The Golden Image (The Wheel Turns, Five.)

 And war broke out in heaven Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. ~Revelation 12:7-9

...

The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits — not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. ~Ronald Reagan

I saw this last night.

Trump is apparently mad because flags will still be flown at half-staff when he is inaugurated.

Seriously, bro, this is not about you.

A man, a former President no less, died.

Just stop and think about that, for a second.

I mean, shit, you know when Trump goes he's gonna think that the whole world should cry basically forever at his own passing, and try to get some half-baked imbecile to demand it. Good God, you'd think he'd just leave the official, by-law and rather shorter regular period of mourning for somebody else just be, lest anybody else simply ignore his own when the time comes.

And it will, death is a part of life. The Wheel of the seasons, of the year, whatever, turns whether one wants it to or not. We are all going to get there.

Jimmy Carter is standing tall before his God, with his wife at his side, and looking at the prospect of the ultimate Happily Ever After, for all of eternity. I doubt he gives much of a damn what Trump does.

And that...that right there...is pretty much the one thing that Donald Trump can't and won't ever have, not least because he's a man who measures destiny and everything else solely in terms of material computation and he doesn't believe in jack shit.

And if we're being honest, Trump is only the force that he is because he fascinates fools, and other people who aren't fools put up with his bullshit.

And in angry, debased, increasingly stupid Idiot America, there's way the fuck too much of that kind of crap going around here in America.

And apparently Elon Musk is trying to spread it around the rest of the world, too.

It doesn't seem to be going all that well, most Brits and Germans seem pretty pissed off about Elon's bullshit.

I mean, fuck, after a couple decades of Tory misrule, topped off by Brexit, the freaking far-Right is lower than dirt in the UK. Most Germans basically have the idea that AFD are just slightly reheated Nazis and if what I've seen about them on social media is half accurate, they ain't wrong. Thus the evidence points towards the fact that Elon Musk is, himself, a fucking Nazi.

If we don't get control of this dude...and mind you, America is a nation...we're either capable of acting like it or we're not and we might as well just pack it up and start being 50 little countries right now...he's going to cost us friends, international standing and whatever respect most of the rest of the world still has for us.

And like any manipulative person, he's not doing it for any sense of greater good, he's doing it for the greater glory of Elon Fucking Musk, and for exactly the same reason that my ex-wife tried to come between me and the rest of my family and my friends at the time...because that's what shitty little manipulators do when they want to isolate somebody to use that person as a toy.

Except there's 330 million of the rest of us and only one of him, and other countries have far less tolerance for the shenanigans of the uber-wealthy than we apparently do.

Which is a good thing, because left unchecked, if Elon Musk lives long enough, sooner or later that asshole is simply going to try to buy the Earth and rename it Planet X or some bullshit.

It's better for all concerned...including him...if this narcissistic stupidity gets checked now.

The funny part is, Elon is probably going to fuck up and steal Trump's thunder at the wrong time. MAGA itself is already against Elon and Vivek so most likely Trump is gonna have to kick both of them to the curb sooner or later just to keep his mob happy...and I won't mind that a bit unlike most of the rest of the shit these people do. More to the point, sooner or later Trump is gonna realize he has a lot more guns at his disposal (simply by activating MAGA, never mind the rest of it) than these two idiot billionaires do. If Trump decides to just...take their money...well, normally I would object to that on various principles but in this case I'll make an exception.

You lay down with scorpions, guys, sooner or later you're gonna find out you're the frog and you're just gonna get stung.

There's two kinds of people who gather around Golden Images, the fascinated fools who want to bow down, and the cynical conniving wannabe-Priests who want to chip off some of that gold for themselves.

And if the idea of the Nation-state isn't or can't be bigger than just one person after all this time...even if from time to time it does end up being represented by assholes...what the fuck are we even doing here??

The funny part is, Trump wants to be That Guy, but he doesn't even have any kind of bigger ideal than himself, which Elon seems to even if those ideas are basically shit...and not just shit but the kind of tedious shit like fascism and racism that's already been tried and didn't work out very well the first time. Apparently the Apartheid fail-son is gonna have to fuck around and find out for himself.

Funny enough, he picked a country where it's illegal to be a Nazi to screw with next. "Hubris and the fall of Man" about covers the title of that chapter.

Are you tired of this crap yet?

'Cause I sure am, I don't want to live in the Demon-haunted, Magical Techno-Gnostic World these moneyed narcissistic idiots want to create.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

It's that simple.

