Never Lonely Enough.

Captain Raymus Antilles: Your Highness, the transmission we received. [hands Princess Leia the Death Star schematics] What is it they've sent us?

Princess Leia Organa: Hope.

~From Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

...

And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double.

How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she said in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judges her.

And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning,

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come. ~Revelation 18:1-10

...

The Holy Quran says it, "Pilgrimage to the House [of God built by the prophet Abraham] is a duty men owe to God; those who are able, make the journey." (3:97) Allah said: "And proclaim the pilgrimage among men; they will come to you on foot and upon each lean camel, they will come from every deep ravine" (22:27). Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun intermittently calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other. . . .That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America, "white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men. ~Malcolm X.

...

"The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride." ~Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly 25 February 2022, Associated Press.

I saw this earlier today.

Apparently there's a bunch of idiot MAGA dudes out there who think they're gonna try to have sex with Alyssa Liu.

*Jeopardy Buzzer* Maybe it's just me but it seems like that's the wrong answer.

Like, why the fuck, bro?? You're clearly not her type. Not everybody that carries an American Flag is some kind of right-wing idiot. Not that a lot of these just plain idiots really are either.

It's funny that the US Men's hockey team got themselves caught acting like a bunch of frat boys partying it up with Kash Patel and ended up getting served cold stank-ass McDonald's cheeseburgers at the White House (Again, think about that for a second) by Trump for their trouble. 

On the other hand the women and non-White athletes in general have actually shown a decent counter-vision of America, and the Women's hockey team both declined that invitation to the White House and scored themselves an invite to some fancy Italian restaurant without having to come back here.

All these men seem to only want to enjoy themselves and do it in the most base manner that is categorically possible.

These idiots would rather be entertained than free.

[Addressing crowd after killing gladiator in solo fight] Are you not entertained? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!?! Is this not why you are here?! [throws away sword and spits at the ground, then leaves] ~Maximus Decimus Meridius, from the film Gladiator.

Like most cults, if you think about it, what MAGA has turned into (because it ain't what it was last year much less ten years ago) is fundamentally about pleasing some dude's dick.

And this is These Fucking People's idea of a good government?

I don't know about you but that's not really the kind of world I want to live in even without shit like the Epstein files and I don't give a damn who knows it.

Like, before you even get to anything else, clearly some people would rather be entertained than free. I'm not one of those people.

Next there's the fact that me and my partner have a 14-year-old daughter to worry about, and I don't really want her to have to live in that sort of world either.

She's LGBT but even so she shouldn't have to worry about these guys. It's that simple as far as I'm concerned.

I love my partner and the kiddo. As is yes, I actually care for them and not because either does anything to make me feel that way in the moment. Yeah, me and my partner have a long and sometimes fun history but we obviously have our struggles too...and if you don't stick with somebody when it's not fun, #1 what were you doing with them when it was? #2 When you come out the other side of it, and you know somebody's gonna be stronger for it and things could be better for everybody, why wouldn't you want to be a part of that?? 

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

Too many of these motherfuckers clearly don't give a shit about consent. 

They don't give a damn if somebody isn't into them, let alone why. 

And I'll add a couple more; They don't give a shit about the future or human connection either.

Hell, I had a couple dudes including my now former best friend (who had just sexually harassed my partner who I'd just gotten back with call me "Gay" for *Checks Notes* having a girlfriend.

No, that shit doesn't make any sense.

The reason for the "Male Loneliness Epidemic" is that fundamentally these dudes want to be this way. They want what they want when they want it, then they wanna just throw it away. Legality, morality, and responsibility be damned.

In fact as long as they get theirs in the heat of the moment, they really don't give a shit about anything else. It's the ultimate intersection of Criminality, Hubris, and Narcissism...yet mainly held by White Bros that wouldn't last five minutes in an actual prison nor would the inmates let them.

And the problem is that when one of them ends up being the one wearing the dress they might actually like it because a hell of a lot of these dudes are legitimately deviant (at least) situationally bisexual and both weirdly hedonistic and ashamed of it closet cases for whom it's less that they're actually bisexual or gay in terms of orientation or sexuality and more that they're the kind of perverse idiots who end up going to the hospital in the middle of the night because they got bored and jammed a light bulb up where the sun don't shine.

These guys ain't lonely enough.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

The truth is while they all think if civilization goes down, they're gonna be the high priest of Baal or the warlord, the truth is they don't really mind being the Bacha Bazi of the local Baal-cult or the catamite that the warlord keeps strapped to the tailgate of his technical truck next to the 23mm ammunition. In fact, they don't care, as long as there's a clear hierarchy, somebody's got it worse than them and there's somebody they can manipulate.

