“On the way home yesterday I noticed a bus stop shelter on Leeson St. has recently had installed a video with speakers into its poster board. Captives waiting for a bus must stand next to a short video explaining how to make something with a particular brand of cream cheese.”
 — What’s big in Ireland now? (Spoiler: bus stops with heinous annoying talking ads about cream cheese. Also probably drunkenness.)

by Abe Sauer

Bill Ayers is the human wormhole linking those mythical dirty, un-American hippies of the 1960s to the Obama administration to the also-dirty socialists of the rising #occupy movement. On October 13th, the conservative blog American Thinker giddily entertained the hypothetical of an Occupy Wall Street movement that would “morph into something resembling the radical factions of the late 1960s and 1970s” — when “it will not be just Ayers and [spouse Bernardine] Dohrn with blood on their hands. It will be their young protégé in the White House as well.”

For some, the stretch to make the 60s connection is done out of ignorance. For others it is a way to unload on a new generation the purported sins of the old. The whole mess came together on a recent windy Saturday in Milwaukee, when both the #occupy movement and the Tea Party picked up protest signs and took to the streets. Bill Ayers was in town.

* * *

“Smelly.” — Erick Erickson, CNN Contributor and editor-in-chief of RedState.com.

“Before I arrived, I could smell the stench of their unwashed bodies.” — Scott Brooks, 2010 candidate for Minnesota state legislature.

“These days a ‘progressive’ is someone who believes indoor plumbing is a tool of oppression.” — James Taranto, Wall Street Journal writer

“Who knew pubic lice would be so down with protesting the banksters, too?!” — Andrew Breitbart, founder of BigGovernment.com

What all of these conservative activists and thought leaders have in common, besides a future at the Laugh Factory, is that they were far too young to have experienced the 1960s protest stereotypes they parrot. Taranto was born in 1966, Breitbart in 1969 and Erickson in 1975. The “dirty hippie” narrative of protesters is one they have picked up through the Hollywood myth-making machine (whose cultural influence they often decry). Just how not new is this narrative? This weekend saw reports of U.S. service members in Boston being spit on by #occupy protesters. Spitting on returning Vietnam troops was, of course, maybe the most lasting legacy of the 1960s protesters — a legacy comprehensively debunked a few years ago.

As Jerry Lembcke wrote in 2005 in The Boston Globe: “I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on. What I did find is that around 1980, scores of Vietnam-generation men were saying they were greeted by spitters when they came home from Vietnam.” The proliferation of this urban legend, Lembcke argued, “intimidates a new generation of activists now finding the courage to resist Vietnam-type ventures in the 21st century.”

Not that the left isn’t also making this tragic comparison to the past. “Is #OWS The Revolution The Beatles Were Singing About? We think so,” fawned Democracy inaction group MoveOn.org.

So while plugging analysis of the new #occupy movement into the rubric of the 1960s is the only way conservatives seem to have of explaining what’s going on, it’s not just them. Proving that few pundits can think beyond the paint-by-number, ad-man Donny Deutsch went on MSNBC and predicted that what “will happen” in the #occupy movement is some Kent State “imagery.” (Deutsch was 12 on May 4, 1970, the day the National Guard opened fire on protesters at the Ohio campus, killing four.)

And nowhere does the right’s spite for the dirty hippies of the 60s marry into its contempt for the modern left better than with Chicago education professor William “Bill” Ayers.

Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute (a conservative propaganda organization dolled up to look like a conventional news service) called Ayers visit to Milwaukee on the same day as the Occupy Milwaukee event “a moment of synchronicity.” After linking Ayers to Obama to the #occupy movement, and noting that “The left in Wisconsin has a lot in common with Ayers and others who practice terrorism,” MacIver reporter James Wigderson wrote, “So much of the current activism on the political left is nostalgia for the 1960s without remembering what really happened.”

“What really happened” is exactly what landed me at the “Protest Ayers” event in Milwaukee.

“Professor Terror!” yelled one of the 40-odd conservatives gathered to protest the appearance of Bill Ayers at the Stonefly Brewery in Milwaukee’s slowly gentrifying Riverwest neighborhood. Five bike police relaxed and flanked the scene. But around the corner, out of sight, were six or seven more officers with a paddywagon.

