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."

The end of the years of the teens are almost upon us, and a decade that began with a bang of bracing stories about the imminent end of humanity is ending with the whimper of our continued existence. Most of you remember 2012 as an epic year for predicting humanity’s extinction, as modern Christians and ancient Mayans offered competing yet equally satisfying narratives about the end of all things human forever—the Christians by toting up the ages of the prophets and the Mayans by carving on a big circular rock.
 
Sadly, neither proved correct. Jesus was a no-show and so was His equally evanescent pal, the earth-ending planet Nibiru. Personally, I love Nibiru and wish that deadly hunk of space junk would show itself, instead of doing what it is probably doing, hanging out in a parallel dimension, drinking and shooting pool with its fellow death planets, because getting smushed by another planetary object would actually mean the end of the world. Most prophets are merely talking about the end of humanity when they describe the Apocalypse—only Niburu promises the end of the actual planet, by whapping it into asteroid-sized bits.
 
A Google search for “End of the world 2019” was nearly barren, with only “author” David Montaigne recycling the Mayan prediction, post-dating to this year and mixing it generously with Biblical sources, astrology and a magnetic pole shift to forward the date of dissolution to December 28th, 2019, which was two days ago. Pretty disappointing.  It’s authors like you, Dave, that give the rest of us authors a bad name. I blame people like you for the fact that when I walk into a liquor store or a tackle shop and ask for the "author’s discount," I just get blank stares.
 
The only other person of note that Google found at all was blind Bulgarian seer Baba Vanga, who died in 1996. According to her legend, at the age of 6, an angel appeared to the future sightless prophetess, and offered her the choice between regular vision and clairvoyance. The young girl chose the power of prophecy, showing the strength of her character, because most six-year-olds suffer excruciating angst when merely being asked to choose where they want to eat their next order of chicken nuggets.
 
Baba, whose resume is said to include predicting Brexit, the 2004 Thailand tsunami, the 9/11 terror attack and the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in the year 2000, actually has some comforting predictions for next year. She predicted Donald Trump would suffer from an illness that will give him brain trauma, inability to hear well and tinnitus.
 
Of course, very few of his critics give Trump much credit for brainwork in the first place, and the salmon shitbird is notorious for his inability to hear anyone who is not engaged in actively kissing his ass.

As far as tinnitus goes, we know Trump doesn’t have it yet, because he hasn’t attacked it on Twitter. Hopefully, he’ll get the most serious kind, which consists of an imaginary Speaker of the House constantly banging a gavel in his ear.
 
Baba said he’ll get laid low by medical problems. In the best-case scenario, this will happens before his shitshow of a trial starts in the Senate, which would make Democrats and Republicans equally grateful for the chance to call it off. Mike Pence will become the Acting President, which would make him grateful, and also the target of every other Republican who wants to be the 2020 nominee for President, which is just about all of them, plus Trump, whose backers are not about to stop running him for President just because he’s in a coma. They’ll wheel him out for rallies, let him drool something about the Wall, pray en masse for his recovery, and blame the media for his vegetable state.
 
The Republican Convention will be an astonishing clusterfuck which will make the astonishing clusterfucks of the previous four years pale in comparison.
 
That’s my prediction for 2020, thanks to Baba. Baba did make a prediction for  the end of the world, too, but she was a nice lady, and gave us until 5079.

Talk about taking the pressure off.

We’ve just endured another Christmas season, and as our little ones fall into light, post-gift depressions and our contemporaries stuff themselves with cookies that they vow to burn off at the gym in 2020, it’s time for atheists to make a resolution themselves—to band together and create our own Christmas traditions so we can annoy our believer neighbors as much as they annoy us.
 
A friend of mine (he had been drinking) said a few days ago, “When are they going to get rid of this Christmas shit?” and was unhappy with my answer, which was, “Long after we are both dead. Give me your car keys.”
 
Christmas isn’t going anywhere. Here’s a link to a Slate article by a Muslim writer who bitches about how difficult American Christmas is for Muslims, to which all of us shrug and say, “Why don't you make your life easier by just quitting being a Muslim?”
 
