Welcome to the revolution (Why Conservatism doesn't work anymore, Part Two.)

 History will absolve me. ~Fidel Castro.

Alright brothers, lean in a little closer, now everyone hold up your guns and shout Allah Akbar!

Allah Akbar!  *Click.*

I just saw this.

Some Taliban dude driving a bumper car in Kabul.

Apparently, the Taliban leadership is admonishing their fighters not to act like tourists and take selfies and shit.

Good luck stopping that, Habib. You're gonna need it. Chances are, you ain't ever going to be able to stop it and you know that as well as I do.

My advice? And I'll note I can drop some pretty fucked up, harsh advice on people from time to time...

Let 'em have at it. All of 'em. Every day, any time they're not on duty and on slow days when they are. I'm serious. People are people. 

Your country has known nothing but war for 43 years. Let people...especially your people...act like human beings for a change. People deserve a chance to be human, to set down their guns and live a life.

I don't give a damn if they are my enemy, people need a fucking break. My guess is that the Taliban are as tired of this fucking war as everybody else. I can't even imagine being my age, let alone younger, and having known nothing but war. 

Do you realize that when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan I was like, six years old?

Think about that for a second.

Of course, the fact that the fucking Taliban are as susceptible to internet-driven dumb shit as any of the rest of us infidels are tells me you probably didn't win as much as you thought you did there, Habib.

Have fun with that, and the long-term implications thereof.

They won the war. If they can't make something of the peace, what were they doing it for?

If they, or their leaders, cannot unbend, what was even the goddamned point?

If they cannot stop, then the next war will be over cell phones and internet dumb shit...and who really won this one, then?

I'm quite serious here.

Give these people 20 or 50 years and they'll be just like us, For better and worse.

Imagine...in some village high in the Hindu Kush in 2071 some old exalted white-beard elder, perhaps the Malik of his village...pulling out an ancient cell phone, plugging it in to charge it, pushing some buttons and then a breath and an exhaled "Allah Akbar" when the old thing fires up, so he can show his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren the Selfies he took in Kabul with his battle buddies and their AK-47's to show them that yes, he really had been there and done that and got the fucking T-shirt.

And he'll show them that and some old memes and shit with a gleam in his eye as he remembers, as the memories, the courage, the pride and thrill of being part of something, the smell of blood and gunpowder and smoke, the terror that still keeps him up some nights, and the faces of old friends long dead all come flooding back... It is an ancient mariner, and he stoppeth one of three...by thy long gray beard and glittering eye, wherefore stopps't thou me?

And of course, one granddaughter, resolutely not wearing Hijab, will make some snarky comment about how he looked back then while smoking a Chinese cigarette...to which he will reply with profanity. His great-grandchildren will listen to American rap music, there will be young men in the village who use drugs, or who fuck each other up the ass. And there will, in point of fact, be those who are agitating for or going off to fight in the next Jihad, the next war. Life never changes, people are the same wherever you go, and in this way every place, every country, is always the same. It doesn't matter what the country is or how Fundamentalist. 

Fucking Christ, some of the stories I heard from my Saudi neighbor in the college dorm were pretty mind-blowing. Drugs and alcohol and homosexuality and the beginnings of internet dumb shit were, 20 years ago and I'm sure now, just as prevalent in Saudi Arabia as they were and are everywhere else. You just have to know the right people in some countries.

And people party harder in places where you just might get your head chopped off for doing it.

And the hectoring of the holy men and the Imams will be ignored by some, and others will see in it their chance for glory or redemption or the relief of boredom in the next fight.

And the government in Kabul will, in one fashion or another, do what it has to to go along to get along in the world, and there will be those who hate them for that, too.

But do you know what that old man will say?

He will say, proudly and in all seriousness (and with no self-awareness) that he fought so that his people could do what they wanted in their own country...and as ridiculous as it sounds now, as alien as what they want or wanted might be to us, I'm telling you that's how it will be then.

And sometimes he'll think back to when he was one of Allah's own warriors and wonder what it was all even for.

And he will tell his great-grandchildren about watching Star Wars with the guys and about them talking about how they were like Han and Luke fighting against the American Evil Empire.

Never once thinking about the implications of any of that, of how much Western culture itself was a part of their opposition to it. 

