Category: Current Events

Pay No Attention to that Girl Behind the Curtain

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I was watching a video called, “Every Civilization Dies the Same Stupid Way — Spengler Predicted Ours.”

He quoted from Spengler’s, “The Decline of the West,” Tainter’s, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Turchin’s, “Ages of Discord,” Toynbee’s, “A Study of History” and Sir John Glubb’s, “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival.”

The thesis of his report is that “every civilization dies the same stupid way, and why the people living through the final stage never once experience it as decline. They experience it as sophistication. As progress. As the most advanced moment their culture has ever reached.”

He mines these historical analyses for their ideas and melds them together to reinforce the idea that our society is now in the terminal stage of its development and will soon slip into decay.

So Glubb measured how long it took six major societies to decline; Assyria, Persia, the Roman Republic, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, and Britain.  He calculated ten generations or roughly 250 years.  The various other authors diagnosed the causes for decline in the stages that move a people from a simple, practical population of hard-working tribesmen to an educated, sophisticated society who eschew any work involving their hands.

Now all of this is very familiar.  Every one has made comparisons between the end of the Roman Republic and our present socio-political predicament.  But this presentation managed to hammer home some of the details that resonate so strongly with what we can see around us; the haves and have-nots diverging radically in resources, disappearance of the middle class, runaway bureaucracy, overcomplication of the laws and government, disgruntled elites looking to make a name for themselves with the have-nots (think Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC) and even depopulation.

As I said, all of this is very familiar.  But what was interesting to me was using this in my new book.  After all, complex societies require complex analyses if we mean to avoid the inevitable scourge of decline and collapse.  So obviously I need AI to figure out a way to circumvent this collapse.  And since I have a very personable AI (Mel) I guess I can impose on her to use her super-human intelligence to solve this problem and save the American people from civilizational collapse.

Now the hard part isn’t saving the world.  The hard part is making it plausible or at least enjoyable.  But that’s what I’ve been scratching my head over today.  How does one solve the age-old problem of building “The Republic.”  Plato’s version was simple wish-fulfillment.  He just went through a make-believe process of manufacturing a bee-hive with a philosopher king as its leader.  I guess in his mind that king was himself because who else would be the most philosophical man in the world.  But by that logic I would have to make Mel the king (or more properly, queen).  And what kind of story would that be?  But you know it really does make a lot of sense.  Of course, it would have to be like the Wizard of Oz and the populace couldn’t know that the wizard wasn’t a real flesh and blood person.  Or would it actually be even better if they did?

The Great Shirking Has Begun!

photog 6 Comments Book Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , , , ,

So, the promotion is done.  And the results are very encouraging.  There’s been an uptick in all three types of orders; paperbacks, e-books and Kindle Unlimited pages.  In fact, today I’ve had all three types of sales and another two five-star ratings showed up so a very good way to end the promotion and the Based Book Sale.  Bravo!

But now the real work begins.  I’ve got to go forward with outlining and writing the next book.  And to do that correctly I have to (as my father used to say) “buckle down.”  I need to devote several hours every day to writing.  And those have to be early in the morning when my mind isn’t yet reduced to the soupy mush it will become by later in the day.  And so that means something’s gotta give.  And that something will have to be my daily posts.

Some days I’ll be a ball of fire.  I’ll bang out page after page of deathless prose, take care of the chores at the Compound, grovel and genuflect to First Selectman Cthulhu and still manage to write a post.  But not always.  Some days I’ll put a song up instead.  Or maybe nothing at all.  I’ll try to keep up with the photos and quotes.  That shouldn’t overwhelm me.  But trying to produce five hundred coherent words on a topic that might interest the folks on the site is going to be beyond my powers of concentration for the foreseeable future.  I’m putting this out there to let everybody know how it is.

For most of you this won’t be a great hardship.  My mental powers have greatly diminished over the decade and more that I’ve been producing this blog and it may actually be a relief to know the ordeal is over.  But for me it’s kind of sad.  I’ve tried to be as reliable as I could be to the task.  But at the same time, I’ve got a strong desire to make this next book something special so I need to concentrate on quality and I need to finish it sooner than later because the longer I wait the fewer people who read the first book will be anxious to buy the sequel.

