This morning since the weather is warm and it’s not raining — as opposed to the rest of this week — I decided I needed to get on with the seemingly endless list of tasks that need done in the house, including tuck-pointing the front of the house before winter, and mulching the flower beds. And–

It’s been four hours and the difference might be negligible, in what I actually accomplished out there. I mean, things are done, just not nearly as much as should be done, and–

And I’m tired. Really tired. Particularly since I’ve been running a low grade fever for days — probably auto-immune because of course my stress levels are spiking at going to Son of Silvercon, even though the guest of honor is my friend and a lot of you are coming — and so I work very slowly and get tired way too easily. However I have chapters to do.

Thing is, you know, that it’s not misplaced priorities. For two years now we’ve been looking for people to do this stuff, from the gardening to the tuck pointing, to the painting. When we first got here, it wasn’t as bad as Colorado, but now it’s getting there. We’re willing to pay, even if it’s expensive, because my time is better employed writing, and I’m getting too old for this.

But after trying, I can’t let the snows come again with the house in this state. and it’s not like Dan can do it. His knees are shot, and he’d never recover.

Of course, I’m not a hundred percent sure I’ll ever recover. Right now it doesn’t feel like it. But I’m sure it will get better. Vitamin I, aka ranger candy, is my friend.

I’d say I have no clue why we can’t find a handyman or someone to do this little stuff. But as with other things that make no sense, there’s usually some macro-society thing going on. At a guess it has to do with my generation having been brought up to the idea that while collar jobs are better, and that no one should do this kind of handyman stuff. As well as a lot of influx of manual laborers holding the pay down, so no one learned to do this. And now the oldsters are retiring.

Why the imported manual laborers aren’t available is something I’m not willing to consider. Look, yeah, I was on a board yesterday that someone was talking about how illegals make so much better construction workers. I’m going to say horse pokey to that. Not only do I know Latin culture and its enshrining of “fast and sloppy” as a virtue (these people mostly based it on speed) but in the last almost forty years in the US, I’ve lived in a lot of Victorians that had a lot of problems acquired over the years. None of it compared to our newest house built by mostly illegal labor, which frankly needed redoing from the ground up, because after 15 years the “good enough” no longer was. So, Bah. Also Latin culture and a lot of others across the globe seem to be completely unaware of the need for maintenance. So perhaps the minor jobs of maintenance don’t appeal to the “imported” work force. I don’t know.

What I know is that handymen are unobtainium and so I must do what I can even though, d*mn it, captain, I’m a writer not a Jill of all trades.

This morning, and I no longer remember about what, which tells you more than it should, and certainly nothing I’d like to know, Dan told me about something “This can’t go on. It’s at a breaking point.” And I told him truthfully “I feel like everything is. Not just that field.”

And so it goes. And I also didn’t want to have to do the maintenance before Fall and the inevitable rebuild after. I’m in the fourth generation of poorly schooled people. As with tuck pointing, I have to read the instructions before doing it, and fashion a narrow enough trowel from the tortured remains of a plastic fork. (Deal.) Only you can’t rebuild working society alone, or with a plastic fork. It’s going to take a lot of hands, and there is by definition very little I can do. And like this stuff I’m doing outside, it might kill me.

But it doesn’t matter, because it needs doing, and I’m — we’re — the ones here.

Sometime before Christmas, I’d like to schedule a whole day to go to bed and stay there. Luxury.

Probably won’t happen.

There’s stuff to do. Before the fall. Either one. And after.

Shoulder to wheel. Let’s get it done.

Banishing BrainGoblins by Caitlin Walsh

It is terribly tempting, and among my worst traits, to wallow in the depths of all of the terrible things happening and being forecast, none of which you can do a blessed thing about.

When I’m being especially bad, it’s not even the Big Things (country-spanning turmoils and whatnot), but just a continual, vicious loop of what’ll happen if I die right now, if my husband dies right now, if all of the things we’ve been relying on to function just up and dissolve in the middle of the night.

Now, my husband is on a similar wavelength to me, so we’ve got a number of things set up for various Worst Cases; I haven’t been able to find a suitable replacement wife for him, nor he a suitable replacement husband for me, but we’ve got a decent number of buckets of bulk staples, cases of toilet paper, and friendly boltholes, so at the very least we’ll probably have enough time to think of the next thing if things go weird.

…and once you’ve managed that, tell me, is there any point in bothering about it further?

So, from the mind of someone who isn’t ever able to *fully* dismiss the goblins of What If, I would like nevertheless to present a list of things that sometimes work, at least a little, to get my feet a bit more under me than they otherwise would be. Perhaps they’ll help you as well!

—

1) A Good Book

This is one of the most efficacious steps when I get to the point I’m afraid to be alone with myself. Why, there was one time that grinding through The Chronicles of Narnia all at once got me through the dark night that somehow lasted two or three days and feeling okay on the other side. Another time it was a teen romance about an aspiring Olympic swimmer who was frustrated that her aspirations and training didn’t really leave her time to date. It’s completely weird what twigs, and I haven’t been able to quantify it yet.

…I’ve been finding this a lot harder since the COVIDiocy. Have you? I’ve been all but unable to keep track of a story for more than a few chapters at a time, and mostly incapable of remembering what I was reading. It’s been almost four years, there’s no excuse for it not to have come back yet.

But it was ridiculously effective before, and even since then I’ve managed to trip into one or two seizing me at exactly the right moment to give me context. Because that’s the thing about books–*context*. Specifically, a context separate from your own, a perspective and drive and ideal outside of the tiny little box your worst self has managed to squish you into.

When the White Witch has enslaved the land of Narnia, and one of the prophesied Sons of Adam manages to redeem himself from helping her in those aims, it’s harder to see your certainty you’ll never do anything useful as an all-overpowering shadow of certainty. Sometimes, all you need is a step outside of your own head to get it back to right.

2) A Win

I believe it’s BA Smith who says to try to accomplish *something* in a day that won’t be undone the next day. Which is a little sideways for me–my stress-doodles are constant, persistent, and when I look at them unstressed I’ll frequently see something valuable enough to keep. It’s the continual things I’m supposed to do, but don’t, that get me down–the things that will be undone tomorrow, but make life better ’til then.

So in my world, when I need a boost, those are the places to go.

Not the littler things, if you’re down enough; doing the dishes or folding the laundry is a great thing to do to keep things rolling, but if you’re looking for A Win, you’re looking for something you *don’t* usually manage. Maybe it’s a Big Effort for something you’re sick of; clearing out the storage room, or organizing the shelves so you can find the book you need, or even throwing out the broken toys that you’re sick of looking at. Or maybe it’s just Something You Don’t Usually Manage–that cobbler your husband likes, or homemade ice cream, or doing that paper craft with the children that always seemed like too much of a pain.

Just a thing where you can go “Regardless of what you say, O Shadow, I have made things run better, and I have made the people in my care happy.”

(That said… cooking in particular carries a big risk of Things Going Even Wronger, so have a backup in your pocket if possible.)

3) Touch Grass

My mom has a saying: If nothing is right and everything is messed up, HALT. That is, ask yourself: Am I Hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? Maybe that’s why.

Now, ideally, once you’ve worked that out, you should fix it; there’s a lot of times that having a sandwich has curbed all of my darker natures. However, for most of my life, Lonely has been my go-to problem–*significantly* less so now that I’m married with children, but still sometimes–and that’s a touch harder, especially if you don’t exactly have a friend you can call up to go have milkshakes with.

But you can trick yourself, sometimes.

A lot of times, Lonely and Angry are absolutely a function of the environment you’re stuck in. Do you browse the web first thing in the morning? I do. And it is an absolutely TERRIBLE thing to do, a way to make sure all of your first thoughts are about all the terrible things people are doing to each other, how everyone probably thinks you’re stupid or evil, and anyway the Grand Titans of the Universe are playing chess on a level we aren’t ever permitted to influence, so why does it all matter anyway?

