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Owning The Libs In The Lake Of Fire (On Mehadism, Part Five.)

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:

And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats:

And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. ~Matthew 25:31-33

I saw this last night.

I have to admit, I've gotten used to stupidity from Trump Supporters but this is mind-blowing, because I spent most of my life as a Christian.

"God is separating the sheep from the goats...and I'm a goat."

Note: She's probably not wrong, but almost certainly not for the reason she thinks she's not. 

I'm sorry, but if you somehow missed the point of the judgement of the sheep and the goats, it goes like this: The sheep are the ones who are going to heaven. It's the goats who are the ones going to hell, well, either you're stupid, you have the worst reading comprehension imaginable, or you care more about Some Dumb Shit I Saw On The Internet than you do about the Word of God. 

I'm honestly not sure which of these three options is the worst one.

I think a lot of people fail to remember that the Bible is Bronze Age, Iron Age and Classical Era stories wrapped up in Platonic philosophy and dunked in a deep, dark well of not-exactly-warm-and-fully Middle Eastern mythology that runs the gamut from far-predating, to contemporary-to the actual Biblical mythos, and indeed much of the latter is in fact a re-working of the former in accordance with the facts that the Old Testament was largely written in Aramaic and Hebrew (which, linguistically, drew on earlier mythos) and the New Testament in Greek (which turned the New Testament into a vehicle for said Platonic philosophy.) Then you add geography into the mix, the people who wrote a lot of this stuff lived on a narrow strip of more arable land surrounded by desert, then as now constantly beset by enemies.

Of course they were going to use things like farming and sheep and shepherds as metaphors in judgements and parables and stories.

Pretty sure the people who wrote all this stuff down had no idea about 21st century Internet Culture and social media and arrogant entitled pricks yelling "Sheeple!!!!" [Insert copious amount of flying spittle here] at everybody who disagrees with them. 

The whole mess is childish and puerile to start with, and I'm not sure that that the people who are attempting to invert the ancient Biblical judgment realize just how closely they're following the list of things that Christ said not to do in judging the Goats.

Giving food and drink and shelter to the needy, clothing the naked, and visiting the ill or the incarcerated are not really their things. 

They'd rather sit in their chair and huff their own farts while perusing Dumb Shit On The Internet with one eye and watching Fox News with the other. They don't give a damn about heaven or hell or whatever sort of conduct it takes to get to either place. They want the cheap internet fame, the regard of all their equally-stupid friends, and the sordid little thrill of "Owning the Libs" (Again, whatever that means) RIGHT NOW!!!!

These are people who'd rather die, or inject themselves with bleach, or shove lights up their asses or poison themselves by taking the wrong medications (including those not even intended for human beings) than listen to some apolitical expert who actually knows what they're talking about and get a free vaccine.

They'd rather bow down and worship a golden idol of Donald Trump right now than obey the teachings they've claimed to follow for their whole lives and the hell with the consequences.

(And yet, these people booed Trump himself when he said that they should get vaccinated.)

I'm being 100% serious here, does any of this sound really stupid to you yet?

If there was a nuclear war tonight and most technology that was both operating at the time and not protected against an Electromagnetic pulse stopped functioning, would these people bow down and worship the few surviving computers? Would those in the ruins build idols out of fried laptops and PC's since that is, after all, where their dopamine fix actually came from?

Trump. Doesn't. Matter.

When they get bored with him or he dies or whatever they'll find somebody else. In the passion of the moment they have made of Trump a literal Antichrist but it's the idea that matters. Literally anyone will do, so long as they say the right words and validate the petty hatreds.

Nothing matters.

Hell, technology doesn't matter aside from its being a facilitator of this type of bullshit, most of the fascist movements that have gained or sought power arose and fell before the internet or this level of technology were even a thing.

If they could find some other way to get their sick little thrill of sticking their middle fingers up at all the world and being seen doing it, they'd do that instead.

And they could absolutely give a rat's ass about other people. Hell, other people basically don't exist to these selfish assholes unless they think they can get something from us.

That, in the terms of the Christianity I was raised in, is what makes each of them a goat and destined for hellfire. The worst part is, every last one of these chucklefucks, burning in hell...would likely see that they were surrounded by people like unto themselves and think they got the better end of the deal anyway...because they'd be surrounded by people from their anti-Vax Facebook group or their pro-Trump Discord chat or whatever.

They would view damnation as salvation, if that's what it took to justify themselves in their own minds.

But according to the Word, Man cannot save Man, and we certainly cannot save ourselves. We are not gods. We do not determine our own fates.

If you're dumb enough to think you'll share an Eternity of blessedness with Donald Trump you deserve what you're going to get.

(And they'd agree, being too stupid to recognize the negative connotation!)

Because they can't see past the Moment, the Self, what they think they want Right Now.

Metaphysically, that ends badly, every time you run the experiment.

But the natural essence of this philosophy that I've termed Mehadism absolutely does make a God of the Self. As I said, other people do not exist to these fools.

And so here we are. What we're going to do about it, I do not yet know.

But we'd best think of something.

Part Four

Do not tempt the Lord your God (On Mehadism, Part Four.)

Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,

And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. ~Matthew 4:5-7

I keep seeing this shit. "The Blood of Christ is my vaccine" or whatever.

Didn't these people ever hear "Do not test the Lord your God" or as I've also heard it my whole life "Don't push your luck."

I mean, seriously, I spent most of my life as one kind or another of Christian. That you go to the fucking doctor when you contract a deadly disease isn't even a question as far as I'm concerned...and I say that as somebody who doesn't LIKE to go to the doctor one bit. I spent too much time in the hospital and in and out of mental health and outpatient care in my 20's. But you bet your ass when my work offered the vaccine I got my name on the list immediately. Still took the Tribe's health care agency over a month to get to me, but at least they did. I wasn't going to complain. God isn't going to miraculously heal you. He does not work that way, and in any case the need for miracles to prove His glory ended when the Word was written down and compiled.

