Part of the attractiveness of Marxism in all its forms, is that it’s a very simple story. Like all its bastard step children, like feminism, or CRT it is simple, obvious and wrong.

The wrong doesn’t hit a certain type of mind right away, though. Partly through our fault, our very great fault, since our society’s institutions have stopped working and therefore we don’t teach kids history in all its multifaceted glory. We don’t allow them to see the world as is. Instead, we just have them running around with these bizarre slogans in their heads, and not only looking at the world through them, but also incapable of breaking them.

When I was really small, and really afraid of the dark, there were prayers I said when I went out into the dark. I knew it didn’t really help, but it gave me a feeling of protection.

In the same way I suspect most people today know that Marxism isn’t reality, but they repeat these shibboleth’s as incantations in the belief that it will protect them from the bad reality. For one, it will help, since the people who are in control of society such as it is will reward you for saying these incantations. For another because if you don’t break the incantations poured into your head since your earliest days, you can avoid thinking. You can avoid having doubts.

You see, because most people — and note when I say “kids” I probably include my own generation, now edging towards retirement age, and we might have to include the generation before mine. When did education burn to heck? When did history get lost in media-endorsed (largely Marxist) narrative? 1920? — don’t have anything to replace the “received slogans” with. They’ve never doubted or thought very deeply about what they were told. They were never skeptical. They never looked for reality.

Most humans just want to fit in. That’s all they want to do. And going against what amounts to revealed truth that they have the impression everyone believes in, is no part of it.

Worse, even though the narrative is falling apart, most people still aren’t thinking. They’re running into stories and hiding there: from Mad Max o Handmaid’s Tale, to that rusty sf future so prevalent in the seventies and eighties. It’s part of what’s egging on climate catastrophism, and a whole host of left-crazy.

And the people who have figured out the full ridiculous evil (how can evil be ridiculous? Well, it usually is. All of it is horrifically ridiculous. It’s just the horror that keeps us from laughing) of communism, prefer to turn it on its head, instead of thinking through it.

Take for instance the crap about “inequality”. There is really no reason to consider this a bad thing. The only time inequality is bad is when it is as in Cuba or North Korea the result of top-down imposition of equality on most of the people, so they can be exploited by the very few rulers.

In a normal, open society, of course there will be inequality, because some abilities are valued higher than others and some people are better at taking whatever is considered wealth and using it than others, and some of them are better at using social connection. Society is unequal because humans are unequal.

In my almost 60 years of life, what I’ve realized is that in the end people more or less get what they want. No, I don’t mean what they want in the sense of airy-dreaming. I mean, sure, I want all that and a pony. I just don’t want to deal with the pony poop.

This came home to me in our mid-thirties, when we were suddenly making good money. The path ahead was clear. Dan could have spent more time working at his career, gone into management and climbed that ladder. Alternately, he could spend more time with us and choose to stagnate at a comfortable-ish career level, but get to see his kids grow up and have time with me. I kind of faced the same, though in my case, even then, I was aware I would need to lie a lot, and lose my soul to become one of the “winners” in my profession.

Let’s say both of us realized we didn’t want success at that level. As competitive as we were, as much as we wanted to get to the top of our careers, there were things we valued more. There were prices we weren’t willing to pay.

A lot of inequality is like that. I can’t explain other people’s choices. A lot of them are living in what I’d consider stark discomfort, or even wasting their lives. But their choices led them there, and without effort to overcome it, effort to reach for what they say they really want, they are where they chose to be.

Even if the game was rigged or unfair, yes. Most of the time the game is rigged and unfair, because humans are like that, and not like impersonal angels. There are ways to overcome that unfairness, but they’re individual. All the government can do is introduce more wholesale unfairness.

But all of the “equity” and “diversity” and “inclusion” bullshit is nothing but a just-so story. The people I know who are unjustly held down are all colors, all sexes, all interests. And they’re unfairly held down mostly by these crazed efforts at creating “fairness.”

In the end, life is “you lays your money, you takes your prize.” Is the prize sometimes not what you expected? Well, things are never simple, are they? In the end, it’s a matter of striving for what you want, while life remains.

Or take abortion. Personally I don’t expect the SC to overthrow Roe. If they were going to, this leak and the riots that will follow — on command as usual — will scare the arrant cowards among them.

But the left is running around with their hair on fire. And they’re not all lying on purpose. A lot of them are repeating what they were told: Roe overturned, women and children most affected. Or: Nothing stands between us and women as chattel now. Or: It’s now the Handmaid’s tale.

None of this makes a whit of sense. You can’t get there from here. But it’s what these idiots were taught, the slogans in their heads, and even if they could question them, they don’t want to.

Because the story in their heads is simple, clear and wrong.

I mean, even if Roe were actually overturned, all it would do would be to devolve the matter to the various states. So the woke states would keep abortion to infinity (or past birth) and beyond, and it would stop it in red states.

So if abortion really leads to handmaid’s tale type scenarios (How only insane people can know) there will be an exodus from red states to blue states.

If someone can’t get an abortion in a red state, she can go to a blue state. Look, greyhound buses aren’t that expensive, and people can form charities to pay for it, right? If they believe that much.

So at most — AT MOST — what this will do is make abortion more difficult for women in red states.

WOE! Horror! Fascism! Racism! Cats and dogs sleeping together!

Generations of American women have been told if they can’t get an abortion, they’re virtual slaves. Because apparently if you can’t get rid of an already conceived child it’s the end of contraception, the end of women in the work place, the end of civil rights?

Does anyone really believe that load of nonsense?

It might be the end of sleeping around indiscriminately and therefore a blow (eh) to all the men who like no-attachment sex, but most human beings aren’t looking for the ultimate bang, no matter what the movies tell you. They’re looking for what Romance calls HEA which usually includes a family.

Oh, this might also adversely affect STD-treating doctors, or at least their income.

But it’s racism! black women won’t be able to have abortions? Sure, because in the mind of the left, all black people are poor. But given our poor are exquisitely tattooed, they probably can afford a grey hound bus. Or some liberal can fund it.

