(Except I took it out to reduce bandwidth. Sorry.)

I also plan to do a signing at Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, MA; I haven't worked out the exact details with them yet, but I imagine it'll be sometime next weekend. Check back here for details.

(The current cartoon is C.H.U.D.s, by the way. Buy books and posters).

NMD

Taking the spacey line forward a bit, let's take a moment to talk about nuclear missiles and the efforts, acronymically known as NMD, or National Missile Defense, to figure out ways to shoot them down as they come arcing in at us from space.

There's some debate at the moment in Canada over our new Prime Minister's decision to co-operate with Bush's ridiculous NMD initiatives. It's a tough question. On the one hand, NMD is a wholly retarded, financially egregious, strategically indefensible stupid idea that Canada would do well not to enable. On the other hand, if we say no, the Bushites will get all pissy with us.

In order to understand why NMD is so stupid, it helps to take a look at global strategy-making in the nuclear age. During the Cold War, the prevailng idea was deterrence based on the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (the acronyms just keep comin'!). That is, Russia had missiles and America had missiles, so if one launched an attack on the other, he knew that he himself would be wiped out by the retaliatory strike. Nobody wants to commit suicide, so nobody launches that first attack.

Now, with the emergence in the minds of many of America as the sole Superpower, we're out of MAD and into just AD: Assured Destruction. Anybody who attacks America with a missile will be wiped off the face of the Earth. Deterrence, it seems, has become total and one-sided; under these strategic conditions, who would possibly launch an attack of this kind that would require an NMD to shoot down?

The stated bad guys are "rogue nations", by which we mean North Korea or Iraq before we took over or whoever gets on our shit list this week. These are nations, suposedly, run by out-of-control lunatics who could at any moment decide to obliterate themselves and their nation in a futile stab at the belly of the Beast, or something. The problem is that the people who run countries tend to have stakes in remaining alive, so the principle of AD means they're not gonna be launching any surprise attacks on us.

Now, there are some people out there who have demonstrated that they *are* willing to kill themselves in order to stab the Beast, those few thousands of people out there who actually fit the label "terrorists". They'd love to launch a missile attack if they could, but they don't run countries so they just don't have any nuclear missiles. If they had a nuke they could very well try to sneak it into a harbor on a boat or something, but there's not much a faulty system of anti-missile-missiles in Alaska is going to be able to do about that.

So why do we need a missile defense system to shoot down missiles nobody's gonna shoot at us? Because make no mistake, the Bushites are rushing the job on this. Incredibly, they're even suspending experimental and test requirements that are supposed to determine if these things actually work in their haste to get some kind of system up and running by, I think, 2005. They're desperate to deploy these systems, insisting on getting stuff that doesn't even work in place as soon as possible, just so they have something.  Why? Part of it is simple Greed, of course. Those billions go into well-connected pockets and it's easy to keep the money tap flowing. But I think there's more than that; they really think they're going to need to be able to shoot down missiles somebody's fired at them. But where are those missiles gonna come from? 

The stinky secret is that there *is*, in fact, a use for NMD in Bush's sick interpretation of the Assured Destruction world. By the principles of AD, nobody is going to launch a pre-emptive attack on America. Nation leaders have too much to lose and terrorists don't have them. So who would ever fire a nuclear missile at America? Why, somebody who'd already had a nuclear missile fired at them, of course. Deterrence will ensure that nobody launches an attack on you, but if you've already attacked them you can't really expect to deter them any more. The purpose of NMD is to provide a shield, not from pre-emptive attack, but from retaliatory attack from an enemy or its allies. It's to preserve America's ability to use nuclear weapons without fear of consequence.

Despite their ideological fixations and internal history-rewriting, the Bushites must be capable of understanding that America's conventional military is stretched rather thin at the moment. They're bogged down in Iraq, their soldiers are exhausted, and they just don't have a lot of conventional muscle to throw around right now. If something flares up and threatens their interests in a new locale, they could rapidly find themselves with no credible threat but the use of nukes. They want to keep that option open, and NMD is supposed to let them do that.

Stupid, of course, because they're placing their fantasy hopes in this creaking, technologically nowhere-near-ready system. Trying to hit a missile with a missile is really difficult, and there have been more failures than sucesses in the various tests they've conducted. Now, that story may change in another 5 years or so with the advent of anti-missile laser technology; it may actually become feasible to shoot stuff out of the sky. But that's all really beside the point. At best National Missile Defense is simply nonsensical and wasteful, and at worst it's tremendously evil. As a Canadian, a good friend to America, I'm levelling with you: it's crap. Don’t get into it.
 

