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."

We’re just going to pull a few news items out of the hat here for today’s column.

The first concerns a brand new driverless shuttle in Las Vegas that got hit by a delivery truck on its first day of shuttling.

While carrying passengers, the shuttle was backed into by a delivery truck. Although the shuttle sensed the approach of the truck, its response was to shut down and let its fenders be bendered, instead of stomping on the gas and peeling out of harm’s way.

This is because artificial intelligence is no match for the human mind when it comes to rapid reaction. Consider this, a typical train of human thought while engaged in the task of negotiating Southern California’s treacherous freeways:

“…boss had a bad cough yesterday, hope he calls in sick today…was that a Lamborghini?... check that billboard, lottery up to 115 mil, gotta buy a ticket…step on it, you friggin’ idiot, you got a thousand feet of empty road in front of you…wonder if that girl I had sex with back in junior college still lives off that exit?…BRAKE LIGHTS HOLY FUCKING SHIT!

Then you hit the brake pedal hard enough to kill all the microbes innocently resting there and avoid driving your car underneath a moving van.

No artificial intelligence, no matter how sophisticated its sensors, will ever be able to understand driving-related concepts like “holy fucking shit.” A machine will never be able to figure out how the principles of sacredness, intercourse and feces are related. Just thinking about it will reduce any AI into a pile of babbling microchips, whereas the human brain immediately grasps the necessity of praying to sex and poo before whamming one’s Nikes on the brakes.

Sure, driverless cars will never drive while distracted, drinking, sleep deprived or getting their genitals orally pleasured from a passenger, all of which human drivers do. But a human will never just freeze and let someone back into them.

Here in sunny California, we’d shoot them first.

Which brings us to our second headline, “Man Accidentally Shoots Self, Wife During Gun Safety Discussion.”

There is no more trenchant way to emphasize gun safety than having the instructor shoot himself and his pupil during the lesson. While they are waiting for the ambulance, the importance of gun safety will never appear more paramount to both of them.

This incident occurred in one of the churches where Bible studies have given way to gun studies in the wake of the Texas church shooting. Both the instructor and the instructee were in their 80’s. The church, unlike this house of worship in Tampa, whose warning is reproduced below, does not have a warning out front about its congregants being armed, and obviously now, it shouldn’t. A more appropriate post for that church bulletin board might be “Don’t Bother Shooting Us—We’ll Do It Ourselves.”

The gun instructor was apparently suffering from dementia, as he forgot the gun was loaded even though he had just loaded it. Both he and the instructee were lightly wounded and are expected to recover. Would a robot gun instructor with artificial intelligence have similarly wounded itself and its pupil?
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Probably not. So, bring on Robocop. But leave the driving to us. 

In the wake of his revelation that he was asked by Time Magazine to be its Person of the Year for the second year in a row, and turned it down, and Time’s reply that they made no such request, Trump has doubled down and asserted that he was also asked to be the Pope by the College of Cardinals in Rome.

“Those guys know I would be an amazing Pope,” Trump said. “I said I was impressed by all their big, beautiful statues. And they’ve got this great balcony where you can stand over people and bless them, which Ivanka and I would look terrific on. And Steve Bannon could be one of my top bishops. But they told me I couldn't bring back torture there, either, and my hair wouldn’t fit under the hat they wanted me to wear, so I took a pass.

A spokesman for the Vatican said Trump’s assertion was incorrect, and added in Latin, “Trump est Dominus plena stercore.”*

Trump also claimed that Phil Mickelson wanted putting tips from him, that he had an open offer from Shakira to give her dance lessons, and when he was done being President of the United States, all the nations in the Western hemisphere south of Panama were going to unite to form the United States of South America, so he could be President of them, too.

*"Donald Trump is full of shit."

Doomed bird derided as ‘loser,’  ‘showboat’ and ‘not bigly enough,’ by President.

The condemned turkey will be oven-roasted on Thanksgiving Day by Sarah Huckabee Sanders and fed to Mike Pence. His wife will be present so Sanders can chow down, too, since Pence won't permit himself to be with another woman alone, even Sanders.

Any leftovers will be converted into sandwiches and sent over to Paul Manafort, who is observing his new Thanksgiving tradition, being under house arrest.

