665, Or How I Learned To Fuck Up The Apocalypse (Not Legends, Not Myths, Facts. Seven.)

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

If any man have an ear, let him hear.

He that leads into captivity shall go into captivity: he that kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he speaks as a dragon.

And he exercises all the power of the first beast before him, and causes the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

And he doeth great wonders, so that he makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,

And deceive them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

And he caused all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13, King James Bible.

...

Everybody's worried about this Y2K problem. Come 2000, the computers are gonna have a nervous breakdown. Planes will fall from the sky, the water supply will dry up and the Pentagon will start shooting nuclear warheads at Canada. Some predict that prison doors will automatically spring open. But I got the solution: A do-over. At the stroke of midnight, it's 1900 again and we get to do the whole fucking century over. I mean, let's face it. We didn't do such a hot job the first time around. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO Series Oz, S3.E8 "Out O' Time."

I saw this last night.

Apparently Jeff Bezos thinks humans should stop using water so Tech Bros can use it to cool down their AI computers and shit.

First off, fuck no.

Second, also, fuck no.

Third: I was a Christian End Times Prophecy Guy at the same time as I was an IT guy working for a dial-up ISP here in Northern Michigan, also during the run-up to Y2K. In roughly 1998-2000 It was my second job, my other job was I was a line cook. Wanna bet which of the two I was sure would still be there on January 2nd of 2000? 

Hardest of all the hard passes. Fuck You. No is a complete sentence.

Look, even in my fairly agnostic current form of Christianity I accept that God created Man, not the other way around. Man cannot create a god in his image and have it be anything more than a useless Idol. 

Or, to put it a little more bluntly to these Tech Bros who think they're gonna create a "God" that'll solve all their problems while the rest of us die of dehydration and starvation...Have Fun In Hell, Idiots.

What happens when somebody comes along and unplugs your god? What happens when there's widespread civil disorder and civilizational collapse because of your bullshit and the power gets knocked out?

Oh, that's right! Power grids weren't really built intelligently, they mostly just accrued over time. 

God...until the power goes out.

By contrast, I've read the Bible, hard copy, zero RAM required and you can read it without a quintillion megawatts of electricity. I find it easier, cheaper and better for the environment to just loosely believe in, ya know, God.

It doesn't get any better when you know a little.

Or care about what's actually in the Holy Books.

And these people don't. Think about that.

I've heard these fucking people make occasional noise about reusing US Navy submarine reactors from scrapped ships to provide on-site off-grid power...well that does two things. #1 Ok, it buys you about 10-20 years depending on the reactor but #2 You're also gonna have a couple of US Navy nuclear engineers and a gaggle of enlisted ratings come through about once a month during that whole time and do an Operational Reactor Safety Inspection...and on an old system, at that. Plus swarms of maintainers if there's a system casualty of any kind...

Oops.

Yup, Maintenance issues, nuclear materials. That's four words I don't like hearing together and I say that as a US Air Force bomb wing veteran. Yeah, I was just a Security Police troop, but I was responsible for the security of the damn things and the bombers that would have carried them if the shit ever hit the fan.

Fuck that.

Now imagine a nuclear accident at your local data center that no one asked for or needs and which is already inflicting technological desertification on the surrounding area...

YOU try sweating through an airbase defense training exercise at PSAB in the middle of the Saudi desert and doing it in full MOPP-4 gear (and the standing order was if you ain't gotta piss you ain't drinking enough water!) because somebody thought Saddam Hussein had a fresh weed up his ass about something and tell me how you like it. That's the world Jeff wants for other people.

I've had heatstroke, it's no fun.

I'll note Jeff Bezos isn't going to curtail his own water usage.

How about we don't risk apocalypses (plural) to basically just power Chatbots for a Tech Bro fad that'll probably be over with in a year or two, that most people hate, and that has actively caused harm to people that I care about?

Yeah, that's right, ChatGPT negatively affected my partner's mental health back in January. It caused a whole big crisis that topped off one that was already ongoing.

All any of that shit does is recycle what's fed into it like any other computer and when it's thus chock-full of the same biases and prejudices and shit as the people who programmed it had? That's a problem.

Yeah, that's probably not going to result in some Machine God that's gonna save the world. It'll tell you you're fat and victim-blame and then want more money for giving you the privilege of its bad advice...or more of whatever the damned things run off of, anyway.

