Damned (American Revelation X, One.)

But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only. ~Matthew 24:36

Lauren Boebert thinks the "Church" has some kind of a role in "Ushering in the Second Coming of Jesus."

Horse shit.

In fact, it's impossible to overstate the fractal level of horse shit involved here.

It comes down to a basic question of metaphysics, really.

Either God is omnipotent, or He is not.

That somebody would even say this in public and not be chased off by an angry mob is the fruit of Conspiracy Theories, Creationism, Man-centered theology and the Prosperity Gospel, ad infinitum.

According to what I was taught, if God needs Man to do *Anything* by definition He is not God. The Bible doesn't say that the Church will help bring about the "Second Coming." Depending on your interpretation or if you believe in the End Times Prophecy narrative, not only does the Church have no role whatever...but most, if not all of it, would simply be gone...if you believe in all the Rapture hokum.

Of course, what remains of the End Times movement has drifted away from that...and embraced conspiracy theories to the point of making conspiracy the point of the belief system...for one simple reason; Belief in Christ offers insufficient opportunities to be cruel and hurt people.

Belief in any fixed point, morally or theologically, imposes limits on behavior.

Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, are infinitely moveable, no wonder they've become the basis of both Evangelical Christianity and Republican Party doctrine.

I'd like to propose a slightly modified scenario.

What happens, if on September 14th, 2022 John Nelson Darby is proven right, at least after a fashion?

Roughly mid-morning (UTC) billions of people...of all religions as well as virtuous nonbelievers and those defined as innocent...disappear in less time than it takes to speak a word. Whatever they're carrying with them, clothes, kids, pets...just gone.

It's a massive disaster simply from various aircraft, ground vehicles and ships either becoming unmanned or at least losing whoever had their hands at the controls. Various alliances and major nations around the world instantly go to strategic alert, though deployments and response times are hampered by so many people missing. Blackouts, brownouts, various power and service outages pile up faster than they can be reported.

In various conflict zones, one side or the other makes gains either because they lost fewer people or simply because they got reorganized faster. For example, the Russians were able to recoup some lost territory simply because half of the Ukrainian Army...along with a similar percentage of the civilian population...was simply gone and their own losses from the disappearances were less severe.

Many leaders around the world, and people in government, are likewise affected. Many leaders from the EU, as well as the Global South, disappear...some of them in the middle of public events, as do other people in attendance. Many current and former US political and religious leaders are gone, including Biden and all living former US Presidents save Donald Trump. 

Tellingly, Russia is less affected. Vladimir Putin declares Martial Law and institutes military conscription...though more for disaster relief than military action at this point.

But somebody takes a quick inventory, the event has left behind more current Republican elected officials than Democrats...and though thanks to the Constitutional line of succession and Continuity of Government, the new President is also a Democrat...but she's facing an instant substantial Republican majority. 

A video from inside a Pentecostal church in Nigeria literally shows almost all of the congregation disappearing. In a different country and time zone, a Mosque in Egypt is similarly affected. Both videos hit the BBC, CNN, FOX News and MSNBC at about the same time.

Somebody somewhere...probably a media person...does a quick tally and realizes that the Global South has been considerably more affected by the Event.

Some shouty YouTube idiot makes all the connections first, a couple days after the Event realizing that liberals and anti-fascist conservatives were hit harder by the event, the same, likewise non-Christians, People of Color, and many disabled and poor people as well.

Dude posts a video within the hour, claiming that God has cleansed the Earth of "Undesirables."

FOX News picks up the line first...

Now you tell me, what are the odds that These Fucking People wouldn't declare the Rapture some sort of cleansing if it eliminated many or most of their "enemies" and instantly reorder their moral universes to declare themselves the Inheritors of the Earth?

After all, Hell and Sin are for Other People, right? Whatever they do is righteous... 

And if they got so much wrong the first time...why wouldn't they just assume they were wrong about all that hellfire and judgment stuff??

After all, you can look at current Republican policies and see that these fucking people seem to regard the judgements of Revelation, and the poverty, scarcity and wars that result from them not as disasters but as laudable policy goals.

And now the people with the infinitely shifting moral compass think they want to bring about the End Times??

Fuck that.

You get what you tolerate, America.

At least Democrats, for all of their faults, try to make things better. Republicans only want to hurt people and try to make money off of doing so.

We need to stop putting up with this silly bullshit. 

Now.

Before people like Blowbert Hoebert figure out some way to blow up the world, simply because they think it would be funny or to offer up the ashes to their Blood God.

The Bible says when the End comes, everyone will see it.

And no man will have brought it about, either.

These people are Damned, and they want you to be as well.

Remember that.

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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

The Day After. (American Revelation X: Prequel.)

Here, have a dollar.

In fact, no brother-man here, have two
Two dollars means a snack for me
But it means a big deal to you
Be strong, serve God only
Know that if you do, beautiful heaven awaits
That's the poem I wrote for the first time
I saw a man with no clothes, no money, no plate
Mr. Wendal, that's his name
No one ever knew his name cause he's a no-one
Never thought twice about spending on a old bum
Until I had the chance to really get to know one
Now that I know him, to give him money isn't charity
He gives me some knowledge, I buy him some shoes
And to think blacks spend all that money on big colleges
Still most of y'all come out confused.

~Mr. Wendall, Arrested Development.

I didn't write anything yesterday.

Not just because it was the middle of my work-week and I was goddamned tired, but because no, fuck you. I don't want to. 

