The Golden Asshole (CPAC 2021: All We Want Is Your Money And Your Soul.)

Albert: No good?

Armand: Actually, it's perfect. I just never realized John Wayne walked like that.

~From The Birdcage

As I start to write this, Trump is half an hour late for his speech at CPAC. (And I just saw that he's going to be at least an hour and a half late.)

Seriously?

Yet these fucking people will literally bow down and worship Donald Trump, when he can't even be bothered to show up on time for his own fucking speech.

Republicans, y'all have issues.

I mean, for fuck's sake dude has literally nothing going on these days, you'd think he'd already be there just for all the props and photo ops and stuff like that.

You'd think he'd be there just for something to do.

But of course Trump is a lazy shit who can't help but show his contempt for basically everybody in how he conducts himself. He's a weapons-grade gold-plated asshole who doesn't even care about his own supporters and if that's not clear at this point, I don't know what in the hell will make it so.

But here's this guy, literally bowing to a golden idol of Trump all the same. Why people want to debase themselves for this motherfucker is something I'll never understand.

How to get to hell in one easy step, I guess. What they think they're going to get out of going there, I don't know.

And you can literally tell these people they're going to hell and they don't care.

In fact, if you're the wrong kind of person, they'll go to hell just because they think they'll get one over on you by doing it.

And you can literally be somebody who's job it is to have been there and done that, who has no reason to not tell them what is true, and they won't listen anyway.

In fact that might even make them double down. How dare you *Checks Notes* be a Reporter or somebody else who's job it is to find shit out, and tell me.
Why?

Because conspiracy theories are not about the truth, they're about agendas and obscuring the truth and protecting the egos of the dumb fucks who believe in this shit.

I'll never understand it.

That has got to be a hell of a way to live. Ignoring the evidence of your own eyes and ears seems like it would be pretty damned difficult after awhile.

These are people who'd literally rather live under a Nazi type military dictatorship, or bow down before our nation's enemies than be free, for the most part because they think they'll get to spite some mostly-imagined "Other" by doing so, or because they don't want to be free if some person that they don't like is also free.

Or as I first said all the way back in 2015, they'd be perfectly fine with being slaves, so long as they get to be a better class of slave than some of the other slaves. 

And the would-be slave masters are perfectly happy using a bunch of circus-stunt, professional-wrestling like bullshit to manipulate the mob. That's pretty much what CPAC has turned into.

That, and a hell of a lot of M4M sexual ads on Craigslist.

Which is fine, if these fucking people would just be honest about it. It's 2021, nobody cares, and hating gay people doesn't make you righteous, it just makes you a hater.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand why these people seem to base their lives entirely upon the imagined opinions of others, and then think they're somehow coming out ahead by performatively doing or feeling the exact opposite.

I don't understand this shit and I used to be a conservative Republican.

It's like if Black people, gay people and/or Democrats get to live in civilization too, without having to wear some sort of hair shirt for doing so, these fucking idiots would rather go out into the deep, dark wilderness and dance barefoot around a fire shouting "Unga Bunga" while they wait for their Witch Doctor to come out of his cave.

I'm sorry, but I don't fucking get it. I don't value hatred of or opposition to other people more than my own life. I sure as hell don't see anything conservative about that.

And I sure as hell don't see anything conservative about believing in a bunch of absolute horse shit just because that's what feels good at the time.

The world is an uncomfortable place, and it's messy and it challenges you and it's very often complicated and difficult to understand, but embracing those challenges, and the diversity and difficulty of life? That's how you be free.

All too often, as we've observed with this week's CPAC convention, these fucking people are just overgrown children, desperately acting out to get attention, and they like Trump because they see him as "Daddy" or some sort of father figure.

Well, maybe it's just me again and yeah I've lived my own life full of enough dysfunction and shit, but if you want somebody like Donald Trump to be your father, I can't help you. And I've no wish to try.

But perhaps even more than that, I think you have no right to force your stupid psychological issues on the whole rest of the world, and we certainly have no obligation to put up with you trying to. In other words, grow the fuck up.

Because if you don't, the world is full of people who are clamoring to take your place and move forward while the world just passes you by.

Does that sound cruel?

It's what I was taught, by a different generation's conservatives, back when that word meant something else, apparently. 

The Russians...and others, including domestic elements like the far-right and the ultra-wealthy aren't trying to manipulate our politics because they like you and share your goals, they're doing it because they want to take what you've got, no matter how little it is. They want to take your spot or eliminate you as competition or grind you underfoot and when you enable or support people like Donald Trump, people who have nothing but contempt for you and can't even be bothered to show up on time for their own damn speech, you let them.

You're saying "Rob me" and "Take my shit."

Does that sound crass, does that sound cruel? It's the truth.

It's not "Cancel culture" or "The Left" that will unman America, it's the willingness of American conservatives, and particularly American conservative white men, to bend over and take it up the ass from anybody who talks stupid and makes them feel validated for their petty stupid childish grievances, when all too often they have no one but themselves to blame for their own inadequacy and their own problems, bringing in Unga Bunga tribal bullshit and blaming other people for your problems doesn't do one thing to change the face you gotta look at in the mirror when you get up in the morning.

In the end, you have power over your life, but you have to fight to keep it. If you're a free person, in your mind, only you have that power, whatever happens, you have the capability to change your circumstances.

Too many people be trying to fight in the wrong direction. Too many people have accepted a kind of learned helplessness, where the only things they're allowed to do is try to blame others and keep them down.

And we wonder why people can't face themselves and commit suicide or overdose on drugs or whatever? Look at the crap we've allowed one of the two main political movements in this country to become!

Too many of us don't even understand what it is to be an American, or a Believer, or a Man, or a Woman, and I'm not talking about the gay people or the Left here.

And this confusion has turned conservatism into a Tijuana donkey show. I'm fucking sick of it.

I used to be a Republican, I contributed to this crap. You bet your ass I'm angry. I want the time back that I put into trying to make things better and thinking this was the way. Fuck these motherfuckers.

Too damned many people are just willing to believe whatever they're told, without even checking to see if it might be a lie, so long as it validates their biases or their feelings.

But if somebody lies to you, they don't have your best interests in mind and they're sure as hell not really trying to make you feel good about yourself.

They're trying to rob us all blind, so they can go spend the money on hookers and blow and enjoying themselves at our expense. Conservatism didn't start out like Donald Trump, but he has consumed it.

And the best the rest of us can hope for is a vaguely humiliating escape as we realize our pockets got picked.