Don't get me wrong, there's occasional things I and other people consider miraculous, but when there's stories of some miraculous healing from religious people 95% of the time they're just that, stories. And there was a time I'd have viewed this stuff as relatively harmless, but in the post-Information, Internet Age the stories and the truth have been stripped away from each other. Honestly, these days, the wilder and more improbable the story is the more likely it'll gain traction on Facebook.

But ya know, that's the thing. The people who are rejecting medicine and science and vaccines, they're *Not* doing it out of unshakable faith in God. 

They're doing it because it's what their social group is doing, and because every last one of them *Hopes* to receive some miraculous healing or other because they want that 15 minutes of fame and the wealth they think it would bring. That's all. They're doing this, at the least, because of the lure of cheap internet fame at the minimum.

They're doing it, fundamentally, because they have more faith in Donald Trump or Tucker Carlson than they ever had in Jesus Christ.

Isn't that idolatry? Isn't trying to use spiritual things to cheat the universe the basics of what all of the Abrahamic traditions define as sorcery or witchcraft?

Or have my former people simply lost any and all ability to detect bullshit when they see it, as well as any inclination to try?

I believe it's something different; When people have convinced themselves that they are the center of the universe, the protagonists of reality, they think whatever they want to believe is real and whatever any Gods say about that is irrelevant.

Because they think that they are God.

This is the core tenet of Mehadism, right here. 

Whether it comes out of fanaticism for its own sake, just plain narcissism, self-centered religiosity, or the Tijuana donkey show of modern conservative politics (and its attendant belief in belief for its own sake) is irrelevant. It's here and it's a problem and we're going to have to do something about it.

Because this shit absolutely has become violent, the competence or scope of said violence is not a factor in the nature of the problem. That it exists at all is bad enough. The Proud Boys spent last weekend engaging in street brawls, petty crime and vandalism in Portland, and damned little was done about it. 

Here, for example, is these brave, pro-American souls vandalizing some disabled person's adapted van before they tip it over. I'm sorry, but what exactly is this supposed to accomplish other than damaging the property of and severely inconveniencing a person who very likely can't really afford it? And I mean, sure, the van is likely insured, but what are they supposed to do about transportation while it's getting fixed?

And you're telling me that these fools couldn't find some hippie person's Subaru to damage? This is in Portland. No, I think the disabled person's van...which is clearly marked as handicap-accessible and has plates indicating such was targeted on purpose, because the fucking cruelty is the point.

The lack of consideration or thought, the cruelty to The Other and the deliberate targeting of people in already distressed circumstances are hallmarks of fascism, yes, but also a key indicator of Mehadism. The last thing your basic Mehadist ever wants to think about is that they could become disabled or 'lesser' so they strike out at disabled people or people they think of as lesser than themselves because they think by driving them away, by not seeing them, then they won't have to think about "There but for the grace of God go I" or any such thing...because the thought of being stripped of their [imaginary] superiority is the one thing they fear most of all...and these motherfuckers fear basically everything outside of the very narrow little bubbles that they inhabit, and their lack of life experience and unwillingness to learn anything itself will also affect their competence.

(Regarding the picture and that these morons gassed themselves...this is NOT how you learn to use a gas mask. 

If these people ever come face to face with police who aren't ideologically in the bag with them, much less trained soldiers, what's going to happen will be an atrocity for which the people who radicalized these morons should be held accountable. They will get their asses beat or they will be killed in great numbers...and they won't even know why. Why is that? Because, thanks to their ideology of Mehadism, they literally do not understand that bad things can happen to them, that they can lose. This has already been observed among incarcerated 1/6 participants and caused mental health problems, worse than the ones they had before at least.)

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

Don't be these fucking people.

Part Three.

 

The Killing Fields, Again (On Mehadism, Part Three.)

Secretary-General Annan spoke for all of us...when he said that ethnic cleansers and mass murderers can find no refuge in the United Nations, no source of comfort or justification in its charter. We must do more to make these words real. Of course, we must approach this challenge with some considerable degree of humility. It is easy to say, "Never again," but much harder to make it so. Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little. But difficulties, dangers, and costs are not an argument for doing nothing. When we are faced with deliberate, organized campaigns to murder whole peoples or expel them from their land, the care of victims is important but not enough. We should work to end the violence. ~Bill Clinton

There's something that's been bothering me for awhile, and that I've written about previously.

It started with the anti-lockdown, anti-mask and anti-vaccine protests last year.

As I said at the time, there's one hell of a lot of Americans that don't want to live in America, they want the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with an Applebee's and a mall. Whether it comes down to hatred of one's neighbors, racism, or shitty politics, there seems to be a lot of this crap going around.

And I'd like to make a note of the fact that both Donald Trump and Mo Brooks were booed by their own supporters at a rally in a cow pasture in Alabama yesterday when they said that their supporters should get vaccinated.

I've also been worried for a long time, longer actually, that especially when the internal logic of conservatism ceased to hold up, the endless radicalization feedback loop would slip out of the control of those who started it.

And since among other things, Fox News has decreased in popularity in favor of channels like Newsmax and OAN, that seems to be happening.

As many other people have observed, in the end fascism spares no one. If this crap blows all the way up and Americans end up shooting at each other in the streets, those who started and hoped to profit from this mess will get to die along with the rest of us.

Is this endless...freaking endless parade of "Own the Libs" bullshit worth that to you?

We have millions of people who've willingly turned themselves into biological weapon Kamikazes for the shitty airheaded ideology that has effectively eaten modern American conservatism alive and worn its skin like a coat. That ideology seems to consist of two things "Donald Trump is God and I DO WHAT I WANT!" Or there's the ever-popular bumper sticker "God, Guns and Trump" which really makes me wonder just what the hell god these idiots think they're worshiping. 

And for all this, the medical profession collectively is Not Okay right now, people are more than a little overwhelmed and you can't find an ICU bed in pretty much the whole damned South right now, how long before we have refugees of our own? Not from some kind of civil war, but from a pandemic we had mostly under control six months ago, but now we're right back in the shitter because culture war-obsessed idiots made the virus and any measures to protect oneself from it a political issue.

You don't need to arm mobs with Machetes if you can weaponize a virus to do the killing for you.

