The Virgins Are All Trimming Their Wicks (Gravity, Seven.)

Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.

And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:

But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.

While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.

And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.

Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.

And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our lamps are gone out.

But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves.

And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.

Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.

But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.

Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.

~Matthew 25:1-13

...

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

I saw this Tuesday night after my Grandma's birthday dinner.

Some idiots made a memorial stone for Ashlii Babbitt and some of the other January 6th insurrectionists who were killed, and tried to take it and put it somewhere at Arlington National Cemetery. They were immediately turned away by security.

WTF?? (I'm a veteran, you can't just do stuff like that, there's rules. I'm not saying that to be mean or because I don't like MAGA insurrectionists, it's just the truth.)

But of course these people are mentally ill fanatics and nothing will ever be good enough for them anyway, and why the hell did we give these fucking people a platform to begin with, like, at all?

It was a busy couple of days for me.

I left here before dawn on Tuesday and met my Mom up at her partner's house, and we drove up to the Upper Peninsula (MI) to my aunt and uncle's house with a few detours like to my Mom's favorite campground near Brimley and around the former KI Sawyer Air Force Base to see what'd changed since my last trip up there. (Really, outside of Marquette itself, not much.)

But you notice things, or I do anyway.

Part of it is natural inclination, part of it is training.

In one of the most rural and Whitest parts of rural White America, I saw about as many Biden signs or Pride Flags or Ukrainian flags as I did MAGA swag or Trump signs, a lot more if you take all the other stuff in total. 

When we drove through Bay Mills...which used to be a typical crappy Reservation with shoddy Federal-grade constructed buildings and a Casino...everything there has changed, Native American business and street names, obvious cultural pride, etc. There was still a drunk Native guy walking down the road but my Mom...who goes up there and camps a lot most summers...just waved and told me he always does that. She knows the guy. Likewise, I noticed that even along the rural and fairly desolate Seney Stretch, things seemed cleaned up compared to how they were the last time I was there, rather than just a few things fixed up by federal grant...there were businesses open where there hadn't been in 2017. Both coming and going, we saw a short train on the stretch of railroad that follows that part of M-28 for most of its length...a stretch of track that was impassable, cluttered up with abandoned railcars for decades...rusting behemoths on abandoned tracks...even the last time I went that way. Somebody hauled them all away.

 We drove through KI Sawyer (my home station for 19 months of my Air Force career) and even that looked less like a moldering former SAC Base and more like a community that'd finally got its feet under it. Marquette...always a Blue island of a city...had a lot of new stuff although I freely admit it's been over 20 years since I drove all the way through it.

My family has always predominately been Democrats with a few moderate, conservation-minded Republicans sprinkled in (Like I was, and I got it from my Dad) and when I lived at my Aunt and Uncle's house while stationed at the then-active Air Force base in the early/mid-1990's apparently my (then generally mutually alcohol-augmented) political discussions with my Uncle (who himself is a 1970's Army National Guard veteran and was a part-time firefighter and full-time maintenance guy with a side of farming. 30 years ago he was a staunch Clintonista) are a thing of family legend now. The two of my three cousins who were there both brought that up.

But a key point that they brought up was that we always got along and both knew what we were talking about...rather than the conspiracy theories and nonsense of today.

The sole remnant of that time...a moth-eaten woodland camo BDU jacket with my name and Sergeant's stripes on it (recently found in the attic) got appropriated by Cousin #1's boys and apparently I ain't never getting that shit back now, so my Uncle and I laughingly showed them how to stand at attention, march and salute and shit like that. They can have it, and more power to them. (Their Mom, herself an Air Force veteran, USAFA graduate, former C-130 Hercules pilot and current lawyer, thought this was extremely funny for some reason. They never got that excited about her stuff.)

I'd expected to have to go upstairs to even get shitty Wi-Fi reception on my phone. That's a thing. (Forget trying to check Google Maps or your weather app between about Newberry and US Highway 41, that hasn't changed.) But, they have good Wi-Fi now...which I should've thought of because of my Aunt's craft business. Things Change, even up there.

I stayed up late Tuesday night playing D&D with my twin (girl) cousins, and twin cousin #1's husband and twin cousin #2's wife. Crash-slept for a few hours, and then got woke up by the dog. In an echo of earlier days, we watched the news (Trump trial stuff was all that was on) and my uncle held forth about political stuff like he always used to. The level of divisiveness, conspiracy BS and outright rage among a lot of the older guys he knew, and how he talked about it, was breathtaking to me. Those people (some of whom I also used to know) were not always like this.

My uncle has apparently thrown hands with some of these guys.

We made Bacon, eggs and toast for breakfast. My Mom and I cut some Asparagus and Rhubarb from the gardens and got on the road by 10 AM.

