...
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!
~From the series "Andor" S1 E10 "One Way Out."
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Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan
It feels like we're approaching a critical mass against all this Trump bullshit.
Know that the arc of history can, in fact, turn on some very small things.
On All Hallows Eve in 1517, a bland-looking middle-aged (for the time) friar and University professor named Martin Luther nailed a document called The 95 Theses, more properly called A Disputation Of The Power And Efficacy of Indulgences to the door of a castle church in Wittenberg, Germany.
An "Indulgence" was basically a piece of paper that one could buy which was claimed by the late medieval Catholic Church to lessen one's time of punishment in Purgatory, and Indulgences were issued or Papal Bulls written for all type of skeevy shit done by nobles, priests, royalty and the wealthy upper class. Want to marry your cousin so you don't have to share Power or so you can keep the wealth in the family, or simply because you're a debased pervert?
Buy an Indulgence!
This shit, like today's bullshit-ass Prosperity Gospel churches, was literally an industry that operated with the blessing of religious leaders, who naturally got a cut of the money.
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco
The Church, and the European nobility at the time, and most of the political systems in the context of the Christian world were corrupt, incestuous, rotten to the core and shamelessly unapologetic about all of it, and this was enforced by Kings and Nobles and their Armies, not to mention the Inquisition. All of the above enforced basically Theocratic monarchies.
People had been tortured and killed for such things as trying to translate the Bible from Latin into their own languages, or even for daring to read the Lord's Word in their own vernacular. Numerous priests and others had been, in real terms, martyred for resisting the excesses of a Church that had been captured by the Borgia and De Medici noble houses of Iberia and Italy respectively.
Sound familiar??
It should, this is the kind of world that a lot of Republicans, especially fake-"Traditionalist" Catholics like Clarence Thomas, JD Vance and Sam Alito think they want.
(Except that, in America, today's rampant illiteracy is largely by choice, as is political-class tolerance for MAGA excesses.)
In spite of all that, Slowly, at first, but with increasing rapidity via the nascent printing press, rapidly expanding literacy and word of mouth, what Martin Luther had written got out, and very quickly started a movement, now referred to by history as the Protestant Reformation.
The truth is that the Church was largely undone in this case by its own debasement and stupidity.
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.
The net result ended up being a couple hundred years of Wars Of Religion which the Catholics mostly lost.
And you're willing to fight for it or you're not.
I was taught this history, in Christian schools. We were taught this stuff so we would know who we were.
You'd be amazed at how many of America's most fanatically supposedly-devout "Christians" simply weren't and don't know jack shit about any of it.
That's something I intend to engage with in this series.
We owe future generations nothing less than the Truth, but you have to teach it first.
And people have to be willing to learn something.
Слава Україна!
Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen. ~Ezekiel 16:49-50 (NIV)
Whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed. ~From the Allegory Of The Cave, Plato's Republic.
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