Jacques hands were trembling, as he reached for the can of tuna. His French accent was back full strength though he’d lost most of it over the eight months of living in the Schrodinger experimental interstellar colony in Alpha Centauri with all Americans and British colonists.

“Eh bien,” he said. “This is our last can of tuna. If this doesn’t work…”

Mike, aka Michaela Smith, who was American, redheaded and a full head taller than him but had kind feelings for the lone Frenchman put her hand on his shoulder. “It will work Jacques. Let it rip.”

Still his hands shook and he took hold of the ring on the can, then let it go, “But what if… We remember…”

“Okay, yes,” Mike said. “We all know what Ausra did. It was a stupid idea. And we all remember how it worked.”

The people standing around in a ring shuddered, remembering Ausra’s idea for opening ten cans at once, and the mechanism she’d rigged. It had caused a reality entanglement event which had killed ten cats. And incidentally Ausra.

“Courage,” John said. “Or do you want me to open the can?” He reached for it.

“Non, no, I’ll do it.” Jacques pulled the ring back, then the lid of the can, with a barely audible sound as the metal parted along the scored portion.

For a long moment nothing happened. Long enough to wonder if all the cats in the Schrodinger program had died. Or perhaps the researchers. In which case it would be a long, slow starvation for the colony….

Then from very far off came a meow. Mike pressed the button of the remote viewer focused on the dock. The supply ship had materialized.

There was another muffled meow, this one indignant. And then the cat door between the supply ship and the station opened, and an orange tabby came running out and towards them along a long tunnel.

When the cat erupted into their room, Jacques had put the can of cat food down for him.

John had made it through the human airlock into the supply ship and now commed “We have supplies for 6 months ladies and gentlemen. And enough tuna for year. Also, starter kit for hydroponics.”

Fifty colonists dissolved into hugs and tears. The little cat ate his tuna on the floor, undisturbed by their effusions.

Who knew, through mankind’s long struggle for the stars, the key would be cat’s ability to teleport at the sound of a tuna can and human ability to create a cage from which the cat could not escape or teleport until the entire ship teleported and attached to a station in the new world?

Sure, the first tuna can and structure — a tiny dome, just large enough for the cat — had to be sent by drone. But after that? After that humans could conquer the stars.

Thanks to cats.

And tuna.

*Yes, I know it’s silly. Yes, I could make it longer and better and just as silly. Yes, I might do it later. But right now you just get this, you gonzo geeks. JUST TO GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD. And into yours. – SAH*

Remember when it was given that no conservatives worked in the arts? Remember when it was a given that conservatives were uneducated and conformist? Remember when it was a given conservatives were just dumb? Remember when it was a given that conservatives were CONSERVATIVE instead of utter and complete rebels defying the status quo.

You probably still know a lot of people that think that way. Pat them on the head. They’re either old or so conformist that they’ve never examined their assumptions.

When a commercial a few years ago told the boss who talked of “sticking it to the man” that he was THE MAN I knew that the long con of the left was done with. And it must be now a good five years since I had a knock out drag out fight with someone proclaiming the received wisdom that the reason conservatives are scarce in the arts is because we’re less creative, less inventive. Since we’re, you know, part of the establishment.

Which would make perfect sense of course, if “conservative” meant, as it was supposed to be, those who defend the establishment.

But during the 20th century, the word … evolved. There is this perception that the left distorts words on purpose, but that’s not actually — I think — the truth. The distortion of words only started as their concept of the world and reality deviated to a point that they couldn’t use the words in the intended sense and not confront the reality. In fact, some future historians — if there are any — will probably identify the rate of distorting word meanings with an ideology in power and still holding on to power, but in deep distress because its vision of the future has been disproven, and it’s now just holding on for power’s sake. But is unable to confront it.

In fact, this goes with nonsensical things proclaimed by any regime in power. Take the divine right of kings, a thing invented only when the very idea of monarchy was in distress. By the time monarchies started falling like ripe fruit, kings themselves claimed to be revolutionaries and for the radical equality of man, which they, somehow, could preserve. (And only they.) In the earlier times, when the ideology was healthy, the divine right of kings was implied and never questioned. By the time it had to be proclaimed, it was dead as the dodo, so it had to be shouted from the rooftops.

Over the twentieth century “Conservative” came to mean “To the right of Lenin.” Because after all, communism was the way of the future and therefore anyone holding on to the old “capitalist” mode of society was someone trying to conserve the past.

This vision got hit with wave after wave of discomfirmation even as it adherents climbed to positions of power and held it through dirty pool.

In this, their ideology being dead gave them a leg up. At some level, they knew they couldn’t justify what they were doing, so they abandoned all principles, played for power, and attracted power-hungry horrors. And hired people who served their vision of power at all costs.

They project this, btw, by characterizing anyone who escaped from a leftist regime as someone who was in power there. Or perhaps they believe it. Since their life is now all about power, they view everyone who wants to do something for altruistic and moral reasons as a liar and vaguely stupid. Because proclaiming THEIR ideology is the way to power.

It really is, you know? The right, like idiots, tend to sacrifice less-than-clean members to principle — see Santos — while the left will hold on to the Hamass “Squad” and the ridiculously corrupt members (Pelosi) for dear life, because the principles they proclaim are all from the lips out.

There is a lot of power in a dead ideology. For the divine right of kings, see Monsieur L’Etat C’est Moi Louis XIV.

For the left it made the “long march” a thing. Because they hired only those who agreed with them while the right hired whoever was “competent” they were able to grab all the positions of power.

Game it out. You get one leftist in and allow him or her power over hiring, all the next hiring will of leftists. And no one who isn’t at least willing to pretend to be left will be denied work, or run off if they manage to get in.

This is how news reporting fell, and the arts, and academia, and and and, culminating with corporate leadership.

There is a price, though. If you hire for any reason other than competence, you’re going to lose competence. Maybe not all at once, but slowly, over time.

Admittedly if you’re doing that, you’re safer hiring for nepotism, if only because certain type of abilities and talents run in families. Having grown up where all my ancestors had for a long while, I can tell you that. Everyone expected me to be academically gifted, physically awkward and blunt as wooden sword. Which, by and large, I was. My family, too, unless it’s going through one of its “poor as Job” phases is good for administrative jobs. If in a poor phase, we tend to climb through being gifted and industrious craftsmen (My path really.)

But if you’re hiring people who mostly know their “principles” are bullshit to be proclaimed from the mouth-out while playing for power, your entire structure is going to devolve — instead of the structure designed to do “the thing” whatever that thing is — into a structure devoted to fuck-fuck games.

Also, as the final waves of discomfirmation hit, with the fall of the USSR and the at least somewhat open propagation of what a horror life was there and how many people communism killed, the people willing to pay lip service to leftism were both dumber and more venal than usual. Those with a brain were even more focused on power and usually psychopaths of the first order.

Which leads us to the state of the arts, the media, most of the corporate leadership and academia.

The revelation of the plagiarism infesting academia surprised you? Oooooh boy, do I have bad news for you. It’s been like that for 50 years at least. They can’t create and they can’t think. Part of it is the few of them who can are afraid to, because the ideology has gone crazy-irrational and turns around and beats you down for thoughts that were acceptable last week. See for instance, how many movies from the eighties and nineties couldn’t be made today. (I have one series of books published 15 years ago that couldn’t be published today. (Yes, I’ll be bringing it back out, because you know what? I’m done giving a f*ck.)) So the ones who can think have decided not to. Or are too scared to. And might not even be aware of it. All they have is a bottomless pit of fear and hunger for power and that is really bad at creating “new contributions to the knowledge base of humanity.”

And this why traditional publishing is dying an ugly and flailing death. It’s why the arts aren’t. It’s why if you hooked up electrical cables to Walt Disney’s tomb you could power America, he’s spinning so hard.

It’s not so much that they want to shove the ideology down our throats: it’s that it’s ALL they have. It’s what put them in the position they are in.