Senator Kevin Keeley: [in drag] No one will dance with me. I think it's this dress. I told them white would make me look fat.

Barbara Keeley: [in female drag] What about me? I'm just as pretty as the rest of these guys! ~From The Birdcage.

 

It's All Bullshit (Conspiracy Theories Are False Religion, Part Two.)

Whose song is that remembered?

At random, serpenting
Through fatty coils, emerging
Some other thought it's thinking
This light
Stands above the
Houses
On the ground
This illumination
Visited upon the whole land

Unmarked helicopters
Hovering
The lord is coming soon.

~Soul Coughing, Unmarked Helicopters.

"Real Americans?" 

There's something that I'm getting real damn tired of.

As if I, or the Latino guy I work with, or the Muslim lady who rang up my stuff at the grocery store after work this morning are somehow not American, even though all of us were born here.

I'm at least as "Real American" as these assholes, maybe more, because I at least try and make sure my word is worth something when I give it. That's what swearing an oath means, Captain, but you should have known that. More to the point, you don't get to choose who's an American and who isn't. The Constitution and 56 years of modern immigration laws spell all that out.

Speaking as a real American here, yeah, I'll admit I've had probably more than my share of conversations about the Bible. That's what happens when you actually believe in things of that nature as being more than a scary-faced Tiki at the edge of the village, when your faith demands that you care for others instead of telling them to stay out.

But I've also had day-long conversations about some pretty esoteric shit. I'm a gamer and I have been for most of my life. It goes with the territory.

But that's not what you're on about, is it, Pete?

Standing for the national anthem? That literally wasn't a thing I, or anybody that I know, talked about before Colin Kaepernick started doing his thing. By dint of life experience, I stand, but I don't begrudge others different choices, and for the same reason. The Constitution I swore to defend gives everybody freedom of speech, not just the people I like or the ones that say shit that I agree with. But again, if you were the person you say you are you'd know that.

I'm sick of these people. Pete Hegseth's "Man of the people" routine is faker than Madison Cawthorn's claims that he got accepted to the US Naval Academy. These fucking people are even more out of touch than the "Ivy League Elites" they pretend so studiously to hate.

Cancun Ted Cruz graduated from Harvard, not Baylor. For that matter, Captain, your education is no slouch, or did you forget that was part of the job? 

I've sat and eaten with people in diners who could and did casually quote the Bible, Ronald Reagan, Saint Augustine and Thomas Sowell with equal fluency, all over bacon and eggs.

I've never had a conversation about the Tenth Amendment in my life. I only remember what it says because of high school and college government classes.

Pete's even bringing it up isn't a reference to some mythical people who believe in the Constitution and talk about it over burgers and fries, it's a reference to an entire sub-genre of cockamamie conspiracy theorists who think the Tenth Amendment makes the States supreme over the Federal government, or something...despite the direct implication in the text itself of the opposite and the stated supremacy of Federal government and laws over those of the States.

I'm tired of people like Pete Hegseth and their "Man of the people" routine because I know that what little use they have for people like me or most people who eat in diners...but especially people like me who have the education and experience to know utter bullshit when we hear it...is as cannon fodder for their shitty political and religious agendas. Pete wrote a book titled "Crusader" in the 21st century, and he said all this shit while standing on a stage that is specifically shaped like a Nazi symbol. I don't give a goddamn what his dumb ass thinks about anything.

These fucking people would crucify Christ again, and they'd do it while singing "Onward Christian Soldiers."

And let me tell you something else, while I'm at it.

I'm goddamned sick of these people bitching about Communism.

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Communism very rapidly ceased to be a force in world affairs after that. If you were seven years old when that happened, you have no damned business talking about it in anything other than a historical context.

These people know they lost, and they know that as their movement runs smack into the wall of reality over and over again they're going to lose still more. That's why they're talking like this, likening their bullshit culture war to the Cold War. 

They think if they can just activate and mobilize and get their people fanatical enough, they'll win. I have to say anybody who thinks that has a pretty shitty understanding of how the Cold War actually went down. Others have directly compared the modern Republican Party directly with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the 1970's and I think that's a pretty accurate comparison. 

If the Republican Party wasn't right in the middle of openly self-replacing with something even worse, I wouldn't have a problem with that at all. Note I do say this as a former Republican.

Here comes the super copter
Here comes the noise it makes
The demon was an idea
The demon is awake
Scratch mark traced across the
Surface of your mind
This hour, now upon us
The hour, now arrived

Unmarked helicopters
Hovering
The lord is coming soon
Unmarked helicopters
Hovering
They said it was a weather balloon.

~Soul Coughing, Unmarked Helicopters.

And I'm tired of the fetish for apocalypse and violence, too.

Especially when most of these people wouldn't last ten minutes in the apocalypse world they'd like to create for all the rest of us. If you can't be bothered to do something as simple as wear a mask to protect yourself against a virus when civilization is still standing, you sure as hell aren't going to have what it takes to survive without civilization.

I think, more than anything, I'm just tired of the hypocrisy, I'm tired of the racism, and I'm tired of the fact that any of these fucking people think any of this is an original idea or that anybody in the world doesn't know what they're really about.

The problem is that about a third of Americans know exactly what's going on here, and they sign up anyway.

What are we going to do about that?

Part One.

The Golden Image, really? (Fiery The Angels Fell, Addendum Two.)

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; ~Exodus 20:2-5

Several centuries ago, it seems (Okay, really, it was 2017 and 2018) I wrote a series of posts invoking the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego being cast into the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the Golden Image of King Nebuchadnezzar, in direct comparison to conservatives worshipful attitude towards Donald Trump, and railing against their otherwise equating political power and the Trump presidency with divinity for their political movement. I've called out their cowardice and hypocrisy on a constant basis and I've invoked this theme of the golden image of Trump repeatedly.

For all the good it ever did.

Note that all that was metaphorical and using Biblical imagery to make a point, I never expected these goddamn fools to do this shit in real life. But ya know, dumbest possible timeline, blah blah blah.

I'd also like to point out that 20-25 years ago this was exactly the type of shit conservatives routinely accused liberals of doing, and to be fair Bill Clinton did have a small, not terribly mainstream personality cult, and I know people who were like that. Ironically, some of those people have also been supporters of Trump (although they mostly are not currently) and for the same reason (i.e. imagined Alpha-maleness.) With Clinton this really came out of the woodwork during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which of course sent the conservatives of the day over the fucking falls. (On the other hand, with Trump it's been like that all along.)

