The Great Breakdown

It is time once more to talk about how things go down the tubes. How the proverbial excrement hits the proverbial rotating object. How the center cannot hold.

There are two proximate reasons for it. The first is that my husband, the apolitical one, as we’re considering a new-to-us car was tying himself in knots about a car that could be adapted to run on fuels of convenience, like fry-oil, say. When I realized this was his source of confusion, I got confused. “Do you have some reason to expect a meteor to hit the Earth? Or–“

“No, no. But if they fraud their way in the way they’re going–“

I had to laugh. You see, I’ve lived through a collapse. It never hit bottom, and it turned around very vast after 78/79, but it hit low enough particularly where most people I knew lived. And it wasn’t remotely like that.

Granted it was a peculiar collapse as we started at the national-socialist “very poor” but the gears used to grind us are the same being applied now: raging inflation and encouragement of crime and criminals and disorder in general. Two more we’re also suffering from, in our case deliberately, were not deliberate then, I think (Though they might have been. And they might not be exactly deliberate now, just a manifestation of their rats in head): the oil crisis of the seventies, which I presume was the same thing as all over the world. I’d say that couldn’t be deliberate for international communists, but when you consider the only thing that Russia makes money on internationally… well. The other being inflicted on us I’m almost sure was accidental in Portugal: the dumping into the country of a very large, un-digestable or un-digestible quickly population. I think it was accidental in Portugal because the left being massive racists worldwide and bizarre dreamers besides, probably anticipated that white people would abandon the African colonies they handed over to Russia and its Cuban mercenaries, BUT they couldn’t imagine that black people, and barely acculturated to the 20th century tribal people from Africa would also leave and come to Portugal by all means possible and some that still seem impossible in retrospect, in a massive sauve qui peut.

You see, the left tends to assume that people who tan are natural communists and will embrace their regime with joy, forgetting that even among the non-literate ones, there is a lot of rumor and talk, and the millions of people who tan the left has killed around the world whose relatives and friends talked.

Anyway, I’ve lived with the same gears grinding a society and the same kind of lunatics in power. Now it was a smaller country, which is good and bad. It will have some effect but what effect it has is difficult to quantify. I’d say the greater ease — qualified by the fact the country didn’t have even A highway system of any kind — of transporting goods is nullified by the fact that the population in general is more credulous and trusting in authority, and more likely to allow the nose of officialdom in. Besides the fact that officialdom is just much closer, kind of like in our big cities.

So I watched the coming apart. And yes, it was more sudden at the onset due to an open revolution which removed existing institutions, or changed the way they worked so no one was sure of the instructions. (Instructions unclear. Insert porcupine where?)

It wasn’t as though a meteor hit. It wasn’t the end of the world as we know it. Not fast, not slow, not in the mid term.

And then we come to the second catalyst for this post: the closest I’ve heard the effect explained, ever: The Ghetto-ization Of American Life.

Honestly, I’d argue this has been going on since 2009 and over the various Summers of Recovery. There was a momentary respite with Trump, until the Covidiocy took hold, but before that, in real terms, we’d become a little poorer each year. Note not in monetary terms. We made the same, or a little higher money every year. Except every year things cost more or were harder to find. Our reserves got stripped more and more every year, and things that should have been easy to find/source/hire someone to do became either difficult to find, expensive, or impossible. And where I was living at the time, daily life became more and more difficult and fraught. Our little grocery store was robbed. We had trouble finding stuff that had been easy before. Etc.

The list in the article is this one:

1. The residents can’t afford to live elsewhere.

2. Everything is a rip-off because options are limited and retailers / service providers know residents have no other choice or must go to extraordinary effort to get better quality or a lower price.

3. Nothing works correctly or efficiently. Things break down and aren’t fixed properly. Maintenance is poor to non-existent. Any service requires standing in line or being on hold.

4. Local governance is corrupt and/or incompetent. Residents are viewed as a reliable “vote farm” for the incumbents, even though whatever little they accomplish for the residents doesn’t reduce the sources of immiseration.

5. The locale is unsafe. Cars are routinely broken into, there are security bars over windows and gates to entrances, everything not chained down is stolen–and even what is chained down is stolen.

6. There are few viable businesses and numerous empty storefronts.

7. The built environment is ugly: strip malls, used car lots, etc. There are few safe public spaces or parks that are well maintained and inviting.

8. Most of the commerce is corporate-owned outlets; the money doesn’t stay in the community.

9. Public transport is minimal and constantly being degraded.

10. They get you coming and going: whatever is available is double in cost, effort and time. Very little is convenient or easy. Services are far away.

11. Residents pay high rates of interest on debt.

12. There are few sources of healthy real food. The residents are unhealthy and self-medicate with a panoply of addictions to alcohol, meds, painkillers, gambling, social media, gaming, celebrity worship, etc.

13. Nobody in authority really cares what the residents experience, as they know the residents are atomized and ground down, incapable of cooperating in an organized fashion, and therefore powerless.

Number 13… maybe. But the rest? it’s absolutely what happens in these circumstances. Little by little by little. Each year is just slightly worse than the last.

I’m here to tell you two things: there a point that people have had enough. It’s just impossible to predict when. In Portugal it was a crazed attempt to consolidate power by arresting everyone to the right of outright communist. The arrest of the socialists panicked people, even though “great reasons” for it were advanced, etc.

Here I’d guess it would be something like trying to lock us down for bird flu (you can see them wanting to) or “climate emergency.”

Already you can tell their attempts at getting a summer of love going aren’t working, because people find the bizarre obsession with Palestine… bizarre. And people remember terrorism and which side of the isle does it. And 10/7 was far too raw and obvious even with their attempts to deflect.

But I don’t have a crystal ball, and I can’t tell you what will be the last drop. I’ll point out of all the causes declared in the Declaration of the Independence, the one that got people moving and doing something was… a fee on official documents.

Of the multiple abuses and grinding that Canada has endured, so far the only thing that got the truckers to rebel was the jab mandate. And once that was withdrawn, they went back to sullen acceptance of insanity.

What will do it here? Only G-d himself knows. More importantly, what of a hundred little rebellions will make a difference in the end? Only G-d himself knows.

Unbeknownst to most of us fed “the revolutionary war as a story” there were a bunch of false starts, before it took hold. And when it took hold was probably the most improbable of the issues.

Unless a revolution is a show imposed from abroad, they tend to be erratic and frankly a little stranger. And unpredictable after they start. When the dice is in the air, only G-d knows which way it will land, even if the inherent culture and population influence it.

Which is why most of us who are still sane hope this can be resolved in the election. That we, MIRACULOUSLY come out in enough numbers they can’t fraud. It is worth voting and trying it, even if it will TAKE A MIRACLE (I’m not naive) because the alternative could go unimaginably bad.

Or it could not. Portugal never recovered all the way past socialism (and are right now in the paws of a Communist/Green cohalition, last I checked, though a slightly defanged, euro one, more like our Democrats than anything else) but it did recover from the very bad times. And it bounced back with a series of demonstrations all over the country that scared the “elites” enough to stop stomping on the face of the economy.

Law enforcement still sucked, and the inflate the currency to escape debt plan of the PIIGS continued through the EU assimilation. And now to a greater extent, they’re living from the savings and land of previous generations. They’re selling their patrimony to foreigners and most can no longer afford to live in their own country.

However, for a moment late seventies to early eighties, it recovered. And it recovered unimaginably fast. Once the throttling rope was removed, the economy started to breathe again. (And everyone got a little or a lot richer than they’d been under national socialism, too.)

I’m not under the impression that our “elites” will be smart enough to get scared if there’s a series of vast demonstrations. But who knows? They almost did with the Tea Party. Almost. And that was pre masks falling down and most people distrusting officialdom.

Or it could be something else. So far they’ve managed to throttle two would be trucker strikes, mostly by deploying the three letters. But that only works so long, you know?

I’m all out of crystal balls. I don’t know when the tip over comes. I know it might be past the end of my life, particularly if it turns out I only have ten years or so. (This would be weird, since my family tends to live at a minimum to their eighties, but two members of my generation went in their late fifties and early sixties, so it’s not out of possibility.) Or it might come tomorrow. Though I doubt it. I think everyone is holding his breath till the election. Which means any tampering with that could get ugly fast. (This is why I’m not planning any trips in November. Not a single one. And I’d advise the same to you. And do your Christmas shopping early.)

One of the pressures the left isn’t seeing because they drink their own ink is something I’ve been observing in my own circle. Why Are There So Many Americans That Can’t Find A Job Even Though They Are Desperate To Be Hired?

They’re believing the official figures, and honestly puzzled as to why people don’t believe the economy is great, but I’ve been watching the unemployment creep up in my circles.

It was bad under Obama, but it’s now catastrophic. I’ve never, in my adult life, see so many of my friends get laid off and being unable to find work for months and months. Sometimes something shows up, eventually, but it’s not a given, and people are running through all possible resources plus some while looking. Older people, a year or so older than I are often just giving up and taking social security, putting more pressure on the already strained system.

Again, I don’t know when it cracks or if it will be peaceful or insane, but it literally can’t go on, and sooner or later, something becomes “intolerable.” Maybe something political, like jailing the opposition. Or something financial, like raising interest rates again. Or something crazy, like forbidding meat/killing most meat animals. Or something dictatorial like another attempted lockdown.

Could be anything really, and our “elites” are crazy-stupid enough to do all of that and even dumber things.

My guess is if we can just get the boot off our necks, the recovery will be unimaginably fast.

But until that happens there isn’t going to be a sudden reversal to the middle ages.

We just, each of us, become a little poorer. Have a little less choice. Every day.

This is already happening. I realized recently that there really aren’t 24/7 diners (or grocery stores) left anywhere. Are those essential for my well being? Well, no. but they are things I enjoyed greatly. For most of our married life, I calmed my fears of growing overseas by telling myself that we’d go by Pete’s Kitchen on the way back from the airport, as a special treat. This was possible at any hour of the day and night.

Heck, between midnight and two in the morning, in Denver, Pete’s Kitchen was like a gathering of every writer in the area. Like going into a convention, I’d walk to my table to a smattering of “oh, hi Sarah.” And plotting sessions with Dan or son would be interrupted for industry discussions with colleagues.

But even our little respites — weekend drive somewhere. Cheap restaurant meal (I LIKE diners, okay?). The occasional fair, or small purchase — are becoming rarer as we simply can’t afford them as often as we used to. Christmas gifts will likely be at least half homemade as a combination of “expensive and can’t find what I want for x.” And we might have to cut Son of Silvercon this year. (We’re really trying not to, but it’s a combination of time and money.)

In my case it’s also tied in to not writing as much, I admit. or writing on an epic I can’t publish yet. I must work on both/and. But that was after 2009 too. Until the year of the six books in a year broke me utterly, and then I couldn’t do it at all.

Anyway, things become hard to find/too expensive. You accept reductions in your lifestyle. At first little ones, then slowly bigger and bigger ones.

It’s never a “and now everything breaks at once.” Look, even blasted places as Cuba or Somalia still exist at a level of modernity. It’s just you get used to living in ruins, and subsisting on very little.

Now there’s reasons that worked in the places it did. I don’t think it works in America.

For one we’re used to a certain standard and their attempts to sell misery as chic are failing. (Outside crazy people and college campuses. BIRM.) For another because they’re pushing much too far too fast. And they don’t realize they’re doing it in the open. For years they destroyed every institution and hollowed out every guarantee of equality under the law, but they did it undetected and no one who didn’t run into it head first knew.

Now… it’s in the open.

