Immigration.

What is it good for?

Contrary to popular belief, the purpose of immigration laws isn't population control. It's white supremacist social engineering.

If it were truly about population control, it'd be completely indiscriminate. “The United States can only accept 29.4 million immigrants this year”—it’d be a sliding number, based on birth rate, death rate, and how effectively we can absorb that population—“and the requirements are you can't be a felon, need to get by in English, and need to get a job and residence within the first month.” And other reasonable things. Special accommodations for special cases, like refugees. Stuff absolutely anyone can do—again, special accommodations for special cases, like elderly parents immigrating with their kids, who are too senile to learn English or too disabled to work. But otherwise: Indiscriminate.

Thing is, the United States has always discriminated. Because our white supremacists don't want America to turn brown. They want it to remain a predominantly white, predominantly Protestant, country. Immigration mustn’t let in so many people that white Protestants become a minority; in fact, wherever possible, they hope to tip the scale further in their direction. Pity so many of the white Protestants in the world are perfectly happy staying in their homelands… although the white supremacists were able to get ahold of some white South Africans recently.

The world’s first trillionaire.

And he’s a Nazi!
 
Okay, he might take issue with that particular word. But between the fascism, white supremacy, and eugenics… y’know, if it quacks like a duck and all that.

There’s a coworker I have who was fond of saying tech CEO Elon Musk is a billionaire “on paper,” because all his wealth isn’t in the bank; it’s in the stock market. Musk currently owns 507.5 million shares of Tesla, and at $406 a share those shares are worth $206 billion.

…I know, I know; you didn’t expect me to throw math at you today, but you do realize when we talk economics, math inevitably gets involved. Part of the reason I dropped my economics minor was because of how much math gets involved; I was already struggling with algebra, and they expected me to learn calculus. My biblical languages minor was way easier. But I digress.

Anyway I was trying to explain stocks aren’t “just paper.” Both of us own stock in our company, and that’s not “just paper”—we can sell it whenever we like, and get precisely what that stock is trading for. In cash. As if we took money out of a checking account.

“Yeah but Musk can’t do that,” he said. Of course he can. He just won’t.

’Cause the instant you sell your stock—assuming it went up in value not down—you owe taxes on it. And if Musk sells all his Tesla stock, 507.5 available shares on the market are gonna make Tesla’s price drop, probably by a lot; and a lot of investors are gonna sell other stocks to gobble up all those cheaper Tesla stocks, making other stock prices drop, making the whole market drop, including Musk’s other stock holdings. He’s gonna lose money if he totally cashes in.

That’s why he doesn’t. He gets a paycheck from his companies, and lives on that. If he needs a billion dollars, like he did when he bought Twitter, banks will let him borrow money against his stock, with ridiculously low interest rates, and he can easily live like he has billions in cash. And if he ever needs actual cash, he can quietly cash in smaller amounts of his stock; just enough to not throw the market into a panic.

Then again, Musk loves to troll people for the evil fun of it all. So if he wanted to give the market a seizure, just ’cause, he could. He’d lose money, but he’d still be a billionaire.

Well, trillionaire now.

One of Musk’s other companies is SpaceX. You’ve heard of their space rockets for NASA. Maybe you know about Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink; SpaceX runs that. You might not know SpaceX also runs Twitter (which Musk persists in calling “X”), his problematic AI chatbot Grok, and a whole bunch of data centers which power Grok and are rented to other AI companies. SpaceX went on the stock market Friday. It offered 555.6 million shares to the public, at $135 a share. It’s trading at $165 as I write this. That’s not all the shares of SpaceX there are; other SpaceX employees have some, and Musk himself owns more than 6.45 billion of them. If they’re trading at $165, Musk’s shares are therefore worth $1.064 trillion. With a T.

Could he cash them? Again, of course he can. Creating a bigger seizure in the market than if he merely sold his Tesla stock, and it’d terrify his bankers, but yeah—he’d have $1.064 trillion in the bank. Till the IRS got ahold of him; then way less. But I think he wants to hold onto that trillionaire title for as long as possible, so he’s likely not gonna.

Is SpaceX worth its $2.11 trillion market capitalization? (That’s economics-speak for its total value in stock market shares.) Bluntly, yes it is. Because a company is literally worth what traders are willing to pay for its shares. Traders are willing to pay $165 a share; therefore all the shares are worth $2.11 trillion. Basic multiplication.

