Years ago, when I already had far more experience of traditional publishing than was good for my mental health, I came across someone talking about how you become an “old pro”.

I no longer remember who it was, but I have a vague idea he was a bestseller, albeit one of those who only made it big purely by accident, after having been midlist for oh… twenty years or so. He was describing his experience, and he said his colleagues who became bestsellers off the get-go didn’t understand the industry. Understanding of the behind-the-scenes mechanics was hard earned language you acquired when the impossible and disastrous happened. And it was experienced and learned as a series of hard kicks to the teeth.

That interview stuck with me, because I had just heard myself — ten years ago, twenty years published, after thirteen years trying to break in every way but the right way — referred to as an old pro and wondering when that happened, because I was a rank beginner the day before.

That stuck with an extra hard vicious twist because he was also older than I. By the time I broke in that kind of accidental best seller was bloody impossible. There were no little bookstores run by brilliant autists who could discover your book and sell it to the public in mass quantities. There were just the big chains, and no one in the big chains read your book (discovering this was one of those kicks. And would take to long to explain how I found out) not even the people responsible for “placing it.” They just listened to the house about the “confidence” the house had and ordered a book or a hundred, dependent on what the house said. And son of a b*tch if the house wasn’t always right…

I don’t even hold it against the houses. In a highly controlled market, you have to have a justification for putting money behind a writer/book. And why would you do that (even if one book sold freakishly well) when they have twenty years of mid list? Sure, if you dove in you’d realize why, but you don’t have the time for that for a mid list author and book. You just scan the numbers, and off it goes to fail like its predecessors.

This level of centralization is a lousy model that brutalizes everyone. For writers it tends to make us stop creating. For publishers, it takes out whatever passion they came into the field with, forces them to lie to creatives, and sullies their souls and sucks them dry. For readers, it produces lousy product that doesn’t meat their needs, and makes them walk away to other genres, or long-ago-published books.

It started to break about ten years ago, with Amazon, and now it’s chaotic, and– I’ll manage it. It’s how I’m broken. Even all the kicks only managed to make me stop writing temporarily, and then it came back. It’s a function of being a very simple tool, made for only one thing: in my case, storytelling.

But this long introduction is just for how I came across that image: kicks in the teeth. It applied to writing in later stage traditional publishing and it applies to us now.

Anyway — kicks to the teeth. No matter your efforts, no matter how much you try, there is another factor that comes out of the blue and smacks you and leaves you reeling and walking around as if something had hit you hard on the mouth. Even after you recover, you’ll never be the same again. Things that are natural to you — like eating — will hurt every time you do it. And other things will just feel wrong. All the time. Forever.

But the same way the burned hand learns best, the kicked mouth teaches. Oh, it teaches. It teaches with precision and pain, and you’ll never forget the lesson. Ever. You won’t be the same after either. Any other pain you’ll shrug off. You’ll become more determined, more ruthless, more — no, not more like what you’re fighting. In a way you become more yourself than ever. It’s just all the little hesitations, all the kindness, all the normal decency you owe to other human beings you care for peel away, and you can’t even remember why you felt them.

Because this is what the left has been doing to anyone who opposes them, with their stomping, their game rigging, their “brilliant” improvised patches, a lot of us are feeling these results as much as I did ten years ago, in writing.

I wonder if they know what they’re setting up. The new rules they’re evoking. The new enemy they’re calling to face them.

Look, yesterday my assistant told me I was basically a nice person and I was gobsmacked. This was in relation to some fraud that probably has been taking place with our insurance accounts, and which has us in a bit of a pickle. Not financial. It’s like this: we have a doctor who refuses to transfer records, and a new doctor who won’t take us up, because it’s continuing care without the transfer. The second is being stupid, but part of the reason we want them is that they’re obsessive like that. The first– it’s unexplainable unless you assume massive gobs of fraud. Or an office so effed up they don’t HAVE records. (In this office, that’s believable, trust me. Part of the reason we’re moving.) The problem being Dan (and I but I to a lesser extent) can’t be without care much longer without serious issues cropping up. Yes, we ARE dealing.

Anyway, she called me nice and I was shocked, because I haven’t thought of myself as that for a long long time. (And I don’t think in this case it is that. I think I’m just gobsmacked –if this IS fraud — at the sheer unmitigated stupidity. Because patients will transfer at some point, right? And I suffer from a very specialized form of dumb, in which I don’t understand stupid that works at that level, okay.)

But long ago and far away, I was raised to be a nice girl. With all the meanings that implies. It never took very well, but I could play it for extended periods of time. And the things that took were things like never being rude unless I was ready to go on the war path. This left me curiously defenseless when people are rude to me, because the back of the brain doesn’t believe it. Particularly when they expect no consequences. Because why would you declare war and not expect return shots?

Anyway there were other things, like not being meaner than I had to be. Always helping people even if I disagreed with them. Always honoring and helping the competent, even if they were in actuality rat finks, etc. etc. etc.

The “nice” I was taught is why the right of Lenin side of the political fight has been losing, worldwide. “Yeah, sure, he’s a communist, but he’s a brilliant musician. Of course I buy his albums.” “Yes, he says things like he wants everyone like me dead, but he’s a great writer, of course I’ll support his career.” “Yes, this series of movies maligns all my values, but they’re a hell of a ride, I’ll take my family to the theater.”

And no, we couldn’t call people names. — I still remember the pearl clutching when I called someone in our field an abbreviation after she called me a racist. Oh, no. So mean. Much evil. We shouldn’t descend to their level! Even worse the pearl clutching for calling Occasional Cortex what she in fact is. So evil, very demeaning. Yes, she’s a commie whore, but we need to give her all dignity, or they won’t treat us right either. (Hint, they don’t.) — We couldn’t ridicule them. Under no circumstances could we hire by political bend as well as by competence. We should allow ourselves to be rolled over and our entire work perverted because look at the credentials of Random Marxist. Ignore that they captured the credentialing process long ago. Because if you undermine the institutions, we’ll lose everything.

That was…. Scrubs hand across face… ten? years ago. Somewhere from fifteen years ago to… Oh, I think the last bits shook off around 2018 or so. Or not. There might still be bits of nice sticking to us, which we’ll only discover when the boot comes out of nowhere and hits our teeth again.

