Category: Current Events

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!

Tom’s World – 22AUG2026 – Money Matters

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

Though I hate to admit it, I seen nothing in Trump’s temperament or previous governance to indicate that he is the man to do it. In his 1st term, there was nothing accomplished or even proposed that would indicate debt reduction was an even a low level priority. Remember the early covid days and the multi-trillion dollar public buyoffs sent as $2000 checks per family?

Reality is that the issue won’t be dealt with until reality shows that it ultimately WILL be dealt with. At some point, a tripwire will occur and hyperinflation will start. If you have a good memory and track retail prices, you will have to conclude that inflation has been significantly larger than officially stated. Especially since the covid era.

There is nothing on the political horizon from any political entity that indicates a willingness to take on budget and reduction.

Debt reduction will occur via inflation, whether severe or hyper remains to be seen.

The average US house is climbing toward $500,000, average car $50,000, hamburger over $7/lb, good ribeye $18+/lb, etc, etc, ad nauseam. “Tom’s Official Inflation Monitor Based On the Price of Cat Food” tells us that a 5.5 oz can of Friskies cat food which sold for $.38/can in 2020 now costs $.87/can. Everything else is on the same slope.

Solve for X ( 1+X%)^5= 2.3 Hint, around 18% per year.

And this curve will not prove to be linear.

What do you think is behind the historically meteoric increase in the price of gold and silver? I bought gold 20 years ago for $600/oz and silver for around $7-$8, an increase by a factor of around 8-10. A lot of the increase has happened since covid. Do I sense a commality here?

I suspect that most of the sorta recent increase has been as people and institutions see something coming and are looking for something more stable than the US dollar.

Australian-group

Picture by TomD BTW, part of a series I was commissioned to do for an Australian coin dealer.

Trump’s Last Two Years

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Regardless of how little or how much the Democrats gain in the midterm elections Donald Trump will not have a congress that can legislate what he wants done in the country going forward.  So, what’s a great disrupter to do?

I think Donald should declare a state of emergency and fix some stuff.  I think he should use this state of emergency to balance the budget.  Unilaterally.  Unashamedly.  I guess it would be a revolutionary move.  But it’s needed.  The country has been bled dry by the titanic waste of the federal budget and waiting anymore time would be dangerous.  Now it’s not possible to eliminate a seventy trillion-dollar debt overnight.  It will take decades to do that.  But it seems necessary to at least make a start.  It’s shocking to think that the last balanced budget was under, of all people, Bill Clinton.  Of course, the “War on Terror” put an end to that but for the last quarter century American politicians have pretended that printing money endlessly was their God-given right.  Well, it’s not.  And acting like it is has brought us to the brink of hyperinflation.  So, calling it a state of emergency is, in my opinion, completely accurate.

Now, this would be a very large undertaking.  Slicing the budget down to size without undermining the stability of the economy or causing undue pain to the taxpayers requires the wisdom of a Solomon.  DOGE had the right idea about eliminating boondoggles, leftist set asides and waste but it was just the tip of the iceberg.  There are over a hundred years of malfeasance and stupidity in that seventy trillion-dollar debt and it will be necessary to close down whole governmental departments and cancel thousands of projects that either we don’t need or we can’t afford.  So, there will be many, many oxen gored during this effort.

Luckily, the most important asset for an operation of this nature is a very skilled salesman; someone who can sell the idea based on the belief that the ones benefitting from all this waste is anyone else than the long-suffering American taxpayer.  There’s nothing a taxpayer likes more to hear than that all those “leeches” out there are about to be removed from the federal budget and forced to do honest work or starve.  So, Trump can sell this based on the idea that trimming the waste will drive inflation down to a very tolerable minimum and eventually taxes can also begin to drop.  Not immediately of course.  The accountants have to figure out how long it takes to reduce seventy trillion dollars to zero.

Now I’ve been told that not having a debt is actually bad for the country and the world.  Well, I kinda don’t believe it.  Sure, government bonds and bills are a very attractive way to spread the costs of expensive programs and systems over the course of several years but making believe that a balanced budget is a bad thing doesn’t add up for me.  It’s one thing to buy a dishwasher on time.  It’s an entirely different thing to be in hock to loan sharks for amounts you can never pay back.  Donald put the United States on a permanent diet.  It’s an emergency.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 20AUG2026 – A Primer on New England Politics

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One thing to remember is a historical perspective. In the 40’s and 50’s New England was Republican, somewhere in the late 50’s to early 60’s a swing happened. Part of it I think was due to a shift in economy; much of manufacturing got up and left mostly for the South. Also, colleges shifted from very conservative to very liberal as the 60’s and 70’s went on. The Universities are a source of much of our growth through the 60’s as tech started to replace manufacturing.
The general character of the Old Line New Englander was fiscally conservative and relatively socially liberal (old meaning). In the cities, a far more liberal (modern meaning) variant (with a hint of that puritanism blended in) runs strong. And the populations of the cities and their near suburbs overwhelm the votes in the more old line/townie parts of the states.