Also, since when is killing black babies proof you’re not racism.

And that’s when you need to turn the entire narrative on its head.

To begin with, let me tell you a story: when I was in high school — in a gifted class — most of us were the perpetual virgins geeks tend to be. One or two were either dating or had arranged marriage of some sort waiting.

And then there was this girl. I don’t remember her name. (It’s been 41 years.) She was pale, blue eyed, blond, (think a Marilyn Monroe type of look), very well dressed, not in the way of our generations.

I had two conversations with her, over the entire three years we were in the same form. In one, I was railing over the fact my parents wouldn’t let me wear makeup (I think we were 14 at the time) and she said I shouldn’t wear make up before I had to, and I should limit the amount of time I had makeup on, because she’d been wearing makeup all the time for three years, and her face was so ruined she had to put it on not to look terrible. Another, we were discussing abortion — and in this Catholic country, where abortion was illegal, our teachers and everyone pushed abortion at us as a humane, sane solution, a way not to ruin our lives with an unplanned child, etc — she very quietly told us she had two or three a year. She didn’t tell us why, nor that it wasn’t a good thing. She just made that statement.

The other thing I knew about her, is that she was picked up from school by older men in very expensive cars. Not the same men or cars from day to day.

In our minds — Lord forgive us — she was glamorous and daring, living an adult life, while we were children.

Took to my fifties, thinking over it, to realize what was happening. Now, I have no idea why or how she fell into that situation, but there were rumors her mom had left and she was living with her dad, who wasn’t a good person.

But you are adults. You can add two plus two. This very young girl had started wearing makeup at 11. She had “dates” with much, much older “boyfriends” and she had multiple abortions a year (Making them illegal doesn’t stop them, no. It just makes them expensive, and makes the doctors afraid to botch them, because it means their license.)

Having those abortions made it possible for whoever was profiting from her to keep doing so. No, I have no idea why they didn’t use contraception, but they didn’t.

And that scenario is much closer to the Handmaid’s Tale of women being exploited for being women than any scenario from the overthrow of Roe is likely to be.

Sure, some women have abortions of their own volition, for reasons that seem to them sufficient. But an equal number, if not larger, have them for a man’s convenience. Like that deluded woman who drowned her kids so her boyfriend would stay with them, a lot of them have abortions either to satisfy a man, or to satisfy society’s idea of who they should be.

Does this mean it should be strictly forbidden? Well, it won’t stop them.

But perhaps living it to the states is the best of all solutions. The states were supposed to be laboratories. We’ll see in which women will thrive, right?

Because so far, telling women what they want is to live men’s dreams of promiscuity and no one’s dreams of rootlessness doesn’t seem to be working particularly well.

Again, not that I think the SC will dare overthrow Roe. But if they did, a bunch of experiments would take place.

And the one thing it wouldn’t be is simple.

Is abortion good or bad for women? Depends on the woman, on when the abortion takes place, on why. Obviously sometimes you do need an abortion to save a life. Just not in most of the cases.

And the pursuit of guiltless and unbound abortion leads mostly to death and dissolution, either in Gosnell’s charnel houses or in forty year olds who are shocked they can’t conceive.

Only people wedded to shibboleths and simplistic narratives can be scared of the experimentation that the overthrow of Roe would bring.

Unfortunately, that is a lot of people.

Yes, of course we make fun when someone starts being hailed as “Stunning Brave” by the left. Because you know, some things are inevitable.

One of them is people who are hailed as stunning, brave! by the left are doing things that have almost zero chance of bringing any backlash, let along a higher price.

So mostly we sit around in shock at the stunning bravery of claiming some kind of heroism for, oh, being a climate alarmist — something already taught to every kid in school 20 years ago — or for “coming out” as gay, tolerance for which has also been taught in schools for 30 years, or for — say — saying that you think women are superior to men (which has been the unstated push of every school for decades — or for making fun of Christianity, which, yes, deeply offends the majority of this country (and large swathes of Europe) but which is so extremely unlikely to bring revenge down on your head as for that to be almost impossible.

Look, I’m not saying that iconoclastic defiance can’t be beneficial to a society. In a way, if art challenges the status-quo, we get the possibility of the culture correcting itself when it goes down some extreme insanity (oh, say, the covidiocy) without a big bloody revolution.

We know what super-compliant cultures are, from China, and we don’t want it. How many times have they burned it all down, then burned the books, and started over, in the same blinkered authoritarian way?

That’s not conducive to a future that’s better than the past (As G-d and Heinlein intended.)

What I’m saying is that what we’re seeing is not iconoclastic defiance. It’s in fact people pretending to be defiant, and to be in some kind of danger of backlash, while echoing the words that those power say, and the ideas they push on us.

What all the #sostunningbrave women (and men, but it’s mostly women) are doing is the equivalent of standing up in the middle of the class and telling teacher “Look, I know you might punish me for it, but I have to tell you that dress is beautiful, and it makes you look stunning. Also, you’re the best teacher I’ve ever had, so profoundly knowledgeable and caring.”

You can say you expect backlash, but you KNOW you’re going to get praised and rewarded. It is in fact why you’re doing that. Because you want the applause, but want to make it sound like you’re not a total suck up. which you are, of course.

You know what things take bravery to say?

Well, it’s become a joke among gay conservatives that coming out as gay was easy, it’s coming out as conservative that risks getting you fired or even physically attacked, if you work in certain fields and places.

But it doesn’t take that much. When you have a supreme court nominee afraid to — in any way — define a woman, you know the fear is real, the cancellations are real, and saying the simplest things like “women give birth” can get you expunged from the world of respectable people.

And yet, you know, reality goes on. Yes, body dismorphia is real, but if you’re born a biological female, you can give birth, if you’re not you cannot. And no amount of wishing will make it so.