It was the 21st anniversary of 9/11. We should be moving on by now, a generation has come to adulthood since. If you were born on 9/11/2001, by the time we got out of Afghanistan you were old enough to be serving on your first deployment in the Marine Corps by the time we evacuated from Kabul last August. 

I slept through it and I'm damned glad I did.

But then I saw this; Vapid Fox News Bitch said "On 9/11 it didn't matter the color of your skin, who you voted for or what your pronouns were, we were all Americans, united, and we had a deep respect for law enforcement."

True.

But, long-term, that wasn't the world even a hell of a lot of Republicans wanted to live in.

Republicans ruined the post-9/11 unity.

And it didn't last very long at all for some people, like the Sikh gas station owner who got shot because some prejudiced idiots thought he was a Muslim and shot him. Or for one of my Air Force bros...by then a Michigan Air National Guard Lieutenant with a Criminal Justice degree...who actually *Was* Muslim and whose Detroit-area Mosque was vandalized...and people called him the N-word while he was cleaning up the damage.  

I've written extensively about that time over the years. But it wasn't very long at all before the planning for the next war started, and the social division that resulted from that, then there was the GOP adopting homophobia as an electoral strategy, Abu Ghraib, Hurricane Katrina, and the list goes on.

For every decent Republican, like George W. Bush or John McCain, or even every Republican like Dick Cheney or Karl Rove that wished to treat reality as a logic-problem they could solve, but they had limits, there was one or two crypto-fascists brooding in the shadows plus a couple of Proto-MAGA types who maybe were completely apolitical or who might've even been racist Democrats bitching about Globalization next door. As I've mentioned a time or two before, a hell of a lot of MAGA's weren't even Republicans before Trump showed up. But I'm here to tell you the Venn Diagram of those who bitched about NAFTA in the mid-1990's as middle-aged factory workers and those who wear MAGA hats today as old retirees is a fuzzy circle.

For everybody, Left, Right or Center who gave a shit and tried to make things better (or at least prevent them from getting worse) there was some jackass who saw only a chance to inflict petty cruelties on the undeserving, or desired to prove some idea of their "manhood" or "Power" at the expense of another, or who wanted only greater glory for their "Tribe."

Looking back, you could see how things started to go the way they are now, it's just at the time, a lot of us didn't want to.

And that's before you get to the goddamned religious nuts.

Apparently Doug Mastriano prayed "In Jesus Name" for "MAGA to seize the power."

Seriously? This is America, and you of all people should know we don't do things that way here.

Let me tell you something else, at that point in my life I was in the middle of getting divorced from my mentally-ill Pentecostal ex-wife. 

9/11 did lead to a brief bout of religious weirdness from those fucking people, it's just something most people didn't see. I didn't have a choice.

If it was radical Islamists doing this kind of shit, FOX News would be airing video of the airstrike that took out the building they were meeting in, with full connivance of the government, before the last stick of Mk. 117 bombs even hit the ground and while the B-1B Lancer that dropped the big iron was still visible, receding away into the distance on a wave of afterburner-fire and a vast racket of thunder.

Why is it different when it's vaguely-Christianized New Age woo woo bullshit instead of a bunch of Muslims believing in hokum and wanting to reshape the world in their demented image?

The fake-Christians and their heresies that call Trump king instead of Jesus are far more of a threat, simply because they're here.

For quite a few years after 9/11 and my divorce, I was still trying to make sense of things. I spent a lot of time reading, studying Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, and for that matter trying to argue for basic humanity and common sense in a lot of religious spaces. It was ultimately a losing battle that familiarized me with the concept of hate mail and left my inbox oozing glowing green acidic drool. 

Why read Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh or The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini or Walking The Bible by Bruce Feiler when you can sit on the couch watching Fox News and Tucker Carlson's smarmy, smirking mug, twitching in rage and work up some violent fantasy of your own but then turn around and call that "Christianity?"

And then not even have to think about it.

Why try and figure out your own issues, and maybe do something about them, when it's simply easier to inflict that shit on other people??

And while you get jack shit, or maybe end up dead or in prison and living with PTSD, some rich fuck at the other end of the Pain Chain faces neither risk nor trauma nor various risks of death and pockets a check from the gun you bought before violently acting out.

Republicans rejected the unity of a nation united in grief and loss, of people trying to help one another and fight to make the world better in favor of trying to force their ways on all the rest of us for no better reason than their own profits. Fuck them.

You can have a better world or you can have greed, hate, and lust for power. You cannot have both. One of these things is not like the other one.

If you want the world to be better, you have to be a better person.

Let it be a damning epitaph chiseled into the tombstone of the Republican Party that when a Black man said "Yes We Can" Republicans said "No We Can't" and then in all things, they tried to make that be the truth.

And that's why I had to stop being a Republican. 

Modern conservatism as an ideology takes people, even great people, and somehow makes them less than the sum of their parts. 

I was not taught that way.

And on the Last Day, the Creator is going to ask you not what you were against, but what you stood for. Not who you hated, but what you loved. Not if you glorified yourself, but what did you do for another. 

Did you reach for the stars, or sit hunkered waiting for someone to tell you that your terribleness was righteousness?

You want to get back to better times? What did you do to bring it about??

Grace is freely given, but you have to accept it. Even in apocalyptic literature there is always a Day After.

But you have to have the courage to face it.

Remember that.

We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
~Ronald Reagan

Last Year

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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

Bedlam.

Think about this; think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that. ~George Carlin

Yesterday, Queen Elizabeth II passed away.