Should it be worth $2.11 trillion? Absolutely not. SpaceX has never turned a profit. It’s massively in debt—that is, it was massively in debt, but thanks to the stock market they have tons of money now. Its businesses are unethical: The rocket launches apathetically do untold harm to the environment, and I’m not just talking about the rockets which blow up, or the Starlink low-earth satellites which fall into the atmosphere and burn up every day. (Seriously, every day.) Twitter, which has few to no guardrails, enables hate speech, disinformation, and trafficking. Grok, which likewise has few to no guardrails, does the same. The data centers consume electricity and water, often to the detriment of the communities they’re in. And Musk, who oversees them all, doesn’t care about anything but what affects him personally. Critique him on Twitter and y’might get banned. Say any other violent, provocative thing on Twitter and he’ll shrug and say them’s the risks of free speech.

But capitalism doesn’t care whether you’re ethical. It cares that you make them money. SpaceX itself won’t make you money… but frenzied traders, who imagine SpaceX shares are hot commodities, will make money on those shares when they trade ’em just right. It doesn’t matter what the company does, or if it’s any good, or if Musk is running it properly. It’s whether you can profit off its existence. And you can.

And Musk gets the bragging rights of saying he’s the world’s first trillionaire. Well, in American dollars. If you’re going off Indian rupees, which are 95 to the dollar, he was a trillionaire already. So are a few other billionaires. Mark Zuckerberg’s $220 billion equals ₹20.9 trillion.

There are some socialists who insist there shouldn’t be such a thing as a trillionaire. Or a billionaire. Their joke is instead of having a billion dollars, you get to keep your $999.9 million, you get a trophy which says you won capitalism, and the rest should go to taxes, to pay for lots and lots of necessary infrastructure and social programs. Or charity, but most socialists say taxes.

I don’t care if there are billionaires or trillionaires, but I do want them to pay their fair share of taxes, and currently none of them do. There are tax loopholes which only the very wealthy can access, and these guys use ’em to pay nothing. Sometimes less than nothing; sometimes the government actually gives them money. Sounds absolutely wrong, but if you’re a social Darwinist you’ll believe this is only right; why shouldn’t you be rewarded for being clever enough to outwit the government?

The national debt and deficit would be substantially lower if we taxed the rich. Our infrastructure problems would be gone if we taxed the rich. Our schools would be funded; our teachers would be paid; public colleges would be free again. We could also afford to fund public healthcare. Homeless people could be helped, and housed. The hungry won’t go hungry. The desperately poor won’t turn to crime, and fill our prisons.

But that’s not gonna happen so long that billionaires can buy votes, and keep politicians from ever passing laws to close those loopholes.

Elon Musk won’t be the last trillionaire, but he oughta be the last trillionaire to live tax-free.

The billion-dollar salary.

Economics lesson time, folks!

Last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY) made a comment about billionaires, in the context of a number of recently proposed billionaire taxes. I started to blog on it at the time, but got distracted and didn’t finish writing the piece. Figured I’d finish that thought now.

First the quote she made when she appeared on Ilana Glazer’s podcast, which I looked up ’cause I wanna be accurate:

There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned. You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that. So you have to create a myth that—since you didn’t earn that—you have to create a myth of earning it. So if you’re making minimum wage at a Walmart, and you’re making $7 an hour, and I mean, dang, with these gas prices, it takes you $7 to get to work. So as a result, we’ve kind of internalized this moralized system, right? “The people at the top are smarter, better, you know, more sophisticated.” And therefore, the people at the bottom are uneducated, lazy, etcetera.

Okay, lemme start by saying this statement, “You can’t earn a billion dollars,” isn’t true. I crunched the numbers.

Apple, which makes iPhones and laptops and watches and other gadgets, and sells and rents music and videos, made a net profit of $116 billion in 2025. They claim to have 166,000 full-time employees, but that doesn’t include all the “independent contrators” who do just as much for ’em, so I’ll include them and estimate they actually have 550,000 employees worldwide.

Now let’s take a little more than two-thirds that profit—$78 billion—and pay all those employees equally. Comes out to $141,818.18 a year. Realistically, new and entry-level employees would make a bit less, and top managers would make a bit more, but still: Not too shabby. Nearly all of them should be very happy with that; it’s better than they could get in union jobs. All the subcontractors making iPhones for ’em in China?—they’d be thrilled. And that still leaves Apple $35 billion to distribute between the shareholders.

