The War On Stupidity (Presumed Part One, Updated.)

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocideAnd history hides the lies of our civil wars. ~Guns & Roses, Civil War

I woke up this morning, to find "Civil War" trending on Twitter. Naturally,. given our current season of stupidity, the cause of this appears to be none other than the President of the United States. At this point, judging from his own elevated levels of unhinged panic over the past several days since the House announced an official impeachment inquiry, I cannot help but think the man is guilty of something. Innocent people do not do shit like this. Sane people do not make such madly contradictory statements, and people who give even the slightest of a shit about civilization do not use their high office to try to urge their followers to go to war against the rest of us.

We need to get this guy out of there. Trump has got to go. It's going to come down to every person having to answer the question for themselves, which do they love more, America or Donald Trump?

Civilization.
Electricity.
Flush toilets.
The internet.
The medication Mom needs to live.
Your pets not ending up on the dinner table.

Or That fucking guy.

I mean, I'm reasonably set here, I might be old and beat up, but I have survival skills, I have guns, I know how to hunt and defend myself. Hell, when the power goes out I could shoot a couple of deer, process them, and then charge my neighbors for dinner and a show because while ferrets are too small to eat, they're entertaining to watch and when you're the only guy in the neighborhood with something along those lines that's not a bad spot to be in.

But ya know, I really don't want to live that way. And you don't either.

For one thing it's finally starting to get cold out. My arthritic limbs very much appreciate the capability to turn the heat on and not having to go outside to poop in a hole in the yard.

Yeah, I used to be a conservative, but I never bought into the Right's "When civilization collapses all we'll need are our guns and the Bible" primitivism, which also began to be in vogue in the 1990's.

But then maybe that's because I followed the events in the former Yugoslavia throughout the early to mid-1990's, I personally knew people who'd been over there. Had things worked out a little differently I might have been one of those people. I have friends who were part of supporting Operation Deliberate Force, the bombing campaign that forced the Bosnian Serb government to the negotiating table. I was one of the people who watched the Rwandan genocide unfold and raged about the rest of the world not doing anything about it.

The no-fly zones, half-ass negotiations, reliance on air operations and United Nations efforts and the various indifferent "solutions" imposed on complex, thorny situations by assorted globalized elites that typified U.S. foreign policy in the 1990's enraged me. They too often solved only the immediate problem, forcing people to stop shooting at each other, and all too often enabled bad actors to either remain in power or escape and go on the run.

Consider the case of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader...who despite being wanted for war crimes, was not arrested until 2008. In the intervening time between 1995 and 2008 he worked as a New Age "Alternative Medicine" woo woo doctor, he traveled around Europe under a variety of aliases, lived in Austria for awhile, and he even attended Association Football matches in Italy under yet another alias.

When I found all that out, I hit the roof, especially given my conservative Christian views at the time that a lot of this stuff was going on, the big-bad uber-nationalist ended up as nothing more than a New Age quack selling herbal remedies and shit.

And yet...the Far-Right still sings songs about him. In the meme-happy current paradigm the 4-Chan idiots and White Supremacists got a big laugh about the Christchurch Mosque shooter playing "Remove Kebab" (a 1990's Bosnian Serb army marching song about Karazdic) while he killed people with a gun marked up with the names of anti-Christian murderers of Muslims and battles won by nominally "Christian" anti-Islamic forces and various killers of the right-wing's "enemies" and live-streamed it.

No, I do not consider mass murderers to be Christian, whatever they may call themselves. You do not get to break God's commandments on a massive scale and get to call yourself a Believer.

And before he embraced New Age quackery as a way to survive, Oh yes, Karadzic styled himself a Christian Crusader against the Ottoman Hordes, oh yes, he did.

The internet Nazis are just as bad, if not worse.

These people still celebrate a man responsible for over 100,000 deaths, who made refugees of hundreds of thousands more...enough so that there's several credit unions in Iowa that have Bosnian as a language option on their phone banking system because a lot of refugees were settled there. Think about that for a second.

And because America has people who idolize the asshole who turned those people into refugees the first time, they could become refugees again.

I can remember when Christians and conservatives and Republicans were opposed to ethnic cleansing, hatred, murder, nationalism and war...when we were in favor of civilization even if we didn't always agree with everything that went on in it...because I was one at the time.

Granted, whatever their supposed background or education or training, a lot of these fucking people that are setting themselves up to be on the other side are just idiots.

Not just idiots, but idiots who don't care if they look like deranged idiots. Too many of these people seem happy to make an ass of themselves out of desire to show their dedication to....whatever.

I'm not sure that's as much of a plus as some people make it out to be. I'd rather that my enemies are intelligent enough to respect things like international law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice or some equivalent, and I'm not quite sure that the average Trump Supporter, whatever military background they may claim, is intelligent enough or simply cares enough about things that they wouldn't commit war crimes. Plenty of evil is being done, or will be, by people who explicitly know better or who at least should.

And that's what happens when capitalism allows a cottage industry to spring up and then fester, that all it does is peddle atavistic fears and hatreds.

And I guarantee you that internet nihilism will make things much, much worse. By the time the Internet really got to be a thing, the Bosnian War was almost over. By the time "Remove Kebab" was being celebrated on the internet, Radovan Karadzic was hiding out in Vienna selling herbal remedies for impotence.

If we have an equivalent to the Srebrenica Massacre it's going to be live-streamed by dumb shit white guys who talk about their weapons as if the damned things are their girlfriends. Think about that for a second. And I guarantee you the "Conservatives" will be hella mad when the various social media companies don't let them livestream that shit or turn the feeds over to the FBI or the NATO peacekeeping forces or the United Nations. Because of course, in this day and age the last thing such people are ever going to think is that they shouldn't have killed those people in the first place.

And I guarantee you that there will be plenty of indifference on the part of those on the other side, including plenty of supposed liberals, who don't live in places that are under the guns of enemy forces, and who have working food distribution networks and internet service and power grids.

