May 21, 2026 · 5:06 am

The Felon of the United States tells government to give him $1.7 billion slush fund to reward traitors.

First the Toddler President sued the IRS. Then the IRS and the DOJ settled the lawsuit before the judge could issue a (probably) unfavorable ruling. The settlement agreement gives the Toddler $1.776 billion in government funds to distribute to supposed victims of “weaponized” prosecution. You know, like the J6ers who attacked the government in an attempted coup and are, in Republican mythology, martyrs persecuted by federal tyranny.

The administration’s pretenses is that as a five-person board will decide in disbursements, the Toddler will have no say. Of course all five members are his appointees, firable without cause, so the Toddler’s in charge. There are no appeals or judicial reviews of the confidential distribution of funds and nobody but the Toddler family, the Toddler organization or the IRS can appeal the settlement.

Oh, and here’s an interesting detail: “The Justice Department on Tuesday expanded the agreement it reached this week with President Trump to resolve his extraordinary lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service to include a provision that would bar the agency from pursuing tax claims against the president, his family or his businesses. In a one-page document signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and quietly posted on the department’s website, officials vowed not to pursue any matters, including those involving Mr. Trump’s tax returns, that are currently pending.”

As we approach the midterms with Republicans increasingly unpopular, having a massive fund to payoff and reward anyone who crimes for the Toddler could be beneficial to rigging the game. Much like the Colorado governor commuting the sentence for Tina Peters, who was convicted of tampering with election equipment (JD Vance is now praising her as a martyr). If the Toddler Crime Family and those currying favor will protect you, why not do a crime?

Even if not, this is a blatantly illegal, corrupt deal. None of the J6 rioters deserves a pardon, let alone financial renumeration (unlike, say, this guy). Nor does this guy, a Toddler lackey though not a J6er, who’s seeking $2.7 million. It’s the same logic by which Justice (ironic name these days) is suing the Washington bar for disciplining the Toddler’s corrupt lawyers. And the opportunity will be abused; Andrew Johnson is a convicted pedophile who told one victim he’d buy his silence with his J6 compensation (this was before the settlement but talk about compensating the rioters has been around a while. You will be shocked (not really) that Acting AG Todd “Toady” Blance lied about this. Vance lies too, saying they’re not going to give it to any J6ers who attacked cops.

Oh, Vance also says he’s very troubled about fraudsters who steal from tax funds — but he means Medicare fraud or more likely alleged Medicare fraud (and by the little people — I don’t imagine him speaking out against former fraudster Sent. Rick Scott).

“Sen. Richard Blumenthal clearly saw the way the wind was blowing and drafted an amendment to block the administration from “making any payments to convicted child predators.” Republicans said no. And to another proposal blocking payments to convicted J6ers. We are hearing protests from one Treasury official and from Sen. Bill Cassidy. Got to say, it’s a little late for Cassidy to discover he has principles.

We’re not talking goodhearted patriotic Americans getting payouts. 78 have reoffended and “at least nine of the cases involve child sexual abuse, three are rape charges and two people have been convicted of murder while driving under the influence of alcohol – in addition to at least 19 weapons charges and nine violent assaults.”

Fred Clark at Slacktivist discusses why Republicans — the party that preened for decades that they wanted good values and morals in government — tolerates such blatant corruption. He suggests it’s the old rationalization that we’re all sinners, all corrupt, therefore the Toddler’s no more corrupt than anyone else; after all, “in God’s eyes there’s therefore no meaningful difference between taking a dubious tax deduction and being a serial killer” At the link he explains why that’s theological bullshit; I took a look at “we are all sinners” back in 2022 and how a confession of humility has been twisted into a get-out-of-jail-free card.

I do hope the next Dem president shreds this agreement, shuts down the slush fund (I imagine the Toddler will spend it all first) and ignores the press when they squeal about how Democrats shouldn’t criminalize political differences.

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May 20, 2026 · 5:15 am

There’s not much left of Ft. Sumter

Time to wrap up my posting about the Charleston trip I took last month. The last day of which we spent visiting Fort Sumter, the place that started the Civil War (as detailed in Madness Rules the Hour).

