Trillion (Not Legends, Not Myths, Facts. Two.)

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

...

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.

...

Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator had come to replace water, virtually everywhere. Water, the basic component of all life, had been deemed a threat to Brawndo's profit margin. The solution came during the budget crisis of 2330, when the Brawndo Corporation simply bought the F.D.A. and the F.C.C., enabling them to say, do, and sell, anything they wanted. ~Narrator, Idiocracy

So, apparently Elon is a Trillionaire as of yesterday

So, do you have to worship a Demon to get that rich, or is Elon just doing that part because he wants to? Or is that a prerequisite to try to turn this Neuralink bullshit into the Mark Of The Beast??

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)

And while I'm at it, what's with these fucking people railing against women in every possible occupation or position, because I'm here to tell you most of the teachers I had in Christian schools were women, and that includes Catholic school and I have the scars on my knuckles to prove it. 

No, I don't give a shit what Joel Webbon thinks about that.

He obviously was never held to the same kinds of educational standards that I was in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh grades nor subject to any kind of punishment for not meeting whatever standard he had, or he wouldn't be this goddamn stupid and he, along with all these other supposedly "Religious" Men (Keg-Breath, Wilson, etc.) wouldn't talk about women the way they do. Among other things I was raised conservative and religious myself and I was taught that was wrong.

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.

Not that any of these CHUDs seem to know right from wrong, or care in the least, which tells me they're Christian in about the same way that my Ferret is an Astrophysicist.

Which is to say he's not, and if given a book on the subject his main contribution to that field of study would be to try and drag the book under the couch, if for different reasons that Joel might.

This shit isn't Christianity, it's the skeevy borderline-homosexual (but not in a "gay" way, keep that rainbow shit and any potential happiness off me) looks-at-women-as-"dirty" end of "Bro" culture, sacralized. These fucking guys don't read the Bible except to find ways to weaponize it against the people they don't like which is basically everybody, but especially women. These are the guys that used to mock my partner, but then 20 years later one of them tried to take advantage of her for being in a bad situation.

I wrote about that here.

And I wrote about how they treated me for *Checks Notes* liking her once they found out.

I have to say, again, sorry guys. I just liked her better than I liked you. I like women, and I'm glad I'm drawn to strong women, not doormats or manipulative pretend-doormats. If you don't like it, fuck you.

Seems like pretty much everything is "dirty" to these guys except for each other, making money and **Most Importantly** Taking advantage of other people.

Like that's why they all hit that Crypto-Bro stage in about 2020 and don't tell me that's not why.

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."

These guys spent whatever time they spent in Sunday School not paying attention to the subject matter, and they were jerks so they couldn't get the cute little Latina girlfriend in high school so they're all trying to say that James Talarico is going to Hell for having one (and for actually practicing Christianity) as an adult.

Dan Patrick lost any credibility he had with me when he said old people should just die for the economy during COVID-19. You learn things from old people. So, Dan, like my Grandma used to say, be careful or your face might stick like that.

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

And they say all their crap is about Jesus and protecting kids and the unborn, but the truth is it's really just a cover for racism and they don't even seem to mind openly telling your ass exactly that right now.

You watch, after November if not before that (because this could very well blow up before then, and almost certainly will after) all these fucking people will be trying to deny that they said what they said if not also claiming that Charlie Kirk was killed because he wanted the Epstein files released (which I think is an actual possibility but it doesn't absolve these assholes of anything like they'll try and make it sound like.)

Unless they're more enthusiastically telling you it's about Homophobia and/or Transphobia each of which seems to have been sacralized all by itself on These Fucking People's side of the fence.

Like, bitch, nobody is giving up their right to vote, except you, voluntarily because you're a moron who thinks the mousy church-girl act is gonna fool anybody other than your husband, you think because you connive and manipulate, everybody should have to do that. 

No, my partner works for a living, she's an honest, strong woman and she has her own opinions...political and otherwise...and I love her for it. We don't have to agree, although in practice we tend to agree on end-goals but differ on how to get there more than anything.

Neither she, nor the kid, nor myself for that matter would be happy, successful or even survivable in the world these motherfuckers think they wanna create, which falls somewhere between The Handmaid's Tale and Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

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.)

But emphasis much more on the cannibalistic psychopaths.

