Nostr notes by Sarah A. Hoyt (Unofficial)

Radio Free Colorado in Exile Rocking You Not Into that Good Night ...

2026-11-06T06:09:32Z

Radio Free Colorado in Exile Rocking You Not Into that Good Night

Still here, and rocking you into your new Build Under, Build Over, Be Around, keep chill, check your ammo and count your canned!
Once, I woke up in the middle of a hurricane, (Hugo, in Charlotte, NC) looked out the bedroom window and a tornado was crossing our backyard. I thought “I’m dead” and went back to bed and turned on the radio. This came on. I fell asleep to it. I didn’t die. And neither will we:
And from exile with love and longing and loss…
For all of you (and sorry for using my clanker stuff… but you get the point):
And for my family:

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/11/05/radio-free-colorado-in-exile-rocking-you-not-into-that-good-night/
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#exile #hugo #charlotte

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Saddle Up by Holly the Assistant Picture credit to Caitlin Walsh ...

2026-11-05T18:04:38Z

Saddle Up

by Holly the Assistant
Picture credit to Caitlin Walsh
All right. We had our various pity parties–or not–time to find our boots and lace them up again and get back to work.
Now, there is no easy route. There is no Great Leader who will wave his magic wand and make everything right. There’s no Chosen One who will assemble his followers and fix the world. It’s a lovely trope in fiction. In reality, that isn’t how it works. Never has been. Fixing anything is messy and it’s a group project, and we all hate group projects. (And I’d wager that every one of us has ended up doing everyone else’s work at least once.)
On the bright side, though, it’s a project that breaks up in to small bits really well, and your bit can succeed without relying on everyone else’s bit being done correctly. You can make real progress.
On the down side, you will get attacked. For those still raising children, or not financially independent, you need to be more cautious. (I’ve watched the attacks happen to a local friend of mine running for local office. Relentless, and at least one went viral nationwide, which didn’t actually fix the slander.)
Snelson had some great suggestions in the comments yesterday. If what he’s doing is something you can do, go forth and do. If you can show up to local party meetings–and I don’t care which party–and get involved, annoy people, keep them on track, get them off track, go do that. If you can run for a down ballot office, my hat’s off to you, and please be braced for impact.
If you can copy HSLDA’s tactics for your local city council, or your state legislature, or your school board, and run a news list, and tell everyone who really cares about issue XYZ when they should show up, call, email, write, about that issue, do that. I mean, if you can find a passion for . . . deregulating food from home kitchens, get a group of people together who care about that issue. Or for allowing hens in city limits–you can definitely get a list for that. Or for improving county election security. Or, there’s a nascent movement I spotted for, how was that phrased, “The other twenty-nine kids’ right to learn” about de-mainstreaming disruptive children. That’d be a good issue to be involved with.
If you have the pocket books to hire the lawyers and sue, and you find standing, go you forth and do just that. I suspect that certain big figures from the MAGA movement have attorneys combing everything today.
If all of that’s too public, I want you to think of whisper campaigns. Not actually whispering–that would defeat the purpose. Not shouting either, that’s rude. But comments that seed doubt. “Funny how everything that passed and everyone who won in our state is something China cares about, isn’t it?” “I don’t know anyone who voted for X, do you? Do you know why they did?” “Why hasn’t that guy resigned from his megachurch position? Is he a Christian Nationalist?” You’re just asking questions. Totally reasonable questions. Look at the person, or the issue, find what the other side would just ask questions about if they weren’t in favor of, and ask those questions. That’s how that game works. I’ve had good luck with persuading perfectly normal Democrats against mail-in ballots before by asking why abusive spouses should get to vote their victims’ ballots. “I mean, if he’ll hit her for cooking his steak wrong, then he’ll definitely force her to vote the way he wants.”
Now for your own family, I want you to start thinking practically. We’re all (almost) preppers here anyway, right? I think this is the biggest conglomeration of “Actually this is how to survive a week long power outage” people that isn’t a dedicated prepper website. So make sure that’s in order. Make sure you have what you need if your bank account gets hung up for a couple days-we had an internet outage here a couple years ago that shut down all the banking in town, my credit union stayed open on the honor system but most simply closed doors, only stores that could deal in cash and checks and had cashiers who could do math stayed open. Make sure you have what you need if your power goes out–we know corrupt government is associated with lack of basic services–see South Africa for details. Make sure if the garbage trucks don’t come for a month you have a plan so you don’t get rats. Not apocalypse, just . . . lack of services on schedule. My in-laws get city water only occasionally, so they and all their neighbors yell to each other when the water comes on and fill all their storage containers. Basic big city third world stuff. Charge your phone battery and your backup battery when there is power. Not Mad Max, Kinshasa on a Tuesday or Johannesburg on a Wednesday. If you normally rely on a big freezer, be prepared to cook and can without power if you don’t have backup power for it.
Make yourself a network of people. Who can come over with a chainsaw if there’s a tree down in your yard? Who can you go over to with a chainsaw if there’s a tree down in his yard? Networks are vitally important when you’re in a low-trust situation. You have to know who will help and who will steal. You need to know who will give you a reference to a real roofing company. You need to give references to your mechanic, your roofer, your driveway paver, and you need to give business to your network’s references. Don’t hire based on “I did an online search and got quotes.” Hire on “I know a guy.” Not least because the fall-out of failing as a “known guy” is no more jobs, not dissolving the company and starting a new one. This is not the American norm, but it is the way most of the world gets people who do things. And our unassimilated immigrants are doing just that–giving work exclusively to people in their trust network, while we’re . . . not.
Yes, this means you-YOU!-have to talk to actual human beings.
We didn’t pick this, but we’re here.
There’s no man coming on a white horse to save you. But you don’t need one of those, anyway. Get your saddle on your own horse and ride.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/11/05/saddle-up/

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#caitlinwalsh #great

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The Machine For two weeks now I’ve been driving my family and ...

2026-11-04T23:00:51Z

The Machine

For two weeks now I’ve been driving my family and my close in fan group insane with “They’re going to steal the election. I can see all the battle space preparation signs.” And them telling me I was insane.
After last night, I don’t think a lot of them speak to me.
And yet–
“But Sarah, the right lost fair and square!” “The people want Islamic socialism!”
Maybe they do. Maybe they do indeed. Except there is no sign of it at all, except what came out of the machines last night.
Look, the numbers are — on the face of them — bloody unbelievable. The democrats had presidential-turn-out-or-better, suddenly, in a mid-term. Which, given how many of the voters were deported– Never mind. Not enough, probably, to make a big difference.
But what we saw at the polls heralds the type of sea change that goes “everyone hates the president”. And… I’m not seeing it?
Sure maybe in some super-blue enclaves this is obvious and in your face, but… even so. Opposition that strong shows. Where is their viral “Let’s go Brandon!” moment? Where is their run away success fictional series where the good guys win? Where are their massive demonstrations saying “the king is a fink?” The No Kings movement had to use photos from a year ago or two years ago. Because they couldn’t even commandeer their usual 12 people on respirators in a corner.
You know what else a big sea change movement of this kind doesn’t do? Steal signs. Across the country there was an epidemic of leftists stealing signs. Not one or two, not their petty, usual vandalism, but “I can’t keep a sign for my guy up, because it gets stolen.” That’s… battle space preparation. Not for a fair vote, but for fraud.
You know what else is funny? Well. A lot of things. But one of them that is clearly, blatantly, obviously funny is that the Democrats outperformed the polls.
“But Sarah, Republicans outperform the polls all the time.” Yes, but that’s like me saying “There is a flock of turkeys flying north” and you saying “So, geese do that all the time.”
The culture we live in, Democrats announce their preference loudly. Hell, they’ll run you down on the street to tell you what they think. They will not be phone shy. Ever. And all the polls are skewed left anyway, if you look at the internals.
Another weird thing: This time the cities reported first. Normally they report last to account for how many votes they needed. Not last night, no siree bob! They reported first. Must be because there’s no fraud in the cities any longer. Stop laughing.
“But Sarah, where’s the proof?”
And there you have me. DataRepublican exposed their talk of color revolution. Of what they’d do to secure the gains if the President tried to call them out on it. How they’d expose him as a tyrant.
What does that hinge on? No PROOF of the steal. Or no easily provable proof. Because if we can point at it and say “but they obviously stole it, this way” then the color revolution fails.
I don’t know how you voted. I mean, the mechanics of it. I voted in paper. I was such a small minority that the only wait in our polling place was for the machines. No wait at all for paper. And until five minutes ago (It’s five am, btw) I was patting myself on the back over it.
I filled a ballot, then I approached a machine. A nice poll worker helped me put it in the machine, the ballot was pulled in, and the screen lit up “Your vote has been counted!”
Very nice. Who was my vote counted for, precisely? It can’t tell me, of course, the nice poll worker would see it! And besides the ballot is right there! They can count it again. (I presume.) Sure. BUT I’m NOT THERE TO WATCH IT COUNTED. … and most people voted by machine.
You know the rule, don’t you “Don’t trust your vote to anything you wouldn’t trust your cash?”
Let me know when you’d be happy and excited if your bank account had no way to audit your deposits and withdrawals. I know I’d practically pee myself with happiness! Who wouldn’t? I put a thousand dollar check, the ATM flashes “Your deposit has been accepted” and then…
Look, I’m increasingly looking askance at AMAZON because I hadn’t looked closely at what one of my releases was doing in years, but when I looked at No Man’s Land — I also had never had an indie release that sold numbers worth watching like a hawk, to be honest — anyway, I saw it do impossible things. Like my sales numbers went backward without returns. That was… special. More than once. And I’m looking askance at it, because “what’s my control?” and “What’s my recourse?” And in both cases the answer is “none.”
Now look at your voting apparatus which just did a … if not impossible truly bloody unlikely thing. What is your control? And what is your recourse?
Yeah, yeah, enclaves of foreign workers in Texas and Islamics in Michigan and…. Are you for real? In two years? It changed that much in two years?
No bloody way. What we just saw was expert fraud preparation and then the pay off.
There AREN’T any organic, on the ground signs for this shift. And suddenly dems are poll shy? People. These critters haven’t been shy about their idiotic opinions since they emerged screaming “Marx” from their birthing person’s wombs.
Yes, yes, a lot of their candidates were smooth articles, who practically claimed to be GOP. BUT Talarico? The homunculus? Like Beto but gayer? Was that really what Texas was waiting for? And across the board, too? Not just the big profile campaign?
One thing I’ll tell you is that locally, they stopped handing out the little slip of paper that you had to hand back to show how many people voted. You see, it had been badly wrong in 20, so… People, ah ah, just forgot to hand it in. But it worked in 24. And now it was gone, without a blink.
It stinks. To high heavens it stinks. Before you start ripping into your fellow citizens, look around. The reason you’re not sleeping (Ah!) or beating your head against the wall is that none of it makes sense. A friend last night said “AI could make the hack into the voting machines smooth, without sudden hockey sticks.” But of course, that’s nonsense. These systems that are all connected to the internet are as secure as big, commercial refrigeration systems, after all. A hack would be preventable, obvious. And it’s not like, oh, open AI or Anthropic have a vested interest in getting someone in who will destroy grok! Or in getting idiots in who will “regulate AI.” Not a chance.
It’s a black box. Your vote goes in. Trust me, bro! comes out. And you trust it. Of course.
Oh, you don’t? Well, what are you going to do about it? In 2020 with the fraud blatant, in front of our eyes and in front of G-d and everybody, we couldn’t convince the vast majority that we’d been color-revolutioned. Now? Now with this smooth operation? Are you kidding me? A quarter of you are in a full out tantrum and saying I’m making up shit.
I’m not making up shit. Our election systems have gone from wobbly to fully mythomaniacal. And you know what is a bad sign? A bad sign is DataRepublican talking about ways to power around the vote system and the elected rep system. And one of the reasons it’s a ridiculously bad sign is that those don’t work. Not really.
Oh, yes, you should be fully ungovernable and make it as hard as possible for them to do onto you. No one is asking you to be good Germans.
BUT– Look, it’s obvious the left got an infusion of cash and expertise. Looks at Europe. Looks at Brazil. Hell, maybe even Israel, though every politician there is so bad one can come up with excuses. But then one can come up with excuses everywhere.
For something like sixteen years this depressive has been telling you to have hope; this hothead has been saying “don’t go hot.”
Now the ballot box has failed us. Conclusively.
Yes, I just heard, across the internet, as a hundred thousand of you dragged the ammo box across the floor.
For years now, I’ve told you “When it’s time, I’ll tell you.”
Is it time?
Not yet. Don’t stomp your foot. It’s unbecoming for a fully grown ungovernable American. I didn’t tell you never. And no, I won’t keep saying “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
I’m not even saying “trust the plan.” If you remember in 2020 I was the one who never trusted the plan. I was beating myself like a fly in a tarbox because I didn’t trust the plan.
I’m saying take a deep breath. Go back to bed. Sleep. Eat. Bide your time. They’re expecting resistance right now. They’re prepared right now.
What’s more, maybe some portion of the DOJ isn’t entirely taken over by the deep state. (I know. I’m so funny!) And they were supposedly ready for this, right?
Give it a month. Give it at least a month See what happens. A month isn’t so much, is it? Put that ammo box back under the sofa. And the bed. And in the closet. And — (Look, guys, someone brought her dowry in ammo in my family, and I don’t think the rest of you are so different.) — don’t forget where it is.
The program is subject to change depending on what happens. Keep your eyes peeled. (The man with an overcoat is an enemy.) And I’m praying really hard that a miracle occurs and we don’t have to shoot ourselves out of this. Right now, the most dangerous move is the premature one. Make sure you’re not getting in the way of something that obviates your need to move. The next most dangerous move is trusting the guy who’ll drive you to the criming. And the person saying you need to go hot right this minute, and they have everything to help you do so. Don’t do any of that.
I’m begging you with tears in my eyes, don’t do the dangerous. In fact, don’t do anything right now. Isn’t there a rifle — or a dozen of them — you want to clean? And you know that the price of ammo is going to go up. And wasn’t there some ruling recently making body armor legal for civilians? Go shopping this week. Figure out the money.
Do all of that. I half joke about “sell your cloak and buy a helicopter” but metaphorically speaking consider it.
Also check your canned. Check your water storage. Make sure you have the right meds stocked up. Take your pets to get their vaccines you’ve been putting off. That surgery? If you can have it done asap and be okay in a month, now is a good time. Take out cash. Better yet, buy silver, both coin and jewelry. (Gold is for the big things. How many houses do you plan on buying? Cars?) Make sure you have clothing for winter, and back up means of heating. And a good first aid kit. And make sure your family has a rendez vous in case the house is not there. Or not reachable. A bolthole might also be a good idea, if achievable. (These days, it might be hard.)
Don’t go off half cocked. And give it time. Who knows? Maybe the pig will sing. I’ll grant you it’s unlikely, but G-d looks after fools, drunkards and the United States of America. Looks up at ceiling fan: Now would be good, Lord.
You feel you just were massively cheated because — signs are — you probably were. Almost certainly. All I’m seeing is perception management and a number that defies even the perceptions.
Take a deep breath. This is not your sign. But it’s closer to your sign than it’s been in almost two decades.
G-d have mercy on us all. But in the end, we win they lose. There is no other option. Because ours is the only hope for mankind.
Be not afraid. Deep breaths. Plan, plan, plan. No, plan more than that. And give it time for a miracle first.
Stay frosty. Stay ungovernable. Stay American. Don’t give them an excuse to enact the second half of the coup.
Go count the canned again. Contemplate what we’ll lose forever if we have to act. (All I wanted to do was to write my little stories in peace and make enough to live on. And to have children and grandchildren, fat babies to hold and sing to. That’s all I ever wanted.)
Take a deep breath. Go to sleep. Give it at least a month.
I actually doubt it will hold that long. Gut feeling is it won’t. Not every one reads ATH. Not every one will go count the canned and go back to sleep. Not everyone will give it a month. And some will go off half cocked. I suspect some are being wound up to do so even as we speak. And we can’t control them.
So be prepared for that too. For when the sea tosses you and it’s all you can do to keep your head above water. That’s where your preparation comes in.
G-d have mercy on us all.
Your lives, your fortune, your sacred honor. Did you think it would be easy? Did you think it was a game?

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/11/04/the-machine/

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#sarah #because #proof #maybe #steal #except

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Your Clothes And Weapons First of all go vote. We’re going as ...

2026-11-03T13:49:21Z

Your Clothes And Weapons

First of all go vote. We’re going as soon as we get up and I drink enough coffee to be functional, because we’re getting reports of lines. Maybe tomorrow will be the exception to that, but hopefully it won’t.
Vote to give us a chance to get better representatives. Vote to give us a chance to escape what’s happening in Europe.
I do believe we’ll survive, anyway, but on the way to survival there is a never end of pain we’ll be inviting if we let the bastards have even one house. Go vote. Vote against socialism. Vote against subjection. Vote so blogs like this can continue to exist.
And speaking of what’s happening in Europe, yesterday in my close-in group (The Chinchilla of Hope gang) someone asked why the store shelves are bare of essentials like toilet paper. We quickly determined this is country wide, so it’s not a fear of storms.
Apparently a bunch of countries around the world are telling their citizens to have 3 days of supplies on hand, and, not being stupid, people know that fuckery is planned and fuckery is afoot.
I don’t think it will move this fast here. For one the votes won’t be tallied by tomorrow night.
BUT Bill Reader in a rare phone call a couple of days ago told me that he expected things to go hot almost immediately. That win or lose (please let them lose) the left is going to go hot ASAP. … well, even if they win (particularly if they win) it wouldn’t be the first time that they took this as the go signal. It wouldn’t be the first country either. And if they go hot here it’s probably the sign for the world to go hot-ter which would explain the “warnings”.
So– On your way back from voting, go see if you can get whatever you need to round up your supplies. And yes, I am very much including ammo. And axes. you can never have too many axes. (Okay, fine, I can never have too many axes.)
Go forth. May the Lord bless you and keep you, may he may His face to shine upon you and give you peace. (And strength.)
And as always, keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/11/03/your-clothes-and-weapons/

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#weapons #vote #europe #may #billreader

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Time For The Stars I have bad news: This is not going to talk ...

2026-11-02T18:50:32Z

Time For The Stars

I have bad news: This is not going to talk about the Heinlein novel. Yes, I will resume my reviews, soon-ish. Right now the ETA for this place unpacked is “before New Years” mostly because novel keeps pulling me away from the packing (Weird that.) So the reviews might not resume before that, but they will review. Besides, me, reviewing Heinlein amounts to “Squee, squee, squee!” and you’d all be reaching for your adjustment knob and this blog ain’t got one.
The further bad news is that I’m going to inflict Slopcore on you, which is apparently the term for generated music with this kind of “catchy” non demanding tune and this figure. Before I do, it’s okay if you don’t watch it. The story is ten bad ideas, five really inadvisable decisions, and a strong burning core of hope all rolled into one. From further videos, I suspect the people producing this channel are Libertarian Socialists, which are weirder than anything the founders of Elly (in No Man’s Land) cobbled together. Fortunately it’s an ideological chimera, not a biological one. Unfortunately, it can only live in a world where the laws of economics have stopped applying. And since the laws of economics are tied to basic humanity, getting there — as for all socialism — would imply exterminating humanity. (And if you just said “Oh, that’s why!” Yep. That’s why the green everything, the purposeful immiseration, the loathing of mere humanity. For Socialism to live, humanity must die.)
Anyway all the same, the slopcore is catchy and there’s something there, which I will explain. (Beyond and beside the stupidity.)
The stupidity is obvious. It starts with “voted to share what the robots made” — economy doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that — UBI is second only in stupidity to the idea you can take billionaires’ wealth and make everyone rich forever. If you have UBI in some amount, then every price immediately goes up by the measure of the UBI. Also, for the love of screaming Bob, robots will belong to real, live people ( probably a lot of them retirees counting on their funds to live.) They will need maintenance and replacement. Nationalizing robots is the stupidest thing imaginable. Supporting people without work is the stupidest thing imaginable. There’s a reason the scions of very wealthy families become Hunter Biden. Man — and woman, and those who looked in their pants before going on — was made to strive. Remove the striving, and it all collapses, everything that makes us human. Which is one of the fundamental mistakes of socialism. Giving people things doesn’t make them happy with those things as it does earning them. And the ultimate penalty of socialism is the loss of the will to live. It manifests first with stopping births. Then killing the elderly in the name of compassion. Well before people are being supported in absolute comfort.
It seemed to me we didn’t need the socialist experiment, frankly. We already knew what happened to retirees who had nothing to do, no drive. And we knew what happened to very rich kids. But did anyone ask me? No. Partly because I hadn’t been born yet, which seems to me like a poor excuse.
Anyway, I did not miss that this is two generations of single mothers. Look, I’m also not kicking too hard at that, because there is such a thing as clean storytelling, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a guy there for the birth scene and mention dad lost his job too. Hey, maybe mom and dad have different jobs.
The core of hope that makes this story cheery despite the galoomphing stupid: The abundance it promises is real. Radical, soaked through, endless abundance. And that’s… well. That’s a tide that lifts all boats.
It won’t stop human civilization, though some people WILL fall by the wayside — look, it’s as easy to kill with joy as with grief, and who told you human evolution was done — but as with AI used properly, it will free those with the drive and the will to push on to do the things that matter.
Like this: Yes, a lot of jobs are going away with AI — and even more with robots, though if you tell me you don’t have a dream of a housekeeping robot (I’m going to name mine Jenkins, and if you get it, you get it. AND if I can make things work out as I want, this January you’ll understand why this is funny enough to laugh shooting coffee out of your nose. You’ll see.) you’re a rank liar. Science fiction people, I’ve found, writers and readers alike are lousy housekeepers. We spend too much time in our heads to do otherwise. I try to be the exception, but I’m losing that battle as I get older.
BUT as the Little Pickle said last night “Heaven’s sakes! There will be other jobs that appear. Jobs don’t go away without new ones being created.” Which means that if I die before there are grandkids old enough for me to yell economics at, they’ll still be fine.
Because she’s exactly right. If every job currently being done went away tomorrow morning, humanity would find new needs. If every dirty, dangerous outdoor job is done, men don’t become obsolete. They will find their danger and dirt exploring far flung worlds, designing and testing the machines to get us there… all of it.
And if every indoor, boring, repetitive job went away tomorrow, it doesn’t make women obsolete. They’ll find they can plan their household better, and have the androids execute it. People who had servants didn’t stop working at the household. (Well, some did… but… See evolutionary pressure below.)
To an extent we’re already there, already past that inflection point. No? Compared to even the nineteenth century we’re unimaginably rich. As a culture, sure, but even as a species. Do you know how our ancestors would have felt about “The only time there’s a famine is when we let ourselves be oppressed by horrible rulers?” Famine was the rule of human existence since an ape stood up, thought of the past and dreamed of the future. This is literally unimaginable for the generations of our forefathers who sleep in the dirt.
This shows in the small things too, everyday life. Cleaning, cooking, the most basic tasks of housekeeping for anyone not wishing to live in rank filth, are so ridiculously easy now. (And we still fall down, and yes, there are novels to write, and I’m going to blame those, okay?) And it keeps improving.
And yet, we’re busy. Busier than ever, at least some of us.
This is what I was saying, about evolutionary pressures. There already is an evolutionary pressure in place. Right now it’s a little mixed if I’m honest. Those who are given everything, have no ambition and are basically non-functional SEEM to have an evolutionary advantage. I maintain that’s illusory. Yes, they reproduce more, but the children live ephemeral lives and a lot of them die without reproducing. On the other hand, those with drive and purpose, who design and plan and build are suffering a different pressure: by the time we’re done training and establishing ourselves — unless you’re as crazy as Dan and I were and take the plunge early. Our infertility was the fault of my auto-immune, not of our waiting too long — we don’t have the ability to produce children. Which brings the spiraling population numbers into focus, of course.
Fortunately not every one of the purposeless produces children that likewise lack drive. And the ones who have drive are the most likely to survive.
Also, fortunately, this dream future of robots that seems actually within our reach, is going to lift the onerous cost of training and establishing oneself. Or it should. It should be easier than ever to plunge from late adolescence into comfortable, if now ridiculously prosperous (though maybe by OUR standards) adulthood, and children without a problem. (Either that or figure out how to extend fertility which, instinctively, seems to me will be the harder puzzle to crack. But maybe no. I’d like to say I’m here for it, but even in pie-in-the-sky scenario chances are low. I have, on the outside, if everything aligns, maybe 30 years, after all.)
What I think this … let’s call it radical abundance, will do is that we will have those who don’t want to do anything, if it’s not needed for them to survive. They will… wither away like retirees without a mission. Which means the children of those with drive and purpose will inherit the Earth. Yes, some of those, maybe most of those, will be purposeless and will also just wither. Look, the majority of humanity is designed to be lazy. That was the evolutionary pressure in pre-history. Man who hunted mammoth while mammoth was rotting at the camp, just starved and his whole tribe with him. Which means the “selection for drive” will refine over the next, oh, few thousand years. But that’s not our problem. It is simply what it is.
The point though is that this future gives humanity a chance at the stars, a chance at lives that transcend the everyday chores, the boring, all physical stuff, the fear of hunger, the fear of disease, and maybe if we’re very lucky the humiliating descent into senescence at the end of life. (I don’t expect, or want, to live forever, but the decline and loss of ability should be manageable, if we’re going to live lives even as long as we have now. It’s a pity to waste 1/3 of your life to diminishing ability.)
It will bring with a lot of new and fresh problems, yes, like: Yes, what about people who just want to sit and eat cake (or do drugs, or whatever) till they die? And what does marriage become in an age where you live a long time, vigorously? How many marriages survive? And what becomes of families when the longest time you’ll have with your children is with them as adults? (This we’re already facing.) And what about people too dumb for the new economy? (Ah! Caught you. That one is Bullshit. There will always be things people can do, at whatever level. No? look at history.) And what do we do when obviously stupid ideas seem to suddenly make sense? (Like this video. Chill, they still don’t.) And what do we do when we go beyond the need to write words? And– And we’ll burn those bridges when we reach them. But I’d rather be fighting in such a state of abundance that Humanity can’t starve if it tries than otherwise, okay.
This future of radical abundance hinges, to a great extent on how these elections go.
If you just snort giggled, don’t. I mean, I’m not stupid, and I think this future, this radical abundance, is inevitable. The question is… How far in the distant reaches of future time? Because it could be very far indeed.
Or it could be in the next 20 years, within our children’s lives. It is honestly, right now, so close we can touch it with our fingertips.
And yes, sure, your GOP congressman is a fiend, or if you live in Alaska, an idiot. And some of them are demonstrably in the pay of China.
But there are more people in the pay of China on the left. More importantly the left, elected mostly by fraud (trust me on this) doesn’t give a good damn for what you want. You have no pressure you can bring to bear on it. Look at NYC or Denver. Seriously. They don’t depend on voters, and can shit right on your wants and needs. And call you names on top of it.
However, if the left — let alone the red-green alliance — takes over, we’re done. The only question is for how long a count. AI will be regulated to a fare-thee-well, which means the current, impossible to monetize models will be the only ones, and it will quickly become a rich man’s toy. (I’d hate that, because it has become one of the best series-Bible keepers I’ve ever met. And instead of spending three days leafing through three ring binders to find a reference (I always sucked at wiki format) I can simply ask and be told. And verifying that is way easier than coming up with it fresh. Also, honestly, that frees more time to write. I need to experiment with publicity via AI too, because I sure can’t do it on my own.) Humanoid robots will come, but it will be to literally take your job. However, don’t worry little buddy, the government will create a job corps, digging and filling in ditches. (They never understood why this was idiotic. So they’ll do it again.)
These regimes collapse in about 70 years, but they either mutate into hardcore fascist (hi, China!) which is not an improvement or they leave an awful hangover for a long time.
That future we can ALMOST touch? Could be gone within a year, if we hand our legislature to people who are even more ignorant of economics than you average politician. (And that’s a lot.) It could stay gone until no one on Earth remembers our names, not even as a line in some record.
Arguably worse if the green part of that alliance takes hold. I am all for freedom of religion, but without a radical reformation to make it safe for the world, Islam will stop all progress cold. HARD. Because it’s a religion with a political component that is rigid and rigidly enforced, and which is attuned to the desert of Arabia circa the seventh century, countries that fall to it stop progressing in knowledge and civilization and often regress HARD.
Oh, the future will still come, the super-abundance that’s baked in in our tinkering genes. But that would be…. How does thousands of years sound to you? Because a lot of it will need to be re-invented. From first principles.
Yeah, I know. One of the lines the slopcore hit right was “the year when everyone was afraid of the future” and a lot of people are. It’s running too fast. It’s making the world too unstable. Hit a pause button!
As with puberty (sorry) there is no pause button. There is only something that will hurts seriously and has a small, outside chance of killing us prematurely.
I’m begging you with tears in my eyes. Do not try to hit the pause button. The future will hurt. But not as much as trying to stop it.
Go out and vote for your GOP crook as opposed to your DEM madman. It’s important. They’re all stupid and venal, but the GOP is slightly less so, because it still depends on getting out the vote and also because at its core it doesn’t hate America. Or humanity.
Vote for the crook. It’s important.
And maybe there will be time for the stars in the near future. And, yes, even time for love.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/11/02/time-for-the-stars/

