Beyond expressing my sorrow for the lost and injured and all those affected by this tragedy, I have little to say about the horrific events in Arizona yesterday except one thing. Regular Mep readers / listeners will know all of us here put a high value on communication and the power of rhetoric; the two greatest speakers of the twentieth century (arguably) were Martin Luther King and Adolf Hitler, and I don’t think anyone needs a cheat sheet to determine which person pursued the good and which the evil. What yesterday conclusively, definitively proves is that rhetoric is not an unalloyed good. It is a neutral tool, and it has consequences.
Good morning. Have the highest resolution photo ever taken of a nebula (specifically, this is the Carina Nebula.) Alright, you may now go about your business. Never mind the utter wonderment that is commonplace in our universe. Go get yourself a decaf latte that you might sit and properly worry about the scratched spoiler on your Honda Civic. It really matters. A lot.
No commentary for you this evening on the Arizona political depravity egged on by vapid celebriticians. Suffice to say, it’s bad out there. And it will get worse before it gets better. No fretting about that now, though. It’s Saturday night. Have some Norweigan mountain ranges. Nobody has shit on them yet, as far as we know.
Been staying up past my bedtime and re-watching Network. If you’re not familiar, the Paddy Chayefsky creation is one of the finest screenplays ever written. It also eerily predicts the rise of pundit-driven entertainment/news. Many commentators have noted that NewsCorp’s Glenn Beck is a rather transparent re-creation of Howard Beale…
The following piece features the voices of Joe Rogan, Bill Hicks, and the Bizarro Reagans. In posting this, I do not wish to convey that drugs are necessary to transcending the narrowness of your daily perceptions. They can help, if used properly. The real point is that it is your responsibility as a human to remain curious, to absorb more of the world than your traditional senses can impart, to access deeper parts of yourself. And, for the love of everything, you need to start doing this now.
Thousands of dead blackbirds plummeted out of the sky and fell on Beebe, Arkansas this morning. Though this is hardly a novel occurrence, it may be that the planet is trying to tell us something — in the way of a choking victim desperately pleading for a Heilmlich…
I’m not usually one for New Year’s resolutions. But, if I could offer one to you Meppers, by way of suggestion: spend the year tempering your use of facebook. Let’s face it, facebook is 98% nonsense and 2% usefulness. You could take up professional lawn bowling this year and have a much more productive life in the outside world.
Only five years or so late, RedLetterMedia has finally released its critique of the final installment of the Star Wars prequels. And it was actually worth the wait.
Our population doesn’t sound so massive when it’s in those terms, does it? Nor when it is explained that, shoulder to shoulder, the world’s population could fit in Los Angeles. If only we didn’t eat, burn, and crap so much, we could totally sustain this species.
Another TheraminTrees piece, this one on conformity studies. Particularly of note, was the Weaver study, which established that hearing something multiple times makes it more convincing even if you are hearing it repeated by the same source. Could Fox News and friends have incorporated this bit of social engineering into their broadcasting style any more obviously?
