Being on call for jury duty this week, I found this post particularly amusing.

Full-sized link.

While I can’t embed it in the page like I usually do for you lazy internet folk, I’m going to recommend that you flip over to this interview:

Tremendous piece by Bill Moyers’ Journal on The Wire, The Drug War, the corruption of American ideals, and the inevitable end of the American Empire. It’s all in there. You will learn more from David Simon here than in any civics or business class you have ever taken. So, click over and grow your brain immediately.

Someone must have had this baby memorize hours of Jerry Falwell sermons. I honestly can’t tell any difference between the two. Highly impressive.

A study featured in New Scientist this week showed that average people have a spectacular capability for short-circuiting their own judgment when in the presence of an expert.

This new data happens to fit perfectly into TMR’s 85% Theory. The theory states that since a large majority of professionals and advice-givers are incompetent, people should always take advice with a grain of salt and do their own due diligence before making decisions.

So, while I temporarily have the support of the scientific community on this one, let me preach for a moment: Don’t listen blindly to doctors, lawyers, accountants, politicians, brokers, astronauts, or clergy (or scientists). These people are just as fallible as anyone else. They are just as self-serving as anyone else. They are just as complacent and mistake-prone as anyone else.

Expert status is just as much a function of good publicity as it is of real practicable wisdom. You are almost always the most qualified advocate on your own behalf . And you always know yourself better than anyone else ever can.

In the words of Emerson,

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.”

Image via Kim Richter.com

For those of you, like myself, who aren’t particularly compelled by March Madness, here are some alternative bracket pools that you can follow:

Mentalfloss is running a “Tournament of Genius.” Einstein is, of course, the prohibitive favorite there. Keep an eye out for my sleeper pick, Nikola Tesla and fan favorite, Stephen Colbert.

On the flipside, HolyTaco is currently running the 2009 National Douchebag Tournament. You’ve got to think that A-Rod is in the driver’s seat here. While Bernie Madoff, Rush Limbaugh, and the Notorius AIG all have compelling cases, I’m holding out hope for Dane Cook to pull it out.

I don’t mean to be telling tales out of school, but friend and fellow Mepper, Storily Clayton, once shared with me a theory of time that I found both brilliant and strangely comforting.

The idea is as follows: If we think of time as the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun (which is how we typically measure a year), any given time is actually a very specific geographical position in the Earth’s orbit. In other words, the Earth is in a nearly identical spot today as it was a year ago. And so am I, and so are you, as are all other passengers on the giant blue sphere as it careens through space. We are constantly traveling through “time” at over 66,000 miles per hour around an orbital track over 585 million miles long.

This gives a strangely physical or spatial quality to time. And lends a lot more credence to the relativists’ notion of Space/Time as a single entity.

It also warrants a new type of observation. Are we prone to certain behaviors or actions at certain times of the year because we find ourselves in the same geographical location?

I mean, think about how returning to a formative location (a school you graduated from, a house you spent your childhood, a old familiar dive bar) affects your thoughts and brings back certain old lines of thinking, certain memories.

Now realize that visits to those locations are randomly strewn about space; each visit to the school (that wasn’t an anniversary of another visit) could have taken place hundreds of thousands of miles apart from each other (in the context of where you are in space). Relatively speaking, the only time when you’re anywhere near in the same place as you had been before, is on the yearly anniversary of a given day. Even if you are on the other side of the planet (having a circumference of about 25,000 miles) on that anniversary you’re still much closer to your location on that anniversary than a half hour later, when you’ve moved another 30,000 miles down the orbital track.

So Mr. Clayton often uses his blog as an empirical analysis of how different times tend to affect him. And I’ve begun to buy into this line of thinking. I just re-listened to Mep Report 18, an absolutely phenomenal specimen that we recorded almost exactly three years ago. And I listened to myself wrestle with life questions that have been occurring to me very recently. I suppose I can only truly be in the same mental “space” as I was for TMR 18 during this time of year.

Some food for thought.

Russ and the Christmas Curse, Greg Calls Natural Laws Out, What If God Was a Baby, Russ Goes to the Island of Dr. Santa Claus, Russ is No Longer a Fan of Cheese, Russ is Hit Over the Head With a Yuletide Log, 11 Months of Sanity Out of 12 Isn’t So Bad, Clea Calls the West Coast Out (Again), and Gandalf Claus.

Download Mep Report #111

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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:

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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.

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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:

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