An Infinity Of Crab Buckets (Bropocalypse Now, Nine.)

When vice is extolled by the name of virtue, so that a man is induced to sin not only without regret but with joy and triumph, and is hardened beyond the modesty of a blush for his enormities, this sort of flattery, I say, has been fatal even to whole kingdoms.

- Plutarch, The Flatterer

...

So Ahab sent for all the children of Israel, and gathered the prophets together on Mount Carmel. 

And Elijah came to all the people, and said, “How long will you falter between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; but if Baal, follow him.” But the people answered him not a word. 

Then Elijah said to the people, “I alone am left a prophet of the Lord; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men. 

Therefore let them give us two bulls; and let them choose one bull for themselves, cut it in pieces, and lay it on the wood, but put no fire under it; and I will prepare the other bull, and lay it on the wood, but put no fire under it. 

Then you call on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the Lord; and the God who answers by fire, He is God.”

So all the people answered and said, “It is well spoken.”

Now Elijah said to the prophets of Baal, “Choose one bull for yourselves and prepare it first, for you are many; and call on the name of your god, but put no fire under it.”

So they took the bull which was given them, and they prepared it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even till noon, saying, “O Baal, hear us!” But there was no voice; no one answered. Then they leaped about the altar which they had made.

And so it was, at noon, that Elijah mocked them and said, “Cry aloud, for he is a god; either he is meditating, or he is busy, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is sleeping and must be awakened.” So they cried aloud, and cut themselves, as was their custom, with knives and lances, until the blood gushed out on them. And when midday was past, they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice. But there was no voice; no one answered, no one paid attention.

Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come near to me.” So all the people came near to him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down. And Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord had come, saying, “Israel shall be your name.” Then with the stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord; and he made a trench around the altar large enough to hold two cords of seed. And he put the wood in order, cut the bull in pieces, and laid it on the wood, and said, “Fill four water-pots with water, and pour it on the burnt sacrifice and on the wood.” Then he said, “Do it a second time,” and they did it a second time; and he said, “Do it a third time,” and they did it a third time. So the water ran all around the altar; and he also filled the trench with water.

And it came to pass, at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near and said, “Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that You are God in Israel and I am Your servant, and that I have done all these things at Your word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may know that You are the Lord God, and that You have turned their hearts back to You again.”

Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood and the stones and the dust, and it licked up the water that was in the trench. Now when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces; and they said, “The Lord, He is God! The Lord, He is God!”

And Elijah said to them, “Seize the prophets of Baal! Do not let one of them escape!” So they seized them; and Elijah brought them down to the Brook Kishon and executed them there. 

~2 Kings 18:20-40

...

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

I'm tired of These Fucking People.

But you know what? I'm ESPECIALLY tired of their petty hatred of women.

I'm tired of their shitty obsessions with Force and political power and I'm tired of the fact that they think their bullshit ideas are so "Superior" and think they shouldn't have to ask anybody else what they can do while thinking everybody else should have to ask them for the right to walk down the street in their own neighborhood.

This isn't politics, it's the authoritarian narcissism of an abuser.

And America has tolerated this bullshit for way too long.

Very little of this shit is inherently "Christian" or has anything to do with the Bible or even a lot of the beliefs and systems that a lot of people claim it does.

I was raised a certain way, I went to Christian schools until my Mom and I moved somewhere where there weren't any, I served in the military. I was a politically active Republican until September of 2008.

In no way was I ever taught that the kind of welfare people like my partner's idiot MAGA relatives who gave her such a hard time (and are still trying to) should be treated like valid Conservatives or have any claims of Christian (or in fact any other) religious belief taken seriously.

Among people that I've known throughout my life (including a fair number of Democrats) stuff like "If you don't work, you don't eat" gets thrown around a lot...right or wrong.

But of course, Republicans don't give a good goddamn if welfare people (be they Michigan rednecks on welfare or Israeli settlers living off government stipends) are welfare people so long as they vote Republican or otherwise serve various Evangelical or Right-Wing causes and give the "wrong" people (even within their own groups) a hard time.

It's like I've been saying since Trump declared in 2015, Republicans are basically Communists now.

And when the state of Ohio wants people to "register" pregnancies like it's the People's Republic of Ohio China??"

Well, what happens when the State decides to deny a "Certificate Of Life" to certain people, or a certain kind of people...based on criteria set by a small group of random fanatics??

