According To Hoyt

First, let’s specify that is an honor and a privilege to be an American citizen and part of this grand experiment in self governance.

Even now, with all the fraud and… ah… weirdness, we’re still the best country in the world. More, we might manage to extricate ourselves from this without landing in the dystopia of the Davoisie’s dreams, and that’s pretty much us, in all the world.

Long ago, before embarking on this wild adventure of marrying and raising a family, my fiance and I discussed it, and realized we’d be poorer (relatively) in America, but this is where we wanted our children and grandchildren to be raised.

Surely this great a privilege must come with duties, right?

Sure. One of them is to exercise franchise with care and thought (or ask a well intentioned idiot who they’re voting for, then vote against.) Another is to understand history and try to speak out to keep our experiment to the intended Constitutional course. Another is to serve in the military, or otherwise defend your country in any way you’re called to, in time of danger. To that purpose, you’re supposed to keep yourself trained to take part in the militia that all citizens are supposed to constitute.

You know what’s not part of those duties? “Pay taxes for the privilege to vote.” For one, because our privilege of voting right now is not worth a plugged nickel, since legitimate votes are being flooded out by the dead, the non-existent and the non-citizens. (No? Prove otherwise. Keeping confidence in the vote is the duty a legally elected government. They’re supposed to do what it takes to reassure us that the voting is legal and clean. You know what doesn’t do that? Yelling at us and telling us it’s legal. You know what would? Permitting investigations, in fact demanding them, encouraging states to clean up the voting rolls, and stopping the use of dodgy machines, as well as stopping motor voter and demanding proof of citizenship to register to vote. Demanding people register a month ahead of voting and show ID to vote would be a good start. But not anywhere near enough.) For another because that’s called a poll tax, and rightly or wrongly it’s been specifically disallowed. Which if you think on it, makes sense, since, right now, if you needed to pay taxes to vote about half of the citizens couldn’t.

If you reflexively respond to any hint that one considers taxation theft, or that just changing the means or our fleecing will not change much, with “That’s unAmerican” and “you owe the taxes for the privilege of being American.” congratulations. You’ve been successfully brainwashed by New Deal Politics and have a massive confusion between your country and your government.

Let’s leave aside the fact that Taxation is in fact theft: you don’t get the right to say no, or even to argue. As someone who has had attempts to dun her for money not only not owed but “wait what?” back when, you argue with trepidation, and always aware that these bureaucrats, on a whim, can take everything you’ve worked for and destroy your life.

“But Sarah,” you’ll say. “You just need to reform it.”

No, you see, because once you establish the government’s “right” to take from you on threat of prison or worse, you can’t reform that. How can you? The people it attracts are the kind who love the crazy money and power. And it is not just the IRS but people in government in general. They’re attracted by large amounts of money that no one tracks very well. All the subcontractors to the government know they have to spend every bit of money. If you save money, you get punished by not being given the money you need next year.

What kind of crazy system is that? And that’s not counting all the politicians who hire family; those who divert “shovel ready” money to things like opera; and those who spend money preaching to Middle Eastern youth “gender” nonsense that makes Kansas farm boys laugh till they cry.

In fact, throughout the 20th century, in the full bloom of theft from the people, drunk with money, the US government who covered itself in the “defense” fig leaf (defense expenditures are something like 3% of the budget) has done only two things well: arranged to kill its own citizens and arrange new ways to steal from us.

The things it did badly are innumerable: it has destroyed our social fabric with mandatory discrimination against males, particularly males of a pale complexion; it has destroyed our schools with bizarre ideas hatched in Marxist struggle sessions; it has destroyed our science by sloshing around mad money for results it approves of; it has destroyed our transportation with its dreams of non-pollution and its fears of an end to gas; it has destroyed our families by paying women to kick men out; it has killed our babies in batch lots by demanding no limits to abortion; it has destroyed our arts by turning our artists into prostitutes; it has destroyed our military in a mad rush to make it kinder and more sensitive. It is now well on its way to destroying our ability to grow food and keep ourselves warm in winter.

If you like all of that, please let’s go on as we are. But might I perhaps suggest that if you like all of that, it might be cheaper to pay a discreet dom to whip you, call you names and feed you dog sh*t? And it will be easier on the rest of us.

You cannot stop the crazy train by “reforming” it. What are you going to do? Tell it that it can only steal so much and no more? Have you heard of honor among thieves? When? Not in humanity, that’s for sure.

So, what can you do?

Well, it is time to start questioning the very paradigm all this rests on.

It is time to realize taxation is theft. There is no other name for taking money by the force of arms, whether present or implied.

Oh, wait, yes, there’s another name. It’s Armed Robbery. But theft is shorter and easier to write, so I’ll continue using it but you may assume I mean armed robbery under threat of assault with a deadly weapon. (Whether the US army still qualifies as that, I leave as an exercise for the reader.)

Taxation is theft, and citizens of a free nation should be duly outraged to be subjected to it.

So–

Let’s stipulate that the government needs some money — oh, not the sloshing vast quantities of money it has — but some money.

We are a vast land, and it is probably right that our ambassadors don’t do their work part time, while teaching languages in local colleges by day (though what a glorious idea that would be. Talk about dedicated public servants.) We probably do need an armed forces (though note that the founders didn’t like the idea of a standing army) and we need (in fact very much need) weapons research, because I’d rather pay now for high-level killing devices than in American blood later on. (Hey, you know, the DIL and DIL in training might at some point give us grand-spawn, and at any rate, I have ducttape grand-spawn. I would prefer those don’t die, particularly since we can’t guarantee the Commander in Chief in 100 years won’t be a screaming Fraud Plant like Bai-Den.)

At any rate, some money is needed, though it shouldn’t be anywhere near the quantities that it is.

How to extract it without theft?

Well, believe it or not, the American people are the most generous people in the world, known to open their purses for good causes all over.

But yeah, I can also see that running the government from the charity of the governed isn’t a wonderful thing. Mostly because you can’t plan. You can’t count on it. (On the other hand, maybe not allowing these cartoon characters to plan would be a good thing?)

I’ve suggested a national lottery. Or rather a series of them. “Ooh, the lottery for Defense is up to a billion this week. We should buy two tickets. We can dream large, on that.” “Oh, you know, we haven’t bought the lottery for medical research in a while. And I’m not going to until they get rid of Fauci-clones.”

It puts the onus where it belongs. The government asks for our money, not the other way around. The same with oh, annual fundraisers, and what not. You want it? Ask the people for it, and show us what you’ve done to deserve it, or at least show us you’re not assholes stepping on our liberties.

I’m open to other suggestions in how the money should be collected to run the government.

There are some hard and fast things I’d not compromise on (not that I get to do as I want, of course, but I’m doing my duty as a citizen by pushing discussion of this.):

-No reaching in and taking money from people’s pay checks. Payment due must be paid at a time and place. You stand in line to give in your hard earned cash. And you see how much you’re giving the idiots

-No corporate tax. Why? Well, because corporations don’t have any money of their own. No, seriously. Their taxes are paid by increasing the cost of products. They’re paid by the consumers, and it’s a hidden tax.
However, also, no money given to corporations. Ever. The government is not Robin Hood stealing from everyone to give to their friends. We’ve gone a good long way towards Fascism (Real fascism, which is crony capitalism on steroids) and it’s time to throttle the heck back. If corporations have a contract with the government the terms of the contract should be publicly disclosed and available for anyone to look at/make a stink about. ALL the terms. Nothing hidden.

