Comic Strip of the Day: Inconceivable!

Today is Hump Day, not because it’s Wednesday but because the President has asked us all to believe that there are scary brown Muslims headed our way from Honduras, mixed in with the scary brown Latinos.

We’ll know them because SBLs ride on burros but SBMs ride on camels.

Joe Heller‘s cartoon suggests that this delusion is brought about by too much cable news, but Vice President Pence explained, “it is inconceivable that there would not be individuals from the Middle East as a part of this growing caravan.”

Which, of course, drew a chorus on social media of people noting that he keeps using that word and that they do not believe it means what he thinks it means.

However, he has a point. There are 7.6 billion people in the world, of whom 1.8 billion are Muslim, so that, if there are 7,000 people in this refugee caravan, we may logically assume that 1,658 of them are Muslim.

And, since 20% of Muslims live in the Middle East, there are conceivably 331 Middle Easterners in the caravan.

And 1,289 Chinese, though, while it’s inconceivable to believe otherwise, you should also remember that Uighars are Muslim and assume that therefore some of the Muslims and Chinese are the same people, but, then again, some of the Middle Easterns are Lebanese Catholics or Yazidis.

Anyway, it’s math and you can’t conceivably argue with math.

And it’s no less ridiculous than the rest of the efforts to make Dear Leader sound like something other than a delusional, blathering nincompoop and migod but this would be hilarious if it were happening in some other country.

 

For instance,  if you had the man who directed a murder put in charge of finding the perpetrator.

Ann Telnaes combines a color palette blending foxy-orange with the prince’s habitual red, then uses her Disney training to illustrate the response of the chickens.

Perhaps I should say “the response of the chickens” but that all seems a bit speculative at this point.

In any case, it’s funny in a gallows humor kind of way, since there’s no isolationism possible in the global village, and when the Saudis sneeze, we all catch cold.

Remembering that there are, conceivably, six Saudis in the refugee caravan.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(RJ Matson)

(Ward Sutton)

One place in which the math had better hold is in the upcoming elections, and Matson depicts the GOP strategy, which not only includes striking large numbers of voters off the rolls in largely African-American neighborhoods in Georgia but moving the only polling station in Dodge City, Kansas, a mile out of the center of town, which will not inconvenience people who own automobiles but will keep a lot of lower-middle-class and poor people — predominantly Hispanic — from voting.

Ward Sutton has made some posters to encourage voting, though this is the only one on his website and I suspect the others are on his Tumblr.

He’s got hi-res versions that will print at 11×17 for anyone who wants to post them.

 

Meanwhile, besides promising a tax cut before election day that can’t possibly happen, Dear Leader is setting us up with farcical claims of massive, pending voter fraud, and I’ve heard somewhat paranoid speculation that, if the Democrats win, the Republicans may reject the vote count.

 

Right now, he’s just monitoring those early voters and other fraudsters, to keep us safe.

Nothing for law-abiding citizens to worry about. Move along.

 

In other news

Barney & Clyde cracked me up this morning for what I guess is kind of dark reasons.

We’ve had an ongoing issue here of groundwater pollution from a couple of industrial sources plus the former well-named Pease Air Force Base, and one of the contaminants is Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, otherwise known as “PFAS.”

Which is very serious stuff, but, since I get most of my regional news from New Hampshire Public Radio, I’m hearing it said rather than reading it and it sounds like Pee-Fast, which, once you get into your 60s, is pretty much anything you drink, polluted or not.

 

And then there’s this

The Barn features some humor about something that will also make you pee fast.

It’s a sign of how far out of hand the whole coffee thing has become that Ralph Hagen can just drop a reference to kopi luwak into a strip without explaining it, though, if you are hep to the term, you would wonder why Rory is not charging a substantial premium.

 

I’m well-informed on the topic of coffee because one of my few indulgences is really good, genuinely fair-trade coffee from Dean’s Beans, and Dean, who is good people, not only visits his farmers personally but has occasional updates on what’s-what in the trade.

Some time ago, he visited Sumatra and ran into some farmers who wanted to sell him this magical coffee.

Here’s his account of the visit, with some valuable insights on authentic free trade, the relevant paragraph being:

At the hotel ten exporters are waiting.  They all want to sell me kopi luwak, the famous coffee eaten by wild civit cats, excreted, then collected and processed by these guys.  Kopi luwak retails for about four hundred bucks a pound, and in some hipster cafes you can buy a single small cup for twenty dollars.  I know that about two-thirds of all claimed kopi luwak has been shown not to be the real thing by scientists who test the stuff, so I ask how much is available.  Forty containers – 1,600,000 pounds! I tell the guys that there aren’t enough civits in the entire world to produce that much. What are they doing, force feeding their kids coffee cherries? They all burst out laughing and there is no more talk of kopi luwak. 

 

But he did find some of the real thing on a trip to Ethiopia, and here’s what all the fuss is about:

I don’t know if the term “kopi luwak” is Sumatran or Ethiopian,
but “cat poop coffee” seems to cover it.