Happy Obama Appreciation Day!

In addition to celebrating Barack Obama, I'd like to note a couple things that happened on this festive day in 1777:

Resolved, That the flag of the ∥thirteen∥ United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white: that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.

The council of the State of Massachusetts bay having represented by letter to the president of Congress, that Captain John Roach, some time since appointed to command the continental ship of war the Ranger, is a person of doubtful character, and ought not to be entrusted with such a command; therefore,

Resolved, That Captain Roach be suspended, until the Navy Board for the eastern department shall have enquired fully into his character, and report thereon to the Marine Committee.

Resolved, That Captain John Paul Jones be appointed to command the said ship Ranger.

I had a book about Jones, devoured it a couple of times as a lad, rather enamored with his swashbuckling story.  More recently, I read Rick Atkinson's The Fate of the Day:

Abigail Adams would describe Captain John Paul Jones as “a most uncommon character…small of stature, well-proportioned, soft in his speech, easy in his address, polite in his manner, vastly civil…. He is said to be a man of gallantry and a favorite amongst the French ladies.” Those who had seen him swinging a cutlass in battle or roaring curses from the quarterdeck drew a less genteel portrait. As he put to sea from Brest on April 10, two days after Commissioner Adams arrived in Paris, Jones paraphrased Paradise Lost in a letter to a friend: “The world lays all before me.” 

The son of a gardener from Solway Firth, on Scotland’s southwest coast, John Paul had gone to sea at age thirteen; after killing a mutinous crewman in the West Indies, he added a new surname to cover his tracks and fled to America. Short and wiry, with prominent cheekbones, a cleft chin, and hazel eyes, he found purpose and opportunity in war, having won a commission in the nascent Continental Navy.

Anyway, a couple years after his appointment to Ranger, he took command of Bonhomme Richard, and engaged with the British at the Battle of Flamborough Head:

When a British boarding party appeared with cutlasses near the quarterdeck ladder, Jones and his seamen drove them back across the bulwarks to Serapis with pikes, firelocks, and shouted oaths. A panicky American gunner, convinced the ship was sinking, headed aft to strike the flag in surrender, until Jones knocked him unconscious with a pistol butt. And when Commodore Pearson, hopeful that the Americans were ready to capitulate, called out above the tumult, “Do you ask for quarter?,” Jones scoffed. Various versions of his defiant reply would be attributed to him, including, almost half a century later, the exhilarating “I have not yet begun to fight.” A week after the battle, Jones wrote Franklin only that he “answered him in the most determined negative.” He later told Louis XVI that he had shouted, “I do not dream of surrendering, but I am determined to make you strike.”

He did, in fact, cause Pearson to strike.  We will do the same against our current adversary, whilst flying our colors high.

Anyway, Happy Obama Appreciation Day to all, even the haters and losers!

PS - Happy birthday to Grandma, who would've turned 101 today.

God only knows what I'd be without the Wrecking Crew

Well, life would still go on, believe me.

PS - Check out this 1976 interview with Brian where he talks about Pet Sounds and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound technique.

huēyi tlahtoāni

Divine Rights:

Sprawling like some small group of picnickers,

They're propped among the shadows of the trees,

Though one seems drunk, spread-eagled. Nothing stirs

Except the flies that clog their cavities.

A red cleft rules the parting of that head.

You stretch a little and slide out of bed.

Acres of debris are in sodden flood   

About the ruined village, which concedes

In blackened matchwood to the tide of mud

Its smoking households. Rising from the weeds,

Arms reach up stiffly, as for an embrace.

Out of the mirror you observe your face

While sunlight offers all that you desire.

The Aztecs, to appease your counterparts,

Would hook still-living bodies from the fire,

Hack out and hold aloft the pulsing hearts,

Drenching the steps with blood, so they might give

Those idle brutes each day a day to live.

You have today. Stark-eyed and hollow-faced,

Her rigid ribcage almost bursting through

The skin, a girl sits in a land laid waste

And stares out blankly. So then, it is you—

The thought had not occurred to you before—

It's you, Huitzilopochtli, God of War.

Stephen Edgar.

The Filthiest People Alive

Thinking more about "Nature and Nature's God", it occurs to me there's been an underlying (r)evolution  at work:

• Divine Right of Kings (Henry V): 

He wills you, in the name of God almighty,
That you divest yourself and lay apart
The borrowed glories that, by gift of heaven,
By law of nature and of nations, ’longs
To him and to his heirs—namely, the crown

• Divine Right of the People (Declaration of Independence):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these, are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. 

 

That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

• Divine Right of White Men¹ (Southern Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches):

Baptist and Methodist churches had opposed slaveholding members in the early years of the Republic. These denominations’ rapid expansion in the South, however, meant abandoning this position “in recognition that upwardly mobile members increasingly included slaveholders.” Justification for slavery came with this growth and found its parallels in the biblical subordination of women.

“Southern ministers had written the majority of all published defenses of slavery,” Jemison reminds us. For these ministers, slavery not only had divine sanction, it was a necessary part of Christianity. This was because slavery was defined as akin to a marriage: the “power of slave owners over slaves paralleled the power of husbands over wives and of parents over children.”

