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Calls on District Attorney and City Commissioners to uphold election integrity
These days, every new console launch is followed by an online flood of complaints about quality control issues. Far too many original Nintendo DS systems showed up with dead pixels. The Xbox 360 was plagued by vague Red Ring of Death “general hardware failures”. The PlayStation 4 is known to spontaneously shut itself off. (Save your games early and often!) So it’s not surprising that people have run into problems with the new hybrid Nintendo Switch. But are its glaring design flaws and Nintendo’s apathetic response a sign that the system was released half-baked – and they just don’t care?
Set around the turn of the last century in New London, Connecticut - where young Eugene had summered - O’Neill’s 1933 Ah, Wilderness! is a marked departure from his usually gloomy plays, fraught with familial Sturm und Drang. Indeed, with their happy if imperfect lives, this comedy’s Millers are the polar opposites of those long suffering characters in his angsty final dramas, such as The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten. Indeed, one could say that the Millers are the family O’Neill wished he had grown up in, rather than the tense, dysfunctional, substance-abusing unit he had the misbegotten misfortune to have been born into.
Donald Trump’s first budget makes his antipathy to the environment clear—and his love for fossil fuels and nuclear power even clearer.
In addition to slashing funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, he also announced this week that he wants massive rollbacks in automotive fuel efficiency standards and billions in new investments in nuclear weapons and storage for commercial nuclear waste.
We have to start winning wars again. I have to say, when I was young, in high school and college, everybody used to say we never lost a war. We never lost a war, remember?...
America never lost. And now we never win a war. We never win. And don’t fight to win. We don’t fight to win. We’ve either got to win or don’t fight at all.
Donald Trump does not always in every way appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed. Yet there is great wisdom to be found in some of his assumptions of stupidity on the part of the rest of us. If I act like a real jackass, he thinks, the media will give me tons of free airtime, and I’ll be nominated. If I pretend to oppose corrupt power, the Democrats will nominate the living embodiment of corrupt power, and I’ll be president. If I cut everything that everybody values out of the budget but move the money to the military, my spineless war-adoring opponents will tie one hand behind their backs before they even try to put up a fight.
Jim Lo Scalzo / Pool image via AP
Last October, three weeks before the presidential election, I wrote an essay for left progressives titled “The Ruling Class’s Hatred of Trump is Different Than Yours.” People on the left, I noted, loathed the white-nationalist, quasi-fascist Donald Trump because of his sexism, racism, nativism, authoritarianism, militarism, “law and order” police-state-ism, anti-intellectualism, his regressive arch-plutocracy, fake populism, climate denialism and promise to “deregulate energy” and thereby escalate the petro-capitalist, greenhouse gassing-to-death of life on earth.
The establishment’s contempt for the orange-haired beast, I noted, was different. The nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire were perfectly willing to live with most, if not all, of what the left hated about Trump. After all, I reasoned, they’d been backing or tolerating most or all of those terrible things under presidents from both major United States parties for decades.
It is the leakiest of times in the Executive Branch. Last week, Wikileaks published a massive and, by all accounts genuine, trove of documents revealing that the CIA has been stockpiling, and lost control of, hacking tools it uses against targets. Particularly noteworthy were the revelations that the CIA developed a tool to hack Samsung TVs and turn them into recording devices and that the CIA worked to infiltrate both Apple and Google smart phone operating systems since it could not break encryption. No one in government has challenged the authenticity of the documents disclosed.
A recent report from Equality Now titled 'The World's Shame: The Global Rape Epidemic' http://www.equalitynow.org/campaigns/rape-laws-report offered a series of recommendations for strengthened laws to deter and punish sexual violence against women and girls.