First off, let’s keep Christ in Christmas. I hear you howling, my peeps, but hear me out. On Atheist Christmas Eve, Jesus circles the globe on his magical Christmas Cross, bring toys to all the good little rationalist children of the world. We’ll sing little songs about him:

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows when you've been bad or good
And when you masturbate!
 
Then, when your kids are around 11, you can tell them, “Jesus doesn’t really exist,” and mean it sincerely, killing two birds with one stone.
 
Decorating our homes with the atheist A and blowing up balloon Baphomets to place on our lawns gives neighborhood decoration admirers a nice break from Santa, Frosty and Rudolph and us an equal chance to be apprehensive about our January electric bill.
 
Caroling should be limited to singing satirical melodies. People who are sick of random Christians showing up at their doors, belting out “We Three Kings” and expecting cookies in return, are bound to feel refreshed by the song stylings of groups of random atheists harmonizing on “National Brotherhood Week,” and give them beer.
 
Adults should only gift each other with alcoholic beverages or where legal, cannabis products.
 
We’ll sink into a bloated, buzzed stupor just like our Christian neighbors around 7 and tune into the Atheist Christmas Channel, a cable network where the Grinch keeps Christmas, Rudolph’s red nose is diagnosed as a nasty case of rosacea, and Charlie Brown experiences existential angst when Peppermint Patty lets slip that the little red-haired girl is her lover.
 
And then it will all be over for another year. Ho, ho, ho, everybody.  

Oh, Lord, be with us at this blessed time, when we look back in the tranquility of Christmas upon another year of serving the donor class. Praise You for creating the great numbers of racist yick-a-doos whose votes we can count on even though we lift not a finger to actually do good for them. Thanks be to You for the dark money so plentiful that we stuff in our pockets until our fingers grow numb from the effort. Thank You for Your Bible, whose Holy Word we can invoke anytime annoying scientific types point out that our moneyed handlers are destroying the planet. And thank You for your son Jesus, whose Return we proclaim every time we need evangelical women to send us donations to help keep other women from getting abortions. And we thank You for not sending Him back quite yet, and we beg You not to do so, at least not while the economy is so cranking.
 
But thank You most of all for your prophet Donald Trump. He has shown us the Way, Oh Lord. His mendaciousness inspires us, his greed glorifies ours, his corruption makes our own invisible. He has drained the swamp, Oh Creator of All Things, while remaining best friends with Mitch McConnell, a miracle which makes the whole loaves-and-fishes thing pale by comparison. He makes us better Republicans in every way just by his example, whether he means to or not. And we’re thinking not.
 
And yet, Oh God, can it be that his time groweth near? Once we all swallow our pride, not to mention reason, and acquit him of the crimes he is manifestly guilty of, what will he do next?
 
We guess what we are telling You, Almighty One, is that we can take it from here. We want to go back to pretending we care about individual responsibility and fiscal conservatism, while managing the ignorant nativists, Nazis, gun fetishists and other assorted gullibles that keep us in power by dog-whistle.
 
We beseech You, Oh Highest One, to take Donald Trump to your side. Raise him up in glory, preferably before we have this impeachment trial during which the whole nation will watch us screw our eyes shut and stuff our fingers in our ears in order to find the guilty bastard innocent. Grant him the cheeseburger of doom, the heart attack while having sex with a whore, the coronary from an overdose of Adderall that You have inevitably fated for him, soon. New Year’s Eve would be good.
 
Let him lie in state in the Capitol, and we will weep hypocritically about how he sacrificed his life for his country, and we promise not to giggle until we get behind locked doors and get a couple of drinks in us.
 
Amen. The Republican Party.  

GOD and JESUS are sitting in Their eternal throne room, receiving prayers. The prayers stream towards HEAVEN in the form of bubbles, which the Almighty and His Son are bathed in constantly. JESUS particularly seems to enjoying the flow of the bubbles percolating around His form.
 
GOD: You’re liking that prayer stream today, is what I’m getting from you.
 
JESUS: Yes, it’s little golden bubbles full of prayers for world peace and justice, and an end to global warming and for someone to win the Super Bowl besides the fucking Patriots. The kind of prayers that soothe me.
 
GOD: Why don’t you move a little to your left? There’s where the bubbles praying for You to make a Second Coming are coming up. They seem quite thick today.
 