What people like Keg-Breath don't realize is, if you remove the guardrails from what we call "Civilization" that means people rise or fall according to their own ability or ruthlessness, and it'd be an error, generally speaking, to assume that you (rather than some random person you least expect) are That Guy. Or that you would even survive.

Daryl Dixon: Hey kid, what'd you do before all this?

Glenn Rhee: Deliver pizzas. 

Why?

Daryl Dixon: You got some balls for a China man.

Glenn Rhee: I'm Korean.

Daryl Dixon: Whatever.

~From The Walking Dead S1.E4 "Vatos."

Just sayin.'

These Fucking People...all of them...have no idea what the hell they're doing by fucking with things to the degree that they have. Unintended consequences are basically a scientific law of this equation at this point, the way things are going.

When the shit hits the fan (and it will) about half of them, mostly the Proles and shit, are gonna look at Trump as their Lord and Savior and hope they can all lie or shoot their way out of the problem.

How'd that work with COVID-19??

The "Upper" half? They're gonna look at Elon as their "god" and hope the fuck he can pull some kind of a giant Mars-bound spaceship out his ass that'll whisk them away from the consequences of their own actions. But like the people at the end of Don't Look Up, if he has one at all, most of them? 

They're gonna find out they don't have enough money to be on that ship.

And for most of the rest of us? The "Bread and Circuses" routine is wearing out if we ever were the least bit interested in the first place.

Note: I wasn't.

I don't want a government that "Entertains" me, I don't find any of this shit entertaining and I'd really like to get back to the business of living my life without having to worry about what the government is doing or what the President is gonna fuck up this week or the next or worrying if I'm gonna have to protect myself and my family from some deranged racist religious fanatics or crunchy fake-hippies turned MAHA wannabe-SS.

And that's not a hypothetical.

Last week, Elon Musk and the British far-right instigated riots and attacks against immigrants and people of color in Northern Ireland in response to a (non-fatal) stabbing attack involving a Sudanese immigrant, who was arrested and (rightly) charged and is awaiting trial.

Northern Ireland's population is almost 97% White and 80% Christian, so I don't wanna hear it.

Part of it is the usual Ulster Protestant "Loyalist" assholes find some bullshit to riot about every damn year. There's a reason the Police Service of Northern Ireland has armoured vehicles, issues firearms to all its officers and looks more like a typical American police force than a regular British one.

But ya know, since These Fucking People and the American religious right are up each other's asses (and that goes way back) and Christianity among various Northern Ireland Protestants far more often quotes Revelation and has a similar apocalyptic bent to the American kind than to what Christianity throughout most of Europe usually does.

And, frankly, despite the fact that Northern Ireland is overwhelmingly White, it's also ridiculously racist.

Because That is the Point of this stuff as far as people like Dan Patrick, Elon Musk, and the Ulster rioters are concerned. Anything but "Love Thy Neighbor."

Here's the thing they didn't tell you in the Left Behind books; If there's to be a False Religion of the Beast and a New World Order dedicated to the Antichrist and some Demons or some shit? It won't be "Left Wing." It'll be Far-Right, and it'll be all about protecting the Wealth of some unaccountable Trillionaire like Elon Musk if not Musk himself.

And that's why these fucking idiots want to mythologize everything else, because the pure banal-ass sad-sack Truth of this shit doesn't make for good stories at all...and probably makes for even worse reading than Atlas Shrugged.

Accumulation of Wealth to the point of Stupid, talking about taking away people's Constitutional (among other) rights and abusing one's neighbors aren't "Cool" or even things Decent people do and these motherfuckers actually know it.

That's why they try to create mythological conditions to justify their bullshit.

You can absolutely argue (for or against) "Love Thy Neighbor" because it's a fixed point on a known spectrum of observable behavior with tangible results. That doesn't fit today's "Right" and its clearly post-modern ethic. Besides, it's much It's harder to argue with Aphrodite being born from the sea-foam, or perhaps more likely, Baal riding on clouds

The thing is, Truth is the only floor most of us will ever have to stand on to push back against Power.

If Elon Musk decides he wants to buy himself a country, the main defense the people there will have is the Truth. Trump is just the Golden Idol to distract from that.

Those who claim to be "Conservative" but in reality seek only to profit from licking Power's boots know that.

That's why they wanna turn everything into Ghosts and Goblins and Myths and Legends, so they can lie to their heart's content and there is no Truth.

