Q-Berty, Again (American Revelation XXI, Ten.)

[In the Preox-Morlana planet of Morlana One, Deputy Inspector Syril Karn is confused his superior won't open an investigation into the murder of two Pre-Mor officers]

Chief Inspector Hyne: Tough case. Bad timing.

Syril Karn: I'm sure that in several days, with the proper resources, I can bring this case to a-

Hyne: Stop! And I don't just mean the talking. I mean stop. [closes his office door] This case appears to bear all the hallmarks of what I like to describe as regrettable misadventure.

Karn: Sir?

Hyne: Two dedicated Pre-Mor employees caught in the sad orbit of a rare calamity.

Karn: I don't understand.

Hyne: I want you to conjure a suitable accident, and let's make sure it's on the far side of the plaza. Let's get it outside the Leisure Zone.

Karn: But they were murdered!

Hyne: No, they weren't. They were killed in a fight. They were in a brothel, which we're not supposed to have. The expensive one, which they shouldn't be able to afford. Drinking Revnog, which we're not supposed to allow. Both of them supposedly on the job, which is a dismissible offense. They clearly harassed a human with dark features and chose the wrong person to annoy. I suspect they died rushing to aid someone in distress. Nothing too heroic. We don't need a parade. They died being helpful. Something sad but inspiring in a mundane sort of way. [regards Karn] You look stricken, Deputy Inspector. Are you absorbing my meaning here?

Karn: Trying to, sir.

Hyne: When I said bad timing, I wasn't referring to the fact you spent all night worrying this. I mean that I am on my way this very morning to an Imperial Regional Command review, where I'll be asked to make a report about our crime rates, and the goal of that speech, should you ever be asked to deliver it, is brevity. Minimizing the time the Empire spends thinking about Preox-Morlana benefits our superiors and, by extension, everyone here at the Pre-Mor Security Inspection team, which at the moment includes you. [dons his coat, picks up his briefcase and moves to leave] Don't put your feet on my desk in my absence, and let's have an accident report waiting when I get back.

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S1.E1 "Kassa."

...

We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley

...

Eli Sunday: Daniel, I'm asking if you'd like to have business with the Church of the Third Revelation in developing this lease on young Bandy's thousand acre tract. I'm offering you to drill on one of the great undeveloped fields of Little Boston!  

Daniel Plainview: I'd be happy to work with you.

Eli Sunday: You would? Yes, yes, of course. That’s wonderful.

Daniel Plainview: But there is one condition for this work.

Eli Sunday: All right.

Daniel Plainview: I'd like you to tell me that you are a false prophet. I'd like you to tell me that you are, and have been, a false prophet, and that God is a superstition.

~From the film There Will Be Blood.

I wasn't going to write anything today, among other things it's fucking Labor Day weekend and I'm working five nights in a row.

But then last night, I saw this bullshit.

Somebody's trying to bring back the Q-Anon bullshit except now they're calling it "Q+" or something. No, Google has not caught up with whatever that means and I don't want to know bad enough to go looking for it.

Whatever it is? Apparently the "World" is supposed to just "Understand" when Trump burns it down??

Something tells me it's not going to work out like that, just sayin.'

All this conspiracy theory and racist crap is, and that the entire Trump thing as it's become is...it's a distraction, a circus act dog-and-pony show while Republicans disrespect the American people, crap all over America itself, and loot the country of everything they can before Trump dies and they have to face the goddamn consequences of this Godless bullshit.

And because Trump's health appears to be failing, this shit is ramping up into overdrive and they're literally trying to set it up so that when he goes, the whole damn country comes flying apart, because they can't win if they have to face all of us.

All that all of this crap is, all that any of this crap is...is a shield to hide Republican corruption or failing that, escape consequences.

And what with the Epstein list being out there, they know that shield is wearing thin.

And I'm here to tell you, we wouldn't be here with this shit if the Church hadn't tolerated all type of child abuse and conspiracy theory crap and Spiritualist idiocy basically forever. I (unfortunately) do happen to be aware of the books from which Jack Posobiec got his uh, "Theology." 

When I read part of one of them, I was a devout conservative (if pretty mainstream) Baptist and...to put it in the vernacular of the specific time in which I was doing this, also because the subject of the books kept coming up in the Men's Group I was helping to run at the time...it had about as much bearing on actual Christianity or sound Doctrine thereof as the ever-present bullshit TV commercials for "Miss Cleo" (a fortune-teller with a fake Jamaican accent that was kind of all over the place in the late 1990's) did.

This stuff, written back in the 1980's by a guy named Frank Peretti in a series of books loosely called "This Present Darkness" postulates a world in which every damn little thing could be or was influenced by prayer, and everybody had hordes of angels or devils around them and if you prayed hard enough could determine (for example) something as simple as if your car would start or not.

Me, as a 24 year old Baptist pretty much did a good impression of my "Glares Bumboclaatically" meme that I still use on occasion, when I saw that.

