I regret to inform you that we have achieved peak Rex Morgan, M.D.
Crank theologian fka pastordan A hopeful monster Read me at dandadad.com
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I regret to inform you that we have achieved peak Rex Morgan, M.D.
Melania just found out about Laura Loomer.
Fixed it.
Alert: Pope Leo XIV denounces the 'pandemic of arms' as he prays for the victims of the Catholic school shooting in the U.S. www.chron.com/news/world/a...
"Neither putatively correct messaging nor generational change in leadership can overcome authoritarianism, but only resistance based in solidarity."
Loaded onto a plane that turns out to be a rocket aimed at Jupiter, yes.
admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it.
Yabbut are Republicans really going to yeet them?
I mean, obviously Stephen Miller gets led out into woods and shot quietly, but who's next?
Late hit, but assuming Trump does die, who's the first administration figure to get yeeted into the sun?
🤔
Sure, sure, I'm just leaving some room for a margin of error. I'd definitely like to get a close-up on him.
Them: Proof of life! Me: That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die
Even making allowances for blurring due to him being in motion, something ain't right there.
Whatever else happens to Trump, he can always count on three Supreme Court votes to let him out of Hell while his appeals proceed.
Come on guys, this speculation is gross. He's just stuck in the bathtub, like Taft.
Yes, in fact he is!
Listen, I don't want to rain on any parades, but I asked a guy today if he'd talked to his parents recently (he's in his mid-80s). "Oh yeah," he said. "They were dead, then they came back to life. I don't know why that happens, a lot of people are doing it."
Bluesky is a free social media service
True, Darth. People have long wondered if talking to Mark Zuckerberg constitutes human relationship or engagement with a bot.
which ones
I wonder if there are any political scientists who would be able to share some ideas for how to do that? 🤔
Shhhh, the Heathcliff creative team will hear you
Every time I come to this McDonalds it reminds me of why I should not come to this McDonalds, and yet I keep coming. Discuss.
Ha! I'll take the comparison to a pupper. Yes, "thank you" is fine. I've also had people tell me I'm "doing the Lord's work," which I can get under.
(Yeah, I get it, not everyone can do this job, but it's really not as hard to do as people think. And as anyone who reads my stuff knows, sometimes you get some pretty funny stories out of it.)
More important, it doesn't take the people we work with seriously. I don't go to The Dying or The Suffering. I just talk to people, most of whom would really rather not be defined by their health conditions.
It's uncomfortable to get that sort of adulation, obviously. Makes us feel like you're not seeing the whole person, as complicated, fragile and morally ambiguous as any person is. Take me more seriously than that, as Max Clelland used to say.
I'll say it to you all because I can't really say it directly to the people who tell me such things: please don't call hospice workers — or really any health care workers — "angels" or "heroes."
I must, mustn't I.
And doing all of that as an out gay man in the 1960's! It was, uh, quite an end.
Nice nice. Mishima is said to also be a hoot in the original Japanese.
There was this blissful moment in early 2021 where I could wake up and the headlines didn't begin "Trump ____." Lasted all of about a nanosecond.
*If you will excuse the expression
Every day it feels like we inch closer to the apocalypses* predicted in all that terrible sci-fi I read in seventh grade
White-hot rage against Microsoft Word falling... falling... RISING... falling...
Going to repost this thread from last night with a note about where I was originally headed with it: Even if the worst happens in our democracy, these relationships will continue, must continue. They represent an ultimate reality that can never be controlled or overwritten by a dictator.
No, sir. I'm just a guy who likes his work to be meaningful.
If you knew American Legion bars, and bars in Wisconsin, you would understand.
Tomorrow, I am so adding a change of clothes to my box of supplies in the car trunk.
And when you're really down in the dumps, completely despairing, remind yourself that there is always more to life, more to reality than even the most powerful dictator's fever dreams. You could sit in a puddle of someone else's piss, for example.
Think of that when Stephen Miller froths about "immigrant crime," or when someone shrieks about how Democrats are just Republican-lite, and "we" shouldn't work with neocons.
You must carry this with you wherever you go in the dark days. What is real is what connects us to one another. What divides us is not.
Love is real in a way that hate and division can never be. Standing with someone is real. Ministering to them, in word and presence and humble service, is real. Trump's vanity and authoritarianism? Delusions like chaff in the wind, as Psalm 1 has it.
Those grace-filled moments of love and solidarity are more real than anything Trump can ever imagine, because they will last beyond his tacky gilded empire, beyond his presidency, his life or his legacy, beyond this world and into the next.
But you should also take time to remind yourself that there are other realities, other stories that continue to play out. There are people who shit themselves and piss themselves, and people who clean them up or pray for them, sometimes just for the money, often just out of stubbornness and love.
Now when I say those moments are what is real, and what happens in the headlines or on social media is not, I don't want you to hear that as saying that Trump's goons aren't running roughshod over the Constitution, or that you shouldn't be concerned about it. They are, and you should.
I've had entire visits where I just sit with someone in silence, or held their hand. That's it, that's all you do sometimes: bring comfort, reassurance and connection to their lives.
You wipe up their piss and their shit, trying not to get on yourself or your clothes, you give them something to eat and something to do, you make sure that they're not sitting or laying in one position for too long. Sometimes you brush their hair, polish their nails, or rub their backs.
I hear every day about how Trump is trying to make American society, and really the world, about himself. He may yet find a way to interfere with ministry to the dying, but so far, no.
On my second visit of the day, I sat with a woman in the same dining room while she fell asleep and drooled on her clothing protector. Meanwhile, the other resident at her table was meticulously smoothing his protector on the table. Otherwise, it was quiet, peaceful really.
