Canadian Non-Healthcare a Guest Post By the Balloonatic
A recent medical issue in my family brought the problems with Canadian healthcare to my attention again. My younger brother let us know in April that his wife had an appointment with a cardiologist. She has been having issues for years because one of her valves is opening the wrong way so blood going through is moving away from her heart instead of to her heart. On a positive note, she is now scheduled for open heart surgery at the end of June, which makes it seem that the Canadian healthcare system is moving quickly to take care of her – until you find out that she had to wait over 18 months to see that cardiologist. A quick phone call to one of my local cardiology clinics and their average wait time is 4 to 6 weeks.
This isn’t my first personal experience with how broken socialized healthcare is in Canada. This wasn’t something I noticed when I was younger. My only health issue was with migraines and I had no trouble getting into the doctor who did his best to try various alternative treatments, but there weren’t many of those available in the early 80s and I ended up falling into the trap of pain management with codeine causing an addiction with a feedback loop where my body started to produce more migraines to get more codeine. When I finally was able to break out of the cycle by finally quitting cold turkey, I was able to get the help I needed – counseling and trips to the emergency room for pain relief until I could find other ways to manage the pain.
It wasn’t until I came back to Canada in the mid 90s after an absence of almost 4 years while I studied in Australia that the problems of government run healthcare first caught my eye. While in Australia, I made my living as a street performer making balloon animals (yes, that’s where the nickname came from!). This was a great way to earn a good amount of money in a more limited time frame so I kept this up while finishing my BA in Alberta. I worked through various entertainment agencies, managed to get myself an annual gig at a big festival which covered a good portion of my living expenses for the year, and then busked at a local farmer’s market.
It was at the farmer’s market where I made friends with “Mary”, one of the market’s employees. Mary was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. She could only walk with the assistance of two canes/braces on her arms. We got to talking once and she let me know that the biggest issue was with her hips, where the joints had deteriorated. She had gone to several specialists and they let her know that the only option to help her would be to have both of her hips replaced. This doesn’t seem like a big deal sitting in my room in Ohio – hip replacements are fairly common. For Mary, though, this decision wasn’t just between her and her doctor or her insurance. It was up to the healthcare bureaucrats to decide when someone is allowed to have hip surgery. And their decision was that she didn’t qualify because she was too young. If she got hip surgery now, in her mid 20s/early 30s why she would need to have it done again in 30 years. So, better for her to wait until she’s older when she would only need to get it done once. I must say, that was a real eye-opener for me and brought up the problems of healthcare by committee when the focus is on saving taxpayers money and limiting healthcare rather than on putting the focus on treating and healing people.
This came home to me again several years later. In 1999 I was living in Saskatchewan, doing an internship program when I got sick – more sick than I had ever been in my life. I was aching all over, had severe chills and zero energy. It was all I could do to pull a pre-heated meal out of the freezer and microwave it. I finally called someone to take me to the hospital when I started having trouble breathing and began hyperventilating in panic and got admitted to the hospital. I recently found paperwork on this when I was cleaning up my attic and going through my visa applications to find that the doctors had admitted me for panic attacks. I spent a week in the hospital, hooked up to an IV while they had me blow into a plastic tube with a ping pong ball, and I couldn’t make the ball move up. That was the sum of their treatment. Finally, in frustration and desperation, I booked myself out of the hospital. My adopted grandmother sent me a plane ticket to come back to stay with her and her husband. I was so weak when the plane landed that I had to ask for help to depart, and they took me out in a wheelchair. My grandmother later said that she looked at me in the arrivals section of the airport and thought I was going to die. I was lucky, though – I had a great family doctor in Edmonton who saw me right away, got me in for x-rays and discovered that I had had a version of the flu that lead to a type of pneumonia which was viral rather than bacterial. She prescribed the right medications and while it took months, I did recover. This taught me that I couldn’t depend on a medical system or doctors to help me when I need it – I had to push for my own care and proper treatment, because the public system doesn’t want to make the effort to do more than the absolute minimum.
There are many more examples I could provide – my uncle, a quadruple bypass survivor ended up in the emergency department of a hospital again in the 2020s with heart problems. He went in on a Friday and didn’t get to see a cardiologist until the following Monday because the only cardiologist available at the hospital in a town of over 166000 people was on holidays and they had to fly one in from the nations capital to see him. My 87 year old father experienced a similar issue last year, when he went into emergency because he was light-headed and dizzy. He went in at night and it took 8 hours for him to see a doctor because they didn’t have any actual doctors in the emergency department at night – he spent that whole time sitting in the waiting room. At least he is more fortunate than one of his old buddies from work who developed cancer and spent the last three months of his life lying in a hospital room with 12 other men. Or the father of one of my childhood friends who also developed cancer and could not get proper pain management treatment so he chose to use the MAID program instead – which is a whole other blog post. Canada: where they would rather kill you than heal you.
The horror stories abound and are never ending. When I go in for my next annual check up and see my doctor, I will thank him once again for being available even at short notice when my son or I need to see him and for the way he does push me to get preventative care and go for tests to make sure that any health care issues are taken care of and not left to grow worse from lack of care. While yes, I may sometimes have bills that seem much too high (Thanks again, Obama!), I will take those bills over the alternative of a “free” system paid by higher taxes where the focus is on saving money over saving lives.
*ANNOUNCEMENT: I forgot to put this in yesterday evening’s post: If you have a blog and occasionally do reviews, or if you review for a professional venue, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com and I’ll send you the link to download the e-arc. Needless to say no obligation of a review. Also, for the record, soliciting reviews and help promoting, because frankly I suck at the marketing thing.)
My finally getting the books up for pre-order yesterday is not an isolated event in terms of writers who have been silent or nearly so suddenly having new properties. Mostly authors to the right of Lenin, mind.
I’ll confess this makes me a little uncomfortable. It brings to mind all my lefty colleagues in the early oughts claiming they couldn’t write, because they were so busy purging and tearing out their hair over the horrible reich wing dictatorship of…. W.
Yes, I’m fairly sure they are engaged in similar antics now over Trump. I don’t know for a fact, because I haven’t been part of their circles and email lists since oh 2015. I’ll be honest, I still belong to a few of their groups — those that haven’t imploded — under the principle that I lurk and am very quiet, so they probably don’t remember I’m there. The other side of this is that I don’t remember I’m there. I mean, guys, why should I, precisely? I can watch their histrionics in real time on twitter and facebook. And… I don’t. I stumble on them periodically and go “Oh, no. Not that again.” Because the principal emotion evoked through all this is “It’s all so tiresome.”
Which I think is more to the point than our purging and tearing out our hair over losing an election. No. The last four — arguably twelve — years have been silence-inducing for completely different reasons.
And it took me a while to figure out why, and a while longer to conceptualize it, but I think I should share the thoughts — still half formed — in my head as I grapple with this, because I think a lot of you who are not writers might be facing the same issue… with modifications.