I’d had no idea Sumter was an island, though I must have read it somewhere. Tracy, Craig and I got on a ferry and headed out across the bay.

Sumter includes Battery Huger, a newer black structure built during the Spanish American War.

The battery is in much better shape than Sumter’s walls.

A few spots have shells embedded in the walls. They’re marked by the threads.

The ring around the flagpole marks the height of the walls before the Union bombardment leveled it (obviously after the Confederates had seized it).

There are cannon still in place.

And a great view from atop the Battery.

The next day I headed home to TYG and our pets. It was a great trip — hopefully we’ll do another before too long.

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May 19, 2026 · 12:15 pm

“Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.”

The title comes from Stephen Vincent Benet’s mid-1930s poem “Litany for Dictatorships,” a grim assessment that humanity was not living up to its potential:

“We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.”

Living in the oh-so-red-state Florida Panhandle and through the Reagan Years, I’ve never been under the delusion that the light was guaranteed to increase. Letters to the local paper back in the 1980s made it quite obvious lots of people stewed with resentment that women had life choices other than “stay at home mom.” They hated that Christianity — their brand, of course — wasn’t allowed to dictate the law of the land.People weren’t as open about being antisemites or racists but I saw some of that too. Homophobia reared its head later, as did Islamophobia.

Despite all that, it’s horrifying how quickly how many people embrace old hatreds now that the Republican Party leaders are saying its okay. Case in point, a lawsuit from multiple Republican AGs fighting against the Biden administration classifying gender dysphoria as a disability ended when the Toddler undid the rule. Some of the AGs turned it into a different suit, demanding the federal government drop a requirement that states have to provide disabled individuals with services in the community whenever possible, rather than institutionalizing them.

The AGs are staying silent about the reasons for this suit, probably because “I want to lock those stinking freaks away” isn’t a popular position. I’m sure if pressed they’ll eventually spout some bullshit about states’ rights, federal overreach, blahblahblah. They’re lying; nobody pushes a lawsuit like this unless they want disabled people locked away.

Republicans are also pushing to eliminate a federal program that pays family members to care for a loved one at home. Here they offer an argument there’s too much fraud, but rather than investigate (or offer examples) they simply want the program gone. Which could lead to more disabled being institutionalized.

I know people who are only alive because they’re on antidepressants but RFK Jr. opposes them too. And wants to ban them. He’s not unique in this: when Obama said people with mental illness should seek treatment and not be stigmatized, right-winger Neil Munro said, yes they should be stigmatized — people who seek therapy instead of just working through it are weak! Which fits with RFK Jr.’s conviction that a healthy, pure body won’t get sick or the ideas of other Toddler officials that covid would only cull the weaker members of our society, herd immunity would save the rest.

It’s not just about making bigotry against the disabled fashionable again. The religious right has grumbled for years that “freedom of religion” means freedom of their religion and they’re still at it: disbarred Toddler lawyer Jenna Ellis says “We have a civil government that protects the right of Christians to be able to live and work” and does not protect anyone else. Which is wrong, and also evil: nobody making this argument is advocating “even though we could shut down Islam in America, we’ll tolerate them” (some good discussion of all this on Baptist News). They want Muslims gone. This is particularly about Muslims right now but trust me, the Jews and the “wrong” Christians will get it eventually if the Religious Right’s dream of a Christian state becomes a reality. As witness one New Hampshire Republican wants to teach Holocaust denial in schools.

And, of course, there’s racism. The Biden administration wanted to help poor blacks in Alabama who desperately needed new septic systems. The Toddler killed the project. Red states are jumping on gerrymandering black Americans out of political power now that the Supreme Court has given them the A-OK. And when black state legislators in Tennessee objected, the Republicans retaliated. How dare they speak up to the master race? And Republicans continue calling for an end to the Fourteenth Amendment — which as Kevin Leman says at the link means they’re either ignorant or white supremacist. As others have observed, stripping black Americans of legal rights isn’t about the rationale, it’s about stripping them of legal rights. And then there’s the racist alleged murderer who’s getting thousands in donations since allegedly gunning down a black man in a hate crime. Or that the one type of refugee Republicans believe in bringing to this country — even spending money on it — is white South Africans.

