According To Hoyt

The new slur of the left for those of us who won’t conform is “Weird.”

Apparently “Deplorables” has lost its sheen, and “ultra Maga” (Ultra Maga assemble!) is no longer working, so now we must be stigmatized as weird.

To say this is bizarre is an understatement. It’s also a symptom of their losing the etymological war. Oh, and the ontological war too, while we’re at it.

You see, for years now, the left has anchored its power on two things:

1- being able to define what “bad word” their enemies are, a single bad word, which, whether it makes sense or not, puts you outside the overton window and makes you someone to shun and disparage. An untermensch if you will. A no-man.

2- being able to define which ways of being render you untouchable. “If you are this way, whether a characteristic of birth or acquired, or just the way you prefer to be, it makes you the enemy.”

The two can work together and often do. So, if you are, say, an anti-Marxist, that both makes you “stupid” and therefore untouchable. “Well, she’s really dumb. She doesn’t even understand Marxist dance theory, and that it’s the only way to interpret modern dance.” This is a bit on the nose, of course, but something like this would be the code phrase that rendered you unhirable for anything from art criticism to serving coffee at the local coffee house.

It would also make people laugh behind their hands at you, and ascribe all sorts of other characteristics to you, in sort of a reflexive cloud-grouping. So if you were anti-Marxist they would adduce traditionalist, easily shocked, very religious, not very educated, etc. etc. etc.

It is that sort of grouping that caused people in the early days of this blog to come here and yell at us that if either I or my commenters had ever finished highschool or left the deep South we’d think differently. It’s also behind their forlorn foghorn of “educate yourself” which really means “Fall in line with my mental categories, and behave as I want you to.”

Because this started breaking down, they had to try to resort to more overt stigmatizing. Which led to racist, sexist, homophobe, leading to the absolutely hilarious moment during a late in-field kerfuffle when a blog accused me of homophobia, a year after the publication of A Few Good Men. (Oh, I’m sure they would come up with a justification. You see, REAL gay people can’t be USAian, therefore I must be writing them wrong because I hate them. But it’s stupid, and even they know it’s stupid.)

Their old stigmatizing of “stupid” doesn’t work, as not only have a lot of us with advanced degrees from institutions THEY respect are coming out of the closet as conservative, but it’s becoming glaringly obvious most of their leading lights are utterly brainless, like the current candidate for the presidency on the dem side. Or their previous one.

So they tried deplorables, which because Hilary is old is almost charming. It’s like she called us ne’er do wells or rogues. Of course, it was immediately seized up, ran with, worn as a badge of pride and in online names etc. I honestly can’t figure out how they expected anything else, except they had their sense of humor ablated at birth.

And then there is Ultra Maga. I keep trying to get my favorite artist to do a picture of a Maga Superhero, whatever that would look like, in a power-pose with Ultra Maga, Assemble! But they don’t get that either, and hence the red speech and the insistance that this that and the other thing are “ultra MAGA.”

Except that too didn’t bring opprobrium. And they’re desperate.

So the new thing is to call married men with children “incels” which of course means involuntary celibates. Which has ALL OF US laughing into our hands, because either they don’t understand how children are made, or they’ve lost their minds. (Narrator voice: They lost their minds.)

When that kind of glanced off us with a “LOLWUT?” they then resorted to “Weird.”

There are multiple problems with that. It starts with the fact that well… weird is rather a province of the left, from weird hair colors to weird neurological groupings, where people make their disability their identity.

But they’re now trying to claim the ultimate ontological beach head by defining that as “normal” and you know, being married, having kids, working a full time job, etc as “Weird.” Oh, and being male as “weird.”

They’re not going to succeed. They don’t realize they’re no longer “the youth” however defined.

To be fair, they kept that badge as “the youth” far too long, riding on the boomers being generally understood to be left (even when it was not true) and the fact that “the boomers” for a long time took one more year every year, till a generation — not a genealogical generation but a commercial and experiential one defined as “babies born of parents returning from WWII” included people whose parents weren’t born by WWII — so that they were “forever young.” But that was a battle they’d lose, anyway, and they have. “Boomer” now means “Old” and heck, “Millennial” now sounds old. And each generation being not only smaller, but by virtue of our bizarre leftist regulations and governance that make adulthood and entrance into the workforce difficult, increasingly more desenfranchised and poorer, they don’t have that kind of power as to make a bizarre way of life “normal” and normality “weird.”

I’d expect that new definition of weird to hit the movies, TV, youtube, lefty media all over, at the same time, in coordination. It’s their modus operandi.

But it won’t work. Why won’t it work?

Well, it would have worked on THEM. The leftists remaining are creatures of group and consensus. They couldn’t stand to be out of step, strange, considered not hip.

They don’t realize those of us who clawed our way out of a Marxist Leninist mind set DESPITE all means of indoctrination aimed at us are, by definition, immune to group-shaming and calls for us to fall back in line.

They don’t understand we’ve been out of the mainstream so long, we’re comfortable here.

Weird? Sure, we’re weird, and frankly the fact that many of us have happy marriages and families is not our weirdness. We have far more weird things we think/do/believe/work at.

Weird? You call us weird like it’s a bad thing.

Yes, we are weird. And together we’ll build a beautiful weirdness.

One in which the NPC greyness of fake weird will feel so out of place they’ll need to fit in with us and adapt to our weirdness.

They’ll never be free-thinkers, poor things. There’s something intrinsically broken in them that forbids it.

But with work and care, they might be able to fake it, and not be quite so boring, speaking only in echos.

Sure, go ahead, call us weird. That was a badge of honor before you even started finger-pointing and screaming.

I predict by the end of today there will be t-shirts with “Weird by choice” and “Get with the program, be weird.”

There is no one here but we weirdos, and in our chaotic lack of conformity, we’re a target they can’t begin to hit.

Yesterday I came across this from Power Line Blog, and I agree with their call for lawfare against this attempt at gaslighting.

However, what stuck out at me, perhaps because of my own experiences was how they assume someone is financing a blog run by lawyers in their spare time.

That first stuck out to me when people — not this outfit I don’t think, though it’s possible it did, and I ignored it — started sending me emails asking me who paid me and how much I made. Sometimes accusatory, sometimes interested.

There was also the break in of my online accounts, where it became obvious they were looking for emails/messages that mentioned money. Which means as I was already booting them they spent precious time sending very rude messages to my editors, to fellow indie authors discussing earnings, and a friend talking about how to split money for a birthday gift of another friend.

This wide variety of subjects obscured the purpose from me, but with thought I realized those messages, rapid fire and full of for real racist slurs that made no sense whatsoever, were copy-pasted and sent to everyone mentioning money without reading the actual messages they were responding to, under the assumption that they were offending my sponsors so they’d drop me.

Years ago, during a time when I’d just had a SWAT attempt and was more paranoid than my normal baseline, a young lady contacted me and asked to come to the Hun’s dinner. It was obvious she wasn’t a regular at the blog/our circles. And she was, she said, a recent convert to our side. And she wanted to talk to me.

I don’t think the Huns dinner was what she expected, and she never came back. Partly because we were all in super-paranoid mode. And partly because she wanted to talk about money.

No, she didn’t want us to pay her. I think. Probably.

What she wanted to tell us is that the left had far less support than we thought. That young people were working for the left not because they believed Marxism, or its lies, but because they wanted to be paid. And the left paid. And the young had student loans. And the job market sucked.

At the time I didn’t believe her. While I realized that some of the left were paid — they all have the billionaires, but a handful — I didn’t realize it was pretty much everywhere.

Just like the USSR used to fund and pay for even stupid little publishers and newspapers throughout the west; just like China pays for much of the left nowadays; other interests and would-be totalitarians fund a lot of the left, from insane feminist bloggers to dumb as rocks anti-gun kids spouting off, to … well…. ante-fa burning, looting and murdering one city at a time, because they could only recruit enough people for a few busloads.

The point is that I’ve since from questions asked, from the assumptions of the left about us, come to the conclusion that maybe not all, but a good number of them are crazy for pay. They’re in it for the money.

And the funny — hilarious really — thing is that they ASSUME there’s more money on the right. Well, they would, of course. They think that they are the underdog, despite their clearly being the conformists. And they are for the “poor” which means we must be “for the rich” so it stands to reason we’re much better paid, right? right?

Also, particularly in the arts they know anyone striking out and being blatantly right wing stops being paid by the official outlets, so how much more must the unofficial ones pay?

Look, it’s the only reason for me to often being accused of selling out…. Apparently my price was a stale doughnut and a pack of chewing gum and I was looking for someone who’d offer LOW enough. (What?)

This is ultimately the thing. They don’t understand why anyone would oppose tyranny or work against its consolidation UNLESS they’re being paid. They can’t understand anyone undertaking hardship and sacrifice to purchase freedom for generations yet unborn, unless the ka-ching is echoing somewhere in their personal register.

This is a fatal misunderstanding.