Because it's already there, privileged white liberals aren't the ones whose families are being broken up, whose kids are being locked in cages, and far too many of them seem oblivious even to the incompetence of their previous leaders that directly contributed to this situation. Yes, triumphalism by your own side can and will make this whole situation worse just as much as incompetence on the other side will, and for the same damned reasons. People who not just should know better but who explicitly do according to their own backgrounds or job descriptions will do wrong or make mistakes, and people will die because of it.

And if you don't think the callousness to let them die exists on both sides, you absolutely have another thing coming.

Hell, I worry that if the right-wingers do decide their best bet is to break off a piece of America for themselves, that once the borders firm up and the fighting stops, liberals and more than a few of whatever conservatives don't go over to the other side will be more than content to adopt the 1990's methodology of sternly-worded letters, no fly zones, air campaigns and expanded refugee quotas.

That is, so long as the fighting stays in Alabama and Mississippi and the rural areas of Louisiana and Texas and doesn't affect the tourist-y parts of Florida and the hellscape these idiots turn Kentucky and Tennessee and West Virginia into doesn't start polluting eastern rivers. I'm likewise sure that talking heads will opine endlessly about the Carolinas and Georgia being turned into a war zone...but ya know, that's going to be hard on the people who actually live there.

I'll ask again, how in the hell did we ever get to the point where we place such a low value on the lives of others?

And if you don't think the right-wingers will learn those limits and be utterly tyrannical within them as well as seek to expand them, I'd recommend giving AM talk radio a listen or slogging through 4Chan for a couple of hours, then apply that unfortunate Gnosis to your mental image of how these fools will run an occupied zone.

And oh, yes, there will be plenty of refugees, non-Christians, the wrong Christians, people of Color, LGBT folks, the wrong kinds of white people, and if these people's patterns are consistent an awful lot of them before too long will be conservative white people who supported the bad guys at first. Do I think liberals who are willing to write off Florida are going to maintain their current tolerance for refugees when those refugees are from Florida? Sorry to say so, but I don't. There will be plenty of iniquity and intolerance on our own side. And that's before we even give any thought to the bad guys.

Why do I say that? Because we've spent three years now watching what happens when we as a people give power to those who cannot or will not deal with the world on an equal basis. Say what you will about the George H.W. Bush or Clinton administrations, they were trying to deal with a particularly shitty reality in a manner mostly consistent with international law while shedding as little blood as possible because they, unlike a younger me, were fully cognizant of what happens when you introduce heavily armed force as a tool to pacify a country already riven with conflict and genocidal hatred where people are shooting at each other already.

For reasons both good and bad, my younger more idealistic self disagreed with both sides of that coin. The difference is that neither George H.W. Bush nor Bill Clinton was an idiot or a homicidal maniac or a childish narcissist obsessed with brutality and displays of power, and for the record even Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic seemed to have the sense not to blab about what they were doing live on CNN and to at least kind of try to hide the shit they were responsible for or their involvement in it.

Do I think that Donald Trump or his enablers do? No, I don't. I think "Conservatives" and wealthy are fully capable of letting this motherfucker burn down America and split the country and fully willing to deal with years or decades of conflict so long as they get to keep the level of power they think they're entitled to at least somewhere. Hell, I think they'll fund both sides and I think our military-industrial complex will arm and support both sides...and do so as openly as they are allowed...simply because in some people's debased minds War = Profit.

And for the same reason, the media will lavish glory on both sides, show us the courage of resistance movements, the horror of the battlefield, the gravitas of war-crimes trials, the pomp and circumstance of the founding of new nations...all while deftly avoiding the truth that none of this shit needed to or should have ever happened in the first place.

Obviously, somebody has figured out that there's more money for them in the dismemberment of America and some kind of restarting of the Cold War than in the global order and free trade of the 1990's and the first decade and a half of the 2000's.

The difference is that this Cold War has a good chance of having an Inner-American border rather than an Inner German one and the Walls of this conflict will be through, or around Atlanta and Dallas and Houston and Orlando and the armed clashes won't be in the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf or the mountains of Afghanistan...they'll be in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, on Lake Michigan and in the rolling hills of western Maryland.

The next Operation Earnest Will might just be in the Gulf Of Mexico, trying to prevent the Russians from smuggling weapons into Mobile. At least if an Arleigh Burke-class Destroyer hits a mine, they can probably make it to Pascagoula under their own power...assuming the shipyard there remains in allied hands.

And oh yes, there will be blood.

It's very simple, really, we can either stop this shit now, with Impeachment and the force of law and by showing up at the ballot box next November in numbers great enough that the normal Republican fuckery doesn't work, or I've just laid out probably decades of our future in a few paragraphs.

And if you think you, or your ego, or your "masculinity" or whatever you want to call it will benefit, the answer is no.

That's the trouble with America, everybody thinks when things go to hell they're going to be John McClane. Trouble is you;re far more likely, best case, to be the cop whose car gets hit by a falling corpse or the SWAT guys in the APC that come up against terrorists with rocket launchers...or the shitty salesman who thinks he can bluff his way out of this mess.

People forget that even John McCalane wasn't really John McClane.

It's really that simple.

We can stop this mess. We'd best do so, and as soon as possible.

If we impeach the motherfucker, the same things may happen, but the assholes will have less power and the crisis will be easier to deal with.

This all could've been avoided in 2016, but we declined to take that option.

Think about that.

Maybe we can call this one the Global War on Stupidity. Slap the Mad Magazine kid on the medal, or something.

Update:

Just in case YOU didn't think Trump was serious...well, somebody else does and is trying to gin up his own people to act accordingly.

Never forget that the goal of these people is to kill Americans, period.

And once the shooting starts, they are not going to stop and ask you what your political orientation is before they open fire...because they don't really believe in all that. What they believe in is the gun, and the dick, and they don't see a lot of difference between the two, to be honest.

Tribes.

Vi veri vniversvm vivvs vici.(By the power of Truth, I, while living, have conquered the Universe.) ~Aleister Crowley

Climate worship is nothing more than re-branded Paganism?

Well now, we've officially reached the point where The Federalist weighs in on the topic of Greta Thunberg, with 35 years of Satanic Panic bullshit and an eternity of faux-Christian "Western" jingoism. For bonus points the author appears to be Anglo-Indian.

