Okay, so, here is where we are: No, I don’t think Trump will “win” in November. I mean I think he will win, if you count voters who are actually alive and can vote. But I don’t think there is a chance to beat the fraud. I will say I will be pleasantly surprised if we do, but I don’t think there’s a chance in a million of its working out.

BUT the other side isn’t sure. They keep panicking at the thought that Trump will win.

Now this might be because the enormity of what they’ve done under their color revolution, of stealing the election and then sitting on it and refusing to even let people question it, is terrifying them.

Sometimes the magnitude of the crime itself is enough to scare the criminal. And frankly, they should be scared. Because what she’s done cries to the heavens for vengeance, really.

They are terrified. Every day I read another article that amounts to the FBI or some other institution gibbering in fear that Trump will win, and thinking that telling us how scared they are means we won’t vote for Trump. (Laughs in “And I did nothing because I was refueling the helicopters.)

But that’s not to say they’re really in danger. “The wicked flee where no man pursues.”

However, I won’t lie, their very panic is working on our side. Yes, it means they will do some truly horrible things, but it also highly magnifies their chance of blowing the whole thing wide open.

More importantly, whether they steal the next election or not, every month they’re in power they’re losing adherents and losing the culture war. Yeah, it doesn’t mean they’re not going to hurt us horribly every month they are in power, because they are. And I hate that. BUT– BUT– They are losing. Incrementally. And much faster than I could expect.

The truth is that holding the institutions while the enemy holds everything else means they’ll lose. And faster than you expect.

What is very important: even if they seemingly seamlessly steal the election so it appears to be fully honest: DO NOT TURN ON YOUR FELLOW AMERICANS AND ASSUME THEY’RE SOCIALIST MORONS.

The fraud is deep. The fraud might be unbeatable. But the amount of socialist morons is negligible, at least once they’re ten years out from graduating from any educational establishment.

The reasons their elected officials are morons or senile is because that is the bulk of the electorate voting for them. Yes, there are also nice, smart people who just don’t pay much attention to politics, don’t understand economics, and believe the MSM.

But that’s it. The bulk of the country is okay. It’s just the fraud.

And that we can deal with, one way or another. Hopefully peacefully.

Americans are okay. The culture is going our way. Every day more masks drop and more people recoil from the horrors beneath.

We’ve got this. Don’t pin all your hopes on a rigged election. And don’t believed rigged results.

Keep calm and build under, build over, build around. We got this.

No, I’m not going to talk about the people who think they’re edgy and dangerous by breaking statues, in the most traditional habit in history, that of damnatio memoriae, where the memories of people who are disapproved of by those currently in power are expunged from public consciousness. The ancient Egyptians did it, for crying in bed. The problem right now is that this generation is so history illiterate they are trying to erase the memory of the entire past, not just a particular person of whose actions they disapprove.

There are several reasons for this, one of them being that, nope, they don’t know history, but more importantly, they don’t understand that history exists: that is, they completely fail to understand and believe, much less internalize the fact that people in the past weren’t exactly like them, didn’t have exactly the same ideas and the same interests, and were driven by different pressures. They never reasoned, for instance, that slavery was all pervasive in the past, not because people in the past were somehow uniformly evil or stupid (as opposed to their enlightened selves) but because there were different pressures on human society before widespread mechanization. That is, to be fair, everyone (but a very privileged few, did an insane amount of work and there was simply work that was too unpleasant and boring for free people to do it, or that it was impossible to pay people enough to do. Slavery — and as far as the impulse to force others to do what one wants, that’s the oldest sin of mankind — filled that niche. What eventually freed the slaves (which to be fair some religious souls always aspired to do, but there is no society in which “if everyone just” worked, so while the religious souls might have freed their own slaves, preached against slavery, that wasn’t going to make it vanish wholesale) was the mechanization of work. In places in the world where mechanization isn’t common, de facto or de jure slavery still exists.

Anyway, taking slavery as an example, one can understand a feeling of disgust at the practice leading young people to want to destroy, say, statues of famous slave traders (there are none that I know of) but they have gone past that to destroying statues of anyone who might have owned slaves, to statues erected by recently freed slaves, to commemorate their freeing.

That’s just wanting to expunge all memory of the past, partly because they assume all the past is somehow tainted, but also and more importantly because they have imbibed deep the Marxist-neo-Rosseunian ethic that if you destroy everything somehow paradise will emerge.

It is also not that ethic, the “everything in the past was wrong and I’m going to destroy it” that I’m going to talk about, but perhaps the comeback from it.

If I’m right, the time we’re entering could rightly be called “A time of iconolasts.”

Except of course, since it’s coming after a time of the iconoclasts themselves being in power and engaging in wholesale condemnation of what came before, it’s going to look very odd.

To understand what is coming you have to understand what the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did. By being the culmination of the industrial revolution, and bringing in mechanization of all processes, and making a lot of things cheaper via mass-manufacturing, it ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity. It also ushered in an era therefore in which many of the rules of the past no longer applied. When technology or economics change and make the previously inescapable rules and necessities optional, it becomes easy and natural to imagine that all rules and all social restraint and all the centuries-old ideas of “how things are done” can also be done away with. And because many can indeed be done away with with little harm or harm that only becomes obvious in retrospect, a lot of things get swept away — like the wholesale breaking of statues just because they’re statues.

This was one of the forces of the 20th century. It was further fed by a popular understanding of Darwinian theory (popular and very wrong) that led people to believe that each generation got better or more enlightened.

The other force, because people need and seek “leaders” and wish to believe their leaders are special, was the odd cult of “experts.” It started fairly early, much earlier than any of us will think, if we don’t know about it. It was fed by the idea that there were many discoveries being made that brilliant people were coming up with amazing things every day in which they were experts. While this was absolutely true — to an extent. Many of those “discoveries” were wrong or partially wrong and didn’t connect easily into the “system of everything” that these people tried to create. But never mind. At the time there were discoveries in astronomy, in physics, in biology, and a discoverer could make a pretty good living of lecturing on it. There were also lectures on what we’d consider “Self help systems” including how to improve your memory (That being the one I remember.) This was going on from the eighteenth century at least, but in the mid twentieth century, it coalesced with the prevalence of mass-manufacturing, and the subsequent concentration of power in big cities and a powerful state apparatus, and fed off the subsidence of churches so rulers couldn’t say they were ruling by the power of G-d. A new vast apparatus of “experts” appeared, culminating in all the governmental departments which are supposedly advised and staffed by “experts” and “trained people” and well… “best men.”

I don’t know if “very capable” “best men” were ever involved in any of that. Personally I doubt it. Having been involved in artistic and scientific endeavors of various kinds, the “expert” who “knows everything about” whatever it is usually turns out to be either a sham or grossly exaggerated. And the number of even middling scientists or artists who are willing to leave their field of endeavor to become government bureaucrats is zero, meaning those associated with government are usually useless.

