False Religion, to Own The Libs. (Left Behind Is A Lie, Again, One.)

Thou Shalt Not Kill. ~Exodus 20:13

I saw this earlier today.

At some TPUSA conference, some idiot from Idaho asked Charlie Kirk "When do we get to use the guns?" and "When can we kill the Democrats?"

As if some dipshit like Charlie Kirk can somehow magically make all those things like criminal law and human morality go away.

As if other people wouldn't shoot back, as if the government and the military wouldn't react.

There's something wrong with these people. 

A person with some kind of an adult perspective on life doesn't ask questions like that...as if it's all a game, or something. Whoever this guy is...he has a very childish understanding of life, asking a question like that in a manner that suggests a little kid asking if they can have another candy bar.

To his half-ass credit, Charlie Kirk half-ass denounced the guy, saying that if he acted on that, it would hurt the cause and that conservatives would be repressed or some shit.

Seriously?

These fucking people are getting to the point where they're basically living in a fantasy world, and far too much of American culture and capitalism in particular...to say nothing of politics...is simply trying to see what it can get out of these idiots instead of pointing out reality and showing leadership and teaching proper conduct...I mean, seriously, I grew up Christian and conservative. Whatever happened to the idea...to the Biblical Commandment...that killing people is wrong?

And they're going to do something horrible, and provoke a conflict where people will die in great numbers, and then act like everybody else is the bad guy for defending themselves. I'm tired of these fake-ass martyrs and their murderous bullshit.

At least the Taliban seemed to realize that sometimes it's good to be human, once their war was over.

I'm not sure these people will ever do the same, or that they are even capable of such.

Today, in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the judge ruled that the Prosecution could not refer to his three victims as "Victims."

I mean, seriously, what else would you call them but victims of a crime, of aggravated assault and murder?

What sort of Orwellian bullshit would these assholes have the rest of us come up with, just to avoid themselves having to face the fact that one of their little pawns killed people, none of whom were doing anything that would be considered a capital crime. What's it going to take to get these fucking sociopaths to understand that this little shit killed two people and wounded a third in a state where he didn't live, inserting himself into a situation that didn't concern him, claiming to defend property that he did not own and the little fucker is on trial for that crime?

I mean seriously if this little punk ass had been anything other than an affluent white kid with fascist sympathies these motherfuckers would have demanded...since he took a firearm across state lines to commit a crime...that the Federal government step in and charge him and that he face the death penalty. 

The truth is, half of these so-called "Conservative" dudes out there are whacking off to the idea of shooting people themselves, but they're too chicken shit to actually go out and do it.

And the other half are mendacious little fascists with violent fantasies of their own who don't want to get their hands dirty and are perfectly happy to use Charlie Kirk's audience member or Kyle Rittenhouse as pawns to enact their violent fantasies. 

It's a nihilistic death cult. 

Do we dare ask who gets to be the death cult Jesus?

It sure ain't Jesus.

These fucking people think if they can't have totalitarian control over what everybody else does...well then nobody should have anything at all...and they resent the American legal framework...as imperfect as it often is...for the fact that it generally gives people rights.

I keep trying to tell you, these fucking people literally do not believe in human rights, not for actual humans anyway.

They would replace our modern understanding of life and rights and stuff with, in effect, a system of privileges dependent on one's class and race and wealth and institute a totalitarian system to enforce it all.

American "Conservatism" has gone so far to the Right that it's leaving fascism in the rearview mirror. They're going to have to come up with a new name for this horse shit soon. And the fact that these fools are simply refusing to engage with reality is only part of the problem.

The whack-a-nut conspiracy theories, and the refusal to engage on the basis of reality and empirical truth are, in and of themselves, becoming a false religion.

When you start by telling yourself over and over that the world was created in six days, that a bunch of mythological claims about how things work are more true than testable reality concerning those things...and when emotion and feeling good about yourself becomes more important than moral behavior or sound doctrine, you set yourself up for this kind of shit.

Jim Caviezel did a pretty bad-ass job of playing Jesus in The Passion Of Christ years ago. I'll be honest, I would not have imagined at the time that he would go on to be a believer in some obvious bullshit like Q-Anon. I have to wonder just what happened to him.

Sadly, in all honesty it was probably just that he had to go down this road simply to maintain relevance as a conservative actor. 

There's been a strong push towards being ever-more crazy for at least a generation with these fucking people, and the internal logic of conservatism has collapsed under the weight of the collective madness.

And ya know, I'm sorry, but I think all this was ginned up with malice aforethought. No, I'm not big on conspiracy theories myself, but there's pretty strong evidence that certain bad actors have encouraged this lockstep March Ever Rightward and now that it's hit the wall of reality, those same people, the Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson types...are encouraging their followers to back the truck up and hit it again...and again...and again.

And they don't care who dies.

They just want to not have to contribute to society, pay less in taxes, and propagate shitty social values for their own benefit.

Meanwhile...from the other direction, from that of their base...there seems to be a growing conviction that the only thing that's true IS the conspiracy theories, and what they want to believe.

These people have already removed Jesus Christ and the judgments of Revelation from their End Times theories and replaced them with Anti-vax bullshit and Q-Anon like I said before. That didn't come from Fox News, that came from people like my ex-wife and one of my ex-girlfriends, from people where I used to work and from various Youtube morons and small-time preachers. But it's trickled up.

These people are going to reach a point where they decide that they themselves are the Saviors, except they're not going to die, or sacrifice, for all of Humanity...they don't care about being the mediator between God and Man.

No, they're going to kill...and they're going to do it for their own glory. And they'll tell themselves whatever they have to so that they can feel righteous while they do it. Hell, they don't care about God at all, except insofar as they want to be Him.

And this is, ultimately, the pernicious bastard child of the Prosperity Gospel and assorted Pentecostal shenanigans, but now untethered from Christianity or from any pretense of doctrine...or even religion in any understandable sense...at all.

It's all the same shit, fanaticism for the sake of fanaticism, but with themselves as the center of the Universe, and with Donald Trump (or anybody they can find who's even worse than he is) as a figurehead golden bull to worship.

Want to take a guess where all the rest of us stand, in that kind of a cosmology?

There is no eternal life in a materialistic cult of self and selfishness.

The rest of us had best start doing something about this shit, and soon.

Before these people realize that Left Behind is a lie and decide to make their own Apocalypse. Before they realize that there is no eternal life and no god in their own belief system that they've created...and use that as a rationalization or a stepping-stone to something even worse.

That won't end the way they think it will.

But they don't care.

They will see the Eternal Death that their former religion says is their due as some kind of opportunity. They will twist it around to make God Himself the bad guy.

And I'm here to tell you, when that time comes these fucking people will make the Taliban look sane and reasonable by comparison...and I guarantee you they will start with targeting Christians and other religions and anybody with any kind of morality other than their own twisted version.

