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CSotD: Mooving on

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Mike Peterson February 12, 2020 1 minute 3 comments

So the Primary is over and we’re back to being invisible.

Someone will ask for our vote in November, but with only four electoral votes, that’s all they’ll do: Ask. The begging is now officially over.

And I guess I’m not an influencer after all, because I read a couple of analyses of the vote that expressed surprise that Warren didn’t do better here, given that she’s from a neighboring state.

Dammit, I told you! Massachusetts is full of city people.

They are not our neighbors, and, when they come up here, their wimminfolk won’t pee in the woods like normal folks.

As noted in today’s Non Sequitur.

I had a city girlfriend who wouldn’t eat wild raspberries and blackberries because they were just out there in the open instead of something something something.

Instead of being planted in rows or packaged in little cardboard tubs.

It wasn’t clear.

But even she would make a quick exit behind a bush when nature called. She wasn’t that much of a city girl.

And while we’re indulging in bathroom humor, Betty is in the midst of an arc about toilet games which started back here.

I used to have magazines in there, but you’d get caught up in an article and the next thing you know, it’s 20 minutes later.

Phone games are stupid but they’re the right length, and I’m not looking for some great knowledge to descend upon me.

Just something slightly more amusing than an egg timer.

Besides, if you hold your phone in your hands, it isn’t gonna slip out of your pocket into the john. So it’s practical as well as entertaining.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

(Ed Hall)

(Matt Wuerker)

Vying for “strangest juxtaposition of the year” is this pair of stock (get it?) jokes.

It is odd that Hall and Wuerker both seized upon cattle, since their points are so different: Hall is talking about the poor saps who are lured into the feedlot on empty promises, while Wuerker is commenting on the obedient Senate herd that Trump has gelded and branded and that follows him anywhere he leads.

Note in the upper corner of Wuerker’s piece that Romney has wandered away from the herd, a maverick, unbranded and with his rocky mountain oysters intact.

While, in a different branch of the bovine business, Mike Lester pokes fun at Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar speech decrying the dairy industry.

I don’t think it’s really got anything to do with cowboys, since the semiwild cattle in roundups would not take politely to being milked even if you happened to catch them lactating and they aren’t bred to produce sufficient milk to feed a calf and provide a profit, too, though I guess you’d get enough to lighten a cup of coffee.

This refers less to Hall and Wuerker’s discussion of compliant cattle than to the discussion above it of city folks in the country, because, while Phoenix isn’t wrong, he isn’t exactly right, either.

That is, the more people flock to cities, the greater the need for large-scale food raising, and let’s remember that the cattle drives out west began after the Civil War, as we started laying railroad track and building factories and luring immigrants to live in our tenements and trying to figure out how to feed them.

Plus you can make anything disgusting if you describe it right.

I’m much more sympatico with someone who has gone vegan either for health reasons or because of Francis Moore Lappe’s discussions of responsible land use than because of some weepy Sarah Maclachlanesque concept of bereft moocows being violated with the semen of strange bulls.

In fact, I’d be more sympatico with some city kid who got a first hand look at the number of flies that wander around on a real live cow and how much slop gathers on her undercarriage and promptly decided never to drink milk again.

Though personally, I’m okay with it and I’m even going to put today’s musical treat halfway up the blog posting to prove it:

Additional Canadian Content

While we’re gazing above the border, Doc and Raider has been proving that it’s possible to have fun with Harry and Meghan without simply piling on.

Meghan’s taking care of business out west, while Harry and his official bed are visiting the boys.

This isn’t roll-on-the-floor laugh-inducing, but rather fun storytelling that is more entertaining for its direct, straight-faced approach to important topics like Corgis.

The current story starts here and god knows where it ends.

Probably with Joaquin Phoenix explaining how sad and bizarre and unnecessary the royal lifestyle is.

Or something.

Meanwhile, Canadian political cartoonist Michael de Adder picks up on Stephen King’s decision to quit Facebook.

I’ll admit that, if I got 257,800 likes on Twitter, I’d feel the promotional aspects of Facebook were negotiable, too, but he’s right that the platform is both toxic and intrusive and that Zuck not only doesn’t care but appears to be buddying up to the right wing.

And, while I’m a First Amendment supporter, I think the experimental phase of the Internet is about over and it’s time we exerted a little bit of control over the beast.

Meanwhile, Keith Knight wonders aloud about what Watergate might have been like if Nixon had had somebody like Fox News broadcasting a 24-hour defense of his actions.

Now, the justification for control of broadcast is based on its limited spectrum, the argument being that we control TV and radio because the spectrum belongs to the people.

By contrast, there’s no real limit to the Internet and so we don’t do much to regulate it, and this makes sense.

To an extent.

But you certainly can’t argue that the Second Amendment only had muzzle-loaders in mind without accepting that the First Amendment was written in a world of handset, one-page-at-a-time printing presses.

I’m less interested in your position than I am in your consistency.

It was easier to stick to our principles when we lacked the technology to act against them.