Combat! - Page 190 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

News media goes willfully ignorant over Obama selfie

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media December 11, 2013 3 Comments

The leader of the free world bites his lip.

AFP photographer Roberto Schmidt took this picture of President Obama, British PM David Cameron and Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt posing for a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Not in selfie: Michelle Obama, who remains sternly otherie. In his account of the image, Schmidt notes that he took the picture approximately two hours into the service, when much of the crowd was dancing and singing. Quote:

The atmosphere was totally relaxed—I didn’t see anything shocking in my viewfinder, president of the US or not. We are in Africa.

So start using “African funeral” as a euphemism for a really fun party. Also get ready for some top-flight outrage from such deeply investigative outlets as Fox News, which has already declared the photo an “international incident.”

Worldwide spying exceeds bounds of actual world

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror December 10, 2013 2 Comments

Some high-value tactical communication on World of Warcraft

I don’t know about you—because what am I, the NSA?—but I worry that blanket domestic surveillance will be a problem because the federal government could use it for evil. Recent developments suggest that I may have overlooked another possibility: blanket surveillance could be a problem because the government will use it to waste vast quantities of money and time. I refer, of course, to the news that intelligence agencies are monitoring Second Life and World of Warcraft. Props to Mose for the link. The NSA, FBI and CIA believe that terrorists and other international criminals could use online multiplayer games to secretly communicate with one another and exchange resources. In fact, terrorists are most likely to use World of Warcraft to get called fags by 14 year-olds in Ohio. It’s a real misunderstanding.

Ad says Black Friday protestors are paid, lazy millennials

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric December 9, 2013 1 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-BsjnlaPW8

The commercial above was produced by Worker Center Watch, a website registered to Parquet Public Affairs, a lobbying and PR firm led by Joseph Kefauver. Kefauver is the former president of public relations for Walmart and the former government relations director for Darden Restaurants, which owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden. Pretty much everything good and profitable in America has been publicly related by Kefauver, and yet his clients are the objects of massive protests. It doesn’t make sense. Walmart served 22 million customers on Thanksgiving Day, so Americans obviously support the idea of giving people who worked that night $8.25 an hour. The only explanation is that unions are paying lazy kids with great hair to protest.

Friday links! Securitocracy edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links December 6, 2013 0 Comment

NSA headquarters, which does not look arrogant or evil at all

Imagine that you are a wealthy member of one of the two parties that control the richest nation in the history of the world, or you run one of the corporations that made it rich, or you’re one of the people who work for those corporations or political parties to feed your family. America is doing great, but everyone also seems to agree that it is doing worse lately and is possibly about to stop doing great forever. Meanwhile, religious hillbillies on the other side of Earth have vowed to come here and randomly explode, plus an unknown but growing number of Americans have less incentive to support the status quo because present conditions benefit you much more than them. You are winning this game, but the game is almost over. If you were such a person, you might understandably organize your politics and your worldview around one central question: how can I keep anything from changing? What you need is security—order-maintaining, threat-identifying, future-avoiding security. Today is Friday, and anything different is necessarily bad for us. Won’t you arrest the progress of history with me?

Ravalli County planning commissioner warns of “drunk Indians”

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized December 5, 2013 0 Comment

Welcome to Hamilton! We hate you.

The last time we checked in with the government of Ravalli County, commissioners had rejected federal Title X funding and closed the county’s only family planning clinic. That was dumb, but at least it pertained to things the commission actually governed. Two weeks ago, county officials met with representatives from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to discuss their objection to the CSKT placing tribal land at Medicine Tree under trust of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Ravalli County gets $808 in property taxes from Medicine Tree every year, and they had appealed the CSKT’s disposition of its sacred land. Commissioners also warned tribal officials not to build a casino on it. Jan Wisniewski, head of the county planning board, took the floor at the end of the meeting to observe that jails in Havre are full of “drunk Indians” and that historically, Indians use trust lands to “get drunk and try and run back into the reservation so they don’t get caught.” You can read about it in my latest column in the Missoula Independent. In case you’re wondering if Wisniewski is in fact a great guy, the Tea Party stalwart also filed for election as a Democratic precinct captain in 2012. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.