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Female Star Wars character walking

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.

Harvey smiling with Solartopia shirt on

On New Year’s Day, the first baby boomers will turn 70.

From Jan. 1, 1946, through the end of 1964, 76 million babies were born in the U.S., more humans than lived in this country in 1900.

With a little help from LSD and our friends, we’ve won a cultural and technological revolution.

But our earthly survival depends on beating the lethal cancer of corporate domination-and the outcome is in doubt.

The GIs coming back from World War II kicked Rosie the Riveter out of the factories and into the suburbs.

The GI Bill gave them cheap home loans and free college tuition, birthing one of the world’s great university systems and one of its best-educated workforces.

Millions of boomers entered those colleges in the early ’60s. They lit the torch for a cultural revolution. They also invented the personal computer and the Internet.

Pot and psychedelics were essential to both.

 

If you have to obsess over a political candidate who's ocassionally allowed on television, please do so with Ted Rall's book on Bernie. This is not John Nichols' interview of Bernie in which he forgets that foreign policy even exists. This is not Jonathan Tasini's almost worshipful book in which he selectively includes the best and omits the worst of Bernie Sanders' record.

And this is not even just an honest look at the facts about Bernie (which Rall sees as far more positive than negative). What sets this book apart is not that it's a cartoon, but that it's an argument for placing Bernie Sanders in a particular position in U.S. history, namely as the restoration of liberalism to a Democratic Party that hasn't seen it since the McGovern campaign.

In Medina County, Ohio, the local prosecutor, sheriff and judge are not behaving the way the fossil fuel industry has come to expect. A pipeline venture known as NEXUS is seeking to move 1.5 billion cubic feet of fracked gas per day across Ohio, angering and galvanizing residents along the route. However, despite not yet receiving a critical permit from the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Houston-based Spectra Energy and Detroit-based DTE Energy Co. have forged ahead with highly controversial surveying on private land. While most Ohio counties have streamlined access for NEXUS surveyors, Medina officials are cautiously resisting.
Photo of woman

As the winter emerges

It fixes me with a piercing stare

My tears sparkle,still

I take a walk in the cold

Mist wraps me up like a robe

Nature's severity lessens my inner shock

Daisies, Lilies, Roses adorning the yards

Charm me and I am taken up, but

Your ignorance hurts me as the cold approaches

Like winter trees you are brutal and stand bare

Drop my love like leaves to survive yourself.

 

(The poet lives in Ohio, USA; She can be reached arubabz@gmail.com)

Picture of Tamir Rice

Thursday, Dec. 30, 2-4pm
Ohio Statehouse, 1 Capitol Sq, Columbus, Ohio 43215
There has been no indictment for the Cleveland police officers that murdered 12 year old Tamir Rice. Let's show the world that Columbus demands that Black Lives be treated with dignity, respect, and justice. The whole State of Ohio is responsible for the disgusting and racist negligence shown at every level of this case, and it's time we let our state know that we will not be silent in the face of injustice. Bring signs and banners. And for those able, be ready to chant. Please continue to check the event page throughout the day if you plan on coming late, we'll post updates regularly.

Write about love, as in love thy enemy, and the social recoil sounds like this:

“There is no nexus at which we can speak with ISIS. Singing Kumbaya while being led to a beheading can’t work.”

Or this:

“Any thug who threatens a cop gets what he deserves. One bullet or ten — I could care less. If a thug will threaten a cop or a prison guard, he will kill or maim me or mine without hesitation for very little reason. You want to give these thugs ‘civil rights’ — I want to give them a funeral. My way insures me and mine do not get killed or maimed. Your way insures I probably will.”

Saudi Arabia’s Yemen has a fascist whiff of Franco’s Spain circa 1936

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