Category: Current Events

Graham Platner: The New Democrat

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In search of a populist communist, the Democrats have embraced Graham Platner the former combat Marine, oyster farmer, misogynist and philosopher king.  Platner is embroiled in a scandal that just keeps getting weirder with every passing day but his poll numbers have been so strong up till now that the powers that be in the party have everyone from Sunny Hostin of the View to Chris Hayes of MS NOW playing along with Platner being what the party needs in Maine.  Now all of this is very interesting because Platner has a history of making disparaging statements about women and gays.  He also has a Nazi SS death’s head tattoo on his chest (although he has now tattooed over it).  Several of his girlfriends have described violent and controlling behavior toward them.  His wife has reported that he also has a history of “sexting” women on a service called Kik that is much frequented by Gen Z users.

But my all-time favorite detail about Mr. Platner is a remark he made to one of his girlfriends when describing what he would do if a man broke into his house.  He said he would the rape the man (but not in a “gay” way) to show his dominance.

Well, what can we say.  Graham Platner sounds like a certifiable mental case.  He has serious anger management problems and by his own admissions he’s a heavy drinker and drug user.  Sounds like the perfect Democrat Senate candidate for Maine.  As I mentioned above, Platner has been ahead of his Democrat rivals from the start so that the establishment candidate, the current Governor, Janet Mills, suspended her campaign.  And Platner is still higher in the polls than the Republican incumbent Susan Collins though that lead has lessened significantly.  But all of this negative publicity has rattled a lot of the Democrat establishment and Mills has reminded voters that she still appears on the primary ballot so if Platner is further damaged by scandal they can vote for her.  Also, even if Platner wins the primary on June 9th he can drop out of the race and the Democrats can pick another candidate for the regular election in November.  So right now, there is an enormous unsettled cloud over Platner’s status.  The Democrats are convinced that they must win in Maine in order to retake the Senate from the Republicans.

Well, this is wonderful.  Listening to feminists bending over backwards to explain how they can vote for a caveman misogynist against a woman is just too delicious to ignore.  And the best part is that the Democrats are frightened to death that there is still more dirty laundry waiting for after the drop-dead date on July 13th after which Platner’s name must stay on the ballot.

Now let me be clear.  I think of Susan Collins as a Democrat.  There is absolutely nothing conservative about her.  So, if Platner were to win in November I wouldn’t be too upset.  New England does not have a conservative constituency.  It should have the lousy communist politicians it deserves.  But it would be nice if we could squeak by without losing the House or the Senate in this midterm election.

Anyway, watching Chris Hayes making nice with a guy who claims he would rape a male home intruder in a non-gay way has to be an important milestone.  We’ve reached terminal Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) fallout.  At this point, I believe the Democrats would vote for Hitler himself if he promised to unseat Trump.  So good luck Mr. Platner.  And good luck to any burglars who may be working up there in Sullivan, Maine.  It sounds like a tricky proposition.

What Would an Honest 60 Minutes Look Like?

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You know all this Scott Pelley comedy got me thinking.  What if 60 Minutes became a real honest to goodness investigative reporting show?  You know, like it’s claimed to be.  Watching the legacy media reporting on Pelley was hilarious because they all used exactly the same wording to describe just how venerable 60 Minutes is; “the gold standard of journalism,” “unbiased and non-partisan,” “acclaimed by both political parties.”  Of course, if anyone objective was within hearing of these claims, the eye-rolling was epic.

But imagine it for a moment.  What if 60 Minutes did an expose about Somalians in Minnesota running daycare scams to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars?  Or suppose they did an undercover investigation to find out which NGOs provide money, equipment and legal aid to Antifa?  Then they would really be doing something useful.  Even I would watch things like that.  Or could you imagine a detailed investigation into Gavin Newsom’s spending on high-speed rail and other boondoggles.  Or how about someone doing an audit on the “massaging” of the data used for the global warming studies?

Well, anyway, I don’t actually expect this level of honesty from legacy media but even if all they do is take a more balanced approach to interviewing political figures it would be a revelation.  Now the question remains whether a more even-handed approach to reporting would increase the market share for CBS.  Well, in my opinion, yes!  I used to watch 60 Minutes back in the ancient days before all of journalism became a leftist monolith.  Let’s say 1985 as a time when some vestigial fairness could still be found in the media.  If Bari Weiss succeeds in convincing the Right that she is willing to give respect to both sides of the country I think she can increase the audience by more than just a few percentage points.  And just as importantly if other networks see something like that it will make an impression.