The other day, in a small(ish) discord group I belong to, a friend mentioned something about the newest Strange New Worlds having a character fall on knees and pray and how unimaginable this would have been 5 years ago. She meant it as a “taking the temperature of the culture” thing. Which is correct, but it’s more than that. Put a pin in it; we’ll come back.
Her mentioning this made me realize how profoundly I’ve — personally — changed in 5 years. I haven’t become someone else. All the principal impulses were there five years ago. But the unthinkable happened, and I tumbled with it. And like rocks in a tumbler, it changed me in significant ways, making things obvious that were occluded and in a way making me possibly harder and smoother.
And what five years it has been. Guys, if in 2018 you’d told me that — I’m sorry, I still think this was the reason — as a ploy to make us all dependent on government and scared and tank the economy to “win” the 2020 election, the democrats would lock the entire country down for a bad flu and run a scam on how this was the next black plague that would cause Europe to also lock down and be terrified? I’d have told you that while weed was legal in Colorado, you should definitely put the bong down and go breathe some fresh air.
And if you’d told me that after all this they would still need to fraud the election at the last minute, visibly, in front of G-d and everybody? I’d have been hitting that speed dial for the men in white coats which no longer exist in our society.
And yet… And yet it happened. And yet, we were locked down, and people were terrified, despite the fact that numbers like the Diamond Princess were out and clearly demonstrated this wasn’t even an existential threat for the over 80 set, unless truly horrific treatment protocols were engaged. (And they were. Most of that group died of respirator setting.)
Because it was unthinkable, (both in here and in Europe, TBH) and yet it happened and kept happening, it broke things in our brains. And the fracture lines are still shaking up inside each of us, and in society as well.
On that pin: yes, a lot of people — self included — have become more religious. Note, I am still me. I think I have more atheist friends than religious friends. And I don’t engage in battles, anyway. Particularly not in what I call “beating over the head with Bible verses.” If they don’t believe, that will just make them puzzled or upset. I know, because my own particular branch of Christianity is often beaten over the head with Bible verses by people who think they’re “owning” us, while we have our own interpretations of those verses, so at best our reply is “First of all, rude.”
Which is what argumentum ad Bibliorum (Yes, that is in fact son of bitch Latin) is at the best of times.
But my tolerance for religion in my entertainment has gone up. Oh, you can still drive me bonkers with the average “Christian novel” because the characters stopping every fifty pages to pray, or wondering if G-d wants them to kill the bad guy feels phony and tacked on. However, a character, in an extremity of feeling falling to knees and praying? Yeah, I can see that. 2020, man. 2020.
To be fair, I always had a high tolerance for religious characters, whatever their religion, even if it was a fictional one. Sincerely religious people exist and their beliefs is part of how they process events. It’s just that few people write them/wrote them convincingly.
Will that change? I don’t know. I would suspect so, from internal changes and also how I see people around me changing.
But the change is not all, or even primarily religious. Though it is ideological, personality, enormous.
First there is the sudden doubt of everything experts say, but more importantly everything they’ve said over the last oh 100 years.
While this is good — “scientific government” has been a disaster for the world at large and filled over a hundred million graves — it is also bad, because some things are actually true, established, and can be scientifically proven (Say the germ theory of disease) but now face a much bigger cliff to convince people.
There is also high skepticism of institutions and elected — and even more non-elected — leaders. Look, you’re not going to get me to admit there is a downside here. I’m still a libertarian. An OWL (Older, Wiser Libertarian) sure, but still a libertarian (And I miss L. Neil Smith something fierce.)
Our institutions by an large have been so corrupted by Marxists and Marxism-light that we really need to topple them and replace them. The problem is that second. We really need to make with the replacing, because we still need their functions to work. Take higher education — please? I don’t want it — it desperately needs a complete overall, not in style but in substance. Yes, yes, the founding fathers, in a society that moved by ox cart, thought well of universities which were logical successors of monastic learning.
But in the 21st century? 99% or more of the learning done at universities could and arguably should be accomplished either long distance or by formal apprenticeships, with perhaps a year (tops) in localized learning and communal discussion. TOPS.
Replacing that properly (not just changing the ideological sign which will accomplish nothing) will require breaking our heads out of the mold of centuries. It might be achievable now, after the shocks of the last few years, but it will still take time and (arguably) hurt like a mother.
In the meantime, in upper education as well as everything else, frankly, everything is going to be adrift.
And each country in its own way is clinging like mad to its fundamentals. In the US that’s fairly decent but — looks sideways at Europe — guys, you know what Europe gets up to when we’re not smacking it on the nose…
The point being, though, everything is tumbling. Or to quote the great Leonard Cohen:
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions Won’t be nothing Nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard, the blizzard of the world Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul
In the middle of this, those of us who write feel sucker punched, unable to hold onto a coherent vision of society long enough to actually write books.
Look, until last year I felt iffy about the shifter books because they take place in a diner and I didn’t know how to deal with the lockdowns. I still don’t, except mentioning them in the rearview mirror, honestly. And how do I deal with the fact that all night open diners now seem to be a thing of the past everywhere? (Something I will never forgive the bastards who locked us down for. There was nothing like coffee at two am in an urban greasy spoon (okay, fine, Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax) to plot and clear one’s head.) I still don’t know!
But I’d guess, because outside the books I still feel a bit punch drunk, that the rest of you are going through a version of this, that this is universal and contributing to strange events with strange outcomes that keep the feeling of everything tumbling going.
In a way we’re like someone married for 50 years who is suddenly served divorce papers and then finds their spouse has had two other relationships going the whole time. Finding out what was true, what was a lie, and reestablishing our sense of self is difficult and mind-breaking.
And yet, here we are.
I’m glad I’m writing again. For those still stuck, let me advise you might have to force it in the beginning — I did stating around February last year — and find a support group to cheer you on (thank you to the terrible triplets of twitter — all different ages and looks — who kept me going. And their auxiliary corps like Fuzzy.) And if you can, if your writing field allows it, go as strange and far flung as you can. Another world, for choice.
If you’re not a writer, my advice is what I said before, but still useful.
1- Be kind to yourself. I know it’s five years, but five years is not too long to get used to the impossible happening. Give yourself grace. Give yourself time. Do something for yourself at least once a week. Carve some place and time to breathe and relax if you can. And forgive yourself for stumbles. You’re punch drunk in a world of punch drunks. Slips will happen.
2- Start figuring out how to replace compromised institutions, processes, ways of doing things. I don’t know your field, so I can’t tell you what needs changing. But I seriously encourage you to approach it from a “Do we even need the way this has been done for centuries? What if I turn it on its head?” Yes, some of the things are still needed/valid. But the processes have all changed. So examine each of the precursors first.
That’s it. Most of all, truly, give yourself grace.
No, you shouldn’t have known how to cope when the world broke. No one expected the world to break.
Now that it has, glue yourself together as you best can, and keep going.