It’s the reason they try to strangle us financially (and fail, because there are always a million of us who have just had about enough and will mouth off for free or even at great cost) and destroy our careers. Because that will make us go to their side to get paid, right? We’re only doing this because we’re being paid, right?

They probably also think that like them we rig the vote, so they’re just anti-rigging.

They honestly think that Marxism is foreordained, that it’s “scientific” and no one can question it, unless they’re doing it for money. So we must be doing it for money. Heck, they only bother to fight us for money, too, because it’s foreordained, right? There’s nothing to fight for. The future belongs to them.

It’s a fatal misunderstanding. It prevents them seeing that they can’t crush us, because we’re a real grassroots rebellion.

If we’re lucky their sources of funding dry up. Likely in the case of China, less so in the case of the Soros. (Though possible. Alex reads as a moron to me.) And others… But there’s always the possibility of miracles. I count Musk’s flipping over as one of those. Oh, and Trump too, at that.

If we’re not lucky it’s going to get very bad before it gets better.

Hold on to the sides of the boat. The water is getting choppier and choppier.

And be not afraid.

In the end, we win, they lose. It’s just the getting there.

I’ve already done a post on this. And M. C. A. Hogarth did an excellent post on this. So, why do the third? Well, because we’re talked about the effect of the deeper game in not fighting back against the let’s unrelenting, ceaseless attacks.

But we’ve not talked about the effect on those who fight. Or what you’re doing to them. Yes, you. That the enemy will attack them, is a given. That you choose to condemn them to whatever the other side wishes on them is however on your conscience. And should be.

First let’s establish the situation, shall we?

Before I was born — I turn 62 this year — the left had captured and commanded all the institutions and definitely all means of mass communication.

What this meant is that they defined what was real, what was sane and what was possible.

This take over of the institutions was specifically sponsored by the USSR which first took over communications and schools. Whether the take over of educators (prior to taking over education) was facilitated by the fact that WWI had stripped the previous ideals from people who were never very reality-oriented and therefore more than willing to replace one airy-fairy ideology “our nation is better than all others and destined to empire” with another “No nations (except low key the USSR) and international communism.” I leave as an exercise for the reader. To me it seems obvious that WWI set this domino up, and the only way the disillusioned people could recover their self esteem and ideas of being the smartest ever was to come up with another overarching ideology that replaced the fallen one. (While on this our mistake when the USSR fell was not offering the same set of people a “just so/explains all philosophy” so like the dog to his vomit they went back to communism. Let’s come up with something better. Let’s give them USAanism this time.)

Anyway, by the time the Nazis were defeated, the USSR had gotten hold of the communications and arts and education in most of the allied countries. No, it wasn’t open, but if you go back it was blatant. And part of it was just that the winning of WWII also convinced a vast number of people that the government could do everything now.

How much that had to do with the press not reporting how fraught that win was or that things like rationing were actually injurious to the war effort is something else.

It’s also a piece with how they kept control until very recently, and how a lot of you will fight me tooth and nail on “But they weren’t in control.” Oh, but they were. They shaped everything people saw. They just couldn’t come out openly. However most of the history you think you know for the twentieth century is either subtly shaded or an outright lie.

Then how was the USSR defeated? Well, partly because communism just doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. It’s an academically perfect way to starve out and destroy a nation, not to build anything, and certainly not to live.

But also because some people continued fighting. They had to fight with both legs in a bucket of cement, mind, but some people were just that cussed. People like Ronald Reagan and the other people he assembled around him, all of them determined to destroy the USSR.

And I know a lot of you will say stuff about how he didn’t do enough, etc. This is a mirage caused by the fact the times have changed. While the left controlled every means of communication, it was impossible to be out there, and get everything the Freedom Lovers wanted and not get destroyed.

As it was, it was touch and go. The left commanded enough of the opinion making, that Reagan got called crazy, and a warmonger, and evil, and above all –persistently — stupid. Even P. J. O’Rourke called him “His dumbness.”

When intelligence is defined by parroting communist cant, then someone who doesn’t is “stupid.”

As was his every utterance was distorted to make him sound totalitarian. And everyone abroad knew he was “a Nazi.” So has every Republican president been. EVERY ONE OF THEM. And every candidate. Even McCain who was really a soft-communist. (I’m not using socialist, because socialism is just the way to communism, and every communist nation calls itself a socialist republic. So I’m not indulging their desire to use shading to hide what they are anymore. And yes, our democrats are “socialist” but really communists, just hiding. Look at what they’re trying to do, from making the vote a merely show activity to silencing opinion, to controlling production and who can use what, to wealth taxes. They’re communists. There is no difference from the USSR’s plans. They even want 5 year plans.)

But Reagan took the hits. And he was already bit enough by the time he was elected and was savvy enough that they couldn’t stop him. Which meant the USSR fell, because it couldn’t continue without the complicity and connivance of the US government. Couldn’t survive without massive quantities of wheat, charitable shipments and ridiculous concessions from our presidents which allowed the USSR to swallow ever-increasing territory they could leech for sustenance.

Well, the USSR fell, but we didn’t give the loonies any other system they could use to feed their sense of unearned superiority. And the loons in the academic and communication system need that. So after a few years of fumbling, they went up to communism, telling themselves it had never been tried before. Not real communism.

And here we are. If it weren’t for the fact that we now have other means of communication and expression, we’d already be under the boot.

Well, that and because they still have their basic problem: Communism doesn’t work. Fascism does, barely, for a time, which is why China fell from Communism into the facto fascism. And why the system they’re trying to impose here is fascism under the rhetoric of communism. But the thing is — looks at China — that even fascism only works for a time.

Look, it’s the totalitarian, bureaucratic aspects, combined with an ideology that doesn’t mesh with the real world. What they think is inevitable, or perfect, or necessary NEVER WORKS. But everyone lies up the line, so people think it does, and it’s just them failing, or something. Until the wheels come off. And they always come off. And come off spectacularly.

All these centrally controlled, ideologically-infected systems have the fundamental problem of treating humans like widgets and governmental proclamations as laws of nature. None of them account for unintended consequences, which always bite them in the butt. And none of them can feed even the diminished population their starvation and lack of reproduction policies create.

To the extent they limp on is due to the fact that America, even hampered as it has been, has remained free enough in essentials that we can feed and clothe half the world, while they play at state socialism.

Which is why they must take us down, because we’re proof of how flawed their ideas are. And why they can’t take us down, because then their regimes will fail harder and faster, and therefore will be revealed as failures and go down.

And this is where we are. Only well, they are ideologues and very stupid. Stupid DESPITE or BECAUSE some of them have genius IQs. Which means they don’t understand the real world AND they must salvage their impression of themselves as brilliant and infallible.

So right now, their overriding concern is to shut down every opposing source of information, and everything that reveals their chose system for the failure it is, and history as a rebuke and proof of their insanity.

I don’t know if some of them are smart enough to realize that if they achieve their goal humanity dies out, but I suspect this wouldn’t upset them too much. Since the USSR fell, they’ve been furious at humans in general for breaking their little red — I speak advisedly — wagon.

So right now, even as we can communicate around their barriers to information, they are insanely preoccupied with shutting us up and silencing us in every way they can.

Note “disinformation” a Soviet concept is now uttered by them with no shame. (It sounded better in the original Russian.) There is no such thing as “Disinformation”: there is only truth or lies. “Disinformation” ends up meaning: this is true, but it goes against our objectives, so we don’t want people to know it.

Every one of them, from the Biden Junta to the WEF has been very concerned with “disinformation.”

We know they put through hell and destroy anyone who opposes their program since Reagan. We have seen what happened to Trump (And Palin). This will only get worse.

But this is visible and obvious. Below the surface, there’s been a war going on on dissenting voices in art and journalism, in academics and history, in broadcast, film, and even, yes, all the auxiliary arts to film, including costuming.

By the time I broke into publishing, now almost 30 years ago, this was already obvious from the inside. Not only couldn’t you, say, declare yourself an anti-communist, but giving them any reason to suspect you might not be fully onboard got you sidelined so hard you’d never work in that field again. I am told it is the same for every other field they controlled.

Yet people kept breaking through. Either by keeping very quiet until they were huge and couldn’t be taken down, or by a combination of accidents and ability.

This drove them insane, particularly the people keeping very quiet — which was my chosen strategy until it was untenable — and then speaking out. Since it often also happened because people changed their minds as they got older and saw more of the world, it was even more difficult to curtail.

So they started demanding more and more demonstrations of loyalty. Trying to tie you to having said increasingly more horrendous things, so you couldn’t walk it back.

This was the strategy of the Roman gangs where you had to kill a family member before you could join.

And some of us couldn’t. Some of us walked away. Others hurt themselves by proclaiming what they knew to be lies, to sell one more book, one more story.

Meanwhile, in public, we were told by people who knew nothing, that the right just wasn’t creative. It was because we were so conformist (as though arriving at an opinion completely different from everything the mainstream told you COULD even be conformism.) And those of us still working were told we were “peculiar” or “just not very bright.”

