Becoming Babylon (Day Of The Lord, Ten.)

And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.

And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. ~Revelation 6:1-2

...

Captain Ramsey: You do qualify your remarks. If someone asked me if we should bomb Japan, a simple "Yes. By all means sir, drop that fucker, twice!"

[Men laughing]

Capt. Ramsey: I don't mean to suggest that you're indecisive, Mr. Hunter. Not at all. Just, uh... complicated. 'course, that's the way the Navy wants you. Me, they wanted simple.

Hunter: Well, you certainly fooled them, sir.

Ramsey: [chuckles] Be careful there, Mr. Hunter. It's all I've got to rely on, being a simple-minded son of a bitch. Rickover gave me my command, a checklist, a target and a button to push. All I gotta know is how to push it, they tell me when. They seem to want you to know why.

Hunter: I would hope they'd want us all to know why, sir.

Ramsey: At the Naval War College it was metallurgy and nuclear reactors, not 19th-century philosophy. "War is a continuation of politics by other means." Von Clausewitz

Hunter: I think, sir, that what he was actually trying to say was a little more -

Ramsey: Complicated?

[Men laughing]

Hunter: Yes the purpose of war is to serve a political end but the true nature of war is to serve itself.

~From the film Crimson Tide.

...

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 saw this last night.

Some Norwegian asking why we can't remove a corrupt, treasonous pedophile from our political system?

He brought up that the Norwegians removed somebody from their government for stealing a pair of sunglasses.

(Good for them, at least somebody in the world cares about right and wrong.)

Well, homie, the short answer is that America's wealthy and the Republican Party have convinced a third of the country that they get to steal the sunglasses too.

And, more broadly, half of America (including a lot of alleged "Liberals") just likes the idea of stealing shit.

There's just a lot of people in our country that would rather kill and steal than live.

Worse, in America, even right under the nose of the global (and majority non-White!) Catholic Church, there is an entire religious apparatus basically dedicated to telling These Fucking People that's Okay. In fact, be more of an asshole, for Jesus.

In case anybody wonders why I'm a very agnostic sort of Christian.

The trouble is, you can't threaten these right-wing political Bishops and Cardinals with Hell, because if Heaven doesn't have a hierarchy and Hell does...they'd rather go to Hell to start with!

In Dungeons & Dragons terms, we'll call Bishop Barron here Lawful Evil, he's going to the Nine Hells of Baator anyway and he likes it that way. Like I said, I didn't know Mammon had Bishops.

This Homophobic motherfucker here? Straight up Chaotic Evil, bound for the Infinite Layers of the Abyss, with a Will.

With Malice Aforethought.

If there's anything I've learned from gaming, religion, studying religion and traveling the world a bit both in Uniform and out? It's that people are people and a hell of a lot of people suck. If it wasn't Christianity, with these fucking people it would be something else, some other excuse, some other justification for or attempted buy-off of their Sin.

Like literally if a charismatic enough person came to them, preached belief in Dis Pater and Mammon and looked like they were gonna win...That's who these assholes would worship.

You have to beat the assholes, make it generally unprofitable to be an asshole and then actively work to support good people being good people! And you have to actively deter and visibly punish bad behavior and shit like that.

Also, electing and promoting for competence might help.

Likewise actively working to remove incompetents from the system (and discourage them from seeking public office) might help.

We as a society have to start making value judgments, on something other than petty bigotry or on a profit/loss basis. 

Trust me, take it from me and my partner, if you make being a good person optional too many people simply won't do it!

And stuff like that is exactly why I think America is going to fall apart like the Soviet Union did.

In November of 2024 I wrote how the collective American attention span was about two weeks, a milestone I saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

I further in a subsequent post wrote that there were 771 days between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Fall of the Soviet Union.

Maybe it's just me but I think we're well past halfway there and on an accelerated timeline. 

You can have the best military in the world, the most money, etc. It doesn't matter worth a shit if your leadership is corrupt and weak and the People don't want to live together any more, and I am totally not kidding.

There's people out there who'd rather that the military had raided Idaho than Venezuela.

And they ain't Liberals.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

Think on that.

There's people out there for whom literally nobody can be "Conservative" or Right-Wing enough.

Because it's not really about that.

Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from Planescape Torment

Not because of any political philosophy or anything of the sort, but because all These Fucking People actually desire is destruction and to satisfy the lusts of the Flesh.

And they don't even wanna do that with real people anymore.

The fascism is simply a distraction from that. The actual reality of what these fucking people are is worse.

This, not Zohran Mamdani's New York City, is what a godless America (practicing a Christ-less Christianity) looks like.

Basically We Be Becoming Babylon.

And the immigrant Muslim socialist or the Gay People are not why. It's the White "Conservative" folks and their total lack of care for anybody else or desire to govern themselves, it's their unwillingness to do the work of life and the Wealth Without Work they lust after.

That's what's killing us.

So read the Book of Revelation and figure out if that's how you wanna live, pretty much.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You either believe in whatever higher power you worship, or you don't.

Donald Trump ain't that higher power.

Слава Україна!

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

Nine

Elisabet Sobeck: I remember yelling that I didn’t care. And that’s when my mother took my face in her hands and…spoke.

GAIA: Query: What did she say?

Elisabet Sobeck: She said I had to care. She said, “Elisabet, being smart will count for nothing if you don’t make the world a better place. You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death.”

~From the video game Horizon Zero Dawn.