Secure your oxygen mask before assisting those near you.
For those of you who aren’t old Baen fans (or fans of Baen for a long time) I suppose I should explain what e-arcs are.
So in the days when the mammoths roamed the Earth — 30 years ago or so — the main mode of publicizing an upcoming work was the ARC, aka the Advanced Reading copy. whenever a publishing house had a hot — or lukewarm, or cold. The difference was in the number of ARCs printed — book to push, they would print a bunch of these.
They were distinguished by having cardboard covers with no images, just the Title, author’s name and Advanced Reading Copy, not for resale. (I need to write about the resale, and why giving resale rights in ebooks is the road to ruination. Even if we do, by default, because how not? I think I’ll do that for MGC on Wednesday.) The pages inside were an unnatural white.
This is why experienced indies print their books in cream paper, btw. The bright white pages are off putting, unless it is non-fiction for some reason.
Anyway, these copies were dispatched to any reviewers you thought might put in a good word, friends of the author who might tell their fanbase about it, and in desperation just complete strangers whose address you happened to have.
Since I was in SFWA at the time, and had put my address on it, I’d get a few of these a month, most of them not even vaguely interesting. Or worse, interesting, but what to do with them after you read them and bought the book?
I might or might not have done walk-bys of those free-book bookshelves outside the local bookstores, put them in little libraries, etc. I have never stuck them in random cars with their windows down. They were not zucchini after all.
Anyway, I THINK Baen started electronic ARCs, because they were the first house to go into ebooks full force. (I read Baen ebooks on a used electronic planner I bought at the thrift store. Well, I had better eyes back then. Needed them, as the screen was sickly green.)
Anyway, I don’t remember when Jim had the brain storm of selling the e-arcs. He sold you the manuscript as the writer sent it in, typos and scenes that weren’t quite right and all. But it came out months before the book, and gave the people who bought them bragging rights.
I remember a Liberty con in which John Ringo reminisced about Jim Baen’s joy at how well they sold “Oh, Johnny, Johnny, it’s like watching the sheep shear themselves.” (If you don’t hear that in John’s voice it’s not my fault. It was very funny.)
Anyway, I’m not really aiming to sell them, but I’ve been looking for things to give my substack subscribers: see links at the top on the right. Because I got caught in this book and my health went weird and I kept forgetting to post.
Yesterday I posted the link to download e-arcs of No Man’s Land, Volume 1. They are actually pretty finished, save for some awkward wording and my usual fun with typos.
Why volume 1, you ask? Well, because each of three volumes is about 300 pages, printed. There’s no way I could print this as a single book, unless I set it in a type even zoomers will have problems reading.
So I am putting it out in three volumes, two weeks apart. Today I set up the pre-order for volume one. It comes out September 10. And then volume 2 and three each two weeks after the first.
Meanwhile the first volume is out in earc, and the second comes out in two weeks, the other two weeks after.
After that, Witch’s daughter e-arc should be ready to go. (I’m going to restart serializing it.) It tells you how well — not — my brain was working that I was very upset because I was serializing at substack but didn’t realize that they didn’t keep access to the archives easily, and there was no way for the to set up a unified page of what went before.
Of course the solution to that, which I’ll implement tomorrow, is to have a secret page here, and put the code to sign on to that page over in substack. (Derp, right?)
The other thing hopefully coming soon ((ish) It needs to be done this week but I owe younger son detailed outlines for the series we’re collaborating in, so that will eat some large portion of tomorrow, and there’s still doctor appointments this week) is that I’ll set up a shop with shopify so I can sell my own books both print and ebook, and other merch, book and not book related. (Look, I want to do calendars. And planners. And….)
Eventually that shop will “Stock” earcs, but today is not that day. Mind you, I’m not allergic to money, so if one or more of you wants to pay me 6.99 (it will be 4.99 on amazon) for getting the book early, I’ll be more than happy to sell it to you, and the sequel in 2 weeks and the next 2 weeks after that. So, the third one will be out well before the first officially comes out.
If you desperately need the e-arc, send me 6.99 via paypal. And shoot me an email to bookpimping at outlook dot com (because my hotmail eats emails) so I know where to send it. (Turns out paypal won’t let me see it easily, and what I see doesn’t always work.)
And if you don’t… well, know it’s coming in September. (I didn’t quite make the August deadline. I probably could force it but don’t want to give my copyeditor a headache.)
So, yay, things are happening again. Go over to Amazon and poke around and read the blurb! (And yes, I’m releasing wide, and hopefully selling in my own store as well.)
I’ve spent the weekend (and honestly the end of last week) under a rock with the manuscript for NML (the earc for volume 1 is out, btw. Post about this later.) so I’m not writing about Tulsi’s revelations on Friday.
I read them again this morning, and one thing jumps out at me: the use of the word “Treason”. As Charlie Martin has explained on X this has a very specific meaning in US constitutional terms: It means cooperating (Aiding and abetting) an enemy at open (shooting) war with the US.
Is Tulsi using the word loosely? Did none of her advisors point out the meaning? Or is she using it advisedly? What war were we involved in? Well…. Afghanistan. Eyes the ignominious retreat….
This stuff seems more solid than it’s been, though I’ll point out to Cynical Publius that at least for me the “Big Mike” thing was never a serious conspiracy. I don’t know if it was for anyone, but certainly not most people. (Unlike the French who are deadly serious about Mrs. Macron.) I think it was just our way of pushing back on Michelle Obama’s stunning beauty and style when in fact she was a “fairly decent looking” woman about my age. I’d like to think with her resources I’d look better. I’m probably wrong, but hey, I’d probably look about the same. Anyway selling her as the most stunning and well dressed woman ever was a serious attempt at gaslighting.
(Her sense of style reminds me of P. J. O’Rourke’s description of the sense of style of Russian oligarch wives: cover yourself in Elmer’s glue, then roll through the boutiques on Rodeo Drive.)
The “Big Mike” thing was our way of rattling the cage bars right back.
But the rest…. yeah.
Now, I’ve read Mike Walsh screaming that none of this matters unless there are indictments. I’m not sure he’s right.
Unless Tulsi really means that “treason” and has the receipts on that (in which case we’re in “hanged by the neck” territory, guys and … scary times ahead) it might be better, instead of arrests that while they aren’t will give the appearance of revenge, to expose Obama very thoroughly and make it so he can’t hold up his head in public anywhere.
For him, and those with him, that is literally a punishment worse than death.
But this post is to say: I’m taking the 48 hour BUSINESS DAY rule. Because none of this, right now, makes any sense in my head. I’ll wait till the contents under pressure settle.
However, I figured you guys needed some time to discuss it, and a place, and I’ll let you do that.
The one thing I’m already sure of is that all the people who idolized Obama need to go on their knees to Nixon’s grave and apologize.
Anyway, I’m going back to the day job (fiction, guys, fiction) and give you a chance to arggle bargle on this thread.
