RIP Brian Thompson (RIP Stands for Rot in Purgatory)

Oh dear, I seem to have forgotten to weigh in on the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Let me fix that. Considering that the Facebook announcement of his death got at least a hundred thousand laugh reacts, my opinion is not fresh or controversial. He made millions of dollars a year by denying healthcare to people, and as far as I'm concerned, his life had less value than a mosquito's. I couldn't possibly give fewer shits that he was a husband or a father. So was Heinrich Himmler, main architect of the Holocaust.

Incidentally, he and his wife had been separated for years. I wouldn't imply for a moment that everyone who's separated from their spouse is evil, but it's stupid that his very few defenders think having a wife who didn't love him is a point in his favor. And his kids will get over it too. They're set for life. They'll never suffer the deprivation that his victims did. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of vigilante violence. In an ideal world, it wouldn't have been necessary because he would have been executed by the state after a fair trial. Scratch that - in an ideal world, he never would have profited from human suffering and death in the first place because the United States would have universal healthcare like every other developed country that exists.

Of course, one man's death doesn't fix the systemic problem that is health insurance companies, but I bet it will make his successor and other CEOs think a little harder about the way they treat us peons. If they didn't notice before how normal people feel about them, they absolutely have now. We can see from the effort that went into finding his killer and the absurd decision to charge him with terrorism that this one death has rattled our oligarchic overlords more than all the schoolchildren being mowed down every week in the United States (including on the same day). I've had it up to my eyeballs with obscenely rich douchebags doing whatever the hell they want, and it's only going to get worse in the immediate future now that the richest one of all has bought all three branches of government. President Musk, with the help of First Lady Trump, is going to give them even more tax cuts and repeal the few regulations that keep them from screwing the rest of us even more than they already are, and morons who've been brainwashed into thinking that people on food stamps are the source of their problems will cheer them on all the way. Brian Thompson's well-deserved removal from this planet is a small sliver of comfort as we head into that bitter reality.

So yeah, this is about as un-merry as I've ever felt during the Christmas season. The other reason is that there's no snow where I am. I think we've had snow on the ground for less than a total of twenty-four hours so far. It was fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit yesterday. And this after I moved here just in time for a record-breaking heat wave that lasted a month. Tell me more about how climate change is a hoax. The good news is that my memoir is coming out by the end of this year. It's called Goodbye Mormonism, Hello World: My Slightly Pretentious Search for the Truths of Life, the Universe, and Everything. As you can guess, it's about my religious deconstruction and spiritual journey. I keep it focused on myself so I'm not preaching or telling people what to believe, but I wrote it to help people, and I flatter myself that it's more important now than ever. I'm really pleased with it. And because it has Mormonism in the title, I bet it will sell better than my first book.