Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

​This burning theological question, raised by recent reports of at least 300 priests in Pennsylvania molesting at least a thousand kids, has not been answered by the Pope.
 
Those of you who think that the answer has to be a resounding “No!” need to remember that this is a Pope who is prone to letting people into Heaven. He has already admitted atheists, gays and Jews, which is bound to change the tenor of eternity, but the Pope has no regrets, at least not for now. When he arrives at the Pearlies himself, he may begin to wonder if overpopulating the place with non-Catholics has negatively impacted the value of eternal real estate, and whether manna-rationing will someday have to be enforced, but for now, he’s content to let almost everybody in.
 
But the Pope has kept his thoughts on eternally rewarding child-molesting members of the clergy to himself, even though they seem to be a significant segment of the priestly population. He is in Ireland as of this writing, and doing some heavy apologizing for child-abusing priests there, of which there were also a solid number. Ireland may well have been the birthplace of pedophile priests; in the Catholic traditions of that land, if one of your sons was prone to wearing dresses, he was bundled off to the priesthood, where he could wrap himself in robes full-time. If he also occasionally slipped a hand up an altar boy’s cassock, it was all part of God’s plan.
 
Don’t think the Pope hasn’t done anything about this. He has called on one of the Heavenly heavies, the Mother of God herself, to put an end to the scourge of pedophilia among priests. This is a Papal Tweet:
 
I ask our Blessed Mother to intercede for the healing of the survivors of abuse and to confirm every member of our Christian family in the resolve never again to permit these situations to occur.
 
That’s bringing out the big guns as far as Catholics are concerned. The rest of us might point out that it’s comparable to the “thoughts and prayers” offered by the NRA and the politicians they own every time some young white guy shoots up a school. You can’t really count on the BVM to do anything but show up randomly to a bunch of kids occasionally somewhere, at Fatima, at Guadalupe, or in Ireland, at Knock. That’s it—she is the Bill Murray of the Heavenly Hosts.
 
The Pope doesn’t really have to answer the question in the headline, though—it has already been answered by Catholic doctrine, which this column had a heavy dose of in its childhood. Any sin can be forgiven, as long as it is confessed to a priest.
 
There’s no rule forbidding one pedophile priest confessing to another pedophile priest and in fact, it may occur quite frequently. These Fathers can employ the confessional booth to both smooth their way into eternal grace and also compare notes on which of the altar boys is already sprouting pubic hair.
 
Must seem like Heaven already.

Donald Trump’s former doorman has been released from his contract with the National Enquirer, so now he can speak freely of the affair Trump had with one of his housekeepers, which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child--News item.
 
Other Presidents have been rumored to have had bastard children before, and some undoubtedly had them—Thomas Jefferson took the “father” part of his Founding Father gig pretty seriously, and had a whole batch of them with one of his slaves. Arnold Schwarzenegger did the exact same thing this story has Trump doing, probably about the same time, but he was only the governor.
 
Let’s face it, there’s something about a woman cleaning under the sink that makes some men want to drop their trousers.  Knowing Trump, that housekeeper was probably an immigrant, because that’s all he hires for menial labor. They work cheaper and are less likely to complain about being bent over the banquet table.
 
But before this man-child or girl-child’s identity is uncovered by the enemy of the people, also known as CNN, and discovered to be mundanely attending community college in his or her mother’s native Costa Rica, where he or she was deported by Obama, we can construct a backstory for them freely. Let’s model it on Game of Thrones:
 
Young Don Snow, knowing nothing of his noble ancestry, drifts to the North, where he becomes the leader of a band of men whose hobbies include constant fighting with the neighbors, sword battles with polar bears and building ice walls. Becoming aware of a great army of the undead, which are eventually revealed to be a battalion of bots and Internet trolls led by the maleficent Vladimir Putin, Don Snow travels south to warn the Fifty States of the threat on their northern doorstep.
 
The King pooh-poohs the threat, thinking that he can eliminate it with a simple trade war. Besides, he has his own problems to deal with—Lord Mueller the Relentless, the plotting eunuch Sessions, and the whole House of the Justice. More than a faint hint of incest exists between him and his daughter Ivanka, which desire has to be concealed from the evil Queen Melania the Partially Nude, and their oafish son Barron.
 
