"No." (On Bigotry, Conservatism and Stupid Shit, Three.)

And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. ~Matthew 23:9

...

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."

I saw this yesterday.

Charlie Kirk posted a picture of Trump with the caption "Dad is home."

No.

Now, I want to be clear, here, and I want this on the record; If I'd have ever said anything like that while my Dad was still alive, I wouldn't have said anything else that day. I probably would not have been able to comfortably sit down for about a week, either. I'd have gotten a spanking, probably a pretty bad one. It wouldn't even have been a question. And yes, I'd have deserved it.

Had I said anything of the sort around either of my grandfathers? I'd have got my ass whupped and there would have been no question of that, given that I got it for less.

Family is family, for good or ill. Honor thy Father and thy Mother. I was not taught that these were idle words, but commandments of God. I was also taught that you don't disrespect family, least of all for a piece of human garbage like Donald Trump.

My family had standards, I was required to have them as well. My Grandpa drilled it into my head that "Some things are not done in the better places." This brooked no argument.

I don't know much about Charlie Kirk's family, based on what I've seen of him and who he associates with, I don't want to. They probably failed at parenting him, but I'm fairly sure he has a father and a mother and his father is not Donald Trump.

Like I don't care what kind of Daddy-issues you have or think you have, that shit is...like so much of the crap that goes with MAGA...Disrespectful, Unmanly, and Unseemly.

Is having a leader who acts like a braying racist jackass really that important to you, that you disrespect your own parents?? Your parents should, at least theoretically, still care about you. Trump never has and never will. Dude is a narcissist, he's incapable of giving a fuck about anybody but himself, and that only in the ego and atavistic self-preservation categories. 

Look at Trump, the man clearly has no self-respect!

I get that these shameless fucks were not taught properly, and that's clearly to their misfortune. But come on, dude, when is enough of this shit going to be enough??

And yeah, I'm warning you that the rest of the world has had about enough of this bullshit. I think we're going to find that we've Idiocracied ourselves out of Superpower status, nobody trusts us anymore. And we haven't even formally started alienating our allies yet.

And I'm also going to warn you that this loss of international status and the corresponding blow to the ego of the American Idiot in particular is going to do as much to break us as anything Trump does or anything any of the various kinds of fanatics he's riled up will do.

And yeah, this is all on the American Idiot, and the twenty million or so alleged Democrats who, knowing what the stakes were, didn't bother to vote.

Because I guarantee you, people from other countries will ask you who you voted for at some point. Yeah, a lot of people in a lot of other countries already regard Americans as parochial, self-absorbed idiots and that characterization is not entirely undeserved or unfair, and I say that based on my own interactions with one hell of a lot of "Conservative" Americans who are somehow proud of being basic back-country hicks who've never been more than 100 miles from where they were born.

Also, it wasn't always that way, at least not when I was coming up. This kind of worldview was marketed, including by a hell of a lot of absolutely fake rednecks like the Duck Dynasty crew and Sarah Palin. 

I'm old enough to remember when even all the little redneck kids listened to MC Hammer and dressed like wannabe rappers and when even here in Northern Michigan, our cultural inspirations were mostly urban and nobody but absolute hicks and religious nuts (and most of the conspiracy theorists and holy rollers fell into those two groups) would've considered anything different, and they were pariahs anyway. I can remember when the expectation even around here was that if you wanted a job that didn't involve cutting down trees or shoveling shit, you took the chewing tobacco out of your mouth, stopped thumping the Bible and ditched the scumbag redneck look to dress like a normal person. And this was regarded as a *Conservative* point of view.

The crank, the John-Bircher, the pervert and the village idiot were not people to be indulged.

I'm old enough to remember when being aware of the world was kind of expected, and when it was looked down upon to be the kind of person who didn't go anywhere or do much of anything but just exist. Hell, my Mom had a business doing craft shows all over the country, by the time I was seventeen I'd assisted her in driving damn near coast-to-coast. I had wanted to...and ultimately did when I was 19...enlist in the United States Air Force mostly to get the fuck out of northern Michigan for awhile.

In that vein I've been to places like Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. 

These fucking people who imagine themselves like little children playing contentedly at the feet of some father-figure Strongman are gonna find out, even without the USA having much more than a wannabe of that, nobody, not even the wannabe-Strongman's actual kids, ever gets to lead that kind of easy life in that sort of environment.