Create? They can’t create. They are the ultimate establishment men and women, raised to repeat back what they heard, flawlessly, and never to deviate. They always knew that was the path of to success. And it was. They look around, and everything at the top is like them. So they imagine everyone else are subhumans.

And because questioning, denying, creating are completely beyond their reach, they assume it’s beyond everyone’s reach. They’re just clever enough to hide it, see? And mouth the right words. And that’s why they’re supposed to lead.

This sad state of affairs, with worsening performance for every infested field, persisted as long as it did, under the illusion that the people creating increasingly soggier pieces of cardboard passing itself as novels, or paintings or whatever, because the critics and academia were also infested. So what was praised to the sky was soggy, moldy cardboard. What people trained on was soggy, moldy cardboard. Even the occasional still-creative soul was thus destroyed and made into a copy of those hollowed out by the poisonous ideology and craving for power.

But it’s been many years since I had to argue that yes, there are as creative people on our side of the isle as the other, and that what was happening was pre-and-quiet-cancellation of anyone who wouldn’t sing in the choir.

Pre, if you were identified as “to the right of Lenin” before you broke in. and quiet, after. In writing as in the arts, as in industry, they invented some crime, some reason you were cancelled. it was never “because his/her thoughts threatened us.” You had insulted someone. You were secretly a horrible person who tortured animals. Whatever. In writing it didn’t need to be anything specific. The entire industry worked by hearsay because there were so many people trying to break in and so few slots for them.

All you needed was a whisper campaign: “Well, she” intent look “you know.” And if the other person had no clue at all, they pretended they did, because not to know, and to associate with someone who’d been cancelled meant you were also cancelled, also “you know?”

In the heights of industry, where people were likely to fight more, they usually found some reason or created it. I wonder how many people were drugged and photographed with live girls, dead boys, horses and parrots? Probably a lot. Probably a lot more were implicated in embezzling and financial crimes. Even if the crime had to be invented.

I laugh — but not with any joy — when people complain of cancel culture.

Cancel culture? What, you noticed when? Ten years ago?

Ah, but that’s when their power started falling apart. And then cancellation had com out in the open. Which means it’s done. It’s already done.

Why? Can’t I see all the cancelled people?

Yes, I can. I can also see the mechanism failing and sputtering, and the cancelled coming back.

Look, it used to work because the establishment was unified. No one could come to the attention of the people who had been cancelled. This means the establishment could make up whatever it very well wanted about the cancelled person, and more importantly, people were FORGOTTEN.

What killed that regime was the ability for the cancelled to say in the public eye. Indie publishing, and mass-broadcasting. This blog, sure, but also podcasts, indie music, etc. etc. etc.

The cancelled don’t go away and disappear, allowing the lies about them to proliferate. Or their fans to imagine they are dead.

Eventually this means that cancelling is just a sign you displeased the left who, as our own boycotts are starting to show, are a minuscule part of the buying public.

I fully expect the time to come when people put “cancelled by the left” on the cover of their normal, no politics, books. (They already put it in the cover of political books.)

For now? For now it means very little, outside a very limited circle. Which means of course that the left has gotten more vicious, trying to make it stick with stuff like debanking, and trying to equate challenging them with being evil.

But it’s not sticking. People are using this brave new world to get around, get over, get under.

Not saying it doesn’t hurt — both emotionally and financially. — In fact I made the point when explaining why even Glenn Reynolds fundraises. No matter how well some of us manage to do, you can take it to the bank that if you’re may age or older, started out under the ancien regime and are to the right of Lenin, you’ve taken major financial body blows. Most of them, of course, before tech opened things up. But not all of them. Not nearly. We’re still throttled to a great extent. (Explain to me how MHI doesn’t have movies yet? one of the most visual and successful series. Even more so, explain why Honor Harrington doesn’t? When mediocre series on the other side were filmed and pushed at people?)

But it’s changing. And cancellation? Utter cancellation? It no longer works. Which is why the old argument is only trotted out by the old and the terminally out of touch.

Cancelling doesn’t work while it’s in the open. It’s a thing of darkness and quiet social maneuvering.

Once it’s visible, once people stare at it with open eyes, it starts to lose power. Like “the divine right of kings” if you have to say it and defend it to the masses in general, you’re going to lose.

So don’t look away. Don’t let them maneuver in the dark. Keep your eyes wide open and ask questions.

Yes, what you see might be horrible, but watch it. don’t flinch.

You kill it by not looking away.

I have a complaint. Who in heck set Valentine’s Day on Ash Wednesday? It’s a fishy affair if you ask me!

However, it prompts me to say remember you are dust and to dust you shall retur– Er…. Okay, but what I mean is: let’s talk about love.

In present day when we mention love, it’s always one sort of love: eros. Or at best, romantic love, the sort of love between married people.

But love has many forms. And to the credit of valentine’s day in schools and childhood, people do have “love” in the sense of friendship. Although in schools you have to love everyone, which of course means you love no one.

STILL to our point…

I’ve been — rather surprisingly, considering it was not something I expected, and I’m neither good with feelings nor with people — blessed with a grand love affair. I married the love of my life, and 38 years on, we’re still very much in love.

However, despite that, and taking nothing from it, my life is beset with other loves as well. I love my kids. I love my extended family. I love my friends. I love my country. I even love my commenters, and worry about you guys when you’re missing. (Or take a powder and wander off, usually over something silly.) Oh, and I love my cats. Though apparently not as much as Muse loves me, because today she won’t leave me alone. At all.

Anyway, the juxtaposition of Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine’s and the fact that recently a lot of friends and acquaintances, some younger than I, are dropping off — stop that. Seriously. I mean it — make me think that this love stuff, not just eros, but agape, and the friendly, companionable love we have for pets, and and and… are important. Else, what is life for?

I’ve reached the weird part of my life where I get more fun doing something nice for someone that they aren’t expecting, or perhaps secretly helping someone than you know going out and getting a big dinner. Which is good, since there will be no big dinner today.

It’s sometimes hard to explain this to people. “Oh, no. But you should take that money and do something good for yourself.” (Seriously, people.) When in fact I am doing something good for myself. This is not the bad kind of altruism, where I hurt myself to make others happy, but the happy kind of altruism where I do things because I can and they make people happy. (Yes, I know. I should put up free short stories more often!)

On this very fishy Valentine’s Day, yell back at death and desolation by loving someone. And I don’t mean that kind of love. I mean… Do something nice for someone you love. Even if the someone is a cat who has no idea it’s a special day. Get out of your own head, and give the cat a treat. Call an old friend who might be feeling lonely. Go for a walk with your spouse. Water your house plant. Something. Do something for someone else.

And do it with love. It will make you feel better, I promise.

When it comes to being “Latin” Portuguese are the Schrodinger nationality. One of my favorite comments from the left of the field about me was that I couldn’t be Latin, since Portugal was “solidly European.”

Sure, and potatoes are solidly vegetables but they sure ain’t greens. I will grant them that the EU has pasteurized Portugal and turned it into England’s idea of an exotic vacation spot. That’s not even vaguely the Portugal I grew up in, though. Even ten years ago, Europeans were not exactly quiet about saying that Portuguese were more Africa than Europe.

Missed in all of this is the left’s obsession with race, and with “Latin” being a race. Some insist to be Latin you have to have some amount of Indian blood. I actually do. Both kinds. Great grand grand must have brought home souvenirs, but that’s nonsense. It’s a tiny fraction — less than Norse — and Latin is not a race. It’s a cultural group. In the forms we feel, Latin is identified as a cultural group. Race is separate.

As far as culture goes — closes eyes and hopes her parents don’t read this — Portugal has more in common with Spain and vast swaths of Latin America than with anywhere else. Take Pope Francis (please? When Benedict died, a call went up from Catholics, “Oh, Lord, wrong pope!” (It’s a joke, son)) I understand his particular brand of idiocy perfectly, because I grew up around my brother and his friends, who were all Latin leftists. Which is to say “Oh, Lord, really?” intensely strange. A very weird brew of Latin machismo and chauvinism and accusing everyone else for the issues caused by the screwed up culture. (And it is screwed up. All cultures are, of course, in some ways, but really.)