Organizer Sara Conrad told me she is “a writer for AOL-Patch” and that she organized the event because “We don’t agree with bringing a terrorist to Milwaukee.” When asked what specifically Ayers did that was so horrible, Conrad said, “He was the founder of the Weather Underground and was involved in killing police officers. He was as much an anarchist as he was a Marxist.” But what really upsets Conrad the most is that “He’s not repentant. He has not disavowed the organization and has even said he may have to use bombs again.”

(“Of course I did my due diligence before I organized this event,” she said.)

“Jane Fonda loves you!” yelled someone from the Protest Ayers group at the 30 or so people loitering around outside the Brewery.

It would be an understandable mistake to think Fox News or The Heritage Foundation or even anti-terrorism Sharia watchdog Pamela Geller had been dogging Ayers since 2001 and immediately exposed his connection to Obama when the Illinois Senator announced his candidacy. But no, it was an early February 2008 London Daily Mail piece by Hitchens.

No, the other one.

The right never gave two twigs about Bill Ayers. His importance as a terrorist was marginal — until Christopher Hitchens’ brother Peter came across the loose connection, asking, in his coverage of the Obama campaign, “Can this possibly be the same William Ayers… who used to plant bombs in the Seventies?” Peter answered himself: “It wouldn’t be surprising. Those (like me) who know the left-wing codes notice things about Obama that he is far more radical than he would like us to know.” (The story was such an outrage that it took Ben Smith at Politico two more weeks to write about it.)

But it gained steam. On April 16th, the “Ayers question” was put before Obama at a Democratic candidate debate.

Overnight, the right’s narrative changed. Bill Ayers became the man who pulled the strings to launch Obama’s political career from his and his wife’s living room — a cozy Chicago living room in which Ayers and his Weathermen (Weatherperson?) spouse spent their down-time sipping tea, plotting to kill police officers and turn schoolchildren into Communists.

Rightwing activists who had ignored years of opportunity to vilify Ayers became experts in Weathermen history. Ayers’ admittance of setting bombs became an admittance to setting particular bombs. (Ayers maintains that none of the bombs he ever set did anything more than destroy property.) The bomb conspiracy and rioting charges were dropped due to questionable evidence-gathering methods. Though he was never even charged with it, it’s now commonly accepted by the right that the conviction he avoided was for murder. (Never mentioned is that prosecutors also dropped charges for fear of revealing CIA secrets at trial.)

“He’s guilty as hell. He’s out on a technicality,” said Vince Schmuki, who identified himself as part of Wisconsin Interests Now. He was dressed in a Halloween costume that was half cop, half jailbird and with a “Ayers, B” nametag. (Wisconsin Interests Now led an effort in 2009 to recall Democratic Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle.)

Schmuki brought a boombox with him and was playing, rewinding, and replaying tapes of himself reading various communist and terrorist quotes and beliefs of Bill Ayers. Schmuki pointed to those across the street: “They think that terrorism is laughable.”

When it comes to terrorism, Schmuki sees a lot of it. In August, Schmuki was at the Tea Party Express Wisconsin recall bus tour where he compared the state’s recall campaigns to terrorism. Schmuki told Politico, “This is ground zero. You remember what the term ground zero means? We have been attacked.”

Asked what he thinks of the comparisons between the Tea Party and #occupy movements, Schmuki jumped. “That’s absolutely false,” he said. The #occupy protests “are anarchists and communists.” For Schmuki, the primary difference is that the #occupy protesters “are paid to be there” while “the Tea Party, from the inception, never had paid members. We’ve never had people who were paid to be at events.”

Schmuki then mentioned the Coast Guard member in Boston being spit upon. “Hippies recycled,” he said.

A particular regional curiosity about this “Protest Ayers” event came when I noticed a note on its Facebook page. Event organizer Sara Conrad had written that Ayers “founded and led an organization that took credit for bombings that killed people…among those a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison who had the misfortune of being in Sterling Hall when the Weather Underground’s bomb went off.”

A day before Protest Ayers, Conrad went on local conservative talk radio and explained to host Mark Belling why she had organized the event to protest Ayers coming to Wisconsin, “a place where his beloved organization set a bomb that murdered somebody.” Belling said nothing.

