Killing America (American Revelation, One Shots, A Rolling Series.)

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
~Linji

This is not normal.

This is not normal?

How is this not normal?

I used to be a conservative.

All my life, there's been at least a few nuts who were determined, against all odds, to believe that the entire world was against them and all they could do was amass an arsenal and hope to go out in a blaze of glory.

It's a hell of a shitty set of life choices to make, but this is America and there's no shortage of paranoid stupidity.

Oh sure, there might be other variables, but one constant was always the same. They wanted to shoot people.

I swear, it's like a bad bit of code in some people's mental programming. Plug in any variables you like, but the result it spits back out is always going to be -1.

They were going to shoot people when The Commies Took Over nope The Ravening Black Mobs from the cities turned up nope The Soviets invaded nope The New World Order (TM) took over nope THE END TIMES! JESUS IS COMING double nope and if He was you'd want to shoot Him, too OMG Terrorists! nope OBAMA!! *Frothy Spittle-flecked Rage* nope When Trump tells us we can kill all the people we don't like.

And when that doesn't...on multiple counts actually can't...happen, these goddamned fools...of whom there are more now than there were when I was growing up, by at least an order of magnitude, will simply move on to some other reason to constantly entertain and regularly beat off to fantasies about murdering their neighbors. Most of whom are white, not many of whom are the promiscuous hippies they imagine, and most of whom have guns too, and a good number of us actually know how to use the damn things.

But every few months or so, one of these goddamned fools goes out and kills somebody anyway.

And the reason Trump can't tell them what they want to hear isn't some legal or moral reason, it's because Trump is a simpering coward. These fucking people have assigned a godlike status to somebody who simply, on all counts, does not fucking deserve such a thing.

The right-wing Jesus is, on all counts, a complete and utter fraud.

But at the end of the day these fucking people don't care.

This is America, there is no problem these fucking fools think they can't shoot their way out of.

Somehow, the fact that people might resist or shoot back never occurs to them.

And they're always surprised when it happens.

No, don't ask me why. I'm not flexible enough to stick my head up my own ass to possibly discern these people's "logic."

In Buddhism, there's a story about how a Monk came back to the temple, babbling excitedly about having met the Buddha on the road. The Master, upon seeing this replies "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!" Why? Because the person the monk met on the road was not the Buddha, but merely a reflection of the monk's own desires.

And flawed human reasoning filled in the rest.

Trump might not be a very good Right Wing Jesus.

But he's an excellent false Buddha for the Monk to find on the road.

Donald Trump is nothing more than a meme into which these people have poured their desires, hopes and insecure fears.

He doesn't really believe much more than that anyone who is against him is bad, he should have money and power, and that somehow, deep down, everybody else is a total bastard just like he is.

Of course, in that way he's not too much different from what a lot of these people are really like. Come on, you don't think Marco Rubio Tweets out random Bible verses because he really believes this stuff, do you?

Kyle Rittenhouse killed two people, one of whom was just walking down the street, because people tried to disarm him and he panicked.

His mother drove him so that he could go and do this. Apparently the words "accessory to murder" for her and "Life Without Parole" for her son, likely under hellish conditions, never entered her thought process.

I'm so old I can remember when conservatives thought that killing people (at any stage of life) was wrong.

Evangelical Christians are raising money for Kyle's legal defense, and Trump personally defended him when asked about the subject this evening. Kyle is well on his way to that trajectory of "Make a rap album when he gets out of jail" and if he gets hit with a standard life sentence, he'll be out in 20 years, maybe a little less...and make a soft landing right into whatever's left of the wingnut welfare system.

It's pretty much an insult to the people that are, ya know, dead because of his dumb ass.

In Portland, Oregon, after months of attacks and terroristic threats from these fucking people, one of them finally got shot, and these motherfuckers spent all weekend making it sound like it was the worst thing ever.

I'm serious, these fucking people are fucking weak.

We can beat this shit, all we have to do is show up, and not back down. They'll fold. The entire basis of their paradigm is that they need to have political power and the power of the State behind them just to feel like men.

Just like, far from having faith as the basis of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, modern Evangelicals demand the entire Universe exist for their own gratification and shout their claimed beliefs back in their face at all times.

Nothing is ever about what they say it's about. It's stupid.

All we gotta do is show up, hang on, and not back the fuck down.

And we'd better, because if we don't things will only get worse.

Stupidity is killing America.

Gates Of Paradise (American Revelation, One Shots, A Rolling Series.)

This article is a direct sequel to this one written at the end of May concerning the George Floyd protests: War Dance.

Nobushige, a soldier, came to Hakuin, and asked: "Is there really a paradise and a hell?"
"Who are you?" inquired Hakuin.
"I am a samurai," the warrior replied.
"You, a soldier!" exclaimed Hakuin. "What kind of ruler would have you as his guard? Your face looks like that of a beggar."
Nobushige became so angry that he began to draw his sword, but Hakuin continued: "So you have a sword! Your weapon is probably much too dull to cut off my head!"
As Nobushige drew his sword Hakuin remarked: "Here open the gates of hell!"
At these words the samurai, perceiving the master's discipline, sheathed his sword and bowed.
"Here open the gates of paradise," said Hakuin. ~Zen Koan 57, At The Gates Of Paradise

I had to take the car in to the shop today. I thought maybe I might need a new alternator or battery for sure yesterday, but then the damned thing started up just fine, if a little rough, this morning.

Thus telling me it's probably some stupid little thing just like it was the last time. So I took it in. Funny thing, but I noticed one of the mechanics was wearing a camouflaged Trump hat. Inside, while sitting in an office drinking coffee.

My roommate followed me to drop the car off at the mechanic, and then we went home.

He likes to take back roads. We live out in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the zip code for our town. It's Trump country all the way down...or at least it was in 2016.

You know what I saw this morning?

Biden signs, and signs for local Democrats, out in the country.

There are hardly any Trump signs anywhere, I'm not talking "Less than there were at this point in '16" I'm saying there are no new ones at all.