However by the mid century the press was also centralized, and in service of big government, which could burnish those “experts” and make them seem like supermen.

But that is the culture all of us grew up in. I’m sixty one, and I grew up in this mind set of “ask the experts.” By the 90s, we seemed to have “new experts” with “new theories” coming out every day. Most of them of the “self-help” variety. The “wonks” of the 90s made me roll my eyes, because what they kept coming up with amounted to “a new way to collect pocket lint.” However people piously believed it, and if you paid attention, friends and colleagues would tell you “Actually, research proves the best way to collect pocket lint is to–“

Only, as we’ve found out, as the control of the media escaped those (largely Marxists and neo-leftists) who kept the appearance of infallibility and expertise in place, most “scientific research” is falsified (quite literally most of it) particularly in the soft sciences, and most “experts” are no such thing, and most “new way to” is just a variation on rotating the cat.

Long before the watershed of 2020 people had the uneasy experience that those in control of the ship of state had escaped from the proverbial ship of fools and were just old fools in a new floating vessel.

But the last 4 years have been a mind-blowing demonstration of the falibility, incompetence and sheer ridiculousness of the “experts” and “top men” (not to mention “top women” or “top people who aren’t sure what they are.”)

I don’t think they can recover from this. And of course from such events two courses of results flow. One is that people stop believing in everything. They just devolve to savagery and inability to function. There is some of that, but curiously not as much as you’d expect, and most of it seems to be from that fringe element who would otherwise be mental patients anyway.

What we’re mostly seeing are people who are reaching back, beyond the mid-century and trying to recover what has been lost. People 30 and younger are desperately trying to figure out how things were done, and how things worked.

And yeah, part of it is that tech has changed again, from mass-everything to far more personal, which means what we have doesn’t work and older things might work.

If my feeling is right, the coming era is one at which we dethrone the “experts” and cock a snook at them. (I don’t know what a snook is but I’m itching to cock it.) And instead we try to figure out what used to work, and try it to see if it works. And we study and inform ourselves on whatever we’re trying to do — aided by the internet’s availability of information on everything — and figure out how to do it the best way. Which often is the old way, though perhaps modified for current circumstances.

And if my guess is right it’s going to be glorious.

Sweet Liberty* a blast from the past from September 2011

I have some experience with revolutions, partly because Portugal never believes a thing worth doing is worth doing only once. I get PTSD at the sound of Green Acres because Porto had one reel in its local broadcast station. Green Acres. When Lisbon got cut off, they played it back to back. This meant that someone had taken over the main broadcasting station in Lisbon.

(Okay, here I should explain that Portugal had two broadcast stations. Yes, I had a deprived childhood. [Yes. I spelled that right. I’m quite sure it’s an I.] Only one of them broadcast during the day at all, and that limited hours. So usually my experience was come home from school and watch something on lunch break and… ack… Green Acres. I wonder who is in now.)

For those who wonder why I’m “obsessive about my Portuguese background” – I’m not, but this kind of childhood experiences mark a person. I think this is why I’ve always been fascinated by revolutions. The ones that go right. The ones that go wrong. And the ones that go very wrong.

I read obsessively about the French revolution, the American revolution, the Russian revolution, and other, less obvious, revolutions. Like… The industrial revolution, or even the agricultural revolution.

Societies don’t change easily. People don’t change easily. Societies are worse than that. They’re slow to change like dinosaurs whose signal has to travel from head to tail and if it’s in full careen, it’s going to take a while to stop, let alone turn around.

One of the things I’ve noticed, in recent times, is that revolutions have another issue, particularly social revolutions of the non-bloody kind. Knowing you’ve won. Knowing it’s now, not thirty or fifty or seventy years ago.

Often when I’m talking to people, particularly people of an academic bend, I find myself wondering what world they’re talking about. It’s the silly little things, like “Oh, a woman would never dare say/do that,” when I saw women do it just that morning. Or “the neighborhood will get upset if there’s a non married couple” – what, like that one, that one and, oh, yeah, that one?

I will grant you that every once in a while, one comes across a person or persons who seem to be a blast from the stereotypical past, but my kids schools’ have more trouble with unwanted pregnancies than with girls being sent home to put on a longer skirt.

One of these effects of “delayed realization you won” keeps annoying me. Lately there have been any number of women writers complaining that they’re not proportionally represented as science fiction writers. They’re not being taken seriously and this is because they have vaginas. Etc. etc. etc.

Now, I’ve been this field for ten years as a published author. First of all let me get out of the way that there are some prejudices in this field, usually evinced by people you wouldn’t expect. For instance, I was pushed rather strongly fantasyward, in part because I had the v word. (Yes, verve.) And a friend of mine who is a physicist, was told that she should write fantasy, not science fiction, because she was a woman and therefore had the heart of a fantasy writer. (To which Rebecca Lickiss answered that yes, but it was in a locked drawer, and besides the statute of limitations had expired.)

There are other, more subtle prejudices. Some people told me they never read women writers, because they can’t write action. Weirdly, when they read me, they have no problems. I don’t worry about it. I just wait till they come around.

And btw, any male writing in romance or a romance-germane field, like certain forms of urban fantasy gets the opposite pressure, I’m sure. It’s all part of no one having a perfect life, and other people having certain expectations. My husband, for instance, had trouble placing his space opera (still hasn’t) because it’s character development oriented. (Yes, he actually got rejected by someone who told him it read too much like Bujold. No, I’m not joking.)

However, claims that women are discriminated against in fantasy always make me laugh. And claims that women as writers are discriminated against make me laugh even harder. And then there’s the post at MGC two days ago, and the comments – my Lord, the comments. Part of what got to me was seeing my friend Dave Freer getting attacked for making a perfectly reasonable and polite comment. Well, I was brought up to think part of my job was to give voice to those who didn’t have one, whether they be battered women in Portugal or silenced and demonized males in the US.

First let me establish there was a time I called myself a feminist. This is because I believed in the equality of women. I still do.

This doesn’t mean that women should be exactly the same as men. Or that they should behave exactly the same way. In fact, any such notions were pretty much dispelled by the time I came of age in the seventies. The average man and the average woman are very different creatures. And I strenuously object to such things as the fire fighters tests being rewritten so that you don’t need to do a fireman carry to pass. OTOH I heavily endorse any woman who is able to pass non “rewritten” tests being a fire fighter if she so wishes. And that’s because the median of anything is not the only person – there’s also the extremes. For instance, bad as I am at spacial reasoning (sad that) I am miles better than some males (okay, none that I’ve met, but I’m sure there are some. Maybe they were hit really hard on the head.) In fact I pretty much occupy the far outlier extremes of a bunch of categories (and I’m not saying which extreme.) As such, I am sympathetic with outliers. And I think letting people do what best suits them, without judgement, censure or barriers is best for everyone.