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

And then you throw in that these same fucking people are actively encouraging conspiracy theories, illiteracy, medieval-peasant mentalities, religious extremism up to and including Epstein-cult shit that scans to me as basic demon worship, and straight-up superstition peddled as redneck elitism??

Wait 'til some CHUD that can't add 2+2=4 and has to Google basic mathematics causes a Divide By Zero in yo Machine God, that'll be a hoot.

Then throw in what else these idiots will ascribe divinity to, and how much they're willing to lie about it. Trump, for example.

And these are the fucking people programming your Machine God for you? Yeah, that sounds like it's gonna go well.

Garbage In, Garbage Out. That's pretty much the first rule of coding. You have to get it right the first time if at all possible, but because most people can't you run through most likely several versions that aren't all-the-way live before you run the real thing to try and do whatever you're programming it to do for real.

Now imagine it's being programmed by the kind of people who can't be bothered to take out the trash at my partner's work and they'll gundeck the logs about it, too. She went on a big rant about this and I agreed with her 100%. If you can't get the small things right you won't get the big things right. 

I had that drilled into me first by my Navy-veteran Grandpa, then in the military myself, she learned it from her Dad (who is also a veteran) and in her career.

A lot of people didn't, apparently.

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

Still, I'm imagining These Fucking People's AI super-god as being just smart enough to implement the Mark Of The Beast in conjunction with human politics, but like, that next bunch of judgments that are in reaction to it per Revelations are actually just the result of bad anti-rejection drugs or improper sanitation on a mass scale as ordered by the AI...and since nobody is smart enough by then to problem-solve and do it right or fix it, everybody thinks it's God that did it, rather than good old-fashioned FAFO along the same lines as Russian dipshits blowing themselves up.

I'd say these idiots want to go to Hell.

But the truth is, they'd probably find a way to fuck that up too.

Call it 665.

There comes a point where you either believe in Truth, as a concept, or you don't. Truth is the only thing that gives most people a floor to stand on to push back against Power.

Think about that for a second.

That's why these morons want to turn everything into mythology, so they can turn idiocy and medieval peasant-brain into a goddamned religion. And they wanna have that be backed up by some malfunctioning chatbot??

FUCK THAT. No!

I shouldn't even have to say this, but here we are.

Слава Україна!

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. ~Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

Six

A bunch of men sit in cells on the brink of a new year, a new century, a new millennium. They stare into the future and all they see is themselves in those same cells. Black or white, here we are on the precipice. We either hang on or we fall off. Together or separately. It's our choice. It's up to us. It's up to you and me. Happy New Year! 

~Augustus Hill, from the HBO Series Oz, S3.E8 "Out O' Time."

Crab Bucket (Not Legends, Not Myths, Facts. Six.)

Crab mentality or crabs in a bucket (also barrel, basket or pot), is a way of thinking best described by the phrase "if I can't have it, neither can you." The metaphor refers to a pattern of behavior noted in crabs when they are trapped in a bucket. While any one crab could easily escape, its effort will be undermined by others, ensuring the group's collective demise.

...

Brother Cavil/Number One: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star go supernova?

Ellen Tigh: No.

Number One: No? Well, I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the Universe. Other stars, other planets and eventually other life. A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air.

Ellen Tigh: The five of us designed you to be as human as possible.

Number One: I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I - I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws; and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I'm a machine, and I can know much more. I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body. And why?! Because my five creators thought that "God" wanted it that way. 

~From Battlestar Galactica (2003) S4.E17 "No Exit."

...

Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from the D&D video game Planescape Torment.

I saw this earlier.

The National Swamp is already falling apart.

But wait! There's more...

Apparently, JD Vance and Ross Douthat got into an argument about the Trump administration being "Unchristian" and "Uncharitable."

Duh. For once, Ross ain't wrong. Even if it's a case of Captain Obvious being promoted to Admiral Of The Fleet.

And of course all JD has is to try to talk about the "Tone" of somebody's "Communication" as if that justifies all this evil bullshit.

America, Republicans don't care about you; Except that they have a way they think the Universe is supposed to be, and that they're too good to have to explain themselves, and you, America, happen to be where they live and the place they think they were handed to hammer into the shape that they want.

