Global

Bring spray bottles of pink liquid to military recruitment offices and displays.
Spray them.
Tell potential recruits: Be all that you can be. And this could be you.

“Pink mist. That’s what they call it.
“When one of your mates hasn’t just bought it,
“but goes in a flash, from being there to not.
“A direct hit. An I.E.D. An R.P.G. stuck in the gut.”

Those are lines from a play called Pink Mist written in verse by Owen Sheers about three young lads from Bristol who sign up for war in Afghanistan.
Read it. Perform it. It begins like this:

“Three boys went to Catterick.
“It was January,
“snow pitchen on the Severn,
“turning the brown mud white,
“fishermen blowing on their fingerless gloves,
“the current pulling their fishing lines tight.
“That’s how it was the morning when
“the three of us did what boys always have
“And left our homes for war.”

“Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” –Orwell

The U.S. government has reached the bottom of the barrel. Having packed every square inch of the National Mall with monuments to every war they wanted to admit to, including the wars on Vietnam and Korea, and including the two world wars, our dear leaders have decided that another World War I monument is needed, and that it will be built in Pershing Park (named in 1981 for a World War I general by then already sufficiently forgotten).

It’s the day after the big vote and I’m doing my best to dig Tulsi Gabbard’s endorsement of Bernie Sanders out from beneath the pile of Super Tuesday numbers and media declarations of winners and losers.

As a Boston Globe headline put it: “Clinton and Trump are now the presumptive nominees. Get used to it.”

But something besides winning and losing still matters, more than ever, in the 2016 presidential race. War and peace and a fundamental questioning of who we are as a nation are actually on the line in this race, or could be — for the first time since 1972, when George McGovern was the Democratic presidential nominee.

Embrace what matters deeply and there’s no such thing as losing.

Washington, D.C., March 1, 2016 – The nationwide nonpartisan Election Protection voter hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE received more than 2,000 calls as voters in 12 states made their voices heard during the Super Tuesday presidential preference primaries and caucuses. The hotline received a steady stream of calls throughout the day with voters seeking information as well as assistance on a range of issues resulting from poll worker misinformation, voter ID problems, overcrowded polls, long lines and ballot shortages.

Growing up, the words “athlete” and “Brooke Sousa” were rarely used in the same sentence. The Westerville resident said all that has changed in the past year.

After becoming “addicted” to Strongwoman competitions, Sousa can’t believe she will be competing in the Arnold Sports Festival March 3-6 in the Bricker Building in the Ohio Exposition Center.

“Last year, we sat in the crowd watching the Strongwoman competition and it was our dream to get there,” Sousa said. “My coach (Bob Howell) had a lot of faith in me and he gave up a lot of his time to help get me there. We both knew last March we had a lot of work to do but he kept asking me ‘How hard are you going to work to get there?’”

“I haven’t seen anyone strength wise excel like she has,” Howell said. “After two weeks of working out with her, I told her if she trusted me, we could get her to compete in the world’s strongest woman competition (at the Arnold). Now here we are.”

Strongwoman competitions test a person’s ability to lift and move objections. The contests usually involve five feats of strength but the events vary from competition to competition.

Marvel and Fox Studios’ R-rated superhero action/comedy Deadpool, a gamble of a movie that required some “leaked” test footage and a fan campaign just to get made, is now breaking box office records. In addition to a stellar opening weekend that surpassed any of Fox Studios’ other X-Men-related movies, as of this writing it’s on its way to becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever.

This flies in the face of “common wisdom” in Hollywood that superhero movies just can’t make money without that under-17 audience. And while an R-rated superhero movie may never make as much as a kid-friendly, PG-13 Avengers, Deadpool proves that a good one can still outperform an average PG-13 one.

The problem is that some in Hollywood are learning all the wrong lessons from Deadpool’s success.

The millions of people in the United States who are denied equal rights because they are immigrants have vast stockpiles of wisdom and rich culture to share; they engage in more strategic and courageous activism than do non-immigrants; and without any doubt they would vote better than do the "legal" people of South Carolina if only they were permitted to vote. The mistreatment of these people shortchanges every U.S. enterprise and reduces civil rights, paychecks, public safety, sense of community, and basic levels of morality for everyone.

he official version of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia’s death at a remote Texas luxury resort during the night of February 12-13 is that he died of natural causes, in bed alone and without any witness, time of death unknown. While there’s little forensic evidence to support this or any other conclusion, there’s even less evidence to challenge it. What, after all, is not credible about a 79-year-old, overweight man with heart disease and other medical issues dying in his sleep after overindulging at a dinner party for forty people?

BANGKOK, Thailand -- While the U.S. alliance with Thailand suffers
strains after Bangkok's 2014 coup, Russia has delivered combat
helicopters to the military regime and now wants to provide tanks,
counter-terrorism training, security intelligence and other
assistance, Russia's ambassador to Thailand said in an interview.
   Moscow's willingness to support coup leader Prime Minister Prayuth
Chan-ocha sharply contrasts with the Obama administration's public
criticism of Thailand's junta, Russian Ambassador Kirill Barsky said.
   Meanwhile, Thailand's Defense Minister Gen. Prawit Wongsuwon, who
is also deputy prime minister, visited Russia February 23-27 so the
two sides could tighten military relations after decades of relatively
low-key links, Mr. Barsky said.
   Prime Minister Prayuth is invited to join a May summit in the
Russian city of Sochi between the Kremlin and the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) which also includes Brunei, Cambodia,
Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore and
Vietnam.