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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.

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.

We Have Some Good News and Some Bad News

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It’s very rare that New York City newspapers can trumpet good news about crime in the city.  But last week they could:

“Major crimes in the subways, including robberies and felony assaults, declined 18 percent from Jan. 1 through March 31, to the second-lowest level in nearly three decades, police officials said at a news conference last week. There were no murders during the same period for the first time in seven years, the officials said.”

Unfortunately, this good news was nestled near the end of a crime story that was entitled:

“Police Seek Man Who They Say Violated a Corpse on an R Train.”

For the non-New Yorker, the R Train (or RR as it used to be known in my day) is a local subway line that plies the underground between Brooklyn and Downtown Manhattan.  The details were sparse but sufficient:

“The police were searching on Thursday for a man investigators believed violated a dead man Wednesday night on a train in a Manhattan subway station, according to an internal police document.

The person who died boarded an R train at around 8 p.m., according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter and the internal document. It was unclear on Thursday when or how the person died.

A man entered the same train car at around 11 p.m. at the Whitehall Street-South Ferry station in the Financial District, according to the official.

Within 45 minutes, the man saw the dead man and began to rummage through his pockets, the official said. The man then began to have sex with the body, according to the official and the document.

The sexual acts were captured on surveillance cameras inside the train car, the official said.

Soon after, the man got off the train and fled, the police said.”

Well, at least it’s good to know that the surveillance cameras were doing their job even if no one else was.  So, a man can drop dead and be lying there for three hours in a subway train without anyone including the crew aware of the fact and in fact another patron can take the opportunity to bugger the departed at his leisure without fear of interruption.

So, this 18% reduction in subway crime is being touted as a great success by the Mayor and the Police Commissioner’s offices but the fact that corpses are being sodomized on the R Train is to be taken in stride.  Call me a glass half empty kind of guy but somehow the 18% crime reduction rings a little hollow when necrophilia has surfaced in Gotham City.

I used to live in New York City during the time when crime was considered at its worst.  I can remember several gruesome murders and some aberrant behavior but I will say I’ve never heard that anything like this ever happened on the subway.  And the fact that the New York Times is trying to paint this “reduction in crime” as a triumph in law enforcement can only be described as Kafkaesque.

I like how the New York Times article describes the crime, “Police Seek Man Who They Say Violated a Corpse on an R Train.”  “Who they say” as if it’s in dispute.  What else could it be?  Could he have had prior consent from the deceased in the event his corpse happened to be found on the train?

I have friends and relatives who still live in the city.  I can only assume it would be too expensive for them to relocate.  Otherwise, I cannot imagine anyone who can get out, not doing so.  The public schools have become a sad joke.  The streets are covered with filth and the homeless and crime is at the point that you probably have to fear for your life on a regular basis.

But up until now you never had to consider that after you were murdered your corpse might be sexually abused by your attacker.  This does seem like an inflection point.  Or am I being oversensitive?

Guest Contributor – Milo Mindbender – 06APR2025 – Trade, Tariffs and Time

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Whatever the agenda is it must be cast before January 27. If it delays, it dies. After the next swearing in of Congress any progress not completed will probably be smothered in it’s afterbirth.
The usual suspects are screaming for blood, and don’t understand the way tariffs should work.
If you penalize products coming from my country to yours, I should do the same to your goods in order to keep a balance of trade. We are bit by tariffs, excise taxes, and down right bans on our exports, but are expected to forget that on their exports. Some actually make sense, like the ban on beef since we turn cattle into unwilling cannibals by reprocessing animal offal into cattle feed, some are just a protectionism by the other countries.
We need to either play reciprocally or refuse to play at all. Rumour has it mothballed cardboard plants in Maine are being looked into as a consequence of the tariffs with Canada.
European social practices have been indirectly supported by our bearing their defense burdens freeing up their Treasury for bribing the masses with healthcare, work breaks, and other bennies. Let them sort their own issues in their home since we are only uncultured upstarts according to them.
Asian economies get the same bribery, Japan was able to direct the monies that would have been used for defense into industries post WWII, and allowed them to specialize in electronics, Korea directly benefits by having our tripwire troops in place permitting them to focus on commerce instead of having to secure their borders. Post Kim rule in NK might collapse and actually allow for reunification of the two societies, but not under the one family rule it has had for 75 years.
If we did what the world is asking and tended to our own interest and business, because power hates a vacuum some entity would club to the top of the dung heap and declare themselves king of the pile.
It would be interesting to see as a thought experiment whether it would be an eastern invasion into the power vacuum, or another global jihad. Time may tell.