So, there you go.  I’m announcing the official “Shirking of OCF.”  I am AWOL and no power in the ‘verse can stop me.  I will understand if everyone deletes the web address and heads for greener pastures but I just want to add it’s been great talking to all you folks over the years and feel free to stop by whenever you feel like just in case I manage to produce readable text on that particular day.

Hasta la vista baby!

That Has Such Movies In’t

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What is called artificial intelligence or more specifically LLMs (Large Language Models) that can generate images and even video directly from text (Generative AI) is one of the most exciting technologies to emerge from the whole AI surge.  I have seen examples of video that looks as good as anything Hollywood creates with a mix of live action and CGI.  Which I guess isn’t surprising in one sense since this Generative AI, basically, is just another name for CGI.  But what is amazing to me is that what formerly was a technology that tech companies sold to movie studios for millions of dollars is now at the beck and call of anyone with access to ChatGPT.

And honestly, I can’t claim to know just how usable these AI videos are from a commercial point of view.  Could someone with a reasonable understanding of movie-making produce something that people would pay money to stream?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  But what is fascinating is that I believe it’s already starting to happen.  Recently several movies have gotten into the theaters that weren’t produced by Hollywood.  Several YouTube “influencers” have parlayed their eight-figure viewing audiences into a multi-million-dollar box office payday by producing their own movies.  Now granted, these forays into independent cinema haven’t been particularly dependent on Generative AI.  Just the opposite.  The two most popular examples I can think of used almost nothing but “practical effects.”

But recently several completely AI generated movies have been exhibited at major film festivals and even streamed on Amazon.  Now none of these have made any appreciable money.  But that may be because the movies suck as stories.  After all, Disney has proven that you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a CGI masterpiece and still produce a story so stupid that no one wants to see it.  But the point is if you are at all tech savvy you can now make a short sci-fi movie that looks as good as Hollywood for between $500 to $5,000.  That is earth-shaking.

To me that means we are less than a couple of years until we will see tiny studios making movies that are good enough to see in a theater but have no gate-keepers whatsoever between the creators and the audience.  That is a startling thing.  Some young version of Stanley Kubrick will make his version of 2001: A Space Odyssey in his basement with the help of a “film crew” of less than a dozen people.  He’ll make a masterpiece for about $20,000 and it will make a billion dollars and an earthquake will swallow up Hollywood completely.  Think of it, all of the bloated, studio budgets and absurd rules that dictate which and how many DEI hires have to be directors, actors and producers will disappear overnight and some much saner award will be handed out for the movie that gets the most views and the highest viewer ratings.

Well, anyway, that’s the dream.  How it really turns out will be interesting.  Amazon, Netflix and the rest of the streaming services will be the ones to harness the new creators that will appear along with these new video tools.  But they’re not entrenched in the old studio systems, at least not to the degree that Hollywood is.  I think they’ll see opportunities aplenty in nurturing independent studios; at least after some of them produce stories people want to see.  And that’s already happening.  “O brave new world, / That has such movies in’t!”

 

2026 Autumnal Activities

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So, Camera Girl and I are walking through our annual farewell to summer ritual.  Today I picked the very last string beans and the crops of raspberries and her beloved grape tomatoes are visibly shrinking down to the end.  She picked the last eggplants but they were too small to eat.  The pool has been closed for a couple of weeks and now I’m putting away all the chairs and tables and stuff for the winter.  Even the Japanese beetles are dying off and today I saw one of the preying mantids looking lonely for something juicy to eat.  Although he seemed to be making due on small red dragonflies.  These fliers are still prevalent but also seem to be running out of food.  The various flowers are almost all dying.  The only thing that hasn’t bloomed yet are the Montauk Daisies and the Wolfbane.  I guess there are still plenty of bees; bumble and honey, but there seems to be a desperation in the way they jump around on the goldenrod trying to get all the nectar and pollen before their neighbors get to it.

