Category: Current Events

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.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 19MAY2026 – Politics

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Hard to call for 2026. Right now the house is held by 5 republicans plus an independent who caucuses with them. with the California redistrict vs Florida and the lame one seat win in Louisiana (which could have been 2) AND Indiana going AWOL I think it’s going to be very tight, likely slightly Democrat (5-10 seats). The big question on the Senate side is Platner vs Collins. Collins is not the best candidate from a conservative view, But probably better for us than Platner most days. Platner is such a fricking mess and there’s likely far more dirt that Collins can use that the elderly and upstate folks probably will swamp Portland and Southern Maine. The thing that would be good to do is close out Iran but resolving that such that things recover before 11/3 will take some really lucky breaks that I just don’t see happening. We HAVE to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon they make North Korea look like a calm reasonable opponent.
One race to watch is the LA mayor. If LA unblues enough to elect Pratt all then things get really odd.

2028 is a totally different situation. Likely, the major issue (Iran) will be resolved at some level. That unblocks large parts of the economy. Although the last half of the Trump administration probably gets stalled due to a blue house (and tied or slightly blue senate) they really cant do much as they haven’t got a veto proof majority and are unlikely to get one. So we get 2 years of sitzkrieg unless a miracle occurs.
Problem is the Democrats have no one that can easily steal states from the electoral coalition that Trump used. Newsome is an idiot and anathema to middle America, AOC is worse. Spanberger might have been an option but her run at the gerrymandering and the gun nonsense makes it clear she is just a traditional far left Liberal cosplaying as middie of the road. Buttigieg? Please don’t make me laugh. Shapiro from PA? If they would take him he MIGHT have a chance. Except he is never getting by the primaries because of the massive antisemitism of the democrat far left base. Kamala? She couldn’t even hardly touch Trump who had massive negatives in her base. The blue Gerontacracy that was boosted by Obama backstabbing any up and coming Pols means their bench is essentially all folks politically based in deep blue one party states. They have no clue where the middle is and any attempt to go there will get you slammed in the primaries. And because these are such lame candidates they will have basically no coattails. I’d expect things in 2028 to swing back to a more 2024 like situation with likely small Republican margins. And that takes us to 2030 where the big prize is fixing the ersatz 2020 census. That census is going to be absolutely critical, not controlling it will mean you’re headed to the edges for up to 10 years. It will already slame the blue states even if the questionable practices of 2020 are not removed. If they are removed the house might lean 20+ seats red in the 2032 elections.

The one big worry is we have 2 fairly old Supreme Court members who are the bulwarks of originalist interpretation (Thomas at 77 and Alito at 76). Should we lose them and the Senate is blue or evenly divided replacing them with other than some squishball moderate gets REAL hard. Add Roberts at 71 who although not SUPER dependable tends more to the originalist side unless he is trying to curry favor or look wise.

After 2028

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So, everybody wants to know if all the redistricting for the race-based districts that is going on down south will offset the midterm disadvantage for the Republicans.  My guess is it will absorb the bulk of the blowout and the Democrats will take the House by a handful of seats.  Right now, they’re talking about the Senate being a toss-up.  If I were to guess I’ll say it’ll be a fifty-fifty Senate with Vance as the tie breaker and thus keeping the Senate for the Republicans.  So that deadlock means nothing substantive will be legislated for Trump’s last two years.  And that’s okay.  Executive orders will be the name of the game.

But what happens in 2028?  A lot of people are very pessimistic.  Personally, I’m optimistic.  Two years should be enough time for Trump to break Iran.  After the midterms I see him closing down the Straits of Hormuz for as long as it takes to bankrupt Iran and cripple China.  It won’t be pain free.  Iran will lash out and who knows how crazy they may get.  But I don’t think it will take two years to get them to give up their nuclear program permanently.  So, if he gets past Iran, I can see oil prices dropping drastically and that will have a profoundly positive effect on the economy.  Now what comes after Trump?

Let me take a pessimistic scenario.  Suppose everything goes wrong and the Democrats take the White House, Senate and House in 2028.  According to their leaders, they will nuke the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court and make all illegal aliens, citizens.  That will have the effect of providing them with a permanent majority in Washington.  That is what they say they’ll do.  But will they do it?

I think they know that if they do those things, they are effectively declaring war against the red states.  That is a very big deal.  And I think some of them are afraid that it will cause a permanent breach between the two separate constituencies that this country is composed of.  And I think they know if they’re the ones who do it, they will force the other side to give up on the normal way things are done in Washington and begin using “unconventional” tactics to prevent the federal government from destroying their states.  Now what this would exactly look like, I’m not sure.  But I suspect it will not all be “passive resistance.”  And eventually, this will bring about a permanent separation between red and blue states.