JESUS: Oh no you don’t.  I’m not paying any attention to those prayers. Not that I’m paying any attention to these, either. (To change the subject) Oh, there’s a big one. (A giant bubble hovers in the space between Them)
 
GOD: Yes, a very sincere prayer indeed. Probably getting his leg munched on by a crocodile.
 
JESUS: Or he’s got Stage 4 something. My turn! (Reaches over, pops bubble) That was fun. Hey, look at that gray stream over there. I don’t like the look of that.
 
GOD: (Putting His hand in the stream, breaking many of the bubbles. A swarm of tiny, hideous creatures, half moth, half slug, fly out and start buzzing the throne room) My Me! What are they?
 
JESUS: (Half amused) Better listen to them.
 
GOD: They’re prayers for Trump! Apparently, he asked people to pray for him while he’s getting impeached!
 
JESUS: “Apparently?” I thought you knew everything.
 
GOD: Being All-Knowing is not the same as always paying attention! I’ve told you that before! I’ve never seen such ugly prayers.
 
JESUS: They’re from people who have already sold their souls to Satan along with Trump. It was kind of a charter deal. Satan was charmed by the originality of it. They all get to go to Hell with Trump, but they have to do anything he asks, so when he says ‘Pray for me,’ this is what happens. Look, there’s one from Devin Nunes.
 
GOD: HOLY FUCKING YOU! THERE’S ONE IN MY BEER!
 
JESUS: Better call an exterminator. Who’s the patron saint of exterminators? (A pause) Well?
 
GOD: All right! I had to Google it. St. Gertrude of Nivelles! Where do you think she is?
 
JESUS: My guess is at the bar, with all the rest of them. Those old virgins can drink, can’t they? I’ll give her a jingle.
 
GOD: Good. In the meantime, (He creates two Holy Fly Swatters and flips one to JESUS) Get after them!

​JESUS: Naw, I think I'm going to answer them. I'll get Putin to say he's innocent.

Christmas comes at the end of the busiest time of year at my day job, so, apart from an occasional snappy essay, I don’t personally war on it much. Fantasies about being a Stocking Stealer, or an Elf Eraser aside, I just don’t have the time. It would be swell if Christmas and I could just exist in separate bubbles whose surfaces never touch. Truthfully, I come close to that—I’m a rationalist, my girl is Jewish, my mother lives in Pennsylvania and my son in Australia. Christmas requires little effort on my part. I deck no halls and hang no balls.
 
But Christmas makes itself impossible to ignore. One trip to CVS and you’re likely to come home with not only some useless homeopathic cure and a receipt longer than your boss’s Tesla, but a nasty Christmas earworm, some loathsome old Yuletide tune that your brain plays over and over again, maddening you until you lull your marbles to sleep with alcohol or a nice fattie.
 
That exact thing happened in our household over the weekend, as my main squeeze returned from shopping with a crippling case of Holly Jolly Christmas, a particularly treacly tune sung by Burl Ives, an avuncular old bastard who sang it for the last time in 1995. Despite his death, his Christmas carol lives on, infesting my brain like a prionic disorder, an Xmas version of mad cow disease, because I promptly caught it from her.
 
Unlike a normal illness, catching a Christmas earworm can be done over and over again. The girl and I transmitted Holly Jolly Christmas back and forth for days. Just when my gray matter had gone quiet and the sappy strains of Ives’ jingle had been stilled by my better neurons, or at least been replaced by a non-Noel song (the Muppet version of Don’t Fence Me In is one of my brain’s favorites) she would wander by humming the obvious thing, and I would be infected once more.
 
It could be worse--All I Want for Christmas Is You comes to mind, which I sincerely wish it wouldn’t. My girl and I quarantined ourselves from the rest of the neighborhood so the infection wouldn’t spread. To pass the time, and to keep Burl from yodeling in our skulls, we decided to come up with new names for the penis fish. This species had just made itself noticeable by suffering a mass stranding in Northern California. Neither she nor I had ever heard of it before, but it struck us both as immediately in need of a re-naming.
 
“How about Pecker Trout?”
 
“I think Schlong Bass.”
 
“Or Erection Eel.”
 
“One-Eyed Perch?”
 
