Month: December 2025

03DEC2025 – This ’N’ That

photog Current Events, Trump ,

Finally, a breathing space!  I don’t have to do anything for almost a week.  I spend my time working on getting my book ready for publishing and watching Christmas movies.  I confess that I overindulged on turkey and the fixin’s around Thanksgiving and am still recovering from caloric excess.  But after some vigorous exercise today I’m back in shape for what lies ahead.  And that looks like snow and ice removal!  Dunwich is up to its old tricks.  Instead of three inches of snow we’ve gotten a day of rain which probably will turn into a half inch of ice tonight.  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Luckily neither Camera Girl nor I are compelled to leave the Compound tomorrow so I can slowly work on the driveways.  I wish I had more tube sand but even a hundred pounds or so of it should be enough to prevent the whole thing from resembling an ice-skating rink.

I noticed that the latest fake crisis is horror over cigarette boats filled with fentanyl being blasted out of the water.  I can conceive of no better targets for the US military than narcotraficantes heading for US coastal waters.  What clearer priority do we have than preventing these people from selling poison to our people?  Don’t they realize that Saint George of Floyd was killed by a fentanyl overdose?  Surely that must give them pause.  But Democrats are always looking to side with evil against us.  They can’t help it.

Well, enough about that.  Now, how about those kooky Somalis in Minnesota?  Good old Tim Walz was handing over hundreds of millions of dollars in fake aid to the Somalis and they were sending it to terrorists in Somalia.  Even his own state employees blew the whistle on him and even the New York Times is exposing the sordid details of his cover-up.  Trump said that Walz is severely retarded and I think it’s hard to deny it.  Of course, this doesn’t add to the reputation of Minnesotans for keeping this bozo in office.  Now, of course it isn’t everyone in the state but it’s a clear majority that seems okay with government fraud as long as it goes to a constituency that will vote reliably Democrat.  We’ll have to wait and see if Trump’s Justice Department can find a judge willing to honestly hold Democrat crooks accountable.  Lately it doesn’t seem to be the case.

And finally, early indications are that Hollywood is throwing in the towel on woke entertainment for children.  Disney and its peers have lost so much money on woke movies for children and young adults that they’ve sworn off woke lecturing for the foreseeable future.  For at least the next year or two they’re going to try and remember what “wholesome” means.  No more trans kids, girl bosses or obligatory race-swapping of traditional characters.

Well, anyway, that’s the plan.  But can they do it?  I tend to doubt it.  I’m not even sure they would know an exciting adventure story if it reached out and bit them on the butt.  But it’s hopeful that they’re even trying.  At the very least it means that a whole bunch of woke writers, directors and actors will be out of work for the next year or two.  And that’s a beautiful thing.

Well, Spin the Wheel

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , ,

If a brutally long and tedious day starts and ends with good news, does that make it a good day? I would have to say yes. This morning started with the book cover for “The Sniper” arriving. And after returning from a long, grueling day trapped in the bowels of a drab New England city, bored almost to desperation, I finally have a deadline for the launch of my book. It will be out sometime between the middle and end of January. Now granted, that can be as much as two months from now but just putting a stake in the ground is what I need to coordinate the whole crazy flying circus of an effort. Covers and EPUB files and pdfs and key words and discount deals and reviews and project pages and pseudonyms and email lists and Amazon ads and heaven knows what else. Yes, a day that starts and ends well is a good day.
I was pleasantly surprised at just how accurately the cover art portrayed the scenario and the mood of the story. And the quality of the drawing exceeded my expectations completely. I’m extremely glad I went in the direction I did instead of a more generic cover. If for no one else than for myself. It makes the book real.