…honestly, things go Much Better when, instead, I manage to take a bike ride before the kids get up. This time of year? Oh, it’s cool, it’s misty, it’s *perfect*.

(Why on earth is it so hard to convince myself to do it?)

Other times, I used to (before children) go to bars early, when it was just the retirees hanging out. They’ll talk to just about anyone, in my experience. Or if I just needed to know other people existed and behaved normally, I could just go to a grocery store. The big idea is to *break your usual habit* so you at least get *some* impression of something being different.

These are really, really basic things, and you probably know them. But… I keep forgetting them every time I fall into the pit. So I share them, if for no other reason than I can bookmark it and check back next time I need it.

Hopefully it’ll be a while. But you never know.

—

MANDATORY PLUG: Are you going to be in the Las Vegas area the weekend of the 13th through the 15th? Remember, our glorious hostess will be one of the guests at SON OF SILVERCON! Come see Sarah and Dan Hoyt, MCA Hogarth… and even me, Caitlin Walsh, the Chief Artist! (Or sign up to be a Supporting Member and I’ll send you something pretty in the mail.)

Check the details or buy a membership at https://fission-chan.org/ !!!

We, children of the sixties, tend to think of propaganda as a megaphone. A voice shouting out and drowning all other voices.

We were conditioned through hundreds of movies about the Nazis and Hitler’s speeches.

And some propaganda is like that, but not all.

Those of us who grew up under socialism shading into communism, till you didn’t know where one unholy sister started and the other ended, and you just knew how it sounded/felt, know propaganda by a different feel, though.

Oh, it’s still coming from the government, or at least from what the government under leftist control wants you to believe, the way they want to channel you. It continues to come from them when the government is not in their hands, but a bit of “hate at the person in power instead of them” is thrown in. You learn to identify the new “smart” “Just discovered” or “newly fashionable” “truth” to be pushed into every mean of mass communication and through them into your personal conversations, your water-cooler-side discussions, your every day concerns.

I saw it in the US when I first came here. And everyone thought I was nuts. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a blog then. I’d have three or four followers, all of whom knew I’d been right for 38 years, but everyone else, like my husband back then would have said “you’re oversensitized.” Note he doesn’t say that anymore.

Take the “Reagan is going to nuke us all.” (I got married and moved here during Reagan’s second term.) I swear to you this was already in every private conversation among the young and the hip. How we’d been lucky not to get nuked so far. But one more Republican term, and…. The Soviets were losing their patience, peaceful as they were.

Everywhere. At once. It was also in every bestselling book set in the present, from mainstream to mystery to science fiction. (I didn’t yet read Romance back then.)

It was also profoundly uncool and low class to be Republican. Anyone upper class who was Republican was obviously stupid, or possibly a prude.

There were a lot of smaller ones. Stupid crap about everyone who was smart was atheist (like the millennia of religious men and women who were brilliant was a fluke or just that they “didn’t know.” As though proof in that matter had become available, ever.) About how the republicans were enriching themselves by making the poor poorer (which usually had to do with cutting some social support net which… well, no person who has ever experienced thinks it uplifts anyone. But it did get rid of democrat sinecure jobs in the welfare system, and that was the moral equivalent of genocide.

Other stuff: a constant drumbeat of more money for schools, while keeping the teaching jobs strictly controlled and requiring more time in schools of education than anyone sane can stand. It was to attract better teachers, see. Who wouldn’t be allowed to teach without enduring four years of indoctrination, no matter how much they knew of the subject to be taught. Or possibly because kids learn by eating money with a light coating of mayonnaise.

Constant opposition to the military and war, and a constant drumbeat for demilitarization and de-nuclearization. Because the USSR was peaceful. And anything that leaked out of the USSR as awful, we did the same, doncha know. So, because the USSR put political dissidents in mental hospitals (you had to be crazy not to love communism. It was scientific) we must also be doing the same. So, de-institutionalization, and stoned people destroying our cities…. eh. I once almost went over the table at the throat of a good friend (in the mid 90s mind) because he said there was no moral difference between the USA and the USSR. They both did horrible stuff. G-d forgive him. He wasn’t stupid. He was innocent. And the propaganda is everywhere.

It’s still everywhere. But… it’s not working as well as it used to. Mostly because our streams of entertainment and information are too diverse, so that the conversations going around are no longer uniform, and you no longer feel alone or stupid if you disagree.

As an example, when Dan was “movie scrolling for something to watch” on the TV while I was… I think posting on Instapundit, actually, last week, he stopped on a movie “based on a real story” about a “NASA Engineer” during the moon push.

Of course he did. I mean. But the trailers had him utterly bewildered, and had me giggling at the blatant propaganda.

I will say right now that I don’t remember the man’s name, and don’t know how much of it is true or not. Based on never having heard of him, at all, I assume he wasn’t a big enough figure to be noticed before, but now, now? He has the essential qualification. He tans. See, the guy was Hispanic, the son of Braceros (migrant agricultural workers, usually under limited work visas.) The movie of course has him being rejected for engineering and given a janitorial job, because NASA was just that racist (rolls eyes.) Since it also shows him going back to school, etc…. waggles hand. Anyway, it’s all the speeches, though, about how important it is to give command positions to people who come from people who harvest vegetables with their actual, personal hands. (I might be a little saucy.) Because, you know, only they can understand how much humans long for the stars.

As the descendant of people who were often very poor (and often very rich and crazy and often yes) and who almost to a person grew their own food and raised their own food, whatever else they did, I want to endorse this deranged idiocy. My ancestors had animal shit on their clogs, and dirt on their fingernails. I am now ruler of the world. Just happened. So sorry, I’m going to take over the world and leave it ruthlessly alone.

My only problem is all the people with the same qualifications. Fortunately they don’t tan as much as I do. Okay, most of them don’t. I’ll only have a few million co-rulers.

Would someone get my eyes, they rolled under the sofa. Indy will eat one of them, at this rate. He eats everything.

Ah, but you’d have bought it too: the soft lighting, the man talking of his dreams with tears in his eyes. His aged, bedraggled, so-proud parents. Fuck it. Any propagandist would be touched. Beautiful work.

And my guess is most people at whom it’s aimed will do what we did and scroll on by. Which is too bad. Because they were counting on that, see. Open the borders and saturate us with propaganda that both makes us feel guilty about our historic sins against these noble people, who are pouring in of their own free will, mind, and make us think they’re the second coming of Einstein and Tesla rolled into one with dirt beneath their fingernails and can-do in their hearts.

It’s like the superbowl commercial of the little girl scaling Trump’s evil wall to be handed a little American flag on the other side.

None of it is working because, well, they broke entertainment by pushing too much mini-tru bullshit at people. No one wants to see that/read that/consume that, so you know…. they’re pushing on a string. But they keep trying and getting louder and louder. (I hear that in trad publishing now, [I doubt Baen] trans characters are mandatory.) Which makes them more and more unpalatable. And they don’t know why.

All of their screaming pushes, from making us believe we SHOULD be invaded by the world, to making us want to eat yummy yummy bugs, to making us want to stop driving or be scared of climate change, to their attempt to make “the new normal” (more on that later) stick, none of it is working. It used to work. More importantly it used to be invisible.

I suspect it’s still invisible to a lot of people. It’s just unpalatable. “Why are all these movies about LGBTQ? What sense does that make? No others?” Or “Why are they changing the story I loved to be about race? Who cares about race that much?” In fact there’s a backlash building, which worries me sick, because of my very weird book. (Look, I got mad at The Left Hand of Darkness, okay. I was 14. And without this book, which I’m writing now I know how to, I’d never have started trying to write.) There are people who won’t read me because I have a female name, because “female” equals “preaching feminism.” (Well, not in my case. though some of my characters are many forms of crazy.)

However, a lot of us are seeing it, and see the strings.

Their only major propaganda hit in recent times — well, two of them, but one depended on the other — was the Covidiocy and BLM summer of burning love.

The first was essential to the other. Because when you’re locked in, and you turn on the TV to know what is happening beyond your house and see all the doom on screen, you get more scared. And then you ingest, wholesale, their tales of Racial SLAYINGS for no reason. And the fiery love scares the cowards into submission.