At 3:43 am on August 24, 1970, a Ford Econoline filled with 2,000 pounds of fuel oil and ammonium nitrate exploded outside Sterling Hall on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The bomb injured several and caused millions of dollars in damage. Found in the rubble, lying face down in twelve inches of water, was 33-year-old postdoctorate researcher and father of three, Robert Fassnacht. The bomb targeted the military-funded Army Mathematics Research Center (which after closing for just one day, resumed work).

The four bombers are well known. All UW students, they included Karleton Armstrong, Dwight Armstrong, David Fine and Leo Burt. Three served three to seven years on prison. Burt remains in hiding to this day. They called themselves the “New Year’s Gang.” And as far as anyone knows, Ayers never met any of them.

So when I asked Conrad about her claims, on Facebook and on the radio, that Ayers was responsible for the Sterling Hall bombing, she told me, “You would have to ask him about that.”

“Are you going to ask him the hard questions too?” asked Gail Chicks, standing behind me.

Chicks, a member of the Tea Party Wisconsin 9/12 Project, had come to protest Ayers as well. Recently, Chicks modeled a pink dress (worn by a man who poured a beer on a Republican state legislator) when the dress was auctioned on eBay to raise funds for the GOP.

Of Ayers’ connection to the Sterling Hall bomb, Chicks said, “His group was. I don’t know if he specifically was. It slays me because he is killing Americans.”

Though Ayers connection to Sterling Hall is surely advanced by the wishful ignorance of a large conservative group desperate to believe Ayers’ unaccounted for years in the 1970s were spent smuggling Obama into the United States from Kenya, liberal Hollywood actually hasn’t helped. The 1988 Sidney Lumet film Running on Empty melts the on-the-run lives of Ayers and his wife with a crime based on the Sterling Hall bombing.

I found Wisconsin State Treasurer Kurt Schuller holding a sign that had the quote “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we did not do enough” along with a picture of Ayers. Schuller pointed out the photo was “of him standing on an American flag.” Conrad reported that local business AmeriSign & Graphics donated 55 full color signs, including the ones with Ayers’ photo, which originally ran in a 2001 Chicago Magazine profile.

“Ayers is no different than Osama bin Laden. He was the leader of a terrorist organization. Bill Ayers sent out his minions to kill people for his cause. And bin Laden sent out his minions to kill people for his cause. Sadly, bin Laden was just more effective,” said Schuller.

A long pause ensued as I thought of a follow-up question more professional than, “Whaaaaaaaaaaaa?”

Schuller looked over the protesters on both sides, and said, “I lived the history these people were never taught.”

“That’s a good one,” said a nearby protester.

Born in 1955, Schuller was 14 in 1969.

Schuller, who openly identifies as a member of the Tea Party, also bristled at any comparisons between Tea Partiers and the #occupy movement. “That’s no movement,” he said. “It’s a bunch of people getting together with no aim, no cohesion. There is no comparison. It’s laughable.”

What’s more, Schuller does not understand what the protesters are upset about. “Wall Street is one of Obama’s biggest fundraisers. Wall Street doesn’t reach into people’s pocket and take the money,” he said.

Schuller points me to Dan Sebring, a candidate for Wisconsin’s 4th Congressional seat.

Sebring, who also came out to protest “an unrepentant, admitted terrorist,” he said, is part of the Tea Party. When I asked Sebring how he feels about the Sterling Hall bombing being wrongly associated with Ayers, the candidate said, “I don’t know that’s true.” After a pause, he added, “It’s accepted knowledge that he’s admitted involvement.”

During the entire afternoon I did not speak with one member of the 50 or so Protest Ayers group who admitted that Ayers was known not to be involved with Sterling Hall.

“Cop killer!” is a favorite taunt of the protesters anytime the energy gets low. Ayers’ involvement in the February, 1970 bombing of a San Francisco police precinct, which killed an officer, is a favorite focus of conservatives. After Obama’s election, the group America’s Survival launched a high profile push for Ayers’ indictment. (The outfit’s most recent allegation? “How George Soros got Glenn Beck fired from Fox News.”) No even remotely solid evidence exists connecting Ayers to that bombing.

Just because crackpots are sure Ayers did it doesn’t mean he didn’t. Ayers has admitted to bombing Chicago’s Haymarket Police Statue in anticipation of the Days of Rage protest, which Ayers also helped lead. And there is evidence that suggests his wife, at the very least, knew about the bombing.