Now I have to confess that I have no idea whether what I’m trying to do makes any sense. Can a book from an unknown author with an extremely niche audience break out and find a generously sized audience? My rational engineering side says the odds against it are long. I’ll say one in a thousand.
But at the same time, a part of me is anxious to take the plunge. And that is exactly what I’m doing. It’s a roulette wheel spin with a big pot of my money plunked down on double zero. What could be more fun than that? Well, I guess winning would be more fun. But that’s well beyond my power to ensure. I’ll have to let fate have her say.
I guess now I know how every author since Homer has felt when his creation is about to be unveiled. And I’ll say it’s a good feeling. As Kipling said:
“When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went an’ took — the same as me!”
Every teller of tales is part of the long tradition. You make up something in your head and you want to see if the audience resonates to the same vibration you felt. But the worst fate would not be if a lot of people didn’t like it. The worst is if no one ever hears it.
Achilles in the Iliad wanted to die for glory, for immortal fame. Well, I’d prefer to live but I’d forego any profit if I could guarantee that a million people read my story. That would be a form of immortality. Well, spin the wheel.

Sometimes Good Enough is Good Enough

photog Current Events , ,

Human beings are terrible at governing each other.  Admittedly, there have been short periods of time when men have managed to flourish for even a few centuries at a time.  But over the long stretch things inevitably break down and human society returns to ugly oppression.  The Athenians managed maybe fifty years of decent self-rule under Pericles and his successors.  The Romans lost their republic to the greed of their oligarchs and had to settle for the rule of the emperors.  But they were a pretty awful lot.  Even the five “good emperors” managed about eighty-four years (96 AD to 180 AD) of decent rule.  But even during this period most Roman subjects were slaves employed as field hands on the industrial scale agriculture that the rich controlled.

As for ourselves, we’ve done rather better than worse.  The last two hundred and fifty years have been less oppressive and freer than almost any time and place in human history.  But there were very special circumstances.  The rich were so preoccupied with benefitting from the populating of an entire continent that they didn’t have a chance to thoroughly exploit the human beings under their control.  And then the industrial revolution made it incredibly lucrative to turn us into mass consumers and so they tolerated the idea of allowing us to be middle class while that process was ongoing.  So far, so good.

But both of those conditions have ceased to be ameliorating factors.  North America has been parceled out.  The money to be made by selling Americans consumer lifestyle improvements like automobiles and washing machines has sort of petered out.  Paying Americans to build washing machines has become horribly outdated since Asian labor became a thing.  The oligarchs really don’t see much profit in trying to maintain a middle class here anymore.  So, I think we’re reaching the end of our exceptionalism.  What now?

The way I figure, the usual ending to this story is feudalism.  The rich band together and the poor become slaves of one stripe or another.  Or worse, our overlords dispense with us altogether.  Robots are just so much more efficient and cost effective.  Sure, a few human slaves to take care of anything that robots can’t do as well as people but definitely a very small number of living beings.  I think that’s what they’re working toward.  But can we find a way around that?

Well, one way around it would be to burn it all down.  If all the information age infrastructure was destroyed and even the knowledge of it thrown away, well, then we could buy ourselves quite a bit of time.  Let’s say we made the integrated circuit a forbidden fruit.  Basically 1940s technology only.  We’d have to have a law enforcement department whose only job was to maintain the prohibition.  And it would have to be worldwide.  But for the sake of argument let’s say that the revolution is global in scale.  So, mankind decides to throw away automation.  Then what?  After all, slavery preceded computers by thousands of years.  It’s human nature that we’re up against.  Well, there you are.  Whether we’re eliminated in favor of robotic slaves or just made into slaves ourselves, it is human nature to oppress our fellow men.  It’s just who we are.

Of course, there is the old “The Day the Earth Stood Still” angle.  Instead of getting rid of computers we could put all-powerful and incorruptible robots in charge of us and allow them to fairly maintain a government for us.  Gort would make sure each of us was given a salary to live on and also makes sure we do our assigned work.  And with his staggering intellect he’ll make sure that society is arranged so that the whole range of human capabilities is optimally utilized so that everyone is stimulated and no one is abused by the system.

Sounds great, right?  Sure, it does, it’s the ideal of socialism but powered by artificial intelligence.  Could it be done?  I don’t know.  But I think we may be about to find out soon.  This is what I suspect is lurking around the corner.  And in a way, I hope it works.  After all, humans don’t want perfection.  They just want a solution that is good enough.  And maybe our present capability is an AI that’s good enough.  We’ll see.