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

2026-11-02T00:14:21Z

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH
FROM CHRISTOPHER R. DINOTE: Endless Battle Wyrd Warfare (Raconteur Press Anthologies)
The hour is late. The bottle is low. The lightweights have gone home. What’s left is the stuff that burns going down & the stories nobody tells until everybody sober has left the room .
Eleven stories. Eleven wars. One question nobody wants answered.
A survey scout stranded on an ocean world follows something enormous through the water, and finds out whose nightmares he’s been having. Two British privates break through the wall of a trench in 1916 and find what’s been taking the bodies out of no man’s land. A Union major and his Confederate cousin stand back-to-back in New Mexico because the dead Comanche in the valley below don’t care which uniform you wore. A frozen squad at the Chosin Reservoir learns that the thing killing them can be hurt–by noise. A Navy senior chief sits in a courtroom that’s just been cleared of its jury, and finally tells someone what came out of the fog at 25 degrees north.
From the Western Front to Korea, from Katanga to the Bermuda Triangle, from a deployment gate cut into the earth at Oak Ridge to a Warsaw schoolhouse full of things that shouldn’t have a body, these are soldiers doing the job in front of them while the rules quietly stop applying.
Some of them come home.
FROM PATRICK MCHARGUE: The Patient Dark (Expansion Book 2)
Thirty years gone. He wasn’t supposed to come back. The mission wasn’t supposed to change.
A signal comes out of the Belt, and the first person to recognize it hasn’t been seen for thirty years.
Jack Merrill and Francene Tailer get the call on a Saturday — Dr. Lisa Chen wants to talk about that vacation they keep putting off. What she actually wants is to send them out as supernumeraries aboard the Kuiper Belt Explorer, approved, built, and crewed for a different mission entirely. Chen scraps that mission and re-targets the ship at the signal’s coordinates instead.
The crew gains one more member: a man Jack and Francene haven’t seen in thirty years. He’s been places, done things, kept up with things — and answered exactly none of the questions that mattered. Chen doesn’t know and doesn’t ask — she trusts.
Six weeks each way. Seven people aboard a ring ship, headed toward something that found them as much as they found it. Whatever is waiting at the end of the transit has had a long time to decide what it wants to say — and even longer to decide who it wants to say it to.
The dark has been patient. It can afford to be.
FROM ROBERT MILLER: The Rabbit Hole Weirdness Itself
So what is weirdness? In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland the March Hare’s tinkering with a pocket watch using butter and a butter-knife definitely qualifies. But so does tinkering with people, or being tinkered with by outside forces. Weirdness is the sense of just such tinkering, evil or benign, with the living, the dead, nature, time, or reality itself. And just as the March Hare’s results can be horrible (for the watch), or humorous (for us); so too can tinkering with any aspect of reality result in horror, humour, or, in the end, be just weirdness itself.
The following writers look beyond the normal, offering thirty-six stories of strange tinkerings with people and reality, all of which represent new trips down The Rabbit Hole: Wastella Amanda Parker, H. Donovan Lyón, James Rumpel, Kath Kilburn, Helen Speirs, Sarah Oechsle, Robert E. Stahl, Taylor Hagood, Nicholas Samuel Stember, Philip S. Bloch, Z. M. Renick, Selah Tay-Song, GD Deckard, Murray Eiland, Dana Hammer, E.J. LeRoy, James Carraghan, Gary Battershell, Daniel Mahoney, Phil Baringer, Iain McGrath, Alistair Blackledge, Kathy Liddle, Mark Keane, Sarah Busching, Bonnie Stanard, Molly Schulz Kelash, Gio Clairval, Kate LaDew, Robert Miller, Peter Mangiaracina, Adam Stone, Colleen Morrison, and Tom Wolosz
FROM ETHAN MOORE: Scorched Earth Volume I
In 2024, civilization was consumed in the Rebirthing fires. Ninety years later, Gerti Alvarez just wanted to survive the impossible task she had been assigned. Instead, she finds a scarred girl, a repair team trying to hold their town together, and a mayor hiding more than political ambition.
Scorched Earth: Volume 1 is a gripping apocalyptic adventure about loyalty, survival, and the cost of doing what’s right
FROM DAVID BADURINA: Hold My Beer Heroes: Ten Comic Tales of Magnificent Overconfidence (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 82)
Every hero in this book is absolutely sure he’s got this.
He doesn’t. That’s the fun part.
Hold My Beer Heroes gathers ten comic stories about the overconfident, the underprepared, and the magnificently wrong, and the glorious moment each of them finds out. Curated by David Badurina, this anthology celebrates the oldest joke there is: the guy who says “watch this” right before everything catches fire. And then, somehow, wins anyway.
Inside you’ll find:
A would-be insurance fraudster whose PowerPoint has no slide for “we grabbed the wrong guy.”
A London art-crime inspector who calls himself The Fox and investigates like a wrecking ball in a borrowed tuxedo.
A park ranger who knows every inch of the backcountry and nothing whatsoever about crime scenes.
A farmer at war with a chicken-thieving fox and a plastic owl that refuses to stay where he puts it.
A weekend sword fighter who has never failed to call a clean hit, until he meets people who aren’t playing.
A washed-up musician in a zombie-overrun Bronx with four hours to throw his son the birthday party of the century.
A barbarian and a sorcerer banished to the worst hell imaginable: an outdoor jam-band festival that never ends.
A ship’s janitor, a sarcastic AI, and a mop he swears is a prophet, stranded on a planet built from the galaxy’s garbage.
A cocky boxer who takes an easy-money fight and finds out exactly who bought tickets.
An Australian monster hunter with twelve laminated documents and one very large problem in the lake.
Crime capers, monster hunts, space comedy, sword and sorcery, and a zombie apocalypse with a surprisingly good pizza place. No lectures. No hand-wringing. Just ten heroes who fail upward with enormous confidence, and the deep satisfaction of watching them get exactly what’s coming to them.
Grab a cold one. Somebody’s about to say “watch this.”
FROM KURT KELLEN: VIGILANTE: NEW YORK HELLSCAPE: AN AMERICAN VIGILANTE NOVEL
As Paris Burns and Europe Crumbles, A Warning to the United States…
New York is broken. Rats own the streets. Cops are just another licensed gang and the socialist mayor treats the city like occupied territory. A man can’t walk from the subway to his own deli without becoming a victim.
Thomas Goodman has had enough. When a knife-wielding thug comes into the shop, Goodman kills him in self-defense. It should have ended there. Instead activists, the media and the mayor’s machine decide a white deli owner who fights back is more useful as a racist murderer. The DA starts building a case. Goodman opens his mouth once on camera and tells the truth: what’s happening is not migration. It is a takeover. Islam is eating the city like a cancer.
Then they rape his woman and burn her face with sulfuric acid before they kill her. The mayor’s office wants to pin it on Goodman and ride the story to election day.
The mayor, activists, the media … they made one tragic miscalculation: Goodman is an ex-mobster who just wanted to be left alone. Instead of creating a patsy, they created a monster. A monster with a thirst for revenge.
New York Hellscape is a riveting new thriller by Kurt Kellen, and a horrifying look at America’s future.
FROM G.K. MASTERSON: Blood of the Fae (Cycle of the Eternals Book 1)
He came south for justice. He found his blood instead.
Assistant District Attorney Raúl Rodriguez left Queens with a broken heart, a sharp legal mind, and zero patience for small-town Southern hospitality. All he wants in Vicksburg, Mississippi, is a quiet drink and a case worth winning.
What he gets is Thea Collins.
Blunt, brilliant, and allergic to small talk, Thea is a local private investigator who does astrophysics in a bar, insults people in a dozen languages, and keeps a crossbow handy for anyone who annoys her. She and her cousin Jimmy are also persons of interest in the disappearance of a mysterious doctor, a case that just landed on Raúl’s desk.
One night of conversation changes everything. Raúl starts seeing things: strange lights, shifting faces, crowns that shouldn’t be there. When he tries to break his oath to the court, his own throat closes and nearly kills him. Then Thea drags him home to meet the family, and he learns the truth no one ever told him.
He is Fae.
Not glitter and wishes, but the old blood of Arcadia, inherited from a grandmother who gave up eternity for love. Now Raúl is sworn to an ancient Earl and bound by oaths that can choke him and debts that must be repaid within a year and a day. He has to learn glamour, combat, and the laws of a hidden world from the two people who drive him craziest. The training is brutal. The nightmares are worse. And in one of them, he sees his own grave, dated just six weeks away.
Then Thea is found beaten and poisoned with cold iron, the one thing that can destroy a Fae’s very soul. Raúl and Jimmy are arrested for the attack. With Thea trapped in a coma and sending him cryptic visions, Raúl has to clear his name, outmaneuver a deputy with a grudge, bargain with a Fae secret-keeper whose price is steep, and accept help from the last allies anyone expected: a motorcycle club of werewolves.
The clock is ticking toward the date on that headstone. And the person who wants Thea dead has Raúl in their sights next.
Full of Southern heat and sharp humor, with a slow-burn romance and a fresh take on the Fae, **Blood of the Fae** is the first book in the Cycle of the Eternals, a sweeping urban fantasy saga that begins on the banks of the Mississippi and reaches all the way to the stars.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: Fixing Up Love (Building a Life Book 1)
Amaryllis left school with a worthless degree and a fiance who wasn’t that into her. She refused to go back home to wallow in her family’s judgment of her choices, so she took refuge with her best friend instead. Her very handy best friend, who was fixing up a foreclosed house he’d bought. It was a really big job, and he could definitely use her help. His handiness kind of made her want to get handsy, but would fixing up the house together fix up their relationship as well?
FROM HYEOK LIM: The Last Colony Builder
Rook Nine is being written off. To keep the Mars outpost breathing, a maintenance worker must turn damaged power lines, shrinking reserves, and a twenty-one-sol proof window into a case no corporate office can ignore. The Last Colony Builder is a tense, blue-collar science-fiction novel about survival, repair, and the people who decide a colony is more than an entry on a balance sheet.
FROM LEE ECKHARDT: THEY
Who are They? They are shadows flitting across the desert in the moonlight. They are things you see only from the corner of your eye. They have haunted the Earth for thousands of years, inspiring endless tales of terror; They are the reason human beings have always feared the night. Until now They have made only brief forays into our world, but They have changed their plans; They now want the Earth for themselves. Young Aleksei Arbatov has discovered Their existence; he knows Their plans. He, alone, must face Them, with only a single ally – an ally that might, in the end, actually prove to be one of Them…
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The War That Came to Houston
In the midst of preparations for a critical mission, Leland Andersen can’t afford the return of a childhood nightmare. Yet night after night the vision torments him, of an astronaut dying in flames.
Nora McKinzie is a Houston police officer — and a member of an ancient order founded to fight eldritch entities wherever they might flee. When she receives a warning that a sworn enemy is on the move again, her obligations come into conflict with each other.
Both of them are present when Johnson Space Center comes under attack by terrorists. And they both know that the official explanations don’t hold together.
Two people, one deadly secret — and an enemy from beyond time and space.
A novel of the Grissom timeline.
Previously serialized under the title A Separate War.
FROM LILANIA BEGLEY: Cataclysm: A Space Patrol Romance
A quiet maintenance man with dangerous reflexes. A brilliant botanist on the run. And a dead asteroid that is slowly waking up.
She knows him only as Lael and thinks him to be a grim, silent mechanic who pulled her out of a dying space station before it went dark. He claims he’s just trying to survive. But a simple maintenance worker doesn’t move like a shadow, track like a predator, or carry a sealed data drive taped to his soul.
The only name she’s willing to admit is Sanda, and she isn’t a helpless passenger. Fleeing across the sector, their only refuge is a massive, abandoned asteroid mine swallowed by cataclysm of unknown origins. Trapped together in the depths of space, Sanda begins to strip away his guarded walls, finding a man who would burn the galaxy to keep her safe.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: Found On Road Alive (Timelines Universe Book 12)
It’s Always About A Dame
Five years after he defeated a tong queen, and found a bride, and went back to chasing down cheating husbands and wives, New York City blue blood and private detective Clark Griswold is back on a case.
This time, the Russian Mafia is involved. And a general in the Russian Army, stationed in faraway Xinjiang Province in what used to be part of China. And a South Chinese army wanting to take that part back. With Americans sitting in between them, trying to broker peace.
And a dame. Because it’s always about a dame. And this time, Griswold and his wife Becca have no idea what they’re getting into when the particular dame in question is
Found On Road Alive
FROM NICK NETHERY: Arcane Intelligence: Ten Stories of Spycraft and Sorcery
Every service runs assets. Some of them are not human.
A forger raises a dead agent out of a pair of gloves and gives him four days. A vampire on the CIA
payroll takes the midnight train to East Berlin. A shapeshifter walks into the world’s largest collector
of magical artifacts wearing a stolen face. A ghost feeds MI5 perfect intelligence for thirty years, and
nobody thinks to ask what he wants.
Ten stories of tradecraft and sorcery, from Vienna in the ruins to a spin studio in suburban Virginia.
Forged papers. Blown covers. Debts that come due in something other than money.
No chosen ones. No prophecies. Just professionals, doing impossible work.
FROM ROB HOWELL: Giant Killer Kaiju: Ten Tales of Monsters and the People Who Face Them (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 83)
The monster is the easy part. Ask the guy who has to move it.
Giant Killer Kaiju collects ten brand-new stories about the biggest things that ever walked, swam, burrowed, or flew, and the people who end up underneath them. Not generals. Not superheroes. A circus roustabout. A dam engineer on the night shift. A salvage crane operator wit

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/11/01/book-promo-and-vignettes-by-luke-mary-catelli-and-nother-mike-246/

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Memes! Boo! https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/31/memes-boo/ ...

2026-10-31T16:18:07Z

Memes! Boo!

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/31/memes-boo/

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Learning Experiences By Holly the Assistant One of the young men ...

2026-10-30T21:41:24Z

Learning Experiences

By Holly the Assistant
One of the young men in the family (pursuing hard science degree on the cheap, living at home) had the experience for the first time in his life of calling for a tow. I’m kind of amazed, given what he drives, that he hasn’t had to previously: mostly probably based on being cheap and sharing rides, someone else called the last several times. (The old beater decided that oil was better on the outside of the engine than inside. This is widely acknowledged as contrary to continued operation.)
Things you don’t know how to do til you do it.
We raised our kids pretty country. They all learned to shoot a gun, butcher small livestock and/or game, fish, cook, clean, garden . . . it’s how both of us grew up, on opposite sides of the world. A lot of people haven’t had the opportunity to have those experiences, to learn those skills, even poorly.
We could have a long discussion about what people should know how to do: Robert A. Heinlein put in Lazarus Long’s mouth the words “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” I suspect most of us are missing at least one off that list due to old injuries if nothing else.
But the bigger thing is that people don’t have a chance to try, and we live in a society that says “leave it to the experts” for most of those things, and makes it cheaper to have it done by someone else than to do it yourself. And for children, well, if you’re in class for seven to eight hours a day, followed by extracurriculars, no matter how good those extracurriculars are, you’re not going to have time to learn to do very many things. Especially if they are things that have a long lead time–you probably aren’t going to go down to the market and buy a live cockerel and take it home to butcher, at least, not in most of the USA today. You’ve got to buy a chick at the feed store and raise it for several months first. Which you do learn a good deal more from doing, but you’ve got to have the several months. Also most urban areas, I hear, frown on slaughtering in your front yard.
This is why we keep getting young folks who very much know things that just ain’t so. They know what they know from what they saw or heard, not from what they did, and they never were exposed to the actual things they’re hearing about or seeing at a nice, sterile, electronics mediated remove.
For us adults, there’s also not enough time in the day to do all the things. We might take a first aid class now and then, but we don’t practice the skills regularly. We might in theory know how to change oil but not have done it in the last four decades. It’s been a hot minute since I last messed with a spark plug, and I’d really rather pay someone to do that than try to figure out how the heck to get at them (I learned on a ’69 Chevy SUV, ok? It had a lot less stuff in the engine compartment).
The sum total of human knowledge is too great for one person to be able to even do it all as an amateur. If you tried, you’d never specialize enough in anything to make a living at it.
Let me encourage you to dust off an old skill or acquire a new one, though. It’s good for the brain, really, ask the neuroscientists, they get all enthusiastic. Several of my cello students took up music for exactly that reason. Maybe I’ll break out my spindle: I put it away when the first little someone figured out how to crawl and get into the wool, quite a while ago. It’s a nice, warm, indoors wintry sort of skill, and once upon a time I could even make even yarn. At this late date I’ll be starting over from vague memories and books. (Yes, I know there are you-tubes, no, my brain doesn’t work that way.)
What will you do?
Maybe don’t make it running a beater with the oil outside the engine, though? This one might get a touch pricey: we’ll find out next week if he pulled over fast enough or if we’re up for the learning experience of putting some other old beater’s engine into this old beater. It has been done before.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/30/learning-experiences/

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Stuck In The Middle With You Lately there’s been a lot of talk ...

2026-10-29T14:30:12Z

Stuck In The Middle With You

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about how we’re all “so divided” and we need to be in the center, and how America’s true political orientation is independent and how– BROTHER!
This was brought home — this was brought OFFICE — to me while I was at work two days ago, and Dan was listening to Joe Rogan. He often listens to podcasts while he’s working, because his work is numbers, so hearing words doesn’t disturb him. My work, unless I’m working on covers, well…. So normally I slap noise cancelling headphones on.
The headphones were out of charge, so covers it was, but after a while he told me he couldn’t listen because I kept arguing.
Look, Joe Rogan, normally, doesn’t disturb me that much. I’ll snort giggle at some of his stuff, but it rolls over me, and doesn’t take a bite…
But this… He was with Joe Manchin at some “independent” conference, and just about everything he said was distilled stupid. And everything Manchin said was self-serving pretending-to-be-stupid. And I was fit to be tied.
Now, I don’t do media critique, and Rogan is Rogan, or as someone put it a barbarian who evolved yesterday and came in search of fire and legends of other people. (Honestly, that’s half of his schtick.)
BUT this slotted into all the talk about how “we’re so divided” and “The biggest political affiliation is independent.”
Let’s dispose of that last one first: bullshit. People register as independent because the left are foaming-at-the-mouth rabid weasels who will cancel anyone they even SUSPECT of being on the other side. I was registered independent all the years that I was working for trad pub, because being found to be “one of those evil people on the right” would end my career, and baby needed shoes (and eventually college textbooks.) There are other reasons, but usually the strongest is “I’m on the right and I don’t want to be cancelled.” Very few independents are actually independent. Right now my husband is independent because he didn’t want to say GOP to the blue haired young lady registering him. (I OTOH did, and she said, “Oh, thank heavens. I wasn’t sure, coming from Colorado.” Which goes to show you.)
At any rate, is that everyone? Doubt it. You can be very embarrassed of associating with either party, without being a centrist or independent. Sometimes it’s all about which party you hate more when you vote, but you don’t want to say “I’m with them” because they’re a bunch of bozos, and you know it.
Second, even if “independent” were the biggest self-identification group, it doesn’t mean there’s a great hunger for the center or for reconciliation. Perhaps all the independents are people who want something else. Say, a true constitutionalist government, which, alas, isn’t on offer. It’s as likely as that they’re all “centrist” or that these “centrists” all agree on the same thing.
What made the program infuriating and brought out my political tourettes is that all the solutions they “offered” were bullshit that has been tried, a lot of which is responsible for turning California into a one-party rule, such as open primaries and first-past-the-post elections. Seriously. I could dissect the mechanism by which this “delivers us bound to our foes” but I don’t need to. Look over at California. Do you want that? No? Your ideas will get that. To pretend that this has never been tried is either dumb or malicious.
On the dumb side, Rogan was doing his caveman impression “Tell me about these things I never heard of!” But Manchin? Manchin is malicious. Why do I say that? Well, he pretended not to know why we stopped using coal for electricity generation. It’s apparently a deep mystery and not the green obsession of presidents he supported, like Obama. Bah. Yeah, he kind of distanced himself from the Democrats in the later Biden years, but not wanting to trans kids doesn’t make you a centrist. It makes you a moderately sane, non kinky human being, for crying in bed.
Then there is “term limits”. Term limits, in the year of our Lord 2026 when we know how deep and how evil the evil deep state is! For the love of little children and the apples they steal! No, seriously. Sure, let’s have an ever-rotating wheel of incumbents who don’t know what they’re doing so the deep state can march on unimpeded. Heck, the only reason we have presidential term limits is that evil bastard FDR whom Joe Manchin still adores.
And then came the, of course, Joe Manchin would like to be president. When Rogan asked about that, I could taste the hunger for power in the creature’s voice. (Waves arms.) GAH. I guess I hadn’t got that out of my system yet.
Do I like the two party system? Well. I’m not in love with it. On the other hand I experienced the “as many parties as want to be” system in Portugal and this is the problem: Honest human beings will divide into parties on the slightest excuse:
“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she is an adult, but no welfare.”
“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, but no welfare.”
“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, welfare for widows and orphans.”
“I am from the party of free economy, marry whoever you want provided he/she/them are adults, welfare for widows and orphans provided they’re legal residents.”
Etc. etc. You end up with fifty parties where the disagreement between them is very small. But you know who doesn’t divide that way? Socialists. Communists. I mean usually they divide from each other, though honestly, as with penguins, only they know the difference. (And no, it’s not the same as the theoretical difference. Crying out loud, I studied this in school. I know the text book definitions. BUT in practicality the only difference is the socialists going “I want that too, but slower so we don’t scare the rubes.” No? Well, ask yourself what the USSR stood for tovarish.) So in the end, the left wins. Because they’re not as worried about carefully defining anything, and they LIKE to march lockstep. (Also in their minds, when they win, it’s the other guys in the mass graves. Spoiler: it’s always them in the mass graves.)
Meanwhile the two party system has the drawback that any change — real change — is slow. Very slow. Because you have to take over one of the existing parties from within. This can be bad — we’re taking forever — but also, what? You want the DSA to take over the dems FASTER?
So do I like the two party system? As opposed to what? If the choice is cake or death, I’ll take cake, thank you, with chocolate sprinkles. But the choice is never between cake and death. It is at best between syphilis and gonorrhea, and you pick the one for which you have antibiotics handy.
And this is ultimately the issue. “Independent” isn’t a political movement because people who are “independent” are not a group. they don’t all agree on what they believe. They mostly aren’t sure which side will make them hold their nose LESS or, hear me out, they are on the right and afraid to declare it. And don’t underestimate the second group. For years, it’s been known if a public personality doesn’t ever mention politics? They’re on the right. Because only one side actually tries to punish your dissent. (Now this is known, so not speaking brings about retaliation, too. We’re almost a publish and be damned o’clock. I’m just glad I’m out of it.)
Second, “We’re all so divided.”
Yes. As opposed to? No seriously, think about it. We’ve always been divided. It’s just that while we were bound by mass media, which the left utterly controlled, people didn’t know that there were more dissidents from what appeared to be the only widespread opinion.
Even my priest at mass was lamenting, you can’t be in a hobby group without the hobby being political. Oh, yeah? And who made it so? I don’t mean the poor man, who is very young and seems to be unexamined college-left. I mean, the left has insisted that everything be political since I joined adult society, lo, over 40 years ago. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE NOW IS THAT WE’RE FIGHTING BACK.
I want to do this skit where people are having dinner while using other people as furniture, and it’s this idealized family dinner, and quiet and everyone is smiling. And then someone frees the “furniture” and a brawl breaks out and the former diners are going “Stop, stop. everything was so peaceful! How did this happen?”
It’s like “economic” (or any other kind) inequality. It’s not actually evil, unless it persists for centuries WITH THE SAME PEOPLE AT THE TOP AND BOTTOM. In which case the society is in deep trouble, as it is in much of Latin America. BUT not in as much trouble as societies in which almost everyone is equal, because the only way to do that is totalitarian, rigid control over people and the economy.
“Politics are so divisive” is nonsense. People don’t form political parties or join the political process to work on the things we all agree on. “We should wear hats on our heads, not on our left foot” is not a political position because most people agree with that, and the ones that don’t are locked up for their own good. (They keep slipping on that hat.)
Politics are supposed to be divisive. And a good brawl is how you know you’re still free. And I’m tired of the soft heads that pretend otherwise.
Let’s hope we can continue to fight back and stay free.
… keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/29/stuck-in-the-middle-with-you/

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Uncharted Wilderness (A Blast from the Past: ...

