Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn

September 6, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Prester John or Presbyter John was a supposed mythical figure, a priest of an Eastern Christian church and ruler of a famed kingdom of untold wealth, that people of the Middle Ages hoped would help quell the rise and encroachment of the Islamic world into Christian countries. Although some people believe he was a real historical character, Prester John’s origins have been traced to 1145 and a letter that was said to have been written by him and later shown to be a forgery. (Though that supposed forgery, in itself, could be a myth.)

Although I’d been aware of Prester John’s story for decades, I’d never thought about it until I started reading the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams, but seeing the name rang an internal bell. The first book of the series begins in the kingdom of the realm King John Presbyter, and although the book is not about the mythical king, apparently Tad Williams borrowed the name for his own fictional king. I shrugged off the coincidence until later in the series when the young hero ends up in the house of a sort-of wise witch. She helps the young hero escape the bad guys, and while on the run, he stumbles on the stilt holding up her house and is shocked to see that it resembled a chicken foot.

Just like with King Presbyter John, the hut on chicken legs rang a bell — Baba Yaga, of course, a witch/wise woman in Slavic folklore. Then I realized that this series, like the Wheel of Time, took its inspiration from various myths and legends.

There are many other folkloric creatures in the series that I’ve noticed, such as the Kilpa, water spirits that lure sailors to their death, based on Scottish legends of the Kelpie. Sithis, the sort of good fairies based on the Irish Sidhe, and the Norns, the human-hating fairies based on Norwegian Norns. Certain episodes in the tale are based on historic battles and famous people, such as the War of the Roses and King Alfred the Great of England and three burnt cakes. And the religion of the story people seems to be based on the Osiris myth.

Although I spent years digging through all the references in The Wheel of Time series, not just the legends and myths, but world religions and philosophies, historical references and costumes, I’m not sure I want to do the same with Tad Williams’ series. But still, as I pointed out, many references echo in my head, so I might end up decoding his influences by default.

Two things stand out for me. One: that both these series —The Wheel of Time and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn — that are based so much on real world mythologies and histories began to be written about the same time. Though Tad Williams’ books were published first, there’s no doubt that Robert Jordan developed his ideas separately. It seems perhaps as if ideas are floating in the ether, and they belong to whatever writers happens to catch them. And two: that not only was The Game of Thrones inspired by Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, much of it seems to be a rip off, but who knows. Although The Game of Thrones came out much later, it’s possible Martin himself grabbed the similarities from the ether.

It does seem as if the fantasy genre that interests me is mythic based, which makes sense that so few fantasy novels appeal to me — too many are based on totally fake history and mythology and worlds that I cannot connect to.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in books, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Basically, a Basic Story

August 28, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a book you never finished but still think about?
View all responses

A book that I never finished and that I do think about? The Lord of the Rings. I’ve started those books multiple times because I wanted to like them, but I simply could not get immersed into the story even though the series is considered a seminal work. For most people, I think, the books were a revelation, but as one who had been studying myths, legends, quests, and fairy tales my whole life, the books seemed . . . flat. The framework of the story isn’t new — it’s the quintessential hero’s journey story, where a naïve person (or hobbit, apparently), leaves the ordinary world, sets out on a quest, meets allies and mentors, encounters obstacles, fulfills the quest, faces one last transformative ordeal, then returns home with an elixir or boon to transform the ordinary world.

This framework of the hero’s journey is written in our psyches — it’s as old as humankind and goes all the way back to the very beginnings of literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh. Other ancient examples are Beowulf, The Odyssey, and most of mythology; also, King Arthur, The Fisher King legend, fairy tales, The Wizard of Oz, and the tarot (the major arcana seems to be an outline of the hero’s journey). The examples of pre-Tolkien heroic epics are endless, and yet he’s the one everyone holds up as the epitome of the genre.

I should like the books since I am enthralled with quests based on the hero’s journey, but I get mired in his language.

Although language and story are intertwined (because obviously, you can’t have story without language to form the story, create mood, set a tone such as mythic or prosaic), I’ve always thought that story transcends language. A story can be heavy with complex situations, ambiguous characters, and dark themes, yet still be light enough to break through language and rise to a level of reality that the brain treats as true.