There are three things a certain kind of person will always try to do, no matter what or how much you take away from them; Get High, Have Sex, and Kill People.

And if rescued from that kind of "life" by Free American Soldiers, or by their EU/NATO allies or by United Nations Peacekeepers, such men might well even resent the help. A lot of these dudes want to be somebody's bitch.

And that's just the commons.

When you give these kind of dudes money and/or power it gets a lot worse; like when you consider that per the Epstein files, Trump apparently was the Monica Lewinsky for old Slick Willie at least once.

The current US government is full of such men and while, among themselves, there's no depravity they would leave untried...they think themselves fit to tell others what Righteousness is.

It's not just that they don't understand things like common decency, human solidarity or priestly celibacy, it's that they literally don't want to. They think to call themselves the heirs to religion or tradition...but the only beliefs in either sense that they're preserving is the cults of Baal and Mammon.

These are guys who'd hook up with a Succubus just to brag about it, then be surprised when she sucks out their souls.

And then they'd get mad because a woman did it.

They don't even see any difference between that shit and Catholicism, protestant Christianity or Islam let alone Judaism, the beliefs, history, interconnectedness and theology is all irrelevant to them, as is the existence of any gods, it's all about Power and they don't even see any difference.

Or want to.

And fundamentally all they want to do with that Power is enjoy themselves and protect themselves from all the shit that they're afraid of which is basically everything.

You take a drug, right? The chemicals, they rush through your body, rush through your brain. And the sensations, you want the sensations again and again and again, but let me tell you, you can also get addicted to grief, to guilt, to hate. Because when you feel dead inside, even bad sensations make you feel like you're alive! ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E5 "The Straight Life."

That's not what I was taught. Sorry, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do things. If you choose to get power by worshiping Demons, you go to Hell. 

I don't make the rules.

But the truth is worse; They don't care.

In fact if Hell has a hierarchy in which they can call people racial and other slurs and Heaven doesn't? They'd rather go to Hell. 

If they can abuse women in Hell, that's where they want to go, period.

In fact if going to Heaven requires treating the short-haired female Angel staffer with the tattoos who's at the front end of St. Peter's receiving line handing out the intake forms like a person instead of a sexual object a hell of a lot of these dudes would just reject the entire concept and turn right around and walk back out the gates.

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way! 

~Brother Cavil, "No Exit," Battlestar Galactica (Reboot) Season 4.5

I hate to sound that way, but that's exactly what's going on here.

They'd rather be a Ghost or in Hell or consigned to Oblivion in The Abyss than treat a woman like a person.

And they want to make the world such that it sends them there faster.

Because Anything but "All people are created equal, endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights."

Because Anything but "Love Thy Neighbor."

Because Anything but "Treat Women With Respect."

And the reason these fucking people are like this and they maintain a supra-theological belief that everything sucks and it should suck is actually worse.

They want everything to be terrible because they think that justifies their bad behavior and narcissism and whatever they think they want to do.

It's domestic abuser logic, writ large and applied to the Universe.

And these people's core belief is fundamentally in a Godless world where Man's self-satisfaction is the moral purpose of his life.

Eli Sunday: Daniel, I'm asking if you'd like to have business with the Church of the Third Revelation in developing this lease on young Bandy's thousand acre tract. I'm offering you to drill on one of the great undeveloped fields of Little Boston!  

Daniel Plainview: I'd be happy to work with you.

Eli Sunday: You would? Yes, yes, of course. That’s wonderful.

Daniel Plainview: But there is one condition for this work.

Eli Sunday: All right.

Daniel Plainview: I'd like you to tell me that you are a false prophet. I'd like you to tell me that you are, and have been, a false prophet, and that God is a superstition.

~From the film There Will Be Blood.

Their alleged State Of Confusion is both deliberate and malicious, and they think everybody else is stupid.

If you want that shit to stop, if you want yourself or your lover and your children to be free from this crap?

You're going to have to fight for it.

Freedom isn't free.

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

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

"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.

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

When is enough, enough?!

State Of Confusion (Exorcism-SOTU Edition.)

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray

South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenberg's, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it. 

~Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire.

...

We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon On The Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. ~General Omar Bradley

...

From Stettin on the Baltic to Varna on the Black Sea, the regimes planted by totalitarianism have had more than thirty years to establish their legitimacy. But none — not one regime — has yet been able to risk free elections. Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root....If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly....Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated. ~Ronald Reagan

So, in last night's State Of The Union, Trump finally went full Fidel Castro.

