The Eternal Boundary (American Revelation V: Prequel Two)

Dillon: This is a leadworks, isn't it? All we got to do is lure the fucking beast into the mold. Drown it in hot lead.

Morse: Oh right... and how do we do that?

Gregor: Yeah. What are we gonna use for bait...?

Kevin: [realizes] Aw, fuck!

Dillon: We're all gonna die. The only question is when. This is as good a place as any to take your first steps to heaven. The only question is how you check out. Do you want it on your feet, or on your fucking knees... begging?! I ain't much for begging! Nobody ever gave me nothing! So I say fuck that thing! Let's fight it!

Morse: Fuck it! Let's go for it!

~From Alien 3.

 The first Presidential debate of the 2020 Campaign was last night.

Biden did alright and held his own. Trump went off the fucking deep end. Nobody who was paying attention was expecting anything else.

It's what the rest of us do about this crap that matters. All the more so after last night.

When he was called upon to denounce the Proud Boys and White Supremacists Trump instead said they should "Stand back and stand by" as if he were not the President of a country, but some shitty insurgent General giving orders.to some kind of American Viet Cong, and planning some kind of American Tet Offensive to try and keep himself in power when he loses. I rather suspect it will be more along the lines of an American Sendero Luminoso, in the end. But the thing to remember about that is lots of people still died in all those Latin American insurgencies, and lots of those rebel armies became political parties, like the Communist Party of Peru...AKA Shining Path, or in Spanish, Sendero Luminoso.

Are you willing to live with the idea that, even after losing a civil war, these people gain legitimacy and recognition as part of the peace process and go on holding some equivalent of Trump rallies and wearing their red hats basically forever? A system where it's the Democrats, what's left of the Republicans and the Trump People's Party?

I'd kind of like to see this bullshit stopped, but the truth on a pretty major level is, that's what happens.

I keep saying that this is an act in two parts for a reason; First we're going to have to vote them out. Then we're going to have to fight them off, and in all likelihood they will succeed in breaking off some piece of this country to use for their shitty little Banana Republic or becoming a legitimized political faction separate from those that formed them after achieving some success in an armed insurgency and gaining the political clout that this entails.

There is no other choice unless we all stand up. There is no better option. This is what conservatives have become. Republicans now...are the people who apparently think we were in the wrong to fight the Nazis, or wrong when we went into Bosnia in 1995 and kicked hell out of Republika Srpska and forced an end to the killing in Bosnia. These are people who think Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic and all the shitty little nationalist murderers under their commands did nothing wrong.

Hell, these fucking people think Augusto Pinochet and Efrain Rios-Montt didn't do a goddamned thing wrong, other than not be American.

Lest you think the "mainstream" Religious Right and Republican Party are blameless in this kind of shit, Efrain Rios-Montt preached at Tim LaHaye's church in California when he was exiled from Guatemala for awhile in the 1980's before the full extent of his crimes were known, and the Reagan administration was perfectly fine with that shit, with a genocidal dictator who spent most of his life being unable to leave the country he'd once nearly destroyed not only because no one else would have him, but because if he did he'd get arrested and face United Nations war crimes prosecution.

And Republicans gave shelter to that motherfucker.

And some of these people are running our government.

This is going to end badly.

The only question is, what are you going to do about it.

This is not just about an election. This is about the fact that some of us will in fact be staring down that Eternal Boundary between life and death somewhere in this mess. People will die, people are dying, and they have been dying, now by the hundreds of thousands and that's just from how these fucking people fucked up the pandemic response. It will get worse.

But we still have to stand up and do the right thing, not just once, but every step of the way.

The Russians...aided by the party that was once their natural enemy at all levels...are trying to do to us what we did to countries like Chile and Guatemala during the Cold War. The American people as a whole have mostly caught on to this fact, just about a quarter to a third of them are fine with this shit.

Up to and including armies fighting it out in the hinterlands, apparently.

Except it won't stay there, it already hasn't. 

A hell of a lot of Americans are hoping that when this election is over, Trump will be gone and they can go back to sleep and back to ignoring all of America's problems in favor of pet issues and pop culture dumb shit. It's not going to work that way.

Even if this mess stopped tomorrow we'll be years in digging out from it. 

Just as we already have with the tax returns, we're going to eventually find out that this whole mess was a lot worse than even those of us who knew it was pretty fucking bad at the time ever suspected.

And as it is, we have one third of us imagining that they're about to get some kind of "clearance" to kill the other two thirds. As if the laws of God and Man are somehow held in abeyance for their political and racist whack-off fantasies and shitty desires.

If we don't stop this mess now, the next step is armed conflict and quite possibly a peace imposed from without...by powers like the Chinese, the European Union and the United Nations...and handing world leadership over to the Chinese because there is functionally no more America to stop them. Is that something we want? Is that the kind of world you want to live in?

This is life and death not just for each of us, but for our country, and for our ideals.

This is a choice every last one of us is going to have to make, to stand up or not to stand up.

Make your choice.

Prequel One.

Why American Revelation? (American Revelation V: Prequel One.)

 

Dillon: Why should I put my ass on the line for you?

Ripley: Your ass is already on the line. The only question is... what are you gonna do about it?

~From Alien 3

I keep seeing stuff like this.

Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong.

Kyle's Mom got a standing ovation at a Republican women's conference in Waukesha, WI.

Conservatives, openly and loudly defending a literal murderer who also broke several other laws just to get there to kill those people, and who should never have had a weapon in the first place. 

Whatever happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?"

They are literally saying he didn't do anything wrong. If you believe the Ten Commandments, if you believe God, he did.

And while I'm at it, what happened to not dressing like a bad impression of what you think Mr. Pink's stunt double was supposed to look like?

His body armor plate holder is on backwards, the fuck is that, a Betsy Ross flag? Even assuming some level of protection, keeping your cell phone holder attached to your chest seems stupid. What the fuck is that helmet, and...did he cut the knock-off camouflage pants so that people could see his flag underwear?

Ya know what, I don't even want to speculate what those kneepads are actually *For* or why this dude might be planning on spending time on his knees. I don't even want to know.

Might as well throw in that his pants aren't bloused and he's wearing incorrect footwear too. Those shoes would be awful in an actual battlespace.

It might not seem like a big deal, but packing your gear properly, dressing functionally and following basic procedures can in fact mean the difference between life and death. Given his lack of attention to detail (or even of caring whether or not he looks like a fucking idiot, I'm pretty damned sure I don't want to see what kind of shape this asshole's weapons are in.

You know, for want of a nail, and all that. If you can't be trusted with the small things, why should anybody trust you with anything else?

Like social policy, for example.

This is America, in the modern world, you have to consider that there are people other than your group who do not believe the same things that you do. And that this is perfectly fine. It's the natural order of things that people should damned well be free to make their own choices and if they don't like your shitty dogma or your small, mean, selfish god...then they have the choice not to follow.

If "All lives matter" why is this soft-handed bitch in the snipped Tweet here wasting his day hawking stickers and wearing camouflage that seriously suggest that no lives matter to him, only dogma.

After all, most of these people take "We are but dust and shadow" as more of a Gospel than the actual Gospel, without actually knowing the words, or who wrote them down. It's really kind of sad to this guy who had to learn this stuff in elementary school.

I saw this earlier today. Just the Pope doing his actual job, saying that things like personal security should be based on something other than the possession of weapons.

As I understand it, Pope Francis worked as a bar bouncer at one time, so he knows a little about the use of force. 

Yet, as one would expect of a Catholic Priest, of a Christian...he calls the faithful and the world to do something better than that. You know, like Jesus did. It shouldn't be a hard lift, this is the Pope's actual job. This is what every Pope that I can remember all the way back to John Paul II has done...and, thank God, has apparently actually believed. I spent most of my life as a conservative, and take it as a given that peace is better than war. This belief is only reinforced by seeing what my friends who went to war had to deal with, and how it still affected them well after the events in question.