Portuguese like to distinguish themselves from Spaniards, like Austrians like to distinguish themselves from Germans. Portuguese say they’re less cruel, less loud, less–

Is it true? Yeah, it actually is. Northern Portuguese in particular tend to be much quieter. Blame it on the British cultural influence because the North of Portugal was where Britain sent remittance men before they had an empire.

However, having spent most of my life in the US and acquired a certain feel from the outside, let me tell you it’s practically a distinction without a difference. Sure, from the inside it looks like a big difference. Heck, the North and South of Portugal look like a great difference. But on the ground, while visiting the North of Portugal from the US the entire country seemed unbearably loud and everyone gestured overly much. (Okay, that might have been just my sons.) It reminds me of Dan’s first visit to Portugal, to propose formally — something my parents insisted on before recognizing our engagement — and how he almost hid under the table, from what he was sure was a to-the-knife argument among my family. In point of fact, we were discussing…. where to buy shoes. It wasn’t even a mild disagreement, let alone a fight.

As for a commonality of culture: I find myself translating from Latin for American friends with Mexican or Argentinian spouses. Or laughing my head off at websites about growing up Cuban because I recognize about half of those, like the idea that the best thing to do when you come home late at night is have a warm mug of…. coffee with milk?

Are there differences? Sure. Myriad. As there are between every single Latin American country. It’s not even an argument. There are also differences in culture you only see from the inside. (Mexicans have a lot of opinions about the rest of Latin America, some of which will have Americans biting their tongues not to hold up a mirror.)

But if you’re going to make “Latin” an officially recognized cultural group, yep, Portugal and Spain should be thrown in. Spain, arguably a little less, since it’s become more Europeanized, having been more prosperous and more integrated into Europe, long before Portugal, for various reasons some of which make no sense.

Heck, there is an argument for throwing in parts of Italy. (But not France. France is its own thing, really.)

Otherwise, what you fall into is the ridiculousness of saying someone if a protected cultural minority, because they spell their name with a z not an s (Chavez, Marquez, Mendez — the list goes on.)

Of course, I’m me, so you guys know what I think of protected cultural minorities. What I think of immigrants and immigration, too. Being an immigrant, I think the whole purpose of immigrating is to become of the country you immigrate into. You’re supposed to learn the language to the best of your ability, (Unfortunately my going back to Portugal at 18 for four years probably set the accent in stone, but I do try to use English with native fluency, with some success. The typos and malapropisms to be fair were worse in Portuguese. Now Portuguese is… difficult.). You’re supposed to adopt the customs and habits of your fellow Americans, to the best of your ability (to be fair, habits and customs vary a lot in this great land, but there’s more commonality than you think.) You’re supposed to respect the history, the civic virtues and the cultural icons of your new country (I take a pass at movie actors. Simply because I can’t tell one from the other.) You’re supposed to do your best to be a good citizen, not a burden to your new homeland. And you’re supposed to love it above all others, and renounce every other allegiance. Or if you prefer, you’re supposed to “Fit In or Fuck Off.”

Therefore where you came from, much less where your ancestors came from should matter not at all.

However, if we’re going to play that game — and the left clearly is — we should play the game logically. Which — in addition to my finding out most people identify as Latin on sight, and also that it annoys the left, started calling myself Latin. But particularly because it annoys the left.

On the other hand I am Latin enough to be highly amused at the black comedy of the left trying to open the borders and toss in amnesty to please “Latins.”

First, most of what is coming over the border at this point is not Latin in any way shape or form.

Second, nothing will piss Latins more than opening the borders and letting the old culture reach and touch them again.

Because here’s the thing: there are good things about Latin culture: a reverence for family, for protecting children and women and the weak. There are double edged things: the concentration on family is good and bad. Good because it gives people more support than they have in looser cultures. Bad because it gives the tribe a veto on everyone’s path in life. Which has repercussions for the culture including making things more difficult for anyone starting or innovating anything.

There is also a certain built-in corruption, because the law is something notional. Things are done over and around it, through influences, connections and bribes. Connections and well bribes count for more than law or system of government. But mostly connections. There is a saying in Portugal “He who is without a godfather dies in jail” and I understand there are similar ones throughout Latin countries. In the same way there are words for Mordida. In Portugal it’s “gloves”.

Now you’re going to say “How will that be different than importing Italian culture?” Oh not much, except for numbers. the greater the numbers of a culture who come in, the harder it is to keep the culture from being everywhere. Also the fact that “Latin” is a protected minority makes enforcing FAFO harder. It still happens, but slower. Much slower.

I felt that frustration when our “classy” vacations in Denver were taken over by a previous wave of Latin migration. If you remember, being classy, and also of course “well off” — snort giggle — when we had little kids we went to Denver for the weekend and stayed at Embassy Suites, because they had a bonus room (of sorts) with a door between our sleeping quarters and the kids’s area. And because they had breakfast. Huge breakfast. Which meant if we pushed the breakfast time as late as possible (I think it was ten thirty on weekends) we could let the kids eat as much as they wanted and skip lunch so we only paid for dinner.

So imagine our shock when we came down with kids and found out that at ten they were already mostly clean of any food. They’d started cleaning up at 9:30, so they were completely clean by 10:30.

I know that culture. Retail and service positions are sinecures, run for the person working there, not the client. And I didn’t want that here.

That is one of the points of annoyance and a reason Latin immigrants don’t want to import every Latin country into the US and destroying the culture we escaped to, and chose to raise our kids in.

But I know the other side of this: legal immigration is difficult, and a considerable number of Latins, and other immigrants have come legally, either as refugees (real ones) or just through much effort at finding a job, being here for enough time, applying for citizenship, staying clean and making sure you’re not a liability of any kind.

I came here on the easy setting. I did have a job to take up, and I could have taken that route. But I happened to fall in love with Dan and we got married. But being a permanent resident with the right to work wasn’t instant or easy. It’s not like in the movies, where you marry someone for citizenship and it all works seamlessly and in weeks. It was six months before I had a green card and permission to work took longer. (A problem for a young couple living on almost nothing.)

My process was easy, relatively. It’s been almost forty years. BUT there was a lot of expense in applying for citizenship because of the papers to file, and the drive to the nearest INS center, and time off work. There was also crawling all over our life, to determine if we were “really” married and not somehow faking it. (The infertility probably didn’t help.)

It was still onerous and work, and nerve wracking. And neither of us — me, or Dan — ever considered allowing me to be a burden on American tax payers. I came here to contribute, not to be a dead weight.

So imagine how I feel about people coming over the border and treating what is handed to them as a sort of deserved reparations. On people coming in to be used as illegal voters and an enforcement army for the Junta (the second won’t work, but it is the intent.)

Imagine how I feel. Imagine how every legal immigrant, who worked and saved and integrated feels.

People whose ancestors immigrated much earlier might think they’re outraged.

Trust me, it doesn’t compare to what us later day Americans feel.

No, this isn’t a matter of pulling the plank after us. I’m not anti-immigration. I am anti open borders. I’m anti-invasion.

I do believe the US should bring aboard the best, most innovative people in the world, those wishing to become American and make a contribution. (We could use more Elon Musks, and a few Javier Mileis or heck, Nigel Farages wouldn’t hurt.) They should be identified and processed to the best of our ability. And then once here, they should be convinced to FIFO. Always.

But people just being allowed in and given every possible bene and care without having intention of fitting in, or respecting the local culture or becoming American? In fact, allowing people in who are actively hostile to America?

That makes my blood boil. I bet it makes the blood of every recent immigrant boil.

We came here to serve and be part of America, and to preserve this wondrous thing for our children.

To have it destroyed and undermined is the worst thing ever.