However, as well as that worked — sort of. Not well enough to prevent people from heading out and voting for Trump in unexpected numbers, which forced the visible fraud at the last minute — it wasn’t perfect. And it didn’t last. They really thought that they had their New Normal, and they could tighten the noose forever.

(This comes from being poisoned with narrativium from simplistic just-so stories, honestly.)

It started breaking almost immediately, though it lingers in certain classes and areas. Thing being those classes and areas were places already convinced of the leftist gospel. Mostly they scared their own coreligionists.

They’re holding on by the barest of margins, by splintered nails, by subtly manipulated numbers in the voting machines, and blatant registering of everyone who arrived here yesterday.

If they were smart, they’d realize the propaganda machine won’t save them this time. They’d back off and govern mostly from the center, with slightly subtle pushes. In 30 years years they’d have us.

But they can’t. They’re terrified. Because the pellet propaganda dispenser isn’t delivering mind control anymore. Or it is, but people ignore it.

Hence the push for censorship. And all the banning of fossil fuels. And the crazy all the time, everywhere.

To one extent they are right. If they tried to take us down slowly, given the tendency of the rest of the world to follow-ahead-of-us into crazy, the rest of the world would be dead by the time we got there. And heck, we’d have broken enough that probably we’d never get there.

But this way it’s worse. Because they’re removing the pretty propaganda mask, and showing the hideous face beneath.

They’re still fighting though. Just this last week, I noticed more and more people I don’t know/haven’t followed or friended in my social media streams. They’re all saying the same things: Trump is not conservative, he’s fooling you all. (He’s not fooling us. We know he’s not conservative. OTOH he’s not a communist. And he loves America. It’s worth a try.) And things are worse than we think. And the left already has won everything. We should just give up.

Deep dives into any of their allegations makes it obvious the lie is there, but no one can do a deep dive into all of them. And there are so many voices saying this all the time. (I suspect most are either the Chinese 50c army — might be cheaper now. China is in bad trouble — or AI bots.) All the time.

And people are getting depressed.

I’m not. Much. The fraud might be unbeatable. Or not. The backlash might be so extreme we pull this out of the fire once more as in 16. Could happen. (In which case the polls MUST get cleaned. Registration anew. Everyone. Proof of citizenship. One day, in person, purple ink on finger, except for the armed forces. Period. No, I don’t care how sad your story is. It’s what every country with semi-clean elections does.)

Mind you it will take a miracle, but we’re a country of miracles.

And if they weren’t scared, the propaganda trying to get us to give up wouldn’t be everywhere.

Thing is, we can’t give up. We can’t. There is no halfway point between us and people who want all of humanity dead.

Doom? Bring it on. We’ll meet it head on and show it what for.

Think of what they’re likely to do and be two steps and a corkscrew turn ahead.

And do remember what they’re best at is propaganda. And they’re not proving that great at that.

Ignore the trolls. Ignore the doom. Ignore the propaganda. It’s a counter signal to what you should believe.

No giving up. No surrendering. You can’t surrender to people scattering nonsense over their shoulders as they run and hide in their safe rooms, anyway.

Be not afraid. It’s going to suck rotten eggs. But we got this.

In the end, we win, they lose.

In this dispute there are two sides.

I say this because telling you the other side gets a vote is stupid. We all know that. They have seized the levers of external power, and are doing their best to convince us — and perhaps have already convinced themselves — that only they get a vote.

Honestly at this point in their descent into madness while dragging us along for the ride, it’s hard to know what part of this is crazy propaganda, and what part is what they believe.

Except that I’m fairly sure there is a demoralize and cause to desist campaign going on by those slightly more competent services that until recently were forbidden from working in America.

And of course, it’s working because people born and raised here are so bizarrely unused to psy-ops and being messed with.

So, I feel it’s my duty to remind you that we also get a vote. Oh, maybe not in the vote-box (Considering PA also has enlisted into the full vote fraud operation.) But we get a vote. They can issue commands, but we don’t need to obey. They can forbid this and that, but they’re going to have a hell of a time doing so when it’s things necessary for life.

Remember the left, like our — special needs — European cousins has no idea of the geography or exigencies of life in America. Most of them are denizens of big cities or so stupid that without their trust funds they’d already have died from not knowing how to walk and chew gum at the same time.

So, you know, they don’t understand that no, we can’t make do with renta-a-mopeds when the grocery store is a minimum of a half hour drive down the freeway. They don’t understand that no, delivery trucks can’t be all electric. They don’t understand that if you forbid airplane flights, people will get pretty pissed at not being near aunt Minnie in her final moments.

They don’t know who we are or what we do.

Their crazy dictates can’t work here. Truth be told, they can’t work anywhere, which is why Europe — Europe! — is one step from open war, stopped only by the fact that they only have pitchforks to go after the bastages with, and that they bought the “climate” BS so long that they now probably also don’t have cars to drive to their capital.

But Europe could get that far, because in Europe you can accommodate that sort of insanity that much farther without the wheels coming off. Even their “rural” folk are closer to urban than most of our country. And they don’t routinely need to go the distances we do to transport everything from produce to packaging materials.

We can’t. They try that, the wheels come off. They come off fast enough that they won’t be beyond retribution.

And we’re armed. They know that. Which is why they’re buzzing on about guns, again/still trying to find a way to convince us to give it all up.

If you think they’re going to come door to door, you’re out of your mind, worse than the left. Note the left hasn’t done that. They haven’t done that even in the cities that are nominally wholly under their control. Because if they do that, they — even they — know will light the fuse and they won’t be able to put it off again.

My guess, if I had to make a guess, is that the reason they killed that poor elderly man in Utah was because he was talking about his guns and was a gun nut. And they though this would maybe scare the other armed to the teeth people.

It doesn’t seem to have worked. In fact, the result of their new offensive on guns, is, at a guess, that credit card reading machines in every gun shop across our great land, are smoking.

And make no mistake, the possession of guns by we the people (how many no one knows. I mean, a lot are at the bottom of lakes and rivers. People, learn to boat) is the ONLY thing keeping the second civil war from erupting.

They have a mental plan for this and it’s roughly covalent to how they seized Russia. Starve, send the army in, destroy, etc. etc. etc.

But those dang guns, and those dang Americans are in the way.

And we’re going to continue being in the way. Yes, their goal is to starve us of fossil fuels. People, we are Americans. You and I and the little aardvark in the corner know d*mn well if they make it uncomfortable enough, we’ll come up with solutions. For all I know there will be crazy guys in a shop in a corner of every town pounding out steam engines and dropping them into re-fabbed junkyard finds. Or other things we can’t even imagine. But two guys tinkering about will figure it out, and that night word will go out “Hey, they have a new car that” and copycats will spring up.

You know it, I know it. The big idiots in charge know it too.

They know we get a vote. Which is why they keep trying this and that, and talking really big, but not getting to do anything, other than, well, take the economy into the ground. They’re good at that. They do that as a default, even when they think they’re making things good.

But the thing is, as an aunt of mine once put it, the bad here is still better than the good most places. And as Trump showed in 16, if we wrest control from the left’s dumb and greedy little paws, America comes back like that. All we need is the boot to lift off a little. Or to press down harder and make us go … inventive.

But the thing is we go inventive by default.

Which, again, is why they’re trying so hard. Oh, you think the Roman Empire (guys thinking about it, or this being exactly like the fall of Rome) came up naturally on social media everywhere at once?

You are adorable, do you guys know that. Sweet Summer Children!

Listen, the comparison of America to the Roman empire was a favorite of the Soviet agit-prop thing, here and at home. “The decadent Roman Empire” made their people PROUD of not having the minimal comforts needed for life, much less the type of wealth we have. It made it seem like there was virtue in living in stack a prol apartments and eating rotten beets while standing in line for clothes.

