Fallout (Left Behind Is A Lie VI, Ten.)

[After Burke is revealed as the one who set the facehuggers loose on Ripley and Newt]

Hudson: [aiming his rifle at Burke] I say we grease this rat fuck-son-of-a-bitch right now!

Hicks: It just doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Ripley: He figured he could get the alien past the quarantine if one of us was... impregnated - whatever you call it - and frozen for the way home. Nobody would know about the embryos we're carrying. Me and Newt.

Hicks: Wait a minute. We would all know.

Ripley: Yes, the only way he could do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home. Namely, yours. Then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he would like to.

Hudson: Fuck! He's dead! [aims his rifle at Burke again] You're dogmeat, pal!

Burke: This is so nuts. I mean listen... listen to what you're saying. It's all paranoid delusion. It's really sad. It's pathetic.

Ripley: You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over a goddamn percentage.

~From the film Aliens.

...

[Having ensured Finn and Poe got away with Chewie, General Hux shows up before Allegiant General Pryde walking on a cane and his leg wound]

General Hux: It was a coordinated incursion, Allegiant General. They overpowered the guards and forced me to take them to their ship.

Allegiant General Pryde: I see. [to female aide] Get me the Supreme Leader.

Aide: Yes, sir.

Pryde: [takes a stormtrooper's blaster, executes Hux, and gives the stormtrooper his weapon back; to aide] Tell him we found our spy.

~From Star Wars: Episode IX, The Rise Of Skywalker.

Like I said on Threads last night, I currently identify myself as an Agnostic Christian.

I have a church background, I got "Saved" in the classic Baptist sense of that term at five years old in 1978. We'd just moved back downstate after spending most of my five years in the Upper Peninsula and we'd started going to a Baptist church a few miles down the road, my Mom got me into the church school which was actually in sight of the trailer park we lived in.

I've been to every kind of church you can think of from High Church Episcopalian to dour and serious Baptist to Latinate Catholic to Howling-at-the-moon Pentecostal. I've worshiped with everybody from deployed Airmen to Nigerian immigrants. I once heard Marianne Williamson (Yes, That Marianne Williamson) preach a sermon at a church called The Church Of Today in Detroit.

After having more or less lapsed as a teenager I got "Saved" again as an adult, as a Senior Airman serving in the 410th Bomb Wing at KI Sawyer AFB, MI. 

For more than half my life, for a hell of a lot of the 34 years that I was actively in the Church, my religious identity was simply "Christian."

Congratulations to Mike Lee for erasing this veteran's religious identity as far as the Department of Defense is concerned.

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

He thought he was gonna get Trump to declare Mormons as Christians.

Instead, like Segregationists after the Civil Rights Act got passed, they drained the swimming pool and filled it in with cement rather than let him swim in it, eliminating "Christian" as a category completely, effectively classifying a whole bunch of Christian denominations as separate religions. They nuked "Christian" as a category for a damned reason, but probably not the one you think.

Atomizing the Body Of Christ, as it exists in the United States Armed Forces, into something less than its component parts, as far as the government is concerned...and handing people like Trump a convenient means to crowbar the wider Body of Christ apart, should they decide to. Boom!

And you know they WILL.

Like weapons, Man does not invent pretexts without using them.

But like some idiot rich Uncle Tom who'd spent previous generations betraying his fellow Black folks to the White Citizens Council, Mike Lee thinks he's clever having extracted a "Concession" that's not only not a concession, but actually a potentially far more insidious weapon to use against the Church than anything any of the writers of Christian End Times fiction ever thought of a hypothetical Antichrist doing.

He's smiling all big 'cause some Boss Hogg-looking motherfucker just handed him the keys to the club, but hasn't yet found out that they stripped and sold all the furniture and shit and filled in the pool with concrete in the middle of the night.

"Christian" is a common identity.

And for all their efforts to make it so, Smug Republicanity is not.

Remember that Doug Wilson, Pete Keg-Breath and a bunch of these other idiot hyper-Calvinist dudes are part of a fairly small mini-denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, that has something like 170 member congregations. You add in all the current big names and fellow-traveler groups and it's like 500 churches. It sounds like a lot...until you consider that in the part of Michigan I live in, there's literally more churches than that, since most towns (even small ones) will have several, and some that are a bit bigger might even have several churches from the same denomination.

