No Hiding Place Down Here.

There's no hidin' place down here
You know, there's no hidin' place down here
I went to the rock to hide my face
But the rock cried out, no, no hiding place down here

I wanna tell you that there's no hiding place down here
Don't you know there's no hiding place down here?
Yeah, I went to the rock to hide my face But the rock cried out, no, no hiding place down here.

~African American Spiritual

I saw this last night.

Apparently, somebody at the White House called somebody at 7th Fleet and asked if the USS John S. McCain could be moved, or its nameplates covered up, or something, so that Trump didn't see it and become upset during his trip to Japan. Apparently, somebody, some Admiral or other, was perfectly fine with this. The ship is under repair and cannot be moved, so they covered up the nameplate and parked a barge in the way and gave the crew the day off.

I have to wonder how that affected fleet morale, while I'm at it.

Now, if I have to explain to you why something like this is wrong, you'll never get it and as far as I'm concerned you've failed as a human being and as an American...and I sure as fuck wasn't no Admiral.

The correct response to what in all respects was an unlawful order (or request, or whatever),\ was "Fuck you, Sir." Not least because the ship is, in fact, named for John McCain's grandfather and father, both Navy admirals. The eponymous late Senator was only added to the ship's naming shortly before his death...as well he had a right to be as far as I'm concerned. And I didn't vote for the guy, often didn't agree with his politics, and in fact I was damned near done with being a Republican by the time he was even nominated. Like him or not, he was a prisoner of war, a war hero, a long-serving Representative and then Senator, and ultimately a presidential candidate for my former party. That deserves a certain amount of official respect, not least of all within the Navy in which he served, and this should transcend petty politics and the volatile moods of the current occupant of the White House in all cases.

Or we aren't the people we say we are.

That goes double for Naval officers who not only know all this, but are heirs to the traditions fundamentally maintained and bequeathed to them by John McCain and his ancestors.

And by military law and tradition the Armed Services are supposed to be apolitical. They aren't always, but they're supposed to be. Our Founding Fathers set things up that way for a reason.

But it's actually worse than that if all that I've heard is true.

Anticipatory obedience to such outlandish, volatile whims is a sign of abuse. Any mental health professional or social worker or operator of a website that deals with the topic can tell you that.

And again, where is this crap coming from?

That part, I'm not so sure about, or at least one likely has to wade through 50 years worth of crap to find it. But I can sure tell you how we got to this mess in the here and now.

Petty hatreds, misogyny, racism, the kind of shit-headed fear of change that causes utter morons to actually create changes far worse than whatever they might fear...and, I believe,  to ultimately destroy their own civilizations and their own power because they in their infinite cowardice and stupidity could not tolerate the idea that a Black person...or whatever...might get some.

The dumb person who posted this gives no thought to the fact that, as the snipped bit below describes...these kids, whatever their color, are being taught Irish culture and language in school.

To people like this lady, culture and nation are about how you look, not what you're taught or where you live or what your character is.

And of course there's not one word about how the actual reason Irish-speakers are a minority in their own country is because the British spent centuries attacking and trying to destroy Irish culture.

Change the variables around a bit, Jews, Gay people, Muslims, etc. and the same bullshit has been used by Orban, Putin, Trump, and of course others as well. These fucking people and their followers are hollowing out their own countries...Hungary's population has shrunk by around 20% as anybody who can get a job anywhere else does so, Russia has an economy far smaller than it should because the oligarchs have stolen so much of their nation's financial capital. The USA is drowning in stupid shit despite the best efforts of a literal majority of the population to save it...and is going to come out of this quite literally a reduced nation, with a reduced status and a reduction in the trust placed in it by the rest of the world no matter what happens...and that was what the basis of our power even was.

Given that our media, and our political system seem determined to let people do what they want rather than taking a stand on anything and facing the risks involved...because literally everybody fears losing their gilded perch in the magical city more than they fear losing their lives or the country that even provides said perch...I quite honestly believe that we're going to come out of this a fractured Republic...though, very likely one with all the titular things on an international level that we had before. You can, if you like, ask the Russians how well that worked out for them for the first couple of decades.

But it can always get worse. The world is full of men who simply do not want our modern world to exist, because they think they might have been more powerful or successful, or richer, or had more success with women 100 or 300 or 1,000 years ago. So, they want to go back in time.

See Also: Real-life slaves in Libya, a country where Moammar Gaddafi, right or wrong, earned tremendous respect throughout Africa by doing stuff in other countries that actually helped people. Nation-building, and on a far smaller budget than the US applied to Afghanistan or Iraq. But this...literal slavery...is the result of his death. And I didn't like Gaddafi one damn bit, either.

For bonus points, you may, if you like, look up the popularization of the term "Infidel" in anti-Muslim terminology. Go ahead, look up the kind of imagery associated with such on websites like Facebook. Fuck Confederate Flags, there's people who want to bring back Taking the Cross and going on Crusade. And I'm a tell you right now, if you think an extremely Westernized country like Israel that is majority-Jewish is safe from those idiots you have another thing coming. If you think countries with large Christian populations, like Egypt or Jordan, or countries that have politically conservative leanings and deep ties to the (Establishment) Republican Party like Qatar or Saudi Arabia or the UAE would be safe from this shit...they won't. These motherfuckers can't even be loyal to the guy that was their fucking political standard-bearer for several years. The fuck makes you think they're going to be loyal to their allies in other countries?

They can't even be loyal to this one.

Trump basically came right out and said that Russia helped him to get elected, at least twice today.

Whether that was what he intended to say or not, that's what he said.

Look, we have to get these motherfuckers out of power, by voting them out or however else we have to. It's that, or we might not get to be free for too much longer. It's really that simple.

We may well come out of this a fractured republic...not least because roughly a third of Americans have decided that they don't want to be free in any real sense of what that word means. All too many conservatives have reached the point where they're apparently fine with being slaves if it means they get to be a better class of slave than all the other slaves. You can't live with that, you can't reason with it, but you can kick the shit out of it, kick it to the curb and make sure the people with that mentality have as little control or territory as possible, and we can protect ourselves and others with force. That's really the only kind of "No" people like that will ever understand. Republicans have basically at this point said that they'd rather be Russians than Americans if they have to share America with LGBT people, non-Christians, People of Color and women.

