Here’s a pdf of a printed comics collection that was passed out at San Diego Comic Con (which I sadly couldn’t go to this year). It includes Minimum Security with comics from may great web cartoonists!
http://www.jorgecham.com/sdcc09/freebie.jpg
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And here’s the finished sample page for “Mischief in the Forest”:
Prepare for the shock of a lifetime as it is revealed the South is a hotbed of racism and stupidity.
I admit I don’t know much about economic policy, which I guess is an easy way for opponents of what I think on it to dismiss me easily. But I understand math, and moreso I understand basic logic. So even with my limited economic knowledge, I have for at least ten years now failed to understand why economic conservatives spout all this statistical nonsense about “the rich paying more then their fair share of taxes” and then prepare proof by pretending that payroll taxes don’t exist. Payroll taxes, of course, being the second-largest source of government income after individual income tax.
It’s more and more frustrating to watch the only point of view in the tax debate being that there are too many taxes, especially on those who actually have the money to pay them with. As I just said, I’m wildly simplistic on economic stuff, which is why I don’t really talk about it. But basic knowledge of history is why I get so irritated about how for the last two years we’ve been told there is a “financial crisis.” There is no “financial crisis.” There is a “people don’t want to pay taxes” crisis.
George Bush started a massive trillion-dollar war. Not only did he not raises taxes to pay for it, he cut them. Obama tried to pass a stimulus bill, and could only do so when half the bill was tax cuts, and the already-weak bill was even weaker. The state of California is about to fire thousands of teachers and government workers and cut huge amounts of aid services because the voters not only don’t ever want to raise taxes, but voted for a state law that essentially makes it impossible to ever do so.
This is usually the part of the conversation where someone thinks they are incredibly clever and sure showing me by suggesting in any various levels of sarcasm how I, personally, should satisfy the government need for additional income by personally providing it myself. Occasional abbreviated indication of laughing out loud or rolling on the floor of some type follows. I wish it was more impactful on these people that when they say this I picture them as having just defecated in their own pants, not as a function of a medical condition but because they are literally so stupid that they cannot talk and forget not to shit when not sitting over a toilet at the same time. It’s almost funny in its depressing stupidity, becuase it shows the outright hypocrisy of greed- these same people almost ineveitably suggest that instead of raising taxes, we should eliminate government programs, or destroy unions that allow people to have higher salaries- essentially arguing that instead of them personally having to pay more, a large number of other people should make and receive less. This is their definition of “fair.”
But sadly, this is a depressingly effective argument, and nearly impregnable against the equally-ineffective concept of increasing tax rates. Which is why we are going nowhere. And I freely admit I have absolutely no idea how to realistically solve this problem. Unrealistically, the answer is already there- we need to increase taxes on a progressive level to rates as they were ten or twenty years ago. But it won’t happen. Ever. But that’s not really because of my admitted lack of economic expertise; it’s because I’m well aware that collectively, we’re a nation of fucking idiots.
I only watched the cartoon and TV show, but this cartoon owes a lot to The Tick.
Next Week: Secretly Replacing Harry Reid
This appeared in a Seattle Weekly article on the “locavore” movement a few weeks ago.
The BBC has it in for fat people.
It’s not that the new organization merely reports on the findings of various studies purporting to explain obesity; nor that they pass on this information without question or challenge. They do those things, certainly, but it’s the way these articles are written the show such incredibly smug bias against fat people.
Here, look at the headlines alone:
Here’s the first paragraph from the “Keep Slim Friends” article:
If you want to stay slim, don’t hang out with fat friends as they can make you obese, mounting evidence suggests.
The study concerns “imitative obesity” revealed in data from 5,000 teens in the United States. Here is their stunning conclusion:
From this the researchers found friendships between the adolescents tended to cluster according to weight, meaning overweight children tended to hang out together.When they looked at weight changes over time, they found having a fat friend could lead to weight gain for a child.
Golly, why are all these fat kids flocking together? Could it be, mmmmmmm, I dunno, rejection by body conscious peers? Open mockery, silent shunning, a childhood of repeated taunts that instills shame and fear? Do they want to hang out with other kids who won’t punish them for their body size?
And, hey, I wonder if anorexia is “contagious” or if there is evidence of “imitative bulemia.”
I don’t doubt that peers can reinforce bad habits. I was a teen once (for almost a decade, in fact!) and can cite that period as the start of a smoking habit that I still struggle with.
But the combined effect of these articles — no fat role models, no fat friends, they might get their icky fat germs on you — appalls me. I’m glad my daughter doesn’t read the BBC. Of course, she doesn’t need them to feel ugly and fat; at eleven years old, she has already received the message from other kids, from the media environment we live in, and probably from all the other social and developmental influences that tell young girls to feel ashamed and nervous about their looks. Only now (or really, building up over the past decade) the medical establishment and health news media reinforce the social ostracism with scary stories of obesity epidemics that require harsh measures.
Oh, and bad writing:
Two-thirds of American adults are obese or overweight — or shaped more like the bulbous Orangina bottle than the hourglass classic Coca-Cola bottle — and obesity-related illnesses cost the United States nearly 150 billion dollars a year, health officials at the conference were told.
From a story on a proposal to tax soda pop. Everyone guffaw. Let us chortle. Oh, that clever journalist with the cheeky analogy. You went to school for that, didn’t you! You got high marks in similes and metaphors, yes, you did. Say, when you graduated, did they store your soul in a jar? “You’ll need this when you get old and fill up with regret.”
| Originally published at mooreroom. |
Over at The Economist blog, it is written:
It seems self-evident to suggest that if schools that have eliminated physical education and recess reinstituted them, there would be fewer obese adolescents in America.
Evidence suggests adding phys ed isn’t the cure for fatkiditis the Economist imagines. Quoting Gina Kolata1 in the New York Times:
In the 1990’s, the National Institutes of Health sponsored two large, rigorous studies asking whether weight gain in children could be prevented by doing everything that obesity fighters say should be done in schools — greatly expand physical education, make cafeteria meals more nutritious and less fattening, teach students about proper nutrition and the need to exercise, and involve the parents. One study, an eight-year, $20 million project sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, followed 1,704 third graders in 41 elementary schools in the Southwest, where students were mostly Native Americans, a group that is at high risk for obesity. The schools were randomly divided into two groups, one subject to intensive intervention, the other left alone. Researchers determined, beginning at grade five, if the children in the intervention schools were thinner than those in the schools that served as a control group.
They were not. The students could, however, recite chapter and verse on the importance of activity and proper nutrition. They also ate less fat, going from 34 percent to 27 percent fat in their total diet. Alas, said the study’s principal investigator, Benjamin Caballero, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “it was not enough to change body weight.”
What I’d really like to know — but this article doesn’t say — is if the kids were healthier, as measured by blood pressure, cholesterol levels, ability to walk on a treadmill and so on. There’s an unfortunate attitude that an intervention that doesn’t lead to thinness is necessarily a failure, which leads us to ignore many important indicators of health.2
So why does “it seem self-evident” that we can make thinner kids by adding gym and stirring, when the evidence says otherwise? Well, part of the reason is that “self-evident,” in this case, means that the blogger is reciting conventional wisdom. And conventional wisdom is selective:
The paper appeared in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003 to no acclaim, Dr. Caballero said. No press release, no media coverage, no invitations to speak about the results at scientific meetings. On the journal’s Web page, a search of articles that refer to the study comes up empty. It has not been cited anywhere.
The 300th issue of The Comics Journal will be out in October and they did something special for this one. Check out the description released today by Fantagraphics.
