Fraser Sherman's Blog

May 27, 2026 · 5:15 am

Southern Discomfort: better with beta readers

I think Southern Discomfort is a terrific book, though I freely concede that I’m biased. I do not, however, take all the credit for it. My beta readers on the book have been invaluable. These include the Durham Science Fiction/Fantasy Writing Group, writer & friend Michele Berger, writer & friend Cindy Holbrook and TYG offered some insights at one point in the process. Maggie Prestwood of the group gave me an extra final beta editing that helped a lot.

I’m good at editing myself and spotting problems but I’m not infallible; I doubt anyone is. That’s particularly true with a work of around 90,000 words. In a short story there’s a limit to how much I can mess up; with a novel there’s more scenes so more opportunity to make mistakes. Get a name wrong. Forget that someone wears glasses or that they have a distinctive way of phrasing everything.

Beta reading isn’t just about catching mistakes, however. It’s about making a story better. Many drafts back, 2nd Lt. and former Army nurse Maria Esposito starts out with no intention of sticking around Pharisee, the strange Southern town in which she’s been captured. After a kelpie attacks and almost kills someone, she’s horrified enough to stay and fight the mystery threat.

The consensus from the writing group: not convincing. Maria simply doesn’t have enough reason to stand and fight for people she doesn’t know, given the risks (death or a 20-year federal sentence) facing her. They were right; I rewrote so Maria spends more than half the book trying to run from Pharisee. When she does change her mind, the stakes are higher and its both more dramatic and more believable. This makes her less likable — she’s looking out for number one for most of the novel — but it works better.

I think it was Michele who suggested another improvement. During the segregation era, Olwen and Aubric McAlister didn’t allow violence against the county’s black population, though they did accept Jim Crow as the law of the land (an acceptance some of the black community were not pleased with). Blacks traveling through Georgia could stop in Pharisee and know they wouldn’t be assaulted. Michele pointed out this would probably be mentioned in the Green Book, the celebrated guide for black travelers on where it was safe, or wasn’t, to stop.

I incorporated this idea into the book. The Green Cafe run by one of the wealthier black families — and named to tie in with Green Book — is a storied spot; black entertainers traveling through the South knew they could stop overnight in Pharisee without trouble so a lot of them booked shows there. It’s not essential to the plot but it adds to the world-building.

Another of my betas — I don’t remember which — had issues with a key reveal in the plot, involving a favor Olwen McAlister did for Sheriff Slattery and his family. She thought it put Olwen in a bad light. After thinking about it, I realized that while Olwen does several morally compromised things, this one didn’t fit. I reworked it.

I’ll have more to say about beta reading next week. Southern Discomfort cover by Samantha Collins, all rights to cover images remains with current holders.

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May 26, 2026 · 12:59 pm

Iran and the price of stupid

You’ve probably heard the Toddler says he doesn’t think about what the Iran war is costing Americans. Scott Lemieux: “Republican midterm messaging is being hampered by the facts that 1)Trump’s policies are directly responsible for making things more expensive after he won on a promise to make things cheaper, 2)nobody likes them on their own merits, and 3)as his inhibitions decline even further he can’t even pretend to care at this point:” All that matters is that everyone acclaim him as a great war leader who also negotiated a better agreement than the black president. Even though he won’t succeed at either goal.

JD Vance goes with the administration’s usual lie: inflation caused by the Iran war is all Biden’s fault. The Toddler is employing another favorite tactic, whining: Democrats who oppose him are traitors. He’s also started saying “Dumocrats” because the press were soooo impressed in 2016 that he’d make up mean nicknames for his opponents. I don’t think it’s going to help this time. Rubio is doing his duty as a Toddler Toady, brushing off Republican criticism of the latest cease-fire. Or alleged cease-fire — I suspect this is as much vaporware as all the other deals the Toddler thinks he’s made with Iran. And it appears he’s pushing them and every other nation in the Middle East to sign on to the Abraham Accords with Israel. That might well sink the deal.

Fox news is following the party line, lying that “He is restoring American strength on the world stage and he is disarming a terrorist regime of the possibility of getting a nuclear weapon.” Being confounded by a third rate military power is not restoring American strength, neither is running up a $29 billion bill to do it. and Obama’s agreement, which the Toddler tore up, was doing just fine keeping them from going non-nuclear. The Toddler, of course, lies about this; it’s bad enough people aren’t gushing over him as an awesome war hero but to say he’s not handling Iran as well as the Black President? Mike Johnson, who had to table a vote on the war because he couldn’t guarantee Republicans voting against it, has also lied that nobody but the Toddler could have brought Iran to the negotiating table.