No, none of this works like that. In the real world, even as a much more religious person then, than what I am now, I knew (from experience) that short of (usually human) misconduct, real interactions with the spiritual realm (at least as far as Christianity is concerned) are...and should be...fairly rare. We do not all have little angels or little devils sitting on our shoulders. Humans have moral agency, this shit should be self-explanatory to anybody with the least bit of grounding in the Abrahamic faiths or modern science or Western culture and that list goes on.

What people like that term as "Prayer" or "Religion" is basically Sorcery in Biblical terms, trying to use spiritual powers to manipulate the Universe, and it's a Sin for a reason.

They don't believe in or want Jesus, these fucking people want to have Magic powers that they can lord over other folks and it really is that simple.

I get that a lot of White American Dipshits thirst after living in some kind of magical world, because they're bored with the banalities of modern life and this, that and the other thing. I've also known people...mostly Arabs, Black Africans and Native Americans who come from traditional cultures and also accept beliefs like Christianity, Islam or for that matter secular Americanism and they ALL #1 Have to make all that stuff fit together and #2 Live in a world infinitely more complex and (to them, anyway) sometimes dangerous than the mostly bland self-constructed big-box world of White American Evangelical Idiot Consumerism and its bullshit-ass Prosperity Gospel religion.

And I've seen enough to know that there's something to Traditional stuff and it's not something to fuck around with, where on the other hand if some dopey Pentecostal author or preacher or secular right-wing conspiracy nut predicts a bunch of things that do not come to pass, within a couple weeks everybody forgets about it and it's a normal day (at least for everybody but them. Maybe.)

The problem is that the hate all this crap has generated and continues to manufacture is going to eat this country up, soon.

And no, the world will not understand nor will the rest of us Americans who aren't like this and who will have to clean up the goddamn mess one way or the other.

Freedom and liberty require some kind of belief in Truth and engagement with the real world, as well as acting with a degree of rationality and self-interest.

Trumpian Q-Berty? Well, apparently you can believe whatever bullshit you want, or something as long as Trump is your "god." Apparently what with a bunch of people thinking that Trump was gonna die over the weekend, now some of the Q-Nuts are trying to say Trump will just "Ascend to Heaven" or some shit like that. No, bro, you're in a cult. You're being manipulated. Worse, you seem to want to be.

Slavery sucks, whether it's enforced with chains and whips or simple cultic groupthink. 

I don't give a damn.

MAGA and Q-Anon and all that shit is spiritual bondage, and apparently These Fucking People will say literally anything to stay in it.

I wasn't taught that way. My God has never asked me to burn the world for its narcissism. My religious education was mainly about making sure I picked up a "Christian" idea or two and that such things stuck.

That's why Fundamentalism and various other forms of NO, IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY!!! Don't. Work. The second there's nobody standing there with a big stick or a notice of Excommunication to enforce whatever "THIS WAY!!" is, most people just wander off and do what they want.

Because the odds are, nobody really wanted to act that way in the first place, they was just crowd-followers and dumb people who got caught up in something.

Part of Freedom on a society level is keeping Fascists, Grifters and Scammers under control and away from hurting too many people like that, just sayin.' Societal standards matter.

And when it comes to the balance between collective and individual rights, all far too many of These Fucking People care about is using "Individual Rights" as a stick to beat the rights of the vast majority of the populace into a pulp.

And that's true whether it's LGBT rights, the rights of People Of Color, Women's rights or even the basic human rights of the average White Christian American Idiot. 

These people don't give a fuck, and the only "Right" they want is the "Right" to kill and steal, because they'd rather do that than live.

And since "Jesus Is Coming" has stopped working for most people...because way too many people simply don't have enough actual faith to believe in a God they can't see...now they're using Trump to point to and say "He Is Coming" then pick your pocket and bash your head in when you ain't looking. When they say "Behold, he is in the desert!" Go not forth.

Like I keep saying, you either believe in freedom or you don't.

Make your choice.

Слава Україна!

For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. ~Matthew 24:27

Nine

[after Burke is revealed as the one who set the face-huggers loose on Ripley and Newt]

Hudson: [aiming his rifle at Burke] I say we grease this rat fuck-son-of-a-bitch right now!

Hicks: It just doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Ripley: He figured he could get the alien past the quarantine if one of us was... impregnated - whatever you call it - and frozen for the way home. Nobody would know about the embryos we're carrying. Me and Newt.

Hicks: Wait a minute. We would all know.

Ripley: Yes, the only way he could do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home. Namely, yours. Then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he would like to.

Hudson: Fuck! He's dead! [aims his rifle at Burke again] You're dogmeat, pal!

Burke: This is so nuts. I mean listen... listen to what you're saying. It's all paranoid delusion. It's really sad. It's pathetic.

Ripley: You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over a goddamn percentage.

~From the film Aliens.