We were never the Roman Empire. We were never an Empire. Sure, sure, garrisons in other lands. And tell me, did they even suppress anti-American sentiment, let alone install our hand picked puppets? Bah. Trust me, I was in Germany in the 80s. No. No, our garrisons did nothing except stand ready to defend the populace.

As for buying from other lands — dudes, that’s commerce! Only the dirty communists think of that as oppression. America’s appetite for cheap gauds and trinkets has spread the most prosperous of times across the world.

Sure, we buy cheap. Again, commerce. But there are always the dodos invested in fair trade also known as “paying more than you need to, because it gives you warm and fuzzies.” Because some people are like that.

However, our cheap is the expensive of other countries, and again, spread prosperity across the world.

What we don’t do is send our armies in to strip the locals of anything valuable to us.

In fact, the Roman Empire is closer to the Soviet Empire, spreading across the Earth to get bread crusts for those at home.

An American empire, operating the same way, wouldn’t be able to feed the country for a month, after the commies destroy food production at home.

And opening the borders isn’t going to do to us what it did to Rome. Americans aren’t disarmed. More importantly — trust me — is the fact American sons and daughters still served in the armed forces until very recently. So America is full of veterans.

In Rome most of the legions by the end were pretty much foreign. Though there was provincial too. Only we don’t have provinces. All our veterans are right here, in possession of know-how and armed for bear.

But yeah, they’re trying to make you think we’re just like Rome. We’re doomed, and we should give up. And that’s why that meme came up. And some of you rockheads are spreading it instead of thinking and pushing back.

Look, right now they can’t push further. They can’t. Yes, they can cause confusion and destruction and they can fake elections. (Maybe. I still say it’s going to take faking 400 million votes for the Bidenfuhrer. And then we win that battle by virtue of “eyes on your face.”)

But they can’t seize the total control they want.

We are not early-twentieth century Russia. We’re not like any of their models. And we’re damn flexible and inventive. Which they’re not. And scares them.

So sorry to interrupt your doom podcast broadcast into your head 24/7 by the enemy, but the fight isn’t lost. Hell, the fight is damn near won, though the mop-up will be a right bitch.

They had to lock us up and take all sorts of blatant measures, after four years of 24/7 everywhere propaganda and the cooperation of the deep state in it, to make it appear Trump was corrupt and in the pay of the enemy (Dear Lord, they had to pick Russia, because they’re stupid, and didn’t realize we were all looking at it and going “that makes no sense.” Because in their minds we all naturally hate Russia, since they never got what we hated/hate is communism. Sigh. Such special children. Makes me think the Spartan methods of culling had a point except “addled enough to be a commie” doesn’t show at birth.) And then they still had to fraud at the last minute, in front of G-d and everyone. Because their most extensive and “diverse” (WTF does that even mean) network of fraud came up short.

After unprecedented propaganda war on all Americans, and trying to put the country under house arrest.

Note also that all their powers of propaganda have failed to gin up a second scare. And note that their attempts to re-ignite the “summer of fiery love” have been limited and looked at as crazy.

They aren’t winning. They can’t win. The truth is all their agendas and five year plans always fail. Always. The fault is usually of wreckers and hoarders of course, though everything from agriculture to foreign enemies can be named.

The truth is their program can’t work. And we’re not about to let it anyway.

Because we have agency.

We’re the people who didn’t let them keep the lockdown going forever. (Yes, they really had planned on that. Lock us down, move us to their “15 minute” cities, and make us eat bugs. Go and look at the media of two years ago. They weren’t subtle and they weren’t hiding. They saw it so close they could taste it. Hence “new normal” (Spit))

We’re the people who have thwarted them at every turn, and looked at their clever propaganda operations and made up memes to mock them.

Because we’re American and they — poor sods — have forgotten they are.

Go be inventive, devious, and always, always:

Go be ungovernable.

That will do!

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM CAEL AMARI: Oathbound: An Age of Shadows Story

Life is short in Signe’s village. Monsters and undead infest the unforgiving mountains, and a brutal winter is prowling at the door. But when her closest friend is murdered in secret, Signe must undergo a dangerous journey in order to find the truth — and exact justice for the dead.

Sword’s justice, if need be.

Yet sometimes justice is not what one finds at the end of an oath of vengeance, and sometimes, it takes more than a blade to ensure the dead are truly at rest.

Rooted in a Dark Age inspired world, with nods to Old https://amzn.to/3EZFyJuNorse, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian legend, OATHBOUND is a standalone dark fantasy novel.

FROM RACOUNTER PRESS, FEATURING STORIES BY ALMA BOYKIN DANIEL G. ZEIDLER AND MORE: Space Cowboys 3: Return of the Bookaroo

When there are no frontiers left on Earth, humanity will head to the stars.
And the cowboys will be there, riding herd on rockets, asteroids and whatever animals make it to space with us.
Join these 10 authors as they tell the stories of life, death, justice and the struggle to survive on humanities next frontier.

BY Z. M. REMNICK: The Wedding of Light and Shadow (The Seelie Court Book 5)

Emma Greer is a Champion of the Mortal Realm against the forces of the Fae—and her life is now a mess. She sees things that no one else sees, hears voices coming from the shadows, and senses danger in things everyone else considers ordinary. She feels like she’s going insane as she tries to go about her every day life with the forces of the Fae swirling around her.

In the midst of all this, Emma receives an offer to run security for a wedding in Estes Park. The pay is good, and it includes a free week at the Stanley Hotel. It seems like a no-brainer to Emma. Then she finds out that the wedding is between two fairies of different courts—and if it doesn’t go off without a hitch, it could start a cascade of destruction that will shatter the Fae Realm and send ripples into the mortal world that will bring everything into chaos.

Keeping a couple dozen fairies out of trouble in a Colorado tourist town is difficult enough, especially when aided by a security team of questionable loyalty. But then a critical member of the wedding party disappears, and foul play is suspected. Can Emma find the missing Fae, keep the wedding from turning into a battle, and make sure that the bride and groom get to “I do”? To do so, she must master her own powers and take the next steps to understanding her destiny.

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.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Chained Adept: A Lost Wizard’s Tale

MEET A POWERFUL WIZARD WITH UNANSWERED QUESTIONS–AND AN UNBREAKABLE CHAIN AROUND HER NECK.

Have you ever wondered how you might rise to a dangerous situation and become the hero that was needed?

The wizard Penrys has barely gained her footing in the country where she was found three years ago, chained around the neck and wiped of all knowledge. And now, an ill-planned experiment has sent her a quarter of the way around her world.

One magic working has called to another and landed Penrys in the middle of an ugly war between neighboring countries, half a world away.

No one has any reason to trust her amid rumors of wizards where they don’t belong. And she fears to let them know just what she can do — especially since she can’t explain herself to them and she doesn’t know everything about herself either.

Penrys has her own problems, and she doesn’t have any place in this conflict. But they need her, whether they realize it or not. And so she’s determined to try and lend a hand, if she can. Whatever it takes.

And once she discovers there’s another chained adept, even stronger than she is, she’s hooked. Friend or foe, she has questions for him — oh, yes, she does.

All she wants is a firm foundation for the rest of her life, with a side helping of retribution, and if she has to fix things along the way, well, so be it.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Deep Pinkhttps://amzn.to/45iCJOq

Like all Private Detectives, Seamus Lebanon [Leb] Magis has often been told to go to Hell. He just never thought he’d actually have to go. But when an old client asks him to investigate why Death Metal bands are dressing in pink – with butterfly mustache clips – and singing about puppies and kittens in a bad imitation of K-pop bands, Leb knows there’s something foul in the realm of music. When the something grows to include the woman he fell in love with in kindergarten and a missing six-year-old girl, Leb climbs into his battered Suburban and like a knight of old goes forth to do battles with the legions of Hell. This is when things become insane…. Or perhaps in the interest of truth we should say more insane.

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: sticks

Or, if you prefer “Don’t look down. We’re over this part now, and those rocks are going to hurt, as we fall.” Or if you prefer “what can’t go on won’t” “But there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.” And “No one knows what will happen when the break starts, it can go any direction.” And, to quote the late, great Jerry Pournelle, “Despair is a sin, and we don’t even know if it’s necessary.”

