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The film set in the Sahara desert – situated near the namesake of Darth Vader’s home world, the Tunisian city of Tataouine – will be soon buried by a crescent-shaped sand dune, or barchan. The dune appears to be poised to “eat” the city in this time-lapse gif of collated Google Earth images from Kotaku.com. Sand dunes move across Earth 10 times faster than the sands of Mars sweep across the Red Planet.

Ron Radosh takes a look behind the scenes.

You may not have heard of Leon Keyserling, but he was one of the bright young men who rushed to our nation’s capitol to work for FDR after he was elected President, and who helped to fashion a great deal of the New Deal legislation. As his obituary in The New York Times pointed out, “as an aide of Senator [Robert F.]Wagner, a Democrat, [N.Y.] Mr. Keyserling helped draft such measures as the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the National Labor Relations Act, also known as the Wagner Act.” Later, as his Wikipedia entry shows, he went on to work for President Harry S. Truman and continued to advise him on major domestic programs.

…

Mary Keyserling became enthusiastic about communism after she visited the Soviet Union in 1932, and wrote that she became “sympathetic to Communist not only as a Russian idea but as a feasible program when altered for many other countries.” She wrote home that “many of us have come round to an acceptance of the major elements of Communism- altho I think we or I shall work thru the Socialist Party for a while.”

As for Leon, Storrs notes that he became converted to the doctrines of Marx while studying at Columbia University. “Economically,” he wrote to his father from college, “socialism is probably sound…the rich and the poor should not be ‘equal’ before the law. The law should help the weaker party.” In 1932 he supported Communist candidate William Z. Foster for President, and hoped that he would get two million votes that “will mark in the future the definite turn toward socialism in this country.”

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A health insurance actuary at Humana testified in a Kentucky Department of Insurance rate filing document made publicly available today that his company’s individual health premiums need to go up eighty percent in 2014 and that sixty percent of that increase is due to the ObamaCare requirement for all applications to be accepted.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.

The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s.

When Snyder published his book in 2005, it was as if an explosion ripped through Hollywood. The book offered something previous screenplay guru tomes didn’t. Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.

Next step: Robots that write blockbuster screenplays, union agitation to save screenwriter jobs, government interference that leaves everyone involved worse off than they were before.

We’ve seen this movie before….

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Well, John, you’ve actually got to put up a fight in order to win. I guess winning is just not in your nature.

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“Despite the fact that it’s one of the greatest health measures ever invented by man or woman, there seems to still be a small residue of humanity that objects to the very idea of immunization,” Welsh doctor Dai Lloyd told the Journal. “If you go around the cemetery you can see the historical evidence of childhood slaughter from pre-immunization days.”

We had the same trend in the U.S., mostly pushed by bubble-headed Hollywood Obama voters. (Hey, it’s not as if they have any problem with killing children, after all….)

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In order to identify America’s worst companies to work for, 24/7 Wall St. examined employee reviews at jobs and career community site Glassdoor. Based on the reviews, Glassdoor scores companies on a scale of one to five with an average score of 3.2 for the over 250,000 companies measured. 24/7 Wall St. identified the nine publicly traded companies that received scores of 2.5 or lower.

Oh, yeah, that’s a statistically valid sample…. These guys need to look up the definition of ‘selection bias’ on Wikipedia.

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At the forefront of organizations pressuring the USDA is the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).  Many people believe that HSUS is a friendly organization that raises money for pet shelters through sappy commercials featuring abandoned dogs and cats.   In reality, HSUS is a radical animal organization with an agenda similar to PETA.

Despite what their commercials lead unsuspecting donors to believe, remarkably, only 1% of HSUS donations go to animal shelters of any kind.  The lion’s share is funneled into a massive animal rights lobbying organization, buying off politicians in order to pass regulations that make raising livestock or purebred pets prohibitively expensive.  Ultimately, HSUS would like to see a meat-free America with all pets being adopted from shelters and all hunting and fishing prohibited by law.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The Ford Motor Company has been making some big plays lately to bring the automobile up to speed with consumers used to touchscreens and on-demand content. But one of its flagship efforts in this regard, the MyFord Touch dashboard system introduced in new Ford and Lincoln cars starting in 2011, has not had a smooth ride so far — plagued with glitches and freezing menus, which Ford tried to fix with UI updates and a return to some analog buttons. But it’s about to get worse. MyFord Touch is the target of a class action lawsuit filed against Ford in California earlier this week. The lawsuit, which was brought to our attention by Automotive News, alleges that MyFord Touch “has been an unmitigated disaster for Ford” and accuses the company of “unfair, deceptive, and/or fraudulent business practices” and “failure to disclose defects in the MyFord Touch system” that led auto owners to “[suffer] losses in money and/or property.”