BUT and this is important, the NICE people on our side didn’t help. They didn’t say: wait a minute, I read so and so, and they’re not peculiar or stupid at all. They’re just not leftists.

They didn’t say: wait a minute, these people who are being pushed at us from every outlet are the height of conformism.

They didn’t say: So and so who is attacking this person for daring to speak up, is a rancid idiot with the IQ of a gnat.

Oh, no. We must be NICE.

Therefore, when I made up nicknames to people who were trying to destroy me (Partly because I’m dyslexic and remembering how to spell their names is often difficult) I got told I shouldn’t be mean or dismissive towards them, even though they were attacking me and trying to make it impossible for me to continue working.

And whenever one of us comes out and says something like “Well, fine. But communism doesn’t work” or “women are not the same as men” or “people’s opinions are not determined by their sex or race.” the left descends on us calling us everything but children of G-d.

And you nice people stand above and tell us we must be nice. We can’t even expose their real misdeeds, or call them names. Because that would be falling to their level, and that, for the nice people, is worse than death.

I don’t know how they imagine this works. What? People who are willing to kill and destroy to get to the top, will look at you being so saintly and repent and come to your side? That’s not how real life works. There’s more to Ghandi than the legend they sold you. Even saints engaged in war at times.

How it works is that the right tries to be oh, so fair. So, say we do manage to won a publisher, or a journalistic outlet, or a school — usually because we saved money and started it — we don’t say “No, we won’t hire commies.” No, we’ll say “These two candidates are about the same, but the commie is slightly better. I’ll hire him.” (Since the ‘slightly better’ is often by credentials, and it’s easier to get credentials if you’re a leftist, because the left will hire you and push you ahead, this doesn’t even denote real competence.)

Meanwhile on the left, they will look at two candidates, and one is brilliant, but not quite so leftist, while the other is barely passable but an outspoken communist. And they’ll hire the communist. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Which is how, eventually, even “right wing” institutions and outlets get taken over by the left. The leftists have better resumes, after all. and one has to be fair. We can’t be like them. Oh, no. We are nice. And we don’t descend to their depths.

We will punt a president and call him names, and believe an OBVIOUSLY STOLEN ELECTION that deposes him because “he did mean tweets, so obviously people hate him.”

We will not mention that Kamala Harris is REALLY Commie LaWhorish and a complete dunce and intellectual nullity with it. Or that she was hired because Biden promised a “black woman” VP. Which caused her to undergo a convenient race change, of course. No. We won’t mention any of that, because that would be sinking to their level. And we couldn’t have that!

We will pluck out our eyes rather than see that our behavior just means the left takes more and more institutions, and jobs, and means of communication, causing also a disproportionate imbalance of their having all the money on their side. (Oh, but we can’t say they’re really the rich. And we can’t say we’re for everyone else. That would be populist. And — fans self — we all know how bad that is.)

AND THEN we’re surprised no one speaks up. We’re shocked that a president on our side can’t find anyone to hire. It’s almost like there are no reliable resumes, or something. We are confused that the only people who speak up on our side are either dunces, evil or uncouth. We know they are because the left told us so.

And we can’t understand why every form of entertainment sucks, our college presidents are illiterate and our scientists are bought and paid for. We can’t understand why civilization is falling apart at the seams.

Why, we’re so NICE and we’re not like THEM.

Look, those of us in the trenches are getting really tired. We don’t demand you knit socks for us. But can you please stop joining the enemy in their attacks?

It’s all we ask. Despite it all, we have a fair chance to win the war.

It’s not that you’re good or supportive. It’s that the enemy is not only wedded to a system that doesn’t work, but they’re as stupid as they are vile. Seven decades of hiring for ideology rather than competence will do that.

So we can win this. We really can. If you stop stealing our weapons and trying to beat us unconscious.

No. I won’t be nice. Yes, I will descend to their level. (With the difference I won’t lie. I don’t need to.) I will take a tooth for a tooth and eye for an eye. And I’m better at it, particularly when annoyed.

You keep on this war for yourself image and preen in front of the mirror with how nice and civilized you are.

Me? What I’m fighting for is nothing less than the survival of humanity and civilization.

It is a cause worthy of being a little rude.

Don’t you think?

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM JERRY BOYD: Nikki’s Day Out

Nikki wants Bob to help a failing colony from her Guide days. It turns out some people don’t want to be helped. Bob is able to explain it to the colonists, but our shepherd is handy with new and different things to worry about. Ride along, and see what BSR gets up to this time.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Wild West Bar and Grill

Horst Aslanov is a seventeen-year-old criminal. Or at least he aspires to be one. But his mentor is missing, the number two boss is a dictatorial idiot, and it’s hard to say if the possibility of a police raid is better or worse than the violent criminal gang moving into their area.

The Wild West Bar and Grill is a restaurant in a cross-dimensional future Moscow. Serving authentic barbeque, and tiny shows of wild west shootouts. It’s also a cover for an unlicensed brothel . . . which is an extra layer of cover for an ID hacking and brainchip forging operation. But the old forger is missing, and now Horst has to decide if he’s going to try to keep the business running . . . or go straight.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: All the Little Hedgehogs

In Soviet Union, genetic engineering does you.

Yona wondered why everyone kept steering him toward a military career, until one of his teachers noticed his aptitude for genetics. Now he’s the personal student of Academician Voronsky, working in a secret genetic engineering facility in a closed town.

However, Yona keeps having to spend as much time babysitting the Academician’s adopted son Kolya as actually doing genetics. When this extra assignment becomes a frustration, Yona learns just how quickly privileges can be retracted.

And then he starts learning just how deep the secrets of the Soviet human genetics program really goes.

A story from the Grissom timeline (Gus on the Moon universe).

Caution: Contains intense material that may be disturbing to some readers. Reader caution advised.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Hunter and Horseman: Familiar Generations Book Four

Undying love or cruel obsession?

Devon County, a quiet rural corner of Pennsylvania. That is, until two brothers refuse to take “no” for an answer. Malice and magic pull Jude Tainuit, the lone Hunter, into the fray. When a tornado rips through the county, leaving pain and twisted power in its wake, the Hunter and his allies face two foes – one in the open, and one who lurks, patient and deadly. A blood-path magic worker hides in the storm, one who hunts Hunters.

Worse awaits. Aunt Martha goes to visit relatives, leaving Jude in charge of the farm … Or as in charge as his Familiar and Martha’s cat will allow.

Jude Tainuit will need all his skills, and the help of allies great and small, to face the storm when twisted power awakens the phantom Horseman.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Cataclysm

The end is coming.

Unlucky jerk Tom Beadle was on watch at NASA when the collision alert sounded: a new asteroid, bigger than the dino-killer, headed for Earth. Big problem, but that’s why we have NASA, right? Except, after decades of budget cuts, NASA has no way to shove it off course. That job has to be contracted out. Will the private sector company his best friend from college works at succeed where the government option failed? Might be best to have a backup plan, just in case…

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: The Gear Engages: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure

It takes more than a single terraformer to start a new world.

The human colony on the lost world of Not What We Were Looking For faces fracture and schism. On one side of the river, the settlers from Earth remember what it means to live in a free society. In the Marss-controlled city, the governor cancelled elections long ago and strives daily to cement his grip on the inhabitants.

Thaddeus Dawe and the Hudson cousins, including the one who agreed to marry him, save the colony’s last terraseeder from the governor’s political grandstanding, and head for the secret northern enclave started by Thaddeus’ brother. But all Thaddeus’ careful planning takes a wrenching turn when not one but two parties race in pursuit.

Thwarted in his original goal, faced with repairing the consequences of what he does to escape arrest, and besotted by the discovery of newspapers, Thaddeus wrestles with new ventures and roles in which he dare not fail. He must save not only Earth’s microbial legacy but its knowledge base as well. Not to mention, he’s getting married.

But when the governor’s chief of staff decides to weaponize Thaddeus against both the city’s farmers and the newspaper’s publisher, Thaddeus must fight the governor’s attempts to steal the farmers’ land even as someone destroys everything Thaddeus himself tries to build. In the end, he must do what he can to save those his own betrayal put at risk.

Picking up where Under the Earthline left off, The Gear Engages is the fourth book in the gripping science fiction colonization series Martha’s Sons. If you like action, political machinations, and a driven hero, you’ll want to dive in heart-and-head first.

Pick it up now to join the fight for a lost world!

FROM BECKY R. JONES: Night Mage (Academic Magic Book 2)

After fighting a demon in the middle of Philadelphia, Zoe O’Brien wants nothing more than to return to her normal, if stress-filled, life as an assistant professor of history at Summerfield College. But she’s an Elemental mage and that means when there’s potential magical trouble on campus, the squirrels come to her. Who or what is the dark presence moving around campus? Why is it here and what does it want? Zoe struggles to come to terms with her mage powers and the leadership role her colleagues have given her. Complicating everything are all the papers that have to be graded, classes that need to be prepped, and most importantly, cats that require attention. Oh, yeah. She might actually have a boyfriend as well.

https://www.amazon.com/Summer-Scarborough-Pride-Prejudice-Sequel-ebook/dp/B07T8ZRZ51FROM ANNA FERREIRA: A Summer in Scarborough: A Pride & Prejudice Sequel

Miss Anne de Bourgh was delighted to receive a letter from her cousin Georgiana, explaining that she would be spending the summer by the sea, and requesting the pleasure of her company. A glorious few months of balls, shopping, and walking by the sea awaits- a wonderfully diverting holiday for Anne, who has rarely left Rosings before.