Quickie Contest
Okay, I was reading and I came across a passage that struck me so much that I decided to put it up on the site and make a quick contest of it. So, the first 4 people who identify the source of the following will receive in declining order 4, 3, 2 and 1 book/s:

"The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe --I have thought since-- I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house with the chequered wall."

** mini-update ** - That didn't take long; I've gotten about a hundred responses since I posted this last night.  I was all ready to compliment my fans for being so literate but it turns out if you just copy the passage and stick in Google, it'll pop up the answer. So my literary contest turns into a "how often do you check the site" contest and a "how quick can you Google" contest. Still, everybody did very well. Thanks for playing.

The cartoon this week is about

Movie Reviews
This week we've got a surprised and positive review of Ashton Kutcher's new movie The Butterfly Effect, which turns out to be a rather slick little time travel flick, if a bit cheesy. It's in the reviews section.

M.I.T. Appearance
I'm getting kinda jazzed about this M.I.T. panel thing, not least because I just made a poster for it, to wit:

(Removed for bandwidth reasons)

The more I think about this event, the cooler I think it's gonna be! Woo! Yeah!

Buy my book
 
C'mon, folks, you know the drill, all you cats out there who've read the whole archive a bunch of times... I just need a steady trickle of orders to stay alive, folks... make this week the week you plunk your money down. And buy some posters while you're at it.

And now some drunken blogging...

Bush on Mars
And now we come to it. I've always felt that a sign of good thinking was the refusal to be too fervently locked into any one partisan ideology. If I oppose something Bush is doing, I should also have opposed it when Clinton was doing it, and if there's a policy I supported under Clinton, I should also support it under Bush. 

And here it is. During the Clinton era, I was all behind a policy of moonbase-making and Mars exploration. That was my number-one big-science dream, and it was one of the major reason I was mad at the billions blown on national missile defense when we could've been going to Mars. 

Now, Bush comes out and says he wants a moonbase and a Mars mission; shouldn't I be on board? Well, I don't know about should be, but I'm not. I hate Bush for Mars.

Here's why. In principle, Mars missions and moonbases are good investments. People complain about spending money in space instead of right here on Earth, but that's idiotic. Of course the money's spent here on Earth, spent on employing researchers and scientists and engineers to solve a particular problem in a way that creates solutions for lots of other problems in the bargain. True, it's a high-end social investment, billions of dollars, but you get payoff from these kinds of things you just can't get any other way. Players of any of the Civilization games know what I'm talking about; Wonders of the World are worthwhile investmests.

But -- and here's the key-- they're worthwhile investments for a growing, confident, enthusiastic, forward-looking society that has its affairs in order -- kinda like Clinton's America or Canada today. But that ain't Bush's America, not by a longshot. Bush's America is a nervous, imploding, looking-over-its-shoulder train wreck of historical proportions due for rendezvous with its nemesis long before any spaceship's gonna be taking off for Mars. 

The Bushites doesn't give a damn about science; in fact they hate it. There's the whole animosity for science that comes from their connections to fundamentalist Christian ideology, and then there's just a basic disrespect for what science is and what it does. Their attitude to science they don't like is: get different scientists. It's a pattern of thinking we can also see in their selection and interpretation of the "intelligence" on Iraq. Conclusion first, evidence after.

It's the ideology of power: what I say goes. I make reality. It's the defining characteristic of the Bush government; in a recent speech Al Gore said "in almost every policy area, the Administration's consistent goal has been to eliminate any constraints on their exercise of raw power, whether by law, regulation, alliance or treaty", and that pretty much nails it.

Consider what we've seen in Bush's first term. After running a campaign based on the messages of bringing civility back to the White House and of being a uniter rather than a divider, after losing the popular vote but taking the presidency through a blatantly partisan and legally indefensible Supreme Court decision, what did he do? Did he reach across divides to create a new America, offering basic respect to his opponents as Americans just as devoted to the dream of America as he was?

No, he didn't. The approach has been, tentatively at the start but locked in after 9-11, to push every agenda as far as it can go with zero compromise. Gigantic budget-busting tax cuts, secret energy policies, billions in handouts to drug companies, aggressive new powers of search, seizure and detention, and of course two wars, one of them launched with a case riddled from end to end with falsehoods against the objections of eight tenths of the world. 

