I don’t need to tell you what I really think about Trump, because I don’t use language that bad in public, and because cartoons capture what I think better than anything else does (except maybe the Mueller investigation… hopefully that captures Trump’s antics better.
It is really hard to believe all the fascist Shiite that is going on.
Filed under angry rant, cartoon review, cartoons, feeling sorry for myself, humor, politics
And God said, “This world I have created is good. It is very good. In fact, it is too good. We must balance the good with evil.”
Then God took a ball of elephant dung and created Republicans.
“You see, beloved ones, if the world is too good,” said God, “Then when I get full of wrath, there will be no one to smite. You don’t want me too full of wrath. I may pop like an overfilled balloon. So someone needs to get struck by lightning to let off some of the pressure that has built up through the hard work of being God.”
So God took up a ball of old chicken guts and created Democrats.
“Why do you always seem to let the evil ones get away with lying and deceit?” a prophet dared to ask. “They cheat and steal and become wealthy, and then use that wealth to cover over their crimes, yet you do not smite them with lightning bolts?”
God threw a bolt of lightning and incinerated the prophet.
“I did say in the Bible somewhere that God helps those who help themselves. I’m sure I remembered to put that in there somewhere. God doesn’t make mistakes. Or if He does, they are perfect mistakes.”
“So you authorize the wealthy, who became wealthy by exploiting others, to commit further acts of exploitation until they virtually control the government and say that any crime is not a crime because they are now in charge of making the laws and deciding the consequences?” asked another brave but stupid prophet.
God immediately sent a plague of locusts to eat the prophet’s flesh down to the bone.
“The Bible says that all governments are put in place by God. No government exists except with my approval. If I don’t like them, I will remove them. So if the government of the United States is to be run by my evil Republican creations, I merely have to create a lot of very stupid citizens who will vote to give everything to the rich and exploit everyone else, including those who basically voted against their own best interests.”
Another rather stupid prophet got up to ask a question of God. He raised one finger, opened his mouth, and was immediately turned into a pillar of salt.
“I have anticipated your question. I do have a plan for mankind. Remember the Greek myth of Sisyphus? That old Greek idiot who has to labor for eternity rolling a heavy rock up a hill, and just as he almost reaches the top, it rolls back down on top of him and he has to start over at the bottom of the hill? That is a metaphor for all human life and accomplishment. Income inequality becomes a heavier and heavier burden as you near the goal of getting rid of it. You have a Great Depression, then FDR comes along to fix things and help common people. Then Reagan takes over with “trickle-down economics” and rolls you all back to the bottom of the hill. It ends in Junior Bush’s Great Recession of ’08. Obama comes along to fix that. Then, in a sudden political reversal, the party of pure evil takes over again. Back to the bottom of the hill we go.”
And so, no further prophet got up to speak. It was not because prophets had gotten any smarter. No, it was because there were no prophets left.
Filed under angry rant, cartoons, feeling sorry for myself, humor, irony, metaphor, politics, satire, villains
If you are a budding talent and future Batman villain, there are some simple and easy steps to take that will turn this country completely evil. We are, at present, at the threshold of an evil empire envisioned by Sith Lord Darth Cheney, implemented a little bit by the rodeo clown Junior Bush until he crashed the economy so badly he actually made a black man president, and now seriously enabled by the total takeover of government by the GOP (Greedy Old Pigs). So how do we turn everything to the Dark Side of the Force and Make America Evil Again? There are several simple steps to the process.
Surely as a super villain you have somebody you utterly hate and pathologically need to get even with. For Twitler it began with Mexicans and continued with any and all Muslims. “They are rapists and criminals and terrorists, and some, I assume, are good people… but wait, those would be the white supremacists and neo-Nazis… so never mind the good ones. Kill their families and build a wall. Sad!” And it was easily expanded to include people of color… any color… except white and orange. You get your rabid-dog followers to beat up anybody with a “Black Lives Matter” sort of message. Even the churches will help you do the work of it. Fundamentalist Christians are fertile ground for the seeds of hate trees. They stopped quite a while ago noticing in the Bible where Jesus said to help the poor and the defenseless, and basically talked bad about the rich. They only pay attention when the Bible talks, in obscure parts of Leviticus, about the kinds of people you should hate. And American gun laws are bearing the fruit of the violence against ordinary and non-rich people. Look at how many were murdered in Las Vegas for the crime of listening to a Country Music concert. And we shall call that a mental health problem, not a gun problem… and then later forget to do anything about mental health problems. Stirring up hate is easy. And sooner or later the guys with all the guns will decide that the people they hate need to die.
