This Week's Sneak Peek

I was a bit miffed by how last week's cartoon looked on my phone.

Many of my cartoons consist of four equally-sized panels, but there were five panels of different sizes last week. If you were reading it on a desktop computer, each panel should have shown up equally tall; on my phone, however, they were equally wide. 

I stack the cartoon panels for this blog instead of displaying each cartoon as a single graphic solely for the benefit of those of you who visit here by phone, which seems to be how most people interact with the internet these days. I'm just trying to save phone readers the bother of pinching and expanding. 

We aim to please.

So it was disappointing to see the top panel of my cartoon scrunched down so that folks had to pinch and expand it anyway.

It's even embarrassing, since Blogger tells me I have an uptick in usual readership in the last couple of weeks. (For reasons I can only guess at, the second most frequent referrer to my blog after Google has been a fast food burger chain's website.) To those of you who aren't webcrawlers, welcome. Heck, welcome, you webcrawlers, too. Have it your way.

I'll be back to the four equally-sized panel format this week.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Is anyone else out there experiencing the same sort of hurdles I've been running into when trying to upload stuff to web-based apps?

I still find that I can only upload cartoons to this Blogger site if I sign in on in incognito mode. In regular mode, I can sign in, type text, check for comments and stats, etc. Trying to upload any kind of file, however, I get a new window asking me to sign in to Google again, then the upload window — but nothing uploads. It doesn't matter whether I use the Chrome browser or the Edge browser.

In incognito mode, instead of the new sign-in window, I get a window asking permission to authorize cookies, and a second window asking me to be more specific. Then the upload window opens, and it has worked so far.

I haven't tried signing in on a different computer except in incognito mode (I don't want a strange computer saving my log-in info). I could see whether I could upload files here from my phone, except that I don't scan cartoons to it.

Blogger isn't the only site where I'm encountering this. At work, where I use Stripe, Wordpress, and a congregational management program called IconCMO, I've had to start using each one in incognito mode for full functionality. (In the case of Stripe, for any functionality at all.) There I have Foxfire and Safari browsers on an Apple IOS; I have had the same experience using Wordpress and IconCMO from home. 

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In case you've been jonesing for editorial cartoons from 1924 these last couple of weeks, D.D. Degg at Daily Cartoonist highlighted a series of cartoons printed in the San Francisco Bulletin. They called it a "Symposium by American Cartoonists," and it featured a few editorial cartoonists I've included in some of my Saturday Graphical History Tours — William Hanny of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Grover Page of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Ted Brown of the Chicago Daily News — plus some others who have not yet joined the tour.

The Bulletin apparently intended for the feature to continue, but dropped it after the second week.

Perhaps they hadn't known when to expect their regular editorial page cartoonist, Douglas Rodger, back from vacation or sick leave?

Banned on the Internets

 By the way, I finally found out which of my blog posts got flagged for violation of Community Guidelines. It was this one from seven years ago, and the complaint is utterly ridiculous.

There is a link in the post to an article in the Charlotte Observer about a porn site, not a link to the porn site itself; that's the most risqué thing I can find there.

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Update:

All's swell that ends swell.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I'm still trying to figure out which of my posts Blogger told me last week that it is putting a trigger warning in front of. Saturday's post about Ku Klux Klan terrorism hadn't been posted yet; last week's sneak peek didn't have any racist or salacious material. 

I've visited my blog on various devices, and have yet to encounter that trigger warning, although the notice from Blogger is still atop my posting home page.

Could it have been something older? The nudes in Karl Arnold cartoons in the previous Saturday's discussion? They were tasteful enough for German readers in 1923. Athletes in the shower in some of my cartoons from years ago? I thought those were respectfully done. The few times I've drawn anyone in flagrante delicto, the cartoon has only shown it from the chest up or the thighs down.

Well, just about any given post in this here blog is bound to run afoul of the DeSantis Inquisition, Truth Social, Elon Musk, or the internet censors in China, Russia, Hungary, Poland, and much of Africa.

Thank goodness I'm not posting anything offensive this week.

Klanwatch 1923

It is African-American History Month again. Having spent the last two weeks dwelling on foreign affairs 100 years ago, it's high time to turn to domestic affairs — particularly, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan.

"A Blot on the Escutcheon" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. Jan. 3, 1923

We'll start with a Klan lynching that attracted national media attention — quite possibly because the victims were white.

In August 1922, members of the Ku Klux Klan tortured and killed Filmore Watt Daniels and Thomas Fletcher Richards. (Some accounts omit "s" at the end of both last names; I'm using the names from contemporary newspaper reports.) Daniels was the adult son of a wealthy landowner in Mer Rouge, Louisiana, a town near the Arkansas border; he and his father were vocal opponents of the Klan. Richards, a mechanic, was a good friend of the younger Daniels.

