American Babylon (One Of Us... One.)

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. ~Luke 2:1-14

...

Nebuchadnezzar spoke and said unto them, Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship the golden image which I have set up?
Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music, ye fall down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.
If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.
~Daniel 3:14-18

...

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

So I saw this yesterday.

Some diamond-exporting firm gave Trump a ring that literally looks like he's trying to wear Trump Towers on one finger. 

Nobody needs this gaudy horseshit.

What if Jesus was a Poor Man??

Because the Word is rather explicit on the point that He was so.

Calvinism and the "Prosperity Gospel" are heresies and lies. The "Protestant Work Ethic" is not much more than a marketing and control strategy and to provide the example I give you nothing less than the behavior of Evangelical Republican White Men lately.

And the more political or wealthy they are, the worse it gets.

For all their warmongering and wanting to basically go out and fight everybody that isn't a White Evangelical Republican, these guys can't even fight a damn war properly.

Think about that for a second!

We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley

Then I saw that the Venn Diagram between right-wing "Influencers" and OnlyFans hoes is just a smoothly-polished and waxed circle of stone. I mean, seriously there's at least one of these fucking people that pretty much films all her videos doing softcore porn-model teaser shots. Sorry but I used to be a conservative Republican and none of this is what I was taught. And I grew up when a Playboy calendar at the job site, local auto shop or even in somebody's work office was still not necessarily considered out of line.

Shit like that even made it into movies like Die Hard.

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.

But nobody that I know ever considered the kind of men who that did stuff like that to be serious Evangelical conservative Republicans, yo. I knew plenty of conservatives and Christians (or both) who were like that but there was a line concerning public behavior and public display.

Even 20 years ago it could generally be assumed if some lady with her boobs hanging out walked up to you or you were watching a video like that, that the next words out of her mouth were not gonna be "Have you found Jesus?"

Same with the Neo-Nazis and the racists, I can remember when even the Southern Baptists could usually be counted on to beat those people up. Even though a large percentage of such people might privately have harbored similar such sentiments themselves, again there was a line between what was publicly permissible and what might be privately held.

And everybody had the sense to know that having that kind of shit in your group made you look bad.

“The moment stretched into eternity as both men brought their weapons to bear. He saw the man's eyes. It was a young face there, immediately below the emergency light, but the eyes . . . the rage there, the hatred, nearly stopped the Colonel's heart. But Bondarenko was a soldier before all things. The Afghan's first shot missed. His did not.

The Archer felt shock, but not pain in his chest as he fell. His brain sent a message to his hands to bring the weapon to the left, but they ignored the command and dropped it. He fell in stages, first to his knees, then on his back, and at last he was staring up at a ceiling. It was finally over. Then the man stood by his side. It was not a cruel face, the Archer thought. It was the enemy, and it was an infidel, but he was a man, too, wasn't he? There was curiosity there. He wants to know who I am, the Archer told him with his last breath.

"Allah Akbar!" God is great.

Yes, I suppose He is, Bondarenko told the corpse. He knew the phrase well enough. Is that why you came? He saw that the man had a radio. It started to make noise, and the Colonel bent down to grab it.

"Are you there?" the radio asked a moment later. The question was in Pashtu, but the answer was delivered in Russian. "It is all finished here,"

~Closing moments of the battle at the Soviet laser installation, from The Cardinal Of The Kremlin, by Tom Clancy.

I ain't saying it was right, and if you read something from even (for example) 20 years ago it's pretty easy to crack the code now...but that's how it was. And even authors you could do that with (Tom Clancy for example) often prominently had Black or female or Muslim characters as both major protagonists and major villains, either being written with a fair degree of humanity.

Now??

All these same fucking people just flipped a massive bitch because Helen Of Troy was played by a Black woman. Naturally, the film was a fucking blockbuster. I have yet to see it but I eventually will.

Sorry, America, but if somebody like Miss Rachel is yelling at you, you done fucked up.

That's about like if Mr. Rogers would have rolled up his sleeves and beat someone's ass back in the day. If things had ever gotten that extreme I don't think anybody would have argued that whoever got beat up deserved it.

But that's not the world we live in anymore and we're all worse off for it.

I'm sick of the ostentatious bigotry, greed, scamming and sexual excesses of These Fucking People even as they try to tell everybody else who we can have sex with or not...while also maintaining the attitude that us older people (at least those of us who ain't rich) should just wander off and die or something. 

Fuck all that.

And JD Vance wants the rest of us to "Sacrifice??"