They won't call Evil good, and Good evil then...they're doing that already.

In that sense, there is no coming apostasy, it's already here.

If you're not willing to go down the unending rabbit hole of crazy with them, you will be The Enemy, to them, akin to the Devil himself. Left unchecked this will consume even those who orchestrated it...we're already starting to see it with these people turning against Fox News for not being crazy enough.

It's not going to stop until the rest of us step up and stop it.

Or there will be no more victims, just whatever terminology they make up to comfort murderers.

We have a problem, slowly coming together in this rising anti-faith.

We need to do something about it.

That's all. 

We have to stop this shit, or more people will die.

I can't make it any simpler than that.

"I didn't want to do it,'' he hears himself saying. "I didn't want to leave them behind.''

The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. "You had no choice.''

"Yes I did! I didn't have to come here.'' He pauses. "I didn't have to do anything,'' he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. "It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.''

"-- Evitable,'' echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F-117A hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. "Your family could still be alive, you know.''

He looks up. "They could?'' Andrea? Jason? "Alive?''

The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.'' 

~From the Novella "A Colder War" by Charles Stross.

If we lose freedom here...

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change. We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant in the weeks and months to come. We've been asked to pause for a reality check; we've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can. ~Barack Obama

I saw this earlier.

There's a real issue that I have with Trump Supporters, and that is that they seem to believe that everybody who doesn't agree with whatever passes for a Republican party line right now (Read: Before Trump shoots off his mouth later tonight and changes it) is a Republican In Name Only, a traitor, who never really was one of "Us" to start with etc. etc. etc.

You know, first of all I came to an awareness of what conservatism was in the Reagan years. A lot of people in my family, who were Democrats, voted for the Gipper. There was a sense that, whatever our disagreements, we were all Americans and all on the same team. The far-right, the John Birch Society, etc. had all been banished to the fringe, where they would remain for most of my life so far. If somebody came around bitching about "Traitors" especially if they were talking about other Republicans or spouting conspiracy theories, you damned well knew you were talking to a nut.

We defined ourselves by philosophy and religion, variously resisting or cautiously accepting change, as Bill Buckley put it, we were the people standing athwart the flow of history yelling "Stop!" We lived in a world where Communism had been vanquished, where Nationalism had been crushed, where basic small-L liberal Democracy seemed triumphant and the people of the world collectively had American conservatives to thank for it. Sure, we had our problems. Newt Gingrich turned out to be a sack of shit, the apocalypticism of the Religious Right often bordered on ridiculous (and I say that as an End Times Prophecy guy who did his part to beat back a lot of the cockamamie bullshit that the nuts came up with.) And truth be told we were often frustrated with a world where, simply put, it wasn't popular to be a conservative. Hey, all these years later it turns out there was a reason for that.

And as I've written before, where I live was rife with militia bullshit back in the 1990's and frankly nobody who had a brain in their head that I'm aware of thought those people were anything but small-time criminals and terrorists. At the time, people like Newt Gingrich were always trying to brand Democrats as "The Enemy" and ramp up the culture wars but out here in the real world it wasn't like that. Plus I'd seen the end results of excessive ethnic strife, nationalism and right-wing political bullshit. Nobody at the time thought the Bosnian Serbs were the fucking good guys. 

I'm afraid to ask what these people think a loyal Republican should look like, or what they might consider acceptable in terms of debate or ideological disagreement. What are these people even loyal to?

Part of me is afraid I know.

When he was pulled out of hiding and arrested back in 2008, Radovan Karadzic had been making a living peddling alternative medicine woo woo bullshit for years. That should've been a hint of what was coming.

So, in terms of the American experiment, who's the fucking traitors, really? Quoting the Bible, Abraham Lincoln once said a house divided against itself cannot stand. Modern Republicans want nothing more than to divide even their own Party in the name of little more than feeling good about themselves, putting on a mask of smug certainty over shitty choices too many of them know they made.

They just don't care.

What has become of us, and I ask this as a former Republican? I used to be one of these people.

Nowadays, civil war talk, conspiracy theories and far-right extremism, medical woo woo bullshit, outright lies, survivalist woo woo bullshit and various crypto-currency scams are just par for he course if you're what passes for a conservative these days.

Hell, these people are so bitter they've even kicked Jesus and any theological hope of a better world out of their End Times narrative.

And some unnamed "They" supposedly hates somebody or other for it.

Hey, if somebody hates you for all that, maybe there's a damn reason? Maybe, just maybe, the problem is you?

Hmm, me personally I don't hate that, I just think it's pathetic. Josh Mandel was a Marine, he should goddamned well know better than this.

Anybody who's ever been anywhere near a combat zone knows the first thing to get trashed is likely the civilian power grid, there goes the meat in your freezer and your ability to access or use cryptocurrency, unless you're trying to live off the grid or with renewables as backups for when the power goes out. And it will/

Nobody should know better than this crap than a guy like Josh Mandel if he's the person he says he is.

But he doesn't, and he isn't...or wasn't...because his Word was never worth a shit to start with. His oath didn't mean anything when he took it, and he's hell-bent on seeing other Americans as the enemy. Next, he's going to want to go out and fight somebody, for no reason other than that's the end result of thinking you have to have a chip on your shoulder and a gun at the ready and being hellfire sure that somebody hates you for it.

I wonder, in 20 years when some cop pulls this motherfucker and whatever Russian agent he's screwing out of some third-rate safe house in the Central African Republic after he gets the conflict he hankers for and loses, just what kind of woo woo shit he'll be selling to pay the bills? 

I have to wonder how many people will die because of him and people like him wanting to do nothing but go out and fight their fellow citizens for no better reason than pure rage and spite.

I have to wonder who will be on peacekeeping duty on some grim morning in Texas, standing there in the mud and the rain while United Nations workers start to pick through the bones and try to match them to the names and faces of the missing?

And will any of these fucking people care?

Will they care about all the deaths? 

I doubt it. It seems like, to these assholes, three quarters of a million deaths from COVID-19 wasn't enough.

Will they give a shit that they'll have taken some part of the United States Of America or other and turned it into a charnel house and a failed state, while inflicting untold misery on the rest of it as we deal with trying to fix and hold together what they seem intent on breaking? And breaking it on purpose...because they are bound and determined to convince themselves that someone hates them and they want to go out and fight the whole damn world because of it.

How the fuck does any of this make any sense, even in their own heads?

What kind of shitty person do you have to be, to be absolutely goat eager to say "No we can't" because a Black man said "Yes we can." I mean, really?

And as far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what this comes down to, racism and stupidity. There's no damned good reason for it. These people are just mad because the world changed on them...when if you really look at it, they were too bitter, too caught up in their own bullshit, or too plain ass lazy to even bother to suggest a different way.

