Recent Comments

1. about 11 hours ago on Calvin and Hobbes

    The first Bible writer, Moses, wrote down what God told him to write.

   First off, it’s dubious whether there even was such a person as Moses. Second, what basis do we have for “knowing” that he was merely an amanuensis for God’s own dictation? (Answer: only his word for it.) Third, how exactly do you explain the parts of the Pentateuch supposedly dictated by Yahweh himself after the part where Moses dies within sight of the promised land.

   This whole myth is so riddled with inconsistencies, improbabilities, and lack of evidence that it’s best understood as the folk tales of a primitive people, not substantially different from origin stories everywhere else in the world, ranging from Gilgamesh and the great tree Yggdrasil to Scientology’s flying saucers and the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker. Fine stories, yes; entertaining, you betcha; realistic, no way!

2. 1 day ago on Calvin and Hobbes

    I think the objection is Richard’s attack on Christianity as he is want to do.

   Reading the owner’s manual out loud hardly constitutes an attack. The real question is whether the manual accurately describes the product. Let’s just leave it at caveat emptor.

3. 2 days ago on Frank and Ernest

   Just stay away from “Press the Face”.

4. 2 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   This is basically the way Christianity claims to operate. No matter how much evil you do in the world, all is forgiven if you repent on your deathbed. It’s like the “Get Out of Jail Free” card in Monopoly. (Don’t try it in a court of law, tho.)

5. 2 days ago on Frazz

   Possibly — just blue-skying here — it’s because we’re speaking English.

6. 3 days ago on Doonesbury

   Walt Disney had a better idea, also featuring clowns and cartoonish figures.

7. 3 days ago on Rob Rogers

    Stochastic terrorism is inciting violence through rhetoric, but not explicitly. Instead, stochastic terrorism foments violence with implicit calls to arms and dog whistles, knowing that someone in the audience will eventually execute the implicit call. So the violence is “statistically predictable but individually unpredictable”, and, importantly, the speaker can plausibly deny any connection to the bloodshed.

8. 3 days ago on Rob Rogers

   I clicked on “Like” because it’s the only way GoComics gives us to say “thank you”, but of course there’s nothing at all to like about the horror story you recounted.

9. 3 days ago on Mike Luckovich

   The only things that matter to Disaster Pumpkin are fame and money. Now that he’s been deprived of the American nuclear secrets that he was probably going to auction off to Russia, China, or Iran (or more likely all 3, never admitting to any of them that the other 2 got them as well), he’ll be reduced to asking liberals for contributions to get him to promise not to ever show his face in public again. Of course, we’d all know he was lying about that, too. How would we KNOW he was lying? His lips were moving, weren’t they?

10. 3 days ago on Non Sequitur

    After humanity goes extinct because we’ve destroyed the environment, it might well be said that we had it coming, because we did it to ourselves. But dogs deserve better.