Sword of the (Bad) Spirits (Exorcism, Three.)

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
For I hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. 

~Matthew 25:31-45

...

The clocks stopped at one seventeen. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. I think it's October but I can't be sure. I haven't kept a calendar for five years. Each day is more gray than the one before. It is cold and growing colder as the world slowly dies. No animals have survived and all the crops are long gone. Soon all the trees in the world will fall. The roads are peopled by refugees towing carts and gangs carrying weapons, looking for fuel and food. Within a year there was fire on the ridges and deranged chanting. There has been cannibalism. Cannibalism is the great fear. Mostly I worry about food. Always food. Food and the cold and our shoes. Sometimes I tell the boy old stories of courage and justice - difficult as they are to remember. All I know is the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke. ~The Man, from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (Film.)

I saw this yesterday.

James Fishback, who is, by the way, a scammy finance bro and not some kind of preacher or something (and who, despite the name, is a Spanish-speaking son of immigrants) wants to change divorce laws.

Uh, has this motherfucker met old Republicans??

I'm old enough to remember when Newt Gingrich effectively got shit-canned out of the Party for adultery at the same time as he was trying to impeach Bill Clinton, but what the fuck do I know??

Of course I get it. These motherfuckers think their bullshit will mostly affect women, or they wouldn't be trying to do this shit.

Like all these idiotic attempts to pass the Death Penalty for having an Abortion.

I'm so tired of this crap. It has no purpose. All too many of These Fucking People do not make the slightest effort to live up to the shit that comes out of their mouths.

It's not right, and all this bullshit posturing ends up hurting actual people.

And let me tell you why;

Okay, yeah, I admit that I've been pretty hard on conservative Evangelicals and shit down through the years, it's kind of what I do. But then for most of my life, I was conservative and pretty Evangelical-adjacent. I know more than most people do about this stuff, and I think I have a right to say something.

But here's the thing;

A lot of people don't stay with this crap. They get hurt and leave, they grow out of it, or they simply grow up. It's usually only the people with bad intentions who end up staying in it and maintain lockstep with people like Donald Trump, Doug Wilson and people like Pete Keg-Breath.

While there's always going to be people like Lauren Blowbert, for every one like her I know ten people like my partner or the vast majority of my House Church friends from my old job.

Or people like James Talarico, for that matter.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

Let me give you an example (and I had to ask permission to share this story, mind you) 20 years ago when my partner and I were both working Third Shift at my old job, it's lunch break and me and a couple of the Gaming Group bros are sitting there in the smoking side of the breakroom eating and hashing out how we're going to adapt a few then-popular Christianity-related conspiracy-tinged things (One of them was the Da Vinci Code IIRC) into the long-running Vampire The Masquerade/White Wolf-overall game I ran. 

My partner, then younger and more combative (and also part of the gaming group, and that night we'd been working together) comes in, sits down, sees that the subject of the moment is politics-and-religion-tinged and a light goes on, like "Ooh, Ooh can we have an argument? Can we?? Can we??" She was very much a conservative Evangelical at the time.

(The kid thought me telling this story last month was quite hilarious while her mother glared razor-sharp daggers at me from across the table at the pizza place the whole time.)

She was mildly crestfallen to find out we were just talking Gaming but her input almost certainly closely followed the argument she thought she was gonna have.

Anyway, after break guess what? We had the argument, on the way back over to the hotel, the whole second half of the night, on the way home, into the living room and through the first smoke break of the day.

We ended up (for neither the first nor the last time) making out and dry-humping on the couch.

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

At that time even the fact that we loved each other often manifested itself in arguments and fell (despite my no longer being in it) within the 'norms' of conservative Christian church culture.

Here's the thing; She grew out of being the right-wing debate girl, even if she still loves a good argument.

And if we want to defeat this crap, that kind of fierce, passionate energy is at least some of what we need.

A lot of that comes from women, in my experience.

Which is exactly why these weird creepers want to strip away women's rights and their right to participate in the goddamned argument.

Four Words, Beard-O.

"Over My Dead Body."

Not least because even 20 years ago when I was like, totally secular and not the least bit interested in this stuff and didn't want to even be bothered with it, when I occasionally attended a house-church mainly because there was Weed, I found it within myself to care about people who did believe in it and those people eventually showed me that it wasn't all the same rotten crap preached by False Prophets like Doug Wilson or Lauren Blowbert.

