GTFO- Get The Fix Out A Guest post by Thomas Kendall

               I’ve noticed that current Democratic messaging on the upcoming election is:
               A) We will not know the election results for a couple of days

               -and-

               B) Republicans need to accept the results of the election

               Given that just recently the Republicans have been very heavily favored to pummel the Democrats in this election, the latter of these would be rather confusing if not for the first.

               So with this in mind, allow me to explain something to our “friends” across the aisle.

               Your brain-dead, know-nothing, goldfish-like mob of quasi-gender pseudo-intellectuals might have the collective memory of a damp rock and be so credulous that you can rewrite their basic goals and desires at the drop of a hat. But pretty much every person of voting age remembers that we were consistently able to count election results to within the statistical margin on election day in the not too recent past. The closest we came to a genuine delay on knowing was Al Gore’s endless recount demands, wherein new Democrat ballots would suddenly and mysteriously appear from nowhere every time the same ballots were counted. Weird how that happens.

               That practice of getting the results the same day suddenly and mysteriously changed in 2020. Extremely coincidentally, that was also the election where a bunch of places that had been trending towards various Republican candidates mysteriously started sliding blue in the magic-extended-counting-time which never existed before then, until they were outside the margin of error, whereupon counting was stopped. And because coincidences are apparently all best friends with one another and love to hang out together, that was also the election where a man whose brain and primary food group are both pudding, a man who had barely the stamina or coherency to be safely allowed to appear in public (and still doesn’t), “won” an election against a president who got more votes than any other incumbent in history. This astonishing feat involved many impressive accomplishments— some of which he might even be able to pronounce on his third try— including pulling larger proportions of the black vote than the first black president in history in various major metropolitan centers. Also, the usual areas with more than 100% voter turnout, which thanks to same day registration is not technically mathematically impossible anymore and so can never be questioned ever or you’re a Nazi (which is funny, given that vote totals mysteriously coming to more than 100% to support an entrenched ruling party was exactly the kind of thing the actual Nazis were fully in favor of).

               Bearing this recent series of amazing coincidences in mind, allow me to translate the points above from Democrat into something more recognizable to humans who didn’t sell their souls to Moloch:
               A) The Democratic party intends to unveil an egregious cheating campaign to save their sorry, worthless hides, the likes of which is going to make South America blush and say “Oh, my”.

               -and-

               B) You are not allowed to complain

               To which I say:

               Duly. Noted.

               Now before we go any further, I have to say something. Despite this: still go out and vote. Vote so these sons of bitches know exactly what kind of fire they’re playing with. Vote especially because they’ll have to triage resources. They can’t manufacture the whole vote everywhere. They don’t have the resources. If they did the DNC wouldn’t even be fighting this hard to run campaigns for candidates in various places. They’d do what they did with Biden and run Potemkin campaigns—the bare minimum to lend a vague appearance of credibility. National elections are easier to steal, because they can focus attention on choke-points in certain major cities to get disproportionate effect. It’s a lot harder to canvas a lot of little races. Your vote will matter even in blue strongholds. They’re facing huge swings this year. Your vote in a blue stronghold is taking up resources reinforcing ground. They would otherwise be able to use those resources to corrupt close races in less-safe areas. Maybe all it will do is make them take weeks to scrape together enough fraud. Stay with me, there’s a second part to this.

               Now it may well be too late to organize campaigns to protest outside the places where votes are counted when they begin magic-extended-counting-time. There’s a risk to any protesters who do turn out that even if you’re protesting in a perfectly kosher way, you may still be arrested and prosecuted. Being Republican is the only crime the current crop of corrupt kleptocrats care about. Even so, there’s no substitute for real faces in real places, and they’d have the biggest impact if we could muster them and keep them legally kosher (second part’s important, you gotta give your defense lawyer something to work with).

               But there is a plan B. If memory serves, I believe there was a notoriously dirty county in Florida that tried to pull this shit in one of the last two elections and didn’t back down until Trump himself shined a spotlight on them via social media. They do still respond to intense enough public pressure. Of course, Trump isn’t going to able to serve as nearly as much of a force multiplier this time around. We only have us. It has to be enough.

               With that in mind, I propose we prepare to shine a spotlight on them. They’re deathly scared over losing control of Twitter, and recent events show they were absolutely right to be scared. They’re still reeling from it. Biden has been fact-checked on transparent lies twice in the last week—once on gas prices being higher at the start of his “presidency”, and once on social security payouts. Hillary Clinton got a newspaper swat to the muzzle for trying to frame the bizarre hammer incident at Chez Pelosi as right wing violence. The censorship police have been stood down for the moment, and there’s an actual chance of truth shining out through the murk.

               Bearing this in mind, find out how to track your local races. If you have an old Twitter account, light it back up. If you don’t, now might be a good time to get one. Bring a friend. Network with some. Prep to signal boost. And if magic-extended-counting-time starts in your little neck of the woods, start pointing it out. Loudly. Point out how prior elections were counted. @BlueHairZoomer507  can write every WaPo explainer xhe wants saying how it’s perfectly normal for elections to take weeks to count, during which time all the previous trends in the counts mysteriously reverse course. You know better. You’ve lived in a time where that didn’t happen. They’re thieves and they’re liars and they’re trying to gaslight you into doubting your own eyes and your own memory. Point all of that out. “They literally know nothing”. They’re indoctrinated left-wing journalism BAs who think choosing between kale and quinoa on the side of their vegan avocado toast is the height of enlightened humanity. Their articles might sound fantastic to them, except for the tiny detail that we’ve done this in the past. Everybody including them knows the reason we’re suddenly not has nothing to do with incapacity and everything to do with the facilitation of corruption. And while they believe the glorious cause is worth corrupting the vote, they still don’t want to be caught red-handed at it. Our best chance is putting enough public pressure on them that they stand down. Point out the marking on the cards, and the shysters might not be able to pull off the trick.

               And if by some miracle the combination of the above efforts is enough—

               Republican leaders:

               Enough is enough. Your unwillingness to stand by the sanctity of the vote has pushed this country to the brink. It should have been your first fucking priority when Trump was elected. Half of you pissed it away trying to use Trump as a foil to look “principled”. Then you waffled like you were trying to take the eponym from Belgium in 2020, when the fraud was plainer than white bread and screamingly obvious. You don’t seem to understand: the game where you get to be the pet loyal opposition is so very 90s. It’s over now. The Democrats want it all, and they don’t care what they have to break to get it. You are not on the roster— you are on the menu. If you want to take your millions from highly legitimate donations and strangely accurate off-the-record investment advice and move somewhere far enough away from the plebs to not have to bother with us unwashed masses, fine. Do it. We’re sick of you, but fortunately for you, your incompetence has left us with enough fires to put out that we have bigger fish to fry. I suggest you make your getaway. Because understand, whether it’s us doing it, or the Democrats, the trough you have fed so well at is closing. Beat it.

               Everybody else in the Republican party:

               Fair. Elections. Now. Any power you accrue at the local level or state level, I don’t want to hear one damn word about anything until you explain how you are contributing to unfucking our elections. I know you can’t do all of this stuff with the power you’re actually able to get immediately, but we need you doing everything you can, and you need to start thinking long term about what you can set up now so that when you do have an opportunity, later, if we can somehow wrangle you another opportunity again, you don’t waste it.

                We need voter ID, tied to robust verification procedures. Voter rolls need to be purged regularly. Voter registration cannot be same day and it certainly can’t be automatic. Above all, no more voter participation over 100%. We need to be able to tell immediately if that happens that that district is dirty, and audit them until they start playing by the rules of basic mathematics again. Participation in our votes needs to be restricted to A) living people, B) people who actually exist, C) people who are legal citizens, and D) people who are old enough to vote. The only people who find these criteria legitimately problematic are by definition people who are trying to corrupt the vote. Their opinions don’t matter, and should not even be engaged with. If they freak out on Twitter, tell them to have fun freaking out and to go to Hell while they’re at it. These are basic, utterly common-sense benchmarks.

               Scrap early voting, or if you must have early voting, then extend it only very close to the election. Look at the water-carrying for Fetterman before the debate (I know doc Oz is not an ideal candidate—to say the least—but dear God). Do you suppose his early voters might be feeling a little buyer’s remorse? Realize that the con artists in the media are running constant interference. The further in advance you let people vote, the better the odds that this media interference can prevent people from glimpsing the truth before they pull the lever. To say nothing of the fact that if Democrats can get access to those votes, or even polls of people who have voted, they can calibrate their fraud operations with that information. That inability to calibrate accurately is almost certainly why the Clinton machine got caught off-guard badly enough for Trump to become president. That’s why Clinton herself shut down attempts at audits in 2016, even though she was beyond salty at losing—they would almost certainly have revealed the work of the same voting fraud organizations that came back with a vengeance in 2020.

               No more kicking out observers while counts happen. Most especially if a precinct decides it feels some magic-extended-counting-time coming on. If you want to count the ballots of the American people, you will do it in their full view. Poll workers who disagree with this should be dismissed—with the assistance of security if necessary—and replaced by ones who understand the necessity of transparency in voting a little better.

               And no vote by mail. It’s an invitation to fraud. Fraudsters steal the ballots and vote on people’s behalves. They pick them up in nursing homes and poor neighborhoods and vote on people’s behalves. They steal already filled ballots, steam them open, and spoil ballots that vote for the wrong people. They copy blank ballots and use them for all sorts of nefarious purposes. It was alleged by Giuliani in 2020 that this was up to and including “ballots” that were almost-blank sheets of paper with only the appropriate scanning guide-marks and filled in bubbles in places that lined up with where Democratic candidates were on the ballots, so they could be printed off faster to be run through machines en masse (Sure would have been nice if we had done any proper investigation of the voting irregularities given these serious allegations, rather than letting Democratic judges pass endless decrees that anyone who sued on the issue “lacked standing”. It certainly would explain why even the superficial investigation the Cyber Ninjas were allowed to do revealed—among other things— that more mail in ballots were returned than were sent out. But I digress.). Heaven knows, I’m not usually in Europe’s corner vs. the US, but for fuck’s sake, even various European countries won’t do mail in ballots because all these methods of cheating, and more, are opened up. I see people getting their hopes up for places with vote-by-mail like Colorado. I would call these places intrinsically long shots. I think your only hope is to overwhelm them so much it would take them weeks to “win”, and to make the process of “winning” too uncomfortable for them to move forward with. By all means, let’s do this. Just understand that we are fighting an uphill battle.

