#that would be a nuclear bomb of a revelation.

[goldensunset]

sorry but if we’re bringing back the ‘sora is player3’ theory we NEED to acknowledge the insane implications of that. player2 raised xehanort as a baby. xehanort and sora fought each other. i think someone mentioned maybe player2 didn’t initially remember their old life but it came back to them later? if this idea is true then maybe once again sora wouldn’t have known who he was but it might happen to him later in life. that would mess him up absolutely horribly

[undeadcourier]

So given that Mormonism is almost dead and it's very possible for the Courier to have never heard of Christianity, I'm trying to brainstorm post-war beliefs. What do you think people swear by? What sort of religions, superstitions, rituals, etc. have sprung up in the wake of the bombs? (Note that I've only extensively played FNV so far of the series so I don't know about other games' stuff much.)

This is an incredible question and really fun to consider. Gonna tag the expert @calder to weigh in on canon (and beyond) too.

Christianity is a bigger influence in Fallout 3. Revelation 21:6 is the favorite bible verse of James and Catherine, the Lone Wanderer's parents, and it's quoted multiple times. That's probably the most overt reference outside of Joshua's Mormonism, but the wiki has a log here if you want to see more. It's also incomplete, since it doesn't mention Arcade quoting Isaac in Genesis 22, but still a good source for what's mentioned in canon. Given how ridiculously invasive Christianity is in U.S. American politics/culture and how inextricably tied it is to the jingoism, racism, McCarthyism, American exceptionalism etc. that the Fallout games were meant to critique, I don't think you could effectively do Fallout without it coming up. I'm trying not to write a whole dissertation on how Chrisitianity has influenced U.S. politics right now (tho maybe someday), but even where you don't have actual Christians, I think you're still going to have a lot of Christian influence. I wouldn't be surprised by people still swearing on a Christian bible or saying "Jesus Christ" or the like as an exclamation, even in places in the wasteland where Christianity isn't practiced or particularly well-known, since that has become so integrated into the language (similar to how the days of the week in English are named after ancient Norse deities even though very few people in the U.S./England practice that religion). Fallout 4 starts to explore new post-war superstitions and religions with the Children of Atom, and 76 goes even a bit further with Mothman and some other cultish beliefs, but I haven't spent as much time playing those or the games before Bethesda, so I'll let others way in on that for now.

This is already so long and I haven't even begun speculating about stuff that isn't directly supported by canon, so I may just make some more posts after this. I love the idea of a cult centered around the power of nuclear weapons, but the Children of Atom didn't really do it like I would have, so I can outline my ideas about that later, too. I'd like to explore the concept of radiation as akin to fae or spirits, which is probably not something that meshes well realistically (virtually everyone knows what radiation is and wouldn't need to explain radiation poisoning as a ghost's curse, for example), but I think it would be Fun.

Nuclear semiotics in Fallout is so fascinating to consider. Like the idea of narrow triangles and spiky symbols becoming taboo because they're associated with the hostile architecture of long-time nuclear waste sites. Of course, the point behind hostile architecture like that is that we already associate thorny shapes with danger. Maybe phrases or folk wisdom develops around the idea of a problem compared to the size of your thumb, related to using your thumb as a measurement against a mushroom cloud to determine if you're in a fallout zone. "A problem bigger than your thumb" is serious, whereas "a knuckle" is considered a less urgent issue.

[denimbex1986]

'There is one triumphant moment in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer: an imaginative flash of apocalyptic anxiety for a post-nuclear world. In the film’s final exchange, Nolan leaves us to consider a man’s regret for his development of the atomic bomb that brutalized the civilian families of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is a moment that neither Oppenheimer the film nor the man deserves.

Nolan cites Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror as a reference for Oppenheimer — a revelation that exposes the superficiality behind its tangled narrative. In Mirror, Tarkovsky weaves disparate narrative strands to plot the scattered thoughts of a dying man. It ditches the comfort of linearity for conceptual cohesion. The result is inventive, transcendent. It compels a new ontology of film.

Nolan perverts Mirror’s legacy. His structural subversions are confused. What is Oppenheimer even about? What are we meant to make of its protagonist? The film meanders — Nolan treats its chronologies like wind-up toys. They are left upon release to determine their own divergent trajectories: the humiliation of Lewis Strauss, the loss of Jean Tatlock, Kitty Oppenheimer’s depression. Those that attempt to assign meaning to this film will often say that it is about Oppenheimer’s regret. This is what Nolan would have you believe, if the film’s final scene, that one triumphant moment, is any indication. Then what do you make of its preceding three hours? Its preoccupation with the physicist’s reputation and romantic life leaves little room to contemplate his culpability. One redemptive sequence of the film is a harsh cross-examination in which Oppenheimer admits that he recommended Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decimation. But Nolan’s reproach is insincere — the film answers his sin with Rami Malek’s moment of glory, in which his character defends the physicist’s honor. This is the incoherency of a noncommittal Nolan who juggles ideas with little concern for where they land. He abuses Göransson’s score to foster some mirage of thematic cohesion.

One can only imagine what Stanley Kubrick could do with Nolan’s footage. He might allow us to at least sit with an image long enough to contemplate it. Nolan commands the edit like a schizophrenic autocrat, dictating the placement of film with misguided conviction. He would rather have us glimpse at Jack Quaid’s astonishment than spend a few seconds with an atomic bomb. Nolan champions this film as a historic development for practical effects in cinema — so let us look at the effects, Christopher!

An unsuspecting casualty of Oppenheimer’s disorientation is the American Left. Do not be fooled by Nolan’s sympathetic treatment of the film’s Communist Party; he grants no real credence to Leftist ideas. He condescends them. In the same breath that Nolan condemns McCarthyism, he justifies its characteristic paranoia through his sensationalization of the Chevalier incident. He scorns the thought that the Manhattan Project could have been a nationalist strategy of empire-building. His neglect of the Japanese and Indigenous American victims of the Project is a whole other discussion. Oppenheimer carries this cosmopolitan attitude: “Let us play nice with the communists, everyone deserves a right to express their beliefs,” and so on. It understands communism as some respectable but still misguided alternative lifestyle — the way that an agnostic might tolerate a religious moderate. This is a fundamental misinterpretation of Marxist doctrine, which places socialism as the exclusive order of social organization that must, as the historical dialectic demands, wholly replace capitalism. Nolan’s communists are lethargic, innocuous. The Nolanite brand of technocratic, liberal idealism infantilizes the American Left at the same time that it upheaves Nolan’s very own industry.

It is a shame that Oppenheimer is an impressive film. Its performances are tremendous. Its score is tremendous. Every Nolan release carries a certain smugness — this grand, attention-seeking self-importance. It is a pretentious attitude that will have cynical critics often root against him. And yet, as with Interstellar, Dunkirk and the like, Oppenheimer succeeds by embedding its problems into a popular vehicle for technical flourish. So long as Nolan can claim critical success, popular filmmaking will continue to sedate its audiences and justify ideological perfidy. The Left is not safe with Nolan.'

[at-the-end-of-days]

It all goes back to the Temple Mount.

So I didn’t realize this until today, but everything Hamas is doing, from the initial attack of 5,000 missiles onwards… it was named after the mosque on the Temple Mount.

“Also known as 'Al-Aqsa Flood', Operation 'Al-Aqsa Storm' is a military operation led by was a surprise attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023. The attack involved firing thousands of rockets at occupied territories, including enemy positions, airports, and military positions.”

They could have named it ANYTHING.

Operation Freedom, Operation Get Our Land Back, Gaza Storm, Hamas Flood. But they didn’t. They named the attack after the mosque on the Temple Mount. Which, while not the holiest site in Islam, is the third.

Now, I made a post a while back that it was my personal opinion that the matters of Revelations couldn’t begin until the Desolation at the Temple. What is that, who knows, even the son of Gd didn’t really specify.

Mark 13:14, King James Version

But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains:

And then it goes into the whole bit which has been previously posted about how you shouldn’t grab a thing, you should run. Don’t get a coat, run.

My assumption was that … well, it would be nuclear, if not something else. Something… awful. But nuclear made the most sense, at least to me. You wouldn’t grab a coat in a nuclear blast.

And it was my opinion that this desolation wouldn’t take place until the red heifers were ready for slaughter, solely because then Israel would have a pointed reason to make a move on the Temple Mount.

Not that they have left that mosque alone as it is.

The most recent issue.

And honestly the take away from the article:

“The Al-Aqsa Mosque is under the administration of the Jordan-affiliated Islamic Waqf. While non-Muslims are allowed to visit, they are not permitted to worship under a long-standing status quo agreement.

However, attacks by far-right groups advocating for Jewish control and over Al-Aqsa have been ongoing for years.

In recent months, radical Israeli settlers have increasingly been storming the mosque under the protection of Israeli security forces. Hamas said that its attack on Israel was motivated by the settler provocations.”

And if not storming the mosque, Israel has acted in other ways.

Such as saying that they need to be in the area for archaeological reasons.

https://new.thecradle.co/articles/israeli-excavation-under-al-aqsa-accelerates-with-intensity-report#:~:text=For%20several%20decades%2C%20Israel%20has,to%20the%20land%20of%20Palestine.

“For several decades, Israel has been excavating under the Al-Aqsa Mosque as part of a vague, historically motivated search for 'Solomon's Temple. ' These excavations represent Israel's attempt to justify the occupation through archeology, by which Israelis claim they can trace their heritage to the land of Palestine.”

I mean, look at how this place is divided up.

So what happens now?

If you’ve been watching the news, there’s been a lot of talk about a physical invasion into Gaza. But despite the operation being named for the mosque itself? I haven’t seen - doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened or doesn’t exist - any articles or news stories about Israel using this time to act against the mosque. Or Hamas attacking the mosque.

And frankly? That would be.. idiotic.

Why? Because if Israel does anything to the mosque at this point, it’s inviting Iran and other Muslim nations to fully turn against them (ignoring Iran lighting fireworks, and getting US military plans that went from Trump, to Putin, to Iran, no doubt aiding in attack plans against Israel). And this, when Israel was trying to make peace with Saudi Arabia.

This would be the worst time for them to move.

Now, someone else may see this, and make a move on the Temple Mount, pinning the blame on Israel.

I don’t know. No one knows for certain. Even the son of Gd didn’t know exactly when this would happen, and he wasn’t very descriptive. But then, how does one two thousand years ago, describe any of these things that have come to pass? Or will come?

Mark 13, New International Version:

14 “When you see ��the abomination that causes desolation’[a] standing where it[b] does not belong—let the reader understand—then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. 15 Let no one on the housetop go down or enter the house to take anything out. 16 Let no one in the field go back to get their cloak. 17 How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers! 18 Pray that this will not take place in winter, 19 because those will be days of distress unequaled from the beginning, when God created the world, until now—and never to be equaled again.

Now I have quoted Zechariah and Ezekiel, but as a Christian whose holy book is the Bible… the timeline seems.. uncertain at best. Just that some things have to happen before we get into the worst of it all.

Famines and earthquakes are here. Famines will get worse. War is at the doorstep of every home.

Atrocities, in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Israel.

Whispers, across Europe, America, Australia. Preppers, the paranoid, the children of the Lord see this. And it is ignored by those that can afford to ignore it.

With any luck? The mosque will stay standing. It will not be attacked, it will not be desecrated. Lives will not be lost, and no earthquake will fall over Israel to show that this is the last act before the end of days.

And I don’t mean that sarcastically, given the name of my blog.

But this attack was named FOR the mosque atop the Temple Mount. Why?

[gsirvitor]

Uuuh, can you give me some lore on that nuclear capable missile?

We talking the air to ground missile or the ground to air missile or the air to air missile?

Let's go over the final first.

The Douglas AIR-2 Genie was an unguided air-to-air rocket with a 1.5 kt W25 nuclear warhead. It was deployed by the United States Air Force (USAF 1957–1985) and Canada (Royal Canadian Air Force 1965–68, Air Command 1968–84) during the Cold War. Production ended in 1962 after over 3000 were made, with some related training and test derivatives being produced later.