But, at this point, a majority of the people who are dying are conservatives, the performatively Evangelical, Republicans, the followers of the people raging against masks and vaccines. How the fuck does any of this make any sense?

It only makes sense if you consider that at the height of the virus last year, a previously very much underground current of Eugenicist thought bubbled to the surface, along with the Right's traditional social Darwinism...on full display these days with Fox News requiring vaccinations and such for its employees but trying to discourage their viewers from getting the jab.

It's not just the same old garden-variety hypocritical bullshit anymore.

These fucking people are trying to kill you.

These fucking people are actively trying to kill other people, and they've started with their own followers, simply by making them fear and hate education, reason and science and encouraging conspiracy-minded paranoia and tribalism. Once they did that, they didn't have to do much else, but the programming may have worked too well. When they made "Giving a fuck about your health" a tribal marker...which they actually did a generation and more ago, if you think about it...the stage was set for something to turn into a goddamn disaster.

And, to top it off, the violent rhetoric of last year has not only not stopped, it's gotten much worse. Hell in the last week so-called American Christian Conservatives have been exalting the fucking Taliban. These are the same damned people who, for eight years while Barack Obama was in office, acted as if the words "Radical Islamic Terrorism" could summon devils.

Because of course, it was never really about any of that. They were afraid that a Black President with a funny name somehow meant that they were going to lose something, just by the fact of existence. There was never any threat of this, but the idea that there theoretically might be sent these chucklefucks over the fucking falls with paranoid paroxysms of utter rage for basically no goddamned reason. I mean, yeah, racism and all that, I get it. I get the fact that American conservatism has been dead for years, replaced by a perpetual Opposite Day ideology of anti-liberalism at any cost. 

And I get it, we're dealing with unreasonable people who are too used to getting their way and who didn't reason themselves into any of the positions they now hold. So they can't get out of this vicious feedback loop they've gotten themselves into.

I understand that, do you?

Because we, as a society, are going to have to find a way to defuse this bullshit before it blows up or it's going to blow up, because the NRA, right-wing ideology and stupid Hollywood movies have been convincing a whole hell of a lot of these morons that they're Bruce Willis as John McClain and it's perpetually Christmas Eve...but for fuck's sake Bruce Willis isn't even the guy he plays in the movies, he's a fucking actor. Some people legit need to learn to distinguish between fantasy and reality before it gets people killed.

Yeah, one hell of a lot of these dudes would die of a heart attack just getting off the couch, a hell of a lot of those who didn't do that might have serious problems distinguishing between their dicks and their rifles at a critical moment, and a hell of a lot more of them might just shoot the wrong person the second they find themselves in whatever they think looks like combat.

In other words, take the ravening insanity we saw on 1/6 and drop it onto a battlefield.

But a few of them might be effective, and for an insurgency or a terrorist group that's all it takes, really.

It's far more likely that a hell of a lot of these people would kill their own, use the crisis that they started to solve petty grudges, and shit like that. It's a safe bet (and trust me, I know this from experience) that most of these morons have no idea what liberalism really is let alone what liberals actually look like or how people of color or others that they hate actually do conduct themselves, or of the skills that a lot of those people have in the modern world.

Trust me, a lot of the people who compose today's modern conservatism think only in terms of emotional reactions and stereotypes. That makes them very dangerous, but also very stupid and likely, self destructive. (And I think this is why a lot of their leaders want them as biological weapon Kamikazes, rather than say, insurgent fighters.)

But that's wrong too, isn't it?

We as a society, as a civilization, are not supposed to just let people destroy themselves.

Especially not for the fun and profits of a few people who are already fantastically wealthy.

But if we don't stop this silly bullshit that's what we're doing, because one hell of a lot of these fucking people have been convinced that the way to really enjoy themselves is to shoot down their own neighbors.

And the ideology being used to justify this shit is itself contradictory and stupid. Mehadism, like I've been saying. I do what *I* want, even if what one wants to do is kill one's neighbors for no damn reason, or overthrow the government because something something Gazpacho that they heard Mike Lindell or Tucker Carlson say.

The incompetent stupidity seems baked into the whole thing. I would not want to be one of the people who throws these ignorant goons at Army National Guard soldiers, for example, much less one of the goons. The bill for all this is going to come due eventually and it won't be in these people's favor.

But that's not the goddamned point. The point is war is a fucking crime, and civil war all the more so. We as a people should not be tolerating this, we should never have allowed ourselves to even get to this point. That the other side doesn't see this bothers me, because I learned all this stuff as a fucking conservative my own damn self. The only thing I can conclude is that what it all meant when I was coming up and what it all means now are two fundamentally different things.

Mehadism is the glorification of the self, even at the expense of other people's lives.

And if it's not stopped the only thing that might wake people up is when they've done so much damage that the power grids  and the technological base collapse and all the sudden the dopamine rush of Fox News or their favorite "Conservative" Facebook group is gone, but by then they'll have all sorts of other reasons to keep fighting.

We as a people need to stop tolerating this bullshit and start holding these motherfuckers accountable before it ever gets to that point. WE have to do this, not the government. The government's response to 1/6 for example has been swift, but ultimately half-ass because the Republican minority keeps trying like hell to undermine it. No, this is a democratic country, WE have to push the government to action, while countering those forces trying to push it to inaction.

Because if we don't, well, the fucking Republicans are making no secret of the fact that they want to kill us, or at least at the minimum try and turn America into another Afghanistan, in the hope that one day Washington D.C. will be like Kabul was last weekend.

If you want to stop that, if you want a better country, you have to start by being a better citizen now.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

Part Two

Part Four

Bullshit, literally (On Mehadism, Part Two.)

Joe: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

Attorney General: "So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops.

Joe: Yes.

Attorney General: Water. Like out the toilet?

Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that's the idea.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Attorney General: It's got electrolytes.

~From the film Idiocracy.

I keep seeing this.

People are trying to use Ivermectin, an animal deworming medication designed for livestock, to treat COVID-19.

DAFUQ?!

Listen, y'all. For the past 17 years and ten months I've worked as a custodian in a kitchen in a casino. It's not the most exciting job but the pay is OK and I have good days off. So I've been there way longer than I thought I would. 

