Month: March 2025

Fat Tuesday

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Trump , , ,

Well, let’s see.  Today is Mardi Gras.  Interestingly, it is celebrated in Dunwich but with a local twist.  Because the Great Old Ones are devout Roman Catholics (go figure) they forego eating humans during the entirety of Lent so tonight they have a wild party where they make an enormous cauldron of jambalaya (5,000 gallons) and garnish it with any local elected officials they can find within the town limits.  So, for that reason I’m currently hiding in an abandoned fallout shelter with the Elder Sign emblazoned on the bolted hatch.  Above me I can hear the screams of the Dunwich Town Clerk, Treasurer and Tax Collector as they’re paraded down Bourbon Street on the way to dinner.  Well, nobody likes them anyway.  They voted to increase taxes and wouldn’t let us put up that Trump sign behind the Town Hall so boo hoo!

It’s kind of boring down here.  All I have is an internet connection, a dart board and ten thousand sugar cubes.  I’m trying to build a pyramid with them but it looks kind of crooked.  It really adds to my respect for those Egyptians.  First off, I now see why they didn’t use sugar as a building material.  After all, the slaves building the pyramid might be tempted to lick one of the blocks surreptitiously.  Multiply that by a billion licks and now you’re looking at real issues.  I’m guessing type 2 diabetes would have been rampant, so there’s that.  It really makes you think.

But now Donald Trump is starting his speech.  He’s speaking to a joint session of Congress and the Democrats are all holding what look like ping pong paddles with catchy slogans like “Trump Sucks” and “Pelosi is Still Hot” emblazoned on them.  After a particularly provocative anecdote about how ugly Chuck Schumer’s wife is up jumps Billy Dee Williams and threatens Trump with a golden handled cane.

Trump jumps down from the podium and joins Billy Dee in a spirited fencing match.  I believe he borrowed an umbrella from Speaker Johnson.  Luckily for everyone involved the Sergeant at Arms trips Billy Dee from behind and put him in a full nelson hold before giving him the bum’s rush.  After taking a few bows, Trump returned to the lectern and continues his remarks on his photos from his trip to Las Vegas with Mitch McConnell.  Riveting stuff.

Oh wait, I made all that stuff up in my head.

Actually, Trump’s address was quite effective.  He gave a long list of the frivolous causes that DOGE discovered that have wasted literally billions of dollars of taxpayer money.  One of the funniest revelations was of the age of some of the social security recipients.  I guess the most egregious was a man who was reportedly 350 years old.  Now this was just one case.  There were also actual millions of social security beneficiaries that were over 120 years of age.  Think of that.

He described the atrocities that illegal aliens have caused to our people; the murders and rapes and the fact that he has now closed off the border and is deporting illegals at a record pace.  Trump reported that the military with the aid of the Pakistani government have recently apprehended the leader of the group responsible for the suicide bombing of American troops during the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.  And he reiterated how incompetently Biden managed that withdrawal.

He announced his intent to end the Ukrainian war and revealed that Zelensky has sent him a message saying he is now ready to get involved in peace talks and also wants to sign the rare earth metals contract.

Trump highlighted the steps he’s taking to lower energy costs.  And he highlighted all of the failures of the Biden administration.  It was a very long list.

All in all, it was an entertaining talk.  The impression is of a President confident in his ability to make America great again.  The Democrats on the other hand appeared to be a bunch of petulant children.  Interesting.

Bad News – Good News

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , ,

So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Ukraine – Endless Death

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I’ve probably said too much already about the Ukraine War but it’s one of those horrible things that can’t just go away.  So, ignoring it is just denial.  At this point there are no longer any good options.  Both sides have lost so many men that they feel they must win in order not to appear to have sacrificed a generation of young men for nothing.  But one of them will have to.  And if I were to guess I’d say it’s the Ukrainians that will lose.  But I think it will take another year for them to get to the point of collapse.    By then, the Russians will have lost a million men and the Ukrainians will have lost two million.  At that point the Russians will be so enraged that they’ll inflict crippling conditions and may increase the ceded territory beyond the four provinces they’re currently claiming as theirs.

And most of the blame for this should be laid at the feet of the neo-cons who put together this whole war during the Obama and Biden administrations.  They organized and sponsored the color revolution and armed the Ukrainians and told them that with the aid of the United States and Europe they would not only beat Russia but they would become a part of NATO.  The neo-cons saw this as an opportunity to test out all of their weaponry on a battlefield against the Russians without having to risk many of their own troops or nuclear war.  And they figured it would bleed the Russians dry and then humiliate them in the eyes of their own people and thereby destroy Putin.

Well, they were half right.  We have managed to cause the Russians great harm.  But from where I stand what we’ve accomplished is making them our implacable foes for the next hundred years.  And we’ve thrown them into the arms of China and hastened the end of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.  Well done, neo-cons.

But now Donald Trump is stuck with this mess.  That sideshow he put on with Zelensky in the oval office is part of some plan to get the Ukrainians receptive to a peace treaty.  I assume what he’s setting up is a take it or leave it deal where he negotiates with Putin, and then Zelensky gets his side to accept.  Well, Trump likes to negotiate but I’m not sure how much give there is on the Russian side.  I think the things that are written in stone are:

  • No NATO membership ever.
  • Permanent Ukrainian neutrality.
  • Substantial reduction in Ukraine’s military.
  • Some proviso against the Azov leadership ever holding power again.
  • Complete protection of Russian ethnic institutions (language, religion, etc.) in Ukraine.
  • Substantial territorial transfers to Russia.

I think there is probably some give on exactly how much land will have to be ceded to Russia.  I think the Russians are very tired of the meat grinder that transfers Ukrainian territory to Russia at a rate that translates to just a few square feet per hour but also can be measured in hundreds of deaths per week on each side.  It’s a sickening spectacle.

I don’t envy Trump’s job in trying to negotiate a peace treaty.  Not only does he have Putin and Zelensky to reckon with but he also has that pack of idiots in Europe.  The clown car filled with all the globalist “leaders” from Britain, France, Germany and all the rest of those useless countries will be howling and shrieking and demanding that we provide enough arms and money to continue the war until the last Ukrainian is dead.  If he does manage to negotiate an end to the war, he shouldn’t just get a Nobel Peace Prize they should also take back the one they gave to Obama.

But I’m not so certain anything but time will end this war.  If (when) the Ukrainians are forced to capitulate the outrage they will experience because of the brutal conditions of surrender will probably result in a witch hunt for the leaders who were responsible for this debacle.  I’m guessing that if Zelensky doesn’t have a bunker in a friendly nation that won’t extradite him he’s not going to live much beyond the end of the war.

And there will be other consequences of this brutal war.  What’s left of Ukraine will be destabilized and there are hints of Hungary, Poland and Romania looking to make territorial claims based on ethnic enclaves that were long ago added to Ukraine.  All in all, the fallout from this brilliant geopolitical catastrophe threatens to haunt the world long after we’re all dead.  Once again, well done, neo-cons.