Stomp the Flag and Hit the Jackpot

I don’t know about you, but I sure could use $85,000.

I had just received an email this morning from someone called “The Slot Guru,” offering me his booklet on “How to Win Big” at the slot machines. But I was distracted by a news item that demonstrated a surer way to hit the jackpot.

As reported by The Daily Caller ( http://dailycaller.com ), July 7, a high school English teacher in South Carolina has been paid $85,000–plus his regular salary and benefits, plus $32,000 in attorneys’ fees–for stomping on an American flag in front of his class. In three different periods, no less. In recognition of his childish behavior, school officials suspended him with (of course) full pay.

Now the taxpayers have to pony up for an out-of-court settlement to avoid a lawsuit. The flag-stomping teacher sued the school district for breach of contract (it’s virtually impossible to fire a unionized public school teacher), defamation (like anyone but this doofus himself is to blame for showing himself to be an ass), and–ta-dah!–“emotional distress.”

I cannot explain why school officials thought they’d lose this lawsuit if it came to court.

So we must suppose it’s okay for a public school teacher, battening on the taxpayers, to tear down their country’s flag in front of their children and grind it underfoot. Come to think of it, we ought to applaud him for showing so vividly what public education is doing to America on a much bigger scale. It’s almost Biblical in its symbolism.

Do you suppose he would have been paid $85,000 for stomping on organized sodomy’s “rainbow” flag? Or the Mexican flag?

Meanwhile, American parents continue to send America’s children to schools where they are taught, by the likes of this flag-stomping teacher, to despise America.

That’s another thing I can’t explain.

One of My All-Time Favorite Fantasies

Let me introduce you to one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels–Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (“…from the creator of Tarzan”).

I fell in love with this book when I was a teenager; in fact, I still have my 35-cent Ballantine paperback with Bob Abbett’s glorious cover. The older I get, the more I enjoy this book. You can enjoy it, too. If you can’t buy a used copy at various websites, you can read it for free on your computer. I like this book so much, I’m even pitching it to potential readers of my books.

What’s so great about it? Simply this: when I read it, I’m there. That’s the acid test of any fantasy–whether the author can get you to believe the crazy story he made up.

Chessmen takes place on Mars, in a backwater cut off from the rest of the planet. The people are splendidly barbaric, with a lot of strange customs and beliefs. Chief among those is a fanatical devotion to jetan, the Martian equivalent of chess, which these nonconformists play with living pieces battling with live steel. As a bonus, Burroughs also gives you the rules of the game, so you can make your own jetan set and play it. By the way, it’s a very cool game. Of course I made a set. I brought it to my local chess club a few times, and everyone enjoyed it. Sometimes you can also find websites where you can play jetan online.

Chessmen also features one of the most original and captivating characters any writer ever invented: Ghek the kaldane. Ghek is a monstrous head with hardly any body. His kind live parasitically on headless human bodies from which they can detach themselves at will. They worship the intellect and take pride in being uninvolved, unemotional–pure thinkers. But Ghek, wrenched out of his culture by the plot, must wrestle with certain aspects of life which are completely new to him–love, loyalty, friendship, self-sacrifice. As a kaldane, can he learn how to be a human being? His progress makes for fascinating reading.

Why read books like this? For refreshment and escape! Sometimes I just can’t take any more of the pompous asses in the Senate, our civilization-ravaging Supreme Court, that lawless golem in the White House, and pro-aborts chanting “Hail, Satan!” I can’t keep fighting every hour of every day. And so, from time to time, I just take off for Mars. Or Narnia, or Middle-Earth. Anywhere but here.

But don’t worry. I always come back.

Borrow ‘The Borrowers’

When you were a kid, did you ever wonder how come your chess set, one morning, had only 15 pawns instead of 16? Were your little green army men stealthily deserting? And why did your mother insist you took  her pack of needles, when you never touched them?

Mary Norton solved those mysteries in 1952 with the publication of her award-winning young readers’ novel, The Borrowers, following it up with four sequels. I mention it now because there’s a crying need for kid-lit that doesn’t corrupt its readers or pollute their minds.

I read all the Borrowers books not long ago and enjoyed them tremendously. I wish there were more. Kids will like them–I say “kids,” but I really mean all readers whose imaginations are not yet ossified–for the fantastic situations set out in the stories, the vivid characters, plots that are long on suspense, and pure fun.

