Too complicated to explain, but I’m the SANE one in this family.

No, seriously.  It’s not weird I read and write science fiction…

The suitcase was found. I now need to decide which of the THREE wedding outfits I wear….

Meh.

Lots and lots of meh-itude. :D

Oh, the things I’ve seen — and done.

Started with “missing” the flight out of Denver. Only not really.  Oh, the things I’ll have to say about Norwegian airlines.

An obscene amount of money and five hours later, circa midnight on Tuesday, we got the flights we could get.  Note I’d never have come via Madrid otherwise, much less with a tight connection.  But I had to.

So we arrived here without luggage.  Because we’d paired our carry on till we had not even a change of clothes, we had to wash our travel clothes overnight.  Our bags remain MIA.  Which is a problem, since it includes not only Dan’s and my clothing to attend the weeding (Thank G-d the Bride and Groom have dress and suit) but also the converter to plug this laptop in, so I’m writing this on the dregs of battery.

We’re about to go out and try to find “clothing that looks like we should be at a wedding.”  Since my size was always outsized here, even when I was a seven, I’m going to end up dressed in the equivalent of “old fat lady” clothes.  For which we have to shop and burn half the day that Robert’s inlaws have free to see something of the country.

Calls to the lost luggage center get them to tell us they’re “endeavoring.”

ARGGGGGH.  There will be more about this when I have more battery.  And there will probably be a private sale (as in I collect them and sell them through here before/instead of putting on Amazon) of a book of essays which I’ll start rounding up as soon as I have a converter (we should try to buy one this morning.)  Because we’re over 10k down for new tickets before we start getting replacements for things, I don’t expect royalties for about a year, and the delivery payment is spoken for for younger kid’s tuition. And PJ is no longer relevant as a source of income.  Once I get indie out, we’ll be fine, but this is the worst possible year for financial hits, and the hits keep coming.

Pray/send good thoughts that the trip got the worst out ahead of time and it’s smooth from now on, because I’ve had just about enough.

It is available for buying now

The explanation from Synova in comments yesterday:

For those who don’t know what an eArc is, it is an unproofed (if that’s the right term) advance reader copy. This means that changes might be made to the final book. It also costs more. If you want the final version as well, that’s a separate purchase.

Admittedly the things I don’t believe are exponentially larger in number than the things I believe.

One of the things that always makes agnostic in me rear up is “the new, new thing for self-promotion.”  There is a herd instinct in my field, and honestly it seems worse in indie since no one knows what works.

Right now the new new hot hot thing is newsletters. I’m agnostic on these.  I know they work for a ton of people, I don’t know if they’ll work for me.  And they don’t seem to work for me as a reader.  I’m subscribed to the newsletters of about a dozen writers, whom I like well enough to wish to hear when they have a new book out.

So, do I?  No.

Why not?  Because the philosophy driving newsletters right now is to treat them as something between this blog (note not necessarily other blogs) and twitter.  You send something out every couple of days, so people feel they know you and want to buy the book when it comes out.

I don’t know. Maybe most readers’ mailboxes aren’t as busy as mine, but any given day, on skimming the emails I divide them into three categories: must answer right now; must answer by end of day, and don’t have to answer.

Honestly, these last few weeks (we fly out of the country tonight, and it will be even messier for two weeks upcoming) my “Must answer by end of day” haven’t been getting answered, for which I beg pardon, and it will get better around May 15th.  The “don’t have to answer” though are pretty much on perma don’t-answer.  At least when I go through one of these phases when life is hitting me with the busy stick.

Which means my email learns. What it learns is that these emails are spam.  Which means I then don’t hear when a book comes out.

IF I can figure out how to do emails (honestly, like putting the donation button on my blog it might be a job for husband) I will probably have two email lists.  One is for updates, snippets, what have you, and the other ONLY releases.  So, if you see it in the email, you know there’s something to buy.  I think that MIGHT work, in the sense that the author tracker in Amazon used to work (Right now my email also puts it in spam, so I can’t tell you.)

