The hairs on your arm will stand up, at the terror in each sip and in each sup...

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. ~Exodus 20:3-5

Did you ever read the comic "B.C." by Johnny Hart?

Back in 1998 or so, there was an excellent full color Sunday morning strip in the Detroit Free Press that I remember to this day.

It featured the bird (who usually rode on the top of the turtle's shell) and the turtle.

The bird asks the turtle "Do turtles believe in God?"

In the next panel, the turtle replies "Of course, Turtles gotta believe in God."

'Really?" the bird replies as he rides along on the turtle's back.

"Yep, the evidence is all around. The earth, the sky, the ocean, the stars. Even birds and turtles all were made by somebody."

The bird responds "That's an interesting answer" as they proceed.

The turtle comes back with "Yep. Believing in God is easy..."

In the second-to-last frame, they round a corner to find a caveman bowing down before an idol made of stacked stones and tree branches and stuff.

"...But that? That's hard." the turtle expounds confidently.

Now, granted at the time I was a conservative Christian, and my traumatic divorce and exit from that whole religious mess was several years in the future, but in a general sense, despite now being an Agnostic Theist, I still accept the core statement as valid.

The truth is often simple, and while empirical, literal, testable truth is not always evident in a logical or physical manner and must be searched out or tested for...spiritual truth is often the opposite, though at times more subjective. All too often people know what right and wrong in a given situation are, they just don't care, because we as Americans all too often think of ourselves as being smarter than everybody else...up to and including God.

Man makes things complicated because he does not want to obey what that often-simple Truth tells him.

Yes, you heard that correctly.

What do you think things like misogyny, racism, or any "Supremacist" ideology and some of these crazy political beliefs or various flavors of religious-sounding woo woo bullshit really are?

It's fallen, unregenerate sinful Man putting his opinion above that of God, and that's...if not provably wrong in an empirical sense...wrong on enough obvious levels that if you have the sense God gave a potato or the knowledge, you should be able to determine the rightness or wrongness of history of a Fifth-grader or the equivalent doctrinal and religious knowledge of that Fifth-grader in a Sunday School class...you should be able to figure it out for yourself.

You know, basic things like "Do I sound like a damned Nazi" or at least "Do I sound like a gibbering idiot?"

For example, consider Greg Piatek, proud member of the gibbering idiot category. Dude walks into a bar wearing a MAGA hat, and this being New York City, [he claims] nobody wants to serve him or talk to him. He claimed he felt discriminated against and now suffers from "Anxiety and severe emotional distress." Naturally, no one in the bar seems to remember the incident.

Just sayin' dude, you might want to talk to a lot of African Americans, Gay people, Latinos or Muslims in this country right now before you continue to say dumb shit.

As all too often happens in this country, what this guy functionally believes is "liberal democracy and rights for me, and jackboots for everybody else."

He claimed his "Make America Great Again" hat was a symbol of "Sincerely held religious belief."

Now I've been saying for awhile that These Fucking People are treating Trump like he's some sort of god since 2015. Whether it's Congressional Republicans, or Diamond & Silk, or Franklin Graham or some ignorant drug addict in Ohio...these people are literally taking the word of a known liar, long-time con-artist and serial adulterer with a very long history of over-promising and under-performing and an equally long record of stiffing contractors and supporters and leaving any who deal with him diminished for having done so as gospel including concerning a great many things about which the Orange One knows absolutely nothing.

These people have cheered and laughed as both he and they have set fire to every belief or value that American conservatism or Republicanism has ever claimed, and then they wonder why it's slowly slipping into discredit and disrepute, even as nearly everybody who's paying attention notes the pitchforks and the torches and the pissed off voters and a spate of Democratic victories in special elections that Republicans usually win due to low turnout and predicts big Republican losses in the 2018 midterm elections.

I find almost no commonality between the George H.W. Bush-era conservatism that I took as my original political philosophy...and this crap.

Now, somebody has entered their belief in Trump's godhood into court record, legal precedent, etc. etc. whether they actually believe it or not.

But see, here's the thing. Here in America our legal system isn't equipped or inclined to determine the truth of somebody's beliefs, but simply the facts of the case, as in what happened in the bar and whether it rises to the level of discrimination based on certain categories. His claims of being a religious Trumpist probably fall outside of that, as his is fundamentally a political rather than religious belief.

While the case will likely not be decided in his favor, his belief in Trump's "godhood" will be entered into the record without animosity or judgment, lest that prejudice the case or otherwise cause the government to be seen as discriminating...because that is legally actionable, and for damned good reasons even though his actual case is most likely going to get laughed out of court, for equally damned good reasons.

I believe the Afterlife probably isn't going to be so accommodating.

If somebody is dumb enough to believe that Donald Trump is their god, they deserve what they're going to get, and they deserve to get it good and hard.

That's the thing about truth, somebody's going to be right, and somebody's going to be wrong. That said, I think, to a great degree that God cares more about one's conduct than one's exact doctrinal or religious belief...but we are in part defined by who our friends are, by who and what we will follow or put our name to and whether our word is good or not.

But Trump? Come on now...

The road to hell...or the path to where the boat picks you up and you pay the ferryman...if you accept the belief in an Underworld that Jesus Himself would have at the time, is most certainly paved with "Sincerely held religious beliefs" that just happened to be wrong.

 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. ~Matthew 7:13-14

Only the best chicken farts.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!

That ever this should be!

Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs

Upon the slimy sea. ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner.

Well, it's been a hell of a weekend. It's safe to say that when I throw in the towel and go clean ferret cages for an hour just to clear the nastiness out of my brain by cleaning up ferret crap, things are fucked up.

 I'm talking about this, of course, it just broke a few hours ago that Micheal Cohen's other client was Sean Hannity. Judging from what I've seen since, somebody needs to take the shovel away from these two motherfuckers, they're already in a hell of a hole. They need to stop digging!

Between that and Trump's ham-handed attempts to distract from James Comey's interview and book release over the weekend, I think it's quite justified that the Syrians...people who've been blasting the shit out of each other and their own country for most of this decade so far, and who we just bombed in what might as well be called Operation Extreme Redundancy..are comparing us and our air- and missile-strikes and specifically our President (Who they call Abu Ivanka Al-Amiriki-that is, Father of Ivanka, The American) to chicken farts. 

This appears to be what the intellectual and moral fiber of American conservatism has come to....but never forget that non-voters and Third Party protest voters let this crap happen. Trump said he'd hire "Only the best people" and we'd all get the best of everything. Instead, Trump and his cronies and the Republicans are looting the country, cashing out and retiring and all we got was daily rage-Tweets and FOX News and only the best chicken farts.

Not only that, but apparently Trump warned the Russians, who warned the Syrians, who evacuated the targeted facilities, so basically we spent $240 MILLION to blow up some empty bunkers and rearrange the rubble on some Damascus streets into more pleasing patterns.

Yeah, Fuck these motherfuckers.

 Then of course, there was this little gem, some 72 year old Georgia woman assaulted two female US Army Soldiers, one of whom is African-American and pregnant, over some stupid thought that she (who isn't apparently handicapped, but she has the plate because her husband is, or something) should have got the handicapped parking space (Pregnancy, on the other hand, being a valid reason to have one of those things that hangs from the rear-view and that says you can use the space.) This lady and her dumb-ass supposedly adult son kept referring to these two ladies as lesbians (!) never mind that the one being pregnant probably would suggest otherwise... (I'm not saying it's not possible that an African American US Army Captain couldn't both be gay and want to have a kid, I'm just saying it's less likely...but in either case bear with me for a second)

...Am I the only one here who had the thought that "Lesbians" was probably not the word this dumb-ass redneck old biddy actually wanted to use? Like I said earlier on Facebook, Truman signed E.O. 9981 when this old bag was two years old. It's settled national policy. If she doesn't like the fact that a Black lady can be a Captain in the United States Army, Too. God. Damned. Bad. She can go piss up a rope. She's damned lucky, in my view, that she isn't facing more serious charges, in my state she would be. Not only that, but she's damned lucky she didn't get laid out like yesterday's laundry and end up facing more serious charges. The troop could've goddamned well busted her ass and had a 100% valid claim to self defense, Georgia be damned. That old bitch put her hands on a pregnant United States Army Officer. There's no county Prosecutor or Police Department even in Trump's America that'd risk the bad press they'd get from any other scenario. The Soldier's restraint in this case is admirable. If it'd been me, I'd have slapped her lips right off her face, and I'm normally very against hitting women. Racism is one of the few things I'll make an exception for.

As I've said many times here, the real problem with the Republican Party is the racist conservative voters. As I've said before, that makes it so that the fucking problem here is Republicans: (Note that this is painful for me to say, as I used to be one, back when being a Republican meant that you were...or could be...something other than a bigot. And there's damned few left to whom that label doesn't apply. I can remember when Bob Dole said the Racists knew where the exits were, and could get the hell out. Those days are long gone.)

Once again, these fucking idiots show that they have nothing but contempt for the military, unless the Troops in question are White hard-rightists, or unless the Armed Forces or Veterans can be trotted out for some dog-and-pony-show distraction like the Syria bombings last week or for a political dog-whistle or vendetta. I'm fucking serious, I'm sick of these motherfuckers and their hypocrisy.

If we had any person in the White House other than Donald Trump, Republican or otherwise, I'll still bet you money that this old bag's response to these women would have been nothing more than "Thank you for your service, Ma'am, have a nice day." Trump has contempt for both the Military and People of Color, so apparently that makes it OK for old-ass white people to be assholes, too.

But please, by all means, remember that this is how these fucking people want to see themselves, and the President. It's demonstrably not true. I saw it with my own eyes when Trump got up there on CNN back in 2015 and said in front of the whole damned world that he didn't think he needed God's forgiveness. But apparently Franklin Graham is either legally blind or conveniently forgetful. These motherfuckers are so desperate to see him as a reflection of what they think themselves to be in the short term that they'll piss away any credibility they may have left in the long term in order to do it. It may be convenient to believe the comforting lies, but the road to hell is paved with comforting lies and confirmation biases and convenient political amnesia.

In my lifetime, the Republican Party has gone from Morning in America and "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" to being compared to chicken farts as a measure for its weakness, by the very people that we just bombed, and despite the fact that it currently controls our government.

I find it an apt comparison, and have resolved never to get into a contest of insults with any Syrians I may encounter.

As for Republicans? Fuck these motherfuckers.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. ~Romans 1:22 (KJV)

Go ahead, look the rest of the chapter up for yourselves. I think you may find it an apt commentary on the state of America...and no, I'm not talking about the gay people when I say that. I'm specifically talking about the conservatives.

