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A young man was tortured in Chicago this week. It wasn't an act of the Chicago police. It was live streamed on Facebook. And the President of the United States declared it an horrific hate crime.

The President did not advise "looking forward" rather than enforcing the law. Nor did he hold open the possibility that the crime might have served some higher purpose. In fact, he didn't excuse the crime in any way that might help recommend it for imitation by others.

Yet this same president has forbidden the prosecution of U.S. government torturers for the past 8 years and has now seen fit to keep a four-year-old Senate report on their torture secret for at least 12 years more.

Some people in the United States would maintain that environmental and climate policy should be based on facts. Some other people (there is very little overlap between the two groups) would tell you that U.S. policy toward Russia should be based on proven facts. Yet, here we are readily accepting that U.S. torture policy will be based on burying the facts.

It’s too easy simply to blame Donald Trump for the void that’s suddenly apparent at the center of American government — or will be on Jan. 20.

In fact, I’m utterly sick of hearing his name, let alone accounts of his latest outrage or trivial impertinence, which is the equivalent of crack cocaine in the news cycle: all Trump, all the time. It’s been that way for a year.

Trump is a symptom. But, come on, far less of a symptom — of a deep, raw social and cultural wrongness — than, for instance, the global war and terror, environmental exploitation, climate chaos, poverty, racism (old and new), infrastructure collapse, the commonness of mass murder, the limitless expansion of the security state, or the congealing of a one-party status quo that ignores all of the above.

Letter to Investigators Individual copies of this letter were sent to:  Hon. Loretta Lynch, Attorney General Hon. Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security Hon. James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence Hon. John Brennan, Director, Central Intelligence Agency Hon. James Comey, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as aides to Senators and Members of Congress on committees that are investigating Russian interference in the election:  

We are a group of independent election forensic investigators, election monitors, data analysts, and election integrity advocates who have been examining and analyzing the 2016 election. We are writing to you to share our views regarding the importance of including certain systemic vulnerabilities in the scope of your investigation, and to offer our resources to assist with your investigative work.

Bob yelling into a mic and words Bob Bites Back

The Russian election hack may be a “red herring” so to speak. Visions of a new Cold War and appeals to Mother Russia aside (see this issue’s cover), the real problem is private, partisan, for-profit vendors secretly programming the computer hardware and software used in our elections.

Why is this so difficult to see? In Ohio, the Right-to-Life movement has long been active in voter registration databases, ePolling books, central tabulator and computer voting machine maintenance through companies like Triad and GovTech.

When dozens of computer security experts like Alex Halderman, professor at the University of Michigan, tell us that our elections are easily hackable, why don’t we believe them?

So Russians aside, let’s look at the history of computer voting in the U.S.

To understand the history of voting machines, we need to go back to the beginning of the Cold War. In 1950, the Bureau of Social Science Research (BSSR) appeared at American University. In 1953, it became a non-profit entity heavily involved with the CIA.

Vice Neil singing into mic with long stringy blonde hair and lots of tattoos

The year was 2001. My wife and I were both second-year law students at Ohio State, and had just had our first date at what was then the Thirsty Ear Tavern. Casting around for second date plans, I learned that my old guitar teacher’s band was opening up for Motley Crue frontman Vince Neil at the Alrosa Villa. Oh great, I thought, this ought to be hilarious.

Exactly what Neil, who had just gotten off of a world tour with Crue, was doing playing an 800-person capacity club with a group of hair band hacks is an open question. It wasn’t a side project, as he was only playing Crue songs. Maybe he needed beer money? In any event, it was a mess of a show.

Neil was an astonishing ass who couldn’t sing for shit, and my wife still talks about the horrors in the woman’s restroom. Seared in my mind is this weird look of disappointment his guitar player had when a woman in the crown refused to take his suggestion to remove her shirt. In fairness, this was all sort of the point in going.

Picture of barbed wire and hands in handcuffs with the words If You're Afraid to Speak Out Against Tyranny You Are Already A Slave

“We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” -- H. L. Mencken (Baltimore Sun 26 July 1920)

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." – Voltaire

“A nation can survive its fools - even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the galleys, heard in the very hall of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor — he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and wears their face and their garment, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation — he works secretly and unknown to undermine the pillars of a city — he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared.” -- Cicero (42 B.C.)

Map with states highlighted that legalized marijuana

I recently stopped by a smoke shop on North High Street to visit a friend. From floor to ceiling, colorful glass pipes – small and large – graced expansive shelves. Several cost more than $1,000. Accessories aimed at every taste aligned well-lit display cases. It was a smorgasbord of everything weed, except for, well, the cannabis. I felt as though I had time traveled and arrived in the future. It wasn’t that long ago (2003) that Tommy Chong spent nine months in prison for selling this kind of glassware. My, how things have changed.

From this perspective, I look back on 2016: how far things have come. Will this contentious year mark the plant’s coming of age or when pendulum of progress swung back the other way?

Blue version of Rolling Stones logo with words blue and lonesome

While celebs and a clutch of great musicians croaked by the dressing room full, did anyone notice the Rolling Stones had a banner year?

Yes, I am writing about the Stones--again.

Because they matter. Perhaps more than ever. More on that at the end, luv.

Early in 2016 they conquered South America with a 10-show tour that included figuratively climbing over the diplomatic and ideological walls and playing a free show inside a communist dictatorship--Cuba. No ordinary gig by any act's standards, hundreds of thousands of Cubans showed up after months of behind-the-scenes finagling (underwritten by a Latino billionaire) complicated by the timing of Obama's surprise overture and visits by both the president and the Pope.

Besides the DVD, Havana Moon, of the concert, there is a fantastic must-see documentary of the rest of the Stones South American tour and hombre, it I think think it is the best Stones movie yet.

Black women in old fashioned clothes like they are celebrating

Hidden Figures tells a fact-based story so fascinating that you wonder why it hasn’t been told until now. Of course, if it had been, they would have had to change the title.

“Hidden Figures” refers to complex mathematical equations that had to be solved before the U.S. could send men into space in the early 1960s. But it also refers to the people who helped to solve those equations.

Specifically, it refers to a group of black women who—because of their race and gender—labored under trying conditions. Directed and co-written by Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) and based on a book by Margot Lee Shetterly, the film focuses on three of these women who worked as human “computers” at NASA’s Virginia headquarters in the midst of America’s frantic “space race” with the Soviet Union.

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