Which means the rest of us need to be stunning brave for real, and stand up and proclaim the truth: inequality is just a symptom of freedom. The only way to have a society be completely equalitarian is to be a brutal, totalitarian repressive regime. (And even then, the ones at the top get perks. Biologically there are men and there are women. Yeah, you might feel like something else, and we are more or less — most of the time — decent human beings, so we’re not going to stop you living like you want to, or doing to yourself whatever you want to do to yourself, but stop denying that biological sex exists and has a meaning. And stop pushing this on children too young to know there is such a thing as sex, much less which they “feel” like. Because as of right now, people can’t actually change sexes. They can just take a lot of drugs and have surgery to make it seem like they did. But the side effects include a 4 times higher risk of cancer and sterilization. And if you’re an adult, you have the right to choose that for yourself, but kids don’t.

Other things. So many things you can say, including that no, in fact going against imaginary unbreakable rules of the imaginary 1950s by oh, wearing daring clothing, or swearing isn’t stunning brave. It’s just …. reinforcing the current rules.

In fact these days you can get attacked, cancelled or destroyed for saying “Good morning” or something equally innocuous. You don’t have to go against heir big, flamboyant precepts to get attacked or destroyed.

Sometimes it’s just what you are. Say, male, or worse male and white.

And sometimes it’s that you say something that was accepted until this morning, but the party has changed the line, and now 2 + 2 =43 and math is racist.

Look, society can’t go on like that. It is a mark of true evil that it takes everything apart and creates chaos.

Telling the truth can destroy you, but sometimes you have to do it. Let’s start with those of us who have less to lose — like me, like the rest of us who are on the lee-side of 50 and 60 — and maybe we’ll make it safe for the new generation to make a different future.

One based on actual reality.

So, I had planned to do a post today, and plant grapevines (yes, more) and finish a book, and edit a chapter and read a friend’s book.

My family didn’t precisely sit on me. They were either more or less polite than that — I’m not ACTUALLY sure which — but I was told I was taking the day off.

I negotiated — see how good I am? — and got them to allow me to do covers. It’s a compromise, because covers DO need to be redone for a bunch of books. And this way I don’t feel so guilty “taking it easy.” And I do enjoy playing around with art/ideas.

But apparently (!) I’m not allowed to write today, so no new post. And I’m encouraged to take…. er…. naps (they’re so weird.) Because I was working hard all weekend (!!!!) or something.

Speaking of which, I’m about to go take a nap. See you later.

(Oh, yeah, and the congestion, coughing,infernal headache is gone, so it was definitely SOMETHING in the hotel. I’m having episodic bouts of cough, because phlegm* doesn’t vanish overnight, but not getting worse, and no other symptoms. Will push A LOT of lemon tea.)

(*I used phlegm in a post and not as an insult. Achievement unlocked.)

Sorry for not giving you warning guys, but after recent threats, (the ones here, and others) I think it might not be a brilliant idea to tell people where I’ll be. Yes, I know that’s counterproductive, and of course I’ll start announcing these, just right not it didn’t feel like the sanest thing to do.

Anyway, we went to Tulkon, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

It’s a little town, in its second year, but for a little con it sure is packed with talent, my fans, and my old friends.

It was very nice. Busy, because as at Liberty con I couldn’t go more than ten steps without bumping into a friend or fan I hadn’t seen in years.

It was my first post-lockdown con. Not my first gathering with friends, of course, but my first con, and I felt… weird.

Apparently you can lose the knack for pretending to be an extrovert for the duration of a con. It was more …. consciously done.

If you saw me in a corner, glaring, it wasn’t you, or that I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was just tired and my itnernal alarms were ringing with “toooooooo mmmmmmany people, RUN.”

I didn’t run.

Even the panels were enjoyable. They were the guinea pigs for the first panel I did with younger son “Teaching my mom to write comics in the 21st century.”

This means, btw that yes, G-d willing we’ll do the same panel at Liberty, and MAAAAYBE at Fencon?

Younger son was unexpectedly great at it for a raging introvert. And yes, he still spent a ton of time hiding in the room (TBF everyone did, in a way, because we were all out of it/out of practice) but he actually made an effort at socializing.

Someone btw put Jim Curtis in charge of moderating a panel with David Weber and me on it. He made it through 3 of his planned four questions before we ran out of time. SOMEONE should give him an award for that. He might have broken the universe. Most people run screaming into the night. I mean, once at Liberty con I lost my voice from violently agreeing with David Weber for 1 hour.

The Texas Troublemakers hosted maybe the room party of the century. If you have to ask about the shower ducks, you weren’t there. ;)

So… Tulkon? A few growing pains, but massively fun and friendly.

I’m hoping they let me go back next year, despite the fact I accidentally blew my last panel.

Accidentally?

Well, there was construction going on, and they couldn’t get one of our rooms de-featherized. So I was having asthma attacks, and sneezing and coughing like a plague carrier (if you saw it, feather allergy is NOT contagious.)

So I somehow missed that I had a panel at 1 pm, called “with fans like this.” and we headed home.

I hate it when I do that. When it’s necessary, I usually find the organizers and give them a heads up.

Hopefully they understand and they let me come back next year, and when I should be more organized and able to do more, too.

And maybe a couple of you want to join me next year?

I mean, if you can’t make it to Liberty con, either geographically or because of the membership limits, come to Tulkon. The water con is fine.

In a hole in the ground there lived a writer….

I’m not going to tell you — and you’re not going to ask — about hair on my toes (are you? that’s so rude!) but…. it’s all very weird yo.

As I was getting ready for this micro-con (it really, really is) and freaking out internally. I no longer know how to pack. I feel a million years old. People — ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

So, we’re here. It’s fun. Mostly because well, all of the Texas troublemakers are here. So, you know, there’s a defense wall.

But mostly, being in con mode, looking around myself, the people I know….

I thought we’d all have aged 10 years. Because internally it feels like I aged ten years. I think that’s the effect of being put through the emotional ringer backwards and sideways for the last two. But … well, I don’t know about me. I probably do look 10 years older (So, my ear piercing closed. I found that out yesterday. I only wear earrings at public things. This has happened once before when I had infants. I’m going to have to have them re-pierced) but anyway, other people don’t. They look remarkably good.

What everyone looks is…. softer and calmer is not the right term. It’s a sort of “I’ve seen some sh*t and this ain’t nothing” which I’ve only seen before in people who came back from (real, combat) war or who had survived a very serious near-fatal illness.