And yet today a hell of a lot of these same fucking people are perfectly fine with Donald Trump.

Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

Nebuchadnezzar spake and said unto them, Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship the golden image which I have set up?
Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.
If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.
~Daniel 3:14-18

Perhaps more to the point, it's only getting worse, and it is being enabled by those who are nothing but Golden Image desirers in their own right, whether they'll admit it or not.

A couple days ago, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene caused a stir by putting up an anti-Trans sign outside her office door. Rep. Marie Newman responded by putting a Trans pride flag up next to her office door, and posted a video of herself doing this. Facebook took Newman's trans pride flag video down as "hate speech" while leaving Taylor Greene's assorted anti-everything stupidity mostly in place.

Facebook, more so than Twitter and some other sites, has made a point of making itself a half-ass safe space for bigotry and hate simply by selectively enforcing its own increasingly arbitrary and bizarre rules, and because its content moderation is largely automated and crowdsourced, "Conservatives" routinely dogpile anything they wish to censor.

Which is probably exactly what happened in this case, which has the effect of making Facebook a safe space for hate.

Mind you, Marie Newman's kid is transgender and she likely put the flag up for exactly that reason.

So, what happens when some Christian person calls out this Trump-worship bullshit as the base idolatry that it is? Is their standing up for Jesus "Hate speech" if somebody does so?

Of course, the sad truth is that most likely nobody who isn't already a liberal Christian will likely do this. And that, my friends, is exactly the problem.

And people like Mark Zuckerberg, who could give a fuck about any of this stuff, will gladly allow it if it means they might get their own golden statue. When Malcolm X talked about how the media would have people loving their oppressors and hating the oppressed, this was the kind of shit he was talking about.

Modern conservatism is bullshit, as the meme goes, prove me wrong.

Except you can't.

Addendum One.

Great Signs And Wonders (Conspiracy Theories Are False Religion, Part One.)

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. Behold, I have told you before. Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not.
For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. ~Matthew 24:24-27

 I saw this stupid bullshit last night.

Apparently, there's people who think Bill Gates somehow swamped Texas with fake snow because something something Gazpacho let's mess with Texas. These fucking people apparently don't know basic science like freezing and warming, nor understand that water can exist not only as a liquid but as a gas or a solid as well.

I'm from Michigan, it'd take me like five seconds to prove to these people that they're full of shit. *Smack* Did that fuckin' snowball feel fake to you? There, now that's enough of that bullshit, I have to deal with this shit for anywhere from three to five months out the year, get over your damn self and be glad this is the first goddamned time you've had to put up with it in your life. 

I remember my first really big, power-grid crashing blizzard when I was like five years old. My Dad and my Grandpa spent most of the day after it stopped, digging out so we could leave the house, then digging a path to the garage, then digging the garage out so they could get the truck out to plow, then plowing the driveway and digging out the cars so my parents could go to work and shit. 

And we lived in my grandparents' mobile home at the time, which sat at a relative high point, unfortunately as I remember it the wind was blowing crossways so it piled up worse on the side where the front porch was, but at least we could get the door open and digging out was a downhill slog until we got to the level of the driveway and the road.

I remember the snow being piled up higher than my Dad was tall. Sitting on his shoulders when we went out to the car to go somewhere a few days later, the snow was just about eye level for me.

And that was just one fucking memorable year, when I was a kid. Truth is, more winters were like that than not back in the day.

Had Texas and all its little fly-by-night power companies and rich assholes who put profits over basic common sense taken the basic preparations any goddamn Michigan or northern tier county has to in any given winter as a matter of course, y'all wouldn't have had this damn problem. Trying to blame others and rationalize it just makes you look childish and really fucking dumb. Conspiracy-theorizing your own mistakes just makes you look fucking retarded and I ain't sorry for saying so.

Y'all like the idiot who thinks he's saving money by not changing the oil in his car and then when the engine seizes up and he needs to get a new one he acts surprised.

Get. Over. Yo. Damn. Self.

But that's the hard part with conspiracy theorists, and the conspiratorially-minded, isn't it?

It is ever and always, always going to be all about them. Because low-grade mental illness and narcissistic stupidity are apparently more fun than paying your bills and doing the shit you gotta do.

Climate Change doesn't care about your culture war, and it laughs at your "Libertarian" beliefs.

Old dame Nature doesn't give a fuck whether you "own the libs" or not. In point of fact, if that's what your focus is and you don't maintain your stuff or weatherize because you're used to it always being warm out, well eventually she gonna own your ass and it's not because of partisan affiliation.

It's basic laws of physics and the sciences. There's always a hard wall of reality you're going to run into sooner or later, that you can't figure or manipulate or politically spin your way out of. Certain things have to be done the right way, every damn time, or shit breaks. Karl Rove was wrong.

If you've ever owned a car, or a computer or a house, or in any way ever had to work on any of that shit yourself, you should damn well know this. You should damned well not need to be told. And if you're somebody who's done any of that stuff, you should damned well not listen to somebody who hasn't, or to some city-slicker who just pays to get somebody else to do it and then makes decisions based on ideology or profit rather than experience.

I mean, come on. I'm a computer guy, at least by training. Do you really think Microsoft Snow would even work without a half-dozen patches and a service pack? 

But you know, I'm here to tell you that it's not just ignoring the hard sciences for financial and political profit that's a problem, it's ignoring the softer ones too, and in a way that's just as bad if not worse.

A DC Metro police officer got assaulted during the Capitol insurrection by an ex-NYPD officer who kept screaming that he was a "Fucking Commie Motherfucker."

Communism in the United States effectively disintegrated in 1939 when the Soviets switched from promoting improved race relations and workers rights to pushing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and peace with Nazi Germany. Communism hasn't been a thing on a global scale since 1989. The Soviet Union fell in 1991. 

Even the Chinese and the Cubans and the Vietnamese aren't really Communists anymore.

It's 2021, please try to keep up.

But I've frankly heard more people bitching about Communism in the last year than I ever did in my entire life before that, including when Communism was actually a thing. I'm quite honestly sick of it and in this day and age when American corporations and almost especially profit-minded conservatives routinely outsource much of our manufacturing economy to the Chinese it's downright farcical anti-reality bullshit to even talk about it. Communism hasn't been a thing since 1989. 

I know, I watched it fall live on CNN. I watched ordinary Germans take sledgehammers to the Berlin Wall while East German border guards...armed and trained the same way as Red Army soldiers...stood by slackly with rifles slung. I watched revolution after revolution claim the East Bloc and the people who lived under it be the very ones to tear down the Iron Curtain. I wrote about it.

