Global

At his parents’ house in Westerville, R.G. Florey keeps the original list of the 10 things he wants to accomplish after one of his friends, Sgt. 1st Class Johnny R. Polk, was killed in a grenade attack in Kirkuk, Iraq.

 Since he returned to Columbus, Florey has put check marks beside eight of the 10 goals including becoming the captain for the Capital University men’s soccer team (4-4 overall before Oct. 1). Florey, who scored goals in a 2-0 win over St. Fisher College on Sept. 6, a 3-0 win over Wooster on Sept. 17 and in a 5-1 loss to second-ranked Kenyon on Sept. 23, won’t rest until he accomplishes them all.

 “I set very specific goals after (Polk) passed away,” Florey says. “Johnny was always there to motivate you and push you. All my drive since that day has been to please him and remember him in a positive way through my actions.”

 Polk’s death has been the keystone in Florey’s unlikely path to Capital. The 2007 Westerville South graduate spent three years on active duty in the U.S. Army including a year-long deployment in Iraq before joining the Crusaders.

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD has returned to ABC for a second season, following Agent Phil Coulson and his team as they try to salvage something of their mostly-benevolent government organization from the mess left by the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

With the recent iCloud account hacks that put private celebrity photos in the hands of Reddit jerks, it’s a good time for us to all take a moment to look over what our phones and online accounts are doing. For most of us there’s no danger of someone running a coordinated attack to access our dick pics, but some of the same steps can also keep you safe in the event of larger cloud storage hacks and security breaches like the Heartbleed bug. They’re also useful if you’re going to be participating in political activism. While our smartphones do a lot of super convenient things, some of them aren’t worth the security risks.

(As a note, I don’t mean to victim-blame here. What happened to Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, etc. was WRONG and no one’s fault but the hackers’. But it’s still a reminder to practice good data hygiene.)

Unrestrained corporate power is the Ebola virus of our global ecological crisis. Rooting it out will demand a whole new level of resistance.

The worldwide march for the climate this weekend is focussed on moving us to a Solartopian energy supply, a green-powered Earth.

But those who march must also focus on the real core problem: the nature of the modern corporation.

As currently structured, the corporation’s sole mandate is to make profit. Its insatiable need for more and more money, and its immunity from the consequences of its actions, are unsustainable in any sense.

Its fossil fuels heat our planet. Its atomic reactors threaten us all.

The U.S. House of Representatives has not just left town, but prior to leaving passed a rule preventing any member from using the War Powers Resolution to force Congress to return and vote on war.

Here's a video of Congressman Jim McGovern denouncing the rule (or read the transcript here)

If you watch the video, following Rep. McGovern's remarks two of his colleagues run their mouths. The first is Congressman Pete Sessions nonsensically replying to McGovern. The second is Congresswoman Virginia Foxx on an unrelated topic. If you jump ahead to 10:25 McGovern replies to Sessions. It's well worth watching.

In addition, Congressman McGovern and five other Democrats and six Republicans have asked Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote on war. Here's their letter: PDF.

Finally, somebody commenting on the state of Iraq thinks George W. Bush got something right. Turns out it's ISIS. In the new hour-long ISIS-produced film about how nice it is to die for ISIS -- Flames of War: Fighting Has Just Begun -- Bush is quoted: "You are with us or against us." Video shows him saying "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists." A graphic in the upper corner of the screen reads: "Bush spoke the truth, although he's a liar."

What truth does ISIS think Bush spoke? The Manichean truth that there are two groups of people on earth with nothing in common between them and a shared dedication to annihilate each other. Of course, the notion that they have nothing in common is delusional. They have almost everything in common: their belief in violence, their monotheism, their stupidity, their desire for a U.S. war in the Middle East.

"In the face of the dark wave of the crusader force..." begins the ISIS movie.

"This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while," said Bush.

Barack Obama’s central dilemma last week, when he tried to sell a new war to the American public on the eve of the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11, was to speak convincingly about the wisdom and effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy over the last decade-plus while at the same time, alas, dropping the bad news that it didn’t work.

Thus: “Thanks to our military and counterterrorism professionals, America is safer.”

Hurray! God bless drones and “mission accomplished” and a million Iraqi dead and birth defects in Fallujah. God bless torture. God bless the CIA. But guess what?

“Still we continue to face a terrorist threat. We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm.”

So it’s bombs away again, boys — another trace of evil has popped up in the Middle East — and I find myself at the edge of outrage, the edge of despair, groping for language to counter my own incredulity that the God of War is on the verge of another victory and Planet Earth and human evolution lose again.