Snowflake (Gravity, Left Behind Edition.)

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ~Thomas Jefferson

...

Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other.

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. 

In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men.

~Malcolm X, letter written following the Hajj.

...

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

I saw this yesterday while I was out doing payday stuff.

I have to admit, I'm tired of these damned Republicans being such snowflakes, and treating Trump as if he is the Specialest Snowflake Of All and acting like even the slightest inconvenience towards him is literally the most horrible thing ever.

It's a freaking courtroom, in the New York City, in May. They probably have to keep the air conditioning on lest the temperature in the building become insufferable, if not unsafe.

More to the point, Republicans demonstrably do not give a shit about the other people attending the trial, or working there...much less the countless other people (many of them People of Color, or poor) who've cycled through that very Courtroom in the exact same conditions.

Republicans are continuing to act like a routine search warrant (for more classified documents, no less) being served and executed at Mar-A-Lago was some kind of bullshit-ass assassination attempt on Trump.

It's puerile. It's ridiculous. 

These fucking people are grasping at motherfucking straws at this point to try and say that everything is horrible and the only solution is some kind of violent right-wing revolution.

The revolution will be short. They'll lose. That might not matter. Mostly it comes down to "What do we do about it." 

Anything that doesn't crack down on bigotry and stupidity and enforce standards on civilization is just stalling for time.

By the way, I also saw this morning in the local paper that this area...which by the way is traditionally pretty economically depressed...is in extremely good shape economically and adding jobs. Around here that's pretty much a Unicorn as far as headlines go, not least because a major local employer closed a few months back.

I live in the middle of nowhere, two hours from the nearest freeway or large city. There's not much appetite for Revolution here (and trust me, historically there has been) and nobody, not even the obvious Trump Supporters, seems to be particularly bothered by the increasing diversity of my own workplace It's an understatement to say that where I live was pretty much White Bread-istan even 20 years ago. 

As I've said before, in 1992 if you saw a Black person around here, they were very likely either an Airman stationed at Wurtsmith Air Force Base...or married to somebody who was. Even 20 years ago an "Out" gay person was uncommon, and the type with rainbow-dyed hair that's fairly routine to see now was more of a Unicorn around here than a headline about the local economy adding jobs. 

Meanwhile there's a new person at work who appears to be transgender. (I saw her yesterday, and I wasn't going to be rude and ask.) The world hasn't ended. No one seems to care.

The only people bitching about Joe Biden, the only people living in fear, hell the only people I see who are whining about anything are the people who'd find some reason to do that anyway, no matter what was going on.

And from the look of things, if Trump wants to have a rally in The Bronx, he has to bus Supporters in from outside of the area.

But the media tried yesterday to say that he was drawing big crowds of Black and Latino people at a rally in NYC.

Is this supposed to be like that one infamous picture of the old White couple wearing "Blacks For Trump" shirts from like five years ago??

The media and right-wing elites are trying to magic up some kind of appearance of inevitability and/or invincibility for Trump even as he continues to disintegrate in a Manhattan courtroom. Failing that, they're trying to WILL a "Revolution" for Trump or...something...into being.

I quite wonder how popular of an idea that's going to be when it inevitably costs rich people money. Like the old saying goes, it's not so much Gravity that kills a person, it's that sudden stop at the bottom.

I've no idea what the fuck is wrong with these people, other than that they want Anything But America, as I've said before. 

These fucking people seem to want some kind of Clickbait Future, a fascist Idiocracy that'll direct the "Clicks and Likes" such as to make all the "Right" people money, secure "White" power...whatever that even means. (I'm White and all this bullshit is to me and my life and everybody and everything I care about is a threat) and in general Something Something Gazpacho.

Here we are now, entertain us, I feel stupid and contagious. Basically.

And somehow, certain people think they're going to try to jam Medieval Catholicism down our throats in the middle of this mess. Really?

The White Right, or at least the "Traditionalist" Catholics are effectively demanding the "Right Of Revolution" to undo the American Revolution and the modern world.

How the fuck does that make any sense??

Also, No, get your own damn country. By the way, if you try to carve it out of this one you can expect this United States Air Force veteran to be militantly opposed to that idea.

(And I won't be the only one.)