Okay, that’s enough happy-happy talk.  We haven’t seen anything substantive yet.  Maybe all of this is just a way for Sky Dance to eliminate a lot of high-priced employees from their payroll.  I’m sure Scott Pelley was making eight figures and since they fired him for cause they don’t have to pay off his contract (as long as his lawyers don’t win in court).  But potentially this could be another case of the economics of angering fifty percent of the country leading to the collapse of another corporate dinosaur.  Just as Hollywood can’t both fight off new entertainment technology and also alienate more than half its audience, we may be seeing the breaking point for this crooked industry.  And isn’t it just poetic justice that it’s happening under the Trump administration.  Tonight, I saw a clip where a reporter asked Trump about Pelley and he said, “I think Scott Pelley’s got his own problems, he’s terrible. Look, Scott Pelley’s a stiff and he’s afraid, and he’s part of this, you know, gang of crooked, stupid people that don’t care about our country.”  Well, I think that sums things up admirably.  Hopefully from here it will get even funnier.

Goodbye Scott Pelley, We Hardly Knew Ye

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First Stephen Colbert and now Scott Pelley?  Has the whole of CBS gone topsy turvy?  The insufferable Pelley has been fired for cause from 60 Minutes after verbally assaulting his new boss (Executive Producer Nick Bilton) and the editor-in-chief of CBS News (Bari Weiss) at Bilton’s first staff meeting after taking over the news show.  During the meeting Pelley said to Bilton, “What qualifies you to be in this position?  …  You have slender qualifications for this job.”  He also accused Weiss of “murdering” 60 Minutes.

And then a day later he got the termination letter from Bilton, “Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt,” He described Pelley’s behavior in the meeting as a “performative display of hostility — enacted in front of the staff.  …  Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you.”

Pelley has been making accusations that Weiss ordered him “to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story” and “to include assertions that are unverified.”  He stated that “Incompetence and unprofessionalism in the new management have wreaked havoc.”

Alright, suppose Pelley was my favorite journalist.  Would I then think he was right to say those things to his new boss?  Of course not!  Anyone who works for a large corporation knows that you don’t call out your boss and especially not at a staff meeting and you definitely don’t tell him he’s unqualified for the job.  You don’t do it even if he is unqualified for the job.  You can try to make your point of view known in a respectful and convincing way or you can keep quiet and send your resume out to the headhunters right after the meeting.  But calling your new boss and his boss idiots or crooks is a very, very bad strategy.  It will not only get you fired, it will get you black-balled in your industry.  I guess Pelley thought he was bullet proof.  I guess he wasn’t.  Bye Scott.

So, what does all this mean?  It sounds to me that Bari Weiss is making a decent attempt to turn CBS News into a news organization again instead of a propaganda machine for the Democrat party and the Left in general.  I’ve got to say I’m stunned!  What next?  Will Donald Trump get an honest to goodness interview without the usual “Mr. President, are you still beating your wife?” question?

Well, even if nothing more gets done this is a spectacular result.  Personally, I think they’ve been hoping to trigger Pelley into something like this because ending his contract will save them many millions of dollars and their bloated budgets are probably the real focus of Sky Dance and their efforts to make Paramount profitable.  Well, whatever the real reason my hope is it continues and accelerates.  There is no shortage of insufferable journalists at CBS and firing another dozen or two can only make life in these here United States that much better.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 02JUN2026 – Adios John Cornyn

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I’m a Texan.
I was unhappy about John Cornyn’s love for amnesty but let it slide because “he was the one who could win in the general”.
Then Cornyn stabbed us in the back on gun control. That was a bridge too far. I swore then that I would vote for a democrat for US senate before I would vote for Cornyn again. My reasoning was that we would have to put up with the dem for 6 years and then we could replace him with a real conservative but that Cornyn was there until he died.
Apparently, I was not alone in this and John picked up on it announcing that this would be his last term in the senate.
Didn’t care. Didn’t trust John to keep his word anyway.
(BTW, John was warned. He was warned by constituents such as myself and by organizations like GOA and NRA that if he supported Biden’s gun control he would face an expensive and grueling primary. He did not care.)
Then along came Ken Paxton. Fresh off 4 years of suing the Biden administration to a standstill, Ken was the guy who could beat John.
I sent Ken money in the primary and in the runoff and I will again for the general.
We are sick to death of RINOs pissing on us and telling us it is raining.
I am very happy to see John Cornyn in the rear view mirror.
Don’t go away mad, John. Just go away.

