a war, you vodka swilling schlups. you're being attacked because you're in a war. I'd call them a bunch of mongoloids, but the mongols are a fine upstanding lot compared to these mooks.

I'm just going to state the obvious here, the natural processes for forest recovery are on the span of multiple human lifespans. The rate of destruction is exponentially higher than any possible recovery. No human alive now will live to see the forests that their fathers saw. No grandchild will live to see what their parents saw, as a matter of fact. The damage is catastrophic.

"The fuck you are!" He yelled, slamming his suddenly incandescent fist down on the ornate marble table between them, "We had a you-damned deal."

That rat bastard of a cloud skrogging apes.

Ten-thousand years. Signed in divine blood and wrapped in their names. He was given ten-thousand years to convince the population that this shyster over here was as full of crap as he was proving himself to be now and to convert them to believing in their own destiny.

He got to hand pick his own angels to make it happen and he'd chosen the best and brightest of the up and comers. The hungry ones, the ones who still cared about making a difference in the endpoints for eternity. They'd given the malignant sonofabitch exactly one-thousand years to make his case and prove his brand, and then they were allowed to start making their counter arguments.

A great flood? Please, easily demonstrable as a fiction and leading to all kinds of awkward questions regarding repopulation. And, worse, he'd used that same trick at various scales some half dozen times. The bastard had an absolute rager for incest voyeurism, and it made his horns crawl.

Then there was the whole age thing. Why in his own hells this idiot had married creating the world in seven days and the entire world being some 6,500 years old, when they both knew it had taken around four billion and change was beyond him. All you had to do was look a the dirt to figure out that shit wasn't kosher. The rocks didn't get up and move themselves across the fucking planet now did they?

He leaned over and hawked a glob of magma onto the iridescent clouds upon which they sat, watching it fizzle into something some hopeful ape would wish upon. Shortly after, some pitiful loser won the lottery and found new ways to ruin their own lives.

"You signed the contract. I signed the contract. Sol witnessed. Didn't you?" He addressed the gravitationally collapsed nuclear furnace over there which winked once for yes.

A couple of satellites cooked in the solar wind. Meh, you know about electromagnetic shielding, you're welcome, by the way, so stop cheaping out.

The being across the table folded its ephemeral arms, pouting.

"It's only been 1022 years since we started keeping score and look at them!" He gestured vaguely towards that marvelous blue pearl.

"Nuclear reactors? Antibiotics? Public transportation? What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? And you! Bubonic plague was a dirty damned trick and you know it!" Bitched Yaweh.

"Hah!" He scoffed, brushing ash off his shoulder, "What better way to prove to them you didn't give a shit than to let a quarter of them sit around plagued to death waiting for you to come along and save them?"

"But Noooo, your paradise awaiteth ye in the kingdom of heaven, you said." He mocked, the deep booming voice with a distinctly nasal addition of his own.

"Well there's a big difference between reaching heaven at the end of a long, productive, emotionally enriched life of self determination rather than wallowing in your own shit listening to the only literate man in the village tell you soap is my work. Even if it is! Who the fuck cares where it came from if it keeps you from experiencing the absolute joy that is the Cholera that YOU made?" he screamed across the table.

Yaweh, looked down at his knuckles, murmering, "It sounded like fun at the time."

Oh a god of great jokes was this one.

"Look, enough with the shit. It's right here in divine fire. I get 10,000 years after giving you one unimpeded, to prove that the only way forward is through human achievement." He read, continuing to mouth the words written long ago, "If in the event the mortals extinct themselves through their own actions, this contract shall be null and void."

"What part of liquidating my department, which is lawfully doing my work and half of whom are devoted solely to keeping the blasted moon in place, is anywhere written here?" He demanded.

The glowing form reached over and pointed to the thirty-fifth clause.

"Wherein the demons of hell will be bound unto their dark master, who may not be freed from his pit until the end of days, the sounding of seven horns, etc. etc."