And just because the Tea Party despises him doesn’t make defending Ayers easy, or even necessary. By all accounts, the professor did illegal and stupid, stupid things. That he never served any jail time seems, from a practical 2000s standpoint, unjust. It also doesn’t help that Ayers himself regularly comes across like a gigantic prick.

Finally, one in the Protest Ayers group, looking for something new that would resonate, yelled: “Bill Ayers is part of the one percent!”

* * *

Around the demonstration, a local named Jeremy estimated that at least half of the “counter-protesters” were just people from the neighborhood who came out to see what the hubbub was all about. “It’s exciting to have this energy here,” he said. Jeremy said he did not know much about Ayers, adding, “But in Riverwest open minds are welcome. Freedom of speech and all that.”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this terrorist who killed everyone. And is still trying to kill everyone. Name’s Bill Ayers. He’s Obama’s best friend. Maybe you’ve heard of him,” said a man wearing a “Xav” nametag. It’s the epitome of the sarcasm sincere activists on the left bemoan. But Xav, who lives in the neighborhood and said he was at the #occupy Milwaukee protest earlier in the day, is a sincere fellow: Xav Leplae held a hunger protest during the Madison labor protests earlier in the year.

Another Wisconsinite who joined Milwaukee’s #occupy march, Ben Foldy, agreed many have a cynical hesitancy about the movement. “Milwaukee is clearly on the periphery of the movement,” Foldy said, but he’s heartened by the diversity, “which for an event in Milwaukee was noteworthy.”

Xav is encouraged by the Milwaukee’s wing of the movement, but he’s not yet confident it has the kind of energy needed.

* * *

In any event, if these Wisconsin protesters were genuinely interested in “remembering what really happened,” they would turn their attention to Wisconsin’s own unrepentant murdering terrorist. After serving seven years of a 23-year sentence, Karleton Armstrong returned to Madison to open various food shops, including a juice cart on the UW’s Library Mall. Today he can be found, usually daily, just blocks from Sterling Hall. Like Ayers, even years after the bombings, he has expressed less than remorse.

But then, Armstrong has never been in the same room as Barack Obama (as far as we know).

A day after the event, one of the attendees would post on the Protest Ayers Facebook page [all sic]: “I was there protesting Ayers and when U got there and saw the pro-Scott Walker and ‘Liberalism is a disease’ signs I wonder, what was the point of people bringing those? We were there protesting Ayers not liberals or anti Walker people… I’m pretty sure not all liberals think Ayers is a swell guy… to go into peoples neighborhoods and insult them probably isn’t the best method of trying to get a message across..”

William Jenkins responded: “Not convinced you are playing with a full deck. That liberal neighborhood shares political ideology in line with Bill Ayers and you’re smoking crack if you think they would be against violence in the name of that same brand of politics.”

The thread was soon deleted.

Driving home from the Ayers protest, I got the day’s last, sad dose of the reanimated “dirty hippy” narrative. During his October 15th radio broadcast (otherwise focused on Fannie Mae’s role in the recession), CNBC host Larry Kudlow quipped of the #occupy protesters: “They have the wrong narrative and the wrong sanitary conditions.”

Born in 1947, Kudlow might actually know what he’s talking about. Especially since he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1969, The New Yorker even profiled Kudlow as a standout SDS protest organizer. One of the leaders of the SDS at that time? Terrorist Bill Ayers.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com. He is also on Twitter. His book How to be: NORTH DAKOTA is out next month.

“Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.”
 — Lemony Snicket!

“’Rewilding’ — bringing elephants, cheetahs, and lions out of captivity to run free in parts of North America — could help save these megafauna from global extinction. More important, it would restore to the continent biological functions lost millenniums ago. The big guys would help stop the march of the pests and weeds — rats and dandelions — that will otherwise take over the landscape. And they would promote the natural processes that generate biodiversity.”
 — Today is a good day to revisit the interesting idea that Josh Donlan wrote about six years ago: to populate the North American plains with African megafauna. Here’s hoping the Siberian tiger is not one of the animals that have been shot by the Zanesville police so far, and that it makes it to the 250 miles to the Canadian border. (Without killing and eating any humans, of course.)