Some of this is already happening.  Businesses and high net worth individuals are leaving blue states and blue cities in droves.  The socialist mayors and governors are panicking because their budgets are in a shambles and the unchecked crime is frightening away the middle and working classes too.  So, we’re already seeing a separation begin.  If the Democrats flood the country with illegals, the red states are going to have to figure a way to prevent these invaders from harming their states.  And making that happen will cause additional friction between the feds and the red states.  And that is how it will escalate.  How will that end nobody knows but it will not look like one country anymore.  So, will they declare war against the red states?

Recreational Time Travel

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner

So, as you get older you find that nostalgia is your favorite guilty (or guiltless) pleasure.  Movies and songs that showcase things from your younger days are among the happiest moments you spend.  Now don’t get me wrong, things happening in the present day can be fun and exciting and interesting for sure.  But more and more, you become a stranger in the strange land that is the present day.  You look around and you see that everything has changed; the culture, the people, the places, the language, the entertainment and especially the technology.  Even the things that are supposed to be things from your time have been changed until you’re not even qualified to use them.  As an example, look at the telephone.  If you had handed a smart phone to a person in 1970, they would have no idea what it was but they would definitely deny it was a telephone.

So, we are experiencing the slow eradication of the world we knew.  And if you came from a place that has been remade over the last half century it’s even more disconcerting.  Your past has been basically erased and what’s left sometimes has nothing at all left that resembles the place you grew up in.

So, this is all true.  And getting angry or depressed about it won’t change anything except make you feel worse.  But recently I realized that nostalgia is a form of time travel.  You get to use your memories and some touchstones (like people, movies, photos and music) and travel back to a magic place where you were a kid or a newlywed or a happy parent but definitely in the older world where everything was familiar and you were at the center of the universe.

So, you might be watching an old movie and suddenly a bus is moving down a street and it triggers memories when you were living there and were on an identical bus and you think of a day when you took a bus ride that was involved in an important event in your life.  Or you hear a song that you remember hearing when you were on the beach with your best girl.  Or you go to a classic car show and see a car that you owned or was owned by a friend.  And the memories come flooding back and you’re walking around in 1969 or 1987.  And your older relatives are still alive and none of your friends have moved far away and everybody you care about is a short ride away.

Sure, it’s a bit of an escape.  And it doesn’t solve any of the problems you have in the here and now.  The country is still overrun with illegal aliens and gasoline is almost $5 a gallon and your bones are really creaky but for a few minutes or an hour you’re living in the happiest place on Earth; your youth.  Now, you can’t over do it.  If you spend all day every day in the past, you’ll lose the ability to cope with the present.  And you won’t be any use to people who think of now as the center of the universe.  So, I plan to use it sparingly and save it for special occasions where I can share it with the other survivors from the golden age.  Just something I thought of.

Tom’s World – 17MAY2026 – The Blue Tribe

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TomD

I would think that the principle and purpose behind the concept of government was an outgrowth of earlier tribal organization. A chief by whatever name, usually the strongest, surrounded by his warriors and “wise” elders or something very similar was the precursor to organized government. The purpose wasn’t necessarily the aggrandizement of individuals but to protect the tribe members from predation from within and without of the tribal structure.

In dense blue run cities it seems that the basic purpose has been inverted to center on the increase of the wealth and power of a central elite and the public can be damned.

The only valid purpose of government should to provide a framework of protection from predators physical and economic, codify limits of behaviour and enforce same so the population can thrive without fear to whatever extent possible.

Seems to me that Brandon has flatly failed at his warrant and is flailing around blaming the ramifications of his failure on whoever seems to be semi-plausable while the predators swarm and prosper. Essentially chaos.

Multiply that by a large enough factor and it is civilizational failure.

What Retail Sales Looks Like in the Jungle

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The quote is the beginning of the linked article.  It’s worth a read.

“Walgreens is shuttering a location in Chicago, upsetting residents, and stirring fury among exploitative and complicit politicians. The way some local “leaders” tell it, the drugstore chain is acting greedily, selfishly, or even criminally.

“Walgreens should be charged with first-degree corporate abandonment,” thundered a local alderman. “It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our elders. It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our families.”

This is complete nonsense, of course, but the asinine nature of his flailing is laid bare by Walgreens’ reasons for closing its store in the Windy City’s Chatham neighborhood. According to the local Fox affiliate, the corporation was losing more than $1 million annually at that location, driven by stunning levels of theft and exorbitant security costs.”

