Becoming Babylon (Day Of The Lord, Ten.)

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. ~Revelation 6:1-2

...

Captain Ramsey: You do qualify your remarks. If someone asked me if we should bomb Japan, a simple "Yes. By all means sir, drop that fucker, twice!"

[Men laughing]

Capt. Ramsey: I don't mean to suggest that you're indecisive, Mr. Hunter. Not at all. Just, uh... complicated. 'course, that's the way the Navy wants you. Me, they wanted simple.

Hunter: Well, you certainly fooled them, sir.

Ramsey: [chuckles] Be careful there, Mr. Hunter. It's all I've got to rely on, being a simple-minded son of a bitch. Rickover gave me my command, a checklist, a target and a button to push. All I gotta know is how to push it, they tell me when. They seem to want you to know why.

Hunter: I would hope they'd want us all to know why, sir.

Ramsey: At the Naval War College it was metallurgy and nuclear reactors, not 19th-century philosophy. "War is a continuation of politics by other means." Von Clausewitz

Hunter: I think, sir, that what he was actually trying to say was a little more -

Ramsey: Complicated?

[Men laughing]

Hunter: Yes the purpose of war is to serve a political end but the true nature of war is to serve itself.

~From the film Crimson Tide.

...

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

I saw this last night.

Some Norwegian asking why we can't remove a corrupt, treasonous pedophile from our political system?

He brought up that the Norwegians removed somebody from their government for stealing a pair of sunglasses.

(Good for them, at least somebody in the world cares about right and wrong.)

Well, homie, the short answer is that America's wealthy and the Republican Party have convinced a third of the country that they get to steal the sunglasses too.

And, more broadly, half of America (including a lot of alleged "Liberals") just likes the idea of stealing shit.

There's just a lot of people in our country that would rather kill and steal than live.

Worse, in America, even right under the nose of the global (and majority non-White!) Catholic Church, there is an entire religious apparatus basically dedicated to telling These Fucking People that's Okay. In fact, be more of an asshole, for Jesus.

In case anybody wonders why I'm a very agnostic sort of Christian.

The trouble is, you can't threaten these right-wing political Bishops and Cardinals with Hell, because if Heaven doesn't have a hierarchy and Hell does...they'd rather go to Hell to start with!

In Dungeons & Dragons terms, we'll call Bishop Barron here Lawful Evil, he's going to the Nine Hells of Baator anyway and he likes it that way. Like I said, I didn't know Mammon had Bishops.

This Homophobic motherfucker here? Straight up Chaotic Evil, bound for the Infinite Layers of the Abyss, with a Will.

With Malice Aforethought.

If there's anything I've learned from gaming, religion, studying religion and traveling the world a bit both in Uniform and out? It's that people are people and a hell of a lot of people suck. If it wasn't Christianity, with these fucking people it would be something else, some other excuse, some other justification for or attempted buy-off of their Sin.

Like literally if a charismatic enough person came to them, preached belief in Dis Pater and Mammon and looked like they were gonna win...That's who these assholes would worship.

You have to beat the assholes, make it generally unprofitable to be an asshole and then actively work to support good people being good people! And you have to actively deter and visibly punish bad behavior and shit like that.

Also, electing and promoting for competence might help.

Likewise actively working to remove incompetents from the system (and discourage them from seeking public office) might help.

We as a society have to start making value judgments, on something other than petty bigotry or on a profit/loss basis. 

Trust me, take it from me and my partner, if you make being a good person optional too many people simply won't do it!

And stuff like that is exactly why I think America is going to fall apart like the Soviet Union did.

In November of 2024 I wrote how the collective American attention span was about two weeks, a milestone I saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

I further in a subsequent post wrote that there were 771 days between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Fall of the Soviet Union.

Maybe it's just me but I think we're well past halfway there and on an accelerated timeline. 

You can have the best military in the world, the most money, etc. It doesn't matter worth a shit if your leadership is corrupt and weak and the People don't want to live together any more, and I am totally not kidding.

There's people out there who'd rather that the military had raided Idaho than Venezuela.

And they ain't Liberals.

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.

Think on that.

There's people out there for whom literally nobody can be "Conservative" or Right-Wing enough.

Because it's not really about that.

Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from Planescape Torment

Not because of any political philosophy or anything of the sort, but because all These Fucking People actually desire is destruction and to satisfy the lusts of the Flesh.

And they don't even wanna do that with real people anymore.

The fascism is simply a distraction from that. The actual reality of what these fucking people are is worse.

This, not Zohran Mamdani's New York City, is what a godless America (practicing a Christ-less Christianity) looks like.