“A redundant satellite is falling back to Earth and experts have no idea where it will come down. Scientists are no longer able to communicate with the German satellite ROSAT, which orbits the earth every 90 minutes, and estimate there is a one in 2,000 chance it will hit someone.” Scientists expect the satellite will hit at some point between Friday and Tuesday, so, uh, be careful out there.

A brief primer on writer and lesbian-marrier Robert McAlmon. (Who? Yes.)

A writer, publisher, and a connoisseur of the Parisian nightlife, Robert McAlmon was a fixture of the Lost Generation’s expatriate community in Paris in the 20s and 30s. McAlmon took Hemingway out to the bullfights in Spain that he would immortalize in The Sun Also Rises. He typed proofs of James Joyce’s monumental novel Ulysses, and due to the convoluted system of notes and addendums in Joyce’s manuscript, the voice of Molly Bloom that the first generation of readers received was actually McAlmon’s interpretation of Joyce’s. Through his publishing company Contact Editions, he was the first to publish works by such luminaries of the modernist movement as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Nathanael West.

I am finally going to read Being Geniuses Together.

Ohio On Lockdown As Animals Roam Free

“Sheriff’s officers toting assault rifles are out seeking and killing exotic wild animals that escaped from wild animal game preserve in Zanesville, Ohio. By Wednesday morning officers in the rural, eastern Ohio area had already killed dozens of animals that escaped from a wild-animal preserve — the Muskingum County Animal Farm — and where the owner’s body later was found. Employees from the Columbus Zoo also went to the farm hoping to tranquilize and capture the animals…. The county Sheriff Matt Lutz described them as ‘wild animals that you would see on TV in Africa.’ They include lions, tigers, cheetahs, wolves, giraffes, camels and bears.”

Did Adolf Hitler fake his suicide by using a body double who was shot in the the head and then escape by plane and submarine to Argentina where, with U.S. government complicity, he and wife Eva Braun raised two daughters and lived out the rest of his days until he died in 1962 at the age of 73? Uh, sorry, I’m usually pretty relaxed about these things, but I’m gonna have to go with “no” on this one.

by Emerson Beyer

The jack-o’-lantern traces its origins to the Dark Ages’ British Isles, where once upon a time, as oral histories convey, they were carved from turnips, illuminated with swamp gas and held aloft to protest the excesses of the financial elite. In sophisticated neighborhoods, the jack-o’-lantern has evolved into a tool for clever parents to send amusing political jokes to one another and to demonstrate their artisanal bona fides. The puking pumpkin simply won’t suffice anymore. A range of genius o’-lantern alternatives exists, but these mostly work indoors only. I’m going to show you how to design and carve a spirited jack-o’-lantern for your stoop that will shock and mesmerize all who behold it.

An artful jack-o’-lantern is especially trenchant as part of a themed ensemble. I prefer themes that delight in nostalgia and the low brow; nothing too topical unless it’s amusingly stale. The figures should also be ghoulish — it is, after all, Halloween. In previous years, I’ve gone with demagogues and dictators. This year my theme is daytime talk shows. If unemployment is the plague of our era, then daytime television hosts are its apocalyptic horsemen. I’m starting with one who is so demonic and shudder inducing (and apparently trigger-happy with the lawsuits) that I dare not speak his name. Like many of our contemporary demons, he is from Texas and strongly disapproves of your parenting. (Shivers!!)

Are you ready to carve like Jason Voorhees? OK, let’s massacre some pumpkin!

Use Google Image Search to find a good black-and-white picture or a simple caricature of the nightmare visage you’ve chosen (for the latter, set search criteria to “Line Drawing”). Here’s my seriously low-tech way of doing this because I don’t have Photoshop (or computer skills): download the picture and put it in a PowerPoint presentation. Stretch it to a seven-inch square — it’s okay if the picture gets blurry or pixelated. Use “format picture” to convert the color to “Black and White,” even if it’s already monochromatic. Adjust the brightness and contrast settings until you get a highly schematic but still passable image of your ghoul.

Use a black Sharpie to outline and fill in the black parts of your picture and to add any obviously missing parts (top of head, jaw line). The carving method we’re going to use is fairly precise, but not surgical, so you can be sacrificing minutiae at this point. You will ultimately leave the “black” areas intact and carve out the white areas. You want to keep the telling details, like Doctor McGruesome’s moustache, dimples, laugh lines and soaring dome. You’ll also need to draw a “halo” around your figure — this is important and you’ll eventually see why.

