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."

As a nonbeliever, I feel confident that there will be no pain for me in the afterlife. In several columns here, I have expressed novel beliefs about eternal life for atheists, such as All Atheists Go to Heaven and Why God Loves Atheists. But, like all theologians, I make up divine principles right in my head, according to what I find convenient to believe. Research has nothing to do with it.
 
So, I could be wrong. I could end up in Hell, for the sin of finding blasphemy extremely amusing. This is not among the listed sins, at least in any list I’ve read, but I’ve been assured by religious people that it is, and I’m going to Hell for it. There have been a couple of other sins I’ve committed along the way, too.
 
I’ve always assumed I would end up in the nice Catholic Hell that was promised me by the nuns that slapped me around in grammar school. The best feature of Catholic Hell was ease of entrance. Chewing gum before taking Communion was a one-way ticket there, and skipping Mass on one of the Church’s innumerable Holy Days of Obligation got you a front-row seat, too.
 
So, there you would be, Mr. Little Gum Chewer, right where you belonged, getting tortured eternally with all the liars, cheats, serial rapists and mass murderers. Even before you learned to masturbate, which assured you of your place in the Fiery Pit, you could get what you deserved, suffering without end.
 
The nuns were not specific about the torments of Hell per se. It was hot, of course, and random slashings by Satan’s imps were common.
 
As a Catholic, you could always luck out and go to Purgatory. Purgatory was hard to get into, as the category of sin, venial, that put you there was pretty mild. Lying to your mom about having made your bed could put you in Purgatory, for example. The place had all the torture features of Hell, but your sentence there was only temporary. The best thing about Purgatory was that your mom was probably going to end up there, too, and you could get the bed-making thing straightened out with her between scaldings by hot lava.
 
But what if Mohammed really was God’s messenger, instead of just a horny bastard who hated booze and wanted a batch of teenage wives? I could end up in Muslim Hell. Muslim Hell has seven layers, kind of like a burrito offering by Taco Bell, and there’s plenty of El Scorcho Sauce in every one. The only redeeming feature of Muslim Hell is that you are surrounded by bad Muslims, which is way more fun than being surrounded by good Muslims. Ask anybody in Kabul, if you don’t believe me.
​
Jews are kind of half-assed about Hell. You don’t have to believe in eternal life or eternal torture to call yourself a Jew. You can believe in Hell if you want to, but it is a merely a Hell of teeth-gritting inconveniences, like being seated at a table by the kitchen in a restaurant. Instead of a menu, you have a list of all the shitty things you did in life that you ought to be ashamed of. You have to read it, over and over. The good news is that Hell for Jews is only temporary. Eventually they are released and go to Jewish Heaven, which they call “the world to come.”
 
My girl and her daughter, who are both Jewish, were discussing the World to Come the other day and, me being in the room, the subject of whether atheists would be admitted there came up, and her daughter had a swift answer.
 
“Of course,” she said. “Because, as soon as they get there, they’re no longer atheists.”
 
Works for me.

​Tucker Carlson, highly-rated sputterer of senselessness, burst onto the nighttime cable waves last week with a major scoop about the US military covid vaccine mandate, claiming it was an effort by Joe Biden to weed “Christians and men with high testosterone” out of the US military.
 
Why Christians are particularly eager to get their numbers thinned by Covid is left to the imagination. Men with high testosterone are presumably ready to go to the mat with the virus at any time, sneering at death and being intubated on a respirator like any manly man should.
 
Carlson also claimed that the vaccine mandate was designed to weed out disobedient soldiers, although the military usually promotes the virtue of obedience, particularly in the arena of obeying orders, and one of the standing orders in the military is that its members take almost every vaccine ever formulated, including ones that aren’t even recommended for regular Americans unless they book a cruise up the most microbe-infested tributary of the Amazon.
 
Whether it’s taking a vaccine or a machine gun nest, the US military expects you to do what you’re told.
 
It is odd that Tucker should go on this rage-bender about testosterone, since even his biggest fans would hardly consider him a fount of male hormones. Nobody looks at Tucker, a downy-faced 50-something year old and says to themselves, “That dude is a walking test-fest. I would probably get a contact boner just by touching him.”
 
In fact, Tucker was recently accosted in a public by a man who identified him as “the worst human being in the world.” Tucker did not inflict a beat-down on his critic on the spot, as would any guy with an above-average amount of t coursing through his red-blooded American arteries would. He backed meekly away.
 
