As David Hume reminds us, what often appear to be fundamental connections joining the elements of experience—causality, the consistent self, the unity of objects—prove little more than illusions when we examine them closely. Sure, we like to think that the component parts of our culture cohere into a sensible whole. The nomination of Elena Kagan seems to say something about the tension between a youthful, tolerant United States and an old, angry America, just as the laxity of our federal regulators appears vaguely connected to the popular belief in an omnipotent supervisory force that abides in space, but who knows if that’s really true? When you get right down to it, our most urgent attempts at sense-making amount to, as Emily Dickinson put it, “a bunch of bullshit.” It’s Friday, it’s 73 degrees and sunny in Montana, and Combat! blog has embraced nihilism. Sure, I could tie together this week’s links into some sort of totalizing theory, as I am generally wont to do, but that would rob you of half the fun. Like an undiagnosed schizophrenic alone in his studio apartment filed with pictures of Kennedy, painstakingly circling the first letter of each sentence in the New York Post, it’s more fun when we figure it out for ourselves. This week, Combat! blog presents a bunch of stuff that happened. Something is going to happen tomorrow, and we don’t know what.
Thursday is melt your brain with theo-philosophical reasoning day
Good morning, Christopher Hitchens! I'd like to trade you my argument that a transcendent plenitude of being is the necessary predicate of universal contingency for your rat's ass. No? Not gonna do it?
It’s Thursday, and you know what that means: its time to read theist critiques of the philosophical logic behind contemporary atheism! You don’t remember us doing this every Thursday since the creation of this blog? Well, I do, and the onus is on you to prove that we haven’t. In the meantime, I’ll be running for the local school board. Nah—I’m just messing with you. You can’t prove a negative, unless you use an indirect proof to demonstrate that assuming the negative’s opposite results in a logical contradiction—like, for example, when you point out that an omniscient god could not also be omnipotent, since his certain knowledge of the future would delimit the field of his own actions. That’s one of the many appealing but ultimately bankrupt arguments* 
for atheism that Eastern Orthodox theologian David Hart mentions in his dense, insightful and enormously infuriating indictment of “the new atheism” in May’s issue of First Things, which I assume is on your coffee table right now. Hart, who is the author of a book called Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, (beach reading!) contends that the present cottage industry in books indicting religion is a poor, pale imitation of atheism’s great past. He writes like CS Lewis listening to a tape recording of his own voice, but he makes an interesting point. From the standpoint of rigorous logic, contemporary atheism has become sufficiently popular that it needs to start watching its ass.
She seems like a nice lady. Loves cats.
Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, seen here at the mouth of a cavernous, damp space.
If Elena Kagan isn’t a lesbian, she’s about to have her feelings hurt. The Solicitor General and Supreme Court nominee is a former dean of Harvard Law School, served as an Associate White House Counsel under Clinton, and otherwise—as our disturbingly uniform national media points out—has a mighty thin paper trail. She’s never sat as a judge, so we can’t pore over her rulings to determine whether she’s going to require abortions in church or allow mean dogs wearing American flags to preside over secret terrorist trials or whatever. Her academic writings are well-regarded but also famously technical. And you can’t tell anything about her just by looking, either. Nope—not one thing. She’s like an empty vessel, or maybe a vase with a calla lily in it, or one of those orchids by Georgia O’Keefe. She has emerged freshly formed into the national spotlight from Obama’s side like Eve, or Lilith. Maybe more like Lilith Fair.
Combat! blog completely buried
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V_DsL1x1uY
Combat! blog has been buried in a terrible avalanche of last-minute work today, and will be frantically falsifying knowledge on a variety of subjects for the rest of the day, and probably a good portion of the night. We’ll be back tomorrow, bleary and stumbling. Until then, enjoy the foregoing history lesson, starring my friend Jake Johnson. Everybody working now.
Rhetoric watch: Krugman on the disintegration of government
"Allowing our mascot to be hunted to near-extinction since 1849."
In the course of last Friday’s Link Roundup, we mentioned that members of the Department of the Interior tasked with regulating the oil industry were revealed to have “[taken] bribes and engaged in drug use and sex with oil industry officials” in 2008. That was awesome. In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman promises more cops-‘n-robbers-get-together-to-do-coke-and-shout-out-the-window-of-the-squad-car frivolity with the headline, “Sex & Drugs & the Spill.” It turns out that’s just a come on, though, for a column about how anti-government sentiment can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the kind of thing you need to do when you’re competing for eyes with Freakonomics. It’s like when Maureen Dowd wrote about the hot, throbbing need for derivatives regulation.*