The interception of Soviet strategic bombers was a major military preoccupation of the late 1940s and 1950s. The revelation in 1947 that the Soviet Union had produced a reverse-engineered copy of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, the Tupolev Tu-4, which could reach the continental United States in a one-way attack, followed by the Soviets developing their own atomic bomb in 1949, produced considerable anxiety.

The World War II-age fighter armament of machine guns and cannon were inadequate to stop attacks by massed formations of high-speed bombers. Firing large volleys of unguided rockets into bomber formations was not much better, and true air-to-air missiles were in their infancy. In 1954 Douglas Aircraft began a program to investigate the possibility of a nuclear-armed air-to-air weapon. To ensure simplicity and reliability, the weapon would be unguided, since the large blast radius made precise accuracy unnecessary.

The then top-secret project had various code names, such as Bird Dog, Ding Dong, and High Card. Full-scale development began in 1955, with test firing of inert warhead rockets commencing in early 1956.

The final design carried a 1.5-kiloton W25 nuclear warhead and was powered by a Thiokol SR49-TC-1 solid-fuel rocket engine of 162 kN thrust, sufficient to accelerate the rocket to Mach 3.3 during its two-second burn.

Total flight time was about 12 seconds, during which time the rocket covered 10 km (6.2 mi). Targeting, arming, and firing of the weapon were coordinated by the launch aircraft's fire-control system. Detonation was by time-delay fuze, although the fuzing mechanism would not arm the warhead until engine burn-out, to give the launch aircraft sufficient time to turn and escape.

However, there was no mechanism for disarming the warhead after launch. Lethal radius of the blast was estimated to be about 300 metres (980 ft). Once fired, the Genie's short flight-time and large blast radius made it virtually impossible for a bomber to avoid destruction.

The new rocket entered service with the designation MB-1 Genie in 1957. The first interceptor squadrons to carry the MB-1 declared initial operational capability on 1 Jan. 1957, when a handful of rockets and 15 F-89 interceptors capable of carrying them were deployed at Wurtsmith Air Force Base in northern Michigan and Hamilton Air Force Base outside of San Francisco. By the next year, 268 F-89s had received the necessary wing pylon and fire-control system modifications to carry the weapon.

While officially known as the MB-1 Genie, the rocket was often nicknamed "Ding-Dong" by crews and pilots. About 3150 Genie rockets were produced before production ended in 1963. In 1962 the weapon was redesignated AIR-2A Genie. Many rounds were upgraded with improved, longer-duration rocket motors; the upgraded weapons sometimes known as AIR-2B. An inert training round, originally MB-1-T and later ATR-2A, was also produced in small numbers – the training version was known to Canadian crews as the "dum-dum".

A live Genie was detonated only once, in Operation Plumbbob on 19 July 1957. It was fired by USAF Captain Eric William Hutchison (pilot) and USAF Captain Alfred C. Barbee (radar operator) flying an F-89J over Yucca Flats.

Sources vary as to the height of the blast, but it was between 18'500 and 20'000 ft above mean sea level. A group of five USAF officers volunteered to stand uncovered in their light summer uniforms underneath the blast to prove that the weapon was safe for use in populated areas. Gamma and neutron doses received by observers on the ground were negligible. Doses received by aircrew were highest for the fliers assigned to penetrate the airburst cloud ten minutes after explosion.

The only other Genie user was Canada, whose CF-101 Voodoos carried Genies until 1984 via a dual-key arrangement where the missiles were kept under United States custody, and released to Canada under circumstances requiring their use. The RAF briefly considered the missile for use on the English Electric Lightning.

Now onto the ground to air missiles.

The CIM-10 BOMARC was a supersonic ramjet powered long-range surface-to-air missile used during the Cold War for the air defense of North America. In addition to being the first operational long-range SAM and the first operational pulse doppler aviation radar, it was the only SAM deployed by the United States Air Force.

However, two squadrons of these were purchased and deployed by the Canadian government in 1958, and were modified to carry a nuclear payload, designed like the air to air missile to detonate on a fuse between enemy bombers. This was part of Canada's role during the Cold War to defend North America against an attack from the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately Prime Minister John Deifenbaker refused to allow the nuclear-armed missiles to be used, opting to use non nuclear options over Canadian soil, souring Canada's relationship with the US, and upon the Cuban missile crisis he lost reelection as his cabinet was split over his decision to disarm the nuclear ground to air anti aircraft missiles, the coward.

Now, onto the air to ground missile.

The North American Aviation AGM-28 Hound Dog was a supersonic, turbojet-propelled, nuclear armed, air-launched cruise missile developed in 1959 for the United States Air Force.

It was primarily designed to be capable of attacking Soviet ground-based air defense sites prior to a potential air attack by B-52 Stratofortress long range bombers during the Cold War.

The thermonuclear warhead carried by the Hound Dog was the W28 Class D. The W28 warhead could be preset to yield an explosive power of between 70 kilotons and 1.45 megatons.

Detonation of the Hound Dog's W28 warhead could be programmed to occur on impact (ground burst) or air burst at a preset altitude. An air burst would have been used against a large area, soft target. A surface impact would have been used against a hard target such as a missile site or command and control center.

The Hound Dog could be launched from the B-52 Stratofortress at high altitudes or low altitudes, but not below 5000 feet in altitude.

One Hound Dog missile crashed near the town of Samson, Alabama, when it failed to self-destruct after a test launch from Eglin Air Force Base. In 1962, a Hound Dog was accidentally dropped to the ground during an underwing systems check.

In May 1962, operation "Silk Hat" was conducted at Eglin Air Force Base. During this exercise, a Hound Dog test launch was conducted before an audience of national and international dignitaries headed by President John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson.

After thirteen years of service with the Air Force, the last Hound Dog missile was removed from alert deployment on June 30, 1975.

[hotgirlmythology]

The Extinction from the magnus archvies

Honestly I fell off listening to it after about 130 episodes but I heard about the extinction and was like :D wow cute ur my bitch now terrifying entity of spookiness, and I think it is interpreted wrong by a lot of people.

A lot of people compare it to the desolation and the end because that's what first comes to mind when you think of what would make us go extinct. But to me, the extinction is more than the fear of just mass destruction and the end of humanity. If that was the fear at play then it would have shown up far earlier what with all the religions preaching about judgement days where the earth would be destroyed.

The fact it showed up in 1860 is interesting because that's just after Charles Darwin dropped his bombshell of a book and the idea that life could change began to gain true traction in the scientific community. Coupled with the rapidly advancing industrial revolution upsetting many of the societal structures of the time, I think the extinction was initially a fear of change to the status quo, the idea that the world you were stable and secure in is changing around you and you don't understand how to keep your footing. Basically it used to be a lot more general.

How it became specifically associated with the end of humanity fits with this idea. The atomic bomb and the revelation of climate change both brought about a huge shift in the world's mindset - there was a very real chance that the world could experience "the biggest" change, which nobody would be able to find their footing in. Everyone was terrified of this prospect, especially because of how quickly information spread, and so the extinction rapidly grew in power. Growing in power from this particular fear of change, its nature became primarily that of embodying the changes many people feared greatly but were powerless to stop, for example, nuclear apocalypse, climate change, replacement of humanity by machines/genetically modified organisms, because these fears were unlikely to disappear any time soon. Thus people now associate it with the apocalyptic terror it thrives on, and not its more general existence as fear of uncertainty and lack of control

This theory also kind of explains its aliases: "The Terrible Change" = change is scary oh no it is terrible "The Future Without Us" = this is more jiving with the modern extinction ngl "The World Is Always Ending" = change is always happening!!!! the world is literally collapsing!!! argh!!!

manifestations (ripped from the wiki soz) Man made objects + technology = oh no new and modern things that people are unsure what effects they may have on our species!!!! Yum Destruction of nature + natural order = obviously partly because of the apocalyptic tendencies it has but also because the natural world is something many view as immutable so destroying it is a big uncertainty thing

TLDR: The extinction is the fear of change and uncertainty given modern form by the wide array of existential and very dangerous horrors we have to worry about

[cannibalcaprine]

okay, so dnd campaign bbeg idea, so spoilers for when it's my turn to dm

Marchosias the Repentant

an ancient and powerful lich that takes the form of a bejeweled skeleton, with golden ribs and gemstone eyes. notable appearance features are probably the gold-plated halo stuck in the back of his skull, like a catacomb saint

kidnapped the princess of Ignarthah to steal her body to prepare for the new world promised by his god, Its Deathly Majesty (insert revelations of John references here)

the kidnapping starts the whole war that the party gets whipped up into, with Ignarthah being suspicious of Mayidor, a country across the short sea (geographically similar to Italy and Egypt)

is sending skeletal reinforcements to Ignarthah on hopes that the mass death caused by the war would be enough to power His Deathly Majesty's birth, which he believes would grant him immeasurable power, basically making him a god in his own right

probably developing the necromantic equivalent of a nuclear bomb

lair is an ancient palace-cathedral, surrounded by hoards of the undead, and his Magic Jar is a mummified homunculus stuffed with notes and jewels (alchemical, looking like a human fetus instead of the adorable winged beasty)

starts off as an incredibly looming threat until the party whips his shit and he's revealed to be a massive coward

is totally not a metaphor for church-funded corruption and war haHAha

[et103]

I wanna talk about DeadDeadDemon's Dededededestruction.

It's a manga by Asano Inio which, as is the case with their work, is incredibly eccentric both in artstyle, design, writing and pacing.

It's a slice of life manga featuring an apathetic girl called Kadode-chan who has a slight obsession with this manga called "Isobeyan" and her friend, Ontan, who is an incredibly loud game addict and seems to be spouting nonsense instead of saying what she feels (yes I used seems in italics for a reason, dw about it). The main twist in this formula is the setting and how the world itself interacts with the situation; the world is actively being "invaded" by aliens with a massive mothership hanging above Japan and drifting around Tokyo with the occasional saucer floating down onto land only to be shot down by futuristic laser weaponry. How it is being handled by the world itself is very much the most interesting part about this manga, that being not at all. The general population seems to be entirely ignorant of the big-fuck-off-hunk-of-metal hanging barely half a kilometer above land outside of the occasional gossip in favor of continuing their routines. At the start of the story, it had already been 3 years since the apearance and immediate nuclear bombing of this mothership, dubbing both events in conjuction by their date, "8/31" (you understand the reference). Of course there are the groups of separate ideologies as is the case with these invasion plots, namely people for and against the protection of invaders with the government paying no attention to neither but that is besides the point.

What I want to talk about is how it doesn't feel like it's trying to make commentary on an issue as much as it wants to present the nature of events that are big in scale. Sure, every character who's given more than 30 frames of time is calling the entirety of the world sheep for differing reasons like it's a 4chan board but it isn't handled like a major revelation or a key point of the story. In fact, the very next frame they could start talking about a new update for a videogame or what they wanna eat for lunch. It is expected of you to understand that these arguments are not important to anyone at all. Not told to or nodded towards, expected of you. There are conspiracies, misinformation, propaganda, it's got every single thing you can think an alien invasion plot needs to have and the only characters that are ever concerned about them are the people that can act in relation to any of them. Guess who don't? That's right, the main girls.

Except... This is the spoiler cutaway. I implore every single person that would ever care to read this, if my little summary of the manga's concept interested you at all, read it before you click to read more. It is an incredibly interesting manga and it would be a genuine waste to spoil it for newcomers.

So, back to what I was saying.

Except they were involved. In about the middle of the manga's runtime, it introduces time travel. In a previous timeline, Kadode met one of the "invaders"'s early scouts 10 years before the events of the manga. A singular person that gave both Kadode and Ontan a rundown of why they was even sent here. They also had some gadgets that were very similar to those that Isobeyan had in the fictional comic Kadode was interested in at the time. What ended up happening was Kadode became a vigilante, stealing Isobeyan's gadgets to enact judgment upon all deemed evil by the evil people she cleanses from the world. Ontan proceeds to ask Isobeyan on how she can help her best friend and the alien friend tells her of a time machine that transfers one's conciousness to a past self.

From this point onwards, the entire dynamic of everyone that knows of this event shifts dramatically. Sure, the slice of life in spite of the world's end approaching continued without much of a hitch but now the main group is actively thinking about the implications of everything regarding the aliens, Ontan's behaviour and the entirety of the aliens' arrival have been answered and the characters had to process it. This affects the girls and the people they shared this information with and needs to be digested.