I mean, almost anybody who regularly appears on Fox looks like they could kick Tucker’s ass. Hannity, certainly. He’d stand a better chance with Laura Ingraham, but my money is still on Laura. Ann Coulter? Tucker would breathe his last underneath her sharpened hooves.
 
Geraldo? Ok, maybe he could take Geraldo.
 
There are certain people that belong on the high-testosterone pantheon on which Tucker longs to be placed himself. Hulk Hogan. Dwayne Johnson, although the Rock seems pretty affable for a guy who loses more testosterone when he clips his fingernails that Carlson will ever have in his whole life. Or UFC fighter Conor McGregor, who is so whopping full of testosterone that he has never said anything that didn’t get him in trouble in his entire career.
 
Hmmm…maybe I’m missing the point about Tucker.

What’s coming out about the final days of the Trump circus reveals that Mike Pence, far from being the stern Constitutional defender that he will no doubt portray himself as when he makes his own laughable run for the White House in ’24, actively consulted with people who were aware that one of Trump’s lawyers had a six-point plan for him to throw a pipe wrench into the gears of election 2020.
 
The plan was for Pence to refuse to certify the electoral votes of six states, thereby making Trump the winner in the Electoral College. When the Democrats howled at that like they were getting their skins scraped off by rusty Brillo pads, Pence would shrug and pass off the problem to the House of Representatives. The House would conduct a vote based on state delegations, which the Republicans control 26-24, and Trump would have been re-elected.
 
The trouble with this rather breathless analysis was that one of those Republican state delegations was, and is, entirely controlled by one person, and that state is Wyoming, and that person is Liz Cheney, who, despite having inherited her dad’s opinion that the only way to achieve world peace is to keep paying Blackwater to kill brown people, is the Republican most utterly and publicly sick of Trump’s bullshit. The House would have tied 25-25, and no President would have been elected.
 
Come last January 20th, there would have been three people who could claim to be President—Biden, the guy people voted for, Nancy Pelosi, who automatically became Madam President on that date when nobody else was elected by the House, and Trump, who would continue to squat in the White House despite having no legal claim to be there, because of course he would.
 
When the Republican mobs hit the streets, they would have been met by Democratic mobs. Oath Keepers vs. Antifa would have happened every day. The US military would have been split down the middle. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of President Pelosi and awarded her the nuclear football, Putin would probably have reinstituted Russian control over most of Eastern Europe, and would get a congratulatory call for that from Trump, still holed up in the West Wing, now guarded by Proud Boys instead of the Secret Service.
 
Nobody would have gotten America vaccinated, and when the Delta variant showed up it would have swept through the entire nation, instead of just weeding out fat people with GED’s who get their science from YouTube.
 
In desperation, California, along with many other states, would have seceded from the Union just so they could buy vaccines from Israel, and Gavin Newsom, the Acting President of the United States of the West Coast, would announce a mutual defense treaty with the United States of the East Coast, to try and forestall an invasion from Texas and Florida aimed at preserving the rights of Americans to breathe on other Americans. The Mask War would have begun at the California and New Jersey state lines.
 
But Pence consulted with former VP Dan Quayle first because, apparently, he felt that you ought to talk to a senior advisor before pissing on the Constitution like it was a bush in the back yard of your frat house. Quayle, who was probably not the first Vice President to make a spelling error but the first to be famous for it, and whose phone number has been forgotten by everybody except Mike Pence, could have said, “Go ahead, Mike, I’m tired of being remembered as the dumbest Vice President in history, anyway.”
 
Instead, Quayle said, “Jesus, Mike, did that fly eat most of your brain? No fucking way. Just sit down, shut up, count the votes and call a moving van.”
 
So now, the biggest problem we have today is a few extra Haitians.
 
Thanks, Dan.

The big demonstration in support of the numbnuts jailed for invading the Capitol last January 6th totally dudded out over the weekend. Even Steve Bannon and Trump Jr. wouldn’t have anything to do with it, not to mention elected squawkers like M. T. Greene and Andy Biggs.
 
The rioters stayed incarcerated, and the nation shrugged. The big question in the minds of the fringe right is why all these alleged patriots are still in the clink while all those elusive antifas are running free after rioting all last summer in the name of racial injustice? All those MAGATS are dying to do the False Equivalence Foxtrot over the January 6th insurrection and any or all destruction caused by the George Floyd protesters.
 
Now, tossing a piece of cinderblock through the window of a sporting goods store in Wisconsin is reprehensible, to be sure, but attempting to overturn election results by trying to hang elected officials is really a much more serious threat to democracy.
 
