False Gods (American Reformation II, Four.)

He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere. ~Barack Obama, RE: Donald Trump.

...

The Holy Quran says it, "Pilgrimage to the House [of God built by the prophet Abraham] is a duty men owe to God; those who are able, make the journey." (3:97) Allah said: "And proclaim the pilgrimage among men; they will come to you on foot and upon each lean camel, they will come from every deep ravine" (22:27). Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun intermittently calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other. . . .That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. ~Malcolm X.

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So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. ~Galatians 3:26-29

I saw this last night.

Some old-ass idiot MAGA Bitch at a Trump rally, when asked if slavery still affected Black people said that when they were slaves, they were "Given food, housing and medical care." Well, color me skeptical but I don't think any of that matters much if you can't leave.

Like, the fuck?? I knew "Slavery is bad" when I was like...five years old, maybe?

And, I'm sorry but with the Midterms and an extremely likely political ass-kicking looming, I'm starting to see a lot of shit even weirder than that. Like there's some kind of AI Terminator/Warhammer 40K slop video making the rounds on Twitter. Catholic Space Marines with laser rifles and swords vs. T2 Judgment Day grade Terminators, and I'm just like what the fuck??

Midterm Loss Psychosis seems to be a real thing, apparently?

[As the four newly-revealed Cylons aboard Galactica struggle to deal with the information, the call to action stations sounds]

Lieutenant Felix Gaeta: [over the loudspeaker] ...Inbound Cylon fleet! I repeat: action stations, action stations. Set Condition One throughout the ship. This is not a drill.

Tory Foster: Oh gods... what're we going to do?

Saul Tigh: The ship is under attack. We do our jobs. Report to your stations!

Chief Galen Tyrol: Report to stations?

Saul Tigh: My name is Saul Tigh. I am an officer in the Colonial Fleet. Whatever else I am, whatever else it means, that's the man I want to be. And if I die today, that's the man I'll be. ~From Battlestar Galactica (2003) S3.E20 "Crossroads, Part 2."

Like, I don't give a fuck. 

I'm tired of these idiots telling me who to hate when I don't hate any of those people and I'm not going to. That's not who I am or who I want to be. I'm tired of everything being expensive and me and everyone I know being stressed because of it. That and I've been done with the Donkey Show Politics of the whole Trump thing since long before it was "Cool."

Apparently I'm not the only one, and there's worse people with way worse reasons for being done with it than me. A lot of these MAGA's and shit are about to find themselves under attack from their Right. Apparently, Joel Webbon decided to threaten Mike Huckabee and call for his execution and while I didn't see what it was over or what the threat was, it was apparently bad enough of a threat that there's calls for Joel to be arrested.

There's people out there that think Trump didn't or doesn't go far enough, because among other things Trump is (Yes, still) constrained by the Constitution and electoral process and America's democratic culture, not to mention his own low popularity and lazy shitty nature. Really, he can't.

Or, more particularly, he can't with 30% or less of the country supporting this bullshit.

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.

But people who think everything is ideally the domination of women, macho war shit and performative religiosity are quite likely going to be unimpressed by even Republicans quoting the Constitution or the Bill Of Rights to them...even if said Republicans are only doing it because they don't want to be slaves.

And another problem with this is that America's culture is violently atheistic and materialistic, the Church has historically been balls-deep in making it that way and keeping it that way, simply because people of a more spiritual inclination don't keep showing up, participating in all the horseshit and manipulation that infect churches in America or putting their money in the offering plate. 

Pretty often, doctrinally religious or genuinely spiritual people get bored, leave, and find their own ways to connect with the Divine Conversation because the sad truth of the American Evangelical religion is that most of those churches don't really do much in the community or have any real effect besides occasionally manipulating and parasitizing their members. Making the preachers the Zampolits of the Republican Party was actually a bad idea if you wanted to make people be more religious.

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

Like it or not, that's a pretty rotten, soggy grounding for a "Theocracy" of any sort. Best case for these CHUDs is that people mail it in and pretend for awhile, but honestly I don't see that lasting any longer than a couple of weeks. "Owning The Libs" or whatever they're calling it this week is only fun for most of these fucking people if it doesn't inconvenience them or require any real effort. Blame internet meme culture if you want.

Another issue is that the realities of American culture and diversity and of who is in the Body of Christ simply, I don't know, no longer work well with a lot of these fucking people's biases. Imma just put it like this. There's ads for a movie that keep crossing all of my feeds. It's called Drummer Boy and it basically looks like a less bloody, more musical updated version of The Patriot. But I noticed that #1 The main character's love interest in the previews is a black woman, and #2 the previews at least use the Christmas song Little Drummer Boy. #3 The film is produced by Angel studios, which is one of those knock off Christian movie outfits.