Could they then take a billion of that, and give that to their CEO as salary? Of course they can. It’d be excessively more than the rest of the Apple employees make, and that might bother a few of them. They’d feel if he’s earning a billion, they oughta be earning at least millions. Even though $142K is a better-than-average salary. (Whether it’s a living wage in someplace as pricey as Cupertino is another thing.)

But in real life, that’s not happening. Subcontractors are still grievously underpaid, managers are still grievously overpaid, and Tim Cook made $74.3 million in 2025. Where’d the rest of the profit go? Shareholders. (Full disclosure: I’m one of them. Not a big shareholder, but still.) Cook’s one of those big shareholders, and made a lot more money in stock than in actual salary; nearly $700M. Pretty sure the shareholders want as much of those profits as possible going to them, not employees. Nor, even with as profitable as Cook has made the company, Cook himself.

There are plenty of big companies whose profit margins are so large, they could totally pay their employees a comfortable wage, pay their CEO a billion dollars, and have profits left over. You don’t have to break rules, nor abuse labor laws. We can also debate whether people, even though they’d now be paid very comfortably, still aren’t truly paid what they’re worth. But yeah, in some of the big companies, the person at the top can earn a billion dollars. It’s just the board won’t let them, because the board represents the shareholders, and a billion dollars to the CEO, and living wages to the rest of the employees, means money they won’t get.

Yep, boards and shareholders are the problem. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez needs to address that… and probably won’t, because quite a few working-class Americans are also shareholders, and kinda like getting their quarterly dividends, and would be pissed if anything interfered with them.

Now lemme tell you about another way Ocasio-Cortez is wrong about this. It has to do with those billionaires who are supposedly getting billion-dollar salaries. Except they actually aren’t.

Donald Trump and the Declaration of Independence.

One of the many “Great MAGA King” T-shirts out there.

Yesterday was one of the national No Kings protests, in which people took to the streets and publicly objected to the way Donald Trump has been running the country, with minimal pushback from the MAGA Republican-led Congress and MAGA Republican-dominated Supreme Court. I live in Vacaville, which had a sizeable No Kings protest in front of City Hall. Vacaville is pretty evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, so it was interesting to look at the Facebook comments: Moderates and liberals all talking about how nice it was for the people to peaceably assemble and express their grievances, and conservatives either angry or mocking, because they just love the tangerine fascist.

Most conservatives are asking, “What do you mean, ‘No Kings’? Trump’s not a king.” Although I doubt they’re that ignorant of all the “Great MAGA King” memes and merchandise out there. It’s been around since his first term. First time I saw it I thought, “No; people are just messing with conservatives’ heads,” but nope, people willingly purchase and wear crap with Trump as a king on it. Maybe they’re doing it to troll liberals; back in my conservative days that would’ve been my thinking. But there are an awful lot of irony-deprived people out there, who’d wear it because they really would like Trump to be king. A right-wing dictatorship, in which they’d get everything their depraved little hearts have ever wanted, really appeals to them.

Trump’s not a king, but he certainly does love to act like a king. Not just because he decorates everything in tacky gold, and wants people to fawn over him him like courtiers before a shah. For comparison I got out the text of the Declaration of Independence. Does any of George Hanover III’s behavior sound familiar? (For convenience I put numbers and letters before Thomas Jefferson’s bullet points.)

On Charlie Kirk.

14 Oct. 1993 – 10 Sep. 2025.

On Wednesday, 10 September, political activist Charlie James Kirk was holding an event at Utah Valley University. It was his usual schtick of debating liberal college students; not a proper debate, with moderators and rules and time limits and everything, but one in which the kids took the microphone, challenged Kirk on something, he pushed back, they kept going until Kirk felt he won, then on to the next student. I’ve seen Kirk in proper debates, and he never fared well. Kirk did his debates to encourage young Republicans, and maybe recruit new ones.

Back when I was a young, argumentative Republican, I would’ve loved it. Nowadays I just shrug. I had plenty of impromptu, unformatted debates with fellow college students in my day; either trying to convert ’em to conservatism or Jesus. Wasn’t till I wrote political columns for a few years that I finally realized debate doesn’t convert anyone. If you’re losing, it just makes you angry you’re losing; you never concede unless you never really cared. It doesn’t win anyone for Jesus either; St. Justin Martyr’s dialogue with Trypho the Jew demonstrated this in the second century, but Christians don’t know their own history, so our apologists keep right on debating.

