Author: photog

Ain’t It a Grind

photog Current Events, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner , ,

Okay, enough about Trump and Musk and DOGE.  Sure, they’re saving me trillions but leave me alone about it will you?  Just send me my share of the loot when you break it loose.

And enough already about Ukraine.  Everybody knows by now they should just stop the killing each other and get back to being cold all the time like they’re supposed to be.  So, until they wake up to this reality, I’ll let Trump shut off the money and the whole stupid merry-go-round will slow down and stop.

And about the government shutdown.  Just shut up.  We’re all tired of that game.

So, what do I want to write about?  Well, I want to write about writing.  My writing.  I handed my story treatment over to Ark Press but that was a cry for validation.  I wanted to find out from an expert if it’s good stuff.  But unfortunately, the story isn’t finished.  So regardless if it’s deathless prose, I’ve only got 55,000 words and I need to finish a number of plot lines and story elements.  I think I have a major character to kill and I may even remove a chapter that moves things into a more difficult direction.  And, horror of horrors I may actually try to entangle two of the characters in a romantic relationship.

The main problem is how I end my war.  The action is frozen in a bit of a stalemate as both sides attempt to figure out a path forward.  The US government is a mess after the attack on Washington decapitated the federal government by destroying the White House, Capitol, Pentagon, Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies.  They’ve cobbled together an administration but after the late president’s nuclear attack on Connors’ organization and the country’s reaction there is fear that another ham-fisted military action might start a real civil war.

Connors’ organization is reeling from the shock and anger over the deaths of thousands of their friends and neighbors.  And the realities of trying to guard against the government’s next move and restoring the lives of his communities to some semblance of normalcy is not going smoothly.

So, I need a way to resolve both of these situations in a dramatically satisfying action.  I’m thinking of having my protagonist, Bogey (the sniper) put on trial and using that as the device to sway public opinion into some kind of reformation of the United States.

I also need a plot device that clarifies the back story for my computer genius Cutter and his AI stepdaughter Mel.  I think I have to tie Cutter and Chastain together with some deep dark history.  Maybe even something that neither of them is aware of but Mel digs up.  And I think to work out the story right I need to kill Cutter off.  But how?  Is there a rogue element left over from the CIA or Army intelligence who hunts him down and kills him?  Maybe.

And then there’s the love story.  Bogey’s son’s widow has four kids who need a father and Connors is a lonely nerd who also happens to be a billionaire friend of Bogey’s.  I’ve already added a few sparks between them but how to progress it along?  Obviously, the woman will have to move things along.  This will be something new for me in storytelling.

And last but not least, I have to find a satisfying ending that still leaves room for the next book.   I like the idea of having a world where scientific innovation has been established and I can push off in various directions.

So, as you can see the book is far from finished.  But I’m such a lazy man that between work, chores, the daily website stuff and writing the novel I’m overloaded.  Oh well.  Such is life.  Grumble, grumble.

11MAR2025 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I go to them and compare their voices and beauties to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.

Dorothy Osborne

Kursk and General Thoughts on Ukraine

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Kursk and General Thoughts on Ukraine

The story I heard was that the Russians used a natural gas pipeline to move hundreds of troops several miles behind the Ukrainian lines and the panic this caused in several locations within the Ukrainian Kursk front has disrupted the situation and according to some reports is leading to a rout.

It will take a day or two before reports can be confirmed.  But this may be the beginning of an overall shift in the battlefield situation.  Up until now the words, meatgrinder, attrition and horrendously slow seemed to be the best way to describe the war.  Russia has been making steady but glacially slow progress in capturing the four provinces they’ve declared their own.

The exception was Ukraine’s lightning strike into Russia’s Kursk region that seemed to catch Moscow off balance before stalling out.  Zelensky had hoped that Kursk could be used as a bargaining chip in eventual negotiations with Russia.  But this new situation may be Russia’s determination to put an end to the Kursk front.