Last night, some idiot Q-Nut posted this.

"It's been 1776 days since the first Q-Drop."

So?

(Actually, no it hasn't, a friend of mine pointed out that as of last night it'd been 1778 days, but you know, Creationist Prolife Math or something something gazpacho.)

Good God, people.

Right or wrong, millions of people around the world are mourning right now, and some fucker thinks it's all about their pet conspiracy theory bullshit?

Fuck these motherfuckers and the unicorn they rode in on. Jesus, I'm sick of this shit.

And I'm here to tell you, the conspiracy theories and all the other stupid shit isn't getting any better.

In fact, if anything it's getting more asinine and creepy.

I'm not even joking.

Charlie Kirk said the "Trans Agenda" is going to lead from Transgenderism to Transhumanism, and I'm like "Is that like all the crap you fuckers talked back in the 1990's about the legalization of homosexuality leading to the legalization of incest and pedophilia?

It's funny how the only people these days with a creepy fixation on incest and pedophilia are...Republicans.

I'm starting to wonder if all the Q-stuff is just projection, and if it's "Conservatives" who actually are the ones who are doing that type of shit. Certainly, that's the world a lot of the MAGA base seems to think it wants to live in.

But of course, all that is a LARP.

When faced with a real crisis, like COVID-19 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they either deny it exists, conspiracy theorize it to death, or start trying to empathize and rationalize in favor of the invader. 

They literally cannot even comprehend that a virus doesn't give a shit about them personally, or that Russian neo-Soviet Imperialists would not be their friends. They seem to think that America sucks because Black people or Liberalism or something, and they long for some imagined Empire Of Right to come and sweep them away to some imagined utopia where everybody knows his or her place and no one steps out of line, yet somehow they're not required to contribute anything and the harsh rulemaking of such a society doesn't apply to them.

Historically, yes, such situations can exist but you're never going to be one of the super-elites to which the rules don't apply, and belonging to such a class had its own list of requirements. Being a member of the Roman Senate required a net worth in terms of property of at least 1,000,000 sesterces and membership in the Imperial Family could come with its own long list of fucked up bullshit.

And these fuckers think they're going to cheat the Universe or come up with the right combination of Magic Words And Phrases to become those people?

This shit is an infinite exercise in goalpost-moving and the cruelty and perversion being the goddamned point.

And the thing to remember is these fucking people want you to be the one to die of disease and poverty or to otherwise bear the costs of it while they sample all the debaucheries and pleasures they imagine went with being some kind of Dark Ages nobility in Europe. They want civilization to blast itself back into illiterate savagery because they think they'll be the ones who get to recreate the Power of the medieval Church and that then they can re-fight all the cultural and social struggles of the last couple of thousand years from some point of advantage. They want Civilization to come crashing down so they can "Win" their own imagined Culture Wars.

Never mind the millions, or even billions, of people who might die if these idiots ever get their wish. Hell, they think they'll just go right ahead and repopulate the Earth with their own people.

Never mind, as demonstrated during the worst of the COVID-19 Pandemic a couple years ago, all of the cultural, environmental, logistical and social problems inherent in the deaths of even a couple of million people worldwide.

If it takes a nuclear war reducing the world's major cities to open-air ossuaries and irradiated ruins overrun with genocidal cyborgs fighting bands of stubborn survivors, these fucking people are fine with that.

Never mind that either way you look at it, places like Northern Idaho, rural Iowa or West Texas are going to be downwind of major strategic targets, what's a few hundred thousand deaths among their own from radioactive fallout and starvation...or the vast, crippling poverty and starvation that would result even from a less severe disruption of food production and distribution??

And what about the despair and rage among their own people when all this bad shit happens and Jesus doesn't show up to save them??

All this bullshit is starting to smack hard against the utterly immovable wall of reality now.

I'm legitimately concerned that when none of these fucking people's various bullshit predictions come true, we're going to be dealing with a quarter of the population of America having some kind of mass psychotic break. And I'm sure there's smaller, but comparable percentages of crazy people in a lot of other countries.

We need to do something about this shit, and a good start would be to stop indulging or tolerating these idiots. These fucking people think they have some kind of right to impose their bullshit on the rest of us. I can't put it any more simply than that.

These rich, white, conservative idiots...and that is overwhelmingly exactly what they are...are going to have to be (possibly violently) disabused of the notion that they have a right to do whatever the fuck they want to the rest of us. It's that simple. If we as a species, are going to even survive, we're going to have to stop listening to these fucking idiots, their conspiracy theories and their racism...and we're going to have to strip power from them and keep it from them on a permanent basis, one way or the other. 

Because if we don't, these fucking people will keep up the firehose of bigotry and bullshit and conspiracy theories until they can use it to collapse civilization itself in a maddening Bedlam of nonsensical bullshit.

People like Charlie Kirk or Jerry Falwell Jr. don't give a damn if the people that were their followers have been reduced to primitive cannibals dancing around a fire and shouting Unga Bunga while they pound old truck springs into spears to raid the next tribe over, so long as they're safe in their gold-plated Technocratic Elysium with their fortunes and their heretical debaucheries.

If you want a better nation, you have to be a better citizen. If you want a better world, you have to make it better.

And this? This ain't it.

QBerty

Last Post

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

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Babylon (Where the hell are we? Three.)

Thou, O king, saw, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible.
This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass,
His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.
Thou saw that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.
Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. ~Daniel 2:31-35 (Link)

I just saw this.

