According To Hoyt

Today is the day when traditionally people set up elaborate — and often ridiculous — hoaxes on other people.

I was never particularly fond of those that were actually designed for people to believe, mostly because I’m not fond of making fools of others, or humiliation humor. Perhaps I have more empathy than average, or perhaps I know that I am on occasion foolish myself, and don’t wish to inflict it on others.

To me the ideal April Fools joke is the one where it’s obvious from the beginning that it’s a joke, but people are amazed at the thoroughness and the trouble you went through to create it, so that they are, in a way, in on the joke and admiring your artistry.

That’s the kind I tried to perpetrate with the famous announcement of the eminent publication of my mystery Sharkdip Thieves. And my son, back when he did a comic, went through a great deal of trouble to do something similar when he claimed he’d been bought by an anime corporation which would be, from then on, responsible for the art. Or my husband, when he announced he’d sold the world’s stupidest book for a million dollars. I mean we were very careful so it was obviously absurd.

And yet, casual readers fell for it. And yeah, sure, they weren’t so much humiliated, as they came back and slapped their foreheads minutes later going “Oh, no. I should have realized.”

I considered doing something of the kind today, though honestly I can’t even think what. Or I considered doing an outright very silly one, and have Havelock-cat write this post and claim he’s holding me hostage until provided with an orange kitten friend.

The reason I’m abstaining is not just because I’m still trying to finish Bowl of Red (Yes, I know, but it’s hard to write fast enough (And not have to delete bits because I suddenly went off on a tangent for ten chapters, which happened there. Okay, only 5. Those will probably be used in the next book, All Hot) when I’m in the middle of an eczema outbreak that disturbs my sleep. Yes, it’s much reduced, and “not bad” in the scale of outbreaks, but I still wake up when my arms rub against the covers which they do, of course) and I REALLY need to get it to my editor by close of business today, if I’m going to keep my publication schedule. And then, after a couple of days break, I need to roll tout-de-suite into Dark Waters, the sequel to Deep Pink.

I could take an hour and come up with a fun post, since I’m taking it to write this, anyway.

But I found when it came right up to it, I didn’t feel up to honoring deception, even open, “obviously not deception.”

I’m too bruised and my nerves are too raw. Over the last ten years, in everything from culture to politics, we’ve been made fools of and been caused to repeat things we know are foolish, for the sake of survival.

Someone, either Herb or Snelson, during one of his depressive periods said he wouldn’t be surprised if he came here and found this site had always been a front and a deception, designed to take down the names of participants. For the record, it’s not, though I imagine all our names, handles and proclivities are written down by various interested parties. These days if you’re not on a list you’re not trying.

But I remembered my first reaction to that, which was utter indignation, and then I thought of all the sites that had effectively pulled that on me — and you — over the years. I won’t mention them because I’m not going to get in a war. But we all know them. In fact these days sites that are what it say on the tin are very few. (And in that spirit, this is the blog of a neurotic fiction writer of socially unacceptable opinions, trying make sense of a bewilderingly bizarre and stupid world.)

And I remembered all the friends I’ve lost over the years. And some of them probably have cause to think I was the one who changed. I never did, but by keeping quiet I allowed them to think I was a leftist and “one of the good people” which of course is their foolishness, that they assume anyone not actively fighting them agrees with them, or that the side that put over a hundred million thinking, feeling individual people in graves is the “good people.”

But others I was truly wounded by, because our relationship was not political at all. We never mentioned or thought of politics — that I know of — unless it was the fictional politics of a created universe.

Yet all of a sudden, over a plastic rocket and the standards for being awarded such, there they were, calling me all sorts of ist and ism, and reviling people like me…. for no good reason.

Lately I’ve been looking at pictures — not out of nostalgia, but because I’m unpacking framed pictures of us that were never put up int he house we moved to in 2003. These pictures are mostly of us in the nineties, with our kids and our friends.

Of that group…. none remain. Not in contact with us and friendly. I think one of twenty or so people have our current address. The others, I wouldn’t trust with it.

This is shocking to someone who tried to keep friendships even after moving to another country, and who always expected her friendships to be life-long.

I look at those pictures, of parties at our house, and I marvel. And the thought “How beautiful we were” goes through my head, having nothing to do with our physical appearance. There was an untroubled, carefree look, an ease of casual friendship.

Was it always a sham? Probably a double sham, honestly. Even though I was open about my politics with most of our friends, they either assumed we “didn’t really mean it.” Or that my opinions were silly and my being an immigrant, once I “informed myself” I’d agree with them. (Completely missing the point of my history.)

And yet…. How beautiful we were. We knew we disagreed. We knew some of those disagreements were fundamental. But we thought in time things would shake out and a consensus would be arrived at, and that there was no true animosity on either side.

I think those ideas started falling apart with the 2000 election, and were nuked to kingdom come when they joined with our active enemies to lecture us about how America had brought the 9/11 attack on itself by being…. mean? Free? Whatever. By being us.

That was when most of our friendships fell apart.

We’ve rebuilt. But we can’t seem to trust that carelessly again. I don’t know if it’s just us, or if it’s universal. At this point, another betrayal still hurts, but I shrug and go “What did I expect?”

Heinlein’s bastard son, Lazarus Long said (paraphrased because I don’t have the quote right here) that a mother’s illusions are functional. If mothers didn’t believe that their children were the most beautiful, the smartest creatures ever born, none of us would survive childhood.

In the same way, our illusions were severe, but in a way functional. They allowed us to subsist and be happy, in the belief our friends, our co-workers, those who shared our passion for our hobby were well-intentioned human beings, no matter how deluded.

With the illusion gone, we might survive, but not happily.

How beautiful we were. And what fools.

Something fell into place with me, this morning, about this fun little start to a WWIII we have. And it makes sense.

Like the meme posted later on in this post, I want to warn you if you read this post, it’s one of those “Once you see it you can’t unsee it” and it might cost you sleep. Or not, if you’re one of those people who needs things to make sense. It might also allow you to prepare.

One of you surprised me a few years back by saying my style, my — for lack of a better term — natural voice, when I’m not being one of my characters (it’s complicated. Think of me as a radio that types, channeling narratives from parallel worlds. No, that’s not true, but my subconscious is a stone cold b*tch) reminded her of Agatha Christie, specifically in the Miss Marple stories.

It surprised me because while I read Agatha Chris obsessively for years, I read her mostly in Portuguese.

However, Miss Marple was so much like my (paternal) grandmother, that I couldn’t help but be influenced by her. Or by grandma. It’s hard to tell which. Both of them could figure out the rational explanation to something, because a fact didn’t fit, and they’d dig, and dig, and dig, and create analogies for what was happening, in search of an explanation.

I have the same need to make sense, to see “reason” out of things that don’t seem to. And I can’t stand it when something doesn’t FIT. If you want to drive me insane, you do something completely out of character for which there is no rational explanation. I’ll obsess over it for years, whether it’s in my favor or not.

This is why I knew the covidiocy was a sham of some sort. Not only weren’t the homeless dying like flies; the third world, despite some reports, also weren’t dying like flies. And the big cities in the US were encouraging homeless to crowd and congregate while everyone else was locked up. It didn’t add, unless the whole thing were a sham perpetrated by several groups for several related goals. (A prospiracy more than a conspiracy. I could expound on the cross-purpose goals I’ve uncovered so far, but that’s another post, right?)