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo,please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months(unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
iktaPOP Media proudly presents three classic westerns by pulp author Robert J. Horton!
Rider o’ the Stars
When he was hired on to the Diamond H Ranch, the stranger gave his name as Dane. After seeing his skill with rope and gun folks started calling him “Lightning Dane”.
Was he a gunman? An outlaw? Why was he here? Nobody knew except Dane himself. And he wasn’t talking.
The Prairie Shrine
Annalee Bronson and her mother left everything behind when her father died, setting out to homestead in the prairielands of Montana. But being from the east, they simply don’t have the experience to cope with all the circumstances they find themselves caught up in.
Luckily, prairie poet and loafer Andy Sawtelle and mysterious gunman Silent Scott are more than willing to lend a helping hand.
The Man of the Desert
It starts with a stampede, and never lets up from there!
This iktaPOP Media omnibus includes introductions by indie editor and author D. Jason Fleming putting the book into historical and genre context.
Remember How It Began is the first volume in a pair of linked stories. It details the opening missions of the most complex operation The Project had ever attempted, how they did it and the price the agents paid along the way.
The Project had been in The Trade for five years, as mercenaries and spies fighting in the sideshows and forgotten theatres of the Cold War. Things changed over those years. Opponents changed. Circumstances changed. And the lives of the intelligence agents, the “Disposable People” of The Project, had changed.
Gary Keith had become an essential part of The Project. He was one of the linchpin men around whom The Project built teams of agents and operators. When a dirty job had to get done right, he got the call. The problem was, he was so good at being bad because he’d been David Cox: shameless, ruthless and entirely willing to be deadly and manipulative to get the job done.
The capper to Siobhan Miller’s terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day was a dog, tied to the stop sign. She hates dogs. She’s terrified of dogs, and that was a big dog. Looking sad and lonely, tied to a stop sign. That was not okay. She was the only one around, so she took him home. Only to find that he wasn’t a dog, but one of the Good People, under a curse. And there were more of them.
And they were all after her. And all she had was the dog (who wasn’t a dog) to help keep her from being taken away from all she’s ever known. Because that dog? He and his twin sister are family that she didn’t know she had, and their appearance has upended everything she’s ever known about herself. Including that she was human to begin with. She has a lot of questions.
Starting with curses, and how and why they sometimes spread.
Most of my writing is in a series people seem to enjoy but there is a constant small crowd who say: I’d really like your take on an alien invasion story. Well this is for them. The bulk of the aliens come to Earth stories assume their vast superiority, sometimes invincibility. Sometimes they suddenly appear on the white house lawn dictating terms. I have yet to see one with them appearing at the Kremlin or Canberra which seems rather parochial. Other times they are so advanced they quarantine the Earth or Solar System without discussion because we are such barbarian slime-balls. They may alternately be impossible to talk to and attack without mercy. All these assume they come with a plan and the means to carry it out. Our own age of exploration showed things happen much less orderly. Islands and natives were happened upon while seeking someplace else or even because a storm or miscalculation left the ship lost. In that case there is no plan but survival with the assets at hand. As with any game remember that turnabout is fair play.
Almost Curable’s fourteen short stories take you on a journey to equal few others. There are fantasies, like a long-dormant guardian waking to save a lost boy; or a luckless medieval princess finding her destiny; or even an angel helping a tech nerd fight off the devil, and then there are nightmares, from a steampunk adventure in which the characters have to face a literal dragon, and where dark elf ancestry can brand you for life. Or a land of living sugar slowly losing its fight with evil. There are cautionary tales, like the one of the fully automated bio grocery store, or the one about AI watching your children. And then then there are stories we don’t know what to do with — and doubt you will either — such as the one about the zombie dinosaur who is too cute to put down. Enjoy a journey of adventure and wonder through these amazing stories.
A wizard must produce justice enough to satisfy a dragon. A young man tries to rob a tiger’s lair. An enchantress tries to keep a court safe while they ignore the perils of misusing her magic. A lady finds that court intrigues can spread even to the countryside. And more tales. Includes “Over the Sea To Me,” “Dragonfire and Time”, “The Maze, the Manor, and the Unicorn”, “The White Menagerie”, “The Dragon’s Cottage,” “Jewel of the Tiger,” and “The Sword Breaks.”
Alain de Kerauille wants to be a knight more than anything in the world, to win as many jousting tournaments as he can, become wealthy and famous, and gain the hand of the fair lady Emma. As a squire in a noble household, he’s well on his way to success, and when he’s chosen to joust in a celebratory tournament, all of his dreams seem within his grasp. Until his rivalry with a fellow squire reaches the boiling point, threatening to destroy everything Alain has worked for and send his future crashing down around him.
AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.
Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.
This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.
The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.
The Columbian Exposition has transformed Chicago into a vision of the bright shining future. However, the electric lights that turn night to day bring no joy to Kitty Hawthorne, and not just because they are the work of her employer’s chief rival. Now Edison wants her to abandon her investigation of Tesla’s alternating current system and look into a mysterious newcomer. Who is Samuel Gillian, who devises calculating machinery as easily as he builds flying machines?
Transform into a shape-shifting dragon? Complicated. Run a successful diner? Even harder. Fall in love? Now that’s really testing Tom Ormson’s self-control.
Between managing a temperamental new fryer and his budding romance with fellow shifter Kyrie Smith, Tom’s plate is already full. But when a vengeful sabre-tooth tiger stalks into town and an ancient dragon starts playing matchmaker, his carefully balanced life threatens to spiral out of control. Add in a string of mysterious murders at the local amusement park, and a lovestruck ex-triad dragon with country music aspirations, and Tom’s having the week from hell—literally.
Now Kyrie’s been kidnapped, and Tom must race against time to save her while keeping his inner dragon in check. Because eating the bad guys? Definitely bad for business.
Welcome to Noah, Colorado, where the supernatural meets the everyday, and young love comes with teeth, claws, and the occasional bout of spontaneous combustion.
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.
The reason for fundraising and the reason bloggers on the right in general should fundraise: Every blogger to the right of Lenin has paid the price in career, in wealth, in prospects. And that keeping us poor and meek is a great way to serve as a warning to others who would speak out. If you want to nullify the “warning,” consider donating. Thank you to everyone who has donated. If you wish to donate: The Give Send Go is still active. There is also paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) a couple years ago because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)
So, here’s the paypal link. While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available: Sarah A. Hoyt Goldport Press 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107 (Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out another place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And if you want to give me physical stuff, it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)
If you’re a substack subscriber and wish to continue subscribing, please do so. There will be earcs tomorrow. Spoiler: There were no earcs today. Look, the book is finished. I just ALWAYS consistently forget how long formatting takes. Also, tbf my formatting program invents new glitches EVERY BOOK.
Tomorrow, I SWEAR. I’m going to get my butt to bed, get up tomorrow and finish formatting the earc. Then entering changes so my long-suffering copy editor (like my typos aren’t enough) actually get the manuscript she’d made room for on… Monday. SIGH.