Picture from the Trump rally in PA over the weekend, with a whole bunch of Trump supporters showing a raised middle finger to something-or-other.

In case you wondered what the whole damn point of all this stupid bullshit for all these years now has been. The most important fucking thing to these fucking people is that they be able to stick their middle finger up at the whole damned world, and more importantly, that they be seen doing it.

This is why they put up with whacked-out loons like Mike Lindell, or perverted elitists like Mehmet Oz or why they're willing to let Donald Trump sell nuclear secrets or try to break America apart, so that he can sell whatever pieces of it he ends up controlling for parts and a couple of $10 Crack rocks for Junior.

Because the whole goddamned point, to these fucking idiots, is being able to say "Fuck you" to somebody. And it's telling that even with the "cover" of somebody like Donald Trump, most of these cowardly shits don't have the guts to actually swear. 

Do you think, if somebody invaded the United States, that these fucking people would fight for their country like the Ukrainians are doing?

Shit, if we got invaded by the Russians half of these motherfuckers would try to join the enemy, and when they got thrown into Gulags for resettlement and russification they'd cower before their jailers and obediently start trying to learn Russian.

And if they got to see some Black person or gay person get murdered by Putin's neo-Communist Chekists, they'd cackle in simpering glee.

Because it's not the Russians they hate, it's other Americans who have different beliefs or opinions, or who are of different races or religions.

Apparently, these fucking people have been having a fit because the new Lord Of The Rings has Black characters...and why wouldn't it? Tolkien wrote of a fairly diverse world. If there's elves and hobbits and orcs and shit, why wouldn't there be people of different colors?

Seriously, these fucking people have the balls to wonder why others consider them uncivilized...and then they demand the right to sort humans by color?? And there is no damned difference other than skin color.

All these Republicans ranting about "Crime?" They don't give a good goddamn that Trump stole nuclear secrets and just left that shit laying around. When they say "Crime" they mean "Lord Of The Rings has Black People." 

And they've come to hate America because Americans decided that it was wrong to discriminate or hurt people for no reason other than the color of their skin. That's what Republicans mean when they rant about "Crime" or "The Border." 

There's no crisis. The "Crisis" is that Republicans have become the party of White Superiority if not White Supremacy and they see their chances of having that being eroded simply by the fact that so many of us are simply used to dealing fairly with other people, not on some basis of novelty but simply because they're people and why should they be treated as anything else? 

Fuck these motherfuckers.

Some idiot federal judge in Texas ruled that companies shouldn't have to pay for anti-AIDS drugs if it offends their "religious beliefs."

Now hold the fuck on.

I study this stuff, and I don't know of any religion that says disease should be allowed to spread unchecked.

Except maybe for Dr. Oz's assorted woo woo New Age beliefs...and hold on, this guy's a Republican?

I can remember when Republicans thought that shit was The Devil.

Yes, I understand that some of these idiots still think HIV/AIDS is some kind of "gay disease" but it's not, and in fact globally it never was that. HIV/AIDS is not even exclusively a sexually transmitted disease. That's why things like bloodborne pathogen training are a big deal most places now.

People who hate and fear other people for no reason, or for stupid reasons, should not be allowed to be in government. People who hate and fear science or sexuality should not be allowed to be in government. People who believe in and seek to profit from woo woo bullshit definitely shouldn't be allowed in government.

Government of, by, and for the people cannot be based on what's good only for one financial clade, or group or ideology let alone someone's ego, and it has to be based on what's real, in good faith, or it's not going to work.

And perhaps more to the point, Republicans don't want anything to work, unless they're the only ones who benefit from it.

People keep calling these motherfuckers 'Fascists' but that's not quite right. Fascism is based on the power of the State, and Republicans want to destroy the State if they cannot have complete, totalitarian control over it. Their desired methods may be fascistic, but that doesn't tell the whole story.

What they desire is worship of the Self, not the State.

They think the State...or for that matter their "god"... should only exist to be used as a club to beat the people they hate.

And every last one of these fucking people thinks they're the center of the goddamned universe.

Chuck Colson called it an idolatry of self and selfishness.

And they would break America to pieces, collapse it to an anarchy, a failed state, in the service of their own vainglory.

I found it telling, awhile back, when the "Christians" started trying to cast Trump as some sort of modern Nebuchadnezzar, based off of how that ancient Babylonian king is portrayed in the Bible.

They didn't really believe that Trump was some sort of unbeliever being used by God. No, that would require believing in God themselves...rather than "God" simply being something they talk about so people will think they're righteous. 

They idolize Trump because they want to be him. So these people were telling on themselves with that Biblical comparison. They all want to be that ancient, vain Babylonian god-king who could have all the wise men killed when they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear.

It must be a hell of a way to live, this Babylon Of The Self.

And what do you think is going to happen when Trump gets indicted and charged and put on trial, or when Republicans get their ass handed to them in the next election by a pissed-off public or reality otherwise continues to refuse to cater to these idiots and their delusions?? We're already dealing with mass psychosis.

What the fuck happens when a quarter of the country has a mass psychotic break?

Don't be these fucking people.

Two

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

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House Of Bondage (Where the hell are we? Two.)

I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; ~Exodus 20:2-5

I saw this last night.

Nick Adams said that Mar-A-Lago is "Sacred hallowed ground" and that the FBI should not be able to raid any Trump properties.

Excuse me? As a former President, Donald Trump is a private citizen, he's subject to the law the same as everybody else. Listen here, bitch, I know enough about how they do things in Australia to know it's the same way there. If anything, probably more so than it is in America.