Trump's kids are adults, now, and look at how they conduct themselves.

Donald Trump is not in the business of making other people feel content or safe for any reason. That's simply not even what he does. Didn't we learn this bullshit the first time??

The first time, when COVID-19 hit us, Trump stirred up divisions and spouted rhetoric that damned near broke up the country and caused multiple blocks of states...Blue and Red alike being in the same blocs...to ally themselves against the Federal government to make sure that things like COVID tests and PPE were available for their citizens. Then there was the George Floyd crisis, and the list basically went on and on until we ran the fucker out.

This time will be worse, will be more divisive, and I think way too many people #1 have decided they're not going Back and #2 Even a lot of MAGA's are already like "Hey, I didn't vote for this."

And a hell of a lot of us who legit didn't vote for this crap at all are already pretty pissed off, and it hasn't even started yet.

And hey, MAGA, guess what??

However bad you think you have it, or however much you think you have to whine about now? Let me share a little bit of my life-understanding as a veteran.

Things can, and will, get worse.

You ain't even seen real problems yet.

And if you think Trump is going to actually fix anything, real or imagined? Well, like my Grandma used to say "You have another thing coming."

And when you do??

Well, you either believe in civilization or you don't.

You either believe in freedom or you don't, and freedom ain't free.

You fuckers insisted on electing idiots who talked of no half measures, and the second they got elected, they immediately started contradicting themselves.

Ain't nobody gonna be happy, least of all you.

Now you can either be mad about that and keep trying to burn everything down or you can find some constructive way to channel it. Hate ain't cutting it, bro, self-hate even less so. You ain't happy? You're the only one, at the end of the day, who can change that. Donald Trump sure ain't gonna do it for you.

And it's the middle of Winter, so if I was you I'd be thinking don't be a dumbass and burn down the house we all gotta live in.

Слава Україна!

See, in Em City, retribution gives way to redemption. Timmy boy believes he can save every one of us, from each other, from ourselves, from the system that dumped us in here. Only thing he don't get is, you gotta want to be saved. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series "Oz" (Season One.)

Two

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

Burning Like Fire (On Bigotry, Christianity And Stupid Shit, Two.)

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

...

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.


The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

~Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, Jonathan Edwards, 1741

I saw this crap when I got up this morning.

A bunch of Pentecostals, attempting to consecrate a hearing room in the Texas capitol to their nonsense, primitive version of "God."

This politicized Christian Nationalist/wannabe New Age crap isn't Christianity, it's acting out, it's fake Bunga Bunga woo woo bullshit. They are worshiping some kind of Ur Beast-Man type of shit made up of their own urges, not God.

Note; I won't say that about all of these people...just the political, public ones. There's plenty of decent Pentecostals who don't go around acting like they think they should rule the world and who try to use whatever abilities they think they have to make things better. Some of those people helped me. They know who they are, and so does their God.

But these nuts in Texas are not trying to make Texas a better place...except for themselves.

And they don't care about God or what He asks.

You ever notice these fucking people never want to Jesus it up about feeding the hungry, helping the poor of welcoming the stranger?? This kind of thing is, ever and always, loud, declarative, self-serving horseshit of the exact type that Jesus Himself despised. Don't take my word for it, look it up.

Although, to make it easy, I've quoted the relevant verses here many times myself. I'm not a born-again anything, it's what I read.

I mean, on a certain level (and I say this as a former Christian myself) I don't understand WHY convincing people that they had magical powers and some kind of a direct line to "god" and that whatever bigotry and made-up nonsense and dumb shit they thought up was therefore sacralized, didn't come off as a dangerous level of foolishness and narcissism the first time.

Religion, or at least Christianity as I was taught it, or Buddhism or Islam as I've had them explained to me, is supposed to call people to something higher, not ratify their existing selfishness and shitty behavior.

Seriously, God does not care if you get the good parking space or not. nor does He have anything to do with that, nor does He require your thanks like you think there's an open line and Jesus is just sitting there on the other end listening to you say random shit. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not a narcissist or the Big Fascist In The Sky who needs their ego to be constantly fluffed. You're thinking of people, of men specifically, like Donald Trump or Greg Abbott.

Like where does it stop??

I left Christianity in 2007 and conservatism in 2008 and a big part of why I did that was because all the magical woo woo stuff, fanaticism for its own sake, and political shit was becoming the point, or at least where the money was, and thus becoming the dominant strain of American Protestant Christianity, and I could see both collapse and the fall into even more ridiculousness coming even way back then.