I also wrote about how there's people in America who'd rather live through the horror of a nuclear war and the end of the world than deal with social change. The same people who constantly bitch about "Cancel culture" i.e. the consequences of their actions would gladly "Cancel" Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and their greatest accomplishments in ending the first Cold War without it turning into a major, and potentially nuclear, world war.

Because honestly, these fucking people's greatest fear or most hated enemy was never Soviet Communists or even the Capitalism-funded Chinese kind and their vast armies against which we decided the best response was better equipment, weapons and training. No, their enemy was always their neighbors, the Black people down the road, the moderate conservatives who prevented their paranoid bullshit from taking over. The enemy was always The Rest Of Us.

And when they made that their actual platform and the focus of their politics they lost.

Oh, hey, maybe treating the majority of the people in this country like dirt and rubbing your dicks all over America wasn't the solid electoral strategy that you thought it was.

Just as science says there's empirically testable laws that define our existence that anyone can learn and use to find answers, even religion...even Christianity teaches that at the end, the truth will be visible to all. The purpose of conspiracy theories is not to seek after the truth in some unconventional, wonkish way, but rather to obscure it.

This is becoming painfully obvious.

And what's the Republicans' response? They're trying to do it even more.

The Virginia Republican Party is having a drive-in nominating convention for all its statewide offices at Liberty University of all places, at only one specific date and time. Republicans' response to recent events, to national electoral defeat, to getting walloped in the last several statewide elections in Virginia, is to double down infinitely and become even more esoteric and exclusionary and opaque and to do so in a way and at a place that suggests anyone outside of a very specific set of religious and social values is unwelcome.

It's not a political party anymore, it's a cult.

Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. ~George Orwell, 1984.

Pink-Haired Ladies And 150-Foot Angels (Fiery The Angels Fell, A Series, Addendum.)

Here come old flat top

He come grooving up slowly
He got juju eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please

He wear no shoe shine
He got toe jam football
He got monkey finger
He shoot Coca-Cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free

Come together, right now, over me.

~Come Together, The Beatles (Also ably covered by Aerosmith.)

Seriously? (I know I say this a lot, but, Seriously?)

(Also bonus points if you know the origin of the song lyrics from the pull-quote.)

I just saw this not too long ago. Christian Evangelist Prosperity Gospel False Prophet and Trump Supporter Kat Kerr claims that "150-foot Angels" will protect her from anybody who wants to kill her or criticize her ministry or something something Gazpacho. She evidently believes in some kind of dance party hippie Jesus who is, nevertheless, a Republican and a Trump Supporter and he keeps "commissioning" Kat to do stuff.

In the interest of decency, I'm not going to explain what sort of 'stuff' came to mind when I read this.

I'd just like to point out that in my old-school, conservative, Baptist church back in the day Kat Kerr would have been asked, at best politely, to leave on the basis of her pink hair alone. She'd never have been allowed to preach because, well, she's a she. 

Our pink-haired Christianized Marianne Williamson-wannabe would not even have gotten a chance to start spouting cockamamie bullshit about angels. 

As our Pastor, Brother Larry, would've put it "Go start a chat room if you want to talk like that." Dude was the sort of Pastor who still, in the oh-so modern situational ethics of the 1990's and the laid back "I'd rather just have a beer" early aughts...the Bush 43 era, before things went to shit...Brother Larry still wore a suit when acting in any official capacity, whose personal Bible was well-worn from use and full of bookmarks and yellow post-its with hand-written notes in ink, and he didn't think too much of technology. He had a computer mostly because he needed it for the office-work part of his job.

That was something I learned from him. The truth is simple. Man makes it complicated because he does not want to obey. Love thy neighbor as thyself, Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy mind. This isn't hard. It's since been my experience, both as a Believer and otherwise that if you have the Truth, you don't need...and likely won't be interested in...a bunch of fancy garbage ass bullshit.

If that doesn't seem "Woke" or particularly 21st Century, well, too bad. Agree with them or disagree, standards like that served to keep the pink-haired, gold-plated propeller-beanie goombas on TV (if that) and out of your church. Were things still that way, Kat Kerr would've probably hung a sign that said "Psychic Reader" outside her house and nobody would know who she was but the gullible chucklefucks who showed up at her door.

I'm here to tell you, without the self-absorbed moral torpor and rampant vapid performative moronism of people like Kat Kerr and Paula White, people like Ted Cruz would have to get real jobs before too long.

Blaming others, abandoning millions of your constituents and your dog to freeze in the cold with no food or water while you jet off to Cancun and self-righteously insisting that the people in your state would rather freeze to death than have Federal government regulations? 

This level of selfishness would not be socially acceptable, would not be possible without a dedicated cadre of political Commissar, Republican Zampolit preachers to bullshit these motherfuckers gullible constituents and whisper in their ears that God loves them because they're them and everybody else can literally go to hell. And not only that, but these people's entire religion functionally consists of self-justifications and rationalizations for why they should get what they want, and belief that they'll get to watch smugly from Heaven after the Rapture while Big Butter Jesus zaps everybody they don't like into charcoal briquettes. That's really all there is to it. That's what Christianity is to these fucking people.

Rush Limbaugh, may he rot in hell, would not have found as much purchase as he did without political preachers like James Dobson and Ralph Reed and fake-Christian Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay hollowing out Christianity from the inside so that these devils could crawl inside it like a Tauntaun and use its warmth to shield themselves from the freezing cold of reality.

Trumpism was a hologram. Trump is a symptom. These fucking people are the actual disease. Trump just added a whole bunch of circus-stunt bullshit that served to get the mob riled up and interested, and he even attracted a coterie of preachers to tell them that their desire to kill the rest of us was righteous.

And people have the nerve to wonder why I'm an Agnostic?

The other day, Lauren Boebert was in a congressional zoom meeting demanding that she have a security detail if she can't carry a weapon on the job.

(I mean, seriously, Gunbunny, the fuck are you even afraid of? The mob you tried to help direct?)

Behind her, were military-style semiautomatic rifles, pistols and a shotgun, all obviously loaded and in battery, stacked haphazardly and unsafely among and on top of the books on a bookshelf.

Every once in awhile, on her Twitter feed, Lauren will piously insist that "Jesus Is Lord." Honey, if you really have faith in the Prince of Peace, why the fuck to you need to be so heavily, incompetently, and yet ostentatiously armed?

