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."

Scrolling through the pages of Facebook last week in one of my many idle moments, I came across a plug for heavenornot.net. I had never heard of this web site, but realized right away it could prove profoundly useful. I’d like to know if I’m going to Heaven. I’d like to know if there is a Heaven, too, but the domain name presupposes that, I guess.
 
I clicked on the link. I expected detailed questions about masturbation, drinking, lust, church attendance and use of pornography. I freely acknowledge that I might rank among the lower percentile when tested in the religious SAT (Sin All Time) rankings, but you never know—I may be avoiding just enough sin to scrape into Heaven, and that would be cool with me. The bottom rung of the Hereafter would suit me just fine. I’ve always been a back of the class kind of guy.
 
At the very least I expected a quick quiz like the kind you always run across when you log into Zuckland. You know, one like “What Kind of Central American Tropical Insect Are You?” I did one of those the other day, and it turns out I’m a Costa Rican Hairy Caterpillar. Self-discovery is always worth the effort. At least I could find out if I’d be hanging with the Heavenly Hosts, Cherubim and Seraphim section, or if I’d be confined to one of the smaller eternal subgroups, like Philadelphia Sports Fans Who Aren’t Quite Shitty Enough for Hell.
 
Heavenornot.net turned out to be vastly disappointing. I don’t recommend it. One of the first lines you come across is “Many historians, as discoveries over time have increased, now believe the Bible to be the most reliable source of early world history.”
 
The Chinese and the Indians were already having history in Biblical times, and indigenous peoples had barreled across the Siberia-Alaska land bridge and were finishing up spreading to every corner of the Americas. This was happening in the world, and God was unaware of it, apparently, or ignoring it, or just being laser-focused on the Middle East, because that’s the only part of the world where the Bible can claim to be any kind of historical guide at all, and a sometimes dubious one at that.
 
The site rambles on about sin and Jesus, and how we were born with the first and must accept the second to have any chance at all at eternity, and concludes with an invitation to prayer. You can click a button that says “Yes, I Prayed,” or “No, I Still Have Questions.” There was no button that said, "I Prayed, But Nothing Happened." The addition of this option would improve the site immensely, in my opinion.

No matter what your response, you are invited to submit your email to heavenornot so you can receive what I expect is a barrage of solicitations for the salvation of your soul. Also, probably requests for money.
 
The site is just boring, nearly as boring as singing hosannas for all eternity. It’s the opposite of raptureready.com, which is hours of entertaining info about the imminent probability that you will be Left Behind. I recommend it highly.
 
But I gave them my email anyway. That way, when tragedies like train crashes in Ohio, or earthquakes in Syria strike, and the doubters among us start wailing, “Where is God?” I’ll have an answer for them.
 
He’s in my spam folder. 

The downing of two “unknown” objects over the far north has raised a question that, so far, that our cowardly politicians and mealy-mouthed military have failed to answer.
 
Are we shooting at Santa?
 
Those among the captive media who pooh-pooh this hypothesis by pointing out that it has been almost two months since Christmas, when Kris Kringle is sure to take to the Arctic skies, must be reminded of the North Pole’s need to maintain its preparedness for the holiday season. The popular view of Santa gorging himself on milk and cookies and cuddling with Mrs. Claus for all but one night a year is obviously a carefully cultivated image. Flying sleighs must be rigorously spot-checked. Just because they are magical does not mean they are not subject to maintenance schedules and fluid changes. They may very well have to be flown on a regular basis. And there may be more than one.
 
Not only the sleigh, but the reindeer must be kept in shape. Do you expect these small northern ungulates to pull a sleigh full of toys and goodies around the entire planet once a year if they spend the rest of it lounging around eating candy canes with elves and polar bears? Hell, no. They have to be worked into a lather at frequent intervals. The efforts of a thoroughbred at a racetrack are nothing compared to the stupendous mission of Donner, Blitzen, Rudolph, et al, on Christmas Eve.
 
The authorities have kept this pretty buttoned up, but several ominous clues have emerged. One is that the mystery objects shot down were said to be “car -size.” Well, “car-size” is about the same as “sleigh-size,” isn’t it?
 
