything bad behind the curtain. Here, they have these pictures clipped from Soviet Life in the seventies to show you how beautiful and prosperous a planned economy can be. And if only everyone–

If you imagine this in the sniveling, high tones of a middle school girl in a snit, you’ll have the full picture.

These are the people who working behind the scenes at Hillary’s campaign not only thought that the pee story about Trump made sense, but also would cause the entire right to run screaming from Trump, because ‘ick, Russia’. You see, they never understood why the right in this country rejected communism. I mean, they told us it was wonderful. They explained. They explained in school and in movies, and on TV. So, the only reason we rejected it was, of course, because we’re evil. And mean. And hate Russia, for no good reason. So associating Trump with Russia would make us run. When it didn’t they suddenly assumed that’s because it was true, and Trump was working with Putin. NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE unless you assume that communism is absolutely wonderful, the USSR agit prop of the seventies was holy writ, and that if only they explain louder–

This is the Biden camp. That and a few ruthless people who are getting very rich and protecting their stash while assuming “Apres moi, le deluge.”

But the few manipulating Biden, the ones in charge, picked by Jill who, as various people have pointed out, is cunning and profoundly dumb?

They are commies, sure. But not the cunning commies of the cold war. No. These are 40 something theater kiddies, who have been doing all the right things according to what they were told is right.

Kiddies who were told that all the discomfirmation of their cultish upbringing in holy Marx was “disinformation” and “evil.” (And probably greedy and mean too.)

They BELIEVE. They incandescently believe in a bunch of shibboleths that make no sense whatsoever, but which they hold onto like a baby to his pacifier.

They believe if the US disarms, or turns its military into a cross between a charity organization and a force for disseminating sexual liberation propaganda, there will be PEACE.

They believe if price and wage controls go into place, everyone will be prosperous, and only “the rich” will suffer.

They believe you — yes, you — aren’t sufficiently taxed.

They believe in open borders, because it helps redress “colonialism”.

They believe in two spirit, and BIPOC and– THEY BELIEVE.

They believe so hard they figured no one would realize that Biden was a zombie, because look, he’s saying the Holy TRUTH and therefore good. And once everyone hears it, they will of course realize it’s true and perfect.

I have a headache. And I’m for real terrified. Because evil? Evil we can fight and maybe even defeat. But this is stupid. Willful stupid on steroids, and without bounds.

And stupid is dangerous.

In the short term, expect much much louder affirmations of what IS RIGHT AND JUST, including that Biden is an immortal genius.

In the long run, may G-d have mercy on the United States of America.

Because if we don’t take as much control as possible out of the hands of the fanatical stupid, the crash is going to be very hard and the rebuild painful, because what we’re doing is the equivalent of letting the toddlers bang on everything with a hammer. And that breaks things. And some of those things are things we’ll need.

Evil has revealed itself. And it’s well-meaning. And profoundly stupid.

UPDATE ONCE MORE I FORGOT TO POST THE FUNDRAISER BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*

Human brains — and bodies — are not designed to deal with glut.

Throughout most of our human journey in this world, heck, from before we were humans even, had no problems with an excess of anything. It wasn’t even a consideration.

If one of your ancestors before say the eighteenth century and then only if he/she was well off, had to fight with him/herself not to eat an extra cookie, it was not just “because I’ll get fat” but “because I’ll be taking food from the kids, who are still growing.” (Which if you’re a decent human being, makes it easier to resist.)

Now I routinely fight with myself not to overeat at breakfast. (Because I wake up very hungry, and it takes a while for the body to know I’ve eaten.) And if I were to give in, the damage would be to my attempts at weight loss, not to our budget or survival. You see, a bowl of cheerios is cheap. Which by itself is a miracle and a wonder, but never mind.

It wasn’t till this morning that it hit me, we’re now facing the same problem with glut on the informational front. Not just story or entertainment, but information. Of all sorts.