               If you are a rising Republican leader in a state has vote-by-fraud, my best advice is to start looking at ways to make ballots harder to copy and easier to enumerate. Any lever you can pull to make this happen, do it. Maybe things like watermarks and serial numbers which are not connected to the person who votes in any way, but will flag as duplicates in the system if someone tries to copy them, and will flag as non-existent if someone tries to assign serial numbers that don’t exist (my impression from the work of the Cyber Ninjas was that something like this may already exist, but I’m throwing everything I can out there). My advice would be to make them sequential but algorithmically obfuscate them in such a way that it’s not simple counting numbers—then even if your local Democrats print thousands of extras to give their local fraudsters leeway, they’ll still need to reverse engineer the algorithm or get very lucky to hit on a legitimate number. All of this, and any ways you can imagine, push to make counting more transparent and harder to put a thumb on the scales in, and preferably do it with the biggest public pressure campaigns you can. Sunlight is a disinfectant. A lot of the ballots you’ll get will still be ones spoiled, or stolen and filled out, or filled out on behalf of the barely functional, by fraudsters and ballot harvesters. But at least you can filter the outright non-existent people from the pool. You might need to ultimately wait for us to find a way to bail you out from the national side, but at least it’s better than you sitting there with your thumb up your ass, right?

               Again I repeat: Fair. Elections. Now. This age of unprecedented American electoral corruption must end, and people who insist upon practices that mask and abet corruption must be called out publicly and constantly. Disconnecting the elections from the votes cast is end-stage socialist dictatorship shit. There is no item on the agenda more important than this. It is essential to the integrity of the Republic. There is nothing else we can get traction on before we get this sorted out. Look at all the good Trump did, and look where the fraudulent 2020 election has left us two years later. And Republican leaders have ignored it or even aided the corruption for much, much too long.

               End it now. The fix has been in long enough, now get it out. We no longer have the luxury of playing these games.

Look, St. Francis preached to the animals. St. Anthony preached to the fish. I’m going to try to give a friendly warning to the left. Who knows? Maybe I can save us a hard landing. Because they’re preparing a really hard landing.

Let me start by stating that however much the lunatics on the left think they want a civil war, they really don’t want a civil war. It’s not a matter of win or lose. They’d lose. No, listen, it’s not that I don’t realize a lot of them are armed. It’s the hardware in the head. They’re blood thirsty but not disciplined. And their idea of who we are is completely wrong.

Remember the Sad Puppies kerfuffle, where they assured us they were just waiting for us to die since we were so old? The person saying that is three years younger than I. And that’s just the beginning of their misconceptions. There is the “uneducated”, the “poor” and the “millionaires” (And only heaven knows how they reconcile all those.) oh, also the “religious” which is somewhat right, kind of, if you squint.

The thing is, if they go on the war path, they’ll mostly shoot up their own constituents: the elderly who trust the MSM, the rich who have gone woke, etc. And they’ll do it first, because they always believe they’re righteous and that justifies anything.

They don’t want a civil war. They suck mightily at reading the room, and even then the feel of our anger should be enough to tell them they don’t want a civil war.

We don’t want a civil war either. No, seriously, we don’t. It would be worse for them, but very bad for us. If we get to throw down, Starship Troopers might be a best case scenario. And while a dictatorship by Veterans bent on service is not the worst thing that could happen, it’s not the most likely either. The most likely is that whoever ends up on top will decide we need to do away with the left once and for all by…. inverting all their positions, so we end up with socialism from the other side.

As someone who lived both under national and international socialism, let me tell you it’s a tough choice. National socialism kills you slower (unless we go German-efficient, of course, G-d forbid) but makes you much, much poorer and less self-sufficient (no, trust me) in between.

I want the Republic and individual liberties back, not socialism of either stripe.

So, it’s really important that the left listen to this: WE SEE YOU. AND WE HAVE A MEMORY.

Yeah you think that “we see you” is affirmative, recognizing the “good” things you do. Not this time, bucko.

I’m not the only one getting bombarded by articles on how long it will take to count the votes. Apparently you put that in the speech of your zombie in chief, too. And I’m not the only one who’s seen articles on how the right will “appear” to win, but then when all the votes are in you’ll be proven victors.

Let me put this in terms you understand:

NO ONE BELIEVES YOU. Not even a little bit. If you could read the room you could sense that. All of these articles on how long it will take, how wrong the first counting will be is just making people pissed off.

It’s kind of like that brilliant article asking for “amnesty” for things done during the Covidiocy. It might have worked fine if the entire nation had gone amnesiac. But in fact what it did was bring back memories we were trying to forget. AND NOW WE’RE AWARE AND REALLY ANGRY.

It’s the same thing. You THINK you got away with the soft coup in 2020. You stole the elections fair and square. And despite all your fears, no one has shot your skanky *sses into the next century. You put up all the barricades, you practically invited us to boog. And we didn’t. So you think you got away with it.

You didn’t get away with diddly squat. Your own polls should tell you that. As much as our side tries to avoid answering polls, (because we don’t trust them further than we can throw them, and have you seen the weight of some of those pollsters?) a majority of the country thinks you stole the election in 2020.

So, why aren’t we boogying? Because we aren’t you. We’re fully aware of dangers and consequences. We’ve studied history, and not the just-so stories Marxism imposed on it. We know that while there is a possibility of restoring the republic, it’s maybe 10% of chance. And all the others, even if they wipe out the “left,” are fairly horrifying.

They can’t win, but we can lose and lose big, and in the process lose also the lives of any number of innocents. Because both sides have targeting problems, though the left more than the right.

Does this mean they can get away with frauding again and everyone will stay quiet.

Ah…. No.

See, lefties, it would have been okay if y’all had stolen the presidency then sat down and gone ‘well, this is working, so let’s leave it in place. But we’ll definitely change the messaging.’ So you’d live our fuel independence in place, not do crazy sh*t to the economy, leave the border wall and protocols in place, and instead spend your time telling us how much better you were. H*ll, after a while, people might have voted for you for real. Non-politics-addicts tend to forget things like fraud if the economy is good and everything is stable.

But y’all are lunatics. Or cultists. Same/same. Despite the fact that communism in any form has never worked anywhere, ever, you’ve convinced yourselves you could make it work here. (Of course, you also think FDR “ended” the great Depression. Sometimes I think we should make you learn economics. Real ones.)

So you think that the Earth really is going to burn up, because Al Gore said so, and you poor bastards think the failed divinity student is a scientific genius. (It’s okay, my brother does too. A triumph of indoctrination over intelligence) And you think that if you just forbid fossil fuels, or at least forbid them in the US the not-even-enough-to-self-sustain solar and wind energy will automagically become viable. And you think that people won’t mind if our gas goes to same price as Europe — even though seriously I drive farther to the grocery store than my parents drive in a week to theirs. European countries are itty-bitty and everything is close together. We have miles and miles of miles and miles.) You think simultaneously that we’re overpopulated because, well, governments don’t lie, right? And that we must allow people to pour over the southern border (why only the southern, you racists?) because of course they’re “climate refugees.” (And ignore the fact our climate refugees go to FL which SHOULD tell you something, if you ripped off the ideological blinders.)

And so you set around running about with hammers in the machinery of government and — how to put this? — oh, I know: F*cking up everything. At speed. To the point that Jack and Jill public is finding it hard to survive, much less give their kids a good Christmas and honestly, most of us don’t know how to survive the next year.

People are angry and getting angrier.

And meanwhile you cartoon characters (Wile E. Coyote, super genius) are telling us everything is wonderful, the most important thing in the world is not to have voter ID, to keep voter by mail, and to legalize third trimester abortion everywhere. Oh, yeah, and to welcome the “new Americans” pouring over the border with no vetting and immediately enrolled on all forms of welfare.

Are you for real now? Do you have to brain cells to rub together?

The speed with which “Let’s go Brandon” became a thing should have given you a clue.

No one has forgotten 2020. I grant you that the less politically aware have forgotten that you kept polls open in Arizona for an extra 2 weeks in order to fraud Sinema in. Under some severe weather injunction. And they might have forgotten how much you frauded in 2006.

We also remember how quickly votes can be counted. And we KNOW that places like Portugal and France manage it, so why couldn’t we? Unless there is… what was it? Something like “the most extensive and inclusive fraud organization?” Was that it.

You think we’ve forgotten because we’ve been quiet.

But we haven’t. And most people will be open to us putting out articles about those and disseminating the knowledge (I have books to write, and would appreciate guest posts on irregularities perpetrated by dems the last …. 20 years. I’ll do it if I have to, but…. books.)

And we’re looking at your warnings that it takes SOOOOOO long to count votes, and it might be weeks after, and going to the shed and inventorying our agricultural implements.

You have no idea what Americans can MAKE out of pitchforks. Or make pitchforks out of.

Sure, it might “work” again. For maybe a month. And then it will get really ugly, really fast.

People can forgive one massive act of fraud. We know you’ve frauded before.

But Americans are not going to take well to being disenfranchised.

I don’t want to see what an actual American insurrection would look like. Y’all had enough trouble with Afghanistan. This is not the life I want for my kids and grandkids.

You’ve had a good run. Your model sucks. All it can do is kill and impoverish people.

And people are on to you, now you’ve lost the information monopoly. (And are losing more every day.)

It’s time to pretend you have some principles. We know you don’t, but we’ll let you hum the tune.

Take the drubbing that’s coming and shut up. Yes, you probably need a new party and new figureheads, but then again look around. All your great leaders are so old they look embalmed. Except for AOC and she’s so stupid that it’s obvious she’s a dinosaur with a brain the size of a walnut. (If that. We grant you she might have an additional one in her tail, but no, we don’t want to know. Regardless of her illusions, even our males would pay NOT to date her.)

If you try to fall back on old shenanigans, it’s going to be bad. Very bad for you, but bad for us. And a disaster for free men everywhere.

I beg you with tears in your eyes to be cautious for once in your life.

There is no arrow of history. The future doesn’t belong to you. And there is no amnesty where you’re pushing us.

Let it go. Let the fraud go. Let us rebuild.

Your ilk will come back. They always do. they are an inherent malware of the human heart that elevates envy to a virtue.

A healthy society and economy can live with you. What we have right now can’t.

I invite you to study virology and what an exaggerated immune response can do to a body.

Think about it.