The other is that the downed objects “did not appear to have surveillance equipment.” Bullshit. He knows when you’ve been sleeping. He knows when you’re awake. This is obviously a cover-up.
 
Be prepared for never seeing photos of the downed “objects,” because they are probably gruesome tableaus of fragments of a red suit trimmed in white fur scattered across the icy wilderness, together with a pitiful debris field of dolls, toy trains and Legos, a “test payload” of next year’s holiday season’s giving.
 
But all cover-ups collapse eventually. I don’t like Joe Biden’s re-election chances, though, if he has to stand before the nation and say the words no American wants to hear:
​
“There is no Santa Claus.”

Numerous Republican sources have reported that Joe Biden waited to knock the Chinese spy balloon out of the sky over the ocean because it was carrying another one of his son Hunter’s laptops, a laptop he had accidentally left at a repair shop in China while he was funneling funds to his father from the CCP.
 
None of these sources were willing to be publicly identified, but they were said to fall along the MGT—Matt Gaetz—Tucker Carlson wing of the party.
 
“Biden couldn’t risk downing the balloon over dry land and having the pulverized pieces of Hunter’s latest laptop put together by the New York Post,” hissed the Gateway Pundit.
 
To even hear even regular Republicans talk about it, he might as well have sent the spycraft a bouquet when he ordered a missile through its envelope.
 
Brave Tom Cotton said to FOX, “What began as a spy balloon has become a trial balloon testing President Biden’s strength and resolve, and unfortunately, the president failed that test. Of course, if he had downed it over Arkansas and crushed so much as a single meth lab, I’d be singing an entirely different tune.”
 
“This is all about China testing the American resolve,” Chris Sununu, who is coincidentally sometimes referred to as the New Hampshire Gasbag, said on "This Week" on ABC. “They know that tensions are escalating, and they want to see what kind of leadership we have. The president clearly failed on this one,” he added. “I just wish it could have been downed over my state. My constituents don’t mind being covered in radioactive soft noodles for the sake of national security.”
 
But, let’s face it--if Joe had climbed into a fighter jet himself, Independence Day style, and shot the spy balloon out of the sky fearlessly while it tried to slather him in death rays, Republicans would not be happy about his actions. They are annoyed because he followed expert advice (the Pentagon’s). This is not the Republican way, as exemplified by their treatment of the Center for Disease Control during the pandemic. The advice of people who think about certain problems and how to solve them full-time is to be cast aside in favor of the opinions of reality TV stars and country-western singers when it comes to a national crisis. People standing in their yards and emptying their AR-15’s uselessly at the sky are the real Americans, not our woke military and its billions of dollars’ worth of air-to-air-missiles, of which exactly one was used to pluck the spy balloon out of the heavens.
 
Apparently, Biden wanted to pop that sucker right away, but was counseled not to shoot it down over land, even when it was over Montana, where it would only possibly have killed a few a few sheep and survivalists when it fell. Or so he says. The haunting possibility that the President dunked the balloon deliberately in the drink in a calculated attempt to cover up the crimes, and possibly more naked pics, of himself and his kid renders this accomplished act of American self-defense in a sordid light.
 
The Republicans, ever paragons of forthrightness, would have shot it down over Atlanta, just for the sake of suppressing the black vote, I suspect, along with preserving the proof of Biden chicanery that the Chinese were so helpfully trying to ship them.
 
But we’ll never know for sure, now that the hard drive full of Biden crimes is melting hopelessly into the dead sargasso off the Carolina coast.
 
Next time, Xi, just use DoorDash.

As people with adequate credit ratings and a stable home address, myself and my life-partner-domestic-companion-main-squeeze, Nancy, receive more than our share of mail solicitations. She gets way more than me because she actually contributes to charities, whereas I remain a tough sell, also known in the donations industry as a “cheap bastard.”
 
Much of our daily mail consists of solicitations from a cornucopia of worthy causes, so many that if we contributed to them all, we would be living in a cardboard box under the freeway ourselves, and I would constantly be invited to get my own cardboard box, and find my own freeway, if I didn’t like it.
 