No, none of this shit is based on reality anymore than Soviet Communism was.

So, therefore, they keep trying to impose their idea of reality on the world. How did that work with the Iranians??

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

For good measure, throw in that Republicans absolutely hate their own voters.

And Republicans hate that they have to ask anybody if they can have power, in any fashion no matter how pro forma or propagandized. They just want to do what they want to do, period, and the higher up the chain you go the worse it gets. The Republican mentality is basically that of a 13-year-old boy who thinks he knows everything...before his grandma gets ahold of him and beats the arrogance out of him with a wooden spoon one Sunday afternoon.

We need to bring back the Ass Whuppin. These fucking people feel too safe to do their shitty behavior.

And they know, yes, they know none of this stuff is going to work. It can't, the world does not work like that, at least not anymore, and you cannot put the Progress genie back in the bottle no matter how many rural white racist dipshits or white Suburban crunchy Yoga moms you infect with Medieval Peasant Brain.

There's a whole rest of the world that first will laugh at you, then stop doing business with you, and eventually stop talking to you altogether and wait for you to wreck yourself, until it gets so bad that UN peacekeeping forces have to get involved and then things get rebuilt on the rest of the world's terms and whatever some dipshit Calvinist from Idaho or Sedevacantist Catholic weirdo from New Jersey thinks about that, they can write on the pad of paper that prison in the Netherlands gives them and call it a Manifesto. Yes, there is a certain class of Republicans who think their shitty beliefs make them next to God.

In fact, to paraphrase Brother Cavil from BSG, they don't want to be human, they think this world is dirty and fallen...they think they know better.

While at the same time people like JD Vance apparently are iffy on the idea of whether or not us mere working people can be "Christian." Fuck you, bro. I don't need your stank ass to talk to the Lord, I can do it myself.

But, far from the higher thought processes of 40 or 50 years ago, modern Republican "Libertarianism" has basically just reduced a lot of people to being basically crabs in a bucket for no good reason, while higher up, privilege and religiosity have turned a lot of "Conservatives" into dumbass narcissists. 

Well, that and there's always the racism, that's the only glue that holds all these assholes together.

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.

Like I keep saying, I can't even talk the way these people talk anymore, and I used to be a Republican.

Seriously though, nobody has to put up with this shit. Not in America, and not in the rest of the world.

They know their ideas suck, and that the vast majority of people even here will never agree to most of this shit.

Social Security, for example, is something most of us have to pay into and thus expect to get, it's part of the social fabric of this country and pretty much nobody but idiot Libertarian teenagers and the most Miserable Bastard old Republicans out there expects or wants anything different.

There's a reason I say that their real Big Plan sooner or later is going to be "Break Off A Piece Of America For Themselves and hope like fuck that they can get all the people that do agree with them to move there." And there's a reason I say these guys are going to try to turn Florida into their own personal Banana Republic. Even that's not ideal, because there's Other People that live there, but it's what they have.

So they'll immediately start trying to price living there out of most people's income range while trying to lure in more rich people. 

Never mind who does the actual work.

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

Cuz whoever that is, the person doing the work, making lunch, taking out the trash?? 

it sure as fuck ain't gonna be no Little Mike Johnson.

The real issue here is that the whole basis of the current "Conservative" thing is disrespect. Disrespect from people that ain't got no self-respect. 

It's why these motherfuckers literally shit all over everything the first chance they get.

And then they wanna talk shit and use religion to cover their asses? Idiots like MAGA wannabe-rapper Forgiato Blow.

Being Black, or Down's Syndrome as "Punishment from God??" Sorry, bro, but God does not work that way and pretty much every Black person I've ever met is an observant Believer in something. 

More, *Every* person with Down's Syndrome that I've ever met was exactly that, but specifically Christian. My ex-girlfriend's disabled sister was very active in our church. She was the one who wanted to go to the camp meetings and all that type of stuff. She did nothing wrong.

She was the kind of person that if she tried to tell a lie her tongue would probably break off.

And I repeat, God does not work that way.

More to the point, sorry to be especially "Politically Incorrect" about things but I can tell you exactly what a guy with a name like "Forgiato Blow" would have got from basically everybody who wasn't some kind of politically correct liberal 30 or 35 years ago, and longer than that, it would've been worse! Probably the only people I knew who wouldn't have made fun of a first name that Italian would have been the Black people, and a last name like "Blow?" 