Let us stabilize society, and you just might get away with the massive fraud of 2020. As long as there’s no repeats. No one will come for you, because we KNOW what the alternative is. But if you insist on keeping it up…. well. Things can go ugly fast.

No, I don’t know anything. None of us has — that I know — any plans. But I know a lot of people are very very angry. And they’re Americans. No one knows what they’re going to do. Not even themselves. However, if you know our history, when we do things we tend to be …. creative.

Sit down. Have another think. It’s in you best interests — and ours — to let this election be clean. After your performance, no one will believe you won this without fraud.

Sit down. Think. Stop reacting. Do the right thing.

I’ll be here. Inspecting my pitchfork. Which I WANT to use ONLY to mulch the flowerbeds.

Please, let me tend my garden.

What if the leftists gave an insurrection and nobody came?

You’ll remember leading up to Jan 6, despite being very unhappy about the big election theft, I was not really that enthused to go to DC and “protest.” Partly because I thought it wouldn’t accomplish anything.

I might still have considered going, just as a show of “we’re here and not happy” if we hadn’t been flat, stone broke at the time. (Which I was. For various reasons including the lockdowns which made it impossible for younger son to find work.)

The funny thing is how many people who never came by again dropped by to tell me I absolutely, definitely must go. It was my duty. (I wonder how those polo shirts fit….)

I do understand the people who went. It was an attempt at showing we existed, an attempt at showing “We see you.” Which we did. I mean people who regularly comment here, or their spouses were kicked out as poll observers just before that amazing jump.

And for the *ssholes reading, no I’m not going to discuss it. That’s not what this is about. Yes, the election was dirtier than my cat’s behind. For recap go here: the 2020 election: fuckery is afoot and here Election 2020: the more fuckery update. Larry says everything I could say, with far less swearing and much less arm waving, but correct in essentials.

I’ll only add that I KNEW it was going to go this way and there’s a lot of posts leading up to it. I’m not a number’s person like Larry or my husband. But I am a people person. No, I don’t mean I’m an extrovert. On the contrary. I’m someone who sits in a corner and observes people. (Unless it’s a con, and I’m on.) Partly because I don’t trust people and need to be forewarned if they’re going to do something freaky like be hyper friendly or — ick — talk to me.

I have half a century experience watching people, alone and in groups, in private and in public.

No one, absolutely no one would run the campaign Joe Biden ran unless they had everything pre-sewn-up with fraud so extraordinary that they could not have had more than say 10% of votes and yet “won.” It was a Potemkin campaign, designed to lend credibility to a fraudulent win. You could see it coming for months before hand. Or you could if you have some experience with how the left operates.

It is the measure of how badly they lost that even with that extraordinary network of fraud in place they had to fraud at the last minute, desperately and in full view, which is what Larry’s post is about.

And since then their entire behavior has been the behavior of those with a guilty, no, a filthy conscience, trying to prevent getting what they know they so richly deserve. From thwarted court cases, to the barbed wire and guards on DC, to… well, everything.

Part of the reason I didn’t go out for the forlorn hope of the 6th is that I couldn’t see how it would help. But the left, feeling guilty, needed to taint a demonstration against fraud and make it sound like an “insurrection” and something unprecedented (Which is hilarious considering how much wholesale political violence the left has engaged in in the last two or three decades, particularly during the lockdowns, but also routinely. Remember the ketchup bottle cosplayers at the SC hearings? They also “broke” into the Capitol. And they’re not sweetness and light either. And let’s not get started on the Occupy movement, because I don’t have all day.)

Of course, the only deaths by violence at the Capitol that day were among the protesters, one shot down out of the blue for no reason, the other apparently beaten to death. If you’re among the idiots who think police officers were attacked, do put it in the comments. I’ll enjoy watching my commenters eat you alive and burp out a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner afterwards while you run away in shame.

And other things have come out and quickly been hushed, like apparently Nancy Pelosi set the whole thing up and got it filmed in style. (She should have cameras in her own house, to prevent her husband’s tricks hammering him. But hey, perhaps she doesn’t care as much for that. She’s all about that power.)

Anyway, the left knows very well what they’ve done. They can also sense the anger in the country and the fact we know very well what they’ve done. It’s little “subtle” things like Let’s Go Brandon appearing everywhere in the night. Yes, sure, the left thinks it’s astroturf, because it always is for them, but at the back of their minds, they are discomfited, scared. They sense this giant ball of anger hanging over them, and they want us to do something highly inadvisable, so they can prove we’re “bad” once and for all.

Over the last couple of years, it’s become obvious this is the left:

It might sound utterly crazy to you. It does to me. But you forget two things:

1- the left is a cult and they believe with the certainty of fanatics that the future is theirs. The arrow of history points to their ultimate and eternal victory.

2- They don’t understand us at all. Violence for them is a knob which they twist up and down for effect (and usually via astroturfing and paying psychotics to scare the normies.) The don’t understand ours is a switch. If it turns on we can’t easily turn it off. Which is why we’re being slow and deliberate. The left meanwhile, like all primitives, mistakes restraint for weakness.

EXCEPT they’re starting to get a feeling they might have misjudged the situation. It’s not open, it’s not fully articulated, but the hair is rising on the back of their neck, and they feel like everything might not be up to their script.

They…. see a bad moon rising, so it put it. And they hear howls here and there. They’ve convinced themselves it’s just lost puppies so much that they’re probably going to try industrial levels of fraud in the mid-terms again. And it will go badly because we can see them. The cover of the media is now veil-thin. But they’re telling themselves that’s not true. And that they can get away with it.

They might… one more time. Maybe. Except that I suspect this time there will be fighting back by peaceful/legal means. But the establishment GOP is not very good at lawfare.

Mind you, I hope lawfare beats their fraud. No one wants an actual boog except the left. And they only want it because they’ve convinced themselves we’re incapable of fighting. May G-d have mercy on their souls.

But they sense something is not right. They sense a disturbance in the force. And they keep going more and more unhinged. Particularly in the whole “The sixth of Jan. was totes and insurrection, y’all!”

Except you know, it’s not very convincing come out of people with identical hair cuts and polos, wearing issue-shoes. It comes even worse from the clown face at CNN.

Take this for instance:

(link in image.)

Oath keepers spent over 400 on a “FEAST” at Olive garden, y’all. Says clown face CNN.

I’m not 100% sure what they think they’re accomplishing. I think they’re as usual assuming that we’re all barefoot scrambling peasants who have never been to a restaurant, or at least not recently. They think we’ll look at Olive Garden and go “Those dirty conspirators must have had foreign money to spend FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS on a meal, at a posh place like that.”

Except those of us who have traveled and/or moved know that Olive Garden is mid-price (And might be the best priced place they could find around DC) and heck, even where I live which is not what you’d call the most expensive place ever, a meal out with the two of us at a cheap place now will set us back $50 once you tally tip and soda. Or it will if we have an appetizer (which husband likes to do.)

And sure, this was early 21, before the bidenflation, but these people had been walking around all day, most of them are men, and if you had ten people or so there’s no surprise they paid four hundred dollars at Olive Garden. I mean, we hit a hundred if we take son to Olive Garden for a celebration. And it’s no “Feast.”

So what has CNN uncovered? That people to the right of Lenin eat? Why, GASP, how dare we? That they eat at mid-price restaurants? Well, you know, not everyone is Nancy Pelosi or that Newsom fellow, let alone the Comos. Right wingers don’t get jobs for their politics. We don’t have money to spend like that….

Were we supposed to have a packed lunch? No one told us it was a brown bag event. Last we heard, the clowns on the left had declared brown bag lunches racist?

You’ve heard about if life hands you lemons, make lemonade?

They don’t have lemons. They don’t have anything they can make anything out of. At this point they’re just trying to spin nonsense out of thin air, and hoping it works.

This is what happens when all you have are lies, damn lies and Marxism.

In the end we win they lose. But don’t get cocky. On the way there unless a miracle occurs, they’re going to make a lot of us wish we were dead.

Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

Be not afraid. Some things you have to go through. As the chicken says, it’s the only way to get to the other side.

Keep on keeping on.

Myth Matched – A Blast from the past post from December 2015

Every culture has myths. For instance, I grew up in a culture where I knew (not thought, mind you, knew) that if you took more than one aspirin at once, you’d die.

Proven?  You don’t need proven.  Everyone knew this.  Why would you test something that could kill you?

So my first week in the states, when I told my host mother I had a headache and she said “just take a couple of aspirin” I thought she was trying to kill me.  She had to show me the instructions on the bottle.

This trivial incident was my first exposure to the idea that “what everybody knows” can be wrong.

Progressive culture in the US, having been the dominant culture in media/entertainment and the news for the last 100 years at least (not the dominant culture in the country, necessarily, but the dominant culture in the classes that controlled these intellectual products and which were consolidated/made uniform by the “mass” aspects of communication since at least the end of the nineteenth century) has lacked challenges to its internal myths, which means it ended up with as many unfounded “everybody knows” as a small village in Portugal where aspirin was still a miracle drug and a little scary.

I normally don’t pay attention to what Bernie Sanders says, and pay Hillary only the attention necessary to roll my eyes at the things that come flying out of her mouth.  (Like, for instance, that Republicans don’t know that terrorists use guns to kill people.  Oh, lady, we know, that’s why we want guns of our own to defend ourselves, because the terrorists, you know, aren’t likely to obey gun regulations.)

But yesterday Mike Rowe went after Bernie Sanders.

At first I just read it wishing that popcorn didn’t have so many carbs.  Then I went back and read the tweet that inspired Mike’s take down. Here it is in its full glory:

“At the end of the day, providing a path to go to college is a helluva lot cheaper than putting people on a path to jail.”

Mike got seriously upset — as he should — at the notion that not going to college is the same as being condemned to becoming a criminal, and he went after it, as well as after the fact that absent a few professions (and the only reason my kids are in college is because they’re aiming for two of those professions) college really doesn’t help.  (Make an informal count in your head.  How many of your friends with degrees work at anything even vaguely related to their degree?  And don’t tell me “but they learned to learn” because this is another thing altogether and you might have confused cause and effect.)

But there’s more than that in that tweet, there are at least three warring myths, all of them so central to what liberalism once was that the current progressives aren’t even aware most of them have been disproven by the real world tm.  These are things “everyone knows” and why would you question something everyone knows?

The thing is outside their world, where no one gives a good goddamn about their myths, these things are disproven, and most people only don’t realize it because of the entertainment news industrial complex repeating them so often and acting like they’re proven.