Before I threw yesterday’s batch of starving children and abandoned puppies in the trash, though, I noticed one item that was distinctly different than the others. It had a picture of the ex-Caucasian in Chief, in all his vulvic-necked glory on it, and it had “Pay to the Order of (her full name) $1100” visible on the outside of the envelope.
 
I sincerely doubted that Trump was sending 1100 smackeroos to my beloved and, on opening the missive, discovered that I was, as happens occasionally, not wrong. The 1100 bucks were a “credit voucher” towards the purchase of the MAGA Movement Coin Set, 24 “luxuriously layered in gold” coins, each “33 mm in diameter” (which is promptly translated as 1.3 inches, for those of you who are so core MAGA you regard the metric system as purely a libtard scam) enclosed in a “Free Premium Wooden Collector’s Box.”
 
Once the $1100 credit voucher is applied, the prospective buyer must cough up a measly 99 simoleons in order to own the whole package of base-metal, thinly coated with gold coins arranged on a cheap velvet-type material enclosed in artfully stained particle board, which can then be displayed in your home until Republicans take away half your Social Security, upon which it can be taken to your local pawn shop to be laughed at.
 
It is hardly necessary to say that Nancy will not be purchasing the 24 Piece MAGA Movement Collectors Set, not even if she gets higher than a Chinese spy balloon. She is far more likely to make a guest appearance on MILF Manor than to buy anything from Trump. In a way that is too bad, because we all need to be reminded of what Trump regarded as his triumphs, which included “Supporting America’s Veterans,” despite insulting Gold Star families and war heroes when it suited him, “Achieved Record-Setting American Economic Comeback,” even though the economy was fine when he started his term and teetering next to a cliff like Wile E Coyote when he ended it, and “Supported the Constitution,” except when he tried to overturn it.
 
Notable are missing coins, like “Built the Wall,” “Made Mexico Pay For It,” and “Repealed Obamacare.”
 
The whole project is designed to scam money out of the people he failed to scam money out of with his NFT fraud, not because they wish to not be scammed, but because they don’t understand NFT’s.
 
Hey, maybe he mailed it to the right house after all.

​Satan popped up on my Skype screen again to vent a little. He looked woebegone. His usual gleaming scarlet complexion was verging on a dull purple, and the Satanic glint in his eyes had been replaced by a dull, if still thoroughly unwholesome, stare.
 
“What gives?” I said. “I didn’t think the Evil One got hangovers.”
 
“I don’t,” he said. “The pressure of running Hell just getting to me.”
 
“I imagine. The war in Ukraine must be filling the place up with customers arriving early.”
 
“It’s not them. Most of them just get the standard treatment. Melt a red-hot medallion onto their chests and turn them loose to swim in the Lake of Molten Fire or play along the Beach of Blisters. The grandma-rapers and other war criminals get fileted by my imps when those guys get around to it, which isn’t often—they negotiated a four-day work week for themselves in their last contract, plus unlimited mental health days, claiming that pitchforking souls for all eternity gives them permanent PTSD. Even pouring hot lead down the gullets of politicians to keep them from lying gets old after a while, they say. But you don’t see them on some condemned psychiatrist’s couch on their days off. All they do is hang out at their taverns, drinking boiling wine from gold chalices and playing cornhole with shrunken heads.”
 
“Are you just showing up to complain about your labor issues again?
 
“Hell, no. I’m here to talk about real problems. Vladimir Putin’s going to die one of these days, and I always feel the pressure when someone who really, really, REALLY deserves to be here shows up at the Gates of Despair.”
 
“Are you afraid he’ll take over? He might be qualified.”
 
“Frankly, I wouldn’t mind. Ain’t no vacation days in eternity, and sitting by the Pool of Urine from Failed Drug Tests, sipping the blood of unbaptized boys, and enjoying the screams of the damned from afar sounds like a peaceful way to spend a millennium or so, but there’s no rest for the wicked. Kind of sorry I made up that rule in the first place. But, no—if I let Putin have the run of the place for even a few hours, he’ll drum up some kind of fake referendum to make himself Lucifer-for-Life. I know how that guy works.”
 