You see we know how rare America is, and how worthy of preserving. And we know there might never be another one. Not in our life time. So anyone risking destroying it, in any way makes us very angry.

Because America is stronger than blood ties, than cultural ties.

Trying to appease us with stupid pseudo-racist crap, by favoring a presumed race or culture is stupid.

The culture we’re interested in preserving is America.

Shiny! Let’s be Bad! – a blast from the past from January 2018

Most humans want to fit in, and will go a long way to fit in.  In fact, most if not all dictatorships in the 20th century depended on this impulse.  “You don’t want the neighbors to think you’re a bad person” or mutatis mutandi, Jew/Jew sympathizer/wrecker/hoarder/saboteur/running dog of imperialism/etc etc.

No army in the world can hold even a small mutinous fraction of a large population in subjection, if they are not held back by internal controls and stops, and the ancient social-ape impulse to be liked and accepted by the band.

What strikes me when reading books about the holocaust or the various communist massacres is not that these were horrible people and monsters.  It’s that 99.9% of the people involved were just “human beings” put in a position where the unthinkable had become normal, and there was no one to say “oh, wait, this is objectively not only evil, but one of the craziest things ever.”

The same instinct that made us civilized, that creates rules of behavior like “I will not kill and eat the neighbors” can be turned around completely on its head, where killing and eating the neighbors, or at least their children, is acceptable, as something you do to survive.  (See holodomor.)  In that case, of course, it was needed to survive, because you and yours were being deliberately starved.  However, the fact humans can do things like that then move on, get past it, go back to normal life, tells you how plastic humanity is, when faced with times/a community gone crazy.

Manners, good behavior, lack of social aggressiveness, all of that which we take for granted is in fact, completely part of the “we all do this, and that’s how we fit in society.”

And in the west at least, for a long time, it has been part of the public facade that we’re a meritocratic society, that people will succeed or fail, sure, with some element of luck, but mostly based on what you can do, what you know, and how hard you’re willing to work.

Now all of us have been in jobs and situations where … we knew it wasn’t precisely so.  Sometimes it was simply that, you know, the editor’s ex-roommate or the boss’s son in law were going to get promotion and advantages no one else could have.  This happens, and is, unfortunately human.  You lumped it, and you moved on, looking for another situation where your talents were better appreciated.

In the last few decades, in certain industries and certain fields of endeavor, it would slowly (or fast, in my case, since I’d seen the movie before) dawn on you that you weren’t going to get anywhere if your political opinions weren’t left.  It became clear, hearing say editors talk, that the furthest to the left, the better — which is why some bright lads and lassies formed the “young communists club” for science fiction writers, AFTER the wall fell, and by the time it was formed not one of them under 30 — but if you believed in the free market, individual freedom, and despised the idea of benes for protected classes (even if — particularly if — you fit at least two of them) you’d better keep your opinions to yourself and pretend you were too stupid to understand politics.  Because the moment you revealed your politics your career was done.

This was particularly insidious because the pretense wasn’t that it was your politics.  Even the people shutting you out might not realize that’s why they were doing it.  The fact is that the left has erected a facile self-image as both concerned underdogs (they’re not, they’ve had most of the power most places since world war II) and the “smart” ones.  In fact, of course, they are not that.  All of us, even the blind ones, could see the writing on the wall.  It took a thoroughly disconnected geek not to perceive leftism as a social positional good. Most of us aren’t that.

The people who embraced the “easiest setting” of life as a leftist intellectual were two categories: The first is the genuine good boys and girls.  In this case “good” doesn’t imply moral.  It implies people in whom the fitting-in impulse is stronger than thought.  They are the kids teachers’ loved and parents praised.  They instinctively figured out leftism was how to be “good” and therefore followed it.  The other category, of course, are the amoral SOBs, which usually went the furthest.  They knew how the wind blew.  They were smart enough to know it was wrong, and that communism was the charnel house of history.  The brightest might even know why and that the corpses inhere from the principles.  But they didn’t care.  The way to the top of most professions (except some stem) was to play that game as hard as they could.  What if they were screwing future generations.  They’d got theirs.  I have no proof, but I have long suspected this second group were the ones that were catapulted to leadership.

However, the self image of both groups is that they were the smart ones, the caring ones, and — this is very important — the SANE ones.

This meant the minute you outed yourself as not belonging to either group, as in fact, having too many principles for your own good, you were considered stupid, uncaring (racist/sexist/homophobic) AND insane.  So it was easy enough to exclude you “per cause.” “Yeah, so and so is a good writer/worker, but he/she is insane.”  “Difficult to work with.”  “Couldn’t be part of the team.”  “Isn’t googly.” (Follow that link if you have a strong stomach.)

I’ll never forget — pre twitter — the day I voiced a mildly non-conformist opinion in an email list for female writers.  I don’t know which was crazier: the public pile on, inferring things about me that my worst enemy couldn’t say, or the private panicked emails, saying “I agree with you, but…”

There is a term for this.  It’s preference falsification.  And in totalitarian societies it can be so total that each individual can’t figure out that his opinions are in fact the majority and only a small minority at the top actually believes the opinions they enforce.  It’s what explains Ceausescu and his equally brutal wife being beloved figures in the morning, and cooling piles of bullet-riddled meat by the afternoon.  It’s also what gave us Trump’s victory.

Since then… things have changed.

Look, I kept my peace for many years, and because I couldn’t pretend to be a liberal (because, reasons.  I know too much about the nature of the beast.  I like to sleep at night.  More importantly, I like to look at myself in the mirror in the morning.  Putting on makeup by touch is possible, but can yield inconsistent results) I pretended to be apolitical, and would let political references, jokes and barbs roll off my back.  Now, that required me to work mostly in historical fiction, of course, but that was fine.

It was only two things that allowed me come out of the political closet — besides something that was either my subconscious or perhaps the divine applying iron-clad boot to my behind — a) the existence of indie.  b) the fact that the left had gone so far they were demanding vocal endorsement.  And that I couldn’t give.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

Even after Trump’s victory most people held their social facade.  If you were in a certain set of professions you’d never (still) admit you voted for Trump.  Wild horses couldn’t make you. For one, you’re probably addicted to food on the table and a roof over your head.  For another, the left is so busy demonizing everyone who voted against Hillary, that it would be the same as stepping forward and saying “Yes, I’m racist, sexist and homophobic.”  EVEN if objectively not only are you not any of those, but there is no evidence Trump is any of those. (I was told there would be prison camps.  Honestly, worst Hitler, EVER.  Not even Hillary’s promised “adult fun camps.”  Sheesh.)

But the left has now gone as zany everywhere and publicly as it’s been for years in my field and covertly.  (As for my field it has gone…. I think it’s achieved terminal velocity on the way to insanity.)  You must loudly proclaim your hatred for Trump, you must exhibit something like Tourette’s about everything the man says and does, no matter how unimportant.  And you must at all times proclaim yourself of the body and stamp out heresy with all your being.

Of course this sends all the wrong signals.  A confident ideology doesn’t engage in heretic hunts, and tolerates the philosophical fringes.

But more importantly, what the left is doing is sending out the same signal I got loud and clear five or six years ago “you can’t pretend well enough for us to leave you alone.  You must join, or we’ll destroy you.  We’ll make sure you never work in this town/business/field/world again.  We’ll leave you nothing, not even your reputation.”

What they’re forgetting, again, is that freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Or put another way, if you take away everything because someone failed to conform PERFECTLY, then you leave people free to act the way they always wanted to.

And us, on the right?  Us, the damned?  We were never “good boys and girls.” We were just conforming enough to fake it.  A lot of us were the people who cut classes, spit in the teacher’s eye, and still had straight As.  We are the people who have spent a lot of time infiltrating YOUR organizations, just so we could survive.  And, oh, yeah, we do have a moral code.  And it’s not yours.  And you’ll never get us to kiss ass again, because you’ve proven yourselves unstable, narcissistic buffoons.