Resistance Is Futile?

We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. ~Locutus of Borg, Star Trek: The Next Generation

So, as of yesterday, Paul Ryan is out. He's announced that he's not going to run for reelection. Given that for maybe the first time in his career he'd have been facing a tough campaign, most likely against Union iron-worker Randy Bryce (although the Democratic primary in the district is months away, yet) for basically the first time in his career, I'm not sure I can blame him. That Eddie Munster-looking motherfucker has all the charisma of a well-worn copy of Atlas Shrugged, and in this political climate I'm not sure that, nor all the Koch Brothers' money, nor all the Wisconsin GOP's dirty tricks would be enough to save him, with that in mind.

But, there's another major factor at work here.

Republicans. Specifically, Republican voters.

Also, with a side of nutty House Republicans.

Ginny Thomas, the wife of SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas, recently shared a meme that said "Donald Trump was caught in the company of two prostitutes." The picture, of course, showed Trump sitting with Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan, who in 2011-2012 famously put Ayn Rand back in the radar range of American popular culture and was memorably eviscerated for it, directly by Rachel Maddow, less directly by Chuck Colson. Paul Ryan, who has done more than damned near anybody to solidify what the Republican Party...at the Congressional level, at least...really stands for. Paul Ryan, the dead-eyed Granny Starver, fanatical Ayn Rand devotee, and yes, Conservative Catholic...that last being a trait shared with Mrs. Thomas.

Paul Ryan, who got steamrolled by Trump and his Supporters just like everybody else with an (R) next to their name and who, like almost all of the rest of them, suddenly discovered that his spine had been surgically removed. Not only that, but a certain percentage of House Republicans to his Right (!) wanted to get rid of him for not being supportive enough of Donald Trump. So yeah...

Enjoy your retirement, asshole.

So far, Paul Nehlen, the Nazi motherfucker who I've written about before, is the only alternative to Ryan that has presented itself thus far. Nobody else that I'm aware of as a prospective replacement for Ryan in his district has even close to any kind of following or name recognition. The Wisconsin GOP has said they will refuse to back him. What do you want to bet, that's going to change? Initially, they didn't back Trump either, and nobody thought he could win the Primary, or they thought he'd get killed in the General Election. My bet is the Wisconsin GOP will support the goddamned Nazi, whether they do it openly and enthusiastically or simply follow the Illinois model and do so tacitly by allowing him to run and then distancing himself when he won the primary...but you notice they're not taking any steps to do anything about this mess.

Let me tell you a story:

My journey out of conservative Christianity began, naturally, with my marriage to and ensuing divorce from my ex-wife, and of course with questioning the path I'd been on since the mid-1990's as a result. The adoption of more theologically-liberal views, and the study of other aspects of Christianity and other religions followed swiftly...life experience had already provided me with a basic familiarity with Islam years before, and just from dealing with people, I'd learned more about Agnosticism, Atheism, various forms of Paganism and Satanism. This process of learning was well underway by the time I moved to this area (and moved in with my girlfriend, Angie, and her family) in June of 2003.

 That August, I'd found myself with extra time on my hands because we'd both quit working for the shitty property management company we worked for (She was an apartment complex manager and I was a maintenance man.) So, besides looking for a job, I was mostly spending a lot of time on the computer. I posted a lot on several message boards...the social media of the day. A couple of them were gaming-related, a couple of them were religious in nature and one was a science-fiction/fantasy board. One day, I was on Christian Forums AKA ChristianBBS and some nut named Dominic from California...AKA Sola Gratia (Latin for "Faith alone") one of the board's Calvinists, and a serious homophobic nut...posts a very fire-and-brimstone thread literally advocating the burning of homosexuals.

To their credit, the vast majority of the board's assorted posters (a mix of Christians of various types and some trolling Atheists) were horrified...but there were a few "Amen" type comments and a couple more people who actively backed him and egged him on. The shit turned into literally a week-long argument and eventually admins were notified and they only grudgingly...due to multiple terms-of-service violations on this guy's part and since he'd directly threatened at least one LGBT board member and several people knew him and knew where he lived, threats to go straight to the local police...did something about it and locked down the thread, although they never followed through on a pledge to ban him.

Me? I spent that week trying to talk some sense into the guy, trying to talk him down. That right there was a real education in how utterly shitheaded some people can be. I'm not kidding when I say that some of these fucking religious nuts think about gay people more than gay people do.

ChristianBBS was infamous at the time among those who'd had issues with Christian Fundamentalists, the place was not well run, although a couple of the admins tried. Most of the time it was a flaming shit-show of conspiracy theories, homophobia, religious woo without much basis in Scripture, and toward the end, various anti-Muslim bullshit. I found a different board to post on, and a decent number of people followed me there, including one of Sola Gratia's actual, real-world neighbors. According to that neighbor, Dominic beat up a gay dude a couple months after that, and went to prison for assault. By that time, I'd gotten another job, and eventually I dropped off from posting on all those message boards, so I don't know what happened with any of these people after that. Eventually ChristianBBS got bought out by another website, and basically nobody cared.

That site, and the nuts who infested it, had burned that many people.

But, what I learned from that whole experience, is that once you give nuts a platform, eventually that's all you're going to have is rabid nuts, because they'll run everybody else out, and once you become known for openly or tacitly supporting the nuts you're going to get a lot more nuts. You cannot reason with unreasonable people.