Some of the Biden signs were at houses that had Trump signs four years ago. This is boring ass middle of nowhere central Michigan, where the normal influx of student-fed diversity has been cut by more than half this year due to COVID-19, to the point where yesterday I was able to get in and out of Walmart fairly quickly at a time when the aisles would normally be thick with students. And I'm seeing Biden signs in fairly steady numbers in probably the most white-bread part of the county.

What's any of this got to do with anything?

Two days ago, a 17-year-old white kid with a criminal record from Antioch, Illinois got his Mom to drive him to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he murdered two people with an AR-15 rifle that, so far as I know, he should not have been able to possess. He committed a felony in transporting a weapon across state lines to do this crime, and he showed up wearing gloves. And the local cops let this stand. Nothing to see here, move along, just a little First Degree Murder going on. Note: The kid was arrested in Illinois.

I'm just sayin' even at 17 if you're the kind of loser who needs your Mom to drive you places, you probably shouldn't be doing crimes.

Note that the protests to which Rifle Kid objected came about because a Black man was shot in the back seven times by a police officer, and left a paraplegic, because he tried to break up a fight.

This is not how you Law & Order.

The push-back from public opinion over these two events was...well, exactly what one might expect. The sports world, especially the NBA, has gone all in supporting Black Lives Matter. Yeah, some of it's half-ass or insincere, I'm sure, but we live in a world where the leagues now feel that they have to take that step.

Whatever happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?"


As I wrote earlier this week, the Republican National Convention was a flaming tire-fire shit show.

Republicans have lost the argument, lost their minds, lost the plot, and are reduced to lying to us, screaming at us, or to tedious bullshit.

From down here at the street level it seems like it's not working. As an example Trump has pulled ads from markets in Michigan.

And, say the Republicans, That's Okay.

Because it was never about any of that.

It wasn't about Christianity, or conservatism or democracy or even religion or tax cuts, let alone getting elected on their merits. It's about power.

It's about the power to manipulate fools into throwing away their lives at your command, whether explicit or implicit.

Seriously, Tucker, what 17-year old in the whole damn world even knows what "Order" is? What even half-sane teenager is gonna go out there and Kamikaze themselves  for your racist dog-whistles?

When I was that age I effectively measured time in "How long until I get my next blowjob?" You know, like any other sane young man in America (or any other country in the world) especially a young rural white conservative who played Basketball, listened to Rap music and did stuff like write papers on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas for my government class. Even then, I gave a shit, but my priorities were (as they damn well ought to have been) mostly worked around more basic stuff. You know, like not killing people because I didn't want to go to prison.

I mean, seriously, I could be pretty inventive when it came to doing dumb shit but if I'd asked my Mom to drive me anywhere while I was carrying a weapon, it's a safe bet that she would have broke her foot off in my ass.

Among other things, one did not handle weapons at 17 in my family without an adult in the immediate vicinity being informed, whether it was my Grandpa, my Mom, or one of my uncles if they were up north. One did not go anywhere with a weapon without informing said adult of where they were going and how long they would be gone, either. Likewise, we were conservatives, if I'd have ever suggested a plan to go out and do crimes, calling the police wouldn't have been the first thing to occur to any of those I normally answered to...but beating my ass probably would have.

And no one would have cared, let alone saw anything for it, and I would certainly have been seen as the one seen as being in the wrong. Why? Because way back in the barbaric and crude 1990's we weren't this fucking stupid as a society.

But it's not about any of that. What good is firearms safety, parental authority or the simple basic job of keeping tabs on your kid when...well, to be honest you abandoned all that stuff years ago in a mad quest to promote right-wing politics?

Even at the expense of conservatism itself. Even at the expense of religion itself.
All must fall before the shitty agenda.

I'm serious, when was the last time you saw a conservative, much less a Trump supporter, talk about Jesus?

Why do the actual work at the micro-level and ya know, give people actual reasons to want to follow this stuff when it's so much easier [Eyeroll] to just get the "right" President into office and then he'll do all the work...and yeah go ahead and tell me how well that strategy has worked out, you fucking assholes.

And they know it's not working out. Oh yes, they do. That's what the kid with the rifle is for.

Saving Western Civilization, one child soldier at a time.

We're gonna party like it's Sierra Leone under Corporal Alfred Foday Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front in the late 1990's and this is saving "Western Civilization?"

And there are people and organizations literally preparing to spend money to defend this asshole wannabe terrorist in court. He has a Go Fund Me set up for his legal expenses.

And he killed two people, live on video. One of them was just an innocent bystander. Like I said these shitty little losers think you should have to ask them for permission just to walk down the street.

Fuck you. This is supposed to be America. We are supposed to be a free people. All of us.

These fools don't give a damn about civilization. They want you to be afraid, and feel that you have to ask them permission to walk down the street with grocery bags...and if they can, write that into law. They want it to be required of you to cower in the face of authority...and then make it so the only authority is theirs. And it doesn't matter how, or if they have to degrade America to the merest shadow of its former self to do it, because again, it never was about America.

It's about weak little white men who want to pretend to be the burly cigar-chomping Alpha Males of previous generations (or so they think) who look to people like John Wayne for inspiration. Somehow they never understood that even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne. Not to mention a lot of these dudes are closer to Nathan Lane doing his John Wayne impression in The Birdcage.

And note that I consider comparing these dudes to homosexuals a grave insult...to the homosexuals. I just saw a video not too long ago of Jacob Wohl getting punched in the face. At long last, consequences.

Jacob Wohl didn't stand and fight, he ran away, and as we would say back when I was a young dude his age, he runs like an interior decorator. That being a reference to a profession that was associated with gay dudes at the time.

I'm sorry, guys, but some things just gotta be said and in my generation sometimes they got said that way.

I'm gonna be honest here, I'm tired of homophobic and misogynist assholes who in their personal conduct act much more like the people they say they don't like than like the Man's-man types they say they aspire to be.

That should be Okay, they should have been able to be who they really are and not hold themselves up to some ridiculous standard. They should also have been able to get the mental health support they needed to figure out who they were in the first place.

But instead, we stigmatize mental health stuff and promote a reactionary view of manliness that creates vast amounts of cognitive dissonance.

