A "surly curmudgeon[], suspicious and lacking in altruism." (Robert A. Heinlein)
Here’s a good one for you, straight from the fever dreams of the lovely and talented Sarah A. Hoyt, the Beautiful But Evil Space Princess who commands her Hordes of Huns.
(All sales final. No money back. Buyer beware. Your mileage may vary. Offer good only in the State of Inebriation. Etc.)
Seriously, I do love Sarah to pieces and she’s a lot of fun to watch moderate a panel on Dystopias when she doesn’t actually care much for that genre…
God is protecting this man.
Photo credit: Evan Vucci
UPDATE, 7/16: Reddit mods deleted this image from a post in r/pics. Clearly it needs to be posted everywhere.
Seriously, folks, your sexual preferences have absolutely nothing to do with pride. Frankly, it’s a Flag Day for people to start waking up and smelling the coffee.*
The thing to be proud of is your country. Yeah. It’s a little tough to do right now, with the worthless sacks of shit that are running it, right up to the Commander of Pantloads of Shit himself, but I had a sort of an epiphany today while thinking about the Masonic Ceremony of Seven Toasts.
I’m sure you are all sitting there thinking, “WTF has that got to do with pride in one’s country?” Hang on a mo’, I’ll tell ya.
You see, the Ceremony of Seven Toasts came to us in the States from the British Freemasons. One of their toasts was, of course, to the King or Queen. Which makes sense. Because British folks are subjects and they owe fealty and allegiance to the monarch, which is sort of the same as saying to the country, because the monarch is the country. Sort of. Even if the monarch is only a constitutional figurehead.
So we took that on in the US and since we don’t have a monarch, we substituted the President (or sometimes, the President and the Congress). However — that’s wrong. Because the toast is supposed to be to the entity to whom (or which) you actually owe that fealty and allegiance.
And I got news for you. In the US, that ain’t the President, and it ain’t the Congress, either. They’re functionaries We The People sent to Washington DC to do our bidding. That they don’t is pretty sad, and probably rises to treason, and thus deserves hanging by neck until dead, but that’s not what I’m here to discuss.
Growing up as a kid in this still-great nation, I was taught my allegiance was to the Flag Of The United States Of America, and to the Republic For Which It Stands. Because we don’t pledge allegiance to anything else. It would be silly to do so — because in the United States, every person is a sovereign. We The People govern ourselves, and for the things we can’t do every day, we elect and appoint other people to do them for us. But we don’t pledge allegiance to them, we expect them to do as We The People tell them to do.
In other words, nobody told Crusty Joe Biden to sell out to the fucking Chinese. But he did and we’re stuck with him for a bit till we sort that shit out.
This is something we need to remember as this fraught season of electoral hi-jinks is forced upon us. We declared independence from a king who was being an asshole to us (the same king the Brits toast today, just a newer version of him). We’re never going to toast that guy, just like (even as much as we thought of his mother) we never toasted his predecessor. And we should not be toasting the President, or the Congress, or any other piece of government we’ve set up to do our will and which has subsequently turned on us to force us to do its will. Screw that.
We should be toasting the Flag and the Republic. And then we can all come together again as citizens of a great nation and tell our political functionaries to start doing as they’re told, or get the fuck out.
Rainbow flags, feh. Toss ’em in the trash along with the U.N. flag.
On this Flag Day, be PROUD of the AMERICAN FLAG, and what it stands for. Long may it wave; and long may we continue to water the Tree of Liberty.
PS: Happy Birthday, President Trump!
* Did you like how I worked that in? I was kind of proud of it. Speaking of pride and all.
Three years in the writing, it’s finally done, and it’s up for purchase, or read free on KU. Paperback and hardback editions are coming soon live as of 7 June.
The Long-Awaited Sequel to The Lion in Paradise
At long last, Ariela Rivers Wolff begins her mission to the Simulated Worlds.
As the Martyr of Sardristra, she finds herself in the position of a Joan of Arc, burned at the stake for preaching a sermon of love to a very violent race of . . . blue, four-legged, four-armed, sort-of-horse analogs. Five hundred years later in their history, she finds a totally-reversed welcome as “Saint Ardreyelya” in the country in which she first appeared. Will she be able to prevent the rest of the world from destroying “her” people before she can convert them, too?
As the Goddess of Mahoukai, she finds herself the deity of a world religion in a world governed by magic. And like all worlds with magic, inevitably there is a Demon Lord. She’ll have to deal with that Demon Lord before the world of Mahoukai can be realized into the True Universe . . . but in the event, the Demon Lord is an infiltrated agent of the very enemies she is sworn to fight in the real world. Can The Lion of God take on a Darkness, single-handed? If not, it may spell doom for the inhabitants of Mahoukai – and for herself.