Right now the hot hot thing which is confusing a lot of readers and social media  users is to have a nice picture with an embedded quote from your book.  This is an attempt at getting around Facebook’s limiting of links. I’ll be honest, I don’t think that works most of the time.  It MIGHT work marginally, if you can then put a link for purchase in the first comment.  But if the book isn’t out yet?  Again, going on my experience as a reader, I’m going to say nuh-uh.  Why?  Because my memory sucks.  Unless I’m your most fanatic fan ever, why on earth with fishes do I want to look at this, think “Oh, that’s interesting” and not be able to buy right away?  You know as eggs is eggs I’ll have forgotten it when it comes out in a month or so.  With a link in first comment, and if you pick the hottest, bestest of your quotes?  Mayyyyyyyyybe.

And then there’s book trailers.

The Passive Guy is Agnostic on them.

I used to be downright disbelieving on them, and like him I can’t remember when I last saw one.  They were the hot hot thing of the early oughts.

But as I was writing why I didn’t believe in them, I realized things had changed.

You see, I used to say “When you’re in youtube mode, even if the trailer knocks your socks off, what are you going to do? Run out to a bookstore and buy the book?”

But things have changed. If a trailer, or something knocks my socks off, I open an amazon window and buy the book for the kindle.

It also, like the quotes and pic might make a good way fro readers who ADORED your book to share with friends that is stronger than “You must read this.”

Caveats, of course, that it must be good, it must not be crazy expensive, (I used to be able to make them from static pictures, and now that I can render…. um…) AND it must come out after the book, so people can buy right away.  But I think it might have some value.

All the vale it used to have is what I think email lists have now: they tell the publisher you’re invested.  Seriously, you used to write “Has book trailer” and the publishers thought it was teh hottest thing.  Because NY publishing is Hollywood for ugly people.

Now… well, now book trailers might be worth it.

I find the herd instinct weird, because most often what everyone is doing has no more effect than a pardon me in a hurricane.

So periodically I need to reevaluate things and at least become agnostic on some…

It’s long been my belief that sometime the 20th century will be held on a par with the 14th for “centuries you’d prefer not to live in.”

Of course the 20th century saw a lot of advance in technology, life expectancy, cleanliness, the ability to feed the masses of humanity.  On the other hand, just like the 14th century is marked by the black plague, the 20th century was marked by state killing. Masses and masses of humans went to their death at the hands of their own governments.

And because the 20th century was more industrialized and efficient, these killings were done in big batch lots by the numbers, or at least with lots of paper work.  In the past it took sun-worshiping cults and stepped pyramids, and even then they mostly killed prisoners of war, not their citizens.

The thing is that in the twentieth century most citizens became prisoners of dreams.  Both the ideologies responsible for most of the non-war (war too, but) killing of people in the 20th century were “dream ideologies” that inspired, promised and drove people towards an imagined utopia and incidentally promised the birth of a new man.  And yet Aryan Man or Soviet Man were both completely impossible, had no basis in any factual reality or history.

They were pieces of dream, incarnate, striding the land, attracting people with their shining beauty, and hiding the dark carrion evil within.

This last week, under the stress of trying to figure out thing in Portugal (which might or might not happen. Paperwork seems delayed in ways that make no sense, unless of course someone hasn’t liked my articles on the American Council of Bishops and their shilling for illegal immigrants.  In which case that someone should perhaps consider that they really don’t want me upset. Or “never pick a fight with a woman who buys pixels by the bushel.”[UPDATE: Apparently I was maligning the local guys, and it was Portuguese unease with email causing issues.] ) and packing, and a head cold that descended on me out of nowhere, I ended up reading a lot of posts on the supernatural/occult.  I have no idea how I fell into it.  It had something to do with the private detective who goes to hell, and I wanted the name of a minor (and crazy) fortune teller, and next thing you know I’m reading articles from religious people telling everyone how shocked they were that something that looked beautiful and good turned out to be evil/have evil effects.

This practically made me rock back on my feet, because, I’m sorry, what kind of emotional infants is our civilization raising? I thought “a man may smile and smile and be a villain” was well established. And if a man, why not an entity, or for that matter a group of people, an ideology or a dream?

Then I remembered being in a group of female sf/f writers and getting excoriated when I pointed out there’s a long history of male characters who appear horrible, but who do their charity secretly, (as one is supposed to.) And how to me the most powerful character is the one I at first misjudge, and which later shows to be a good person.  This brought a clamor of “No, we have to signal all the right beliefs/politics, etc. upfront, otherwise he’s a villain!”