I mean, I was a Christian, I also have guns. I practiced safe storage and weapons handling because I'm not afraid of everything, because I'm not an idiot, and because that's what I was taught, period. The only job I ever carried a weapon at was when I was in the military. Firearms and other weapons are not toys, they are a deadly serious business, tools for defense, for hunting, for work for some of us and in the various professions of arms. And they should be treated as such, it's really that simple.

If you can't understand that, and treat your weapons accordingly, you don't deserve to have one.

And again, you wouldn't have a high-school dropout restauranteur and sometime oil pipeline worker in Congress at all without these airheaded, bizarre self-absorbed Mammon-preachers telling you that Intelligence was literally a curse from the Devil.

People who want you to be dumb don't have your best interests in mind, read this again until you understand it.

Except...well, now we've hit the point where it's often the Republicans themselves that are this dumb.

Consider, for example, perverted shit-talking Wheelie-Ghoul Madison Cawthorn (And yeah, I'm disabled too, I can say that) who thinks that US law applies to the Vatican...and he can't even get US law right because vaccine mandates aren't illegal.

How the hell can you be a grown-ass adult, supposedly a Christian Conservative, and not know that the Vatican is a City-State within the city of Rome and the country of Italy with the Pope as its absolute Monarch? I knew this stuff so far back I don't remember when I learned it. This is basic knowledge, or it should be, especially for somebody like Madison Cawthorn.

If he was any of the things he says he is.

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

Part Six.

Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled around their shores; burning with the fires of Orc. ~Roy Batty, Blade Runner (A deliberate misquote of William Blake's America: A Prophecy.) 

 

For Her Sins Have Reached Unto Heaven (Fiery The Angels Fell, A Series, The End.)

“When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water (he cups his hands) and if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again. ~Thomas More, as depicted by Robert Bolt in A Man For All Seasons.

Yesterday, I saw this.

Some Pennsylvania Republican saying that Pat Toomey ought to be censured because "We didn't send him to D.C. to vote his conscience or whatever."

Well then, what's he there for, Mr. Republican?

What are you doing where you're at?

What is even the purpose of going into government, for real, if you're not there to provide leadership of conscience, whether one be conservative or liberal?

What is even the damn point?

I mean, come on, was everything I was ever taught a fucking lie? These days, I ask myself this on a daily basis.

Somehow, going into government for the purpose of exercising power and making money just doesn't make any sense to me, as one can do both with less oversight much faster in the private sector. Why even bother?

I say this as someone who once swore an oath myself, an oath not unlike that taken to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and to obey the orders of the President, government officials and officers duly appointed above me.

Had I broken this oath, I would have gone to prison. But worse than that I would have betrayed the faith and trust placed in me by my own brothers and sisters in arms.

Why is it, that Republicans are being allowed to be in our government if their oaths, their word, doesn't mean shit? When did these people stop caring, when did they stop policing their own? When did, for all intents and purposes, other people cease to matter? When did the Republican Party become nothing more than a vast criminal enterprise dedicated to the worship of Donald Trump, and to disregard and disrespect for literally everybody else?

The Republican Party, insofar as I can tell, has three actual guiding principles:

#1 MORE MONEY FOR ME!

#2 FUCK YOU! (Note: This applies even, perhaps especially, to other Republicans.)

#3 Donald Trump is, for all intents and purposes, God. (I didn't say it, they did.)

And some of these fucking people have gone so far down this rabbit hole that they'll disown their own family members and call them The Devil for believing anything else. This is exactly the apotheosis of religion into an anti-religion that the Bible talks about in Revelation where people bow down and worship the Antichrist instead of God.

A friend of mine, an old African-American gentleman named Hayes, once told me he believes that Trump is effectively 'A trial run for when the Evil One comes.' and the more I see of how conservative Evangelicals have converted wholesale to the worship of Donald Trump and how the Republican Party has morphed from a secular political party into first a vehicle for Evangelical priorities and then a replacement for Christianity altogether...well, the longer this goes on the more I believe what that old man said to me that day. I feel for people like Adam Kinzinger...because I spent much of the decade of the Aughts being that guy, often simply arguing for a little humanity in the comments section and getting nothing but bug-eyed spittle-flecked hate in return. Far too many conservatives ignored the nuts altogether, until it was too late. Then they either joined them, or were driven out damned near by force.

And what's left of the Republican Party is going through that again, if the numbers are any indication, probably for the final time. It's like how Abraham argued God down to sparing Sodom if ten righteous people could be found...and there were only seven.

Come out of her, my people, indeed.

It's nothing but bad faith on a massive scale, and there's nothing they believe in strongly enough that they won't lie about it. Tell me, Gunbunny, where has any aspect of the "Green New Deal" been implemented? It's just a proposal at this point. And what good does giving the oil companies money do, when we're in the middle of a massive snow season that makes fuel distribution harder and wrecks the power grid, especially in places like Texas where it was already a soup sandwich of epic proportions?

How does any of that work, exactly?

Bitch, you worked for an oil company, you should know exactly how this stuff works and how long it takes, at least at the line level.

So stop lying, and stop trying to use bad weather and other people's pain to create a political or financial windfall for yourself. That shit is wrong.

And if you believed half the shit you say you do you'd know it.

The Republican Party needs to be burned to the ground and replaced with something better, before it turns into something worse. Vote the bastards out, all of them.

Part Five.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. 

~Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

 

68 Years (Fiery The Angels Fell, A Series, Part Five.)

Standing in line, marking time
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old ladies' eyes
Just for fun he says, "get a job"

That's just the way it is
Some things will never change
That's just the way it is
Ah, but don't you believe them

Said, hey little boy you can't go where the others go
'Cause you don't look like they do
Said, hey old man how can you stand
To think that way
Did you really think about it
Before you made the rules?

~Bruce Hornsby and the Range, The Way It Is.

I saw this on my Twitter feed this morning when I got up.

New York Post headline "House Dems hire ex-gang member for top campaign post" with no context, no nothing, that's the only thing that defines this guy, DyJuan Tatro, to them. Well, that, and he's Black.

This isn't a racist dog-whistle, this is the naked guy walking down the street wearing a sandwich board that says "I hate [Racial Expletive Deleted]" painted in big block letters. 

As if this guy would be advising Chuck Schumer how best to carjack a Lexus or sell drugs or something? I mean, sure, that's the stereotype these right-wing assholes say they have, but like everything else with them, that's not really it.

I looked at this guy's Twitter feed. He got his degree in prison, he's a serious dude and he seems to know what he's doing. And if I had to guess he'll have some pretty sound advice on things like criminal justice reform and dealing with racism, which is what really bothers the Murdoch acolytes at the Post.