The Danielses, father and son, were returning home with Richard and two others from a ballgame in nearby Bastrop when they were stopped by heavily armed, black-hooded men. The five were blindfolded and abducted to a remote site where they were whipped and beaten for information on the location of another person. Their captors released the elder Daniels and the other two men; but the younger Daniels and Richards were tortured and killed, and their bodies dumped in Lake Lafourche. 

"When Klanhood Was in Flower" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 28, 1922

After their bodies were discovered on December 22, Louisiana Governor John M. Parker sought help from the U.S. Department of Justice in suppressing Klan violence within the state.

"A Blot on the Old Man's Journal" by Dennis McCarthy in New Orleans Times Picayune, ca. Dec. 29, 1922

If the meaning of Times Picayune cartoonist Dennis McCarthy's December 29 cartoon left any doubt what sort of "mob violence" was a blot on Old Man 1922's journal, his front page cartoon on January 9 was explicit.

"Explain This" by Dennis McCarthy in New Orleans Times Picayune, ca. Jan. 9, 1923

Reaction by members of the Klan differ from that depicted by McCarthy, according to the Shreveport Times, of January 7: 

Publication of the membership of the Morehouse klan 34 Knights of the Ku Klux Klan excited only passing interest here. Most of the charter and later membership were already known. The list included many of the many of the best-known and most substantial business and professional men, farmers, and officials of the parish. And the most pungent comment regarding it was, "why didn't they print the whole list, I felt slighted because they didn't have my name."

Prominent in the list was the name of J. Fred Carpenter, who happens to be the sheriff of Morehouse. The sheriff does not appear to be bothered that anyone should know he is a klansman.

"Resign?" he was asked.

"Not yet."

"Going to?"

"I hadn't thought of it." 

"Mer Rouge (Red Sea)" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 7, 1923

Other klansmen unmasked by the probe included a former mayor, the district attorney, the local postmaster, and a town marshal. The testimony of former klansman "Big Jim" Norsworthy exposed several locals as members, but in the end proved to be more flash than fire.

Meanwhile, Captain J.K. Skipworth, "exalted cyclops of the Morehouse klan" held court outside the courthouse to make sure that the media and anyone else in the vicinity could hear his opinion of the goings on inside.

There were klansmen in the grand jury, too. As a result, kidnapping and murder charges against named klansmen were dropped for "insufficient evidence." Even the minor charges against 17 men were dropped while the accused sheltered themselves out of state. 

By the end of 1923, the judge in the case had lost his reelection bid, and Governor Parker had retired.

"His Own Property" by Rollin Kirby in New York World, before Jan. 26, 1923

At the same time that investigative hearings were underway in Louisiana, a White mob burned the predominantly Black city of Rosewood, Florida, to the ground on January 8, 1923. Six Black Americans and two White rioters were killed. and the rest of the city's population fled by train.

"With Loose Rein" by Rollin Kirby in New York World before Feb. 4, 1923

As was usually the case in these pogroms, a White woman claimed that she had been assaulted by a Black man. The assault allegedly occurred on New Year's Day; enraged White mobs, bolstered by a Klan rally in nearby Gainesville, descended on Rosewood on January 4.

White mobs sought out one suspected Black man, then another, then turned their rage against the whole town. First setting fire to churches, they then began setting fire to homes and shooting at the residents as they tried to flee. White merchant John Wright sheltered some people in his home; others hid in the swamps outside of town.

Anonymous (Watson?), for Watson Studio, in Baltimore Afro-American, Feb. 23, 1923

One Black resident, Sylvester Carrier, shot back at the mob, killing two White rioters before being shot and killed himself. The news got even more White Floridians joining the mob. Governor Cary Hardee offered to send in the National Guard, but Sheriff Robert E. Walker claimed to have the situation under control. When the riot finally came to an end on January 7, the entire town had been destroyed. 

It will come as no surprise that although a grand jury was convened in February, 1923, nobody was ever charged with a crime of any kind in the Rosewood massacre. Nor will you be shocked to hear that it wasn't until 76 years later that any of the survivors received any compensation for their losses.

As for the nation's editorial cartoonists, when it came to addressing current events from their drawing boards, white riots and klan terrorism were just one issue out of many.

"The Three (Dis)Graces" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. Jan. 24, 1923

Even though these were only two klan/mob attacks among over 50 of them in 1922, many of the nation's cartoonists never even broached the subject at all in January or February, or at least never got an idea past their editors. On the other hand, every single editorial cartoonist at some point in January put out at least one cartoon satirizing Emile Coue's mantra of "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better." (Coue was the Stuart Smalley of his day.)

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When your humble scribe started writing this essay several days ago, Blogger, the host of this site, began posting the following notice at the top of my post list screen:

I can't say whether Blogger's content monitoring bots flagged this week's essay as possible hate speech, or if Blogger management is cowering in fear of southern Republican politicians who have been cracking down on history lessons that make bigots feel bad.

