Category: Current Events

Curses!  Foiled Again!

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Ah, the whiplash sting of rejection.  My manuscript has been rejected by Ark Press (see bold text below).

 

Thank you for submitting to Ark Press.

The Ark editorial team has reviewed your work and given it careful consideration. We appreciate the opportunity to review your treatment and manuscript, however, The Sniper isn’t right for us.

We would, however, love to see another project from you. The writing was quite good and the story kept us engaged. Please do keep us in mind in the future

Best of luck with your writing,

 

If I were a drinking man I’d probably go on a two-week bender and drown my sorrow in 180 proof rum.  But the show must go on!  I will gather up the jagged shards of my dreams and limp off stage to nurse my wounded pride and super-glue my shattered dreams of literary glory back together somehow.

I told Camera Girl of this crushing defeat.  She told me to suck it up and stop whining.  Not the sympathetic shoulder I was hoping for.  In another age maybe I would have run off and joined the French Foreign Legion but I don’t think they allow enough free time for macrophotography and right-wing punditry in the Legion.  Vive la France!

Well, it wasn’t all bad.  They did say the writing was pretty good.  I mean, maybe they were just saying that to soften the blow but I’ll take a positive spin on that and continue to work on finishing the book and then either get it published or self-publish it on Amazon.

Honestly, I was very glad that they got back to me.  And I liked the polite and professional remarks they sent.  I think a lot of publishers don’t even bother to send rejection letters anymore.  So, an honest rejection is actually kind of comforting.  But still, there is a disappointment when you don’t win the prize.  But we know that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.  At least that’s what that crazy atheist said back a hundred and some odd years ago.  And he should know because he went crazy and died!

So, the show must go on and all sadness and chagrin must be pushed aside and efforts must be redoubled.  I intend to memorize a hundred new adjectives every week, take up MMA fighting and try my luck at swordfishing to increase my relatability with the reading audience.  After all Hemingway did some of that stuff and he was very relatable.  I wonder how good Camera Girl is at MMA fighting?  She’s pretty strong and agile so maybe she would be a good sparring partner.  But she is kinda mean and I can’t afford to be injured too badly before I get into the octagon with my real opponents.  Maybe she’ll agree to fighting me blindfolded and with one arm tied behind her back.  That seems reasonable.  But just to be sure, maybe I’ll also tie her ankles together.  Yeah, that would be good.  I could definitely take her then.  Alright, I love it when a plan comes together.

The Coalescence of the Not-Stupid

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So, what if it’s true that Hollywood as an industry is more or less done?  Suppose that there won’t be ten or twenty somewhat-good movies coming out every year anymore.  What if instead there are a couple of decent mini-series by Netflix and Amazon and maybe one or two summer “blockbuster” fantasies and all the rest is just low budget dreck?  How would that affect the entertainment habits of the population?

Well, let’s think about what the population is.  Currently the populace is divided into several different divisions.  But overall, there is a demarcation into two larger groups.  First there are the boomers and GenX contingents.  They both grew up when entertainment was big business and they are used to paying for entertainment that they consider “good.”  They would go to a good movie or buy a music album if they consider it worthwhile.  These are the people who are most distressed by the current state of American entertainment.  Someone my age looks at television or what is currently considered good cinema or popular music and is horrified by the low quality and overall stupidity of the art.

The second grouping is everyone younger; millennials and the Zoomers.  For the most part these people don’t buy music or pay for movies.  They stream everything and are willing to watch and listen to low quality content if they can pay next to nothing for it.  Not being part of this group I’m not completely sure whether this strategy is a byproduct of their poverty or whether they simply don’t care what kind of entertainment product they consume.  Nevertheless, the outcome either way is that the future will be determined by this paradigm.  Entertainment businesses will not be making the kinds of profits they made from the boomers and GenX from the new kids.  Okay, that’s what we are seeing.  Entertainment will become mass marketing of the lowest common denominator at the lowest price.  In other words; garbage.

But that will not be the whole story.  The bell curve is a fact of nature.  Most of humanity is very average, and lately that average seems to have sunk a bit.  But the right side of the curve exists.  There is a segment of the population that is intelligent and they need entertainment that isn’t always the lowest common denominator.  And they tend to be more prosperous than their less intelligent brethren.  And whereas they will join with everyone else to celebrate whatever moronic pop star or whatever mindless video game happens to be in vogue this month, they will occasionally need something more nutritious for the mind and soul.  And how will this work?  After all there isn’t a pipeline for intelligent entertainment.