On his feed I found an article about another guy, Joe Ligon, who just got out of prison after 68 years and he was sentenced as a juvenile offender, for being part of a group that committed a series of robberies and was alleged to have killed two people. Joe admitted to being part of the group, and to doing crimes, but denied that he killed anybody. 

When this dude went to prison in 1953, the Korean War was still raging. My Mom was three years old.

This dude's whole damn life basically got wasted for no damn good reason. For fuck's sake when he went to prison, most of the modern technology we take for granted didn't even exist. He witnessed everything from the beginning of the Civil Rights movement and the Sputnik crisis the Apollo program and the Vietnam War on up to the election of Barack Obama, Black Lives Matter, the Trump years and COVID-19 all from behind bars...for some things that, for most of my life, would have seen him let out of jail with a sealed record by the time he was 22. Think about that for a second.

Dude was in jail for 20 years longer than I've even been alive.

It seems like a huge, senseless waste of a life. The whole damn world as this guy knew it is gone, likely his family and any friends he had before are gone as well, and a vast, unfamiliar technological abomination risen in place of the world he knew. Is it even possible to adjust to that much of a change, in whatever time he has left?

Think about it, I mean, really. For the people who put Joe Ligon in prison, for the system that kept him in there, the cruelty really was the goddamned point. 

And I'll bet you the people at the New York Post don't care, even now.

The other day, I saw this.

Black family puts $400,000 into renovating their house, gets it appraised, and sees no change in its value. Then they get a white woman to pose as the owner, and it's appraised at half a million dollars higher in value then it was before. Is Black people's money and time worth nothing?

The problem here is racism, straight up, there's no better way to put it.

But even more so, the problem is that there's people out there who think they have some kind of a fucking right to inflict these kinds of evil costs and conditions on other human beings for no reason other than they damned well feel like it. If it wasn't Blackness, they'd find some other excuse.

And people, even, perhaps especially privileged people with something to lose, tolerate this horse shit?

Things can always turn around, so it's you that's the target. If January 6th didn't prove that to people I don't know what will. But 43 Republican senators are perfectly willing to rationalize and explain away a mob being sent against them that could have resulted in their own horrible deaths in order to hang on to power and Whiteness just a little longer.

Fuck all that, if somebody sends a mob after my ass I'm going to do what it takes to defend myself and if I get to sit on a jury against the motherfucker you bet I'm gonna vote to convict.

But it'll get worse.

I guarantee you, the people that do this kind of evil shit hare are just fiending for the day when they can do it to whoever they like, and the person doesn't have to be Black or whatever, and they don't have to have even the most twisted of reasons. It's just somebody who crossed the wrong line or came to the attention of the wrong person or got noticed by the mob. If you don't think these fucking people are looking at conspiracy theories as their great bloody-minded hope in these matters you have another thing coming. This is exactly why that scumbag 25% of America looks at Donald Trump as some kind of great liberator. He freed them from having to act like civilized people and hide all this bullshit.

Racism, as an excuse, is fast going out of style. Don't worry, they're already lining up another one, which will be that much harder to combat because it's even more arbitrary and dumb and even less based on reality.

As bad as Trump was, and as bad as Marjorie Taylor Greene is, I guarantee you they can and will find worse.

And in the meantime, I guarantee you, they can and will find people who will try and make it look like these Trump motherfuckers, with their endless disrespect for everyone and everything, were not so bad. It's already started. Don't worry, ABC, the "Liberal Media" and the reality show morons are already on the case.

Discrimination really is these fucking people's god, and they'll find some way to hang onto some aspect of it even if they have to invent whole new worlds of nonsensical bullshit in their own heads to justify it and how dare the rest of us inflict even the most minor consequences on even some of them for being such flaming assholes.

And they'll even promote somebody like Claudia Conway, who made a name for herself posting videos on TikTok railing against Trump and her parents, if it'll help to rehab her Mom's reputation or get her Dad and his fellow Bush 43-era Ghouls at the Lincoln Project a few more consulting gigs.

They'll gladly give out a little vapid celebrity, if it'll maybe buy her off for a little while.

Now that Trump is out of power, all most of these people will want to do is forget, which I suppose would be understandable if even that desire to forget was not held in bad faith.

They don't want to forget because this last five years was painful for them. They want to forget...and they want us to forget as well...because the consequences for it might be painful if they were held to account.

If you don't think any of this is dysfunctional and wrong, I really can't help you, and I'm not sure I want to try.

Part Four.

F. U. 43 (Mitch McConnell and other stories, Part One.)

Imam: Just because you do not believe in God, Mr. Riddick, does not mean God does not believe in you–

Riddick: You think someone could spend half their life in a slam with a horse bit in their mouth and not believe? You think he could start out in some … liquor store trash bin with an umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and not believe in God? You got it all wrong, holy man. I absolutely believe in God … and I absolutely hate the fucker.

~From Pitch Black

 57 to 43.

That's right. After facing possibly even their own deaths on January 6th, 43 Republicans voted not to impeach the man most responsible, so even though a majority of the Senate voted to convict, the vote still fell short of the two-thirds majority required.

Multiple people have compared the conduct of those 3 Republicans to jurors in the trials of Klansmen in the Jim Crow South.

Fuck these motherfuckers.

Meanwhile, on the conservative side of the fence, all the problems that led to exactly this mess are just getting worse. The conspiracy theories, the hate, the racism, and the list goes on. 

There's nothing else left of conservatism. Seven Senators, maybe a few dozen House Reps at the most. Republicanism is dead, it's the Paranoid Shitty Little Haters Party now. I mean, for fuck's sake, when they're even ranting about NASCAR...literally the most unabashedly conservative and Evangelical sport there even is...being against them? Fuck, I mean I don't even really know what to say to that. 

Instead of standing up and stopping this bullshit, as only they could, instead of asking "What the fuck is wrong with you?" Republican elected officials and leadership and right-wing media either are actively encouraging this bullshit, or they're cowering in fear from it. Mitch McConnell tried to have it both ways, somehow I don't think that's going to work out for him.

MAGA is a jealous god, in the exact same way that Marxism-Leninism once was, and will tolerate no deviance from its belief in Trump's infallibility.

And make no mistake about it, while most Republican donors, elected Federal officials and this and that would just love it if the Trump era went away quietly...MAGA and Q and Trump maintain an iron grip on many state-level Republican parties and a slowly shrinking yet increasingly fanatical percentage of the Republican voter base. And instead of standing up and trying to fight back, most Congressional Republicans who aren't on board with this shit cower and equivocate and try to have it both ways.