If Ukraine retreats from Kursk, I think it might signal a broader collapse of Ukrainian military resolve.  But as I said above it’s too soon to know if some of these reports are Russian bravado over their pipeline strategy.

But even regardless of the impact of this attack it almost surely seems the Russians have the wherewithal to eventually wear down the Ukrainian army into submission.  These are two stubborn enemies and the attrition is mutually destructive.  All Russia has as advantage, is size.  As I’ve said Russia will lose two million men and Ukraine will lose one million and Russia will win.

That’s victory?

From my point of view, Trump will not arbitrate this negotiation.  At best he is forcing the Ukrainians to the bargaining table by refusing continued military aid.

But he has no special insight into the psychology of these two closely related peoples.  This is very, very close to a civil war.  And considering how many Russians live in Ukraine it’s even more personal than that.  The only ones who might be able to negotiate an early end to this war are Vladimir Putin and whoever the Ukrainians pick as their leader.  Is that Zelensky?  I doubt it, but it’s possible.  The reason I doubt it is that Zelensky has rejected much better Russian deals in the past and vowed that he would force Russia out of all Ukrainian lands including Crimea.  I think he would fear for his own safety if he came back with a worse deal that cedes the lands Russia demands.  But whoever it is I believe that the sooner they start talking the better, for Ukraine.  Every day that passes more Russians die and more Ukrainian land passes into Russian control.  Eventually Russia will win on the battle field everything it currently wants through negotiation.  However, as the Russian casualties continue to mount so will their demands.  Eventually it might come to include all Ukraine.

And not all the blame goes to Russia and Ukraine.  Joe Biden and Boris Johnson convinced Zelensky that the Turkish peace talks weren’t as good as what they would get with the help of western weapons and intelligence aid.  This terrible advice was a siren song that seduced the Ukrainians into thinking we knew what we were talking about.  That was a crime.  Because we were stupid or maybe we didn’t care and just wanted to see Russia damaged even if it meant killing every last Ukrainian.  Because we knew or should have known that the Russians weren’t going to let Ukrainians mistreat the Russians living in Ukraine.  They’ve been living there for hundreds of years.  It’s as if California somehow became part of Mexico again and then the Mexicans started to abuse the Americans living there.  Who thinks that the United States would just stand by while our countrymen were abused and killed.  We would do just exactly what the Russians are doing right now.

So that’s my thought.  Ukrainians and Russians know the psychology of their relationship better than anyone else.  The sooner those two sides sit down at the negotiating table the sooner the killing can stop.  Hopefully for good.  Because it’s not as if they’re going to somehow move farther apart.  They better learn how to be neighbors of some sort.

10MAR2025 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

“Comrades!’ he cried. ‘You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink the milk and eat those apples.”

George Orwell

Oh, Damn the Power’s Out

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We now return you to your original program already in progress.

So yesterday Ithaqua, the Great Old One known as the “Wind-Walker” knocked out my electric power and internet connection.  What a vindictive jerk.  Well, the generator kicked in but it caught me flat-footed.  I hadn’t loaded my post for yesterday or the night before’s, “Photo of the Day.”  So, apologies.

I went through the whole dance.  I charged up an old flip phone I keep for just such situations and tried calling up my truly useless power utility and my truly useless cable company.  And spent about fifteen minutes with each trying to escape from their AI and get information from an actual human being.  Completely in vain.  The power company told me it was after their business hours so no actual humans at all.  The cable company had humans but they are actually worse than the AI.  They know nothing, they care about nothing and they sound so bored all I could think of was the, “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” monkeys.  I noticed that both outfits promised to call me when they knew something about restoration of service.

Power returned almost 24 hours later around 3pm today.  And ten minutes after restoration the flip phone rang and both companies called to say that service would soon be restored.  Words failed me.