Anyway, as UVU student Hunter Kozak was debating Kirk about the topic of transgender mass shooters, at 12:23PM MDT, somebody shot Kirk in the neck. He was taken to Timpanogos Regional Hospital, and pronounced dead.

The FBI nabbed a suspect and questioned him, but let him go. This didn’t stop FBI director Kash Patel from tweeting they got someone—then having to walk it back. But ultimately the FBI caught no one. The alleged shooter’s dad recognized his son on the surveillance footage. He and a fellow member of their Mormon church, a retired detective, confronted him and convinced him to turn himself in. The suspect, Tyler James Robinson, 22, has some leftward leanings, and politicians have been using that as an excuse to denounce—and maybe persecute—leftist groups. We’ll see where that goes.

Of course rightists, leftists, centrists—everybody sane, anyway—have been denouncing the assassination. Kirk lived in a country with free speech laws. We have these laws to prevent this sort of violence. In countries without free speech, shootings happen. Bombings happen. Terrorism happens. People have to be free, and remain free, to say what they please—unless of course they’re inciting violence, and then we prosecute ’em for the violence, not the speech.

Plenty of people don’t get this, and think we should stop people from speaking lest it lead to violence. Fr’instance Kirk liked to denounce and belittle transgender people. As a conservative and sexist, their existence, and any public acceptance of them, personally offended him. Robinson apparently had a romantic relationship with a transgender individual, so Kirk’s statements offended him—and he felt Kirk’s stance exacerbates transgender abuse. Now, I don’t know that Kirk ever advocated violence against transgender folks—not that violent bigots ever needed Kirk’s endorsement anyway. But it appears Robinson felt shooting Kirk would help solve the problem. And of course it wouldn’t. Violence only begets more violence.

Others think we should stop people from speaking for various other reasons. Parents don’t want their kids to encounter sex, violence, and anything they feel the kids are too immature to handle… and some of ’em would rather we ban uncomfortable subjects altogether. Religious bigots don’t want other religions to spread. Donald Trump doesn’t want to be mocked, opposed, or even critiqued. I feel there are appropriate and inappropriate times for all those things, but I don’t want any government or dictator deciding when those times are. And certainly don’t want any murderer doing it either.

Okay, enough about the shooting. Lemme talk about Charlie Kirk.

His merch.

One of the many reasons partisanship is a work of the flesh, is it destroys the partisan’s discernment. They’re no longer able to identify good fruit. They still know right from wrong, good from evil… but everything their guy does, no matter how wrong and evil, gets justified. No grace for those same wrongs and evils in the other parties—and even the good deeds they do, get labeled as ulterior motives and evil.

So it’s no wonder Evangelical partisans can’t see Donald Trump’s thorns and brambles.

On cancelling 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘚𝘩𝘰𝘸.

You might’ve been in denial it was coming, but here it is.

On 17 July, Stephen Colbert personally announced on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, his CBS talk show, that the show will end in May 2026. He’s not being replaced; CBS is getting out of the late-night talk show business. “This is all just going away,” Colbert said. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, claims it’s an economic decision: The Late Show has been losing them between $40 and $50 million a year.

It’s caused backlash from Colbert fans, particularly from those fans who suspect Paramount isn’t really cancelling the show for economic reasons—citing the movie studio’s purchase by Skydance Media, which the Federal Communications Commission, staffed with Donald Trump cronies, has to sign off on. Plus the recent $16 million payoff CBS made to Trump to get him to drop his frivolous lawsuit against 60 Minutes (and the fact 60 Minutes’s showrunner Bill Owens quit on 22 April, citing editorial interference from CBS management). Plus of course Trump crowing on his social media platform Truth Social how he got Colbert cancelled. Trump lies all the time, but here’s a statement which liberals want to believe.

The idea’s still stunned a lot of people. I remember when CBS desperately wanted to get into the late-night game; Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was getting crazy ratings, and CBS tried out The Pat Sajak Show against him in 1989, and it just bombed hard. Sajak was fine as the game-show host of Wheel of Fortune, but nobody wanted to watch him tell lame jokes and interview C-list celebrities. Nope, he couldn’t get A-list celebrities, ’cause Carson’s producer, Fred de Cordova, rigged the game: If you did any other late-night show, you were banned from The Tonight Show for 10 weeks. The Pat Sajak Show just couldn’t get the guests.