To those of you brave enough to click past whatever content warning Blogger threw up at you, thank you.

This Week's Sneak Peek

 
I answered a phone call from an irate elderly woman at the church where I work last week.

She was upset over having looked the church up in the Kenosha phone book, and instead of calling the church where she had attended however many years or decades ago, she got some child care institution somewhere. How was the church supposed to get new members if people couldn't find it in the phone book, she demanded to know.

I probably shouldn't have remarked that I hadn't seen a phone book in years.

The woman just got more upset on behalf of all the people everywhere who must rely on phone books because they don't have computers, and shouldn't I make sure that the information in the phone book is correct every year, and what kind of church did I come from, and so on and so forth, and maybe she should just call a Catholic church.

Which, after she finally got around to telling me why she wanted to call a church in the first place, she hung up and, presumably, did.

Backing up a little bit: I was on a council of representatives from the then sixteen ELCA Lutheran churches in town back in the early '90's, and we had tried to get those congregations to go in on a single Yellow Pages ad listing all of them. We had tried to convince the Yellow Pages not to have a separate listing of "Churches - Lutheran" apart from "Churches - Lutheran ELCA,"* "Churches - Lutheran Missouri Synod," and "Churches - Lutheran Wisconsin Synod." They also have just plain old "Churches." Our complaints fell on deaf ears; why would they want to sell one listing when they could sell two or three?

In those days, the Yellow Pages — and its rivals that came and went — were delivered free to every household, apartment, and office. If you had more than one phone on your land line, you'd get more than one phone book whether you wanted them or not. The Racine phone book, with both white page (alphabetical) and yellow page (by type of business) listings in it, was about an inch thick, 8.5"x11" newsprint paper, mostly tiny type.

Several years ago as residential land lines became more rare, the Yellow Pages went to publishing one book covering both Racine and Kenosha Counties, on smaller paper and fewer pages. If you want one, you have to order one; you don't get one just for having a phone. Many churches, with increasingly tight budgets, do not purchase ads in the Yellow Pages any more; why would they want to buy ads in a book that has been displaced by internet search engines on the phone in your pocket?

So yesterday, my better half and I were visiting my Dad, and I asked him if he had a phone book. He did, although it was four years old.

I looked up the church where I work, and the phone number was correct, in the white pages, and also in the yellow pages under both "Churches - Lutheran" and "Churches - Lutheran AELC." (A note to whomever is in charge at the Yellow Pages: the AELC joined with the ALC and LCA to form ELCA in 1987. It hasn't existed for over 35 years.)

The name of the church where I work is quite common among Protestant churches. That 2019 phone book listed like-named Lutheran churches in Kenosha, Racine, Twin Lakes, and Burlington, as well as some Baptist and non-denominational congregations. 

I noticed that the listing immediately above that of the church where I work was for a day care operated by one of those other churches. I figure that my elderly caller had dialed their number by mistake.

I hope she had better luck calling a random Catholic church. And that she didn't dial St. Mary's Catholic Benevolence Society Insurance of Waupun instead.

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* ELCA = Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

One Last Sneak Peek for 2022

 It's a cartoon that has kept me up nights.

Then, when all the drawing and scanning and formatting and shading the grayscale version was done, it turned out that our internet service was down.

So I rebooted the router a couple times; and when that didn't work, unplugged and replugged the modem as well. Then my better half called Spectrum's three-digit help line, and was put on hold until he got tired of the muzak and hung up. So we rebooted the router and unplugged the modem again.

By then, I was mostly finished with the colorized versions, so I tried calling Spectrum again. The automated voice assured me there were no outages in our area, and advised us to reboot the router and unplug the modem. With a predictable lack of results.

Then I got through to a human. Let's call him Ron.

Ron asked our account information, then wanted to know how many units were affected. One, I told him. We don't have a bunch of modems and routers in the house. Oh, said Ron, do you have a business account with us? And since we have a residential account, not a business account, Ron said he would transfer me to residential services.

After I sat through a recording touting Spectrum's new voice-identification security plan, a guy I'll call Rick picked up the line. The conversation was nearly the same as that with Ron, including the point where Rick said that he was on the business account side of things. Then he told me the phone number to call for residential services.

So I hung up and called the ten-digit number, where the same automated voice as before went through the same automated advice as before — although this time, she did say that there were reports of intermittent service outages in our area, and technicians were already working on the problem.

I put my cartoon files on a USB drive, drove over to my Dad's house and sent them from there.

Four hours later, still no internet at home; so my better half tried calling Spectrum again.

This time, whoever he talked to wanted us not only to reboot the modem and unplug the router, but to turn off the computer as well.

Good thing that worked.

Because the next step would have been to reboot the modem, unplug the router, turn off the computer, and shut off power to the whole house.

Q Toon: OnlyG-RatedFans

When OnlyFans announced last month that it would shut down adults-only content on its app in October, it was in response to its financial backers — it wasn't because of celebrities or self-help gurus chary of associating with porn actors and sex workers.

