It's not religion, it's Murder (October Unsurprising, Three.)

And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savor, where with shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:

But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. ~Matthew 5:1-22

...

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.

I saw this over the weekend.

A bunch of idiot Pentecostals held a pro-Trump demonstration in Washington DC, blowing Shofars, waving "Appeal To Heaven" flags and in general loudly praying for Trump to get elected because something something Gazpacho. The simple reality of it is, they think their religious scam-fuckery would profit from Trump being in power, and most of these idiots haven't the slightest idea that they've already been politically buttfucked by the Sedevacantist-in-all-but-name "Traditionalist" Catholics.

Yes, it's already happened.

So, If they ever get what they think they want, they ain't going to like it.

Between that and Aleksandr Dugin trying to claim that the war in Ukraine is some kind of exorcism in specifically Christian terms...and mind you, to the best of my knowledge Orthodox Christians aren't usually all that big into that kind of spiritualist crap anymore than most Catholics or other mainstream Christians are...that he's doing so at the same time as Russia is now employing North Korean troops on the battlefield (You know, North Korea, home of Kim Jong Un and the violently anti-Christian personality cult thereof) seems to undercut his argument, but he naturally cares not a bit.

Because none of this is actually about Christ or Christianity. 

It's about hate, and power, and wealth.

And these fucking people will say whatever nonsensical bullshit they have to in order keep it that way, because it's the bullshit and hate that generate their profits. 

They don't give a damn about Jesus, and they sure don't care about you.

But it's like this: If you really believe in Chemtrails, gay fire ants or that a person can be "converted" to "homosexuality" or for that matter that being an LGBT person and being a Christian (even an Evangelical or Pentecostal) is somehow mutually exclusive, I'm sorry, but you're already Lost...in addition to just being plain-out wrong...and I do very much use that term in the Christian sense of it. There are plenty of gay Christians out there, and a fair number of them are weird Pentecostals, no it doesn't make any real sense...but that's my own lived experience and there weren't any fire ants involved. I'm serious, I have a church background and I grew up going to church and reading and studying the Lord's Word and believe it or not, none of this hoodoo woo woo shit is even necessary. 

But it's popular because it makes small angry people feel good, and gives them an excuse to try to conquer the world in the name of their dystopian urges or some shit. These people aren't Christians, they're fanatics. This shit isn't religion, it's murder.

I mean, like literally, if these motherfuckers were forced to admit that Jesus won the victory over Sin when He died on the Cross...well that'd give them one less figurative stick to beat LGBT people and anybody else they don't like, and they can't have that, can they??

It'd also give them a lot less justification for acting like jackasses in public, or for their shitty politics, now wouldn't it?

But there's a catch: Just because you want to do everything the hard way so you can justify being a shitty person doesn't change what the actual Truth is in strictly Christian terms. That Jesus died and rose again and thus Saved you from actually having to do anything at all, much less this kind of crap might be inconvenient for your narrative...but too damned bad.

And people like that then proceed to tell on themselves by going whole-hog into all this other pointless Mumbo Jumbo, Unga Bunga horseshit that has no basis in reality.

I mean, you can believe that Donald Trump is God and here to save us from the Second Coming of Hillary Clinton all you want...but that doesn't make any of it true; All it does is tell the world you never got over the 1990's. Grow up.

I mean this seriously; Nobody is going to replace a major candidate with 23 days to go before an election. Hell, it was a close-run-enough thing doing it with five months to go, and I was worried when I saw that's what happened. Well, by the next morning, I was absolutely floored by the fact that Harris basically grew her own independent campaign operation in less than 24 hours.

I wrote about it: Yes We Can

The whole fucking problem with these idiots is that a Black man said "Yes We Can" so now these fucking racist fools are utterly stuck on "No We Can't."

And they'll stick with it even if that's what destroys them.

In fact, if anybody needs to be replaced, it's Trump.