Remember this guy? Judge Pedo-Bear? This motherfucker is running for Senate again in 2020.

It's not just that he has the same utterly shitty agenda that he always has had...it's that he thinks God told him to have it. Somehow, he seems to think that makes it Okay for him to fondle 14-year-old girls, too. Most likely, that's not all he's done either, he just didn't get caught doing anything else. And perhaps more to the point, Alabama Republicans are Okay with this guy being in their political scene.

You can't reason with that kind of stupidity, you can only defeat it, and if you can't defeat it all the way you have to contain it until you can.

We may lose, but if we don't fight, if we don't stand up against that shit, we lose everything and still have to listen to these insufferable motherfuckers bitch about everything, every goddamned day, because they will never be happy no matter how much others submit.

We have to win, but to win, we have to fight back, consistently, for as long as it takes. Show up, vote, run these motherfuckers out of power and when some of them decide to break off a piece of America for themselves...and they will...we kill that shit with fire just like we did the first time. We have the capability to make Sherman look like a piker simply because we have better technology.

All that sitting on your ass worrying about what's too divisive or too hard or whatever is going to do, fundamentally, is get people killed...or worse.

And if ya'll Republicans think you're safe...just remember that Roy Moore lumps you in with the LGBT folks and Liberals. If anything that invokes the memory of John McCain isn't safe from the moods or wrath of Donald Trump or the machinations of his courtiers in efforts to avoid the same, what makes you think George H.W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan, or Richard Nixon, or hell, Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln...or you...won't be next?

When you're dealing with a domestic abuser, conflict avoidance, knuckling under, obeying more, abasing yourself even harder...doesn't make you safer, it simply exposes you to more danger as the abuser's lust for power over you deepens.

Remember that, and check this link.

There's no hiding place down here.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood...

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. ~Ephesians 6:12
It's Memorial Day.

So, I suppose it's only natural that Trump would be taking the side of a murderous, nominally Communist hermit-state Dictator against his fellow Americans?

Ya know, I can hardly wait to see what this motherfucker has planned for the Fourth of July.

You'd think the Evangelicals would notice that Trump keeps making nice with a Christian-persecuting, totalitarian Dictator whose family has turned the North from the most Christianized part of the Korean peninsula into one where religion is, for the most part, a criminal offense. I should add, none more so than Christianity because North Korea's Juche philosophy steals much from Christian traditions and texts in an effort to place the mantle of divinity upon the Kim family in general, and Kim Il-Sung in particular. I learned about this stuff from several specifically Evangelical groups...chief among them books published by the Christian music group "DC Talk" and the Voice of the Martyrs organization...that sometimes went into some pretty gruesome detail about what the North Koreans (for example) would do to people that they caught with Bibles, or who were engaged in underground Christian worship. One account that I remember specifically described people being executed by being run over with a steam roller.

And today, Trump sides with the son of the man who was in charge when that is said to have happened?

And again, what about Otto Warmbier, a very well known case of the death of an American resulting from North Korean sadism and torture?

I have to wonder, where are those anti-persecution activists and Christian bands now? Are they still focused on Christians being (for real) persecuted in places like Cuba, North Korea, Pakistan and Sudan? Or have they hopped on the nonsensical "Christians are being persecuted here in the United States" bandwagon?

Funny how it seems like there's nothing that'll launch an Evangelical Republican into paroxysms of "Look at me! Look at ME! Look at me and how holy I am!" that a sincere religion-adjacent statement by a Democrat...no matter how generalized an innocuous it may be.

And that should tell you something.

It seems like a hell of a lot of American conservatives would rather be buddy-buddy with the remnants of Soviet Communism at this point, whether it be the KGB agent that sits in power at the Kremlin or the literally still-Stalinist client state that's been Salacious Crumb to the Russian Jabba The Hutt this whole time, than get along with their fellow Americans.

So, Republicans...just what the hell was that 45 years of the Cold War really all about, anyway? If we've learned anything in the last few years it's that a hell of a lot of those who were our enemies then still are...and yet now that the guy in the big onion-domed castle claims he's not a Communist anymore (and remember, the Russians themselves say there are no ex-KGB guys) it's all good?

So, what you're saying is that if old Joe Stalin himself had promoted anti-choice rhetoric and tax cuts, we could have just avoided that whole Cold War business?

I mean, dude did after all, pay the father of the Koch Brothers five million dollars to fix his oil infrastructure...and the father of the biggest promoters of American Libertarianism was more than happy to take the money...

Just sayin.' Something is starting to seem really fishy here. It's almost like all this anti-Communism shit was (as I've said before) some kind of Kabuki-dance shit aimed at trying to intimidate American liberals...and now that the other side isn't advocating for the working class to seize the means of production anymore...they've all the sudden found out that they can at least talk to each other, oligarch to wannabe-oligarch and the hell with the people who...all through that 45 years of the Cold War...could at least be counted on to be on the same side and fighting and dying in the snows of Korea or the jungles of Vietnam right along with their more conservative countrymen.

Just sayin' on a normal day it's "What a fucking thing to say" it should be even more so on this particular long weekend. I know...I personally know...people who could not have agreed on a single thing if they'd tried it who were like brothers because of shared experience in peace or in war where they were facing down Communists...East Bloc and Russian or Chinese and North Korean...on the other side of some line on a map.

And today I wake up to see Trump taking the side of the grandson of the guy who started the Korean War over that of his fellow Americans?

Fuck that shit.

I'll ask again, does any of this seem...Christian to you? Does any of this seem at all conservative?

If it does, you need a better god and you need a better political philosophy.

That said, I can at least kind of understand the desire of the American Right to make sweet, sweet love to its former political bogeymen because they're willing to talk shit about the current ones. Only a small percentage of Americans ever had to live under Communism, and all those people are immigrants or Never-Trumpers anyway, so, the "Trump Logic" goes...who cares what they think?

