Friday links! Impending vacation edition

Participants in the Appleseed Project learn to shoot a man-sized target at 500 yards. Seriously.

Combat! blog is just one Friday link roundup away from its weeklong vacation, and this is it. There will be no Combat! blog next week, because my urbanized ass is going camping in the wilds of, um, New Hampshire. Obviously this period of discombatery will be difficult for all five of us, so today’s link roundup is designed to give you as much to think about for the next week as possible. By “think about” I mean “ponder nervously while you fail to sleep.” It’s the gift that keeps on giving: the gift of fear, and it’s all over American politics this week. Whether it’s guiding our decisions or just coalescing around them years after the fact, absolute scared-shitlessness is the unifying principle of apparently everything of note in contemporary culture. Won’t you catch a chill with me?

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Combat! blog flies through air, isn’t useful

Greetings from the middle seat of row 32 on a 737 to Reagan International Airport, the airport that everyone remembers as much better than it actually was. Very little of value can happen on Combat! blog from this position, since even the uploading of photographs doesn’t work here. We’ll back tomorrow, but in the meantime check out this fair and balanced article from Fox News, about a woman who was expelled from her graduate program in counseling for her refusal to counsel homosexuals. Two things are striking:

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Work sucks, Combat! blog acquiesces

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCv8wClAC38

As you can probably judge by the lateness of the hour, Combat! blog is behind in its paying work today and has no time for astute cultural analysis, much less what we usually do. Instead, enjoy this video clip from the “Art of Gracie Jiu Jitsu” series, which explains the then-nascent discipline of Brazilian jiu jitsu to the world via grainy video clips of Royler beating hell out of karate instructors. Even if you’re not a jiu jitsu fan—and I frankly find that position baffling—you can appreciate the serene, nature-documentary narration as Royler mercilessly hits this poor man in the ear to get him to roll over. Enthusiasts will enjoy the entire series, which also contains perhaps the most humiliating refutation of hapkido ever caught on tape. Protect your neck and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Friday links! Unprovable assertions edition

One can only imagine what life is like for an engineer, or a commercial fisherman, or some other person whose survival is predicated on their assessments of things actually corresponding to the world around them. The real racket is commentary, where ontology goes out the window in favor of epistemology, and once epistemology gets comfortable it stops wearing pants and starts leaving Mountain Dew bottles full of chew spit on the coffee table, while simultaneously claiming that it cleans up “all the time.” As in fashion, the trick in commentary is not to be right so much as memorable. Even being publicly proven wrong is a moment of career advancement, providing at worst an occasion for further commentary. Frankly, we at Combat! blog are a little jealous that we’re not getting a bigger piece of the pie. We’re wrong all the time, but nobody ever pillories us for our specious claims, much less our constant use of the word “rimjob.” One suspects that we simply need a bigger megaphone.

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Combat! blog flies through air, isn’t useful

Combat! blog woke up in its brand-new apartment at 5:30 this morning and dove immediately to the airport, where it was beset by all the sights, sounds and smells of the modern age. In addition to getting an extremely detailed explanation of how drip coffee is made from the man in line next to me at the airport coffee place, I also witnessed a woman who had purchased two seats from Denver to Des Moines and found herself unable to fit into them unsuccessfully argue for a free third seat, at that time occupied by a man trying valiantly to read his book. Half an hour later, she was upgraded to two business-class seats. Anyway, that’s A) why my flight was delayed and B) why Combat! blog does not really exist today, since I am sweating sack in Des Moines and still under two deadlines. We’ll be back tomorrow, bright-eyed and American obesity epidemic-oriented. In the meantime, have you been keeping up with Tea Party Jesus?