Okay, first to get a bit of off-topic business out of the way: Sarah sucks at scheduling things, yay and verily, like a Dyson with the animal hair attachment. And I’m very sorry. All I can say is between the auto-immune that clogged my breathing and reduced me to a fraction of the oxygen I should have (making me go into respiratory distress when lying flat) and the steroid to combat it, I’ve been even more like a cat with ADHD than normal.

In practical terms this means I totally forgot to schedule A cyber Monday sale. Fear not, though, starting on the thirtieth there will be something of mine on sale for 99c through the end of the year. I’m also bringing out author’s editions of the Magical British Empire and of the furniture refinishing mysteries which have now reverted. The fourth one of those and the sixth musketeer mysteries are in various states of completion, which means I might or might not be able to bring them out by Christmas. We shall see, but I’m gonna try.

Meanwhile today I must run an errand and send an overdue outline to KJA. Then resume work on Darkship Revenge this weekend. I’m sending the book in “sets” to my betas as I finalize portions, hoping to get it done faster that way.

Which bring us to a very short blog post, before I run off.

For years now, I’ve been telling you guys that this country is functionally occupied. Sometime between the forties and the seventies, a significant portion of our most promising young were proselytized and converted by the then USSR, an enemy that was not markedly skilled at much, except subversion, but who were very skilled at that.

This means, as my friend Bill Reader says, that “we’re doing all right, we just lost the cold war.”

Oh, we won it, economically and militarily, and everywhere else, but they’d taken our culture, and their long march had acquired all the command positions, and therefore they were in control. And having been, effectively, turned into enemy agents, even after the enemy had disbanded, this meant that they treated us like an occupied land.

This is the only way to make sense of the oikophobia of our cultural “betters” and of their desire to dismantle the culture that gave them birth, as well as their certainty that factually-disproven means of government like communism and socialism (both really the future of the past) are still the coming wave of the future. It is also the only thing that makes sense of, say, flying the American flag being considered an act of aggression ON AMERICAN TERRITORY while every other flag is not only accepted but encouraged.

We’re doing okay, it’s just that we’re occupied. And the couple of days have been an “oh, boy, howdy, and how!” as we watch people who pretend to care for the fate of the republic and to be proselytizers for freedom and liberty deliver themselves of painful and cringingly-awful encominiums to Castro, a man who would have been Stalin, had he had more territory than Cuba to rule over; a man who enslaved his own people and who, by hiring his army out, like the Hessian mercenaries of old, but worse, laid fire and waste to Africa and perpetrated (there) racist aggression as was rarely seen under European powers (except maybe by the Belgians who were special all over Congo and of course the soviets who were the masters of the Cubans.)

It’s been breath taking to watch the masks drop, and the would-be officials of our own country act like quislings and traitors. Their beards all seem to have grown longer overnight, (particularly the women’s) and the noises that comes from their mouths are no longer the sounds of rational human beings, but the eructations of the long-dead masters who possess them. They are channeling Marx and Lenin, Stalin and Pol Pot, standing atop the pile of corpses of their victims, and speaking with the rotten voice from the grave, lamenting the passing of one of the last of their comrades to resist the encroaching of liberty, and to carry on their carrion-tainted legacy.

Remember them. Keep in mind that moment when the masks dropped. They will try to don them again, and look, once more, impartial and over it all, and like gods among men. Don’t forget though, the death-marked visage they revealed and how their empathy for this repulsive tyrant reveals what they’d do, given a chance.

We’re doing all right, for a country that lost the cold war. We’re doing very all right. While they were busy taking over the formal mechanisms of power, the sons of Martha — almost ours to a man — have created alternate structures to the ones they stormed and occupied.

We have means of communication and organization, and the resistance is making a comeback. Don’t get cocky. The vichy are still in power in all relevant positions of external power, and — as with publishing — they’ll try to get things under control again. Look at all the fuss about “fake news” by which they don’t mean the ones who have, so gleefully, been trying to gaslight the nation for decades, but the people doing yeoman work, mostly unpaid, to reveal their deficiencies. Look at traditional publishing, in increasingly ineffective ways, trying to grasp once more the power they had over the nation’s intellectual life.

There will be tussling back and forth. Be not afraid, nor despair. Keep working to build under, build around. Keep working to take the weight of the corrupt edifice when it falls. Maybe we’ll get lucky and take enough of the political establishment it never really falls, just totters and firms up again, but you can’t bet on it. You have to keep working, to remember we’ve been occupied for almost a century, and we’re just now fighting back.

On the good side, the technology for communications, for learning and hopefully soon for manufacturing (to some extent) is going the way of individual freedom, unlike the technology of mass production and mass marketing which gave birth to socialist/communist mental map.

In the end we win, they lose. But you must keep working.

Now go work.