But of course, right on schedule, here's two American cousin-humpers trying to argue theology with the Pope, because after al, what would the Vicar of Christ know about Christianity?

Lance's Bio pretty much was all about how he loves Jesus. Austin's was about how only bad Catholics are Democrats and all the good Catholics are Republicans.

I'll remember that the next time some Reverend Chucklefuck is on TV calling Catholics pagans or Satanists and their religion the Antichrist. 

But ya know, it's hard to escape the conclusion that these people are stupid. The Cold War ended in 1989. Communism hasn't been a thing since Christmas of 1991. Even the Chinese and Vietnamese aren't Communists anymore.

Yet these fucking people long to be staring down the Red Army through the firing ports in their bunkers. As a child of the late Cold War, I'll never understand this.

Why do these people want to live in fear?

And how and why do these fucking morons see Donald Trump as more of a guarantor of their earthly and spiritual security than Jesus Christ, or the Pope? I mean, isn't it better to not have to worry about killing people? 

Christianity was integral to the conservatism I was raised with. The Ten Commandments, among other doctrines, are integral to Christianity. Being secure in your beliefs and not living in fear was also a thing that I was taught was important.

And I'm going to be honest here, yes, a certain amount of masculinity was important as well, if you were a man.

If somebody spent $70,000 in one year, hell, in a lifetime...on their hair, and they're a dude, the conservatism I was taught compels me to question their sexuality. 

When I saw some of the stuff that came out of the NYT article about Trump's taxes I was like "What the fuck?" But the hair thing, most of all. Perhaps more to the point, my adrift-in-the-timestream brain in the 21st century understands that if you spend $70,000 on hair...and it looks like that...the gay dudes are probably going to be laughing even harder about it than I am. I'd like to note for the record that I fully support them in this, and that if I spent that much money on my hair and it looks like Donald Trump's hair does, I'd want my money back.

By comparison I bought a comb back in 1991 for $2 that I'm still using. I think the most I've ever spent on a bottle of shampoo was $8, and I spend an average of $20 for a haircut a couple times a year, and that's when I don't just take a pair of clippers and trim it down to the standard military high and tight...or more often these days, just shave it all off because then I don't have to screw around with it again for awhile.

But, these fucking people think a guy who spends $70,000 a year on his hair, who cheats on his taxes, who has a decorating aesthetic that would embarrass Liberace, who sold America out to the Russians, and who wants to fuck his own daughter is going to Immanentize some sort of Conservative Eschaton for them?

That's only true if it never really was about any of the stuff that they ever said it was about. That is only the truth if it was all a lie and the important thing was the racism.

Maybe you can live with that, but I can't.

Maybe you can live with hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths from a virus, a leader who doesn't lead and who doesn't fulfill basic societal obligations, or a rising tide of right-wing extremism or a President that kowtows to the Russians and pals around with dictators, but I can't and I won't.

Whether you know it or not, your own ass is on the line right along with mine.

And I'll tell you one thing for sure, the behavior of lots of my fellow men in this time is making me start to believe in Revelation again.

In the Book of Revelation, it speaks about how with God literally raining judgment down from the heavens people go on believing in the false religion of the Beast, even though they can see and should know exactly what is happening.

I never thought I'd see anything comparable to that in real life.

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 sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9:20-21

Xenomorph.

 

Hudson: Is this gonna be stand-up fight, sir, or another bug-hunt?

Gorman: All that we know is that there's still no contact with the colony and that... a Xenomorph may be involved.

Frost: Excuse me, sir...a what?

Gorman: A Xenomorph.

Frost: It's a bug-hunt.

~From the film Aliens.

At work last night, a friend of mine told me that during his vacation last week, his family more or less forced him to attend a "Trump party" that he didn't want to go to. He's not just not a Trump Supporter, he hates Trump. He constantly complains about all the nutty Republicans in his family...and this really was just an extension of that.

A "Trump party."

Hold on, let's back the truck up here.

Now, personally, I'll be 47 years old in November. I've been going to parties of one sort or another my whole life. Birthday parties, Barbecues, Christmas parties, other holiday parties, etc. Halloween is at this point in a category all it's own. Thanksgiving, New Years, all the traditional food-and-festivities holidays I've dealt with both as a cook or other food service person, and as a partygoer. I even have worked catering and event staff for formal balls, including the Marine Corps League ball in Petoskey, MI two years in a row. Add in beer parties, dance parties, drug parties, pool parties, sex parties. Hell, I think I've been to or around most kinds of festivities known to man, both religious and secular, and some from other cultures; including Buddhist celebrations, multiple Christian gatherings in different denominations, a Muslim Eid feast and a Passover Seder, hell I even went to a Powwow a few times, and worked to do the catering for one when I worked at the college up north. In 2001 I went to a Jamaican Independence Day party put on for all the foreign workers in the area by Boyne resorts and that...that was a trip.

And there ain't nothing on this earth like the Reggae festivals I've been to, including one in Jamaica, which seemed to draw people from all over the world.

But I've never heard of a party dedicated to one specific non-mythological individual, let alone a President, especially a supposedly-conservative Republican president.

I can't imagine a Reagan party, or a Bush party, or a Clinton party, or even an Obama party. It seems to me, in fact, like none of those people would care for the idea, or would have.

My reaction on being told such a thing existed was literally "Excuse me, sir...a what?" 

Such a thing as a "Trump Party" is incomprehensible to me, it's like finding out that the Xenomorph from Aliens lived next door, or Dragons being real, or Zombies rising from the dead.

I'm going to level with everybody here, and it's time for some real talk.

This Trump bullshit is turning into a cult, period. The Republican Party is not a political party anymore, it's a cult, and it thinks it wants to be some kind of state-sponsored quasi-religion like Juche in North Korea. It'll have Trump as its Godhead, Conspiracy Theories as his bastard Son, and a Holy Spirit composed of ever-increasing racism...and as I wrote yesterday there's no aspect of life that they'll consider private or unfit for visitation by their shitty judgmental attitudes. Other people's desires, lives or needs mean nothing to people who will measure everything based on how it makes them feel or whether it gives them power or not.

And these fucking people have an endless, insatiable desire to feel powerful.

Like, give these motherfuckers another four years and the only kind of parties they'll want to allow are "Trump parties."

And why? 

It's the same shitty unreasoning fear that leads some doofus in Iowa to carry four weapons just to go to the store, strapped up like he thinks he's going to get into a firefight with Daesh or SPETSNAZ in the line at the goddamned ice cream counter. I mean, come on, dude. This shit is ridiculous and I say that as a gun owner. I have literally never in my life felt a need to take a weapon into the store with me.

ALL IS TRUMP because these cowardly, useless shits...many of whom, mind you, don't or can't work and depend on "liberal" programs and liberal people so that they can have electricity to power their computers and TV's and keep eating and have a roof over their heads...hate and fear liberalism, centrism, and even moderate, pragmatic conservatism on the level of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan simply because those guys expected something of people, had beliefs other than nihilism and racism and didn't offer the easy, dopamine-fixing answers that these goddamned fucking morons crave.

Even lots of these fucking people know it's all bullshit. The sad fact is that they prefer the bullshit to reality. They'd rather feel good about themselves and their incurious, shitty attitudes and lives for a couple minutes than face the change they know is coming, and that they know they can't stop short of killing children, short of plunging America into civil war and ripping the country down the seam like an old T-shirt, and short of casting themselves off from the United States and into the dangerous waters of being a new state in international politics....and even that would only net them part of the country.

And probably a lot smaller of a part than they think, too.