The reaction by those porn actors and sex workers was swift and loud, and rival apps sprang up to offer them somewhere else to peddle their prurient wares. And in no time, OnlyFans reversed its decision.

Pornography was one of the oldest professions to capitalize on the internet, so it would be practically impossible to root it out of all its possible avenues into everyone's favorite apps any more. Unlike in the physical world, where zoning laws could limit where porn shops could be located, they can pop up anywhere in the virtual e-world. If you are someone who wants to avoid smut completely, you have to bone up on the tricks of the trade.

I've more or less learned how to distinguish between Facebook friend requests from strangers who are interested in my cartoons, and requests from strangers who are — or pretend to be — exhibitionist bimbos and gigolos. At the risk of offending whatever scantily clad buxom blonde from Eritrea who just joined Facebook hours ago, I'd rather she "follow" than "friend" me.

Here at the blog, I suspect that there is porn behind some of the flattering comments to my web posts that lack any indication that their authors ever actually visited my site. There again, they might not all have anything to do with pornography, like the one the other day that included a link that appears to be to a moving company. But who knows? Maybe the movers work in the nude.

For a while a couple years ago, a collection of referring URLs belonging to girlie webcams kept showing up as "referring URLs" in the web statistics for this weblog. It strains credulity to think that there were dozens of guys who, after wanking off to Veronica or Mindy, decided to check out what some middle-aged gay cartoonist had drawn that week, or to catch up on World War I cartoons.

But it takes all kinds out there. Whatever floats your boat.

Q Toon: Lgbt And Found

While the Senate is busy deciding whether anyone gets to hold a president accountable for inciting a riot in a desperate attempt to overturn an election, I have chosen instead to wrap up another story thread from the previous administration.

Back in 2017, when that previous administration abruptly erased the White House's LGBT web page, I created the character of a guy in charge of the office of that administration's LGBt Liaison.

Drawing his cramped closet-cum-office was easy in four-panel format; a later single-panel episode presented me with the challenge of filling the space with all sorts of props: chemical buckets, a hand-cart, a roll of insulation, and so on and so forth. Separated from the boiler room only by a beaded curtain, the nameless liaison had by then taken to working in his underwear, and even the janitor was surprised to find he hadn't left.

As the then Ambassador to Germany adopted the role of the administration's LGBt Liaison as one of his many side jobs, Basement Dude quietly disappeared from my cartoons. Which was unfortunate. Surely he could have helped explain that administration's sustained assault on transgender Americans. Or its various antigay judicial appointments. Or opening loopholes in LGBTQ non-discrimination policies you could drive a church bus through.

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Politico editorial cartoonist Matt Wuerker hosted an on-line discussion about how to draw Joe Biden, titled "For Cartoonists, It's All About the Smile." In a Facebook thread, I noted that it was the same with Jimmy Carter — until he got into office, everything got serious, and we all had to learn how to draw him not smiling.

As you can see, I've ducked the issue of how to draw Joe Biden not smiling. For now.

For Whom the Toon Toles

by Tom Toles in Buffalo News, September 27, 1984

Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles is closing up shop after tomorrow, so today's Sankaback Saturday is devoted largely to my personal favorites of his cartoons from before he was hired by the Post. And I have to give the Post credit for hiring a cartoonist who was so very different from his predecessor there, a Washington institution in his own right, the undisputed dean of the profession, Herbert Block.

I was instantly taken with his simplistic style and craftily pointed humor when he burst onto the scene in the early 1980's. It would be interesting to see his pre-syndication cartoons for the Buffalo Courier-Express, which folded in 1982, to get some idea of how his artistic style — so unlike the Oliphant and MacNelly clones of the day — evolved.* I assume that his style of humor, which often comes at you from unexpected directions, was evident from the beginning.

in Buffalo News, June 21, 1984

His colleagues were equally impressed. The late Jeff MacNelly wrote that he was crazy about Toles's "masterful timing and comic staging" and "graphic goofiness." Mike Peters admired his "satire in the Jonathan Swift tradition of satire." Jules Feiffer blurbed, "There exists a school of thought, led by me, that wonders why Tom Toles has not yet wan a Pulitzer Prize"; so in 1990, to nobody's surprise, he won one.

in Buffalo News, March, 1983

If I can wax pedantic for a moment, "Hunting the Hazardous Substances" illustrates the Toles approach to an idea. Many cartoonists, if they came up with this idea for the Reagan administration's attitude toward environmental protection, would have drawn the third panel as a stand-alone cartoon. The pacing established by the four-panel format sells the idea so much better than the third panel alone would. (The reference in the lower right corner to burnt EPA documents is a bonus.)

in Washington Post, November 14, 2002

Sticking with the topic of the environment, I include this one Washington Post cartoon to demonstrate how masterfully Toles tied together two separate news stories in a way that made readers wonder why they hadn't connected the two items themselves.