“Haliboner!”
 
“Call them what you want, but they’re no doubt great bait for tuna.”
 
And so on. It was not the most uplifting conversation for two educated adults, but it kept Burl at bay. But any relief you get from a Christmas earworm is bound to be short lived.
 
I hear Grandma got run over by a reindeer.

Have to take this week off, guys and girls, so enjoy this classic, from a more innocent era, when vain bullshit artists were just well-paid TV personalities, instead of Presidents of the US who use their position as Leaders of the Free World to complain about how many times they have to flush the toilet to get a copy of the Constitution to go down.

​

 He (Dr. Oz) also suggests how often we should move our bowels and what they ought to look like when we do (at least every other day, brown with a hint of gold, shaped like an S, he says and "it should hit the water like a diver from Acapulco."


From "The Operator," a profile of Dr. Mehmet Oz, heart surgeon and star of "The Dr. Oz Show," published in The New Yorker, 2/4/2013.

Frankly, for me, this medical revelation opens a whole new field in which I fear my accomplishments may be inadequate. I was already self-conscious about my many attributes which I feel are substandard by American ideals; the money in my IRA, the quality of my automobile, the diminutive size of my gun collection, the number of friends I have on Facebook. For Dr. Oz, an Ivy-league educated heart surgeon, a scion of Oprah and popularly known as "America's Doctor" to have opened the lid, so to speak, on fecal aesthetics promised a possible death knell for my remaining fragments of self-esteem.

Nonetheless, as working journalist, full disclosure on my part is a necessity. Immediately after my most recent accomplishment in the field in question, I consulted the contents of my Kohler and was initially pleased. They were indisputably brown. I failed, however, to notice any flecks of gold, and resolved to add a couple shots of Goldschlager, a liqueur which features actual gold leaf swirling in the bottle and is currently popular only with frat boys and young women psyching themselves up for wet t-shirt contests, to my daily intake of alcoholic beverages. That should make the product shine at the upper end of the Oz spectrum, I calculated.

However, I quickly noted other failings that defied correction. Nothing before my eyes resembled an "S" and I lacked any hygienic means of editing. Other letters were represented, and I was particularly proud of what appeared to be a capital "E," but I am not sure Dr. Oz would approve.

The Acapulco rubric I must admit I failed to understand. To "hit the water like a diver from Acapulco," that is to say, from a great height, wearing a pair of small, tight diving underwear, accompanied by cheers and the scuttling of frightened crabs, is nothing I ever envisioned for my specimens, and rather than chastising myself for my own inadequacies in this area, I wondered what sort of plumbing fixture Dr. Oz personally uses and how he manages to pull a crowd for his events.

You'll note Dr. Oz does not offer his followers extra credit for the appearance of corn. This cost me valuable points.

The doctor entirely omits the subject of odor, for which we can all be grateful. I am sure he would set a high bar on this aspect, describing the ideal stool (his own) as smelling richly of cinnamon, or possibly of cumin, with just a few background notes of basil and coriander.

The word "stink" would not be applicable.

 

The Flat Earthers are coming. They are a growing segment of the population, according to this piece in CNN, and often brag how their numbers are increasing.
 
NASA is their bogeyman. It is this government agency, they say, that is the source of all round-earth thinking. Before NASA, they say, everyone was all cozy with a flat earth, although NASA has only been feeding us its oblate spheroid lies since 1958, while round-earthing propaganda was around long before that, being spread by the likes of Eratosthenes, Galileo, Columbus and the Harlem Globetrotters, when NASA was just a gleam in the Bilderberger’s eyes.
 
But NASA is the powerhouse of the round Earth disinformation league now, after faking the Moon landing. Landing on the Moon is impossible, because the Moon is just a paper plate being towed across the sky, its white surface slightly discolored because God ate a couple pieces of oily fried chicken off of it. Yes, that God—He is central to the flat earth belief system. The Earth is not round in the Bible, and that settles it for the flat Earth crew, because what a bunch of wandering Semites with a peculiar dietary regimen believed about the cosmos was the last word on it.
 