-Granted that we’re going to have to finish paying social security to those people in serious trouble. But social security should be means tested. And you should allow people to opt out of it who are just about eligible to receive it. (Like me.) You also should not sign any more young people to it.
This disbursement should be paid from a tax that sunsets in oh, 20 years. And everyone receiving payments should know it sunsets in 20 years.

There will need to be a tax levied to keep our commitments to our veterans, too. Because it was a contract, and it will not be abjured. While on that, though, those disbursements will be audited, because I understand we’re not giving our fighting men (and women) the very best. Not even close.

-Most federal departments should be disbanded. Yesterday. Government needs its frigging nose out of education; medicine; the environment; food production; etc. etc. etc. The government needs its nose whacked hard with a baseball bat before it gets it cut off with a guillotine.

-Any taxes levied for special purposes, should be temporary, sunset, and have no possibility of being extended. Ever.

-There will be no taxes levied and no federal funds available to illegals entering our border and being winked and nodded at by a government not keeping its fundamental duty to guard the borders. No services either. You want to come into our country trailing five or six kids who might be yours or kids you kidnapped along the way?

Fine and dandy. Well, not really. Defending the borders is something that the Federal government should be doing, and I’d gladly contribute to that. However: if I can’t prevent you coming in, I should not be responsible for treating your medieval disease caused by filth or bizarre alimentary habits, or your drug addiction. I should not be responsible for educating your kids. And I most definitely will not feed you or house you in the style you hope to become accustomed to.

You want handouts? Go back to where you came from and demand them from you local tyrant. Our local tyrants need a leash around their necks that tightens when they try to buy a new people with our money.

*******************

Now, yes, I’m fully aware that I don’t have the ability to enforce any of this. And most of it might be a pipe dream until the system crashes.

The thing is, the system is crashing, and will crash hard. Both because it is out of control and now it’s mostly doing more harm than good. It is also running headlong into a population crash of the productive. I’m half-sure that the importation of people over the Southern border (oh, now the Northern too) is just because the idiots in power don’t realize humans aren’t widgets and are amiably trying to import people to keep population numbers up. But there is a difference between the productive and the parasitic, and a country can’t subsist on the second kind. (I’m going to say too that while not every import is parasitic — not even every illegal import — the government largess showered on them on entry doesn’t lend itself to their becoming productive or striving to be so. Humans respond to incentives.)

Also our thieves, drunk on money, are trying to make us obey more minutely and in more insane ways, which will only crash everything harder and faster.

What I’m doing here is my duty as an American citizen. When it all crashes down, remember this failure was baked in.

Handing money to a bureaucracy in batch lots, money that is largely untraceable and uncontrollable by the true owners of this country, is how we get here. Money in huge, untraceable quantities attracts the corrupt, the corruptible, and those who want power. Because money is power, and the power to tax is the power to destroy.

Whatever is designed after must be done in the understanding that taxation IS theft. There is no “fair tax” the only fair tax would be a tax decided by each citizen, individually, and carefully. And that might be impossible given the size of the country and the complexities of collecting.

However the knowledge that taxation is theft should be beaten into any and every governmental stooge. Even supposing theft might at times be necessary, it should be limited, undertaken only in the most exigent of circumstances, and limited in time. And if possible, as much of government as possible should be funded voluntarily, be it by lottery or other means.

Think about it. Because handing money to a bunch of drunken clowns who are throwing it in a dumpster fire is NO part of being a good citizen.

And given sufficient untraceable money, you’re almost always going to attract drunken clowns into government and permanent bureaucracy.

And a nation ruled by drunken clowns cannot survive long.

I’m getting very tired of hearing people mindless repeat that the future is “plant based foods” Or “The future is meat free” or whatever the unholy idiocy they keep spouting.

The idiots who are spilling milk in the UK grocery stores — thereby of course, raising the demand for milk, because people still have to feed their kids! — the idiots who sit in front of shelves blocking access to milk — yeah, I note that it only happens in places where people are too civilized to get three strong guys to come, lift them and toss them out of the store with enough force to make it hurt — and the idiots who assemble at DAVOS to plan how to stop animal husbandry are all of a piece: idiots.

They’re the kind of lack brain who might own farms, but has no clue how agriculture, let alone raising animals actually works. The kind of mental midget who accepts numbers — population numbers, in this case — from the UN and never asks how those are gathered, or how the interests of the people gathering them run. I mean, do they wish to report high population or low population? Because you know there is a reason to go through the effort of reporting something.

Also, and by the way, there is no way that South Elbonia, who consists of a few farmers, two large cities in a state of war, and the rest more or less nomadic pastoralists, and whose GDP consists of painted clogs and three buckets of rice (that can be tracked. I mean, obviously the people have more, but they sure as heck aren’t volunteering to pay taxes on it) and whose officials get rich only one contributions from the IMF (“Loans” no one ever expects to be paid back) is able to count their population. Even if they wanted to. And FYI no they don’t want to. They want to report an explosive population increase, because that’s the way they get more money (per capita) to feed all those non-existent people, but really to make the president for life and his cronies very rich.

Look at these numbers from the UN and you see the problem of population predictions very clearly: Take this UN-number-based nonsense.

You don’t have to be my younger son, who can’t look at numbers that don’t add up without feeling pain and starting to growl out all the ways in which they don’t add up. You can poke around and see all the supposed “births” are in countries that are net recipients of aid.

More importantly you can poke around and realize we have — even with their numbers — a massive dearth of women in child bearing ages worldwide. So they expect the population to continue increasing…. because they expect non-existent women to give birth.

Beyond all that if we are anywhere near six billion — let alone eight — I’ll eat my hat without salt and pepper. The big floppy straw hat I use while gardening. Why? Well, because it’s not just the fact that developing countries make up numbers out of the clear blue sky. “There are three farms within walking distance of here, and each of the farmers has 10 children. That’s three farms in two miles. How many square miles does the country have? Obviously we multiply that by three farms every two miles, and number of families with ten kids.” (And I’m being generous. It’s not nearly that scientific. It’s more “How many people did we report last year? How may do we need to get more millions to steal? Okay. Let’s add that many.” It’s also the fact that countries immigrants come from continue counting them as living there, and often collecting payments for them as unemployed. Ask me how I know that. Come on, ask me. And take in account this was standard operation procedure in Portugal, which was always almost first world. Imagine what goes on in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Brazil or in the depths of Africa.

I repeat if we’re anywhere near six billion and you can prove it to me, I’ll eat my hat. Twice. Without salt or pepper.

And note that however many we are, the only famines happen due to explosive government stupidity. Every time, in the last hundred and fifty years or so, that any place in the world was starving, it was because government corruptocrats had come up with something special. They were either intentionally starving a sub-population, or they’d become enamored of some “brilliant” intellectual notion, like Marxism, and thereby redistributed land or the like, and sent their farmers to the desert, killing everyone with hunger.

The “green” delusion is a new way to accomplish this, but a very effective one, to look at Sri Lanka.

And it all starts with twin lies.