Basically We Be Becoming Babylon.

And the immigrant Muslim socialist or the Gay People are not why. It's the White "Conservative" folks and their total lack of care for anybody else or desire to govern themselves, it's their unwillingness to do the work of life and the Wealth Without Work they lust after.

That's what's killing us.

So read the Book of Revelation and figure out if that's how you wanna live, pretty much.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You either believe in whatever higher power you worship, or you don't.

Donald Trump ain't that higher power.

Слава Україна!

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press

Nine

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.

Oblivion (Day Of The Lord, Nine.)

Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from Planescape Torment

...

Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

That strengthens the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skillful of lamentation to wailing.

And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord.

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.

Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.

But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?

But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. ~Amos 5:7-26

...

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

I saw this shit yesterday.

A couple of Incel idiots on Threads going on and on about replacing women with "Artificial Wombs" and Sex Robots and shit.

These guys ain't lonely enough.

And of course it's Anything but "Love Thy Neighbor"

And Anything but "Treat women as people."

I'm so tired of this crap.

But then I have a real, living breathing, wonderfully complicated, interesting and often gloriously bitchy woman in my life and I have no need of any of this type of shit.

But...and here's the key part...I wouldn't need or want any of this shit if I didn't.

Me and my partner have 20 years of history, of passion and joy and loss and pain and human connection that I wouldn't trade for the hottest little Clanker in the world and I don't give a damn.

If you don't understand why that is so, I can't help you and I don't want to try.

Hell, if somebody gave me a female-coded Sex Robot, I'm pretty sure just by reflex I'd treat that as a person, too.

And if she told me no, well, No still means No even when it's an AI, doesn't it??

Like I said I can see the protest signs now, "Artificial Women are Women" and so on.

It's not really about sex.

Or the fact, technically, that these guys can't get it.

If they really wanted to they could find some religious doormat of a girl who'd let them do what they wanted.

But the truth is it's about Hate and Power and the fact that the only real thing These Fucking People value or that These Fucking People WANT is Slavery.

And they're failing at terrorizing the world into accepting that shit again.

They'd rather spend umpty-fucktillion dollars that they don't really have for a sex robot than be decent enough to a woman to get her to have sex with them or do the work of life and relationships, or take care of any resulting kids, and so on.

This bullshit is narcissism, pure and simple.

There is no "Male Loneliness Epidemic."

There's a Biblical-grade plague of assholery and narcissism.

And these chuds are mad that women don't have to put up with that crap anymore. Too fucking bad, bros, too fucking bad.

It's not for nothing that I said awhile back y'all need Jesus.

This Ain't The Way.

But then these guys don't want love.

They want Oblivion, with some kind of narcissistic blast-off attached to it.

They want power and they want slaves.

And they'll wonder why the Robots won't fuck them, either.

Love, like freedom, takes compromise and effort, kindness and work.

It is not, by definition, all about you.

These men? They ain't lonely enough.

Слава Україна!

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.

Eight

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."

Red Horse (Day Of The Lord, Eight.)

And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.

And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword. ~Revelation 6:3-4

...

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

...

Hess: So what shall we toast to, boys? I can blather on about “To health” or “To success,” but I’d like to do somethin’ a little less rote. Where you from, Brown Eyes?

Migs Mayfield: How ’bout a toast to Operation Cinder?

Hess: Now there’s a man who knows his history.

Mayfield: No, I don’t just know it. I lived it. I was in Burnin Konn.

Hess: Burnin Konn?

Mayfield: Mmm.

Hess: That was a hard day. I had to make many unpleasant decisions.

Mayfield: Yes, you did. Entire city gone in moments, along with everybody in it. We lost our whole division that day. Man, that was like 5-10,000 people.

Hess: Yep. All heroes of the Empire.

Mayfield: Yeah. And all dead.

Hess: Well, it’s a small sacrifice for the greater good, son.

Mayfield: Depends on who you ask, don’t you think?

Hess: [irritated] What you gettin’ at, trooper?

Mayfield: All those people, the ones who died, was it good for them? Hmm? Their families? The guys I served with? Civilians, those poor mud scuffers, died defending their homes, fighting for freedom. Was it good for them?

Hess: But we’ve outlasted them, son. They’re eating themselves alive. The New Republic is in complete disarray, and we grow stronger. You see, with the rhydonium you’ve delivered, we can create havoc that’s gonna make Burnin Konn pale by comparison. And then they’re gonna turn to us once again. You see, boys, everybody thinks they want freedom, but what they really want is order. And when they realize that, they’re gonna welcome us back with open arms. Ah. To the Empire.

