We'll Cut You In, O Lord! (Rationalizing Themselves Into Revelation, Two.)

Priest: [To Balian, who is working on sharpening swords in the town blacksmith forge] The village does not want you. When the old lord is dead, they will drive you out. When the bishop is dead, it is certain.

Balian: And you take my property.

Priest: The Church.

Balian: You.

Priest: They would have taken you to Jerusalem... away from... all this. I arranged it. I swear to you... you will have no peace so long as you stay here. No man ever needed a new world more. Imagine your sin and pain erased. All. [Balian takes out a sword and starts malleablizing it] If you take the Crusade... you may relieve your wife's position in hell. I put it delicately. She was a suicide. She is in hell. Though what she does there without a head... [Balian notices priest's cross necklace, holds it up and impales him with sword throwing him onto the fire, Balian takes the necklace with the priest leaping out, igniting the forge.] ~From the film Kingdom Of Heaven.

...

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he strikes a man.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.

And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.

And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.

And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,

Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.

And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.

And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.

And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.

By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.

For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9, King James Version.

I saw this when I woke up.

A bunch of old white people, ridiculously angry about the fact that a new local burger place uses Halal meat.

For the record Halal is basically the same thing as Kosher, it even says so in Islamic dietary laws. Lots of the beef you find in the average American grocery store is Kosher by default.

It's not for religious reasons, it's Capitalism.

I also immediately thought of both my best friend from when I was in the Air Force...and his eventual wife, both of whom were amazing cooks.

And I remembered my Muslim college friend from Egypt and his wife (Well, girlfriend back in those days) and the fact that she made an amazing veggie Lasagna. Like, seriously when I got on Facebook in 2010 and found they were already there, I made a point of asking if I could have the damn recipe (and I got it!)

Honestly, I can't imagine living life without stuff like that!

I put no stock in religion. By the word religion, I've seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the "Will of God". I've seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves. And goodness - what God desires - [pointing at his head then heart] is here and here. And what you decide to do every day, you will be a good man...or not. ~The Hospitaler, from the film Kingdom Of Heaven.

I mean, fuck, what joyless lives These Fucking People lead...and seem to want to. But then the next time I logged in, on my Laptop, the first thing I saw was the AIG post snipped above and trust me, you're not going to find very many people that define "Joyless religious fanatic" more than they do.

Well, except maybe for Pete Keg-Breath and all his Calvinist Theo-Bros, who think they're getting everything they ever wanted right now and they're still all getting shit-faced drunk in Pentagon restrooms and then trying to deny it to each other because they're all so "righteous" and shit.

What the fuck is wrong with men? I ask as a man, a former conservative Republican and as a veteran.

But then, I was never one of These Fucking People, these violent drunk fucking religious-bro narcissists and yes, we had them when I served. They ain't all that, especially by their own alleged standards.

Shit, as a Senior Airman and Staff Sergeant I was responsible more than once for guys like that facing disciplinary proceedings because they're stupid. 

Worse, for all their religious talk, if anybody can find a bag of Cocaine, a fifth of Patron, a foreign prostitute and an impressive selection of um, toys, in a place like Marquette, Michigan and then get caught with all that (and reported) by their pregnant wife who then goes from meek Christianized submissive to utterly righteously angry Feministic diva with a job at an LGBT bookstore (this in a time when such places were less common than they are now) in like 12 mind-shattering seconds??

Yeah, it's these idiotic motherfuckers.

Also, you think these knuckle-draggers are regressive? The Uniform Code of Military Justice when properly applied is, shall we say worse.

The funny/sad part here is dude got his ass busted down a grade among other things but somehow managed with counseling and rehab to weasel his way into keeping his career, an utterly Pyrrhic victory when he ended up paying like 3/4's of his check in child support and then spent the next 18 months of his life in Saudi Arabia and a few years later his career came to an utterly predictable bad end with a failed FITREP and loss of professional qualifications anyway. Followed by jail (repeatedly) for nonpayment of said child support.

So much for "Integrity Above All, Service Before Self, Excellence In All That We Do" huh?

I mean, more than once I've wondered aloud how Pete Hegseth had a career and didn't get himself shit-canned for God-Only-Knows-What before he ever made it out of the training pipeline. 

(Just kidding, I know why: In all cases, it's because some other idiotic CHUD-bro higher up in the commands structure who likewise once escaped accountability their own damn self goes to bat for them...but is then magically never themselves present when the bill comes due and everyone else ends up covered in sloppy shit.)

I'm just warning you now, America, some variation of this writ large is exactly what we're all in for.

