CSotD: Doublechecked Cartoons

Bill Bramhall takes a shot at New York City’s new and improved “We (heart) NYC” logo. I won’t dispute him on whether the place has too many rats, because I’m not a city person to begin with and NYC is not high on my list. If I had to live in a city, my first choice would be Montreal, but, alas, while my French is good enough to live there, it’s not good enough to make a living as a writer there.

And Boston is nice, if you park your car in Newton and take the T into town. Chicago and Pittsburgh are good collections of blue collar neighborhoods, though Chicago’s weather puts me off.

However, it is my well-considered opinion that the City of New York should have held onto its “New Amsterdam” label and let the other 57% of the people in the Empire State call their place “New York.”

Or vice-versa. Makes me no never mind which, but when they report something on the news as having happened “Upstate,” that means Yonkers or maybe Kingston.

What it really means is that the newscaster doesn’t give a damn where it happened, except that it was in the part of New York that doesn’t really count. The part with no Rockettes.

Back in 1977, when they came up with “I (heart) NY” we all knew they didn’t mean us, but we could pretend otherwise and the state did a whole tourism thing promoting the many many many many many places in the state from which you cannot see the Statue of Liberty.

Which is in New Jersey, home of the Jets and Giants.

Anyway, they — the people who matter — seem now to have decided that the new motto should be “We (heart) NYC” and I suppose it’s more honest, but it’s not my NY, so I won’t argue with Bramhall over how it might apply to rats.

On to more substantive matters:

Tom Stiglich (Creators) refutes the possibly maybe pending eventual indictment of Donald Trump by, first of all, assuming that the Manhattan DA can only prosecute one crime at a time, a theory he may have gotten from watching “Law and Order.”

Second, he assumes that crime is up in Manhattan, which isn’t true even though you might have read it on Truth Social.

Yep. Even though Donald Trump said it, it somehow turns out not to be true.

Astonishing, eh?

After awhile, you begin to wonder how much indulgence you should allow for honest mistakes. The failures of SVB and Signature banks happened over two weeks ago, and this Chip Bok (Counterpoint) cartoon just appeared yesterday.

Seems like plenty of time to get the basic facts straight.

As widely reported those two weeks ago, the Fed scrambled to avoid a panic that would bring down other banks, by removing the executives of SVB and Signature as well as voiding the holdings of their investors. The only guarantee — granted, a substantial one — was that the FDIC would lift the limits on depositor insurance in order to protect depositors.

That was, however, to protect the “passengers,” not the driver, who, the above dialogue notwithstanding, did have insurance, just not enough.

The administration’s point was to avoid a Bank Meltdown Contagion, which would be extremely bad for the American economy.

Which makes it very important to get your facts right.

Depending on your goal.

Dana Summers (Tribune) is also apparently hoping to encourage the type of needless, pointless panic that could crash the economy. I’m not sure why: I didn’t think 2008 was that much fun.

But I’ve certainly been accused of lacking a sense of humor.

I did get a laugh out of John Deering (Creators)‘s response to the Congressional flogging of TikTok.

The hearings were praises as “bipartisan” but I’m not sure that’s a such good thing. I’ll admit I didn’t sit down for a heapin’ helpin’ but what I saw and heard reminded me of Sen. Ted Stevens’ remarks in 2006 about the Internet being a series of tubes.

I’m not particularly opposed to rules keeping TikTok off government computers and phones, but, beyond that, that room started to smell like censorship.

It’s possible to be bipartisanly ignorant as well as bipartisanly hostile, and there seemed to be a fair amount of both going on.

And I would say so even if I didn’t believe that TikTok is a candy mint.

Jeff Danziger (Counterpoint) offers my standard haystack defense, which is that the more they gather, the less they can process, and that most of what is posted on TikTok is of dubious value overall, never mind of any value to spies.

Granted, of course, they could add filters to sort out certain topics. Someone at the hearing asked, for instance, if TikTok had taken down references to the massacre at Tiananmen Square or the oppression of the Uyghars, which would be a sensible question, if TikTok were available in China, which it is not.

ByteDance, which owns TikTok, has a different social app in China, which is, indeed, highly censored and on which kids under 14 may only spend 40 minutes a day. Which sounds pretty good, if your goal is to have a government like Beijing’s, though Clay Jones indicates that it’s not his.

In fact, Jones has a really good blog entry on the topic, by which I mean we agree pretty much down the line and he quotes lots of smart people, which I mean people who agree with both of us.

But Walt Handlesman wraps it up in a neat package with a bow, pointing out that, while TikTok may well be tracking our kids, so is everyone else. All them tubes on the Internet got to lead somewhere, gosh durn it.

Still, let’s be reasonable. As Mike Smith (KFS) says, we’re only concerned with protecting our children.

From the Internet tubes, that is, not the kind of metal tubes that bullets come flying out of.

Nobody dares hold a hearing about those.