In the same way, this whole “We really are in a shadow war with Putin! The cold war is back! Putin is crazy! He’s invading the Ukraine for funsies! Putin is invading because we crowded him! Biolabs in Ukraine!!!!!!” But at the same time — to give Trump his due — Putin, in this head to head (supposed) context, hasn’t dumped the contents of Biden’s laptop (of course they have it. I mean our FBI has it, and they are rapidly approaching status of enemy, domestic) into our national discourse. (I mean, it would complete disorganize us, and lose us whatever international prestige we still have, such as it is.) Or Putin could have dumped all the other Kompromat I’m sure they have on the not-very-bright and not particularly stealthy Biden crime family. Why hasn’t he?

And Biden, despite his continuous gaffes that take us to the brink of nuclear exchange, at least in theory, is STILL USING PUTIN TO BROKER THE SUICIDAL IRAN DEAL. And hasn’t opened up the keystone pipeline and started authorizing drilling,which would sink Putin and possibly save the democratic party. (Yes, Greens, but seriously. It’s either a war and an emergency or it’s not.)

This morning, this thread hit my mailbox from three separate sources (and if you’re not following Trent Telenko on Twitter, create a burner account to do so. I’m going to need to do it, since I refuse to log in to my real account (I just use it to echo my blogs) and Twitter is getting pushy about logging in. It’s worth dipping a toe into the sewer for the man’s insights, honest).

You should go and read the whole thing, but until you do, let me quote a bit, so you get what we’re talking about. Again, the thread is here:

Alright, this is the promised thread🧵explaining the “Irrational Regime Hypothesis.”
This is a national/institutional behavior template.
Warning: once you see this template. You cannot unsee it.

The basic concept is that for certain unstable regimes (or even stable ones with no effective means of resolving internal disputes peacefully, particularly the succession of power) domestic power games are far more important than anything foreign, and that foreigners are

…only symbols to use in domestic factional fights.
The need to show ideological purity & resolve – “virtue signaling” in modern terms – as a means of achieving power inside the ruling in-group becomes more important than objective reality
Only the internal power matters

…as outside reality is merely a symbol to be used in the internal power game.

The ruling Imperial Japanese military faction of 1931 – 1945 was a classic example of this irrational regime hypothesis.

Trent Telenko, on twitter

And suddenly the back of my mind clicked. Not conspiracy, which is hard on this scale — Not kabuki which didn’t feel quite right — but like the Covidiocy? Prospiracy. “We’re all going this way because we think it fits our goals.”

Now I want you to consider that it’s not one, but two irrational regimes, we’re dealing with.

This has been bothering the heck out of me, because it smells like they’re cooperating, only that’s not QUITE the right pattern.

None of this makes sense, unless you have TWO irrational regimes (Ours and Russia’s. China is too, but it’s another ball of wax. China doesn’t really believe other nations are real, anyway. They’re just Barbarians and China is all-under-heaven, so this is all much of a muchness on that front.) that are using each other as scarecrows to quiet the opposition at home.

Yadda, yadda, sure, the great reset and depopulation is part of the plan, but look, this is not actually throughout the left, and I bet 90% of the Biden Junta (as a handle for his handlers) isn’t committed to it. The plan exists out there as a wished for exegesis that makes them be “on the right side of history” but most of them are running on what they heard in college was good, and are not committed to the great reset world.

Why do they act like they’re simultaneously enemies and besties, and all the while are bringing us closer to nuclear war than we’ve been in 40 years?  What sense can we make of this?

This is not about Ukraine. This isn’t even a shadow war between us and Russia.

This is two, enormously unstable regimes, who don’t understand why the internals of their country aren’t conforming to their theories and things aren’t falling into place as their ideological certainty tells them they should, trying to stomp on internal enemies and keep/increase power. 

The other/opponent is just a paper target, something to focus the eye on, but it’s not really what they’re shooting at. I submit to you that Biden’s supporters really, truly thought that the “right” (for lack of a better term) would not just say “Well Putin has a point” (Which is the worst I’ve heard) but fall in, vocally, ecstatically, behind Putin.  That because they’ve been told Trump is Putin’s bud (And remember the left assumes that the right in the US goes for cult of personality as much as they do) we would all rush to vocally support Putin.

And then, as they did during the two world wars, and claim was done during the cold war (waggles hand. Sometimes. Inconsistently) they could righteously suppress the opposition as traitors in a time of war and paint them as evil to the populace.

Meanwhile Putin thought that he could have a short victorious war, start on his dream towards greater Russia, and cement the suppression of opposition, and his cult of personality at home.

Those were the actual goals, and that explains the “we wouldn’t object to a small incursion” and the crazy cakes way Putin went at the war.

It didn’t work, on either end. So now the only thing the two can do is escalate, in pursuit of their real goal: the cementing of internal support/suppression of opposition. This is the only thing that explains why Biden is still making obvious “gaffes” that take us to the brink, and why Putin, reportedly is conducting the war from a nuclear-proof bunker.

Will they go that far? I don’t know. Grandma was fond of saying “I’d not go anywhere – even to heaven – with a madman, because he might push me down.”  And we’re dealing with two insane regimes.

May G-d have mercy on our souls.

*Ladies, gentlemen, dragons, sea otters and small flightless birds: Frank Fleming needs no introduction. A lot of us grew up reading IMAO.US (Yes, yes, I am older than he is. Who are you to dictate when I grew up). My reaction whenever he offers us something for According to Hoyt is “We are not worthy.” Also, and this is very important, you must all go out and buy his books. He allegedly has evidence of my participation in Instapundit’s puppy blending rituals*1 and hypothetically could release the pictures, if he doesn’t make enough money out of his books. So, I’m pushing him for purely altruistic reasons and totally not because I apparently once left a laptop for repair and forgot it and there might possibly be pictures of puppies and blenders. GO BUY HIS BOOKS. – SAH*

Writing Male Characters – by Frank J. Fleming

Writing is hard. For one, there’s a seemingly infinite combination of letters, but only a small subset of them make any sense. To demonstrate, I’ll just bang on my keyboard a bit.

qoiebnv,mdjapx,ciouipoebhjcklaq[;pejklsm,d

See? That doesn’t make any sense. It takes a lot of work to get all those letters in the right order.

And the other hard part about writing is creating realistic characters — really believable people. Now, one thing everyone can easily do is write female characters. That’s because women are straightforward. Women like it when you compliment their hair, and their primary motivation in life is obtaining more shoes. To write a realistic female character, that’s really all you have to know.

But men are more complex, and that’s why I think a lot of people write male characters who aren’t very believable. But I have some tips here that will help you write some male characters who seem to jump off the page.

TIPS ON WRITING MALE CHARACTERS

* Duty is important. One of the main motivators of male characters is duty. Duty is what gives men purpose, and a sense of duty should be the driving factor in any story. The only problem with duty is that when it’s said out loud, it sounds a lot like “doody” and makes men laugh. So while duty should be important to the story, it should never actually be said, or it’s going to derail everything with snickering.

* Few emotions. You may think, “I’m going to write a really passionate character pulled to his limit by extreme circumstances.” Well, not if you’re writing a male character, because men aren’t big on feelings. You tell a male character, “Barbarians sacked and destroyed your home village killing everyone!” his first reaction will be to grunt and shrug. Because men aren’t big on feelings and aren’t going to get all worked up over events.

* Always tries punching. So what does your character do when faced with a problem? Does the character use their brains to think of a solution? Not if the character is male; he’s first going to try punching something. Because men like punching things and will always give it a try in every situation. Let’s say you have a science fiction story, and there is some sort of interstellar anomaly. A male character will walk right up and try to punch it. Only if that fails will he then try something else like quantum physics. This is why Sherlock Holmes was widely criticized for having an unrealistic male character because Holmes always went straight to observation to solve crimes instead of just punching the nearest person and yelling, “Who did this?”