Or that modern Fundamentalism of the kind that birthed his own movement was largely an American invention, as was...for that matter...his own movement's Mujahideen progenitor which was armed by the CIA and the US military-industrial complex via the Pakistani ISI with Saudi money for the purpose of fighting the Soviet Army.

He won't give any of that any thought, if he was ever aware of the grand scheme of things at all.

Because that/s how people are. Good luck with that, Habib.

Think I'm nuts? Think I'm wrong?

Taliban fighters, various and assorted terrorists that we've captured, hell, prisoners in Guantanamo, have said as much to us already. I've read, heard from people that I know who dealt with prisoners over in places like Afghanistan, accounts of captured gomers comparing Mullah Omar or Osama Bin Laden to famous footballers and shit. I'm serious. How in the hell does Soccer fit in with these idiots crazy ideas of what Islam should look like?

(And while I'm at it, consider how many American idiots regularly try to depict Trump like he's a boxer or something when he's really an old fat guy who's never thrown a punch at somebody who could or would fight back in his life.)

The Taliban are going to find out that they cannot defeat human nature. If they try too hard, they'll die trying,

And they will lose.

Of course, this post isn't really about Afghanistan, except to say that what's going on there should be a warning for every extremist movement, for every cultist of the Orange Asshole or follower of some crazy holy man.

I started out as a conservative.

I almost certainly have better conservative priors in any traditional sense than plenty of Republican members of Congress.

I've been there and done that, and no one cared, mostly because I didn't go along with the crowd. Now lots of the values that I was taught land me firmly on the other side of the political fence and now that my beard is turning white, I'm Okay with that.

In my own life, in the last 30 years I've seen tons of stuff that was absolutely unacceptable when I was a conservative kid with a religious education growing up in a moderate conservative family in rural Northern Michigan.

I've seen everything from conspiracy theories to fascism to smoking weed to outright murder to teenage pregnancy go from being regarded with horror to just normal to wholeheartedly accepted by conservative Republican voters. 

And that doesn't even touch on the idea that some New York fat cat sometime-liberal like Donald Trump could become a Republican President or that all this functionally happened because "Owning the Libs" (who now act a lot more like the Republicans of my youth did than, say, acting how the Democrats did in the oh-so-liberal 1990's under Bill Clinton) became more important than anything else.

Hell, while I'm at it I know more than one person...in my own former and again current neighborhood...that was an ardent Clinton supporter or the son of one...who is a Trump Supporter almost 30 years later. On the next street there's a house that used to be owned by an old guy who was an Army veteran and GM retiree who thought Bill Clinton was some great thing. Some descendant of his has the place now and flies a Trump flag. Can't help but wonder what old Ernie would think of that.

And given the values I was taught, I look at things like that idiot kid who ran over those cyclists in Texas, or at somebody like Kyle Rittenhouse or Lauren Boebert and I despair.

We're dealing with people who'd rather shoot their neighbors than live with them, and they think it's funny. 

We have Republican members of Congress who try to act more like celebrities than like legislators. I have to wonder who pays for and produces some of the videos Blowbert puts out, among other things.

We're dealing with people who'd rather see their 15 year old daughter get pregnant and have a kid than have an abortion and maybe salvage her life. And they'll double down on it when their liberal neighbor points out that she's made life harder for herself and her whole family.

Hell, we're dealing with people who'd rather die of a deadly virus than get vaccinated for it because getting vaccinated is something "liberals" (or, god forbid, moderate conservatives) do. Or they'd rather take horse medication and shit their innards out than get vaccinated even when the vaccine is the right (and thus far, most reliable) medication.

Because some dumb shit made a political issue of this one vaccine, and those fools who are against all vaccines seized on that idea for their own selfish reasons.

And now Republican voters are mostly the ones dying at the behest of their politicians and other Republican voters applaud them for it.

How the hell does that make any sense?

Just as experience and getting a little smarter have made the Taliban unrecognizable from how they were 20 years ago, and thus perhaps more effective? So have groupthink and generalized stupidity, as well as simple opposition to this, that and the other thing and feral, tribal loyalty for its own sake made the conservative movement dumber and by orders of magnitude in the last decade increasingly unrecognizable to me from how it was 20 years ago.