And there’s homophobia and transphobia (e.g., here and here) too, and some Republicans declaring that no matter how bad the Toddler is, they still support him as the alternative to Biden daring to declare Transgender Visibility Day. As Rick Pidcock says, “nobody dies from Transgender Visibility Day.”

Benet ends his poem with the lines “our fathers and ourselves sewed dragon’s teeth/our children know and suffer the armed men.” The dragon’s teeth in this case being the rights blacks, women, gays and the disabled won for themselves in the last century, which then spawned the opposition of pissed-off, resentful people who can’t stand to share “their” country. That works both ways, though. Just as hatred didn’t die with the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the ADA and Obergefell, the push for equality and the knowledge that it’s possible won’t die either. We can be dragon’s teeth. We can give birth to a better America. Women, blacks and gays fought for their rights when they had none, when the law actively denied them rights. It will be a very long struggle and many people will suffer unjustly and die before it ends but we can eventually bend the arc of the universe back towards justice.

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May 19, 2026 · 5:13 am

Southern Discomfort: cover and back copy reveal

Samantha Collins and I are almost done with the cover of Southern Discomfort.

We’ve got the image set, more or less what I showed you in January. Plus title and my name.

Here we have Maria and one of the many pissed-off cats in the story staring down Gwalchmai, clutching the hand of glory. I’m happy with it but we still have some technical details to make it pass muster with Amazon.

But with the cover done, I’ve set a release date for the ebook July 11 (this might change). I’ll have it ready for pre-order within a week or so. It’s finally going to happen.

And here’s the cover copy:

“Travel back to Georgia in 1973, as Lt. Maria Esposito experiences — Southern Discomfort.
For the past three years Maria’s been a wanted fugitive, constantly on the run, never letting anyone get close. Now torrential floods have trapped her in tiny Pharisee Georgia, where the FBI is investigating a terrorist bombing. Maria’s only hope is to keep a low profile until the rain ends.
Too bad for her that the victim’s widow, an unearthly beauty named Olwen McAlister, claims only Maria can bring the killer to justice. The Pharisee sheriff takes Olwen’s “visions” seriously: either Maria agrees to help or he’ll find a reason to lock her up.
It gets worse from there. Suddenly Maria is the target of hostile ravens, a homicidal horse, and a living shadow warning her to leave town or die. Cats everywhere are yowling with rage. Maria’s seeing things her grandmother would have called malocchia, evil magic. Magic isn’t real, Maria knows that, but she has no other explanation.
If she stays in Pharisee either the shadow kills her or the FBI sends her to prison for life. Trouble is, something monstrous is looming: if Maria doesn’t stick around to fight it, innocent people will die. Maria tells herself she doesn’t give a damn. She can’t afford to give a damn. 
She has a grim feeling in her gut that she’s not going to listen …
Southern Discomfort is a standalone intrusion/urban/Southern fantasy novel. It includes multiple POV characters, several woman protagonists and multiple POC. The spaniel lives. The villain does kill a cat. It will appeal to fans of Alex Bledsoe, Tom Deitz, Luanne Bennett and Charles DeLint’s Jack the Giant Killer.”

I debated adding a statement that I did not use AI, but I don’t think that’s necessary. I do hope that sounds intriguing.
 

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May 18, 2026 · 5:01 am

Having a Toddler as president isn’t funny

When a friend of mine described the current president as “the Necrotic Toddler” it led to me adopting “Toddler” to refer to him, rather than say the name of that scumbag when I write about him (“Felon of the United States” works too).

It’s not really fair to children — I can’t recall knowing any toddler as horrible or as spiteful as he is — but it does capture a lot of his personality. His complete lack of impulse control, his willingness to say whatever he thinks will work now, then take it back ten minutes later. His continued outraged sniveling about how he really won in 2020 — as his niece Mary said at the time, he wanted to win, he didn’t get what he wanted and that’s the most horrible thing that has happened to anyone, ever.

It also explains why, as they say in old gangsterm ovies, he’s a double-crossing rat. It doesn’t matter how loyally you serve him or support him, the moment it’s more convenient for him to throw you under the bus, he’ll do it. Only now matters. And revenge on everyone he hates, like America’s first black president. Including anyone who reports accurately how his Iran war is a failure.

