Sarah Cooper tells it:
- What’s a Libertarian to do? You can’t very well devote Memorial Day to honoring those who died for our freedoms, then denigrate their sacrifice. Yet Ayn Rand, the founder of the libertarian movement, had only contempt for sacrifice of any kind, promoting instead the innate virtue of selfishness.
Michael A. LaFerrara rises to the challenge. He insists those who died that we may be free were not actually sacrificing anything at all. They each had a personal stake in their personal freedom, so they were engaging in the purest form of egotism. They were actually the very model of complete selfishness.
- Near the corona-beginning, couple guys at the car repair place told me not to worry about the grandkids. Youngsters can’t get the virus and aren’t going to die. Some are still saying that. M. Bouffant at Web of Evil digs into the relationship between kids and COVID and discovers they can and some do.
- Scotties Toy Box asks us to remember long, long ago, before the pandemic, when blue lives mattered.
- The bright side is that 99.98% will survive this so called “pandemic”. We’ve all heard that, in some form, from one Trumpster or another. Right? nojo takes a slow and steady scalpel to the argument they are holding until there is nothing left on their hands but blood.
- John Scalzi at Whatever acknowledges that Ohio is officially ending stay-at-home rules and opening up. He explains why he will stay in for another month. Me too.
- Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson invites a guest writer, local religious leader Jerry Bader, to offer a “faith-based perspective” on wearing masks.
- Dr. Mark Bear, in MadMikesAmerica, discusses, from a Christian perspective, our mutual obligation not to harm each other’s health and suggests that an angry correspondent is incorrect in thinking that God is his personal property.
- JoAnn Williams at Biased Unbalanced and Politically Incorrect is impatient at one side-effect of pretty much every crisis: the loonies that come out of hiding. She is especially testy with one true believer who can’t picture Jesus with a mask on.
- tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors officiates as America votes on why why Mr. Trump does not want to be photographed wearing a mask. Maybe it’s because Jesus was never photographed with one?
- You have to hand it to my friend Jack Jodell. He can generate a rant. At The Saturday Afternoon Post he gets creative with names for my president and his allies as he supports his main point. Mr. Trump’s words produce headlines, but his actions and inactions produce danger and death.
- So my president is taking hydroxychloroquine, right? PZ Myers briefly explains how we know Mr. Trump is lying. No, it is not because his lips are moving.
I dunno. The reasoning seems speculative. So far, we do know he is not taking injections of household cleaning products. Uh… don’t we?
- Andy Borowitz reports on the White House sponsored, nationally televised, demonstration that hydroxychloroquine causes delusions.
- At The Onion, President Trump orders the CDC to research his investment portfolio for potential coronavirus cures.
- It happened before most currently living Americans began dwelling the earth, but I’m old enough to remember it well. Green Eagle notes the hype around Trump-favored drugs, and the promised cutting of bothersome regulatory safeguards by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and reminds us of deaths, broken lives, and deformed babies that were all part of the tragedy of thalidomide in the 1960s.
I also remember the stubborn Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, the FDA regulator who did not believe unverified assurances by the manufacturer, who resisted great industry and political pressure, who refused to approve the drug without independent testing, and who thereby saved American newborns the horrible deformities suffered in other parts of the globe.
Let’s hope today’s regulators get it just as right.
The world lost this hero 5 years ago. She lived to be 101.
- We’ve heard about the Trump threat against Michigan: that he’ll withhold funds because they sent out absentee applications to all voters regardless of party, all voters being eligible to vote absentee in Michigan. In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson does a little digging into the social media exchange and finds, hidden in plain site, what Trump might just fear the most. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson reminds me of Ali standing over Liston: What’s my name?
- News Corpse watches as my president makes it explicit. The Fox network is failing to fulfill its only rightful role, which is to ensure that he and Republicans in general are elected. Hey Fox! You had ONE JOB!
- In case it’s hard to tell (often is), this is satire. The Ant Farmer’s Almanac reports as Trump hosts a special White House ceremony to award America’s all time hero the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Purple Heart.
- Iron Knee at Political Irony uses a short video and an accompanying statistical analysis to completely explain Obamagate.
- Isn’t this pretty much the dictionary definition of petty? At The Moderate Voice, Joe Gandelman reports as the Occupant of the Oval refuses the traditional unveiling of Obama’s presidential portrait.
- driftglass looks at recent history and predicts what Republican pro-Trump enthusiasts will do once Trump is out of office.
- Frances Langum looks into a Senate proposal, for which there is growing Republican support, to make substantial cuts in Social Security benefits.
- Senator Ben Sasse was asked to give a commencement address at a high school in Nebraska. He decided to go beyond a few jokes and make the entire thing a comedy monologue. Max’s Dad provides an acerbic review that can eat through steel, but is way funnier than Sasse. If you’re ever around Max’s Dad, and you tell a lame joke that falls flat, here’s my advice: Just apologize quickly and slink away fast.
- In Hackwhackers, someone goes all Bart Simpson on the Republican Governor of Mississippi. It was a tasteless and juvenile prank. I’m ashamed of the person who did it. And …
I’m ashamed of myself for laughing and laughing and laughing everytime I think about it. I may be old, but I make up for it with immaturity.
- The Journal of Improbable Research posts a hard-to-resist headline about how to write a hard-to-resist headline, which is based on a hard-to-resist headline posted by Trinity College in Dublin about a proposed link between quantum entanglement and cold coffee.
- Ken Osmond, the actor who portrayed the sly bad boy Eddie Haskell on Leave It To Beaver later became a police officer in California. He performed heroically. Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit tells more of the story, including his unorthodox method of disproving to authorities a weird rumor that he had once been a notorious porn star. RIP Officer Eddie Haskell.
– Podcasts –