Friday links! National Donut Day edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 21 Comments

The picture above is of my friend Nick, captured in honor of today being National Donut Day. I love motherfucking donuts,* as anyone will tell you, but Donut Day is not what interests me about this photo. What interests me is Instagram, the website on which it was posted, and their ad copy: “Robert is using Instagram—a fun & quirky way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures. Snap a photo, then choose a filter to transform the look and feel of the shot into a memory to keep around forever.” Let us put aside “quirky,” in the same way that Caeser put aside Cicero, and consider how choosing a filter will “transform the look and the feel of the shot into a memory.” It’s true that memories are low-contrast and color saturated, just like Polaroids. Long after Nick and donuts are forgotten, this photograph of a man in military dress eating a croissant will implant a flickering, false memory in all who view it. You can see him taking the next step across the office—is it that much more difficult to see it happening from the same perspective in the room?

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Palin bus tour leaves nation in desperate need of real talk

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment

Combat! blog is buried in paying work today, so the interns have all been set to researching and composing while I drunkenly supervise them. That’s fine, because I think we all need a little more time to consider the significance of Sarah Palin’s bus tour. The Times’s Michael Shear sure does. From his flub in the opening sentence—do they not script these? do they lack the technology to do a second take?—to his “analysis” that the tour looks like a campaign, but Palin says it isn’t, this video reminds us why the Times will be remembered as a really good newspaper. Check out the sound bite in the middle, though, when a reporter asks Palin if she wants the press along for the trip, and she responds that she feels like she doesn’t have a choice. That’s where a dignified press corps would turn on its heel and walk away, right there. Instead we get this:

And the embed code doesn’t work. Thanks, New York Times! At least I can still count on your real estate articles about apartments in other countries that aren’t for sale. You know what the American people and their self-appointed leader need? Real talk.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdaAWFoWr2c

Palin says national bus tour not about publicity

By Dan Brooks in Just Sayin' Stuff 4 Comments

"I wish I could stop thinking about me, too! (Cat sound)"

Good news, you guys: the One Nation Bus Tour—a multi-state junket that began in Washington, DC and will conclude in the quadrennially-significant state of New Hampshire at some unknown point in the future—is not about Sarah Palin or publicity, despite Sarah Palin having publicly announced it to reporters before her bus disappeared. If the lamestream media wants to act like the former vice presidential candidate’s trip up the east coast in a bus with eagles and primary source documents painted on the side of it is a campaign tour, that’ll just be the sort of bullshit they pull. As she explained to Greta Van Susteren:

I know that many of the mainstream media are looking for kind of a conventional campaign-type tour. And I’ve said from the beginning this isn’t a campaign tour, except to campaign on our Constitution.

Okay so, um, is a campaign tour, then? When you say you’re campaigning on something, you are still campaigning—even if, as Palin elaborated, all you want to do is “highlight the great things about America.” That’s like Dick Clark saying that really it’s about New Year’s Eve. Even more belying promotional video after the jump.

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Utah legalizes gold, silver currency

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 2 Comments

The official Utah state human being

The Utah legislature moved a step closer to complete insanity fiscal independence this month by declaring gold and silver coins legal tender in the state. Sort of: no laws have been passed requiring merchants or banks to accept an ounce of 24-karat gold with Rush Limbaugh stamped on the front, but as of a week ago, it’s still totally money. It’s just that legally, parties to a contract cannot be required to accept it as tender for debts public or private. This raises the question of exactly how those pieces of precious metal constitute currency, but that’s not important. What’s important now is that, thanks to Republican state representative Brad Galvez, Utah doesn’t use federal bills. Don’t worry, by the way—he isn’t crazy. “We’re too far down the road to go back to the gold standard,” Galvez acknowledged to the Associated Press. “This will move us toward an alternative currency.”

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Friday links! Spectrum of problems edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments

I will never get sick of you, lolcats.

We learn as children that “problem” is a relative term. Even a quick foray into epistemology suggests that we classify as problems only those conditions that fail our expectations; I don’t call it a “problem” that I continue to be unable to fly up into the air and shoot lasers out of my mouth, despite the certainty that learning to do so would improve my life, particularly when I’m in Target. But it’s not a problem because I never really thought I’d get it. This is why you always see footage of people smiling and dancing in Uzbekistan and whatnot: they are not aware that, from an empirical standpoint, they live on a big pile of shit. Here we arrive at a corollary to our first observation, which is that the problems of others are often astoundingly horrible compared to ours, yet paradoxically not very important. Basically, the problems of everybody down the Doing Okay Chain from us are mind-rendingingly abject, and those of everyone up the chain are risibly petty, but nothing in either direction is as big a deal as having to sit by the annoying lady at work. It’s Friday, empathy is asymptotically impossible, and the spectrum of problems is bizarre and alienating. Except right in the middle, where we are—that part is of dire urgency. Won’t you work your way toward it with me?

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