Soup Sandwich (Left Behind Is A Lie IV, Twelve.)

 You see the face on the TV screen?

Coming at you every Sunday
You see the face on the billboard?
That man is me

On the cover of the magazine
There's no question why I'm smiling
Buy a piece of paradise
And you buy a piece of me

I'll get you everything you wanted
I'll get you everything you need
You don't need to believe in hereafter
Just believe in me

'Cause Jesus, he knows me
And he knows I'm right
I've been talking to Jesus all my life
Oh yes, he knows me
And he knows I'm right
And he's been telling me everything is alright

I believe in the family
With my ever-loving wife beside me
She doesn't know about my girlfriend
Or the man I met last night

Do you believe in God?
'Cause that is what I'm selling
And if you wanna go to heaven
Well, I'll see you right.

~Genesis, Jesus He Knows Me.

...

[Cassian plays Nemik's audio diary]

Karis Nemik: There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try. ~From Andor, S1 E12 "Rix Road"

I saw this yesterday.

The longer he's in his position, in the public eye vs. having been an unknown before, the more suspicious, and indeed, the worse the new Republican Speaker, this wannabe Preacher Of The House, looks.

It seriously looks like at 25 or so, this supposedly uber-Christian Republican dude had some kind of an inappropriate relationship with a 14-year-old boy. How the fuck is this acceptable??

Given the amount of goddamned nonsense floating around on social media today, would it even matter??

Current House Republicans, backed by the MAGA grifter-class, appear to have no governing principles, no values at all other than hate and power, along with an utter refusal to even acknowledge anybody outside of their shitty little in-group.

They are starting to be doctrinally closer to Radical Islam than to the Evangelical or "Traditionalist" Catholic beliefs claimed by a lot of their members.

Nothing seems to matter, not even what is being said, as long as the person saying it either is an old White or at least light-skinned dude wearing a suit, or a reasonably attractive woman...and that they say a bunch of nasty shit about the "right" people.

And all of these fucking people seem to just plain hate America. And they all want to do it with Tucker Carlson's smarmy, sneering affect.

On the one hand it's like these fucking people think they're talking to dogs.

On the other hand, emotion and a hateful-enough sounding tone of voice directed at whoever the "approved" target of the moment is really seems to be all that matters to at least some of their fucking followers.

But there's a catch;

You'll notice Sameera Khan doesn't want to give back all her evil American money, or give up her own freedom, or even stop living in Washington D.C. She just wants others to do all that.

Like seriously, most of the Muslims I've ever met in the United States, be they American-born or immigrants, just want to be Americans and live their lives, and most want to contribute to the society of which they are or have become part. For a hell of a lot of them, their claimed home country is this one! In point of fact many of the immigrants and refugees came here to get away from autocracy, Jihad, and wars.

I wonder if Sameera Khan thinks her bit of vapid beauty queen turned right-wing political agitator would even be tolerated in a country like Afghanistan where the kind of radical Islam she espouses purely as an "Own The Libs" act held power, or even in Russia, which she supports for basically the same reason? Russia seems to have fallen all the way back to the lowest ebb of Soviet times, or worse, and Russia cannot even conquer Ukraine.

How the fuck does anybody think Russia is gonna take on the EU, NATO, and the United States of America...unless these fucking people tear us down first??

Which, by the way, seems to be the point. As with both the invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Israel...all those creepy little sets of tracks seem to lead back to Vladimir Putin, KGB agent, who had to be a Communist's Communist just to get in the door, much less pass his training and get an actual billet.

You'd think that would bother the same fucking people, many of whom spent my youth fearmongering about *Checks Notes* Communism.

But that's not the world we live in anymore. These fucking people want Putin's neo-Communism, and Radical Islam to eat the world, perhaps thinking it'll justify their fascism or make them feel "Special" somehow, or they'll get an easy grift out of it.

The real motherfuckers in your movement don't give a shit who you are on Twitter, lady, and I think this holds true of nearly all these fucking people loudly shouting this crap online or on the street.

"Conservatives" hate America...because it's too "Liberal" or "Woke" whatever that means. So, they cannot figure out why anyone else doesn't, let alone why people would walk across deserts or sail across oceans or even climb aboard a C-17A Globemaster III jet with 800+ other desperate people to try to get here.

Right-wing reactionaries...and at this point they're all either reactionaries or waiting to be kicked out by the reactionaries...and Left-wing Tankies simply cannot comprehend why anyone would want to fight for a (small-L) liberal (small-D) democratic country like the United States. 

I live here, I'm not really a privileged person, I don't have that option...and I have too much skin in the game to simply fuck shit up because I'm mad about stupid shit.

They on the other hand, sure can't understand why anybody would fight for the right simply to be like us, which is what the Ukrainians are doing...or to preserve their society as it is like the Israelis are doing.

These people, many of them pampered elites themselves, want to trash every aspect of America, weaken its military, wreck its economy, Lord only knows what else...because of some BS that only exists in their heads! Fuck that! I need civilization so that I can be alive...and so do most of you.

These fucking people see no value in civilization, it gets in the way of what they think they want to do. They see no value in freedom, unless they're the only ones who have it.

So they don't really want to help either Israelis or Ukrainians, much less their fellow Americans.

These fucking people, for the most part, imagine themselves getting to live it up somewhere nice while the people carrying on the "struggle" for them are suffering. 

It doesn't matter what the struggle is.

And a lot of these motherfuckers simply don't like other people.

At the end of the day, we're either a society or we're not, though.

And remember, if you don't want to be in a society or give a shit about other people...in this nation of, by, and for the People...there are those who'd gladly usurp that mantle from you, along with any say in anything that might go with it.

Think about that for a second.

Because there's people right here in America who'll shit all over every belief, creed, religious doctrine or anything they ever claimed to hold dear...and blatantly ignore the Constitution and every law of God or man that you could possibly imagine, ruining everything to the point where they show the supposedly ultimate conclusion of their "Faith" to be nothing but a damned lie...and they'll do it all with a disingenuous smile on their faces, in the service of nothing more than being slaves of the Caesars, out of some hope that they'll get to be a better class of slave than some of the other slaves are.

In pretty much the one country that was founded on the hope of being something other than that.

Fuck these motherfuckers.

And if you can't be bothered to stand up against them?

Fuck you, too.

It really is that simple. 

You either believe in freedom...for all of us...or you don't.

And it's either that...or some version of these clowns and their shitty right-wing eschaton.

It's "Have some fucked up version of Christianity forced on you by some boy-raping pervert" or stand up and do something the fuck about it.

There's only two options here, apathetically shrugging ain't one of 'em.

The modern Right only wants to have two kinds of people, Lords and Serfs.

And every last one of them thinks they're going to be the king in his castle. They all think they gonna be Vladimir Putin someday.

An intelligent person here would ask, just where the fuck does that leave the rest of us??

The only way Russia ever becomes some world-dominating empire is to manipulate and drag everybody else down to their level and make everything be a goddamn soup sandwich. The thing that pisses me off, is there's so many people willing to volunteer because their petty grudges are more important to them than being free.

If you want a better nation, you have to be a better citizen. If you want a better world, you have to be a better person. Is that really so hard??

Eleven

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press

Слава Україна!

Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. 

In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. 

~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.