Global

In a video from February 2008, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton passionately denounces candidate Barack Obama for criticizing her healthcare plan and daring to "discredit universal healthcare."

 As 2016 begins, here is my take on things. People, who espouse aging liberal political economic analysis, lack substance to challenge the Capitalist attacks on workers shriveled by underfunded compensation packages, inadequate Health Care, nationalist worker organizations and evaporating retirement/pension systems.
  First, the Capitalist worldview is to juice the workers for all the value that is produced. Second, what is worse, working families are without a clear vision of a future demanding what families need.
  Capitalism is an economic system that directs political affiliations and aspirations, decapitate thought from action, desiccate Mother Earth resources for myopic profitability, and shrivel the life of working families. The system eviscerates all imagination.

 The loudest response to President Obama’s executive action on gun control has unsurprisingly come from Second Amendment advocates on the right, seeing their worst fears realized in the form of required background checks for online and gun show customers. Republican presidential candidates decried it; Governor John Kaisch said the mandate was “poisoning the well” of relations between lawmakers, and Ben Carson tweeted that the law would only target the freedom of law-abiding citizens. This was to be expected. There was also a fair amount of hand-wringing from centrists concerned about executive overreach by the president, who side-stepped Congress to push through the most meaningful gun control legislation of the century.

  “An abuse of power!” cried many. But was Obama not acting on behalf of the people, something Congress has been unable and unwilling to do?

For sports fans in the state of Ohio, the year 2015 reads like something out of Charles Dickens novel. It was the first of times; it was the worst of times. And it was everywhere in between.
  The Buckeyes won it all in football … and wrestling … and synchronized swimming … and pistol … and rowing. The Cleveland Cavaliers, the Columbus Clippers and the Columbus Crew SC placed second in their respective fields. The Cleveland Browns and the Columbus Blue Jackets earned participant ribbons for their respective seasons.
  Mush it all together and you have a very odd year.

As we close out 2015, the continued mainstreaming of geek culture couldn't be more obvious: Star Wars: The Force Awakens is currently obliterating box office records like they're superweapons with conveniently-located weak spots. And while some have railed against their fandoms going mainstream, the simple capitalist truth that bigger audiences bring more money has had the effect of making geek culture as a whole more progressive, more welcoming and more diverse.

  The biggest trend in movies this year was nostalgia, but instead of remakes (the worst of all being tepid PG-13 remakes of R-rated classics) we got new entries to moribund series that often chose to ignore the more recent entries in favor of unapologetically homaging the originals.

It has been argued that nonviolent struggles to liberate occupied countries – such as West Papua, Tibet, Palestine, Kanaky and Western Sahara – have failed far more often than they have succeeded but that secessionist struggles (that have sought to separate territory from an existing state in order to establish a new one) conducted by nonviolent means have always failed. See 'Why Civil Resistance Works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict'. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820

The Saudi mass beheadings on January 2 proved nothing new to a world that well knows Saudi Arabia is still a tribal police state with a moral code of medieval barbarity. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-Muslim country that executes people for witchcraft, adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality (among other things). And the Saudi regime is perfectly willing to torture and kill a Shi’a-Muslim cleric for the crime of speaking truth to power, knowing that that judicial murder will inflame his followers and drive the region toward wider war. The Saudi provocation is as transparent as it is despicable, and yet the Saudis are held to no account, as usual. 

In the United States it's not actually difficult to find significant funding with which to research new and innovative -- not to say bizarre and absurd -- pursuits, as long as they form part of an overall project of mass murder.

The United States has hundreds of programs at universities, think tanks, and research institutes that claim to devote their attention to “security” and “defense” studies. Yet in almost all of these programs that receive many millions of dollars in Federal funding, the vast majority of research, advocacy and instruction have nothing to do with climate change, the most serious threat to security of our age.

What if the very worst result of George W. Bush's war lies is that people stop taking seriously the danger of actual nuclear weapons actually falling into the hands of actual lunatics? Arguably the very worst result of Woodrow Wilson's lies about German atrocities in World War I was excessive skepticism about reports of Nazi atrocities leading up to and during World War II. The fact is that nuclear weapons are being recklessly maintained, built, developed, tested, and proliferated. The fact is that governments make mistakes, fail, collapse, and engage in evil actions.

As of this writing, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has beaten out both 1997's Titanic and 2009's Avatar to become the all-time highest-grossing film in America. It has been a massive success, both commercially and critically, thrilling old fans and creating new ones.
   It's also been accompanied by a pervasive campaign of marketing tie-ins—with everything from toys to toasters—the likes of which we haven't seen since, well, the last resurrection of the Star Wars series with The Phantom Menace. And all you have to do is look around your nearest Kroger to see a glaring problem with much of it.
   In the world of all-ages action movie marketing, no one knows what to do with Rey.