Category: Current Events

Let Jake Barter Work on That for a While

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , ,

Now that I’ve assumed the persona of Jake Barter, my whole life has changed.  Jake Barter is no ordinary man.  At the very least he has the training of a double nought secret agent and the social connections of Bruce Wayne.  His resume is a combination of special forces operator and philosopher king.  And because of this I told Camera Girl that she needed to treat me with much greater respect and an almost religious awe.

I don’t think she “gets it” yet.  You know what they say about a prophet in his own country.  Well, that goes double for a pseudonymous author.  I think I may now begin to write the memoirs of Jake Barter in my spare time.  I think he will be a picaresque character who gets involved in serious situations like wars, revolutions and social movements and ends up causing things to go south in horribly predictable ways based on his sloth, greed and phenomenal incompetence.  His only redeeming qualities are monumental overconfidence, enormous likeability and unbelievable luck.  I’m thinking I’ll start him off as a special advisor to Trump on constitutional law and then take it from there.

But seriously, I am thinking about new characters for future stories and I think the next thing I do will have a strong humorous streak in it.  And this is because I do enjoy making fun of things I don’t like and combining that with a writing project should make it a lot of fun for me.  But what I must do is decide if it will be in the same “universe” as “The Sniper.”  So far there isn’t a lot of humor there and maybe it would be better to separate a new project from a place with so much trauma lurking around every turn.  And that’s fine.  Making up multiple fictional worlds allows the author to escape from any traps he’s gotten himself into in the old ones.  You can get tired of a scenario or you just need a break from figuring out how to keep your characters from either getting killed or solving all their problems.  After all, either of those paths ends the story.  So, you have to be constantly threading the needle to maintain the overall “problem” but still carve out a piece of plotline to make the present installment interesting.

I think I might want to do an extraterrestrial story.  I’ve played around with some short story / novella length things in the past but they just petered out.  I think this time I’ll try to storyboard a whole bunch of stuff first so I have a direction and enough plot lines and an overarching direction for the thing before I get really started.  And what is currently completely stymying me is deciding what kind of Earth this will be.  Will it be like the actual current day disaster we are living through or will it be some kind of “day after tomorrow” where we’ve gotten our act together and learned how to live like human beings.  Well, I’ll let Jake Barter work on that for a while.

Europan Trilobites

photog Current Events, Science ,

I was watching a YouTube video about the material that a NASA probe brought back from an asteroid.  This asteroid apparently is in a near Earth orbit and so this mission was able to reach and return from this tiny world in just a few years with its cargo of sand and gravel.  By the look of the asteroid, it’s not even a solid piece of rock but a bunch of space junk that gravitated together out in the lonely stretches of interplanetary space.

But as unpromising as this locale seems to me, apparently, it was a bonanza for science.  This one kilometer flying gravel pit somehow contains an astonishing collection of organic molecules that hint shockingly about being the precursors or even the aftermath of life.  A slew of amino acids and even some precursors of the RNA molecule showed up in this sampler that NASA recovered.

Now, reading this I immediately began to question in my own mind whether these organic molecules started out on Earth and were ejected into space during one of the asteroid collisions that befall this planet every once in a great while.  After all, if rocks from Mars have ended up on Earth (as has been claimed by geologists) then surely debris from Earth could have contaminated nearby space and ended up on this neighboring rock.  But the writers of this report have information that dates this asteroid to very ancient times.  In fact, they claim it’s older than the planets and could possibly contain material from completely outside the solar system.  Well, who knows?  Despite assurances I think it’s fifty/fifty whether it’s originally terrestrial organic material they’re looking at.

But suppose it really is extraterrestrial in origin.  In that case, I think that eventually we will find that life existed on Mars in the past when it possessed abundant water.  In fact, it’s entirely possible that life exists cryptically below the surface of Mars at a depth where temperature is higher and reservoirs of water exist.  And if organic molecules are floating around the solar system, it seems likely that some of the larger Jovian and Saturnian moons with their liquid water oceans will also turn out to contain life.

Now here’s the thing.  I would make a small wager that when these life forms are found, they will be shown to have a relationship to terrestrial organisms.  I say this because I think they will be descendants of microorganisms that have managed to be ejected from Earth and drifted through the solar system until they reached environments that they could adapt to.