But the Republicans have to keep Trump lest his MAGA cult get bored and wander off. It's not just that JD Vance makes pretty much any Democrat, Mitt Romney or my ferret that sleeps all the time look like a banger of a candidate...it's that Republicans as they are now simply cannot field anybody with more Charisma than a piece of 80-grit sandpaper and they need to pull a big bait-and-switch with Trump to get the Religious Right into power. Never mind that the character of the faction itself has changed to the point of being something altogether alien to the American character and dominate by foreign Catholics who see Rome itself, and the current Pope, as too "liberal." If you think these ass-clowns would look at a bunch of dipshit Pentecostals acting out and see it as anything but an excuse to call up the Inquisition and (literally) go Heretic hunting, you're just plain wrong.

I know people who've bought into the Trad Catholic shit. Those people? They want the blood.

Their entire plan if they get elected is to (at best) 25th Amendment Trump, break up the USA to "Other" any regions or states that are too resistant and can's simply be plowed over, probably kill or drive out anybody else that won't convert to their bullshit (especially any MAGA's or Republicans who are like "Hey, wait a minute!") or who is unwilling to work as slave labor, and THEN run the US, it's economy and global power, health metrics, standards of living, and this and that into the fucking ground so they can basically rebuild the shit as medieval Europe, but with modern weapons and go on that Crusade they've been spanking the monkey to the idea of for 20 years...although I'm not really sure, having in the process shed population and wealth by orders of magnitude...how these idiots would expect to pay for something like an F-35 Lightning II after that, much less find somebody with the basic physical skills and the education needed to fly or maintain the goddamn thing.

And I'm not sure they care.

More to the point, these motherfuckers don't actually want to go crusading in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq or some other place in the Middle East, much less against a genuine atheistic peer-level threat to their Power like China or Russia. They want to do that shit right here in America and against their own damned neighbors.

Because all that other shit isn't even real to them, which is really weird because JD Vance at least, has been to Iraq.

The thing is, if you base one part of your whole bit on woo woo bullshit because it feels good or justifies what you think you want to do; It's probably a safe bet that the bullshit and the tendency towards shouting "Unga Bunga" while dancing around a fire is going to infect anything and everything else you think you're going to do.

They know. They know what's real. They just think because they can bamboozle a bunch of willfully pig-ignorant cultists and somebody like Donald Trump, that they can fuck around and not find out. Hell, these assholes think they can lie to God.

I'm not gonna lie, this shit has ruined organized religion for me in general, and ruined Christianity in particular.

Gravity is still gonna gravity no matter how much you lie about it. I don't get how people don't get that, and it applies to spiritual matters as much as anything else.

It only gets worse, though.

 They think they can wage war the same way the Russians are doing it. Well, that's kind of hard if half your army is incapacitated by some disease because you didn't provide proper sanitation facilities or vaccinate your troops or something, not to mention the fact that if you don't think these corrupt idiots would steal the money meant for ammunition or food or weapons and spend it on blow and underage hookers and Grindr rent-boys you're wrong and you just haven't been paying attention.

And they think acting all Churchy on Sundays will hand-wave that shit away.

And no, they don't give a shit how much suffering they cause or who dies as long as they can insulate the top 0.01% of rich assholes (and themselves) from enough of the worst effects of their bullshit that those guys keep giving them money.

But the whole damn point is, this is America. That's the exact kind of shit this country was created to stand against. We do not have to put up with this bullshit. None of this needs to happen.

Hell, you don't have to even specifically be against anything to defeat this garbage, you just have to stand for freedom.

And vote accordingly; Right now like it or not (and no, I don't always like it) that means voting for Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party in general.

It's like this; You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You're either willing to stand against the fall of night or you're not.

It's that simple. These fucking people will do all this shit to you. They don't care. 

Well, somebody's gonna have to.

Freedom ain't free, sometimes you have to fight for it, and that's exactly what this will come down to in the end.

I'm warning you that these assholes, be they Republicans or Russians, don't want it any other way. That they're as incompetent and self-interested as they are means it shouldn't be all that hard to defeat them.

But you still gonna have to stand up.

Слава Україна!

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

Two

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

Bonus content in honor of the fact that Columbus Day was just a couple days ago.

Fuck that motherfucker, too.

And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama