1690 Poop Noodles.

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Man… there is so much shit going on that I don’t feel comfortable sharing. It’s taking up all my brain space though so I don’t have anything to say when I get here though. A friend of mine is having a divorce after 20 years of marriage and it’s been really tough on him. I’ve been very worried about it ever since he told me. I think he’s finally on an even enough keel that I don’t need to worry about him hurting himself, but you never can tell with emotional stuff like that. Major life changes, especially ones that come out of nowhere, are brutal to deal with. I’m glad that I can be there for him though.

The teen… I’m just gonna let that whole thing stew for a while. I don’t even feel like typing anything about her at the moment.

This health care thing with the republicans has got so many people terrified that it’s spilling in to everything. Even the economy on the internet. People are bracing for disaster and when they do that they spend a lot less on advertising and patreon pledging. My friend with the divorce is petrified that he’ll never have health care ever again because he has a pre existing condition and where his life is now he may not be able to afford being in one of those high risk groups.

All of this shit is totally exasperating and there’s nothing I can do but just live through it with everyone else. A month of no disasters would be really great. Just a little calm time so I can recharge and get my life in some kind of order. Everything happens so much…

49 Comments

Did Ed just give sexy Latino Jesus an epiphany?
“Actually I believe it was the Lord working through Edward to-”
Yeah, yeah we get it sexy Latino Jesus.

A month of calm with this president? Not very likely.

Things have never been calm since ever. If you ever thought they were, you’re either misremembering or didn’t know what was really going on at the time.

The only difference between this president and the last one is that the media constantly fellated the last one and constantly crucifies this one. Whether they’re justified or not is beside the point; my point is that the normal chaos is simply being pushed in your face because the media wants to make this president look bad. There was just as much chaos before, but they kept a lid on it because they wanted to make the then-president look good.

TLDR: Chaos is normal, unfortunately.

“Chaos is normal, unforunately”

So is order but chaos is more entertaining? And why does it have to be more in conjunction with American values? Do you guys get bored THAT easily? Do something positive for chrissakes!

Exactly!

Hell, Obama Care actually screwed up my health insurance from work, making it worse.

I had an uncle who loved it. Researched his options, got the best insurance for him. Hates it later. Why? Because while it perfect for him and covered everything, when he did his taxes, they said “You’re not paying enough for your insurance, so you’re going to owe taxes now, to make up for the low cost of yours.”

It may have helped people, but they always seem to forget it screwed over other people.

Also, while we hear lots about fake news and people saying, “They’re just saying it’s fake.” we’ve seen many stories of how they (the news) would edit footage to make it come off differently.

One that always sticks to mind, is one of a black woman saying “We need to stop all this and work together.” when the unedited version was her saying, “Let’s not screw up our neighborhood, let’s take it the white neighborhoods.”

So both sides are messed up. Always have been. Always have been.

I’ve had six months of calm with this president. I feel pretty darn good after the last eight years of hopelessness

It’s been kind of the opposite for me, being in the military. We went through four years of peaceful weirdness, holding our breath that someone didn’t decide to do something stupid.

Now it’s we’re gone through three months of absolute batshit insanity, holding our breath that we can keep telling the administration they can’t tell us to do that because it’s against the law that no one will change the law. I mean, I sat in a meeting where we had to tell two very important people who should already know this that “you can’t just declare war on the Democrat People’s Republic of North Korea without an act of Congress,” and “nuclear strike options are not at the discretion of the administration – there are specific criteria for ordering the deployment of nuclear assets.”

And it’s not one guy. It’s an administration that we’re having issues with, not just one person. Don’t worry about ONE GUY – worry about the rest of them.

And I had to specify North Korea when I used DPRK, because the first time I said “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” they kept associating with our ally, South Korea. “No, we don’t want to consider attacking South Korea,” they kept saying. Oh FFS, people. GEOGRAPHY is your friend.

No, I’m afraid that for a lot of people, Geography is the study of rocks and the age of the Earth, and we don’t want to go into that. Or something. I just pointed out to someone that the map they were looking at was backwards, and he couldn’t figure out how I could tell that with just a tiny glance.