Look, I understand. Particularly the hiring for politics thing. It’s bad cess and a bad road. If you hire for anything other than competence, you over time break everything. Because only if you get very lucky does your second cousin, your friend’s nephew, or your political coreligionary turn out to be brilliant and focused on the job. And the more you do it, the more it takes to draw that lucky card. It’s like all gambling.

But we aren’t given that choice. The left started doing it early in the twentieth century — partially because they confuse agreeing with them with intellectual brilliance — and if only one side does it, the side that doesn’t loses.

And there’s other begs for each one of those. Though at this time, the luck is on our side, simply because to make it in anything when the credentialing in every field and the gatekeeping in all the arts have been captured by the other side, it takes exceptional people. As long as we remember to flip it to “just competence” when we win this. I doubt we will, because we’re human. And we’re walking wounded. But I can hope.

Anyway, look, I came here to be nice. Here being described as this time, this place. I’m a very simple tool. I’m made to tell stories. Sure, my politics will leak into some of the stories. But except for kicks in the teeth at really, really early ages, I probably wouldn’t even understand or pay attention to politics. I’d be too busy telling stories.

And even after I had become aware of, and weary of politics, it probably would only show around the edges of some of my stories.

Heaven knows I hope there is an alternate universe in which I ignore politics and just write silly mysteries and ditsy space opera characters, all held together by the rule of cool and a sense of enjoyment. Oh, I hope.

In this timeline… There have been a lot of kicks in the teeth. Weirdly this means I have more teeth, and they’ve gotten sharper.

I can’t list them all. I remember election fraud going back to 2006 and to me it’s been blatantly obvious since 2012. Kicks in the teeth. And then…. oh, the last four years. The last four bizarre years.

Yes, the bio-engineered virus with research funded by our own sh*theads in government. But also the lock down. The inconsistent, varies with every city lockdown, and no one else seeming to realize if the illness were that horrifying, we’d all be dead. And the chicanery with enforced vaccination. And and and and and and —

Government enforcing censorship of social media. People being debanked. “Weird occurrences” around those of us who won’t shut up.

Kick, kick, kick.

To me the last kick in the teeth was October 7. Not that it happened. If you let your pet savages you’ve been nurturing like deranged piranhas out of their box to do what comes naturally, the results will be horrifying. I mean they do the same sort of thing among themselves all the time, it’s just they expect it and no one hears about it.

But that someone planned and financed that piece of lunacy because they thought it would benefit them. And you know who, precisely, by the way the left flipped on a dime to demand the final solution in a way that would make Hitler proud. (Even while still calling their opposition Hitler.)

The evil, the stupidity, the BLINDNESS. Kick, kick, kick.

They think the kicks have softened us for the kill. You see, they confused the nice with cowardice, with a sense that we were wrong, and therefore wouldn’t fight back.

Oh, they might even be right about some of the older people on our side. Not that they thought they were wrong, but they believed in the Marxist eschatological message and thought that the future was pre-ordained and that it all ended in world communism.

But Reagan and what came out after the USSR changed that. We saw the inept, bumbling evil behind the papier mache, flawless monster. And you can’t undo that. Even the kids not being taught won’t undo it. They’ll stumble on the truth sometime.

The rest of us? We’ve been fighting mad a long time, and only holding back because only monsters and crazed cultists want the world to burn.

We still don’t want the world to burn. And we’re not going to lay down a fire storm. Unless we’re forced. We might be forced.

Israel didn’t want to lay down a fire storm, and they’re still being controlled and careful. But the shrieking harpies of the left don’t understand why Israel no longer cares about “world opinion” and no longer stops on command.

Well, you psychotic bitches of the left, because they’ve done that before, and you kicked them in the teeth, and the last one was warning that the next one will kill them. They won’t stop — I pray they won’t stop — till they cut off the kicking foot.

And those of us who would normally try to moderate the feeling that they should be justified turning Hamass to powder? We don’t feel that way anymore.

The left and the right should look very carefully at this event.

The right because you need to understand what’s happening to you. People who still are nice, much nicer than I, are now saying “I told him/her what I think, and if they stop talking to me, I don’t care anymore.”

“I don’t care anymore.” is the anthem of the nice person who’s been kicked in the teeth enough. And next time? Next time it won’t be just words. And they don’t care anymore.

And the left? The left needs to stop. They just need to stop. Look at what happened there, take a deep breath and realize that while their manufactured “opinion” is demanding that Israel stop reducing an enemy that attacked her with no provocation, and which has yet to surrender, the real opinion in most of the world has turned…. On Hamass.

Most of us who aren’t left realize that this is our battle. The battle for civilization itself. That what happened over there can happen over here. Has been happening over here in small increments. In light kicks to the teeth.

And we know it.

Now, it doesn’t mean the right will go to war, as the IDF has been forced to go to war. But the forces are in motion and are going to be damn hard to stop.

You see, the left is starting to get scared. They have a prophecy that they’d win, and they believed it. And sure, the right seemed to give territory up as a matter of course, like we were pre-defeated.

But …. But particularly since 2020 things haven’t been going according to plan. We didn’t turn on and let the Kenosha Kid hang which they expected and which would have stopped all resistance to their rent-a-savages in Buy Large Mansions. And even the soft left is turning against their open borders insanity and their coddle criminals insanity. And only the very young and very pampered buy the lies about “climate change” (yes, it changes. It changes all the time. And it has mighty little to do with humans, really.)

The right has learned to boycott. And quietly, on the qt, the right has learned not to hire/buy/promote those who hate them. It’s anecdotal, of course, but all of us are seeing it. So are they.

Their credentials are becoming worthless. No one believes authorities. Their attempts at shutting us down are not effective enough, which is why the WEF — the grand babbling heads of their moron prospiracy — is terrified of free speech. The farmers are in revolt against climate maumauing. And they’re making it stick. AND people aren’t hating on the Jews as the left hoped they would after 10/7.

It’s all going sour for them. And they only know one way to continue. Unreasoning attack and aggression has worked for them for so long.

So, listen up, all ye pampered Jades of the left. Stop. Take a deep breath. Think.

The life you safe might be your own.

Because trust me, from this side — and I’m not the biggest hothead on my side, not by a year of Sundays — one more kick in the teeth, and the remaining HUMAN DECENCY flakes away.