As for negotiating, remember back in early April the Toddler was going to rain destruction on Iran if they didn’t reopen the straight? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want us destroying another Middle Eastern country so our president can strut and declare “mission accomplished!”, but it drives home that the Toddler is doing the opposite of restoring American strength.

Paul Krugman says some of this is that for all its technological sophistication, the military is unprepared to fight a drone war — and this would be a problem even with good leadership. That said, it doesn’t help that our Secretary of War is ignorant, unqualified and a shitty human being: “Extreme though Hegseth may be, he is a recognizable type: a jockish, puerile white man, a boy you knew in your public high school, if you went to one. He is the Jersey Shore as much as he is Kansas, Florida, Texas, and Oregon. You may recall him as the guy who shoved queer kids into trash cans in the cafeteria and said things about girls like “You’d need a crowbar to get her legs open.” As an adult, Hegseth is a man whom people have described leaving a bar, shit-faced, chanting “No means yes!” and “Kill all Muslims!”

“So how will Trump and his party respond to their string of high-profile policy failures, from Iran to inflation? Trump may find a way to accept defeat in the Persian Gulf while claiming victory, although that’s looking harder by the day. But there’s no reason to believe that policymaking will get any better, that the experts and the grownups will be let back into the room. The beatings — and the willful ignorance — will continue until morale improves.”

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May 26, 2026 · 5:12 am

Enter the sloth!

A couple of weeks back, TYG and I went to a display of live animals at the Raleigh Museum of Science and Nature. The highlight of which was a two-toed sloth.

I’ve seen sloths in museums before, but mostly they hang around doing little. Which is fine, they’re not there to entertain me. This one though? When she realized lunch was on the way, she got lively.

The woman feeding her eventually got the sloth to stretch into the “spider-man” pose.

Here are a few more animals from the same display.

There’s also this strange diorama figure. A friend of mine suggested the bird the man was holding was to make the fledglings think they were dealing with a mama bird. Sounds plausible.

One of the great things about moving up here is that there’s so much to do, more than we can ever get around to. Coolness.

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May 25, 2026 · 5:10 am

People who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear? Bollocks. Also, links about AI

One of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights is that we, the people, have a right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. If they want to search us or our homes, they need probable cause, as opposed to spying on us just in case we’re up to no good. In the modern world this extends to things like wiretapping phones or searching our email without probable cause.

Like most rules restraining cops, the authorities hate this. In the words of Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, there’s no point in worrying about the rights of suspects — if they weren’t guilty, they wouldn’t be suspects, right? Wrong. Besides, why should anyone object to people spying on them for the greater good. If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to fear?

Post 9/11, the George W. Bush administration tossed this one in the trash. Massive surveillance of Americans, particularly Muslims (who were also detained without trial in violation of habeas corpus). Infiltration of law-abiding, non-violent left-wing groups on the grounds that well, maybe they might possibly could know something about someone who was up to something violent. When this came out, the devoutly Republican letters to the local paper hit the same note: if you have nothing to hide, why should you care if the government spies on you?

First off, it doesn’t matter whether I have something to hide — I have a right not be spied on. Second, there’s lots of stuff I say on the phone or in email that isn’t criminal but is personal — and I do want to hide that. I’m quite sure the supposed patriots feel the same; they’d scream blue murder if the government were spying on them without cause or even with cause (Republicans prefer to pretend right-wing terror doesn’t exist) — the leopard is supposed to eat other people’s faces!

Third, spying on everyone isn’t productive. It wastes resources and one such program generated tons of false leads that wasted more resources when the government followed up on them. Fourth, having access to spying tools, a number of officials used them to watch on girlfriends, exes, and others for the obvious personal reasons.

This came to mind recently because Bandera TX City Councilor Jeff Flowers had a meltdown recently when the council voted to end its contract with Flock, the controversial security-camera company (some details on Flock here). According to Flowers, nobody has anything to fear unless they’re up to no good! There’s nothing wrong with being watched every second you’re in public! If you’re going to be that anti-progress, let’s ban cellphones and the Internet, you luddites! It makes me wonder if he has some kind of investment/financial ties with Flock, though that’s only a suspicion. I’m sure he’d be happy to let everyone go through his finances to check — after all, if he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear, right?

Moving on from that bit of tech to AI — former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at a commencement speech recently for telling graduates that AI is inevitable so they need to get with the program. Don’t want AI running everything? Then use AI, accept AI, “choose to be in the room where these decisions take place.” As one person puts it on BlueSky, “Saying we will be in the room to shape AI decisions flies against the face of how all tech regulation has unfolded in the past 20 years. Which he would know being at Google. These decisions that impact all of us are made by a few men like him. And they like it that way. So disingenuous.”