As a result of that cognitive dissonance, these fools think they want to be the drug- and juju- addled soldiers of some thug like Charles Taylor, who believe their heady mix of being fucked up on drugs and absolutely certain of the power of Witchcraft will rush into battle naked with their AK-47's and think that they're bulletproof and invisible.

It's like when somebody tried too hard explaining Armor Class to the dumb ass Bard in The Order Of The Stick...only this is real life, not Dungeons & Dragons.

Instead, they're a lot more like an asshole version of Rave Night at the Ramrod and because they don't like what they are...because they've been programmed with all this silly bullshit...they demand the rest of us adopt their ideas of forced uniformed sameness, harsh religion and white supremacy just so they can feel good about themselves and learn to be what they think men are supposed to be like. Never mind that damned few of those guys back in the day were really like that. Never mind that their 1950's archetype hardly existed outside of the movies.

It's the 21st century, they can be whatever they want...but because there's a loud, vocal, and politically powerful sector of our society that fetishizes the 1950's and shit, that's what they want to be like. Of course, for a good percentage of that time conservatism was dominated by men like Roy Cohn...oh, wait.

And remember, ladies and gentlemen, that's who taught Donald Trump, and who the Orange One is still trying to emulate all these years later. Roy Cohn was a hard-right gay dude.

Donald Trump's idea of manhood...didn't measure up to Donald Trump's idea of manhood. When Roy Cohn was dying of AIDS, Donald Trump abandoned him.

And it only becomes more of a self-destructive circle-jerk from there.

I'm not gonna lie, and I'll say this specifically looking through that 1990's conservative lens of vague homophobia. Rave Night at the Ramrod would be a fucking huge improvement over all this silly bullshit.

We live in a world where American culture and capitalism and society have decided, in the majority, that LGBT people, people of Color, people of other religions (or no religion) etc. should be able to do what they want. We live in a world where, were he still here and dealing with it today, Roy Cohn's biggest challenge would be maintaining health care coverage.

And it's the "Conservatives" who have a problem with that.

This is the kind of crazy stupid shit that pre-modern societies occasionally do, and that we're working up toward post-modern societies doing a lot more often. This is basically like the Taliban preaching their hard-core Salafi Islamist party line...but then going out and getting fucked up on drugs and then sodomizing the youngest of their fighters.

Conservatives used to hate and fear this sort of thing, now they're virtually the only ones advocating for it. This is the direct result of 40 years of conspiracy theories and creationism. I grew up laughing at Jim Bakker and his gaudy stupidity. 40 years later nobody's laughing anymore.

And this kind of crap only ends one way, every single time. War, death and destruction. That's how this ends if we don't stop it, and stop these fucking people.

This is the kind of cognitive dissonance that destroys societies.

Take careful note, that this teenage murderer is what these fucking people want.

We can stop this shit, but you have to show up, and do so in enough numbers that these fucking people know better than to try anything funny.

If we don't, they're going to split the country.

For however long theirs lasts, it will be horrifying.

 It doesn't actually matter that much who wins in November in that regard. These people seem to feel like they're losing the culture wars, or some shit like that, or they didn't get a blowjob from the Prom Queen in high school or their delusions flattered enough in life...so now they want to make it so you have to ask their permission to walk down the street and go get groceries or whatever.

No, they don't care if they'll be consumed by their own system. Hell, that's the only thing they think the system should be for. These fucking people have decided what they want to be, and it's Gonzo Afghanistan with more drugs. Or right-wing North Korea, with more killings.

They think government, or the police, or the State should only be a malevolent presence in people's lives, and that you should only be able to succeed in spite of society...not because of it...unless you're a white man who's rich enough or has the exact right political views, or both.

And they think that they should get a free ride from life, just for being whatever they think they are or aspire to be.

Right now, as a society we face a choice. We can keep indulging these assholes and destroy ourselves, or we can start giving a shit about one another, stand up and put an end to this crap and tell these people to go fuck themselves.

Thus open the gates of hell.

Unless we choose differently, and keep doing that.

Series IV.

Series III.

Series II.

Series I.

This Web Of Life.

Hell Is Empty... (Death Spiral, Part Two.)

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorcery, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9:20-21
...Because all the demons are here.

And making that connection is probably insulting to demons.

Seriously, watching the flaming goddamned train wreck that is the 2020 Republican National Convention, it's hard to shake the feeling that Republicans have lost the argument. It doesn't really matter what argument, or how you frame the thing.

When somebody like Kimberly Guilfoyle just abandons all argument or even pretext of having one, and just starts shrieking at people...and keeps it up for seven minutes...this isn't a political nomination convention anymore, it's an abusive relationship in which one of the partners is in dire need of mental health care. I mean, come on, if Hillary Clinton had done something like that, Republicans would still be smugly bringing it up 20 years from now.

When Donald Trump Junior goes from merely being Beardo Von Fail-son to looking like he spent all day snorting cocaine at Benny's House of Blow, y'all got issues and you shouldn't need somebody like me to tell you that.

When one of your speakers is the kid who literally made a name for himself standing there sneering at an old Native American dude...you ain't got a damn thing to say that's worth saying, come on now. When somehow what the Republican Party is now manages to make Ted Cruz look less punchable it's time to take a good hard look in the mirror.

When the calmest-sounding people in the room...virtual or otherwise...are the St. Louis gun couple, whose banal white-bread stupidity is exceeded only by their incompetence at weapons-handling, even the most hard-bitten, jaded Republican pundit should be able to see there's a fucking problem.

And somebody should have...should have long ago had...the guts to step up and clean house.

That no one did simply confirms my belief...backed by personal experience...that the Republican Party has been rotting out for at least a generation.

People think Trump talking about maiming migrants is shocking, yes, and rightly so.

But, as I've written previously, Evangelicals were ranting about burning gay people at the stake in 2002.

The Republican Party has been losing its base for at least a generation, probably longer.

Ivory Tower, Shining City On A Hill, it doesn't really matter all that much what you call it if the floodwaters of evil and unreason have been slicing through the limestone and washing away the sand beneath, often encouraged...at least tacitly...by the Republicans themselves in their eternal desire to screw for political advantage and their unceasing drive to try to make everything political in a balls-out effort to try and squeeze more votes out of the diminishing returns from an increasingly aging and monochromatic...and shrinking...base.

