Opinion

Layered over our city is another reality, a virtual world of Pikachus and Squirtles and… lots and LOTS of Drowzees, for some reason. (What’re you implying about Columbus, Niantec?) The Grandview post office is now a Pokemon gym, complete with twenty-somethings hanging around outside defending it. Short North wall murals are now Pokestops. Public spaces like Mirror Lake and Goodale Park are full of gyms, Pokestops, and newly-minted Pokemon trainers. And all over the city, people are walking around looking at their phones even more than usual.

Pokemon Go, a new mobile game from Nintendo and Augmented Reality Game pioneers Niantec Labs, was a massive hit from the moment it launched. And for good reason: For a generation of gamers, going out into the real world in search of Pokemon has been a lifelong dream. And at the low, low price of Free (with microtransactions) there’s little to stop anyone with an interest from downloading the game and playing along.

The all-female title characters of 2016’s Ghostbusters can bust ghosts just as well as their 1984 forebears. Just don’t expect them to bust a lot of guts in the process.

Despite its overall quirky charm, the original film was primarily a Bill Murray comedy. It was fun to watch the other Ghostbusters spout pseudo-scientific jargon as they tried to save New York from a spectral invasion, but what made it funny was Murray’s wry attitude to the whole thing. He was too busy trying to romance Sigourney Weaver to take his job seriously.

The main problem with the new Ghostbusters is that despite its comedically adept cast, no one is given the chance to fill Murray’s laconic shoes. Nor, unfortunately, are they allowed to take Ghostbusters in a revolutionarily new, female-centered direction. Certainly nothing on a par with director Paul Feig and star Kristen Wiig’s 2011 buddy picture/romcom, Bridesmaids.

There’s Mars, the god of war, perched in a parking garage in Dallas, annihilating the enemy with utter impunity. Mars, you sicko! Just listen to President Obama:

“By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you — strangers — you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off, I’ll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents.”

The man who murdered police officers in Dallas, Texas, this week had earlier been employed in a massive operation, now in its 15th year, that has killed many thousands of people in Afghanistan. He was trained to kill by the U.S. military using U.S. tax dollars. He was conditioned to believe violence an appropriate response to violence by the examples everywhere to be found in U.S. public policy, history, entertainment, and language.

Murdering police officers because some other police officers committed murder is unfair, unjust, immoral, and certainly counterproductive on its own terms. The Dallas killer managed to get himself killed by means of a bomb delivered by a robot. The police could have waited him out but chose not to, and no one indoctrinated to accept violent revenge will blame them. But that technology will spread among police and non-police killers. The airwaves are reverberating with cries for a race war. Greater militarization of the police, not greater restraint, will follow this incident. More lives will be lost. More screams of agony will be heard over loved ones lost.

The man who murdered police officers in Dallas, Texas, this week had earlier been employed in a massive operation, now in its 15th year, that has killed many thousands of people in Afghanistan. He was trained to kill by the U.S. military using U.S. tax dollars. He was conditioned to believe violence an appropriate response to violence by the examples everywhere to be found in U.S. public policy, history, entertainment, and language.

Murdering police officers because some other police officers committed murder is unfair, unjust, immoral, and certainly counterproductive on its own terms. The Dallas killer managed to get himself killed by means of a bomb delivered by a robot. The police could have waited him out but chose not to, and no one indoctrinated to accept violent revenge will blame them. But that technology will spread among police and non-police killers. The airwaves are reverberating with cries for a race war. Greater militarization of the police, not greater restraint, will follow this incident. More lives will be lost. More screams of agony will be heard over loved ones lost.

One of the many interesting details to be learned by understanding human psychology is how a person's unconscious fear works in a myriad of ways to make them believe that they bear no responsibility for a particular problem.

This psychological dysfunctionality cripples a substantial portion of the human population in ways that work against the possibility of achieving worthwhile outcomes for themselves, other individuals, communities and the world as a whole. In an era when human extinction is now a likely near-term outcome of this dysfunctionality, it is obviously particularly problematic. So why does this happen and how does it manifest?

he federal lawsuit, titled Katie Johnson v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein, accuses Trump and Epstein of rape and other sexual assaults during the summer of 1994, when plaintiff was 13 years old. Attorney Garten denied the accusations and cast doubt on the existence of the plaintiff.

The Chilcot report's "findings" have virtually all been part of the public record for a decade, and it avoids key pieces of evidence. Its recommendations are essentially to continue using war as a threat and a tool of foreign policy, but to please try not to lie so much, make sure to win over a bit more of the public, and don't promise any positive outcomes given the likelihood of catastrophe.

The report is a confused jumble, given that it records evidence of the supreme crime but tries to excuse it. The closer you get to the beginning of the executive summary, the more the report reads as if written by the very criminals it's reporting on. Yet the report makes clear, as we always knew, that even in 2001-2003 there were honest people working in the British, as also in the U.S., government -- some of whom became whistleblowers, others of whom accurately identified the planned war as a crime that would endanger rather than protect, but stayed in their jobs when the war was launched.