I think in a lot of cases, they just thought things would never change, that they would always have the power...so they did nothing, and certainly nothing fair or honest, to actually try and keep it.

Or maybe at some point they had the sense to know if they told us what they were really thinking, that they'd get told to shut the fuck up and maybe get somebody's foot broke off in they ass for their trouble. But of course Trump convinced these fucking people that, in effect, good was evil and evil was good. As a lifelong student of the Word of God, I just can't get past how these idiots didn't read the rest of the quote and see how that would turn out for them.

It never fails to amaze me, even in the middle of nowhere where I live now, it's nothing to go to the local small-town grocery store and see Black people, mostly young, true enough. But I can remember when one mixed-race family...a couple who'd met while serving in the Army and their two biracial daughters...was the extent of our local racial diversity in that town. 

And across from the grocery store I go to there's the local outfitter, bedecked with Thin Blue Line flags and Trump slogans where once there was Sierra Club signs and local hiking information to go with the guns and hunting gear. Apparently the place is under new management.

Where I live, for so long its own isolated space, looks pretty damned well exactly like the rest of the world now, for better and worse.

I prefer to face that and think "Yes we can" than try to change it back to some imagined ideal while screaming "No we can't."

If you want a better nation, you have to be a better citizen. Put down the fantasies and the apocalypse LARP bullshit and stupid culture wars and do your job as a fucking citizen to make this country better, and as a human to make this world better...or what the fuck are we even doing here?

I know what I was taught, and this? This ain't it, Republicans, not by a damn mile it ain't.

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

Good and Hard.

 

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. -H.L. Mencken

I saw this earlier today.

Michelle Fiore is running for governor of Nevada.

Her platform such as it is, appears to be  Boobs, Guns, Trucks, love for Donald Trump and hate for the media.

In other words she's hoping that she gives enough idiot white dudes a boner and enough other people don't take her seriously that she can climb the resulting giant phallus to higher office like the people in the Old Testament who built the Tower of Babel.

But this one's made of dicks.

Seriously?

Part of who I used to be died inside, seeing this.

I used to be a conservative Republican.

One of the main reasons I'm not is Sarah Palin.

It bothers me that the Palin routine, vapid gun bunny/religious nut combo has become a...if not the...winning move for female Republicans. 

And if people like Lauren Blowbert and MTG are any indication nobody who's doing this really cares about government or public service, let alone doing a good job. They just want to get famous and make money.

And conservative internet morons are happy to let them.

None of these people have anything but contempt for the common person, let alone anybody who needs anything.

People who play to your base impulses and try to make you think with your dicks ain't your friends.

Politics isn't an action movie, let alone the kind that used to be on Showtime after 1 A.M. that features some hot model with big boobs in a starring role with some character actor dude to drool along behind her, stereotype villains and improbable fight scenes.

It's not Trump and his followers trying to turn the presidency into WWE.

It's not all this Tijuana donkey show bullshit that Republicans have embraced.

Good government is boring. Good government is people like Joe Biden, or hell Al Gore, George Bush (technically either of them) Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, hell even John McCain before he lost his damn mind after losing the election.

Good government isn't what Republicans or their donors or the corporations currently want. They want bread and circuses to keep the masses distracted while they rob us blind for a couple decades before the world and the situation we're all in gets bad enough that they have to behave. But by then there won't be anything else left to steal.

And maybe they can get people to accept slavery in return for a loaf of bread and some distracting political show filled with vapid wannabe celebrities without anybody seeing the sociopathic political handlers who nobody voted for. You know, the people really running things.

This is already the state of things within the Republican party and people are all too willing to support it for the chimerical illusion of "Owning the Libs " whatever that means. Meanwhile life gets worse.

Doesn't this seem fucked up to you yet?

This shit isn't what I was taught.

The old country club Republicans my Grandpa and I used to cut the grass for and fix their houses? They made fun of the people who dominate their movement today. They sought to take advantage. They thought that the people who are the current Republican base and younger Republican politicians of today were stupid. Eventually those guys got crowded out of their own party or they died off.

The stupid people took over.

The next generation gave in, bitterness was easier than even pretended high ideals.

There's nothing left of the old Republicans, even the brand is dead. .

The culture war remains but it's a dystopian parody of what it once was. They couldn't stop social change so now they just want to imagine getting revenge for it.

But the impulse towards contempt remains and it's getting worse.

Even to the point of killing their own voters with lies.

At least the old WASP-y shits that I used to know were pragmatic and knew that they couldn't fuck shit up too badly.

Nothing about Michelle Fiore says she's that smart.

If you want a better country then you have to be a better citizen.

And this ain't it.

Long time for something to go wrong (On the contradiction of conspiracy theory, part one.)

They say most of your brain shuts down in cryo-sleep. All but the primitive side...the animal side. No wonder I'm still awake. Transporting me with civilians. Sounded like 40, 40-plus. Heard an Arab voice. Some hoodoo holy man, probably on his way to New Mecca. But what route? What route? Smelled a woman. Sweat, boots, tool belt, leather. Prospector type. Free settlers. And they only take the back roads. And here's my real problem: Mr. Johns, blue-eyed devil. Planning on taking me back to slam...only this time he picked a ghost lane. A long time between stops. A long time for something to go wrong. ~Riddick, from the film Pitch Black.

I just saw this not too long ago.

Some fake account on Gab, claiming that MacDonald's is in on the big Cabal Q-conspiracy now. I've seen this one enough to notice that "Art Raven" doesn't write like a girl, and doesn't seem to hold the sort of views girls named Raven usually do...and yes I've known more than one over the years, strangely enough.

Now, I'll be the first to tell you there's a lot of bad shit and dark and dangerous places in the world. People, as a general rule, are evil shits.

But if you think that there's some global Cabal that's secretly running things (and that if it really existed people like Donald Trump wouldn't be balls deep in the whole damn thing) you're more than a little crazy at this point. I'm sorry, but when your conspiracy theory bullshit starts getting so big that everybody but you and your particular idols is in on it, the problem most likely is you and you're just a paranoid loser.

Conspiracies end up with a lot of loose lips, a lot of moving parts. The more people are involved, the more of a chance that there's going to be a leak...this is generally one of the more easily provable reasons why conspiracy theorists are full of shit. Lots of people involved? Lots of time for something to go wrong.

Also have you ever noticed that the people who say this kind of shit are almost always the exact same types of conspiratorial far-right conservative types? I'm just saying, that looks a little suspicious to me.

And in any case, given the historical behavior of white conservative wealthy people in general and of fascists or aspiring fascists in particular...not conspiracy theories, actual history, including that of recent years...the whole comment just reads like projection.

And I'll bet you ten bucks that whoever runs this fake "Art Raven" account doesn't give a goddamn about oppressed Chinese Muslim people.

Or any real oppressed peoples, for that matter.