As for the rest of you? You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

One

Cassian Andor: What? To steal from the Empire, what do you need? A uniform, some dirty hands, and an Imperial toolkit. They’re so proud of themselves, they don’t even care. They’re so fat and satisfied, they can’t imagine it…

Luthen Rael: Can’t imagine what?

Andor: That someone like me would ever get inside their house, walk their floors, spit in their food, take their gear. 

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S1.E2 "That Would Be Me."

Pronouns (Not Legends, Not Myths, Facts. One.)

You walked into the party like you were walking onto a Yacht

Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot

You had one eye in the mirror as you watched yourself gavotte
And all the girls dreamed that they'd be your partner
They'd be your partner, and...

You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you
You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? Don't you?

You had me several years ago when I was still quite naive
When you said that we made such a pretty pair
And that you would never leave

But you gave away the things you loved and one of them was me
I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee
Clouds in my coffee, and...

You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you
You're so vain, I'll bet you think this song is about you
Don't you? Don't you? Don't you?

~Carly Simon, You're So Vain

I saw this last night, Nancy Mace (She/Her, Was/Were. Fuck/You) came in 5th place in the primary for South Carolina governor.

Get lost, bitch.

If I never have to see that stank ass bitch hamming it up in front of a camera again it'll be too soon.

Had this stuck in my head last night:

Hey, hey
Bye, bye, bye (bye, bye)
Bye, bye
(Oh, oh)
I, I'm doing this tonight
You're probably gonna start a fight
I know this can't be right
Hey, baby, come on
I loved you endlessly
When you weren't there for me
So now it's time to leave and make it alone
I know that I can't take no more
It ain't no lie
I want to see you out that door
Baby, bye, bye, bye (bye, bye)
Don't wanna be a fool for you
Just another player in your game for two
You may hate me, but it ain't no lie
Baby, bye, bye, bye (bye, bye)
Don't really want to make it tough
I just wanna tell you that I've had enough
It might sound crazy, but it ain't no lie
Baby, bye, bye, bye
You just hit me with the truth
Now, girl, you're more than welcome to
So, give me one good reason
Baby, come on
I've lived for you and me
And now I really come to see
That life would be much better
Once you're gone
I know that I can't take no more
It ain't no lie
I want to see you out that door
Baby, bye, bye, bye (bye, bye)
Don't wanna be a fool for you
Just another player in your game for two
You may hate me, but it ain't no lie
Baby, bye, bye, bye (bye, bye)
Don't really want to make it tough
I just wanna tell you that I've had enough
It might sound crazy, but it ain't no lie
Baby, bye, bye, bye. ~NSYNC, Bye Bye Bye.

I woke up early and something hit me while I was making something to eat this morning. You know what "Pronouns"(keeping in mind that the word is pretty much always said with a sneer by a certain kind of "Conservative" these days?

I/Me.

There's a reason everything else is a slur, or all but that, or said with a sneer out of sheer homophobia and transphobia.

Other people don't really exist to these motherfuckers, not even people they interact with and see every damn day. That's the only reason they can talk the kind of shit that they do about people like James Talarico. Sorry, but I've seen the guy and absolutely nothing about the dude says "Weird Shit" in any way at all. I saw the picture of him and his girlfriend, hell I used it as a header for a previous post. If a Golden Retriever could take a human form it'd be him.

But These Fucking People are Solipsistic Narcissists.

Insofar as they think about something like the Bible at all, they think it's about them or want to make it be so. Other people do not really exist, except (maybe) as their toys.

By definition, in terms of the conservative Christianity I was taught (not that they ever bother to follow even that) the Self is always going to be on the Throne with these fucking people.

And war broke out in heaven Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. ~Revelation 12:7-9

There is no God, unless its Them (Oops, I used a pronoun, my bad, but "Them" in this case being the singular use of the word, not "Them" as a group."

And they don't really care who else's dreams or lives they fuck with in the process of their seeking never-ending self-glorification and self-satisfaction, either...but they're terrified of being seen that way (really, of being seen in any way traditionally seen in a negative social light) so then they try to redefine every damn thing so it looks like them.

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

But we live in a world today defined not by legends or myths, but by facts.

You can only bend reality so far before it snaps back hard and smacks you in the nuts. These fucking people want to turn everything into mythology because deep down they know how they'd feel if some unaccountable person was fucking with their career or dreams.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

~From Cormac McCarthy's The Road (Book.)

