We are all afraid of the future. Both sides.

Only one side goes around shrieking "They're eating the dogs! They're eating the cats!" Never mind that this future they see is expressed in the present tense — the mind only knows the present tense, and this is their reality.
Go ahead, tell me it's the only philosophy they can afford because of Biden's over-regulation. What I fear is finding another intelligence test in your every assertion. It's exhausting trying to calculate which of your divinations of entrails are worth paying attention to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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Licensed Apparel

Nov. 25, 2022

You could be excused for wondering if your boss has a dick under that dress… all these men dressing as women and women dressing as men. Imagine going to grab ‘em by the pussy, and grabbing a dick. Boy, is your face red.

Before you use your own computer to google “chicks with dicks,” you might want to think about borrowing someone else’s computer… you don’t want some bot company customer of google inundating you with offers to make your dick grow.

For most of us of course romance starts with moon-faced glances, hand-holding, and kissing. Monkeys don’t have this problem. And for a hundred thousand years, before we became people, we were just fancy monkeys.

So let’s look to our forefathers, our heritage, and get back to God. Let’s outlaw clothes. You’re probably saying, “What about the weather?” but I happen to know that science is on the verge of perfecting personal force-fields that fit the individual like transparent tights. No problem, no mystery.

Of course exceptions must be made. Clothing could be licensed. I don’t want to see Tucker Carlson’s electric butt-plug that goes off every five seconds making his voice suddenly jump two octaves for no apparent reason. That’s not funny.

 

 

LA

 

By Joe McMansion

Nov. 6, 2021

I’m a real businessman. I work hard in the real world to get ahead, which in 1988 in West Virginia meant coal. Buying and selling coal; I don’t actually touch the stuff.

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I’m a real businessman. I work hard in the real world to get ahead, which in 1988 in West Virginia meant coal. Buying and selling coal; I don’t actually touch the stuff.

Who better to represent coal miners in politics? So many environmentalists out there tryin to tell us about energy. We’ve been selling coal to the world for centuries. That makes us the experts, and these tree-huggers can’t be allowed to change the laws just because China wants to sell solar panels.

This is the real world: 50 years ago you could pay for college by waiting on tables, because the government needed a lot of smart people to get us to the moon. Now we need more energy than ever. America knows that it’s just as important to keep fossil fuel companies strong as it is to go to the moon.

Some changes are always necessary as time goes by. I’ve got my finger on the pulse. And who better to make sure the rules aren’t changed that made fossil fuel the most important industry in the world?

You have to be really careful about changing what works. Can you believe these people speaking uncharitably about the Senate, which is the “greatest deliberative body in the world.”

Silence Dogood, a well-known left-wing wacko, summarizes their argument thus:

Really? The difference between deliberation and masturbation is the difference between thinking about doing nothing, and doing nothing.

Benjamin Franklin said, “If we don’t hang together, we shall surely hang separately.” By any measure, revolting and taking part of the old country to make a new one is treason to the old. No legal argument against King George hanging the lot of them. So the argument was settled on the battlefield.

Since only half of Americans wanted to be traitors, it’s kinda miraculous that 13 out of 13 colonies signed up. It wasn’t the summer of love; they didn’t trust each other. How could little Rhode Island ever hope to affect policy when nearby New York is 50 times their size and population?

Simple: divide the legislature in half. One half is based on population; the other half is awarded to each state just for being a state. In fact, each state used to appoint their senators, rather than elect them like today. So whoever had the money in Providence (the governor, the state legislature, the chamber of commerce, etc.) picked their senators, and whoever had the money in Albany picked theirs. Can anyone say veto?

The only real veto in the constitution is the constitution itself (and money). A president’s veto can be overridden. Supreme Court orders can be negated in new lawsuits and by new laws. The events of Jan. 6 disappointed me, because a few days earlier the maghats were calling for a constitutional convention. I think they chose wrong. But they probably knew there are more Democrats than Republicans.

The Senate is reminiscent of England’s House of Lords. Except those foreigners recognized a vestigial appendage when they saw one, so they made their appendix into a showpiece, like the queen or the guards at Buckingham Palace. No real power.
Americans don’t seem to realize you can remove the appendix with no discernible effect… or leave the thing in, knowing this thing can kill you but is otherwise useless. But Americans have this other stone to roll up the hill for eternity called the electoral college, created for the same reasons and just as useless and deadly. Is that a mixed metaphor?

These two anti-democratic institutions could have been avoided if the “founders” had created their own comparable-sized states instead of keeping the king’s borders for each colony, to become a state. Were they just lazy, or were they in a hurry? Put all that on the back burner, and simmer until it becomes mixed metaphor muffuletta. On the menu now is fricasseed filibuster.