That is not the point, say Republicans, but, really, it is. Antifas get away with rioting because they don’t video themselves doing it. Their sneaky, black-clad asses work at night, amid the dim glow of burning hardware stores. They have a brick in one hand and a leaf-blower to direct pepper spray away from themselves in the other. Their iPhones remain tucked away and turned off, so Siri won’t rat out their positions.
 
Not so the Trumpers. Be they Proud Keepers, Oath Boys, or Some Percenters, they just can’t try to overthrow the Deep State without taking selfies. The FBI had so much video of painted goofs attempting to stab the Capitol Police with flagpoles that it took them months to go through it. Posting “Shoot Pelosi in the head” on social media is evidence, no matter how many smiley faces you put after it, although in their upcoming trials, I can see the defendants arguing that any seditious sentiment should be regarded as a joke if it's followed by a laughing emoticon.
 
Or two, or three. The point at which you’ve put enough smileys after your death threat to avoid prison will no doubt be decided by the courts.
 
In the meantime, the Capitol defendants rot in jail, while the merry band of anitifas do whatever they do in their spare time, probably drugs, getting their parents to pay their utility bills and touching themselves while looking at images of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. They know that, unless they start carrying flags and wearing horned headgear to their next riot, they only have fuzzy anonymous images of their crimes on shitty security cameras to worry about.
 
We don’t know when the antifas will rise up again, but there may well be another Capitol riot, if Trump runs again and loses again, which he will. Joe Biden is slobbering for a chance at a rematch is the bet here. And when Trump has a rally and convinces the attendees that the ten million votes he’ll lose by next time are all fake, he’ll no doubt be able to urge them to march to the Capitol to try to hang Kamala Harris.
 
The Republic of Stupid will once again arise, carrying a Gadsden flag in one hand, and a smartphone in the other.
 
I expect the same result.

The most famous testicles in all the world now nestle in Trinidad, thanks to pop star Nicki Minaj’s series of tweets regarding the side effects of a coronavirus vaccine.
 
This friend-of-a-cousin has yet to be identified by Minaj, so it seems that while his nads are enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame, he will remain anonymous himself. His story is a sad one, though. After getting a covid jab (which one is also anonymous) NMFC, as we will refer to this unfortunate soul, experienced testicular swelling and impotence, causing his fiancée to cancel their impending wedding.
 
In Minaj’s telling, this luckless Trinidadian lost both love and his boner on account of the vaccine. Now he has swollen balls of the blue variety, and those fat nuts dominate the Twittersphere.
 
Minaj urges her followers to “do their research,” before submitting themselves to the risk of ball-swelling and peen shrinkage that may be a side effect of the vaccine.
 
Minaj’s musical repertoire includes Bottom’s Up, Bang-Bang and Anaconda, which implies that she’s done her research into balls and dongs, and rather extensively at that. What she isn’t is a viral epidemiologist, and while many viral epidemiologists may softly rap the lyrics of Anaconda to themselves while they work, or even modify those lyrics to make them relevant to the lab, i.e., titrate that shit on me, baby, those people agree pretty unanimously that getting vaxxed doesn’t have gonadal side effects.
 
What does make your nads swell is a plain old STD like gonorrhea or chlamydia, and a known cause of chubby loss is your fiancée shrieking “Get that diseased thing out my face!”
 
Regarding this alternate theory on NMCF, Nicki is scheduled for a call from a White House doctor to patiently explain it to her, in hopes that she will recant and urge her followers to get vaccinated, and the Minister of Health for Trinidad had a major public hissy about how full of shit Minaj was.
 
And, speaking of people who are not qualified to do their own research, I can confidently report that after taking two experimental shots of Moderna, blindly following the advice of the CDC, the lovable ovals in my own trousers have experienced neither swelling, shrinking or hair loss.
 
Turns out that sheep have naturally big balls.

Ran across the following pic in my Facebook feed yesterday and was immediately fascinated. Who is this smiling, thumbs-up guy who devoted time, energy and money into making a huge, front-yard sign proclaiming his fealty to the ex-Caucasian-in-Chief and then being photographed beaming next to it?
 
I’m always interested in the “Don’t Blame Me—I Voted for Trump” crowd. Blame you for what? was my first reaction. That was before Biden withdrew from Afghanistan with all the dignity of a part-time lover crawling out of a window and falling naked into a hedge outside it, resulting in multiple contusions, when a husband came home unexpectedly. The fact that Trump would have done the same thing,* only earlier, and left most everybody that Biden airlifted out behind, is lost on the Don’t Blame Me bunch, and lost forever, to be sure.
 