Rule #1 of my job is USE CHEMICALS ONLY FOR THEIR INTENDED PURPOSE.

Rule #2 of my job is DO NOT MIX CHEMICALS.

Rule #3 is READ THE FUCKING DIRECTIONS 

Not necessarily in that order, but I've heard and repeated countless variations of this theme in my time.

It was the same when I was a cook. Hell, it was the same when I was an Airman. If a thing is intended for a specific purpose, you use it for that, according to procedure and repetitive training, or people can die. You do it the right way the first time, because if you don't it can get people killed...including when they aren't supposed to be.

Most jobs, especially jobs that middle- and working-class people do, have some variations of this. Why is this hard?

The fact that I feel the need to write a blog post about this sort of bothers me.

Not least because anybody who's ever had to fill out a goddamned job application should damned well not need to be told about things like workplace safety.

So why is it any different with medication directions, or public health?

Let's look at this logically: COVID-19 is a respiratory virus. That's your lungs and stuff like that. An animal deworming medication is intended to, basically, make a critter shit so hard it gets rid of intestinal worms.

How in the hell did anybody conflate or confuse these two obviously massively unrelated things?

Why does "BUT I SAW THIS ON TUCKER CARLSON!" suddenly trump what it says on the side of the package.

To paraphrase my Grandmother "If Tucker Carlson told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?"

Facts, reality and science don't give a shit about your rabid partisan tribal loyalty.

And specifically, as regards this whole political tribalism thing. You're an American. Being a Democrat or a Republican is a party affiliation, not a tribe in the sense that, say, being a Native American or a Pashtun or a Zulu is.

Even if it was, what is the damn point of denying common sense, education and hell, the damn directions on the package in favor of metaphorically dancing around a fire shouting "Unga Bunga" because some smarmy trust fund asshole with a TV show on cable told you to?

It's nothing but, to use one of those tired terms that I don't like, virtue signaling.

And potentially at the cost of your health and life. I mean, come on, what's the point of this bullshit?

We've all spent the last week watching a global primer on the perils of extremist religion and tribalism watching the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, and domestically we had a huge reminder the other day of how that dovetails with political extremism when American conservatives suddenly started praising the fucking Taliban, who they essentially considered an existential enemy until they didn't, despite the fact that the Taliban in no way threatened the existence of America or conservatism.

But even if you're a Republican or a Trump Supporter...you're not a Pashtun, no matter how extreme you are you wouldn't be part of the group. For one thing people are born into an ethnicity, you're educated into a culture, a people, a tribe. You accept or reject a religion. Political affiliation is a choice, and in spiritual terms a profoundly agnostic one at that. So is terrorism.

There are many Afghans, many Pashtuns, who are extreme Fundamentalist Muslims who agree with the Taliban on most things, but they are not Talibs. They may even hate the Taliban. You don't have to buy the whole damn cow, every time.

In point of fact, until the last five or six years most Americans defined themselves as the opposite of that type of shit.

But it's a rare Republican these days who isn't at least trying to look like they're straining at gnats over what the Democrats do and swallowing the whole damned camel, every time something comes up.

Even when there's a massive, plainly visible pile of evidence that screams the entirely opposite point right to your face at full volume.

It's puerile and tiresome. Come on, people, we are not the Borg. You're a human being, not a goddam fire ant beholden to a fucking hive mind. Act like it. God or evolution or your revered genetic heritage gave you a brain and some measure of intelligence, why aren't you using it?

Why does What You Saw On Tucker Carlson overrule what your eyes (or the pain in your guts) is telling you?!

And why do you fuckers keep doing this to yourselves?

The Me-hadism of the present political moment in America, just like the Jihadism of the Taliban in Afghanistan...is doing nothing more than causing fools to blow themselves up for the greater glory of Somebody Else.

And how fucking stupid is that, really?

Ignoring that you have a problem, pretending that it's not a problem, or refusing to see it does not make it go away.

And partisan tribal loyalty does not change the composition of chemical compounds that might kill you. No matter how much you believe it, you're not going to be the first one that Ivermectin works on differently than it says it will on the side of the package and you will not bask in glory for taking it.

You're not a goddamned bull.

But Ivermectin is designed for a thousand pound animal, for a bull or something like it. So it might cause you to shit yourself to death if COVID-19 doesn't kill you first.

Look with your eyes, people, read the goddamned directions. This isn't a game, and it's not that hard to figure this out.

Stop screaming about how great you are and show that you have the basic intelligence to read and understand that you don't put stuff in your body that's not supposed to be there...if that's even really what you're so worried about.

Of course, in a lot of cases that's not really it, is it?

Part One. 

Part Three

The Signs Of The Times (On Mehadism, Part One.)

The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired of Jesus that he would shew them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonah. And he left them, and departed. ~Matthew 16:1-4

I saw this last night.

Lin Wood, Trump's crazy election lawyer, claiming that COVID-19 is a "Partisan virus" and therefore some kind of conspiracy to kill Republicans.

No, dude, that's not it. COVID-19 is a virus, a strand of DNA that attaches itself to your cells, replicates and makes you sick. If you could somehow communicate with a virus, say telepathically...the only thing you would even get from it, is that it's simple, single-minded and operates only on the imperative to replicate itself. That's literally all the shit even does. Evolutionarily, it exists for no other purpose. A virus isn't a high-enough order organism to care about anything else. It is, pure and simple, a force of nature.

The virus doesn't give a shit about you, except for the fact that you're alive and can act as a vector to spread it. If you're a warm body, congratulations, you can be infected. Somehow, Republicans can't seem to get this. Nature was here long before you were born, and it will be there long after you're dead.

If it's a partisan conspiracy, shouldn't these fools be getting vaccinated, masking up, and protecting themselves?! 

Something something Gazpacho "Own The Libs!"

*Cough Cough*

This bullshit is becoming nonsensical, except that it seems like conservative elites, who are often vaccinated, seem to want to sacrifice their followers to the virus in the hope that our civilization will collapse under a big enough pile of bodies and they can rule the ruins as gods that have no followers.

Seems kind of contradictory if you ask me.