2. Make ‘Em Afraid
3. Remember, the Enemy of My Enemy is My Best Friend
You can really stir up a good batch of evil hot poop if you make friends with former enemies of the country. Who better than Vladie? No, not Vladimir Dracula, the other Vlad… you know, Putin, the KGB guy. You can make money for each other and keep filthy American regulators from preventing that next sweetheart Exxon deal just because the KGB guy poisons people and makes them disappear. What, you think we are so good that we don’t kill people? It’s really the American way. Go into somebody else’s country. Kill them. Take all their valuable stuff.
Where there’s a will, there is a way. These are three easy steps towards the dictatorship of your evil villain-dreams. And remember, lie about everything. Lie so much they start accepting the lies as truth. Stupid people especially will bow down before you and beg you to hurt them, and hurt the people they hate even more.
Filed under angry rant, humor, irony, pessimism, satire
Page Publishing finally has my novel in page design. I am hoping to actually seeing a physical book in print, though I am no longer in any way confident that such a thing will actually happen. The more time that passes, the more I find out about Page being a scammer-type publisher. The mistakes they made in my work in editing were apparently on purpose. Now that I have threatened to sue them, I am hoping they will no longer try to sabotage my book to the point they can extort money out of me to fix it. I think if I had more control over the publishing process, the book might actually sell. So my resolve is to hereafter do only the cheapest possible self-publishing.
My art, my writing, and my life is basically organic, growing and changing in dynamic and unpredictable ways. That is the biggest drag on living in this mechanized, grinding-wheels-for-profit world. I don’t fit into their neat and perfectly stackable boxes of officially sanctioned society. They have to chop the leaves and branches off my tree of creativity to make me fit. I am thoroughly tired of saw blades and wood-choppers of the metaphorical kind.
My swimming pool is now a grassless space for reading in the sunshine. I hope to grow flowers there. There need to be more flowers in this life.
My work is more real to me now than reality is. I intend to spend as much of my remaining time on Earth creating things, making the world of my mind tangible and viewable to others.
I finished a novel on my Tuesday blog posts. I am debating what to plug in there next. I discovered that the scammers at Publish America are being sued in a second class-action suit by authors. I might be able to score some money, even though I never paid them for anything. They have had the rights to my novel Aeroquest bound up in their publishing agreement since 2007. But my contract is long over. I can use that novel on Tuesdays with ample rewriting.
I have made peace with the idea of never having money enough again. Life continues to cost more than I make. I tried to sign up as an Uber driver for extra cash when I am well enough to drive. Unfortunately I am only rarely well enough. And even more unfortunately, my android phone refuses to download either the Uber or the Lyft driver apps. So I am all signed up, but unable to receive even one driving assignment. I just read a literary biography of Poe, though, and even though he was a better writer than I am, he lived in abject poverty for the majority of his adult life. Who am I to do better than he? For that matter, who is James Patterson? I don’t claim to better than him, but he is definitely not better than me. And that dude is a writing millionaire.
The TV Justice League from my boyhood.
That, then, is my “So on and so on…” for today. Thanks for letting me complain. If you read this far through my ramble-brambles, you are a noble and worthy reader. I appreciate you. And I promise you, it gets better from here on.
Filed under angry rant, grumpiness, humor, Paffooney Posts, publishing, rants
He says things daily that are provably untrue. He makes huge messes that nobody is willing to clean up, both internationally and domestically. He throws fits and Tweets like a Twit on Twitter. He insults people with impunity and tries to wreak vengeance on those that give as good as they get from him. How can he possibly be the President of the United States? Well, he can’t. If this were an actual democracy, he’d never have been voted in, let alone stay in the office this long without being impeached and removed. Most intelligent people who haven’t been hitting themselves on the head with hammers of prejudice and party ideology can see that. Even some Republicans.
The selfish, orange-headed moron only cares about what affects him directly. He constantly seeks attention and plays to the camera and to friendly audiences. He is deliberately provocative because it gets him the attention he craves, whether it is positive or negative doesn’t seem to matter. His decisions are guided by virulent racism and misogyny. He will provoke conflict and do irreparable damage to the functioning systems that keep this country running. And the Republican controlled Congress will let him do it because they got that control by cheating. All the levers of power are in their corrupt, feckless little greedy hands. And they will let the monkey throw poop everywhere until we all succumb to poop-related diseases.
I am already today feeling quite ill. It helps slightly to take out some of the bad feelings on the Nazi clown that is now in charge. But only slightly. At some point I’m still going to die. And we the people are probably never going to be in control of the government again.
Much scarier than Batman’s Joker, isn’t he?
So I am bummed. Things are not going well. I have hand cramps from shooting the bird at the TV news every day, every time Monkey-face Cheetos-head is talking. Bile is my ruling humor this morning. And I need a nap so I can feel better.
Filed under angry rant, cartoons, grumpiness, humor, politics
These are Warhammer 40,000 Harlequin Warriors I painted myself.