* Men only want one thing. Despite whatever is going on in your story, it’s important to remember that men only want one thing at the end of the day: nachos. This is most of their motivation for doing anything, so make sure to mention it in your writing. “He knew that by overthrowing the dark lord, he’d be free to eat all the nachos he wanted.” Stuff like that. Men can also be motivated by pizza and tacos, but it usually all comes down to nachos.

* Men don’t like it when you make fun of their homemade Mandalorian costume. When men work really hard on a cool imitation of the Mandalorian costume, it really hurts when people make fun of it. I think I did a great job, and I don’t think it’s that far off from the TV show. And I know before I said before men don’t have emotions, but they might get a little emotional when they spend all week trying to make cardboard look like beskar steel and their wife just laughs at them when they walk around the house in it.

—

Well, there are all the tips I have for writing realistic male characters. Apply these, and maybe you’ll finally stop getting criticized for not understanding men in your fiction. And maybe get a 3D printer. Then you’ll be able to make a Mandalorian armored codpiece so realistic even your wife won’t be able to laugh at it.

Frank J. Fleming’s new novel, Superego: Betrayal, the third in his Superego series about a psychotic, intergalactic (male) hitman, is out now.

*1 Instapundit being a puppy blender, to get him energy to power his posting (when it was just him) was of course a joke Frank floated, in response to never being linked at instapundit. It spread until Glenn Reynolds was known to a substantial portion of the internet as “the puppy blender, himself.”
It is of course just a joke. No puppies were blended in pursuit of it. And of course instapundit doesn’t have a teleporter so that all of us, contributors, can get together and participate in horrific and yet cheesy puppy blending rituals. If you don’t believe me, ask Stephen Green or Charlie Martin, whom I totally didn’t share the Colorado teleporter for a while.

All right. I’ve had just about enough of this nonsense.

Yes, the title is a dig at our alleged VP, one that Ace of Spades loves to make. It appears every time she fails — I knew someone who worked for her for a while. They don’t know if she’s stupid or lazy, but apparently her modus operandi is to sit in her office and browse for shoes, while people do her work for her — the journalists go on about how some male “failed to position her for success.”

If it were only her, though, I would grit my teeth and go on, which honestly is all I’m doing under this destructive mal-administration. (If they don’t get us nuked, it wasn’t for lack of trying.)

But I was reading Austen fanfic, and I realize this is a generational problem, starting with X probably and really horribly bad in my kids’ generation. Women really expect to be “positioned for success.” And if they fail it’s some man’s fault.

This Austen fanfic was exemplary of this, and I read it with awe and horror, in the same spirit one would watch a train wreck, disgusted and shocked but afraid to look away.

Look, the central conceit of Pride and Prejudice, if you haven’t read it, is that both the parents were objectionable, and the young ladies were cast upon the world with no a feather to fly with. This falls broadly under “author being an *sshole to characters, because it makes the story more interesting and their triumph greater.”

Mr. Bennet, the family father, is probably a raging introvert. He hides in his office and reads great works, emerges to make sarcastic comments, and finds “felicity in marriage” in an unusual way. This is because his wife is vulgar (she is a merchant’s daughter. In this case “Vulgar” is a term of art meaning “she never learned the complex interactions of the upper class”) and frankly dumb as a post. (Beyond being vulgar she doesn’t understand a lot of the interactions between people, pretty much anything people say that is even slightly involved or…. really anything. She is credited with the ability to set a good table (no mean feat at the time) but in no way intellectual.

Now this rings absolutely true. And milder than it might have been. I know many a brilliant man who, for reasons of being young, desperate and male, married a woman who creates beautiful music with the wind whistling in and out of her ears, when turned a certain way. The best ones are like Mr. Bennet. They develop their “felicity” by amusing themselves with the strange things their wives do. This is because, as I told my son long ago (about his classmates) if you laugh at people, you still love them a little. Particularly, if it’s a tender laugh as in “Oh, boy, she’s so silly” which unless Mrs. Bennet is being egregious is the type of laughter in P & P.

The middle type will leave the family.

The really bad ones turn abusive. Arguably that was my grandfather. (And grandmother wasn’t stupid. Just ignorant, and he was brilliant. She had practical knowledge, but the man read everything and was friend with authors.)

I was aware of the “It’s all Mr. Bennet’s fault and he’s the bad guy” faction mostly because (for weird but cogent reasons) older son took a Jane Austen course in college. The perspective, as someone who grew up with Jane Austen, puzzled the heck out of him. But I knew it was out there.

I mean, was he flawless? No. He should perhaps have done more to secure his daughter’s future, but at their income level people really didn’t have a season in London, so he wasn’t depriving them of that. (They might have taken the girls to Bath, maybe.) But mostly the reason they were having trouble marrying the girls off wasn’t even dowries. (And yeah, at 21 Jane, the pretty one, was practically on the shelf.) It was the Napoleonic wars, which were killing men in batch lots, and also taking away a lot of rural boys to go fight. which left rural hamlets curiously devoid of marriageable prospects. This is something neither of their parents could have foreseen when they were born. As the local gentry, Mr. Bennet probably figured out his daughters would marry the like from nearby hamlets, or perhaps wealthy farmers/merchants. (They were on the bottom of their class, so permeable.) Also, Mrs. Bennet’s marriage portion is intact, and not inconsiderable being five thousand pounds. The interest of that would keep widow and children in some comfort in a rural village, even if not in affluence.

It’s also obvious from the book that Mr. Bennet mostly gives way to his wife because “it’s not worth fighting.”

We don’t know if the estate is well administered, but since there’s no mention of debts or tenants leaving, we must assume it’s well enough administered. It’s just not that big or profitable, period.

Now, sure, part of fanfic is making assumptions, and sometimes the assumptions or outright changes to the characters are okay. This one annoyed the living daylights out of me, though, because one gets the impression that the author didn’t realize she was making changes. There was no “Because of her father, Mrs. Bennet actually had a lot of business acumen” or deep seeding you do for these things.

No, it was just “Mr. Bennet failed to support and help his wife, and that’s why she was this bad. Oh, yeah, he also mismanaged the estate, so we’ll have Lizzy manage it for him, and she’ll do brilliantly, even though in the book her main talents are snappy come backs and dancing, because she has a vagina and therefore is brilliant. Oh, and he’ll recognize he did wrong and spend the entire book apologizing to his wife and daughters, and being really impressed with his wife for taking him to task.” (Again, these young women idea of a strong woman seems to be being a b*tch on wheels.)

The entire book is a pile on on Mr. Bennet for failing to “support his wife” and “help her with what she needs to know.”

IOW, the author seems to think that Mr. Bennet should be doing both jobs — and we won’t even go into the fact here that yes, lady of the Manor was a job, as was Lord of the Manor (even though they weren’t titled) each with its specialized area of knowledge and management, and that Mr. Bennet probably had absolutely no clue what it took to do his wife’s job, since his mother would never have taught him that — and giving his wife all the credit.

Which seems to be like a subset of young women views as their due in life, because … because they were born with a vagina. Which means if they aren’t wildly successful, they’re being discriminated against and it’s some men’s fault.

I won’t go into the central contradiction at the heart of this, which I’d already noticed in the 80s, and which is apparently the central relationship-between-men-and-females neurosis of boomers, which is that women can do anything, but they’re being held down by men, and are fragile flowers who will met if looked at the wrong way.