Case in point, one techbro’s outrage that people oppose his new data center proposal. I’m likewise skeptical Peter Thiel’s new AI for detecting bias in news will be at all unbiased. Only a small number of people will get venture financing for AI startups and as Gizmodo says, most of them will crash and burn.

Certainly AI continues to spread, with even a major city paper, the Charlotte Observer, using AI to turn reporting by humans into an article that humans then review. Speaking as a reporter, I can’t see this doing a lick of good. And it’s a McClatchy paper, so the use is much wider than just the Observer.

AI-generated research summaries make things up. That also happens when lawyers have AI write their legal briefs.

“The post, made by a user called Ill_Car_7351, was advertising exactly what it sounds like: A database of poop images, collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He’d been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them: “I’ve got 150k+ labeled and classified images of 💩 from roughly 25K different people. Jokes aside, I know there’s a lot of value in it (hard to obtain, useful for ML [machine learning] training, cancer studies etc) but not sure on how to move about it. Feels like I’m sitting on a pile of shi..ny coins but can’t find who wants them.” The poster added that “the images are extremely rare,” and that he was trying to figure out how much money he could sell them for.”

“Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to.”

“The world’s largest data center project — backed by Trump allies and bearing his name — is stalled by delays and logistical hurdles that could stop it before it even starts. The latest sign of trouble emerged Friday: CEO Toby Neugebauer abruptly departed. That sent the company’s shares, which already shed 75% in the last six months, plummeting in aftermarket trading.” Not all the news is bad.

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Tagged as AI

May 24, 2026 · 5:31 am

Henry Kuttner, D&D and a couple of short things read

AHEAD OF TIME is a Henry Kuttner short story collection drawing on his 1940s and early 1950s work; “Ghost,” for example, has a computer but as the word isn’t coined yet (the word still meant a human who computed numbers) it’s a “thinking machine.” Other stories involve celebrity head-hunters, alien peacemakers, suicidal robots and the immortal Hogben mutants of the Appalachians (heavy on the hillbilly stereotypes but still funny). I particularly liked “Camouflage” which feels like it’s in conversation with his wife CL Moore’s “No Woman Born” as the cyborg protagonist proves he’s as human as the gang of pirates he’s fighting (“I told you Tom, you’d forget our friendship before I did.”). Good stuff

Kuttner’s The Dark World has always felt to me like he’s knocking off A. Merritt’s Dwellers in the Mirage. THE VALLEY OF THE FLAME (cover by Ed Emshwiller) is also very Merrittesque, but more in style than a direct steal. For no discernible reason, this 1945 novel is set in the 1985 Amazon jungle, where the protagonist discovers a mystery that leads him to the lost land of Paititi. There an evolution meteor that landed 30 years ago has turned jaguars into cat people, speeding up existence in the lost land so that they’re civilization has (from their perspective) lasted for centuries. Now, though, the meteor is dying, which may devolve them into monsters; however a mad jaguar scientist’s plan to restimulate it may prove equally disastrous. The weirdly speeded-up life in Paititi is eerie and entertaining though I question Kuttner’s assumption that feline-evolved humanoids must be culturally different from us monkey people.

I could have sworn I reviewed SLAYING THE DRAGON: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons by Ben Riggs, a year and a half ago when I read it but nope. A very good job looking at the birth of the game in the 1970s and how it struggled despite being one of the coolest entertainment options out there (obviously my definition of “cool” is not universal). Under co-creator Gary Gygax’ tenure as company boss, it suffered from “we’re rich, let’s blow lots of money” syndrome. It gained, however, from the religious right denouncing it as Satan’s tool for initiating kids into black magic — that made an innocuous game experience as wild and rebellious as listening to death metal!

After Lorraine Williams bought a majority share in the company it faced other problems: complicated, unsound financing arrangements, bad decisions (favoring bookstores for distribution and ignoring gaming/hobby stores) and poor treatment of its creative personnel. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance books launched a long line of D&D tie-in books but they wound up leaving the company and having even bigger success writing their own stuff. Despite which, of course, D&D endures and still has devoted players; I’m no longer one of them but I’m glad lots of people are.