But they can't face that, won't name it, and sure as fuck won't empathize when it happens to somebody else.

Especially if they're the unaccountable petty bureaucrat stamping the form. 

There was a time when most conservatives hated State Power for exactly those kinds of reasons.

And by the way, These Fucking People have spread the "Meme" of being a bad guy in politics as being beneficial  for one's goals such that Democrats have adopted the idea too. 

I knew Platner was gonna win the Democratic primary in Maine for exactly that reason.

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 then they convinced themselves that, somehow, they would be the only ones ever wielding the power, and too many Democrats, high off watching too many episodes of The West Wing and shit, let them get away with it for too long so it all went downhill from there. Taking the high road didn't work.

And now these fucking people are too high on the smell of their own shit to see it's already gone sideways. 

People didn't take the bait of ICE and all that. So, It's a lot less likely to end up with this bullshit flaming out in a violent civil war at this point, I think, than it is for it to end in a Fyre Festival or Woodstock 99 type of collapse or for that matter, a Berlin Wall 1989 type scenario where all the CHUDs end up standing around confused with rifles slung while regular people take down their walls with sledgehammers and shit just because everybody got sick of it all and they bungled the fuck out of the response. Not just that, but most narcissists aren't great with responsibility, especially when their name ending up attached to something that went badly might have real consequences for them personally.

And these idiots are mostly being undone by public mockery and their own incompetence.

But at the same time they're hoping they can collapse things enough that (for example) they can just break off somewhere like, say, Florida as their own most Bananas of Banana Republics and nobody will care. They might even be right about that.

Truth is, most of these fucking people simply don't care if not caring will get them a 30-year career at the public trough for doing nothing but faking concern, insider trading and spewing disingenuous horseshit. 

It doesn't matter where they're the politician or the religious bullshitter spewing whatever crap, only that they get to be that person and have whatever wealth without work such a position gets them.

That's why they want to make everything into mythology. You can argue reality, actual religion or theology to a great extent, science, what's actually happening...all of those things involve shared reference points. You can only really lie about XYZ until it punches somebody in the nose. I mean, sure, some people will always be some kind of committed ideologue, partisan fanatic or shitty little hater...but most of us can't do that forever, it gets old, it becomes "not fun" anymore, the spell breaks, it wears out.

You cannot argue Athena springing forth fully armed and grown from the cleaved head of Zeus.

It's not even that kind of a story.

And that's what they're trying to turn "Conservative" ideology into now. Yes, they'll dispense with Christianity entirely on the way out the door and most of the Evangelicals will absolutely follow them. It's not the Mark Of The Beast when WE do it.

(Yes, Yes, It Is.)

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

Last Post

Cassian Andor: Kino. Tell them what to do. It has to be you. Come on, Kino. You do this every day. Tell them what to do.

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!

[Repeats it multiple times as he leaves the command center]

Andor: Come on! Let's get out of here!

~From the series "Andor" S1 E10 "One Way Out."

Fallout (Left Behind Is A Lie VI, Ten.)

[After Burke is revealed as the one who set the facehuggers loose on Ripley and Newt]

Hudson: [aiming his rifle at Burke] I say we grease this rat fuck-son-of-a-bitch right now!

Hicks: It just doesn't make any goddamn sense.

Ripley: He figured he could get the alien past the quarantine if one of us was... impregnated - whatever you call it - and frozen for the way home. Nobody would know about the embryos we're carrying. Me and Newt.

Hicks: Wait a minute. We would all know.

Ripley: Yes, the only way he could do it is if he sabotaged certain freezers on the way home. Namely, yours. Then he could jettison the bodies and make up any story he would like to.

Hudson: Fuck! He's dead! [aims his rifle at Burke again] You're dogmeat, pal!

Burke: This is so nuts. I mean listen... listen to what you're saying. It's all paranoid delusion. It's really sad. It's pathetic.

Ripley: You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over a goddamn percentage.

~From the film Aliens.

...

[Having ensured Finn and Poe got away with Chewie, General Hux shows up before Allegiant General Pryde walking on a cane and his leg wound]

General Hux: It was a coordinated incursion, Allegiant General. They overpowered the guards and forced me to take them to their ship.

Allegiant General Pryde: I see. [to female aide] Get me the Supreme Leader.

Aide: Yes, sir.

Pryde: [takes a stormtrooper's blaster, executes Hux, and gives the stormtrooper his weapon back; to aide] Tell him we found our spy.