Funny thing… at the very same time The Pat Sajak Show began, Paramount launched The Arsenio Hall Show, and CBS distributed it in syndication. And it did get the ratings. In fact it started to chip away at Carson’s ratings. That’s because Hall had all the guests Carson wouldn’t even think of having on his show, i.e. black people. Plus people whom youngsters like me wanted to see: Rock stars, hip-hop artists, wrestlers, MTV personalities. If CBS had aired Hall’s show instead of Sajak’s, they’d’ve had a late-night franchise in the 1980s, and not had to wait till the ’90s.

But what happened, as most of you know already, is Carson retired, NBC gave The Tonight Show to Jay Leno instead of Carson’s designated successor David Letterman, Letterman quit NBC and moved to CBS, and The Late Show with David Letterman began in 1993. Aired 22 years. Colbert succeeded Letterman in 2015.

Now. As to why the show’s getting cancelled… well honestly, I believe Paramount. It’s a financial decision. It’s not the right financial decision; it’s just the quickest and dirtiest one, and one they’re gonna regret and try to undo later. And the reason they had to make this decision… actually also comes down to politics. Yeah, I’ll explain.

Bouncing around the social media platforms.

Last year I quit X and joined Mastodon; this year I’m quitting Instagram and joined Pixelfed. The times, they are a-changing.

Last year, on 1 January, I quit Twitter. It’s only been a year since I’ve been off the platform, but it feels like longer. Not sure why. It’s not because I miss it; I’m far happier with Mastodon.

I left because of its new owner, Elon Musk. I didn’t have any problems with Musk before he bought Twitter and renamed it X; he simply struck me as just another tech billionaire who bought companies, then claimed he was the brains behind them. Bought PayPal, then claimed he started PayPal; bought Tesla, then claimed he started Tesla. Okay he did start SpaceX, and a few other companies. But once he bought Twitter, he quickly became its chief troll.

Which is the one thing I don’t abide in social media: Trolls. I block ’em.

I didn’t always. Back in the ’90s, when instead of social media we had bulletin boards, and I was interacting with people on America Online and Bethany Online, I naïvely tried to debate the trolls, of all things. Somehow it didn’t occur to me they were being dicks for the evil fun of it all. So I tried reason. Got me nowhere. Eventually I gave up, told the moderators on them, and got them banned. Whereupon they created new accounts and harrassed me again… till I got ’em banned again. And again.

When I got into social media, the one thing I appreciated most was moderators. I wanted somebody to police the trolls. And they did! They were great. They also had a huge job on their hands; there are an awful lot of awful people out there. It’s no surprise that bots wind up doing most of the moderating. But of course bots aren’t intelligent, and can’t tell the difference between “I was killing it in the stock market today!” and “I’m going to kill you and your family; I know where you live.” (Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if this very blog post gets automatically blocked, just for me writing that.) Bots have one job, and they suck at it. That’s why I appreciate human moderators so very much—and not just because they’re helpful at correcting bot overkill.

Musk not only canned a bunch of moderators; he’s a troll. And you’re not allowed to block him. That’s when I knew it was time to leave.

“Oh, you’re just brainwashed by the woke media.”

Critical thinking skills on both sides are at a low.

“Well, we reelected the rapist.”

It was about midnight. I checked the news on Election Day, and found Donald Trump had been reelected president. That was my first reaction, so that was the first thing I posted on Facebook and Mastodon.

I am, as regular readers of my blogs and social media have kinda figured out, a never-Trumper. I have never voted for him, and never will. Even if his allies overthrow the Constitution, make him president-for-life, have him run unopposed, and threaten to shoot anyone who won’t vote. I wouldn’t vote for the Beast either. (No, Trump’s not the Beast. He’s just beastly.)

Unfortunately many of my fellow Christians refuse to understand my never-Trumper thinking, and assume it’s just because I’m liberal. That any abysmal defects of character Trump demonstrates are simply partisan attempts to make him sound as evil as possible; but in real life, he’s the nicest guy. The smartest guy. The greatest president since Ronald Reagan. Why, better than Reagan. Up there with Washington and Lincoln.

Y’know, eight years ago when Trump first ran for office, a lot of these same people acknowledged that Trump was a slimy huckster, but at least he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Since that time he’s somehow gone from “Could be worse” to “Put him on Mt. Rushmore.” How’d that happen?

Duh; brainwashing. Turn on conservative media and that’s all you’ll hear.

Paganism in old pop songs.

