#but trump can make up hundreds of thousands of murders and it gets to be a footnote to the debat

[theskydoesgreatthingsnow]

Donald trump saying illegal immigrants kill “hundreds of thousands of people a year” when there are only around 20,000 homicide deaths a year in the entire U.S. should be enough to have him driven out of politics. It’s insanity that it isn’t.

It’s insanity that the media isn’t hammering the hell out of him for that alone. It’s not just extreme fearmongering, it’s not just exaggeration, it’s not just pure lies, its not just scapegoating and paranoia, its not just hate for the vulnerable, it’s blatant, violent distain for common sense. Any news outlet worth its salt should treat that as if it is the immediate and humiliating end of his campaign.

[thegaylink]

Biden and Harris shot themselves on the foot but sure the 500k people who voted Stein are to blame

Many things to work on here.

1. Stein is not the only 3rd party candidate.

All together, this amounts to 2,097,242 votes

2 million votes that were wasted on candidates that everybody knew wouldn't win. When we say every vote counts, this is why. They ADD UP. These numbers can change the course of an election, and they were tossed aside.

2. I never said 3rd party voters are the only ones at fault. If you chose not to vote, you are as much to blame as Trump supporters. Non-voters also make up an enormous number of people. Those kinds of numbers can change the course of an election, and they were discarded by people who chose to remain ignorant, uneducated, and uninvolved.

3. I assume you are the same person who sent me an anon message that says "genocide is bad" and YES. That's exactly what I said. Trump has been very clear about his plans for Gaza. He will not help them. He will continue to fund the IDF and support Isreal. He will help Putin invade even more European countries, and in doing so, he will fund the murders of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. I understand that Kamala Harris has contributed to the horrid deaths in Gaza, but the chances of getting a ceasefire/stopping support of Isreal were much better under her than Trump. If you seriously believe that voting 3rd party is going to help the people of Gaza, you are just as ignorant and uneducated as those who support the genocide.

4. Even with the genocides going on, the president's biggest loyalty should still be to the people of THIS country. They should be fighting for the rights, liberties, and happiness of the American people. Out of every candidate on the ballot, Harris has shown that she is loyal to America. She had worked in all 3 branches of the government, she has worked her way up and worked hard to get to where she is. She understands the struggles the average American faces. Trump is loyal to his own pocket, and that's it. He makes decisions not based on good values, but on how much money he's set to make. He is greedy in his professional and personal life. He takes from people over and over again, whether it's by taking their money, their trust, or their bodies. He grew up rich and stayed that way by running back to the comfort of his father so he can take more from him. He ran his business into the ground repeatedly, he ran his marriage into the ground, and he ran this country into the ground. He has no sense of loyalty. Not to his family, not to this country, and not to our people. He is loyal to himself and his wallet, and that's it. To see all of this evidence, these testaments to their character, these reflections of their values and morals, and still decide to use your vote for a candidate that you know will not be able to win even one state, even one county, shows where your loyalties lie. It is a testament to your character and a testament to your values. If you vote 3rd party, you do not value the people of this country. You want to be able to say you voted, to let people think that you used your power and your voice, while allowing your voice to be silenced. You want the praise from voting, but refuse to help. When you vote 3rd party, you prove your loyalties lie only to yourself, not to your community, and not to others. You are thinking only of your conscience, despite the fact that your poor choices will lead to thousands of deaths. You do it so you feel better when you lose, instead of fighting to win. Nobody will never agree with everything a candidate believes in, but elections are not for you to elect someone just like you, they are to elect someone who will lead the country with its people in mind, with loyalties to their people. If you vote 3rd party, you have failed at your role in this election.

[mariacallous]

There is no shortage of misery in the Middle East today. As the region marked the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, Israel mourned the murder of around 1,200 Israelis and worried about the fate of the remaining 100 hostages held by Hamas. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the subsequent war, hundreds of thousands are currently homeless, and much of Gaza lies in ruins. Lebanon, too, is now devolving into a war zone.

Often overlooked amid all this misery is Iran, which is also having a terrible, horrible, very bad year. But unlike most of the other actors here, it has only itself to blame.

Consider where Iran was strategically on Oct. 6, 2023. The United States, torn between competing demands for its military forces, was looking to reduce its military presence in the Middle East. That brought Iran closer than ever to achieving one of its long-term goals: ridding the region of U.S. influence. Israel, meanwhile, was tearing itself apart at home over controversial judicial reforms. Iran had suffered a strategic blow a few years prior with the passage of the Abraham Accords, which promoted Israel-Arab ties, but Tehran had arguably countered this in part by forging closer military ties to Moscow. True, Iran remained under significant sanctions, but the Biden administration unfroze some $6 billion in Iranian funds in exchange for freeing American prisoners.

Now consider where Iran is just a year later. Hamas, an Iranian proxy, has been decimated. Israel has shown that it can reach into a VIP guest house in Tehran to kill Hamas’s leaders. Hezbollah, the crown jewel of Iran’s proxy network, has been mauled to the point where Iran needs to strike Israel on the group’s behalf, rather than vice versa. Israel’s fractured political spectrum doesn’t agree on much, but it is united when it comes to making Iran pay for its missile attacks on the country. The Abraham Accords—which normalized Israel’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—are strained but remain intact, and Saudi-Israeli normalization remains possible in the longer term, even if it is not in the cards right now. In fact, despite the violence, it is easier to fly to Tel Aviv from Dubai than from many European cities. And the U.S. military is once again surging into the region. Further Western sanctions relief—in this geopolitical climate—is currently off the table.

While Israel faces strategic problems of its own, at least Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can argue that he did not start this war. By contrast, it is an open question to what extent Iran’s leaders helped plan the Oct. 7 attack and set the region aflame in the process. Even if Iran was merely caught up in one of its proxies going rogue, it certainly did have a direct role in the missile barrages against Israel and, by extension, the retaliatory strikes that followed.

Perhaps the silver lining for Iran here is that it could have been worse. Tehran’s missile attacks—in April and again in October—failed to kill Israelis or cause significant damage. Had they done that, Israel’s retaliation would likely have been significantly more robust.

But this gets to the crux: Iran’s tolerance for risk is growing. Firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at a militarily superior adversary is a dangerous game. Firing them while repeatedly calling for the annihilation of a likely nuclear-armed, militarily superior, superpower-backed state with a right-wing government inclined to hit back hard is a potentially suicidal gamble.

That’s not the only thing Iran has done over the past year that was so risky that it could have threatened the regime’s stability itself, had it not been for Tehran’s incompetence. Iran reportedly tried to kill former U.S. President Donald Trump and other former senior Trump administration officials in retaliation for the killing of Iranian Quds Force leader Qassem Suleimani. Thankfully, those plots were foiled. But the attempt itself was a huge risk, especially given that Trump is a current candidate for the presidency and known for holding grievances. Indeed, after being briefed about the attempted assassination, Trump threatened to “blow [Iran’s] largest cities and the country itself to smithereens” if he gets back to the White House and Iran tried a similar ploy.

But whereas trying to assassinate a former—and potentially future—U.S. president on American soil is a gutsy move, imagine what would happen if such a plot actually succeeds. Republicans—many of whom are already pretty hawkish on Iran—would likely be calling for blood. Democrats would not likely let the killing of a former U.S. president go unpunished. Indeed, if one thing could upend the post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan received wisdom of eschewing regime change in the Middle East, killing a former president could be it. In short, if the Iranian regime survives this war, it will be thanks to luck and its own incompetence.

Of course, from the Iranian perspective, its actions—or at least its missile strikes—were driven by strategic necessities to reestablish deterrence after a series of Israeli and U.S. affronts to its sovereignty, such as striking Iranian diplomatic facilities in Syria and killing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders. But there is little evidence that Iranian actions are having any deterrent effect whatsoever. If anything, Israeli leaders are talking even more openly than before about regime change in Tehran and even more adamantly about destroying the Iranian nuclear program.

Strategically, the wisest option for Iran right now would be to retreat to the shadows, rebuild its proxy network, and fight another day. After all, it will take time to rebuild Hamas and Hezbollah into the formidable fighting forces they once were. At the same time, Israel’s ties to its Arab neighbors and the West are already frayed, thanks to the bloodshed of the Gaza campaign and the Netanyahu administration’s unwillingness to commit to any sort of Palestinian state—a win, if a Pyrrhic one, for Iran. Pulling back also leaves open the prospect of some sort of future deal with the West over the medium term—which Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian says he wants and even Trump says he’s open to supporting.

That is not, however, what Iran seems intent on doing. Whether it’s because of Iranian domestic politics, concerns about losing face on the international stage, or simply a desire for revenge, the regime looks intent on doubling down. In a rare Friday prayer speech, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—with a rifle by his side in case anyone missed the point—praised the Oct. 7 massacre and promised that Iran “won’t back down. Israel won’t last long.”

Iran’s seeming unwillingness to reverse course has important implications for the United States and the West’s approach to Iran. It raises the question of whether threatening Iran with further costs will be sufficient to force a change in direction. The United States and its European partners can sanction Iran all they want; Israel could bomb Iranian oil fields. But it may not change Iranian behavior.

If deterrence by punishment won’t work, then the United States and the West will need to resort to deterrence by denial—destroying Iran’s ability to attack Israel and aid its proxies. That would be hard to do, since it requires destroying significant chunks of Iran’s military capabilities rather than simply threatening to inflict pain. But if the Iranian regime seems intent on escalating, then the United States and its allies may have no other choice.

And if that happens, while this year may have been a terrible one for Iran, next year might be even worse.

[crazyintheeast]

As someone who has studied politics on an university level and has a bit more indepth knowledge there is something you need to understand. Israel just like USA, France, Russia, Britain and any other colonial power has always had a foreign policy of pure evil and mass murder. The reason why Israel escalated beyond passive massacres is simple. Trump. Why Trump? Because Trump is the FIRST US PRESIDENT to submit to Israel's demands and recognize Jersalem as Israel's capital. This was something huge, no US president in history has ever been his servile to Israel. It gave them the green flag to do whatever they wanted So why did they start their active genocide under Biden ? Simple. They needed an excuse and that came under the form of October 7. And no it's a conspiracy to acknwoledge that they obviously let it happen. Not when Israel has one of the best intelligence networks in the world and the terrorist act was so wide spread. And yes this is further confirmed by reliable reports even in otherwhise extremly pro Israel media that they knew

So what does this mean? Israel will not end it's genocide until the election because they are deeply invested in getting Trump back to power and undermining Biden. So nothing he will do will make Israel stop. It doesn't matter if he stops the arms shipment Israel will continue. Eve if he tries to put sanctions on them which will never ever happen because it goes against USA's benefits Israel will continue because they hope for Trump and know that even if they lose short term USA will still support them long term. After all don't forget that Israel blew up an USA warship killing hudnreds of US soldiers and it only got a slap on the wrists So what can we expect? Israel HEAVILY relies on emotional liberals who will refuse to vote or throw away their votes on a third party and they will do anything to make this happen. So the closer we are to elections the more massacres they will commit. And the worst will probably come in the week of the elections where they will most likely targets children and women to give you enoug trauma to keep you from voting. Does this mean you shouldn't crticize Biden or push for a pro Palestine policy. No it just means that if you fall for the propaganda and don't vote it will get much much worse Because right now if Trump wins do you know what will happen? With his blessing not only will Israel continue the genocide but they will start MASSIVE colonisation. We are talking hundreds of thousands of settler being sent to steal as much land as possible in the next four years If Kamala wins....well most likely there will be some shadow talks. USA won't go publicly against Israel but in private Kamala will make it clear that this won't go on. What hostages survived Israel's bombimngs will be returned and in turn Israel will declare that they won and retreat. It won't be justice , it won't be nearly enough but at least Israel will be killing dozens of Palestianians per year instead of tens of thousands So yeah I know it's deprssing but tha's how it is. So you have to chose. Will you follow Israel's plan and throw your vote away leading to eve greater suffering udner Trump or wll you vote for Kamala and try to minimise the suffering as much as possible

[spiderlegsmusic]

The republicans insistence that hundreds of thousands of rapists and murderers are flooding into the country over our southern border is such a huge stupid lie. We get accused of fear mongering when we talk about the REAL threat of Project 2025—they are fear mongering about this fake “migrant crime wave,” which if you look at the statistics, crime committed by migrants is even lower than crime committed by white people. Republicans are so desperate for a cause they can rally around, they don’t care how bogus it is. They make shit up and then fear monger the fuck out of it.

If the republicans really worried about immigration, they’d have passed the immigration bill that a Republican co-wrote. But they didn’t. Not because they disagreed with it, but so they’d have an issue to bitch about in months ahead of the election. That was trump’s decree. The big orange lying liar who lies said “don’t pass that bill, democrats will get credit for it. Don’t pass it and we’ll say they’re soft on immigration.” Except, hey dumbass, we all know you told your cult not to pass the immigration bill one of them wrote. We know you want immigration as an election year issue. Well, that certainly backfired. You guys suck. A dummy leading a bunch of even dumber dummies. The GQP. The Repugnicunt Party.

We fear monger too. But at least our fear mongering subject is documented in 900+ pages on its own web site which will come true if Trump somehow gets elected. I have nothing against VP Harris, I hope she can beat Trump. The racists, dummies, and wealthy people will vote for Trump—but how many people is that? I still maintain that if every woman registered to vote shows up to vote, it won’t be close. And republicans can make up a bunch of bullshit for the next election, assuming they’ll behave this time and not attack the capitol or start shooting people like they really want to do. Crazy people get to vote. Cult members get to vote, please wonderful women! Show up on Election Day or early vote, either way.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

President Joe Biden will announce a new executive order Tuesday that will shield the hundreds of thousands of immigrants married to U.S. citizens from being deported—and Stephen Miller, the ghoul behind some of Donald Trump’s harshest immigration policies, just can’t handle it.

With this policy, around 490,000 people who have lived in the country for at least 10 years will become eligible to apply for “parole in place,” meaning they can remain in the United States and receive work permits, two sources told the Associated Press.

Miller took to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday to lament Biden’s reported upcoming police announcement.

“Big news: Biden to announce an unconstitutional executive amnesty for illegal aliens during a border invasion and in the aftermath of multiple gruesome raped and murders of Americans at the hands of Biden-freed illegals. This is an attack on democracy,” he wrote, likely referring to the murder of Rachel Morin last year.

With his penchant for white nationalism, Miller is no stranger to making disgusting and racist generalizations about immigrants. He readily touts actual tragedies as political talking points, hoping to drum up reactionary votes for Trump in November.

Biden’s new policy, which is yet to be confirmed by the White House, has the potential to significantly expand the legal avenues for immigration into the United States and keep families from being torn apart.

Earlier this month, Biden announced a new immigration policy to lower the number of people crossing the southern border, which has been widely criticized by Democrats, the very people he needs to support it. The new policy also adopted new language that will make it significantly easier to deport people, and harder for those who cross illegally to gain asylum.