You don’t want to create what will come from that kick.

Hell, we don’t want you to create what will come from it. We’d rather fight you on the details and mop you up in every day life, despite how many more lives and wealth that will cost us, until you damned (I’m not swearing. I use the word advisedly) ideology is in the ash heap of history. We’d much rather.

But those kicks–

If you make it so you survive or we do? Common decency will make it so we have to survive. Because in the world you create if you eliminate us (not that you can, truly) no one WILL survive. Not even you. Your poisonous, evil ideas will destroy all mankind. And the fact some of you just quietly cheered at that tells us all we need to know.

If you make it a choice, we will survive.

You will not like this. No one will. We won’t be civilized anymore.

The world will enter a dark turn that will probably take up the rest of my life, and leave it to my grandkids to rebuild.

I beg you, with tears in my eyes, consider you might be wrong. Consider you don’t want to do this.

Because once it starts, we won’t.

The kicked teeth learn best. And you should have seen what you taught us.

I often feel like everything I came to this blog to say has been said, like I’m repeating myself, like there is no point in going on.

I know I’m not the only one thinking that, as I keep getting occasional comments about preaching to the choir, or “what is the point of speaking up. Everyone who will hear will already have heard.”

And since I’ve been at this, more or less 12 years and change, it’s easy to believe that. At this point, who doesn’t know my views on Marxism? And if they rejected them in the past, why would they listen now.

And then this week, I had one of those experiences that changed my mind on this.

First, I shared a meme on facebook that listed all the movies in which we sympathize with the resistance, and ask what’s wrong with us in real life. Now, I hesitated a little on sharing it, because “the resistance” is a memetic thing that the left has highjacked. They call themselves the resistance against you know, the “fascists” of the right, because they put little stupid signs on their lawns and imagine they’re singing the Marseillaise in the face of the Nazis. And you know — you know — this is complete and utter nonsense. Because they are completely in their own head and think that they are the brave underdog, even while they control every institution, corporation, etc. At this point they imagine they are fighting invisible demons that no one has ever detected “institutional racism” and “micro aggressions” and whatever. They are in such denial of the fact they are actually the people in charge of the institutions that they have to invent something greater to fight. And like every time they try to invent something, they’re failing and instead are exposing how silly they are.

And so, because we are the real resistance, and paying for it in career and income, and for more and more of us every day in arrests and being sued, I decided to share it.

What would never occur to me, never in a million years, was that this meme had originally been created by Palestinian-sympathizers. It never occurred to me, because I guess I’m innocent and I’d never think that raping women and children and killing entire families in horrible ways and taking babies hostage and killing them, and displaying innocent civilian corpses as trophies was “resistance.” Or in fact that Palestinians were resisting anything. They certainly didn’t resist the temptation to becoming a murderous parasite, taking all the money that is handed to them and producing nothing but Jew hatred.

I guess I’m innocent, okay?

But at the same time here, we must apply a bit of a check. I don’t actually know the meme was created by someone like that, or just shared by them. Frankly, it could have been something invented by a leftist who didn’t like the meme. There is nothing in the meme, which is white words on black, with no signature or byline, to indicate that should be the interpretation put on it, or that anyone posting it would agree with that interpretation. Needless to say, where I found it was someone in our cohort, not the fishing phallestinians.

However as soon as I put it up I had several of the people who have followed me forever and who are Jewish defending themselves as though they thought I was pro-Palestinian (as if I’d be pro-savagery.) So, I told them the truth, that as far as I’m concerned, Israel is fighting for Western civilization itself, and if we turn a blind eye to the horrors of October 7, we are consigning civilization to savagery and the whim of barbarians. And also that yes, I’m still salty about October 7. I’ll be salty till the end of days.

And suddenly, people who have followed me forever and who should have known better, were — PLEASANTLY — shocked that I was on the side of Israel, and so vehemently so. I suppose at least that is not a surprise to anyone who reads HERE, but who knows?

Here’s the thing, these are not randos. They are people who followed me for years. But they didn’t GET that I was pro-Israel. And I haven’t been mealy mouthed about it.

So, here’s the thing: We must repeat ourselves, because we’re not the center of the universe.

Just because I say something a number of times, it doesn’t mean that the world stops to listen to every single one.

Just because I say something and someone rejects it, it doesn’t mean that on another day, said slightly differently, they won’t hear.

Just because I say something, it doesn’t mean that the person on the other side even noticed that day.

Heck, even for people who read me every day, I’ve noticed sometimes I say something that’s been said a number of times, and suddenly it means something to them as though it were the first time; or it gives them the argument they need to explain it to the kids, or–

Also, the culture is loud with “abandon all hope you who disagree with commies” that I think sometimes people don’t hear me.

And there is a purpose to the repetition. And it does something good.

So, I’m going to keep beating my little drum. Right here.

Rattatatatat.

As many of you — perhaps most of you — know I was at ConFinement this weekend. We drove like insane people, a long, long time, without stopping, mostly because none of us could afford to take the time off for driving for two days.

I almost forgot to take books. With all the death and issues I completely forgot to get new copies of the newly issued books, or new-cover versions of the old things, including new hard covers.

So at the last minute I remembered and filled a box with far more books than I thought would ever sell, considering how old they are. I did sweeten the pot by putting them at half price, since they are old.

Anyway I didn’t have arrangements for a booth minder — in future, though not Liberty con this year, because since we aren’t absolutely sure our other stuff will allow us to go, so I didn’t book a table or booth. Next year, younger DIL (well, she’ll be by then) will figure it out — so I just put books on a table on the honor system, and had people come find me to pay. Yeah, real classy. Anyway, I only brought back four books everything else –50 or so — sold.

Other than that, it was a small con, but it was very friendly.

I stayed out very late talking to people. I met Devon Eriksen, who says he’s not a cat, and I need to read his book. I mean… shakes head… cats writing books.

