Mark Of The Beast

Romans 8:38-39 King James Version

38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,

39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I went to Wal-Mart this morning, with my roommate. As luck would have it, the line at one of the actual cash registers (as opposed to the self-scan units that have replaced most of them) was short, just one guy, so I got in line behind this old dude. I was more than a little surprised to see this guy, easily 20 years older than myself...pull out his cell phone and use an app to pay for his groceries.

This amused/interested me, but it also got me thinking. If somebody would have told me 20 years ago that this would happen, let alone be so routine...End Times Prophecy Movement member, moderate-but-strident-on-a-few-issues conservative Christian me would have cited chapter and verse from Revelation.

The wheels must've been turning pretty obviously, because the Cashier, who knows me a little, asked what was on my mind. I said "Ya know, I think the Bible and all those End Times preachers were kinda wrong. We don't need no 'Mark of the Beast' no computer chip implanted in the right hand...we carry a whole bunch of them around in our hands willingly, without even thinking about it." She didn't disagree.

Why do I bring this up?

I saw this, yesterday.

It made me so angry that I swore I was going to take a day before I wrote something about it, else the content of said post might simply have been an unending stream of profanity.

"I’m a Christian and my Christian beliefs are you don’t do interracial marriage. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s the way I believe...I have black friends, I hired black people. But when it comes to all this stuff you see on TV, when you see blacks and whites together, it makes my blood boil because that’s just not the way a Christian is supposed to live."

As I've said, I used to be a Christian.

I've read the Bible. I still own several of them. For most of my life I believed in the Bible. Jesus had no such belief and the Bible records no such teaching.

This dude has effectively made a god in his own image.

Jesus was a brown-skinned Middle Eastern Jew. The only people in ancient Israel who were "white" as we would define the term today would have been *Some* of the Romans. ALL of the Romans (along with Hellenized and Romanized Jews) were considered anathema by observant Jews in Israel, which during the early part of Jesus's life was a Roman client kingdom under armed occupation, becoming a Roman province during His life.

Then, as now, the Middle East  and the people therein were none too thrilled with what it had seen of "Western" civilization, given that such as it was, it was forced upon them with Gladius and Pilum just as today it is forced with Abrams tanks, M4 Carbines and Predator drones, and the local response was pretty similar, though delivered with sling and sword and hurled stone (rather than today's IED's and Kalashnikovs) as was the language of shouted invocations of divine favor and victory shouted by armed zealots who fought an insurgent war against Rome, that would turn conventional for its time some 30 years later.

 Aramaic is the precursor-language to Arabic, and Aramaic was the vernacular speech of much of the Middle East in Jesus's day. 

But, "Whiteness" as we know it was not even conceptually a thing yet. For Rome, bigotry was a matter of culture. You were either culturally Greek/Roman, or a barbarian.

Race is a social construct, even in the time-frame over which the Bible was actually written, up to when its basic form was finalized after the Council of Nicea...the modern concept of race (which dates from the Atlantic Slave Trade) had not been constructed yet. Jesus Christ would have known no such concept. In point of fact, there's a substantial body of theology...the Gnostic gospels...that suggests that Jesus was married, and that Mary Magdalene was His wife. 

There are a number of theories on the part of the alt-Christianity, Holy Blood, Holy Grail crowd that suggest that Mary Magdalene was Ethiopian, you do the math.

The Bible doesn't tell the whole story, given the aims of Constantine and his priests, it can't. See, for one thing as not only an observant Israeli Jew, but a Rabbi...Jesus would have been expected to be married. For Him to be considered Sinless in the context of His own culture and place...rather than the Platonic asexuality forced upon Him by Constantine and Rome...Jesus would have had to be married. Jesus would have drank wine. Jesus would have worked for a damned living and for fuck's sake, Jesus would have fought the power rather than tried to become it.

His Kingdom is not of this world. The Bible says this, in each of the Gospels.

If you'd have told me 20 years ago, that this would be happening, and told me about that Georgia city councilman: I'd have cited chapter and verse, though more likely from Matthew than from Revelation. A few years later, I'd be quoting Bruce Chilton, John Shelby Spong

And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.~Matthew 24:12

Do you understand what this means? Do you understand why Trump should not have pardoned this man? He committed murder. In or out of Uniform, it's the same fucking thing. It's one thing to kill somebody in a firefight, and it is completely another to kill a helpless prisoner, especially when command authority has directed you not to.

What incentive do our various enemies, opponents and rivals around the world now have to respect the Geneva Conventions and the rules of war when it comes to American prisoners? Do you really think Trump pardoning a murderer...a murderer, mind you, that I've not seen one single veteran speak out in support of...and obviously I don't support him either. Dude disobeyed a lawful order, then committed murder. He served five years...don't ask me why it wasn't longer...and Trump just pardoned his ass.

You tell me what reason somebody like Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi or whoever's running the Taliban these days...not to mention Ali Khamanei, Kim Jong Un, Nicholas Maduro, Vladimir Putin, or Xi Jinping (and mind you, many of these people are at least technically allies against us) would have to expect that their own soldiers could reliably expect safety if captured by American troops? Or to provide for such safety in turn? I mean, all it takes on either side is one angry dude, a few minutes, a bullet or two and an eventual pardon from the leadership, right? Oh, sure, the rules fully apply and all relevant conventions will be observed...until some yahoo with an ax to grind against the world gets elected or lies his way into power and decides that they don't.