It’s this lack of transcendence that makes The Lord of the Rings so problematic for me. I’ve tried many times over the years to drag myself through the books, but the most I’ve managed is to get halfway through the second volume without getting completely bogged down in his words. I simply can’t get beyond the anchor of Tolkien’s language.

The Lord of the Rings has often been hailed as the first, but the first of what, I don’t know. Maybe the first to bring fantasy to the mainstream reading public. He certainly wasn’t the first to write a fantasy. George MacDonald did that. His novel Phantastes, written in 1858, is recognized as the first modern fantasy. Tolkien certainly wasn’t the first to create a completely fictitious world separate from our own. That was William Morris who wrote The Well at the World’s End in 1896. Other writers had created fictitious worlds, such as Jonathan Swift, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, but they are not considered fantasy. (Apparently, if a story is written before the delineation of a genre, it can’t belong to that genre.)

Nor was Tolkien the first to create his own languages (a hobby of his from a young age). A Princess of Mars, a science fantasy novel written by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912 is considered the first, though Burroughs didn’t create a full grammar for his language. Nor was Burroughs anywhere near the first. Other writers and linguists had been creating languages dating all the way back to the Middle Ages. Esperanto, created by Polish polyglot L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, is spoken by maybe two million people today. (Though come to think of it, any language is a created language. As far as I know, there is no language quarry where one goes to dig up a new language, nor did anyone come down from on high to gift humans with language. Humans and language are intertwined. Humans created language and have done so from the beginning, but also, language created humans. It is language, according to some maybe-experts, that helped rewire our brains and turn us into what we are today.)

What Tolkien did was create entire languages, complete with grammar and syntax, and he grew those languages in conjunction with the mythology and history he devised to support the languages. As a philologist, he believed that language could tell a hidden history; for example, the word “wheel” traces back 5,000 years to a Proto-Indo-European language, which shows at least how long people have know about wheels. In his own languages, he wanted to show that same type of back history. Only then, after he’d built his languages and the myths and history behind them, did he concoct a story (influenced by Beowulf; Celtic, Finnish, and classical myths; Norse and Germanic sagas) to showcase the languages.

And this is why The Lord of the Rings feels so leaden to me. There is no way to transcend the language because the story is not just anchored in language — its whole purpose is the language.

Knowing this, I bought the books . . . again. (The first couple of sets I’d purchased are long gone, lost in the mists of my past.) I figure I’d try to read them, not for the story but for . . . whatever.

Will I be able to get through them even treating them as a study project? I don’t know. What does surprise me is how people are so willing — happily willing — to allow Tolkien his long, drawn-out sections of nothing happening but boring texts of history and geography, yet those same people complain when other authors (such as Tad Williams in his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series) don’t jump in immediately with the fast action that is demanded today.

Maybe eventually I’ll find out what made Tolkien rise to such glorified heights as to be forgiven every modern fictional sin, but first, I’ll have to get through the books. Maybe if I rename the series “Lord of the Language” it will help me remember the point of it all. There’s just one small problem with that reminder — I don’t like fake languages and don’t see that they add anything to a story, so I always skip over such things when I encounter them in books.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss o a Loved One

Posted in books, fiction, history/myth, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , . Leave a Comment »

Time to Fill

August 26, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I thought I’d have trouble spending way less time on the internet, but the only problem I have so far is what to do with all that free time. There’s only so much work I can do outside before the heat makes being out there a dangerous folly, so I’m not doing too much more than I had been. I did clamber about my back garden patch, the one where I planted a pumpkin vine that is creeping over the entire area, to do some weeding. Luckily, I was able to do most of the work near the fence, so I had something to hold on to as I worked my way through the jungle. To my delight, I discovered a pumpkin hidden back there! It’s still green, so it will be a while until I can harvest it. Meantime, the first pumpkin I found has turned a luscious orange. Now I just need to figure out what to do with it. Maybe cook it, peel it, puree it, and freeze it. The best part is that the work will take up some of my free time.