We’re evil you say?  We’re crazy?  We don’t play well with others?

Aw, shucks, honey.  That was us being good.  But you wouldn’t leave us alone.  And now many of us are coming to the conclusion the masquerade isn’t worth the reward.

We’re looking at all the work we put in not to disturb you, and the things you call us, nonetheless, and we’re going “Oh, yeah?  You think we’re bad?  You ain’t seen nothing yet.  Shiny.  Let’s be bad guys.”

The only question is how fast what I think is a majority gets there.  But the worm is already turning, and you can’t stop it.  Screaming and name calling will only increase the speed of the turn.

You’d better learn to swim, or you’ll sink like a stone.  For the times, they are achanging.

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: Baby Ruth (Bob and Nikki Book 43)

The Gene makes it back to Charlie’s in time for the birth of Jim and Hannah’s baby. You didn’t really expect Murphy to take a day off, even for such a blessed event, did you? Come along and see what Bob and the crew get up to.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love

Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?

FROM GABRIELLE MARIE: Friend of the Pack: fated mates, slow-burn, paranormal, wolf shifter romance (The Mawu Shifters Book 1)

Friend of the Pack is the first standalone book in The Mawu Shifters Series featuring strong female characters, fated mates, dual POV, and slow-burn romance.

Tucked away on the other side of the sleepy human town of Evergreen Falls lies the largest Pack of Wolf Shifters known as the Moon Pack.
As the daughter of the Alpha, Eva has known her whole life that someday it will be up to her to keep the peace and protect her packmates from threats . . . including the threat of discovery.
The problem, though, is her best friend Sky is the human son of Evergreen Falls’ Mayor.
These star-crossed childhood friends fight to stay together in a divided world that threatens to tear them apart.
When rival Packs, hidden enemies, and long-held secrets come to light, it will take everything they have to keep those they love from getting hurt.

And their world will never be the same again.

If you enjoyed the dual perspective, lyrical prose from Rebecca Ross’s Divine Rivals, or the supernatural characters from television drama Teen Wolf then you’ll love Friend of the Pack which mixes the two together with an extra dash of spice.

FROM J. L. CURTIS: Ice

Revenge is a dish best served cold… but vengeance isn’t the only thing that comes to he who waits.

Colin Graham and Lisbet Sarnov were kids when they witnessed their mining colony habitat’s destruction and his father’s murder while checking for survivors. Eighteen years later, his little payback list is almost finished when his command catches wind of unsanctioned justice, and sends him to a backwater a hundred light seconds from command HQ.

If only they’d known the coldest reaches of space held not only the last ‘prize’ he was looking for, but also a long-lost treasure he’d almost forgotten…

FROM I.M.LERNER AND CATHERINE L. OSORNIO: The Door in the Hedges (Under the Staircase – An Economic Adventure Series for Kids)

The man stood up and extended his hand.
“Welcome. Come in. I’m Professor Walter Williams.”

Mandating a minimum wage for each job sounds good, but is it really? Former officials from the city of Strait have made some good arguments to the citizens of Kirkcaldy Point, but Maggie, Maya, and Nate are not so sure. Something seems…off. The Society is nowhere to be found, and the kids don’t know who to trust. Just when all hope seems lost, an unlikely ally shows them the way.

Under the Staircase® BooksA mystery and adventure series that teaches treasured values: personal responsibility, individual liberty, and economic freedom.

Psst! Parents & Teachers: The third book in the series introduces a variety of Walter Williams’ concepts, including Self-Ownership and a Minimum Wage. Books include All It Takes Is Guts, Up from the Projects: An Autobiography, Liberty versus the Tyranny of Socialism, and much more. Under the Staircase books include examples from kids’ day-to-day lives in school, with friends, and in familiar situations.

FROM RALPH BARTHOLDT: Tank Creek: Short Essays from the Panhandle

Tank Creek is a timeless account of North Idaho’s outdoor lifestyle. With humor and passion former journalist Ralph Bartholdt captures the spirit of the Idaho Panhandle’s wild places from the Snake and Salmon rivers to the Coeur d’Alene and St. Joe mountains of the Bitterroot Range. Tank Creek chronicles with erudition and insight the experiences, memories and lore of rural inhabitants as they hunt, fish and embrace the sanctity of their surroundings.

“This is how it works and why people say fly fishing is just another of life’s mirrors: You breathe. You forget about the broken things. You let your heartbeat mark time and focus on future endeavors, count cadence, let distance and past fall away,” Bartholdt writes in “The Whole Day.”.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania

A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

FROM VAN LEDYARD: CEMENTOPOLIS

The inside joke was that they were hatchlings, genomic trash, chicks from the Pentagon henhouses. The black humor masked the hard reality that the super soldiers created at the Eau Claire Project and other black sites were now unexpectedly timing out. They faced certain — and a grisly — disintegration.

Trevelyan Moss, an Eau Claire “graduate” and a veteran of the serial wars in the western Pacific, is sent to the Navy’s Cyberwarfare outfit in Souda Bay where he meets Nepheli, the math whiz and Cretan beauty.

Moss takes an express discharge from the Navy. He will go undercover in New Racine, the half finished smart city on the shores of Lake Michigan, to take down a renegade oligarch terrorizing much of the Midwest with a fleet of driverless bomb cars called Weevils. Moss talks Nepheli into joining him along with Marcus, her teenaged son. Desperate for a new start, she agrees to go. But she’s frustrated and mystified at how little she knows about Moss’ background and his reluctance to talk about his family.

The undercover work gets Moss close to Eau Claire. And maybe – how exactly he doesn’t know — he can begin to find some answers, make some connections, find some genomic clue that will make him whole.

Nothing seems to stop Moss. Not Bad Axe Security, the oligarch’s brutal private police. Not the warring gangs in New Racine’s no-go zones. Not even double-crossing Col. Mac McKelvey, the man who had mentored Moss — controlled really — since Eau Claire days.

And it all goes horribly wrong.

Ah the smell of electric vehicle fires in the morning! In New Racine, the future ain’t what it used to be.

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: BEDS

First of all calm down. No, seriously, calm down.

Before I was aware the walking corpse was giving a speech, my phone went nuts, with people wanting to lay bets on when he’d resign.

We are, of course, in clown world colliding with a dumpster fire while both are carried at the flood, and a UFO is trying to beam the whole mess to Tartarus, so anything is possible. HOWEVER if my experience of reading the news in Pravda means anything? NOTHING will happen.

Nothing will happen. Part of your alarm comes from the fact that you either still want to hold on to some idea of normalcy, or that you’re just too sane and clean to see — much less enjoy — the full spectacle of madness on display.

You have apparently completely forgotten or re-written the spectacle of Biden’s so called 2020 campaign — aka the potemkin campaign — where, rare and controlled though his appearances were, he was… fully as crazy-stupid as he’s now.

There are arguments, in fact, that he’s always been this crazy-stupid. There was a joke in the senate that if Joe Biden got up and said “I have rabbid weasels in my pants” everyone would shrug and go “that’s Joe.” There is also an argument that at least he or his handlers were better at plagiarizing. I’m going to go with “Uh. Okay. But you know, that was probably his secretary, and they’ve been getting dumber and more illiterate on the left, because… well, because fourth generation commies are like that.” And also that his long and distinguished — splortch, giggle — career comes from the fact that yes, they really had that much control of the press.

Ah, I see that having woken up very late (don’t ask. I almost wrote last night’s dream here to give you a flavor of my nights. But staring at the ceiling took 5 hours. And this wasn’t a bad one. And no, I’m not taking melatonin. Because it’s switched to keeping me awake. Though I’ll note that the dreams with that are more amusing than the normal ones. I’m going to take to writing empires in sf. I swear.) the news has caught up with me. Or at least Ace of Spades HQ has.