~From Star Wars: Episode IX, The Rise Of Skywalker.

Like I said on Threads last night, I currently identify myself as an Agnostic Christian.

I have a church background, I got "Saved" in the classic Baptist sense of that term at five years old in 1978. We'd just moved back downstate after spending most of my first five years in Rudyard in the Upper Peninsula and we'd started going to a Baptist church a few miles down the road, my Mom got me into the church school which was actually in sight of the trailer park we lived in, I could walk to school on a nice day if I wanted, if I cut across the field.

I've been to every kind of church you can think of from High Church Episcopalian to dour and serious Baptist to Latinate Catholic to Howling-at-the-moon Pentecostal. I've worshiped with everybody from deployed Airmen to Nigerian immigrants. I once heard Marianne Williamson (Yes, That Marianne Williamson) preach a sermon at a church called The Church Of Today in Detroit.

After having more or less lapsed as a teenager I got "Saved" again as an adult, as a Senior Airman serving in the 410th Bomb Wing at KI Sawyer AFB, MI. 

For more than half my life, for a hell of a lot of the 34 years that I was actively in the Church, my religious identity was simply "Christian."

Congratulations to Mike Lee for erasing this veteran's religious identity as far as the Department of Defense is concerned.

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

He thought he was gonna get Trump to declare Mormons as Christians.

Instead, like Segregationists after the Civil Rights Act got passed, they drained the swimming pool and filled it in with cement rather than let him swim in it, eliminating "Christian" as a category completely, effectively classifying a whole bunch of Christian denominations as separate religions. They nuked "Christian" as a category for a damned reason, but probably not the one you think.

Atomizing the Body Of Christ, as it exists in the United States Armed Forces, into something less than its component parts, as far as the government is concerned...and handing people like Trump a convenient means to crowbar the wider Body of Christ apart, should they decide to. Boom!

And you know they WILL.

Like weapons, Man does not invent pretexts without using them.

But like some idiot rich Uncle Tom who'd spent previous generations betraying his fellow Black folks to the White Citizens Council, Mike Lee thinks he's clever having extracted a "Concession" that's not only not a concession, but actually a potentially far more insidious weapon to use against the Church than anything any of the writers of Christian End Times fiction ever thought of a hypothetical Antichrist doing.

He's smiling all big 'cause some Boss Hogg-looking motherfucker just handed him the keys to the club, but hasn't yet found out that they stripped and sold all the furniture and shit and filled in the pool with concrete in the middle of the night.

"Christian" is a common identity.

And for all their efforts to make it so, Smug Republicanity is not. MAGA managed it for a few minutes but is in the process of disintegration right along with Trump. That's the trouble with personality cults.

Remember that Doug Wilson, Pete Keg-Breath and a bunch of these other idiot hyper-Calvinist dudes are part of a fairly small mini-denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, that has something like 170 member congregations. You add in all the current big names and fellow-traveler groups and it's like 500 churches. It sounds like a lot...until you consider that in the part of Michigan I live in, there's literally more churches than that, since most towns (even small ones) will have several, and some that are a bit bigger might even have several churches from the same denomination.

If all or even half, hell, a quarter of American churches stood up and told these idiots to go fuck themselves, they'd pretty much have to.

Basic insurgency tactics, if you can't face that kind of adverse numbers directly, you start breaking it down and force the other guy to divide their forces.

There's enough Christians in America that doing that shit will take a very long time. They can divide again and again and again for 100 years before it starts to even show. But, These Same Fucking People just spent over 60 years undermining the Civil Rights Act, and believe me when I tell you they intend to include White People in the oppression this time because they think they can beat and bully their way into permanent power by doing so.

If it takes 100 or 1000 years to make it so they can break things down to where the CREC won't just get squished like a bug if they declare a crusade against another church or group of churches, These Fucking People will do it, they'll keep doing it, they'll invent libraries worth of completely bullshit bad theology to justify it, too.

In Oz, the guards lock the cages and walk away, and the predators rise, take control and make the rules. But in Em City, the guards are with us 24 hours a day. There's no privacy. Everybody sees what everybody's doing. Eyes everywhere. McManus' eyes. See, in Em City, retribution gives way to redemption. Timmy boy believes he can save every one of us, from each other, from ourselves, from the system that dumped us in here. Only thing he don't get is, you gotta wanna be saved. ~Augustus Hill, From the HBO series Oz, S1.E1 "The Routine."

