Banal Hemorrhage

Let me begin this by saying that in the current contest, I will vote for Biden happily and heartily. I am a Biden apologist, I’ve liked him since the Obama years. His gaffes are the gaffes of a boomer who has seen the world evolve and is trying to stay with it and not against it.  That said, he’s old AF. Trump is old AF. This makes me out to be an ageist, I believe. In my defense, most of my friends will be octogenarians. Here’s the thing, I don’t think that these candidates are too old to do the job, I just think that the crown could have been ceded to a properly coached and introduced successor with enough time. They’ve both experienced their share of success, shouldn’t the goal be to show humility and sweep the floor in front of newer generations? I don’t know if it’s because of internal polling or because of ego that Biden is considered the best choice for the United States. Whatever intel they used may have been flawed. In my mind, I dreamt of a Biden introducing some of his f...

The alliance between the GOP and the Libertarian party is one of the strangest things in a country full of strange politics.  A libertarian in the United States in 2023 has two choices to make an impact. Either play with the Democratic party or play with the Republican party. The Democratic party wants the government to be big enough to intercede on behalf of people, with systems like affirmative action, social safety nets, food stamps, Medicare for all. They believe in the freedom to love, marry and bang any consenting adult your heart desires. They want women to have private choices. They trust citizens to make their own choices regarding some drugs. They realize the United States is made of immigrants and they want to improve the pathways to citizenship we have. Read their platform , it's available for all. The Republican party wants the government to be small, but big enough to investigate women's ovulation patterns, disallow people from doing marijuana, build big walls and...

It is pretty funny how NRA aficionados focus on where shootings are happening or the particular root issues of the shooter . By funny, of course, I mean horrendously deceptive.  There's the direct cause of angry males having access to guns that they somehow always skip over.  The main reason I don’t like Joe Rogan is that he imprinted into his easily convinced audience the simplistic retort “This country has a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem.” That was like a million shootings ago and people still say it! People gloss over the fact that Joe is implying we are crazier than the rest of the world. Or forgetting to imply that we could have both problems.  It's tantamount to looking at traffic accidents around a city and focusing on the locations and motivations of the culprits (valuable variables on themselves), but completely ignoring a total lack of safety systems in the intersections.  We need stronger laws for who gets access to guns. Yes, thi...

I pity the people the GOP pander to. If their messaging is about being anti-woke, who are they trying to appeal to, the asleep? They’re anti-Antifa, are they Profa? Would they call Hitler their daddy and ask to be spanked? Think of the dumbed down messaging they throw around: "build the wall", "make America great again", "all lives matter". These are slogans for scared, simple people who can't handle nuance.  They think so little of their constituents that they truly believe all they have to do is put a guy like Herschel Walker on the ticket. Republicans are not dumb, however. They have successfully sold anti-immigration to religious immigrants. There's humans in my sphere that have been both illegal immigrants and pro-Trump. Republicans make this happen by aligning with quick-bite issues du jour .  Having trouble with the multiple pronouns and terms emerging out of the LGBQT community? "Join us, we don't even try!" Worried that books...

  Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be a Trumpian? To start your support simply because you are a closeted xenophobe, but then being carried through a river of cruelty, white supremacy and ignorance? All of a sudden, you are following Marjorie Taylor Greene, you think Big Bird is a Marxist and you prepare a borax bath just in case you are forcefully vaccinated by the man. I mean, if their support wasn’t absolutely destructive to the immigrant community, you’d almost feel sorry for them. Sadly, if you take the xenophobia away, what IS the credo of a Trumpian? They don’t believe in small government, they want a government that focuses on women’s uteri, makes education nationalistic, and has a say on election results. True conservatives scoff at their degradation of the flag and their deification of petty men over country. Nope, their minds are networked through the simple concept of fear. I am yet to be convinced otherwise, but if you have a pro-Trump argument that is not n...

This comic is made all the better when you learn that HP Lovecraft, the father of the Cthulhu mythos, was a raving racist. Here's a blog from an author awakening to this reality . And here's a quiz to determine if an excerpt was written by him or Hitler. So, making a woke Cthulhu is very cathartic to me!

Things have been... weird. We finally beat the worst president we’ve ever had. He’s out. More than 80 million people hate him. His autocratic style was transparent and against what the United States stands for, regardless of if you are a Democrat or a Republican. A weight is lifted for immigrants, LGBQT, liberals and the environment. And yet... tens of millions of people voted for him. Many have moved on since, but at least half (the same half that put credence to Q Anon) believe that the election was systematically rigged and that it will be turned back to Trump. Let me be clear, these people are idiots or monsters. These are the worst of our society. People keep telling me that many of them are ignorant, as if that excuses their dangerous wants. At this point what they want, based on slim evidence, is to overthrow the election in swing states. They want to have the legislatures (many Republican due to gerrymandering) elect their own electors.  The gulf between what they want and ...

