Combat! - Page 331 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Conservatives accuse own conference of gay takeover, Muslim conspiracy

By Dan Brooks in lying January 19, 2011 3 Comments

Glenn Beck shouts "Howard Stern's penis!" into the microphone at last year's Conservative Political Action Conference, shortly before being dragged offstage.

The Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation and Liberty University have all pulled out of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, citing CPAC’s inclusion of GOProud as proof of “how committed they are to advancing the homosexual agenda.” Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. Obviously, the Republican Party has been taken over by a gay conspiracy; any schoolchild will tell you that. What you may not know is that several members of the CPAC board are also under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood. So says Pamela Geller and several other conference participants, who claim that directors Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist, of all people, are secret Islamic supremacists. Seriously. I’m not saying that contemporary conservatism is defined by conspiracy theories, bigotry and religious persecution, but I am saying that if you put a bunch of spiders in the same jar, don’t be surprised when someone gets his liquefied organs sucked out.

Good night, sweet prince

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas January 18, 2011 2 Comments

In a blow to snide remarkers everywhere, Michael Steele is no longer chairman of the Republican National Committee. He has been replaced by a man named Reince Priebus, who certainly sounds amusing, but seems unlikely to go on television and talk about how he’s so street that sometimes he wears a hat backwards without even thinking about it.* We are not likely to see another Michael Steele. That’s kind of ironic, because there are already two of him. As Ben al-Fowlkes and the Huffington Post recently pointed out to me, the story “Michael Steele loses RNC chairmanship” threatens to be eclipsed, in our minds if not in our lives, by the story “Daily Show retires Michael Steele puppet.” Video after the jump.

Happly MLK day!

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized January 17, 2011 3 Comments

Today is not the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior’s actual birthday, but it is the new day white America has given to him for the purpose of work scheduling. Thank you, Dr. King, for offering your life to create real change in the lives of millions of Americans and provide a three-day weekend/guilt-free conception of society to millions more. As you know, Combat! blog rigidly observes all federal holidays that give us an excuse to knock off work, and there will be nothing of interest posted today. But wait! A lot of people ask me what, when I’m not concocting totalizing theories based on a sandwich commercial I saw once, I do with my day. Okay, almost no one asks me that, but I can often work the conversation around to it. One of the things I do when I’m not et cetera is write a series for Machinima.com, the website where people use video-game source engines and voice-over actors to create animated shorts. The first episode went live last night. Behold! (Warning: profanity, gross zombie, cavalier attitude toward death and social inequality, uncanny valley.)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs6BTBqZFRM

I think it’s exactly what Martin Luther King had in mind.

Friday links! Max Headroom edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized January 14, 2011 4 Comments

Combat! blog was down much of this morning for reasons I still don’t understand, forcing me to assume that we were pirated by 1980s cola advertisement/conceptual art project/daylight hallucination Max Headroom. Remember that guy or possibly thing? It took a particular society and moment to produce such a baffling quantum of culture, and I remember he felt Very Important at the time.* Particularly in his weirdly dystopian television show, Max Headroom seemed a harbinger of things to come. Watching him now, one is struck by A) how oddly slow-paced he seems and B) how apt a prediction he was. Our discursive world is weird. An outside perspective might call it surreal. Don’t click on “More…” unless you want to explode your brain.

Scientists identify religious gene, intractable research problem

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas January 13, 2011 1 Comment

A giant Pacific octopus, since pictures of scientists are boring. The octopus is the scientist of the sea.

In their ongoing quest to determine why other people believe in stuff that cannot be demonstrated by logic or cutting open a mouse’s brain, scientists have identified a gene that predisposes people toward religious belief. They’ve also identified a classic problem of deductive reasoning. Citing the World Values Survey, Cambridge economist Robert Rowthorn noted that “adults who attended religious services more than once a week had 2.5 children on average; while those who went once a month had two; and those who never attended had 1.67.” From these statistics, he concluded that “the more devout people are, the more children they are likely to have.” Kombat! Kids: can you spot the flaw in Professor Rowthorn’s reasoning? Probably not, because there are only 1.67 of you for both Combat! readers.