FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From Max’s Dad:

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door in the country.”

That was a quote from a tape made by Harvey Milk, to be released just in case he was murdered. If you dont know who Harvey Milk was you oughta learn.

40 years ago today a conservative San Francisco supervisor, that’s city councilman to us rubes,named Dan White walked into City Hall and murdered Mayor Willie Moscone and Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the entire nation. Oh yeah, he used a gun, like all chickenshit assassins do, and he did it because he saw a conspiracy against conservative white men like himself.

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From driftglass:

So now Frank Luntz is not exactly a Republican anymore. Maybe even an “independent”. And he blames both sides.

Yes, by now all the GOP plague rats who brought this country to ruin know the all the magic words that will get them a seat on the lifeboat.

I presume the next step will be a book which will have the same theme as every other Never Trumper book —

— and will be launched with boosts and blurbs and free air time by all the usual credulous Beltway Liberals and cynical Beltway Both Siderists.

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From Dorian de Wind at The Moderate Voice:

Remember the 17 young students and teachers who would never come home again?

Remember, one month later, the March for Our Lives, where hundreds of thousands of high school students from all over the country organized, marched and spoke up demanding that they be allowed to attend school without the fear of being gunned down?

Remember how the young people who organized, led and participated in those demonstrations and in other gun reform movements – many of them survivors of the Parkland shooting – were called trouble makers, immature, that they didn’t “fully grasp the issues at hand because their brains have not fully developed yet”?

Remember the names David Hogg, Emma González, Jaclyn Corin and Matt Deitsch?

Well, even if some of us have forgotten the names of these Parkland school shooting survivors, the world community has not

A week ago, at a special ceremony in Cape Town, South Africa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu presented the 2018 International Children’s Peace Prize 2018 to David, Emma, Jaclyn and Matt.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

Like a lot of conservatives, [U.S. Senate candidate Jeff] Bell argues that the effort to remove historical artifacts has its roots in the Stalin methodology that George Orwell highlighted in “1984.”

“Orwell satirized the idea of a ‘memory hole’ and now the left is starting to have a memory hole for anything they don’t believe in,” he said. “They don’t want Americans to be proud of their country. They want to change the story into a triumph of evil.”

True enough. But Mulshine goes on to include Confederate monuments in the category of historic American artifacts that deserve to be preserved. That’s where we differ.

First of all, there is no “alt-Left”. The Left has always been anti-American, at least since the rise of the New Left half a century ago. It stands to reason that they’d want to remove true American heroes, and morally equate a Washington with a Lee. Under cover of the white nationalist, alt-Right controversy, the New Left is making a direct assault on reason, individual rights, limited rights-protecting government, and free market capitalism.

Having said that, count me among those who would remove statues that hold up Confederate leaders among America’s heros. They are no such thing. True, history is messy. Most historical figures were mixed bags, morally. Plus, context is everything. We should be very careful about where we draw the moral lines. It should not be taken lightly. Many factors must be balanced. But we can and should draw moral lines.

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From the Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Robert Mueller’s announcement that he would be offering Cyber Monday plea deals touched off hysteria among disgraced Trump associates desperate for the chance to score a drastically reduced sentence.

Moments after the office of the special counsel went live with its Cyber Monday Web site, Sing4Bob.com, thousands of Trump cronies flooded it with traffic, causing the site to briefly crash.

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From Glenn R. Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

Florida. . . look, you’re already rolling your eyes in expectation, but no, this isn’t another expose on political corruption or public stupidity, it’s about crimes against English. Maybe it’s about crimes against reality too.

For at least a hundred years, the real estate business has defined Florida to what may be a unique degree and that “industry” if I can call it that has had a history of misrepresentation that some might call fraud although some of what might have been swampland proved to be quite profitable to those who hung on to their underwater and snake-infested plots of land now called Delray Beach or Boca Raton. Still, most of the buyers in the 1920s and later were eager to fall for the poetic nomenclature and fake stories about Spanish pirates and treasure and old maps and faux Spanish architecture.

Realtors, as they’re now called have long led the pack in dressing up the merchandise with creative English. They still do it and we still seem to fall for it. I live on the coast, like most Floridians, but I notice that the farther inland you go, the more you’ll find place names including nautical terms: cove, point, bay, etc. There’s a huge retirement living project being built near me called “Canopy Cove” Several miles inland, there are no nearby coves and having been clear-cut, hardly any canopy. Across the highway, there’s “Lost Lake” which is Realtor-speak for “Drained Swamp.”

But these things aren’t my complaint du jour.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

If you want to understand burnt food—understand it better than most humans have managed to—this study by Nikolopoulos and Tzanetis is a good source of insight:

“TIME-ESTIMATES OF BURNT FOOD FOR A NONLOCAL REACTIVE-CONVECTIVE PROBLEM FROM THE FOOD INDUSTRY,” by C.V. Nikolopoulos and D.E. Tzanetis, Advances in Scattering and Biomedical Engineering, 2004, pp. 355-362.

For a less theoretical exploration, the place to go is (we remind you) The Museum of Burnt Food.

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From Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger:

What is it that gives “great meaning” to the lives of Americans? There are some — those who want to convince you that the United States is a christian country — that would have you believe religion is the thing that gives people meaning in their lives. But that is simply not the case.

The Pew Research Center asked Americans what gave them meaning in their lives, and religion did not finish well.

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

Let’s pretend for a moment that we are an amoral, moronic president (Hi Donnie!) and by law, we are required to release a report on climate change that damns one of our key policies to hell. When do we release it?

Black Friday, silly! You know, the day after Thanksgiving when everyone—who is not buying their way into debt—is sitting in a Cheesecake Factory-like torpor from eating too much. Death, where is thy jolly old sting?

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From News Corpse:

Whereupon, Payne interrupted Stockman and diverted him from a discussion about how badly Trump is managing the economy to some absurd speculations about an imaginary war between the U.S. and China. Clearly Payne wasn’t going to allow Stockman to educate the willfully ignorant Fox News audience about Trump’s foolish economic agenda. Payne thought it would be better to fear monger about a war that no sane analyst is predicting. And it went downhill from there:

Payne: It’s kinda harsh for you to call President Trump a madman.
Stockman: Oh, absolutely he is.
Payne: Because he’s fighting back against unfair trade, intellectual property theft, a country that’s building man-made militarized islands […] You don’t think that we should be pushing back against China?
Stockman: No. China is not a threat to us whatsoever. If they want to waste their money on sandcastles in the South China Sea, be our guest. […] China’s economy is a house of cards. They’ve got forty trillion of debt. It is the biggest speculative building spree in history. Without our export markets, without 4,000 Walmarts and everything else in America, their economy would collapse. They don’t dare threaten us.

So Payne successfully sidetracked the conversation from Stockman’s initial commentary that Trump is a “madman” who is “out to lunch” with regard to the economy. But only to get walloped by Stockman’s astute insight into the weakness of China’s position in relation to the U.S.

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