Anyway, from the blog, and I will miss people, I saw Ben Olsen and his wife, Dorothy Dimock and her husband, the one who wrote the great baking book I advertised here a little while ago. I also met Turquoise Thyme, who is so sweet in person and had fun talking shop with my husband. And I met Nancy Edwards from Facebook. I thought I remembered her being older than myself, but I swear she’s forty and just faking it. And I got to see David Bock and his lovely wife again and–

Anyway, what is there to tell? I ate junk food. I stayed up too late discussing things like whether there were ancient civilizations or at least if we could lie and say it did in a convincing way so books can be written. And what books were fun, and–

I couldn’t make it to the Dave Drake Memorial Shoot, because I was doing a reading. Bad timing on my part, but at any rate, I need to get better at shooting before the next con, right? I just need to make range time. It’s been WEIRD.

It was great. That’s the short and long of it. Small, but intense, and full of highly engaged fans. I recommend it.

In fact, as difficult as leaving the house or being around more than 2 people at once, I am going to try to make it to Confinement next year again. Which is the highest compliment I can give any con.

I mean, I love Liberty con, but we really need a wide scattering of new cons, don’t we?

The good side of all this, is that the persistent depression from what this year has been so far seems to be gone.

The bad side is that I’m still exhausted, so this report is the least coherent thing I’ve ever written. Probably.

But…. well, I had fun. Would you consider coming out and hanging out next year? Even if you have to send me to bed at 2 am, because none of you are really up to carrying me to bed. It would take a carrying party and who wants to do that?

I don’t know if MadMike has scheduled next year’s yet, but you can ask him. I’d love to see more of you.

Anyway, we can hang out and talk and have totally unhealthy snacks (No, the con had very good food, like chill and sandwich makings. I just have a fatal attraction to unnaturally yellow cheese puffs, okay?) and talk and–

Just plan on it. It will be fun.

*Note that this post is a re-run of a post first published in 12/8/2016. But it fits in well with our run of recent posts, and I thought it bore repeating*- SAH

Flavors of History – Alma Boykin

In the beginning there was vanilla, and it was . . .

OK, correction. In the beginning there was olive oil on flat bread with goat cheese, better known as Herodotus. He really does deserve the title of the Father of History, in the sense that he did research, interviewed people who had traveled, and made clear what he knew to be fact, what he had been told was fact, and what he suspected was conjecture. As far as Western history goes, he is the first general historian, and we might say the first social historian, since he wrote about unusual people way over there and what they did. He could also count as an anthropologist, back before the two sides parted company. In China, I’d count Sima Chin as the first historian who was not simply compiling king lists or writing on oracle bones. He is a political historian and intellectual historian, writing about monarchs and the good and bad things they did and if they accorded with his preferred philosophy. No, he wasn’t “objective” but back then historians weren’t supposed to be.

The next major Western historian was Thucydides, a military and political historian. In fact, political and military history dominated the field for quite a while, if you focus outside the Christian Church. People who could write tended to be churchmen and/or affiliated with royal or princely courts. The most important things going on involved ruling, challenges to ruling, inheritance, and how good the patron was. As a result, we tend to find pious descriptions of saintly monarchs (Alfred the Great) interspersed with descriptions of battles and marriages and offspring, or accounts of how horrible the previous monarch was and how G-d, in His mercy and grace, allowed the current claimant to the throne to overcome the bad monarch and replace him. Buried within the accounts, we find nuggets of what moderns consider history.

During the early middle ages (say, 1100s – 1300s or so) we find a lot more national histories written. These are descriptions of the long history of the Bohemians, or Magyars, or Britons (although the English and Welsh started early with Gerald of Wales and the Venerable Bede tracing things back to the Trojan War). The goal was to show how long a nation had been in the land, and how noble and dignified their ancestry was, thus locking in their claims to territory and respect from other, less worthy peoples and rulers. This is when the Magyars staked their claim to Pannonia based on descent from wandering ancestors related to the Huns and farther back, to the sons of a princess and an eagle. The Bohemians didn’t go quite that far, settling on a princess in the 600s or so (pre-Magyar and German) and a plowman. The Kieven Primary Chronicle dates to this period, skipping the mythology for the most part.

Until the 19^th Century history focused on what we call today political and military history, with some diplomatic history wrapped in, and historical biography. When people grumble about “history is just dead kings and battles” they are thinking of this sort of writing. But the people writing histories were not interested in “objective” history. They were recording events in order to support a certain side, or to justify certain actions, or to explain why their side won (or lost). And the most important things to the literate people who were not businessmen and women, or clergy, were politics and wars. Politics and wars shaped everything in the world of the nobility and upper classes, international trade and diplomacy, and even some religious matters, so that’s what you wrote about. And that’s what interested the people who had enough extra money to hire scribes to write family histories and accounts of events. A few individuals wrote diaries and detailed accounts of events that they participated in, like Samuel Pepys (most famously), a latter-day version of the old monastic chronicles, but they were not writing history per se and did not claim to be.

Then along came the professional historians, first Gibbon, and then most importantly Leopold Von Ranke, who ordered his students to go into the archives and government documents and write down things as they really happened, no favoritism or glossing. And political history, diplomatic history, and nibbles of economic history appeared in the form of trade histories. The American diplomat George Perkins Marsh wrote the first environmental history in the 1890s, with the book Man and Nature where he compared the descriptions of the Classical world with what he observed as an ambassador, and described what he thought had happened and why. After WWI people began turning away from the older kinds of history, looking below the level of monarchs and ministries, to see what had been going on in departments, counties, parishes, and villages. The French in particular started combing through local records, digging up anything they could find and trying to make sense of it. Called the Annals’ School because of the title of the journal where the first of their work appeared, the French also began looking at the longue durre, the extended stretch of history of places and peoples.

After WWII, with the surge of new people coming into the universities and more access to archives and new tools to analyze things, history either exploded or shattered, depending on how you view things. Political and military history still led the field in terms of respect and number of practitioners, as the box on my office floor containing the full paperback set of Samuel Elliott Morrison’s history of the US Navy in WWII can attest. Governments still funded historical writing. But economic history emerged as an official specialty, and environmental history, women’s history, Marxist and labour history that looked back at the working classes, and peasants and slaves and serfs to tell their story (E. P. Thompson most famously), religious history that didn’t focus on the development of theology or advance a pro-denominational thesis, corporate history and industrial histories, much better histories of non-Western places with South Asia, China, Japan, and so on developing their own standards and patterns and conventions, geographically focused histories such as American West or Borderlands, and new takes on older writings. Medicine developed its own history that lapped into social and political history. Military history shifted from how battles were won and lost into the daily experiences of soldiers, and of civilians around the soldiers, to histories of logistics and supply, how warfare affected society and shaped culture (see Victor Davis Hanson’s early work), and war-on-the ground like John Keegan’s Face of Battle.