People in memory care units can be surprisingly aware of politics. But I constantly find myself in a very different world than the one I find on Bluesky or Facebook or any of the other social media platforms.
My job does help me keep things in perspective. There's not much realer than working with the dying, as one of the colleagues said. And here's the thing: what I said goes for Trump just as much as it does for AI.
But she'd heard my story from earlier in the day, so I just looked at her and told her the truth. I deal with people who piss themselves and shit themselves and die, five or more days a week, every week. I am constantly glad that I don't have to deal with AI as part of that.
My wife's colleagues were talking about AI in higher education, and one of them was getting all gloom-and-doom about it. She thinks AI is leading us into the End Times, and she's really not kidding about that.
She proclaimed for all of us to hear that *her* president was neither a Republican nor a Democrat, he was Bernie Sanders, which might tell you something about why we're in the mess we're in these days. She had a cute little bulldog with her, though.
Later, I joined my wife and some of her colleagues for a drink at the Legion bar around the corner from our house. One of the bartenders was off-duty and had been drinking all day, so we were treated to her very loud, very long soliloquy about immigrants, Democrats, and Trump.
Or I can do what I did wind up doing, which was let them dry and put up with it until I got home. Perhaps not my most hygienic decision of the day, but after all, they were only damp, and my options weren't great.
Despite this being a fairly decent-sized town, the hollowing out of American storefront retail means my options for a change of pants are roughly 15 miles that way to Target, 12 miles that way to Wal-Mart, or hope the St. Vincent De Paul store around the corner was open.
Without thinking about it (because why would you), I had grabbed Darlene's seat, with a protective cushion on it, because Darlene insists that she doesn't need to go to the bathroom. Friends, that was not water on the protective cushion.
It's only after I get up and head off to chart my visit that I notice that the back of my pants felt damp. Please tell me you just wiped these seats off, I said to the staff. Friends, they had not just wiped the seats off.
*For those who don't know, I'm a hospice chaplain.
To wit, I got to my first visit of the day,* with a lady sitting at a table in her facility dining room. So I grab a chair from another table, plunk down next to her, and have a perfectly lovely, if nonsensical, conversation.
I have something to tell you about fear and democracy, politics and ultimate reality. I hope you'll stick with me, because it starts in a rather inobvious place.
EVERYBODY FEELS SORRY FOR MY KNEES
I have so got to find a new posture for talking with people in wheelchairs
She just waved at me as I was leaving the building. Probably couldn't tell you what she had for lunch five minutes before, but she "feels sorry for my knees."
I just had a 99-year-old tell me to be careful with my creaking knees. How's your day?
Again, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but if the 2028 Democratic presidential field winds up with Newsom and Pritzker being major players, I'm okay with that.
One thing about Pritzker is I think he actually cares???
Just inject this scholarship directly into my nerd-lined veins
One thing I like to do when I see the name Radio Free Tom is change the dang channel
This is it, this is the thing. It's just Rush Limbaugh's "political correctness" play run again, with the same implications.
(This will drive the comment section on Go Comics crazy. Good.)
Yass come through woke Gil Thorp
I fixed the Cracker Barrel logo if anyone is interested! #illustration #branding
I don't want to get into a 2028 flamewar, but I do kind of hope Bernie doesn't run. Too much of a distraction, and it really is time for a younger generation of leadership.
I have no problems with this, particularly if it is paired with a taco truck on every corner.
I think this is right. First order of operations is to pressure Congressional Dems to adopt a winning* strategy for 2026, to raise money for their races, and primary the f*** out of them, as needed. (*=! "My preferred strategy.")
In this post, I will lay out seven ways Bernie Sanders could still win, despite the primary being over for almost nine years. First, Hillary Clinton sucks...
@ironspike.bsky.social Bill Griffith's book on Schlitzie the pinhead was excellent, but I'm sure it only got published because it had his name on it.
The years since 2000 have done nothing to relieve my nihilistic Gen-X belief that I was born ten years too late.
A few weeks back, Greg and a guest in his show whose name I can't remember speculated that as Trump's polling numbers declined, he would escalate his authoritarianism. Well, about that...
o_0
🫰🫰You cannot vocabulary your way to political effectiveness 🫰🫰
12. And while they search for scapegoats for the problems they create, the problems they create continue to impoverish people like me. And that makes me mad. Let me put it this way.
James Dobson dies, conservatives are boycotting Cracker Barrel, and my wife wonders why I want to have a drink.
Wait, now we have a *good* reason to eat at Cracker Barrel?
I was going to ask you to comment on the potato angle.
I see what you did there.
Having had an orange breeze custard shake, I disagree with this strongly.
I mean chopsticks I'd buy...
A nurse tells me we all start out on liquid nourishment, then soft food, small bites, finger food, finally utensils to feed ourselves. If we live long enough, we all eventually reverse that progression. Interesting, great way to frame things, etc. But the summit of my time on earth is using a fork?!
And that's it. The last candidate endorsement I made was for Obama in 2008 because I was pissed at Hillary Clinton for not giving up when the primary was clearly over, and that wasn't even in church, just on my dumb blog.
5. Minor, but telling, point. It's a *clerical* collar you ninnies at the New York Times, not a "priest's collar." It's worn by all kinds of ministers, and — I don't know if you knew this — it can be purchased even without showing Catholic credentials.
4. I've actually met and worked with Bishop Erickson in the past. He's a solid individual and leader, the kind of guy who I'd listen to if he said "That's a really bad idea," just because of who he is.
Don't try this at home, kids! The law is ripe for selective prosecution, with a Supreme Court prone to making rulings of "Trumps will be Trumps."
3. Nor did I expect the bit about the administration not issuing any guidance about the new situation, which I really should have. As things stand now, it's basically a cop saying "Don't worry about that law," which...😬
