Seldom Balanced – Usually Fair
From The Journal of Improbable Research:
The mystery of whether drinking coffee affects people’s minds is still mysterious, thanks to the results of a new, complex academic study of many old, complex academic studies:
“Habitual coffee consumption and cognitive function: a Mendelian randomization meta-analysis in up to 415,530 participants,” Ang Zhou, Amy E. Taylor, Ville Karhunen, et al., Scientific Reports, epub 2018.
From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:
I was listening to the Bill Cunningham show on WLW-700 on my way home from my doctor’s appointment today. Cunningham had as his guest Brian Tome, pastor of Crossroads Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cunningham and Tome were discussing the untimely deaths of children, young adults, and family members. Tome, evidently, was brought on the show to give advice on handling such deaths. What he did, instead, was spend the time throwing up cheap, worn-out Evangelical clichés. On one hand, Tome went out of his way to say, hey, I am just a regular guy who is looking for answers to questions concerning life and death. On the other hand, he was the typical preacher, ever ready to give an answer when he should have, instead, kept his damn mouth shut.
From Tommy Christopher:
It was three weeks ago Sunday that James Shaw Jr. stopped a mass shooting at a Waffle House in Tennessee. And it took that long for Trump to finally contact him.
On Monday afternoon, deputy press secretary Raj Shah opened the White House daily briefing by quickly noting that Trump called Shaw that morning to “commend” him. The 15-second mention contained no direct quotes from the call.
From Jonathan Bernstein:
Now is the time to finally fix the presidential order of succession.
The order of succession outside of the vice president is determined by legislation, not the Constitution, and it’s changed several times over the years. The current law has several problems. By inserting the speaker and the Senate president pro tempore into the line of succession, the law raises the possibility of a partisan incentive to remove the elected officials, at least during times of divided government. That’s a terrible idea. The president pro tempore of the Senate, regardless of party, has no business being involved with this at all — they get that distinction by having the most seniority, which means that half the time it’s someone long past their prime. And there has been more than one recent senator with the job who wasn’t remotely capable of handling normal Senate duties, let alone the presidency.
From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:
The swamp doesn’t drain itself, as we seem to learn again and again, so it comes as little surprise that some multinational corporations are having a few regrets that they paid millions of Ameros to Comrade Stupid’s Stupidest Lawyer, Michael/Mikhail Cohen.
As we know, AT&T wanted to buyTime-Warner, and Novartis didn’t want to negotiate drug prices with Medicare. So you know, what better way to get what you want from a crook than to bribe him?
In the time-honored tradition of being a mark, they didn’t get anything other than being taken.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson:
“There is no other way to say it—AT&T hiring Michael Cohen as a political consultant was a big mistake.”
Novartis CEO Vasant Naraimhan:
“We made a mistake in entering into this engagement and, as a consequence, are being criticized by a world that expects more from us.”
From Blue in the Bluegrass:
You don’t piss off the people who cook/serve your food or who cut your hair. And you don’t deliver public, deadly insults to the judge who handles all the lawsuits against your maladministration.
Gov. Matt Bevin went after a Kentucky judge Tuesday, the day after that judge ruled against Bevin’s procedural motion in a lawsuit over Kentucky’s new pension law.
“I now have the most incompetent hack of a judge — I don’t know if in Kentucky, but certainly one of the worst — who happens to be in Franklin Circuit Court,” Bevin said in a radio interview on 55KRC, a talk radio station in Cincinnati.
From Frances Langum:
I keep hearing that the one thing Trump is good at is Reality TV, but is no one in charge of optics when it comes to Russia?
I guess they only care what one person thinks about their Russia policy, and that’s Putin.
From The Onion:
“It’s very beautiful, such a beautiful custom,” said Trump of the cherished Israeli pastime of mowing down unarmed Palestinians with rifle fire. “They’ve been doing this for years, but this is the first time I got a chance to watch the whole ritual. It’s really something, very powerful. Other countries use just tear gas, but here, they outright murder people for throwing glass bottles. I can really see something like this catching on in the United States.”
From John Scalzi:
Dear Humanity:
Thank you so much for your application to join the Intergalactic Federation of Civilizations (henceforth abbreviated as the IFC). We regret to say that after careful consideration by our Admissions Committee, we are currently unable to offer you admission, either as a full or probationary member of the IFC. Indeed, I have to confess there was serious consideration as to whether we should refer your application to the Containment Committee as possible evidence of the need for a quarantine of your planet and sequestration of your species. But after a close vote, we decided simply to table the matter and move on.
I understand that this news will come as a disappointment to many of you. While it is not the practice of the Admissions Committee to offer detailed explanations of its decisions to reject applicants, I understand that, as this is your first attempt at an application, you may benefit from a few hints, tips and pointers that will put your civilization in better stead if and when you ever choose to apply for IFC membership again. So in the spirit of helpfulness, and to give you something productive to do with your time, here are some of the reasons committee members gave for rejecting your application.
From nojo at Stinque:
Facts, as we know them, haven’t been around very long. It was only a hundred and fifty years ago that science, literacy, communications, and availability of written material started kicking in, providing the distribution of knowledge beyond previously limited enclaves.
It was exciting at first, knowing the world as it is, instead of what we thought it was. New discoveries! New understanding! New breakthroughs! All with the promise of more amazing things to come, soon as we got more facts under our belts. Finally, humanity was being liberated from millennia of superstition!
Yeah, funny thing about that: Folks stopped caring.