I believe in equality before the law not equality of results.

I still believe the same things, but I’m not calling myself a feminist, partly because the word has gotten corrupted. A lot of people seem to think the only way to elevate women is to degrade men. Others seem to be on a permanent hunt for offense, including attacking perfectly innocent words – no, history does NOT mean his-story. Please, study some linguistics.

This is many flavors of wrong, for many reasons, but the main reason is that it leads to a sort of permanent revolution. This reminds me of when the French revolution had got rid of every aristocrat either through beheading or immigration and had started attacking as aristos people who could read. Or people who dressed better than the others. Or people who used the word “roi.”

This is the sign of a revolution that has become its own reason to exist, and which will consume its own partisans, until it all ends in a sea of blood or until it’s stopped at last by a “strong man” of some sort, and suppressed for good. And at that point no one complains, because, frankly, it’s a relief.

Part of what disturbs me about this is that the justification for the “permanent revolution” is that we “could lose all the gains tomorrow.” You know, like if we don’t jump behind the latest harebrained “offense” campaign, next thing you know we’ll end woman suffrage (and good riddance, women have suffered enough! – Yes, yes, it’s a joke. And yes, I’m aware there is no joking in feminism. Another reason I no longer use that word.)

But the advances are fragile in another way. Much as I hate to say this, women’s gains rest on two things – one of them is safe contraceptives. The other is a stable western civilization. (No, I’m not even going to argue that. You want to live anywhere else in the world, be my guest. I wouldn’t, though.) And both of them can be lost more easily than you think.

Western civilization can be demoralized and subverted from within by a contingent of males who feel like women exist to punish them. Males who have been treated as criminals or morons or both from kindergarten on. Males whose education and employment figures, if reversed (i.e. if women had the same stats men have in the US today) would be a real offense and a call for investigations and remedies. Males who, btw, have never discriminated against anyone (most of them, at least) and whose fathers and, for that matter probably grandfathers, never discriminated against anyone.

These males can very easily see how women are treated in the rest of the world and, if pushed enough, form a concerted effort to subvert the current rules of behavior. (And no they haven’t done it yet. They haven’t even THOUGHT of doing it, yet. Again, don’t get me started. I lived in a country that is Western but only just. I know what discrimination is better than most people my age or even slightly older.)

I love the women who say it’s just the way the pendulum is swinging and that it’s right for it to go to far in the direction of privileging women. Let me enlighten you – if this is a pendulum, it’s one that has men as its favorites. Men are physically stronger and more aggressive. Any devolution from civilization to barbarism, or even any prolonged disruption in the economy that, oh, say, interrupts the production of contraceptives, and men will have to be very, very good not to be in charge. And if you’ve been pushing your little pendulum with glee and joy, don’t be surprised if they push it as far as they can the other way, till you’re in a world out of your worst nightmares.

You’ve won the revolution. Do you know what the mark of a GOOD revolutionary is? He knows when to put down his musket and go back to his farm. He knows when to shake hands with his neighbor who was on the other side. He knows when to make his rule so just, so fair that no one would contemplate returning to the former rule.

And he does not look for counter revolutionaries under ever bush and hallucinate that the war is still ongoing. Because then they just lock him up and beg the old regime to take over once more. Or start looking around for a Bonaparte.

Since I and my sons and my potential grandsons and maybe even granddaughters have to live in this world too, I beg you to come to your senses.

*–

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 NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion and the Darkness (Timelines Book 4)

The Long-Awaited Sequel to The Lion in Paradise

At long last, Ariela Rivers Wolff begins her mission to the Simulated Worlds.

As the Martyr of Sardristra, she finds herself in the position of a Joan of Arc, burned at the stake for preaching a sermon of love to a very violent race of . . . blue, four-legged, four-armed, sort-of-horse analogs. Five hundred years later in their history, she finds a totally-reversed welcome as “Saint Ardreyelya” in the country in which she first appeared. Will she be able to prevent the rest of the world from destroying “her” people before she can convert them, too?

As the Goddess of Mahoukai, she finds herself the deity of a world religion in a world governed by magic. And like all worlds with magic, inevitably there is a Demon Lord. She’ll have to deal with that Demon Lord before the world of Mahoukai can be realized into the True Universe . . . but in the event, the Demon Lord is an infiltrated agent of the very enemies she is sworn to fight in the real world. Can The Lion of God take on a Darkness, single-handed? If not, it may spell doom for the inhabitants of Mahoukai – and for herself.

EDITED BY JAMES YOUNG, WITH A STORY BY LEE ALLRED: Hooves, Tracks and Sabers!: Tales of Alternate History (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 29)

Alternate history allows us to explore, in thrilling detail, what might have been. Come with these authors down the untrodden divergences from reality, while still staying close to the possible. Can history be fun? Yes! Be entertained by these stories and find yourself wondering along with the authors. What if…? Cavalry had evolved from hooves, sabers, and tracks in other ways than we know happened.

WITH A STORY BY LAURA MONTGOMERY: Tales of the United States Space Force

TALES OF THE UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE: New fiction and nonfiction focusing on the United States Space Force from top authors.

It has been six decades since mankind first shook off the yoke of gravity and flew into outer space. After cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first fateful trip into the vastness beyond our atmosphere, the Apollo missions landed twelve men on the moon. Since the building of the International Space Station, humankind established a semi-permanent base in space.

But wherever people and their interests go, the military and law must eventually follow. Enter the Space Force!

In an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment, the wars of tomorrow may well be fought and won in space. Russia and China have successfully tested anti-satellite missiles. A Russian satellite approached a U.S. government satellite close enough to conduct an attack, forcing evasive maneuvering. Analysts believe the Chinese government has launched a satellite equipped with a robotic arm that could be used to manipulate and disable other satellites. With satellites critical to everything from weather forecasting to disaster response, agriculture to environmental monitoring—pizza delivery tracking to guiding missiles during war—a lot is riding on a safe and secure space program.

Here then, stories and essays of the United States Space Force, the first new United States military service since the establishment of the Air Force in 1947.

With stories by Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Harry Turtledove, Brian Trent, Gregory Benford & James Benford, David Brin, Jody Lynn Nye, Martin L. Shoemaker, M.T. Reiten, Avery Parks, C. Stuart Hardwick, Karl K. Gallagher, Gustavo Bondoni, Liam Hogan, Henry Herz, Marie Vibbert, Laura Montgomery, Sylvie Althoff, and Matt Bille.

Essays by: “Star Wars” program chief space laser engineer William F. Otto, USAF space office Michael Morton (ret.), and C. Stuart Hardwick.

At the publisher’s request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

FROM LL LOYD: Mysterious Guardian Thief J.B.: Good-bye, Marianna Rose

Unexpected visitors send the Mysterious Guardian Thief J.B. to the phantom planet Fahlon, where he encounters an old love and new danger.