The jokes write themselves...and that's before you realize he sucks. Dude could (okay, just hypothetically speaking) have been good at something and back in the day people would've still been relentless. I ain't saying it's right, I'm saying that's how it was. You either rolled with the punches and gave back as good as you got (and probably got very tired of shitty people and tried not to be that way yourself, or you turned out to be a monster and ended up in jail) or you were considered a bitch and probably had to move away and change your name to make that shit stop.

I get that a lot of people thought they were doing the right thing changing the culture but the meanness just went online and if anything the bad people actually got worse due to lack of consequences and too many of the good people ended up in their own bubble and didn't start realizing they had to defend themselves until shit was already starting to get really bad. 

There's a reason I say bring back the ass whuppin.

You wouldn't have somebody like Andrew Tate or Elon Musk...certainly wouldn't have them being open about being how they are let alone famous...with the societal standards that I grew up with or the fact that they were backed with a little more force. Not to mention Trump was Tabloid fodder that pretty much everybody hated. I mean, come on.

I shouldn't even need to say this shit!

Instead, I saw Republican standards in particular decline throughout the 1990's and the Aughts while they bitched about moral relativism and situational ethics (even as they became the primary practitioners of that stuff) and ultimately way too many people reordered their moral universe to accommodate men like Donald Trump!

And along the way, they flushed everything else and turned our country into a moral and later literal swamp, and now they'd rather mythologize that crap than fix it. If they can get you hooked on the idea of Aphrodite springing fully formed from the seafoam it's easier to manipulate you into being the crab in the bucket pulling other crabs down so nobody gets out. They don't want sound doctrine, they want excuses.

Sorry, but way too many of these secular liberals didn't do shit about that. I hope that guys like James Talarico might be able to accomplish something, but clearly going high all the time doesn't work.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And sometimes, to defend freedom, you gotta get dirty.

But the idea is not to be a crab in a bucket, not to stay in the swamp. Sooner or later you have to reach for the stars.

But you have to get the small things right first. My partner and I had a conversation about that today because she's dealing with idiots at work. That's the part these fucking people don't understand.

And worse, they don't want to.

We get out of this mess, this crab bucket, and reach for the future Together.

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

Five

 [The Mandalorian brings together the entire Mandalorian covert after Carson Teva makes a surprise visit and asks him to help Greef Karga's situation on Nevarro when the New Republic won't lift a finger]

Mando: Now, many of you don't know Greef Karga. And those that do fought against him when you rescued me from his ambush many cycles ago on the streets of Nevarro. Since then, he's had a change of heart and has risked his life to save mine as well as the Foundling in my charge. [Grogu coos] I stand before you to petition an intervention. To help rescue Nevarro before it's too late. I am in no position to ask any more of you. However... However, the enemy that decimated this very covert were Imperials, not Greef Karga's bounty hunters. Greef Karga is now a High Magistrate and has offered me a tract of land on his independent world. Perhaps it is time for us to live in the light once again on a planet where we are welcome. So our culture may flourish and our children can feel what it is to play in the sunlight.

Armorer: Does anyone else wish to speak?

Mando: It's up to them now.

Paz Vizsla: I do. I was there on Nevarro that night. I fought against Greef Karga and his hunters. I saw my brothers and sisters fall at the hands of the Imperial butchers that hunted us in the sewers. I saw many die to save the life of [gestures to Grogu] this one, tiny Foundling. And now we are asked to sacrifice yet again. The question we should be asking ourselves is, "Why? Why should we lay our lives down yet again?" Because we are Mandalorians! I have had my disagreements with this man, but he risked his life to save my son. And Bo-Katan Kryze did not give up on my child's life even when the rest of us did. These two are asking us to take up arms in the name of a brighter future, and I for one will take up arms to fight by their side. [Mandalorians agree] This is the Way!

Mandalorians: This is the Way.

Armorer: This is the Way.

~From The Mandalorian S3.E5 "The Pirate."

Survivor: Republican Politics 2026 (Not Legends, Not Myths, Facts. Five.)

