Welcome one and all to the wide world of political cartooning and The Art of Politics… the best cartoonists in the world who manage to perfectly illustrate the news of the day, often better than many thousands of words…
You want one cartoon to sum the month up?
Or another… summing up the farce of the anti-vax, anti-mask morons… Nigel Auchterlounie –
As you would expect the British government still cannot find its arse from its elbow when it comes to running the country.
The rules around Covid restrictions and travel were seemingly changing every other day. Ben Jennings on that…
And of course, all this was just when we seem to be getting new and exciting new variants every few weeks, just to throw everything into even more chaos. Nicola Jennings on that…
And if all that Covid stuff wasn’t bad enough, we then had the news that, yes, the world is in the midst of a climate disaster and there’s very little hope. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) basically felt they couldn’t trust the world’s politicians to act on their draft report, so they decided to leak it early.
‘Global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next four years, coal and gas-fired power plants must close in the next decade and lifestyle and behavioural changes will be needed to avoid climate breakdown, according to the leaked draft of a report from the world’s leading authority on climate science.’
So yes, we’re all going to burn/drown/freeze and the only hope we have are the world’s politicians. Yeah, that’s going to work.
Malagon on that…
Kal …
Henry Beaumont – Boris Johnson and the climate crisis…
Ben Jennings on the timing of kids here in the UK getting their A-level results the day after the IPCC report…
And then there was Prince Andrew… oh, Prince Andrew… absolutely no news about Prince Andrew and the woman he absolutely had nothing to do with – you know, the one in the picture with him. There are lawsuits coming in and they’re going to test whether he really can sweat or not…
And then we had Afghanistan. Oh yes, Afghanistan.
It’s been an area that’s never been at peace really, with the troubles starting over a hundred years ago – British-Afghan Wars (1838-42, 1878-80, 1919-21), Russian-Afghan war (1979-1989), the Mujahideen, the Taliban, the rise of Osama Bin Laden, and then the US-Afghan/Taliban war from 2001-now. There genuinely seems to be no easy solution. (PBS have a good timeline to crib from, the FT look at a history of failed foreign occupations, and the Washington Post crunch the financial numbers.)
Just the latest failed mission, two decades of it has cost so many lives, Afghan, American, British, and cost something like $2.2 TRILLION, to accomplish… well, what?
However, the shocking speed of the US withdrawal and the subsequent advance of the Taliban through the country really changed things. The Americans pretty much left the country and the military high and dry, taking all the foreign contractors and air support out almost overnight.
And who paid the price? Well, the military of all countries for sure, but the human cost from now – that’s something that we just can’t begin to imagine right now… it’s horrifying.
And Ben Jennings again –
And then there was the UK response, limiting the number of refugees the country would take to 20,000. Priti Patel’s vile nature strikes again…
And the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, “refused to be contacted” about some government business while he was having a nice little holiday as Afghanistan fell.
Back to the global pandemic that really doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, no matter how much those in power seem to be denying it… this time from a US perspective…
One from the Nib now – A Once-in-a-Century Pandemic – comics reporting from Joyce Rice, Eleri Harris, and Sarah Mirk – but surely, the idea of “repeating a lot of the same mistakes from the 1918 “Spanish Flu” H1N1 outbreak” is just absurd.Y eah, right.
There’s a big problem in the States; vaccinations have plateaued, the anti-vaxxers are complaining, there’s big protests against any kinds of mask or vaccine mandates. And cases are rising, rising, rising…
All perfectly summed up with this…
Ann Telnaes – on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott testing positive for covid-19 after signing an executive order against mask and vaccine mandates in his state and attending a packed, maskless gathering.
And this from Peter Kuper –
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