Although many have compared Biden’s tightening on immigration restrictions to Trump’s old policies, this is not enough to satisfy Miller, who is only concerned with reelecting his former boss so he can get back to making the United States look exactly how he dreams: all white.

[hellbecomingroundthemountain]

Trump and the Sacred Ear

For those relishing in the miracle of Donald Trump’s assassination survival…

So God saved Donald Trump by tapping him on his “sacred ear” and Mr Comperatore was just collateral damage, a sacrifice to the greater good. And I suppose that Crooks boy was just a pawn in the glorious game in the re crowning of Trump. So if you believe your God is omnipresent and makes these decisions for the greater good, the Comperatore and Crook family are at home rejoicing over their part in the scheme. So tell me, if Joe Biden was almost assassinated and some innocent audience member was killed would that have been worth it? Would God have been considered to have made a divine intervention and now you all would vote for him?

How does God make these value judgements? What’s the formula? One innocent bystander equals Trump elected? One million Covid deaths, plus George Floyd gets him defeated? The Bay of Pigs equals Kennedy’s assassination? Six million Jews in the Holocaust earns Hitler a trip to Hell? 

But tell me this, why hasn’t dozens of murdered school children earned us better gun control? Hasn’t God got to that one on his list of good deeds yet to qualify gun control for God’s intervention?

And the abortion situation. Does God have a scale of justice where he’s weighing thousands of zygotes, embryos and fetuses on one side and women’s right to choose on the other and he’s trying to decide which should win. Everybody’s waiting for him to make a decision. I can just imagine a stadium filled with fans cheering, bands playing, beer flowing, hot dogs being consumed by the hundreds and fights breaking out in the parking lot while the numbers are being counted by his angels out in the middle of the field. Just a real humdinger of a scene waiting for God to decide who will be blessed. 

It’ll be a while though. He’s over at the local Little League field deciding who’s praying harder so he can let their team win the next ball game.

Tough job God has making all these decisions. Tougher job humans have thinking they can know what God is, how he thinks, why he does what he does, and that they can even for a second think they can influence what he does or take any credit for anything that may happen on this earth.

Face it, shit happens. Get over it. We deal with life as it happens as best we can, as we are taught, and with the tools we are born with.  Tack the Golden Rule on your wall and follow it. It’s man made. And know this, if your hero is Donald Trump, wise up. He doesn’t follow it.

[rhetoricandlogic]

“The law is the true embodiment

Of everything that’s excellent.

It has no kind of fault or flaw—

And I, my lords, embody the law.”

                             —W. S. Gilbert

So this woman comes up to me in the front bar of the Flawless Diamonds of Orthodoxy, which is to all intents and purposes my office. “I want to murder my husband,” she says.

Another one. “Sure you do,” I say. “Sit down. Let me buy you a drink.”

You don’t often see unaccompanied women in bars, let alone respectable bars like the Diamonds. I buy her a half carafe of the house red.

She hardly touches it. He’s making my life a living hell, she tells me. Every damn thing I say, he contradicts me. Every damn thing I do is wrong. He spends all the money and then moans at me because we’re poor. We haven’t, well, you know, for two years. When we’re out, he looks at other women.

“Excuse me,” I interrupt. “Did you say he’s spent all the money?”

She looks at me. “I’ve got six hundred staurata,” she says. “Is that enough?”

I usually charge five hundred. “No,” I say. “But in your case I guess I can stretch a point.”

I always buy them a drink. True, it’s twelve trachy out of my pocket, but the return on my investment is substantial, and it makes them feel like I’m a friend they can turn to and confide in. Actually, it wasn’t my idea, it was hers; Euphrosyne, my partner. She knows human nature much better than I do—which is weird, considering she isn’t human.

“I don’t blame her one bit,” she says, when I tell her. “That poor woman.”

It doesn’t matter to me one way or another, but I’m a lawyer, I can’t help arguing the toss. “Murder,” I say. “The deliberate snuffing out of a human life.”

“Extenuating circumstances,” she replies, inside my head. “Women in your society are effectively powerless. Men are allowed to treat them like property. Having no other recourse, the poor soul is driven to violence. It’s so unfair. It’s wrong.”

Sometimes being a lawyer is its own punishment. I wish she wouldn’t shout. Someone yelling inside my head gives me a migraine for the rest of the day. I should be used to it, after fifteen years of what I guess you could call demonic possession, but it still annoys me.

“Sorry,” she has the grace to say, though of course it’s too late now. “But it’s not right, surely you can see that. No man ever went to Hell for being unfair to his wife. But the moment a wretched victimized woman stands up for herself, it’s straight to eternal damnation, no appeals, no excuses. The whole system is fundamentally rotten.”

I agree with her, as it happens. The system, as ordained by the Invincible Sun, sucks. Agreeing out loud would be blasphemy, for which there are consequences; long term consequences, involving brimstone. Euphrosyne knows that. Even after all these years, she’s as slippery as a snake. Of course. “Get thee behind me,” I say. “And cut it out, will you? Biting the hand that feeds you is not a nice thing to do.”

She doesn’t apologize. “It’s unfair,” she says. “It’s wrong.”

Well, of course it is, I don’t bother saying.

In law, a man isn’t liable for anything he does when he’s possessed by an evil spirit. Lawyers call this principle the defense in Sechimer’s Case, after a famous lawsuit over a thousand years ago. Sechimer was able to prove that when he smashed his mother’s head with a brick he was possessed by a demon, and so the judge directed that he should be acquitted, and it’s been the law ever since. Of course, back then murder was an ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but two hundred years later, Gulbrand’s case confirmed that it was good law in secular courts too. It’s the ultimate trump card—provided you can prove possession. Which is, of course, what makes me smarter than any other lawyer who ever lived.

At least it was a wife this time, getting rid of her husband. It appalls me somewhat that a good third of the murders I aid and abet are husbands getting rid of wives. When I first got into this business, I assumed most of my clients would be businessmen, seeking to dispose of inconvenient rivals for sound commercial reasons, with a healthy leaven of oppressed serfs and political idealists. Instead, I get all this domestic work, and to be honest with you, I don’t think it’s right. Under the old Republic they had proper sensible divorce laws, so if the two of you couldn’t stand the sight of one another, you went along and told the judge about it, and he granted you a divorce, and everybody lived happily ever after. But Florian II abolished divorce (except on grounds of bigamy and consanguinity) and now the only way to be free of an intolerable situation is the death of one of the parties—the wife, usually, which is of course unfair, though since most wives get rid of their husbands with poison, which is a real bitch to detect and prove, maybe the statistics aren’t quite so monolithic after all. Even so. People say we’re so much better off under the Empire, and isn’t Progress wonderful, but I have my reservations.

“My client,” I tell the judge, “fully admits that she struck the fatal blow. Hers was the hand that grasped the hammer and swung it against that poor innocent man’s head in a frenzied, remorseless attack that left him dead in a pool of blood on the floor of the marital home.” I pause for effect, sheer force of habit; the judge knows me and knows what’s coming. Kudos to him for not yawning. “But hers was not the mind, the will, the intention. She is no more guilty of murder than the hammer itself, because she was merely an unwilling instrument of the true guilty party.”

The jury, on the other hand, haven’t heard all this before, and they’re properly impressed. I’m not looking at them at this stage, so I can’t see their faces, but I can hear little gasps. “The true guilty party,” I go on, “the real murderer, is right here with us today, in court, in this building. Your honor, I call my first witness. I summon the demon Euphrosyne.”

When I first got into this racket, I had to hire a priest to do the actual exorcism. No big deal; I know a lot of priests, as it happens, and all of them are more than happy to earn an honest stauraton doing what is, after all, God’s work. Besides, what priest doesn’t love a big exorcism? Especially in public, with everybody going home and telling their friends and neighbors about how Father So-and-so grappled with the minions of the Prince of Darkness and prevailed after an awful struggle... And sooner or later, word of their exploits reaches the ear of a wealthy patron, leading to a tenured chaplaincy, leading to further preferments, quite possibly a bishopric—what’s not to like?

But the simple fact is that my clients don’t tend to have bottomless purses. Five hundred staurata is a lot of money, usually all they can afford and then some, so I can’t tack the priest’s fee on to my own, it has to come out of my pocket. So, a couple of years back, I made a handsome donation to the Golden Rose in Templegate, in consideration of which the abbot ordained me as a junior curate, meaning I can now legally cast out devils anywhere in the province of Transpontine Aelia.

“Objection,” thunders my old pal Coelwulf, hauling himself to his feet and winking at me with the eye the jury can’t see. “Am I to take it that my learned friend proposes to exorcise this so-called demon here and now, in this courtroom?”

The judge sighs. “Approach the bench,” he says.

The judge, incidentally, is my other old pal Lutebrand, who was in the year above Coelwulf and me, and who got made a judge because his uncle on his mother’s side is the suffragan bishop of Schanz. We don’t actually like each other very much, but we’ve known each other since we were kids. “Just keep it short, will you?” Lutebrand says, practically pleading with me. “If there’s one thing I can’t be doing with, it’s someone who plays with his food.”

“It’s not up to me,” I say. “If it doesn’t want to come quietly—”

Lutebrand gives me a look I’m not entirely sure I like. “I’m sure you’ll manage,” he says. “And you,” he tells Coelwulf, “skip the funnies, all right? It’s bad enough having my court turned into a burlesque house without you scoring points all the damn time.”

Coelwulf tries to look offended, but he knows the score. I can see where he’s coming from. He’s going to lose this one and all three of us know it, so why shouldn’t he try and salvage something by making a monkey out of me if he can? I don’t begrudge him, so long as I win, but Lutebrand isn’t as fair-minded as me. Besides, he still has a few naïve notions about the dignity of the courtroom, which I think is rather sweet.

“Understood,” he says. “And you and Praeclara must come over for dinner some time.” Lutebrand’s wife Praeclara can’t stand Coelwulf or his wife and makes no bones about the fact, which Coelwulf finds hilarious. I’m just glad they keep me out of it.

“Motion dismissed,” Lutebrand says out loud, so the jury can hear him, and Coelwulf and I troop back to our places. I settle myself down and take a deep breath. Showtime.

Later, after I’ve made my excuses and slipped away early from the victory party, Euphrosyne says to me, “I hate you. Why did you have to be so rough?”

“Sorry,” I say. “It has to look convincing.”

“Oh come on.” She’s angry with me. “It was a foregone conclusion, you were always going to get an acquittal. No, you like showing off to the jury, which is why I had to put up with all that mauling about.”

“It’s good for business,” I tell her. “A big scene in court, word goes around, we get more customers.” I pause (for effect). “You get to fill your quota. And more.”

There’s no answer to that, so she doesn’t try and come up with one. Instead, she sulks. When she sulks, it manifests itself as a sharp stabbing pain just above my left cheekbone.

“Don’t be like that,” I say. “It’s not like you feel anything.”

“How dare you say that?”

“You can’t feel, you don’t have a body. Not one of your own.” I pull myself up short, afraid that this time I’ve said something unforgivable. “Well, you don’t. It’s the punters who do the actual hurting, and I don’t hear them complaining.”

I take a lot of risks. If she wanted to, she could kill me, easy as winking, simply by pinching a blood vessel in my brain. Or she could ransack the inside of my head, and I’d spend the rest of my life in the dark, being fed porridge from a spoon. I’m not sure she’s authorized to do anything like that, not without a direct order from a superior officer inside the organization, but what could they do to her if she did? Luckily for me, she obeys the rules because she thinks they’re good, wise rules, not for fear of what’ll happen to her if she doesn’t.

“I hurt too,” she says, in that ominously quiet tone of hers. “I feel everything they feel.”

“So you keep saying.”

“I don’t lie.”

No, she doesn’t. “So you keep saying. But let’s suppose it’s true. You feel their pain, big deal. Pain’s just an unpleasant sensation. It comes and then it goes. You know for a fact that it’ll go away and then you’ll be fine again, and you’ll always be fine, because nothing can genuinely hurt you, because of what you are.”

She’s heard it all before, of course. And she knows I’m a lawyer, so naturally I can argue any point, make the worse argument appear to be the better, prove (on the balance of probabilities) that black is white. She knows I don’t necessarily believe everything I say. She probably knows by now that I don’t believe anything.

“It’s different for us,” I carry on nevertheless. “It’s not the pain that hurts us, it’s the fear of consequences. We haven’t got stone cold assurances that sooner or later the pain will stop, and there’ll be no lasting damage, and we’ll still be here this time tomorrow, like nothing happened. Pain’s just a signal, to tell you when to be scared. But you’ve got nothing to be scared of. Therefore—”

“Shut up, will you?” she says. This means I’ve won. That’s all a man in my line of work can ask for.

I get my six hundred staurata the next day, in cash, by special messenger. I put five hundred aside in my big steel box, which lives in the secret room you can only get into by lifting a flagstone in the cellar. That leaves a hundred. Fifty of that goes to the Lawyers’ Guild, for their gracious permission to practice my trade on their turf. Ten for rent (is it that time of the month already?), ten for church dues, leaving me with thirty staurata I can actually spend. That’s a hell of a lot of money. Where I grew up, you could have bought a valley for thirty staurata, along with a house, fifty sheep, and the lives and destinies of three indentured servants.

I lay out the six gold coins on the palm of my hand and look at them, trying to understand what they really mean, but that sort of insight is beyond me, I’m afraid. I’m a working intellectual, not one of your contemplative, ivory-tower types. Actually, I knew a man once who built himself an ivory tower. He made a fortune in the fuller’s earth business and wanted something nobody else had. Trouble is, he told me, after a few years of wind and rain the ivory turns a sort of shitty brown, so either you spend a fortune on having it cleaned every eighteen months or you declare victory, cut your losses, and move on.

So I’m back in the Flawless Diamonds, and this man comes up to me. Are you the guy who does the murders, he asks.

“I’m a lawyer,” I say. “Let me get you a drink.”

“I want you,” he says a minute or so later, as he fishes a dead fly out of his beer, “to murder the archbishop.”

I give him my trademark frown. “I don’t murder anybody,” I say. “You do that.”

“Yes, fine. Can you—we—?”

“I don’t see why not,” I say. “Assuming you can get close enough to His Grace to stick a knife in him.”

“Not a problem,” he says. “I’m the archdeacon of Greditz.”

The trouble with statements like that is, they aren’t necessarily true. So I wait, for maybe two heartbeats, until I hear her voice in my head; yes, he is.

“In that case,” I say, “I can’t see any major difficulties. Of course, you’re entitled to benefit of clergy, so you don’t really need my services. Which are,” I add, “expensive.”

He gives me an impatient look. “Not,” he says, “if I want to be the next archbishop. But demonic possession—” Quite. Nobody’s fault, except maybe the Devil’s. “How much do you charge?”

“One thousand.”