The 2 above paragraphs took 10 chapters with the digestion taking 1 and were left alone afterwards. They can't do anything about it. Using the time machine again serves no purpose, as having already used it once has done nothing to prevent the mothership from arriving. The girls just want to live their lives with people they want to spend time with and study for their respective ambitions. They can't do anything except for one of their friends that has the means of doing so and even then this fact is engaged with as sporadically as it troubles that character.

And that feels natural. You've never heard of a person that is constantly worried about their troubles, it isn't natural. But now these troubles are so unimaginably large in scale that seeing it handled like this is fucking unnerving on the first go because it does make sense

In the earlier chapters, a girl in the main girls' friend group dies in a saucer's rough landing. It becomes the subject of an entire chapter, with no cuts to other characters or scenes. It takes that entire chapter for the characters to talk to each other and metabolize the fact that a member of their friend group was gone. We get a glimpse at this manga's inner functions and it lays bare the one thing we could say it wants to deliver; the events that happen, no matter the size and scope of their effects, will only be important to those it affects with the opinion of the rest being that of general indifference, sometimes even disdain for those prying into the facts behind them. I can't see it displaying itself as commentary because it uses too broad of a spectrum in examples of relevant events. From accidents to political propaganda, it shows every kind of event it could present this "lesson" in, where commentary sticks to its guns with one event or subject matter and expands upon only that. This feels different.

I would like to hear people's input on this after they've read this manga just to know that I am not going insane from overexposure to the Internet. I am willing to discuss it if anyone is interested.

So, yeah. That's all I wanted to vomit on this blog I guess. Read DeadDeadDemon's Dededededestruction. :)

[thorntonkrell-blog-blog]

What's good, y'all?

Yeah the Riv is another liar that you can trust. The liar paradox suggests that if I'm a liar then I'm lying about being a liar

Is everybody happy? Of course not all the time but some of the time every day. A strong suggestion to the Riversend congregation.

We are a congregation without obligation nor confrontation which makes us omninondenomenational practicioners of prolife choice.

Yeah we juxtapose

Nyukayayum.

I know who I am.

You know who you are.

I know more about who we are than you do because I alone see the sign in sheets which are not to be construed as attendance sheets. Nobody's taking attendance and we're keeping our secrets.

Many of us here have suffered and continue to suffer as the winds blow wide and right.

You may be wondering where is everybody. I assure you that everybody is here in varying degrees of intensity and frequency…waves and particles…epiphanies and processes. Sometimes we entangle and arrive together simultaneously in two different places stunned by our mutual discoveries of ignorance and uncertainity.

Everyday we learn something new about light which increases our humility which we tend to lie about anyways as we gain trust in one another.

Okay, this is getting a little cryptic but it's still a keeper. Not sure where it's coming from but it's getting closer and closer to the beginning.

Once upon a time on a subway wall I read this "God is dead" signed Nietzsche underneath which some one wrote. "No Nietzsche is dead" signed God.

Take a shot of ambiguity mix it with reflection and turn the power on to guestimate the condition of your and our condition/connection. So let us raise a toast to this captivating fusion of ambiguity and reflection, for within its embrace lies the essence of our shared humanity, beckoning us to explore, to question, and to revel in the mysteries that bind us together. Here's to the river, everflowing before us.

Everybody's here again except for Nietszche and Fermi and billions of others. Most of us have been orphaned thousands of times including right now if we're lucky because very few of our parents would have preferred it to be the other way around. So let's make the most of it. so here we go again with the fleeting nature of existence, the vacation we all enjoy between infinities.

And what's Fermi got to do with this and who was he anyways?

Enrico Fermi was an Italian-American physicist who made significant contributions to nuclear physics and quantum theory. He was born on September 29, 1901, in Rome, Italy, and died on November 28, 1954, in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938 for his work on induced radioactivity.

One of Fermi's most famous achievements was his leadership of the team that constructed the world's first nuclear reactor, known as Chicago Pile-1, in 1942 as part of the Manhattan Project. This marked a crucial milestone in the development of nuclear energy and ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bomb.

Fermi's contributions to science and his role in shaping the course of human history serve as a reminder of the impact we can have on the world, despite the fleeting nature of our existence even those of us who are not here.

And Fermi came up with his own paradox which as an essenatial element of the metaphysiction and misunderstanding that is at the core of Riversend.

Yes, Enrico Fermi is also known for the Fermi Paradox, which raises a thought-provoking question about the apparent contradiction between the high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.

The Fermi Paradox stems from Fermi's observation during a casual conversation in 1950, where he questioned why, if extraterrestrial life is abundant and the universe is teeming with potentially habitable planets, we haven't yet detected any signs of intelligent alien life or been contacted by them.

That's when he famously asked "where is everyone" which we will confront in the next rivulet when the River flows on Friday when we lt the cat out of the bag and put it in the box as we edge our way to the beginning.

Let's face it, we've all got our hangups. The more we struggle to repress them, the more they retreat but never surrender. The best way to address them is through sleep, through dreams. If life is a vacation between infinities as some claim then why do we waste so much of it sleeping. On the other hand some say why do we waste so much of it waking as there are no dreams in heaven because there are no hangups to be annihulated where as in hell, the hangups have taken over and manifested into monstrosities as they sometimes do in the waking world before "after life" when humans become murderers which often times doesn't suppress the hangups that festered into monstrosities but rather feeds their fire and desire for more. In addition we spend too much time while awake thinking about death either our own or that of our loved ones. From birth we are conditioned to believe that everyone is going to die so we come up with all manner of imaginations to describe what will happen when that day comes although nobody and I mean NOBODY knows for sure as no traveler has ever returned from "that undiscovered country."

So while we "vacation" here, let's take opportunities like this to ponder invites us to ponder the meaning of life and death, the nature of existence, and the importance of confronting our inner struggles while we have the opportunity to do so. It prompts us to embrace the mystery of life and approach it with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to engage with the unknown.

What's good,y'all?

Today's Good.

Today's Friday.

Today's Good Friday.

Let's finish with Fermi who was paradoxically asking "where is everybody?"

We must keep in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Some in Riversend ask "if God exists where is he, she, they, it?. Where's the proof?"

Others ask, "what is where?". They contend that the concept of God transcends physical location or spatial constraints. God is everywhere and that's where where is. Where's the non-proof.

Where takes up a lot of space and time and that's what baffled Fermi who wasn't talking about God but rather about space.

His question, "Where is everyone?", encapsulates the puzzling notion that, given the age and size of the universe, along with the potential abundance of habitable planets, why we haven't encountered any clear signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

To which others might respond "ask Moses or Ezekial"

To which Fermi might respond, "I'm not talking about burning bushes or pillars of fire, I'm talking about ancient and/or future astronauts who might want to phone home before saving/destroying us."

To which Captain Kirk might respond, " Advanced civilizations have a principle of non-interference with less advanced civilizations and wil not interfere."

To which Spock might reply," Advanced civilizations may use communication methods or technologies that are completely different from ours, making it difficult for us to recognize or interpret their signals. It's also possible that intelligent alien civilizations simply have no interest in communicating with Earth. They may view Earthlings as insignificant or uninteresting compared to other pursuits in the universe which may or may not include Naked Love Slaves of Venus."

To which Professor Irwin Corey might respond, "what was the question?"

As we ponder the mysteries of the universe and the enigma of extraterrestrial intelligence, we are reminded of the profound significance of this day, Good Friday. Just as the search for answers in the cosmos may lead us to question our place in the vast expanse of existence, so too does the commemoration of Good Friday prompt reflection on themes of faith, redemption, and the mysteries of divine presence. In this juxtaposition of cosmic exploration and spiritual contemplation, we find ourselves navigating the vast unknowns of both the universe and the human soul, seeking meaning and understanding amidst the complexities of existence.

Which sounds a lot like prayer and feels a lot like dreaming.

Like if you like.

The River flows.

[born-to-kill]

hi! the mun’s name is joel and i am currently 26 years old.

Exploring themes of identity and self-discovery in a world rife with conflict and moral ambiguity.

RULES

Respect: Let's all treat each other with respect and courtesy at all times. Refrain from personal attacks, and avoiding any behaviour that may be considered disrespectful.

No Godmodding: Avoid controlling or dictating the actions or outcomes of other characters without their consent. Everyone has the right to have agency over their own character's actions and decisions.

Stay True to Character: Stay true to the established personalities and traits of the characters from the Metal Gear series. Try to accurately portray the character you're role-playing as.

Communication: Keep communication open and transparent. If there are any disagreements or misunderstandings with my portrayal, try to resolve them civilly through discussion and compromise.

Quality over Quantity: Focus on the quality of your role-play posts rather than the quantity. Take the time to craft your responses as there is no pressure to rush things out.

Stay In-Character: When posting as your character, stay in-character and avoid breaking immersion by discussing real-life topics or using modern language or slang that wouldn't fit within the setting of the Metal Gear series.

Have Fun: Above all, remember that role-playing is a collaborative and creative endeavour meant to be enjoyable for all participants.

BIO

Name: Raiden (real name: Jack)

Alias: Jack the Ripper, White Devil, Snake's Disciple

Background: Raiden, born Jack, was originally a child soldier in Liberia during the early 1980s. He was conscripted into a rebel army at a young age and forced to commit acts of violence and brutality under the command of his superiors. These traumatic experiences shaped him into a skilled and ruthless fighter, earning him the nickname "Jack the Ripper" for his prowess on the battlefield.

Joining the Military: After being rescued from the battlefield by Solidus Snake, Raiden was taken under the wing of the Patriots, a secretive organization manipulating global events from behind the scenes. He underwent extensive physical and mental conditioning, including cybernetic enhancements and VR training simulations, to become a highly skilled operative capable of carrying out the Patriots' agenda.

Shadow Moses Incident: Raiden's first major mission came during the Shadow Moses Incident in 2005, where he was deployed as part of a top-secret operation to infiltrate a nuclear weapons disposal facility in Alaska. Under the guidance of Solid Snake, Raiden faced off against a rogue group of terrorists led by Liquid Snake, uncovering a web of conspiracy and betrayal that would shape his destiny for years to come.

Big Shell Incident: In 2009, Raiden was assigned to the Big Shell, an offshore clean-up facility in the Hudson River, as part of a counter-terrorism operation known as "Operation Snake Eater." However, the mission quickly spiraled out of control when a group of terrorists seized control of the facility, threatening to detonate a nuclear bomb. Raiden, operating under the codename "Snake," was tasked with infiltrating the Big Shell and neutralizing the threat.

Revelations and Betrayal: During the course of the Big Shell Incident, Raiden uncovered shocking revelations about his own past and the true nature of the Patriots' control over his life. He learned that his memories had been manipulated and that he had been groomed from a young age to become a pawn in the Patriots' grand scheme. Feeling betrayed and disillusioned, Raiden struggled to come to terms with his identity and his place in the world.

Rebirth and Redemption: Following the events of the Big Shell Incident, Raiden underwent a period of self-reflection and transformation. He sought redemption for his past sins and resolved to break free from the control of the Patriots once and for all. With the help of allies such as Solid Snake and Otacon, Raiden embarked on a journey of self-discovery, ultimately reclaiming his humanity and forging a new path for himself.

Becoming a Cyborg Ninja: In the years that followed, Raiden underwent further cybernetic enhancements and became known as the "Cyborg Ninja," a formidable warrior with superhuman strength and agility. Embracing his new identity, Raiden continued to fight against tyranny and oppression, using his skills to protect the innocent and uphold justice wherever he went.

Fatherhood and Personal Trials: Despite his tumultuous past, Raiden found happiness and purpose in his relationship with Rosemary, a data analyst he met during the Big Shell Incident. The couple eventually married and had a son named John, whom they affectionately called "Little John." However, Raiden's newfound happiness was short-lived as he faced personal trials and challenges, including the abduction of his son by a mysterious organization known as Desperado Enforcement.