And what, exactly, is wrong with Paganism? Unlike conservatives of late, Pagans at least tend to be decent people. And in most countries that follow Western legal codes, Paganism is in fact, perfectly legal to practice and has no need to re-brand.

I mean, seriously, this shit almost has to be read to be believed.

Couple things, tho.

The author of the article starts out describing a relatively obscure article by a relatively obscure historian named Lynn Townsend White, Jr. like it's some kind of Leftist ecological manifesto from which quotes are shouted by ranks of beret-wearing, uniformed Young Pioneers under a wall-sized portrait of Fidel Castro Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez...Oh, wait, my bad. That mental image is so last year.

In point of fact the author in question was the son of a Calvinist minister, himself held a Masters of Divinity from a specifically non-denominational Christian seminary and was a historian...a historian who mainly dealt with the intersections between culture, religion and technology. All of which, in the context of the time, means it's fairly unlikely that dude was actually some kind of a Leftist, Che Guevara Beret or otherwise.

But at minimum he's not their kind of conservative and in Federalist Land, that is enough. There are many paths to heresy.

That said there's a couple things in particular I'd like to call attention to:

"If nothing else, the last few days should be enough to prove that Western civilization, a product of more than 1,500 years of Judeo-Christian values, is facing its most significant and sustained challenge in centuries from tribalistic paganism, a force that seeks not only to turn back time but essentially to destroy the entire current edifice."

With full credit given to Jim Wright, of Stonekettle Station; These people have all the self-awareness of a dog licking its own ass in public.

First, it damned well needs to be noted here that Jews were not invited to take part in "Judeo-Christian" anything until well after World War II

Second, the above quote, without even the slightest change, could damned well be employed in an article attacking Trumpism.

And...

As secular liberalism destroyed the fundamental ties that bind society — faith, flag, and family — the human instincts for faith — to believe, worship, submit, and fear — didn’t just go away but manifested in various other pre-civilized tribal ways. For example, a liberal seminary encouraged its students to skip classes to pray and confess sins to potted plants. In Switzerland, 250 people in full funereal garb mourned the apparent approaching death of a glacier.

*Stares in Get Off My Lawn.*

My GOD, but these people apparently have an almost ridiculously shitty view of what things like humanity and society even are.

I used to be a conservative, I can play this game as well as anybody. The "Pre-civilized tribal ways" quote could just as handily be applied to #MAGA hats, "Lock her up" chants, talk radio and the full-throated worship of Donald Trump, not to mention cultural Christianity, Eurocentric jingoism, and the Right's increasingly tribal racism.

The only real objection these fools have to tribes is that other people are beginning to mirror their own tribalism and some of those tribes have turned out to be pretty damned effective opposition.

Well, I suppose it helps that a lot of these right-wing idiots can't find their ass without both hands and a hound dog.

I mean, I don't give a damn about confessing sins to plants, but certainly as far as I'm concerned if people want to hold a funeral for a major geographical feature that they've been around all their lives, that is now melting away...well that's their right to do that, isn't it?

I mean, would the same person object if a bunch of people...especially conservatives...held a funeral march to mark the closure of a military base, or the demolition of an old church?

Different people have different priorities, actual traditional conservatism recognizes that and doesn't mock people or call them Godless for marking something's passing or trying to deal with change.

Honestly, the article only gets worse from there, at one point equating Twerking and some dumb music group that I've never heard of to "ancient people praying to Gaia." Never mind that the modern NeoPagan idea of "Gaia" is younger than my Mom is and that NeoPaganism as an entire concept is only around 100 years old.

If I had to guess, I'd say this author probably has some sexual issues and thinks ancient people...or crunchy hippies for that matter...got more booty than he does.

I suppose, given how much of the rest of this discussion has gone, that I should be grateful that nobody proposed having sex with teenage girls as some kind of objective good, here. I mean, the attempted sexualization of Greta Thunberg pissed me right the hell off...but now these fucking people basically want to in effect sexualize everybody that even gives a damn about the environment... (?)

And of course sex is bad, right?

(...Unless of course Conservative White Men want it...)

Which is of course, the whole point as far as this guy is concerned, but there's something worse.

It's that this fucking moron just throws out blanket statements of his personal beliefs and opinions as if they were as self-evident as the color of the sky or the fact that conservatives are apparently mostly perverts.

Ya know, this might sound weird, and keep in mind that it's coming from an old former conservative...but thanks, Greta.

Thanks for showing us just what the hell these people are. Thank you for exposing the Truth of them.

And the sad part is that at least some of them were always that way. I used to be a conservative, I know this.

I'm just sayin' if you can support this type of shit, fuck you.

If you support the corruption of governments, the destruction of the environment, the erosion of democracy, and for that matter the sexualization of children...for any reason especially if you think you're going to get something out of it, the only two words I've got are "Fuck" and "You."

And fuck the rest of your tribe and whatever they rode in on, too.

Women are not your sex objects! (Really, people? Part Two.)

Thousands of people have been killed by the terrorists and millions have been injured. I am just one of them. So here I stand, one girl among many. I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated. ~Malala Yousafzai.

Listen, guys, Women. Are. Not. Your. Sexual. Objects. Repeat this until you understand it.

A friend of mine sent me this snipped Justin Murphy tweet this morning. People do this, on the presumed logic that if they have to suffer with the knowledge that it exists, I should too. Or something. They think it's funny.

Now, I'd never heard of this asshole before my friend decided to torture me with this stupid bullshit this morning.

According to what little I've been able to actually dig up, Justin Murphy is some comparatively minor Libertarian idiot on Twitter. Judging from what I saw of his Twitter feed, the creepy, dumb son of a bitch has an unhealthy obsession with teenage girls in general, and Greta Thunberg in particular.

I'm like, really?

Speaking for myself here, the last time I wanted to have sex with a sixteen-year-old girl I was a sixteen-year-old young dude, and the only more-or-less serious relationship I'd had at that point was with a chubby nerd girl who was the same age as me. Oh, sure, there'd been a few other situational encounters here and there, nothing too serious. I always was trying to score with older girls, and almost always getting turned down.