And while I'm at it, it seems to take an average of five minutes these days for any talk of "Cabals" to devolve into blatant anti-Semitism...of which blood libels and allegations of cannibalism have always been a significant part.

Don't forget that.

Shortly after I saw the first post, I saw the second.

Boeing workers protesting the company's mask and vaccination mandates.

I actually just happened to pause the video to snip the post at this particular spot. But the sign kind of jumped out at me for obvious reasons.

First off, all the ferrets didn't die. My little Buddha Belly is fine. Of my former ferrets, those whose current humans have contacted me so far report all is well. Some of the ferrets have a better life with their new people than I was able to give them and that's saying quite a bit since I put so much into keeping them.

Second, since ferrets have a respiratory system that is similar to humans, if they had all died wouldn't that be a reason to get vaccinated and mask up?

It's the contradiction in that, that gets me.

Trust me, the ferret community was on edge over COVID-19, still is. Had all the ferrets (or even a significantly large number of them) died, I'd have heard about it.

I think what this idiot's sign is referring to is the commercial Mink culls in Denmark after Danish fur farm Minks started testing positive for the virus on a large scale, and those were big news in the ferret community, on a global level, at the time. 

Also, it was around the internet for a few days that Marshall Ferrets had diverted all their pet stocks to providing test animals for COVID-19 research. This was disproven over the course of the next few weeks by several regular deliveries of the normal numbers of kits (baby ferrets) to my then-local pet store. (Test animal lines and pet animal lines are kept separate for a variety of reasons, legal not being the least of these factors.)

But I'll bet sign guy isn't a ferret guy. I'll bet he doesn't know any of that and is just repeating something he heard on the internet. That's always how it is.

That's the thing with conspiracy theories. They're set up to be hard to disprove using the rules of logic. But here's the thing, usually they fall apart in the face of knowledge and observation. It doesn't usually even take all that much.

I feel like...given that this is Boeing workers protesting their own company's safety measures here...we are going to hit a point soon where this conspiracy theory bullshit starts to become a threat to national defense and national security, not to mention transportation networks and shit.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it won't be too long after that before this crap starts to impact the pocketbooks of the wealthy people who ginned up this garbage and allowed it to fester in the first place, in the hope that it would help elect right-wing governments that would be favorable to business interests. Usually, when something starts to affect the profits of the wealthy that's when the hammer comes down and whatever it is gets cracked like a walnut.

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

In a world where robot dogs can have assault rifles mounted on their backs now, and where worries about increasing automation have prompted serious discussion of things like universal basic income...and where fear of a changing world is a direct contributing factor to an increase in fascist ideologies and this is known to be being manipulated by certain people...it's also a safe bet to say that with a certain clique of wealthy-mostly white-people, if it comes down to Eugenics vs. Profits, there's a decent chance that Profits might actually lose out.

Because it's a death cult and they want to kill people. 

Just looking at FOX News (and for that matter, who's vaccinated and who isn't on the conservative side of the fence) you can see it. You can see where the line is, the people who know it's all bullshit vs. the people shouting "Freedom" while protesting measures intended to save their own lives. You can tell who's who in the power structure...and who's stupid enough to just accept all this bullshit.

And yes, Eugenics is absolutely a factor in conservative ideology regarding the virus. Hell, I've heard people...conservative working people who are certain to be the ones on the losing end of this thing, who'd realized they couldn't just ignore it and hope it went away...just accept it saying "If I die, I die."

As a former-conservative working person I think that's insane.

Republicans and wealthy conservatives are killing their own supporters, and their supporters applaud them for it. 

It's the bald-faced, open contradiction of it all...and the fact that the only consistent ideology AT ALL is loosely defined as "Own The Libs"...that I don't get. 

I don't understand the point of going out there to Kamikaze yourself for assholes who don't give a fuck about you, who don't give a fuck about your culture wars except for how they can use that shit, and who'd gladly massacre their own supporters physically rather than metaphorically if they could get away with it and doing so would save them a dollar.

I don't understand the logic of basically doing anything, up to and including killing yourself, just because you think it might make somebody [you think] you don't like unhappy in some vaguely undefined way.

If somebody doesn't want me to die, I'm not going to kill myself just to prove some moral point that exists only in my own head. But then I was never that kind of conservative. I don't want me to die either, and given that I just had a bout of depression upend my life that's saying something.

The urge arises to say that it's not conservatism itself that's the problem, but rather the current interpretation of it. My feeling is that there were never actually all that many people who were ideologically conservative. They had to bring in the crypto-fascists, the nuts and the racists to get enough people to vote for their side to win elections at all. Along the way, the people who were really the conservatives seem to have been crowded out of their own tent...and the ideology that's resulted doesn't look the least like what I was taught conservatism was.

But then, the seeds of this mess were always there, the whole time. This too is verifiable historical fact, and it's only made worse by the tendency of a large minority of Americans toward fanaticism for its own sake.

The truth is, the internal logic of conservatism collapsed a long time ago. Maybe not that long, chronologically. Call it a decade or so, maybe. But on the scale of things these days, that's a long time for something to go wrong.

And I think we're just about there.

We need to start doing something about this bullshit.

He's got the whole Party, in his hands (Reality Check, Two.)

God knows he's perfect and we're not and we can never be but he expects us to be. And he punishes us if we're not, you know what I'm saying? God is the ultimate gangster. The supreme-o boss, you know what I mean? Forgiveness, live by he code. Deadness, if we don't. Yo, he never has to talk to us face to face and he never has to explain exactly why he does what he does. Know what I'm saying? Nigga sits up there in Heaven somewhere, drinking a cappuccino, chillin... *Singing* He's got the whole world in his hands...

He got the whole world by the balls.

~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series "Oz" episode 1.3 "God's Chillin'"

A friend of mine sent me this today.

"You're a traitor"

Note: This is apparently from some mailer bugging people who've already donated to give Trump even more money.

Are you fucking kidding me? This isn't asking for donations. This is extortion. I'm serious, if some person sent me something like this I wouldn't be giving them money, I'd be calling the cops.

Any normal person in this day and age could get fired from their job for putting stuff like that out there.

What the fuck is wrong with you, Republican voters, that you're putting up with this ridiculous shit.

And I just fucking love how "Patriotism" is equated with loyalty to Donald Trump.

Oh, and the 17 minutes thing? That's not an accident or a random number. It appears to be a little Q-Anon numerology.

You know, I once was an observant enough Christian to know that numerology was considered a sin. Just sayin.'

But these fucking people, far from getting tired of this shit, seem to want even more of it. How the fuck does that add up?

And now Trump is threatening to have Republican voters stay home in 2022 and 2024 if the Republican Party can't find some way to hocus pocus him back into power before that because something something Gazpacho or whatever.

Look, it goes like this.