Mitch McConnell said he thinks Trump committed crimes and should be tried in the courts for what he did, and it has to be done, true. But, the place to start in trying to stop this, Yertle, was in your own house.

Anything the courts, or corporations, or the donors or the elites or the Democrats or moderate and Never-Trump Republicans (and trust me, from the perspective of the average MAGA idiot I'm repeating myself here) do will only deepen Trump's and his cult's sense of martyrdom and reflexive paranoia.

This is a conspiracy, one big damn conspiracy, and everyone's in on it!

Including NASCAR, apparently.

Please, take a moment and consider how much of a paranoid, stupid moron somebody would have to be to believe that, and to believe that 5G is somehow controlling their brain waves.

As opposed to 4G, 3G, the internet, or hard-wired land-line telephone communications? I mean, why start now? Why didn't they start with the technophobic bullshit back in the days of ATM cards, dial-up internet, flip-phones and message boards, back when Google didn't stalk me at the pet store, when paper job applications were still a thing and it might take me all day to download something if I got online at my Mom's house?

I mean, what's even the point of doing it now, when the Mark of the Beast is made technologically irrelevant by these little bricks of technology that we all willingly carry around with us, and often can't even function without? My debit card has a chip in it, what more purpose would putting a chip in me even serve?

It only even starts to make sense, honestly, when you start thinking in terms of it not being about any of the things these fucking people say it's about. It's all bullshit.

It's about preserving at least some kind of White-superiority patriarchy type bullshit, which is exactly what it's going to be when the majority of those 43 Republicans are old white men.

When we live in a country where one of our two main political movements is dominated by 70 and 80 year old white men whose sole guiding value is fanatical resistance to change in a rapidly and vastly changing world, what the fuck do you think is going to happen? If anything, these last five years should show that all these fearful, silly old men have neither the power nor the wit to stop any of these changes and they aren't even really trying, but they sure will try and make you afraid, so that you give them power over your life, which they'll then use to rob you blind, and rob your children and grandchildren and their grandchildren and all these silly old fools don't care because they'll be dead by then. More to the point, when pushed on the issue, that's exactly what they'll say. They won't be here to see it. 

So let's kick the can for dealing with every other problem down a few more generations, too, huh?

How's that actually working out so far when...just to use the Senate numbers as an example...57% of America including some conservatives wants to step boldly into the future, or at least not be mired in the past, and 43% of America be like MAGA! Unga Bunga! 5G is Satan! and looking at Asian and Black and Brown people who were born here, that they know were born here, and telling them to "Go back where they came from." How does this work out, exactly? 

How do you find common values with some of your fellow citizens when even religion has been replaced with an ever-shifting vortex of conspiracy theories, all to protect a bunch of secular beliefs that a majority of these people don't have the guts to even admit to having?

You cannot reason with unreasonable people. You cannot claim a shared faith in anything with people whose only approach to everything is in bad faith. For fuck's sake, the only reason these fucking people even bothered to claim to believe in Christianity was to have something to hit others over the head with.

You can't reason with that shit, the only thing you can do is continue the work of removing it from power. We're off to a decent start, but that's all it is.

We've got a long road ahead. If you want a better country, you're going to have to be a better citizen.

If you want things to get better, you have to vote Republicans out, all of them, at every level.

And fuck the conspiracy theories, religion, and any other bullshit they'll use to try to stay in power. It's not like they really believe in any of it anyway.

It's all bullshit, at least to them. We have to acknowledge this and act accordingly.

We have to kick them out of power, and keep it that way.

There's no having it both ways.

On the far-away island of Sala-ma-Sond,
Yertle the Turtle was king of the pond.
A nice little pond.  It was clean.  It was neat.
The water was warm.  There was plenty to eat.
The turtles had everything turtles might need.
And they were all happy.  Quite happy indeed.

They were... until Yertle, the king of them all,
Decided the kingdom he ruled was too small.
"I'm ruler", said Yertle, "of all that I see.
But I don't see enough.  That's the trouble with me.
With this stone for a throne, I look down on my pond
But I cannot look down on the places beyond.
This throne that I sit on is too, too low down.
It ought to be higher!" he said with a frown.
"If I could sit high, how much greater I'd be!
What a king! I'd be ruler of all that I see!" 

~Yertle The Turtle, Dr. Seuss

Party Of God (Fiery The Angels Fell, A Series, Part Four.)

Lee Butters: (Roughly arresting Chinese guy in a case of mistaken identity)You have the right to remain silent, so shut the fuck up! Okay!? You have the right to an attorney! If you can't afford an attorney, we'll provide you with the dumbest fuckin' lawyer on Earth! But if you get Johnnie Cochran I'll kill ya!

Chinese Waiter: Johnnie Cochran! He fight for me!

~From Lethal Weapon 4

Yesterday, during the opening day of Trump's second impeachment, I found myself repeatedly thinking, RE: Trump's lawyers "Where did they manage to find the dumbest fucking lawyer on Earth?" and "Who did you blow to get this job? I mean, I guess you get what you pay for, but from what I hear one guy was Epstein's lawyer and the other one was the prosecutor who refused to bust Bill Cosby, so there's also clearly an overwhelming lack of ethics involved, too.

But there's more to it than that, when faced with video of the insurrectionists storming the Capitol, lots of Republicans acted as if this was the first they'd seen it, some seemed genuinely shocked, others, principally Cruz, Hawley Rubio and the other co-conspirators and conscious enablers, couldn't or wouldn't look at what they'd done.

Rick Scott made a big show of reading a book about the Civil War.

My question is what's even the point of obsessively studying that conflict if these fucking people refuse to learn the lessons of it? Why make a big show of reading a history book if you don't really care about what happened or why it happened?

The entire point and the primary cause of the Civil War in all respects was racism and slavery. Even the Lost Cause "State's Rights" argument falls flat when you realize that the primary "right" these fucking people were concerned about was the "right" of their elites to own other human beings as property and to profit from their forced labor.

And the vast majority of the people who fought for that system in the Civil War or who idolize it now, are people who would never have been able to afford to partake of it. Think about that for a second. Just the same as the Trump era, the vast majority of the people who supported this shit would never actually benefit. Yes, the cruelty really is the fucking point.