You see, America's word has to mean something...or at the end of the day our nation has no power.

We can't just bomb somebody every time we want something...not unless we want the rest of the world to put an end to us and our willful ignorance real quick...and probably without ever firing a shot. All they have to do is cut off our trade, call in our debts and sit back and watch as our economy crumbles, our society collapses, and the conservatives and rich people are the first ones to try to head for the door...but, based on our own logic, what other country would have to take them?

Everybody else could just as well start treating us like we've been treating them for the last few years, and that'd put an end to our shit real quick.

But ya know, it's more than that.

If Christianity in general, much less the American kind, wants to survive...the word of Christian believers has to mean something other than a privilege-dipped "Fuck You" to everyone else. If not, sooner or later, Christianity goes the way of belief in Moloch and Zeus, Fionn Mac Cumhaill, Odin, and the blood-soaked god-kings of ancient MesoAmerica...and at this point I'm no longer sure that it shouldn't, if this is what it's come to.

"The Word became flesh..." With a picture of Trump? That's basically saying that Trump is Jesus.

Evangelical Christianity in general, and the various forms of the Prosperity Gospel in particular...seem hell bent on becoming the Cult Of Trump. But Trump is just a man.

Show me, in the Bible. Where does it say that Man can Save Man? Do these people even understand what the Christian concept of Salvation even means?

Go ahead, show me in the Bible where Anti-Blackness and the worship of one Donald J. Trump is described as being righteous. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Go ahead and show me where Jesus exhorts his followers to cruelty and hate toward their fellow humans. I'll wait, I promise. I work third shift, I can do this all day.

Read the snipped Twitter post here, and read it good.

Calling Angela Merkel "Hitler's daughter?"

Hey, wait, aren't these alt-Right Nazis the people who think Hitler did nothing wrong? Back the truck up here a minute...

Look, fundamentally this bullshit can be killed with a calendar. Hitler committed suicide in 1945. Angela Merkel was born in 1954. The where's and whens of this stuff are all documented fact. It literally makes no damned sense to me why anyone would try to pretend otherwise...let alone why anybody would want to live in that kind of world.

Oh, right, to a one these goddamned fools believe that conspiracy theories, fascist bullshit and racism magnify their own importance and make them feel powerful because something something gazpacho.

You want to feel powerful? You can start by getting a job and moving out of your mama's basement, you fucking losers.

Look, people who believe shit that's this dumb, people who are this divorced from concepts of law, reality and truth that go back to the Enlightenment if not before, cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be trusted, they can only be defeated, physically, electorally, or both. Then you laugh at them, shun them, don't give them a single thing that makes them think you're okay with their bullshit, and sure as hell don't fuck them.

You cannot reason with unreasonable people. Do you think, if these people ever get the level of power that they want, that even the most abject submission will be abject enough? These fucking people are already never happy with anything!

I'm serious.

People need to quit arguing over policies and get behind whatever Democrat can get the most people behind them, and maybe give conservatives who don't like Trump something to vote for...and right now that person looks like Joe Biden.

We can enact the policies we want once we clean up this mess. But we have to show up, we have to do the work. You have to be responsible and do your homework before you get an "A." Ya'll gotta eat your vegetables before you get the ice cream. It's not a choice. This has to be done.

Because if it isn't?

Do you really think that if Trump were to declare himself a god, pull some random number out his ass and demand that his followers take it upon themselves in some way so that they could eat or engage in commerce, do you really think they'd say no?

They'd be lining up 'round the block for that gold-plated "666" and you and I both know it.

It gets worse.

Do you really think that if he ordered his idiot supporters to try to kill the rest of us, that they would not at least try? Think about it. What other set of words does "Build the wall" sound like?

Our civilization and our world face an existential threat here. We'd best start thinking and acting in those terms. Vote the sons of bitches out, all of them, and then be prepared to defend yourself.

I feel certain that this bullshit is going to end with Americans shooting at each other. That's what these people want, it's what they advocate for among themselves, it's what they threaten daily on social media. It's what they whack off to at night.

There's no shining Savior, no unicorns, just us...but we have the power to stop this shit if we just come together.

They already have, and they've chosen their god. A weak, small, petty and venal god to be sure, but he's theirs and they're welcome to have him.

But we live in a nation where a person gets a vote but their God doesn't. We don't have a God, we have a Constitution. We are supposed to be WE, a body politic, not a bunch of atomized little groups fighting over who gets what while the ship is sinking.

It's time we start acting like it.

Things ain't great, but the alternative is worse.

Revelation 13:16-17 King James Version (KJV)

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

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

Pravda.

Words that do not match deeds are unimportant. ~Che Guevara

I saw this yesterday.

Some idiot Yellow Vest Nazi in England, shouting "Shame on you!" at Royal Navy officers, sailors and veterans for...I don't know...doing (or having done) their duty.

Tell me again, how conservatives  and these Nationalist motherfuckers just love the military. (And yes, this crap is the same in any country.)

Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station had an interesting thread on this topic yesterday.

Basically, at this point it's my take that conservatives and nationalists only even give a shit about the military when it can be used to further their agenda, or score political points. That's what a lot of this "support" of the military and veterans seems to boil down to these days, people wanting to score points in some imaginary whatever that exists only in their heads or wanting to feel like they're a part of something bigger than themselves without having to put any actual work in.

Trust me, veterans don't generally care if some goober of a cashier "appreciates" them, most just want to live their lives and not be constantly bothered about stuff like their military service.

I wonder how many of these "thank you for your service" fools might stop doing this shit if they got a hobby, joined a church or a photography group or even, yes, a shooting club or something? Or just walk your dog and go talk to people. Do something to feel like you have your own worth instead of expecting other people to carry the load for you.

The fake veteran-worship is, to a certain extent, generated by Republican bullshit. There's also a certain element of guilt on the part of the Baby Boomers over how Vietnam veterans were treated, including by many Boomers themselves.

That's a part of it. But I think there's another element, too.

You'd be amazed how many people anymore don't leave the house that much, let alone talk to their neighbors. I saw something not too long ago, that said Fascism is helped by social isolation.

Honestly, I think that's a lot of where this whole Trump thing came from. He said "Follow me" and a bunch of followers who didn't have anything to do with themselves...who had mostly given up on the traditional "Conservative" outlets of church groups and fraternal societies, and who mostly did not have the experience of things like interaction with different people, military service, travel, etc. all said "HELL Yeah."

I have a theory that the success of a given bullshit conspiracy theory, cult or gimcrack political movement in this day and age is inversely proportional to how many losers it makes feel like heroes.

And something that goes with losers needing or wanting to feel heroic is that they often feel the need to try to tear down actual heroes, successful people, or even those who have simply achieved adequacy and have nothing to prove. Thus many of these people also adopt Trump's perpetually aggrieved attitude as well as his never being happy with anything.

But at the same time, I think there's also something more sinister going on here, and it's not just in America...but everywhere.

Governments that represent everyone, and military forces that protect everyone are, by definition, a threat to those whose greatest desire is to shoot down their fellow citizens, their neighbors, and then squat in the ruins with their Bibles and their guns while eating salted rat (or each other) and peering suspiciously out of the gun ports of their bunkers. Such things are an even more profound threat to those who regard only their culture, political viewpoint of religious subculture as representative of civilization or deserving of humanity.

I'm not sure how we can continue to have a civilization when roughly 25% of Americans (a number that seems to neatly dovetail with the number of registered Republicans) simply don't believe in civilization as a concept, or at best simply attach the term to "their" culture or country without grasping or even trying to understand what the word "Civilization" even means. And of course, the fact that this, or that, didn't go their way is never their fault. The Right has absolutely mastered the arts of blame, learned helplessness and victim-hood...just like it used to accuse the Left of doing.

And then Fox News and talk-radio turn them into rage-filled spectators in their own lives....and the President tries to amplify this, and conspiracy theories point it in all kinds of crazy directions. My Grandma always said TV rots your brain. Since I stopped watching it about the time I got married (we didn't have cable, and the internet was dial-up) I have observed that this is very much true. I never re-started watching TV, despite consistently having Cable or living with somebody who did since then.

I've been making a point of sort-of paying attention to Fox News when I can, this week, and I've come to the conclusion that relying on that crap for news is about like relying on the Bible for an understanding of the classical world and the early Roman Empire. One or two of the names mentioned might be the same...but that's about it. Fox News is more real-time mythology than information.

As I said before, I have observed that certain people watch Fox News like ADHD little kids watch cartoons, with kind of a zombie-eyed glazed over stare. If TV rots your brain, what does TV that promotes hate and rage do to it? Today "Conservatives" from Trump on down have been making a big deal of the fact that washed-up character actor James Woods got himself kicked off of Twitter again...claiming there's some kind of Leftist-led effort on the part of Twitter (a corporation founded by Libertarian Jack Dorsey) to silence "Conservative" "Thinkers." Note that absolutely nobody on his side points out that Woods indeed did routinely break the site's rules, and that they were well within their rights to shit-can him.

Just sayin' I mostly know of Woods from Family Guy episodes, are ya'll really sure this dude is the role model you want? If he's a thinker, no wonder our political dialogue seems like the mutant love child of the Enclave from the Fallout video games and Spongebob Squarepants at its dumbest. This shit only gets worse when people don't even know their own history.

Combine that with a 24-hour news cycle that has to spend a lot of time filling dead air for money, and people who have been turned into spectators regarding their own existence don't have a short leap ahead of them for seeking fulfillment or glory through others instead of trying to find themselves and make their own.

The Anti-liberalism, Anti-Semitism (and anti-everything-else for that matter) and the desire to shoot people simply grows out of this. When everything sucks but nothing is ever your fault and you not only feel rage and resentment at slights real and imagined all the time...but have such things amplified and encouraged by the media that you consume...even as you yourself feel no incentive to change or do anything; I guess it ends up being, I don't know, easier maybe...to just blame somebody else.

And with or without the government being involved in it, that rage is eventually going to stop simmering and just boil over.

I was always told it takes two, for any kind of interpersonal situation. It takes two to have a fight, two at least for most of us to have a job, two make a baby, to have a marriage work (or fail) or to legally dissolve the same. There is always you and always the other. Yeah, once in awhile it does all fall on one person, but in most of our lives that doesn't happen on a constant basis.

Just sayin' being offended that other people exist seems like a hell of a way to live.

Increasingly, it seems like a bad idea to be like that, just sayin.'

Last week, for the hell of it I downloaded The Hunt For Red October, and The Cardinal Of The Kremlin. In reading both, I've noticed something that I find pretty interesting. Read something like that...written by a conservative in the 1980's, and then compare and contrast it to today. You'll see some interesting stuff. For one thing, I've observed that as of right now, at least, Trump Conservatives and Republicans sound an awful lot like how Tom Clancy wrote Soviet characters.

Everybody is corrupt, everybody lies, more to the point they know they're lying, but most of these people don't say anything for fear of the consequences.

I'm not sure how anybody considers that to be conservative. How do any of these people, in their own lives, determine what is true?
Without truth, there IS no freedom.

Inside the Party, Stalin has put himself above all criticism and the State. It is impossible to displace him except by assassination. Every oppositionist becomes ipso facto a terrorist. ~Leon Trotsky

Does this quote remind you of anybody else?

Ironically, the other night I saw some conservative idiot refer to teachers as "Commies."

But ya know, I guess it holds up.

In a movement or society built on lies, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Do it.

The APC Diaries.

If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine. ~Che Guevara

So, there's apparently some kind of conflict developing in Venezuela. Conservatives have been busy crowing about it all morning.

Me? I'm just thinking "Damn, I hope those people in the crowd made it out okay." But ya know, it looks like at the least that APC clipped a few people in the crowd.

Like, seriously, what the fuck is even wrong with these people, by which of course I mean the American conservatives, not the Venezuelans. As I understand it, two guys, Nicholas Maduro and Juan Guaido, each legitimately believe themselves to be President of Venezuela. Maduro, an autocrat, won an obviously-rigged election last year...and is wildly unpopular due to bad policies, refusal to diversify the country's economy and, for that matter, neglect of the oil infrastructure on which it currently depends. Juan Guaido, far from being some kind of conservative ideal, is a centrist Democratic Socialist...so, somewhere between a Latin American equivalent to Barack Obama and maybe Bernie Sanders. Nobody's going to sweep away socialism here, maybe refine it some or strike a balance between capitalism and the needs of the many, as democratic socialists usually try to do, but nobody's "Ending socialism."

And this Juan Guaido guy is supposedly some kind of right-wing ideal? I'm not buying this. Hell, I'm not even renting it.

This, yet again, isn't about actual ideology or policy. It's about "winning." It's about fear of people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and fear, not so much of socialism...but that somebody other than conservative white people will get any. As with our own domestic Trump bullshit...these idiots will maybe figure out what they actually want after they gloat about "winning" for a couple of weeks and make insufferable fools of themselves all over the internet. I've noted that actual professionals are either still pretty quiet or cautioning against buying into the right-wing narrative on this.

These fucking people have had it out for the current Venezuelan government since Chavez was in power...as if much would change under a guy who is legitimately the interim President under their Constitutional system?

Meanwhile, on the US conservative side of the fence, there has been little if anything said about the people who've been injured or killed and damned little concern for the Venezuelan people and what they might actually want. It's worth noting that food insecurity has been an issue for years, and that basic survival has been a trial for many people...and that in and of itself has nothing to do with socialism...instead being the result of an incompetently administered system that's dependent on oil for revenue, and oil prices have been down for years. Socialism isn't the problem here, stupidity and the government failing to live up to its responsibilities while glorifying the gimcrack desires and passions of one man is the problem.

Sound familiar? Oh, wait...

Over the weekend, Trump repeated and embellished his bogus infanticide claims at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

The response by this NICU nurse is worth the read.

As I've said before, this shit does not happen. The entire business stems from a willful misquote of something Ralph Northam said regarding pallative care of an infant that was not going to survive due to medical conditions. It's a lie. There is nobody executing babies in the United States of America.

I'm going to ask this again, for the people in the back. Yeah, you in the red hat; How exactly do you think lying rectifies injustice?

This bullshit is going to get somebody killed, probably the wrong person, and for stupid reasons.

Likewise, How exactly does crowing about a nation's internal conflict, that fundamentally stems from food insecurity and incompetent government policies, help even one damned thing?

People are dying down there, and I'm pretty sure those people standing up against the Maduro government...and by extension its Chinese and Russian allies...don't give a damn about your ideology. They just want to have food on the table. No, everything in the world is not about you.

While I'm at it, we had our own violence here in America over the weekend, some idiot angry internet nerd shot up the Chabad Poway Synagogue in California, near San Diego.

I didn't see very many of these people who are crowing about guns and freedom and an end to socialism having one damned thing to say about that shooting.

In point of fact, the collapse of and infighting within the NRA seemed to grab more headlines, but okay, whatever.

The fact is, all these conservative culture warriors don't give a fuck about justice, they don't give a fuck about people being killed for no reason. It's actually kind of hard to see what they do care about...except of course their adoring worship of Donald Trump.

Speaking of topics like Communism and Socialism, veneration of Joseph Stalin is increasing again in Russia...and being pushed by the State...and I don't see very many conservatives even having one damn thing to say about that, either. Actually,  most of the ones who are are the Never Trump conservatives. No one else seems to care. These Nazis don't give a damn that Stalin fought Nazis, they only care about their idea of an archetype of a "strong leader." They'll edit out all the inconvenient parts later.

Actually, I don't think a lot of these people either in America or Russia even know what Stalin stood for. You bet your ass Vladimir Putin does though, KGB officers were required to study that shit. Sword and Shield of the Party, you bet.

