Pride (Beginning Of Sorrows, Prequel.)

Here's a pop quiz: name the seven deadly sins. Come on, you saw that Brad Pitt movie. Lust, yeah, well, everybody gets that one, huh? Gluttony, sure. Greed, yeah. Envy, sloth, anger- or to be a little more technical, wrath. What else? What else? Let me put it this way: if you think you know the answer, and because of that, you think you're better than everybody else, then you're guilty of it! ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1 E3 "God's Chillin.'"

...

Cassian Andor: Kino. Tell them what to do. It has to be you. Come on, Kino. You do this every day. Tell them what to do.

Kino Loy: [presses PA system] My name is Kino Loy. I'm the day shift manager on Level Five. I'm speaking to you from the command center on Level Eight. We are, at this moment, in control of the facility.

Andor: Is that the best you got?

Loy: How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us. We have deactivated every floor in the facility. All floors are cold. Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it'll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and [looks at Cassian, knowing he said it] "I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want." We know they fried a hundred men on Level Two. We know that they are making up our sentences as we go along. We know that no one outside here knows what's happening. And now we know, that when they say we are being released, we are being transferred to some other prison to go and die, and that ends today! There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out! [repeats it multiple times as he leaves the command center]

Andor: Come on! Let's get out of here!

~From the series "Andor" S1 E10 "One Way Out."

...

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

I think things are going to boil over, Soon.

If I had to guess and like I've been saying for awhile, pretty much at the first sustained stretch of warm weather, I think it'll start.

Last weekend, there were protests all over the country, in many major cities and many more not-so-major ones, including places that I know, like Manistee, Michigan that are not known for that kind of thing.

(And all a hell of a lot of comfortable White People managed to demonstrate was their own cluelessness.)

The effects of the economy crashing out because of Trump's tariff bullshit are already beginning to become visible.

The Right, of course, is in denial about this, just the same as they're in denial about Trump's tariffs and the effects thereof. Sunday night, I saw somebody crowing about Zimbabwe being willing to negotiate. Well, here's the thing, Zimbabwe is one of the poorest countries on Earth, starting a new currency after literally not having had one (they used the South African Rand and the US$) for many years...and they don't trade that much with us...but they can't afford a trade war, at all.

Crowing about "Winning" a "trade war" with Zimbabwe is about like thinking you're a bad ass because you found the Bonus Chest in Minecraft.

The Hubris of these fucking people is off the charts. 

Their accomplishments, not so much. 

Like, in a couple thousand years, we are going to be a mythological lesson to some other future people about not doing stupid shit.

I don't even know what else to say at this point.

Like, when I say "Hubris" I mean all these MAGA bros think they're going to own factories run by AI and staffed by robots or some shit.

Meanwhile, do any of these morons consider whether they or their neighbors might have jobs or enough food to eat?? It's simple facts of life that factories take time to build, and not everybody will get to own one. I'm sorry, but I think stuff like this shit will go down as the main long-term negative effect of shit like Cryptocurrency. It's convinced a bunch of CHUDs who work at Walmart and that have less grasp of economics than a common domestic ferret does, and no relevant skills, that they're all Billionaires-in-waiting.

Smoking marijuana, eating Cheetos, and masturbating do not constitute plans in my book. ~Walter White, Breaking Bad.

Look, at this point, either America gets over its narcissism and starts learning the facts of life, or it dies.

We live in a country in which facts and knowledge provided by experts are routinely discarded in favor of what people want to believe.

We got dudes that basically look like a pasty, red-bearded version of Jabba The Hutt who think having a rifle makes them a soldier and gives them the authority to threaten protesters for exercising their *Checks Notes* Constitutional rights.

Having been an Airman and sworn an oath to that Constitution, No. One of these things is not like the other one.

What you want to believe does not overrule reality, or for that matter, your own actual physical abilities, America. And too many of us are not the people our egos convinced us that we were.

It really is the case that a hell of a lot of Americans seem to have learned only the ability to hold out their hand and say "I want..."

And no, it's not the Black people, the Brown people, the liberals or poor people on welfare. It's not LGBT folks demanding special considerations, either.

It's the White Men.

And all these privileged American White People had best get a grip, because Trump and the Republicans and their billionaire enablers are coming for them next 'cause they figured out all "Those People" didn't really have that much money to steal from.

And it's going to come down to a fight, I'm serious.

More to the point, Republicans already don't want to have to live with the rest of us. As soon as they figure out that a majority of people (even MAGA's) are against all the shit they want to do, first they're gonna try and kill their way out of that problem...and then when that doesn't work they're going to engage in the time-honored Republican tradition of taking their ball and going home.

Except in this case, home is, like Florida and some other states with warmer weather and a compliant population. And they see themselves as taking that shit from the rest of us, and kicking out the people who live there that won't go along.

Just in case you wondered what these assholes trying to impose an ethnic and political monoculture on a diverse nation was about, well, that's how the Yugoslav Wars got started.

Republicans have decided they want to be Serbs.

They are basically looking at it like Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic were the fucking good guys in the Bosnian war. All this nonsense flows from that.

Sorry, but I was over there. No.

The tariffs and narcissistic bullying comments and reality-show-horseshit picking on immigrants and students all flows from that.

When other countries, and most of America is not impressed and does not bow down, these fucking people will react with violence. They will probably not do it well, and certainly not intelligently, but so many of these jerkoffs all think they're John Wayne...without realizing that even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne.

But people will still die, remember that.

These fucking people cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be trusted and will gladly fuck over even their own. They can only be defeated.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Privilege is only gonna get people killed.

These fucking people's idea of a Revolution doesn't give a shit about you.

So I'd suggest the rest of us stop putting up with this bullshit.

Soon.

Слава Україна!

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

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Pride goes before destruction,
And a haughty spirit before a fall.
~Proverbs 16:18