Trump isn't some kind of a God. Hell, he's not even the leader of this goddamned movement, except as it's fucking figurehead. He's a symptom, but too many people act like he's the whole damned problem.

It's not Trump. It's the some of the corporations, the media, Republican middle-management, and some of the wealthy. And in the end, as with that "United Reich" bullshit from a few days ago it's going to be Trump and his idiot mob that fuck it up, even with all that trying to drag his flabby ass across the finish line.

But sooner or later, either they'll get somebody competent or (far more likely, in my opinion) American unity will simply gradually fracture...if it hasn't already.

Speaking as a former Republican and a veteran here, do I trust Democrats (much less the "Left" to keep us all together in the face of all that shit?? 

Not really. Most of us, perhaps, but not all...on the one hand, simply because not all of us want to be part of America anymore.

The Right has this long-standing fantasy of "Going Galt" for one thing, because Ayn Rand still has more influence over "Conservatism" than Jesus Christ ever dreamed of having.

On the other hand, there's also the whole very American idea that it's not a party unless somebody ain't invited. America ain't America if everybody gets a slice.

And I guarantee you the "Conservatives" will volunteer if it "Gets them their own place" so to speak. America is too big and too diverse to ever be what they want it to be as its currently constituted.

And it doesn't matter to them how shitty the alternative is.

Because being a better citizen is just too hard for some fucking people.

And there's plenty of alleged Liberals that'll let them leave and take a few states with them if it comes to that. I strongly suspect that if there is to be a Civil War it'll be more about who gets to keep what and getting people who don't want to live in some kind of Catholic Trad banana republic (Like, bro, if you don't think Evangelicals would convert to that shit to "Own The Libs" well, LOL) out than anything else. That we're effectively a House Divided has already been established, any violent breakup will be more haggling over the price than anything.

And yeah, call it 75% America, it'll still be 25% less capable of helping to protect the little guy from the bad guys, which is why so many foreign powers are involved in this shit.

But I'm starting to think that's how it'll play out. For one simple, if ugly, reason;

Left Behind is such a fucking part of our national identity that belief in the Rapture and the sacralization of the whole fucking idea of "Fuck You I've Got Mine" illustrated as some people getting whisked up to Heaven while others get left behind on Earth to get cornholed by the Devil spawned here. 

For fuck's sake that's what the End Times Prophecy movement even is.

And sooner or later the Left is going to grab onto that idea, simply because just like all the rest of us they'll get tired of arguing with these fanatics. But because far more of us (and enough people in whatever Power structure) don't want to live in Donald Trump's "Trailer Park Rome" MAGA won't get as much of the country.

If you look at the whole issue of the pro-Palestinian protests vs. those in favor of Israel, the Left already has decided one way or another who gets Left Behind. It just hasn't generalized out to America as a whole yet.

But on another level, anybody that's ever been in an abusive situation can tell you, sometimes you just have to get away for your own mental health and/or physical safety.

Here's the thing; Whether or not Trump ends up with it, or this movement finds itself another damned dancing monkey...you aren't going to want to live in their Snowflake Republic.

And I strongly suspect a lot of them won't either, if they ever get what they think they want. Pick a damn conspiracy theory or whatever, would you want people that really believe that shit running your world?

So it's gonna get ugly, but it'll probably be worse for the bad guys.

Like, seriously, all of these egocentric idiots think they're gonna be the one in charge.

So if I was you, I'd vote against Trump and the rest of these motherfuckers just the same, if nothing else to try and protect your own ass.

But they're already telegraphing their desires for criminality and violence. That's what this "Appeal to heaven" shit is.

The key point, as I've said many times before also, is that first we're going to have to vote them out, and then we're going to have to fight them off. And they'll still probably get something.

They won't fight well, but movements have lost wars and then ended up with nations in negotiated settlements or just because the majority of one side gave up before. I use the example of Algeria. Somebody inevitably counters with "But that was a colonial war."

You think these fucking snowflakes WOULDN'T claim that they'd been "Colonized" by liberals??

We can avoid this crap if we all stand together and tell these people to go fuck themselves, and do it for long enough.

But will we??

Слава Україна!

And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven. ~John Locke

Four

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: "save the planet." What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet! We don't care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? I'm getting tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract, they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam ... The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?"
"Plastic... asshole." ~George Carlin

Appeal To Heaven? (Gravity, Four.)