After a surprise attack leaves a dead woman at his feet, J.B. and his partner-in-crime Poe head for Fahlon, a world that can travel between dimensions. It’s a bittersweet return to a place J.B. remembers fondly. Unfortunately Fahlon isn’t the world he left behind. Something has changed it – and that change threatens its destruction. Can the Guardian Thief save Fahlon – and the Marianna Rose – in time?

FROM J. L. CURTIS: The Grey Man- Sunset

Whoever said retirement was quiet never met John Cronin…

The old man may have retired for the final time from the Sheriff’s office, but there are still cows to run, court cases to testify at, and consultation calls to tap decades of experience. And that’s not even counting the cold cases he’s still trying to solve…

With his granddaughter Jesse running the gun store and managing the ranch books, and her husband leaning how to fill Cronin’s shoes on investigations and arrests, John is keeping busy training the next generation, while settling a few old scores!

FROM KAREN MYERS: Mistress of Animals: A Lost Wizard’s Tale (The Chained Adept Book 2)

AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.

Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.

This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.

The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Pendragon Resurgent (Legends Book 2)

Life is much better when nobody is trying to kill you.

Sara Hawke, now a university professor, has had five years where nobody was trying to kill her…if you don’t count her course load’s grading. Five years of watching over and helping raise orphaned young dragons.

Her comfortable life comes to an end when she’s attacked by Eastern Dragons, once again—this time, though, her attackers aren’t in the ruling elite. She’s in for the fight of her life again, only this time, Mordred is on the other side of the world, and she must first reach his side before they can succeed.

The running fight to survive brings to light old treachery, blackest magic…and new hope and new allies.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Perfect Darkness

What would perfect darkness look like? And what would happen if you saw it?

When Pavlik becomes obsessed with the idea of seeing perfect darkness, it becomes a distraction from the pod’s duty as asteroid miners. Little does he know that danger lies in opening one’s mind to the things that lurk in perfect darkness. Things that endanger his pod-brothers, even all of Briar’s Children.

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Recovery Agent

Mike’s nephew Ari was kidnapped and recovered by an unknown man.
Mike helped get the ten-year-old all the way home . . . to find Ari’s father dead, and the relatives circling . . .
The police seem to be more interested in the rescuer than the kidnapping.

Falk was the youngest detective on the investigation, that had just gone sideways, as it seems the boy had been rescued by an infamous assassin. As an important and wealthy man’s relatives fight to control his estate and his only child . . . Falk is starting to realize his own family is entangled in the apparently natural death, the kidnapping . . . and the Recovery Agent.

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: concentrate

Sorry, guys. I’m running a fever, and I have absolutely no idea if it’s a real thing or “just” autoimmune. OTOH the panic attacks of the night before are explained. Not unusual when fever starts to take hold.

One of my ways of wasting time when I feel like I’m not doing anything productive is to play with midjourney. So, have some pretty pictures to look at, use for whatever you want, since I am not going to use them.

First a meme, related to yesterday’s post illustration (and maybe yesterday’s post.):

And that’s it. If one of these sparks an idea for one of you, I’ll be ecstatic.

I’m going to have some tea and maybe nap. The next chapter of NML is insisting on being written, so….

Last night I woke up five times, in a panic. This has happened before, but it was usually from a nightmare. This … was not. And I don’t know what caused the panics. It’s one of those: check everything, see if there was a loud noise.

Anyway, I think metaphorically speaking we need a reality check. We’re sitting here, in the dark, and we scare ourselves. Worse, people are trying to scare us, on purpose or not. In the sense that they think they’re going to do a lot of really bad things, and that intention and their certainty this is achievable can scare the best and most rational of us.

Look, first let’s establish something clearly: we are all poisoned by story.

Every time I see the stupid meme about how in revolutionary times “me and my homies would already be stacking bodies” I want to…. spit. Because seriously, no. The founding fathers were careful, deliberate, spent a lot of time analyzing things and almost killed themselves trying to find a peaceful solution to their dilemma. Benjamin Franklin was in London, looking for a peaceful solution, when war broke out. DESPITE deliberate insults, threats and attacks on them and their property. They were still trying to find a peaceful solution.

But that’s not how it’s portrayed in stories. In stories it’s all wham bam, and now we’re going to war. The refusal of the call (to action) cannot take too long or it’s a dud story, and that’s what we’ve been conditioned to.

This is one version of “poisoned with story” which is why we “know” a lot of things that just ain’t so. Like we know revolutions happen when people are starving. Or we know the government has super powers to stop all communication. Or we know–

Except none of it is true.

The good and bad news is the left is even more poisoned with story than we are. By and large, they are less practical and more people of word text and theory. (Part of it is self selection. The reason they are attracted to the left is that they like self-consistent theories and fail to realize they apply to nothing in reality. Because they work in fields/live in places where they’re not exposed to people who aren’t like them, with the same background and education.)

Do I believe the left is intending to bring us under the heel. Yes, yes I do. Does the left have plans and believe they can fulfill those plans? Yes, yes, they do.

And now I’m going to light this one lamppost sitting here, in the dark forest, guys: Does the left have a chance in hell of bringing their plans to fruition?

No, no they don’t.

Look, sure, they might jail Trump. They might even kill Trump in jail. I think both of them will cause a reaction, and not the one they expect.

What they expect, because it’s the way it would totally work in books or movies, the way of the story, the way we’ve taught our subconscious that things happen, is that “rednecks” a group of will commit terrible acts in protest, preferably indiscriminately killing families to protest this crime against their “leader” (No, they really think Trump is our Svengali and our leader. No. Seriously. Trust me. They think that.) and then the left can stomp down, arrest us all (as if) of us who ever spoke against them, and shut us down effectively and then it will be the reign of a thousand years (it’s either five or a thousand with collectivists. I don’t know why. They’re dumb that way.)

But that’s not what they’ll get. Because the right isn’t collective and the individualists fail to organize. What the individualists do instead if become very very impossible to track down and govern. And things start to happen. Like government vehicles might have a lot of flats. And families of certain three letter agents might just have a heck of a time making friends. And– But you know and I know what can happen, the base level “You smell” rising to the heavens. And for that matter, at a guess, so many whistles will be blown internally, from all the good people still embedded in those places that no one will get anything done for being deaf. And, and and– They have no idea what they’ll unleash, and the truth is neither do we. We just know they will.

How do we know they will? Well, look at all the things they’ve tried to do and which they’ve quiet quit because we ignored them/made fun of them/made them realize they’d reap the whirlwind? Everything from not being able to institute their disinformation ministry to their attempts at gun banning for the last… oh few decades that sure have had a few set backs, but have resulted in each middle class American having enough of an arsenal to obliterate a third world nation. And a majority of states now having constitutional carry. Or look these last few years at their attempt to lock us down again. I mean, if they could they’d never have lifted the lockdowns, but it became untenable. People were just ignoring them.