Look for … the Union label….

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Al Sharpton? Missing. Jesse Jackson? Not here. Congressional Black Caucus? Silent.

I guess some animals are more equal than others.

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“Lyme disease is the only infection I know of where we have a safe and effective vaccine, but it’s not available to the public,” says Dr. Allen Steere, the physician who uncovered the disease. Steere was 33 years old back in 1975 when he was sent to the Connecticut town of Lyme to look into a mysterious cluster of kids who had gotten arthritis.

Wait for it….

Introduced in 1998, the vaccine sold well at first. But then opponents spoke out: self-described ‘vaccine victims’ — perhaps similar to people today who claim the MMR vaccine causes autism. Back then, they said that the Lyme vaccine gave them arthritis.

“And this sort of got into popular lore,” Poland recalls. “It got on the Internet. There were a number of East Coast lawyers who started putting together class-action lawsuits. There were anti-vaccine advocacy groups that were formed.”

And there were threats against the scientists who had worked to help protect people against the disease. Poland had to hide where he lived. Steere got a security detail.

This is why we can’t ever have anything nice.

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Couldn’t happen to a bunch of nicer guys.

Hey, dudes, you voted for him. Chickens, meet roost.

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Perhaps the avant garde has gotten a bit too avant. You can only go so far into left field until you’re entirely out of the park.

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Hear, hear.

When wealthy Americans brought home the practice of tipping from their European vacations in the late 19th century, their countrymen considered it bribery. State legislatures quickly banned the practice. But restaurateurs, giddy at the prospect of passing labor costs directly to customers, eventually convinced Americans to accept tipping.

We had it right the first time. Tipping is a repugnant custom. It’s bad for consumers and terrible for workers. It perpetuates racism. Tipping isn’t even good for restaurants, because the legal morass surrounding gratuities results in scores of expensive lawsuits.

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More evidence of how the government screws up daily life for the rest of us.

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Hey, if you had to cope with modern feminism, you’d be infertile too.

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 While there’s been plenty of attention over the last month or so concerning the revelations from Ed Snowden about NSA surveillance, there have been a series of important ongoing lawsuits that tried to challenge the various aspects of the surveillance efforts. Unfortunately, most of these have ended badly, leading some to wonder if there even is any way at all to legally challenge these programs. At the end of 2011, for example, in a case testing the legality of the telcos helping the government with warrantless surveillance, Hepting v. AT&T, one of the key reasons why the court rejected the challenge was because it basically said, “well, you can always sue the government, but the government has the right to absolve companies of such wrongdoing.” Except that, as the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year, because the government keeps the program a complete secret, no one has standing to sue. That is, unless you can prove that you were spied on via this specific program, you can’t sue because there’s been no harm.

The Supreme Court Justices were clearly troubled by the idea that the government could implement a secret surveillance program that could never be challenged in court, and homed in on that key point in questioning the Solicitor General of the US (and former top RIAA litigator), Donald Verrilli. As the NY Times notes, Verrilli insisted that it simply was not true that no one would ever have standing, because if the government ever used information from such surveillance programs in a court case against someone, the government would have to reveal that the info came via that program.

Since both are Democrast, I choose all of the above.

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The DHS was formed out of a combination of two bureaucratic impulses: Make Our Empire Bigger and Do Something Even If It’s Wrong. Unfortunately, a government agency is the closest thing we’ll see to immortality on this earth, so it doesn’t matter how good a case you make for getting rid of it.

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The present condition of America owes much, for example, to the struggle between the proponents of limited government and the proponents of statism — a struggle that began in earnest with the onset of the “progressive” movement in the latter part of the 19th century. The Great Depression and World War II solidified the devotion of most Americans — and especially over-educated elites — to the cult of the state. Relief from the privations of the Great Depression, when it finally came after World War II, fostered the cult of the child and financed the growth of institutions whose denizens (politicians, bureaucrats, professors, and purveyors of entertainment) grew increasingly detached from the vicissitudes of daily life and increasingly attached to utopian schemes for the betterment of the unwashed masses from who they eagerly distance themselves.