If all or even half, hell, a quarter of American churches stood up and told these idiots to go fuck themselves, they'd pretty much have to.

Basic insurgency tactics, if you can't face that directly, you start breaking it down and force the other guy to divide their forces.

There's enough Christians in America that doing that shit will take a very long time. These Same Fucking People just spent over 60 years undermining the Civil Rights Act, and believe me when I tell you they intend to include White People in the oppression this time because they think they can beat and bully their way into permanent power by doing so.

If it takes 100 years to make it so they can break things down to where the CREC won't just get squished like a bug if they declare a crusade against another group of churches, These Fucking People will do it, they'll keep doing it, they'll invent libraries worth of completely bullshit theology to justify it, too.

In Oz, the guards lock the cages and walk away, and the predators rise, take control and make the rules. But in Em City, the guards are with us 24 hours a day. There's no privacy. Everybody sees what everybody's doing. Eyes everywhere. McManus' eyes. 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 wanna be saved. ~Augustus Hill, From the HBO series Oz, S1.E1 "The Routine."

Make sense yet, why Republicans are investing so much energy into talking idiotic shit about James Talarico??

If These Fucking People can't turn American Christianity into the "religious" arm of the Republican Party...or more accurately of Trumpism, an analogue of the Chinese "Three Self Patriotic Church" perhaps...and cannot keep enough of those they thought they had locked on corralled? 

They'll simply destroy it, or more likely attempt to and fail.

It's the same shit with these motherfuckers trying to turn every damn thing into myths and legends lately, Truth is the only floor most people have to stand on to push back against Power. Like it or not, that includes spiritual or theological Truth. These assholes know that, which is why they don't want you to have any.

And they want to do a bunch of things they know nobody, as our country is currently constituted, would ever support.

And that's also exactly why they're scheming to try and make being a Republican a bigger (in terms of fanaticism and numbers) "Identity" than being a Christian. That's what Donald Trump is actually for, nobody but a bunch of braindead idiots thinks he's a good leader, nobody. But he has that cult following him around. That's why they invested so heavily into turning Evangelicalism into a Christ-less form of Christianity...only to see so much of it simply absorbed into MAGA and effectively secularized. I feel like they wasted a lot of time with how they did it, but in the end they still kinda got the result they wanted there.

That they had to throw millions of people, people like me and my partner and most of the conservative Christians we knew 20 years ago out of Evangelical spaces or Evangelically-adjacent spaces to do this doesn't bother them, they'd rather kill us anyway.

But they've also gotten greedy and impatient and started stripping away the false ecumenicism that let them get away with a lot of this shit for so long. Fortunately (I guess?) Mike Lee is too dumb to see that's what's really going on here.

The next sets of moves they make along these lines won't be nearly so blandly bureaucratic.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

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

Nine

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

Not Legends, Facts II (Left Behind Is A Lie VI, Nine.)

Red Army General : I carried out my orders. I sent in all of my boys. But the Germans engulfed us. They have artillery, aircraft, tanks. And me, what did I have?!

Khrushchev: A sacred duty to resist! I have to report to the Boss. [puts a pistol on the table] Perhaps you'd prefer to avoid the red tape.

[Khrushchev walks out of the room to address political officers. There is a gunshot, then he begins.]

Krushchev: My name... is Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. I've come to takes things in hand here. This city... is not Kursk, nor is it Kiev, nor Minsk. This city... is Stalingrad. Stalin-grad! The city bears the name of the Boss. It's more than a city, it's a symbol. If the Germans capture this city, the entire country will collapse. Now, I want our boys to raise their heads. I want them to act like they have BALLS! I want them to stop SHITTING THEIR PANTS! [briefly pauses] That's your job. As political officers, I'm counting on you. [stops at one] You, what's your suggestion?

Officer #1: Shoot all the other generals who have retreated. And their chiefs of staff, too.

[Khruschev looks at another.]

Officer #2: [terrified, stuttering] M-make s-some examples. D-d-d-d-d-de-port the families of the d-d-deserters...

Khrushchev: [bored] Yes, yes, that's all been done.

Danilov: Give them hope!

[Kruschev walks over and looks at the officer standing in the front, who motions with his eyes toward Danilov.]