When I understood they thought “Anyone not politically correct is evil” I shut up. Because these are moral and emotional infants, who have never examined what their own dreams would be like in reality.

Like many mal-adapted teens, I had dreams that would be nightmares for anyone else like “One morning, science stops working, and magic comes into the world.”  The death and destruction that stuff like that would cause did not hit me till I was about 14, but it did hit me by 14 and has, since then, made me the enemy of “if only we shout loud enough, or march shoulder to shoulder, there will be paradise” school of dreamers.

Because you know what? Paradise doesn’t happen when the dreams try to work in the real world and with real humans.  The dreamers always forget the non-glamorous things like sewage, waste removal, or even growing food.

The problem with the twentieth century is that it was saturated in dreams.  Because Marxism infected academia, news reporters and entertainers of all kinds, bits and pieces of it infected everything.  Still does at times.  And the problem is NONE of it works in any way better than the rest.

I woke up to this seemingly innocuous article:  Workers Love AirPods Because Employers Stole Their Walls.

Seemingly innocuous because, even as they base the entire article on the fact that a cherished piece of collectivist dream was dreadfully wrong, they give it an anti-capitalist spin.

The entire idea of wall-less offices (or even cubes, though that, mostly, was an attempt to expand really fast without having to build/spend a lot) was part of the collectivist dream.

It started with wall-less schools, in which the kids were supposed to learn so much better, because in the ur-story of the socialists, humans were created as collective creatures, only happy in the group and it was the invention of private property (the oldest skeletons we find have their own arrows and their own implements that likely they used in life, but never mind. The dreamers want the past to be perfect communism, so they declare it so and shout and stomp their feet) that brought evil and strife into the world.  So they built a lot of elementary schools without walls.

Look, we’d already tried this, and we knew its limits. Most monasteries in the middle ages were supposed to be “everything in common” and they worked, up to a certain number of VOLUNTARIES.  Once the conditions were broken and you got too many people or people who were involuntarily shoved into the monastery, things… went wrong.

But the dream required that children be naturally “communal” so…  So, it was a bloody disaster.  Which is why by the time younger son went into a school originally designed on the open plan, someone had made very sturdy walls cutting willy nilly through the original plant.

Those were popular when? The seventies? But someone failed to learn.  And no, it wasn’t the employers, except to the extent that the employers were brought up in the public school system which extolled that failed dream, and listened to “consultants” that were the product of humanities degrees that were infected with it.

By the early two thousands (Twentieth century- the hangover years.  I think it will take all of the 21st to recover from the 29th) I was reading article after article about how people were so happy and more productive in wall-less offices, and how the younger people — ah, that fabled Homo Sovieticus — was NATURALLY social and communal.

Turns out, no. People do not work better in groups. As all of us who have been forced into group work growing up KNOW.  Turns out, that, as we explained to older son’s second grade teacher “no, the future is not more group work and collaboration, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work very well.  The future, with work from home tech being easier is more likely to be for self-starter and individualists.”

But the dream persists.  And when it blows up, it must be the fault of those evil employers and “greedy” capitalists.

Because at least in the minds of born extroverts — yeah, people like me just wake up screaming — the dream that we’re all really collective creatures who’d love to live in a pod and share all our thoughts and feelings persists. And is too beautiful to give up.  Even when the reality proves to be a crab bucket of petty bickering, mistrust, paranoia, empire building and lack of production.

In fact, there is a non-trivial overlap between those who can’t do and those who dream.

Keep your eyes open.  Reality isn’t always pretty, but dreams are dangerous things.  Beautiful dreams have killed millions of human beings.

And even the pieces of them are harmful.

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN:  Miners and Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Five.

Aedelbert Starken shapes stone, not magic. Or so he thinks.

The town of Garmouth depends on the mines for life. Aedelbert comes to the city with his partner Caedda Quaedel in order to build three new smelters for the ore. Aedelbert and Caedda, master stone-cutters, just want to work, collect their wages, and move to the next job. Nothing more or less.

To their chagrin, building smelters and training an apprentice pose the least of their problems. A noble with a grudge threatens the mines and the city, leading to a race between the men of Garmouth and the mines, the noble, and the forces of ice and water.