Trust me, I have a lot of familiarity with Those kind of studios and the movies they produce 'cause I have a conservative Christian Church background. 

It's like this: When the original left behind movies cast the principal pastor, Bruce Barnes, from the first four books as a black man (actor Clarence Gilyard) it was no big deal. Sure it was a long way down from Top Gun and Die Hard, but Clarence needed a job. Also, it's pretty obvious that's not the world we live in anymore, thanks to Trump.

But Trump isn't America and at the same time, now studios have to do stuff like have a diverse cast to reflect that a lot of their audience (Christian or otherwise) wants diversity. As much as some people don't want it to be, the American church, whether Christian or Evangelical, Catholic or Protestant, is a diverse Church, in a diverse country. 

And so tomorrow, as we take the campaign South and West, as we learn that the struggles of the textile workers in Spartanburg are not so different than the plight of the dishwasher in Las Vegas; that the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of L.A.; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people, we are one nation. And, together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story, with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: Yes, we can. ~Barack Obama

It's stuff like this that's a problem for people like Joel Webbon, Dale Partridge etc. These people, these so-called "Conservatives" pretty much turn against anything that says black people, immigrants, poor people, etc. deserve any consideration at all...even the Bible, or even when it comes from modern Evangelical sources.

And that's why this whole mess is falling down. MAGA is not a growth industry or movement, the Republican Party isn't interested in making itself bigger or more diverse. Oh yeah, Trump still yells a good game now and again, or meanders through some kind of bizarre hate sermon at his rallies. 

But whatever Demonic aura of protection or magical attraction Trump had is gone; If they haven't already, these fucking people are going to start looking for a fresher or stronger drug again. I'm not sure Trump's Christ-less Prosperity Gospel Christianity is that. 

For all their constantly being in everyone's faces screaming their bullshit, Republicans actually want a lot fewer people to participate in the political process (But not in the same way that guys like Dale Partridge, Doug Wilson or Joel Webbon do) or for that matter, in religion past whatever it takes to get people to support Republicans. The unholy ghost of Richard Nixon forbid somebody get far enough into the Word to read "Love Thy Neighbor."

Christianity, as written, is inconvenient to the political Right. There's a reason the Nazis were big on Germanic neo-Pagan woo woo and practicing Black Magic.

It's gonna be the same way with these motherfuckers.

They're gonna find themselves Another God. In a pinch, Devils and Idols Of Gold will do. The "god" of Hate and Racism is a false god.

And then, they're going to come at the rest of us, MAGA and all included.

If there is to be an American Reformation, these fucking people will call Baal-worship their counter-revolution. I mean, just from what we know is in the Epstein files, that mess already infects a lot of America's "elites."

Anything but "Love Thy Neighbor."

I've got a partner and a kid to think about. I can't be cool with that. Their freedom and safety and physical and spiritual well-being matter to me more than my own life does.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You either give a shit about other people or you don't.

And either you're willing to fight for it, and for them, or you're not.

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.)

Three

"I didn't want to do it,'' he hears himself saying. "I didn't want to leave them behind.''

The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. "You had no choice.''

"Yes I did! I didn't have to come here.'' He pauses. "I didn't have to do anything,'' he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. "It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.''

"-- Evitable,'' echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring within its belly, the F-117A hunts on: patrolling to keep at bay the ancient evil, unaware that the battle is already lost. "Your family could still be alive, you know.''

He looks up. "They could?'' Andrea? Jason? "Alive?''

The void laughs again, unfriendly: "There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their life. There is a fate worse than death, you know.'' 

~From A Colder War, a novella by Charles Stross.

[Kuiil and Mando have successfully repaired the Razor Crest with the parts recovered from the Jawas]

The Mandalorian: I can't thank you enough. Please allow me to give you a portion of the reward.

Kuiil: I cannot accept. You are my guest, and I am therefore in your service.

The Mandalorian: I could use a crew member of your ability. And I can pay handsomely.

Kuiil: I am honored. But I have worked a lifetime to finally be free of servitude.

The Mandalorian: I understand. Then... all I can offer is my thanks.

Kuiil: And I offer mine. Thank you for bringing peace to my valley. [leaves the ship and mounts his Blurrg; to Mando] And good luck with the Child. May it survive and bring you a handsome reward. I have spoken.

~From the Star Wars series; The Mandalorian, S1.E2 "The Child."