But Anne is a de Bourgh, and life is never simple. Before long, she finds herself caught between the attentions of two very different men, and must choose if she will follow her heart or disoblige her family. One must be disappointed, and Anne has never been very practiced in the art of disobedience. Must she give up everything she has ever known, will she find the strength to search for happiness elsewhere?

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: vest

I’m going to start with a startling confession: I am a cat lady. There, are you shocked? Running around in circles and rearranging your mental image of me, yet? No? Why not? Could it be because I constantly talk about my cats, when I’m not talking about my kids?

What’s worse, I come by this naturally, having got it from grandma, who was like the platonic ideal of a cat lady, having somewhere between 17 and 30s some named, cared for, clean cats at any given time (To be fair, they were mostly outdoors, in a rural community.), Dad, who if mom allowed him, would bring home every cat who needed a home, and every dog, rabbit, injured bird and turtle too, and older brother who takes in dumped, abused and injured cats on the regular and has a variable clowder of them.

So, of course, I’m now mad at Vance for saying Cat Ladies were bitter and lonely and I’m going to vote for his opponent, who merely wants to strip Israel of the ability to defend herself, and turn over our cities to feral homeless and criminals, and erase our borders. And, oh, yeah, wants to confiscate guns and–

What? You’re not? But you’re low key mad about the cat lady comment? Well, listen, that’s because — I know this is shocking — it was completely taken out of context, and weaponized (by CNN initially) in order to seed dissension on the right. When will you learn? Then for further digging, it was paired with comments he made earlier about people with children deserving more of a say in the future… Sigh. It’s like that.

We now have crazy women running around in circles claiming that Kamala Harris is just like George Washington who also only had step children. Thereby increasing the stereotype of “all women are crazy and hysterical” and seeding more dissension.

I must ask, on the serious, were you people not awake and aware when the left weaponized “Women in Binders”? A reference to giving PREFERENCE TO WOMEN WHO’D BEEN OVERLOOKED which was turned into “proof of sexism” by repetition without context? And which never made any sense, btw?

So, I don’t have a link to it, or even a link to where Charlie Martin pointed out it was taken out of context on Twitter, but I’m sure one or more commenters will find it. The CNN utterance was cut and further distorted by the “concerned discussion” after, as the left does.

What Vance was referring to was not CHILDLESS people, or even people who tried to have children but couldn’t, or people who are childless but have anchors in the future.

What he was referring to was our “elites” who, frankly, are of a sort that infests any nation in trouble — see decadent Rome, France just before the revolution, England before the Victorian renewal, etc. etc. — that is the kind that has bent their entire life into working for and seeking power.

This happens when a polity is so centralized and codified that the only way to ascend the hierarchy is to LIVE FOR IT. Which always ends up with profoundly unhappy people in power. Whether they be male or female, yellow, purple or pink. It’s just the way it is. And having profoundly unhappy people in power, particularly people bent on denying they’re unhappy, always ends up in horror.

Right now our nation is such that we’ve bent every field of human endeavor to be that kind of greased pole, in which you must bend everything and subordinate everything to attain it. Trad Pub too was that kind of ladder, and amid the many career mistakes I made was not bending everything to success. OTOH I have a family and I love my family.

Anyway– I feel the need to explain what he meant by childless versus having children. This is a weird thing to explain, and to make things worse, it’s not even absolute (for the reason Washington and Kamala aren’t the same. And that’s just a beginning.) There are people who have children who are in fact childless in every manner that counts, and people who are childless who are in fact people with children in every way that counts. It’s just there are lessons that are easier to learn through having children and raising them, so that’s the way the personality tends to bend.

It’s weird to have to explain it, because of course, most of the time, most of society has children, and knows what it’s like. Except that’s no longer true. In fact, again, the way our society is organized most of us who have children are encouraged to behave and live as if we don’t.

I wasn’t even aware of this until a much younger friend mentioned in passing that the beau ideal of our fiction — movies, tv, novels — nowadays is sort of an eternal college student. I.e. you have no ties, not even to your parents, and you live life for yourself and your own self-actualization. Even romances are portrayed this way, with often the female’s self-actualization being primary, and the male being there to serve it. Unless they get together because “it will help us both be more ourselves” (which isn’t wrong, but it goes through becoming sort of a blended person first. It’s complicated. Yes, I can do a post on that, too, if anyone needs it.)

This is what people are being told to be. Which in turn distorts everything. Because this is what people view as being “adult” and “responsible.” You have a career, you have friends whom you help, but they’re sort of fungible, you have a place you live and where you can have parties. Children, in both fiction and the way you’re encouraged to live, are viewed as hindrances. And if there is a pet it’s usually a cat, because cats are subordinate to the way you live. You don’t have to walk them everyday. There’s automated feeders and most cats who aren’t Indy don’t take them apart. Etc.

This is so alien for most of human history that it’s distorting the way we live and everything we do. It also doesn’t take in account that we still age. Yes, we stay vigorous and hale till very late in life. But we still age. And old age without someone younger to lend a hand, do the tough stuff, make difficult decisions when you’re not feeling well, etc, is hell on Earth, as a lot of people are finding out, since a vast majority of the population is now hitting old age. (And yes, that’s why MAID and other such programs.)

People who hit it and can no longer live the college student lifestyle are likely to be bitter. Further, every woman I know who hits menopause while childless feels regret, even if childless by choice. If they deny that regret, it too becomes bitterness partly because the culture lied to them and most people aren’t introspective enough to distinguish what they wanted and what the culture told them to want.

More importantly, our lifestyle goes against every instinct and deep-set bit of culture laid in over thousands of years, and that too generates some deep-set subconscious alarms, no matter how happy one thinks one is with one’s life.

So, the explanation:

First let’s get a few things about childlessness out of the way:

1 – Being childless is not a moral failing. There are tons of reasons to be childless. Starting with “never found a mate.” Continuing through “Is infertile”. Going on with “Is physically or emotionally unsuited to having children in the sense that being on certain psych medications makes you unable to.”

2- Being childless has a cost. Even in a perfect welfare state, (which doesn’t exist anywhere) once you hit the slope of old age, you’re going to need help and company, and no, paid help and paid company are not the same. Even if you can find them. I’ve now seen this story several times, and being old makes you cranky even if you were sweetness and light before. And it makes you need tasks done for you that should NOT be performed by strangers, even if some strangers are saintly enough to do them. There is a cost. It’s part of the human condition that everything has a cost.

3- The cost is not, despite our longings and ideas that our genes won’t go on. I actually was watching youtube videos on how genetics work down the line yesterday, because I couldn’t function and it was white noise, but really, it’s fairly obvious if you have 23andme or anything like that. Other than a couple of very ancient genes, our genetics get sliced and diced in such a way, if I have grandkids, ever, they’ll be about as related to me as a second cousin. And further down the line, we all sort of return to an undifferentiated sea of humanity. (This could be a post in itself. Tell me if anyone is interested.)

4- The cost of being childless does NOT include “not passing on my values and ideals” because frankly, you learn through being a parent what you pass on is super weird. Like, you can spend 18 years trying to convince the kid to follow your deeply-felt religious faith, but what actually emerges when they’re in their thirties is that they dress nice on Sundays and have a special dinner. (Not even joking, that’s about normal. They pick up the incidental, more than what you try to teach. And culture always has a say.)

5- Having children has a cost too. A high cost, which is harped on by society endlessly. But in the end that becomes a reward.

Which segues into the costs and rewards of having children, very nicely. Strap on. It’s going to be a weird ride.

I know a lot of people who lament never having had children. This is sort of like lamenting never having gotten married. Or never having gone to college. Or whatever.

It’s legitimate, because it was a thing you wanted to do and didn’t get to. So, of course, regret is legitimate. Envy, bitterness and revenge AREN’T.

Because there’s trade offs. And sometimes it didn’t happen because you weren’t willing to make that tradeoff. (Like, in a flip, my career sucks partly because I was the primary caretaker for the family. I had to learn not to be bitter over that.) And sometimes it didn’t happen because it didn’t.

BUT if it had, you’d have been required to make other tradeoffs, which you might now regret. And which would have made you a different person in the end. You would be markedly different than you are. And might feel bitter because your career was blighted. Or because you you never got to go to France, or whatever.

I find, on average, most people get what they really want out of life. What they’re willing to sacrifice for. (They just sometimes don’t think through the consequences of what they want.)