I looked it up. This motherfucker is here because he got kicked out of Australian politics for bad behavior and corruption, and was apparently told to leave the country. So of course he's going to be a boot-licking cultist to anybody who'll let him in the game pretty much anywhere and I suppose sucking Trump's withered old balls (in his mind anyway) beats being an advisor to the king of Tonga.

(Actually, I'm fairly sure the first time he called a golf course sacred ground in Tonga, Nick would get fired, likely arrested and probably laughed at. Tonga is such a Christian country that the airport is closed on Sunday. Also I've met people from there, they don't fuck around.)

Nick is another one of those people who nobody would know who he was if it wasn't for Trump.

So of course he'll bow down before the Golden Toilet.

Apparently he thinks it beats having to get a real job. I mean, I wouldn't hire this moron to shovel shit, but there you have it.

Now, look here:

If you're a Christian and you want to go straight to hell, listen to these fucking people.

Mar-A-Lago isn't a goddamned sacred space or hallowed ground, it's a golf club!

Donald Trump isn't some divine figure. Love him or hate him, he's just a man. Donald Trump is not a god. Man cannot Save Man, only God can do that, if you really believe in that sort of thing you shouldn't have to have this explained to you.

The Bible says that God created the Earth in six days. Donald Trump created a cult by calling Mexicans rapists. One of these things is not like the other one. Fuck you. That spell it out for you or do I have to use smaller words?

Seriously what the hell kind of stupid, weak ass person looks at a loser like Donald Trump and then says "There's my God, yo. I want to bet my soul on that guy." I mean, seriously??

I mean, come on, the core basis of Christianity (and of the other Abrahamic religions) is belief in the God of Abraham and being sorry for your sins. Love thy neighbor as thyself and love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy might. That seems pretty simple to me. The Jews basically say "Keep the ten commandments and you're good, bro." The Muslims likewise say that if you believe in God and the Last Day you will see Paradise.

Likewise, Buddhism pretty much boils down to practicing kindness and right action.

I mean, really, that's most religions. Seems like that's fairly easy to me.

As opposed to "Unga Bunga Own The Libs devote my entire existence to fueling this narcissistic asshole and hating basically everything??"

Sooner or later these Trump idiots are going to start burning themselves out and destroying themselves, oh, wait, the Republican Party is doing that already.

It's become a cult, and it's headed for a Jonestown moment or Kamikaze-ing itself for it's "God-emperor" probably sooner, rather than later.

These fucking people don't want a President, they want a Pharaoh, some ridiculous looking god-king that fucks his own relatives. They don't want a free country, they want the house of bondage, because they think they'll get to be a better class of slaves than all the other slaves.

And they don't want the Creator of the Infinite Universe and an afterlife of eternal wonder, they want a god and an afterlife that's small and mean, like them.

Seriously if your idea of a blessed afterlife is to have to sit there and praise Donald Trump for all of eternity, you're an idiot.

Don't be these fucking people. Is that really so hard?

So, folks, let’s remember who in God’s name we are — I really mean it — what our values are, what we believe.

“We the People” — that how our Constitution starts — or the Declaration. “We the People.” It’s who we are.

And, by the way, no one expects politics to be a pattycake. It sometimes gets mean as hell. But the idea you turn on a television and see senior senators and congressmen saying, “If such and such happens, there’ll be blood in the street.”

Where the hell are we?

~Joe Biden

One

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Feet Of Clay. (Where the hell are we? One.)

So, folks, let’s remember who in God’s name we are — I really mean it — what our values are, what we believe.

“We the People” — that how our Constitution starts — or the Declaration. “We the People.” It’s who we are.

And, by the way, no one expects politics to be a pattycake. It sometimes gets mean as hell. But the idea you turn on a television and see senior senators and congressmen saying, “If such and such happens, there’ll be blood in the street.”

Where the hell are we?

~Joe Biden

Last night, President Biden gave a speech calling Republicans out for their shitty, fascistic behavior, for, basically everything.

And all these fucking capering, simpering fascists who've been counting on everybody to continue to politely ignore their fascism lost their shit.

Good.

Maybe it's just me, but if you don't want to be called out for being a fascist, don't be one??

I mean, the absolute butthurt from people like Lauren Boebert, who Tweeted "This is 1776" on January 6th, 2021, has been absolutely off the hook.

Again, maybe it's just me but if you're going to play at being some kind of fascist revolutionary (While trying to act like you're an Instagram star) maybe you should expect some level of resistance or retaliation? That's the thing that gets me about these idiots. 

They want to play at all this stuff, talk all tough, even call themselves "Domestic Terrorists" in private because it feels smart and transgressive. But if somebody calls them out for it they get all soggy and hard to light and need to go cry on their Waifu pillows?

I mean, what the fuck??

Given her actual demonstrated maturity level, Lauren Boebert damned well needs a lecture, and to be sat down and given a good talking to, a smack in the mouth, and being told to go stand with her nose in the corner for a couple hours.

This person is nothing more than an overgrown, bratty child who thinks bullshitting her way into Congress makes her some kind of celebrity. You ask me, bitch should be forced to actually complete high school and a couple years of community college...and do it with a decent grade-point average...before being allowed to continue to participate in public life.

It's not so much the lack of proper education, though, as the utter dedication to willful ignorance that's the problem, in her case. I've honestly known a number of people from here in America as well as around the world who lack much formal education at all but are very intelligent, because they applied themselves.

