Several things baffle me about panics like this. Firstly, people are now hoarding hundreds of packets of ‘anti nuclear-pills’ that have absolutely zero possibility of helping them, or preventing any sort of radiation poisoning. It seems as long as something can be taken in a pill form, it is pre-approved and justified for American consumption, regardless of whether it actually does anything or not. Remind me later to open up the first PlaceboTown Superstore.

But secondly, and even more stupefying, is that these very same people who are worried about trace amounts of radiation traveling halfway across the globe, are seemingly totally fine with drinking arsenic in their tap water. They are hunky-dory with eating PCBs and Bisphenol-A, and excreted hormones from hundreds of millions of ingested prophylactics. They have absolutely no objection to a multi-faceted poisoning from their daily routine, so long as these poisons are American-made. So throw me a pack of Marlboro’s and a fifth of Jack Daniels, and lets take the rest of the Jimmy Dean bacon-wrapped corndogs down into the nucular shelter to chase down our cache of potassium-iodide pills. That’ll show them Japanese particles whose boss.

Originally posted on Technorati.

Zaptra – “The Wise” Music Video from Danny Kim on Vimeo.

Anonymous made an appearance at the ever-growing (yet largely mass-media ignored) Wisconsin solidarity rally today. Meanwhile, a parallel branch released the following video condemning the Federal Reserve…

From time to time, I use this space to relate my frustration with the trappings of capitalism and its various profit-motivated aggravations. It is a constant wonder to me how badly people will treat each other when small pieces of dirty green paper are on the line.

I’ve banked with Wells Fargo for about a decade and a half at this point, and have been able to avoid all manner of fees and annoyance because I have a grandfathered account that’s almost older than the debate kids I coach. So while this mainline banking institution has hiked fees and lined its pockets with all manner of shady nickelings and dimings, I’ve enjoyed remarkably simple, direct, cheap financial services.

Until this week. When suddenly, with the end of the month, a $7.50 fee for using bill-pay shows up. I admit that I’d been leery of signing up for bill-pay as a new aspect of my free checking when I did it six months ago, but I did it six months ago amid promises of absolutely no fees ever I swear, so I went with it. And never got charged. And that was all well and good.

So I march into my local Wells Fargo (formerly Wachovia) and ask them why I was suddenly charged without warning or notice. And they tell me that $7.50 is just the cost of bill-pay. And I relate that I’d never been charged before. And they look with consternation at the proof this is true. And then realize that my account is a 14-year-old fossil of a bygone era.

And then they tell me the whopper of all-time to explain why I’ve suddenly been charged fees: “The federal government recently outlawed free checking accounts.”

They did what?

So I started poking around the Internet and Googling some things. And I’ve come upon articles like this that explain why free checking is fading. Not, however, why it’s illegal. Only why it’s illegal to try to bilk free checking customers out of additional moneys, and thus why banks no longer find it profitable to offer free checking. I can’t wait to go back into Wells Fargo and tell them what the reality of the situation is.

They tried to sell me a new account, of course, with bells and whistles. I instead cancelled bill-pay, got my fee refunded, and asked, in detail, whether other mystery random fees would start to pop up on my long-held account. They assured me absolutely not. So we’ll see. For now, they’re not forcing closure on my “illegal” account and that’s good enough for me. Since they haven’t outlawed the post office yet, I’m going back to checks and stamps.

the causeway from ben joyner on Vimeo.

Some of the notable Sheen updates/remixes of the week:

Jimmy Kimmel’s Charlie Sheen as Charlie Brown.

The inevitable Dubstep remix:

And the tour de force mashup, High Noon in Crazytown:

Picture Source.

Greg Runs the Gauntlet of the Spa Castle, Uniforms Vs. Au Natural: Fight!, To Every Horde, Turn, Turn, Turn, The Horror of Red Bumperman, The Joy of Having One’s Skin Ripped Off, and Zombie Kings.

Download Mep Report #125

Between Two Points

Went to the park last weekend to catch up on some reading. One of my little known habits is that I prefer to sit on the bleachers, in view of an empty baseball field. For some reason, I’ve always found baseball fields to be a very calming presence, and good for doing serious thinking. I was sitting there pouring through Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology, when an older man in a tracksuit walked over, glanced up at me, and said, “They got any chinning bars around here?”

I said, “ehh… you mean for chin ups?”
He says, “Yeah, what the hell else is a chinning bar?”

He had a very friendly, yet no-nonsense Irish-New Yorker feel to him. He reminded me of an old boiler-room boss I had when I worked for a financial newspaper. Friendly, but gruff. Perhaps seeing a person reading in front of a baseball field was some sort of sub-conscious New Yorky behavioral code – so he knew he could get an interesting response out of me through approaching.

And so began a conversation in which the stranger and I found out that we were both from New York (he grew up in Long Beach, Long Island), he came from an Irish-German family, and apparently was an actor of some renowned. While he looked vaguely familiar, I didn’t realize on what scale until he mentioned participating in Seabiscuit. In the meantime, we conversationally wandered through Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, religion, psychology, existentialism, Camus, Sartre, and a little bit about stand up comedy.