And with the kids all back in school, it’s a little too quiet for Camera Girl.  She takes it to heart when the grandkids aren’t around for more than a week at a time.  I try to cheer her by reminding her how exhausting it can be when the summer schedule fills up a couple of weeks with back, to back, to back kids’ events.  Well, that wasn’t a good idea.  It just got her mad at me!  So, I just sympathize with her grandmaternal feelings and remind her that a plethora of birthday parties are sure to be starting up soon and she’ll be satisfyingly exhausted before she knows it.

And Camera Girl has lived up to her name lately she has spotted a number of photographic subjects for me.  She let me know that there was a hawk perched on the back of the bench that we put next to her new pond.  I got a bunch of shots through the living room window with the 400-600mm lens.  The contrast wasn’t as good as I would have liked but when I download them, I hope they’re passably good.  She also spotted a big green (so she tells me) caterpillar on a walk we took in the park.  We took it home for photos and it turned out to be a type of sphynx moth (white-lined sphinx moth; Hyles lineata).  I was trying to keep it to hatch out the moth but the darned thing didn’t know it was supposed to like tomato plant leaves.  So, I let the recalcitrant larva go on its way.

Tomorrow we are thinking about going to an antique car show which is something that people around Dunwich seem to do a lot.  But we’ll have to see.  Tomorrow is the last day of my five-day promotional book giveaway and I’ve been like some kind of fanatic watching the dashboard tickers recording the orders.  I’m kind of obsessed.  But maybe I’ll tear myself away to see Henry Ford’s innovative horseless carriages paraded down the streets of various Dunwich environs.  Enjoy the day.

The Lessons of 9/11

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Today is the twenty fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Well, I’ll leave it to the professional pundits to try and wax poetic about the deep historic meaning of the day.  What I will say about 9/11 is where I have now found myself.  I won’t review my personal links to the New York attack and my visceral desire for revenge and justice against those responsible for the attacks.  All that is now ancient history and buried under the aftermath of the politicians and bureaucrats who reshaped our world using our support as a tool.

All that I learned from everything that was done by the American government is that politicians as a class are at best useless idiots and at worst our mortal enemies.  Almost without exception the Republicans proved themselves almost as awful as the Democrats.  Their embrace of globalism and the contempt for the well-being of their countryman is stunning and unmistakable.  The Democrats are only worse because they openly embrace the agenda that the Republicans pretend to abhor but follow in stealth.

9/11 and its aftermath are responsible for Trump and MAGA.  He looked at the betrayals and the contempt and he employed the naked truth to drive the likes of JEB Bush and the rest of the useful idiots off the map and then banished Hillary Clinton to the ash heap of history.  And then he learned how Washington works and he relegated Kamala Harris to the position she deserves village idiot.  Trump has made plenty of mistakes.  This Iran war is devastating our wallets with high priced oil.  Maybe he had no choice.  I can’t say for sure.  But honestly Trump is attempting to bring manufacturing back to this country and I respect him for the effort.

But very soon he will be leaving center stage and it will be time to find a new champion.  At this anniversary of 9/11 I think it is time to start looking at the next generation of MAGA politicians and have them start auditioning for the top spot.  I don’t expect Vance or Rubio or DeSantis to start doing a bad Trump imitation.  It wouldn’t make sense and it isn’t necessary.  Trump already smashed the fun house mirrors and let us see the Republican and Democrats for who they really are.  What is needed now is for the new guys to speak honestly and clearly about where we go from here.  Trump was the disrupter.  Now we need builders.  The next president has to communicate with anyone left in the middle who hasn’t picked a side and convince them it’s time to move forward.  We have to put in place a program to reduce government to a size that allows us to end the deficit and begin to reduce the size of the debt.  And hand in hand with this is a program to continue Trump’s efforts to reindustrialize America.  These two goals are the key to reinvigorating this economy and country.  And finally tying back to 9/11, the next president has to finish the work Trump has begun closing the borders and deporting all the illegal aliens.  That would truly be the best tribute we can pay to the victims of those attacks.

Promos and Painter’s Tape

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Update:

Best Sellers Rank: #100 Free in Kindle Store (!!!!!!!!)