It was while scanning a conversation online, overnight, that I came across people saying “But how could he not have known?” And then it hit me “Well, because it was more than twenty years ago, and finding information was difficult then.”

No, seriously. You people who are younger than me, get off my e-lawn. You have no idea. It used to be really hard to find information. All information. In general.

Small piddly stuff, like people’s address, sure. “I know so and so lives in this small town, but dang it, I can’t find his last letter. Let me hie myself to the library and see if they have a phone book.” (They usually did, at least for towns in the state. But still.) But also “Mom had a recipe for carrot fritters, but I can’t find it. It must have been a known thing, but….” It could start a years’ long dive into historical cook books and chances are good you’d never find it. Now I can find it in ten minutes of poking around at the right area and recipes online.

The most obvious illustration of this, in my career, and it also shows how fast the change was, was my research for the Musketeer Mysteries. I couldn’t find a thing on how police was organized in France at the time. Not a word on line, or any of the books. I went on just keeping it out of the books as much as possible. Now it’s trivially easy to find. The same with a map of Paris at the time. I still have a huge (Wall size. It’s behind a set of bookcases) map of Paris at the time of the Musketeers, for which I paid the Earth in a specialized map store. (It’s a reproduction of course, not antique. Weirdly at the time the gentleman who worked there told me they mostly sold such historical city maps to RPG gamers.) but it stopped being needed halfway through the series. Because there are a ton of them online.

For those born in the new age of glut, the process of finding out info went something like this (and I’ll use research for a historical novel series as the model, because those were my most egregious fishing expeditions):

Have an idea. Go to the public library and come home with 50 books on the general area/time/subject. Read them to refine more closely what you might want to say/work with. Go out and get another 50 books by borrow, beg or buy. Refine still more. Now go and buy (at this level, it was almost always buy) another 50 books. Note some of these will be useful for one line, maybe two.

Now imagine having to do that for everything. I mean, everything. Like, you have some specialized thread you found at the thrift store. It’s very pretty. So you got it for 99c. Now what do you do with it. Just researching what it is, and where it came from even if you had a bobbin with a name, could take years. Now: minutes with an internet connection.

This applies to information on current events as well. Not only can we hit the net and get a lot of (early on very conflicting) information, but we can usually these days — or at least I can — call a friend in a nearby region to the event and talk over what happened. A surprising number of times, I’m no more than two degrees of connection to someone who was there. (The first instance of this for me was 9/11.)

This is not in any way a bad thing. It’s a great counter for the unified front of propaganda. Which is how and why the left is failing these days, because they got used to being the man behind the curtain. Their positions of power in the information/entertainment industrial complex helped them manipulate the country and the world for almost a century. They really got nothing else — the ideas don’t work and their social beliefs are (at best) puerile and increasingly more so — but they could make it seem like everyone else ‘believes this way’ and thereby force the social apes to fall in line, no matter how absurd the development/idea/push.

It’s not working. These days we can see them doing the push in front of G-d and everybody. And even if most of the people tune it off — more on that later — enough of us see it that the front isn’t unified. And for the more ridiculous ideas/pushes such as that no one knows what a woman is, or that Joe Biden is a fully functional human being, it takes a unified front. Now not only are there dissenters, but the dissenters know there are dissenters and that there is a good reason for dissent. Which makes the whole push less effective. (Not completely ineffective, mind.)

But there is a snap-back reaction to the glut of information.

I’ve explained before how I am an information sponge and my normal day resembles an intellectual drunkard’s walk through internet information sources, from the sane to the silly. To an extent I was always like that. Before the internet a lot of my morning was consumed reading six newspapers. (If you’re going to ask why! I just had to. Yes, we subscribed to six. It’s a long story.) But I’m unusual.

And even I find that the glut of information on the net makes it impossible to remember where I got the information/idea. (Ah, for the memory I had at 20.)