If I have to guess — do I? — the turn around comes first very slowly (we’re already there. The sullen resistance to their insanity, in this land, has gotten to the point of having physical weight) and then suddenly.

The best thing would be an election miracle. But it would take a miracle.

Until then, we each get a little poorer, a little more limited every day. The nation gets a little rustier, a little more worn out. On and on and on.

Until it flips.

The Small Subtle Poisons

Imagine you were a crazy person who actually believes all the statistics that are collected, as well as books written by alarmist idiots (rich alarmist idiots, mind you) like Paul Ehrlich are G-d’s holy writ, handed down from mount infallible to your tiny little mind.

And imagine this is around the fifties, and you look around all these families with four and five kids a piece, and you think this means there is a population bomb and ahrgle bargle, gasoline gargle, you’re all going to diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie when the population bomb goes off and reeeeeeeeeee!

You could stand at the corner and scream non stop that people should stop having kids, but that wouldn’t work. At best people would point and laugh. At worse they would give you the much deserved beating of a lifetime.

Or, if you are the type of learned idiot, who has connections, you could start ensconcing yourself in institutions and, more importantly, the highly centralized centers of communication and entertainment media in this country, and from there slowly and gently — shall we say painlessly — poison the minds of the young so that they will OF COURSE decide not to have children. Because they’re “smart” and “educated” and, of course “of a higher class.”

Humans being social apes, you can sell almost anything to them as higher group social signaling. I mean, look at the things that have been sold to humans as denoting higher social class, from pallor so white it required the taking of small dosages of arsenic, to wearing miniature ships on your head (that had to hurt) to the bizarrely convoluted garments of various eras, to living in a big ol’ drafty palace where all the food arrived cold, and where you had to bankrupt yourself and your estates to remain, to the twiggy-thinness of the eighties, to sterilizing yourself and destroying your future …. today.

And that’s how a childless lifestyle, and frankly voluntary extinction was sold.

Oh, they tried the direct method too. Showing pictures of mismanaged third world countries and assuring you that’s where we’d be without serious population control; or showing you pictures of children in Africa, starved by their kleptocrat rulers and pretending that this is the result of your having enough to eat and having children.

Somehow it never worked or never very well. Like convincing people “rationally” that we were running out of fossil fuels.

In fact, like the “climate crisis” they can only terrify the extremely neurotic, the borderline autistic, and people so smart that in everyday lives they function like complete idiots, and can be convinced of everything that someone sells with enough gusto. I.e. no matter how much they scream and stomp, only a small portion of the population falls for it.

The rest continue to live in a sane way and know that fossil fuel is not scarce. The exploration and sale of it is being strangled in its crib by the malevolent idiots in power. Like food distribution in Africa.

Because when things are presented frontally people have defenses against the bloody stupid. Or at least most people do.

There are signs. Like, when I was in high school they gave us the contracts in which we promised — pinky swear — to never have children in 11th grade. By my kids’ generation they were presenting it in the seventh, trying to get in below the age of even mild reason.

Of course those don’t work, even when you get kids to sign them because they want good grades. Because kids aren’t stupid, and at some gut level you know contracts signed under duress aren’t valid.

Ah, but then there is the slow poison, and the intimations of social signaling.

So… We’ve been watching a lot of old mysteries/thriller series in the evening. By “we’ve been watching” you should as always understand that what this means is that Dan is watching them, because this is his activity of choice when his brain is fried from real work, and I’m doing the next day’s blog (as you can tell from time of posting, not recently, but that’s because of sleep disturbances. Meds are being adjusted.) I get bits here and there, between work, enough to get the gist. I mean, these are not high-demand shows (no tv show is, really. Colombo, maybe, but how long ago was that?)

Because my brain is divided and squirreling on other stuff, back and forth, it took a while to sink in, and in fact I didn’t see it at all. Dan did. And then I reviewed it through my head and went “Oh. Oooooooh.”

Two days ago, early morning, as I was getting dressed, Dan said, “You do realize that these shows, none of the “aspirational” married couples have children? Even the happily married ones have a dog or a cat, and if asked about children laugh and say it’s not for them. The only children are either conceived by single women in abusive relationships, or are the children of divorced mothers who obviously had bad marriages? Children are always associated with poverty and abuse.”

I reviewed it my head, and yep. It is exactly like that. Plus, mind you, the wife and the husband usually both work, the husband in some sort of corporate or high stress career and the wife makes JUST as much, and her job is just as vital, but the wife works at some artsy fartsy field, from outright art to catering, to custom cakes, or whatever. But she’s massively successful — everyone of them is — and makes a lot of money, and they both go out to eat or get take out, or cook GOURMET meals all the time, and dress in the dernier crie of fashion, and look down on the poor dumb peasants who don’t live like them.

Upper class. Totally unrealistic, bizarrely self involved upper class.

Yes, yes, I know. You’re all laughing at me now, “TV shows are unrealistic, news at 11.”

But that’s not the point. The point is that they’re all unrealistic in the exact same way. Like, they’re all reading from the same song book and only one song will be allowed, sung in perfect harmony.

I’m not proposing there is a conspiracy — though heaven knows, there might be, as recently it came out there’s yet another incarnation of the journolist, this time with the rabid left and the Never Trumper “right” (they must be so proud to be included! I hope they realize they’re still on the elimination list, and ahead of us at that) deciding how to report things to make it so that Potatus can fake a win in November. (Selling their country for a mess of attaboys. Pottage at least you can eat.) — but a prospiracy. These people who control what you see are hired and promoted by the media-news-entertainment-complex because they are either true believers or so ambitious they’ll sell their grandmother to an Havana brothel for a crust of bread, or a bit of social approval.

I.e. they’re not pushing this nonsense because they want to save the world — though some of them are probably stupid or smart enough to (the extremes really touch in this case) — but because they really believe these things they put in fiction. It couldn’t — wouldn’t — be so pervasive if they hadn’t internalized it.

And the problem is that the serving of poison in small measures works, where screaming at people won’t work.

It has been established that our Neolithic brains don’t process very well the idea that what we see on the screen isn’t real. And we internalize a lot of it as having happened to us, or as being our real social circle.

So, for instance, we tend to include characters of frequently watched sitcoms in our count of people we see every day. And we will describe events and things we saw on TV as having happened to us. (Why I don’t hold against Hillary describing disembarking in Sarajevo in a hail of bullets. And as for FJB his dementia has scrambled his brain, and he was always a filthy liar, but seriously, at this point the barrier really is gone in his mind, and he probably really believes Ol’ Uncle Bosie as eaten by cannibals, because he saw it in some show in the forties.)

And so, insensibly, our young people are internalizing that having children means being very poor the rest of their lives, or getting divorced. And women are internalizing that wanting children means they’re abused.

Children are still happening. Weirdly, this means they’re happening more concentrated. I.e. fewer families have children, but those that do have large families. Because they are stubborn and mullish enough to buck the trend. Which also means the future presents itself with four feet stuck in the ground and screaming “you can’t make me.”

But even those of us who raised children (granted my body didn’t allow us many) are going to lose much of the next generation to this subtle propaganda.

Yes, many of us said the reason that the birth rate is falling is not that the new generation is deprived compared to their distant ancestors. But then we’re not in the stone age, and if you try to raise ten children in a grass hut in the middle of the field, social services will come and take them away. However, and more importantly, young people all have, at the back of their heads, the certainty that if they have children their lives are over.

How many times have you seen the “studies” on things like raising a child to 18 is a quarter million or a half a million dollars? We were enormously flattered by these when we were raising ours. Because heaven knows, you feel pinched and exhausted (when they’re toddlers) and you feel like at least you’re saving that much. But is it true? Is it ever true? I know that we didn’t make enough to pour that much into each kid. No way. It would be more than 10k per kid per year, and you’d have to count “lost wages” if I were in a well-paying job, instead of staying home and trying to be published in that. And you’d have to not count all the money I saved by buying used furniture and refinishing, buying the ingredients and making food, buying thrift store clothing, etc.

Now, yeah, the kids did cost time, and I was in one of those artsy-fartsy jobs that don’t pay for decades. Eventually they might (or might never) but they don’t pay much while you’re breaking in.

And yes, we were very poor for a long time, but honestly? We’d have been even without the kids. Maybe poorer, because the kids counted as our entertainment system for a long time. (No, seriously. Now I’m not saying everyone has enormously amusing children, but we did.)

But the studies, the talk, the shows, all assure young people their lives will be over if they have even one or two kids.

I didn’t realize this, until one of you said it, but the lifestyle being sold as aspirational is “College student with money.” The marriage is just like living together in college, but both of you are making pots of money. And this is sold as what everyone should be doing.

Now– Does that lifestyle sound great? Sure. Though Dan and I never partied as college students (since — back when this was possible — both of us did college very cheaply by keeping high grades) but we did have our first six years of marriage as a sort of poor-man’s version of this. And when I was working as a high-rent version of this.

The thing is it’s not as fun as you think. The work in your twenties if you are in a high-demand, high-pay position (which wasn’t artsy-fartsy for me, more soul killing) is brutal because everyone expects you to do 12 hours, no paid overtime. So the eating out, the clothes, etc? Well, we did it, because we had no time to do anything else. And yeah, we had a group of friends who were like us, and we went to comedy clubs and music shows, and movies with them. But I was usually too exhausted to enjoy any of it. And at the end of the year, we had almost no money left.

More importantly, and left out of these shows which shows people in their forties living this lifestyle: it wears out. It palls.

The subtle poison won’t sell itself for more than a generation. Because not having kids is an ugly lifestyle as you age. Yes, I know. There are social services and charitable organizations. Do you want to count on them as you age?

We’re not seriously impaired yet. In some things, we are very much like people in their thirties, and on the good days I still do that level of work, no problems. But Dan’s knees have given out (we’re finally trying to get back on track on the replacement that the lockdowns derailed) and in physical work, I do about half what I think is my normal rate, so things take forever. (I have a list. From yard work, to painting, to tuck pointing, but it will probably take the whole summer, instead of a couple of weeks.)

But there are days, and there are times, already, that if we couldn’t call on one of the sons to help me take a piece of furniture downstairs, or to come help when we tried to bring an exercise machine in ourselves, and Dan fell and literally can’t get up, and I don’t know if he broke something. (Seriously. That was terrifying, because the treadmill was across our door, and he was outside. I had to lock the cats, then go around to even see if it looked like he broke something — he hadn’t –) Without the kid dropping everything and coming over to lend a hand (thank heavens he works from home) we’d have had to call the fire department and the ambulance and wait.

I’m not going to say we’re in big trouble yet. We always did stupid things. We’re not old enough to be in bad trouble. But we can see old age from where we are and the vulnerabilities and dangers of it.

Now, I’m the last person to rag on anyone who for good and sufficient reason chose not to have kids. (And good and sufficient reason includes “because no.”) Or anyone who tried to have kids and couldn’t. We were almost in that boat. And though I got married in my early twenties, I was an old maid by village standards, and I am also not going to rag on anyone who never found anyone to marry or stay married to.

However, it’s not a dream lifestyle where you get to be a college student with money forever, as the shows sell it. Eventually old age comes to us all. And while having children is not a guarantee of having some help, (we’re really very lucky that for now sons are within driving distance and one close-ish) it is more likely than if you don’t.

Sacrifices to raise them? I guess??? Though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly. I lost years of life and tons of hair over their schooling, but that was mostly because I was stupid and thought I couldn’t homeschool.

Still, their sales job, the subtle poison of “no children is better” is working. And though even government shills and some establishment lunatics are waking up and realizing that the “overpopulation” let alone the “population bomb” were likely always snow jobs, and the correction has been disastrous, they’re having trouble turning the boat around.