What can’t go on, won’t. We all know that. I mean, that’s life. The toddler’s tantrum ends, it doesn’t just go on forever. Pregnancies end one way or another, they’re not a permanent state. Our lives too will end, because we’re not eternal. (Parts of us might be. I will not push my belief on you though. There is no objective proof. But we’re not eternal in this world.)

Good things come to an end, and bad things too. And human arrangements come to an end when run by people either insanely ignorant or malicious enough to want to break everything.

I think — maybe — my feeling related to the border. Maybe. Or just to a lot of things that we’ve run off the cliff on, and are now running midair trying desperately not to look down. Because if we look down we fall.

I’ll list a few below but this is not an exhaustive list and honestly you guys will probably add to it in the comments.

1-The border situation. I mean, at this point it’s outright nuts. People are flying across half the world to come in at our Southern border and most of them we don’t know why they’re coming in, and I doubt they do. I suspect some have been ordered to come. Some have the whole bizarre idea our money is limitless. They can come here, and get money for free forever, and send home, and then everyone will be rich, rich. And some … heaven knows? Escaping situations at home. Coming because they think they can set up a criminal empire. who knows.

The one thing I’m fairly sure is that various leftist and communist front organizations are recruiting them and/or kidnapping them because they think they’re gathering themselves an army to throw against us. And I’m absolutely sure that won’t work. It won’t work amid people from different villages, much less people from different races. The left thinks all races unite against ‘whites’ but the left has a narrow definition of whites. Most of South America consider themselves whites. And you’d be shocked how many people who look black to us, from Africa, consider themselves “Arab” and therefore white. On top of which practically everyone from elsewhere in the world is “racist” in a way that the left can’t comprehend, but would if they realized foreigners are human and watched them.

In most of the world race is equivalent to nation. Or part of nation. Or small group of villages. Or– And everyone else can’t be trusted and is the enemy.

The grand army of the left will be shooting each other within minutes. And running away screaming the first time they meet resistance from Americans.

What I don’t know is what comes from this. The fantasy of the left doesn’t work — day ending in y — but what actually happens. I have no idea. I have a vague idea we’re going to hit a period of really high crime for… a little while.

Look, the thing is, these people are completely unvetted by us, and I’d be shocked if they’re not “undesirables” their government is trying to get rid of. Some will be or pretend to be convinced communists and there’s a non-trivial overlap of that and violent criminals. So likely a large group of them is here for free benes, plus to terrorize the locals and steal from us. Partly because they resent and envy us and — because of our media — think us soft.

But here’s the thing: they are used to a disarmed and submissive population, partly everywhere else in the world. Peasants, you know? We’re not that. Not even in the big cities. They’re going to try their games, and it’s going to blow back, and then it’s– I don’t know. I know they don’t win, but I don’t know what comes next. I know the places controlled by the left will go from treating them as pets to concentration camps by any other name. Which would be bad, because once you have the camps– Well, people become numbers to run through.

But I don’t know how all that breaks in the end. I know there is almost no way it won’t be very bad for the people coming in by the tens of thousands per day. NO. Possible. Way. They’re dumb as rocks. And really misinformed. The signposts are there already. They should be scarpering back as fast as they can. Or faster.

BUT what I don’t know is when it breaks, and how bad it will be for the rest of us. I don’t know if the backlash will go crazy and a lot of good people die. I don’t know how much societal trust breaks, or how rigid society after.

I just know it breaks.

2- The vaccine covidiocy ….

So this week this came out in more than one source: Researchers Warn Molnupiravir Causes New Variants; mRNA Shots Contaminated with DNA Fragments.

For the TL:DR crowd:

Back in June, Microbiologist Kevin McKernan, a former researcher for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Human Genome Project, announced that he had discovered simian virus 40 (SV40), a virus found in monkeys and humans, in the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. SV40 has been linked to cancer in humans, including mesotheliomas, lymphomas and cancers of the brain and bone.

Cancer genomics expert Dr. Phillip Buckhaults, a former proponent of the mRNA shots who received the Pfizer Covid vax himself, confirmed the presence of DNA contaminants in the vaccines during a Senate hearing in South Carolina on September 15.

“I’m kind of alarmed about this DNA being in the vaccine – it’s different from RNA, because it can be permanent,” he said.

Two points on this:

One:

“There is a very real hazard,’ he said, that the contaminant DNA fragments will integrate with a person’s genome and become a ‘permanent fixture of the cell’ leading to autoimmune problems and cancers in some people who have had the vaccinations.” The doctor noted that these genome changes can “last for generations.”

Two:

Another expert panelist, Dr. Janci Lindsay, argued that the contamination of the DNA in the shots was not an accident, and had to be due to nefarious intentions.

“The SV40 sequences, they should not be there. They don’t need to be there to grow this in bacteria. I don’t think it’s an accident. They could have chosen another plasmid that did NOT have the SV40 sequences,” Lindsay said.

“If these sequences sit above an oncogene, and they are promiscuous, that means they are likely to integrate in places, more likely then other generic inserts. Then they can cause cancer,” she added. “There is something very unusual going on here.”

This stuff beyond the neglect and insanity and the propaganda used on us, the silencing of sane voices, the fact people had to and some people are again being forced to take the vax or boosters to keep their jobs or to have medical treatment, is a level of monstrous that as it comes out and breaks (And things always come out and break, sooner or later) has the potential to make the Nuremberg trials look like time out in kindergarten. Because at least the Nazis, horrendous evil that they were, didn’t try to genocide the HUMAN RACE. All of it. That’s a level of evil never before seen in the world, or outside certain more extremes work of fiction.

And if the rest of the world catches on that the entire virus mania was dreamed up by the left to tank the AMERICAN economy and mess with OUR elections. (No? Wanna bet? The measures taken against the virus certainly were designed for that. Whether the virus was made and released on purpose, I don’t know. However given the stuff above, I’m agnostic, not disbelieving. Evil that evil…. well…) and that their people were just carried along for the ride to strengthen an otherwise thin and unconvincing narrative, well… Hell breaking lose is not the half of it. And no, I don’t know if they’ll ever catch on. Their media and culture are not ours and most of them haven’t undergone a new media revolution. But if they do…

This can’t go on. The left knows it can’t go on. Their running around asking for amnesty, while at the same time trying to get these “vaccines” into babies is a measure of how crazy with fear they are.

What happens next? I don’t know. How do we fix the harm to the human genome? I don’t know.

I do know their attempt to gin up a second panic is only taking with those captives who can’t talk back, or with the very out of touch with reality. They keep pushing, but it’s a string.

3- Our money situation.

The government spending is now just outright silly. Printing new money to look after the illegals they’re letting in — their imagined grand army — is not going to stop inflation. And raising the interest rates will not stop it, because the government will keep spending.

The end result is– unpredictable.

The US dollar is the de-facto world reserve currency. No, I don’t think that will change. Not because we’re great, but because everyone else is unimaginably worse.

Without that last factor, we would just have crashed. But we haven’t. And we might not be able to. On the other hand, the crazy spending can’t go on.

So, when does it break? How does it break? How can it? And what the heck should we do to prepare?

I don’t know. Neither do you. Neither do the “experts.” We’re running mid-air. Don’t look down.

4- Into this throw a reducing population. Yes, it’s entirely possible the idiots in power are letting in the illegals ALSO because they think that it will boost the population.

Except this is not — by and large. There are always exceptions — a population that can work/be taxed/ spend. They are not a population that can integrate in America and make up for the babies that weren’t born and have been lied about on the census for … 50 years at least, and maybe more.

Falling populations are deflationary. (Less demand.) But the government spending like drunken sailors on non-productive population is inflationary.

HOW does it break? When? What to do? Keep running. JUST keep running.

4- China. China is breaking. Economically they’re more of a mess than ever, and they were always a hidden mess, with a veneer of prosperity.