Sounds an awful lot like the last 20 years or so of the history of the Republican Party, doesn't it? The Republicans both encouraged and profited from the same exact kinds of extremism, and now things are so screwed up that they have actual Nazis running for office on their ticket.

I spent my last couple of years that I identified as a Christian doing the best I could to fight against the crazy bullshit, before I left in frustration and became an Agnostic Theist in 2006. I spent a couple more years as a Republican, basically doing the same thing while the crazy got worse and worse. Eventually, I had to chew out the by-then former girlfriend over a "Birther" chain E-mail, and though we communicated for many more years, I don't think she ever sent something like that around again. She wasn't insane, or a racist, but ya know, some of the people that she knew were...and she tolerated them being that way.

Needless to say, that's how you end up with a lot more racist nuts.

Eventually, I would spend several years as a staff member on an ex-Pentecostal forum, until I basically was the last functioning staff member. The lessons I'd previously learned would serve me well there and we helped a lot of people start to find their way back to sanity.

So no, resistance is not futile. It just ends up being a lot of work.

More work than a lot of Republicans want to do, apparently, even those who will privately complain about Trump. A record number of Republicans have already quit or are simply not running for reelection.

I can't say I'm sorry to see them go, and to be quite honest I hope that the Republicans lose their ass in the midterm elections in November. All indications seem to point to that being the case, not least of all Trump doing his level best to make it All About Him even though he is very unpopular.

Meanwhile, the situation has now claimed Paul Ryan. If he's out, no Republican is safe.

Make sure you vote, this November, and vote Democrat if you want to continue to live in a free and democratic America that isn't some other country's bitch.

Get out and vote, like your life depends on it, because it just might...

By Any Means Necessary.

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

As I've mentioned here and there, I work in a casino. Specifically, it's a casino owned by a Native American tribe. At work this morning, toward the end of the shift I was talking to a friend of mine, Ashley, who is part Native. She mentioned she was having issues with this younger girl in a discussion class on Native American issues that she's taking. Now, mind you, she said this is a discussion-class, where the whole point is to talk about stuff. Ashley said this young girl makes a point of rolling her eyes and sighing dramatically whenever she speaks. Now mind you, Ashley is extremely well-informed about Native issues, she stays current on top of having numerous books about various subjects, and she generally always has been pretty well informed, overall.

She said this other girl takes a strongly pro-US government stance...claiming that Indian Boarding Schools (which were notorious for abuse and for attempting to eradicate Native culture and language) were good for Native Americans...and that the Trail of Tears (a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Eastern Native American tribes involving forced relocation to what is now Oklahoma, from 1831 to 1850) was voluntary...to which my first response was "What...Are you kidding me?" As I immediately pointed out, I went to Christian schools and a shitty public high school and I knew better than that...by the time I was like, ten.

My mind of course, also immediately flashed to all the shitty efforts to rewrite history in places like Texas, and how that State's board of education is dominated by Fundamentalist nuts who mostly have no background in education. People like this girl in my friend's class are the result of that crap.

But ya know, that's not the only vector for this disease.

There's also people like Mark Robinson, a Black Republican city councilman from North Carolina who apparently is the new popular guy on Fox News and shit. (And what is it with these people trying to claim that Michelle Obama...a beautiful woman with two beautiful daughters who look like their parents...is a man? Not just that, but those two have been married long enough that their relationship and family predate marriage equality or even the serious push for it by a number of years...just sayin.') It's people like Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson and all these Republicans and Trump nuts who get up there on these TV shows and lie their asses off as if God, Karma, the Ten Commandments and their unpopularity with the majority of the public were somehow not real things. It's all these people scuttling to cash out now before the worried-about "Blue Wave" hits and they may have to worry about being thrown out of office...as if money is the most important thing in the world.

I was taught that lying is wrong. I was taught not to lie, and in the course of learning that lesson I got an ass whuppin' or two. I remember at least one in particular that was for that reason. I was taught not to lie by people who were, functionally, conservatives at least at the time.

What the fuck happened?

I don't have an answer, I'm asking You. 

I, having been raised conservative, would no more think to say that Michelle Obama was a man or that the Trail of Tears was voluntary (nor to repeat any of the countless other conspiracy theories and lies these people have foisted on the public) than I would think to say that the Moon is made of green cheese or the Sun revolves around the Earth or that said Earth is flat. The vast majority of this stuff is demonstrably false, and the rest can be proven so with just a little work. In a world where we all have vast amounts of information at our fingertips as close as our cell phones or the nearest computer...there's no excuse for this crap, None.

There's even less excuse for the one of the same white conservative dudes who claim to be so rabidly against homosexuality, pedophilia and sexual abuse (unless it's done by one of their own, I guess) to be ranting about sodomizing a (male, by the way) high school student with an object. Sorry if it sounds crude (although, no, I don't actually give a shit if it offends anybody) but there was a time when if a dude was ranting about sticking things up another dude's ass, his sexuality might just be questioned...by which I mean likely fists first, questions later because there was a time where conservatives were a lot more numerous, less crazy and more consistent about what they considered to be perversion. I mean, yeah I'm old but there was a time when talking like that on TV wouldn't just cost you that TV job, it'd mean you'd be lucky to ever work again. I know of incidents like that from when I was a kid where somebody would say something stupid or threaten somebody (although I can't remember anything quite that bad) and then they'd get fired from their job and have to move out of the neighborhood. 