Partly because the poison continues, and is out there in re-runs too. And partly because when you establish that kind of social signaling in the culture “children are low class” it’s really hard to reverse. China, who, being China, forced it at first, now can’t overcome the “one child is plenty” expectation of the culture. And this is China, who if you remember, we were assured was in irreversible population explosion, such that if there was a line of Chinese jumping off a cliff, more would be born in line so it would never run out.

The rest of us…

The invasion over the border is giving people the idea the rest of the world is overpopulated for sure. But like high prices giving the idea that fossil fuels are scarce, this is not true. None of it is true.

Not happy with making our children into useless pensioners, we’re stealing the third world’s children to do the same to them. In their wake are left empty countries who can’t do anything, because the young people have left. Not quite fully visible yet, because as in most first waves of migration, it’s mostly young males. The females are left behind for now, as old-maids and functional widows even if married. And some of the older people are thirty and forty. But in ten years it will be obvious.

(BTW I never understood this part of the population bomb gospel. Mostly it wanted the first world to stop reproducing. But didn’t they realize that just meant we’d import people, and the total would be more or less the same? I did by 35. I wrote that story. Couldn’t sell it of course. I’m now amazed I was stupid enough to think I could.)

Because this fall in population is worldwide. Partly because the convincing by entertainment affects the entire world. Everyone watches American and English shows. Our left never understands that.

The more far-seeing population experts are now screaming about a catastrophic population drop, and extinction level event.

It’s funny I could see this twenty five years ago, when they thought I was crazy and tried to shout me down. Yeah, I know, Cassandra didn’t get half the beating she deserved.

Is it early enough to reverse it? Who knows? How low can we go before we can’t hold a technological civilization? Who knows?

It’s stupid. It’s bizarre. The entire species was convinced to commit slow suicide. Still is being.

Not by sudden catastrophe, not by preaching and raving on the street corners, but by slow dripping poison, convincing us that the next generation was just too much trouble and too expensive, and that if we didn’t give them life, we could live forever, young and golden in the isle of the blest.

I have no counter to this, except that we need to write stories of families, stories of happy parenthood. And we need to be open enough to explain how having kids was worth it — probably the biggest challenge and the best experience we ever had — and how humanity is worth it and worth investing in.

Oh, and how no one is perfect, childless or parent, and we’re all broken and do the best we can. And that’s the best we can hope for.

We need to believe and invest in life. Either creating it or adopting it and guiding it. (And I don’t mean legally. We’ve covered that.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m human and I’m for the humans. I don’t care if beavers, or lobsters, or insects are better.

I’m #teamhuman all the way. #teamhuman is worth it.

It might be too late. It might be hopeless. But grandma always said “While there’s life, there’s hope.”

Go and work for Team Human. Go work for the future. Hug a young ‘un today and tell them they’re worth it.

A Coffee For All Seasons

Okay, my first question is: What were they thinking? No, seriously, what were they thinking?

Yes, I know why they named it The Brain Coffee, and it ties to one of their epic tales, as usual, but obviously this should have been 4 season coffee.

Why? Well, let me explain. King Harv’s sent me a testing package of Brain Coffee. This was useful, as at the moment for some reason, my body decided I don’t need to sleep anymore, and between insomnia and nightmares, I have considered in fact drilling a hole in my head and pouring the coffee in.

Anyway, the more I tried it out the more I was amazed at how misnamed it is.

I started with unadulterated coffee. It’s got a lot of body, and the body is immediately present. It starts out at a high volume, right at the start of the sip, presenting initially as dark, earthy, and with a smoky bitterness most reminiscent of wood smoke. Then there is a blueberry note, arriving mid-taste. It sits in the background but doesn’t resolve in clarity till later. Even more present in the background is cinnamon and a kind of sweet cinnamon flavor, like a cinnamon pastry. That is even present mid. A cinnamon forward baked good.

The feeling was of camping in the woods, early spring, with the big sky above and morning breaking all pink and orange in the East and you’re sitting by your wood fire, eating a lovely blueberry pastry for breakfast. At the end there is a sort of savory taste, very light, kind of like you just got some beef broth hotting up to sip before your hike, and you’re smelling that.

Sweetening with sugar reins in that big earthy bitterness of the front end, but leaves the hardwood flavor intact. Actually it makes it easier to pick out, because it’s not buried in the smokey forward.

It also changes how the blueberry presents. Sugar brings out the tartness and makes that background blueberry really pop and have almost like a luscious sort of sensation.. You know how when you’re eating really fresh berries and you get the tartness at the back of the tongue that makes them kind of more-ish? You can even still taste that cinnamon pastry note, but I don’t feel the sugar brings it out. In fact on the back end it buries it a little because that juicy blueberry note really takes over.

Sugar also all but kills the beef broth note. It’s there on the back end, and actually plays well with the blueberry weirdly, though I understand leaving that off the package, because it seems incongruous, but it’s actually very pleasant.

You’re now in the woods in fall, and you have gotten some nice fresh blueberries to eat with your pastry.

Now milk and sugar, which is how I usually take my coffee, with a light hand with the milk, puts the cinnamon pastry note front and center. Like, it’s impossible to miss. The coffee literally tastes like I added cinnamon to it. The hardwood flavor is there still, but it’s now supporting flavor for the cinnamon. Kind of rounding it out and adding dimension, but still presenting as fundamentally a cinnamon flavor with benefits. Almost like a rare and expensive variety of cinnamon you can’t have every day, but still recognizably cinnamon.

And I can confirm you actually get that effect to some degree, even with just milk, though not as strongly. And yes, the beef broth note comes through with milk only as well, and if anything is more detectable, if you know you’re looking for it than it is straight coffee.

So, you’re now in a log cabin in the New England woods, in winter, and you have your soup on the hob, but you’re enjoying a lovely cinnamon pastry, and looking out at the falling snow making the outside like a postcard.

I never drink my coffee with cream (or very rarely) but I’m honor bound to try it because a lot of people do. It’s fine. Like the milk, it really brings out the cinnamon note and makes me think whatever contributes to the cinnamon is something that’s forced to the surface when you add fat, like adding a single drop of water to the whiskey actually intensifies the flavor by forcing the oils to aggregate in a single layer.

Okay, so something that isn’t always appreciated is that coffee and lemon actually play pretty well together sometimes, but you have to have the right coffee.

Turns out this is the right coffee. Even just a squirt of lemon, no sugar, is shockingly good right off the bat. It changes everything about how the coffee presents.

The wood and cinnamon notes in the front end, with the added acidity now present as a complex, refreshing herbal note.

And that note dominates the front end and continues into the back end and melds with the blueberry.

Oh, man, and then if you add just a leettle sugar, it does loose some of that complexity but damn it is a refreshing flavor. Very herbacious and fruity.

This coffee likes to be paired with lemon juice much better than the average coffee and while the flavor can be pieced back and described, the gestalt is a refreshing late spring/early summer drink, not quite like anything you’ve had before.

Drinking it immediately evokes for me the desire to set out an evening meal on the veranda of my seaside villa (look, it’s my ideation. I can totally dream up a seaside villa) and plan a loose, relaxed dinner party with some friends. Maybe more early afternoon given that it’s coffee. But the image is the same. A relaxed dinner on the balcony with the sound of the sea in the background. Leaving the cares of the world behind.

So you see, I think the branding is slightly off, and now you know why.

This is a coffee for all seasons. A solid coffee that can be done in multiple ways with very little effort, for use as anything from a daily driver to special occasions.

It reminds me a little of a grand touring car, something designed to be comfortable to use on an everyday basis, but that has a lot more going on under the hood than it appears at first glance and can be far more exciting and interesting at a moment’s notice, when you’re feeling sporty.

And that’s it. King Harv’s The Brain Coffee, now on sale for $19.95. A coffee for all seasons.

The Quest for Motherhood

I have a friend who is going through something terrible. I’m going to give her history, even though she is not the main subject of this post, just the jumping off point. And also because she needs help and is one of the most terrible people at ASKING for help, because she’s so mortally embarrassed about the whole thing.

I first “met” her online (though I’ve met her several times now) when Darkship Thieves came out. Which I think –though I could be wrong– is when she found me. Weirdly, she didn’t send me a fan letter, but instead asked if she could post in my facebook conference a plea for help for a neighbor who was a disabled veteran with no family and was having some health problems. She was helping as much as possible, but she had almost no resources, since she was either studying or had just finished nursing school. This is by the way of giving you an idea of her character. This is what impelled her to write “big writer” (I’m not, but at the time, before the blog, I seemed even more remote, I guess?) and ask for help.

I’m not going to say she is a saint. She can be salty, and sometimes hot tempered. But she and her then husband-to-be are basically, fundamentally, good people. So good, as you will see if you follow their Give Send Go Link, that we trusted them with two of Miso’s kittens, Bruiser (now renamed Ranger) and Banshee.

Even before they were married, I knew they wanted a large family. I didn’t know that Amanda had had her tubes tied, before legal age in what I can only term an inexplicable act of parental and medical malfeasance. (I’ll just say she’s the vanguard of a lot of very hurt people. I’m sure if she were fifteen years younger she’d have been put on puberty blockers.)

Unfortunately she found the sterilization couldn’t be reversed, so having babies became a matter of harvesting eggs, creating embryos and implanting them, which required them to have the sort of medical insurance that would cover some of it, and the money for the rest Which meant waiting far too long, until it was an unlikely endeavor, due to her age.

Last year they tried and spent all their savings. They got two “viable” embryos, which is a shockingly low number. The one implanted didn’t take so they have one remaining. They are trying to take care of some remaining issues to give this little snowflake baby (frozen embryo) a chance at life. (Note that the chance of success is about 20%. Still worth it.) The problem being they’re all out of money. I had to kick them, screaming, into putting up the GSG.

Note, though THIS ISN’T US ASKING FOR HELP. WE’RE SHUFFLING THINGS AROUND AND I ACTUALLY MADE MONEY LAST YEAR, FROM AMAZON. AND I NEED TO WRITE MORE: We’re very tight right now because of the watermain break, which involved breaking up part of a concrete foundation (but not to the house) and other exotic amusements just to get fixed, and for other reasons, which took up most of my income for the last year, but when I told my husband the knife I was about to plunge into our bank account for their GSG he didn’t even flinch “Do it. Poor kids.” So, I consider their cause very worthy.

So worthy that I linked it at instapundit.

I never read the comments at instapundit. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to continue posting there, both for time sink reasons and because it would corrode my soul.

However friends have reported the comments are full of “Just adopt” and “so many children need homes.”

And I see it’s time, once again, to turn Heinlein’s picture to the wall, roll up my sleeves and speak frankly.

WHY ON EARTH WOULD PEOPLE ASSUME THE ADOPTION PROCESS WORKS WHEN ANYTHING ELSE THE GOVERNMENT DOES IS A FLAMING DUMPSTER FIRE? WHY WOULD THEY ASSUME IT’S NOT INFECTED WITH DEI AND WORSE? WHY?

As with student loans, as with everything else that the government has got its dirty mitts into, I find a lot of people have a rose-colored idea of what goes on in realms they never had anything to do with and don’t understand.

I suspect if most people actually knew what is going on with children: CPS, fostering, adoption, etc. etc. etc. there would be torches and pitchforks. In fact I suspect that’s true if they really understood student loans; what’s being done to the job market, particularly for youth; youth labor laws; schools, etc. etc. ad nauseum. (And trust me, the nauseum applies.)

