Oprah Winfrey has enlisted a dangerous new ally in her war to conquer the media and wipe out rationality. Unlike Oprah’s earlier recruits, Jenny McCarthy has a body count. Dr. Phil may be a self-important blowhard with an angry elephant approach to therapy, but at least he isn’t helping the resurgence of diseases that kill infants.

Can Oprah brand homeopathic pediatric cancer treatments be far behind?

Among the economists that I see and hear in the media, there seems to be an almost uniform lack of ability to conceive of what actual life is like for anyone who lives below the middle class. I figure it’s probably hard to be an ivory tower academic if you’re stepping on roaches when you go for a midnight snack. I’m just sayin.’

This comic is dedicated to NPR’s Planet Money podcast. The show does a great job of demystifying complex economic concepts, and has a surprisingly low percentage of stuffed-shirt market fetishists among its guests. But even they occasionally talk to somebody who desperately needs to live on plain pasta and powdered milk for a year.

Also, I’m aware that you waited almost two months for a new comic, and it was totally not worth it. Not only did it take forever, but if you follow me on Twitter, it’s kind of a re-run. I’d love to say that I’ll be able to remedy that in the near future, but that would be crossing the line from harmless fib to blatant falsehood.

Bipartisan, goodwill, new day in Washington, blah blah blah. For eight years, we’ve been told that questioning executive authority means we’re unpatriotic America haters. I haven’t quite let go of my bitterness yet.

Add on a generous dollop of homophobic mega-church preacher, and it adds up to not being as excited by the whole thing as I expected to be on election night.

By some odd coincidence, this little squirt of vitriol managed to be both my 450th post and my 50th comic. I’m not sure what this says about me, other than I find arbitrary round numbers very pleasing. Yee-haw.

I am well aware that, in this newfangled modern era, there are women architects who are just as capable as any man of designing a building that looks like a giant prick. One suspects that their motivations are slightly less pathetic.

Yes Virginia, there is a most-overused metaphor ever.

At least in the war on drugs, some of the people have guns.

And once the Bible Belt was uninhabited, we’d have plenty of room for wind farms, solar collectors and spent nuclear fuel.

Stupid non-antichrist Obama.

From ModBlog, by way of Warren Ellis.

I was far away from my computer when inspiration struck, so I thought I’d give a hand drawn comic a shot.

Stupid inspiration.

Seriously, I don’t care which guy you think is the kitten and which guy you think is the stabbing. The point is that they’re radically different. A lot of us are having a hard time understanding how this could be a difficult choice. If you can explain what the hangup is, please feel free to enlighten me.

I was either four hours late or eight hours early. Either way, it wasn’t going to happen.

Part of the reason why this was confusing is the way law school exams are graded. They’re graded on a Curve. (Trust me, you can hear the capital “C” when law students say it.) It’s not like curves in undergraduate courses, where the best grade gets bumped up to 100, and everybody’s score gets increased by the same amount. The law school Curve is a mathematical spread. There’s a median score, then a certain number of exams get better grades, and a certain number get worse.

As a simplified example, say that the Curve is set right at a B. If five people take the exam, the person who scores in the middle of the pack will get the B. If someone else’s answers were much better, that person will get an A. BUT, for every A, there has to be a corresponding C, so that the grades will average out to the target B. So if there’s one A exam, there has to be one C, with three Bs in the middle. If there are two exceptionally good exams, they can both get As, but then both the people who were slightly worse than the average have to get Cs. It’s wildly more complicated than that, of course, but that’s the general idea.

So I’m confused about what the prayer was for. Praying that everyone does well on their exams is useless, because everyone can’t do well. If everyone has a great day, that just means the bar for that average exam is set a lot higher. It won’t change the number of good and bad grades. Everybody maxing out their test taking skillz doesn’t overcome the power of the Curve.

I suppose they could have prayed that everyone who participated in the prayer did well on their exams, and screw everyone else, but that seems a little mercenary. It’s not crazy to think that religious people would look out for their own interests, but I know a lot of the believers at my school, and they’re generally too nice to take that approach.

I’m going to guess that they went with something along the lines of “help everyone to do their best on the exam.” There was probably also some reference to relieving stress and anxiety, which would truly be righteous if it came to pass. The tension in the law school atmosphere during exam time is enough to choke a healthy water buffalo in only a few minutes.

I wonder, though, if any of the participants stopped to consider how the Curve ultimately trumps any divine influence. If a deity conjured the best performance out of every test taker, the Curve would still demand the blood of a few C minuses. I suppose that, as logical inconsistencies go, this one is relatively minor. If one can worship an omnipotent, all-loving being who still lets babies die of AIDS, ignoring the power of the Curve to mitigate the potential effects of prayer must be no great shakes.

Yes, I take my computer to the bar. It saves me having to talk to people.

The Alien And Sedition Acts of 1798 called. They want their definition of treason back.