Part of this, as Paul Campos says, is that “Donald Trump has lived a largely consequence-free existence, and he’s gradually discovered that all of our various “guardrails” don’t actually apply to him, at all.” As Campos has pointed out in several other posts, compliance with the rules is to a certain extent voluntary: if we all speeded or ignored redlights or cheated on our taxes, the system couldn’t handle it. In the words of the movie Changing Lanes, the system works as long as we all agree not to go apeshit.

The Toddler has figured out that he can always escape consequences. Not that he’s unique: money allowed hit-and-run driver Rebecca Grossman to postpone her trail for three years (thanks to good lawyers) while she stayed free on bail and got a sympathetic profile in the media. Happily a court rejected her recent appeal. The Toddler has more money, fewer principles and more belligerence than Grossman. He’s ducked consequences by declaring bankruptcy, threatening to sue people, refusing to pay them (suing him would be a lot more work than it’s worth) and whining. Or simply refusing to follow the rules (one example) and trusting nobody will do anything about it.

As I put it a couple of years ago, “Trump has repeatedly publicized the names of people in his various trials such as judges, judges’ family, witnesses and jurors. He’s been placed under gag orders and violates them … which would get most people locked away in jail. But he’s an important person so he gets a pass.” He gets away with grabbing women because he’s rich and powerful and they know pushing back might be worse for them. He got out of one legal mess by a large donation to Pam Bondi’s campaign when she was Florida AG.

The victim of one of the Toddler’s sexual assaults, E. Jean Carroll won her defamation lawsuit against him. Now the Justice Department is trying to replace him as defendant, because you can’t sue the government for defamation. Her judgment against him would go away; the Toddler will undoubtedly lie that this exonerates him, just like he keeps lying that he’s been exonerated from any association with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking. He’s also figuring out how he can sue his own government and collect. Apparently it will be a $1.7 billion slush fund to reward allies who got caught and punished for their crimes.

I’ve seen arguments that the sheer flood of rottenness also deadens the senses. What would be a career-ending scandal for Biden or Obama is just one of a half-dozen outrages a day in the Toddler years. Consider, for example, Toddler Junior investing in a company that wants to be the Amazon of mail-order guns. By a strange coincidence, the administration is looking at changing the rules to make that possible. Just great. Likewise, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spent seven months on the road making a reality show paid for by companies with a stake in transportation rather than do the job he’s paid for (not the only scandal in Duffy’s orbit).

The Toddler has also benefited, as this Bluesky post puts it, from so many people treating him as amusing: “I think the disconnect between Atlantic elites is that Americans think Donald Trump is a kid getting to drive a monster truck for Make A Wish and Europeans and Canadians think Donald Trump is the president of the United States.” In 2016 they gushed about how he threw mean nicknames around, how edgy! A few years ago (I can’t find the link) during Biden’s presidency a couple of journalists whined because the Toddler’s Twitter ban was in place — come on, we all miss seeing his insane, rage-filled lies, don’t we? Admit it! It’s so unfair not getting to watch him freak out over this, that or the other thing!

Or consider the comment one anonymous Republican gave before 1/6: sure, we’re humoring him when he says he really won the election — it makes him happy and what does it hurt? Now, of course “he won!” is Republican orthodoxy, even though it remains a lie (and not even a credible lie).

This is one reason the war in Iran has gone so badly: the Iranians have no reason to humor the Toddler, kiss his ass or to go soft on him. I imagine if they could get a satisfactory deal to end the war, they’d be fine with the Toddler getting to brag that he won; that would be sensible for both sides as a way out of this. However the Toddler isn’t sensible; he has no idea how to negotiate, no idea that qualified, competent negotiators would do better than his son-in-law, can’t accept that he doesn’t dominate the situation (or the Iranians). It’s much easier to post AI slop about Iran (see the Campos link) than fix things. Or whine about how anyone who says he hasn’t completely beaten Iran is committing treason. And as it’s all about his ego and how it reflects on him, he doesn’t care how it’s hurting Americans. Or Iranians, who are getting it far worse.