But ya know, the thing about those angry conspiratorial old white guys is that now they want to change America right out of the American Experiment as it has ever existed, and they want to kill women. Yeah you can just go right ahead and tell that shit to a guy with three girl cousins...one of whom is LGBT and has a really cool, nice wife. I've got something for you, if you wanna be that way, but you ain't gonna like it.

All I keep hearing about from Republicans is revenge.

Revenge for this, revenge for that, revenge for the goddam other thing...and Death, lots of death.

Revenge...for Trump being held to account for once, for literal criminal acts?

Republicans are mad that other people exist, or that laws can be applied to them and theirs. Some of them always were, and now they've chased all the other Republicans out. And now they wanna kill people because Trump is facing a possible guilty verdict?? I mean seriously these fucking people have just been outright lying about how juries and criminal convictions work, to gin up outrage.

These fucking people don't want to live in America as it's currently constituted, and fundamentally, they want to kill anybody who does. It doesn't matter that this BS doesn't make any sense, not least of all to them.

Shit, these fucking people would try to argue with Gravity.

Well, let me tell you how this is gonna go;

It's not Gravity that kills you, it's that sudden stop at the bottom: There is a hard baseline to reality.

I swore an oath to this country and I'm naturally going to be opposed to seditionists and traitors, and it pisses me off that some motherfucker would try to commemorate treason on the sacred ground of a place like Arlington National Cemetery. There's a motherfucking reason that place was built on the grounds of Bobby Lee's plantation house. When the government gave you the middle finger back in the day they didn't screw around.

Before I was ever a Republican or a Democrat, or a Christian or anything else that I am or ever was, I'm an American. 

And if you don't wanna live in America, if you'd rather live in some country called Trump Land, you can get the fuck out.

Antarctica is nice this time of year, I hear.

But the truth is, at the end of the day, these idiots want to take over America or at least break a piece of it off for themselves and either would be rebuilt in Donald Trump's demented image. I don't think they'll succeed at the former, but it's very, very likely that they will attempt the latter, and more likely than most people think that they would succeed.

The world is not ready for some kind of Trump-cult Nation.

So the only way to stop this shit is that we have to show up, and quite likely, we'll have to fight them off after we vote them down. Start working on stopping it now.

I didn't make the rules, decades of Democrats and Republicans alike dropping the ball while a few bad actors laid the groundwork for this situation created this mess.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

But if I had to guess, these motherfuckers have a lot less support than they've convinced themselves that they do.

The trouble is, if we don't stop this bullshit now and find a way to force the crazies out of public life, and to get the wannabe murderers out of "Conservative" politics, people are still going to die. This is literally what they're publicly declaring that they want.

And they're making up literally endless excuses for it, having decoupled decency and morality from basically any of their claimed beliefs...simply because to retain either would not permit them to do what they think they want to. They've started to replace any political conservative beliefs or anything else they ever claimed they had with bigotry, racism and every other form of societal fentanyl you can think of. I mean, what the fuck is even the point of an alleged "Conservative Christian" theocracy if one of the first people they'd kill is Jesus??

They'd sooner call Valdimir Putin "Christ," claim Russia is Rome, and then blasphemously unify the two...and join themselves to that bullshit...where the entire fucking point, theologically is that Christ and Rome are naturally in opposition.

If we don't put a stop to that, these fucking people just might get their Killing Fields with a mall.

And it's Republicans who want that. Same people who go a little buggy without "Liberals" to argue with and go to pieces when confronted with a virus think they're going to kill everybody else and take over.

No, it doesn't make any sense.

But if you don't want that, or want them to try it, that means you have to stand up.

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Six

"It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity". ~Martin Luther King Jr.

Bonus Content

[Cassian and Kino Loy have successfully broken out of their cell block and took over the prison complex's command center]

Cassian Andor: Kino. Tell them what to do. It has to be you. Come on, Kino. You do this every day. Tell them what to do.

Kino Loy: [presses PA system] My name is Kino Loy. I'm the day shift manager on Level Five. I'm speaking to you from the command center on Level Eight. We are, at this moment, in control of the facility.

Andor: Is that the best you got?

Loy: How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us. We have deactivated every floor in the facility. All floors are cold. Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it'll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and [looks at Cassian, knowing he said it] "I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want." We know they fried a hundred men on Level Two. We know that they are making up our sentences as we go along. We know that no one outside here knows what's happening. And now we know, that when they say we are being released, we are being transferred to some other prison to go and die, and that ends today! There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out! [repeats it multiple times as he leaves the command center]

Andor: Come on! Let's get out of here!

~From the series "Andor" S1 E10 "One Way Out."