For fuck's sake I can remember when talking like this idiot is might get you beat up or threatened with a gun. But then I'm old enough to remember when I was 16 and I didn't want to get caught talking like that about girls my own age. Shit, I'm so old that I can remember when Conservatives didn't want teenagers having sex or talking about it.

I say this as somebody who was raised pretty conservative.

Also, I'm pretty sure I wasn't very interesting at that age, I frankly can't imagine having the least bit of interest in anybody past (at most) their late 30's or early 40's at this point in my life. Hell, I look at a lot of the early-20-somethings that I work with like they're nuts half the time.

So I really, really don't get this shit.

I frankly don't know how he even got from Greta Thunberg to Jeffrey Epstein having sex with teenage girls, myself. That's not a connection I would have made.

But then, I can't imagine even wanting to have sex with somebody that I can't relate to as a person. Of course, that's not a problem for fools like Justin who seem to view women as some kind of ambulatory penis-washing equipment. Most of these fucking idiots just don't relate to other human beings anyway. Everything is some kind of philosophical problem. And then we wonder why social media is such a mess.

I give you the Libertarian DudeBro as an example of why.

Again, DudeBros, women are not your sexual objects. If that's what you want go get yourself one of those Chinese sperm-bank dick sucking machines.

Oh, and if there's anything worse than this idiot's views on sexuality it's his views on education. Don't listen to that cartel of stuffy academics who might actually teach you something! Listen to me and my views on life and sexuality that were formed by reading Ayn Rand and watching too much Anime Porn!

I don't know if Justin is "power-hungry" but if he's a grifter he sucks at it.

I sure as hell wouldn't give this guy any money.

Somehow, this whole shit-show managed to get even more pathetic and I finally had to stop looking at the guy's timeline because it just started to seem like some kind of bitter joke.

Penis pumps?

That shit doesn't work. Rubber bands on your junk? There's a few ways for that to end badly, and some of them end with veins having to be cut and your shit never working again.

It ends not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with a slight hissing noise.

Seriously, people, how hard is it not to be this guy? I mean, just from the little bit I saw of him, the only thought I had was "You don't want to sell me death sticks, you want to go home and rethink your life."

Fucking loser.

And when it comes to these far-right or libertarian idiots, how come this shit almost always comes back to some sad pathetic worship of their own dicks and a perverted desire to have sex with teenage girls?

I mean, at my most conservative I was a young man, and my criteria could have been best summed up in a popular rap song at the time "I like big butts and I can not lie, you other brothers can't deny..." which for the most part until the later part of my mid-20's meant the majority of what dating I did involved church girls and nerd girls all in the "Plus Size" range, and that was fine.

And it worked out, because most of the time I had partners with whom I could have a conversation, and we had more to offer each other than being sex objects.

And that is something that this bag of shit will never know or understand.

Too bad for his stupid ass.

Women are not your sex objects, repeat this until you understand it.

Part One.

Fuckin' Stupid Watergate. (Really, people? Part One.)

The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared
Merrily did we drop.
Below the Kirk, Below the Hill
Below the Lighthouse Top.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner

And we're off.

As of yesterday afternoon the House of Representatives has begun a formal Impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.

About a year behind schedule, I think, but hey that's just me.

And, well, the dumb motherfuckers haven't helped their own case, not one goddamned bit.

Note that the link takes you to their unclassified, heavily edited version...and at the top of page 3 and page 4 there's still enough to put these morons away for a good long while.

I would say "Somebody please take the shovel away from these motherfuckers, but, well...

The White House just E-mailed the Republican talking points to House Democrats...

What?

You've gotta be fucking kidding me?

First, this damned moron makes this goddamned moronic call trying to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate a Biden not-scandal, thus turning it into a Trump scandal. They get caught, somehow manage to bungle the cover-up (again?) and then they release an edited version of events that's still enough that it should come with a small, sharp knife because any competent lawyer will use it to cut their throats.

Assuming the Democrats haven't gotten rid of Barry Berke since last week, they have at least one.

*Stares Bumboclaatly*

As of last night I've officially started referring to Trump as Dipshit Nixon.

I mean...fucking seriously?

On a scale of "I am not a crook" to "I didn't kill my wife, but if I had here's a book on how I would have done it." Donald Trump manages to make both O.J. Simpson and Richard Nixon look like pikers.

And his various and assorted minions E-mail the talking points to the other side? I mean, I've heard of giving somebody enough rope to hang themselves with in a figurative sense...but I've never heard of giving the other side enough rope to hang you with damned near literally.

Listen up.

This might sound kind of weird but I've been kicking around the idea that all this Trump shit is some kind of Hail Mary plot to rehabilitate the memory of one Richard Milhous Nixon.

I mean, Nixon was an asshole, a criminal, a racist, and an all-around shitty person. So naturally, lots of Republicans worshiped the ground he walked on and the very air he breathed. They've spent 46 years, now, taking Watergate personally.

Hell, Fox News itself is an explicit effort by the late Roger Ailes, a Nixon acolyte, to prevent another Watergate.

The Bill Clinton Impeachment, the long-running Benghazi witch-hunt, etc. are all efforts by Republicans to "get revenge" for Watergate.

Too late, assholes.

And never mind that by the end, Nixon had lost the support even of many Republicans and seen the proverbial writing on the wall himself.

But at least Nixon also managed to do some good things, he had the watch when we went to the Moon. He ended the main phase of American involvement in the Vietnam War, he made peace with Communist China, he started the Environmental Protection Agency and changed regulations to increase women's involvement in the military.

I would, in fact, argue that a decent amount of good came from Nixon's fall as well. Chuck Colson served his time and went on to found Prison Fellowship Ministries, for example. Even Nixon himself became counselor to subsequent Presidents and ended his days a revered Elder Statesman.

Trump has been very little more than a corrupt, greedy, incompetent traitor and wannabe dictator. While he's been at it, he's shown the Republican Party collectively to be not much more than that themselves.

The best these fools have managed is that Sean Spicer dressed like a traffic sign and embarrassed himself on Dancing With The Stars.