Trump doesn't want to be President.

He doesn't want to be a dictator.

He doesn't want to be the king.

The former would require a modicum of personal and physical courage as well as some amount of work ethic. Trump has none of the above. The latter would be too much work and require too much by way of class and decorum.

Trump wants to be these people's god. 

And he's threatening to sink the entire Republican Party if he doesn't get that.

It gets worse. Trump's followers have already effectively secularized their previous End Times mythology, effectively cutting out Jesus Christ, and weaving in Donald Trump slowly but surely in His place, with COVID-19 and Q-Anon and other conspiracy theories and all that garbage replacing the judgments of Revelation because ya know, instant gratification. They just have to have all that shit now. Waiting for that stuff on a Biblical timescale with the understanding that it probably wouldn't happen in your lifetime is just...not exciting enough, I guess.

I'm a former member of the End Times Prophecy Movement. This stuff really burns my ass.

Trump wants to be a god. His followers want to let him.

That way, he can do or say whatever he wants and have these fools accept his every utterance and fast food fart as Gospel and give him endless money for nothing and he doesn't have to do anything for any of it. Not only that, but then he can declare it's a sin to question him and throw the offender to his horde of ravening fanatics to be torn apart, one way or the other.

It's all in the same vein as the Civil War talk bullshit. Trump doesn't want to do anything. He's fiending for narcissistic fuel and if I had to guess, the rallies aren't cutting it anymore.

He longs for worship, not of anything else but of himself, and for violence to be done in his name. He wants his pronouns to have to be capitalized. Like I said, I believed in Christ. I believed what the Bible said. This shit makes me angry on a level most people can't even imagine.

And these fucking idiots, who are so afraid of the rest of the world...would happily give him all that, if it was solely up to them. More to the point, they resent the hell out of the rest of us for not giving them that. I'm left wondering what the hell these fucking people think is so bad about the rest of us, that they'd embrace a known piece of shit like Donald Trump.

But, ya know, I come from an older school of thought and from previous versions of Christianity and conservatism where the end-all, be-all is not "The Next Dopamine Hit To The Brainpan and Belonging To The Tribe." I was taught to distrust cults and ideologues and impulsive thinking, and to not just blindly trust people who keep lying to me...and life has backed all that shit up, so far.

More to the point if I was like these people, just blindly following along...or worse, following with eyes open and malice aforethought...I'd likely have been dead years ago.

And the worst part of all this is that if you've been paying attention all this time, Trump and his followers are turning out not only to be exactly as pathetic as we thought they would...but not only that. They're actively trying to be even worse than that, and most of the Republicans are just going along, or rolling over and taking it.

I used to be a Republican, this isn't what I was taught.

And too many people, Democrats included, are not taking this bullshit seriously. I'm not saying that I think Trump could inspire an actually competent religious pseudo-Jihad in his name. I'm saying even the incompetent shit show of one that's likely to happen will get people killed unnecessarily and I'm saying that we need to do something about the fact that a quarter of our population is so goat-eager to have their bullshit Left Behind LARP crap validated that they'll happily appoint Donald Trump their god out of sheer needy pathetic desperation.

We need to stop doing this shit to ourselves. We need to stop putting up with it, all of it, now.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen and this? This ain't it.

One.

Fuck all this silly bullshit, part the infinite.

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought. ~Pope John Paul II.

Earlier today I saw this.

Sean Hannity, evidently trying to blame the high number of people who've quit their jobs on Joe Biden. Also, trying to tar the man by comparing him to Jimmy Carter?

No. 

That's not it, you anthropomorphic Spam can.

And I say that as one of those people.

There's a lot of shitty jobs out there, motherfucker, and people have a right not to keep working a job they don't like, especially in the sort of economy where it's supposedly relatively easy to find another one. 

Among other things, in retrospect Jimmy Carter looks pretty good, historically, right now.

And he's at least a moral man.

That's a lot better than can be said for Sean Hannity.

This is America, we don't have a caste system, we're not a Communist country where a person's job could be dictated by the State and we don't really have some kind of rigid class system either, at least not in the 19th Century, Victorian sort of sense that Sean Hannity wishes we did...as if somebody with an Irish name like Sean would have ever benefitted from such a thing, just sayin.' And then there's the fact that we forcibly abolished and Constitutionally banned slavery.

But of course, that's the thing, isn't it?

Sean Hannity is mad that he can't clap the middle class, the poor and us working class people in chains and force us to work for his personal profit.

 But he's trying to pawn that off on other people so he doesn't feel bad about it.

These people know what they're doing is wrong, deep down, or they wouldn't be projecting or rationalizing or trying to make it somebody else's fault. They just hope that you don't.

Because, at least since Reagan and Bush 41 left office, the Right's endless talk about freedom is just that, empty talk.

In the 1990's, "Freedom" means that as long as people like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay fronted as Catholics and Evangelicals they could do whatever they damned well pleased behind the scenes and if they got caught, they'd blame the media or whoever outed them as irreligious libertines for simply trying to make them seem that way.

Then back in the aughts this was taken to the next level by people like Larry Craig, Mark Foley and Ted Haggard. Funny how as the outrage about adultery ramped up, Republicans got outed as adulterous motherfuckers who were rutting like horny Bonobos, and then when the homophobia got going, well, these same fucking people got caught in the kind of skeevy same-sex sexual shenanigans that they (and their voters!) liked to accuse other people of doing.

And then yesterday, whoever's in charge of that announced that the current iteration of Superman is going to be bisexual and dating Louis rather than Lois.

Okay, whatever, I don't give a shit. I haven't followed Superman in decades and the last story arc I actually knew about had Superman having had a kid with Lois Lane and ya know, Superman was always at least heavily implied to be sexually active...idealization of the American male that he always was. For better or worse, the last movie that I saw was at least less corny than the Superman movies of the late 70's and early-to-mid 1980's/

But whatever.

I mean, seriously, why stop with Superman? 

Why not a Bisexual or...ya know, swarthy Middle Eastern Jewish Jesus who lived according to the customs and religion of his time? And being that Jesus was a Rabbi, He would have been married. (Which in those days would not have precluded bisexuality even among most Hellenized or Romanized Jews. In fact, only the radicals who were fighting an insurgent war against the Romans even cared about such things.) About that...isn't it past time that Mary Magdalene be given her due as one of the Apostles? Because historically that's very likely what she was, along with being the Lord's partner.

Personally, I don't care all that much anymore, but I think it's past time that a lot of this stuff be acknowledged and the equality that such implies be made part of somebody's dogma, at least.

And it'd be fun to watch these people shit themselves inside out in rage.

I am, frankly, damned tired of hearing people talk about freedom who absolutely reject the concept in any real terms, and I'm goddamned tired of hearing people talk about and try to police sexual morality who themselves have all the sexual morality of, again, a troop of horny Bonobos. I'm even more tired of people who claim that their religion holds all the answers and is what everybody should follow, turning around and acting like they know it's all bullshit.