I won’t do the “I was right” dance. I’ve seen this movie before. I grew up watching the family watching a movie very close to this one. And my mind doesn’t rewrite the horror of 2020 or the horror that is our politics.

To think that “speech” — ululation, screech, whatevs — yesterday was the prelude to a palace coup is to forget the times Joey Malarkey tried to fight SUPPORTIVE factory workers, or called people creative things like Dog Faced Pony Soldier (It sounds better in the original Chinese.) or not to have followed the daily gaffes (which frankly should be a website) or– Yeah, he looks older now. That’s no big surprise since by my internal clock, he’s been placed in power over us …. a thousand years ago or so. But he always sounded demented. Mostly what you hear when Joey opens his mouth is the wind howling around his empty cavern of a skull looking for his three brain cells, then lamenting because said brain cells are too busy with cupidity, greed and concupiscence to notice the hurricane.

You’d also have to forget how Ruth Badder Ginsburg, a terminal cancer patient was the most fittest and smartest woman ever, and swam laps in an Olympic pool at 5 am sharp every morning, before winning foot races against 20 year old fit males, then settling down to read the full 40,000 pages of that day’s proposed Democrat legislation, before sending it all back, annotated and proofread and competing in a triathlon before lunch. All while people with her condition and at her age were doing well to actually wake up and say a couple of words before taking their medication.

You keep trying to rewrite all this to a reality that makes any sense, as though you know, over the last four years the Junta and its sycophants in the media hadn’t proved that they have not even notional contact with reality. As if they had some concept of shame or awareness of lies.

People, this is the post modern left that believes that each person has their own personal reality, and moves around in a bubble of it, something I couldn’t even make work in a fantasy world, carefully constructed. (Though it bears some resemblance to the concept of hell in several fantasy worlds, and possibly in traditional theology.)

They have no shame in saying utterly untrue bullshit, because to them it’s true, and therefore, it’s their personal reality.

Now why Joe went out and made a disgraceful spectacle of himself? Only G-d knows, and even Himself might be scratching his head. If it was Joey’s idea, it was because his pride was aggrieved. Because his pride and self-conceit is at least comparable to Obama’s and maybe just slightly less.

If it was someone else’s idea, my guess is it’s not directed at us at all, but at some internal play and trying to extort some concession from whoever is puppetting Joe.

If they could have replaced him with Kamala — or anyone — they would have done it by now. Why they haven’t is a mystery. Look, yes, Kamala is a deep throat with a dressing of word salad, but she’s at least as competent as Joe, and has a vagina and sort of tans. They wanted her as president. They were writing paeans to her long before she tanked in the primaries.

IF THEY COULD she’d already be president.

So why can’t they? I have no idea. Either there’s dirt on her that dwarfs the deep midden in Biden’s past and family or — indulge me here — he and “doctor Jill” know where bodies are buried. What bodies could be big enough? I don’t know. If I knew I’d blow it wide open. But we’re spoiled for choice, from the Clintons through the Obamas and everything and anything in between. The dirt they keep slinging at the right? they believe it because they’re filthy. And some of that dirt we can’t even comprehend.

However, Joey is not getting replaced, unless he exits feet first. And if he exits feet first it better be natural, or Jill will make sure it all comes out even if it’s phyrric. She likes her position. She worked all her life for this. She’s going to enjoy it.

And while we’re at reading the news in Pravda: Please, I beg you for the love of all that’s holy, stop saying that Obama is manipulating everything behind the scenes. I remember Obama off the teleprompter. At best he can manipulate his toes. And that’s when not high, which I’d guess is fairly rare.

Whoever controlled him is controlling Biden? That’s possible. Probably even. But here’s the thing, from their actions while in power, I’d guess that to be… Iran? And I didn’t know they had anyone competent enough to do that.

Then again perhaps I’m overestimating the competence needed when Pravda stands ready to cover and make up stories out of whole cloth.

Fortunately Pravda is losing influence. Now if we can cure the right’s amnesia, we have a shot.

Oh, and as for Tucker’s interview with Putin: is Tucker a dunce? And do the people who credit Putin’s utterances partake the same kind of stupid, or simply want to think that dictators tell the truth? (Yes, hes’ a dictator.)

He might be nationalist. But then the USSR leaders always were. International communism was always really Russian National Communism with an international face. Which is why all communists, the world over, sang the praises of Russia.

If you believe he doesn’t want to recreate the old USSR I think less of you. And unexplained is why he didn’t play his games when Trump was in power. Yes, he played into the left’s propaganda in that interview and said that he likes Trump better. That’s by way of helping Joey both brand us as traitors and give the left a leg up on the election.

OF COURSE Putin is on the side of the left here. It allows him to run unchecked. Remember the “sanctions” on him just made him richer, and Joey kowtowing to the greens filled Russian coffers. (I’ve been yelling for how long that this was all cooked up with the Junta, to give the left a chance to grift more, and to get Putin what he wanted. Pity about Ukraine, eh?)

Again, calm down. Nothing shocking has happened. Nothing shocking will happen. This is the circus portion of our national entertainment.

Oh, yeah, all of this probably hides something real that’s happening and they don’t want us to see. Likely something truly horrifying.

I’m not going to think about that, because my dreams are already bad enough. But that’s probably all it is.

One of my minor endearing (Ah!) characteristics is that I’m digit dyslexic. Well, I’m dyslexic, dyslexic, but thanks to a very boring childhood I had to read, starting at 4, and you see words so often, you start reading them straight after a while. Except to be fair, it was spellchecker that finally got me to spell right in English. As you guys know my typos are still otherworldly.

But I transpose numbers. 345 is 543 is 435 is … You try doing complex equations like that. I mean, it’s quite possible, and I’m fast, and once I had figured out it was just digit transposing and not some baffling attack of stupidity, my math was fine. In fact, both my sons who inherited this (ah!) charming characteristic took all the math they could and some. Doesn’t surprise me. My husband’s second love is Number Theory. He had a fling with Vedic Math for two or three years (and might still play with it now and then. I pretend I don’t see, you know?) And I used to dream in math. My first boyfriend was acquired because his older brother had math books I wanted to get my hands on.

But the dyslexia and the fact I didn’t know what it was made me too hesitant to fight for a career in engineering, which was my first love. (Look, how many 8 year old girls spend a summer building rubber-band powered match box (the boxes were made of balsa wood) cars (with lego wheels connected by toothpicks) and carefully recording their weights and their speeds, and trying new ways of winding the rubber band? I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. But by 13 I’d met two math teachers who, in retrospect, were just checking the results off the end, instead of looking at what I’d done and I’d failed math twice. And I was afraid.

Maybe it’s all for the best. Oh, sure, I suspect I’d have found my way to writing science fiction anyway, and it would be harder sf, because my head would be in that head space. But it is unlikely if I had an engineering degree I’d have been willing to chuck my credentials overboard. At the time it wasn’t accepted in the US. We’d probably have bit the bullet, even though I always felt like a stranger in a strange land in Portugal (Bought the book for the title) and Dan would have moved. And the Portuguese sf scene is… not really profitable, so My stories would be in the drawer or online for free, and– Different paths. And then, as Pratchett said, our house burns down with all our children in it.

The point of this, which I got semi-lost on, is that in my thirties I had reason to doubt it was JUST the digits that scrambled around me.

So, it’s a joke in the family that they know when I hang something, be it a picture of a cabinet. No matter how much I measure, or what type of level I deploy, everything is slightly angled. (I suspect brain damage actually, because my drawing does the same. It skews just a little to the left (of all things).)

When I was in my mid thirties, we bought my favorite house, the one where I expect to wake every morning before I open my eyes: the pink house on a hill in Manitou Springs, CO.

It was labyrinthine and odd because it had been converted from three apartments to a single house just months before (Poor thing is apartments again, and her graceful balconies were stripped, more’s the pity.) And it had…. Odd things, we’ll just put it this way. Like the room next to the master bathroom, with a double vanity and…. nothing else, that the seller kept telling us would make a great dressing room.

