CSotD: Funny, with a chance of politics
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Rabbits Against Magic is swimming upstream against a rapid current, because whatever idiotic thing Elon Musk says today, he’s bound to exceed tomorrow. His latest brainstorm is that he wants new Xitter members to pay for each posting, which would discourage bots, his announced intent, but would also discourage people from signing up at all.
If ol’ Muskie really wanted to offset his financial losses on Xitter, he’d trademark the phrase “I am not making this up” and charge people for using it in reference to him.
Specific to today’s strip, the House is considering a bill to make it illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections and I am not making that up, either. I hope they also make it illegal to ride unicorns on February 30, because that’s every bit as major a crisis.
It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, which nearly everyone who does not serve in the Freedom Caucus seems to know, since so few non-citizens even try to do so, and generally fail.
A few places allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, particularly school board races, on the theory that they pay taxes and their kids go the schools. That’s a tradition that goes back to the days before Women’s Suffrage, when women voted locally many places.
And let’s not forget that, before women could vote in federal elections, Jeannette Rankin won a seat in Congress because, while she was forbidden to vote, she wasn’t forbidden to serve. Now those damn women are everywhere, just because American voters want them to be.
It’s a slippery slope!
Juxtaposition of the Day
Elsewhere in things I am not making up, Britain has been convulsed with reports of counterfeit stamps being sold, apparently as a money-making scheme from China. I was going to say “illegally sold” but duh.
This was a problem here on Facebook but, unlike in Britain, the mainstream press took little notice. The US Postal Service put out a notice, including on Facebook, declaring that they don’t wholesale stamps and that the stamps being sold cheap were fake. Facebook responded by pocketing the money and ignoring repeated complaints from users about the scam.
The ads have since disappeared over here and I’d love a peek behind the scenes to find out how that happened because it certainly wasn’t because Facebook users were being ripped off.
As has often been noted, Facebook users are not the customers. Advertisers are the customers. Users are the monkeys in the zoo that the customers pay to see.
Elsewhere in the zoo, here’s one from Ed Hall, who is usually political but here is mostly being humorous.
I’ve seen Farm-Ed day at the county fair, and they will have some particularly docile cow washed down and set up so the kids can stand in line and each take a turn at grabbing a teat and making milk squirt into the bucket.
But the kids at the county fair have at least driven past herds of dairy cows nearly every day of their lives, even if they haven’t got friends who live on farms or lived there themselves.
But back in 1968, a friend of mine and I wandered through Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo the morning after a Jefferson Airplane/Iron Butterfly concert, and were amused to see a Holstein among the animals exhibited.
However, a group of tiny inner city youngsters came by shortly with their teachers and the cow was as exotic to them as the giraffes and lions. And while she seemed docile enough, given that nobody was yanking on her teats, she had not been scrubbed down and so looked, and smelled, like your average cow.
Judging from the way the kids reacted, there was going to be a lot of leftover milk at the classroom’s next lunch.
Meanwhile, back at Betty (AMS), Bub has persuaded Junior to watch a classic western with him.
Back in the Good Ol’ Days, westerns were a staple of both movies and television, and Dennis the Menace was as obsessed with Cowboy Bob as my older sibs were with Hoppy.
I was a Davy guy, myself, but trust me, that stick was portraying ol’ Betsy, and I could travel far and wide with Betsy by my side. I just couldn’t cross the street.
Junior, however, has not been steeped in the lore of the Golden West and probably thinks guns go pew-pew-pew. He’s both logically and historically correct that, while a cowboy might — emphasis on “might” — carry a gun to discourage coyotes or rattlesnakes, the full Hollywood regalia was too bulky, expensive and unnecessary to bother with.
To which I would add that those cowboys who did carry firearms on the trail were often required by local laws to surrender them for safekeeping when they came into town. It was a century before the childish dreams of five-year-olds became a legal reality.
Juxaposition of the Day #2
Two views of management, each recognizable.
I noted the other day little surprise at the finding that billionaires under 30 are all nepo-babies, and I’ve worked for enough of them that Joe Martin’s cartoon drew not a laugh so much as a chuckle of recognition.
Sometimes the founder’s wisdom sustains: The owner of Camp Lord O’ The Flies let his son run the place for one disastrous summer before selling the place to somebody competent and retiring, but I worked for a publisher whose sole qualification for management was having married the owner’s daughter.
As for generational trends, a girlfriend’s father wanted to be a meteorologist but took over the family’s major electrical contracting company when his father unexpectedly died. He passed it on to his son who managed to put the place out of business.
Not sure if Sonny could have picked his employees out of a lineup, but he sure had bought hisself a big old beautiful house.
I used to feel guilty about watching the evening news while we ate dinner, but at least my kids grew up well-informed. Now, as seen in the Lockhorns (AMS), there are TVs in restaurants.
All I ask is that they mute the sound and put on the closed captions.
Though I doubt that’s how John Lennon envisioned reading the news.
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