The Birds Revisited

A story about NFL fans, Mickey Mouse and Ron DeSantis...

Recently, pods or herds or outlaw motorcycle gangs (I’m a little hazy on the correct Orca Terminology) of Killer Whales have been attacking boats and scientists are still trying to figure out why, but I drew the obvious conclusion (and please don’t miss that top-quality pun) that the Killer Whales had a union meeting and decided they needed to kill us before we kill them and I for one can’t blame them.

According to the internet, a Killer Whale’s brain is five times larger than a human’s and has “highly developed insula and cingulate sulcus” which gives them self-awareness, understanding of social relationships and empathy, which is more than you can say for about 73% of all human beings and that percentage goes even higher if you’re talking about the humans who paint their faces and go to NFL games.

I mean look at these faces:

Then this one:

And tell me who looks more intelligent.

I’m also never going out on a boat again because next thing you know the Animal Revolution will spread and we’ll be facing Killer Perch and Killer Sea Bass and Killer Rainbow Trout and if you don’t think Nature can kick our ass if All God’s Creatures Great & Small get organized, you need to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds again.

If you want to read more about Killer Whales and why they will soon take over the ocean and then crawl up on land and learn to ride horses and put Charlton Heston in a cage, here you go:

https://news.yahoo.com/comparing-orcas-brain-humans-explains-123700090.html

Earlier this week Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy reached an agreement to avoid default which sounded like an excellent idea, but when that happened the immediate question was whether they could get Extremist Members of both parties to go along and approve it (and they have).

In any case…

According to the following article, members of Congress would have continued to get paid even if the government had defaulted, so the politicians were playing chicken with everybody else’s money – Social Security recipients, military personnel and the people who put out those orange cones to warn drivers of road construction and then leave town for four years to attend college – but members of Congress weren’t risking missing a payday of their own.

Which inspired Representatives Abigail Spanberger and Brian Fitzpatrick to introduce a bill that would withhold members of Congress’ pay for the duration of a default and for showing such common sense, I’m ready to elect Abigail and Brian Homecoming Queen and King and here’s a picture of Abigail right after the rest of Congress showed how much they appreciated her logical thinking by dumping a bucket of blood on her head:  

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/18/new-house-bill-would-block-pay-for-members-of-congress-if-the-us-defaults.html

So we had yet another mass shooting, this time in Hollywood, Florida and it reminded me of a friend who said the Republicans are more worried about transgender athletes playing sports than thousands of people getting shot to death and I turned that observation into a cartoon.

According to the internet, there are less than 10 transgender athletes in the entire state of Missouri and when Kansas passed a bill preventing transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports, the Kansas City Star said it would affect a grand total of three student-athletes.

Meanwhile…

According to Yahoo News there were 647 mass shooting in 2022 – approximately 1.8 per day – and according to the Archive for Gun Violence more than 44,000 people died from gun violence in 2022 and according to the New England Journal of Medicine, in 2020 firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in children aged 1-to-19 years.

So the Republicans aren’t going to do jack shit about the proliferation of guns and daily mass shootings, but let one transgender kid try to play soccer and they won’t stand for it.

Thank God they have their priorities straight.

https://sports.yahoo.com/us-had-214-mass-shootings-193017176.html?guccounter

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to announce he’s running for president and also decided it would be really cool to announce it on Twitter because what could possibly go wrong after Elon Musk fired a bunch of the people that keep Twitter from exploding like a Social Media Hindenburg?

Turns out a lot could go wrong and did.

Twitter crashed like I do after having a two-margarita lunch and thinking I can sit down on my couch and get comfortable and read a book or watch a ballgame and not do a remarkably accurate Rip Van Winkle imitation.

(On the other hand, falling asleep at 4 PM is balanced out by being wide awake at 4 AM and if that’s part of God’s Grand Design – along with hair not growing on top your head while growing wildly out of your ears – I think we may need a factory recall.)

The DeSantis announcement was delayed by nearly half an hour and the sound kept cutting in and out (so they were clearly using the same technology as my cell phone) and they tried to pretend all that happened because so many people wanted to hear DeSantis speak, but as someone who wasn’t in charge of rationalizing the Ron DeSantis Twitter Shit Show pointed out, other media platforms handle much bigger audiences without imploding.

If you think about it – and I have – the guy who’s telling us he knows how to solve all our country’s problems couldn’t make a simple announcement without stepping on his own dick, which sounds like an insult, but depending on your sexual tastes might actually be a compliment and now seems like an excellent time to change the subject.

In any case, I used Mickey Mouse ears to remind people that DeSantis started an unnecessary feud with the largest employer in Florida and cost his state a billion-dollar project when Disney cancelled it and it sounds like Disney cancelled the project mainly because they think DeSantis is a jerk.

And for all those reasons I thought it was a “Mickey Mouse” announcement.

Timeout for a Mickey Mouse joke:

Mickey’s seeing a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist says: “So you think your wife’s insane?”

And Mickey says: “I didn’t say she was insane, I said she was fuckin’ Goofy.”

(OK, my apologies if you were offended and find the profanity deplorable and all I can say is when you repeat this joke – and I’m pretty sure you will – I want credit. And even if you don’t repeat this joke because you’re just too damn classy, you’ll think of it every time you hear Mickey or Goofy mentioned, just like I do, so now you have that stuck in your brain.)

Google “did economists predict” and before you finish typing your question you’ll be offered a variety of articles about economic events economists failed to predict like the financial crisis of 2008 and according to the following article, they not only failed to predict it, they argued that it couldn’t possibly happen.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-economists-failed-to-predict-the-financial-crisis/

Just in case you didn’t read the article:

One of the problems was economists relying on mathematical models that ignored factors that stood in the way of clear conclusions – like human psychology – which reminds me that one of the earliest complaints I heard baseball players make about analytics was the tendency to ignore anything the numbers guys didn’t know how to measure, like a ballplayer putting up good numbers, but being a selfish horse’s ass who made all his teammates worse.

It turns out a bunch of economists also failed to predict the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed, none of which has seemed to stop anybody from trying to predict the future.

So when I read economists were about to make a brand new economic forecast because the last one hadn’t been accurate, I drew the above cartoon and no matter how far off economists’ predictions turn out to be, I predict they won’t stop making them.

Right up until the Killer Whales take over.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/