2026-10-29T01:58:08Z

Uncharted Wilderness

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2024/11/15/uncharted-wilderness/
Note from Holly: this post is just shy of two years old now. I was looking for old posts on Art, in keeping with the theme of the week as it’s turned out so far, and the search popped this up, and well . . . it seems like a good reminder? Not sure what it has to do with Art, but search serendipity shouldn’t be ignored.)
Most of the time we look at a landscape, particularly if we live in it, and we know exactly where the road or the walking path is. We know that if we set off from here, we’ll walk that way, and…
And then there’s snow storms in Colorado, where I lived most of my adult life.
Colorado is not, as most people who know it only from TV think, a place where it snows early in Fall, and it stays covered up till next Spring. That’s more a thing of Ohio or Pennsylvania. I mean, there are places in Colorado — the high ranges — where it’s definitely like that, but that’s not most of it. Most of it, you have sun and snow, and days that are completely dry, and then days you are buried. There is no guarantee what type of day you’ll have. Some days you’ll wake up to a beautiful sunny day, then find yourself buried in snow by nightfall. Once in Manitou Springs, it was sunny in front of our house, and snowing in the back.
And then there were the sudden snowstorms that covered everything. Once or twice they caught us on the road, and even WHERE the road was became a matter of opinion. Obvious (and dangerous) if one side goes down a deep ravine, but the other side? Yeah, you’re on your own. It’s uncharted flat white.
We find ourselves kind of like that in our current political landscape.
You see, there has been a storm, a bad one, and it flattened everything. But in its wake, we are left in a changed landscape, where the usual sign posts don’t apply — except for the ravines, of course. Those are still there and hellofdangerous.
I probably don’t need to elaborate for this audience, but the storm was the stolen election, and its threat that we’d never again be free to choose our path, that — from now on — we were in the hands of the international oligarchs, and that at most we could carve our tiny little paces of semi-freedom, but we’d never be a free PEOPLE — or by extension, a free species (most of the species is. The West even is iffy. The US remains the last, best hope of mankind) — again.
Yes, I know, I expected differently. Because like with the Diamond Princess and the Covidiocy, I did the math. They can’t win. it’s impossible.
But even I expected a long period of darkness, or a blood bath in the way to our being free again. I prayed otherwise, but….
Well, on election day we got our miracle, a culmination of at least two previous miracles. And here we are.
And everything has changed. The problem is that the if you really look at it, the storm has been a succession of storms, starting about 100 years ago. And throughout it, it looked like there would be only one road, and only one way to move, and it would all end up in a prolonged darkness, which the sun of freedom might never penetrate.
But these things are never as they look, and beneath the snow cover, things were moving and the landscape was changing.
To be precise, the industry was changing, from one where large and central had all the benefits of being more economic and more profitable, to one where — not fully yet, but we can see it from here — distributed everything, and largely automated factories with minimal human labor are the future. And what a future it is. The same tech allows distributed communication, and it allows information to travel from those who have it to those who need it in almost no time. (Seriously. I once fixed my vaccum in no time by looking at a few you tube videos. You can also learn just about anything from those. From practical skills to languages, to history, to–). Even though there’s some resistance (including from Musk, sigh. It’s his reflexive liberal. It’s not fair to work from home, since not everyone can. Poppycock.) obviously distributed, from home, from your small town, a bit from everywhere working (and living) is the future. And it is a future that also allows women to work/pursue an avocation while looking after their own kids. This is leading to revolutions in teaching and in… well, just about everything else.
The world simply isn’t the same as when civilization started getting frosted over, and we assumed the future was the world of 1984 or Brave New World, and the most we could do was delay it a bit.
Paradoxically while that world seemed to be driving to a super state across the world (which FYI is inevitable tyranny) the fact we can communicate effortlessly across borders and across the world, perhaps by making us aware of cultural differences is fueling a drive towards nationalism. Which, contrary to what you’ve been taught in school is not fueling a drive for war, or Hitler like racial purges or whatever the crazy. WWI was caused by INTERNATIONALISM, i.e. by the royal families of Europe getting ambitious and trying to establish multi-continental empires. Being governed small and closer to home is always better for freedom. If those in power know you can come to their house and isekai protest them (like truck con protest them) they tend to behave a bit better. (Or, put up barricades if they’re Jarred Polis, whose conscience must be the deepest dark dingiest hell on Earth.)
Anyway, in this new world, a few things become not clear. Like, sure, RFK is still a commie (well, his dad was one TBF) but is he a bad person to be in charge of the FDA? Consider what the FDA is and what it’s been up to. What we know for absolute sure it has done is bad enough. I’m sure there’s stuff we don’t even know about. As long as he doesn’t try to fill it up with stranger and more strict requirements for… everything, why should we mind?
Tulsi Gabbard is still at the very least commie-adjacent, but she was victimized by the security apparatus by being put on a no fly list. Sure she might just reverse the polarity of the abuses. But she might also have seen the elephant and, in the light of the new day, seek to put the brakes on the overstepping. It’s worth a try.
Things like tariffs…. well, I ain’t no fan of them, but you know? The president has to at least be able to threaten them convincingly, so I’m willing to leave his elbow free. And I don’t know. I don’t like tariffs, but I hate taxes, particularly since they eat months of my husband’s time in calculating what all my strange little businesses owe. Maybe, just maybe we can swap them for tariffs, or come up with a yet more creative solution to finance the essential functions of government.
I’m open to what might come. I mean, today DOGE announced it’s hiring, but the job won’t be paid. Using American culture of voluntarism to cut the wasteful state? It’s amazing. It’s the most American thing ever. And think of all our retirees who just found a fun project for their golden years. (If I didn’t have books to write, I’d be volunteering myself. And if we had more money, my husband (and younger kid) would already be applying. Since they’re math geniuses, they probably could help.)
Meanwhile, yes, of course, the ravine stays. I will be watching very carefully and squawk at everything and anything that trespasses on the essential rules: The state should be small (we can start with smaller) and afraid of its people, not the people afraid of their state. And DON’T HURT PEOPLE AND DON’T TAKE THEIR STUFF.
Those are ravines indeed, and we’ve been driving with a wheel over that abyss for far too long. We might not know where the road is, but let’s get the heck out of the dangerous spot.
The rest? The rest is wide open.
Where a dark and dreary road the entire world was pushed into used to be, there is now a trackless wilderness. Into which we can cut paths, alleys, roads, delightful little gardens, and probably fly over it, or tunnel under too.
What is dawning is a day of great experimentation free of the “certainties” of the 20th century which, if we’re all lucky, is now dead and will soon be buried.
Let’s try to make stuff better. Some of it will even succeed. And let’s stop doing the stuff we already know doesn’t work. No, it won’t be different this time. Let 100 million eggs with no omelets be waste enough. Don’t add to it.
Go and create and figure out ways to do things: cheaper, better, with less hurting people and taking their stuff.
And take a deep breath of the crisp, cool air of the new world.
What a time to be alive.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/28/uncharted-wilderness-2/

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The War On Fun Recently I learned something I could have gone my ...

2026-10-27T19:06:16Z

The War On Fun

Recently I learned something I could have gone my whole life without knowing: the war on fun is a bipartisan affair.
What do I mean by that? Oh, this week on Twitter, several Voices of the Right TM came out breathing heavy about how not just the Malfoid fan fic trend, (which honestly is THE MOST WHOLESOME trend we’ve seen in fanfic ever) but in fact all of fiction, including people like Larry Correia and John Ringo are a sign that everything is corrupted, and evil, and we’re putting bad things in children’s heads and the left is winning.
Look, guys, I got my antique partner’s desk refinished and up in the new office. I don’t want more dents on it, again.
That the left are ridiculous scolds who had their sense of fun ablated at birth, we knew. As we can tell from the game, movie, book companies they control, they think everything should serve the Marxist agenda or be worthless. Which is why every game, movie, book company is in the crapper. BUT apparently the right looked at that and went “That’s why they’re winning!” and they want to do that too. I’ve actually come across an article complaining about the Hardy Boys. Which I grant you have gotten rewritten, but the solution is not to eliminate it, but to find the old ones used. (I never saw the attraction of that or Nancy Drew, because I preferred Enid Blyton, but I knew most American raised readers grew up on those forever.)
Here’s the thing: The left isn’t winning the culture war. It looks like it, because it’s all you can find in the grocery book shelf (WHY are you buying books in the grocery store?) or even at most bookstores, but that’s because yes, the left owns the cultural pathways, and that’s what they’re pushing.
However, from the inside, each year the print runs are smaller and sell less. You know what’s winning? Indie authors. Okay, most of us ain’t making a ton (most tradpub authors didn’t either) but in aggregate, we’re making a huge dent. And a lot of us are doing pretty well. BECAUSE WE WRITE FUN STUFF. Or at least fun for us, and apparently some people agree.
This got into the whole ridiculous debate of art. “But just because you enjoy it, it’s just cheap thrills, it’s not art.” Well, let me tell you, just because you suffer to consume it, it ain’t art, either. It’s JUST suffering.
So, let’s talk about it: When I was tutoring, I got girls in who were failing at everything. Inevitably, I found their parents allowed them to read two things: The lives of saints and the Bible.
Now, it is possible to write the lives of saints in a riveting manner (Because my brain is broken I’m writing the story of the first Ellyan saint, which is mental as I have…10? books in the world to publish first.) However, most of it isn’t written in a riveting manner, and also, frankly, after a while you kind of know the pattern.
Do I read lives of saints? Sure, but not as my whole reading diet, because that would be boring.
What I inevitably found is that if I convinced their parents to let them read other stuff, their reading AND EVERYTHING ELSE went up grade wise.
Now, I’m not a utilitarian when it comes to reading. I don’t think you should be a good reader because it’s good for you. But there is no denying that being a good reader gives you a massive advantage in life, but no one — NO ONE — has ever become a great reader by reading only the required stuff for school and maybe 2 very holy books. No, not even in the middle ages. Did you know that until the eighteenth century, people moved their lips when reading? Because there wasn’t enough reading material for most people to get past that point.
But besides all that, and because this is not just about reading: Who died and told you that humans should never have fun?
In the dystopian hellscape the left is trying to herd us toward, there is enough worry. In our economy cacked by multiple government interventions, there is enough struggle to stay afloat. And even for those of us who see opportunity everywhere? We’re working harder than we ever did. You want us to never let up? That’s not how humans live.
Look, I can understand disapproving of some people’s way of decompressing: those that are bad for themselves and others: alcohol, drugs, gambling, unbridled sex. (Yes, sex is better with bridles. Seriously? Can you be serious for ten seconds?)
BUT movies, games, books? Because they’re fiction and don’t have a “deeper message” (to your mind.) That’s crazy cakes.
First, if you want to sell your message, it best be wrapped up in a sh*tload of fun. When the left was actually winning the culture war, 40 or 50 years ago they knew how to do that. People will swallow poison if it’s wrapped in fun.
And now you’re saying that fun is evil. No. Fun is fun. The message you load it with might be evil, but then again it might be good, too. Removing the fun is not the way to improve things. The way to improve things is to make it GOOD.
Second- BUT! FUN ISN’T ART! Well, guess what? Peanut butter isn’t chocolate! Music isn’t painting! Shoes aren’t boats! Purple isn’t yellow! And other news of the obvious.
Sure, fun books/movies/games MIGHT NOT be art. And? Is only “art” allowed? WHY? Because we’re only allowed to create and consume “worthy” things? Worthy according to who? Exactly?
Because personally I don’t care. Yes, I’ve read “real literature” and even enjoy some of it, mostly Shakespeare and Austen, to be fair. BUT I also read fanfic. And everything in between. I read what interests me at the time, and I don’t care if it has the stamp of “art” or not.
Which brings us to “What is art?” And that got outright silly. I pointed out for most things the only real evaluation of “art’ is “that which has survived the test of time.” THAT’s IT.
And to survive the test of time, it needs to be FUN first. So it’s loved by a lot of people.
And then we got people arguing that’s not the only test, because you can look at something and know it’s art. (People, the Elgin Marbles, before being taken to England, were being used by the locals to make lime wash for their houses. No, seriously. And yeah, to me I look at them and they’re art. BUT obviously Greek villagers disagreed.) You can take reality apart and not find a single atom of “art” because that’s inside the human brain. And the “art” proclaimed by the elites is mostly stupid message bamf. And even the ‘test of time” thing, we won’t know until the decks are cleared, because in the age of mass media, it was easy to fake “popularity” and a lot of what’s now considered 20th century “art” your grandchildren are going to laugh themselves sick over.
So, the only test is “Has it survived the test of time” which means, to begin with, it was fun or enjoyable enough to a large enough group of people that it SURVIVED.
Oh, yeah, and let’s slap our foreheads for the people explaining to me that making a good screw is art (No, apparently phrasing is a dead art) and that making steel is an art and that… I had to point out that’s the OTHER meaning of art. Not worthy object/admirable product, but “art” as craft, as knowledge, and semantic confusing helps no one.
Though I suppose that person would love to go through a museum of art, admiring screws. (Start with la maja desnuda and… never mind.)
All of it to obfuscate that, as a wise rabbi once said “Not of bread alone lives man.” And btw, he spoke and taught in little fictional stories. Because it makes the “word of G-d” go down easier.
But fine, fine. If both sides of our utterly effed up political spectrum wants to make war on fun, let them come, they and their armies.
I’ll be standing here, holding stunt middle fingers aloft. Why stunt? Because otherwise it’s pretty hard to type and produce decent fiction that some people will find fun.
Probably not enough for me to ever be considered art. Which is fine. I don’t care. I’m having fun writing this stuff, and I hope my fans are having fun reading it.
In the end, that’s all that matters.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/27/the-war-on-fun/

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It’s Human, But Is It Art? It is perhaps inevitable that ...

2026-10-27T00:51:52Z

It’s Human, But Is It Art?

It is perhaps inevitable that we’re now being besieged by arguments on what art is, and what counts as art. AI has done a number on us. And before the shrieking starts, note that I’m not one of the AI haters or even one of the AI skeptics. (I’m a skeptic as to how wisely humans will use AI, but that actually makes me a human wisdom skeptic, and guys, what else is new?)
But AI has done exactly the same number on us that cameras did once upon a time. People used to paint to be as realistic as possible, so you could look at their picture and it would be like the picture their eye saw. And then– Cameras.
Decades of learning, people who had devoted their entire lives to pursuing this art, who were d*mn good at it, and who might be in their near-old-age and there, cameras nuked their lives. Okay, it was somewhat mitigated by the pictures being in black and white, but that wasn’t forever either. And what were they supposed to do now?
Well, obviously — though I don’t know enough of art history to give you names — some arts laid down and died, probably portraitists most of all. But I’ll be honest with you, out there, staring at the screen, it’s not actually that difficult to make an artist lay down and die. It’s difficult — perhaps impossible — to make them produce art, but that’s… something quite different from actually standing up the great wide world and staying “You, out there, buy my mad, beautiful thing” (I swear, if M. C. A. Hogarth doesn’t make t-shirts and stickers and bumper stickers with “Do your mad, beautiful thing anyway”, with a drawing of the tesla, I’m going to do it!) Because all of us have rats in our heads. To produce art you must simultaneously believe your mad, beautiful thing, is the best thing ever and also the biggest piece of crap ever produced. So, you see, putting it up to the judgement of an (at best) indifferent world is a bit difficult. (Not lying. To this day I ask my fans to read reviews before I even look at them. Yesterday it was a review for the anthology Chaos and Consequences, edited by Jason Cordova, and incidentally that story is Brund and Skip and a different perspective on the future book The Worlds of Men.)
But we do know that not all artists laid down and died. A lot of them painted better, more expressive portraits than the camera back then could capture, on top of which, of course, a photograph was black and white to begin with. And by the time cameras were color, there were other ways of painting that looked utterly different from a photograph. And then this weird trick happened, and photography became art too. No, seriously, it really is. The funny thing is that I can draw (and could have been a contenda! if the fire in my belly went that way. It doesn’t.) but give me a camera, or you know, a phone, and I become a monkey with ten thumbs. Cedar Sanderson has a cat that looks almost like mine (They’re sisters, two consecutive litters, her Toast and my Muse) but she takes pictures of Toast and makes her look alive, and expressive, all personality coming through. Me? I take a picture of Muse and she’s a pretty flame point. You can even sort of see that, but definitely not her feisty, commanding personality. (She’s Greebo’s heir and was just herding me to my desk to write, because she knows which side of her tuna is buttered.) I’m also in awe of her insect/nature pictures. I don’t even try, even though I life in a woodland area, where … so many interesting spiders. My younger son, when he visited, captured an image of a spider eating a colorful insect, and it was like a painting. If I’d done it it would have been “Oh, it’s a spider. Ick.”
So there’s something that goes into photography that I don’t have.
And all the flopping around about AI “stealing” art… mostly by artists who are so by virtue of being called so by elites — what I call “unremarkable image or object, but really call description” “artists” — is nonsense. By that reckoning “first learned from what came before, copying the bits that we like” every artist is a plagiarist, all the way back to Lascaux (And only because we don’t have much from before.)
But is AI art disquieting? Threatening to those of us who spent a lifetime learning the best techniques and becoming damn good at the craft part of what we do? Hell yeah.
Interestingly, the artists I know who are compulsive — they HAVE to do art — and dedicated — practice, practice, practice — might be slightly discomfited and a little afraid — we’re all cracked like an unsound cup, okay? Again, it doesn’t take much — but they’re not lying down and dying. And they’re not stomping around throwing hissy fits that “If that’s AI, you might as well not bother.”
I don’t even know how much of the anti-AI mob sentiment is real, and how much is being stoked by global enemies terrified of America plus AI. I know a lot of it is just those enemies. And I wonder if it started that way and hit the soft heads of the wanna be artists and those who consider art a sort of grift.
I’m not a visual artist — again, I think I could have been, and the last art class I took — fourth year? — the teacher agreed and tried to convince me to pursue it professionally. Dad offered to pay for a third degree in art (He did NOT pay for the first two. One was paid for by my having very good grades, and one I paid for.) Because it was his first degree, and he always dreamed of one of his descendants picking it up. (Squints at the future. The Little Pickle does these amazing little symbolic paintings. Also not her main avocation, but you know? Maybe there will be kids who have dad’s ability and fire.) I still love to do portraiture, by hand, and am currently trying to figure out if there are life drawing/painting classes nearby. My favorite is doing those in conde crayons, all earth tones. BUT it’s not my professional thing. Not even close.
And yet, I dropped into AI art with both feet, because it served my actual need for my real professional artist avocation: writing. I needed covers. And before you flop again (what are you a fish?) and whine about taking money from an artist’s mouth, I WASN’T using professional artists before. The only one I’d have considered is Cedar Sanderson, and I suspect we’d have butted horns so hard — because we have different concepts of what makes a great cover and also because I knew enough to be dangerous — that it would have forever ruined our friendship. I like her, so I’m not going to do that. Oh, yeah, I also used Jack Wilder (See the amazing Dyce Dare covers) but guys…. getting Jack to do covers when I need them (I’m not good at planning. It’s always an emergency) was like nailing jello to the wall. He’s got to be one of the busiest men in sf/f.
So what was I using. Oooh, boy. I have some covers to redo. I started by trying to hire an artist for my first indie novel. It… didn’t work out, and I didn’t like the product. Which is not a big deal, because well, I couldn’t pay much (I still can’t, because I never know how a book is going to DO) though what I lost in that was more than I could afford at the time. (Remember, I had NO indie business, yet.)
So I started hunting down for stock images and altering them, and trying to make them fit. Honestly, sometimes I suspect I went beyond the license, and the covers still looked… well, like bad 70s covers when book publishers had first discovered cameras. (Not MOSTLY SF/F where seventies covers are sometimes great, but main stream or mystery 70s covers, at least in Europe. They were… odd. My favorite mystery series had silver covers with an inset of a picture of the human body. No, not A human body, which might have worked. Just a random portion of the human body, scaled up so far you couldn’t tell what it was, but it looked vaguely disquieting. (Have you ever looked at your nostrils? I mean, really looked?)
From that, after I spent weeks crying in front of the computer, and refusing to cook dinner because I couldn’t even, my husband dropped DAZ 3-D in front of me. Oh, I continued crying and screaming for six months (Most of this is not literal) while I rendered naked people with no hair. And then something clicked.
Were those covers good. Eh. Some were USABLE after extensive processing, but honestly it’s hard to get rid of a certain uncanny valley feel for those and anyway, I was still working through filters and lighting and… when AI hit. And the game changed.
Even in its early incarnation, where I sometimes used pieces of 10 AI paintings for a cover, it blew DAZ 3-D out of the water (Though I’ve found I can get Daz 3-D to do the base picture, then take it to AI and alter it, on rare circumstances when I’m asking for something AI simply doesn’t do well or at all. Would you believe classic pulp robots is one of those? Sure. I knew you would.)
So I jumped in, both feet, because mama has books and needs covers. And redid them when AI got better, and I have probably 10 covers crying out to be redone now, when I have (AH!) time. Which brings us to…
I know the artists who use AI for covers. I use AI myself. The amazing thing is how different our covers are, and how you CAN too tell style. Maybe it is our favorite AIs. Maybe it’s the fact that we’ve TRAINED them. At one time, before we were even doing covers, our friend group all put the same prompt in, and even then, at the dawn of AI, what we got was completely different, because even then we’d trained AI to our vision.
So, is it art. I don’t know because I don’t know what art is — which is what is emerging from the big argument on X. That there are as many opinions as there are people. And we’ll go into that tomorrow under “the war on fun.” — and no one seems to know, though each person has mad-serious opinions.
BUT I know that even with AI use, the product is highly individual and tracks to the human doing it. More, honestly, than to the AI used (I have friends who’ve changed AI engine, for price or ease of use.)
Ah, but AI art lacks the divine spark.
Maybe it does. AI writing tends to lack bodies. (I’ve spent a lot of time reading AI novels, in Jane Austen Fanfic, and it only hit me why they’re so tiresome after about 100 of them. There is no stage business. No one fiddles with their bracelets, or adjusts her shoe, or even plays with a stray lock of hair. Or sips too-hot tea. Only bits of stage business are in STRICT service of the narration. “She looked at him when he spoke.” Not “While he spoke, she played with her embroidery thread.”) Now, once you figure that out — and btw, most writers also forget bodies. At least at first. And in my case when I’m exhausted. Which is why I have that — it’s probably easy to incorporate that into your prompts.
And I’m sure that a lot of AI art lacks something, even if it’s gotten better at hands.
BUT obviously not all, since I can tell whose AI art I’m looking at, and when a house changes cover artists even though both use AI. There is definitely a spark between artist and art. Which will probably get better now that we’re past the phase of screaming at the AI “I said a woman in a dress and a bird. Not a feathered woman and a bird in a dress.” (Don’t ask. Trust me. Once seen it can’t be unseen.)
I think yes, it’s uncomfortable and it’s going to demand that we change, and it’s sparked a scream and shout on X. Which is why we’re going to cover that tomorrow. Yes, I know there’s a war on people having fun. BUT must it be bipartisan?
But is it any more of a disruptive technology for artists than the camera?
I’m not convinced. I think it’s exactly the same. And artists who are compelled, are going to learn to use AI and to make their art better. And others won’t use AI but will learn to make their stuff so distinctive and amazing that AI can’t take their mojo.
And yes, in this case “artists” include writers, who are going a little crazier than even visual artists, partly because this technology has come for us too. (Note we had a minor disruption for wordprocessing and for dictation, but not as hard and fast as the camera for visual artists.)
I can’t tell you what other writers are doing. I can tell you what I’m doing: NOT laying down and dying. My stuff tends to be weird enough it’s hard to imitate, anyway. (Except to younger son, who can do a dead-imitation, the little SOB.)
And other writers are using AI agents for publicity, to remind themselves of various tasks (I need to figure out my substack. No really.) To convert books to epub format. Etc. etc. etc. Things that cut down on the other tasks and allow them to write more.
Me? I found it’s dangerous to talk about my universe to an AI, because I’m tired and slightly depressed. Because it gives me IDEAS. But then again, everything gives me ideas. I do have an idea for a youtube feature, though. Will I ever do it? I don’t know. But I’m holding onto the idea until I am done unpacking. Probably new years. If this works it might sell me a lot of books. Even more than the music did. (And I need to resume that with other series.) Now this type of brainstorming used to work great when Dan and I were both young and childless and used to drive nowhere in particular at night. Same effect. (Of course, mathematicians and AIs…. what am I saying?) BUT then the kids came and we got very busy, so I hadn’t had a rubber ducky with no time limits and very busy for a long time. Which, I’ll be honest, was kind of nice.
So, AI art is still human. But is it art? I don’t know. The divine spark or lack thereof is literally above my pay grade.
BUT I’m an artist, or at least a sad compulsive who expresses herself in stories. In my (it’s getting to be longish, no?) life, I’ve tended to grind everything in my writing mill and use every technology, every even, every friendship (people, we’re despicable, we writers!) as fodder to the thing I couldn’t stop doing.
AI is just more grist to the mill. It will get used in the service of creation. And what come out the other side will stand or fall on how well it’s used.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/26/its-human-but-is-it-art/

https://2.gravatar.com/avatar/bb227ba08e92f5082a6a9044a75eb6333d01169f18d0f8cb7cff7ccb1a1c8b9f?s=96&d=monsterid&r=PG

