Cloud Potato posted:

Sunday Telegraph:

Vib Rib posted:

This is a really impressive story about an extremely clever and brave man, but it's so loving extraordinary and that's exactly what makes it a news piece for the ages. Unfortunately it's become a popular piece for the right and for meek centrists to shove around. I've seen it touted many times in the last week alone by people going "See?? Don't punch nazis make friends with them and they'll see the error of their ways!"
It's a near-legendary exception at this point and people use it as proof that all you need to do is be nice to nazis and they'll stop being nazis. They're just waiting for someone to show them the light! It could be you! Which some spin even further into it being the duty of any minority dealing with extremists to put themselves in harm's way and attempt to convert them, personally.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

That's a real thing called false dawn or drinker's dawn which happens either when the booze in your system has worn off enough that it no longer keeps you asleep or you wake up still drunk because your body needs hydration. You're not actually rested but in the first case you can't get back to sleep and the second case you'll feel manic till the next day drunk wears off, after which you'll crash. It's the bane of any alcoholic's existence, that and going through your texts from the previous night.

Avenging_Mikon posted:

Gary Ridgeway, The Grim Sleeper, The Beltway Sniper, The Zebra Killings. That’s off the top of my head.

I’m not a fan of fighting idiocy with idiocy.

Saint Sputnik posted:

Hihohe posted:

I think its from Daredevil on Netflix

Sandpuppy posted:

4

Stiglich posted:

Former Philly DA Seth Williams sentenced to 5 years in prison for corruption.

Hihohe posted:

This has been making the rounds and I love it
https://youtu.be/biehbIPqV8c

A HUNGRY MOUTH posted:

Those fuckers! our poo poo!!

Horrible Lurkbeast posted:

I always thought that Americans are really quick to jokingly label people as Nazis for silly things like obsession with grammar, I didn't forsee this criticism=The Real Nazis^(tm) trend however.

Jerry Cotton posted:

Are there any cartoonists who just draw Trump straight-up bald?

Ularg posted:

Why does the Clinton Foundation car have a confederate flag on it?

Jerry Cotton posted:

Are there any cartoonists who just draw Trump straight-up bald?

Numero6 posted:

Why is Hollande still here, didn't they get the memo about Macron?

Jerry Cotton posted:

Are there any cartoonists who just draw Trump straight-up bald?

Cat Mattress posted:

I think it's supposed to be Juncker.

Herblock posted:

2. Money, Money, Money

Few proposals in recent years have provoked more discussion than the idea of a guaranteed income for people below a minimum income level. The novel feature of this idea is that it would apply to the poor; there is nothing new about guaranteed incomes for the wealthy — and guaranteed profits and tax exemptions besides. Whether these things destroy the incentive of the rich to work for a living, I don't know. They certainly do not seem to destroy the incentive for further governments and more profits, which many of them pursue diligently, while also providing much gainful employment to lawyers and lobbyists.

I mention this not by way of "pitting class against class" — a charge, incidentally, which I have never heard leveld at those who speak for the well-heeled. As a matter of fact, I have always felt that the really great struggle in the world is not between the haves and the have-nots, anyhow. It is between those who get in the way of honest work and those who don't. By "those who get in the way of work" I don't mean the "shiftless" or idle, who at least avoid being obstructive. I mean those people who are so intent on self-advancement that they interfere with those who simply want to do the best possible job. This includes all who are more jealous of their prerogatives and more devoted to personal promotion than to the work itself or to any organization or service. They exist in every form of government and in every kind of occupation.

These people are not underemployed — they are overemployed. They hold up production while they go through unnecessary motions and put on great airs of importance to justify their positions and their paychecks. In their efforts to show authority and activity, they have no end of time to bother or hinder busier people in an effort to show how busy they are.

It is these overemployed people who should actually be given guaranteed incomes — with a guarantee that they not be allowed to think about work at all. They could also be given medals, honors, a gold watch, and possibly some badge which would entitle them to be saluted on the street. They would all be kicked upstairs into a state of permanent and innocuous glory, with everything necessary to satisfy their economic wants and their egos. This would cost no more than they already manage to get through full-time conniving and posturing — and think what it would do for the rest of the population!

The retirement of this great universal carbuncle class would make room for jobs for all the unemployed, and would at last release the full productive energies of the employed-but-frustrated, who would be free to get on with the world's work. It would raise production levels in every nation, while lowering blood pressure, the incidence of coronaries and nervous disorders.

