Author Archives: The Happy Pessimist

Sisyphus meets Fannie Mae

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus the king of Ephyra was punished for his deceitfulness by being condemned to roll an enormous rock to the top of a hill, watch it roll down the other side, and then roll it back up, FOREVER. Sisyphus is alive and well, it turns out, only now he lives in the […]

Kimchi Geopolitics

The ventriloquist Jeff Dunham uses a dummy named Achmed the Dead Terrorist, who periodically leans toward the audience, bugs out his eyes, and screams “I keel you!” Achmed is a piker. For the last several weeks, we have been subjected to hysterical eruptions of genocidal bombast from the current Dear Leader of the Democratic People’s […]

Yankee Come Home

The Pushtu President of the Afghans that we shoehorned into office accuses us of collaborating with the Taliban! The Mexican El Presidente demands that we ship his proto-wetbacks handbooks on how to squeeze welfare out of our taxpayers after they creep across the border! The Greeks and Cypriots march and scream that the IMF (which, face […]

Eat the Poor

That’s unusual advice. After all, the comic films always have titles like “Eat the Rich,” on the assumption that rich people are over-indulged, weak, and helpless before the united might of the virtuous poor. What a crock. First of all, how do you think the rich got rich? By being smarter and tougher than the […]

Honesty Is the Worst Policy

In the seventeenth century, Duc Francois de La Rochefoucauld penned the still popular epigram “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” Unfortunately, this remark is rapidly losing its currency. It’s not that we have turned into a planet of Goody Two Shoeses, far from it. We have plenty of vice left. The problem is […]