And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven. ~John Locke

...

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

I just saw this, not too long ago.

I'm sick of this shit.

Not just Sam Alito and his Christian Nationalist and insurrectionist symbolism.

But even of the fact that the Pine Tree Flag...a bit of historical trivia that I barely remembered from, like, elementary school, until I looked it up...has been appropriated (and yes, I use that word deliberately) as a Christian Nationalist symbol at all.

Because the whole goddamned point of the Pine Tree flag...as the first pull quote should point out...is that it's an affirmation of the Right Of Revolution and a specific rejection of the Divine Right of Kings.

In other words, in a time when modern ideas of "Left" and "Right" (which stem from the French Revolution) didn't even exist yet, the Pine Tree Flag was about the furthest-Left of far-Left and ultimately secular symbols.

And remember, the idea of secular symbolism hardly existed at the time, which made the idea particularly revolutionary.

Along with the idea that there even could be such a thing as an appeal to God that did not go through Kings and State-backed religious institutions.

So of course Republicans have to dirty that shit up and rub their dicks all over it and they do so hoping that other people won't get the symbolism...which, honestly, it's Okay if ya don't. I only happen to know about it because Christian schools of all kinds Love them some Colonial and Revolutionary War history. Largely because so much of it was, and so many of the struggles within the pre-US-Founding colonies were, explicitly Christian. 

Like, yes, this is even why a couple of states exist now. Rhode Island (for example) was originally a community of religious dissidents from Puritan Massachusetts. That's the environment that birthed the debates that led to the founding of this country and symbols like the Pine Tree Flag. And even I barely remembered it...but something told me to look it up and I at least remembered that I'd heard of it before at that point.

And in a world where Donald Trump has such a grip on the Republican Party that even Nikki Haley (for so long the principal opposition to Trump) now feels the need to bend the knee, because she's not ready to give up being a Republican...I think it's necessary to point out that even the symbolism these motherfuckers appropriate to justify their bullshit doesn't even mean what they think it means.

Donald Trump is All About the "Divine Right of Kings" or at least, his own imagined "right" to do whatever the fuck he wants, and of course Republicans won't stop sucking off the narcissist.

Thankfully, Nikki's voters appear to not be going along for that particular ride.

Which is good, because if you want a better country, you have to be a better citizen.

And that doesn't mean slavish loyalty to Party over country.

That doesn't mean letting people bullshit you, even if you want what they're saying to be true.

History, like Gravity, is a testable thing.

Remember that, because it's going to be on the test, later.

Why the fuck else you think Republicans don't want kids reading books?

Слава Україна!

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

Three

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

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

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

Eater Of Souls (Gravity, Three.)

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

...

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

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press
...
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." ... "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." ~HP Lovecraft

I saw this yesterday.

Tucker Carlson has a new show on Russian State TV.

Reagan Wept.

I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I'd be on break at the Casino...or working in the breakroom...and there'd be at least one table full of old white guys (usually always the same ones) watching FOX News on one of the breakroom TV's. They'd sit there, zombie-eyed and zoned out like ADHD kids watching the Cartoon Network or some shit. Especially when one of the main hosts like Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson was on. I'm serious, it was creepy.

All of these guys were roughly in their late 50's to mid-60's and one of them actually was a registered Democrat who didn't vote for Trump, though to be fair to that guy he skewed conservative on most other things. Not a bad guy, just not very smart in a way that strongly suggested he'd fried his brain doing too many drugs after he got out of the Navy in the late 1970's, having served as a Mess Specialist. The guy I've mentioned before who couldn't tell me why he liked Trump past "I like the shit he says" was also part of this crew.

And because on Third Shift a lot of the stuff we caught was repeats of earlier programming on all the news channels, I saw a hell of a lot of Tucker's sneering mug and snide affect, which to me seemed calculated to piss off his own viewers (Or at least, any of them that didn't like leering prep-school bullies.) It didn't take me long to reach the conclusion that little Fucker Carlson did not get enough ass whuppins as a child.

The fucking Russians can have his ass, if you ask me. 

Like, you don't like America, Tucker? 

Get the fuck out.

Good luck when Putinism reaches its final level and goes full Stalinist, bro.

