Tag: opinion

Quick Friday Update; Constitutional Carry

The Portly Politico4 Comments

Yours portly is still playing catch-up from a combination of end-of-the-school-year-busyness and post-vacation-readjustment.  I know the blog has been short on substantive content lately; unfortunately, I simply lack the time and energy to put more into it at the moment.

I have a busy weekend of non-blog writing ahead (mostly stuff for the Town of Lamar), and precious  little time today to work.

Last night (Thursday, 9 May 2024) the Town’s Police Department hosted an event with SC SLED (basically, the “FBI” for South Carolina) to discuss the implications of our new constitutional carry bill.  There is a great deal of handwringing over the idea of hot-headed eighteen-year olds blowing each other way now that they can carry openly, but when I asked the SLED agent if any of the other thirty-four States with constitutional carry had experienced an uptick in these emotional bouts of lethal violence, he waffled, saying that “it varies from State to State.”  My entire impression is that this law enforcement officer didn’t really know what he was talking about.

I love the police, but like engineers, they tend to look at an issue from only one angle, usually that of safety.  Safety isn’t necessarily the enemy of liberty, but it frequently is.  Eighteen-year olds are still going to blow each other away in the heat of the moment; now we can just see the ones stupid enough to display their $500 handgun on their hips.  There’s a lot of hysteria over the new law, but not much thoughtful reflection.

Let a thousand handguns bloom.

Myersvision: The Last of Us (TV Series)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Dear old Audre Myers e-mailed Ponty and me a couple of Sundays ago recommending the HBO Max series The Last of Us, based (albeit, I suspect, somewhat loosely) on the video game of the same name.  I’ve never played either of the two TLoU games, but I am quite familiar with the controversy surrounding the sequel, which went fully woke.  It is a classic scenario:  a hugely successful cultural phenomenon gets hijacked—willingly or otherwise—by the Cultural Marxists and becomes a pitiful version of its former self.  The Cult Marxists hope to trade on the popularity of the intellectual property or franchise by shoehorning their bizarre beliefs into it, thereby reaching a massive audience before everyone sours on it.

It’s a fundamentally vampiric, parasitic relationship:  the healthy host rapidly loses whatever cultural cache it enjoyed, becoming an insufferable, withered husk of its former self.

I was not surprised in the slightest that Ponty reacted so negatively to Audre’s request that one of us review the show.  As an avid gamer who (it seems) enjoyed The Last of Us video game and despised its woke sequel, I knew the suggestion would touch a nerve.  Poor Audre had no idea; I hope Ponty wasn’t too hard on her!

So, I proposed that Audre write a review.  I’ll check out the show when I’m able, but she is the queen of television reviews around here.

With that, here is Audre Myers’s review of the television series The Last of Us:

Read More »

TBT^256: End the Income Tax

The Portly Politico5 Comments

It’s that time of year again, when yours portly yells impotently at the clouds and demands the end of the income tax.  Unlike prior years, yours portly actually got his taxes done relatively early (if you count early March as “relatively early”), and while I owed both Uncle Sam and the Great State of South Carolina a pound of flesh, I ended up getting away with only paying $54 total—woooooot!

Still, the annual ritual of telling the federal government how many miles I drove to music lessons and what I paid for WordPress is an odious and obnoxious reminder that the federal government dominates our lives and our personal information.  I recognize that taxes are a necessary evil, but let’s focus on the “evil” part of that equation.

I don’t know what the solution is, and I think the Republican Party has spent far too much time quibbling over the placement of commas in the tax code instead of fighting the necessary cultural battles in our nation, but tax reform should be a no-brainer.  Here’s the Portly Proposal:

  • Tax all income at 10%
  • Don’t tax interest earnings in savings accounts

That’s it!  Easy.  Cheap.  Everyone pays the same percentage.  Maybe—maybe!—have a carveout for people who earn, say, less than $20,000 a year—they pay, say, 5%, or even just 1%.  If people want to withhold from their paycheck, fine.  But there are no surprises—if you earn $2000 in March, you withhold $200.  At filing time, all that would be done is confirming you’ve paid your amount; if you overpaid on that first $20,000, then you’d get a refund.

Even that is more involved than I’d like, but it gives a bit of relief to the working poor.  Otherwise, no deductions, no carveouts, nothing.  There’s still an incentive to save, since no one pays for interest earned on savings accounts.

Yeah, yeah—you want to write off your $300,000 mortgage.  No.  Sorry—let’s not incentivize people to borrow huge amounts of money so they can save forty bucks on their taxes.

With that, here is 13 April 2023’s “TBT^16: End the Income Tax“:

Read More »

Monday Morning Movie Review: Southern Comfort (1981)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Shudder serves up some strange dishes sometimes, including a good bit of non-horror fare.  For a service that is ostensibly dedicated to horror, it’s always interesting when something outside of that genre pops up.