The truth is, every country is governed with consent of the governed. How that consent is withdrawn isn’t always a dramatic revolution, but slower and more grinding.

Look, there isn’t a doubt in my mind that they planned to arrest us, send us to camps, etc back in 21. Only, you know, even having the national guard in the capital started not working the way they intended. It was supposed to be a show of force, but it really just showed how scared they were. And even the national guard people — there were interviews — who believed this was needed due to a grave threat of insurrection started hating their guts. And–

But more importantly, this template they’ve lifted from stories… well, mostly about the Soviet Union, where they win and everyone falls in line scared of their brutality, and they confiscate all the food, stop food production, starve the parts of the country that disagree with them, etc. etc. etc. … it will never work.

Sure, they’ve managed to skyrocket meat prices, but let’s face it, they’ve skyrocketed most prices. That’s inflation and printing press go brrrrrrt.

Most of their attempts to get American farmers to slaughter their herds have been met with something between “You’ve got to be kidding me” and “Don’t try that in a small town.” Bird flu is not being any more successful. And you know, I’m probably the only one of my friends without chickens. (Mostly because I’m allergic to feathers. And also everything I raise turns to pets. See quail, and they’re younger DIL’s.) Even people in suburbs have chickens since the great egg insanity of 20 and 21.

So, yeah, they could confiscate our food…. if we were a country that has three major cities and a bunch of isolated villages easy to access all in a line. And a disarmed populace.

With all this, the size and variety of this country are the best defense. The orneriness of its people is another.

Sure, what they try to do, particularly if they “dominion” themselves into power again in November, will hurt like a mother. There are a lot of things we foolishly let become centralized, from energy production to transport. And those are the areas they are having the most luck messing with. Not completely, but the ones they are messing with the most. And even that is only affecting certain areas of the country. For the rest we’re… mostly ignoring them.

So some places, some professions, some cities, some areas are going to hurt. Worse than they’re hurting now. The rest of us are just going to get very upset.

Worse for them, and something they never get, is that their actions have consequences beyond what they intend. This for some reason is something they can’t understand in any way, shape or form. So they’re having trouble understanding why the lockdowns caused people to be able to work from home, caused people to be able to move anywhere, caused their favorite cities to become half-depopulated and the tax base in their fiefdoms to fall and…. Oh, yeah, caused a lot more people to homeschool, a lot more families to become close knit, and incidentally caused the demand for oil to fall (fewer commutes) which means the prices haven’t gone up as much as they wanted to.– This was not what they intended at all. And they keep trying to put the toothpaste back in cubeland tubes and not understanding why it doesn’t work.

None of this computes to them. And I’m not sure what their attempts at making us fall into line will do, but I can guarantee it will be the opposite of what they intend. Or a lot of things orthogonal to what they intend that incidentally mars their plotting.

This is because their plans are simple and — always — based on the simplified version of history they want to be true, and they have no real understanding of cultural and geographic differences.

Look, if they could, we’d already all be in camps. If they could, they’d have Hillary in power. If they had that kind of power over us, they would not have needed to scare everyone with a “pandemic” and put the country in house arrest to get the zombie elected.

They can’t. They’re already up against the hard limits of their power. Sure, they can say they moved the polls their way (it was one poll, and let’s say no, it’s not what they claim.) They have lost the consent of the governed. In fact, they never really had it. And they’re too dumb to know that at this point any more attempts to run “WWIII” or “USSR” or “Pandemic” scripts are just going to have less and less effect and more and more contrary side effects.

So, they can make us miserable for a while. And depending on where you are and your state of health, etc, you should make more or less extensive preparations to survive.

But that’s the other thing. Americans are prepared. I swear in 2015 when we were looking at houses everyone already had a “prep room.” I also presume all their guns were lost in a tragic canoe accident. BUT their canning, freeze dried food etc? That was next level. This is something that no other country does to this extent. (Or often to any extent.)

Be not afraid. Yes, their plans are horrific. And if they succeed it will be the first time their plans succeed in all of history.

Let’s not forget the Soviet Union, their beau ideal, the template they try to imitate, was brought down by…. typewriters, which allowed people to disseminate and spread information. And they’re trying to run the script in a country with…. internet, with personal cell phones, with–

Bah. They’re idiots studying to be morons.

They can cause a lot of pain, sure. An idiot with a hammer can break a lot of machinery. But in the end someone grabs the idiot and if the idiot is lucky, the hammer doesn’t get used on his head. If he’s lucky, he’s just locked in a back room were he can’t hurt anyone. People are very resistant to being killed and having their stuff taken away. And the idiots in charge are insistent they should do things people notice.

Move towards the light. The black pill is not your friend. If there were no hope, they wouldn’t be trying to gaslight us so heavily.

Sure, it’s going to take time. It’s not a glorious revolution. (Stop watching movies!) BUT in the end we win and they lose.

And definitely they’re the ones who should be afraid.

Don’t Look Down, it’s a Long, Long Way To Fall* a blast from the past from November7,2013

I confess yesterday I was very depressed.  I don’t think it came across how depressed I was – I was trying to be reasonable and being, by nature, depressive, I’m aware of how to compensate for depression – but I was.  Between certain speculations on who will run against Hilary in 16, which prompted me to say “In that case, I don’t have a dog in that fight,” and “let it burn” there was an article about how thoroughly screwed my kids’ generation is.

The article was written from the POV of “you bought this, you voted for this buffoon.”

Except that not all of them did, of course.  (At least I hope not.)  When I was manning the phones, many people my kids’ age were there and they were fully aware of what waited them if the buffoon won.

So to have them be told “you’ll never pay your student debts, you’ll never have a decent job, you’ll never be anything but some sort of retail aid, no matter how brilliant or what your degree is” depresses me.  It depresses me more than it would if you told me that I had no hopes of ever getting anywhere.  Because I know my limitations.  I’ve stared my potential failure in the face.  I don’t even expect full success at this point, just “not dying” as far as career goes.  I’m me, I can cope with that.  But not my kids.  I’ve known them all my life, I know their potential.  Yes, I’m their mother, but I see their failings too –but they’re not the sort of failings that should consign them to a life as debt slaves.  They’re hard workers, they’re focused, they’re battlers.

Don’t tell me “But they’ll be all right then.”  Meh.  Guys, I grew up in a country where my limitations were stark and clear.  For instance, I never considered writing as more than an hobby, because in Portugal it wouldn’t be.  The excuse is that the population is too small to support full time writers without government grants and stuff.  I call poppycock.  The population is large enough for writers – multiple – to earn a living.  I suspect the Portuguese publishing industry is even more effed up than ours.  Not that it matters to me at this point, except if I had money – like, if I won the lottery – I’d start an ebook publisher publishing exclusively in Portuguese and serving the entire Portuguese speaking world.  License to coin money – maybe – but above all a chance to destroy the entrenched publishers in Portugal.  (Okay, I was born a trouble maker.  Deal.)

