A blog by Dan Brooks
J-Coates
First of all, I stand by the addition of apostrophe-s to make possessive names ending in s, and so should you. If typing like EB White is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Second, and possibly even more important, Ben al-Fowlkes alerted me to this tweet from Joyce Carol Oates:
I admit that I was skeptical. I suspected that this Oates tweet might be parody. And that is how I discovered the treasure trove of insanity that is Joyce Carol Oates’s Twitter feed.
Artificial hip
In 2010, the Affordable Care Act included a 2.3% tax on medical devices, designed to offset the cost of subsidizing health care for low-income families. Last week, the Senate voted 79-20 to repeal that tax in response to heavy lobbying by the medical device industry. Weirdly, 34 Democrats voted for repeal—many of the same senators who voted for the original tax. What a difference 30 months, several dozens lobbyists and one false cost estimate make. According to Bloomberg, the “reasonable assumptions” that the trade group AdvaMed used to estimate the cost of the tax “conflict with economic research, overstate companies’ incentives to move jobs offshore, and ignore the positive effect of new demand created by the law.”
This is sarcastic clapping. I will turn your production of Our Town into a sea of fire.
On Friday, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea ruined imperialist weekends by declaring war on South Korea and the United States, sort of. The official declaration is hard to interpret. On one hand, you’ve got sentences like “It is the resolute answer of the DPRK and its steadfast stand to counter the nuclear blackmail of the U.S. imperialists with merciless nuclear attack and their war of aggression with just all-out war.” It sounds like they’re standing in steadfast resolve to attack us mercilessly/nuclearly, right there, but then you also get sentences like this: “The state of neither peace nor war has ended on the Korean Peninsula.” So maybe Kim Jong Un is threatening nuclear peace. Also we’re pretty sure he does not have nuclear capabilities, and the whole baffling plate is slathered over in a runny translation that makes this state declaration sound like it was edited down to 500 words from 1000, then stretched out again to 750. In short, it’s a prime candidate for Close Reading.
A modern classic. A fun thing to do is Google this image and see how many knockoffs there are.
Even more than projectile motion, our understanding is bedeviled by the arrow of time. So many things seem obvious in retrospect, and yet they arrive like thunderbolts in the way that only a new piece of obvious information can. Okay, I guess a thunderbolt can arrive that way, too, since that is how similes work. In retrospect, it was obvious. Constantly, we are not so much learning things as realizing them, and once they become real to us they cannot be un-known. Today is Friday, briefly coalesced from the unknowable future on its way to the rigid past. Won’t you realize some mind-blowing stuff with me?
The Fort Peck Indian reservation. Not pictured: everything.
Probably you read it this morning between cloves at Butterfly Herbs, but here is my most recent column in the Missoula Independent, wherein I excoriate the state legislature, again. The Montana legislature meets for six months every two years. It’s designed to be an efficient body, but the 2013 session has been cavalcade of weird and unnecessary bills set to the ongoing neglect of real problems. The state’s medical marijuana law is still verkakte. As the Washington Post pointed out, reservation schools are facing significant funding cuts after sequestration. We have a $400 million-plus budget surplus, and Republicans and Democrats remained locked in an argument over whether to give it back to homeowners all at once with a rebate or by lowering property taxes for the next four decades. Meanwhile, Fort Peck Elementary can’t afford to give paper workbooks to kids. So far this session, Montana legislators have proposed laws nullifying any future federal ban on assault weapons, requiring FBI agents to get permission from local sheriffs before serving warrants in the state and, most recently, allowing the salvage of road kill for meat. That last one passed. If you’re reading this in Montana, now might be the time to send a quick email to your state representative reminding him or her to unfuck him or herself. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.