Perhaps this was massive, world-interrupting news yesterday and I slept/vomited through it, but a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against broad federal collection of cell phone data, saying that the program “surely” infringes on the Fourth Amendment. Blanket domestic surveillance from the NSA is by no means over, but it seems likely to suffer a serious blow in the next six months. DC District Court Judge Richard Leon stayed his injunction to allow the federal government time to appeal—something it almost certainly will do, so business as usual recently revealed by a dude who has to hide in Russia. But Leon also called the programs “almost Orwellian” and said James Madison would be “aghast” if he knew about it. He meant to say “a ghost.”
Gross, dead, I speak to you from the nether plane
I Googled the phrase “dead ghost,” hoping to find an image that would express my physiological state, and I got this amazing blog post. That first sentence resists me, either because it is difficult to understand or because my cognition has been impaired by bacterial meningitis. My god, the things that come out of me. I can’t go five minutes without some loud biological emission, and my head feels like I’ve been chewing a tongue depressor. I am sick. My eyes don’t work right. The wheels are coming off and, as usual, the blog is the first to suffer. There is no blog today but my lament. I am like Job, only instead of patiently suffering I curse whatever force is behind this illness, be it God or that girl at the burrito place who looked like she had a cold. Pity me from afar.
Megyn Kelly can’t believe no one got her joke
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjkqeRyfqSs
There is no Combat! blog today, so that I can make deadlines for paying work. If you guys wanted reliable Monday-morning posts, you should have sent me a bunch of Bitcoins or, better yet, hunks of gold. Precious, precious gold—but I digress. The point is that I need to do work, son, and nothing I write could surpass the thrilling mendacity of what’s already out there, anyway. For example, in the video above, Megyn Kelly assures us all that she was just joking when she insisted Santa was white. Her original declaration had all the hallmarks of humor: she said it with a straight face, no one on the panel laughed, and—the sure sign of a joke—it was about black people when none was around. But everyone attacked her for it, which just shows how society still has a pervasive bias against Fox News. Fox News can’t even get a cab at night, and has there been a Fox News president? Again I digress. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter what Megyn Kelly thinks about Santa. He’s still going to come to my house, drink the grape soda and Chili Cheese Fritos I set out for him, and leave me a bunch of wool socks. Maybe, if you’re good, he’ll leave you a Combat! blog tomorrow morning.
Friday links! Doing it wrong edition
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYlJqf4dLI
I’m no internetrician, but I think Megyn Kelly’s declaration that both Jesus and Santa are white was our most quickly-disseminated viral video yet. She said it Wednesday night, and I saw it on Facebook before noon. Maybe it’s because it was seasonal and Megyn Kelly is pretty, as marketeers would have you believe. Or maybe it’s because in this moment, Fox wildly underestimated the sophistication of its audience. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he’s white” is a claim too simultaneously petty and absurd for anyone to swallow. Also, Jesus was a Mediterranean Jew, but whatever—the point is that our massive architectures of social and political control are surprisingly bad at controlling us. Today is Friday, and the most powerful people on Earth are doing it wrong. Won’t you revel in their incompetence with me?
Here’s what’s wrong with the Daily Kos
Thanks to Facebook’s policy of allowing entities my friends have “liked” to post articles to my news feed, I saw this story in the Daily Kos, headlined “Teen Kills 4; Judge LITERALLY Lets Him Off Because He Is Rich!” First of all, you will know your objective news sources by their uses of exclamation points and capital letters in headlines. Second, you’ll be glad to hear that a Texas judge did not literally let off 16 year-old drunk driver Ethan Couch, because he was not literally on a hook. Certainly, Couch being sentenced to probation after he killed four pedestrians while driving with a blood alcohol content of .24 is infuriating, especially in context of the defense’s claim that he had lived a life of such privilege as to not understand the consequences of his actions. But there is a difference between the local CBS report and the one in the Daily Kos, and that difference seems to be between news and something else.