And I knew just how far my lifestyle could go, and where it was limited.  In the same way, even in the States, my generation’s chances have been limited in comparison to the older boomers (which fuels some of the generational hatred on blogs.)  Inevitable given their population-bulge and the fact they were post war babies.  (It’s really not their fault, not even the lefties.  We just like slapping them.  But it’s irrational.)  We have friends who are ten years older than us who never had to make as many sacrifices, and who are looking at retirement.  We aren’t.  By the time we came along the housing market had been inflated, and a lot of our work has been running to stay in place.

What I mean – I don’t want to start boomer bashing, so please none of that in the comments.  It really is a matter of chance.  No one chose this – is that when you are born and when you come of age, and when you enter the work force shapes your life and limits your choices.

And d*mn it, I don’t want my kids’ limited.

So, I was a wee bit depressed.  Sort of.

You see guys, I have some insight you don’t have.  Some insight I’m sure those who want to bring us to the level of “other countries” don’t have, because they’re pampered little snowflakes, whose pampered paws never touched hard ground – and it’s encapsulated in that title above, which I woke up with it running through my head, “Don’t look down.  It’s a long, long way to fall.”

Look, I grew up upper middle class.  I also grew up dirt poor.  Yes, both are true.  For the village we were “of good families.”  My family had never been barefoot laborers, we owned land.  We didn’t own enough land to amount to anything but a small farm, but…  And my grandfather was a skilled worker – a cabinet maker – and my grandmother ran her own business (would you believe hand painting/building cosmetic boxes?)  Yeah.  And my dad had a college education and a white collar job.  And all the grandkids attended college.  (Though a couple didn’t finish.)

We were not “peasants.”  I doubt we ever had been.  All my ancestresses as far back as memory stretches knew how to read, which is not normal in Portuguese peasants.  And we had some nice China and stuff.

So, why do I say we were dirt poor?  Oh.  Well, there was the three suits of clothing, one for best, one for everyday and one for rough.  (We might have had double that, because mom made them, but honestly, she stored ALL our clothes – for the four of us — in ONE dresser and one wardrobe, when my brother was a teen, and I was little.)  I had a never ending succession of pinafores, which is what I wore to keep the “good clothes” clean.  There was the ONE alarm clock in the house, which had to be moved around depending on who needed to get up (and for these purposes the “house” included my grandmother’s next door.

But perhaps nothing will encapsulate it as well as the fact that it was normal, both from my family and other middle class families to take a sweater apart, re-dye the yarn, and make a “new” sweater.  You could go three or four rounds before the yarn itself became too bad to use.

Relatives from abroad brought us chocolates as gifts when they visited.  You know, your normal multi-square candy bar.  We hoarded it like gold, and ate a square or two a month. (Yes, there’s Portuguese chocolates.  I believe they are categorized as soap.  Or were, at the time.)

I don’t say that to induce pity.  We were neither conscious of being poor nor were we in bad shape in relation to other people.  On the contrary.  And in a comparison either with the world or with historic norm, we were rich.  Rich beyond the dreams of avarice.

This is something that shocks Americans born-and-bred.  But it is true.

We are so rich that even the rich of other countries don’t fully get us.  They don’t see how well off we are.  They don’t see how our MIDDLE CLASS lives better than their upper classes.  Sometimes, and in some things, better than their middle class could dream.

Portugal is considerably better off (technically, though it’s all apparently borrowed money) now, but still, guys, I’ll be blunt with you.  I’ve been to their grocery stores, and I don’t know how people live.  I know what they make, and their salaries seem to range about half of ours, but everything – EVERYTHING – is in a smaller package and costs more.

I submit to you a lot of our stupidity is the stupidity of the well off.  You can decide to be vegan – if you have enough money.  You can be very tolerant of stupid people yelling at you for being imperialistic, if they don’t destroy your way of life.  You can pick odd styles of dress and “go back to nature” because you have enough money and because other people are well off enough they don’t care.

That I’m very much afraid is coming to an end.  I’m not a clairvoyant, if I were I would not have spent two years trying to break into short stories and twelve years trying to keep a foot in other-publishers-than-Baen.  I’d simply have gone Baen only twelve years ago and right now would have piles and piles of mysteries to go up.

But I do have the ability to get pictures in my head that describe a situation. Sometimes a situation I can’t explain rationally, and one no one believes me on.  When I first came into publishing, I could see it as a rotten ladder, breaking low and middle.  If I got to the top, I’d be safe, but there was no path there.

Everyone kept telling me I was seeing what wasn’t there.  “Publishing has always been in trouble.  It’s okay.”  It wasn’t okay.  The combination of consolidated publishing houses and big bookstores was killing the field, low and middle, and only the darlings survived (but lost readership every book.)

The image in my mind right now, with this Obamacare insanity, is of someone taking a car that is barely running, opening the hood and pouring a few buckets of fresh cement over the engine.

Don’t look down.  It’s a long, long way to fall.

And as I said, the prospects for my kids, and for all the bright kids of their generation HURT me.

But we’re all born where we are and even I can only do so much to prepare the kids, and to ensure they’re not hurt by this.  And cr*p like what is already in the pipe and flowing at us?  It’s going to hurt EVERYONE.

However, I’m no longer depressed.  I’m no longer depressed because… well… turn that around.  “It’s a long, long way to fall.”

We could lose half of our easy wealth and we’d still be better off than 90% of the world (let alone history) and that’s if THEY don’t fall too.

And that’s the other reason.  The crap that’s flowing down the pipe?  It’s going to hit the whole world.  America is a late-buyer into teh shiny (I typed that initially whiny) of socialism.  Which is why we’re the world’s largest consumer and the best well off.  And the shiny is running out of other people’s money all over the world, because the system promotes redistribution, not creation of wealth, which means people slowly get poorer.

America is going to hurt.  I’m not going to lie to you.  Are we going to hurt as much as the rest of the world?  Impossible.  Wealth doesn’t vanish over night. Look, I think I admitted to you before I buy most of my clothes from thrift stores.  This is something that’s not even really available in other countries (oh, yes, it exists, but there isn’t that much surplus.)  Nine times out of ten the clothes I buy are new, sometimes still with labels.  Someone bought them/got them as a gift, and either gained/lost weight and never wore them.  I think it’s expensive to pay $10 for a pair of designer jeans.  I wait for the half price sale.  This is only possible in a VERY wealthy country.  And that wealth won’t vanish.  Not for a decade or two.  The surplus is still around.