This big sky tallywhacker, drawn over Okanogan County in Washington state by two Top Gun-type crewmen on a training jaunt in their F/A-18 Growler, pics of which have spread all over the Internet since last Friday, has been duly admitted to and apologized for by the Navy, which owns the plane and pays the pilots.

“There is zero training value (in putting a chubby in the clouds),” a spokesman for the Navy admitted.

The willy in the wild blue yonder was criticized by some observers on the ground, including one mother who said she was worried she might have to explain what the high-flying dong was to her young children.

The Navy replied, “Well, if you have a boy child, he already knows what it is. And if you have girl-children, they’ll find out soon enough. Sooner than you want them to, for sure.”

No. The Navy did not actually say that. What the Navy said was "Sophomoric and immature antics of a sexual nature have no place in Naval aviation today, and added that the men were “rebuked.” Which was kind of boring. “They got their wieners whacked,” would have been a more synchronized description of the disciplinary action, in the opinion of this column.

The Navy also denied that Louis CK was aboard the aircraft.

But that was it. These guys expressed their testosterony brohood by using the taxpayer’s dime to draw a wang in the heavens, instead of settling for scribbling images of penises all over the stalls of filthy rural restrooms, which is what most guys who live to illustrate the world with handwritten hard-ons do. The crew’s only regret was that they were unable to land on time to take a selfie with it, probably.

But no one has yet said that the schlong above was a sign of the Apocalypse, giving this column a chance to step up.

Apocalypse news has been really crappy lately, with only regular end-timers like Stephen Hawking (who, in his dull scientific way, still gives us a thousand years) and that guy who has been predicting the Rapture for every weekend since Labor Day.

So, I want you people out there to do some research. Find me a Bible that says, “Lo, the sun will vanish from the sky, the moon will turn to blood, and a proud phallus will rise from the clouds.”

And check that Mayan calendar again, as here we’re very skeptical that ancient natives were capable of carving a bunch of stuff into a stone wheel without including at least one dick pic.

And Nostradamus? Please let’s discover his writings warned us of a “hovering prick,” right before Jesus appears to check us all out of this existence.
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Of course, that warning could mean the Navy’s pecker in space, or, in another interpretation, it could just refer to Trump. 

​Either way, we're all doomed.

Judge Roy Moore, candidate for the Senate from Alabama, got to be the big story last week when reports surfaced that he engaged in some heavy petting with a fourteen-year-old girl when he was thirty-two.

“Wait a second,” I hear you saying. “What about Kevin Spacey? What about Louie CK?” It’s true these are big, icky stories, too. Forcing yourself on young men or holding women captive while you slap your bishop at them are not things you want to have to admit doing. Turns out they are real career-breakers as well, as both of these guys went from major Hollywood players to people you wouldn’t let sit your dog in one news cycle. The only people that will even have lunch with them now are Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.
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All we learned about Louie is that when he played a chunky, unattractive guy filled with submerged anger at all the sex he wasn’t getting, he wasn’t just acting.

But what we learned about Kevin Spacey was even more important. If he had the foresight to have been the actual President of the United States, instead of just playing him on TV, he would still have his job.

Because while we, the American public, don’t want to be grossed out by watching known molesters on Netflix, we’re cool with them leading the nation. I don’t just mean President Pussy Grabber either—you had Bill Clinton running the White House in the horny 90’s. Even his predecessor, Bush the Elder, was caught palming hiney last month. The thinking here is, it wasn’t the first time HW went for the gusto.

So, Judge Moore is still in good shape, despite the fact that he once advocated confinement for all gay people because—wait for it— “They pose a danger to our children.” He also got kicked out of his job at the Alabama Supreme Court for insisting on putting a slab of stone inscribed with the Ten Commandments in the courthouse. Now we know why—he could check it every day to make sure it didn’t say “Thou shalt not put a little girl’s hand in thy BVD’s.”

But the Judge will probably still take a seat in the Senate next year, for two reasons—first, he’s running in Alabama, and secondly, Alabama is the state he’s running in. Alabama is a bucolic land, operated for the most part by white Christian Republican men, many of whom have probably been forced to beg God’s forgiveness already for satisfying their lust with underage girls, near relatives, or farm animals.

What I’m saying is that the voters of Alabama understand their Judge. A man can’t be expected to keep his hands off all the fourteen-year-old girls running wild through the fields of their state, flaunting their blossoming attributes in the face of his masculine needs.

