Combat! blog flies through air, isn’t useful

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 2 Comments

667airplane

There is no real Combat! blog today or even tomorrow, because my friend Curt is getting married. Such an event is likely to occur only two or three times during our lifetimes, and I’m going to the bachelor party. By Monday, I will be dead. If somehow I am not, we’ll be back with more actual blog. In the meantime, how about you read Ezra Klein’s damning indictment of the Senate on the occasion of the failed gun control bill? You know you want to lose even more faith in the Senate. I’ll see you in a few days, unless I go blind.

Dead Idea Watch: Elitism

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 4 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSurzeGvPrQ

Behold—behear, I guess—“Accidental Racist,” Brad Paisley’s and LL Cool J’s attempt to settle this black/white thing once and for all. Attention white people, particularly those involved in poetry slams: please stop talking about race. There are lots of ways you can do it cogently and inoffensively, but there are also a lot of safe routes through a minefield. Well before LL says “RIP Robert E Lee, but I gotta thank Abraham Lincoln for freeing me,” this song turns into Claymore City. I first became aware of it via Grantland’s Rembert Browne, who argues that the appropriate response is not indignation but smirking disdain. It’s hard to ignore a song from history’s greatest country music singer and today’s hippest rapper, though, which is why Will Shetterly has taken to the New York Times to explain why elitists hate “Accidental Racist.”

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Someone please explain why that happened

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 0 Comment
Two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon yesterday.

Two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon yesterday.

My first thought when I woke up this morning was that I would find out who bombed the Boston Marathon, and maybe why. As of this writing, no explanation is available. From a practical standpoint, that should not bother me so much; it pales in comparison to knowing that, say, an eight year-old boy was among those killed, or that several people who had just finished running 26 miles suddenly had their legs blown off. That is catastrophe, right there. It is disaster, in the same sense as a tornado or an earthquake, which also happened yesterday. The difference is that in nature, a bunch of screws and BB’s and nitrates do not spontaneously fly together and make a bomb. Somebody had to do that, and I would like to know who it was so that this disaster can become a tragedy.

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ALEC model bill makes taping farm cruelty an act of terrorism

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 1 Comment
Gay lambs

Lambs forced into the homosexual agenda at a cruel farm

Earlier this month, the fifth of five Butterball employees pled guilty to criminal animal cruelty, in the culmination of a two-year investigation that began with the activist group Mercy For Animals covertly taping mistreatment at a North Carolina turkey farm. A Department of Agriculture veterinarian, Sarah Mason, was convicted of obstruction of justice for tipping off a friend at the Butterball farm just before they were raided. On the same day the last Butterball employee pled, North Carolina state senators introduced the Commerce Protection Act, a bill making it illegal to videotape farm conditions that is modeled on ALEC’s Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act.

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Friday links! Dearth and taxes edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments
Just a little 2008 Democratic primary lolcat tax humor, courtesy of Google

Just a little 2008 Democratic primary lolcat tax humor, courtesy of Google

Future humans will find the image above completely inscrutable. I’m kidding—they won’t be able to look at it, because the loss of present-day operating systems will turn all digital files into gibberish. It’s inevitable, just like death and, presuming I can get a free minute this weekend, taxes. Pretty much all the inevitable things suck. Otherwise we wouldn’t be trying to evit them in the first place. Today is Friday, and all that might have been avoided has come to pass. All that cannot be prevented will happen, too. Won’t you hurtle forward helplessly into the gaping maw of the future with me?

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