Couplea days ago, work radio started playing “Jacob’s Ladder” by Huey Lewis and the News. The DJ really likes that band. Me… meh, they’re okay. Definitely better than Imagine Dragons. For fun, I like to imagine dragons breathing fire all over Imagine Dragons. The only band I wanna hear screaming, “Thunder!” is AC/DC. But I digress.

If you don’t know “Jacob’s Ladder,” it was written by Bruce Hornsby and his brother. At the time, he didn’t care for his version, so he shelved it for a few years, and let Huey Lewis record it; may as well get some residuals. It’s about how he twice encounters certain off-putting Christian evangelists, and rejects their offers of salvation because he’d rather do it himself—“step by step, one by one, higher and higher… we’re climbing Jacob’s ladder.”

As I recall, Jacob’s ladder (or as Led Zeppelin calls it, the stairway to heaven), was a vision Jacob had of a route from heaven to earth, on which angels ascended and descended. [Ge 28.10-17] Not humans. I suppose if God permitted us to climb it, we could; but if we could, it’d only be possible through God’s grace. Our own efforts wouldn’t get us anywhere.

But that’s what Hornsby (and Huey Lewis and the News, I guess) preferred to the gospel: His own efforts. Good karma. F--- grace.

Although a lot of it, I expect, is the messengers. Verse 1 is about a fat man bugging a fan dancer; verse 2 is about a televangelist begging for money, “and I don’t wanna be like you.” I get that. I regularly see lousy examples of evangelism, and churches full of really creepy people instead of healthy Christians. Still, it takes a lot of chutzpah to think you can save yourself.

On quashing one’s editorial board.

Since I’m reawakening my blog anyway, what the heck; I’ll rant a bit.

Mastadon has been blowing up lately about the respective owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post stopping their editorial boards from endorsing vice president Kamala Harris for president. The Times was even gonna do a whole series leading up to it, called “The Case Against Trump,” no doubt explaining in detail why former president Donald Trump is senile and evil. But owner Patrick Soon-Shiong shut it down. Three editorial board members have quit in protest—editor Marial Garza, and writers Karin Klein and Robert Greene.

The Mastodon posts have largely been about how awful it is that these feckless billionares are interfering with free speech, and speculating the owners are probably doing it because they’re either Trump supporters, or expect him to win… and if he’s gonna go full fascist on everybody (and he can now that the Supreme Court has removed the guardrails), they wanna remain standing as he vengefully retaliates against all the media that previously opposed him.

I actually don’t think it’s that. I don’t think politics are the motivator so much as the money is. “Follow the money,” remember? And according to the money, editorial boards and political endorsements are bad for business. If your paper endorses Trump, it’s not the fear that Trump’s coming to getcha; it’s the fear Trump fans, and they are legion, will pull all their advertising.

Same with endorsing Trump: Harris fans will pull all their advertising. Same with endorsing a proposition which certain big businesses oppose: They’ll pull their advertising. Editorial opinions have a cost, and while the editorial boards might think that cost is totally worth it, ’cause free speech, the billionaire who actually owns the newspaper, who’s already agitated by the fact print media is a dying industry, might decide it’s way cheaper to keep all the advertisers… and get the editorial board to resign in protest, and that way he doesn’t have to pay ’em severance.

And if he happens to also be a Trump supporter, that’s just a bonus.

Putting the stuff back up.

I started this blog decades ago. (Yep, it’s been decades now.) But for a good long time I left it dormant, ’cause I was busy with other things. I did most of my blogging on The Christ Almighty Blog; I still do. Didn’t want this blog distracting from that!

But every once in a while I wanted to dig through old things I’ve written, and since I took everything down from here, I hopped on Internet Archive, which has backed up all those years of blogging. Even when I kinda didn’t want them to. I wanted to retract or edit or update things; one of the great things about blogging is it’s not like print, and you can do that! But Internet Archive wants to archive everything, and did. Oh well.

Anyway this past week Internet Archive was attacked by hackers, and most of the site has been offline. Not all of it; its Wayback Machine, with all those archived webpages, including my old blogs, are still around. Still, it’s just a reminder of how ephemeral web content can be. All it takes is one server going down… and its backup, and its other backup, and maybe a few other redundant backups. Or the company which is hosting the backups.

So I decided to start putting it back. Which is gonna take me a while. But in the very little spare time I have, why not.

“God’s will in heaven and on earth.”

Posted today at the Society of Evangelical Arminians site. The original’s at Christ Almighty!

The #TrumpBible.

As if he’s ever read it.