Money and politics and what the mob wants to hear are not the point of religion and should not be its fucking focus. If you're telling people what they want to hear or letting them act like beasts, you're not preparing them for any of the shit that's going on in this world, right now, much less the next life, and you're not fulfilling any sort of spiritual calling. You're just another disgraceful jackoff grifter of the same sort that's loudly and publicly running America into the ground.

Yeah, I get it, that's where a lot of the mob wants to go because they're bored, debased and stupid. These are the people who thought them being able to go to the store during COVID-19 was more important than your health. I get that people have simply reached a self-destructive level of boredom and stupidity and a lot of them are so well-fed and far from even the idea of the basics of life, survival instinct, or anything other than material computation as the destiny of Man that they *Can't* believe in anything or be mentally un-fucked. 

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. That's what leadership is, leading the people not just serving some bullshit avatar of idiot-consciousness. You get what you tolerate.

In the end if this crap is not stopped, or at least if people aren't made to understand that GOD is not their Political Party nor some great ratifier of Whatever They Already Wanted To Do Anyway, you end up with people who'd worship demons and golden idols if that'd fluff their narcissism.

Before this is over, these motherfuckers will preach from their pulpits that stuff like Elon Musk's Neuralink is "Not the Mark Of The Beast when we do it" and that one must swear allegiance to the goddamned billionaires and the false world-system people like Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin want to create. Yes, it will come to that, but only after killing and misery.

These assholes want the End Times so bad they're turning into the Beast of Revelations themselves. They know how it ends, they don't care. Inflicting suffering on the undeserving in the here and now is more important to them.

And whatever Jesus might have to say about that or whatever it might do to the kind of people who'd actually follow Him...regardless of what those people may be...be damned. The privileged could give a shit.

His Wrath toward them will burn like fire, and they don't care.

Think about that, for a second.

Of course, that's why these fucking people much prefer to worship a Dead Savior On A Stick rather than a Living Christ who might judge the Sheep and the Goats or require things of them without being an endless font of bullshit "Forgiveness." They can start by understanding that Jesus wasn't White, didn't speak English and didn't live high off the hog. The Bible is actually pretty clear about most of this stuff.

There's a reason they don't read it, and that they prefer to listen to made-up bullshit. The Truth isn't what these fucking people want. I'm serious about that. No, they don't care if they go to hell.

Nobody acts more like Christianity and all that stuff is all crap, and they know it, than the Christian Nationalists and Prosperity Gospel Liars do. They want to spew enough bullshit to make you fear the bullshitters.

Don't.

I say that as somebody who's been through all this crap already.

And of course, it will come down to these fucking people trying to kill other people for this horseshit because somehow every time, to a person who doesn't really believe in anything, the power to take life becomes the greatest thing there is.

And it's going to come down to a fight, literally, if we want to make this stop.

You didn't want to be a better citizen.

So now it comes down to "You either believe in freedom or you don't."

Freedom ain't free, sometimes you have to fight for it.

And you won't have time to be bored.

Слава Україна!

And he spoke this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:

Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.

The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.

I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalts himself shall be abased; and he that humbles himself shall be exalted.

~Luke 18:9-14

Two

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.

Shitty Man (On Bigotry, Libertarianism And Stupid Shit, One.)

 The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

~Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God, Jonathan Edwards, 1741

I saw this the other day.

Also, before I go on, there's a point I'd like to stress here, my pull-quote, the infamous sermon "Sinners in the hands of an Angry God" was not directed at "Unbelievers" but at the Reverend's own congregation.

At Christians, likely the upper-crust of their time, as well (because historians tend not to write as much about regular people.)

Chris Rufo is allegedly a Christian...or at least, a Creationist.

Now I'm not a born-again anything anymore but I seem to recall that Jesus preached that those who are disabled, poor, sick and in various ways less fortunate than yourself should be helped, not hindered. I fail to see how cutting off deaf people from proper communication helps anybody.

Also for the record the Americans With Disabilities Act was signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush, thanks largely to the tireless advocacy of Republican Senator Bob Dole.