Historians also began nibbling, then gulping, the tools of other fields. We crunched numbers and developed Cliometrics, history based on statistical analysis that could be amazingly useful when it worked and miserable to read when it didn’t. We pestered the archaeologists and the Dark Ages turned into Late Antiquity as more and more continuity appeared in the historical and archaeological record, plagues, invasions, and the climatic downturn in the 500s-600s notwithstanding. We harassed geographers (OK, we’ve been doing that since Herodotus), plagued engineers, annoyed ecologists and foresters and naturalists, irked physicists and chemists, “borrowed” from archaeology and linguistics and hydrology and anyone else who forgot to lock up their journals and research notes, and came up with some wonderful results. And some not so wonderful results.

Today, late 2016, you can find a historian looking under pretty much any rock you mention. Music historians, art historians, historians of ideas, environmental historians, historians of sex (not as exciting as it sounds), historians who write about people and animals, historians of water, or fire (Stephen Pyne and yes, that is his real name. He was predestined to go into fire science and pyrohistory). Is this good or bad? It can lead to some pretty dead-end research, because the PhD requirement is to either find something new, or refute something old. Classics and political history especially have grown some pretty esoteric-to-questionable branches, in my opinion. But it also means that anything is fair game for anyone, and you can find works about all sorts of fascinating and odd and intriguing and “that is so cool!” things and peoples and places.

Of course, I’m the poster bad example for someone who could not focus in graduate school and who still refuses to specialize to the extent required by academic standards. So you might not want to follow my lead.

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

https://amzn.to/49EUhHIFROM HOLLY CHISM: Bar Tabs: A Modern Gods Story

Brief back stories on the characters from the Modern Gods universe.

FROM SCOTT MCCRAE: Finding Bradigan’s Mountain

A brand new Mountain Man adventure from Scott McCrea!

Mountain man Richard Bradigan goes on a deadly cross-country trek to save the girl he loves from his old nemesis, the sadistic Colonel Sauvage. With him are the outrageous Bon Chance Legrand, dime novelist Fred Stryker, and disgraced soldier Captain Burr. But time starts running out for the searchers when they are pursued by some of the most dangerous badmen to ever come out of the West.

One thing is guaranteed – it will all end in blood. But who will live and who will die?

A Mountain Man’s Revenge is the pulse-pounding conclusion to the exciting Finding Bradigan’s Mountain trilogy.

https://amzn.to/3wLpAShFROM CARL MICHAEL CURTIS: Stigmata Invicta

On a backwater planet in an otherwise barren solar system, an underground church thrives. For generations, the tyrannical world government has tried to stomp it out. But now, an elderly nun has brought hope to her suffering people when she begins experiencing a genuine stigmata. Her bishop requests her be rescued and taken far away. The Knights 15 13 send a spec ops team to do just that.

But these missions never go easily.

Discovered and assaulted from the land to the atmosphere, the Knights 15 13 rush to save the nun from the clutches of their enemy. An enemy who has much more sinister plans in mind. They don’t want to just kill her. They want to force her to help them kill everyone.

https://amzn.to/48CSmCaFROM BECKY JONES: Academic Magic

Zoe O’Brien has found her dream job at a small liberal arts college teaching the history of Medieval witchcraft and magic. Academic life is exactly what she expected it to be…until the squirrels stop by to talk with her and her department chair and best friend turn out to be mages.

Zoe discovers a world of magic and power she never knew existed. She and other faculty mages race to stop a coven from raising a demon on the winter solstice while simultaneously grading piles of final exams and reading the tortured prose of undergraduate term papers. Can Zoe master her new-found powers in time?

Karen Myers: Bound into the Blood – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 4)

Book 4 of The Hounds of Annwn.

DISTURBING THE FAMILY SECRETS COULD BRING RUIN TO EVERYTHING HE’S WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD.

George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is preparing for the birth of his child by exploring the family papers about his parents and their deaths. When his improved relationship with his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, is jeopardized by an unexpected opposition, he finds he must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a god.

He discovers he doesn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did. His search for answers takes him to the human world with unsuitable companions.

How will he keep a rock-wight safe from detection, or even teach her the rules of the road? And what will he awaken in the process, bringing disaster back to his family on his own doorstep? What if his loyalty is misplaced? What will be the price of his mistakes?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Baying of the Hounds

In the world we know, Nikola Tesla’s Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion? In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe. Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds. A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Other Princess

This time, they invited the last fairy to the christening.

Elise, uncursed at her christening, received strange gifts about castles and roses. With such good fortune, what more does she need? She grows up forever in the shadow of her lovely, cursed, tragic cousin.

Even when the curse falls, and Princess Isabelle lies in enchanted sleep, life must go on for Princess Elise. Despite the curse, the kingdom can not sleep itself, and neither can she.

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: HELP

“We’re just like Rome in the Decadence.” “We’re decadent, and we’re going to fall.” “It’s all scripted, we can’t escape it.”

What if I told you that you sound like a true believer in “climate models?” Or perhaps that cute little model about how Covid-19 would kill millions! Millions!

First of all you can’t hit me, because I’m on this side of the screen, and you’re not. AND furthermore, every night I pray G-d to give me one superpower. Just one. The ability to reach through the screen and bitchslap the heck out of idiots. He still hasn’t given me that, so I doubt he’s given it to you. For one, wanting to bitchslap people isn’t very holy — I’m told — so no miracles for you. Ahem. Now that we’ve established that very important point, let’s move on to the main point.

Yeah, yeah, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But it’s not an inescapable model or an exact repetition. It just tells you how humans are supposed to react to “situation x.” Not “factor a b and c are in play. So x will happen.”
Yes, many science fiction authors have forecast the emergence of such ability. Psycho-historical equations make a great story, of course, which is why the mind is attracted to it.

The problem, same as with climate forecast are all the factors. You can’t tally all the factors that went into something that involves more than one person. Let along something that involves more than one person, and which you only have access to via reports from people who were there. Or, more likely people who knew people who were there. And all the people involved in the transmission of knowledge are people who were raised in a culture so different from yours that you can’t guess their bias fully. You can get some idea, but you can’t guess all of it.