As I've said before I greatly prefer Reagan's Biblical ideal of the Shining City on a hill to the daily tire-fire bullshit-fest of the Trump administration, but when you factor in that by the time Reagan spoke those famous words, Newt Gingrich had been in Congress for a decade stirring up trouble on Capitol Hill and perfecting the tactics that would turn the Republican Party into the compromise- and facts-proof information- and ideological-silo that it is today...and those were the very scorched earth ideological tactics that would lead us to Trump and every bit of the current mess! Reagan's shining city on a hill was being undermined before he even rhetorically built the thing. Trumpism is nothing but a hologram. This mess is Newt Gingrich and his tactics of political warfare carried out all the way to the end.

It's no wonder these fucking people can't even hold a convention without insulting your intelligence, lying to you or screaming at you.

There's a lot of strands of Republicanism that have always been shit and note I say this as a former Republican who was aware of them at the time. And as I've written before I was a mid-stage casualty of those fucking people's efforts to kick everybody else out.

Today's Republicans are the damned devils.

And they are, in point of fact, here.

They don't deserve to have the power that they do have, and if the rest of us don't step up and take it away from them, and protect our own freedom...well that's on us.

If we want a better country we have to be better citizens, We The People have got to be better people.

Part One.

The Dark And Rolling Sea, Again (Death Spiral, Part One.)

Oh you set your course for the furthest shores
And you never once looked back
And the flag you flew was a pirate cross
On a field of velvet black
And those landsmen who you but lately knew
Were left stranded on the lea
Don't call on them when the storm clouds rise
On the dark and rolling sea.

~Al Stewart

The Republican National Convention, or what of it there's gonna be, anyway, started in Charlotte, NC, this morning. I'm just saying, I've watched old people suffer through the lingering decline and slow death of diseases like Parkinson's and Dementia before, and sooner or later the pace always accelerates, there comes a tipping point where the end is no longer in doubt.

Half of our political system is dying, and it would dearly love to take the other half down with it, not to mention the rest of the country. That's exactly what Immanentizing the "Conservative" Eschaton means.

We don't want to have anything, but we don't want you to have anything, either. They would rather hate than eat, at this point.

The Republican Party at this point is that wrinkled gray, mean old bag from White Pines, running around naked in the woods while the cops and the nursing home staff are trying desperately to chase her down before she freezes to death in the cold winter night.

Or perhaps its that shitty middle-aged domestic abuser, all flabby arms and beer gut, yelling "I'm gonna kill you, bitch" as he's hauled away in handcuffs by the cops.

Except it's worse than that, so much indescribably worse.

This is the same "We're out of ideas and attempting to land this thing on popularity" vibe that afflicted the Republicans in 1992 and then the Democrats in 2000. This is the same mentality that led people to vote for Ross Perot and Ralph Nader, the whole idea that "We should have power, Why? Well, because we've always had it before."

I've read my history, that kind of thinking only ends one way, if it goes on long enough.

It ends in Guillotines and Terrors, It ends in mass evacuations, firefights in the streets even as the regime and its army disintegrate, and tanks crashing through the gates of the Independence Palace. It ends in ethnic cleansing and wars and peace imposed from without, and United Nations tribunals.

It ends with Saddam on the gallows, defiant to the end, convinced that if he only yells loud enough, all will bow to his will.

Right up until the trapdoor opens beneath his feet.

That mentality tended to make a younger, more conservative me want to kick over the card table and tell these sons of bitches they had to go get real jobs. I personally liked Bush 41, but I voted for Clinton because I thought he'd done a crap job as President. By the same token, I liked Bush 43, but I more strongly felt that the Clinton years had not worked out all that well.

Now? It's the same old bullshit, again.

Except this time it's in the middle of the bed in an expensive hotel room, naked, with the pool boy snorting powder cocaine off its boobs and Jerry Falwell Jr. tied to a chair, watching eagerly.

Oh, wait, did I say that out loud? Too damned bad.

The other mental image I had was much worse, and involved a gaudier, shabbier hotel room in a Trump property, Donald Trump, Ivanka, no clothing, a glass tube, K-Y, and a magically-shrunken Ronna Romney-McDaniel, with Jared tied up in the corner watching the whole procedure and Lindsey Graham in a dominatrix outfit, a gimp mask, and high heels.

Oh I have no need of a chart or creed
You told your waiting crew
For the winds of chance, they will bear us straight
And you spoke as though you knew
So you paid no mind to the warning signs
As you gave your words so free
Don't change your tack when the timbers crack
On the dark and rolling sea.
~Al Stewart

Actually, it gets even worse. These fucking people are so out of ideas that they're attempting to revive fear of a political system 30 years gone, that no one who ever lived under it wants to fully go back to, and that most Americans now living cannot even define without looking it up. And then they want to pin that on the opposition party.

Even though they're the only ones bringing it up.

I'm here to tell you, with these fucking people Everything is about the shitty agenda, and everything else is somehow a repository for their own endless wellspring of insecure fears.

There are no American Communists to speak of. Unless you consider my longstanding argument that, behavior-wise, Republicans are Communists now.

Never mind that these idiotic conspiracy theory-addled dumb ass motherfuckers are the ones in thrall to Kremlin paymasters and one former KGB Lt. Colonel in particular, namely Vladimir Putin. So, much if not all of what Beardo Von Fail-Son here is even saying could likely be chalked up to projection. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, there are a hell of a lot of things about the modern Republican Party that come off as creepily Soviet.

Yet they're so afraid of everything, that they desperately would bring back even the Cold War and the threat of nuclear war, mass death in 30 minutes and eye-searing flashes in the cold night as the Air Force Base an hour from your house and the city a few hours away in which a bunch of your family members live are reduced to a light dusting of wind-borne ash...simply to create a rationale for their own existence.

Except that they want to deploy that fear, and create that New Cold War not against some foreign power...but against a majority of the citizens of their own country, because they need something, anything, to cover their own shitty hypocrisy and because a majority of the American body politic would rather be citizens than subjects.

