Author: photog

Have Patience Oh My Friend Polemarchus

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So, today Camera Girl asked me whether I had figured out the plot for my sequel to “The Sniper.”  I had to confess that my efforts to outline the story had so far been pretty feeble.  And this has a lot to do with work and the annoying responsibilities it entails.  But I have been thinking of late about a plot line having to do with a very, very wealthy and powerful character (Connors) trying to change drastically the way that Americans live.

And this ties in with the current state of affairs in these United States.  It’s apparent that people on the Left and the Right are turning to populist leaders and movements because the American dream doesn’t seem to be working very well lately.  Of course, the two sides of the political “binary” would attack the problem in completely different ways.  The Mamdani wing would confiscate all wealth and “redistribute” it in a way that would turn the United States into Cuba or worse.  But even the Right hasn’t managed to turn America into a capitalist wonderland.  Trump has made some moves to try and reverse the off-shoring of American industrial jobs but so far, the results have not been robust in my opinion.

So, I look at this situation and I think that this may be the challenge of our age.  And suppose the political parties aren’t up to the challenge.  And what if the corporations aren’t interested in being part of the solution.  If I want to get dystopian, I can have us descend into a rerun of the end of the Roman Republic with our own Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar.  We could run that playbook and end up with an Augustus ushering in the approximately five centuries of American imperial rule by destroying the republic.

But what if I write a more hopeful tale.  Not a utopia but a technocratic attempt to find a better way to organize society.  Of course, artificial intelligence (AI) is the boogeyman of the day right now and it gets stood up as the cause of and cure for all our problems.  So, I can easily be accused of jumping on the bandwagon if I have Connors use some form of AI to help design a different framework for integrating people with an optimal result for the great majority of the population.

Now, I freely admit I haven’t the foggiest idea what that would look like or even if such a thing is even theoretically possible.  I wouldn’t want to end up looking like Plato does when someone reads through his “Republic” and the whole thing is a bunch of feeble arguments where he knocks down a bunch of straw men on his way to enthroning “philosopher kings” as his best and brightest ruling over his ant hive of an ancient brave new world.

But I think I would like to play around with this idea of a trillionaire re-ordering society along logical lines to optimize human happiness.  So that’s kind of my take on the sequel’s plot.  Of course, the first question I’m asking myself is whether the attempt is a success or a failure.  I’ll have to roll it around to see which is more interesting.  Have patience oh my friend Polemarchus.

Books and Bugs

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So, today’s post is about nothing.  I’m involved in a bunch of random things right now.  I’m reading two novels.  I’ve got Jim Butcher’s latest Harry Dresden book “Twelve Months” and I’m also reading a very old book called “Buddenbrooks” by the German author Thomas Mann.  And you couldn’t hope to find two more completely different stories if you tried.  But I have an interest in reading both.  But the Dresden book flies by while Mann’s description of the 19th century events in the lives of the merchant family Buddenbrook is a task that I peck away at a few pages at a sitting.  The translator saw fit to preserve the large chunks of French that Mann incorporated in the speech of some of his characters.  And the religiosity and the local customs of Northern Germany are curiosities for a modern American reader.

I’m also involved in a microscopic inspection of the flora in the fields.  I mentioned in an earlier post that I couldn’t find any preying mantis egg sacs in the yard this year and assumed that the mantids that I introduced into the yard in the last couple of years weren’t capable of surviving New England winters.  Well, either that isn’t correct or the native populations are making their appearance this year.  In two different areas of the yard on two different species of flowering plants (cone flowers and day lilies) I found the specimens photographed below.

Now, these critters are infinitesimally small.  And considering my old eyes, I’m shocked I found then at all.  And as things stand now, I haven’t been able to locate them again on the plants where I originally spotted them.  But this doesn’t discourage me.  After following some of the mantids around the fields last year I know that they get around and move quite a lot to find the diet of tiny bugs they need to fuel their substantial growth potential.

And I don’t mind saying that finding these little monsters cheered me up considerably.  I really do enjoy hunting them around the fields and watching them go about their work of stalking, killing and eating tiny flies and other arthropods.  Their skill is considerable and their appetites remarkable for something so small.

And the other thing keeping me busy is preparation for an upcoming birthday party for one of the grandchildren.  I found out that the propane cylinder I was trying to get refilled was too old.  Apparently after five years it’s considered unsafe and has to be recertified for use.  So, the Tractor Supply folks sold me a new twenty-pound cylinder for eighty bucks and now I have both.  I wonder how much they’ll charge me to “recertify” the old one?  I’m guessing something like eighty bucks.  After all, we’ve got to do whatever we can to discourage the use of evil hydrocarbons!  But it’s fine.  The burgers and dogs will still taste just as good cooked by the new propane.

