The chandelier might have been there for months, sheathed by bushes and high weeds, or it might have been dropped off the week before we found it, me and Noni who had business sense even when we were ten and still friends.  It was the perfect time for something interesting to happen – the second week of summer vacation when reading comic books all day was losing its novelty and waiting on the curb for the ice cream truck seemed far too juvenile for our maturing young man minds.  By then I wasn’t asking Noni to go to the art museum with me anymore because I always took my sketchbook, tried to copy famous works since our art teacher said it was good practice.  Noni didn’t have much patience for my museum drawings unless I was copying a painting of a naked lady.

Those years weren’t bad.  Ma and I had enough to eat, she got me a new coat every winter, but there wasn’t much extra money so I spent a lot of time at the museum and the public library and in front of our building with Noni.

I don’t remember why we were poking around the vacant lot, what we could have been searching for, if anything.  The lot was bare dirt scattered with refuse — tires, cardboard boxes, a broken guitar, several hubcaps, odd bottles and pieces of wood, empty plastic bags that blew like tumbleweeds in a slight breeze.  Things were added by lazy tenants who didn’t want to go to the garbage dump and removed by homeless scavengers who slept on grates in front of apartment, a flow like commerce.  Near the back of the lot was a wooden fence and sudden patch of tall grass. Full story »

by Brittany Gasper

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Despite misquotation, Plato famously spoke of the inability to define beauty. A woman’s culture declares the ideals of her beauty to the point that some societies oppose each other.

In the United States, many women consider a tan to imply sun-kissed, healthy skin. Citizens of Southeast Asia consider pale skin so beautiful consumers rarely find cosmetics without whitening agents. Despite government attempts to control the growing market, one research survey estimates four in every 10 women in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan use whitening cream.

A beautiful woman’s skin has diverse interpretations throughout the world. Pakistan, Northern Libya and North India consider “mehndi” or henna to have “Barakah” blessings and apply it for luck, joy and beauty.
Full story »

According to Peter Gleick, he was moved to impersonate a Heartland Institute board member by a memo he received in the mail, the details of which he wanted to verify. Since the publication of both the memo and the internal Heartland documents, however, there have been many questions and claims about the source of that “climate strategy” memo, with The Heartland Institute claiming it was fabricated and Heartland’s allies claiming that Gleick must have written it himself. However, one oddly specific paragraph in a recent Heartland statement, written by Heartland communications director Jim Lakely, raises a number of questions about Heartland’s prior claims of innocence with respect to the authorship of the memo. Full story »

The more I watch modern politics (and economics and the culture wars and science “debates”) the more it all reminds me of pro wrestling. You know how it goes. Tough match, back and forth, both the good guy (the “face”) and the bad guy (the “heel”) getting their licks in, and then at the decisive moment either the heel “accidentally” knocks the ref down or his manager distracts the ref or something. While the zebra is looking the other way, the black hat clocks the crowd favorite with a steel chair. Ref turns around. 1…2…3…and we have a new champion! Lather, rinse, repeat.

Which brings us to the breaking story surrounding The Heartland Institute and the revelation of all kinds of incriminating internal documents that, in a nutshell, prove that everything climate scientists have been saying about them is true. Full story »

She was not alive…nor dead…just a
WHITE ZOMBIE
Performing his every desire!

Now picture Bela Lugosi, sketched in faint Day-Glo green pastels, intense eyes staring, one eyebrow raised as though it alone is gonna dish out an ass-whoopin’.

He’s best known for Dracula, of course, setting a stereotype for vampires that lasted for fifty years, but among Lugosi’s other achievements, he starred in the first zombie movie. Full story »

by Fred Skolnik

   In the pantheon of the Classic American Novel, An American Tragedy and U.S.A. had been novels about the essential division of America between those who have and those who have not. Dos Passos produced an energetic narrative that raced along without lingering to give its characters a human face while Dreiser dissected his protaganist’s inner world so clinically that it is impossible to see him as a living, breathing individual. Not so James T. Farrell. His alone of the three great social novels of the era brings to life a full-blooded human being capable of moving us.

   Like U.S.A., Studs Lonigan is a trilogy whose individual volumes were first published separately: Young Lonigan in 1932, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan in 1934, and Judgment Day in 1935, and then the trilogy in one volume over 75 years ago in 1936. Full story »

Yesterday the American Moustache Institute announced plans for the “Million Moustache March,” the objective of which is to encourage men to grow moustaches. It’s all about economics, they say.

According to AMI research, mustached Americans earn 4.3 percent more money than “clean-shaven Americans” on average per year. Therefore incentivising mustache growth would boost the economy.

It was a slow news day and this one got some play. Of course, the idea that you can grow the economy by growing a moustache is silly. And while the correlation between moustaches and earning power may well be genuine, it’s more likely coincidence than causality. No reasonable person really believes that not shaving will get them a 4% raise, or a job that pays more.

But over the last seventy years, the U.S. government has pushed the same silly idea, and the education industry has taken that argument and turned it into an insanely successful marketing ploy. Full story »

As of three days ago, The Heartland Institute began delivering letters/emails to bloggers and journalists who reported on the confidential Heartland documents that were published on Valentine’s Day. The letters demanded that any copies of Heartland’s internal documents be deleted, all comments on the contents of those emails be purged, and full retractions be issued, under threat of legal action.

Last night, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, admitted on the Huffington Post that he was the anonymous source for those documents and that he’d claimed to be someone else to get them, in an attempt to verify information that was leaked to him from someone unknown via postal service mail. Gleick wrote that his behavior constituted a “serious lapse of [his] own professional judgment and ethics.”