The first and most basic myth, and one of which, once upon a time, I was an ardent proponent, is that education is transformative.  This goes along with the myth that man is infinitely perfectible.

The liberal project — back when liberal meant classical liberal — as undertaken by our ancestors, hinged on the idea that education would transform everyone into individual thinkers and philosophers like themselves.  It would make them more moral too and improve them to be onto like angels.

They had a point of sorts, in their time.  Most of the people who weren’t learning weren’t learning because they were underfed, too busy making a living, sick with a million little illnesses that made them not function well intellectually.

I saw this in action in the village, which is why I was an ardent believer in this myth.  Giving people education truly uplifts them if the people giving the education also provide a meal and clothes.

The thing is, it’s one of those things that has huge gains up front.  “Teach everyone to read” makes a huge difference.  And yes, can make for a more moral society, if the education has a moral component.  This is important as “education” is not a neutral value.  It can be adaptive or maladaptive to reality.

However just about every country in the world that isn’t in dire crisis or doesn’t belong to a religion that forbids secular education has free education — yes, even where I came from, though often the kids were taken out of fourth grade to work in factories.  This was strictly speaking illegal, but you could always find a doctor to sign a paper saying your kid was educable mentally retarded and couldn’t learn any more “abstract stuff” but could learn to be a factory worker) — at least through 9th grade and often through 12th.

I’ll pause here to point out that when I was little, someone with a 9th grade education was accorded the respect here given to people with Masters Degrees now.  They were learned and performed work of the mind, and didn’t dirty their hands.  This I’d guess is true for most of history.  The level of a 9th degree education allows you enough to explore and learn just about everything that doesn’t require hands on training or specialized tutoring only administrated by professionals.  (I’ll not specify which trades because it varies per learner.  I can’t learn languages outside a classroom, at least a virtual one.  I also have trouble with art by myself.  I’d guess there’s the same problem with most things requiring labs to learn.)

So, are people made more moral?  Snort giggle.  Hardly.  The causes for this are complex and a lot of it has to do with how wealthy our society is.  Wealthy people have always had more time to get funny on morality.  Other parts include a morally neutral or worse education (when the purpose of education is to deconstruct the culture that made more people wealthy and healthy than any other culture in history, while praising cultures that mutilate women, kill gays and enslave children, it is worse.)

Are people individual little philosopher kings, for all these years of education thrown at them?

I read something in a book I can no longer remember the title of, when I was researching Shakespeare.  The number of people who are fluent enough readers to read for pleasure in our day is the same as in Shakespeare’s day.  When they didn’t have free education, much less 12 years of it.

The idea that if you gave everyone enough food and time and free schooling they’d all become erudite and thinkers can be disproved by a stroll through your local Welfare hub.  Go on, I dare you, go down and start a little discussion on Kantian philosophy.

But it’s an idea that remains a myth on the left which has lost all other classical liberal ideals (like, you know, individual freedom) but holds fast onto this idea that education will somehow make a progressive out of everyone.  (Patently ridiculous as they’ve been indoctrinating several generations now, and it still won’t take the way they want.  That cold slap of reality counteracts it.  Which is why they advocate more cowbell.)

The other myth in that statement — and the only way to make sense out of that linkage between education and prison — is actually several linked myths:

1- that people turn to crime when they’re poor  (an insult to every poor but honest person ever.)

2- that without a college education you’ll be poor (Mike Rowe ably disposed of this one in the linked article.)

3- that if the government won’t pay for something it’s unobtainable because there is no private charity and also people can’t lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

All of these are nonsense.  Sometimes I think people like Bernie Sanders watch Les Miserables (a piece of propaganda even when it was written) and say “it’s true, it’s all true” and then see the world through that lens ever since.

Being poor doesn’t lead to crime.  Wealthy people can and do commit crimes, not all of them white collar (in one of the stunning contradictions that would make their heads explode if they paused and thought about it, progressives also assume that all rich people are criminals, since economics is a fixed pie (giggle-snort) and to have more you have taken “more than your fair share.)

Lack of a college education doesn’t make you poor.  I’ve yet to meet a poor, competent plumber. And I sometimes regret I didn’t learn more carpentry from grandad, instead of going to college.  We knew someone who built cabinets by grandad’s method (think all manual tools) in reproduction of colonial furniture.  One of those cabinets which he could build in 3 months, sold for what my husband was making at the time, as a computer programmer. I’m fairly sure anyone who knows one of those trades really well is raking it in.  We’ve become a nation of do-it-yourselvers not because we enjoy it, or want to save money but because finding a competent tradesmen takes longer than just doing the best you can.  (Been there, done that, have spackle on my t-shirt.)

People have managed to be educated beyond their relatives and parents without any government intervention (in fact until government stuck its nose and quotas in, there were a lot of merit scholarships.  My husband did his college with them and a part-time job.)

Once you realize those myths ARE myths, Bernie’s prescription to end crime makes about as much sense as saying something like “Hit yourselves on the head with rubber mallets, increase the production of wheat.”

In fact, someone came trolling a share of this post trying desperately to keep the two things linked by yelling that it was a shame we spent more on jails than education.

Again, with the what?  Nothing our government does makes much sense, but this makes as much sense as “Abolish the helium reserve. Subsidize canneries.”

What we’ve found since the classical liberal times when we thought education would uplift everyone is that education and proper nutrition and proper civic instruction does uplift some people.  Yeah, there are a percentage of people out there who could/would do much better with a little help.  I don’t know about you, but I make it a point, on my own, to identify such people and such situations and intervene and help when I can.

But you can lead a student to school; you can imprison him/her in it for 8 hours a day for 12 years: what you can’t do is make them learn.

The same person who was whining about that horrible discrepancy between jail spending and education spending said that you know, most criminals stop learning in grade school.  I think he meant they dropped out.  This is probably true, although I’d bet the reverse, that if you dropped out of grade school you’re likely to be a criminal isn’t true.  It’s also insulting to claim so.  For this he advised more cowbell… er I mean more free education.

The sad fact is that we’ve continuously not only dumbed down education, but tried to make it “fun” (listen, if you’re learning a language, there’s no way to make it fun.  To be fluent, you need to start by memorizing vocabulary and studying grammatical structures.  Neither of those is fun.  Useful. Needed.  Not fun.) to the point that a High School diploma means nothing, which is why the new push to put everyone to college, as if more of the same will fix the problems.

There are people who don’t learn because they have no interest in learning.  Some of them might be very good at things — engines. Carpentry — that would baffle phds who are not put together that way.  There are people who don’t learn because our educational system, barring active teaching at home after class, is put together NOT to teach but to keep the masses from rebelling in their pseudo-scholastic prisons.

Lack of book learning doesn’t make anyone a criminal.  It doesn’t make them poor either.  I think my dad’s dad had a third grade (might be fourth) education.  Like younger son when he was younger, he had problems with verbal expression, and issues writing a legible hand.  In those days this meant “stupid” or at least book stupid, so his caring parents apprenticed him as a carpenter.  He supported his family in (for the village — grin) a more than middle class lifestyle, never that I know so much as stole a stamp, and raised sons and daughter who did better than him, and grandchildren who — weirdly — all have college educations, almost all of them (except me) in useful fields that actually make things or cure people.

The left is so wrapped up in their myths that they don’t understand “subsidize more education.  You’ll need fewer prisons” makes about as much sense as “eat more fiber. Control garden pests.” Worse, they legislate based on these myths, without the slightest qualm.  And then are shocked and posit bizarre theories (the GOP is holding back solar energy! The oil lobby! Eleventy!) for why it didn’t work.

And this is why our monoculture of progressivism hurts every field in which it is in fact a monoculture: education, the arts, entertainment, politics.

This is why diversity of thought is important. And why the progressives’ crazy attempts to shut down opinions they don’t agree with are … well… crazy.

In the safe space everyone believes as you do.  And that’s the problem.  Human beings aren’t built to be safe.

It is in the rubbing of thought against thought, in the contest of vision against vision that the truly ludicrous is eliminated and that, at least, we avoid the worst errors.

It is in not being locked up in a tiny intellectual village that real progress is made.  Not the “progressive” of progressives, which fills mass graves with those humans who weren’t infinitely perfectible, but the progress that fills bellies, raises humans above poverty and makes it possible to aspire to the stars.

Real progress comes from strife and work.

Which is why they’re acting more and more like isolated, illiterate villagers in a land where myth is more important than evidence.

And why in the end we win, they lose.

I don’t believe in aliens but I profoundly dislike Woo Woo. And Aliens at least aren’t woo woo. Or they weren’t. It could be argued that when everyone on the left started running around talking about UFOs being some kind of psychic phenomenon, (circa early seventies) it was a sign of true cultural rot or perhaps a sign that my (tongue in cheek, I think. I THINK) theory below is true, of course.

I don’t know how many of you remember this, but UFOs and aliens didn’t use to be in the same category of belief as elves, fairies, ghosts, weird spirit messages and the thing called “Earth changes” that has sneaked back in under the scientifist guise of “Global Warming” on the left.

UFOs were a sign of something physical out there. Of possibly more scientifically advanced but not supernatural aliens. Maybe very bad aliens. (Looks at Puppet Masters.)

And then it changed and became part of the new age circus. Which is when I gave up on it, though I always had trouble believing in aliens, which is why they don’t exist in my fiction, even when they seem to. (More on that later.)

Yesterday in a group, a friend said what is obvious about the left is that they seriously oppose human reproduction and longevity. Ultimately human life, I guess.

Here’s the list as to why:

NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:

1) Pushing to maximize abortion

2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality

3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting” b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies– allowing limitation of IVF, and also e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)

4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de-facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink

5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY

6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids

7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider

8)Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID

9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)

And then this:

Whether they intend this to be a coordinated effort or passively want us gone, at some point you realize

The Democratic party? They’re the aliens in Independence Day.

Because I don’t like Woo Woo, I jumped off from this to aliens:

If the hypothesis that appeared in a lot of pulp age SF that humans were “the old ones” of the Galaxy (or the universe) who lost a war, and whose remnants were sent to Earth in exile, and whose “leaders” are being manipulated by “aliens” to keep them from achieving high tech, specifically space travel again, what would be different?

Space travel?

Well….

1- Shortly after the moon landing, there was a concerted effort by the left to confuse, thwart and obfuscate all attempts at space travel.