There is another reason – when societies are shocked, they revert to their founding myth.  It’s not by chance that things like Golden Dawn are resurgent in Europe.  A lot of the countries are going to revert to their founding myth which is both racist and triumphalist.

BUT that’s not our founding myth.  We were founded in liberty.  Yes, there are many who think this mean “liberty to have everything I want given to me.”  But those are not the active, able people.  Those who can stay on their feet during the tumble are people like us, who believe in individual liberty.

Is this guaranteed?  Oh, h*ll no.  We could end up with a strong man.  (Only we won’t.  We’re ungovernable, as the idiots at the top are finding out.  A state or two could go for a strong man.  The rest of us?  — pah.)

The statists think out of disorder will come communism.  Guys.  Remember they’re a religion.  A particularly dopey one.  There’s almost no chance of that, because communism requires a strong man.  The current buffoon ain’t it.  Nor are any of the people around him.  And given present-day America, there might be no one strong enough.

My biggest fear is that we’re wealthy enough to limp along another three generations, by which time we would be tenderized as it were, for the “Strong man.”

Bah.  Won’t happen.  They want the full socialist shiny and they want it now.  They’re pouring the cement over the car, because the engine is still running.  And if it stops – communism!  (The poor dears never get over the idea that the starving masses are JUST waiting for the intellectuals to lead the revolution.  Poor num’kins.)

A rebirth of liberty is far more likely than communism.  And it something we can fight and work for.

As for my kids and their future?  Well!  Who in the depths of Carter foresaw the Reagan boom.  And guys, if we can arrange for a boom now, it will be bigger and better than Carter.  Has to be.  Like after WWII, the rest of the world will be in a shambles.  Which is why my kids are so lucky to be American.

Is this pie in the sky?  Not hardly.  You’re going to have to work for this one.

First, the preparation for the crash, which you should already be making: pay off/streamline/prepare.

Then the preparation for the resurgence: this has to do with what makes us uniquely American and I can’t give you instructions because I’m not there.  Which is good.  You’re Americans.  Make your own instructions.  “An Army of Davids” – what the man said.

Roll up your sleeves and see what you can do – ideally what will make you money (multiple streams of income) and also keep things going.  If you don’t have my brown thumb and have land, growing some food might not be amiss (I think food will get expensive and there will be disruptions in delivery.)  If you have the time and the inclination, learn how to keep cars running.  People are going to be holding onto them for longer, and it will be needed.  Other stuff like that – not preparation for the stone age, but for the conveniences getting more expensive and harder to find. Figuring out how to keep computers running, or small appliances, might not be a bad idea either, though there is a lot of wealth between us and new ones being utterly unaffordable. Learn to cook from scratch if you don’t know how.  Learn to make bread by hand.  Flour is cheap.  So is rice. (I wish I could have either.)

I’m a fairly useless person, other than telling stories and doing some art, but yes, I’m working on both of those.  People don’t live from bread alone.  They’re still going to need entertainment.

My kids are in STEM degrees and hopefully they’ll find jobs, but if not… well… I told them my best advice, the one that kept me working throughout 10 years in which everyone in the publishing field except Baen seemed to be actively trying to sideline me: I won’t die.  Even if they kill me.

I’m now giving that advice to all of you – and to America in general.  Refuse to die.  Even if they kill you. (Metaphorically speaking, of course, though if you find how to do the other, do let me know.)

It might be, and I always certainly guarantee will be, that you’ll hit the wall on what you’ve done all your life; what you know how to do.  Don’t sit there and go “it’s all over.”  Despair is a sin. It’s also a sure route to utter destruction.

Instead, go “I won’t die, even if they kill me.”  Find new ways to do what you love, or find something new to do.

Go under, go around, go over.  Use their regulations against them.  And never give up.

Don’t look down.  It’s a long way to fall.  Fortunately, we’re on the high wire, and as long as we keep moving and doing, we’ll be fine.

*Give me a break okay?  The furniture refinishing mysteries will ONLY be written to Evita.  Other music, nothing happens.  And then you guys wonder why I cry, bitch and moan about writing another of those.

Lately, as in in the last year or so, I’ve been discovering that a lot of things I blamed myself for were baked in, part of who I am, probably physiological not psychological, and likely impossible to budge.

Not mind you that psychological problems aren’t real, or easy to overcome, but that the things I’ve spent my life trying to brute force simply couldn’t be brute forced. Things like ADD. I can manage some improvement, brute-force some concentration, but I pay for it, in the fact that I shut down afterwards sometimes for months, while I rabbit around doing crazy stuff that amounts to nothing. This is basically why my career had the iteration of a book in two weeks, then nothing for six months. And it wasn’t some gigantic personal failing, though it felt like it. Still does.

Yes, ADD can be treated, and … Look Adderal makes me borderline psychotic and has the neat side effect of shutting down the writing. Dan shouldn’t have to live with me on Adderal, (I don’t want to live with me on Adderal.) Vivanse (sp) works and I can actually sort of kind of get stuff done, except that…. so, I can sit down and force myself to write. Which I grant you is an improvement over sitting down and watching a youtube video, shopping for private planes or Persian carpets (no, I don’t buy them. I just shop for them, price them and rank them as to which I’d buy. I mean, I am not, thank heavens, so insane that I will try to buy things I can’t begin to afford. I just do a “the price is right” type of info-dive) or trying to establish once or for all whether dinosaurs were cold blooded. On the other hand, for whatever reason (and not a hundred percent sure so another test might need to be done. Might have been other factors) the gateway-in-head shuts down. So, you know, I can type whatever on command, I just can’t “feel” the story or the words. If you think about it as clay sculpting while blindfolded and wearing oven mitts, you might have some idea what it’s like.

I’m fairly sure my problem with Chapter House (link to it on the right side) and the novel serializing is exactly that. I’m trying to be regular and my brain isn’t regular. In my defense Witch’s Daughter really is almost done. My brain just got high-jacked by No Man’s Land which is also almost done. Except that I might as well have flushed May down the toilet or spent the month sleeping for all I accomplished. That was, illness and recovering from illness, which probably has to do with being old, which I also haven’t processed yet, and then this week trying to get the house’s last nests of utter disorder fixed and triggering my raging household-dust allergy. (Which is why this post almost didn’t happen.) Hopefully functioning by the end of the week, but there’s not much use sitting here beating myself because it didn’t happen. The result might seem like laziness, but the origin of the issue is very much physical and flattened me.

So, what is this in name of, other than making excuses for myself? Um… They’re not precisely excuses for myself. They are “these are the limits of what I can do.”

I don’t like them. And they’re perfectly insane compared to the “Standard issue human” our industrialized situation has convinced us we’re SUPPOSED to be, but they are what they are.

The situation we’re in as a country, or even if you prefer as a culture, for the entire west, is rather similar to me trying to navigate my body.