Certainly, they don't seem to have anybody left who can find their ass without both hands and a hound dog.

I said to somebody yesterday that because Democrats dawdled for so long in getting this show on the road, that Trump's term could very well be over before impeachment proceedings were over. After all, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bill Clinton impeachment dragged on from 1997 to 1999.

I stand corrected, if these fucking idiots keep screwing up this damned bad, this bullshit could be over by the end of the month. Jesus Christ, what's wrong with these people?

To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President I must put the interests of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. ~Richard Nixon, Resignation speech, August 8th, 1974,

...

I'm gonna go out on a maybe-unpopular limb here and say that it's quite possible that for Republicans, some clues regarding how to get out of this particular box canyon lay in the actions and words of old Tricky Dick himself.

Greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes; because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. Always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember: Others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win, unless you hate them. And then, you destroy yourself. ~Richard Nixon, speech to White House staff before departure, August 9th, 1974

The difference, though, is that Nixon was smart.

These people E-mailed their own talking points to the other side.

You do the math.

Part Two.

To be, Or not to be.

When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society. ~Pope John Paul II.

Last night on Fox News, some idiot called Greta Thunberg "Mentally ill."

Apparently, the entire incident was offensive enough that Fox News itself issued an apology.

Let's unpack this a bit, though.

No, seriously, don't look away, conservatives.

Why is it, that people destroying the environment of the very planet we all live on, the only planet we can live on, the very place our species and every species we are even aware of was born...and people hoarding money to the point where 400 individual humans have hoarded wealth to the point where they've beggared half the planet is somehow not considered mental illness or even wrong...but some young kid who is trying to save the planet we all have to live on immediately gets tagged as "mentally ill?"

You tell me, conservatives, how in the fuck does any of that make sense?

How is this mess not being considered utterly sociopathic right on the face of it?

What are you going to do when the Earth starts to warm at a faster rate, and the oceans rise and probably even a hell of a lot of your fellow rich people are among the swarms of refugees headed inland because oh, hey, everything they owned and derived their wealth from was in some nice, wealthy coastal city, the one that the tops of its skyscrapers are officially being designated a maritime navigational hazard?

Do you really think you'll be able to fund a crash Faster-Than-Light space travel program with your own resources in the amount of time you have left? Where are you going to get the mathematicians and physicists you need? You know, scientists, the people your pet politicians have spent years disparaging, diminishing respect for, and cutting their funding?

Or do you think you're just going to have to break down and build a spaceship out of bricks of $100 bills?

No, seriously, don't look away and stop waving your hands around. What is the end goal here?

What good does any amount of money do you if the planet we all live on becomes uninhabitable?

And no, the fact that you'll be dead by the time things start to get really bad is not an out. Don't you even give a shit about your own kids? Grandchildren? How your own name is gonna be remembered in the history books?

What exactly do any of you people even give a shit about?! Clearly, your own families don't even make the cut.

How much money is enough?

And speaking of disasters, apparently Trump spent at least part of his disaster of a UN General Assembly speech fear-mongering about Communism and Socialism. Never mind that of the people he's talking to, a substantial number live in and represent countries that lived under Communism and probably survived living under it themselves, and yet more live in countries (and I'll grant there's some overlap between the two) that have adopted or retained some socialistic elements in how they live and run their countries. God Bless America, we've hit the point where our idiot President is literally trying to Mansplain shit to the rest of the world...that the rest of the world lived through and we didn't, mostly because we were on the other side of the fucking ocean and developed nuclear weapons before the Soviet Union did. God DAMN but I am sick of these fucking people.

Not to mention, I'm 45 years old and I was not quite 16 yet when the Berlin Wall came down, and Communism fell faster than a row of dominoes on a card table in an East Berlin apartment block.

So much for domino theory...when push came to shove it literally worked the opposite from how "Conservatives" said it would. By the time I actually buckled down and got my driver's license a couple months late...there wasn't a Soviet Bloc anymore and Germany was well on the way to being a united country again. Not too long after I registered to vote, the world got the fall of the Soviet Union as a damned near literal Christmas gift.

Fuck these motherfuckers, not one damn person should be ranting about Communism almost 30 years after it even ceased to be a real thing. For fuck's sake, even the Chinese aren't really Communists anymore!

What's wrong with you?!

I feel like we're at some sort of a tipping point here, when you have somebody like former [Ohio] Republican Governor John Kasich also supporting Greta Thunberg, when suddenly talk of Impeaching Trump is a thing again, when Boris Johnson gets his ass handed to him on a plate by the UK Supreme Court and his suspension of Parliament is declared illegal and fucking Benjamin Netanyahu loses an election in Israel...all in the same week or so? Yeah, I think we may just have hit the point where people are getting tired of the Far Right's bullshit.

But that's only the first half of the story, isn't it?

First, it'll only get worse, as they start to lose these people first are going to rant about the End Times and the Rapture...and then they're going to try to bring them about by brute force.

Second, It's going to come down to a fight with these people, both politically and otherwise. I rather suspect that in the end it's going to be far less along "Party" lines than, at the end of the day, between those who believe in life and those who don't. Perhaps more properly it's going to come down to a fight between those who believe in human (and other) life and those who believe in the supremacy of ideology.

Yes, fundamentally people are going to have to fight wars for the right to be alive...against those who think that the deaths of other people proves some kind of philosophical point.

Perhaps in the end it'll end up that the real divide is between humanists and ideologues.

I mean, seriously, what the hell good are your bloody ideas without humans to put them into practice, and a functioning world in which to see if they work?

Some people seem to have this belief that ideas or ideologies are somehow things that exist apart from humanity and the natural world in some sort of perfect, splendid isolation...and then they usually try to force their idea of "perfection" on the rest of us.

And it rarely if ever works, or does anything more than make trouble.

Fundamentally, what modern conservatism is about is simply trying to beat the rest of the world into some kind of submission towards its shitty ideology...no matter how contrived and unnatural that ideology may become. Let it fester long enough and this shit becomes the kind of "We had to destroy the town in order to save it" logic that got us that war that Donald Trump skipped out on.