2- the talk of UFOs and possible space travel was corrupted by an entire slew of “sightings” and ideas that made UFOs and aliens into a supernatural, woo woo phenomenology fit only for New Age circles.

3- NASA might have gone the way of all government agencies, so natural, but–

4- Every democrat president is intent on crippling our ability to travel in space further, and discredit the very idea we SHOULD aim for it or attempt it.

5- Even space opera with or without minimally believable science, which — if nothing else — kept the idea we can eventually travel to and colonize the stars was shut down hard, in favor of fantasy and HARD science fiction. (I have nothing, absolutely nothing about hard science fiction, but with very few exceptions, it is only exciting to people who know enough science to understand what’s being done. It’s not how you popularize the idea of space colonization.) And the old masters who were pro-space were discredited and attacked. Even Baen who kept space travel fic alive, kind of, ended up in the narrow mil-sf sub-field most of the time. The rest became one of those self-fulfilling prophecies of trad pub: Space opera doesn’t sell, so we won’t publish any, and what we publish we won’t promote, so it doesn’t sell, so space opera doesn’t sell, so we– last verse, same as the first.
Note trad pub did this even though space opera movies continued to do exceedingly well, even arrantly stupid ones.

6- our capacity to generate enough energy to allow for even thinking of space travel is under systematic attack, which

a) feeds into depopulation, or will this winter, but also

b) inexplicably nuclear is included in this and attacked twice as hard, which of course is at war with us going to space, interstellar travel and eventually FTL (yes, it’s “impossible.” Our species has an history of doing the impossible on the regular. It’s just incremental steps, which are being thwarted by cutting us off at the ankles.)

That second list is also not exhaustive and I’m sure other people can contribute more instances of “this just doesn’t make sense, unless….”

Now I said I don’t believe in aliens and I don’t. I mean, base level fundamental, either aliens are utterly incomprehensible to us, or we wouldn’t realize they’re sentient. I THINK. But at the same time, if our species is much, much older, the aliens could be us.

Maybe there’s a universe of space commies, and we’re the space Americans who’ve lost the battle but not the (final war.)

Look, no, I don’t believe in any of this. This is the process I go through to create universes. I go through the evidence, see if it’s coherent, etc.

But if this were true what would be different?

And mostly I say “aliens” because I don’t like woo woo.

On the other hand, if it’s aliens I can’t do anything about it. If however it’s activity by a well-dressed gentleman of wealth and taste whose expensive perfume can never fully disguise an underlying whiff of brimstone.

…. Well, I can pray.

Even if it’s the equivalent of looking for the car keys under the street light and doesn’t make much sense.

Anyway — I don’t believe in any of this. I think. But it was worth laying out to think on.

Cui bono in all these things? Cui bono?

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*

IF YOU’RE DOING A SALE FOR CYBER MONDAY SEND THE ANNOUNCEMENT TO THE EMAIL ABOVE AND PLEASE DO PUT “CYBER MONDAY” IN THE TITLE. I INTEND TO HAVE A PROMO POST HERE AND AT MGC.

ALSO, BEFORE THE PROMOS, DARKSHIP THIEVES AND DARKSHIP RENEGADES ARE NOW ON KU. AFTER LOOKING IT OVER, I DECIDED TO PUT THEM IN THE PROGRAM FOR A YEAR. IN CASE YOU WANT TO TRY THEM.

Darkship Thieves

Darkship Renegades

FROM LEANN NEAL REILLY: The Last Stratiote: A Dark Urban Fantasy Retelling of A Tale of Two Cities

Foul-mouthed and bloodthirsty, Elira Dukagjini should have died 500 hundred years ago. Instead, she left her Albanian homeland at the start of the 16th century to fight as a stratiote, a mercenary. She wears a gruesome keepsake in a leather pouch around her neck and a telltale scar on her breast. Driven to enforce the primal Blood Law, Elira spends her days running a café and bookstore in a modern Boston suburb while hunting human prey at night.

Until one fateful night when the prey Elira hunts have their own prey: Mirjeta Gjakova, the intended honor sacrifice of fundamentalist imam Xhemajl Krasniqi — Elira’s uncanny and more civilized twin living the life that Elira never had.

The war that Elira left behind in the Balkans never really ended. And now, in the 21st Century, she once again must choose between slaking her endless bloodthirst and finally quenching it.

FROM J. M. NEY-GRIM: Artemis in Chase (The Hades Cycle Book 2)

The goddess of the hunt burns for justice…

When Artemis discovers her handmaiden dead in the forest—slain by Dìs, lord of the underworld—she demands that Zeus punish the murder. But Zeus upholds Dìs, who boasts that he will steal a nymph away to his dark realm whenever he so desires.

The indifference of the other Olympians forces Artemis to take matters into her own hands.

Because Dìs wields powers beyond any Artemis commands, she crafts a complex scheme to secure the magical artifact she needs to bring Dìs to his knees.

But unless Artemis learns the essential truth at the heart of all vengeance, her strategy must fail. Will she do what she knows is wrong to defeat Dìs? Or will she do right and condemn her nymphs to death by his hand?

Artemis in Chase is the second tale in the immersive Hades Cycle. If you’re entranced by the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece—if you long to visit their mythic world, to witness their passions and triumphs—you’ll love J.M. Ney-Grimm’s compelling story of revelation and revenge.

FROM C. CHANCY: Oni the Lonely

A grieving mountain cove doctor. A pair of wayward oni. A curse borne on the black wings of crows.

The Rivertown Shopping Village has seen a lot of strange proprietors. An oni painter on the run from a bad breakup is a new one. Maple Leaf Studio opened with blazing color, but will a haunting end Kyosai Momoji’s dream before it begins?

At the south end of Rivertown, Rain McKee delivers soap and perfume with a hint of mountain blessings, picking up her life in the wake of her grandparents’ deaths. Deaths that may have been from a firstborn curse….

Kyosai’s a firstborn, and oni attract trouble like lightning strikes. If either of them want to survive, they’ll have to face haunts, monsters, and a curse so ancient no living mortal knows its name.

The Appalachians are old; the evils lurking there, older still….

(If you want ancient folklore, modern magic, and a love story that prioritizes friendship first, this is the slow burn for you!)

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Zombie Maggots

What could be worse than a zombie apocalypse? Two tales: A nameless protagonist faces off with humanity’s worst fears. The motley group just needs to find someplace safe. Maybe, then, they can think about the families that were left behind.

In the second story of the apocalypse, the defenders of what’s left of civilization discover the cold winters of Alaska are not enough to save them. Right now, they need some redneck engineering, and a whole lot of luck. Time is growing short, and the skies are buzzing…

FROM ALMA BOYKIN: Familiar Tales

Smiley Lorraine: Wolverine. Rosie Jones: 100-lb. Skunk. Morgana Lorraine: Witch with Editorial Problems.

Welcome to a world where Familiars choose magic workers, and a few others, as their partners. A world of adventure, tax-deductions, bad publisher tricks, and odd veterinary clinics, where wolverines wear glasses and iguanas sing along with the radio—badly—while casting spells and keeping their chosen humans out of mischief.

Or try to.

(Five short-stories.)

FROM BLAKE SMITH: Fairyland: A Short Story

Eleven-year-old Branna fell asleep on a hill in the foggy Irish countryside and woke up in a land that was supposed to be a myth. Fairyland is a beautiful place of green oaks and golden light, but it is also a dangerous land, and Branna must use all of her cleverness if she is to escape the clutches of the fey creatures who rule over it.

FROM JAMES Y. BARTLETT: Rainbow’s End: A Swamp Yankee Mystery (The Swamp Yankee Mysteries Book 3)

All seems peaceful in Little Penwick, the smallest town in the smallest state. Then, Police Chief Gus Haddock is run off the road, someone shoots at the police station and the realization sets in …

… She’s baaa-ack!

Janine Stone, the Glitter Girl in Book One of James Y. Bartlett’s Swamp Yankee Mysteries, has returned to town and she’s looking for the pot of gold she was owed from the human smuggling ring she ran for the criminal element up in Providence.
So Chief Haddock and the Little Penwick department start searching around town … for Janine … for the stash of money … for the local idiots Janine paid to shoot up the station.

At the same time, Gus Haddock’s personal life is set aflame when his girlfriend, the Providence lawyer-turned-abused-women’s-advocate Maggie Wells announces she’s pregnant.

It’s all in a day’s work for a Swamp Yankee like Gus Haddock in this exciting new small town police drama.

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.

The Chained Adept is the first book of the series.

FROM DOROTHY GRANT: Between Two Graves (Combined Operations Book 4)

He swore he wouldn’t be back while his parents lived…

Now, almost thirty years later, AJ is going home.

Ordered to attend his mother’s funeral in the rugged northern border of the Empire, AJ is baring old wounds to his new wife, and burying familial feuds.

But the past won’t die that easily, and grave secrets will threaten all the survivors and the women they love. Because the Feds are after AJ’s unwanted inheritance…

And they’re willing to risk a war to get their hands on it.

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: NOD

It never fails. Whenever I post about something that a vast number of people have issues with: from ADD to “being on the spectrum” to serious anxiety issues, to a million other things, someone either here or on FB (usually on FB) plants feet square, puts hands on hips and goes “Yeah, right. We’d never heard of those problems forty years ago and now it’s everywhere. This isn’t real.”

Okay then. Spits on hands. Let’s have it, shall we?

You’re making a lot of very weird assumptions Some of course are that because issues weren’t diagnosed they didn’t exist. Almost everyone “on the spectrum” or with “sensory issues” or even with ADD and anxiety or other problems can look back through the family tree, and as the realization dawns on them, slowly cover their face in their hands and go “oh dear Lord.” Because you see the signs galloping through the family tree as far back as human memory goes.

Look, these problems are a problem because for the last 100 years crazy people have been social engineering, instead of trying to figure out how and why some things existed. Or because those things were “bad” according to their new and “urgent” doctrine.

Kind of like what they’re trying to do with fossil fuels, they’ve done with everything.

Take anxiety. I only realized recently that I have near-crippling anxiety, and it’s been getting worse. (Eyes times we live in.) Why did I only realize it recently? Because I pray for it. That is literally my treatment. I hand it up and say “You deal with it.” Does that solve it? No. But it allows me to sleep and kind of function. And then –that looking back thing — I realized I came from a family of obsessive pray-ers who get more so as they age. And who came through some incredibly bad upheavals looking like they didn’t have any anxiety at all.

But praying is evil bad, religion is the opium of the people, and there are probably a lot of people to whom the concept is actually alien. So they medicate.