Of course, it’s possible that life on Earth also came from space.  Experimentation with hardy terrestrial lifeforms has shown that they can exist in the vacuum of interplanetary space for surprisingly long periods as spores.  I guess the interesting question is just how advanced is the life that we will find in the rest of the solar system.  There is a big difference between finding bacteria, algae, lichen or moss on Mars or a jellyfish swimming in the oceans of Titan as opposed to finding the xenomorph.  Well, I won’t be greedy.  I’ll split the difference.  I’ll settle for a Europan trilobite.

Tom’s World – 04DEC2025 – The End of “Our Democracy”

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

Here’s a column by Christopher Chantrill, whom I’ve been following religiously for several years. He has several uncommon, shall we say, takes on the political landscape.

A Commoner Manifesto Pushing Back Against the Revolution of the commoners Christopher Chantrill Dec 03, 2025

“Our situation is not whether to have a republic or democracy. Our situation is what to do after the failure of the educated-class project of the last 150-200 years. Obviously, the educated class wants to hang on.”

…

“Problem for any ruling class is that, at the end of the dynasty, the rulers are not sending their best: Biden, Harris, Walz: see what I mean? And so, even though they have sat majestically on the throne for decades and won world wars and saved workers and blacks and women and gays from a fate worse than death, when it comes to the crunch, they don’t have the ability and the skills and the cojones to realize that they have screwed up, that their regime is incompetent and corrupt, and that dynasties don’t last forever.”

03DEC2025 – This ’N’ That

photog Current Events, Trump ,

Finally, a breathing space!  I don’t have to do anything for almost a week.  I spend my time working on getting my book ready for publishing and watching Christmas movies.  I confess that I overindulged on turkey and the fixin’s around Thanksgiving and am still recovering from caloric excess.  But after some vigorous exercise today I’m back in shape for what lies ahead.  And that looks like snow and ice removal!  Dunwich is up to its old tricks.  Instead of three inches of snow we’ve gotten a day of rain which probably will turn into a half inch of ice tonight.  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Luckily neither Camera Girl nor I are compelled to leave the Compound tomorrow so I can slowly work on the driveways.  I wish I had more tube sand but even a hundred pounds or so of it should be enough to prevent the whole thing from resembling an ice-skating rink.

I noticed that the latest fake crisis is horror over cigarette boats filled with fentanyl being blasted out of the water.  I can conceive of no better targets for the US military than narcotraficantes heading for US coastal waters.  What clearer priority do we have than preventing these people from selling poison to our people?  Don’t they realize that Saint George of Floyd was killed by a fentanyl overdose?  Surely that must give them pause.  But Democrats are always looking to side with evil against us.  They can’t help it.

Well, enough about that.  Now, how about those kooky Somalis in Minnesota?  Good old Tim Walz was handing over hundreds of millions of dollars in fake aid to the Somalis and they were sending it to terrorists in Somalia.  Even his own state employees blew the whistle on him and even the New York Times is exposing the sordid details of his cover-up.  Trump said that Walz is severely retarded and I think it’s hard to deny it.  Of course, this doesn’t add to the reputation of Minnesotans for keeping this bozo in office.  Now, of course it isn’t everyone in the state but it’s a clear majority that seems okay with government fraud as long as it goes to a constituency that will vote reliably Democrat.  We’ll have to wait and see if Trump’s Justice Department can find a judge willing to honestly hold Democrat crooks accountable.  Lately it doesn’t seem to be the case.

And finally, early indications are that Hollywood is throwing in the towel on woke entertainment for children.  Disney and its peers have lost so much money on woke movies for children and young adults that they’ve sworn off woke lecturing for the foreseeable future.  For at least the next year or two they’re going to try and remember what “wholesome” means.  No more trans kids, girl bosses or obligatory race-swapping of traditional characters.

Well, anyway, that’s the plan.  But can they do it?  I tend to doubt it.  I’m not even sure they would know an exciting adventure story if it reached out and bit them on the butt.  But it’s hopeful that they’re even trying.  At the very least it means that a whole bunch of woke writers, directors and actors will be out of work for the next year or two.  And that’s a beautiful thing.

Sometimes Good Enough is Good Enough

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Human beings are terrible at governing each other.  Admittedly, there have been short periods of time when men have managed to flourish for even a few centuries at a time.  But over the long stretch things inevitably break down and human society returns to ugly oppression.  The Athenians managed maybe fifty years of decent self-rule under Pericles and his successors.  The Romans lost their republic to the greed of their oligarchs and had to settle for the rule of the emperors.  But they were a pretty awful lot.  Even the five “good emperors” managed about eighty-four years (96 AD to 180 AD) of decent rule.  But even during this period most Roman subjects were slaves employed as field hands on the industrial scale agriculture that the rich controlled.