They’ll all trudge to the polls and pull the lever for the Judge, and at least some of them, conscious of the state’s history of sexual passion, will be thinking to themselves:

“At least it wasn’t his sister.”

The Caucasian-in-Chief, Twittering from Asia like some demented jungle songbird, patted himself on the back over the weekend by noting that he had never called North Korean head apparatchik Kim Jong Un “short and fat.”

By Tweeting this he immediately claimed the moral high ground, because Trump is tall and fat. Not only that, but he rules over a nation of fat people, some of whom are tall as well. Un is the only fat person impoverished North Korea can afford to maintain.

Tall fat people are superior to short fat people because they are easier to spot at crowded events such as concerts, although they are also easier to shoot at them, if your concert happens to be targeted by an insane mass killer.

Also, tall fat people can get food off high shelves more easily than short fat people, although this is probably not a problem for Kim, because if people don’t bring him food, he will have them shot. Other hungry short people need to get stepladders.

By proposing that tall and fat is the preferred body type for world leaders, Trump has claimed first place among American Presidents, at least first since William Howard Taft. Many, if not most, Presidents are tall, but few have pushed the envelope of lardassity like Trump. Clinton jogged, Obama played basketball, Dubya did stuff on his ranch, and JFK did Marilyn Monroe, all to keep their weight down. Trump just watches TV while stuffing his face with fast food. In that, he is more representative of many Americans than runners like Carter and woodchoppers like Reagan. Think about that, and a second term seems more possible.

If we allow Trump to set the standard for national leader body types, the rest of the head-of-state crew can easily be judged inferior to Trump. Un has already been found lacking, but what about the rest?

GERMANY—ANGELA MERKEL: Short. But goes beyond fat into the realm of dowdy. Loser.

CANADA--JUSTIN TRUDEAU: Tall. Dreamboat in the looks department. Easily defeated in sumo, though. Doesn’t have the belly for it. Showboat.

PHILIPPINES—RODRIGO DUTERTE—Really short and skinny. Admirably belligerent nonetheless. Hater.

FRANCE—EMMANUEL MACRON—Tiny little thing. Just pat him on the head when he starts babbling about NATO. Sad.
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RUSSIA—VLADIMIR PUTIN—Can only look Trump in the eye when sitting on horseback, and stays unfortunately thin by wrestling tigers and swimming amid icebergs. Physically inferior, but a pal nonetheless. Bro.

People have assured me that my Facebook account is a complete waste of time, but without it I would never have discovered this link to a website that proposes that humans are aliens, and were brought to earth hundreds of thousands of years ago, crossbred with Neanderthals to form modern humans, and that is why we suck.

This theory is the intellectual property of Doctor Ellis Silver, who reasons like someone who earned his advanced degree when a piñata got whacked and a bunch of PhD’s fell out.

The proposal neatly splits the difference between the two most popular theories on the origin of our species, which are us evolving from specks floating in the ocean, or half of us being formed from dirt and the other half from a rib by a divine being, who then started killing us shortly afterwards.

That is about all it has going for it, though. As evidence that we hail from Alpha Centauri, Silver points out that most of us wouldn’t survive if we were forced to live in the jungle, where we allegedly evolved. Well, duh. Many of us wouldn’t survive if we were forced to live without our cell phones. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some people out there who still live in the jungle, and will blow a poison dart into your hiney if you try to talk them out of it.

Ellis also feels that the fact that people are subject to all kinds of illnesses is evidence that they come from a planet where all the local germs weren’t trying to kill them. Doc, it’s not just people who get sick. My Chihuahua had a $400 tummy ache last year. The vet did not once suggest that the reason my dog was hucking chow all over the carpeting was that he came from another planet.

Which brings us to the one of the greatest of all the unanswered questions—Why do dogs never throw up on tiled floors? It’s always the rug, when puppy is puking.

As long as I am pointlessly digressing, I might as well announce that I have also discovered another website that claims scientists are trying to clone Jesus Christ from cells He left behind on the Shroud of Turin. Or, rather, that they have already done this. The problem of Jesus’s multi-millennium reluctance to return has now been solved by science. According to this web page, the cells were obtained, mated with an unfertilized human egg and implanted in one lucky virgin, with labor scheduled to be induced on December 25th, 2015.

So, Jesus has returned, but He’s not quite two as of this writing. He’s already walking.

But probably not on water.

