If Vladimir Putin didn't convince you that good pecs and hair do not qualify you to govern, I give you Justin Trudeau, Canada's prime ministerial princeling whose years in office have proven that there is no policy so progressive that he will not back it -- provided he never has to do anything to make it happen. Read the rest

This video from Bohemian Browser Ballett on Germany's public broadcaster Funk is absolutely genius: a comic dialogue between a literal uniformed Nazi officer outraged that someone had the temerity to call him a Nazi: "Just because someone doesn't share mainstream opinion it doesn't mean he's a Nazi. Maybe I'm a concerned citizen who is afraid of foreign domination!" (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

"Juicy Ghost" is a new tale from Rudy Rucker (previously), an explicitly politican sf story told from the point of view of a suicide-assassin who is getting ready to take out an illegitimate president during his inauguration; as Rucker describes, he really struggled with the story, and couldn't figure out where or if to publish (he even contemplated rebooting his late, great, much-lamented webzine Flurb with an "all-politics" issue as a means of giving the story a home). Read the rest

Volume One of Man-Eaters, Chelsea Cain and Kate Niemczyk's scathing, hilarious, brilliant comic about girls who turn into man-eating werepanthers when they get their periods, is the best comic I read in 2019, and Volume Two, just published by Image comics, continues the brilliance with a set of design-fiction-y fake ads and other collateral that straddle the line between a serious piece of science fictional world-building and Switfian satire. Read the rest

Facebook usage is falling in the US and Canada, especially among young people, but it's still dominating the internet overseas, especially in countries where Zero Rating is legal. Read the rest

Online privacy is pretty much a dumpster-fire, but it's a funny dumpster fire in the world of Kiwi editorial cartoonist Chris Slane, whose one-panel strips are hilarious in a kind of oh-shit-we're-doomed kind of way. Read the rest

Redditors' convention of tagging their sarcastic remarks is a dream come true for machine learning researchers hoping to teach computers to recognize and/or generate sarcasm. Read the rest

The Onion is apparently struggling to satirize an election that is so absurd it can only be called "self-satirizing," but they scored a hit with their op-ed by Donald J Trump: "No Matter What Happens Tomorrow, At Least I Had Fun." Read the rest

Benjamin Hart journeys to the forgotten post-industrial town of Bleaksville, Kentucky and digs deep to find the answer to the question no other journalist (apart from the roughly 7,200 who wrote articles on this subject during this election cycle) will ask: why are Trump supporters so angry? Read the rest

I've been noting humorous updatings of Ambrose Bierce's 1906 humor classic The Devil's Dictionary for years -- there was the publishing edition, and this corker on copyright -- but the Educational Technology edition, by New Storytelling author Bryan Alexander has a currency and an urgency that scores an acerbic bullseye. Read the rest

Doges are done; sneks are so September. What's next? @Hay_Man's Peasant Memes! Read the rest

Derryl Murphy writes, "Former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave Canada Post CEO Deepak Chopra (I know) a new contract a month before the election when he still had time on his contract, and Chopra's working hard to pillage the postal system in Canada. So I did this up for a little fun, but the word needs to get out there." Read the rest

John Oliver continues to deliver the best comedy tech analysis in the business, with an epic rant/explainer that delves into Apple vs FBI and the new crypto wars with scathing wit and deep, technical truth that's made miraculously accessible to a general audience. Read the rest

Samantha Bee's monologue on the 2010 midterm election -- the election that will.i.am didn't make videos for, the election where progressives stayed away from the polls, the election that put the obstructionist, do-nothing radical right into Congress and the vicious, do-everything right into state houses across the USA -- is hilarious, but like everything Bee does, it has a sting it its tail. (via Metafilter) Read the rest

Ever since the Supreme Court ruled that states could restrict access to abortion provided the restrictions weren't "unduly burdensome," Republican thinktanks have been spreading "TRAP" ("Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers") rules that have a veneer of reasonableness but have the effect of making abortions impossible to procure for the majority of women in those states. Read the rest

On McSweeney's, Susan Harlan rounds up some less-objectionable alternatives we can use to describe so-called "Resting Bitch Face," such as "Yes I Really Do Just Want to Sit Here and Read My Book Unmolested Face." Read the rest

Univision, a hugely successful Spanish language broadcaster, bought humor newspaper/site The Onion two weeks ago, and in so doing, transferred control over a site that has produced scathing comedy at Hillary Clinton's expense to Haim Saban, millionaire financier and Democratic power-broker, who calls Clinton "pristine plus" and "great for the country and great for the world." Read the rest