Anyhow, it’s the Borrowers who cause small, common household objects to disappear. The Borrowers are these tiny people who live under your floor, or between your walls, or inside your piano–wherever they can remain safe from discovery–and live by “borrowing” your stuff. Their lives can be very snug and cozy, but can also be quite dangerous. Mary Norton’s books follow the hair-raising adventures of a family of Borrowers.

There are also two film versions. There’s one by the BBC from 1993, starring Ian Holm as the father in the Borrower family, and Sian Philips as the housekeeper who tries to exterminate them. We have it as a VHS that some bozos thought would be even better if they constantly interrupted it by comedy bits by an American comedian I never heard of, who isn’t funny. So we have to fast-forward those. Aside from that, it’s a good movie, lots of fun.

Another version, starring John Goodman, was made in 1997, but I’ve never seen that one.

If you’re looking for some high-quality entertainment for your kids (or for yourself), you can’t go wrong with The Borrowers. Borrow these books from your local library. Black-hearted knaves won’t enjoy them, but you will.

How to Argue With a Lib

Oops! The headline is misleading. After all, you can’t successfully argue with a liberal, anymore than you can argue with a bird-bath or a fence-post.  So probably the headline should be, “Why You Can’t Argue With a Lib.”

My wife and I were discussing British socialists the other night, and I marveled that persons who seemed otherwise intelligent simply can’t see that socialism has been a total bust all over the world. There’s no denying it–the bigger the dose of socialism a country gets, the bigger the failure. Even Red China has had to change to a market economy, while preserving the name of communism. And to the extent that China can’t resist the urge to impose government controls on the people and the economy–to build things that never should be built, and to refrain from buildings things that really need to be built, simply because the state is the supreme authority–to that extent will China fail: almost certainly in your lifetime and mine.

So why can’t socialists (and other libs and progs) see that their hair oil doesn’t grow hair, their seeds sprout only into weeds, their boat doesn’t float, and their cockamamie system depresses productivity?

Because it’s their religion.

They don’t believe in God, they don’t acknowledge the authority of Scripture. The state is their god, its political leaders their angels, and its teachers’ unions their priesthood. They are incapable of questioning any of it. That’s why, if you do try to argue with them, and are uncivil enough to subject them to facts and logic, they instantly resort to shouting, name-calling, and threats. You are a racist! You are a bigot! You are a hater! In the interests of peace and love and harmony–not to mention diversity–you must be beaten senseless.

So, no, you don’t really argue with a liberal. You just have to find some way to get him out of office.

Hail Who? Do They Know What They’re Saying

As reported by the UK Telegraph and umpteen dozen other papers, pro-abortion protesters last week chanted “Hail, Satan!” at a public event in Texas ( http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100224931/pro-abortion-activists-chant-hail-satan-at-a-texas-rally-satan-doesnt-need-this-kind-of-bad-publicity/?ico=^editors_choice ). You can see and hear it on video.

So if you still think “a woman’s right to choose”–that is, her desire to kill her baby before it can be born, or even shortly after birth–is anything but satanic, you’re out of step with your fellow libs and progs. But then leftism, secular humanism, whatever else you want to call it, has always been the work of Satan. Ye shall be as gods, deciding good and evil for yourselves. It’ll work out great!

Out of one corner of their mouths you get all this pap that sounds so nice and well-meaning, if a bit muddle-headed. “We want a health care system that works for everybody!” “All we want is for marriage to be equal for everyone who loves someone else.” “We’re taxing the blood out of your veins to save the planet.” But out of the other corner you get the truth about who they really are: “Hail, Satan!”

Hey, they said it, not me…

An Apology to King George III

Dear King George:

Today we celebrate our forefathers’ Declaration of Independence from you and Great Britain. We are sorry to hear that your spirit is uneasy on this day.

We apologize to you for declaring independence, shooting up your army, depriving you of your American colonies and their revenue, and making you look weak and incompetent in the eyes of the world.  Heck, all you wanted was a stamp tax and a tea tax.

We apologize for doing you all those injuries, when today we lie down on our backs for insults and injuries to which you never would have dared subject us, for fear of God’s wrath and the contempt of civilized people everywhere–insults and injuries done us by our own elected officials. Remember how we demanded our own representation? You must be laughing yourself silly, to see how that turned out!

We stood in arms against you when Britain was the greatest military power in the world. Now we tamely submit to indignities that it never, ever would have occurred to you to subject us to. We grovel before homosexuals, feminists, illegal aliens, welfare queens, community organizers, and other low forms of life. Maybe if you’d sent over a regiment of poofs and pansies instead of the Hessians and the Royal Navy, you might have won the war in a matter of days.