That said, there are two ways in which the difference that comes with having children makes it better for a nation if those governing it have children. And two ways in which the majority of people NOT having children makes a nation face a crisis as those people age.

The first is obvious. Right now my perception of the future is my potential lifespan plus that of my children. I.e. I am intensely interested in the future of the world for another 60 to 70 years, which given a long-lived line is my expectation of longevity for my children and their spouses.

Because of the times we live in, that’s worrisome, but not a very long time span historically. Even with the wheels coming off, with luck, I can expect that with minimal effort that will keep my kids reasonably fed and prosperous and comfortable for the rest of their lives. At least by historical standards of comfortable.

OTOH if one or both of them spawn my interest in history is suddenly a hundred years with the possibility of more. That means I have a major investment in keeping life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness available for those yet unborn generations that I feel responsible for, because those individuals would not have existed but for my choices. (For at least four generations or so, then…. undifferentiated sea of humanity.)

But Sarah, you’ll say, that’s only if you care about your kids. This is very true. If you don’t care about your kids, had nothing to do with their upbringing or actively dislike them as individuals, OR if you don’t feel responsibility to those you created? All this is null and void.

The flip side, where we get George Washington, btw. who married his wife while the kids were little, is that if you raise or help raise someone else’s kids and care about them INTENSELY then you have the parent mind set, even if you’re not biologically one.

I’ll only add it’s easier to be passionately interested in their fates if they’re actually biologically yours. This is not a slight on adoptive parents, or others, it’s just an instinctive thing. It’s EASIER. Doesn’t mean it happens, or that it doesn’t happen if you’re not biologically related. It’s just that a lot of us who otherwise don’t particularly like kids can connect to our own. That’s all. (I keep giggling as young people in my circles discover this and are shocked.)

The second importance of being a parent, and one not immediately obvious, is that it makes it very obvious both the extent of your ability to influence others, and the sheer, blind inability to save those you love from bad decisions. It makes you less authoritarian because you realize you can’t even completely (or much) control those you oversaw from birth and whom you love passionately. Every parent I know has hit this point with a very beloved child. “I love him/her but I can’t stop him/her doing this bizarrely stupid thing.”

If you’re lucky the bizarrely stupid thing is not permanent, and it’s just oh, getting in a very bad job situation, or a bad relationship, or moving to a strange place. And sometimes the kids come back from those. The permanent ones give you nightmares. And yes, they can include outright suicide.

AND sometimes you find that the horriblebad mistake you thought the kid was making turns out fine, and that it was perfect for them all along. Sometimes that paragliding course turns into a whole life of soaring to high expectations. Because parents are no more infallible than anyone else.

The important thing here, as a parent, is that it teaches you you’re not omnipotent and people aren’t widgets. You don’t get out what you put in. It’s not all situation and gestalt. People are individuals, and sometimes some deep inheritance, genetic or otherwise, can come out and bite you in the pound of flesh closest to the heart. And you still love them. You shake yourself off, and keep on loving them despite that. Because the link is still there.

But Sarah, you don’t need kids for that. You can get that with a spouse, a friend or even a cat.

True. It’s just that having seen the story from the beginning, and having it happen with a creature that depended on you for feeding, cleaning, LIVING for years just makes the lesson inescapable. (As for the cat, a friend with a very abusive parent says that parent learned from the CAT what the parent wouldn’t learn from the kids. That you can’t control everything. People are weird.)

It is an important lesson in terms of polity. And one that a vast portion of our population doesn’t seem to GET, which is why they keep thinking entire groups are composed of widgets, and if you feed input a, you’ll get output b. And never understanding the tradeoffs or unintended consequences.

I’ll note, as in my friend’s example above, that even though every single parent runs into this, some parents fail to learn it. Those are the ones that were either never connected to the kids, or are broken in such a way they CAN’T learn it. So they either cut off the kid utterly or keep trying to control the kid, lifelong.

BUT normally, in the normal run of things, all of us learn our kids are — gasp — individuals, different from us in fun, cute, interesting (sometimes blessed) ways, and also in horrifying “you think what?” ways. No matter how much input we put in, the outputs are more likely than not unfathomable.

These are the primary ways in which being a parent changes you. The third is less obvious and it’s that once you have raised kids, it actually is easier to relate to and care to the rest of humanity.

Now, again, because we live in crazy times: this is not a judgement on people who don’t have kids. For a long time I thought I’d be one of those. First because I thought I’d never marry, and second because it took us six years and intensive treatment to have first son. (Second was an unexpected miracle.)

I have no idea who I’d be in that leg of the trousers of time. I do know my proclivities, though, which are isolation and being slightly afraid of other people’s kids. (VERY afraid back then.)

I might very well be one of those very isolated, bitter cat ladies (cats are a given, look you) who resented the comment, without thinking through it.

And that last would be a mistake.

If you care about the future, even if it’s of that undifferentiated humanity from which you came, and to which your genes will return, it is essential that you think about the future, and think of it as a way that people who aren’t like you but for whom you care can survive and thrive. And of a future where individuals are LESS controlled by an authority that can no more guarantee good outcomes than a parent can for the children he/she raised.

It’s also essential you don’t let yourself be manipulated by cheap tricksters into being angry at people over a handful of words and protecting your abstract group over the actual future of civilization.

Pardon if the post is semi-confused. I’m better than yesterday, but still not well. I can and probably should revisit all the components of this very long and perhaps confused post.

But right now, this is what I feel must be said.

I’m tired. Maybe the fact that Canada is burning and in the air again has to do with this, or maybe it is the eternal wishful stupidity of the right. Could be either or.

Unfortunately this means I have a fever, which lately happens when I’m having an auto-immune outbreak.

For those of you who are new here, when I get a fever it’s like when other people are on prednisone. I lose what little governor I have. Also, because my head hurts, I become very short on patience.

What does this mean? Well– The old hands will tell you.

It means I roll up my sleeves, turn the Heinlein picture to the wall and speak without prettifying it for the sensitive souls. I’m sorry. But in case I haven’t mentioned it, I’m tired.

On facebook, someone took offense at my “Getting it out of the way” post. First at my saying that Kamala probably has less recent African ancestry than I do — and mine isn’t that recent. It’s someone who comments here, but he primly informed me that a little research would have prevented my embarrassing faux pas, since her father is of Jamaican ancestry so, obviously she has recent African ancestry.

Head>desk, repeat with gusto. He then insisted the “cast of her father’s features” meant he was black. I know that what y’all are conditioned to think of as “black” reads as “What?” to me, but seriously, the man looks Mediterranean with some English and I checked with people born here. Also, I’m not going to post my own family photos, but the side that so far as we know (unless that’s the tiny amount of Nigerian in my 23 and me. Yes, that’s right. I’m a princess!) has no African blood looks more African than Kamala’s father. Because, well… Portugal is a very mixed place, but also because what American’s consider “black” is not.

But even so, my contention in making that statement was not to dispute one-drop rules, because frankly who cares, but to argue that Kamala is no more black than I am: She’s not black American by culture or ancestry. Meaning that as far as there is a common (and there is) experience among Americans of (some) African ancestry whose ancestors were brought here as slaves, she ain’t got it. She got made “black” because Joe wanted a “black woman” vice president and it was her or the “real governor of Georgia.” That was it. Which is disingenuous.

For some reason this gentleman decided what I was REALLY saying was that Kamala and her family didn’t experience discrimination. (Pfui.) He then went on to lecture me about how if we say she isn’t black we’re making it so that black people rally around her. (This takes a level of double reverse leap and mental gymnastics that, given the fact I don’t have brakes right now, meant I was better off absenting myself from the discussion.)

Look, she isn’t black. Black people know she isn’t black. They were willing to fall for Barrack Obama who at least looks like an American black, but if you think they weren’t bit by that and aren’t wary of him, you’d be silly.

Now, am I saying she didn’t suffer discrimination?

Wait a moment. If I bang my head on the desk some more, with force, maybe it will stop hurting so badly at the arrant stupidity of this idea.

Yeah, she suffered discrimination. I have very bad news for you who are a little older than I: The conditions the democrats and their race obsession have set up in America, largely by poisoning kids’ minds in elementary schools, there is NO ONE that has lived in the US for the last 50 years who HASN’T experienced discrimination based on the way they look, or some perceived racial group. (Other reasons too.) Significant, marked discrimination that often affects their financial or physical well being. White men have suffered significant continual discrimination. So has everyone else. And it’s been much, much worse in the last 30 years. Largely because the left has succeeded in its endeavor of having everyone’s hands against everyone else.

Sure, people who tan have been discriminated against. I happen to know a highly educated Indian (dot) young man whose white wife had nasty things said to her in a diner while he was in the restroom, because she was a you know what “lover”. I also know that mixed race families can be extremely sensitive on that stuff, sometimes unwarrantedly. A couple of our friends, way back when used to get upset at people “staring at our kids”. The truth is both their kids were stunningly beautiful. So, yeah, people stared. Now, some might have been racist, but I suspect most were like me, awestruck at the kids’ beauty. Still, yeah, there are still racists out there, though most of it isn’t the “white supremacy” of the left’s obsession but “He/she ain’t one of us.” And all of us, everyone alive right now, has been a victim of it.