“Well, you could just torture him in any of the numerous ways he’s killed people here. Poison his underwear, put polonium in his tea, starve him in some gulag, launch missiles at his head, shoot him from behind when he least expects it. I mean, the ways are almost endless.”
 
“I could, but then I might be accused of a lack of originality.”
 
“Just combine it, then—shoot him while he’s exploding while wearing poisoned underwear and sipping radioactive tea. Over and over. And just for the lulz, push him out of a high window in the Castle of Condemned Souls at random intervals.”
 
“Hmm…not bad. I always knew you were an idea guy.”
 
I blushed. It’s not every day you get praised by THE fallen angel.
 
“Thanks. And oh, by the way—see you soon.”

As I sit here, on the Legal Holiday That We Get Because Christmas Was on a Sunday This Year (I really don’t know what else to call it) my thoughts are dwelling on the Christmas wishes the ex-Caucasian-in-Chief recently bestowed upon the nation he formerly, and half-assedly, led for four years.
 
I’m no huge fan of Christmas myself, mostly because I hate the traffic and the music, but I endure it until the ho-ho-hoing stops and the cold, credit-card balance viewing depression of January sets in. I don’t blast the airwaves with bitter harangues about “Radical Left Marxists who are trying to destroy our Country,” among other things.
 
For those of you who don’t know what a radical left Marxist is, and that includes just about all of you who fling around the term like it was the pickleball of cutting insults, it merely means someone who didn’t vote for Trump at least twice.
 
The FBI comes in for some abuse, as does the “Social and Lame Stream Media,” whom the Tangerine Tyrant accuses of ‘pushing for a mentally disabled Democrat (here he is frothing about the current President) over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant and USA-LOVING Donald J Trump.” (Random capitalization all by the Stable Genius)
 
You might be thinking that clairvoyant is a strong word to describe a person who blackmailed Ukraine for political favors and begged for fake votes from Georgia on recorded lines, and never looked at Cassidy Hutchinson in her office down the hall from the Oval one and thought, “That girl is going to dime me out to the Select Committee someday,” and you would be right, but this is the sort of baked-in batshittery that Trump serves us in lieu of Christmas cookies.
 
America’s Ex finishes off his Christmas fury with a blast at “the Special ​​Prosecutor​’​ who, together with his wife and family, HATES ​’​Trump​’​ more than any other person on earth​.”
 
This sentence, once you get passed the oddly-moored quotation marks, is enough to give anybody pause. If I had known hating Trump was a contest, I’d have entered it long ago, especially if there were cash prizes involved. I don’t know how you would quantify hate for Trump in order to make the competition fair. Hate grams? Hate joules? Cubits of hate? I’m sure it would be near as difficult as winning the lottery, though. For all the distaste I can muster for Trump, there’s probably another guy who has a full-size voodoo doll of the Ex in his basement and kicks it in the genitals every day while screaming obscenities. He’s going to be favored over me.

Meantime, the mentally disabled guy put out a message for peace on Earth and unity among Americans. It’s treacly and possibly insincere (you can read it here) but, hey, that’s what we expect out of our politicians at Christmas.
 
Not the airing of grievances. Christ, you’d think Trump was celebrating Festivus. 

We’ve only developed a concern about planet-busting size asteroids since I grew into my dissipated adulthood. We never worried about asteroids hitting Earth when I was a youth—we were too busy worried that we couldn’t get under our desks in time if the Soviets decided to drop an H-bomb on our elementary school.

Worries change though, and the discovery that a massive chunk fell out of the sky and killed the dinosaurs, plus a few Hollywood blockbusters about a fictional chonk space rock killing all of us if it wasn’t for Bruce Willis, and now there’s at least one story a week in the news about astronomers discovering another near-earth object that could potentially flatten us back into the Stone Age.
               
They haven’t found one that is actually going to hit our planet yet, and their definition of “near” extends out several millions of miles, but when science writers seize on each newly-discovered interplanetary brick capable of busting the windshield of human existence, the first thing they do is size it. And we’re not talking about its size in feet, yards, meters, tons or kilos. The science press is obsessed with comparing planet-popping rock gobs to objects it thinks the public can identify with.
               
