Styrofoam faces smiled facetiously. Lauren wanted to say that she knew all along and that she was just kidding too and that she was just being stupid or funny or both, but she just giggled along with them as her cheeks melted. She didn’t know what was going on, but she quickly concluded that these girls were much more experienced in life than she was.

The rage soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is easily directed to innocent civilians who are seen to support the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral leap. It is a leap from killing – the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm – to murder – the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing.

Targeted by insurgent groups, denied help from the US army, the Iraqis who cast their lot with America are being kidnapped and executed every day, and no news report or televised pleas of help have caused a stir in the American conscience.

“It’s nice to be naughty,” claims the buxom hotty in a certain widely disseminated ad for True.com, one of online dating’s biggest players. It’s the sort of oxymoronic sentiment that encapsulates, at least in spirit, the seemingly two-faced practices of a company that has been
raising the hackles of its competitors in an industry struggling with stagnant revenues.

“When I was a boy,” Donat said, “I was afraid of falling into the sky. And you? Were you ever afraid of falling into the sky?” I made no reply. The idea was absurd. No one falls into the sky, and surely even as a child I had sense enough not to fear such a thing.

It took a while before I gathered that jazz was… actually a form of resistance. Nowadays I realize that jazz is no different from Jihad. As much as jazz, the classical music of America, has been a call for freedom, America is not a free place anymore.

She always had someone: the strongest one, the man who had slaughtered the most animals. Now the man who had killed the most barren cows slept by her side with his white skin that sparkled by her brown body. He held her in his dreams.

Harper’s attempt to portray himself as environmentally conscious is all the more insulting considering his track record. Harper’s “greening” is nothing more than a whitewash.

As America’s major media companies pressure the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow for more cross-ownership, Eric Klinenberg examines how media consolidation is suffocating democracy and even putting people’s lives at risk.

Reacting to 300, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took advantage of his Iranian New Year’s address to talk about Hollywood’s campaign of “psychological warfare” against his country. Perhaps he didn’t realize that we’ve been fighting that campaign against ourselves for some time now.

That pretty well sums up the way most of us in the affluent West feel about global warming: we’re ready to make small sacrifices, change our light bulbs, our cars and even our leaders, but our culture – the American way of life – is not negotiable.

Although the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have shown that media conglomerates limit the diversity of views, subvert democracy and stymie journalistic integrity, media regulators continue to let them expand. As each of these three countries enters another round of media convergence, their federal media watchdogs appear to be looking the other way.

If you’ve ever felt the need to know what every single one of your chums is doing at every hour of every day, then count yourself lucky.

For a decade now, Jim Keady has been trying to kick Nike’s ass using their shoes as ammo. The former professional soccer player’s crusade began when he was canned from a coaching gig for refusing to wear Nike’s products – a stand he took after learning what was happening in overseas sweatshops while researching his masters thesis.

Despite the walloping defeat of the Republicans in the 2006 midterm elections, the clowns are once again spilling out of the Volkswagen. Lately the neocons seem to be all over the public airwaves, and not as the targets of purgative public flogging or tarring ceremonies, but as the subjects of serious interviews, with respected journalists treating them like real human beings with real opinions.