Oh, don't worry, they'll throw China and Russia and the rest of them under that bus later, too. All Republicanism is transactional.

Sometimes, when you see the entire rest of the whole damn world as enemies, maybe the problem just might be you.

The Party's motto might as well be "What have you done for me lately?"

The only better Trump is the one that wrote that book and ratted out the rest of them.

And the only better Republicans are the ones who've thrown in with the other team and are supporting Joe Biden.

This is what those who remain part of the True Faith Cult are.

This is what they always have been.

The only difference is, in these last five years or so, they've finally found a "leader" who will sink to their level. They will never abandon him. These people cannot be reasoned with. You cannot appeal to the better nature of somebody who simply doesn't have one.

We have to vote them out, and then after that, unless the numbers against them are so overwhelming as to make the outcome a foregone conclusion, we're going to have to fight them off.

You have been warned.

If this was a mob in the streets of a dusty desert country shouting "Allah Akbar" or "Death To America" in response to the harangues of some bumptious mustached fool in a beret and Soviet-style uniform, while firing their Kalashnikovs into the air, millions of Americans would be screaming for blood.

But since it's the Republican Party, at the Republican National Convention, conflict, murder, treason and the dismantling of America are somehow Okay.

Or celebrated, or implicitly or explicitly agreed with.

How the fuck do you not see the problem here? Why the fuck does only one side see the double standard?

We have to stop this shit. Now.

Now the thunder rails in the great main-sails
And the stars desert the skies
And the rigging strains as the hands of rain
Reach down to wash your eyes
And your oarsmen stands with his knife in hand
And his eyes spell mutiny
Don't call my name when your ship goes down
On the dark and rolling sea.
~Al Stewart, On The Dark And Rolling Sea.

Part Two.

Zero Sum (Pillars Of Qreation, Part Two.)

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he strikes a man.
And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. ~Revelation 9:4-7

Martha McSally wants you to not have food to eat. She literally wants you to go without a meal...for the sake of her political campaign, and give her the money you'd spend on food. Keep in mind that she's by definition wealthy, or she wouldn't be a fucking Senator, or have the connections that were what got her appointed to the position in the first damn place.

But it's the way she puts it, that I find infuriating. She wants to use the idiom of religious practice and self-denial...your self-denial, not her own...to boost the chances of her sagging Senatorial campaign.

How about no?

All things considered, I once tried to expect more from Martha McSally, who was once upon a time one of the first female fighter pilots in the United States Air Force, the first to fly the A-10 Thunderbolt II, and who seemed, in those days, to be a fairly competent and decent person. I guess that assessment was wrong.

Makes you wonder if Captain (later Colonel) McSally's call sign was "Blue Falcon."

But ya know, it gets worse than that, a lot worse.

These people want you to be religious because it's easier to pick your pockets if your head is bowed and eyes closed in prayer and that also makes it harder for you to read the fact-check, so it's a win-win.

They want you whooping it up and baying for someone else's blood because then the hounds that might restrain their own actions or hold them accountable are off the trail.

They want you equating right-wing politics with Christianity, and in fact teach modern so-called "Conservatism" as Christianity simply because in the end, it's a great tool for fooling the feeble-minded and getting people to give them money or accord them power or special privileges. They want funny hats and secret handshakes and exclusive secret societies and most of all, unaccountable power so that they can force people to have to pretend to follow their religion and ultimately, to give them money and more power.

No, no amount of money or power will ever actually be enough. They will always want more. And it's always easier to get stupid people to give you stuff if you convince them that you know magic words and phrases. Do you notice how the Q-stuff is now pretty much just woven in without hashtag or pretext?

Conspiracy theories and religion offer them power and profit and the ability to denounce and kill others without accountability. Democracy, facts, and truth do not give them any of that. So yeah, you tell me which side these motherfuckers were going to end up on. Sure, they could have better beliefs, better policies, do the work of governance and outreach, but they don't want to. Besides, it's much easier and more fun to simply denounce your opponent as the Devil and hope like hell your mush-minded followers buy into it.

And then they wonder why everything's a goddamned soup sandwich right now, and two thirds of America hates them. More to the point, they wonder why they can't reach out and expand their coalition beyond conspiracy theorists, racists, religious nuts and scoundrels.

I have to wonder if, now that he's out of jail and supposedly converted to Evangelical Christianity, Roger Stone will go the route of Chuck Colson, who founded Prison Fellowship Ministries and try to help people because of his experiences?

Or will he just go back to being the same kind of self-aggrandizing little dick peddling some variation of the same bullshit line he's been peddling since the Nixon administration, with a nice little side-stop at the Swingers club?

I'm going to go with Option Two, here. And people like Pastor Greg Locke won't even care, because it never really was about any of that.

It never was about God, or Jesus, or Conservatism and it sure as hell wasn't about America.

It's about their shitty selfish beliefs and their zero sum economic and social policies and the fact that yes, they do want to kill you and take your stuff, or reduce you to abject misery, because they cannot feel like Men unless they see somebody else suffering and can convince themselves it's for their benefit.

God ain't got one damned thing to do with it.

And if God needs them to protect Him, then He is not God.

One of these things is not like the other one. No, Two plus Two does not equal Five and never will.

It's as simple as that.

I'm starting to wonder if we're seeing the birth of a new religion, or at least a new religious movement. It'll be like those Rama Rama Ding Ding nutty cultists one used to find at airports in the 1970's, but the first thing they try and do is take your wallet.

The difference is, as goofy and corrupt as they were, the Rajneesh followers and shit didn't control half the government.

Think about that for a second.

Part One.

AmeriQa, FuQ Yeah (Pillars Of Qreation, Part One.)

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. ~Revelation 9:1-3
Well there it is. Trump has gone all-in on Q-Anon because "They like him."

And there's people out there that will try and tell you that Trump is some kind of moral paragon?

Yeah, about that...

I believe the proper answer here is "Fuck No."