As for ourselves, we’ve done rather better than worse.  The last two hundred and fifty years have been less oppressive and freer than almost any time and place in human history.  But there were very special circumstances.  The rich were so preoccupied with benefitting from the populating of an entire continent that they didn’t have a chance to thoroughly exploit the human beings under their control.  And then the industrial revolution made it incredibly lucrative to turn us into mass consumers and so they tolerated the idea of allowing us to be middle class while that process was ongoing.  So far, so good.

But both of those conditions have ceased to be ameliorating factors.  North America has been parceled out.  The money to be made by selling Americans consumer lifestyle improvements like automobiles and washing machines has sort of petered out.  Paying Americans to build washing machines has become horribly outdated since Asian labor became a thing.  The oligarchs really don’t see much profit in trying to maintain a middle class here anymore.  So, I think we’re reaching the end of our exceptionalism.  What now?

The way I figure, the usual ending to this story is feudalism.  The rich band together and the poor become slaves of one stripe or another.  Or worse, our overlords dispense with us altogether.  Robots are just so much more efficient and cost effective.  Sure, a few human slaves to take care of anything that robots can’t do as well as people but definitely a very small number of living beings.  I think that’s what they’re working toward.  But can we find a way around that?

Well, one way around it would be to burn it all down.  If all the information age infrastructure was destroyed and even the knowledge of it thrown away, well, then we could buy ourselves quite a bit of time.  Let’s say we made the integrated circuit a forbidden fruit.  Basically 1940s technology only.  We’d have to have a law enforcement department whose only job was to maintain the prohibition.  And it would have to be worldwide.  But for the sake of argument let’s say that the revolution is global in scale.  So, mankind decides to throw away automation.  Then what?  After all, slavery preceded computers by thousands of years.  It’s human nature that we’re up against.  Well, there you are.  Whether we’re eliminated in favor of robotic slaves or just made into slaves ourselves, it is human nature to oppress our fellow men.  It’s just who we are.

Of course, there is the old “The Day the Earth Stood Still” angle.  Instead of getting rid of computers we could put all-powerful and incorruptible robots in charge of us and allow them to fairly maintain a government for us.  Gort would make sure each of us was given a salary to live on and also makes sure we do our assigned work.  And with his staggering intellect he’ll make sure that society is arranged so that the whole range of human capabilities is optimally utilized so that everyone is stimulated and no one is abused by the system.

Sounds great, right?  Sure, it does, it’s the ideal of socialism but powered by artificial intelligence.  Could it be done?  I don’t know.  But I think we may be about to find out soon.  This is what I suspect is lurking around the corner.  And in a way, I hope it works.  After all, humans don’t want perfection.  They just want a solution that is good enough.  And maybe our present capability is an AI that’s good enough.  We’ll see.

Donald, Maximum Effort

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I hate to sound like the crazy old guy walking around with the sign that says, “THE END IS NEAR!!!

I hate to be that guy but I think maybe things are getting so much crazier that I’m not sure things aren’t going to crack up pretty soon.  The crazies seem to be coming out of the woodworks and they’re shooting up all kinds of people and places and things.  It’s got me thinking that the whole mess may boil over pretty soon.  Now, I don’t even know what that means or what it would look like.  After all, when the bad guys start shooting at the good guys the only thing the good guys can do is shoot back faster and better.  So that doesn’t allow for a normalization.  I guess what I’m thinking is that we’ll be going through a catastrophe; a meltdown.

When that Afghan fired on the National Guardsmen it made me think that we’re going to see some violent chaotic times.  I’m trying to think of an analogous historical example and the only thing I could think of was the gang warfare and general lawlessness associated with the Prohibition Era organized crime in places like Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s.  The difference is that in our era a major political party is more or less sponsoring the chaos.  At the federal, state and local levels Democrat politicians are advocating for and justifying violence against law enforcement.  Whether it’s Bernie Sanders or AOC or Mamdani; they’re calling for violence against ICE agents and National Guardsmen.  They couch it in terms like resistance but what they mean is violence.  The only thing I don’t know is whether the Trump administration is ready to fight fire with fire.  I hope they are.  Because if they back down from these people we will lose this country.