Eli Sunday: Daniel, I'm asking if you'd like to have business with the Church of the Third Revelation in developing this lease on young Bandy's thousand acre tract. I'm offering you to drill on one of the great undeveloped fields of Little Boston!  

Daniel Plainview: I'd be happy to work with you.

Eli Sunday: You would? Yes, yes, of course. That’s wonderful.

Daniel Plainview: But there is one condition for this work.

Eli Sunday: All right.

Daniel Plainview: I'd like you to tell me that you are a false prophet. I'd like you to tell me that you are, and have been, a false prophet, and that God is a superstition.

~From the film There Will Be Blood.

Hell, the second time we dated, when she was down in Tennessee, my partner even got me to go to church with her a few times.

I can't really say I was very impressed at the time, mostly, I did it for her.

But the truth is all those little efforts by people worked up to that when I heard the Epstein motherfuckers were into worshiping Baal and eating babies, I remembered all that I'd been taught.

And whether one wants to hear that or not, I really don't think secular liberalism is gonna be able to deal with this shit by itself, at least not without cold steel and hot, righteous rage to go with it.

Like I said I think there's a case to be made that we need a national exorcism at this point.

It's funny, so far, who I've seen feel threatened by that idea and who doesn't.

Like, there's a reason These Fucking People don't feel threatened by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, but that they do feel threatened by James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett.

And if it's people rooted in the Black church or who have theological educations vs. scummy finance bros who are trying too hard turned amateur Bible-thumpers, I think I like our odds.

But it's absolutely going to come down to a fight.

Don't be surprised if one of the later moves of the Goddamn Monsters is to go public with their demon-worshiping horseshit because, as the whole Trump thing has shown us...there are, 100% and then some, people in this just to be bad goddamn people.

And there's a reason these fucking people keep doubling down on performative acts and religiosity.

The letter of the law rather than the spirit of it, lends itself well to being used as a weapon.

They only ever adapted or co-opted everything else they ever did because they thought it might be a useful weapon to hurt somebody else.

Ultimate Evil will, as it turns out, be the same way.

They sure do want to take up the Sword of the Spirit...but only that of the Bad Spirits.

It should surprise nobody that it'll be the backsliders and the castoffs, the educated theologians and the LGBT folks, all of us "Sinners" who actually Believed and it's the wealthy white privileged church-as-social-club Republican assholes who turned out to be depraved monsters who will, in the end, worship demons if it helps them hang on to "Power" for a few minutes longer.

To shorten that time, it will come down to a fight.

And you either believe in freedom or you don't.

Including, by the way, freedom of conscience, religion, or thought.

There's a reason these people trying to make an AI Jesus to cover up real sins.

The only "Freedom" Republicans want is the "Freedom" to be bad people.

Слава Україна!

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.

How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she said in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judges her.

And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. ~Revelation 18:1-10

Two

Cassian Andor: Kino. Tell them what to do. It has to be you. Come on, Kino. You do this every day. Tell them what to do.

Kino Loy: [presses PA system] My name is Kino Loy. I'm the day shift manager on Level Five. I'm speaking to you from the command center on Level Eight. We are, at this moment, in control of the facility.

Andor: Is that the best you got?

Loy: How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us. We have deactivated every floor in the facility. All floors are cold. Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it'll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and [looks at Cassian, knowing he said it] "I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want." We know they fried a hundred men on Level Two. We know that they are making up our sentences as we go along. We know that no one outside here knows what's happening. And now we know, that when they say we are being released, we are being transferred to some other prison to go and die, and that ends today! There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out!

[repeats it multiple times as he leaves the command center]

Andor: Come on! Let's get out of here!

~From the series "Andor" S1 E10 "One Way Out."

The Unseeing (Exorcism, Two.)

 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.

How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she said in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judges her.

And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. ~Revelation 18:1-10

...

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

...

Cassian Andor: What? To steal from the Empire, what do you need? A uniform, some dirty hands, and an Imperial toolkit. They’re so proud of themselves, they don’t even care. They’re so fat and satisfied, they can’t imagine it…

Luthen Rael: Can’t imagine what?

Andor: That someone like me would ever get inside their house, walk their floors, spit in their food, take their gear. 