There is no typical filibuster. It grew out of a byzantine series of rules devised for different purposes.

In 1806, after shooting Alexander Hamilton to death, Aaron Burr (Vice President and President Pro Tempore of the Senate) said we should drop the rule that a simple majority vote could end debate and hold an actual vote on the bill in question. The power of parties was growing then, another failure of the constitution, and nobody knew why removing the mechanism for shutting up and voting would be any different from walking around after putting on your boots. Why would you put on your boots if you’re not going to be walking?

But someone who knew from the Bible that slavery was ordained by God also knew that godless republicans would outlaw it, and figured out that this hole in the rules could be loaded up with Christmas tree ornaments while he had the majority. New rules appeared requiring that 3/5 or 2/3 had to vote to have a vote, so I guess you could also require that a bill about broccoli needs a 9/10 margin. If you want to, and you’re in the majority.

You get that you’re voting three times? Once to vote to vote, and once to vote. But before you get to the second vote, and before you get to the first vote, you’ve voted whether to impose a filibuster rule.

So the Senate leader is just saving time because he knows he won’t let something pass, so why bother him unless you have 60 votes? Because you’ve shut out a majority of American voters who want something. Say 90% of Americans support background checks. Too bad; 41 Senators saw you coming long ago and passed a partial, pre-emptive veto. By comparison, the Frankenstein monster was elegantly engineered. But Frankenstein wasn’t all bad — he had some good parts.

See, that’s where you’re wrong, Silence. The filibuster (Dutch for “pirate”) is whole, and beautiful. It is salvation. Let’s say a family has a weekly “family night,” getting together to vote on what or where to have dinner. Naturally kids will vote for fast food high in sugar and fat, like pizza. A smart parent will set rules to maintain gustatory sanity, like you have to get a 67% majority to win pizza, where other dishes like stir-fry and salad only need 51%.

Say the family is a woman, child and man, and the woman and child vote for pizza and the man votes for shepard’s pie with ants and termites. You can talk about putting fruit and vegetables on a pizza, but then they just eat around the pineapple and broccoli. So the 2/3 voting for pizza, mom and child, get 66.66666 (recurring) percent, which will never reach 67%. Who’s your daddy?

 

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Rinse and repeat

Sept. 3, 2021

Recently, someone said if you had a spaceship heading for a nearby star, you'd want heterosexuals rather than homosexuals or else they’d die out in a few generations. I was surprised that anyone would dredge up a “Spaceship Earth” meme from 50 years ago to oppose the gay agenda today. Surprised because the original meme was about a closed system in which you had to behave intelligently or you'd run out of something vital like clean water or air or dirt.

If these people on the spaceship reproduce at the rate we reproduce on earth, after two or three generations your spaceship would have to support two or three times as many people as originally. A mix of hetero and homo could address the problem without relying exclusively on mandating family size limits.

But that’s of little interest to us Republicans. We joyfully throw ourselves into the noble cause of reducing the earth’s population. Specifically, holding out for herd immunity prepares the human race for the future. You don’t have to carry your vaccine to Alpha Centauri because the solution is in your blood. Survival of the fittest.

We’re blasting off on a trajectory to ever-increasing perfectibility. Obviously not actual perfection, because only Jesus is perfect, but it’s the principle that matters. Only lofty moral principles can determine which people we need on our spaceship.

If we ever discover the gay gene, that would be progress. But abortion is out of the question, of course. You know this is beginning to sound like a whole lot of complicated new laws. Never mind… go back to sleep.

 

 

 

Fearing

Nov. 2, 2020

It seems like everything we’ve done in the last six months reflects some fear. If it’s not Covid 19 it's politics.

I think in January we will see a new crop of terrorists. Not all of them, but enough. How many does it take? You tell me. Pick some numbers.

Of course I wonder, if we should not post messages insulting them, in case some nut fixates on punishing me. Then I realize a really good hater would swing for the stars, take aim on a building or a plane. And if I draw the un-ambitious hater who comes after me, well obviously it just falls under “shit happens.”

But at the end of the story I think we want to all put ourselves in the crosshairs… to all say this is not okay. And to give them too many targets. So they have no one to hate but everyone… and that’s exhausting.

 

 

 

Pop Quiz

Nov. 13, 2020

True or false: America invented democracy. You want to own democracy? You say you own the Libs, but owning involves taking responsibility. And you can’t even say the word democratic. I suppose someone invented tying a carrot to a stick and dangling it in front of a horse. If you can find a patent attorney, nobody owns it now.