Hoebert doesn't want to do that, for the simple reason that she's afraid she might have to change.

Which is really, modern conservatism in a nutshell. They pretend like bombs and bullets are nothing to worry about but show a ravening fear of the existence of Black folks, LGBT people and Muslims?

Bitch if you're afraid of the fact that a transgender person is alive and free (and not doing anything to hurt you) you're going to shit yourself when you find out that the United States Air Force can whack your ass with a drone and an AGM-114 Hellfire Missile that shoots knives.

I mean, seriously??

If you're going to try to overthrow the government, or install some sort of fascist regime, doesn't that require...I don't know...a modicum of courage?? 

If you're going to try and be some kind of 21st century Nazis, don't you think you should expect to get bloody and dirty and have people hate you or talk shit about you??

American fascism will be defeated by the fact that, instead of focusing on the titillating minor details of the latest scandal, We The People, including a large group of disgusted military veterans who've held security clearances...focused on what was actually fucking happening.

We don't care that Trump was using top secret documents as, basically jerkoff porn...but that he had them in the first fucking place.

Like, I get that a lot of this Republican fascist stuff has been shaped by decades of comment sections and internet contrarianism and cosplay but...Jesus...you want this fascist bullshit, you're going to have to come out from behind the keyboard or the desk or the comfortable anonymity of monetary policy and fight sooner or later...and no, you can't rely on the cops to do it for you, that's literally the opposite of the military's job and as far as all these wannabe militias go...LOL. 

Gilead will be defeated by the lack of blood pressure medications, and the unsuitability of the people who need them to functioning as light infantry.

And another thing, if "Conservatives" are so right, or so righteous, why does Jeanine Pirro always look like she's drunk? I'm sorry but if somebody who's always half in the bag starts talking at me about "Violent retaliation" well, I've got a few things for that. But you ain't going to like it.

This fascist movement is full of gun nuts who don't know how to shoot, right-wing policy wonks who can't organize a two-car motorcade, shit-talking tough guys who can't fight, and a whole bunch of various "leaders" who couldn't lead a toddler to the bathroom.

And these fucking idiots want to threaten the rest of us?

Fuck You!

Seriously, if These Fucking People come at the rest of us at this point, there's going to be blood in the streets, alright.

Theirs.

These fucking people have taken the tolerance of the rest of us and their decreasing ability to game the system as evidence of their own toughness and political acumen, and confused the ability to stockpile large amounts of civilian grade weapons with some kind of military strength.

If y'all want to come out and fight the rest of us, fine. I know how to use a rifle well enough, they taught me that in the Air Force and I learned it from my Dad before that.

But maybe first you fuckers might want to practice "Not melting down in the presence of harsh language" or "Avoiding feeling guilty when somebody points out what you've done. Whatever else it is, conservatives, war IS a serious business. It's not a game, or for fun or profit. People die, and civil wars in particular tend to be a really dirty, nasty business.

Oh, all the Lost Cause romanticists who propped up Confederate sympathies and southern Segregation for a hundred years didn't tell you that part, did they?

If you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen. You. 

Somebody like Donald Trump sure as hell ain't going to get it for ya. Republicans won't do it, but they'll sure help themselves to your Medicare, your Social Security, your wages, and your young daughter, won't they? And then they'll get some preacher to call that shit "Righteousness."

People need to grow the fuck up.

I've looked across a field that was nothing but mass graves.

I've seen that perpetually haunted look in the eyes of a Bosniak Muslim woman who was the victim of Serb rape camps.

This is the world some "Conservatives" have decided that they want, the Killing Fields, but with a mall. I guarantee you, though, they expect some other poor schmuck to go out and get it for them, and do the dying part.

I've also seen the quiet resolve of Bosniak soldiers who sometimes fought fully armed Serbian soldiers armed with Soviet weapons, IFV's and tanks with nothing but hunting rifles and improvised explosives.

I've also seen what those Serb fighters became once you took away that AK-47, nothing but a bunch of drunks with a bottle in one hand, stumbling around talking about how tough they are because they could shoot women and children, all while they got piss running down their legs at the sight of fully-armed US soldiers and some British and German cops or UN officials telling them to go home.

That's what Republicans have decided they want to be.

Choose your next move wisely, Republicans. 

We see you.

It's hard to do a ruck march with feet of clay.

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

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Fallen (American Revelation IX: Postscript.)

Well the government bugged the men's room
In the local disco lounge
And all she wants to do is dance, dance
To keep the boys from sellin'
All the weapons they could scrounge
And all she wants to do is dance
Yeah, but that don't keep the boys from makin' a buck or two
And all she wants to do is dance, dance
The still can sell the army
All the drugs that they can do
And all she wants to do is
All she wants to do is dance
And make romance. ~Don Henley, All She Wants To Do Is Dance

I saw this last night.

Sarah Palin lost the special election to replace Don Young-who had recently met the True Death after so many years of Vampiric undeath-in Alaska. I remain uncertain...especially given that he pulled a knife on John Boehner...whether Young was a Brujah or a Gangrel but I'm fairly sure he was a vampire. I mean, how the fuck does even an old white man be in Congress longer than I have been alive and still always look the same?

Anyway....

L...and I cannot stress this enough...OL.

How the mighty are fallen. LOL.

14 years ago this week, I was still a Republican. 