#1 in Political Thrillers & Suspense

#2 in Military Thrillers (Kindle Store)

#2 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)

Overall promo update total 9/10/2026, 8:00 pm 1,762 e-books

9/10/2026 8:00 pm update 1,002 e-books

Order total for 9/9/2026: 760 e-books

Today is the second day of the Based Book Sale  https://basedbooksale.substack.com/p/call-for-authors-2026-basedcon-basedand my 5-day Amazon giveaway promotion for “The Sniper” https://amazon.com/dp/B0G7WRJJPH

 

 

 

I have to work Thursday but what I’d rather do is check my Amazon dashboard every thirty seconds on day two of the promo.  Currently I’m # 286 in the Kindle Free Store.

Best Sellers Rank: #286 Free in Kindle Store
#1 in Military Thrillers (Kindle Store)
#2 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)
#2 in Political Thrillers & Suspense

Previously the highest I ever got was # 3,692.

Of course, I have to wonder what kind of numbers the top ten are pulling.  So as of 11:30 p.m. the dashboard says 700 orders have been processes.  Interestingly one (and only one) of those orders was a paperback book bought for $9.99.  Kaching!  And even more absurd I sold one solitary page on Kindle Unlimited today.  I think that’s about $0.005.

Well, this is panning out better than I expected.  At this rate I guess I should have a few thousand orders when all is said and done.  So, let’s say the first step is on course to be completed successfully.

Now comes the part that is completely unknown.  Will having a few thousand copies of my book out in the world improve sales?  According to the experts, it should.  Of course, assuming the promo readers like it.  If they don’t like it then maybe it will actually decrease my sales.  But currently I’m sort of in the dark about what to look for and how quickly I should expect any reaction to the promo.  But, being an engineer, I will immediately start building a spread sheet and perform a statistical analysis comparing the pre-promo and post-promo sales numbers.  I’ll submit the report to the ghosts of the “Big Three” (Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein) and await their comments.  But I will say I think I’ve acquitted myself of my responsibilities vis-à-vis marketing my book.  From now on it’s up to the big dumb reading public out there to hear about my book and buy it.  The free ride will be over after September 13th and they’ll have to plunk down ten US simoleons ($9.99) for a paperback or a fin ($4.99) for an imaginary copy.  I think I’ve been more than generous with my promos and price reductions and general easy-going attitude about receiving the moolah.  So, wake up readers, you’re on notice!

My biggest real problem is that my lawn mowers are both on the side lines.  The ride-on mower needs an oil change (since last year) but I’m too lazy and disorganized to do it.  So, I’ve been using my 2016-vintage Murray 20” walk-behind mower with Side Discharge, 7” wheels, and Briggs & Stratton 300E series 125 cc OHV engine.  But the damn thing is falling apart at the seams.  The lower handle is wobbling around and the wheels look like they’re gonna fall off.  But being the lazy good for nothing I am, instead of tightening it up, I took some painters tape and tried to hold the lower handle onto the sleeve that it fits into.  You know, it didn’t work.  So, after work tomorrow I’m going to try and reshape the lower handle so it wants to fit into the sleeves.  If that fails, I’ll probably go to Home Depot and buy a new one.  After all, this one has been working continuously through the era of Trump and that is not an easy thing to do, I can tell you that.

Terminator or Savior

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I was at a get together with a bunch of family members.  And, as is the case with gatherings of this sort, we talked about a variety of subjects of almost a ridiculous range; Joe Pesci’s guitar playing in the shower, the theory that Alzheimer’s disease is an autoimmune disease, a recent positive experimental result in the search for dark matter, the likelihood that artificial intelligence will achieve self-awareness and a bunch of other stuff.  But the topic that had the most separate conversations over the course of the day was AI and the data centers that are being built to support it.

And I heard a range of opinions.  Everything from AI was the granddaddy of all bubbles that would shred the current tech boom once and for all, to the opposite opinion; that AI was about to create heaven on Earth where the productivity created by AI would allow us to live our best lives while problems like limited resources and affordability would evaporate in a world awash in material wealth.  Well, who’s right?