It might be that a realtor didn’t take you seriously, because you were “Mexican” and “poor” — waves hand in the air, though honestly most of it was, PROBABLY that we went to see the house dressed like college students. It was Saturday, we had a small child. We were tired — or it might be you were passed up for promotion because you’re a male of pallor (there’s a vast group of these, and frankly their wives are salty too.) Or it could be the teacher who treated your kid as mentally slow because he was “mixed race” even though being Portuguese you weren’t aware you were of a different race than your Scotts/Irish/German/Amerindian husband. Or– Never mind.

Yes, it has affected me, hence the examples, but heck, I’ve had friends discriminated against for being Mormon, which as we all know is a legion of pale.

And part of this is that people are trying to read “a certain cast” of features which can be interpreted various ways. I can post pictures here of my mom that will have you certain she’s Philippine. That I know of we have absolutely NO Asian blood other than some Indian (dot.) But between hairstyle, makeup and the peculiar artifacts of photos in the 40s, you’d swear to it.

And the problem is Americans read these tea leaves all the time, and do things like “see” some race or subrace in someone. Because they’ve become conditioned to do so. And then they make assumptions — I want you to admire what it would take to look at me and see “Mexican” because it really is astonishing. But then imagine the triple leap of the people who decided DAN was also Mexican, because…. I don’t know. He has black hair? And the truly gifted people who out of nowhere decided we were BOTH Russian and spoke Russian at home (this was after years of trying to put our kids in bilingual, Spanish education, but new principal. And this is what she attributed younger son’s deafness-driven speech issues) — and treat people a certain way. Those people get very upset and treat other people in retaliation. My younger DIL who is one of the whitest women I know has been screamed at and attacked for being “white” which is racism, exactly like attacking someone for being black.

Racism is not skin color plus power or lack thereof, for one because power is not a Marxist thing where groups have power and others don’t. A young white woman who works entry level employment for a living has far less power than a black woman with an ivy league education. To pretend otherwise requires the invention of phantoms like “Structural racism” which is invisible and undefinable bur pervades everything, supposedly, and that leads you down the rabbit hole where you start claiming holocaust survivors have “privilege.” The backlash from that kind of stupidity is going to be epic and leave scorched cities in its wake. And it’s already started.

Which brings us to the next part of this. Apparently we’re not supposed to make fun of Kamala, or refer to the fact her greatest accomplishment and so far as we can tell the only thing she was competent at was servicing a powerful man in exchange for advancement. And we’re not supposed to make fun of her cackle. And we’re not supposed to point out her stunningly bizarre lack of competence. (She’s not really any more competent than her zombie boss.)

Why not? Because you don’t hit a girl. Particularly you don’t hit a female “of color.”

This is the part I roll up sleeves.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

Apparently attacking a woman will backfire “with the American people.” As Sarah Palin can attest right? The woman who was dragged up one side the street and down the other, and called everything but a child of G-d for the offense of running for VP as GOP and being one of best governors Alaska has had? Yeah, granted, she wasn’t a “woman of color” being about one jot lighter than Kamala.

Are we for real now? I don’t know where you people are coming from, but you must have grown up in 1940s movies, where offending “a lady” was a problem.

Nowadays women will be offended if you call them ladies. No, I don’t get it either, but it’s what it is, right?

Nowadays 90 lbs women will challenge 200 lbs guys for a fist fight, because they’ve seen it in movies and it must be real. It speaks to the essential goodness of American males that fewer of them are killed than you’d expect. Nowadays there’s not a single man OF ANY COLOR alive who hasn’t been screamed at by a woman in a rage for the crime of… being nice to her? There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t seen a woman promoted over him because “has vagina.” There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t been told he’s a horrible person for having a penis. (This last includes boys.) There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t been accused of something imaginary by a woman and had a hell of a time extricating himself. And if there is one or two, maybe, he probably has close friends or relatives who have suffered through this.

The chivalry and “you don’t hit a girl” and “let the woman have her turn” of the American people have been stretched to the breaking point.

Now, do all women behave badly? No we don’t. Do all women get undeserved promotions/grades/benefits? No, we don’t. Just like not all minorities advanced are undeserving.

And frankly, the Didn’t Earn It advancement of the undeserving pisses off women and minorities who actually work for it and earned it MORE than it does the white people bypassed in favor of the incompetents. Because our hard earned success gets ascribed to the same kind of preference. And NOTHING, nothing burns more than that.

There is a meme going around about how you shouldn’t say Kamala advanced on her knees, because would you want your sisters/daughters/wives to hear that.

My response to that is, yes, when I say TRUE THINGS about how a woman in power got that power, I WANT my child to hear it. I want her to hear that sleeping with a man for power is NOT the way to achieve it, that it makes people question your competence. I want them to see strong, powerful women who achieved power on their own merit.

I mean, I may disagree with political positions held by Nikki Haley and Tulsi Gabbard (two OTHER Indian-American women), but neither of them can credibly be accused of selling themselves for power. At least not sexually.

Kamala Harris is a horror. The horror starts with her having slept her way into power she was quite incompetent to hold. It goes on through her being a convinced Marxist which at this point after all the discomfirmation of the philosophy is the refuge of the idiots who rely on discrimination to advance.

And it continues to an utter and complete lack of empathy or even understanding others are human beings. Her “I was that girl” at Joe in the primary debates — whatever you think of Joe — was her slipping a shiv in the back of a man who had materially helped her. His look was one most men will recognize. Go and look at that debate. There are recordings, I’m sure. In my opinion that was responsible for how badly she did in the primaries. Wounded men recognized the behavior. They’d suffered it before. So do the women who love them and saw them be treated that way by women they helped before.

And while on that, her complete lack of empathy is expressed in her support for Hamas and hatred of Jews AFTER THE EVENTS OF 10/7. Oh, and her help to release BLM burners and looters to burn and loot some more. All of which is her using humans as chess pieces, not really humans.

If you can look at that creature, and NOT hit her with everything you have, including that she’s pretending to be something — American black, descended from slaves — which she’s not, that she’s a woman who advanced in the oldest and most corrupt way possible, that her very utterances show either lack of brain or heavy drug use, and that she’s to all accounts an ideological monster and a horrible human being, that doesn’t make you “good”, it makes you willing to trade the future of the nation for your own self image as superior and standing above it all.

More importantly, if you’re clinging to “Gentlemen don’t hit girls, because if they do everyone will turn against them and defend the girl”, you’re a patsy. You are specifically a patsy of the leftists, and believe what they want you to believe.

They certainly hit women on our side with everything for the slightest step our of line. If you have time, I’ll show you the scars, some day. Or maybe they’re displayed well enough on this post. Also, I recommend you ask Sarah Palin about it. They destroyed her on every level.

More importantly, we DO know the culture has turned, even if the left refuses to believe it. I call to witness EVERY movie with girlbosses or even super-tan girlbosses, and their failure at the box office.

Yes, in most cases it is because those movies are horrible. But in a couple of cases, because younger son told me the movie was actually “okay” — not wonderful, but okay — and had been lumped in with the horrible ones because of the girlbosses, I watched them. And he was right. The movies were okay. But people couldn’t take another girlboss, another reboot with “girlboss of color”.

The left still thinks casting that way is infallible, because no one would dare hit the movies. They’ll get called racist! Sexist! (Which probably explains their choosing Kamala.)

They don’t get those words have lost all power. I do.

Since if I have grandkids they’re likely to tan (notwithstanding the pallor of one DIL. The other tans darker than my son despite being blond.) and since I have friends with beautiful, bright young daughters who are far darker and more “black” than Kamala, since I am a woman even if an atypical one, I beg you to stop your ridiculous chivalry to people like Kamala.

She doesn’t deserve any forbearance or respect accorded to her for characteristics of birth. And the more you give to people like her, the more you setup the rest of us for the backlash.

If you insist on behaving like patsies and let that creature be “elected” (mostly fraud, but if you shut up you let it sound plausible) you’ll probably be setting up such a backlash to the horrors she’ll put us through that you’ll set the condition of women and people who tan back to the EARLY twentieth century.

Do you want that on your conscience? I hope you do, because if you allow that to happen most of us will never, ever forgive you.

Now lecture me once more about being nice. Tell me again that I must fight with my legs in a sack. Tell me I can’t call her Kamala when most of us called George W. Bush Dubya. Tell me I can’t say chick who looks like light skinned Indian (dot) isn’t black. Tell me I can’t refer to her as being a slept-into-power woman when I said the same about Hilary.

Go ahead. Lecture me. It will be amusing. I have a fever and time to burn.

And I’m fighting for the future of women, particularly those who tan. And for that matter the future of men, particularly those who tan.

And frankly, your delicate, lilac scented feelings aren’t even in the picture as far as my concerns.