A Very Important Start

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Isn’t this a crazy world.  Our politics are suicidal.  Our culture is demented.  The captains of industry and the oligarchy are made up of sociopaths.  What passes for “artists” are debauched narcissists who don’t even know what they’re supposedly rebelling against.  And yet, in some strange sense we’re starting to shake loose from the system that seems hellbent on tearing all of society down to the ground.

Despite the havoc that surrounds us and the confusion that even “our” side seems to be strewing in all directions I feel like the mass of people have shaken off the stupor that enveloped us for decades and are now willing to say openly that the narrative is a bunch of lies and search out like minded people and in what ever ways they can, move their lives in the direction that benefits them.

One of the signs of this is the recent spate of Republican senators and congressmen being primaried out of their offices.  It used to be we’d be told that if we didn’t support a John Cornyn or a Mitch McConnell then we would weaken the party and the Democrats would “win.”  So, we’d hold our noses and vote for the RINO and watch as he voted with the Democrats on a whole host of issues that hurt us.  Well, no more.  I tell you the truth.  Even if the Democrats pick up a few seats I’d rather see that than have another traitor stabbing us in the back at the last minute when we need him most.

It’s like Susan Collins in Maine or Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.  Neither is a conservative and they’re just as likely to vote with the Democrats as against them.  If we lost both those seats it would hardly matter at all.  The main thing is that voters are voting their convictions and attempting to eject the fakes from the party.

Another sign that people are starting to wake up is the situation in Hollywood.  For the last few years it’s become painfully obvious that movie-goers are staying away from movies that push “the narrative.”  The biggest victims are the Star Wars franchise and the superhero movies.  These two formerly unstoppable money-printing engines abused their fans by tearing down the storylines and characters that the fans loved and replacing them with “woke” versions of them.  And the result is these franchises have stopped making money.  Where before some of these properties might gross over a billion dollars and make hundreds of millions in profits, now they can’t even break even against the production and advertising budgets.  And in opposition to this model, lately you have a few studios trying to court these fans with more traditional fare like Amazon producing the science fiction movie “Project Hail Mary” where a positive message and a minimum of preaching “the message” were rewarded with a handsome profit and the lesson that a fresh storyline and traditional values can make the studios lots of money.  In addition, some independent internet content creators have of late begun to make movies on a shoestring budget and been rewarded with the profits that such an endeavor can reap.  Horror movies costing $1-5 million are making ten or twenty times that much money at the box office.  Now, not all of these movies are any good.  But they’re no worse than some of the schlock that comes out of Hollywood and they have audiences that will pay to see them.  They’re giving an audience what they expect.  We will see changes in Hollywood and those who don’t change will lose a lot of cash.  That is progress.

Let me be clear.  We have not won the culture war.  What we have done is awakened to the fact that the war was rigged against us by our “friends.”  And waking up to that fact is a very important start.

Antifa and the Hidden Hand

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So, I saw this article:

Bessent says IRS and FBI investigation into antifa has made ‘substantial progress’

“What to know

  • Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed progress in the IRS-FBI antifa investigation.
  • New IRS guidance will hold grant-making organizations responsible for violent recipients.
  • Antifa is labeled a militant anarchist organization by the Trump administration.
  • The executive order cites antifa’s violent activities and attempts to overthrow the government.

The memo and the antifa executive order targeted the tax-exempt status of foundations funding civil society groups. The memo instructed the IRS commissioner to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism.”

So, the gist of this investigation is identifying NGOs that are providing funds and other aid to antifa and use it as a reason to strip them of their tax-exempt status and then prosecute them for the aid they’re providing antifa in its illegal activities.

It sounds like a good strategy.  Of course, the various antifa legal fronts will challenge all this in every commie-sympathizing jurisdiction (NY, CA, D.C., OR, etc.) but the Supreme Court has been very supportive of the administration’s attempts to go after rogue elements of the Left so there’s a good chance all this will move forward.

Based on the assassination attempts against Trump, Charlie Kirk and that healthcare CEO, these antifa psychos are extremely dangerous and need to be defunded, rounded up and put away for a very long time.

