Added a simple CAPTCHA that uses text/number mixing and first grade math to determine the humanity of posters/registrants. I believe it has enabled me to go back to open comments, as I have it set up so anyone can post as long as they answer the CAPTCHA. If you get tired of doing that, feel free to register, and you won’t see it any more.
Author Archives: admin
Casual Friday
So this is the first story comic, and, in it, we establish that Scot has moved in with Penny, having previously shared an apartment with Steve. I don’t love the art, and the “Dharma and Greg” joke is dated, but there are worse (in case you were wondering why I didn’t fix it). Looking at these old comics I have to pick and choose what’s bad but part of my “style” (for want of a better word) at the time and what’s just truly awful. Believe me, the awful is coming.
My next comic will be more exciting as i will be mentioning some experiences in the dating world, all awful hahah but many are funny, I even have one from an adult site, because believe me Horny females are also online looking for sex right now so if you want some you can very easily get it! And let me know your experience, we might be able to make it into a comic?
This is an idea that has been on my mind for a very long time, if you are interest let me know so we can share ideas and make our routine world an fun and awesome place.
Heresy by Deed
I’ll be honest: I’m glad that Bradley Manning was acquitted on the charge of Treason. I’m also glad that he’s going to jail for his irresponsible release of sensitive army files. He endangered lives and operations; some of the documents he forwarded to Julian Assange included information from which troop placements and movements could have been derived, and that is criminal. He is not, however, a traitor. The fact is that no one can be a traitor under US law, because we are not engaged in a declared war. We have not been in a war since 1945.
“What about Korea and Vietnam?” you ask. Not wars. Police actions, the same with every military action taken by American soldiers in the last sixty-eight years. We’re not even in a military engagement at this time. Our soldiers are simply occupying territory (a concept that is much more dangerous than actual warfare, since they are subject to attack from unknown quarters). Just as you can’t be a traitor without a war (or at least a rebellion) you can’t have a war without a Congressional Declaration of War. Period.
So he’s not a traitor, but I hesitate to call him a whistleblower. While the data he sent to WikiLeaks did contain a surprising amount of evidence regarding US military abuses that had been handled summarily or swept under the rug, they did not justify the bulk of the classified information he sent. The military can count themselves lucky that Assange cherry-picked the items that were published in WikiLeaks and didn’t just dump the whole chowder.
Speaking of Assange, by what right is the US pursuing a foreign national living on foreign soil for violating a US law? I know our government has nursed a few black eyes due to documents published on WL, but tough shit. Unless the Department of Justice is ready to turn everyone over to North Korea who’s called Kim Jong Un (and his father and grandfather) as crazy as a bag of cats, we don’t really have a leg to stand on (especially in light of recent revelations regarding our own intelligence-gathering activities).
Which, of course, brings us around to the source of those revelations, Edward Snowden. As I write this, President Obama is in a giant snit about Russia’s decision to grant Snowden provisional asylum. He even cancelled a summit meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Now, if you’re old enough to remember the Fall of the Berlin Wall, I want you to pause and think about this a moment. Did you even in your life conceive of a time when an American President would cancel a meeting with a Russian President because the Russians refused to deliver an American dissident for prosecution? If you were born on the day the Soviet Army upheld the popular mandate that the Supreme Soviet had tried to ignore, you could not rent a car on the day that our President gave the late Leonid Brezhnev a run for his dissidence-suppressing money.
And if it was only Snowden, who, admittedly released a lot of classified information, that would be bad enough. President Obama—the man who, on the day before his inauguration, swore that his Administration would be the most transparent in decades—has passed his entire Presidency pursuing and discrediting whistleblowers of all sorts. The ink was barely dry on his Oath of Office, when Obama’s administration summarily fired Inspector General Gerald Walpin for doing his job (investigating and ensuring the prosecution of an Obama crony who was mishandling government grant funds in hilarious ways).
The Obama Administration has prosecuted more people for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act (the law that makes leaks of classified and sensitive government information illegal) than all other previous administrations combined. This while openly and arrogantly violating the Constitution (by murdering American citizens without due process), international law (the insertion of the Stuxnet virus into Iranian computer systems comes immediately to mind) and plain common sense (“I could have been Trayvon” really, Mr. President? Did you forget your oath to uphold the Constitution, including its provisions regarding a fair and just trial?). This, then, is the “new dedication to transparency.”
I have friends who are afraid that Obama is turning America into a Soviet-Style Socialist state. I don’t have such high hopes. President Obama has already turned the White House into a Chicago Ward Office. Any day now, the text on the Great Seal will be changed from “E Pluribus Unum” to “Snitches get Stitches.”
Spambots Die Now
Every “user” whose name is something that was output by a random character generator is getting deleted at noon (central daylight) today if I don’t get an e-mail asking me not to.
UPDATE: All users that I couldn’t identify have been deleted. If you are a real human and I deleted you in error, please leave a comment on this post and I’ll make sure you don’t get caught in the next spambot sweep.
Casual Friday —TAKS
“TAKS” is an acronym for “Test of something something Skills” and was the achievement test established for Texas School assessment under the program that became “No Child Left Behind” when George W. Bush became President and took it to the national stage. Mind you, prior to the development of the TAKS test, we already had an achievement test, the Test of Academic Achievement and Skills (TAAS), which was used to determine whether a child would progress past certain grades (I want to say 1st, 5th, 8th, and 12th, but I’m probably wrong).
The first TAKS test took place at about the same time as the first ever statewide test of teachers’ knowledge and skills. The results were an unmitigated disaster. Not only did the more difficult TAKS test result in whole school districts failing even minimum standards, but one in five teachers failed the teachers’ assessment test—a general knowledge and aptitude test set at about an 8th grade level of learning.
Needless to say, no one was surprised by the results except for the educational Powers That Be, who immediately fixed the problem by scheduling retests for the teachers that failed an 8th grade exam, and developing policies that essentially restructured school curricula around the “knowledge points” covered by the TAKS. They maintained a certain plausible deniability regarding accusations that they were teaching to the test by not actually having the teachers read out the letter answers to that year’s test.
It occurred to no one that the same schools and districts that took such a beating were the inner city and deep country schools that had been taking a beating this whole time, especially when the “Robin Hood” plan of redistributing tax income from wealthy districts to poorer districts was repealed. For some reason, the idea that some districts were failing because they couldn’t afford quality teachers and equipment is (to this day) foreign to some people’s way of thinking. To be fair, those same areas also seem to suffer from a Culture of Stupid, where anyone who seeks to improve their mind or life is viewed as “thinking they’re better than us” and quickly shoved back into place.
Anyway, the whole idea of forcing a talented teacher to spew out review points for a standardized test seemed hilarious to me. Especially once the teacher’s Advanced Placement class gets ahold of it.