Frustrated by his secret father’s irresoluteness, Don Snow finds himself an ally in a blonde hottie who has her own dragons, army and dwarf, and a string of titles longer than a Super Bowl halftime show—Flash Flood Warning Born, Naked in the Campfire Girl, Khaleesi of All Bong Hits , Hater of Bagpipes, Breaker of Beer Mugs and Ring-Ting-Tingler of the Bermuda Triangle. Together they join forces to battle the undead bots of Putin, which the King is still blind to, and to wrestle the Fifty States out of his corrupt grip…

Well, maybe. They haven’t aired the final episodes of Game of Thrones yet. But since the Terminator from the Future hasn’t showed up to whack Trump as of this writing, a powerful blonde with her own brown army of undocumented immigrants may be our last and best hope.
 
Pass the popcorn.

The devil might have gone down to Georgia, as the song goes, but he didn’t nearly cause the fuss the Satanic Temple did when they shipped a statue of Baphomet, a horny transgendered goat god, to compete with a display of the Ten Commandments the Arkansas Legislature had decreed to be placed on its lawn.
 
The Ten Commandments had already had a rough time of it in Little Rock. A man described as a “serial destroyer” of Ten Commandments monuments had already run into it with his pickup truck. This makes sense if you consider that it’s easy to break a couple Commandments simultaneously—the one about ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain” can be combined with almost any other sinful activity, for example, but if you want to break ALL the commandments at once, nothing works like a Dodge Ram.
 
The monument was restored, but it was shrouded on the day Baphomet came to visit it, as it was being treated against some sinful microbes that had infested it, but the Satanists hardly needed it to rail against, as homegrown Bible thumpers showed up to shout holy verses at them, which warms their devilish little hearts.
 
The Christians no doubt felt they were fighting the minions of Lucifer himself, but the Satanic Temple congregation is not required to worship Satan. To make things even more tiresome, Baphomet is not Satan at all, but a deity made up by a French king so that he could enjoy accusing people of worshipping it and then torturing them until they begged to be burned at the stake. The Satanic Temple mostly consists of party people who get a kick out of blasphemy, and they had already trucked their winged hermaphroditic ruminant to Oklahoma to face off against the Ten Commandments and End Timers there.
 
These busy little heretics put us to shame at this column, because we’re Dudeists. Even the Pastafarians get headlines now and then for insisting that they be allowed to wear colanders on their heads for their driver’s license pictures, but we Dudeists hold fast to the two pillars of our faith, which are drinking too much and working as little as possible. We are not required to do more, like memorizing every line in The Big Lebowski, although many of us have. We are not making a statue of Jeff Bridges in a bathrobe and carting it around the country, man.
 
We let the Satanic Temple do our work for us, but in fact we will let just about anybody do our work for us, so they shouldn’t put that on their resumes. Baphomet has returned to Detroit, but he/she stands ready to wing to any location where any legislature puts up the TCs or even just a couple of Bible verses that they can hide behind while they rob, steal and cheat on their wives, each other, or the public at large.

But he won’t be returning to Arkansas soon. State Senator Jason Rapert, one of the driving forces behind the Commandments display, has said “It will be a very cold day in hell before an offensive statue will be forced upon us,” by which, incidentally, he does not mean Confederate monuments.
 
Trust us on that. 

Dishonest black trash sleaze Omarosa Manigault has said that there is a tape of dishonest white trash sleaze Donald Trump using the n-word.
 
The White House denied this, because denying things is what they do, and while Omarosa seems to have recorded a lot of things said in the White House, including John Kelly and Sarah Huckabee Sanders exchanging squirrel and possum pie recipes, she has no recording of Trump employing the n-word, just one of Trump aides discussing what they would do, other than hide behind the biggest sofa they could find, if such a tape was released, which suggests that such a tape does exist.
 
If it comes to light, we’ll get a raft of justifications from Trump. He’ll say he was just trying to be hip-hop, and that black Americans use the n-word all the time, which is true, but resented only by him and Rush Limbaugh. He may claim that the word he actually used was “niggardly,” although the suspicion here is that he’d better bone up on what “niggardly” really means. Eventually he’ll say the tapes were doctored by CNN or claim that it’s not actually him on the tape.
 