Of course, there is one fatal flaw in this plan to push out the pushy and replace the ulcer-givers with those who previously got the ulcers. The administration of the program would probably fall into the hands of executives, admirals, colonels, bureaucrats or elected officials who had schemed, intrigued and shoved to get those powerful administrative positions. So those who just want to do a good job will probably have to continue coping with the other kind.

Enough of pleasant fantasy, then. But there is nothing unrealistic about assuring jobs and any necessary wage supplements for all who can work, and some kind of adequate living standard for those who cannot. This can be done through any necessary combination of private and public effort — and probably much cheaper than the costs of welfare, of preventable illness, hunger and increased crime. And if this would not get rid of the overbearing incompetents, it would at least help the underemployed and benefit society in general. But there is a hitch in this too, as in all the best-laid plans for human betterment: Money — or, rather, budgetary conceptions of money in relation to people.

In producing cartoons about financial and economic matters, there is sometimes a labeling problem involving the word "economy," which can refer either to the national economy or to the piggy-bank type. For the economic system, I usually use "The Economy" or even "The U.S. Economy" to avoid confusion.

Unfortunately, many politicians, in their work, don't seem to make any distinction between the two meanings. For some of them, economy (save those pennies) is equivalent to or closely related to a healthy national economy. And, often as not, they manage to do their saving in the places that will hurt the nation most.

Through long-overdue tax reforms, the government could save billions of dollars which go into the deep gold-lined pockets of oil multimillionaires and other beneficiaries of Congressional tax-law largesse. Subsidies, import quotas and special tax deductions all swell the incomes of those who least need a dollar. Congressman Henry S. Reuss offered a bill to close tax loopholes which he said accounted for more than four billion dollars in lost revenue annually. And he pointed out that there are thirty individuals with incomes of more than half a million dollars each who pay no income tax at all. All this is at the expense of the small taxpayer-consumer, who is guaranteed a bigger share of the taxes — and generally a bigger consumer bill besides.

But despite constant warnings of the need for a general tax increase to keep us on a sound fiscal basis, the situation never seems to get serious enough for tax revision which would bring into the U.S. Treasury those billions of dollars that the U.S. Government can't seem to lay a glove on. As far as the Congressional econo-misers are concerned, "Unto everyone that hath, shall be given — but from him that hath not, shall be taken away..."

The dangers of inflation are not lessened by failing to close those large loopholes. And the dangers of deflation, "recessions" and wider unemployment can be considerably harder on the wage earner than making-more-and-paying-more.

A man who was bitterly voluble about the requests of poor people for adequate living standards told me that in his day everybody got only what he earned, and none of this government-help nonsense. It turns out he had completely forgotten that in his day, which was during the great depression, the U.S. Government was pouring out billions for make-work projects, for relief, for anything that would get money into people's hands.

Similar projects are obviously no long-term solutions to today's unemployment. But to the man who can't get a job or the family with insufficient income for adequate food and housing, depression is here today — and no more tolerable for being a patch of desolation surrounded by unparalleled affluence.

Such contrasts exist in rural as well as urban areas. Writing about the farm price-support programs and food programs, Ralph McGill noted that in 1967 nine large landowners received a total of fourteen million dollars in benefits and that 42.7 per cent of the small landowners with gross incomes of less than $2,500 received only 4.5 per cent of the total benefit payments. Then, commenting on programs to get food to the poor, he noted an interesting irony: "Much of the opposition to the food programs comes from farmers, large and small, who are themselves conditioned to federal relief programs and could not live without them, but many of them strongly oppose feeding the hungry and any and all forms of welfare."

Congress practices its economies particularly on the poor, who, it apparently feels, must be suffering from delusions of grandeur if they think they are entitled to some of the help the government gives their betters. But it is capable of pinching government departments too — in the nonlegislative branches of government, that is. Some of these savings have been, to use the current term, counterproductive, even in the short run. For example, cutbacks of about seventeen million dollars in the Customs Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service were estimated by those departments to result in reduced collections of over seventy million dollars. Estimated net loss of that "economy": fifty-three millions.

But this is small stuff, and not nearly so dangerous as the "savings" of a few millions here and there on rent supplements, model-cities programs, the Teacher Corps, and other all-too-modest measures to relieve desperate needs.

In June 1968 the House of Representatives indulged itself in the kind of appropriation-chiseling that serves as a fine example of save-a-little-and-lose-a-lot "economy." It cut by half a piddling thirteen-million-dollar appropriation needed to give a little muscle to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. This kind of action somehow suggests toasting marshmallows over smoking slums. It is not economy. It is insanity. It is an invitation to disaster.