After all, conservatives tend to discount things, until it happens to them.

Austria, on the other hand, was the first nation suborned by Hitler's Germany. Everybody in that country has ancestors who had to live with this. So why are people in that country using the Swastika to deface photos of Holocaust survivors? I mean, they don't have "Free Speech" the same way as we do here in America, that symbol is actually illegal in most of Europe. What in America would be a mere cause of public outrage, and maybe misdemeanor vandalism, is over there a serious police matter and a political issue sufficient for the country's right-wing Prime Minister to denounce it and it will be taken seriously and the perpetrators punished if they're caught.

While I'm at it, their government is collapsing because the head of the "Freedom Party" (which, mind you, was founded by former Nazis) the junior partner in the Austrian ruling coalition, got caught making deals with the Russians in exchange for their "Support."

Again, that should tell you something.

And one has to wonder what somebody like old Joe Stalin would think about something like that, right? One has to wonder why a country that lost 27 MILLION people in WWII thinks nothing of getting in bed with the ideological descendants of the people who were responsible for the vast majority of that number today.

Maybe it's just me, but I think old Joe would round up the lot of these motherfuckers and ship them off to Siberia and fates that even the Russians could only guess at. That, and he'd probably get better internet trolls.

Perhaps more to the point, I think it's worth it to take a look at which side of our political divide is honoring the fallen on this day, vs. which side would happily crawl into bed with the descendants (ideological or literal) of those who killed them.

Barack Obama honors the fallen today.

Donald Trump sides with Kim Jong Un against Joe Biden...on Memorial Day.

And that, my friends, should tell you something.

I used to say Republicans only gave a fuck about America when they were running it. We're past that point now. Republicans are running America, and instead of merely not giving a shit they'd rather take the side of our country's enemies against its own citizens.

I'd say "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here" except I'm pretty sure even the devils wouldn't want to be associated with these scumbag motherfuckers.

These people are worse than the damn devils. Even the devil has to care about the truth, if only so that he may pervert it. Satan himself knows that he was once an angel of light.

At this point, I don't think there's a single Republican left who's in good standing with The Party, that ever so much as believed one word that ever came out of their own mouths.

Note that I say this as a former Republican.

And I'm not sure I want to know what these motherfuckers do believe in.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. ~Ephesians 6:12

The Three Christs of Washington D.C.

A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. ~Winston Churchill

Let me tell you a story, once upon a time back in the oh-so-righteous early 1960's, there were three guys, all Paranoid Schizophrenics confined to the same mental institution, who each believed they were Jesus Christ. This situation became well enough known that a psychologist came to that institution and put all three men, who had previously not interacted, into the same support group. I suppose the objective was to see if being confronted with others who believed the same would cause each man to change their beliefs, or improve their condition. They did not, and in fact each doubled down and their delusions became more lurid and sexualized. The study "The Three Christs Of Yipsilanti" eventually became a book, and the story is still analyzed and talked about in psychology classes today. There's no happy ending, all three of these guys lived out the remainder of their lives in the mental hospital and would likewise die there, and be buried in some potter's field owned by the State.

Why do I bring this up?

Oh, no particular reason. Just that after the anti-choice shit-show of the last week or so, now Trump is saying the US will veto a United Nations resolution aimed at stopping the use of rape as a weapon of war because the resolution contains language about abortion and access to reproductive health care.

As if such a resolution could be passed, or would even make any sense, without such? Rape when used as a weapon in conflict is typically an instrument of genocide, of population disruption. It's specifically aimed at creating a class of women no one wants to marry, and a class of children who will always be viewed as out-caste by the society that has been so violated. Without confidential access to abortion and women's health care, those aims will tend to succeed, UN Resolution or no UN Resolution. In other words, this is nothing but more Cruelty Theater, this time aimed at pleasing the anti-abortion nuts. Come on, it's not like a child begotten of rape in some Third World ethnic conflict has any chance of growing up loved and safe and well-cared-for...unless they are lucky enough to be put up for adoption. This is American religious nuts, yet again, proving their "purity" by inflicting pain on people they will never meet or ever give a shit about.

And this is supposed to be "Christian?"

As I've said before The. Cruelty. Is. The. Point. These fucking people get off on this shit.

It's not like America doesn't already have a serious history of exporting its cruelty elsewhere or anything, right?

Trump is reportedly planning on pardoning a war criminal who is on trial for multiple murders, including the killing of a prisoner in direct violation of the Geneva Convention, the laws of war, and US military regulations, a man whose own teammates turned him in, and who in turn threatened to kill his own comrades in arms for not enabling his crimes, and that is indeed what they were. Had I done what this man did, I'd expect to spend the rest of my life in the US Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, and I'd deserve it.

And again, the question is "Why are they doing this?" Because it was never about conservative views, it was never about Christ, it was never about anything that they said it was about and the second they didn't have to keep up their holy talk, they left all that crap to burn on the side of the road like they'd never ever need it again, and these fucking people are positively enraged that there is any resistance at all to what they want to do, either here or abroad. They're enraged that they lost the House last November...and they're pissed off at most of the rest of the world now, including most of their fellow Americans, because the rest of us have not joined them in ecstatic worship of their new god.

Read the article, the reporter to whom Rick Wiles is replying writes for Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, kind of a center-right equivalent to the New York Times or the Washington Post. This entire outburst was because this Jewish reporter criticized the Alabama abortion law (Israel, mind you, is a very pro-choice country that puts a hell of a lot of the money they save on their military--because of US M.I.C. funding--right into their national health care system.) Yep, one of God's chosen people, from God's chosen country, called bullshit on their bullshit. So what was the response? Of course, it was an anti-Semitic screed blaming Jews for abortion. Trust me, if God told them He wasn't down with their agenda...they'd turn on Him, too. Because these people's real "god" is their political agenda, and everything else is just to try to bullshit the feeble-minded into following along or to provide rationalizations to those who actually believe this shit.

