It’s a brand new week, and I feel like shit’s fat brother. I have the flu, and I know exactly where I got it: at Thursday night’s birthday celebration for the venerable Brad Monahan. That’s where a three year-old greeted the arrival of our pizzas by standing on his chair, putting his hands on his back and coughing—straight up into the air and sort of left to right, like a sprinkler. I felt liquid hit my face. I did not restrain myself form eating pizza in any way, which is why A) I should not be in charge of my own behavior and B) children should be briefly boiled upon arrival in any restaurant. While I sweat through a series of disturbingly cyclical dreams, how about you enjoy this exhaustive inquiry into the Kony 2012 phenomenon. It’s either great or hideously cynical—probably both!

Since we spent so much of the week railing against declinism, I figured we’d take Friday to argue that American society is going down the tubes—you know, in the interest of fairness and balance. I’ve learned to use those words to refer to the opposite position of what is true, because I regard contemporary discourse as so broken that it doesn’t matter what I say. Thus does cynicism propagate itself. Of course, it is a true fact that empires rise and then fall again. Straitened people achieve great things, and into this greatness they bring a generation of entitled pussies. That was probably our parents, and now we are absolutely livid with them that we might have to do something to remain the Earth’s only superpower. It’s Friday, and Rome is in decline. Won’t you make the potentially disastrous mistake of eating a bunch of olive oil and dates with me?

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