And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.
And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.
And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.
And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he strikes a man.
And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.
And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.
And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.
And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.
And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.
One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.
And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,
Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.
And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.
And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.
One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.
And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,
Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.
And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.
And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.
And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.
For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.
And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.
And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.
And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9, King James Version.
...
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.)
Another part of it is, I'm a gamer. Magic is something you roll dice for, that doesn't much exist outside of your imagination and the numbers you're keeping track of in your head and occasionally writing in your notebook or on your character sheet as the current combat round progresses.
And of course, my ex-wife is Pentecostal and so everything she didn't like was "Demonic."
Honestly, even now I'm a hell of a lot more worried about the people who apparently believe in Baal than I am about Baal. I thought (if it ever really existed, according to my previous thought process) humanity left that crap behind.
I thought a lot of things.
Since this Epstein shit started coming out? There's no natural explanation for why I've drawn back towards Christ. I started hearing about all this Epstein files stuff and a rage came up in me like fire. I started getting Biblical when talking to people, always something I've done occasionally, not on a daily basis. When the bad guys are old school to the point of going back to the worst parts of the Old Testament, secular liberalism won't do it, not by itself. Not without cold steel to back it up.
We need an Elijah. Probably, we need more than one.
That rationalistic side says they're working up a "The Devil Made Us Do It" defense for all this horrible bullshit, and gonna try to blame somebody else.
None of this actually works like that, one of these things is not like the other one.
The trouble is, a lot of people aren't rational, and I feel like even if they were a need exists to cover all the spiritual bases simply because one doesn't fuck around with this type of shit.
Whether it was the ancient Israelites fighting against their neighbors, Elijah on Mount Carmel challenging the prophets of Baal or the Romans fighting against Carthage, it seems like the common understanding at the time and down through most of history has been you don't accept or negotiate with this bullshit, you burn it all the way out, salt the Earth behind you, and start the fuck over. Rome and Yahweh pretty much didn't agree on anything else but proper procedure in this case.
Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
You don't negotiate with this bullshit, you defeat it, assert dominance and then actively hunt for those trying to keep it going in secret because clearly if they have to perform their shameful rituals in secret for 3,000 years to keep it going, they'll do it.
And no, the Christian Nationalist homophobic horseshit ain't the answer because Those Fucking People have been shown to be balls deep in this garbage, literally.
Like the Xenomorphs in Aliens, or with Russians in your politics, you start fucking around with this shit at all, it apparently spreads out of control very fast no matter how much you smugly think it's not gonna get you, it will.
And it's not the LGBT people doing this, it's the conservatives.
I have a partner and kid to think about, also they're both LGBT. It's not just that I don't want to live in that kind of world myself, one where "Christians" would rather submit to the prophets of Baal than live with people like my own little chosen family, it's that I don't want them to have to live in that shit either.
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."
For fuck's sake I have pictures somewhere in a folder on my old laptop of Clarence Thomas at the Bohemian Grove. That empty man is a Moloch worshiper no matter how much Sedevacantist Catholic horseshit comes out his mouth. I saw recently that former FBI agent and convicted Soviet spy Robert Hanssen died, dude was an Opus Dei type Catholic and a raging pervert, besides being a traitor.
America wasn't Asshole Nation enough for him.
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.
Seems like all somebody's got to do is appeal to prejudice enough, give some asshole enough money or tell somebody how great they are long enough, maybe teach them to believe they're in some kind of secret club or some bullshit and suddenly There Is No God and Sin becomes a fun toy instead of something not to do.
It seems to take very little to get this started, hell, conspiracy theories and our ongoing Biblical-grade plague of narcissism alone got people most of the way there.
And I'll note it was the "Conservative" "Christians" who really ate that shit up. Never mind what the fruit of it would be decades later. That shit was a big part of what turned Evangelicalism into a Christ-less form of "Christianity."
Worse, they don't care.
If you don't think you have a soul, you can easily sell your soul to Baal and it's just spending money. You get the spiritual consequences later whether you believe in them or not. The consequences believe in you.
The thing to remember is they know what they're doing and where they're going, and their goal is to drag as many people as they can into Hell with them. They can't be gods, but they can take life and separate other people from God and in their zero-sum Man-centered worldview that's damn near the same thing.
If you want a world where none of this is a thing, or at least like it was when I learned this stuff in church, we're all gonna have to fight to get it back.
Remember that.
Because it's going to be on the test.
Слава Україна!
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."
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
