#483 – Glory And Glamour
Handful of people asked about the Bookend book. It is now available for purchase at IndyPlanet.com. If you buy it, please contact us at encrew@exterminatusnow.co.uk and let us know what you think.
In order to set this up, I had to provide some foreign tax information to the IRS. The form has been sitting open in a tab for a week and a half before I filled it, and I’m still not sure it’s right. I am beyond caring.
I fucking hate legalese. Despise it. It makes me uncharacteristically angry like few other things can. Now I am not an unintelligent person. I am at least familiar, if not deeply educated, on a wide range of subjects, grasp new ideas quickly, literate well above average, and just generally a smart-arse. I could have a casual conversation with a neuroscientist, or an astrophysicist, or a quantum physicist, and just about hold my own and take away something of worth. But anything to do with legal matters or tax or finance, my eyes glaze over and I stop absorbing the words halfway through the paragraph. Many fields of science can be complicated and hard to follow, but it is always fascinating and elegant and beautiful. On the other hand, legal-speak is intentionally designed to be as impenetrable and obfuscated as possible so average people need a fucking overpaid translator to turn it into something that makes sense to someone who’s not a raging bellend. SCIENCE IS HARD BECAUSE THE UNIVERSE IS COMPLICATED. BUSINESS IS HARD BECAUSE CONNIVING MOTHERFUCKERS INTENTIONALLY MADE IT THAT WAY TO TRICK YOU OUT OF YOUR TIME AND MONEY.
Here is the instruction for Line 1 – Name:
Enter your name. If you are a foreign individual
who is the single owner of a disregarded entity that is not
claiming treaty benefits as a hybrid entity, with respect to
a payment, you should complete this form with your name
and information. If the account to which a payment is
made or credited is in the name of the disregarded entity,
you should inform the withholding agent of this fact. This
may be done by including the name and account number
of the disregarded entity on line 7 (reference number) of
the form. However, if the disregarded entity is claiming
treaty benefits as a hybrid entity, it should complete Form
W-8BEN-E instead of this Form W-8BEN.
That is for your name. Whichever twisted facsimile of a human being wrote this, fuck yourself. Take a sizable potted cactus, embed it with razor blades and used syringes, and ram it savagely and repeatedly into your into your person. I’ll even let you pick which orifice! But do it. For you are a monster and the world would be a better place without you in it.
This is why we should prohibit lawyers from holding legislative office. Letting lawyers write laws is like appointing the fox to design the security for the hen house.
except non lawyers will almost certainly leave giant loopholes for the lawyers to exploit…
Wasn’t it Shakespeare (Or his character Dick) who said “First thing we do let’s kill all the Lawyers”? Maybe not all of them but only the annoying ones.
90% of lawyers give the rest a bad name. Heh heh heh.
Sturgeon’s Law. Yup, except instead of being crud, it’s being evil.
Everyone hates lawyers until they need one.
I guess I don’t hate lawyers, per se. They’re just doing the best they can in the system that exists. It’s that system that sucks.
Unfortunately the system has to be air-tight from a language standpoint or someone will figure out a way to make a loophole and push it through by convincing the right people.
It also has to be air-tight in a legal sense so that people who know the language can’t do the above and for judges to laugh at the people who try.
Add in those two requirements and you have a heck of a lot of specifying and semantics-nonsense to avoid the above two scenarios.
not really. most lawyers, like most people out there, are decent enough folks who are looking out for the best of everyone, just like everyone theres a few assholes mixed in who will take advantage.
and while the system sucks, those assholes can do a lot more damage “legally”* if you cut out the system
to quote another webcomic, lawyers aren’t out to screw you, after all, the last thing they want is to do something they then have to sue themselves for afterwards.
I’m afraid it’s too late for one to simply decide lawyers shouldn’t hold political office in the United States. I think the last politician we had that wasn’t a lawyer was President Washington. But, at least we know that a significant number of politicians believe in justice… Which is odd because no matter how many descriptions of the political process I’ve read in books I still don’t know how to get elected into public office. And, to the best of my knowledge, while I supposedly qualify to become a politician, I don’t actually know anyone who can make it happen. So, obviously it’s not accessible to all people, and I suspect lawyers are prevalent in the field because justice makes for the easiest entry into the field of politics.