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Nebuchadnezzar spoke and said unto them, Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship the golden image which I have set up?
Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer, and all kinds of music, ye fall down and worship the image which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.
If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.
But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.
~Daniel 3:14-18

Four

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

Fiery The Angels Fell (The Wheel Turns, Four.)

Joe: For the last time, I'm pretty sure what's killing the crops is this Brawndo stuff.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

Attorney General: "So wait a minute. What you're saying is that you want us to put water on the crops.

Joe: Yes.

Attorney General: Water. Like out the toilet?

Joe: Well, I mean, it doesn't have to be out of the toilet, but, yeah, that's the idea.

Secretary of State: But Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Attorney General: It's got electrolytes.

Joe: Okay, look. The plants aren't growing, so I'm pretty sure that the Brawndo's not working. Now, I'm no botanist, but I do know that if you put water on plants, they grow.

Secretary of Energy: Well, I've never seen no plants grow out of no toilet.

Secretary of State: Hey, that's good. You sure you ain't the smartest guy in the world?

Joe: Okay, look. You want to solve this problem. I want to get my pardon. So why don't we just try it, okay, and not worry about what plants crave?

Attorney General: Brawndo's got what plants crave.

Secretary of Energy: Yeah, it's got electrolytes.

Joe: What are electrolytes? Do you even know?

Secretary of State: It's what they use to make Brawndo.

~From the film Idiocracy.

...

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. ~Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

I saw this when I was out and about, this morning.

Honestly, after all the crap he's done in the last couple years, do we really trust Elon fucking Musk with space exploration, let alone interplanetary colonization??

I wouldn't.

But the actual goddamned problem is that "Conservatives" positively cannot wait to live under the mercurial whims of some unelected tyrant or some similar dumbass shit, especially somebody like Elon who has...literally...the murderous sensibilities of an colonialist Emerald mine owner and the (apparently) Dickensian social ideas to go right along with it.

Like, seriously, didn't humanity spend a few centuries trying this shit already and find out that it didn't work very good if you weren't already massively rich??

And these fucking people want to hand Mars over to this asshole for colonization?? Like, seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people??

It's like the Empire from Star Wars meets Idiocracy in a bar...

It's like the source code of these fucking people is the thoughts of some 18th Century Tory in Boston who looked at the colonists rising up against Mad King George and decided that the Mad King was their guy simply because he's the King and he has some kind of a right to inflict his ravening insanity on the world...including them. Seriously, there's a reason nobody whose ancestors had to live under it believes in the "Divine Right of Kings" anymore.

Like, come on, people.

We already carry around these little bricks of technology which give us instant access to 10,000 years of human history. Why should we have to speed-run the last five or six centuries simply because these fucking assholes are too illiterate and/or lazy to read about the shit that already happened when we've previously run these kind of experiments and they don't want to learn anything unless it's experiential and they both find out the hard way and aren't given a choice??

I'm tired of this bullshit.

I saw this when I got up this morning, too, and while I have no idea if the Vegas Cybertruck explosion was a terrorist attack or some idiot (also apparently an active duty US Army soldier, fuckin' Jesus) just drove the damn thing through a puddle or some shit, the image itself seems emblematic of the whole mess we've gotten ourselves into.

It seems emblematic of the future "Conservatives" want, one of draconian rule by utter madmen.

Trouble is, now we have to figure a way out of it.

And I think the Universe is sick of our crap, to be honest.

The trouble with modern "Conservative" thought is that it's become so overridden with conspiratorial thoughts, fear of change and hubristic narcissism that...honestly, at the end of the day there's not a lot of distinction between this crap and straight-up mental illness.

They've lost the understanding that change is going to come and the Wheel is going to turn no matter what you do...and a lot of these people are going to get crushed by their own bad choices and fear.

The trouble is, they've all decided they want to drag the rest of us under the treads so we get squished right along with them.

That's not conservatism, it's insanity.

You either believe in freedom and the future or you don't.

And freedom isn't free, sometimes you have to fight for it.

Same goes for any future that isn't a techno-dystopia.

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Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled around their shores; burning with the fires of Orc. ~Roy Batty, Blade Runner (A deliberate misquote of William Blake's "America: A Prophecy.)

Three

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. ~Chief Seattle.

Original Post

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

The Spider In The Web Of Life (The Wheel Turns, Three.)

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. ~Chief Seattle.

...

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

There's something that's been bothering me.

On the American Right, there seems to be an escalating level of nihilism. Like, these fucking people have basically decided if they, as extreme far-right White men, can't have everything they think they want, nobody should have anything at all. I've been writing about this garbage since a couple days after the election, and it only seems to be getting worse.