Being cut off from television, the internet and any news of the outside world was at first annoying.  But by late this morning I think I was starting to enjoy it.  I watched a movie on DVD (Mel Gibson’s Hamlet) and some music on an MP3 player (Traveling Wilburys) and felt relief that I wasn’t entranced on YouTube or X.  But all too soon Camera Girl saw a convoy of utility trucks heading down our road.  So, she dared me to get up and follow them.  I drove about a mile up the road and there was a truly colossal white pine being sawn into manageable pieces and stacked by the side of the road.  An hour later the generator cut out and the phone started ringing and civilization had me by the throat again.  Oh Ithaqua, we hardly knew ye.

So now I have to find out what I missed.  As far as I can tell, nothing.  Democrats prancing around trying not to look irrelevant, ridiculous and despicable, but failing.  Trump and his merry band running around breaking stuff and calling out world leaders as losers.  Cable news companies firing their half-witted staff by the bucketful.  Check, check, check.  So basically, nothing happened while I was hurled back into the nineteenth century (well, kinda).

But there was some progress.  We got some warmer (if windier) weather and the majority of the ice melted off the bottom driveway.  So, I went out there with various shovels and hammer-sliced it off the blacktop and piled it on the grass.  And I went to see what condition the west field was in.  It’s the wettest area of the fields and in spring it can be 6-8 inches of mud that makes it a bad idea to walk on it.  But it’s drying nicely and maybe tomorrow I might go back there and cut down the older raspberry canes and put down fertilizer for their spring growth.  And I took out a pair of binoculars and looked at the trees and sure enough the buds are ready to bust open anytime now.  So, ignoring the world for a day was a great thing as far I can tell.    But I’m back and ready to chronicle whatever tomfoolery the usual suspects get up to.  But it’s good to see the world is finally shrugging off winter and Dunwich is ready for spring, renewal, new life and all that crap.

Corcyra Again

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I found out that Ark Press does send rejection letters on submissions so therefore I haven’t been rejected yet.  But I found out it takes up to a month to get a letter after submission so I might not know anything for quite a while.  Well, patience is a virtue.

I listened to the ZMan’s Friday podcast today.  It was on US Foreign Policy and he was making a distinction of a realistic foreign policy (meaning in the interest of Americans) versus one based on some kind of moralistic crusade like “making the world safe for democracy.”  I guess this was a discussion sparked by Trump’s recent foreign policy statements that centered around the self-interest of the United States.  It was interesting and hearkened back to Woodrow Wilson and his attempt to restructure Europe in his image of what modern countries should look like, namely, the United States, which sounded a lot like every neo-con secretary of state for the last thirty years.

And all of that was good stuff.  But the end of the show was a discussion of Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War.”  And that always holds my interest.  It’s uncanny how the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC can reverberate down the millennia and ring warning bells over today’s headlines.  He reviewed Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the Melian Dialog and showed how these stances mirror the foreign policy reality and the attendant justification that we see today from an imperial state.  All very relevant and instructive for anyone looking at our relationship to Europe and its relationship with Russia.  I commend the ZMan for his use of this timeless lesson from history.

What it reminded me of was that other bit from Thucydides work, namely his chronicle of the Civil War in Corcyra.  Here the Athenians and the Spartans encouraged the aristocrats and the peasants in Corcyra to back respectively the Spartan (aristocratic) form of government or the Athenian (democratic) form of government in Corcyra.  And eventually the familiar escalation into class warfare reached the heights of insanity where even blood relation wasn’t enough to save someone from partisan hatred and murder.

“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In short, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was lacking was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations sought not the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition to overthrow them; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.”

It seems I trot out Corcyra every seven or eight years whether I need to or not.  The last time was October of 2017.  And since then, we’ve had the January 6th “insurrection” and Merrick Garland’s crusade to jail unarmed people who trespassed in order to protest in a public building.  It’s hardly Corcyra where at the end of the revolution people were dragged out of a temple and butchered in the street by their fellow “citizens.”

But it’s good to remember how all these things degenerate when people’s rights start getting trampled in the name of revolutionary fervor.  That’s why I’m glad that freedom of speech and the other freedoms seem to be making a comeback around here.  I think they do more to restrain government and make life in this country worth living.  Well, that enough.