CSotD: The Tangled Webs We’ve Woven
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Danae may be ahead of her classmates in today’s Non Sequitur, but they’ll follow soon enough. The notion that what’s said on-line stays on-line is nonsense.
I remember, in about 2003, going to see a principal at an elementary school so rural (How rural was it?) so rural that you could see cows in the pasture just beyond the school parking lot.
She was momentarily tied up with three fifth graders who had been in some kind of quarrel that required sorting out, and as I waited in the outer office, I could not only hear them mirroring the confrontational speech style of a Jerry Springer show but catch glimpses of them using the hand-sweeps that no little white farmgirls would have known if they hadn’t been watching Jerry.
No surprise to parents that kids pick up the things they hear, or, at least, it’s not a surprise after the first time a toddler drops an F-bomb.
(Personal trivia: For eldest son, it was when his grandfather gave him a playful swat on his diapered behind. Understandable response, inappropriately phrased.)
I’d be surprised if teachers and principals are not already seeing the consequences of our unbridled on-line hostility.
Speaking of things we knew but don’t think about, I like today’s Andertoons, particularly since I’ve been ticketed for the same thing.
But it occurs to me that there is a whole list of songs we think of as Christmas songs which aren’t, and “Frosty the Snowman” is among them, as is “Jingle Bells,” or, to use its proper title, “A One Horse Open Sleigh,” and “Walking in a Winter Wonderland,” though that last one always gets me sidetracked on the question of why they took Parson Brown out of a frequently heard version.
I guess that’s so Jewish people could sing it or something. Which is further proof that it’s not a Christmas song, though, I would point out, most years it could be a Hannukah song.
Even in the year of the Menurkey.
We get snow at Thanksgiving up here and that’s not likely to change as we rearrange the jet streams over the next 77,000 years before the next convergence.
Or maybe it is.
I get confused.
Okay, let’s get serious
Chip Bok offers this commentary on the IG report, which is essentially correct: The report said the investigation was perfectly appropriate and called for, but that the way the FISA applications were filed was deeply flawed.
Which is interesting but something of a side issue to be raised once we deal with the essential treason at the center of this scandal, if we ever do.
The point being that I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody of any depth or credibility on either side of the aisle defend FISA.
FISA is part of a whole network of things we’ve allowed over the years as we permitted our country to be transformed into a police state, things that range from fingerprinting toddlers “to keep them safe” to making an icon of Dirty Harry Callaghan as he solves crime by simply disregarding ethics, rights and procedure.
Dirty Harry, the Chair Whisperer, is currently promoting his Richard Jewell movie as showing how evil the media and the government are.
In the wake of Watergate, we had the Church Committee Report, which detailed the abuses of the intelligence agencies and shocked us into enacting a lot of reforms.
Most of which we seem to have gotten over.
Kal Kallaugher points out the futility of our war in Afghanistan, and it’s depressing to see how little impact the revelations of the papers detailing how we got into that mess have had, compared to the thunderbolt of the Pentagon Papers in undermining support for the Vietnam War.
We’re getting pretty hard to shock, and it’s been pointed out several times on social media that any of a number of Trump dealings would have disqualified a candidate just a few years ago.
We impeached a president for lying about consensual non-marital sex, but shrugged off Trump’s obscene bragging on the Access Hollywood tape and his bribing of concubines to keep them quiet.
Granted, Trump wants to pull us out of Afghanistan, but it’s only part of his bizarre foreign policy blunderings that have not only gobsmacked his staff but resulted in the deaths of our Kurdish allies and their families.
Not to worry. Ed Hall reminds us that we’ve got a vice-president who has built his career on unswerving morality.
He has visited our Kurdish allies in Iraq to reassure them that we don’t plan to screw them there the way we screwed them in Syria.
He’s from the government and is here to help you, after all, and the check for Ukraine is in the mail and there’s a third one I’ve forgotten.
Kal’s cartoon is reminiscent of the British withdrawal from Kabul in 1842, though they’re more likely to turn on each other.
What’s not likely to happen is that we’ll create a museum like the Russians have, to admit and confront the failure of their adventurism in the Graveyard of Empires.
Only one aspect of the tangled mess some future generation will have to deal with.
And to keep this cheerful mood going, Ted Rall speaks some hard but pragmatic truth about the future of choice.
Those of us old enough to have been young, single and active before Roe v Wade realize that rich women were able to get purported D&C’s back in the day, but even then, their daughters were frequently too upset and fearful to come forward in time for that.
Younger people cite coat hangers as an abstract symbol, but some of us remember true horrors.
There are religious groups that both oppose abortion and help support the children of the poor, but there are plenty that don’t.
It’s certainly not government policy, which cares deeply about pre-born children but not the post-born ones.
So the states propose insane pro-life laws while the Feds pull food assistance to poor families.
And empathy is for libtards.
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