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International students play a critical role in sustaining quality science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduate programs at U.S. universities, a new report from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) argues.

Majors Americans won’t do?

It will come as no surprise to observers of graduate education that the report documents the fact that foreign students make up the majority of enrollments in U.S. graduate programs in many STEM fields, accounting for 70.3 percent of all full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 63.2 percent in computer science, 60.4 percent in industrial engineering, and more than 50 percent in chemical, materials and mechanical engineering, as well as in economics (a non-STEM field).

Well, economics pretends to be a STEM field, so that’s understandable.

The report also emphasizes the value that international students can bring to the U.S. economy after graduation as researchers and entrepreneurs. Measures that would make it easier for STEM graduate students to obtain visas to work in the U.S. after graduation – measures that many in higher education see as crucial to the U.S. maintaining its edge in attracting international graduate students — are pending in Congress (and are included in the comprehensive immigration bill recently passed by the Senate).

Sorry, Congress is more concerned with importing uneducated crop-pickers and day-laborers than people who will actually support themselves and so not be dependent on the government and the Handout Party.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

As part of The Children’s Defense Fund’s “Protect Children, Not Guns” campaign, some Chicago children are writing letters to President Obama asking him to save their lives from gun violence.

Let’s have the Magic Negro wave his magic wand and all our problems will be solved.

The program is being sponsored by the Trinity United Church of Christ–the church in which Obama sat listening to Jeremiah Wright and others for 20 years.

Of course — hating America will lead to less gun violence. Makes perfect sense.

CBS Chicago printed an example from the letters in which a 10-year old wrote: “When I go to sleep at night, I’m afraid, because I have fear of dying from all this gun violence and stuff, and I’m afraid that someone could come in and make sure I don’t wake up in the morning.”

And what color would that ‘someone’ likely be? Careful what you answer….

A different excerpt from the same letter said, “I live in Chicago, Illinois, and I want to live.”

Not a problem. Move to Texas.

Tell you what: We’ll have Barry send you one of his right-hand men, Rahm Emmanuel, to be Mayor of Chicago. That will certainly fix everything up.

Despite strict gun control laws, Chicago is one of the deadliest cities in America for children.

Or maybe not….

Read it.

Hey, what’s the use of ‘crony capitalism’ if you can’t capitalize your cronies?

Some people, seeing a fresh corpse, don’t feel the urge to suck the blood out of it while it’s still warm. It’s safe to say that such people don’t live in Detroit.

Read it.

This is all dependent, of course, on Zimmerman not getting a ‘consolation prize’ conviction for SOMETHING, as the prosecution is now desperately hoping.

Read it. A reaction to the D.C. city council’s shooting theirconstituents in the wallet.

Washington DC’s city council has “tentatively” passed an ordinance that would raise the minimum wage from $8.25 ($1 more than the federal minimum wage) to $12.50 per hour. But this ordinance only applies to “non-union shops that are at least 75,000 square feet and whose parent companies gross above $1 billion annually.” Guess what company fits that description.

Oh, gee, let me scratch my head and think…. This is effectively what we lawyers call a ‘bill of pains and penalties‘, in which a legislative body just decides to poop on somebody they don’t like without bothering to go through the normal legal rigamarole. Historically this has been held to be unconstitutional as a violation of the ‘no bill of attainder’ clause, but nowadays nobody bothers with or cares much about the Constitution, especially in Democrat strongholds like D.C.

The left excuses this discrimination by calling it a “living wage” ordinance. But why is it that only employees of WalMart, and not employees of smaller retail shops, supermarkets, restaurants, or other businesses?

Well, maybe they lied….

Ironically, over the last decade three successive Washington DC mayors worked hard to attract WalMart to build stores in inner-city neighborhoods. WalMart was reluctant to build in those areas due to crime, but finally agreed to open six stores in the district. “We’ve been praying for food in this neighborhood for about 40 years,” said the resident of one neighborhood where WalMart was planning to build.

Sounds like another case of Lucy and the football to me.

