Syria Versus The God of Guns

    So on Wednesday, Congress decides whether to bomb Syria. Why, though? Is there just some rule
somewhere that says the US has to throw explosives every time shit gets crazy in the Middle East?

    Kind of, actually, yeah.

    The stated purpose of these proposed missile strikes is to enforce the UN's convention against chemical weapons. Chemical weapons aren't really good for winning wars. They're only really good for killing tons of civilians in horrifying ways. Nobody really likes them except for terrible, terrible people. But if your opponent might be using chemical weapons, you've got a lot of incentive to start using them too. So a while ago, the UN was like "hey guys, let's all agree not to shoot each other with toxic clouds of death. Sound cool?"

    And the world was like "Sure, UN. Whatever."

    Because the problem with the UN is that it's an earthly authority. Lightning doesn't strike you if you break the rules. That's where the US comes in. We HAVE orbital lightning in this country. We spend most of our money on the stuff. The interesting question to me is how we ended up cast as the Old Testament God.

Miley Cyrus Makes People Feel Things

    Okay fine, let's talk about the VMAs.

    Miley Cyrus's performance (some would call it "behavior") was an impeccably hewn diamond, each facet trolling a different subset of the internet with laserlike precision. She hit all the big ones. She was obscene, she was hideously racist, she's just not very good at dancing... And then there's anger at the event itself. There's her collaboration with Robin Thick in his apology for rape culture. There's the way she's been slut-shamed. There's the fact that she's distracting from actually important issues. There are even people who are angry about how angry everybody is. Miley Cyrus and the VMAs are, in effect, the worst thing to happen on the internet for at least several minutes.

    I have seen terrible things on the internet before. I think we all have at least one gaping asshole or horse-sodomy video we're still trying to purge from our subconscious. What interests me about this "scandal" is that everybody's equally up in arms about it, but we're all mad for different reasons. That says to me that there is perhaps something more primal, more unifyingly "human" going on here.

The Hyperloop is Elon Musk's Ticket to Olympus

    Okay, so, full disclosure: I really, really wish I was Elon Musk. I wish I was Elon Musk because the thing I spend the most time wondering about, out of all the things I spend time wondering about, is what the mass of ordinary human beings must look like to a person who is operating on a greater-than-global scale. I wonder about the kinds of questions you start asking yourself when you no longer have to ask "how am I going to pay all these bills?" I wonder what qualities a person has to possess to get to that rarefied zone. When Elon Musk crawls out of his diamond pit in the morning and hops aboard his private robo-pegasus to glide to work, do the blurry little dots scurrying along the streets below him look like people?

    Why am I asking these questions? Because Elon Musk just issued a challenge to the entire State of California, and I'm trying to fathom the endgame.

Where are the Trayvon Martin Riots?

    It's August now, four months since George Zimmerman was acquitted in April, and hardly anything is on fire. A couple whites have been beaten and robbed. A couple of hispanics. Time has passed, and the media has moved on. So this article is coming a little late, but that's kind of the point.

    I live on Chicago's west side, in a neighborhood that boasts two or three empty lots to a block. Some of these lots are fairly new, the only solution the city can find when an abandoned building becomes infested with squatters. Most of them, though, date back to April, 1968. When I take the train downtown, the first train station I pass is a charred skeleton, a stop that has remained unused since it was burned down by rioters. That was also in 1968.

Lollapalooza is God, And God Is Blackout Drunk

Sup guys. I'm new here, so allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cory O'Brien, and this is what most of my days are like:

     Lollapalooza was hardly an hour old, and a gangly boy in a muddy yellow t-shirt had already become an object lesson in collision physics. In the midst of the mob he was safe enough, bobbing as he was in a sea of people animated by a tsunami of bass, but take the crowd away and he became a newborn wildebeest with half the requisite number of legs. I could tell you what music we were listening to when this happened, but you've got the whole rest of the internet for that. Instead I am going to tell you about the crowd, because the crowd is where I found the agents of the gods.

     More accurately, they found me. My friend and I were a little sick of having all the hollows of our anatomy vibrated in four-four time while strangers cheerfully attempted to feed us their elbows, so we retreated to the relative safety of the port-a-potties, where the only danger was hepatitis. I wasn't too jazzed about locking myself in a closet full of other people's shit, so I opted to wait outside. I found a few square inches of lightly-trampled grass to call my own, and began juggling to pass the time. This was my first mistake...