Thank you for your service?

Ah, Veterans Day. The national holiday when we salute the mercenaries who police the world!

Veterans Day is a farce.

There's nothing worse than being reminded by holier-than-thou types that we should tell veterans how much we appreciate their service today. "It means so much to the veterans," these people will tell you, and most others will listen, because, man, we owe veterans a serious debt! THEY PROTECT OUR COUNTRY WHILE PUTTING THEIR LIVES ON THE LINE!

Once upon a time, fawning over veterans probably made sense. If your father fought in the Civil War, for instance, that guy saw some fucked up shit and was in a war that truly CHANGED things (kind of). That guy deserved at least one holiday per year, and yet men in those days were true men — they didn't want a goddamn holiday for doing what was right.

These days, going into the military is supporting the massive military-industrial complex in America, signing up to kill brown people in the Middle East, and, more than anything, a calculated decision that you can put up with some shit from the military in order to get your education paid for and some nice benefits on the way and down the road.

There is nothing noble about being in today's military. If you enter the military, you are one of three things:

1. A mercenary.
2. An idiot who had no other options.
3. A sorely misguided young person with nationalistic ideals and dreams of waving the American flag on a mountaintop after you killed the entirety of ISIS with your bare hands.

And yet, we are subjected to this kind of awful thinking when it comes to saluting veterans: 5 ways to honor veterans beyond Veterans Day.

I mean, COME ON. If you are a veteran, you signed up to be in the military. You were not forced into it. I will not honor veterans anymore than I expect anyone to honor me for having a white collar job. We all have jobs, and we all make choices based on what's best for us. Joining the military is not a selfless act. Joining the military in 2014 is accepting a job. You weigh the pros and cons and you either do it, or you don't.

The worst part of all of it, of course, is that you don't dare say anything bad about the idea of honoring veterans, because otherwise you are an asshole in the eyes of 99 percent of the country. Even bleeding heart liberals would be appalled at the very notion someone would say FUCK VETERANS DAY.

But, seriously: FUCK VETERANS DAY.

Dinosauria

Good Evening Reader:


Sometimes when I have a spare moment I like to grab a cup of organic black root tea from Bogota and read the latest academic findings of Dr. Jack Horner, who I consider to be an amazing mind and also one of the most evil men to ever grace this planet.  His greatest sin is the perpetuation of the lie that Tyrannosaurus Rex was a scavenger and not the uber-predatory hunter we know that he in fact was.

I've never shared this before, but I've traveled to an alternative universe nearly identical to our own thanks to the wonders of quantum physics.  I landed in this nearly identical universe in a time approximately 70 million years before the arrival of the Great Bane of the Earth - Humans.  We really are the worst.  I saw a guy throw a cigarette butt out of a speeding 1989 Volkswagon Rabbit and it killed a sun-bathing armadillo, or something.  The. Worst. 

Where was I?  Oh, right, multiverse travel (TIME travel is not possible, and please don't say it is).  I happened upon what is present day North America just in time to see a female Tyrannosaur in action, at the peak of her powers, and she just downright took out 20 full grown hadrosaurs in the span of 30 minutes.  I swear I am not making this up.  I clocked her at 30 miles per hour in peak stride.

Which leads me back to "Doctor" Jack Horner.  How in God's Good Green Earth* can you posit that the Tyrannosaur was a scavenger?  I saw all of this with my own eyes, those animals hunted.  They ran.  They stalked.  I'd tell you how I got to the multiverse, but frankly, I don't think you have the mental capacity to take it in and I actually don't really remember.



Yours In Fury,


Rupert Chang










*prior to arrival of man, now it's vaguely gray in color