The admission of responsibility by Gleick – taking responsibility for his actions and owning up to an ethical failure – draws a sharp contrast to Heartland’s own lack of ethics and history of misrepresentation, deception, and dishonesty. Full story »

The face of Voodoo has always been painted greasepaint white. The personification, stuck with me since I was a kid, comes from the final scene of the James Bond movie Live and Let Die. Bond has vanquished his foes, throwing the last one out the window of a moving train while on the way to a well-deserved respite with the movie’s leading lady. But perched on the front of the train sits the sinister Baron Samedi, the lord of death, a dark, dangerous figure throughout the movie, still there, in the final shot, offering a tip of his ragged top hat, laughing.

Samedi was played by Geoffrey Holder, who would go on to star in 7-Up’s “Crisp and clean and no caffeine” TV commercials, where he’d get to again let loose that deep bass laughter. As a Bond villain, that laugh had much less mirth. Samedi handled snakes, presided over dark ceremonies, and promised all sorts of evil nastiness for my favorite secret agent. He was Voodoo.

But real Voodoo is something else entirely (surprise, surprise). And yes, there are real zombies. Full story »

I don’t know, this might sound a little too familiar and if anyone comments on this, i’m sure that someone will chime in to tell me that none of our candidates are like Nazis because they don’t have plans to kill every Jew, Slav and person of color on the planet. And that may be true. Nonetheless, on February 20, 1933 a certain mustachioed Austrian met with a list of German luminaries, mostly from industry but perhaps also a board member of Allianz AG. He needed to win an election. You see, Communism could only be stopped if he won. In fact, his pitch to the cigar smoke-filled room blamed democracy for Communism.
Full story »

On Valentine’s Day, someone obtained a number of internal documents from the Heartland Institute including IRS records from 2010, the agenda and meeting minutes from the January 17 board meeting, and proposed 2012 fundraising plan, among others. On the 15th, Heartland claimed that these documents had been stolen and that one was a fabrication, and they announced plans to “pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation.” Earlier today, Greg Laden posted the threatening email he received on his blog, and Heartland’s demands are as follows:

[W]e respectfully demand: (1) that you remove both the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents from your web site; (2) that you remove from your web site all posts that refer or relate in any manner to the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (3) that you remove from your web site any and all quotations from the Fake Memo and the Alleged Heartland Documents; (4) that you publish retractions on your web site of prior postings; and (5) that you remove all such documents from your server.

Brendan DeMelle of DeSmogBlog.com was sent a similar email which is posted online as well. Full story »

“Damn, Sam – that looks like it hurts.” 

On January 8, 1998, while playing basketball at my club, I made a beautiful back door cut, took a nice pass, and came to a two-footed jump stop in preparation for an uncontested layup. Last I checked, the man guarding me was still standing at the foul line looking for his athletic support gear.

When I planted, though, something went very, very wrong. My left knee executed a hard sideways shiver that exceeded standard design specifications, and I went to floor screaming. Stayed there screaming for quite a while, in fact. Like a little girl, only louder. Full story »

“I will be with you on your wedding-night.” – Frankenstein’s Monster

Well, it looks like Romney has caught up with Santorum in one way.

The website www.spreadingromney.com is working to introduce a new word into the language. Just as Santorum in now best known as the frothy fecal matter accompanying anal sex (or something like that), this group is now proposing the following definition:

romney (rom-ney) v.1. To defecate in terror.

One part of me hopes this doesn’t take (the part that predicted Romney would win the nomination. The other part doesn’t give a santorum.) It’s hard to feel sorry for Romney, even though we have a mutual friend who swears he’s a great guy and would make a great president, because he deserves some punishment for the deliberate distortions and outright fibs he’s told trying to cozy up to the Base. But today the AG of Ohio switched his endorsement from Romney to Santorum, which could be nothing or it could be the first rat running down the hawser. Full story »

“I don’t believe in this fairy tale of staying together for ever. Ten years with somebody is enough.” Who said it? Full story »

If I’m going to study zombies, I need some context. For that, I need to read up on Haiti. The zombies that live on the small Caribbean island are different than the brain-eaters I’ll spend most of my time looking at over the next few months, but it doesn’t hurt to arm myself with knowledge.

But if I’m going to look at Haitian zombies, then really I need to start across the Atlantic, in Africa, in the small coastal country of Benin—the birthplace of voodoo. Full story »

As regular readers know, we’ve been tracking the progress of the design and construction of a new nuclear facility (the CMRR-NF) at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. As we posted yesterday … Nuclear Pit Boondoggle at Los Alamos Temporarily Scuttled due to a combination of the economic climate and the efforts of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), which has been educating the public, lobbying Washington, and filing two suits to halt the CMRR-NF on environmental grounds.

But sociologist Darwin BondGraham, who is on the LASG Board of Directors, is in no mood to gloat about the victory. In an elegiac article for Counterpunch titled Starving the Real Beast, he writes

The war machine has begun to eat itself for the sake of preserving hyper-inequalities resulting directly from the less progressive tax code instituted a decade prior, and the multitude of shelters capital now hides behind. Full story »

The new budget for fiscal year 2013 (which begins on October 1) just released, reports Chris Schneidmiller for Global Security Newswire, calls for the

Energy Department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration to receive $11.5 billion. … just shy of 5 percent above the amount allocated in the current budget … The budget would provide $7.6 billion for NNSA efforts to “maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.”

The other $2.5 billion …

… is proposed for NNSA initiatives to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and related materials. [Nonproliferation, in other words. -- RW] That amount, if approved, would constitute a $163 million boost from the amount allocated for this year.

All in all …

… the administration is seeking $372 million less for weapons programs than it had anticipated requesting as of 2011.  Full story »