The first is overpopulation, stretching exponentially, until the universe is entirely composed of humans, not choking in vacuum because there’s no space for vacuum. There’s only humans.

The second is that any hunger in the world is due to our not producing enough food to feed the EXPLODING human population. — Which of course, makes perfect sense, since we don’t know how to grow wheat in vacuum — and therefore we need to optimize our ability to feed everyone, not by creating the most calorie-dense food possible, but by feeding everyone the bare minimum to stay alive and make more humans. Or something.

It is in fact Malthus’ old stupidity, almost instantly disproven, that human population would grow and grow and grow regardless of incentives. Like a total berk, having seen population in his time explode (largely due to reduced child mortality) he never considered that human beings, like every living thing on Earth, respond to stimulus, and decided women would continue to spend all their lives pregnant, when they would raise every one of the 14 or 15 kids, instead of — with luck — one or two to look after them in their old age. Because idiot. And fastening on one aspect of something, without realizing that there were more variables. He also didn’t take in account that humans figure out ways to produce more food when such is needed. No. He assumed two factors were all that mattered and would remain the same world without end. If he were alive today he’d be a climate “scientist” proving that we’re already all burned in our shell and have been for twenty five years, and ignoring everything to the contrary, including the fact we’re obviously not all dead. But then again, he probably would also be running the British models that said that Covid would have a close mortality to the Black Plague, with numbers pulled entirely from their posterior.

Anyway, all it boils down to is lies about people: that people are mindlessly reproducing automatons, and lies about food.

Not just that food is scarce, but also a bizarre idea that could only take hold in minds that have never been near anywhere that food is produced. As I said, I don’t fully understand how Bill Gates can own farms and not understand this. But I suspect he has gotten reports, and looked at them, and not correlated them with anything else.

I suspect they read Diet For A Small Planet and BELIEVED it credulously, with closed eyes and open mouths. (And the idea that created that execrable book had been in the air amid the hippies, I suspect because most of them hated the idea of killing moo cows and bah lambs and were looking for an excuse not to. I have some vegetarian cookbooks printed in that era. They’re great for lent and side dishes. But the idiots bought the idea that plant based food was good for us, or something.)

The whole thesis of Diet For A Small Planet was that we’d need to go to all plant-based food, because we couldn’t afford to raise cows on acres that could produce rice and wheat. Because we’d need every handful of wheat to feed our EXPLODING population. I mean Paul Ehrlich, a man who has never been right, ever, and yet gets paid money for his prognostications, did say we’d all starve by the eighties. Or was it the seventies?

Anyway, I remember reading Diet For A Small Planet standing up at a Walden books (I was waiting for my job at a mall store to start, so–) and snorting loudly enough for everyone to turn to me. Because it was painfully obvious that no one who wrote that book had any clue how food grew. They vaguely thought that food grew “Out there” where it was rural and backwards and stuff, but nothing more than that.

To explain: Animal husbandry takes place in a completely different area than grain production. In the US, but also in Europe, the land that cattle pastures in is land that is almost universally not good enough to grow … well, much of anything on. In fact, having cattle pasture somewhere is a good way — over time — to improve the land for agriculture. There might be a reason our ancestors were pastoralists before they were agriculturists.

However, the idiots deciding that bugs are better protein don’t know that. They think (And granted it happens somewhat, in factory-farms, but even then what the cattle eats is not what is sold for humans to eat) that cows eat the same wheat that could go to feed ‘the starving.’ And they think that cattle takes up amounts of land that could better be used to grow wheat or rice.

There is a name for these people. “Simple.” And that’s the polite word, and we used to put them in homes where they couldn’t hurt themselves, not in places of power where they could hurt everyone.

All their contortions, their railing against cow farts, and screaming about nitrogen, and their insistence you eat the bugs (which take up less space than cows per cubic foot, see) is all based on this idiocy.

The population is EXPLODING. If it hasn’t exploded on your block, it must be because you’re keeping all your neighbors in separate containers so they can’t reproduce wildly, or something. And the food production of the world is maxed out, and people are already staaaaaaarving.

This is bolstered by things like the fact they’re importing people from the rest of the world as fast as they can, and they all live in cities so they think “The cities are growing exponentially. We’ve got EXPLODING population.” (This is bs. The US has almost only grown by importing people for the last 40 years — yes, including me — and those people are coming from countries that are not overpopulated, and in fact often have a dearth of young people and are turning into vast old age homes. And keep in mind that even in Europe, they’re importing from the third world as fast as they can. AND they’re still vast old age homes with borders. Also, even with those massive imports, our cities are now dying. And our countryside was always mostly depopulated. It would help if these idiots drove coast to coast instead of flying.)

So, they want to use every possible space to grow food. And bugs are better than cows, because (though they eat way more) we can stack them to grow them.

Lies kill. The lie that population is too high or that people are starving from lack of food, not excess government is creating other lies, including the idea we need to grow low-nutrition food everywhere, and forego the dense food that can eat brush and turn it into high calories to feed multitudes. Including the idea that bugs, one of the most voratious forms of life is better for those high-density calories than cows. Including the idea that if you make the West poor everyone else will be rich.

Malthus’ lies and Marx’s lies had offspring, and it is hideous to behold, as though it had come from the pit of hell.

Lies kill. And we need to fight them, every day of our life every way we can.

The more centralized government, the more a single lie can take hold of it — being only a handful of similarly-indoctrinated brains — and kill millions.

It’s time to stop centralized governments, centralized news, and centralized information. It’s time to stop the indoctrination factories that colleges have turned in two.

It’s time to stand on our own two feet, and with that human inventiveness that bedevils the mentally-slow one-factor or two-factor only prognosticators, make mockery of their predictions and confound all their directives.

Steak is delicious and cows can turn spiny oak brush into it. Chicken is a great way to turn bugs into food. Milk has allowed humans to prosper for the last 10000 years.

We will survive the idiocy — we’re already in the process of fighting back — as we survived the EXPLODING humans and lack of food before: by working around it.

If I weren’t allergic to chickens, we’d already have a coop. I’m not going to suggest you do what Portuguese do and use extra parking spaces for goat pens (though it might come to that) but if you can grow anything, even a balcony garden might help (Go for beans or other dense food.) And if you have a plot of land… well, in America even upscale suburbs have chickens now, and even the saner HOAs are turning a blind eye.

Grow your own as much as you can, and support your local farmers.

And laugh in the face of those who want you to starve or eat bugs. And ask them where the women to bear that massive population increase they predict are coming from.

Because barring aliens coming to earth to have babies with us, we’re in for a population crash. Which brings food production and distribution of a whole different kind, because non-existent people also don’t farm, or drive trucks.

So, prepare. This one is going to hurt like a mother.

But in the end we win, they lose. And humans will grow and multiply again. And eventually we will get to the stars and away from the centralized idiocy that would kill us all. Probably by our grand kids time.

Sursum Corda. Be not afraid.

