Debunked! UCB’s “The Straight Men” is fake. It was entirely pre-planned by Will Hines.
Watch this video to learn how Will Hines:
1) Knew the suggestion beforehand
2) Wasn’t authorized to be in this show
3) Manipulated the audience with his clothing
4) Communicated with an off-stage puppet master DURING THE SHOW.
I find this pretty convincing…
Sal is smarter than me. I am scared for the future of this country. The stuff Sal writes about here is why. But it’s put very well. Read this. Reblog this. Be aware of this.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is testifying today in Congress on how his company managed to evade billions of dollars in taxes. Most of the questioning is about tax loopholes. But that’s only part of the story. The other part is far more important, in my mind, and far more destructive.
In the United States, we’ve seen notable — albeit slow — growth since the recession. We are very sluggishly clawing our way back from the lows of the financial crisis. Even that modest progress stands in stark contrast to the rest of the world, which is, by and large, still suffering.
The major flaw of our recovery has not been the pace, although certainly it could have been much faster. Instead, the major flaw is distribution. The economy is growing, but corporations and the richest Americans are capturing the lion’s share of the proceeds from that growth. You’ve likely heard a lot about the one percent — in the first year of the recovery, they captured 93 percent of the income gains — but the story of America’s corporations is even more troubling.
We’ve seen systemic inequality in our country growing for decades, even before the latest financial crisis. Between 1979 and 2007, income for the top one percent grew by nearly 300 percent, while it grew by just 18 percent for the bottom quintile of earners. This is, of course, worrisome in itself, and not just as an economic problem. Our founders feared the political consequences of yawning inequality and class conflict, of allowing wealth to aggregate in the hands of the few. Referring to people who own property and those who don’t, James Madison wrote in 1787:
The most difficult of all political arrangements is that of so adjusting the claims of the two classes as to give security to each, and to promote the welfare of all.
We are seeing the consequences of systemic, growing inequality play out now in our politics. Inequality has been slowly corroding the basic project of collective governance for three decades. A more recent and perhaps even more troubling problem, though, is the aggregated prosperity of American corporations.
Neoliberal economic theorists will tell you that keeping corporate taxes low is good for the economy. The more money corporations have, they say, the more they will be able to reinvest in the economy, make new things, create new jobs and grow opportunity broadly for all. But that’s not what’s happening right now. Since the early 2000s, something mysterious has been going on: Corporations are gobbling more cash than ever before, and rather than reinvesting it, they’re just sitting on it.
No one knows quite why. There are a number of plausible theories. Paul Krugman told Up w/ Chris in February that it may be as simple as this: Corporations are “making so much money, they don’t know what to do with it.” At the end of 2012, for example, Apple had accumulated nearly $140 billion in cash, and was doing absolutely nothing with it.
In a consumption-based economy, such as ours, this trend must, by definition, be untenable. When people make money, they buy things, and when they buy things, demand for products goes up, so companies make more products, hire more people, pay those people money, and so forth. That is the basic model upon which our economy is founded. But right now it is broken in a very basic, deeply troubling way. A cog somewhere is not turning, but no one knows which cog it is.
In the meantime, corporate profits continue to soar inexorably, with no ceiling in sight. The higher corporate profits soar and the more cash corporations hoard, the less they reinvest in the economy. Workers, meanwhile, continue to make less and less. The divergence between employee compensation and corporate profits, as illustrated in the chart above, is at an all-time high.
The economic and political consequences of this divergence, in my view, cannot be overstated. One simple first step would simply be to try to re-capture some of those aggregated profits by raising taxes on corporations, and by taxing off-shore profits. Right now, we have a peculiar system that taxes the profits corporations make here on American soil, but allows them to pay only foreign taxes on profits they make overseas. Which brings us back to the story of Apple.
The moneyed class and their patrons in Washington are arguing that we can fix the corporate tax problem not by taxing off-shore profits, but by allowing corporations to repatriate those profits back to the U.S. without having to pay American taxes. They argue that bringing that money back to the U.S. will allow corporations to reinvest it in the economy. We may lose some potential tax revenue, they say, but we’d make up for it in all the new jobs and economic activity we would get.
Except, of course, the experience of the last decade or so tells us otherwise. And the chart above tells us why such a policy would be disastrous not just for the working class and for millions of Americans suffering deeply from a flawed economic recovery, but for our political system as a whole.
Apple argues that its off-shore profits should only be subject to off-shore taxes. As if those off-shore profits had nothing to do with America. Of course, they do. Apple may sell products across the world, but the company is based in America for a reason. Apple enjoys, indeed exploits, countless legal and economic benefits by operating in America, benefits Apple wouldn’t enjoy anywhere else: basic legal protections, a judiciary that safeguards and enforces the rule of law, an intellectual property regime that affords generous — in fact, overly broad — protections for new ideas and innovations, a world-class system of higher education, a (somewhat) open immigration policy, reliable security, an advanced infrastructure for business development, and countless other basic benefits that accrue from operating in a functional, developed society with a genuine social contract.