They don't care what he stood for. It's the cruelty, stupid.

They don't care what Juan Guaido or Nicholas Maduro stand for. It's the idea of some kind of proxy conflict that will, in the end, fail as it always does to banish their American opposition to some kind of mythical outer darkness...that's what they want.

There aren't going to be American boots on the ground in Venezuela...there don't have to be. This is, yet again, another proxy conflict between the US and its allies on one side, and China and Russia on the other...and likely a chance to sell some guns and wank off to the idea of people being killed for something something gazpacho.

But ya know, fundamentally both Communism and Socialism in Latin America...are generally equated with resistance to tyranny (or at least to American economic and political dominance which were often enforced by basically fascist dictators installed by American coups...dictators who I remind you are actually venerated by the alt-Right Nazis today. So yeah, I think we need to be careful with this whole Venezuela thing, and I don't think it's a choice.

I'll admit, I wasn't terribly aware of a lot of this stuff as a younger man...not besides what I'd seen on various news programs, PBS shows, and stuff like that. In 1998 I bought a cheap copy of Che Guevara's book The Motorcycle Diaries at Borders book store in Traverse City, MI for around $10 and change. I was curious. I should add that I was both a conservative and a Republican at the time.

The book is the story of Che and a friend going on a trip across South America from Argentina to Peru, to volunteer to provide medical assistance at a leper colony in Peru. I read it, and mostly forgot about it as my liberal social worker Mom claimed the book as soon as I was done with it and it's still on her bookshelf. But, to a great extent, in describing a formative experience for Senor Guevara the book makes an excellent case for and serves as a manifesto concerning his later beliefs. Years later I read a chapter in Max Boot's book Invisible Armies about Che and how those early experiences influenced his fighting alongside Fidel Castro in Cuba and subsequent efforts to promote Communism and Socialism around the world later on...a quest that eventually killed him.

Max Boot is a conservative, yet his perspective on Che was pretty favorable. Ya know, sometimes it comes down to smart people just take note of this stuff, and the reasons for it. Sometimes it's best to leave the political bullshit outside the door and just be concerned with the human aspect.

Oh a whim, I bought The Motorcycle Diaries again last week, this time for $5 in E-Book format on Amazon, for my Kindle app. A more faceless form of capitalism than Che would ever have imagined, I'm sure, but they carry his book.

Capitalism isn't all good, or all bad. It's what we do with it that matters. Likewise Socialism is not inherently good or evil, but rather it's what we do with it that's important.

And that's the part these jingoistic morons can never seem to remember.

I'm almost afraid to ask what a manifesto for the politics of the anti-socialist crowd on Twitter might be called, just sayin.'

America is an idea.

"The Whacko:" Elections are great in principle, but this is no time for high ideals!

President Colin Powell: This is the ONLY time for high ideals, because those ideals are all we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars, we don't have a common heritage, we don't have a thousand years of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have...all we have is what we want to be. 

~From the Max Brooks novel "World War Z."

Well, as of early this morning, he's in. Joe Biden is officially running for President, yo. Or there's the Spanish video if you prefer. It was all over the news this morning that he was declaring his candidacy, and his first campaign ads appeared bright and early also. 

But it was his statement "America is an idea" that hooked me in.

I've said this before, a time or two, here or on Facebook. I've often paraphrased the above quote from "World War Z" in so doing.

To me, that seems to be the perfect "counter" to the blood and soil nationalism of the Alt-right Nazis and the Trump Supporters. Doesn't hurt that for better and worse, Joe has a lot he can fall back on to appeal to those conservatives who may be disgusted with Trump.

It's also inclusive of, without being dominated by, those further-Left who've thus far dominated the conversation on the Democratic side of the fence. And don't get me wrong, those people have their place, and certainly as long as they show up and vote they too should get a chance to help shape the future. But you have to win first.

Bernie has already not helped with that, along with his Bernie Bro fans. Last night I saw on Fox News something to the effect of "New Dem party platform: Voting rights for terrorists."

Now, what Bernie was actually saying was that he felt that even incarcerated people should be able to vote. Personally, I'm not sure I agree, I'm willing to be proven wrong and if such could help reduce recidivism and keep people integrated into society while they're in there, I'd support it. Certainly I think anybody who's served their sentence should be able to vote, and I don't think that should even be up for debate. As far as I'm concerned, if you get out on the last day of voter registration and can still get to the DMV go ahead and register. Use your mug shot for an I.D. if you have to! But, for now, I think you should have to pay your debt to society first and serve your sentence. Prison is, after all, meant as a punishment. But, minus loss of the right to bear arms for spousal abusers, stalkers and violent felons, I think the punishment should end when the sentence is up. I spent the last couple of days involved in a discussion about this on Facebook with a variety of people, mostly those firmly to the Left of myself.

And I think it was a discussion that needed to be had.

But of course, that's not what Fox News was even close to talking about. They're going to find nothing more and nothing less than the most click-bait right-wing OUTRAGE-worthy headline they possibly can and that's what they're going to go with.

Is THAT the idea of America that you want? 

I'm sick of anger, I'm sick of outrage, and I'm frankly sick of the people who claim Jesus the most being the people who'd be marching and shouting "Crucify Him!" in the streets if He actually showed up. 

