Recent Comments

1. over 9 years ago on The Comic Strip That Has A Finale Every Day

   I can’t believe this is the last strip.

2. about 10 years ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

   “The Origin of Language”

3. about 10 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Brilliant!

4. about 10 years ago on Super-Fun-Pak Comix

   But literally, this is the last strip. And every strip before that was the last strip. Was that ulterior joke? Am I Captain Obvious? Anyway, it was a great run.

5. over 14 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   I don’t claim to know Jesus better than the apostles did, I’m just saying that their second-hand accounts paint a mixed picture of the man. “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a nice sentiment, but teaching that anger puts you on the road to eternal damnation is kind of screwed up, don’t you think?

   I mean, don’t get angry with me for my comments, or your God might torture you for all time. Am I reading this wrong?

   With statements such as ‘The Scripture cannot be broken’ (John 10:35) and ‘Until Heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the law, until all is accomplished’ (Matthew 5:18) and “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets” (Mathew 5:17), Jesus seemed to be endorsing, say, Exodus 22:20 that “whoever sacrifices to any god other than the LORD must be destroyed”?

   Why don’t you have an open mind to the divinity of Hercules, or the fact that there are striking parallels between their stories, and that one might have colored the other? Or to ask yourself why Christians follow Exodus 20:1-17 (the ten commandments), while chosing to ignore Exodus 21:20-21, on which this fine comic is based?

   “When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.”

   I think the attitude that many Christians have towards their Bible is the same as their attitudes towards their own bodies: it’s all holy and a divine creation, even the nasty bits which we’ll pretend don’t exist most of the time.

6. over 14 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   I personally have no idea who Jesus was and what he said. All I have are some really old, selectively edited and somewhat contradictory second-hand accounts. I agree, he seemed like a real nice guy in his Sermon on the Mount (apart from this bit: “whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause, shall be in danger of the judgment…shall be in danger of hell-fire.”)

   As far as Jesus rejecting Leviticus, it seemed that he did implicitly, if not explicitly, in John 8, in where he is reported to have said “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” (At which an old woman threw a stone and soon the crowd goes went with the stone throwing, whereupon he turned to the woman and said “thanks a lot, Mom!” Jesus wept.)

   I really don’t know what Jesus believed. I’m much more curious about what Christians believe. It’s my belief that every last one of them cherry-picks from the Bible. For starters, the Ten Commandments are a cornerstone of Christian faith, right? Well, they appear in Exodus, right next to Leviticus. If these commandments are to be followed by modern Christians, why not the teachings of Leviticus? Even if Jesus was soft on adultery, there’s no reason to think he rejected the teaching that shellfish is an abdomination.

   Most Christians don’t seem to acknowledge that they cherry-pick from the Bible, so they’re alarmed by passages in the Koran that seem to exhort Muslims to kill non-Muslims. Do these Christians know that their Bible also advises in Exodus 22:20 that “whoever sacrifices to any god other than the LORD must be destroyed”? Fortunately, the vast majority of Muslims (over a billion of them) cherry-pick just as Christians and Jews do.

   Lastly, I don’t believe that Paul made it ALL up. But where the miracles are concerned, I find it significant that the Romans of Jesus’ time already believed in a demigod, born of god and woman, who performed miracles such as going to the underworld and returning, and who was elevated to full God status after his mortal death. Of course, I’m speaking of Hercules. If you cross Hercules with the Jewish concept of the Messiah, you have something close to Christianity.

   Paul, who was trying to build a brand new religion, was in my mind playing to his audience.

7. almost 15 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   Doug Dean…bought into the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac blame game hook, line and sinker, didn’t ya? Next you’ll blame them minorities for, say, bankrupting Iceland.

   “Federal Reserve Board data show that more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions…” http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

   The “hapless banks” were entirely in on the scheme. What’s more, they pushed it hard - making serious $ from charging points on bad mortgages, and then selling them as “mortgage-backed securities,” which was essentially bad paper that they got rated as high yield, low-risk investments through some hocus pocus.

   Freddie/Fannie may be somewhat questionable, but their mission was to increase home ownership, not to perpetrate actual, criminal, Enron-style outright FRAUD on the world’s markets.

8. over 15 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   “toxic assets and the current economy is the result of government intervention not capitalism.”

   This is a conservative talking point that has no basis in fact.

   More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions, according to Federal Reserve Board data. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

   What’s more, the government had nothing to do with the scam artists who packaged up subprime mortgages into A rated securities, or the banks who failed because they did not keep enough cash on hand.

   The toxic assets are the result of greed, plain and simple. Lenders were making mad cash on points whenever they issued a mortgage, and then would pass the risk on to greater fools. It worked for a while.

   The only solution is more regulation of the financial markets. And yeah, I do think the government should try to buy the toxic assets (we’ll end up paying for the damage one way or another), but I think we should be getting a much better price for them than we are.

   Great, great cartoon.

9. over 15 years ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   This is a great, scary, funny strip.

   I have a friend in the mortgage business and asked him what the hell was going on here. He said that basically banks were getting rich off of charging points. Investors loved it and were rewarding the banks for massive short term profits.

   And now that everything’s falling apart, the government cleans up after the mess with our tax dollars…giving it to the same morons who got us into this mess. Except maybe they’re not morons after all.

   Sigh…I like Obama, but he’s just treading water here. IMO we need to nationalize these failed businesses that are “too big to fail” and provide accountability, not throw money at them.