What I think will happen is organizations; whether corporate or individuals, will spring up to curate what’s out there and arrange for venues and opportunities for these people to enjoy this better entertainment together.  Now maybe the “together” isn’t physical.  Maybe they’ll be doing this over the internet with chat functions used to allow the patrons to share their reactions to the content.  But I think renting a theater to play old movies (or new movies that have been made expressly for a specialized audience) would make perfect sense.

The power of the internet to connect smaller but focused groups is already very well known.  What still needs to happen is for a larger group of intelligent people to coalesce around a commercial entity that is willing to provide them with entertainment that exceeds the lowest common denominator on a consistent basis.  But I think it will happen.  Some day soon, the not-stupid will band together and find out just how strong they are.

Guest Contributor -Chemist – 28APR2025 – Military Women

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I have had two friends with daughters who went into the military.
(Small sample size, I know.)
Both young women were stronger than I am and may well have been physically stronger and in better health than I was at 18.
Neither woman saw combat.
Both washed out within a year of graduating basic training for “Medical” reasons.
Whatever medical issue they had was not obvious nor did it affect their ability to work post service. Both were able to carry to term and deliver healthy baby’s. They both get full VA benefits.

IMHO, for these women, military service was a scam to get benefits that will last them the rest of their lives without really earning them.

Guest Contributor -ArthurinCali – 28APR2025 – Military Women

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There are many well-qualified women in the military.

Alright, now with that said, in almost 30 years of active, reserve, and now civilian DoD experience, the parable of “The Emperor Has No Clothes” is probably the best metaphor regarding women in the armed forces. Every reasonable person who has looked at the requirements and conditions sees that it is not an enhancement to try and put women into every role performed in the armed services. Not one single deployment was enhanced with having females around. In fact, it usually presented unnecessary hindrances and complications to the mission at hand. Military service has one purpose — defense of the country and its national interests. To treat the institution as a grand laboratory for social sciences has been a complete detriment overall.

Women in the Military – God Help Us

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I saw two stories today about the military and both of them were associated in one way or another with women and DEI.

The first one has to do with Defense Secretary Hegseth’s orders to force women to pass the same physical fitness tests as men for combat and other physically challenging roles.

You would think this should already be in place since women claim not to be inferior to men in any way.  But reality rears its ugly head and now this will essentially eliminate 99.9% of female candidates from the special forces organizations and a very large chunk of women from even basic combat roles.

This is one of the first things I see happening in the Trump administration that I can point to as a clear improvement on the status quo.  Ever since Obama the military has been woke and women in command positions has been a big part of the problem.  Hopefully now a lot of combat officer positions will be restricted to men and that should have a very positive effect on our combat capability.  Now if there are women who are physically capable of pulling their own weight in combat circumstances, I don’t necessarily think they should be in combat roles.  There are other problems with mixing women and men in close physical quarters.  But at the very least eliminating women who aren’t strong enough to fight from the equation is a big plus.

The second story is a NY Times article about the investigation of the crash of the Black Hawk helicopter and the civilian airliner near Ronald Reagan airport.

https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/black-hawk-pilot-rebecca-lobach-ignored-key-instruction-before-dc-crashreportclaims-article-151511950

The first item is that the pilot was a woman who was performing a periodic training flight to maintain her flight status.  The article says she had 500 hours of flying experience at that time.  But the most disturbing aspect of the article was the statement that the control tower had warned her of the collision danger and her trainer told her to change course to the left to avoid the collision and she did not.  She had fifteen seconds to change course and she did not.  In addition, the female pilot had some linkage to the Biden White House.  I didn’t see any details about what her role was.  But that immediately raised a red flag in my mind.

So, it’s very easy for me to immediately take these details and say that this disaster was caused by DEI.  Is that fair?  I don’t know, but as a first approximation I think it’s a reasonable starting hypothesis.  If even the NY Times is throwing this woman under the bus, then who am I not to cast the second stone?  And this goes hand in hand with a number of stories I’ve read of women in the military whose aircraft and naval vessel piloting have been less than adequate.  When I think of Camera Girl behind the wheel of her car and all the times I’ve told her to go left and she’s gone right (or other-left as she calls it) I get the sense that DEI can be a recipe for disaster.

Well, anyway, Pete Hegseth, keep going the way you are.  Put women back in the kitchen and the nursery and everyone will be that much safer and happier.

Update:

Here’s another more detailed article about the female helicopter pilot.