I haven’t had recent experience of any of this, but I have seen young fans go through this, and I know it hasn’t gotten better. It MIGHT have gotten exponentially worse, but it’s hard to tell because at some point you hit infinity, and how much worse than infinity can you get. It was already a horrible system for mothers, fathers, babies and everyone.

Lately there has been a ridiculous upswell of anti-IVF on the right because of various misconceptions, including what IVF is, what surrogacy is, etc. BUT ALSO this idea that babies are just waiting to be adopted, and if you only weren’t so h*ll bent on having your own genes you could just adopt, and it’s so much cheaper, etc.

All of this are fantasies. And those comments tempted me into doing something I never like to do and speak of my own life, particularly very private parts of my own life here.

When I got married at 22, we wanted a very large family. For whatever reason I was fixated on “at least eleven children” though I was willing to take more, if they were given to us. We were “careful” for a year, while we frankly got used to each other, since we’d dated mostly by phone and letter. Only not that careful, because we wanted kids. And frankly, being young and ADD the only reason we didn’t have a honeymoon baby is because… I turned out to have the fertility of a small rock.

I’ve only recently identified what I think caused it, and this is based on a bunch of things, including an episode (months long) of unexplained body-bruising (like, bruises just appeared randomly all over my body) in my late teens. If I’m right, my issue, never really diagnosed (though there were guesses, but those were more on the symptoms and treating the symptoms) is an auto immune disorder (natch) that attacks pregnancy hormones. One of the clinchers on this is that the way to defeat it is to get supplemental pregnancy hormone from the moment of conception (and that means guessing, because you can’t tell. You can just tell there was a chance.) And that if you defeat it, you’ll have pre-eclampsia.

The symptoms… My cycle went from absolutely regular — 28 1/2 days — to being 40 or 45 days one month, 14 or 15 the next. This came with uncontrollable weight gain, and um… exponential breast growth.

For six years. There were days I got my period, at 45 days, and cried for the next two weeks, because I’d been hoping and dreaming.

After a year and a half we sought help. Because at 24.5 a year and a half is a long time not to be able to conceive.

We found and shook out a bunch of other little things. Despite being regular, my ovulation wasn’t. So for instance, child one was conceived on the 27th day of my cycle, Second child on the… 4th? None of this makes sense.

Also I’m more neurotic than a shaved cat and episodes of anxiety translated to my period arriving because why not.

Now, various religions — including mine — have problems with at least part of these processes, and I was lucky we never needed IVF, though we skirted the edge of licit (in our religion) with what we needed. And I was desperate enough to do IVF, etc. if we could have afforded it. However, even back then, it was as far from our grasp as the moon from the Earth.

When we sought help for infertility we found that at least in the eighties, in Charlotte NC, most infertility doctors were the least sympathetic bunch of loons I ever dealt with. All but one.

Anyway, the ones I went through, besides bizarre and dehumanizing exams and tests and “therapies” that made me feel like a malfunctioning machine, were full of advice.

My favorite was the guy who told me all Portuguese people were infertile. (WHAT?) And then there was the one who told me G-d knew why he didn’t give me children, and if we adopted we should get a severely disabled child, so we couldn’t screw him/her up more.

All of them were interested in one thing only: Doing a laparoscopic exam for endometriosis. This was the hotness in the eighties, because most people looking for help were mid thirties to forties, and relatively well off two-income couples and because the exam was new. I no longer remember what it cost. My memory insists it was 20k, but I actually doubt it. It was probably 5k. At any rate, back then we made 20k a year. 25k if I was working. So either amount might as well be “the pound of flesh closest to your heart” for our ability to pay it. Also, though I know younger women can have endometriosis, it was highly unlikely at my age and history. But most of the doctors, once they found out we couldn’t afford that, told us they couldn’t do anything else.

Needless to say, meanwhile I was reading books on infertility left and right. And eventually in one of them found a mention that one of the best infertility doctors for desperate cases (which due to age and long-trying we qualified for) lived in Charlotte, NC. I called, and scheduled an appointment. I’ll point out parenthetically that this was the ONLY female doctor for female issues I ever found who was competent and a decent human being. Most of the female doctors in this field are far worse than the males. This is MY experience, note, and I don’t claim it’s universal.

Anyway, Dr. Hoover was an amazing doctor, the kind you can talk to, and who goes “Oh, okay, no that theory is crazy” but doesn’t hold it against you. And if the theory wasn’t crazy, she would try things.

I thought what I had was a short lutheal phase, so she went “what the heck” and gave me hormones, starting the day I could have conceived (and to ensure I did, she did IUF (intra uterine fertilization.) Though there was also opportunity for natural conception. However, she wanted to make sure it “got there.” The possibility was for “false pregnancy.” But in fact when we had the ultrasound at 8 weeks, it showed 10 embryos. Which in turn set of a panic, as they wanted us to reduce, etc. But a month later there was only one. That was likely due to pre-eclampsia and a whole different ball of wax. We won’t go into that portion of it.

Instead, I want to point out that as 20 somethings, really tight on money, we were spending $500 a month in an attempt to have children.

DO YOU THINK WE DIDN’T LOOK INTO ADOPTION?

We did. Both before older son and after, when his brother — miracle child — made himself waited a mere three and a half years, and after younger child, when we continued to have no luck while actively trying to conceive for SEVENTEEN YEARS. (I told you we wanted a large family, right?)

Though I will admit, once we had the second we didn’t push into what it would take to adopt quite as assiduously. For one because we already knew it was hopeless. For another because I was leery of the intrusion it would entail.

Hopeless? Intrusion?

Pull up a rock.

Back when we started looking into it, in 86? 87? I had the same idea most people do. There are all these kids being moved through group homes and foster care, in the hope of adoption, but no one will adopt, the heartless cads, preferring to spend hundreds of thousands on IVF or even inexplicably adopt abroad. (Though that seems to be less now, for various reasons. Mostly ours and their governments.)

The truth… we went to various meetings, read everything we could on the process, talked to people who had adopted or were in the process.

The idea of us adopting was… hopeless:

1- we were too young, and only one of us worked. We weren’t judged “stable” enough. Ultimately? We didn’t make enough money. There was a minimum to even apply.

2- we didn’t have enough money. To even enter the process for adopting you needed to pay money to go through things like “home study” etc. We didn’t have the money. And later on you’d have to pay court fees, etc. I THINK — again, it’s been a long time — fourteen thousand dollars? Something like that. No way did we have that. Our savings were negative at the time, but anything we managed to sock away was “to buy a house.”

3- we were the wrong race.
Now here people will rant and rave about how most kids needing adoption are black or Hispanic, but most adopters are white, and “waiting for a white infant” because they’re obviously “racist.”
Pardon me, it only hurts when I laugh. I’d have taken a child of any tone or description, BUT THE SYSTEM WON’T ALLOW IT. The system is designed to place the children with people perceived as being the same race. And even though Hispanic is not a race but a culture, my culture wasn’t close enough. And even though I have more than the required drop at the time I couldn’t prove it (And I’d have claimed it for a kid. Even though I don’t, because I don’t have the experiences.) As a “present white” couple, we just weren’t allowed to adopt ANYTHING ELSE. Weren’t ALLOWED. Wouldn’t even be considered.

Heck, we wouldn’t even be considered for disabled babies or toddlers. We would be considered for older children, but we were in our mid twenties. We weren’t qualified for older children. And frankly, I still wouldn’t take anyone much older than 3 because I know how children develop, and the depth bombs that can be buried, even though the person no longer remembers them. Losing a child because of trauma inflicted before we got him/her or because we weren’t qualified to raise someone almost our age was not acceptable.

So the other advice we got was to foster-to-adopt. But there again, you had to be willing to do this, with the possibility when you started the process to adopt the kid would be yanked from your house and you could never contact him/her again. Or the possibility his/her say incarcerated natural parent would suddenly claim to have found Jesus, get parole and take them back.

I don’t know in what percentage of cases this happens, but the fact it happens at all — the fact that manifestly unfit parents are given “back” infants or toddlers they haven’t seen since the day of their birth because our child services worship Rosseau and think there’s something special to the “natural” link — made me unable to do it, because I’m more neurotic than a shaved cat.

This left private adoption. We did tell people (And for the love of heaven, even though we’re now grandparent age, if you’re a hun who finds herself in that bind, do not abort. We will take the child. We’ll figure out the financials to make it legal.) and put out feelers, but one child she decided on abortion (long story) and one the mother decided to keep.

Things we hadn’t even considered at the time, because we couldn’t, because we didn’t have life experience, but which, now, having dealt with schools and assumptions of officialdom about our child rearing, are the fact that after adopting, even foreign or private adoption (I think) you lay yourself open to scrutiny by the government busybodies, who can yank that child from your house for any reasons or none, after you’ve been his/her only parent for life.

I wouldn’t put it past, in the current environment for “you don’t vote for democrats” or “we don’t like your yard signs” to be a reason to take your child away. You know they’ve convinced themselves we’re all secretly horrible people, anyway. What about being a sincere religious person? You think that won’t turn CPS against you?

As an example of our brush with stupidity, they tried to start the process to take younger son — born very much to us and our genetic child — away because he had a speech impediment and a problem paying attention (both proceeding from a hearing issue), which they — using their powerful intellects and no information, not even casual query beyond his PRESCHOOL TEACHER’S OPINION — determined came from us speaking exclusively Russian at home. This was revealed to us when we fought back. We had to break it to them, not only didn’t either of us speak Russian, Dan speaks only English and bad public school French, and I speak only English except for the weekly call to mom, when I speak Portuguese (and the guys amused themselves pretending to understand.) BUT NO ONE HAD ASKED. AND THEY’D STARTED OFFICIAL PROCEEDINGS to first take his education out of our hands, and eventually the child. (That was fun to fight. BUT we ended up diagnosing and fixing his unusual hearing issue.)

After that, and knowing the possibilities, we remained registered with our church should they absolutely need a family for a child. (We did get a ping the one year it was absolutely impossible and when we were unlikely to get approved as we were over 50, but that’s something again.)

It never happened.

It never happened because it’s almost impossible. Yes, there are children in need of good, permanent families. There are families willing to give them homes.

But the government is standing between and making it almost impossible for the two to meet, and also bleeding them of money when they do meet, to the point you have to be well of to do it.

People aren’t undergoing dehumanizing exams and treatments that cost the Earth or adopting abroad (when it was possible) because they are heartless loons, but because it’s almost impossible to adopt. And when you do “adopt” it’s conditional, and your child could be yanked from you for years.

Now, would too loose an adoption system have issues? Likely. There are nefarious actors abroad.

Would it have more issues than this?

Look, it’s almost impossible.

I hate to say it, but there is no perfect system. Children will be harmed either way. But this system seems to harm children UNIVERSALLY, instead of the rare case.

And it was created by a combination of wanting to avoid the occasional bad outcome for a child (a laudable goal) and wanting to keep the iron rice bowl of CPS bureaucrats filled (A far less laudable but predictable goal.) The result is a inhumane meat grinder that ends with many miss-placed, often dead children. And with decent, middle class, not wealthy Americans balked of their chance at parenthood.

Now you know.

In any such case where masses of otherwise rational people are doing what seems oddly expensive/harmful/irrational, assume the system is borked. Because every official system, in which the government has ANY hand is borked right now.

Fixing it is going to take things getting much worse. Which will hurt more people but seems inevitable.

And that’s the times we live in.

The Madness of the Marxists

It is said that those whom the gods love they destroy. And those whom the gods destroy they first drive mad.