Which it would, of course. Or, you know, a palatial bathroom. Which, since at the time we knew a handyman we could rely on, is what we chose to do.

Anyway, once he was done with the bathroom, I painted it, and then knowing myself, I went to get him, where he was fixing some issues with the kitchen, to come install the towel bars for me.

And he measured and he used the level, and he put the bar up and he…. cursed softly.

After a while, he turned to me and yelled, “You. Go away, get out of the house. I swear to G-d that measurements change around you. GO OUT OF THE HOUSE now, Chaos Woman.”

(I’ll point out the old codger — rest his soul — was normally rather fatherly to me, so that outburst was more hilarious than not.)

I went out of the house and he installed the towel bars straight.

For the rest of the time I knew him/was in his orbit, he called me Chaos Woman, and told the story to everyone.

He wasn’t exactly wrong, in a macro sense, either. I had/have a 30 year career in writing, at a time when most careers were either three books or mega bestsellers. I obviously was neither, but I wound the drunkard’s path through the so called career, and it all worked, sort of, and it still continues to. Every time a door closes, I can’t even find a window. But then part of the roof falls in and I climb out, and from there I can see a new way. It’s hard on the nerves, but it all works out. I couldn’t have plotted it. Heck, I can’t see what comes next. Indy seems limited and limiting, but I keep getting a feeling as far as fiction goes my greatest days are ahead of me.

It’s all very strange, but I’m panicky, because I don’t have a fear of success. I’m spitlessly scared of failing. So I have a few irons on the fire at all times. Some of them are strangely shaped and might be made of alien metal. And sometimes the fingernails I’m holding on to this sheer, diamond-hard wall with are mostly imaginary, yet I’m still holding, and climbing, sometimes minimally.

And it’s not because I’m better, it’s not because I’m smarter, it’s not because I work harder. All of those could be disputed and are doubtful. It might be because I’m not precisely sane, and when I’m scared I’m less so. Maybe.

But mostly, I think it’s because not only does my mind move at odd angles and bend in weird ways, and I fight like a cornered cat, and not just physically, but because I encourage chaos all around me.

Younger son and clone says the least likely thing always happens around him. I named it something different, but since my twenties, I call it “Treading the path of least probability.” It just happens naturally. And if I try to play it safe or do what’s expected, it always blows up in face in a major way. While if I take the impossible bet, reach for what’s just out of reach, jump to the roof over the busy street, it always pays off. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Again, in talking about one’s calling and how unlikely it is, this should be a characteristic assigned to some debonair pirate, some high flying trapeze artist, not to a woman who craves security and who lives mostly on her own nerves and is by nature a clinical depressive.

But perhaps because of this — Ah, now, 2k words in, she gets to the point. Shut up. At least I hope the journey was entertaining. I’m in fiction mode, and have a short hanging from the machine as we speak — I am very well suited to speak to the current times, particularly the current times and America.

Because we’re about to enter Chaos Time. And we live in Chaos Country. Even hemming us in with rules and regulations a la European fashion didn’t work. We just ran out through where they didn’t expect, and the internet that was supposed to serve the military became cats and porn and…. ultimately a major instrument of political disruption.

This is something I must talk to. I must because a number of you are as depressive as I am but have less experience of chaos. And dang it, call me Edna and paint me purple, if you guys don’t keep falling for the talk of the planners.

Oh, I don’t mean you think central planning is a good idea. If you regularly read here, you’re not in fact enamored with having experts run your life. (Or if you are, you hide it well.)

I mean that from whatever that Russian defector was, describing the USSR’s plan to destroy America, to the agenda of the WEFidiots to the newest quinquenial plan of the Junta, you guys listen to them in horror and go “It will all come true.”

Will you please give me a break? They haven’t managed to make their plans stay on track, in the realm of EVER. That defector? I can tell you that though the US took some body blows from USSR Agitprop, we took what they threw at us and folded it, spun it and mutilated, so it became something other. I could see the holes myself as he described the grand unified plan. And the others? Not a chance. Not a bloody chance.

Yeah, things can look bad, but kindly remember that since Obama, but more likely since Clinton, our own secret services have been propagandizing us and more specifically propagandizing liberty lovers and Constitutionalists into giving up.

But– Well, guys, this is the ideology that couldn’t make five year plans work in the USSR where they technically controlled everything. They can propagandize us that all their plans are working as planned. And because we don’t get the real news, but still, to an extent the filtered news — would you know the world is on fire if we didn’t have enterprising Huns informing us? Sometimes I feel I’m in the world of Puppet Masters Masquerade. Even the “right wing” news ignored much of the Texas rebellion for days, and the farmers’ revolt is a passing mention — make it look like they’re succeeding.

They’re not. Sometimes the rebellion becomes visible. The farmers’ revolt. The Canadian Convoy. The Stonk Kiddies (yes, I know BGE has opinions, and it might have been silly, but it was a revolt, and a revolt from a quarter never expected. A lot of these will be phyrric, it’s the nature of the beast.) the parents taking the schools to task.

But there are secret rebellions. There are single or small group actions going on, the only purpose of which is to make the plans go array, to make things go pear shaped for the “elites”, to stick a burr up their bottoms.

How many cashiers did you see, during mandatory mask wearing, with the mask under their nose and not attached at the bottom? Yes, one or two might have been stupid. But do you think all of them were??? How many people wore gauze veils? For every idiot driving alone and double masked there were ten of the others. How many people made it a point of getting together with friends, as big a group as possible, just smartly and were never caught? How many bars defiantly opened? Yes, some were slapped down, but all? No way. And then there’s Twitter, without which we wouldn’t even know most of this. Who had Elon buying twitter and making it a free speech platform on their bingo card? Because I didn’t. And I’m chaos woman, and can sense these things.

And how many kids are really being homeschooled, does anyone even know? How many illegals are or at least are trying to scarper back out through the border as fast as they can because the US isn’t paved with gold and the natives are testy? How many kids are lying flat? Yes, that might seem like despair, but despair turns the corner and becomes rebellion. How many of us are planting thought-bombs into strangers’ conversations, like when I pointed out to well-intentioned strangers that no, Biden was never a good man. And gave examples. (And the fact I was a nice older lady with an accent likely blew their minds.)

Their plans aren’t working. Their propaganda-entertainment arm is collapsing. And they’re not very adaptable. They believe in centralized planning because they relish order and planning. Rigid planning. Besides they think everyone is widgets and will behave as the plan calls for.

But we’re in chaos time, and we’re chaos country. And frankly the rest of the world, much to my amusement, has reached such a point it’s becoming too chaotic for them to even lie to themselves it’s working.

And there’s a great anger. Across the world, though the US is perhaps a little angrier. You see, we’re used to living better. We’re used to each generation improving. Despair is not natural to us. We’re not Russians. To us things don’t “get worse.” And besides we can tell — bless Trump for pulling down the masks — that most of the crazy is being imposed from above. America, improbably, despite all the propagandizing, the “educating”, the “opinion shaping” is still America. And we don’t like being told what to do. We don’t like smug bastards. And we don’t recognize any self-styled “elites.” We were fooled by experts for a while, but the ex-spurts used up all their credibility in that last insane push.

Angry people are unpredictable. Yes, that can work against them. But history tells that when a vast mass is furious, chaos descends.

Let’s pray — not joking. If you’re an atheist or agnostic, pray anyway. Imagine the novelty, if He exists and hears you — that it doesn’t take the path of the French revolution, and Madame Guillotine doesn’t run till the country is exhausted.

I’m naturally a sans coulotte. I realized that when I found myself cheering rebellion, even when self-destructive. Something in me is angry enough to set everything on fire and warm my hands as civilization burns.

BUT I am rational. And I hope not evil. Unbridled rebellion burns the good, the bad, and everything in between. To an extent France never recovered from the French revolution. (The fact it was run initially by the planners doesn’t help.) And in a time when we’re short on people, particularly people with specialized knowledge, we can’t kill them all and let G-d sort it out. An — ah — operation paperclip might well be needed, and people rational enough to institute it.