But I kind of know at least some of the issues influencing this insane view that men should “position women for success” while giving them all undue praise and worship.

1- It starts with the women who were upheld while women were fighting for “equal rights” meaning for entry in the male world of male jobs (but only the indoor and clean ones, mind.) Keep in mind that in most western countries (well, not the one I came from) the barriers weren’t political or legal, but social. There was a strong “ladies don’t do that” that kept (mostly middle class. Lower class women always worked. They had to) women out of middle class jobs. Which means that women who bucked that were to begin with iconoclasts and odd. Those who succeeded weren’t merely crazy.
Women who first broke into … oh, professorships, or commercial writing, or even professional secretary, were exceptional. You see this a bit when you read thirties books, and you have the utterly devoted secretary who knows how to do everything in the office, and is unmarried because she devoted herself to her career.
They were exceptional, because it was very hard to break in. You had to be super-hungry, determined and focused to get a foot in the door.
So they were amazing and exceptional. From this a lot of people on the activist side took the idea EVERY woman was like that, and imagine the amazing things unleashed if they were “equal” to men, or even better took charge.
The just-so story that emerged in the heads of activists and theoretical thinkers was that if women were this wonderful, what force men MUST be exerting to keep them down in all sorts of ways.
(And since in most cases there was no legal barrier, this is why boomer females believe in a vast conspiracy by all males, ignoring that most males want their wives/sisters/daughters to succeed and also that they’re not a hive identity.)

2 – When women were pushed, harangued, shoved into professions many of them had no interest in, because culture had flipped and you couldn’t be “just a wife and mother” and if you tried you were called names and assumed to be dumb, most of them failed to amaze.
Which, of course they did. Look, most people are average. That’s why it’s called average, or normal. Heck, most men also have no interest in a career. If they’re wealthy and/or fortunate enough, most of them will happily putter through life doing this and that, and nothing of consequence. And 99% of men and women have jobs, not careers, much less vocations. Those of us who must do one thing, come hell or high water are very, very broken.
So, women failed to take over and remake the world into paradise. And the just so story went wild. There really must be a vast conspiracy of males and the patriarchy. And it’s so sneaky, you can’t see it, so micro aggressions, etc.

This is how we get to boomer females, ten years older than I who are sure their potential for a brilliant career in science was ruined by Mr. Jones in Third Grade who told them that girls just weren’t good at math. I mean, it’s possible Mr. Jones existed, though so many of them report this, I think they’re borrowing each other’s experience in the guise of false memory. There are asses everywhere. But if you had a real vocation and drive to science, you wouldn’t be deterred by that.

Me? I love science, but I transpose digits in math, so despite all encouragement, and because I didn’t figure out the digit thing was an actual brain glitch till my late thirties when I had to figure out ways for the kids to overcome it, my love affair with science remains mere flirting, including a lot of reading popularizations, and listening to scientist friends. And having known a lot of these women intimately, if Mr. Jones told them that girls couldn’t do math, he was lying to console them. He didn’t want to say “You, personally, my dear can’t do math. You can’t do much thinking either. You should stop trying to be an intellectual leading light and learn crochet or something. Also there are better channels for your fervor than grievance and feminism. Have you tried Christianity and becoming a missionaire?”

But their impression that “if women had free rein, they would all be amazeballs” sticks, and they won’t let go. So we’re now in the fourth generation of finding excuses.

And the women are actually factually handicapped by the fact that no authority figure dares judge them harshly, or judge them at all.

They can’t give the highest grades to boys, because someone will notice and accuse them of being misogynist. Look, NATURALLY in mixed classes, boys have the top three spots or so. And this is being told to you by a woman who always had the top spot, even if she had to half-kill-herself to do it.

This comes not because men are smarter — there might be more brilliant men than brilliant women but society rewards high-normal not brilliant — but because males in general are more competitive, so they care if they are the best. And also because statistically — which says nothing about the individual — men have more geniuses (and more morons) and women tend to cluster around the center of the bell curve (there are evolutionary reasons for this. I’m not going into them.)

But that’s not what we see in any classes today. Because no one would dare do that. In fact, they will distort the entire style of teaching and all the testing, and finally resort to outright lying to make women be in the top slots.

Look, older son is thirty. I have gone to a lot of graduations. I’ve read a lot of “Award winning” projects. ALL women. Sometimes a man snuck in, but 90% of them were women. And I have eyes/can listen to speeches/ can read the “winning” efforts.

When my kids were carrying high Bs and these girls had perfect As? They were doing at best C work. The boys were doing A work. (And no, not because I’m their mom. You should hear me critique their efforts when they’re subpar.)

Our acquaintance included boy and girl twins, both of average intelligence. The girl had straight As. The boy eventually dropped out of high school, because he felt there was no correlation between effort and grade. They are not anomalous. I keep hearing more and more stories like that.

These girls are being given praise and high grades for work that frankly should be taken to the woodshed and given a good drubbing.

Every time I taught or tutored, I found that by the end of high school girls were maybe three years behind the boys. They were also, by grade, at the top of their classes.

Not because girls are stupid, and in fact when I tutored and was ruthless with them, most came up to speed really fast. (So did the boys. I…. might be a bit scary.) (Why were the girls in tutoring? Well, some parents NOTICED they were little ignorant monkeys and wanted them to actually be prepared for college.)

It’s because girls aren’t being taught. They’re being praised, and glorified, and told they’re the best evah!

Here’s the dirty secret: no matter how much you mollycoddle someone, sooner or later they’ll come up against a test.

It might be in college, when it is required that you actually do that math you’ve been avoiding, because it’s boring, and some professor refuses to play along because vagina, and he has tenure, and you’re going to fail.

It might be as a young newlywed, when you can’t balance your checkbook.

It might be in a job, where they let you keep the title, but you realized you’ve been shunted aside and your subordinates are actually doing the job. (And you don’t want to spend your day shopping for shoes.)

Sooner or later you’ll get tested. You can’t mollycoddle someone into success.

No one can succeed for you, nor get you into a position where you’ll never make a mistake. For one, we are not born perfect, and we all make mistakes. Every day. It’s mistakes that really teach.

In that fanfic, if Mrs. Bennet had suddenly shunted her husband aside, because he had “failed to support me.” she would have rapidly squandered whatever money they’d set aside in fripperies and a new carriage, because THOSE not estate management, or preparing her daughters for society were obviously her areas or expertise. And throwing a 19 year old girl at regency estate management would mean ruin. Before or after her nervous breakdown.

If you have no other reason you’re supposed to be successful than “because I”m a woman” and if you think you should succeed without trying because you have a vagina, you are delusional.

Failing to do your job for you and give you praise is not failing you. Unless it’s you failing yourself.

Yeah, sure, some men — though mostly women — will stab you in the back and climb the ladder over your dead body. Humans, what are you going to do?

And some professions/jobs are closed shops and guilds, which mostly favor those who have family/parents already in them or in some contact with them. Like, it’s much easier to become a bestseller, if your parents worked for NYC publishing, or at least attended the parties. Oh, and if you have the right politics. (In publishing, liberal female is life on the easiest of settings.)

But that’s what life is like, and what a complex society is like. No one owes you anything. Not because you’re a woman, not because you can tan, not because you’re a cross eyed Pacific islander, with an interesting history.

People will try to give you breaks for all of those, even those in most cases those characteristics have nothing to do with professional competence. And people will try to push you into their idea of success.