Just go to Google and run “asteroid the size of” as a search and you’ll see what I mean. They run the gamut from “the size of a giraffe,” up to “the size of Texas.” Architectural achievements are well-represented. The Great Pyramid, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Eiffel Tower all have their asteroidal equivalents floating around out there, waiting to smush into us and cause unimaginable harm.
               
For some reason, giraffes are the favored animal in which to size asteroids. Asteroids the size of polar bears, elephants and blue whales must be out there as well, but so far, they remain outside of scientific scrutiny. But giraffe-sized asteroids have been spotted, raising the questions about the appearance and behavior of these space stones. Are they spotted? Do they graze on the high leaves of the solar system? Will they inevitably crash into the Serengeti?
               
Another Google result is “the size of 350 giraffes.” This is useless. Nobody I know has ever seen 350 giraffes at once. There is also “the size of 2,000 ferrets.” This may make sense to you, if you are concerned about asteroids and also a ferret-farmer, but it doesn’t help the rest of us much.
               
Some asteroids are vaguely described. The “size of a building,” is often used. Buildings can range from the size of a sex shop or a meth lab to the size of the Pentagon, and the asteroid-watching public deserves to know which variety of building is most likely to land on their head like a leftover Chinese booster rocket.
               
There are many objects that most people are perfectly familiar with the size of, and yet they never make it into the asteroid comparative-sizing chart. You’ll never see “The size of the yard sale my weirdo neighbors have every week,” “the size of the truck I’ve been stuck behind for five fucking minutes on this goddam upgrade,” “the size of an $800,000 condo in La Jolla, California,” or “the size of a destination wedding party on Maui,” used to describe any potential earth-ending space rubble.
               
Also neglected are the effects of sized asteroids. An asteroid the size of a giraffe would kill you pretty cleanly if it landed in your man cave, just as cleanly as a real giraffe would if it did the same, and a tad more explosively besides, but it wouldn’t end many lives outside of your own. An asteroid the size of the Golden Gate Bridge would blow up Marin County and a couple of adjacent counties besides, or swamp the Bay with a tsunami as tall as, say, the Eiffel Tower, if it landed in the adjacent Pacific, but it wouldn’t would wipe out life on Earth.
               
State-sized asteroids are of much deeper concern. An asteroid the size of Rhode Island would be massively bigger than the six-mile-wide space slab that erased the dinosaurs, so evolution might have to start over again from whatever preheated scum might survive in the oceans, if that one hit. An asteroid the size of Texas would be pretty unlikely, considering  Texas is 801 miles across, and the largest known asteroid, Ceres, is only 587 miles across. But if an asteroid the size of Texas would sneak in from one of the low-rent neighborhoods that surround the Solar System, like the Kuiper Belt, it would probably blow enough of Earth into space to form a ring around it, which would eventually coalesce into a second, smaller Moon.
               
​Which would be pretty, sure. None of us would be around to write songs about it, though.

A live Nativity scene on a North Carolina island was ruined when several cows who were scheduled to perform in it ran away rather than share the stage with Baby Jesus.
 
The rationalist herd animals stayed for sixteen hours up to their fetlocks in the waters of the Cape Fear River rather than return to the company of Mary and Joseph. They were eventually rounded up by the local police department, aided by a K-9 police dog with “specialized herding skills.”
 
Asked to speculate on why the cows didn’t want to be stabled with the rest of the Nativity burros, pigs and chickens, the local chief of police said, “Well, we think it wasn’t the Wise Men. They were told to keep their frankincense and myrrh tightly closed, because barnyard animals aren’t used to those kinds of smells. And our Mary wasn’t actually a virgin, but neither were the cows, so I don’t see how that could have bothered them.
 
“It might have been the Little Drummer Boy. A lot of cows don’t care for percussion instruments.
 