And incredible as it seems, get your head around it --this is all stuff Bush did when he's still holding back because he's worried about getting re-elected.

Scary, isn't it? But it gets scarier. Another result of the ideology of power is its startling short-sightedness. If your basic assumption is that everything will be as you would have it, you make one plan and you execute it. Things are not allowed to go wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. You just keep clunking along, exerting power with less and less idea how it's affecting everybody else. You can no longer even imagine anything other than your viewpoint. We saw that in Bush's 2004 State of the Union, which was such a bland recitation of old lies and justifications, without a single nod to reality, that it's meaningless.

The situation in Iraq is bad, and under Bush's control it's gonna get worse (keep an eye on the most important man in Iraq right now, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, who's single-handedly blocking the absurd American "sovereignty handoff" planned for June by peskily insisting on elections). But the real problem, as they say, is the economy. The Bushites have served notice that their economic plan is to drive America towards bankruptcy as quickly as possible by blowing the budget on needless wars and gigantic handouts to people who need them the least at the cost of racking up enormous debts and starving all the government services that ordinary Americans rely on. It's economic suicide, and the financial markets of the world are starting to take that into account by backing, slowly but surely, away from the American dollar and the shakey, no-longer-guaranteed-to-be-solvent American economy the dollar represents.

I guess it's ironic that, for all their obsession about security, the Bushites' policies expose and weaken America's most vulnerable flank. America's military supremacy is unchallenged and currently unchallengeable, but it has gaping weaknesses in its economy. The Bushies are running America just as Bush ran all his previous companies: at a loss, crumbling into debt and eventual bailout. Who the hell is going to bail out America once Bush is gone?

Huh. So, in the spirit of broken-ankle inspired comic strippery, I offer the following cartoon:

Reviews n' stuff
I've been rather slow on the movie reviewing front lately, but I got one for y'all this week: Monster, starring the unrecognizable Charlize Theron. Pretty good movie, I'd say.

Upcomin' stuff
I think I mentioned this before, but I'll be appearing at M.I.T. in early February (the 5th, to be precise) to do a panel on webcomics, which is kinda weird since I try not to think of myself as doing one. I'll be appearing alongside "Weeb and Skoo" from The Everyday Happenings of Weebl as well as Randy Milholland from Something Positive, the archives of which I dug through and actually quite liked on account of how he's really bitter and foul-mouthed and yet contrives to hang out with lots of cute girls. Word.

And then, two weeks later will be the scrumtastic carosel of joy known as the Alternative Press Expo in gay-filled San Francisco at the The Concourse on Feb 21-22. Should be pretty sextastic; that is if there's any justice in this universe.

Oh yeah, buy my book
C'mon folks, just cuz I'm crippled that doesn't mean you should ease up on your UBOPE ordering. If anything, you should increase it out of sympathy. 

Links dump
Well, lessee. An enterprising fan named Dirk created a small mini-golf game you can download that features Bob as the main character. I must confess I'm having some trouble mastering it, or figuring it out at all, but here's the link, anyway. Slightly further down the Inbox we find a link to a kind of parody Bush-in-30-seconds ad, and then another link to a site that lets you play around with George Bush's face. 

And that's it for th' links dump. It's free, and there's virtually no screening!

Wow. Who cares? Anyway, here's the most recent strip, inspired by my  foot mishap.

You can buy books after Christmas, y'know!

It's true. Buying doesn't just stop because the big Christmas buy season is over. You have a responsibility to the economy to spend, to keep that money moving, and I assure you that if you are kind enough to spend it on my books I will immediately turn around and spend that money on something useful like eating, thus continuing the grand cycle of money on which we all rely. So don't just buy my books for me, or for yourself, though we both will benefit. Do it for the economy, for the nation, and hell -- do it for the children. They need help, bad.

