Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back. ~Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll.
...
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
...
Hawkeye: My father's people say that at the birth of the sun and of his brother the moon, their mother died. So the sun gave to the earth her body, from which was to spring all life. And he drew forth from her breast the stars, and the stars he threw into the night sky to remind him of her soul. So there's the Cameron's monument. My folks' too, I guess.
- Cora Munro: You are right, Mr. Poe. We do not understand what is happening here. And it's not as I imagined it would be, thinking of it in Boston and in London...
- Hawkeye: Sorry to disappoint you.
- Cora Munro: No, on the contrary. It is more deeply stirring to my blood than any imagining could possibly have been.
- ~From the film The Last Of The Mohicans.
I saw this shit yesterday.
A whole bunch of Trump supporters being interviewed, no fucking idea what's going on, not a goddamn clue what's happening in the world. But oh boy, you betcha, they're sure Trump's going to fix it! I'm sorry, but I've never been capable of fitting my head that far up my own ass.
I'm a conservative. These fucking people are just idiots.
Twenty years ago, when my partner and I were just a couple of third-shift food service workers, part of the same gaming group, and the sort of friends who were so close everybody else assumed we were a couple before we did...we had intense, passionate arguments about politics, and we were in fact mostly representing different parts of the same side. I was more old-school Reaganite, she was more Bush 43 Neoconservative. As the Republican Party lost me...a process well underway at that point, the arguments just got more interesting. But, we worked with opinionated, very smart people for the most part. You had to keep up or you didn't last very long. Lots of 'em didn't.
"I will not trash talk. I will not be a divider in chief or an agitator in chief. I won't be out there blowharding, talking a big game without backing it up. I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter but send a signal that we're prepared to act in the national security interests of this country — to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world."
[Silence, you can hear the braincells draining from the crowd, Silence.]
"Please clap."
~Jeb! Bush, February 2nd, 2016
As a custodian, I worked with this guy, let's call him Jim.
Jim was a Trump Supporter, Capital T, Capital S, and by his own admission, no fucking idea why. I mean, not that I'm interested in being fair to this ass-clown but in fairness to him, he didn't seem to have any kind of idea about anything else either. No military service, no life experience or work-experience outside of jobs like the one he had, cleaning kitchen equipment and mopping floors. Never seemed to be or said anything religious either. He'd been a janitor at Dow Chemical in Midland or somewhere like that.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.
You know, the kind of $20-an-hour-for-grunt-work jobs that pretty much died off in the 1990's...until they outsourced the job to Service Master and he'd mucked around with bullshit jobs ever since. The one thing he had that I ever saw was a nice 1995 Chevy Silverado extended-cab 4x4, just a slight update on the red truck I'd had. That shit was immaculate. That was about the only good point this fool had.
It was one thing when it was my ex-wife's young son doing that. It's quite another when it's a 60-year-old man.
I found it massively creepy.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco
So one day, I straight up asked him WHY he supported Trump. He thought about it for a second, like visibly crunched...I don't know, chicken bones, numbers, old stale cornflakes, a tuna can, various janky porn films he bought on VHS when they were cheap...I don't know, whatever was in that empty-ass head...and came back up with "I like the shit he says. I don't know, I'm a dumbass or something."
Hey, at least he was honest. That was a statement I never saw anything to ever contradict it.
By contrast, my partner...along with most of the conservatives I've ever known who ever gave their beliefs or anything else any thought at all...fucking hates Trump, if for slightly different reasons.
And it got worse after dealing with the leech MAGA relatives.
Deservedly so.
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)
The thing is, a lot of these fucking people were not like us.
There were quizzes and shit with smart-ass trick-questions.
My partner? Different books, different location, similar scenarios. Same result, too. Her stuff, running a little later than mine, is a little heavier on 1990's Disney and janky aughts vampire fiction. But in both of our cases, imagination was encouraged, intelligence expected, you had to read and understand the material.
