FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
From PZ Myers:

Good news, everyone! In the future, we’ll have flying cars! And the world will be deeply multicultural, a melange of different ethnicities, all working side by side, with equal status. That’s the bright side of the science fiction universe in Netflix’s Altered Carbon.

Now the bad side. The key innovation in this story is the ability to upload and download minds. Everyone is walking around with a little disk in their neck that archives their mental state and memories continuously; some people also have a kind of brain wifi that allows them to periodically upload everything in their head to a remote backup. This means that if someone dies, they can just cut out that disk, insert it into a new body, and voila, you are revived! Unless someone shoots you in the neck, unfortunately; destroying the archive is Real Death. If you’ve got the wifi option, you can also restore from the last backup.

Wait, what’s so bad about that? It’s effective immortality! That’s where the series is most interesting, in exploring the consequences of radical new technology.

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From Glenn R. Geist at MadMikesAmerica:

If you could somehow harness the immeasurable power of the sea, one of those things that actually is awesome after decades of that word’s erosion, you could do anything, destroy almost anything.

The mindless, angry sea: too frequently, somewhere on Florida’s Atlantic coast some ill-prepared and overconfident soul disappears forever, paddling off from the beach or motoring out of or into an inlet – and of course the sea, in its season comes ashore to visit, leaving only devastation.

Mankind is like a sea, dumb, implacable, destructive, but far more controllable. When it’s idiot rage comes ashore, our flimsy constructs, like reason, truth, justice, and progress hardly stand a chance.

I got a message this morning. Someone had posted a vicious, poorly spelled but confident diatribe against Obama and pro-Trump on a friend’s page – extolling the great success of Trump’s economic boom and I replied to it.

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From nojo at Stinque:

Here’s how this plays out:

Nothing changes.

The Memo has been Released, it’s being used as toilet paper by anyone not in the Treason Tank, and none of that matters. It might as well be a blank Doctor Who psychic card, open to whatever interpretation an enterprising traitor wishes to give it. Does it provide grounds to fire Rod Rosenstein and get at Robert Mueller? Sure, why not? Nobody ever took it seriously, starting with its authors. The Memo exists as a propaganda tool.

But you already knew this. A year in, we have achieved Groundhog Day, and we know how this plays out. It already has. Many times.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From The Borowitz Report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump collapsed from exhaustion after approximately ninety minutes of pretending to be a human being with empathy, the White House doctor has confirmed.

“In all my years of practicing medicine, I have never met a patient as healthy and vigorous as President Trump,” Dr. Ronny Jackson said. “But the sustained effort of simulating compassion proved too much for someone who has never exercised that part of his brain before.”

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From Green Eagle:

Well, I could not imagine anyone but the worst of right wingers using that sort of language about Hillary Clinton, let alone a widely known supposed progressive. In fact, it is as far as I can remember the most anti-woman comment that anyone ever made in my presence.

Okay, enough of my personal tale; now on to the point. We have all been distressed, I think, at the behavior of the Berniebots and Jill Stein supporters, and at their willingness to accept the 25 years of Republican smears directed at Hillary. I guess we are not all that surprised that they refuse to take one shred of responsibility for their falling for the Republican propaganda about Hillary, and for their very significant role in putting a miserably unqualified and corrupt Repubican in the White House for the second time in sixteen years. But (like many of us, I suspect) I mainly wrote this off as the attitude of polticial neophytes that just didn’t understand the damage that a Republican President could do, and failed to see their responsibility to the American people to elect a decent President who cared about poor people, sick people, anyone but the extremely rich. I guess I naively assumed that they would become more responsible as they saw the damage they did.

But what does it say to us when we see this same behavior at the very top of the “progressive” world, coming from people who certainly, somewhere deep inside, know the truth?

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From Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass:

And the representation in the population of privileged white conservatard men rises every day that working, patriotic Americans are railroaded out of the country.

With every lost immigrant, America gains more gun-crazed, racist and misogynistic assholes just panting for the chance to kill more ni**ers and cunts.

We are eating our seed corn.

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From Jonathan Bernstein:

If you blinked, you missed it, but there were actually two very interesting lessons to be learned from a brief flap on Thursday in which PolitiFact hired, then fired, former Democratic congressman Alan Grayson to be a “reader advocate.” Twitter exploded with complaints, and PolitiFact backed down. They’ll search for some other Democrat to pair with Republican David Jolly.

It seems that Grayson’s extreme partisanship, failure to respect the truth, and other poor behavior — including accusations of domestic violence and physically intimidating a reporter — have made him a rare point of partisan (and media) consensus.

Lesson No. 1: There’s nothing inherently conservative or Republican about radicalism, norm defiance, and other types of behavior that make Madisonian democracy difficult. I talk about Republican radicals quite often because there are a bunch of them in Congress who matter a lot, but that’s an artifact of all sorts of things, not something for which liberals (or centrists, or people at any other point on an ideological scale) are somehow naturally immune.

Lesson No. 2: The impulses may not be particularly Republican, but the two parties are very, very different.

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

• @bjork55 at Bjork Report is careful to redact the Nunes memo while keeping the essential purpose in a few words.
   
• Although it is partly based on dangerous disclosures of real life classified information, Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post is unimpressed with the Nunes fantasy memo.
   
• Since it turns out the Nunes memo is nothing, Dave Dubya at Freedom Rants releases the real thing with the Dubya Memo.
   
• nojo at Stinque notices a steadily growing hum. It is the non-legitimacy of those who administer our current government.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors references new polling that confirms the tectonic shift. The party of law and order now hates law and order. It strikes me as an ironic, but natural, mutation of a political party that has become history’s largest obstruction of justice conspiracy.
   
• The Borowitz Report has published a verified video showing Donald Trump lying under oath.
   
• Anyone catch my President’s SOTU? I got into about 45 seconds of what seemed like dishwater before I had to switch to an ancient episode of I-know-not-what. He was doing a Trump impression of a hostage forced to read a random note. Jonathan Bernstein says that, by making the speech an hour of nothing, Trump missed an opportunity.
   
• T. Paine, at Saving Common Sense, has some fun at our expense. Wants to know if we would prefer to pay old “Obama rates” this year. During the Obama years, most folks were not aware their taxes had been cut by Obama. Or that the deficit had been slashed. Or that the Trump cut will be replaced by a hike in a few years, except for corporations and the very wealthy. Or that folks like my friend T. Paine were once quite angry about the deficit. In fact, my friend once had a running total of the national debt on his site. Through some odd coincidence, my friend’s national debt presentation disappeared once Obama was out of office.
   
• Green Eagle researches the research and discovers just how high the Republican deficit will be.
   
• PZ Myers brings some perspective to the Muslim conspiracy to infiltrate the GOP.
   
• Meanwhile, here in Missouri, our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit visits, at least in writing, and hears our Attorney General blame today’s sex traffic on the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
   
• Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives produces the same old tired word salad in defense of the electoral college. It is a safeguard against majoritarianism. It is “intended to balance the power between the state and federal governments.” Actually the stated purpose, according to accounts of debates at the time, was to preserve slavery. I have had some thoughts on the topic.
   
• Joe Hagstrom at MadMikesAmerica says Mike Pence will never be President. He lacks the single quality Republicans have come to value most.
   
• Yellow Dog at Blue in the Bluegrass finds a Kentucky Chief of Police who directly orders his officers to shoot pot smoking kids, but only if said pot smokers are black.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil seems less than convinced by a religious conservative urging followers to never accept flu vaccines.
   
• The Journal of Improbable Research finds a New Zealand study proving your chances of getting into medical school drops substantially if your application uses apostrophes incorrectly.
   
• This week’s note in Trumpian ‘Alternative Facts’ comes from ABC News, casting a net into the flow of President Trump’s SOTU and coming up with a massive catch.