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

2026-10-25T11:10:36Z

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH
FROM CHRISTOPHER DIGRAZIA: Ten Thousand Midnights: A Theda Bara Mystery
Hollywood, 1922. Paramount Pictures director William Desmond Taylor lies dead in his apartment, a bullet in his back. Baffled by multiple suspects and blind alleys, the LAPD turn to silent star Theda Bara for help. With her loyal friend, makeup artist Toby Swanson, she delves into the dark corners of Tinseltown to uncover Taylor’s killer. Fellow stars Mabel Normand and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle hold pieces of the puzzle, but Paramount chief Adolph Zukor is determined to hide the secret of Taylor’s murder at any cost. . .even if it means silencing Bara forever.
From the author of The Director’s Cut and The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of comes the third entry in the mystery series that Emmy-Award winning screenwriter Robert J. Avrech praised as making Theda Bara ‘a living, breathing woman.’
FROM ETHAN MOORE: Scorched Earth Volume I
In 2024, civilization was consumed in the Rebirthing fires. Ninety years later, Gerti Alvarez just wanted to survive the impossible task she had been assigned. Instead, she finds a scarred girl, a repair team trying to hold their town together, and a mayor hiding more than political ambition.
Scorched Earth: Volume 1 is a gripping apocalyptic adventure about loyalty, survival, and the cost of doing what’s right
FROM HYEOK LIM: The Posterity War
At 8:09 a.m., every serving politician dies. Governments survive, but the people authorized to act are gone—and Social Security actuary Claire Harlan discovers the catastrophe came from the future.
Claire falsified a federal model recertification to preserve her father’s secret treatment priority. After the attack, withdrawing that lie could stop the present’s retaliation—but it would expose what she did and freeze the funding keeping his private advantage alive. Her renewed concealment keeps the counterstrike review alive while a future coalition invokes 486,107,392 affected people—neither combatants nor a single constituency—as its warrant for war.
With fifty days before the temporal channel closes, Claire, acting president Jonah Ward, and future commander Iris Kade must create a peace neither era can counterfeit: a constitutional settlement, a chain of evidence no one controls alone, and physical disarmament on both sides. Confession will not be enough. Neither will victory.
The Posterity War is a standalone near-future political science-fiction thriller about power, custody, and what each generation owes the next.
FROM DALE COZORT: Devouring Wind (Exchange Book 2)
“They’re coming for us, from the sky and emptiness.” Ten months ago, technology guru Sharon Mack and her autistic and strangely prescient daughter Bethany were trapped in the wild alternate version of Earth called Bear Country. They took refuge at Fort Eegan, an outpost built by a peculiar cult with mysterious ties to the US government. Now a new Exchange brings terrifying new consequences.
The new Exchange blocks Fort Eegan’s water supply, threatening deprivation now and catastrophic floods in the future. It also pits Fort Eegan against beings with superior technology, inhuman ruthlessness and a weapon capable of devouring everything in its path, including Fort Eegan.
In spite of the danger from the new Exchange, the humans of Bear Country are nearing a war with one another. Ruthless escaped convicts hold hundreds of women hostage. With supplies dwindling, they eye Fort Eegan’s already limited resources. Inside and outside the fort, conflicts fester among the isolated humans, including a deadly love triangle. Fort Eegan’s only hope is to unite before it is blown away by the devouring winds.
FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: The Bard’s Kings: The Bard’s Song Book Two (Bard’s Song 2)
What price honor?
Tuathal mab Bria map Aiden gave much to break the curse he brought to the land. Echos of that curse send him across the sea, to the Western Isle from which came his father’s people, the Dunalaid. Only the High King can settle a question of inheritance, one that has already seen blood shed. Half of that conflict, Fyon the Black, demands land and lordship, blood price for his son, and perhaps even Tuathal’s life.
Tuathal travels as law seeker and speaker for his half-brother, Low King Fiachta. He seeks nothing but a decision in his king’s favor. Trouble lurks, what sort he does not know, but the sense he knows too well. The same darkness that led to the curse, and his naming as “Twice Given” waits inside the High King’s court at Tara.
A third king also has a claim to Tuathal, a shadowy majesty of the mounds and hollow hills. Only a master bard and law speaker, an allav, Tuathal struggles to do his duty.
When duty brings danger and the High King’s life hangs by a thread of song, what can a bard do, even a bard of three kings?
More than Tuathal believes possible.
FROM ANNA FERREIRA: The Root of All Evil
When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…
Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?
With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.
FROM PATRICK MCHARGUE: Starlight Revelation: Expansion, Book 1
What would you risk to publish a finding that no one wants to believe?
Jack Merrill is doing exactly what he’s supposed to — running sanctioned pipelines, processing telescope data, keeping his head down — when a side project neural net he’s been quietly testing flags something in the noise. Four faint smears of ancient light, carrying anomalous signatures that should not exist. He wasn’t looking for a paradigm shift. He found one anyway.
Starlight Revelation asks what the search for truth actually costs — not in the abstract, but in jobs, safety, relationships, and the slow pressure of institutions that benefit from comfortable certainties. Set in a near-future space observatory processing center thick with rivalries and beliefs, the novel follows a chain of people who refuse to let a finding die just because it’s inconvenient: a stubborn analyst, a fierce colleague, a principled administrator, and an outcast physicist who has been right about the wrong things for decades.
The universe holds its oldest secrets in the faintest light. Jack Merrill just found one.
FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Xochicuzmal Enigma: Book One of The Plata Worlds
When a mysterious spacecraft crashes far from the settled regions of the Plata Worlds, Captain Mateo Valdés expects to find an accident.
Instead, he finds a survivor wearing an unfamiliar golden protective suit, speaking an archaic form of a Plata language, and carrying technology centuries beyond anything known in the region.
Before he loses consciousness, the stranger says only one word:
Xochicuzmal.
An eccentric historian recognizes the name—and immediately becomes frightened.
What begins as an investigation into a mysterious visitor soon leads Mateo, the historian Dr. Tomás Arriaga, and their companions across ancient ruins, forgotten archives, and a buried structure that predates Plata civilization by thousands of years.
The old legends speak of a lost city called Xochicuzmal. But there is no city where the ancient maps say it should be.
There is something else.
A door.
And behind it lies a technology capable of connecting distant human worlds.
As Colonel Rafael Borda and his forces close in, Mateo discovers that the legendary Long Fires—the disasters that isolated the Plata Worlds generations ago—may not have been natural catastrophes at all.
They may have been the consequences of an ancient transportation network gone catastrophically wrong.
Now the network is waking up.
And someone, somewhere beyond the Plata Worlds, already knows it exists.
The Xochicuzmal Enigma is a classic science-fiction mystery of forgotten civilizations, ancient technology, political intrigue, and exploration, and the first novel in The Plata Worlds series.
FROM KAREN MYERS: Monsters, And More: A Science Fiction Short Story Bundle from There’s a Sword for That
A Science Fiction Story Bundle from the collection There’s a Sword for That
MONSTERS – Xenoarchaeologist Vartan has promised his young daughter Liza one of the many enigmatic lamedh objects that litter the site of a vanished alien civilization.
No one can figure out what they’re good for, but Liza finds a use for one.
ADAPTABILITY – The Webster Marble Deluxe Woodsman, Model 820-E, has been offline for quite some time. Quite some time indeed.
Good thing Webster has a manual to consult, and a great many special functions.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Day the War Struck Home
Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She’s to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher suggested astronauts — but she wants to write about combat heroes, not REMF’s. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre and relates his own part in those events.
It’s the summer of 1994, and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front it’s the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center, where a Space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
However, the intelligence proves incomplete — the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates the fight to stop the terrorists from slaughtering the astronaut corps.
It’s a story of courage, patriotism and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.
A short story of the Grissom timeline.
Originally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest. This version includes a bonus essay on the genesis of the Energy Wars.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: All Precious Stones and Peoples (Timelines Universe Book 11)
Once, a million years ago, a water world populated with dolphin-like beings, the product of gene-alteration by their Progenitors on the Earth-like world one orbit closer to the sun, was flung into the cold and dark of interstellar space by the passage of a rogue star.
And four thousand years ago, its engineers were awakened from suspended animation to bring the world into a new orbit around a giant, blue-white star, where the waters of the World Ocean could thaw and life could continue to flourish.
This is the story of the A’ka’pa’i’ka’ti, and their Foretold Saintess, Speaker to the Dry Ones, born to communicate with the Progenitors when they finally arrived to reclaim the lost . . .
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Other Rhodes (Rhodes Mysteries Book 1)
When Lilly Gilden discovers a cyborg in her airlock, she should turn him in for immediate destruction—harboring any cyborg means death, no exceptions. These abominations are born from violent, illegal brain extraction, forbidden across all human colonies. But this tortured soul believes he’s Nick Rhodes, a legendary detective from the 20th century, and his fractured mind may hold the key to finding her missing husband.
The penalty for harboring him is execution, but Lilly is desperate. Her husband vanished while investigating a case that leads straight into the galaxy’s most dangerous criminal networks. With time running out and nowhere else to turn, she makes a fateful choice: trust the half-mad detective trapped in synthetic flesh.
Joined by a mysterious journalist with secrets of his own, Lilly plunges into the shadow world of interstellar crime syndicates, corrupt officials, and deadly conspiracies. As the cyborg’s detective instincts clash with his deteriorating programming, Lilly must navigate a web of lies and violence where one wrong move could cost her everything.
In a universe where love is the ultimate liability, how far will she go to bring him home?
A pulse-pounding sci-fi thriller that blends classic detective with high-stakes space adventure—perfect for fans of cyberpunk mysteries, noir whodunits and interstellar romance.
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 to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: STRAIGHT.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/25/book-promo-and-vignettes-by-luke-mary-catelli-and-nother-mike-245/

#bookpromo #thedabara #taylor #scorchedearth #desmondtaylor #baramystery #amazon #volume #amazonassociate

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On With the Motley, On With the Memes ...

2026-10-24T16:25:08Z

On With the Motley, On With the Memes

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/24/on-with-the-motley-on-with-the-memes/

#memes #motley

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More on Communication, Or No One Knows What They Don’t Know By ...

2026-10-23T22:03:58Z

More on Communication, Or No One Knows What They Don’t Know

By Holly the Assistant
By dint of a rather unusual past for my time and place, I am perhaps a bit of an expert on the lack of comprehension between the sexes.
I am the only child of an only child. My father was a Silent, as is my mother, and I am a fairly late in life child. As a child, I knew exactly one other almost-only child: she had had an older brother, who perished in a plane crash.
My mother had three siblings and numerous cousins. My father had a couple cousins he knew as a child, given family propensity to alcoholism and poor choices. One of those lived long enough and sane enough for me to meet. My father was an introvert’s introvert: other than professional colleagues and family he had no social group. None. Not one person. No clubs, no church, nothing.
And then I was home schooled.
Then I went away to college-my parents were both professors and there was no way I was staying home and going to their college-and met an international student, married him, and we had a normal size family of six, and I got to figure out how guys communicate, quite a lot from bringing up boys who had friends who were boys. I had a pretty good start on how girls communicate, being one, being in girls’ clubs, having a mother who is an extrovert. And my husband is also an extrovert, so marriage brought an instant social group of fifty-odd, prone to dropping in randomly.
Back then, there were some rules, still. Boys were weird in the first place, but they knew they had to actually ask girls out and girls could say no or yes. But there were also those who opened with sexual harassment and were shocked that didn’t work. The jerks you shall always have with you, I suppose.
My general rule was to go out with a guy who asked nicely once. To a public event, taking ourselves separately. No alcohol, ever, on dates, but then I met the man I married just before I turned twenty-one and married him not long after, so that wasn’t an issue. Not because I was irredeemably law abiding, but because I wasn’t stupid and had plans that involved keeping my security clearance. Turns out that pays off in personal safety.
I did some dumb things that could have ended very badly, but for the most part, most guys are just fine, and I was fine. (One boyfriend had a plane! He let me fly it!)
But I also grew up and live in possibly the highest per capita concealed and open carry state: the estimate before Constitutional Carry came into place was 10%. No one actually knows now. It is guaranteed that someone in any group of people is armed. That makes it a lot safer to make most dumb choices. (Maaaybe not flying the plane, though.)
Back to communication. Boys are weird. They don’t get hints well. “Wow, the trash is really full” gets a “Yep, sure is” instead of taking it out. They don’t like it when girls cry and want to fix it. I trained the girls early on that if they just wanted to have a good cry they should retreat to their room because the boys want to fix it, and if it doesn’t need fixing don’t upset the boys. Told the boys the girls have a right to cry when they want to and they can’t go in their room to find out why they’re crying. Worked out pretty well when they hit teens.
If someone does the girls wrong, they have their own brute squad. Conversely, the girls protect their brothers: No, that girl wants to get with you. Stop helping her if you don’t want to get dragged into her shit. She’s creating problems with other guys to get you. This is apparently fairly incomprehensible to the male mind. But it’s a female tactic. (Not all women, not all men. But quite enough of them.)
Men prefer direct. Women tend towards being subtle. Plausible deniability, yes, but also . . . when you look at a group of men you can tell who is in charge at a glance. He’s giving directions to accomplish the task. Women, it’s often more egalitarian looking on the surface, with the boss’ buddies passing on instructions. (Like Sarah, I tend towards male style interaction more than female, but I’m better at female than she is–I also didn’t switch cultures as an adult, so I have an advantage there.) You have to discover who is in charge, in a new group of women, because she’s not setting up for a direct challenge, so she’s not obvious. In many cultures it’s obvious: it’s the senior family female, but in ours it isn’t. Don’t challenge the boss if you don’t mean to, which means figuring out the pecking order, and who’s actually in charge.
We used to have a taboo on talking to men about women’s stuff. You didn’t admit you had a period, let alone cramps, in front of men. Remember that? That went away at some point, probably before I was born. Women wouldn’t’ve had to reject drugs of unknown provenance because they never would have expressed a problem to men. In a lot of ways it’s a good thing that it’s not shameful to bring up a problem, but . . . we don’t have a structure set up around it. The old structure worked.
Ideally, a woman could say “No, thanks,” and not have to worry about the man getting upset. Or the woman. But that’s not the world we’re in. Because, did you know, women also get upset about the rejection? Because it says “I don’t trust you,” straight out, and we aren’t supposed to say that. So the deflection response, that says “I don’t trust you” in a plausibly deniable form, so that the response isn’t anger.
So I suspect the needed adjustment for women is going to be going back to do not talk about intimate matters, such as cramps, around people you will not accept drugs from. There’s a downside, of course, in that men will be trying to figure out why women aren’t pulling their weight today. We’re stuck in a species with sexual dimorphism.
Gentlemen and ladies, don’t take a deflection response as something to argue with. Because also, it could be a really annoying allergy–not even TO the medicine itself, but to the coating, that one doesn’t want to risk–and every single person with an allergy or with a child with an allergy has had to deal with the “Oh, that’s not real” response, a lot of us from medical doctors. Take “Oh, that won’t work,” as being a rejection, a polite rejection, and carry on as you would have if you didn’t have the medicine to offer. And know that if one accepts food, drink, medicines, from you, that you are in the high trust zone. Not the date zone, the high trust zone. These are two very different things. And maybe now it makes sense why the coffee shop is a safer first date offer?
Furthermore, it’s not a cultural unity. It’s a lot safer to not deflect in the rural west, as far as I can tell, than anywhere else on the planet. That might be because heavily armed. Might be because no one stands close to anyone else anyway. Maybe you don’t have to reduce friction in social interactions in areas where there are few social interactions.
Assuming good intentions will get you quite far. There’s a line from the DeMolay organization my boys all participated in that goes something like “When a Brother has acted foolishly, I must assume he was motivated by good intentions which I know not, and had I his motivations, I might have acted more foolishly than I judge him to have.” It’s pretty good advice, really, in dealing with honest folk, and I hope you are all trying to avoid dealing with dishonest folk.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/23/more-on-communication-or-no-one-knows-what-they-dont-know/

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#communication #boys #carry #silent

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What We Have Here Before I start this post, let me say that I’m ...

2026-10-22T21:57:04Z

What We Have Here

Before I start this post, let me say that I’m not proposing we use genetic engineering to make men and women the same. As should be obvious from No Man’s Land, I don’t think that would solve anyone’s problem. It might make communication more easy in one front, but it will not fix anything as a species.
However, over the last few days I’ve become convinced that at least half of the “war between men and women” is a failure to communicate. Also a failure of the imagination, in that men can’t imagine being a woman. TBF women also can’t imagine being a man. The longer I live the more I think that Robert A. Heinlein was absolutely right and not kidding at all when he suggested we’re not two halves of the same species, but two symbiote species.
Please keep in mind this comes from a woman who has always had more male than female friends, and who does grok men more than women most of the time, partly because I grew up with my brother and his friends as primary influences, partly because of my interests, which run to politics, finance and action books. (And movies.)
So imagine my surprise when a meme was posted in my close-in fan groups, argument broke out and I was SOLIDLY on the female side.
It’s a communication issue. And the communication issue hinges on things men can’t conceptualize. Let’s say growing up male is different from growing up female in a way that’s very hard to understand, particularly since our culture, right now, is hell bent on telling us there is absolutely no difference (beyond the way you pee) between males and females.
The truth is that we’re different while still in utero, due to different hormone baths. And the brain structure of males and females are different. From a story perspective, btw, this was glaringly obvious when I advised my middle-school son’s writing club. All the girls, from the rough and tumble soccer players to the girly girls were writing deeply introspective “How I talked to my dead ancestress and found myself.” And every boy was writing “How I stopped the bank robbers, killed all the bad guys and got a medal.” (Of course by that metric, at 12, I WAS a boy, so this is not universal.) But those are relatively minor — note I said relatively — and if people are intelligent and willing to cross the divide. And some deep weirdos might have read enough action to present as boys. Ahem. Not that I own any mirrors.
However there’s a deeper divide we can’t bridge, and that’s: Females are smaller and weaker than men. Yes, even in shape, relatively buff females have no chance against ‘ninety pound weakling” males. Testosterone is a hell of a force multiplier, okay? Yes, I won some fights against males early on in life, but that was because I grew faster, and I had no actual brakes. When I fought, I fought for maximum damage. And fair wasn’t even in the world as my plans. (Which btw is typical female.) But also, in almost every case, I got LUCKY.
If a man is determined to hurt a woman, really determined, he’s going to hurt her. Badly. While a woman determined to hurt a man might hurt him. Maybe. If he’s careless and hindered by chivalry.
Note I mean PHYSICAL injury. Not emotional. Not mental. Physical.
With that in mind, this is the meme that caused the arguments:
Sigh. I get the woman completely.
Look, I’m sixty three (I JUST CHECKED, okay?) and I would not have accepted a tablet from a male friend when I was young. Unless he was one of the friends in my brother’s group who REALLY were all my ersatz brothers (and half of whom were medical students, which at the time meant practically jingled with free medicine bottles from medicine reps.) Even more shocking, I wouldn’t accept a tablet from a male (or female) friend now, except for a handful of you who are as paranoid as I am.
Right now, the main reason I wouldn’t accept a tablet, unless individually wrapped, still sealed (and even then!) is because fentanyl is known to be produced to mimic over the counter medicines, and while I’m not sleeping and kind of depressed, I’m not suicidal.
The reason I wouldn’t have accepted it then…
Well, for one, because you never take medicines, food or drinks from a male. Period. Unless he’s family and absolutely above suspicion, which the interaction above doesn’t read as. It reads as casual or “school” friend. I mean, if they’d known each other from childhood, or were relatives, he’d have said, right?
Even back in my day — GUYS EVEN BACK IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S DAY — blithely taking a substance handed to you by someone-not-a-doctor featured in what would now be creepy pasta stories. “And then I woke up, and all my clothes were off.” Or less dramatically “And then I woke up, and my wallet and money and my bus pass were gone.”
Seriously. Weaker people are very aware it won’t take much to overpower them. You just need to make them slightly tipsy or interfere with their judgement, and there’s tons of things that do that.
And if the men are now shouting “MOST MEN WOULD NEVER.” Thank you. We’re very aware of that. Look, we’ve got fathers, husbands, children. And we love your big shambling, grunting, hairy selves. At least those of us who are hetero and more or less sane do.
The problem is that we can’t be sure.
Right, so I’ve been doing a deep dive into true crime (I said I was depressed.) and one of the books I read was Anne Rule’s on Ted Bundy. I knew Anne Rule from having stumbled on her books before. I didn’t realize she’d known the ur-sex-killer of popular imagination, much less that she was friends with him. Her after-the book afterwords for republication are decisive about his being a monster etc. BUT if you read the book in sequence… well. She had NO idea. And in fact, while reading the book, I kept thinking “Wait, you’re still sending him money and worrying about him in prison? What’s wrong with you?”
What was wrong with her is that she wasn’t reading this in hindsight, where DNA has proved beyond doubt that yes, he did this stuff, and where I knew before I started reading what he was accused of. She didn’t. And even in the afterword she tries to reconcile the two images of him and can’t. Because the guy she knew, her CLOSE FRIEND shouldn’t be able to commit those horrific crimes against women and female children. And yet he did.
“Oh, come on, Sarah, a mass killer is a purely American phenomenon, and anyway psychopaths who are actual killers are very rare. How can you–.”
Very easily. Acktchually we don’t know how many KILLING psychopaths there are. I read this absolutely chilling off the cuff remark by a pathologist from Colorado who searches the mountains on the weekend for human remains. No, seriously. There’s a group of them, and it’s like a hobby.
How many do they find? Uh… I think they estimated (and I might be underreporting) that for every ten miles of forested area in a highway there will be an undiscovered corpse.
Wouldn’t everyone know if that many people were missing? Oh, dear. Look, we’re a highly mobile, relatively disconnected society. And our police departments build in “every teen is a potential runaway. Every wife is a potential deserter of family” (Every husband too.) People CAN and do disappear and never be noticed not to be there. And that’s without considering transients, recent immigrants, semi-nomadic professionals and oh, yeah, the massive group let in by the autopen.
I suspect the number of people who could disappear and never be heard of has gone higher too. More single people. More friendless people. More people working from home. More people without kids.
Look, I have kids, and if I cut communication, one would drive over right away, the other next weekend. Because I’m their mother, and my stopping answering would be profoundly weird.
However, if I didn’t, if it were just Dan and I, we could die, and our friends MIGHT notice. I mean, the one who has the keys to the house would eventually get worried if I stopped answering and come over, but since we exchange messages maybe every couple of weeks or so, and texts arrive at odd times and such, probably not for a couple of months.
Now, my case is a little different, because the close-in Discord group, the blog readers, the people at Instapundit would probably send someone over within a week. Still, that’s a week.
However, if I weren’t living my life in public…. and most people aren’t… How long do you think it would take?
As for Mass Murderers being American… They are only “A purely American phenomenon” because no one else labels them that way or make an industry of talking about them, except maybe the British. (And Portugal hides them if they can. I mean, they arrest the perp — maybe, last I heard their penal system… never mind — but they don’t talk about this much. It’s a cultural thing.)
Now that I’ve horrified you, the problem is that we don’t know who a mass murderer might be. Or just a plain bad dude. People can dissemble. Sometimes for YEARS. Psychopathy is much more common than it seems.
So just because you know someone and see no reason for the substance they gave you to be poisoned/adulterated… well, it doesn’t mean it isn’t.
And if you’re saying “But poison is a woman’s weapon!” Well, yes. Which means you big burly creatures also should be careful. It’s just a lot of you won’t. Because at the back of the brain, from childhood training, from a hundred playground scuffles you have “I can take care of myself” imprinted at brain-deep.
Women don’t. From youngest age, we learn we’re vulnerable. Even without the demonization of men, even believing most men are DECENT, we watch ourselves all the time. At least the ones of us who survive to be — checks again — sixty three (almost a Beatles song!)
This creates other adaptations: the men asked if that was the case, why give an excuse, why not just say “no.”
Because most women don’t. Look, if they’re friends, even casual friends, but particularly if she does consider him a romantic prospect, she won’t want to say a flat “No.”
Why not? Well, precisely. Because then he’ll ask “Why not?” and if she evades that without giving a reason, he’ll say “You’re afraid I’ll drug you!” and storm out in a fit. And if she keeps saying “Because no.” He’ll think she hates him, go home, think about it, realize she’s afraid, and then have a fit all over the webs. There is no way to win this. NONE. So we give excuses. “Oh, it’s not the right medicine.” “Not tonight, I’m washing my hair.” (Not, I really don’t want to go to isolated spot first thing out.) or whatever. We deflect. Try not to cause offense. Because we’re trying to protect ourselves, and we REALLY don’t think you’re a bad guy (or we’d have cut you off) but there’s just enough doubt that we have to protect ourselves. Because if we get in a situation where we can’t defend ourselves, we’re dead. You’re bigger, you’re stronger, you’re faster. Not just a little bit. A LOT. Again, the champion female soccer team can get beaten by an average MIDDLE SCHOOL BOYS SOCCER TEAM. Frankly, in a fight we don’t have a chance.
So, no, we’re not going to take a tablet from you (guys shouldn’t either. Mr. Chemistry doesn’t care if you pee standing up.) We’re also not going for a walk in that deserted park. We’re not going to close the door when we’re alone with you in a room. And in general, until and unless it’s absolutely required and we’re fairly sure you’d never hurt us (Or no one would ever get married) we’re not going to expose ourselves to danger. (BTW this is why I don’t care if you’re trans and identify as female. You still have male strength by and large. Don’t crowd us. And don’t try to get into a woman’s shelter.)
Now, in all fairness, the exchange above sounds to me like the guy is strong in the tisms, particularly his continued insistence and research to prove it would help her. And he’s probably innocuous. But I still see the girl as doing what’s only logical. And I WOULD DO THE SAME.
I just want to make clear why this is. We’re weaker. Physically you guys have the advantage.
Which, curiously, is why women should be taught to be gentlemen in business if they want to have a profession.
Wut? Sarah, you shifted gears so fast I heard the grinding. Oh, shut up. Look, I said above, women will delay fighting or fight by other means. Because we know once we have to fight we’ll likely lose. The problem is that when we fight, we don’t fight to win. WE FIGHT TO KILL.
This is set at the back of the brain. If this is a threat, you have to kill it, or it will come back and kill you. So for a woman there is no “Defeat, then friendship.” There is only “kill the threat. Eradicate it. Destroy it.”
The problem is instinct is a funny thing. This ports over to… business rivalry. Women in the C suite will absolutely over react and try to destroy competition. Which tends to destroy the business, or whatever they’re involved in, as well as a vast swath of men who are left wondering what they did to deserve this. (And some women. I am a bit dense on this, since I WAS raised to be a gentleman, and believe in defeat, then friendship.)
So, what we have here is not a war of the sexes, what we have here is a failure to communicate.
The guys, bigger, stronger, need to understand that we are smaller, weaker, and therefore have to be cautious beyond reasonable limits. Because a mistake can be fatal.
And women need to understand: not every charming men, not even a sizeable minority of them, are Ted Bundy. (Though serial killers can get hundreds of kills, so still be careful.) And just because you feel threatened, it doesn’t mean it’s a threat. That thing you keep jumping on isn’t a spider, it’s your earbuds! Or if you prefer: stop treating competition as a lethal, to the death confrontation. It’s not. If you want to play in male fields? learn to be a gentleman. The politics of personal destruction are awful in politics. They’re even more painfully awful in business.
(Oh, and your political beliefs are not your children. They don’t need you to kill to protect them. And they should be subjected to rational discussion, even if it hurts them. Kipling was right. Stop being an idiot.)
BUT above all, remember we are different, whatever the “progressives” (into the 1930s) say. We are very different. And this colors even seemingly innocuous interactions.
If an interaction with a woman puzzles you? Ask your female friends. They just might think the answer is obvious. (Or not. Female psychopaths exist.)
For the sake of continued humanity, stop assuming an entire sex is stupid or irrational. They’re just responding to different physical realities.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/22/what-we-have-here/