During the Obama administration I noticed that their way of hiding terrible things they’d done was “hide a scandal with another scandal.” This is a well known strategy and was used by the fashionable in the courts of Europe. But to dance like that in full light of news/information, over and over again was breathtaking. And while I’m sure some of it was deliberate, I now wonder how much of it was simply that all of a sudden we could watch them much closer, and the information just kept coming.

The other day I was trying to list all the “Trump did this horrible thing” that have been debunked, and could only come up with three, so I asked in a group, and I swear for all of us, hyper connected, hyper political people, it took us hours and then someone would go “Oh, yeah, this.” until the list was something like 25. And I’m sure if I look in that discussion now, there will be others.

But the thing is, it’s too much information. The normal brain will not track or retain all of it, unless it’s immediately related to survival.

If I weren’t hyper-political and connected, or were in an information subgroup that reports “everything bad ever said about Trump” but not the denouement where the report is often completely upside down, all I’d know was that “there have been a lot of bad things said about Trump. What a horrible man.”

And this is the reason why, although partisans were always hard to convince of flaws, that that there are Scott Adams’ two movies (at least. Actually there are at least six at the same time) in people’s heads, and people are so resistant to even admitting there are other movies.

Because there is an information glut. And the human brain deals very poorly with too much of anything, including of a good thing, like food, or info. One way to cope with it is to artificially filter it.

Diet wise, we tend to do that by artificially restricting it. Low carb (never really worked for me, but it worked for Dan, so we were low carb for 20 years, because it was far more important to keep his sugar under control than for me to lose weight. Until it stopped working for him) or vegetarian, or vegan, or paleo or– I always wondered how many of these diets were actually beneficial (they are, to some people. But the human genetics are a mess, okay?) and how many were just a way to make it so you don’t have to fight with all temptation, all the time.

We do the same with information. I — as I said — am in a weird group. So whether it’s someone we love or hate, we usually have this one guy (actually a gal, but–) who does a deep dive and comes up with the contrary view. But for most people? Nope. They already decided what they believe, and why will only consume information that confirms it.

This is true even in non-political fronts. I bet half the people in the comments are going to tell me low carb works for everyone and how very dare I? (It worked great for Dan, so long as he could exercise. It worked for me for about six months. And then I started craving things I simply could not have low carb. Obsessively. Corn chips. Potatoes. etc. etc. etc. I can’t swear I ended up consuming more of the allowable food to compensate, but I think I did, because I started gaining weight. And after that, I simply couldn’t lose. But I could gain. Its stopping to work for Dan, for a bunch of reasons including inability to exercise, and then probably cpap issues meant we had to try “normal food small portions” which is working better for me than for him, but also for him at last. And the weird thing is all the cravings have gone silent. Completely. Heck, even the things I love, like potatoes, I’ll eat a few and I’m done.) Because it’s the way to cope with things one has found, and it’s horrible to be thrown back to formless and disordered glut (of food and info.)

This is also fueling a lot of the “I want to go back to when we were united, and things were simple and–“

To the extent Joe Biden got real votes in 20 (I’d guess about 25% of them were real) it was because people were sick with the wish for normalcy and old white dude who has been around politics forever promised it. A lot of the anger at him, likewise, is not just that he’s a walking cadaver, or that his policies have been uniformly disastrous, but that he couldn’t take us back to circa 1950 when, in our minds, things were so much simpler. (Spoiler voice over: they weren’t. It’s just how we remember them. Partly due to lying movies.)

The frustrating thing with all this is that there is not a single panacea for how to cope with glut. Again, neither bodies nor brains were designed for this. Throughout the history of the world scarcity was the norm. Mostly extreme scarcity at that. Life-threatening scarcity.

So whether for excess food or excess information, we each have to find our way to cope.

I just humbly submit that over restricting on either of those, and never re-examining the evidence or the results can be as lethal as natural extreme scarcity.

