If you watch the trailers for Tomorrowland—or if you just consider the fact that it’s a Disney film named after a Disney theme-park attraction—you have a pretty good idea what to expect: It’s going to offer an optimistic view of a future in which technology is used to cure the world’s ills.

Surprisingly, it’s not like that at all. Even more surprisingly, it might have been more satisfying if it had been.

There’s a part near the beginning when it briefly lives up to expectations. A young boy named Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) visits the 1964 New York World’s Fair to show off the flawed jet pack he built from an old vacuum cleaner.

There he meets a girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy) who gives him a strange pin that turns out to be the key to a magic kingdom of sorts. It allows him access to a hidden world filled with gleaming structures and giant robots. One of the robots even fixes his jet pack, allowing him to soar above the exotic landscape.

After seeing this glorious scene, you might be fooled into thinking this Disney-fied view of the future is what the story is about.

Last week, Portage and Fulton Counties joined Medina, Athens, and Meigs Counties to petition for County Charters through direct initiative. County residents are faced with shale gas drilling and fracking wastewater and liquid natural gas (LNG) pipelines, and are determined to protect themselves through a vote by the people for community rights to preserve clean air, water, and soil, and assert their right to local self-government. They join a growing movement across the state for community rights. Portage County residents have been alarmed for years at the volume of frack wastewater deposited into fourteen active injection wells, and learned more wells have been permitted. Athens and Meigs Counties also face unprecedented quantities of wastewater to be injected in their communities.

If you’re the sort of gamer who carries their 3DS around town to pick up StreetPasses (and there are plenty of you out there!) you might have noticed that an awful lot of people are playing something called Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. While Capcom’s Monster Hunter series has been a huge success in Japan since the release of the first game for the PlayStation 2, it’s only had a cult following here in the US. But with the latest addition to the series, which Capcom reported in April was the first Monster Hunter game to sell more than a million copies outside of Japan, it’s becoming a phenomenon here as well.

But what is it? And is it worth a look, or at the very least a demo download?

“What struck me” journalist Christian Parenti said in a recent Truthout interview, referring to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “was the fact that these local towns and states around the region were sending the only resources they had to New Orleans: weapons and militarized gear.

“After 30 years of the War on Drugs and a neoliberal restructuring of the state at the local level, which is not a reduction of the public sector but a transformation of the public sector, the only thing local governments had were weapons.”

Parenti’s observation summed up a deep sense of puzzled frustration I’ve been feeling for a long time, which has been growing in intensity since the Reagan era and even more so since 9/11 and the unleashed Bush agenda. Fear, exploited and unchecked, triggers a deep, “rational” insanity. We’re driving ourselves into a new Dark Age.

For the third time in a decade, a major fire/explosion has ripped apart a transformer at the Indian Point reactor complex.

News reports have taken great care to emphasize that the accident happened in the “non nuclear” segment of the plant.

Ironically, the disaster spewed more than 15,000 gallons of oil into the Hudson River, infecting it with a toxic sheen that carried downstream for miles. Entergy, the nuke’s owner, denies there were PCBs in this transformer.

It also denies numerous studies showing serious radioactive health impacts on people throughout the region.

You can choose whether you want to believe the company in either case.