Just like 100 years ago, in complete ignorance of neurological weirdness, I’d have gone to my grave thinking I was incredibly lazy and couldn’t be redeemed, we live in complete ignorance of culture, and the issues wrought by culture and how culture propagates/changes/is transmitted.

Today talking to a friend, she was amazed mules are still used to grade roads/landing strips in the rural west. And you know, it reminded me of things in Portugal that are still the domain of one family, for centuries and many millennia. And at the same time there are other things that have changed so completely since I lived there that my memories of childhood seem like an acid trip.

And that’s physical processes/events. Beneath it there’s …. buried stuff. Stories that kids get told and in some form tell to their kids, some of which I’m convinced has passed from brides that were kidnapped or captured in war when the rest of the tribe was killed and their whole culture destroyed to the point we don’t even know it ever existed.

Our very languages have things embedded in them we’re only partially aware of.

So as rational human beings, when we sit here and we watch, say, to use an example, our country shut down for a case of the common cold, or start to kill its dairy herds for fear of a bird flu that’s completely treatable in cows and which has failed to kill a single human (though it allegedly infected one,) all under the impression it will have a 25% mortality rate because “the experts” say so, and feel we should do something…

For most of the insanity — oh, including throwing things in the atmosphere to make the Earth colder, and other shananigans — in this, the craziest of all timelines: there’s nothing you, an individual human can do to fix it. It’s not yours to fix, anymore than you can fix your ADD or my ridiculous auto-immune, or….

Does it mean it’s all hopeless? Well, no. Humans do some pretty bizarre and irrational things over the course of history. The fact that all over the world, periodically, we’ve buried cities and walked away from them is one of those. And yeah we have tons of theories on those “It was ecological collapse” being the favorite, except that really, it’s a just so story. We don’t know, and it couldn’t possibly apply in every circumstance. And given the material culture of various times, walking away from a perfectly good city made probably less sense than locking our entire culture down for the sniffles.

But there we are. We as a group aren’t rational. We respond to deep set prompts, some of them from our very language. And we get panics and strange ideas about how things work.

But– But, we survive.

So to cheer — eh — you up, here are some thing to keep in mind:

What can’t go on won’t go on, but there’s no set timetable. Because people haven’t yet, visibly, en masse reacted to injustice or abuse, it doesn’t mean they never will. It also doesn’t mean they aren’t reacting, in subtle and yet paradoxically perhaps more effective ways.

There is nothing you can do that’s a big hero solution, where you explain things, and suddenly “everybody” does thing a or b. That’s not how any of this works. BUT that doesn’t mean you’re utterly impotent. Talking back still has value. Speaking up can slowly turn the culture. In fact, you can say that is happening, as mass media loses its grip. And if you can’t do either, if in fact career and feeding your family requires you to stay embedded in highly leftist locations/jobs, I salute you. You know what you risk — when the worm turns it will be sudden, and there will be friendly fire. And you’re not stupid. You know that — but you’re doing something highly necessary. There’s whole fields of human endeavor that might be lost or impossible to restructure, unless we have sane people among the Marx-insanists. Neither talking back in a small (in my case mediumish, but hey) way, nor educating are nothing. And staying embedded in enemy territory is certainly not nothing. You’re all our advance troops, our culture sapper specialists. I’m proud of you. (Which granted won’t buy you a cup of coffee, but is important.)

What you should do, in and around this: Stay informed. This is important, because it keeps you abreast of situations, and able to better:

Look after yourself. (Secure your oxygen mask before applying others, metaphorically speaking.)

Look after your family and those dependent on you that can’t look after themselves.

Keep yourself out of catastrophic trouble.

You should also do things you enjoy. Yes, I know everyone is pinched, we are all enormously stressed. But that’s the more reason to do things that bring you joy. Pick up a new hobby or an old one. Have dinner with friends, even if it’s sandwiches in the park, go for a walk withy our sweety. Pet your cat or dog. Listen to a favorite piece of music. Build in something like that every day. You are not a machine. Don’t treat yourself like one.

Be kind to yourself and others. Don’t assume the worst. Don’t assume someone is the enemy due to circumstantial evidence. (This is very important if things get spicy.)

Practice joy and mercy. And patience too. We’re going to need all the patience, one way or another.

And accept, at a deep level that yes, the worst could happen to you or those you love as a result of your action (or inaction.) But that’s known as the common flaw of mankind. You could die right now because a very small meteor drops on you.

Do the best you can. It might not be enough, but by definition no one, not even you, can require more of you.

And be not afraid.

Able, Differently Abled, Disabled by David Bock

I’m a regular contributor to Blue Collar Prepping, and over the years many posts have addressed things such as Bug Out bags (BOB), Get Home Bags (GHB), and the like. Several articles have also addressed physical limitations and pain management.

One thing that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention lately is actual disabilities and self-perception.

This was driven home to me recently when my doctor advised me to file for disability. I’m only in my mid-50s, and while I have health issues, I don’t think of myself as disabled. Or at least I didn’t.

One of the consequences of this image of myself, is thinking I can manage more than I really can, frequently to the dismay of My Wife. One of the benefits of my doctor’s recommendation is I’ve started to take a harder, colder, and I hope more honest, look at myself and my abilities.

I’m not young, I’m not in very good physical condition, and my health limitations need to be taken into consideration when planning for disasters or emergencies.

I approached the self-assessment as if I was considering another person for a variety of jobs, mostly physical at different levels of exertion.

Can they regularly lift twenty or more pounds multiple times a day? Yes, I can still do that.

What about fifty. Probably not, or at least not as frequently.

Are they able to carry a fifty pound pack for several hours? No, I’m no longer able to do that due to medical issues.

What about a twenty pound pack? Possibly, though I’d likely be in considerable pain at the end of that time.

Can they walk five miles? Maybe, but depending on the pace there would be a certain amount of health risk.

Can they cover broken ground at a reasonable pace? No, I can’t do that.

Could they carry another person a short distance? As long as the person wasn’t too big and the distance wasn’t too far, probably. But there’s a good chance I’d require medical assistance after.

And so on.

Based on this assessment, at this time Bugging Out is pretty much off the table for me, especially on foot. I can no longer carry a significant quantity of gear, and I can’t carry it very far. While physical conditioning may improve this to some degree, there’s the counter weight of my deteriorating health.

I’m not planning on dying any time soon, but part of that is accepting that I need to live within my limitations.

Moving forward, more of my preps will focus on Bug In situations, and making sure our home can be maintained in adverse conditions. Never a bad plan, but even more so now.

I also plan on seeing what physical therapy can do with regards to some of my medical limitations. Of course, that will also run into my financial limitations.

I strongly recommend all our readers take a dispassionate assessment of their own health and abilities. Then work at tailoring their disaster plans and supplies to that reality. No matter how mentally uncomfortable it is, for optimum survivability, it needs to be done.

Stay safe, and good prepping.