But self-centered people, who believe in Man-centered theologies, desperately want to make everything all about them, and to believe that they live in an ordered Universe that's small so stupid people can understand it, instead of an unimaginably vast, empty space containing these scattered whirlpools of light we call galaxies, each one careening marvelously amok, some of them with their own life, their own civilizations, and likely their own gods.

Much easier, it is, to believe that the Self and whatever one claims to believe in is the default setting of the Universe.

But that's complete and utter bullshit.

And once you believe that, anything becomes possible. Everything becomes possible, but nothing can be true.

Belief in truth means you have to be willing to understand that it's not all about you. Empirical reason and science is not going to shout back at you how great you are. It's going to tell you the true state of things.

We've all watched in horror as the Jihadist Taliban swept aside the Afghan National Army and took over Afghanistan last weekend, that is, except for a few of the conservatives who are cheering that shit on because they think that they might do the same here someday. Their previous horror at the ideas espoused by Islamic Jihadism seems forgotten in the passions of the moment.

What far too many people have failed to even notice, on the other hand, is the base Me-hadism that dominates much of America, in much the same way, and has an iron grip on the Conservative movement in particular. 

Frankly, I'd argue that this Mehadism is worse. 

Where a Taliban might shout "God is Great" and might do wrong things to try and prove it, the Taliban is still in theory answering to a power outside of themselves, and that may constrain their behavior. There are still truths they cling to, if only from a certain point of view. 

The conservative Mehadist desires to think, if only to themselves that "I am great" and they will do all type of debased shit to try and prove it to themselves but be predisposed to finding ways to always answer in the affirmative. The only way they determine "Truth" is by whether or not that dopamine rush hits their brain on time.

This bullshit has become not much more than endless ideological masturbation.

There is no sign from the heavens that proves how great and right they are...so they'll just invent one.

I saw this last night too. The Q-Anon nuts seem to be on this thing about the evacuation from Kabul not being a real thing. 

Like, what? Is everything somehow secretly OK over there and all this just 'made up?' If true, please let us know, so we can worry less about the people over there.

The question I have is "Why?"

Show me a cost/benefit analysis. Show me the logic of how you arrived at this conclusion. What's even the damn point, or reason for such an exercise?

As an Airman I was around plenty of big jets. I saw the original video. Yes, that is indeed a Globemaster.

You get shit like this when people who don't know what they're looking at but think they know everything start offering opinions and other people whose purpose in life is saying dumb shit on the internet agree with them. Nobody's thinking about the real people who are really involved here, the soldiers trying to protect the evacuation and keep order...or the Afghans and others who are trying to escape.

But of course, to the Q-Nuts not a bit of this is about those people. They care nothing for the real people living through this all too real hellish situation. The people of Afghanistan don't even exist, in the minds of these conspiracy theorists, who are overwhelmingly White and relatively comfortable and would never have to worry about hostile religious fanatics taking over their country. In point of fact, a lot of them are the hostile religious fanatics attempting to take over our country and having weird meltdowns while they livestream threatening to bomb the Capitol building from the cab of their truck or some shit, only to have a college student call the cops on them.

And again, they are desperate to believe they are the center of a small, ordered Universe, because they are afraid of everything that they do not understand, which is, well...everything.

All this shit basically boils down to a combination of narcissism and nihilism, bored comparatively well-off people (and mind you, even a poor American may be light-years better off in real terms than a person from Afghanistan) who simply feel that God or the Universe or the US Government or whatever hasn't given them enough.

They seek a sign to prove their imagined greatness, and they will not find one.

Therefore, in their own minds, they must try to tear down the Universe until they do.

I'm not sure how we're going to get ahead of this mess and start countering this garbage, but we'd best think of something.

Part Two.

Taliban Wannabes In America, WTF?!?!

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace, and that's made brothers and sisters out of every race. ~George W. Bush

I saw this, this morning.

(!)
Protesters in Kabul, apparently led by women and girls, but also including men and boys continuing to resist the Taliban with nothing more than flags and iron courage.

Bit of a surprise, I'll admit, after we all watched the Afghan National Army roll over like a bitch or sell itself out to the fucking Taliban.

It appears, though, that this time the Taliban may have to actually run a country, and they know it, and they know that a lot of their country's financial resources are in the care of now-hostile powers. I quite suspect they're going to get a lot of help from Pakistan and Russia and they're going to grudgingly tolerate (and selectively respond harshly to) stuff they'd have just shot people en masse for previously. Like I said I think we're up against a smarter enemy this time around. They certainly rolled the Trump administration, didn't they? While I don't like that, as it's bad that America looks like a bunch of fools no matter who's in charge, if it prevents something like the Taliban's previous criminal, thuggish rule I'll take it. 

If they're forced to engage in their thuggery behind the scenes...well that's basically every government this country has had in its modern history from the Soviet-backed communist government to the Taliban to Karzai's and Ghani's regimes. It ain't great, but it ain't mass slaughter either.

In point of fact, one of the things I've seen mentioned a number of times is that Taliban fighters are doing shit like taking selfies near Kabul monuments (which means they're less likely to destroy the country's technological resources at least not on purpose) and helping themselves to food and gifts offered by supporters...and naturally there are some, whose good will they will wish to maintain...and generally speaking, restraining themselves for the most part, or some of them are restraining the other ones, at least. 

There have been some people who were shot during the protests, but the people as a whole did not back down.

Street protesters are not the focus of the Taliban's efforts, maybe just not right now...but it's a start.

Probably, I'd guess...because there's an actual organized effort making use of resources taken over from the government to hunt down those they feel they need to and they'll go the route of most of their neighbors and some of their funders and have religious and/or secret police instead of random killings in the street. Again/ it ain't great...it's actually going to end up being more effective of a level of brutality than what they practiced before...but they're not taking their bullshit out on the general population. Likewise they seem to be abiding by at least some of what they said they would.

And there's these protests, too. That's a hell of a good sign, way better than I was expecting. Clearly, there are at least some of the Taliban who understand the concept, and there is something left of Afghan civil society. That's a much better thing than I hoped would be possible at this point.

At least in the cities people are standing up.