Can we dig out of this? I’m not sanguine about that. MA, CT and RI and so overwhelmingly super liberal democrat in their legislatures that no reason reigns. On top of that RI and MA (and likely CT but I am less connected to that anymore) are rife with corrupt deals which feed back into the various Democrat politicians. VT and ME are overrun with hippy types that moved in and keep folks like Bernie and the other VT “Independent” senator in office. NH gets whipsawed back and forth as the balance swings, it is the most purple of the New England states, but it has voting laws (same day registration in particular) that let havoc happen at the towns containing UNH and Dartmouth. Maine is oddly split: the interior North is clearly Old Line New England and is actually one of its remaining bastions. But the coast (Portland and south) is VERY much indistinguishable from Boston suburbs in political bent. Just taking statewide offices from time to time is NOT sufficient. The state houses MUST be changed as that is where the power really lies. Without that, the feedback loop of Graft-> seats-> graft (repeat) can not easily be broken. If I had a guess, NH has the best chance to break the cycle. Its oddly large house means power doesn’t focus quite like it does in the other 5 states, so graft is less profitable. That combined with volatility in the seats weakens the loop. Unfortunately, when NH succeeds in starting to break away, it gets an influx of MA, VT, and ME folks who want the advantages but don’t buy into the politics, and we see that familiar seesaw effect as NH swings back to the Blue. I fear things will have to get MUCH worse for the head in their lower colon liberals to actually pop out and view the real world. Boston is Bad, but Not yet Detroit. Chicago or San Francisco bad, although Mayor Wu is trying REAL hard.

Muddling Through in Dunwich

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Being a Republican in New England is an awful fate.  Well, no, a Republican in New England is typically just a Democrat who doesn’t like high taxes.  He doesn’t have a problem with the social justice or the anti-white racism, just the loss of savings.  But for someone like me who is genuinely conservative, it’s horrific.  In every law and policy, you see misery and stupidity and what seems like the absolute worst governance imaginable.

Now, some of my fellow New England conservatives (of various stripes) are always hoping against hope that their neighbors will come to their senses and vote in a Mitt Romney or some other squishy “conservative” and fix the taxes, stop wasting money on welfare and get crime under control.  They say things like, “If we can just boost turnout of Republicans and Independents, we can fix these problems and show the Democrat voters that we’re the sensible choice for fair governance.

But these are just pipe dreams.  Sure, if the state after a decade or two of Democrat control has managed to empty the treasury and destroyed the credit rating of their specific New England state government, then surely, they will elect a Republican governor to restore fiscal sanity and prevent complete exsanguination.  But if the Republicans could read even the smallest lesson from history, they would see that this is just an emergency tactic.  Sort of like a rupture disk that prevents a catastrophic failure but is never meant to permanently regulate the system.  As soon as the emergency is over the powers that be will set to work pushing the system to the breaking point again.

Now, my opinion about these things doesn’t make me a very popular figure around Republican party circles.  What they want to hear is that things can be fixed and we’ll all live happily ever after.  Which reads like a fairy tale to me.  But the thing that gives me any hope at all is actually Michigan.  There is a blue state that seems to be slowly slipping back into purple and maybe red status before our eyes.  And maybe this is an evolution that worked its way through the death of one of the greatest American cities; Detroit.  Detroit and by extension Michigan was a union heavy population.  All the heavy industry, especially the auto industry played into the blue state model.  But over the course of decades these industries have been victimized by the rust belt decline in middle America and with Detroit’s shrinking population we seem to have reached the point where Republicans (at least MAGA Republicans) have a chance to get elected even to the US Senate.

And maybe that’s the only way blue states can be flipped.  They have to rot away to such an extent that the progressives leave out of desperation and all that remains are poor people who can’t escape.  Something equivalent may be happening in California.  But I think it will be decades before New England will reach anything like what California is experiencing.  More promising in the Northeast is New York City and State.  Here we see a case so extreme that even short-term changes may be enough to catastrophically destabilize the whole system.

But here in New England we’ll muddle along with just regular old progressive absurdity.  We’ll leave true insanity to the experts in Gotham and Los Angeles.

Spidey Gets It Done, Mission Accomplished

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I went with my three youngest grandsons to see the new Spiderman movie; “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.”  And shockingly, I actually enjoyed it.  We got there early enough to pick out good seats and let the kids buy mass quantities of popcorn and sugary drinks.  So reinforced by these provisions we took our seats and watched the half hour of advertisements and coming attractions for all kinds of useless products and awful movies.  Now it’s been a few years since we went to this theater and in the meantime, it went out of business and been refurbished by its new owners.  And they installed luxury pleather powered recliners instead of the usual crappy movie seats of yesteryear.  So far, so good!