Georgia is a swing state now. Iowa is a swing state. Texas is a swing state. These fucking people are having to play defense on their own home turf...because of Trump, and they still can't quit him.

And they hate us for it.

They hate us for their own bad decisions, because the thing that must be protected above all else isn't actually Donald Trump...it's their own fragile egos.

Conservatism isn't actually morphing into fascism. They've tried that, and it failed. They have a force of fascists, that's massively outnumbered by the rest of us. Fascism collapses when its internal logic no longer holds up. Conservatism is imploding, not changing. The problem is, it's imploding the way a star does after shedding most of its bulk in a supernova, condensing down to a supermassive dwarf star and its gravity is deforming spacetime in such a way as to accelerate the process for creating a Black Hole.

And this is, fundamentally, because conservatives tried to please a narcissist, tried to be like him, tried to give him the adulation they thought would make him happy. The trouble with that, is that Trump has a personality disorder.

So does my ex-wife. I've lived this already.

You could pour the entire country, every single aspect of it, down that empty hole where Trump's soul is supposed to have been and it still would never fill it.

And the only thing we can do is show up, in great enough numbers that they're afraid to try anything funny, and be prepared to fight them off after that, because that's where this mess is going.

And no matter how badly it goes for them, no matter how many of them and the rest of us die, in 20 years the ones that are left will still be posting #MAGA shit and while Confederate statues will certainly still be coming down, Trump statues will be going up to replace some of them.

Because some people might as well be goddamned Xenomorphs, for all the humanity they possess.

[after Burke is revealed as the one who set the facehuggers loose on Ripley and Newt]

Hudson: [aiming his rifle at Burke] I say we grease this rat fuck-son-of-a-bitch right now!

Hicks: It just doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Ripley: He figured he could get the alien past the quarantine if one of us was... impregnated - whatever you call it - and frozen for the way home. Nobody would know about the embryos we're carrying. Me and Newt.

Hicks: Wait a minute. We would all know.

Ripley: Yes, the only way he could do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home. Namely, yours. Then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he would like to.

Hudson: Fuck! He's dead! [aims his rifle at Burke again] You're dogmeat, pal!

Burke: This is so nuts. I mean listen... listen to what you're saying. It's all paranoid delusion. It's really sad. It's pathetic.

Ripley: You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over a goddamn percentage.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! ~Isaiah 5:20

A middle-aged suburban Mom wrote an article today, about how Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death pushed her to join the Satanic Temple, because she wants a religion...or at least something...that she can count on to fight for her rights and those of her kids.

Okay, whatever. You go your way on this one, and I'll go mine. As long as we all pull together on November 3rd and vote the bastards out, I'm good. I don't give a damn what other people believe in because that's their business. I have my own beliefs and I'm not threatened by anybody else's.

I'm totally not kidding, though, when I say that Conservatives saw this and pretty much went bananas.

I'm totally not joking. There's thread after thread of this stuff, all the usual Evangelical freak-out bullshit, for the most part. People saying it's a sign of the End Times or "This is how pervasive Satan is" or whatever, blah blah blah. Because of course everything is always that with These Fucking People.

The Devil is always hiding around every corner, they always expect they're going to find a terrorist in the meat department, the world is always about to end. Somehow actual reality in all its difficult glory is never as exciting as these people's make-believe fake religiosity and its attendant spirit world full of dangers. It's like they read the Pilgrim's Progress and thought it was about a literal journey across the land where some kid fights giants and gets stuck in a swamp, instead of the allegory that it is.

Here's the thing, while still a Christian, I briefly dated a Satanist while I was going through my divorce. She was a decent, rational fucking person and we had a thing for a couple months in the summer of 2001 and we talked an awful lot. She was a lot more willing to talk, period, than the vast majority of Christians (especially Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, or Pentecostals) in my life were at the time. Plus she actually was fun to be around and interesting to hook up with.

And she, like the Muslims I dealt with during the school year, never once tried to convert me.

She probably forgot about me years ago. I've never forgotten her, and I remain thankful for the little bit of influence she had on my thought process.

About that, though...

That whole thing caused my ex-wife to have an epic religious flip-out that literally went on for years afterward. Before that, my ex had been the cold, rational bad actor. After that, she never made another rational decision regarding me ever again.

But as with these fucking people on Twitter, the self-righteous, smug faux-religious martyrdom was a constant. A never-ending drumbeat of trying to cheat the universe by trying to look righteous, even when the other parties can see full well what you are. There's something about this stuff that shorts out these people's brains.

I'm honestly not kidding when I say I think these people missed the point so hard they ended up in the next solar system, because not only do they piously not stop with their self-righteous circle-jerk long enough to maybe Google what the Satanic Temple is or what it stands for, they utterly refuse to undertake the introspection and self-examination that's exactly what the Satanic Temple people are generally trying to create by pointing out the hypocrisy.

And as an example, here's the poster of the snipped O.P. 

Rogan O' Hand-job or something like that. Fitting name for one of these Evangelical Christian circle-jerk motherfuckers.

What branch of Christianity does he follow?

I mean, is there one that canonizes the ass-tastic film version of Frank Miller's "300" which was, to put it mildly, garbage that failed to do the least bit of justice to the original comic book series...which itself lacked a lot of the nasty undertones that made the film appeal so much to right-wingers.

I mean, say what you will about Ross Douthat and his fascination with Gladiator, at least that film drew heavily on the same Platonic themes that underlie Christianity and on the Roman stoicism that was the basis for so much of global conservatism on a historical level. There was, ya know, actually something to it.

The film version of 300 is just a fascistic gore-fest and frankly anybody who can sit through that more than one time...well, to be honest, probably thinks the film version of Starship Troopers is a good movie and shouldn't be trusted to comment on much of anything. I mean, that particular Heinlein novel is basically Ayn Rand with more guns, but I read it, and it was at least more readable than Atlas Shrugged was. So there's that.

And of course this dumb son of a bitch has #MAGA in his bio, because of course he does.

Run around the shop floor naked, flapping your arms and shouting "He's The One!" long enough, and they think Trump will become God, I guess.

Yeah, assholes, we're in a battle of good vs. evil, alright.

You just decided to follow the closest thing we'll ever get to your own religion's Antichrist.

And you ended up on the wrong side.

I think we both remember what the Word says about that.

Have fun in hell.

 

Who would Jesus murder?

 

Ye have heard it said, thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he makes the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?
And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans do so? ~Matthew 5:43-47

"Not a shot fired and we gave up our freedom."

I saw this sign in town yesterday, it's relatively new.

What freedom was that, I wonder, as I never heard about this. It seems like, legally, there would've had to be some kind of announcement or referendum or something.

And right behind it, a Trump sign, which isn't new. Maybe that particular sign is, but this house has had some kind of a Trump sign since 2015. For the record, this year it's the only one on either cross-street, surrounded by a sea of signs for Biden, Gary Peters, and other Democrats. The only Republican signs are one for John James, and a few for our useless local Republican State House Rep. Some of the houses that have Biden signs now had Trump signs four years ago.

I'd like to note for the record that whatever "freedom" this asshole imagines he lost happened under a Trump presidency, so I can't quite imagine what he thinks will be different in a second go-round. Of course I'm sure it's just anti-mask bullshit.

What great freedom it is, to die in the street, or your own house, of a perfectly well avoidable virus? What a grim, nasty world these fucking people want to live in.

Last night, I saw this, Fox News idiots yet again trying to defend Kyle Rittenhouse, calling him a "Little boy."

First off, bitch, I was 17 once, I'd have been massively offended at being called a little boy, and I sure as hell wasn't. I was a young man, feverishly trying to work in as much "adult" stuff as I possibly could, because that's what one does when one is a horny young man, almost regardless of politics.