I've written plenty about my own experiences with internet dumb shit and stupidity during my own exit from conservatism and Christianity.

Internet dumb shit clearly won that war, too.

And I think there's a bit of a warning to be found in that, too.

We need to stop this shit.

Revolution is when the masses make the revolution. A people’s revolution. But even when the revolution is made by others in the name of the masses, expressing what the masses want, it can be revolution. A people’s revolution because it has the support of the masses and interprets the will of the masses. ~Muammar Gaddafi

Part One.

Part Three.

The Emperor Has No Clothes (Why conservatism doesn't work anymore, Part One.)

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

I saw this the other day.

Ross Douthat, of the New York Times, lamenting the fall of "The American Imperial Project" whatever that is, and the rise of "Wokeism" also, whatever the fuck that is.

Honestly I'm tired of hearing people bitch about this stuff.

First of all, Ross, nobody gives a shit about your Catholic Neoconservative pretensions, least of all the vast majority of your fellow modern "Conservatives" in general and card-carrying Republicans in particular and I say that as a former Protestant Neoconservative Republican myself. It's just not happening. 

And I'll be honest with you, the reason for that is that a lot of the "Conservative" voter base was never really all that conservative and simply lost interest in any philosophical anything longer than four words and requiring more than two active brain cells.

In fact, they hate you and even people like the Bush family or Mitch McConnell or Mitt Romney simply for not being racist enough. and Republicans as a whole for failing to deliver on their imagined spectacles of blood and cruelty over the decades.

Trump was probably the closest they'll realistically get to that, and damn it, they're going to hang on to that particular mile marker with everything that they've got for exactly that reason. They don't want people who can convincingly quote Marcus Aurelius or Winston Churchill or who offers conservative economic policy or right-wing Christianity. 

No, they want WWE in the goddamned Oval Office and somebody who will give them money and make them feel good about themselves.

They want somebody who they think will hurt the people that they don't like for basically no good reason. They've been wanting that since the days of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, and they've been disappointed for just exactly that damned long.

But we're talking about people who haven't gotten over the fact that their ancestors (real or imagined) lost the Civil War, here...and too many of them hunger for another one without having the slightest idea what that might mean, or who might die in such a war.

In another 156 years, these people's descendants won't be talking about Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Caligula, and the complex interplay of Platonic philosophy and Roman conservative culture in the formation of Christianity and the eventual influence of these things on the modern West and the United States. No...they'll be building gold-plated statues of Donald Trump whether it's in the backyards of mansions hidden in the bushes like a Rhodesian war memorial...or in the town square like so many Confederate statues were (and in some places still are.)

Second, I'll remind you that the American or more appropriately Conservative ideological and imperial projects of this century were ran smack into the ground at full speed, controlled flight into terrain at relativistic speeds, by conservatives.

Your attempt to set up some kind of a "Stab in the back" mythos doesn't pass the sniff test for a presently-unemployed food service worker who's done nothing much more than pay attention off and on throughout this mess.

Too damned few white Americans even give a shit about religion anymore, if you ask me, one hell of a lot of them never really did, either. Racism is their new holy gospel, although again, in too many cases it was a dominant factor in any others they claimed to believe in as well. These people's idea of strength isn't the military, or a sound political structure. They think strength is exemplified by a bullying coward who brays like a jackass on stage in front of a bunch of drooling morons.

And their idea of religion is brazen cultic worship of Donald Trump...and through him, worship of themselves.

There are a hell of a lot of people out there who wouldn't believe in Jesus at all, except that they've been shown images of a white Jesus with brown or red hair their whole lives, in spite of the improbability (in a straight up historical sense) that such a person would have been regarded as anything but an outsider and unclean by Israeli Jews in the First Century/ As I've been saying for decades now, the only white people in that part of the world at that time were some of the Romans...and whiteness itself, as a construct, didn't even exist. In point of fact the main relevant cultural signifier was whether one had adopted Greek or Roman culture or not.

Of course, you know this, even if your understanding of Rome and the Classical era comes from obsessively, repeatedly watching Gladiator. (For the record, since the film is deeply based on Platonic and Stoic philosophy it's not actually a bad place to start, just it's not really all that comprehensive and the film is riddled with historical inaccuracies. That said it's still a hell of a good movie.)

