Red Horse (American Revelation, Explained, Three.)

 And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.

~Revelation 6:4

...

Evey: Can I ask about what you said on the telly?

V: Yes.

Evey: Did you mean it?

V: Every word.

Evey: You really think that blowing up parliament is going to make this country a better place?

V: There's no certainty, only opportunity.

Evey: I think you can be pretty certain that if anyone does show up, Creedy will black-bag everyone of them.

V: People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Evey: And you are going to make that happen by blowing up a building?

V: The building is a symbol, as is the act of destroying it. Symbols are given power by the people. Alone, a symbol is meaningless, but with enough people, blowing up a building can change the world.

Evey: I wish I believed that was possible, but every time I've seen the world change it's always been for the worse.

~From the film V For Vendetta.

...

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 last night. In a United Nations general assembly vote, the United States was the only country to vote against creating an "International Day Of Hope."

Good God, Republicans, talk about showing your ass. I mean, I get that about the only thing Republicans seem to collectively love...even more than money or political power...is being miserable sons of bitches, but for fuck's sake both North Korea and Russia voted in favor of this thing.

Like, what's even the damn point??

You know, before this is over I bet Putin ends up regretting backing Elon and Trump. If these guys are fascists, well, they're also soft-handed bitches who project weakness by pretty much every action. 

Seriously, somebody shot ONE CEO a few months back and they can't show a picture of the guy without him being surrounded by a fuck-ton of cops. I hear people have been tagging and torching Tesla cars and Tesla dealers lately...so they seriously need 25 cops in formation in front of the place?? I think one or two sitting out front in a police cruiser would probably have sent the same message more efficiently.

Isn't "Government Efficiency" the big buzz-word lately??

Of course, why be efficient when these fucking people can put their bumptious fascism on full display??

The Red Horse of Revelation these fuckin' people ain't. 

At least not on purpose. (Perhaps by incompetence?)

I mean if you want to get really technical about it, Donald Trump has had a busy couple of months. He's singlehandedly created Canadian Nationalism and European Militarization (neither of which was much of a thing 4 months ago) crashed the Biden economy (a thing I'm already starting to see here) Kowtowed to Russia (a backward 17th century shithole) removed America's global hegemony and superpower status, and thrown all this away hoping it would somehow give Putin a hand up in reconstructing the *Checks Notes* late Soviet Union??

And while I'm at it, if these morons actually do pick a fight with Canada, remember it ain't just Canada. Canada is a part of both the British Commonwealth and NATO. That's like half the world, right there.

And let's not forget these fucking people are gutting the government and the military and reducing American state capacity by the day.

Yeah, that's right. Supporting even one major military operation takes a lot more than just proper military logistics and a good amount of supplies built up with a way to get it on the battlefield where it's needed. The guy pulling that trigger needs to know his family is safe back home, his government isn't a shit-show and that he'll get his paycheck on time. Not to mention, that the Black guy watching his back will still be there when he needs his back watched.

Yeah, that's another thing: People need to be able to trust their government. Other countries need to be able to trust ours. The list goes on.

If this blows up all the way, I fully expect we'll lose, and that Australia ends up with Alaska, Guam, Hawaii and the West Coast, the British burn the White House again and my ass ends up living in the new Canadian province of Lower Ontario. India will end up employing American tech-bros as call center tech support guys for the same, and you "Conservatives" can pretty much expect you'll have to learn a thing or two and you will lose your guns, or at least face much tighter regulations. 

Toting an AK-47 around Walmart like you expect to get jumped by Al Qaeda while buying eggs is probably not going to fly.

And if you're the kind of fragile punk-ass White Man who thinks you need all that, well...I strongly suggest you get your head out of your ass and look around and see how the rest of the world is reacting to our bullshit.

Ya know the big line about Trump from his first term, like it meant something, was "He fights."

The observation about it that I remember was "We lose."

And ya know, I get where this shit comes from.

Yes, I used to be a Republican.

It's the "Conservative" mentality that they could somehow take on the whole rest of the world (including all the Americans that they don't like) and somehow win by sheer Craggy Bumboclatically-glaring Cowboy Masculinity. It's the whole John Wayne thing. And it's stupid.

The thing you have to remember about John Wayne, though, is that John Wayne wasn't even John Wayne, literally. Dude wasn't a tough guy, he just played one on TV while being an adulterous, drunk, racist asshole off-screen. Of course his was more the "Great White Father" brand of racism than ranting about them N-words like George Wallace. As far as I'm aware, the only person John Wayne ever even considered attempting to actually assault was Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather, but security at the Oscars prevented him from doing so.

But dude was a Republican, even if he did have the occasional bout of common sense regarding his politics, so Republicans think John Wayne was the ultimate tough guy.

This is how Mike Pence could post a picture of himself staring intently across the Korean DMZ while wearing a bomber jacket and post it on Twitter and expect not to just get laughed at (and by the way that was for a domestic Republican audience, as far as I know nobody in North Korea (even now) has Twitter or X or Whatever The Fuck It Is This Week.

But here's the thing, when stage-managed Republican crap meets the real world, Republicans tend to actually lose.

I'm serious, there was a time when most Republicans were not like this.

But the truth is, there were at least some that were always like this.

And, worse, you can add as I've said before that these fucking people have an attention span for serious events that lasts about two weeks at the longest before they spiral out into conspiracy theories and crazy shit. If COVID-19 was most of these people's first crisis (and they failed that test) how do any of them really think they're going to weather all this crazy shit that Republicans are doing now??

Like, does anybody really think that declaring war on the rest of the civilized world is going to come without any personal inconveniences??

I mean, if you think about it, these motherfuckers want to pick fights with the Commonwealth? BAE Systems, a British company, owns one motherfucker of a lot of our Military Industrial Complex. That could get...complicated if Trump tries to invade Canada.

You'd think these fucking people would have thought about stuff like that.

Or do they just not care??

And that's the most likely answer, because the driving force for a lot of these guys is narcissism, whether it's religious narcissism or just plain mental illness.

But I consider several things to be safe bets.

#1 Any war these idiots get us into, we're going to lose.

#2 Their actual goal whether it's part of a wider conflict or the result of that wider conflict not being possible or winnable is to fight other Americans.

#3 They absolutely intend to break up this country, because current wider American culture. Most of America will not reject the idea of Hope. Some of us may hope for some deviant things, even too much of MAGA if you really look at it isn't interested in hopelessness...or at least not more of it...and does not valorize the idea of squatting in the dark and shitting on your own shoes while peering suspiciously out of the firing ports of your bunker through a rifle scope.

#4 Russian culture, on the other hand, is like 11 time zones of paranoia and just fine with #3.

#5 You Do The Math where that puts whatever part of the former USA these ass-clowns get, both internationally and socially.

But of course, there's a catch.

We know they're Oligarch-raiding the USA in preparation for a Soviet-style breakup.

Which, whatever wars there may be because of it, leads to another certainty:

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. ~Revelation 6:5-6

By which I mean that standards of living in the former Soviet Union dropped massively after its fall, especially in terms of health care, social metrics and support for the elderly.

And that, too, is both a goal and part of the plan. It's less social Darwinism than Stalinism with a gilded veneer, or as I've put it before, it's the Killing Fields, but with a mall and shit.

Any war these motherfuckers get us into, we're going to end up fighting with rifles, machine guns and Technical Trucks, while the Republican war profiteers still make bank off the shit.

I'm serious.

There is no bottom with these fucking people.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press

Two

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