“But my best guess is they were just atheist cows, sticking up their noses at the God-fearing citizens of North Carolina. The Nativity scene owners just accidentally selected a few cows that harbored blasphemy in their udders. We have vast herds of good Christian cattle in our state, I’m sure. It was unfortunate that these nonbelieving Herefords were picked to moo lullabies at the Christ Child instead of some more respectful representatives of the dairy industry.
 
“Or it could just be the War on Christmas. I guess the atheists won that this year, thanks to those God-damn cows.”

​The ex-Caucasian-in-Chief, in one of his more notable outbursts, said the other day that the Constitution should be overturned and him either installed promptly back into the White House or a new election held.
 
“Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False and Fraudulent Elections!” Trump babbled.
 
The Founding Fathers had more in common with Trump than it appears on the surface. Many of them wore wigs, and they also had a penchant for random capitalization. A considerable number of them owned slaves, which Trump, by accident of his modern birth, cannot, although the smart money is that he would dearly want to, especially when his bipolar Nazi pals shoot their mouths off at Mar al Lago.
 
But, hey, the FF’s are dead. It’s Trump’s misfortune that they never invented the position of Secretary of Ignoring the Constitution, which would have been ably filled by Michael Flynn. The Office of Installing People in Office Anyway After They Lost would be a perfect slot for Mike Lindell. Kari Lake needs work now, and the head of the Task Force for Re-Running Elections When You Don’t Like the Way They Came Out would suit her just fine.
 
Herschel Walker, if he loses his mush-brained bid to sit in the Senate, could still serve as the Commissioner to Find Extra Votes in Georgia. If Aileen Cannon could be persuaded to give up her lifetime appointment as Trump’s personal federal judge, she would make a perfect High Declarer of Rightful Winners.
 
Unfortunately for Trump, the authors of the Constitution did not create these offices, and the inscribers of the 27 amendments to it that came afterwards didn’t think of them, either. He’s stuck without a Czar of Do-Overs. He’s crapping in his pants like Putin because he’s no longer facing off against Merrick Garland, who comes across as a humorless college professor whom everybody in his department secretly hates. Not a guy you’d like to have a beer with, but still, not a guy utterly without mercy. Instead, he must do battle with Jack Smith, who, if he threw on some leather and chain mail, would look like an executioner on Game of Thrones.
 
Off with his head, Jack. Off with his head.

In the collection of cringe that is the Senatorial campaign of former football star Herschel Walker another noteworthy nugget of knuckleheadery dropped this past week. Apparently, another woman whom the erstwhile running back had begged to abort his child had recorded some of his horny yowlings on tape during their affair, the most notable of which was Herschel murmuring on her voicemail, “Ah you, this is your stud farm calling, you big sex puppy, you.”
 
No one can say for sure this is the worst pickup line ever uttered in English, but the women of America certainly don’t want to hear any attempts to compete with it. The state of Georgia’s favorite pickup line, i.e., “Git in the truck,” is the soul of grace and humor compared to this awkwardly mixed metaphor about dog breeding.
 
It was enough to make me wonder whether other, more senior Republicans had their own favorite lines they used when they went a-courtin.’ I asked my sources and it turned out that, indeed, Republicans have their own special vocabulary of love. Here’s just a few examples:
 
“I’m your turtle and you’re my dove, baby. You make my carapace hard.” Mitch McConnell
 
“I know skinny, cowardly little traitors turn dirty girls like you on. Catch me if you can.” Josh Hawley
 
“The Republican Party has a new big reptile, baby. Come sun with me on the Florida rock of my love.” Ron DeSantis
 
“I’m horny, you’re horny. The guy who dropped you off at the gym—do you think he’s horny, too?” Marjorie Taylor Greene
 
Just call out “Hunter! Hunter!” when we’re making love, baby. That’s what makes me hard.” Kevin McCarthy
 
“Mommy, not while Jesus is looking.” Mike Pence
 
“Come on, cowboy, stuff my ballot-box like you were a Democrat.” Kari Lake
 
“Wear this wig and call me Daddy, and you can make it great again.”  The Mango Mussolini
 
“Ah you, this is your stud farm calling, you big sex puppy, you.” Lindsey Graham