Danilov: Here the men's only choice is between German bullets and ours. But there's another way, the way of courage, the way of love of the Motherland. We must publish the army newspaper again. We must tell magnificent stories, stories that extol sacrifice, bravery. We must give them hope, pride, a desire to fight. We must make them believe in the victory. Yes, we need to make examples; but examples to follow. What we need... are heroes.

Khrushchev: [looks around, wryly] Do you know any heroes around here?

Danilov: Yes, Comrade. I know one.

~From the film Enemy At The Gates.

Last month I wrote a post entitled "Not Legends, Facts." There was a reason for that.

Last night I saw some idiot at some bullshit event trying to blame Satan for Feminism and saying the Salem Witch Trials happened because of abortion. I studied the colonial history largely in Christian schools, I've been to Salem, albeit as a bored, disinterested teenager at that time. None of this works like that.

And These Fucking People know it.

They're just trying to mythologize our history and turn it into fables and legend because they think that'll make it harder for people to argue with them.

You can argue and to a certain extent prove your point via careful study of the Bible, Christian doctrine, history and tradition, the same goes for secular politics.

You can go to a place like Salem, walk around, visit museums and shit, or if you'd rather just sit at home and read all type of history about it. The Devil didn't do it, there was all type of conflicts with Native Americans, political upheaval at the time, poverty, a whole litany of Puritan bullshit that was then ongoing both over here and in England...these are known, historically proven facts.

You cannot actually prove Athena emerging fully armed and armored from the split head of Zeus after somebody cleaved his head because he had a headache. It's not even that kind of story.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. ~2 Timothy 4:3

And that's the point. That's what These Fucking People want. It's not "What does the Bible say" it's "What did the Pastor say?" They want to make everything subjective because then the loudest or most vehement voice is more likely to win the argument.

These fucking idiots want everything, up to and including religion...to be subject to political power.

Because they think they will have it.

The Mormons got a big surprise last week when they found out that hyper-Calvinists and Evangelicals don't actually consider them Christians and the Department Of Defense changed the designation of their religion on the new list accordingly.

Oops.

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.

Now These Fucking People want Trump to personally fix it...when the literal point of the Constitution is he shouldn't have to!

This is exactly the kind of problem for why the Founders put the First Amendment in the Constitution and indeed put Freedom of Religion first on the list.

When religion is subject to political power, nobody's really free to believe anything at all. In the world our Founding Fathers grew up in, it was nothing for people to have to change their religion every time there was a new king, or a new foreign army conquered the region in which they lived, Europe's wars of religion, the Puritan wars in England, etc. were still in living memory.

The moral and religious framework I was taught cannot exist in such a world as that. The entire concept of Christian Salvation as most Protestant American Christian churches believe it (or at least say they do) does not function in a world where the State in any capacity can say that one religion is valid and another is not, for any purpose.

By definition, if worldly Power can determine Spiritual Truth we're all damned anyway, and nothing matters. Jesus said His kingdom is not of this world for a damn reason.

And what happens, Evangelicals, when everything goes to shit and civilization falls and all the sudden armed men show up and tell you, at gunpoint, that you have to worship Baal or some other such Demon now??

If religion is subject to Political Power and political power grows only from Force, what grounds have you to say "NO?"

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

Truth is the only floor most of us will ever have to stand on to push back against power.

Faith requires belief in certain things and actions based on those beliefs to be more than just a bullshit word.

You can do legends and myths and all that in a positive fashion, to expand the mind, to make a point, to teach, that's literally what mythology is for. Jesus used Parables.

Revelation is a larger example of the same thing, an Apocalypse isn't just destruction, if there is to be destruction it's for a purpose...an Apocalypse is actually supposed to be a great revealing.

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."

"Conservatives" such as they are at this point want to make up myths and legends to get people to stop thinking, to obfuscate the Truth, to let them just reorder the country, the world, hell, the Universe according to whatever crap they like...but what they want is largely based on partisanship, personal preferences and politics, it's all subjective and it literally cannot and does not work for everybody...or even most people...and it's not even meant to!

If you're not one of these people, or if your beliefs or preferences were set (For example) a generation or two ago...Fuck You!