Big Swack of Links Dumpage
I've finally dug down to the ground on my Inbox, so here's a bunch of various things people have sent to me or at me that I pass on to you because it costs me nothing to do so. First off is a link to the finalists in the Bush in 30 Seconds contest; not all of them are winners, but there are some good ones in there. And then in the wake of my Somewhere in China cartoon and subsequent whining about the fact that Tom the Dancing Bug did the gag first I have a web-toonist sending in a link to his own quantum-themed strip. After that we find a couple of links, one to something called Ebolaworld.com, which apparently features some left-leaning flash animations, and the other to some Flash game in which a priest shoots zombies. Step lively, folks; those zombies zoom in at you pretty quick from the side of the screen. And then the people who run a humoristic site called Mockspatchcock.com wanted a mention, so I told them I'd give it to them. Also, apparently I long ago link dumped something called yodellinglama and they wanted everyone (or at least you people) to know that it's at yodellingllama.com now. Okee dokee. And then a fan sent me a couple of links to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, so I give valuable HTML link-space to them here and here. And hey, Nina Paley at Ninapaley.com had this to say about the UBOPE: "I love it I love it I love it... Oh my it is good". Wasn't that nice of her?

Anyway, here's a new strip, a little thing entitled

And gosh, that's about it for the update this time around, I'm afraid. What with being crippled I haven't seen any movies since Peter Pan or Paycheck. I guess I can take a moment to urge y'all to buy my book, no longer pictured below.

Upcoming travel n' stuff
This is all a while off yet, but I'll be heading to Boston to do a panel at MIT on webcomics in the first week of February, and then two weeks later my yearlong comic-convention circuit starts in San Francisco with the Alternative Press Expo, which I hope to rule with boots of iron. Such a busy year! Holy smokes!

(Broken foot? What am I talking about? If confused, please reference Wednesday Dec 24 update below.)

Anyway, hup-ho, gotta hobble over to the computer and provide another cartoon for y'all, this one a stern call to action I like to call

Reviews n' such
Well, now, let's see. I saw Peter Pan, which turned out to be great, and then I saw Paycheck, which turned out to be not. That's how it goes in the movie-watching biz.

And these aren't movie reviews, but I'll toss in Friday-update links to two UBOPE reviews I mentioned on Wednesday's update, my brother Paul's review on Amazon.com and Johanna Draper Carlson's review at ComicsWorthReading.com.

Embarassing
Here I thought I was all cool and everything with my Somewhere In China cartoon last week and then a fan sends in a link to this Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon and I realize he beat me to the punch and did the whole gag in three panels. Jeez.

Year-ending
Woo, boy, am I ever looking forward to 2003 being over. I have a strong feeling 2004 is gonna be a corker of a year, a real red-letter annum, and I'm itching to get to it. Of course, I wasn't planning on entering 2004 with a crippling injury, but life's frickin' hliarious that way, and at least I'll get to forge my will against the anvil of pain for a few weeks, Conan-style. I hope all you dear readers had good Christmases and satisfying personal interactions over the holidays, and I'll catch y'all next year as we buckle down and try to save the trifle we call "civilization." Should be a party!

Why am I re-posting this older cartoon? Why, because I broke my foot last Friday tobagganing, of course. When I did "Boggin'", I was just commenting in general on how whenever people go tobagganing, somebody gets hurt. Eventually it had to be my turn, and so it came to pass, zipping down the insanely icy Connors Hill, hitting a bump, crashing onto a dead spot tufted with frozen grass, flying off while hearing a loud "KNOCK!" sound, thinking "Uh-oh, I think I'm hurt", staggering to my feet, stumbling 30 steps up the hill before collapsing and crawling --Sam and Frodo-like-- the rest of the way up the hill. Ah, good times.

I went to the medi-centre, got an X-ray, and was told it wasn't broken, merely sprained. My foot swelled up enormously, my ankle swallowed up in gross misshapen flesh, and nasty rotten-sausage bruises appeared and started to wander around my foot. Then yesterday I got a call from the medicentre wanting me to come back, and sure enough, it turned out to be a fracture after all, forcing me to decide between a cast plus 6 weeks on crutches, which I'd already determined I hated more than just about anything, and an $169 "airboot" that would allow me to skip the crutches and hobble around in low-level pain. I went with the airboot, but man, it hurts.

So that's my inspirational Christmas story. Like it? 

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is to let folks who've placed orders in the last week or so know that it might be a few days before I'm able to get your stuff together and in the mail, hobbled as I am.

In other news
I've got a couple of links to UBOPE reviews to toss atcha. The first is by my brother Paul at Amazon.com, you can check out his qualified rave here. And then over at ComicsWorthReading.com we have Johanna Draper Carlson with a witheringly dismissive review; my favorite line is "Reading through those author's notes just reinforced that I have little interest in his perspective on the universe." Thanks for sorta reading part of my book, Johanna! I'll take what I can get!