The veneer is breaking. The mess is unimaginable.

What happens to our — and all over the world — politicians they’re buying when they stop paying? What happens around China itself? If it collapses, will it stay relatively contained? Will it result in death for its neighbors? (I don’t think they can or have the capacity, but who knows?)

Add in that totalitarian regimes can stave off collapse by lying. Until they can’t.

I don’t know. You don’t know. Don’t look down.

5- The economy is spiraling down. As it does under Democrat influence.

As Americans tighten their belts, and most of us already are to one degree or another, jobs are lost. Stagnaflation sucks for everyone, and we’re starting into it.

But it’s worse abroad. Because we stop buying what we buy from them. We tighten. And even if it’s minor for us, it’s their livelihood. There are several nations that don’t have the ability to attack us. But they have terrorists…

The list is not over. I just don’t want to go on. One of these situations is enough to keep a person awake and worrying at night. But there are…. probably dozens of them, where it’s already impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but… it hasn’t broken.

We’re running middair. We don’t know what comes next.

Here’s the important thing: Don’t despair. When I say no one knows how it will break, I don’t mean “the worst will happen.” I mean “no one knows.”

Part of it is that the examples from history apply weirdly to us, both due to our size, our variety of subcultures, the fact our “governing elites” are their own culture and have no contact with most of us (or reality) and the fact that … well, there is not something quite like us in history.

We are not, no, despite the attempt to organize like it — sort of — like the Roman Republic. We’re even less like the Roman Empire. The organization and functioning of that was closer to the USSR. And our people…

Well, we’re different.

Does this mean with all this against us, we can get by?

Oh, not in this way. Something will break, and after that things will change.

And the break will hurt. Even good breaks, society wide, hurt. We’re still processing the internet and everything it broke.

Does it mean we can get past this mess without violence, or at least a civil war?
I don’t know. I can’t see it, but then again, I can’t see a lot of things in this mess. It makes no sense. Not to me, and not to anyone else.

Anyone pretending they can see exactly how this breaks, and what comes next is either deluded or lying.

Two things we know:

The left’s plans will fail. They always do. Even in smaller and simpler countries, their stranglehold is always limited in time and scope. And we don’t have a USA to feed us. So their plans fail faster.

The future isn’t written in stone.

Hey, maybe we can build a bridge, while running midair, and get somewhere else.

If anyone can do it it’s us. No. Not betting on it.

But also not betting we fall and die forever. Of the two, the first is more likely, to be honest.

And at any rate, despair is a sin.

And it might not be needed.

In the end we win they lose. The only doubt is the messy stuff in the middle.

Grab a parachute or two, will ya? And pass me some planks for the bridge.

The time has come to talk of many things, but I’ll stay off cabbages and kings, if you will. Even if every time I finish a story I wonder if it’s cabbage.

First, I figured out why things have been so unproductive since February. I mean other than getting repeatedly sick. (It’s better than last year. I find there’s a period of acclimating to the new place’s viruses and peculiar allergies. Used to be a year, but I keep forgetting I’m old now, and past warranty. (To be fair, I don’t think this body ever had a warranty. I think it was in a bin, as is, a dozen for ten cents and dad walked by and thought “A baby, that would be nice.” Anyway…))

The problem is that it’s been pretty much 2 weeks recovering from some trip, then preparing to go out again. Most not cons, really, just …. things we had to do.

And the next two months aren’t any better.

October 13-14-15, Dan and I will be guests (With guest of Honor M. C. A. Hogarth — take a bow, Maggie!–) at Son of Silvercon, in Las Vegas.

Mid November, we’re heading to San Antonio TX, to pick up a batch of kittens. We think we have homes for all of them (though slap me silly and call me Edna if I know how to get a little white girl to Ohio. It might come to a same day there-and-back flight with kitten as carrier.)

The batch of kittens in question:

See, how it happened — sigh, is that in April we got two adorable little fraternal twins, Indy (then called Pollux) and Helena. But for reasons we don’t understand, though we have suspicions, Helena died in boarding while we were at Liberty Con. We miss her terribly. Her twin had already got renamed Indy (We named the cat Indiana) by Dan due to his tendency to explore everywhere. He’s healthy and adorable, and the smartest, most engaging cat we ever had. (And we’ve had a lot.) However our hearts were broken losing our little girl.

Also, to be absolutely honest, Indy needs a friend his age. He’s made friends with our elderly (15) Havelock-cat but Havey doesn’t have the energy to run and play with Indy for very long.

Anyway, in a moment of insanity I asked Celia Hayes, who owns Indy’s parents, to allow them to have another litter before fixing them. I thought this time for sure there couldn’t be another six kittens. I was right, there were seven.

As I said, I think we have homes for them, but yeah, if you desperately want a writer’s cat, kin to Indy and Cedar Sanderson’s Toast and Becky Jones’ Marshmallow, we’re taking applications for back up homes, just in case.

For us, we get to keep Circe, the little orange girl, who so far looks a lot like Helena though she somehow comes across as more timid even if I’ve just seen her in pictures.

Hopefully Indy likes her. (EVERYTHING crossed.) And hopefully she’ll be happy with us.

So, the rest of the year, through November, is a bit crazy with Son of Silvercon, picking up kittens, and then driving (and sigh, maybe flying) around like a deranged Kitten fairy.

Despite that I want to finish Dyce’s 4 and 5 and maybe Rhodes. I don’t know HOW but I’m sick at how low in productivity this year has been.

And then we’re quite fixed at home, until I’m…. clears throat, guest of Honor at Confinement in Lebanon TN March 1-3 of 2024!

(Yes, it’s the most arrant nepotism, since my younger got engaged to his eldest daughter. But what are you going to do? And no, I’m not sure about the sanity of letting the children of science fiction writers breed, but they didn’t listen to me. I think the bio-ethics committees are going to show up at my door any day. Not Mike’s likely, because even the bio-ethics committees won’t take on a guy who has a bigger arsenal than most first world countries.)

Anyway, come and see me (that announcement above is a link and I’ll put up a flyer in a minute) if you are around there and can. It’s the only time we’re going East for a while, other than G-d willing (Who knows. Next year presents weird. There’s at least one kid move in it, and it might overlap) Liberty con. (Though Dan is sure that in a few years we’ll move to Tennessee. I have no idea why he thinks that.)

I know I say this a lot, but I feel like I must say it again: we are all soaked in story, drenched in it. More so than any other generation or people in history.

I was lucky — eh — to live in a very old fashioned time, in a backward place until my teens, and not to have been particularly affluent.

How not particularly affluent? Well, there wasn’t much money for books. There was some, mind you. Just not much. And until I was eight we didn’t even a television, and the first time I went to the movies I was 12. Oh, there were other things. We did watch TV at friends and relatives places (which is how I loved The Saint.) And there were… radio soap operas. I couldn’t really listen to those regularly, because they usually were on over lunch, when I was either just arriving from school or just getting ready to go to school. (Due to lack of physical buildings enough for all the students (none had been built since my parents’ time, and there had been a marked migration from the provinces to the big city and big-city-adjacent (where we were. The village is now essentially part of the big city. Back then and through my life we became more and more of a suburb)) school was either 8 to 1:30 or 2 to 7.)

Even then, soap operas were so universally listened to, and so loud, to be heard over whatever else was going in the (usually very small) houses that while I was in intermediate school to which I took the bus, and walked down and up the village main street, I absorbed most of the story through just walking past door after door. And linked in the bits in between, because I couldn’t help it.

But still, there were vast times without story, and there was marked story-craving. I re-read books, a lot. I read everyone else’s books, including school books. I read old Reader’s Digests. I read everyone’s comic books. I read my older cousin’s romances. Yes, I read instructions for things I’d never owned and never would own. And I read the instructions for medicine I’d never take. As I’ve said before, I have a problem, and it is bad.

