And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.
And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.
And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.
And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.
And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.
And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.
And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.
And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.
And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.
One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.
And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,
Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.
And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.
And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.
And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.
By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.
For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.
And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9 (King James Version)
I have a confession to make.
As I've said before, I used to be a Christian and a member of the End Times Prophecy movement.
I never really believed it.
No, it's not God or Jesus or the Wrath of the Lamb itself that I rejected, nor the spiritual purpose for why there is such a thing as belief in the End Times...although life has subsequently given me much reason to question, if not outright reject all of the above.
All stories have to end somewhere. That wasn't my issue, though.
Fundamentally, Revelation is a diatribe against Rome, against Empire, and against Earthly Power in all its frequent, debased oppression and sinfulness. It's a wonder that Constantine and the various Roman backers of enterprises such as the Council of Nicaea allowed it to be included in the Word at all.
Christianity, practiced according to Christ's ways is Revolutionary, literally.
(For the record, imagine if you will, somebody trying to explain to your basic Redneck Southern Baptist that the Early Christians rejected the idea of personal property and held everything in common, and this wasn't "Liberalism" it was what the Apostle Paul told them to do.)
No, my problem was different;
Well, now it's 30 years later, 30 years since I even started to get into that crap (which happened because one of my Air Force buddies got into it, actually.)
I had a church background, albeit one that was fairly mainstream and had barely even mentioned Revelation, and I was politically Conservative at the time (and unlike a lot of these people, I was educated in the how's and why's of all that, too.) So, it sort of fit.
And like I said, I was in the military. Hell, I was a Security Policeman serving in a Bomb Wing. At that point I was surrounded by the Power and literal financial excess of the State (Not to mention the literal physical capability to inflict the torments of Revelation on somebody) damn near every moment of my life.
Also, like I said...I always looked at what Christians themselves said about their hypothetical bad guys and wondered how anybody could believe in something like that enough to put a computer chip in their forehead or right hand, swear allegiance to it, and functionally get Satan's name tattooed on their ass.
That was then.
Now "It's not the Mark Of The Beast when they do it!" And yes, by next week or the next time Elon Musk farts out some bullshit stuff about Neuralink, that will be the Official Line.
If you, time traveler, would have told me in 1994 that in 2024 Fundamentalist Christian southern Rednecks from Oklahoma would openly consider an openly godless, openly lecherous and perverse NYC fat cat like Donald Trump as their Light and their Salvation...Or that they'd still be ranting about Communism, then the deadest of dead ideologies...I'd have punched you in the face.
Like, the fall of Communism had happened live on TV five years before that. The idea that anybody would try to bring it back was the stuff of third-rate action movies featuring Russian Nationalist villains and the movies always got all the military and political shit hilariously wrong, if they even tried to get it right.
Fundamentally, I'm an American. I went to Christian schools, I got a bigger dose than average of pre-Founding American Christian history and explanation WHY the Revolution happened...whether they intended to give me that, or not. I was a Reaganite Republican. Hell, I watched Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech live in TV.
Think about that, for a second.
"Reagan Wept" does not even begin to cover it, so far as I'm concerned.
And this shit isn't Christianity, it's not even the Right's Christ-less version, it's Antichristianity straight up.
Now?? Republicans openly side with Russia, which marches its armies in Ukraine under the Hammer and Sickle, that's right, the goddamned Soviet flag, and the Russians are persecuting Christians (and presumably all other religions, too, but we don't hear about that.)
Modern Republicans want you to have to worship the State, but only so long as the State is defined by dudes like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.
This modern "Conservative" bullshit idea of a weak State and a strong "Leader" is basically Kingship.
It's saying the Government doesn't have the authority to keep human waste out of your food or prevent the authorities from torturing you...but if some bullshit dictator or wannabe Monarch orders you to be Burned At The Stake, that's just fine.
And these are the fucking people who just fifteen years ago gleefully adopted the moniker of the "Tea Party" evoking the Boston Tea Party of 1773 as the alleged inspiration for their movement based 100% on Anti-Obama racism (and who, for the most part, will die of foodborne illness if given the power to dismantle extant regulatory structures because they think science is "Liberal" or something, and who've never been anywhere that has a King or seen how much that shit sucks) cheered.
Sometime I'll have to write something about the fact that Crispus Attucks, considered by most people who know the history, to be the first Martyr of the American Revolution, was Black...but I digress.
These fucking people's idea of "Government" really is handing power to the mob, but only after they dismantle Democracy and even the idea of human rights and whip the mob up on a bunch of hateful screeds and send it out to kill people.