Some nut was just busted by the FBI in Virginia with more pipe bombs and other improvised explosives than the FBI has ever seized in its entire history up to this point.

Said nut's claimed ideology, literally "No Lives Matter" not people, not people's pets, not even their own lives, apparently. Death and Destruction and solipsistic narcissism and fascism for their own sake appears to be the only goal of this alleged group

Of course, it sort of dovetails with that of the conservative movement and the Republican Party since around 2015, but I digress. And it probably takes it a bit further than even most of those people would like.

And those people are spiraling out.

The wheel turns, and these nuts seem to want to make the turning of the age claim as many unnecessary victims as possible, just for the fun of it. Me? I think that's pretty fucked up.

As a veteran with various levels of training in certain things, as a ferret owner (Seriously) and hell...as a person...I think it's necessary to point out that this shit bothers me on a fundamental level. Being what I am, a citizen and a veteran, I figure I have a goddamned duty to civilization, not least because I'd never have made it this far without it! For shit's sake I'm 51 years old and I know people who didn't last this long. We as a species decided starting a couple centuries ago that conflicts and wars needed things like laws and rules to govern the behavior of armies, leaders and governments and since we first started to decide that...there's been enough atrocities and breaking of said rules that #1 We keep having to add more and punish war criminals, #2 We know why this is necessary and #3 Much of the world has gotten sick of this bullshit.

But there's always nuts out there who think that glorious revolution, holy war or whatever the fuck will get them whatever bullshit they think they want.

And it's the stated goal of people like Kash Patel to have the FBI chasing after *Checks Notes* conspiracy theories that exist only in his own bug-eyed, spittle-flecked, fevered head.

And then, there was a car attack in New Orleans in the small hours of this morning and the driver was apparently killed in a firefight with the police. Think about that, for a second.

In case you wonder why I think there's a very good chance that America is going to come flying apart in the next couple of years...well, that and crazy Republicans are continuing to go after other equally crazy  Republicans...basically for not being racist enough. There's a reason that's long been one of my tells to start worrying about a civil war.

But I'm here to tell you, this shit is pretty much gonna be like The Walking Dead, but with morons, not Zombies. Not that there's really all that much of a difference when it comes to fanatics. Except, Maybe, technically, you could argue that the Zombies are more open to new ideas??

We really need to find a way to force a cut-off point into these fucking people's desire to live in the Dark Ages. If they're not going to have a bottom of the barrel, then the rest of us need to construct one and make it stick.

Nihilism, shamelessness and stupidity are pretty much starting to reach an Extinction Level Event amount for some of these fucking people and I say that as a former Republican who had to listen to some of the other Republicans bitch about stupidity and the need for "Population control" 20 years ago. (And by the way, I had it figured out then how big of a red flag that was. I know from my experience in Bosnia that mass death poses Apocalyptic-level threats all its own, and tends to cause more if it goes unchecked. 

I wrote about this pretty extensively during COVID-19 in fact.

And by the way, there were a lot of people trying to pretend it was all 2017 meme-warfare grade bullshit then, too, or that it was all some kind of big joke or bullshit conspiracy theory that wouldn't affect them.

And when MAGA doesn't get what they want, or at least doesn't get much of it but they see that the money people get everything, I'm going to say this will probably get worse.

And the money people, like Elon, will win this round and probably the next several, simply because Trump wants their money more than he needs the cheers of the mob at this point.

I think it's a safe bet, if today is any indication, that things are gonna fly off the handle pretty soon.

There's a shit-ton of idiots out there (mostly people who don't understand the subject matter, or much else) that think Trump promised them "Blood! Blood for the Blood God, Skulls, Skulls for the Skull Throne!" And when they don't get it, or at least don't get it from him, they're gonna be mad.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You either believe in protecting your own life and the lives of those you care about or you don't.

You either believe in civilization or you don't.

There's no middle ground to be had, here, and when things start to fray and we start to undo the Web of Life, there'll be endless knock-on effects that nobody even thought of precisely because the world we live in is complex and interdependent and it will affect you. And people are going to have to pull together and put up with a lot of shit just to survive. If you thought the COVID-19 pandemic was bad, this will be worse.

But too many people fancy themselves the Spider in the Web Of Life, and they all think other people are the fly.

We'd best start preparing to deal with this, because too many people couldn't be bothered to get off their ass and vote against this bullshit.

God damn it, White People.

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Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning-hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong. Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O Lord. Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. ~Joel 3:9-14

Two

...We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom Of Fear (2004)