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. – SAH

As a side note, when you send me books to promo, do not send it with your own associate’s code. Obviously I’m not using that. Little as it is, the commission is my compensation for this work on Sunday morning. However, having your code there means I generate a link with your code, which apparently is what almost got my account cancelled before. So, let’s try NOT to dot hat, okay? I mean, I’d think it was common courtesy, but in case it’s not clear, DO NOT SEND ME BOOKS WITH YOUR ASSOCIATE CODE ATTACHED -SAH

BY MARGARET BALL: Shadow of the Crescent

Twenty-seven years after the fall of Constantinople…Caterina, Countess of San Florian, keeps a book of important things she’s learned, from poison antidotes to cosmetic recipes, from charms for toothache to ways of raising and commanding demons. Having a reasonable care for her soul, she has never actually tried demonic magic. Yet.Gian, captain of her personal guard, has an innate magical talent that does not rely on incantations, but warns him of danger and awakens him to opportunities. It makes him nervous.And Sultan Mehmed II wants one last great victory. San Florian would be an excellent base of operations for his army to attack Venice.On the run from Venice to Constantinople after the Turkish-aided takeover of San Florian, Gian and Caterina will need all their wits and every scrap of magic they can employ to escape, to survive, and to recapture their city.

FROM KYRA HALLAND: Source-Breaker (Tales of Tehovir)

After twenty-seven years in the trade, Kaniev the Source-Fixer has suddenly lost his ability to repair magical Sources. He decides it’s time to go home and take up fishing, but first, one more repair job lies ahead of him – Source Chaitrasse is experiencing problems. Kaniev’s depleted finances and self-confidence demand that this time, he get the job done right.

Fransisa always thought she would be the next High Priestess at Source Chaitrasse, but now her career has come to a dead end. She’s struggling to hold on to her place at Chaitrasse when a wandering tradesman appears, claiming that the Source has a problem and he’s the one who can fix it. He looks more like a brigand than a powerful wizard or wise scholar, but with an important ceremony coming up, Fransisa decides it can’t hurt anything to let him take a look at the Source.

Kaniev’s disastrous attempt to repair Source Chaitrasse leads to a sorcerer who is conducting dangerous experiments with magic. Caught in the sorcercer’s schemes, Fransisa and Kaniev must overcome their past failures and their differences to stop him before the Sources of magic and all the lands around them are destroyed.

BY STEWART STERLING, WITH INTRODUCTION BY D. JASON FLEMING: Down Among The Dead Men (Annotated): The pulp noir classic

Plenty of dead ones get dragged out of the dark, roily water that runs through the greatest city in the world. The Harbor Police take only routine notice. But when the cadaver comes in installments — a torso, a leg, an arm — that’s murder… There are lots of murders, sure, but what made Lieutenant Steven Koski do a double-take on this particular butchery was the gadget that came with the torso. In its own frightful little way it was a weapon — the kind of weapon that kills a lot of people kind of quick.

And Koski began to move — but fast. The murder marathon took him from a Coast Guard auxiliary vessel (cargo: one stunning blonde) to a waterfront dive. From a union leader’s hangout to an executive’s luxurious office. From a Chinese laundry to a ship being loaded with sudden death…

And all the way, a long thin shape, detestable and horrible, paced him. Koski drove himself frantically onward. He had to catch that thing — had to…

BY CEDAR SANDERSON AND VARIOUS: But Not Broken.

Fourteen stories of surviving and healing from cPTSD. Fiction has the power to give us an escape from where we are, and an ability to envision where we could be. None of these are easy stories, but all offer hope, and healing, for those who need to see a path through the fog of pain.

FROM TIM GILLILAND: The Djinn of Just Deserts: And other Stories

What would you do if you had a wish? One wish that could change your life forever. If you meet the Djinn of Just Deserts your life could change, or end depending on the choices you make. This is but one of ten tales of adventure spanning all the ages, and from the Earth to the further reaches of the Solar System.
A warning though, If you ever meet the Djinn,
Know wishes aren’t all that they seem.

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Visitor, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That

A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for ThatTHE VISITOR – Felockati is anchored to his permanent location underwater and misses the days of roaming his ocean world freely.But something new drops out of the sky and widens his horizons — all the way to the stars.YOUR EVERY WISH – Stealing the alien ambassador’s dagger is a sure thing for Pete — just what he needs to pay off his debts.Until he starts talking to it. There has to be a way to get something for himself out of the deal. Has to be.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Shadow of a Dead God

What secrets lie beneath an alien world?

A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage — until the dreams started.

Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact.

Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants’ rule. Nothing will ever be the same.

A short story.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

I did not land here as a warrior, but a warrior I so soon became . . .

One moment, Dr. Yukiko Yamaguchi was in her high-tech singularity research lab in California, busily adjusting an electronically-leaky fitting playing hell with her instrument readings.

The next moment, she was falling through space, and landing hard in a wilderness area she would quickly discover was her family’s ancient stomping grounds in Japan – but with an apocalyptic twist.

A hundred years later, there would be legends of a great yōkai, a demon, whom some called a kamaitachi – a sort-of whirlwind, weasel-like creature with blades for claws, which catches up unwary humans and slices their skin. But this kamaitachi is no ordinary yōkai – rather, she is

The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

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: AGREE

Will be AFK doing life stuff.

Don’t break the blog and please, please, please, I beg you, don’t feed Fluffy sardines again. You think it’s lots of fun, but I’m the one cleaning scale-balls all day long the next day.

Be good. Or at least don’t be google.

See you tomorrow.

As we watch the increasingly ridiculous and try-to-be shocking antics of the would-be leading edge leftists, one question keeps coming up: who are they trying to shock?

No, seriously. Look, guys, I’m sixty. That’s grandmother age, even if I’m not one except via duct-tape yet.

Yeah, sure, both my parents and Dan’s parents are still alive, but look, my mom is a boomer, okay? And so was Dan’s mom. And our fathers are only slightly older. They got married in the fifties, raised kids in the sixties, and though they might have projected a stern image to them, neither of our parents’ were particularly conventional people. (No, not science fiction. But I don’t think science fiction would have shocked them.)

Heck guys, I’ve read books written by people my grandparents’ age.

Pseudo-satanism on stage? Dear Lord, people. That would have been old by the 20s. The 1920s. The early Victorians were already into all kinds of insanely stupid mysticism often shading into satanism. Racy novels with lots of sex? I believe Agatha Christie mocked those in the thirties. And everything from sexual communes to drug use, to New Age to Witchcraft were already old hat in the twenties. Naked Shakespeare was tediously common when I was kid. Naked anything really.

The seventies … Well, for all you kids not born then, the seventies normalized a lot of things that are considered far more outre now than they were then. Including drug parties and orgies and– Well, you know, I hung out at the fringes of seventies parties, observing and not participating because even back then I had the idea a lot of these things were a very stupid idea. Which didn’t stop full grown men propositioning me, or trying to get my clothes off, because in the seventies it was thought to grow up healthy children needed to have sex early. It wasnt just the music that was bad, or the fashion that was laughable. The seventies were pretty much insanity all the way.

So when some young woman’s greatest contribution to “art” is to knit with string coming from a ball shoved her up her twat, she deserves the respect such “art”: to be laughed off stage, have her knitting get the “ew, this is soppy” it deserves, and to be sent to her room with milk and cookies until she has an idea worthy of attention by adults.

But no, our art scene is under the impression that they’re being “shocked” or “paradigm breaking” and that they are doing things “pour epater les bourgeois.”