I suppose things like that could be said form behind a pointy white hood, or maybe a gun and a ski mask, but I digress. There was a time when being a criminal meant you wouldn't be accepted by conservatives, and being found to be a white supremacist meant people would think you were a loser and might just beat you up for it, but I digress again. Fuck, I can remember when being against something like threatening a kid with sexual abuse wasn't just a liberal idea and when even (perhaps especially) a conservative-owned TV station wouldn't wait for public pressure to fire the asshole who said it.

Like I've been saying, in the last few years I've been watching these fucking people basically set every belief or value that they ever claimed to have on fire, mostly for Donald Trump. What, if anything, are they hoping to get out of this? What's even the possible endgame here? I ask this, because none of the current trends nor conservatives' nor Trump's levels of public support or trust seem conducive to achieving those goals...or maybe they were just that incompetent at trying it, It's hard to say when I'm not flexible enough to try to fit my head up my own ass so that I might be able to better see these people's point of view:

This Tweet got me thinking; What these right-wingers want is to break down Rule of Law, and our existing Constitution and Federal system so that they can bring back things like "Manifest Destiny" and Segregation...and try to shoot down the government and their neighbors while they're at it. No, it never occurs to these assholes that the liberals down the street have guns and would shoot back, nor that the government has more firepower than they could ever dream of having, or afford or maintain in a million years of trying. Yes, to a great degree these fucking people appear to be willing to give up damned near anything, including America's global power and place in the world and status as a First World nation...or even their own families, futures, and kids in order to get it. What they want, is impunity to do whatever fucked up stupid things they want. What they want...and why they prop up Dictator-wannabe Trump...is because these fools dream of being millions of little petty dictators...as if our country would ever survive such a setup. All these conservative white men think they'd get to be the local warlord...when the truth is that what most of them would get is dead, and in fairly short order...more likely from bad water or from starvation than from bullets or bombs or cannon shells or missiles.

Conservatives in general, and a decent percentage of conservative white men in particular, have lost the plot. They have, all too often with malice aforethought, refused to deal with a changing society and a changing world, and now...despite having somebody who they think is "one of their own" in the White House (Spoiler: He isn't.) they're continuing to lose their ass due to their own bad choices, and it's actually getting worse, because they think Trump is somehow going to protect them or give them something better.

He couldn't even protect his own lawyer, what makes anybody else think he will protect...or gives a fuck about...them?

Consider for example, these Illinois farmers. While farmers in most of the rest of the country are hella pissed off, worried about losing NAFTA and worried about getting hit by Chinese tariffs, these idiots are comparing themselves to the Founding Fathers of the United States! Talk about deluded, self-important assholes, my God. What in the hell is wrong with these fucking people?

This right here is the problem, all these people think they're going to be big damned heroes and shoot down the government. (How that works when the fire from their AR-15's is answered with 30mm Bushmaster II cannon shells, 120mm H.E. rounds from Abrams tanks, and Hellfire missiles, I'm not sure, but you can't convince them of this basic reality.) The last guy in particular really gets to me, because while there are various legends stating that most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence lost their ass in the ensuing years, the truth is most did not, and in fact most ended up in public service. Only seven of them came to bad ends, most due to their own actions, bad business deals, etc. and in a couple of cases acts that could well have been considered treasonous. The Founders were the elites of their time, and then as now most elites will remain elites short of major national calamity.

The farmers? They're expendable targets in the never-ending search for Republican vainglory.

We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

— Malcolm X, 1965

The tragedy of America is that so many people want this only for themselves.

I was taught differently. I remember singing this song as a little kid in the Baptist school, it was written by a man who had "This machine kills fascists" written on his guitar, and who served in the U.S. Merchant Marine (in so doing surviving his ship being torpedoed) and later in the U.S. Army, so that he could say such a thing. Funny enough, he had his own bad dealings with the Trump family...

This land is your land, this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
I saw above me that endless skyway
And saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me

I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me , a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling
In the wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me

This land is your land and this land is my land
From the California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land was made for you and me

When the sun comes shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling
The voice come chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me.

~Woody Guthrie

That's the vision we all must stand up for, by any means necessary.  

Killing the Buddha.

It became necessary to destroy the town to save it', a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong. ~Peter Arnett, Associated Press war correspondent.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!

I first became familiar with this ancient Buddhist koan many years ago. In some versions there's a sort of a short story that goes with it, in which a younger Monk comes to the Master, excitedly saying that he has met Buddha on the road. The Master, of course, replies "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" The idea being that it's not truly the Buddha that the young monk met, but rather a reflection of his own desires, which must of course be overcome if one is to proceed on the path to enlightenment.

When I first became familiar with this Koan I was a conservative, we'll get back to that in a minute.

In case you don't recognize it, the picture above is the gigantic niche in the side of an Afghan mountain where the taller of the two ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan once stood. These two gigantic sculptures were built in the 5th and 6th centuries C.E. in the valley of Bamiyan which was then a Buddhist religious center along the Silk Road. The Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban, who considered them idols, in March of 2001 despite worldwide condemnation of this action and numerous diplomatic attempts by foreign governments to prevent the destruction. At the time, this was considered a worldwide symbol of fanaticism and religious intolerance. I was very against it, and in fact wrote a paper about this in a college class that I was taking at the time.

I was a conservative, and not only that but a conservative Christian at the time as well, though thanks to the fact that my ex-wife and I were in the process of splitting up at the time, I'd soon begin my journey out of that mess.