Although I suspect in the case of Keg-Breath or Trump this ends with fleeing the country, exile, and a gilded palace in Saudi Arabia, probably even in the same neighborhood in Jeddah where Idi Amin stayed during his exile there. I'd have said Dubai or Qatar but I think these fucking people have burned up all their goodwill (and the Iranians have trashed a lot of what would have been their protection) among the Arabian Gulf states. 

If so, I can live with that, a gilded cage is still, in fact, a cage.

Honestly it looks a lot like some of These Fucking People are finding that out already. It's funny how these fucking people never think about stuff like that, then they do a bunch of skeevy shit in the public eye and then they have the nerve to wonder why they're constantly followed around by angry mobs of their former followers.

The thing is at this point there's basically three kinds of conservatives when people find out how much of this stuff is utter bullshit.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

#1 There's those like myself or the one lady I described up above who get the fuck out and probably end up worse critics of all this horseshit than any liberal you can think of

#2 There's the "Simp Harder, Lie To Me More, Daddy" types that there are so many of online.

And no, I'll never understand that shit. There pretty much is no bottom, I guess.

And then #3 There's the people who do some degree of that shit who, increasingly and almost entirely because of Trump, see the world coming at them, greet it with both middle fingers upraised and a defiant "Fuck You!"

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.

Then they get what people like that get, get figuratively or literally punched in the face, figure out they don't like that very much, and retreat behind a Facebook page that beats everybody over the head with how "Christian" they are. This is the shit my partner's cousins did.

And maybe it's just me but I think a hell of a lot of the problem with Christianity in America is Christianity tolerates this bullshit! Most especially the basic-ass American Christian Nationalist Dispensationalist "Evangelical" type that constantly shouts about how "Jesus Is Coming!" but then somehow acts like He is never really gonna show up and judge them for what they do.

Like I said, awhile back, there's a reason that I think the true prayer these fucking people pray is "We'll cut you in, O Lord!"

Call it 'The Republican's Prayer."

Like they think Jesus is just as much of a scammer as they are!

And somehow these lying idiots get the idea that this is "Religion."

But they have no plan for if Jesus isn't like that.

In fact, they can't imagine He isn't just as dishonest and evil as they are.

The truth is they're wrong and hell-bound and I think deep down they know it. They just hope you don't.

Like I've said they regard their own joyless addicted perversion as the new Religiosity. They approach it with the same stolid dedication that their grandparents did tight-ass Cold War era Calvinism or that their parents did the 1990's and Early Aughts narcissistic Pentecostalism.

It's a joyless religious duty, they literally think they have to be like that or they'll go to hell.

The joke's on them because if they keep it up they're going to Hell anyway.

And like I keep saying, at this point, with These Fucking People laying all this out so obviously, at this point you either believe in freedom or you don't.

When is enough going to be ENOUGH?!

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.)

One

Valin Hess: So what shall we toast to, boys? I can blather on about “To health” or “To success,” but I’d like to do somethin’ a little less rote. Where you from, Brown Eyes?

Migs Mayfield: How ’bout a toast to Operation Cinder?

Hess: Now there’s a man who knows his history.

Mayfield: No, I don’t just know it. I lived it. I was in Burnin Konn.

Hess: Burnin Konn?

Mayfield: Mmm.

Hess: That was a hard day. I had to make many unpleasant decisions.

Mayfield: Yes, you did. Entire city gone in moments, along with everybody in it. We lost our whole division that day. Man, that was like 5-10,000 people.

Hess: Yep. All heroes of the Empire.

Mayfield: Yeah. And all dead.

Hess: Well, it’s a small sacrifice for the greater good, son.

Mayfield: Depends on who you ask, don’t you think?

Hess: [irritated] What you gettin’ at, trooper?

Mayfield: All those people, the ones who died, was it good for them? Hmm? Their families? The guys I served with? Civilians, those poor mud scuffers, died defending their homes, fighting for freedom. Was it good for them? 

Hess: But we’ve outlasted them, son. They’re eating themselves alive. The New Republic is in complete disarray, and we grow stronger. You see, with the rhydonium you’ve delivered, we can create havoc that’s gonna make Burnin Konn pale by comparison. And then they’re gonna turn to us once again. You see, boys, everybody thinks they want freedom, but what they really want is order. And when they realize that, they’re gonna welcome us back with open arms. Ah. To the Empire.

[Mayfield chuckles, then fires a blaster at Hess' chest, killing him instantly. He and Mando then shoot their way out of the mess hall] ~From The Mandalorian, Season 2, Ep. 7 "The Believer"