I think you'll find that the New Soviet Man's view of the Bourgeoise (or at least, the non-ethnic-Russian Bourgeoise) haven't changed one damn bit from those of the Old Soviet Man.

I wonder if the Russians remember how that whole Molotov-Ribbentrop pact thing worked out in the summer of 1941. Not that I really think the Russians...or anybody else who can and will fight back...has all that much to fear from Republican SS Division Das Trump-Reich.

I find it interesting, though, that I'm not the only one who thinks Republicans are trying to gin up a right-wing insurgency and, if possible, to get somebody else to do the fighting and the dying, which is what they've always done before, too.

And by the way, if Republicans were winning, they wouldn't be doing this shit.

If Republicans loved America, especially like they say they do, they wouldn't be taking paid gigs from the Enemies Of The State, from people whose express goal is the destruction of America and some kind of undefined "Revenge" for the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At this point their whole bit is "Anything but America" as this country is currently constituted.

Of course, now the big victim-y conspiracy theory is that the FBI tried to "Assassinate" Trump, because they executed a Search Warrant RE: More classified documents found at Mar-A-Lago. A few things about that, though; 

One, I'm not unfamiliar with the history of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the 1960's so my feeling is that if the FBI really wanted to whack somebody they're not going to be alive to whine about it afterwards.

Two: Speaking as a United States Air Force veteran here, if I'd done what Trump did and stole classified documents I'd still be sitting in a cell, and I served 30 years ago.

Three: If these whiny, narcissistic bitches really think a search warrant is some kind of assassination attempt? If they do try and start a Civil War, it'll be a short war.

Remember, you have to believe in conspiracy theories. You don't have to believe in Gravity and other observable, testable things. 

Among such things is Federal Law. It's literally standard procedure to warn anybody subject to a Search Warrant that force may be used, if needed, in the same way and for the same kinds of reasons that a person being arrested is told that they have the right to remain silent and that they have the right to an attorney.

These fucking people know that, they just hope you don't.

Like, do these fucking people have no souls?

Yes, they're already trying to gin up violence.

If they were winning, if they were nearly as confident as they try to sound like they are, they wouldn't be doing that.

But you have to show up. You have to be a better citizen. You have to vote the bastards out.

And when they come at the rest of us and try to take by force what they couldn't take in a fair election, we fight them off. 

Freedom ain't free, yo.

And unless you want to have to prostrate yourself before the Hammer And Sickle right along with these motherfuckers who've gladly desecrated everything that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and all of their forefathers stood for, and do it out of sheer desperation to cling to Power?

Somehow "Better Dead Than Red" has morphed into "They'd rather be Russians than Democrats."

Against that type of shit, whatever costs freedom incurs, you pay. It's as simple as that, or you don't keep it.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And if you don't think these fucking people would gladly shrug at their kids being forced to learn Russian in school in their half-burned-down walled-off Russian satellite banana republic while (for example) fake-pearl-clutching about the codification of Roe Vs. Wade, full LGBT acceptance, or even the successful defense of the American Rump-State, the European Union or Ukraine against their neo-Soviet masters, you have another thing coming. 

Anything to "Own The Libs" is basically their credo, even if that means giving up their own Freedom or lives. Didn't we learn this about these sons of bitches during the COVID-19 pandemic??

(And note that it's four years ago today that we went back to work at the casino after two and a half months of shutdown and Unemployment checks. So these fucking people's shitty attitudes are personal to me. They were deliberately trying to get me killed.)

I for one am not willing to see how far down the rabbit hole of Crazy these idiots want to go.

And you shouldn't be, either.

Слава Україна!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream.  The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.  And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan

Fuck Nazis (Gravity, Two.)

We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world, a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you. Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us; they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not. Fuck them. ~Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom Of Fear (2004)

...

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

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

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

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran

At some point late yesterday, Trump (or, allegedly, some intern running his social media account) posted some bullshit about America being a "Unified Reich" if he wins the election.

Of course, that shit didn't go how he thought it would so the intern was promptly blamed and the post deleted.

That's not the point. It was still a trial balloon for literal Nazism. And now MAGA will be mad because people shot it down.

Because Republicans can't stop clapping for Donald Trump.

What's it going to take to make this shit stop?? When does enough, in fact, become enough??