So, Once Great Britain is going to grant the vote to sixteen year olds.
Upon reading this a friend pointed out it was the opposite of the reason to give the vote to eighteen year olds. After all, eighteen year olds could drink, get married, go to war, but not vote.
I’ll note since that justification was brought up, eighteen year olds have lost the right to drink. And the fact that they lost it because supposedly their brains aren’t yet fully developed must, of necessity, cause one’s eyebrows to go up in questioning wonder. So, their brains aren’t fully developed, but they’re developed enough to vote? Of course, it makes us wonder about the other things too.
There is something to that brain thing, btw, but maybe not as much as we’d like to think. More on that later.
Meanwhile, of course, sixteen year olds can’t do any of that, and I believe in Europe must be enrolled by law in public education. They can’t have jobs. But oh, yeah, sure, let’s let them vote.
The truth in fact is that the impulse towards giving younger and younger people the vote, be they 18 year olds back then or 16 year olds now is a pet project of the left worldwide and it’s in pursuit of the same thing: people too naive and ignorant to know the leftist project has brought nothing but misery and death to this weary old world.
And while at it I’ll admit my immediate reaction was that eighteen was also too young to write, but that’s not actually true.
The actual truth is that any age is too young to vote if it is treated as the age at which you suddenly become an adult.
Adult is not something that happens when you hit a magical birthday. Be it 12 or 16 or 18 or even 21.
Heinlein mentioned decades ago that the problem for the law and who got to vote was distinguishing between forty year old children and 12 year old adults. He wasn’t wrong, as rare as those are. And without some test, we cannot, and the test needs to be absolutely unbiased.
So for voting we use an age delimitation at which “it is most likely people can.”
Unfortunately this leads us to think of the magical age, when people become able to do xyz.
In point of practice, what that has encouraged is not letting people do anything that would prepare them for the responsibilities of adulthood before that age. No living alone, no signing contracts, even trivial ones, no — and this is very important — working at all. Because that would somehow taint their childhood.
Okay, technically at least in some US states, people under eighteen can work. It’s just that in most of them the paperwork necessary to enable that job is more than anyone is going to brave, and the restrictions on the work more than any employer will want to deal with.
In the end, that is the problem. Not the age of voting. Not the age at which you’re magically “an adult.”
The problem is that if we pin our “they’re now adult” ideas to 18 or 21 or even, who knows, 35, in our minds that becomes the magical age of adulthood, and before that we must protect people from EVERYTHING that we’d protect a two year old for.
Adulthood is not a function of age or development. It’s a function of practice. Heck, when I first got married I spent the first year having anxiety attacks we’d suddenly be unable to pay our rent. Meanwhile my husband who had lived on his own for years took it in stride and was faintly amused by my terrors. (We are almost exactly the same age. He’s three months older.)
In the same way, my children were perfectly poised taking part in panels or speaking in public at 20 because they’d been doing it since their mid-teens, while I was a basket case at 35.
It is practice. Adulthood is when you can shoulder your own responsibilities, be on your own, and take the find out for your effing around. And getting there means failing a bunch of times before you shoulder it and stand under it. (And even then at times, you cry in the night and really wish someone was coming to save you.)
Look, I don’t have an answer for how to do this. There is an inherent difficulty in testing when people are ready to do X.
Take sexual maturity: people are sexually mature long before they can understand relationships or that relationships have consequences. Or even that older, more mature people can be unscrupulous perverts. So, changing age of consent to age of sexual maturity is a problem. On the other hand wrapping the kids in cotton to the age of thirty or so (just in case someone takes advantage of someone) gets us the authors of regencies having the gentleman ask the lady for “affirmative consent” before kissing her. (You only wish I were making it up.)
Yes, you can mitigate this by teaching young people that sex has consequences, and that there is no such thing as consequence-free sex. But then you run into the “if only everyone” fallacy. Because never is EVERYONE going to teach it, or be capable of learning it.
For something more nebulous take drinking alcohol. We’re told that people drinking alcohol before 21 will impair their brain development in some horrible way.
As someone from a generation and a country where I could drink if I could toddle up to the counter and ask for it, and where wine was part of the daily meal and Port Wine part of special days, I don’t think my brain is any less capable or developed than the brains of younger generations. Heck, until recently, mom told half joking of how while pregnant with me she had craved bread soaked in read wine and eaten a vast quantity of it every day. (Yes, sounds revolting to me too. Sounded revolting to her also, but not while pregnant.) Since this was not high-octane wine, I don’t seem to have suffered any bad effects from it. Meanwhile if you’re a woman your doctor will label you alcoholic if you confess to having one glass of wine a day with dinner. (No, I don’t. We couldn’t afford it so long I got out of the habit. BUT a friend made the mistake of answering that answer seriously.) And this is for full adults. Could we allow children to have wine now and then under their parents’ supervision? Probably. Would there be bad effects? Only if the parents are heinous, and if the parents are heinous, they’re getting it now.
I don’t have a perfect answer. As close to one as I can get it is that we should let people work if they’re able to. We should let people escape the public education gulag as soon as they can prove a certain level of competency, whether or not they’ve reached the magical age. (Yes, this will be abused. And? Can’t be worse than the high rate of illiteracy we have now, to be honest.)
And we should let people vote when they’ve paid their own bills and held down a paying position for a year. Regardless of age.
Until then, we are giving the vote younger and younger to people less and less prepared to vote. Or live.
Let the kids grow up. Most of them are trying to — desperately — but right now, short of becoming entrepreneurs, we make it impossible for them to support themselves or do what adults do: pay their own way.
Until the magical day when we expect them to automagically do all of it. Without training.
Batty BLOG FUNDRAISER 2025
Let’s get the bats out of the way, shall we? feel free to ooh and ahhhh
Pleased to meet you. Hope you like my bats!
Moving right along…
This is the final day but one of blog funding.
The reason for fundraising and the reason bloggers on the right in general should fundraise:
There is also paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) a couple years ago because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)
While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available:
Sarah A. Hoyt
Goldport Press
304 S Jones Blvd #6771
Las Vegas, NV 89107
(Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out another place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And if you want to give me physical stuff, it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)
If you’re a substack subscriber and wish to continue subscribing, please do so. There will be earcs tomorrow.
Here I feel I must explain: No Man’s Land is FINISHED. It is also very very long. So I’m publishing it starting mid-September, in three volumes, published 2 weeks apart for the sake of the Amazon Algorithm. Starting in September allows me to put out the complete book as an omnibus (ebook format only, or the print will have to be tiny) in December. By which point there will be three volumes out.
Anyway, I will release e-arc of Volume one tomorrow, Volume two in two weeks, Volume three in another two weeks. The volumes are not stand-alone but thirds of a long story. In the meantime, the volumes will be going to the copyeditor, one by one.