It won’t amount to anything, because you only have to go back to the century before last when 100% of white Americans, when referring to black Americans, used the n-word. That percentage has gradually come down, mostly from older Americans dying off rather than people actually reforming their speech patterns. Our own ancestors in the Greatest Generation, particularly the male ones, were close to universal users of the expression, and the occasional one who refused to was derided as a Jew. My father, whose transport ship was sunk by the Germans and both my Uncle Joes, one of whom was a submariner and the other a bombardier on a B-24, all used the n-word as unselfconsciously as any other in the language and meant it derogatorily, although to be fair to those heroes, they weren’t particularly fond of “wops,” “chinks,” or “spics,” either.
 
Racial and ethnic hatred was the norm back then, and bubbled to men’s lips as innocently as a request for more mustard on a sandwich. Came naturally when your job was to fight krauts and nips. But use of the word began to be regarded as at least rude, if not downright dangerous, gradually after the war. The girls led the way in this field, and men reluctantly followed, especially if they wanted sex or any mustard at all on that sandwich.
 
But not everybody reformed. Probably at least 90% of white guys have used the word at some point in their lives. Not all the girls regarded the term as offensive either. There’s a solid core of Americans, centered in the South but also spread as generously, and as whitely, over the rest of the country as marshmallow on a fluffernutter, who still employ the n-word in daily conversation. The estimate here is that 50% of the population still clings to the n-word.
 
Of course, ten percent of them are black and as noted above, feel entitled to the word. If you want to argue with them about that, feel free, but we’re not paying attention. Ain’t nobody got time for that.  That leaves about 40% of whites as steady employers of the n-word. And the hard core of Trump’s support, the ones who are with him no matter how much he screws up, displays his astonishing lack of knowledge, or makes this two-hundred and forty-two year-old nation about himself, stands rock-steady at about 40%.
 
If you think that’s a coincidence, I’ve got an email from Nigeria to forward to you.

​Some scientists are saying that there is a good argument to be made that human beings are the only intelligent life form in the universe, which is leading other people to think “The universe ought to be pretty well ashamed of itself, then.”
 
These researchers are not just ego-tripping—they point out that if civilizations way older than ours existed they would have started broadcasting radio signals into space thousands of years ago, and we would certainly be able to tune in to advanced alien versions of Dr. Pimple Popper and My 600 Pound Alien Life, were any being produced.
 
We can’t, though, and there’s a deeper reason for that other than the fact that 600 pounds might be a perfectly average weight for an advanced alien. That reason is called the Fermi Paradox. The FP, briefly summarized, is that any beings advanced enough to invent technology will eventually destroy themselves, going extinct or at least degenerating into packs of leather-clad savages chasing each other around the barren landscape in dune buggies armed with machine guns.
 
The Fermi Paradox is named after Enrico Fermi, who after developing this theory that we are all eventually doomed, invented the atomic bomb to assist the process. You can’t make this stuff up.
 
Anyway, the paradox states that any critters smart enough to discover how to use fire will eventually cease to exist, nuking or global-warming themselves out of existence. Just consider the human race—you’ll nod and say, “Hell, yeah, we could do that.”
 
That’s what happened to any alien civilization that developed before us. They grew wealthy and populous, dominating their planet, sucking up all its resources while sitting around eating salty snacks and watching reality TV, until they started a world war with hydrogen bombs, cooked themselves in their own swill, or invented Terminators. All those alien signals from Too Many Tentacles for the Dress and Housewives of Arcturus swept past the Earth years ago, while our ancestors were sitting in prehistoric mud, and are heading out to the other galaxies, where other life-forms will blow themselves up before they can receive them.

The aliens don't exist then, at least contemporaneously. Many people will be disappointed by this, especially people that make aliens the centerpiece of science fiction features or who have been kidnapped by them.
 
But the Fermi Paradox can now be summed up much more succinctly, and Orwellianly. How about this?

 All intelligence is stupid.
 
​How's that for words to live by?

On the anniversary of the Charlottesville white supremacist beer bust and barbecue, which resulted in one dead and a dozen injured when an insouciant young stormtrooper drove his ride into a packed sidewalk, Donald Trump called for national unity and “peace to ALL Americans.” (his caps).
 
It was his most recent statement on the "Unite the Right" event, which he had characterized previously as having “good people on both sides.”
 
The statement was greeted with extreme merriment in some quarters. A by-no-means complete list of Americans who guffawed at Trump wishing them well follows:
 
NFL players who kneel during the national anthem. Trump wants them fired. Is he wishing them well at their new jobs in the Canadian Football League?
 
