“There’s what’s right,” H.I. McDonough notes in Raising Arizona, “and there’s what’s right, and never the twain shall meet.” He was explaining why it’s okay to kidnap a baby, but it also applies to contemporary politics. Regular readers know that I support virtually every sort of transgression you can think of. It’s a paradox, because I’m also a big fan of individual conscience. Life is like a game of Monopoly, in that A) children have  a hard time finishing it and B) the written rules are not enough. You can set forth laws governing every aspect of human behavior, experienced and projected, and still they will not hold your society together in the absence of individual conscience. Just as a decent person will be good even when no one is supervising, a crappy person will invariably find ways to suck in accordance with the law. Today’s link roundup features conflicts between what’s right and what is (mostly) legal, and they remind us that a ship steered only by whistles and the lash is bound to sink. It’s kind of a bummer, actually, which is why it will be interspersed with movie clips. Because I care about my readers, and not so much about copyright law.

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Combat! blog is taking a personal day today, which is a good time to think about capital-l Life—known more popularly as death. Today’s New York Times ran the succinctly compelling headline Bob Anderson, Sword Master, Dies at 89, and sure enough, there is the life of an eventually-elderly badass you’ve never heard of but have, in fact, seen. Anderson played Darth Vader in the light saber combat scenes of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, which makes him a part of my recollected childhood arguably more vivid than the third grade. He was also an inter-service fencing champion for the Royal Marines in the 1940s. Go ahead—picture the man above as a 22 year-old in basic training, whacking at another 22 year-old with an épée and wondering whether the Red Chinese will invade Korea. Then picture him in 1981 as someone explains to him what the fuck a Star War is. Now picture him lying in bed thirty years later. The scope is impossible, widening the picture until the man in the middle becomes a technical problem of scale. I heard about this man by reading the newspaper the day after he died. Possibly, several years from now, I will not be able to remember his name. The question of what it all meant surrounds any person’s death in a way that suggests the very origin of meaning. In this case, analogous like the other cases, it is perhaps best to say that Bob Anderson loved fighting with swords.

 

 Combat! blog incurred a terrible hangover last night in the process of observing the thirtieth birthday of a certain federal employee who shall not be named. Nothing is so important as holding our eyes absolutely still. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to admit light through his pupils, much less read, so instead here is the annual holiday greeting from MMA Fighting’s Ben al-Fowlkes. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.

 

Did you know that the CIA keeps statistics on distribution of wealth and income in various nations? Historians and sociologists have long considered income equality a prime indicator of social stability, which is why our friends at Langley have something called the Gini Index, which assigns numerical ratings to income/wealth distributions according to their deviation from the Lorenz curve. Don’t try to understand the Lorenz curve from that Wikipedia introduction or your brain will explode. In fact, don’t think about the CIA’s inequality ratings at all. Especially don’t think about how the difference between the US Gini Index score from 2000 and our score from 2007 is greater than the difference between our 2007 score and that of Papua New Guinea. Since the end of the Clinton administration, America has gotten halfway to achieving the economic equality of Mexico. We’re more than halfway to Zimbabwe. We continue to be less equally distributed than Iran and Cambodia. Of course, our overall standard of living is much, much higher than what those countries enjoy. Considering that the Gini Index is tabulated as a measure of social stability, though, it should be noted that our Central Intelligence Agency considers us a more fertile land for unrest than Turkmenistan. But that’s nothing to worry about.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5ZFenb_flY

 

Combat! blog starts its vacation today so that I may fully prosecute my war on Christmas. I call it Total War on Christmas, and it strikes at Christmas’s very ability to wage war. Anyway, enjoy whatever culturally reified version of an earlier religious ritual is most meaningful to you this year, and I will see you next week. I presume I will be typing on that solid gold touch-screen Zune.