The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed (Intro.)

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

If any man have an ear, let him hear.

He that leads into captivity shall go into captivity: he that kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he speaks as a dragon.

And he exercises all the power of the first beast before him, and causes the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

And he doeth great wonders, so that he makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,

And deceive them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

And he caused all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13, King James Bible.

...

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride."

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press....

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.)

I saw this stuff overnight, while I was at work.

And I reached a rather disturbing conclusion.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

It will not be Facebooked, Instagrammed, Threaded or Twittered. There's a very excellent chance it will be Blue Sky'ed though.

The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed.

Imagine, you're sitting at home, where you're at things might be a bit rough, but they're livable. People are working together, they have to. Communications are patchy but an old guy like me can still text his girlfriend who lives 3 hours away, although we're both a bit busy, older people with skills having been drafted by the powers that be to teach those skills to others.

Elsewhere, things are not so livable. Some things changed when the "Culture War" and all this political Cold War shit went hot.

But, Scrolling? Scrolling didn't change. Not in our off-hours at least. 

Maybe what we're watching...

Scrolling. 

Following a squad of soldiers, as once things fell apart, once regions and states and even whole countries were forced to make the call, which side they were on, things got bloody conventional, hybrid-conventional but still conventional real fast.

Brussels and Ottawa and Washington DC vs. Moscow, Miami, some shithole bunker in the Urals and some gilded techno-fuck-state where Gaza used to be, where anybody that can dig up enough money becomes a citizen no questions asked. Turns out a ravening shit-ton of them that did were rabid Christian Nationalists. It turns out the Israelis liked their new neighbors even less than the old ones. People hanged over there for what they called the "Great Betrayal." 

In Europe the line is somewhere in what used to be Belarus and well north of the Ukrainian border. Turns out you don't wanna start a war with a major power-bloc when you can't even defeat one country you've spent several years trying to conquer, but there's been an offensive going against Moscow so long that even the new Free Media just let it fade into the background. Even both sides using tactical nuclear weapons only got the scatter-brained attention-economy to look for a day or so.

Men and women surge forward, standard two-by-two cover formation, hitting the deck or finding cover as gunfire splatters down the alley, and then returning fire themselves, including the trooper whose bodycam provides the current perspective.

One can flip from helmet-cam to helmet-cam. Their gear is a hodgepodge of whatever, Old US Army BDU's and ACU's, Canadian, British or EU Multicam, their weapons? wide variety of NATO and US-standard arms, but at least a few AK-101's, that's what they call the classic Kalashnikov, chambered in 5.56mm NATO standard.

The accidental protagonist of the moment is carrying one of those. Old School is the best school, even here.

Military Operations In Urban Terrain, as the term of art goes, are a bitch.

"Clanker!" someone shouts, meaning there's a robot in the battlespace. A sputtering sound like a zipper from the rear tells me that a C-Ram Gatling gun is active, explosions above and forward suggest it's engaged a drone swarm, with mostly good effect on targets.

A volley of 40mm grenades lands around the robot, just visible through the haze and smoke, the enemy gathering their forces behind the Big Metal Brother, until a Javelin missile puts it out of commission. The squad's moving again and overhead there's the Thwack, Thwack, Thwack of rotors in the heavy air, and the sound pickup on the cam garbles some indistinct radio chatter even further.

Turns out there aren't very many of the enemy and they aren't very motivated, and the firefight is over quickly. doesn't seem to matter, because they can always find more and for the other side it's more that even they can't quit the Infantryman. But the Reds went all-in on technology.

Too much.

Even with the cannon-fodder. A quick visual inspection reveals every last one of them is White, and has an implant in their forehead or right hand, that's the new thing, even for the Enemy, convince the troops they're going to upload into some AI heaven so they can be with AI Jesus when they die.

Axes, Machetes and various blades come out and implanted hands are severed or visible chips gouged out, even (especially) from the still-living. 

Can't upload if you ain't on the network, Beastie. 

It's savage, but it's the only thing these motherfuckers understand.

The squad's female medic, machete in hand, checks to make sure they're dead, she stops and looks in the direction of our viewpoint, her eyes an utterly emotionless thousand-yard-stare.

"Cornell!" a Ukrainian-accented voice yells "Move your American ass, Rally point is close!"

She sheathes the blade and our camera-viewpoint turns away as the squad sprints down a side-street. There has been action here, also. Parked cars are pocked with bullet holes, tires flattened, window-glass broken.

There are helicopters landing two at a time in a park up ahead, a horribly damaged green space in the middle of Hell.

The squad sprints past a decapitated, pulled-down gilded statue of Donald Trump. The head is five meters in the other direction, gouged and pockmarked but still recognizable.

There's some kind of improvised, shouted conclave of officers and senior NCO's, with riflemen fanned out to protect the LZ. The choppers still have their rotors running. Clearly, something is going down somewhere.

Someone waves our protagonist/perspective towards them, and he runs up the rear ramp of one of the helicopters, a Leonardo AW101 Merlin, only with the noise of the outside muffled a little do we hear he's breathing hard, his camera pans over the rest of the team, apparently a diverse group of young to middle-aged troops led by a grizzled, bearded apparently Ukrainian veteran with Sergeant's stripes on his chest and sleeves.

====End Transmission===

Always remember that what These Fucking People do to inanimate (or even, apparently, animate) objects, they at least want to do to people if given the chance.

Assholes have gotten way too comfortable in the United States Of America and some other places.

The reckoning is brewing, remember that.

We can put the fear of God and the People back into these motherfuckers, we're gonna have to.

If Republicans are so damned sure they're going to win why are they in panic-mode and yet still managing to do the worst possible thing for if they actually wanted to win anything.

These people don't want to win.

They think they want to provoke Armageddon.

They may well be successful, but I don't think it'll go the way they think it'll go and it sure as hell won't end up the way they think it will for themselves.

They're going to lose.

But that doesn't mean it's not gonna come down to a fight to stop this shit from getting worse.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

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In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”

At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”

And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

He said, “Go and tell His people:

“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull
and close their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.”

Then I said, “For how long, Lord?”

And he answered:

“Until the cities lie ruined
and without inhabitant,
until the houses are left deserted
and the fields ruined and ravaged, 

until the Lord has sent everyone far away
and the land is utterly forsaken.
And though a tenth remains in the land,
it will again be laid waste.
But as the terebinth and oak
leave stumps when they are cut down,
so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.”

~Isaiah chapter 6 (New International Version.)

Last Post

[Cassian plays Nemik's audio diary]

Karis Nemik: There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try. 

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S1.E12 "Rix Road."