Make sense yet, why Republicans are investing so much energy into talking idiotic shit about James Talarico??

If These Fucking People can't turn American Christianity into the "religious" arm of the Republican Party...or more accurately of Trumpism, an analogue of the Chinese "Three Self Patriotic Church" perhaps...and cannot keep enough of those they thought they had locked on corralled? 

They'll simply destroy it, or more likely attempt to and fail.

It's the same shit with these motherfuckers trying to turn every damn thing into myths and legends lately, Truth is the only floor most people have to stand on to push back against Power. Like it or not, that includes spiritual or theological Truth. These assholes know that, which is why they don't want you to have any.

And they want to do a bunch of things they know nobody, as our country is currently constituted, would ever support.

And that's also exactly why they're scheming to try and make being a Republican a bigger (in terms of fanaticism and numbers) "Identity" than being a Christian. That's what Donald Trump is actually for, nobody but a bunch of braindead idiots thinks he's a good leader, nobody. But he has that cult following him around. That's why they invested so heavily into turning Evangelicalism into a Christ-less form of Christianity...only to see so much of it simply absorbed into MAGA and effectively secularized. I feel like they wasted a lot of time with how they did it, but in the end they still kinda got the result they wanted there.

That they had to throw millions of people, people like me and my partner and most of the conservative Christians we knew 20 years ago out of Evangelical spaces or Evangelically-adjacent spaces to do this doesn't bother them, they'd rather kill us anyway.

But they've also gotten greedy and impatient and started stripping away the false ecumenicism that let them get away with a lot of this shit for so long. Fortunately (I guess?) Mike Lee is too dumb to see that's what's really going on here.

The next sets of moves they make along these lines won't be nearly so blandly bureaucratic.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

Nine

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning.

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

Not Legends, Facts II (Left Behind Is A Lie VI, Nine.)

Red Army General : I carried out my orders. I sent in all of my boys. But the Germans engulfed us. They have artillery, aircraft, tanks. And me, what did I have?!

Khrushchev: A sacred duty to resist! I have to report to the Boss. [puts a pistol on the table] Perhaps you'd prefer to avoid the red tape.

[Khrushchev walks out of the room to address political officers. There is a gunshot, then he begins.]

Krushchev: My name... is Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. I've come to takes things in hand here. This city... is not Kursk, nor is it Kiev, nor Minsk. This city... is Stalingrad. Stalin-grad! The city bears the name of the Boss. It's more than a city, it's a symbol. If the Germans capture this city, the entire country will collapse. Now, I want our boys to raise their heads. I want them to act like they have BALLS! I want them to stop SHITTING THEIR PANTS! [briefly pauses] That's your job. As political officers, I'm counting on you. [stops at one] You, what's your suggestion?

Officer #1: Shoot all the other generals who have retreated. And their chiefs of staff, too.

[Khruschev looks at another.]

Officer #2: [terrified, stuttering] M-make s-some examples. D-d-d-d-d-de-port the families of the d-d-deserters...

Khrushchev: [bored] Yes, yes, that's all been done.

Danilov: Give them hope!

[Kruschev walks over and looks at the officer standing in the front, who motions with his eyes toward Danilov.]

Danilov: Here the men's only choice is between German bullets and ours. But there's another way, the way of courage, the way of love of the Motherland. We must publish the army newspaper again. We must tell magnificent stories, stories that extol sacrifice, bravery. We must give them hope, pride, a desire to fight. We must make them believe in the victory. Yes, we need to make examples; but examples to follow. What we need... are heroes.

Khrushchev: [looks around, wryly] Do you know any heroes around here?

Danilov: Yes, Comrade. I know one.

~From the film Enemy At The Gates.

Last month I wrote a post entitled "Not Legends, Facts." There was a reason for that.

Last night I saw some idiot at some bullshit event trying to blame Satan for Feminism and saying the Salem Witch Trials happened because of abortion. I studied the colonial history largely in Christian schools, I've been to Salem, albeit as a bored, disinterested teenager at that time. None of this works like that.

And These Fucking People know it.

They're just trying to mythologize our history and turn it into fables and legend because they think that'll make it harder for people to argue with them.

You can argue and to a certain extent prove your point via careful study of the Bible, Christian doctrine, history and tradition, the same goes for secular politics.