And I will have to find things to do to use my reclaimed time. Although I’d just as soon not play the game I’ve been fooling around with for the past six years (being at home during the Covid mess and needing something to do is what got me started with it), it’s hard not to want to log in when I get bored. So I do. Log in. Not to play. Just to check to see what’s going on, maybe play one of the less irritating side games for a few minutes, then I’m finished. Anything more annoys the heck out of me. It’s a simple hidden object game where you look for hidden objects in pictures, and yet they act as if each move is a major casino-like win, with all sorts of lights and flashes, and whirling objects that seem to fly out of the screen. Luckily, I have nothing invested in the game, so whether I play or not is no big deal.

I also check on the news aggregator I follow, but even that now is a quick in and out. To be honest, I’m getting to the point where I don’t want to know what’s going on out there. I’m so much better off in my own little world. Or in the magic worlds of the two fantasy authors I like. It doesn’t even bother me anymore that the books were never finished. Well, I suppose The Wheel of Time was finished, but since it was finished by a terrible substitute author after Robert Jordan died, to me, it is unfinished and will always remain so.

I did find another series from that same era (before Woke hit the fantasy genre), though who knows if I will like it — the reviews are mixed. Still, I’ve read about a third of The Dragonbone Chair, and so far, so good. Best of all, it’s a million-word novel spread out over four different books, so even if it turns out that it’s not my sort of story, it will keep me company through thousands of meals.

Although I don’t particularly like fantasy, in fact I can’t stand most of it, there is a genre within a genre — a coming-of-age/hero’s journey story in an earthlike world, where much is familiar though skewed with a bit of strange — that I do tend to enjoy, but so far, I’ve only found three such series that appeal to me. Luckily, these stories are all very long with multiple books in the series and deserve more than a few readings. In fact, it was only during the second reading of The Kingkiller Chronicles that I realized that much of the dialogue is in rhyme or seven-word sentences depending upon the character. Something to go back and pay attention to. Best of all, none of those books has much to do with our world today except in an allegorical or fable-ous way, which is good for my peace of mind.

Still, as with working outside, there’s only so much reading, and working puzzles, and such that I can do in a day, so there’s still a lot of time to fill.

Luckily, as I find myself reaching for the keyboard to offset an upsurge of boredom, I remember what is waiting for me, and that makes it easy to stay away.

At least for now. Who knows what I’ll get up to in the coming days.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, books, history/myth, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 5 Comments »

Acquiring Knowledge

August 25, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The acquisition of any knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it can thus drive out useless things and retain the good, for nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I certainly need to acquire more knowledge to drive out the useless things I’ve learned about how so many people are trying to destroy this country — not just the globalists and other international groups, but groups of citizens and non-citizens, politicians and judges, fraudsters and lawbreakers within our own country. Useless knowledge indeed since there’s nothing I can do so long as the elections in Colorado are pre-determined as they have been for the past couple of decades.

I’m not sure how to acquire more knowledge except by reading, and for the most part, I’ve read all the non-fiction I intend to, at least for now, anyway. I do have a small collection of alchemy books I inherited that I started to read, but they aren’t so much a history of alchemy as self-teaching books. The exercises all start the same: visualize something (that something varies from book to book). In one book, they explained how to change things: visualize your immediate surroundings down to the merest detail, change what you need, then merge the visualized world with the real world, and voila! Or presto! Or ta-da! Or whatever your preferred word is, and the world has changed.

The problem is, I can’t visualize anything. I am mentally blind. (The word for that is aphantasia.) So much for my becoming an alchemist.

There are, of course, real world ways to acquire more knowledge, mostly just by living. Recently I’ve learned that one needs a certain ruthlessness to be a gardener. For example, my petunias were getting long and leggy and producing few flowers, so I trimmed the plants way back and now they are blooming again. And I wacked the branches off an overgrown bush, so now I have an unattractive stump with lots of arms sticking out, but I can see green where new sprouts are coming up, so in another year, that bush will be small and attractive and evergreen.

Another real-life bit of knowledge I acquired (or rather reacquired) is that no matter how careful you are, there will always be some weird accident that brings you low. In my case, I had just pulled a cup of tea out of the microwave and carefully set it on the counter, but my fingers must have been entangled in the string of the tea bag because as I pulled my hand away, the bag sloshed out of the cup and onto the back of my hand. 200 degrees of heat is painful!!