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S1.E2 "That Would Be Me."

...

The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. ~Ronald Reagan

I saw this last night. 

Florida Republicans are naming the Palm Beach airport after Trump.

And, perversely enough, this shit reminded me of the day I met my ex-wife.

(Actually, Florida-related stuff does that more than I'd like. The over-the-top Banana Republic Conservatism and religiosity combined with the sexual morals of a goat that defines that place now was her vibe.)

It was towards the end of May, 2000. I'd somehow managed a Friday off from both of my jobs, had Saturday morning off because I was working an evening shift at the clubhouse, and I had money. Basically, the stars had to align correctly for all this to happen at once. I was thrilled.

So I'd decided to go over to Traverse City and go to Borders bookstore and a few other places, and because there was this girl I'd been talking to from over there I'd fired off a message on MSN Messenger and also called and left a message on her voicemail, with my then-new-and-exciting Nokia Track-Phone.

(LOL)

So I drove over there, did most of my running, went to PetSmart and got dog food, etc. Then I went to the book store basically with full intent to just hang out for the afternoon regardless of anything else. I ended up reading a good chunk of The Indwelling, the new Left Behind Series novel at the time...and thinking it was absolute crap. 

Note I was only just coming down off of being all about End Times Prophecy stuff.

As it turned out, I was a good couple hours into it and my girl called me, I told her where I was and asked if she wanted to meet and it turned out she was up for it. Hour or so later she showed up more in a T-shirt and fuzzy pink pajama bottoms but she was cute and chubby, flirty and, fun to hang out with and physical in a way my last girl definitely hadn't been so I didn't care. We ended up getting a coffee, sitting together and reading, I bought us both some books (although definitely not the one I'd been looking at) then we went to lunch at Chili's and ultimately we decided to go back to her place and hooked up and the rest is some seriously unfortunate history.

But at the time it seemed like a good day. 

Considering I was coming off a breakup it was the very best of days in the heat of the moment. I remember every damn thing about that day, unfortunately including every fucking line that I read in that book. Including the fact that the "Global Community" bad guys started renaming everything that wasn't nailed down after the Antichrist, from the highway system to the money.

Honestly I thought that was so ridiculous at the time that I still remember it all these years later. Actually, come to think of it the whole day ended up like that. I just didn't see the rest of it that way at the time.

And that entire day, including the sexual looseness of the moment (and keep in mind me and her were both different levels of Conservative Christian at the time) to a bunch of buried secrets I'd only discover later is a little too much like what all this shit has turned into now in real life.

Yeah, we were a bit of "Convenience Christians" ourselves but we were two consenting adults doing nothing much compared to what's being excused by These Fucking People nowadays!

We were also, still could be and if I can even now I'd assume she can be as well...observant Believers to the best of our ability.

Other people, apparently not so much.

Trump is the natural end result of the Prosperity Gospel and of empty spiritually vapid Pentecostalism more broadly.

More to the point this absurd desire to remake the world in Trump's bloated, doddering image is all too indicative of the mentality of what I call the "Atheism Minus One" people, the people who don't wanna believe in anything but some variant of Right-wing Christianity and Republican politics. 

Including rejecting not only every other religion (even Christian denominations) but rejecting the validity of reality and science themselves in favor of whatever conspiracy theories make their chosen (false) god look good.

Also typically such people see no difference between Christianity and being a Republican, the two things are fused together like they got melted by a dragon's fire-breath.

And as consequences and scrutiny intensify, yeah sure...some of these people will get disgusted and leave. Some will bow out and revert to sports-fandom or some other addiction to fill the Void. But, some will get weird and double- and triple-down infinitely on this fucking garbage.

Even now, and I say that because that type of shit has already been happening for years and by now most of the MAGA's that are still left have already done that kind of thing at least once.

Now I don't know if Trump is The Antichrist but MAGA and Trump and a lot of the other people associated with all this shit definitely are Antichrists and I find it interesting that even my ex-wife is apparently against this shit.

So is my partner, so is my conservative religious old-lady neighbor that I ran into when I went and checked the mail. I mean at this point being against Trump and this Ideology of Power and Wealth that now seems to be fine with cannibalism, murder and pedophilia is pretty much just a baseline for keeping one's Humanity somewhat intact.