I can see the sum means nothing to him, one way or another. I’m disappointed. You’d have thought that a smart man like him, a serious scholar who’s read all the important books, might understand the meaning of money—have come across it in the course of his reading, or figured it out for himself. But no, to him it’s just numbers; in this case, an acceptable number. Oh well. “So,” he goes on, leaning forward a little, “what’s the procedure?”

“Simple,” I tell him. “You decide when and where you’re going to do the deed. I need at least a day’s notice, because she’s got to get properly settled in.”

“She?”

I shrug. “I think she’s a she. It’s all pretty theoretical, because as you know, they don’t have bodies as such. But when I hear her in my head, she’s almost certainly female. With,” I can’t resist adding, “a faint but quite distinct Mezentine accent. Make of that what you will.”

I don’t think the archdeacon has a sense of humor. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“So,” I go on, “the day before the killing, I transfer her into your head, and you spend the next twenty-four hours getting to know each other. Gives her a chance to get used to your motor functions, reaction times, level of physical strength, any disabilities or weaknesses, are you right or left handed, that sort of thing. Then you trot along to your prearranged meeting with the victim, and she handles it from there. And then of course you’re arrested, and as soon as you can, you send for me.”

He gazes at me. He’s not a hundred per cent sure he wants to go through with it.

“It hurts,” I say, because he’s too proud to ask. “According to her, it hurts like hell. When she’s inside you, it’s like a constant dull headache. Also, if you have rheumatism or arthritis, apparently you suffer the torments of the damned, so to speak. When I get her out of you, she reckons it’s the worst pain a human body can endure. To quote her, like giving birth to a thirty-pound hedgehog.” I let that sink in, then ask; “Do you think you can deal with that?”

He looks the way they all do at this juncture. “I guess I’ll have to.” Then a pause; then; “What about—?”

“Lasting side effects.” I nod. “Yes, there are some. You’ll lose a certain degree of fine control in your fingers. In practical terms, you’d still be able to play the harp, but not nearly as well. Your handwriting will be permanently affected. I did a surgeon once, and he had to retire.”

“Understood.”

“Also,” I continue, “there’s a ninety per cent chance it’ll affect your bladder control, to a greater or lesser extent. Some people lose about thirty per cent of their hearing, though usually it comes back eventually. One man I worked for ended up paralyzed from the waist down, though I can’t say for certain it wasn’t a perfectly ordinary stroke, brought on by the stress of it all. Oh, and it tends to lower your resistance to colds, coughs, that sort of thing.” I pause to wipe my nose on my sleeve. “Whether you think it’s worth it is up to you.”

He’s not happy, but he resolves to be a brave soldier. “What about—?”

“What?”

He’s looking for the right words. “Bad dreams,” he says. “Things like that.”

I stay silent for a moment, though I know the answer. “That,” I say, “is mostly up to you. Some people, yes. Others, no. I imagine it’s to do with whether or not you have a conscience. I’m not really qualified to advise you about that.”

“Understood,” he says. “In that case, let’s do it.” He pauses. “Is there any paperwork? Anything you need me to sign?”

I shake my head. “If you can’t trust an archdeacon,” I say, “who can you trust?”

Benefit of clergy is a wonderful thing, from a lawyer’s perspective. It’s another trump card. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done or to whom, or when or where or with what; if you’re a properly ordained minister in holy orders, level three or above, you can’t be tried in a secular court. Only your fellow clerics can sit in judgment on you; and it’s even better than that, because if you stand up in front of them with the Book in your right hand and solemnly swear that you didn’t do it, they have no choice but to acquit. If you can’t trust your fellow cleric, the argument runs, and so on and so forth.

I guess it’s a good thing, on balance. Which is not to say it can’t be taken too far. When I was just starting in the law, the most feared assassin in the duchy was Brother Ambrosianus, the rector of Lubin. He charged a thousand staurata for a killing, and when he’d done the job he’d drop the knife, sit down with his arms folded and wait for the Watch or the Prefect’s men to take him downtown; he knew better than to give them the slightest pretext to draw a weapon on him, and they never did, because the clergy are sacrosanct, meaning that if you lay a finger on a priest without due cause, it’s automatically the gallows, strict liability, no excuses. There was no point trying to get Ambrosianus defrocked, because he was exceptionally punctilious about performing his parish duties and all his sermons were impeccably orthodox, and the only way they can sling you out of your parish is if they can prove negligence, dereliction of duty, or heresy. Eventually he made what he felt was enough money and moved to Scheria, where he bought ten thousand acres and a castle overlooking the sea. For all I know, he’s still there, and happy as a clam.

So, you see, there’s a lot to be said for being a man of God (like the archdeacon, or Brother Ambrosianus; not me, because I’m only level two). To give you some sort of perspective, the archdeacon of Greditz controls a portfolio of assets comparable to that of a duke or a marquis. There’s a vast amount of agricultural land, much of it profitable; also things like iron mines, tollbridges, quarries, water mills, sawmills, tanneries, wine and olive presses; a whole fleet of barges, carrying bulk commodities up and down the Ostar, and a half share in at least a dozen grain freighters making the Olbia-Auxentia run. The archidiaconal fingers are to be found in practically every worthwhile pie this side of the Friendly Sea. But the archbishop is something like fifty times richer. Also, he gets to shape and decide church policy and formulate doctrine. He’s ex officio chair of the standing committee on heresy and gets to vote at ecumenical councils. On various carefully defined occasions, he speaks with the voice of God on issues that really matter. Worth murdering for? You tell me.

The downside—if you believe in all that stuff—is that in the eyes of Heaven, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. More precisely, the level of retribution you can expect in the Other Place is ten times more if you’re a priest. Now this argument doesn’t really speak to me. If you’re bad, says Scripture, you earn eternal damnation and infinite suffering. Fine; do the math. Ten times eternity is eternity. Ten times infinity is infinity. It amazes me sometimes that nobody else seems to have noticed that. Maybe it’s because I’m a lawyer, and we look at things from a rather different angle.

“Oh come on,” I say, when she starts moaning at me. “At least it’s not another domestic.”

“An archbishop.”

“Exactly. That’s going to look so good on your annual report.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

“No,” I say. “For which I’m truly thankful.”

No reply, just that horrible pain in my cheek. I don’t drink strong liquor, because it makes her nauseous, but just for once I’m tempted. Instead, I grab a handful of pistachios from the bowl and start munching. “It’s good money,” I point out.

“So?” She’s determined to be miserable.

“Like I said,” I tell her, “it’s got to be better than yet another inconvenient wife. Well, hasn’t it?”

“I’d stay off that subject if I were you.”

You may have noticed that when I’m annoyed, I tend to pick verbal fights. It’s a bad habit, and curious given my trade. Surely you’d have thought I get enough of that sort of thing during working hours, and when I’m off duty I’d want to relax and do something entirely different. Maybe I just like to fight, and the job is only a pretext. I really hope that’s not true. “I think you make far too much fuss about that. For a start, you’re inconsistent.”

“Really.”

“Yes. For example; what’s the main reason why our clients want their wives out of the way? Because they’ve got a thing going with the housemaid or the kitchenmaid or one of the girls in the clerks’ office. And maybe the wife knows about it and doesn’t give a damn, but the girl starts saying, this is no good, if you really cared about me you’d get rid of your wife, and then we could really be together. And she keeps on and on about it, maybe threatens to cut off supplies, so next thing is, you and I get called in, and eventually the course of true love runs smooth and there you are. A good thing.”

“Rubbish.” She never uses rude words, like bullshit.

“On the contrary. It’s social mobility. How else is a girl from Poor Town ever going to get a chance to raise her status, dramatically improve her standard of living, and assume responsibility for running a large and complex household, with control of a substantial budget? You and I, we’ve made it possible for literally dozens of ambitious, strong-minded young women to achieve their true potential, in a society which would otherwise have stamped them back down into the mud. And their children and their grandchildren will go on to reshape—”

“Just stop it, will you? I hate it when you do that. Twist things so something really evil sounds good.”

“Pot,” I say. “Kettle.”

“Shut up.”

I give it a moment; then I say, “Why not an archbishop? Especially a corrupt, degenerate bastard like Theodosius. From what I gather, when he’s in residence at the Silver Star, no nun is safe. If anyone ever deserved a knife in the neck—”

“Shut up.”

The next time I see the archdeacon, it’s in the Mercy chapel of the basilica. It’s just after Matins, and we have the place to ourselves. “Well?” I ask him. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes.”

I have no special insight into how people’s minds work; that’s her side of things. But it’s pretty obvious he’s not sure at all. “It’s not too late,” I tell him. “We can call it off right now. You’ll forfeit the deposit, of course, but—”

“I’m sure.”

“Suit yourself.”

I’ve already told him what he’s got to do. He holds out both hands, waist height, palms upwards. I put my hands on his. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but she reckons it’s the most efficient way, for her. I feel my palms tingle, and that’s it. “Are you in?” I ask.

“Yes.” His mouth, her voice.

“What’s it like?”

“You know better than that.”

There’s a code of conduct, would you believe. Part of it is host confidentiality; she’s not supposed to tell me what she sees when she’s inside someone’s head. The archdeacon sits down on the end of a pew. It takes her a minute or so to get comfortable with the legs. “He’s been eating onions,” she says.

“Oh dear. Do try not to fart during holy communion.”

I get up to go. For some reason, I always feel a bit guilty leaving her, on these occasions; like a mother taking her kid to school. “You’ll be all right.”

“Yes. Now go.”

I leave her and walk out of the basilica, into the hard, cruel light. As usual, I don’t know what to do with myself. In theory, this is a time I ought to look forward to; a holiday from demonic possession, a chance to be myself for a week or so. It doesn’t work like that. I miss her. I even miss the headache, and the dull pain in my joints, and the constant pins and needles in both feet.

I go home. In the cellar, I unlock the steel box and take out the money, which I put in a cloth bag. I take it where it needs to go, then come home and sleep for twelve hours. Then some clown comes hammering on the door and wakes me up. I’m needed at the Prefecture. There’s been a murder.

The trial of an archdeacon for murdering an archbishop is a pretty big affair. We’re in the ecclesiastical court, so the hearing’s being held in the chapter house of the basilica, which happens to be one of my favorite places on earth. The ceiling is a fresco Epiphany by Ruderius, one of only six left in the whole world. The east window is genuine pre-Iconoclasm stained glass, with those amazingly deep, warm colors they just can’t seem to make any more. We’re there immediately after Matins, so the dawn light is streaming in through the window, flooding the floor with reds and blues and purples, and the choir stalls are bathed in pure gold, insubstantial but acutely visible; you feel like you could scramble over there and scoop it up in your cupped hands, as though you’d finally managed to find the end of the rainbow. The floor, incidentally, is a mosaic, a Judgment by Apsimar of Rudezza, and on the stroke of Prime, it’s designed so that the red light through the window fills the center of the floor and you can’t help but believe it’s actual roaring, unquenchable hellfire, surging upwards until it licks the walls and the roof. Unless, of course, it happens to be raining outside, in which case you have to make do with ordinary everyday faith.

This is a big case, so we’ve got the Patriarch, no less, sitting in the big chair in full dalmatic, chasuble, pallium, pectoral star, the whole nine yards; no joke on a warm day for a man no longer young. I don’t know him, but I know the prosecutor. “You,” he says, as I take my place next to him in the front row of the choir stalls.

“Me,” I concede. “Hello, Genseric. It’s been a while.”

Genseric was in the year below me; now he’s the prior of the Golden Chalice in Foregate and honorary precentor of the basilica. Not bad for a kid who showed up on his first day wearing his brothers’ hand-me-downs. It was very wrong of us to give him a hard time about that, all the way through from first year to graduation. Especially since, but for the grace of God, I’d have been in the same boat as him. The only reason I didn’t come to the big city in my brothers’ old clothes is that I’m the eldest.

“You’ve got a nerve,” he says.

“Several,” I say. “And right now, I can feel every single one of them. This place gets to you.”

Not to him, evidently. “This is a bit rich for you, isn’t it?” he says. “Out of your league.”

“My client has faith in my abilities,” I tell him. “What can I say?”

“I’ll be interested to find out,” he replies. “As far as I can see, I’ve got your man stone cold. Why isn’t he pleading benefit?”

“He’s innocent.”

He looks at me. “I never did like you much,” he says, and then we’re all on our feet for the grand entrance of His Grace.

She’s a trouper, I’ll say that for her. They used mundus vergens, which is a fifth-level charm, really big medicine in the exorcism stakes. Essentially what it does is drag the evil spirit out of the host by its hair, or whatever the non-substantial equivalent might be. I wouldn’t be surprised if they heard my client’s screams the other side of Westgate.

“Not my fault,” I tell her, back in my lodgings. The shutters are closed and the door is bolted. “You were the one who clung on. You could’ve come out for ruat caelum and nobody would’ve minded. The client wouldn’t have, that’s for sure.”

“He needed to suffer,” she says grimly. “He did a very bad thing.”

“So you had to suffer too. Which makes it your fault, not mine.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?”

No, frankly, I don’t. She’s the devil, or at least a devil; her function is to ensnare, seduce, entrap. The payoff is supposed to come later, when the victim’s immortal soul presents itself before the judgment seat. But she insists on putting herself through the agonies of an opposed extraction, just so the host gets to feel them too. At least, that’s how she justifies it—to me when I nag her about it; mostly, though, I think, to herself. No, I think she feels the need to suffer everything the sinner suffers because of imitatio divinitatis, the emulation of God. Just as He, incarnate among us, suffered the torture and death our sins deserved and thereby spared us our just retribution in the Hereafter, so she has this urge–

(Even so; I have my doubts. Not about her so much as Him, incarnate among us, taking away the sins of the world in that singularly melodramatic manner. He was born, He suffered, He died—and guess what, He didn’t stay dead. All along, He knew it was strictly a temporary thing, no permanent damage, no lasting effects, not even one small, discreet scar on the back of His incorruptible hand; one brief pang of discomfort for the Omnipotent Eternal, then business as usual. Know what that reminds me of? In the last war, or was it the war before last, a whole bunch of really famous actors went out to the front lines and put on the latest City farce for our brave boys in the ruins of Grafstad. While they were there, they wore army clothes, ate army food, slept in army tents, the complete experience, and everybody said; how brave, how noble. But you know what? They knew that the moment the show was over, they would head home– hot bath, shave, pedicure, put on their smartest clothes and out to dinner with the archbishop and the lord mayor at the Prefecture. Business as usual.   The actors, I mean, not the soldiers. The soldiers stayed where they were, until Prince Ekkehard’s spring offensive did for all the ones who survived the winter dysentery. Business as usual for those poor sods as well.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe—in the Incarnation, the Passion and the Resurrection, every last word and tiny detail. I think it all happened exactly how it’s described in Scripture. It’s just that it doesn’t make me respect Him particularly. If anything, the opposite.)

And her urge—well, it’s not for me to say, is it? Where does imitatio divinitatis end and kinkiness begin? And is it any of my business? Decidedly not.