And people don't believe me when I tell them that these motherfuckers will turn against Israel and want to attack that country, and someday consider it an enemy as much as they consider Iran one now. Hell, the Israelis don't even have to do anything for that to happen, all that has to happen is for Jesus to not show up...or to show up and not do exactly what they want.

Because that's what this is about, fanatics, small petty men who have made deities of themselves in their own minds, who regard their own shitty beliefs as Holy Writ.

And because they can't persuade rational (or even somewhat irrational) people of good conscience to go along...they rile up a mob of the hateful and the prejudiced and the stupid and the venal, and take money from the endlessly greedy and sociopathic to promote this shit, while promising them endless riches in return, all for an agenda that very few people would agree with on its merits. Go along, IT'LL BE GREAT! They say, like some young shitposting idiot trying to get people to post moronic memes...only this crap has painful, real-life consequences for the vast majority of people, and only those with enough power or status that they're not actually affected by much of anything get to benefit from any of it in the slightest. These people are literally a mob of drooling morons, and it's a failure of education systems, morality and for that matter parenting on a massive scale that things have even gotten this way.

But to do something about that...and despite the fact that a majority of these people are probably unreachable it has to be done, or this will keep happening...the rest of us have to win, period.

I spent a good chunk of my morning arguing with a Bernie Bro on Facebook over the fact that I said Democrats had to win before we could start talking policies or expect any such to be enacted. His issue with Joe Biden was that Biden has not said much about policy, which isn't true, though I'm not following the Democratic race that closely yet this early in the cycle...and whoever wins that aspect has my support, even if it's Bernie...the self-defeating fanaticism on the Democratic side of the fence has to stop...it only enables the fanaticism on the other side. I don't know how these people can't see that. Democrats need to stop chasing Unicorns. The Republicans have already found theirs, and they'll burn everything to the ground, even their own lives, even their own families, Republicanism itself, to keep that feeling.

To stop it, we have to...not be fanatics.
...But then, I distrust fanatics of all types, and I always have.

And let me tell you why I see that distrust validated every damn day.

America's social compact is starting to break down. Or perhaps, it's more accurate to say that the breaking-down which was begun deliberately by Republicans 50 years ago and ramped up by Newt Gingrich 25 years ago has become visible, and obvious to the point that one doesn't have to be looking for it to see it. Yeah, right now it's Right vs. Left, and to a lesser extent urban vs. rural, or maybe to a greater extent non-racist vs. racist. How long before that translates into geographic divides on a more major scale as well? What happens if the Midwest and South turn into dueling factions of Center-Right/Center Left vs. Nationalists and Racists? And how long before East Coast and West Coast develop dueling factions of Progressive thought, besides? (And what happens when one faction decides to get sporty and decides it wants something that another has? Hmm?)

What happens, when things don't go his way and Trump gets impeached or loses in 2020? This is a thing even many conservatives that I know consider quite likely, especially seeing as many have said they won't vote for him again.

See, I think on some level Trump knows he doesn't have the level of public support he needs to be a dictator.

I think deep down most Republicans know that their shitty agenda is shitty and unpopular. So, what you do in that sort of a case is pull back, until you have a group, or an area, that's relatively unified and on your side and then you build your power base back up from there...because there certainly are places where these shitty beliefs are popular. Alabama, most of Georgia outside of major cities and the coast, some chunks of the Florida panhandle...vast areas of the rural South in general...

Let me put it another way. What do you think is more important to the anti-Choice fanatics? Preserving this country as a whole...or protecting their anti-choice bullshit? Do they protect America or do they protect "Conservatism?" Spoiler: A lot of these fucking people have already decided that they've lost and they just want to make the rest of us pay.

And while I'm at it, when did Republicans decide that RAPE was some kind of a good thing, let alone the atrocity that is the idea of forcing a rape victim to have her rapist's baby.

That is the wages of fanaticism.

Look, I don't have a solution here, I don't have any ideas, but if we as a people don't find a solution and find one that doesn't result in people losing their basic rights or control over their own bodies, I can tell you exactly how this is going to end...and I can already tell you from long experience that that's exactly what the other side wants.

And the only way to prevent that is Impeachment, investigation, revealing all the facts and letting that shit air out in broad daylight for all to see. There will still be some who refuse, but we have to at least try to reach everybody that can be reached...and defeating this crap has to be Bipartisan, at least on the level of getting the #NeverTrump Republicans.

The "Nationalists" and the Nazis are unreachable, except to punch them.

Conservatives...what actual conservatives are left, anyway, have to have something they can hang on to, and people like Bill Kristol and Justin Amash and Tea Party Joe Walsh and Rick Wilson give them something to hang on to, some way to feel that they're represented, like it or not that's life.

Because if they aren't...if no one is prevented by facts or by the truth outing from doing what they naturally want to do anyway...then no matter what happens it's already too late.
If that's what happens and the Democrats win by the ballot in 2020 the Republicans will try to undo it by the bullet (and depending on how bad things get if Trump wins, the same is just as possible by the Democrats.)

Justin Amash is giving us an out, here.

If, as my Bernie-bro former Facebook-friend suggested, the Democrats just keep ramping up the base plays, and yes, most of the Republicans will do the same, no matter what happens. If no one tries to talk to anybody on the other side or get people to come together in a fair way to negotiate...I'm not saying it will work, but we have to try. If not, I think we might as well just expect that every night we're going to go to bed every night seeing the two sides of our political divide shelling each other across a moonscape of craters and free fire zones and rubble littered with un-exploded ordinance that used to be South Florida or Northern Iowa or Western Maryland. If it comes to that CNN and FOX News respectively tallying the body counts as if war is some awful video game. I think we have to face the fact that the next major conflict could be here...and that some Americans would gleefully commit atrocities against other ones.

Hell, some already do. Just ask any Black person about the cops these days, or any school kid about guns.