Do we have to give these fucking people power and see a bunch of ourselves not to mention all those other people indiscriminately murdered so some 20 year old chucklefuck intern can "Own The Libs??" Do we have to have our country destroyed by the bigotry, depravity, greed and mental laziness of the average white American Idiot?

Or do we not give these fucking people power and have the same shit happen on a lesser scale because these fucking people are basically threatening a bloodbath Civil War?? But it won't be as bad because they don't have the backing of the entire American State?? 

That's basically where we're at.

They'll lose, but that'll be cold comfort to the million people who died because these fucking idiots neither knew nor cared enough to not shit in some city's water supply while also disrupting the distribution networks for food, medicine, and yes, clean water that could have been shipped in.

Just like you don't have to believe in Gravity for it to kill you, disease and logistics kind of shake out the same way. And don't forget, none of these motherfuckers has ever lived in anything but this modern world that they detest so much. How you figure they're going to like living in bunkers and peeing on their own shoes when there's no liberals to argue with and no power for them to connect to the Internet to go and find some??

Like, I keep trying to tell people that these MAGA's are idiots who only want to kill people, preferably their fellow Americans...and they all see Trump as the way to get that.

And no, they don't really care if they die too, or if they lose their businesses, their jobs, whole industries and walks of life, even. A hell of a lot of these people, if told that their terrible choking death drowning in their own snot was necessary to preserve some notion of White Superiority and the wealth of the super-rich, would be just fine with that. Shit, that's what they were doing four years ago.

Didn't we learn that from how right-wingers conducted themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic?? First, these assholes tried to use the virus as a biological weapon against the rest of us. And, when we didn't all volunteer to die...they changed their story mid-stream, went massively Anti-vax and started filling up portable morgues their own damn selves.

And now they've reached the point of wanting to burn down America itself rather than see somebody else get a slice. 

They know, if they break America apart, there's a lot of it they won't get...but they're banking on non-fascist 75% America struggling to reboot, rebuild and rewire itself around the economies of California and New York and the agricultural production of California and Minnesota while they get instant help from China and Russia while trading on Texas oil simply out of those countries' eagerness to fuck us over strategically and give America the middle finger.

And maybe the pro-Palestine Tik-Tok kids get a slice too, reducing the power of the American rump state even more.

I don't think they've thought very much that there's a whole middle slice of the country that'd be a battlefield, or even about what battlefields and war and all that kind of shit entail. It's all a big game to these shitheads.

And they're doing this because Putin (their real boss) figures 75% America is going to be 25% less able to help Eastern Europe, Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and anywhere else they decide to fuck with. It's a dark, nasty world they wanna live in.

These nuts don't really even care if it leads to them working for a dollar an hour in some Chinese-owned factory that's outsourced to make basketball shoes marketed to teenagers in Zambia, so long as that one [Racial Expletive Deleted] that's still here only gets paid 75 cents an hour. These assholes seem to want everything to be shit, and life to be horrible, so long as it's worse for somebody else lower down and the wealthy get to live among the glittering towers of places like Dubai and gather for parties at the Kremlin or Mar-A-Lago or whatever.

As long as Putin gets to feel like he's lived his fantasy of Moscow being the Third Rome and these idiots get to feel like they're somehow part of that shit, it's all one right-wing ball of happiness, in theory.

It's just...I don't know...do any of these fucking people look happy to you?? 

From Donald Trump on down it's all the same fake-ass looking gilded bullshit, if you ask me.

And their next move, either way, is to try and make it so that the rest of us have to fight a war to get rid of these assholes, thus feeding their narcissism and sense of victimhood forever while making it almost certain that they'll break off a chunk of America for some kind of shitty little banana republic where they can make their own rules.

Basically MAGA wants to liberate some or all of America from the Americans, from the American experiment, from any ideals whatever that aren't narcissistic worship of themselves.

In the end, they'll lose.

But they want to make it so they take millions of other people down with them out of simple cruelty and spite. That's the whole point of this increasingly petty Fascism.

They don't really care if they win, just so everybody else loses.

These people would rather destroy their own shit than share it with Black folks.

Evidently they see America that way too.

Does that quite spell it out for you??

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

You're either a Better Citizen or you're not. 