And now they don't even try to hide it. 

But they want everybody else to pretend that they're still the Moral Majority of the 1980's before all the televangelists got exposed as skeevy bullshit artists and perverts.

And in the last six years, Republicans have gone out of their fucking way to reject even previous levels of base hypocrisy, and to literally, openly, act in ways that would shame a goddamned Billy Goat and shit all over everything they ever claimed to believe in before. Hell, they don't even bother with the old brand or messaging or any serious attempt at public religiosity...but they still want the credit for all of that and for those things to be assumed about them. I mean, hell, Jim Bakker is back to being a member of this shit in good standing...and I'm old enough to remember when we all laughed at him.

It'll get worse. It already has.

There's a reason I call Lauren Boebert "Blowbert." 

I get exactly the same kind of vibe from her that I got from my ex-wife after we split up. I'll bet you money she played the whole technical virgin thing for awhile. I'd bet more money she wants to talk about Jesus right after having sex even now. I'll bet you twice that much that she is the sort of person to go out and party it up on a level that'd make a pack of Navy chiefs blush on Saturday night but then she's up early Sunday morning drinking coffee and eating pancakes and whatever to try and sober up and counteract the alcohol and then she's flat on her face during the altar call at church begging God to forgive her for exactly the same thing she'll go out and do next weekend, too.

And then she wants to tell you how to live your life, right down to the smallest and most intimate and personal details and dictate whatever your religion or spirituality is, while observing absolutely none of her own claimed beliefs her own damn self.

And people like her and my ex-wife? They're the fucking baseline for American Christianity right now. Those people won, my people lost, and either submitted or went over to the other side.

There was a time when I was appalled by this shit, but still a conservative Republican even as I started to lose my religion. Then those people ran me out, and now this shit is just...normal. Like, seriously hardly anybody even bothers to comment on it anymore.

Because it's ultimately a lot easier to just get away, and the harder and longer you try to fix all the shit that's wrong with their movement and try to move it back towards the things they claimed to believe in before...the harder they come at you.

Nobody knows better that it's all a lie than they do, but they expect everybody to be in on the joke and just go with it and award them all the bonus points for religion anyway. What they think will happen in the End Of Days, I don't know, but it seems to me that according to what I read, Jesus Christ has a rather low opinion of such people.

But if you point this out, they call you anti-Christian or "Communist" or "Deep State" and claim you're oppressing them. 

As if there's any serious effort, or hell anybody outside of their movement who gives a damn about white evangelical "conservatives" or who has it out for them anymore than the people they've raised up as their "gods" do. The "Left" doesn't disrespect these people to their faces like Donald Trump does. The "Left" didn't cause hundreds of thousands of them to die of a perfectly well preventable illness. Trump did that. 

And they wanted more of it, forever.

Because they thought somehow, somewhere, somebody else was going to get it worse.

These are people who look at the quote from Pope John Paul II that I posted above, and take it at face value to use as a justification, without realizing that he said that in reference to Christians trapped behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

And given the chance, they'd impose their contradictory, selfish, silly politics and religion and wannabe-fascism on the rest of us the same way that the Soviet Union imposed Communism and State Atheism on the East Bloc countries, and they don't even see the irony, or how their own behavior and desire is exactly the same.

Hell, they don't even see their beliefs, their lust for power, their politics, even their sexuality as any of those things. They see it all as some holy mission from "god" and god conveniently looks a lot like Donald Trump right now. But give it a couple years, and He will have a new face.

And it'll be worse than the last one.

Seriously, I got out years ago. I had to, for my own sanity. I could give a damn about these people except for the fact that they keep trying to get up in the business of people that I care about and keep trying to make my life harder, for no damned good reason at all except their cruel, shitty, selfish beliefs in the name of their mean, shitty, small-minded interpretation of god.

These people literally do not believe in freedom. Do whatever you can to eject them from our politics, or they're going to try and take yours.

Fuck. All. This. Silly. Bullshit. I've had it.

And you can tell 'em I said that.

Fuck the Civil War Talk (Reality Check, One.)

Look at your young men fighting
Look at your women crying
Look at your young men dying
The way they've always done before

Look at the hate we're breeding
Look at the fear we're feeding
Look at the lives we're leading
The way we've always done before

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can't deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars.

~Guns N Roses, Civil War, from the album Use Your Illusion II.

When I got up this morning, I saw this.

Some woman at yesterday's Trump rally saying that she's "Sick of it" and sees a "Civil War coming."

No, you fucking don't. 

Oh, you think you see something coming alright, you think other people will be the ones who do the dying and make the sacrifices while your life goes on as normal, and you have a whole bunch of lame ass ideas about how your politics will somehow magically triumph, your side has all the guns, blah blah blah.

None of this works like that. Not a bit of it.

I'd like to start by saying that I'm sick of it too, but from the other side. I've had it up to here with the modern Republican party and all of your culture war Trump-cult bullshit and I say that as a former Republican. The modern Republican Party bears absolutely no resemblance to that founded in a little white school house in Ripon, Wisconsin...a place I've walked through, by the way.

I'd also like to point out that I first learned firearms safety and shooting as a kid, and hunting and prowling around in the woods as a teenager. Hell, some of my first memories were of helping my Dad make bullets for his .57 Caliber Enfield rifled musket that he carried as a Civil War reenactor. It was a modern replica of one of the firearms that was there at the beginning of a long and bloody process literally changed how wars were even fought. That weapon was one of the ones that took us as a species from the old smoothbore Brown Bess to the industrialized killing of the Great War and thence to the vast logistical and technical modern military forces and the new ways of war born during World War II.

Which is likewise, something I'm not unfamiliar with, both in terms of the history and the profession. My own service as an Airman was during peacetime, but I still had to learn all the same shit as part of my AFSC (Air Force Specialty Code) I was a Security Policeman.

My own relatively brief tour of Bosnian peacekeeping had not much more risk than a couple tense situations and a lot of harsh language, but I still had to be prepared for worse, and in point of fact expected it. You want to imagine trying to deal with that? Even for just a few months?

And then, starting six years later I got to see what war did to a couple of my friends, one of whom committed suicide a decade ago because of what happened to him and some other things that had happened since he got back from Afghanistan.

War sucks.

I know what kind of person my friend was. I know how bad things must have been to drive him to that point. If a guy like him can end up in that bad of a state, mentally or otherwise...that he didn't want to be alive anymore? Well, I'm sorry but I think these over-privileged fucks who get all bent out of shape over "Sexual anarchy" wouldn't stand a chance.

Hell, these people can't even react properly to a simple virus that we know how to deal with now. How in the hell are they going to react to the kind of complex, multi-layered threats posed by everything from direct combat to lack of diplomatic recognition and supply chain disruptions?