"History Will Absolve Me." ~Fidel Castro.

Note: You Never go the full Fidel Castro.

And then the motherfucker had the nerve to call Zohran Mamdani a Communist.

First off, Communism hasn't been a thing since 1989.

I know, I was there. I watched the Berlin Wall fall live on CNN.

Second, I didn't watch the whole speech, hell I didn't even watch clips of it I just watched Rick Wilson's Lincoln Project analysis this morning and the whole fucking mess would be better titled "State Of Confusion."

Republicans forgot what the fuck they were supposed to be doing a long time ago.

Basically, they got addicted to blowing the narcissist. Now, having been married to a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder, I sort of get it. Crazy can be fun...for awhile.

But Republicans are officially at the "Already Left Once, then Went Back For More" stage and it's working out exactly like that shit does every time. 

The Republican Party is eventually gonna wake up flat-ass broke, with a sore ass, groggy in a dirty gas-station restroom with its wallet missing and a $256 overdraft on their checking accounts while Trump hits the bar with Kim Long Dong, Vladimir Putin and whatever ancient ass Soviet Politburo members he can dig up.

Although really, to look at the average Russian official or, in fact, about any Russian over 40...what's the damn difference? Every older Russian dude has a face like the mutant love-child of a Basset Hound and an old-ass leather shoe anyway and most older Russian women look like my ex-wife if she would've drunk a fifth of the cheapest available Vodka straight out of the bottle every day for the last 20 years with a side order of Kratom and too much fast food.

Slap a bad suit on a couple random Russians and Lord Dampnut wouldn't know the fucking difference as long as they pretend to kiss his ass.

(And these are literally the people who think if you aren't a Russian you should be their bitch...and they frame this in explicit racist terms even against other "White" people...Republicans who 20 or even 10 years ago *Checks Notes* called Ronald Reagan [Who famously referred to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire] their Patron Saint if not God Himself--my late uncle, as I've said before was explicitly one of those guys, and he hated Trump-now can't wait to drop their pants and bend over for this goddamned bullshit.)

Now I realize that this whole mess is basically the product of bigotry and a sort of puerile Anti-Liberal perpetual "Opposite Day" line of bullshit like how my ex played on End Times Christianity.

We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go." I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't…". You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they're moving ahead on this? Well, they know they're not, they're just hanging out in the same place, five or six generations sitting in the projects when you're just supposed to stay there long enough to get a job and move out. ~Bill Cosby, the "Pound Cake" speech.

Technically, my ex actually did believe in that shit too, though. She just believed in scamming guys out of money in general and manipulating me in particular a lot more.

These Fucking People are lining themselves up to get destroyed about like I was when I let my ex move back in because she was having trouble keeping a job and couldn't make her rent. Do I even need to tell you how much of a fiasco that was??

Oh, and it was this time of year in 2001, also.

And just like I did, America, you're going to have to quit this bullshit and spend the next few years fighting to get your life back, rebuild something at least and if we're being honest, probably let these assholes who keep believing in this shit take some small part of the country for themselves as if Florida ain't already a goddamned Banana Republic under our own damn flag. And we're gonna have to let these idiots wander off and basically destroy themselves.

And learn to fucking say "No."

And mean it.

And potentially back up that word with literal force.

Because it will come to that.

All that comes before the fact that we basically need an Elijah to confront the Epstein mess and our modern day Prophets of Baal.

That's going to have to be dealt with too.

Again, and I've been saying this since my partner and I got back together in June and since I've been forcibly reintroduced to the concept of fatherhood and of constantly trying to be a decent, protective guy because I actually do like the women in my life, these fucking people's treatment of women absolutely repulses me and fills me with white-hot rage.

You can take a lot of things away from a man. Cigarettes, the gym. You can take his freedom, his legs, but not his feelings. Not his feelings. A man loves a woman. Don't matter what kind of man he is, if he loves her, he wants her. He wants her body. He wants her to want his. So you say to him, "you can never make love again. You will never touch her in that way again. This is the last time. The last time. Forever." If that's not cruel and unusual punishment, I don't know what is. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO series Oz, S1.E2 "Visits, Conjugal and otherwise."

I love my partner. I loved her when she was just a 20-year-old college dropout who'd become the loud brassy bitch in our work clique and gaming group and when she was my late best friend's ex-girlfriend who needed a place to stay. I loved her when we were long-distancing it when she lived in Tennessee and God Willing I'll still love her in another 20 years.