Over the years I have played many role-playing games. Virtually always I have done so as the game master, the dungeon master, the story-teller behind the action. Players decide what to do about the story problems I represent to them. They have characters that have painstakingly advanced in skills and levels of skills to use for the problem-solving the plot centers around. But ultimately, when they take action, the outcomes are decided by a roll of the dice.
Life is like that. You labor hard to control what happens next in your life. But random chance intervenes. If you are the Harlequin Space Elf known as Smiley Creaturefeature (the masked elf in the green robe on the front row, far left in the picture above) and your band of high level Harlequin War Dancers have come to Checkertown City Square hunting for your hated enemy, Bone-sucker the Space Orc, it is entirely possible when you use your scanner operator skills to find him, you could roll a “1” on the twenty-sided dice. This would mean failure. Not merely failure, but failure on a spectacular level. The scanner would explode, killing your entire squad, yourself included. And all those weeks of building the character up to level 17 in order to defeat Bone-sucker and his mutant minions, would be lost and become all-for-nothing in the disappointment department.
Of course, a benevolent game master would alter the outcome in some way to keep the story going. Perhaps the exploding scanner, instead of killing everyone, created a mini worm hole in the fabric of space-time and transported them to a parallel dimension where Bone-sucker is actually the chaotic good hero of Checkertown, and you must now work out an alliance with him to fight his enemies, the other-dimensional versions of you that are actual Evil Smiley Creaturefeature and his band of Evil Harlequin Space Elves. You must then defeat your evil selves carrying out the evil plot that the game master had originally designed for the villain Bone-sucker to employ before returning to your own original dimension.
Real life does not work that way. It works more like you see above. The lovely, metal-bikini-clad female barbarian of swimming pool repair is faced with the attack of the giant rats of city pool inspection, necessary electrical repair, and limited finances. You can see, if you look incredibly carefully at the purple twenty-sided dice, that her defensive attack roll is a “2” for catastrophic failure. Her sword cuts off her own leg and causes personal bankruptcy. The giant rats roll a lucky “13” on the black twenty-sided dice for successful tooth and claw attacks. They then go on to eat her and force the pool to be removed from the property, using up all the money the player (who is me, by the way) has left.
No game master steps in to create a more reasonable outcome. The worst possible outcome is what happens. That is how real life works. Roll the dice, and lose your swimming pool.
It’s raining today. Appropriate for the moment when this thing that has consumed my entire summer comes to an end. Appropriate too for the way the orange-faced king of our country has dominated everything in public life. As hard as I have worked the last four years to claw my way out of debt, I am now bankrupt. Everything the king has done and continues to do hurts poor folks like me. Was George III the insane one? The narcissist and paranoid schizophrenic? And if he was, why did we decide after more than 200 years of independence that we needed a corrupt despot in charge again? We have invited the king back to where he doesn’t really belong.
So what can we focus on today to get our minds out of the mud?
There’s always sunshine to consider. The sun will come back. It is like a law of nature or something. And, although nothing is ever certain in life, “The sun’ll come out… tomorrow! Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow… there’ll be sun!” (That’s from the Broadway musical Annie, in case I wasn’t obvious enough.)
One can always also appreciate a pretty girl. Is that being inappropriate? I am a cartoonist and I have been obsessing about drawing pretty cartoon girls. So maybe that’s what I really mean. I’ll go with that. Let’s think about pretty cartoon girls.
Yes, Emma Watson before Harry Potter wearing Mickey Mouse ears counts as a pretty cartoon girl.
So, if I still can’t get my mind off the mud… what will I do?
Think about Zebras climbing trees maybe?
Or Millie Bobby Brown starring in season 3 of Stranger Things on Netflix in October?
But while I’m writing this, I get a call from the pool demolition guy. The plumbing and the electrical work apparently didn’t pass the city inspector’s inspection. Now, it’s not only mud time again, I have a fire boiling in my spleen and am tempted to take an ax to city hall.
Yes, now that I am bankrupt, I thank the God who made me that he made me poor and saved me from the terrible torture of being rich.
I know that sounds like a joke. But I am serious. In this world where you have to be willing to climb over the bodies and crushed hopes and dreams of your fellow human beings in order to be rich, I would prefer to be on the side of the downtrodden with a clean conscience and an empty wallet.
I have a castle of my own, but it isn’t very large.
I am actually a bit miffed after this last week. The swimming pool that has given me ulcers from significant financial reversals all summer is still not removed. I keep having to pay more and more. I had to declare bankruptcy because my credit rating was degrading and all insurance companies and mortgage companies punish that crime by charging you more money. The city is pushing hard to get the pool removed, but on Friday their city inspector failed to inspect the pool which must happen before the demolition can begin on Monday. In fact, the inspector never showed his face or called to explain why. But the city did not fail to contact the bank that holds our mortgage lien to make them reconsider the value of our property and the payments we are required to make. Chapter 13 bankruptcy doesn’t protect you from such things as that, by the way. In fact, it doesn’t help protect you from debt. I still have to repay everything I owe Bank of America and the other credit card banks I owe money to. The only thing it does do is stop the snowball of finance charges from rolling further down the mountain, and then it reorganizes my finances with outside guidance to guarantee the banks get paid off. That is because, even though I had to pay lots of money to the lawyer, and will have to pay more before we’re done, taking care of the banks’ needs is the first priority. So, I am on my own with the city and their demands and their bullying to make certain their demands are met too. It is probably a good thing that I have decided to become a nudist. After all, there will be no money left for clothes.