And Mike Collins runs from reporters?

And "Conservatives" try to Cancel Miss Rachel??

What's next?? 

American families being "Asked" to sacrifice one of their daughters to the Epstein Class??

Because if we keep letting these monsters do this kind of shit, it'll come to exactly that, at least for certain "White" families. And since we're about half a step from open worship of Baal and Dis Pater Mammon, don't think they won't see how far they can push the cult behavior they've already established. It's a short step from tolerating the Epstein files bullshit to actively enabling it to being complicit.

And again, and I'm not sorry to say this, the rot goes pretty goddamn far down.

My partner and I have a daughter, the only answer that kind of shit is ever gonna get is "Fuck You, No" emphasized by racking the action of a 12-Gauge Remington M870 pump shotgun.

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."

And it'll probably come to that.

And I can tell you exactly how they're gonna do it too:

Start insinuating that God Is Black and the Demons are White.

Imply that the Virgin Mary may have been Autistic.

Accentuate the known fact that King James, who commissioned the favorite Bible of many Fundamentalists, was at least Bisexual.

Fuck, just point out that the next country to pick up the gauntlet that we threw down and fight for their freedom was Haiti.

Because it's at this point a proven goddamned fact that These Fucking People will ditch everything they ever believed in or claimed to for bigotry and an imagined "right" to be shitty to somebody else in public.

If you haven't noticed, the people being faithful to America and God in this mess might range from least being "Far-right but still believes in Democracy" to Social Democrats but it's nearly all people willing to at least say "Hey, wait a minute!" when the bigoted crap gets bad enough.

Meanwhile the Right is the goddamn Fyre Festival but they're still holding the reigns of Power while fighting it out, and there's no limit to what they'll do for another bigotry, outrage or just rage-induced hit of whatever dopamine-fix this Prosperity Gospel Trump shit provides!

America needs to learn the word "No."

We need to stop allowing bad behavior and bigotry. Racism should be a criminal offense at this point for all the trouble everybody knows it's caused. Right now, the Billionaires and Republicans are literally using this shit to kill us.

We need to tax the fuck out of rich people and place hard limits on their behavior and what they can use that money for.

Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house comes, at evening, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning, ~Mark 13:35

We need to start honoring and living out the promise of equality that's the basis of our entire system.

And We the People need to start backing that shit up with the credible threat of Force.

That's what the Second Amendment was even for. We the People are the last line against Tyranny.

We have to say NO.

Fuck you and the data-center-powered cloud-computed Terminator you rode in on.

Enough is Enough.

Elisabet Sobeck: I remember yelling that I didn’t care. And that’s when my mother took my face in her hands and…spoke.

GAIA: Query: What did she say?

Elisabet Sobeck: She said I had to care. She said, “Elisabet, being smart will count for nothing if you don’t make the world a better place. You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death.”

~From the video game Horizon Zero Dawn.

I'm tired of this shit.

Whether it's this Mark Of The Beast type Data Center bullshit or just Trump.

The question is why aren't you??

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And either you're gonna fight for it or you're not.

If we ain't all free, none of us are.

I can't put it any more simply than that.

This American Babylon is gonna fall, hard, fast, and soon.

What we do after that??

That's on us.

Слава Україна!

The Cylon War is long over, yet we must not forget the reasons why so many sacrificed so much in the cause of freedom. The cost of wearing the uniform can be high ... [after looking at crowd] but sometimes it's too high. You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question, why? Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, jealousy. And we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done. Like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. When that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore. ~William Adama, from the Battlestar Galactica (2003) Miniseries, Part One.

Prequel

Joe: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

Attorney General: "So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops.

Joe: Yes.

Attorney General: Water. Like out the toilet?

Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that's the idea.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Attorney General: It's got electrolytes.

Joe: Okay, look. The plants aren't growing, so I'm pretty sure that the Brawndo's not working. Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow.

Secretary of Energy: Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.

Secretary of State: Hey, that's good. You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world?

Joe: Okay, look. You want to solve this problem. I want to get my pardon. So why don't we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?

Attorney General: Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it's got electrolytes.

Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?

Secretary of State: It's what they use to make Brawndo.

~From the film Idiocracy.

If God had a name, what would it be?

And would you call it to His face

If you were faced with Him in all His glory?

What would you ask if you had just one question?

And yeah, yeah, God is great

Yeah, yeah, God is good

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

What if God was one of us

Just a slob like one of us

Just a stranger on the bus

Tryna make His way home?

~Joan Osborne "What If God Was One Of Us?"