I don't think this is a coincidence, It's already a known fact that the Q-nuts are in the process of deciding whether they want to be a new religion, a terrorist movement, or maybe both. I want you to think about that for a second...a movement of bloody-minded fools hell bent on seeking out nonexistent cabals of pedophiles. It's basically a ready-made excuse to do whatever they want, to whoever they want, if these fools get power in the kind of way they want to have it.

As political consequences, reality and the law close in on Trump, he's going to cleave closer to these fools. If the polls, trends and general public rage at the Trump administration's excesses hold and these motherfuckers get booted from power...well, fuck being President, he can just declare himself a god at this point and probably break off a quarter of Americans as followers and a decent chunk of land, to try and protect himself from the consequences, and don't think Russia (in my view, the probable source of the Q-nuts bullshit to start with) won't help these people and sell them weapons and sponsor them internationally, you have another thing coming.

It'll be just like North Korea, except conservative, sweaty and covered with grease. If there's an upside it's that this will probably arise too late to help Brian Kolfage, Steve Bannon, and several others who got arrested today for mail and wire fraud by the FBI and the US Postal Inspection Service for a fraud scheme involving Boaters for Trump and The Wall Project, and also connected to former Sheriff David Clarke, Erik Prince, and a veritable who's who of Trump World.

In effect, if these people keep losing politically and lose the election, their likely best bet is going to be to go all-in even harder on this crap, try and break off a piece of America for themselves and try to form some sort of Q-Theocracy. What such a thing might be composed of or do, in real terms, I have no idea but the very concept itself sounds horrifying.

Like I've said, these people don't care if they win, they care about Immanentizing some sort of right-wing Eschaton.

And no, they don't care how many people they kill or what they destroy in the process. And don't be surprised when the very first person they throw under the bus to try and keep their power or establish a new power-base is Jesus Christ.

It was never about Christianity, let alone conservatism nor any other thing these people said it was about. If you haven't noticed, most of the Christians who still profess Christianity and most of the Republicans who still believe in anything I can recognize as conservatism have thrown in with the Democrats at this point.

There's a reason for that.

This is the end result of Conspiracy theories, Creationism, and listening to people like Sarah Palin and Tucker Carlson; A political movement with no basic coherent philosophy other than opposition to mostly-imagined enemies and tearing down anything it can tie to such, and no basis in fact, logic or reason nor loyalty to anything outside itself. Throw in one hell of a persecution complex and a staggering inability to see what's right in front of them.

If I were the Biblical Beast of Revelation I could not design a better false religion than this crap.

Nor more foolish, lost people to believe in this silly bullshit.

You can, if you like, do the math concerning how this is going to work out for the rest of us if we don't stand up and do something about it.

The efforts of Facebook and Twitter and all these other organizations to try to prevent the spread of this crap are all well and good, and they will help some.

But that's not enough, we need an Anti-Q movement, with an actual basis in facts and knowledge, religion and truth to even begin to counter this bullshit.

And we need one now, because without it, given these people's other proclivities, they will fixate on the idea that they're being persecuted...by the Elites or the Globalists, the Jews or the Muslims or the secular Liberals and that will make them double down even harder, #WWG1WGA will become the new INRI.

When faced with bad ideas, you have to have better ideas. Americans, hell, conservatives used to remember that.

We'd better come up with something fast.

Or it's only going to get worse.

Part Two.

Fear And Loathing In Undisclosed Locations.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well... maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.

What I'm about to tell you would be highly classified in normal times. Suffice it to say these are not normal times. Also, please note that I had no control over any of these events, I'm just one of the guys from Security Forces. Also note that for most of us, you don't join the Deep State, you don't PCS here, you don't transfer in or get seconded by some other agency. You get denounced and dumped here by Republicans. There's nothing wrong with that, by my count right now, we're roughly three quarters of America.

Estimated, Seven Days Ago.
Deep State Sector Victor Seven.
Former United States Air Force SAGE control bunker.
Somewhere near Richmond, Virginia.

Picture a dimly lit room, viewed through the one-way glass common to interrogation rooms from Abu Ghraib to Lefortovo to Rikers. Some shitty old Republican bound and gagged, tied...rather artistically...to a chair by a Dominatrix who stands quietly in the corner on the other side of the wall, seen dimly in profile, I can't quite make out who it is. He's seated in front of an empty metal table, the kind they make in Federal prisons. An armed guard standing at attention, in Arctic/Urban pattern BDU's and wearing a ski mask impassively keeps watch from over by the door.

My battle buddy is watching the CCTV screens for the security cameras in the hall.

A knock on the door, which the guard opens, then snaps back to attention. Barack Obama walks in, the former President is wearing Khakis and a brand new, still crisp Biden/Harris 2020 T-shirt, and carrying a small bundle. A second guard follows him in.

He addresses the seated figure, his voice seeming to be at once serious and full of concern.

"So, you want in? You're sure about this, bro? Are you sure?!" His deep voice echoes slightly in the silence of the small space.

The seated figure nods nervously, sweating.

Obama lays out the contents of the small bundle on the empty table, four peppers sit on the unrolled white Cheesecloth.

A Jalapeno.

A Habanero.

A Carolina Reaper.

And some nasty-looking mutant orange thing labeled in Thai with internationally-recognized danger symbols. In the small room, I'm certain they can feel the heat radiating from it.

The seated figure mumbles. Obama carefully removes the gag.

There's a knock on the heavy steel door, the guard opens it and a broken-looking Bill Kristol shuffles in, carrying only a single, clear glass of ice water on a small round tray.

Obama looks meaningfully at him, then at his seated fellow-traveler, then at the peppers.

He nods to the dominatrix, who comes up behind the seated figure and carefully cuts the rope with a knife.

The old Republican stretches, massages his wrists and looks around, confused, his features now more clearly visible.

"You see those peppers, John? Eat three out of the four without reaching for that glass of water and you're in. No pressure, It will not be held against you if you fail, you will simply be returned to your home with an interesting story you can maybe tell over drinks in a few months. I'll be back in ten minutes."

He nods to the dominatrix and the guards. "We should leave these gentlemen to their moment of truth. I really don't want the Governor to feel unduly pressured into making a decision he's not comfortable with. Either he passes the test, or he does not. It's up to him."

