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Fans of Deadpool-the-character are an odd mix of fratbros and social justice types. He's a violent antihero mercenary straight from the Xtreme days of early 90s comics whose repartee tends toward adolescent humor, but he's also a mentally ill canon omnisexual whose superpower is also a disability. There was a concern that, with Hollywood involved, a Deadpool movie would pander too much to the former group at the expense of the latter.

Fortunately, that's not the case at all. While Deadpool-the-movie is even more full of filthy language, crude innuendos, and bloody violence than the comics – Parents, this is NOT Avengers! – most of its humor is as its own expense rather than punching down. It doesn't quite bat a thousand on social decency – there are a couple blink-and-you'll-miss-them trans jokes at the expense of a super-strong woman villain – but it comes a lot closer than one might expect from a Hollywood action movie, especially a hard-R one immersed in adolescent humor.

Maybe if we declared “war” on poison water, we’d find a way to invest money in its “defeat.”

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, writing at Tom Dispatch this week about what they called “The United States of Flint,” make this point: “The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable.”

I sit with these words: “No one knows where the money will come from.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Human Rights Watch, political analysts and others
are criticizing President Obama for inviting Bangkok's coup leader to
an ASEAN summit in California on February 15 amid expectations the
junta will display it as U.S. endorsement of the military regime.

Indicative of that support, the Pentagon will simultaneously train the
junta's troops for 11 days here in Thailand during February to ensure
"stability within the region."

All 10 leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- which
includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the
Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam -- received invitations
to the February 15-16 U.S.-ASEAN Summit at Sunnylands in Rancho
Mirage, California.

Most of the leaders arrived alongside Prime Minister Prayuth
Chan-ocha, who seized power in a bloodless May 2014 coup.

"We advised the White House to rescind invitations to Prime Minister
Prayuth and [Cambodian] Prime Minister Hun Sen," said Human Rights
Watch's Washington-based Asia Policy Director John Sifton.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- An American "cardiac electrician" who helped Dick
Cheney survive for 10 years and also eliminated nearly all of
Thailand's spooky Sudden Death Syndrome which killed mostly sleeping
males -- inspiring many to wear women's clothes as disguises -- has
received a $100,000 Prince Mahidol Award.

Dr. Morton M. Mower and a colleague invented the award-winning device
based on the big, bulky, hand-held electric paddles which doctors
usually place on the chest of a heart attack victim to send a bolt of
electricity to revive a dying heart.

Co-inventor Mower's device is miniaturized and implanted in a person's chest.

Later, whenever it detects a heart attack, the device automatically
sends electricity to the organ to revive it, without any medical staff
present.

His Automatic Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator is not a
pacemaker, which simply maintains a heart's beating pulse by
stimulating the heart muscle and regulating its contractions.

Mower's defibrillator acts only in a life-and-death emergency when a
heart is about to stop.

Super Bowl 50 will be the first National Football League championship to happen since it was reported that much of the pro-military hoopla at football games, the honoring of troops and glorifying of wars that most people had assumed was voluntary or part of a marketing scheme for the NFL, has actually been a money-making scheme for the NFL. The U.S.

ernie Sanders has shown in Iowa that he’s a viable candidate … and more. Considering Bernie was down 50 points just a while ago, Iowa has sent a clear signal that this campaign must be taken seriously.

But the terrain will quickly shift. Bernie will obviously do well in New Hampshire. Then the race will move to southern and bigger states, where Hillary may have an edge.

But we’re not talking about demographics. The real terrain shift that concerns us is from a caucus state to ones where the votes are counted on electronic voting machines.

The key strategy in question is “strip and flip,” i.e., the stripping of electronic registration lists, and then the flipping of the vote count on machines that have no reliable system of verification.

The “strip & flip” realities are simple enough:

STRIP:

“It was also a shock to the system that a candidate universally known in Iowa, with deep pockets and long experience, could come close to losing to a relative unknown who was initially considered little more than a protest candidate.”

Just think of it! The tiny, tightly controlled consciousness that calls itself The World’s Greatest Democracy got all rattled and discombobulated by the behavior of Iowa caucus participants this week, because a large number of them — virtually half of the participating Democrats — cast their vote for an old socialist, well outside the zone of official approval.