It’s one reason he might try some trick to run again, despite what the Constitution clearly says. He’s never let rules stop him before and as Campos said in another post (which I can’t find the link for), he’s an attention junkie who knows he’ll never get the world’s eyes on him again if he steps down for good. No more coverage of his TruthSocial posts, no more taking him seriously, nothing. And what if a Democratic president tears down his big beautiful ballroom and takes his name off everything? Waaah!

I’d love to see it happen though the media will undoubtedly freak if a Democrat makes things that personal. I hope our next candidate has the spine and determination to do it anyway.

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May 17, 2026 · 5:18 am

Cutting and wishing: two books

Ever since reading Jackie Morse Kessler’s Hunger, I’ve been meaning to follow up with the sequel. I finally got around to RAGE: Riders of the Apocalypse 2 which continues the premise of having Death — a Kurt Cobain lookalike — recruiting teenagers for the remaining three slots of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (though the protagonists of both books are girls). In Hunger, an anorexic becomes Famine; in this one, Missy is a teenager who relieves a boatload of emotion (bad relationship, death of her cat) by cutting; then Death shows up and suddenly she’s got a much bigger sword and the option to cut other people. The book establishes there’s a high turnover rate in War, Famine and Plague, hence the need for new recruits

From some of the reviews on Goodreads, Kessler does a good job capturing the impulses that lead to cutting. However where anorexia feels connected to Famine, cutting yourself hardly mirrors War. Nor does the book deal with war as much as the first book did starvation — it focuses much more on petty feuds, resentments and small-scale violence. Missy’s big struggles with bullying and slut-shaming at school, plus with her family, don’t connect with the main plot other than to add to her stress. The book does better in the straight Y/A stuff, which is not what I expect to enjoy (I am after all, way aged out of the target market). Not a bad book — I do like that Missy’s family really does have some dysfunction, rather than just her misreading everything, everyone was nice all along (a reveal I rarely like) — but a drop from the first too.

THREE LITTLE WISHES by Paul Cornell and Steve Yeowell is an amusing riff on both rom-coms and three wishes fantasies. Kelly, the protagonist, is a lawyer and a stereotypically sensible, head-centered romantic comedy protagonist, the kind who clearly needs to loosen up and become more of a manic pixie.

Acting on a suggestion by her best friend, Kelly impulsively buys the contents of a storage unit in an online auction, then discovers they include the bottled spirit of Oberon, the faerie king — and releasing him gives her yes, three little wishes. Or big wishes. Well, that can’t possibly go wrong, can it?

In this case, it doesn’t. Cornell asks us to imagine what if the protagonist uses their wishes wisely? What if you don’t regret what you wish for? What if being sensible and thinking before you act is a good thing? I don’t think I’m giving too much spoilers — the fun is in how the creators execute all this — but in any case, the story is fun and worth a look.

Covers by Nick Cardy and Yeowell, all rights to images remain with current holders.

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May 16, 2026 · 5:32 am

Time travel back to mother’s day, but not to Rio Lobo! Movies viewed

A hard-drinking Aussie writer with a collapsing marriage meets THE GREEN WOMAN (2022) who shows up out of nowhere, knows a lot about him and claims she went to college on Mars — hmm, is it possible she’s not just a woman in green body paint or a drunken hallucination.

This drama became a “talking lamp” very quickly (i.e., something to glance at while I did other things), primarily because the eponymous woman has a very affected manner that I presume is meant to show her strangeness but comes off like bad acting. Nor does it help that the married couple are both unlikable — and if the writer’s making $40,000 a year, why is his wife complaining that he needs a “real” job (spoiler, some of this may be unreliable narration, but even so …). The film did pull one twist I didn’t expect but that doesn’t make it watchable. “I’m hiding all the mail as part of an evil conspiracy against all bureaucrats.”


TIM TRAVERS AND THE TIME TRAVELER’S PARADOX (2024) has the titular mad (and completely obnoxious) scientist (Samuel Dunning) successfully throw himself one minute back in time, at which point he murders his past self to see if the grandfather paradox works. It doesn’t — and then another future self shows up and kills him because Tim needs more data points to form a definite conclusion.