Either you'll stand up, or you won't.

Me? I don't want to keep having to put up with this bullshit.

Слава Україна!

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan.

One

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

~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press
...
When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

The Stolen God (Gravity, One.)

We're so self-important. So self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: "save the planet." What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet! We don't care for one another, we're gonna save the fucking planet? I'm getting tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract, they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me.The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles ... hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages ... And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. WE are!

We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam ... The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?"
"Plastic... asshole." ~George Carlin

...

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

I saw this last week.

Answers In Genesis...you know, the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter people, whose whole damn point is to bamboozle dumb-fuck Americans into giving them money because Jesus...are on Threads. I didn't even know those jackoffs were still around.

AIG was founded by Australian evangelist Ken Ham back in the 1994 and...to be honest...was even a joke among most of the Christians that I knew, and an absolute rhetorical punching bag among the various Atheists, Agnostics and assorted other non-Christians I knew who were aware of it. In other words, whatever this is, it's not effective Evangelism.

But then, if you believe in a literal six day Creation and that (to paraphrase Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station) two of every animal lived within walking distance of Noah's house and that he built a boat the size of a WWII battlecruiser with Bronze Age hand tools, it follows that you're going to believe every other fantastical-sounding lie that somebody tells you.

Like I said, I didn't even know AIG was still around, aside from the fact that the dopey creationist museums still apparently exist. And I find it kind of interesting that the one real negative Threads has is all these Evangelical morons, most of whom...if you actually look...are selling something. 

Not only that, they're bothering alleged Atheists (or, far more likely just random people) in Walmart and using that to post videos and sell whatever bullshit merch they're trying to foist on their ignorant-ass followers.

And here's the thing, if you want to know why Republican politics is full of useless, grandstanding motherfuckers who'd be fine with overthrowing America if they thought they could get away with it, and who functionally do nothing otherwise except kiss Donald Trump's ass and suck up to flabby wannabe corporate Overlords...that's why. And yes, a lot of them did learn this bullshit from their preachers. Hell, some of them have said so. Well, that's not what they thought they were saying, but it's what they actually said.

Most of these Republicans claim to be Christians. It doesn't matter if they are or they aren't, really, Christianity permits this fucking horseshit to be done in its name.

Sorry, but one of these things very much does follow the other. If Christians are fine with Christianity being used as a grift by people who basically want to burn down Civilization for shits and giggles, and could give a damn about anything that their supposed Savior actually said, well that's the kind of people they're going to get.

And of course these same fucking people very much, from the highest preacher or politician to the lowest street-corner preacher weirdo who reeks of cat piss and bath salts, all believe that God is basically some kind of a big stick that they can use to beat their alleged "Enemies" with.

For example, Greg Locke here, RE: the fact that the President of Iran was killed in a helicopter crash late yesterday. Not that the President of Iran is particularly important in the government of that theocratic State.

(And, from what I know of the man, fuck him, the country will probably be better off without his ass.)

And, to be honest, I think the only real reason that guys like Greg Locke or the average Republican don't like Iran is some level of professional or religious jealousy because they'd like a Christianized version of the same damned thing in all or part of America if they thought they could get away with having it.

And nobody seems to face any level of judgment or penalty until they're dead?

Yes, a lot of us...not least of all these fucking people...believe that the Soul is eternal, so that whatever punishment administered in said Afterlife will indeed have effect.

But these fucking people sure don't act like they believe they're going to suffer for Eternity if they're jerks to the rest of us here on Earth, do they??

In fact, most of the time it seems like they think the bad behavior, the petty little cons and the shitty politics is the entire goddamned point of their religion.

I mean, look at what the Christian MAGA types say and do, same with the Hamas fanatics or the Jewish Zionist settlers. It's all the same shit, their religions are ethnic creeds, an excuse for a middle finger and a shouted slogan at the other person at best, or for a 5.56mm bullet in their guts at worst.

And it doesn't seem to matter if it's good old fashioned American Evangelicalism, Russian Orthodox Christianity or Twelver Shia Islam, does it??

The love of Christ, or the peace of serving the God of Abraham through Islam or Judaism doesn't even seem to enter into it in the fucking least.

What's even the damn point??

Thou Shalt Not Steal??

Bitch, these motherfuckers stole God.

