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Whaddup. It’s the flu your four-year-old brought home for spring break. Are you gonna let me in or what? You’re hoping I leave you alone? You booked a family trip to Wolf Lodge Water Park? The deposit is nonrefundable?
Listen, I just KO’ed two dozen preschoolers like complimentary chips and dip at Casa Azteca, and now I want my entrée, capisce? Vis-à-vis for the next week or so, this is my house. And lemme tell you something—Michelangelo had marble. Da Vinci had paint. I have fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. And in three days, your GI tract will be my magnum opus.
Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I’m way too contagious to pass you by. I’ve literally spent a millennia evolving my DNA to inflict maximum carnage on your O-ring. The fact we’re even having this conversation means I’m already prancing through your upper respiratory system, painting the walls with flu.
What I’m saying is the chain reaction has begun. There’s no stopping the shitstorm descending upon your world. Think of me as Franz Ferdinand, the flu.
Not a WWI buff?
Why clocks need to follow the tempo of nature.
The post A Revolution in Time appeared first on Nautilus.
by Dave Rollo
Imagine a landscape with some of the richest wildlife habitats in North America. Settlements are scarce and water is plentiful. Birds dot the skies, mammals abound on the ground, and fishes fill the rivers and lakes.
That’s Tippecanoe County, Indiana. In 1800.
The county’s transformation over the past two centuries would make it unrecognizable to its original inhabitants. Today, much of Tippecanoe consists of flat plains of fertile soils.
The post Water Theft in the Heartland: The Case of Tippecanoe County appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing each other with such vigor and in such numbers? Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an “axis of evil” intent on harming us,... Read more
Source: There Is Only One Spaceship Earth appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Callie Siskel’s Two Minds is neither minimalist nor maximalist, but the spareness and efficiency speak volumes—and sometimes speak in long lines, sometimes short—making an art of saying as little as possible, but crucially no less. What’s left out presses upon what remains, and what remains is both substantial and hard as stone. Here’s the beginning of “Invitation,” which begins with an invitation:
My initials curled inside the oval like three robins
crowding a tree hollow.
The cardstock was beveled, the envelopes lined in airy pink paper.
My father was dying
quietly like the sound of his pen lifting
then touching down again.
Social realism is about more than misery. Work centred on effects, rather than causes, runs the risk of suggesting that poverty is a tragic yet somewhat unavoidable reality. What makes artists like Ken Loach, Ronan Bennett, Lynn Ramsay and David Peace so valuable is their ability to tell stories of policy failure through the close […]