But, and I'll say this just one more time...the average modern Republican doesn't know much of this stuff and cares even less. Personally, I remember when this was not the case. Hell, I watched and rewatched that movie repeatedly for years myself because I do know this stuff and I love that shit.

But your brand of conservatism falls completely flat with people whose main exposure to history is watching Ancient Aliens and a few vaguely Christianized documentary series' on the History Channel, if that much, who think Donald Trump is basically God, and who've lived lives of bad food, bad TV and shitty jobs who mainly support the Giant Orange Asshole because they think he's entertaining.

It makes me sad, that this is so, just as I'm sure it does you.

But I am here to tell you, it can and will get worse.

As I've said before, all any of this "Woke" stuff is, is common decency. That doesn't say too much about the people who are rabidly against it, or how they are as people. I'm pretty sure your boy Marcus Aurelius had a few things to say about that kind of stuff/

We're dealing with a "Conservative" movement here that doesn't give a flying fuck about history, about the achievements of its ideological forebears, or even about words and what they mean. If anything, conservatives have turned away from the idea of Empire because Empire means that Brown People get to come here...because Empire is a two way street. Do a lot of business or wage war in a different part of the world, and you end up with people from there coming here. That's not "Woke" that's reality.

Also as I've said before Communism hasn't been much of a thing since 1989.

But these fucking people are so eager to "Red Bait" their fellow Americans, Democrats in general and moderate conservatives in particular that...well, they'll just go right on ahead and erase the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In point of fact, they've pretty much already erased both the memory and the legacy of every American President that came before Donald Trump.

And the vast majority of current in-power Republicans (some of whom predate Trump in power by many decades and retain power bases that could be well independent of his that would prosper and even increase if only they stood up against this bullshit) went along with this or, excepting only ten, then two and in some cases only one, sat silent and let this happen.

In a lot of cases it's easier and even physically and psychologically safer to retire than it is to stand up. I get it. I was there for the formative days of social media, back in the aughts. I got chased out of first Christianity and then conservatism itself because I wasn't crazy or racist. I understand, oh yes, I do.

Doesn't say much for any conservative ideological or imperial projects, does it?

But of course these are people who are perfectly content to, now, view slavery as something one can argue the pros and cons of, rather than simply viewing it as bad because it's, well, slavery and that's a thing nobody should be subjected to.

But that's the difference between conservatism as I was taught it 40 years ago and what it's become today. There's no moral absolutes, no reverence for truth or even historical fact or the accomplishments of their own movement.

The racism, the stupidity, and the worship of cult leaders and wannabe dictators has become the fucking point.

The difference now is, all these people think is that the bad stuff won't happen to them, and they can profit from the misery of others. The only thing a lot of these morons want is the chance to own other people.

Because of that, They'd rather ally with our country's enemies and cast themselves fighting the conflicts of the past (but against the wrong people) for their own glory and for the sake of fighting than contribute to the greater good or human progress or even support their own country.

So, Ross, I'll answer your claim of an American imperial project with another of my own.

I've personally referred to Barack Obama, more than once, as the American Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius was the last of a century-long series of Roman rulers known to history as the "Five Good Emperors." Under the second of these, Trajan, Rome reached the apex of its power, stretching from the rolling hills of the Scottish borderlands to the deserts of modern-day Kuwait.

Likewise if you count down the list of the Five Good Presidents, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama...the apex of this idea of American Empire was under George H.W. Bush, when the Soviet Union fell and we were suddenly the only superpower.

There's a thing to be said for some of the historical parallels of such an analogy, but America is not Rome nor even the Victorian Britain that shaped Churchill. America is not an empire, not in real terms.

And to become one would mean the end of America. That's the part that ghouls like Ross don't understand. The Emperor ain't got no clothes, and in America his philosophy that we should have one is fit only to be laughed at.

If you want a better country you have to be a better citizen. Stop lusting after the idea of being a Subject to some kind of god/emperor and remember that.

Yes, it's harder, but that's the price of being a free people.

I think previous conservative leaders like Reagan or either president Bush understood that.

If we lose freedom here, there is nowhere to escape to.

Remember that part. There'll be a test later.