You will have to forgive me for beginning to think dark thoughts about rich people. One way or another, the wealthy minority are to blame for most of what’s wrong with my life. Congress right now is trying again with the Graham-Cassidy Bill to make certain that my next health reversal kills me. It is very important to them that Obamacare is repealed. And why would that be? Is is it because Obamacare works because it takes more in taxes away from one per centers, and the Republican-controlled Congress wants to give that all back to the rich folks? They need the extra millions more than I need to keep living, right?
I am tired of fighting over numbers in bank statements and credit card bills. I am poor. I have paid an awful lot of money to get to that point. I will be satisfied to defend my tiny kingdom to the death as the orcs of wealth-acquisitions overwhelm me. After all, I have a certain satisfaction with how I have lived my life, and no matter how badly it ends, that satisfaction cannot be taken away from me.
So, Tweedle Dumb, being me, is getting rooked. The pool demolition being done by Tweedle Dim is going to get started finally, three weeks late, but it is going to cost me more than planned. That is because Tweedle Dumber, the city pool inspector, added new wrinkles to the requirements that he didn’t tell Tweedle Dim about until Dim filed for the building permit. Added work on plumbing and electricity that was actually already done when I was trying to repair the pool has to be inspected and signed off on by a professional in each of the two areas. The decking has to be completely removed and the pool wall collapsed by 12 inches. All of that is different than other cities in the area require, and they didn’t inform Tweedle Dim until today. So I will have to dig up a gold mine or rob a bank by this afternoon. At least this Tweedle beetle puddle paddle battle is not being fought in a bottle… yet.
Filed under angry rant, Uncategorized
Catch a Falling Star 
Liars Run the Animal Farm
Napoleon the PIG.
Napoleon the Pig makes himself ruler of the Animal Farm in Orwell’s 1945 book by lying about Snowball, his rival Pig, and blaming the destructive acts of the former human Farmer Jones on poor Snowball. He is driven away from the farm by the farm dogs whom Napoleon has taught to think since they were puppies. This, even though Snowball was actually the hero of the animal rebellion that drove the humans away. Collusion? Perhaps. But definitely a lie. And the PIG Napoleon, once in power begins to keep all improvements to living conditions for the PIGs. Other animals, he says, are happier with a simpler, hard-working life. The PIGs begin to dress like men and walk upright and wear long red ties.
Keith Olbermann in the video is very much like Benjamin the Donkey, who is cynical and skeptical about Napoleon’s methods. He also reads as well as any Pig. When Boxer the workhorse is wounded defending the farm against neighboring farmers who attack and destroy the windmill, he shrugs off the the wound and works at rebuilding the windmill until he collapses. Then Napoleon declares Boxer will only get better if he’s taken to the vet’s animal hospital. But he calls the Knacker (the man who renders dead horses into glue) to take Boxer away. Benjamin calls him out. He points out that it says “Knacker” on the van that takes Boxer away, not “veterinarian”. He points out that Russian Facebook trolls used targeted troll-posts to help get Napoleon his position of power. But Napoleon gets away with his lies. Boxer apparently dies in the so-called animal hospital.
Now, I am not sure which tiny animal on the farm Robert Reich is like, but he is pointing out in this video that once the PIGS got themselves into power on the animal farm, they lie in order to get their agenda operating, enriching all PIGs (or is that GOPs?) and their political donors. They are doing it all by LYING. Pigs lie. We should have learned that lesson by now. They don’t care who dies and gets rendered into glue.
In 1945 Orwell intended Napoleon to be a satire of Joseph Stalin in communist Russia. But I truly believe, as we are living on the Animal Farm now as the hard-working farm animals, that he has a bad wig on his head with whippy straw-yellow hair, and a distinctly orange face, with the same little piggy eyes he always had. And he is in power because he tells lies. And what’s worse, he gets away with the lies. As long as the PIGs are in power, controlling both houses of congress and the Supreme Court, he will not lose his lying grip on the farm. We are all doomed to continue being hard-working animals who eventually get rendered into glue.
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Filed under angry rant, book reports, commentary, farming, foolishness, humor, metaphor, Paffooney, pessimism, satire, sharing from YouTube, surrealism
Tagged as Animal Farm, George Orwell, GOP, lying, Napoleon, PIGs, Trump