Abstract the gods from it, and it makes perfect sense. The favored ones in any society, favored to the level of “no consequences” are driven mad and ultimately destroyed. This is part of the reason the left is how it is. For 100 years, partly because of the cultural overstructure, facilitated by mass communication with easy choke points, solidified in place by FDR though it started before him, in the long war of the 20th century, they have been beyond control and beyond reproach for 100 years and maybe a little longer now.

No? Go back and look. Even the red scare, who came out of it smelling like a rose and capable to stomping down on anyone impugning their pushing of outright communism and pro-soviet propaganda into the culture? It certainly wasn’t the anti-communists.

McCarthy’s biggest mistake was being too late. There was nothing he could do that wouldn’t be twisted against him and make anti-communists look dictatorial and ridiculous, because the left — the extreme left even — was already fully in control of all the choke points. In his defense, most people were unaware of it. My husband managed to be unaware of it in the eighties and thought I was nuts when I pointed it up, until after 9/11 when a lot of the masks fell off.

But the result of being able to do whatever you want, and having power conferred on you by belonging to a — rather toxic, in this case — group of believers (toxic because the beliefs are toxic) is that you’ll do what you want. And if your beliefs don’t come with limiting boundaries — and Marxism doesn’t, being based on envy and an inversion of traditional/Christian values — then you’ll go off the rails to insane. And you’ll quickly proceed to the level of insane that makes you blind to anything outside your belief system. Or to how amoral and corrupt the belief system you subscribe to is.

I came across this yesterday: He Eats the Souls of Human Babies. It purports to explain how blind the left can be about Trump, and to an extent it nails it, except the author accidentally reveals his own blindness in an hilarious almost bizarre fashion. Note I know nothing about the author. I’m presuming he is male, though one of the comments makes me wonder. And I have no clue if he’s right or left. It’s possible he is left and trying to stand in the center. A few of the recently red-pilled have blindspots the size of the universe. Or it’s possible he’s on the right and still has blindspots that tend left.

Yes, I’ll explain, in a minute, but first this is the thing: because until the internet, the culture we swam in was pervasive and default left, even the right has accepted some “rules of the game” that aren’t even vaguely so. Event he right tends to assume the left “has a point” on some completely insane things, where the left has no point whatsoever, not even remotely. An even the right knows a lot of things that just ain’t so, but which were proclaimed from the rooftops so long we don’t question them. One example of this in a recently red-pilled female (Wolfe? I think?) was her assuming that Trump making a bad comment about ONE woman was an insult to all women. WFT, out? A woman is a woman. There are a lot of women I don’t like, and some I hole in near-reverence. Why would saying that Occasional Cortex (if I remember correctly) has the brain power of a very small lab rat an insult to all women? Is saying that Joe Biden is a brainless ass and always was an insult to all males? Or even all white males? WHY? Why should women be beyond criticism, even individual women? But this woman seemed to think that without examining it. And none of her commenters picked up on this.

In this case, the rats in the writers’ head are as follows: he says that the left didn’t need to invent the pee smear there was a lot to attack Trump on in reality, and why weren’t they using this?

So he shows a capture from Trump’s Art of the Deal:

He says that thing about the 70 year old guy and three blondes from Sweden would be enough to attack Trump on.

This tells me three things about the writer:

1- He’s never read any celebrity-written books, which are usually ghost writer written books. Let’s be honest, they’re all pretty cringe. If you read Hillary’s supposed brilliance, or Obama’s or … anyone’s you’ll come across far worse (if SOMETIMES more politically correct) stuff. Probably the worst was Jimmah Carter’s (or Rosalyn’s. It’s been ten years) book, which for years we owned and used as a game where each of us read a passage at random, and the one that made people laugh the most was the winner. Seriously. Sometimes I wonder if this is the secret revenge of the ghost writer.

2- He doesn’t understand males. No, seriously. Even if he’s a male, the left has gotten in his head enough that he doesn’t get the appeal of a club so powerful that even ugly old guys can pick up three babes. (The blonds from Sweden is a cultural moment. In the 70s for… reasons it was assumed every Swedish girl was a slut. I don’t know why. But this was “known” even in Portugal when Swedish girls were largely mythical. Blonds from Sweden, in multiples, were what every guy dreamed about.) If revealed, that cringe would earn him points with 99% of straight males, and get married women to go “he’s an idiot, just like my husband” which might dispose them towards him.

3- He doesn’t get the left. The left couldn’t use that because they themselves obsessively look for celebrities/bigger people to interact with that can pull them up. It’s 90% of their dominance. The “I wanna belong to the club of the powerful and have sexual access” is what the left does and their modus operandi right now. Whether they actually BELIEVE Marx or pretend to believe, until it becomes an unconscious reflex is up for debate, because all of them are the type of people who sells their soul for access. And access means “power and babes.” Whether the power is money or influence is immaterial, and it’s usually both.

His other misfire is his inability to understand why the left won’t use “Trump is still proud of the vaccines” against Trump. This requires ignoring that the left tried to make those vaccines MANDATORY. And made a lot of people take them against their will. And their most prominent governors were insane about locking people down for what turns out to be the sniffles. And–

So, yeah, they can’t do that.

But other than that, he is correct about how they miss reality by a mile. Or more than a mile. And keep insisting Trump will lock everyone up/put them in camps.

For the record, I’ve been seeing THAT since Reagan. It is a variation of Whoopy Goldberg’s bizarre idea that the Republicans want to institute slavery. Because, you know, the party of individualists, who want to free individuals to make their own decisions are… secretly slavers?

He’s right that they are fighting a war not with reality but with the stuff in their own heads.

It has been suggested what they think Trump (and each republican, who’s never done it) will do is a projection of what they’d like to do to us. That is possibly more than possible but probable now, looking at what they’re doing to Trump and don’t seem to realize they’re doing.

But it’s more likely they are so terrified of Trump/Bush/Reagan/whoever doing this to them because they are terrified of this person and have to SOMEHOW justify it to themselves. Or because they are inherently aware of the power of the centralized government, but still want it, in their own hands, so they’re only “allowed” to be terrified of “someone bad” taking it. Which is why they must vilify anyone who opposes them and tries to get power.

Or it’s possible this is a magnification of their “cancelling” tactics to individuals who don’t agree with them in fields they control. Usually when someone stepped out of line in SF/F what you got was “she’s a bad person” or “Do you know what she did?” or the even vaguer and more efficacious “Well, we all know about HER.” You never knew why this person was blacklisted, only that being seen with him/her was death to your career, and that they’d done something to deserve it. Whether the something was talking back to an editor (Waves hand in the air, and shakes it all about) or being an evil person who roasts and eats baby puppies on camera is left to the listeners imagination.

And to an extent, while they controlled the media completely the same was done republican candidates in a wink, wink, nudge nudge way. Sure, they assured us Goldwater would start world war III but if you go back and look at it, a lot of it is was wink wink nudge nudge.

But the openness, starting with Bush — Clinton, because of Rush, really — and expanding, as the internet expanded, has forced them to be explicit. Hence the “He’s gonna put us in camps” or “They want to enslave us” both of which sound completely insane to dispassionate observers. Mostly because they’re actually completely insane. It’s just insanity proceeding from their political creed, which makes no sense outside it, and which is still indulged by a lot of people who have been so exposed to their creed they think it’s reality at some level. As shown above.

The other thing this guy isn’t right about is his forecast of the future when he says the next 20 years of American policy will be:

HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN.HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN HITLER PUTIN.

He’s wrong, because this is late-stage insanity, and is already not being tolerated. Not by the people. I mean, the left can scream that all they want to, but most of them have already tuned it out.

And frankly, the biggest risk at this point is that they are retroactively white-washing both Hitler and Putin, by applying their names to people who are fighting for individual liberty. You already see this with so many on the right trying to defend Putin in comments, even though Putin is a KGB horror who HAS NEVER CHANGED and wants to rebuild the USSR this time under the name “Russia.” Like all the people who believe he is a “nationalist” — um…. no. He is like the Soviets, an internationalist, it’s just that he wants to build a supernational entity subjugated to Russia. But since he identifies Russia with himself (l’etat c’est moi) it’s difficult to know where that stops.

No one is — or no large numbers are — for now wanting to just defend Hitler (except on the left because of the Jew hatred) but if the left continues applying his name to their opponents and saying that someone inoffensive is just like him there is the risk of our profoundly mal-educated youth looking around and going “Well, if these idiots who can’t do anything right don’t like Hitler, then I need to find the Nazis and give them a phone call.”

Needless to say that’s one way things can go seriously wrong for a while. (I don’t think they will, not in the US, but in Europe…. it’s far more likely.) Not permanently, because again, that kind of government doesn’t work, and would fall apart, but for a while.

But more importantly, that’s not 20 years of American policy, because we don’t have 20 years. At most, highly extended, we have 10. And even then I doubt it. I’m seeing people I never expected, people who aren’t political at all, sniffing the air and smelling smoke. That’s even more shocking than the leftists being redpilled for some reason, because leftists in our sphere are already TUNED TO POLITICS. A change of direction when you’re already on the road is easier than someone who is miles away, in the middle of a field suddenly realizing that the road everyone else has been on is wrong, and deciding to do something about it.

You see, the leftist madness is not just in how they signal/campaign/what they see.

Yes, sure, that’s pretty terrible, because they’re stuck in the 20th century, and their techniques for the 20th century (demonize person in all the culture;make them look bad; have celebrities endorse the other guy) aren’t working, so they’re doing in the open a lot of things they did behind the scenes, and they’ve switched almost exclusively to censorship, legal/economic persecution of opponents AND FRAUD. Fraud being the decisive factor and what leads to insanities like opening the border to facilitate massive fraud. (Not seeing the almost inevitable backlash of that is almost amusing. If we weren’t living here, but in a galaxy far away, watching this on a movie screen.)

But nothing else they do works, including economic and social stuff.

To be fair, it never did. It only appeared to because control of the information allowed things to look like they were working. People might not be better off, but if everything told them the country was better off, they assumed their own situation was a fluke. Also, they were afraid to talk about it.

But now we have 100 years of crazy leftist policies, piled one on the other, and the left is trying to solve failures by pushing “the same thing but more intense and harder.”

And it’s all falling apart. All of it. From education to jobs. From retail to home life. ALL OF IT is DISINTEGRATING.

Mad people can’t establish sane policy. Or even save themselves. If fully in control of centralized choke points, they can maybe keep control for a while.

But it ends badly. Very badly. When, I don’t know, but the “badly” is obvious. And the “not twenty years” is obvious, because a lot of things are ALREADY at critical point.

The problem, of course, before you say it, is that they can hurt us a lot on their way down. Not catastrophically. Remember I’ve already seen a variation of this story: disintegration means everyone gets a little bit poorer, every year, not that next year we’re all wearing collanders. And rebuilding in these situations can happen bizarrely fast. When the boot is removed from the face of the society and the economy, rebuilding can be in a couple of years.

Look, we’ve had two really non-Marxist presidents in the last 50 years, and the left was permanently disrupted by them. They’re not NEARLY as strong as they still manage to project. They’re just loud and still in control of a lot of megaphones, plus the levers they installed in YOUR head from kindergarten.

Repeating: none of their five year plans worked, none of their grand wars worked. No communist regime, EVER was even able to feed its own people. OR perfectly propagandize its own people.

If you think they are now fulfilling a cold war plan, you’re giving them way too much credit. And yes, I know a lot of that interview. It works great as a “we meant to do that” if they get you to interpret everything that happened their way. But the interview itself is the psy ops. Whether the person giving it was really a defector or not.

They are not powerful. They are not strong. They are certainly no great planners. (Though they are all of that inside their heads.)