I know it’s the middle of the night because when I open my eyes, I can hear the bell of the Iron Star in the distance, ringing for Lauds. “Get up,” she’s yelling inside my head. “You’ve got to go. Move.”

There’s someone moving about in the house. Not stealthy creeping. “What?” I say.

“Soldiers.”

Which makes no sense. Either there’s a war nobody’s seen fit to mention, or they’re here to arrest me. Why would they do that? I’m a lawyer, a professional man, a pillar of society. “You need to get out,” she’s telling me. “Now.”

Why? I’ve done nothing wrong. I haven’t broken the law. But she wouldn’t tell me to do something like that if it wasn’t in my, our, best interests; so I hop out of bed, pad across the room, unbolt the shutters, straddle the windowsill, haul my leg over until I’m sitting on the ledge, then slide myself off into empty air. Just as well that I live on the ground floor.

Even so, it’s a short drop, four feet or so. I land, absorb the shock by bending my knees. Then someone grabs me and punches me in the face.

“If you’re innocent,” says the Watch captain, “why did you run?”

We’re in the Watch house on the corner of Corngate and Horsefair; a fashionable neighborhood. Most of their clientele is rich drunks and the better class of burglar. I’d been here a few times, back when I was in general practice, before I specialized. I’d been in that very room, sat at that very table. It’s a bleak room, designed to eradicate hope, like bleaching fleeces for dyeing. The Watch captain is a man about my age, prematurely bald, small nose, double chin; there are rust stains on his padded jerkin, because it’s hot wearing armor, so you sweat like crazy. His hands, folded in front of him on the table, are twice as big as mine.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe because I wake up in the middle of the night and there’s people crashing about in my home. Incidentally, what am I supposed to have done?”

“Resisting arrest, for a start.”

I make a show of considering that. “I guess you could say my jaw resisted his fist, but that’s pushing it. Apart from that.”

“That’s enough to hold you for fourteen days,” he says, not unkindly. “After that, it’s none of my business. Have a nice day.”

“Obviously they aren’t going to let you see a lawyer,” she tells me, for the umpteenth time. “You are a lawyer. Therefore—”

“Fine,” I say. “At the very least, they should bring me a mirror.”

“Funny man.”

The Watch captain was quite right. They can hold you for fourteen days on suspicion of resisting arrest before they’re obliged to do anything at all. Then either a preliminary hearing before the examining magistrate or they have to let you go. If the magistrate agrees (they always do), they can hang on to you for another twenty-eight days—which gives them time to make their initial enquiries—before hauling you back in front of the magistrate, who remands you in custody for another month. The regulation tariff for resisting arrest is, incidentally, ten days solitary confinement. It’s not solitary for me, of course, but they don’t know that.

A bit later, the panel in the door slides open to admit my stale bread and quarter-pint of water. Through the open panel I yell, “I confess, I did it, I’m guilty, take me in front of the magistrate”, and then the panel closes again. I can confess till I’m blue in the face, but if nobody’s prepared to listen, what can you do?

“Poetic justice,” she tells me, as I start munching the stale bread. “You live by perverting the law, and now they’re doing it to you. Really, you’ve got nothing to complain about.”

“Have you heard me complain?” I point out. “No, you haven’t. It’s just the game. Fine. But they’ve had their go, and now it’s mine.”

“I’m guessing,” she says (she never guesses) “that we’ve got your pal the archdeacon to thank for this.”

I wouldn’t be in the least surprised. Naturally, I guarantee discretion to all my clients; not that I need to, because client confidentiality is the very essence of our profession; it’s the one and only thing we hold sacrosanct, we believe in it. Even so; if I was him and I was within inches of getting my arse on the archiepiscopal throne, wouldn’t I want rid of the one witness who could utterly destroy me?

“Quite,” I say. “I know what I’d do if I was him. I’d have me arrested on blasphemy charges, then keep me cooped up on remand until everyone’s forgotten I ever existed, and then I’d arrange an accident. Or better still, see to it that I catch something nasty and die. Prisons are dreadfully unhealthy places, because of all the low-lifes who end up in them. I could die in here and there wouldn’t be a case to answer.”

She finds that disturbing. “You don’t seem particularly worried,” she says.

“I’m not. I’ve got you. You’re going to get me out of here.”

She thinks about that. “I’m not sure I’m authorized—”

“The hell with that.” I didn’t mean to shout. “Think about it,” I say. “You’re with me to further your career, and the interests of your organization. Through me, you have exceptional opportunities. Because of me, you’ve filled your quota for the last ten years hand-running. But not if I’m stuck in a prison, and not if I’m dead. Then you’d have to start all over again, from scratch, assuming you can find someone else like me who’s prepared to put up with you like I do.” Pause, for effect. “You need me.”

“Fine.”

“Quite. So, the moment someone shows his face in here, you know what you’re going to do. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” she concedes. “All right.”

Only—and I’ve been trying not to worry about it, because if I worry, she’ll start worrying too—it’s been thirteen days and nobody’s crossed the threshold. Arms have come through the panel in the door, delivering and removing plates and jugs, but you can’t possess an arm, you need eye contact. Coincidence? I’m inclined to think not.

“Fourteen days,” I say. “And then I’ve got to go before the magistrate. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

“Fourteen days,” she repeats. “You’re eating.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Does that bread taste all right to you?”

Funny; I never thought of myself as particularly stupid. I guess that’s what prison does to you, rots the intellect.

The poison—it wasn’t actually poison per se, the archdeacon or his consultant was too smart for that. It was just moldy bread, which is a fact of life in our under-funded penal system; rotten luck that it should be that particular strain of mould that kills you stone dead in six hours, unless you’re fortunate enough to be possessed by a demon -

She can keep me alive—by grabbing hold of my soul and not letting it slip away, even though the pain is unendurable. I kick and writhe and arch my back, I have no control whatsoever. I can feel myself ripping my tendons off the bone, but she won’t let go, because if she does, for a split second, I’ll be out of there and gone—and what will the robin do then, poor thing? The judgment seat, my crimes, my just deserts, brimstone, what’s coming to me. She would get credit for that, of course, another contribution to filling her quota, but like I explained just now, I’m more valuable to her alive, for the time being. So she holds on, and I crack another bone, dislocate another joint, struggling to be free.

“It’s all right,” she says.

A statement which is patently untrue. Every bit of me hurts. A lot of me isn’t working.

“I digested the poison,” she says. “I took it into myself and let it dissipate through my system. It’s gone now. I fixed your torn ligaments and broken bones. You’re safe.”

Greater love hath no man—“You took your time about it,” I say.

“I was as quick as I could be. But you can’t speed it up, it’s got to run its course. I don’t make the rules.”

“What day is it today?”

“The fourteenth.”

“Change of plan,” I say grimly. “Let’s do it.”

Shortly after that, the door opens. Showtime.

They blindfold me, so it’s only when they unwind the bandage from my eyes that I realize we’re in the chapter house again; a beautiful place but scary. If I merit the top venue, I must be in serious trouble.

“No,” says the guard, “this way.”

Force of habit; I was heading for the front row, reserved for learned counsel, but today my place is at the back, where the prisoner stands. “I want a lawyer,” I say. For some reason, everybody thinks that’s a great joke.

I’m also seriously underdressed. In court I always wear the plain grey ankle-length robe, invariably newly laundered and pressed and scented with lavender and rosewater. I draw strength from the clean, fresh smell; it makes me feel smart. Fourteen days wallowing in my own shit doesn’t have the same effect, somehow. “Don’t be such a baby,” she reassures me inside my head. “You’re fine. You can do it.”

“I stink,” I say, and the guard looks at me sideways.

“You’ll be fine,” she says firmly. “A little bit of caked-on excrement never hurt anybody.” There speaks one who’s never had a body of her own.

All rise for the Patriarch. I stay on my feet when everyone else sits down. “Objection,” I call out.

That doesn’t make me popular. “What?” asks the Patriarch.

“With all due respect to Your Grace,” I say, “you. You can’t hear this case.”

He gives me his basilisk glare. “Why not?”

“Prior knowledge.”

You idiot, she says inside my head, and of course she’s right. I haven’t been told what I’ve been charged with yet, so I’m only assuming it’s something arising out of the archdeacon’s case. That assumption is, in itself, evidence of guilt. “Objection withdrawn,” I say, and sit down.

The clerk reads the charges. That, on such and such a day in such and such a place, the accused did knowingly and willfully cause his Grace the archdeacon of Schanz to be possessed by an unclean spirit, namely the demon Euphrosyne, with the intention of causing the said archdeacon to murder our Holy Father in the Invincible Sun Theodosius, archbishop of Stachel. How do I plead?

Need you ask?

They’ve got the landlord of the Flawless Diamonds, who saw me and the archdeacon, and the girl who brought us our drinks, though of course she didn’t hear what either of us said. Objection; purely circumstantial. Overruled; witnesses’ testimony is good evidence that a meeting took place, which is all that the prosecution is seeking to prove. Next up is the archdeacon himself. I was lured to the Diamonds, he says, by the accused, a man known to have had dealings with the forces of darkness, who claimed to have knowledge of a demonic plot to possess the archbishop. During the course of the meeting, the accused introduced the demon into me, and I was possessed. Was the transfer a deliberate act on the part of the accused? It was. Was the intention to murder the archbishop conveyed by the accused, or was it the demon’s intention? It was the intention of the accused.

Objection; hearsay. Overruled; witness heard the alleged remarks inside his head, rather than in the form of spoken words, and the hearsay rule applies only to spoken words. Further objection; how could the witness know that a statement conveyed into his head by a demon was true? Surely, furthermore, the presumption must be that any statement made by a demon is untrue. Overruled; the truth or otherwise of the statement itself is a matter of fact, therefore for the jury to decide. But there can be no objection to introducing as evidence the fact that the statement was made.

The prosecutor is making mincemeat out of me, and the Patriarch is bending over backwards to help him, but I’m not too bothered. The archdeacon’s his last witness, and that concludes his evidence in chief. At which point I haul myself onto my dirty bare feet.

“I claim benefit of clergy,” I say.

For a moment, it looks like they’re going to fall for it. The prosecutor stands up and starts conceding the point—no skin off his nose, after all. The Patriarch just sits there like a sack of artichokes. It’s only when the clerk gets up and whispers in His Holiness’ ear that it all goes pear-shaped. Application refused; accused is a level two cleric, therefore not eligible for benefit.

Not that I give a damn, because I knew that already. The whole point of the application was to sucker the prosecution into thinking that that was supposed to be my trump card. I smile graciously and move on. I call my first witness. The demon Euphrosyne.

The Patriarch goes a funny color. It’s just over a fortnight since he had the demon Euphrosyne in his face, yanked inch by painful inch out of a screaming, writhing archdeacon; quite possibly, he’s not keen to meet her again. Objection, yowls the prosecutor. The testimony of the Evil One, in person or by his servant or agent, is not admissible.

“Your Grace,” I say, in my insufferably calm, reasonable voice, “I wasn’t proposing to put in anything the demon may say as evidence. The mere fact of her extraction from inside me will be irrefutable proof of demonic possession. It was decided a thousand years ago in Sechimer’s case that a man is not responsible for any action he may perform while possessed by a demon. At that point, therefore, I will move that there is no case to answer.” Pause, for effect. “That is, assuming that Your Grace is inclined to accede to the prosecutor’s objection. If, on the other hand, Your Grace decides he wishes to hear the demon’s testimony, we may all learn something very interesting about the true facts of this case.”

Like I keep telling everybody, I’m a very good lawyer. Not something to be proud of. In fact, the opposite.

At that point, the proceedings fold up like one of those collapsible tables. Before the Patriarch has a chance to say a word, the prosecutor’s up on his hind legs saying that in the light of my application, he feels that it would not serve the interests of justice to proceed further with this case, and all charges are withdrawn. The Patriarch has the wit to recognize a trump card when he sees one. Case dismissed; all rise.

I don’t rush out of there; I dawdle. The clerk comes up to me. His Grace would like a word with you, he says, if it’s convenient.

It’s convenient.

“How could you?” she screams inside my head. “Informing on your own client, betraying him, that’s unforgivable. It goes against every sacred precept of your profession.”

I’m tired. It’s been a long day. “He had it coming,” I tell her.

“It was wrong. Unethical. Client confidentiality—”

“He tried to kill me,” I point out. “Poisoned bread.”

“Mould,” she says. “Could’ve been an accident. You’ve got no proof—”

“He had me arrested. He tried to frame me.” Pause, for effect. “And he still owes me five hundred staurata.”

The archdeacon is under arrest. Right now, he’s in a cell, quite possibly the one I was in.

“I’m the one who made the ultimate sacrifice,” I say. “I’m finished in this business, at least in Stachel. And I made the sacrifice in the interests of truth and justice.”

“Nonsense. You only did it because you were scared he’d try again.”

“That too. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“What you did was morally wrong,” she says. “What price honor among thieves? You had a duty to that man, as your client.”

“Add it to your quota.”

She doesn’t like that, one little bit. “You just don’t get it, do you? My job is to punish evil. I don’t approve of it.”

“You’re a predator,” I point out, “just like every other cop. Evil is your meat and drink. Without it, you’d starve.”

After that, understandably enough, we aren’t on speaking terms for several days. Not that I mind. Quite the opposite.

My testimony is enough to get the archdeacon the stake. I’m not there to see him burn; I’m in jail. Nobody sees fit to tell me what I’m accused of, but I can guess. I have, after all, recently told a packed courtroom that I earn my living by introducing a demon into would-be murderers so they can get away scot free.

Fourteen days later, I admit all the allegations made against me, and cite Sechimer’s case. Before all this began, I tell the court, I was just another lawyer, a poor boy up from the country on a scholarship, quietly making a name for myself in the probate and admiralty division. Then one day I woke up to find I was sharing my head with the demon Euphrosyne, who made me a business proposition I couldn’t refuse.

True, I went on, there were periods of time when the demon wasn’t in my head, she was in the client’s. But it doesn’t work like that—call Father Gennasius, professor of demonology at the University, who testifies that a demon continues to influence and control its victim up to three weeks after leaving the host body, unless properly exorcised by a qualified practitioner. Therefore at all relevant times I was under Euphrosyne’s control, and the defense in Sechimer applies.

I could, I continue, call the demon as a witness, if His Grace would be prepared to hear her testimony (although, strictly speaking, in law such testimony is prima facie inadmissible). The trouble with that, I added, is that once she starts talking, it’s hard to get her to stop; and, being a demon, she dearly loves to make mischief, such as allegations about persons of standing in the community, including some members of the clergy and judiciary, whom she might claim to have been clients of ours in the past. None of these allegations would have the slightest evidential value. But human nature is an imperfect thing, and people dearly love to believe the worst about people, especially the great and the good -

At which point the Patriarch, who I suspect has had enough of me over the last few weeks, stops the trial. The defense in Sechimer, he declares, clearly applies, and there is no case to answer. In fact, it should never have been brought in the first place. The prisoner is accordingly discharged, subject to the proviso that he is no longer licensed to practice law in Stachel. Meanwhile he is to be confined within the Golden Branch monastery, until such time as the demon within him is properly exorcised.

