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.