What does bias matter for reporting what happened? Oh, hell.

Having transferred between cultures and acculturated, I can tell you bias makes you see different things when looking at an event. Yes,okay so it’s a given, for instance that Portugal is a far more “patriarchal” society than the US. That doesn’t mean that women and men are the same, but the rules are different. It means that even an odd duck “liberated” woman — which I was by virtue of never caring about people’s expectations for me except for not giving scandal to strangers and by not upsetting people without a good reason — like me was running different software in the head.

When I was traveling to the US to marry Dan, in the airport, there was a family with mom, dad, and four teens. All boys. At the time I thought the other utterly ridiculous. Why? Well, her hairstyle was about 20 years too young for her. She just had straight hair, worn long. And she was ordering everyone around and telling them what to do. It seemed stupid to me. Would my evaluation be the same now? Well, there isn’t the back brain assumption that married women will either confine their hair or wear it short. So her hair would probably not bother me. As for ordering everyone, my guess is I’d see a middle aged woman exasperated by clueless young males. Heck, I’ve probably been that woman a number of times. “Have you gone to the bathroom? Remember you don’t want to all rush the bathroom on the plane.” “Did you have breakfast? No? Maybe you want to go and get a sandwich, before we board.” “Pull your pants up, I can see your underwear. Do you have a belt? Put that one.” etc. etc. etc.

What you report changes. My first one would be “Geesh, this woman was harassing everyone, and she was nuts because she had a far too young hairstyle.” My second would have been “This poor woman, was trying to keep the kids from doing stupid stuff, and it was a full time job. Even if she was fussy.”

Now, the difference between Portuguese culture and American culture is almost non-existent, compared to the difference of head software between us and the average Roman.

On top of that, people see different things. No? Find a cop. Ask him about witness reports. Oh, ask Lawdog for instance. I’ll wait. Yeah. Now ask him about witness reports collected a year later, or collected by hearsay.

This is what we’re dealing with in history, adding in the fact that the person who wrote down “history” had an ax to grind. Usually a very personal ax.

I am familiar with a lot of it from when I write historical novels. One of the things that amuses me immensely is reading someone else working the same time period I do. Say Tudor England, or Dumas musketeers. The names are the same, but the actual place is completely different. And it’s not that their research is wrong — because I don’t read those. I fling them against the wall with force — but that what they focus on, or how they interpret the reporter’s bias is completely different. Take Kit Marlowe — please. I’m tired of having him haunt my stories — I can write him as an ugly customer, or a triple agent spy, or a confused, lost young men, caught in a web that he doesn’t fully understand. And that’s not counting writing him as gay, or straight or bisexual. (And — speaks sternly to back brain — I’m not writing Kit Marlowe erotica. No. Drop that idea right now. I am serious. Don’t make me get the chancla or doom. Ain’t nobody got time for that.)

Then there’s propaganda. Rome and in particular “decadent Rome” has been the object of propaganda since it was still very non-decadent by our lights, to when it had been fallen for hundreds of years.

You’ll hear other Romans screaming the equivalent of ‘get off my lawn’ almost from the inception of Rome, because kids those days refused to live in a hut and grind acorns for their bread, or didn’t beat their wives into submission as is right or proper, or insisted on bathing, which as we all know weakens the blood. Those dang kids. Decadent.

Now, are there a ton of “vices” humans indulge in as soon as they’re a little above extreme subsistence conditions? Yeah. Look, we’re apes, okay? Sometimes really creative apes.

Give us a surplus of food, and we over indulge. Funny mind-altering substances and some of us will indulge. (The fact I hate to be out of control of my own mind makes me a very odd duck, so I won’t, but trust me, I’m the exception.) Nice clothes, and we’ll probably own many more than we need. Or comely whatever partners of whatever sex — or yes. Shut up Marlowe! — and a great portion of us will screw their way to glory or at least exhaustion.

Few of us indulge in too much work, too stern a discipline or too exacting a diet. Although it’s been known to happen.

So, given that America is the most prosperous nation the world has ever known, you’re darn tooting we will be compared to “decadent Rome” the most prosperous nation the world had ever known (for its time) before us.

But does that mean our fate will be the same? Well… probably not. Humans might be the same, but the software in the heads is utterly different, technology is different, and the way America relates to the world has nothing to do with how Rome related to the world.

If you assume it will be the same, you’re ignoring all other factors. You’re also being oddly Marxist, because he viewed human differences, etc. as meaning nothing. We’re all widgets, in widget landia, and running this program. Of course, to get his “program” he relied on a highly simplified version of history that abstracted “factors” and treated them as immutable.

Cue “this is not how any of this works.” Not even vaguely. Which is why all his predictions have turned out wrong.

So, should we study history at all? Oh, hell yes. For one because it helps you understand what your culture assumes and why.

But unlike Marxist-history, which is what I learned in Europe, which is all about “the factors of the time, leading to” and individuals don’t matter, because another individual would do the same, we should study both the ethos of the time: technology, commerce, beliefs, and the biographies of influential people. Both because it helps us understand how they were and if typical of their time or not, and to understand “the individual as a factor in what actually happened.”

Imagine the leader of the continental armies was Benedict Arnold, and tell me the revolution would turn out the same, and we’d have the same USA, save for the capital being called Arnold? Uh uh. Sorry, no. (Though starting a short with someone flying to Arnold DC.. well… And I could probably sell “very similar but different’ in a short story. In a novel, it would all apart. The personalities were too different, the trajectory too different.)

So right now? Yeah, we know we’re in trouble. And I think, though I’m open to other opinions, that the best model for what we’re going through is not “Decadent” (For one, because in our case that was USSR propaganda. Yes, we have tons of vices, but we’re not terminal on any of them. No, we’re not. See how we resist vices imposed from above.) but “Occupied land.” We were overtaken not by another nation, but by a small minority indoctrinated to hate us. To the extent this minority is international, you can see our struggle mirrored all over the world.

I’ll add that all over the world, Marxism and it’s offshoot of internationalist insanity is on the run, and having to cheat and go violent to stay in power. This if one looks on history for a guide, would seem to indicate it’s doomed. How soon? What form will their fall take? What does it mean for us?

