A blog by Dan Brooks
The single largest audience for HBO’s Girls is white men over 50. Fifty-six percent of the show’s audience is male. I got those fun facts from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s indictment of Girls in the Huffington Post, which he wrote because “win six NBA championships” was crossed off his to-do list. It is weird that Kareem composed a critical review of a TV show. What’s really weird, though, is that he makes a lot of very good points.
Harrison High School—who wouldn’t want to go there five days a week as required by law?
Last week, police arrested a 14 year-old student for bringing two handguns and 47 rounds of ammunition to Harrison High School in Montana. According to another student, the boy said he did so for political reasons; he wanted to prove that you didn’t need an assault rifle to shoot up a school. Later, in a detail that reminds you the person in question is 14 years old, prosecutors said that he decided to run away to the mountains and use the guns to hunt food. You actually do kind of need a rifle for that.
I’m not saying I’m a genius continental philosopher, but I also have a mustache.
Nietzsche wrote that a great idea in the hands of common people will become itself common. I’m paraphrasing, here. Thanks to the internet, the common people have access to more great ideas than ever before, or perhaps the same number of great ideas plus several hundred million shitty ones. It’s hard to tell, in this brave new world, which is which. Once an idea like umadbro? is embraced as clever by hundreds of thousands, who’s to say that it isn’t great? Anyone of discernment or even interiority, that’s who. Today is Friday, and the common people are full of ideas. Won’t you smugly disdain them with me?
Vincent Hancock defends his gold medal in skeet shooting at the 2012 Olympics.
For some reason—probably to convey that he, like all other Americans, just loves to fire a gun—Obama told the New Republic that “we go skeet shooting all the time” at Camp David. Exactly who “we” is remains unclear; he specifically exempted his daughters but said that guests use the range at the presidential retreat often. Presumably, “we” means that he goes, too, and obviously, the president is lying. The president hates guns, as anyone who hates the president will tell you. To support this story, Fox News has found an anonymous source who says he has been to Camp David a half dozen times, yet only knows of Obama shooting skeet twice. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE-PGR7G1P0
That’s former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, delivering the opening remarks at today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence. As you may remember, Giffords was shot in 2011 by Jared Lee Loughner, whose list of complaints against her included her failure to completely answer his question, “What is government if words have no meaning?” at a 2007 campaign event. Something is wrong with Loughner’s brain. Thanks to that and his legally-purchased Glock 19, something is wrong with Giffrords’s brain now, too. After she struggled to speak on an issue that affects her and thousands of other Americans on a very personal level each year, Wayne La Pierre took the stand to disagree with her, because that is his job.