Month: September 2013

Tatiana Danger spotlights “the world’s largest doomsday timeshare,” an underground complex with room for 5,000 that bills itself as “an attraction for the entire family, both above and below ground”:

It’s a modern-day Noah’s ark for the nuclear generation. It will house thousands of DNA samples and withstand a 20-megaton nuclear blast. … The shelter is located 50 to 150 feet below the Missouri River bluffs in part of a former limestone mine known as the Atchison Storage Facility. This facility served as a secure bunker complex for the U.S. government since World War II up until 2013, when the company behind the Vivos Survival Shelter and Resort acquired a large portion of the 2.7-million-square-foot underground storage facility. The Vivos shelters will also come with their very own “Cryovaults” that will house “reproductive gamete cells and DNA of humans and animals for a potential re-population of the Earth.”

Of course, cryovaults and underground volleyball courts don’t come cheap. A spot at the Kansas-based facility will set you back $25,000.

Jaya Saxena calls Mildred Taylor’s novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry “a perfect response to To Kill A Mockingbird.” Below is her lesson from juxtaposing the two books – both narrated by young girls, one black and one white:

The main difference is that To Kill A Mockingbird is a book written for adults with a childishly simple moral, and Roll of Thunder is a book written for children that is powerfully adult. … To Kill A Mockingbird is a story about learning the difference between right and wrong, and then doing what’s right. It’s an important lesson, and one that everyone should definitely start thinking about as a kid. But it’s also simple.

Roll of Thunder takes that idea to the next level, showing the deep personal calculus necessary to weigh “doing what’s right” against public expectation, personal safety, and what kind of privilege is necessary to even be able to make that choice. Atticus Finch can do the right thing, have it not work, but still say “hey, at least I tried.” His children can be attacked and it’s considered a crime punishable by the full extent of the law. If the Logans do the “right thing,” everything they hold dear will be destroyed. If a Logan is attacked, no one in power cares.

A reader in Alaska writes:

An average moose yields about 700 pounds of lean meat when recovered from a crash. Even if the crash is bloody and causes clotting, about 300-400 pounds of burger meat can be salvaged. Many churches, food banks and non-profits are on a call list. When a moose fatality is reported, they call folks on the list and are given an hour or so to harvest the meat. Folks consider it a privilege when it’s their turn on the list.

Another tells a story:

Early eighties and I’m at a small, rural college in Vermont.  A friend and I were bombing along the desolate road to campus and a little deer, spots and all, leapt over a snow bank and directly into my path.  The impact launched the fawn onto an icy patch on the road and it slid to a stop.  We got out, and to our surprise and horror the poor thing was still alive and making an awful whining sound.  We realized we had to put the animal out of its misery; the question was how.  My friend suggested I drive over it, an idea that I quickly rejected. A rock to the head? A tire iron? We settled on suffocation – not terribly appealing but the best of a host of bad ideas.

So there I was, in the middle of the road, strangling a baby deer.  As if on cue, another car came along, filled with fellow students coming back from – and you can’t make this shit up – a Greenpeace meeting.  So I was a deer in the headlights strangling a baby deer. Quick explanations from my friend averted a beat-down (or at least the Greenpeace version of a beat-down).  The deer let out one last breath, went limp, and all was quiet.  There were a few tears.

Meanwhile, the town game warden – an old Vermont character named Donny – had been alerted and showed up post-strangulation.  He made his way to the center of the drum circle, picked up the deer by the neck, looked at all of us and said: “Sunday Dinner.”

Another:

Great thread. I don’t have any roadkill stories to add, but I just had to write in because I’d never heard the term “car-harvested” used to describe take-home roadkill before. I laughed out loud when I read it. It’s perfect. Car-harvested! That’s why the Dish is the best.

Update from a reader:

Come on guys this is too easy – it clearly should be Carvested!

Adam Ciralsky reports at length on Lockheed Martin’s troubled F-35 Lightning II program. How the project has survived:

The political process that keeps the Joint Strike Fighter airborne has never stalled. The program was designed to spread money so far and so wide—at last count, among some 1,400 separate subcontractors, strategically dispersed among key congressional districts—that no matter how many cost overruns, blown deadlines, or serious design flaws, it would be immune to termination. It was, as bureaucrats say, “politically engineered.” …

[Lockheed Martin] employs a stable of in-house and outside lobbyists and spends some $15 million on lobbying each year. When it comes to the F-35, which accounts for one of its largest revenue streams, Lockheed takes every opportunity to remind politicians that the airplane is manufactured in 46 states and is responsible for more than 125,000 jobs and $16.8 billion in “economic impact” to the U.S. economy. Signing up eight allied countries as partners provides additional insurance. “It’s quite frankly a brilliant strategy,” said General Bogdan, acknowledging that it is effective even if it is not admirable. Political engineering has foiled any meaningful opposition on Capitol Hill, in the White House, or in the defense establishment.

(Photo: A U.S. Air Force pilot navigates an F-35A Lightning II aircraft into position to refuel with a KC-135 Stratotanker over the coast of Florida on May 16, 2013. By MSgt John Nimmo Sr via Wikimedia Commons)

They’re covered by the Constitution now:

“Liking” something on Facebook is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, reviving a closely watched case over the extent to which the Constitution shields what we do online. In doing so, the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a former deputy sheriff in Hampton, Va., who said he was sacked for “liking” the Facebook page of a man running against his boss for city sheriff. “Liking” the campaign page, the court said, was the “Internet equivalent of displaying a political sign in one’s front yard, which the Supreme Court has held is substantive speech.”

Gopnik urges the country to support sensible gun control laws:

Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse” is a fine study of why societies persist in obviously irrational, sometimes suicidal, behavior, even when the reality of just how suicidal it is stares them in the face. Why do they continue to deforest in the face of floods, refuse to eat fish even at the price of starvation? Most of the time, he points out, the simple sunk cost of the irrationality helps it persist: we have always believed this, and to un-believe it is to lose our faith in ourselves.

Yet sometimes things change. Diamond cites the success story of the Tikopia chiefs who presided over the decision to eliminate pigs from their tiny island, despite an ancient chieftain’s attachment to the destructive animals, and to turn instead to eating shellfish. Passionately held irrational values, even when they are hugely destructive, deserve empathy from all of us, since we all have values that are just as irrational, and just as passionately held. But it’s our job as grownups, not to mention as citizens, to learn the price of our pet irrationality and, like the Tikopians, to undo the animal forces, on our island and in our head, before they finish undoing us.

(Photo: During a press conference at the U.S. Capitol calling for gun reform legislation, Kyra Murray holds a photo of victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. With the shooting at the Washington Navy Yard earlier this week, gun reform activists are renewing their call for gun control laws. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)