Aedelbert wants nothing to do with any of it. The Scavenger, however, has other ideas. And what He gives, He can also reclaim…

C.J. CARELLA: To The Strongest (The Bicentennial War Book 1).

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: hair.

Marx Attacks! (Go for the illu, stay for the article- SAH)

So the left-wing Marxist soldiers are engaged in a systematic and widespread attack on Western Civilization, armed with the weapons of critical theory: radical feminism, social justice, identity politics, the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism, and the accusations of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and evangelical religious oppression. The battle is waged against what they view as the establishment of “whiteness.” The equinsu-ocha, the white devil, is the enemy, and has to be destroyed at all costs in order to bring about social justice and cultural transformation.

The strategy? Criticize, demonize, disrupt, divide, and destabilize Western society and its institutions so that they can be dismantled more easily and a new social order can replace them. The criticism and accusations don’t have to be true, and they almost always aren’t. Truth doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the Marxist narrative, to be accepted as dogma through blind ideological conformity.

Go read the whole thing.

A friend of mine posted this on facebook, and I thought it was too good not to run with/expand/share:

Look, I get that, and we can test this theory with insults:

You Utter Puking Cat!
You Utter Water Bottle!

Likely, of course.
But consider “I was utterly carpeted” might work for drunk. Or “I was utterly scribbled.” but depending on context both could also work for angry or worried or more likely flabbergasted.  Consider:

Those utter bran muffins!  I was so completely lawned that they said that.  I can’t believe anyone could be that completely flowering bush!

What say you.  My husband is of the school of thought that ANYTHING can sound dirty said suggestively and with a wink.

“Hi there. I’d like to help you cook!”  Or “I see you’re moping the floor” can be utterly obscene the way he says it when he’s … well… you know… when he is trying to make it so.

What other completely inappropriate to the task words can you pervert?

Come on, you peeled carrots.  I’m sure you can give it an escaped balloon chance.

(And yes, I’m AWARE that this wasn’t the type of linguistic post you expected.  But it is one of the ways languages change and grow. Eh.)

Hi, guys. Can we talk?

Blogging is going to be spotty for about two weeks, starting Tuesday.  I’ll log in, and post, maybe even pictures, but I’ll be in Europe, so making it coordinate with early morning here will be difficult.

Heck, it has been difficult for about a month.

And perhaps that’s why hits on this blog have gone from 4k a day to about 200.  And why comments that were once around 300 or more are now struggling to break 50.  I don’t know.  I know we’re getting low hits, and at some point I wonder about spending an hour of my day on that.

There’s other stuff going on.  In November my mainstains for income fell apart within a week.  The later change in one of them only made things worse, as in, technically now that’s not paid at all.  (Yes, I know, and I’ll explain in private if you wish, but let’s say that my chances of getting paid anything in any month are lower than 0%)

This is a problem because we were counting on my income to not completely crash and burn the final year of supporting kids through their degrees.

And yes, I know.  I even try to find meaning in it.  Sometimes in public (but I always wash my hands afterwards.)

There is something human in trying to find meaning, to find “where I’m supposed to go” particularly when you’re in a year of “things fall apart” which seems to be the theme for 2019.  You build, it collapses. You build, it collapses.  And you think “What do you want me to build?” And “what am I supposed to do?”

Maybe there is something that wants me to do something. (NOT Ilhan Omar’s something.) Who knows.  I have trouble with “lives guided from outside” because, what part of it is hindsight? And wouldn’t it violate free will?

I don’t know.

I know some hard facts: I never wanted to do political commentary or, in fact, non-fiction.  Time there was that I worked really hard to write an article, even a blog-post-like article, and it took me about a week, while I could dash out a short story in two hours.

I felt compelled to blog, and it seems to have helped some people, but it was never something I wanted to do.  I’m still not amazingly fond of it.

Fiction writing seems to be — now — designed for my talents, since indie is a volume game, and I am/used to be a volume writer.  It’s just that between the blog and various other things going on, and particularly financial worry as we try to get through this very bad year, I don’t know how to get back “there” again.  I’m going to try again today.  But other than a story that was contracted, nothing has got finished and very little has got finished since the end of last year.