By the time I got out of the Golden Branch, I was seriously worried. The priest who did the exorcism summed it up quite neatly: the moment you get out of here, he said, all your old customers are going to want you dead, for fear of what you might say. He didn’t seem unduly distressed at the thought of that, even though I was legally and morally blameless. You’ve got no reason to keep your mouth shut now, he told me. When you leave here, you won’t get twenty-five yards.

So I asked to see the abbot, who reluctantly agreed to have me smuggled out at midnight in a cartload of vegetable peelings. I went back to my lodgings and found a man waiting for me. He stabbed me nine times in the stomach and neck and left me for dead.

“You took your time,” I say.

“Two and a quarter seconds.”

There’s blood all over my doorstep. How on earth did it get there? Oh yes, someone stabbed me. “That’s a long time,” I tell her, “in context.”

She fixes me. It hurts like hell, but when she’s done I feel much better. “I was here waiting for you,” she says. “You were never in any danger.”

“It didn’t feel like that,” I say. “Still, it’s over and done with now. Thank you,” I add.

She doesn’t reply to that, and there’s a long, rather awkward silence, with me sitting on the ground outside my closed front door, in a pool of my own blood.

“Well,” I say. “Now what?”

“Up to you,” she says. “You’re debarred, but your Stachel law degree means you can practice in Nagelfest and Odermeer. Do you want to carry on, or not?”

“What else can I do?” I ask. “I’m a lawyer. I’m too old to learn an honest trade.”

More silence. Then she says, “I gather it’s quite civilized in Odermeer.”

“It’s the provinces,” I say. “Mud brick and thatch, and clients who smell of cowshit. Probably they’ll want to pay me in chickens.”

“Fine. Then we’ll dissolve the partnership.”

She doesn’t mean it. Neither do I. “Nagelfest isn’t so bad,” I venture, after another pause. “It’s a seaport, so there’s quite a bit of passing trade. I went there once, years ago. The guild dues are extortionate, but it’s a cheap place to live.”

“Word will get around,” she says. “Clients will come to you from the four corners of the Earth.”

Probably true. There’s a lot of wickedness in this world, after all. “I’m sorry,” I say.

“What for?”

“Telling everybody that the partnership was your idea, originally. It makes you out as the villain of the piece.”

“That’s all right,” she says. “I’m the embodiment of Evil. Water off a duck’s back.”

Yes, but she feels things like that, so much more than I do, or ever could. She is fundamentally a thoroughly moral creature. I, on the other hand, am a lawyer, to the bone. That nasty crack I made about her being a predator is essentially true, but I know it hurt her. She’s a public servant, doing an important and worthwhile job within the corporate structure of a fundamentally necessary organization, and someone’s got to do it, otherwise there would be no penalties, no comeback, no restriction on unfettered free will, and then where would we all be? Just think what the world would be like if everybody was like me, not just the few fortunate enough to be able to afford my fees. Although, since the fortunate few are the ones who have all the money and power, decide all the policy and make all the laws, maybe things wouldn’t be quite as different as you might think.

None of my business. Good and evil lead to right and wrong, right and wrong lead to legal and illegal, in whose stinking carcass lawyers lay their eggs. I can’t remember now what it was like before she joined me. I like to tell myself I used to be a fundamentally decent person who made one huge mistake; and that mistake was forced on me by poverty, desperation and a system that discriminated against me because I was a poor boy from the sticks who never had a chance. It’s all so long ago, and there are no surviving witnesses to contradict me, that it could very well be true. In fact, on the balance of probabilities, which is the accepted burden of proof in civil cases, it is true. Truth is what you can persuade a jury to believe; there’s no other meaningful definition. Trust me on this, I’m a lawyer.

I know where I’m going. When I get there, it’ll be hot and there will be brimstone. Big deal. I was always going to end up there. A smart kid born where I was born, with no chances in life, who couldn’t bear the thought of sixty years shoveling cowshit, followed by death; it’s the system. Stay put or find a way out, but the way out will assuredly lead to where I’m headed. It’s all the fault of the system. Society is to blame.

The last thing I do before leaving Stachel is go down into the cellar and take the remaining money out of the steel box. I carry it down the road to the Iron Star, where Brother Treasurer takes it from me and gives me a receipt. For the last ten years I’ve been endowing a school, for poor kids in my home province, so they can have the chances I never had.

It’s a law school, naturally.

© Copyright 2024 K.J. Parker

[the-firebird69]

These kids are a pain in the ass and we mean the trumps that he is a huge a****** this news about him it's not really huge yet it's going to get pretty big. People can't stand him is an adolescent demented murderer and people hate him they should hate him he's a wicked too

--going to start taking his companies tons of them we need them right now one project that really took off and we need them from him for

;:beer we're making tons of it and some people want beer companies and we do offer to make beer for people and unless they're Trump and that's probably one of them so they hate it but they don't want to do business with us. It's very successful he always need more people we're opening several divisions and we are creating a huge amount of revenue my son says he wants a special projects for that needs beer company but you know there's a special projects that we have but for each beer company there'd be marketing and sales and he wants them too so far bud man and duffman he's going to try and keep them straight opportunity for him to make some extra money cash so they're going to start working right and they provide the costume and he keeps his wallet and stuff on him yeah and he wants to do it he thinks it's a great idea by that time if you'd be a few months he will have his groin will be healed for the most part and he only has to stand up for like 10 minutes of time for an hour total couple hours you can eat me in between and people love it and bud he can have a zero while he's doing it. He really likes the concept of doing that and he wants to be the guy doing it and at that time three or so months he would be fairly good-sized not really huge probably 19 biceps 5 ft 11 at about 275 lb and less fat so he be big so these people he be pretty big and he look more in shape and his belly would be gone enough to do it we like the idea and Hera does too it's a way to start getting into it and he wants her to be somewhere nearby and she has to keep an eye on him she says and he wants his Porsche BW and we know what it means and these guys are going nuts if he has one and bja is working on it so we have a lot of things to think of but that's one of them a lot of people might get this idea Terry c. And the VW golf would do the same say my people are going after the German hardware and you guys jump up and say where his people and Dave says he's sprung and that's great we were in court or something or says no but that's fun I might do that. He might do that he says that was Dave. So he wants to go up there with his VW 928 and yeah that's what he was going to call it Volkswagen 928 they put the Porsche stuff on there but seriously they might call that on the title he wants to go upstairs and have his own duffman costume so people can copy him they will anyways but if he has one they're all going to be doing all these superhero things it might be what happens.. that'll get him going.

:: yeah there's some weaklings around here you guys been Wheeling his dog around like it's a baby and a baby carriage and people looking at him like he's a bum because he is his people are a bunch of minis.

so there's a couple characters that he wants to do. And he'd make some money we hear reports how much they make it's like a cosplay job some of them make like $800 and appearance some make several thousand it depends if you're famous or not or a famous cosplay actor or if you fit the bill a son can act and he'd fit the bill and he's famous people know who he is and he's famous and secret avenues they still don't pay much but we'll try and help him out he says a couple hundred bucks is good and money to get up there and back so it's like 400 bucks it's good you can eat stuff then have something and people think that's not bad they might try for $500 and compete deaf man versus BUD man. What's going on right now is ladies are wearing really practically nothing for some reason they're mistaking what he's saying and it's not even big yet and they're kind of stupid

This beer project is taken off we're up to about 70% of where we thought we should be and we have filled tons of orders huge numbers of orders coming in we bear we put it in cans and it gets her fine usually we ship it that's why and we can ship practically anything even ship it down the river and up the river giant giant numbers of cases just humongous numbers they're going all over the USA all over the world too different middle areas are making it I was pushing for it and helped it start and two picked it up and it's going great they even have their own beer brands they want to make one of them is a generic beer company and they want people want that to start and we're going to make whiskey there and beer and it'll be a different brewery but yeah it's going to be huge all sorts of stuff and most all of it's going to be the quick Brew and all new facilities and very very clean and it's going to be great.

But today we got about 700 orders and it's it's probably twice as many as normal it's only a small percentage increase but the orders are to be filled pretty quick and we're going gangbusters and sending what we can you're not disappointed but we're going to be picking up the speed and opening more breweries probably a couple days and we're acquiring them and we're buying companies one of the stock market and we're buying stocks huge amounts and we are going today and was seeking to buy companies there's another project though it's taking off pretty good

---it is a motorcycles huge numbers of motorcycles were ordered and we have increased production it's not part of the automobile number we are at about 20% of what we thought we would be at or what we want and it's going slow we haven't been getting the orders now we're getting orders and we're getting a lot of there's a huge amount of the bikes being orders ordered it's going to be about 10 to 15% more this week and it will increase like that every week we think huge numbers and Harley-Davidson only accounts for probably half of a percent of this 15% but it's still an increase and they might stop playing people off and we're not really running that facility and at all but we are around that area a little bit it has something to do with us yeah we supply them.

:: the commercial airliners we have a huge amount of commercial airline companies coming to us and it is a giant number and there's a girl walked by and he thought it was one of those pig teams and it's easier to hold on she says she doesn't weigh much and they're doing it because they're making fun of Emily and we don't know who she is he says could be one of them it probably is and it is funny. We have made progress and he's got to get going and the progress is very good we're up about maybe about 10% it would be that much today and we really need it and what kind of low right now at about 30% average or 25% really and this will help this is kind of a average increase or increasing in certain areas it's going to take a bit of work we have to get to it there's other things we're going to discuss but this is very big

:: oil is up a little but we're at the stocks and exchanges we're also looking for private company private companies to purchase in land pretty much any land that you're serious about selling good money

We will trade under certain circumstances if you want to distribute our beer or beers that are already huge and things like that we can send you a bunch for you to sell and sample for property and things like that all sorts of deals like that so and it sets up for the future more shortly

Thor Freya

Olympus

[the-hem]

"The Sheep and the Goats." Matthew 25:31-46.

The Final Judgment

Is Jesus really going to come down out of the clouds and again and sort people out? Set them straight? When will he do this? The Parables do not say when, only how to be ready should this happen.

We know now how far humanity has fallen, and falls more every day, so now is definitely not the time for Jesus to arrive, judge's gavel in hand.

Examples include over 3,000 nuclear bombs tested in the planet's oceans, all the apartheids and genocides, the Russian invasion of Ukraine which is super heating the earth's atmosphere and will kill all of us, this added to our extreme delusion about climate change, gun violence which is steadily increasing, the fact Donald Trump was allowed to cheat in a federal election and murder hundreds of thousands of immigrants while he was in office, and his friends continue to plan more of the same all around the world. We are unrepentant and getting worse.

Who is going to make the first move and declare our current situation is out of compliance and lead the world out of these deadly and dire conditions? This Parable explains how easy it will be when we are ready.

Before we begin, we need to know up front why Jesus chose to compare sheep and goats, right and left.

The sheep’s dominant trait is its docility and obedience. The child obeys his father, but does so out of an appreciation of his father’s greatness; the sheep does not obey for any reason—it is simply obedient by nature. It is this element of our relationship with G‑d that the sheep represents: an unquestioning subservience which derives not from our understanding of His greatness and our feelings toward Him (in which case it would be defined by the limits of our understanding and feelings), but from the recognition that “I am His sheep.”

Goats represent something else entirely:

While the calf immediately evokes the story of the golden calf, finding the meaning of the goat is a bit harder. We must turn back to the book of Genesis to discover that indeed the goat played an important role in the most tragic sin of the family of Israel: the sale of Joseph.3 After the brothers tore their family to shreds by selling Joseph into servitude in Egypt (a sale which ultimately led the entire family to relocate to Egypt and descend into slavery), instead of showing remorse they used a goat for their cover-up:

And they took Joseph’s coat, and they slaughtered a he-goat, and they dipped the coat in the blood. And they sent the fine woolen coat, and they brought [it] to their father, and they said, “We have found this; now recognize whether it is your son’s coat or not.” He recognized it, and he said, “[It is] my son’s coat; a wild beast has devoured him; Joseph has surely been torn up.”4

As the people gathered at the Tabernacle waiting for a sign of the Divine presence, Moses taught them that in order to heal the relationship with their Father, the children must first heal their relationship with each other. He explained that the jealousy and division which led to the sale of Joseph, was, in fact, the precise character trait which led to the division and separation from G‑d at the golden calf, and in order to find harmony with G‑d, it must be eradicated from their midst.

For indeed, the only way children can be in complete harmony with a parent is when they are in complete harmony with each other.5"

To turn Right is to head East, into the Light of Awareness. To turn Left is to turn into the unknown, quite possibly into transgression. In general one is considered to be a bit schwifty if one is purporting to turn left.

We know what the Son of Man is, Mashiach, the fully enlightened state of all of humanity all at once, ie. the birth of mankind in its own image.

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 

35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 

38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 

42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 

43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life. ”

None of the above require esoterica, it would blur the pudding. The lingering question, however is, why do we cover up our sins with more negliegence? Why do we turn away rather than face reality and employ every bit of brilliance mankind has accumulated, make things better and keep them that way? Why are we persistently playing the goat instead of the sheep?

Nobody knows. To know why might not be of help, but look at this way, nobody knows why not either. If we make up our minds, salvation, Jesus says is immediately nigh.

If we drill into the bedrock of the final two verses v. 45 and 46,, we will discover what that means.

The Gematria is 13165, אג‎או‎ה, agao, "a desire or drive for a gathering of people."

αγω

The verb αγω (ago) means to guide or lead and thus to bring, carry, conduct, fetch and so on. It's is cognate with the Latin verb agere (to set in motion), the Sanskrit ajati (to drive) and shares its Proto-Indo-European root "heg-", to drive, with English words like "agile" and even the verb "to act."

Ag is also the basis for the word synagogue.

This verb 'aw, yields four derivatives, which all mean desire: the masculine nouns או ('aw) and מאוי (ma'away), and the feminine nouns אוה ('awwa) and תאוה (ta'awa).

If we instead desire to drive people away, drive them nuts, or drive them into the ground, we shall not live to comprehend the meaning of this Parable, and certainly shall not be allowed to live forever.

[unveilandresist]

this post is about the systemic failure of US government and healthcare systems to protect human life while letting covid run rampant while it kills and disables tons of people. though you're right without adequate understanding and context it is unclear who 'they' is. so here's some context.