Everyone is mellow, and a little…. softer.

Which didn’t prevent me from staying up till near midnight talking to friends. Because that’s what you do at cons. Something the last two years have made me very aware of: given all the friends I lost (Startlingly few of them of COVID) I’ll have fun with my friends while we’re both this side of the sod.

I’ll take the near-midnight as a sign I’m getting old. I used to collapse at two or three in the morning.

Anyway, I’m okay, will try to do promo post tomorrow morning, but no promises, depending on a ton of other things.

If not, will post on Monday.

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

It’s time to object now, by any means possible: To this abomination.

The head of the abomination is a buddy with our old enemies.

We cannot let this stand. If this stands, this is THE balloon.

And there it rises.

Not long ago, a friend — the same one who lost his job in Academia, in the Northeast last year for being too white, too Christian, too male — was surveying the people we know who are trying, however ineffectively to fight the good culture war and said “The kids are confused, mal-educated, not very well read, but full of fight and vigor. And their hearts are generally in the right place. We’ll be all right. We just have the scrappy band of losers to save the world, and we will save it.” (Which is part of what he’s working on.)

I noted the other day, when student loans were mentioned, that you guys have a really weird vision of the people who are in trouble due to student loans.

Now, look, yeah, sure, there are puppetry majors. There are also a never-end of English majors (and there’s a reason for that, which I’ll explain later.) And a bunch of other things, some of them that self-obviously were never going to pay.

But for every one of those, because I have a lot of fans, and kids who have friends anywhere from the early twenties to the late thirties, who have crushing debt from stuff they never completed through no fault of their own. STEM even. And if you’re bristling at the “through no fault of their own”, don’t. For one, I swear, though I can’t PROVE it (because like most of what the lefty cockroaches do it’s still underhanded) most of it seems to be covered up and individual excuses given, but it looks to me like if you’re a conservative, they’re going to kick you out without a degree one way or another. Sure. Not all over the country. Not every university has gone militantly stupid. And some conservatives and their families are too prominent to get kicked out, but I’ve seen waves go through where people I know are conservative all hit bullshit road blocks at the same time. And then other bullshit road blocks. And then more. To the point that, you know, one is happenstance, two is coincidence, three is enemy action.

And I love you guys, I do. Like ice-cream with sprinkles on top, but every time one of you talks about “working your way to school” I hit my head on something and scream. Yeah, I know one person who did that. It only took him 4x as long as it should have to graduate, but he did it. And I know people who attempted it, and their grades fell, and the degree dragged, and eventually they dropped out.

What you’re not taking in account is how much college costs these days. I have insight into it, because, by promise, we paid half of each of the kids undergrad.

Let’s just say if you’re unskilled, a state’s college tuition is now your take-home from a full time job. If you’re supporting yourself, that leaves food, place to live, car, gas, and BOOKS (which are ridiculously expensive) for you to find money for, somehow. (I understand this is different in Utah, and might be in other systems, but not in Colorado.)

Worse, because college (and to be fair, every level of school) is now full of button counting, time-consuming, group work (I saw this with my kids from first grade, and worse, if you were “gifted” they gave you more.) you’ll only be able to take half the courses per year, which prolongs the time for which you have to find living expenses, etc.

“Work to put self through college” is a pipe dream if you’re taking STEM. (It is possible, to an extent with English degrees, if you are naturally gifted. Just occurred to me a friend of mine did this recently. But trust me, it wasn’t easy.)

And no, the people saying “Well, most Americans don’t go to college, so this is subsidizing the rich” aren’t right. Because the people who were pushed/sent to college aren’t rich. (Hence the loans. The rich, largely pay for their kids to go and have “the college experience.”) They’re usually “smart” or at least did well in school. And they’re usually (though not always) strivers. That’s the only thing they have in common.

The people who are partying are either the children of the rich, or athletes with full scholarships.

These days scholarships also have bloody nothing to do with merit, btw. If you’re a woman it’s easy to get a scholarship. If you are interestingly tan, ditto. If you can tell a sob story and have the right opinions, you have a good chance. But pure merit? If they exist (and I presume in a country this size they must) we failed to find them. And when they exist and we found them… well, younger son was offered a full ride across the country. But he was 16, and where would he live? And how would we pay for housing/food/etc? which was more than local tuition? (In retrospect, we SHOULD have done that, but that’s a long story.)

Oh, and on useless degrees: a lot of kids take English degrees because they are given a snow-job on how valuable it is. “With an English degree you can be literally anything. There are companies dying to hire you.” And because it’s easy, if you also have to work full time.

As the possessor of an English degree (in my case ESL, and different, but you know) there are indeed companies dying to hire you. Retail and food service. But seriously, why wouldn’t the kids believe what they’re told by authorities? Isn’t that what we tell them to do? Trust the experience and wisdom of those who are older than they are?

But leaving aside the whole contentious issue of student loans — look, guys, if I’m right, the mummy is going to forgive them anyway. The least you can do is not throw fits, because driving away the kids is the worst thing you can do. No not all of them are brain dead, and a lot of them have been red pilled already — there is the fact that the whole “formal education” thing from pre-school to college, these days amounts to little more than a program of retirement for Beardo the Weirdo.

So, you know, these kids — at least those who didn’t grow up under the gimlet eye and book-flinging hand of someone like me — are very badly read, and sometimes almost painfully ignorant of everything real, from history to economics.

Take the “x number are socialists” I also stared at that and despaired, until younger son laughed. “Yeah, they think they are. Because we were told that everything, from street lights, to public roads, to police was “socialism”” and people who don’t know better, and think that a society should have SOME degree of public service, think they’re socialists. They’re by and large not.”

Or take the fact these people literally have no clue who fought in WWII. Or what the Nazis wanted, besides “they were racisssss and white.” Or–

Yeah, I know. You have an atrocious view of the kids, and some of it is justified. For some of them.

As I said, they’re uneducated, or worse mal-educated, and think they know things they don’t because “older people” taught them those things. They’re appallingly badly read (mostly because of the books that were pushed at them in school.)