Now, mind you, I have Tinnitus...mostly thanks to a youth filled with loud truck engines, loud music, and shooting guns...including that I spent a few years in the Air Force, most of that time being spent around large, particularly loud aircraft like BUFF's (B-52 Stratofortresses) and KC-135 Stratotankers and in my specific AFSC (Security Specialist) doing a lot of light infantry stuff, which can get pretty loud. I'm also 51 years old, and my hearing ain't as sharp as it used to be...enough so that various people commented on it over the holidays. I use the shit out of Closed Captioning. I know a little ASL but not really enough to get by (See below.)

Lots of people in the veteran community have hearing issues, including some of my friends. I had a girlfriend for years whose adopted sister was both mentally disabled and severely hearing-impaired (although not completely deaf) and whose father had been disabled by a stroke and who was old and used hearing aids himself. Sign Language was used in that house, as was closed-captioning. 

But anybody can become disabled, or just get old. So yeah, fuck these motherfuckers. 

And don't be fooled, shitty little eugenicists like that basically just wanna kill people, and they see the disabled as a convenient target. 

No, they don't really care how people got that way. Having someone to abuse and discriminate against is more important than taking the time to note if somebody earned some right to compassion by service to their country or simply deserves it for being a human being. 

These fucking people's sole credo is "They Don't Like Other People" and that includes most of their own people. So, think about how they'd treat anybody they label as "Other" and stop giving these motherfuckers power. 

Yes, eventually they'll find a way to target you.

These fucking people don't give a shit about America, and it's obvious enough that even Steve Bannon (of all fucking people) called out Elon Musk the other day.

Also, I gather from social media that Pete Hegseth is exactly as much of a soup sandwich as pretty much everybody that was aware of, well, anything, predicted he would be. I'm sorry, but on top of having served in the Air Force, I also worked in food service for 25 years and I don't think anybody who's disgusting and inconsiderate enough to not wash their hands should even be allowed to go out in public. This motherfucker was an Army officer, you'd think he'd know how fast something like conjunctivitis or even the goddamned flu can spread around a barracks...let alone if somebody who's contagious is on an aircraft or a ship. 

More to the point, you're either a professional with standards or you're not. If you're not washing your hands...what else are you not doing?? How can you defend the goddamn country if you won't do basic health and welfare type of shit that's expected of any grunt completing their first full day of Basic Military Training?? What kind of Shitty Man refuses to clean himself??

And don't even get me started about lack of respect for things like the Geneva Convention. You want the world to cut us off and America to become a genuine failed state because we don't make our own toilet paper and other basic shit anymore (nor seem to want anybody around that's from somewhere else and still knows all that) yeah, go that way.

Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with people??

Oh, right.

Pretty much everybody (including not a few alleged "liberals") even after all this time is still trying to use all this Trump horseshit to fulfill petty agendas or make money.

They don't give a good goddamn if Trump's divisiveness and gang of morons divides and wrecks America (thus meaning a lot of that money is worthless, the petty agendas were for shit, and we're all worse off.)

It's all about attention and hedonism, relative status and wealth...right now.

These idiots don't give a damn if it all evaporates seven days from now because 30 years of endless infotainment bullshit and over a decade of Social Media has reduced everybody's brain to mush, and the latent Calvinism of America pretty much means as long as somebody else has even less of nothing than they do, they'll find a way to be happy with it.

Maybe we goddamned well need to have things get so we're all too busy surviving to worry about attention economies, relative status and stupid shit?? If things go the way I think they will and the combination of Trump's divisiveness and the fact that nothing he can do will be enough for some of these goddamn fanatics breaks America (and don't forget, the rest of the world gets a say in what goes on, too) it'll get pretty close to that level.

Unless a lot of people who haven't been willing to learn anything thus far start doing so, that alone will kill people. Our insistence that freedom is just taken for granted and luxury goods are freedom isn't going to work if these goons succeed in breaking America and we all have to start living like the rest of the world does.

Sociopathy doesn't work out very well (for you) when things go sideways and you need other people to fucking survive.

I say that as somebody who lives in Michigan, a place that'll be more like Latvia, in a Fall of the Soviet Union type scenario, and we'll network like we did during COVID-19, likely ending up the core of a Great Lakes Republic. Places like Texas on the other hand will basically be Uzbekistan for White People, with more dystopia and a non-zero chance of ending up with Elon Musk as their first president as a former-US republic, besides that. 

Think about that for a second.