He remarked that I could find out more through the “IMDBees,” though admitted his ignorance of computers and the internet in general. Upon returning home, I found out that the Eddie Lauter I was speaking to was rated as IMDB’s number one character actor of all time. And he’d been in My Blue Heaven (one of my childhood dark horse comedy favorites). Not to mention the lead prison guard in The Longest Yard, a detective in True Romance, a parent in School Ties, and a role in Star Trek: TNG. I’ve probably seen his face dozens of times, in my 80s TV/Movie meanderings.

In a revelation that he had recently been into Zen philosophy, he quoted the phrase, “You are what you do.”
If that’s true, Eddie is many, many different things all at once, including a very thoughtful individual.

If you’re interested in what Eddie is up to these days, he’s apparently working out the outline of a one-man show, in which he’ll do some storytelling on stage — and I get the sense that he’s got a ton of fascinating stories to tell about the past 40 years of Hollywood.

In any case, it was a welcomed, unusual, and quintessentially Los Angeles day at the park.

Not to take the debate back to Greg’s and my epic battle over the Rose Art Museum, but this example of modern art is where most such “art” belongs – in the landfill.

What’s great about this is that it’s so innocuously obvious. The trash collectors of Albuquerque are charged with keeping the city’s streets clean of refuse. They pick up anything that looks unwanted, needless, pointless, ugly. And to be honest, New Mexico (while I love it) is not exactly known for its aggressiveness in sanitation procedures. The workers involved must have really thought this thing was a blight to cart it away.

I mean, look at that thing. $50,000 for that? And that’s in New Mexico money, which would make it about $1.2 million in New Jersey. Sheesh. I’m in the wrong business. Anyone got some fiberglass and the retrograde imagination of a particularly uncreative four-year-old?

As he stopped to survey the dancers on stage (many of whom were male and semi-clad), he commented to my girlfriend “Man, they’re so smoking hot!” As she turned to ponder why he was talking to her, he remarked, totally deadpan, “Hey! You’re not my mom!” And sauntered off. It took me a few hours, but I put the mental pieces together and realized where I had seen him before:

The face of a continent is changing this week. Stay tuned.

FYI, here is a fantastic video feed that has continuous updates on anything that breaks in Egypt.

Mini Cup Round 3 (Brandeis A vs Brandeis/BU) from Will Crocker on Vimeo.

Warning: You may need an attention span for this.

Any other divisive political footballs only exist to distract you from the fact that we are funneling mountains and mountains of currency directly into the machinery of destruction. Our lives are, for the most part, an attempt to rationalize and deny and ignore the atrocities that are being committed with our tacit consent. Unless you are actively doing something to oppose the constant growth of our Military Industrial Complex, your presence serves to bolster it. Your taxes bolster it. Your votes for major party politicians bolsters it. Your purchases at Walmart, Best Buy, and Target bolster it. You are an accessory to murder by default. If you don’t like this new association, then do something to change it.

I’ve always felt the turning point in the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign was the moment when the sight of then-candidate Barack Obama after wrapping up the Democratic nomination was almost immediately contrasted with now-failed-candidate and angry man John McCain, in front of a sickening green background and performing to an audience which sounded more like a canned laugh track, giving a nasty, pitiful screed about the man who would trounce him in the election only a few months later.  One man represented the best of what America would like to imagine itself as–intelligent, broad-minded, appealing to the better angels of our nature–and the other represented the impossibly tired bitterness of a rapidly disappearing part of our society.  The choice, and thus result, was never more stark.

Fast forward twenty-six months, and we find ourselves dealing with a massive tragedy–not because of the number of people killed and injured (how many Iraqi and Afghani citizens have died every single day during America’s adventures overseas?), but because of what the attack says about the level and intentions of our political discourse and our overwhelming obsession with guns.  And just as before, we’re presented with a contrast.  On one hand we have the half-term governor of Alaska, whose defining characteristic is how little time she spends doing any one job, sitting in front of an empty stone fireplace (I assume most of the camera crew has already packed up and headed home) and describing how much it hurts to be a victim.  Not Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who lies in intensive care in an Arizona hospital after being shot in an assassination attempt, of course, but Sarah Palin, who has put aside her dog whistle for the moment to discuss her First Amendment rights (she’s left Sharon Angle to discuss the Second Amendment ones) and avoiding “blood libel” (I’ll leave it to her speechwriter to explain whether the horrifically inappropriate term was used out of intention or shocking stupidity.  I’m sure it’s unfair even to accuse the speaker of anything other than the best possible motivations, after all.)

On the other hand we have now-President Obama’s speech, invoking not the politically driven aspects of what happened (which I’ve discussed elsewhere) but the things which matter most at a time like this–what should ultimately bring us together.  While Palin spent the majority of her speech feeling sorry…for herself, President Obama spent the entirety of his feeling sorry for others–most notably the nine year old girl Christina-Taylor Green, whose only crime was in believing that she would be safe outside a Safeway with a member of Congress.  “I want us to live up to her expectations,” he said, in a powerful reminder of what ought to matter most to all of us.  One speaker appealed to her rapidly fading base, raging against the dying of their light; the other appealed to everyone, as he always does, as he always has since entering the American consciousness.