Continued Struggle and Legacy: Throughout his journey, Raiden continued to struggle against powerful adversaries and forces beyond his control. He faced off against rogue military units, rival mercenaries, and even his own inner demons as he fought to protect those he held dear and preserve the fragile peace of the world. Despite the hardships he endured, Raiden remained determined to forge his own destiny and leave behind a legacy worthy of the title he had earned as a legendary warrior.

Legacy: Raiden's legacy lives on as a symbol of resilience, determination, and redemption. His journey from child soldier to cybernetic ninja is a testament to the strength of the human spirit and the power of hope in the face of adversity. Though his path has been fraught with hardship and sacrifice, Raiden continues to inspire others to stand up against injustice and fight for a better future for all.

VERESES

WIP

[denimbex1986]

'Popular responses to Christopher Nolan’s latest cinematic offering, Oppenheimer, have generally been positive, with the film generating unexpected commercial success given its length and subject matter. However, audience opinion has been polarized regarding the film’s political implications, bifurcating in accordance with the lines along which people have interpreted its ideological content. Some have read Oppenheimer as an indictment of its titular character, typically praising the film for not shying away from the physicist’s personal shortcomings (like his arrogance or infidelity) or attempting to justify them.

For them, the film also shows Robert’s complicity in the most devastating war crime ever committed by foregrounding such details as his justification for continuing the Manhattan Project post-Hitler’s suicide and his refusal to sign Leo Szilard’s petition against dropping the bombs on Japan. Another strand of popular discourse, however, has gone the other way and accused Nolan of whitewashing the image of J. Robert Oppenheimer by de-emphasizing the horrific outcomes of his actions (such as by keeping the harrowing images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offscreen) and portraying him as skeptical when it comes to atomic weaponry by glossing over his moral culpability in making them possible.

For this latter camp, the film’s decision to utilize Oppenheimer’s victimization at the hands of the Gray board as a framing device to bookend the narrative meant a shift in perspective from ‘Oppenheimer as perpetrator’ to ‘Oppenheimer as victim.’ For still others, the film has seemed to be a balancing act between these two contradictory tendencies, with the criticism and the sympathy canceling each other out to varying effect: for some, a fair representation of a complicated historical figure, while for others, a politically-toothless blockbuster looking to cover all bases.

Despite the differences between these positions, the common axis around which they revolve concerns a moral assessment of Oppenheimer as an individual, both as a man sustaining frayed personal relationships and as the physicist who made nuclear warfare possible. The film gets read merely as an exploration of Oppenheimer’s guilt, with opinions differing as to the success or failure of the depiction. The questions implicitly posed by such discourse tend to be of the following type: How are we to think of Oppenheimer and his legacy more than eight decades after the inception of the Manhattan Project? How should history judge this complicated figure, and what lessons could we draw regarding brilliant (but flawed) individuals occupying positions of power during times of global crisis?

Such considerations, while valuable, nevertheless seem too restricted to the level of the individual and inevitably miss the most crucial point to be derived from Oppenheimer, one underscored by its closing scene involving an ominous exchange between Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. “When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world,” says Robert, recalling a previous meeting between them.

Einstein confirms that he remembers the meeting well, and then Oppenheimer’s spine-chilling follow-up comes: “I believe we did.” The film ends with a montage of nuclear warheads launched, eventually engulfing the planet and triggering atmospheric ignition, cross-cutting with grief-stricken close-ups of Cillian Murphy’s face. Of course, Oppenheimer doesn’t refer here to having started an actual nuclear reaction and set fire to the atmosphere, which was the genuine worry at hand during his prior meeting with Einstein. Instead, he draws a revealing parallel between nuclear weapons and the scientific-military-industrial complex that facilitates them by analogizing the chain reaction that characterizes them both–forever threatening to spiral out of control with catastrophic consequences.

In these final images of the film, the fear and grief writ large on Oppenheimer’s face thus have little to do with either atmospheric ignition or even the specific dangers posed by nuclear weaponry. They reflect, instead, his confrontation with a final revelation – one that comes perhaps too late in his own life. It’s an acknowledgment of the tragic course taken by scientific reason in general (“the culmination of three centuries of physics,” as his colleague Isidor Rabi put it), which seems to lead inevitably to a paradox through its weaponization. The grand institution of science and technology, long heralded as the flagbearer of enlightenment rationality and progress, seems to produce scenarios that violently contradict its own utopian ambitions with the existential threats it generates.

The more pertinent questions raised by the film then become the following: How come “three centuries of physics” ultimately lead to a paradoxical scenario where its progress becomes the foundation for an existential threat, despite peerless geniuses like Oppenheimer and Einstein being fully cognizant of such dangers? And what does this indicate regarding our pursuit of technological progress itself, usually widely accepted as an unquestioned universal good? This essay shall probe such questions through a reading of Oppenheimer, which aims to bring forth and examine these fundamental contradictions (mirrored by the film’s contradictory characterization of Oppenheimer himself) and thus interpret the film as an alarming representation of the tragedy afflicting the very heart of our project of scientific-technological modernity.

The Tragic Subject of Oppenheimer

As the film opens with Oppenheimer reading his statement to the members of the Gray board security hearing, the first introduction we get to this character is through a flashback to his days spent at Cambridge, where he attempts to poison his tutor Patrick Blackett (James D’Arcy) with a cyanide-laced apple after being antagonized for his subpar laboratory work. This early instance of a young Robert responding under duress and lacking control over a situation almost instinctively with the urge to kill seems to foreshadow his eventual historical legacy–as the man fated to spearhead the single most violent act of death and destruction in human memory.

It’s tempting to read this sign as indicative of the ‘tragic flaw’ within Oppenheimer, which, despite his best intentions, sets him down a dark, winding path and ultimately becomes his undoing. But, as we shall see, such attempts to locate the roots of tragedy within Oppenheimer, arising from his personal attributes, would be to misrecognize how the tragic element manifests across the film’s narrative.

As per the classic Aristotelian theory of tragedy, hamartia (most commonly translated as ‘tragic flaw’) is responsible for the series of events affecting a movement from a state of felicity to disaster for the tragic hero, bringing about their downfall. Traditionally, hamartia has been understood to be some inherent character defect that gets in the way of the (otherwise virtuous) hero’s attempts to retain control over their fate and, as such, the possibility of depicting the downfall of a wholly virtuous (or villainous) character, as tragedy, was ruled out.

Later critics like Jules Brody have contested this interpretation of hamartia and insisted that it be understood as a morally neutral term, indicating a chance accident. It’s deemed an unforced error that leads the hero to ‘miss the mark’ (literal translation of the verb hamartanein). Like an archer inadvertently missing their mark, not due to lack of trying or inherent moral deficiency, tragedy manifests as a contingency that unalterably sets the course towards downfall. As opposed to the classical notion, this interpretation of hamartia emphasizes its externality and autonomy relative to the character: tragedy, in this vein, is that which strikes not because one is inherently flawed (for then their downfall is merely the comeuppance they already deserved) but due to something that lies radically outside the bounds of one’s will.

However, neither of these two interpretations of hamartia fits the tragedy of Oppenheimer, for they oscillate between locating it either entirely within the character or entirely without them while positing the character’s actions as the site where the tragic element takes root. To take the classic example of Oedipus Rex, where Oedipus fails to recognize his father Laius at the crossroads and kills him, the tragic error is attributed either to Oedipus’ hasty behavior because of his hubris (as per the classical notion) or to sheer bad fortune. But in both cases, it’s something that Oedipus (and Oedipus alone) does that actualizes the tragedy.

In both cases, Oedipus’ actions evince regret in him, and if he could’ve gone back in time and done things differently, it’s clear that he would’ve avoided slaying the man he meets at the crossroads. This isn’t true, however, for Oppenheimer. As the character of Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) reminds us, Robert never once admitted to having regrets over Hiroshima and that “if he could do it all over, he would do it all the same.” Admittedly, the latter claim isn’t a factual observation but something that Strauss rhetorically puts forth to make his case against Robert. Still, it does lead one to wonder: What precisely could Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer have done differently, had he the chance to turn the clock back, so as to effect any different outcome?

He certainly couldn’t have stopped the nuclear race from ever starting, for that becomes inevitable the moment the atom is split by scientists in Nazi Germany and, a year later, World War II breaks out. Perhaps he could’ve more strongly opposed the decision to bomb Japan. Yet this argument misses the fact that the hindsight with which we now assert that the Japanese surrender wasn’t due to the bombs but rather the USSR’s entry into the war on 9th August 1945, was not something that was prophetically available to Oppenheimer who, like his fellow scientists, could only act based on information fed to him by the US military. Further, it is known that Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur, and even Truman’s chief of staff Leahy, went on record to condemn the atomic bombs as “either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both,” and yet Truman went ahead anyway.

It’s fair to say that a “humble physicist” like Oppenheimer, especially with his personal “questionable associations,” could have done little to sway Truman. This isn’t to absolve Oppenheimer of all personal responsibility or claim that he always acted ideally. But it is to assert that the question of the violent trajectory taken by scientific rationality–culminating in nuclear weaponry but certainly not restricted to the bombings in Japan–cannot simply be reduced to the individual decisions taken (or not) by Oppenheimer (and other scientists like him), regardless of whether these decisions were motivated by inherent tragic flaws or brought about by chance circumstances.

We thus note how the existing notions of hamartia are ill-equipped to adequately account for the tragedy of Oppenheimer and preclude the possibility of deriving a politicized critique: the classical notion attributes all responsibility to the individual afflicted by the tragic flaw. In contrast, the latter notion leaves it all to accident. What’s necessary here is a way of configuring hamartia that situates it neither entirely within a character nor without them. Instead, it accounts for the dialectical relationship between inner subjectivity (acting upon outer reality) and external structures (determining and constraining the subject from within).

After all, the ‘tragic flaw’ manifests as most tragic precisely when it appears to be located within, leading us to proclaim the character as inherently flawed, even as its ultimate genesis lies elsewhere. Hamartia, in this case, must thus be located as being extimate to the character – deriving from the Lacanian concept of “extimacy,” a portmanteau of the two mutually contradictory words “external” and “intimacy.” Extimacy refers to a dissolution of the usual demarcation between interior and exterior and thus reframes the question of hamartia – no longer understood as some moral deficiency but rather as a mode of subjectivity volitionally adopted by the character as their own, but which nevertheless is founded in the external structure that produces the subject.

To view the ‘tragic flaw’ in the narrative as extimate to Oppenheimer is to insist that it operates through him, even as its origins remain radically outside him. As shall be discussed in the next section, this shows up in the film as Robert’s significant psychical investment in Enlightenment-era rationality–as embodied in the ideals of scientific progressivism and bureaucratic due diligence–a structure of which he is a product through and through. As the film unfolds, this structure unravels for Oppenheimer to reveal at its heart a gnawing irrationality, manifesting through his often contradictory behavior as well as the rising sense of a loss of control (which Einstein also brings up in the final scene) and the tragic realization of his own helplessness in the face of it all.

Enlightenment and its Discontents

Regardless of the wide variety of opinions out there regarding Oppenheimer, there seems to be a near-universal agreement in describing him as a deeply contradictory character, something that Nolan’s film also evokes in numerous ways. Edward Teller’s (Benny Safdie) testimony of Robert’s actions as “confused and complicated” may not have been entirely fictional, and we see how the Gray board leverages the apparent contradictions in Oppenheimer’s behavior (like his shifting position with respect to the H-bomb) to persecute him.

Additionally, Robert often behaves in ways that undermine his personal position, like admitting to prosecutor Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) that the communist Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) is still his friend. We also see him arguing more than once that the scientists’ role as creators of the bomb does not give them any greater right to dictate whether it’s used, even as we see him doing precisely the same while convincing his colleagues of the need to unleash the bomb despite Nazism no longer being a threat.

Oppenheimer’s contradictions can only be fathomed if we first recognize that he’s a Kantian liberal subject through and through, implicitly following the rational framework elaborated by Immanuel Kant in his seminal essay “What is Enlightenment?”. The path to Enlightenment, Kant wrote, lay in maintaining a clear separation between private and public uses of reason and in having a state form that freely allowed the maximization of both. Put simply, the difference is as follows: private use of reason refers to executing one’s assigned duties in the specific role (teacher/scientist/lawyer/banker, etc.) one occupies within civil society, whereas public reason refers to performing one’s greater duty towards society as a whole, i.e., by speaking out and protesting, according to one’s convictions, against that which threatens the so-called “common good.”