As Elizabeth Warren famously put it, “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.” In the same way, there is no company in this country that got rich on its own. Corporations like Apple are hampering the economy and corroding our political system by hoarding hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. They owe the American people back payments.
Do I have a treat for you today. As you know, this year is the 75th anniversary of Superman and Lois Lane. In April I ran a series of posts from some of the creators who wrote Lois to celebrate the character. Brad Ricca is a well known authority on the history of the creation of Superman and Lois and we discussed his doing a guest post for the series. The result is this post which discusses and shows for the first time in many decades some some of the early, non-Superman comics by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel that led to the creation of Lois Lane.
Brad Ricca (shown below) takes it from here.
So when Sue approached me about writing a guest post for the 75th anniversary of Lois Lane, I jumped at the chance. I love the character, like DC Women Kicking Ass (especially on Twitter), and oh yeah, I have a book coming out called Super Boys (June 4, St. Martin’s Press) that is all about the creation of Superman. But I had one request: I didn’t want to write about Lois.
This is a fascinating peek at the pre-Lois Lane female characters that Siegel and Shuster created – with hints at the real life woman she was based on. Really… read this!
carolinedesk:
John Frusciante serenades Caroline Cotter.
I love this one so much.
Here is an alternate image:
Don’t be fooled by that title. I have no advice for Two Person improv teams. Instead I am asking for other people to give advice.
I’m often asked for advice by people starting their own 2 person groups. I understand this! Will and I perform as the Brothers Hines and are both teachers. We should have great advice! But I don’t! Not really. Maybe Will does?
Sometimes people also ask me to coach them, which I usually don’t have time for. Even if I did, I am not sure how I’d run a rehearsal for 2 and if I would run it that different than a rehearsal for 8.
The dirty little secret is, Will and I never rehearsed together. We each rehearsed with other groups on a regular basis and we’d both been learning, practicing, and talking about improv for 5 years before we ever performed together. In fact the first time we performed together was because someone asked us to. We didn’t even really decide on our own to do it. We enjoyed it. So we kept doing it.
Sometime later we got good at it.
So my initial reaction when people ask me for advice is “just start doing shows!” But that might not be good advice for people who have been only performing for a short time.
When people ask me to coach them, I think – just be in the same practice group! You’d do a lot of scenes together and it’ll cost less. But I understand that a 2 person group is very different then a 6-8 person group.
The closest I came to rehearsing two man improv was when Chris Gethard, Dave Lombard and I used to rehearse for a show called Hindsight. But when we did that a lot of our focus was on the form we wanted to perform and it was a long time ago when I wasn’t as good at improv and there were 3 of us, which feels different then 2. So I don’t know how much of that experience would influence how I’d coach a 2 person group.
So improvisers on the internet, what are you thoughts? How do you coach 2 person groups? What advice would you give? What’s your experience?
My mother died of cancer in 1987 when she was 40. I was 16 and memories can be hazy and unreliable. But I have a memory that reminds me of what an understanding person she was:
First day of my kindergarten, a parent accompanied each student. So my mom came to class with me. At the end of the day,…
My mom got sick when I was 10, and died when I was 12 so while I have some memories of her, I don’t have enough.
I like hearing stories about her, so I liked this.
Have you seen my sketch show about the end of the world? Watch hapless citizens of Cromwell Connecticut deal with the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, errant volcanoes and swirling clouds of knives while still going about their daily lives.
It stars me, Kassia Miller and Eric Gersen. It was directed by Brandon Gulya. It has videos by Ed Mundy. It opens with a song by Summer & Eve. It has a poster by David Ebert.
It’s paired with Arthur Meyer’s show Arthur Meyer: Rock and Roll. I saw this show a few weeks ago and it’s very funny!
Normally I tweet and FB plugs for days leading up to the show, but this week I didn’t. Until just now.
Mind Ride
by Mitch MageeI only watched this for the first time a few days ago, but I really love it. Mitch has a way of crafting really great weird moments in his short videos. I love the song and dancing. I want to know what a mind pit is.
Mitch has a kickstarter going on right now where he is raising money for a film project. He has a week left and he is really close to making it happen. If you know Mitch and his work and haven’t contributed a few bucks, please consider going over there right now and pledging.
The person who made this video wants to make a short film. So, that should happen right?
He’s close to getting his kickstarter funded… but there is less than a week left. So fund it if you haven’t already!
Jordan Klepper and Laura Grey make up the sketch duo, Klepper and Grey. Klepper and Grey met at the Second City in Chicago and are both currently performers at the UCB Theater in NY. Watch them here as they present a few things you should know before seeing an improv show.
To see more videos from Klepper and Grey, check out their Tumblr.
this made me smile and laugh and thank the universe that i know jordan and laura. this is fantastic.
Wonderful!
This is a video I took a month ago during a Code Red rehearsal.
I’m not going to explain what’s going on in this scene because it doesn’t matter.
Just watch James and Zack dance and wait for Joel’s scene stealing performance.
I honestly watch this video once a week.
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