[Mayfield chuckles, then fires a blaster at Hess' chest, killing him instantly. He and Mando then shoot their way out of the mess hall] ~From The Mandalorian, Season 2, Ep. 7 "The Believer"

So last night the US Armed Forces launched a smash-and-grab raid on Venezuela and arrested Nicholas Maduro.

There was apparently fighting, chances are, this isn't over and remember that the enemy gets a vote.

How the fuck did we get here, to a situation where we're now the destabilizing rogue state that the rest of the world is going to have to fuck over if anybody wants to have anything return to "Normal" pretty much ever? (Including us, by the way.)

There are reasons I say this shit is Antichrist and too much of America's "Christianity" is completely Christ-less.

It's in fact, effectively a form of Anti-Christianity.

Now, let me tell you why;

I saw this yesterday, somebody with Measles went to the Ark Encounter (a stupid bullshit Creationist museum in Kentucky) and may have infected a whole bunch of people there.

I think the links between conspiracy theory bullshit, rabid religiosity, total selfishness and utter narcissism don't really need a whole hell of a lot of explanation. Nor should the link between faith-healing Pentecostalism and Antivaxxer bullshit.

Or at least, I hope they don't.

When you start off with the premise that you, personally, have some kind of one-on-one individual relationship with Jesus Christ because Something Something Gazpacho, that can fuel a whole hell of a lot of narcissistic shit by itself.

And I've seen that boil down to "Who gives a fuck about other people?!"

Anyway, I recently found out from my Mom that an Evangelical Christian ex-girlfriend of mine (The lady I dated for a few years before I got involved with my current partner the first time) has cancer.

That sucks for her and I'm trying to be charitable as best I can but a couple things she said when I texted her to express my sympathies made me blow my top and because reasons, I'm probably not going to keep talking to her.

Like, she apparently saw from Facebook that I had a girlfriend, but (because my Partner doesn't have the same last name anymore) she didn't make the connection, or simply didn't care enough to (I suspect it's more the latter, to be honest.)

So anyway I got a churchy lecture about my partner's bisexuality like it's 2004 or some shit, which later on included her wondering if I was that way, and I had to point out no, I'm still painfully straight. And my partner is a Christian. So am I in a more agnostic sort of way. I support LGBT rights, Human rights etc. She knew this about me and often agreed with me back then, supposedly.

And not everybody has to live by or obey your Fundamentalist interpretation of the Word and there's lots of LGBT Christians. More, this is America. Nobody has to listen to this crap.

I should add this lady wasn't like this 20 years ago when K and the guys would come over to the house for D&D (of course she wasn't particularly a fan of me playing D&D either but IDGAF.)

She and my now-partner did not like each other, I suspect she saw K as a threat. K just thought she was a religious bitch. Although in our sporadic interactions after she moved to Indiana and over the next few years, my ex-girlfriend wasn't surprised K and I got together or that we broke up or got back together again after that.

This lady is one of the three people who Emailed me the Obama "Birther" conspiracy theory crap in the same evening back in 2007, as I believe I recently discussed.

So please consider that as I think it was a tell. This is not somebody that is necessarily a good person.

And one thing I will point out is this lady and her parents couldn't quite understand why we were having so much trouble in Iraq in 2004-2005. It's kind of-less narcissism than buying into American Exceptionalism BS.

But in the end, and especially for people in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or Venezuela, what's the damn difference.

People like this are so convinced of their own "Rightness" that they either don't understand why people resist them or their politics, or they think it MUST be The Devil making them do it.

Or, and just as often, they simply don't want to know anything different.

Narcissism is a Biblical-level plague on America right now because a hell of a lot of our nation's government-created Identity is, honestly, narcissistic as fuck.

And then these motherfuckers wonder why what they think is the Conquering Christ of Revelation always turns out to be the blood-soaked demonic Red Horse of Revelation and then we all get fucked.

And we will because the rest of the world doesn't have to put up with this shit.

You have eyes to see; Open them.

You either believe in freedom or you don't, America.

Слава Україна!

Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from Planescape Torment

Eight

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984. 

Hellscape (Day Of The Lord, Seven.)

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.

...

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."

...

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

I saw this in the thread about the no people DHS post that I wrote about this morning.

And like I say every time this dog-breeder bullshit comes up, fuck you, you will take my Mom's or my Partner's franchise away or force any woman to have some white Chud's babies over my dead body, our ancestors decided this over 100 years ago and this has been a conservative point of view.

And I say that as a veteran, specifically. plenty of the officers I had were women.

