The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has released its recommendations for returning federal deficits to manageable levels, and like the rest of the country, I’ve caught Fiscal Responsibility and Reformomania. In previous eras, my condition was only treatable with a frontal responsibilobotomy,* but modern science has given us several options. We can cut defense spending and reduce Social Security benefits for new retirees. We can eliminate certain deductions and return income tax rates on the wealthy to historically normal levels. We could stop invading central Asian countries for seven years at a time because God told us to. Or we could look at this slate of tough decisions, vitally important to the preservation of our way of life and , and puss out and do nothing.

Continue reading

Social interactions will become strangely more difficult as your appearance declines with aaaaaaage!

Now that the most world-altering and profound election in our nation’s history for at least the next two years has come and gone, it’s time to make broad pronouncements about the future. You know this game: each player makes a series of unfalsifiable claims about impossibly broad national, global and temporal trends, secure in the knowledge that the prediction will be forgotten long before the predicted comes to pass/turns out to be total bullshit. Sure, the prognostications and trendspotting say more about the biases and fears of the prognosti-spotter, but that’s always been the soothsaying game. Horoscopes, tarot cards, palms—they’re all just cold readings, and the job of the modern reader is no different. It’s the crystal ball in reverse—the mirror ball, if you will, and just because it insists on only telling us about the gypsy doesn’t make it any less reflective. Won’t you join the party?

Continue reading

Scully. Scully! We have to get to the Sublime concert.

Ah, the future—a glittering world of flying cars, helpful robots and weird Singaporean dudes who will sell you a frozen eyeball. At least that’s what I always envisioned, but as the future keeps getting closer (2025,) it seems more likely to be defined by floods of corporate money and amazing technological progress in the field of explaining why we can’t do anything about it. The titanic forces we once imagined wielding threaten to wield us, as the ability to extract resources from anywhere on earth and magically replicate and distribute cultural products boils down to bottled water and rap albums that you can’t loan to your friends. It’s a digital world, and a democratized world, and possibly even a virtual world, but the money is still real. And what is money if not a force completely beyond our control that has existed forever apart from human whims? Today’s link roundup is all about the future, near and far, humorous and scary, greedy and greedy. So put on your shiny, buttonless shirt, affix your breathing apparatus, and set the DeLorean for 2010: we’re going sideways to the future!

Continue reading

It’s been a fairly amazing week at Combat! blog, what with Christine O’Donnell and Ginni Thomas restoring our faith in the human capacity for stunning feats of public dumb. Amidst this epic stupidity, though, we risk forgetting the real defining human quality, the one that animates our daily lives: mendacity. While a couple outliers were garnering all the attention with their reverse phoenix act, thousands of hardworking journalists, political commentators and cardinals were churning out the half-reasoned opinions and appeals to popular prejudice that make the world go ’round. Whether they’re lionizing the dumb for the strength of their numbers, dressing up their bigotry as victimhood or forcibly conforming other people’s fictional worlds to their own, the stars of this week’s link roundup remind us that we can be dim pinpoints of honesty in a vast, formless void of dissembling. Or we could be on TV! The choice is ours to make, and one of the two options is winning in a landslide. Fortunately, we on the losing side have our frustration to console us. Won’t you yell at a screen with me?

Continue reading