It's all bullshit. The Truth is simple, Love God and love your neighbor. Man makes it complicated (and political) because he does not want to obey.

There's not much money to be had from what's actually in the Bible, or the Koran, or the Torah. And whatever excuses there are to dominate or kill or steal from other people have generally been overruled by modern secular laws. So people have to make up all type of crazy shit.

And the thing is, I have to believe that God is good.

But I sure as hell don't have to have "faith" in the scumbag behavior of so many religious people, do I??

Which of the two, do you think, is going to win out??

I don't have to believe in Gravity, or the physics of the earlier-mentioned 5.56mm bullet. I'd have to believe in the goodness of a god or in Young Earth Creationism...and if I'm wrong for not especially believing in the former and laughingly rejecting the latter...by the time I find out I'm wrong it's too late to do anything about it anyway, and in some interpretations I'm not even aware of what's going on for fuck knows how many years plus a thousand years *After* the End Times.

Think about that, for a second.

I don't have to believe in Gravity, if I push too far in testing that, it'll kill me either way, and we already have empirical, visible proof of what it does and that it works.

Likewise, I know what Evil is. I've seen it. Mass graves in Bosnia, for starters. 

And while I'm less sure, these days, of what is Good...I know good doesn't go around pestering people in the hope that somebody clicks on the link to their T-shirt shop that's in their bio, and then decides to buy something.

Good doesn't go around invading its neighbors, trying to overthrow countries, or taking people's rights away.

Evil does that.

But if you look at how Christians and some of these other people present themselves, they've become exactly what the Bible talks about RE: People calling evil good, and good evil.

Seems like kind of a broken system, doesn't it??

And we're the only ones who can fix that.

If they stole God, it's possible the rest of us can steal Him back.

(Or, if we prefer, simply make Him irrelevant, which should've always been the case in a secular society.)

So get after it.

Слава Україна!

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well fought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same. And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free. ~Ronald Reagan.

Last Post

God knows he's perfect and we're not and we can never be but he expects us to be. And he punishes us if we're not, you know what I'm saying? God is the ultimate gangster. The supreme-o boss, you know what I mean? Forgiveness, live by he code. Deadness, if we don't. Yo, he never has to talk to us face to face and he never has to explain exactly why he does what he does. Know what I'm saying? Nigga sits up there in Heaven somewhere, drinking a cappuccino, chillin... *Singing* He's got the whole world in his hands...

He got the whole world by the balls.

~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series "Oz" episode 1.3 "God's Chillin'"

Missing The Point (House Of Bondage, 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

...

It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. More than half of you represent the very first member of your family to ever attend college. In the most diverse university in all of New England, I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places. ~Barack Obama

....

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

I saw this when I got up this morning.

Some idiot football player, using a Commencement speech somewhere to equate Pride Month with the Seven Deadly Sins and to demand a "More Conservative brand of Catholicism."

Bro, you play a game for a living, shut the fuck up. Your dumb ass has probably the least actually-conservative type of job on the planet, and you're paid way the fucking hell too much money to do it. This is America, nobody has to be religious, or care if you are.

Ya know, at least Tim Tebow managed to not be a complete douche canoe about politics or religion and has actually found some ways to do good in the world, whether I agree with his beliefs or his various cultural impacts or not.

And the thing is, it's funny how around the world there aren't really any countries or large people-groups who are practicing a "More Conservative" Catholicism. In fact, it's only here in America that there's people who even want to have that kind of shit.

I don't know how Traditionalist Catholicism became a fad among right-wing weirdos but I'll note that of the few people I know who've gone down this rabbit hole, none of them were regular Catholics before. This crap seems to pull in primarily insecure White dudes who think Anti-Liberalism somehow equals conservatism. 

It doesn't.

And some of these motherfuckers claim to want a King. I'm sorry, but I'm an American. This is America. The entire fucking point of this country was that it was founded to be in opposition to Monarchy...which was then the prevailing system of government throughout the world. And "In Opposition" in parliamentary terms was exactly where we were at, too. But within a few years, France had its own Revolution, and by the middle of the 20th Century most of Europe had decapitated or fired their Monarchs...or at least neutered their power, and most of the rest of the world has continued to follow suit since.

I don't know how you can live here and miss the point of America that goddamned bad.