Even so, there were vast moments without stories and without words. Times when I had to cobble together stories in my mind, either of fantastic worlds, or of things happening in the village. This was not exactly gossip. I have a problem with names and faces, and older people (Really old people, like over 25) didn’t interest me at any rate. I just took pieces of their stories, and tried to figure out why, and what happened next.

Here’s the thing, even then, I was abnormally soaked in story. Because I probably spent a few hours each day listening to/reading/watching stories that I didn’t tell myself.

Evolutionarily I think this is crazy high for humans. Think of hunter gatherers (and remember that even that, evolutionarily is yesterday for our species. Okay, maybe last week. Agriculture is yesterday.) For most of human history, humans knew maybe five or six stories, which got told and retold, and sometimes “fixed” certain ways.

I know that at some point someone did um… Paleo-linguistic work on fairytales and found that Cinderella dates back to pre-history, as do a dozen others. Now, whatever you think of their methods, etc, this is not surprising. If you know more than a couple of cultures, even ones that supposedly were apart for a long time, you start picking stories or story elements that are the same.

Stories are part of what made humans very successful. Like, grandma’s told stories, so kids didn’t go traipsing in the woods and get eaten by a saber tooth, so they had kids and they told them stories, and their kids–

By substituting for experience, in a way that our brains seem really confused about — study after study indicates that we remember things we heard and PARTICULARLY watched as having happened to us and imprinting there with the emotion attached to it (which competent stories do) — stories can spare us dying in horrible, messy ways by showing “here be tigers” (Or really bad people. Or whatever.)

Also epics can sell a civilization. There’s reason to be Indo-European was not so much a blood tribe as a culture, sold through vast spoken sagas about how great the people were. Other people wanted to be part of that and imitated the culture and learned the sagas. Anyone who’s been abroad knows America as a leading purveyor of cool stories has the same effect. But because our stories aren’t always as high on America as they should be if it were a sane world, the rest of the world gets very funny stories about us. Stories that are completely wrong. And they still think we’re cool, so they try to imitate them.

No, seriously, there are probably gansters in Africa trying to wear their pants falling down their butt. And there are probably people who are criminals because they were sold by our music and movies that being criminals is cool. Such the power of story.

Because our main stream media is also a narrative, and a really loud one, and because it’s largely fiction and obsessive, there were BLM riots abroad in 2020. In some countries that are more minority-impaired than others this was particularly funny.

Also, I like to did myself violence laughing — and quoting Mr. 11B, “Had to go and breathe into a paper bag for a while” — when I ran into reports of people in Portugal having demonstrations after Trump’s election and screaming “Not my president.” Because… well, self obviously true, but why did they feel the need to get together in the middle of the street to yell it? Much less in front of the American Embassy? I’m sure the embassy knew it too. They didn’t need to be told.

I mean, guys, level-setting, we don’t even know — not even me, and I still have family there — who the three times refargin Portuguese President is. And if I knew and had some vague memory of his or his family, I might go “Oh, that sh*thead” but I wouldn’t feel the need to run around telling people “not my president.” As for the rest of you…. uh, except for some notable figures like Thatcher, say, do you even know who the BRITISH PM is? And mind, they’re closer to us culturally than anyone else around. I mean, I know Castreau is the — Premier? President? Prime Minister? Secretary general of affairs between middle-aged, married people? I don’t remember what they call their sh*thead in charge — Honcho is specialness in Canada. But honestly, I only know it because he pisses me off, and someone needs to draw a Hitler mustache on all his pictures. No, seriously. Including those in his family album. And I know Micro-Macron is in charge in France, because he’s unusually crazy even for a Frenchman. And don’t get me started on Obrador, in Mexico who is rapidly approaching “What if we shoved his nose in?” levels of annoyance. (Incidentally Obrar is the polite slang for “shitting” in Portuguese, so you know, in Portugal Obrador would be Shitter. I know, in Spanish it’s worker. BUT all the same, it pleases me in that indefinable way that linguistics sometimes do.)

However not ever, in the eve of ever, have I felt the need to shout: Not my president/premier/head honcho/idiot in special, much less in the streets.

Why did they do it? Because the narratives about the US are so special and compelling. (Also quite possibly the worst thing ones own citizens can say about a country, i.e. ficticious and slanderous, being produced by a minority that is oikophobic, Marxist and brain dead. But that’s something else.)

I mean, when I was little, in a place where (back then) an apartment building with four stories, the only one in the region, was known as “the high rise” I knew I had to grow up and live in a high rise. A real one. Because that’s how Americans live, and that was the future. (I told you they lie.)

And that was then. Now we’re really super-soaked (like a super-soaker with a back-pack) in story, to the point that we rarely pop out of it. I’m sitting here, typing this post, and ignoring the stories blaring over my husband’s computer. Because most songs are stories too.

More importantly, the primary forms of story, consumed by most of the US population, and what creates the texture of our minds are movies and games.

Look, even books have changed. And the books I like have changed. And what I require from books had changed.

Some of that is normal due to age, yes. But not all. And while I’d like to say I have gone towards wanting to consume more complex stories — bah, this isn’t true. On the contrary, I want my stories to go very fast.

Now there is nothing wrong with this, and there were always fast, quick-delivery tales.

However if you read stuff 20 years old, then 60, then 100, you’ll find it moves slower. The story moves slower. There are more things that are at least implied to happen in between the beginning and the satisfying (ah!) climax. The cigarette moment afterwards takes its own sweet time, too.

In stuff 100 or more years old, you often find entire mini novels or novellas in the middle of the novel, because someone sits down and tells a story that is transcribed in full. And yea, sometimes it applies to the main novel and sometimes it’s just…. local color? It’s bewildering.

This is because life felt slower, but more importantly, because people didn’t consume so many movies/games.

Movies and games telescope story. They have to. Movies particularly. Look, my favorite visual of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (a slim and relatively low-event book) is the six hour A & E mini series.

Because telling a story visually takes a long long time to do it justice. Most movies can’t do that. Or we’d routinely go and sit in the theater for 14 hours at a go to see a movie of our average thriller novel.

What movies do instead is take short cuts and telescope things. And they use short hand. One of the short-hands is something happens “and the people all rise up.” (Happened never, in the history of ever. The closest is the Romanian Merry Christmas and even that was first slowly, then very fast. Unimaginably slowly, so most people in and our of the country didn’t see it happen.) Another, for romance — which to be fair, romance novels also use — is the look that binds them forever or the kiss that’s like no other kiss.

Movies gallop from “first indications that” through doing something about it to rushing to climax big fight, dropping into bed, whatever, to solution.

But real life is not like that. And because particularly movies get in the back of our brain as “lived experience”, we expect life to be like that. We expect the shortcuts to work. (The number of young women, starting when I was one, who aren’t sure they’re in love because his kiss isn’t electrical. Leading me to point out they’re not eels. And that storytellers lie. (More the first when I was young. I was a sarcastic little thing.))

It’s worse for movements that involve “all the people.” Heck, even if we ever got to the point of all marching “shoulder to shoulder” it would take decades to get there.

Let me see, the oppressed people and the evil rulers plot. You see the oppression, you see something outrageous like persecuting a folk hero. People start giving pissed looks and going armed. A popular ditty propagates about how the ruler sucks… toes. And suddenly revolution!

Never happened. In the history of ever.

Even in a small kingdom it would take 20 or 30 years from death of the folk hero, to “go.” And the “go” would involve multiple uncoordinated “gos” and about 90% of them would die aborning, or be stomped down.

In something the size of our nation-continent? Yeah. Look, I saw the crisis in commercial real estate coming 35 years ago. I could predict it. But obviously most people didn’t, because as in the time of Noah, they were marrying and being given in marriage, building increasingly ginormous and more expensive corporate headquarters. Without the Covidiocy they might not have been wrong, even, as it would probably only have landed 20 years from now. Instead, they are now shocked, shocked, shocked that there is a commercial real estate crisis. This is more the speed things happen.

The thing to remember is how even the history you learned in school is telescoped. The abuses and infringements leading to the revolution took a long time, and in the end only a small minority fought.