2 million people are getting covid a day right now and statistically hundreds of thousands of those people will get long covid. the biden administration pledged to address covid better than Trump did and basically did nothing then ended the covid emergency declaration back in may.

this is despite the fact that covid is causing people in their 20s to have strokes, still killing over 1000 people a week and at least 1/10 infections causing long covid which has no cure and can absolutely destroy your entire life. we now know that each covid infection causes long term damage to your immune system. Covid destroys your t cells in a way similar to aids. right now more than 3/4 of hospital beds in the country are in use due to covid related hospitalizations.

but the government declared covid over, it has been downplayed like it's just a cold and it is not. the white house press sectetary recently said 'make your own decisions, we don't get involved in that' as if public health is an individual decision. and because of the backlash against masking now we have regressed; I've heard countless stories of no masking in transplant wards, in nicu visits with santa, no masks when family members show up to get chemotherapy. it's not okay. there could be laws about this, protecting people in healthxare settings. there could be laws requiring improved ventilation in workplaces! so much could be done differently.

the reason this is mentioned in relation to palestine is because it is another instance of the US government opposing human life in their policies while trying to fool the public with their messaging.

the US is focused on profit making, on 'business as usual' despite the human toll, just as it is focused on turning a blind eye to the murder of 25,000 Palestinians, (70% women and children) in Gaza to make weapons manufacturers rich and exert pressure on arab countries through their partnership with 'the only democracy in the middle east'.

If you haven't seen it yet I'd highly recommend watching biden's speech where he clearly states that investing billions in Israel is the best decision our government makes because "if there wasn't an Israel the US would have to invent one to protect our interests in the region". he's actually said it over and over, here, look:

US politicians do not support Israel out of the goodness of their hearts. they take a lot of money from the Israel lobby, AIPAC, and joe biden has taken more money from them than anyone in history.

I'm on my phone right now so I can't pull sources on every single thing I've said right now but feel free to message me for more info or clarification 💗

[route22ny]

Sky

Perhaps this will be hard to read. Laments often are. It may bring you comfort, or it may make you angry. It may make you think more of me, or less. It may offend you. Rest assured, it offends me. So be it. 

Once upon a time, there was a man who spoke of torture as a good in and of itself, to be pursued whether it was effective or not. Who promised to use the power of the state to enact violence upon scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities. Who insisted upon framing our struggle against Mideast terror groups in the same religious terms the terrorists themselves insist upon. Who praised himself for nursing petty grudges, for treating revenge as justice. Who threatened the free press with retaliation for reporting certain truths about him. Who bragged about sexual assault. Who mocked people more brave than himself and called their bravery weakness. Who lied seemingly without strategy, as if lies were good to tell only for the telling, who showed a shocking indifference to the very concept of truth. Who praised brutal dictators for their brutal methods. Who seemed (and seems) to be receiving shadowy support from a brutal dictator. Who claimed dictatorial power for himself.

This is fine.

He appeared entirely confused about the basic facts of geopolitical reality, or of how our government works, or even of the function within our government of the role he proposed to take on. He had a clear and obvious history of fraud and hucksterism, of enriching himself at the benefit of others with less leverage, and was even engaged throughout his campaign in a lawsuit for defrauding college students, since settled for $25 million dollars. He speculated with frightening casualness about destabilizing actions: proliferation and even use of nuclear weapons, defaulting on our debts and our treaties, backing out of our most long-standing alliances. He publicly called upon the intelligence apparatuses of foreign governments to intercede in our election on his behalf, and it seems increasingly likely they may have obliged. He whipped his crowds into frenzies, then directed their ire toward journalists reporting the event, many of whom he threatened to prosecute once in power. He offered to imprison his political adversary, to the delight of his chanting crowds, who wore t-shirts decorated with the flag celebrating the war to preserve American slavery, decorated with vulgar slogans of violence and rage. He promised to steer us directly into the deadly heart of the oncoming climate catastrophe; having claimed the work of men more intelligent and knowledgeable than he was nothing but a Chinese hoax, he sneered at the very idea of new energy sources.

This is fine.

That’s a short list. It’s a hell of a short list. But wait, listen: The people went for it.

Tens of millions of people voted to make him the most powerful man in the world. He will soon have the ability to blast the planet to an irradiated cinder, if he sees fit. He will continue to run his business, which appears to involve sitting in a golden throne and putting his names on things. He's given every indication, despite some laughably thin feints toward divestment, he will run that business from the Oval Office. Maybe he’ll even put his name on new things, like laws. Laws: a whole new product line for Trump International, and a potentially lucrative one. He owes the banks of foreign powers millions and millions of dollars. One wonders what laws they’ll want passed. Word is, his first foreign trip will be to visit Vladimir Putin. Heigh-ho. 

His party is in control, too. They don't seem bothered by any of this. They're a bit more focused on providing checks and balances upon ethics watchdogs who have pointed out their party leader's multifarious and historically unprecedented infractions. They'd rather ignore those, so they can immediately—immediately—get down to the serious business of divesting millions and millions of the most vulnerable people in our society from the only chance they have at affordable health coverage. They plan to replace this program with something...someday. Their speculation so far indicates they will be replacing it with the opportunity to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for medical bills if you need them someday, or, if you don't have hundreds of thousands of spare dollars, to maybe go screw yourself. So, a lot of people are going to die in coming years, that would otherwise have lived, and they're rushing to make it happen. My, look at them laugh. 

Republican lawmakers sign legislation to repeal ACA and defund women's health care access through Planned Parenthood, January 2016

Meanwhile, they're ignoring as peccadilloes the caricatured infractions of a man who intends to keep his own private security detail around him, who expounds upon provable lies, and then when exposed simply doubles down on the lie, who is considering throwing the press out of the White House, and other maneuvers straight out of the dictator handbook. It's really something to see. It's a new order, trumping the old. Isn't it great again?

Laura Ingraham, speaker at the Republican National Convention, 2016.

It’s hard to understand what people hoped for from him other than this. It’s hard not to assume they were responding to the shockingly frank bigotry, his promises to return to an earlier time, the knowing use of slogans used byracists and fascists of days past. These are certainly what seemed to generate all the most popular applause lines. But I don’t want to think that of my country or my fellow citizens. I really want it to be something else. Let us consider other possibilities. Many seem to think that a great thing about him was his frankness. They liked that he “tells it the way it is.” Then again, those same people seemed most likely to think that he didn’t really mean his more shocking proposals. It’s a bit confusing, then, parsing what is meant by ‘telling it like it is,' as it appears to rely on selective trust in insincerity. Many voters, excited by promises to “drain the swamp,” but now disappointed by the recent appointment of a Goldman Sachs foreclosure kingpin to Treasury, of a Putin-connected oil executive to State, and by other signals the new president has given about his eagerness to rob us all blind, have been admonished by a key advisor for taking his words so literally. The 'alt-right' Neo Nazis and the KKK are very excited, for what it’s worth, about the more shocking proposals, and they remain confident our new leader meant every word.

You're really going to want to go to video on this one.

Some people thought he would be less likely to make them pay more in taxes, I suppose. So perhaps at last now we know the answer to the old hypothetical about whether we’d be willing to travel through time and sacrifice our lives to prevent the rise of a self-professing tyrant. Answer: We wouldn’t even suffer a hypothetical increase in our income taxes. I'm told folks voted for Trump because they were tired of being called racist. I imagine that was hard for them—who wants to be considered racist? If this complaint is yours, I imagine reading this (if you're still reading) is also hard. I sympathize; it's not particularly easy to write. But then again, the response seems an odd retort to the complaint. If your persistent problem is people keep telling you there is spinach in your teeth, you might consider getting a mirror and taking a look, rather than voting for the Jolly Green Giant running on a platform of outlawing all floss. And, perhaps, if it is painful to be considered racist, consider this: it may be all the more painful to live under racist oppression.

KKK Newspaper, The Crusader, endorses Trump. 

Many seem to have mainly enjoyed that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton, and it’s certainly true to say many concerns and criticisms could be levied against her. But the man they voted for as an alternative already stood actualized as the cartoon parody of any potential danger she may have hypothetically posed. Bad judgment? Corruption? Fraud? A proclivity to violent retaliation? A worry about temperament? Untrustworthiness? Lack of transparency? It’s hard to believe this all had much to do with Hillary Clinton and her faults. Hard to believe this list of concerns would yours, but your acceptable alternative would be Donald Trump.

Or maybe they believed the more lurid stories, the debunked, the ridiculous. Hillary’s murdered 80 people close to her. She invented cancer and put it in your cell phone battery. She is secretly seven tiny demons all stacked up in a pantsuit and glued together with the blood of aborted fetuses. She controls the Yosemite supervolcano, along with a cabal comprised of George Soros and 17 other Jewish industrialists. I don’t know what all. I know there are people like this, who have seceded from objective reality into a dystopian alternate dimension, where they can perhaps supplement the powerlessness they feel in their lives with the comfort of false control, of being one of the few with the secret knowledge unavailable to the masses. I don’t know what to do with them, because they live in an alternate dimension. And, it must be said, I don’t think there are 63 million of them.

So here we are. In grave moral and physical danger. All of us. And for what? I’ve heard the same line again and again since the election: “America isn’t a different country today than it was before the election.” Jon Stewart trotted it out. I think I heard it from President Obama.

I fear I agree with the statement. I’m puzzled, though, because I think it is meant to be reassuring, to think we’ve always been the country capable of such a choice.

The statement doesn’t imply that we’re still great. It implies that we were never good.

It has to be admitted, people responded to Trump for what he is. Which means we are left with the statements and proposals by which he distinguished himself. And millions of us—tens of millions—preferred him specifically for his points of difference. Excited by his promises to return us to a time when our system existed only for certain people, and the preferences and needs of all others were beneath consideration, or at least willing to overlook that, in favor of some material or policy advantage somewhere. And ultimately, the reason is immaterial. A man ran for president promising to use the power of the state to bring violence to scapegoated religious and ethnic minorities, to make America torture again, to make it easier for an already-militarized police force to employ violence, who praised dictators, who bragged about sexual assault, who praised vengeance as good, who promoted as fact debunked conspiracy, who stated his determination to ignore as conspiracy what the data overwhelmingly indicates is an oncoming extinction-level event. There was some other reason to vote for him, that allowed you to overlook these facts? Save it, please. It really doesn't matter. It was a bad reason. We have seen this movie before. Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore. They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding? What am I saying here? Am I saying we are Nazis? The answer, I suppose, has to be 'no.' Only Nazis are Nazis. We are Americans. But what that will mean in decades to come—'American'—has been thrown into hazard. We used to be the sort of place that doesn't allow Donald Trumps to happen. That's gone now, along with that specific sort of trust the world once had in us. In any case, what we seem to now be trying to redefine 'American' to mean seems like a rough beast, and omnivorous. Democracy reveals us by our choices and our actions, not our intentions. We are what we are. And Donald Trump will be president.

As a result, I’m bereft. Bereft of the country I thought I was living in. Bereft of the people I thought I lived among. Bereft of what I believed was a shared direction despite divergent opinions. Bereft of a belief in the possibility of a common dialogue or even a common reality. Bereft in confidence in basic decency and intelligence. Bereft of the spiritual heritage I was born into, because of course Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters were white Christians. Christians voting for a new Herod with the power of a Caesar is a pretty good joke for the universe to tell, I suppose. He’s even promised to go after the (anchor) babies.

My translation of the Bible is full of all this toff about loving your enemy, about how love of money is the root of evil, about showing hospitality to the widow and orphan and the immigrant, and admonishments against drawing the sword lest you die on it. My reading of the Bible doesn't ask "but who's going to pay for that?" My reading of the Bible suggests to me that if you wish to pretend to care about babies unborn, maybe you shouldn’t be so hostile to the idea of making sure they’re cared for once they are born and inconveniently and expensively needy, and perhaps you shouldn’t make so many of their mothers into the welfare-queen boogie-men of your whole realpolitik, and perhaps you shouldn't make weaponry a right more important than health and food. Maybe healing and wholeness and liberty is something that should be available to even the pagan. Maybe the door is open for the tax collector and the prostitute and the Samaritan. Maybe, unencumbered by the overweening need to be perceived as correct in every moral posture, they've even entered that door ahead of us as we do our best to hold it shut against unworthy access.

Maybe I got a trash translation. Maybe the other ones are all about the joys of using political power for your own aggrandizement instead of the call to self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, about the dangers of anchor babies and welfare mothers, about how paying tax money toward a shared life is tyranny, about how with terrorists you have to kill the families, folks, believe me, kill the women and children, you’ve got to go after the families, and we’re gonna torture again, folks, we’re gonna torture, believe me…

You know what? I believe him.

WWJD Check: White Evangelicals are the group most likely favor use of torture by a military superpower. 

* * * You wake up and the sky is gone. At times that’s how it seems. You wonder at it: how could there not be a sky? What will become of us now, in this world without a sky? Was it ever there, or did we just imagine it there, as an exercise of collective will?

And then you talk to other people who insist the sky is there. They say: It’s not gone, it’s just red now. Don’t be a sore loser, just because you didn’t want it red. Accept that we did want it red. It’ll be fine if it’s red. And anyway, the banks seem to like it red. Move on with your life. Suck it up. Hope that the red sky will be as good as the blue one. But the sky isn’t red. It’s not anything. It’s just … not. It is a not-ness. An un-sky. A nothing.

And then you start talking to people who laugh, not without compassion, that you ever fell for the idea there was a sky. They say: That big vast emptiness? Oh, yes. That’s always been there for us. Is it there for you now? How… interesting. We can tell you a thing or two about that emptiness, if you’d listen. We’ve been watching it an awful long time.

American Nazi Rally, Madison Square Garden, 1939 

Future Georgia Representative and Civil Rights pioneer John Lewis, beaten by a state trooper on "Bloody Sunday" in 1965.

Oh. Will he. Will he do that.

The sky is the future. Or it was the future. That’s how it seems, at times. How odd, to speak of the future in the past tense.

But the past tense presents us with further troubles. It seems the past is gone, too.

In 1965, everybody thought King was great, and nobody tried to dismiss him by tying him to violence.

Growing up, we were taught that we were a kind and good and just nation. The story we were given was of a nation born of a righteous cause, not quite made perfect by the godlike men who forged it, but honed to apotheosis over the decades that followed. The destruction of the native nations and their people, ah, tsk, a shame, we’d change it if we could, but unfortunately in the past and unrecoverable. Slavery, a dark stain, but by now expunged entirely. Jim Crow, its shameful cousin, absorbed by a saint named King, who led a boycott (a pleasant and polite and non-disruptive one, it seems, in our memories), then stood on some stairs to give a universally-admired speech about his dream of inclusion, and then, his work seemingly accomplished, having seemingly changed minds forever, ascended harmlessly into the clouds.

Somehow we are never culpable. It was always a long time ago. Mistakes were made, but we’d never make them ourselves. It was always somebody else holding the gun, the whip. We arrived here after that, you see, born blameless, without any afterbirth or shock, into the Greatest Country in the World. Our holocausts we absolved ourselves of, because they served to illustrate not the evil we’d done, but how far we’d come from it. We stood on the prow of the ship, looking forward as we cut new water, not aft looking back at whatever may have been churned up in the wake. Not big on the rear-view mirror, us, not fans of the over-the-shoulder glance. We’d tell ourselves stories of what lay behind. We’d imagine ourselves into those stories of darker times, making ourselves the protagonists. We would have been the ones to build false walls in our home to hide slaves. We would have marched with King. We would have spoken out against the Japanese camps. We would have stood at Stonewall.