 

Likewise, Kyle Rittenhouse ain't no boy. If he was on that emotional level and had real parents, it would never have occurred to him to commit crimes, or kill two people and wound a third in a city and state where he did not live, defending things he did not own, on behalf of a political system in which he was legally too young to participate, because of a President who does not give a shit.

He's a young man who made a decision, albeit a foolish one, to have himself driven across state lines with a weapon, with the intent of committing crimes. You don't take that kind of rifle with you unless you intend to kill somebody. It's not a deer rifle, it's not a handgun, it's a military-style rifle that fires NATO standard 5.56mm ammunition, which only has one purpose, to gravely injure or kill human beings. You have to know how the stuff works to fully understand that. That kind of bullet is designed to fragment inside the target, and it's a devilishly clever design for doing just that. This wasn't some kid packing a .22 Ruger for self-defense. He wanted to kill people.

And it's beyond shameful that Republicans are defending this little asshole.

Likewise, It's beyond imagination to me, not least because I'd been taught how serious of a matter handling weapons was, and that they are not political statements or toys or a means of showing one's masculinity. I learned how to shoot as a kid, and inherited my Dad's guns after he passed away. I was not even allowed to handle them without one of my Grandfathers or Uncles present, although that list later grew to include my Mom and this went on that way until I was old enough to drive a car and have my license. Even then, if I was leaving the house with one of my rifles, to go to the range or go hunting, I had to tell my Grandparents or my Mom where I was going, how long I'd be gone and when I'd be back, in addition to following the procedures for the homeowner's association my Mom lives on, which means they knew who's at the rifle range or in the hunting areas too.

I come from a military family, both of my grandfathers and most of my great-uncles were World War II veterans. All of my uncles had served in the Vietnam era, most on active duty, two in the National Guard, and one who was in the Navy never came home. We took weapons-handling seriously and there were always strict-ass rules about guns and other weapons, even knives were not to be messed around with. These rules remained in direct effect until I left home to join the Air Force, and came back into force whenever I came home, and they're still there. Just now, I'm one of the people charged with enforcing and maintaining them on the rare occasions we all get together. I've taught a couple of my cousins to shoot.

So, yeah...

If I'd have ever thought of committing crimes with a weapon, much less killing somebody, I'd have got my ass beat, my weapons taken away, and the cops called on my ass, because I had real parents who gave a shit, about me, about life, about right and wrong.

But that's the kicker, isn't it?

Apparently, conservatives don't give a shit about right and wrong. Giving an award for "Christ-like behavior" to a man who's ordered seven executions is pretty much the height of hypocrisy, it's downright anti-Christ if you ask me.

It makes you wonder just what happened to "Thou Shalt Not Kill?" My grandparents on both sides had the Ten Commandments somewhere in their homes, in multiple languages. My Dad's side of the family had them in Finnish and Swedish besides of course English, one set of grandparents had them spread around the house. The other had them in English and Norwegian on the back wall of the living room, one framed, the other a hand-carved wooden plaque given to my Grandpa by my Great-Grandma. 

We were religious, and my family was fairly well split between Catholics and Lutherans. Nearly everybody was against Capital Punishment except for my Republican uncle Bill, and even he wasn't gung-ho for it. He just thought it should be an option. For the Catholics on my Mom's side, when Pope John Paul II came out against capital punishment that was that. For the Lutherans and the occasional American Baptist on my Dad's side of the family (My Dad became a Baptist, and that was the tradition I was raised in) they always had been. I was kind of the exception, supporting Capital Punishment in some cases. 

I've gradually become very disgusted with the relish with which modern "Conservatives" want to execute people. 

It's not a deterrent, it doesn't work that way. I've figured out down through the years that some of these fucking people get off on killing other human beings. I don't think that's right, and you can make the State your murder weapon all you want, that doesn't absolve you of wanting the deaths of others your own damn self.

And you sure don't get to call yourself "Christ-like" for killing people, whether you do it using the power of the State or a rifle in the street.

Who would Jesus murder?

Remember that.

The Anti-Americans.

The Cylon War is long over, yet we must not forget the reasons why so many sacrificed so much in the cause of freedom. The cost of wearing the uniform can be high ... [after looking at crowd] but sometimes it's too high. You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question, why? Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, jealousy. And we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done. Like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God, create life. When that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn't our fault, not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore. ~William Adama, Battlestar Galactica (2003) Miniseries.

I was out and about today, running errands, the usual for a Tuesday morning and the end of my weekend.. 

On one corner in town there's a handmade sign, on a sandwich board in somebody's front yard. "Without firing a shot, we gave up our freedom." 

Right next to it there's a Trump/Pence 2020 sign.

No context, no nothing, just we're not free and "Keep America Great." Wow, what a combination. I'm not quite sure whoever this fucking person is, that he's saying what he thinks he's saying.

For one thing, whatever this loss of freedom was, it happened under Donald Trump and he did precisely dick about it. So yeah, let's vote for him again!

Whoever put that sign up is apparently older, and likely owns their house.

Of course if I absolutely had to guess I'd say the sandwich-board sign is a reference to mask mandates, social distancing, etc. etc. because after all, it's an awful thing that conservatives should be required to give a fuck about anybody else, at any time, for any reason. Except the virus doesn't give a shit about your politics and will kill you just as soon as it will anybody else if you don't take certain precautions. There's no special "MAGA" Section of COVID-19.

I want you to sit back and think about the confluence of longstanding problems in this country that would enable a grown-ass adult, let alone an old person, to even have these sort of views. This isn't an angry reactionary young person shoveling this shit. It's an older person who if they didn't know before, should have learned somewhere along the way.

And Trump has not only half-assed the virus response, he's actively and with malice aforethought done things to make the virus worse, politicizing mask-wearing for example.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in practical terms isn't it kind of hard to be free when you're, ya know, dead? 

I mean, sure, you might have denied somebody something-or-other or whatever or stood for some principle. You know, against certain human enemies or ideologies I can even see the merit in that. Sometimes you have to make a stand, even if you'll die, because God or history or whatever will judge you if you don't. But Coronavirus doesn't care, and this history is going to be written by the humans who did what they had to do to stay alive. Science doesn't really give a fuck about your ideology either. Yes, that's what the actual problem is here.

And this person's idea of freedom requires people being able to just die of a perfectly well avoidable, preventable contagion that while we don't have a vaccine for it yet, we know how to reduce or stop the spread of the damned thing, if you just pay a little bit of attention to the science and take a few seconds out of your day to put a mask on when you go in somewhere and give a shit about your fellow human beings.

But the truth is, that's too much work for some people. They'll burn vast amounts of mental energy making up excuses and lies and waste everybody's time with this shit, when the truth is it would just be faster and a whole hell of a lot easier to just put a damn mask on.

Conservatives...as they are now, anyway, stopped giving a fuck about science when Evolution went from religious heresy to scientific fact. Never mind that they made complete asses of themselves in the Scopes Monkey Trial and got their ass waxed in the court of public opinion. (Historical Note: They won the case.) They stopped paying attention to science when Homosexuality was de-listed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, when the medical profession decided to do their jobs and treat AIDS instead of just letting it run rampant because "it was killing the right people" and they stopped giving a fuck about laws in 1973 when Roe V. Wade was decided, or 1989 when a Supreme Court that included two of their favorite conservative jurists, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, decided that flag burning was protected speech, never mind that Kennedy and Scalia were in the majority on that decision. Or when the same court, including the same two justices, decided in favor of both marriage equality and Obamacare.

And when a majority of Americans first decided to protect themselves from the virus, and then objected to the brutal, videotaped killing of a Black man and millions of people of all creeds and colors marched in the streets and all their hoarding of guns and political power and loading Federal law enforcement agencies with tin-pot wannabe fascists was insufficient to suppress public opinion and perpetuate their systemic racism with no criticism, that's when they stopped giving a fuck about America.

