Crazy Bitch (Left Behind Is A Lie V, Three.)

[Cassian plays Nemik's audio diary]

Karis Nemik: There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try. 

~From the Star Wars series "Andor" S1 E12 "Rix Road."

...

There's a reason for this, there's a reason education sucks, and it's the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It's never going to get any better. Don't look for it. Be happy with what you've got... because the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now... the real owners. The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. That's right. ~George Carlin

I saw this the other day.

Some idiot Republican in Congress is trying to propose a law to enable Trump to annex Greenland and rename it "Red, White And Blue-Land."

As if nobody else gets to have an opinion??

As if not one other country, but two (Greenland is a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark) would somehow have to obey This. Domestic. American. Law?

As if the fucking EU isn't already working on contingency plans to deploy a garrison there in case this stupid shit continues.

As if Greenland doesn't already have a name.

Speaking of which I have to wonder how many of these fucking idiot Republicans know why Greenland has that name or who gave it that name or why? 

For the record the first European contact with the place was a Norse explorer named Erik The Red, who'd been banished from Iceland along with his family because his father (who was also part of the travel group) had killed a man. They named it Greenland, hoping that giving it such a name would attract more settlers.

Hell, if they were who they say they are, the story of why Greenland is Greenland sounds like something Republicans should get behind, doesn't it?? Murder and bullshit, it's kind of what they do.

My ancestors, the Norse, discovered North America. Christopher Columbus was just a self-promoting asshole. Again, think about that for a second.

Why would you make laws, or teach a history, that's utter bullshit and serves no purpose??

(Unless your actual ideals are colonization and slavery, but now it's White Americans that are the ones being colonized by Elon Musk. Think. About. That. For. A. Second.)

All this stuff that's going on, it's all bullshit. Too many people are OK with this.

And more to the point, this simply isn't reality. You might as well propose a law that says the sky is Green or 2+2 = 5. Law as an instrument of "Power" not reflecting reality only works as long as people put up with that shit.

People need to stop blowing the goddamned narcissists. Screwing around with people that have personality disorders rarely ends well. It might occasionally be fun, but they tend to wreck everything.

Trust me, when it stops being fun screwing around with somebody that has a personality disorder, it stops being fun in one big goddamn hurry, and just gets very tedious, if not actively dangerous, real fast. We are fast approaching that on a national level.

Trust me, I know this from experience. There was a point where I was still playing around with my ex-wife, when she was newly my ex-wife, because on the one hand I was angry and on the other hand, toying with her and watching the early stages of the religious horseshit trip she was on was kinda fun in a revenge-based sort of way.

Until over the course of a couple days, it wasn't.

It started small, weird creepy "Christian" shit, notes left with people, things left where I could see them, etc. People warned me what she was up to. Complaints were filed. Some of the people in my ex-wife's orbit came at me. Some just acted out, in the way that Pentecostals do. Things escalated incredibly rapidly. It's one of the few times I've really been scared, 'cause I knew she'd flipped her lid and was No-Shit crazy.

One young dude very aggressively tried to preach at me, another attempted to assault me (on campus, in public, in front of witnesses) apparently not having been informed that I had actual training (which he did not.) He went to jail (for longer than he expected, as he had active warrants, yes, plural.) I went to the clinic at the insistence of the Dean of Students because while I gave better than I got, I was still bleeding. 

My ex, who'd provably set the whole thing up (and according to multiple people in the cafeteria later, had bragged about it) and done a bunch of other creepy shit over the course of two days was expelled from the college and banned from campus along with the "Christian Counselor" whose services she'd engaged for whatever bullshit reason. 

Public Safety went to question my ex (She was ultimately charged with stalking, though less came of that than I or the college administration would have liked) and when sent to make their initial assessment the cops (who doubled as firefighters and thus had the power to make the following call) conveniently discovered her apartment building was not up to fire code. 

Just sayin' the universe does not exactly bask in justice, but sometimes the stars align just right. Sometimes, you (literally) have to fight back for that to happen, though

A lot of people had my back, but I'm still not sure they'd have backed me as strongly as they did had I not defended myself when pushed. (Although for the record, I was told had I not gotten law enforcement involved, the college would have done so to whatever extent they were able.)

Sometimes people have to feel safe enough to be brave, that's just a fact of leadership.

What I want to know is, especially when these fucking wannabe fascists are as bumptious and stupid as they obviously are, why are so many Americans, of all the fuckin' people in the world, still outsourcing as much of the moral courage as they fuckin' possibly can to other people.

We're either who we say we are as a people or we're not.

Why is "Freedom" so often only a big word that we use when we can beat somebody else over the head with it, and not so much otherwise?? Why is America willing to go full Crazy Bitch on a bunch of raggedy Afghans and Arabs forever because of one successful terrorist attack, but when we get terrorized by white billionaires, we just take it, to the point of many of us being fine with giving up our freedom??

And I'm serious, writ-large, this whole Trump thing is a lot like my marriage and subsequent divorce, and the healing from it will be just as long and painful, and it will probably involve PTSD.

It's not for nothing that the title of this multi-installment series is "Left Behind Is A Lie." My ex-wife literally tried to cast me, herself, and the children she imagined us having as the Prophets of Revelation. She spewed forth so many False Prophecies and lies (and yet was very easily bullshitted herself, as I've written about a couple times on here) that to this day I cannot count them all.

Nor do I even want to try, anymore. Lies are just lies. They pervert the purpose of speech.

And much of religious dogma is a flat-out lie. If somebody's lying to you about the meaning of this Bible verse, or that one...who's to say what else they're lying to you about?? Also, people like this seem not to care if they go to hell, so long as they take you with them.

That's a big part of why I'm no longer religious and openly state that I'm not a born-again anything.

It's also not for no reason that I say there is ultimately going to be a split up of this country, functionally between those who support Trump and the kinds of things he represents (or is willing to involve himself in, for example Trump playing fuck-fuck games with the Christian Nationalists even though he isn't a Christian) and those of us who do not, and who are not willing to live with that kind of shit. It'll probably break more than that, but that will be the initial Cassus Belli.

And at the end of the day, everybody is gonna have to make a decision one way or the other.

It's not just that elderly Democratic leadership does not understand this fact, they appear not to want to. So, somebody else is gonna have to.

These fucking people aren't going to let you just live your life and pretend this isn't happening, they're fanatics and narcissists.

You're either willing to say "No More" or you're not.

And it you don't stand up and say that and mean it, and put some force behind it, this crap will never stop.

Half-measures will result in full slavery.

If other people end up having to save us, like if this Trump crap gets defeated in a war with the Chinese or the EU, we'll never get ourselves back.

If America just falls apart out of lack of interest, likewise. I've been saying for months now that the ideal of "America" as it previously existed is like a rescue ferret in a cage right now.

People are gonna have to step up to find it a home, or give it one. If we do, things might still never be quite the same, but they will be better than they are right now. If. We. Stand. Up.

Or it can live out its days supported only by those who collect things like discarded ideals or old, abandoned ferrets. We'll do what we can, but we can only do so much by ourselves.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Light has no fellowship with Darkness.

Make your choice.

Words Have Meaning.

Слава Україна!

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

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