Panel one typo: “You’re little barista”.

Yup, it was bugging me too!

Bugging me too. Your, you’re, yore confusion is bad.

Your – the possessive form; it belongs to you
You’re – the contraction of “you are”
Yore – Middle English way of saying in the long past, as stated by the Miriam Webster dictionary :”time past and especially long past — usually used in the phrase ‘of yore'”

Bugging me too. Your, you’re, yore confusion is bad.

Your – the possessive form; it belongs to you
You’re – the contraction of “you are”
Yore – Middle English way of saying in the long past, as stated by the Miriam Webster dictionary :”time past and especially long past — usually used in the phrase ‘of yore'”

Grammar Police out!

If it helps, whatever the House came up with still has to get past the Senate. As I understand it, there are still shenanigans the republicans can use to get past a filibuster , but it is highly unlikely the Senate will simply rubber stamp whatever the House sent them and send it back down. The Senate can do one of three things. Ignore the House Bill and not take it up at all. This is what the Democratic Senate did to the multiple “repeal” bills the Republican House sent them for four years. Admittedly, this is unlikely. The second is the Rubber stamp option. That is, they simply vote up or down on the House Bill. Also unlikely. The third option is that the Senate will write their own version of the Bill, then send it back to the House where they will have “Reconciliation.” This is where both houses hammer out the final details of the bill. One thing I’ve heard proposed by the Senate Republicans on NPR is a “high risk pool” for preexisting conditions with the extra cost to the consumer offset by government subsidies. This would effectively be putting people with preexisting medical conditions on Medicare. At this point, nothing is law, though. We’ll see.

The Senate almost-certainly will NOT rubber-stamp a bill as important as this. If they’re going to sign their names to something (i.e. pass it) they’ll want it to carry their imprint in some way.

This got torpedoed with Obamacare itself because Edward Kennedy very inconsiderately died, and his replacement senator was even more improbably a Republican, taking the Democrat Senate majority to 59, putting the filibuster back in the Republican minority arsenal. But the conference committee could still send back the last version passed by the Senate for House approval. The Democrat majority House had a really hard time scrounging up enough votes to pass it, but they did.

I’m just more amazed at the fact that you guys have to have all this because ‘universal healthcare’ is just not the American way.

Universal Healthcare has its own costs, and not just monetary. There are strong arguments for and against it. Unfortunately, few on either side of the debate even notice that there IS another side.

And when they do think of sides they think coin when in truth it is some weird pandimensional polyhedra. XD

One given truth is though that base costs of materials and especially administration is wacky dystopian Shadowrun universe without actual magic – as far as a we know anyways.

I normally avoid getting into your personal stuff. I come for the comics and haven’t seen anything there that would push me away. Even though the Christian themed Coffee Shop put me on edge. (Have one near by called “Holy Grounds”, I believe.) However, on the Healthcare issue, you and your friend have nothing nto worry about.

Don’t listen to any news source that doesn’t read directly from the bill itself. If you can, go read it yourself. It’s been a while, but I am sure that pre-existinng conditions will not end up with you being unable to find insurance.

A bit of a tip for folks in the future when it comes to news and such: Unless the person telling you about thinngs like this points to the text and says “This right here is an issue because…” then they are just trying to stir up emotions. The more someone shouts that you sould be afraid of the monster over the next hill but never shows you that monster, the less you should trust them.

This is very true. In fact I’m going to go ahead and say it’s more true, more often, than I’m generally capable of expecting. When reading about politics, I go into it assuming that the headlines are false, and that anything a friend or family member told me is false. This is not enough. News stories will look like they have near-quotes of the bill, when they do not. Stories will cite other stories, exaggerating the original just ever so slightly each time. Stories will claim the text of the bill itself isn’t public, when actually it is. Members of Congress will say things about the bill which do not line up with the text. (Sometimes they have thought about the consequences… sometimes they’re just spinning it how they want to.)

This is true of science news too; science is hard to describe so you can’t always trust even the scientist’s description (vs. their published paper, I mean). I’ve repeatedly had to dial back my expectations – some news sources will repeat years-old, debunked pseudoscience as if it’s a recent breakthrough (BBC news regarding dolphin language, for example).