The four of them leave, leaving only the two old men.

It's apparently some kind of personality test the psych guys came up with. Something about terrible people not liking to eat spicy foods.

Just then, my radio crackles. There's a knock on the door. My buddy opens it, and my relief arrives, next step in the rotation.

I step out into the smaller service hallway. Five meters to my left is another door, A couple of seconds later I knock on it, thumb the switch for the radio on my shoulder "Positive Control Unit, Rotation Kilo 0300, Go." The door opens, I step in, the troop I'm replacing steps out and I look through the one-way glass.

A brown-haired older woman is seated at a table, on it has been set a contraption that clearly resembles the gadgets Representatives and Senators use to cast votes on bills electronically.

She's rocking back and forth in her chair, holding herself and plaintively wailing "But I'm very concerned! I'm very, very concerned."

Another older woman, blonde-haired, shorter, and who's clearly been trying to nudge the seated woman to make a decision for at least a few minutes, appears to have had enough. "Oh, come on, all you have to do is vote 'No." Is this what you really want to be associated with for the rest of your life? We're giving you a free shot, here."

There's a knock on the door. The guard opens it.

It's Obama, followed by one of the guards.

"Time's up, time's been up, I stopped to use the bathroom just to give you an extra few minutes. How's she doing?"

The blonde woman walks over to him, shaking her head.

A staffer joins the huddle thumbs up on the Governor!

It's not my business to follow the decision making process from here, so I don't.

I look over at the other troop "What happens now?"

"She'll be sent home, slightly drugged, probably with the suggestion hypnotically implanted that she really did smoke two joints in the afternoon, and it made her feel alright, and that any other weird shit she remembers flows from there."

South Florida
Near Palm Beach
August 18th, 2020
Estimated Time 22:30

It's one of those small apartment complexes you mostly find in a place like California or Florida, a motel...the kind with kitchens in the rooms...converted to an apartment building, these places usually provide housing to lower-income seniors and young couples, or those who might only temporarily be residing in a given locale, usually on a seasonal basis. There's another category in play here, too, crazy people...and this is, after all, Florida.

A car pulls up. The driver leaves the car running, lights on, there's a slight mist in the humid night air. A young woman gets out. She's prim and proper, dressed professionally in a red pantsuit and carrying a fairly decent-sized cloth-and-zipper binder labeled "Florida Republican Party" and a tablet. She looks around, as if seeking the proper door, there's a few political signs about, mostly Republican in this kind of a place, Democratic district or no. Her eyes settle on the proper place, the lights are on, back-lighting a sign in the window that says simply "Loomer 4 Congress." The young woman gulps. Here we go.

She steps up to the door, knocks. It sounds as if the TV is on with the volume cranked up and someone on the other side of the door is having an intense argument, particularly loud sex, or maybe both. She belatedly notices a noise complaint taped to the door. Oh shit.

No response.

She knocks harder, looking rather nervous about it.

The door opens, a smell like the combined odor of cat piss and mothballs comes rolling out, yet there is no cat obviously present...and apparently nobody else, either, just her boss.

"Oh hi, Jamie, come on in!"

Fuckkk. No choice. Couldn't we do this at the office tomorrow? She steps into the apartment, to say that it's messy would be charitable. It's..typical crazy person...stacks of boxes in one corner, the kitchen table full of various boxes and half-empty food containers, kitchen sink full of unwashed dishes, the smell of cigarette butts smothers out the harsher scents that greeted her at the door.

The desk. Oh fuck my life. Stacks and stacks of papers, as if she's been writing proposed legislation already...in notebooks, with a pen, in longhand?

Something dies inside the young woman's soul.

 Laura grabs the remote and turns off the TV, then pauses the Youtube video that's playing on the laptop sitting on the couch cushions. She looks around, as if to clear off a spot, but the only bare spot on the desk is occupied by a rather abused copy of Unveiling Islam by Ergun Caner that appears to have doubled as an ashtray at some point. A couple of clearly more scholarly books by Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the former-Muslim Atheist Ibn Waharraq sit untouched, somehow not even dirty, atop a stack of papers.

They settle on sitting on the couch, the young woman opens the binder, turns on the tablet...

"What have you got for me?"

"Well, it looks like you won..."

A whoop of exhilaration, probably worthy of another noise complaint itself at this time of the night.

 "...And it wasn't even close, but remember this is a heavily Democratic district and you're running against Lois Frankel, who is extremely popular here and heavily favored to win."

'But Mr. Trump said I was going to win big against this Pelosi puppet!"

"Wut?"

She pulls out her phone, the first thing on screen is the campaign Twitter account.

"No, listen. Laura, honey, we got shit to do, Okay?"

"But I'm going to WIN, I'm the FUTURE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY!!!! That's what people are saying, everybody's talking about Meeeee!!"

She's positively giddy, and for a second looks like she might actually try to kiss the young campaign staffer, who scuttles backward a little, protectively.

Who knows what Lovecraftian horrors lurk in this place?!

"Well, if you're so sure, why don't you just go over that stuff, and we'll talk strategy in the morning. See you around nine?"

"Ten, maybe Eleven."

"Okay."

The young staffer carefully makes her way to the door, and manages not to run to the car.

Once safely in the passenger seat, she looks at the driver, a burly Cuban man wearing a US Army ball cap, an unlit cheap cigar sticks out of his mouth. His eyes are bright, alert. He is, as always, calm, cool and collected as only someone who has faced the fear and horror of combat and learned to control their fear can be.

"Lazaro, please just take me home."

"You Okay, Ma'am?" He sounds worried for her.

She doesn't reply. As he drives, she pulls out the business card, the one that grizzled old bald guy from that Lincoln Project thing gave her in the bar last Saturday night and she looks at it in the city lights and the glare from her phone, gradually, slowly tapping out a text message, she finally hits "Send."

Okay, U said U could get me out. What do I gotta do?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This set of disasters has been brought to you by 50 years of racism, 40 years of Creationism, 20 years of escalating conspiracy theories and dumb shit, and five years of Trump.

Now the key question is, what are you going to do about it?

Because that's how we really stop this.