Or worse.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*

In cities across the US — in fact across the world, but particularly in the US — homelessness is a growing problem. In fact, there has been a growing bleeding heart argument that we should just let people camp and defecate on the street, or it’s “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The cities are dealing with this the way they deal with this, and the do gooders ditto. The way the cities deal with it, is by building at great cost, houses to put these people into. The do-gooders collect money, build shelters, and generally try to make it easier on people who are in these circumstances, in the hopes they’ll pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

They seem to think the people camping on the streets, randomly attacking passerbyes, defecating and masturbating in public are doing this because housing is too expensive. Or that there isn’t enough housing. The latest renaming of “homeless” to unhoused puts the emphasis on that, making it sound like these people are really, really, really just on the streets because mysteriously there aren’t enough houses to go around.

Now, I’m not going to argue with any of you that housing and rent isn’t to expensive. That has way too many reasons, among them the stupid covidiocy and the fact landlords have to recover all the money they lost during the “no one needs to pay their rent” so they can do repairs and such, you know? But also well, the open borders bringing illegals in and then having the government house them at the People’s expense and top dollar, and foreign investors buying American real estate under the illusion it’s a safe investment. Honestly, to list all the reasons houses are too expensive and people– particularly young people –are having serious issues paying for housing I’d need a bigger blog. However, I’ll note in passing we could get rid of the shortage and have a glut if we got rid of all the wanker regulations on what houses have to have and do to allow people to live in them. No, I don’t mean “must have a roof” and “must be minimally functional.” I mean stuff like “The pipe used must be blah blah” and such. If you just make it easier to retrofit commercial real estate into living space you get rid of the office space glut and you create enough housing to make the housing market more rational.

But here’s the thing: the people who can’t afford houses or even apartments aren’t the people who are “homeless” or “unhoused” in the sense of camping on city streets and making a public health hazard out of themselves, while making it impossible for people to live normal lives around there. No, the people who can’t afford houses or even apartments, a number that’s growing as inflation makes it hard to afford that and food, both, are either getting another couple of roommates — it’s not unusual for married couples in their twenties to share with other married couples, or three or four single people — or living “van life” or couch surfing with friends till the crunch passes, or move back in with mom and dad, or, oh, a million other arrangements that still count as “homeless” because they aren’t renting or buying a house. Those people might not or might be helped with some money, but honestly? Most of them you couldn’t get them to take it. Like all Americans they’re not poor, they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The best help you can give them is cut through the forest regulations and government money making housing stupidly unaffordable.

The “Homeless” making our big cities unlivable and growing in numbers are a different breed, and throwing money at it isn’t going to solve anything. In fact it’s going to make everything worse.

Look, even I didn’t fully realize this. Except, you know, I lived in a downtown area for most of my married life. To be exact in downtown Colorado Springs. And we routinely walked downtown (all of us) mostly because parking was really impossible. It took less time to walk the mile and a half downtown than to drive and then try to park. And we often walked through or around Acacia Park which at the time was full of homeless people.

It was impossible to do that and not listen in on their conversations — look, I’m a writer. I listen to conversations. That’s what I do. — and to start getting a feeling for why these people were there.

Sure, most of them were addicted to something. Sure. Whatever. A surprising number sounded functional enough. However…

They talked — particularly the young ones — about leaving home because of “all the rules”. And they made fun of the rest of the population, those who worked for a living. They talked of places to eat for free, places to sleep for free and “with no judgement”, places where they could get medical care and dental care. (Outside emergency room where they get medical care for free anyway.) All of this — absolutely all of this — for free and not demanding anything of them.

They thought we, the rest of us who work for a living and try to save for retirement and all that, were stupid.

And you know, if you don’t mind living in a tent, etc. they aren’t even wrong.

Yes, there’s genuine untreated mental health. There’s genuine untreated addiction.

But through it all? There are people who are homeless, or at least start out that way — I think the drugs and mental health kind of come with the territory after a while, because man was made to strive, not to an endless, purposeless summer vacation — because it’s easy. Because there re no rules to follow. They don’t have to do anything. Everything gets given to them. This while life for the productive, between unemployment, inflation, and increasing regulations is getting harder and harder every year.