If the goddamned ANA hadn't rolled over, maybe these people could've really accomplished something. Hell, they might yet, but I suspect it will be more difficult now. But so far, the people aren't backing down.

So, What the fuck is our excuse?

On our end of things, the evacuation seems to be progressing well, and people who need or want to get the fuck out are doing so without Taliban interference, and that is also a hell of a lot better than I thought this thing was going to go. It's truly not the situation over there that worries me in the least, at this point. 

We have our broken end of things in hand, finally, and the Afghan people who are remaining behind? Well, these people are tough survivors. More will get out as things progress, some will stay and fight. Some will resist in other...possibly more effective...ways. What worries me on that side is that the Taliban, too, appear to be stronger, having evolved and gotten smarter after two decades of dealing with us.

Like the Iranians, that makes them a threat. But, like the Iranians I suspect if we leave them alone they'll leave us alone...at least in a direct sense. 

I fully expect things like intrigues and terrorism but we're prepared for that...and to a certain extent that's a default setting for that part of the world as wrong as it probably is to put it that way.

For a lot of reasons, it's over here that I'm more worried about. Among other things, I keep seeing pro-Taliban hot takes from American far-rightists. 

I'm sorry, but I very well remember 9/11 and the days after it. Something like that is...well, I can't even imagine thinking that way...and I can remember when you might've got beat up for expressing admiration or sympathy for the enemies of America.

I expected the privileged, racist, Trump supporting assholes who'd say that they didn't want refugees from Afghanistan coming here...when they've been coming here for 40 years since the Soviets were the ones bombing the place.

I don't remember these kinds of reactions then...so why is it different now? I seem to remember when Jihad was considered a far greater threat than mere Communism and basic American liberalism wasn't even on these fucking people's radar.

Of course I should have expected they'd change their minds the second it became inconvenient to maintain their previous views.

Doesn't make it any less evil or repugnant that it was expected but it fucking was.

What I absolutely wasn't expecting was not only that the Taliban would be spoken about as if they were a good thing, the legitimate government, a mere interest group that should be on social media...and then to have them directly equated with former President Trump.

I don't think that's quite the argument you think it is there, Chester.

And I'll note this post was made from Matt Gaetz's Congressional Twitter account.

You know who'd roll over if an enemy attacked us just like the Afghan National Army rolled over for the Taliban?

Conservatives. Republicans. These Fucking People.

Those for whom America as she is, is inconvenient at best.

They don't give a good goddamn about America or its people. They worship Donald Trump. I had to go to the store today and on my way into town I was briefly behind a truck that had a bumper sticker that read "God, Guns and Trump."

And Donald Trump has been out of office for seven months now.

I've always thought the term "American Taliban" was a bit overwrought, but there are certainly American Taliban-wannabes and that is a thing we are absolutely going to have to deal with, and probably the same way eventually, with massive force...but we can't afford to fuck off for 20 years and treat this bullshit as an exercise in long-term disaster capitalism...or we will lose, at the minimum, a chunk of our country to these sons of bitches.

In fact, I rather expect that's going to be exactly what happens, certainly the collective responses to 1/6 suggest it will. My personal take is that it's what is somebody's objective, for the simple reason that such a thing would be the unending money-pot for the military-industrial complex that we absolutely couldn't walk away from because it's not halfway across the world, it's right here at home.

And if we continue to half-ass our national response to the fact that there's anti-American, literally pro-Taliban people in our own country right now...we will eventually become two countries which are perpetually at war. The only people who want that are the people who profit from war and the people who think, on ideological terms, that war is somehow good.

Given these people's newfound love of our enemies I have to wonder how much of that 1960's Domino Theory shit was really projection. I wonder if somebody knew it would come to this.

Had a conventional World War III been stopped only at the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay and Gibraltar, because our allies just rolled over like the ANA did, I wonder if all the sudden the Right would've been all about sucking up to the Soviet Union??

I think it's time to ask, Conservatives, which side are you on?

'Cause it sure seems to me like there's some people in Afghanistan even now that understand our values better than you do. And that's why you don't want them to come here.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

Shining City (White Christmas In August, Part Two.)

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. ~Ronald Reagan

*Raises Hand*

I saw this last night, some stupid idiot asking if people would want a Globemaster full of Afghan refugees landing in their town.

The question got him put through ratio hell on Twitter.

Good.

I'm fucking tired of these right-wing assholes and their smug assertion that there's something wrong with being a brown person, or an immigrant, or a Muslim, or a refugee. I'm especially fucking tired of it when I know that the people he's talking about are on the run from their own country because they or some member of their family helped us over there. I'm fucking tired of people who think that what color their skin is, where they were born, or whatever other stupid criteria they make up give them some kind of "right" to judge other human beings as lesser than themselves.

All the holy books say that all of humanity is equal before the Divine.

Our Constitution promises equality, even if our culture and society often fail to deliver it.

You don't have to be a "Uniparty Globalist" (Whatever the fuck that is) to see this. You only have to be literate, have the basic intellectual curiosity God gave a German Brown Cockroach, and not be an asshole.

I mean, fucking seriously, what's wrong with these people?

We are a nation of immigrants and refugees. This isn't a new thing. It wasn't instituted by some shadowy cabal or conspiracy theory. This is...and has been since the beginning...a defining factor of our national character.

And it should always be so.

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

We are the first nation to have been a Democracy in the modern sense. The whole world is watching, the whole world always has been watching.

And it's watching to see what we do in response to the disaster in Afghanistan.

That is what we will be judged by, not so much that this disaster happened...but on how we react to it, on how we treat those who aided us, and on where we go from here. It was the same way before. The Vietnam War and its ending in the fall of Saigon and Operation Frequent Wind maimed our credibility for a few years, certainly negatively effecting the presidency of Gerald Ford, and ultimately enabling the Islamists in Iran and the Soviets when they invaded Afghanistan and started this whole mess.

And we'd forgotten the lessons of Vietnam, hadn't we? The lessons learned there changed the way we fought wars for a generation...and sure enough, when this began those lessons were still in force, but I believe familiarity and time bred contempt and laziness, the endless grind of 20 years of conflict became routine, and so we forgot the lessons. 