I did what I always did with burns — slather it with natural vitamin E from a capsule, and when I still felt that excruciating burn, I iced it. That took away the heat enough that I felt fine. Whew! The weird thing is that it actually charred the skin. Turned it brown. Luckily, it’s healing well, even the bits that blistered, and I haven’t had any pain since those first few minutes. Even now that the charred skin is flaking off, there’s no problem. (And yes, I do know that brewing tea in a microwave is not the way it’s supposed to be brewed, but it’s a lot easier to brew one cup that way than with a kettle.)

Frankly, I can do without that sort of learning. Perhaps I ought to dig out my alchemy books again and try to see what I will never be able to see. That has to be easier than to damage oneself, however accidentally, in the name of knowledge.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in Adventure, books, history/myth, How to, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Dealing With Uncertainty

August 20, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you deal with uncertainty?
View all responses

Some people go through life absolutely certain about themselves, their opinions, their place in life, and life itself. Even as a kid I noticed this. There were some grade schoolers who absolutely knew without any tinge of uncertainty about . . . well, about everything. Those kids tended to be the leaders, the ones others would follow, perhaps, because like me, they were riddled with uncertainty. Unfortunately, for me, my uncertainty about myself, my place in life, and life in general, also encompassed those “certain” people, and so I just sort of “uncertained” my way through grade school, into high school, and into the rest of my life.

Because of that pervasive uncertainty, I learned to learn. I wanted to be certain, but I also wanted to be certain I was certain about things that were true, not just the things that everyone else was certain of.

During times of exceptional uncertainty — such as the years after Jeff died when I was left without an anchor, and so just hovered above life, trying to find something to tie myself to — I simply endured the uncertainty. I even learned to embrace it because after all, life is uncertainty. Some people are lucky, and their faith brings them a certain degree of certainty, but as an adult, I was never gifted with that sort of belief.

And so I deal with my uncertainty today the same way I always did, by trying to find out the truth.

This very idea of certainty and uncertainty is one I’ve been struggling with lately. People seem utterly convinced of the rightness of their ideals and politics and even their own righteousness, and yet, to me, they seem ignorant of any fact or historical context or perspective. Which is where my uncertainty grabs hold of me. If they are so certain of things my years of learning have taught me are wrong, maybe I am the one who’s wrong. So I go back and forth, seeking out the origins of my thoughts, digging deeper into history and finding people who know more than I do about certain subjects, and I seldom find I have to contradict myself, mostly, I think, because any idea I had or have was a long time forming. I try not to jump to conclusions, try not to believe something just because I want it to be true, and yet there is that dichotomy between what I have come to know are facts, and what lies and untruths other people are so certain are true.

I’m not in grade school anymore, and so I see that certainty for what it is — a belief some people hold on to because it’s what they were taught or have come to know through ticktock or wherever they get their ideas, and because they need that certainty. Since they are so convinced of their certainty, they feel free to blindly hate those who disagree without ever looking beyond the dark veil of their own certainty. Most people don’t even see they have a veil.

So what makes me think I don’t also have a veil? What makes me trust myself more than the “certain” ones? The same way I trusted myself in grade school — by not trusting. Not trusting the “experts,” not trusting the “certains,” not even trusting myself. And it’s this uncertainty, I think, that leads me often to a truth, sometimes even to a truth I dare not say because of the backlash from the “certains.” Uncertainty leads to study, to seeing what the “certains” are certain is true, seeing where they got their “knowledge,” and heading out from there.

In a discussion in the novel The Wise Man’s Fears by Patrick Rothfuss, a character defended a story he told that the others found pointless. “Not pointless,” he said. “It’s questions you can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers. . . . That way, when he finds the answers, they’ll be precious to him. The harder the questions, the harder we hunt. The harder we hunt, the more we learn.”

And that’s why I trust that my truth is closer to the truth than those who scream their epithets and polish the same old “facts,” and publish their vile insults.