Anyway, I have started the second story — The Ghost in the Ruby — but it will have to compete with my finishing other things such as Witch’s Daughter and Rhodes to Hell and the two, two Dyce books. Let’s see how many I can have out by Christmas, shall we?
So…. I guess that’s the other part of the funding. And we’ll see how it goes.
Oh, yeah. doctor’s appointment today: Thyroid is off again. Prescription has been increased.
Three other appointments remain, the first next week. I’m also in the middle of the largest auto immune outbreak since we left Colorado. I presume because of all the travel last month. If that’s the case, it should calm down soon.
Okay, that undersells it. I know many of you are flat on the floor, kicking and screaming “I was promised arrests.”
I understand. In my mind I’m doing exactly the same thing. And in my emotions it makes perfect sense. We went through Obama’s years, seeing things get worse and worse as they piled corruption on corruption and made it more and more unlikely we’d ever have our country back as a constitutional republic. Then we had four years under Trump with the nonsense of Russia! Russia! Russia! and all the other fake emergencies, distractions and attacks, and nothing happened. And then 2020. My LORD 2020. The entire insanity, the gaslighting of an entire nation, the abuse of power, all of it so they could get away with the myriad open fraud events during the election.
Then came the four years of the Bidentia, with an obviously demented man who wasn’t any good even before he was demented (wrong on every issue) supposedly in charge, and a gaggle of the most radical Obama followers making decisions that amounted to the destruction of America. I mean, it’s not like they were hiding it. Their pro-open borders protesters kept saying “No border, no wall, no America at all.”
Sure they didn’t get everything they wanted, but I don’t need to tell you — you went through it with me — that it got pretty dark there for a while. Pretty d*mn dark. Between monetization sites trying to enforce what speech you could engage in, social media sites were silencing us, heck, Biden tried to install a “disinformation” czar not to allow any speech that they didn’t approve of.
Of course you want perpwalks. You saw the evil doers dancing in front of your eyes while violating every law, every civilized restraint. Of course you do.
Because it’s been six months, and the world isn’t completely made anew.
Read that sentence again. It’s been six months. Okay, six and a half.
The administration is working with a severely corrupted apparatus that has distorted our every institution, inserted itself in every investigation, and makes it impossible to do anything without fighting them every.step.of.the.way.
Six months. Okay, almost seven.
I’m sorry, it’s not a lot. It’s not a lot even if they weren’t trying to work with the equivalent of a computer infected with a virus.
I think part of the demand for the Epstein list is coming from this frustration. We want to see something being done and someone punished, and it’s been six whollllllle months.
Part of it too was the first electric month of the presidency, with Doge scaring everyone on the left, and finding more and more corruption. We got addicted to the high.
Guys, that is not how lasting change is made. It just isn’t. Even the stuff done against us wasn’t that fast. (And fortunately the stuff Biden tried to do, by and large didn’t work at all.)
Again, I must remind you that we are extremely online. And we are political addicts. We know everything that happened, and we’re outraged about all the crimes. Most people aren’t either of those. And when and if there are arrests, it will need to be made clear what caused them and also that the trials are impartial.
If we just replace their unjust persecution with our own, we just set up a cycle in which we alternate between triumph and revenge and the country will be destroyed. The worst thing we can do is appear to the country in general to be unjust and dogmatic.
Yes, I know we aren’t. You know we aren’t. But the point is that to move without proof, absolute proof that stands before the world, we will appear to be.
This is the same reason Trump hasn’t completely ignored the utterly ludicrous orders from every federal judge and his sixth cousin. It would be too easy for the apparatus of the left, still in place, to convince people that he’s a dictator and ignoring “the law.”
Instead, these judicial oversteps are getting cleaned, one by one, by the supreme court. Yes, it’s slow. But it’s effective.
In the same way, other things are being rolled back. Heck, the BBB has a poison pill for the entire make the young massively indebted to make sure beardo the weirdo has a university job deal. Things are moving. Slowly but surely, a lot of crap that has held the Republic down, some of it going back to FDR’s “New Deal” is being overturned.
All this while dealing with enemies inside the apparatus of state and an adversarial official cultural establishment, and the chaos abroad left by the Bidentia.
Is everything perfect? No. Does this look like paradise? It’s still the same Earth with the same flawed humans.
Do I agree with every step of everything the administration is doing? Guys, I don’t agree with everything I’m doing half the time.
But they are doing an awful lot. If not everything I’d like them to. And their priorities are the right ones. First of all, and most important of all, we need to clean our election system. The rest will be easier after.
So are we going to get perp walks? Maybe. In the fullness of time. Some. Perhaps.
If the evidence hasn’t been completely destroyed while in the previous administration’s custody. If it isn’t being destroyed now by the underlings that are in the grip of critical theory they learned in college. If —
We might get some perp walks. Maybe.
They probably won’t be the biggest of the evil doers. And if we do get some of them, it will be for what we can get actual proof of. So, you know, not, say, corrupting our election system, but mortgage fraud. There is a reason we got Al Capone for tax evasion, after all. The evidence of bigger crimes is always more carefully obscured.
Yes, this frustrates me at a level I have trouble articulating.
I understand it frustrates you too.
However, we must have — how was it that Tom Jefferson put it almost 250 years ago? Oh, yeah, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. — and make it clear that our grievances are just. And if we can manage to get it through without the war that Tom and his buddies ended up in.
Yeah, yeah, I know. There are days when you think you’d love a second American revolution. The problem is that revolutions don’t have a scripted end. And while I believe our cause is just and that liberty would win in the end, we’d end up destroying a generation, maybe two. And unlike two hundred and fifty years ago, neither we — nor humanity — have people to spare.
If we can get this through without it all tipping into a war? that would be ideal.
And to do that, it must be done slowly, subtly, with steady work and many, many, many of our own poison pills inserted into things like the BBB and making the pervasive election fraud, the absurd high jacking of our institutions impossible.
We must return power to the people, for the people, if possible, without burning it all down and while maintaining a thriving economy.
Not just for us. For the world. When America sneezes, the world catches pneumonia. Whatever happens here is worse the world over.
And the world is in rough shape right now. Our troubles have been amplified for them. For us to take a turn in the nuthouse and rip at each other might not mean the end of civilization. But it might very well mean several steps back with the ascent not guaranteed again.
Yes, I want a hundred perp walks. I want to see the smug bastages who lied to our faces proven rotten criminals.
But that’s the point. It must be proven. Without a doubt. And if it can’t be proven, even if we know in our hearts they’re guilty, we’d best let the forest of laws stand than get at the devil.
That’s what the play was about:
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts
Take a deep breath. Things are moving. Things are being done. Frankly, if you look, things are being done at such a spanking pace that I suspect no one in the administration is sleeping more than every other night.
They’re just not the perp walks, the strutting, the big revenge moves.
And I am enough like the rest of you to understand why this upsets you. It upsets me too, but I also understand that this side of heaven there will always be disappointments. And sometimes what we want isn’t what it’s best for us.
