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.