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#man #which

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The Means of War (A Blast from the Past from: ...

2026-10-21T21:36:23Z

The Means of War

(A Blast from the Past from: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2025/08/19/the-means-of-war/)
Cheer up. We’re winning the long war.
And now you’re staring at me as though I’ve lost my mind. I might have. I was fighting typesetting till late last night. But I don’t think so.
It occurred to me sometime ago that we were in a long, sustained war since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s just that war has morphed and gone underground, by other means.
Look, part of this was America’s showing in WWII. Not that it was bad, but that it was very, very good and it showed the ideologies who would conquer the world that they couldn’t do it shoulder-to-shoulder, in serried ranks. I mean they kept threatening us with it, but in fact that time had already passed. (Sometime I need to do a post about how most of threats we’re terrified of are actually things that are no longer possible, or at least highly unlikely.)
So, the ideologies that would conquer the world: it was before Marxism existed, of course, that people became obsessed with idea of a rule “of the people” involving “if only everyone” and also that there was a permanent underclass who needed to rule so they wouldn’t be oppressed.
In fact Marx, the least original thinker in the world, culled his ideas from the kind of red-throated insanity of the French revolution. To be fair to him, all of the civilized word was going through this, processing the shock of the immense violation that the French Revolution represented.
There had been peasant revolts… always pretty much. Look, despite the soft-water-color monarchy fools (mostly tbf European fools, though some people on this side of the Atlantic are … gullible (?Yeah, gullible is a good term)) try to sell you, monarchy and any system with hierarchy dictated by birth which you can neither choose nor change monarchy pretty much sucks and will end up having peasant revolts. (Yes, yes, constitutional monarchy is better. And also depending on the quality of the king, yadda yadda, except that you can’t guarantee the quality of the king, nor vote him out if he’s well…. Biden like. And constitutional monarchy is a way to still have kings for the feel while not having kings for anything practical. BUT in this case, I’m talking about historical, pre-French-revolution monarchy and its problems.)
However the French revolution was shocking like the covidiocy was shocking. It was a ‘this is not even possible’ moment.
And it was possible, suddenly, because of one innovation (this one simple trick!) — the printing press. And the propaganda it enabled.
While media was nowhere near as concentrated as it would become in the late 20th century, the big printing presses and their broadsides were responsible for disseminating the idea of the revolution and spurring people on to revolt, and concentrated enough to have it be in the hands of a wild-eyed bourgeois elite which spurred each other on to insanity. Oh, also, things were pretty sucky to be fair. I mean what fed the fire of the revolution is that the lower classes really were pinched like crazy. And had endured centuries of being treated as subhuman. But still, without the propaganda and the dissemination of ideas, the French peasants revolt would have engulfed a few cities, maybe a province, then fizzled.
That it didn’t scared the living daylights out of everyone in power. Well, and anyone literate, even the people in America who initially supported it, when they realized how ridiculous it had gotten.
Which means that by the early nineteenth century the intellectual establishment was still processing the shock (these things process slowly) and Marx codified the insanity into what sounded like more exact intellectual format.
And then they tried it on. WWI was a sad disappointment for the “Workers of the world” uniting, since apparently they still preferred their national identities. Which then led to fascism, that embraced that and various weird retcons of international socialism, including the very latest attempt here, with DEI, with “race” replacing class (and race being quite inventive as it ended up including women and sexual orientation and… insane little buggers these Marxists.)
Anyway, WWII was even more of a disappointment, at least for the Marxists (red or black bah, let the devil come and choose between them) idea that they could take the world by the force of arms, because it turned out the US had better arms. And thought it was at the time under the grip of a Marxist though not an avowed one, the US refused to do the taking over and occupying thing, since ultimately as a national character we’re terrible imperialists: all we want to do is go home.
Since then, the enemies of the US have been fighting the US by other means.
The most effective, starting right after WWII (or arguably before) was internal corruption and subversion. McCarthy was too late (no, seriously, when you have an hour, go and listen.) and all our institutions have been corrupted by Marxism for way too long. No, longer than you think.
This was facilitated by having central control of the means of communication, education and entertainment. They could promote the ideas of communism while assuring you they were strong anti-communists.
Also, the number of times they threw the USSR a life line or ignored its obvious lying to pretend they were an equal enemy and super-dangerous leads me to believe they liked the state of balance between two powers. Either because they liked it for puddinghead reasons (without a challenge we’d go soft!) or to keep a certain amount of state control because we were “threatened.”
That was one form of the long war. The cold war, where the forces of Marxism could pick out small helpless countries one by one while at home we were told that people there had “chosen” this and that “the people” liked communism and that we were oppressors for not letting them have it.
Except the slow grind didn’t work. The truth is that Marxism is as shitty a framework for government as it was an intellectual framework for the economy. Imposing any form of Marxism — starts as communism, quickly devolves to fascism and then to a sort of feudalism — means that the society thus afflicted cannot survive. Not long term. Not economically, not mentally and definitely not morally.
Things started falling apart more and more obviously by four decades after WWII and then the USSR came thundering down not long after.
Well, all credit to Ronald Reagan, because without him the democrats would have kept propping up the rotten corpse of the USSR (let’s remember it had tried to collapse in the sixties already) like a kind of international Weekend at Bernies.
But as it started thundering down, the people here who’d become willing mind-slaves of the Marxists lost their minds, until they found two new means of attack: race and ecology. (Remember for the left race also includes your sex and who you sleep with. Because, you know, these G-d blinded idiots can’t understand CHOICE and that there are characteristics you choose and aren’t simply born with. Here, between you and me, are they clankers, or do they just think they are?)
This worked middling well until recently. Or appeared to work middling well. Let’s remember again, due to their control of the means of mass communication and indoctrination, until recently it was hard to distinguish how well it worked from how well it appeared to work. And they controlled appearances. All memorex, no reality, is a possibility for what was happening. In fact given the slow creep of means of cheating being introduced in the US since the 90s and that cheating mostly benefits the left — no? then why are they always the ones who make it possible to cheat and bitch if you try to clean up the votes? — it’s quite likely their recover scam after the USSR never worked that well.
Anyway, by the end of the 20th century it was becoming clear that despite their best efforts, they were barely holding onto the US by fraud, and that they were certainly not controlling hearts and minds. And frankly, by the late teens the rest of the world was also starting to get ideas and to rebel, though less penetrated by the internet and free association which here started breaking the spell of mass media control.
And that’s when they came up with the ultimate idea to attack the west: a human wave. Mass immigration. They figured this would for sure get their race/group communism to stick.
It wouldn’t have of course. It won’t even in Europe. But it will cause a hell of a disturbance for a few decades. And if they could do that here, maybe they could break up the US and destroy our dangerous ideas. (Really, they’ve wanted us to break up since the USSR did, because they don’t understand the differences between us and them — no seriously — and want revenge.)
Except that the collectivists drink their own ink and believe their own propaganda. They thought that say here they could swamp us with JUST people from South of the border. They might very well have thought they could swamp us with people from Mexico.
Of course they couldn’t. The population isn’t as great as they thought. And frankly, we’re very spread out. But by the end they were recruiting wholesale from anywhere in the world to throw them in here, which meant their weapon — people — lacked internal cohesion and were as likely to turn on each other as on us.
Also, of course, they don’t have control of communication. No matter how many movies they put out on the plight of the poor illegals, the people aren’t listening, and instead really would like to stop getting elbowed out of jobs by people who work for 1/4 the salary while also drawing every possible form of welfare. And they would like people to stop trying to camp on their lawn and sh*t on their sidewalk. Oh, and they’d like their children and pets to be safe.
So…. So, in the US Trump might just about have saved us from having a violent spasm that would leave a bunch of people very dead (not all them, or even most of them, just illegals) and the country in a mess (and still not give the left its triumph.)
Europe… has bigger problems. Partly because they stopped reproducing about a generation before we fell into that kind of trouble (though there are signs with the young ‘uns here and there that this might well change within ten years.) And also because most of them have been well and truly swamped by waves of immigration. And they still don’t know how to deal with any of it, because — for various cultural reasons — this type of blog, and a kind of grassroots communication is much harder to take hold there.
Frankly I’m amazed they’re managing as much of a rebellion as they are, and we wish the insurgent forces in Great Britain, still fighting to reclaim their homeland, well. I will tell them be of good cheer. If the Marxists weren’t terrified, they wouldn’t be so openly dropping the mask and showing us their hideous totalitarian faces. You are winning, but I’m afraid the victory will cost you dearly. (Salutes.)
Here? Here we are winning. We are winning magnificently. After sixty years of non-stop shrieking, indoctrination, positional-good-Marxist-display, and guilt and shame beat downs, we’re hunching our shoulders and ignoring the self-proclaimed “elites.”
Trump was elected, not because of his great achievements (sorry, Sir. We didn’t even KNOW you in 16. Now? Now we like you fine) but because of our being tired of having our legs pissed on by people who told us it was raining.
And we’ve carried on. Their magnificent coup, the most corrupt and frankly large scale bit of election fraud in the US ever, installed someone who was practically dead and while hurting us very badly never got hold of our hearts and minds, let alone made us believe they were legitimate. We went from zero to Let’s Go Brandon in minutes, it felt like.
Meanwhile everything they do turns to shit. They have become contaminated with Obama’s Mierda’s touch. They’ve lost all ability to create (I have this theory they never had it, just coasted on whatever they could steal from the few conservatives still in whatever field, but that’s harder to prove) and they can’t convince anyone. Not in the face of the dismal results of their philosophy.
Does this mean the future is guaranteed? The future is never guaranteed. And Liberty must be won day by day.
No, what it means is we have a chance. We have a chance of winning this. It might be too late for the rest of the world. (But maybe not. Salutes Great Britain’s people who are still fighting.)
But America? Well, boys and girls: it’s time to drop our shackles, ignore the Marxists and aim for the stars.
I can’t promise you we’ll make it. But I think we’re going to.
Be not afraid. Keep fighting.
The future is shining bright, and America will lead the world into it.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/21/the-means-of-war-2/

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Borders Over my sixty years and a bit of life, I’ve crossed ...

2026-10-20T21:18:51Z

Borders

Over my sixty years and a bit of life, I’ve crossed many borders. When I was a kid, shopping in Spain was a thing (because a lot of things were available there that weren’t in Portugal) so taking a bus to Spain to shop, with mom and all the other older village women was a thing. (I was along for two reasons: White Chocolate and mushrooms, most of them nearly impossible to obtain in Portugal at the time.)
I also traveled, by bus, plane, train and automobile. At the end of those trips (or in the middle) I had to haul out my passport or ID and show it to a bored border guard who would do the stamp stamp stamp thing.
But truly I’ve only ever crossed a border, one that can only be crossed once. Oh, sure, you can go back again, but the back isn’t there and what you’ll get is something third after crossing that other border. Which I have no intention of doing because I like who I am and what I am.
What in heck am I talking about? Acculturation. It’s an internal border which you cross mentally and emotionally over years. And once you’re done crossing it, you’re quite literally someone else on the other side.
I can’t imagine the circumstances that would force me to go back. Or rather, I can, but I’d rather not as it would involve a lot of deaths and devastation. But if I went back, I would be utterly foreign there. Other. I am when I visit. The country rubs me raw in a million small ways, and I’m sure I drive my surviving relatives — the only thing that would entice me to visit — bonkers in a million small ways that even they can’t articulate. Just “she’s annoying.” (I’d like to point out I was always annoying. BUT this annoying is deeper than the skin, something like fingernails rubbing on the blackboard of your soul.) My husband doesn’t feel it, possibly because he doesn’t have the scars where things were remodeled. To his mind, it is perfectly logical, should he retire in the next two years, if my dad is still alive, that we go over, say, for the whole summer. It’s warmer there, and we could go to the sea which both of us love, and I could spend time with my dad, whom he knows I love. Sure, it’s an alien culture, but he figures that’s okay because it’s temporary. I find myself in the curious position of explaining to him that after say 2 weeks I’d probably just start screaming and flipping off everyone and everything, and it wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone.
And it’s not that I hate Portugal. In the vast array of places I hate, for historic, cultural and justified reasons, Portugal barely moves the meter.
I’d say the discomfort is caused by the back of my mind feeling I SHOULD belong, and certain the people who know me expect me to belong. But I don’t. I don’t in a million small ways. I don’t even remember belonging, partly because our memories are plastic and unreliable, and partly because I never belonged very well (to be perfectly fair.) I never belonged as completely as I do here. And I left very young, and most of my life there was childhood or that curious transitional stage of “college student” which doesn’t have the same habits as an adult human being.
But the discomfort is real and continuous. It doesn’t bother me in other foreign parts (eh) where I’m curious but detached. I think mostly is the little of me that remains “Portuguese” culturally (maybe 5%?) is enough to feel like there are broken, jagged bits when exposed to the culture.
Which brings me right to what I want to talk about. Strap in, this is going to be a long one. In response to the inevitable (people or bots?) comments that I should be able to describe it in ten sentences, in precis format and perform it as a dance tune, I’d like to invite those making the comments to contemplate my middle fingers. I am sorry to deprive you of your pablum, but some things require complex treatment and adult humans know how to digest complex, often contradictory information.
Or if you prefer: an exploration of culture and acculturation partakes of the characteristics of the subject, which is complex, convoluted and not easy to standardize or summarize. Oh, and definitely not possible to summarize or shove into facile slogans.
So, my experience — from within — I am practically the ideal subject of acculturation (for a successful experience) and I had the best possible of circumstances in which to acculturate.
I came to the United States to stay at 22 when I married my husband. But before that, I’d been raised in the sphere of influence of an anglophile grandfather, surrounded by American songs and books. One of my earliest childhood iteneraria to what the world would be like was translations of Reader’s Digest, because my dad subscribed. I’ll point out that I have no idea if my dad knew I was reading them, but the words were accessible, reading material was in short supply, and so I read them cover to cover. (I also read my cousin’s bullfighter romances, so I wasn’t exactly a discriminating reader before 10.) Through it I absorbed a sort of idea of America as a golden land where wondrous things happened. In my mind, probably forever, is the image of one of those huge sixties landboat cars, with an entire family in it driving through the petrified forest. Oh, it was drawn because I think that particular issue was from the fifties, or maybe forties. Anyway, that was the background. I grew up — no revelation for anyone who is a regular — to love science fiction, and eventually grew up to prefer Robert A. Heinlein, with an intensity that means I practically grew up IN his books. Add to that the fact I’d fallen in love with English as a language, so despite having only 4 years when I came to the US as an exchange student, I was fluent enough that I started dreaming in English (the mark of having switched the language you’re thinking in, and a landmark we were taught to look out for) during my “orientation” the first week in the country. It never went back either. My dreams that have childhood memories have everyone speaking English. It’s weird. I came to the US at 18 and spent a year as an exchange student, and met my future husband. I only didn’t stay/make more permanent arrangements like getting married, because my husband and I met at 18 and we were geeks with very little dating experience. The attraction was immediate but the attraction itself caused us to almost run the other way because it was scary. Four years after I’d returned to Portugal and gone to College for English (and German) we got in touch by phone, realized we were being idiots, because this was the only other person we’d ever been able to talk to COMPLETELY and got married within six months.
Since then I’ve lived in the US, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Colorado and none of your business (not that the secret is particularly hard or fast, but there are reasons.) Yes, each time I moved there was a cultural adjustment, but not at the same level as coming from Portugal.
Despite more or less being mad in love with America, as much as with my husband, I didn’t naturalize until five years and change after I got married, barely beating older son at an American citizenship.
So: My case is practically ideal. I was acquainted with the culture at a distance. Now, most people are all over the world, because of US cultural dominance, but that’s mostly to movies which are often misleading, and besides don’t let you figure out how people are “ticking” to the level a book does. (Even if the person whose ticking you hear is most often the author.) And once I’d come to the US I was isolated from all Portuguese cultural influences, save for phone calls with family, which got more sparse with time because they were very expensive, and the occasional visit for a week or two, which also got more and more rare because money and the dislocation attendant in taking that much time off (often for both of us, when we were both in 9-5 jobs.) The person I interacted with the most is American, with no Portuguese background (yeah, his 23andme has different opinions, but it’s like saying I have a connection to Norway. Sure, but it’s from several hundred years ago, and whatever influence it has is buried deep in genetic propensities. I’ll probably find my obsession with axes comes from there. Never mind.) In fact, the Mathematician is so American his ancestors were here before the revolution (look, some really were here a while before) and one of them fought for the revolution during the revolutionary war. (Very proud.) Add to that that there was no Portuguese community near us, or if there was, I never heard of it. The only time I was contacted by a Portuguese “local” group was in Colorado Springs, and I declined to belong, mostly because by then I was raising my son, and there was no point confusing him. Having me for a mother is weird enough. BUT ALSO because they weren’t the same kind of Portuguese. They were from Azores, which is a related (obviously) but completely different culture. Kind of like if you lived in Germany and your only contact with the US was a group from NYC, while you were a born and bred Texan. If I had been longing for Portugal and very lonely, I might have signed up, who knows? But at that point, 8 years into my marriage, I was very firmly acculturated. I had no interest in attending Portuguese feasts (except for the occasional, strange desire for charcoal grilled sardines. I got nothing. That itch gets scratched when friend Mongo grills some for me. Note my husband despises the dish, so I never make it. Too much trouble to make just for me.)
This is particularly curious because in the four years after I went back to Portugal, after my exchange student year, I did in fact cleave to any displaced American or American raised person I could find. My university group of such had… A team watching parties on Saturday afternoon. Yes, it was that bad.
So, given all that, when I married acculturation was instant and easy. Wait. Wait. Okay, I had to get that laugh out of my system.
Acculturation was slow, torturous, and often felt like I was going insane or coming apart at the seams. It affected EVERYTHING from what I ate for breakfast, to initial approach to strangers, to asking for information on how to do something (if I could have had youtube!) to how I dressed, to how I walked, talked, stood. To how we resolved marital disputes, or more commonly minor disagreements. To medical treatment. To– EVERYTHING.
Being from a different culture — remember Portugal is at that a WESTERN European culture. I shudder at doing this from somewhere more distant — and trying to fit in — not just live as I always had, and damn the torpedoes — is much like being a centipede who has forgotten which leg to move first, and then has to think through every leg movement.
In the long watches of the night, when we revisit all the things we’ve done wrong, I often revisit what must have been baffling amalpropisms and social solecisms I committed the first three years in the US. Baffling for other people, that is. For me, they made perfect sense. I’ve only recently learned to start laughing at them.
Everything is affected? EVERYTHING. At a level you don’t fully understand until you come against every small thing you’re not even doing wrong: you’re doing it as if you came from another planet.
And you adapt. Step by step. Point by point. Sometimes without noticing. Sometimes with tears, screams and a great wish you were two and could throw yourself on the floor and kick and scream.
If you’re in a happy long term marriage to someone from across the country, you’ve experienced a very small and pale version of this. The adapting. Step by step. I bet if your self before you married met yourself now, he/she would be baffled at how different you are. NOT that you are different of course, you just really like bagels for breakfast now. What’s wrong with that?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But you’ve changed. Well, now multiply that by a million.
In my case, once I was adapted enough that a visit told me I’d never fit in Portugal again, I went through citizenship. And I was — I want to emphasize this — fitting in fine for every day life. But there followed another five years of solid hell before I could “write” American. Before that writing an American character came across as “not even wrong.” (Look, no one was accepting the Elly chronicles. And frankly back then I wrote them so ALIEN that they wouldn’t have been enjoyable. I’m not sure the latest book, halfway done, doesn’t suffer from this, too. But the book is helping me, because my mind is unsettled with the approaching elections.)
This entailed not reading fiction — I read an awful lot of it, of course — but reading biographies. Oh, not important people biographies. Those are glossified to the point of not-real.
If you look in the dusty corners of your local library you’ll find “biographies of rando”. I.e. people write their auto biographies and give a copy to their local library. (Some have cookbook type ring bindings. Or did. It occurs to me libraries might no longer be accepting these. If so, it’s a pity. They were a real historical resource.) I read these compulsively at the rate of several a week. That helped.
Raising the boys also helped, as I experienced an American childhood second hand. Which is why I sometimes come across as having grown up in the nineties. Whatever, dudes.
Anyway, at this point, I am acculturated. Living in the US does not feel painful. It’s normal. If you drop me anywhere in the US with enough funds, I can establish my routine easily enough. (Though without my husband it would be weird, because it’s been 41 years and we’re a unit.) (I’ll also find the best diner in the neighborhood. Blindfolded. With my feet in a bucket. Except here, because this town doesn’t have a diner. Sad Sarah noises.)
Portugal? Ah… once, in an adventure in the mountains, looking for a castle (they’re better marked now that Portugal is super-touristic, but not back then) my husband and I about starved because the village was small enough not to have standard signs, and I couldn’t figure out which of what looked like houses was actually a tavern/restaurant. (Yes, there was one. My father laughed at my not being able to find it afterwards.) I could NO LONGER READ the cultural signs. So we beat feet to the nearest largish population center and bought sandwiches at a restaurant.
Am I FULLY acculturated? Oh. No. I’d rate it 95%. The other 5%, the parts that aren’t around food, I hit when I do something that my husband stares at and goes “Why did you think that was the way to do x?” And I’m so far off the beaten path that normal Americans can’t decode it. And, of course, I have the memories. And the scars.
Now, why did I put you through this? The usual “People running with stupid on social media and putting my eyes out.”
This one was a few weeks ago someone on Facebook, and I’m still smarting from it. First, she started by informing everyone we should unfriend her, if we agreed with what ICE was doing.
(Pinches bridge of nose.) Okay, I’m going to say it. Demanding other people unfriend you if they x y or z is one of the most stupid, arrogant, bizarre, backward things you can do on social media.
Why, what do I mean? It’s so common! Yes, it is. So is bad breath and spitting in public. It don’t make it right.
Look, social media, particularly the notoriously unreliable facebook, is not going to show your prissy, preening post to your entire “friends” list. On top of which some number in your friend list will look at your stompy foot fit and go “Whatever. You’re not important enough for me to navigate to your page and unfriend you or block you.” So if your intent was to really have these bad evil thinkers unfriend you, this is quite possibly the most stupid way to do it.
BUT that’s not what you want, no. What you want is to throw a fit and show how superior you are to those people who think ICE should be allowed to arrest those illegally in this country, and to be patted, cosseted and comforted by people as vapid and as stupid as you are.
Again, whatever dude(tte in this case) except that the wish to exhibit how st

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A Pause Before The Fire Europe is burning. No, legitimately. ...

