Global

If war were inevitable, there would be little point in trying to end it. If war were inevitable, a moral case might be made for trying to lessen its damage while it continued. And numerous parochial cases could be made for being prepared to win inevitable wars for this side or that side.

Critics of internet and computer voting have an axiom: the election is never over until the cybervote comes in. Now there is a Spanish-based company planning to count U.S. overseas and military votes from Europe. It also has the technology to manufacture, manipulate and rig the vote count. Welcome to the world of Scytl. This spooky new world is held together through a complex assortment of interlocking directorships and investment deals.

The dangers to free and fair elections posed by electronic voting are well documented. Partisan goals can be achieved through the subversion of the central tabulation via an attack on the voting network. Wealthy politicians or their friends can invest in and own the voting machine manufacturers. The manufacturers themselves can be openly partisan. The threat to the universal franchise posed by the intelligence community controlling the manufacture of voting equipment from design and development to sales and integration outweighs all previous dangers.

There’s a new X-Men movie out, the excellent Days of Future Past, and that means it’s time for the Fake Geek Boys to phone in filler about the X-Men characters they remember from the 90s cartoon. But here at the Free Press mutants are serious business, so instead of the Top 10 Most Overrated X-Men, I present to you: The Top 10 X-Men Who Are Better Than the Alive’s Top 10 X-Men.

10. Longshot

Engineered in another dimension to be the ultimate fighting performer, Longshot also has the power of Luck on his side. Every thrown knife hits its target and every lady (and man so inclined) swoons for him. It helps that he’s a naïve and likable guy.

9. Colossus

Piotr Rasputin is the classic big guy with a heart of gold—and skin of organic steel. The big Russian softie is a capable fighter and one-half of the classic Fastball Special, but he’d rather be painting.

8. Magik

X-Men: Days of Future Past is the best Marvel Comics movie so far from someone other than Marvel Studios itself. That’s not faint praise, either. It’s a fun, well-paced, character-driven superhero movie with a bevy of great actors. In a summer laden with characters from the pages of Marvel Comics, the latest installment of X-Men may not be quite as good as Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but very little is. And it’s far more enjoyable in just about every way than Amazing Spider-Man 2.

I have recently returned from three weeks in Korea and Vietnam, countries which have in the past suffered and are still suffering from the ravages of war.

Writing recently in TheNation, Chris Hayes drew an intensely unnerving parallel between the use of fossil fuels as an energy source and the use of slave labor — not a moral parallel, but a financial one, though money and morality have a perversely symbiotic relationship. Where there’s money to be made — especially enormous quantities of it — moral justifications come awfully cheap.

Hayes points out that the movement to end dependence on fossil fuels, drastically reduce carbon emissions and reverse global warming faces a financial hurdle of staggering proportions: “. . . the total amount of known, proven extractable fossil fuel in the ground at this very moment is almost five times the amount we can safely burn,” he writes. Possession of this unexcavated carbon is claimed by global corporations: It’s theirs to pull out of the ground, and it’s worth . . . uh, somewhere between $10 and $20 trillion.