Pun Salad

Alcohol is responsible for more than 5% of all deaths worldwide or around 3 million a year, new figures have revealed.

Whatever happens to Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats have normalized yet another illiberal position in their pretend crusade to save the Constitution from Donald Trump.

“Doesn’t Kavanaugh have the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America?” CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono this past Sunday. “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases,” was her unexpectedly honest answer.

Democracy is the rule of hooligans, and hooligans demand hooliganism from everyone else. Check Facebook, the news, the English department’s faculty meeting, or Twitter, and you’ll see that modern democracy is characterized by a tribalistic, neo-barbarian* ethics. Here are the rules of the game.

1. You must take a side immediately.
2. You must believe what your side says on the flimsiest of evidence.
3. You must not question what your side says.
4. You must prove your loyalty by taking ever more extreme versions of your side’s view.
5. You must never notice hypocrisy on your side, but must find it everywhere on the other side.
6. If the other side tries to reason with you in good faith, presume their explicit arguments are mere propaganda covering their dark beliefs and evil motives. 
7. All evidence for your side is to be believed; all evidence against it is to be dismissed.
8. You must denounce apostates, skeptics, and heretics to your side.
9. People and cases are not to be judged on their individual merits, but on their membership in our tribe or theirs, and on the usefulness to our tribe of taking a stance one way or another.
10. Nuanced analysis is forbidden.
11. Anyone who repeats these 11 rules is to be denounced as a traitor and an apologist for evil.

Tech giants get a lot of well-deserved flack for playing at partisan politics, picking sides in policy disputes, and suppressing speech and ideas that don't fit well with their dominant political ideology—or promoting those that do. Even some of the companies' employees' find the internal culture stifling, such as the Facebook workers who recently derided the social media behemoth for "a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views." But for a glimpse of real danger, consider what happens when Google, the dominant search-engine company, teams up with a regime it apparently finds agreeable, and lends its considerable clout to reinforcing authoritarian rulers' control over their suffering subjects.

Google left China in 2010 after realizing that there was no end to the demands and intrusions the government would make, no matter how the tech firm tried to comply. But now the company appears willing to do almost anything asked to win access to the vast market. And what's being asked of the company is that it help the government control its people.

HEAVEN—The Lord of all creation has reportedly bumped up the scheduled date for the consummation of all things after briefly checking Twitter Monday morning and verifying that things are much worse off than they were a year, a month, or even a week ago.

The timeframe to kick off the end times has been set in stone from eternity past, but the Almighty agreed to push it forward "just a little bit" after staring into the abyss of Twitter this morning.