Worst, the pedagogical methods used on my kids — and I bet you they’re worse now — were make-work and boring stuff, designed to crush love of reading, love of learning, initiative and … well, anything useful.

The one thing they got pounded with was “responsibility” Only it wasn’t. It was more make work, and a solid dose of guilt.

For instance, when son had to have knee surgery that kept him out of school for two weeks, the teachers were incapable of telling me what he should work on, because they didn’t PLAN that far in advance. At the same time, they told the kids the papers due for the next two weeks, and then didn’t remind them. Just had a box for them to be dropped in. And these papers, which were often painfully boring and stupid, counted for more than the grade. With each of the boys — because they are ADD AF — there was a semester they failed, and we’re looking at the grade going “but he had all As in the tests” and eventually found out they’d done ALL the homework, and on time even, but it was either still on their desk or (Younger son’s) their backpack front pocket, which is so full it barely closes.

At the time they did this, they were… under 12. And were, of course, getting hit with the hormone stick. But the same adults who couldn’t plan two weeks ahead, for jobs they were getting paid for, told us that “No, we don’t remind them. They have to learn responsibility.”

Mostly, the kids, at least mine, learned guilt. Because their teachers’ lack of planning was their problem.

But what you have to remember is that most of these kids are all right. Probably the vast, overwhelming majority are all right.

Oh, they have the same number of custard heads and evil bastages as any other generation. But we only hear from those. And the people who have been red pilled, the productive and smart ones? They’re keeping their heads down and slogging ahead. Because, see where “being discovered to be conservative” (or really to dissent from the choir) will have immediate results, and they won’t like them.

That is starting to change. Oh, heavens, way too slowly. But changing. People have won lawsuits for wrongful dismissal or political discrimination. Now, most of these are the most obvious/egregious cases, but the avalanche starts with a very few grains of sand.

The kids are all right. And we’re starting to take back the culture. Or the wouldn’t have had to fraud 2020 in such a blatant last-minute manner. Because the fraud was already immense and baked in. They should have coasted. Hence the potemkin campaign. But they didn’t.

And that must be our consolation: there are probably fewer young ones to rebuild than we think, and they’re probably just as ignorant and lost as we think.

On the other hand, there are people making a living from teaching various things on youtube, history being one of the subjects I know of. And the kids (and elders like us) are paying for it.

They are trying to engage in the great relearning.

So, the best time to plant a tree or teach your kids properly is 10/20/50 years ago. The second best time is now.

If you can take them out of public school, do so. (And don’t trust private schools without tons of research. Yeah, there are still good ones, but most are as bad as public, if not worse.)

If you can’t, follow the plan in Have Spacesuit Will Travel (and what we did) and teach them at home, after and around school.

If your kid is considering college, look really closely at what they’ll be studying, look at rates of graduation, send an elder to audit interesting courses (most states have free or very low price classes after 55.) It’s an investment, and you should know the likely return.

And if you don’t have kids, and there’s this mass of kids (and I mean anyone younger than you, out there) engage. Talk to them. I don’t know, distribute books. (I am the book fairy.) Or start a you tube channel teaching your specialty.

If you do interesting stuff: building, sewing, machine repair, start a you tube channel or a blog (the same goes for history, languages, whatever) and send me the link to publicize.

As the left is fond of saying “The children are our future” (and the white horse of Napoleon was in fact white.)

But the future they tried to mold these kids for is impossible, and the possible part of it would be horrific.

I don’t care what you think of them. They’re the ones who will be building the world, once it’s obvious the model of centralized control/production/everything else is now counterproductive.

Teach. Teach in every way you can.

Seed the seeds of the future. You can’t control how they bloom, but you can seed. And do what you can to nurture.

I believe the kids will do us proud.

The title is a line I stole I THINK from Mark Alger. It hit me as ridiculously funny mostly because both mom and grandma were obsessed with the Clean Underwear in case you have an accident thing. So underwear to go to war is a very necessary thing, you’ll agree. And there’s a high chance of death. But I would say very few people die at war with clean underwear.

So, on where we are, what we do, and what comes out of the current upside down, sideways, tilt-a-whirl world?

There are things we know, and things we don’t know relating to the present situation.

We know there is a great break up of the status quo, partly because it no longer works.

Now, this is something we, children born in the sixties, were primed for in everything, from science fiction to serious courses.

But what we’re seeing, the break down of the status quo, is exactly the opposite of what we were told to expect by 90% of those teaching or entertaining us. Supposedly competition, and striving and individualism were on the way out, and soft, fluffy bunnies and unicorns perfect communism was on the way in.

Of course that was never going to work. I mean, we know that. But you have to remember guys, that back then they viewed the USSR as ruthlessly efficient. (It’s one of those. I’m caught between laughing and crying. They literally couldn’t feed themselves and the only way they could fool us into thinking they had nuclear parity was to drive around eighteen wheelers loaded with loooong tubes. But– image, yeah, and mass communication fooled us all.

Now, the “right” around the world admired the ruthless efficiency, but smelled something wrong, and therefore they wanted …. softer efficiency.

Which is how going on almost a century, the West sold its soul to socialism.

Socialism is of course not a different beast from communism. It was supposed to be a stage on the way to communism where the means of production were in individual hands (unless they were essential, like, you know, health) but the government controlled all. There was supposed to be some kind of clear dividing line.

The truth is that all this sh*t spewed from the diseased brain of Karl the mad, never made a whit of sense, and most of it boiled down to “That’s not how any of that ever worked.”

So, communism or socialism was often a matter of opinion, and you can tell how well any of them worked by the fact that both called themselves “democracies.” (It was naming by opposites day. It was a long day.)

But even the “free” or “capitalist” west was various forms of socialism. And I don’t mean just the ponzi scheme of social security. I mean crazy cakes stuff (a lot of the crazy started by FDR) that made the assumption the fargin feds had the right to decide how the money you earned should be distributed. And once that kind of disease gets in the brain, the government decides it owns the fruits of your labor, and only lets you keep some, which means you’re essentially a governmental slave. It’s bad crazy and it corrupts everything.