But be comforted, old boy–as much as we wronged you, we wrong ourselves the more.

Important Notice: Shipping Rates to Canada

A couple of my readers in Canada have reported that they can’t buy my new book, The Fugitive Prince, because amazon.com charges in excess of $22 per book to ship to Canada.

I have just been on the amazon.com page which lists “Shipping Rates to Canada.” According to this, Standard Shipping (for one book) totals $4.99 (per shipment)  plus $4.49 (per item)=$9.48 to have one book shipped to a customer in Canada. With Expedited Shipping, the cost would be $6.99 per shipment plus $4.49 per item=$11.38.

Those are the rates as listed by amazon.com on its official Help page.

Note: You can also order my books directly from the publisher, the Chalcedon Foundation, at http://www.chalcedon.edu . Click on “Store,” then “Books,” then “Fiction.” Or phone Chalcedon at 209-736-4365 (Ext. 12 for Orders). When Chalcedon HQ opens today, I will call and find out what is their shipping rate to Canada, and inform you accordingly.

I have no idea how two Canadian readers would arrive independently at the figure of >$22 shipping per book. But, happily, it does appear to be wrong.

PS–Upon further investigation, I can’t say whether the $22-$23 figure is right or wrong! But I have been informed that international shipping rates were sharply increased in January. Meanwhile, the shipping charge from Chalcedon (in California) to Canada is $12-$14 (depending on the weight of the book) for one book.

I admit it’s expensive, but governments determine international shipping rates and there’s not much any of us can do about it. So, ask yourself–“Would I rather read Lee’s book, which is noble and edifying and great, and keep it for myself and my family, or go to some stupid movie about a comic book and take my kids and spend $50 or $60 just to aggravate myself?”

A Lurid Tale of Sex, Murder, and Betrayal

Actually I was going to write about my visit to the dentist; but when I saw that nobody at all had visited this blog so far today, I panicked and wrote the above headline to boost readership.

But to be perfectly truthful, I am currently reading a tale of sex, murder, and betrayal–The Fall of Arthur, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Written in 1934 or thereabouts, but never finished, and finally published 40 years after the author’s death  (By Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, New York: 2013), this epic poem tells the story of King Arthur and the destruction of his kingdom–by sex, murder, and betrayal.

I’ll get into an actual book review later. For now, we might want to ask why King Arthur matters. After all, these things happened some 1,500 years ago, and historians can’t even agree that Arthur ever existed.

It matters because the story of Arthur demonstrates how utterly dependent we are on God’s grace and how little we can accomplish without it. King Arthur was the bravest and noblest of kings, he had the most beautiful woman as his queen, and the strongest and best knights in the world–and it all went down in a shambles. God only knows how many times this story has been told in fifteen hundred years. Tolkien’s poem is the latest version, but it won’t be the last. We may never find out what really happened to King Arthur, but we’ll surely keep on trying.

More Atheist Tomfoolery

Atheist buttonheads have unveiled their own pathetic monument outside the Bradford County Court House, Florida, to counter the presence of a Ten Commandments monument that, in a rare turn of events, they were unable to get removed.

I would have thought the mass graves in China and Cambodia, or the gulags in Siberia, would have been monument enough to atheism. But of course this particular brand of ankle-biter never has enough.

Their latest frenzy of activity is designed to hide the truth that, for all practical purposes, atheism has become the state religion of America, and the creed of its ruling class. Want proof of that? You need look no farther than last week’s infamous Supreme Court decision to gut the institution of marriage.

I am a fantasy writer, and I wish I could escape into my own books. I can’t. Nor can I impose my fantasies on the rest of the country. But atheists certainly can, and do; and socialists (plenty of overlap there!) can and do; and gender-benders can and do…

God save us.

Ugh! What a Nightmare!

I had a dream the other night, when everything was still–and it wasn’t of Susannah a-comin’ down the hill.

I dreamed I was standing on the beach, nobody else around, just watching the surf. And then up from the waters rose… Bill Clinton. Larger than life. He wore a wet tuxedo and looked kind of bloated, so I couldn’t be sure if he was dead or alive. And then he advanced toward me…

Of course I woke up.

By and by it occurred to me that this was not as original as it seemed at first. And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. (Revelation 13:1)

No, I’m not making up a wise-guy story to make a political point and abuse Scripture. I really had the dream, just as I’ve told it to you. And I don’t think I need a crystal ball to understand it, either. Neither do you. We need hardly discuss anything so obvious.

Does the current state of our country give you bad dreams?

It should.