What they are for real is completely insane. And that’s bad enough. As grandmother would say “I wouldn’t take a madman to heaven with me. He might yet push me down.”

In the end we win, they lose. The interim will hurt like a mother.

Be not afraid. Fear fights on the side of the enemy. Be prepared. Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

And build under, build over, build around. Because we’ll still need structures and functioning institutions (some of them) after the madness is gone.

Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

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 SHANE GRIES: Ashes of Armageddon: Last World Volume 3.

In the darkness of space a battered fleet hovers over a thriving world, a lost colony intended to be the refuge of a defeated ruler. Instead of an abandoned safe haven, the refugees find a thriving world grappling in political and military intrigue. The new worlds’ tech is far inferior to that of the desperate spacefarers, but the natives have the numbers to make a hard, nasty fight. Instead of war, the fleet manipulates the indigenous population to gain leverage until a mutiny erupts within their own ranks, tearing them apart.

The schism in the fleet triggers a bloodbath, turning former comrades against one another while embroiling their adoptive world in a colossal struggle which will determine whether they live in tyranny or freedom. This epic conclusion to the “Last World” series finds entire nations and alliances planetside siding with factions of the alien interlopers, dragging them in a global conflagration that threatens to consume them all. A world war instigated by a leader in the space fleet driven by his naked quest for power.

While the only world available to them burns, a rebel officer commands an outnumbered and out-gunned squadron of warships, engaging in a cat-and-mouse game against superior forces, fighting and dying in the cold vacuum of space. His meager unit strikes out in a series of deadly raids across the solar system, leaving charred derelicts and lifeless, frozen bodies tumbling in their wake. Down below, Terry Hannigan and his team struggle in the blood and the mud, doing what they can to save their world from the usurpers in the face of impossible odds.

The side that ultimately prevails will determine the fate of a world forgotten in antiquity. A world that holds the key to survival for them all.

FROM DALE COZORT: The King’s Fifth: A Snapshot Novel

An American teenager is caught up in a hunt for treasure in the murky politics of independent conquistador kingdoms built on the ruins of Aztec cities.

In this alternate history novel, fifteen-year-old Elijah Haigh’s mom sends him to live with his army major father because he keeps getting into trouble. Bad move. His dad is stationed in New Galveston, in an alternate reality where Spanish Conquistadors set up independent kingdoms in the ruins of the Aztec empire. Apache raiders still roam nearby, while the US and a surviving Tsarist Russia come from their own realities to compete for influence and natural resources among the conquistador kingdoms and search for the fabled King’s Fifth, a lost and possibly mythical gold hoard supposedly held in trust for the King of Spain until it was lost during civil wars among the conquistadors.
Elijah goes on a joyride with Julius Butcher, a teenage Indian guide, and ends up in the middle of a scramble for that gold hoard and a high stakes competition for influence in the alternate reality between the Russians and Americans.

Please Note: This novel has no relationship with Scott O’Dell’s 1966 children’s historical novel. Different audience. Different use of a historical term in common use long before either Scott or I used it.

FROM TERRI M RUWE: Space Ranger: Down the Event Horizon

Leaving the Rangers was Eddie’s way of dealing with tragedy, but the Rangers weren’t going to leave him alone even as a regular in Space Force.

When a high tech weapons theft involves Eddie’s new ship, he has to get involved. Can he stop the transfer of the stolen goods to the Alliance’s adversaries before the whole situation devolves into war? Can he save his shipmates from becoming cannon fodder?

FROM DAVE FREER: Dog and Dragon

Lyonesse: a world formed with a magic so deep that it takes a true king to hold its parts in balance. Yet there is no king on the throne, and a dark power struggle is underway between an ancient sorceress with her shadow army of destruction and the human subjects of Lyonesse’s power-mad wizard. The only spark of hope is a prophecy that tells of a Defender who will one day come and set things to right.

Young Meb, flung from her dragon-ruled homeland in another plane of existence into Lyonesse, doesn’t think she’s been called to be any kind of Defender. And she certainly isn’t happy when she’s immediately embroiled in the deadly power plots of the local royals. But Meb also happens to be an adept at the universe-folding skill of Planomancy, trained by a world-walking troubleshooter of the multiverse, the great Dragon Fionn himself –a dragon who is desperately searching for Meb, whom he’s come to love. Accompanying Fionn is Dileas, Meb’s pet and the most loyal magic sheep dog in a thousand universes. If anyone can track Meb across time and space, Dileas can.

As the legions of Shadow Hall gather to bring down the leaderless kingdom, Meb must decide whether to use her ability to become the Defender everyone hopes for–if only to avoid becoming the plaything of tyrants. With the Dragon Fionn on the way, magical battle is joined, and the destiny of universes hangs upon the courage in one young woman’s heart.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: Lyddie Hartington: Galaxy Sleuth

Facing poverty after a childhood among the wealthy and powerful, Lyddie Hartington decamps to Ceres, a newly colonized planet on the edges of the galaxy. Armed only with a change of clothes, a letter of introduction to the directors of the Andromeda Company, and a blaster, she is determined to make her fortune.

But Ceres is nothing like Orion-14, and before she knows it, Lyddie is witness to a murder- a murder that goes to the heart of the Andromeda Company and puts her life in danger. With the help of her new friend, an entirely too handsome captain of the Galaxy Watch, she must discover the murderer and solve the mystery of her family’s downfall.

FROM CELIA HAYES: My Dear Cousin: A Novel In Letters

When Peggy Becker married Englishman Tommy Morehouse in San Antonio in the spring of 1938, her cousin and best friend Venetia “Vennie” Stoneman was her bridesmaid. After the wedding, Peg and Tommy traveled across the Pacific to Malaya, where Tommy managed his family’s rubber plantation. There they expected to raise a family and live a comfortable and rewarding life among the British expatriates in the tropics, while Vennie returned to Galveston to continue training as a nurse.
The start of the Second World War changed those comfortable, settled lives: Tommy Morehouse became a prisoner of war, Peg barely escaped the fall of Singapore with her small son, and Vennie Stoneman was a nurse in the US Army Nurse Corps, tending to battlefield casualties in North Africa, Italy, and France. In Australia, Peg waits out the war, wondering if her husband will survive brutal captivity by the Japanese, and Vennie risks her own life as an air evacuation nurse. Throughout all, the two women write to each other, of their lives, loves, of Vennie’s patients and comrades, and Peg’s children and the woes of running a wartime household among rationing and shortages of shoes for her children.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Detritus

Nick Bryant was a junkie. Lived on the streets, and everything. And then, he saved a baby girl from drowning, and fell into the role of protector. As he, the baby, and her older brother get to know one another, he decides that maybe, there’s more left to him than the drugs, and decides to try to live again. And maybe build a family.

FROM KAREN MYERS: Tales of Annwn – A Virginian in Elfland

A Collection of Five Short Stories from The Hounds of Annwn.

The Call – A very young Rhian discovers her beast-sense and, with it, the call of a lost hound.

It’s not safe in the woods where cries for help can attract unwelcome attention, but two youngsters discover their courage in the teeth of necessity.

Under the Bough – Angharad hasn’t lived with anyone for hundreds of years, but now she is ready to tie the knot with George Talbot Traherne, the human who has entered the fae otherworld to serve as huntsman for the Wild Hunt. As soon as she can make up her mind, anyway.

George has been swept away by his new job and the people he has met, and by none more so than Angharad. But how can she value the short life of a human? And what will happen to her after he’s gone?

Night Hunt – When George Talbot Traherne goes night hunting for fox in Virginia, he learns about unworthy men from the old-timers drinking moonshine around the fire and makes his own choices.

Who could have anticipated that the same impulse that won him his old bluetick coonhound would lead him to his new wife and the hounds of Annwn? Every choice has a cost, he realizes, but never a regret.

Cariad – Luhedoc is off with his adopted nephew Benitoe to fetch horses for the Golden Cockerel Inn. He’s been reunited with his beloved Maëlys at last, but how can he fit into her capable life as an innkeeper? What use is he to her now, after all these years?

Luhedoc needs to relearn an important lesson about confidence.

The Empty Hills – George Talbot Traherne arranges a small tour of the local human world for his fae family and friends, hoping to share some of the sense of wonder he discovered when he encountered the fae otherworld.

He’s worried about discovery by other humans, but things don’t turn out quite the way he expects.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Moon Mirror

Chelsea Ayles dreamed of going to the Moon since she was a child. Now her dream job at NASA has turned into a nightmare, thanks to those many blood-sucking arachnids. Yeah, politics, as in a Senator accusing her of destroying America’s priceless heritage because she chose the moonrocks that were used to make a proof-of-concept mirror segment for a lunar telescope project. Now the mirror sits in her office like a bitter mockery of what might have been — until the day her reflection turns into a handsome stranger who calls himself the Man in the Moon and offers her visions of a world that might have been. Visions that ignite a longing of an intensity she hasn’t known since she was in grade school and watched videos of the Apollo lunar missions in science class.

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: HEARTBREAKING.

Live Free And Meme

Lying To The Young, a blast from the past from 5/1/2015

*An Announcement: Matthew, who comments here, has started a tube of you channel in which he posts this blog turned to AI voice. He thinks this will appeal to people who want to LISTEN to posts, like while driving or cleaning, or any other time you feel a need to hear my often inane words. Full disclosure: Though the idea was his, if this works out (And tube of yous doesn’t ban it) I will derive some profit from this venture as will he. This is the link.* – SAH.

One of the really interesting things about cleaning up the rest of the other house, to move, is that we’re hitting exactly the sort of things we’d even forgotten had happened/existed.

For instance, we opened a box last packed away in 1990, when we moved from our very first house together.  It would have been exciting if it hadn’t been packed by movers, who don’t seem to have the ability to distinguish between trash and office stuff.  So, we had Dan’s business cards hoard, now with a lot of names and addresses either no longer in the business or no longer at that address/number; we had some sketch pads with funny drawings which back then was his way of dragging me away from writing.  You know exactly what.  We were 27.  There were pictures of cartoon guys with googly eyes and “here’s looking at you kid,” etc.  There were also sheets of paper that from their crumpled look the movers rescued from the trash can.  You know what I meant.  Crumple marks on an old shopping list.

There is a certain factor of “Wow, really” to this, at least when you realize not only have you any idea what the party was you were hosting, but also when the number of apples and cucumbers required must have meant some sort of salad I no longer remember making or having a recipe for.

It is a reminder of both the permanence of who you are and the transience of many things that seem incredibly important at the time.

Take those business cards.  If we’d found them 15 years ago, we’d never have shrugged and shaken the whole mess into the trash bag.  We wouldn’t have done it because, even though we probably would never have contacted any of those people anyway (note we never felt the need to ransack the house for still-unopened boxes) we’d have had the feeling that it might “be important.”

Weirder still is finding evidences of me in that creature I don’t remember.  Like endless miles of rejections, that mean I must have submitted a lot of stories, but I can’t remember any of those titles, and the stories I DO remember I’d rather I didn’t.  (There’s miles and miles — and MILES — of twerpitude on the way to becoming who we are as the late Pterry (pbuh) said.  What he didn’t say is that who we are is marginally less twerpy and our future selves, still a little less twerpy, will laugh at us.)

But then there are other surprise discoveries that have more meaning for both our society and us.

We found older son’s grade reports from sixth grade, for instance.  And I blinked at the grades.

For background, both our kids are brilliant, which in this case is defined as “sharper than old mom” or to quote PTerry (pbuh) again “So sharp they cut themselves.”  This means they have a ton of idiosyncrasies and that if I’d known what was really going on in elementary/middle school, AND if I’d known I could homeschool (listen bud, I was afraid of missing something essential.  My formation has HOLES) I’d have taken them out in a New York minute, or even a Colorado one.