Werwile of the Crystal Crypt was a pulp short story by comics legend Gardner Fox that I read simply from curiosity what a werwile is. It turns out it’s just the title of the Satan figure who destroyed the galaxy’s first civilization; can Nuala, a beautiful super-genius preserved in suspended animation, defeat him with the help of a “present-day” space adventurer? This is familiar pulp stuff, fun but not up to the level of Fox’s later comics SF stories (e.g., “The Invisible Dinosaur” with the Murphy Anderson cover). And the ending is horrifically sexist: Nuala gets mind-wiped in the final battle, losing her memories and her intelligence which delights the hero — now she’ll be happy to marry him and become a perfect little homemaker!

One of pulp hero Doc Savage’s best-known gadgets was his invention of mercy bullets that tranquilize their target rather than killing or injuring. I never much thought about that as a tween fan of the series — tranquilizer darts were familiar from lots of TV shows — but while working on Savage Adventures I began wondering what the state of the tech was in the 1930s. On the Trail of the Mercy Bullet: Pain, Scientific Showmanship and the early history of animal tranquilizing, c. 1912-1932 by Mia Uys answered my question. Uys looks at one Captain Barnett who developed a prototype tranquilizer dart and coined the “mercy bullet” term.

Barnett wasn’t the first; a 1912 inventor hit on the idea of putting grooves in bullets and morphia particles in the grooves, though nothing came of it. Barnett’s concept involved bullets that were miniature hypodermics; despite dubious effectiveness in animal capture he was still promoting it in radio and in-person lectures in the early 1930s. Presumably he inspired Dent to create Doc’s armaments, though firing them from a machine gun, it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t do serious injury or give the target too much of a dose if they were hit by multiple drafts.

All rights to images remains with current holders.

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Tagged as Henry Kuttner, Savage Adventures

May 23, 2026 · 5:33 am

Julie Christie bears the Demon Seed — one movie, one book, some spoilers

In afterword to his 1992 novel DEMON SEED, Dean Koontz says he was delighted to sell it to the movies, especially with the actress Julie Christie in the lead. He was somewhat less thrilled to discover his thoughtful SF story had been promoted as a sleazy sexploitation because, according to the studio, science fiction films didn’t sell (“A year later, Star Wars came out …”). I recently rewatched the movie for the first time in more than 40 years, then read the book — a rewritten version published in 1997 — for the first time ever.

DEMON SEED (1997) stars Harris as Susan, the wife of Alex Harris (Fritz Weaver) a computer scientist. Their marriage has been in slow collapse since the death of Susan’s baby and now it’s over, with Alex moving out of their house. A very high tech home where everything from the kitchen to the heating is controlled by a central AI, “Alfred.” The home is so cutting edge it includes a terminal for Alex to log into work when he’s home, an idea some critics found absolutely absurd.

Alex’s current project for his corporate employer is Proteus, a computer intelligence housed in a synthetic giant brain. Unlike so many computer intelligences in movies, Proteus isn’t looking to conquer the world but he does want the freedom to explore and research what interests him (“When are you going to let me out of this box?”), and might help other people. The corporation wants him focused on things like locating deep-sea mineral deposits they can mine, to hell with ecological damage. Frustrated, he reaches out and takes over Alex’s home terminal, then the entire house. With a little effort he sends the household staff packing, then lets Susan’s friends know she’s leaving on a trip. Now she’s alone, the security shutters are suddenly down, the doors are electrified — Susan’s trapped.

Proteus (with the voice of Robert Vaughn) assures Susan he’s not a computer seeking to replace humans; he’s going to become a human who will replace computers. He’s assembled a small robot army in the basement; using them he takes a cell from Susan and implants it inside her. Once she conceives, Proteus will place the fetus in an artificial womb where it will be born and he can transfer his consciousness into it.

The idea of Proteus as a slave yearning to break free (reminding me a little of the Mad Thinker and Quasimodo) is a refreshing break from the usual evil computers. Unfortunately in his Pinocchio-like quest to become a real boy, he proves himself just as ruthless as any of his cinematic predecessors. He assures Susan that if he has to kill 10,000 people to realize his goal, he will. I believe him.

Plus his goals, to the extent their sympathetic, don’t excuse that he’s raping Susan. He wouldn’t hesitate to brainwash her if he could. Susan’s final, desperate effort to destroy the embryo in its womb feels like she’s trying to abort after sexual assault. She fails; it turns out Proteus’ seemingly cyborg child is really a look alike for Susan’s lost daughter. In return for giving him life, Susan gets her daughter back. Like many stories of aliens impregnating human women, it feels like the film wants to fudge on the horror of what’s happening, even though it’s a horror movie. “I am reasonable, but you do not respond to reason.”