On an unrelated and much more positive development my Kindle Unlimited page views have continued to increase:

Tonight, has been the highest page count to date (407 pages) and that curve looks pretty encouraging (so far).  I won’t try to make too much soup with such a little bit of meat but we authors have to take our solace where we find it.  Now, I’d prefer that it was 407 million pages but we all have to start somewhere.

Now based on my years of experience extrapolating curves based on limited data it’s obvious to me that the next data point will be 800 pages followed shortly by 1,600 pages and by obvious curve fitting this will turn into an asymptote by June 7th at which point the number of pages will reach infinity and Amazon will have to proclaim me the new James Patterson.  Of course I shouldn’t say this quite yet.  You never know.  I could be wrong.  It might take all the way until June 15th for all of this to reach its crescendo.  So, I’ll just bide my time and maintain a humble façade.  I’ll practice my gracious acceptance speech, “Oh no, I’m not worthy!  I’m not worthy!  I’d like to thank all the little people.  If I’ve seen farther, it’s not because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants but rather, because I am a super-giant.  And I want to cast aspersions on those who tried to hold back my reputation.  All those who claimed I wasn’t greater than their favorites; all those fanboys of Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Tolkien or whomever!  Bah!  Tired hacks and amateurs.  Their memories will be swept away like chaff from the wheat in the glorious sunshine of my new day.”

Or something like that.

29MAY2026 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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So, I’m a week in on the Kindle Unlimited program and I’ve got about a thousand pages sold.  Now that’s like five books worth.  Which is not much but the curve has been increasing for the last five days so I’ll keep an eye on this for a few weeks to see if it goes anywhere.  If any of you guys currently uses Kindle Unlimited explain how it works.  Do you read it on the website one page at a time or how does it work?  It seems kind of clunky to me.

So, Camera Girl and I went to the Dunwich Spring Middle School Concert which includes both band and chorus sections at both the upper and lower levels.  This is a remarkable experience because the range of accomplishment varies from fairly good to nonexistent.  But realizing that the teacher has managed to get these children to even organize into an orchestra is almost inconceivable.  The choral songs aren’t mostly to my taste.  They tend to try to introduce a foreign language song that doesn’t translate to an American audience.  One exception was Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight).  The Tokens version is a favorite of mine so I was excited.  But something went wrong with the arrangement.  As is typical in these school choruses the ratio of girls to boys is seven to one.  So, the deeper voices are always practically missing in the song.  But Wimoweh famously has a towering falsetto section and of course all those girls should have been able to translate it into a powerful soprano part.  But instead, they had the three boys with their barely audible tenor voices whispering through this part.  Oh, the pain.

But the highlight of the evening was the band giving their rendition of the theme to “Jurassic Park.”  And the kids did a serviceable job of John Williams’ Fanfare for the Common Dinosaur.  But the funniest thing was a kid sitting behind me.  He must have been three years old and he started exclaiming loudly, “Giraffic Park, Giraffic Park!!!” at the top of his lungs and all the parents in the front rows started laughing.  But the Conductor/Music Teacher never missed a beat and her band performed the miracle of producing a recognizable version of the popular melody.

I’ve started reading “Project Hail Mary.”  My oldest grandson has loaned me his copy and I’m treating it with kid gloves since I remember what it was like when I had a mint hardback copy of an sf favorite.  I’m a hundred pages in and it’s interesting.  It’s definitely a millennial book.  There’s a difference in the voice.  It’s a kindler, gentler voice.  There’s much more emotion.  Now the protagonist is a Middle School teacher so you can say this is just the consequence of this particular character.  But the choice of the character is part of this younger generation of readers and writers.  Well, the book is good so far.  It’s inventive and well-paced and has an interesting manner of unfolding the story.  It starts in the middle and flashes back to the beginning but one flash at a time.  Weir has come up with an interesting twist on an interstellar drive.  It dovetails with the crisis that is forcing the need for a trip to Tau Ceti.  Now I don’t think it’s a particularly plausible mechanism but it is entertaining for sure.

Well, that’s enough.

I, Robot Author

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I was just reading about the second serious scandal concerning AI generated fiction being published by experts in the world of publishing.  In the last scandal Hatchette bought a self-published book because the author managed to attract a very large number of readers on her own.  After they republished the book, it was discovered that there was a lot of very obvious AI generated content in it.

In the present scandal a prestigious contest that accepts fiction from amateurs living in the countries of the British Commonwealth had three of the five winners flagged by readers as being AI generated by a capable software used for this function.

