CSotD: Learning as we go, or not

I’m going to wait another day for a few more Trump/Tax cartoons to hit, but Morten Morland (London Times) lays out the administration’s response, which is, of course, denial.

Trump’s constant refrain about fake news brings up the line from Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I am not sure it means what you think it means,” and ditto for “hoax.”

To the rest of the world, “fake news” means it’s not true, as, of course, does “hoax,” but, when Donald Trump says them, I can’t help but think he means anything he doesn’t want to hear, like a two-year-old not only furiously denying that he wrote on the wall but that anybody wrote on the wall, and it’s all your fault for pointing it out.

Morland, in fact, captures just that combination of horror and denial in Trump’s face, and I’m glad he included Ivanka in the scene, because her role in all this remains unclear except that she pretty obviously has one.

F’rinstance, I’m not sure she’s in any legal jeopardy for her father having deducted her “consultant fees” as a bogus business deduction, though it seems, if he’d bundled it in under “employee compensation” that it would have passed the sniff, if not the laugh, test.

Still, the circumstances under which she accepted the boodle might be sketchy.

 

In a coincidental but stunningly apt bit of timing, Bizarro (KFS) suggests that, once we get a real Department of Justice back in place and stop pissing away taxpayer funds looking for election material under Hunter Biden’s bed, we’ll dig into this tangled mess and I doubt Ms. Trump-Kushner or her idiot brothers will come out unscathed, having, like this little lad, all jumped aboard the scheme.

Until that happy day, I’m with Jeff Stahler (AMS) and would like to have my taxes calculated in the way Dear Leader’s have been.

And, if you follow the business news, this cartoon gets a double-laugh because Turbo Tax has gotten their own tail caught in the crack.

Which goes beyond asking if you’re angry that Trump only paid $750 in income taxes and asks if you mind having the sharks busily trying to rip you off, too.

Nor is that the only way ordinary people have been holding the short straw — I note that the Boy Scouts, as part of their consent decree, are paying for ads reminding their victims of sexual assault to file their claims by November 16.

After which we can expect a flood of ads on daytime TV, offering to buy up your structured settlement and give you (quite a bit less) cash now.

Until then, let’s head

Back to School

Mr Boffo (freelance) brought me up short with this one. I’m not sure kids can simply binge-watch back episodes of Zoom classes, but, then again, if you are forward-thinking enough to record them or the school chooses to archive them on-line, why not?

Anyway, it’s a funny way for slackers to repent for their lack of consistent work, and I say that as someone who plowed through Christiaan Huygens’ “Treatise on Light” and Newton’s “Optics” in 24 hours in order to take a test in a class I’d been skipping, and who, in high school, got up at four in the morning for a couple of weeks to catch up on my translations of the Gallic Wars.

OTOH, Huygens, Newton and Caesar were pretty entertaining lecturers, and I’m not sure I’d want to sit through real-time repeats of lesser presentations I’d zoned out on the first time around.

However you handle it, after class you should put on your racoon coat and grab your pennants for this

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Steve Sack – Star Tribune)

 

(Phil Hands – AMS)

Before he got distracted by taxes and such, Dear Leader was all-but-demanding that schools open up, making the simultaneous arguments that kids can’t get Covid and that spread of the disease was the fault of 18-23 year olds gathering at bars and to protest.

As part of this push, Dear Leader was adamant that the college football season also had to happen, and, since he knows more about running a successful football program than anyone, and since TV revenues matter, the schools appear to be obeying.

Sack notes that fans think college players can obey protocols that it’s impossible for them to follow themselves, and the joke is funnier if you see what the NFL is putting itself through to keep their game safe and practical.

The NCAA’s guiding principle — honored more often in the breach as it is — is that student-athletes are supposed to live, for the most part, as their fellow students who are not athletes. But protocols that would allow players to block and tackle student-athletes from other schools would isolate them so much from their classmates as to essentially remove their “student” designation entirely.

Meanwhile, as Phil Hands suggests, letting the students have any more access to the games than they would get staying home — not gathering in bars — to watch on TV is begging for Covid outbreaks.

And please don’t insult our intelligence by mewling and puking over letting those young men live out their dreams. Let them sit out the season in safety, give them an additional year of eligibility and bear in mind that 90% of them do go to classes.

Maybe a year out of football would let them spend more time with Professors Huygens, Newton and Caesar.

 

I wonder what the rich folks are doing tonight?

Whatever happens to Ivanka, Eric and Donnie Jr, there will always be full slips down at the yacht club, and First Dog on the Moon seems to have little sympathy for the wee lordlings whose muck-up day (what we would call “Senior Prank Day”) turned out to be a ghastly scavenger hunt that combined sexism, racism, elitism and a few levels of plain old proletariat-level crime.

It brought tears to the eyes.

“This is not who we are,” the headmaster declared.

Except that it’s exactly who you are. We’ve got “smug entitled sociopaths” up here, too.

First Dog nailed it.

 

https://youtu.be/j_69OXyGkd4