Am I certain? No. And neither should anyone else be, but that’s always been the way. The “certains” are heard because they scream loudest while we uncertains quietly stumble around searching for more of the truth.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, history/myth, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Creating a Whole New Reality

August 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram

Despite my extensive research in previous years into ancient civilizations and the mysteries they left behind, I’d never heard of Tartaria until recently. Some days, my online feed is filled with tantalizing tidbits about a super-advanced civilization that lasted until around the turn of the twentieth century when it was buried by a mud flood in a great global reset. To prove their theory, they point to such things as the massive fortress-like buildings that were erected to house the insane, or rather, according to the story, to house those who still remembered the Tartarian world before it was destroyed. Also “proofs” are the incredible cathedrals and government edifices that were seemingly impossible to create in horse-and-buggy times. Those buildings were supposed to be conductors of earth energy, a free energy source that was known once upon a time. Also, so many of these buildings all over the world were created in similar styles, which leads people again down the trail to Tartaria.

As much as I enjoy fun theories, I couldn’t get behind this one. Oh, I do believe in earth energy (something Tesla supposedly proved, though that “proof” disappeared after his death), and many researchers have found connections between cathedrals (if you’re familiar with The DaVinci Code, you know as much as most people about those connections). The half-buried buildings could have come from settling over the centuries (much in the same way that Venice is sinking), rather than a single mud flood.

But despite the cohesion of the theory, I couldn’t buy into it. How could they make a billion people stop believing in what they knew happened?

Well, I have my answer. All I had to do was pay attention to what’s going on today, how the liberals in particular are rewriting history and teaching kids things that simply are not true, or at least not the whole truth. (I’ve written and deleted several examples because all of them would get me called a liar and a racist and a bigot and a whateveraphobic and a bunch of other unsavory things, which would prove my point, but proving a point isn’t worth getting curses called down on my head.)

So, let’s try this one: kids are being taught that this is the worst country in the world, that we are an oppressor civilization, which leads kids to believe we created the whole slave trade when in fact, it had been going on for thousands of years before anyone in this country held a slave, and it continues to this very day. What this country did was make slavery illegal. You can’t teach kids one thing without following through with the rest of the story. Nor can you ignore the hundreds of thousands of white Americans who died to free those slaves. Nor can you shame a country for things that happened before anyone alive today was born, without balancing it out with all the good things that the country subsequently did. We are a country in progress, with each generation trying to improve their lives, their family’s lives, and the lives of their fellow citizens. You leave those important parts out, and what you end up with are a couple of generations who want to tear the whole thing down and make the billionaires pay for everything. And though there are some rich folks using their money to sow discord in this and other countries (and somehow, the money those billionaires have is sacrosanct) others are simply working, providing jobs for people, creating wealth. Wealth is not a pie. When someone creates a successful business, it adds to the prosperity of everyone. But that, too, is something that is left out of the discussion.

So, there begins the erasure of the truth. In future generations, assuming this current crop of neo-socialist/communists don’t rip the country to shreds, that’s what people will believe. They’ll sit on top of the destruction of a country that was built to serve the individual and protect individual rights because they believe the government needs to be in control of everything. (Which is utterly insane. The more money the government has, the more it squanders, the more fraud there is, and the worse off things are.)

Anyway, those future folks will be digging through the ruins, and they will find the Smithsonian Institute and the exhibits (paid for with our hard-earned money) that instead of celebrating this country, tell the story of how terrible we were. And those folks will nod in self-congratulation, and tell themselves that, even though they ended up in rags, they did the right thing by tearing it all down.

This is an exaggeration, of course, and with any luck, we’ll never see that destruction, but my point holds — it is possible to create a whole new reality within a short time. So who’s to say that there wasn’t some kind of great reset that lies forgotten in the not-so-distant past, just as people today are rewriting our own history.

There is one lingering question I have that mention of Tartaria brought to mind: in 1900, our population was only 76 million people, so why were there so many immense buildings erected all over the country to house the insane?

 

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in culture, history/myth, internet. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Power and Corruption

August 17, 2026 — Pat Bertram

When I was young, I thought the world would be a lot better off if women were running things. I figured there would be no war, that kindness would prevail, that courts would be fairer, that there would be more empathy, and that government fraud would be reduced to a minimum. Boy, was I delusional!

In my defense, I didn’t really have any facts to base that theory on, just what I knew about women. Mainly me.