Conservatism means "Things as they are."

And like I keep saying, that's not the world These Fucking People wanna live in.

I went to Christian schools and was actually educated in a lot of this stuff, that's not what these fucking people want either.

Conservatism is not what these idiots want.

And it sure It does not mean "As some creepy far-right White misogynist racist fabulist believes they should be."

Likewise for most of my life, Russia was either considered our enemy or at best an unfriendly competitor (and honestly for most of the time, a Third-World soup sandwich barely worth thinking about except for their nuclear arsenal.) So I really don't understand why Republicans went all in on supporting Putin's Russia.

Except of course they all wanna be Vladimir Putin and at the head of some bullshit totalitarian neo-Communist regime that's been misbranded as "Conservative" because it hates Gay people and anybody outside of the dominant ethnicity. 

Yes, if These Fucking People get their way, most White people and certainly anybody who has to work for a living or who doesn't have inherited billions will be just a lighter shade of expendable N****r to the people really pulling the strings, like Elon Musk, too. 

Sorry to be that way, but it's the fucking truth.

There's a reason their latest flagship poster don't have no people in it.

There's a reason these monsters are just fine with the Red Army's idea of a strategy being "Just throw waves of meat at the Ukrainians like it's a damned Zombie Apocalypse."

This current brand of "Conservatism" is anti-Human.

It's not just profits over people, it's that they think money should get a vote and people shouldn't.

It's not just beliefs, ideas, or religion over human dignity, life and rights, it's that these nut-bags, out of mental illness or rabid self-hatred, actually desire the Apocalypse.

Not because they really want to be judged or meet God, but because they're basically so debased that, in effect, total self-destruction is the one thing they haven't, er, done before. And yeah, think of that in a sexual sense, more or less.

Cuz these dudes are that gross.

And not just that, but they're getting worse.

Like happens in a lot of backward supposedly-patriarchal places like Russia or the Taliban's Afghanistan it's not just that they want to sexually abuse women and force them to have kids...they want to sexually assault boys and other men, too.

Why do you think they're really doing their damnedest to try and hide or drag ass on releasing the Epstein files??

Why you think these bitches crash Grindr every chance they get??

It's not about sex, it's not even technically about ethnicity or race, it's about Power. And it's about exercising that "Power" as transgressively as possible, even to the point of mocking the Lord.

In fact, I'd argue, especially to that point.

And it's less about trying to redefine shit from the past like Norman Rockwell or famously-progressive Republican president Teddy Roosevelt in some way that benefits their "cause" than it's about them making themselves the "gods" or some post-Apocalyptic HELLSCAPE where the dominant "faith" is dancing around a fire and shouting "Unga Bunga" (and actual religions like Christianity or Islam or Judaism only exist in the pockets of Civilization that have survived) when they aren't dodging the resource-collection robots or the Terminators left behind by long-dead billionaires and Corporations now remembered only from faded logos and serial numbers on the oldest Machines.

As long as the profits are only going to some 900-year-old brain-broken demented Quadrillionaire who cannot survive outside of their Torment Nexus of "Life Support" equipment that's the only thing keeping them alive, some Republican that broke out of a Stasis pod like the guy in Idiocracy into this world would just shrug and have no problem with it all.

At least, they won't have a problem with it once they've found themselves a gun and got back into the swing of screwing over other people for profit.

And that is what truly is These Fucking People's idea of "Eternal Life."

Stop and think about that for a second.

Like I said the Republican idea of the Future is the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Kampuchea but with a mall.

Only difference is they want to make it so there's not enough left over for Cambodia to rebuild itself into anything after the rest of the world steps up and drives the remnants of the Khmer Rouge into the deepest darkest jungles and brings their leaders up on war crimes charges and puts them on trial.

Except they want that to be America and any other country they can get ahold of, too. 

And they seem to be particularly targeting rich, white countries for this bullshit. They wanna colonize the White People now.

A hell of a lot of White "Conservatives" seem just fine with that, so long as they get to be the local Imperial lackeys.

So yeah, stop and think about that shit, too.

And all these weird little narcissistic fascists are just hella mad that anyone, anywhere, would tell them "No."

This is going to come down to a fight.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. 

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke. 

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; 

I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

Six

[Cassian plays Nemik's audio diary]

Karis Nemik: There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try. ~From the Star Wars series Andor, S1.E12 "Rix Road."

Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

That strengthens the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skillful of lamentation to wailing.

And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord.

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.

Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.

But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?

But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. ~Amos 5:7-26

Goddamn It, White People (Day Of The Lord, Six.)