"75% of white Evangelicals described the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants as a positive thing?"

Hmm, interesting bit of data, that.

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. 

~Matthew 25:31-45

*Also* an interesting bit of data. I wonder if they don't teach that stuff in church anymore?

But that's our choice, are we a country that accepts the stranger...or tosses them out, and likely our own most sacred principles with them as well?

You decide.

Which idea of America do you support? This upcoming election is a referendum on that idea.

And then of course, there's this.

I've...honestly never heard of anybody thinking that killing and eating one's political opposition was a valid idea before now, but as I've been trying to point out to people lately, this is the kind of stuff that's on the other side's mind these days. This idiot was supposedly angry about the media's coverage of Trump.

Shit like this is the end-result of the Fox News rage-machine constantly working on angry or gullible people who don't know or don't care that it's all bullshit. And ya know, there's something I've been noticing lately about the people at work who will make the effort to turn one of the break-room TV's back to Fox News. Where the average person, even in many cases the average Republican, will simply watch TV like a normal person might, or maybe half-watch it while doing something else...those who change the channel back, who seek the shit out? They'll sit there and stare at Fox News, zombie-like, like an ADHD kid watching cartoons. I've occasionally seen this before, but lately, there seems to be more of it.

If you wonder why my pull-quote came from Zombie fiction, there you have it. I'm not sure I see Fox News Rage Zombies as outside the realm of possibility, here.

An America where you can be killed and eaten for your political preferences...where ever such may spring from...is not the kind of idea that I'm going to get behind. Also, the other party is dominated by old white guys whose countenance otherwise resembles gas station beef jerky...so yeah, you can count me right out.

Just sayin.'

And then there's these fucking people.

Misogyny and religious woo woo bullshit all in one, this guy. I mean, seriously, Roosh the Douche here is basically one shout of "Allah Akbar" away from being the Taliban...only with a double dose of misogyny and superstitious idiocy on top of what you'd normally get.

Ya know, I've never quite understood what it is that these fucking people want from women, or want women to actually do, that might be within the realm of human possibility...but when what I have seen of them suggests that they'd regard the Republic of Gilead from Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" as hopelessly "liberal" I don't have to understand. You cannot reason with this type of bullshit, you can only leave it stewing in it's own rage and hot pocket crumbs in its Mom's basement and expect to kill it with fire if it ever comes at you.

But all that has to happen to destroy that particular threat is for women to avoid fucking them for long enough and it's going to die off on its own.

All this hate and racism is another matter. That is an existential threat to our nation and to many of the people in it...and probably to a hell of a lot of white people like myself as well.

That's the level we're at here.

Look, this election isn't about "Medicare for all" or the Green New Deal or whatever your pet policy idea is or whether or not everybody gets a damn unicorn. This election is about whether we get to keep our Democracy and the foundations upon which all that other stuff is even built or by which it might even be possible. We're up against people who don't believe in Democracy, here.

We're up against people who don't believe human beings should have human rights, who would give such things to corporations only, and maybe themselves.

We're dealing with people...Americans...who reject America on political or theological grounds, or simply because they're so greedy that they don't feel they've gotten enough out of our current system even though it's mostly favored them.

And I strongly suspect that even (or maybe especially) if Democrats win, Republicans will try to break a part of America off for themselves. Among their own, that's the kinds of things they're talking about. There have been E-mails sent out by the Trump campaign that say "This is YOUR country, not theirs." But ya know...I thought we were all Americans, here?

And that's the thing, isn't it?

This election is a referendum on Trump.

Democrats have to win. We can work on all the other stuff after that. No more putting the cart before the horse here, no more unicorns. There is not going to be any Green New Deal or Medicare for All if we lose. So, We have to Win first, period.

Joe Biden seems to understand that.

Look, ya'll, I like Joe, I support him, I've said for years that I'd be happy to vote for him.

But I'm a be honest. I'm mostly just tired of seeing Trump's stupid orange face on my computer screen or the damn TV all the time.

I've said since June of 2015 that I'd vote for a moldy ham sandwich in preference to Donald Trump.

There are other candidates I like, who I'd also support. But Joe has the best chance, and if Kamala Harris or Mayor Pete were to end up in Biden's V.P. nomination slot I'd be damn happy with that.

But we gotta win first.

Joe is our best shot. To me, he represents something left over from the Obama era, which was pretty damn aggravation free by comparison to just last night, much less the last three years. 

And that is an idea that I'll gladly get behind. I'm in. I kinda liked being able to not have to pay attention to what the government was doing for a few days or weeks, if I felt like it.

And ya know, I've never felt like I had to watch things like a hawk before that motherfucker got elected.

As one of my state's house reps said, we need to impeach that motherfucker already.

The clock is ticking down, it's time to choose, which idea do you support?

America, or Trump?

The two ideas are not synonymous, and don't you forget it.

But that the dread of something after death...

My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims pride,

From every mountainside

Let freedom ring!

~American patriotic song.

Over the weekend, Trump attacked Ilhan Omar on Twitter again. I'm just sayin' it's getting to the point where this reality show really sucks.

Listen, I'm here to tell you that there's at least some of these people that just aren't going to be happy until Americans end up shooting at each other over their bullshit. I'm serious, Trump is a serious problem, but he's not the cause of this mess. The fact is that we have...and always have had...far-right elements who see their fellow Americans as more the enemy than any foreign dictator. We, as a country, need to put a stop to this shit right now. Why? Because we've gone from mostly ignoring those people and treating them as fringe kooks to having a President that gleefully fans the flames because he likes conflict.