Every action, every day, is a test. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and that's a statement attributed to and repeated by figures as diverse and historical as Cicero and John F. Kennedy.

There's a reason for that. It's the truth.

Peace.

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. ~Marcus Aurelius

Part Two.

Trinity's Child

 

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

***

Capt. Ramsey: Think it was a mistake, Mr. Hunter?

Hunter: Sir?

Capt. Ramsey: Using the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hunter: Well, if I thought that, sir, I wouldn't be here.

Capt. Ramsey: Interesting way you put that.

Hunter: How'd I put it, sir?

Capt. Ramsey: Very carefully. [Chuckles]

~From the film Crimson Tide.

Today in Washington D.C. dozens of far-right nuts rallied against the mostly-imagined injustices inflicted upon the 1/6 insurrectionists in the so-called "Justice for J6" rally.

There were far more cops and reporters than there were wannabe insurrectionists this time.

That, to me, is considerably less important than some of the sentiments expressed during this stupid clown show.

One woman said she would celebrate if somebody dropped a nuclear bomb on the Capitol building.

Congressional Republicans presumably declined to comment.

Also, it seems to me that this idiot doesn't understand that she's clearly well inside the blast radius of even a small tactical nuclear weapon.

Nor that since only nation-states possess nuclear weapons, that such an act would cause millions of deaths and start a war. She seems not to understand that not only would millions of Americans be killed or wounded but so would people from that other country. 

I'm a United States Air Force Bomb Wing veteran, having served as a member of the 410th Security Police Squadron, part of the 410th Bomb Wing, once stationed at K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, near Marquette in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan...and after that, after the BUFFS were flown out to Minot and Sawyer closed, I finished out my time as a member of the 91st Security Police (later Security Forces) Group at Minot AFB in North Dakota. There was a slight detour by way of Italy and Bosnia.

When you've been a part of stuff like that, even in some small way, you have it impressed on you just how fucking dangerous this stuff is, how everything has to be done in the right order, the right way, the first time, and just how big and fucked up of a deal it all is. This shit could end all life on Earth if we're not careful. Nuclear weapons aren't something to fuck around with.

And this dumb narcissistic bitch wants somebody to drop a nuclear weapon on the seat of our own government?

Why?

Functionally, because to this dumb cunt who lives in the right-wing bubble, her stupid beliefs are literally more important to her than people's lives. If it doesn't drop black rain containing nuclear fallout on her parade and cause her hair to fall out and cause her to get radiation sickness and cancer and die and then pollute her bloodline for generations after, well, even nuclear war doesn't really exist.

And if it did do all that then it's Hell Hath No Fury and why didn't somebody warn us and who's damn fault is all this anyway?

And whatever happened to that nice young gentleman who represented her district, anyway?

I mean, seriously, I get that these people are fucking morons and that it only, ever and always gets worse and that these people are utter moral bottomless pits but Jesus Christ, could we have a little consistency, logic or at least self-preservation here?

Apparently these people are not only stupid, nihilistic fanatics but they are good and goddamned well willing to die in a nuclear blast not only to "Own the Libs" but to "Own" Congressional Republicans and all those agencies and units and people who would then have to go out and do terrible and unspeakable things as a result and then spend the rest of whatever lives they had dealing with it.

I already have depression and PTSD. Fuck you, bitch. I wouldn't wish that shit on my worst damn enemy, and certainly not on that kind of a scale.

What are we?

What have we become that the mental and physical health of other people, their lives, and even the life of our own country or any other, or our planet itself matters so little even to so few of us?

No real or even science-fiction nuclear hellscape ever produced monsters such as this. This lady didn't come shambling out of the Nevada Test Site or the wilds of Novaya Zemyla, I'm quite sure her origins are pretty mundane.

What have we become?

And what the hell are we going to do about it?

'Cause if you can't answer that, we've got one hell of a problem.

Capt. Ramsey: You do qualify your remarks. If someone asked me if we should bomb Japan, a simple "Yes. By all means sir, drop that fucker, twice!"

[Men laughing]

Capt. Ramsey: I don't mean to suggest that you're indecisive, Mr. Hunter. Not at all. Just, uh... complicated. 'course, that's the way the Navy wants you. Me, they wanted simple.

Hunter: Well, you certainly fooled them, sir.