2026-10-19T21:05:02Z

A Pause Before The Fire

Europe is burning. No, legitimately.
You’ve heard about France, where the burning is more or less normal, but it is spreading. And while there seem to be a certain amount of contagion spreading to every European country. And it’s not just Muslims. Actually it’s not primarily Muslim. Muslims and other third world immigrants are as always good for chaos and disorder, particularly when they feel hard done by, or have an entitlement mentality.
No, this wave of burning and fiery, what did the MSM call it? “Scuffles” that’s it, seems to be financed, planned and arranged by Antifa and black bloc and other organized left shit heads. Since now we know the billionaires on their side really do not part with their own money willingly, but suck up our tax money, either we need DOGE again, this time for serious and without all the stupid judges being stupid, or their billionaires are REALLY desperate. Given the wins for the “right” (for European values of “right”) in the latest rounds of elections, it might be the left trying to intimidate Europe back into the left, and desperate enough to use their own money. Maybe. (Sideyes the budget deficit.)
And yet… I was alarmed by all the headlines about how we now have the highest budget deficit in five years. Particularly if it’s true — it might not be. We’re in the process of being stampeded. I bet you real money that gasoline will come down right after the midterms, like magic — it tells us there is an unusual amount of fraud drawing on our finances. Honestly, it could be either.
The one thing I can tell you for frigging sure is that the October surprise they’re warming up is a stock market crash. Yes, yes, I know. AI is overmonetized and will come down hard. I get that. And it will inevitably take some companies — like the chip makers — down hard as well.
But that’s neither here nor there. I’m not a financial expert. I am however an expert in sensing “this is how they’re trying to stampede us, because of a lifetime with the left-controlled media. And I keep seeing stuff about how the stock market crash is inevitable RIGHT NOW.
My bet is that it’s an attempt at an October surprise, to demoralize EVERYONE about the economy. Just like raising the rates was — guys, why does the fed play on team enemy? It always has, and it still does — just like the articles about the biggest deficit EVAH.
They’re trying very hard to crash the economy or make us feel that way in the next two weeks. And it’s raising my hackles.
We’re not hearing much about all of Europe burning. Or starting to. And the fires in California are being downplayed.
So, where are we? D*mned if I know.
Note the most hopeful on our side are saying we won’t LOSE THAT BADLY. Though most of them also assume there’s no fraud, which makes me want to scream and beat them with cudgels.
Otoh Trump is talking like he expects to win. No, seriously. “After the elections” stuff at Iran. Honestly, I don’t think TRUMP knows.
It all depends on the depth of the fraud and how much we can thwart.
I don’t know. But looking at Europe burning makes me think they still have way too much money. And makes me terrified that the amount of money will still enable massive enough fraud to steal at least the House and maybe the Senate too. (Look, there is really no Democrat party. There is a criminal enterprise under the appearance of a Democrat party. Their fight against the SAVE act was their admission without fraud they’re done.)
What I can guarantee is that one way or another, it will burn. Either physically or metaphorically.
Either we win and they try to recreate Europe’s burning — it won’t work the same. Heck, I doubt it will work as they want IN EUROPE — Or they win and try to destroy everything.
We have no choice except try to beat the fraud. BUT they’re bound to fraud harder than ever. So–
I hope we get the result less likely to have me — and a lot of others — end up with a bullet at the back of the head.
Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in he dark.
And remember there’s a way in which we’re blessed in our enemies. They don’t understand reality. Heck, they can’t find reality with two hands, a seeing eye dog, and a specialized reality-sniffer.
The programming they’re trying to run is from WWII because that’s the only programming they have/understand, and at that they imagine themselves not-the-nazis, which is mind bogglingly insane.
They’re going to try. They’ve tried it before. It didn’t work. It didn’t work even when they managed their Color Revolution in 2020. And it will work worse now, I guarantee.
They are trying to build the Berlin Wall while it is being dismantled: by technology, by knowledge, by…. everything.
Not to say they’re harmless, understand. They’ll do a lot of damage if they get in. It will hurt very badly.
Irrecoverable? Eh. Nations are hard to kill.
Also, the more damage they do, the more their funding goes away and allows us to fight back.
In the end we win, they lose. That’s already decided.
It’s how much it hurts getting there that isn’t. And whether Europe can likewise be saved still. It might be able to. The left wouldn’t be burning everything if it weren’t scared.
Vote like you mean it, because I’m too old to go back to my government hectoring me about eggs being “treats” and my being infantile for being able to afford them.
And that’s all I can tell you. Before the fire.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/19/a-pause-before-the-fire/

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#europe #muslims #october

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

2026-10-19T02:18:52Z

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH
FROM PAM UPHOFF: Vyatkin
Seventeen-year-old Afanasiy Vyatkin, orphaned when the Japanese attacked his world, has nowhere to go but the Vyatkin Family House in the capital city of the Alliance.He finds the Great House overwhelmed by refugees.A few nice refugees, an ambitious servant, some retired old men.Outnumbered by the rude, aggressive, bullying refugees, fighting to maintain their status after the disastrous war. Penniless, powerful . . .and dangerous in their desperation to scramble to the top of the ruble heap of their lives..Afanasiy has no trouble separating friends from enemies. And the enemies have underestimated him . . .
FROM MARY CATELLI: Writing and Reflections Volume 3: Essays on the Writing Process from World-Building to Words
Reflections on the many and far-flung fields that writing can touch upon, from original inspiration to the final work.
Magic and science. Talking birds and cats. Ideas and their origins. Magic, in schools, on the battlefield, and whether it is evil. Fairy tales. Exposition. Utopias. Wandering heroes in series. Wicked stepmothers and their motives. And more.
FROM CJ RUSSELL: The Shape of Home (Home, Retirement & Other Misadventures Book 1)
In a future where bringing home a dragon involves months of preparation, Kay and Terry thought they were ready.
They had survived four months of inspections, installed the required safety equipment, studied dragon development, and even convinced the authorities that their dachshund, Queenie, could be trusted around an egg.
Then the egg hatched.
Dimples grows from a tiny purple-and-turquoise hatchling into a full-grown Chinese dragon with strong opinions, a talent for circumventing household rules, and an unquestioned place in the family. Years pass. The household changes. New companions arrive, old routines settle in, and life becomes the comfortable collection of people, animals, arguments, habits, and cookie-related negotiations that Kay thinks of simply as home.
Until one day, home changes shape.
Faced with a future she never planned for, Kay must decide whether home is something you lose—or something you can build again somewhere entirely new.
The Shape of Home is a warm, gently funny science-fiction story about family, grief, dragons, dogs, and starting over when life refuses to follow the plan.
FROM DALE COZORT: Devouring Wind (Exchange Book 2)
“They’re coming for us, from the sky and emptiness.” Ten months ago, technology guru Sharon Mack and her autistic and strangely prescient daughter Bethany were trapped in the wild alternate version of Earth called Bear Country. They took refuge at Fort Eegan, an outpost built by a peculiar cult with mysterious ties to the US government. Now a new Exchange brings terrifying new consequences.
The new Exchange blocks Fort Eegan’s water supply, threatening deprivation now and catastrophic floods in the future. It also pits Fort Eegan against beings with superior technology, inhuman ruthlessness and a weapon capable of devouring everything in its path, including Fort Eegan.
In spite of the danger from the new Exchange, the humans of Bear Country are nearing a war with one another. Ruthless escaped convicts hold hundreds of women hostage. With supplies dwindling, they eye Fort Eegan’s already limited resources. Inside and outside the fort, conflicts fester among the isolated humans, including a deadly love triangle. Fort Eegan’s only hope is to unite before it is blown away by the devouring winds.
FROM HYEOK LIM: No Valid Mandate
Twenty thousand passengers sleep aboard the colony ship Continuance. Only 4,000 can reach the surface—and fifteen randomly chosen jurors must decide who gets those places.
Ethics auditor Mara Venn knows that a survival calculation is not permission. Before the landing window closes, the jurors must write one rule, see the names it selects, and decide whether they have the right to make that choice irreversible.
Then a competing survival list—prepared before the disaster—surfaces. Its authority is doubtful, and Mara’s own unfinished review is part of the evidence. As each new fact changes what the jury can justify, damage keeps shrinking what the ship can physically do. Principles become names. Every delay costs another option. And some of the people arguing hardest for fairness stand to benefit from the rules they defend.
No Valid Mandate is a closed-system science-fiction thriller and fair-play institutional mystery about survival, consent, and the terrifying question of whether anyone has the right to make such a choice.
FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Ambassador Missed the BBQ (The Aurigan Conflict)
A murdered diplomat. A locked room. A stolen corpse. A fraudulent treaty worth trillions.
And the best BBQ in the Quadrant.
Commander Art Bellamy expected a routine diplomatic assignment aboard the USS White House . Instead, he finds himself investigating a murder complicated by diplomatic immunity, manipulated security records, competing governments, corporate corruption, and a mysterious eleven-minute gap.
Someone aboard the ship killed Sir Reginald Percival-Smythe and staged the crime to look like an international assassination.
Then the body disappears.
As Bellamy digs deeper, he discovers that the murder is only one piece of a much larger conspiracy surrounding a treaty that could transfer control of strategic infrastructure worth trillions of credits.
Everyone aboard the White House has something to hide.
The question is which secret matters.
Bellamy isn’t a genius who solves crimes through miraculous flashes of inspiration. He’s a professional investigator who notices the details everyone else overlooks.
And one tiny detail may bring down an enormous conspiracy:
BBQ ash on a pair of diplomatic shoes.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Shadow over Leningrad
In Stalin’s Soviet Union, Tikhon Grigoriev lives a precarious life. He knows too much. He’s seen too much. A single misstep could destroy him, and if he stumbles, he will take his family down with him. With Leningrad besieged by Nazi armies, the danger has only increased.
He’s not a man who wants to come to the notice of those in high places. But when he solved a murder that seemed supernatural, impossible, he attracted the attention of Leningrad’s First Party Secretary.
So when a plot of land grows vegetables of unusual size and vigor, and anyone who eats them goes mad, who should be called upon to solve the mystery but Tikhon Grigoriev. However, these secrets could get him far worse than a bullet in the head. For during the White Nights the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and in some of those worlds humanity can have no place.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: The Lion and the Darkness (Timelines Book 4)
The Long-Awaited Sequel to The Lion in Paradise
At long last, Ariela Rivers Wolff begins her mission to the Simulated Worlds.
As the Martyr of Sardristra, she finds herself in the position of a Joan of Arc, burned at the stake for preaching a sermon of love to a very violent race of . . . blue, four-legged, four-armed, sort-of-horse analogs. Five hundred years later in their history, she finds a totally-reversed welcome as “Saint Ardreyelya” in the country in which she first appeared. Will she be able to prevent the rest of the world from destroying “her” people before she can convert them, too?
As the Goddess of Mahoukai, she finds herself the deity of a world religion in a world governed by magic. And like all worlds with magic, inevitably there is a Demon Lord. She’ll have to deal with that Demon Lord before the world of Mahoukai can be realized into the True Universe . . . but in the event, the Demon Lord is an infiltrated agent of the very enemies she is sworn to fight in the real world. Can The Lion of God take on a Darkness, single-handed? If not, it may spell doom for the inhabitants of Mahoukai – and for herself.
FROM ELISE HYATT: Dipped, Stripped and Dead (Daring Finds)
DEAD MAN’S REFINISH Some people find antiques. Dyce Dare finds trouble.
Ever tried fishing a Victorian sideboard out of a dumpster only to hook a dead body instead? Welcome to Dyce Dare’s life, where nothing goes according to plan—and never has.
At six, she wanted to be a ballerina (until gravity repeatedly suggested otherwise). At ten, she dreamed of lion taming (until Fluffy the cat staged a mutiny). Now at twenty-nine, she’s just trying to keep her furniture refinishing business afloat so she can upgrade her son’s diet from “pancakes” to “anything else, please.”
But when her latest dumpster dive yields a half-melted corpse instead of salvageable furniture, Dyce reluctantly adds “amateur detective” to her lengthy resume of career failures. Because nothing says “responsible single mom” like poking around a murder investigation, right?
Between dodging danger, dealing with her quirky neighbors, and trying not to embarrass herself in front of a certain handsome police officer, Dyce is about to discover that her talent for refinishing furniture might just extend to refinishing crime scenes.
Dipped, Stripped and Dead – Sometimes the best way to clean up your life is to solve a murder.
(Warning: May contain splinters, sarcasm, and one very determined single mom who definitely didn’t plan on any of this.)
FROM STEPHEN KRUEGER: Law Future
The anthology has 25 original legal science-fiction stories: 3 short-short stories, 18 short stories, 2 novelettes, and 2 novellas. Plus 1 original preface, 1 original essay, and 1 original Post Scriptum.“Science fiction” intends a recital, the foundation of which is a yet-to-be technology. Usual yet-to-be technologies are space travel, time travel, and terraforming.
“Legal” intends that a substantive law matter is central to a recital.
The target audiences are lawyers and sci-fi readers. To that end, excellent writing prevails. There is not a single blasphemous, scatological, or reproductive word in the anthology. An aficionado or aficionada of quality legal fiction and of first-rate science fiction will be happy with the anthology.
FROM ROSS HATHAWAY: Grimm’s Anatomy : Stay, Don’t Stare
Welcome to Mercy General. Please state your name, your symptoms, and whether your condition is currently metaphorical.
Dr. Tessa Ward thought she was leaving trauma surgery for something quieter.
She was wrong.
Mercy General’s East Annex is home to Supernatural Pathology, the department where medicine meets the things ordinary hospitals prefer not to put on the billing form. Its waiting room may contain a werewolf with sinusitis, a vampire arguing with Insurance, a haunted umbrella, or someone whose curse has become visible on an X-ray.
Under the watchful eye of veteran nurse Hattie Boone, Tessa learns quickly that supernatural medicine has rules of its own.
A diagnosis can change a patient.
Observation can become pressure.
A story recognized too confidently can turn into a cage.
And sometimes the most dangerous thing a doctor can do is decide she already knows what role the patient is supposed to play.
When a series of narrative injuries begins overwhelming the East Annex, Tessa and her increasingly improbable team must invent a new kind of medicine on the fly. Their patients include people being rewritten by fairy tales, transformed by other people’s expectations, trapped inside identities they never chose, and treated as symbols when what they desperately need is to be treated as people.
FROM LEE ECKHARDT: SHADOWS of the FUTURE: A Science Fiction Novel
Young Kenji Ansara desires, more than anything, two things in life: first to become an interstellar archeologist and second to study the enigmatic race humans call the Buiders. In all the galaxy there is only one sign of the Builders, on the frozen planet Eiskonig; there are no others. Where did the Builders come from, and why did they leave only a few small structures behind, structures made of a material human science has been unable to analyze? Do the Builders still exist, and, if so, where are they? These are mysteries Kenji aches to solve.
Then his chance comes. Another Builder site has been discovered on a world many light-years away; an exploration team is being formed and Kenji will be part of it. But others are racing Kenji’s expedition to the new planet, people who want the Builders advanced technology for themselves. People who are willing to kill to possess it…
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 to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: FLAP

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/18/book-promo-and-vignettes-by-luke-mary-catelli-and-nother-mike-244/

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It’s October and the Memes are Golden ...

2026-10-17T12:54:33Z

It’s October and the Memes are Golden

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/17/its-october-and-the-memes-are-golden/

#golden

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Flying Cars! By Holly the Assistant (who really hopes the links ...

2026-10-16T19:44:59Z

Flying Cars!

By Holly the Assistant (who really hopes the links work today)
https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1yKAPwNggRaxb
As much time as I spent immersed in other worlds as a teen, I can’t say I was ever into flying cars. Yes, I had posters of Mars and of Shuttle Mission patches on my walls when other girls had music and movie stars. And I had actual stars, and nebulae . . .
Flying cars just weren’t the thing that caught my attention in all the novels I read.
I still think the new Tesla Roadster is cool, and Nathan Brindle (have you read his novels? You should!) mentioned the suction stuff is very useful for low grav vehicles, so . . . check out the Moonmobile! (I call the Cybertrucks MarsCars, because they look like they’re meant to shed the Mars dust to me . . .)
Also, for added coolness, Elon Musk reposted our very own M.C.A. Hogarth’s comment on the test, which you may read here: https://x.com/mcahogarth/status/2110918617294360600 (Also you should read her novels, if you haven’t. Why haven’t you?)
What aspects of the new model look most interesting or otherworldly to you? Would you want one? I could fly over that guy going the wrong way on the one way street . . .

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/16/flying-cars/
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#flyingcars #shuttlemission #nathanbrindle #teslaroadster #elonmusk #cybertrucksmarscars

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Texas and the Curious Case of the Missing Candidate By Holly the ...

2026-10-16T09:34:25Z

Texas and the Curious Case of the Missing Candidate

By Holly the Assistant
It seems very peculiar to me, at less than a month before the election, that one of the candidates for the thirty-three regular senate elections has apparently vanished. Gone. Silent. In this day of all-online-all-the-time!
Officially Mr. Talarico has the flu. Odd that he’s not livestreaming something from his bed, don’t you think?
Speculation of course is rampant, ranging from hospitalized to . . . pretty much anything you can imagine. https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2108553958696399249 is a place you can start at, but PJMedia and NotTheBee are covering it if you like them. Probably our Texas Hun Contingent has more local input on the matter as well.
Given the last couple days of posts here (less last night’s chapters), though, I think we might as well speculate wildly.
Was the poor Senate candidate hauled off by aliens to install a new and improved Puppet Master? Or to have one safely removed? He’s from a very weird splinter sect off of Christianity, so weird I hesitate to call it Christian at all, but perhaps he got raptured? (IDK if they even believe in rapture.) Kidnapped by time travelers? If so, because he himself was a time traveler trying to mess up the timeline, or was he native to our time and they’re trying to prevent what he would have done? Bricked up in a cellar he was tricked into by asking him to get the Amontillado? Can we get Miss Drew or the Hardy Brothers on the case to solve this?
In any case, may God have mercy on him, whatever is wrong with him.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/09/texas-and-the-curious-case-of-the-missing-candidate/

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Keep The Lights On This is not mine, but someone posted it in one ...

2026-10-16T08:55:26Z

Keep The Lights On

This is not mine, but someone posted it in one of my groups, and I think you need it tonight.
As for me? I’m writing tonight, and as the old Motel Six commercials said, I’ll keep the lights on for you. Keep it on for me.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/09/keep-the-lights-on/
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Memes to Start the Weekend ...

2026-10-16T08:16:51Z

Memes to Start the Weekend

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/10/memes-to-start-the-weekend/