Now there are plenty of facts, facts that show up in the news every day and have for the past couple of decades, and it turns out that women are every bit as corrupt and as sociopathic as men, using their positions of power to lie, cheat, steal, manipulate, enrich themselves to the detriment to the country, and all the other ways people in poser have of holding themselves above “the deplorables” they hate, as well as their own constituents. And oh, yes . . . as is abundantly apparent when some of the women politicians open their mouths, they are every bit as unintelligent and ignorant as some of the men in politics.

It’s not just politicians and those running political machines, as well as anyone else who carves out a place of power for themselves, but district attorneys and judges, too. It’s no secret why so many of these individuals are women — women make up about 56% of students in law school. I was right — women in such positions are more empathic, but for the wrong side. It used to be that justice favored the victim (or at least it was supposed to), but now “justice” favors the perpetrator. Occasionally victims defending themselves end up in prison instead of the perpetrator. Too often, cops arrest doers, the DA refuses to bring them to trial, and so the criminal ends up back out on the street to do it again. And so more victims. But oh, that poor perpetrator! He had such a terrible life. (Not a word about the victim who now has no life, just a grave and grieving relatives.) Then there’s cashless bail where the perpetrator is released on his own recognizance with no incentive to return for his trial. Even worse, when they are here illegally committing crimes, sometimes the judges even conspire to let the doers go to keep them from being deported.

Why? I have no idea. Perhaps they really are empathic, though judges are supposed to be impartial. Perhaps they really do care, but it’s a killer’s empathy — not just an empathy for killers (because as some judges have said, they can’t convict if they don’t know the reason for the crime) but an empathy that gets innocent people killed. Perhaps they have a greater agenda — greater crime rates increase chaos, and in chaos is power.

As it turns out, women — or rather some women — are every bit as addicted to power as some men. Lord Acton’s belief that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” holds true for women, too. Even if women go into politics or the law or whatever for humanitarian reasons, they begin to believe that they deserve their power, and when their bad actions have no consequences, they begin to believe that they are right no matter how reprehensible they might be. It’s more than that, though. Although power does lessen people’s moral culpability, it seems as if morally ambiguous people — people who are ready and willing to be corrupted — are drawn to positions of power.

Despite the message you might be getting from this blog, the truth is, it doesn’t really matter to me if the powerful, morally ambiguous person is a woman (except that it gives women a bad name). I simply don’t like corrupt people. Period. They take too much power from the rest of us.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, culture, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Self-Censoring

August 15, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been sitting here for a while, trying to figure out what — if any — of the many thoughts and worries going through my mind I want to write about, or if I should keep them to myself.

I hadn’t realized how much I censor myself, both in speech and in blogging, but I do it. A lot. There are too many triggering topics where a single remark or a simple question gets the full hate treatment. If you don’t believe what a certain group wants you to believe and dare to say so, it seems to unleash the beast that people try to hide offline. Or maybe they don’t hide it offline. Maybe, because I spend so much time alone in my little corner of the world, I’m just not seeing it. It does seem, though, that people are too willing to accuse others of hate speech, racism, fascist, or whateveraphobia. (At least one of those “phobias” is a realistic fear and shouldn’t glean the hate that it does, but still, in this political activist climate, you’re only allowed to say what is “approved.”) To those people, there is no rationale for a different belief. It’s all emotion, all the time.

Luckily, I don’t get a lot of that blowback, but that’s mostly because I tend to stay in the middle where I open myself to getting bashed from both sides.

I could still write about my concerns, of course, but the unpalatable truth is, although I like getting comments, I don’t always want to know what other people think about what I think about if they disagree with me, especially when it comes to certain hot subjects. Like “gender-affirming care” for minors. I’ve already been shot down more than I care to be over that one. And even merely asking questions of adults who have transitioned has left me with fewer friends. And when it comes to transwomen in women spaces, there again, I have questions that bring me no answers but accusations of cruelty, since the transwoman I know still prefers women. (Something no one talks about, and no wonder, if everyone gets shot down for simply asking a question.)

There are also people I admire, but since I know too many people who hate them, there’s really no point in trying to explain the good I see because . . . well, just because.

And then there’s all the truly insane political stuff — people who hate this country are being elected to various offices. How is that even possible? But oops. I shouldn’t have mentioned that. Just the question itself earns a person one of those whateveraphobia slurs.