That Was Entertainment

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If you’re older than fifty then you remember when entertainment was big business.  Big American corporations made our movies, published our books, recorded our music and amused us sitting around the television set every night.  And they made good money doing it.  Going to the movies was a national pastime and buying records of popular music was what teenagers did relentlessly.  And everyone watched must-see-tv whether it was a Thursday night sit-com or the late-night show with Johnny Carson.  Entertainment was bankable.

Well, that’s all over.  Kids don’t buy music.  They stream it for almost nothing.  They stream movies too so they don’t go to theaters.  And they really don’t want to pay for it either.  Same for books, same for television.  The only thing that still kind of pays is cable television.  That’s because cable is set up so the fees are lucrative.  But guess what?  Millennials and zoomers have now cut the cable.  Only old people pay for or watch cable.  So, the change is complete.

The result is that except for truly bankable extravaganzas like Marvel superhero movies (mostly) or Taylor Swift concerts entertainment producers aren’t spending the money needed to make entertainment entertaining.  Case in point, have you looked at broadcast television in the last five years?  Don’t.  It’s unbelievably bad.  The production values are awful, the actors can’t act but worst of all the writing is putrid.  It’s as if it were written by emotionally disturbed cretins.  The characters are unlikable and the plots are idiotic and completely predictable.

After what passed for Oscar nominees this year, we don’t even have to bother talking about how bad Hollywood has become.  Up until recently the only bright spot was that some of the cable channels and corporations like Amazon and Netflix were spending generously on good writers and good actors for some of their series.  It could be debated whether these shows were as well made as Hollywood movies were in their heyday but without a doubt, they were head and shoulders above anything that was on broadcast television in the last ten years and they absolutely entertained.  But now even these shows are starting to fall apart.  Amazon recently spent a billion dollars on a Lord of the Rings adjacent production called “The Rings of Power” and it flopped very badly.

So, what is next for entertainment?

Well, the answer is confusing.  What young people like is video games.  And because of this they consume other entertainment in a way that relates to this medium.  They like to read fan-fic about those games.  In other words, fans of the video games write amateur stories and post them to websites so that other gamers can read them.  And now these writers are even seeing their fan-fic turned into videos or even movies of these video-centric stories.  These stories adhere closely to the limitations and conventions of the games.  The characters are constantly referencing their health levels and skill levels as they attempt to conquer different challenges.  So, the plot is very much tied to the experience of the game.

I find all of this confusing and somewhat disturbing.  I don’t doubt that these video games are exciting and maybe even challenging but how much of the same thing can you stand to consume before something more original and intellectually and even emotionally stimulating will be needed?  And at some point, wouldn’t it be reasonable to want a movie about real life where normal people overcome the challenges that happen in the real world?  Or how about a comedy or a drama?  It can’t all be video games, can it?

Well, anyway that’s what I was thinking about today.  I don’t know how all this ends but it’s something that is worth thinking about.

Make Way for the Expedition!

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Voigtlander 10mm e-mount trees in vertical

Camera Girl is an excellent wife.  She understands the nuances and challenges of being married to a profoundly disorganized man.  And what she has done is become my enabler.  She knows how lazy and easily distracted I can be so she goes out of her way to find things in the real world that can help me in my stated goals.

For instance, I’ve been complaining about needing a photography trip to get a bunch of new pictures.  So, she took it upon herself to research day trips to photogenic locations.  Car shows, museums, stuff like that.  Well, she asked me if I want to go to a botanical garden on Friday.  Apparently, the weather is going to cooperate and she was able to get discount passes from one of her library friends (she loves discounts passionately).

“Perfect!” I said.  And so tomorrow morning I will assemble my gear and she will act as my native bearer or sherpa guide.  With her carrying all the weight, my inner vision will be free to unlock the mystical dimensions of the secrets of nature.  Like a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci (only without all the gayness) I will frame the photographs that will capture truth, beauty and small insects everywhere I go.

Like Frank Buck and Ali “bringing ‘em back alive” or Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquering Everest, we shall conquer new frontiers of arboreal greatness together.  I with my Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens and A7IV camera and Camera Girl with her 83-pound backpack with forehead strap to take some of the weight off of her shoulders.  To some this may sound excessive.  On the contrary, I’m leaving behind the laptop, larger tripod and the flash gear.  Everything I packed is critical; the portable generator, my yoga mat and the collapsible hammock for my 1:30 pm siesta.  After all we’re not barbarians, are we?  And she knows that the roll of a good producer is to, “keep the talent happy.”  After all, without my perfect composure and comfort the whole thing will be for naught.  Remember, art is the hardest thing in the world.  We must be perfectly in tune with the astral plane or it will collapse like a deck of cards or some other analogy.