Meanwhile, the left-wing Grist magazine chortles over a requirement in Cape Cod, Massachusetts for any big-box retailers to do an “economic impact analysis” before receiving a permit to build. The retailers will presumably be denied permits if the analysis shows that existing businesses might be harmed by the lower prices and wider selection of goods offered by new superstores.

And of course ‘progressives’, being the Party of the People, can’t have that.

Read it.

 D.C. lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill requiring some large retailers to pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage, a day after Wal-Mart warned that the law would jeopardize its plans in the city.

If it were truly a ‘living wage’, everyone would be required to pay it. It’s just a blatant attempt to pick the pocket of Walmart. All the politician hot air can’t disguise what everybody knows.

“The question here is a living wage; it’s not whether Wal-Mart comes or stays,” said council member Vincent B. Orange (D-At Large), a lead backer of the legislation, who added that the city did not need to kowtow to threats. “We’re at a point where we don’t need retailers. Retailers need us.”

Even if that were true, it’s still stupid. A ‘living wage’ doesn’t mean a damned thing to somebody who doesn’t have a job, and can’t get a job because of all this politician posturing. These guys are doing it so that they can fell self-righteously virtuous, a distinguishing characteristic of ‘progressive’ assholes.

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Homosexuals pounced upon the word “gay” decades ago and seized it as their own, gradually changing its meaning from “happy” and “carefree” toward something that now denotes “angry” and “intolerant.”

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Considering how poorly public-school teachers carry out their core function of educating the nation’s children, I wouldn’t trust them with guns either.

Read it.

Gotta love those strict gun control laws.

David Henderson, a Real Economist, points out how busybodies trying to make things better often make things worse.

Let’s say that people like Derek Thompson get their way and that offering unpaid internships becomes legally very risky. What happens next? One big advantage of a free market is that it brings together people who are strangers. So, for example, a major business can offer an unpaid internship to someone who has no connection with the firm. But if the business fears getting sued later, it will be much more hesitant to offer that internship. In what situation would the business be at less risk? When it offers an unpaid internship to someone that the firm’s owners or managers know, someone in their social circle. Why? Imagine that I offer an internship to the daughter of a good friend of mine. If the daughter accepts, then I am not as fearful that she will sue later. I know something about her ethics from knowing her father. And even if she is inclined to sue, her father will, because of our friendship, be likely to talk her out of it. So the ironic unintended consequence is that making unpaid internships legally risky gives the person who has social connections to the business an added advantage in the competition for an unpaid internship. If it’s the case that the people offering unpaid internships tend to be higher-income and that the people they’re connected with tend to be higher-income–as I think it is–then making unpaid internships legally risky will help exacerbate the very problem that Derek Thompson and others have with unpaid internships.

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 School administrators at Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) are systematically raising the final grades of African-American students, three ex-faculty members told Campus Reform last month.

…

Documents provided to Campus Reform by one of the former faculty members appear to validate these claims. Campus Reform has chosen not to publish the records due to concerns that doing so may violate the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act by revealing the names and grades of students.

According to Hedgepeth, and the two former professors who were granted anonymity because of they feared speaking out may jeopardize their retirement, instructors would submit final grades to the school only to have them later revised upwards by administrators as a way to “take care of their African American students.”

Affirmative Action taken to the max. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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“Indeed, the argument that educational benefits justify racial discrimination was advanced in support of racial segregation in the 1950’s, but emphatically rejected by this Court,” U. S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion in Fisher v. the University of Texas. “And just as the alleged educational benefits of segregation were insufficient to justify racial discrimination then, see Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483 (1954), the alleged educational benefits of diversity cannot justify racial discrimination today.”

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Back in 2011 we posted extensive coverage of the “Camp of the Saints” crisis in Italy and Malta in the wake of the Arab Spring, as hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants flooded into the islands of the southern Mediterranean and the southern coasts of Italy and Sicily.

The flood of refugees abated somewhat in 2012, but is still ongoing. During the migration season — the summer months, when the Med is fairly calm — hundreds of people in rickety boats show up off the coast of Lampedusa and have to be rescued, housed, clothed, and fed, according to EU asylum regulations. No matter that they riot, vandalize, commit robberies, and terrorize the locals — they are “refugees”, and their needs come first.

Aaron Renn turns over a rock.

