Recent Comments

1. about 14 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   Try proofreading your rants before you post them, though if you make ludicrously false claims like “The Democratic Party has the records for lies” then no reality-based person is likely to take you seriously even without all the misspellings. Waste and inefficiency are hardly unique to government. While it is true that both government agencies (and divisions of other large organizations as well; again, these things are not unique to government) do occasionally spend leftover funds in their budget in order not to have their next year’s budget reduced, that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you imply (they are at least as likely to run out of funds and be unable to do all they planned to do), and it’s often either because they were actually more efficient than they expected, or because a major project got delayed or cancelled, so the money budgeted for it didn’t get spent.

   Most US government agencies are actually fairly efficient for their sizes, getting a lot done with often insufficient resources. I read recently that Social Security, for instance, has administrative costs that are only 0.5 percent. One big part of the government that does have a lot of waste and inefficiency is the Defense Department (Homeland Security is another), so your suggestion that DOD should take priority for funding shows you aren’t serious about actually tackling waste. And as many people have already said, if Musk and company really wanted to reduce waste and improve efficiency, they wouldn’t take such an obviously inefficient approach to doing it, like wholesale dismissals without even a pretense of trying to sort the good from the bad.

2. 3 days ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

   This comic is a great critique of capitalist society. It’s like something George Carlin might have come up with if he’d done cartoons instead of stand-up comedy.

   In response to the comment above, it was for a long time largely true that there wasn’t all that much distinction between the two major parties, and that they were both overly beholden towards corporate interests. But reformers like Teddy Roosevelt aside, the Republican party has always been somewhat closer to big business, even going back to the 19th century. And while many Democrats are still too corporate-friendly, the Republican party has now been totally captured by the absolute worst elements of society, whether it’s psychopathic anti-democracy billionaires, the worst corporate wrongdoers, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, xenophobes, conspiracy theorists, or just all-around nasty people. For all their flaws (and their excessive attachment to the capitalist system), the Democrats are at least not fascists out to turn the country into an authoritarian oligarchy, like the MAGA Republicans are.

3. 5 days ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

   I would guess another difference was that Chuck Berry’s song was called “Roll Over Tchaikovsky”.

4. 5 days ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

   It’s fairly entertaining, though even given its fantastic premise it’s not very logical (for one thing, while the Beatles and a handful of other influential cultural touchstones don’t exist, everything else is unchanged).

5. 5 days ago on Get Fuzzy

   Satchel is exaggerating. Whether a cat will run away from a dog, big or small, depends on the cat and its mood at the time. My mother told me she once saw a fairly large dog charge up to a cat barking. The cat swatted the dog on the nose with its claws and the dog ran off howling.

6. 6 days ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

   This comic is a reference to the movie Yesterday, in which a failed musician ends up in an alternative universe where the Beatles never existed. In our world, the Beatles and their songs are no more likely to be forgotten than Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart (or Foster, Gershwin, or Porter).

7. 9 days ago on Pooch Cafe

   That may be true, but it makes no sense to arbitrarily create a definition simply to limit the number of planets to a smaller number. The definition should be based on concrete physical properties of the object, and saying the object has to “clear its orbit” is both extremely vague and not a characteristic of the object itself (there are likely star systems where objects the size of Mercury or Mars orbit alongside smaller objects, like Pluto does). If scientists are going to create such an arbitrary definition, they could just as easily have created one that included only Pluto and Eris and perhaps a few of the other largest TNOs (it should be remembered that Pluto, while much smaller than Mercury, is also much, much bigger than many of the other “dwarf planets”, such as Ceres; even Pluto’s companion Charon is much bigger than Ceres). One suggestion is to define a planet as an object large enough to have its interior differentiated into layers, though admittedly it’s difficult to be sure that’s true of a given object.

   In any event, the term “dwarf planet” has the word “planet” in it. If they didn’t want Pluto, Eris, etc. to be considered “planets” they should have come up with another term. One possible solution would be to say Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are the “major planets” (and the only ones students need to memorize), though even then there should be a better definition for what should be considered a “major planet”.

8. 10 days ago on Pooch Cafe

   Since it was a small group of Earth scientists doing the “demoting”, it shouldn’t have affected Pluto’s status at the Annual Solar System Conference. And even after “demotion”, Pluto is still considered a dwarf planet, which should be treated as a (small) kind of planet.

9. 11 days ago on Get Fuzzy

   There castle!

10. 11 days ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

    Just what I was going to say. For any unfortunate people who haven’t seen the movie, here’s a clip: httpS://www.youtube.Com/watch?v=2ernUF5sP9U