Sarah Palin's nomination as John McCain's running mate had added a whole new level of disgusted to how I felt about things. I...an Air Force veteran who had two friends who'd been wounded over there...was tired of the Iraq war. I was tired of the conspiracy theories and racism. I was tired of the "But who would you rather have a beer with?" ethic of the Republican base at the time...which isn't a lot of fun to be around if you're a recovering alcoholic. And I, recently a declared Agnostic, was sick and tired of the religious bullshit from the Evangelicals. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I'd voted for Bush twice...and I figured Bush himself...or Cheney for that matter, seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with any of this crap.

And I quite literally had lost friends over my response to all the Birtherism bullshit, which simply was to point out thus: 

If you're anywhere in the nuclear chain of command or custody from the President on down to the Security Forces troop guarding the ALCM Structures, the CIA, FBI, whatever-the-fuck-branch-Office Of Special Investigations and the goddamned military industrial complex will know what kind of cereal you ate as a kid, at what age you started jerking off, and with which hand. 

Considering that a lot of the people I'd said this to were your basic uptight non-veteran conservative Christian, you can imagine how well that went over.

As of August 29th, when Palin was announced as VP-nominee-presumptive I still leaned slightly in favor of McCain...in contrast to my grandfather, a staunch conservative Democrat and retired Naval Aviator who'd been in the twilight of his career when he'd at some point encountered John McCain at the start of his own. I never did get the details. 

Anyway, my Grandpa...a swing voter for obvious reasons, he'd voted for Reagan twice...was already leaning toward voting for Obama. He didn't like it, but his literal words to me were "Yeah, I'll vote for a Black before I'll vote for that son of a bitch and you can tell him I said so" followed by a spit on the garage floor. 

My Grandma on the other hand, voted for McCain/Palin, just to cancel him out. They almost always did that.

Perot in 1992 was the only exception.

I liked Barack Obama, but I wasn't sure I thought he had enough experience for the job.

And then along came Sarah...my thought, and a running joke about this shit that I cracked at work...was that she had to have sucked on somebody's wrinkly old balls to get the nomination and every dumbass vapid utterance I heard confirmed this in my head. I spent like a week being like "What the actual fucking fuck!" 

And that was before Saturday Night Live and Tina Fey got ahold of Sarah.

More to the point, I'm looking at John McCain like "The fuck you thinking, Captain Queeg?" Except that McCain, himself was starting to sound all to much like that same character from the Herman Wouk novel The Caine Mutiny, sounding a lot like Bogie's performance in the eponymous film, and looking rather unhealthy to boot! And then he wants to put this dumb bitch a heartbeat away from the Presidency?

No. Fucking. Way.

The shit I heard from those idiots that week was prequel to all that's come and gone since, and I could see it. I knew voting for the crazy was death. Most people couldn't see this, even many of those who voted for Obama.

And by the time it was official at the Republican National Convention, the religious nuts...including my ex-wife, mind you...were coming out of the woodwork calling Sarah Palin the reincarnation of several different Biblical heroines. I'm just like "What? One of these things is not like the other one! Christians don't believe in that stuff!" But there it fucking was. And Palin herself is Pentecostal, so I knew pretty much any false-doctrine arglebargle would be up for grabs.

(And remember, as bad as Peter Meijer is he voted to impeach Trump, he voted for aid to Ukraine, LGBT rights and post-Uvalde gun control. His presumed replacement will be much worse. Remember, it's an actual articulated viewpoint of MAGA that America-as-it-is isn't worth defending, and that our decisions should be made for us by perverted old Catholic men in foreign countries, or by Russian dictators, whichever gives MAGA Republicans more money.)

So the following Friday...at that point, a day off because I had my days switched to Fridays and Saturdays for about a year...I went down to the Secretary of State and changed my voter registration to Independent. I voted for Obama and I never looked back.

And the more the Republican Party goes off the rails crashing like a train full of POL tank cars through a small Quebecois town...the happier I am that I made that decision.

To even be a standard, "moderate" Republican these days, you've got to hold some pretty monstrous views, have no pride or self-respect and be more concerned about "Owning the Libs" than even defending America or our allies...or you're out.

Even one deviation, like believing that Ukrainians have the right to defend themselves with weapons from the Russians who want to destroy their culture, erase their nation and kill them...is too much. Ironic, considering that Republicans as a whole think they want to go out and fight the whole world.

And, given the very real, very likely threat of war with Russia and threats by Russian media of terrorist attacks against Americans, that's a hell of an ideological stance for the Republican Party as a whole to take. 

They can't wait to be poodles to every dictator that comes along, and for America to be the same.

Have to wonder how they'd feel about Russification?

And this is America?

Reagan fucking wept.

Well we barely make the airport
For the last plane out
As we taxied down the runway
I could hear the people shout
They said, "don't come back here Yankee"
But if I ever do
I'll bring more money
'Cause all she wants to do is dance
And make romance
Never mind the heat
Comin' off the street
She wants to party
She wants to get down
All she wants to do is
All she wants to do is dance
And make romance
All she wants to do is dance.

~Don Henley, All She Wants To Do Is Dance

Nine

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I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

~Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Glorious Revolution? (American Revelation IX, Nine.)

They're pickin' up the prisoners

And puttin 'em in a pen
And all she wants to do is dance, dance
Rebels been rebels
Since I don't know when
And all she wants to do is dance

Molotov cocktail, the local drink
And all she wants to do is dance, dance
They mix 'em up right
In the kitchen sink
And all she wants to do is dance.

~Don Henley, All She Wants To Do Is Dance.