I’ve done some cover work, but that doesn’t have the joy it once had. (It pays. And I’ll have a site soon where you can order them, and I can do it when I’m about dead.  All these are helpful. They just don’t feed the “must create.”)

All of this is distorted and influenced by the fact that right now I’m having a massive auto-immune attack presenting as a head cold/massive URI.  I know it’s autoimmune because my eczema is ramping up with it, which never happens with real viruses, and also because it ramps up with each new worry/upset.

I had to stop singulair, which was giving me ADHD and memory issues (as well as depression.)  I don’t know if I’m depressed out. I’d classify it, rather, as extremely stressed.  Both work on the auto-immune, though.

Now, some of the lability is still the come down from what the singulair was doing, but the issues are real.

Unless hits on the blog pick up — and yes, I know, it might be throttling. But it could also be “one of those things.” — I can’t justify the time I spend on it. It’s a “duty” hanging over my had every morning, that consumes a lot of the energy I have, first thing.

I can do more guest bloggers (I’d need more guest bloggers, of course) but that’s not a long term solution, and the current hits are too low to attract much.

As I said, this is going to be weird till the 15th of May, which won’t help hits, but shouldn’t alarm you. I’ll just be in another time zone and probably very busy. It’s not the statement of any decision.

You guys have been here a long time, some of you from the beginning, so I thought I’d turn this over for discussion.

As I see it my options are:

1-Shutter the blog.

Pros – This would free a ton of time and remove the obligation from over my head.  Kim du Toit, in former times, advised me to do that multiple times.

Cons – I like you guys, and this blog has formed into a sort of little community.  And sometimes I do have things that must be said. This is a much-diminished platform, but it is still a platform.

2- Reduce the blogging to 3 times a week on specific days: say Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Pros – much less work, much more free time to attempt to sit down and do fiction.

Cons – my guess is that would take the hits to about 20 a day.  Blog reading is a matter of habit. If you don’t do it every day, you’ll eventually not do it at all.  And then it will not be worth to keep open. So I see 2 leading to 1.

3- Do long blog posts when the mood strikes, but post something every day.  A quote from something I’m reading; something that struck me as funny in a facebook exchange; a link to a blog post that interested me.  I mean, there is something that amuses me/interests me every day, but not necessarily something that I need to/want to write a long post about.

Pros- I’d still be posting every day, and maybe you guys would still come back every day to see what’s up.  If I make it amusing enough, maybe the discussion will be interesting, too.

Cons – is it enough? What do you guys think?  It’s not hard to do, and there would still be the occasional long post once a week or more. But is it enough to keep the blog alive, even if it just stays in this diminished state?

4- go on as I’ve been.

Pros – traffic will probably come back. We’ve gone through low times in the past for two/three months, but it always comes back.

Cons – it’s an hour and sometimes two every morning.  When I say “I haven’t written” it ignores the 1 to 2k words poured into this every morning. And since it started mostly as a vehicle of promoting my fiction, it’s counterproductive if it’s eating my fiction.

So — I’d like your opinions.  #3 is the most feasible to my mind, I just don’t know if it will be enough.

Additional to that is that I must find some way to make money.  Yes, fiction writing will do it, if I can get back to that, and I’m going to try very hard.

But I won’t lie that having say 10k in the bank right now would clear my mind wonderfully and allow me to write.  (For perspective, it’s just the cushion is gone, from well, stupid university tricks, mostly.)  It has occurred to me to teach an online workshop or two, but it would have to make a good amount of money, so I don’t know.  No, Gofundme isn’t an option. It’s not that I’m not making money from fiction (Not this last year, but I also have not written much.) It’s more that oh, at random, delivery payments, not to mention royalties are paid unpredictably in my field. And non-fic used to provide the cushion.  I feel even more need of a cushion before jumping to indie, and right now…

I realize this is mostly psychological.  And maybe Himself is trying to tell me something, lead me a new way.  I don’t know. If so, I’m an exceptionally bad listener. (What else is new.)

To fully explain how pathetic I am, the auto-immune is increasing my stress because I’m afraid of gaining weight, as I usually do when it’s going nuts.