So, I missed the previous Spiderman installment but I was told that in it another MCU character (Doctor Strange) performed some kind of magic-adjacent activity which eliminated knowledge of Peter Parker’s existence completely from the human race including all his friends and the girl (MJ) that he loves.  Now this seems particularly stupid but that is the situation.  So, one of the plots of this movie is Parker getting up the courage to tell MJ that she has forgotten that they were once in love.  Okay, that’s an even stupider plot element but let’s give the writers some slack to try and make that work.  Then there’s a plot element where Peter is having major problems with his spider powers.  His ability to shoot webs and other skills seems to come and go.  Okay, this is more of a standard superhero plot element so full speed ahead.

And finally, some telepath is able to take control of human minds and force them to attack a shadowy government agency called the Department of Damage Control (DODC) for some unknown reason.  I won’t give away any spoilers by saying that DODC isn’t a benign organization and the telepath controlling minds isn’t completely unjustified in these actions.

Well, before the end we have a whole sequence where Bruce Banner is telepathically controlled and forced to turn into the Hulk with predictable cataclysmic results and we find out that Spiderman has a quasi-working relationship with the comic book character “The Punisher” an Italian American New Yorker whose real name is Frank Castle.  Castle is a vigilante who doesn’t have as many scruples as Spiderman when it comes to using firearms to thwart criminals.  As an Italian American native New Yorker myself, I especially relished Castle’s extremely accurate Bensonhurst accent and vocabulary.  It felt like coming home.

Well, anyway, the plot moves along in a reasonably superhero-ish manner and naturally our hero comes out the other side with some progress in his personal problems but no permanent solutions so he can be just as conflicted in the next Spiderman movie sometime in 2028.  And that is all that can ever be said for a Spiderman movie.  Also, the special effects were especially deft and fun to watch.  So, the movie was quite entertaining and the boys enjoyed it thoroughly.  Or maybe it was the snacks.

Anyway, mission accomplished.  We returned home and Camera Girl loaded down a table with spaghetti and meatballs along with some biscuits that these grandsons especially love to dunk in a meat sauce.  What more could I ask for?

18AUG2026 – This’N’That

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Tomorrow, I bring some of the grandsons to see the latest Spiderman movie.  What is this, the ten millionth Spiderman movie?  Well, the oldest grandson is boycotting the film because he’s reached Marvel saturation.  And I can’t blame him.  I feel that no matter how many multiverse iterations they manage to shoehorn into the plot, I’ve already seen before what will be flashing across the screen.  But, regardless, I can’t pass up the chance to hang out with my younger descendants in their own element.  I can buy popcorn and their carbonated sugar water of choice and be one of the kids at least one more time.  What’s better than that?

And afterward, Camera Girl has promised them their favorite meal; spaghetti and meatballs.  We will gather around the dining room table and I’ll see what they have to say about Summer 2026 which ends for them next week.  And I’ll tread carefully because mentioning school would be highly insensitive.  I remember only too well how critical it is to forego the s-word this close to Labor Day.  But I am interested in hearing what they enjoyed most this year.  But I also want to just hear what’s on their minds.  They’re growing by leaps and bounds and I almost don’t recognize the little kids they were in the teenagers that they’ve become.  So, it’s important I keep some continuity in the relations so I don’t feel too disoriented by their rapid metamorphoses.

So, I’ve sold over four hundred copies of my book.  Hmmm.  Not exactly a national best seller by any stretch of the imagination.  And in the last ninety days I sold a little more than ten thousand pages on Kindle Unlimited (KU) which equals about fifty full books.  And based on the royalty data that means a book equals about a dollar of royalties to me.  Well, all I need is nine hundred, ninety-nine thousand six hundred more sales and I’ll be a millionaire.  In your face Elon Musk!  Seriously, it apparently takes a lot more than what I did in order to market a book successfully.  It’s a little humbling but I still want to pursue finding a larger audience for the book so since the ninety-day window of Kindle Unlimited ends today, I’m going to suspend KU so that I can include “The Sniper” on the next Based Book Sale.  Getting the book in front of right-leaning sf fans seems like the right way to grow its audience.  We’ll see how that works out.  But regardless of my lack of millionaire author status. I think I’ll start the sequel after the summer.  I have had some complaints that I need to provide closure on a number of plot and character situations.  I think the biggest complaint is that Mel needs to be explored to find out how this AI came about and where she leads to in the story and in Cutter’s life.  Personally, I’m more intrigued (and befuddled) about how Connors is going to stabilize his organization after the events of the nuke attack on his underground facilities.  I think I’m going to devote considerable thought to how he decides to influence the future shape of social/commercial/political life in the radically altered American landscape.

Well, that’s enough.  Enjoy Tuesday.