We're at a critical inflection point here, as Mayor Pete said in his speech yesterday, we're in one of those spaces between chapters. We, as a people, know we have a lot of problems and we're very rapidly sorting down into two camps. Simply put, there's those that want to do something about the issues we face, and those who don't.

Those who don't...are awash in creepy obsessions, fear, and hate. I'm sorry, but it really creeps me the fuck out that Fox News has mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over 3,000 times in recent weeks.

That is some real creepy stalker shit right there.

"This country was founded on the ideas of justice, of liberty, of the pursuit of happiness." Yes, all Rep. Omar is doing here is pointing out the obvious, something that most people of good conscience believe whatever their political orientation. I believed this when I was a conservative, and I still believe it now that I'm not. But you know, we have a lot of people in the United States of America that are not people of conscience, and while it's tempting to say they're all on one side or the other...that's not true. Now I'm not drawing a moral equivalence between the two, problems are worse on the Right than they are on the Left, but the point here is we all have a lot of work to do.

I just had to delete a Facebook post because a friend of mine was being an idiot and talking stupid about the Notre Dame fire in Paris that so many of us have been watching this afternoon. I'm just sayin' even if you're an atheist (as my friend happens to be) so are a lot of French people that just lost a major cultural treasure and symbol of their country. You don't have to believe to recognize that a thousand years of history just went up in smoke, likely due to some mundane cause like an electrical fire. We all should stop and reflect on our mortality at such times. Even things that stood for a thousand years can fall...and it may be for no reason that we will ever know or understand.

Just like, fundamentally, you don't have to agree with somebody to see them as a human being, or to recognize that they are part of a great tradition that has shaped no small part of human history and to which we owe a great portion of our modern world's existence.

A huge part of our problem in America right now, is people who are too small to get past their own personal issues with stuff.

Racism, religiosity, and shit-headed fear of the unknown all stem from the same things, lack of compassion, lack of curiosity and lack of empathy. It's the same shit that causes somebody to say "let it burn" when somebody else's cultural landmark goes up in flames.

I hate to tell people that we need to start doing better than this, but it's the truth. We as a people need to stand up and tell all these small-minded bomb-throwers to sit down and shut up, and be prepared to back it up with an ass whuppin' if we have to.

Parliamentary procedure, Quiet sabotage, Strongly worded letters, talking them out of it in private, and all that kind of stuff has its place...but it's not going to quiet this mob that both extreme ends of the political horse-shoe are slowly working up. It's not going to reign in the rage that seems to dominate some people's lives.

And that's sure not going to stop the Russians from perpetually stirring the pot, in an effort to try to get us to destroy ourselves. We have to put a stop to that crap, too.

I don't know what idiots started giving these people a platform, but it has to stop. A not-small percentage of American conservatism is literally morphing into a death cult of angry conspiracy theorists right before our eyes, people who literally reject the truth they can see with their own eyes in favor of the words of some guy with a bad suit and a worse haircut on a TV screen or a website.

It has to stop.

We'd better stand up, get to work and start trying to find a way to deal with America's addiction to anger and outrage and racism and shit-headed nihilism before this ends with America's next war being between its own citizens, and that is the truth. I'm not sure how America can be saved when roughly one in four of us simply doesn't believe in America anymore, much less lofty concepts like democracy, freedom, justice and pluralism. But we have to try to find a way.

We'd best acknowledge that we have a lot of work to do...and get after it.

Gravity

Lightning crashes a new mother cries
Her placenta falls to the floor
The angel opens her eyes
The confusion sets in
Before the doctor can even close the door

Lightning crashes an old mother dies
Her intentions fall to the floor
The angel closes her eyes
The confusion that was hers
Belongs now to the baby down the hall

~Lightning Crashes, Live.

This was the very first thing that I saw when I logged into Facebook after I got home from work and some errand-running this morning. Visible scientific proof of a Black Hole, taken using a telescope (actually, many networked telescopes) effectively the size of the Earth. This is the Galaxy M87, 53 *Million* light years from Earth. This image we see is a million stars being destroyed by gravity so powerful that it will rip atoms apart before it consumes them.

In other news, Einstein was right, but I digress.

Take a moment, and consider the vast distances, the terrible speeds, destruction so vast that it breaks down even the most basic building block of matter itself, and a darkness so deep and profound that even energy or light does not escape from it. When the light we now see left this galaxy, humanity itself did not yet exist, and would not for many millions of years more. Hell, the *Dinosaurs* were still a fairly recent memory, as geological time goes. Think about that.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Not even five minutes later, I saw this. Country artist Charlie Daniels (who is still, mind you, coasting on stuff that he did in the 1970's) still harping on all the Benghazi bullshit, as if Hillary Clinton is still in government, and Trey Gowdy still has a career.

Nobody's talking about Benghazi anymore, Charlie. It's just you.