The “creepy, sleepy and sloppy,” criticism seems unwarranted. We’ve had much creepier Presidents than Biden. Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton—all had tremendous creepy tendencies, and at least two of them were regarded as successful Presidents. Kissing little girls on the hair doesn’t seem nearly as creepy as screwing every single woman who wanted to put I fucked a President in her sexual history, composing an enemies list, or letting an intern pants you in the Oval Office.
 
Sleepy? I’m sure Joe gets eight hours a day, because he doesn’t have to watch TV compulsively for mentions of himself or flame Rosie O’Donnell on Twitter.
 
Sloppy? Joe generally looks pretty natty, especially at an age where a lot of guys wear nothing but their untied bathrobes all day, even to the bus stop or the 7-11. His neckwear is always tied at the right length and he doesn’t have any strange, is-he-wearing-a-Depends? bulges in his trousers. He is never photographed wearing cargo pants, a t-shirt and flip flops, unlike his critic.
 
The advice to Do Your Research Next Time!!! is a little puzzling. We had four years to research Trump. A majority of us decided we hated the Salmon Shithead way more than we were worried about Hunter Biden's job history. The three question marks seem excessive. He should have saved at least one of them for Don't Just Vote For A Party ???, because those question marks are just plain wrong.
 
But the big mystery is, what is a narsostic? Is it a narcoleptic agnostic? A narcissistic tic-tac-toe enthusiast? A narcotic paralytic? A narwhal sleeping in the attic?
 
Is it just someone who drinks too much covfefe?
 
Merriam never heard of a narsotticism, and the closest the Urban Dictionary got was an NPR American, which is a person who gets their news from NPR.
 
In other words, a snotty educated liberal who thinks he knows way more and looks down on people who got all C’s in high school and currently form their political opinions by smoking medical marijuana while watching Hannity.
 
So, sign me up as a narsosist. Is there a fee involved?
 
Meanwhile, I’m betting the guy in the pic has discovered that his fifteen minutes of fame was about fourteen and a half minutes too long. He’s shaved the beard, gotten a buzz cut and put on a track suit. 

*Not crawl out the window. He would have hired somebody to do that for him.

Instead of directly responding to criticism that the current controversial Texas law banning abortions after six weeks made no exceptions for rape or incest, Governor Greg Abbott doubled down on his position.
 
"Rape is a crime, and Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas," said Abbott.
 
No mention was made of eliminating incest, Abbott probably realizing that sister-fuckers and niece molesters make up a sizable minority of his base. Nonetheless, catching all the rapists in Texas and ‘eliminating’ them is an ambitious policy goal, especially for a state that can’t even keep its lights on in a snowstorm.
 
For one thing, rape is not always practiced on the street. When rape happens outdoors, “Ahine the shed,” is more like it. But Abbott doesn’t have to drive rape indoors—that’s mostly where it happens already. While the image of a stealthy predator roaming the urban wilds, looking for women wearing fishnet stockings to force himself on may be uppermost in the popular mind, most rapes don’t happen that way. A lot of them start with a date, where the guy decides the girl is going to have sex with him, and the girl decides, after watching him drink a case of Lone Star, or brag about how he kneecaps homeless people, or shoots at cows from the highway, or that he’s had sex with all of the other girls in her sorority, that she is not. Her decision is overruled by the Lone Star.
 
She doesn’t go to the cops, knowing that they’d point out she had a few frosties herself and was wearing a leather skirt on the date, a sure signal she wanted sex. She finds out she’s pregnant six weeks and a day after the louse last burped on her. Now she has to drive herself out of state to get an abortion, and Texas is the state that has the longest drives to get out of.
 
That’s if she has a car, of course, and gas money. She can’t take any of her sorority sisters with her to help her hunt for good stations on the radio, because that would subject her friend to being sued for ten k by some ultra-Evangelical freak concerned about the fate of a tiny blastocyst fathered by beer.
 
Because that’s who Abbott is playing to, people who think that rape is God’s will, and if God didn’t not want you to be pregnant by a really unpleasant stranger, He would not have invented roofies. This is because God works in mysterious ways.
 
Or, as I prefer to think of it, God always seems to be up to some shady shit.
 
He’s like Abbott that way.

Last week, it was noted here that several famous anti-vax voices have been stilled by the ‘rona, and that a couple of them, at least, had recanted their disgust with the vaccinated "sheep" on their deathbeds. That, such as it is, is the good news.

The bad news is that Joe Rogan, that well-paid celebrator of medium intelligence, has the covid. The worse news is that he's announced that he's taking de-wormer for it.
 