As the kids would say, “I’m stoked.”  And I predict the most amazing results from this expedition.  I do intend to bring along some other lenses.  The 10mm Voigtlander should be useful for capturing some of the vertical shots of the trees and I’m considering bringing the Sony 200-600mm zoom for any shots of birds up in the higher branches.  And I guess I’ll bring the Sony 35mm f\1.4 for some landscape shots.  I’m not sure if I’ll bring the new 135mm f\1.8.  It’s kind of an in between lens.    Not really long enough for wildlife but too tight for landscape.  But it has great bokeh for backgrounds so I probably will bring it.  Ah, decisions, decisions.

So, I’ll be away for a chunk of the day.  The site will be quiet but I’ll be home in time to catch up with everything.  “Ali!  Where is my elephant gun you lazy heathen!”

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

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I have lived through the Space Race, the Arms Race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the Vietnam War, the Oil Embargo, Watergate, the Carter Presidency, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Stagflation, the Various Arab-Israeli wars, Black Monday, the First Gulf War, Bill Clinton, the Dot Com Bust, the Y2K Panic, 9/11/2001, Afghanistan, Iraq II, the 2008 Bank Crisis, Obama’s Race War Incitements, All of the lawfare against Trump, the George Floyd Color Revolution, the COVID scam, the 2020 Election Fraud, Biden’s Fake Presidency, the Ukraine Debacle, the Green Energy/COVID/USAID looting of the Treasury and the assassination attempts on Trump.

That’s a lot of dysfunction.  If you look at the scope of how much mismanagement and dishonesty has been the focus of our lives for the last sixty odd years you can’t help but ask yourself if maybe the problem is that we are being “led” by terrible people.  Looking at the awful things going on I believe that those running this country are either purposefully evil or incredibly stupid.

Or both.

And now look at where we are.  Every attempt by Donald Trump to even partially repair the damage done by Biden’s open border policy is being stymied by partisan federal judges.  It’s like every stalemate we’ve ever experienced when the Right wins an election.

All of what I’m saying is obvious.  In fact, we saw the same thing in Trump’s first term.  In some sense Trump must have expected all of this to happen.  Maybe he has a plan to move all of this along.  But what I’m trying to express is a reality that resists any real progress being made in Washington.  It’s an institutional mindset that resists any attempt to untangle the strands of bureaucracy and administrative control that protect the status quo.

Probably what is needed is someone with the courage to cut the Gordian Knot.  And it really will take courage.  I think what it will take is for Trump to defy these federal judges.  And I think I’ve figured out the ploy.  What will be needed is to have a judge declare someone in contempt of court and then have Donald Trump issue a pardon for the contempt action.  Of course, he’ll probably have to issue the pardons every day for the whole length of his presidency.  But it should allow him to get his work done and really, really annoy those judges.

And I think I must be a genius or everyone else is an idiot if they don’t see how this will work perfectly.  Remember during a campaign rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, on January 23, 2016, Trump said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”  Well now it’s literally true.  He can pardon himself or anyone else he’d like from whatever crime he needs to commit to fix all of our problems.  All he needs is the courage and the mental clarity needed to carry out the campaign.

So, Mr. President get to work writing the executive orders and the pardons for each of the contempt decisions by all of the various judges that are working against you.  It will be wearisome and highly annoying but you will be fixing the ills that Joe Biden and his predecessors inflicted on us.  And it will tick off a lot of horrible people.

Even Barabbas Couldn’t Dampen This Day

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Such a good day.  Camera Girl cooked up a storm.  Beef and pork roasts, vegetables, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, stuffed mushrooms and more.  And then the desserts. At my insistence there were five different flavors of ice cream.  That’s because I know the kids crave it (well me too).  But she also made eclairs, tiramisu, ricotta cheesecake, chocolate cake (for the kids) and pineapple upside down cake.  I never even got to the pineapple cake.  I was too stuffed.  And the coffee was hot, strong and good.