Because these fucking people think they are entitled to something that no one has ever had, freedom from criticism or opposition. Even the Caesars got assassinated. Et tu, Brute? Even Medieval kings like Guy of Lusignan were defeated in wars, driven from power, and mocked before the Saracen hordes and their own soldiers who stood on the walls, even if their fellow kings and nobles might just appoint them the satrap of some island or whatever as soon as the ransom was paid to Saladin, they still lost.

People remember Julius Caesar because he built up Rome and set it on the path to empire. People don't remember King Guy because he enabled bad actors and got the Crusaders into a war they couldn't win and then most of those knights turned out not to be worth a damn, because it was never about any of the things they said it was, and sooner or later that always comes out in the wash.

Conservatives might not remember the specifics, but deep down in their bones they know the feeling, they get the vibe, same as everybody else...and they know their time is running out.

Now, even as they themselves have torched every last one of their vaunted values, and even as they stop believing in America, or democracy, or voting, or well...much of anything except Donald Trump...and start trying to brand whole cities and eventually entire regions and states as "Anarchist" for no god-damned good reason...they want to pick the next Supreme Court justice and have influence over our laws for a generation.

Even as they're already setting it up so they can break this country apart and use the power of the State to destroy the State if they win in November.

Even as they've got to know that every single bad precedent they've set in the last five years or so can, and ultimately will, be deployed against them, win or lose.

As if, at this point, anything they do under our current system will not simply be undone by the next administration and with damned good reason, because the judiciary is not supposed to be one party's shadow-government.

Because if you want to lead in such a way that changes that you make stick, you have to at least be able to convince people that you believe what they're saying. You have to show some degree of righteousness. I'd say Republicans up to Reagan and Daddy Bush at least understood that on some level. Now? For a very long time they were simply saying the same things because it had always worked before. Maybe Bush the Younger believed in that stuff too, but the truth is most of those around him didn't.

Republicans don't believe in anything, all they want to do is hurt people. At lease as long as there's been a Southern Strategy, there have been some of them that were always that way.

As if they are not threatening the same...that they'll undo changes and just go right back to being unreasonable shitheads...if they eventually get back into power, with malice aforethought and their only reason being desire for power over everybody else, because to them, the only purpose of government is perpetuating their power.

They know their god will fall, because the unforgiving eye of history is already upon him, and them. They've gotten themselves into a mess they can't just politicize or shoot their way out of, and they know even packing the courts only perpetuates their rear-guard action against cultural and social change for so long. They know our system grants us a political change (or not) every four years and they couldn't figure out a way or get their guy popular enough to change that.

It's only a matter of time before these fucking people decide that America is the problem, that its Constitution, public opinion and even often-grudging but still-present march toward equality IS the problem.

It's only a matter of time before they decide they'd rather peer at Blue States or Purple States through binoculars across minefields and No-Man's-Lands from watchtowers over tall fences than regard the rest of us, or even their own who have any degree of common sense, humanity or moderation, as fellow citizens. And if you don't think their next steps will be ethnic cleansing and wars against the rest of us, you haven't been paying attention.

They don't have enough public support for a Nazi America, not if they want the whole thing. America's culture wars and political divides will end up with a two-state solution.

But we can deny them the power of the Presidency and the power of the State in November, and make them have to own up to and work for this vicious, silly bullshit they're pushing, and they can pay the price for this crap in blood just like everybody else if that's what they want. If there's to be an American Stalingrad, maybe they should ask their buddy Vlad how the first one turned out for the Nazis.

My guess is, if they have to pay a price for this bullshit, there's gonna be a lot fewer of them willing to pay it than they think.

Therefore, we have to make sure they lose.

It's really that simple, vote them out, and then be prepared to fight them off.

But know that we have to love our freedom more than they love their desire to take it away. The rest of us have to stand up and stop these assholes. If you're unwilling to do that, fuck you.

I can't put it any simpler than that.

This Present Darkness...Part Three (American Revelation, One Shots, RIP RBG)

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you. ~Ruth Bader Ginsburg 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away last night.

Republicans wasted no time in being, well, Republicans and plotting to reach into every uterus in the country in their never-ending, relentless search for absolute, unaccountable power. Let me just say that I'd like to add "Fuck these motherfuckers."

The outrage...and epic-level fundraising...from Democrats was immediate and predictable.

And I found out that there literally is a PAC called "Get Mitch Or Die Trying" so there's that.

But of course we live in an age where literally everything has to be an election issue.

Well, RBG just underlined and added a bunch of exclamation points to the question of "Who do we want to be?!?!?!?"

Well, let me tell you who they want to be.

Delaware GOP candidate Lauren Witzke is a Q-Anon nut who pushes anti-Semitism, Flat Earth bullshit and various and assorted conspiracy theories, who, when asked about him, said that Donald Trump should be President for life.

Personally, I never thought the Delaware GOP could top Christine O'Donnell, I was wrong.

So, basically, for starters; Republicans want to not be citizens of a free, democratic nation, but instead to be subjects to a dictator or a king. Tell me again how these fucking people ever became known as "Conservatives?"

Even as recently as 2010, in the midst of the Tea Party craziness, somebody like Lauren Witzke would have been beyond the pale. But since then, in the face of cultural, political and social change, Republicans have developed what I'd call basically an Anti-Freedom Caucus. This is a problem.

The essence of conservatism is supposed to be "Things as they are" and the United States of America was founded as a democratic nation in opposition to dictators and kings, which were at the time of our founding the norm for how power and politics functioned in the world.

Conservatives, my fucking ass. I'm tired of these fucking people and they need to be driven from power and never allowed to have it again. It's really that damned simple. The fact that it's taken people until relatively recently to start understanding this is...problematic.

"Things as they are" means freedom and democracy. How people like Marsha Blackburn square statements like "We will never rewrite the Constitution of the United States" with the "Let Trump Be King" mentality of many of their own voters is something I'll never understand. But then, as even many Republicans have admitted since 2016, these fucking people have an amazing capacity for incomprehension and ignoring whatever the fuck is happening right in front of them if it doesn't fit whatever their narrative is at the time.

During the George Floyd protests in Washington D.C. the Republicans were scheming to turn weapons of war against peaceful protesters. The only reason they didn't was that enough military people said no, and a lot of the shit they wanted to use simply wasn't available...generally because when the military finds something to be inhumane, which is naturally from that perspective a pretty high bar, they tend not to keep it around. So there tend not to be things like LRAD's (Long Range Acoustic Devices) and directed-energy heat rays laying around for any old wannabe-despot to use. It's one thing to use an LRAD against Somali pirates on the open ocean where they're the targets are by nature the only people in the area of effect. It's completely another to use such a thing in a crowded city where a substantial number of the people who might be affected aren't even involved s in whatever is going on, and where your own people are certainly going to be present as well. But then we already know that Republicans seem to view simply being present whenever something is happening to be a reason for people to be targeted.

The party of "Freedom" wants you to have to ask their permission before you leave the house, apparently, but they can come in yours and shoot you if they want.

How anybody thinks this entire mentality won't result in even more hatred and resentment, ultimately leading to bloody revolution and their own deaths is something I'll never understand.

But then it's also a documented fact that Republicans aren't really trying to win here, they're trying to immanentize some sort right-wing eschaton. Which decades of a conservative supermajority on the high court would nicely accomplish, as it would make it harder for anybody else to get anything done, and literally everything becomes possibly subject to ridiculous lawsuits. 

Also, you ever notice that Democrats always have to always be on point, while all Republicans have to do is show up and not shit themselves in public and the media and lots of other people will wax eloquently about how great they are.

