Back in the day (4000 BC–1948,) people looked to the alignment of the stars for broad assessments of their cultures. They did not know that the universe is constructed around lopsided circles like a child’s science project—probably because they had neither science nor, for very long, any particular child—so the seemingly random movements of the heavens constituted huge, baffling signs. Basically, the sky of our forebears was like the first dude your mom dates after the divorce: vast, inscrutable, and by those virtues ominously significant. If it looked all pretty, like Sagittarius the Dog was chasing Polonius the Squirrel across Poseidon’s Scales or some shit,* then they were doing good. If there was a comet or the sun went out, their culture was doing Bad, and they had to ransack their homes looking for gay dudes or pork or books or whatever. It completely sucked to live in our ancestors’ world, is what I’m saying, which is why being alive is so much more popular among people who were born recently. Recently we have the germ theory of disease instead of pogroms, and instead of the stars we have the news. If you look up at the news just now, I believe you will discern a terrifying omen.

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As you may have noticed, Combat! blog existed last week only in a deathlike, remembered state. First of all, thank you to everyone who wrote and urged me to post some blog entries, for Chrissake. Your support makes me feel like people actually read and care about Combat! blog, and also like I could use service outages as an attention-getting device in the future. Here’s what happened: starting Monday, every time I tried to log in I was redirected to a page that explained I did not have sufficient permissions to view that page. This Kafkaesque fuckaround A) persisted all week and B) was apparently due to some corruption in some root directory that I did not possess the WordPress kung fu to fix, and I read codecs. WordPress codecs and their associated support forums are excruciating, by the way. I was going to spend this afternoon building a temporary version of the site with iWeb—which is what we used to do back when we had three readers and iWeb’s notorious Google search limitations were not a major concern—and redirecting our URL to that until I could implement a WordPress architectural fix, but as of an hour ago my login problems are magically gone.

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A useful concept from the social theory of revolutions is reification: the degree to which a given system or way of thinking has manifested itself in concrete forms and therefore become resistant to change. The idea of the heritability of property, for example, is highly reified—in probate law, in the use of pratronymics as family names, in the strong association between ethnicity and land. Reification doesn’t just affect socioeconomic systems or broad mores; it can also take hold in cultures, codifying ideologies and systems of behavior so that it becomes difficult for people to leave or join a given culture. In politics, this phenomenon is called 2008 To Present. Since the election of President Obama—an occasion of joy for much of the country and of bitter resentment for a voluble minority—the lines between different cultures and different political affiliations have become increasingly A) sharp and B) congruent. One can predict with great precision what a Republican will think about a given policy proposal, and with great accuracy who will agree with him. The beautiful horror of cultural reification, like watching a lava flow over a rain forest and then set up, is that it has much more power than, say, logical argument. It’s Friday, and today’s link roundup features multiple instances of reification proving more powerful than argument, information, sense or the pleas of elementary schoolchildren. Won’t you abandon persuasive discourse with me?

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Because of a series of free choices I made last night, which just happened to be the midpoint between my thirty-third and thirty-fourth birthdays, Combat! blog was Combat? Blearrgh! all day. Do you sometimes miss work because of drinking? I do apparently, and I think we can all agree that my new life as an alcoholic will be even more exciting than what has come thus far. The only hitch is that I never want to drink alcohol again, but I’m sure that will change as I get alone-er. Good news on that front: I did get the number of a young lady who had accumulated so many drink tickets that as I was leaving she won a snowboard in a raffle, and as soon as I learn her name, we will be in business. While I regain homeostasis, how about you read this fascinating article about how you kill a religion? You say you wouldn’t, but what are you gonna do when religion kicks down your door in the middle of the night and starts menacing your family? If you’re picturing Southern Baptist in this hypothetical, it’s because you’re a racist. I know—I’m an alcoholic.