Listen here, perhaps we get more and more homeless every year because we throw money at it. You get more of what you pay for. It’s basic economics. Everything else is a cope session to claim economics is wrong in this case.

We sneer and point fingers at the Victorians because they put the poor and homeless in work houses. But you know, from where I stand, I don’t see where “hand them everything with no judgement and don’t demand anything of them” is better. Do you? At least they — failing and with massive recidivism — tried to encourage bourgeois virtues, not spit on them.

Perhaps we should stop treating those who fall by the way side as impaired, incapable and victims, and stop throwing money and care at them with no conditions.

If you ask me, encouraging them towards normalcy and a productive life would be better for everyone. Including themselves.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*

We need some way to study culture that isn’t as silly, corrupted by Marxism and outright faddish as our current anthropology field.

No, hear me out, okay? Studying what a culture even IS and how much it influences the group it works with; what happens when the culture is broken or occupied; signs of a culture under attack; a culture under natural decay; a culture that’s gone toxic.

Because humans are social apes, it’s always a question what’s nature and what’s nurture, and because cultures as they exist currently are just a static thing, you have to look at cultural perspective, which in turn involves bias in reporting.

However, it’s possible to break through that, as through all bias in reporting issues, by having many historical reports, with many biases, and not assuming our current one is more right than the rest.

But Sarah, you’ll say, why do we need cultures to be studied? What’s with wanting all these fluffy irreproducible social science stuff? Don’t we spend enough money on those? Let’s study STEM.

Okay, you do you. And note, I’m not 100% sure these should be founded by government. In fact, I’m fairly sure they shouldn’t because wellll the inherent biases of a corrupt bureaucratic structure don’t help anything. BUT–

The other day at insty I shared this: Tough Question, Simple Answer.

Yes, I do realize it’s an old post, but I thought it was still relevant. And I wanted to point out that I agree with him on South Africa in general and on apartheid in general, but not on the whole “The population might be genetically predisposed to short-time preference and inability to plan.” Not because “racissss” (And not Kim doesn’t say “IS” because we can’t, because studies on it are all muddled, partly by being done by the apartheid regime to justify itself.) But because as far as I can determine it isn’t true.

Sure, Africa is a total mess, and Africa in general exhibits a lot of of the same pathologies (though part of this is the European export of communism which is is the worst colonialism.) But there’s really no proof they’re due to a common genetic heritage OR lack.

First of all because Africa has the most genetically diverse populations in the world, and second because African people who immigrate and make a point of acculturation often do quite well. Also a lot of African countries did well under colonial rule, and it wasn’t despite it’s native populations, but they were full contributors. Also when people bring this up, they inevitably bring up the black population of the US, which is a laugh, since 90% of them are technically what’s known in the rest of the world as “Caucasians” and Americans go on the slightest facial hints to say “that person is black.” (We recently watched American fiction, and I was baffled because I’d heard it was about a black author. I kept waiting for the black author to come in, until the character meets his family and they’re obviously black. Until then he read “Mediterranean” to me. Dan says he’s obviously black. GO FIGURE.)

Also, though this is deliberately hidden, despite all the things stacked against them, black people in America were doing quite well and were perhaps more “bourgeois” in values than white people, until the welfare state came and socked them down again. And as far as black misbehavior, it’s more or less standard “white trash” misbehavior, probably proceeding from people brought in in small groups or individually (slaves came from all over Africa) and having lost their moorings acculturating to the culture of other field hands and supervisors. So, you know “Lower class British/Irish in the 18th and early 19th century.” Like the speech. Anyway, the white underclass is going on the welfare ride along with black people in America, and both need to be freed from the degradation of low expectations.

Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t a genetic component to some human behaviors. We’re still, after all, mammals and have bodies. Oh, and an evolutionary history. It’s just that it’s not that simple. Even short/long time preference isn’t — probably — based on a single genetic trait. And all genetic traits can be employed various ways.

When I went to older son’s sweeping of every award for chemistry on his final undergrad year (not seriously. They told him “Don’t bother getting off the stage.” as they called in each new award for this and that) I will confess I felt a little uncomfortable. In the sense that every kid there but son and another kid had a German last name. And it turned out kid had a German immigrant mother, and son has a Amish great grandmother. Add it all together with the fact that chemistry — which I cordially detest — is a fussy, exacting, button counting system, and you start getting the slightest bit squirmy and going “Well, now…”

But historically that’s complete BS. First because the Germans were considered “wild and unorganized” well into the eighteenth century. Second because the communists managed to make the East Germans slovenly and short-time-preference incapable of maintaining anything.

So do I have a bad sample, or is there a correlation, and it’s just how the culture uses the “fussy, obsessive on details” genetic trait?

I’d be inclined to the latter, because, well…. because. I mean, if the entire culture is “wild” then the fussy obsessive on details gets spent on…. I don’t know. Better traps for house breakers? And the communists turned that trait into obsessive spying on everyone, till there was no energy for anything else.

In the same way, I often refer to Portugal as ADHD with borders. And it is that. It’s weird, the level of ADD that’s considered completely normal there. (And I was off the charts even for there. Oh, well.) But it took me till this last visit, when I’m almost — to the extent I’m fully acculturated here, or as much as it’s possible to be — to realize how much of Portugal’s inability to organize its way out of a wet paperbag OR maintain anything less durable than a Roman aqueduct (and even those!) is reinforced and driven to eleventy by a culture that goes “The highest virtue is doing things fast, no matter how BADLY they’re done.” And that’s pushed everywhere and by every possible means. And yes, I grew up with it (Anyone making a comment about my books gets put in the corner. Actually they’re worse if I take very long. Yes, I have an explanation, but it doesn’t matter. It is what it is) and internalized it to such an extent it took almost forty years to SEE it was there and it was bad.

And these traits can be recoverable from, if one acculturates elsewhere. I know that, because when I first moved here — I tell this story often, because it’s now hilarious — my entire family was shocked and dismayed to find out that as I was sending things over the transom, the manuscript would get rejected if I had a typo or punctuation error in the first page (Or others, but particularly the first.)

It wasn’t so much that they found I was being asked to do something impossible, but also because they couldn’t understand why I was expected — as a creative — to punctuate my manuscripts at all. “Surely the houses have people for that.”

You’ll be shocked — because I know what this blog looks like, yes, but it’s fitted in around things — that my manuscripts are actually cleaner and more grammatical than 90% of the writers’ out there. Because I spent so many years in slush, I trained myself to correctness and obsession with details. Though looking at Portugal no one would expect that.

And there’s Portugal, of course. Let’s say that to talk of innate Portuguese characteristics is …. kind of like talking about the innate genetic characteristics of street cats. My kids’ characterization of Portugal as “the reservoir tip of Europe” is mean. It’s also accurate. Genetically Portuguese are…. a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a dollop of the other thing. However they are all for real ADD AF. Even if I’m more so than most of them. And they all exhibit short-time-preference.

I suspect — to revisit the vexed question of “Africa always wins” which is not the point of this post, but needs a sort of exclamation point at the end — that Africa’s true tragedy is an overall (with exceptions, yes, I’m not stupid) climate that makes living easy for humans, and a fact that tribalism was never broken there, and tribalism is a curse on humanity. Like communism, it penalizes saving or planning for the future, in favor of short term “being in good with the group.” And it’s about as pleasant to live under as communism. Don’t be fooled by the “country borders.” Sure, countries exist in Africa, but as far as I can understand, they’re just a nifty mask for the same old tribal wars and clashes.