[updated 7 Jun 2024]
…or so he thinks.
What he really is, is a kangaroo. Presiding over a kangaroo court, in a kangaroo city, in a kangaroo state. Hell, just move the whole thing to Australia — that’s where kangaroos live.
When you figure out exactly what that jury of his convicted Donald Trump of, let me know, because it’s sure unclear how a case even the feds didn’t want to touch managed to find a receptive venue in New York State.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump simply grows stronger with every hit he takes.
And even fictional Judge Dredd did a better job of being the law.
MAGA, bitches.
This is the real Memorial, or Decoration, Day, as set forth in 1868 by General John A. Logan, at the time Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (the Union Army’s veterans’ association, for those of you who flunked high school history, or simply weren’t taught it by our woke public schools). He established that date by his General Order No. 11.
The date wasn’t officially established by the federal government until after World War I, but a number of states and municipalities had adopted it during the antebellum period.
And Congress broke things with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed in 1971.
But to me, Memorial Day will always be the 30th of May.
And Sarah Hoyt wrote a great Memorial Day post this past Monday which, if you haven’t read it, you should go there now and do so. In Flander’s Fields
10年が経ちました。これが最後となります。あなたが愛してる。
Yoru ga Akeru Mae ni
Sakushi: Manami
Sakkyoku: Nakamura Daisuke
Henkyoku: Nakamura Daisuke & Nomura Youichirou
Hajimete jibun ni sunao ni nareta nowa
Kono hiroi sekai no naka de anata to deaeta kara
Te to te ga fureau anata no sono nukumori
Watashi no naka ni nagareta toki itoshisa de namida afureta
Issho ni saite ita narande saite ita
Nanigenai hi ni anata ga ita koto
Dare ga hakonda kiseki nan darou
Yoru ga akeru mae ni
Omoi ga todokimasu you ni
Anata wo aisuru kokoro ni
Eien wo mitsuketa
Ashita wo shinjiru tsuyosa wo moteta nowa
Nagai nagai yoru wo koete anata to deaeta kara
Issho ni saita kara narande saita kara
Donna toki demo waratte irareta
Anata to terasu ashita dakara
Yoru ga akeru mae ni
Omoi ga todokimasu you ni
Anata wo aisuru kokoro ni
Eien wo mitsuketa
Ikite iku hi mo shi ni iku hi demo
Kisetsu wa megutte iku kawaranai mono
Kaerarenai mono
Ima anata ga kureta ai ga todoku
Yoru ga aketa sora ni
Kyou mo hikari sasu you ni
Anata wo aisuru kokoro ni
Eien wo mitsuketa eien wo mitsuketa
Welcome to “Scouting America”.
Bah. Humbug. I left the organization in 2020 after 40 years of service. I was an OA member for 34 years, Vigil Honor for 25. An Assistant Scoutmaster for a while, briefly a Scoutmaster, district committee member and commissioner staff for a long time, and did other things as well. Scouter’s Training Award, Scoutmaster Training Award, Commissioner Arrowhead, District Award of Merit, etc.
I put up with what I thought of as the evisceration of the Scouting program and letting everyone and their gay brother become leaders, then allowing gay Scouts into the program, letting women become leaders, letting girls into programs like Venture and Varsity…but finally they let girls into the regular troops, and that was it for me.
As I say in my author’s bio at the back of most of my books, “Parents – it’s time to find something else for your young boys to do while learning to become men. There are other options. The Order of DeMolay, for one. Check out https://demolay.org .”
In the meantime, RIP Boy Scouts of America. You were a big part of my life. You’ll be missed. Eventually.
I have released AI is Love as a Kindle book. It took a while to figure out how I was going to do that, but in the end, it was possible to format it like a comic book or manga and upload it that way. (This involved the use of Kindle Create, which is an application I am not fond of, though admittedly the copy I had installed was from 2020 and was way out of date.)
The Kindle book is priced at a much more modest $15.00 (half the price of the softcover edition). I still make money off of that, but the paperback publishing cost is gone.
I will add the following caveats:
If the e-book version still interests you, well, just click on the gorgeous picture of my wife…I mean, the image of the cover, above.
This afternoon, it got dark.
Shot from my deck, CoolPix P900, f/6.3, 1/125s, ISO-560, focal length 214mm, 35mm focal length 1200mm. No filter; the dark filter I bought for the rest of the eclipse was too dark to pick this up.