And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sits upon many waters:
With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon The Great, The Mother Of Harlots And Abominations Of The Earth.
And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.
And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carries her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.
The beast that thou saw was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.
And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sits.
And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short space.
And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goes into perdition.
And the ten horns which thou saw are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast.
These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.
These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.
And he saith unto me, The waters which thou saw, where the whore sits, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.
And the ten horns which thou saw upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.
For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. And the woman which thou saw is that great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth. ~Revelation 17, King James Version.
...
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984.
Somebody made some freakish AI rap video about "Trump Gaza" and Trump reposted it on Truth Social.
It's basically a bunch of stupid, tacky shit, clips of some magical city...kind of a cross between Dubai and the Moscow skyline mixed with clips of belly dancers, Elon eating a sandwich, gold-plated Trump-kitsch, people (including Benjamin Netanyahu) on a beach, and Trump partying it up. It'd be ridiculous if it wasn't so disturbing.
And honestly, the reason it disturbs me may not be the reason it disturbs most people.
Like I've said, I was an End Times Prophecy guy.
The End Times Narrative that I was taught claimed that in the End Times, Babylon would be rebuilt as some golden magical city, to serve as the End Of Days capital for the Beast of Revelation...inevitably a bumptious fool that "Conservative" Christian writers tried to portray as a Leftist. Basically, if you think about it...if Donald Trump had stayed a Democrat, that's what these fucking people would be saying about him.
While a lot of individual people's stuff, the Left Behind series books for example, claimed New Babylon would be built/rebuilt at, or as something close to or adjoining or near the original location of ancient Babylon in modern Iraq...neither the Bible nor the 1990s narrative itself actually specified that.
Historically, Technically, that's with good reason, because looking at it through the lens of culture and time and interpretation, Babylon was clearly a stand-in for Rome, and Rome a metaphor for Empire itself. I mean that's literally what it is...if you read the text with that stuff in mind.
Mythologically, not so much.
Because that's what the End Times narrative as I was taught it was, mythology. In actuality, I mean, hell according to most accepted ways of reading the Bible this is mostly considered a bunch of shit that John Nelson Darby and Cyrus I. Scofield made up whole-cloth; It's no more true than saying that Athena was born from and sprang fully armed and armored from the head of Zeus because one of the other gods split his head open with an axe because he had a headache.
But right or wrong, people tend to get more excited about mythology than critiques of Empire no matter what century or holy text they're written in.
No, it doesn't have to make sense to you.
And along that line, something in my brain wonders if all this DOGE bullshit is Elon and his Nazi hacker kids trying to strip-mine America so Trump and his cabal of super-rich guys can buy the Gaza Strip from Israel and turn it into some kind of debased Billionaire-Shangri-La right smack in the middle of the Middle East. In other words, these assholes think that would be trading up.
In a way, technically I suppose these motherfuckers might want to try to write themselves into the mythos out of pure narcissism, but then that part of me that became an End Times Prophecy guy when I was still a young Air Force Sergeant listening to a couple of more-senior NCO's talking about all this shit in the library at KI Sawyer Air Force Base clicks on and says...hey, wait a minute!
This whole Trump thing made me start believing in the End Times again a long damn time ago. It's such that I've maintained since about the middle of 2016 that Trump is some kind of bullshit test run for the actual Beast Of Revelations.
And if so it's a test that the Christians in particular have failed absolutely miserably.
And worse, they don't even care.
Nobody acts more like the Bible is all crap than the Evangelical Christians do.
Remember that.
Because as to what such a place would actually look like, it's probably very important.
Let me put it another way:
I give it about a week before every radical Jihadist in the Sandbox and his uncle Habib feels super-ass empowered and starts going apeshit on principle.
Crisis after crisis after crisis as these mooks end up shooting it out with the IDF one week and Radical Islam the next, probably causing a total and rather bloody political realignment in Israel in the process as the Israelis realize what the fuck they let move in next door, like that shit probably would be a new war about every other damn week.
Not that we can help much because half of what's left of America is picking up the pieces and trying to rebuild and going hat-in-hand to the Canadians, the Chinese, the EU, the Ukrainians and the United Nations to try to get our shit back in order. The other half...likely a whole other country by that point... is cheering this on and scheming how to join these motherfuckers.
How long before we got sucked in, anyway?? (Not Long.)
Fuck, how long before that shit makes Iraq look like summer training at Camp Grayling??
(And yet the wealthy and their drug parties keep going.)
Expect levels of Cryptocurrency horseshit, drug addiction, organized crime, White-collar crime and other scam-fuckery like you can't even imagine. Three words: There Is No Law.
Unless you're Ali the janitor and then it's cameras and guns and roid-rage coppers fuckin' everywhere.
I'm pretty sure, aside from the ethnic cleansing these fucking people have already proposed, one could expect human rights violations on an industrialized scale...for anybody but billionaires.
You can furthermore expect that the Russians, among other people, would probably arm these assholes for free. I fully expect them to just give up on the whole Ukraine thing simply because they've already accomplished their next several goals in getting America to basically destroy itself.
Like that was effectively the point of all these various crises that Putin has been starting.
And if Trump gets this shit, then losing Syria is pretty much no big deal for Putin.
If you think it'll be a fight to deal with these motherfuckers here...oh, you have absolutely no idea what the fuck it's gonna take if they get a foothold over there.
Like you could fully expect Trump City, Gaza disorder to replace Jerusalem Syndrome among right-wing Christians. IF they even still bothered to call themselves that.
Remember, Trump is a narcissist who wants to wield absolute power. America being America, it'll probably break before he gets that here. The trouble with America is that it's full of Americans. And hardcore MAGA and Republicans cannot stop blowing the damn narcissist!
You do the math what that shit looks like if these fucking people get their own place.
Especially if it's in a part of the world they've literally idolized to the 11th Degree. I mean, the shit's bad enough here.
Like I said, it's the New World Order, run by idiots. Republicans spent so long expecting some kind of gay Leftist antichrist that they never expected it would be themselves.
You either believe in freedom or you don't.
Слава Україна!
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
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
No comments:
Post a Comment