Everybody’s hating Trump nowadays, with his disapproval rating pushing 62% in the Gallup. But, think to yourself--are you hating him for the right reasons, or are you just following the herd? Anyone can hate the Caucasian-in-Chief for his policies, his personality, or his naked lying about nearly everything, but to be truly outre, you have to have a unique reason for your disdain of Trump. Even ex-Presidents can’t get it right, as when Bush the First called him a ‘blowhard’ over the weekend. Sure, he’s a blowhard. But he’s also a chucklehead, a shit-for-brains, a dickless wonder and a shameless rectum. HW didn’t cover that ground, probably because he’s 93 and has forgotten a lot of the best and rudest slurs out there.

You can hate Trump for purely personal reasons. If you’re not white, American and English speaking, or a banker in Moscow, he probably dislikes you already, so you might as well return serve on that ill-will.  If you’re a war widow he insulted, you’re not the only one. If you work for or with him and he’s hung you out to dry, you’re probably already fantasizing about cutting the top off of his preserved skull and making it into a goblet. Or an ashtray. Mitch McConnell has, I guarantee you.

But you’re unique and different. You can’t just hate Trump for the same reasons everybody else does. Just him wanting to take away everybody’s health insurance, or his willingness to start WWIII to distract us from his son’s dumbassery isn’t cool enough for you. You need a fashionable reason to detest the Dotard in Chief, one that Tim Gunn would be proud of.

You’re in luck; here’s ten of them.
 
He has only one passport, unless he’s got a Russian one, too.

Has lied about his pecker size on the record.

Says he suspects all Muslims, but sword-dances with them every chance he gets.

Doesn’t know how to tie a tie. How often does it get caught in his zipper, for God’s sake?

Fossil fuels never prevented him from raping anybody.

Flaps his ears with his fingertips every time he talks to Jeff Sessions.

Provides scientific proof that the shithead gene is dominant every time he fathers a child.

Thinks taco bowls are real Mexican food.

He hates dogs, probably because dogs hate him. Dogs know.
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Favorite thing? His collection of up-skirt pics of Ivanka.
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A petition to split California up into three separate states has qualified for the ballot ​out here, which means next election we get a chance to vote to Balkanize the Golden State.

Looking at the proposed map, I see that I would live in the same state as Disneyland but I’d have to cross state lines to get to Universal Studios. Who needs that?

And the proposed names are stunningly unoriginal. “North California,” “South California,” and simply “California,” are way too mundane and confusing. We are not the Carolinas, or the Dakotas, and we don’t want to be. I propose “Redwood,” “Deadwood,” and “Hollywood.”

Of course, nobody takes my political suggestions seriously, so we’re probably stuck with the other nomenclature.

The plan is being pushed by some Silicon Valley billionaire, who is tired of living in the same state as Harvey Weinstein. Also, he thinks that having smaller states would make politicians cheaper to buy. Sure, pal, but now there’s three times as many of them. Does that sound more economical to you? Also, under his plan, South California would begin in Fresno. Nothing begins in Fresno.

The whole scheme is a full employment plan for politicians. Not that we don’t need one. Once you get a nice political job in Cali, you hang onto it. Our governor is nearly eighty and one of our Senators is running for re-election at the age of eighty-five. Our state is full of younger pols chomping at the bit to get into the primo jobs. Two more states mean we’d have two more Governors and four more Senators. But is that good? Because when we look at the way the government works today, do we immediately think “Hey, we need more of those guys!”

The higher education system would be utterly balled up. UCLA would be okay, and San Diego State fine, because UCLA would still be in California and San Diego State could belong to any state, but what about the University of Southern California? Are they going to have to move it to Riverside?

And who’s to say we want to live in smaller states? We San Diegans love living in a state with giant sequoias and majestic waterfalls, even though they are about eight hours away in traffic. We enjoy the thought of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, even though the best way for us to do that is to fly into San Francisco and rent a car.

About the only way state breakup would benefit me personally is that maybe my mother, who lives in Pennsylvania, wouldn’t call me in a panic when gigantic wildfires start up five hundred miles north of here. If I lived in a different state, she might not feel the need to beg me to get ready to evacuate.

But that’s about it. The most telling point, to me, is that if I wanted to live in a less significant state, there’s already 49 others I could move to.
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So, to borrow a phrase from the once and future drug wars, just say no. Leave California alone. Brittany, too.