Public policies work. They have always worked. The number of adult smokers has plummeted since restrictions were put in place . Many of us are too dumb to realize how good this is for us and society in general. I was definitely (and likely still am) one of the dumb ones. A snowflake if you will, like a Republican refusing to accept the 2020 election.  “But what about my rights?”, I voiced to no one in particular when indoor smoking was banned. Why would it be their business what I did with my body? Well it turns out there’s many reasons why.  First of all, these decisions rarely affect just one person. My smoking caused second had smoke, litter and probably a litany of regrets when waking up next to my stinky pack-a-day ass.  Second of all, we are not great at seeing 20 years down the line. Public policy tries to bridge that gap. I may not care that I will be a wheezing, smoke-spewing, leathery sack of crap when I’m 70, but the healthcare system sure will. Lastly & ul...

This year has been rough. I’m not going to list the ways it has been awful for most of us. Okay, I will, because I love lists: Fires, RBG, COVID, unemployment, stress, Trump, police killings, tabloids, lost children, friends lost in cults, being home-bound, finding out Kirstie Alley is a gender-bent James Woods. The George Floyd killing was one of the terrible things that happened, no mistaking that. However, this year, more than any other year, I found increased support for BLM. More people seem to have bought-in to the fact that Black Americans are being policed, prosecuted and punished more severely than their white counterparts. I was pleasantly surprised at some of the support this idea found, in the year of despair 2020.  Let’s talk about Republicans, though. Only about 16% of white Republicans support BLM in some way. Compare that to 88% of white Democrats. I just don’t get the Republican philosophy. Imagine being a Republican your whole life. Over the past 4 years, you hav...

Well, by now most of you know the drill. Information has changed and we are all a bit screwed because of it. Our choices change our news in ways that have never happened before. The news are bottled up and served as a product to people. You are drinking Coke and your neighbor is drinking Mr. Pibb; a bizarre, dubious and objectively wrong choice. I know I can't claim to be right, I mostly jest. I am extremely biased when it comes to immigration, women's choice and LGBQT rights. I will favor those over stock market increases and regulation reductions, even though I am an avid stock market investor. I click on articles that show how immigrants are less prone to commit crimes, while my neighbor may click on articles talking about the hive of scum and villainy that files up to ask for asylum. Just like rashes, the amount of biased news you get grows the more you pick them. If you still are not clear how this works, there's an accessible documentary on Netflix: The Social Dilemma...

Empathy towards strangers is learnable. So why are some of us so uneducated?   I'm not always empathetic towards strangers. During the Paris terrorist attack I wondered why Muslims weren’t decrying this heinous attack. Spoiler alert: They WERE decrying it (I was just too angry to see it) and they didn’t have to. You don’t expect Christians to apologize for every insane Christian. They'd spend every Sunday apologizing half the time.  My mind changed after a single act: meeting Muslim people. We helped a family from Syria as they were welcomed in our community. The “them” became “us.” Their amazing cooking skills and easy laughter will always stay with me. How do we get this to happen to people? There's value in learning that we are all extremely similar. We all worry about COVID, we all want to protect our own, we all occasionally leave skid marks in our underwear and never really talk about it. I’m the most introverted person I know, and I still have been able to meet Jew...

  41% of adults in the United States approve of Donald Trump as of the writing of this blog post . 42% of adults in the United States say they will vote for him this November. I am telling them to get bent in this comic. I never said I was good at this whole create-a-following aspect of creating webcomics. When he got elected, I really hoped for the best, to the annoyance of my more leftist friends. I trusted that the system of checks and balances wouldn't let his flippant cruelty become policy. And for the most part it hasn't, but the effects that his intentions have had on the psyche of many of us is as indelible as his pronunciation of Yosemite.  There is a lot of fake news around this president, I will never deny that. There is fake news about everything these days, including stories denying the benefits of wearing a barrier between your saliva fountain and other saliva fountains.  The things that are terrifying and monstrous about this president are not fake ne...

The most frustrating thing about these people is that they’re almost displaying intelligence. Doubt and curiosity are healthy and necessary elements of scientific thinking. And yes, we have witnessed and been made privy of horrible things like MK Ultra , the  Tuskegee Study  and Trump being made president which make us doubt agencies and governments.  But the gap between the facts, “ the world really dislikes Trump “, to the conclusions, “ COVID is a hoax to undermine Trump ”; this gap is bigger than the gap between Trump’s IQ compared to his predecessor’s. Unbridgeable.  Wether it’s Dunning Kruger effect ( like I displayed in one of my earlier comics ) or meek mental mettle; these people can stop being funny (like when Buzz Aldrin punched one of them ) and start getting dangerous at times. People have followed Fox and OAN’s trails to endanger other people. People are refusing to vaccinate their children due to ridiculous claims. Soon, these people will not vacc...