Here’s a sample of the text:

“Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.”

Okay, what the hell does “white rum hot as apology” mean?  It doesn’t mean anything.  It’s AI slop that it thinks sounds “poetic.”

Now five “Experts” picked this gibberish and declared it worthy of a prestigious award.  Why?  Well, the only thing I notice that both scandals include are woke publishing “experts” selecting the work of minority writers without bothering to see if it’s any good or even written by human beings.

The most hilarious aspect of the latest scandal is that the contest judges refuse to admit that they’ve been made to look like fools and the stories are still up on their site as the winners.

I watched a YouTube video by a young woman who considers herself a seasoned editor and although she agrees that the text is extremely unlikely not to be AI slop she does add the obligatory warning that we should remember that minority writers must not be singled out as more highly suspect just because they always seem to be the ones whose work slips through the editors who are afraid of being called racists if they look too closely at their work and find it’s not very good.

I guess it’s not enough that the publishing world gives precedence to any writer who isn’t a straight white man.  Now they add robots as long as they’re not straight white male robots or at least not working under one of their names.  Well, be that as it may, today I officially began work on the sequel to my book.  I began the outline by writing out a bunch of plot lines to choose between.

Plot Threads

  • Update on Bogey and his life
  • Update on Grace and her boys
  • President Chastain’s crises
    1. Constitutional Convention
    2. Seceding States
    3. Potential Military Insurrection
    4. Personal Problems (health)
    5. Relations with Connors’ Group
  • Connors’ crises
    1. Disaffected Groups with His Organization
    2. Relations with federal and state officials
    3. Connors’ indecision and doubts
    4. Disagreements with Cutter and others
    5. Personal Problems (Grace, Bogey)
  • America’s Crisis of Instability
  • World’s Crisis of Instability
  • Technical Instability

So that’s a lot of stuff.  I’m not sure all of these will be included but it’s always best to start with the kitchen sink and pare it back.  Well, take that Chat GPT.

Fame and Fortune

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So yesterday I finally got my book onto Kindle Unlimited.  Huzzah!!!

An then I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.  A day later the page counter for KENP stood at zero.  This seemed unpromising.  So, I closed down the laptop and did something else.

I took a juvenile milk snake that I found hiding under the famous copper sheet and shot a photo shoot of his best profile.  And then we had lunch and worked on some other projects.  I put an air conditioning unit in one of the windows and I started weeding the raspberry patch and I helped clean some kind of ooze that had accumulated on the new fish pond.

And when I checked the KENP after all that, the counter was at one!  Now that’s not one book that’s one page.  So, if a book pays me forty cents what does a page earn me?  Well, you can do the math.  If the book is about two hundred and fifty-two pages long then that page is worth 0.15873 cents in cold hard cash.  If Jeff Bezos took a penny and a pair of tin snips (zinc snips?) and did some rudimentary trigonometric calculations he could probably nip off an arc from the edge of the coin that would somewhat represent this hefty sum.  So, I shut down the laptop again and began to recalibrate my plans to purchase that summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

I began reading some more of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”  You know this PKD is a very talented writer but I don’t think he spent a lot of his life smiling.  In fact, I think WWIII was probably one of the lighter topics he thought about.  He’s got the extinction of most animal species, widespread human chromosomal damage, widespread human brain damage and bizarre religious tendencies as the window dressing of his highly depressed main characters.  After a little of this I decided to take a break.  Apparently, this wasn’t going to be Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah.  It’s going to be a lot less chirpy.  So, I got in touch with the First Selectman and arranged a special meeting to discuss my succession plan as his special assistant in charge of burying the bodies.  Unfortunately, the committee was unable to locate anyone stupid enough to agree to the position.  I came home a few hours later and checked my KENP counter.  It was seventeen pages.  That’s 2.6984 cents.  Well!  Now we’re getting somewhere.  At this rate I’ll be able to afford my favorite Dunkin Donuts donut (an old fashioned) by Fall.

And I think my addition to the Kindle Unlimited rolls has netted me my first troll.  He was pretending to be a fairly successful non-fiction author but was unaware that he wasn’t supposed to be a fiction author so his answers didn’t track with that.  I brought this to his attention and he started making incoherent sentences.  Well, what can you do?  Now that I’m on the road to fame and fortune everyone wants a piece of me.  J K Rowlings eat your heart out.