In fact, the only place in the world where one finds Absolute Monarchies is in the Islamic world, places like Saudi Arabia, for example. Come on, bro, give it a shot. You only have to convert to Salafist Islam. I mean, seriously, what's the damned difference between that and what your ass claims to believe now.

I've been to Saudi Arabia, it sucks. This dude wouldn't be any happier there than he is here. And more to the point, a lot of the radical Islamists there aren't happy either (for different reasons) but the difference between Saudi and the USA is they don't dare say so. Over there, if you're going to openly be against the government you might as well take up arms against it...because the response is going to be the same. They'll kill you.

Funny thing, but between military service and college and living where I've lived in general, I've known quite a few people from Saudi Arabia. Most of the Saudis I've met in America didn't want to go back home. Most of the Saudis I met over there wanted to go somewhere else. I had a neighbor from Saudi Arabia downstate, he was happy to be here and that his wife could go to college and learn how to drive and even just be a person without his say-so. Hell, we were all in the same World of Warcraft guild. Trust me, those people appreciated America.

The only reason these motherfuckers want either Monarchy or "Traditionalist" Catholicism is that they think they'd be in the favored groups in such kinds of arrangements, and they've never had to live under any such system nor been anywhere, where they were a guest in such a country.

And it's the same with people who jack off to the idea of Putin's Russia. Aaron Rodgers doesn't know dick about Russia or Vladimir Putin, he just "likes" Vladimir Putin's reactionary views, and apparently also Putin's revisionist views RE: Russian history. I guess he don't realize nobody plays American Football in Russia. Or that their culture is not our culture, and their ideas of either conservative or even liberal politics are not ours either.

And here's the thing;

Those who do know or have it in their living memory what Autocracy or Communism are like, are the ones fighting against that shit.

But Evangelical preachers and rich NFL white bros are too high on the smell of Donald Trump's Big Mac farts to notice, and too stupid to listen to anybody who actually knows anything.

Around the world, "Traditionalist" Catholic sects like Opus Dei are generally sects of the poor, far more than they're fads or playthings of the powerful or the rich...and where excessively right-wing Catholics have been allowed too much power (1960's South Vietnam pre-American intervention, for example) they have very Traditionally soup sandwiched the whole deal. 

After Ngo Dinh Diem sparked the Buddhist Crisis by abusing his country's Buddhist majority, also backing up the machinations of his idiotic brothers Nhu and Thuc (Note: Thuc was a Catholic Priest and then-Archbishop of Hue) and thus threatening American power in Southeast Asia, the CIA overthrew his ass and then once they'd been captured and were in custody the agents running the operation had both Diem and Nhu assassinated by the coup plotters. Thuc only escaped death because he had been summoned to Rome for the Second Vatican Council, and when that was done he went into exile in Rome.

Meanwhile Diem's wife was in Beverly Hills talking so much shit about the Vietnamese Buddhists that it pissed off most Americans.

And, functionally, that kind of shit is what drew America into the Vietnam war. I mean for fuck's sake at least the people we're backing in Ukraine now aren't that fucking stupid, and they at least appreciate our help...which is more than can be said for the Israelis.

Ngo Dinh Thuc went on to help found the first major modern Sedevacantist movement after the Second Vatican Council, and emigrated to America to collaborate with others of similar theological leanings, although he ultimately tapped out and recanted and Pope John Paul II (who, by the way, these nuts also consider "Too liberal") let his ass back in. 

He should not have, but he did.

I use this specifically as an example because functionally, that's what these fucking people are.

Parasites who basically live by sucking off the blood and effort and good graces of others.

And they want to turn America into a House of Bondage just like the Ancient Egypt that Moses and the Israelites fled from...so that they can keep doing that...and leave the rest of us without recourse or any redress of grievances. I don't give a shit how conservative you think you are, these motherfuckers ain't your friends. They'd rather live in the Killing Fields of Khmer Rouge Cambodia than live in an America that's equal and free, or even just trying to be better.

The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love. And those that confess to the Angkar are punished, and no one dare ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive. ~Dith Pran, The Killing Fields

And they ALL see Trump as the way.

God has not one damned thing to do with it, except that He is a convenient excuse.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

Слава Україна!

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

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

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

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

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