Now, the left thinks if they destroy everything, then people will naturally turn to communism. It’s one of those plans that cannot — CANNOT — naturally come true. Yes, yes, supposedly it happened in Russia, and Cuba and such. But it didn’t. Not really. Even after destroying everything they had to take power by force. Which in America won’t go so well. (“behind every blade of grass” comes to mind.) Even if the idiot Junta thinks it will.

Even at the height of the mass-industrial-age, when theoretically at least fully centralized society would be what people would naturally support, they had to impose communism by force.

Communism, btw, in the left’s beau-ideal of the USSR was brought down by … typewriters. Fax machines put the final period to it. It can’t survive decentralized communication. They’re holding on by their fingernails only in countries that they took to the nineteenth century and hold there. North Korea and Cuba come to mind. But America isn’t small. H*ll the world isn’t small and humans aren’t simple.

We’re chaos apes. We’ve confounded the plans of much, much, much better planner than they are.

Chaos is just beginning. It’s going to get worse. Or better, however you picture it. It’s going to feel like the world is shaking itself to pieces, but what it’s doing is shaking itself free.

For a hundred years the planners have pretended to be in control. Now we can see the sad and pathetic bond villains behind the curtain.

We will not eat the bugs. We will not live in the fifteen minute cities concentration camps. If they take away our cars, we’ll build new ones, and heaven help us because even we don’t know what they’ll be powered with. Some bright boy will make Heinlein’s Shipstone. Just you watch. If they try to take the internet down, we’ll find ways around it.

We have only just begun. And we are chaos. And with this chaos, we’ll rebuild civilization.

I was alluding to something yesterday. It wasn’t exactly being black pilled, but it was something that is scaring the living daylights out of me. Not just for the US either, but for the world.

I haven’t been sleeping well. A lot of us haven’t been. I think most of us are sensing this subconsciously.

We are, facing a perfect storm. And it is worldwide. And I can’t see or feel a path through it much less what comes out at the other side.

No, this is not precisely true. I had a — not a vision — but a strong feeling; I was vouchsafed a certainty that America comes out the other end of this as America, and closer to what it was meant to be than it was in 2019. Now, like all woo woo, this might be all in my head and wishful thinking, but it was given unasked, before I knew there was any reason to ask. As it turned out, it came to me in the very last day before lockdown, in Colorado.

Sometimes this is all I hold onto in the dark of night, at 3 am, when I’m staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep or think clearly about anything.

Because I know what we’re facing, I know what we’re going through, and I understand completely there is no way back.

Let me make things very clear. First, if you feel like the world is falling apart, that’s because it is. Second, the world that is falling apart, and the US that’s shaking apart like a ship in a storm is not the US as founded. It’s the socialist, statist, center out, top down model of the twentieth century, now almost 100 years old.

I don’t care how how misty colored your memories of your childhood, the America you grew up in was more or less intentionally subverted from the design of the founders and the Constitution. In many ways — at least at the culture level — we’ve been reclaiming it for 20 or so years now. And before you squawk the insane is mostly being pushed from up to down, from center out, and is a symptom of the socialists losing power and trying to destroy what they can’t hold. (Though it started before, at the behest of the USSR, their beau ideal.) But you see the real America coming back in the fact that we’re no longer swallowing the dictates from above with no skepticism, the fact that they keep losing control of the financial system (particularly the gig economy, which yes is why they also hate it.) or gun rights. Look at the latest insanity they’ve been trying to push in the culture war and how hard the push back is.

Now America is not coming back because it wants to. It was so far submerged that it wouldn’t ever see the light of day again. But the fact is that the same way the technology changed so that it encouraged both the late 19th/early 20th century’s illusions of the efficacy and superiority of central government control and silencing of the “uneducated populace”, it changed again, so that now technology encourages a society more dispersed, more weighed towards the individual, not the same but closer to the society of the 18th than of the 20th century.

And to an extent we are prepared to go through this storm better than the rest of the world for a variety of reasons.

But first, let me outline the storm:

The first front driving the storm is the decay of what I’ll call “the blue model” from the color used for the leftist states in the US (and yes, I fully appreciate the irony of their not wanting to be associated with the color red. And manipulating things accordingly.) The blue model is decaying because even with the super-centralized technology that provided it the illusion of working, it never worked very well.

Marxism is a poor fit for the real world, and what it does — whether in national or international model — is destroy productivity and the economy, as well as human competence at anything. One part of this is hiring for political compliance. If you hire for any reason other than competence, competence decays over time. Even if you start with the best of the best, in four generations, you have people too stupid to pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the on the heel. We are now, all over the western world, 4 to six generations into the soft-socialist hiring system, which hired for Marxism and compliance with the system.

Marxism’s sheer inability to produce or create was masked by the US not being fully taken over, and having remarkable ability to produce and create, and bolstering the entire world’s productivity and production. Partly, mind you, by being the consumer in the economic engine of the world, at least for things that the third world can sell.

The second front of the storm is that unfortunately the color revolution in 2020 put into power people who believe the way to make the rest of the world rich is to make the US poor. This idea that the US is rich because other places are poor, and vice versa, is an article of faith with them. It was in my kids’ schoolbooks 15 years ago.

So having seized power, and not liking the US very much — I mean we refused to vote them in and made them fraud — they decided to make the rest of the world very rich. By destroying our economy.

The problem is that economics doesn’t work that way. So, when we stop having the money to say buy trinkets from China, China collapses.

We aren’t doing well but it’s one of those things: when America coughs, the world catches pneumonia.

So the rest of the world also dependent on the blue model and convinced of it — to an extent we spread it to the world after WWII under the amiable impression we were thwarting communism — is falling apart much harder. It’s part of what’s fueling the farmers revolt.

Part of what’s driving the blue model falling apart is that since the USSR fell, the left has been running from insanity to raving insanity. And now it’s become obvious to everyone. They lowered the mask and revealed their monstrous face, and they’re not even aware of it, or that we can see it. so they keep trying crazier and crazier stuff.

The next front of the storm is what’s driving the ability to fight against the blue model: the more distributed production and communication model. The internet, three d printing (in its infancy), online commerce; places like this blog.

All of it, every bit of it is accelerating and reverberating other change, a lot of it unforseen — except by some of us — 20 years ago. Because of it there will be a commercial real estate crash in the US, and big cities are dying and– and– and–

At the end of this everything will be changed including the way we marry. Though it will be going back to an older model, where people worked at home, or where work was a whole-family endeavor, so… not totally unknown.

But right now? The change is so fast, so dizzying and so unpredictable to most people — and definitely to the sclerotic pretend experts whose ideal world is circa the early 20th century — that it’s shaking every structure in our world like a terrier with a rat.

Since this is hitting institutions and governments controlled by 4 generation plus Marxists, the only thing they can be guaranteed to do is the worst possible thing. The craziest one. The one that will make everything worse.

There is a storm coming. It’s the perfect storm. We can all feel it.

I have my… vouchsafing, but I can’t trust it. It’s woo-woo. And you certainly shouldn’t trust second hand woo-woo.

I know we are indeed going to eat the bread the devil kneaded. it might be a millennial storm, as far as difficult transitions go.

But if I have to go through this, I’ll go through this in the US. And I’m glad I chose to throw my lot with y’all. I’m glad my kids were raised American.

Because of our culture, because of our funding documents, we’re more likely to come out of this okay than any other place in the world.

There is even a chance we’ll come back more like ourselves than we’ve been for 100 years.

Yes, everything is falling apart, but birth always has pain and blood, and there’s a good chance this is a rebirth of liberty.

It is our honor, it is our very great privilege to preserve liberty for future generations. To preserve this liberty-born country for future generations.

Yes, it’s going to hurt like a mother. But such a prize is worth the pain.

Be not afraid.