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.

...

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984. 

...

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

I remember it was a bright, sunny morning, although not very warm yet, and almost shockingly quiet when I got in the car to go to town. There was hardly any traffic noise from the busy highway about a quarter-mile from my house...a crappy 1970's-vintage mobile home that I owned jointly with my Black roommate...who'd taken the State's shutdown order of a couple days previously as a good reason to go visit his ailing mother who lived about an hour away. He'd left the previous day.

I had done a round of shopping on the day we shut down at work but, naturally, I'd forgotten a few things. Ferrets need treats and stuff like that, I wasn't sure I'd bought enough toilet paper...and goddamn was that ever hard to come by.

I ran my errands and got my stuff, noting that there was hardly anybody out and about and Walmart was locked down like they were expecting the Zombies were coming. 

I'd had to wait to get in the store.

I went to the pet store and got the stuff I'd forgotten there, and drove through Rally's because they were open although the workers were gloved and masking.

It was...stunningly quiet...almost everywhere.

I decided to pull up by work, and see how well I could pirate off the Wi-Fi, I parked in front of the head shop next to the gas station and sat there for an hour, dicking around on Facebook and Twitter and eating my lunch. The freaking wireless signal was amazing with nobody using it, I'm serious.

It was incredibly quiet.

You could hear the wind whipping across empty parking lots.

I'll never forget that sound.

Shit, it really did feel like the Zombie Apocalypse.

And it felt profoundly creepy and sad.

...

The date was March 25th of 2020, the location, the Soaring Eagle Casino, Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Nation, Mount Pleasant, Michigan. USA. 

And that was at the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic although our local wave (eventually the worst in the country) hadn't even started, much less crested.

I knew one person who'd already died.

Hell I was all for doing what needed to be done and I thought Whitmer went a bit overboard with the precautions.

But, all things considered, Big Gretch was not wrong.

COVID-19 eventually killed around ONE MILLION Americans, many of them conservative, White and/or elderly. I personally only knew a few people who died.

It was still horrific to me, as would be people's conspiracy theories and idiotic reactions after the first week or so when self-defense did not get instant gratification.

Think about that for a second.

And These Fucking People want to drive out, exile, and/or (let's not kid ourselves here) Kill 100 MILLION American people??

Losing ONE million almost broke us. You take out 100 million, you literally don't have a civilization or a country anymore.

I suppose it's either not an accident or These Fucking People are just that stupid that the poster they put up looks like the artwork for Horizon Zero Dawn and features no humans whatever.

'Cause that's where this shit ends up.

Mass death and mass removal (especially of people who do vital but unseen and "low class" work) have economies of misery and death all their own once it gets big enough.

And that's before you factor in that people will fight back, things will not go as planned, the country would fragment under the pressures of even 1% of this fucking bullshit and there's no way they have the logistical capability or numbers to pull it off.

It's not that they don't care...they're counting on that.

Their calculus is that failure will kill even more people, including those they are forced by custom, etc. to call their own...but don't really want.

Goddamn it, White People.

Yes, Poor "Conservative" White people, that means you too.

This crap doesn't make America more "Christian" or "Civilized" it wrecks America and the civilization you need to have things like religion.

It turns your local majority faith into "People who believe in shouting 'Unga Bunga' while dancing around a fire, and who make offerings to the spirits to try to recharge long-dead iPhones" because they don't know how anything works anymore, and they believed in magic and Unga Bunga shit even before Civilization fell.

Turn your fucking brains back on!

You either believe in freedom, and in your own right to have a life, or you don't.

And you're either willing to fight for it or you're not.

So get after it.

Слава Україна!

[Mon Mothma addresses the Senate chambers again]

Mon Mothma: Fellow Senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries, I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart. I've spent my life in this chamber. I came here as a child, and as I look around me now, I realize I have almost no memories that predate my arrival, and few bonds of affection that cleave so tightly. Through these many years, I believe I have served my constituents honorably and upheld our code of conduct. This chamber is a cauldron of opinions, and we've certainly all had our patience and tempers tested in pursuit of our ideals. Disagree as we might, I am hopeful that those of you who know me will vouch for my credibility in the days to come.

I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil! When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber's hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza! What took place yesterday, what happened yesterday on Ghorman, was unprovoked genocide! Yes, genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this Chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine!

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S2.E9 "Welcome To The Rebellion."

Five

Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,

Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is his name:

That strengthens the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.

Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right.

Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time.

Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skillful of lamentation to wailing.

And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord.

Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.

Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.

Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts.

Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols.

But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?

But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. ~Amos 5:7-26