Yes, I’m aware what I need is a long week away in the center of the city, near the museums, with my husband and just writing.  What’s actually ahead is a two week trip to Portugal, with the stresses that always brings (through no one’s fault. It just piles on the guilt and the grief to see how much everything has changed, people included. There’s also the fact the older I get the more I hate and dread traveling, no matter where REALLY.  Which is why the relaxing weekends/weeks are half and hour to an hour from home and in well-trod ground.) And then two conferences before the end of June.  If I could I’d totally fast forward to July and start writing and cocooning, but life isn’t a DVD.

So, guys, give me your wisdom (such as it is.)  And yes, prayers and well wishes much appreciated.  This year isn’t BAD like oh, 2001 was bad. People aren’t — knocks on head — dropping dead left and right.  It’s just a time of transitions, sudden inversions, things falling apart.

The way life goes through these periods is in itself interesting and almost evidence of external plotting.  If that’s the truth, then there’s something I must do, a change of course I must effect.

Well, a change of course is in the plans anyway, because what can’t go on, won’t.

But right now, I literally don’t know which way to turn, and nothing seems to work.

So…. give me your wisdom.

This too shall pass. It’s just a rough patch.

There is a rolling and dreadful (in the original sense of “inspires dread” poetry to the words about the final judgement “when the secrets of every heart shall be laid bare.”

To someone who loves her privacy and who is also very sure she’s not the same twerp she was at say 12 or 14 (but a completely different kind of twerp) and who frankly has forgotten most of her misbegotten growing up years, it would be embarrassing to have the thoughts and deeds of that little twerp not only laid bare but pinned squarely on me.

On the other hand, to someone who loves truth and who in recent years has become very aware of how many of the things that are SUPPOSED to be the truth — news, scientific studies, etc — are in fact packaged narrative manipulated by a small set of people for the purpose of giving themselves power (and quite indifferent to the fact their plans would make it hell on Earth for most people) there is a part of me who hungers and thirsts for that truth to be revealed, for us to see, finally and bare for all how many people and organizations who plume themselves on how just, righteous and CARING they are have been screwing… well…. everyone for decades, intentionally, lying intentionally, trying to destroy what is still the last best place on Earth, intentionally.

There is a cleansing power to the truth. My fourth grade school book, unironically advised that you have a window that opens in the kitchen because sunshine “disinfects.”  which is true, I suppose in a mostly humid climate where your greatest danger in the kitchen is mold and mildew.

It is true in the metaphorical sense, too.  But more importantly, the lack of sunshine, the lack of truth, slowly corrodes. Because we’re humans.  We’re attracted to having our own way, to the things we want to do.  I was never particularly interested in power, except to the level of controlling my own surroundings and environment, though there I can be outright demanding.  I was never interested in power because the saving grace in my character is its immense laziness. Power over others is a lot of work, and it will take time away from writing.

I’ve long since realized that while I’m not alone in that, neither am I the majority. Most people are more industrious than I, they want to control more. And absent public censure and watching them, they will try it by means fair or foul.

Oh, and the means they’re trying are foul indeed.  See Seattle’s Revolt of the Elites, for what they are trying to do to shape opinion.  They are planting misinformation in a ton of channels, so they can then point to it when the mess they made with handling the homeless is brought home to bear and maintain that their destructive policies are “good” and “helping.”

At that this very sophisticated lying is a new thing.  And, yes, stupid.  It can last for a while, but overall, people are going to believe their own eyes/living conditions over what the left tells them, no matter how many times.  Even the Russian people, far more heavily propagandized, figured out “there is no truth in Pravda.”  The greatest danger from this is that they propagandize JUST ENOUGH that people fleeing Seattle will think the problem was “they didn’t spend enough” and buy more and worse homelessness for their new towns.

Note, btw, this is being done by supposed charitable foundations.  Because they don’t actually care that their “solution” is making it worse for everyone, particularly, possibly, the supposed targets of their benevolence. No. They care that it’s done their way and according to their (mostly progressive and “let the good people do it) delusions.  They’d rather reign over hell than serve those who need it in heaven, is what it amounts to.  “Charity”seems to be other name for “command and control.”  As, btw, is everything they touch.  And if they went into this — once — which some of them might have with the intention of “doing the best thing to make it better,” it’s now devolved to “we’ll just virtue signal and pretend it’s the best.”  Yeah.