It was another reminder of how very different the two philosophies are, and another reminder of how very different our country would be had the first one–me first, guns second, and damn all the rest of you who don’t agree–won out over the second–others first, put away the weapons, and join together in common purpose to repudiate hatred.  It’s a contrast which Sarah Palin will never understand, for she lacks the interest in anyone other than herself to recognize it.  But although the conflict is ongoing, it is a limited one, for her supporters have already lost the war only they wished to fight.  Nothing made that clearer than listening to the rhetoric of an exceptional President again, for yet another time, soaring above violence and appealing to hope rather than despair.

As Robert Shrum put it: “At the end of the day, after listening to the president, we’ll know why he’s president and she never will be.”  It’s like comparing apples and oranges.  And as always, there simply is no comparison to be made between those things.

Given that, hearing about the inner workings of DisneyCorp, was an irresistible opportunity.

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. 

When a group of people, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, spew the same kind of language–”target,” “reload,” “crosshairs,” “bullets of justice,” and on and on–it is only a matter of time until the consequences are felt.  And calling for civility “on both sides,” when the simple truth is that one side calls for violent, bloody revolution and the other calls for immediate legal remedy, is a colossal and shameful cop-out.  Yesterday’s events are the absolutely predictable result of the dog whistles the Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs, and Sarah Palins of the world blow at every opportunity only to raise their hands in mock horror when something (vandalizing property, death threats, shooting 18 people including a federal judge and a congresswoman–execution style, in the head) happens as a result.

Don’t be fooled.  Don’t allow political leadership to make the false equivalency between the rhetoric “on both sides.”  No such equivalency exists.  Don’t allow pundits to claim “it’s a stretch” that publishing a map with crosshairs over specific people and waving around automatic rifles to get the approval of a gun-obsessed culture leads directly to violence.  It isn’t a stretch.  This is more than shouting fire in a crowded theater.  It’s taking a can of gasoline and a box of matches, setting them down next to the theater and giving the people outside a meaningful look before turning your back and walking away.

It’s criminal.  It’s evil.  But most of all it is absolutely, completely, utterly predictable, and the purveyors of such shameless rhetoric know it.  It is up to us and the rest of our supposedly civil society to call them out on it before they bring that society crashing down upon us.  Speech has consequences.  It’s time we acknowledge not only the effects of violence–but the cause.

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.

There is a very good reason that you will never, ever catch this movie being re-broadcast on your favored cable TV outlet. This movie delves into the undue influence of corporate conglomerates on the framing of news. It delves into the art of crafting propaganda to quell a populace irritated with the powers that be. It delves into the sociopathic qualities and behavior that it takes to wield power as a capable corporate executive. Sadly, this is a post-structuralist piece that you won’t see unless you go out of your way to look for it.

Greg Gets a Mortgage (and Becomes an Adult), Russ Gets a Bear (and Becomes a Psychic), Storey Gets a Twin (and Becomes a Skeptic), Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel Destroy Society One Video Game at a Time, The Meppers Get Immersed, and Everything is Awesome In Sloooooowwww-Moooooo.

Download Mep Report #124

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology claim to be one step closer to mimicking plant-like energy production in the lab. Apparently using a Cesium-Oxygen-Nitrogen mixture, they can create a potent fuel from scratch using concentrated sunlight as the only catalyst.

Exciting stuff. This would seem to get us out of the problem of our feeble solar battery storage capacities. And it would require only a moderate re-tooling of our current fueling infrastructure. What, you say? No apocalyptic predictions tonight? Hey, whaddya want? It’s almost the weekend/holiday of doom. I’m swamped already… To distract yourself, have some more information on Cerium:

And--scene.

Admittedly, my non-Celtic fan Mep friends may disagree…but this picture, taken right after Paul Pierce’s game winning shot against the resurgent but still not rival New York Knicks, is priceless.  (Not pictured: Nate Robinson almost killing himself jumping over Pierce, and Spike Lee almost killing himself in an apoplectic fury off camera as Kevin Garnett bows to him.  Who says civility is dead?)

Hell yeah, I want my pony!

This article at The People’s View should be required reading for all those interested in discovering what some parts of both the right and left of the blogosphere have to gain in trying to destroy (fortunately unsuccessfully, I think) President Obama–or, more accurately, what they have to gain in upping the ante on false outrage in a public forum.  (Here’s a hint: it’s the same thing anti-corporatists are always claiming (often rightly) is the end goal of every politician.)  One wonders how much time MLK or Gandhi would have had for this kind of kabuki.

We could use him around these days.

For further reading on Transactional Analysis, I recommend going to the source author, Eric Berne. In doing so, however, prepare to have your mind rent asunder. Fair warning.