And I am one of those people, as is my partner, much less my Mom. Our beliefs predate all this current bullshit and we like it that way. None of us are gonna change at the drop of a hat because some dipshit Influencer on a stage thinks we should.

I've got people to think about, I can't sign on to this garbage even if I wanted to.

And it's getting worse.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You either believe our rights are God-given, or you don't.

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

Eight

[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."

Aliens (Left Behind Is A Lie VI, Eight.)

 [Han arrives at Docking Bay 94 and sees a familiar face, and his ship surrounded.]

Jabba the Hutt: [in Huttese] Solo! Come out of there, Solo! Solo!

Han Solo: Right here, Jabba. [Jabba and his henchmen turn around to see Han and Chewbacca] I've been waiting for you.

Jabba: Have you now.

Han: You didn't think I was gonna run, did you?

Jabba: Han, my boy, you disappoint me. Why haven't you paid me? And why did you fry poor Greedo?

Han: Look, Jabba, next time you wanna talk to me, come see me yourself. Don't send one of these twerps.

Jabba: Han, I can't make exceptions. What if everyone who smuggled for me dropped their cargo at the first sign of an Imperial starship? It's not good for business.

Han: Look, Jabba, even I get boarded sometimes. [accidentally steps on Jabba's tail, causing Jabba to yelp in pain] Did you think I had a choice? But I got a nice easy charter now; I'll pay you back, plus a little extra. I just need a little more time.

Jabba: Han, my boy, you're the best smuggler I ever hired. So, for an extra 20%...

Han: Fifteen, Jabba, and don't push it.

Jabba: Okay, 15%. But if you fail me again, I'll put a price on your head so big, you won't be able to go near a civilized system.

Han: Jabba, you're a wonderful human being.

Jabba: [orders his minions] Come on! [Jabba's gang leaves with bounty hunter Boba Fett following behind.]

~From Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope

...

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

I saw this last night, in a tranche of Threads posts about the fact that Republican LA-mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is not only losing to Karen Bass, but he's very likely going to be overtaken by a third candidate and thus not make it into the general election at all.

I'm gonna be honest though, what I noticed, what stuck with me, etc. was his partner's Jabba's Palace space-alien lips. Like, come on, who wore it better? This bitch, or Sy Snootles??

Also I threw in the Bioshock reference for a damn reason. There's no corner of the Star Wars universe thus far that reflects the sheer incompetent malevolence of this shit.

I mean, I get it, American political-class and/or rich people are profoundly out-of-touch, weird, and hate the rest of us, because most of us refuse to be their toys or feed their narcissism (or we simply can't afford to or don't have the time.) And a lot of Americans, understandably, hate them right back.

The Andor series sort of hit this with characters like Cyril Karn and his mom, but even science fiction has to have limits to be believable, reality doesn't have that. Trouble is, there's about 20% of us that are fighting over which one of them gets to be the Imperial Stormtrooper that's holding the shock wand.

But at the same time, the reason I know all that "Left Behind" crap is a lie is that the Evangelical churches that preached it the most are busy as fuck trying to cover for all this bullshit!

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

And that's before the Epstein files and lurid talk about Baal-worship, cannibalism, sex crimes and gods know what else at this point...

But ya know, I used to know some old-school Republicans, the kind of guys who had bumper stickers like "Charlton Heston is my President" on the back of their pickup trucks (and it was a regular pickup truck not some ridiculously jacked-up monster, because these guys didn't need to overcompensate. I'm just gonna say that the extrapolating the comments those guys would make about any woman they saw whose lips looked like that (or even repeating comments I actually heard about things far less egregious in nature) would probably get me kicked off this platform. Yes, these guys said shit like that complete with slurs and other type of language people get canceled for today...right to people's faces.

It's the dark underbelly of Societal Standards, I guess. It's worth noting that all of these guys that I knew hated Trump. And they were not the kind of conservatives who'd just follow along either. Just sayin' I don't have to wonder what them guys would say or think about somebody like Gwneth Paltrow because when it came to the kind of movies she was in, just like my Grandpa their attitude was "I'm not even gonna watch that crap, what's wrong with you?!"

She says she's "Not a Republican" but she doesn't "Feel Anything" right now.

Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. ~Ezekiel 16:49-50 (NIV)

I'm here to tell you she didn't feel anything before, either. She's not a complete dumpster-fire, she was a big Obama booster back in them days, and did the same for Mayor Pete, she urged proper precautions during COVID-19, also. But the truth is Gwen is the kind of "Liberal" that, for all the noises she's made about feminine empowerment and shit over the years, could give a rat's ass about any woman who can't afford to steam-clean their lady-parts with her "Goop" crap...or who lacks the inclination to.

Let alone anybody like my partner who wants to work for a living and doesn't care about all that crap except to point out the health risks of weird shit (which she'll do) and/or anybody whose feminism is more than a brand or situational.

In other words the only differences between her and Republicans at this point are less bad intentions and less active bigotry.

At worst, Gwen's the type that's like "Ew, Ew, poor people." And don't tell me she isn't, bitch is cousins to a bunch of people in Hollywood and politics. This ain't somebody that's ever had to work a real job. Hence the shitty social views despite the at least socially-liberal ideas.

Look, I don't know how her partner does it, but *I* couldn't be with somebody like that, and I say that as somebody in a politically-mixed relationship. Not because I'm so righteous, but because for better and worse I have a fucking soul. I can't imagine having anything in common with someone so vapid. Among other things both me and my partner have hit rock bottom and been poor people. We both got out of that pit by the help of others and varying degrees of government assistance. We agree on most things, end-results-wise, but have (and will fight about) some different ideas on how to get to that end result.

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."

The difference between Gwen and us is we both actually give a shit, we have to. We have to look at what's going on and feel something, we live here. We have to work for a living.

And, like it or not, right or wrong, we actually believe that there's a higher power we're gonna have to answer to when we die, and that each person is a wondrous creation of God, and that to alter or degrade that creation excessively for any reason...let alone just to show something like Conspicuous Consumption"...is wrong.

And that is, basically, the bright side of having standards. Me and most of the people I care about who were taught similarly were never gonna fall for this crap!

Unfortunately, too many people can't say that or weren't taught like we were.

Yeah, okay, if you don't know anything you can believe whatever you want, in theory.

But at the end of the day you as a person living on this Earth in a Universe that, one way or another is not about you, it was not made for us, and we are responsible for getting certain things right or not.

That's our rent for being here.

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

Luthen Rael: Can’t imagine what?

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

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

And I was taught there are consequences for getting it wrong. We have free will, but that also means we have to accept the consequences of our own actions. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Yeah, that includes having lips that make you look like a Star Wars alien.

This moral framework that I was taught can't really exist outside of a free society, it cannot be imposed on somebody else, not if you believe we each have a soul and that is in our keeping alone. Such things must be Taught. You cannot make a person Believe or want to be Saved.

And whatever choice one makes must be made freely.

Yeah, some people get it wrong and that's the nature of the world. Okay, everybody fucks up, but you can't make a Civilization out of fucking up, especially if you're doing it on purpose. There have to be limits.

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft....When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. ~Baba, from The Kite Runner.

I'll note that the "Freedoms" current "Conservatives" promote are mainly the kind of "Individual Liberties" that only really can be used to beat on the collective rights of the majority. There's a reason for that. These people ain't your friends. The only "Right" these idiots care about is an alleged right to steal and waste everybody's time. I'm an old-school conservative...nominally a liberal not by choice but because my standards didn't move. I'm a capitalist, but there have to be limits. "Don't make your face look like that" would at least be a start.

It'd almost make more sense if These Fucking People were Aliens.

Man is not the center of the Universe.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

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I don't preach a social Gospel I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, "Now is that political or social?" He said, "I feed you." Because the good news to a hungry person is bread. ~Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Seven

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

~Matthew 25:31-45

Antimatter Family (Left Behind Is A Lie VI, Seven.)

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

~From Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Book.)

...

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 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

I saw this bullshit on like Monday. "Nuclear Family Month" WTF??

But I didn't get to write on Tuesday because I had to come home, take a nap and then drive downstate to take my partner her art, art supplies, and whatever else I could fit in the car. Her mom decided at the last minute to come up for the kiddo's Middle School graduation, which is today. Momma Werewolf wants to hang the paintings, fix some cracks in the sculptures and in general decorate the place. 

My partner also still had to work yesterday (so it was a quick trip) though she's off today. For my part I'd already debated going but I asked kiddo if she wanted me to be there or if she'd rather have money...and naturally she wanted the money.