You can go to a place like Salem, walk around, visit museums and shit, or if you'd rather just sit at home and read all type of history about it. The Devil didn't do it, there was all type of conflicts with Native Americans, political upheaval at the time, poverty, a whole litany of Puritan bullshit that was then ongoing both over here and in England...these are known, historically proven facts.

You cannot actually prove Athena emerging fully armed and armored from the split head of Zeus after somebody cleaved his head because he had a headache. It's not even that kind of story.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. ~2 Timothy 4:3

And that's the point. That's what These Fucking People want. It's not "What does the Bible say" it's "What did the Pastor say?" They want to make everything subjective because then the loudest or most vehement voice is more likely to win the argument.

These fucking idiots want everything, up to and including religion...to be subject to political power.

Because they think they will have it.

The Mormons got a big surprise last week when they found out that hyper-Calvinists and Evangelicals don't actually consider them Christians and the Department Of Defense changed the designation of their religion on the new list accordingly.

Oops.

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.

Now These Fucking People want Trump to personally fix it...when the literal point of the Constitution is he shouldn't have to!

This is exactly the kind of problem for why the Founders put the First Amendment in the Constitution and indeed put Freedom of Religion first on the list.

When religion is subject to political power, nobody's really free to believe anything at all. In the world our Founding Fathers grew up in, it was nothing for people to have to change their religion every time there was a new king, or a new foreign army conquered the region in which they lived, Europe's wars of religion, the Puritan wars in England, etc. were still in living memory.

The moral and religious framework I was taught cannot exist in such a world as that. The entire concept of Christian Salvation as most Protestant American Christian churches believe it (or at least say they do) does not function in a world where the State in any capacity can say that one religion is valid and another is not, for any purpose.

By definition, if worldly Power can determine Spiritual Truth we're all damned anyway, and nothing matters. Jesus said His kingdom is not of this world for a damn reason.

And what happens, Evangelicals, when everything goes to shit and civilization falls and all the sudden armed men show up and tell you, at gunpoint, that you have to worship Baal or some other such Demon now??

If religion is subject to Political Power and political power grows only from Force, what grounds have you to say "NO?"

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.)

Truth is the only floor most of us will ever have to stand on to push back against power.

Faith requires belief in certain things and actions based on those beliefs to be more than just a bullshit word.

You can do legends and myths and all that in a positive fashion, to expand the mind, to make a point, to teach, that's literally what mythology is for. Jesus used Parables.

Revelation is a larger example of the same thing, an Apocalypse isn't just destruction, if there is to be destruction it's for a purpose...an Apocalypse is actually supposed to be a great revealing.

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."

"Conservatives" such as they are at this point want to make up myths and legends to get people to stop thinking, to obfuscate the Truth, to let them just reorder the country, the world, hell, the Universe according to whatever crap they like...but what they want is largely based on partisanship, personal preferences and politics, it's all subjective and it literally cannot and does not work for everybody...or even most people...and it's not even meant to!

If you're not one of these people, or if your beliefs or preferences were set (For example) a generation or two ago...Fuck You!

And I am one of those people, as is my partner, much less my Mom. Our beliefs predate all this current bullshit and we like it that way. None of us are gonna change at the drop of a hat because some dipshit Influencer on a stage thinks we should.

I've got people to think about, I can't sign on to this garbage even if I wanted to.

And it's getting worse.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You either believe our rights are God-given, or you don't.

Слава Україна!

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. ~Ronald Reagan

Eight

[Mon Mothma addresses the Senate chambers again]

Mon Mothma: Fellow Senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries, I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart. I've spent my life in this chamber. I came here as a child, and as I look around me now, I realize I have almost no memories that predate my arrival, and few bonds of affection that cleave so tightly. Through these many years, I believe I have served my constituents honorably and upheld our code of conduct. This chamber is a cauldron of opinions, and we've certainly all had our patience and tempers tested in pursuit of our ideals. Disagree as we might, I am hopeful that those of you who know me will vouch for my credibility in the days to come.

I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil! When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest. This Chamber's hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza! What took place yesterday, what happened yesterday on Ghorman, was unprovoked genocide! Yes, genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this Chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest, the monster we helped create, the monster who will come for us all soon enough, is Emperor Palpatine!

~From the Star Wars series Andor, S2.E9 "Welcome To The Rebellion."