in Buffalo News, July, 1990

I would be remiss if I didn't include a couple cartoons about American presidents. This one about George H.W. Bush's nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court is an excellent example of Toles carefully setting up a pay-off that comes from a completely unexpected direction. It plays off the unfair characterization of Bush being a wimp without playing into it, while still using it to make the cartoon's point.

in Buffalo News, May 14, 1993

Toles's minimalist caricatures have been instantly recognizable even when they diverge wildly from portraiture. His George W. Bush, for example, had ears sticking way up from the top of the man's head like no animal you have ever seen; but Toles drew him that way consistently and readers always knew who that figure was. He drew Obama with big ears, too, but then, so did everybody else. His Trump is appropriately grotesque.

in Buffalo News, ca. June, 1986

Since this here blog skews gay, here's Toles being gay-friendly back in 1986, when the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's anti-sodomy laws were constitutional in Bowers v. Hardwick, a case involving the arrest of one Michael Hardwick for having consensual homosexual sex in the privacy of his own bedroom. Other cartoonists may well have had the same idea in this cartoon, I suppose, but if so, probably only drew the police officer intruding in the couple's bed. Or the judge. Or a legislator character. Toles takes the idea and keeps spinning it out well past absurdum, and the result is worthy of standing next to Justices Blackmun's and Stevens's dissents.

Finally, a Tom Toles "I Told You So" from the early days of the technology enabling you and me to have this conversation, and others to share their insights about liberals drinking children's blood in a network of tunnels linking pizza parlors around the country:

in Buffalo News, September 8, 1994

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* Update: D.D. Degg at Daily Cartoonist has dug up one of Toles's Courier-Express cartoons, and even some juvenalia.

Toon: Coronaspiracy

Conservative media are at it again, and their captivated audience is eating it up.

Everything is fine.
Rush Limbaugh, who was recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his audience of millions that the [COVID-19] virus is really just the “common cold.” He claimed that it was being overhyped by the director of the National Center of Immunization—who just happens to be the sister of former acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a bad guy in the world of conservative infotainment, thanks to his role in the Mueller investigation—to damage the president.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham dismissed the fear about a potential pandemic as “a new pathway for hitting President Trump,” and speculated that it had been engineered by China as payback for the president’s trade war.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity said on Thursday that there was little to be afraid of—no Americans had died, he noted, days before they inevitably did—and that the virus was simply the latest desperate anti-Trump ploy from Democrats. Having struck out on impeachment, they were now “sadly politicizing and weaponizing an infectious disease as their next effort to bludgeon President Trump.”
It is the same defense that Trump’s supporters have trotted out for the past four years: Obfuscate the truth, laud the president, blame the Democrats.

This denialism is mother's milk to Donald Berzelius Trump, who tweeted, “Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible."

It is true that the markets have been severely shaken by having one of the world's most important suppliers and consumers virtually shut down, and by discovering a turd in the vacation travel industry punch bowl.

Oh, and there is the matter of thousands of deaths and the prospect of there not being a cure for over a year, too. But the stock market doesn't usually have a problem with matters of mortality and morbidity.

But contagion is highly unpredictable — who foresaw Italy and Iran becoming such hot spots? — and if there's anything stock markets hate, it's unpredictability.

That unpredictability is what makes the denialism of Limbaugh, Ingraham, Hannity and their ilk so dangerous. We've seen the danger in the form of the anti-vaxxers who put not only their own children at risk but also any children who have the misfortune to be around them. COVID-19 appears not to pose a lethal threat to the young and hardy at this point, but we know that it has a latency period of several days and is communicable before symptoms are evident.

None of those nursing home residents in Kirkland, Washington had been to China, Iran, or Italy lately, you know.

Well, I'm not a doctor, and I don't even play one on TV, so I'll leave you with this link to the Center for Disease Control if you want to keep up with more authoritative information than your humble ink-slinger can provide.

This Week's Sneak Pitch

The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) has been talking about overhauling its website for several years, and finally did so at the beginning of this month.

The issue became more pressing earlier this year as the old site creaked and groaned beneath the weight of the thousands of cartoons AAEC members had uploaded to it over the years. Lately, members and visitors would be greeted by a screen blank except for the words "Service Unavailable," especially in the morning when many of us were trying to upload files.

The new site still some bugs to be worked out; my cartoon last week never showed up on the home page, possibly because the default setting for uploads was for unknown reasons set to "private" at some point. The black elements of my cartoons are translating on the new site to raw umber, so I suppose I'll have to switch to uploading RGB (screen-friendly red-green-blue) files instead of CMYK (print-friendly cyan-magenta-yellow-black) ones.

The list of members lists us alphabetically by first name instead of last name, which I find disappointing, and not just because I get pushed back from the front of the alphabet to the middle. Like most cartoonists, I don't sign cartoons with my first name, so there's no reason for most readers to look for me under "P."