Based on my life experience, I would argue that much of the destructiveness of Man, particularly (in Christian terms) Sinful unregenerate Man (That is, Man who refuses to accept-or falsely claims to accept- God, or more particularly Jesus Christ and the redemption from Sin or 'regeneration' that this acceptance provides...according to doctrine at least...) most often comes from ignoring reality and indeed, most often ignoring beliefs, doctrines and facts that are well known to the person in favor of what they want to believe is true or what their carnal flesh, that is, their human nature that is still consumed with Sin, wants. This is why the Buddhists teach "Kill the Buddha" and why the very First Commandment is "Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me" and thus Christianity, Islam, Judaism and all the offshoots thereof strictly prohibit idolatry. It's also why in the terms of my former conservative Christianity, Believers are exhorted to let their old selves go, to "Die to self" and pick up their Cross and follow [the ways of] Jesus.

Of course, because this is America and the most common metrics by which one's Christianity are often measured are Man's Approval and public religiosity, in practice, most Christian public figures are anything but. This also tends to apply heavily in politics, and as I used to always say when arguing with my ex-wife, I'd spend an hour arguing with her only to waste 58 minutes of that time and in the last two I'd find out what it was that she really wanted.

Why do I bring this up?

Because among other things, the Trump-loving nihilism of the modern American conservative would, if unconstrained by laws such as the Posse Comitatus Act, send American troops into action against basically nothing at best, and have them kill unarmed men, women and children whose only infraction against anything is a desire for a better life...this when the troops are already over-deployed, over-stressed, often under-trained as maritime accidents involving the United States Navy keep bearing out. What it basically comes down to is Trump isn't getting his wall and wants some sort of stupid monument to his own bottomless insecurities and damned vanity, even if that "monument" is dead brown kids in the Sonora Desert. Never mind that undocumented border crossings are at a 46-year low, and never mind that basically nobody but Trump wants this, and never mind that there's no funding, no mission, no objectives, no plan, no rules of engagement and nobody even knows if the Soldiers would be armed or not, at this point. Legally, the military cannot be used to enforce the law on U.S. soil without specific acts of Congress authorizing for this to be the case, and any such missions taken without this must be carefully defined, with extremely strict rules of engagement, such as suppressing acts of armed rebellion or other civil disorder.

Far-rightist fantasies about machine-gunning undocumented immigrants or protesters be damned, it simply cannot legally be done. Perhaps more to the point, in a heavily-armed, litigious and politically reactive society like the United States of America, such acts would very likely create a legal and political firestorm that nobody could put out, least of all Trump and his team of LegalZoom lawyers or the incompetent nuts that make up today's Republican party. Perhaps more to the point, chances are excellent that one hell of a lot of us might not survive it, either, and you can bet your ass that the majority of casualties would not be People of Color, because most gun violence happens within each race and usually within the same social groups, which all of the shooters are usually part of.

Go ahead, look at the militia nuts and the Nazis and especially the Sovereign Citizens, hell, look at your average bunch of dumb-ass Libertarians and you go ahead and tell me that, given their chance to shoot it out with all and sundry, these motherfuckers wouldn't spend a disproportionate amount of time shooting at each other and those conservatives who they consider to be insufficiently conservative. I'll wait.

Hell, look at the over-dramatic soup sandwich that is the Trump White House and see if you can tell me that either an attempt to seize power as a dictatorship, or any effort to counter a political or violent revolution from any quarter whatever wouldn't turn into a ham-handed, blood-soaked failure in a matter of days, if you can. The motherfuckers are about to send Army National Guard troops out into the desert, basically to stare at nothing through their field glasses for hours at a time, for months on end, with no real reason for it. There is no enemy, and no threat, and yet this will be an expensive failure simply because there is no endgame and no objective other than to make Tang the Conqueror feel better about himself since the Mueller investigation is still chugging along, the trade war isn't working out, and his popularity is underwater...again.

In effect, those professional sayers of stupid shit, the cast and crew of Fox & Friends, are the ones running the country...because Trump sure isn't. The man is an idiot with the leadership skills of a German Brown Cockroach. But goddamn, he sure spends a lot of time watching TV. 

My God, though, these self-righteous hypocrites never waste an opportunity to try and look righteous, all the better if they can appropriate the work of others to do so and don't have to do one single goddamned thing themselves. At least Trump has the superficial defense of possibly having Dementia, personality disorders, senility, etc. What in the fuck is this guy's excuse?

It's not just Trump. This is the modern Republican Party. The very same people who'd retroactively give Abe Lincoln the boot, and replace him with Jefferson Davis if they could. These are the people who think that Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush (Both of 'em) basically are commie liberals AKA Republicans In Name Only at this point. Hell, criticize Trump one time, or fail at his crazy, unrealistic and very much destined for failure policies and you're out.

American Conservatism has effectively reached the point where it's gone too far and can no longer sustain itself.

The Trump/Pence administration is perpetually the "The Dog Ate My Homework" administration and deserves to be known as such in perpetuity.

They're also the "Look at me, LOOK AT ME! Look at ME and how holy *I* Am" administration, or possibly the "Loud obnoxious idiot who just has to be seen giving the whole world nothing but an upraised middle finger" administration, depending on who's speaking.

