Month: February 2026

One Month In

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So today was the last day of my marketer’s book launch service.  And as of now we sold sixty books.  Thirty-four were e-books and twenty-six were paperbacks.  And today I noticed that one sale (an e-book) was sold in Germany.  Well, well.

Owing to the fact that book sales have not topped one million copies, as of yet, I’ve decided to turn the whole thing into a network marketing exercise.  I intend to find ten people and have each of them buy ten copies and then each force ten people to each buy ten copies and then so on and so forth until by level ten we have ten billion copies sold!  By the way that math may be off a little but you get the idea.  After all if it worked for Amway and Communism how can it possibly fail?  Why didn’t I think of this earlier?  All I have to do is buy a white board and some dry erase products and maybe combine this with a Tupperware item or two and before you know it I’ll be a huge success.

All in all, it’s been very educational.  I guess the takeaway is that price-point and ads on Amazon are what sell books.  As soon as I dropped the price of the e-book from $5.99 to $2.99 there was an immediate surge in sales.  Since I have very few reviews, I’ve decided to drop the price of the e-book to $0.99 and try to get a bunch of sales right away in the hopes that it will generate some reviews.  Of course, that’s just my idea but it seems to make sense to me.

The marketer has additional services to extend the launch but I’ve decided to try it myself.  Now that I’m running the campaign on my own, I’ll depend on Amazon’s automatic key word selection to attract the attention of the techno-thriller/vigilante justice readers out there.  It should be very interesting to see how this change affects sales.

I will say that becoming a “best selling author” is harder than I imagined.  I assumed that with my incredible writing skills the publishers and the reading public would beat a path to my door and shower me with riches.  So far, no path.  So far, more like a trickle of riches.  But I am undismayed.  My acquaintances who’ve read the book report enjoying it a lot.  Now of course they may be just saying nice things because they like me.  But I will say it is very nice to receive accolades even from friends.  If instead they had told me, it was awful I think I’d be pretty discouraged.  So currently I’m buoyed by the minor success I’ve enjoyed and hopeful that with further exposure the book will find an audience (possibly in Germany!).

So, let’s just see how the next stage in this odyssey goes.  As always feel free to add a review to Amazon and hopefully the word will get out that a new classic has appeared on the horizon for discerning readers.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 27FEB2026 – AI, Yes and No

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I’m no Luddite regarding technology advances, especially regarding AI. It definitely has a place in the 21st century and in society as a powerful tool and emergent technology that can help humanity progress. However, the almost childlike faith many exhibit on its ability to never be mistaken is a troublesome factor. Numerous examples have been pointed out where AI LLMs get historical facts incorrect, or outright repeat Progressive-Liberal dogma verbatim when asked to clarify a social issue. Not really a good development to polarize public opinion on a technology they are promising will revolutionize the world. Over 400 AI data centers are currently under construction with another 900+ scheduled in the US alone. With over 1500 expected to be in operation around 2030, these questions of authenticity and quality of information provided will become more salient to the viability of AI. As to the effects on entertainment, I believe that the AI slop will become popular to a segment of the public, but another effect of this will be that human crafted works of art; whether in cinema and literature will also become more valuable to many. It will be the difference between “store bought” and “homemade” so to speak.

I’m Sorry Dave, That Was a Lie – Part 1

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Can AI completely change the world?  I don’t mean like Skynet nuking all the cities.  I’m not talking about terminators slaughtering humans and rounding them up for extermination.  I mean will the routine use of AI radically change human society?

Some people will say it already has.  I spoke to a hiring manager who said that three of the four applicants for a job he was trying to fill used the same wording in their resume for how their experience was relevant for the position.  And I spoke to a teacher who said he routinely failed sixty percent of the homework he reviewed because it was obviously AI.