 

So, let’s sum it up:

  • 16% of their merchandise is stolen per year.
  • That equates to more than a million dollars in losses per year.
  • They spent $400,000 in security for this one store
  • Their employees were still subject to frequent physical attacks by the thieves.

And then Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson characterized Walgreen’s decision to shut the store as criminal abandonment.  Wow, that’s amazing.  If I were the mayor of the third largest city in the United States and I discovered that a vital retail provider of drugs for my citizens was pulling out because my police force had failed to keep thieves and thugs in check at this location, I would move heaven and earth to make an example of that store and surround it with cops 24/7 until the crooks gave up.  But Brandon Johnson blames the people being robbed and assaulted by the mob that represents his true constituency.

From one end of this country to the other all blue cities and states are devolving into something that more resembles third world, banana republic street chaos than the United States of America.  But I now doubt that the voters in these jurisdictions will ever kick the Democrats out.  Los Angeles is the current test case.  Spencer Pratt is lambasting Mayor Karen Bass on the abysmal record she has accumulated over her term.  Between the horror show that was the Palisades fires and the complete lack of assistance to the victims, to the enormous disgrace of the out-of-control homeless epidemic on the streets of Los Angeles, Pratt has been speaking out and posting advertisements mocking his opponent’s ineptitude.

But will it make any difference?  California is a one-party state.  It’s owned by the state-workers’ unions.  Their pensions are the only important policies they care about and the Democrats have bought their votes with these funds.  So, I expect nothing to change in California, New York and the rest of the blue states for as long as their states can fund those pensions.  When the day comes that they run out of other people’s money, there will be hell to pay.  But the devil works for them so I’m sure he’ll pony up.

The Pursuit of Happiness – Part 1

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Over the course of human history, what civilization or society produced the greatest amount of happiness?  Now this is a hard thing to define.  What do I mean by “greatest amount of happiness?”  Do I mean that the highest number or proportion of inhabitants were happy?  Or would it qualify if some subset was incredibly happy while the rest of them were miserable?  And even if all of a people were happy but they achieved their happiness by immiserating some external human population such as marauding Vikings or rampaging Vandals did, would it qualify?  Could slave owning societies be happy if they treated their human chattel humanely.  And can we attribute the happiness of a people to their form of government or do we think it has more to do with the innate traits of a particular people?

So, let’s start with forms of government.  If we follow Aristotle, there are three main forms of government; monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.  Of course, every variation on these three classes have occurred over time but I think it’s fair to say that there has never been a form of government that over the very long term produced a stable happy society.  Instead, it seems that each type can have a “golden age” that eventually degenerates into a miserable failed version of itself.  So, a good king or emperor is followed by a monstrous tyrant (possibly his son).  Aristocracies can decay into greedy oligarchies that suck the wealth out of a society and turn their fellow citizens into serfs.  And of course, when democracy becomes mob rule, we have plenty of examples of mass murder from ancient Corcyra to the Terror of the French Revolution.  So, it does not seem that we have discovered a form of government that inevitably leads to happiness.

But maybe there is a condition in society that does contribute to greater happiness in a people.  Now I say this with great trepidation because this principle can be twisted into a weapon that has also caused untold human misery throughout history.  I hesitate to give it an old name.  It can be called religion, morality, law or even philosophy.  What it amounts to is a way to direct the way humans interact with each other and the universe around them.  It might even be called science or knowledge nowadays.  Because sociology tries to turn human relations into science.  It is interesting that the American Founding Fathers thought that in order for their republic to flourish the citizens would have to be religious and therefore virtuous.  And by the same token if they weren’t, then no constitution would be able to keep them well governed.

So, maybe the only way to ensure the happiness of a people is for them to believe in the same god or philosophy or code of behavior.  In some sense they would have to be one family (or tribe).  But does that mean that any empire or mega-state like the United States cannot expect a happy polity?  Well, I think this is actually the truth.  Over the course of the last hundred years the people of the United States have more and more divided along ideological lines until at this point it is more or less at the point of a cold civil war.  And soon it may be hotting up.  So maybe we are seeing an unavoidable consequence of trying to force people who believe in different things to live together.

It seems to me we will have to figure out a way to give each other space.  What occurs to me is some changes to the constitution to give the states more power and the federal government less.  This would allow the different states to diverge toward the practices they favor without the constant battle to control the behavior of the “other side.”

But how do we get there?