And the only way to stop it, is to stop glorifying being a fanatic for its own sake. We have to stop glorifying conflict, killing, and war. We have to reign in our national obsession with guns. We have to try to get along without one side having to bend over or knuckle under for the other one to do it. We have to stop being fanatics.

That's hard...but we're Americans and we used to do hard stuff just to see if we could do it.

What the hell happened? When did we, as a nation, become those three schizophrenic men?

And how do we save ourselves?

Welcome to the Idiot Revolution.

It is true that liberty is precious — so precious that it must be rationed. ~Vladimir Lenin

Over the weekend, Trump was ranting on Twitter about "Patriot Farmers" because his trade war isn't going so well, and the farmers who've lost markets in China and other places are starting to complain, of course, because their business is in free fall, and China is hitting back at the Trump administration with another round of retaliatory tariffs.

And then of course...not just the snipped Tweet above, but also it's source...caught my eye.

I'm not sure if it's just base ignorance or what, But Trump is really starting to talk like he thinks he's some kind of Communist dictator.

And people laughed at me in 2015 when Trump started talking about a wall and I said "Republicans are basically Communists now."

Well...all I have to say is, welcome to the Idiot Revolution.

The Revolution will not be Televised...unless you have Cable...it will be Facebooked and #Hashtagged and Instagrammed and Tweeted. It will sell cheap Made-in-China dumb shit to idiotic Florida Men and its soldiers will be Russian Bots on the battlefields of social media, and the occasional real-life Keyboard Warrior with his Hot Pockets and Waifu pillows (And if you don't know what those are...don't ask.) Their weapons will be misogyny and racism and shitposting on social media. It's goal is nothing less than something something gazpacho angry white dudes all hail God Emperor Donald Trump!

Okay, I'll be back, I need to go soak my brain in bleach now. That actually hurt to type. If none of this makes any sense to you, don't worry. It doesn't make any sense to them, either. They just don't care. This is what happens when a political party, or movement, or whatever, is basically about nothing more than angry stupid white dudes wanting to feel good about themselves right now.

Did you think I was kidding?

Here we have Seb Gorka getting all soggy and hard to light over a cartoon rat's gay wedding. I guess there was a gay wedding on the PBS Cartoon "Arthur" recently and I don't know why that matters to anybody...but if you think people who get bent out of shape about something so simple that it can be avoided just by changing the channel are going to be able to successfully fight a war or run a government, you have another thing coming.

It's a cartoon, for fuck's sake...and not a very well known one, either. If my ex-wife hadn't had a kid, or we'd had Cable in our house I'd have never know that cartoon even existed. But to these small men, it's a "War on our culture."

Oh, don't worry, these same fucking idiots want to have a real war or two, while they're at it.

This isn't going to end well.

By which I mean, we have an excellent chance of just straight up getting our asses kicked, especially with what amounts to even less troops than went into Iraq in 2003.

Once the Iraqi Army was off the field, that op went to complete shit and bogged down in an insurgency in no time at all. This one won't get to that point before it goes to hell.

The Iranians have a modern military that, as a friend of mine pointed out, trains to BE invaded. They have the support of their people, and of China and Russia (including the Russian mafia) and we *Won't* have the support of our allies or the rest of the world on this one. You can count on that.

Not to mention, Republicans and Trump keep dividing and causing chaos here?

As far as I'm concerned, even considering this is likely a recipe for some sort of disaster.

My take? It's probably going to go about as far as all the saber-rattling against Venezuela did a few weeks back, which is "not very" and then "Conservatives" will simply go back to threatening their neighbors. Anything else, it seems, is too hard.

Iran is a vast and ancient country, of mind-boggling complexity and vastness...and its civilization was a peer to that of the Ancient Greeks and the Romans, whose works form the basis of the "Western Civilization" that people like Seb Gorka talk like they value so damned much, except that the Greeks won, and so Iran, or Persia as it was then called, is a part of western civilization too, and became even more so when the country was later mostly converted to Islam and cast aside its Pagan and Zoroastrian belief systems. It's not just a bigger version of Iraq. In point of fact, Iraq spent a lot of time being a part of what is now Iran...and Baghdad was in fact once the Iranian capital.

Iran is, despite its current form of government, far from the Republican ideal of some kind of religious theocracy. Abortion is legal there, and the use of birth control strongly encouraged. A large percentage of its population is young,,,and young people need jobs that the economy or the government or whatever sometimes struggle to provide. Yet Iran is somehow more advanced than Alabama, just sayin.'

You think these idiots are going to master a situation that complex? I don't.

Probably more than half of these people's voters would have trouble finding Iran on a map.

From what I've seen since I saw these articles and stuff, I guess Trump is none too happy with John Bolton and his push for war against Iran. Trump equates that idea with the Bush administration, which is somehow bad and icky and it probably reminds Trump that there was a time where being a Republican didn't involve acting like a beast.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember there was a time when being a Republican didn't involve dictator blowjobs at the White House, but like somebody said, Viktor Orban (who visited the White House a few days ago) is basically what Trump wants to be.

And of course, Viktor Orban is a scumbag who's looting his own country, even as a large percentage of its more educated citizens and more well-off-but-short-of-Oligarch-or-regime-crony-status people have left the country...presumably for other places where the leadership is less fascism-curious.

Just sayin' if we don't vote that motherfucker out next year, this is the future conservatives want.

Not that I think they'll get it, this crop of idiots is too damned careless and incompetent, I think. And after all, it's not like Republicans have ever made decisions for political expediency or immediate gain that would later backfire in horrible ways...

Oh, what is this, you say" Ronald Reagan sitting with Afghan Mujahideen leaders in the White House, under a painting of George Washington? Some of these guys would later go on to be part of the Taliban, and would fight against Americans.

And this time, it's worse. At least Reagan had a basic level of competence, for most of his time, anyway. At least Reagan could pick...and could get...competent people to work for him. The guy we have now? He can't do that. He wants to suck up to murderous killers and we don't even get the fall of the Soviet Union out of the deal. We get...trade wars, for which the American consumer must pay.

Welcome to the Idiot Revolution.

