Dispatch: Campus Police, recorded line.

Reporting Caller: I was just walking through here in the front foyer of [REDACTED] and we have a person sitting there laying down in the living room area over here. I didn’t approach her or anything but um he seems to be out of place … umm … I don’t see anybody in the building at this point and uh I don’t know what he’s doing in there just laying on the couch.

Dispatch: Can I have your last name please?

Reporting Caller: [REDACTED]

Dispatch: I’ll send someone over and check it out.

Reporting Caller: Alright. I’ll wait over here.

– Campus Police call transcript, July 31, 2018,
as released by Smith College on August 3

At least that’s the hope of those who elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, aka Peje, on a platform of sweeping out the corruption — a platform promoted in Obrador’s book, A New Hope for Mexico. That Barack Obama did not permanently decommission the word “hope” for credible electoral campaigns on this continent may be the least of the book’s surprises.

In the first Star Trek movie, 1979’s unimaginatively-titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there is a scene where the USS Enterprise gets sucked into a wormhole. This spatial anomaly wreaks havoc on time (or something) so everyone on the bridge is suddenly rendered blurry and left speaking in deep, distorted voices.

Kirk is lunging to-and fro in his captain’s chair. A bald lady is there, giving ominous countdowns to impact with some rapidly-approaching celestial body. I’m pretty sure the dad from “Seventh Heaven” is in there somewhere, maybe firing photon torpedoes as he drones on in his slow, time-warped voice.

It’s a truly awful movie, remembered only for its ambition (and failure) to live up to the spectacle of Kubric’s 2001 or the fun of Star Wars, and does not bear rewatching for clarification on any of this. The point being, the scene in question is slow, sucks, and seems to take forever to get anywhere.

Secretary of State Jon Husted:

Ohio has a long and unfortunate history of election irregularities. In recent years millions of Ohio citizens have been purged from the voter rolls. Large numbers of electronic voting machines have yielded dubious results that indicate manipulation and hacking.

In light of this, a number of serious issues have arisen surrounding this year’s special election in the 12th Congressional District.

First, let us consider that Ohio, and U.S. elections in general, are undemocratic. They fail the basic tests of transparency by allowing private, partisan, for-profit companies to secretly program the computer voting machines.

In all seven counties that comprise the 12th Congressional District in Ohio, easily hackable Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines were used. Many of the counties used the notoriously rigged Diebold AccuVote TS touchscreen voting machines.

It’s funny how pure chance can affect things. I usually make it a point to attend the premieres of every play at my favorite theatre, Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum. Thus I greatly looked forward to driving out to the splendid amphitheater in Topanga Canyon on July 26 for the opening night of the first revival of the 1938 revolutionary play Haiti, A Drama of the Black Napoleon. But it was not to be - the road from Pacific Coast Highway up from Malibu to Topanga was closed, alas.

The following Saturday my disappointment turned into a piece of colossal luck, as I attended the next performance in the repertory season of Haiti - as did that courageous Congresswoman Maxine Waters, in order to receive The Will Geer Humanitarian Award. Before the show began, Congresswoman Waters joined the costumed actors onstage to be presented with the award by WGTB Artistic Director Ellen Geer to an ovation from the audience and cast.