Friday Diversion: The Launch of Luna City 3.1

Yes – just this week, we have launched the third of the Luna City Chronicles – there will be at least two more, and possibly beyond, as it is a fun series to write and readers seem to enjoy them immensely.
Behold the cover –

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Luna City 3.1 is available on Amazon for Kindle and in print (although the cover image doesn’t show, yet) and on Barnes & Noble.

As a bonus – a short snippet of a chapter –

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Calumny

So a writer who hangs out in a blog that I follow had a very cogent point in a recent post about calumny and the moral crime of falsely accusing an innocent person of a crime, ranging from the mild social offense to the deeply hideous crime against God and humanity at large. He felt, if I read the post aright, that calumny is one of those deeply awful things as it damages an innocent person ….
Calumny has kind of fallen out of fashion as a dastardly deed, and you may well understand why by the time I’ve finished. To my mind it can be a worse deed than any of the above sins … I think it worse than the crime or sin. Calumny is false witness where the person committing calumny knowingly and maliciously lies in testifying that an innocent person did something that they did not do. … And when you think about this, you can see why this is somewhat worse than the evil deed itself. Firstly, the person who will be punished is innocent. Secondly, the victim has to live with that. Their reputation, even if innocence is eventually established, is tarnished forever …

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Up A Lazy River

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A nice bit of riverine scenery, just to pass a lazy Sunday

A Lament for These Times

No upon reconsideration, not a lament more of a bitchy rant, pounded out between finalizing one book, the last chapters of another both intended for the fall/holiday market season, wherein most of my direct sales are made.

Yes, politics and the social scene appear to be getting stupider, reactionary and more risible in every passing day. Unfortunately, I do not possess a reservoir of spleen the size of Lake Michigan, the hours in a working day, or the energy in which to give certain topics the thorough and at-length venting which they so richly deserve, so a series of brief drive-by crankiness will have to do.

1. Hillary Clinton is not a well woman, as ought to be obvious from her infrequent public appearances, horrific coughing fits, and the hovering solicitude of a guy who may be her medical handler/personal physician. Infrequent appearances, small, sparsely-attended rallies while Donald Trump who is in the same age bracket, mind you keeps going and going like the Energizer Bunny, packing them in by the thousands every other day or two. It could be that she and her people are so convinced that the election is already in the bag, that she need only make the slightest pretense at a campaign. But just looking at her gives me the impression that she is being held together with duct tape, bailing wire and prescription medication.

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News, Covered

There have been any number of important stories covered by the nationally-based establishment media in the last decade or so in the deathless phrase tweeted by Iowahawk, David Burge, “with a pillow, until they stop moving.” Through the internet and alternate media, a good many of those stories that would have stopped moving through judicious use of the media pillow in previous decades have still managed to percolate from those alternate media sites into the national mass media conversation. Things like the Dan Rather/TANG faked memo, the Swift Boat Veterans going after John Kerry as the duty-shirking Eddie Haskell of the Swift Boat service and dozens of other incidents fought off the smothering pillow, the Chick-Fil-A boycott, and yes eventually got discovered in the major media outlets. With considerable reluctance, one might add. The matter of black on white violent crime may be on the edge of being discovered by the mainstream media, much as the Hollywood producer in the Godfather movie discovered the head of a dead horse in his bed.

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