Civilization, freedom, military service, society, the workplace, all these things have rules and require things from people and all that exists for the benefit of you and your team. If it restrains your baser impulses, well, that's the cost.

The right-wing insistence on unfettered individual rights...which ends up only being for the few, in any case...exists solely to beat down the rights of the majority and of society as a whole, with the aim of breaking civilization to benefit a very small number of bad actors.

Which, by the way, is the entire point of Libertarianism. It's not Liberty for you. It helps if, when you hear these idiots say the Rapture is coming...you mentally substitute the Bioshock version.

Because that's how they think they want to live and they think we're the ones who are gonna suffer?

And we're six days from being halfway there, again.

Either you believe in freedom or you don't.

And if we don't all have it, then none of us have it.

 Слава Україна!

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

Last Post

I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck. ~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

Generation Of Vipers (Nation Of The Self, Five.)

Then spoke Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples,

Saying The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat:

All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.

For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,

And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren.

And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven.

Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ.

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.

And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!

Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifies the gold?

And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever swears by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.

Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifies the gift?

Who so therefore shall swear by the altar, swears by it, and by all things there on.

And whoso shall swear by the temple, swears by it, and by him that dwelleth therein.

And he that shall swear by heaven, swear by the throne of God, and by him that sits there-on.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.

Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchers of the righteous,

And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.

Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.

Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.

Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?

~Matthew 24:1-33

...

If you're not willing to fight for it, take the word 'Freedom' out of your vocabulary. ~Malcolm X.

I'm tired of this shit.

The Republican legislature in Idaho is trying to get the Supreme Court to rule against gay marriage.

I have to ask, what for? What the hell business of it is theirs if gay people get married??

I'm tired of this fucking bullshit where "Conservatives" and "Fundamentalist" Christians think they have some kind of a right to make other people live by their beliefs.

First off, No. 

Second, not only does nobody outside of your belief system give a shit what you think, half the people in it could give a damn, either. Either way people have a right to live without you sticking your nose in their business all the damn time.

People need to shut the fuck up and mind their own goddamned business, when I was a kid, if I was worrying too much about what somebody else was doing, my Grandma or my Mom would about slap my lips off my face, or later on give me something to do that they knew I didn't like doing. Yeah, I was raised Christian and conservative...but I was also raised with the idea (and it was enforced) that other people are Other People and it's not my business what they do, so long as they're not hurting anybody else.

The United States of America is a constitutionally secular democratic republic, and not only that, but these fucking people just elected Donald Trump, an atheistic/agnostic literal criminal who clearly could give a shit about God or the Bible on a good day.

More to the point if you are a Christian or any other religion, your teachings affect you, not me. You're Saved or Not Saved by how or if you live according to the Lord's Word, not by what you make other people do. This bullshit isn't Christianity, it's Narcissism.

Like, I don't give a fuck. This is America.

Your church has no goddamn business dictating to anybody who doesn't go to it or doesn't want to, or to you when you're not in the damned building. People are, by design, supposed to be able to control themselves and govern their own lives and tempers and make their own choices.

I'd have said the same thing as a Republican 30 years ago.

And your employer sure as all hell has no business dictating to you outside of work or "Morally" or for any other reason "opposing" what you do on your own time...because it's yours. Like none, zero. I don't even understand how the shit anybody would think such was appropriate, let alone somebody who just owns shit and doesn't even have to work for a living.. Just because I work there doesn't mean you own me. Slavery is not only illegal but unconstitutional, we literally had a Civil War over this, and the slavers lost.

You wanna tell me what to do?? Pay me. 

If I'm not at work and not on the clock, fuck off.

We're not "Human resources." We have Human Rights.

And those rights aren't just given by the State or even the international community, but by the gods, the Universe, whatever. You exist. You are a Person. You do not have to put up with this shit.

This is, among other things, why I only ever worked one management position, because even in a community college where almost everybody that's a full-time employee and *Not* in a supervisory position is in a union, they tried to save money by making the salaried people work more. Fuck that.

This isn't hard.

"No" is a word Americans need to learn to use again, and we need to teach it to "Conservatives" and the religious and the wealthy as well (and all too often, to our own political parties and government agencies, also) the hard way, if it comes to that. There aren't any laws that actually give you the Power or relative status that you think you have, and it is only by the sufferance of the People that you have anything at all...including your money. 

We don't have to give you money or vote for you nor tolerate you fuckers trying to burn down civilization so that you can reduce a free people to Serfdom.