After Donald Trump couldn’t name his favorite bible verse, Twitter users decided to come up with it for him. So the Twits have been cranking out Trump versions of bible verses under the hashtag #TrumpBible. Not everyone’s going for funny; some of ’em are just replacing “God” with “Trump,” as if his god complex has run amok. The rest clearly don’t know any bible, and are just tacking the hashtag onto Trump quotes.

Anywho. Yesterday, for fun, I threw a few into the pile. It’s disturbingly easy. I’ve seen enough episodes of The Apprentice, so faking his voice ain’t hard. It reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s complaints about writing The Screwtape Letters: You gotta go to a really dark place within yourself in order to get the mindset. And in Trump’s case, a really ignorant place: You gotta pretend you don’t know any bible, and don’t believe half of it.

Okay, by “a few” I mean a lot.

• “‘Can’t serve God and Mammon.’ Okay? Jesus said it. Great guy. But Mammon’s mythological. Doesn’t exist. Fake god. So no problem.”
• “Simon Peter? Why’s he got two books in the bible? He denied Jesus. I like loyalty.”
• “Saved by grace? Great, great idea. Really generous. But I wouldn’t include the losers. They’ll really stink up heaven.”
• “Okay, blessed are the meek. Blessed even more are the self-promoters. They get stuff done. The meek, not so much.”
• “Blessed are the poor in spirit. I wanna emphasize: IN SPIRIT. In real life, blessed are the not-so-poor.”
• “Blessed are the meek, ’cause they inherit the earth. But they run it into the ground, so they need guys like me.”
• “Blessed are the peacemakers. I’m a peacemaker. I get along with everybody. Okay not Rosie O'Donnell. Everybody who matters.”
• “The apostles? Sure I can name ’em. There’s Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, George, and Ringo.”
• “I get why Jesus threw out the money-changers: Eliminate the competition. Smart. Very savvy.”
• “This Beast guy in Revelations? He went too far. You gotta know when to step away from the table. I won’t make that mistake.”
• “After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the family went back to Nazareth. They didn’t stay, as illegals. I respect that.”
• "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. And a vote for me is righteous. I'm making America great again."
• “God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear. But illegal Mexicans sure have. That’s why we’ve gotta build that border wall.”

𝘚𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘎𝘰𝘥, and cheesy Jesuses.

I’m guessing the original art came from their website. I didn’t get it from there though.

When Son of God hit the theaters last February, various people at my church were talking about it like it was the Second Coming of Christ. A Jesus movie! In the theaters! In wide release; not only playing in hard-to-find specialty theaters in Sacramento and San Francisco! Produced by Hollywood producers! (Well, Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, anyway; she got to play Jesus’s mom.) Public vindication of everything we Christians hold dear!

I got in some minor trouble at church ’cause I had made, in the church’s coming-announcements video, some joking comments about how jazzed Christians were about the movie. They didn’t appreciate it, and complained to the pastor. He asked me to refrain from the commentary, and just give the announcements. So if you attend my church, and have always wondered why I stopped making comments and jokes in the announcement video, that’s why: We got complaints from the humor-deprived, and we decided it was easier and better to not offend them, then entertain.

This week I decided to kill two hours, 18 minutes (well, less; I skipped the credits) by watching Son of God on Netflix. So now I’m gonna rant about it.

Mr. Squish’s memorial service.

When I first conceived this brilliant idea where Leonard Squish stayed dead, I figured I’d make it into a regular thing.

The characters in the strip would frequently refer to the recently departed Leonard, much like the Bloom County regulars kept referring to the recently departed Bill the Cat (until they cloned him). The strip would thereafter consist of Randall, Armand, and any other characters I added, and they’d continue the strip without him. And whenever it came up, “So why’s the strip still called ‘Mr. Squish’?” I could point out that I could rename it “Randall”… but there was no guarantee Randall wouldn’t get whacked at the end of the semester.

Nah. The strip would still be “Mr. Squish,” and regularly, to justify the name, they’d refer to the late Mr. Squish.

Yeah, dumb idea.

Mr. Squish is dead. Really most sincerely dead.

I killed off Leonard Squish in fall 1990, and I meant it. He was honest-to-goodness, no-fooling-around, dead.

Okay, some fooling around.