But one of their idiosyncrasies is that, being very similar, they like to play opposites.  What I mean is, though their basic makeup is close to the same and though they are (like my brother and me) when not in contact likely to be reading the same book at the same time, or playing the same game for the same reason, when they are together they view it as their sworn duty to not be alike.  So, since older son was a straight A student (or close enough) who gave himself an ulcer in high school worrying about grades, younger son studies for what interests him and lets the rest go hang, which makes him an A/D student or an A/F student on rare occasions.  (Mind you almost everything in college at least interests him minimally, so last time I looked he maintained a B average, but he gave me white hairs getting him through K-12.)

So as I looked at the report card I thought “2nd son” but the name was #1 son, and I thought “#1 sonnever had an F in math” and “This must be a strange mistake.”

But I remembered, vaguely, being very worried about #1 son all through sixth grade, until we moved and changed schools and put him in an advanced program which was not that great in retrospect but which, at least, graded him on what he’d learned and his homework and tests.

Because you see my husband found the sheet explaining that grade.  I.e. the sheet with the checks and points for various things during the semester.

I’m fairly sure I never saw that sheet, though I can’t swear.  It might have been at the back of our desire to move which was so intense we picked a house totally unsuited to us by the method of “it’s in another district” and “We can afford it.”  (There were other reasons, like that someone in the neighborhood was killing cats, and we didn’t know who.)  Also, this was the year coming off Dan being unemployed and while he still was suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnea, which meant I was suffering from undiagnosed being kept awake (more than health issues were already doing) by apneaing husband, so heaven knows what I saw or what I made of it. The entire year is a fog.  Which is good as it kept the berserker from descending on the school to create the sort of scene where the police say “the bodies haven’t been found yet.”

Because that check list leading to an F in math read as follows: Items, three, tests, with perfect scores.  Item, “bring in x boxes of kleenex” with zero.  Item, bring in three lightbulbs, with zero.  Item bring in folders of appropriate size and 24 highlighter markers, zero.  Item inspection of locker showing it messy, zero.  Item, failed to organize his notes and use the appropriate colors to take them, zero.  Etc. etc.

Now younger son often managed to have cs in classes where he aced the tests due to an allergy to homework.  As the woman who grew from the kid who wrote her homework in the two seconds before class, whose stories of how her homework had disappeared (it was aliens.  A UFO, I swear. They paralyzed me with their rays and took my long division homework) became preparation for her current career and who, up to her Junior year in college, was known to read essays from a blank sheet, I couldn’t really come down like a ton of bricks on THAT.

But this wasn’t even homework.  It seemed a deranged combination of trying to stock up the school (okay, it’s a small village and I imagine they have trouble, but still, giving grades for it, and for that matter asking the kids for it isn’t cool) and trying to enforce blind compliance.

There were mitigating circumstances, too, that adults could have told the teacher about, but son couldn’t or wouldn’t.  First of all BOTH our kids have a marked aversion to spending our money.  Not their own, that they’ve earned, but ours.  And back then the money was all ours, or at least son couldn’t drive to the store and buy Kleenex from the money he’d earned helping my friends with gardening projects.  And we were broke.  Dead, flat broke, as we’ve only come close to being since.  Dan had lost his job in the middle of a tech flight from town, and we were scrambling and not sure when he’d find work again.  Now we didn’t discuss this with the kid, but kids know.  So he never even mentioned the shopping list to us, much less take the stuff in.  And btw, since this was the ONLY time (and only because we REALLY were at the end of our rope) our kids have been on free-lunch program (Yes, I know I disapprove of those, but you know what?  Part of the reason we were in the pinch we were in was the massive amount taken from Dan’s severance check.  So it’s not like we weren’t paying into the maw of the government, not-by-choice.  And it’s not like if we hadn’t used it it would have been returned to the tax payer.  It would have been spent in ever more creative ways.  It was, in fact, as the school (the shopping list notwithstanding) had a surplusage they spent on showy but useless equipment.  And when the school more or less forced us into it, we thought that if we didn’t have money to eat, we wanted to make sure the kids did) the teacher could/should easily have known that and SHOULD have understood not only that we couldn’t afford a lot of those items to stock her in-class cupboard, but that it was insensitive and crass to ask the kids to bring this stuff in with no regard for parental circumstances at the time.  (And these are the people who preach sensitivity.)  I’m going to guess if son had abased himself before the class and told them we were broke she’d have excused him.  Only, of course, he’d rather take the F and I can’t blame him, since I remember Middle School vividly.

Then there was the blind compliance of “dot this with this particular color” and “take notes in the approved manner.”

When we showed the list to Son he said “I was near suicidal that year.  Because my mind doesn’t work like other kids’ I guess.  I just couldn’t see where that stuff mattered.  I mean, in college whether you take notes or rely on aural memory no one cares, as long as you KNOW the material, but it seemed in sixth grade knowing the material counted for nothing, and it was all how well I did these pointless tasks.”

This probably wouldn’t disturb me as much if I hadn’t gone through this, in spades, with younger son four years later and if school administrators hadn’t told me that the purpose of middle school is not to teach the kids anything so much as is teaching them “the process.”  And the process as described by these bright souls seems to consist of “Ve hav ways und means to make you OBEY.”  Seriously, with younger son, too the emphasis was on “You will dot all the is and cross all the ts in the color designated!”

Perhaps it’s just my kids (heaven knows where they picked it up, but they have slight problems with arbitrary, shouty authority) or maybe it is why all our friends’ BOYS (not the girls, not even in cases where we saw no difference in IQ between the kids) hit the wall in middle school and started lagging behind their sisters.  Girls (present typist and a lot of readers very much excepted) tend to be more compliant with group mores and authority.

This girl, of course, faced with that course of “study” would not only also have had Fs but would probably have thrown shoes at the teacher’s head and got expelled.  Fortunately her kids turned out calmer.

Anyway, the whole idea that middle-school is supposed to enforce blind compliance and that’s what they’re actually grading on (or was when my kids were involved) makes my gorge rise.  It might be a very good way to raise machine-operators, but it sucks when raising free-thinking citizens in whom (we the people) the power and the legitimacy of the state is supposed to rest.

If I had my time again those kids would never have seen the inside of a classroom till I put them in the dual high school/college program Younger attended, in 10th and 11th grade.  (And for those in the area, Coronado Highschool.  Yes, they’re a magnet school and take kids even from out of district, though it’s a little harder.  And unless it’s changed all out of recognition in the last 3 years, highly recommended.)  Because colleges still prefer standard high school grades to portfolios.

But it’s past, and it’s past by a long time, and it was just a memory of gritting my teeth and a surge of annoyance at the items on that check list.

However, those of you with kids in school — check what they’re actually being graded on.  Then ask yourself if that’s why you sent them to school and if that’s the formation you want them to have.  Then see if there’s anything you can do, including but not limited to “teaching them at home after school.”

And cut our fellow citizens some slack.  They are the product of this system.  They’ll need to go through conditioning as well as twerpitude before they come out on the other side as free men and women.

And yet, I have faith a number of them will.  Reality tends to beat this sort of programing.

Just don’t pile on with the school and assume the teachers are always right.  This is not the school you went through (or at least I hope not.)  And what your kids are failing on might be things that would hurt them in life and work should they learn them.

How Do You Know?

With stuff on my post on men and boys; with stuff on how bad things are out there; with all of this, the question is: How do you know?

I realized my idea that every woman was the predatory partner in a divorce was mostly (MOSTLY. I’ve heard of a few others, but not that bad) one woman who has divorced either six or seven times. And yeah, she knows how to manipulate the court system and some of what she did was unconscionable. (Note she’s staying anonymous to protect the guilty.) And she has single-handedly shaped my perception of divorce court in the US. And yes, I’ve known of predatory males who got away with stuff too, but less often.

Here’s the thing, though: how do we know? My perception is that the skew is maybe 60% of predatory females. Is it? Or is it that there are a few bad females, and males keep marrying them? Partly because males can get protective aroused off a good sob story. Partly because males prefer the intersection of hot and crazy to the point of making it a joke.

I do know a lot — a lot of conservative/normal/well behaved girls who never found someone, or who found someone really late.

Now, it is irrefutable that most of officialdom right now from the schools on out is prejudiced in favor of women. Anyone who had kids in public school in the last 20 years, knows and a few are even willing to admit it.

But why does anyone assume — as one of the commenters did — that “this is what women wanted! Women created this system” — which is hilarious posted on the blog of a woman speaking up in defense of men and boys and in answer to a female commenter who is a regular here? What sense does that make? The worst “you can’t treat my little girl that way!” when trying to punish a girl or young woman for blatantly BAD behavior is always from men. Sure usually relatives, but men. The worst, most out of touch “being a white male is the easy mode of life” feminists are ALWAYS male.

So where does the idea all females support this come from? Ah, well, it comes from interviews with female actors/directors. From female talking heads. From angry-feminist-politician.

But why in G-d’s green Earth (or out of it) would you thing ALL women are represented by those figures and loud mouths? As well believe every rich person is a thief, every male is a rapist/evil, every white person is racist. Because those are the same images projected from the exact same sources. So, why would you think they are right? Or that most women protect them.

But then, you say, why are these women not “speaking out!” Gestures at blog. Obviously some of us are speaking out.

Why aren’t we in the movies/TV news/interviews, then?

Well, yes. That is the question you should be asking yourself. And the answer would be “Because that’s not the image of women that the officialdom wants to project.” Partly because they think if women think all women are feminists, women will fall into line (they haven’t met some of us, obviously.) And partly because they want men to not trust women.

They also want women not to trust men. Hence the same sources portray every man as the deeply wounded but seriously out of touch man who came here to advocate all women should be beheaded. Because that keeps women away from men. And makes women fall for bullshit like “Should trust men not to rape.” As though most men WOULD automatically rape.

In the same way I’ve heard people ranting about other races. “They want this!” How do you know? No, seriously. How do you know? It wasn’t black people burning and looting for BLM. If you ever encountered any of the Buy Large Mansions crowds in the flesh, you’d see they were mostly white, and frankly mostly young college women, at the age when they still believe the lies TV and their elders tell them. No, not because most women are leftist, but because young women are the most group-influenced creatures in the human race. So, they are, you know, trying to be liked by doing what they’ve been told is approved.

But out news managed to project the idea that the people burning and looting were black so much that even now a lot of people believe that Kyle Rittenhouse killed black men.

So, how do you know most black people support it? More importantly, if they do, how many of them — like the very young women — do it because they too have been lied to? Do you know how many black people in our communities I’ve met who are defensive, until they realize I’m not carrying any kind of racial animus, and in fact I normally don’t actually NOTICE people’s color. (Which the left will tell you is racist. Yes. And you should ask yourself why they tell you this.) In fact, the black people I met who weren’t deeply suspicious until they knew me better are the exception. Because as badly as you’ve been propagandized, they’ve had it a million times worse. And most of what they’ve been lied through is the supposedly public education, sanctioned by our federal government, which teaches them raspers like that the US was founded FOR slavery. Or that only black people were ever enslaved and only by white people. Or– Some of those lies were perpetrated with the best possible intentions, like “to build up their racial image” (though how they thought that worked, is something else, unless you understand they consider there is inherent value in victimhood) but they are still egregious lies, and in the end, they turn one race against the other. And here keep in mind that race in the US is a phantom. Most of the self-identified black people in the US look completely white to my foreign born and educated eyes. It’s literally like looking at the far side cartoon of Penguin bathrooms, with two identical images on the door, and “Only they can tell the difference.” But they’ve been convinced if they have the one drop, everyone who doesn’t hates them or — pass Whoopy Goldberg who is dumber than most boxes of rocks and possibly even dumber than Occasional Cortex — wants to enslave them. Because they were taught there. By our schools. Paid for and supported by our tax dollars. And fed approved teachers, created by our system of accreditation.