In the west this centralization of power and deferring of everything to increasingly larger governments and “rule of by experts.”

And everyone trusted the experts and the big government, and the increasingly more leftist narrative, because everyone got their news from central sources that supported (or were complicit) in all of that. And then the news got made into history. And if you dissented because — say — you were at the event, and knew the report was insane (every one I was at. Not even wrong. Just like… parallel world insane.) you were considered uninformed or some kind of crazy, because the news and knowledge came from the journalistic experts.

I don’t know when the wheels started coming off. We KNOW they started coming off, because even with Obama, they couldn’t continue selling him as the most important figure ever, or super smart. Oh, the sales job of the media still worked…. on the media, permanent captives of the federal government who live in DC, and celebrities. But the majority of the public wasn’t fully buying the story.

I mean, it really was a next-level sales job, but most of the Obama merchandise, from beach towels to cards seemed to age on the shelves.

And judging from the reaction to Hillary, I wonder how complete the sales on Clinton was.

And of course 2016 was a complete shock for the bastages. And 2022 arguably a bigger one, since they were sure they’d already frauded enough.

But it’s not just here where the internet explains it to some extent. In much of the rest of the world the net isn’t used for news as it is here, and yet the narrative is also falling apart. Despite a next-level snow job on COVID, complete with lock downs and punitive measures, if you look, there are demonstrations, resistance, riots, practically everywhere, and no one really believes “the thing” the establishment is pushing.

Yes, to an extent that includes Russia-Ukraine. No, I don’t support Russia. Yes, I hope they’re beat into flinders so they don’t go around attacking their neighbors. No, I don’t care that the Ukraine is equally corrupt. No, I don’t actually support the world going to war over this, and I think the US should stay the heck out of it.

And that, it seems, is confusing the powers that be around the world. I get a strong feeling they thought they could whip up a world war (probably with Putin’s cooperation) but there is no enthusiasm for it anywhere. So, the grand plan to shore up central governments by having a war that allowed them to stomp dissent fell apart.

And meanwhile Russia, who has been pumped up and pumped itself up as a co-equal if not superior power to the US has revealed itself a sclerotic, disorganized totalitarian mess in the deepest possible trouble, a nation that would probably lose a pillow fight against US kindergartners.

And China, like our local commies, is going insane in full view of the world.

So, that’s what we know. No, we don’t know how advanced the rebellion is or real numbers or anything, because the information is being suppressed at every possible level. And the only people who “get” a panoramic view of this are people like me who are crazy-addicted to news and look everywhere, not just the most common channels.

What we don’t know — you know, little factors that actually affect the outcome of things —

1- how many people are there in the world actually?

2- how many people in each country, and how many are at all educated to operate modern civilization (Mostly trades and stem graduates. People who do things, you know? Though you can count maybe people like me who can train/explain things.)

3- how many people are actually working?

4- how many people are working at needed things, and how many are cat rotators?

5- how big is the next generation, and how many are getting any education that makes sense?

6- how many people are immigrating to the US? Is the net migration even positive? (Not as crazy as it sounds, but would take a whole post to explain.)

7 – Ditto other countries of the world.

8 – How many people actually still believe in the shiboleths of big government and “experts”

9 – How many of the things we THINK we know are based on fake, irreproducible, stupid studies?

10 – How close are we to a major systemic collapse of government/organization/all professions?

That’s a hell of a list of known unknowns. And for each of them there is probably an equally long list of unknown unknowns.

So, you know, when trying to figure out what comes after our current collapse (and the status quo is already in collapse. Right now relatively slow motion) we have to work with all these things we don’t know. We’re making guesses from insufficient data.

Now it doesn’t mean the guesses are invalid. It just means that it’s a mighty shaky edifice, built on spindly foundations.

But that’s all we have. You go to war with the underwear you got on, even when it’s just a little scrap of satin or some really dirty bloomers. It’s what you got.

I’m going to start point out things that don’t fit the narrative and what I think they mean in future posts, to try to figure out where we land when we’re tossed in the pot.

Now, when you’re a mom you can guess the weirdest things from tiny clues. (Call it the mystery of the gallon of milk in the bathroom.)

But I’d still feel better if we had a lot more hard facts.

And some kevlar underoos.

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. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM SAM SCHALL: Vengeance from Ashes (Honor and Duty Book 1)

First, they took away her command. Then they took away her freedom. But they couldn’t take away her duty and honor. Now they want her back. Captain Ashlyn Shaw has survived two years in a brutal military prison. Now those who betrayed her are offering the chance for freedom. All she has to do is trust them not to betray her and her people again. If she can do that, and if she can survive the war that looms on the horizon, she can reclaim her life and get the vengeance she’s dreamed of for so long. But only if she can forget the betrayal and do her duty.

This new edition contains new material not included in the original release of this book.

BY EDMOND HAMILTON, WITH INTRODUCTION BY D. JASON FLEMING: Crashing Suns: Interstellar Patrol Volume 1 (Annotated): The classic pulp space opera series

Somewhere, out in the unimaginable vastness of space, a star is hurtling toward the Sun. Accelerating at ever greater speeds, it can only have been aimed by alien intelligences. With only months to go before the destruction of the entire Solar System, and all life within it, three men and one ship are sent to the destroying sun, in a desperate bid to save life as we know it…

In 1928, in the pages of Weird Tales, Edmond Hamilton published the serial Crashing Suns, initiating his Interstellar Patrol series of stories. With little concern for scientific accuracy or deep characterization, but much concern for excitement, the wonder of space travel, and blowing stuff up real good, Hamilton refined the tone first set by E.E. Smith, and his example was soon followed by others in the first great age of space opera, the pre-Golden Age of science fiction.

This collection brings together the first three Interstellar Patrol novellas, Crashing Suns, The Star-Stealers, and Within the Nebula. Volume 2 will contain the only Interstellar Patrol novel, and Volume 3 will collect the final stories of Hamilton’s first series.

This iktaPOP Media edition includes an introduction giving historical and genre context to the stories included.