It's not yet comfortable or especially practical for me to stay down there for 3 days especially not with other people also showing up (Plus her mom and I didn't get along all that great 20 years ago) and I have ferrets and stuff to do at home so it was just easier to unpack the car, hang out for a little bit, then come home.

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

And then I slept most of yesterday, anyway, apparently being more tired than I thought I was.

So, anyway;

"Marriage Is Between One Man And One Woman."

I've been hearing this shit for like *30 years.*

Pretty much since people ever considered the idea in this country that *Anybody Else* should be able to get married, it rapidly morphed into this:

"God Made Adam And Eve, Not Adam And Steve."

You know, the good old-fashioned Nuclear Family, which I was raised to think of as some kind of an ideal. 

How I was taught it, that's considered husband, wife, two kids, generally presumed to be Patriarchal, White, and immediate family only. Dad works in a factory or some physical job and served in the Army at some point (The Navy and Marines were vaguely considered gay, none of this foofy Air Force shit and nobody even noticed the Coast Guard or the reserves unless there was a disaster.) Mom is a Housewife. The son plays (American, duh) Football, the daughter might be a cheerleader or some shit if she does Athletics at all. Church on Sunday very much implied. What they do the rest of the week doesn't really matter much.

Sounds like something out of a 1950's Cold War Anti-Communism brochure...and not by accident either because that's exactly the kind of political and social environment where the bullshit fucking term even originated. Anybody else including aged relatives, blended family (be it through adoption or step-siblings or whatever) elders and extended family, was only adopted in grudgingly and under pressure, a process only being completed culturally when I was a kid in the 1980's.

If this kind of imagery invokes thoughts of air raid sirens, cold bright flashes from over the horizon as the power goes out, and the distant rumble of jet engines as bombers sortie to hit back and fighters launch on air defense missions to protect whatever's left, well...that's kind of what the whole idea was behind it in the first place.

[Nuclear IBCMs have been launched]

Airman: You know what that means, don't you? Either we fired first and they're going to try to hit what's left, or they fired first and we just got our missiles out of the ground in time. Either way, we're going to get hit.

Airman Billy McCoy: So what are we still standing around here for?

Sergeant: Where do you want to go?

Airman Billy McCoy: Well, how about out of here for starters? I've got to get my wife and my kid!

Sergeant: We're still on alert, Billy! No one leaves this facility. Not until the choppers get here to take us back to Whiteman and to the shelters...

Airman Billy McCoy: [cutting him off] Are you kidding me, man? The bombs will be here before the choppers will! Listen to me. Listen to me, man. The war is over! It's over. We've done our job. So what are you still guarding? Huh? Some cotton-pickin' hole in the ground all dressed up and nowhere to go?

Airman: He's right!

Airman Tommy: What about Starr and Boyle?

Sergeant: What about them?

Airman Tommy: What are they doing?

Airman Billy McCoy: Yeah, they're 60 feet down, sipping on some cold beer and whistling "Misty"!

Airman Tommy: Well I'm going down there!

Sergeant: You can't go down there! That elevator is secure!

Airman Billy McCoy: Do you hear yourself talking, bozo? 'Cause I hear you saying that we've got direct orders to be sitting ducks!

~From the TV miniseries, The Day After.

Throw in some good old fashioned American hypocrisy and Keeping Up With The Joneses for good measure. My partner's family was like this (I know the town she's originally from well since it's the next one over from where I lived until we moved to California) and it's taken her (and them, for that matter, or at least the ones that want to) 40 years to start untangling the damage. And that kind of environment...you know, the one that's left millions of us Gen-Xer's and Elder Millennials stuck with addictions or needing therapy or both, isn't good enough for some of these fucking people?? Oh, fuck off, what's wrong with you?!?!

Nowadays the Right would be crying about a Black actor playing Airman McCoy, a doctor being one of the other main characters, and the several strong female characters in the series.

The actual message, including the deaths of several characters from causes due to social breakdown, and the "Is there anyone there?" at the end of the film, answered only by a Morse-code message during the credits, would be too subtle for These Fucking People.

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft....When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. ~Baba, from The Kite Runner.

Or maybe they just don't care.