History has shown that doesn't work, and that people don't appreciate having their lives or their towns, much less their planets sacrificed for some idiot's ideology.

Maybe that's what should be engraved on humanity's tombstone, either by unknown aliens or by the intelligent descendants of cockroaches and ferrets and rats that rise up as the next intelligent species on the Earth:

"In the End, they became so Free, that only ideas mattered. It was then, that they destroyed themselves. Do not be like the humans, and forget to be humane."

It's time to stop worrying about where these people get their shitty ideas, and start doing something about them. If humanity is going to survive this stupid bullshit, we're going to have to start caring about other humans, and yes, we're going to have to put those who won't in check.

I'm not asking you to like Greta Thunberg, I'm asking you to look around you and see what's going on in the world, and do something, while we still can.

If you won't care about other humans, care about yourself enough to think ahead and look at your own survival instead of listening to what some old white man in a bad suit tells you.

Is that so hard?

Capitalism, religion, and insanity.

"People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money. This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. How dare you!"
-- Greta Thunberg

I saw this earlier today.

I live in Michigan, about a hundred miles or so south of the 45th Parallel, halfway between the Equator and the North Pole. It's the first day of fall, and it's a sunny, warm day. This, in and of itself isn't terribly unusual, we can generally expect warm days right up until about the first week of October...or we could...in the last few years that threshold has crept forward about a week. The bugs have been bad this year...it's been a different thing every year for the last several years, but all things that rate as unusual to a guy that's lived a majority of his 45 years in various parts of Michigan.

I don't live in a state like Florida that is facing dramatic climate change effects.

But I can see it just the same.

How exactly, then, are politicians in general and conservatives in particular having so much difficulty seeing...and dealing with...things that are obvious problems?

The status quo may be lucrative, but anybody with a brain in their head will tell you that nothing goes on forever, and unless you want to get your ass kicked by reality, when things start to change you'd best adapt, and better yet find a way to get out in front of whatever it is...not just to maintain your profit margins, but to ensure basic survival.

Instead, Republicans in particular seem to think it's great fun to crap all over the environment, the functionality of our government, and damned near everything else...all the better if they can squeeze a few more dollars out of our system in the process.

And it's positively amazing how much hate they'll heap on a kid...or anybody else that speaks the truth.

All because they think they'll get money.

But you can't spend all that money if you're dead, or if the money itself has become worthless, and if you yourself become a refugee because the place you live in is now less habitable but you can afford to leave, other people like yourself will tend to take exorbitant amounts of your money from you, because after all their existence is obviously less threatened than your own and you want to continue to exist, right?

And the worst part of it, to me, is that these people apparently lack the imagination to even consider that anybody else might believe anything different, or hold any belief...differing or otherwise, sincerely enough to stick with it.

They sure don't.

Listen, people, if we don't get our heads out of our collective ass and start doing something, the exact sorts of hate and selfishness and stupidity that fuel conservatism, nationalism, Trumpism and all these other shitty beliefs are going to be what something or other chisels onto Humanity's tombstone.

There may well be other habitable planets out there. Don't get me wrong.

But humanity squandered the Space Age trying to find better ways to make more money instead of trying to break the Light Barrier. It was too hard, or we're all doomed anyway, or Jesus will save us, or none of the right people owned space technology companies at the time....or something.

So if there are other habitable worlds, we have no way to get there without Faster Than Light space travel.

We have to make our stand here, and make this shit work at least until something better turns up and we have the means to go there.

Or we die. I die, you die, my ferrets die, everything...including your profit margin, Mr. Old White Conservative...dies.

And no, there's no White Jesus going to swoop down out of the clouds and save you, let alone let you watch while the rest of us burn.

Personally, I don't think God works that way, and if He does than He is not worth following. It's quite funny to me at this point, how if you really look at it, all a lot of these "Believers" have done is simply made God in their own image.

I learned a long time ago, that we humans have the capability to cause our own End Times. One B-52H Stratofortress bomber full of AGM-86B cruise missiles, much less a whole Squadron or Wing of them, one ICBM squadron, one Ohio-Class Ballistic Missile Submarine...or by the same token, the Chinese or Russian counterparts to the same...could inflict incalculable suffering on Humanity simply by launching its payload. We know this, we invest incredible amounts of money and safety efforts and time in making sure that none of these weapons are used without proper orders and the crews are sane and we as a species have been damned lucky.

But why, then, when the world itself can wield so much more energy than we can...as I remarked recently one hurricane uses more energy in a day than all of the Earth's power grids do...why are the environment and nature not treated with the same levels of care?

A hurricane will destroy your city and kill you as surely as a nuke will, and one doesn't need radiation to make an area uninhabitable when one has enough water contaminated with animal and human waste or various chemicals.

Again, we humans have the capability through non-action, to make our own apocalypse.

Lately, I've been sporadically bombarded with nonsensical End Times crap by a former partner of mine, who apparently doesn't watch the News (or at best she does so very selectively.) She keeps pushing the same line of utter nonsense that she did back in the early 2000's, like her brain is stuck on some kind of weird loop or other, which given her own mental illness it probably is. She sends me these long, deeply weird rambling Emails that careen from the minutiae of daily life to the same old End Times Prophecy nonsense without warning...and no, she doesn't seem to know what a paragraph break is, so if anything I'll scan the Wall O' Text and point out (again) that she's nuts and the next time I hear from her it's just more of the same.

At this point, I'm having difficulty believing that I ever wanted to sleep with this woman.

She has no car, no job, no money and no prospect of anything without radically changing her own life. But she has convinced herself that God is going to give her a car, a house, money, etc. I don't know how anybody can live like that. It's gotten tiring enough that I'm probably just going to block her.

I understand some people live in desperate or shitty circumstances but, again, this runs afoul of my own actually-conservative upbringing and something in my brain just keeps shouting "If you don't like it, DO SOMETHING!!! You have the power to change your life!!!" Every time, in too many cases, it falls on deaf ears.

At best, these people including this particular ex, seem hell-bent on waiting for one of their "betters" that they approve of, to tell them some easy solution to all of life's problems...and of course there aren't any such things.