Alabama, Goddamn

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam

Can't you see it
Can't you feel it
It's all in the air
I can't stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer

Alabama's gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddamn ~Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddamn

So yesterday, the Alabama Senate voted to effectively ban abortion in the state...with the specific intent of trying to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

Listen, I'm a former conservative Christian, I used to be a moderate (and by default, pro-choice) Republican. I've heard both sides of the argument here more fucking times than I can count or care to remember. That doesn't matter now.

This. Is. Wrong.

This is gaming the political system, for ends most people don't want or approve of.

This is exactly the kind of bullshit that leads to revolution because the masses got sick of the privileged shitting on the vulnerable.

For one thing, it's going to likely cost the Republican Party women's votes basically forever, or at least any woman that's ever had any kind of pregnancy-related issue or has a brain in her head or the sense to know that these goddamned fanatics will probably neither be satisfied nor even consider stopping here. For that matter, they can't, because anti-abortion bullshit has been their single biggest openly-used wedge issue since 1973.

Granted, open racism seems to be making a comeback as well. I don't think that's going to end well for anybody, either, but I digress.

Listen, I don't give a damn which side of the argument you're on here. Control over your own body and what goes on with it, and what you allow into it or what you don't...is a basic human right. Perhaps it is THE most basic human right. It applies to women just as much as it does to men. We're all human beings, here. This should not even be up for debate.

As a non-religious person, I firmly believe that right should come without strings attached. In order to have sovereignty over her own body, a woman should not have to wear a Hijab and modest clothing and go about with a male relative for a bodyguard. This is America, and it sure as fuck isn't the 11th Century. As far as I'm concerned that should not be up for debate either.

But it's more than that, and worse.

These "Pro-Life" motherfuckers are the same damn people who want to destroy public education and health care for anybody who can't pay tens of thousands of dollars out of pocket, and get rid of the social safety net, and gut wages and benefits to reduce anybody who isn't already wealthy to penury while increasing access to firearms and then putting guns in every single environment imaginable, including churches and schools and then shitting on the future and wrecking the environment in every single way fucking possible, because Jesus profit!

Ya know, it seems to me like there's a hell of a lot of contradictions here, but at the heart of it, does any of this seem Pro-Life to you, Really?!?

Let's consider that there's no exceptions for incest or rape, here, for starters. I'll never understand that one, not least because aren't these the same damn people who get creepily obsessed with genetics every so often? (And whenever the "wrong" people come around, but I digress, again.)

There need to be exceptions for incest and rape, and here's why:

Look, if a couple of cousins want to fuck, or whatever, I don't think that needs to be anybody's business. Granted, I don't wanna see it or know about it, but so long as it's consensual and on even terms and they don't breed it's not my business or society's. Now, if they have an "oops" and want to do something about it...that option needs to be available.

Why? Because if they have a kid, especially one they don't want or aren't willing or able to deal with potential serious medical bills from, it becomes society's business. Also, it's a serious (if, hopefully, rare outside of Kentucky) problem, unless we want our civilization to start resembling the old Russian royal family after awhile.

Plus, I keep seeing this pop up in my feeds today and I don't give a goddamn what you think, no girl or woman should ever be forced to have her rapist's child, period, regardless of the circumstances. Likewise, any legal mechanism that would allow a rapist to continue to re-victimize their victim in any way, shape or form needs to be removed from the equation, period.

Likewise...and I think, far more pressing in the kind of crazy situations that religious dumb-fuckery can create, there's the issue of sexual abuse of a girl by older male relatives. Granted, this is something that shouldn't happen in the first place, but it does. As a society we need to plan for the sick and wrong bullshit we have, not the sick and wrong bullshit we want. I've personally known social workers who've been forced to deal with these type of messed up situations. It happens.

Look, I know these ain't ya'll favorite pro-choice talking points, but they have to be addressed.

What I want to know is why in the fuck "Conservatives" seem to far too often be at least tacitly okay with abuse, incest and rape...and seem to think that the consequences for these acts should fall upon the victims rather than the perpetrators.

Don't come at me with talk about Original Sin or patriarchy or whatever, no, I want you, conservatives, to tell me to my face what societal benefit you think derives from making a woman who was assaulted and raped bear her assailant's child?

Don't hand-wave, don't look away, and leave God and any of your theological navel-gazing out of it. Rape and incest are forbidden in the Bible just as much as by secular law, and if anything, religion tends to be even more squicky about such things than medical science or secular people.

Who, or what, benefits from this? Show your work.

If your answer is that some dude gets to show off the power of the penis, Fuck. You.

ANY rapist or sexual abuser, as far as I'm concerned, needs to be either in prison or better yet explaining their misdeeds to their deity, in person.

The truth is that abuse, rape, and unwanted pregnancy in general don't benefit anybody...and those things are the main reasons that abortion exists and continues to.

Why do you think so many cities and even small towns in developing countries have hordes of street children? Does some kid being run out of their family and forced to survive doing crimes or menial work, or worse trading sex for food or money (and perpetuating the cycle of abuse, disease, and quite possibly more unwanted kids) benefit the human race, really?

There's not exactly a shortage of human beings in this world, at least not yet.

Abortion is a medical procedure, not a theological concept. In various forms, it's been around forever. Abortion existed in the ancient world, yet God and Jesus and all the Books and Prophets of the Bible never saw fit to mention it even one time. There wasn't any shortage of humans then, either, though there were fewer of them than there are now, in relative terms. though Rome still spent much of its imperial history as a city of over a million.

This isn't about the Bible, and it's not about making the lives of any living people better. Plus, the second that kid is born and becomes a human rather than an idea, the first thing Republicans are going to do is start finding ways not to help that kid or the mother.

At best, it's about power and control, and that's pretty fucking bad. At worst it's about fanatics who've been conditioned to believe...BAN ______________ AND EVERYTHING WILL BE *GREAT!!!* and "Abortion" is simply the subject-of-fanaticism du jour.

Except, it never is. To be quite honest, anti-choice bullshit, stagnant wages, threats to health care and all this other insanity that "Conservatives" have forced upon the rest of us is likely a factor in declining birthrates in America.

