Valery Legasov: What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: "Who is to blame?" In this story, it was Anatoly Dyatlov. He was the best choice. An arrogant, unpleasant man, he ran the room that night, he gave the orders... and no friends. Or at least, not important ones. And now Dyatlov will spend the next ten years in a prison labor camp. Of course, that sentence is doubly unfair. There were far greater criminals than him at work. And as for what Dyatlov did do, the man doesn't deserve prison. He deserves death.
[Legasov stops the tape, sips a glass of water, and then restarts the tape from where he left off.]
Legasov: But instead, ten years for "criminal mismanagement". What does that mean? No one knows. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that, to them, justice was done. Because, you see, to them, a just world is a sane world. There was nothing sane about Chernobyl. What happened there, what happened after, even the good we did, all of it... all of it, madness. Well, I've given you everything I know. They'll deny it, of course. They always do. I know you'll try your best.
~From the HBO Miniseries Chernobyl.
...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.
Dear Republicans,
I saw this last night.
There is no purpose to any of this, it's all complete bullshit. Trump shouldn't be running for President, he should be in a goddamn nursing home. The man literally needs a medical and mental health intervention and no one around him, no one in the Republican Party, none of his friends, and not least of all his own bullshit family, gives enough of a shit about him to say "No, dude, you need to sit down, you shouldn't be doing this."
Motherfucker has no idea what he's even talking about and yet our bullshit political system is allowing him to continue to run for President.
Why??
Let me tell you why.
Fundamentally, these motherfuckers are why.
And our political system, or at least the "Conservative" side of it, is full of these motherfuckers...hangers-on and shitty little losers and toadies who fucked it up and they're still blaming somebody else and mad about it even though they know, deep down, why they're not in whatever position they previously held.
For the record, if I'd done my job in the Air Force as badly as Flynn bungled his last command in the Army at DIA, I'd have been stripped of my certifications and professional qualifications and administratively separated (at worst) based on my failure to maintain and uphold standards, or simply denied reenlistment later on (at best) and no one would have cared. No one at all would be lining up to hear me talk about conspiracy theories and Jesus.
Dude was apparently always a nut, and given a position where he had to act in a professional manner, to a specific standard based on the goddamned facts he soup-sandwiched all of it.
Obama fired him for it and deservedly so.
And Trump's orbit, the Republican Party, what's left of conservatism itself, is chock-full of these fucking people. I mean fuck, the goddamn director of Project 2025 himself was fired from the Heritage Foundation for creating a hostile work environment, inappropriate behavior towards subordinates and sexual harassment.
I mean, while we're at it Trump is one of these goddamned narcissistic losers his own damn self!
And all of these motherfuckers see him as their Lord and Savior.
Oh yes, they do.
But, They see that, not because he's good for the country (or even them personally, they know how many before them Trump fired by Tweet, or how many of them walked out of the White House with a knife in the back.) or that he's some great man...but because they're riding him hard trying to get whatever bullshit they think they want out of him before the goddamned batteries run the fuck out!
And the batteries are damned near out.
Trump is disintegrating, which was probably the plan.
Or at least it became the plan once it was clear that the magic spell to turn Ron DeSantis from wooden puppet to real boy was a failure no matter how much he tried to fuck with Disney.
Because the tech-bro ghouls like Peter-puffer Theil want an unctuous bootlicker that they can control and Ted Cruz was unavailable to fill the position, but JD Vance was right there.
You think a dude like Elon Musk is just gonna leave money on the table??
But more to the point, do you think any of these assholes really care about you??
On the off-chance that Trump wins, well, they get JD after a brief period of sound and fury signifying nothing while they work to remove him. And at that point the only thing likely to save anybody is, well, JD's general lack of force of personality or any real leadership qualities whatever (Like how that fucker was a Marine just don't make any sense to me.)
But maybe they can work more gradually towards State Capture by the aged paragons of the 1990's Religious Right (You know, people who sucked so badly at their Jihad against LGBT people and social progress that damn near everything they were so loudly against 30 years ago is the Law of the land now.) That is, IF the Fundamentalists and all that shit don't get themselves politically buttfucked and burned at the stake by the Sedevacantist Catholics.
Which, by the way, the more you think about it, all this crap makes less than no sense given that these idiots claimed goal of dismantling the State was long ago totally accepted at face value by a voter base that's then gonna be mad as fuck that they *Checks Notes* Don't get to live in peace and blessedness with Donald Trump for all of eternity. And you cannot, I mean, simply cannot do Totalitarianism, be it religious or otherwise...without a very large goddamned administrative State.
So, as usual these fucking people are contradicting themselves.
The dude who 30 years ago was a walking, talking example of everything that was wrong with his buddy Bill Clinton's Democratic Party, who only switched parties or ran for President because he didn't like Barack Obama.
Does any of this make any sense to you? 'Cause it sure doesn't to me and I just had to write it all down.
But that's more or less what's become of the Republican Party.
Reagan. Wept.
And while the threat of Trump and all this other horseshit won't really even stop...much less go away...when he loses the election, at least we won't have to see Fidel Castro With Aphasia all over the goddamn media for awhile, at least not until Sentencing.
Yeah, again, go ahead and think about that one for a hot second, will ya??
Like, where's even the bottom with these Republican mooks?
Make it make sense.
I'm sorry, but I can't square that with what I was taught.
I can't square that with the values even of the `1990's Republican party, as fucked up as it was.
Unless, of course, all that shit was just a lie.
You go right ahead and think about that, Republicans.
But know that I'm apparently not the only current or former Republican that's pissed off about all that.
Republicans for Harris is a legit thing.
If I had to guess, three weeks from now you'll be wishing you'd thought about that before you did all the shit you did.
I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the fact that it's likely going to take a fight to get rid of these assholes.
And I'm tired of the fact that half of America is bored stupid and looks at what will likely be some horrible conflict as some big adventure that'll validate their dumb ass somehow.
I'm tired of Trump's bigotry, his bullshit, his lies, his motherfucking stupid face and his simpering, slavish man-crush on any random dictator that happens to wander by.
We should not, and we cannot keep, outsourcing fighting that particular fight to the Ukrainians.
We need to stop these assholes, and stop any Americans that want to bow down to that crap...including people like Donald Trump.
I'll remind you again, that Trump doesn't care about you, he's simply trying to arrange and unending narcissistic blowjob for himself, with a side bonus of staying out of prison.
That's simply the truth.
And if you don't like it??
Fuck you.
Signed, a former Republican voter.
That spell it out for ya??
Слава Україна!
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
Three
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