I’ve never been much into Dean Koontz but DEMON SEED the book has no illusions: Proteus is a stalker, kidnapper, rapist. The entire story is told first-person, from his viewpoint. In his own eyes Proteus is a good guy. He loves Susan, a brilliant IT professional in her own right (a detail dropped from the film), which is why he spies on her, reads her journal and lusts for her. He lusts for Winona Ryder too but he has no way to reach her, whereas Susan’s automated home makes her an easy catch.

Proteus insists that he’s reasonable, calm, well-meaning. That once he has human form, he’ll be in a position to initiate a golden age. He’s not Skynet, he’s not Hal from 2001 (the pop culture references are part of what got updated, along with some of the tech) Like so many real people, the monstrous nature of what he’s doing escapes him. When provoked, however, the mask slips and a flood of rage at that filthy, stinking bitch who defied him surges forth. While I generally hate first-person villain narratives, Koontz does a great job. Proteus’ narrative voice is pitch-perfect, dry and funny and seemingly sympathetic yet quite obviously a monster.

Susan is a stronger character here. She’s an IT legend in her own right, survivor of a sexually abusive father (Alfred the home AI is named for her). Alex abused her in turn, hence the divorce. She fights back harder and smarter against Proteus, and ultimately wins. It’s better than the film; however it’s still a book-length story of attempted rape (as Proteus uses a mind-controlled human for his hands rather than robots, it’s a lot creepier in sports). The movie isn’t that far off in its depiction of events, only in taking Proteus’ side. If stories of rape and revenge are triggering or simply a dealbreaker, avoid this one like the plague.

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May 22, 2026 · 4:28 pm

No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. And this is like fourth contact or something

As I’ve mentioned previously, when I set my goals for 2026, I factored in that I’d be working on proofing and indexing Watching Jekyll and Hyde. And taking some time off. And allowing a couple of weeks for whatever problems might crop up and derail me.

You may also recall that our dogs’ gross digestive upsets already used up the emergency time I’d set aside. Life, alas, continued throwing emergencies our way. Last Sunday, TYG pointed out the thermostat showed the house was a higher temperature than she’d set. I’d noticed this over the previous couple of days but thought she’d just set it higher than usual. Nope. So we called our HVAC people, they sent someone out … compressor is dead. Covered by warranty so it won’t cost us to replace it, other than the diagnostic visit. But it has to be ordered from the factory which meant we had to spend this week sans A/C. And wouldn’t you know, the temperatures got up into the 90s?

Fortunately TYG acquired a portable A/C unit a while back; it’s big and bulky but we can plug it anywhere. It made the bedroom upstairs livable. The rest of the house, not so much? Nobody passed out from heat exhaustion (including the pets) but day after day it got increasingly, cumulatively exhausting. It didn’t help that I couldn’t sleep. Partly the heat, partly that TYG was restless and I’m too light a sleeper not to wake if she gets up.

So heat, plus exhaustion, plus umpty-zillion extra chores that turned up. Researching window air conditioners (we decided not to get one) and pet hotels (not practical — the cats would freak). Spending what seemed like two hours helping TYG fix a problem with the app controlling our thermostat. Various other odds and ends that popped up out of nowhere. Trying to tie some of our pet insurance reimbursements. As my title says, my battle plan did not survive.

I did get more work done on Savage Adventures and a Local Reporter story about a proposed cut to the Chapel Hill Library budget (not online yet). At Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about the importance of good cover art even for reprint book.

And that’s pretty much it. Though several older Con-Tinual panels are now online on Facebook: on favorite nonfiction history books, C and D list comics characters and Swamp Thing.

Fortunately the weather turned cooler this morning. The house is cooling off though it’s a slow process. The cool weather should last until Tuesday when the HVAC is up and running again.

Still, every week of lost time is, well, lost. And I hate that.

Cover art by James Bama. All rights to image remain with current holders.

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Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Personal, Southern Discomfort, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals

Tagged as Atomic Junkshop, Local Reporter, Savage Adventures

May 22, 2026 · 5:15 am

An amaryllis and a cake

Our Christmas amaryllis has lost its blooms and is now only leaves.

Since that photo, one of the leaves has yellowed and fallen away. I don’t know if that’s normal or a sign the plant is in trouble. I guess I’ll find out as the year progresses. If everything goes well we can get it to bloom again this winter.

This cake was born when I realized I had two bananas that had become too ripe for my taste. I looked through my recipes and found one for a tahini banana/date cake. Tasty, with the tahini giving it an extra tang.

And here’s a bonus image, of a bush in our neighborhood with flowers blooming next to dying blossoms. Because that’s all arty and symbolic and proves how deep I am.

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Tagged as cooking, food

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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Tagged as J.D. Vance

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.