And I guarantee you, when things turn sideways there will be hardly a fanatic to be found, and those that are will want to blame everybody but themselves.

Ya'll could ban abortion in all 50 states, and it don't change the fact that in most families both the husband and the wife (or both partners if its some other situation) have to work just to make ends meet. It doesn't improve access to health care. It doesn't make wages go up. It's not going to make more women have more babies, trust me, it's not, and as long as Big Pharma has more and better-funded lobbyists than your local state "Pro-Life" org does, birth control and condoms aren't going to go away anytime soon.

And anybody who can afford it will simply go somewhere else. Those who can't, will likely  avail themselves of the services of people willing to break the law...and just wait until that particular self-inflicted social problem starts resulting in grisly deaths.

And then there's the matter of women threatening to go on a "Sex strike" until this kind of stupid bullshit goes away...and if you try and force your way across that particular picket line it's called rape.

I strongly suspect the viability of anti-choice bullshit as a right-wing wedge issue will not long outlive public awareness of the consequences of abortion bans as actual, enacted, public policy. It's hard to rationalize it away when somebody that you care about dies for no damned good reason.

Granted, I don't live in Alabama, but neither does Alyssa Milano or any of the other people I've seen promoting this idea, so this definitely could affect me, and I'm not some kind of anti-choice nut and never have been. I don't necessarily "like" abortion, but I'm a guy, so it's none of my business.

Not that it would have to be.

Bodily autonomy is a human right, for all people, and you can make all the laws that you want but that truth will never change. That's not a Left issue, that's not a Right issue, it's a human thing.

And if the State can violate a woman's bodily autonomy, especially in the service of somebody else's religious bullshit (despite the Constitution clearly forbidding such) who's to say I'm not next, or some other dude might not be next?

Think about it.

If you're worried that women won't fuck you because of abortion or equal rights or feminism, maybe the problem is you, and you just need to stop being a poor excuse for a man and a shitty person in general.

And that, too, is a truth that will never change, unless you stop being an asshole.

R.I.P. Conservatism

Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great. ~William F. Buckley Jr.
I saw this last night.

Fucking seriously?

Just shoot them...

I thought these people were the conservatives, the Evangelicals, the serious, holy, and righteous motherfuckers and all that? Just shoot them?

What part of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" don't these fucking people understand?

Just shoot them. Guatemalan Pentecostals (and other Protestants) Honduran and Salvadoran Catholics? Just shoot the people who might be a day or two of decent treatment, or one favorable bit of legislative action away from becoming hard-working Green Card holders and quite possibly eventually reliable Republican voters themselves?

All of the countries these people are coming from tend to fall, on a global scale, more on the conservative end of the spectrum. Guatemala in particular has the largest percentage of Fundamentalist Protestants in Latin America...and is a favored haunt of American missionaries (I know some who've done mission work there) and the military industrial complex alike.

Does any of this seem...short-sighted...to you?

More to the point, my analysis aside, Trump and the rally crowd just laughed it off, made it sound like a big joke that the dude could only get away with saying such a thing in that location.

Just shoot them. 

If you think that statement just applies to "illegal" immigrants or Latinos or whatever, I'm here to tell you that you have another thing coming.

Eventually it'll be "Undesirables," those who refused to go along with Trump, those who didn't get on the bandwagon fast enough, those doctors or nurses or teachers or veterans that don't toe the hard-right line, you, me.

These people are never happy about anything, and they'll never just stop and say Okay, we've gone far enough.

No.

These fucking people believe in their guns more than they believe in civilization. I've been telling you for years that when they decide to start shooting people, they're not going to inquire as to your political leanings or your religion or anything like that first. No, they're just going to open fire.

Why? Because these people don't believe in Christ, they don't believe in conservatism, they don't believe in human rights or anything like that.

They believe in their guns. They believe in that shit more than they believe in life itself.

Some dude in California got raided by the Feds and it turned out he had over 1,000 guns in his house, at least some of which he had manufactured and was trafficking in them illegally.

What in the hell use would any one person have for over a thousand guns, equipping their own infantry brigade? I think there was more going on here than just some dude trying to make a few extra bucks, because that is a lot of damn guns.

Speaking of guns...there was another school shooting yesterday, this one in Colorado.

Look, ya'll, I'm a gun owner, and I'm damned tired of there being some kind of mass shooting damned near every day, a school shooting damned near every week so far this year...and of this one right, the right to bear arms...supposedly being so inalienable and sacred that it appears to invalidate every other Constitutional, human and legal right that any of us may possess.

Something tells me that's not what the framers of the Constitution nor the founders of our country had in mind.

And while we're on the subject of schools, the Warwick, Rhode Island school district is under fire not only for...and nearing the end of the school year, no less...setting a policy whereby students with lunch debt get only a sunflower-seed butter and jelly sandwich to eat.

Supposedly the money isn't in the budget, blah blah blah.

But this isn't about debts, not at all. No, it's not even about the money.

See, a local restaurant owner offered to pay off everybody's lunch debt and per the article, the district turned her down.

It wasn't even the paying off of the debt that they were apparently opposed to, it was the paying off of everybody's debts without any kind of a "process" to determine who was worthy and who was not. The district told the lady to set up something and get back to them. She simply started reaching out directly to parents. But of course, not all of those parents will hear of this, or be able to get in touch.

See...I'm willing to bet whoever came up with this ridiculous policy is a Republican.

America isn't America if everybody gets to eat. Heaven isn't heaven if we all get to go. These absolute motherfuckers aren't happy unless somebody, somewhere, gets left behind and is hungry or miserable. The worst part is, a majority of the affected students are in the position where their parents are working, but they make too much money to qualify for free or reduced lunches.

So, kick people in the teeth for trying to better themselves and make it on their own instead of staying on welfare and not getting ahead. How conservative of you, assholes.