But in the end, in the very end, short of cancelling you and making it impossible for you to be hired (and sometimes — feral grin — not even then) people will succeed at what they want to do, if they want it badly enough and are willing to work their tails off.

Yeah, they will sometimes have to work harder than other people, for various reasons. Well. That’s humans for you. You can’t really equalize access without ending up doing things like preparing women atrociously, because you’re afraid of discouraging them.

And also, most jobs that look glamorous and easy from the outside aren’t. Anything that pays really well, and a lot of things that don’t, are a lot of work for everyone. And a bunch of headaches, and often total lack of security.

Don’t go imagining that people of a difference sex, color or body type have it easier. Yeah, some do. Though in most closed-shops right now, the greatest advantage is leftist politics, and if you want it badly enough you’ll pretend that.

Or you’ll go away and do something else.

Despite a century of indoctrination, most humans don’t want “careers”. They want jobs that pay for the things they really want to do.

Trying to demand that men do everything while giving women all the credit is not only spitting on feminists like grandma, who fought to erase the legal distinctions, making women responsible for their own money and allowed to live alone even if widowed: it’s trying to take us back to when every woman was considered sort of an overgrown child.

Because you can’t keep telling people to believe you over their lying eyes without a reaction.

So grow up. Succeed or don’t. Work or don’t. Fight for what you want or don’t. Just stop blaming others for it.

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. ;)*

*Some of these books are getting pushed two weeks in a row because now (crosses fingers) they have images. Apparently it makes a huge difference. Who knew? – SAH*

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: SPOTTED

*Yes, yes, this time it worked. Well spotted! Granted it worked in a slightly different format, but I think I like it.
Anyway, didn’t quite finish the book yesterday, despite a valiant effort, so going back to head down. If you need me, some of you have my # (you just have to play find the person.) If you can’t find someone who has my number, and you don’t have my number, you don’t need me. Keep the dragon out of my office. He’s liable to get his nose bitten off. And try not to wake Havey, who is sleeping instead of bothering me. Thanks – SAH*

Hoping this will actually get written and show up, which shows you the triumph of hope over experience, I’m going to put it up super fast:

I’m okay. The reason there was no post yesterday and there will be no promo post today (promo post probably tomorrow) is that WordPress is embuggred.

We have again the return of “no picture will post, and if it posts, it disappears seconds later” and now with extra special “The post too will disappear suddenly and with no explanation.”

Comments too are having issues.

For the more paranoid among us, of whom I OFTEN am one:
No, I don’t think they’re messing with me personally. I think they did an update, and because I’m using a really old theme it hits me harder than other people. I’m saying this because last time I had to go into the bowels of the post and fix a bunch of crazy settings that had got flipped by the update before I could “post with images” or even read your comments normally.

I’m trying to finish a book, so I won’t have time to do that today and (maybe) tomorrow.

It might be time to change theme. I might even have to — gasp — get a paid theme.

I’m not the only one getting hit by this nonsense, and it’s really seemingly correlated to age of theme (I think mine is from 2016.) I just hate changing themes, period.

Anyway, wanted you to know it’s nothing major. It’s just the forces of evil (technology) messing with me again.

See you tomorrow.

I’m actually not sick. I am tired. Tired, with a bone-deep tiredness, but not sick.

Well, I just had one of the worst eczema outbreaks of my life — please, no recommendations for treatment. I’ve had this since I was 1. I’ve tried EVERYTHING. One thing works, a medicated prescription cream (Triamcyclone, I think. I have a huge tub of it, but managed to pack it and lose it in the move — which is double weird, because it’s been years since I’ve had anything half this bad, and because low altitude usually stops my outbreaks.

On the other hand, the infallible trigger for my eczema is stress, and between the last few months of the move/fix and the house sale that was ratcheted up to insane levels. By the times things slowed enough, my arms were raw flesh AND infected there were outbreak patches in the middle of my back and some on my back thighs. And I didn’t want to go to the doctor again. (For one, I couldn’t drive. My prescription was way off, and I just got new glasses yesterday.)

But I don’t really count the outbreaks till they go nuclear, so the last two weeks. (But seems to be on the downstroke, now. And almost okay. I no longer look like I have critical burns all over my arms. At one time someone at comicon asked what the outbreak was. He was so kind of advocate for disability, and he was super impressed I was wearing short sleeves, with my arms as bad as they were. Meh. I don’t actually even notice it until it’s affecting my sleep, etc.)

I am tired, though. Boy, am I tired.

Some of this is I suppose normal, considering what the last year was.

But some of it is being super-tired of…. life in the last two years.

Look, when I used to visit Portugal for one or two weeks, it felt like I was spending time in “frustration land.” Anything, no matter how simple ran into delays, contretemps, parts not being available, waitstaff being dilatory (I realized I’d become completely American when I stood on a chair and made like a semaphore to get the waitress who’d been ignoring us to come to the table. The rest of my family who had been waiting for an hour groaned and hid their faces. I wasn’t even vaguely embarrassed. I might to have done it, to avoid retaliation, if what we were waiting for wasn’t the bill.)

I mean, stuff like “I need to buy a notebook” turned into an epic expedition over ten stores, and most of an afternoon because a store would be out of the type I wanted, send us to another, who swore they’d never carried it, then–

And I can tell you it wasn’t lack of familiarity. It was how you lived there. Someone made a comment about how much creativity it took to live in the USSR. Forget it, Jack, it took creativity to live anywhere but the US. You learned to make do, to haggle, to exchange favors. And when to ignore the law. (It was my inability to convince my husband to go the wrong way on a very short street that almost got our rental car wedged in the medieval part of Coimbra, to the point only a helicopter could get it out. Seriously. We managed to get out, but it took 3 hours of turning by inches. And he was like “How come this doesn’t happen to locals” Well, because no one cares about the one-way sign, that’s why. Yeah, it was PROBABLY a source of revenue for local policemen, but better than getting your car wedged. Back then you could bribe a traffic cop for $20 or less.)

It was a relief, like a massive weight lifted off my shoulders, whenever we landed in the US. No matter how crazy the airport, tight the connection, hassled the airport restaurant servers, we knew life had just got massively simpler.

I wish I could take a plane back to the US before people who think they’re universal experts started f*cking with everything.

It’s not even that there are shortages. It’s that the shortages are utterly random and unpredictable. And service? Yeah, there’s a shortage of employees in jobs that are mostly taken by women, and I assume that’s because after the covidiocy many women decided to stay home with the kids, which is a good thing. Statistics seem to indicate so.

But even short-staffed, there’s a curious lack of service in the “dead hours” of the day. And almost everyone I know who is working, their companies have cut staff to the bone and are abusing the remaining employees with crazy schedules and/or overtime. Because, well, yes, the companies are pinched (the war on energy does that) and therefore they’re trying to cut in human resources, as they always do. (And not the actual HR. If they cut HR efficiency and service might go through the roof.)

More importantly, “the way to do things” got broken during the covidiocy. Now you never know if you come in, if you do it from a distance, if they’re going to require masks (And some of us at this point get hypoxic at the thought of wearing masks) if they’ll have what we need in stock, if we’ll have to wait for months, if–

I’ve been trying to get an estimate for some simple work on this house for…. 3 months now. It’s– slow and unreliable. Not as bad as in Colorado, but still slow and unreliable.

And I’m slow and unreliable.