But if that weren’t enough, they are now also being fed a completely fantasy version of history, by our entertainment in which black people were always 50% of every population, including in regency England, and there was a system of apartheid like in the old South Africa, and everyone lies about noblemen and QUEENS not being black, because that’s how much we hate black people.

Are they defensive and a little crazy. Sure. But that’s because of what they don’t know but think they do. In the same way that college feminists might approve of the crazy feminist initiatives in our society and institutions but that’s because they think they know things and they don’t. And they were fed that by the establishment.

Mostly we run into this under the guise of “everyone went along with the lockdowns. No one protested.” While that is a confusing issue because as many people on the right as on the left fell for it, a lot of us were protesting to the limits of our ability. And a lot of bigger people than I were protesting, and were silenced, threatened with the loss of professional licensing and worse.

In the same way, when people were saying “People are staying home because they’re getting money from the government” when in fact, if you looked at the money most people got, it wasn’t enough for anyone to stay home in even a pretense of comfort. Mostly the persons I knew who chose not to go back to work were pink collar workers who suddenly realized they would rather be homemakers and look after their own kids and made the appropriate cuts. Or younger people who were forced to move home for the lockdowns, and couldn’t find jobs after. (So many of them.)

Which brings us to the “kids these days.” First there is the notion of the student loans and how many people on the right — almost all commenters but me — go on about how the loans were legal, therefore must be paid, and also how forgiving them benefits “doctors and lawyers.”

There are two huge fallacies in that: we always have punished predatory lenders, nor their victims. And this is the epitome of predatory lenders: someone who loans money for something that everyone tells someone very young and naive they “have to have.” Even though it’s ridiculously expensive, the goods are tainted and the lender is the American government. Also, these young people –kept naive and without jobs by law until the date they get the loan — know –not just are told — that you do in fact have to have a degree, because even fast food places require a BA or BS to let you do anything more than serve burgers.

Second the “doctors and lawyers” is a nice — surely planted — bit of leftist cant and envy mongering. Sure, some doctors and lawyers do very well for themselves. And most doctors and lawyers have huge loans. What you are missing — perhaps — is the ten to twelve years of study before they earn ANYTHING following by five to ten years of practice when they are objectively paid less than minimum wage per hour. Followed by yeah, some years of relatively high wages, but not as high as it used to be. In lawyers’ case because there have been a lot of them graduated. And in doctors’ cases… well, HB1 visas, eh?

But beyond all that, how do you know it’s “doctors and lawyers” benefiting from loan forgiveness? The ones I know, none of Biden’s skivvy forgiveness has even begun to touch. And if you forgave 10k or their loans they wouldn’t even feel it. So, how do you know?

Well, it’s what everyone says, isn’t it? And though you see it mostly on the right, isn’t that whole envy thing a lefty talking point? And where did it first come from?

I bring all this up because recently I came across a “Biden is gaining on Trump on the polls” and the usual right wing barking seals either go “it’s because this was the” (leftist mondo brains. Who even believes in those) “plan all along. Trump can’t win, because Truuuuuuump” and the others are going “Oh, people are that stupid and actually want socialist slavery.”

And no one asks the obvious question “What polls? How structured? And BTW what has Biden done, suddenly to increase his popularity?” Or are these polls being manipulated to hide the theft already in progression?

For years I’ve watched right wing sites change their whole approach on the assumption that elections were clean and people wanted socialism, even though it’s blatantly obvious they weren’t.

And please, let’s not get wildly optimistic about November. As much as Biden stinks on ice, they have not only infinite votes created by crooked machines, but they are now giving illegal invaders papers at the border advising them on how to vote. For Biden, of course.

So here’s the thing, they’re preparing the fraud, and they want you to turn against all your fellow Americans, and think they want the destruction of the country.

And therefore with everything, you must ask yourself “How do you know?”

I don’t remember the statute, but apparently there was something that forbid our agencies propagandizing our own people, and using the same techniques they used to “build democracy” and opinion abroad.

Well, that was completely lifted by Obama, but it was already being not-respected under Clinton.

You are being propagandized. The intent of the propaganda is to turn American against American.

While you’re waiting “All women who want this” and “All men who are all rapists” and all “people who tan they want this” “people who don’t tan, they want to oppress me”, while you’re telling the young they should suffer like you did, while most of them are being squeezed like lemons to the last drop and see no future…

Well, if you’re turning the old against the young, the young against the old, and every possible group against each other…

None of us are turning against the real culprits: the power-pigs who have infiltrated our institutions, who concentrate more and more power into their hands, who bring in foreigners to eat out our substance, who in fact are killing us so they can enrich themselves.

And that’s what they want.

So when you hear that some group is bringing your misery, don’t be a fool. There’s only one group doing that: those (mostly Marxists) in charge of our bureaucracies, supported, aided and abetted by the corrupt educational establishment and covered up by the media.

And even there, remember it’s the ones in charge. Not the poor slob trying to do some good and earn a pay check. Yes, some of those are corrupt, but I know a lot of them, and they’re doing the best they can in a corrupt system and often with their hands tied. (And before you say they shouldn’t take that job, have you looked at what jobs are actually available, now?)

This was brought home to me again by Bill Reader asking how Europe is doing. Are they starting to feel their yoke and rebel? And I had to tell him i don’t know. It’s even worse there, because they don’t have a first amendment and therefore no blogs.

How do we know?

We don’t. And the reason we don’t know is deliberate. You can kind of sort of sometimes see the outline of the truth, by what is selling or isn’t, or through family gossip and a feel for things.

But in general?

Spit out the propaganda. It’s poisonous.

The enemy are those with the boot on your necks. Sure, some of your fellow Americans might have been lied to enough to go along with them. Doesn’t mean you should, also, just to make up the weight. If all the other mammoths jumped off the cliff, would you do it too? What, so you could be butchered at the bottom?

Be not afraid, be not credulous, and be not stupid. The last most of all.

Remember they are lying to you. Don’t let them in your head.

The Cat Ate My Homework

In case you guys wonder why this week the posts have been very late, and I haven’t updated Chapter House or my newsletter in two weeks…. I have an explanation. it’s not an excuse, but it’s an explanation.

One of three explanations is above. Let me give you more of the explanations:

That’s Circe and Indy.

And yet more:

This is muse on the isle, and you KNOW she’s too cute to be in trouble. Or at least, SHE knows.

All together now:

But, you’ll ask, how can these beautiful, loving creatures be the reasons I haven’t been posting on time? Am I just blaming them?

Well, they’re not the only reason. BUT–

Here, let me tell you about my day yesterday, so you can… taste the chaos:

I got up at a normal human time, around 7:30 am. walking downstairs, where we have Six FOOT TALL GATES on he doorways the kittens and cats aren’t supposed to go into, I notice Muse walking around on the other side of the gate.

To explain, on the other side of the gate we have: Plants we don’t want attacked, my sewing room where I don’t want the fabric peed on, and the living room which is a sea of boxes and construction stuff (a lot of it to go to the shed which figures in this story later.) The later is potentially dangerous to the raving idiots, hence the gates.

I run to check if I accidentally left the other gate open. Nope. it’s closed.

Freak out. Dan and I start getting cats out of there, which is hard, because Indy hides very well. Finally get them out and are discussing how they might have got in, when they…. show us.

So the living room and the family room share a fireplace. It’s huge, in the way of mid-century-modern construction, and just open.

Because we haven’t got around to try to find extra large screens you screw on, we have just iron screens blocking it on either side.

They managed to wedge to move the screens aside. So, get the weight lifting weights to put in front of it, so it can’t be slowly wedged way.

Which is when Indy shows us he can jump six feet from the floor to the top of the gate and get in anyway. There ensues a half hour of searching for him. Proving he’s evil, he was lying flat on the rug in the bathroom, in the dark.

Get him out of there. Put a baby gate in the little space above the gate so he can’t just jump in. (He’s still trying.)

Sit down to write yesterday’s blog. Get phone call. Our prescription insurance, sulky about my dressing them down till they covered our prescriptions, has made two inexplicable assumptions: 1) that my health is worse than Dan’s. Specifically that my diabetes (which I tested positive for once, but mostly test pre-diabetic, and which is fully under control with ozempic) is much worse than Dan’s (who is on three meds, eats like a teen girl and is still not under control sugar wise.) AND 2) They can solve it by phone, by putting me in consultation with an RN “because she can advise you on diet and exercise and stuff.” (Duuuude. We were hard core low carb for years, are still technically low carb, and I’m NOT a non-active person. Unless the RN is some kind of magician fixing genetic code and problems of auto-immune (I always gain weight when having a massive auto-immune flare. Doctors tell me this makes sense. It might but it’s unfair. I want to have chocolate cake, if I’m going to gain weight.)

I try to explain that I don’t think telemedicine is going to solve my medical issues when doctors over the years can at best patch them, and get told making the appointment will take me 1 minute.

An hour later….

And then I finally did the blog.

Which is when Dan told me we needed to go move all the moving boxes from the shed to the curb, because someone was coming in less than an hour to pick them up. The explanation on this: We moved ourselves, but we did it over six months, with multiple trips. Which meant we got A LOT OF BOXES. How many boxes? Thousands. Add in the end stage where we were packing things because we couldn’t decide whether to pack them or donate them or throw them away? THOUSANDS. (To illustrate, I recently opened a box that told me it contained glasses for the kitchen. It contained MASSES of wrapping paper and a serving plate. I did this. I can’t blame anyone else. But that is not worth a box. Also, really?)

The problem was that the boxes were taking over our entire shed, so I couldn’t walk in it. Literally. Which means some furniture that needs to be fixed/refinished, was just there, taking up space. With boxes all over.

Took me a while to convince Dan even if we move again (depends on where kids end up and if there are ever grandkids) we probably will have someone move us as we did the times before this last. We only did it ourselves this last time because it was lockdown, and we were trying to do it on a shoe string, because we were house-poor. And then he still, understandably, didn’t want to throw some barely used boxes away.

Anyway, I spent an hour and a half carrying boxes around. And then we found out that the cats had found another route into what Dan is calling “The East Wing” or Forbidden Land. (It’s a grand name, for an area that was obviously an addition to a relatively small house, and consists of living room, Dan’s bill’s office, the guest room/sewing room and a bathroom. Most of it in states of still packed. BUT It makes it sound like we live at Pemberley, so I’ll allow it.)

AND THEN some family stuff happened. Including some administrative stuff that required a decision on my part. By which point it was 10 pm, and I sat down to write a chapter of No Man’s Land, because if I don’t it won’t let me sleep.

Which means I wrote till midnight (and still didn’t finish the chapter because inexplicably (ah) I was scattered and slow.

And then woke up late (9) this morning, with Dan saying “The cats were in the East Wing, and I had to grab Muse with one hand. I might have squeezed her too hard, because she tried to bite me, but she won’t let me near to check her.”

Well, we replaced the screens and put a baby gate inside the fireplace. Finding enclosures that fit this mammoth size… well…. And Muse is fine.

But by that point I didn’t feel up to writing a blog post, and it took a while to do the Mad Genius Club one and then–

So, here we are. See, I told you I had explanations, even if not excuses.

They’re adorable and fuzzy. And I wish they’d stop breaking into the East Wing.