Ramsey: [chuckles] Be careful there, Mr. Hunter. It's all I've got to rely on, being a simple-minded son of a bitch. Rickover gave me my command, a checklist, a target and a button to push. All I gotta know is how to push it, they tell me when. They seem to want you to know why.

Hunter: I would hope they'd want us all to know why, sir.

Ramsey: At the Naval War College it was metallurgy and nuclear reactors, not 19th-century philosophy. "War is a continuation of politics by other means." Von Clausewitz

Hunter: I think, sir, that what he was actually trying to say was a little more -

Ramsey: Complicated?

[Men laughing]

Hunter: Yes the purpose of war is to serve a political end but the true nature of war is to serve itself.

~From the film Crimson Tide.

Oh, and the title? Look it up, I dare you.

Sunset.

 

I am just a poor boy 

Though my story's seldom told 

I have squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbles such are promises.

All lies and jest.

Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. 

- Simon and Garfunkel, The Boxer.

Sunset.

The manifold petty frustrations of working in a  food service job in today's labor and political climate.

The virus.

The sheer impossibility of finding an apartment or other affordable place in my hometown of nearly twenty years after endless shocks to the system from the 2008 economic crisis to the virus.

These were the things on my mind when I stopped to take this picture.

Something intrigued me about the clouds turned orange by the sunset, which of course didn't show.

Story of my life.

It's as good of a  header photo as any I guess.

I  resigned from my job. My boss tells me I could come back as early as next week if I need to.

Like hell.

Fuck that place.

Hell, maybe I  just couldn't put up with the bullshit anymore.

I've been depressed for many months and I don't even know why.

That fog is starting to lift and I've not been liking what I can see of where I am, in terms of mental health and the purpose of this life.

Maybe it's just me.

Christ, if I knew what the fuck the answer was I wouldn't be in this mess.

Sometimes you just hit the point where you're done.

The sunset was as good of a metaphor for that, and the uncertain future that fast becomes the Now, as any I guess.

9/11, 20 Years later

 

Even the smallest act of service, the simplest act of kindness, is a way to honor those we lost and reclaim that spirit of unity that followed 9/11.

-Barack Obama 

Where were you when the world stopped turning, on that September day, As the line from that Alan Jackson song goes?

I was in my college dorm room arguing with my ex-wife on Yahoo messenger. I  couldn't even begin to tell you about what. My neighbor stopped by to bum a cigarette for the walk to class just then and when I  got back to my screen my ex was freaking out and demanding that I turn the TV on. I did. It was set to CNN.

I turned on the TV just in time to see it live when the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

My neighbor, an international student from Saudi Arabia, said something in Arabic that I didn't catch.

Classes ended up being canceled that day.

I've written extensively about that time and the events surrounding it on this blog.

I'm not going to do it yet again.

I'm going to ask you;

What have we become?

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Tens of thousands of his followers and tens of thousands more of Taliban who sheltered them are dead.

For what? What good did it do?

Half of us have become a  smaller hearted, smaller minded people in the intervening 20 years, people who glorify individualism without practicing it or understanding what it means, who think it's "freedom " to die of a  preventable disease and who think that selfishness is the highest good, who twist Christianity into something that Osama would have very much approved of.

And the other half of us tolerated it, or fought against it until we ran out of energy and just gave up.

Some people do very much want to live in a  country like Afghanistan as it was 20 years ago.

But they want to do it right here in America and find a way to get rich from it without ever leaving the couch.

And lots of the people who could or should be doing something about this have gone along with it out of fear of losing their positions or are paralyzed by indecision regarding what to do.

Conspiracy theories run rampant through our society like a tweaked out Talib who lit his long beard on fire.

Religious idiocy takes precedence over facts and reality in too many people's minds.

And hell, some people are so hopped up on the bullshit of the moment that they're trying to backdate that shit so they can make themselves seem more righteous, and for what?

Against the backdrop of this day, while other leaders like Bush, the Clintons, Obama and President Biden stood solemnly this morning at remembrance events, former President Trump and his son  are commentating at a boxing match tonight and spent some time this morning saying dumb shit about aliens.

What's even the damn point anymore, Republicans?

The Taliban got smarter and won, and we didn't.

Why?