Daniel Plainview: I did what your brother couldn't. I broke you and I beat you. It was Paul who told me about you. He's the prophet. He's the smart one. He knew what was there. He found me to take it out of the ground. You know what the funny thing is? Listen, listen, listen! I paid him $10,000 cash in hand, just like that. He has his own company now — prosperous little business — three wells producing $5000 a week. Stop crying, you sniveling ass! Stop your nonsense! You're just the afterbirth, Eli —

Eli Sunday: No...

Daniel Plainview: — that slithered out in your mother's filth. They should have put you in a glass jar on a mantelpiece. Where were you when Paul was suckling at his mother's teat, eh? Where were you? Who was nursing you, poor Eli? One of Bandy's sows? That land has been had. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s gone, had.

Eli Sunday: If you would just —

Daniel Plainview: You lose.

Eli Sunday: — take this lease, Daniel!

Daniel Plainview: [yelling] Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy! Drained dry. I’m so sorry. Here: if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw — There it is. That's a straw, see? Watch it. Now my straw reaches across the room, and starts to drink your milkshake. I drink your milkshake! [slurping noise] I drink it up!

Eli Sunday: Don't bully me, Daniel!

Daniel Plainview: [throws Eli to the floor] Did you think your song and dance and your superstition would help you, Eli? I am the Third Revelation. I am whom the Lord has chosen. [throws bowling balls at Eli]

Eli Sunday: [dodging the bowling balls] Daniel!

Daniel Plainview: Because I'm smarter than you! I'm older!

Eli Sunday: I'm your old friend, Daniel! Help me! Help me, please!

Daniel Plainview: I'm not a false prophet, you sniveling boy! I am the Third Revelation! I am the Third Revelation! I told you I would eat you!

Eli Sunday: We're family!

Daniel Plainview: I told you I would eat you up!

~From the film There Will Be Blood.

...

Joe: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

Attorney General: "So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops.

Joe: Yes.

Attorney General: Water. Like out the toilet?

Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that's the idea.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Attorney General: It's got electrolytes.

Joe: Okay, look. The plants aren't growing, so I'm pretty sure that the Brawndo's not working. Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow.

Secretary of Energy: Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.

Secretary of State: Hey, that's good. You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world?

Joe: Okay, look. You want to solve this problem. I want to get my pardon. So why don't we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?

Attorney General: Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it's got electrolytes.

Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?

Secretary of State: It's what they use to make Brawndo.

~From the film Idiocracy.

I'm so tired of this crap.

RFK Jr. talking shit about Autistic people again, saying they won't work, go on dates, make art or even get to the bathroom on their own.

Excuse me? (Does this lady look like she can't take care of herself?)

My partner is Autistic, she works two jobs, she does art, she's never been a sports person but we played Pickleball a few times last summer if that counts. The Kiddo is Autistic, honor student, played sports last year, wants a job something fierce...and more than that, ferocity defines her. 

So what if she geeks out and hyper-focuses on Anime or video games once in awhile?! 

I'm sick of this garbage and I'm sick of these idiotic liars who are constantly talking shit about, for all intents and purposes, my family.

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.)

Note I say this as a former Republican. My partner is in the same boat. I mean, goddamn, how can you have any humanity and be a goddamned Republican at this point? These Fucking People have let Trump become their identity and take over their minds to the point where they're Okay with Trump (or anybody else) torturing kids??

It's all dishonest, it's all a lie. To call it a cult at this point is to understate the matter, unless you're calling it a Murder Cult like the cult of Moloch in ancient Carthage or the Thugees in India. These Fucking People want so very badly not only to discriminate against other people for no good reason, they want to pretty much create whole classes of people that they can do whatever they want to whenever they want. Like Orcs in some of the older D&D editions.

How "Christian" of them.

And if you haven't noticed there's a already a constant stream of sick shit coming out about *Checks Notes* These Fucking People. And there's a lot of these White, supposedly "Christian" freakish idiots who would let them torture even their own kids. Obviously, I have a problem with that.

And I'd have a big problem with that even if I didn't have a partner with a kid, come on.

It's called being human.

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 mean, the simple fact is a lot of these "Republicans" have forgotten what that word even means, and basically turned it into a cult of their own "Identity" which is itself largely founded in racism and simple ass being oppositional to Other People for no reason. I can't even talk the way these people talk.