I don’t know. I have feelings more than clear ideas. But I do know it won’t be “like the fall of Rome.” Because that model has nothing to do with anything. (And for that matter we don’t know really why Rome “fell”.)

I do know the last time a “conceptual model of society” — absolute monarchy — was on the ropes this way, it took more than 200 years to fall, and a lot of the falls were bloody messes.

OTOH, history seems to move faster now, (probably because communications do) and Marxism is nowhere near as deep set or as close to the basics of human nature as absolute monarchy was. (Though it shares with monarchy the belief in anointed ones. Just different annoying.)

The one thing I know from history is that once the philosophical underpinning of the order, whatever the order is, is fatally damaged in the minds of those living under it, fall will come.

How soon, when and how….? Well, that depends on many many factors, some of which will be unknown unknowns.

What will come after? I don’t know. I have a feeling it will be better. But it’s a gut-feeling, based on factors I probably can’t fully articulate.

I can also tell you that getting there will probably hurt. Though a miracle could occur.

Go ahead and study history. And even feel free to apply it as a predictive model.

But at best remember what we have of the past is a pretty, pretty picture with all the messiness brushed away. In the present? All we have is mess. Comparing the two is imperfect at best, insane at worst.

So when you apply the predictive model, use our different tech, and our different software as factors.

Will you be able to predict the future? No. But it might give you a rough guide. However, stay ready to incorporate things that aren’t exactly as you expected they would be, and to change your model on the fly.

Part of the issue with the climate models, or Marxist models of history, for that matter, is that instead of changing the model to accord with reality, they try to wish reality away, so that the results will be as foretold by their system.

Don’t be those guys. Always incorporate the new systems as they appear.

By all the factors I can tabulate we win, they lose. The only question is how soon, and what the butcher’s bill. And those, I can’t answer. I have ideas. They’re probably wrong.

There are too many factors, and it’s too complicated. The best we can do is work for what is best and endure.

Till we come out the other side.

The future is not scripted. Go do your best to fight for a good one.

I’d like to pick up on Holly’s guest post of yesterday.

When I was reading it occurred to me that the problem of art is the problem of traditional publishing, it’s the problem of any centralized power and information.

We are social apes. Naturally and instinctively we tune in to the group we live or work with. It’s normal. We have all been members of groups that skewed slowly off normal — in minor and harmless ways, normally — and which made adjusting to the rest of the world more difficult after. (The gentlemen who said “Yeah, this comment section” can go to the corner for half an hour without books, thank you.) I mean even my writers’ group gave me a wicked addiction to popcorn, since that’s what we always ate when critiquing.

The problem comes with concentrating functions of society. When it’s something free-market (ish) based, it just means the entire field will fail. But when it’s government supported and/or subsidized it just tilts away from what the people would do with their own money, and gets more expensive and utterly offensive and useless.

So, take what Holly said about art. Public art, paid for with government money, might be good art (maybe) but it’s good art for people who are immersed in art and art education. Which means for the normal human being, it’s either stupid, useless or outright ugly.

In the same way, though in a free-er (look, the centralization of publishing itself was part the result of technology, and part the fact that the government puts its thumb where it has no business being. Tor power tools is one of the least egregious though most recent thumbs on the scale.) market, publishing, particularly genre publishing having relocated to NYC and being a small, incestuous field, where everyone knows everyone else, and where everyone goes to the same parties and the same restaurants, it started mostly catering to itself.

What do I mean by this? Well…

Take cozy mysteries. They were incredibly popular, but then for … reasons all the publishers started talking about how cozies weren’t real mystery. And it should be absolutely forbidden to have amateurs solving mystery, because the professionals were best qualified. Etc., etc., etc. And then they stopped accepting cozies.

You see, two things made this easy. The fact that everyone else who worked with them thought cozies were stupid, and the fact that they could stop just accepting them is because by that time for various reasons the publishing houses could determine if a book swam or sank. So curtail cozy distribution and publicity, have it not sell and then go “see, cozies don’t sell. Nobody wants it.” And stopped accepting it.

I don’t know what happened there, if it was just a happy coincidence with someone publishing this one off craft mystery and its doing really well or if the bottom line crashed so badly they tried to accept cozies without accepting cozies. “We know cozies don’t sell, but how about with crafts?” And then those sold, and suddenly were everywhere.

Same happened in science fiction with space opera and then with all of science fiction in favor of fantasy. Baen was about the only hold out on that. Because, of course, if the only science fiction you allow is hard sf you’re only going to hit a small group of connoisseurs, while Planet Stories was wildly popular. (Yes, yes, there’s a post on science fiction, possibly, eventually for Mad Genius Club.)

Same with “clean” romances. The editors were tired of them, so they didn’t want that and–

Fortunately with indie publishing all the “but we don’t like it” are making a come back.

But the same type of thinking, the same “but our in group doesn’t like it” is now dooming Hollywood. They’re essentially making movies for themselves.

It’s not even malicious. It’s that they’re tired of the things that the public perennially loves. Because they see a lot of it and it gets boring. And they forget the public hasn’t seen it every day for years. And they forget that whatever they think is virtue signaling woke in their circles is not hot at all in ours, but boring because we get it from every institutions and often our jobs.

And upper education. And educator “certification” is insane bs, that concentrates and distorts teachers into an in-group. Which in turn hardens a lot of insane ideas into what the entire group thinks, and tries to push on the kids (or adults) they teach.

And this is why government is in the mess it is in. Exact same reason. Even when they’re not raging commies, government employees as a group are obsessed with problems that aren’t problems: Income inequality, climate doomerism, etc etc. TO THEM these are vital. And they don’t understand the rest of the world is not really interested in any of this and in fact that most of these are only a problem in their minds.

Again, this is a reason for government being as distributed as possible. And where everyone, including bureaucrats are routinely changed. It should be normal for the president to fire everyone int he bureaucracy and hire his guys. Yes, yes, that means a period of confusion where no one knows “how things are done.” Too bad so sad. Perhaps “the way things are done” has tilted so far away from normality that it should change. And perhaps resetting to normal humans on the regular would stop us having government only interested in its own obsessions and at war with its people.