For all that, I'm starting to think their followers are worse. Here is Hollywood F-lister and shitty stand-up comedian Owen Benjamin (who is evidently a Libertarian and a Trump Supporter but yet likes to spend a lot of time talking about the pubic hair of other men) talking stupid in the general direction of David Hogg on Twitter. I'm fucking tired of these people, hundreds or thousands of them pop up every single time there's some kind of a shooting and I'm getting fucking tired of it.

These people would rather shoot down the future, and would rather destroy our educational system, and denigrate the young than accept some very basic regulations on firearms that pale in comparison to what citizens in most other First World nations...including heavily militarized States like Israel...have to deal with.

Why?

You can boil modern Republicanism down to two words: "Fuck You." My friend Jay suggested I should have added "...Pay Me" where I said this in my last post, except that he missed the point that to these idiots the "Fuck You" for the politicians as much as the base, is itself the payoff. We're not talking about people who can think far enough ahead to have a plan to get paid, if you're somebody like Scott Pruitt, you just get lost down a graft rabbit hole of your own making, to the point where it looks like Trump, of all fucking people, is considering firing him.

But make no mistake, corruption is exactly what a lot of these people...most especially the base...signed up for. They just thought the rest of us would join in, or go away somehow or something something gazpacho. In other words, they thought they were going to get away with it.

Now that they're not, they're mad. Now that it looks like their politicians are going to be held to account and little by little, the voters already are facing consequences (some recently engineered by said politicians) it's all a big let-down and funny enough, the anti-government talk is starting again, not that it really ever died down much.

Why? Because conservatism itself has been thrown out the window. All these people care about is hate and racism. They've set fire to literally everything else they've ever claimed in the last year.

Like I keep saying, it's a wonder there aren't more of these people getting fucked up on Opioids all the time.

Then there's this fucking guy, right here. Scott Walker was in full panic mode yesterday after the election of Rebecca Dallet, the Democratic-backed liberal candidate, to the Wisconsin Supreme Court the other day. GOOD! These motherfuckers should be worried, because people are pissed off. In a (small-L) liberal (small-d) democratic society...NO elected seat should ever be considered safe, and the electorate should damned well be prepared to hold their elected officials to account at all times.

Like I've been saying, it never seems to cross their minds not to be complete dicks to basically everybody. They keep sowing the wind with this behavior, they need to reap the whirlwind.

The thing that gets me about Walker's Tweet, though, is the "Optimism and organization" part. "Tell your story?" Has he not been paying attention to the story his own damned party has been telling for the last 20 years, and most especially for the last three, with Trump?

Optimism? From Republicans? I'm just not seeing it.

These people are preparing to try to burn America down, because they're finding out that Trump conned them and their own ideas they've thought were so great for so long don't actually work, and they've mostly been finding out the worst of this in the last couple of weeks.

Look, I'm divorced, OK? I know what it is to have to overcome illusions, to find out that everything you ever believed about something was nothing but a hologram. It can be done, it can be done without losing one's conservatism, I did it. Why can't you?

Here's a knife, Scott, now go out there and stab that Buddha...

It's for your own good. To become what we can be, we often must overcome the things we think we should be.

A soldier named Nobushige came to Hakuin and asked "Is there really a paradise and a hell?"
Who are you? Hakuin asked
"I am Samurai" Nobushige replied.
"You? a Soldier? What kind of ruler would have you as his guard? You look like a beggar!"
Nobushige became very angry and began to draw his sword. Hakuin continued "So, you have a sword? Your weapon is probably too dull to cut off my head!"
As Nobushige drew his sword, Hakuin boomed "Here open the gates of Hell."
Understanding the Master's discipline, Nobushige sheathed his sword and bowed.
"Here open the gates of paradise" said Hakuin.

Listen, ya'll. I remember when the first MacDonald's opened up in Moscow in the summer of 1991. Clown shoes went where Boots on the ground never could. I think there is a lesson in that. Peace is better than war, and if your ego or your religion requires dead kids in the desert for you to feel good about yourself, you need a mental health professional or a new religion, full stop. As imperfect as they often are, know that the rules we make for our diplomacy, our trade, and even our use of force are not for others, but for ourselves, so that we do not become monsters. Being better than Al Qaeda or Daesh or the Taliban means we have to act as a better people, even when it's hard. If you want to defeat terrorism, do not allow yourself to be terrorized.

If you do not want to live in fear, stop allowing yourself to be afraid.

We're all human beings, and when they fought us, the Taliban thought of us as the evil Empire, and of themselves as being Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. No, we don't all get to be the "good guys" and we don't all get to be right. But we should understand that most people see themselves as being the good guys, if not as being right. Most of us, anyway, are just trying to do the best we can with what we've got. Right now there's a lot of bad actors out there...but there's more of us than there are of them and don't you forget it.

Until more people abandon nihilism and selfishness and trying to destroy the world to save it for their politics or their small-minded shitty interpretations of God and then come to understand compassion, that's the only defense we're ever gonna have.

So stab that Buddha, and just keep walking. The road is hard, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Part 2.

It's got electrolytes (Part 2.)

Joe: Why me? Every time Metzler says, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way," I get out of the way.

Sgt. Keller: Yeah, when he says that, you're not supposed to choose "get out of the way." It's supposed to embarrass you into leading, or at least following.

Joe: That doesn't embarrass me. ~Idiocracy.

