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No wonder the economy is stagnating. Literally nothing is happening, everywhere. Here’s Fox New’s lead story today:
But I’ll have you know that I scooped ’em. I was reporting on this very topic over FIVE YEARS AGO, albeit in China.
What with all the faux-fervor over the “rushed stimulus bill,” and the general attitude of panic that grips our Chicken Little demographic, I thought we might all take a deep breath and observe something absurdly slow and deliberate…
Brandeis remembers its motto.
…since we’re doing the debate metaphor, I thought I’d finish with my “rebuttal” speech. But since Jehuda ended up “punting” (though not surprisingly and unlike Storey, I applaud him for it), I figure there’s no reason to go through some big point by point refutation. I’ll just make three final statements:
Get your day-glo vests and buckshot ready, it’s Fat Cat Season.
Average Americans, armed with incendiary e-mails and blog commentaries are actually beginning to affect Business As Usual. An op-ed from yesterday’s NYT documents the new populist fervor.
In debate, we have speeches at the close of the round called “rebuttals”. This terminology, despite its use in both high school and college, is something of a misnomer. To rebut something is to disagree, to counter-argue. The rebuttal speeches are actually the middle speeches, where everything being said is a refutation of an earlier argument and few to no new arguments are made. I think the phraseology evolved from the fact that new arguments are disallowed in “rebuttals”, but they should really be called “summations” or “closing arguments”.
Run away! Run away!!
Before Storey and I continue our pleasant little war, it appears Brandeis has already ended the debate, while pretending the sides weren’t the right ones to begin with. From Jehuda Reinharz to the Brandeis community today:
An artist’s rendering of 320,000 lightbulbs, or about the number of kilowatt-hours wasted every minute from a lack of efficiency in the home.
Part of a gallery of photographer Chris Jordan’s attempt to show people the staggering amounts of stuff we use up as a collective.
Great idea for a piece, though I would have have gone with a person by person account to hammer home the potential change that one dedicated individual can make. Also, I’d really like to see my personal lifetime bananas-eaten fractal image.
You're using me to justify what?!
I must admit I hadn’t expected a reply of any kind from a fellow Mepper, though I considered the possibility that some Brandeis alumns might disagree (though, as Storey points out, the vast majority of Brandeis alumni are as annoyed about this as I am)–but I must say I was pretty flabbergasted at Storey’s take on my post about the closing of the Rose Museum.
Einstein, a key figure in Brandeis’ founding, would have approved of this move.
Consider this my spirited rebuttal to Greg’s post from Monday.
Brandeis University e-mailed its alumni on Monday, January 26th to inform them of the decision to close the Rose Art Museum. This immediately struck me as a brilliant and courageous move to cut dead weight at an institution reeling from faith in the stock market and the fallout of the Bernie Madoff fiasco. Over the course of the next week, I learned that I was pretty much the only almunus in university history who felt that way (though surely there must be some alumni on the unanimous Board, no?) and that everyone was in a fervor rarely found among Brandeisians not discussing Israeli-Palestinian politics. What happened?
This Superbowl Sunday, as you’re huddling into your inflatable beer chairs with your Tostitos NachoMan helmet strapped firmly to your attentive brain cans, know this:
You are about to spend five to six hours watching an event in which you will see approximately twelve minutes of actual sport.
The rest of the time you will be a semi-conscious participant in the real event of the day. For, this day, America’s largest and most prestigious corporate advertisers will line up and attempt to sell you useless shit that you don’t need in a mind-bogglingly extravagant cavalcade of shilling.