And they're apparently expanding this cult shit. I mean, I could have told you years ago that Cory Booker was not a good guy, I just got that kind of vibe about him when I saw him on Roland Martin's show on CNN back in the day, but nobody wanted to listen at the time. He's butt-buddies with Peter Pan Theil. Stop and think about that for a second.

Cuz like it or not, you're probably looking at the list for the next Epstein Cult right here.

America needs an Elijah to call this Baal-worshiping bullshit out.

Sorry but I'm increasingly of the opinion that if you go to cocaine parties or get wrapped up in weird shit with creepy billionaires you not only shouldn't be in government or public life, you should probably be investigated like a common criminal. I want the bullshit stopped, the cliques and secret societies and weird shit broken up, term limits for everything, I don't give a shit if you're some bullshit-ass policy staffer or the Senate's fucking doorman.

And we have Representatives and Senators that have been in office until they died. Don Young represented Alaska for the entire first 45 years of my life. This should not be the case here. And Don Young isn't the worst one. Chuck Grassley has been in Iowa politics since 1958 and Federal politics since 1974. I was less than a year old when Chuck Grassley ran for office at the Federal level the first time and he was already middle-aged!

Nobody that's 92 years old and still has the values of 1958 or before needs to still be employed in 2026, much less be a Senator, dude should have retired 30 years ago...and easily could have.

America was not designed to have a noble or political class, let alone one full of demon-worshiping perverted murderers who keep trying to enslave everybody else!

And yes, that's exactly what all these attacks on women's rights are. I have a problem with this. Most of the people important to me at this point are women, because I'm a man and *I* pick the fucking Bear.

That's what all the eugenics crap and racism and rich people's secret "debate" society bullshit is.

If you're not there to do the job like it says on the side of the can, if you don't live where you represent, if you're just there to get rich or be buddy-buddy with rich weirdos...get the fuck out! Go work in the private sector. If you're older than the concept of the jet aircraft you should have to retire (and why you refused to quit should also be a subject of investigation. Call it ageist, I don't give a fuck, holding up progress is not a valid reason to do anything.) 

And if you're one of these freaks that, for all intents and purposes believes in Slavery? We had a war about this. You should be gone and so should everything your racist self-serving ass ever voted on. We'll start over without you and your creepy horseshit. Fuck You. And fuck these fucking people's voter-base that somehow thinks they're not on the list.

Because I'm here to tell you, White People, Republicans want to colonize and enslave you first, because you're the ones they haven't got to yet.

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

And however bad you think it is, it's worse.

Because while these people play their fuck-fuck games, steal money and try to enact their prejudices into law, they've let America go to shit. 

These fucking idiots have turned the reflecting pool in Washington DC into a rather green National Swamp that looks very little damned different from the lake in front of my Mom's house. 

More to the point it only took a couple weeks to go to shit and turn green. And too much of America thinks that crap is funny, somehow.

These assholes have turned a place at the supposed center of our national life into a fucking swamp.

The Holy Quran says it, "Pilgrimage to the House [of God built by the prophet Abraham] is a duty men owe to God; those who are able, make the journey." (3:97) Allah said: "And proclaim the pilgrimage among men; they will come to you on foot and upon each lean camel, they will come from every deep ravine" (22:27). Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun intermittently calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other. . . .That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. ~Malcolm X.

Too much of this shit ain't working and America is heading for, I believe, a Fyre Festival-like collapse if we don't turn things around, and quickly.

More to the point I think that's exactly what Republicans want to happen, so they can have a little banana republic somewhere and throw out all the people they don't like...which will in fact include a shit-ton of other Republicans.

There's a reason too many of these assholes saw shit like Survivor when "Reality TV" first appeared on scene in like 1999 and said "Ook! Ook!"

As I've said on here before I thought it was ungodly and wrong at the time.

My ex-wife watched that shit with an expression of absolute joy on her face. It was creepy, I still can't explain it.

Not legends, not myths, facts. I was there.

And they're already voting people off their own island. It'll be worse now.

You think the "Purity" Leftists were bad? You have no damned idea how much worse the Purity Republicans are gonna be.

Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from the D&D video game Planescape Torment

America was not intended to be a Cult.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And either you're gonna fight for it or you're not.

Pick a fucking side.

Слава Україна!

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."

Four

We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our Government has no power except that granted it by the people. ~Ronald Reagan.