"P.O." Leaders don't have a clue? Listen here, you moldy orange nutsack, YOU'RE THE PRESIDENT. If you don't like what the Post Office is doing, you squirrel-wearing dickbag, it's YOUR GOD. DAMNED. JOB. To get on the phone, call up the Postmaster General (That's Meghan Brennan, appointed in 2015) and tell her what's up. Also, with the exception of U.S. Postal Inspectors (Armed, certified Federal Law Enforcement Officers) the Federal government and the U.S. Tax-payer don't pay for SHIT except in the context of going to the motherfucking post office and buying packaging or stamps or using various provided services. The Post Office is a government-owned corporation, it's everybody's delivery boy, and that's it's goddamned job.

Perhaps the Orange Assclown would be better understood in this context: If you don't smoke Tarrlytons... Fuck you!

If you buy from Amazon, Fuck You! If you read the Washington Post, Fuck You! If you think I shouldn't childishly mess with the economy over the fact that Jeff Bezos owns the Post and it criticizes me, Fuck You! If you didn't vote for me, Fuck You!

Actually, I think it could safely be said at this point that Trump's entire stated government policy is, indeed, Fuck You!

Listen, The world runs on money. I'm not a terribly huge fan of this, but it is a fact. The purpose of money is to serve as a medium of exchange for debts both public and private for the general public as well as the State, so in turn this serves as a medium of exchange between nations (and we'll get to that a bit more down the line, too.) I like money on some level, I suppose, and generally support regulated capitalism. The purpose of money is not "Something to be dumped in vast quantities into the pockets of one Donald J. Trump, and you know what, dude? The day Trump Adulation is something that the world runs on will also be the day pigs fly, my ex-wife gets a job, and you have a big dick. I'm fucking sorry, dude, but my ferrets have a better understanding of economics than you do and I'm pretty sure they'd be better at running the country and they might even listen to their advisers (and I'm taking into account the fact that several of my ferrets are, indeed, completely deaf.)

Also, I just saw this on my Facebook, on the "Angry Democrat" page. Yes, I think you could make the argument, easily, that these fools are crashing the economy so they can sell off stock, and then buy it back. Crash the economy and our government, and try to make money off of the crash. Also, if you think this will somehow benefit you, you're an idiot. There isn't one damn person that any of these Trump motherfuckers care about except for themselves, on an individual basis. No, they do not care about each other. No, they do not care if they survive this, or what happens after. All any of these idiots care about is the next day's stock prices, the next quarter, and in Trump's case the next poll and how he imagines his "ratings" are doing. If he has to crash the United States of America, not to mention the Republican Party in order to feel good about his monstrously insecure self, he'll fucking do it. 

Where does that leave you and me? 

I'll tell you one thing, tariffs and trade wars, or worries about such have already jacked up the price of pet foods a bit. Did I mention that Orijen (the pet food I'm buying nowadays) is a Canadian company? If you think this influences my (despite living in Michigan, which suffered from the arrangement back in the 1990's) favorable opinion of NAFTA at this point, you'd be right.

It leaves me wondering if I'm going to be paying $9 for a toilet brush at Wal-Mart before this is over...and if you think that won't adversely effect them and their capability to keep stores open in a situation where people are already saying bricks-and-mortar retail is going to be the next big bubble to pop. This is why companies like Amazon, and things like net neutrality for those companies to function, are very important. No matter what happens, people are going to need groceries and pet food and toilet paper.

It's left me, more than one time, wondering if I'm going to end my days with my shotgun in my hands, defending my house from hungry people who want to eat my dog and my ferrets, not out of malice but simply because civilization has collapsed and they're starving. If you doubt me, concerning how civil war and societal collapse works out, I suggest you get a second opinion from the cat population in Aleppo, Syria. That is, if you can find any cats. The God & Guns, shoot-all-the-non-whites-and/or-bait-the-Jesus-Trap Christian Homeschooling Creationism-inspired fantasies of the gun nuts, the militia nuts and the NRA are just that, fantasy. For most people they'll end like a typical game of The Oregon Trail: You Have Died Of Dysentery.

If you think Trump and the Republicans give a shit about you, you're wrong, unless you happen to have a billion dollars or so in the bank and you give some of it to them and you hold the "right" political views, whatever that means at the time.

As of right now, Republicans in the House and Senate fear a Democratic wave that will sweep many of them from office in November. More sober analysts feel that there's going to be a wave, but they're not sure what color it will be...only that it's probably not going to benefit Trump...and long-term, political change is likely to not benefit the Democrats, either, but in the short term it's going to be horrible for the Republicans.

It simply never occurs to these Republican motherfuckers that the most obvious solution is probably NOT to be total dicks to basically everybody. In point of fact, judging from the number of Republicans declining to run for re-election...or in the words of Bob Corker "Cashing out" they're hoping if they're not in office when the Mueller investigation and/or the public get back to the Sulaco and nuke the site from orbit (It's the only way to be sure) that the political will to prosecute will be lacking.

We have to make sure it isn't, and start holding these motherfuckers to account. These are the people who think that Marie Antoinette was too liberal for (allegedly) saying "Let them eat cake." They'd rather we all shoot each other or starve to death than faithfully execute the responsibilities that they swore to when they took that oath.

With these Republicans it's more like "Let them drink Brawndo" and Brawndo doesn't exist.

When you elect people to government whose word isn't worth shit, you can damned well expect your government and ultimately your country aren't going to be worth shit as a result.

Take some time and think about that before November, will ya?

Part 1