You wanna have a better country? Be a better citizen.

The Underpants Gnomes theory of Conservatism.

Step One: Collect Underpants
Step Two: ???????????
Step Three: Profit!!
~From the South Park episode "Gnomes" Season Two.

There's something I keep seeing that's really starting to irritate me.

I've been mentally referring to it for awhile as the Underpants Gnome theory, a reference to, yes, unfortunately, a South Park episode. The basic idea of it is perfectly illustrated by this snipped Tweet. Basically, people have no idea how things work and they don't want to know. So they just assume that whatever they want to believe already is possible.

In reference to Mr. Miller's specific post, this is America. We elect our political leaders. If Joe Biden is "Unelectable" how then was he in office for 40+ years? How did he come to be Barack Obama's Vice President, an office that has a nomination process and to which the nominee must be elected along with the Presidential candidate?

His answer? Democratic Party Argle Bargle New World Order Something Something Gazpacho. Hell, I'm surprised he didn't find a way to throw in Commies, George Soros, the Illuminati and some ancient, sinister deal between the Assassins and the Knights Templar.

Joe Biden got reelected to Congress multiple times in Delaware over a period of decades and, as I remember Fred Clark of Slactivist...a Delaware resident at the time...pointing out, as gaffe-prone as he is, Delawareans *Love* Joe Biden.

Apparently, so did Black voters in South Carolina, and Democrats more generally as he's the nominee. Hell, even Bernie Sanders is on board now, as are a decent number of card-carrying Republicans.

American conservatism, and especially religious conservatism, is shot-through with deep strands of anti-intellectualism and paranoia and an even deeper strain of incuriosity. They don't want to know, and they don't want you to know either. But hey here's this crazy bullshit we just made up. That is Truth, just believe us. Would we lie to you? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, and all those other lies. This is different. Despite numerous efforts to root out the kooks, going all the way back to William F. Buckley in the 1960's they always find a way to weasel their way back in.

Or, as I've put it elsewhere, if you don't know anything you can believe whatever you want.

And this time they managed to shove almost everybody who might restrain their antics out of the airlock.

Seriously, there is no such thing as the "New World Order" the phrase gained currency because George H.W. Bush used it in a speech attempting to define where we were going to go as a nation and a world in the post-Cold War era.

It was nothing more than a reference to the simple fact that with the end of the Cold War, and the fall of the Iron Curtain, some sort of new order would likely emerge after a brief period of sole-superpower American hegemony.

Pat Robertson immediately seized on the use of the term to, basically, create what became a cohesive narrative for a body of Evangelical End Times conspiracy theories that mostly already existed...itself largely devolving from the book "The Late Great Planet Earth" by American nominally-Baptist Evangelist and theologian Hal Lindsey, published in 1973...and the two texts, that and Robertson's New World Order book...were the foundational texts of the 1990's End Times Prophecy Movement.

I know, I was there. As I attempted to point out numerous times, none of this crap is in the Bible.

The New World Order, as a concept outside of the vaguest terms, as an organization or this, that, or the other thing, simply does not exist. It was a quote from a speech misconstrued by idiots.

It's worth noting that most of the "New World Order" bullshit is just an updated re-tread of various things that were used in anti-Communist propaganda at one time or another...just like most of the "Conservative" bullshit coming out the woodwork these last few years from racism to complaints against women dancing is not much more than recycled 1950's bullshit with a little generic religious Fundamentalism of the kind that seems the same from Kandahar to Kankakee thrown in to make it acceptable to the chuckefucks that are looking for excuses to buy into whatever dumb shit comes along.

And for the record, because some idiot will bring it up, Agenda 21 originated in the same era as the New World Order conspiracy theory, as a non-binding United Nations agreement to promote environmental health. Somebody from the Bush administration signed off on it, as it was a routine bullshit agreement of the sort that people will make simply to show international good faith and a commitment to progress. Anybody with a brain in their heads...those few of us that noticed, anyway, saw that it was routine bullshit and acted accordingly.

And if there was such a thing, why would any Americans...who seldom can even agree with each other...feel beholden to answer to it?

Never mind that we have documented evidence of the Republicans working with the Russians in 2016 and since. If the "New World Order" and all that crap would just identify itself as or make itself acceptable to Right-Wing Conservatism they wouldn't just be on board with it, they'd be working overtime trying to force everybody else to have to go along as well.

Partisanship is a hell of a drug, apparently.

It's like with the whole Q-Anon thing. Despite Jeffery Epstein and his suspicious suicide and the fact that his procurer-of-victims is in Federal custody and the fact that there are dozens of photos of both with Trump, the entire Q-Sphere is basically screaming "No, Not THOSE Pedophiles!!"

Most of the time, Right Wing conspiracy theories are just another effort to try and ratfuck somebody.

When a guy who goes by "Bongmaster" makes more sense than you do, it's probably time to hang it up and go home.

The truth is that there always is a truth, humans are always capable of finding it if they want to, and we can usually understand anything that's not of clearly supernatural origin...and there's very few things that really fall into that particular category in observable, let alone verifiable, terms.

Magic ain't really a thing, people, there are no Gnomes, much less Underpants Gnomes.

And note, I say that as a gamer. And as a former conservative.

We live in a world where anybody that can afford a $35 Smart Phone and a $45 phone card has literally all the knowledge of humanity at their fingertips and the ability to spread their knowledge or opinions over a scope just as vast. All one really has to have, past that, is the curiosity to look for whatever information they're trying to find and the integrity to try and verify as much of it as they can. Or the ability and desire to say something that resonates with people.

And because too many people are doing that, and it doesn't benefit the wealthy and those in power, people who don't want you to know what is true are engaged in a vast disorganized effort to try and make sure that as many people as possible don't have that $80 and to pollute and slow the flow of information by less technological means.

People like Donald Trump and Louis DeJoy. And no, they don't care what else they screw up in the process or who dies because of it, not even if it's their own supporters. People who profit from the Underpants Gnome theory of government and who would benefit from some Magic 8-Ball method of choosing our leaders instead of voting.

How's that for a conspiracy theory?

Hey, I'm just asking questions here.