I remember the ‘92 LA riots. If you don’t, there’s a brilliant documentary in Netflix about it (LA 92). At the time, the loss of property and all the literal flames made me question if the response was balanced to the cause (Rodney King’s beating.)  Now, I don't even pose the question. I can never know what it is like to be culled and focused on so adamantly. Sure, other minorities get some crap. But there’s something about the image of a black individual in society at large that scares white people. An angry white man doesn’t generate the same fear and reprisal that an angry black man does. An armed white man? Well that’s just Walmart on a Friday night! An armed black man is a death sentence.  I’ve only experienced racism a few times, and it only happens when they hear my accent. Instead of cops, the institution that treated me like dirt was Homeland Security in airports. They mocked my accent, they questioned my motives, and they generally made me feel powerless. Howeve...

It’s been over three years of this, and the media doesn’t seem to get wise to it. Sensational insanity from the prez always trumps (sorry!) the actual shady stuff happening in his administration. Ad Nauseam. Speaking of nausea, how many of you thought that your gastric juices would stop maelstorming every time you heard this imbecile talk? I for one, thought we would be inoculated by now.  It’s really difficult to focus on the enduring damage he is doing to the institutions that have held this country together, when he says the loony things he does. Neither of the possible truths looks good for him or his supporters. He’s either a con man or absolutely insane.  Another 4 years granted to him by a scared, ignorant and hateful populace would be just so 2020. I hope I’m wrong.  

Obama was a bit drone happy. Hillary was a bit hard to relate to. And I voted for both of them. The thing that surprises me the most about the Trump presidency is how his supporters don’t even acknowledge his faults. This week the president suggested that we look into putting disinfectant inside our bodies. Fact. Even the dumbest among us know how dangerous that would be. And the Trump defense force has been strong this week. Their defense is the most hilarious thing I’ve seen, and I consume a lot of comedy. Their argument is that Trump isn’t actually doing it, he just wants us to consider it. The highlight of my week was a Trumpian saying it was fake news and providing text that would exonerate the President, but the idiot forgot to change the words and provided the actual words: “And I then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in th...

A lot of the people I grew up with say that there's no racism in Venezuela. Somehow, they reached adulthood and failed to notice the lack of representation of non-light-skinned people. The paler the pigment the more you'd be seen in a leadership position (admittedly anecdotal observation on my part). The beauty queens, our second most famous export, didn't fit the mold of the majority of Venezuelans. They tended to be lighter in complexion. Incredibly racist jokes abounded in my private school, spread with gleeful ignorance (and the security of not having many people of color around us to hear them). Chavez rallied the poor, and the poor were dark skinned. Chavez supporters were called "ugly", "monkeys", and many more names. I am not a supporter of Chavez, but I can see how he coalesced his army. The study referenced in this article , puts Venezuela smack dab as the most racist country in the Americas. The question in this survey was someth...

Dear readers, politics in the United States are a mess. The right, in particular, has become meaningless. The right was the party of law and order, at one time. Under Trump, however, they are anti-FBI. They were for economic conservatism, but now they support the largest budget ever. They say they have an issue only with illegal immigration, and yet they cheer Donald Trump when he curtails legal immigration . The right under Trump only makes sense if you really see them as (poorly written) evil characters. The Hidden Brain podcast has an interesting episode called “ More Divided than Ever ”. It was really interesting, especially the part with John Hibbing, who talks about the biological nature of our political views. For instance, people who lean conservative tend to also dislike spicy food [duh, says my anecdotal experience]. I feel like understanding there’s a biological component to our stances does help me empathize more with an opposing political position. The thing is...

ENGLISH VERSION BELOW “No Podemos Regresar a Casa” Cuando decimos eso, casi siempre queremos decir que tú o el lugar donde crecistes han cambiado muchísimo. En el caso de Venezuela, nuestra casa literalmente no existe. Yo se que no se compara con lugares como Siria, pero es impresionante como todo un país fue eliminado por las terribles decisiones gubernamentales. Desde que abandoné  (todavía se siente como que la abandone) a mi Caracas en el 2003, se ha convertido en uno de los países más pobres en la región y el crimen se ha vuelto insoportable. La última vez que fui fue en el 2011 y no la pude reconocer, a mi Venezuela. Todos estaban cuidadosos, estresados y asustados. Mi corazón siempre piensa en los que se quedaron atrás. Cuando veo fotos de mi valle, el valle de la ciudad de Caracas, yo y miles de mis compatriotas soltamos un suspiro grande. Yo la tome por sentado por 25 años, pero nuestra preciosa cordillera es una de las maravillas del planeta. ...

The choice patient is a Republican talking point. Most people in the United States already have no options in their insurance as it is done through their employer. If you have a public option that will pay for your main healthcare needs, only a portion of Americans would need to supplement it with  something else. And this is the United States of America so there will always be VIP options , I have no doubt. We need to go to Universal Healthcare. On that the Democrats mostly agree ( Biden's 97% promise falls short to most others ). They disagree in how to get there. You heard on the democratic debate one of the main rifts: Should we have a federally managed, exclusive public option or should there be a space for private insurance? I am not intelligent enough to know what will be best in our current economic and political climate but hear me out. An exclusive single payer system is very rare in large countries. France, Spain, Germany and Canada have a role for private in...