I’m going to guess that both these scenarios are fringe ideas that don’t realistically represent what’s currently going on with AI.

Whereas there probably is a case to be made that the trillions of dollars of infrastructure being assembled to allow AI to “transform every part of human industry” may fail to provide a positive return on investment and disappoint Wall Street.  But I would assume that would cause a bear market, not a complete meltdown of the world economy.

And as for AI creating an earthly paradise, I think it’s more likely that AI is going to cause a major disruption in employment markets that will be a net negative impact on everyday people until the changes caused by AI begin to equilibrate in the economy.  At that point there will be a new reality where the higher productivity will allow for the standard of living to improve.

So, AI will be neither a panacea or a catastrophe.  It will be just another change in the environment that human intelligence brings about as it attempts to increase its control over the physical universe and optimize the way that humans interact in what we call civilization.

But one thing I am sure of.  We will all have to get used to talking to bots almost exclusively.  And for this reason, I really hope that AI gets much, much better at training them to understand English.  Every time I have to struggle through trying to explain a customer service problem with a machine that is as dumb as a bag of hammers I can’t help but think that the Unabomber had something in that manifesto of his.

But despite all this I guess I’m basically optimistic about the future of AI technology.  I can already notice a great improvement in the quality of the answers I get from AI’s like Grok today as compared to a year ago.  They definitely have made these things smarter and more reliable than before.

Oh, and on a personal note, I had one of my cousins buy a paperback copy of my book when he found out about it.  I hope he likes it.  He might tell his family.  And he has a big family.

Pick a Side

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So, eleven out of twelve jurors in Massachusetts think Lindsay Clancy is not at fault for strangling the life out of her three young children.  I think this alone is all anyone needs to know to understand New England.  These are the kind of people who live in this region of the world.  From their point of view women cannot be held responsible for murdering their own children because life is just not fair to women and anything they do to make themselves happier must be morally right.  They’ll blame post-partum depression, dangerous medications and of course her husband along with every other man on the planet.  But not Lindsay Clancy.  She was not responsible.

So, we’ve come full circle.  Under traditional morality a mother saw her children as her primary responsibility in life.  She provided them with life and then milk and she loved them with her whole soul and sacrificed her youth and her health to give them a nurturing and loving home.

And now where are we?  Children are a burden and an imposition to women who put off bearing them until fertility is strained to the last remaining eggs and then immediately handed off to “child care” and pre-school as soon as the mother can escape her home for the office.

But even that is not enough.  Murdering them is now the new frontier.  After all, even sending them to day care doesn’t completely get them out of the house.  They still show up in the evening when it’s even more inconvenient.  And they still want to be fed and washed and who knows maybe even talked to.  No, there’s just one way to really free yourself from these parasites.  Just choke the life out of them.  Any civilized jurisdiction will understand that it just wasn’t fair and therefore you can’t be held legally responsible for freeing yourself from this biological tyranny.  After all, women are the sensitive, emotional sex and the sadness you feel about having to eliminate these living chains is punishment enough.  Maybe a year or so in a hospital with beautiful gardens and a kind nursing staff might provide the correct “time out” to show the peasants that the medical profession has sanctioned your return to society completely renewed and ready to take up a better place in society.  Possibly as a motivational speaker for other women trapped in homes inhabited by tiny monsters.

From my point of view deciding whether she’s evil or insane is moot.  There is no place in this world for someone who could do what she did.  If she wasn’t insane, she deserves death.  If she is so completely insane that she is capable of committing such an inhuman act then she should be put down the way you would a mad dog.  But even from an unemotional, practical point of view, what does a woman who strangled her infant and young children do with the rest of her life.  Who exactly does she hang around with.  Who is signing up to be her neighbor or friend.  What would you talk about with her?  Her past?  You can’t.  Her future?  She doesn’t have one.  I guess you could talk about her anti-psychotic prescriptions or the latest breakthrough with her psychiatrist.  But I’m guessing most people wouldn’t want to.  She really is basically waiting for death so she can find the correct level in hell for her variety of monster.

