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Cuba’s cherished ballet tradition endures through daily blackouts and shortages
Cuba is facing severe challenges, with blackouts and shortages affecting daily life. Yet classical ballet remains a cherished cultural institution. The National Ballet School in the capital of Havana continues
In science fiction thriller, civil engineer focuses on our vulnerabilities in the age of AI
J. Luke Bennecke's book, "Blackout" blends science fiction with real U.S. infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Washington Announces Blackout Game for Week 4 Against Minnesota
Washington announced on Monday that they will host their annual Blackout game in its Big Ten opener against Minnesota.
PlayStation Blackout Boycott Had 'No Significant Change' on Player Counts or Engagement, Says Analyst
The recent PlayStation blackout boycott reportedly had no "significant" change in player engagement with the platform, according to an analyst.
PS5 Blackout Protest Made 'No Significant Change at All' to Player Counts, Says US Data
The state of play
Sudan’s war-driven blackouts push residents toward solar power but high costs shut many out
In Sudan, many residents are turning to solar energy to cope with frequent blackouts caused by the ongoing conflict.
ESPN Unlimited Now Available on YouTube TV
ESPN Unlimited content is now available directly on YouTube TV, giving the streaming service’s subscribers access to thousands of additional live sporting events. YouTube TV’s addition of ESPN Unlimited comes under the deal struck between Google and Disney reached in November 2025, after a two-week blackout of Disney-owned networks on YouTube TV. Other pay-TV providers …
Sen. Tammy Baldwin Pushes to End High Streaming Costs and Sports Blackouts
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin met with local sports bar owners in Eau Claire on Friday to promote her “For the Fans Act,” a piece of legislation aimed at tackling rising sports streaming costs and eliminating broadcast blackouts for local games.
New Mexico cannabis businesses prepare for six-day inventory system blackout
NM cannabis operators are raising concerns about revenue loss and layoffs as the state transitions to a new inventory system, which includes a six-day blackout period starting August 25.
Furious PS5 Players Unplug Their Consoles in Protest as Blackout Gets Underway
And so it begins
PlayStation Blackout Starts Tomorrow, But Are You Taking Part?
The #PSBlackout social action kicks off tomorrow, but who is taking part, and will it have the effect participants desire? Probably not.
Sports on TV for Aug. 17
ADV15-16 (All times Eastern) Schedule subject to change and/or blackouts Monday, Aug. 17 4 p.m.
After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
PlayStation ‘Blackout’ Planned In August To Protest Discless Future
The PSBlackout organizers are asking PlayStations to refrain from logging into and purchasing any content on PlayStation platforms from August 23 to August 30
Angry PlayStation Fans Propose PS5 Blackout in Protest of Sony's Disc Decision
Unplug your consoles for a week in August
Solar storms don't shock people directly — they induce electric currents in long metal, meaning power lines, pipelines and undersea internet cables become the very antennas that channel the damage into modern life
Solar storms do not electrocute people. They induce slow electric currents in long conductors — power lines, pipelines and undersea internet cables — which then channel the damage into substations and shore stations. The 1989 Quebec blackout took down a continent's grid in 90 seconds without a single direct strike from the Sun.
Pay raises for incompetence at the Colorado Capitol
By Jon Caldara I am personally responsible for helping overpay socialists to make Colorado unaffordable, overregulated and one windstorm away from a power blackout. I failed you. Colorado legislators already get automatic inflation raises. You know, just like your job (I’m assuming the sarcasm bled through that one). No private-sector worker has that kind of […]
CIA chief makes historic trip to Cuba as US blockade chokes island's energy supplies
The U.S. has been restricting oil shipments to Cuba since January, plunging the country into blackouts lasting days at a time.
Iranian businesses said resorting to mass layoffs amid wartime economic struggles
According to New York Times, business leaders warn 3.5 million industrial jobs at risk, several tech firms shut down due to internet blackout, with others laying off hundreds
Iran Businesses Buckle Under Strain of Record Internet Shutdown
Iran’s record internet blackout is taking a heavy toll on private businesses, with owners and industry officials warning that it could lead to mass layoffs and closures.
Bill Would Stop Sports Blackouts
New legislation led by democratic Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin would stop professional sports leagues from blacking out games for fans and end the complicated, costly web of streaming services. The […]
Baldwin introducing bill aiming to stop sports blackouts, cut streaming costs
The rise of streaming services have made watching games difficult for some sports fans.
May Day: Some SF businesses staying open despite calls for economic blackout
It's anticipated to be the largest national day of action since the No Kings rallies in January but this time around, some San Francisco businesses aren't on board.
May Day: Some SF businesses staying open despite calls for economic blackout
It's anticipated to be the largest national day of action since the No Kings rallies in January but this time around, some San Francisco businesses aren't on board.
Baldwin introduces 'For the Fans Act' targeting sports blackouts, costly streaming wars
Baldwin said her "For the Fans Act" would ensure fans can cheer on their favorite sports teams regardless of their location or financial situation.
U.S. Senator to introduce bill aimed at ending sports blackouts, making games easier to watch for fans
The bill aims to prevent fans from having to own subscriptions to multiple streaming services to watch their favorite team.
