 One of the things that made World War Z so successful is that presents itself as a collection of oral histories about the zombie apocalypse. Author Max Brooks did an outstanding job of presenting a global catastrophe from multiple perspectives, creating distinct character voices for each.
One of the things that makes A Mammoth Book of Zombie Apocalypse so unsuccessful is that it presents itself as a collection of primary documents—emails, memos, transcribed recordings, diaries—about the zombie apocalypse. Anthologist Stephen Jones does a patchwork job of presenting a global catastrophe from multiple perspectives, creating bothersome continuity issues.
And it tries too damn hard to be clever, to boot. Full story »
While war may seem like an instrument of foreign policy to the world of international relations, to many of us, except when our soil is threatened, it’s simply evidence of deep-seated pathology.
Any international affairs authority who acknowledges that would likely be to the left of center. Michael Brenner, Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, fits that bill. The National Journal National Security Experts Blog often poses questions to its panel, to which Brenner belongs. On April 9, Sara Sorcher asked What Do You Expect from Negotiations With Iran? Titling his response Immaturity, Brenner wrote that it:
… expresses itself in various psychological strategies to cope with a reality that challenges self-image – e.g. a recalcitrant Islamic Republic of Iran that threatens the ingrained belief of American leaders that they can coerce weaker states to bend to their will and thereby fulfill the United States’ self-defined needs. Such an ego defense mechanism becomes pathological when [it tries to] construct a refuge for a threatened ego. Full story »
What’s a vexed, reactive incumbent to do when his best-laid plans go awry, put upon by lying hordes after his job, then that pugnacious posse at the Supreme Court (SC)? Full story »
 by James Boyce
You’d think the USDA would see the flaw of logic in letting the people who make the food inspect the food and decide if it is actually safe to eat.
The USDA has decided in its infinite wisdom, despite pink slime and a few other debacles of the food industry, to test a program allowing chicken companies to check their own livestock and decide whether or not the chickens are safe to eat.
The USDA claims this will save them tens of millions of dollars.
Well, USDA, I can save you even more. Full story »
My friend Evans Mehew (the man who, several years ago, introduced me to this brand newfangled thing called “blogging”) has launched a site called Guerillassance (as in guerilla + renaissance). Evans is a very smart guy and lately he’s been thinking a lot about our addiction to things, to stuff, and more generally, what the hell has happened to the American Dream?
Have a look at his latest, “Retail Therapy (Or, The Most Effective Trap Is the One We Volunteer to Walk Into).” Thoughtful and immediate – I’m guessing most of us are going to see our own reflections in the mirror he’s holding up to the world.
 We know that the Romney campaign is ramping up its attempts to lure female voters, and we were optimistic about the entertainment prospects of these efforts when, a few days, Mitt garnered the much sought-after Gene Simmons endorsement (which, now that Wilt Chamberlain is dead, is pretty much the gold standard of playa cred).
So we weren’t surprised to see Mitt on the stump wailing away at Team Obama.
Romney rebuts claims that he, GOP are anti-women
By Charles Babington
Associated Press / April 11, 2012
HARTFORD, Conn.—Presidential candidate Mitt Romney intensified his efforts Wednesday to rebut claims that he and fellow Republicans are insufficiently supportive of women, or even hostile to them. Full story »
Former coach of the year fired from Christian school for out-of-wedlock pregnancy
By Cameron Smith | Prep Rally – 3 hours ago
In an incredibly bizarre situation that appears headed for a legal challenge, a Dallas-area volleyball coach and science teacher was fired by the Christian school at which she worked for becoming pregnant before being married.
OK, I am sorry any young woman is out of a job without insurance. But who did she think she was working for? Full story »
“We can almost speak in shorthand. … We share common experiences and have a perspective and underpinning which is similar.”
Thus does Michael Barbaro quote Mitt Romney in a New York Times article titled A Friendship Dating to 1976 Resonates in 2012. Of whom does Romney speak? Another Mormon deacon? Bain & Company founder Bill Bain? Barbaro explains.
… in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, briefly but indelibly, in the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group [headed by Bill Bain before he founded Bain & Company], where both had been recruited as corporate advisers. … That shared experience decades ago led to a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue. Full story »
“Any man who is not a progressive at twenty has no heart, and any man who is not a conservative at forty has no head.” Attributed to A.E. Housman.
That’s a bogus quote of course, as are most quotes that fit current events a little too neatly. But it sums up my predicament exactly. I am a reluctant liberal.
I don’t believe in the massive redistribution of wealth. I believe people are lazy, and that given a choice, many will not work. I am passionate about work. People are not lions. We were not engineered to lay around 22 hours a day. We are built to do stuff, and feel better when we do it. I believe that the greatest positive of the Great Society is that we have essentially eliminated extreme poverty—at least in the sense that people were poor in South Carolina in the fifties, living in unheated shacks without electricity or running water, and eating dirt to eliminate stomach cramps when food was short. Full story »
 Dr. Denny at Scholars and Rogues, a reputable voice for authentic journalism, occasionally shares insights into the industry that the Fourth Estate has become. As a non-authentic journalist/authentic non-journalist (circle one), I read his articles and am struck with a near-Gothic melancholy. The news on the state of the art reads like an elegy for a dying bride. I can almost hear the plaintive rain pattering on the windowpanes, see the water running down the glass in waves against a backdrop of weeping willows. What I do hear, figuratively, are bells, tolling. But for whom are they tolling?