So, do go ahead. Make my day.

Let’s suppose you live with say 20 roommates. (Don’t ask, you just do.) You have a private room, but the common areas include office, living room and kitchen.

You all, by common consensus acquire a beautiful, fluffy puppy, all big eyes and eagerness to please.

The puppy does as puppies everywhere do, and goes on the carpet. You clean it up, but you don’t rub his nose in it, and don’t punish him, because well, he’s a puppy. He doesn’t know he did wrong. He’s just doing what’s natural, and it’s mean and non-Christian to punish him for doing what comes naturally.

The same applies to his tendency to nip when he gets over excited. You tell him “no” or stop playing but you don’t smack him, because he’s just a puppy. He doesn’t know any better, and he didn’t mean to draw blood.

You’re going to end up with a nightmare of a dog, unless someone else is training him properly. As Heinlein pointed out, training a puppy that way means that when he’s a full dog and uncontrollable, the only thing you can do is take him out back and shoot him. Which is a horrible way to treat a dog.

But wait, it can get worse. Suppose that the people you live with, for whatever reason, are divided into 15 who are like you, and 5 who are absolutely perverse f*cks. They like/think it’s funny to encourage the dog to go everywhere, all over the carpet, and to bite their roommates.

So when the dog poos or pees inside, they give him treats and tell him how great he is. And when he nips, they laugh, and praise him.

You’re going to end up with a nightmare, vicious dog. And your — and your other 15 friends — only alternative to hiding in your room/living up to your ankles in dog shit/getting bitten every time you try to use the common areas is to move. Only any place you move to, those 5 people — tired of living in shit and getting bitten — follow you and train your new dog the same way.

This is what our society has been like for 100 years just about. Each new puppy — each generation of young people — get trained that being leftist is a positional good that makes them BETTER and more admired. Why?

Well, because the left will praise them for being attack dogs who scat everywhere with leftist slogans and “philosophy”. That’s where the praise is, and the good jobs, etc. And they can be absolutely unfair and go after anyone they please, both officially and in social interactions. But anyone trying to retaliate runs not only into the barrage of leftists, who really don’t want anyone to teach the puppy that spreading poop all over is not a survival strategy, but into a number of “well meaning roommates” who gang up to tell the person trying to train the puppy that punishing the poor little thing for what it didn’t know was wrong is mean and evil and unchristian. Not to mention declassee. “We’re better than that!” they say. Until they run away, and try to find a place they will be left away. Which never happens, because there is no incentive for leaving people alone. Only for being an incontinent, leftist attack dog.

No one is asking you to beat the puppy to death. And you definitely shouldn’t be the one training the puppy if you have no stomach for it.

But this is the process by which we’ve got where we are.

The squeamish on our side will condemn our candidates for being “uncouth” and “mean tweets.” While their side is egging on people who dox, pile on and SWAT at the slightest sign of opposition to the craziest points of the leftist agenda.

It doesn’t take a genius to know how it ends, if you tie the hands of your fighters.

You know lead, follow or get out of the way? You don’t have to do any of that, but respectfully, stop being a sissy.

If you don’t have the stomach to fight, don’t. But stop piling live coals on the heads of those who do. Some of them hate fighting as much as you do. They just had to fight or be killed, and chose the first. Be aware if you’re trying to hamper them, you’re choosing the second. And frankly, at this point, they’re fighting for you too.

Be not afraid. You don’t have to be a lion. But don’t be a sheep.

I don’t care how much you’ve internalized the hierarchy by which only the left gets to do whatever it wants.

It’s wrong. And if it doesn’t stop, civilization itself will die.

Our fighters are not only fighting for the dissidents from the Marxist-Leninist party line. They’re also fighting for all those who never had a chance to learn any better. And for the Marxist-Leninists who don’t realize at the end of their dreams, it’s not utopia that will reign, but death.

Remember the 2012 DNC? The guy on the street interview? “We all have to belong to something, so why not belong to the government?” while I was screaming at the screen “Some of us prefer to be self-owned and not slaves!”

Funny times. It appears many women — not all but many — particularly the exquisitely indoctrinated ones think they must belong to “women” and that by virtue of being born “female” they owe some kind of allegiance to other people born with a vagina. And that goes double, with a cherry on top if they also happen to tan. They then belong to “people of vaginitude” and “Tan group”.

Note “people of vaginitude” because often these are also people who can’t define what a woman is, and frankly, no one can define race very well, and whatever it is it’s not as Americans see it. (Kamala might tan slightly darker than I, maybe. I do however have more African ancestry. Not saying I’m black, note. That’s complicated. And the one drop standard is stupid.)

But even those women who seem to know that women is not something assigned at birth, but something observed at birth, and who are starting to be red pilled will default to reflex genuflections at the mention of “fellow woman.”

Dr. Naomi Wolf is a good example of it. On X she was being all ruffled because saying Kamala advanced on her knees was some kind of sexist remark. This shouldn’t surprise me, as she also took Trump saying that Occasional Cortex is dumber than rocks as being “sexist” and an insult to all women.

Marxism is a helluva drug. It causes women (and some people who tan) to demean themselves and think of themselves as widgets with no individuation, will or agency.

So, from the top: If I say that man — say old Joe — is a disgusting old pedophile who showered with his daughter, will that cause every man to tell me I can’t say that because that’s sexist, a low blow, and demeaning to all men? No?

Then why would saying Kamala is a ho who got into politics on her knees and whose only demonstrated ability is what she did while on her knees bother “all women” and be considered sexist and a low blow? Enlighten me.

Oh, because women are oppressed is it? And a minority despite being a majority by numbers? And Reeeee six thousand years of oppression, you say?

Bullshit. Bullshit on stilts.

Were women oppressed throughout history? Children! PEOPLE were oppressed throughout history. For the few, very few at the top, sure, some women were oppressed sometimes. Of course you read of more women than men being oppressed, but DO consider who writes history. No, not men. Crazy feminists.

Kings were written about more, because they went out to battle and fought and died more. And if you think that’s the good part, or more enviable than staying home minding the demesne, you might be poisoned by story. If I read one more story where a regency lady hates sewing and wants to go to university, it will be one too many. Few men went to university, either. And granted, amid the upper classes in England, a woman’s only way to make a decent living was to marry or be a governess or something. But then among the upper classes in England, a man’s only way to make a decent approved of living was to administer an estate, be a rector, or go to war. None of which are enviable or speak to a lot of freedom. And in the lower classes, people scrambled to survive, did what they could and died young.

Yes, women throughout history got pregnant, and often died. But then men throughout history did the dirty, hard work, outside, and often died young.

There is no choice between the two. They were both terrible. Be glad you live in better times. Spit out the Marx pill. It induces stupidity. Just because someone was oppressed, it doesn’t mean there is a whole group of people who oppressed them. More importantly, it doesn’t mean that group extends unchanging through time.

All the shrieking feminists remind me of the screaming for reparations. The screaming for reparations is demands from people who were never slaves for money and privilege from people who never owned slaves. The shrieking of feminists is a bizarre fear of and desire to beat and humiliate men who never hurt them because they were told that people who had penises in the past hurt their ancestresses. That this would make the men who putatively hurt these women their ancestors too seems to evade them.

Oh, and sure, there were some very bad men who abused power in the past. There are those now too. The fact that they make up abuses of men on the right while giving people like Clinton and Biden a pass just says it’s all Marxism in its feminist skinsuit. (An Edgar suit would be better.)

There were some very bad women in the past too. In fact, you can’t study the royalty of any country without coming across at least one woman who outdid all the men. In Portugal there was the French bride who not only took up with her husband’s younger brother, but managed to depose the king and give the power to his brother. So, you know. There are some bad women too.

The point is humans are humans. I might be diminished because Kamala slept her way to power. But I’m not diminished because someone says she slept her way to power just because she and I both — presumably, and I’m not checking — have vaginas.

You know what I’m diminished by? Women who sleep their way to power and then demand respect. Women like Kamala and AOC and for that matter Hillary, whose only claim to fame is that they are women (and Kamala and AOC “minorities”) and who thereby demand that everyone respect them and be quiet about their atrocious behavior, on penalty of being called “sexist” and “racist.”

Meh. Clinton is also a man-ho. And worse, a predator. So is old Joe. (Yeah, yeah, Trump. Bite me. If the BEST they can bring against him are the ramblings of a broken down ho, and another broken down ho who claims to be a writer of some sort, the man is cleaner than I’d expect of a triple-divorced New York City tycoon. FAR cleaner. Almost impossibly clean, in fact.) And frankly, we didn’t say it enough and we should have. We particularly should have noted how the “feminists” was really quiet on this.

Now, is that the worst that Kamala has done? Oh, pfui. Everything that woman has done is a horror. Probably because she’s an empty shell occupied by evil, but then again, I’m not the owner of her soul, and maybe she still has a scintilla of humanity. Her prolonging the sentences of a lot of incarcerated black men to take advantage of their labor wouldn’t indicate that, but it’s possible, right?