Certainly, some people never learned them. Certainly some viewed these wars as a for-profit enterprise.

It was the same way 50 years ago, in Vietnam. That's why we lost. We forgot...or never knew in the first place...what the hell we were doing.

But at the same time, those people who came over here from Vietnam have absolutely helped to make America a better place. We took those people in, and they became a part of us and by the time I met Vietnamese people and even had some in my Catholic school class...you'd never have known they were not always here. They may have ethnically been Vietnamese...but their hearts were, or had become American.

And it'll be the same with these people, won't it? It always has been before. In five years, or ten, or twenty...it will seem as if they have always been here. Certainly there have been Afghan people in the United States for a long time, but I'm talking about these refugees in particular.

In his novel 'The Kite Runner' Khaled Hosseini wrote the main character's father, Baba, as becoming a Republican while he acclimated to life in America. This was mostly out of (understandable) hatred of the Soviet Union and love of people like Ronald Reagan for standing up to its power. I see no reason (except that current Republicans do not want to) why American conservatism or the Republican Party wouldn't find a way to accept the Afghans, who are naturally pretty conservative and, if treated well, could become the 21st century equivalent to the Cubans who fled Communism and mostly became Republicans.

The Republican Party could easily find a way to accept these Afghans fleeing Radical Islam.

Except that they're stupid racist assholes and they don't want to.

Or at least, most of them don't. There are certain exceptions.

The governor and legislature of Utah, for example, stood up to be counted on the right side.

As the governor points out, his state was founded by people fleeing religious persecution. Given the climate and terrain of Utah, and the character of its people, I think the Afghans would be a good fit there, too. The state already has a decent-sized Muslim population, and other conservative religious ethnic groups like Pacific Islanders are also well represented in Utah.

So it makes sense that the governor and the legislature would do what they've done here and offer to help the refugees. 

And it's not an unsurprising development for the spiritual descendants of Joseph Smith, who was often called "The Yankee Mohammed" at the time when he was founding the religion that became Mormonism.

Like I've said, what has become of conservatism and Republicanism is not what I was taught. There's a reason I quote people like Ronald Reagan. Likewise, modern liberalism certainly is less 'Leftist' in this country than some people would like...so often in the same vein I can also quote Barack Obama. The American tradition requires both elements, liberalism and a sane conservatism...and what we've got at the moment sure ain't that. Far too many Republicans aren't actually conservatives, or Republican in the sense of what that word means. Too many of them are basically old school racist, segregationist Democrats. And where my current party shows little evidence of that past, Republicans have adopted it wholeheartedly...while still trying to push the blame for it onto other people.

It is they who, in all respects, would douse the light of Reagan's Shining City.

Because they think by doing so, they would hurt somebody else more than themselves.

But don't we all live here? Aren't we all in this together?

What happens to one, will happen to the other eventually.

It need not be this way. This is America, we can do better than that.

Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this ancient Holy Land, the House of Abraham, Muhammad, and all the other Prophets of the Holy Scriptures. For the past week, I have been utterly speechless and spellbound by the graciousness I see displayed all around me by people of all colors. . . .You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my firm convictions, I have always been a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth.

During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug) -- while praying to the same God -- with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the "white" Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana.We were truly all the same (brothers) -- because their belief in one God had removed the "white" from their minds, the 'white' from their behavior, and the 'white' from their attitude. ~Malcolm X.

Part One.

NOTE: As regards the series title, the code-signal for the Operation Frequent Wind helicopter evacuation on April 29th, 1975 was "The temperature is 105 degrees and rising" followed by the playing of the song "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas."

The 'new' New Colossus (White Christmas In August, Part One.)

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! ~Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus.

This is one of the saddest things I've ever seen in my life.

We're all watching the death of a nation, the death of people's dreams, in real time.

I saw this video last night, people running alongside a C-17 Globemaster III jet as it taxis, some of them grabbing onto the sides of the aircraft or trying to climb onto it.
 

And all Lauren Blowbert can fucking do, seeing this, is make some passive-aggressive pro-Trump comment "Oh woe! Oh woe! If only my Lord and Savior Donald Trump were here!" Well, ya dumb fucking bitch, this wouldn't even be happening without Donald fucking Trump, who is the one who negotiated with the Taliban and threw the elected government of Afghanistan to the fucking wolves to start with. Lauren Boebert's idea of the 'new New Colossus is nothing more than a giant statue of an upraised middle finger.

I mean, seriously, do you think Trump even gives a shit about anybody in Afghanistan other than the fucking Taliban? Whose current leader and 5,000 of their soldiers he personally went to the mat for and had them released from prison?! All so he could bro it up with some other authoritarian shitbird during the negotiations in Qatar for a few minutes.

I love these fucking people who think that American white male Republican politicians have some magic authority that people who otherwise don't give a shit about us will magically have to obey and respect. No, it doesn't work like that.

And Trump used what authority he had to get some Taliban out of jail.

I'm going to be honest here, I quite suspect that most of the Taliban are just as tired of twenty years of war as we are. It's starting to look like they're going to at least appear to behave and moderate their conduct a little, at least where it can be observed...which will just make them more vicious when they do what they usually do out of sight. But I rather suspect their patrons in China, Pakistan and Russia probably want this thing to be over, too, and so have pressured them to appear to behave.

The Afghan people on either side are tough survivors, and remember, a great many of them are already nearly as Fundamentalist as the Taliban.

Those who want to stay will stay and tough out whatever, as long as the Taliban don't run the country's infrastructure and technology base into the ground again or fuck with the country's agriculture and food supply...well, things will be bad, but likely survivable. Likely the ones the Taliban intended to kill or punish have already been dealt with, seeing as they issued a general amnesty this morning and are trying to get whatever's left of the government to go back to work.

Usually in this type of situation you only do that after you've killed whoever you thought needed killing.

Not that I trust these people's word, but I suspect they won't break it as much as some people (including me) thought they would. 

In fact, if anything I think their newfound apparent pragmatism will make them more dangerous in the long run...particularly when you consider they just inherited 20 years of our work in building up their country and have a much higher technology level with which to support Jihad.