Imagine having to walk to work, or ride with somebody else, or take a bus...or even walk, because there's a knocked-out tank in the middle of your street that nobody around even close to has the capability to move.

If you even have gas for your car.

And that firefight wrecked half the houses on your street while killing several of your neighbors.

And the power's out. 

Cable and cellular service is out, Satellite service is present, but spotty...and the people who have it...and can keep their devices charged by hook or by crook...are finding that they can turn that into a considerable source of income simply because people want to be able to have 15 minutes to check their E-mail or their Facebook or make sure friends and relatives are OK.

But for the most part social media and shit is being used for official purposes, so aside from basic communication there's less going on there right now. Adjust your economic expectations accordingly especially if you depend on that for some aspect of a business.

Water service has been cut, fresh water is delivered twice a week by a military truck convoy, and the soldiers carry weapons and have a police escort...or in some cases, simply whatever armed civil or paramilitary authorities who can be found that have law enforcement powers and keep order.

Gardening is suddenly an essential skill, not for pretty flowers but for growing vegetables and such so people can eat.

Right now, unless you're at work, you shit in a trench in the yard. You shower under a cheap metal bucket that's had a bunch of holes drilled in the bottom, after using a fire to heat the water in a metal pot.

A few people had generators, for awhile, sure. But now there's no gas to run them unless you're doing something essential and have a permit...or the black market connections and wealth...to get it and the political connections to still get or the criminal ties to forge said permits.

With food supplies tight, not only are people not walking their dogs anymore, but they're protective of even letting them out because some people steal them to kill and eat to supplement their food supplies. Neighborhood stray cats and small game have been gradually becoming more rare as well.

And your previous higher-paying bullshit office job has been replaced by working in a local munitions plant manufacturing 5/56mm NATO Standard rounds by the crate-full, for a third of your previous salary and an extra ration card. If your side cares enough about its citizens to give them one.

Your spouse's job is they're a member of the local defense group, supplementing police and military personnel. They do their duty armed with a hammer. Everybody else is armed the same way except for one person in each section has a .22 caliber rifle, because ammo for it is cheap and available.

Weekly entertainment has more or less been reduced to whatever hard-copy books you have, whatever songs you know the lyrics to, and an enterprising neighbor who allows people that he trusts to come over and pay to watch his ferrets play for an hour or two each week in small, manageable groups. Then he sits there with a shotgun to make sure that nobody tries to steal one of the ferrets and eat it. Because that's life now. 

And right now, that guy is the richest dude in the whole neighborhood, because entertainment-wise he's what there is. The feels when "Pet owner" suddenly becomes your profession.

Why? What radio and TV is left is primarily dedicated to government and military announcements, official news, and various delivery schedules and survival information broadcast for the benefit of the public. 

Magazines and newspapers are largely in the same boat, and also subject to the same distribution woes as everything else.

Nobody other than truck drivers and people who have to because of the situation is traveling. Incidentally, those who are are as much of a source of news and rumors as anything else...and they can profit by this.

And if you think you're going to be one of the ones with enough money or privilege or skills you can trade (without going to fight in the war your own damn self) to be exempt from that to some degree or another, think again.

And if you do go and fight, only the connected or their children get into the Air Force or the Navy or sent on whatever foreign deployments MUST be maintained. It's Army Guard green or Coast Guard blues and domestic counterinsurgency...or active duty Army (or god help you, Marine Corps) and conventional combat...for the majority. M1A1 Abrams slugging it out with Russian-built T-72M's in Kansas cornfields and on Texas city streets.

Oh, and as for your fears of "Sexual anarchy" or public or private shitty views on race? Or whatever hang-ups you have about religion?

The heroes of the week, in terms of battlefield valor and public service respectively, are a biracial US Marine Lance Corporal who credits the good things about himself to his Black navy veteran father and his Florida redneck mother, and a transwoman who went into government accidentally, having been an activist and gone into politics from there. But it was pairing her skill at organization and her love of gardening that made organizing a dozen successful food drives in Chicago happen.

Also meet your town's new Pagan mayor, who campaigned on ensuring proper treatment for this crisis's essential workers.

Also, seriously, do you think in a real crisis that demands everything possible be used to ensure basic survival that religion is going to continue to be a tax-haven for those who can lie real good?

Oh, please. Churches and religious groups...those who can maintain enough interest or provide some sort of practical WHATEVER to keep people coming, WILL get taxed.

And, if you want to win anyway, bullshit and conspiracy theories will get real unpopular real fast.

And this may be true no matter what "side" you're on. People end up where they end up for a variety of reasons.

Reality doesn't care about your politics or your prejudices, we've learned this the hard way too. 

War is endless, needless suffering and pain inflicted primarily on the conscripted, the innocent, and the undeserving, civil wars all the more so. 

We learned this the hard way once.

We as a people should be smart enough to not need to learn this the hard way again.

We really need to stop listening to these fucking people.

You don't get a better civilization, a better society, by gunning down your neighbors.

You want a better country? Be a better citizen.

That is all.

Tears In Rain (Why Conservatism doesn't work anymore, Part Three.)

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

Today, Chuck Grassley didn't just stick his foot in his mouth. He swallowed that fucker all the way to above the knee, offering what he thought was some sort of compliment...as in, making a particularly dumb borderline-racist statement toward a Korean-American judicial nominee..

Jesus Fucking Christ.

If there's a better argument for term limits, I haven't seen it.

Chuck Grassley has been in office since 1981, having been elected in 1980 as part of the same Republican upwelling that gave us Ronald Reagan. 

Chuck Grassley has been in office since I was seven years old. Think about that for a second. Also, this man has a degree in political science and was an educator. Think about that for a second, too.

Now, about that. If I had thought to say something like this at that age, two things would've happened. #1 My Mom would have looked at me like I was crazy and asked me where I learned to talk like that. And #2 My Dad, who was then still living, would've cut directly to the chase and tanned my hide for talking a bunch of nonsensical dumb shit and then the next time we went to the library...which was pretty often...I might have to do something like write a book report on people from other countries.

Ignorance and talking stupid were things that were not tolerated in my family.

And frankly I don't give a damn if you're some doddering geriatric old fossil of a US Senator or not. In point of fact, citing some lame-ass bullshit claims about economic impact, Chuck Grassley voted against establishing Martin Luther King Day as a holiday...and I remember the first one of those. Though Grassley would later vote for a couple of posthumous awards for MLK, his initial vote strikes me as suspicious in light of his recent comments.

Now I realize this dude was born in 1933 and came of age in the 1950's and honestly I don't give a shit. My Grandparents were all born in the 1920's and still at least picked up on the idea that racism is wrong and at a bare minimum you don't say shit like that in public...and mind you these lessons were being passed on to me when Chuck Grassley was still a new Senator.

