Stealing Our Souls

 

There's a new strain of Covidiot virus going around among healthcare workers — proof that Stupid can strike any of us, though if you consider how long it takes to become a doctor vs. how long it takes to become a nurse, it all makes sense.

There have been a couple of outbreaks of the new Stupid Variant in the past week, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and in New York. A close read of the thread in which Max Blumenthal tweets the NYT article tells me, personally, that Blumenthal is about to dive down the anti-vax rabbit hole if he hasn't already. He seems to imply at one point that PhD's were among the most reluctant to take the vaccine, which proves nothing except that having a PhD doesn't make you immune to the Stupid Variant — nor does not being a Trumpster.

But, back to the outbreaks of Covidiot Virus. You know how back in the 1970s and '80s you'd read every so often about some National Geographic documentary crew going deep into the Amazon jungle or someplace and encountering some tribe that's lived in isolation for a thousand years, and they see the cameras and video images of themselves for the first time and freak out because they think the cameras are stealing their souls? Well, how different is that from these doorknobs who think that Bill Gates is putting microchips in vaccines, or that taking cow dewormer and shitting out your stomach lining will cure Covid-19?

9 x 17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 1.2mb

Afghan Women's Liberation no. 2 (or, Won't Somebody Think Of The Women?)

 

When the US first set out inflicting two decades of destruction and misery on Afghanistan the Liberals, true to the old Phil Ochs song, were never more red, white and blue — and the Liberals' most appallingly cynical appeals for support for that debacle came from the "imperial Feminists" who tried to tug our heartstrings with horror stories about burqas, illicit nail salons, and no HBO. 

So, it was no surprise when America's Imperial Feminists picked up where they left off, joining the chorus of bitching, pissing, moaning and sour-graping about their being run out of Afghanistan, reviving the tired old bromides about women's rights and how the US "left women behind" when it dragged its bloody ass out of the place after twenty years in the Graveyard Of Empires.

The most unctous of these was an article in The Atlantic which dragged out every one of those tired old arguments, hoary old horseshit so old it's got SCSI ports on the back. What was merely appalling twenty years ago is absolutely godawful today, considering the current abuse of working-class women in the US, and in US satellite states like Saudi Arabia:

One reason that we stayed in Afghanistan so long with nothing to show for it except the safety of women, @CaitlinPacific writes, is that for all of our sins, our default position is freedom.

—The Atlantic, @theatlantic on Twitter, 08.19.2021

Says on the author's profile that she traffics in "thought crimes for all occasions". I wouldn't know about that, but that article of hers sure is a goddamn crime, I'll tell ya that for free.

10x17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 993kb

This Is Your Captain Speaking...

 

I present for you now, ladies'n'gents, my very first cartoon of the 2024 Presidential campaign — and leave all hope behind...

Human remains were reportedly found in the landing gear of a US military plane after it departed Kabul airport, with harrowing unverified footage purporting to show a person trapped on the plane’s exterior as it took off...

...In footage too graphic to publish, presumably filmed through a window by a passenger on board the plane, the person was seen trapped outside the craft in mid-flight, though it is unclear exactly when the video was captured or how long after the C-17 took off.

— RT.com, 08.17.2021

 

...and the tweet in question has since been pulled for "violating the Twitter rules" — though, luckily, that evil, terrible old Russian-controlled media nabbed us a frame or two. I wish I'd jumped on it and downloaded a copy of the video as soon as I saw it — barely 7 months in, and we already have a disgustingly apt visual metaphor for the entirety of the Biden Years.

This is your future, working-class America.

11x12.5 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 901kb

Miss Kabul

 

Elvis has left the building. At last.

...and as the band was playing him out, the Beltway chattering class was in a mass conniption over all those poor, helpless collaborators we left behind, and our lack of political will, and how, if we could only piss away another trillion or two and tough it out until mid-century, we could lick those mean old Taliban once and for all.

In the days leading up to Elvis' departure from the building, the press was full of screeching and howling about how this wasn't going to be like the evacuation of Saigon, honest it wasn't, seriously, for real — and the louder they howled, the more convinced I was that it would be like the evacuation of Saigon, except even more awesome.

I was 18 when I watched terrified Embassy flunkies being plucked off the roof by the choppers on TV. The draft had officially ended around 1971 or so, but I still had to register. Got a ready-to-burn card and everything. The day Saigon fell, I was about two weeks from graduating high school, and classified 1-H.

Turn out the lights, the party's over...!

11x18 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 660kb

Up, Up, And Awa-aayyy!

 

Alright, just so I'm straight, here... we're being thrown out of our homes, we're losing our jobs, there's a new COVID-19 wave hitting, fascists are terrorizing our streets, the cops are mass murdering us — not to mention that millions of us all over the country still don't have broadband service — and Mr. Counterinsurgency Big-Shot at the White House wants to fly balloons over Cuba to "provide internet service" while they hijack connections to broadcast US State Department propaganda, including the Voice Of America.

Christ, I hate this goddamn country. I really, really fucking do.

11x19 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 1.6mb

At Last!

 

Despite the vaccine, we're still getting sick and dying in huge numbers out here. We're also still unemployed or trapped in shit jobs, or being thrown out of work, about to lose our homes. Some of us are already homeless and our poverty has been criminalized. Some of us are being murdered by the police.

In the face of all this, what's Priority One for the Democratic Party?

Giant asteroid hurtles toward Earth. A liberal basks in the glow, "Now Trump is going to pay!"

 — Vastleft, @vastleft on Twitter 08.09.2021

Yep, you guessed it. Their empty-ass January 6 show investigation which will achieve absolute zero, and which will be dragged out clear into the midterms to raise money.  

11x17 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 1.1mb

A Great Day For America (or, That Aged Well)

 

Late this past spring, even while the Delta Variant was spreading in Europe and elsewhere, Gropin' Joe went on TV in the White House Rose Garden, pulled off his mask and declared the pandemic over, calling it "a great day for America" — following later this summer with what had to be the weakest, most pointless COVID vaccine policy ever. Regular testing and a mask requirement? That's it? Not "get vaccinated or get fired"?

Needless to say, the Washington Post and crew were right on top of it, cranking out articles about how wonderful it is to be re-emerging, to go back to "normal", sometimes vaguely insuinuating that people still wearing masks in the grocery store were "the new weirdos" — as opposed to the knobs who thought they were being muzzled and forced to breathe their own CO2, who were last year's weirdos.

Yeah... that sure aged well, didn't it? Seems that Biden & Gang are employing the same strategy Trump did after the last election.

14x13 inch medium-res color .jpg image, 2.3mb