However, I think its the psychologists are actually the ones with the obfuscation of language in mind for the sole purpose of financial gain. They aren’t even internally consistent with their jargon, and some of the ones from the east coast like to invent new words by combining terms from 17th century english. There was a movement in the 60′s to make psychology understandable to the layman, of course that still doesn’t change the fact that anything revealed is always 40 years out of date. I’m interested in psychology as a writer because it makes it easier to understand human coping mechanisms. Still, the different therapeutic schools are a headache because they obviously have their own unique jargon for the same or similar approaches to behavior management.
No offense, but given the choice I wouldn’t recommend anyone become a psychologist if they want to genuinely help people. To the best of my knowledge it’s therapy for them to face the problems of other people, so they’re basically charging you for the privilege of helping themselves.
I’m not suggesting one shouldn’t seek help or counsel from a psychologist, but a psychiatrist can at least mend bones. Not to mention there are counseling options that are available free of charge through your local church that are probably just as beneficial. At the very least with religion you already know some of the pathology involved in the counseling process.
Ultimately, it’s all behavioral management. If somebody can scare you away simply by making it so that you don’t fully understand what your getting into, or keep you from self actualization, reaching your full potential or apotheosis, through the use of emotional blackmail then that’s their choice. The tricky thing is that language can enslave or bind themselves or others if one isn’t careful in how they use it, so I’m sure the legalese is meant to cover ones backside.
Wow. First off, holy wall of text batman. Second off, not sure what the thing about psychologists has to do with the discussion at hand.
I was suggesting that it the “jargon” or shop language used by psychologists was worse than the language traditionally used by lawyers and bean counters. For the simple reason it’s not even internally consistent outside of a particular philosophical movement. For instance, while psychoanalysis is the root of psychology it branched off into Adlerian, Jungian, Psychodrama, Gestalt, Existentialism, Transactional Analysis, REBT, REMT, Marketing, Control Theory, Somatics, Haptics, Kinesics, among other social sciences and sociological movements I’m unfamiliar with…
I apologize if your eyes glazed over, but Virus was talking about how a similar effect occurred whenever he moved into discussions about financial matters and, based ona personal evaluation he seemed rather adamant that he could keep up in a conversation on everything from quantum physics to computers or microbiology and not get his mind blown the way it does when it comes to a language used by lawyers and bean counters intentionally designed to be impenetrable.
I was suggesting that psychology was even more intentionally impenetrable because psychologists like to invent words using portions of 17th century english, latin, and german among others, despite a short lived movement to make psychology accessible to the layman during the 60′s and 70′s, and even then only revealing 40 year old knowledge that was already accessible to the public through the use of common sense.
I was also addressing Pyro’s statement that lawyers shouldn’t hold public office. I wasn’t arguing that they should, just that justice seems to be a gateway to politics. And, at the very least the politicians in charge have a sense of justice regardless of how childish it may seem.
Getting into a political office?
Step 1: Figure out if it’s a “party” position or not.
If it is a “party” position:
Step 2: Get nominated for and win a “primary” election (an election performed inside a political “party” to decide who the party will officially support for the position) in a “party” that currently has access to the position (this usually related to that party recently obtaining some minimum number of votes for eith the same, or another, “party” position; a “new” “party” will usually have to do the non-”party” steps). You might have to spout some complete nonsense to win, since political “parties” tend to have an above-average percentage of political extremists (e.g. the Libertarian and Republican parties are going to have more than your average number of “Tea-Partiers”). The “party” “apparatus” (a.k.a. the “party’s” internal bureaucrats and/or power-brokers) After this, all further steps are shared with non-”party” positions.
If it is NOT a “party” position:
Step 2: Get the paperwork for the position and fill it out. This will often require obtaining a minimum number of signatures from people who are eligible to vote for the election in question (such signatures WILL be double-checked if you have an opponent in the race, likely by the opponent’s staff, and courts occasionally throw out an entire sheet on the basis of ONE signature: be thorough, don’t cut corners, over-collect; also, the signatures will likely be checked if you don’t have an opponent as well).