At first glance, it’s easy to see that the bells are tolling for the news industry as many of us grew up with it. Some of us can actually remember going to quaint little metal boxes and stuffing nickels in one slot, dimes in another, to extract, on the honor system, one copy of the newspaper. Full story »
 Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen recently lost his freakin’ mind. He told Time that
I love Fidel Castro…I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [SOB] is still there.
Predictably, the world then stopped spinning on its axis.
Few in the West are aware of the extent of the savagery that Christians rained down on Muslims during the crusades. This is my fourth post on Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (Basic Books, 2011) by Jay Rubenstein — a crusades history for dummies and historians both. My previous posts: Sanctifying the Killing of Muslims, The Secret to Islam’s Rapid Expansion: Free Love (?), and Justifications for Slaughtering Muslims Were in Ample Supply for Crusaders. Now, more fuel for the jihad fire. Full story »
 Alan Mutter, writing at Reflections of a Newsosaur, put it succinctly:
The number of journalists working at U.S. newspapers today is at the lowest point since the American Society of News Editors began its annual newsroom census in 1978.
Newspapers now employ 40,600 editors and reporters vs. a peak of 56,900 in the pre-Internet year of 1990, according to the census released today. Thus, newsroom headcount has fallen by 28.6% from its modern-day high. [See the year-by-year table.]
When an industry charged with holding government accountable — government at all levels, from village council to the presidency — loses about 29 percent of the sheriffs on the beat, we have to wonder: Who’s minding the watchdog store? Fewer reporters with less experience are asking fewer questions about government and corporate decision making (and decision makers). That means the public has less credible information at its disposal to make wiser political and consumer decisions.
Yet all’s good, say newspaper execs. We’re leaner and meaner and still on the job. So, we should think, What, me worry?
But how can management claims of better reporting be true with such high losses in the newsroom?
Full story »
Insert according to instructions below: جهـاد or الـجهـاد (jihad)
James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory: the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (Doubleday, 2008), is the foremost chronicler of illegal surveillance in the United States. His latest post at Wired’s Threat Level is Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA. In his previous lengthy and widely read post, The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say), he wrote:
Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013.
Since illegal surveillance has become one of America’s greatest growth industries, one is almost reluctant to rain on the NSA’s “job-creating” parade. There’s a sense of impending inevitability to it as with globalization a decade ago. Full story »
 Is there a more incendiary, compact, unapologetic cover for domestic vigilantes than “Don’t Retreat, Reload”? Though domestic terrorism occurred before and after Palin’s pandering war cry, her loaded gun imagery decoying as political rhetoric, gave itchy-fingered zealots free passes when “feeling endangered.” Overall, what the Bush Doctrine distilled into unilateral pre-emptive perfidy, executed by Rumsfeld’s dire “shock and awe,” then justified by Cheney’s One Per Cent Doctrine, was domesticated by this in-your-face mandate from a presumptive national leader.
With the Christian right playing the chorus, what our rogue government sustained endlessly “over there” has come home to roost, with literal vengeance, a slaughter of innocents. Full story »
We recently did a three-part ArtSunday series on the work of Denver photographer Greg Thow and I know many of you were as blown away by his shot of Colorado and the 5280 as we were. Full story »
 I did, I did. I did saw a likeness.
So what hits the news last night?
Obama, Romney Say Admit Women to Augusta Golf Club
Oh, for crying out loud. I get that discrimination is bad. I get that discriminating against women is bad. But seriously? With all the discrimination running rampant across the country, from the endemic to the hyper-politicized, the President of the United States weighs in (by way of mouthpiece) on discrimination against a 1%er blue-chip CEO by an exclusive golf club. Okay, this is bad, too. On a list of bad things, maybe this is 49,518. Or lower.
Now I’m beginning to wonder just how many NASCAR owners the president is friends with. Full story »
I don’t know if this is some kind of bizarre ploy to lure the female vote or what, but personally I find would-be First Lady Ann Romney’s outing of her husband’s impotency to be wildly inappropriate, no matter what I think of his politics.
Full story »
 Here’s my personal top 5 reasons to vote “None of the above” this November:
1. Mitt Romney
2. Rick Santorum
3. New Gingrich
4. Ron Paul
5. Barack Obama
I feel this way because I am a far-left progressive liberal. If there’s a better term for my political position, I haven’t found it yet, but I keep looking. I’d say maybe “democratic socialist”, except I’d actually be willing to put my support behind a candidate willing to govern from a center-to-left-of-center position. Full story »
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