In a sense those who say it already has, are right.  The children have stopped using anything but their phones to interact with the world.  Wikipedia and Chat GPT are the ultimate authority and the only way to learn.  This is a real problem.  And the only way forward is to extract the electronic devices from these kids and make them use the knowledge or lack of knowledge to show what they know in a test.  In future, test rooms will be shielded from wi-fi and teachers will get those wands that airport security use to search for weapons.  Only in this case the weapons will be iPhones.  But what other changes are we in store for?

One thing I’ve heard a lot lately is that music, books and movies will be created by AI.  And in a sense that will be true.  AI is an accelerant.  It can take an idea that it is given and flesh it out into a big flowery pile of mush that no one would call good.  But that pile of mush probably can be pared and reshaped and cleaned up into something the author could use and do it faster than he could write that much story on his own.  Is that a better way to do it?  No, it’s worse.  But will it happen?  Unfortunately, I think it will.  In fact, from all I’ve read it’s already happening.  Some woman bragged on-line that she used AI to write hundreds of romance/porn novels under dozens of pseudonyms and made over a hundred thousand dollars by doing this.  That’s a pretty bleak reality brewing out there.

And it’s kind of a shame.  It seems to me what AI should be doing is using all this power to assist humans to make a superior product.  I could see a writer wanting an AI to use only a small subset of good fiction to help a writer explore the techniques that great authors have used to draw characters and craft plots that appeal to intelligent readers and entertain them.  That’s a lot better than loading up a trough with slop.

Outside of entertainment and education I think AI will be enormously powerful.  It’s ability to research topics is amazing.  The problem is the lack of transparency about how AI makes mistakes.  Currently, the AI claims to be infallible and does not admit when some “fact” is actually false.  What is going to be needed is a testing procedure to give users of AI a way of finding dangerous errors in the information they’re being given.  That’s the world we will be living in.

SOTU Speech 2026

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SOTU Speech 2026

Trump had his State of the Union address.  I heard it was very long so I fast forwarded through the cheering and rigamarole.  What I heard was very good.  Trump highlighted the improvements to border security that have shut down illegal immigration and has curtailed the trade in fentanyl.  He talked about the fraud that was going on up in Minnesota with the fake daycare centers.  He talked about bringing down inflation and increasing foreign investment in the United States and then he had a bunch of feel-good stories like the US Men’s Olympic hockey team and he had stories of victims of crime caused by illegal aliens.  And he mocked Ilhan Omar and her cronies for their lack of patriotism and he criticized the Democrats for stalling his legislation and refusing to fund the government.  And he placed the blame for the problems that he is fixing squarely at the feet of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

I think he checked off all the right boxes and he spoke well and with humor.  I saw a report on CNN that showed that his speech was well-received by Americans and that after listening to his speech they thought that the country was on the right track by two to one.  Good.

I guess comparing this to Biden’s awful speeches and even Trump’s first term this was a very good effort.  It may have been a little long and there may have been a few too many guests but many of these people were worthy of having their stories told.  And Trump did a good job of portraying the humanity of these individuals who deserved to be acclaimed.

So now he has a little less than three years to make a difference in how this country runs.  And he only has until November when he’s guaranteed a Republican congressional majority.  It is my opinion that he needs to craft a real legislative agenda that will allow him to use those three years to the fullest.  I think he should push the Senate to abolish the filibuster and pass a republican platform including an actual budget for the first time in decades.

Many people object that if the filibuster is eliminated that the Democrats will ride roughshod over our country the next time, they get control of the White House and Congress.  I don’t think it matters.  They’ve done so much damage already that we’re kidding ourselves if we don’t give ourselves the tools to start fixing things now.  This is the opportunity to make things happen.  Three years of the White House in control of an agenda that the Republican Congress should enact will be plenty enough to fix a lot of the damage that has been done to this country.

Well, now I’ve said what I’d like to see happen.  Instead, we’ll get to see what really happens.  But give Trump his due.  He put on a very nice show and he tooted his horn justifiably and now he will have to pull a bunch of rabbits out of his hat to keep the Republicans in charge of the Congress.