Step 3 (common step): Do your campaigning. In smaller areas this commonly involves going “door to door”. In larger areas you’re best off if you STILL do door-to-door meet-n-greets, and assign staffers from your campaign to as many other locations as you can. This is close to impossible for US Senate campaign, due to the populations in question. After door-to-door comes public campaign meetings. Personal phone calls presumably fall in this category as well, but mostly they’ll either be impossible (too many people) or unwise (face-to-face meetings don’t require phone minutes… FROM THE PERSON BEING CALLED). Everything else is going to be less important in most cases (Independents might distinguish themselves in debates, Republicans & Democrats just have to do it because of expectations). Campaigns for “big” positions (e.g. Senator, President) have an excessive amount of time spent on fund-raising events (e.g. $100-per-plate lunches) due to the cost for the advertising: state offices will be cheaper in the vast majority of cases, and vastly-so as well.
Note on current circumstances: Modern corporate-speech rules + Modern American disregard of the opinions of others == lots of rogue political advertisements, sometimes aimed at SUPPORTING you. Keep an eye out for the excessive ones, and publicly and quickly renounce them.
Step 4: Win, and do it legally. Positions such as President will occasionally have disputes, but you have to weigh the political consequences of bringing them to light: In Bush Jr’s first run for President, Florida was NOT the only questionable state, but bringing up some of the others that had gone to Gore wouldn’t have gone over well. Since the major news outlets are based in liberal-leaning areas, Republicans risk much more perception of “thuggishness” and “bullying” for such actions than Democrats initially do (insider-vs-outsider mentalities: you see actions of your “tribe” differently than actions from “foreign” “tribes”).
Step 5: Don’t screw up. In many cases the spotlight will be dimmer while in office than during the campaign to win it, but as Anthony Weiner (if you’re going to run for office, do what you have to do to avoid having a joke as a name, including changing it: and if that doesn’t work, at least don’t make it WORSE) demonstrated, the spotlight IS still shining, and those people still paying attention to it (mostly critics & potential opponents, but it varies) will notice “interesting” things, and spread the word.
What a grotesque puppet show.
Harry is acting like I do with naruto right now, calm optimism to the reality that everything sucks and it can only get worse
And that’ll be the only time Harry will ever push a Woman, away from himself.
Come to think of it, the fact that one was close enough for him to push away is probably what struck him as odd.
Huh. Self-sabotage saved his live.
I dunno… they are right out in the middle of a nice, wide open area, and some spiders weave webs that they use like a throw net to catch their vict- I mean, food. And rather fittingly, they bear the common name of ogre spider. Which could in theory be twisted around into DEMON spider. I wouldn’t count them as “saved” just yet.
I predict an “eep” in the near future.
i can relate to the rage about byromancers. altought i do think “Take a sizable potted cactus, embed it with razor blades and used syringes, and ram it savagely and repeatedly into your into your person” is letting them get off a little easy.
Bureau-mancers, or as I like to call them Bureauc-rats, will get what’s coming to them, I mean they have to fill out 20 different forms in order to stop us from brutally violating them, all we have to do is brutally violate them, which do you reckon will happen faster.
“Tricking you out of your money” is literally the entire point behind the very concept of business. The difference is wether or not you get anything useful out of the equation.
I thought the entire point of business was the exchange of goods and services without the guilt or expectation of future gratuity on the part of the consumer, whilst simultaneously building the economy on the backs of your employees, whom you reciprocate by raising their prospects if not the floor to the glass ceiling.
Although, to be fair, the textbook I was assigned when I was taking business 101 did say it was perfectly acceptable to lie in business, and I value and understand the concept of managing perception through omission. After all, when people are constantly trying to degrade your character while simultaneously propping up a sociopath as the ideal leader and entrepreneur of the future, you know at the very least lying is lesser of two evils.
No, you’re confusing business with the IRS.
Why would the IRS want to trick people out of their money? I thought that was the job of politicians who want to justify raising taxes while saying it will only affect the rich. The IRS is just another enforcement agency like the police or FBI. I don’t even think they use the same tactics as a debt collection agency.
They want to trick people out of their money because that is literally their job: to take your money using a system that no one understands.
