The Sorensen Monologues

Government Sh*tdown

If the health care tax credits are not extended, ACA premiums will more than double for a majority of the 24 million people who buy their insurance directly through the marketplace. Republicans have done nothing to address this and could end the shutdown by reaching an agreement with Democrats. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation article linked above, half the voters who purchase plans through the marketplace are small business owners or work for a small business; a quarter of all farmers are also insured this way. Given the already high costs and precariousness of American healthcare, the increased premiums will cause massive disruptions and chaos, sending prices even higher.

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War of the Worlds 2025

The other day, Trump said of Portland: “Every time I look at that place it’s burning down, there are fires all over the place” and “when a store owner rebuilds a store they build it out of plywood, they don’t put up storefronts anymore, they just put wood up.” I feel silly for even typing this, but that is not happening in reality. In the real world, a smattering of people are dressing up in animal costumes to protest outside the ICE facility. Portlanders are also expressing themselves through naked (or semi-clothed) bike rides. These are excellent ways of demonstrating in my opinion.

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America: What Does Not Belong?

The seed of this cartoon was planted when Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily taken off the air by Disney in an effort to appease the White House. It occurred to me that making fun of our political leaders is about as American as hot dogs and apple pie. When you take a step back, it’s breathtaking how many profoundly un-American oddities have crept into daily life. And by un-American, I mean ideas or actions that most of us agreed were not normal — at least while I was growing up.

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Pundit Bro Doom Loop

There’s been a fair amount of discussion lately about certain prominent liberal pundits being cozy with far-right commentators who would have been considered beyond the pale just a few years ago. Our corporate-friendly system wants performative displays of open-mindedness to right-wing ideology and endless trolling of progressives.

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Rage at the Ragged

I have long been perplexed by those who would inflict harm on the most vulnerable and downtrodden. “Fox and Friends” host Brian Kilmeade recently expressed support for the execution of mentally ill homeless people while discussing a horrifying murder committed in Charlotte, NC. From the Associated Press: 

A homeless and mentally ill man, Decarlos Brown Jr., was arrested for murder, and the case received extensive attention on Fox following the release of a security video of the stabbing.

Jones was talking on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday about public money spent on trying to help homeless people and suggested that those who didn’t accept services offered to them should be jailed.

“Or involuntary lethal injection, or something,” Kilmeade said. “Just kill ‘em.”

Kilmeade apologized for his comments after facing a fierce public backlash.

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Civil Warp

So much mainstream “discussion” of the recent political assassination is hypocritical posturing with a dark agenda. We’re seeing a lot of fake moralizing designed to legitimize future violence instead of calls for calm and de-escalation. If we were actually having a serious discussion, we’d make a clear distinction between an act of political violence, which is an affront to freedom that we must always condemn, and a demand that we celebrate the victim’s legacy. Unfortunately, we now find ourselves living in a funhouse mirror world with its own dreamlike rules, with even some previously sensible mainstream pundits straining to sanitize reality.

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Easy to do the Wrong Thing, Hard to do the Right thing

My point here is not to chide, but to note the system of incentives that keeps money flowing to authoritarians. They’re winning by making less ethical decisions easy and responsible alternatives difficult if not impossible. This isn’t just a consumer and social media problem; so much of mainstream journalism today is motivated by professional respectability — which doesn’t necessarily mean lying, but taking the path of least resistance: avoiding certain topics or language because they sound “partisan” or “alarmist,” and other acts of performative neutrality such as platforming well-dressed white nationalists and elevating bogus narratives from the extremists’ cinematic universe.

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Going Trad: Pros and Cons

I’ve been curious about the homesteading movement for a long time, albeit from a non-tradwife perspective. For a few years I subscribed to Mother Earth News, whose pages of solar panel installations and gardening tips filled my head with pastoral fantasies. (It’s possible that growing up in rural Pennsylvania planted a seed of affection for farm life, even though I suspect I would be terrible at it.) So I have nothing against people who decide to abandon the corporate world, or soulless suburbs, to live close to the land. I’m just not so into oppressive gender roles and unpasteurized milk.

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Web’s End

The Pew Research Center recently released a study showing that the AI summaries that appear on top of Google search results are dramatically cutting traffic to websites. This has potentially calamitous implications for news sites, which have already been hobbled by tech company middlemen in other ways.

If you have the time, you might check out this video from More Perfect Union on why Google searches suck now (the third panel of this comic was partly inspired by it, in addition to my own frustrations doing research for cartoons or anything else these days).

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Government or Foreign Invader?

I’m hardly the first person to make the point that another country could not do more damage to the US than what is being done from within, but it did occur to me a long time ago that this was the case. If you were an evil dictator trying to destroy and take over the US, you could hardly to a better job than eliminating scientists and medical researchers, healthcare infrastructure, highly qualified military officers, basic corporate and environmental regulations, and economic data statisticians — to name a few. You’d hobble the government financially by plundering it. And you’d eventually put troops in the streets to intimidate the public and quash civil unrest.

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Nonsense Encounters Per Hour Rise Dramatically

Over the past year I’ve been struck by the frequency with which I encounter conspiratorial, false, or downright threatening messages throughout the day. I initially began calling them NEPDs — Nonsense Encounters Per Day. For the strip, I switched to NEPHs because you can actually pronounce that acronym. I’m not even talking about the headlines, necessarily — just ordinary life interrupted by a “Whoa, that’s odd!” moment over and over again. 

A while ago, the US government’s Covid website was switched to a ludicrous list of conspiracy theories. So there’s that, too. 

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Wrecking Everything

I often watch PBS or PBS Create, especially Rick Steves and other travel shows. The cooking shows are mostly mindless “comfort food TV,” sometimes literally cooking comfort food. NOVA and Christiane Amanpour are also excellent. Now this all faces an uncertain future. I also listen to community radio stations wherever I live, and since I’ve lived in several cities with good stations, I try keep up with some of them online. Now I hear announcements saying “We’ve lost our federal funding, please help cover the shortfall.” Same story for national parks. It’s just bizarre to see visitor centers shuttered in a country as prosperous as this one (speaking in the abstract). You’d think this was the Great Depression.

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