But to me and given my own experience, the headline is more that the End Times conservative and Evangelical Christians have basically become the villains in their own goddamned fanfiction.

Complete with a bumptious Antichrist surrounded by ass-kissing yammering fools and literal False Prophets.

It's not just that they don't even care...honestly, I think they don't even notice.

Call it The Great Unseeing.

If you don't see why that's a problem I can't help you, and I'm not sure I want to try.

I'm not even sure a National Exorcism would fix this, because to get rid of the bad spirits, first you have to be willing to see that they're even there.

Слава Україна!

The clocks stopped at one seventeen. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. I think it's October but I can't be sure. I haven't kept a calendar for five years. Each day is more gray than the one before. It is cold and growing colder as the world slowly dies. No animals have survived and all the crops are long gone. Soon all the trees in the world will fall. The roads are peopled by refugees towing carts and gangs carrying weapons, looking for fuel and food. Within a year there was fire on the ridges and deranged chanting. There has been cannibalism. Cannibalism is the great fear. Mostly I worry about food. Always food. Food and the cold and our shoes. Sometimes I tell the boy old stories of courage and justice - difficult as they are to remember. All I know is the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke. ~The Man, from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (Film.)

One

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
For I hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. 

~Matthew 25:31-45

The Devil Made Us Do It (Exorcism, One.)

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he strikes a man.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.

And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.

And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.

And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,

Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.

And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.

And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.

And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.

By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.

For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9, King James Version.

...

The clocks stopped at one seventeen. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. I think it's October but I can't be sure. I haven't kept a calendar for five years. Each day is more gray than the one before. It is cold and growing colder as the world slowly dies. No animals have survived and all the crops are long gone. Soon all the trees in the world will fall. The roads are peopled by refugees towing carts and gangs carrying weapons, looking for fuel and food. Within a year there was fire on the ridges and deranged chanting. There has been cannibalism. Cannibalism is the great fear. Mostly I worry about food. Always food. Food and the cold and our shoes. Sometimes I tell the boy old stories of courage and justice - difficult as they are to remember. All I know is the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke. ~The Man, from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (Film.)

I'm not a big believer in Demons and magic and shit. Or at least, before all this Baal-worship, Epstein files shit started I didn't used to be. Part of that comes from having been raised in the kind of rationalistic theological environment where the Power of such things is rejected outright, if you believe in Jesus, theoretically you have little to fear from that kind of crap. There seems to be a fair amount of truth to this. I have seen things I can't explain, doesn't mean they necessarily bothered me.

Another part of it is, I'm a gamer. Magic is something you roll dice for, that doesn't much exist outside of your imagination and the numbers you're keeping track of in your head and occasionally writing in your notebook or on your character sheet as the current combat round progresses. 

And of course, my ex-wife is Pentecostal and so everything she didn't like was "Demonic."

Honestly, even now I'm a hell of a lot more worried about the people who apparently believe in Baal than I am about Baal. I thought (if it ever really existed, according to my previous thought process) humanity left that crap behind.

I thought a lot of things.

Since this Epstein shit started coming out? There's no natural explanation for why I've drawn back towards Christ. I started hearing about all this Epstein files stuff and a rage came up in me like fire. I started getting Biblical when talking to people, always something I've done occasionally, not on a daily basis. When the bad guys are old school to the point of going back to the worst parts of the Old Testament, secular liberalism won't do it, not by itself. Not without cold steel to back it up. 

We need an Elijah. Probably, we need more than one.

That rationalistic side says they're working up a "The Devil Made Us Do It" defense for all this horrible bullshit, and gonna try to blame somebody else.

None of this actually works like that, one of these things is not like the other one.

The trouble is, a lot of people aren't rational, and I feel like even if they were a need exists to cover all the spiritual bases simply because one doesn't fuck around with this type of shit.

Whether it was the ancient Israelites fighting against their neighbors, Elijah on Mount Carmel challenging the prophets of Baal or the Romans fighting against Carthage, it seems like the common understanding at the time and down through most of history has been you don't accept or negotiate with this bullshit, you burn it all the way out, salt the Earth behind you, and start the fuck over. Rome and Yahweh pretty much didn't agree on anything else but proper procedure in this case.

Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

We're going to need a national exorcism (if not a global one) whether it's "real" or not simply to show the "Power" of the rest of us once we beat this shit back down. 