Well, that’s enough for now.  I’m watching my Amazon account today.  I sold 613 pages of “The Sniper” on Kindle Unlimited today.  That’s almost three books worth and that is pretty good for my sales output so I want to see if it increases before I go to bed.

Populism on the Left

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Today I heard a news story that confirmed that everyone’s favorite oysterman has officially told the Maine Secretary of the State that he has withdrawn from the Democratic candidacy for US Senator for Maine.  Mr. Platner ended the message with a profane statement about ICE and few other progressive sentiments.  Well, what can I say but, “Graham, we hardly knew ye!”

But this decisive move by Mr. Platner doesn’t seem to have united the Democrats for the election ahead.  You see, there’s the matter of selecting Platner’s replacement in the next week or two.  And apparently the process for doing this is sort of undefined and is up to the state Democratic party to decide on and regulate.  And apparently, a bunch of Democrats inside of Maine and outside are worried that the selection process might resemble the way Kamala Harris was selected for Joe Biden’s spot on the 2024 ticket when it was discovered that he was brainless doofus.

I saw a video clip where the inimitable Joy Reid (yes, she still exists) was warning that the establishment Democrats were liable to replace Platner with an establishment shill who wouldn’t denounce AIPAC and wouldn’t say Free Palestine and might not have a picture of St. Bernie Sanders on his bedroom wall.  In fact, she told her massive Maine listening audience that unless Platner’s replacement was a virtual carbon copy of good old Graham that she recommended that they stay home and not vote at all.  Although she didn’t phrase it quite so politely.  And similar things were said by other esteemed pundits on the Left.

Now these discouraging words made me sad.  I thought that now that Graham had sacrificed himself on the altar of “Believe all women,” everything would be honky-dory.  But I guess maybe things are a little less “big tent” and a little more “We know what’s good for the party so shut up and vote.”

It’s a little hard to believe that maybe Susan Collins might actually manage to squeak by in November.  But I guess we live in strange times and maybe a New England RINO is closer to an establishment Democrat than a Bernie Bro denouncing AIPAC.  Well, I won’t be too shocked either way and honestly Maine is still New England no matter how much dress-up people like Graham Platner do with rubber waders and fisherman’s hats.  Eventually all of the Northeast will be a monolith of Mamdani socialists promising to tax the rich and defund ICE.  So, when all of this comes to a head in November, we will be able to stop thinking of Maine for the foreseeable future.

But something that Platner and Trump have in common and that we should be paying attention to is populism.  Providing an economy that creates middle class jobs and lifestyles for the great bulk of the American people is what Republicans need to be designing right now.  And if they don’t, then the next Graham Platner will be popping up in Texas or Florida and that will be a much larger problem for all of us.

Zodiac (2007) – A Movie Review

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Zodiac is a crime thriller released in 2007.  It was directed by David Fincher and based on the book of the same name by Robert Graysmith.  It is a fairly accurate portrayal of the actual Zodiac murders in the late 1960s to early 1970s in Northern California.  At least five people were attacked by the Zodiac killer in three separate events and several other crimes were also attributed to him.  And the taunting letters that the murderer sent to the newspapers had the residents of the city and suburbs of San Francisco in a panic about the safety of their school age children on account of his threats to target a school bus.

The bulk of the movie is the story of reporters and detectives working on the case following up on the evidence and sifting through the suspects.  The cast is headed up by such notables as Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.  But even the minor parts are ably performed with special notice for John Carroll Lynch as Arthur Leigh Allen who was the primary suspect and probably has the highlight scene during his police interrogation.

The murder scenes are brutal and creepy in the extreme and the whole film has a dismal sense of foreboding about it that reinforces the sense of dread that the populace felt during the Zodiac’s reign of terror.  The investigation into the killings never succeeded in an indictment even though the circumstantial evidence was pretty convincing.  And the protracted length of the search is portrayed as having destroyed the careers of the two reporters working on the story and also negatively impacted the SFPD team that was involved.  And eventually that is the focus of the movie.

And now my recommendation.  I thought this movie was highly entertaining.  The director succeeds in maintaining a claustrophobic atmosphere around the investigators while believably showing us where the blunders and problems hampered the search for the killer.  We can see how law enforcement back in the 1970s is hampered by a lack of coordination between jurisdictions and what we would consider primitive forensic methods.

Eventually one of newspaper investigators devoted years of his life (and the destruction of his marriage) to ferreting out the neglected details that all link back to the same suspect.  But all of it was in vain when that suspect died of natural causes before he could be indicted.  But it is a fascinating and creepy real life murder mystery that I can highly recommend to folks who like this fare.