Californians, whose state is burning up and whom Trump blames for that fact, attributing the wildfires to California laws passed by Democrats regarding water conservation. It's difficult to discern a meaning in the Tweet he posted on the subject. The most generous interpretation would be that he wishes California to abolish the state law that requires water to run downhill.
 
LeBron James, Robert DeNiro, Maxine Waters, Jimmy Kimmel and anybody else whom Trump has called “a low-IQ individual.” Calling people stupid is one of the things Trump does best, and one of the very few things he is better at than any previous President, along with taking golf vacations and paying off hookers. He sounds much sincerer while doing it than he does wishing anybody peace.
 
Muslims. Should be banned from entering the country, even the ones who fought on our side in the dazzling array of Mideast wars we have started. But, now that they’ve managed to become Americans despite this Administration’s best efforts, Trump wishes them well, even the ones who were dancing on the rooftops of New Jersey on 9-11.
 
Obama. Here’s a guy Trump has accused of wiretapping him, conspiring with James Comey to elect Hillary Clinton and characterized as “cheatin Obama.” Obama is cool with all this, and why not? He’s retired, wealthy immensely popular and anytime he needs another million bucks all he has to do is give a speech. He doesn’t need Trump’s well wishes, which is good, because Trump’s secret desire is for him to defect to Kenya.

Immigrants. All right, technically they’re only wannabe Americans, so maybe Trump isn’t including them in his gesture of magnanimity. From “extreme vetting,” by which White House means waterboarding every one of them, to locking up their kids in cages, Trump has done everything in his power to let them know they should huddle in masses yearning to breathe free somewhere else, goddammit. A lot of them think they’re “Americans,” too, because they live on the same continent as us, so it would be easy for them to mistake Trump’s well-wishes as applying to them. Don’t. Except for Melania's parents. They're cool.
 
Robert Mueller. Trump wishes Mueller would get hit by a piece of falling space junk. You can bet the farm on that.
 
On the other hand, there are many Americans who can accept Trump’s well-wishes placidly, because they know he’s talking about them. White supremacists, deplorables, cops who shoot unarmed suspects, bigwigs that sexually assault their underlings, Laura Ingraham, Joe Arpaio, Sean Hannity, Kanye—the list goes on. All of them can imagine Trump embracing them warmly and saying, “You my niggahs.”
 
Yes, of course he would say that. Ask Omarosa. 

​This column has been brooding about the existence of “incels,” self-described “involuntary celibates,” for a while, and the movement they represent, which howls fruitlessly for help, including government assistance in getting laid, and is now going to kindly explain to the incel movement why they don’t get the sex they think they deserve.
 
First off, nobody gets the sex they think they deserve, especially guys. Pizza delivery guys shove countless pies through countless doorways without getting dragged inside and ravished by MILFs, although that happens constantly on PornHub. Plumbers show their butts while working underneath many, many sinks without being seized by the toolbelt and hauled off to the bedroom by their nubile housewife customers who need sex more than they need that ear of corn extracted from the garbage disposal. Often their equally horny sisters, daughters and neighbors are waiting in the den as well, looking to help themselves to a piece of plumber, too.
 
Recognize that this does not happen in real life. In real life, (IRL) you can knock on thousands of doors without any one of them being answered by a woman wearing nothing but a towel. Try it if you doubt this.
 
“All right,” we can hear you incels saying. “I don’t want porno sex. I just want a girlfriend.” Well, good buddy, maintaining a relationship is work. You must know what to say and, even more importantly, what not to say. What not to say would include mentioning on a first date that you are constantly rejected by women, because that will start your date thinking, “Hmm…those girls might be on to something.”
 
The only way to smooth out these bumps in your dating style is to keep working at it. Don’t give up and start carrying tiki torches around town, or lock yourself in your mom’s basement and pour out your rape fantasies onto the message boards on Reddit. The girls you want to be with are on Instagram, anyway. Get a better job. Develop a sense of humor. You know all those fat comedians who joke about never getting laid? Those guys get laid.
 
Above all, drop your Trump fetish. Women hate Trump, except for Tomi Lahren, Anne Coulter, Judge Jeannine, Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. That’s it. That’s all of them, and you don’t have a chance with Tomi Lahren. All those other hot chicks on Twitter who are wildly pro-Trump? You know why they don’t respond to you? They’re all bots. They’re all really guys in Belarus named Viktor.
 
We know you worship Trump as an alpha male. Here’s a guy who grabs all the pussy he wants, and cares about the feelings of said pussy far less than he cares about his next cheeseburger. He imported a sex slave from Slovenia, just as you wished you could do. He has sex with porn stars and Playboy playmates. How does a fat old man with three chins and hair that must at all times be shielded from even the slightest breeze accomplish these sexual feats?
 
Simple. He pays for it.
 
Could be a solution to your problem, too.

Pope Francis, in his nice-guy-for-a-Pope way, has put the Catholic Church formally against the death penalty. While fans of the Church may recall that that it has a long history with the death penalty, with many of its top-ranking saints suffering from it in its early days and, later on, in the era of its domination over most of Europe, employing the death penalty briskly itself against heretics, Jews, atheists and people who thought that the earth orbited around the sun.
 
Those people can breathe easier today, even though their ideological forbears ceased breathing at all courtesy of the Church. Burning, beheading, drawing and quartering and all the imaginative ways the monks of the Middle Ages used to stifle dissent, should any chance to erupt, against the Rule of the One True etc., no longer have the favor of the Holy See. Old school Popes used to organize raiding parties to kill the Muslims of the Middle East, and those Muslims were happy to return the favor. Many of them still are.
 
But the Catholic Church will no longer support such efforts, and seems sincere about abandoning violence, even though it is kind of like Donald Trump abandoning money. While driving in Mexico the other day, I saw a sign that, translated, read “Jesus is the Hope of Mexico.”  Remember, that Jesus was brought to Mexico by the conquistadores, who forced Him upon the natives at sword point, and then when they converted, enslaved them anyway. So Jesus has kind of a mixed record in Mexico, but His followers there are concentrating on restoring His cred.
 
Hope springs eternal, and so does Jesus. The gentling of the Church’s ways under the current Pope is to be encouraged. The Pope has also accepted the existence of gay people, although he still does not approve of them getting married or even doing gay stuff. The fact that many priests in its history have lifted the Communion wafer with fingers reeking of altar boy bum has never prevented the Church from asserting its authority over the congregation’s genitals.
 
So there you have it—death penalty out, gays ok as long as they don’t act on their gay urges or ask for their unions to be legally recognized. You can still get into hell by having an abortion, though.
 
Some things really are eternal.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, has been accused of being a little spotty in Trump’s defense, revealing payouts to porn stars, admitting meetings that took place when his client was claiming they didn’t take place, and maintaining that Trump having his head up Putin's ass is not a crime.
 
Giuliani made another startling admission on Fox and Friends this morning, when he revealed that he was a heavy user of medical marijuana. “I had just toked off a major fattie when the President asked me to be his lawyer,” he said. ‘I could practically see the smoke from my spliff form into the word ‘Cool,’ when I exhaled and accepted.
 
“I mean, I had nothing going on for me. After the campaign, I should’ve gotten a job in Trump’s cabinet, but Jeffie Sessions blackballed me—you know how he feels about stoners. I wouldn’t have been the only one—Betsy De Vos forgot to tie up her yacht the other day because she was completely baked, and Ben Carson only bought that $30,000 desk because he had burned a sherm before going furniture shopping, but Sessions always hated me the most, maybe because once when he told me, ‘Good people don’t smoke marijuana,’ I replied, ‘Fuck you, ya midget.’
 
“I was splitting the rent on a double-wide with another retired guy named Dave in Boca Raton, just burning through my stash and thinking America, which I was once the mayor of, had forgotten my existence, when Trump came through with the defense lawyer gig. I told him I’d be proud to take it, even though Trump told me that he had already called several attorneys whose pictures he had seen on public transportation and they had turned him down.
 
“Been on the job ever since. I was toasting a bud of Kush just the other day when I started staring at a word on my computer screen—you know how you do that sometimes, stare at a word until it doesn’t make sense anymore? Well, you know what that word was? COLLUSION!
 
“So, the whole Mueller thing is illegitimate. I’m going to use the rational person defense, which is that’s the conclusion any rational person would come to, especially after they had fired up some nugget. Say, that plate of loaded nachos off the set—anybody gonna eat that?”