One consequence of the AAEC website change, unfortunate for this here website particularly, is that all the links to cartoons at the old site are dead. For years, I used the embedded link from this site to cartoons on the AAEC site instead of just inserting cartoons directly. You would see a box that looked something like this:

...which took you to my cartoon on the AAEC site. (Don't bother clicking there to view; the image is not a link.)

I stopped using those AAEC links early last year because the host of this here website kept complaining that EditorialCartoonists.com "contains HTTP resources which may cause mixed content affecting security and user experience if blog is viewed over HTTPS." Unfortunately, that leaves about nine years worth of my posts that show this sort of thing:

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒Aug 25, 2016 EditorialCartoonists.com

...and no cartoon. (Again, don't click there to view. Blogger is still upset about the now non-existent website's HTTP resources, and I wouldn't want to spoil your user experience.)

So anyway, I'm in the process of replacing all those old, defunct links with cartoon images. While most visitors here visit only the most current posts, there are a few old posts that still get page views from time to time.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I'm working on the problems, and they should all be fixed soon.

Q Toon: If It Ducks Like a Quack

The town where I grew up recently joined eighteen states and several other municipalities in banning so-called conversion therapy on minors, the practice of using mental and physical torture to change a patient's sexual orientation, or at least to create an aversion to sex altogether.

A young person may still go to their house of worship and talk to the clergy about being conflicted about their sexual orientation, and the clergy may still recommend prayer, 159 Hail Maries, or joining the choir. The godman cannot, however, ship the kid off to Holy Clockwork Orange Ministries to razrez the gay out of him/her.

Rsponding to a Change.org petition, Amazon.com has now joined the crackdown, agreeing not to sell books authored by the late Dr. Joseph Nicolosi. This has deeply upset antigay conservatives, who issued a demand that Amazon resume stocking A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality and other works by the "Father of Conversion Therapy."

These same religiosity advocates only recently argued that if LGBTQ consumers are refused service at any commercial establishment, they can simply find a florist, caterer, photographer or plumber who won't turn away their business.

Nicolosi's books are still available at whatever Christian bookstore or Baptistzon.com cares to stock them, and there are other books advocating conversion quackery still on Amazon's shelves. Most of them do not have the blessing of Liberty University, but not all customers are looking for that kind of thing.

"Conversion therapy erotica"? Really??

Dip In Road

Trump errand boy Devin Nunes (R-CA, and a co-sponsor of the 2017 "Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act") has decided to sue Twitter over some users making fun at his expense.

What horrible things did these accounts say about Nunes to warrant the judiciary’s intervention? The account named “Devin Nunes’ Mom” receives the most attention in the complaint. Its owner frequently posted caustic remarks about him and his actions toward the Russia investigation. One tweet said that Nunes was unfit to run the House Intelligence Committee, while another joked that he was “voted ‘Most Likely to Commit Treason’ in high school.” Some tweets are indistinguishable from legitimate political criticism. Others are more puerile, implying that Nunes wanted to commit sexual acts with Trump and other top Republicans.

Twitter had already suspended the "Devin Nunes' Mom" account — for impersonating a real person, not for materially damaging Mr. Nunes. How the congresscritter intends to prove real damage is hard to fathom. He's a public figure, which makes him fair game by any interpretation of the concept of free speech, and he volunteered for the damn job.

Mr. Nunes might want to read up on Hustler Magazine Inc. v. Falwell someday. In the meantime, he's pretty much inviting the rest of us to pile on.

Q Toon: Shelved

It's time for the obligatory Merry Christmas cartoon!

Carolyn Aebersold popularized her family tradition of Elf on the Shelf in a 2005 children's picture book, telling the chilling story of how elves would steal into households around the world to spy on children and report their behavior back to Santa Claus.

Little did Ms. Aebersold realize that Mark Zuckerberg had already released his Facebook into the world, harnessing people's eagerness to talk about themselves in order for him to harvest information on the behavior of kids from one to 92. It's not only the stuff you post on Facebook, but anything else you do on your computer when you foolishly think Facebook isn't looking. The data is then sold to the highest bidder, the lowest bidder, and all the myriad bidders inbetween.

Then Google and Twitter came along to fill in whatever blanks in our on-line behavior Facebook might have overlooked, but at least they only captured what we were doing on our computer, tablet, phone, or FitBit.

So, to make the spy network of things complete, every room in the house now has Siri, Alexa, Hey Google, and whatever dumbed-down gadget Cricket Wireless is going to come up with for us old fogeys, reporting to the Valley of the Shadow of Silicon what's in our refrigerators, how long we leave the lights on, who rang our doorbells, and whatever the Roomba found on the floor. They're willing to testify in court against us, and we've already signed away our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights somewhere in volume 87 of the Terms of Service Agreement.

So you better look out; you better not cry; you better not pout. I'm telling you why:

Watson's taking everything down.