No, fuck you.

In fact, it's the freedom and prosperity of this country that made your asses powerful and/or rich in the first place. You don't get to stand athwart History yelling "Stop" or pull up the ladder behind you simply because the world is changing, the world changes all the time. It always has. You don't get takebacks just because you don't like what people do with their freedom or who they do it with.

If you did, that wouldn't be freedom. It's just that simple.

You either believe in freedom or you don't, no half measures.

And be aware, there's plenty of us who'll fight for that freedom. I didn't give my oath to Christianity or "Conservatism" or somebody's relative status, let alone to the "White Race."

I gave my word to America and the Constitution, and that Constitution has banned Slavery since 1865. Like I said, we had a war over this.

A war that I've spent my life studying, I've written about this! I did that for a reason.

And I served this country for everyone's freedom. I served with Black folks, Jews, Latinos, Muslims, Native Americans, plenty of other groups, women, even a few LGBT people at the time and none of that stuff mattered because we were all there for the same purpose and we bled red and wore green and nothing else even fucking mattered.

Keep it up, assholes, and this generation of vipers in this Nation of the Self is gonna fuck around and find out.

Freedom isn't free, people. Sometimes, you have to fight for it.

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

 Слава Україна!

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

Four

[speaking to Jack over the radio in Arcadia] On the surface, I once bought a forest. The Parasites claimed that the land belonged to God, and demanded that I establish a public park there. Why? So the rabble could stand slack-jawed under the canopy and pretend that it was paradise earned. When Congress moved to nationalize my forest, I burnt it to the ground. God did not plant the seeds of this Arcadia; I did. [Arcadia fills with poisoned gas.]

. ~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

Rapture (Nation Of The Self, Four.)

I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.

~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

...

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 traded You, oh Lord, for Mammon, and what did it get me, huh?! ~Splicer, Bioshock

I used the term "Empire of Stupid" yesterday.

Not long after that, I saw this.

Apparently, this whole dipshit Greenland thing comes back to Libertarians wanting it for another dumbass bullshit attempt at a Libertarian proto-State, but with this one somehow Something Something Gazpacho backed by US firepower and taxpayer money. So in their minds...Libertarians get somebody else to buy and build them a nation (and foot the bill) but wait, there's more! Who gets to pay for the cleanup, negotiate the return of the territory to Denmark and the US paying reparations out the ass for however long when the bubble invariably pops, everybody finally figures out that the place is inhospitable and that most of the resources there are mostly inaccessible and covered by an ice sheet and it all falls apart??

Oh, that's right, We do, the US taxpayers.

While the Libertarians get whatever they get, and naturally all manage to skate and hole up in non-extradition countries before the bill comes due.

On the other hand, are there Bears in Greenland?? Because it seems to me that the last time it came down to Libertarians vs. Bears, the Bears win. Awhile back these idiots tried to take over a small New Hampshire town named Grafton, but somehow none of them wanted to pay for trash pickup (because they're all inherently lazy, selfish assholes with delusions of grandeur) so they just threw their garbage out wherever or put it in non-Bear-proof containers and the place got overrun by Bears. The "Project" started in 2004 and ended in 2016 after they'd basically ran the place into the ground.

But let's look at this another way, for a second.

Consider for a moment, a bunch of Libertarians living in a can in a hostile environment with no survival skills, eating MRE's and playing Cryptocurrency bullshit games all day, and somebody else is footing the bill?? Throw in some Christian Nationalism, narcissism, racism and ridiculous self-important assholery just for the hell of it. This is going to end badly if they ever get to try it...pretty much anywhere, like, at all.

More to the point, I think I've played that video game before.

 This sounds suspiciously like a land-based version of the plot of the first couple of Bioshock games.

For those who don't know the plot of the Bioshock games is basically, some wealthy uber-Libertarian asshole creates an undersea city called (wait for it) Rapture, it's inhabited by Libertarians. They promptly discover a mutating substance they call ADAM that gives people super-powers and then all go insane and most of them turn into violent mutants called Splicers (for splicing the superpowers into their own genetic codes) and kill each other. 

Your job as the player is, more or less, to figure out what happened, survive and clean up the mess as much as possible. The first two games in the series are heavily based off the writings of Ayn Rand. Along the way, you figure out that your character was created to be some kind of appendage of the guy who built the place, and his demented dreams of becoming a world power unto Himself.