Things get increasingly loopy and we wind up with multiple Tims joining forces to make sense of this, which put me in mind of the Aussie time-travel comedy The Infinite Man — though having multiple Tims engage in an orgy also made me think of David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself. Unfortunately things get complicated as they have to deal with a baffled hit man (he shot Travers between the eyes! How is he still walking around?), grandfatherly hitman Danny Trejo and possible love interest Felicia Day (given she usually plays sweet goofballs, I imagine playing someone with a short-temper and a fondness for f-bombs was fun). Well worth seeing. “I do not want a repeat of the guinea pig incident — only shock the potato!”

If Howard Hawks‘ final film RIO LOBO (1970) were good, it would stand with the similar Rio Bravo and El Dorado — also written by Leigh Brackett and starring John Wayne — as a Western trilogy. Too bad it’s dreadful, a sad film for such a talented director to go out on.

During the Civil War, Col. Cord McNally (Wayne) entrusts his protege with transporting a gold shipment by rail. Confederates Cordona and Tuscarora (Jorge Rivero, Christopher Mitchum) successfully raid the shipment with inside help from someone in McNally’s unit and the protege dies in the fight. After capturing the two Rebs, McNally tells them he doesn’t take their actions personally — it’s war — but he wants the traitor’s name. In return for fair treatment, the two men promise to let him know if they ever discover it. Typical for 20th century treatment of the Civil War, everyone’s amicable — there’s mutual respect on both sides, and no political issues.

Post-war, the quest for the traitor brings McNally to Rio Lobo, where Tuscarora’s father is facing a land grab and the traitor may be lurking in the shadows. Following the template of the earlier movies we have Jack Elam as the irascible old coot and Jennifer O’Neil as a slightly immoral woman (where Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo was a gambler’s widow, O’Neil plays a medicine-show huckster). And inevitably the fight involves holding the Big Bad in jail against all odds until the authorities — U.S. Cavalry in this case — can arrive.

The ingredients for a good movie are there but when the streamer I was using glitched ten minutes before the finish, I didn’t care. Like El Dorado, this is more about the bonds between characters than the action but outside of Wayne and Elam, the cast isn’t strong enough to build those bonds. Reflecting the increased movie violence of the era, there’s also much more on-screen blood (not huge amounts, just more) than the previous films. Quentin Tarantino loved the two previous movies but found Rio Lobo so bad he cited it as a reason not to keep directing too long and lose his mojo. “I heard the racket and somehow I knew it was you.”

MOTHER’S DAY (2016) is one of Garry Marshall’s holiday-themed rom-coms from earlier in this century (New Year’s Day, Christmas Eve, Valentine’s Day) and like them follows the Love, Actually formula of multiple plotlines and an ensemble cast. Here we have Jennifer Aniston dealing with her ex remarrying a much younger woman, Julia Roberts reconnecting with the now adult child she gave up for adoption and Kate Hudson as one of two sisters trying to hide their spouses (one interracial, one a woman) from their parents. The weakest of the four films. “You look like you have a very welcoming bosom — may I rest my child on it?”

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May 15, 2026 · 4:30 pm

Sing hosannas and release the doves!

This week came the day we dreaded — Wisp going to the vet! She gets warier every year, plus we can’t feed her after midnight. Which means Snowdrop can’t get any food either as they eat together.

Fortunately it was mostly smooth sailing. The cats sat by where their bowls go, but didn’t complain too much. TYG was able to grab Wisp and throw her in the big cage; after about half an hour of plaintive meowing, I took her in.

The good news: she’s in great shape. Some tartar on a back tooth, only .25 pounds heavier than last year (we’d thought she’d put on a lot more weight). And she forgave us fairly quickly.

It was a week with a lot of appointments like that, all of them turning out well. I had a dental appointment Wednesday (checkup and cleaning), then Plushie had his eye checkup later that afternoon (still in great shape). Good news, but a lot of time taken up. Plus I had to submit a bunch of invoices to our various insurers for online purchases.