Merry Christmas!

Q Toon: Diss Belief

MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid opened her program last Saturday by apologizing for some posts which apparently appeared on her weblog in the '00's — or perhaps some hacker managed to go back in time and put them there. She "genuinely do[es] not believe" that she wrote them herself.

In the posts on her now-deleted blog, which lives on on the Wayback Machine, she (or her impostor) refer to Senator Lindsey Graham and then Governor Charlie Crist as "Miss Lindsey" and "Miss Charlie," alluding to rumors of their closeted homosexuality. Other posts complain about "Brokeback Mountain" and two men's lips meeting in a Snickers ad that ran during the 2007 Superbowl. There's also a post making fun of Harriet Myers's supposedly lesbian hair-do.

“In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology,” Reid said. “The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.
“Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries,” she continued. “I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.” 

This kerfuffle has the aura of having been generated to distract interested parties away from more significant media misbehavior (say, e.g., Sean Hannity's intimate relationship with Team Trump). Twitting Graham, Crist, and others for rumors of homosexual orientation is fairly common (who, me?); and when Reid's supposed posts about them were dredged up last December, little notice was paid to them.

So someone kept digging and came up with the Brokeback and Snickers stuff, which make it sound as though she believes us LGBTQ folk need to keep our PDA's private. If the posts are genuine, they call into question Reid's ally cred with LGBTQ issues (PFLAG is rescinding a Straight for Equality award they were planning to give her next week). If they're not, it can only mean that Russian, Breitbartian, or Gallifreyan hackers are sophisticated enough to fool the various experts who claim that the posts can't possibly be forgeries.

Gay journalist and Glenn Greenwald is one of the people pushing the Joy Reid allegations. Perhaps his buddy Edward Snowden can clear things up for us.

🎶

Meanwhile, as followers of this blog know, I draw my syndicated cartoons several days before I post them here; so this week's cartoon was created without the foreknowledge that Kanye Kardashian-West would be under fire this week for musing that 400 years of slavery was a "choice."

I think Ms. Reid is probably relieved that Kanye is not in her corner.

🎶

P.S.: Nothing on the internet ever really dies.

Q Toon: Xi Who Must Be Obeyed

In a move supposedly to comply with China's new cybersecurity laws, the country's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, began a crackdown last week against material deemed to run counter to socialist ideals. Prominent among the material censored by Weibo were gay-themed texts, games, and anime.

The Cybersecurity Law doesn’t mention LGBT issues, and the Chinese Psychiatric Association in 2001 removed homosexuality and bisexuality from their list of illnesses. However, a ban on depictions of gay people in online video and audio content was unveiled last year.
The China Netcasting Services Association, the industry group that launched the ban, said that gay people have “abnormal sexual relationships” similar to incest or rape.

An on-line protest with the hashtag #IAmGay (wo shi tongxinglian) sprang up immediately against the move, and appears to have succeeded in getting Weibo to recalibrate its censorship. On Monday, Weibo announced:

“This time, the cleanup of anime and games won’t target gay content. It is mainly [meant] to clean up content related to pornography, violence, and gore. Thank you for your discussions and suggestions,” as translated by WhatsonWeibo.

 Although homosexuality was not specifically mentioned in the 2017 cybersecurity law, Chinese officials including President Xi Jinping are on record including homosexuality as a violation of communist ideology. Rules laid out by the Chinese government last summer provided for censorship of any content published on line or elsewhere that doesn't "adhere to Chinese values."

Programs that undermined a respectful national image, ridiculed leaders, promoted negative or decadent views of life and showed the “dark side” of society would be edited, or in severe cases stopped.
President Xi Jinping has overseen measures to clamp down on independent online media, while reasserting the ruling Communist Party’s role in limiting and guiding online discussion....
The new rules also laid out a range of issues that did not meet with approval, including violence, drug addiction, extramarital affairs and religious cults.
Also on the list was homosexuality, underlining the conservative official view on same-sex relations.

So we'll see how long #IAmGay wins out over #IAmPresidentForLife.

Q Toon: All Your Data Are Belong to Us

While Facebook has been getting a lot of attention from Congress and the mainstream media this week, Grindr has also had to hastily explain to its customers that its same-sex dating app has shared users' HIV statuses (stati?), with two outside analytics firms.

Further analysis also revealed that Grindr is sharing users’ precise GPS position, sexuality, relationship status, ethnicity, and phone ID to other third-party advertising companies. This information – which didn’t include HIV status data – was sometimes being shared in a ‘plain text’ format, which meant it could be easily hacked.

Anyone who uses a computer hooked up to the internet has seen their privacy eroded bit by megabit over the years. Those cookies piling up unseen in the bowels of our computers are, we are told, essential components of our on-line existence. But they result in experiences such as this: I was looking for some sheet music on-line last week, and ever since, the advertising on gocomics.com has been nothing but sheet music.