By the same token what would it look like to beat them?  I guess if the FBI did a serious job of identifying antifa on a comprehensive scale and managed to jail them the way the Biden administration jailed the January 11th protestors that would go a long way toward putting a stop to the resistance in places like Portland, San Francisco and Minneapolis.  If suddenly the radical core of these resistance movements were all sitting in jail cells for three or four years that would have a devastating effect on the radical Left.  In fact, I think it would kill it.

Well, I wish Trump every success in his war on the psychopathic Left.  After all, these are the same people who twice tried to put a bullet in him.  He knows they’re serious and he has a machine (the FBI) that was built for counter-terrorism.  All he has to do is force his lieutenants to rev that machine up.  I figure this summer is going to be “peak street crazy season.”  They’ll be burning stuff and rioting with the whole thing set to eleven.  This will be his chance to show us what he can do.  Donald, maximum effort.

It Might be Good Enough

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews , , ,

I was watching a video on YouTube that discussed the cratering of movie attendance after 2020 and how even after COVID was no longer a thing, how movie attendance has never recovered to pre-2020 numbers.  But the truth is that even before COVID the movies were steadily losing ground since around the year 2000.  So really COVID just hastened a trend that was already under way.

Well, that clarifies things somewhat but I think there are things to consider about this whole trend.  It’s not just a situation where a change in technology is disrupting an old business model.  Without a doubt that is happening.  But there is another phenomenon at work simultaneously.  And that factor is ideology.  For at least the last ten years there has been a concerted effort on the part of the movie making industry to restrict films to what they consider “acceptable” themes and characters.

And I think the drop in ticket sales reflects this change.  A solid thirty five percent of the country consists of people who aren’t motivated to see these types of movies, at all.  And this accounts for the drop in attendance and box office.

I guess the question that must be answered is, can the industry survive without this segment of the population?  The jury is still out but I think the answer is no.  Theaters have already become a low margin industry and without the enthusiastic patronage of key demographics financial viability won’t exist for much longer.  Then, what are the possibilities going forward?

One possibility is for some newer players in the movie making industry to modernize their operations to lower costs to the point where profits can be made with niche projects that can depend on a reliable demographic to support them.  This could work for the superhero films if the movies cater to the expectations of boys and young men to be entertained with an adventure story that appeals to their instincts.  By the same token a film that caters to the expectations of an LGBTQ audience or a young female audience or a baby boomer audience could also make money if its budget doesn’t swamp out its box office.  And so that could be the future.

I guess it’s possible that Hollywood could become so frightened by what has happened to their profits that they decide to do an about face and start making the kind of movies they made twenty years ago; ones that appealed to the bulk of Americans without trying to divide them by race and sex.  But somehow, I seriously doubt they’d succeed.  I don’t think they still have the wherewithal to recognize what goes into a movie like that.  Even if they tried to recreate that kind of movie making their instincts would betray them and the same woke tropes and characters would appear.  So the first scenario with new players seems more likely.

But I do not think any of this will happen quickly.  The entertainment industry is currently in turmoil.  Video games are currently the most popular form of entertainment for the younger generation.  Super hero movies in the last two or three years have bombed at the box office pretty consistently.  It will be a little while before the new money from Silicon Valley has had a chance to completely usurp the crown from the old Hollywood studios.  It’s definitely already happening but it’s not there yet.  When it does, I think we will start to see some very interesting changes.  It will never look like what we had.  Because we are not what we used to be.  But if it provides products for all of the larger audience types it might be good enough for my movie viewing pleasure.

Thanksgiving 2025

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , , , ,

Tomorrow is Camera Girl’s D-Day.  The family comes over for a twenty-six-pound turkey and all the trimmings.  I counted up the individual food courses and it came close to thirty.  So, this is ridiculous and I asked her if she wants to start cutting back on all this preparation or get the daughters to help and she shook off the suggestion as heresy.  Apparently, she lives for this.  And I’m glad.  I think we all would miss something if she didn’t put this particular menu together in the traditional way that everyone in the family now looks at as the only way to have dinner on Thanksgiving.  The grandkids have never known a different menu at Thanksgiving and that’s going back over twenty years for some of them.  All in all, that’s an amazing track record.

Of course, one day things will change.  One day the grandkids will start families of their own.  And they won’t be able to come to our house every year.  Or maybe we’ll just get too old to run Thanksgiving.  But for now, we live in that golden era where all the grandkids think this regime is eternal.  And I’ll let that be the party line.