The way I used to deal with uncomfortable issues was to write about them, but nowadays I need to be careful what I say, not just because the internet is forever but because I’m a lot more sensitive to censure than I like to admit.

So here I sit, rejecting one topic after another as I try to figure out what to blog about today.

I guess the answer is I’ll just post this discussion I’m having with myself about whether or not to continue self-censoring.

The answer, apparently, is yes, I will continue to try to keep my mouth closed and my fingers off the computer keys when it comes to certain topics.

Besides, there are enough opinions floating around; the world doesn’t need mine, too.

[What’s truly amazing about this post — to me, anyway — is that exactly ten years ago today, I posted an Open Letter to Blog Readers where I said that this was my blog, “If you are upset by anything I say, remember, this is not necessarily about your truth. . . . It’s about my truth and I cannot sort out my truth if I don’t mention the things that trigger a spate of emotionalism.” Apparently, things have changed so much in the world, or perhaps just in me, that I’m not comfortable talking about my truth. Though truly, in a lot of cases, I have no truth, just a lot of questions that seem to prove to people that I am not on the right side of the issues today. Well, I do tend to point out hypocrisy and irony, but that’s to be expected when there is so much of it going on, where they want us to believe things that are not true and to believe things that once were touted as good but are considered evil now that a different group is running things.] 

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, blogging, history/myth, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 4 Comments »

A Brief History of Election Fraud

August 2, 2026 — Pat Bertram

The claim of no election fraud in the USA would be laughable if it weren’t so . . . fraudulent. I don’t know if people who say the elections are secure are truly ignorant, naïve, being ingenuous, or flat out lying, but election theft has been part of our heritage from the very beginning. Remember Tammany Hall? Probably not, if you’re one of those generations who were never taught history, but Tammany Hall was a Democratic political machine in New York in the 1800s that kept one hand in the till and the other hand on the voting lever. They bribed and intimidated their way into power, controlled city contracts, embezzled millions from the taxpayers, traded favors and jobs to immigrants for votes, turned in ballots for dead people, and “miscounted” votes.

In 1946, in what is known as the Battle of Athens in Tennessee, returning veterans fought an actual gun battle to prevent Democrat candidates from committing voter fraud.

Lyndon Johnson apparently stole his Texas Senate seat in 1948 with a late ballot drop of over 200 votes. The theft was so egregious that it was pursued all the way to the supreme court, but the court, for some unknown reason, declined to hear the case.

The Kennedys stole the 1960 election. Well, Joe Kennedy did, anyway, by manipulating (buying?) the Illinois vote. (He wasn’t exactly a sterling character; he made a fortune by aggressively exploiting weaknesses in the stock market. Because he knew the system so well, FDR appointed him to clean up the stock market and to get rid of all the practices that made him so rich.) Nixon wanted to challenge the vote and fight for the presidency, but his handler, the Bush patriarch — yes, those Bushes — told him to back off and that he’d get his turn. (Remember at the end when Nixon said that they wouldn’t have him to push around anymore? He didn’t mean the electorate. He meant the Bushes.)

In 1982, a grand jury found that in Chicago alone, there had been 100,000 fraudulent ballots. Some people were even convicted.

Voter fraud has been widespread in Colorado for a couple of decades at least, though these fraudsters are more discreet about it — no late-night drops of exactly 35,000 votes. No major changes to the big cities that might have more oversight. Instead, as they have bragged to researchers, they tweak the ballots in the smaller areas where a few votes here and a few there make a huge difference. In fact, one guy bragged that he knew the names of thousands of dead people in Colorado, and he could get them to vote when necessary. (If you ever wonder how Colorado, one of the most middle-of-the-road states, became rampantly leftist with only 25% of the electorate registered as Democrat, that’s how it happened. If you’re also wondering why they went after Tina Peters so hard, this is it — they needed to make an example of her so they could keep their scam going.)

Even worse, what voters vote for don’t always stay the course. Many years ago, Colorado tried to pass a bill that gave gays preferential treatment, sort of a DEI before DEI. Colorado voters voted it down, but Barbara Streisand and her ilk decided it was anti-gay, though it wasn’t. She made a huge national stink, and suddenly, the whole thing disappeared. I never did understand that — the government of Colorado overriding the votes of its citizens to pacify an aged celebrity who didn’t even live in the state. But they did it.