Here’s the thing: the tax code is tens of thousands of pages long. NO ONE knows our entire tax code, just parts of it, and most parts of the tax code interact with others in some way so it’s impossible to enforce properly. In addition, while we do have an income tax, there’s no actual set definition for ‘income’, and everyone has to pay a tax of some sort. So the IRS essentially get to tax whoever they want how much they want, and operate as they please without oversight or limitation. Primarily this is done by auditing taxpayers to determine how much money they owe versus how much they’ve been paying. Of course, you usually owe more than you’ve actually paid, and when you pay more than you owed you’re not told, unless the tax was collected automatically from your paycheck.
Remember that whole thing a while back where the IRS was targeting Obama’s political opponents? Yeah, that’s not even close to new. The IRS screws over the enemies of whoever happens to be in power and has done so for decades.
(And because this is usually brought up when I debate the tax code: YES, taxes are necessary for a functioning government. A tax code that goes from 400 pages to 54,000 in one lifetime, however, is not, nor is a tax code that can aimed with a laser scope)
I think outside of time, people mostly worry about money, relationships, and personal appearance. Since money essentially buys liberty with all the other things we worry about, essentially alleviating anxiety and the stress that comes with it, one realizes it is particularly stressful that the government demands its cut of a person’s income, and I suppose it could be seen as a form of blackmail because if you don’t pay taxes from your income the government can imprison you.
And, since every government needs taxes to function and survive, one could argue that the tax code is unjust since most people who actually need an income spend a majority of that income on food, shelter, utilities, transportation, healthcare, and education, among other necessities, whereas someone who receives a passive income spends less than 10% of their income on survival needs because they probably own the renewable resources (if not the source of their distribution) and theoretically posses specialized training available to high school graduates long before they’ve finished elementary school.
Which is ironic because if the government didn’t take their cut first there would theoretically be no money for resource programs that provide food, shelter, utilities, transportation,healthcare, and education to the working poor who need government assistance to stay afloat because they aren’t given an income to meet their survival needs because of acts of degradation, extortion, and blackmail that take place beyond the scope of the justice system designed to prevent them.
How’s that for a general statement?
As of late, I had to meet and interact with a lot of lawyers, and you know what really got under my skin? Their arrogance. Those slimy motherfuckers think that they are better than everyone else because they understand their own ridiculous mumbo-jumbo. Their self-delusion is so deep and aggrandizing that they actually think the shit they do is as real as the laws of thermodynamics, even moreso for the effect they have on people’s lives.
Gah, that was satisfying. Cool comic BTW.
I honestly think believing the laws of thermodynamics are absolute is B.S. too. To the best of my knowledge “Garbage in Garbage out” definition that I’m familiar with or that some pre determined value of equivalent exchange exists is supposedly eighth grade science, and ignores the creative complexity and potential of certain organisms.
Laws, such as those of thermodynamics, might work well for a machine with a default mechanism for processing the kinetic energy into some useful form. [Keep in mind I'm not suggesting everyone can just go out and develop their own perpetual motion machine and learn the finer points of zero point energy (if such things even exist).] But, supposedly we are to also simultaneously agree that a larger organism requires less energy than a smaller one to survive. And, that my friend, just doesn’t seem right. Especially since, even when one is counting calories and carbs, monitoring sugar and starch intake, as well as calculating the physical energy expended on a daily basis, there is no guarantee of weight loss or measurable progress.
It probably doesn’t help my argument that the quality of one’s food is based on the quality of ones income or resources and that it actually does have an effect on the ultimate result.
Yannow, I had a bad feeling Virus and Eastwood were too late just by that visual effect in the middle panels…
….
Ick.
Well- at least they don’t need to worry about hostages!
You know, the rant on on the form for the book reminds me of that one page you had for Lothar and Rogue’s Bi-annual review, the “Misnomer” page.
Those soulthirster daemons are looking pretty good right now. I mean, they always LOOKED good, but their prospects do too. In any case, legalese doesn’t actually bother me too much, but I can understand how it could drive an otherwise capable person crazy.
Speaking of crazy, I think Eastwood isn’t giving his new squeeze a fair chance. If the spider puppeteer is good, he’ll hardly know his new girlfriend is a dry husk.
At first I thought they had turned into zombies… that isn’t what’s going on. They’re MARIONETTES. Creepy marionettes made from the drained corpses of the sacrifices and manipulated by the demonic spider’s silk. At this point, I think the daemon is well and truly fucking with both of them just for kicks.