Agreed. Also, regardless of your personal feelings on Trump… News sources were hating the man before he entered the office in the first place. He could cure cancer at this point, and the news would still say something like “Trump puts Cancer Doctors out of work!”. Anything he supports even a little bit is being seen as the devil’s work right now, whether it is or isn’t.

I’m not hating on Trump as much as I wish he’d pick people who were qualified for the position. I get bombarded by people from his administration trying/asking to do things that are either: a) not legal from a military standpoint; or b) not possible from a military standpoint.

For example, one of them wanted to see the red button the President uses to launch a nuclear strike. Even after explaining how that works (no red button), that person still assumed that everything Hollywood taught him about the military was the TRUTH, and I was just “kidding him.” That’s one person very close to the President who should not be in charge of important things.

I feel sorry for you guys for the fact that you have a legit person in an ADMINISTRATION wearing their tin foil hat believing that nonsense. That is crazy!

Insurers will have to provide insurance to people with pre-existing conditions, this is true.

It’s also true that insurance companies will be free to set the premiums for those conditions however they like.

The Republicans envision state-run high-risk pools to help subsidize that cost, but they pushed the bill through before anyone with any actual ability to analyze the costs (like the House Budget Office) could actually work through the numbers.

So far, the best estimate I’ve seen comes from the AARP (an admittedly biased source), which puts those premiums at around $25,700 per year. If this is remotely accurate, then the amount of money set aside in the House bill will not be anywhere near enough to cover PEC premiums–meaning that the rest of the cost will either have to be paid by state taxes, or by the consumer.

This isn’t going to hit right away, since the premium jack-up isn’t going to apply to people who already have coverage. However, if the coverage lapses for any reason (such as, say, having to change jobs and losing your current coverage, or having to move to another state, etc), then you’re screwed.

Oh, for an extra kick: Many states still allow insurance companies to define sexual assault as a ‘pre-existing condition’, because rape survivors tend to have a wider array of health complications (both psychological and physical–just getting regular testing for AIDS and other STDs is a big deal).

I don’t usually post, but the tagline in your tweet forced me to, as it’s one of my favorite quotes about God (even as a Christian myself) from Futurama: “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” It, along with a quote from M*A*S*H (Does God answer every prayer? Yes, but sometimes the answer is no) really encapsulate how I view the Almighty.

Another m.a.s.h. qoute springs to mind for these times. “Ladies and gentlemen take my advice pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”

Holy (/h?l?/) adj.
Set aside for a special purpose, esp. religious purposes; consecrated.

So you set aside that stuff for a religious purpose? Come to think of it, we DO have all-white rooms specifically for the purpose of collecting it…

Unfortunately for the epiphany, the use of crude and/or taboo language is specifically mentioned as a no-no in the Bible (Eph. 4:29). Even though the injunction doesn’t apply to non-believers, I don’t think God would approve of anyone violating His standards.

Just for those who don’t use the Bible:

“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may.”

From what my Bible scholar friend who is a Catholic priest now has said to me, it can be interpreted many ways, depending on the church in question. While some think it means no profanity, some Christian groups consider it more of “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all” type of statement (hence only what is helpful for building up others). I mean, it’s not exactly my forte, but I’ve had this discussion before.

Man, I come here not just to read the comic but also to update on the life of Jackie. But now I feel a bit guilty about it for some reason, perhaps because it nearly slid into entertainment. Anyway, sounds like you’re a good friend to your divorcing pal.

I get decent health care, and here in Canada, the new US bill won’t take it away.

So I will double my pledge through Patreon.

If everyone keeping decent health care will do similarly, perhaps we will offset those dropping out because without health care they fear beingn generous.

— hendrik

Can’t argue against that logic, even if they are Canuck Bucks I will up the ante by a few birds myself.

(Robin)- “Holy DOG crap, BATMAN!”

(Batman)- “That DOG’S been eating too much SWISS CHEESE, Robin!”

(The author of that joke is unknown.) :D

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