Friday links! The future is yesterday edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 2 Comments

Just as we will inevitably build really good robots if we survive long enough, they will inevitably enslave us. That's how time works, right there.

Ever since I learned to write the date as mm/dd/yy in elementary school, I have looked forward to November 11th, 2011. The possibility of writing the date simply by making a series of vertical slashes—11/11/11, with what I envisioned as mounting frenzy—thrilled me, and I looked forward to that distant day as the fulfillment of my particular historical privilege. That I would probably not be completing and dating several worksheets each day at age 34 did not occur to me. I have finally arrived at 11/11/11 with no checks to write or spelling tests to date, and the future seems oddly disappointing. Tomorrow, I will have been alive on November 11th, 2011. My millennial privilege will be behind me, and I will have to confront the classic existential tragedy: what I always thought of as the future is now the past. It’s Friday, prelude to a future weekend, and the present is not as we expected. It’s still pretty weird and crazy, though, if you consider what we expected at age 10.

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Oops.

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 5 Comments

Safe territory

Like most Republicans, Rick Perry knows that government is the problem. But like a shining, lantern-jawed metaphor for his fellow candidates, he is not so clear on which aspects of government need to go. Definitely regulation. Probably taxes, especially for rich people. And uh, when you get right down to it, there’s no need for…um…ah…I’m smiling warmly right now. Is it working? At least my agitation has spread to Ron Paul, who is now waving his hand around like it’s trying to fly away. Video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUA2rDVrmNg

It’s possible that will not be good for his campaign.

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in inside Michele Bachmann's head 4 Comments

Patiently waiting for a new Austin Powers movie

Everyone knows that Michele Bachmann is not going to become President. As with a lot of things everyone knows, it’s hard to tell whether Michele Bachmann knows that. The congress-woman from Minnesota is currently running at 3% support among Republican voters, just ahead of Rick Santorum, although her Gallup recognition score is among the highest. Basically, as many people know as much about Bachmann as possible, and three out of every 100 of them like what they hear. Taking my sixth grade class as a representative sample, that’s roughly the same percentage of the population that wets their pants in a given year. Yet Bachmann continues to behave as if she were a candidate for President. This week, she “vowed to eradicate socialism throughout the entire US government,” before noting that many of her fellow Republicans were socialists themselves. If history has taught us anything, it’s that a widening crusade against Marxists will never backfire on a congressperson from the upper midwest. But that’s not important now. What’s important is figuring out whether Bachmann actually believes she could still be President, and just what the fudge is happening inside her head.

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Pew: Wealth gap between young and old at all-time high

By Dan Brooks in Baby Boomers 3 Comments

Around here we occasionally take swipes at the Baby Boomers, alleging that they have, for example, constructed a culture around catering to their own narcissism that they now blame for everything. But the real objection to the boomers is that there are so many of them. That’s why so much TV in the 1980s was about the 1960s—or simply about being thirty—and why in August we declared that a 66 year-old had the best body in the world. It’s also one reason why it’s so difficult for a person my age to buy a home, and probably why half the country insists we cut all functions of government except Social Security, and maybe why the financial services industry dominates the economy and Congress. The Baby Boomers bought all the houses and made all the money and voted in all the congresspeople already, and now they are enjoying a well-deserved lockdown on society after five hard decades of mere dominance. If all this sounds like unsourced complaining to you, consider the news from the Pew Center that, in 2009, the gap in wealth between young and old reached an all-time high.

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Force the White House to talk to you with petitions

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 6 Comments

You fuckers are lucky there aren't 5,000 of me.

Here is something amazing that the federal government is doing right now: if you put together a petition with 5,000 signatures, the White House will respond to whatever that petition asks. It’s like praying, if god actually existed and/or cared what people thought about him. At a time when a lot of people think the United States has strayed from Constitutional principles, this program is an unprecedented realization of the First Amendment. The people have the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances—something that almost never works when you do it via an actual petition, which is to contemporary politics what asking for a snack machine in the cafeteria is to student council. Nobody with a letter after his name has given a rat’s ass about petitions since the Sherman Act, until now. The good news is that this new program is very well-timed, since the internet has made the logistics of petitioning easier than ever. The bad news is that the two petitions answered thus far have 1) asked the President to legalize marijuana and 2) demanded that the federal government acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrial life.

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