With the one hand, you oil the wheel that turns (for that is your job), and with the other, you mend the spokes that are broken –this seems to be the model of Enlightenment rationality that also governs Oppenheimer. “Argue as much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!” wrote Kant, his blueprint acting as an injunction to people to speak out against the status quo as and when necessary, but not at the cost of neglecting their duties (for without the latter, society itself would break down).

One clearly sees this tension between ‘arguing’ and ‘obeying’ play out in the film through (among other things) Oppenheimer’s engagement with the communists, neither officially joining them nor entirely giving up on their cause. Oppenheimer is quick to ‘argue’ alongside his fellow members of the F.A.E.C.T when it comes to showing solidarity with “farm laborers and dock workers” and insisting that “academics have rights too.”

He is also quick to ‘obey’ when Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) convinces him of the need to tone down his political activity so that he can do his duty, showing the ability to be “pragmatic.” It’s fascinating to see how Robert goes out of his way to inform the authorities about Eltenton (Guy Burnet) because it’s his duty as a law-abiding citizen to report espionage attempts. Yet, he also resists the persistent Colonel Pash (Casey Affleck) to keep Chevalier’s name concealed, spinning lies that would return to hurt him later.

In fact, Robert’s lifelong commitment to ‘arguing,’ i.e., not letting the exigencies of private ends trammel over public reason, is precisely what separates him from Lewis Strauss, whose perspective is taken up in the parallelly-running storyline shot in black and white. While Strauss has spent his whole life climbing the social ladder by greasing the right palms and pleasing the right people, Oppenheimer, in contrast, was (in)famous for speaking his mind (almost to the extent of seeming arrogant) and standing up for causes he believed in, regardless of potential political backlash.

It’s telling that when the senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) was pushing the question of who targeted Oppenheimer and why, Strauss mentions that “Robert didn’t take care not to upset the power brokers in Washington” (which undoubtedly Strauss always took care to), before recounting the tale of his humiliation in the case of exporting isotopes to Norway. Oppenheimer’s real ‘crime,’ for which Strauss takes it upon himself to punish him, lay in this insistence on always keeping private and public reason separate and for not backing down on his stance against further nuclear armament or paying enough importance to influential individuals to bow to them. His folly, perhaps, lay in thinking that the state structure was rational enough to tolerate the same.

Underlying this two-pronged mode of rationality that Oppenheimer embodied is the assumption that the exercise of reason can act as it’s own corrective, i.e., the threat of rationality leading us into error and excess is countered by rationality itself, in recognizing such dangers and undertaking appropriately rational countermeasures. Yet this would be to presume a state form that also functions rationally, where private and public uses of reason can be kept separate, which is only possible in an age of globalization under the aegis of something akin to “world government” as Lewis Strauss puts it in the film, which Oppenheimer imagines functioning through “the United Nations as Roosevelt intended.”

However, nearly two centuries after Kant, the world in which Oppenheimer finds himself is ruled by division and strife, where the imagined separation between private and public usage of reason often collapses – such as when it becomes the very duty of scientists to help fashion weapons of mass destruction, which contradicts their greater responsibility as rational agents to society at large. The Kantian model presupposes a state form that allows for both obedience and argument and thus leads to contradiction in situations where argument itself amounts to disobedience, like when Oppenheimer’s continued opposition to the H-bomb project is framed as a betrayal of his patriotic duties.

Nolan’s film shows us how nation-states’ fractured and warring imaginaries constantly undermine the promises of Enlightenment rationality – promises of scientific progress and peaceful prosperity – both on micro and macro scales. One of the dominant antagonisms staged throughout the film is between the US military’s policy of compartmentalization and the values of transparency and open communication that are key to the institution of science. “All minds have to see the whole task to contribute efficiently,” as Oppenheimer tells General Groves (Matt Damon), which really applies not just to the scientists working at Los Alamos but also to humankind in general, engaged in the Enlightenment project of reaping the benefits of scientific progress while protecting against its dangers. All humanity, setting aside mutual differences, must together see to dangers that threaten us on a planetary scale, whether nuclear bombs or the worry of climate change.

The essence of compartmentalization, which lies in damming the tendency of knowledge and information to circulate freely, shows itself to be irrational insofar as it seeks only to further private interests (in Oppenheimer’s case, that of the US military) at the cost of public ones. As Oppenheimer discovers, to his great horror, his hopes of international cooperation preventing the nuclear race from spiraling out of control seem utterly fanciful given the utmost hostility between the two world superpowers. The contradiction is made explicit with great force in the scene where Oppenheimer meets President Truman (Gary Oldman). He assures the President that the Soviets, too, have abundant resources to build a nuclear arsenal, hoping his reasoning sufficiently convinces the President to shut down Los Alamos and enter arms talks with the USSR.

In response, Truman’s Secretary of State James Byrnes (Pat Skipper) takes Robert’s observation to conclude the exact opposite, arguing that the USSR’s nuclear potential means that they have to “build up Los Alamos, not shut it down,” which shows how incompatible Oppenheimer’s rationality is within such a fundamentally irrational state. At this moment, Robert realizes the error he has been led to with his investment in Kantian rationality, its inherent contradictions growing steadily apparent, as he remarks to the President, “I feel like I have blood on my hands.” It’s one thing to imagine this blood to be representative of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, massacres which (as previously discussed) Oppenheimer wasn’t entirely responsible for and nor could have prevented singlehandedly.

But insofar as the line follows Byrnes’ conclusion, the blood on Oppenheimer’s hands should indicate something far ominous: that is, his involvement within the institution of science and technology – itself a part of the greater Enlightenment project of modernity – leading to a scenario where he has given humankind “the power to destroy themselves,” as Neils Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) puts it. The idea of Enlightenment, a word referring to the state of being illuminated, of the production of light to cast out darkness, thus attains perversion in the spectacle of the atomic explosion–popularly held to be “brighter than a thousand suns”– which paradoxically for Oppenheimer back then also necessarily represented the zenith of scientific progress that he had helped reach.

Technology as Revelation

That the zenith of scientific progress should appear as an act of bringing to light in Oppenheimer perhaps hints at something of the essence of this act of putting science into use, of “taking theory and turning it into a practical weapons system,” as Robert tells Groves. For the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the essence of technology lay in revelation–understood as the movement from a state of concealment to unconcealment. “Technology is a mode of revealing,” wrote Heidegger in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” referring to how science apprehends the natural world to bring forth what would have eluded us otherwise.

We need only think of some of the earliest examples of human technology to get the point across: the harnessing of fire, for example, reveals the nutritional value concealed within plants and animals to be used as sustenance, while the plow that turns the earth reveals the fertility of the soil that’s otherwise inaccessible. It was crucial for Heidegger that we do not fall into the usual trap of imagining technology as something neutral in itself, as merely instrumental means to ends, its purpose defined entirely by how humans use it. To imagine technologies as disparate as the windmill and the atomic bomb as mere instruments at the mercy of humans, while not technically incorrect, reduces them to a false equivalency that obscures their vastly differing essences.

More importantly, it obscures their telos, i.e., their ultimate (intended) purpose, which must also be held responsible for their creation in the first place, for no one imagines that the telos driving the manufacture of windmills and atomic bombs to be anything similar. Thus, for Heidegger, it’s important that we apprehend technology’s essence as ‘revelation’ so that we may better appreciate how the technologies we use constrain (and are constrained by) the realities they bring forth. Revelation in this manner, for Heidegger, thus involves a “bringing-forth,” i.e., something is brought forth from obscurity and into sight. The windmill, for example, can tap into currents of air and bring forth the same as electrical currents, which can then be harnessed as electricity.

The idea of technology as a mode of revealing is acknowledged most directly in Oppenheimer during the scene where Secretary of War Henry Stimson (James Remar) discusses dropping the bomb on Japanese cities, and Robert describes it as “a terrible revelation of divine power.” That the bomb’s power is defined as divine (god-like and thus not of the world of humans) is, of course, no mere coincidence, and harks back to the now-infamous line from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by Oppenheimer, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” typically misunderstood to imply Robert’s identification with the figure of death, given his role in pioneering the atomic bomb.

In the Gita, however, it is told to Arjuna by Krishna, the latter taking on the form of Vishnu’s multi-armed self and thus refers to a moment of identification between death and divinity. Death appears to Arjuna in the form of Vishnu (and to Oppenheimer in the form of the atomic explosion) as something terribly divine, something so otherworldly that he, a mere mortal, cannot possibly hope to comprehend or control it. Later, following the Hiroshima bombing, we hear Truman on the radio describe the bomb as “a harnessing of the basic powers of the universe.” Read together, the technology of the atomic bomb can thus be described as a harnessing of the basic powers of the universe so as to effect a revelation of divine power.

The paradox becomes apparent: what’s harnessed is that which belongs to the fundaments of this world, even as what’s revealed feels like something otherworldly (transcending the limits of the human) – as if to imply the presence of the otherworldly (albeit concealed) within the very building blocks of our reality. Once again, we have here a relation of “extimacy,” in that technology takes the base matter of our world (its natural resources and the physical laws governing them) and contrives it to reveal something that appears external to us insofar as it threatens to exterminate the world.

It is this trait of modern technology, as seen most visibly in atomic bombs but certainly not limited to them, to ultimately objectify its subjects (i.e., human beings), becoming external and even opposed to them concerns Heidegger. He characterizes the logic governing modern tech as a “challenging-forth,” a “setting-upon,” that separates it from older technology where the revelation involved was merely a “bringing-forth.” He contrasts the windmill, which simply taps into air currents already flowing, with the modern activity of coal mining: “. . . a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore.

The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit”. The difference between the windmill’s “bringing-forth” and the coal miner’s “challenging-forth” is that the former resembles receiving gifts from Mother Nature doled out generously. At the same time, the latter is active exploitation of nature, motivated by the single capitalist logic of “maximum yield at minimum expense.”

Revelation as “challenging-forth” thus affects a pretty different kind of unconcealment that Heidegger describes: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve”. The phrase derives from the idea of standing armies forming the military reserve forces. It refers to a peculiar ordering of natural elements wherein they stand by, at hand, and ready for use instead of being freely scattered within the world in their natural forms.

Oppenheimer neatly illustrates the idea through the recurring imagery of spherical glass bowls being gradually filled with marbles, representing increasing quantities of refined uranium and plutonium, standing by, ready to be used as fissile material. This process represents how science and technology reveal the contents of our world as mere means, as things to be used to achieve our desired ends, and not as ends in themselves. The logic of technology subjects humans to a view of the natural world as something that exists only for the purpose of being harnessed for profit, overriding the idea of its existence in its own right.

The problem with this logic of turning nature into the “standing-reserve” is, of course, that eventually, it extends to humans themselves – humans who, as part of the same natural world, are also made part of the “standing-reserve” of science and technology. “The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this,” writes Heidegger. It is to effect a depreciation in the value assigned to humanity itself. It marks that moment wherein technological revelation starts appearing as something external to humanity – external insofar as technology now seems turned against humans themselves and thus out of their control. Indeed, that is how the “terrible revelation of divine power” must have appeared to the hundreds of thousands massacred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who became mere fodder for imperialist war games and who tellingly don’t appear in Oppenheimer except in the form of mere statistics.

Modern technology, thus, as a form of revealing that “challenges-forth” and turns nature into the “standing-reserve”, contains within itself a paradox: As humans keep utilizing scientific knowledge to exploit the natural world for profit and using the profit to further its technologies to better exploit nature (not unlike a chain reaction), eventually the logic of natural exploitation – now magnified manifold – threatens to engulf humankind itself.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Oppenheimer is the realization that this existential threat is not well appreciated until it gets displayed in some form, as when Robert justifies continuing the Manhattan Project despite Hitler’s death, claiming this would encourage deterrence. By insisting that “they won’t fear it until they understand it, and they won’t understand it until they’ve used it,” Oppenheimer directly invokes the logic of revelation–for if technology is a mode of revealing, as Heidegger insists, it seems like the culmination of technological progress must consist in the revelation of its own catastrophic potential, so that we may learn to curb the same before it’s too late.

Oppenheimer beyond Oppenheimer

In an interview about the film, Oppenheimer’s co-producer Emma Thomas describes it as a “cautionary tale,” hoping it leaves viewers with more troubling questions than straightforward answers. But it’s hard to see how Oppenheimer can function as a cautionary tale as long as the discourse around it centers on an assessment of Oppenheimer himself and the story of his moral culpability and guilt. Understandably, popular opinion has fixated upon the depiction of the individual more so than anything else, given that Oppenheimer has been marketed as a biopic. Additionally, the buzz around Nolan’s decision to write his screenplay in the first person so as to tell the story from Oppenheimer’s subjective perspective undoubtedly contributed to prejudice regarding the film’s ambitions, shifting the focus to the man himself rather than the story unfolding around him.

But what this decision does for the film is actually quite the opposite, i.e., by locking the viewer onto Oppenheimer’s perspective, the film eschews a moral judgment of Oppenheimer himself (for that requires us to view him objectively). It encourages a questioning of the structures that made this tragedy possible. In watching the film, the audience is made to feel like “we’re on this ride with Oppenheimer” (as Nolan put it), and this formal identification with the protagonist dissuades attempts to make it all about him, as has primarily been the case with previous attempts at telling the story of the atomic bomb. The idea isn’t dissimilar to the proverbial walking of a mile in someone else’s shoes, which indicates a movement away from making that person the sole object of one’s critique.

It is here that popular discourse around the film, centering on a moral judgment of Oppenheimer and his guilt, falls short: the more significant point alluded to by the film’s closing moments isn’t about whether Oppenheimer was the devil for having commandeered the Manhattan Project to success or a saint for advocating arms control. It certainly isn’t about the role of individual responsibility in overseeing projects of seismic importance (as if a different set of personnel could’ve ensured a different historical outcome). It’s easy enough to investigate some tragic event and have the buck stop with some individual figure to arrive at some scapegoat upon whom responsibility is pinned in order to be relieved of the labor necessary to interrogate systemic factors that keep reproducing such tragedies.

To the extent that Oppenheimer portrays its titular character as flawed, it’s also careful to show us that Robert himself was acutely aware of his flaws and felt remorseful. And as his friend Chevalier notes: “Selfish and awful people don’t know they are selfish and awful.” But it’s precisely by presenting this sympathetic portrayal of the man Oppenheimer that the film encourages a more careful reading of his position within the scientific-bureaucratic apparatus, one that transcends individual specificities, suggesting a sense of fatality with which the events of the movie are tainted and imploring us to derive a critique of this apparatus itself.

Of course, the film is about Oppenheimer’s life and work and depicts the same in detail, but this focus on the man himself is not an end in itself but merely the means to get beyond the man and explore what made, drove and ultimately tormented him. Paradoxical as it may sound, given the film’s text, the title of Oppenheimer may be less of a reference to the famous physicist himself and more of an indication of the historical subject position that was once occupied by Robert but now endures despite him.

In numerous interviews, Nolan has mentioned how scientists working in AI often refer to the current AI explosion as their ‘Oppenheimer moment.’ In revisiting and rethinking the story of the nuclear bomb, perhaps it’s time that we stopped obsessing over what Oppenheimer could or should have done differently and instead broach the question of how such ‘Oppenheimer moments’ arise in the first place and how to tackle them. How come new developments in science and technology often strike us with fear and alarm when we should be rejoicing in the potential benefits they could bring us all? How come when news of developments in computerization, automation, and AI technologies hit the stands, the popular reaction is often one of dismay, stemming from fears of losing livelihoods rather than one of celebration?

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man; for this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity,” the movie’s opening frames inform us. Going by the film’s narrative, it’s easy to imagine that this refers to Oppenheimer’s persecution by the Gray Board under the animus of Lewis Strauss. But Prometheus was punished by the gods from whom he stole fire, not by men. Neither was Prometheus punished for regretting and having hopes of going back on his act, which happens in the case of Oppenheimer and the bomb. So, the ‘torture’ referred to in the quote has nothing to do with the tarring and feathering Oppenheimer undergoes throughout the film, culminating in him losing his security clearance for trying to minimize the fallout from his invention.

Instead, the idea of ‘stealing fire from gods’ in Oppenheimer’s case refers instead to the laws of physics and their harnessing by the institution of science and technology, which gives men such terribly divine powers as the atomic bomb. Being tortured for eternity, then, in this case, means living with the horror and fear that our technological progress can, at any moment, become our undoing. “Chances are near zero,” as we are told repeatedly, but that doesn’t stop Fermi from taking side bets on atmospheric ignition. It is this element of non-zero chance, this uncertainty that paradoxically (re)appears at the end of a long process of scientific inquiry and development based on values of certitude, that strikes as most tragic – that the hallowed project of gaining control over the natural world for human benefit has led to a real possibility of loss of control and human extinction.

In the film, Einstein astutely notes this to be a trait characterizing the “new physics” when Robert first comes to him with Teller’s troubling calculations, observing how they are “lost in your (i.e., Oppenheimer’s) quantum world of probabilities, and needing certainty.” But of course, it isn’t as if quantum mechanics itself introduces uncertainties into our world so as to destabilize it; rather, quantum mechanics – itself the culmination of “three centuries of physics”– only reveals the uncertainties that have long inhered in the world and in the scientific project itself, but which so far have remained concealed. Small wonder then that Bohr’s character insists that what they have is not just a new weapon but a new world.

Thus, rather than deriving a critique of Oppenheimer himself, a man long dead and gone, a far more fascinating and important discussion to be had from Nolan’s Oppenheimer would be regarding the ‘criticality’ of scientific reason itself. The notion of criticality, as used in the film, refers to that stage during which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, beyond which it becomes ‘supercritical’ and proceeds towards explosion. The institution of science in today’s world is similarly self-sustaining insofar as its narrative of technological progress requires no additional justification, insofar as even our response to science’s dangers usually tends to be more science.

Like a chain reaction, scientific progress feeds capital, which in turn feeds science and so on – a juggernaut advancing so autonomously as to almost be insulated against external criticism and the possibility of applying brakes. And carrying with it, all the time, the risk of ‘supercriticality’ – from CO2 emissions causing global warming to developments in AI causing job losses or worse, and so on. It’s precisely this tragic course of events, from rationality and control to irrationality and loss of control, irreducible to the individual and instead requiring deeper systemic interrogation of the fundamental assumptions underlying technological modernity, that Oppenheimer allegorizes in its tale of the atomic bomb and the man who fathered it.

The film lays bare the irrationality at the heart of the Enlightenment project of scientific progress and the paradoxes it leads to, mirrored by the paradoxes of the quantum world and manifesting in Oppenheimer’s contradictory subjectivity and the final tragic realization that despite his crucial role in the making of the bomb there was perhaps very little he alone could have done to change the course of history, a history that through his participation he also helps actualize.'

[at-the-end-of-days]

So here’s… something.

And what does that mean?

Well, to me, I think it means that no war with China or with Russia is going to happen in 2023.

Why? Because if we take Revelations at face value (and many don’t, it’s the end of the world and why should they?) then we know that a huge amount of people are doomed to die. That everything in the ocean pretty much is doomed to die.

I don’t know about all of you, but if the oceans are supposed to be empty ish by 2050? There’s no way they’d recover from a nuclear war in time for Armageddon in the next 25 years to even have anything to empty.

And we know that something is going to happen at the Temple.

What could possibly defile it more.. than to host an animal sacrifice on its steps, and to drive out the Islamic population that’s within the mosque already sitting there?

https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Michael_Zank/Jerusalem/domeoftherock.html#:~:text=The%20Dome%20and%20Al%2DAqsa,mashhad%2C%20a%20shrine%20for%20pilgrims.

Yes, there’s a holy site to Christians and Jews there. But there’s also a site for Muslims! Of great importance!

Do we honestly believe that rebuilding a temple, a location, is worth hurting the people inside it? I, for one, do not believe that Muslims would so readily stand aside and let their place of worship be destroyed. And we have already seen so much violence within Israel.

That is assuming that any of the five cows do not grow a blemish, or a single discolored hair in the next year and a half. But let’s say that one cow out of the five does look perfect. That the priests, kept “pure” all this time, continue to be “pure.”

That the sacrifice takes place.

That the blood is scattered.

The animal burned.

Would not a great desolation be the harming of people within the temple?

Would not nations respond to such violence?

So my belief is that earthquakes and famines will arise and abound during the next year and a half. That the US economy and the world economy will teeter and that some places will do better than others.

But I do not believe a hot war will begin until after the slaughter of the cow.

And hey, if it does? Then I don’t think we’re at the end of days.

I think humanity *does* turn around. That after the war, we actually stop destroying our oceans, we fish more responsibly.

But I think, as a Christian… that I have to follow the word of the son of Nazareth before all else. And he said that some desolation would happen first, that the people of Israel would have to flee. I think.. that since we have red cows.. that we have a definitive timeline.. that while a war is coming… it isn’t the BIG ONE unless something happens at the Temple and all the people of Israel have to drop everything and run.

I could absolutely see, that a red heifer is brought to age, sacrificed.. and then the mosque is destroyed, and lives lost. And that in retaliation.. a bomb, or some gas attack, or a mini nuke, SOMETHING happens.. that sends everyone running for the hills.

Then the end begins.

[andrewtheprophet]

The Risk of Nuclear War in Ukraine: Revelation 16

Joe Biden warned his administration that the world may see its first nuclear strike in 77 years after learning that Russia could be ready to launch a bomb in the first year of the Ukraine war. Getty Images CIA estimated 50% chance that Russia would nuke Ukraine if it risked losing war: report Ronny Reyes The Biden administration scrambled behind the scenes to prepare for the imminent…

[biblenewsprophecy]

Olaf Scholtz says ‘Europe must enter a large-scale war economy’ while Germany increases its military spending

COGwriter

A reader from Italy sent something with the above tweet. Here is a machine-translated version into English of that tweet showing what Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholtz said:

Chancellor Scholz: has just released the following statement: “Europe must enter a large-scale war economy… We no longer live in times of peace”!

The above is consistent with the ride of the second horseman of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6:3-4).

Now, the last statement in the tweet above, by someone other than Olaf Scholz is machine-translated into English as follows:

For me it’s called madness!

While some may see that as madness, the move by Germany is consistent with biblical prophecies.

Regarding increased military spending by Germany, Deutsche Welle reported the following:

14 February 2024

German news agency DPA put the figure of the German government’s reported allocation for defense spending at $73.41 billion (€ 68.58 billion) in the current year which it said would be 2.01% of Germany‘s GDP.

In 2023, Germany spent 1.57% GDP on defense, well short of the 2% target. This Monday, however, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged tto {sic} meet the 2% spending commitment while on a visit to Rheinmetall’s future arms factory site. …

‘Unprecedented’ 11 % increase in defense spending — NATO Chief

News of Germany hitting the 2% spending target came as NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg praised an “unprecedented” 11% increase in defense spending in the 31-nation alliance. …

The latest developments regarding NATO members spending on defense come hot on the heels of former US President Donald Trump’s comments at a campaign rally in South Carolina during which he said Russia could “do whatever the hell they want” to any NATO country that did not spend enough on defense. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-to-hit-nato-budget-goal-for-1st-time-since-cold-war/a-68254361

Many German leaders have been calling for increased military spending (e.g. Germany’s Boris Pistorius urges a ‘change in mentality’ towards militarization and Karl-Theodore zu Guttenberg wants to break German dependence on the military of the USA) and it is beginning to happen.

Moves towards leading a European army independent of the USA are gaining traction in Germany and other parts of Europe.

The same Italian reader also sent me a link to the following (https://www.renovatio21.com/i-socialisti-tedeschi-vogliono-la-rimilitarizzazione-della-germania-e-la-bomba-atomica-per-lue/?amp=1), which was also machine-translated into English as follows:

German socialists want the remilitarization of Germany and the atomic bomb for the EU

14 February 2024

The upcoming Munich Security Council event will have many proposals on the agenda that require major changes in NATO’s position, including a thorough rethink of Germany.

Following the announcement late last week by the chairman of the Bundestag Foreign Relations Committee, Michael Roth (SPD), according to which Germany will have to spend much more than the planned additional 100 billion euros to strengthen its defense, the CDU defense politician Roderich Kiesewetter has shown he is open to a significant increase in the 100 billion euro special fund for the Bundeswehr. …

Then came the incredible statements from the SPD’s main candidate in the European elections, Katarina Barley, who says she doubts – even – that Europe can focus only on conventional weapons. Barley told the Tagesspiegel newspaper, when asked whether the EU needs its own nuclear bombs: “on the way to a European army, this could also become a problem.”

For the German socialist, in fact, the United States’ allies in Europe should not continue to rely on Washington for a nuclear deterrent, she said on Tuesday.

Barley, the top MEP from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), was asked to comment on recent remarks by US presidential candidate Donald Trump that Washington should not defend NATO allies that fail to reach their payment goals.

“In light of Donald Trump’s recent statements we can no longer rely” on the United States providing its nuclear umbrella to European NATO members, Barley told the Tagesspiegel . A “European bomb” could become a step forward towards a “European army”, he added, effectively opening the unimaginable atomic explosion even on the quiet soil of the old continent.

So, calls for a nuclear Europe, with its own nuclear bombs (Europe already has US nukes it could use).

A great European army will rise up according to the Bible:

16 … the king of the north … 25 … shall stir up his power and his courage … with a great army. (Daniel 11:16, 25)

Europe will be militaristically successful for a time per Revelation 13:3-4 and Daniel 11:39-43.

Europe, itself, will become the aggressor against the USA in the future per Daniel 11:39.

Europe already has PESCO, its Permanent Structured Cooperation–which it formed within a year of Donald Trump becoming President of the United States–his position was used as a reason, in my view, to accelerate the move towards a stronger EU military. Here is a link to a related sermonette video: PESCO and a Great European Army.

Europe is in the process of spending more on developing additional military technologies.

The Bible shows that a leader will arise in Europe who, though talking peace, eventually will destroy places like the USA, UK, and Canada:

24 His power shall be mighty, but not by his own power; He shall destroy fearfully, And shall prosper and thrive; He shall destroy the mighty, and also the holy people.

25 “Through his cunning He shall cause deceit to prosper under his rule; And he shall exalt himself in his heart. He shall destroy many in their prosperity. (Daniel 8:24-25)

39 Thus he shall act against the strongest fortresses with a foreign god, which he shall acknowledge, and advance its glory; and he shall cause them to rule over many, and divide the land for gain (Daniel 11:39).

25 And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes; but he shall be broken without hand. (Daniel 8:25, KJV).

23 And after the league is made with him he shall act deceitfully, for he shall come up and become strong with a small number of people. 24 He shall enter peaceably, even into the richest places of the province; and he shall do what his fathers have not done, nor his forefathers: he shall disperse among them the plunder, spoil, and riches; and he shall devise his plans against the strongholds, but only for a time. (Daniel 11:23-24, NKJV)

So this leader gives people the impression that there will be “peace” and is involved in some type of deal. This is the same leader that confirms the covenant in Daniel 9:27. The term is translated as “peace” in Daniel 8:25 is from the Hebrew term shalvah and essentially means security. In other words, this leader will destroy “many” who are under the impression that they are secure because of some type of security and/or trade arrangement. Such arrangements are now commonly referred to as peace deals or treaties.

He will eliminate the USA and its British-descended allies. But he will also want to control all that he can.

Notice more about the Beast:

1 Then I stood on the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name. 2 Now the beast which I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority. 3 And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast. 4 So they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast; and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?” (Revelation 13:1-4)

He will be a successful military leader and the world will marvel because of his defeat of the USA and other nations (cf. Daniel 11:39-43).

And he will arise talking peace.

Europe has long been preparing moves to rise up.

But it will happen after one or more crises (related to one, watch Fourth Horseman, COVID, and the Rise of the Beast of Revelation.).

The old Radio Church of God published the following:

Germany is … going to spark World War III! 

Notice the prophecies!

“O Asshur, the rod of Mine anger,” declares God. Here is a prophecy concerning Germany — the descendants of Asshur today! “The staff,” says God, “in their hand is Mine indignation. I will send him against an hypocritical nation (that is, Israel — America and Britain today), and… I will give him a charge to take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets” (Isaiah 10:5-6). …

God is going to punish us by the very nation whom we have tried to buy for an ally! It is God who is going to permit the revival of Nazism to punish us in World War III. We have won two major wars against Germany in one generation. But the third time God is going to punish us as we have never been punished before! The sword of war is going to strike us “the third time” (Ezekiel 21:14), and we are going to be led away captive to Assyria and to all nations (Isaiah 11:10-12).   

When our people have learned their lesson, and repented of their sins and quit breaking God’s law — the Ten Commandments — and surrender their lives to their Creator, we read in Isaiah 10:12-22: “Wherefore it shall come to pass, that, when the Lord hath performed His whole work upon Mount Zion and on Jerusalem” — when His people Israel and Judah have gone through trial and tribulation — “I,” declares God, “will punish the fruit of the stout heart of the king of Assyria, and the glory of his high looks. For he saith, ‘By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom; for I am prudent: and I have removed the bonds of the people, and have robbed their treasures, and I have put down the inhabitants like a valiant man: and my hand,’” continues the coming dictator of Germany, “‘hath found as a nest the riches of the people: and as one gathereth eggs that are left, have I gathered all the earth; and there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped.'(Hoeh H. Germany in Prophecy. Radio Church of God, 1958)

The old Worldwide Church of God published the following:

As long as prosperity exists, the German way of life will not change. As history clearly shows, however, a fall in the economy always means an alteration in the political course of the nation! Not only will Germany be affected, but the REST OF EUROPE as well. What will happen to Germany, will equally apply to all of Europe.

An economic problem in Germany — the economic heart of Europe — will affect all of Europe and force a UNIFICATION to prevent collapse. The DANGER TO AMERICA will then become most ACUTE. …

The Bible prophesies that this united European power will ATTACK and DESTROY America and Britain! (Boraker R. We Saw the New Germany! Good News, November 1967)

Yes, after a crisis, things will change and a reorganization that will bring unity under the Beast will occur per Revelation 17:12-13 (see also Must the Ten Kings of Revelation 17:12 Rule over Ten Currently Existing Nations?).

We have already seen a lot of reactions related to Russian incursion into Ukraine as well as Donald Trump. Other matters will spark other militaristic steps.

This will not end well for the USA or its British-descended allies.

Yes, Germany is rising up in a military way.

The days of the USA are numbered.

The German-European plan is for Europe to be a strong military power independent of the USA. And one that the Bible shows will ultimately defeat the USA (Daniel 11:39; see also USA in Prophecy: The Strongest Fortresses).

Although many in the USA and elsewhere act like that is not possible, those of us who understand certain aspects of biblical prophecy realize that the Bible shows that:

39 Thus he shall act against the strongest fortresses with a foreign god, which he shall acknowledge, and advance its glory; and he shall cause them to rule over many, and divide the land for gain. (Daniel 11:39)

The “he” above is the European King of the North. In the 21st century, the “strongest fortresses” belong to the USA and its British-descended allies (cf. Daniel 8:24-25; Isaiah 17:3)–and notice that the Bible says that the power with the strongest fortresses will be defeated.

Steps to create a great, German-dominated, European army are being taken now, with plans to do more in the future.

Related to that, the Continuing Church of God (CCOG) put together the following Bible News Prophecy video on our Bible News Prophecy YouTube channel:

15:06

Germany wants to lead a united Europe

Various leaders in German have pointed to a more unified, militaristic, and German-led Europe. After Russia’s ‘special military operation’ into Ukraine, Germany declared it would increase its military spending to the third highest level of any nation on the planet? German-Foreign-Policy.com reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants the European Union to play a powerful and more unified geopolitical role. Does what he is stating consistent with prophecies in the Book of Revelation about Europe reorganizing and turning power over to one called the Beast? Are some in Poland and Hungary (like Peter G. Feher) concerned about the domination of Europe by Germany? Is a European/German leader prophesied as the “King of the North” to make some type of a deal with a leader of nations in the Middle East and North Africa called the “King of the South”? Is that King of the North prophesied to have a great army and many ships? Could the Beast/King of the North be German? Did the old Worldwide Church of God warn back in 1980 that, in the future, the German people be concerned enough about Russia that it would call for a Bavarian strongman to lead them? Does the Bible point to such a leader rising promising peace? Steve Dupuie and Dr. Thiel address those issues.

Here is a link to our video: Germany wants to lead a united Europe.

Germany is re-arming.

A ‘fourth reich,’ where this time Germany will dominate Europe, etc.,  is in the process of being made, but it is not here yet.

But something that can be called that will arrive.

Related Items:

Europa, the Beast, and Revelation Where did Europe get its name? What might Europe have to do with the Book of Revelation? What about “the Beast”? Is an emerging European power “the daughter of Babylon”? What is ahead for Europe? Here is are links to related videos: European history and the Bible, Europe In Prophecy, The End of European Babylon, and Can You Prove that the Beast to Come is European? Here is a link to a related sermon in the Spanish language: El Fin de la Babilonia Europea.

Must the Ten Kings of Revelation 17:12 Rule over Ten Currently Existing Nations? Some claim that these passages refer to a gathering of 10 currently existing nations together, while one group teaches that this is referring to 11 nations getting together. Is that what Revelation 17:12-13 refers to? The ramifications of misunderstanding this are enormous.

USA in Prophecy: The Strongest Fortresses Can you point to scriptures, like Daniel 11:39, that point to the USA in the 21st century? This article does. A related sermon is titled: Do these 7 prophesies point to the end of the USA?

Who is the King of the West? Why is there no Final End-Time King of the West in Bible Prophecy? Is the United States the King of the West? Here is a version in the Spanish language: ¿Quién es el Rey del Occidente? ¿Por qué no hay un Rey del Occidente en la profecía del tiempo del fin? A related sermon is also available: The Bible, the USA, and the King of the West.

Who is the King of the North? Is there one? Do biblical and Roman Catholic prophecies for the Great Monarch point to the same leader? Should he be followed? Who will be the King of the North discussed in Daniel 11? Is a nuclear attack prophesied to happen to the English-speaking peoples of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? When do the 1335 days, 1290 days, and 1260 days (the time, times, and half a time) of Daniel 12 begin? When does the Bible show that economic collapse will affect the United States? In the Spanish language check out ¿Quién es el Rey del Norte? Here are links to two related videos: The King of the North is Alive: What to Look Out For and The Future King of the North.

The Great Monarch: Biblical and Greco-Roman Catholic Prophecies Is the ‘Great Monarch’ of Greco-Roman Catholic prophecies endorsed or condemned by the Bible? Two sermons of related interest are also available: Great Monarch: Messiah or False Christ? and Great Monarch in 50+ Beast Prophecies.

Germany’s Assyrian Roots Throughout History Are the Germanic peoples descended from Asshur of the Bible? Have there been real Christians in Germanic history? What about the “Holy Roman Empire”? There is also a You-Tube video sermon on this titled Germany’s Biblical Origins.

Germany in Biblical and Greco-Roman Catholic Prophecy Does Assyria in the Bible equate to an end time power inhabiting the area of the old Roman Empire? What does prophecy say Germany will do and what does it say will happen to most of the German people? Here is a link to a video Is the USA Pushing Germany to Start WWIII?

Lost Tribes and Prophecies: What will happen to Australia, the British Isles, Canada, Europe, New Zealand and the United States of America? Where did those people come from? Can you totally rely on DNA? What about other peoples? Do you really know what will happen to Europe and the English-speaking peoples? What about Africa, Asia, South America, and the Islands? This free online book provides scriptural, scientific, historical references, and commentary to address those matters. Here are links to related sermons: Lost tribes, the Bible, and DNA; Lost tribes, prophecies, and identifications; 11 Tribes, 144,000, and Multitudes; Israel, Jeremiah, Tea Tephi, and British Royalty; Gentile European Beast; Royal Succession, Samaria, and Prophecies; Asia, Islands, Latin America, Africa, and Armageddon;  When Will the End of the Age Come?;  Rise of the Prophesied King of the North; Christian Persecution from the Beast; WWIII and the Coming New World Order; and Woes, WWIV, and the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

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[tonyjonespastor]

Christmas Unwrapped

Pastor Tony Jones 

Trinity Central Church, Lansdale 

The Emirates Palace is a seven-star hotel in Abu Dhabi. Their week-long package is a snip at $1million and includes a private butler, a chauffeur-driven Maybach luxury car during your stay, as well as a private jet for trips to other countries in the region. The hotel is home to the world’s first gold ATM, and this winter to world’s most expensive Christmas tree. Unveiled this December and located in the gold leaf bedecked hotel rotunda it’s worth a staggering $11 million and is decorated with silver and gold bows, ball-shaped ornaments and small white lights. But the necklaces, earrings and other jewellery draped around the tree’s branches are what give it a record value. It holds a total of 18 diamonds, pearls, emeralds, sapphires and other precious stones. So how do you compete with a value like that? How about with the Christmas story? 

Because Luke wants us to see that even of that tree was ours at $11 million, it would be dwarfed in significance compared to the incalculable value of what Jesus came to bring us at Christmas. But as we turn to Luke 2, our problem is the story is too familiar. We approach it like someone living under a busy flightpath at JFK, so used to the roar of the engines they never no longer notice the planes. We’ve all grown up with the nativity story. And it’s been tamed and sentimentalized with the tinsel and the lights. But Luke’s nativity is not familiar, safe or tame. It’s a raw high intensity drama. 

The Christmas drama opens in v8. The location is a Palestinian hillside and the camera is closing in on some local herdsmen – and in the same region there were shepherds out in the field keeping watch over their flock by night. It’s a normal night’s shift just like any other. There’s nothing really to see. The duty shepherds are counting down the hours to dawn, probably bantering with each other – sitting around the cracking fire. But then, suddenly, without expectation or warning something momentous happens. One minute they’re talking in the blackness of the winter sky – and then – suddenly the next moment the whole sky is lit up in blinding light of the glory of God almost as if a flare or a nuclear bomb has just gone off - An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them. 

The word "appeared" here is the word from which we get the word “epiphany” ��� this is a sudden revelation. And it isn’t far off on the distant horizon, but upfront and personal. And it’s not pleasant. The sight is totally overwhelming. This is terrifying! Because what’s happening is that heaven is arriving on earth. And in the middle of the blinding light, an angel appears. Our problem is we sentimentalize this scene. We think of the angel as a cute little third grader with wings and tinsel. But the angel in the Old Testament is the agent of destruction and judgment. 

In Psalm 78:4 He sent upon them His burning anger, fury and indignation and trouble, a band of destroying angels. In Genesis 19:13 – the angels say for we are about to destroy this place, because their outcry has become so great before the Lord that the Lord has sent us to destroy it. In Isaiah 37:36 - Then the angel of the Lord went out and struck 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians; and when men arose early in the morning, behold, all of these were dead. And in 2 Thessalonians 1:7 – he will give relief to you who are afflicted and to us as well when the Lord Jesus will be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire. 

What the shepherds are expecting is their complete destruction. This is the final judgment of God. They’re finished – undone so v9 – and they were terrified. It’s such an understatement. The KJV is closer they were sore afraid but what the original actually says is that “they were terrified with a great terror”. This would be the terror you would feel on a plane you knew was going down. Or if you were caught up in a terror attack or a shooting on a city street. They were petrified - scared stiff - frightened to death - paralysed with fear – and horror struck. 

Yet – what the angel says is extraordinary. Do not be afraid. The word angel just means messenger. This figure is the ambassador of heaven on earth, an envoy. So this is not a personal opinion but the very announcement of heaven itself. This is the meaning of Christmas. This is the message of the gospel. And this is the mission of Jesus. What is the holy God’s message to rebellious sinners? We’d expect: “be afraid”. But it’s the reverse: do not be afraid. Because the mission of Jesus is not to bring condemnation but comfort. Not retribution but redemption. Not punishment but peace. And this isn’t a minor message of temporary comfort just for these guys that night. This announcement is of global magnitude. It’s cosmic, universal, eternal - good news of great joy for all the people. 

Good news here is the word ‘gospel’. And "Joy" is the Greek noun “chara”, the word from which we get our word charity – from the word “charis” meaning “grace” or “gift,” – and the word “great�� here is “megas” – from which we get our word “mega”. And the good news of mega grace – which is for all the people is that a savior has been born. 

To save is to rescue, to deliver, to set free. If I am trapped in a burning building and can’t get out, I need a fire-rescuer. If I’m drowning, I need a lifeguard, If I need to get to the hospital and can’t drive myself, I need an ambulance. When we need a rescuer, it is because we are in danger. And Jesus came not to save “us” from “them”, or from “it” but to save “us” from “ourselves” – because we are all headed for the eternal judgement of the holy God.But the savior has been born! 

In 2015 an asylum seeker was before a court in Leicester in the UK. The man in his 20s was ordered to pay the fee in June by another court and had appeared before him as a fine defaulter. The man’s inability to pay the fine would mean he would be further criminalised. As an asylum seeker, he cannot legally earn money and to do so could jeopardise his status as an asylum seeker. It was a Catch-22 situation. He could not pay but had to. But it’s what happened next that was extraordinary. The magistrate Nigel Allcoat, 65, decided to pay part of a £180 criminal courts charge levied on a refugee who appeared before him at Leicester Magistrates' Court three weeks ago. It was an incredible humanitarian act, but one that came with immense sacrifice. The punishment of the court fell on him, and he was suspended from the bench. 

And it’s like that for us. At Christmas Jesus was born into the world so that at Easter he might die for the world. On that first Christmas day, God became like us so that he might stand in for us. And take our place. But can this Jesus save me? Yes because of who this rescuer is. The name of this baby is breathtaking: Christ the Lord –Messiah the Lord. Infact this phrase is used nowhere else in the New Testament in exactly this way. It’s the highest conceivable and most lofty title in the cosmos. He is the Messiah Lord – the Lord Messiah. 

What heaven is announcing is that the long-expected king has at long last come! And the location is significant: Bethlehem. Royal David’s city because millennia before the prophet Micah writes: But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.... He will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God. And they will live securely, for then his greatness will reach to the ends of the earth. And he will be their peace." 

The point is that Christmas changes everything. The deliverer – the king has come! C S Lewis calls the incarnation is God’s great invasion. Just like the allies established gained that initial foothold, so the incarnation is the initial bridgehead, God’s great “D-Day,” where the rightful king landed to begin to reclaim his kingdom—this is the first phase of the conquest – the final phase will be the cross. This is of such cosmic significance it divides time into two ages. The Greeks tried to date time from their Olympiads. The Romans tried to date time from the founding of their imperial city. The French Revolutionists tried to date time from the year one of their revolution. The communists from the year zero. And all failed—miserably, yet our calendar is founded on his birth. He divides history into two epochs BC and AD. 

The problem is we are a sceptical generation. Is this for real? And can this be trusted? If these shepherds were in any doubt what happens next is off the richer scale. As the whole of heaven confirms this announcement – suddenly v13 a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests. The Greek word ‘host’ is a military term. It means "army." So here is the whole army of heaven. Warrior angels, who should be executing judgment are announcing salvation. 

But can I really be rescued? After what I’ve done – the affair the abortion – the good news of Christmas is yes. Good news of great joy for all the people and this Christmas revelation is not in the temple to the religious establishment or in the palace to VIP royalty but to outcast shepherds. 

The message of Christmas is – do not be afraid – to Joseph – do not be afraid – to Mary – do not be afraid - the shepherds do not be afraid – so it was Roosevelt who famously said “all we have to fear is fear itself” Yet the world of 2024 will be a scary place. What will happen in the 24? What are you frightened of? Geo-political conflict? The collapse of American culture? A wayward child? Your financial security? Worsening health? Bereavement? The darkness of the future? Being alone? Or death? The angel says do not be afraid. 

One of the most touching kids’ Christmas movies is Snoopy’s Christmas. And Linus loves his blanket, and carries it everywhere, and just cannot survive without it and really suffers when it is being washed. But Charlie Brown challenges Linus reliance on the blanky. And he reads the words of our angel – do not be afraid I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people: today in the city of David a savior is born to you: he is Christ the Lord. 

The problem is that we are all little Linuses. We all have security blankets for coping. What’s yours? A teddy bear? A bottle of whisky on tray? A scented candle. Your financial portfolio? Your spouse? The family? What is it that you seek comfort in, that makes you feel safe. The cartoon was written by Charles Shultz a Christian. And the security blanket stands as the picture of our coping mechanism in the face of fear. If we really understood Christmas and the Lord Christ born to save us, we would place all our trust I him. 

This Christmas come to the manger – to the Lord Christ – the saviour who will redeem us. And as you see the crib, see too the cross, and beyond it the crown. Trust in this king, and know his love and peace. And whatever 2024 might bring - do not be afraid! 

Pastor Tony Jones, Trinity Central Church. 

[keywestlou]

BIG DAY FOR SU…..SYRACUSE V. CLEMSON

BIG DAY FOR SU…..SYRACUSE V. CLEMSON - https://keywestlou.com/big-day-for-su-syracuse-v-clemson/Big day for Syracuse football. Syracuse v. Clemson. Battle of the undefeated. Clemson a 2 touchdown favorite. I don't know who will win. Of course I am pulling for Syracuse. Kick off at noon. The better team will be public knowledge later this afternoon. Goombay began last night. Can't share anything about it. I was not there and will not be. The walk too much for me. Whatever, a terrific event. Two evenings of family and neighborly fun. On this day in 1962, President John Kennedy went on national TV with fearful news. U.S. planes had discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba. Under construction, not yet complete. The news and what followed over the next few days extremely scary for the American people. Nuclear war a distinct possibility. It was kitchen table husband and wife discussions. How do we handle the situation? What about the children? Though young, they could sense something was amiss. We held them closer. Utica is 14 miles from Rome. Rome was home to the Griffiss Air Force Base, a SAC base. Any war and Griffiss would be one of the first to be hit with an atomic bomb. If such occurred, my family and I would be instantaneously wiped out. A year earlier, Kennedy spoke before the U.N. General Assembly. He said, "Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind." Russia did not get the message. A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked Biden's student loan program just as it was beginning. The stay may be short. Both sides must file papers no later than tuesday. A decision could be forthcoming within a matter of 7-10 days. Biden's program involves forgiving $10,000 in some instances, $20,000 in others. In a few, the entire debt. Those opposing the Biden program are 6 Republican states. It is amazing how Republicans can take this position. Republicans when in power or able to do so, pass huge tax cuts. Tax cuts that primarily benefit the rich. Trump did it big time during his  term in office. This same political party now begrudges a minor cut in student loan debt. Debt carried by the relatively poor as opposed to the very rich who benefit all the time from tax cuts. Kevin McCarthy this past week indicated that if Republicans took control of Congress in the elections scheduled in less than 3 weeks, there would be cuts in Social Security and Medicare. A new label for those Republicans who oppose student loan cuts and want to cut Social Security and Medicare: Pigs, mean pigs. A recent revelation re the Mar-a-Lago documents. Seems to be a new revelation every week. All bad for Trump. No question certain of the documents contained "highly sensitive" information. "Secret information" about Iran and China. Information as "bad as it can get." Query? Why did Trump take such secret information with him to Mar-a-Lago? Did he intend to make Mar-a-Lago a profit operation? Did he plan on selling the information? Whatever the motivation, the odds of Trump being criminally charged have accelerated as a result. It is reported the information re Iran described "Iran's missile program." Intelligence experts describe the information overall "so sensitive" because it endangers human resources aiding U.S. intelligence efforts, compromises collection efforts, and could lead to adversaries retaliating against the U.S. Steve Bannon received a 4 month jail sentence. I would have given him more. At least one year. He deserves as much for his open and frequent rejection of the law. He placed himself above the law. Told everyone he was so doing. Probably never expected to be punished for it. Bannon considered himself "special." He did not have to follow the law, no matter how simple, as most others are required. Amazing how his attitude is similar to that of Donald Trump. These men consider themselves a law unto themselves. Enjoy your day!