Of course, “horror” is a pretty broad category, and there is horror in many situations.  Perhaps that is the rationale for the inclusion of Southern Comfort (1981) to its slate of films.

Southern Comfort follows the foibles of a Louisiana National Guard unit on a weekend bivouac into the swamps of Cajun country.  After a truly stupid act, the weekend warriors find themselves embroiled in a guerrilla war with murderous Cajuns.

Read More »

SubscribeStar Saturday: The King in Yellow Review

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

The artwork for today’s post is the cover of the instrumental piece “Yellow Knight,” from my upcoming release Four Mages.  The album releases on 2 May 2024, and a YouTube video for “Yellow Knight” (linked above) will go live on 14 May 2024.

Recently I purchased a copy of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a classic work of “weird fiction” that would inspire writers like H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for sometime, especially with the idea of a malevolent play that is so terrible and beautiful, it drives anyone who reads it mad.  That play, of course, is the titular The King in Yellow, the text of which—beyond a couple of snippets—is never quoted in the book.

The book is a collection of ten stories, the first four of which share the thread of the infamous play.  The rest of the book consists of stories that take place mostly in Paris, specifically the Latin Quarter, and revolves around the lives of young American art students in the City of Light.  Indeed, Chambers published In the Quarter, a collection of stories about the Bohemian lives of the Latin Quarter’s residents, a year prior to the publication of The King in Yellow.

The four proper TKiY stories are quite good, and succeed as horror stories that unsettle, more than they scare.  The hidden gems of this collection, however, are the Latin Quarter stories, which depict a freewheeling, fun-loving period in French history before the unhappy days of the First World War ruined France and the West forever.

I reviewed one of those stories, “The Street of the First Shell,” earlier this week.  Today, I’d like to examine the entire book, which really is two shorter books in one.  There are the stories clearly connected to the “Yellow King” mythos.  The rest are all stories that take place in the Latin Quarter.  Unlike “The Street of the First Shell,” however, most of the rest are comedic romances, though some are a bit heavier than others.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links.  Any purchases made through those link result in a bit of additional revenue for yours portly, at no additional cost to you.

Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2024: “The Street of the First Shell”

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Recently I purchased a copy of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a classic work of “weird fiction” that would inspire writers like H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for sometime, especially with the idea of a malevolent play that is so terrible and beautiful, it drives anyone who reads it mad.  That play, of course, is the titular The King in Yellow, the text of which—beyond a couple of snippets—is never quoted in the book.

The book is a collection of ten stories, the first four of which share the thread of the infamous play.  The rest of the book consists of stories that take place mostly in Paris, specifically the Latin Quarter, and revolves around the lives of young American art students in the City of Light.  Indeed, Chambers published In the Quarter, a collection of stories about the Bohemian lives of the Latin Quarter’s residents, a year prior to the publication of The King in Yellow.

The four proper TKiY stories are quite good, and succeed as horror stories that unsettle, more than they scare.  The hidden gems of this collection, however, are the Latin Quarter stories, which depict a freewheeling, fun-loving period in French history before the unhappy days of the First World War ruined France and the West forever.

Of those stories, my favorite is “The Street of the First Shell,” which takes place during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.  It is a thrilling depiction of the privation and struggle of that conflict, and of the doomed Parisian defense against the Prussian siege.

Read More »

Monday Morning Movie Review: A Bucket of Blood (1959)

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Thanks to Joe Bob Briggs and The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, I’ve finally experienced some film inspirado.  To celebrate seventy—yes, seventy (70)—years of filmmaking, Joe Bob and Darcy the Mail Girl hosted a special live edition of the show to honor Roger Corman.

For the uninitiated, Roger Corman is the king of the B movies.  He’s made anywhere from 500-700 films; one source of the disputed figure is that Corman himself doesn’t know how many films he’s made!  Casual fans most likely know Corman from 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors, which was filmed on the same sets as this week’s film, A Bucket of Blood (1959).  Tonally and narratively, the two films are very similar (as a fun aside, The Little Shop of Horrors was the first flick I watched on Shudder).

Read More »

McDonald’s: A Vision of Our Dystopian Future

The Portly Politico11 Comments

Ever since The Age of The Virus, I’ve noticed a general decline in the quality and value of dining and amenities.  Every restaurant, hotel, airline, and putt-putt golf course used The Virus as an excuse to trim out all of those little “extras” that we did not consider as such, those little dashes of additional service or product that made visits to these places memorable.  Things like peanuts at corporate steakhouses, or regular cleaning of your linens at hotels (apparently, towels aren’t even a given anymore).  Meanwhile, prices at all of these businesses have increased, far outstripping “official” inflation numbers.

We all know that is true; furthermore, we all know it already.  But what if we look at the lowest common denominator, the dregs of these businesses?  What if we look at fast food?

Read More »