I’m tired. There’s the constant stress of knowing we’re now living in a coulrocracy (*government by clowns) and not knowing what they’re going to do next to fcsk things up for everyone. And no, they’re not making this easy by talking about “possibilities of nuclear war.” No, it’s not panicking me. It’s making me angry as heck, though. I wake up in the night punching something, and then have to apologize to husband or cat.

But it’s exhausting. It all is exhausting.

The new neo asked if everyone had aged 10 years in the last 2. In my eyes, most people, myself included, did.

It’s the stress, the not sleeping well, the waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Nothing is as harmful to the human mind and body as continuous uncertainty.

When will it change? I’m uncertain.

Can someone direct me to the waiting area for the flight to America circa 2017? Thank you.

The last time I was in Portugal I got to witness (actually the time before last, while running through the Lisbon airport) something I’d only previously read about as being normal in the soviet union: structures that were being built and decaying, simultaneously, which seems impossible, but I assure you it’s not.

As the idiots on both sides try to hurry us into war, and the custard heads try to side with Russia and cite as a reason “But Ukraine is corrupt” I stare at the mind-boggling staggering amounts of corruption necessary to bring Russia to the level of incompetence on display in the battlefields of Ukraine, and I think “If that’s a reason for Russia to invade a country, they’re going to invade all of the world, and the US only escapes on a “relative” scale. (Mind you, that is precisely what Putin wants, but that’s something else.)

The question is: competence has existed, and had high marks. We know it existed at various times, because their works survive: the landscape of Europe is still littered with Roman bridges and aqueducts, not to mention Roman roads. Cathedrals and monuments abound. Our own country has marvels of engineering and construction still standing and you don’t have to fix daily.

So, where did that competence go? And why does no one seem to know how to do anything. (Here as an aside, almost everything I learned to do competently had to be learned on my own, and often against massive resistance.)

Well, for about a hundred years now, we’ve been under the ideological ascent of socialism. And socialism — international socialism, to be precise — is only good for creating picturesque ruins. (The romantics would have loved them.)

Note that I’m not defending national socialism. As I’ve pointed out before, when the government takes over the economic life of a country, and directs what the companies can or cannot do, the tendency is to quash innovation, and as a rule everyone becomes very poor.

It’s just that it depends. Like empires (which to an extent they are) national socialist regimes can do okay under an extraordinary ruler. I had a mini-dispute with Herb in the comments on whether Franco was or was not Fascist. He absolutely was, both in the economic, and in the repressive, take over every minutia of life aspect. He was also better than the average bear at directing the economic life of the country which is why before his death we used to go shop in Spain, where more and better goods were available than in Portugal.

Relatively speaking, Salazar was a softer leader. Or at least, he stomped less on the opposition (while making more noises about stomping. It’s the Portuguese way.) But as an economic leader (director of the economic life. Fuhrer if you will. Or where did you think that came from?) he sucked. He sucked upside down and sideways and with his head in a sack. And that’s because he was raised by Jesuits, and got his economic theories from them. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. So over his rule, everyone became increasingly poorer. But weirdly not incompetent. (In fact, as a person who — there and here — likes to follow craftsmen around watching how they do things, the average craftsman who learned his trade under national socialism, was probably way better than anyone else.)

Which brings us to: how does international socialism/communism not only destroy competency but introduce incompetency and corruption to the degree it is enforced/implemented.

At first I thought it was due to enforcement/non enforcement of laws. But that dog won’t hunt. Laws in Portugal at least were as inconsistently enforced under one as under the other. And of course the darlings of the regime had, if not carte blanche, at least a certain amount of immunity.

So what does it?

Some people will of course jump to its being the egalitarian ethos of international socialism, the fact that it’s supposed to be a dictatorship of the proletariat, and that nothing can be enforced.

But that’s actually buying the propaganda of the international socialists, and their propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with reality. You are free to believe this is true, but you are also free to believe the Easter bunny is saddling up his egg distribution system.

No, the international socialists are just as totalitarian as the international socialists. In fact, they are usually more so, since they require you to believe– Oh.

Look, the national socialists — other than the Germans, and yes, that is a huge “other” but truly, everywhere else they gained hold wasn’t QUITE that insane and neurotic, let alone murderous — are evil thugs who gain control and rule from above with a heavy hand. Even if one or two exceptions fail to immiserate their populations quite so much, they do in general clamp down on innovation and enforce whatever their strange idea of economics might be, with predictable consequences.

But the totalitarian rule they do enforce is usually in tune with their people. So, Franco encouraged and endorsed the Catholic church, and FDR made noises about good, midwestern values and how “decent” people should live.

It stomps on anyone even mildly different, of course, but the rule it enforces is what most of the native custard heads would think is right and just at least externally. (Yes, I do realize what that says about the Germans of the 20th century.)

So while — in general — it impoverishes the populace and destroys industry and innovation, not to mention free trade, it brings with it an ethos of “poor but honest” and “I take pride in what I do because I belong, and this nation I belong to is the best in the world.”

It slots into the portion of the head that wants to belong to something. And it it gives an appearance of working just long enough that people tend to think of it as right, just and “the natural order of things.”

Which is why so many conservatives– may G-d have mercy on their souls — think of the FDR rule as “the way America should be.”

Meanwhile international socialism (which for a large part of the 20th century was actually Russian nationalism projected outward) while as intrusive and crazy cakes comes with a set of shibboleths that self-admittedly are impossible. And are impossible from the beginning.

Because the international cult dictates that you not only believe but endorse principles that are obviously idiotic, even to the most idiotic of human beings. In fact, it takes years of expensive education to be able to say these things with a straight face. (See the current nominee for Supreme court who is unable to define “woman” because she’s not a biologist.)

In the early stages of this international insanity, it was all about the workers being naturally better than the managers, and therefore if the workers were in control marvelous things would ensue.

Only even the workers know they’re not qualified to manage (No, seriously. I’ve been a worker several times. I suck as a manager.) And the manager seriously know it. And given the workforce of the early 20th (or late nineteenth) century was often illiterate and more provincial than someone born and raised in NYC now, it was obvious they couldn’t manage anything.

Which was okay, because — in an also obvious move — intellectuals took over from the beginning, and managed the “worker’s” revolution, in fact ordering the workers around as the managers never had.

What was even more obvious is that these persons were crazy and had absolutely no clue how anything worked. They were “experts” on everything, on paper, and completely unable to figure out the simplest things in reality. So once they took control things went wrong very very fast.

Which is where incompetence and insanity came in.

Look, it’s like this: When you look at the virtual destruction of the country and the economy, and you like to eat, and perhaps remain clothed, in self-defense, you start making side deals, compromises and side-pacts.

So, that cement for that stack-a-prol building? Well, obviously it can’t go there, because the guys building the sea wall that the government doesn’t think is needed, need it. So the cement takes a walk, and sand is used to make up the difference.

That’s how it starts. And then it expands, until the entire economy is a vast network of lies, arrangements, side deals, mordida and bullshit.

Because there is no real central coordinating authority. There is a crazy person at the top who depending on their particular time in the line of insanity, says — and heaven help us, some of them believe it — that they are ruling in the name of workers, oppressed races, the poor, the gay, the transgender, but who in fact can find his/her/its own ass with two hands, a seeing eye dog and sonar.

And under it there are atomized individuals who can’t trust anyone, because anyone at all could turn them in.

There is no family, no friendship, nothing in which the crazy people won’t intrude.

Now imagine doing business under a regime like that (And all socialist regimes, from euro-socialism, now ruled by an unelected bureaucracy from Brussels, to the hard communism of the USSR are like that. The only question is how hard it comes down on you when you come under its notice. Will you simply lose your job and be made unemployable, will you be thrown in jail,or will you go to Gulag?)

