CSotD: Saturday not-that-short takes
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As noted and/or anticipated yesterday, most of the Mandatory Mandela Cartoons have been at least predictable if not entirely lame. But I certainly like Matt Davies' contribution, which demands some honesty, integrity and sincerity that we know we're not ever gonna get.
The bulk of statements on Mandela's death were almost certainly ghosted by aides and of a sincerity and sense of personal conviction that goes along with the congratulatory speech about the East Overshoe Little League team's success in regional play, made on the floor of Congress when nobody is present except the chair, the clerk, the legislator droning through the boilerplate and the next legislator waiting to drone his way through a stack of pre-fab encomia.
While outside, a custodian is busily running a succession of flags up and down a pole so they can be sent to constituents who will be proud to have a flag that flew over the Capitol.
Credit where credit is due: The guys droning are the honest ones. You can simply have the speech inserted into the record as if you had given it. You don't have to actually spend as much time on the floor speaking as one of those flags spends flying over the Capitol.
In any case, I doubt the Dalai Lama wrote his remarks either, and, if the Dalai Lama is simply going through the rote steps, who the hell can you trust?
Dude, it was a rhetorical question.
But, yeah, okay, you can trust in Ronald. Mike Peters delivers a delightful riff on the apocryphal Marie Antoinette quote.
I imagine, if you're working for the clown, you could while away the boredom figuring out how many Big Macs you could eat before you spent more than you were earning. I suppose the clown feeds his minions, but I'll bet he doesn't let them take a sack of sliders home to Tiny Tim and the rest of the little Cratchits at the end of a shift.
Speaking of clowns, and of Ebenezer Scrooge, I've heard the "Are there no workhouses?" crowd spout the line that minimum wage jobs are not supposed to let you support a family, that they are intended for those aforementioned 16-year-olds, so they can learn how to work and then qualify for well-paying jobs when they are older.
Which makes perfect sense, in a world where McDonald's opens at 4 pm when their employees get out of school and closes at 11 so everyone can be at the bus stop the next morning.
And where there are jobs available in that niche between minimum-wage burger flipper and vice-president of corporate relations.
Clay Bennett puts the onus on the public. Don't pretend you don't know.
Heard another Scrooge dismiss the public actions by fast-food workers as not representing the workers themselves. It was just the unions, he said.
Oh, well then.
Wait … I'm experiencing a flashback …
Our own black folk don't even want to eat at the lunch counter. They tell us they're perfectly happy with the way things are. It's those outside agitators who come down here and stir everything up. Maybe we should show them what happens to loudmouth troublemakers who don't know their place.
Yep. That was it. Now let's trot out one of our happy employees to tell the media the truth about working here:
I don't want no union comin here. Mistah Ronald, he treat us good.
Until the dogs and firehoses and pick handles disappear and then we'll see who signs union cards and who really does prefer working part-time so the clown doesn't have to offer benefits and who really does enjoy living on welfare despite the long hours over the grill.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Well, okay, "juxtaposition of yesterday," but yesterday was not seen so that we could present this special report. We now return you to yesterday, joined in progress.
I wasn't going to comment on Amazon drone cartoons, but Penny Arcade and David Horsey both latched on to an apparent lunatic fringe paranoia over the prospect and I find it irresistable.
If nothing else, the fact that it kind of hit me out of nowhere is comforting, because it means at least these guys have a newsfeed that is full of more idiotic nonsense than mine, and I really didn't think that was possible.
Wow. Y'all are tuned into some very insane people.
By contrast, the Amazon drone stuff I'm seeing is more silly than paranoid and seems to come in two flavors: The completely unhinged idea that Amazon drones will put Santa out of business, or the somewhat scarier idea that they'll put UPS out of business.
The Santa thing is just dumb, and we can't expect holiday cartoons to all make sense, but at least a cartoon in which the elves go on strike fits in with the aforementioned fair-wage issue, while the "too fat for the sleigh" gags tie into the actual obesity epidemic.
This one has no anchor in the real world, which makes the UPS gags slightly more scary because they appear to be somehow based on the notion that — logistical feasibility of the Bezos Brainstorm in the first place aside — it would be less expensive to deliver individual orders by flying robot than by filling a truck with a whole bunch of packages and paying someone to drive down the street dropping them off.
I'm okay with a cartoon based on the idea that Santa is real. Asking me to believe that drones will replace delivery vans edges things over into that area where I start to wonder if my newsfeed is any less filled with insane delusions than Penny Arcade's or David Horsey's.
And speaking of Amazon:
Recognize this?
One of the things Jeff Bezos mentioned in that Sixty Minutes interview that did not appear to have wafted from an opium pipe was that there was a time he was hauling packages to the post office himself, by truck.
My memory of those days was stories of people on roller skates whipping around the warehouse putting orders together, and all sorts of articles by very intelligent people with very important backgrounds in marketing and economics and luddite philosophy who explained how Amazon would never turn a profit.
Periodically, Amazon would thank its loyal customers by sending them a little gift, which is where this insulated mug came from. I don't know if someone went and got it on roller skates so that Jeff could toss it in the van and drive it to the post office, but here it is nonetheless.
So, last night, I got through on the ACA website and completed my signup for insurance. Yes, I wish I'd been able to do it October 1, but it's done now and I've got coverage for the first time in five years, which will start no later than it would have if I'd been able to sign up on Day One.
Those who have complained that Healthcare.gov didn't open as smoothly as Amazon must not remember how light Amazon's initial traffic was.
Or else they're the same geniuses who said Amazon would never turn a profit.
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