Because the whole damn thing is simply a Death Cult...social and otherwise.

The Nuclear Family simply wasn't Nuclear enough. Or, as people like me, my partner and the kiddo demonstrate...that shit all too often doesn't survive the pressures of the modern world much less the Male Narcissism Epidemic that's an ongoing problem and (as far as I can figure) has been getting worse for 20 years. Yet at the same time the people who sort this shit out have managed to survive, to grow or even to thrive in spite of all this shit!

And maybe that's the fucking problem, from a "Conservative" perspective anyway.

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

That anybody else has the capability to get away from their bullshit, much less the freedom to thrive or the will to survive in spite of adversity sticks in these fucking people's collective craw every damn day.

More to the point, the fact that the same people who came up with the often problematic systems that me and my partner grew up under also recognized the dangers and limitations of the world they'd created and came up with or allowed to be released various art, such as movies like The Day After that reflected such would have the New York Post comment section calling people like Ronald Reagan "Woke."

Cannot swords be turned to plowshares? Can we and all nations not live in peace? In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war? ~Ronald Reagan.

SO, Woke person that I (being a former Reagan Republican) am, and having been a Republican back when words meant something and this shit wasn't a Death Cult; I'd like to propose a change in terminology to include such people.

Because the America I was taught about is all about inclusion and being a melting pot, or something. Chalk it up to basic politeness or a desire for exactitude in terminology (Oh, those "Liberals" that obsess about what words ya'll using oughta love this one.)

We'll call it the Antimatter Family.

(Antimatter, of course, being more destructive than mere Nuclear fission or fusion.)

"Marriage Is Between One Man, One Woman and/or his Sex Robot, his Side Piece(s) plus all his Bros whose 'approval' he must maintain, and the Republican Party."

If that sounds more creepy, restrictive and Totalitarian than anything George Orwell ever came up with?? Well, good, it kind of is.

And far worse, the destructiveness is (And the male narcissism) in fact, the point.

Melting pot? 

Yeah, melt this crap down; Like the Terminator at the end of T2: Judgment Day.

John Connor: We're not gonna make it, are we? People, I mean.

Terminator: It's in your nature to destroy yourselves.

~From the film Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

And of course, now even a lot of the people who helped create this mess realize how fucked it is; But that means one gets voted off the island, as Candace, Marge, Meg, Tom and Tucker have already found out, or worse, right, Chuck??

And the funny part here is, lots of the soft-handed bitches who keep driving this bullshit off a cliff can't even own their own bullshit if it doesn't get them resounding applause on social media.

That's just it, too. 

The far-right's "Second American Revolution" appears to be dying off mainly cuz it didn't get these chuckle-fucks as many Heart emojis and Like reacts on Facebook as they thought it was going to. They're finding out the hard way they can't simply make the rest of us Hate like they do.

And without that, there's no glue to hold the rest of the project together.

In general people are tired of this bullshit, and none of these idiots bothered to even think through what they were going to do in such a case, except to try to each protect their individual political power. The modern Right is less a movement, directed towards a goal in the traditional sense, than a horde of Zombies all trying to at the same fleeing survivor, but as soon as a rat scurries by, or whatever, they get distracted and go after that instead.

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.

I can't even talk the way these people talk, anymore. There is no higher thought process.

I'd argue there is no thought or process at all, simply a desire to reactively destroy anything this shit touches, like Antimatter.

The whole idea of this "Nuclear Family Month" shit is some kind of bullshit reactionary opposition to Pride Month, but they made it sound about as celebratory as a 1950's psychology seminar put on by a bunch of Republican doctors, you know, the kind that used to consider "Smoke filtered cigarettes" to be solid medical advice.

And some people look at this horseshit and call it "Greatness."

Yet they can't even handle it if somebody tells them "No."

All that "Left Behind" crap was a lie, These Fucking People would have to believe in God or something other than themselves first.

I know I say this a lot, but either you believe in freedom or you don't.

Either you're willing to fight for it, or you're not.

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

I don't usually deal with those big words because I don't usually deal with big people. I deal with small people. I find you can get a whole lot of small people and whip hell out of a whole lot of big people. They haven't got anything to lose, and they've got every thing to gain. And they'll let you know in a minute: "It takes two to tango; when I go, you go." ~Malcolm X.