Our moral arc bends ever toward justice; an inevitable thing. That was the story.

America was great, because it was good. All the old hits.

People still alive can remember this sort of thing very well. 

This kid is probably still alive. As are most of his classmates. As are the children with whom he refused to attend school. 

This also happened within living memory. 

It's amazing what people consider communism. I mean back then, of course.

Sometimes you’d hear stories about a random injustice or brutality. A policeman who had become a little too enthusiastic. A bad apple, and surely justice was served. If not, it’d have been in the papers You’d hear about it in the papers if it hadn’t been. A gay teen beaten to death in a cornfield. A car with the banner of the struggle to preserve human slavery on the bumper sticker. The KKK marching again, how quaint. Ah, you’d think, if you were like me. We still have some work to do. Cleanup on aisle seven.

Technology has changed that. We see with new eyes now, unless we choose not to. We see videos, dozens and dozens of them now, new ones each week it seems, of police shooting unarmed black people. Again and again and again and again. Can you remember all the names? I can't anymore. And I ask myself: why can't I?

We see the speed with which so many seem willing to seek and find the nearest handy reason the victim deserved his or her fate. We see the news organizations find a Sunday School photo for the shooter and a mugshot to represent the victim. We see acquittal and acquittal and acquittal. We see failure to prosecute.

And, perhaps, we begin to wonder.

We see the people protesting, unarmed, asking only that their lives be thought to matter as much as another’s, and we see the stormtroopers with their massive guns and their tanks, arrayed against a civilian population almost reflexively, like defenses in an organism’s bloodstream mustering against a disease. And we wondered, perhaps: why do they look so much—so exactly, if we’re honest—like an occupying force? 

We saw the white ranchers seize government land, pointing their guns directly at law enforcement officials, speaking openly of armed insurrection against the government, of revolution, of war. We saw them, later, seizing a government building. They weren’t protesting after centuries seeing their children and brothers and sisters killed without consequence by authority. Rather, they didn’t want to have to pay a grazing fee. Was it with surprise that we saw it: law enforcement seemed less frightened of these white men and their guns than they had an unarmed black woman in a sundress, or a 12 year old boy playing in a park? Were we surprised to see they seemed so level-headed in this situation, so much less likely to respond with immediate lethal force?

Why, those fellows with their arsenal didn’t even get convicted. They were less threatening to the system, apparently, than a man, arms up, lying on the ground next to his autistic ward begging not to be shot. (He was shot.) We might contrast to the treatment of the protesters at Standing Rock, and wonder…is the Holocaust against native people relegated only to the past? Would we change it, if we could?

We wonder: Are we seeing the system breaking down, unable to cope with new challenges? Or are we seeing a system working exactly as it’s always intended? Do we as a collective of 'white' people secretly want the police to control brown people by force? Are we secretly hoping that force will prove lethal, only occasionally enough to soothe our consciences, but frequently enough to promote an order less immediately costly, than the pain of culpability, than the justice of restitution?

If not, why are prosecutions so rare, and convictions even less so?

If not, why aren’t we protesting these killings? Why aren’t we in the streets?

Do all lives matter? If so, why wouldn’t we act like it?

White Christian America reveres Dr. King, it should be noted. You remember him—the peaceful guy who gave the speech that ended racism. If Facebook and newspaper op eds are any measure, we white Christians can’t stop bringing him up, almost as a cudgel, an admonishment to those today who would dare ask for their own human dignity, for not doing it as antiseptically as we remember it being done by him. And perhaps people begin to wonder: Why was King enshrined as 'the peaceful one' only once he was peacefully dead? Is King’s being safely dead our favorite thing about him? These days, we white Christians can claim to have brought his dream to reality (the white guy is usually the hero of the story in the movie), and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will not protest—and we white Christians don’t like protest. Heavens, no—it’s so divisive. Dr. King, he wouldn’t approve of this protest, nor that one, and certainly not that one. His protests were so polite! Why, nobody had any problem with them at all! Dr. King agrees with all of us in white Christian America so much, these days. Oh my, he never stops agreeing with us. Just ask us; we’ll tell you. Yes, and what ever happened to Dr. King, anyway, after he gave that speech that ended all inequality forever?

But no matter, I told myself. That’s a dying strain, it's not who we are these days. That’s just a few bad apples. We’ve made so much progress. They’ll exhaust themselves in a final futile sputter. We’re just about to turn the corner. Sure there are racists, bigots, white supremacists, lost-causers, and they're loud, but they're dying out, and they know it. They'll eventually run somebody on an overtly racist platform, and they'll lose huge—I disagree with Republicans, but most of them won't stand for stark white supremacy, surely, and obviously Christians won't be able to align themselves with it — and we’ll show them it’s no use, and they’ll retreat, retrench to even positions even more compromised, less fortified, further back, smaller, diminished. We’re a better country than that.

But then Donald Trump, a half-rate and transparently obvious bullshit artist, a greasy reality TV star most skilled at demonstrating his manifest ignorance, promising mostly the goodness of violence and the strength of vengeance, offering to return America to an earlier time, railing against the inconvenience of practicing sensitivity toward the perspectives of others (he called it 'political correctness'), received 63 million geographically-convenient votes to become the most powerful person in the world. Perhaps, if you’re like me, you took a moment then to ponder that statement about bad apples and what they do to the whole barrel. The meaning of it. And, perhaps, another saying, about recognizing a tree by its fruit. And, it must be said, though we refuse to face it: In America, our trees have long borne a strange fruit.

  Here’s what we’ve lost, or at least what I’ve lost: The assumption of goodness’s inevitability. The assumption of goodness of those around me. The assumption of good intent in their hearts. The assumption that the future is still there. The assumption that most of us will die of old age. Here's what I've lost, the one favor Donald Trump may ever do for me: The wool from my eyes. An illusion, particularly a pretty and a convincing one, can be a painful thing to lose.

I’ve gained a vision of tens of millions of people desperate to bend history’s arc back toward an injustice that favored them, and willing to fight for that regression, willing even to risk species-wide extinction rather than suffer the pain of facing the consequences of their own mountainous indifference.

The moral arc of the universe may bend toward justice, but the gears of history grind the weak. There are people now who are giddy, almost with the air of a teenager behind the wheel of a sweet-sixteen hot rod, to test out their perceived new warrant to deliver retributive and violent indifference to the people they deem unlovely. A headscarf yanked off here. A slur shouted in public there. A swastika scrawled on a wall here. A Neo Nazi propagandist advising the President of the United States in the corridors of power there. A crowd of seig heils in a government building, in praise of our new leader here. A few million children stripped of health insurance with no serious attempt at a replacement there.

They think this is allowed now. Sixty-three million people, complacently or enthusiastically or ignorantly aligned with white supremacy, gave them the idea it is. It’s going to be our job to show them otherwise. We must show them otherwise. And. Even if you voted for Trump—especially if you voted for Trump—the door is wide open for you to join in that struggle. You show them otherwise, too. All you have to do to join...is join. Your intentions were good? Excellent. I believe you. I've badly misunderstood you? Excellent. I believe you. Now, show it. Show your good intention by your good actions. You, like all of us, possess tremendous moral authority. Don't lend it any longer to those who have promised to squander it on atrocity. They seem intent on doing as they say. If you wait too long, they will leave you with none left to withdraw. Use it to protect those different than you. Use it against your own advantage, for the advantage of those who have none. And. If you, like me, did not vote for Trump, there is the great danger of complicity. You will be offered, if you, like me are white and straight and employed and well-off and cis-gendered and able-bodied and healthy and property-owning, the opportunity to be indifferent. Resist that current.

If the universe bends toward justice, the engine it has chosen for this good work is the hard and sacrificial struggle of good people willing to acknowledge the basic humanity of all other people. People who don’t think profitability is the foundational metric of goodness. People who don't think life holds a value that begins at conception but ends the moment it enters poverty. People bold and willing to become peaceful pebbles in the gears. To give time and money. To link arms with a married gay couple. To take sides in a cafeteria skirmish with a transgendered teen. To take a truncheon in the head for a Muslim. To paraphrase Jesus (another favorite who those of us in white Christian America appear by our words and deeds to consider as safely dead as Dr. King): to live, first you must die.

Or, as another poet says, love’s the only engine of survival.

So, what’s next?

First, we lament. We acknowledge the un-sky, the void. We listen to those who’ve been staring at it far longer than us. We name the challenge with clear eyes. That, I suppose, is what this has been.

And then we get to work. Let us hope our leaders will prove other than than they say they will. Let us not be so naive to think it likely. Let us oppose in a fierce and broken love. Let us meet with friends, we eat good meals with them. Let us consider people before money, and notice where our society fails to do so. Let us make art, and we try to make it well. Let us refuse to allow a comfortable silence to enfold a hateful or ignorant statement. Let us stand up against hate, bodily if necessary. Let us learn our system, and work within it. Let us call our leaders, and advocate for those who suffer. Let us practice generosity without care for the merit of the beneficiary, but only for their need. Let us investigate before we publish. Let us loudly proclaim the humanity others try to diminish. Let loudly proclaim the humanity of those who do not share our values, even as we oppose. Let us never celebrate the suffering of those who oppose us, for they suffer, too. Let us seek to divest ourselves of unearned cultural advantage. Let us enter spaces where our voices are not primary, and listen without thinking to speak. Let us create space to speak, in places where our voices are primary, for those who have had no voice. Let us reject optimism and blind belief. Let us embrace hope. Let us work. Let us work. Let us work. We are a people who have dreamed of the sky. I’d like to see if we can make it real.

source: http://www.armoxon.com/2017/01/sky.html (January 16, 2017)

VOTE

[stone-man-warrior]

September 18, 2020: 3:26 pm:

00

I want to do a terror comm reading here, this one looks seriously important.

American Music Supply email promotions are also terror communications from Hollywood Terror Command Generals in the Music Industry in USA.

The thing to see, is the red Gibson SG Standard 61 Vintage Cherry with Case, at $1799.00.

Then, on the line below, is that other SG.

Gibson SG Standard Heritage Cherry with Soft Case at $1499.00.

Those two guitars are SG models. SG is acronym for “Solid Guitar”.

The only difference I can see, at a brief glance, is that the 1961 model is $300.00 more, and comes with a hard case, while the Standard Heritage model comes with a soft case.

That, in my opinion, is only a $50.00 difference, not a $300.00 dollar difference.

You have to know a few things in advance, to see what is happening there, and those things are all over the place, far too complicated to mention here, I’ll just cut to the chase scene, and show you where those guitars are leading to:

The OD Green Flying V, is what you need to see. The two SG’s are part of a set of terror communications, that are actually features that are built into one, particular version of a Gibson Flying V Guitar. The one that is the terror communication, is NOT that one. Like I said, you need some prerequisite information to know what is being shown to you.

I cannot show you what you need to see. The information has been purged from the internet. That does not mean that it’s impossible to find, there are people who have access to the information, and those are the people I am writing this for.

First, the thing that got me to make the connection to this email, from Twitter:

This news about Greek Alphabet Storm names, is connected to the AMS Gibson promotion in ways that are far too complicated for a Tumblr post, I remain confident that there are people who can make the connections without the details explained to them. Those are the people I am writing this for.

Back to that OD Green Flying V: The thing to know, is, there was a time when Gibson was accused of obtaining tone woods that were considered to be unlawful to harvest. At that time, the US Federal Government raided the Gibson Guitars manufacturing facilities in search of outlawed woods. Nothing was found. The woods in question had been harvested decades prior to the law that prohibits harvest of them.

Gibson was cleared of wrong doing.

They made a statement in the 1990′s when that happened, in the form of offering a Flying V in OD Green, to commemorate the Federal Raid. Military colors on a guitar, a flying guitar.

Now, that information that was purged:

The OD Green V, was on display at the Gibson website, That particular build, was entirely unique for a Flying V. The guitar featured the same kind of build characteristics that are found on Hollowbody Archtop Guitars. The bridge, was tall, about one inch tall. The neck of the guitar was set into the body at an angle, was not in a lineal plane with the body of the guitar like the one shown above is. The angled neck set into the body was such that the strings were high above the pick-ups, and the bridge was tall to accommodate the inclined set neck. That is the way many Hollowbody Archtops are built.

Those two Gibson SG Guitars, the “Solid Guitars”, are communication to terror soldiers in the field, they are sending a message that is in-line with the original version of the “OD Green Gibson Flying V”, the one with the inclined neck.

(Don’t get any of this confused with what I was saying at the Pain Specialists of Southern Oregon the other day as I was explaining the comm that is there in the form of a coat rack, an offset ceiling slope/incline, a wall pained in OD Green, and a wainscot trim on the wall, unless you really want to delve into the depths of the terror rabbit hole, where there is no way out once you go in, and learn the truth.) You have to take into consideration that the White House is a terror cell, some of it’s members are identified with the Greek Alphabet:

Donald Trump = Alpha

Melania Trump = Beta

Mike Pence = Gamma

Karen Pence = Delta

Mike Pompeo = Epsilon

Susan Pompeo = Zeta

There are more, but the information is very difficult to obtain, that is all I have on the Greek Alphabet at the White House. Notably, the members all are required to have a spouse.

Enter the Archtop parts of that OD Green Flying V right there.

Know that the Ark that Noah built, is real, not historically, but is a real thing that is ready to float now. The Vatican terror that I have been explaining here for so long is being waged on the population so that at the end of the game they are playing, all of the population will be killed, and only a select group will live to start over on Earth, with a new population. That is what this set of terror comm is about... The Ark, is ready.

The Earths population is planned to be reduced to a select group of 500,000 people. That’s one-half million people selected to survive the upcoming mandatory Corona Virus Vaccines, and a plethora of other means of eliminating the population so that the select group can board the safety of the Ark, and wait until the dust settles, and the smoke clears, and the rising waters recede. Then, they start over, on Earth... just those select people.

They are all Screen Actor Guild members. The “Pretty People” of the world.

This set of terror comm, and this reading, is the most important one I have ever done. There is very little time to act against these terror cult members and the insanity that drives them to murder so many millions of innocent people.

We have only a few months to exist on Earth. The plan has been advanced unchecked for fifty years. The Nitrous Oxide and Versed *Medazolam) airborne gas mixture they have been using has created a situation where eye-witnesses of mass murders of hundreds or thousands of people are not able to remember details about what they saw. The Versed gas prevents memory retention of anything that happened during exposure to the gas.

USA, and the entire world, have been fooled by the entertainers we love to watch, and the news media personalities that we rely on for information, and that has been true for fifty years.