And those who want to get out will likewise find a way, as many are already doing, to their dubious credit, the Taliban are not interfering with our evacuation thus far, and those who've made it to Hamid Karzai International Airport are facing not much more obstacles than long ass lines.

Well, that and 600-800 people being packed into a Globemaster sounds miserable as fuck to me. I hope the hell nobody had to take a piss on that long ass flight to Qatar. I've flown on these planes, they aren't comfortable under normal peacetime circumstances for the 102 people rated as their standard rated passenger complement, and it's worse when you're taking off or landing under adverse or field conditions. But at least they got out, and relatively quickly.

Others will drive out, or trek over the mountains, or get smuggled out, and I don't envy what they'll have to go through.

And those who helped us, or our allies, have every right to go wherever they wish to start new lives.

They have every right to come here, if that's what they want to do. Considering that a lot of these people have learned English and dealt with us for all this time it's a likely outcome in a hell of a lot of cases. 

I'm going to be honest, I'd rather deal with people who, coming from a vastly different cultural context, agreed to adopt and support our way of doing things than with people like Laura Ingraham whose entire bit is undermining America and its culture and ways in favor of how they think it's supposed to look. 

Personally I had enough of their vision of America, white as a goddamned sheet of computer paper but with unending Tijuana donkey show politics in the last four years. It's literally taken me months to recover from five years of this bullshit and I hit rock bottom last month.

Fuck all that, and fuck anybody who wants it to start again.

People have a right to come here, and they have a right to expect decent, functional government and society when they do. Lots of them will hope for exactly that, and work for it when they become able to.

Some Americans, on the other hand, seem to think that the purpose of government is to bomb people, that indeed the cruelty actually is the point.

And they're dumb enough to think using nukes on the soil of an allied country is actually a good idea. 

Back in the day I saw an analysis or two of what people would have had to go through if NATO or the Warsaw Pact had used weapons of mass destruction during a hypothetical World War III scenario in Germany and to this day, I can't imagine how anybody expected that anybody short of troops in full MOPP 4 gear who weren't subject to direct attack would have survived for very long.

I saw the video of people running alongside that taxiing Globemaster last night too. 

Now imagine smoke-filled skies and those Chinooks flying over rubble instead of buildings, and those people clearly suffering the initial effects of radiation sickness, some of them vomiting, and some of them stumbling around blinded...with Airmen in full MOPP gear screening people's REM counts with a dosimeter and Geiger counter. Imagine our airwaves full of bellicose threats of Jihad from Iran and Pakistan, and calmer but more dire warnings from China and Russia amid reports that Strategic Rocket Forces have been placed on full alert...and sober meetings by the United Nations that brand us as the rogue state as other nations start to cut off trade and our economy craters yet again, and as other nations deploy their forces...not as our allies, but in case we do something crazy.

Imagine the world demanding we disarm...or else.

And starting with comprehensive sanctions that wreck our economy. Would this idiotic bellicose nationalism from these morons have made that better, or much worse, do ya think?

THAT would've been the bitter fruit of us using nuclear weapons in Afghanistan.

THAT is why one hell of a lot of Americans shouldn't be trusted with anything more lethal than a plastic butter knife or allowed to decide anything of greater import than what's for lunch...or allowed to leave the house without a helmet on.

Jesus Christ, dude, what the hell is wrong with you?

I'm a United States Air Force Bomb Wing veteran. I served in the 410th Security Police Squadron at K.I. Sawyer AFB and the 91st Security Forces Group at Minot AFB and the idea of anybody using nuclear weapons fills me with a bone-deep dread. That only ends one way; Apocalypse.

The United States of America has had a "No First Use" policy regarding nuclear weapons since the oh-so-politically-correct 1950's for a reason. We didn't want to blow up the world.

Authoritarian chucklefucks can go pound sand.

It really does seem like some people would rather blow up the world than accept that they were lied to, admit they were wrong, or learn anything.

I could have told you, hell I and lots of others DID tell you, the way we were doing things over there it was always going to end badly. Any veteran who paid attention could...and likely did...tell you that. Especially those who served over there. Kabul was always going to be Saigon with mountains, because we didn't build up the country and a government most of the people could support. It was always intended to be a permanent occupation, but as usual the military industrial complex never thought that Americans might get bored, or tired, they just figured we'd take it.

And idiots who think you can bomb an insurgency out of existence are why they think they can do that. In fact, they want to ride the bomb all the way down, whooping and hollering like Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove.

Because "Fight the Communists" or "Own the Libs" or something something Better Dead Than Red...

Hey wait a minute! Aren't WE "Red" he realizes too late...

BOOM!

At this point it seems like it'd just be easier to let the Afghans who want to come here in, dust ourselves off, sit down and learn a few things from this mess and move on.

If you want a better country, a better foreign policy, whatever, BE A BETTER CITIZEN!

I spent some of my younger years in Orange County, CA, where there was a large Vietnamese community. I knew people whose parents fled from Saigon on boats or helicopters. Hell, I worked with an old Vietnamese guy for years, a Republic of Vietnam Navy veteran who'd evacuated on one of their Navy ships, filled to the gunnels with thousands of people on April 30th, 1975. 

Trust me, that guy understood the concept of America, and how being a good citizen and voting and shit was important. Like me, he went back and forth between Democrat and Republican, based on who he thought made their case better or was better at the time.

His best friend was a Latino US Army retiree who had fought over there as a young man, fiercely Christian and Republican but like me, he voted for Obama in 2008, and for the same reason, just as anguished as I was that Sarah Palin and her ilk meant he couldn't support John McCain.

But making choices like that means you have to pay attention.

I guarantee you, those Afghans who come here and become Americans will understand that.

And they will appreciate being here, and strengthen this country, and contribute to it just like the Vietnamese did.

And that, my friends, is exactly what Laura Ingraham and Lauren Boebert and the C-SPAN nuke guy are afraid of.

That's all.

Part Two.

NOTE: As regards the series title, the code-signal for the Operation Frequent Wind helicopter evacuation on April 29th, 1975 was "The temperature is 105 degrees and rising" followed by the playing of the song "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas."