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[ by Charles Cameron — a strange and winding tale, from Frank Sinatra to Donald Trump with possible Babylonian intrigue, too ]
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There has been a quick flurry of news attention devoted to QAnon — a supposed high-clearance, deep-cover source leaking confidential “the truth from behind the curtain” so to speak, supporting a Pro-Trump pro-Mueller (!!) narrative:

causing Q ripples within conspiracy circles

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Here:

Tampa rally, live coverage,” wrote “Dan,” posting a link to President Trump’s Tampa speech in a thread on 8chan, an anonymous image board also known as Infinitechan or Infinitychan, which might be best described as the unglued twin of better-known 4chan, a message board already untethered from reality.

The thread invited “requests to Q,” an anonymous user claiming to be a government agent with top security clearance, waging war against the so-called deep state in service to the 45th president. “Q” feeds disciples, or “bakers,” scraps of intelligence, or “bread crumbs,” that they scramble to bake into an understanding of the “storm” — the community’s term, drawn from Trump’s cryptic reference last year to “the calm before the storm” — for the president’s final conquest over elites, globalists and deep-state saboteurs.

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Q-materials now have enough YouTube channels starting up daily than no single human can keep up with them, and I’m certainly not trying — but one Q-related social media post caught my eye recently:

because it reminded me of a book I’d bought years ago, possibly as early as 1999, when I was researching conspiracism around the 1999/2000 millennium bug scare:

featuring, if you can’t manage to read the small print or recognize the tiny photos, Bob Hope, whom she alleged was her owner, JFK, LBJ, Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Elvis, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis Jr, Reagan, who took her to visit Queen Elizabeth Ii to discuss a breeding program, it goes on and on.. Satanic ritual abuse, prostitution, porn, all under the auspices of MK_Ultra.. including cannibalism, human and animal sacrifice..

Hillary Clinton‘s alleged pedophile ring out of a Pizzaria basement had nothing on this Kennedy-Kissinger-Ford lot, and now Q seems to be corropobrating a variant on the same plot line…

For the Sarah Ruth Ashcrsft – Q connection see this tweet:

The #Hivites are openly threatening the anons & #TheGreatAwakening itself now, in addition to attacking #QAnon & @POTUS. They are showing their true colors. Gloves are off. They're in full combat mode, scrambling, hangry & naggingly terrified… #HangryHangryHivites #ByePhoenicia

— Sarah Ruth Ashcraft (@SaRaAshcraft) July 23, 2018

A recent QAnon video drop:

And the Royals? My book companion to the Bryce Taylor book was this one, about Prince Charles:

I may be a Brit, but fair’s fair, we have our conspiracists, too.

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Readings:

WaPo, ‘We are Q’: A deranged conspiracy cult leaps from the Internet to the crowd at Trump’s ‘MAGA’ tour

WaPo, QAnon: Meet a real-life believer in the online, pro-Trump conspiracy theory that’s bursting into view

WaPo, The mystery of ‘Q’: How an anonymous conspiracy-monger launched a movement (if the person exists)

WaPo, How QAnon, the conspiracy theory spawned by a Trump quip, got so big and scary

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I hope none of this will be confused with Bond’s Q and Q-bond — although Bond’s Q may be the inspiration for QAnon’s name, and Q-bond may make the whole Trump-Mueller duel/duet a whole lot tighter than it previously had been.

Oh, and Q for Quelle (source) is a supposed ur-gospel containing the sayings of Jesus, from which the evangelists may have borrowed..

[ by Charles Cameron — not entirely keen about Judgment, me, but.. ]
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Continuing on from my discussion of negative space in the painting, here’s the MSNBC clip I overheard waas on about:

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The clip, in other words, is about private morality in the public square.

Raw Story picks up there thread in a piece titled ‘Where are the preachers of America?’:

Evangelical leaders slammed for hypocrisy of Trump support:Former New York Times White House correspondent Howell Raines, who rose to executive editor of newspaper, called out the evangelical community during a Friday appearance on MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber.”

“I want to ask you about the negative space in the painting, the thing that’s not happening — that we are always told would happen — because the Christian right and the conservative values organizations and the evangelical right cared deeply about the personal behavior of politicians and especially the president,” Melber observed.

“The president now has squarely admitted to paying this woman in direct connection to the allegations of this extramarital affair,” the host continued. “I ask you for your view of why we’re not hearing any outrage for any of those groups affiliated with Donald Trump and the Republican Party.”

“Where are the preachers of America when morality is legitimately at the center of our national life?” Raines wondered. “I think Director Comey was correct today on CBS when he said this is about values and supporting our institutions and it’s imperative that Americans who believe in the normal political process and the rule of law start speaking out.”

“That’s what’s missing in the picture to me,” he concluded.

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That’s a significant question, to which various answers have been given — from a quick Google search:

The Nation, Why Evangelicals—Still!—Support Trump

Time, Why Evangelicals Support President Trump, Despite His Immorality

Atlantic, A Match Made in Heaven

but I’d like to leave — indeed emphasize — it as a question.

How come the hypocrisy?

And I think we should ask this, not as a question requiring a political answer, but as a moral question, hanging in the air, for the individual consciences of evangelicals to ponder..

I have my own hyposcrisies to consider..

[ by Charles Cameron — or, a samurai’s weapon glistens more brightly than an assault rifle ]
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Consider:

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And in case your object that the proposed assault weapon ban (upper image above) is stereotypically associated wwith active shooters in schools, not issues of love and romance, take this, from Does anyone have the right to sex? in the LRB:

On 23 May 2014, Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old college dropout, became the world’s most famous ‘incel’ – involuntary celibate. The term can, in theory, be applied to both men and women, but in practice it picks out not sexless men in general, but a certain kind of sexless man: the kind who is convinced he is owed sex, and is enraged by the women who deprive him of it. Rodger stabbed to death his two housemates, Weihan Wang and Cheng Hong, and a friend, George Chen, as they entered his apartment on Seville Road in Isla Vista, California. Three hours later he drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house near the campus of UC Santa Barbara. He shot three women on the lawn, killing two of them, Katherine Cooper and Veronika Weiss. Rodger then went on a drive-by shooting spree through Isla Vista, killing Christopher Michaels-Martinez, also a student at UCSB, with a single bullet to the chest inside a Deli Mart, and wounding 14 others. He eventually crashed his BMW coupé at an intersection. He was found dead by the police, having shot himself in the head.

It just didn’t have a headline tht would have made any sense in the DoubleQuote!

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Okay, gunds and swords.

There’s also the question of whether the pen is mightier than the sword, of course — even the samurain sword? — or to coin a phrase:

Don’t bring ink to a blood fight

[ by Charles Cameron — oh, i mean, the whole ball of wax, kit & kaboodle ]
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