That's starting to change in the general population, but only because of Trump. Meanwhile, specifically because of Trump in some areas it's only gotten worse. For example there's a certain percentage of Republicans for whom Trump can do no wrong. This is detrimental to the basic functioning of democracy. America was not designed to have political cults, period.

Make no mistake about it, America 

is on the ballot here, certainly now if it wasn't before. How we treat each other as a people and how our government treats us absolutely is up for grabs. This is not time to fuck around or have some kind of hang ups about purity.

We have to defeat these motherfuckers, and again, make no goddamned mistake about it, amoral, power-hungry, selfish motherfuckers obsessed with forcing their angry, small, shitty god down everybody else's throat is exactly what the fuck these people are.

If you're not willing to fight for it, take the word 'Freedom' out of your mouth. ~Malcolm X.

If we don't drive Republicans from power, and decisively so, we're not going to have a Republic.

Do you understand me?

Part Two

This Present Darkness...Part Two (American Revelation, One Shots, Q-Nut Edition.)

[Jenner tells the computer to do an Enhanced Internal View of TS-19's brain]

Shane Walsh;  [as the group sees the brain of TS-19] What are those lights?
Dr. Jenner: It's a person's life... Experiences, memories. It's everything. Somewhere in all that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you... The thing that makes you unique. And human.
Daryl Dixon: You don't make sense ever?
Dr. Jenner: Those are synapses, electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages. They determine everything a person says does or thinks from the moment of birth to the moment of death.
Rick Grimes: Death? That's what this is, a vigil?
Dr. Jenner: Yes. Or rather the playback of the vigil.
Andrea: This person died? Who?
Dr. Jenner: Test subject 19. Someone who was bitten and infected... And volunteered to have us record the process. ~From The Walking Dead, Season One, Episode Six, TS-19

Have you ever seen a map of the Earth at night, or a map of light pollution?

There's an old favorite Star Trek novel of mine, Spock's World by Diane Duane, that describes the night side of Earth as the other stars coming out, and does so in wonderfully descriptive prose.

Looking down from Low-Earth Orbit, those ripples and seas of light in America and Europe, Abidjan and Lagos in West Africa, The Nile Valley, Israel the Arabian Gulf states, Jeddah and Mecca on the Red Sea, India, China, the southern half of the Korean Peninsula, and Japan, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, then there's Rio, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Brisbane and Sydney in the Southern Hemisphere...those represent civilization, the life of our species as it currently exists.

But it's also telling where there is no light, the vast expanse of Alaska, northern Canada and Greenland, although there, there is not much of civilization, likewise much of Africa, Australia and South America falls into that category, there are cities and people, but few large enough to show their light to the universe.

More ominously, much of Russia is a mass of darkness on the map, as is the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. I once heard it said that in the old Soviet Union, the brightest points of light from orbit, the most well-lit areas, were the Gulags. Surely the same still applies to Russia, or North Korea, or Xinjiang today.

It's funny to me, that not only in terms of how we live our lives, but in terms of how we practice religion and spirituality, humans often still equate light with life and holiness, and darkness with death and evil. Broken primates are we, in the 21st century, in this present darkness we're stuck dealing with the evolutionary glitches left us by our earliest ancestors.

In some cases this is becoming a serious problem. Some people never learn to understand how our minds work, and where we came from, some people never care enough to find out...or worse, actively seek to avoid learning such things because they're afraid that then they won't be able to just do whatever they want.

You know, people didn't always have so much access to information, or to the written word, and it's a damned shame what some people do with such things these days.

And so it is with the goddamned conspiracy theorists. Empirical truth, scientific methods and testable facts fly out the window in the face of a mad swirl of confirmation bias, emotional ejaculation and pattern recognition...often, perhaps even especially when there's nothing there.

Of such things, perhaps, were the earliest religions born. Surely to Neanderthals or the first Cro-Magnon or early modern humans a thunderstorm must have seemed like the wrath of the spirits themselves.

It's the 21st century, and we're supposed to be well past this kind of Unga Bunga monkey-brain bullshit and don't you forget it. 

I come from the Protestant tradition of Christianity, and was taught that in the earliest days of said traditions, people died...and died by horrible means...for having the desire to read the Word of God in their own languages...or even to have the right to read it at all and making any effort in that direction or toward achieving that goal. Education, Freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, these are comparatively recent rights in the Western world. They enjoy a longer...though considerably more checkered history in the Islamic world, but without those people we would not have much of the knowledge of the Ancient World, most especially the Classical Era that underpins so much of our civilization, that we do today.

I was taught this stuff, and taught to respect knowledge, reason, science and theology, by Christians and by Conservatives. 

You know, the same people whose intellectual and biological descendants are today intellectually shitting their guts out for Donald Trump, Fascism, and bullshit conspiracy theories like Q-Anon.

And for what purpose?

Well, on its face, Q-Anon nuts claim to believe that the world is secretly controlled by Satanic elites who engage in cannibalism and child-trafficking and something something Gazpacho, and that somehow Donald Trump and a host of other personages, living and dead, are fighting against this.

Yet there's a problem right out the gate. When you point out the fact that Donald Trump had extensive ties to pedophile billionaire Jeffery Epstein, or that he faces allegations himself, or that the Catholic Church has a bad history in this regard, or encourage these fucking people to contribute money to fight actual documented human trafficking that's really going on and is a known quantity, there's usually a brief, frantic silence and an air of "NO, NOT THOSE ONES, THESE OTHER ONES OVER HERE!!" 

Which of course is what tells you that the entire thing is utter bullshit.

That's because Q-Anon isn't really about elites or child-trafficking, it's just another excuse by "Conservatives" to try and ratfuck people that they don't like...be they elites, liberals, or poor migrant women interned in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Georgia.

Q-Anon, like all conspiracy theories, doesn't serve any more purpose than giving dumb shits a way to feel important and like they're doing something when they're really not.

They don't give a damn about forced hysterectomies, or genocide, or horrific violations of any person's bodily autonomy, and they sure as fuck don't give a damn about actual abuse of actual children, by anybody. In point of fact they'll ignore it completely when it's somebody they "like" who is suspected of doing so.

In fact, I believe they hunger for the day when they can do all type of horrible things to people, for no reason at all other than their own shitty fear and hate. They lust after the ability to make all those lights go out...both the ones in our cities and the ones in our brains...so that everybody has to join them in the darkness of their own fevered imaginations, and then the purification killing can begin in earnest.

The same people who spent my entire life, until just this year, loudly bellowing about how pro-life they were? Too damned many of them read things like what I read this morning, stating that in the United States white people will be a minority by sometime in the 2040's...not based on immigration but on who's already here, and citizens...and they don't think "Hmm, that sounds interesting" like I do. 

No, they see cultural and social change and changing demographics (which I think will flip long before 2040, personally) and they lust after Apartheid and Killing Fields or breaking off a chunk of this country so they can wall themselves off from the rest of the world and be alone with their petty hatreds and shitty fears. As if such people would not almost immediately start finding rationalizations and ways to kill each other over...whatever dumb excuses they can find.

If you don't think they'll rationalize killing liberal women or women of color or forcing life-altering surgeries on them without their consent just the same as they're rationalizing forcing hysterectomies on Latino migrant women you have another thing coming.

And conspiracy theories provide an amazing vehicle for doing just that.

If you don't think they'll use conspiracy theories as rationalization to turn the "proper" conservative white women into nothing more than brood mares for their shitty philosophy, you have another thing coming. They've had the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theories as potential rationalizations for this kind of garbage for years now.

