Axial tilt is the reason for the season

The sun is about to return; let us rejoice! Many years ago, some of those who celebrate the occasion falsely accused my ancestors of waging a War on Solstice when all we wanted to do was mind our own business. We kicked their ass, and we celebrate that victory as Hanukkah, but it's long past time for bygones to be bygones, so to those who celebrate Solstice, as well as to those who celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Yule, Newtonmas, and any other holidays I left out, and don't mind if others celebrate theirs, happy holidays.

Thanx to the late Joel Rosenberg for suggesting this line of thought.

Since the Alt Reich is like a great big Gamergate…

Brianna Wu for Congress

Thanx to File 770

Grim Truth

One reason L.E. Modesitt sells so well is that he understands politics:

The real truth about politics is that it’s both more deadly and less obvious than anybody wants to admit. I knew a lot of people in the intelligence community. As a matter of fact, one of my neighbors was the duty officer at the CIA on the night of the Bay of Pigs. But I don’t know of a single intelligence agent of any country who was ever killed in Washington, D.C., despite what all of the movies say. On the other hand, I could not count the number of suicides. Washington will basically dry up your living, alienate you and your spouse, keep your kids from having any friends, and make sure you don’t work in your field ever again. But they won’t kill you. That’s too kind. Nobody wants that kind of hard, gritty, indirect truth in a book. It’s not suspenseful. It’s not thrilling.

Thanx to Tor.com.

Pack of Lies

Every so often the War on Some Drugs decides to lie about one of the ones it is currently at peace with. E-cigarettes are not a tobacco product. (Not that I’m in favor of them. Nicotine is the one substance I abused that I wouldn’t do again, and probably the one that did me the most harm.)

Thanx to andrewducker

Untied States

I think it was in my 12-step program that I heard that we teach people how to treat us.

I grew up bipartisan under Eisenhower, a Republican president in the tradition of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. The image is that he spent eight years on the golf course pulling his putts, but he accepted the New Deal, got us out of one Asian war, and kept us out of another. Under him, it felt good to be part of a loyal opposition.

But he was followed by Nixon, and the devolution continued with Reagan and even past Dubya, and the Republicans purged their more reasonable elements, and now this bipartisan thing doesn’t seem like it used to be,

“Not my president”? Samuel R. Delany pointed out that in English “my slave” and “my master” sound alike, and “my president” has always sounded more like the latter to me. To say the least, I shall live by Roosevelt’s idea that blindly following the man in the White House is “servile and unpatriotic,” and I urge Congress to heed the example set by Mitch McConnell* and take an approach somewhere between extreme skepticism and Don’t Let the Sumbitch Piss a Drop.

I don’t know if I’ll live to see Balkanized America, but it wouldn’t take me by surprise. I feel like a citizen of the Clinton Archipelago or Pantsuit Nation (the idea, not the registered trademark) or Baja Canada. I do not love sharing a nation with millions of people who took Trump seriously when he promised to rid the government of rich pigs like himself but not when he expressed his sincere desire to destroy Obamacare.

*Who doesn’t seem terribly concerned with foreign intervention in the recent vote.