Also, ten bucks says that the cultist monks were “rewarded” for their efforts in a manner fully befitting of their turncoat nature.
I don’t know, what we’re seeing could still be something Lothar or Rogue cooked up while wandering the halls.
It could also be that the “good” vision is ACTUALLY real, and the creepy one is fake.
dessicated. what spiders do to people is dessicate them
they turn their insides to jelly, drain them out and leave a husk like that behind :D
Unless they are a tarantula. Those things are like the t-rexes of the spider world. Vertebrate prey? Dissolved up until the spider is satiated. Inverterbate prey? Crushed and mashed, THEN dissolved. As a side note, feeding mice or rats to a tarantula is actually a really bad idea-both are more than capable of killing the spider with a single well-placed bite, since a spider’s brain is in a sort of “doughnut” shape in the cepahlothroax. Cockroaches actually make the best food for pet tarantulas due to bulk and nutritional content, with crickets coming in a very closes second. As for why I know all of this, I have one for a pet. Most easygoing and low maintenance pet I have ever had. A dozen crickets a month + being left alone= a happy spider.
I don’t mind crickets, mantids, or spiders, but I never got them as pets because I could never figure out how to keep the crickets alive. Plus, since crickets are something like two dollars a pop and because I don’t know how often to feed the others I figured it was easier to get a raise hermit crabs I think you can keep seven or more in a 20 gallon aquarium and I know they can reach conch/coconut size if cared for well. the largest one I ever had scared my dad, it was as big as a human hand. Although I haven’t been as successful at raising the things since I left Florida. I know they should have a lifespan of at least seven years or so if well taken care of.
Just buy the crickets on the day you feed them. I cannot speak for mantids or others insects, but most spiders will do just fine with a monthly application of juicy crickets; smaller spiders need more frequent feedings. I don’t worry about keeping them alive, because they are immediately fed to my chaco golden knee. They don’t really need more to eat more than that.
Terrestrial tarantulas can live even longer than that. At a minimum, the larger species can at least reach 20 years. Certain genus of tarantula, like the rather popular Avicularia group, only live about five years or so.
A Firefly reference, an indirect crack at the inability of a character to get a date making a trap obvious, and dried husk marionette zombie horror. What’s not to love about the new update?
Also, the IRS is one of the most bloated, counterproductive, and useless parts of the government bureaucracy. It and the tax code really does need to be scrapped in favor of something that can actually be read and understood. rather than being the impenetrable and easily abused by the government mess that it is.
welp that’s no good….
I’m gonna use that in my next Paranoia game.
Care to share how you plan to implement it? Details my good friend, details!
Yes, I want to hear about the next installment in the polybius: killswitch chronicles staring foamy and tweak. (sorry I can’t remember the cast, and Foamy and Tweak were the names I came up with for a world building exercise, and have become a default pairing ever since. besides Portia and Ghastly sound like pokemons… also foamy and tweak were not squirrels, one was a cat and the other an alien spider from outer space… you can already see the similarities, not that all action platform games don’t usually = 1mascot plus 1bruiser team up to take down big bad and must defeat x number of boss and complete y number of missions in z number of levels featuring t number of trouble makers and p number of puzzles. )
I like this entity. It has a sense of irony!
What’s wrong Harry, you got something against dead okapis? :O
Eastwood could do with a little help abut now. Too bad about the throwing Rogue and Lothar to the cultists as a distraction part.
Can you get the book in England?
Yep! I was talking to a friend in England, and he was concerned about the high shipping cost. We found you should make sure to hit the “calculate shipping” button while viewing your cart, before checking out. That way it will definitely show the different shipping options, since the friend initially could only see the $30 express shipping option.
Thank you, it’s now on its way. Looking forward to reading it.
Okay. Umm…comic: Darn. I was hoping they could actually rescue soem people this time. Is everybody dead? That totally sucks. Oh, well, it was still amusing to see read Harry’s last comment.
Author comments: Wow. Seriously? Entity? Criminitly! It sounds like something I would read out of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series of books. And that’s only because they can’t strictly define ‘human’ because of all the different races of alines and fairy creatures involved in the series! I deeply regret you had to go through all that hassle to please fans, however I will pay due respect by buying the book as soon as I have the cash to do so! Hopefully soon.