And when these people, even the Senators who backed and encouraged Trump's play for ultimate power, are faced with the actuality of what happened, they can't face it. Or maybe they just don't want to. Republicanism these days is all about being terrible people and having shitty beliefs, but then denying it, hand-waving it away, making excuses and not making eye contact when questioned. Like, seriously if you can't even own up to something or show some courage of your convictions, why believe it? Why do it?

Why waste even your own time claiming all these economic policies and so-called social conservative values and talking up all this other shit when you have no intention of ever following through?

What's even the goddamned point? Why bother?

In the beginning, God was nothingness. So he started making stuff. He made the dirt, he made the sky, he made the water, he made things that swim, things that slither, things with legs. I mean, God turned himself into a big shot. Then, in a couple of days, or a couple of million years, he breathed life into man. And he's been sucking the life out of us ever since. 

~Augustus Hill, from the HBO Series Oz, Episode 3 "God's Chillin.'"

I mean, I'm so old that I can remember even as recently as 20 years ago when at least some Republicans still had beliefs they could discuss openly with the rest of the world, when they still had a decent chance of punishing their own for illegal or immoral acts. Now? Everything is in some sort of a code because they know if they said what they were really thinking they'd get punched in the face. Trump really could shoot a Republican Senator in the halls of Congress and most of the rest would blame the victim and excuse their murder, or cower in pants-shitting fear and be glad it wasn't them that got shot.

Seems like a hell of a way to live, if you ask me.

It's a hell of a thing to find out at 47 years old that something you dedicated two thirds of your life to, that you philosophically supported on an ethical basis for reasons that sounded valid at the time, and that you abandoned only under duress because it was the elements of those beliefs that you valued the most...in my case equality in general and equality of opportunity in particular...that were the most under attack by your fellow travelers and by methods...in my case conspiracy theories...and for reasons (racism) that I detested. That I had, in point of fact, been taught to be against by people that were Christians and conservatives and a majority of them were Republicans themselves.

In the intervening 30 to 40 years since I was taught this stuff, Republicans have abandoned every single belief or value that they or their system taught me I should have.

While I'm at it, many if not most of the positive aspects of all that have been picked up by the Democrats.

"You can’t ride with the cops and root for the robbers." When Jamie Raskin can unironically quote Antonin Scalia and it doesn't register with these fucking people anymore, it's a goddamned safe bet we're not really dealing with conservatives now, if we ever really were, in a lot of these people's specific cases.

And, to be honest, I'm really, really fucking tired of this shit. Burn the whole rotten edifice to the ground and we can sort it out after Democrats have been in power for maybe a couple decades. The Republican party needs to go. It's been there way too long for any good it may have done, and now exists only to perpetuate itself...and the people within it are not happy unless they are perpetuating it and themselves specifically at the expense of other people. For fuck's sake, I don't think even Ronald Reagan would be welcome in today's GOP. His vice president certainly was not.

But then, if you think about it, Evangelicals and Republicans have thrown out Jesus, and replaced him with Donald Fucking Trump.

How any of that can be considered Christian or conservative, I don't know and I'll never understand.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. 

~Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

Part Three.

The Mark Of The Stupid (Fiery The Angels Fell, A Series, Part Three.)

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13:16-18

There's something I'm getting really tired of seeing. There's a lot of these nuts and two-bit conspiracy theorists who keep coming at me with "The COVID-19 vaccine is the "Mark of the Beast" or some secret way to microchip people, or some stupid shit like that.

Even my ex-wife is one of these nuts. Mike Lindell, the "My Pillow Guy" is just the latest idiot to parrot this crap.

I'm a former member of the End Times Prophecy movement myself. From that standpoint I'd like to say that if you're getting religious or theological advice from drug-addled bedding company CEO's you probably need to go home and rethink your life.

And why?

Among other things, let me fucking tell you, these people must have calves the size of Cantaloupes from all that moving of the goalposts every damn time something happens. 

I'm serious. Everything is proof of the End Times to these fucking people, or at least everything but whatever debased shit their 'side' is doing, i,e, whoever it is the "Conservatives" favor, which is usually what's closest to actually fitting the bill. But no, no, not THAT authoritarian imperialist regime.

I'm here to tell you, all the End Times Prophecy shit turned out to be for a lot of people was just another way to ratfuck liberals and moderate conservatives. It's horse shit, and this very rapidly became apparent in the post-Y2K era especially given the movement's relative torpor during the Bush 43 years and how it very rapidly spun back up during the 2008 election cycle, then there was the Harold Camping false prophecy, the 2012 bullshit, and of course, the entire Trump era.

These people basically all signed up to follow somebody who could've easily been written as a bumptious, buffoonish Antichrist in one of their stupid End Times novels, and I say that as somebody who both purchased and read roughly the entire first half or so of the Left Behind series novels.

Revelation is very specific about the form that a lot of this stuff, if it ever actually happens, would take. But even more to the point, so are the popular interpretations thereof. You're telling me, that if some potential Antichrist came along and told all the MAGA nuts and the Q-freaks that they could kill all their imagined enemies...that they wouldn't be lined up 'round the block to take whatever "Mark" this particular "Beast" had to offer?

Listen here, first off, I just had to set up a new cell phone today. Nobody needs a "Mark of the Beast" when we all quite willingly carry around these little bricks of technology that track our every move and connect us in a vast web to basically every other person in the world that has one.

Secondly, what the "Mark of the Beast" itself signifies in the context of Christianity is the acceptance of the World's false system of having politics, popularity, power and wealth...and those people and things that symbolize them...be your God. If you've rejected the poor brown-skinned Jewish carpenter and itinerant Rabbi in favor of the brash orange real estate guy turned President, you're already screwed according to that metric.

Third, how these people ever got from something as simple as a number (granted, that is still allegorical to any number of other concepts) to things like microchips and vaccines and various forms of politics is something I'll never understand. And then, they end up failing according to their own standards.

The sooner we all find a way to decouple American Christianity from conspiracy theories, and more to the point from the fear, hatred of the other and heretical Gnosticism that always goes with that, the better off we're all going to be. People have been trying to find shortcuts to get to the good part of the afterlife at least since Ancient Greece, and it never seems to work out in the end, but people still do it.

If you think God, or the gods, or whatever's out there isn't smart enough to have figured that bullshit out by now, you deserve whatever you're going to get. But all too often, this crazy bullshit comes from the fear that somebody else...especially somebody these people don't like, might get to go to heaven instead of them.

Stop living in fear, because it's fear that divides us from the truth. It's a mark of foolishness to keep believing in conspiracy theories.

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.

~Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Part Two