I ask this question as somebody who was a  registered Republican on 9/11. Yet I was proud of how conservative people and liberal people alike came together for awhile, because we were all Americans.

Now Republicans don't want to profess to live in the same reality as the rest of us no matter how many of them die from the virus as a result.

I was going to write yesterday, I went to the bookstore instead.

My Mom and I walked the dogs in the woods this morning.

Because fuck all that.

Fuck this day.

And fuck the people who keep using it to justify their hate and selfishness and wanting for endless conflict.

On the afternoon of 9/11 I stood out behind the cafeteria at the college and I pointed out a solitary gray-green speck at the tip of a long white contrail. It was a US Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker. I got my binoculars out of the car and showed my boss. Considering my background I knew what was coming.

If we don't get this hateful madness within our country under control and get a  grip on ourselves it will happen again.

But it won't be Afghanistan next time, it'll be Alabama, or Texas.

And there won't be no damn good reason for it then, either.

Slimy Things (Labor Day 2021)

 

The very deep did rot, O Christ

That ever this should be!

And slimy things did crawl with legs 

Upon the slimy sea.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

I saw this, this afternoon.

It's Labor Day.

As usual Franklin Graham and people like him miss the fucking point.

Frank says he wants to celebrate the American worker...and then he immediately dives in to dunking on people who aren't working, trying to make Labor day about rich  people and blaming the democrats for the fact that people aren't working, making a point to celebrate his true God (Donald Trump) and then he claims that God created people to work.

Huh?

Back the truck up here a minute.

I've been reading the Bible since I could even read. As I was educated in Christian schools the Word itself played a big role in my education and I don't recall that being in there.

Let alone the unspoken implications that some people were created to work and others were created to profit from their work.

In point of fact, Jesus Christ as I was given to understand Him and His Word  seems like somebody who would be far more concerned with the workers and the poor than with the rich and their profits.

In fact I think Jesus would chase Frank around with a  whip.

And note that I used to be a conservative.

This isn't a conservative perspective. It's not a liberal perspective. It's not about politics or even workers rights, as much as it does tie in with all that stuff.

It's about What I Read.

It's about what is in the Word versus what is not. It's about actual Christian tradition versus the corruption of religion in the service of politics and power and wealth.

And that's not the purpose of Labor Day.

We're not here to celebrate Frank's Golden Image. It's not about any of the shit he says it is..

Working people built modern America.

In America,  under our laws, our system, a working person is equal to a wealthy preacher.

That's what Frank is telling you he wants to undo.

He wants to take away people's social safety net. He wants to force other people to work, preferably with the most raw deal he can.

Because it's not even really about that.

It's fundamentally about a person's place before their God and even their rights to not see the world that way if they don't want to.

Frank thinks he's better than you, or me.

And he wants to prove it by using his capability to screw over working people on this day.

God says all people are equal in His sight.

America and its constitution say that religion can go pound sand.

Frank says "Get back to work you lazy assholes, you're costing me money."

And he's mad as all hell that he can't just clap people in irons and force them to work for the greater good of slimy things like Franklin Graham.

I  was taught that there's a  right and wrong in this world and the next. Christians taught me that.

Either things like Labor Day are about this country and its peoples, or they aren't and it's about what rich asshole is the best at lying and getting a bunch of feeble minded people to  follow them.

One of these is right and the other is wrong. It's that simple.

Without truth there is no freedom.

Without truth what are we even working for?

Remember that.

---

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Sky On Fire

Who the fuck is this asshole?!

~Hold Up Man, to Akeem, from Coming To America

Seriously?

This is the reaction of MSNBC anchor Sam Stein to the god-awful Texas abortion law going into effect today?

Fucking seriously?

Who the fuck is this asshole?

Look, and note carefully that I say this as a former conservative, former Christian, White Man who has been there and fucking done that and paid in blood for a fair number of my own mistakes...

One motherfucking hell of a lot of the problems we face as a country...hell, as a world right now are because entitled privileged white dudebro idiots literally don't want to listen to people who know things because they think it might crimp their style or make their penis smaller or rain on their parade or something something Gazpacho.

And I'm personally getting tired of this bullshit.