Other reviews
On top of the o'l RotK action, I've got another one for you in the reviews section, a prety good little ensemble character movie called Pieces of April, starring Katie Holmes. And I haven't written it yet, but I've got a Peter Pan review on its way that's surprisingly congratulatory. Maybe I've just become a big weepy softy now, who knows...

See Mag stuff
Nothing too fancy, but I did draw the Gollum-based cover for See and it looked rather rad, I thought. Here's a link to their site and all that...

Links and effluvia
Not too much to report this week, though a fan from Europe sent me this mysterious evidence that even people as far away as Belgium seem to sometimes dig Bob:

At least, that's how the person who saw this at a "psychedelic trance event" interpreted it. It could just be an entirely unrelated flower; certainly neither the number of petals nor the color nor the expression match up. So actually, it probably has nothing to do with anything.

And while we're at it, let's toss in a link to my brother Paul's growing list of excellent Amazon.com book reviews. Apparently he's the 124th reviewer on Amazon. Way to go, Paul, and if anybody is interested in reading exceedingly learned reviews of important or not-so-important books about history, you should check it out. Also, in the spirit of profiling my brother, I'm gonna repost the link to Paul's Top 500 songs thusly:

Whoops! Almost forgot to bug you guys to buy books and posters! Well, I'll do it now, here.

Pretty sweet, huh?

The above image is something I whipped up as the cover for this week's See Magazine, by the way...

Okay, enough about that. Here's a new strip:

Keep on a-buyin'!

Still such a great book! Still absolutely on sale! And I stupidly forgot to include the link last update, but you can easily order Apostrophe Posters as well! Fabulous!

Sweet UBOPE review
I wanna thank Chad Boudreau at Comicreaders.com for his glowing review of the UBOPE. Aw, shucks. I rule!

Moviestuff
Well, I saw Return of the King, and it rules, but there's a press embargo until the 17th so I can't post my review on the reviews page. But I do have a couple of reviews for you this week, one for the anti-US military flick Buffalo Soldiers, starring Scott Glenn and Joaquin Phoenix, and one for the new Farrelly Bros movie Stuck on You.

More link stuff
I got a-e-mail from a guy named Sean who wanted me to plug his JournalismCareers.com site. Done. Here's some wacky Kidz-Luv-Jezuz stuff I got off an e-mail from Nina Paley, a legendary cartoonist in her own right. And here's a fairly amusing link to a nice re-edit of Bush's State of the Union address that makes his points a little clearer. And I think that's it for outstanding links dump submissions, so there we go. Done.

Anyway, cartoons. Here's one:

BUY BOOKS NOW!
Not to just keep flogging the same old horse or anything, but y'know, wouldn't you be happier if you owned a copy of this fine book? Of course you would! And buying a book is the surest path to owning one I can imagine! And you could get Apostrophe posters if you wanted! Insane!

Movie poo
Well, I ain't got no review of Return of the King yet, but here's my snarky commentary on Tom Cruise's latest, The Last Samurai. And as if that wasn't enough, there's even snarkier commentary on the execrable Timeline. Whew, that's one stinky movie.

Joss Quote
It's not like Joss Whedon and I are buddies or anything, but he did kindly agree to provide me with the following quote:

"Bob The Angry Flower is the greatest anti-hero since Raskolnikov, and the funniest comic strip since Peanuts-when-you're-tripping.  Stephen Notley remains a towering reminder that Great Art comes not from above, but from sweaty, embarrassing neuroses and gratuitous robots."

Sounds about right, I'd say.

Links n' stuff
Well, let's see. A reader asked me to post a link to his online petition to ask Bill Watterson to start drawing Calvin & Hobbes again. I think it's unlikely as hell it'll do any good, but what the hey, here's the link. And here's a link to the awesome Bob-featuring book Ted Rall is putting together, Attitude 2, at Amazon. Nice! 

And here's a special treat: a mirror of the Space Moose site. Www.Spacemoose.Com has been defunct for a while, in perfect keeping with Adam's shoulder-shrugging indifference to his cartoon work, but people still ask about it and want it, some five years after he stopped doing the strip. You have to like sodomy humor to appreciate Space Moose, but if you do, then you will like Space Moose very much indeed.

And this isn't a link exactly, but a fan put together a tiny little animated gif of the "Uh..." cartoon, and I append it here.