What is art? by Holly Frost

I was chatting with our lovely hostess the other day, and made a comment informed by having spent my entire life training and working in artistic endeavors, that Art is something that someone enjoys.

“Guest Post” she replied.

Ok, then.

My background: I was enrolled in music lessons at two, dance probably at three, visual arts as soon as my mother could manage it. Music is my first field, and writing my second. I do not remember a time when I could not read music or English, and the oldest dated score in my own hand is from when I was two. (Visual art and dance I lack the talent for, but I’m a fair technician in visual art.)

Is a banana taped to a wall Art? Sure. It’s simply Art for a very few, who enjoy that sort of thing. (My suspicion is that it’s either an in-joke I don’t get or the enjoyment of a sense of self-superiority.) Is Thomas Kinkade Art? Sure. It’s Art for the masses, and you can tell that a lot of folks enjoy it because they put their money there.

Is 4’33” Art? Yes. It’s Art that reflects on what the nature of music is. The audience is small, and it’s not something one adds to a playlist, it’s something that must be experienced live in concert, and if you are not a musician yourself I would hesitate to recommend it. Some of my favorite music, Phillip Glass’ string quartets, George Crumb’s Black Angels, PDQ Bach, is difficult for someone who is not a musician. I explained PDQ Bach thus to a student yesterday: it’s like puns. If someone is not fluent in a language, puns are confusing. Only when one is fluent are the puns amusing. You might appreciate the surface qualities of the speech as a language student, but you cannot get the full meaning with the puns until you are fully fluent. Meanwhile, John Williams’ movie scores require no music education to enjoy.

But a definition does not a guest post make, and I think it worth talking about the distortion of Art in our country. Much public Art, that is, Art which is funded by taxpayer dollars, is not Art which is widely enjoyed. Indeed, most of it seems to me to be the opposite of enjoyed. Someone commented recently that you can tell the Art funded by the government because it is ugly. This is not universally true:

One reason that has been revealed by declassification in the last several years is that the US Government decided to take Art in an anti-Soviet direction by means of public funding. If the Soviet government funded handsome men and pretty women in pastoral landscapes, then the US government would fund whatever was as opposite of that as possible. This reactionism led to a good deal of Art that is very limited in appeal. It is very poor public policy to buy Art that the majority of the public does not enjoy.

Ah, I hear you, “The government should not fund any Art!” Stop a moment and think on that. Should the federal courthouse have a painting in it? Perhaps the iconic blindfolded Justice with her scales would be appropriate? Or John Adams defending the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre? I would argue that there is a limited place for Art funding by our government, very limited, and it ought to be only for Art that appeals to the majority of the population at the time it is funded, as we are a Republic. (Monarchies of course buy Art that appeals to the Monarch, see Versailles.) Surely the Veterans’ Home ought to have music for the residents, and art on the walls, chosen by them and paid for by us.

The problem with current government Art funding is that it is elitist and overreaching. The money goes not to Art that most people enjoy, but to Art that people with a deep education in Art enjoy. This is inappropriate. That the government buys so much Art distorts the market, and makes the main goal of many Artists be to receive government grants, rather than to appeal to the population. There are millions of people who will hang a Thomas Kinkade on the their walls, and a bare handful that will hang a banana.

Then, of course, there’s the Art that serves as money laundering, and we’ll leave that to our friendly Freds to deal with, and hope that they can and do. I guarantee you someone’s enjoying that all the way to the bank, though!

On the bright side, you can probably find someone free of government funding peddling Art that you enjoy at any farmer’s market or Ren Faire these days. Buy a sketch or painting, a quilt or a pot, toss some money in the dancers’ or musicians’ tip bucket, grab a business card. We live in an era when our materials are fairly cheap, so you’re mainly paying for training and labor. You can have all the Art you enjoy exactly as you want it, or at least as much as your household and budget will tolerate.

A word about prices: When you pay for Art, you’re paying for the hours of production that go into it, and a portion of the training the artist went through to be able to produce it. It’s a five by seven painting, or an hour performance–you’re still competing with other places for the artist’s time and labor–if I can make more working fast food why would I play your event? (And actually, for me? it’s teaching music, so you can figure out pretty close how many hours of prep you’re paying for if you ask my hourly lesson rates and my hourly performance rates.) I have an entire lecture on not undercharging because “it’s for a good cause” and admitting you’re donating, and getting the receipts for all my lovely self-employed unwitting philanthropists, but we can cover that one another time if you like.

So Art? Art is what people enjoy. Great Art is what people enjoy and protect for the future to enjoy. The more people enjoy Art, the more likely it is to be considered worthy of protection efforts and preserved for the future. Remember, the works of Johann Sebastian Bach are only known today because of Felix Mendelssohn’s enjoyment of them. Go forth and enjoy Art.

There is a trope that the right in America is Masculine, and the left is Feminine. This is not precisely true. There’s plenty of women on the right, and they’re the most feminine women where it counts: Married women with children.

But in general, it kind of is true. Or at least the argument of the right tend to appeal to a more “masculine” stereotype mindset, and the ones on the left, to a more “feminized” stereotype mind set. There’s more socializing, more mind games, and an approach to life that’s designed to make everyone “behave” the way they want you to. There’s also a lot of social signaling, and women, being hypergamic, tend to do that more.

Mind you, of course, a more feminized approach refers to the stereotype, and there are men and women on the same side. However on the whole, overtime, this image was true.

Was? Oh, yeah. Starting with the fall of the USSR and then definitely with Trump’s election, and the widespread rejection of the left’s long term projects, it’s more like…. our left is America’s crazy ex girlfriend.

She refuses to let you leave. I mean the way the elections are rigged? Not to mention the way they keep telling us we deeply care about climate change or whatever her obsession is. It’s like she’s telling you that you just can’t break up with her. And when you change the keys, she jimmies the locks to get back in.

She eats our food, tears up our stuff, runs up our phone bill talking trash about us to everyone else. She lets homeless men in to sleep on our furniture, poop on our carpet, kill our pets and set random fires.

Every time we try to get rid of her, she tells us we really love her, and if we say no we don’t, we’re breakup-conspirators and she threatens to get us locked up.

She steals from our wallet too, in ever increasing quantities. And keeps calling our boss and getting us fired.

The question is, how do we serve her an eviction notice?