The conservative thing to do, in this case, would be to help those students so their parents don't have to worry about whether or not their kids get to eat and can get on with the business of contributing to society. Somebody offered to pay, people will perform better if they have less to worry about. Capitalism would just take the money, feed the kids, and...I don't know, try and hook more people into paying off lunch debts and charge interest or something.

But of course, that too is the last thing any of this shit is really about.

Several states, among them California, New Mexico and Virginia, have already passed laws outlawing "Lunch shaming." More states, including Rhode Island, are considering such legislation or have votes pending. Rhode Island is in the latter group. Chances are excellent that, by the time school starts back up again in the fall...this kind of crap will be illegal in the state.

So what this is, really, is a last chance to kick a poor kid while they're down. 

It's funny how the last thing that Republicans ever seem to want to have happen in school is for a kid to learn anything.

Because of course, the party of Small Government(TM) isn't happy unless the government or whatever is demonstratively "punishing" anybody who's different from them, or too poor, or too rich, or who has the wrong political views or who knows too much, or whoever might be conservative but isn't following the crowd and the reactionary fads and vicissitudes thereof, or doing so with sufficient vigor.

Dogma and stability and tradition have given way to "We want whatever we want and we want it RIGHT NOW!!!" Conservatism used to be defined by religion, tradition, and the wisdom of our ancestors. Now, it's defined by whatever dumb shit Donald Trump Tweets at 3 A.M. when he's on the toilet on any given morning. I don't know how the hell Republicans keep up with this or even keep a straight face.

I couldn't do it, I wouldn't do it.

But then I stormed out and voted for the African American, liberal, Democrat, not too long past the minute that Sarah Palin started defining the Republican Party more than John McCain did.

Yes we can, motherfucker, and I don't regret one goddamned minute of it.

I didn't really see it as a choice. I was already on the way out thanks to a year or so of conspiracy theories and racism against Barack Obama, and that shit was a bridge too far. There was a time when being a conservative had a good chance of meaning that you were something other than a bigot.

But that conservatism...I'd say conservatism itself...is dead.

Fast forward nearly a decade and John McCain is posthumously Persona Non Grata, Sarah Palin seems all but forgotten unless she says something stupid...and I find myself sort of wishing all we had going on here was stodgy old conservative white guys and vapid flaming stupid religious nuts.

I can at least say I left before Republicans became fascists, or at least weak sauce enablers of the same.

And what did they do this for?

Why did they set every value they ever claimed to have on fire and leave it in the middle of the road to burn?

Why exactly, do they want to shoot the people who are willing to walk across deserts, to traverse whole nations just to get here, all to do back-breaking labor that Americans won't do, and for less money?

For a guy who lost over a billion dollars in a decade. That's what. For a guy who cheated on his wives and ran many businesses into the ground, who apparently needed Russia to help him win an election in the first place. For a simple demented old motherfucker who can't even speak or write proper English, and who lied his way into power and who lies to them, as well as to the rest of us, every damned day. For people whose greed and stupidity are only overshadowed by their utter contempt for our country, for its laws, and for its people.

I think they know the gig is going to be up soon. 

I think things are going to go sideways well before the next election and probably not in a way that actually favors the right-wingers. I think we're about one dumb Tweet away from some people doing something very stupid and Americans starting to shoot at each other. Though I figure we'll still have a next election, it might be off-schedule a little...though honestly I don't think it'll be by very much. I rather suspect this mess is going to upend most of our political system...to the point where I think this country may become two countries, or perhaps three...and the assholes will end up in power somewhere. Unless he chokes on his filet o' fish or has a heart attack from too much grease and cholesterol, Trump or whoever he designates *Will* still be in power in one of those places, and once all that goes down this shit will never be over and we'll have a Russian satellite state, Cold War style, where Alabama and Mississippi and Kentucky and West Virginia used to be, or something like that. 

Also, no, Not everybody's going to end up where they want to, and there's a good chance that there will be blood...and some of it will come from conservatives fighting conservatives or liberals fighting liberals, because unless we can somehow manage to hold all this together, these things rarely go down in a linear or orderly fashion. There's a tiny Soviet Wannabe unrecognized state sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine, after all. If you don't think the Christian Republic of Western Michigan or a network of liberal technocratic city-states in Texas could be a thing, go look up the Kalningrad Oblast or South Ossetia or Transnistria and get back to me later.

Chaos and polarization tends to create such situations, throw in one extreme event and there you have it. The Soviet Union didn't really start flying apart in earnest until the Communist hardliners tried to depose Gorbachev. 

But by then, it was too late. Certainly, some American equivalent is exactly the thoughts that give Vladimir Putin wood on a regular basis. 

And that's also what the right-wingers want, but I rather suspect that in the end even Trump, coward that he is, won't be able to satiate their desire for bloodshed and hate and murder.

Being a dictator does take a degree of personal and physical courage, after all. But in the end, that doesn't really matter.

All it takes is enough people with intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, who think the effort to look up and reconsider is too great.

And we've got those people my the millions...on both sides of the political divide.

Just shoot them.

Don't feed the kids.

Don't take the money offered to pay the debts.

Because Capitalism doesn't always go their way.

Because the effort to simply treat people as people is too great.

...or Because they didn't get their fucking Unicorn.

Make war on the future in every conceivable way possible, just to shit on the world and leave a big mess for the next people in power to have to clean up.

Because planning for the future is too hard.

And I think they know, deep down, just how the whole Jesus thing would go if He came back.

Just shoot them.

Three words.

If anybody wonders why I'm not a conservative anymore, this is it, right the fuck here.

Whatever world we create out of this mess, I gotta live in it. 

Exodus 20 King James Version (KJV)

20 And God spake all these words, saying,

2 I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

4 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.

5 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;

6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

7 Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

9 Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work:

10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

12 Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

13 Thou shalt not kill.

14 Thou shalt not commit adultery.

15 Thou shalt not steal.

16 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

17 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

18 And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off.

I'm not a Christian, or even religious, anymore. But...ask yourself, how many of these are these conservatives, these Christians, making the slightest effort to follow?

Yeah, that's what I thought.