But they used to get away with this with far less effort.  I realized this when I read this post:  The ideologue who wrote the textbook calling Trump and his supporters “racists”.

Advanced students are being taught this insanity as the truth. They will be expected to “answer properly” in order to make it to colleges.

If you think this is recent, I have news for you. It has been going on at least since the early 80s because my history book when I was an exchange student contained whoppers at least that large (if more skillfully disguised and about the more distant past.)

It’s just that in the past if a parent noticed it, what was he going to do? Tell everyone that the school books were left wing biased? And then what?

You couldn’t do that in public. First of all, you thought you were alone, because the control of the media gave the left de-facto control of what “everybody knew” so you’d be outing yourself as a right wing loon and the punishment has always been swift on that.  The other part, of course, was that even if you complained, as a parent who read the school books you were a tiny minority, compared to the parents who never read them AND those who had no kids.  So everyone would think you were crazy and “denying history.”

Now it can be posted and talked about in public, and no matter what the disinformation campaign, we know we’re not alone and the truth WILL out.

This of course gives the impression that society is on the verge of fracturing and that the left has gone insane.  They have, of course, but it’s not recent. As for fracturing…

I’ve known marriages where one side never dared criticize the other.  There were several reasons for this, but for whatever reason, one side never said anything the other side did was wrong.  The end result was that the person who was never called to reality spun further and further from reality and became more and more addicted to “my way.”

Years ago, a critique group fell apart on this.

Even the best people in the best marriages periodically get way too far up their own backsides, because we’re human and things happen.  At that time it’s important — perhaps the most important — function of those close to us to say “Uh… that is not so.”  Or “Why on Earth did you do that?”

Years ago, I told a friend that I voted Republican, not because they were that much better than the Democrats, but because the press hated them and would keep an eye on them, while the left got a complete pass, which meant they could get crazier and crazier.

I find it bizarre they’re furious at the leaks of Hillary’s malfeasance because it “gave Trump the victory” which is somehow “cheating.”

I don’t think they’re right about giving Trump the victory. I think enough of us just wanted the Clintons to eff off, and when they got there eff off from there, and when they got there–

BUT EVEN IF THEY WERE, this amounts to “we’re furious because we couldn’t hide our candidate’s iffy and outright criminal behavior, and so she didn’t win.”  Come again? Why do you want someone who is AT BEST a careless loon and at WORST (and more likely) a (indicted)  criminal in power over anything? How is it “cheating” to tell the truth?

It is cheating, in their minds, because it never happened before. The electorate should always, ever, think any corruption is on the right. They should be fed outright laws about the left so they think they’re Simon Pure and give them more power.  Why?  Well, because “they’re the good guys” who want “the best for everybody.”

Only they don’t. The stories are too numerous to share, but the corruption runs deep in the Democrats. Arguably deeper than among Republicans.

The difference? The left has no checks. No one calls them on their sh*t.  If the governor of Virginia were a republican photographed in black face/KKK robes? He’d be out of office. He wouldn’t be able to get a job as a dog catcher.  But he’s a Democrat, so most people have never even heard of it.

However, some have.  Which is a beginning.

The window is cracked. The sun is starting to shine in.  What it illuminates ain’t pretty, but being seen is the first step to dealing with it.

So are we close to a national divorce?  I don’t think it’s possible. Not for a couple of generations of selective separation, at least.  Though I’ll note most of the marriages I know where one side cannot be wrong, ever, end in divorce, if they don’t end in death first.  Some hold on, but… I’m not sure they’re good for both parts.

Perhaps this correction, this ability to see things, comes too late for a course check. Perhaps not.  The beauty of the world is that it’s born again, every generation.  I know younger conservatives don’t know and can’t comprehend that sense of “I must be wrong, because everyone else thinks this other thing” that the lot of us had growing up.

Perhaps it’s a matter of time.  Perhaps sunlight truly will disinfect the national kitchen and the sausage made there will be cleaner.

Until then, remember the words of power “I see you.”

The deeds done in dark? Shout them from the rooftops. Do not give the left their presumption of good, or even of good intentions.

Be not afraid. In the end we win, they lose.  Because we fight under the banner of truth, a close cousin of reality. And reality is that which doesn’t go away no matter how much you ignore it.