During the long, hot and violent summer of 1967 the U.S. House of Representatives turned down a Presidential request for some forty millions for a two-year rat-extermination program program — and the Congressmen literally laughed as they did so. Representative Joel T. Broyhill of Virginia told the House, "I think the 'rat smart thing' for us to do is to vote down this rat bill 'rat now.'" It might have been more to the point if he had made his little pun on "rats" and "riots," which have some connection with each other.

This Bourbon let-them-eat-cake-ahaha attitude produced such an outcry from the press that a shamed Congress did authorize a rat-control program. But almost a year later the New York Times noted that Congress had not yet actually appropriated a single dollar to fight rats, and it commented, "After all, the rats won't be biting the Congressmen. Only the poor people."

What probably would be biting Congressmen would be the unruly behavior of people who were probably being stirred up by "troublemakers" or "conspirators" of some kind.

Acting on a larger scale financially but with some of the same mini-mind economy principles, the House Ways and Means Committee, in the spring of 1968, demanded a six-billion-dollar cut in spending — this despite the President's insistence that four billion was the maximum that could be cut without serious danger to needed domestic programs.

Some of the more militant economy advocates combined fiscal fears and injunctions against cutting arms programs with stern warnings against any legislation that would seem to "yield" to the Poor People's Campaign in Washington.

There is never a good time to help the poor. When they stay in their hovels, there is no need to give them attention. And when they make so bold as to seek public notice, aid to such brazen folk would constitute "yielding to pressure."

The Poor People's March, then under way, had been planned by the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It had brought to Washington an encampment of the poor, who tried in a sadly inept, often confused and almost incoherent way to let the Congress know that attention must be paid. Long before these people engaged in civil disobedience and were disbanded, it was apparent that the only interest of the "economy" advocates in the poor was that they should go away and take their problems back with them.

Despite the speeches made at the Lincoln Memorial, perhaps the most eloquent note of the Poor People's March came earlier when the inhabitants of the rain-soaked and flooded area near the Memorial which they called "Resurrection City" were warned of the dangers of disease. The marchers noted simply that they were used to having the rain come in on them, and that in the small plywood tents they were living better than they did at home. At least there were no rats here.

The six-billion-dollar slash insisted upon by Congress was ostensibly to fight inflation, maintain a sound fiscal policy and a sound dollar. But this was hardly an amount calculated to stem inflation, and the great champions of "economy" usually seemed to forget these pressing fiscal problems when appropriating all the billions for arms and moon travel, and supersonic transport — or when considering appropriations for the home districts, or regulation of "the private sector" or placing any burdens on the affluent. Many of them seemed to feel they could save the economy by socking the poor, whatever the ultimate cost to the nation in lives and dollars.

There are indeed fiscal problems which must be considered by an Administration and by Congress, although there is no agreement among economists about exactly what is "sound" policy. And there are still those inflation dangers to be considered.

But it has seemed to me that there has also been an unnecessary inflation of fiscal worries — about things like balances-of-payments and gold-and-dollar exchange. To a nation with more than a hundred billion dollars in direct overseas investments, is a three-to-four billion balance-of-payments deficit really frightening? Is it more alarming than the deficits in ten million American stomachs reported in 1968 by the Citizens' Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States? Not to me it isn't.

Is it too dreamy to suggest that a little more domestic adherence to the Golden Rule is more relevant than the tie still maintained with the memory of the gold standard? If the dollar were cut loose completely from gold, I don't know that we would really have to lie awake worrying about whether bankers abroad might worry. Would they prefer to turn in their dollars for drachmas?

In a nation with a Gross National Product of some 820 billion dollars, would deficit spending to help lick unemployment and slum problems, to provide for a better-fed, better-housed, better-employed people producing more and buying more, be a dangerous investment? I don't think so.

I don't think a concern for sound minds and sound bodies is exactly incompatible with sound fiscal policies. The dollar I worry about is the one that does not have a sound nation behind it.

Saving is fine in the right places and where it really counts. To help Congressmen remember, here is a maxim they can hang on their office walls:

A people saved is a people earned.

Saint Sputnik posted:

Shangri-Law School posted:

Herblocking Part II, Electric Boogaloo: Prepare for some .

Apple Pie Hubbub posted:

3

Shangri-Law School posted:

2 Can someone who knows French history explain what this was about?

King Possum III posted:

3

King Possum III posted:

3

thecluckmeme posted:

Jesus gently caress

King Possum III posted:

3