Attack Cartoons

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 21 Aug 2001 12:00:00 GMT
From Quotes of the Day:
Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps. -- Emo Phillips
and:
Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Unknown News is back! Guess this means that Helen and Harry Highwater have arrived at their new home in Kansas City, Missouri. I wish them good luck and much joy in their new home. So, guys, where's the trip report? [unknown]

John Bergstrom's Attack Cartoons is a very funny place. My favorites (all of these made me laugh uproariously or groan out loud): Sisyphus, $300 refund, greygoose, inexhaustable, dickpuppet, airstrikes, ussypays, ashcroft, goreset, recount, isidiot, haiku. Added to my links page. [anti-state]

Drug War Responsible for Overdose Deaths is a letter I wrote to the Houston Chronicle in response to an article and editorial they printed recently about 16 drug overdose deaths in one weekend. [drugsense]

My site was queried twice yesterday by a spider from the Defense Technical Information Center, dtic.mil. Hmm... Well, at least it was kind enough to query the robots.txt file.

s8-11.dtic.mil - - [20/Aug/2001:05:26:32 -0400] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 1650 "-" "vspider"
s8-11.dtic.mil - - [20/Aug/2001:05:26:32 -0400] "GET /blog/ HTTP/1.0" 200 66106 "-" "vspider"

George Aaron Broadwell at Albany (NY) Times Union - Hart's B.C. cartoon religiously offensive - Mr. Broadwell labels a recent Johnny Hart cartoon "a gratuitous insult to atheists and agnostics". Seemed pretty funny to me, but there's no accounting for taste:

In the July 31 strip, one character asks "What do a dead atheist, a dead agnostic, and a dead saint know?" and the second character answers,"They know that there is a god."

Brian Fitzgerald - CISG vs. RISG - using computer talk to describe the problems with government. Hehe. To find the joke, read all the way to the bottom of the page. [brianf]

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk - What Happened to the Surplus? - First off, there never was a surplus. The Klinton administration made it look that way by routinely raiding the social security and medicare accounts. Primarily, however, there's no budget surplus because congress spends every penny it can get its hands on. Until we kick out the pork merchants, it will continue to get worse.

The federal government cannot maintain a budget surplus any more than an alcoholic can leave a fresh bottle of whiskey untouched in the cupboard... The only way to end the unconscionable waste is to drastically reduce federal revenues by cutting taxes.

Humberto Fontova at LewRockwell.com - Really 'Politically Incorrect' - Mr. Fontova was one way up on Bill Maher and his guests. Hehe. They can dish it out, but they can't take it. Strong stuff. If you are easily offended, I recommend skipping it. [kaba]

bob lonsberry - Gun Owners Shouldn't Protest Cheney - The Utah Gun Owners Association is threatening to protest Dick Cheney's visit to Salt Lake City because guns will not be allowed in the auditorium. Mr. Lonsberry is a self-professed gun nut, and he thinks they're misguided. He's right. Property owners have the right to set the rules for visiting their property. If they say no guns and you don't like it, then don't go there.

Jeff Elkins at LewRockwell.com - Spam: It's The All-American Food - Some good advice for how to fight spam. And laws that violate the first amendment don't make the list. I used to get annoyed with spam. Now I just delete it, unread. Takes about 10 seconds each time I get my mail, and I get lots of spam. I'd rather spend that 10 seconds than have the feds in my e-mailbox. [lew]

Bjorn Lomborg at The Economist - The truth about the environment - a former "deep greenie" argues that environmentalists should replace their littany with facts. The environment is not in as much trouble as they would have you believe. As a matter of fact, it's improving. [lew]

These environmentalists, led by such veterans as Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, have developed a sort of "litany" of four big environmental fears:

...

The trouble is, the evidence does not back up this litany. First, energy and other natural resources have become more abundant, not less so since the Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth" in 1972. Second, more food is now produced per head of the world's population than at any time in history. Fewer people are starving. Third, although species are indeed becoming extinct, only about 0.7% of them are expected to disappear in the next 50 years, not 25-50%, as has so often been predicted. And finally, most forms of environmental pollution either appear to have been exaggerated, or are transient—associated with the early phases of industrialisation and therefore best cured not by restricting economic growth, but by accelerating it. One form of pollution—the release of greenhouse gases that causes global warming—does appear to be a long-term phenomenon, but its total impact is unlikely to pose a devastating problem for the future of humanity. A bigger problem may well turn out to be an inappropriate response to it.

Add comment Edit post Add post