Well, all business is corruption. The only thing that works is the black market, and that doesn’t work very well. It’s all pass the buck, cheat the next guy and cover your own ass.

And for those who will say that Putin has more in common with the old style national socialism than this. No, not really. He too claims a sort of divine right of kings to know what is right and wrong, even if he does pay lip service to old Russian society. From what I understand in Russia it is obvious it is only lip service. (Though the poor bastages are grateful for even that, after what that society has been through.)

More importantly, the bureaucracy, the mobs, everything he inherited are from the old structure. And he didn’t change them. So, yeah, they are also plagued with corruption and inefficiency. In fact, all the old Eastern block countries are, from what I understand including East Germany. (And it tells you something that the crazy-cakes regime managed to make Germans inefficient and slovenly.)

Socialism is not just lethal. It is a force that — by enshrining the rule of “experts” and “scientists” who are neither — makes it necessary to become an inefficient anarchist and a scammer to survive.

If you’re looking around and saying “Uh oh” yep.

We are already well on our way there, and have been for oh, thirty or forty years.

But there is still time. It starts with cleaning up our governance and getting rid of the masses of unelected bureaucracy that make mere survival almost impossible.

Can we get there from here?

I don’t know. The bridge is out, and from that roar, I think there is a fire coming.

What it leaves behind, G-d only knows. But if we can take from it nothing else, take this: Self governance works. Rule by “experts” doesn’t. You’re the only expert in being you. And humans, trading freely, survive and thrive.

As long as you remove the boot from their necks.

*I thought this was worth rerunning, even if less than 2 years old, because we find ourselves casting from history on what will happen here, and it’s important to understand certain things: How different we are from other nations; how different this crisis is from crisis in the past; and, more importantly, how corrupt our understanding of the past is, because of our establishment’s corruption. Sure, those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. But those who believe Marxist versions of history are doomed to be very surprised – SAH*

The Wrong Story A Blast From The Past From August 7 2020

Having dealt with what I’m sure is yet the same troll in the comments, telling us that without Marxism the “upper classes” wouldn’t give a fig for the lower classes, world without end, connected with something that has been going on in my head all morning.

Anyway, this morning I was reading a book from a non-woke author who has been pounded in reviews for daring to tell the truth about pre-conquest Mexican history, and yet, in analyzing previous Mexican/indigenous societies he speaks repeatedly of “class warfare” and seems to think it’s a normal part of civilization.

Which made me pound my head repeatedly on the breakfast table.

Class warfare isn’t a thing. It was never a thing until Marx brought it to the vocabulary. Hell and damnation, it wasn’t even a thing in the French revolution.  No, I’m serious.

The fact that some people have more and some have less has never caused war or the fall of any civilization.  What causes war or the fall of civilization is closing pathways to “having more” to large segments of the population.

The French revolution wasn’t class warfare. Yes, aristo, aristo a la lanterne.  But what it actually was was the violent reorganization of a society whose ruling elite had become obsolete and unable to adapt to new economic circumstances, and also who refused to let society change normally.

Which I can completely understand is something that would make our current self-proclaimed ruling elites uncomfortable, since that’s exactly what they’re doing.

French aristocrats were often not the wealthiest people around. In fact, their means of wealth had been falling for over a century, and most of them were deeply indebted. What they had by law, though, was power over everyone BORN under them.  It wasn’t economic, but state power, ultimately.  And they not only refused to relinquish it, allow the bourgeois (often far wealthier) into their circles, but kept coming up with more and better ways to keep the “interlopers” out.

They were in fact doing what a lot of our soi disant “elites” are doing, trying to silence dissent and return to a way of life that hasn’t been normal or healthy for a century or so.  (The left’s ideal time is the 1930s for instance. Only with more sex stuff, and — in their heads but nor really since they’re now for straight up apartheid under the guise of safe spaces — racial integration.)

But it wasn’t “classes” in the sense that Marx preached them. It had nothing to do with wealth, income levels, or daily occupation. (The nobility QUITE lacked means of production, that being part of the problem, in the industrial age.)

It was more accurately castes: i.e. privileges given by the government depending on the condition of your birth.  Which, again, is what the left is trying to institute here.

Anyway, there has never been “class struggle” in any history ever, in the Marxist sense.  That was Marxist…. Well…. Marx was a high functioning autist and invented patterns even where they didn’t exist. And he wanted to plug in to the romantic ethos of the time and make the industrial revolution bad. So he came up with that load of fecal matter. It means nothing.

If you believe in Marxist “classes” and “Class warfare” and you’re not a leftist, kindly consider you’ve been profoundly mal-educated.

(If you are a leftist, you’ve also been profoundly mal-educated, but you like it, you believe in it, and by gum you’re going to wallow in it like a pig in muck.)

History could more accurately be described as a battle of memes.

Humans live not by bread alone. Regardless of how food and the other necessary goods of society are produced, that’s not what makes people happy/unhappy, etc.  It’s the story in their heads about the society and what makes it tick that counts. And the story always lags reality. And is often used for the rulers’ purposes.

Hence the romantics were an attempt to make life pre-industrial-revolution wonderful. And convince peasants living in rural submission was better.

At some point, though, the story breaks, when its fit to reality (it’s NEVER 100% because human life is fluid) becomes glaringly broken.  This is when revolutions happen.

For instance, it was easy for rural French peasants to groan under the oppression of the nobility, because there was a unified narrative that you were supposed to serve in the place you were born to. And because honestly, the noblemen were different enough so as to be another breed, almost.

It was when the industrial revolution advanced enough that there was a vast group of wealthy people who were told they were inferior “by reason of birth” that the wheels came off. Particularly as the bankrupt nobility tried to push them back into rural subjection.

In the case of the book I’m reading, he talked about pre-Mexican peasants rebelling against the priests who lived so much better, because class warfare.  This is not real. Or serious. It’s more likely they rebelled (we don’t know for sure, as we have no written accounts) because the priests failed in their role according to societal narrative.

I.e. they were supposed to keep bad things away, and didn’t.

In the same way the current covidiocy and intentional crash of the economy is an attempt to reverse the clock and to implant the narrative that “we’re all in this together” thereby giving the Marxist intelligentsia of the west control over the story in people’s heads.

“The heroic people and their heroic leaders defeated the virus with the power of government and therefore the government must have more power and narratives must come from the top and be unified.”

This is their preferred narrative. It leaks out with things like DeBolshevik wanting a ticker tape parade “when we defeat” the virus. Or their being really upset at Trump for not falling in line with “government is the way to defeat this” or imposing unified solutions from the top.

It’s not going to work. In fact, it’s hitting hardest those places they have full control of: Arts, entertainment, news, education–  What they’re actually doing is destroying their areas of power to gain power. Which is a ghost dance typical of what happens when an “elite” displaced by a change in circumstances which makes their story no longer fit tries to hold on to power.

The more they do, the more they flail around, the harder the fall will be.  Which frankly is scaring the shit out of me, as I think it’s going to be guillotines and terror. Not their fake attempts at terror, but the real one, where people Have.Had.Just.About.Enough and have no way to make the bullshit stop except a massive spasm of violence.

This is the way civilizations DO fall.

But the picture in everyone’s head right now is “classes” in “permanent war” which is an invention of Marx and has no contact with reality.

History is not permanent class warfare.  History IS permanent change.  And when the story in people’s heads doesn’t match the narrative, a time comes when it is reset VIOLENTLY.