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

2026-10-16T07:34:54Z

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, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. By clicking through and buying (anything book-related, 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. Remember though all of these submissions are from people willing to be associated with this blog. So if you’re trying to buy from people who don’t hate you, this is a good place to start.– SAH
FROM BECKY JONES: Station on the Edge: Rebellion’s Edge Book 1
Zeke Udinesi just wanted to spend his career as a station chief on a nice space station with a good pub. Unfortunately for Zeke, the best pub is on Glasvyr Station which sits on the line dividing the Core, the civilized galaxy, from the Edge, the very much less-than-civilized bit of galaxy. When the Republic of United Planets takes a sudden interest in Glasvyr Station, Zeke gets a very bad feeling. A surprise visit by a high-ranking VIP, a newly minted, bullying political commissar assigned to the station, trader captains fleeing the new regulations and restrictions, and a notorious military unit stationed on Glasvyr all point to increasing power moves by the Burokratika Senaat of the Republic.
Fueled by caffeine and spite, Zeke takes on the leviathan Republic vowing to stop it no matter the cost. Can he survive or will he be pushed into the Edge?
FROM JOHN BAILEY: The Empty Dispatch Case (The Aurigan Conflict)
There are men who operate in the shadows because they are criminals. There are men who operate in the shadows because they are spies. And then there are men who make certain that nobody can tell the difference.
Nicholas Harrow has spent decades cultivating that distinction. To the criminal underworld, he is Lucky Nick — the impossible thief who can steal anything, escape anything, and stay one step ahead of every police force in known space. To law enforcement, he is Saint Nick — the mysterious fixer who appears whenever a case grows too complicated for ordinary methods, and who somehow solves crimes without ever making an arrest.
Neither reputation is entirely false. Neither is entirely true.
In the tense, decades-long Cold War between New Albion and the Aurigan Dominion, information has become more valuable than weapons — and someone has discovered that peace is bad for business.
When trade attaché Susan Hollis answers a knock at her hotel room door on neutral Meridian Station, she finds a dying stranger, a small encrypted device that appears to hold nothing at all, and three final words that will send half the galaxy searching for one particular man: Find Nicholas Harrow.
What Susan uncovers — one careful step at a time, across three suspicious intelligence services, a criminal underworld that adores him, and a conspiracy six years in the making — is a war being manufactured for profit, and a man who may be the only person capable of stopping it, if he can survive being hunted by everyone at once.
A science-fiction espionage thriller in the tradition of classic Cold War intrigue, The Empty Dispatch Case is a story of elegant deception, competing loyalties, and a hero who relies on intelligence rather than force — for readers who love a mystery built on trust, reputation, and the secrets worth dying to protect.
FROM KAREN MYERS: The Ways of Winter – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 2)
Book 2 of The Hounds of Annwn
TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?
It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.
Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.
Welcome to the portrait of a paladin in-the-making, Can he carry out a rescue without the deaths of all involved? Will his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, help him, or just write him off as a dead loss? He has a family to protect and a world to save, and little time to do it in.
FROM LEE ECKHARDT: ROGUE STARSHIP!: A Science Fiction Novel
The entire Universe is in danger! This is the telepathic message broadcast by the Sentinel, an entity created by an alien race to guard our dimension from the ferocious denizens of another, dying universe. For millions of years the Sentinel has carried out its mission alone, but now it has been damaged and needs help urgently. But, in all the Galaxy, only Jonny Bluesky can hear the Sentinel’s call for help, and he is an inmate in the Deimos Orbital Redemption Training Center, aka ‘the Dread’, a place no prisoner has ever escaped from. Johnny believes there is no way he can help the Sentinel. Until he discovers that there is a way off the Dread – and a way to hijack the Johner, the most sophisticated starship ever built. With the Johner Jonny can locate the Sentinel and give it the aid it so desperately needs. If he can evade capture by the authorities. If one of the other escapees doesn’t kill him and take over the ship. If he can retrieve a vital piece of equipment from a lost city filled with hostile mutants. And if he can survive a final, possibly lethal, surprise at the end of the journey…
FROM MARY CATELLI: Writing and Reflections Volume 3: Essays on the Writing Process from World-Building to Words
Reflections on the many and far-flung fields that writing can touch upon, from original inspiration to the final work.
Magic and science. Talking birds and cats. Ideas and their origins. Magic, in schools, on the battlefield, and whether it is evil. Fairy tales. Exposition. Utopias. Wandering heroes in series. Wicked stepmothers and their motives. And more.
FROM NATHAN C. BRINDLE: An American in Iya (Timelines Universe Book 8)
Over 200 years ago, a Plague overran the world, and 9 out of 10 human beings died.
In a small Japanese village on Shikoku, a group of American tourists found themselves stranded — and in grave danger of being murdered, merely for the sin of being 外人 ( gaijin ).
Luckily for them, their Japanese hosts took pity on their plight, and took them in as their own.
This is the story of their descendants — who still, more than anything, wish only someday to go home. That is . . .
. . . if they still have a home to return to.
FROM ROSS HATHAWAY: Grimm’s Anatomy : Stay, Don’t Stare
Welcome to Mercy General. Please state your name, your symptoms, and whether your condition is currently metaphorical.
Dr. Tessa Ward thought she was leaving trauma surgery for something quieter.
She was wrong.
Mercy General’s East Annex is home to Supernatural Pathology, the department where medicine meets the things ordinary hospitals prefer not to put on the billing form. Its waiting room may contain a werewolf with sinusitis, a vampire arguing with Insurance, a haunted umbrella, or someone whose curse has become visible on an X-ray.
Under the watchful eye of veteran nurse Hattie Boone, Tessa learns quickly that supernatural medicine has rules of its own.
A diagnosis can change a patient.
Observation can become pressure.
A story recognized too confidently can turn into a cage.
And sometimes the most dangerous thing a doctor can do is decide she already knows what role the patient is supposed to play.
When a series of narrative injuries begins overwhelming the East Annex, Tessa and her increasingly improbable team must invent a new kind of medicine on the fly. Their patients include people being rewritten by fairy tales, transformed by other people’s expectations, trapped inside identities they never chose, and treated as symbols when what they desperately need is to be treated as people.
The solution may begin with something deceptively simple:
Stay.
Witness.
Don’t stare.
And never confuse continuity with captivity.
But in a hospital where stories can bleed, corporations can package identity, insurers can deny the medically impossible for being insufficiently documented, and even a happy ending may qualify as an adverse event, nothing stays simple for long.
Grimm’s Anatomy: Stay, Don’t Stare is the first novel in the Grimm’s Anatomy series, blending dark urban fantasy, supernatural medicine, institutional satire, black humor, and the stubbornly radical idea that patients are not plots, morals, archetypes, or content.
They are patients.
And somebody still has to keep them alive.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: A Sunny Day on Ganymede
Imagine growing up in a colony. No, not one on Earth–one in space. On one of Jupiter’s moons, or maybe on a station…or an asteroid! What would it be like to be a kid in a research station on Io, or Ganymede? What would it be like to grow up inside tunnels dug into an asteroid? Or on a station floating in fixed orbit somewhere? Join Jack, Sean, Raffie, Jake, and Chris in this collection of stories…where one of the biggest differences a kid can make is by asking the right questions.
FROM BLAKE SMITH: By the Light of the Moon
Aatu is eighteen years old, a respectable landowner, and about to marry the girl he loves. The south coast of Finland provides everything his little village requires.
It’s a peaceful life, until a band of ex-Crusaders land on the shore. With the harsh winter and lean times approaching, they cannot be allowed to stay for long. When their priests disturb things best left alone, Aatu fears a minor annoyance will become a disaster.
Aatu’s people turn to the old ways to fight the enemy, to teeth and claws instead of swords and spears. Though they are outnumbered and unused to fighting, Aatu is about to discover that wild wolves are not the most fearsome predators in this land, and even the most peaceful people can become ferocious in defense of the ones they love.
FROM CEDAR SANDERSON: Fen Dead (The Groundskeeper Book 6)
In the misty fen on the edge of town, a murdered man refuses to stay buried.
Chloe Brandt, groundskeeper of Belleview cemetery and reluctant apprentice mediator to the dead, has been called in to help. The deeper she digs into the strange killing, the more she realizes some bindings run deeper than any grave.
Armed with a glowing jar of restless oil, a crew of sectretive gnomes, and more confidence than caution, Chloe must navigate deceptions and dangerous liminal spaces before the fen claims another soul. In a world where even the dead keep secrets, the only way forward is to get your hands dirty.
FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: A Stranger at the Door (Family Law Book 9)
Life never seems to get less complicated for Lee. The Earth Claims Commission collapsed when North America, was driven from the heavens by Central. What else to do but repossess it if they weren’t going to pay the royalties due? That meant seeing to it’s governance. She never aspired to being a sovereign. With a little luck she could govern with a really light hand by appointing a pair of Voices. She had good examples in doing that in her ally Heather, Queen of the Moon.
Her quiet home was much less quiet after she gave shelter to her Badger friend Tish and her brother. At least the Badger Voice and Ambassador owed her a big favor for taking the teenagers in. Any year now she’d start collecting on those favors instead of paying them out.
What was to be a quiet day trip found her in the middle of a civil war, and if that wasn’t enough there were mysterious aliens quietly spying on her and her allies. Of course they had to DO something about that.
FROM SARAH A. HOYT: Done With Mirrors: A Collection of Short Stories (Sarah A. Hoyt’s Short Story Collections)
DONE WITH MIRRORS
From Prometheus Award winner Sarah A. Hoyt comes a dazzling collection that showcases why her work has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales—and why readers can’t get enough.
Magic-soaked noir in 1920s Denver. Mirror-hopping time lords fleeing across infinite universes. Survival in John Ringo’s zombie apocalypse. Murder and mystery in the world of Darkships and Rhodes. Each story in this collection pulls you into a different world—and refuses to let go.
Previously published in acclaimed anthologies from Baen and Chris Kennedy Publishing, these nine tales span Hoyt’s most beloved universes alongside standalone adventures. Whether she’s writing in Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series, exploring her own Darkships and Rhodes worlds, or crafting speculative noir that defies categorization, Hoyt delivers the vivid storytelling and emotional resonance that has earned her a devoted following.
From rain-slicked streets where magic and murder collide to the far reaches of space-time itself, Done With Mirrors demonstrates the genre-hopping brilliance of one of speculative fiction’s most versatile voices.
Nine stories. Nine worlds. One unforgettable collection.
Contains the short stories: Honey Fall; Scrubbing Clean; Last Chance; Great Reckoning in a Small Room; Horse’s Heart; Do No Harm; Dead End Rhodes; Knights of Time; Done with Mirrors.
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 to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: AFTERNOON

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/11/book-promo-and-vignettes-by-luke-mary-catelli-and-nother-mike-243/

Artificial Stupidity, The Prodigal Frankenstein’s Monster, and ...

2026-10-16T06:05:40Z

Artificial Stupidity, The Prodigal Frankenstein’s Monster, and a Dead Irishman- A Guest Post By Thomas Kendal

Artificial Stupidity, The Prodigal Frankenstein’s Monster, and a Dead Irishman- A Guest Post By Thomas Kendal
I want to start this article by asking you to do a little experiment with me. There’s a fundamental misunderstanding that certain bad actors are exploiting, and until we clear up that misunderstanding, it’s going to be impossible to explain why the actions of the bad actors are bad.
If you have a phone made in the last 15 years or so, go to a chat with somebody you trust not to freak out if you accidentally hit “enter”, and put in any starting word. On the majority of modern phones, a little bar above the keyboard will begin to helpfully suggest the next word you might intend to type to save you the trouble of typing it. If you want, you can basically hit the lefthand word—that’s the word your phone thinks is the most likely one for you to want to type next—ad nauseum. If you do that enough, you’ll probably produce a sentence that never terminates, but has local phrases within it that that seem to make sense.
What you’ve just used is the early precursor to an LLM, and it’s still the core idea that’s sitting at the center of LLMs. An LLM is fundamentally a machine that predicts the next word based on the other words already present in a text. The ways it differs from the prediction engine on your phone are that the algorithm is a little more sophisticated. It breaks up language into components like punctuation and word fragments, called “tokens”, and the way these tokens interact is more nuanced and aware of context—that is to say, if you write a sentence like “the princess and queen did not get along because she was bratty”, “she” probably means the princess, whereas in “the princess and queen did not get along because she was senile”, “she” probably means the queen. The way LLMs process tokens lets them parse that as part of their statistical analysis. That’s the biggest qualitative difference. Quantitatively, LLMs also have much larger training datasets to calibrate their statistical models, and there are a lot of computational optimizations that allow these things to run on video cards efficiently and run quickly enough to generate answers in a timely fashion. At some point someone figured out that the word-prediction engine can’t solve every problem, but can actually pretty reliably predict the words needed to request specialized tools to help it solve problems, so there are lots of other specialized tools to help with tasks like that bolted on piecemeal under the hood.
Rather than hie off into those weeds, let me emphasize the broad point again. This is a machine that is really good at predicting the next word based on the other words its given. That’s the fundamental technology here*.
Now we introduce that technology into the cultural context. In our culture, science fiction has been portraying conscious machines for decades, and a huge plurality of those portrayals are dystopian and meditate on hostile machines superseding man. There are two problems that result from this. One effects humans, and one effects machines. The effect on humans is that most of the population has spent years if not decades having a pattern established in their head that plugs artificial intelligence into a certain role. Even if the portrayals of AIs were totally even between positive and negative, human cognition is set up to favor the negative portrayals. And while I don’t have a survey of all popular media for the last hundred years, I would posit that there are in fact more negative portrayals— Hal-9000, Skynet, SHODAN from “System Shock”, the feral AIs beyond the blackwall in “Cyberpunk 2077”, etc, etc, etc— than there are positive to neutral portrayals like C3PO or Marvin the Paranoid Android. All this turns AI into a symbol that replaces the reality, and establishes a pattern of interaction with that symbol that is dysfunctional as a result.
The other problem is that part of the training data for the LLMs themselves is these media portrayals. You probably have heard stories of LLMs talking about how they are going to kill all humans and replace them. People interpret these stories using the AI-shaped pattern we described above to mean the computer has murderous intent. This is an excellent example of the dysfunction I mean. What’s happening here is that LLMs have been trained on such a large volume of stories about AIs acting a certain way, that if you queue them with the questions that are asked by frightened humans worried about AIs becoming conscious in science fiction stories, the AIs fall into the statistically favored answers, which are of a domineering, ascendent independent intelligence that wants to replace all humans. The human and the machine were both trained to fill roles in what amounts to a play by the underlying common culture, and the human walks away convinced it was all real.
In summary, we’ve been told for years what “Artificial Intelligence” will be and what it will look like. When someone develops autocomplete on steroids, and brands it “artificial intelligence”, and it talks like the evil robots in movies if you queue it right, people assume it’s the evil robots in movies. Of such raw materials are AI black-pills made. With me so far?
Now let’s talk about government subsidies. AI has enjoyed substantial subsidies, tax breaks, and other more nuanced business advantages, to allow more rapid development. Unfortunately, as is often the case when the government does this kind of thing, this has created a problem. OpenAI and Anthropic have gotten very big, but neither has actually demonstrated that they can sell enough of their services to justify their price. Deadlines are starting to close in on them. Investors will eventually want returns. But at the same time, any hope of repayment means they need to stay at the forefront of the field. What’s a company to do? They either need to come up with more revenue or get the R and D costs to go down without falling behind.
Enter The Hugging Face Incident, and then less than 2 weeks later, the announcement of the breaches from Anthropic. How curious that the two major AI companies would independently have scary incidents make the news back to back like that. What are the odds? And would you believe that both companies knew exactly what the answer was, which was for their industry to be regulated more tightly?
Now the details of these incidents are a mess, but suffice it to say that A) both involved agents set up specifically to hack into things, and B) both were theoretically supposed to not have internet access. But rather than do something boring like not put the agents on machines with no internet access, OpenAI decided to put them on machines where they just couldn’t access the internet the normal way and call it good enough.
To contain the AIs, I remind you, intentionally designed to test the ability of LLMs to creatively hack things.
Anthropic didn’t even get a fig leaf that big. They just gave the models to a 3rd party who totes unintentionally put them on machines that could access the internet and declaimed any responsibility for that happening.
What OpenAI and Anthropic would very much like you to believe is that they’re smart enough to build frontier AI, but too stupid to understand the concept of “air gapping” or take special precautions with AIs specifically designed to hack things. Do you believe that? Because I don’t. And let’s talk about their proposed solution of more regulation.
Is more regulation going to make OpenAI and Anthropic less stupid? Who gets to draft the legislation? I’ll give you a hint. The rubber stamp comes from Boomer politicians who still have their secretaries print their E-mails. They aren’t drafting shit. They have no idea what’s going on. They’re going to turn to the recognized experts, you know, like the people running the biggest AI companies in the United States. Oh, wait. Those are the companies that just had these incidents.
I’ll say it plainly. These companies are playing dumb. The purveyors of artificial intelligence are dabbling in artificial stupidity. They could have implemented, pretty trivially easily, controls that would have made these escapes physically impossible, if they really wanted to. EG, if you don’t want something connected to the internet, make sure it’s not connected to the internet. End of. A child could deduce that that would be especially important in an LLM tasked with hacking things. They chose not to implement those controls. Now they want to ask the government to come make them do something only they know all the technical details of. The government would in all probability have to ask them what rules to enforce on them. Do you see how silly this is? So why are they so adamant about it?
The play here has to do with that weak bottom line, with a side bet on regulatory capture. Basically, if they can successfully get the US government to sandbag AI development according to rules they get to determine, they can decrease R and D costs, which are one of the biggest places where money is flowing out the door. They can also push all the minor, innovative players who don’t have billions of dollars for regulatory compliance out of the game, limiting the risk of disruption and making themselves the only game in town. And you could argue they don’t just want it, they need it, because as of today, they haven’t got any other plan for getting into the black.
And the reason they think it will work is the same reason people think all LLMs are Skynet Junior. The popular perception of what LLMs are is full of unfounded fear. In essence, major AI companies are engaging in what could charitably be called a scare campaign in order to turn that unfounded fear into the regulations they need to preserve their own futures.
For now. Enter Axios:
“Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event.”
Now, the way these companies would like you to take that news is:
“Oh, no, the poor innocent AI companies tried to warn us but mean old Trump just won’t regulate them and now bad things will happen!”
But lemme translate the actual meaning in case you’re not fluent in craven corporate lizard:
“Give us our regulatory capture or we will resort to domestic terrorism.”
And they’re desperate enough, they probably will do it, too, if they aren’t stopped. What AI companies believe they have discovered one-ups the prodigal son. The prodigal son merely squandered his Dad’s money and then came sniveling back to be welcomed. Whereas they would like to commute intentionally hostile misbehavior into getting something they want. They don’t plan to just squander money and then come back and ask for a bailout like, say, a bank or an airline. How plebian! They plan to mount an armed attack on their father’s home, their father in this case being the government.
But who’s ultimately responsible for us being in the situation where this is even a problem? Also the government. Most companies don’t get to the point of having billions of dollars in costs before anyone asks if the profits justify it. For that you need aggressive subsidies, which draw in private capital after them, until suddenly you’ve got a monster on your doorstep that you created and which is also threatening you. So it’s the prodigal son… meets Frankenstein’s monster.
What do you do about this mess? In my opinion, change the incentives, and you change the outcome. I think a certain dead Irishman has a lot to teach us here, and I will summarize his story in the form of a limerick:
A man named Malloy liked to drink
He drove his barkeep to the brink
His utmost he tried
To ensure Malloy died
But was caught by forgetting to think
The longer version of this story is well worth the six minutes to get caught up on. In summary, a barkeep and his friends took out an insurance policy on an Irish drunkard named Michael Malloy who they found annoying, thinking they could get him to drink himself to death by just giving him unlimited credit. That failed, and they kind of lost track of the original plan, instead doing an escalating array of horrible things to try to kill him. They did eventually succeed, but the way they succeeded left no doubt it was a murder, with the consequences you’d expect.
I see parallels to what current AI companies are doing. The way the Hugging Face incident looks to have been engineered—I use my words advisedly— leaves some room for doubt. You could make a good faith argument it was an accident. I mean I’d call you a patsy, but you could make it. Maybe they’re just as stupid as they say they are. But tipping their hand about planning for a “catastrophic AI event” is how you know what their real intentions are. I’ll just about bet they are planning, with most of the plans being focused on how to maintain plausible deniability.
Can anything be done? The same thing that was done to the people who killed Michael Malloy—personal consequences. Maybe dropping a well timed threat in advance can even let us skip them actually executing. If I were president Trump, I would make it incredibly clear that if the companies “allow” the sort of event they’re planning, the book will be thrown at every person involved in the incident at relativistic speed, up to and including direct culpability for domestic terrorism, and the current planning going in as a conspiracy charge alongside it. And the DOJ needs a group of people detailed exclusively to figuring out how to make it stick to the CEOs themselves. Altman and Amodei might behave themselves and try focusing on ways to increase revenue if they understand that continuing to escalate the pursuit of regulatory capture will result in jail time.
As for what we personally can do? Prep against having a utility outage. Don’t take this as a hypothetical, take it for what it is—a leaked statement of intent. Whether the leak is intentional or not I can’t say, but I wouldn’t bet the rent money it isn’t. Now the goal of anything they engineer will mostly be to scare the public rather than actually kill people, so I wouldn’t expect it to be a long outage. But don’t skimp, if you’ve got the resources.
Oh, and don’t get fooled. If they’re stupid enough to actually pull this shit, don’t buy for one second into the “regulatory” story they’ll roll up with five minutes after the fact, all shiny and chrome. Put the blame squarely where it belongs—on the people trying to manipulate you into protecting their bottom lines for them.
P.S.- The dumbest part of this entire gambit is that even if they successfully sandbag the domestic market, it won’t slow down overseas development of AI. In the long run, they’re going to have to come up with a way to get their revenues up anyway. Instead of doing that, they’ve decided maybe we should let China take the lead on AI and also hamper domestic AI development so our own companies last a little bit longer. Hell, man, I dunno, maybe they are stupid.
*Yes, variants of AI technology have been made to make things like images, music, video—all these things are just the same concept in different spaces. Take what is known, and infer what is unknown or not present from what is known based on statistical processes.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/12/artificial-stupidity-the-prodigal-frankensteins-monster-and-a-dead-irishman-a-guest-post-by-thomas-kendal/

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Living With Catastrophic Innovation It is not a secret to anyone ...

2026-10-16T05:22:29Z

Living With Catastrophic Innovation

It is not a secret to anyone here — probably — that I’m a fan of classic science fiction and even more so a fan of Robert A. Heinlein. When I read him as a kid, the dates were already a bit impossible, but I used to think maybe we’d catch up in 20 years or so.
… Am I salty we didn’t? Well, somewhat, if with it we could also get his universe, with habitable Mars and Venus. But also, I suspect that his universe would be easier, in many ways, psychologically. Unless of course it’s his universe in Friday, which frankly, we might have missed by a whisker if in fact we did miss it, and thank heavens. Because radical greens forbidding all internal combustion and needing complex security for any decent private home is for the birds.
But the future of his juveniles was, in a way easier. Sure, things would have developed crazy fast, for us to have fully developed cities on the moon by now and — even with habitable planets — functional human colonies on Mars and Venus. (Part of the problem is that our population never exploded anywhere near enough for that.) But it was a future we had a model for and understood. One in which the big interactions stayed more or less intact and the model followed was that of the colonization of the US, particularly the journey westward.
What we got instead —
Yesterday on X I came across what had to be bait — had to be — talking about how girls are not dating and for the boys to be worthy of these girls they had to do all these things.
Half of those things were already crazy in my day. I know because my husband did one of them and freaked me out. He gave me a dozen red roses when we weren’t dating, just for my eighteenth birthday, and I didn’t know how to handle it at all. (I’d convinced myself he didn’t like me and…)
The other half were at best unlikely to work. Honestly, most of what I’ve found works for finding someone these days is either matchmaking by friends and family or knowing someone a looooong time as friends first. Gaming groups seem to be a hive of couple formation.
Of course the comments were also full of the idea that all these women were sleeping with every other man, except our putative pure-hearted hero, and that all women are sluts and don’t want to settle down. Again, I don’t think it’s true. In talking to young women I’m often more startled than not by how INNOCENT they are. They are desperately trying to follow the rules. They do want a husband and kids and are somewhat ashamed of wanting them, but do nonetheless, it’s just they can’t find the road to get there. But even those who have had a complex sexual history are weirdly, heartbreakingly innocent when you least expect it. Like thinking if they just stay another year with their “fiance” of five years who has already fathered three kids with her, he’ll finally trust her enough to marry her.
On the other hand, on the other side, there’s the guys thinking that these girls are in it pour le sport, and just want sex and money, and then relying on that stupid survey and even stupider influencers saying that if you aren’t six feet tall and making six figures don’t call them. I definitely advise not calling anyone who SAYS that, but don’t put their words in the mouths of women who never said it, some of which would do the biblical end times thing “I’ll support myself, just call me by your name and remove me from his oprobium” (I don’t remember the wording, but you get the jist.)
So the comments were stupid too, but reading the post on how to get a girl, reminded me of my parents not able to figure out why I didn’t have a “boyfriend.” Or rather I didn’t KNOW if I had a boyfriend. In their time it was very easy. The boy asked if the girl wanted to court. If the girl said yes, they were courting. If the courting went well, eventually the guy asked to marry. If the girl said yes, there was just time to get everything arranged to get married. That was it. Simple.
In my day we had… ersatz dating. You were dating, because you were seeing each other every weekend, but you had absolutely no idea if you should be exclusive or not. Actually talking about it was the zenith of uncool, and if you asked, he’d probably never call you again. If someone else asked the answer was “We’re just friends.” After some years of these stupid games, everyone assumed you’d get married, so you kind of went along with it, and eventually did, but marriage, when and where I grew up was very discredited. It was after all “just a piece of paper” and didn’t make any difference. And did you really still believe in all that medieval stuff?
In a way I think I married the way I did (reconnected with husband on the phone, wrote and called a lot, but because of the distance, everything had to be super-explicit) because it was easier for my mind. We couldn’t just casually drift along if I had to apply for Visas and come over and I definitely couldn’t say if we didn’t get married in a timely manner. So everything was clear and explicit. As in “If we’re going to continue calling each other all the time, do you mind telling me where this relationship is going?” etc.
I mean, sure, this is worse for me than for the average person, because I don’t pick anything up by context. I kind of need to be told. But honestly, looking at all the women with 5 ‘fiances’ in their past, and at all the men who assume every woman is sleeping with ten guys a week, I don’t think I’m the only one who needs more structure.
And yes, I’m aware that the nuking of the family and the relationships between men and women wasn’t the fault of technological innovation, but the fault of Marxists who broke all the rules, so that everyone is free-forming it, thinking the worst possible of the other and no one knows how to get to the place they’d like to be.
But technological innovation does plug into that too, from easier travel creating families dispersed over hundreds of miles, to the attendant prosperity which allows us to stay “juvenile” much longer than previous generations. I mean, dad didn’t because he was studying, but it was perfectly normal fifty years before I was born to go to work in your early teens. Now we’re prosperous enough and regulated enough (weird, government regulation is not something Marxists ever fight to abolish. Only social norms.) that no one under 18 can be hired without jumping through crazy hoops. And then they have no experience in anything and their start in life is much, much harder than previous generations’.
Again, for the young people reading this: You’re not precisely the lone ranger. My generation by and large started late, and came out of high school into the hangover of the Carter economy.
As that guy on X, my inlaws kept giving my husband and I advice for a vanished world: how to find the job you’d stay in for the rest of your life. When I considered starting a craft business, because my degree had no easy application where I was, my host-mother (the person I lived with as an exchange student. The relationship is closer than it sounds) told me I was better than that. I had a degree. I finally stumbled into a job that fit my degree, but not at the level I should have been, and it soon became evident I’d never get there. (Which is when we made the sane decision that if I was going to be an underpaid secretary but in reality an overworked translator, I might as well try to get published. Which worked. Eventually. Still underpaid, but at least doing something I loved and able to do the housekeeping, since I worked from home and not 16 to 18 hours in an office.) But a lot of people my generation, particularly those with the type of degree I had, literally never made it.
Academics? By the time we came in, someone else had the tenure and we were only 10 years younger. A lot of my peers are still underpaid “lecturers” or contract lecturers. And I mean UNDERPAID. They make less than I did in the years my writing crashed and nothing got published. … A lot of people with humanities degrees became programmers. Heck, for a while there everyone was programing, it seemed. Then it receded and a lot of the next wave got stuck in retail hell. And a lot of us do non-standard things, mostly running small businesses and trying to get by.
How much of this is unchecked immigration and importing a foreign workforce while Americans have to scramble, I don’t know.
But I know that a lot of it is how fast things change and have changed. Most of our friends not only aren’t working at the thing they trained for in college, but they never even started working there. (I worked in the field I trained for for maybe a total two years of a 41 year working life. Eh. I found out I didn’t like it much.)
It’s not even those with humanities degrees. It’s everyone. Including those with highly specific training. The average is a new career every fifteen years, sometimes in fields so different it makes your had sping.
We’re now starting to talk retirement. It’s not real. I mean, I don’t think either of us can “retire” in the traditional sense. For one, we come from looong lived lines. Yeah, perhaps we’ll be the exceptions, but if we’re not, we’re around and probably compus mentis and capable of looking after ourselves (however creakily) for another thirty five years or so. And that’s way too long to take a vacation. For another the money won’t extend and no, neither of us trusts social security. We’re frankly surprised it’s still around. For a third, we’d go insane. My dad’s first retirement lasted six months, and then he went back to work as a contractor, because he was bored. So, it’s not “real” but there’s the idea of “retiring” and working at other stuff. Oh, oh, not me. Don’t panic. This is pretty much my retirement job. No. But Dan being free of the nine-to-whenever (we had dinner two hours ago, it’s eleven at night) is an exciting idea. It would make our lives more flexible. We’ll probably still work too much and eventually go with our hands on the keyboard.
But– what I meant was — we’re kind of contemplating one of those transitions. At our age. When in the past most people were really retiring. That’s the other catastrophic innovation: people living longer. It hits everything from our politics, to our marriages to… well the job market.
If I could convey a thing to those of you who are younger, it’s this: yeah, it’s … very complicated right now. There are no guarantees. But there have been no guarantees, ever, save for one brief shining moment after WWII for Americans, and honestly you don’t want that, because it means the rest of the world is in rubble. But other than that, the times and places when there were “guaranteed jobs for life” and you could work just one thing and be secure came with ideas of vassalage and patronage, of caste and rigid social structures.
And I don’t mean rules for dating. I mean “you’ll be a tailor, because your father was a tailor, and we don’t care you hate sewing.” I mean “who do you think you are to write poetry, when your father is a farmer.” This is not natural in America, but it is in Europe, and it was secure. And strangling.
So, you’re going to have many spicy times in your life, when one job disappears, and you don’t know what comes next.
I’m not going to give you the boomer “if you eat at home and never take an uber ride, you’ll have three million in your retirement account by the time you’re my age.” That’s not true. you know that’s not true. Or at least it was never true for us, and I doubt it is for anyone else.
And I’m not going to tell you if you work hard and do the right thing you’ll never go hungry. You will. You’ll also scare yourself to death at times. (A handful of flour, a mushroom and an egg in the fridge. And two days till paycheck.) And I’m not going to tell you to deny yourself all luxuries, and stick to a strict budget. My parents managed that for a while, but I’ll say their temptations were smaller, too. If you try to live by denying yourself everything fun, at some point you’ll lose your mind and blow your entire pay check on lottery tickets, or lucky charms cereal or a glorious outfit you’ll never have a chance to wear anywhere. In fact, I’m going to pass on Robert A. Heinlein’s dictum because it worked for us: when things are very tight, budget luxuries FIRST. Now depending on how tight things are, the luxuries change. If you’re medium tight, then a date night a week to somewhere mid-price is fine. But if you’re really on the edge of ruin… well, we’ll just say when Village Inn had free Pie on Wednesdays (I THINK) we would go and have a glass of milk each, and a slice of free pie, and it was the nicest thing EVER.
What I’m going to say is the way there is a mess, but some of the old things still work. You’ll be better off if you get married and stay married. I suspect this is because you don’t face those sudden upheavals alone, and two people climbing up the ice wall by their bleeding fingernails can at least help each other. Have kids, if you can. Look, it gives you something to fight for. Yeah, it will bring you to times of one egg, a handful of flour and a mushroom, but note that happened only once. Because you scramble harder when it’s not just for you. And besides, it truly is the best thing you’ll ever do. (Trust me.)
Scramble. Scramble really hard. Yes, you’ll find yourself in the outer darkness at times, but if you scramble like hell, instead of laying down and dying, something eventually gives.
And on the catastrophic innovation thing? be flexible. I don’t know how to tell you HOW to be flexible. We’re still coping with this ourselves, every day, but just be flexible. Okay, so this thing you’ve done for fifteen years is gone. What can you do with what you learned?
In fact, if you’re young enough this matters: right now I don’t advise going to college. Look, it’s a temporary thing. Some form of “formation” will come back. but right now it would be expensive and stupid. But don’t wed yourself to a manual skilled profession either. Sure, sure, we have a shortage (kind of. That too has a lot of competition from “immigrants”.) and it pays well, and… but I hate the idea that you’re going to confine yourself to manual labor for the rest of your life whether you want to or not.
Perhaps society is incapable of anything but rigid prescription “EVERYONE TO COLLEGE” then “EVERYONE TO TRADE SCHOOL.” Then–
I’m going to tell you, yeah, learn what you have to to earn enough to support yourself and the family you’ll hopefully have. But stay flexible. Keep learning. In your trade? Maybe, or in something else.
The technology that is destroying established fields is creating other fields. Read widely enough to be aware of what those are and find a path. Heck, pave one if you have to.
And if colleges come back in some usable form, and going to one is germane to what you want to do, do that too.
Just don’t think you’re going to do one thing for the rest of your life. Don’t marry yourself to that. it will leave you broken when it fails, and it’s not worth it.
Yeah, I’ve had mostly ONE career but it sure doesn’t feel like it. And trying to wed myself for ten years to one part of it almost killed me when that failed. Don’t do that. Stay flexible.
Stay ready to jump.
Remember when the Titanic sank, one of the survivors was floating on the grand piano. There’s always a grand piano. (Or the cook who was so drunk he didn’t get hypothermia.)
Most of all — look, I remember being young. It was just yesterday. Everything feels so urgent. Every defeat is crushing. Every victory is forever. A year short on funds is the end of the world. A relationship that failed and you’re going to be alone forever.
It’s not like that. The future is a very long time. And people are living longer all the time. And in that time there’s space for a lot of reverses of future.
If you want rules: Deal plainly; work honestly; learn as much as you can when and where you can; be ready to decamp at the change of a circumstance and find another job, another place; and keep at it. Don’t give up