Why am I saying this? Because if I see another of those “my homies and I would already be stacking bodies” I’m going to come through the screen and slap someone. And no one, not even I, wants that, right?

But also because you need to remember the other side is just poisoned with story. More so than us, at least most of them, because most of them don’t read history, though they might sometimes watch “documentaries.” But those are really telescoped, too. On top of which they believe, even often without realizing it, in a prophetic narrative of “how things are supposed to go” which means they believe that you know “shoulder to shoulder, the people will win and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.” They believe in it so much that even their own AstroTurf movements get eaten up whole as “signs of things to come.”

We’re jumpy, impatient, and those of us who are political addicts, are tired of the many infringements and abuses we see happening twice a day and three times on Sunday.

But they’re really jumpy, really impatient. The prophet is supposed to have wakened in his well, second coming of Marx is supposed to have happened. the dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to already be in place. And those of us who are against them, are supposed to already have died off because we’re all so old (they really believe we’re all my dad’s generation, at least, maybe older.)

Instead, we’re getting more and more uppity. And we pretend to be much younger than them, how dare we. And no matter how many times they “shut up, they explain” we just talk back louder.

And they’re exasperated, enervated, sure of their eschatological truth, but not sure how to get there, much less how to interpret growing resistence. They’re the good guys. Don’t we want Utopia? How very dare we not only exist but remind them more of that every day?

This is why they’ve gone nuts, trying to retcon history, and change anything that doesn’t accord to their rather insane ideas. This is why they’re coming with crazy stuff like erasing the borders.

It’s not fraught because they’re winning. It’s fraught because we’re talking/fighting back, and that drives them out of their story-drunk minds. This is not how they ever thought it would go. they want to fix it, but they can’t, because reality can’t really be rewritten. Their efforts at “fixing things” only meet with more resistance.

Ladies, Gentlemen and small devious octopi, this is why it’s going to get very very bad. They’re reaching for everything they can think of, and most things no one would think of. I mean, most of them are movie tropes and complete insanity.

But they will do it. Like Jan 6th, was supposed to set off a minority (in their heads we’re a tiny and old minority) rebellion, easily put down, that would end all resistance. Instead, look at the mess they made…. For that matter, Covidiocy was a movie script from end to end, and if it had worked as in a story, right now they’d be receiving the thanks of a grateful populace. Instead, they’re mumbling about amnesty AND trying to restart it, and having no idea why none of it WORKS.

And instead of people marching shoulder to shoulder, they believe them less and less. How very dare? Stompy stompy stompy.

It’s going to get crazy. No, I mean, crazier than that. And a lot of it will hurt. Us and particularly people abroad. Because when America sneezes, the world will catch pneumonia.

But it will fix itself, because reality does that. Hopefully without it tipping into a “great simplification.” Maybe. Almost for sure without shoulder to shoulder, though a Romanian Merry Christmas is always possible.

First very slow, then precipitously fast. And everything they do makes the fast come closer.

Prepare, prepare prepare. And be not afraid.

We win, they lose.

Cash: Because your pumpkin spice latte consumption should only be between you, your barista, and your diabetes doctor!

“But you need a card for . . .”

Actually, I don’t.  99% of the time folks that want my money will figure out a way to take cash or check.  The other 1% is what prepaid cards are for.

Approximately 4.5 percent of US Households are unbanked as of 2021, that is, they have no bank or credit union accounts in the household (1)  6.9 percent of US Households use general purpose re-loadable prepaid cards. (1)  So you’re in good company when using prepaid cards.  Or at least sufficiently abundant company.

There are two types of prepaid cards we use: the above mentioned general purpose, and dedicated vendor cards.  Do I want to buy on Amazon?  I take my money to the grocery store, swap it for an Amazon card, click through the menus on Amazon to upload the money to my account, and shop away.  This is a win for me because my budget stays intact: there are no impulse purchases.  Do I want to buy gas at Costco, or better yet, make one of my teen drivers fill the van when they borrow it to go play D&D with their buddies?  Take cash to Costco, load my Costco Cash Card, and hand the young men the cash card.  This is a win for me because they can’t spend it anywhere else.

Notice what doesn’t happen?  Debt.  Debt doesn’t happen.  Notice what else doesn’t happen?  Theft.  Sure, someone could steal one of the card numbers, or even the physical card, at which point our annoyance is limited to the loss of the money currently on the card.  Perhaps a couple hundred dollars, at most.  That would be annoying, not devastating.  Nothing bounces, no fighting to get the money returned to the account, no overdraft fees to dispute . . . and it’s never happened.  Do you know anyone who hasn’t had either their credit or debit card stolen?

Now, we do have credit union accounts.  We use them all the time.  The tellers know me pretty well, most of them recognize me on sight (I’m the main person who goes into the credit union).  No one blinks twice at me taking out a grand in cash: it’s my pattern, and the easiest way to make that change is to gossip with the teller about how you’re getting into Dave Ramsey and it’s such a great program . . . “Cash is King!”  Say it with the smile and enthusiasm of the newly converted, and they might almost throw your money at you to get you to go away without preaching!

Am I worried about theft?  No.  First of all, I live in a Constitutional Carry state.  You can safely assume that someone in your immediate vicinity is armed at all times, the commonly stated number is ten percent of adults carry, though I have no idea how they arrived at that, it seems . . . accurate enough from chitchat.  Someone tried to rob a Wendy’s here: the assistant manager held the would-be robber at gunpoint until the police arrived and arrested the would-be robber.  It’s not a great place for that kind of criminals.  Second, no one carries cash.  There’s no blazing sign that says “This person carries cash not plastic” over your head.  The only moment when your payment choice can be determined is the checkout, and don’t flash how much you’re carrying, like any sensible person.  If your bill is $210, pull out just $220 and make a comment about how closely you calculated that purchase.  Dress like a normal middle class person for your area and project ‘credit card debt’ and who will guess differently?

What’s the catch?  The catch is there are a few places that don’t want your business.  A few services you can’t order.  Some of them never thought of it, and will figure it out when you say something.  Summer camp for the kids wanted us to register online and pay with a card.  I went into the office, in person, and they figured out very quickly how to take cash or a check and register the kids.  Your line here is “While this doesn’t apply to me, you do know that the poorest segment of society is unbanked, and you surely don’t want to discriminate against those children, who are overwhelmingly minorities and the children of single parents.  How are you going to fix this?”  Everywhere I have encountered the “We must get money from a card online” that involves anything child-oriented has figured out how to fix this right away.  Well, it took the music camp twenty minutes, but really, that’s pretty fast, and the boss was out on lunch, so . . . really pretty fast.  For the rest of everything, there are prepaid cards.

On top of this, if you want to have a credit or debit card and just not use it, unless it’s really an emergency, you can do that.  No one needs to know, it can be your secret, and hide in your wallet.  I have a business debit on my business account, I use it only for business expenses, nothing else, and that’s all fine and good.  It doesn’t exist as far as actual daily life goes, and the only money at risk is the business money, not current living money.

If you have cash or checks, and your local stores are as smart as our feed store, they’ll even be able to do business with you when the internet is down.  That was a memorable day.  The credit union also pulled that one off, but most businesses had to close because they couldn’t figure out how to ring up tickets and take money without working registers.  The credit union and feed store just went to pen and paper for the duration.

The more people insist on not using electronic payments, the more businesses will insist on their favorite politicians keeping cash around.  Make a minor scene if some place won’t take cash.  Not a major scene, just “Oh, I guess you don’t want to sell me this” and leave it on the counter and walk out.  Encourage others to use cash.  We all grew up in the nineties or earlier, right?  Well, except for you, you, and you, but you three can learn how this works: I know you, you’re smart.  Take a mental step back in time, disconnect from the hustle, enjoy the feeling of never fighting the ‘Oh, our reader is acting up, try it again’ electronic battles, and become so much harder to track.

And your pumpkin spice latte habit stays between you, your favorite barista, and your diabetes doctor, where it properly belongs.

(1) https://www.fdic.gov/analysis/household-survey/index.html