If you’re familiar with the term “comic book death,” you know when comic books kill someone, they never stay dead. They can always be brought back. Even when bringing ’em back would seriously mess up the storyline. Fr'instance Bruce Wayne’s parents, whose murder caused him to become Batman. If one of the Batman writers decided it’d be awesome to bring ’em back to life, via magic or some convoluted retcon or zombie science or Black Lantern power rings, they’ll be back before you can cry, Zatanna-style, “Srehtaefesroh!” Anyone can be brought back, and nearly everyone has. If you know of any exceptions, give it time. They’ll be back eventually.

Your vote matters. Sometimes.

In the United States it’s Election Day—one of ’em. According to the Constitution it’s the first Tuesday of November, ’cause they couldn’t make it Monday, ’cause back in the 1780s it might take you a whole day to travel to the polls, and religious folks didn’t wanna travel on Sunday. So, Tuesday. It’d be more convenient on a Saturday, but then again you can vote by mail, y’know.

The previous Election Day was back on 3 June, when we already voted for most of these people. California being a heavily Democratic state, the Democrats won by huge majorities. But the way our state’s elections work, there’s gotta be a runoff between the top two vote-getters in all the partisan offices. (Even if the top vote-getter had such a lead over all other candidates, there’s no point in any runoff. Which happened. Often.) So that’s what this election is: People looking at the ballot and saying, “I thought he lost. Why’s he on the ballot again?”

Hence turnout is expected to be low. Which is dumb, ’cause if enough people skip the election, and the number-two guy can mobilize his supporters, he might win this time around. But he likely won’t. The stats aren’t in their favor. I tell you though, if any of them actually pull it off, it’ll be the last time: Everyone will remember the freak occurrence.

Social media, October 2014.

WEDNESDAY, 1 OCTOBER.

Thoughts on the soul:

I imagine getting two guys: One who loves the songs, “My Soul Longs for You” and “It Is Well with My Soul,” and one who loves to speak against “soulish behavior.” Then for fun, lock ’em in a room together with nunchucks and pugil sticks, and have ’em sort out the definition.

Just ’cause.

THURSDAY, 2 OCTOBER.

There's way too much fear underlying way too many End Times interpretations.

Easiest way to keep the kids out of the toys in the closet: Casually mention “the closet spider.” The fact they can’t see it makes them even more anxious.

“All right, who in Publicity has been talking to Satan?”

And no, I’m not gonna ask you to share it with 10 people.

FRIDAY, 3 OCTOBER.

Now that the Left Behind movie is out, of course certain reviewers are gonna use it (and its lack of quality) as an excuse to be jerks, slam Christianity, and get revenge on all the Christians who behaved badly towards them in their childhood. I don’t have time for those reviews.

Then there are the reviews which correctly analyze how the “we’re outta here; go to hell, world!” theology of Left Behind is far from Christian; and how some of us really don’t want our loved ones to go to hell. [“What Nicolas Cage’s ‘Left Behind’ Says About Apocalyptic Christianity,” Alexander Joenks, Pajiba, 3 October 2014]

“There is power in the name of Jesus to break every chain.”

Is it only me who finds it ironic how often the people who sing this song repeat this line, or parts of it, over and over and over and over and over again? Kinda like a long, unbroken… what’s the word I’m looking for?…

Yep, there’s cannibalism in this here children’s book.

Ebola news coverage.

SUNDAY, 5 OCTOBER.

We didn’t do this when I was in school. But I totally would have.

If your “prophecy” for me sounds exactly like something I’d get out of a fortune cookie, I’m gonna assume you’re a false prophet.

Oh, I’ll still keep an open mind; just a crack, anyway. I could always be wrong. But that’s just my knee-jerk reaction. Vague statements are for people who are doing nothing more than guessing. For what reason would God be vague?

Halloween with Linus and Mr. Squish.

Ran this one in Fall 1991. So yeah, it’s out of sequence, but appropriate for the day.

No, Leonard didn’t mean Linus any harm, which is why I tacked on that line, “Wanna buy a Fisher-Price chainsaw?” It’s Halloween; it’s a trick. The poor kid did need straightening out, in many ways.

Just for fun, let’s read a few things into Peanuts, shall we?

Lucy ran a psychiatry booth. Not the usual thing a little kid would do; put aside the fact Charles Schulz made the Peanuts gang do a lot of things little kids would do. Instead of a lemonade stand, she ran a psychiatry booth. Consider what sort of kid would come up with such an idea. Someone who figured she knew enough about psychiatry to peddle it to her friends, especially gullible ol’ Charlie Brown, right? Clearly someone who spent a lot of time with her own psychiatrist.