The downside, of course, was that all those appointments ate up time. Plus, of course, time after each to recover and refocus my thoughts. On top of which I had a late night Tuesday and Wednesday which left me zonked on Thursday. Despite which, I got some good work done. The best thing is that I successfully formatted Southern Discomfort for Draft2Digital and Amazon. Draft2Digital is invaluable but their ebook formatting sometimes makes my Word formatting look wonky. That’s now fixed. And D2D will provide me with a PDF I can upload to Amazon.

I did some work on Savage Adventures. I really need to get to work on a cover artist ASAP. Not that I’m close to done, but once I am, I’d like to move much faster than I did with Southern Discomfort. Speaking of which, the cover is done for the digital version (Amazon needs some technical tweaks); I’ll announce a release date next week.

I read “Honey on the Grave” to the writing group. They really liked it, which was great; it’s only about my fourth draft and it usually takes many more before a story is any good. They also gave me some suggestions for polishing it, which I will look at later this month. The meeting was the reason I was up late Tuesday; we discovered Zoom was automatically recording our readings with AI and because they guy who officially hosted it is no longer with the group, we can’t do anything to turn it off. We set up a new Zoom link with myself and one of the other writers as co-hosts; however some people had bookmarked the old link rather than clicking on it from the group’s webpage so we had to go find them and tip them off. A learning experience.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop I reviewed some books about African-American films and reposted my old review about Brother From Another Planet.

On the downside, waking up late led to me missing much of my usual morning exercise and stretching sessions. Next week should be better, though — zero appointments.

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May 15, 2026 · 5:20 am

Hello, friendly Pomeranian!

Met this little guy in the checkout line at Harris Teeter.

Super friendly, super soft, what’s not to love?

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May 14, 2026 · 5:15 am

AI and some other tech stuff

“When the model gave accurate responses, the people using it outperformed a control group of people relying on their own brainpower. When the AI gave the wrong answers, the people using it did much worse than the control group. In other words, people stopped thinking for themselves.”

“Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.” That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.”

I’m delighted Durham has imposed a 60-day moratorium on data centers. The city considered a longer ban but that will take a different procedure. I’m also happy Minnesota has banned apps that can take photos of people and strip them naked.

“Users of the platform can join video calls with an avatar of Jesus generated by artificial intelligence. Like other religious A.I. tools on the market, it offers words of prayer and encouragement in various languages. With the occasional glitch, it remembers previous conversations and speaks through not-quite-synced lips.” Ugh!

“An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds.”

How much does it tiring us if we’re constantly thinking “Is this AI?”

Some tech firms are cutting back worker benefits (PTO, 401k match, parental leave) to put more money into AI.

“Sales employees at Flock have been accessing sensitive cameras in the town to demonstrate the company’s surveillance technology to police departments around the country. The cameras accessed have included surveillance tech in a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community center, and a pool.” Here’s some intel from our local publication the Indy on What Is Flock?

Arizona State University used AI to turn professors’ lectures into online modules. The results were bad.

Well that’s alarming: Webinar TV scraped anonymous Zoom recovery meetings.

Another side-effect of all the money and tech being poured into AI: archiving the Internet has gotten harder and pricier.

Schools push back against excess tech. Jill Filipovic cheers them on.

Google is now using AI to rewrite headlines of articles found in google searches. As I don’t want to pay for the linked article, I’m curious whether it’s dumbing them down, sanewashing the Toddler or what — but it’s definitely not their call (headlines are not randomly selected, trust me). And let’s not forget, AI synopsizing news articles frequently gets them wrong.

“Five developers are planning to build six data center campuses in Archbald, which will cover a full 14 percent of the town, evict a trailer park, and border many residential properties. One campus alone, as The Scranton Times-Tribune reporter Frank Lefneskey pointed out, is expected to use more power than the region’s largest power plant is able to produce. “

China has superior EV car batteries. There’s a push to keep them away from Americans.

Some members of the Austin City Council are seeking answers from Waymo after video showed one of its vehicles blocking an ambulance as it was responding to the scene of the mass shooting at Buford’s bar on West Sixth Street on March 1.

Tech companies hate “right to repair” laws that allow people other than themselves to repair or modify tech. Their new angle to block them: national security.

If aluminum can be turned into a catalyst, that would be a scientific and technological game-changer.

Why the payphone was once a cutting-edge invention.

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