So, safe and secure elections. Right. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.

Until the elections of the past decade, it didn’t matter who won anyway, because Democrats and Republicans have almost always been two sides of the same coin, both betting that coin against the taxpayer. If you doubt my word, ask yourself why so many of the politicians supposedly representing us refuse to pass legislation that the majority of citizens in both parties want and need. You probably won’t like the answer.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 15 Comments »

No Feeling of Vindication

August 1, 2026 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been sitting here mechanically playing a game of solitaire and letting my mind make sense of what is going on with the Covid hearings without any input from my emotions or a mental push from my conscious mind.

It’s odd — I don’t feel any vindication at having known exactly what was going on back then. Hints of the “conspiracy” were running through threads of pandemic panic, and since those same conspiracies (not theories, real conspiracies) have always been in the background of any biological or chemical weapon development (especially since such research has been banned for decades), it was apparent to me what was happening. I also had the advantage of the years of research that formed the back story of my novel A Spark of Heavenly Fire, in addition to a well-developed sense of pattern recognition. (I originally wrote “over-developed,” which leads to a tendency to draw connections among events that might not have anything to do with one another, but in this case, I was right on target.)

More importantly, for me, I didn’t have anyone telling me I couldn’t see a grandbaby unless I got the shots, or any other such personal coercion, so I was able to deal with that whole horror on my own terms. As to why I never wrote about my suspicions back then — it was due to a rather feebly developed sense of self-preservation. (I say “feebly” because it’s obvious from some of my more recent politically leaning posts that the thin veneer of self-preservation is wearing off.) They scared me with all that talk of arresting people who didn’t have a certificate of vaccination, and apps to track people or to turn in people you knew who didn’t comply. Too much like the “big brother” in 1984, who turned out to be one’s fellow citizens. And they were silencing anyone — even doctors and nurses — who told a different story, and some of those people are still paying the price for telling the truth. So I kept my mouth shut, both online and off. Not that it would have mattered — no one cared what I thought.

I mostly feel sad for all the people who got caught up in the megalomania of this man and who were forever damaged by his policies. But despite what we are hearing about his diary, a betrayal of such enormity never comes from a single bureaucrat. He needed backers, protectors, accomplices, media people to keep the fear escalating, lawmakers to force into law edicts that people would otherwise not have gone along with, governments to coerce people into compliance, gatekeepers to cover up the truth, governors to create unnecessary mandates, and everyone to tout “the science” and ridicule the non-believers. If you’re wondering why he’s taking the fifth despite being pardoned for his crimes (and even though “taking the fifth doesn’t hold in such a case like this because he’s already protected), it’s that if he lists names, he’s a dead man. Literally. I have no doubt names of consequence are hiding behind his silence, but although I can guess at some, other names are lost in the utterly secret roster of the global elite that has always wanted to destroy this country (and now, apparently, most of the world, too). He was the face of the pandemic, and now he’s the sacrificial goat. Everyone else who was complicit will simply go on with their lives as if they don’t have blood on their hands.

I doubt I would have paid much attention to what is coming out in the hearings, even with his thunderous silence, but there’s so much else coming out now, things that have been kept secret for generations, things I’ve known from my research without knowing a lot of the specific details. And the details are appalling. And appallingly sad. The huge amounts of money — trainloads — that are moved out of the treasury with no accountability. The utterly corrupt career politicians. The creeping communism. The activist groups that keep free speech for themselves but gag everyone else for disagreeing. Proof that outside operators have almost always interfered with our government, paying off those who are supposed to be on our side.

All this might be shocking to people who are hearing about it for the first time (if, in fact, they are hearing about it since the alphabet media are generally silent on anything that doesn’t fit their leftist narrative), but it’s not shocking to me.

I do feel sad for myself, though in a more general way. A lifetime of trying to peek behind the scenes to get glimpses of the truth has led to . . . nothing, really. Well, it did lead me safely through the pandemic where, despite my fears (and, oh they were so good at playing on our fears!), I was able to stick to my convictions. But other than that?

Just sadness.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »
« Older posts