You don't negotiate with this bullshit, you defeat it, assert dominance and then actively hunt for those trying to keep it going in secret because clearly if they have to perform their shameful rituals in secret for 3,000 years to keep it going, they'll do it.

And no, the Christian Nationalist homophobic horseshit ain't the answer because Those Fucking People have been shown to be balls deep in this garbage, literally. 

Like the Xenomorphs in Aliens, or with Russians in your politics, you start fucking around with this shit at all, it apparently spreads out of control very fast no matter how much you smugly think it's not gonna get you, it will.

And it's not the LGBT people doing this, it's the conservatives.

I have a partner and kid to think about, also they're both LGBT. It's not just that I don't want to live in that kind of world myself, one where "Christians" would rather submit to the prophets of Baal than live with people like my own little chosen family, it's that I don't want them to have to live in that shit either.

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

For fuck's sake I have pictures somewhere in a folder on my old laptop of Clarence Thomas at the Bohemian Grove. That empty man is a Moloch worshiper no matter how much Sedevacantist Catholic horseshit comes out his mouth. I saw recently that former FBI agent and convicted Soviet spy Robert Hanssen died, dude was an Opus Dei type Catholic and a raging pervert, besides being a traitor.

America wasn't Asshole Nation enough for him.

Extreme religiosity, narcissism and smug "Conservatism" all seem to work together to have a "Bitch Switch" that somebody or something can flip to make a person break every covenant they ever made or violate every oath they ever swore, reject God himself and turn on their own damn country.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

Seems like all somebody's got to do is appeal to prejudice enough, give some asshole enough money or tell somebody how great they are long enough, maybe teach them to believe they're in some kind of secret club or some bullshit and suddenly There Is No God and Sin becomes a fun toy instead of something not to do.

It seems to take very little to get this started, hell, conspiracy theories and our ongoing Biblical-grade plague of narcissism alone got people most of the way there.

Throw in a Godless, endlessly profit-seeking mentality and it gets a lot easier. You don't think these rich assholes let somebody like Ayn Rand into their club on a diversity quota, do you?? She preached the ideal of a godless world where Man's self-satisfaction was the moral purpose of his life.

And I'll note it was the "Conservative" "Christians" who really ate that shit up. Never mind what the fruit of it would be decades later. That shit was a big part of what turned Evangelicalism into a Christ-less form of "Christianity."

Basically, that is EXACTLY what I believe all this Trump stuff is now. People be so desperate for something to believe in they'll believe in about damn near anything, because all these people who are what I call "Atheists Minus One" DO NOT believe in Christ, in the Judgment Day or the Other Side, that's why they're the mainstay of the Trump cult. They need a "god" that they can see.

And that's why they're going to hell, the entire *Point* is that faith is the evidence of things *Unseen.*

Worse, they don't care.

If you don't think you have a soul, you can easily sell your soul to Baal and it's just spending money. You get the spiritual consequences later whether you believe in them or not. The consequences believe in you.

The thing to remember is they know what they're doing and where they're going, and their goal is to drag as many people as they can into Hell with them. They can't be gods, but they can take life and separate other people from God and in their zero-sum Man-centered worldview that's damn near the same thing.

If you want a world where none of this is a thing, or at least like it was when I learned this stuff in church, we're all gonna have to fight to get it back.

Remember that.

Because it's going to be on the test.

Слава Україна!

Cassian Andor: Kino. Tell them what to do. It has to be you. Come on, Kino. You do this every day. Tell them what to do.

Kino Loy: [presses PA system] My name is Kino Loy. I'm the day shift manager on Level Five. I'm speaking to you from the command center on Level Eight. We are, at this moment, in control of the facility.

Andor: Is that the best you got?

Loy: How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us. We have deactivated every floor in the facility. All floors are cold. Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it'll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and [looks at Cassian, knowing he said it] "I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want." We know they fried a hundred men on Level Two. We know that they are making up our sentences as we go along. We know that no one outside here knows what's happening. And now we know, that when they say we are being released, we are being transferred to some other prison to go and die, and that ends today! There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out!

[repeats it multiple times as he leaves the command center]

Andor: Come on! Let's get out of here!

~From the series "Andor" S1 E10 "One Way Out."

Last Post

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan