North Carolina rep proposes state religion

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment
North Carolina Rep. Harry Warren, who probably hates America

North Carolina Rep. Harry Warren, who probably hates America

Combat! blog is busier than a one-armed man in a puppet show today, so we barely have time to focus our hate laser on North Carolina’s plan to A) declare itself exempt from the First Amendment and B) adopt an official state religion. Don’t worry—it won’t actually happen. The bill, which explains that the state’s General Assembly “does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools, or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion,” is a reaction to an ACLU lawsuit against Rowan County’s practice of opening commissioners’ meetings with a Christian prayer. That seems like as good a reason to nullify the First Amendment as any. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links and, you know, a bunch of billable hours.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Twitter feed is insane

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media, Uncategorized 3 Comments
J-Coates

J-Coates

First of all, I stand by the addition of apostrophe-s to make possessive names ending in s, and so should you. If typing like EB White is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Second, and possibly even more important, Ben al-Fowlkes alerted me to this tweet from Joyce Carol Oates:

Screen Shot 2013-04-03 at 10.25.35 AM

I admit that I was skeptical. I suspected that this Oates tweet might be parody. And that is how I discovered the treasure trove of insanity that is Joyce Carol Oates’s Twitter feed.

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Medical device lobbyists sway Senate with relaxing truth massage

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments
Artificial hip

Artificial hip

In 2010, the Affordable Care Act included a 2.3% tax on medical devices, designed to offset the cost of subsidizing health care for low-income families. Last week, the Senate voted 79-20 to repeal that tax in response to heavy lobbying by the medical device industry. Weirdly, 34 Democrats voted for repeal—many of the same senators who voted for the original tax. What a difference 30 months, several dozens lobbyists and one false cost estimate make. According to Bloomberg, the “reasonable assumptions” that the trade group AdvaMed used to estimate the cost of the tax “conflict with economic research, overstate companies’ incentives to move jobs offshore, and ignore the positive effect of new demand created by the law.”

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Close Readings: North Korea’s declaration of war or something

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 2 Comments

 

This is sarcastic clapping. I will turn your production of Our Town into a sea of fire.

This is sarcastic clapping. I will turn your production of Our Town into a sea of fire.

On Friday, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ruined imperialist weekends by declaring war on South Korea and the United States, sort of. The official declaration is hard to interpret. On one hand, you’ve got sentences like “It is the resolute answer of the DPRK and its steadfast stand to counter the nuclear blackmail of the U.S. imperialists with merciless nuclear attack and their war of aggression with just all-out war.” It sounds like they’re standing in steadfast resolve to attack us mercilessly/nuclearly, right there, but then you also get sentences like this: “The state of neither peace nor war has ended on the Korean Peninsula.” So maybe Kim Jong Un is threatening nuclear peace. Also we’re pretty sure he does not have nuclear capabilities, and the whole baffling plate is slathered over in a runny translation that makes this state declaration sound like it was edited down to 500 words from 1000, then stretched out again to 750. In short, it’s a prime candidate for Close Reading.

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Friday links! In retrospect, it was obvious edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment
A modern classic. A fun thing to do is Google this image and see how many knockoffs there are.

A modern classic. A fun thing to do is Google this image and see how many knockoffs there are.

Even more than projectile motion, our understanding is bedeviled by the arrow of time. So many things seem obvious in retrospect, and yet they arrive like thunderbolts in the way that only a new piece of obvious information can. Okay, I guess a thunderbolt can arrive that way, too, since that is how similes work. In retrospect, it was obvious. Constantly, we are not so much learning things as realizing them, and once they become real to us they cannot be un-known. Today is Friday, briefly coalesced from the unknowable future on its way to the rigid past. Won’t you realize some mind-blowing stuff with me?

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