I think I told here before — or if not here, in my discord group — the story of the dream I had, in 2020 or 2021 or maybe any time before 23 (I’m no longer sure of the date. Just that it was one of the dark times.)
I dreamed I was watching at a bird’s eye view, the stretch of highway between Colorado Springs and Denver. A stretch of road highly familiar to me.
It was a Colorado winter day, with cold grey light filtering from a light grey sky and just a few flakes of snow dancing in the air. There was no traffic on the highway, and it looked like it had been closed.
Finally down the highway there came very large trucks, looking like military equipment. In the first truck were gallows, piled high. Men got out, and with heavy equipment, erected gallows. These were crude things, just an inverted L and a support diagonal piece, all of it wood so raw I could almost smell the sap on the tree trunks. They were erecting those every 10 or 20 feet, by the side of the highway.
And then behind came a truck filled with people in business-casual clothes, like they were dragged out of some office, during a work day. One at the time, they were taken to the gallows and hanged, by men who looked like they were tired — soul dead — from what they were doing.
I don’t know who these people being hanged were. They looked like our neighbors. Like the parents of kids in our kids’ classes back when. Like people we saw when we went out to dinner or to the museum. Just men and women between thirty and sixty.
And — this is the important and horrible part — I have no idea who was hanging them.
Was our side winning? I don’t know. Was theirs? I don’t know.
And in a very real sense, it doesn’t matter. Because once things get to that place — study the history of our own revolution, comparative clean as it was — a lot of it personal revenge and personal envy and animus.
When things get to that point, we have all lost and it takes a miracle to bring back anything resembling the Republic we know and love.
I woke up from that dream chilled and scared, because it had the feel of one of those dreams I have that seem to foretell the future. (They’re not infallible, but a higher percentage than should be logical come true. I think they’re the result of reasoning going on at a subconscious level.) And it is a future I’d very much like us to avoid.
So, let things be done slowly. Advisedly. In the full eye of even the low information voters. Let us break through the logjam one at a time. Let us — for once — strive for hearts and minds.
If it means we don’t get our perp walks — maybe if we’re lucky one for two. For Christmas. We’ve been such good boys and girls — but we also don’t get unreasoning revenge? Probably a good trade.
Provided of course that the mechanisms and dark pathways that allowed the crimes to happen in the first place are corrected and sealed off. And that, I believe, is in the process of happening.
Guys, it’s been seven months. I know you expected more from seven months. On the other hand, it’s only been seven months. Take a deep breath. Possess your soul in patience. Start a diary of positive developments. Heck, share it with us because as with the outrages of the past, it’s easy to lose track of all the good that is happening.
Deep breath. As they said during Covid “we’re all in this together.” Only in this case it’s true. We’re all frustrated. We’re all angry.
And we, all of us, need to be strong, and let things unroll as fast as they can and no further.
Lest we wrest defeat from the jaws of victory.
BLOG FUNDRAISER 2025
Okay, I must ask: what is it with you and bats, anyway?
Again, whenever I post anything bat related, the fundraising is much much better.
Anyway, so, there’s the bats.
Now for the real thing, yeah, the fundraising has been limping a bit this year. Which is okay. It’s not an emergency. And it’s not like I’m going to shut down the blog if I don’t make enough. The blog money just makes it easier to explain to the family why I must make time to write a post or upload the memes or something, even on my “off” days.
The reason for fundraising and the reason bloggers on the right in general should fundraise:
There is also paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) a couple years ago because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)
While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available:
Sarah A. Hoyt
Goldport Press
304 S Jones Blvd #6771
Las Vegas, NV 89107
(Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out another place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And if you want to give me physical stuff, it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)
Meanwhile for the much abused paying subscribers of my substacks and patreon: the earcs for No Man’s Land are coming — three volumes, each two weeks apart — because I consider if you pay for those subscriptions, you are automatically subscribed to my e-arcs. (And if you don’t know what an e-arc is, I’ll explain when they’re released. The first SHOULD be tomorrow except tomorrow there’s a ton of doctors’ appointments. So it might be Friday. I spent today doing dramatis personae list with pronunciation. I’d completely forgotten the API and it was like pulling teeth.) The first book is DONE save for final copyediting and minor fixes. (And the first book is three volumes.) The second story in the world is started (actually the second and the third, but who’s counting.)
However before I dive into the second story I’m going to take a couple of months and finish the books I promised and that you’ve been waiting for.
Meanwhile keep your fingers crossed for me with the doctors’ appointments. Maybe I can break off my body’s attempts to kill me for a while.
Again, from the top: if there was some experiment done in the twentieth century which forms the basis of lefty beliefs there is a high chance it was faked.
At the very least, the methodology is wrong and the data improperly collected. But actually, at least judging from the Mouse Utopia and the Stanford Prison Experiment?
It’s made up from whole cloth.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was supposed to explain how the horrors of Nazi Germany happened in the (at the time) most civilized place on Earth.
It studied this by having students divided into prisoners and guards. And supposedly it proved that, driven by peer pressure, these arbitrarily chosen prisoners and guards fell into their roles. Right?
data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study’s scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo’s classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation.
The Stanford Prison Experiment — the infamous 1971 exercise in which regular college students placed in a mock prison suddenly transformed into aggressive guards and hysterical prisoners — was deeply flawed, a new investigation reveals.
The participants in the experiment, who were male college students, didn’t just organically become abusive guards, reporter Ben Blum wrote in Medium. Rather, Philip Zimbardo, who led the experiment and is now a professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, encouraged the guards to act “tough,” according to newfound audio from the Stanford archive.
Moreover, some of the outbursts from the so-called prisoners weren’t triggered by the trauma of prison, Blum found. One student prisoner, Douglas Korpi, told Blum that he faked a breakdown so that he could get out of the experiment early to study for a graduate school exam. [7 Absolutely Evil Medical Experiments]
However, again, this is used everywhere, including by people on the right to prove that humans are sheep, completely influentiable and easy to convince to commit atrocities.
And for the left? For the left it creates their fear of any traditional role of authority. Because, you know, conformity is natural blind and inevitable and given a chance we’ll all become abusers and horrible torturers.
Part of their hysteria about what they thing we’re going to do to them is from this ridiculously fake “experiment.”
And their shameless behavior, the horrific things they do are also justified by this experiment. After all, if all humans are so terribly hapless and easily led, then not only can’t they help themselves and have a blank check to do whatever they want, but also they presume because all humans are so weak, and of course we must be weaker than they are, then we must be committing all sorts of atrocities just keeping them secret.
Again, if you hear of a “scientific experiment” which confirms that humans are horrible; there are too many humans; humans are the most horrible creatures in the world or perhaps the universe, chances are it’s not only flawed, but it’s complete bullshit.
Some humans are indeed terrible creatures. But not all. And big, powerful governments that try to re-engineer humanity are not proof against attrocities.