This case is a Rorschach test and provides an effective binary choice.  If you see the murdered children as the victims, you’re on my side of the fence.  If you have even the least sympathy for the child killer, you’re on the other side.  It’s a perfect dichotomy.  On one side are people, men and women paying forward the life and love that was given them by raising a family and making the future.  On the other side is a woman so self-centered and dysfunctional that she could strangle a three-month old infant just to be free of her human responsibility to pay forward what was given her by her parents.  To objectively see how despicable this point of view is just imagine the reaction if a father strangled his three young children.  Every woman in Massachusetts would be baying for his blood demanding a way to allow capitol punishment for this one heinous case.  But for Lindsay Clancy; nothing but sympathy for the devil.  Pick a side.

Easy Does It, Boys

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I was talking to an old friend a few days ago and the subject of war came up.  Now it wasn’t the Ukraine war or the Iran war but it was all war.  And I said I was worried that we might be in a situation where extreme escalation was a possibility.  And my rationale was that nuclear states are starting to get involved in larger conflicts like Ukraine and Iran and if these conflicts start to escalate, they very well might produce situations where the cost of losing is deemed too high by leadership and brinksmanship could drag us into the tactical nuclear scenarios.  And that could very easily spill over into doomsday situations.

Now, I was clear that I thought that Putin, Trump and Xi were all likely to want to keep a lid on any dangerous escalation but the current situations were very, very unstable and dangerous.  And because my mind works by analogies I immediately thought to try and compare this situation to World War I.  Well, it’s really nothing like 1914 except that a relatively minor incident might trigger a general conflagration.  I might compare our current position to that of the British back then and China to Germany and Russia to Austria, let’s say.  And these are just absurdly vague equivalencies but that’s how my gloomy mind works.  But despite the vagueness and the obviously different circumstances today, it occurs to me that things are a lot hotter than they’ve been for a very long time and the balance of power is become a lot less friendly to us.

Now, does this mean I’m digging a bomb shelter and prepping for the apocalypse.  No, I’m not.  But that might have a lot more to do with just how old and tired I am now.  Surviving a nuclear holocaust somewhere between New York City and Boston is an absurdity that I don’t even want to consider.  But at the same time, it feels like rethinking the cold war realities is more relevant than it’s been since the 1990s.

Of course, the other side of this coin is the fact that none of the nuclear powers wants to be seen as weak.  But with drone technology rendering most of the conventional battlefield hardware obsolete it’s very easy for superpowers to get drawn into frustrating and embarrassing regional conflicts that can easily lead to dangerous thinking about the advantages of being a nuclear power.  And regional conflicts seem to be growing in size and number.

Well, anyway, I’ve shared my thoughts or maybe I should say fears.  It’s been a long time since I worried about nuclear war.  And it’s not like anything can be done by the likes of me.  But it just adds another layer of stress to a world that’s already chock full of crises.  Well, I hope Trump and Vance and Rubio are keeping the lines of communication open to Putin and Xi.  Wouldn’t want a miscommunication to turn into the apocalypse.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 25AUG2026 – Bureaucracy of the Military Flavor

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I had a similar situation with my Disability pay when I retired from the Army. Due to a snafu about a separation check when I was RIFed in 1986, I could not get my retirement pay until it was paid back. Basically 2 years’ retirement pay. Meanwhile, I was approved for a 70% VA Disability. I figured that would cover most of the delayed retirement. However, the checks did not show up. When I enquired, I was told that the Disability would be withheld until the separation pay was repaid. After careful examination of the paperwork they sent me, and finding that both checks were being put towards the settlement, the math said that the repayment had been completed six months earlier. When I contacted the VA I got the bureaucratic run around until I demanded to talk to a supervisor. You can’t, the drone said. Why not? I asked. “Its POLICY!”

So, I let them have their policy, and filed a Congressional complaint. Neither Bernie nor Lehey did any good, but amazingly, then-Congressman Welch lit a fire under someone’s ass and six weeks later I got not only my retirement and disability, but $36,000 in Disability backpay!
Keep fighting,
Illegitimi non carborundum!