The Pearls Before Swine comic strip is my favorite among the ones currently running. It has a wildly unpredictable absurdist humor that often breaks the fourth wall by inserting the cartoonist Stephan Pastis into the strip to interact with his characters, and uses puns and other plays on words (like this one).
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Once in a while, especially at times when people are fighting and killing over religion more than usual, I like to link to this audio of a rant by British comedian Marcus Brigstocke. The whole thing is worth listening to but especially the part where he talks about how while the violence is committed by a few extremists, the undoubtedly much larger number of religious people who are peaceful cannot completely escape responsibility for what is done.
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Bank of America is the latest to pay a fine for mortgage fraud that led to the financial crises that resulted in thousands of people losing their homes. In announcing the fine that had been agreed to of $16.65 billion, Attorney General Eric Holder said today:
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… be prepared for surprising things to happen.
Another football season is about to start and we have the Washington DC football team owner continuing to stick with its current deplorable name despite increasing disapproval and the decision by some reporters and media outlets to refuse to use it. I hope that this football team, like my hometown Cleveland Indians whose racist logo is also contemptible, lose every single game or at the least, never make the playoffs. At the moment, the Indians are well on the way to another season of well-deserved mediocrity and I couldn’t be happier.
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I have long since ceased to be surprised that some of the best analyses of hot-button issues like what happened in Ferguson is coming from comedy shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and now with newcomer Last Week Tonight. Oliver provides valuable context and background information on what transpired and brilliantly leavens the dark matter with humor.
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There are a lot of people on the internet whose main goal seems to be to say silly and outrageous things just so that the public will pay attention to them. Ann Coulter in one such media hustler. Sarah Palin is another. The logical thing to do is to ignore them and deny them the visibility they so clearly crave and usually I do just that. But sometimes the things they say are so funnily mockable that I bend the rules.
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Last week a federal judge struck another blow against the bogus amateurism shield that the NCAA uses to prevent having to share its enormous revenues with the students who make all that money for them.
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The latest gambit by American corporations to lower their taxes even more is to take advantage of what is known as ‘corporate inversion’. The way it works is for a big US company to buy a small company in a country that has favorable tax laws, Ireland being the current favored nation. They then ‘invert’ the relationship, claiming that the foreign company is the parent one while the US one is the subsidiary, even though nothing else has changed. This enables them to pay the lower taxes of the other nation while enjoying all the benefits of being in the US.
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By all accounts, Ebola is a deadly disease, now ravaging parts of west Africa and taking a dreadful toll on people there. But for the US media, there is no scare in any part of the world that cannot be made into a scare here. We have seen one media-fuelled panic after another over the past few years, with bird flu, swine flu, SARS, and I forget what else. If ever a real epidemic hits, we have more to fear from being crushed by mobs of people running around wildly in panic than from the disease itself.
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