End terror report: 4:24.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Qanon is magical thinking

For years, Kirby Ferguson's "Everything is a Remix" video series has traced the links between beloved contemporary art and largely forgotten historical roots, making the case that culture is accretive, and originality is just hiding your influences.

In a new video, "Trump, QAnon and The Return of Magic," Ferguson makes a compelling case that Qanon is a remix of the age old trap of magical thinking: "the belief that one's ideas, thoughts or wishes can influence the world's course of events."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca2DSsuE7jI

Moreover, it's a specific, conservative form of magical thinking, grounded in obsessions with purity and protecting innocents: hence the centrality of child-trafficking rings to Q's mythology.

This is a recurring motif in paranoid, right-wing fantasies: Ferguson makes the connection between Q and the 1980s' "satanic panic" and the widespread delusion that satanic cults were kidnapping, raping and murdering babies.

But while the satanic panic merely ruined the lives of the falsely accused, Q is part of a growing conspiratorial belief pattern that elected a president who is on a path to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Americans due to epidemiological ineptitude and racism.

Ferguson poses the current political struggle as a fight between "magical thinkers" and "evidence seekers", with the former being more concerned with feeling better than with discovering the truth.

Magical thinking is a kind of metastasis of pattern-matching, the apopheniac's curse of seeing connections in coincidences, or manufacturing connections in unrelated phenomena that feel right ("I listen to my gut").

In a world of great crisis - pandemic, climate inequality - it's not crazy to want to feel better. For all that magical thinkers cloak themselves in "skepticism" their beliefs are grounded in feelings. Evidence is tedious and ambiguous, emotions are quick and satisfying.

Ferguson identifies six hallmarks of magical thinking:

I. Symbols and codes: Choose a simple enough symbol (a triangle!) and it'll show up everywhere. And wherever you can't find a symbol, you can asset that you're being confounded by a code.

ANYTHING can be a code (think of Pizzagate). It's impossible to prove to a motivated reasoner that you're NOT speaking in code.

II. Dot connecting: Instead of spotting patterns in individual items, you assert that things that repeat, or happen near each other, or at the same time, must be related. Of course, you get to ignore anything that doesn't fit the pattern.

This is the origin of superstitions: the ballplayer who gets two hits in a row while wearing the same underwear "connects the dots" and now they're his lucky underwear.

III. Everything is a person: Personifying inanimate objects is a natural impulse, the basis for all religion, and may explain the overlap of conspiracism and religious faith. The conspiracist personifies all phenomena by asking "who benefits?"

Eg: "Canada benefited from WWII when the EU's industrial capacity was destroyed, thus Canada started WWII."

IV: Purity: a long obsession of the right, the need to defend innocence from "contamination and contagion" (think of how often Trump uses "sick" as a pejorative).

Magical thinkers assert that any kind of dark, imaginative art - horror novels, heavy metal - is motivated by a love of evil, not a desire to rehearse crisis as a way to prepare yourself to live through it (though they give the super-dark Bible a pass).

V. Apocalypse: a belief in a coming final battle - a way to feel like you are alive in a moment of historical significance.

VI. Good and Evil: The belief that you are motivated by beneficial motives, and your enemies are motivated by wickedness - so everything your side does is good, and everything your adversaries do is bad.

Thus the obsession with abortion and "saving babies" but the indifference to kids in cages; the obsession with fighting tyranny and the indifference to police violence.

Ferguson ends by suggesting that the rise of magical thinking is the confluence of a rise in trauma and fear, a decline in education and thus the ability to understand the world, and the normal baseline proclivity of some people to prefer neat answers to messy ones.

He suggests that "evidence seekers" dispense with rational arguments in discussions with their magical thinking loved ones, and focus instead on speaking their language: symbols, connected dots, personalizing, highlighting the sacred, and the significance of this moment.

And he says that the systemic answers to this are an emphasis on scientific education and on the provision of services that make people less frightened by making them more secure.

Ferguson has a feature-length documentary on the subject, "This is Not a Conspiracy":

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/tinactsd

I like Ferguson's analysis here, though I'm not fond of explanations that lean on the imagined social conditions of our prehistorical ancestors, whose lives are almost entirely unknown and unknowable to us.

I also think this could benefit from exploring the business model of conspiracism:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#q

and the extent to which it provides both fun and community to the people who practice it:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1291066613685317633

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: this article is part of the Amerikan Musik: Fascism Ascendant in the USA collection on ninaillingworth.com. For further analysis of the chud rush insurrection attempt in Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2021, join my co-host Nick and I for the No Fugazi Podcast episode “In Between Days: Politics, Violence & Fascist F*ckery.”

Counting Coup

I must confess that I’ve never been particularly good at the “I told you so” essay; which is probably why I failed to capitalize on my work about Russiagate, despite being literally the only person I’m aware of who ultimately got the answer one hundred percent right. Furthermore, after roughly five years of writing about the rise of Americanized fascism through the lens of the objectively fascist Trump administration, I am at this point completely Trumped the f*ck out. I would very much like to pivot to critiquing the incoming neoliberal authoritarian Biden regime and their loyal muppets in the media; but neither the news cycle, nor contrarian faux-left analysts with equivocating hot takes will let me. 

All of which is to say that I find this ritual somewhat embarrassing, and this might come off as a little perfunctory. 

On June 6th, 2016, I published an essay formally stating that I thought Trump was himself, a fascist; although I’d certainly already implied as much in previous articles and on social media. At that point I was very concerned that Trump would win the upcoming election, but I wasn’t sure how much fascist crap he’d actually be able to do under the American system of government.  

By March 1st, 2017, I’d seen enough of Trump’s act to say his administration was enacting a fascist agenda and that it was time to ostracize and oppose those who supported that fascist agenda.

By August 30th, 2017, and in the wake of the deadly nazi riot in Charlottesville, I wrote that Trump was building an alliance of violent reactionary thugs, law enforcement officials and an objectively fascist Republican party to intimidate political opposition. I also warned that Trump and his Department of Justice would try to declare their protesting political opposition terrorists and use that threat to subvert civil liberties, erode democracy and install fascism.

I don’t want to simply list every article I wrote about Trump’s fascist presidency here, but along the way I wrote about liberals using fascism to punch left, corporate media complacency in the face of a fascist threat, the Trump DoJ’s objectively fascist attempts to criminalize J20 inauguration protesters as terrorists, the need to present a united front on the American left to oppose fascism, the GOP’s fascist attempts to rig the next presidential election, and literal f*cking concentration camps. If you’re up for a long, emotional and highly personal read, you can follow my entire saga of trying to warn people about the fascist nature of both Trump and the society he was presiding over, in this August 2020 essay on ninaillingworth.com.

In 2020, and after a rough patch in my personal life that happened to coincide with Trump going full-on Mussolini against Black Lives Matter activists protesting the police murder of George Floyd, and then “antifa terrorists,” I came back to write an essay definitively presenting the core evidence (up to that point) that Donald Trump was a fascist. Furthermore, in the same lengthy essay I mentioned above, I correctly analyzed how Trump would attempt to rig the election, correctly laid out the basic foundations of the right’s “legal” attempts to overturn the election in the wake of a Trump loss, and accurately predicted that if all that failed, he would summon the chuds and try to retain power by force. Crucially, I also pointed out that this strategy probably wouldn’t work, but couldn’t be ignored because of widespread right wing institutional support and the fact that even a crappy coup, is a very bad thing for a liberal democracy.

That fall, I wrote about Trump’s revenge killing, political assassination of an anti-fascist activist merely accused of a crime, about how corporate media had primed America for the fascist moment, and additionally worked on a five part No Fugazi Podcast series detailing every aspect of America’s long flirtation with fascism; during this podcast series, my co-host Nick and I also (repeatedly) predicted Trump would try to steal the election in the courts and then attempt to launch a doomed chud uprising when that inevitably failed.

Finally over that same time period and running into the post-election stages of the Swine Emperor’s presidency, I wrote a number of rebuttals and explainers; including pieces explaining what fascism is, why rich people are helping to install it now, why even stupid coups have consequences and have to be stopped before they erupt in chud violence, why it doesn’t matter that Trump isn’t exactly like Hitler, why it’s a serious problem that about a third of the country is done with democracy and now refuses to accept elections they don’t win, why fascist billionaires don’t need Trump specifically anymore, why fascism will survive the eventual fall of the Klepto Kaiser, and finally why the crypto-libertarian, contrarian “left” can sincerely blow their equivocating sympathizer nonsense out their collective butthole.   

Please also note that the vast majority of the essays above themselves contain literally hundreds of evidentiary citation links, and this was further supplemented by dozens and dozens of Twitter threads that have unfortunately been lost to history in the wake of my recent (permanent) Twitter suspension. 

In light of the fact that Trump is in fact a fascist, did in fact try to declare his political enemies terrorists, did in fact try to turn the army, Homeland Security, and chud vigilantes on those who opposed him, did in fact attempt to rig and then invalidate an election, and ultimately did inspire a chud insurrection designed (poorly) to overturn the results of that election, please allow me to declare complete and total victory while metaphorically asking my twitchy critics how my butt tastes. I could go on, but when you’ve left your opponents crying on Twitter about how the Apple Store de-platforming Parler is the real fascism, it’s best to just take the win gracefully and walk away from that wreckage.

A Jute Glute Riot

Given that I’m writing this on the morning of January 12th, literally thousands of articles about the Capitol Hill riot itself have already been written, and I just spent eighty minutes breaking down Trump’s desperate chud rush insurrection on the last episode of No Fugazi, I’m not going to waste time on blow by blow coverage of the pathetic uprising on January 6th, in Washington, D.C.

Readers who are looking for what I felt was a good, in-the-moment examination of the actual riot are encouraged to check out this January 6th article from The Daily Poster:

The Insurrection Was Predictable by David Sirota

While I think Sirota’s piece does a very good job of hinting at the larger coordination involved in this event, I also feel it’s important to note here that counterfactual arguments designed to minimize this event are sheer and utter bunk. This was a planned insurrection, attended by (ex) members of the military and American law enforcement, aided by Capitol Hill Police and the Department of Defense, funded by rich fascists, inspired by right wing media, as well as an openly fascist Republican Party and the goddamn president of the United States; this wasn’t harmless, people literally died and members of Trump’s fascist mob clearly had designs on committing politicized acts of violence against their perceived enemies.

Look, does it burn my backside that sh*t-tier neoliberal ghouls who enabled Trump’s fascist agenda at every turn, are now publicly patting themselves on the back for recognizing Trump’s fascist intentions all along? You betcha, Sparky. But my feelings don’t stop reality from being real; this was a doomed, stupid coup attempt, but even stupid coup attempts have consequences. 

I couldn’t spare a single tear for a billionaire fascist who lost his Twitter account, or neo-nazi chuds getting chased off social media, but the crypto-libertarian apologists among us are correct when they say the incoming neoliberal authoritarian regime will weaponize the Jan 6th, 2021 chud rush riot to attack left wing dissent. In fact, I predicted that part too; it just has no bearing on the reality that Trump is a fascist, Trumpism is fascism and what we just saw was a failed coup attempt; reality doesn’t really care how any of that makes you feel, folks.

There are dark days ahead for all of us at this point, and while the events of last week are almost certainly the end of the line for the Klepto Kaiser himself, American fascism isn’t going anywhere and the sh*tlibs are about to bring the hammer down on their real enemies - the burgeoning Pig Empire left.

The sooner we can collectively look in the mirror, accept the reality of what just happened and stop fighting over objective facts, the sooner we can get focused on winning “the war between us” against the incoming Biden Regime. Or, folks on the contrarian faux-left could keep carrying water for Josh f*cking Hawley instead, I guess. 

Game, blouses; now tell Mike Tracey to get back in his f*cking hole.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

[prqltothesql]

ANOTHER Stupid weird rant

We knew something like this was coming a year before the pandemic started.

The Democrats never used to be like this. They got in and got power under Obama and for 8 years they became obsessed with control, with power, with the spotlight of the media. But they got cocky with Hillary. They thought they could just trot out anyone and they'd win and it'd be business as usual. They didn't count on Trump catching fire like he did, running a laser targeted campaign targeting key states, key areas that were decimated under Obama. Trump won the election and suddenly, they didn't have that control. Trump was getting more done than anyone else ever had, and the Democrats didn't like that. Trump was bringing America back into a strong take-no-bullshit country. China didn't like that either.

So the Democrats and China concocted a plan. Release a virus. It'll cripple the entire world economy (except for China). Make everyone severely depressed and desperate for change. Kill off hundreds of thousands of people in Trump's key voter demographics, while also wiping off billions in social security need. Blame Trump. In the middle of it, start race riots. People will be so fed up with sitting at home in masks that they'll destroy the cities. And then the Democrats promise, "Vote for us and the violence will stop!" "Vote for us and the virus will go away!" "Vote for us and we will make everything better!"

Then the final piece of the puzzle, how do you guarantee that the numbers turn out in support of your candidate? Mail-in voting. You can say that in-person voting isn't safe and that mail-in voting is the safer option. Some states mailed out ballots to everyone, in theory having 100% voter turnout, which is impossible. In the middle of that, harvest ballots. Falsify ballots. How are you going to tell the difference if you get 150,000 ballots that all of them are real? If you falsify 5000 of them, that's nothing. But add up all of these numbers over however many polling places, however many voting districts, however many vote-counting centers. It adds up and can swing the election. Not to mention, in many of these places you had Democrat sponsored poll workers and vote counters who would do anything to get Trump out of office. And Biden told everyone, "Mail in your ballot! Vote by mail!" So they could hide as many votes as they could in plain sight.

What happens after they get in? Well they have a President who can barely walk, who can barely put a sentence together, who looks lost if his wife isn't right there guiding him by the hand. He's essentially an arm holding a pen. He has no agenda. None of the things he's doing are of his own accord or plan. The Democrats are controlling all of this. He's there because he won't push back. He won't go rogue. China has him and his son and his family by the balls, not to mention probably 50% of Congress. He will sign whatever they put in front of him.

They will make sure that they never leave office again. Make DC and Puerto Rico states, adding 4 more (Democratic) Senators, lord knows how many more Representatives, more electoral votes for the democrats, if they even decide to keep the Electoral College. They will abolish the filibuster. They will pack the Supreme Court. They will institute universal mail-in voting so that they can rig any election they want to. They will do whatever it takes to get that power, to get that control back. They don't care how many people they kill, or how many souls they have to sell. This was all planned 4 years in advance after Trump won. That's not even counting the January 6th thing. Set it up to look like they stormed the Capital to murder everyone. They told security to stand down, opened the doors, put their little shadow Antifa army in the crowd to stir up trouble, and then let them loose. Most of those politicians were long gone. It was a stunt to scare everyone. Now they have the excuse to label anyone who goes against them a radical domestic terrorist.

If you really think about how everything has shaken down since COVID for Trump, the US, all of the great things he was doing, the Democrats, the economy, China. It's all right there.