"Right there. You're bound, you are to stay right there in the hell I made for you, working only through your minions and those they damn." The self satisfied schmuck gloated.

Satan slapped his forehead, claws dragging trails of fire and sparks over his skin, the squealing of metal scraping metal ringing out through the meeting space.

"Where the fuck do you think I've been this whole time? Eden? Nirvana? I can't even get that jerkwad Buddha to answer a you-damned phone call. Ohh nooo! Not him. Not Mr. To Have a Self That Answers Your Call is to be Bound to the Wheel of Karma!"

Yaweh pointed at the myriad glowing lights that spanned the planet.

"And how do you explain the me-damned electricity eh? They just come up with that all on their own?" He challenged.

Satan leaned forward over the table hands to either of his temples rubbing them at the sheer incompetence of this creature across from him.

"You did that. What were they supposed to do when you kept smiting them with lightning? OOH Zeus, OOh Thor, and on and on you sat there with that smug look, so happy with how scared they were. It didn't occur to you that they might want a little of that action for themselves? And don't ask me again about Nikolai Tesla, the man was an anomaly. I spent half a century trying to figure out if one of mine went rogue and incarnated. Nope. That was all them, a genetic fucking act of you." He cried.

They sat there in silence for a moment that stretched for a season.

"And what about quantum mechanics?" the Creator of All asked, skeptically.

"Phaw!" the damner of Man scoffed, "We both know that's bullshit. But they're getting close to the real answer and you'd better watch your fluffy ass when that happens."

*puts thumbs in belt*

I might be able to help you with that.

Yeah, I've hear Thailand is not a good place to be jacking around in such a way as to put the King in a weird position publicly. You do some jail time for that stuff.

I know. CNN damage control and whatnot.

Yeah. Seems pretty awful generally. My take on it is that people in the U.S. are so fucking numb to stuff like this that they don't understand why the Thai people would be so upset. We have helicopters and news crews outside schools covering the killings of innocents on the reg but these guys don't. they're like "what are these assholes doing, we're greiving here".

Yep. With good reason, those dudes completely broke the law, as I understand it.

That statement does fairly well sum up my absolute perplexity at the state of U.S. culture. Gun violence daily, deaths en masse? Throw it up there on television, no worries.

One single nipple? You scum bag what are you trying to do, turn our children into strippers?

I don't get it. I'd rather the news play a thirty second montage of every celebrity cooch shot that has ever been taken than have to wade through seeing where a bunch of kids were fucking murdered.

Yeah the apparent violation of several Thai laws is probably grounds to hold a couple of those dudes for a substantial length of time. You're right, of course, the click baity title does not see fit to add that little tidbit of information.

Last I heard, Thailand was a bad place to play around with the law. Can't be too surprised that a large media outlet would shoot for the moon to obtain some juicy horror for the evening time slot though. Pretty awful, that people would actually want to see the murder scene, just knowing it happened is enough for me to be a little more tired of humanity.

Uhh what? Dude we've had daily reporting on horrors uncountable for my entire lifetime. Who, at this point, is left who has any soft skin to be uncomfortable at finding out that awful shit is happening literally every second of every day?

The Twin Tower attacks were the entire news cycle for six months. School shootings make the news like weekly. Every month we get another blurb on eight palestinians who were shot by Israeli defense forces, or maybe the other way around, some bombing kills a woman and her kids on the way to the grocery. We get news forty or fifty miners are suffocated or poisoned to death in a Chinese mine at least quarterly. Nobody even bothers to mention Africa anymore, they just shrug and be like "it's tribal genocide bro, just like yesterday, the day before that, and tomorrow".

I don't understand what they're talking about when they "deeply regret" their entire business model. I don't understand that people are any longer distressed at hearing about this stuff.

The world is a shit sandwich, all I'm waiting for is the inevitable ecological collapse that kills us all.