Or take ADD — please. No, seriously, I don’t want it — which people say is treated with “legal meth.” They ain’t wrong, but running around assuming everyone getting it is just looking for a boost and “pretending” is mental. Particularly when it’s kids.

Now legal meth — eh. Adderal — and a bunch of the other medications have hellacious side effects, and I’m seeing if I can control it with sleep hygiene and routine. It might work. Well, it doesn’t banish it, mind. But it makes me functional enough to get my work done and not forget the turned-on stove or the unfinished email… most of the time. (Illness and sleep interruptions play hob with that.) Mostly because Adderal makes me psychotic, and when I crash it makes me incredibly depressed. (No, that’s not the lack of patience. Right now my lack of patience is that I’m tired. Really tired.)

But do you know what else treats ADD? Nicotine. And if you look back, not that far back, either, all the people in “thinking positions” smoked. Heck, dad started smoking at 12 (and quit at 31 because MY lungs couldn’t take it.) which probably accounted for his academic success versus the brother who didn’t. Even in my generation, in Portugal, that was normal. I didn’t, because I couldn’t. (I smoked for a year, and got a pneumonia that wouldn’t quit, so I stopped.) But I lived on enough espresso to sink a battle cruiser all through school. I didn’t eat, I just caffeinated.

Somewhere over the last 40 years tobacco became the forbidden. Now, before you yell at me, yes, due to the method of conveyance — ANYTHING burned and inhaled has that issue — it caused health issues, sometimes severe ones in susceptible people. Though I’ll also note generation “everyone smokes” broke new horizons in longevity, so you figure it out.

Note this is me speaking: tobacco was not only a non-starter for me because of smoke, but I’m one of the very few people who could and did legitimately object to second-hand smoke because of ridiculously reactive lungs.

But after the war on tobacco, TPTB started telling us pot — with same delivery mechanism — is just fine, and possibly health-enhancing. Tilts head. Yeah.

BTW pot smoke in public is worse on me than tobacco. I don’t detect it, often, because I no longer have an accute sense of smell, but I can detect it by “oooh. I can’t breathe.”

At the same time we have a war on e-cigarettes, which do not in fact have the problems of burning stuff being inhaled into your lungs. Yeah, they’re still nicotine, which raises your blood pressure, does things to your heart rate, etc: As does anything effective for ADD.

Has anyone done a study on nicotine versus micro doses of meth and long term effects of both?

Well, no. Because the church of experts has excommunicated tobacco and nicotine and you will not partake of it, sinner. NO MATTER HOW MUCH IT HELPED.

You will either take a medications for your ADD, or you’ll lose your job/be unable to finish your studies, and here, have some pot for your depression and anxiety.

In the same way in the last few decades, we’ve demonized alcohol to a ridiculous amount. No, I’m not saying alcohol doesn’t have dangers. EVERYTHING HAS DANGERS. And yes, alcohol addiction can cause serious problems. What addiction can’t? (Except perhaps to prayer, and even then, unless you’re a contemplative monk, you’ll have another life.)

However the size and shape of the problem became clear to me when I realized they were defining “has a glass of not high alcohol wine with dinner every night” as alcoholism for women. (No, not me. We can’t afford that, even on cheap Verde Wine. Mostly I drink Adam’s Ale or tea with meals.) By that definition all of Portugal, Greece and Italy are raging alcoholics.

Now besides having bad effects in excess, alcohol in small doses has a ton of good side effects, including aiding with brain connection pruning, which might help delay Alzheimers or other dementia. It also helps with anxiety. In fact humans have used it in small amounts for most of history.

But it is evil bad. You will instead use these medications, all of which also have side effects, some of them heinous. However, you don’t want to be an evil alcohol drinker, do you?

(And yet weirdly life expectancy keeps dropping. Uh. Must be bad luck.)

As for “aspergers” and the lowest reaches of the autistic spectrum (the high reaches are something completely different yet again. At that level, it’s completely non-functional and well… scary) … after spending some time reading actual books written during the regency I started wondering if most of the English nobility was “on the spectrum.” It “tastes” like it. But they had a work around: they had incredibly detailed etiquette that guided you through 99% of situations, even if you couldn’t “read” people.

It’s a good thing the 60s liberated us from all convention and manners and now it’s “just” what feels good and how it feels, and how do you react to people…. except even I — when tired, frazzled, etc — have issues with that. And I’m so functional I might not (maybe) be on the spectrum. Maybe. It might just be introverted weirdness. With luck and a following wind.

Then there is the treatments for the common ills of menopause. I’ve heard people on the right fulminating on this as on Viagra. “Women just want to keep having sex way too late. It’s like men taking viagra.” Facepalms. HARD.

In women the after effects of menopause or being post-menopausal are not restricted to sex. Not even vaguely. And if you think they are, the women in your life must be very forebearing. There’s memory loss (as in inability to keep a memory in mind) and that’s the kindest. There’s issues with sleep. There’s…. just nasty stuff, okay?

Yeah, my foremothers did it, uphill both ways, with a grandkid on each hip. And I’m so glad for them. But you know what none of them had? A thought-job. One in which I have to channel coherent thought, complex chains of ideas and manage the emotion for it all.

No, I don’t take medication. (Because if you live long enough it will lead to dementia earlier than you might otherwise have had it. And in a triumph of hope over my perpetually breaking down body, I hope to live long and write to the end.) BUT I DON’T JUDGE THOSE WHO DO.

Because we live unusual lives. And the last 20 to 30 years of our lives, when the kids are grown MIGHT BE the only time we have to accomplish what we must do. And what we must do requires functional brains.

Which leads us to “There wasn’t all this cancer when I was little.” Cancer is the failure mode of human cell replication. One of them. If you live long enough you WILL get cancer. Whether you die of it or not depends on a lot of things. (And Biden’s promise to “cure cancer” (which is not a single thing, and can’t really be ‘cured’) is chilling if you know this.) BUT if you live long enough FOR YOU (not the next guy. It’s genetic) you WILL get it.

So.

None of these things are new. Some had coping strategies going back to the beginning of humans. Those are broken through the “experts” of the 20th century. And therefore people must medicate.

Is medication the best way to go? Who knows? Until we grope our way back to sanity and actually test things, in reproducible tests, no one knows.

However, and no matter how I choose to accommodate for my own issues — chronic depression, ADD, being an older woman, anxiety — which in my case is to avoid meds as much as possible as long as possible, but knowing there might be a time I can’t, THIS IS MY HAND DEVOID OF STONES TO THROW.

These problems aren’t new. Except for the ones which are longevity related, they’ve been with us forever.

What we have is a society that kicked the crutches away from the people who need them, and now shames them for using new ones or being unable to do without.

And that’s evil. Which I guess is what we expect from TPTB.

Don’t you join them. Let your brothers and sisters in this screwed up time cope as best they might. Suggest other help if they need it.

But stop throwing stones. You too might need a crutch eventually.

I’d have written this post earlier, but after the Amazon annoyance, I realized there’s a party going on over at twitter and headed over to do the equivalent of dancing on the tables, scattering memes and lawless commentary. Is fun. And at heart I remain the sixteen year old who didn’t fully understand the issues, but was always ready to make the communists uncomfortable because it was fun. Oh, I also seem to have acquired 1000 followers over night. Weird, uh?

Ahem. Puts respectable clothes and glasses back on. Steps down from the table.

Okay, so — shakes confetti off her hair — that weird discussion on conspiracies. Just because I tell you what we’re seeing is not the whole truth, it doesn’t mean that I’m willing to accept conspiracy theories, particularly crazy or mentally challenged ones, but in general all of them.

All of y’all who attribute perfect plans, perfect oversight, perfect ability to guide things over forever to the other side — be they the rogue agencies of our own country or the remains of USSR agencies or any of it — are out of your ever loving minds. Also, you need to stop drinking the other side’s koolaid.

Yea I know, “but there’s this interview where this defector predicted everything that’s happened since! Game over, man, game over.”

I can’t blame the poor defector for believing in the plan. Commies live and die (literally) by the five year plan. And learning to fit whatever has happened into “the plan worked perfectly” was a survival skill in those days and to those people. (Likely still is in Russia and in our own “corridors” (of increasingly less) “of power.”

You kind of get used to thinking that way. Kind of like you got used to thinking that if you wrote a “big enough” book it would go yuuuuge, even though you knew it was all push and blessings from above, (Including possibly getting picked up by Hollywood) and if you didn’t get it, the chances were lower than of winning the lottery. It took me 5 years after dropping out of trad (or being dropped. You figure it. It was fuzzy there in the middle) to get that thinking out of my mind.

So, I’m not blaming the poor guy. I’m just saying most of the plan you have to be willing to believe it worked. That you are should give you pause and make you think.

IF the Soviet plans worked, they wouldn’t have been the USSR we knew and loathed. For that matter, if the CIA and the FBI got their plans to work — even in other countries — the US wouldn’t be taken for a ride half as often. (No, seriously. They’re known as the world’s worst patsies. They routinely believe things like dictator’s self-reports on population, productivity and armament. Remember, most of these people were educated in the ivies. No. Today’s ivies. They can sign their name correctly three times out of nine. But they’ll inform you of their pronouns. The ability to find their own *sses is lower than that, even with two hands, an *ss locating GPS and seeing eye dogs.)

In the same way, I remember being an 18 year old college student, and sitting up late with my host brother, imagining how powerful the CIA must be, and how they probably were recording our very conversation that night! That’s all very well for two geeky kids in the 80s but DO grow up. Yes, I know many of you are close to my dad’s age. This is precisely why it’s time you re-examined your premises. Yes, I do realize that opinions ossify with age, but our world changes too fast for that and there have been two huge paradigm shifts (Reagan and Trump, plus the even bigger ones of Obama and Biden (And what clusters that has been)) in the last forty years, and you really should be blinking awake any day now, or you risk the ability to laugh at the NPCs on the left.

No, we shouldn’t underestimate the enemy, but overestimating it is just as bad. Remember that during wars, people spreading ideas that the enemy is invencible are called, what’s that word? Oh, yeah, collaborators. Or enemy agents.

Put out the fire in your hair. Sit down.

What paradigm shifts?

