FairAndUNbalanced.com

 

We treat some with fear and loathing. Others are a source of amusement.

The homeless in our midst and refugees from without, at least those who with brown skin, share one fatal attribute.

Coverage began with the voice of reporter Elle Thomas.

Talk about weird.

Viewers in Salt Lake City saw the amusing little story first, as they turned to KSTU news on Channel 13. The rest of us caught it online.

You know, this woman cracked open a cold one, literally thought she owned the place, and then things just kept on getting weirder.

Continue reading “Amusement and Fear at Strange, Ragged People”

• Scotties Toy Box posts a sentence and a link pointing to the most prominent of America’s current moral failings.
   
• Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged has the reaction we all should share. The national debate is over what to call the cages holding refugee children rather than the fact that those kids are denied soap, toothbrushes, and even sleep. Nope, we should argue over whether it’s fair to the Trump administration to call those conditions concentration camps for kids.
   
• Okay, we’re gonna bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, then we we’re not, and it all depends on which Fox personality last talks to my President. Green Eagle has a thank you for a lonely publication that treats the coming war with a bit of judicious skepticism.
   
• Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit reads the papers. On Iran, it seems our President managed to do the right thing but still manages to lie about it.

Continue reading “Trump, Migrant Kids, Iran, Collusion, Lies, Environment, Central Park 5”

 
From Stephen Groening, University of Washington, at The Moderate Voice:

Seventy years ago, Eric Blair, writing under a pseudonym George Orwell, published “1984,” now generally considered a classic of dystopian fiction.

The novel tells the story of Winston Smith, a hapless middle-aged bureaucrat who lives in Oceania, where he is governed by constant surveillance. Even though there are no laws, there is a police force, the “Thought Police,” and the constant reminders, on posters, that “Big Brother Is Watching You.”

Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, and his job is to rewrite the reports in newspapers of the past to conform with the present reality. Smith lives in a constant state of uncertainty; he is not sure the year is in fact 1984.

Although the official account is that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia, Smith is quite sure he remembers that just a few years ago they had been at war with Eastasia, who has now been proclaimed their constant and loyal ally. The society portrayed in “1984” is one in which social control is exercised through disinformation and surveillance.

As a scholar of television and screen culture, I argue that the techniques and technologies described in the novel are very much present in today’s world.

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From Frances Langum:

We need to re-take the Senate, too.

Samantha Bee didn’t sugarcoat it on Wednesday night.

“Run for Senate, goddamnit!”

“Winning the presidency would be great, but real change is impossible unless the Senate changes hands too,” the host added.

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From Courthouse News Service:

“You’re really going to stand up and tell us that being able to sleep isn’t a question of safe and sanitary conditions?’” U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon asked the Justice Department’s Sarah Fabian Tuesday.

U.S. Circuit Judge William Fletcher also questioned the government’s interpretation of the settlement agreement.

“Are you arguing seriously that you do not read the agreement as requiring you to do anything other than what I just described: cold all night long, lights on all night long, sleeping on concrete and you’ve got an aluminum foil blanket?” Fletcher asked Fabian. “I find that inconceivable that the government would say that that is safe and sanitary.”

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

No president in at least a century has had a greater need to win over new voters. Yet Trump doesn’t even try.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: There’s nothing wrong with President Donald Trump designating Tuesday night’s rally as his “official” campaign kickoff. Trump is unusual in that he formally launched his re-election campaign at the beginning of his presidency, and in holding an endless series of political rallies. But the only difference here between Trump and other first-term presidents is one of strategy. They’re all running for re-election from day one, and many (okay, practically all) of their public appearances are staged with that in mind.

That’s mostly a good thing. Presidents should work hard to be re-elected in their first term. It introduces healthy incentives: Smart presidents will lead with an eye toward winning over new voters and thus strive to govern responsibly. So there’s nothing wrong with Trump overtly campaigning from day one, or with arbitrarily designating one of his rallies as the beginning of a new phase of that campaign.

No, the question is what Trump has accomplished with all of his non-stop electioneering. And the answer to that is pretty simple: Bupkis. Nada. Nothing.

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From author John Scalzi:

I woke up this morning and checked Twitter and discovered that Neil Gaiman had told me to take a hike — or more accurately, he had tagged me as someone he challenged to walk 2,000 steps by Refugee Day (which is June 20th) as part of #StepWithRefugees, to raise awareness of the roughly one billion miles refugees, in aggregate, walk each year to try to find safety. 2,000 steps is roughly a mile, so the idea is something akin to walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

So I got out of bed and took that walk, and of course, because such a public challenge by Neil requires documentation, made a video of my morning perambulation.

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From Michael John Scott at MadMikesAmerica:

It was just before Friday turned into Saturday that Twitter gained a new account, and not one to be proud of, much like Donald Trump’s.

It appears the infamous murderer OJ Simpson can now be counted among those who tweet, and his very first (and so far only) post has already raised eyebrows.

Simpson posted a short video announcing his entry online, and it included what Inquisitr calls a “cryptic message.” The convicted felon cheerfully tells his viewing audience, almost exactly 25 years to the day his ex-wife, Nicole Brown-Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman were murdered:

“Coming soon to Twitter, you’ll get to read all my thoughts and opinions on just about everything,” “It should be a lot of fun. I got a little getting even to do.”

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From driftglass:

Today’s inciting incident was Harvard’s revocation of Kyle Kashuv’s admission to their university based on some incredibly racist and antisemitic (h/t Yastreblyansky) things he wrote when he was in high school and which have only recently come to light.

For Kyle Kashuv, this means he has once again joined the billions of human beings on Earth who won’t being going to Harvard. Sad! After all, Harvard is a Privilege Factory with more money than God and Mark Cuban (it is frequently referred to as a “hedge fund with a university attached”) and when it comes to admissions it can do pretty much whatever it wants to do.

But for David Brooks, this is his nightmare scenario.

The nightmare of a Conservative who had made his way into one of America’s most elite Privilege Factories —

Most of the famous Parkland students lean progressive and support gun control laws. Kashuv leans conservative. He’s appeared on conservative media, got to meet Donald Trump and lobbied for the STOP School Violence Act, which would create an annual $50 million grant to schools for training programs and reporting systems. He became a student face for the gun rights crowd.

— only to find himself suddenly kicked out because of things he had written in the past.

The nightmare that someone other than a few nobody Liberal bloggers might actually take a look at the shit David Brooks has actually written over the decades — the saccharine schlock, the incompetently researched/cherry-picked propaganda, the hypocrisy, the venomous hippie-punching and the interminable Both Siderism.

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