Author: photog
Medea and Company
It seems all that the news is filled with these days is stories about women committing horrific crimes and the American public (well at least a lot of disgusting women) crying out for these women to be shielded from the rightful penalties they should pay.
Lindsay Clancy is the Massachusetts mother whose trial was underway this summer. She strangled her three young children in January 2023. Eleven out of the twelve Massachusetts jurors voted to find her not responsible for the murders because post-partum blues and anti-depressant drugs made her do it.
Now we have Christa Pike, a fifty-year old woman who has spent the last thirty-two years in prison waiting to be executed for the torture murder of one of her classmates. She even kept a part of her victim’s bashed in skull as a souvenir of the atrocity. In fact, bragging about the killing is what got her caught. And yesterday when all appeals were finally exhausted Pike was given a lethal injection. In fact, she was given two lethal injections and survived! She was given two doses of pentobarbital, remained alive and was heard snoring, and was taken to a hospital where she recovered! Now this is the second lethal injection failure in a row in Tennessee. And because of this incompetence or sabotage this monster will probably sponge off the tax payers for another thirty or forty years instead of being carted off to potter’s field. And the mother of the murdered girl will see justice for her daughter denied altogether.
Well, I guess this is the end point of the degeneration of our society. Women who are supposedly the empathetic, gentle half of our species have now become monsters. Lindsay Clancy is a modern-day real-life version of the Greek myth of Medea, the witch that Jason brought back on the Argo and married. When hatred against Jason aroused her, she murdered their children and taunted her husband with their bodies.
And Christa Pike is a thoroughly vicious creature that should have been put down like a mad dog long ago. But now her defenders tell us that she is the victim of bad parenting and sexual abuse. You know what? Sure, all those things are probably true. She comes from a depraved background. But we who try to obey the law and raise our children to be good people have to share this planet with these monsters. Let’s take justice out of the equation. Let’s just be practical. People with such low impulse control and inability to refrain from violence are completely incompatible with a functioning society. They cannot be a part of the same world as normal people who allow this society to function. And for this reason alone, people completely unable to avoid violent crime need to be eliminated. And that doesn’t mean prison. Housing homicidal maniacs for decades at a time is too expensive and dangerous for society to consider it as an alternative. These people need to be calmly and skillfully put down in the same way a mad dog is put down. Sure this is the fringe case. Most criminals aren’t homicidal maniacs. But there needs to be a policy for those that are and the answer is death. Sorry girls.
02OCT2026 – Quote of the Day
Never tell your resolution beforehand.
John Selden
02OCT2026 – Photo of the Day
01OCT2026 – Photo of the Day
01OCT2026 – Quote of the Day
Marriage is a desperate thing.
John Selden
30SEP2026 – Quote of the Day
Ignorance of the law excuses no man; not that all men know the law, but because ’tis an excuse every man will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.
John Selden
30SEP2026 – Photo of the Day
Critical Vindication
So yesterday “The Sniper” sold over a thousand pages on Kindle Unlimited in one day for the first time (1,014 pages to be exact). In fact, before this the highest daily total was 688 pages so it beat it by a good large margin. And in fact, since the promo ran there hasn’t been a day where I haven’t sold pages on Kindle Unlimited and the total for September will exceed August by more than 100% (4,228 for all August versus something more than today’s 8,561). I consulted Grok about how my progress compared with the average first self-published novel and it told me I was significantly above the average new book. But it then qualified my success by adding that a mid-lister needs 50,000 to 100,000 pages a month to be taken seriously. So that means I need to increase my sales by a factor somewhere between 5 and 10. Well, that AI really knows how to put a budding writer in his place! But when I showed it the graph of my sales before and after the promo it said that there clearly was a change:
“What stands out is the pattern, not the raw total. Through most of July and August the daily line is choppy with frequent near-zero days and isolated spikes of 300–550 pages. From mid-September onward the baseline rises, the zeros become rarer, and the last few days reach 600–700 pages. That timing lines up with a five-day giveaway of ~3,600 copies. Free promotions rarely convert 1-for-1 into paid or KU reads, but they do push the titles into more “also-bought” and “customers who viewed” recommendations and give Amazon’s algorithm fresh activity to work with. The chart is consistent with a fraction of those new readers later borrowing the books in KU.”
Well, some of that doesn’t make sense to me but without a doubt selling has increased. I’ve calculated that sale of books (not pages but paperbacks and e-books) increased 59% after the promo. So even though these sales amounts are objectively minuscule the fact that they’re being driven by the people who participated in the promo and the fallout it caused in Amazon’s “algorithms” is very significant in the way it affects the book’s visibility on the platform.
And just as a reader’s comment recently took most of the wind out of my sails morale-wise, a new comment has restored my faith in human nature (and good taste in literature):
“Lauriea
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read
Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2026
Format: Kindle Verified Purchase
“I thoroughly enjoyed “The Sniper”. It followed the main character through his days in the service until his eventual retirement. He had a lot of hard times, but was a good man wanting justice for the murder of his only child. Lots of ups and downs and I wondered often just how this book would play out to my satisfaction. But I needn’t have worried. The author knew exactly what he was doing.””
So, thank you Lauriea wherever and whoever you may be. Your impeccable ability to recognize and applaud literary greatness is gratefully acknowledged by Jake Barter.