But if she's typical, oceans rise, cities fall and the world burns while Evangelicals and Pentecostals debate how many angels you can stick on a pinhead or rant about their prophesied role of protecting each other and hiding out from the Anti-Christ while eating Jim Bakker's survival taco meat. Where exactly are they going to have, I don't know, revival services in abandoned buildings and the basements of remote houses? I have no idea. Even as fantasies go, this one seems poorly thought out.

Climate change is a global problem, the guy locking Christian Latin American kids in cages and calling himself the "Chosen One" and the "King of Israel" is their President, and the Rapture is still a false doctrine.

And if you point any of this out...or point out just how much their beloved "End Times" would screw things up for a lot of creatures and people that never did anything to deserve such, it either goes right over their heads or they just get mad. Again, how did we as a people even get to this place of having so little regard for the lives of others?

And if you point out that we're causing our own End Times without any divine agency whatever, well then you're somehow against God.

It's our failure as a species, that despite all the knowledge we have amassed, we still have people like this. It's not cute or funny or useful that we have so many angry, mentally ill, reactionary, religion-addled or stupid people and I'm pretty damned sure in the long run it's not that profitable, either.

That this is so, is simply wrong.

We don't deserve Greta Thunberg, and she and her generation sure as hell deserve better than us.

First, they came for me.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. ~Martin Niemoller

I saw this the other day, I commented on it, and shared it on Facebook with my comments. In the actual meme there is a picture of a dude in a Guy Fawkes mask making what should be the obvious statement that other people who are struggling aren't your enemy.

And it's been bothering me ever since.

Why is Narcan free to a "Dope addict" but my insulin is $750 a month?

Well, for one; Capitalism and not enough having been done to reign in the drug companies.

Also, I think even at this debased point in our national life, because we as a society don't want drug addicts to become dead people.

Now, let me tell you something about me.

I have been an addict, and when it was me there wasn't any Narcan or anything like that and for the most part, in the mass media and popular culture of the middle and later 1990's alcoholics and drug addicts were generally treated as criminals, so I beat that shit the old fashioned way, church and community and twelve step meetings and sheer willpower. And it would still take me another eighteen years to quit smoking.

So, to me, things like Narcan are something I understand could save the lives of people like who I was.

And isn't that a good thing?

With proper care, some people who give a shit, and maybe just a little grit and determination...any addict no matter how hard they've hit rock bottom can again become a productive member of society, but you gotta still be alive to do that.

And that's something I've started seeing a lot lately, a complete lack of regard for the lives of other human beings.

Any addict, any homeless person, and for that matter any bamboozled cult member can again become a functional member of society provided they get some help and have some people around them who give a shit.

Instead, we have no less of a person than the President openly being offended that homeless people exist where he and those like him can see them. He's not talking about helping people in need, he's talking about turning the cops loose on them or shipping them off somewhere else,

Because basic compassion for another human being regardless of circumstances simply because they are a living being is too hard, apparently.

I find that frightening, and I can't say that about very many things. Why? Because I used to be a Christian, and a Conservative, and the value of human life was something that, at the time, was held as a core value.

Without regard for life, any philosophy or religion can easily be converted into nothing more than an excuse to kill those who can't or won't bend the knee or conform...but I kind of feel like that goes double for conservatism as practiced in the United States of America. Given Americans' tendency towards fanaticism and religion (or toward using other things to scratch that itch) owing to the fact that Colonial America was often a dumping ground for Europe's religious fanatics. I was taught that people in leadership positions have a responsibility to be good role models and have good conduct for exactly that reason.

Instead, for a generation, conservative leaders have tended to be more the problem than the solution, often in plain sight and with malice aforethought. Newt Gingrich, anyone?

And things like internet nihilism and religious fanaticism haven't helped one damned bit.

And too many people are unwilling to take a stand for anything, because we as a society have become addicted to passive-aggressiveness and fearful of confrontation...even as a small percentage of us become only ever-more belligerent, confrontational and hostile.

What increasingly bothers me, is the prospect that enough people in some places get that we have a problem, enough people in some places are willing to do what it takes and keep showing up and standing up for the right thing, and in others there aren't or no one does. 

Some of us are going to make it,and some of us aren't...and we're all going to see ethnic and political conflict, horror and war and death, not in the middle east or some post-Soviet shit-hole, but right here at home. 

Why? Because even though by the numbers enough of us know what's going on that we could stop it, those in power on all sides seem bound and determined to let each person do as they damned well please instead of demanding that we all stand united and giving each of us the facts so we have to make that call. That's a hell of a problem when some people's only real ambition is to have their boot on somebody else's throat before they die. That's a problem when some people just want another civil war, or to watch the whole world burn. Too many of them care more about their donors or popularity or reelection prospects or their own stinking hides more than they care about the civilization that holds them up. And one way or another, even if we salvage this mess, or part of it, we're all going to pay for that.

When even something so basic as "Do not commit adultery" is casually flouted by people at the highest levels of our society...and all the way down to somewhere as simple as my own workplace...I think we can say we have a problem.

What's worse is the Evangelicals don't just wink and nod knowingly, they give the people who do this shit their full and enthusiastic support. Where I work, it's the people with the conservative and Evangelical backgrounds that are often the biggest offenders...whether they are still actively religious or not.

Hell I was one of those people for awhile too, the difference is I grew out of it.

When even impeachable offenses and outright treason by the President elicits not much more than angry comments on social media by the other party...and full-on fanatical defense by the President's own...I think it's safe to say that we have a problem. Just let him do what he wants, we'll wait it out.

But what happens when there's no waiting it out. As I've said many times, some of these people seem to care more about their place in the magical city than they do about the society that holds it and them up.

It's going to fall to the rest of us to stand up, and to keep standing up, or everybody is going to lose.

We have to not only plan on showing up, standing up and voting the goddamned Republicans out, we have to expect at least some people on our own side won't be much better than they are, and push back against them too. We have to vote the bastards out...and then probably expect we're going to have to fight a war to keep these idiots from simply breaking off a piece of America and going their own way with a Soviet-style Russian satellite state, because if we don't that'll just lead to even more wars.