The only people likely to be shocked by this are the exceedingly well brought up children of the left who have swallowed a lot of stupid ideas about how most of the country — particularly those people in flyover countries — are complete cardboard cutouts of morality, existing in an eternal 1950s that never existed, who will be completely shocked and surprised by all of this.

Instead, most of the world is only shocked by how unshocking and uncreative they are.

It’s kind of like in science fiction, where they decided what people like me — you know, grew up reading Heinlein, but also a lot of New Wave in the seventies (of course) — wanted a return to the “pulps” which were published in our grandparents’ time. To be fair, I did read a lot of pulp. But that’s because I read a lot of everything. And there were never enough books.

However, by the time I was reading science fiction, well…. there were some very strange ideas being floated. Some were strange in the Phillip K. Dick sense. Some were out there sexual ideas (Eh. The Left Hand of Darkness was tame) and those of us who were reading it as kids read all of it. (Sometimes in foreign languages, so our parents didn’t catch us.) In fact a lot of us had such strange ideas that we had no idea how disruptive our written assignments in middle school were to our teachers’ sanity.

I might want a return to science fiction and fantasy that have plots, and have more than screeds against whatever the current bette noir of the left is, but I wouldn’t want a return to the pulps. For one, as amusing as some were, most of them weren’t exactly very well written. I’m frankly more interested in “the new pulps” which take everything we have learned and done, and integrate it in new pulse-pounding adventures.

The illusions of the left that we live in these out-of-time, eternal, fictional fifties, make them see all of life upside down and sideways.

Hence their idea that my friends and I were also “fighting” to keep science fiction white and male. (Rolls eyes.) Let alone that most of us aren’t white and male, when I was attempting to break into science fiction in the eighties and nineties, most of the editors were already women, and most of the new writers breaking in, ditto. Generally speaking, the male authors my age had as much trouble breaking in or more than I did. (And I went uphill, in a snow storm, under fire from my own stupidity.)

Of course, you know, the left has a point.

Breaking real rules, becoming a real iconoclast, opposing the current powers that be? That’s dangerous. You stand real chances of shocking real people who have the power to cancel you and destroying your career. (Thank heavens for indie, no?)

At the very least, the establishment will try to side line you by ignoring you, shutting you out and deriding you. (Okay, so I was called a bad writer in Teh Grauniad, possibly the least credible source for literary criticism. And yet, I bet there are idiots who believe it.) It is not… profitable. It won’t get you the TV interviews, or the gigs teaching in University.

No, those are at the command of the people who attack the FAKE establishment and try to shock people who don’t exist. The real rewards are given to those who speak power to truth, and lave the feet of the corruptocracy with willing tongues. Giving themselves the palms of martyrs for truth and shocking revelations is just an additional perk. I mean, who would question them?

Other than us. And anyone not part of the corruptocracy. And anyone with two brain cells.

I just wonder if they — in their collective multitude — can ever admit that they’re not shocking anyone. And if the assembled multitude of them can come up with a single surprising idea.

Not even shocking. Just surprising. You know, enough creativity to fill a thimble sized for a toddler.

My bet is that they can’t.

I collect expressions like other people collect stuff for their scrap book, and I’m very fond of the British expression “Well, that’s after the fair.”

I also know exactly what it means, because I grew up with fairs. They’re open air markets (except when they’re roofed over) where everything is available for sale, and often the fish is right next to the pottery, which is right next to– And some of them are annual, or monthly, most are weekly and some are permanent, like the one in Downtown Porto, in a multi-story building.

They’re basically markets that attract people from the entire region. Think of them as year-around farmer markets that, sure also have knock off Disney merchandise, books, permanent stalls for the local butcher, and some really good linen sellers and you’re kind of there.

When we visit there is usually an attempt to go to one or two depending on how long we’re there for. In fact I need to go to one urgently next time (?) I visit, because I need pottery, my son having accidentally broken my oven-going-red-clay-roaster in the move. (I forgot to mark the box fragile. I was SO tired.) And anyway, these are massively useful and so expensive in the US (from Amazon.) and there they’re much cheaper (of course you then have to bring them over. Sigh.) And there is often some consternation, because we came in say June or July and therefore missed the “fair” for whatever it is we’re looking for. So, we’re after the fair.

But recently I’ve been under — I thin it’s spam, unless they’re the world’s dumbest — a barrage of emails for another kind of fair.

I’ve been emailed from the “Fairtax” initiative.

Here I should confess that it hit me at a very bad time. I was feeling weird all day yesterday, and it turned into excruciating pain in all my joints by evening. This is one of the rare manifestations of my auto-immune, and usually comes when the other two are very bad which is not the case right now, so it’s a little puzzling. I’m going to assume it has something to do with weather, but what I don’t know, since our weather is okay just now. (But I know these things are usually at a weirder level than what I see. Barometic pressure or something. My last few years in CO I’d have blinding headaches two days before snow, and it didn’t show in anything outside.)

Anyway, I sent back an all caps thing saying fairtax was like fairtheft. I don’t care how fair it is, it’s still morally imbecilic and I want nothing to do with it.

I don’t know if these are the highly specialized “right” idiots who want a national sales tax (possibly less intrusive thing of all) but also a VAT. And for that last, they should be held by their heels with the rest of their body under water until they get over the stupidity or bubbles stop coming up, whichever comes first.

VAT is not just a horrible Marxist “tax” but it is particularly poisonous due to becoming “invisible.” I.e. every product is taxed at every step from rawest of materials through distribution for assumed “added value” so that when it gets to the consumer it’s massively more expensive, but you cant’ tell it’s because of the government dipping in. I saw how this worked in Europe, and of all theft, value added theft is the one I hate the most. Killing is too kind for people who advocate this. They should be kept alive and forced to eat live scorpions for their sustenance while being beaten with sticks with nails in them all the days of their lives. Compared to them rapists and murderers are relative innocents, because they don’t wish to blight the lives of every single innocent stranger within reach of their polity and make future generations poorer and less free world without end.

But let’s discuss the concept of taxes as theft.

I know some of you think I’m joking when I put those memes up, but I’m not. And yes, I am conversant with “it’s a fee you pay to be a citizen.” BAH.

Taxes are an involuntary taking from citizens who might or might not have voted against and whose vote in the present crazy is irrelevant anyway. I mean, I don’t think enough Americans — real, living ones — voted for the regime that bragged about how they were going to raise our taxes during campaign to make them have a mandate.

At any rate, given the speed at which they’re running the printing presses, one wonders why raise taxes, except to make us hurt.

We are in for real “taxation without representation” territory, but to an extent we always were. Why? Well, guys, let’s talk about it. WHY in heavens in name do they come to me and take money to buy hardware to give to the Taliban? Or to distribute to their favorite aggrieved victim class du jour. Or any of that. Do you think I have voted FOR THIS? Or that any of this makes any sense? Why are they taking money from people who are fiscally responsible to house and educate aliens who are then encouraged to consider themselves victims, after breaking into the country? Does any of this make sense to you?

But it never did. There was never any sane justification for taking money from people against their will and under threat of imprisonment to do things that some vague “collective” — but mostly — government wanted to do.

Let’s stipulate that money is needed for those things that the Federal Government (Feral Government) HAS to do by constitutional mandate, like you know, defend the borders (Oh, hello!) or provide for the common defense (under which you can, yes, slide military defense founding) or avoid inter-state war (I leave as an exercise whether the highway system slides under this or the common defense) or any of that. So, the federal government needs SOME money to function, even if not the crazy bunchaton amounts for all their favorite insane projects, such as donating to their friend lefties and/or financing the boondoggle of “green energy.”

Even if you stipulate they need money — why does it have to be taxes?

And don’t tell me it’s how it has always been done. We know. But until the US it had also always been done that nations were blood and soil and that your “betters” had power over you.

We are a radical experiment. Why are we borrowing any trash from the stupidity of the past?

There are ways to finance the government other than taxes. One that comes to mind is a federal lottery. Yes, yes, sure. That isn’t “fair” because it takes from the poorest. But note it’s voluntary. On a scale of theft, is it more or less moral than going to little old ladies and demanding money to pay for housing illegals who have no skills and no reason to be here?

“At least it’s voluntary” and “The odds are printed right there. If people choose to believe they’ll win, it’s their problem” are two good beginnings to stop taxes being theft.

Heck, we could have the lottery fund different branches of government, so if you disagreed with something, you didn’t buy their lottery. Say “welfare lottery” or “armed services lottery” or “green energy lottery” or whatever. Lotteries at least have an upside. You can buy the ticket for the right to dream for two or three days. (Which I’ve been known to do, knowing that’s what I was doing) at the most depressive and broke phases of our lives. Because I could spend all those days dreaming of how I’d spend the jackpot. (And I knew how unlikely it was.)

In addition to that concerned citizens could do other things. There could be bake sales and clubs in every small town in America to provide for the armed forces (or illegals. Snort. Giggle. better luck with the Opera exhibits for that, in NYC and the like.)

Point being it wouldn’t be theft. It wouldn’t be the government assuming they’re entitled to your money and are benevolent for letting you keep any. It wouldn’t foster the idea that it’s their right to spend your money and that they’ll do it better than you.

It won’t be funding the government by sticking a gun in the faces of every productive citizen and demanding their rightfully earned property. (Or unrightfully, for that matter. Probably still less theft than what the government is doing. Private citizens don’t have the same guns.)

Above all — ABOVE ALL — I want people to stop buying into the Marxist idea of progressive taxation: the idea the rich owe more and that’s “their fair share.”

The entire bullshit of “You didn’t earn that” is just that. And it stinks. Sure, it would be really hard to sell my books without an internet, but you know what, Darpanet might have started the ball rolling, but if you looked deep into it, you’d find it also retarded other, private initiatives. Because the government always does.

The idea that if you make more you owe more is an abomination that ignores the fact that most people who make something of themselves worked much harder than those who don’t.

Sure, there are exceptions, and luck (and assets other than work) must be taken into account. But generally those who make more work harder, smarter, and more assiduously.

However, beyond that, the entire idea of taxation as constituted and used in the rest of the world is the idea that you owe the government money for existing, and you can ‘sign’ into this compact simply by being born or living in a country.

This is clearly stupid for a country where we’re supposed to own the government. We need another way to do this.

There is no fair tax, for the same reason that there is no fair theft.

We’ve all heard that democracy is two wolves and a sheep discussing what’s for dinner.

There’s no need to make this even stupider by having the sheep try to make it fair by arguing which cuts are tenderer and should be taken first, okay?

Stop it, just stop it. There is no fair tax, for the same reason there is no fair theft.

And all you do when you try things like this is make statists think they’re justified.

You’re after the fair. We see through the game and we’re not amused.

Walls, Liberty and Trust- A Blast From The Past From October 2015

When I was a kid in the village, I could tell what the oldest walls around fields or houses were.

You see, in the sixties the new, nice houses being built, would have very short walls.  Maybe four feet.  Walls more for decoration than for anything else.

This didn’t mean there was no theft, of course.  I mean, the smart woman brought in the wash from the line at night, and henhouses and rabbit hutches had as good a locking mechanism as a house’s.  Sometimes someone got over the little walls and took all your just-grown lemons, or whatever else.  That wasn’t unusual.  BUT no one would get over the walls and kill you and your entire family in your sleep, and the stories I heard from my grandmother about second-story men who engaged in home invasion were just that — stories that were safely in the past (to be fair, I think most of them were from her mother’s or grandmother’s time) and not at all scary, because they could never happen to us.

But the REALLY old houses in the village, the ones that probably dated back to the eighteenth century, not only had eight foot walls around them, but the walls were topped with bits of broken bottles so anyone trying to scale them would hurt himself badly.

More interestingly, the old fields (the village had clearly expanded greatly in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, mostly with migrants from the mountains, like my grandmother’s family) which again, I’d estimate had been farmed since about the eighteenth century, not only had the eight or ten foot tall walls topped with broken glass, but also gates at least as high and — importantly — faced with smooth sheets of metal in the front, so you couldn’t get a foothold to climb.

This makes sense in retrospect.  In that time it made sense only in light of grandma’s stories of bandits, but I’ve now read a lot about the Napoleonic wars.  I didn’t realize how devastating they’d been to people in Portugal.  Oh, sure, you heard stories like the boat bridge, which sank under the weight of people escaping Napoleon, and that’s one thing — the kind of tales that exist here about the civil war, say.

But then I read some memoirs of the peninsular war from British soldiers, and hey, well…  Stuff like all the cows in the country (even work oxen) being eaten, or stuff like the troops scouring entire regions for anything edible.  It appears neither the French nor the British were well provisioned as we think of it in the 21st century.  To an extent troops were expected to live off the land.  But Portugal was very close to the bone, and …  well, I now know why the broken bottles on top of very tall walls.  I suspect it was the only thing protecting one’s vineyards or fruit trees, very often.  It also explained why most of those were along the old Roman roads, still in use when I was a kid (of course.)  Because further in, in fields amid woods or whatever, there would often be no walls at all, or just bits of broken, knee-high wall (and sometimes just boundary stones written in Latin).  Apparently further in where invaders or counter invaders (sometimes I understand it was hard to tell the difference for peasants on the ground) didn’t reach, or were afraid to go lest they be ambushed, the local trust amid families that had been there forever, (and most of those family were old local families, at the time) kept the walls low.

Then came the nineteenth century, more prosperous, but still not great, and amid civil war and revolution and counter revolution, the walls were a little lower, and the gates might be wrought iron, and you could climb them.  But still, to get to grandma’s back patio where the door was open all day, you had to go past two gates, one of which had a lock (though I never saw it locked.)  And even though the big kitchen window gave out on the side patio, past a set of gates, grandma would put a big board into the frame at night, to block off anyone who might break the window and try to get in.

By the time my parents built their house in sixty eight, it had four foot tall walls and gates the same height, more of a symbolic barrier than a real one.  Of course all the windows had roll-down shutters of the kind here associated with store fronts.

Then the security measures started increasing.  First there was a gate between the garage and the house, locking, and keeping away anyone who might think to surprise us in the back patio.  (Which happened a couple of times before that, and could have got ugly if dad hadn’t been able to stop any intruder.)

And then… well, every time I go back, the walls have climbed a bit more, and are now slick marble-panels on the outside, and the gates are smooth and locking.  I’m half afraid next time I go back there will be broken glass (or more aesthetic spikes) atop the walls.  The last time there were bars in the windows, behind the shutters.