Time to go shopping! Pumpkins grow everywhere and they are very hardy, so there’s a good chance your grocery store carries “local” pumpkins and that they’re grown without a lot of pesticides. No need to buy a giant pumpkin — in fact, something smaller will be more manageable, as long as it fits your seven-inch picture. The main thing to shop for is a relatively smooth surface without deep creases.

When you get home, stir yourself a Normandy, put on your crafting smock and cover your table with a drop cloth. Do not try to do this on the floor — you’ll hurt your back, which I guess would be fine if your costume is Igor.

If you learn nothing else today, let it be this: open your pumpkin from the bottom. This has so many advantages over cutting into the top around the stem. First, you can hack away, and no one will see your mistakes. You also don’t have to worry about your “lid” failing to fit or falling into the pumpkin as it dries out. Cutting out the bottom allows you to make a much bigger hole, and that will make it easier to clean out the pumpkin guts. You can also cut adjustments around the hole if the pumpkin isn’t standing up in the posture you’d like. Finally, when you’re all done, you can set the pumpkin down over the “candles” (we’re using the flickery fake LED kind) instead of lowering them in.

Get a big metal spoon and start digging and scraping. You’re not done when the gooey stuff and the seeds are out. (n.b., These seeds are not good for snacks, they are grody.) You need to keep scraping until the pumpkin chamber is immaculate. Then scrape a little more! Scraping the walls quite thin from the inside will make your carving on the outside much easier.

Tape your picture to the outside, snipping and folding at the corners to minimize distortion. Then, using a puncturing tool, outline all the black parts of the picture. (I use a nut pick, and have never attempted this with an awl, so don’t ask.) Warning: this is the most difficult and tedious part of the project. If you are arthritic, enlist the help of a fastidious youngster.

After piercing your outline, it’s time to connect the dots and start scraping out the image. Ah yes, scraping. Not carving! Surprise! That’s the whole trick! I use the nut pick and the back of a potato peeler. (Did I mention that this is actually very dangerous and not for kids?! Yeah, that.)

A few more cutting/scraping tips:

1. Start with the broad areas, because the vigorous cutting and scraping required can easily cause you to wreck more delicate, detailed areas if you’ve already finished them.

2. A lot of the detail is around the eyes. If you mess up, don’t sweat it. Your figure will just look more zombie-like. (See this Ahmedinejad from a previous Halloween.)

3. Scrape a lot of flesh away — it has to be thin enough for the light to shine through. But be careful not to make holes. Even too-thin spots will break open after the pumpkin dries for a while.

4. If your jack-o’-lantern doesn’t glow as brightly as you’d like, try thinning the flesh from the inside — you’re less likely to mess up your work or to make accidental holes.

Looks a lot like Dr. McGruesome, right? And when he’s joined by a certain Smizing Super Monster and the frighteningly chipper 30 Minute Poisoner to fill out the afternoon terror-talk lineup, the likeness will be even more obvious, and you will have made a name for yourself as the block’s mad genius of Halloween.

What’s your theme going to be? Send ideas! Send pictures!

K. Emerson Beyer, environmentalist and gadabout, lives in Durham, N.C. and tweets as @patebrisee.

“I think it would be mistaken to conclude from these bone finds that this was cannibalism or has some cultural background. In Germany too, corpses are dilettantishly discarded, that doesn’t just happened in the Second or Third Worlds.”
 — Adolph Gallwitz, professor of police psychology at the police college in Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany, makes a good point about a pile of human bones found on the South Pacific island of Huku Niva. Local police think the bones may be the remains of a German engineer, Stefan Ramin, who went exploring the island with a local hunter and has been missing since October 9th. Some say that the bones betray evidence of a ritual killing and perhaps even cannibalism — leading the German tabloid Bild to run the headline, “Do Cannibals Still Exist on the Death Island?” accompanied by a 19th-century etching of Polynesian natives flaying strips of flesh from a prisoner bound to a stake. Huka Niva authorities are concerned this could affect their tourism industry. But as we know, cannibalism is not strictly a South Pacific phenomenon. And there are other terrible things about this story.