FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From The Journal of Improbable Research:

…out of 8.9 million dogs in the UK, 2.1 million were left alone in their owner’s home for quite considerable lengths of time

Perhaps if they (i.e. dogs) could contact each other via the internet, their situation might improve? If so, what might dog-to-dog technology-mediated interactions actually look like?

Such things are explored in a paper for the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

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From Cato Institute:

Julian Sanchez discusses 2020 election security on WWLs First News with Tommy Tucker.

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From Michael Winship at The Moderate Voice:

The GOP is the party of overlook; Democrats must be the party of oversight.

Over the course of my dusty television career, I have from time to time run into situations where a certain Hollywood celebrity type will make a threat—not to do interviews or make public appearances on behalf of a show, for example—unless some egregious demand of his or hers is met.

It’s a trap. Even if you meet their demand, my experience has been that they still won’t do what you request, nor did they ever intend to, no matter how much kowtowing you do. The mean ones get a noxious thrill from their ability to manipulate and diminish others.

So Congress, have you met Donald Trump? By now, you of all legislative bodies should know that nothing you do or say makes much difference to him, that whatever he will or won’t do is based not on policy or philosophy or your stated preferences but on whim, ego and a feral sense of self-preservation.

Thus we have our own celebrity brat-in-chief, a thuggish tot whose response to every attempt to uphold the Constitution and to maintain the balance of power among the three equal branches of government is a childish but deeply dangerous, “I don’t wanna.”

Sent subpoenas for documents and witnesses, Trump replies, ”We’re fighting all the subpoenas” (I don’t wanna). Ordered by law to release his tax returns, the president claims he’s still under audit and by the way, no (I don’t wanna). Letters requesting the congressional testimony of such administration officials as Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and immigration troll Stephen Miller, forget about it (I don’t wanna).

That there should be checks and balances in government chafes Trump. He’s a control freak who brooks no criticism and wants total dictatorial power.

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From Dave Dubya:

Out of curiosity, I occasionally visit the American Conservative website. I even agree with some of their positions questioning Trump and Bolten’s war mongering against Iran and Venezuela.

One article prompted me to comment. It was called “Religious Liberty Vs. Building Progressivism”. Obviously it is a false choice. Yes, the famous “wedding cake issue” was mentioned, along with the obligatory twist of dire communist implications in opposing bigotry.

You’ve heard it all before. The author had a question for progressives. Do you believe that there are any cases in which defending First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty should take precedence over the building of progressivism? If so, what are they? If not, how, exactly, does your view of religious liberty differ from that held by the totalitarian regime that threw people like Silvester Krcmery into prison?

In other words, “How are you libs not Commies??”

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From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:

Churches and pastors who identify with the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement generally believe that marriage is for life and that divorce is a sin. While you will find a variety of interpretations among IFB churches and pastors, I can safely say they hate divorce. The Bible says in Malachi 2:14-16:

Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the Lord hath been witness between thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant. And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit. And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth. For the Lord, the God of Israel, saith that he [God] hateth putting away [divorce]: for one covereth violence with his garment, saith the Lord of hosts: therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not treacherously.

The Bible says that God hates divorce. IFB adherents often say they “love what God loves and hate what God hates,” so it should come as no surprise, then, that the sin of divorce is roundly hated. Not as hated as, say, homosexuality, liberalism, or sleeping during the pastor’s sermon, but definitely a top-ten sin.

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From Scotties Toy Box:

State Department Appeals Federal Ruling Granting Birthright Citizenship To Child Of Bi-National Gay Dads

When will these bigoted assholes just get over it and stop trying to tear families apart? The administration just cannot get over skin color and same sex marriages. Bastards. They may have to let the gays get married but they do not have to let them have the rights of marriage.

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From North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz:

This week as I giddily watched a small army of superheroes on-screen, laying aside their petty squabbling, past disagreements, and warring egos in order to defeat a delusional madman with contempt for half the planet, because they understood the moment and the stakes—I thought about the moment before us.

American Democracy is in the endgame now.

Our leaders are woefully failing us, our checks and balances are nonfunctioning, and our systems of protection have been compromised. We need to stop warring with one another because that has always been the supervillain’s game: get the good guys to turn on each other, divide and conquer, focus them on the wrong fight.

Progressives have a cancel culture, purity problem and if we don’t get over it—it’s going to destroy us.

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From News Corpse:

There is nothing more pitiful than a criminal who is caught red-handed in the commission of his crimes and tries impotently to convince everyone that he’s innocent. That’s the sorry state in which Donald Trump has found himself as he unleashed his regularly scheduled Sunday Morning Tweetstorm.

The flurry of panic-stricken whining from Trump included a some embarrassing missives aimed at a variety of trivial targets, mostly intended to act as distractions. They included a swipe at the Kentuky (sic) Derby wherein the President, who famously cheated in order to win, came to the defense of a horse that cheated and was subsequently disqualified. He also announced his nomination of Mark Morgan to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump had fired Morgan in the first few days of his administration because he was an Obama appointee. But now he’s been rehired after sucking up to Trump at least forty-nine times on Fox News. And Trump also made the painfully idiotic claim (again) that China was paying the United States for tariffs. Any first-year economics student knows that tariffs are paid by the importer (the U.S. company) and passed on to American consumers.

But without question the dumbest outburst of his morning rant was a pair of tweets attacking special counsel Robert Mueller…

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From PZ Myers:

In my years of science communication, sometimes contentious, there was one thing everyone agreed on: tell a story. Data dumps don’t work. Use a narrative hook, get the audience engaged, lead them through the whys and hows and leave them with some resolution, a conclusion, and maybe something to leave them asking for more. Every successful communicator knows this through and through.

(You can also go too far this way, though: many TED talks are terrible because they’re all narrative fluff and not enough plausible, substantive content.)

So. Yesterday my wife and I drive off to Sioux City, Iowa to a Bernie Sanders rally. We got in with a crowd of enthusiastic supporters, we got good seats up front, we got handed our Bernie signs. We listened to the band, we listened to the warm-up speakers (they were all fine), and then the main act, Bernie Sanders, appeared to wild applause.

He was good. I agreed with his position on every danged thing. But…

There was no story here. None at all. We got shotgunned with blipverts.

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From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

Barr is typical of what one would expect in a Trump attorney: undying devotion and loyalty in all matters. He also plays attorney word games to split legal points into a myriad of time stalling points. Trump has oftrn stated that he wants a Roy Cohn-type to help him in his legal matters, which shows how much of a thug Trump is, for Cohn was convicted and imprisoned on perjury charges long ago, and Trump, being both a mobster-in-chief as well as a liar-in-chief, prefers these types of persons to represent him. It also explains why he has kept Rudy GiuLIEani around him as a spokesperson. Rudy may once have been an honorable pracricing prosecuting attorney, but those days have long since passed, and today, he, too, is a partisan hack who has little trouble spouting lies just to stay in the public spotlight and be noticed by the media.

Jay Sekulow, a multimillionaire White House attorney, is part of Trump’s defense tram which is doing all it can to delay any further investigation of the mobster-in-chief, including stalling and dragging its feet on working with any further congressional oversight committees.

But the absolute worst of the bunch is acting counsel Emmet Flood, a savvy veteran D.C. attorney who has represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment ordeal as well as DICK Cheney on a civil suit. He is the perfect attack dog for Trump, and has mocked and belittled the Mueller Report as being a mere “law school exam paper”.

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