However, sleeping her way to power and being a DEI hire, claiming a race that’s not her own is also something she’s done. (I’m not privy to her 23 and me. Maybe she’s got more recent African — we all have distant African — blood than I have. It’s possible. But note I don’t claim to be black. Because I’m not, either by experience or appearance (except to crazy people, which happens.) And by appearance and experience she’s Indian-American. by ancestry? A lot of ancestors who owned slaves. But one isn’t going to hold that against anyone. Now lying about it? Sure.) And we can’t get the full picture of the horror that is Kamala Harris until we know how much she’s willing to do for the power she then misuses.

It’s not sexist to mention it, because we’ve been mentioning sexual transgressions all along. It’s the left and feminists who have swallowed everything the left tosses out. So to put it.

In fact, it’s sexist to protect women from this type of accusation when we wouldn’t protect men. It’s sexist not to hold sexual transgressions and sexual trading against women, when we hold it against men.

It’s sexist to claim someone is amazing — as the left does, and is already doing about Kamala — because someone happens to be a woman. Just like it was the epitome of racism to claim that Obama was amazing BECAUSE he was black.

And if you think I’m being crazy and that there were no people who did that, in 08 that was the usual answer for my colleagues when asked why he was so amazing: He’s black, and he’s running for president. Honestly old Joe’s “clean and articulate” was less racist, as it at least had other attributes. BUT still incredibly racist in assuming this was something that shouldn’t/ couldn’t be true for black men.

I am so tired of this sexism and racism and general bigoted bullshit flying under the radar of enlightenment and “diversity.”

Because this is real pernicious shit and does real harm. To people like me, my kids, my friend’s kids who have a black father, just about every woman alive today, and everyone who tans at about the level of spun gold (Home depot paint chip. And I wasn’t that tan) or darker.

For the sake of letting a few chosen Marxist-Leninists be above reproach and untouchable, or a few no-talent chosen “artists of the left” be lionized and above critique, we’re selling the birth right of everyone else who shares a single characteristic of them.

I resent this. I resent this with the first of a thousand suns.

I don’t want to be judged as a Woman Writer. Or even a Portuguese Born Writer (which implies a little more effort, at least, since even if I’d come here as a child, I’d have had parents who were ESL. The fact that I’m writing in a language I learned at 14 is at least a little more personal and the result of something I did, not merely was born. But still yet, that’s not the little pool where I want to swim the rest of my life.)

I want to be judged as a writer. As a human. Period.

Look, if we’re going to list all the writers I’m not as good as, we’re going to need a bigger blog and also the next month just to write out lists.

BUT I’m working on it. I’m working really hard. And what I aspire to is being THE BEST. I’ll allow some qualification, because it’s impossible to weigh apples and kumquats together, much less apples and dinosaurs. So I aspire to be the best Space Opera writer. Okay, I’ll never get there. But I want to try. I want to compete in that arena as a writer, not was “a woman” or “A woman of color” (Meh. Pale-ish just now. But not transparent, so still of color) or “An immigrant woman” or any of that.

I’m me. I’ll compete as me. As a human being. And I’ll go up against the best, mano-a-mano, and mostly get clobbered. But what meager victory I earn will be my own, and not of some collective group.

Yes, Alexandria Occasio Cortez is an idiot. Whether she has a brain and doesn’t use it, or never had one and is merely a parrot doesn’t matter. She’s still an idiot. There are brilliant women out there, but my saying that this one woman is a blithering moron doesn’t mean all women are morons. To claim that AOC and Margaret Thatcher are the same because they both have/had vaginas is like claiming that tomatoes and pineapples are the same because they’re both fruits. Outside reproductive purpose, it’s completely irrelevant.

All women who get offended and shriek “Sexist” because we make jokes about knee pads Kamala need to take a step back and THINK. Unless they, too, only got into their profession by orally servicing a powerful man, why are they shrieking? Do they owe such allegiance to the fact they were born with a vagina that they’d diminish themselves to ONLY THAT? Do they think sucking off powerful men is the only way women advance, and it’s therefore mean to talk about it? If the last, they are the sexists, and also should be put away for their safety and that of others. But it is exactly the kind of idiotic belief encouraged by refusing to hold women who behave badly to the same standards as men who behave badly. It encourages the perception women protect corrupt women because we’re all corrupt.

And that is something I will not put up with.

As for everyone who tells we’re too good and too clean to refer to Kamala’s underhanded ascent into politics using sexual favors: that’s cute.

You stand there above the fray and pose for the picture of the world’s most noble loser. But leave the rest of us to fight for our lives.

We are in a fight for the life of the nation. Kamala is a horror, not just in her private, but very much in her public behavior. Note this from the GRAUNIAD of all places. And this that mentions her support of HAMAS. Those happy go lucky butchers of 10-7.
Yet there are many LIVs who will ignore the fact that she falsely imprisoned black men, or used her power to destroy and oppress, or opened our borders to invasion, or paid to free the arsonists and terrorists of BLM– BUT will be prudishly shocked she slept with a married man, and refuse to vote for her.

“But that’s not fair. That’s not why they should be not voting for her,” is a cute whine. And it’s everywhere, right now, particularly on the left. Stop using arguments that come from the left. You know where they pulled them from.

Fair has absolutely nothing to do with it. They’d use it against us because it works. We should use it against them because it works. Oh, and unlike their accusations, happens to be true.

This is not a polite argument in a gentleman’s club. This is a bare knuckle brawl in an alleyway. You fight with everything you have, or you’ll end up dead.

And while death for me is as may be, death for those who depend on me is not. And death for America never is.

Which is what’s at stake. No more, no less.

Draw the line at lying, yes, for the sake of your soul. But unpalatable truths?

They wouldn’t shriek so hard if revealing those truths didn’t have an effect.

Fight like you mean it, and never mind the mud. Mud washes off easier than blood.

First of all, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, yes, I did a quick house cleaning yesterday. Forgive me, readers, for I cleaned, and as we all know when I clean things go weird.

Not that this is all that weird, except for the fact that it has all the appearance of a palace coup. As in, one does wonder if Biden knows he dropped out of his campaign. One does wonder, at that, if Biden is alive, or sufficiently compus mentis to know that he has dropped out. And that’s if he knew he was running in the first place, which one very much doubts.

Some people on Twitter are horrified that someone other than Joe Biden is obviously acting as president. I want to scream, vomit, laugh and hit my head on the wall. First of all, if they don’t think that’s been happening since 2020 they are such wishful thinkers they’re not even in this reality. Second, apparently they’re horrified because the people running the country “weren’t elected” which implies they think Joe Biden WAS elected. Despite the campaign run from the basement, which no one would do unless they were SURE they could win, and the only way to be sure was to have it fraud-locked in place; despite the obviously and clearly hackable voting machines; despite the kicked out poll observers, despite the glaring mathematical impossibility of the vote count; despite the way the democrats acted immediately after, like they were afraid the American people would catch on and tear them limb from limb. Despite all this, these people believed. Because they wanted to believe.

This complacency and this going along with it because no one wanted to “cause a constitutional crisis” — this includes our craven Supreme Court — is why we are where we are now.

A small group never elected to anything is trying to manage perceptions while they behave as they please, hold this great country in vile submission and rotate the nominal presidency among them as they please.

America isn’t gone, because America is not its government but its people, but we are being held in nominal captivity by a Junta that is less legitimate than some banana republic governments.

This isn’t our first time in this situation. Most of the elections that put people like FDR in power were probably unable to stand scrutiny.

And the good news is that we are winning the culture, which in turn will change the politics, hopefully before a Northern Ireland situation eventuates. (Which would be very very bad, because Americans do everything bigger and with more bang.)

But this doesn’t mean we’ll wrestle control back this November. Maybe. Maybe a miracle will occur, in which case we should straighten out our electoral dysfunction then and there, before worse happens.

However, no matter how unpalatable what comes next is — and if they get Big Mike in, it’s very unpalatable indeed — remember that yeah, sure, they can’t win the election, but that’s not the goal and never was.

Their goal is simply to PRETEND to have won it, plausibly enough the usual weak sisters tell us to shut up, and obviously Trump lost, because so mean, so abrasive.

In that sense even Kamala might do, because it distances them from the obvious Biden negatives, gives the opposition research less time, and can count on the bizarre tribalism of many American women (no, not all, but many) who will vote for someone “because vagina” having such low opinions of themselves that they think they should be a separate category with only one requirement of being born with an organ that does not in any way contribute to cogitation.

So while we stand here, in awe of the magnificent dumpster fire, make not the mistake of underestimating the enemy. They have fraud on their side, and fraud is a powerful demon.

Be not afraid, but be not stupid. And if you’re a believer — or even if you’re not. Imagine how surprised the Author would be if you piped up at Him — pray for America.

We’ll survive. We’ve survived worse. But we’re going through a very narrow point with near-endless ruthless door-to-door civil war on one side, and vile submission for a few decades on the other.

Pray we don’t fall either way.