The Marxist narrative was never right — which is why it brings death, starvation and destruction wherever it gets power — but it made sense to people in a regimented post-industrial world.  It also poisoned them for any practical solution, but hey, the ruling classes could USE it to get more power.  So it worked, after a fashion.

Only in the information age it doesn’t. And people are buying it less and less. And know all the ways in which it breaks.  But still retain fragments of it in their head. Which means as it falls apart, it will fall faster, harder and more violently.

The more it has penetrated everything and cued people for the wrong reaction, the more violent the outcome.

But screaming the story louder, or having seeded it everywhere doesn’t stop its fall. It just makes the fall more violent.

Reality is a bitch. It always wins.

And the current “elite” inability to understand that, or even to process that they are in fact in charge and not bold rebels (which their Marxist upbringing insists they are) is setting us up for a “blood to our ankles” situation.

Pray that I’m wrong.

Some people are born for the burning times.

Most of us who write or read here were born for strange times.

Look, I do understand the left’s fascination with “the excluded” and “diversity.” It’s just that being collectivists/part of the herd by nature, they go about it backwards and sideways.

They’re not looking for pink monkeys/people who inexplicably are rejected, or even people who think so differently they have trouble explaining how they got where they got, because it’s obvious to them, and they think it should be obvious to everyone.

No, the left doesn’t like those “excluded.” Being the herd, and having instituted themselves as “leaders of the herd”, masters of signaling belonging and judges of what must and must not be accepted, they actually hate those who are true non conformists. Their attempts to enforce herd uniformity descent to levels of “not one thought out of place.”

Because the society where they’re trying to enforce this is one that has long valued the excluded and the off-beat (Partly the Christian heritage, partly, in America, the conciousness we’re descended from/or are those who came here to get away from herd enforcement, and also that as a country we’re completely weird.) they still pretend to accept the excluded, to value the strange, and to enshrine the iconoclast, only they have no clue what those actually are.

Like that song “we are the renegades” which then goes on to cite a bunch of Hollywood and business darlings that are considered “innovative” because they did some slightly new things, and which makes me laugh out loud every time I hear it.

Because they have absolutely no clue about people actually getting excluded for no reason, they try to force the acceptance of people who are excluded for reason, and when society rebels they blame the group for the evil of those excluded.

This is a ploy that works, because it gives the “leaders” of the herd more power, of course.

As the new media and a plethora of individual contact opportunity gave us — the outsiders, the goats, those who giggle at the conformity of the herd — a chance to be herd and create alternate networks, the herd and those who enforce the conformity of the herd started losing their minds.

They didn’t even know we existed, much less that anyone could actually be that different.

Now we’re stuck somewhere between them trying to make us shut up, and them trying to lead the herd off the cliff to prove they can.

But the herd, though it values conformity, is not actually stupid, and is refusing to do as told.

So these crazed sheep are running around biting other sheep on the butt and telling them it’s sheepdogs and the wolves are coming.

Partly because the end of their reign feels like the coming of the wolves to them.

Okay, I might have stretched that analogy a bit. If the left were sheep-leaders, they’d be sheep with some kind of unknown disease that keep trying to infect everyone else, beause patches of fungus and sh*t are the latest trend, and you should be wearing them too.

As humans they’re miserable, desperate to fit in at all costs, yet pretending to value diversity, attaching to irrelevant things like skin color for “diversity” while stomping on any thought that’s out of line, and generally acting insane.

Unfortunately in the years of submersion, the years when we couldn’t be heard, they had seized control of the — well, everything. All the levers of power.

So, now they really are trying to destroy everything they don’t control. And it’s worldwide.

Great evil is being done, and evil is headed to all of us, at speed.

This is good. No, stop glaring at me. It is good, because for many years evil has been accepted as “normal”. It’s been beaten into people that crime is “society’s fault” for instance, when it is no such thing. It’s been impressed upon people that it’s better to beg than to be self-sufficient. And a great evil of mediocrity has settled over all creative endeavors, where sticking out has been considered the only true crime, no matter what they tell us. In my profession, my whole time in it, I’ve been told that they want something “new” exactly like the last “new thing” that is. And it’s like that everywhere, till mere competency is a de-facto crime and punished as such.

Well, it’s good to see that this stuff is all evil. Because turning away from it is the only way we, as a society and a culture, save ourselves and go forward.

What is not good is that chains of supply, institutions, companies, ways to earn a living in the modern world are all going to crash for a time. And people will be in real danger. And the herd will be starving.

And the herd, ladies and gentlemen and the occasional dragon, is most of humanity. They might not be like us, but they’re our kith and kin, and as such we should value them. And it’s not good when the innocent starve.

Fortunately we do exist. We’re the goats, the excluded. Mostly because we think weird, which often leads to our behaving weird, at least in the eyes of those who never had a weird thought in their lives.

Now, granted, many of the weird have gone wrong: those brought up with an amoral disposition, those who just got really angry and traipsed into doing harm as a vocation, those who want vengeance on the herd.

With the shower of sh*t that’s about to rain on all of us, and how many of us have at best a marginal hold on survival, (being by disposition likely to be on employment and money-making ventures that are fringe or odd, themselves) it is easy to think it is a grander purpose to destroy. Heaven know that’s what a lot of “normal” people will conclude. “Everything is wrong, so let’s burn it all down.” And how much easier it is for us to think that?

But it’s not right. Yes, the institutions and structures of society have been turned against it, but it doesn’t mean that the structures in themselves are evil or wrong.

Sure, some are, because the perversion of the normal and good started a long time ago. But not all. “Mere anarchy” being loosed upon the world might briefly feel good, but it is in fact the end of civilization.

We’re not the left, and we do not — if we’re even marginally sane — assume that “destroy everything — ??????– paradise.”

It is important to rebuild or shore up as fast as things fall down. And it’s important to take an unusual eye to things and figure out what’s actively harmful, what must be removed, what can be adapted and what can be salvaged.

Fortunately, we’re nothing if not unusual. As Kate Paulk is likely to say “Think outside the box? What box? I can’t find the box.”

You know the saying “When things get weird, the weird go pro”? It is wrong. We wouldn’t know what pro means. Even those who are professionals in some thing or other, we aren’t really professionals in anything. We’re making it up as we go along, because rules that apply to sheep fit weirdly on goats.

So…. if your entire life you’ve been told you think too much. If you were the kid other kids wanted to kill in kindergarten, because you were so weird. If most of your friends — your friends! — say you’re strange. If your opinion tends to be not only different from mainstream, but sideways and upside down so that the conventional thinkers can’t figure out if you agree/disagree/are completely insane: stand up.

No one is going to ask you to go pro. You wouldn’t know pro if it bit you in the fleshy part of the butt. And that’s how it should be.

We’re asking you to stand up. We’re asking you to go active. Think, plan, build. Prepare.

Build under, build over, build around, and get ready. Because when it all crumbles, we’re the ones who have to not let the herd go over the cliff.

They’ll still hate us, it’s a given. But in the middle of it, we might be able to bite a few butts. And we’ll make sure there’s still a herd and a pasture, when it’s all done.

In the mean time…. we’re going to do some very weird things we never thought we would. We’re going to have to become different people, which will hurt. And we’re going have to face our own weirdness, unflinchingly.

And yeah, a few of us will die. But hey, that was baked in since we were born. If we manage this, not all of us will die.

THINK. Prepare. Act.

This is our song, this is who we are. Be not afraid. This is our time.