God, for example, hangs the Sun on a string so low that it can burn the hair off marsupials in Australia while being invisible in Paris, despite Australia being on the same plane as the City of Light. This is because the sun is small—no bigger than the Pentagon—and there are enough clouds and mists between Sydney and Paris to make the sky completely daylit in one and absolutely dark in the other. Flatties believe this, even though sunsets would seem to be very different in their geography—instead of appearing to drop below the horizon, the sun would just gradually fade away, like the Philadelphia Eagles.
 
Flatters have the same explanation for time zones. The tiny sun is the reason you can call your friend in Peking while it is broad daylight anywhere in the US and piss them off by waking them up in the middle of the night. Try it yourself—they get pissed off even if you don’t speak a word of Mandarin.
 
Who profits from maintaining the round earth hoax? The usual suspects—the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Illuminati and Jeff Bezos. How this profits them is not clear, even to the Flat Earthers, although there are certainly a lot of globes for sale on Amazon.
 
Flatters are also prone to believing almost all conspiracy theories. Many of them are also 9/11 was an inside job faithful, even though being a flat-earther means you need to believe what you see with your own eyes, while believing the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 was perpetrated by the CIA, or Israel, or our reptile overlords depends on you not trusting those images of planes flying into buildings.
 
Flat Earthers have Youtube roots. Prior to the invention of electronic screens, people with same amount of brains found in a bait bucket were mute in scientific debate, because they had to read a bunch of words, sometimes in fairly small print, to even qualify. Now they can binge-watch pure streaming idiocy until they run out of chips and beer.
 
Now you are probably thinking, “Why aren’t I watching YouTube instead of reading this shit?”
 
Well, go ahead. I was done anyway.

The latest political-theological trend among the Republican anointed is to declare that Trump was sent by God to be President.
 
Both Rick “Let Me Work This Ukraine Shit Off My Shoes With The Butter Knife Of Resignation’” Perry, the Secretary of Energy,  and Nicki “I’d Sure Like To See Mike Pence Have A Stroke” Hailey, unofficial schemer after the Vice-Presidency, bolstered their standing with Trump by declaring that the Almighty designated Trump to be President.
 
Trump has personally proclaimed himself the Chosen One.
 
This makes a lot of religious people, as well as most irreligious people, gag, but not me. I think it helps prove my own privately held theological tenet, which is that God hates everybody and wants us all to die.
 
As a matter of fact, we all do die, which is Exhibit A in proving my case, but Trump provides a strong Exhibit B. We shouldn’t take it personally. God has been creating things, growing to hate them, and extincting them since the beginning of time, from the proto-continent of Pangea to the dinosaurs to the wooly mammoths to the Sumatran rhino, which He hated into extinction just a few days ago.
 
He has hated humankind essentially since He concocted us, if either the rib theory or the evolutionary one is followed, and has made numerous attempts to exterminate us since we climbed down from the trees and decided to go for a walk. A nice big flood was just the start.  Supervolcanoes, tsunamis, massive earthquakes, plagues and such have marked His determined effort to eradicate us from the face of the earth. He has enlisted Mongols, Nazis Communists and Ted Bundy to ally with Him in killing off as many humans as possible in a short period of time, and seems to be, in His own markedly sardonic way, inventing new diseases as quickly as we can find cures for the old ones.
 
In Trump, He may have found a perfect foil. Whether by abolishing regulations or withdrawing from treaties that make a faint attempt to keep us from cooking in our own crock pot of hydrocarbons or randomly pressing the nuclear button just to put an end to CNN, Trump seems determined that humanity not outlive him, which may very well be God’s will.
 
If so, then it was the hand of Jesus on the wrist of Trump that guided him to every pussy he ever grabbed.
 
It was God standing behind Putin, Comey and Facebook while they pushed Trump over the finish line in 2016. He was also breathing down the necks of the Founding Fathers when they invented the Electoral College.
 
It was God’s will that we have the Republican party of today, anally raped by a mushroom dick and left prostrate before an incompetent orange weasel. I mean, they always deserved it, but still, watching them bury their noses in the cellulite of Trump’s hiney is enough to make anyone wince.
 
But not God. God looks down on Trump and thinks, “Look at Trump. He accepts blame for nothing, thinks he deserves credit for everything, and is constantly up to shady shit."
 
“Truly, this is one I made in My own image.”