In his novel The Bear And The Dragon, Tom Clancy did a pretty good job of writing about what happens when the State tries to do shit like this, because a fairly major plot point is that a Chinese Christian couple was told by the government to abort a pregnancy and refused to, and a Baptist pastor and Vatican diplomat were killed protecting mother and child...which eventually led to China facing major loss of trade and to a war between China and Russia.

I get that Republicans are supposedly anti-Abortion, but what they really are is anti-Choice and their absolute mania for Control will eventually lead to telling people who can have kids or not, and to shit like the Mark Of The Beast if that shit isn't stopped. If the State can make you have a kid it can make you not have a kid. If it can control your body about that, then the State can control your body when it comes time to put computer chips and such into people's foreheads or right hands.

It's not about Life, it's about Power.

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.

And the thing is the absolute hubris that a conservative author like Tom Clancy ascribed to the Chinese Communist Politburo back in 2000 has nothing on the behavior of current American billionaires and MAGA politicians.

The thing is These Fucking People don't give a shit if they're "ruling" a nation of morons trapped in Infinite Crab Buckets that's effectively destroying itself on a daily basis so long as their political narcissism and alleged goals are publicly blown on a regular basis.

Current Republicans don't give a shit if they blow up the world or even if they personally lose money so long as their "Authority" is "Obeyed" and enough people appear to hate who they hate.

Like I said, it's not politics, it's narcissism. Rich white male narcissism is destroying America. This should be perfectly obvious.

I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide. Any man who tells you different either has his hand in your pocket, or a pistol to your neck. ~Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

Like, the overwhelming need of a certain kind of white male idiot to tell everybody else what to do while never being told what to do their own damn selves is a thing that used to get dealt with by a punch in the face from another kid on the playground fairly early in life or by parents at home.

But the whole issue with MAGA is it's all the people who weren't taught much of anything or who didn't want to learn.

This kind of attitude killed a million Americans during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

We need to stop tolerating this horseshit.

Or it will get worse the next time there's a crisis.

A crisis or crises that these idiots are constantly trying to bring about, because they think that shit will be the End Times.

At the end of the day, you either believe in freedom or you don't.

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

And maintaining freedom requires three things: #1 Intelligence and #2 That everybody gets to have it, also #3 that a certain amount of virtue or at least survival instinct can be assumed on the part of the public.

Christian Nationalism includes none of these. 

These Fucking People don't care if their people are murdering each other in the streets and half the population openly worships Demons as long as they can fundraise off the fighting, pass repressive laws and preach smug moralism. They'll just go about with bigger motorcades than the Pope has and a bunch of armed guards and shit.

Christian Nationalism isn't about Jesus. 

Like most cults (which I'm including Evangelicalism as one lately) it's basically Self-worship (and in particular, a sexualized form of it, which is what a lot of the "Pro-Life" Purity Culture crap really is) and there's a reason I say these motherfuckers will ultimately worship Baal just like the Epstein Class does.

The propagation of heretical lies like the Prosperity Gospel ultimately guarantees that. The coupling of the Prosperity Gospel to feelgood narcissistic horseshit like Pentecostal spiritualism makes this shit worse.

Tack on a Bro-culture Manosphere that essentially tells "Men" to follow nothing more than their own erections, and when the shit hits the fan it'll be like Cormac McCarthy's The Road out there if people with brains in their heads don't get this shit under control.

Trump isn't the cause, he's a symptom.

The problem is that the culture and the systems themselves are rotten.

And we have to face that shit and fix it.

Bropocalypse Now.

These motherfuckers gonna be real surprised when God ain't a dude-bro like them.

Let the day of His Wrath be at hand.

Слава Україна!

The clocks stopped at one seventeen. There was a long shear of bright light, then a series of low concussions. By day the dead impaled on spikes along the road. I think it's October but I can't be sure. I haven't kept a calendar for five years. Each day is more gray than the one before. It is cold and growing colder as the world slowly dies. No animals have survived and all the crops are long gone. Soon all the trees in the world will fall. The roads are peopled by refugees towing carts and gangs carrying weapons, looking for fuel and food. Within a year there was fire on the ridges and deranged chanting. There has been cannibalism. Cannibalism is the great fear. Mostly I worry about food. Always food. Food and the cold and our shoes. Sometimes I tell the boy old stories of courage and justice - difficult as they are to remember. All I know is the child is my warrant and if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke. ~The Man, from Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (Film.)

Eight

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.

How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she said in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judges her.

And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. ~Revelation 18:1-10