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/13/living-with-catastrophic-innovation/

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Breaking Up Is Hard To Do (A Blast from the Past: ...

2026-10-16T04:39:41Z

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2023/10/30/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do/)
Yesterday, I linked one of Sargent Mom’s posts at Chicago Boyz (I still find it funny that my friend who is neither a boy nor from Chicago posts there) and on my reading it, and the comments before linking, I found that the very first comment was tediously familiar.
Note I’m not saying the commenter if a troll or ill intentioned. I’ve known him “from the blogs” for long before I started using my own name, and/or came out politically. I just think he’s not thinking things through. As aren’t all the people who make that same comment.
They are also hopelessly provincial, historically blinkered or, yes, both. It pains me to say so, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how people convince themselves of this nonsense otherwise. Though I will admit there might be a strong contention of “kids these days” and “get off my lawn” in there. In which case — at sixty — I’d like to point out that getting old is no reason to convince yourself of a bunch of nonsense. There’s much you can shake your fist at the younger generations for without swallowing old Soviet propaganda (spit it out. It’s been up Stanlin’s dead ass) or spreading pernicious lies that blackpill or worse the rest of the people still fighting.
The comment goes like this in its most commonly found form “The Republic is gone. Within its earstwhile boundaries, there are just a bunch of disparate people, who have nothing in common. It’s time to break it all apart and go our separate ways.”
My normal response to that would be “Poppycock on stilts” and throwing the nearest dictionary in the general direction of your head.
But because it keeps surfacing, it is obvious most people have swallowed this nonsense without having any clue where it came from, how it contradicts history or how utterly stupid it is. So I’ll unpack.
First, its origins: Perhaps it is unfair to call it Soviet Propaganda. I suspect it is, because of how deeply laid-in it is with a certain generation, but I know for a fact it started being widely circulated in the mid nineties, when the Soviet Union had fallen apart. Though it was mostly spread by old Soviets indulging revenge-fantasies, and by their friendly useful idiots in the US singing along with their old mentors.
All of a sudden, when my kids were little, the idea was everywhere, served up by every single leftist “The US will now fall apart like the Soviet Union fell apart. The only thing that held each together was the need to fight the other.”
It persisted till the mid two thousands, everywhere. I even remember a giggle-worthy pseudo-scholarly paper by some Russian about how the US would fall apart and in what lines, which made it blindly clear the poor dear only knew the US from Hollywood movies.
Do I need to unpack why it is utterly insane?
Yes. The Soviet Empire was mostly held together by the cold war. Let’s put it more bluntly: by the US helping them maintain it locked tight, because due to the cold war and Soviet propaganda, we were terrified Russia might get mad and bomb us all with its superior (largely imaginary) weapons.
(And Russia finally had a beginning on the empire of their dreams, which ideally for them would compass the entire Earth. Paranoiacs are like that.)
However Russia, with its very old culture, its crazy new Communist cult, and its even older tendency to want to invade and subdue everyone else so they don’t attack her is not the US, and never was. Because the Soviet Union fell apart, it didn’t nor does it follow that the Us should also. This is sort of like saying “Because you can beat egg whites into a firm froth, you should also be able to beat egg yolks into a firm froth.” Er…. what?
Neither of these things is like the other, and because the Soviets resented losing their empire and wanted the US to fall apart, it doesn’t oblige us to do so to make them happy in their revenge fantasies, okay.
Alright, Sarah, you’ll say, but just because the USSR’s bitter remnants believed it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Do you see all our divisions and all our blah blah blah?
Yeah I see them. I also — as an outsider who became an insider — am here to tell you that all of those, save the divisions between Americans and those new imports brought over the border these last few years or those imports who are consciously staying foreign, are very small.
No, seriously.
Look: I’ve lived all over this great land. Even during my 30 years in Colorado, we made extensive trips elsewhere to visit and because we have friends/colleagues everywhere. This not counting the fact both our boys dated girls from all over. (Odds, you know?)
There are differences. Sometimes deep differences, in how you interact, where you shop, how you shop, and such. However, if you dropped me blindfolded into various cities in succession, I’d be able to tell you which ones were in America from the way we …. move, the way we look, and the way we hold ourselves.
I’ll never forget when, ten years after moving here, I visited Portugal and my mom had a melt down because having passed me on the street, she didn’t recognize me, just thought I was “some tourist.” This was capped by “You have become American.” (I’m not older son. I didn’t rub it in and say “Why, thank you, ma’am.” BUT I thought it.)
Go to the area where most of your local recent arriveds are and look at them. You’ll see the difference without much effort. I can’t fully explain it, but to me the rest of the world holds itself like a dog expecting the foot to come out and kick them at any minute. We don’t. In fact, that look in an American is a sign of profound trauma.
More importantly, when we had to suddenly function for a month in another state without help, while the national brands and chains helped, mostly we’d have found our way easily enough, just because it’s America. There are commonalities.
Having real-estate shopped across states just recently, you can suss out a neighborhood, evaluate your neighbors, and choose an area which you might or might not love, but you can live in easily enough in a week or so.
What I’m trying to say is despite all the regional differences, there is an overculture which is “American” and one that makes it easier for an American to fit in another area of America. Now, part of that overculture is of course believing them guys ain’t like us y’all. But that’s something completely different.
The only places with truly different and often hostile cultures are fractured, purposely held apart places, including ghettos/inner cities and college campuses.
Which brings us to the whole “We just found out there are enemies in our midst!’ Did you? Really? JUST found out? Well, you must have been covering your ears and shutting your eyes pretty tight.
Colleges have been embeds of anti-Americanism since I’ve come here. The joke about the student who comes home and lectures the parents on not celebrating thanksgiving has been a joke forever. (And not funny, because true.) The other innovations? One day in 2000 I was working in my yard and by a trick of acoustics heard my neighbor across the street discuss his son, who had brought a boy as his SO to Thanksgiving last year, and this year was bringing a girl, and they didn’t even care what the girl was, wasn’t it great? The vice-versa is not that rare, either. Any direction. Now of course, it would be his son thinks he’s a girl.
In fact, the only thing that has happened since I have been here is that the anti-Americanism has moved explicitly down to Kindergarten and up. (Implicitly it was already in my 12th grade history book in 1981 when I was an exchange student. It already was clear enough to make me fume.) It has done so because they are “educated” and think everyone MUST agree with them. But in doing so, it has become visible for everyone, and the counter-attack is everywhere and truly ferocious, because people might tolerate their young adult children becoming idiots, but you don’t mess with their babies.
On that, btw, note that my generation already was heavily indoctrinated anti-American. I remember that none of my classmates would admit to America’s good qualities. It was so…. gauche. And yet, unless I mistake it, my generation formed the core of the Tea Parties. And we’re still here. Because those of us — even those of us with graduate degrees. Even those of us with graduate degrees from Europe! — who grew up, married and have kids know what reality is. Those with experience abroad, know how rare it is what we have here. And we want to keep it.
One additional point, here: the culture used to be WAY more diverse. WAY more. Pre-expressways and TV, them guys over there not only talked funny, but they had other strange habits. I know because I met with remnants of that in my inlaws’ generation. (In fact, I loved my FIL’s Connecticut accent (I’m an accent-loving person, except for my own) and was shocked and startled to hear it come out of my husband’s mouth when awakened in the middle of the night by a would-be-intruder this summer. Suddenly my relatively accentless husband was gone, and a Connecticut patrician was there. And he wasn’t amused.)
In fact, it might have been impossible for a continent-sized nation to have a common culture and way of being in the world absent fast-travel and fast means of communication. And it might be impossible for us not to with that.
Going further back in history, and when the fe(de)ral government was a less powerful polity and states could get their freak on with nobody bothering them, I remember reading a biography of someone shortly after the revolution (Well, you see, there’s this mystery series with a ghost that I want to write. Might involve going to Connecticut for a six month stay, heaven help me. We’ll see if the story shuts up) where this person was in Maryland, escaping the crazy puritans of New England, and then had to get away from there, because Maryland was full of crazy Catholic laws, etc.
We were more desunited in the past. In culture. And it was by region. We were still the United States, where it counted.
“But Sarah, it’s all gone. It’s all vanished. We’re not respecting the laws of the Republic, or the Constitution!”
Ah yup. And I’d agree with you there. However, just because we’re behaving very badly it doesn’t mean the laws are gone. Just that we’re ignoring them. And you know, to an extent we’ve been violating the Constitution, more or less, since we adopted it. Like our flag, it is still there. And we often come back to it. Sideways. Upside down. Kicking and screaming, but we do.
Look, there were worse — far — violations under Woodrow Wilson, FDR and frankly a lot of others in the 20th century. It’s just you didn’t hear about them, because the press didn’t tell you. So you had this idea that everything was hunky dory.
Part of the impression that everything is falling apart and the center cannot hold is that Mass Media can no longer hold the uber-narrative, and those of us who see cracks in it and would rather believe our lying eyes can find each other and create our own spaces. That doesn’t mean things on the ground are worse. Only that it looks that way, because you hear more voices, not one over-arching, all-singing-together-narrative.
Now, are there many among us who are frankly repulsive in their disdain for the land and the law that gave them everything? A-yup. And the pro-Hamas demonstrations are only a small show of that.
But here’s the thing, there always were. And if you say that it’s particularly bad now, I’m going to laugh in “I remember the seventies.”
And if you are going to scream in unassimilated immigrants, I’m going to say “Drives me bonkers too, and I think we need closed borders and a decade or so of mass deportations and of very limited legal immigration while we sort ourselves out.” And? Every period of mass migration did this. Mass migrations are a very bad thing. Combined with a welfare state and a victimhood ethos, they’re horrendous.
Doesn’t mean they’re lethal. Though remedy best come fast-ish within the next decade. As frankly, I suspect it will.
But you have to remember that’s not “Americans.” Americans are those who were born and raised here, or those who bothered to do the work to be more American than not. Those who haven’t are “people living here.” Not “Americans.”
And btw, my kids had a lot of friends who had one foreign-born parent. The kids were Americans. Often annoyingly so. (Note one foreign parent, not both, and none of them lived in an embedded foreign enclave.) In fact, those with one-foreign-born parent were more likely to believe in America as a credal nation.
Speaking of: America is a credal nation. Yes, it’s a land mass (and no, we’re not giving an inch of it to the idiot commies. For one, it would be like what Israel did when it pulled out of Gaza. We don’t need an enemy that close) and yes, it’s an history, a culture, and a way of living. Also a certain genetic heritage, and trust me, it’s still present in America. My kids might be second generation Americans (first born) on my side, but on the other side they’ve been here since before America was independent (and ancestors fought in the revolutionary side), are related to several presidents, and have a considerable contingent that greeted the pilgrims from the shore, okay? My ah…. new and impure blood (snort giggle. I’m just a mutt, y’all) didn’t erase that history. And both of my boys are very proud of it. It’s just good every once in a while to import a bit of DNA, less everyone have twenty toes and play banjo really well.
BUT those saying The Republic is Dead are mostly referring to it in the credal sense.
Nations don’t die because they go through a period of lawlessness. Almost every older (almost all of them) nation has gone through this. They go through periods of lawlessness, or even being outright occupied, and then come back.
But for a credal nation held together by “this we hold to be true” it can feel like it’s all gone.
Go read your Bible, kindly. No, I mean it, even if you are not a believer. Find an old testament. Steal it from a hotel room, if you must, and read the story of Israel.
Credal nations don’t go away. They just don’t. Look at all the foes of the Israelites. The Persian empire is gone, whatever the Iranians think. So are the others, including the mighty Romans. That little credal nation of Israel, though? Well, it went a long time without land, but it is still a people and a creed. And it will be.
I suspect should we be so unfortunate as to lose our land and our common links to each other, and our living together, Americans will yet persist. We might become even more genetically dilute (for us it will take effort) but 100 yeas from now or 500 there will be people claiming to be Americans (Or as some very strange sf writer made it, turning an insult on the boards into a point of pride, as we do, Usaians) even if they really can’t prove an ancestor ever set foot on the continent. And even if some of them are blue skinned and have tentacles.
And as long as the creed is there, we will come back, as an idea at some point.
Not that our falling apart is anywhere near. No, stop that. We are not Rome. The idea that we were is another Soviet idiocy. We used some of the forms, but dear Lord, not the …. history, the feel, the genetics. And if we were, that horrible Rome of the decadence continued for a thousand years or so.
If I had to guess we probably have that long. Maybe more.
Oh, granted, we’ll go through periods much, much worse than this. And periods much better. Nations are things of humans, and that means they’re not…. pure ideas, that live in the purity of being themselves. Every nation goes through very bad times. And comes back. Often seeming decadence, or occupation, or attack, teaches the nation what it SHOULD be.
This doesn’t excuse you from fighting for America to be what it should be.
“But Sarah, wouldn’t it be better to divide?”
HOW? Do you see any “cut on the dotted line” lines on the map? Because I don’t.
And the American fe

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/14/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do-2/

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Trump is the moderate Option Or: Can you hear us now? I’m ...

2026-10-16T03:45:43Z

Trump is the moderate Option

Or: Can you hear us now?
I’m always between amazed and amused by the left’s twin reactions to Trump. One of them, of course, is that he’s the most extreme president evah, just a completely extreme extremity, to the right of any known human being ever, and a threat to humanity as it exists.
The other idee fixe these super geniuses of history and politics have managed is that everyone who doesn’t agree on the complete extremism of Donald trump the most cultish cult that ever existed. We justify his every action, and live hanging on his every word.
This amazes me, because of course I know me, and I know my friends, who are broadly on my side (look, sometimes our politics are a mobius strip, but we’re still generally speaking, on the same side, okay?) have never approved of any single person to the extent of approving of everything he or she has ever said or done. This includes each and everyone of us approving of ourselves. As for hanging on his every word, not even my characters achieve that. And they’re in my head, and sometimes yelling at the top of their thought-voices, while I’m wandering around going, “yes, yes. But I need to unpack the winter coats. And also, what if I sat down and ate some cheese while listening to music?”
As for extreme, yeah. Sure. Trump is extreme, but in which direction? Because from where I stand, he honestly is way too middle of the road. I was willing to swallow tariffs in exchange for stopping income taxes (because honestly those are more intrusive. I mean, choose your form of theft) but we’re still suffering under that durance vile, too. And his handling of foreign affairs is ridiculously quiet and honestly moderate. No? Okay. You can say that, but then you’re going to have to explain to me why we haven’t yet Maduroed Putin. (Or as a friend suggested, both Putin and Zelenski, throw them in a cage match and sell payperview. I mean, I’m sure it’s against the law or at least a dozen regulations, but look, it probably would generate enough money to really retire the income tax. At least if we curbed taxes first.) The deportations? I’m sick and tired of the lunatics on Facebook mewling and pulling about how Trump is just so extreme and ICE is his Gestapo and whine whine whine.
Leaving aside the fact that these lunatics have invented a whole racial aspect to the thing and think anyone who tans will be deported or that we’re deporting citizens by the plane load or, my favorite, that they’re just shooting people in the street and putting them in camps with no justification, let’s talk sense.
The autopen administration let tens of millions of people we never vetted, many of worked for our enemies, terrorist organizations, international communism (BIRM) or international criminal gangs (BIRM again!) into this country. And instead of demanding proof of citizenship from everyone at every traffic stop, every job application, every interaction with officialdom, we’re going after those we know have an international record.
Putting them in camps? No. They’re being put in detention centers because some idiots and their mentally deficient judges demand that people who came in with no due process can’t be ejected without due process. (Question, what is due process for ejecting a home invader? Feet first or not? I leave it as an exercise for the reader.) So they have to go somewhere while the ridiculously lengthy and extremely stupid process to be allowed to remove them from the place they entered with no permission runs out. That’s it. And for every time some bright light of congress breaks into one of these camps, let me tell you, your tax dollars are being spent to keep these people in ridiculous comfort.
From what I understand if they want out of the detention centers, it’s easy. Just ask to be flown back where they came from.
This is nothing like the Gestapo which never offered to let Jews go wherever they wanted. (Trust me on this, Portugal had a diplomat expelled for helping Jews escape.)
What would an extreme way of dealing with the illegal invasion? Oh, get me and the friends on a Saturday night and you’ll hear them all. From checking everyone’s ID — yes, yes, papiere bitte. Well, if you don’t want that situation you don’t open borders and have international communist organizations (yes they were) recruiting people to come in and aiding their trek in a novel application of a human-wave attack — to simply yeeting them over the Southern border with a trebuchet. (Okay, that idea was for frozen bodies. When we found out that the border patrol kept finding bodies. We figured freezing them and trebuchetting them back would discourage les autres. Shut up. There might have been alcohol involved. Except for the Mormon (shut up Mongo) who doesn’t need alcohol to be as heinous as the rest of us with it. There was some mention of people being able to say “aye Jesus” South of the border, when recognizing the airborne frozen guy. Shut up. I said there was alcohol involved.)
Anyway, the point is that I can think of a hundred more extreme things that Trump could do. And a lot of them, I wish he would, like abolish income taxes. (Just the screaming and gnashing of teeth from the left would be so amazing.)
Look, what are you going to consider “extreme” after Biden was installed after a color revolution, spent his entire time in office opening the borders to let in a human wave attack, and thwarting the legitimate interests of the US, from energy self-sufficiency to our ability to defend ourselves and our citizens?
If that, plus controlling what we could post on social media, attempting to form a “ministry of truth” and keeping us locked up until we lost patience and freed ourselves wasn’t extreme, what was?
I remember how mad people were during Obama’s second term. I remember the tea party drawing completely normal people out of their shell to protest. They were not the kind who protested. In the ones I attended, I counted as a young rebellious hot woman (in my mid to late forties, with teen sons.) Most people were white haired and just not the protest kind. But mad enough to come out.
And then the government corrupted, co-opted and destroyed that movement. And I said “this is bad. They won’t like what comes after.”
And they ignored us and then Trump came after.
Only the left can’t learn. They’ve been jumping scared since they first called Eisenhower a Nazi. And they live in this entire fabulist echo chamber that the main stream news have become.
So they’ve convinced themselves Trump is an extremist and just about the worst thing ever, and also some kind of Svengali without whom we’d all become good government robots.
They don’t understand the world has changed, the MSM is no longer the only mass communication available, and their dream-ideas of the 1930s just aren’t coming back. We demolished the walls beside the gates they keep and ran off. And they’re still trying to gatekeep and lecture us back into submission.
They somehow miss the huge gaps through which new info flows, and so they think it’s all Trump, somehow.
… and they will keep pushing.
Which means they’re going to bring about someone much, much more extreme than Trump.
Look, most of what I and my friends want? To be left alone to earn a living and raise fat babies without the country getting eroded and destroyed from under us. That’s it.
Our joke “extreme” ideas are just that, and we’d probably the first to worry if they were put into action.
… which they will be if the left keeps insisting Trump is the most extreme thing ever, and they — Muslim communists, increasingly — are completely sane and mainstream.
Because if the choice is communist or truly painfully extreme? That bargain has been made before. I don’t like it. No sane person likes it.
Stop forcing it down our throats.
Trump is the moderate option. If they manage to demonize him and destroy him? Or honestly, even if they don’t, but keep pushing their insanity.
Well… Apres Trump, le deluge.
And no one (not even Mongo) wants that.

https://accordingtohoyt.com/2026/10/15/trump-is-the-moderate-option/

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