And there's going to be no glory in it, no gratitude, no nothing but putting your back into it and pushing back hard against these motherfuckers.

All of them.

Oh, there might be a positive mention in the history books somewhere down the line, I rather expect a few particular events or people will get most of the attention. But we all have to stand up anyway.

That is, if we want there to be history books.

It shouldn't be that hard. Trump and Netanyahu and Boris Johnson and assorted other nationalists and wannabe fascists face a degree of open opposition and their opposition in many countries...especially this one...have degrees of legal protections and support from people in society in their own countries and abroad that Anti-Nazis in Germany (or the Jews for that matter) could only have dreamed of having. Hell, if you're a Hungarian and you don't like Victor Orban or you run afoul of his government...you can just go somewhere else in Europe, as many have. Even in Russia, where things are basically completely fucked...or in Hong Kong where they are very nearly so...people keep stepping up and fighting back against these assholes.

So what the hell is our problem?

If you want to stop this shit, you have to stand up.

For everybody, not just the people you like.

If we want a better country, a better world, we have to be people who care enough about each other that we wouldn't take the Narcan from an addict who is dying from an overdose.

That is a pretty damned low bar, why can't so many of us clear it?

...The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians - "should I be my brother's keeper?"

Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. - I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? -- Only then did the church as such take note.

Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible?

The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

~Martin Niemoller

Mirror Universe Christianity, Part Two.

I'd like you to tell me that you are a false prophet. I'd like you to tell me that you are, and have been, a false prophet, and that God is a superstition. 
~Daniel Plainview, to Eli Sunday, in There Will Be Blood.

On the last day of California's current legislative session, an anti-abortion, anti-vaccination nut and "Conservative" activist named Rebecca Dalelio threw a cup of what was later determined to be menstrual blood all over a half-dozen California state senators, saying "This is for the dead babies!"

Yes, that's right, she threw a cup of blood...itself classified as a hazardous material...at actual living humans to protest what she considers to be loss of or threat to human life due to abortion and vaccinations. Sorry, but I'm old enough to have been taught that you had to take your first breath (doctrinally speaking) to have a soul, and thus (in religious terms at least) be considered alive. Yes, that's right, the churches changed their doctrines in response to secular legal decisions. How's that for hypocrisy?

Because, again, the absolute last thing any of this is about...is life.

Now, speaking as somebody who's been trained on this stuff in terms of the real world...if somebody throws blood at another person, one generally assumes it's intended as an attack as it's a fairly easy way to give somebody a disease...and thus it's considered assault, either felony or misdemeanor depending on the presence or lack of communicable disease or infection.

Again, we have a case of the same shit from yesterday's post, where some nut(s) cares more about whatever their personal issue is or about making a scene or scoring some kind of arcane point, than about the health, life, safety or well-being of another human.

It gets worse. Let me get this straight. Russia just had a research center blow up, that contained samples of Ebola, Smallpox and various other terrible disease...and we have Anti-Vaxxer's throwing blood at people?

I'm serious, are these motherfuckers not going to be happy until they bring back the Black Death, or some other horrible pandemic, and it kills 20% of the world's population? People are ignoring or actively fighting against basic health science, information that was the product of centuries of trial and error and blood and death and pain until humanity developed the capability to vaccinate for various diseases. If you don't think that something as simple as wind patterns could drop the results of a Russian lab explosion somewhere in the United States...and possibly kill millions of people...you have another thing coming.

Science is your friend, Woo woo bullshit is not.

And ya know, since so many of these people who believe this shit think that religion is the answer, well why don't we change the channel and see what the religious people are doing?

Oh, never mind.

The religious people are trying to "Create an emotional meltdown in Hollywood" by stanning for Sean Spicer who is apparently a contestant on "Dancing with the Stars" (as if anybody with a brain in their head cares.)

And somehow they manage to tie Christianity in with this?

Really?

Seriously.

*States Bumboclaatly*

You're going to wear an outfit that would offend the sensibilities of a deaf-blind gay man stuck in a sensory-deprivation tank and go embarrass yourself live on national TV and you call that "Standing for Christ?"

And these people think that Hollywood is weird?

Look, I don't care if you want to watch Dancing with the Stars or some other dumb reality-show shit, but do yourself a favor and have enough self-respect to just own it and not try to pretend that there's something holy or religious about your choice of entertainment.

I mean, on a certain level, who doesn't love that this poor fool is willing to dress like a traffic sign and go out there and shake his ass (badly) on some dumb-shit reality TV show like a whole bunch of other Republican has-been losers before him, people like Tom DeLay?

Like I said, to each their own. I don't care if you wanna watch this crap. I won't, but it's a free country.

I do care, if you want to call this silly bullshit "Christian." Why? Because I was taught that there was a certain level of intolerance for foolishness that went with being one of those.

And it seems like there was a time when stuff like that went double for Baptist pastors like Mike Huckabee.

Like I said, I test drove a Lincoln Town Car last week...so that must make me Officially an Old White Man. Let's add another bullet point to that: I'm so old I can remember when conservatives had to have a modicum of self-respect.

And ya know, I'm so old that I can remember being taught that I should mind my own business, too.

It's not enough for these idiots, that they harass people who have done nothing to them, for no reason, they have to accuse those people in the same breath in order to give themselves cover for doing it.

Atheists and other non-believers don't "hate" the Christian god, they simply don't believe in it.

This kind of talk would be rather like me, as a Dungeons & Dragons player, saying that I hate Goblins or Orcs. You can say it, but Goblins and Orcs simply are not real, so it ends up sounding foolish outside of the context of a tabletop RPG or video game in which those creatures exist, if only in the imagination of the players or on a screen in the context of a graphical user interface.

It's the same with gods, you have to believe in them or they don't actually exist.

What kind of bothers me, is that apparently even the Christians don't believe in Christ anymore, much less any of the things He actually taught.

So what's the damned point of it all then?

Why even bother, Christians, if this is how you're going to conduct yourselves?

I seem to remember having been taught something different.

Matthew 22:36-40 King James Version (KJV)

36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Part 1