Sound familiar??

Cuz that's exactly what Elon Musk is trying to do now.

By the way this game came out in like 2007. (Also, seriously, kids, don't play Bioshock in the dark.)

Meanwhile, in the real world here in 2025 we keep handing these drug-addled fascists who are high on the smell of their own farts the keys and hoping they don't crash the country with their bigoted ideology that if only the people they "approve" of got to do anything, they'd all be some kind of fascist Supermen or some shit. 

So yeah, I could easily see these chucklefucks letting any jobs where you need people (like armed forces, civil government, firefighters or police) go unfilled because they demand the Perfect Human to fill them...and then trying to fill the jobs with AI and robots (that they don't pay and treat badly because they have to discriminate against somebody) because nobody equals their narcissism and pious belief in their own superiority and hoping they don't end up with some kind of Battlestar Galactica, Robocop or Terminator scenario. (Oh, wait, these idiots don't read, or watch science fiction!)

Worse, they think they have some kind of Divine Right To Fuck Shit Up For Everyone.

And what they really think, as evidenced by Elon/Trump trying to threaten war or "Regime Change" (in favor of the furthest of the Far-Right) against Canada, Germany, Greenland, Mexico, the UK and who ever else they see as "Liberal" or unwilling to submit to their Diktats...is that anybody who doesn't submit or won't be bought is fit only to burn. They're telling on themselves with this talk against California and LA in particular.

America isn't gonna survive another go-round of this stupidity intact unless We, The People, stand up and check this horseshit. And the truth is, if we don't, if We fail like all the "Institutions" did, we probably deserve it...but at least the people in the Great Lakes Republic, the Mid-Atlantic Commonwealth, the Pacific Republic and a few others will have basic human rights and some level of the scraps of whatever they had before. God help you if you live in the South, or Texas, though. The Idiocracy Cometh and it'll be far more evil and intentionally malevolent than the one in that movie was, on purpose, cuz Elon and them think that shit is funny.

The world These Fucking People think their ideology of cruelty and selfish horseshit is going to get them is the glittering, gilded spires of Dubai, but the truth is they're far more likely to get the Bears, overflowing trash cans and ruined public services of Grafton, New Hampshire...or a Polar Bear, nosing about a giant trash heap, and a lot of dead people because they put shit like nicotine and steroids in the goddamn drinking water and tried to build something bigger that the Burj Khalifa but didn't make sure they had a solid foundation and cut all type of corners building it, so of course it would fall down.

And at the end of the day, their only "Product" is Cryptocurrency bullshit and other lies and scams.

When it all goes sideways?? When they're surrounded by ravening mutants that they created and their Land-Based Rapture burns?? Even though they're facing mounting lawsuits and various other legal threats back in Civilization? They will demand the rest of us rescue they ass! Then these dipshits will want to claim some kind of Princely status to protect themselves from the consequences.

You get what you tolerate, Earth.

We, as a species, need to stop putting up with this horseshit.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck. ~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

Three

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

Empire Of Stupid (Nation Of The Self, Three.)

Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong. Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O Lord. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. ~Joel 3:9-14

...

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

...

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds. ~Bob Marley

I saw this earlier today.

Jesse Watters wants to "Quench his Imperialist thirst" on Canada...forgetting that, unlike us, Canada is still a literal part of a literal empire (and a Constitutional Monarchy) with which we had this argument a couple of times. The second such occasion worked out rather badly, especially for the Washington DC elites. Also, we tried to go north in both of those wars and lost rather badly at it.

Somebody needs to explain to these fucking people how this shit usually works out. Just the fact that some of us are talking like this pisses off the rest of the world and sooner or later they're going to start taking us seriously, we're going to find others arrayed against us, and lose our spot and that sweet, sweet Superpower status and if it gets bad enough...we don't make all that much here, anymore, except higher-tech finished products. The rest of the world can just sit back and watch as America falls apart while a couple of these assholes sit there scratching their heads trying to figure out how we can manufacture enough coffee and toilet paper to fill our own needs.

Like, screw anything else, the basic level of American history failure with these fucking people pisses me right the hell off. 

In 1867 under Andrew Johnson (a Republican, mind you) Secretary of State William Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia. Lots of Americans were opposed to this, considering the land to be useless, and it was widely referred to as "Seward's Folly" or "Seward's Icebox." For the record, I first learned this in like, the 2nd Grade or so. It's basic knowledge according to how I was taught.

