Global
The year that seemed determined to crush hopes and smother dreams did have a few bright spots. For instance, the biggest competitive video game of 2016 also happens to be impressively diverse.
Created from the ashes (and creative assets) of a canceled MMO game known as Titan, Overwatch was almost an afterthought, an attempt to scrape something useful out of seven years of work. Now the competitive shooter is so popular that publisher Activision Blizzard is creating its own official esports league for it.
One of the biggest draws of the game, even for people who don’t actually play it (but are more than happy to spread its name and buy its merchandise), is the diversity of its characters. And though Overwatch has been out for months now, something that adds to that was just recently revealed: Tracer, the cheery young woman on the cover, the character whose likeness is incorporated into the Overwatch League logo, is officially a lesbian.
Many top Democrats are stoking a political firestorm. We keep hearing that Russia attacked democracy by hacking into Democratic officials’ emails and undermining Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Instead of candidly assessing key factors such as longtime fealty to Wall Street that made it impossible for her to ride a populist wave, the party line has increasingly circled around blaming Vladimir Putin for her defeat.
Of course partisan spinners aren’t big on self-examination, especially if they’re aligned with the Democratic Party’s dominant corporate wing. And the option of continually fingering the Kremlin as the main villain of a 2016 morality play is clearly too juicy for functionary Democrats to pass up -- even if that means scorching civil liberties and escalating a new cold war that could turn radioactively hot.
Much of the current fuel for the blame-Russia blaze has to do with the horrifying reality that Donald Trump will soon become president. Big media outlets are blowing oxygen into the inferno. But the flames are also being fanned by people who should know better.
Everybody has their own point of view. One person’s meat is another’s poison and all that. And it’s also true that some books that can have an utterly wrongheaded thesis and still have some worthwhile research in it. My friend Joe McBride has pointed out that even Dale Meyers’s book With Malice is not entirely useless, although one has to account for the ideological curve at all times. For his part, Meyers has attacked McBride’s book.
Confirmation hearings for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, named by Donald Trump to be attorney general of the United States, will begin on Jan. 10, before Trump is even inaugurated. The rush and insistence on only two days of hearings reflect Republican efforts to cram the nomination through before Americans understand what is at stake.
Sessions will, no doubt, present himself as a humble, genial and reasonable public servant. In reality, Sessions is an outlier, an unimaginable nominee as attorney general, an implacable opponent of the very rights and liberties that the attorney general is supposed to defend. As more than 200 civil rights, human rights and women’s groups noted in a unified statement: “Sen. Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the attorney general of the United States.”
To many Democrats for whom killing a million people in Iraq just didn't rise to the level of an impeachable offense, and who considered Obama's bombing of eight nations and the creation of the drone murder program to be praiseworthy, Trump will be impeachable on Day 1.
Are you old enough to remember when liberal groups openly admitted that the war on Iraq was illegal and fraudulent, based on oil and profit and sadism?
Well, can you recall when the proponents of the war claimed it was a defense against nonexistent ties to terrorists and nonexistent weapons?
Even if you've wiped those memories, let me assure you, NOBODY ever claimed that attacking and destroying Iraq was necessary to protect civil liberties in the United States (which have been seriously eroded during the course of the war).
Yet, in recent months the generic defense of murdering large numbers of people far away has taken over as the explanation for the war on Iraq.
The ACLU on Friday used the voice of my fellow Charlottesvillian Khizr Khan to claim that attacking Iraq was done "in defense of our country's ideals."
In Liberal America, there's a growing feeling of hysteria
Conditioned to accept whatever's claimed
As long as it's Donald and the Russians blamed
Mr. Putin says he'll be friends with you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians hate their children too
How can I risk my little boy with Oppenheimer's deadly toy
There is no monopoly in common sense
On either side of all the missile defense
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
The Russians hacked your cell phone too
There is no historical precedent
To put a stooge in the office of the President
There's no such thing as a winnable war
It's a lie we don't reject anymore
Obama says we will protect you
I don't subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I know the Russians hate their children too
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might kill us, me, and you
Both South Korean consumer groups and politicians have been for quite some time calling for mandatory GMO labeling, which, starting in February, will be the enforced law.
Because the article that this article is about was in Korean in the original, I will post the translation with a brief comment of my own.
In view of the fact that the Trump FDA Commissioner will be even more manipulated by corporate interests than prior administrations, not much at all is going to get done over the next four years in the realm of protecting consumers. I say that because of the demonstrated record thus far of appointing 4 climate change deniers to Cabinet positions. I am all for giving a new regime a chance to prove themselves, but in this department, that of the FDA, I hold out no hope at all.
The mainstream media and the alternative media in the USA are difficult to submit articles that educate consumers, so I have entirely shifted all of my efforts to other nations. The most significant involves my presenting my initial evidence to the Health Minister of India requesting him to ban Aspartame.