My editor at the New Yorker:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUkQ3fcwI00
And Dan Clowes… ha. I bet he’s glad this never aired.
http://fuckyeahdanielclowes.tumblr.com/post/731534545/never-aired-dan-clowes-apple-ad-by-errol-morris-in
I have not figured out a good graphic for this cartoon…. it has potential but isn’t there yet.
ps. my book is selling for $299
http://www.amazon.com/dp/ASIN/1885418183/?tag=toomuchcoffeeman
Cheap energy is expensive. Whining about environmentalism is free.
Alcholic blogger stalker Ann Althouse is clearly going insane over the fact that as of a week ago she discovered:
1. A bunch of people who don’t give a shit about her are talking about stuff she knows nothing about.
2. She doesn’t know what they said.
So, of course, the second most tenure-questioning law professor in America chimes in with an equal demand that the rights to privacy are completely eliminated when it’s funny to a right-wing blogger. So basically we have two people who are paid to teach law and blog have proven their complete lack of understanding and ethics in the field of blogging and personal rights. Lovely.
Also, I feel this is an important time to remind all you liberals out there that Sarah Palin drives us crazy. That’s why we all keep talking about her. Yep.
Click on the cartoon to see it bigger. (Much more legible that way.)
Script:
TITLE: The 24 Types of Libertarian
Balding white guy: no fair oversimplifying our simplistic philosophy!Caption: NAIVE
Happy guy with goatee: if the government would DISAPPEAR, everyone would act SENSIBLY and we’d all be able to get ALONG!Caption: PETULANT
Annoyed guy with necktie: libertarians don’t win elections because we’re too PURE and GOOD!Caption: TOO SMART FOR SCIENCE
Guy with small face on large head: OBVIOUSLY, climate scientists made up global warming. because they’re SOCIALISTS.Caption: ARROGANT
Smiling woman with “explaining hands”: CLEARLY you’ve never READ the evidence.Caption: LEFT-WING
Woman in distance, yelling to be heard: I’m HERE! i EXIST! i’m against the goverment AND corporations! why does everyone always ignore me?Caption: DENIAL-ICAN
Annoyed guy with shaved head and cigarette: just because i’ve voted republican every election for 20 years is no reason to call me a republican!Caption: MORE LIBERTARIAN THAN THOU
Grinning man with goatee and ponytail: we should PRIVATIZE the police! people who can’t afford to pay the cops won’t have anything worth stealing, anyway.Caption: TERRIFIED
Frightened, crouching man wearing combat fatigue pants: BIG GOVERNMENT is coming! thank GALT i’ve stockpiled so much AMMO!Caption: TOO MUCH HEINLEIN
Black guy making big arm gestures: lazarus long said that all men are created UNEQUAL. it’s not MY fault i’m SMARTER than poor people!Caption: THE ISLAND
Older man in colorful vest and button-up shirt, holding a piece of paper in one hand. An arrow caption pointed at the piece of paper says “social security check.” Two more arrow captions, pointed at the man, say “Public school grad” and “drives on public roads.”
Man: no one ever gave ME anything! so don’t force ME to give to others!Caption: CREEPY
Man in shadows, wearing sunglasses: why should i have to go all the way to THAILAND to have sex with a child prostitute?Caption: SELECTIVELY FRUGAL
Man with worry lines on forehead: the deficit is too HIGH to AFFORD anything for the poor! OR the environment! …but don’t let that stand in the way of my tax cut.Caption: NEPOTIST
as the latest of a LONG line of wealthy pundits, i KNOW success is created by MERIT!Caption: THE APOSTLE
Exalted guy with hands together as if praying: we just need to TRUST that the MAGIC of the MARKET will make everything work out! that’s why it’s MAGIC!Caption: ATLAS
Manically grinning man with messy hair, sitting with his hands on his computer keyboard: someday me and my friends will QUIT updating our blogs and THE ECONOMY WILL COLLAPSE!Caption: CONSISTENT
Intense, woodpecker-looking man: stocks were UP, so i said: CUT TAXES! then stocks went down, so i said: CUT TAXES! i just stubbed my toe! CUT TAXES!Caption: THE HISTORIAN
Man with big glasses and big grin, reading book: I’ve read summaries of the federalist papers MANY times, so I KNOW the framers share my views about EVERYTHING!Caption: GUNNER JOE
Man holding two handguns up: there are only TWO kinds of people in the world: GUN OWNERS and SHEEP! and sheep aren’t really people.Caption: BIZARRELY HYPOCRITICAL
Man with arms crossed: government should stay OUT of our personal lives! except for women’s uteruses, where government BELONGS!Caption: BRIEFLY TEMPTING
Balding man in hoodie: the war on drugs is RIDICULOUS! end police abuse! #%^@! the war!Caption: WHITEY
Balding man in black vest and black tie: i DO think it’s a TERRIBLE affront to liberty if restaurants HAVE to serve blacks! how is THAT racist?Caption: MISSIONARY
Man holding out copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” with wide eyes and bags under his eyes:YOU MUST READ THIS!Caption: CAVEAT EMPTOR
Cheerful man about to eat hot dog: no need for a nanny state! i can test my OWN food for botulism!Caption: STONED
Words coming up from somewhere below the bottom of the panel: hee hee hee
The Oregonian editors lament the latest round of cuts in education throughout the state of Oregon and puzzle over the absence of outrage among citizens who see their school systems eliminate staff, shorten the school year, and close schools.
But the editors hasten to add, lest anyone think they are crazy or something, “We’re not arguing that the federal government always and forever must prop up schools.”
Why not? Isn’t education a national priority? Didn’t we used to have politicians who bragged of being “the education president” or some hollow-sounding shit?