I honestly don’t know if crime is that bad, or if it’s a matter of my parents getting older and less able to defend themselves, plus living in a neighborhood where more people are older and less alert, so the neighbors hearing a disturbance won’t save you.  And also, of course, such neighborhoods attract bad elements as they tend to be easy prey.

But I do know that when I first came to the states it utterly blew my mind that people had decorations in their front yard, with not even a symbolic gate to protect them and NO ONE STOLE THEM.

In Portugal someone would steal these things even if they had no use at all for them.  By leaving them outside, you’re inviting someone to take them.

This morning we bought pumpkins (at last) to carve, and noted the vast bins of pumpkins outside the store, the trust it implies in people taking them inside to pay.

Someone here said something about Arab countries being full of people who want freedom/the blessings of liberty.

I believe them.  Portugal is too.  Many people will express disgust with the Shenanigans of governance, with corrupt authorities, with the general anything goes atmosphere, and will make comments about how much better it would be if–

But what you have to understand is that these people don’t know anything more about America than a cat knows of a king.  They will admire the results of American can-do and entrepreneurship, then commiserate with me when unemployment leaves us without health insurance, and tell me how much better they have it because the government takes care of them; they will talk about how it would be great to have honest policemen, but will expect to get out of a minor fine with a minor bribe; they will decry nepotism but be quite happy when their godfather gets them a job or a good deal on something.

In Arab countries (and in some regions in Portugal) this would extend to things like “there ought to be a law keeping these shameless women from going around in short skirts/short sleeves/etc.”

It’s easy to want liberty in the abstract, but in societies where individual rights, including the individual right to property are not a gut-level belief, it’s almost impossible to implement it.  You need to have citizens who have a minimum of trust among themselves, who view others’ property as sacred, who view others’ rights as inviolable to be able to have people truly govern themselves, without its rapidly devolving to the stuff of nightmares.

As our kids have been taught for the last forty years that the collective is more important, that those willing to hold on to their property or the fruits of their labors are greedy, and that (as Bernie supporters keep saying) one must care for “the people’ in great unwashed collective form, we are at risk of losing the ability to have that mutual trust and respect which is essential to self governance, too.

Cultures change very slowly, and it seems more so when it’s in the direction of liberty and trust.

One of the great flaws in classical SF was the assumption that the whole world could become a sort of extended America without those prerequisites.

It was a beautiful dream, but it’s not how things work.

And when the west welcomes large groups of immigrants who don’t understand the rule of law or the meaning of civic trust, it becomes very hard to keep self-government going.

It is essential immigrants assimilate or leave.  Oh, not in things like food and modes of dress.  That is not important.  But the assimilation of the principles of trust and individual rights?  That is essential.

Teach your children well, and explain to those who would be like us what it actually entails.

Aesop Fan linked this from Gerard Vanderleun’s blog in blogs.

He noted that the original has about 5 links per stanza.
https://americandigest.org/mt-archives/005117.php

What he didn’t note is that most of those are now broken or lead to nothing and I don’t even remember what it was.

    May 5, 2006 The [Linknotated] Law of the Blogger

    NOW this is the Law of the Blogger – as old and as true as the sky;

    And the blogger that keeps it may prosper , but the blogger that breaks it must die.

    Like the visits that pump up your hit count , Blogger Law runneth forward and back —

    For the strength of all blogs is the Blogger that never cuts anyone slack.

    Blog daily from news tip and hat-tip; blog long , but blog not too deep, ;

    And remember the Pundit’s for linking, and forget not that he has to sleep.

    The new blog may free flame the Bozos, but, Cub, when thy archives have grown,

    Remember the Big Blogs are hunters — go forth and make Scoops of Thine Own.

    Keep peace with the Lords of the Blogsphere — the Pundit , the Malkin, The Bear;

    And trouble not Lileks the Bleater , but always mock Kos in his lair.

    When Pack meets with Pack in the Blogsphere , and neither will put down the flame,

    Lie down till the Spewers have Blathered — it always will save you from shame.

    When ye flame on a Prince of the Pack , ye must fight him alone and afar,

    Lest others take part in the Blog-Pile , and all Blogs be diminished by War .

    The URL of the Blogger’s his refuge, and where he has made him his home,

    Not even the Pundit may post, not even the Hewitt may come.

    The URL of the Blogger’s his Castle , but when he has blown it too plain,

    The Lileks shall send him a Fisking , and so he shall blow it again.

    If ye post after midnight , be patient , and wait for the next working day.

    Your readers are reading from cube farms and commenting only for play.

    Ye may post for yourself , or your country, blog your cats if you must, and ye can;

    But post not for the pleasure of Flaming lest you be but a flash in your pan!

    If ye plunder a post from a weaker, remember to link for his pride;

    Link-Right is the right of the smaller; if you’re wrong it’ll be him that lied.

    Now these are the Laws of the Blogger, and as true and as blue as the sky;

    You can link , you can wink , you can blather , but in the end you can’t lie.

   

I was both charmed by the well… pilk? (Is it filk if it’s not sung. Poetry, so Pilk) and things like calling Roger L. Simon A Prince of the Pack, which he undoubtedly was. And so was Gerard, and in a different front, so was Jerry.

And I’ve been feeling maudlin all day. I was on the blogs back then, but hidden and under deep cover. By the time I dared to come out, I was told the age of the blog was done and I’d never get a following.

I’ll note I have, and also that in 12 or 14 years (depending on which you consider: my early blogging, or blogging after coming out of the political closet) of blogging I broke every one of these rules, except the lying (I’ve been wrong. Very wrong, but never knowingly) and the blogging every day (more or less.)

I once went to war with Esquire because they p*ssed me off. In fact, going to inadvisable war seems to be one of my trademarks. (There is a a reason my husband has a t-shirt that says “I am with the excitable Latina.”)

One of my last interactions with Gerard was taking exception to someone he quoted who thought too well of Europe and too lowly of the US. But he emailed, and we talked, instead of turning it into a full blown blow up. (A gentleman, you know.)

This combined with the Super Bowl, which as a rule we don’t really watch, but we used to go to a party with friends from Dan’s old working place, starting in the seventies. Some have died, some have moved a away, some have gone (or always were woke) and that landscape is blasted for good and all.

And I was thinking…. How beautiful we were.

You know, for people my generation the 90s were a golden age of stupidity. We had grown up learning we’d be blown up when “the hammer fell” And suddenly the Soviet Union just crumbled away and fell. And everything was possible.

Most people went soft-liberal. I went full on Libertarian. (Yeah, I do like going to war against everything in general. Your point is?)

It took 9/11 to rock me back into contact with reality. And for a while I even trusted our government to at least defend us.

The last two years… Between realizing our intelligence agencies are a pack of ill-intentioned morons (I always knew they weren’t too bright, but seriously) whose true allegiance is to their erstwhile ivy league masters, and realizing that our military too will lie to the commander in chief, in the interest of continuing stupid wars… Well–

I suspect from here on that’s it. We’re going to plumb new depths of disillusionment and cynicism.

It’s better to know than to not know, but —

But I’m glad we had our age of illusion and dreaming. The time we were beautiful and stupid.

