Oil And Wine (Antichrist Superstar, Five.)

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. ~Revelation 6:5-6

...

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

Got a question:

Why are these people always like this?

Dressed like a 1980's hair-band fan stoner, upraised middle finger.

Timeline full of ostentatious Trump support and oversexed raunchy memes.

"Christian."

By the way, I know plenty of 1980's hair-band fan stoners who are still that way and are (or were for a long time) Christians (This describes several friends of mine.) Couple of them are even conservatives. This handily described the pastor of the Bible study group that I was in for literally years at my old job.

But I'll tell you something about those people, the ones who are for-real, anyway; Their social media is not full of over-the-top Trump support and nasty skank-ass memes and their profile pictures do not prominently feature upraised middle fingers.

Nor do those people, as I know them, wear an entire shredded mountain goat to important yearly work events, nor act like a fool in them. 

(And I sat through tons of H.R. trainings, major meetings and yearly Serve-Safe qualifications with these people, the temptation arises to act the fool just to break the monotony especially when it's the same shit every damn year, right down to the Serve-Safe trainers dumbass jokes.)

And you know an easy way to spot the bullshitters?

Call 'em out and their first response is "Well, that's not very Christian of you." And it somehow manages to go that way every single time one runs this experiment.

Who Is George Santos?

And you know what? 

Nearly every damned time, these fucking people's Christianity comes down to the fact that they think the "Unrighteous" people should be dying in the street, suffering in extreme poverty, etc. etc. and the upraised middle finger comes from the fact that this ain't what's happening. 

Goes without saying that the upraised middle-finger crowd always thinks they're the "Righteous" ones.

Oh, and for extra points check this out: This guy "Liked" a share of yesterday's post that was on a QT of the above snipped Twitter post;

Dude is literally sitting here spanking the monkey to the idea of America being defeated and colonized by the Chinese Communist Party, so he can say "I told you so" about the whole "Spy Balloon" non-crisis. His goddamn timeline is nothing but that plus a few gun posts and QT's of anti-transgender supposed doctors. 

Dude claims to be some kind of a doctor and a big deal some kind of a somewhere; And no, I don't care enough to look and see if he's for real. On Elon-Twitter it's easier to just block his ass and move on. 

If he is more than just some unusually-gussied-up CCP or Putin-commie troll, I rather suspect his career wouldn't survive the shit on his timeline making contact with his company's H.R. Department.

First clue to actually look was mousing over his name and seeing #MAGA kind-of buried in all the hashtags and links in his bio.

But my goddamn point, regardless, is that These Fucking People would rather see America defeated and destroyed, its government, military and power in the world mostly or completely wrecked, and its people suffering and dying than see Black or LGBT or whatever-kind-of-liberal people get a slice.

They're the ones who get hard (or wet) at the thought of people being killed, maimed and otherwise tore up in Ukraine, even when it's their own "side." It's not who's suffering and dying that matters...but simply that people are suffering and dying. I mean, they'd like it better if it was the people that the Hive-Mind has decided it doesn't like.

But the truth is, it doesn't actually matter to them because the cruelty, the death and destruction, and suffering are themselves the goddamned point!

And the reason the Commies can make up or pay off some random troll is, well...bear with me for a second: 

Like I said years ago talking to a buddy of mine in the break room at the casino while Glenn Beck was yammering away and marking up his blackboard on Fox News...if you're anything short of a goddamned internet troll the Republican Party don't want you.

Mind you, that was in like 2008 or so. 

I was talking to one of my conservative/religious but-on-the-way-out-but-at-a-slower-pace than-me friends.

And when you factor in that one hell of a lot of today's "liberals" are people that were conservatives 5 or 10 or 20 years ago, that's fucking saying something.

These people, invariably, don't even care about their own.

When the Bible talks about Oil and Wine as symbols of wealth, or says it's harder for a rich man to enter heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle...this is the kind of privileged stupidity and lack of even the most basic compassion or empathy for another that the Word was talking about.

By their fruits, ye shall know them.

Remember that, and mind the company you keep.

Four

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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