The even worse news is the virus hasn’t shut up many of the other living anti-vaxxers. The virtues of the anti-parasitical drug ivermectin against the plague are being shouted from conservative rooftops, making it this year’s hydroxyquinone, with people being rushed to the hospital for taking horse de-wormer to keep from getting covid, as opposed to last year, when they were dying of eating aquarium cleaner to keep the virus at bay.
 
The difference is, there is now an effective treatment for covid. Last year there was none. If you suspected you had been infected you didn’t have much alternative other than drinking the contents of your tank full of guppies and hoping for the best.
 
Of course, these professional aginners don’t make their cheese by humbly acknowledging that the CDC could rid us of the pandemic if we’d only take their advice. Now they’ve jumped on the ivermectin bandwagon as the only sure cure for covid, despite there being a sure cure for covid, and several of them tweeted snottily the other day that ivermectin won the Nobel Prize back in 2015, so therefore the libs were once again being owned badly.
 
Ok, drugs don’t win Nobel Prizes. People who invent drugs do, and one of the people who formulated avermectin, of which ivermectin is a derivative, is named Satoshi Ōmura, which is an Asian name, so not worthy of being celebrated by a podcast host whose audience just melts for direct racism. So, in their telling, the drug got the prize, which Omura well-deserved, because avermectin is effective against river blindness and elephantiasis, serious illnesses that have affected hundreds of thousands of people where they are endemic. Which is Africa.
 
River blindness not so much an issue in Arizona, where they barely have any rivers to speak of, but people are gobbling veterinary ivermectin in the Grand Canyon State like it was garbage and they were possums, and ending up in emergency rooms, pooping out blood and most of their lymph glands.
 
The difference between a parasite and a virus is not clear to these people, clearly, but big-mouthed mercenary murderers don’t care, so let me put it in terms they can understand.
 
Taking ivermectin for your covid is like taking insulin for your hemorrhoids.
 
While all the while the drugstore shelves are bulging with Preparation H.
 
‘Nuff said.

There’s been a rush of right-wing radio hosts and prominent anti-mask, anti-vax agitators dying of Covid lately, so much so that CNN’s daily opinionator, Chris Cillizza, felt compelled to devote a column to them, during the course of which he wrote, in a pious tone, that their deaths were somehow more tragic than most coronavirus fatalities.
 
Chris and I share many opinions, and possibly a few readers. What we don’t share is the virtue of piety. Cillizza can have all of that, because when I read about howling anti-vaxxers getting the ‘rona and breathing their last into a ventilator, what I see is someone dying with blood on their hands.
 
Chris, it’s like saying the most tragic death at Little Big Horn was Custer’s.
 
Together, these fresh corpses probably persuaded thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people not to get vaccinated, or even wear a mask when they’re packed together at a NASCAR race or at the butcher’s counter at the Piggily-Wiggly. Some of their listeners are going to get the virus as a result, and possibly some of them are going to end up sucking on the same ventilator tube on which their favorite commentator drowned in his own snot.
 
“Yup, put me on the same machine that Marc Bernier croaked on. He’s my hero,” said no one ever.
 
All of these full-throated Trumpsters made money by killing people, sure as Blackstone does. The most useless thing about these guys is that they’ll go on killing people from beyond the grave. The opinions they yowled between plugging their sponsors are right now keeping aged rednecks and diabetic white supremacists from getting the shot that might save their lives.
 
I might be undermining my own argument right there.
 
Even the pair of them that recanted from their hospital beds (Phil Valentine and Dick Farrel, according to Cillizza) and urged their listeners to get vaccinated probably changed fewer minds than they wanted to. “Oh, I hear them saying get the shot now. But I still ain’t going to. They’re the ones that told me the Deep State controls all the ICU’s in the country. They probably threatened to cut off Dick’s ivermectin unless he said somethin’ good about that vaccine. I hear it magnetizes your gonads.”
 
Some of them went to hell completely unrepentant. Caleb Wallace, another hate yodeler, founder of the San Angelo Freedom Defenders, which mostly defended the freedom of Texans to share spit droplets, refused to get tested or treated for Covid because “he didn’t want to be another Covid statistic,” according to his widow.
 
Too bad for him, because he’s a statistic now, of the fatal variety. Wallace was thirty. He had three kids already, and his widow is pregnant. He has passed on his pigheadedness into the next generation, which makes him ineligible for a Darwin Award.
 
There’s a Go Fund Me page to help pay for his medical bills, because, naturally, he was too proud of his freedom to have medical insurance. Fuck if I’ll link to it.
 
Piety is not my thing.