I drank alcohol, you guys

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment

That bear is drunk!

Oh, man. I consumed alcohol last night in order to become intoxicated. I ate only tacos. I drank only more alcohol. Then I awoke with a medical-grade hangover and shouted into Spencer’s toilet. The toilet was unmoved. It has seen worse things than that. I remain deeply affected, however, and there is no Combat! blog today, because I am a drunkard. It turns out rarely drinking and doing hot yoga for a year leaves you woefully underprepared for LA Thanksgiving. While I spend my day in 72-degree convalescence, how about you watch this comeuppance?

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

We all get what we deserve.

Combat! blog flies through air, isn’t useful

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment

The illusion of flight

In a just world, this would be a full post, and I would be writing it from Los Angeles. Also the executive officers of United Airlines would work in a salt mine where I would be a rabid bat. It doesn’t sounds so bad—shrieking, biting, nightlife—and it’s no worse than I deserve. Ours is not a just world, however, and I spent the night in Denver’s palatial airport Marriott. You would not believe the mechanical problem that grounded us. It had to do with the spring-loaded cover on the trash in the lavatory, and more specifically with the process of transmitting the paperwork that proved the damaged trash cover had been inspected. For this I lost a day of vacation. While I pity myself and await my yogurt parfait, how about you read this baffling instance of The Way We Live Now. I’ll be back tomorrow with a clearer view.

Is Bill O’Reilly fucking with us?

By Dan Brooks in lying 6 Comments

Those of you both of you who read Combat! blog regularly know that we grapple with a perennial question around here: do demagogues like Michele Bachmann or Bill O’Reilly actually believe what they say? It’s an unanswerable question, like the exact velocity and location of an electron. To know whether a Bill O’Reilly’s insane falsehoods are delusions or lies is, first, to know whether they are actually false, or if we are the ones who are deluded. Even if we mustered the certainty for that, we would have to further parse whether his audience believes him, or if they view the O’Reilly Factor as an ideologically thrilling romp along the lines of Taken—and if we think we’ve pinned that down, we incur the sub-question of whether O’Reilly is participating in the joke or trying to deceive them. Uncertainty of uncertainties—all is uncertainty. Then I saw this.

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Friday links! Supernatural explanations edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 4 Comments

We think of history as a pretty much continuous forward march of human knowledge, but it’s not as if there are a fixed number of things we are ignorant about. We know more than our medieval counterparts, sure—but can we really say that what we don’t know is any less? There’s our expanding territory of knowledge, and beyond that there is conjecture, limitless the way the space outside a picture frame is limitless. Today is Friday, and ours is a baffling universe. Won’t you comfort yourself through supernatural explanations with me?

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Close Readings: Dick Morris on the Romney landslide

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 1 Comment

Harrumph!

On Halloween, political analyst and former Clinton adviser Dick Morris besmirched the good name of The O’Reilly Factor by predicting that Mitt Romney would win in a landslide. He had sailed that claim majestically around the mediasphere for weeks, despite the fact that it was, you know, insane. Romney did not win in a landslide. No actual data suggested he would, but Morris—an ostensibly unbiased analyst—had, in his own words, “worked very hard for Romney.” Was he deluding himself? Kind of. Was he deluding others? Also yes, kind of, as he explained to Sean Hannity in a thicket of prevarication that is the subject of today’s close reading. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. Bad faith after the jump.

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