That’s the beginning, where we rally round and promise to trounce the visiting team, so now we need know their names no more. Maybe we ought to thank DT for exposing cracks in the system.

 

We haven’t even gotten rid of the stupid electoral college, and the reasons for its existence don’t exist anymore. When the American colonists were trying to hang together and avoid hanging separately, the small states feared the power of the big states. Slave states were also small in census, but parlayed their economic power into the 3/5 law as well as extra representation in the electoral college and — ta-da, the senate.

In civics class back in 1967 or whatever, I heard or maybe just dreamed I heard that the electoral college could be a safeguard if the great unwashed got fooled by a demagogue, then wiser heads would prevail. Obviously crap. So why is the EC still around? I don’t know, but I’d guess it’s the Senate. They’re both bastions of privilege in which the people of Wyoming have as much power as California.

The Senate reminds me of England’s House of Lords. The lords started out legally more important than mere humans but have since been relegated to the dustbin of history. So why two legislative houses? In England the second one is just decoration, while in America one is just in case, which as we see in the case of the electoral college is crap.

The U.S. Constitution never mentioned parties and explains our present polarization. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Was the poet Yeats high on wormwood when he wrote that, tuning into American society a century hence… or is democracy just always on the brink of death?

Other countries (which used to admire this country) looked at us and borrowed bits and pieces (not having to worship a 230 year old script written by God) but fine-tuned their different governments like a BMW or Lexus. A proportionally-representative parliament is not something I can strip down like a fuel injector for you. But to me it just sounds logical, so here goes.

People vote for a party. There’s a guy standing there, but you’re really voting for the party. Then the proportion of the total vote a party gets is given to them in the proportion of seats. Say there’s a fringe party called Q-people who like children on their pizzas, and they have 5% support in the country. In the American House, 5% overall support for Q-people translates into only one candidate hitting 51%, and its other candidates under-performing. In a 100-seat Parliament, they would get five seats. Gee, how could I NOT win over my peepzas.

I forgot to explain there would be more than two parties. We call ours a “two-party system,” but we’re actually stuck in a two-party rut. I’m not great at analogies. I think of it like a pendulum. The party out of power just has to wait for the public to remember they have complaints, and the pendulum swings back.

Some people call the two parties in this “system” co-dependent, or you could call them functionally a single party. Increase the number of parties to three or four and there is no guarantee that the pendulum will swing back to any one particular party.

Another aspect of proportionally-representative parliaments appeals to me, and that is the “no confidence vote.” Again, I am not an expert and don’t know if there’s a threshold number of votes or if the leadership calls for the vote, but the key is reacting to a problem in real time, rather than choosing between impeachment (a high bar) or waiting two or four or six years. These more frequent elections mean other countries have figured out you don’t need a four-year election campaign, and limit the campaigns to typically six weeks. Beauty, eh?

So how would it affect the US? All the parties would still be here… If the progressive and centrist Democrats had voted separately in 2020, they would have lost to the Republicans. With a parliament, Democrats and Republicans who lean toward the end of the spectrum would no longer have to give grudging loyalty to those parties just to keep the devil from being elected.

Yes, that means devils will be elected, but isn’t 1 devil in 435 better than 216 out of 435? Radical, former Democrats and Republicans can still vote how they want, once they are elected as Greens or Tea Party. Does anyone know of a multi-party parliament in which one party has over 50% of the seats?

Ideally no one party would have a majority and could only rule by making coalitions with other parties similar in philosophy, or in temporary alliances to get some specific legislation passed. “Winner takes all” is the philosophy of the two-party system and is most efficient, second only to one party systems and dictatorships. But that also means up to half of the electorate has no representation and is just SOL (out of luck) for the next two or four or six years. That’s a long time to wait as a non-person.

So how would the US ever take such a huge step? I don’t know, maybe one party decides to never relinquish the reins of power. It has the guns, but we have the numbers. It whines about opening up the gyms and the barbershops, but what if we call a general strike for a constitutional convention? Do we really have to ask you, when we didn’t ask King George?

You are having trouble eliminating the other party permanently. No one knows who you are, if you aren’t better than the “other.” You need to blame bad things that happened before you were in power. When media asks a question you don’t want to answer, accuse them of rudeness or other bad vibes he is not responsible for. I do not blame DT for rudeness… I blame you for not knowing that journalists are not trainable.

What you want to know is, what will happen to my party? If you’re asking about the party that is reflecting worry about changing demographics by screaming about disenfranchisement and abuse of white people and Christmas… you’ll keep doing that.

Just wanted to put a bug in your ear… Did you pass the quiz?

 

 

 

Can you cook faster than you can talk? Or read faster than you can listen...see text