Tearing down all the "Old Gods" of the Abrahamic religions...let alone any Eastern religions that tell them they can't hurt people...or the Enlightenment or modern rationalism and installing Conspiracy Theories or Donald Trump or their own platonic ideals of humans being nothing more than shadows on a cave wall in their place gives these fucking people an outlet for their religiosity that...unlike most modern religions...does not include strictures that also bind their behavior. To these fucking people, ideas are what's real. Spectacularly dumb ideas, at that.

As I said before, even Radical Islam can be said to be based on something more than whatever occurred to some basement-dweller posting dumb shit on the internet.

And that dumb shit they found on the internet is what they think is real and are willing to kill for, or to justify atrocity and evil for.

Because if they find themselves alone, screaming into the void, then no one can question the madness of their beliefs.

And that's what these fucking people really want, the power to never be questioned, the right to rule even if it's over ashes or nothingness. They want so much to win, that they don't care what they win anymore and they want to have power so much that they don't give a damn if all they get is to be some kind of a big deal in the Abyss.

Like I said five years ago, these fucking people would be perfectly content to be slaves, so long as they were a better class of slave than some other slaves.

And they'll call that "Freedom."

If you lack the desire or fortitude or self-preservation instinct to stand up and fight against this kind of evil, silly bullshit and fight for your own freedom and rights, I can't help you.

But somebody's gonna have to.

Somebody has to take a stand against the fall of night. We can't afford to pass the buck anymore. Somebody has to stand up, Period.

It's really that simple

Part One.

Part Three

Sinclair Lewis Was Wrong.

I have a mansion, forget the price. I've never been there, they tell me it's nice
I live in hotels, stare at the walls
I have accountants to pay for it all

They say I'm crazy but I have a have a good time. I'm just looking for clues at the scene of the crime
Life's been good to me so far

My Maserati does one-eighty-five
I lost my license, now I don't drive
I have a limo, ride in the back
I lock the doors in case I'm attacked. ~Joe Walsh (Former "Eagles" singer.)

In the 1930's, Sinclair Lewis famously said that Fascism would come to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

I think he was wrong.

If Donald Trump had gotten his way, it would have showed up in a gilded stretch limo with Jesus and JFK Jr. while surrounded by a bevvy of topless Las Vegas showgirls and WWE divas shaking their boobs at all the guys in a spectacle officiated by Don King and Vince McMahon, won a cage match against Barack Obama and the ghost of John McCain, appointed Mike Tyson the Grand Mufti of American Islam, owned itself some liberals and comped everybody $100 at a Trump-owned casino. The actual costs of it would then be paid by everybody else at a later date, with interest.

Instead, somebody dialed 911 when it started stripping off its clothes and running around work flapping its arms and pointing out the glories of its manhood to assorted female coworkers. Now it's naked, biting and scratching and screaming "HE'S THE ONE!" covered in its own piss and shit and demanding that people read its manifesto against the time traveling lizard men even as it's being dragged out into the light by serious men in white coveralls with reporters filming the whole mess.

And, tellingly, conservatives are mad at the reporters.

Seriously, these fucking people live in a moral universe where even Christianity itself is nothing more than a prop for disgraced 1980's televangelists to sell dumb ass patent medicines and survivalist taco meat with a helping of "Let me tell you how I bilked half the Evangelicals in the country, cheated on my overly-mascara'd wife with a homosexual and raped the church secretary and by God, I LEFT JERRY FALWELL HOLDING THE FUCKING BAG, Suckers!" to the children and grandchildren of those who gave their life-savings to this same stupid goddamned fool 30 years ago.

If you think Jim Bakker is the actual problem, you're fucking wrong, you haven't been paying attention and I can't help you. Places like Heritage USA would not have existed without the army of cousin-fuckers and drooling goobers who support this filthy enterprise.

Seriously this motherfucker would be living on social security and talking about how the food here is better than it was in jail while playing cards with all the other old WASP-y shits at some club in the Villages with a slight interruption for some home health care nurse to come check his blood pressure IF it wasn't for the unending soul-fucking gullibility of the American Christian Right and angry old people who do nothing but watch TV all the time.

I'm fucking serious, how in the actual goddamned money-changer whipping FUCK is any of this Okay?

IF these fucking people believe in any one goddamned thing that they say they do.

But it's a big goddamned IF.

Oh, never mind. Well there went that argument.

I'll tell you what. I sure was wrong about one thing.

Five years ago I predicted that before this mess was over, Donald Trump would try to declare himself to be God. I was wrong. It's Trump's followers who are rising up and trying to declare him God.

But the universe doesn't answer to you.

And Donald Trump would never die for your sins. In any case he's just a man with no spiritual power anyway.

He does, however, expect you to die for his sins. And it will only get worse from here. How does "Love Thy Neighbor" factor into all of this? It doesn't, it can't. It will get worse.

Because the next thing they'll be screaming about is that "Jesus is Q."

I'm not kidding. Try me. Give it a week, a month, maybe.

The thing that I will never understand is how so many so-called followers of Christ are utterly, selflessly willing to do just that. To throw away their careers, families, lives and even souls for conspiracy theories and Donald Fucking Trump. I'll never understand it. I can never understand it.

But I was taught not to worship a man. I was taught better than this.

The fuck is your excuse?

I'll wait.

Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me. ~Exodus 20:2

This Present Darkness...Part One (American Revelation, One Shots, 9/11 Edition.)

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. 

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke. 

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

It's September 11th.

And the first thing I saw when I logged on to Twitter after work this morning was this.

Let me tell you what I saw that day, Mr. Krugman. I was a college student at a small community college in Northern Michigan at the time.

Americans did not take even one damn thing on that day "pretty calmly." If they looked calm, it was because most things very quickly shut down for the day, or didn't open at all, including the college. I had to work because one of my two jobs was working in the school cafeteria and students gotta eat, and everybody was glued to the two TV's we had on and even my Mom stopped by to check on me, her own classes in Traverse City having also been canceled for the day.

 That morning I was arguing with my ex-wife on Yahoo Messenger when all the sudden she starts freaking out. Right around that time, I get a knock at the door, my neighbor Ali, an international student from Saudi Arabia, stopping by to ask if he can bum a smoke for the walk to class.

I invite him in, and grab two cigarettes from the pack sitting on top of my Dorm-sized refrigerator. Salaam, brother. Also, because my ex-wife is demanding in ALL CAPS that I turn on the TV, I do exactly that. It's set to CNN. I see a view of the World Trade Center in New York City, one of the twin towers is burning. Why this is so does not yet have time to register. My neighbor and I watch in mute horror as a Boeing 767, apparently aimed deliberately, like a missile, crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

He says something in Arabic that I don't catch, and looks me right in the face and says "Please God, brother, let it not be Muslims that did this."

My friend was part of a small group of Muslim international students, in the 2001-2002 school year they were from Egypt, a couple of the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Just kids, most of them, A few into their 20's a bit. One of the two Egyptians was older and had served two years in the Egyptian Army. They were part of a few dozen overall foreign students, others were from places as diverse as India, Latvia, Nigeria and South Korea.

A lot of those kids...and not just the Muslims either...were understandably nervous.

Some of them asked the older students, their white friends and those of us that were veterans to go with them when they went off campus or to go grocery shopping or whatever. That year, there were three veterans including me, and a currently-serving Army Reservist in the dorms. We, and those others that these kids asked went out with them when we could. Truth is, a lot of them would ask for rides and stuff anyway because many of them didn't have cars, so it kinda followed that we might accompany them. It wasn't a big deal, it was the right thing to do.

It's not just a matter of religion. Imagine being young and far from home and the country you're in gets attacked. Imagine being from one of the countries that is, or is seen as, being responsible. That can be a dangerous space to be in. For most it wasn't, but for a few it was.