You no doubt have had the same experience. Well after you bought that clothes dryer at Best Buy, every dot.com Dick and Harry seems to be trying to sell you another one.

Facebook took that business even further, enabling Big Brothr.com to glean everything knowable about you because some idle friend of yours on Facebook answered a questionnaire to find out which H.R. Puff'n'stuff character he is, or decided to prove that, why yes, she could indeed think of a word that contains a vowel, so there!

Then, through no fault of your own, your news feed becomes rife with stories about Hillary Clinton wanting to confiscate everyone's clothes dryers.

Now, as for the Grindr breach, the company assures its LGBTQ users that their data was shared responsibly, and that they're in no danger of it (them?) getting out to potential employers, TMZ or Vice President Pence.

Still, [chief security officer Bryce] Case defended Grindr's decision to share the data, arguing that Apptimize and Localytics are simply tools to help apps like Grindr function better, and that the information was not shared to make money or for other nefarious purposes.
Case stressed that the HIV data had only been shared with Apptimize as part of Grindr's standard rollout procedure for new features on the app. In this case, it was part of a new opt-in feature that would allow users to be reminded to get tested for HIV. The company stopped sharing the information with the third party when the feature was rolled out last week, Case said.

Whether or not Grindr's users begin to shy away from the company's outreach efforts, this episode demonstrates the need to update the 22-year-old rules for patient privacy observed by every hospital, doctor, and insurance company in the country.

Grindr data breach is a wake-up call for policymakers to revisit and revise privacy regulations, specifically the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Since 1996, HIPAA has governed the patient privacy and protection of private medical information. Back then, policymakers did not foresee situations in which sensitive medical data is shared with a platform that is not involved in medical care. Therefore HIPAA only covers medical providers and their business associates and does not pertain to platforms such as Grindr. Had a similar breach happened at a hospital, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would immediately start a thorough investigation, fine the hospital, and ensure that adequate policies are in place to prevent breaches in future.

Under the Corrupt Trump Administration, I doubt that any investigation into Grindr's data breach would not be focused on protecting user's privacy but in shutting the app down, or at least ferreting out gay, bi and trans soldiers in the armed forces. And I shudder to imagine what the congressional hearings would be like.

Ye AOLDE Yahoo

From AARP.org: 8 Common Job Search Mistakes

A recent AARP article on mistakes older job applicants make included a warning to ditch your Yahoo! or AOL address in favor of a "professional email address with Gmail or Outlook." The comment section of a JoeMyGod post about Verizon's plans to merge the two ISPs is just dripping with contempt for the two dinosaurs of the internet.

So help me out here.

I got a Yahoo! email address back in the Pleistocene Epoch, then an AOL address at the behest of a syndicate editor who wanted to be able to IM us contrubutors. I still have both, although I only keep the Yahoo! one for my Flickr album and because the AAEC listserve is on Yahoo! Groups. I do regularly use the AOL address, which I kept even through a period when the syndicate established its own email url, which never had a spam filter and our accounts kept getting spoofed until it abruptly disappeared without notice. (At least, I think there was no notice. It might have been lost amid all the spam.)

I also have a little-used address through our cable provider because, well, we're paying for it whether we use it or not. Like CMT and EWTN.

I get why I wouldn't want to apply for a job using an email address that includes my year of birth because "paulberge@whatever.net" was already taken, or one with an obvious reference to sex, drugs, or membership in ISIS. But that's common sense stuff to the left of the @ symbol.

It's not as if I have no experience with Outlook or Gmail, but what's the big deal aside from not being quite so ancient? Are they cheaper than free? Has Outlook not yet been discovered by North Korean hackers? Are Gmail fonts classier? Does the recipient listen to your email being read aloud by Morgan Freeman? Do I really need another calendar?

How soon will their addresses betray a decaying e-neighborhood of GenY and millennial fuddy-duddies?

Q Toon: 404 File Not Found

Many in the LGBTQ community were concerned when the LGBTQ page disappeared from the official White House web site.

There have been conflicting signals from the Donald Joffrey Trump administration on LGBTQ issues: there has been a uniform hostility among Trump cabinet appointees to LGBTQ concerns; and we can probably assume that the fellow he has appointed to fill Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court believes that if the Founding Fathers weren't prescient enough to include LGBTQ rights in the Constitution, those rights do not exist.

On the other hand, the administration assures us that it has no intention of revoking President Obama's executive order protecting LGBT government and government contractor employees. “President Donald J. Trump is determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community,” according to the White House statement.

Yet establishing a right to discriminate against LGBTQ citizens is one of the most important issues to Trump's supporters on the so-called religious right. It strains credulity to think that they are going to be content with leaving anything in place that protects the rights of the LGBTQ community in any way.

Meanwhile, the White House appears to have no plans to name a liaison to the LGBTQ community. Even the imagined office in my cartoon may be more than we could hope for.