• Divine Right of Net Worth (Space Karen)

The rocket and satellite company raised a record $75 billion, valuing the company at about $1.8 trillion, pushing the value of Musk's stake in SpaceX to an estimated $690 billion. The company is trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker "SPCX" after pricing its IPO on Thursday.

Combined with his holdings in electric vehicle maker Tesla, as well as other investments and assets, Musk's net worth is now estimated at about $1.1 trillion.

Feels like we're regressing.  In that case, perhaps it's time for the Divine Right of John Waters:

Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit! Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!

I mean, it can't be worse than Emperor Musk telling us to eat shit whilst he hoards bananas.  Beginning to think that basing human value, rights, and power upon made up shit isn't the way to go...

<exits singing, Is Filthy ever Divine? It's all subjective...>

1 - Patriots like Thomas Paine notwithstanding: With what consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretense of authority, or claim upon them?

I Dissented, but Entered Unanimously.

Nature. And Nature’s god. https://t.co/qYbX4k24cV

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 13, 2026

True, that's language Congress ultimately approved in the Declaration, which was essentially a public relations exercise.  But neither Nature nor G-d can really do shit on Earth to protect our rights, which is why I find this to be a more important element in the paragraph that followed:

[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed.

And while "rights of Nature" won the day, I think dissenters had the better argument, as recorded by John Adams:

• Rutledge: Our Claims I think are well founded on the british Constitution, and not on the Law of Nature.
• Duane: Upon the whole for grounding our Rights on the Laws and Constitution of the Country from whence We sprung, and Charters, without recurring to the Law of Nature -- because this will be a feeble Support.
• Galloway: I never could find the Rights of Americans, in the Distinctions between Taxation and Legislation, nor in the Distinction between Laws for Revenue and for the Regulation of Trade. I have looked for our Rights in the Laws of Nature -- but could not find them in a State of Nature, but always in a State of political Society.

Even delegates, including the guy who introduced the actual independence resolution, invoking natural rights did not rest their arguments solely on them:

• Lee: The Rights are built on a fourfold foundation -- on Nature, on the british Constitution, on Charters, and on immemorial Usage.
• Jay: It is necessary to recur to the Law of Nature, and the british Constitution to ascertain our Rights.

In fact, the Lee Resolution, ostensibly the legal basis for declaring independence, doesn't expound on the source of our rights at all:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

Yet there's a basis for a declaration even firmer than any notion of rights, that being practical reality:

[T]he question was not whether, by a declaration of independance, we should make ourselves what we are not; but whether we should declare a fact which already exists:  

Attributed to Franklin in HBO's John Adams miniseries, although it is unclear from Jefferson's notes which specific individual made the observation.  Continuing with said extant fact:

That as to the people or parliament of England, we had alwais been independant of them, their restraints on our trade deriving efficacy from our acquiescence only & not from any rights they possessed of imposing them, & that so far our connection had been federal only, & was now dissolved by the commencement of hostilities:  

That as to the king, we had been bound to him by allegiance, but that this bond was now dissolved by his assent to the late act of parliament, by which he declares us out of his protection, and by his levying war on us, a fact which had long ago proved us out of his protection; it being a certain position in law that allegiance & protection are reciprocal, the one ceasing when the other is withdrawn...

My emph added.

Anyway, the entire exercise sure as hell wasn't unanimous, no matter where our rights come from.  And both Nature and Nature's god have been awfully silent on the matter, so I don't know why we have to keep bringing them into this.

Selah.

Here Are the Beach Boys!

Missed yesterday marking one year since Brian drove down that same old strip one last time.

I

Loving the “I”:

I also love the I, the way it holds everything

I almost know in one great stroke, one great love,

I draw it, though I don’t give it flitches,

have never heard the word until I read it.

Someone tells me about a village called Great Dunmow

where the married couple judged the happiest

are awarded a flitch of bacon. It sounds like hell,

I say, knowing how competitive I am,

imagining dragging my husband down the road,

our smiles stretched across our faces,

never being able to argue—can you imagine,

having to testify: no I have never regretted

our marriage, not for one second, one minute,

one hour, one day. Our arguments taking place

in whispers, frantic snakes of words writhing

in the air between us. All this is to say, my I

does not have flitches. I teach it to my daughter,

top to bottom, I, I, I, the easiest letter

in the world to write. We draw a line of them

marching along the page. I tell her I love you

and she sings out I love you too Mummy.

It takes time for a child to refer to themselves

as I instead of in the third person by name.

But the I is singing in her blood now.

I know what I was before she came.

Now my I throws down its spear

and says I will stand here, and here,

and here, and the I is a stem of a note

without a head, the I is a missing table leg,

the I is running through my poem

like golden thread, look, here I am

trying to write whilst she shouts again and again

Mummy, look at me! I am here!

Kim Moore.

I'll shine up my old brown shoes

I was going to run with The Blue Hearts, but none of their content is embeddable due to copyright, so here's Cheap Trick at Budokan instead.  Pretty much the same thing.

i

Imaginary Number:

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed

is not big and is not small.

Big and small are

comparative categories, and to what

could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed

be compared?

Consciousness observes and is appeased.

The soul scrambles across the screes.

The soul,

like the square root of minus 1,

is an impossibility that has its uses.

Vijay Seshadri.