Which brings us back to cultures. It doesn’t matter if tribes in Africa have different cultures or genetics, their cultures are all varieties of tribal culture, and that penalizes individual action and innovation in favor of almost nihilistic obedience to and supremacy of the group. (The same nonsense our wokies want to impose here.)

And our problem is that we don’t GET cultures. The Gramscian thing of all cultures are alike, except the cultures of the oppressed which are extra nifty and should be let run rampant is killing us all.

We don’t understand cultures, or how to modify them, or how to help them eliminate bad characteristics before they damage another generation.

I know cultures aren’t sentient, but they behave as if they were. Because they embed in people’s brains when they’re so young they can’t even think, they behave as a sort of collective subconscious. And while they change and evolve over time, they are excruciatingly slow to do so.

All of this is a problem in a world of rapid innovation and deliberately open borders. If we don’t study cultures and figure out how to make the better ones prevail — those more useful to human civilization and happiness, on the individual side, because that’s the only measure we CAN use — what we end up with is hordes of locusts roaming the earth, eating out each slightly better off country. Or if you prefer, tribalism on a global scale.

Take a lot of the things we considered once upon a time problems of “overpopulation”. It turns out what they actually are is problems of a culture that has been conquered and is occupied. The women become whores (to survive the occupation by the enemy, because if your kids are of the enemy, well…) and the men become effeminate, and no one works, and– ALL of these are signs of a culture that has lost a war and been occupied. NOT of overpopulation. It is also the signs of a culture taken over by Marxists, which the culture obviously interprets as “foreign occupiers” — and if you see what they do, it’s typical colonizer stuff, from taking over the schools to punishing everyone who doesn’t display allegiance.

But no one is paying attention to that, because no one is studying the “mechanisms of culture” qua culture, and what cultures do and how they change and use humans almost as their instruments to survive/replicate/conquer/die.

It is necessary. It is urgent. And I don’t know what to do about it.

I do know it’s needed because we don’t have the …. ruthlessness to use the old methods, let alone thinking the old methods were horrible. (They were.)

In the old method, either all men over the age of three were killed (that had mixed success as women often managed to pass on enough of the conquered culture, anyway) or everyone but “the babe at the breast” was killed. That effectively destroyed the culture, and let the conquering culture — often simply more ruthless, but often also better organized and more capable of overcoming tribalism (see Rome) — become THE culture.

The history of civilization is made of such encounters, but we can’t do it. As we are, we simply can’t. And faster travel has made the world one large neighborhood.

So, we need sane, non-fluffy people to study: What cultures are (They’re not food and clothes. And they’re not race. To what extent those influence culture is debatable, but they’re not what culture IS); how cultures clash; how to make cultures that are objectively bad/destructive/useless go away without putting everyone to the sword; the symptoms that a culture is in trouble and how to fix it.

I don’t know how to do any of that, though I suspect a lot of my ponderings on it is coming out in the current headache of a book/series. (Yes, published soonish. But so weird, most of you will run screaming into the night. Never mind.)

There is an entire field of knowledge it’s urgent to study. Our culture ignores it because it’s decided culture means race.

And I have no idea how to fix it. These things always fix themselves eventually, but usually by those old, er…. ruthless methods.

If we don’t want to end up there, we’d best figure it out now.

*Because these are my two weeks of fundraising, I’m obligated to add the following:
This blog is reader funded. I don’t have a grant or a patron. You’re my patrons and only you can compensate for the toil of keeping the blog going day after day, year after year. For the full explanation of why a funding drive, and what I intend to use it for, if you’re interested, go here.

There are several ways of supporting me.
GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises meaning I’m not giving you anything for your contribution; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process and yes there will be typos, backtracking, characters who change names suddenly and other mishaps; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic ways to donate: email me for paypal address. The book promo email will do for that: bookpimping at outlook dot com. And there is the snail mail address at: Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107.
I know times are tough — for all of us — and I don’t hold it against anyone who can’t contribute. But all contributions are greatly appreciated. – SAH*