Tomorrow we’ll gather for the feast and sit down at 2pm.  I’ll have the honor (!?!) of carving the turkey and sitting at the head of the table as pater familias but all the power is vested in Camera Girl as boss of the kitchen.  She will be scurrying around making sure that the various dishes are available to people at all sections of the table (or tables, the crowd spills over onto a couple of smaller tables added onto the main table) and truth be told I don’t think she even eats a mouthful of food for the first forty minutes of the campaign.  But once the table is completely stocked and everyone has filled their plates for the first time she will settle into her seat and stay there until dessert is needed.  And this will be an assortment of home-made pies and other desserts.  The only thing I always insist on is the availability of several gallons of good quality vanilla ice cream.  Inevitably there will be several other flavors represented; chocolate chip, strawberry, even heretical flavors like cookies and cream.  But for me the gold standard is vanilla.  It is a pure element, possibly the quintessence of the Thanksgiving dessert.  And my grandchildren agree with me vehemently.  There was an open revolt one year when vanilla ice cream wasn’t clearly visible on the dessert table.  I joined in their cries of protest and Camera Girl was forced to head into the basement to the back of the freezer where the vanilla was hiding.  Since then, there’s been no more nonsense about it.

And after we’ve stuffed ourselves with turkey and fixings and dessert, the grandsons and I will head into the living room to watch our holiday movies.  Typically, we’ll bust out the Laurel and Hardy version of “March of the Wooden Soldiers.”  Afterwards I’ll try to put on one of the versions of “A Christmas Carol.”  I think they feel that the Alistair Sim version is definitive.  But we’ll see.

So, the site may be kind of quiet tomorrow but it’s for a good cause.  Happy Thanksgiving to all you folks out there.  Enjoy the day.

The Crisis of Modernity

photog Current Events, photog's Corner

If you’ve been around for seventy years or so you know that the way we live in these United States has been in constant flux for almost your whole life.  But if you think about it didn’t start there.  In fact, when was the last time that life was wholly stable in form and detail?  Well in some backwater areas of the world it’s probably much as it ever was.  But for Europeans you might have to go all the way back to the mid-1200s.  Back before the age of sea exploration.  So, feudalism basically.

And what was going on back then?  I guess most of our ancestors were serfs living and working on the lands controlled by the aristocracy.  So, was that better or worse than today?  Well, I guess modernity has a bunch of advantages over the 1200s.  Today you mostly get to keep your teeth into at least your middle age.  And you actually get to live probably into your seventies.  And your children mostly won’t die at birth.  And you aren’t illiterate and you can call Pizza Hut on your cell phone and have dinner delivered (assuming you have a job, which isn’t that sure anymore).

But I think the question can still be asked, “Are we living in a better world than pre-renaissance Europe?”  If I were to give an opinion, I’d say yes.  But not because of the material progress that we have to show.  But because I think there is the chance that we might be closer to some kind of breakthrough.

And what I mean by a breakthrough is an analysis about what represents human happiness and how to maximize it.  “Okay,” you’ll say, “but what do you mean by human happiness?”  And that is a fair question.  Because human happiness is hard to define.  I don’t mean that we figure out a way to have the larges tnumber of people hooked up to a dilute fentanyl drip all the time.  What I mean is we should figure out what human beings are meant to be doing with their lives.

If I were to guess I’d say the optimal human activity is learning how to interact with other humans in such a way that everyone feels like their getting something out of the deal.  So, let’s say you’re a pretty good carpenter.  Okay maybe life would be optimal if you could get paid a decent wage to make chairs or tables or porch decks.  And maybe someone else would want to be a Walmart shelf stocker.  Sure, he’s not as bright as the carpenter, but he’s hard-working and cooperative and he’s not really interested in owning all the latest “stuff.”  So, the idea is that somehow all this “AI stuff” really does pan out and we figure a way to systematize the whole human race so that we can keep this whole multi-billion human juggling act in the air without needing a war or a revolution or a great depression.  Now that might be something to brag about.

Of course, this is all a pipe dream but if you think about it, that’s what all of the geniuses have been talking about for the last couple of hundred years.  That’s the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and Mamdani and all the rest of the people who get all stirred up.  Now, we all know that socialism doesn’t work.  But maybe that’s because it’s run by socialists.  What if HAL9000 ran it?

Okay, never mind.  We know how that ends, “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t let you back in the door.  Have a nice day!”