They are in fact the greatest predictors of atrocities.
BLOG FUNDRAISER 2025
The old song and dance! It’s been fairly lousy, so let’s see if the bats can do it!
Four more days.
Yes, I know it’s a nuisance. And I’m not going to claim that if I don’t get enough money I’ll shutter the blog because we all know I won’t. It will on the other hand make it harder to do this on weekends and holidays when my husband objects to my sitting up late or getting up early to put up the post. Which is fine. I’ve survived it for near on 20 years. I’m not going to wilt.
For this year, I’ll (merely) give you ways to donate.
The Give Send Go is still active. (And to the person who compared me to Jerry Pournelle, G-d bless you.)
There is also paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) a couple years ago because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)
While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available:
Sarah A. Hoyt
Goldport Press
304 S Jones Blvd #6771
Las Vegas, NV 89107
(Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out antoher place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And if you want to give me physical stuff, it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)
And please, please, please do not send either a multitool of any kind of learning center for Indy. The cat with hand-paws and the engineer mind who yes indeed does understand English is already enough trouble as is.
And I’m THIS close to having the first third of NML ready for an earc. THIS close.
Bear with me. Yesterday was a serious problem with lots of asthma, which apparently is because of too much Canada in the air again… e-arc tomorrow.
When discussing the experiment of the Mouse Utopia, which, again, to recap, was completely faked, probably tried various habitats to get the results that fit with his preconceived notions (Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia) a friend suggested perhaps the mouse utopia suggested that having everything handed to you and not having to struggle was what caused the problems.
That I know this was never suggested as the meaning of Calhoun’s Utopia. Though, honestly, that’s probably only because they never thought of it, since the left, where he definitely was, love to claim that prosperity makes you weak and decadent.
It’s nonsense. If anything what the Mouse Utopia shows is that it’s a really bad idea to get captured by an alien species that sets up what they think is utopia for you and in the process stress you to a breaking point.
Most of the behaviors associated with “decadence” or in Calhoun’s mind, “overpopulation” are in fact stress behaviors, from over-grooming to infanticide to the entire issues the mice displayed.
For the mice, of course, is was being held captive by an alien species that dictated their every living condition.
For us…
Well, Russia tried very hard to convince us that it was because we were so wealthy. Think about it, the lie might even have been aimed mostly at their people. The USSR couldn’t give them food, it couldn’t give them even basic necessities. It certainly couldn’t give them luxuries. And even right after WWII with the rudimentary technology of the time, it was impossible to completely keep out that we were richer, happier, more free than they could ever hope to be.
This needed to be dealt with, and was, by convincing them that any aberrant behavior, any problems in our society were because of how rich we were. Wealth causes decadence, donchyouknow?
That of course filtered back here, partly because their useful idiots were… idiots. And were all through our society. Even as late as the eighties, in Charlotte NC, I remember reading some brain damaged journalist who had spent time in Russia, extolling how wonderful the ridiculously simple, stupid cartoons in Russia were compared to our cartoons. Because they were simple, of course, and stripped down. As someone who, after the revolution, endured a lot of programming from behind the iron curtain, I’d like to point out this was an exercise in self deception and insanity.
Of course (I don’t need to tell you) over here it hooked into our Puritan roots and a certain very strange idea that being rich is — somehow — sinful. Oh, there is a certain twist of that in all Christianity. It’s not real, meaning it’s not actual good doctrine, but it’s what people tend to get when they fixate on rich and camels and eyes of the needle and such and don’t look at the deeper meaning.
The end result of that is the whole idiotic idea that good times create weak men and hard times create strong men.
No, they don’t. As what remains of the Soviet Union, the various corrupt always on the edge of starvation South American banana republics, and the perpetual sh*t show that’s Africa can attest, what hard times create are … weasely men, slippery men, men who are lawless and shelfish and cruel. Hard times create barbarians, even if sometimes barbarians wear suits and ties. If Putin is your idea of a strong man (as opposed to a political strongman) you might be confused.
So, what caused the symptoms of degeneracy and decadence in the west? Which have worsened exponentially in the last half century?
Well…
Some decadence you shall always have with you. Look, people can find themselves purposeless and be of the kind that breaks at any level of wealth. Or we wouldn’t have such stories dating back what must have been dang near close to the Neolithic.
But mostly?
Mostly what seems to cause the symptoms of society coming apart? I.e. the men become drunkards (and gay), the women become whores, crime goes through the roof, children are destroyed (or never born)?
Being occupied.
It’s the way a culture comes apart when it’s been invaded and occupied by an alien culture.
But, you’ll say, this has never happened to us, ever.
Ah. What do you think happened when the socialists (national and for that matter international) captured the over culture and started trying to impose their “scientific” governance on the masses, and social engineering on a grand scale?
We’re doing all right, for having been occupied for pretty much a century now. We’re fighting back.
In the US we’re fighting harder because we have a healthy disrespect for the overculture, and because frankly disrespecting “our betters” is part of our culture.
We’re starting to win.
Heinlein believed humans — for good and ill — couldn’t be tamed. And frankly our puppet masters are not all that. They’re just Marxists.
“Were they ever really intelligent? By themselves, I mean? I don’t know, and I don’t know how we can ever find out.”
Fortunately, we don’t need to. We just need to remember not to let them manipulate us — the only thing they’re actually good at — and keep in mind that their cultish beliefs are not scientific and are not superior and bring about hell on Earth.
Communists bring about hard times. Stop them and thrive. There is no virtue in poverty and decadence.
BLOG FUNDRAISER 2025
UPDATE: Okay, okay, the song and dance. This one is dedicated to Imaginos. Also, POLKA NEVER DIES!
(Sigh. I’m such a ridiculously indulgent blog mistress. Yes, I was a permissive parent too. I confess.)
Five more days. Four? Well, I took the 14th off, so this will go on through the nineteenth. sorry.
Yes, I know it’s a nuisance. And I’m not going to claim that if I don’t get enough money I’ll shutter the blog because we all know I won’t. It will on the other hand make it harder to do this on weekends and holidays when my husband objects to my sitting up late or getting up early to put up the post. Which is fine. I’ve survived it for near on 20 years. I’m not going to wilt.
For this year, I’ll (merely) give you ways to donate.
The Give Send Go is still active. (And to the person who compared me to Jerry Pournelle, G-d bless you.)
There is also paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) a couple years ago because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)
While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available:
Sarah A. Hoyt
Goldport Press
304 S Jones Blvd #6771
Las Vegas, NV 89107
(Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out antoher place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And if you want to give me physical stuff, it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)
And please, please, please do not send either a multitool of any kind of learning center for Indy. The cat with hand-paws and the engineer mind who yes indeed does understand English is already enough trouble as is.
And I’m THIS close to having the first third of NML ready for an earc. THIS close.
Bear with me. (Why yes, the sinus infection is TRYING to come back. I’m fighting it.)
According To Hoyt 