With, by the way, any brakes on the behavior of rich people like Donald Trump completely dismantled and any government authority for anything but Use Of Force severely circumscribed.
The future these fucking idiots want really is the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, but with a church, and a mall, and not much else.
Remember that, the next time some alleged Democrat whines about Joe Biden being old or having a bad debate performance.
And what the 2024 election is a referendum on, is "Do These Fucking People get the Power of the State" in fighting that war, or "Do They Not Get State Power??"
Trump has, functionally, promised a bloodbath either way.
And now Republicans have limited the Power of the United States Government to prosecute his ass for basically starting a far-right Revolution against civilization, against Democracy and against the modern World.
Again, think about that for a second.
Do you really want motherfuckers who are fine with shit in your food, and who think Donald Trump being a literal King is some kind of good idea deciding what your kids can learn in school or who you can marry...or any other goddamn thing??
I'm here to tell you, if you wanna see how this works out in real life, go somewhere like Iraq or Saudi Arabia and drink water in the wrong place and see what happens and how sick you get...and then imagine that after you spend a month (hopefully in an air-conditioned hotel room) shitting your guts out and trying not to die of dehydration, it's back on the line where you'll be carrying a rifle in the field or doing Force Protection at some FOB in the middle of the desert under some pretty awful conditions.
It's like a buddy of mine put it the other night, Americans have had it too good for too long, and don't understand that in some countries, having the shits can kill you and the diplomatic and military power of the American State is about the only thing keeping the locals from shooting you and shooting down their own government.
This particular buddy of mine served after I did, and went to Afghanistan. And like many veterans of that war, he's followed what's happened in that country since we and our money and power picked up and left.
And make no mistake about it, Afghanistan is exactly the kind of shit that people like Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito and Donald Trump want to turn at least part of America into...and worse, that's the part they hope they get, but they want to make sure that what the rest of us are left isn't much better...and then they'll hate us for our Government and the fact that it's trying to make sure that when you get sick, you don't die and you still have some sort of a job and that people who have less than the net worth of a small country unto themselves can survive.
How many current Americans do you think will survive under those kind of conditions, even without the regulatory power of the State being circumscribed or its finances and ability to provide services to those not In Uniform crippled by secession, war, and the attendant economic shocks to the system??
And how many of these whiny idiots are gonna have the guts to fight through it all to restore even some of what we had before vs. how many of them will just give up and die??
Republicans are basically willing to go to any extreme including being the bad guys in their own End Times, to preserve political power, racism and wealth and be against the idea of Black fighter pilots, generals and Presidents. This shit is so bad, Republicans made me believe in Revelation.
So, the question is, what are you willing to do to defend your own freedom and human rights, and perhaps more importantly that of your neighbors??
Because first, we're going to have to vote these assholes out, and then we're going to have to fight them off.
At this point, American Exceptionalism in fundamentally dead. I mean, shit, the Empire from Star Wars isn't good enough for these fucking people now. It's Warhammer 40K or nothing.
And it's these flag-waving jingoistic asshole Republicans who killed any idea of America being exceptional, of us being somewhere where you could be something other than what you were born or where Law amounted to something other than Who's in Power right now, and they did it for Donald Trump.
And the MAGA's just laugh and be like "King Me."
We literally face American Revelation, and the attempted overthrow of the American Revolution, but the assholes still wanna keep the country.
And if there is to be an American Resurrection, that's on us.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
It's that simple. I did not make this rule.
And each passing moment we don't all stand up and say that enough is enough with this bullshit makes it more likely that we're going to have to fight for it.
If we defeat Trump in November and reelect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the lines hold and we get to do most of this shit legally.
If we don't, they don't.
If we don't show up all bets are off and the assholes on the Far Left have their ideas of a Glorious Revolution, so I guess there's that...but they ain't going to like how that works out, either.
In France, right now, people are uniting to defeat the far-right. We're going to have to do the same.
But here, if Republicans get their way, either way, after that...there's gonna be Blood.
And it's not just the Right that's at fault here, when all those Boomer "Leftists" (the ones who didn't get rich and become Reaganite Republicans in the 1980's and MAGA in the 2010's anyway) said the cool kids don't vote, they tied one hand behind our backs in this struggle.
Yeah, I'm pretty disgusted right now, to the point where it took me a week to write this, and if you don't understand why??
Fuck you, too bad. You figure it out. If I have to explain it to to you, you are the fucking problem.
~Malcolm X.
Last Post
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
Give me back my broken night
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