Waxing Cold (Left Behind Is A Lie IV, Seven.)

Well the government bugged the men's room

In the local disco lounge
And all she wants to do is dance, dance
To keep the boys from sellin'
All the weapons they could scrounge
And all she wants to do is dance
Yeah, but that don't keep the boys from makin' a buck or two
And all she wants to do is dance, dance
The still can sell the army
All the drugs that they can do
And all she wants to do is
All she wants to do is dance
And make romance. ~Don Henley, All She Wants To Do Is Dance

...

[CWO Durant has been taken prisoner.]

Somali Militiaman: You are the Ranger who kills my people?

CWO Durant: I'm not a Ranger. I'm a pilot. [Durant declines a cigarette]

Militiaman: That's right. None of you Americans smoke anymore. You live long, dull, uninteresting lives.

Durant: What do you want with me?

Militiaman: You have taken hostages. We... have you.

Durant: My government will never negotiate for me.

Militiaman: Then perhaps you and I can negotiate, huh? Soldier to soldier.

Durant: I'm not in charge.

Militiaman: Course not. You have the power to kill, but not negotiate. In Somalia, killing is negotiation. Do you really think if you get General Aidid, we will simply put down our weapons and adopt American democracy? That the killing will stop? We know this: without victory, there can be no peace. There will always be killing, you see? This is how things are, in our world. 

~From The Film Black Hawk Down.

So, evidently, the push to elect Jim Jordan as Speaker of the US House of Representatives has failed. Jordan falls. Who's next??

Fuck...and I cannot stress this enough...You, Republicans.

Oh, and while I'm on a roll here, the Opposition won the election in Poland over the weekend, so it kind of looks like the far-right is having a bad week in general.

And the funny part is, reading this shit, I fail to understand how something like the "Islamization of Poland" (a country where about 0.1% of the population is Muslim, and much of that minority is Lipka Tatars who've been there for 600 years) could even be a bad faith "concern" of a dishonest person.

At the end of the day, yo, it simply comes down to the fact that, when given a choice, most people just don't like the far-right very much.

More than that, it's not like the world isn't facing multiple major crises now, just between the war in Israel and the war in Ukraine or the fact that COVID-19 could always flare up again, and that's just the problems we're aware of.

According to Republicans, this is all a conspiracy, or somebody else's fault, depending on who you ask.

Republicans don't want to do anything, they don't want anybody else to do anything either. 

More to the point, Jim Jordan is a perfect exemplar of exactly this, obstructionism for obstructionism's sake.

But these motherfuckers are perfectly well happy to keep spreading hate as long as it keeps their base amped up.

Meanwhile, a 71-year old man is facing First Degree Murder and hate crime charges for stabbing a Palestinian woman and her son. The son was stabbed 26 times and died, his mother was stabbed once and choked, but fought back. She's still in critical condition.

The dude was their landlord. Funny how he was perfectly fine with taking their money before he got it into his head to try to kill them...and to succeed in one case. Asshole.

Motherfucker killed a kid, I hope he dies and goes to hell. More to the point, I hope he has a good long time to think about that shit, first.

Goddamn but if that son of a bitch has grandkids, that's going to be awkward, explaining to them that their grandfather is in prison for the rest of his life for murdering a kid, simply because of his ethnicity and religion.

Have these fucking people got no sense of right and wrong anymore??

Shit, we lock up way more people than the Israelis do. Like seriously what the fuck did that old asshole think was gonna happen?? For the love of many shall wax cold, eh??

I'm sick of these fucking people.

Like, what do all these Imperialists, Religious Fanatics, Shitheads, Terrorists and Wannabe-Terrorists think, that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is just a suggestion??

Why do people think they can just spend their lives living in base evil, fornication, sin and shit and then be welcomed into Heaven with a wink, nudge and a knowing smack on the ass by some kind of Buddy-Christ or some bullshit??

I mean, radical Islam has disgusted me since the excesses of the Taliban in the 1990's. But I know from experience that radical Islam is not representative of Islam itself, or of most Muslims. Fuck, I happen to know enough people to know Hamas isn't exactly representative of Palestinians, either.

Nor is Netanyahu and his clique representative of Israelis as a whole, although most of the Israeli people I've met are either Israeli-Arab Christians, or Jews but pretty secular. The only Orthodox Jews I've ever met have been Americans.

That's mostly just been a function of where I was at in life at the time.

I suppose you could say the same about White American Christians, that they are not representative of the whole. 

But at least in America it's getting harder and harder to see that such is the case. I literally know people who were Fundamentalists 15 or 20 years ago who are irreligious now because of all the crazy shit, because of all the nuts and how they screw people over.

Makes me feel real good about all that time I spent in church, it does.

I've honestly reached the point where I think a lot of these fucking nuts don't believe anything at all. "Conservative" Christians have never, apparently" held a value they wouldn't abandon for expediency.

Nor do I see radical Islamic groups, like Hamas or ISIL being any different than that, not least because they flagrantly break so many of their own rules Using drugs, just for example.

Like, if the Devil showed up and did some magic and gave them a little power...I think a hell of a lot of these fucking people would bow down and worship him, instead.

And there's devils in the world...or near enough to it...who see this and are willing to act on it.

And the fight for freedom has to outlast all these conflict-driven fanatics who want to force their ideas of bigotry and hate and privilege and relative status on the rest of us, along with their taste for mass slaughter.

That attack on Israel that started this war? Those mass murders in Bucha and Mariupol? The defeat of Artsakh and the flight of the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians? That kind of shit is the world all these far-right goons think they want to live in...and they think they'll somehow always be on the winning side of it.

It's not hard to imagine, if Israel had taken more hits...say, lost a chunk of its land to invasion like Ukraine has, and the West faced another refugee crisis...that the far-right would just continue to blame Israelis, ignore the problem, and threaten to bomb Mexico.

Because something something Gazpacho, I guess.

The fuck if I even know why.

Seriously I'll never get over the fact that along with Israel being attacked by radical Islam, literal Christian, conservative nations like Ukraine are under attack by poorly-reheated Communism and Artsakh for that matter was destroyed by a combination of the two (without a peep from American media, much less the far-right!) so yeah, think about that one, will ya?

Worse, the American "Christians" who like to act like they think Western Civilization is under endless violent siege by Brown People could absolutely give a shit.

Because, I suppose, it was never really about any of that stuff, anyway, was it? Not only was all that Left Behind shit a lie, but so was everything else, wasn't it??

In point of fact, these assholes seem to be willing to throw in with the bad guys wherever it's convenient or when they think it's funny.

Even...maybe especially...when the 'bad guys' are those they hate.

And they can't wait to take the most anti-American stance possible and say how much they think America sucks. I used to do drugs, and I can't make this shit make sense.

Meanwhile, the Israelis and the Ukrainians appreciate us...and these are people literally fighting for their own survival...in the case of the Israelis, doing so while feeling there's a clear lack of leadership on their side of things.

But here, especially in "The People's House" the whirl of nihilistic madness just goes 'round and 'round.

And people keep dying, don't forget that part.

When does that stop?

Слава Україна!

Well we barely make the airport
For the last plane out
As we taxied down the runway
I could hear the people shout
They said, "don't come back here Yankee"
But if I ever do
I'll bring more money
'Cause all she wants to do is dance
And make romance
Never mind the heat
Comin' off the street
She wants to party
She wants to get down
All she wants to do is
All she wants to do is dance
And make romance
All she wants to do is dance.

 ~Don Henley, All She Wants To Do Is Dance

Six

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press