Oh, and looking at my blogging career, I’m going to tell you what people say isn’t necessarily so. I managed to make it when everything was already lost and the age of blogging is past.

Let that be a lesson to it. DO IT YOUR WAY. It’s more likely to work than all the opinions of the experts.

I’m old. That’s a given. Okay, so mom says I’m now middle aged. But she’s 87 almost 88 so, you know? She might be somewhat biased.

But here’s the thing, I know all the things that don’t work on writing and publishing, at least the traditional version of those, but like everyone else, I kept deluding myself that other fields worked fine.

You kind of have to, if you want to sleep at night.

Only it’s become more and more obvious that other things don’t work either. Take academia and scholarship. Sure, the soft sciences/social sciences are worse, but the whole publish or perish has not only led to a lot of “scholarship” that isn’t — look, guys, I was shocked when in class we were told to write a poem. Not everyone can write a poem, okay? Asking for one written on command is like asking for “an advance to mankind’s knowledge” on command. Just because you can teach, doesn’t mean you can do THAT — but worse it has led to the government subsidizing a lot of this research which in the soft (and sometimes hard) sciences means your results have to conform to the government expectations. Which leads to false science and reproducibility issues. Worse, it leads to universities hiring because they think you’ll do “research” which in turn, you know, means sweet, sweet government money.

Now, you can survive some of that. Like you can survive a few hyper-pushed books no one reads but everyone talks about how great it is. It just, over time, accumulates into an erroneous and counterproductive idea of what the whole field does and what it should do, and how to achieve it.

Now sit back for a moment and realize this isn’t just hitting things like writing, or you know dance like that sorry spectacle yesterday at mid-time in Superbowl (who knew that “spazing out” qualified as a dance to quote a certain literal video.)

It’s also hitting medicine. Psychology. Education. And you start seeing the full length and breadth of the problem we have.

This is when I get black pilled, btw, because things are so bad that the left’s efforts at DIE and other nonsense almost can’t make it worse.

And it’s easy to — and frankly I like to — blame it all on “Because they hire leftists” which they do. But you know that’s not the problem. The problem is “government being administer by ‘experts’ far away (both physically and mentally) and that has been with us since the creation of vast nation states in the 14th century.

Which is the other side of the black pill, btw, it took this long to break things, and we’re still doing okay, really. I mean better than we were, though the line might be reversing around here if not already.

AND along the way we managed to create a constitution which, if followed would obviate most of the problem.

If followed….

It’s my full belief it’s going to get to a point we’ll have no choice but to follow it.

However things are going to get very dire not just for us but for all of mankind in the mean time. Right now, like in the picture above, the glass is shattered but holding together. But that only lasts so long before the inevitable kaboom which leaves everything in shards.

The everything includes every human life, and all the ways we do things.

And all we can do is keep working and pushing for the outcome from this mess that allows civilization to grow and thrive.

…. Even if it will take a good long while, and a lot of work on civilizational health to get us over mid-game spaz shows.

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. – SAH

FROM SABRINA CHASE: Red Wolf: Exile Part 2

Surviving the sudden shift to a parallel Earth, Nic finds a refuge in the not-quite-Ancient China she finds herself in, the fortress of Shanmen – and a new identity as the idiot water-carrier Niu. But when Nic defends the fortress against an enemy attack in the night and nearly dies, the general in charge uncovers her disguise.

Will he welcome this uncanny foreign woman, or join the others calling her a demon? And will the forces involved in the river massacre track her down and threaten them all?

FROM BONNIE RAMTHUN: The Turtle of Ultimate Power: Book One of the Centerville Chronicles

Ray thought magic only existed in books and movies–not in real life!

On the first day of seventh grade, twelve-year-old Ray Sebastian discovers his home town, Centerville, is the most dangerous place on Earth. Buried in caves underneath the town is a treasure-trove of ancient and powerful artifacts that were kept secret–until now.

Ray and Clancy Jones, the fearless new girl at school, uncover a magical stone turtle that gives them amazing power over others. Together with Clancy’s eccentric grandfather, the three join forces to prevent the turtle from falling into the hands of a deadly sorcerer who wants the ultimate power for himself.

From the streets of Centerville to the dangerous caves beneath, can Ray and his friends protect the magical artifacts and defeat the villains before it’s too late?

FROM STEPHEN KRUEGER: Law Future

The anthology has 25 original legal science-fiction stories: 3 short-short stories, 18 short stories, 2 novelettes, and 2 novellas. Plus 1 original preface, 1 original essay, and 1 original Post Scriptum.“Science fiction” intends a recital, the foundation of which is a yet-to-be technology. Usual yet-to-be technologies are space travel, time travel, and terraforming.
“Legal” intends that a substantive law matter is central to a recital.
The target audiences are lawyers and sci-fi readers. To that end, excellent writing prevails. There is not a single blasphemous, scatological, or reproductive word in the anthology. An aficionado or aficionada of quality legal fiction and of first-rate science fiction will be happy with the anthology.

BY MAX BRAND, WITH INTRODUCTION BY D. JASON FLEMING: Train’s Trust (Annotated): The classic pulp western adventure

Steve Train, gambler, adventurer, clever rogue, didn’t care much for work. But then he was offered a job with no work, but plenty of danger. The job: track down outlaw Jim Nair — and hand him a pile of money!

    This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction by indie author D. Jason Fleming giving historical and genre context to the novel.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania.

A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

FROM DALE COZORT: Earth Swap: The Stone Library of Venus

Near-future Earth suddenly finds itself in a different version of the solar system, one where human civilizations trade and war between planets. Lurking behind those humans: the long-vanished non-human “Builders,” who colonized the solar system long ago, seeding it with Earth life. Ward Parke, astronomy enthusiast and presidential advisor, wants to explore this new solar system, but the planets here are on the verge of a genocidal, civilization-ending interplanetary war.
Our Earth is caught in the middle of that looming war, with technology hundreds of years behind the other powers. Its only advantage is an ancient stone library preserved by a now-vanished human civilization from Venus and a mysterious woman called Pandora who may be that civilization’s only survivor.Near-future Earth suddenly finds itself in a different version of the solar system, one where human civilizations trade and war between planets. Lurking behind those humans: the long-vanished non-human “Builders,” who colonized the solar system long ago, seeding it with Earth life. Ward Parke, astronomy enthusiast and presidential advisor, wants to explore this new solar system, but the planets here are on the verge of a genocidal, civilization-ending interplanetary war.
Our Earth is caught in the middle of that looming war, with technology hundreds of years behind the other powers. Its only advantage is an ancient stone library preserved by a now-vanished human civilization from Venus and a mysterious woman called Pandora who may be that civilization’s only survivor.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Darkship Thieves

Athena Hera Sinistra never wanted to go to space.

Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. She never had  any interest in finding out the truth about the Darkships.
You always get what you don’t ask for. Which must have been why she woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in her father’s space cruiser, knowing that there was a stranger in her room. In a short time, after taking out the stranger—who turned out to be one of her father’s bodyguards up to no good, she was hurtling away from the ship in a lifeboat to get help.
But what she got instead would be the adventure of a lifetime and perhaps a whole new world—if she managed to survive….
A Prometheus Award Winning Novel, written by a USA Today Bestseller.

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: FUEL