And it was conservatives who taught me to care about history in the first place. If you don't know your own past, you don't know who you are.

Like, go ahead, tell me...look at how this country at this point treats most of its own people (like basically if you ain't rich, fuck you) and disrespects its own history, values and even past leaders for scum like Donald Trump; You go ahead and tell me why anybody in this world would want to join that crap?? 

What value does being an American Citizen have when These Fucking People won't ever shut up about literally throwing American Citizens that they don't like out of America. I mean, you tell me, what's even the damned point??

I'll wait.

And note I say that as a veteran who served my country and as a former conservative who is appalled by what these fucking people have become. They don't want to live in America as it is. They want to live in some kind of virtual-reality AI simulation where they get to play hero and get their narcissism jerked off all day.

We are going to come flying apart under the weight of our own idiocy and literally irreconcilable differences between these Idiocracy-wannabes and the rest of us, the sheer unreasonableness of so many Republicans is literally breaking the back of America.

And that's what it's really about. Jesse Watters doesn't really want to invade Canada, not deep down. Most of these fucking people don't know shit about Canada. The rest of the world past pissing matches with their political rivals and petty grudges they hold against their own co-workers and neighbors isn't even real to them. 

What These Fucking People want is to go to war with the rest of America, they want to fight the "liberals" and "Republicans In Name Only" and basically anybody else who isn't a hard-Right troll. But if they actually said that, it'd end with people like Jesse Watters getting dragged from their comfortable perches and beat up and tarred and feathered because the truth is they see very, very few Americans (other than themselves, of course) as fit for anything other than colonization and literal slavery. By which I mean yes, they do want to enslave the White people. 

America is burning, literally on fire, and these fucking people are talking shit about invading Canada??

Who the hell wants to join that??

Who the fuck do you really think wants to watch four more years of the Daily Stupid and all these beauty show contestant reporters bullshitting back and forth with Trump and his gang about foolishness while the world burns?

No, bro, half of America doesn't want to be American (at least not as long as anybody else gets to live here) much less the rest of the world, and most people look at what we've become and they're disgusted and shocked. We ain't some kind of end-all, be-all just because you and your ego live here. I mean, fuck, 20 million of our alleged liberals couldn't be bothered to get off their ass, why would the rest of the world care?? 

Half of America is functionally illiterate, for fuck's sake! Like, if that's you, how the shit can you even hold a job??

We're dumbing ourselves down into oblivion and too many of us would rather be angry, or bigots or entertained than be free...especially if being free requires any kind of adult participation in life. 

And at the end of the day, I think a good percentage of this fucking foolishness is being thrown around simply to distract from the state funeral of Jimmy Carter, because GOD forbid anything take the attention off Trump and "Conservatives" especially if it's like having to show respect to other people.

Disgusted? You bet I am!

If these incompetents go ahead and start shit with the rest of the world, we're gonna lose, because not only have they turned America from a nation into 330 million grasping individuals, they are all similarly atomized and scheming among themselves. 

You have to give a shit if you actually want to win anything. You wanna be a country? You have to give a shit about other people. Christian nation? Hell, most of these sons of bitches would worship demons if it got them a higher percentage or made them feel a little more "special" and because all these Calvinist-Inflected wannabes are each trying to one-up the last guy on showing how they have a "Personal" relationship with Jesus or a special angle to being one of the "Elect."

And that ain't even what Jesus taught, like, at all.

We are spiraling out because all these dipshits all want to be the specialest of special snowflakes, and they think that's somehow what it takes to win a war??

I know from personal experience, being a troop doesn't work like that, you're part of a team.

Leave the "Elan" or "Guts" or other action movie bullshit to Hollywood. Real life is not like that. "Imperialist thirst?" I don't wanna hear that crap.

You want I should tell you how those kind of attitudes worked for the dudes in France who talked that kind of crap, twice?? Especially for the uber-Catholic conservatives?? The first time, only last minute good fortune in the Battle of the Marne saved them. The second? It literally took liberation by outside forces to save their ass.

I'm afraid to speculate how it'll go for America. What's it gonna take to liberate us from the Empire Of Stupidity??

We don't even want to liberate our own minds.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And this? This ain't it.

Слава Україна!

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

Two

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