The two Turkish girls in the Muslim student group asked me the following Saturday morning if I could take them to Walmart to go grocery shopping. Now, neither of these two was at the time particularly religious, they for the most part dressed the same as most Americans do, and these two were very much the shorts-and-T-shirt type anyway...much to the frustration of some of the more religious of their friends. They'd probably be Okay on their own, I thought. But I kinda needed some stuff myself, and I didn't have anything to do and didn't have to work that day. So said alright, let's go. In the car I put in one of my Michael Jackson CD's and we were off.

One of the girls kept getting dirty looks and judgmental stares at the store...all from the same basic type of white people...and it took us a second to realize why. She was wearing a red and white T-shirt that was for some Association Football team where she was from in Turkey, and it had a large Turkish flag right on the back and a fair amount of Turkish writing I didn't understand. This wasn't some kind of a statement...this was her normal clothes, stuff she wore every day being that she was a rabid Football (COUGH...I mean Soccer) fan anyway, and that was her team. If she'd been wearing MJ's number 23 jersey and a Chicago Bulls cap on backwards nobody would have so much as noticed. But here we were.

I was wearing my ratty old woodland-pattern camouflage BDU jacket, a school T-shirt and jeans. I took off my jacket and put it on her, and put my arms around her so she'd feel safe, and we just walked around the store that way, again suddenly two anonymous twenty-somethings out grocery shopping with their other buddy on a Saturday morning and no one cared. My jacket was like a tent on her small frame, she leaned into me like a long-lost lover and you can just imagine what it must have been like for her, to be far away from home and suddenly in a fairly intimate sort of space with a man she'd mostly just said "What's up" to in the hall, ordered food from in the cafeteria and traded some rap albums back and forth with or sat next to in the pit watching the Big Screen. 

Not only that, but in this space and feeling whatever she was feeling while wrapped in the military symbolism of and part of the uniform of and wearing the flag of a country that is a de facto and de jure ally, but one with which her country and her culture was often seen as being in conflict with. And all this to avoid the judgment of fools she'd never know, who'd never care about her.

She was, kind of understandably, stuck on me for awhile after that and we became very close friends...close enough that some of the Muslim dudes and a couple of our Christian friends from more traditional cultures joked...or said honestly and with varying degrees of earnestness...that we should get married. It was just her reacting to the situation, though, and me being a man even if it was with good intentions. We weren't even dating, officially, and it never "officially" rose to that level and we liked it that way.

My ex-wife, however, heard things, and angrily assumed I had a new girlfriend and took it out on me accordingly. Worse, she'd had a class with this girl the previous semester and they didn't get along.

My ex-wife was Pentecostal, and caught up in the religious craziness of the immediate aftermath to 9/11, which those people saw as part of the run-up to the End Times, because after all, what isn't?

Because that's what they do. The world is ending, why should we give a shit. Send me $20 and I'll give you the Truth!

You may, if you like, imagine how well that went for me. These are people who see demons in every shadow, behind every act outside of their narrow space of holiness, and who write books to that effect.

Yeah, Bush tried to help, I'll grant him...and Krugman...that. A vast swath of American culture and learning and media, even capitalism itself did too. The Bible Thumpers and the rednecks simply ignored it all, because it wasn't what they wanted to see.

My ex-wife, and those like her? Bush wasn't their guy. Hell, I had to damned near yell at her about it to even get her to pay attention, let alone vote. Hell, to a great extent Trump isn't even their guy, not even with Pence. They just like that he says racist shit and pisses off people they don't like. To her credit, my ex is not a Trump Supporter.

But my ex was all in for McCain/Palin in 2008, and she wanted Sarah, not Captain Queeg, and said as much many times. So she's perfectly fine with where all this crap started.

Today there is a wide stream of woo woo bullshit and various strands of hate all working their way through American life. It's beginning to be aggressively countered, finally, just as it was in the days after 9/11. But just as it was then it's completely ineffective against those who will not listen, who simply don't want to HEAR anything.

My ex, to my knowledge, never gave a fuck about one thing George W. Bush ever said.

Conservatives like George W. Bush, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or me, the ad guys like Rick Wilson, the philosophical motherfuckers like Bill Kristol or Max Boot, and the dedicated crew of the Lincoln Project...they're all based to one extent or another on facts, philosophy and reason. Sure, they might have a different view of things than liberals do...but if you peel back the layers of the onion far enough there's some kind of verifiable basis and baseline for what they'll do, or say, or how far they'll push something.

Hell, even Radical Islam can be said to be based on something greater than emotionalism and resentment.

My ex-wife, her beliefs, and the people like her are so removed from the writings of St. Augustine or Martin Luther or even any scholarly interpretation of the Word...or from Plato, Hayek, or even Rand...and so hopped up on apathy or outrage in turn, and on their Rama Rama Ding Ding bullshit that they might as well be Hare Krishnas, or even Atheistic Communists, for how much or how well their beliefs relate to what is actually in the canons of Christianity or Conservatism.

So where the hell do these people get off judging anybody else, anyway?

To people like my ex-wife, George W. Bush and every last one of the Never Trumpers might as well be Latte-drinking New York City liberals, or Martians, and people like my Turkish friend from college aren't even real unless they're seen as a threat in some way.

A majority of the people I deal with every day, on either side of the political fence, haven't the slightest who Paul Krugman is, nor he them, and it shows.

Nixon, Reagan and all those other guys, they didn't pay people like Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes to be the Chucklefuck whisperers. They paid them to stir up racism so Republicans could get elected, because that was one motherfucker of a lot easier than trying to explain macroeconomics to morons.

To a solid minority of us, one that's maybe even big enough to split this country and plunge us into chaos and war, this is what's real: If Trump says we're getting along very, very well with the Taliban, then by God and sonny Jesus they'll get along with the fucking Taliban. 

Call it malice or stupidity or vicious blind tribal loyalty, but these motherfuckers will at least pretend to feel more kinship with illiterate boy-raping, Opium-smoking drug running thugs that can't even read the serial numbers on their old ass Soviet-era Kalashnikovs and RPG-7's and that took money from the fucking Russians...their other blood enemies...to kill our troops, and who are hated even by most Muslims especially the ones who have to live around them, than they'll feel for most Americans, and all because of something that Trump said.

And they will feel it on this day, in this space. The next thing I saw after Krugman's post was an article about the famous "Falling Man" photograph. Think about that for a second.

Think about what kind of head-space you gotta be in to maybe see the white guy with the limp and the old Air Force BDU jacket and the chattering foreign college students as enemies, but maybe see the people that sheltered, supported and armed Osama Motherfucking Bin Laden as your friends.

And all because, like Paul Krugman, they can't or don't want to acknowledge that there are other people, with other perceptions, other stories...they only choose, and choose with malice aforethought at that, to refuse to see from an even worse perspective.

And they'll gladly be used by the ultra-rich, who won't care if the pawns die, so long as their hedge fund is up a couple of points. Burn down the world in so doing, and they'll call it a win if they're allowed by their masters to pretend to rule the ashes.

Think about that, on this day. I have been adamant for months about where this can and will go if it's not stopped, and stopped now, with sufficient finality and numbers that nobody gets any funny ideas.

As it looks now, to simply stop it, to vote Republicans and Trump out, to drive them from power in the Constitutionally prescribed manner is not a big lift. But it's what comes after that worries me, and there will most certainly be an after. We have to do more than simply stop it, or they will just break off a piece of America, downsizing, peace with honor, yo. Declare victory and start buying weapons from the fucking Russians and learning the arts of insurgency and war from the goddamned Taliban and then it will never end, except perhaps with sun-bright flashes in the vast sea of night.

We have to get these people out of power and we have to do it now, with what we have.

Or there's gonna be a lot more memorial walls and a whole hell of a lot more dead people.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; 

I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

Part Two.