 Thanks, guys. You are just what Cleveland needs: another bad headline: “FBI arrests 5 accused of plotting to blow up Ohio 82 bridge in Cuyahoga valley.” Another in a long string of too-public humiliations: the Cuyahoga River catches on fire, the mayor catches on fire, the Drive, LeBron’s Big Kiss Off. And you wanted to be anarchist terrorists?
Maybe you didn’t hear, but anarchist terrorism is passe. Granted, four of you have bad hair and one of you has a full beard. But it takes more than a hirsute appearance to make one a terrorist. It takes brains. Full story »
by Kaitlin Lindahl
She’s staring at me, her blue eyes wide awake, but I have nothing to say. From outside the bus window, I stare back, entranced. The man a few seats ahead of me is telling me all about her – personal moments that are now engrained as tidbits of fact and history. She’s 14, just come home from school. Her ivory face captured in a complex mix of surprise and serenity – probably nothing like how she looked the moment before she died.
Her name is Annette, and though she’s painted stories high on the side of a building, she’s speaking to me. She died accidentally in a crossfire. A war she had no ammunition for crept into the boundaries of her backyard and took her life. She never had a say. Full story »
 On April 29, a paper about how wind farms affect surface temperatures was published online by the journal Nature Climate Change. The authors of the paper found that wind farms increase the nighttime surface temperature within and immediately downwind of the wind farm because the turbines mix up cold surface air with warmer air from up higher off the ground. What the authors did not find, however, was that wind farms were having any global effect on climate disruption. But if you only read articles and blogs from Forbes, Fox News, The Star Ledger, the UK’s Daily Mail, The National Review‘s Planet Gore blog, The Free Republic, etc., you’d never know that.
In fact, if those were your only sources of information, you’d believe that the paper was all about how wind farms were yet another cause of global warming, when in fact it says nothing of the sort. Full story »
 Well, the House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport released its report on phone hacking today. Words such as “bombshell” have been thrown around in response to a section that…well, let’s let the Committee, or the majority of it anyway, speak for itself:
“On the basis of the facts and evidence before the committee, we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications.
“This culture, we consider, permeated from the top throughout the organisation and speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International. Full story »
It’s May Day, and it’s safe to dance.
 No, pro wrestling is not sport. Although it is performed by athletes, just like figure skating and cheerleading are non-sports performed by athletes.
Wrestling is art, opera for the masses. In both, overweight people dress in outlandish costumes and act out over-emotionalized dramas in highly staged spectacles. And like opera, it is a more honest version of the morality play. In morality plays, good always wins out. In opera and wrestling, as in real life, not so much.
As art, it is a window into our fears and insecurities. Full story »
 You may have noticed this story in the Wall St. Journal several days ago:
Tide Turns on Border Crossing
- Number of Immigrants Arriving From Mexico Now Equaled by Those Going Home
Net migration from Mexico has plummeted to zero thanks to changing demographic and economic conditions on both sides of the border, a new study says, even as political battles over illegal immigration heat up and the issue heads to the U.S. Supreme Court. Full story »
  How does a bad guy become a bad guy? And how does an author make him a good guy while it’s happening?
That’s the task Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga set for themselves in The Walking Dead: The Rise of the Governor. The two men take one of the most notorious villains from Kirkman’s graphic novel series and cast him as the protagonist of their prose novel. Rise shows the governor’s descent into villainy and plants the seeds for his rise to power.
Yeah, there are zombies all over the place, but this is a novel about people—good people gone bad.
Full story »
 Several years ago we made a trip to Shetland and some of the Orkney Islands, and it was a trip well worth making. One of the things we got to do was poke around a number of Neolithic sites, many of which were underground homes, if not outright collections of houses. One of the remarkable things about these houses, because that’s what they were, was the fact that many were erected before the first pyramids were put up—on some very lonely islands in the North Atlantic. Pretty neat stuff. The same is true for what are called passage graves—burial chambers with long passages from the entrance into the central chamber. The engineering on some of these is impressive indeed.
Full story »
 Used to be, they built airports near cities. Now we’re going to build a city near an airport. Because, you know, we built our airport nowhere near the goddamned city, I guess.