Localities have also been in a fiscal vice as their tax receipts have collapsed thanks to the Great Recession and especially the decline in housing values, while at the same time the chickens are coming home to roost from the accumulated unfunded liabilities that had been racked up from sweetheart pension deals and the like.

And state and federal retrenchment have cut into municipal budgets. Aid to municipalities is easy to cut. Also, it’s easy for states to make municipalities bear the brunt of tax caps and other disempowerment items since living with them is Somebody Else’s Problem for state office holders. And most states radically under-empowered local governments to begin with.

Combine these and there’s little room to maneuver for many cities and mayors. They are hemmed in on all sides. So what do they do? Unsurprisingly, they’ve increasingly turned to gimmicks, especially in bigger cities that have the talent firepower to dream them up.

Just as the cash-strapped and moribund government of ancien regime France attempted to fix its financial problems by farming out the collection of revenues, a short term fix that long-term merely made thing worse, modern state and local governments are trying the same sort of financial handwaving rather than bite the political bullet of actually correcting the stupid practices that got them in trouble in the first place.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws; who knows what a jungle Chi-town would be without that.

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And far too many of them work for the government, i.e. are parasites.

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Dartmouth economics professor Bill Fischel has posted “Fiscal Zoning and Economists’ Views of the Property Tax,” which will be a chapter in a revised edition of Fischel’s classic The Economics of Zoning Laws. Fischel provides a great overview of zoning, development, and property taxes, highlighting the important fact that zoning is fiscal in nature — that is to say, local governments use zoning to “preserve and possibly enhance the local property tax base.” … Contrary the great myth of benevolent city planners getting together and using the best available evidence to scientifically apply land-use regulations that will maximize social welfare, land-use regulations are developed like most government “goods”: through competing self-interested special interest groups fighting over benefits in the political arena.

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No, it’s not socialism, although one could be forgiven for guessing that.

Coccidioidomycosis, known as “cocci,” is an insidious airborne fungal disease in which microscopic spores in the soil take flight on the wind or even a mild breeze to lodge in the moist habitat of the lungs and, in the most extreme instances, spread to the bones, the skin, the eyes or, in Mr. Klorman’s case, the brain.

The infection, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has labeled “a silent epidemic,” is striking more people each year, with more than 20,000 reported cases annually throughout the Southwest, especially in California and Arizona. Although most people exposed to the fungus do not fall ill, about 160 die from it each year, with thousands more facing years of disability and surgery. About 9 percent of those infected will contract pneumonia and 1 percent will experience serious complications beyond the lungs.

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Employers across the country are complaining about the impacts of Obamacare on their businesses, with many slashing employees in order to comply with the dictates of the program. Writing teacher Clint Benjamin, who normally works for the Community College of Alleghany County, saw his hours cut thanks to Obamacare. “I’ve got a kid to raise, bills to pay,” he said. Walmart and Red Lobster are reportedly doing the same thing; part time hires have increased, with full time hires slowing.

Elect an idiot, get it packed up your pooper. You’d think these idiots would learn….

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Obama administration officials are illegally delaying enforcement of a central provision in the president’s namesake legislation in a desperate attempt to manipulate the 2014 midterm elections and swell the ranks of those who look to government for healthcare.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Section 1513’s “Employer Mandate” is one of five parts of the ACA that are absolutely essential for this government-run system to work, with the most well-known of those five being the infamous “Individual Mandate” upheld by the Supreme Court as a tax by a controversial 5-4 decision in 2012.

And the Employer Mandate is mandatory. The law Congress wrote explicitly commands that this provision takes effect in January 2014. The ACA does not permit the government to grant a reprieve or an extension.

Yet in a blatantly illegal move, the Obama administration is presuming to rewrite the ACA by choosing not to enforce provisions that are causing visible problems. The IRS—which is tasked with enforcing the Employer Mandate—will simply not enforce it until 2015. Every large employer in the country is under the mandate. If they don’t comply, then they are breaking federal law.

But the IRS not enforcing Section 1513 is like a policeman who patrols a stretch of road who says for the next year, he won’t issue any speeding tickets. He has no authority to suspend the law, but if he chooses to violate his duty by failing to enforce the law, then to all the motorists on the road it’s as if the law does not exist.

However, the White House is doing nothing to stop Section 1501’s Individual Mandate. Almost every American is still being commanded to buy insurance or face a penalty (now called a “tax” by the Supreme Court). If you work at a large company, you might be on your own and need to buy insurance somewhere else.