Um… for one the fact that all the super-powerful, full of experts agencies were full of f*ck ups and time wasters. Reagan proved that, and heck, he might have underestimated them. Just because the last two years were a disaster don’t assume they expected disaster. No. They expected glorious triumph. Which is not what they got. They didn’t get compliance and kneeling outside some specific crazy areas. And yes, even our crazy areas look good by comparison to abroad, but remember what we hear from abroad is also biased, because we”re not hearing of massive revolt. (And boy, is it massive.)

Schwab might bleat that this is the great reset, and our idiots might have tried to push the New Normal, but it didn’t go that way, and it’s going more the other way, faster every day.

As for nukes and all that… Well, dear LORD did you not notice AT ALL that nuclear detante was not the way to win against the USSR? Were you having a nap? Or did you fail to examine the underlying premise?
The left was convinced if we challenged the USSR at all we’d all DIIIIIIIIIIE. Instead, the USSR folded. Because they had nothing. But while that looks like a given now, it took courage.

I beg you to apply those lessons to now and Russia. Do they have functional nukes? Maybe. And maybe they’ll even use them. But I’ll note Putin is a kleptokrat, not a religious fanatic. Assuring his own death (why, yes, we still do have superior firepower) is not going to get him paradise. Might he lose his mind and nuke the world anyway? Yeah, sure that might happen. The chances however are probably really low. And what do you suggest precisely? That the world buckle down and give Russia everything? WHY? Because you’re nostalgic for the seventies?

Note that I’m agnostic on how much Ukraine even NEEDS our help, or how much real help we’re giving them, and how much the “aid to Ukraine” like the “inflation reduction act” is more of the left’s putting their hands in our pockets. Honestly? I’ve had people go through line by line, and a lot of the “aid to Ukraine” is more Nude Green Heel.

HOWEVER buckling under to the “Stop or I nuke you” is the same as giving Russia and their pet paranoia (Which is larger than the country, runs through the culture, and won’t be appeased even if they control the world — it just means they’ll need to subjugate the universe — ) the run of the world, control over our allies, and ultimately over ourselves.

Do examine that. Yeah, Tulsi Gabbard thinks that’s a good idea, but then again, look at her other good ideas. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more no less. And that’s all she is.

And then there’s the “We’re all going insane because we are too prosperous.” That one makes me want to reach through the screen with a baseball bat.

Yeah, yeah, the fourth turning has some credibility based on styles of parenting, maybe, but there’s a big hole in that. Y’all are running around assuming everyone is America.

Styles of parenting changing, throughout most of history, and thereby causing generational changes… cool story bro. We know they did change in the upper classes, from the eighteenth century on. The lower (or middle middle) classes and back further than that? Yeah. Hold on. I’m rolling on the floor giggling hysterically, and have to pull myself together.

Deep breath. Okay. So, throughout most of history and for most classes styles of parenting were “keep keep alive until he/she can help, then load him down with tasks.” That didn’t change because that COULDN’T change and have people and families survive.

What has no credibility whatso-fricking — ever is the “good times make weak men” or “hard times make strong men.” Consider definitions of “strong.” Sure, the Lafitte brothers, grown during the French revolution were strong. And lawless. And outright evil. And so broken that any sane society would have put them down, which is why they took to the seas.

What this is alluding to is bringing in strong “government” European style. I.e. dictators tinpot or not. And that’s correct, but not generational. And it’s not good times or wealth. It’s LAWLESSNESS. And “decadence” however you interpret that. Which is not, and has never been a result of “wealth” but usually of infiltrators determinedly attacking the culture.

So, you know, Weimar Germany was booth lawless and decadent, but you have to be out of your frigging mind to think it’s from an excess of wealth.

In the same way tell me how much our wealth increased in the last 10 years that all of a sudden pronouns are the holy grail, and schools are holding drag queen twerking contests.

You know d*mn well except for partial recovery under Trump (partial) we’ve been bleeding wealth. So this isn’t good times make week men. It’s the idiots that infiltrated the culture are trying to destroy it, because if they can’t have communism they can throw the world’s worst tantrum, so there.

We don’t need hard times. We need to keep our heads on straight, and start fighting back. Which is why we don’t need “It’s all lost!” doomerism either.

The whole idea that wealth equaled decadence was Soviet propaganda, leaked over here. It was their way to explain that “you see, America is just the decadent new Rome.” It’ would be helpful if y’all would think instead of believing that sh*t. Do try to find the balls of your cultural ancestors who viewed wealth as G-d’s reward. No, don’t go all wealth gospel on us. You can be poor without having sinned. But you can be rich without being decadent either.

Which is why the left can’t find anything on Trump, but keeps trying. Their gospel tells them it MUST be there. Granted, at the base of all great leftist fortunes is a great crime. But that’s because they’re leftist, not because they’re wealthy. When you believe that envy is a virtue, you become a twisted homunculus with no moral sense. So, why would you believe anything the homuncul-press-and-culture propagates.

What is causing our exceptionally crazy times is that the left still has enough of a megaphone that it can scream to the heavens the world is ending, and demand increasingly crazier consolation for this fact.

They are correct, btw. Their world is ending. The world of top down, center out, “experts know best.”

I know it’s hard for those of you who grew up under this paradigm to understand it was never true. It was just kept going by a centralized communications system that covered up for it and kept it alive (barely.)

Even then it was failing spectacularly before the last two years. Which is the why of the last two years. It was their desperate attempt — by those of them capable of planning, that is — to seize control back.

How is it going? Well…. It’s not. It’s falling apart all over.

So yeah. The sky is falling. But it’s their false sky. And once it’s gone, the sun of truth will reveal…. well, a righteous mess. What did you expect?

It’s been a good 100 years of bullsh*t.

Fortunately if you stop setting your head on fire and running in circles, you can grab a pooper scooper. All of us can. And start shoveling.

Because buying the enemies premises and lies might not make you the enemy. But it means you’re giving them a big heap of help.

They can’t win. We can lose by believing their premises and paradigms and applying them to the rebuild.

Bullsh*t is a sucky building material. Let’s not use it.

So think instead of emoting.

I should learn never to say something uploaded to Amazon without a glitch.

I woke up this morning and the paperback version was “publishing” (fingers crossed) BUT the hardcover was punted back because…. sigh the spine lettering was over the fold. No, it was not. It’s just that the frigging bots can’t tell the difference between LETTER and shadow/background around letter.

Weirdly hard to fix, and took me 3 hours. BEHOLD my happy face. (Not.)

I will link here when paper and hardcover become available. (If Drak doesn’t beat me to it per usual.)

Now I’ll write the normal blog post.

H*ll’s Bells (Not H*ll’s Belles, which are the succubi who won the latest beauty contest) people! This is getting in the way of my finishing my story for the next Black Tide antho, dang it.

Grumbling. (A-grumbling she goes, a grumbling she goes. Hey Ho the dairy-oh agrumbling she goes. I might be undercaffeinated and over snarked.)

In some ways, this book has been in the planning stages for ten years.When Noah’s Boy ended, Tom’s dad requested Tomato Soup, i.e. Bowl of Red.

Then, as they say things happened. Mostly my health went South. Baen went in a direction that didn’t allow for this series to continue, not as I had planned it, at least and at the time — being sick — I didn’t have the mental flexibility to change course. (Changing course on a series is hard even if you are healthy.)

All my properties with Baen reverted at the end of 2020. I meant to re-publish everything and continue this and Darkships, but health was really bad and we were moving.

So… as I started improving — I won’t claim to be WELL mind you — and the writing thing came back on line, I fumbled at this series. For a while I thought the world was dead — that is when you are so much not the same writer that you can’t get back to it. (it happens. Sometimes you’ve changed in however long since you wrote that and simply can’t be that writer again. Sometimes in three years, sometimes in twenty. Depends on how close you are to who you were.)

Then I realized no. I’d just got addicted to bigger stories. And heck, a bigger story was teased out in Noah’s Boy.

So I wrote the book I sort of planned to (both start with Kyrie’s kidnapping and her stashing in the Goldport version of Garden of the Gods.) But then it changed. Honestly it required my structural editor to point out since this was Rafiel’s book (POOR RAFIEL) it needed restructuring at the beginning in order not to be a fractured mess. He was right, and even betas who read this twice unprompted told me how much better it read now.

If this works (meaning, if it sells well enough to justify it) there will be another in six months (All Hot) and one six months after that. Yes, I know that’s a long time for indie, but I’m starting another series, and continuing… counts…. six, so, you know.

This cycle can take up to five/ten books and is the beginning of a “we’re fighting for the world and all life on Earth” epic.

Oh, and yes, I’m putting up the paper versions. I had trouble with the covers (yes, probably user errors) probably because still getting over being sick.

Anyway, it’s up tomorrow. and the paper ones might be too. (I’m doing them right after this.)

So… without further ado:

Bowl of Red (The Shifter Series Book 4)

At the top of a tall mountain, there lives a dragon. And the dragon is the master of all animals.
Okay, let’s rewind that. Tom Ormson is a dragon shifter, the scion of a line that was created to rule both Chinese and Norse gods. But he doesn’t want the job. He co-owns a diner with his wife, Kyrie, who is about to deliver their first child.
In fact, they just got married, when the entire shifter-world, which centers on their diner goes insane.
You see, it is a time of Ragnarok, which means all of the shifter clans are in turmoil, with changing leadership. And the lion clan, to which Kyrie belongs has just lost its leader. Also, the Queen of the Norse dragons has woken, and wants a word with the Great Sky Dragon.
Hold on to your hats. A wild ride is about to begin, with Tom, Kyrie and their friends at the center of it.
When it ends, the world will never be the same again.

And how it begins:

1

It had been a dry winter in Colorado, following an exceptionally dry summer and fall. Now at the tail end of December, a dry but freezing wind, carrying particles of ice like an excoriating whip, flung through the streets of the town, making the Christmas decorations dance.

It was almost dark at three pm. Which was good, because in his room, in his parents’ house, in one of the old suburbs of the small mountain town of Goldport Colorado, Rafiel Trall, Officer of the Serious Crime Unit of the Goldport Police Department, lay in uneasy sleep.

It had been busy all through Christmas, mostly make-work as the new Police Chief insisted on “organizing” the force.

He needed a nap. Desperately. He was supposed to be Tom’s best man at Tom and Kyrie’s wedding. He had to be awake and alert.

The howling wind poured into his dreams, turning into baying in his darkly-dreamed night.

In the dark forest, Rafiel, in his lion form, stood in a dark clearing in an impenetrable forest, while around him the snow blew and bit, and thoughts not-his echoed in his mind.