Hell, Trump doesn't do that.
We grew up with expectations of diversity and progress, with the idea that the world should get better, not worse.
I for one always expected to live in a country that wanted to make something more than money, internet content, political power or some bullshit like that.
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.
Today's Republican Party doesn't want to do anything but roll back the clock to something approaching the Dark Ages, immiserate everybody else and then act like misery is some kind of bullshit religious duty, and then sit on its ass collecting checks and letting *Checks Notes* Donald Trump do its thinking and work for it, and their voter base isn't much better. And Republicans somehow thought that everybody else would trade their life and standard of living for Republican BS, perversion and shareholder value they never get any of. I couldn't do it.
Now? Republicans are in panic-mode because for all their attempts at cheating and trying to put their whole ass on the scale, the numbers are still terrible and it looks like the midterms are going to be a Republican bloodbath.
- The Mandalorian: I can't thank you enough. Please allow me to give you a portion of the reward.
- Kuiil: I cannot accept. You are my guest, and I am therefore in your service.
- The Mandalorian: I could use a crew member of your ability. And I can pay handsomely.
- Kuiil: I am honored. But I have worked a lifetime to finally be free of servitude.
- The Mandalorian: I understand. Then... all I can offer is my thanks.
- Kuiil: And I offer mine. Thank you for bringing peace to my valley. [leaves the ship and mounts his Blurrg; to Mando] And good luck with the Child. May it survive and bring you a handsome reward. I have spoken.
- ~From the Star Wars series; The Mandalorian, S1.E2 "The Child."
Whatever, you asked for it, FAFO.
The crowds against are bigger than the crowds for him.
The thing Republicans forgot is it's not just American politics that's small-D democratic, it's American culture that'll try to put almost anything to a vote...almost to a ridiculous degree. Even when it's something like "Other people exist" or "Science is real" that shouldn't be up for debate. Republicans know this and have been happy to exploit it. Then they decided to overplay their hand and shit all over the American people and the world.
And they're panicking now that the voting public seems intent on saying "Fuck All That."
And along the way they assumed everybody else as as cynical and murderous and selfish as they were. No, most of us have people and things we care about.
Then they trusted in Political Cultism and Trump to save them, "Praying" that the Atheism-minus-one mentality of the American Evangelical...a belief system so deeply cynical that anything you can't see or indeed anything outside of what the Preacher said last Sunday or what they saw on NEWSMAX last night can be argued as not real...and yet then they wanna turn around and tell you to have "faith" in "God?"
For people that are so religious, they sure don't seem to believe in any Higher Power than themselves. Maybe when your voters have unseasoned mashed potatoes for brains and will believe about anything, you can do that. But we ain't all that way.
It's nonsense.
And I'd argue that as a result of this bullshit...which starts in churches with preachers that are little more than Zampolits for the Republican Party...that America is an increasingly and violently Atheistic and Materialistic country. I'd argue as much or more so as the old Soviet Union ever was. In fact, it's rather evident that unfettered Capitalism has done everything to us that Republicans ever accused Communism of. I was wrong, even Trump couldn't overcome Ayn Rand at being Republican Jesus.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan
They're being too obvious in hoping that most American people, like Russians, will just wallow in alcohol and miserable bastardy and accept this bullshit. It's not an accident a lot of the media elites are pretty much trying to talk to Americans like we're Russian peasants.
Fuck You, No. I've heard how things went over there, even got to see a little of it in the military. And in Bosnia I saw a lot more of the mess These Fucking People made of Eastern Europe. That's what Trump wants for America.
Like I said during COVID-19, the Republican ideal of the Future is the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with a Mall.
That's Trump's idea of "Great Again."
The hell with that.
People are tired of it.
And we're going to vote the fuckers out.
God forbid they try anything stupid. The country is going to explode if they do.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed.
Слава Україна!
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.
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 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
And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama
The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angkar are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive. ~Dith Pran, The Killing Fields.