Your tax dollars at work.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

 According to Forbes, there are a little over 400 billionaires in the U.S. Many (such as the Koch Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, and George Soros) are actively using their money, influence, and power to promote more immigration. (And this is not to mention foreign billionaires, such as Carlos Slim, financial savior of the New York Times, who profits exorbitantly from phone calls between Mexican immigrants in America and their friends and family in his country.)

Even the Koch Brothers, enemies of all that’s left and good in the world? Say it ain’t so….

 Here’s a question — in the latest round of controversy over immigration, has a single billionaire spoken up publicly against expanding immigration?

Uh, that would be No. And somehow I don’t see this figuring in the ritual denunciations of The Rich by The Usual Suspects any time soon.

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Thereby turning an ugly building into a fugly building. That’s what they mean by progress in these degenerate modern times.

Fortunately, like all student projects, it has about as much chance of seeing reality as I do of receiving a large check from Bill Gates.

(Not that I would turn it down, you understand….)

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Another Democrat Senator lets the veil slip, shows the brown shirt underneath.

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The unions are asking for raises that add up to about 23.2 percent over three years. They’re also demanding the transit agency take steps to improve safety on the job. BART has offered 1 percent raises, contingent on the agency meeting economic goals, in each year of the four-year contract it’s proposed. The agency has said it needs employees to pick up a share of their pension contributions, to increase their health insurance costs and to approve rule changes that would reduce overtime.

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The New York City Commission on Human Rights has ordered Michael and Jennifer Colbert, owners of a Welsh pub, to pay $2,500 for placing a discriminatory job ad. The ad said their pub, the Long Bow, was seeking a bartender or barmaid who could “help enhance the customers’ experience of being in a British pub and all the things that go with a British pub.” The ad also said that “Being British definitely works in your favor.” Michael, who is from Wales, said being British was never a requirement, but commission officials said it’s illegal even to prefer someone from a particular country.

Explain to me what this has to do with ‘human rights’.

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Pity the baby boomers. No generation seems more widely despised, even among its own members. A quick Google search shows just how common this is — the search string “baby boomers are” will be auto-completed with “selfish,” “evil,” and “the problem.” Shortening the string to just “boomers are” adds “the worst generation” to your results. Ouch. How did a generation raised on peace and love in the age of Woodstock come to symbolize everything that’s wretched and wrong with the world today?

By being narcissistic idiots with an exaggerated sense of entitlement, primarily.

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Yet another reason to avoid Facebook, a leading indicator of the degeneration of our times.

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Endgame Syria is a free interactive exploration of events unfolding in Syria today. Rejected by Apple’s App Store but now on PC, Endgame:Syria is a newsgame; a simulation that uses interactivity to explore a real world event. The original version was developed in around two weeks, this updated version allows users to explore the options open to the Syrian rebels as they push the ongoing conflict to its endgame. Each choice the user makes has consequences – the types of military units you may deploy, the political paths you choose to tread. Not only does each choice impact the current situation but your choices may also impact the final outcome. Users can play and replay events to see how different choices on the ground might lead to different outcomes. There is more info, links and sources data on the game’s site. Will you choose to accept peace at any cost? Can you win the war and the peace that follows? Find out in Endgame Syria.[emphasis added]

Oh, guess what, Political Correctness isn’t just a government problem. Every Hollywood movie that attempts to deal with terrorism can’t have Muslim jihadists as the villains, because it would ignite a political firestorm even if the ‘progressives’ in charge of the movie business could bring themselves to do it; and now game developers can’t deal with controversial subjects in Apple-platform games because the New Age metrosexuals in charge in Cupertino won’t allow it.

Rawlings previously produced strategy title Endgame: Syria that used game mechanics to explore that nation’s civil war. Endgame: Syria drew some criticism for using real-life current events in a game, and Apple blocked its release on the iOS App Store. The studio was able to get it back on the App Store after removing the references to real places and governments. Rawlings feels that this is an unfair double standard.

No shit. I remember the halcyon days when I was a Lifetime Subscriber to Strategy & Tactics magazine, where it seemed as if every issue had a new game that focused on a tense situation ‘ripped from the headlines’. But that was The Good Old Days, and Jim Dunnigan buckled under to nobody.