FROM ERIC TESTERMAN: Taming Prehistoric (West Of Prehistoric Book 3)

Axemen. Norsemen. Vikings.

Whoever they are, Jedidiah Huckleberry Smith doesn’t care.

But with the possibility of a pardon on the table, he knows that he’d better do everything he can to prove his worth. Which means leading a civilian expedition, this time along the coast of Prehistoria, towards a mysterious warrior tribe whom the apes fear.

He ain’t going alone though.

Along for the ride are some friends… and former enemies.

But first, they are going to make a little visit to the site of their greatest defeat for some payback.

Because Prehistoria will be tamed, one way or another.

FROM LESLEE SHEU: Kumasagi, Part 1: Destin

The Kumasagi, who is in training to comfort and guide the souls of the dead, forms an accidental bond with Asta, a woman born from a sacred lake…

Najat has spent years as a senior-ranked diver, harvesting destins as they are born from pods in a sacred lake. Soon he must give up diving in order to fulfill his duties as the Kumasagi, the younger of two powerful mystics who comfort and guide the souls of the dead.

When his brother Jayan returns from exploring the uninhabited lands, Najat falls ill with a mysterious virus. An unexpected chain of events places him in the path of an errant destin—a woman newly born, yet fully grown. The destin instinctively seeks a Holy Amala, the one who can awaken her cognition and help her find her name.

When the destin finds Najat instead, they must both survive a mind-bending confrontation, which leaves them with a deep mystical bond held secret even from each other.

Kumasagi is a serialized fantasy saga told in seven parts. In Part 1: Destin, Najat’s last day as a Shakti Lake diver leads to a perilous encounter with a newborn destin—the same destin who will become his brother’s wife.

FROM AARON CUMMINS: The Cartographers Guild and the Search for the Jade Mask: An Amazing Pulp Adventure

A roller coaster ride of action and adventure in the grand pulp tradition

Kidnapped friends. A raging revolution. Dangerous mountains. And, at the end of the trail, a lost city that holds a secret worth killing for.

Ace Barrett is a daredevil pilot with iron fists and a wooden head. There’s no danger he won’t face for his friends.
Verity Hester is a research assistant with unusual skills and a secret past. She can pick locks and pockets with equal dexterity. Just don’t ask her where she picked those skills up.

Explorers have called the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan “the roof of the world” for centuries. Snow-capped peaks tower over deep, dark valleys. Visitors to the Pamirs face extreme weather, dangerous slopes, and deadly creatures.

The year is 1922. When two members of a mapping expedition are kidnapped by raiders, the members of the Cartographers Guild will stop at nothing to get them back. The explorers follow the trail into the uncharted mountains and face doom at every turn, while their missing companions are forced to brave ancient dangers to locate a legendary treasure. If bandits or traps don’t kill them, the mountains will. Their crusade leads to an impossible lost city—one no archaeologist would believe—and the home of the fabled jade mask.

Will the explorers save their friends, or will they die while searching for the jade mask?

Fans of Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, and Allan Quatermain will love the high adventure and exotic settings visited by the Cartographers Guild.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: By the Light of the Moon

Aatu is eighteen years old, a respectable landowner, and about to marry the girl he loves. The south coast of Finland provides everything his little village requires.

It’s a peaceful life, until a band of ex-Crusaders land on the shore. With the harsh winter and lean times approaching, they cannot be allowed to stay for long. When their priests disturb things best left alone, Aatu fears a minor annoyance will become a disaster.

Aatu’s people turn to the old ways to fight the enemy, to teeth and claws instead of swords and spears. Though they are outnumbered and unused to fighting, Aatu is about to discover that wild wolves are not the most fearsome predators in this land, and even the most peaceful people can become ferocious in defense of the ones they love.

FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Cross-Time Kamaitachi (Timelines Universe Book 5)

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

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

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

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

The Cross-Time Kamaitachi

FROM DOROTHY GRANT: Blood, Oil and Love (Combined Operations Book 2)

In a colony world desperate for resources, a search for new reserves reveals a shadow war!

Lizzes Olsen is a newly minted petrogeologist researching the untapped potential of places on her planet even terraforming overlooked. Unfortunately, the site she’s found is deep in enemy-occupied territory. The same enemy is funding the radical eco-terrorism that turned her university toxic, and training terrorists to kill the Empire’s geophysicists and geologists. Between bombings at home and being hunted abroad, Lizzes’ career, and her life, are in danger.

On the other hand, she has the unlikeliest of allies: a fairy god-Gunny Sergeant, and a very determined Imperial Recon soldier named Twitch who’s out to make her his very own happily ever after. If it takes a hecatomb of her enemies to get her down the aisle, they’re going to make it happen…

FROM T. L. KNIGHTON: The Last Champion (The Champion’s Cycle Book 1)

When the kingdom of Altria falls before an expansionist lord, the champion Korr is tasked with spiriting off the next in line to the throne as well as a princess who could be used to legitimize the duke’s claim to the throne. Joined by his childhood friend, one of the legendary Rangers of Altria, Korr seeks shelter with the man who trained him to fight many long years ago.

Korr is charged with raising the young king and readying him to take back his kingdom, but a chieftain of the Bohgan people becomes something of an obstacle to that purpose. Can Korr keep King Darvos and Princess Lauranna safe?

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.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: COMPLAIN

*Yes I know I promised noodling on what comes next. But you know what? I can noodle next week. Put your hands together and give the man who needs no introduction a warm ATH welcome – SAH*

Principles Are A Grand Thing – A Guest Post – by John Ringo

This was pulled from a long twitter thread on the subject of the PRINCIPLES! Crowd and their insistence that DeSantis shouldn’t have lead a charge against Disney, ‘Don’t call them groomers! That’s naughty!’ because PRINCIPLES!

And I’m going to use Dien Bien Phu as an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dien_Bien_Phu

At Dien Bien Phu, the French Foreign Legion was slowly surrounded by the Viet Min. The Communists slowly took high ground position after high ground position. At first the French tried occasionally to push them out and occasionally succeeded.