Saw this last night. Just a small selection of the stuff the FBI retrieved from Mar-A-Lago.

Shit. 

And that's my take as a former United States Air Force Security Forces Sergeant.

If I'd done 10% of what Trump did, I'd still be in prison. This is probably the biggest security breach in US history.

And people keep making excuses for this shit??

"Who gives a rat's ass about National Security, I've got ideological points to score" is a hell of a take on anything, there, media pundits. 

If you MSM fuckers don't know by now that the Republican Party would gladly let the MAGA mob literally eat you, I don't know if you can be saved, either.

And that's before we get to the people who've pretty much declared this treasonous jackass to be their God.

Seriously it seems like 40% of the damn country is either so politically fucked in the head or so committed to false equivalency that, well, we'd be in some real shit if Trump wasn't so goddamned incompetent.

And he has the support of the Russians up to and including Uncle Vlad Dracula his own self? 

Are you shitting me, here???

A real leader with half a brain could turn all this into some kind of successful secessionist movement...if not the Glorious Revolution...and have themselves elected President For Life of El Republique De Texas by acclaim of the mob or something. Then after we have to bug out, get the Russians to put a couple wings of Flankers at Carswell and Dyess, a squadron of Kilo-class Boats at Ingleside, a division of Airborne troops at Fort Sam with a wing of IL-76 Candid transports at Kelly to make sure they can go places and hurt people if needed. Throw in a couple of Motor-Rifle divisions at Fort Hood, just because it's there.

Assume Fort Bliss, El Paso and a decent chunk of the Rio Grande valley are this scenario's Guantanamo.

And with Texas in his pocket, Putin could "safely" back off from his misbegotten adventure in Ukraine. Who needs Ukraine, when you have Texas? I mean, it's a hell of a bet that the Ukrainians don't just...and successfully at that...follow they ass all the way to Moscow at this point, but still...

And while we're stuck sorting out basing, logistics and training issues...not to mention economics and transport...Trump could have settled his ass down to being the Fidel Castro of the 21st Century. If not with Russia as his patron, then China, or Saudi Arabia.

Except Trump is not that fucking guy. 

Fidel Castro started out with 82 fucking guys and a leaky boat and won the goddamned war. Trump was handed every advantage imaginable, 70-some million followers, Russian support, and he still fucked it up every which way.

Fidel, right or wrong, bullshitted and fought and harangued his way into the history books. The place where Fidelito and his guys landed in Cuba with that leaky boat? It's a national park now. Trump? He's going to end up sitting in a cell...and everyplace with his name on it now won't have it anymore. 

Trump is going to go down in history as a damn disgrace, as literally what the fuck not to do.

And yet his mob still roars. That's the damn problem.

The fact that US "Conservatives" are so debased, fat and bored that this looks like anything revolutionary should speak volumes about what the goddamn problem really is.

And the reason they do this shit, is he gets away with going around talking like he's still the goddamn President, spreads all these big lies and crazy stories and feeds the conspiracy shit...while actively trying to provoke a civil war. And the government has only just recently made public its efforts to bring Trump to justice?

On one level, I get DOJ's reasoning, but I'm honestly not sure they realized how bad things were. I think they should have started moving as aggressively on this shit as they are now all the way back in January of last year. At least we'd have known how bad the shit was.

And of course, the Republican Party collectively has the leadership capability God gave a garden slug. Instead of denouncing Trump like the traitor he is, they defend him, while "privately" expressing disgust and hoping somebody "takes care of the son-of-a-bitch" for them. They're scared shitless of Trump's base...but I guess they ain't scared enough to protect themselves? Or are they Okay with Trump undermining the entire damn country, just so they can hold power in one small chunk of it (or the ruins of the whole thing?)

Reagan Fucking Wept.

The Republican Party has become a fascist Idiocracy dominated by the kind of people Republicans didn't used to want to be around...and they're too chickenshit to do anything about it?

These fucking people almost took America down with them!

You know what the worst part of it is? Instead of thinking "Oh shit, what did we do?" or "What the hell are we even doing here?" The modern Republican Party is actively scheming to gain from the chaos of the current situation, convinced that they can turn what increasingly looks like a looming electoral defeat, financial ruin, and ultimate Trumpian disgrace into some sort of insurgent victory carried on the backs of a few thousand armed peasants and a small band of intrepid guerillas.

The problem here ain't just Trump. The media ecosystem that created him and the Party that he ate from the inside out and wore like a goddamn bad suit are both rotten to the fucking core.

Rotten enough, that apparently some of the rich motherfuckers who made it that way think the situation as it is, would cost them too much money, so they're not giving the Republicans anymore.

Fuck you, Yertle, have fun. 

Maybe you fuckers shouldn't have put Medicaid fraudster Rick Scott in charge of the till?

If Trump gets charged with espionage and ends up going to prison...an outcome I see as unavoidable simply because the government has no other choice, and the GOP implodes because 99.98% of Republicans are nothing but a bunch of thieves...

Well, I guess all that leaves these fucking people is to attempt their Glorious Revolution on their own?

Good luck with that.

Eight

Crazy people walkin' round with blood in their eyes
And all she wants to do is dance, dance, dance
Wild-eyed pistols wavers who ain't afraid to die
And all she wants to do is
And all she wants to do is dance
And make romance
She can't feel the heat
Comin' off the street
She wants to party
She wants to get down
All she wants to do is
All she wants to do is dance.

~Don Henley, All She Wants To Do Is Dance.

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