Let me invoke an old “lefty argument” — because that’s what some folks will call it, regardless of its merit — and point out the current state of our national defense spending. Total expenditures: Department of Defense + Iraq + Afghanistan + other (energy, more weapons, etc.) = between $880 billion and 1.3 trillion.
The Christian Science Monitor reports that Congress and the White House are beginning to think about maybe at some point to start cutting the defense budget as part of reducing the national budget deficit. I will believe it when I see it. However, the motivation reflects warped priorities. The article concludes that “a difficult switch from guns to butter – or guns to deficit reduction – is about to get under way.”
Emphasis mine. No butter, all deficit reduction. Anyone reading Krugman lately? The global austerity measures proposed at the G20 Summit this week are knee-jerk reactions to a deceitful narrative that places the blame for financial crisis on overspending, rather than on the investment and financial industry that sold everyone sophisticated instruments made of shit. As Krugman points out, we cut spending at the moment we need it most. History may show that spending — to help the unemployed, to create jobs, for research and development, to retrain workers — promotes economic recovery, but the economic conservatives who currently dominate the conversation are, like so many conservatives, pig ignorant about history. No surprise that the G20 Summit ended on a confused note.
We will go into stupid debt to finance wars we should not wage, but for education? Arts programs? School sports? Morning and after school day care? Modern facilities with decent heating during the winter? School supplies? Lab equipment? Field trips? Lunches that serve real food?
These deserve “always and forever” funding. Unless we suddenly lose the urge to procreate, we humans will continue to have new generations of students to edumacate. It’s that simple. Honest.
| Originally published at mooreroom |
I’ve been sort of burned out on politics lately, so apologies to those of you wanting something about the general in charge of a mostly-stupid war saying something stupid, and people asking stupid questions about whether the stupid comments should have been published.
I have nothing against hot yoga; I actually think it sounds kind of interesting. It’s been on my mind because I follow Black Francis of the Pixies on Twitter, and he tweets about it all the time. Some people have said they don’t get this one, which I find a little surprising — to me, it feels like a Life in Hell strip, or maybe a Roz Chast cartoon that’s just riffing on a concept. I suppose I’ll try to be more down-to-earth next week.
Thursday was a big day for the comic on the internet, as these things go.
TwitterMaster Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) very kindly tweeted about a comic I did for the Village Voice in 2007, "Cormac McCarthy's Toy Story 3," and linked to an image of the comic. This became an instant sensation (again, as these things go), with hundreds of retweets, RTs, etc.
Unfortunately (through no fault of his own), Ebert's link was to a strange low-res advertisement-free jpeg image hosted by the Village Voice, so I don't believe the surge in traffic did the Voice any good at all. Further, Ebert did not refer to me or my twitter-me (@rubenbollilng) in his post, so it probably didn't do me any good at all either. This is also no fault of Ebert — he's limited to 140 characters, he tweets something like a hundred times a day, and he has no obligation at all, obviously, to discover whether I have a twitter account he can publicize before he links to an image he likes. (When I found out about this going on, I tweeted about it, jokingly referring to his link as "unattributed," and he then jokingly made another tweet jokingly mentioning me twice, repeat, twice.)
Then I noticed that the Tom the Dancing Bug comic for this week (Nate, in "Risky Mangement") had climbed into the upper echelons of the reddit.com cover page Hot LIst, and this was also making it a hugely retweeted and referenced item on Twitter. There were almost 300 comments about the comic on reddit.com alone!
Unfortunately, the link on the reddit.com site was not to the site that had published that comic on Wednesday, boingboing.net, but was to a site that had apparently stolen the image off the boingboing site and put it up on their own: something called corporatecomplianceinsights.com
Now, how a site about corporate compliance with laws, rules and regulations can see a piece they think their readers would like and think it would be okay to violate copyright laws, copy the image and put it on their site is beyond me. But this meant that all the considerable traffic generated by the reddit.com posting was not going to the site that paid me to host the strip, boingboing.net, but to the site that stole the image and put it on their own.
So for all the activity generated, not much happened to those who had a stake in it. The Village Voice hosted the Toy Story 3 comic, but they get nothing from traffic passing over a jpeg image. Boingboing.net hosted the Nate comic, but they got nothing from corporatecomplianceinsights.com's apparent theft of the comic.
This world of marketing on the internet, which I've only just begun to dip my toe in, is wild. Sure, it's fun to get all the attention, but if the name of the game is attracting traffic, it's frustrating when you succeed in creating content that does so, but not to your sites. Something can blow up for 24 hours, then disappear completely, often leaving its creator bewildered and unsure if there was any benefit from it whatsoever.
My friend Tom Tomorrow (@tomtomorrow, www.thismodernworld.com; see how great I am at attribution?) said it well in a twitter to me about the corporate compliance site and reddit: "traffic whoring off content created several layers down the line is American ingenuity at work, circa 21st century."
Note 1: I did post a higher resolution version of the "Cormac McCarthy's Toy Story 3 comic" on this blog (below), and when I tweeted a link to it, that link got almost as much attention and traffic as Ebert's did, so I ended up with nothing much to complain about there.
Note 2: Someone from corporatecomplianceinsights.com did contact me Friday afternoon to very nicely apologize and offer to take the comic down.
The hardest line to write in this cartoon was the last one, because I don’t think I mean it. Bloggers aren’t the new wave of journalism. I said this years ago but it’s extended even further now- we really, truly just don’t have journalism in this country anymore.
Of course, my point in the cartoon is a different one: in journalism, especially in DC, we have self-appointed Big Boys who have decided they have the right to decide who is worthy of being important despite they themselves being liars, hacks, and partisans. I hope they have good retirement portfolios. They’ll be shocked to know they’re getting replaced by something even worse.
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