I'm going to be honest here. I've long since reached the point of white-hot incandescent rage when it comes to these small-minded, loud-mouthed malfunctioning idiots whose main goal in life seems to be gimcrack posturing and some kind of "defeat" of their "enemies" real or (as they so often are) imagined. It's 2019, Obama is out of office, Hillary Clinton didn't get elected, and one hell of a lot of people on both sides of our political line need to grow the fuck up and start realizing we have a lot of shit we gotta get done, just for the survival of our country and our species, and ultimately for the environment of the planet it lives on...for literally life itself as we know it or can even comprehend it.

Nobody but them cares about these fucking people's petty political bullshit. For the most part, if it serves any purpose at all, it's to further gum up the works and prevent real shit from getting done.

Does any of this seem stupid to you yet? Conservatives used to be the serious people who did shit like try to figure a way to get us to the Moon, now they're the people who tend to think the Earth is flat. Conservatives used to be the people who cared about truth and disapproved of foul language, now here's some Youtube meat-head promoting a known liar with both middle fingers upraised, to his ostensibly right-wing audience.

Tell me something, conservatives, what good is all this backward-looking, middle-finger-upraised make-the-liberals-mad uneducated bullshit doing anybody but the relative few right-wing media people, Republican politicians and their billionaire benefactors who promote it?!

History is replete with reactionary movements, uneducated proletarians crashing their own societies, fanatics burning down great libraries, learned rulers trampled and their cities sacked by uneducated barbarians...and for what? The fall of Rome did nothing but plunge Christian Europe into the Dark Ages. It took the rise of Islam and a completely different ethic that was not threatened by knowledge or science to keep human progress going. For all their ferocity, which allowed them to overpower Islamic armies and sack Baghdad, the Mongols contributed little to the overall scheme of things...but even the Mongols could competently run an empire while they had it. Everybody lamented the fall of Rome and the Classical civilizations it perpetuated and represented. Genghis Khan is still at least well remembered in Mongolia. What of these fucking people?

Even the people of England, a decade or so after he had died, couldn't stand Oliver Cromwell. They hated him so much they dug up his corpse and beheaded it.

Reactionaries don't end up well-remembered. Reactionaries don't prepare for the future. Reactionaries don't build starships.

But, what of people who can't be bothered to learn their own history, to know anything about where they came from or how the country they lead, or even just live in, was founded and why?

I had to learn about George Washington when I was a kid. Trump went to Mount Vernon and wondered why George didn't name it after himself, and wanted to know how wealthy George was. Way to miss the point, idiot.

In 2011, thanks to my roommate at the time being a Native veteran and member of the local Tribe's warrior society I learned about a thing that a fair number of groups were doing at the Fort Necessity National Battlefield in Pennsylvania.

I thought "Oh hey, I remember what that is from fifth-grade history. George Washington built Fort Necessity...before losing it to the French and their Native allies"

I learned about this in Catholic school. But yeah, go ahead and tell me how history is "Liberal."

Growing up as a kid in a moderate conservative family, I was expected to know my history, I was expected to learn about science. I was expected to care about the truth. For fuck's sake I was expected to pick up after myself and take care of my own garbage.

 If we don't know where we've been, how do we expect to get where we're supposed to be later on? If we don't take care of the things we have, or the place we live, why would we expect that we would still have them? And what are we?

That's the thing that pisses me off the most about these fucking people--NOTHING MATTERS BUT RIGHT NOW!!! For all of their calling other people "animals" it seems to be the Republicans who want to live like animals...every day just existing...nothing changing, memory like a damn Goldfish. Every day is Year Zero, nothing that happened before November 8th of 2016 even exists, much less matters, it's all about the joy of the moment...even as a lot of the things these people themselves say tell you that on some level they know it's never going to last. A lady that I know said recently that her 80-something-year-old boss came up to her and said, in effect "THE MUSLIMS ARE COMING AND WILL TAKE OVER, THE BLACKS WANT REPARATIONS AND THE MEXICANS WILL TAKE ALL OF OUR JOBS!!" all this without any particular prompting, so far as I know. Now, aside from the obvious paranoia and racism...does that sound like somebody who is the least bit confident that their beliefs, their philosophy or way of doing things is going to be successful, or is working out?

Whatever else is going on, whatever spell the right-wingers had over America for all these years seems broken. More to the point, they seem to finally be realizing that fact...over a year after I first made this observation myself. The weight of this realization seems to be settling on them like the pull of a Black Hole's gravity. At least one of them seems to understand the gig is up, and the gravity of the situation seems to be causing random outbursts.

Ya know, America...and by extension humanity as a whole...is about to face a choice. Gimcrack small-minded bullshit or maybe we can just hack doing the kind of science and hard work that can reach across 53 million light years and watch a galaxy be ripped apart by gravity. If we want to know more, we're going to have to go there, or at least get closer.

Creationists, conspiracy theorists and reactionaries don't build starships. Anti-vax nuts don't design the kind of life-support systems or life-science endeavors or medical care that might help us understand what it takes to crew starships or survive in environments vastly different from our own, and for all their talk about "Space forces" these people don't really seem to get that outside of science fiction, nobody's ever done the work of figuring out what it would take to fight a battle in space. Hell, to the best of my knowledge even science-fiction hasn't yet bothered with the physics of sex in micro-gravity, just sayin.' Just lack of gravity as directional force on our bodies changes almost everything.

When I read about this M87 galaxy, this morning, my first thought was I'll see your God and raise you a Galaxy-destroying Singularity.

Ya know, funny thing about gravity.

It'll kill you whether you believe in it or know anything about it or not.