When my surviving now-former best friend turned all creepy sexual harasser almost the second he found out I was talking to her, I got a very bad vibe and to be honest it almost seems Demonic now. This dude wasn't like this 20 years ago.

And I know where he got this bullshit, listening to Manosphere chuds all day while he drives for work, pretty much. Yeah I was caught up in the same bro-culture bullshit he was but the difference is I grew up. Fuck him.

I said what I said in response and I still stand by that.

Guys, ya'll need Jesus, this Ain't the Way.

But, in the wake of all the Epstein revelations there's something Biblical-level evil about all this anti-woman bullshit.

Biblical-grade Evil demands Biblical-grade Justice. 

I don't make the rules.

I say we need a national exorcism for a goddamned reason.

The trouble is so many of these idiots are so fucked up on their own narcissism that they don't want to be human anymore.

They think they're entitled to be gods.

Against that??

You either believe in freedom or you don't.

And this? This ain't it, yo.

You're not gonna defeat this shit with a vote or a strongly-worded memorandum.

You want this to stop?? You're going to have to fight for it.

Слава Україна!

Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex.
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it. ~Billy Joel, We Didn't Start The Fire.

Four

"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.

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way! ~Brother Cavil, "No Exit," Battlestar Galactica (Reboot) Season 4.5

Bonus Content 1

Bonus Content 2

Bonus Content 3

Heaven...Until The Power Goes Out (Exorcism, Four.)

And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.

And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he strikes a man.

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men.

And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions.

And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.

And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.

And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God,

Saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.

And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.

And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.

And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.

By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.

For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.

And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:

Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. ~Revelation 9, King James Version.

I saw this last night.

Apparently at the World Economic Forum, they're promising rich people some kind of AI Afterlife now.

I mean maybe it's just me and most of the rich people I know are cheap as fuck, but wouldn't belief in some religion and its afterlife just be *Checks Notes* Cheaper??

Of course, I suppose then they couldn't fully subscribe to Ayn Rand's belief in a godless, man-centered world where a rich man's self-satisfaction becomes the moral purpose of the Universe, now, could they?

Just sayin' people, don't do this to yourselves.

You can have an AI made and this, that and the other fuckin' thing, upload it into the Cloud, blah blah blah.

That still ain't you.

That still ain't your Soul.

You're still gonna face the judgment.

To me this reads like some fool trying to get out of breathing air, out of sheer misplaced self-importance.

Actually, from my rough-around-the-edges Christian context, well I'd say that Jesus is probably just gonna laugh at you.

Like, you made an AI Avatar of yourself like the Universe is a fucking Facebook page, out of sheer pants-shitting fear of the Void (even as, if you're rich enough to be in the Epstein files apparently, you worshiped the Demons that dwell within it.)

And then He'll go judge your Video Game self, too.

ALL things die, it's just how God, the gods, the Universe, whatever put all this together, made shit to work. It simply is what it is.

No amount of technology is gonna change that. No amount of fear will overcome it, only love can do that. What happens to your AI Data Center "Self" when the power goes out??

AI Heaven ain't gonna provide Eternal Life any more than AI Chatbot Jesus is gonna grant you Salvation.

It's at best a cardboard-cutout Jesus, and therefore completely meaningless.

(And for the record I don't see Buddhists or Jews or Muslims doing all this, it's mostly secular White Guys who come from cultures steeped in Christianity, so I feel alright using that specific context here.)

Like, come on, people. Is having Faith just that damn hard??

Because at worst, this kind of garbage is exactly the type of Deception that people go to Hell both for believing and propagating.

And again, I'm an agnostic Christian. I don't know how all this stuff works at least not with any degree of certainty anymore.

But that's just What. I. Read.

And either you're willing to believe in the written Word or you're not.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

And the light shined in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. ~John 1:1-5

The day is going to come when your choices will be only to embrace all this crap and take that computer chip in your hand and the best you can hope for is that Cloud Afterlife, or to fight against it and get to find out whether the Holy Books were right or not and whether there's a Heaven and a Hell.

I'd prefer my concept of Eternity to last past the next time the power goes out.

Seriously, in a country and a world as marinated in Christianity as the one I supposedly live in, I don't even know why I have to say this shit. This is why I think we need a national, if not global, exorcism.

Either you Believe or you don't.

Make up your minds.

Слава Україна!

The dark is generous and it is patient, and it always wins.

But at the heart of its strength lies weakness.

One lone candle is enough to hold it back.

Love is more than a candle; Love can ignite the stars.

~Matthew Stover, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith novelization.

Three

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way! ~Brother Cavil, "No Exit," Battlestar Galactica (Reboot) Season 4.5