But eventually the Viet had all the high ground with artillery sited on the base.

At first the shelling was a nuisance. Then it got heavier. More and more guns, more anti-aircraft.

Eventually, the French were pounded into surrender.

The Left has been ‘boiling the frog’ for a long time and it has mostly been by weaponizing empathy around ‘cultural issues.’ The Dems have always been win/lose against Republicans but the Left has taken over every major cultural high ground. Academia. Media. Entertainment. Now major corporations.

And the effect has been horrible for conservatives. (And for everyone else I might add.)

‘Practically everyone with a PhD is a progressive! So that shows we’re smarter than you stupid conservatives!’

For decades it has been a major pain in the ass to be a conservative on a college campus. It was bad in the 1980s AT UGA. ‘If you believe in God you’re too stupid to be a scientist.’

If you create a massively hostile environment for people, deliberately destroy their career, you don’t get to then say ‘We’re the smart ones cause we have all the advanced degrees.’

You don’t get to say ‘We’re the only creators because no conservatives can write’ when you deliberately ensure that cons can’t get any awards.

Except that’s exactly what the Left does.

And, remember, lack of a college degree on average cuts long term earnings substantially. Which means less money on the right all things being equal. If you look at the graph of right wing money vs left over time the right has been losing more and more ground. Which is one of the few reasons the Left has been able to advance. It’s sure as hell not their insane, failed, policies.

The Right are the French, being continually bombarded. By Marxists at the least if not communists. The Left has all the high ground. We’re damned near at the point we’re going to be forced to surrender. And we’re at Will To Power. The Left has gotten so powerful, it’s openly defiant of any ‘norms’ or ‘equality’ or even laws.

When the Left burned cities, 99% got a slap on the wrist and rarely jail time. Cons go wandering around the capital and they get a vast panoply of human rights violations against them. Obama was the most corrupt administration in recent history except Biden. But they don’t get investigated. Cons get dragged out of their house in the middle of the night by SWAT teams and shown off to the media over obscure regulations. Trump was investigated repeatedly and illegally for things that were never even CONSIDERED worthy of investigation in previous administrations.

Hillary’s pay to play scams are fine. A conservative gets a parking ticket and they’re destroyed.

Why? Why does the Left get away with all of this? Why does nobody stop them?

James Carville said it recently in the reverse: ‘Nobody is afraid of the Democrats!’

Nobody has been afraid of the Republicans in my LIFETIME. Lois Lerner can laugh at a congressional committee the Republicans are running and gets away with it. Strosz can smirk and preen. Bureaucrats and businessmen flat out lie to Republican leadership and nothing happens.

But they don’t do that to Democrats. Why?

Because if you do, the Left will kill you. They will f’ing DESTROY YOU.

See Joe the Plumber or any number of other examples of ‘nobodies’ that were destroyed for questioning the Left.

So why doesn’t the Right (metaphorically) kill people who disrespect their leadership? Why do the bureaucrats and businesses think they can screw over the Right but not the Left?

PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

The PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! crowd has been a Conservative Surrender Chorus for as long as I can remember.

You can’t attack a bureaucracy that is treating Republicans like something under their shoe! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

You can’t cut funding to academia just because they’re tweeting #KillAllRepublicans. PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

You can’t smack down a company that involves itself, overtly and partisanly, in politics! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

Why?

It goes back to Buckley and National Review.

Buckley set out to create a ‘new’ conservative movement after HUAC and McCarthy burned out. They would purge the icky John Birch, anti-communist, Goldwater wing of the party and campaign on PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

‘Take the high road.’ ‘If you get into the mud with a pig you get covered in mud and only the pig enjoys it.’

If you take the high road, you’re silhouetting yourself and you’re just going to get shot.

If you don’t get in the mud with the pig, it takes you out at the knees and gores nine kinds of stuff out of you.

But PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

Which got us to here. Teachers are openly grooming kids and convincing them they’re… something they are not. Children are being permanently chemically castrated for kicks and money. Two weeks to flatten the curve turned into two years of random medical tyranny. The sitting President that most represented the Right, far more than the eGOP, was investigated over a hoax THAT THE FBI KNEW WAS A HOAX.

The list goes on and on.

We’re in the bunkers, being pounded by artillery. Every time some leader on the Right tries to break out, tries to rally the troops, they get bombarded by fire from every direction.

Reagan was constantly bombarded. Newt to the point he was destroyed. Tea Party was taken out by investigations and the IRS refusing to process their paperwork. Then the leadership was audited to death.

We could fight that. We could rally round a flag. But the worst part. The part that is absolutely INFURIATING, is the Surrender Chorus.

YOU CAN’T FIGHT BACK! THAT’S ICKY! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

Stay in the bunker. Learn to cope. The dinner parties are loverly.

I’m sick to death of the principles crowd. David French, leader of the Conservative Surrender Chorus, once tweeted “If I supported Trump, I’d never be invited to another dinner party.”

If your politics is based on whether you get invites to dinner parties, you don’t have ‘Principles’. You have the opposite.

We’re in the bunkers being bombarded. We’re Dien Bin Phu. We’re Mariupol. We’re overrun and bleeding to death.

But the worst part. The absolute worst. Is the TrueConservatives that every time we start to take a position quite frankly stab us in the back shouting PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES!

If you’re more worried about PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! than @libsoftiktok being doxed, if you’re more worried about PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! PRINCIPLES! than a mulit-billion dollar supposedly ‘family friendly’ corporation with loads of largesse given to it by the taxpayers coming out, very publicly, in favor of chemical castration of children…

Then you can take those principles and shove them where the sun don’t shine.

And when the Left learns to fear the Right, when the woke corporation boards gulp and go ‘Okay, we’ll stay out of it’, when the bureaucracy comes to heel…

Then you can be nice. Then you can take the high road.

Until then…

DRIVE YOUR ENEMIES BEFORE YOU! TAKE THE TALLY OF THEIR SLAIN AND THE LAMENTATION OF THEIR WOMEN!

And, yes, salt the earth.

When that is done, we can have a discussion about ‘principles.’