Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From Andy Borowitz:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis announced on Tuesday morning that he would seek the Democratic nomination for President, declaring, “Everyone else is.”
Explaining his rationale for running, the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominee told reporters, “As everyone else started jumping into the race, I started feeling a little left out.”
From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:
It deserves better than nonsensical all-caps tweets in the middle of the night.
It deserves better than unprepared, uninformed, rambling, and incoherent press events.
It deserves better than abject lies and anti-immigrant propaganda and token religion.
It deserves better than lazy shithole country insults and demeaning nicknames of political adversaries.
It deserves better than vilification of the Press and undermining of Intelligence and pandering to murderous dictators.
It deserves better than the molotov cocktail of fear and lies and violence it has daily tossed into its citizenry.
It deserves better than an unapologetic kleptocracy formed of career white-collar criminals, known supremacists, and serial grifters.
It deserves better than incendiary rhetoric and gaslighting lies and manufactured crises and phony emergencies.
The millions of men and women who have given lives and limbs in defense of this country deserve better.
Service people and police officers and first responders and teachers and caregivers deserve better.
Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr and Harvey Milk and John F. Kennedy and Angela Davis deserve better.
The abolitionists and the Suffragettes and the gay activists at Stonewall deserve it.
The Little Rock Nine and the students of Parkland deserve better.
My children and your children, and the children who will inherit the planet we leave them, deserve better.
From nojo:
Years ago, back when we were in grad school, studying Kant and Descartes and Aristotle and Plato, a friend of ours had an interesting remark:
A philosophy of comedy needs to be funny.
What was interesting about his remark, besides its cleverness, was what he was getting at: The essence of something needs to be what it is. If you’re getting at the essence of comedy, what it’s about, how it works — which is what you do in philosophy, and why philosophers get laid so hard — your understanding of it needs to be funny itself. Which is the classic problem with explaining a joke: There are the ingredients, but where’s the soufflé?
Note: nojo saves the best for last.
– More –
John Scalzi at Whatever celebrated romantic love last week by showing us how to make the ideal Valentine burrito.
Our own Trey reacted:
First I was intrigued. Then a little concerned. The crumbled heart-shaped cake frightened me. Then back to intrigued. Then, yes, interest became piqued with the butter. Then I saw that there was a video of my dude Scalzi actually biting into the monstrosity and nearly being devoured himself by its near-sentient marshmallow fluff.
After seeing all that I said to myself, No. No, Trey. You will not attempt this. In fact, Trey, you will wipe your memory clear of this.
So I did.
What were we talking about again?
From Dorian Estuardo de Wind at The Moderate Voice:
These two letters are part of the Otay Mesa Detention Center Detainee Letter Collection, documenting “the hidden stories of hundreds of refugees from human rights hot spots around the world… Each of them has sought asylum in the United States and has been held at the San Diego, California Otay Mesa Detention Center…”
They are part of the work of “Detainee Allies” and of professors and staff at San Diego State University, many of these letters in response to letters written to the detainees by people with empathy and compassion.
A “project” that started last summer as “an old-fashioned correspondence that bloomed into a friendship, part of an unusual epistolary campaign initiated by San Diego State professors and others in suburban San Diego,” and which, according to the New York Times, “[l]ast week, the university library made public the digital archive of hundreds of letters from detainees, throwing open a window into the fragile lives of migrants from more than 20 countries living, some of them for years, inside a nondescript private prison.”
From Gregory B. Gonzalez at MadMikesAmerica:
I’m not asking as matter of respect for him, and I’m not asking you to stop mocking him. God knows he’s begging to be made fun of. No, the reason I’m asking you to cease referring to him as an asshole is because it offends me. I’M an asshole, and lumping that orange prick in the same category is something I just CANNOT abide. It gives assholes a bad name.
Not only that, it is factually inaccurate. Donald Trump is NOT an asshole; he is a DOUCHEBAG.
From The Onion:
No family is perfect, whether you are from a suburban family of 2.5 kids or your mother was spontaneously pregnant and your siblings are a bunch of super freaks just like you. In anticipation of Netflix’s new show, The Umbrella Academy, here are some hot tips to downplay your own family’s weirdness, because let’s face it, every family has their own baggage.
From The Journal of Improbable Research:
According to a new study from the Graziano Lab at Princeton University, US, there has been a sharp drop in the number of US college students who believe that some form of invisible beams are emitted form peoples’ eyes when they look at something (k.a. extramission).
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:
Axios morning email thingie tells us that our First Shady Ivanka Trump may be making an appearance before Congress before too long, if they can pull her away from her important work Instagramming herself in serene white spaces starring thoughtfully out of windows while holding a sheaf of empty white paper, white coffee mug steaming nearby (enigmatic formatting is all theirs):
Outlining a blueprint for the vast Russia probe planned by the new House majority, a Democratic member of Congress suggested at a roundtable with reporters this week that lawmakers may seek testimony from Ivanka Trump.
And that’s all they said about Ivanka.
From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:
Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! In celebration of the patron saint of love, I present a tale of one who embodied love in his life: radio, stage, movie, and TV star Danny Thomas. For many years, this entertainer was a hugely successful TV star with his Make Room for Daddy and The Danny Thomas Show TV programs. Prior to that, he had made movie appearances, and even before that, was active in radio, using the name Amos Jacobs. Yet Mr. Thomas was not always a successful Hollywood icon. He was actually born into a poor Lebanese Nennon-ite Catholic immigrant family, as one of 10 children born of those parents. He struggled for a time as a stand-up comic before making it in radio. His early career had many ups and downs, yet Mr. Thomas persevered without losing hope. During one psrticularly low point in the early mid-1950s, he went into a Catholic church and knelt down to pray. He made a vow to St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes, saying “show me my way in life and I will make you a shrine.” He left that church and before long began to discuss his idea with the then-Archbishop (later Cardinal) of Chicago, Fr. Samuel Stritch. Stritch suggested that a children’s hospital for the needy might be a better tribute, snd Thomas listened. He initially wanted the hospital to be in Chicago, where he got his start in show business, but, since Chicago already had an established children’s hospital, the Archbishop suggested a city where there would be greater need. He offered Memphis, TN. as an example.
Invigorated with a newfound zeal and sense of purpose, Mr. Thomas began to furiously raise money to build and staff it. Thomas started up the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities (ALSAC) whose sole purpose was to fund and maintain the hospital. He was relentless and eventually achieved success with both his vow and in his career.