I'm serious, like, what the fuck?

I'm fast approaching the era of "Embrace the oldness" myself. My beard is white, I look at a lot of young people...and not a few older people...these days and just shake my head and think "The fuck is even wrong with you?" on a regular basis....and I wouldn't talk to somebody like that, period. Hell, maybe I've just learned not to make assumptions about people nor stick my foot in my mouth up to mid-thigh over it. Jesus Christ. What the FUCK?!

As I've said before, people are people, wherever you go.

I had a doctor's appointment yesterday in my middle-of-nowhere small Northern Michigan town and the doctor who I had my appointment with was from Sudan. You may think about that, for a second, too. We like the same brand of T-shirts, and have a decent number of things in common. He was happy to meet another person who could speak Arabic (though I do not speak it all that well.) Also, no, he was not the only non-white person I saw working there. He laughed when I told him that 30 years ago the racial diversity of this whole area could be summed up as we had like a dozen or so people who weren't white.

Hell, I'm so old I can remember when I found a book of Polish jokes in my grandparents' attic as a kid. Yes, there absolutely was a time when White people were plenty enough racist towards other white people.

And that's Chuck Grassley's world, right there. I'm serious. This dude needs to wake up and smell the 21st Century.

Or maybe, just maybe, We the people should either demand that these fuckers set a maximum age for somebody to be an elected official or just take it upon ourselves and stop re-electing 80 year old Senators. There's literally no reason to keep reelecting people who have simply aged out of the modern world, who have little or no connection to most of their constituents and no understanding of how things work now. It's not 1954 anymore, Chuckles.

Hell, even 1981...or increasingly in geopolitical terms even 1991...is ancient history.

The world we live in shares little resemblance to the world as it was when Chuck was elected to office, not least because of the actions of others who rode the same wave and that could and should be something the Senator could be proud of...if he gave a shit and was that guy but he doesn't and isn't.

And trust me, I get it, it's hard to keep up, Even something as simple as looking for a job has vastly changed since the last time I did it.

But we owe it to ourselves and the rest of the world to try and keep up, simply for the sake of not being unduly hurtful towards other people in a changed world. Note, I didn't say "Changing." It's done changed, that's the way it is. You can't change it back. While people like Chuck Grassley were obsessed with foreign wars and profiting off of financial shenanigans and then making life difficult for the Obama administration, the world passed them by.

Hell, I've done my level best to keep up and especially in coming back to northern Michigan after almost 20 years I feel more disconnected from the timestream, more out of place, than I ever have.

We owe it to our fellow humans to try and keep up, to try to have respect and understand people all the same.

And bare minimum, if you can't do that, you shouldn't be in government.

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen. If you want a better world? You have to be a better human being.

It's that simple...and that complicated...all at once. Try to keep up.

Last Post

Part Two

What the...? (Why Conservatism Doesn't Work Anymore: HERE"S YOUR FUCKING ANSWER!)

Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money. ~Robin Williams

Seriously? I mean...what the...?

Or as a British mate of mine would put it "WHAT THE ACTUAL DONKEY-SHAGGING FUCK!?!?!??!?!

Apparently, Larry The Cable Guy, of all fucking people, got into an argument with a bunch of doctors on Twitter.

I'm going to be honest here, as a former-conservative devotee of various and assorted comedians ranging from David Letterman to George Burns to George Carlin, Johnny Carson, Margaret Cho, Paul Rodriguez and Robin Williams, I hadn't the slightest fucking idea that Larry The Cable Guy was even still around. I think in my entire life I've watched like five minutes of him, and that because somebody else was flipping channels and lingered on some Blue Collar Comedy Tour thing for ten minutes (and Ron White, who my friend was actually a fan of, was on for the other part of that.)

I figured since Larry was probably more known for voicing a tow truck in the "Cars" movies than anything he ever did stand-up comedy-wise he'd probably faded back into fake redneck obscurity along with Jeff Foxworthy by now. 

I'll admit it, I never "got" the whole making bank off making fun of rednecks schtick back in the 1990's when it was popularized by people like Jeff Foxworthy, and I'm from Northern Michigan...from more or less the upper-class area of where I'm from at that. I'm sorry, but white trash poverty and the kind of mentality that revels in it just wasn't funny to me. And I'll note that was before I got with my ex-wife and saw the effects of it a lot more up close. A hell of a lot of that kind of thing is just plain sad.

And people who never had to deal with it themselves putting on the fake-redneck put-on just plain pisses me off, because quite frankly I know a lot of people who (despite lacking starting out with boots) managed to bootstrap themselves up out of that crap. I know even more who tried, tried like hell, and still failed. I know people who did some shit that was just plain unbelievable to me, who worked their asses off on a level I couldn't manage and started on their way to making it. Then life dealt them a bad hand or two or they fucked something up and they ended up worse off than when they started.

And I know people (self included) who were given every advantage you can ever think of who still screwed it up multiple times, or couldn't hack this thing or that.

So people who were hardly "Blue collar" making a comedy tour off of riffing on the struggles of working-class and poor white folks is decidedly not funny to me. People who strongly play up their so-called Christian and "Conservative" values and who were even educated that way...then make not just a living but absolute BANK off of talking the complete opposite? Well, that just plain pisses me off.

I can remember when being a Christian or a conservative came with standards of conduct.

It's not that way anymore. It's just not.

More to the point, here we have a dude who is mostly known for and popular because of saying dumb shit, trending on Twitter because he's gotten himself in an argument with a bunch of doctors on Twitter.

Why is this news?

Hell, why did this even happen in the first place?

I mean, to be quite the fuck honest, I'm not the least bit surprised that Larry The Cable Guy is an anti-vax ninny. I'm really not.

Nor am I particularly surprised that he apparently can't spell or write worth a shit either. I'm just not.

What does surprise me and make me kind of mad is that anybody would accord legitimacy to this chucklefuck when it comes to medical stuff, and I suppose doctors have to engage on that.

But I don't. 

You cannot reason with unreasonable people. I'm not going to lie, my normal social media response to people like this is Fuck You/Blocked. It's really that simple.

It sort of bothers me that somebody who was a drama major and college dropout from a Baptist university would even think getting into an argument with doctors...with anybody who "dealing with that shit is what they do" when at best, he gets paid to talk about things, and at worst to say dumb shit about stuff.

And the thing that really frosts my ass is there's people who will think Larry the Cable Guy was right, for no better reason than he says what they want to hear.

And how in the hell is that "Christian?" Isn't lying a sin?

Isn't speaking ignorantly considered wrong?

That's what I was taught, anyway. But it's apparently not that way anymore.

You want to know what's wrong with America, well there you have it.

How we fix this, I don't know, but we'd best get started.

Part Two.

Part One.