I love the 5280, but sometimes I think a little more oxygen wouldn’t hurt anything….
 by Colin Curtis
In recent history Kansas has become the breeding ground for extremist right wing agendas, legislation and beliefs. The Kansas Republican Party has abandoned the moderate beliefs of former heroes like President Dwight Eisenhower and turned into the main water carriers for the Kochs, ALEC and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce. Since the Republican “clean sweep” of 2010, when the conservative arms of the Kansas GOP led by Gov. Sam Brownback took every statewide office, every Congressional seat and an overwhelming majority in the House, it has been an all-out war on the middle and working classes.
Kansas is becoming the proving ground for extremist legislation. Last year the legislature attempted to pass a string of anti-worker bills like HB 2130, Full story »
 It’s a common theme I’ve noticed running through a lot of zombie apoca-lit: Other people, not zombies, represent the real danger. That’s certainly true in The Walking Dead—in the comics and in real life.
Partway through the first hardcover volume of The Walking Dead, I notice that principle art duties shift from Tony Moore to Charlie Adlard. Writer Robert Kirman remains at the helm.
Turns out, in the midst of the zombie apocalypse, Moore and Kirkman—who had been friends since childhood before collaborating to co-create The Walking Dead—turned on each other. Full story »
The jury is out on the election of Burma’s long-time leading dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) to Burma’s parliament. Roland Watson, who runs Dictator Watch, is one of the most trenchant Burma analysts and activists. In his most recent report, Burma’s Semi-Freedom Scorecard, he writes: “There are clearly winners, but also losers, from the new status quo,” by which he means victims of the organs of the “dictatorship’s oppression apparatus.” In other words, all those “who have been raped, assaulted, murdered, robbed, extorted, forced to labor, imprisoned, and tortured.” Full story »
Maya Lin, best known for the stunning Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, has throughout her career done a number of other remarkable works, both as an artist and as an architect (not that these are mutually exclusive categories). A recent project of hers is called “What is missing?” It’s very much worth a look. The internet, which I normally just think of as the world’s biggest library, is sometimes much more.
 On March 28, 2012, 49 former NASA astronauts, scientists, engineers, and administrators sent a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr. The letter requested that NASA in general and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in particular stop publishing the scientific conclusions about the human-driven causes of global climate disruption. The letter was filled with no less than six serious errors regarding the science, data, and facts of climate science. The errors, in turn, exposed that the signers had confused their fame and/or their expertise in unrelated fields with expertise in climate science. And in response, NASA’s chief scientist politely suggested that the letter’s authors and signers should publish any contrary hypotheses and data in peer-reviewed scientific journals instead of trying to censor the publication of scientific conclusions from NASA climate scientists. Full story »
 Here’s showered leg skin examined by geologist Rip Kirby. Under regular light, the skin seems clean, but ultraviolet light reveals orange blotches – dispersant-mixed oil muck. /Tampa Bay Times/James Kirby photo
If you care about salt water only when gargling, or annual beach parties, might as well skip this piece. Finicky readers will depart anyway, not drawn to environmental catastrophes, here the potential collapse of the Gulf ecosystem. Right off, two years of research proves the causal catch-all phrase, “BP oil spill,” drastically underplays the enormity of effects: the damage from double pollutants (oil + dispersant) carried by waves, deposited on seascapes, then absorbed by an incredible variety of living masses. Full story »
 Spring break, 2011. I’m in Ashtabula, Ohio, visiting my mother, and The Walking Dead are everywhere.
Or so it seems. American Movie Classics, AMC, is about to release season one of The Walking Dead on DVD, so the cable channel is promoting it heavily. I watch virtually no TV, but it plays almost constantly at my mother’s, and she’s an especially big fan of old movies. It makes the Walking Dead commercials seem all the more ubiquitous.
I’ve heard about the cult-fave show. Entertainment Weekly, in particular, has had the magazine equivalent of a man-crush on the series. Since I watch no TV, and since zombie movies gross me out, the show has had no allure.
But the commercials…. Oh, those commercials…. They do something to me…. Full story »
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