The kids were busy with all kinds of silly games and gadgets.  But they were good.  When they started to get bored, I put on the original “King Kong.”  The family Godzilla aficionado was unimpressed with King Kong’s susceptibility to fifty caliber machine gun bullets.  He informed me that a real monster is unkillable with anything up to and including a thermonuclear warhead.  What could I say?  I pointed out that he did manage to kill a T Rex and also a Manhattan elevated subway train.  But apparently Godzilla is so incomparably superior to actual dinosaurs that conquering them is as nothing in the context of what Godzilla can do.  I was made aware that if Godzilla needed to, he has a mode called “thermonuclear” whereby he can emit the equivalent of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb against his surroundings.  This I was informed would utterly consume everything within a forty-mile radius around him.  I confessed defeat and asked if we could still watch the end of the movie where Carl Denham tells the cop that “It was beauty killed the beast.”  He rolled his eyes at the screen and shook his head.  Well, anyway, I still think Fay Wray is pretty good looking.  I don’t blame old Kong for carrying her off twice.

After they went home, I watched Barabbas.  That’s an old Dino DeLaurentis swords and sandals epic from the 1960s with Anthony Quinn as the title character who in the Bible is released instead of Jesus for the Passover clemency.  I’ll say with no hesitation that this is one of the worst biblical epics hands down.  Quinn is playing the same part he plays in Zorba the Greek and many other Mediterranean dramas.  His struggles in a Jerusalem prison, a Sicilian sulfur mine and the Roman Coliseum all seem self-inflicted and by the end of the movie I had to wonder if even St Peter wasn’t ready to kick his butt up and down the Roman jail.  Because Barrabas mistook Nero’s blaming the Christians for the burning of Rome with a real Christian plan to “burn the old world” Barabbas gets caught torching an oil warehouse and claims he’s doing it because he’s a Christian.  So, because of this St Peter and the rest of the real Christians are crucified by Nero.  What a genius!

As Barabbas is hanging on a cross at the end of the movie making what seem to be fairly meaningless comments, it seemed to me that the whole movie was absolutely pointless from every perspective; artistically, religiously, even logically.  As spectacle it was borderline ridiculous.  Quinn has a showdown in the Coliseum with Jack Palance in a chariot and himself on foot.  I’ve never seen a less convincing, more boring fight sequence.  At the end of the battle even the actor playing Nero looked like he wanted to be somewhere else but just couldn’t escape.

I also watched an old film noir called “Steel Trap.”  That was much more satisfactory.  I’ll review it soon.  Well, this will have to do for today.  A good day and a busy day.

Easter Sunday 2025

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Well, it’s here.  If there is any more primal marker for spring than Easter, I don’t know what it could be.  The resurrection of God is about as on the nose as you can get.  This is our chance to embrace life.  Even old codgers like me, maybe especially old codgers like me get to see up close and personal the immortality of the human soul.  We see our children and our grandchildren do all the same things we did forty and fifty and sixty years ago.

We can see the little ones hunt easter eggs and gorge themselves on chocolate and complain about any of the specialty foods they hate and get bored sitting too long at the table and chafe at any fancy clothes their mothers made them wear and want to go outside and play and complain about the may flies and ask when the desserts are served and fight and fight and fight with each other.

As it was in the beginning, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.  But of course, it’s not us without end.  For me I can see that my part in the pageant is drawing to the close.  A decade or two should finish me off and leave my kids to ponder on the mysteries of the spring rebirth cycle without the incredible wisdom that they’ve come to expect!  Boy what a relief that’ll be for them.

And that’s alright.  I actually get a kind of kick out of thinking that after I’m gone, I might be the subject of some stories that play upon some of my idiosyncrasies.  In fact, there already are several stories among my children about the crazy things I’ve done that they remember.

Among my siblings, stories about my father’s expressions, habits and failings are our most cherished memories.  And to be totally fair he could take a joke at his own expense.  If stories of that sort about me became fixed in the family lore I would feel greatly honored.  It’s much better to be gently mocked by your descendants than loathed.  I’ve seen both cases and to have your foibles as the source of laughter is very strongly to be preferred.  As I’ve said before, being remembered and talked about after you’re gone is a form of immortality.  And who doesn’t want to be immortal, I ask you?

And along with all the traditions something new is being added.  Camera Girl tried her hand at a new dessert; tiramisu.  It’s very nice and I commend her ambition and enthusiasm to extend her range.  But what I want is the Italian cheesecake and a large portion of vanilla ice cream.  I’m on a perpetual diet so I look forward to these holidays as an excuse to indulge my sweet tooth with something worthwhile.  And ricotta cheesecake, vanilla ice cream and some nice strong coffee is exactly that.

So, for everyone out there who will be celebrating Easter or even if you just used to enjoy celebrating it in the old days I say, “Christ is risen!”