Listen, in Texas we now have an anti-Abortion law that effectively deputizes random chucklefucks to sue whoever they damn well please on the flimsy excuse that they might be helping a woman have an abortion. Cashier tell your dumb ass to put a mask on? Don't like your Uber driver? Is his next ride female? Have a bad date? Well here's the ultimate stupid excuse to sue somebody, for something that ain't even illegal or wrong and the State says you're entitled to a minimum of ten thousand dollars in compensation.

Something tells me this ain't going to work out the way that Texas Republicans think it's going to. If some jackass decides to sue Amazon for carrying the morning-after pill there's a non-zero chance that Amazon could end up owning the state of Texas, for example. But that's not even the point.

The point is, Hillary Clinton and countless other people fucking said if the Right was allowed to have power, that shit like this was going to happen.

And entitled dudebros from Sam Stein on down to the dudebro I got stuck working with all the time, roundabout that time, ALL said that they were too good to vote for Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders was their guy! When he couldn't even beat Hillary Fucking Clinton, The Dudebros and all the various Well-off overwhelmingly white Progressives stuck up their nose and immediately declared their intention to vote for Evan MacMullen or Gary Johnson or Jill Stein. Hell, I had people tell me they didn't know who they voted for but they felt somehow satisfied because it wasn't Clinton or Trump.

Meanwhile, the number of votes by which Trump won my state was less than the number of people in it who voted Third Party because they were high as fuck on their own self-importance.

It's funny how, in the grand scheme of things, Trump really didn't matter all that much. All he had to do was effectively give these assholes permission to, well, to just be assholes for no goddamned reason worth mentioning.

And ya know, why not?

Why not keep it up, too. I mean, yeah a bunch of them got ruined one way or another, thrown in jail, hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters died of COVID-19 and millions more got stuck with lifelong effects and vast medical bills, but hey if that's not you what's the harm? Why not spin the wheel one more time, kick over the table and try and grab the cash that falls on the floor...

That really is how and what the fuck these people think. I'm serious. There ain't no plan. It's just wreck shit and see what they can get out of it.

When all you've heard for at least two generations is a shitty selfish ideology and preaching about a small, miserable god that depends on you for whatever-the fuck, why not? What incentive does any of these motherfuckers have to care about anything?!

I mean, fuck Abortion, these motherfuckers are presently being quite open about their intention to target and try to destroy America itself, or Capitalism, basically anything and everything that doesn't benefit them and their racist, selfish, shitty ideology on an exclusive and permanent basis. 

There is no god and Ayn Rand # Donald Trump # Ron DeSantis # JD Vance # Gaetz and Greene is his profit. *Cough* I mean "Prophet."

So why the fuck would anybody expect anything better than this shit, much less be surprised? These fuckers are literally trying to find ways to try and nationalize any corporation that stands up to them. Of course, this will work out badly and the Republicans will indeed find out that biting the hand that feeds them will get them nothing more than a good smack, but by then, the damage will have been done enough that it won't matter.

Fully a third of the population of this country has effectively internalized modern Republican politics as an infallible religion that can do no wrong. They will regard corporations legally defending themselves, putting up competent lawyers who successfully defend them under existing laws and in turn refusing to donate to Republican candidates the same way as they regard any other setback in their endlessly frustrated quest for totalitarian power...as nothing more than one big damn conspiracy against "Conservatives."

And mark my words, if it's not stopped this is going to result in violence and eventually large-scale conflict and if these motherfuckers break off a piece of America for their own little piece of shit banana republic it's going to make the Taliban in Afghanistan look positively civilized by comparison.

Meanwhile, in California, the sky is on fire.

Sorry, dudebros and Progressives and Republicans, but we as a species have some real problems from Climate Change to COVID-19 to more traditional problems like corruption and wars and they all need to be dealt with right now, not when you damn well feel like it or your ego or your profit margin get around to it. And if you don't think people are starting to catch on to your bullshit, you're wrong.

I don't know, specifically, what the answer is. But it's pretty clear that without some major changes, the way things are currently being done isn't working.

And if you can't hack that, then maybe we simply don't deserve to survive as a species and the Anthropocene will just come to a crashing end while nature spends a couple million years picking up the pieces.

The universe does not give a fuck about you, and facts and reality are stubborn things. Get the fuck over yourselves and listen to the people who actually do know what they're talking about.

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