Recent Comments

1. 2 days ago on Prickly City

   “The reason Ford was an unelected president was because the elected president (Tricky Dick) and the elected VP (Sleezy Spiro) were crooks and got caught.”

   I’ve heard it said many times that the ONLY difference was that they GOT CAUGHT, not that they alone were “crooks.” The Clintons, by all rights, should have been ridden out of the White House by the Whitewater scandals alone, but they were too complicated for most people to pay attention to. It was only when you could condense it to Bill having a tawdry affair that people paid attention. Ditto Trump paying off a porn star—though prosecutors are truly engaging in a “witch hunt” to throw everything they can at Trump until something sticks (and he gave them lots of ammo).

2. 2 days ago on Prickly City

   The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is the department that is supposed to calculate inflation in U.S. money supply, uses a “basket of goods” regular people buy to calculate the inflation rate. The problem is, that they keep taking things out of the basket in order to manipulate the figures. The latest to go is coffee. Guess why.

   If BLS still used the same basket of goods it used in 1980, the rate would have peaked last year at about 18% instead of the official 10% figure. Even now it would probably be somewhere around 8% instead of March’s official 3.5% annual rate.

   As the old adage says, “Who are you gonna believe—the politicians, or your own eyes?”

3. 2 days ago on Prickly City

   P.J. O’Rourke had more true intellect and wisdom behind his political writing than most commentators out there. As the old observation goes, “If you’re ticking off both the left and the right, you’re doing or saying something correct.”

4. 2 days ago on Prickly City

   No, the Federal RESPONSE to the pandemic—including massive shutdowns, throwing “other people’s money” left and right, moratoriums on rents and evictions, etc.—caused American inflation, which has cascaded down through the global markets.

   Go check out inflation rates in places like Sweden, which didn’t enact shutdowns, massive unfunded subsidizations, etc., and compare.

5. 2 days ago on Prickly City

   The trick to all those “historians surveyed”-style surveys always lies in the choice of whom to ask. It’s a stunt starkly apparent to any truly objectively-minded person watching “the media” from the outside. Go watch or listen to the network news, NPR, read a feature newspaper story, etc. and watch their shtick—they announce a story, then let an “expert” or two of their choosing do the talking to push a viewpoint on their behalf.

   In the case of surveying “historians,” the vast majority of credentialed people in such fields work in academia, which is notoriously skewed leftist in composition and selection. In other such fields, the tendency by default is to reach out to prominent “activist” members of the field. Want to discuss climate change? Find the author of the latest doomsaying book on the subject. Want to discuss “the national conversation on race”? Go find the activists and authors pushing CRT, not the ones that think such activists do more harm than good by pushing racial division. There’s been a train derailment? Go hunt down the guy with the website pushing for the banning of hazardous materials on railroads—not that there’s any safer way to run them by trucks or anything—instead of a true transportation engineer or safety specialist.

   Intelligent historians know that you never rate the likes of a president immediately after their term. It takes time for the ramifications of policy to truly become apparent. After all, Obama spent nearly eight years “blaming” any problems or shortcomings on his predecessor…… FDR was lionized as a hero at his passing, but subsequent historians and economists have faulted many aspects of his 3+ terms in office (the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression, and only the Second World War bailed us out of it at tremendous cost).

6. 2 days ago on Prickly City

   “A trick to understanding T-Rump is to realize how often he does what psychologists call projection, attributing to others his own faults. When he calls someone a liar, crook, or loser, it’s because he is admitting he is a liar, crook, or loser.”

   It’s amazing how so many of the people that embrace such a “projection theory” never turn around and apply it just as fastidiously to Obama, Biden, Billary II, and so many of the critics of Trump, Republicans, etc. Those of us with no allegiance to either “wing of the Incumbent Party” see it starkly, plain as day.

7. 3 days ago on Luann

   Having been the first person with any emergency training to an emergency too many times, I can tell you that, YES, people in a panic or surprise situation have to be TOLD, repeatedly, to call for help. Often it’s me, and at other times I’ve snatched a phone from some blithering, incoherent person’s hand and calmly told the dispatcher the relevant information as fast as possible (I trained in emergency and CB radio response decades ago, so I learned the ropes).

   The ugly stereotype of young people just taking video in such a crisis unfortunately has some basis in fact. As well as people who think they can TEXT “911”. The BIG difference is in whether you have been trained to help others in need, or been “trained” by peers and social media to record and post everything. The big guy in today’s strip has at least been trained to react to this crisis, however badly. Parents and “teachers” of all stripes (Scout leaders, religious leaders, whatever) need to do a better job of training young people that “p00p happens” and how to both physically and mentally react to anything from a flat tire on their bike to someone dying.

8. 3 days ago on In Security

   My reaction to Sedine’s haircut is that of Sheldon Cooper on “The Big Bang Theory” when Penny cut her hair while Sheldon was away:

   “Nope, nope, nope……..”

9. 9 days ago on Rabbits Against Magic

   But THERE IS incompetence going on. That’s my point. As well as heavy mainstream media bias and prejudice of the caliber of Doonesbury’s Mark screaming “That’s GUILTY!!!! GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!!!!!” over the radio (in both 1973 about John Mitchell and in 2017 about Trump).

   And there has been increasing amounts of “doubt in the system” for decades now. “Trump” has simply succeeded in making himself a manifestation of that doubt, in a way that, say, the “Tea Party” or Perot’s “Reform Party” never could. And in that way, he was a political genius, whatever rubbish the rest of his campaign has been.

10. 10 days ago on Rabbits Against Magic

    I have seen numerous rational arguments put forth that the prosecutors and judge in the Daniels trial have engaged in several instances of misconduct and prejudicial behavior, more than enough grounds for either an appeal or a mistrial. This is somewhat on the level of incompetence that got O.J. Simpson off on his criminal trial for murder, and should it rise to the level of Trump getting off, the explosions of outrage by Trump haters will VASTLY overshadow the howls of outrage (and joy) that greeted the O.J. verdict.

    Lest you think I’m just a Trump supporter (I’m not) grabbing talking points from some lunatic right-wing or kook radio host (I dunno who to listen to), today a federal district judge indefinitely delayed Trump’s classified documents trial in Florida—on the apparent grounds that enough mishandling of the document boxes by the GAO prior to them being taken to Mar-a-Lago had occurred to call into question whether the evidence contained therein had been tampered with, potentially enough to support contentions that Trump & Co. were “set up” by people in the GAO.