He was vaguely aware of his human body, on his bed, in his cozy book-lined bedroom. But the lion in the dark forest didn’t know it. The lion was all alone, terrified. At any minute, a claw would come from the darkness and flail him. He could feel death and hatred in the darkness he couldn’t see through.

Out of his fear, he decided he had to make a stand. He set all four feet firmly on the spongy, shifting ground. Throwing back his head, he opened his mouth and roared his defiance.

The thin cold air came in through his mouth. Particles of ice penetrated his flesh.

Round about things that weren’t lights, but more like light reflected upon unblinking eyes, ten, a dozen, a thousand, came on, and from the darkness around him, carried round and round by the whipping wind, came the sound of mocking laughter, and words, spoken in a high and thin singsong voice, as if by a deranged child, “Kitty, Kitty, Kitty. Come and be killed.”

The lion jumped and made a yelp-like sound. A claw reached for him– tearing, slicing–

Rafiel woke, up a strangled scream in his throat. He was covered in sweat, and his heart raced, as though he’d run a long time.

There was a knock at the door, and his fiancé, Bea, asked, “Raf? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just a nightmare.” His eyes, adjusting to the scant light in the bedroom, fell on his tux over the chair in the corner. Tom’s wedding–

He looked at the alarm clock on the bedside. An hour. “I’ll shower and get dressed,” he shouted back.

But he felt slow, stupid, and as though that horrible dream meant something terrible would happen. On Tom’s wedding day.

Rafiel shook his head. No. Nothing bad would happen. Rafiel would not let it.

***

Atop one of the highest mountains of the world, there lived a dragon. And the dragon was the most powerful beast in the world, able to listen to – and control – all of the magical animals everywhere.

And the dragon looked nervous as he said to his bride, “Are you sure it will be all right? Closing the diner for a whole hour? The week between Christmas and New Year?”

Kyrie Smith, the dragon shifter’s bride, a panther shifter, and co-owner with the dragon – her very beloved and permanently worried fiancé, Tom Ormson – of The George Diner in downtown Goldport, Colorado smiled while shaking her head, and pulled back a strand of dark curls that had worked free from Tom’s ponytail. “It will be fine, love. It’s just an hour, after lunch hour and before the dinner rush.”

Tom still looked worried. Tom always looked somewhat worried. It was part of what was so endearing about him. But Kyrie had worked hard at blocking the time from three to four pm so that they could get married with a modicum of privacy. The right kind of privacy. Though every table was occupied, it was occupied by their friends – a lot of them from the police department, others, regulars at the diner – and people who mattered to them, not whatever rando might wander in from Fairfax Avenue.

Rafiel Trall, one of Goldport’s finest, and a lion shifter, patted Tom on the shoulder, “Come on. You’ll be fine.”

Rafiel wore a tux, which looked odd to anyone used to seeing him in Hawaiian shirts and white pants or jeans. He was nominally Tom’s best man, not that anyone was getting that formal about it. “It’s actually impossible for the diner to go under in the time it takes Anthony to pronounce you man and wife.”

Tom looked doubtful, and Rafiel smiled. Tom mumbled, “That’s what you say.”

Anthony, server extraordinaire – he’d taught both Kyrie and Tom the trade of table service – stood nervously between the salad station and the corner booth, wearing a dark suit. His wife, Cecily, carrying their son in her arms, periodically ran out to adjust the hang of his coat or dust imaginary hair from his shoulders. The bridal cake, four layers – created by Laura Miller, The George’s baker, who had waved away any attempts at payment – was topped with a plastic couple, created by another diner regular – by bashing gaming figures– and didn’t look particularly like Tom and Kyrie, except for hair color, but were both attired in aprons that read, “The George,” over their bridal clothes.

Kyrie thought that, all in all, it was a very fitting setup. And more than she could ever have hoped for growing up as an orphan without a family or a steady environment.

Conan Lung, dragon shifter, former enemy turned friend, sat at one of the small booths by the window, dressed in the western wear he’d adopted when his country and western singing career had started showing signs of life. He looked a little lost between the ten-gallon hat and the cowboy boots, but no one had the courage to tell him that, and at any rate, his fiancé Rya liked him that way, so what did it matter?

Kyrie herself had just switched her normal jeans, T-shirt, and apron for a short formal dress in ivory. This had been done because everyone else said she should have a wedding dress. It was just that wedding dresses rarely came in maternity sizes, and she was due in two months. Which meant her belly was huge, and sometimes you could see the imprint of a foot as the kid kicked out at the world.

Tom had proposed months ago, but it had taken this long to organize the wedding. And for Kyrie to get over her jitters.

Which was silly, honestly. After all, she and Tom owned a business together and were having a baby together. At this point, marriage was an afterthought, and just a way to make sure everything was legal, should anything happen to one of them. It was just that Kyrie had been alone so long – basically her whole life before Tom – that much as she longed for a family, she was also used to having sole control over her life and hated the idea of relinquishing any of it.

But Bea, the dragon shifter who was dating Rafiel, had come to spend Christmas with his family. And the loose friend group who called the diner their home away from home had come together and told them to get married already.

So. Kyrie took a deep breath, smiling at the crowd around them. So. They were getting married.

Rya and Bea had pinned a short veil over her multicolor-dyed hair. She thought it looked slightly silly, to be honest, but it also seemed strangely formal and traditional. At that moment, she’d stopped being just Kyrie and was now that strange, symbolic creature, “the bride.”

Honestly, she should just have had Tom and his friends kidnap her and call it a wedding. And yes, that idea had been brought up by the trio – Tom, Rafiel, and Conan – and heartily endorsed by Cas, Nick, Jason, and all the other miscreants. They’d probably have done it, except that no one could figure out how to kidnap Kyrie from her home and bring her to Tom’s when they lived together.

Kyrie grinned, remembering the suggestion that they should kidnap her and run around the block three times before bringing her back. In her mind, they were a massed multitude of their shifted forms, dragons and lions and bears, running around carrying a very pregnant woman.

That would surely have given the various cryptozoologists and collectors of weird news something to write about.

Tom gave her an odd look, and she realized her smile must be very strange. She shook her head at him and smiled.

He gave her a dubious once-over as though wondering if she had some secret plan but never said anything because just then, Rafiel came up.

“Come on, bridegroom,” he told Tom. “I don’t want to have to marry your woman. Bea would burn my feet off.”

Tom laughed, and Rafiel pulled Tom towards the front, near Anthony.

Kyrie shook her head again. Bea – probably already dreaming of her own wedding – had choreographed this whole thing. According to the script, Kyrie moved way back to stand near the cash register. Tom’s dad, the only parent in attendance, came up from where he’d been waiting at the door to the annex and gave Kyrie his arm.

Kyrie swallowed a lump in her throat.

She didn’t know who her parents were. She’d been found, newborn, at the door to St. Anne’s Catholic Church, in Charlotte, NC, on Christmas Eve and been raised in the foster system. Tom’s dad had agreed to do the honors.

She couldn’t say Edward Ormson had matured much since the time when he’d been a lawyer working for the triads in New York City, but he’d … grown in different directions.

Tom said that his father was trying very hard to be a good father and prospective grandfather. It was just that he had never really learned how to be an adult, so he mostly got very excited about the idea of being a father or grandfather but really had no idea what that meant. He was already planning the grandkid’s first car but would be shocked if asked to change diapers.

Still, he was the best they had, and it was nice to have a parent with them. Weddings were things that called for family, and mostly their family was of choice, not of blood. Except for Edward. All told, Edward wore a very handsome tuxedo, and with streaks of silver on either side of his head, he looked the part.

Even better, Kyrie thought, he’d stopped showering them with the weirdest baby gifts ever, from little squeaky mouse toys to little nets, which he thought would be necessary since he was quite convinced that Kyrie and Tom’s babies would be born as “kitten-dragons” with wings. Kyrie hoped she had finally got it through his head that the ultrasounds showed a human baby, male variety.

But she’d rather not make any bets. He’d probably give them a sandbox to use as a baby potty. The best way to look at it was to be amused by the man’s insanity and touched by his joy in their relationship. Otherwise, she’d live angry. And he meant well, so it wouldn’t even be fair.

Conan, looking solemn and strangely nervous, struck up the bridal march on the acoustic guitar.

Edward offered her his arm, and she took it. At the last minute, someone – she thought Cas’s ditsy fiancé, ran up and put a bouquet in Kyrie’s free hand.

It was white roses, in a tight, circular arrangement, with a wrapping of lace. Looked homemade but very lovely, and Kyrie felt tears come to her eyes. Heaven only knew where Dyce had found white roses in December. She walked on Edward Ormson’s arm, slowly and solemnly up to the salad station.

Tom turned. He still looked slightly worried but beamed at Kyrie, his blue eyes filling with appreciation.

A ray of sun came out and gleamed off the polished surface of the very expensive fryer that they were still paying for, and which Tom was perpetually worried would explode.

It was going to be all right, Kyrie thought.

She realized her mistake immediately afterward when there was a bang behind her, and a flash of light reflected from the polished metal surface of the salad station.

***

Tom had just thought that Kyrie was the most beautiful bride in the world.

His throat tightened when looking at her, and he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten this lucky. If someone had told the confused youth he used to be that someday he’d own a diner, be the center of a group of devoted friends and marry a gorgeous woman, he’d have thought they were nuts. He was still nervous about the whole baby thing and unsure how to be a father, but as long as he had Kyrie at his side, he would be fine.

And then, as he was looking at his amazing bride making her way from the register to the salad station, something exploded at the door to the diner.

There was a loud bang, a flash of light in his peripheral vision, and, looking up and at the door, a cloud of smoke.

And Tom said words he never thought he’d say on his wedding day. The words were perhaps shocking to the people around them, or at least to those who didn’t know that Tom was a dragon shifter and not the only one in the world, but part of a complex hierarchy of dragon-kind.

The words that reluctantly tore from Tom’s lips were: “Oh, no! Enter the dragon.”

AND for you maniacs who have been waiting for this, from, I THINK chapt three:

The queen screamed, but before she could react, an alligator tail, seemingly coming out of nowhere, hit her midsection.

The Queen of the North stepped back, lost her footing, and went tumbling into the snake cave.

And the alligator tail closed the door.

Kyrie blinked. There was an alligator, wearing the remnants of plastic armor, a plastic Viking helmet, and a fright wig.

“Old Joe?” she said weakly. “But you’re dead.”

Y’all have fun now. I have some publishing to do ;)