Tammy Baldwin targets game blackouts, expensive sports streaming apps
New legislation from Sen. Tammy Baldwin would prohibit league-owned streaming services from blacking out games and require a free option for fans.
How the streaming dream turned sports on TV into a costly maze
What began as a fan-friendly revolution has splintered into a confusing, expensive web of subscriptions, blackouts and ads
FCC eyes changes to live sports broadcast rules amid fan frustration
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is opening the door to a rewrite of its rules for local blackout restrictions on live sports, a move that could be the first step in a potential shakeup …
Far-left activists stay in 5-star Cuban hotel as island suffers total blackout
CodePink sponsored flights to Cuba to protest President Donald Trump's sanctions, but the group faced backlash for staying in luxury hotels.
Trump: ‘I do believe I’ll [be having] the honor of taking Cuba’
With the Trump administration’s oil blockade cutting off fuel to Cuba, the country’s electrical grid collapsed on March 16, causing an island-wide blackout. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, threatened again to topple the country’s communist government.
Amid blackouts in Cuba, Mario Díaz-Balart sees communism's future fading on the island
Florida's Cuban American GOP delegation says the 'countdown to a free Cuba' has begun.
Cuba hit by widespread blackout; Ecuador expels Havana’s ambassador, staff
Cuba's Ambassador to Ecuador Basilio Gutierrez and his diplomatic staff were given 48 hours to leave Quito.
Call of Duty Warzone is getting a Blackout-inspired mode next week
Black Ops Royale is taking the series back to its roots.
Call Of Duty Announces Black Ops Royale, A New Warzone Battle-Royale Mode Inspired By Blackout
We learned about Call of Duty's new approach to the battle royale genre.
Atlanta Braves launch own broadcast network after split with FanDuel Sports Network
The games will be available without any blackout restrictions.
Iran’s economy falters as internet shutdown hits people, businesses hard
The state-imposed blackout has disconnected Iranians from the world and choked off businesses.
Denver businesses close Friday in support of anti-ICE nationwide shutdown
Local businesses join nationwide strike against immigration crackdown policies
Multiple businesses nationwide announced they would be closed during Friday's “blackout,” and some schools preemptively canceled classes in anticipation of mass absences.
Activists call for a nationwide ‘blackout’ to protest against Trump’s violent immigration crackdown
Organizers say the demonstration is part of a growing non-violent movement
Iranian businesses suffer new blow as internet blackout lingers
Ali Hakim Javadi, head of the Computer Industry Organization, has estimated that the internet outages have caused economic damage of between $18 million and $27 million. Iranian businesses are reeling from an internet blackout, imposed while authorities used massive force to crush large-scale protests, which have crippled commerce in an already battered economy.
Minnesota workers pressure employers to take action against ICE operations
Target, Delta and Hilton targeted with actions leading up to economic blackout of no work, shopping or school
ICE protests: Minnesotans urged not to work or shop in economic blackout over surge of immigration agents
Labor unions and progressive organizations have called on workers across the state to stay home
Across Minnesota, many businesses plan to close Friday to protest ICE action
Minnesota labor unions, community activists and faith leaders are organizing the economic blackout, dubbed “ICE Out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom.”
What to know about Minnesota's anti-ICE blackout day protest
A local news site compiled a list of over 200 businesses that have said they'll join an economic blackout day to protest ICE presence in Minnesota.
Ramstad: Telling people to avoid Minnesota businesses doesn’t hurt ICE
The “economic blackout” day creates unnecessary risk for people who on the side of getting ICE out of Minnesota.
Economics and cognitive science student discusses AI startup to solve
For millions of people, reliable electricity is not a guarantee. In many communities powered by solar mini-grids, evening demand surges routinely trigger blackouts, pushing operators to fall back on
America's largest labor movement joins the fight against ICE
The AFL-CIO, which represents some 15 million workers across the US, is backing a planned Minnesota economic blackout to protest ICE.
Scientists Are Tracking Mysterious Blackouts Beneath the Sea
Scientists have discovered sudden underwater blackouts that can plunge the seafloor into darkness and threaten marine life.
SF's Sunset District business owners meet with PG&E after weeks of blackouts
The three businesses visited during the merchant walk were impacted by the blackout in San Francisco on December 20, and are making claims beyond the PG&E automatic credits.
'Not enough': SF residents, business owners call for increased PG&E bill credits after blackout
The power outage occurred Dec. 20 after a fire sparked that afternoon at a PG&E substation at 8th and Mission streets.
Richmond Buzz: An 'absolutely brutal' blackout weekend
“Richmond Buzz” will be a recurring column on the neighborhood. This edition: Businesses are devastated after the weekend blackout.
Elon Musk takes dig at Waymo after San Francisco blackout
Elon Musk mocks Waymo after rival's self-driving cars stopped at intersections during San Francisco power outage, while claiming Tesla's robotaxi remained unaffected.
Waymo shut down service during San Francisco's blackout because its driverless taxis got confused
A widespread power outage in San Francisco affected thousands of residents. It also left Waymo robotaxis stalled on city streets.
Ukrainians get creative to keep businesses alive amid winter blackouts
Small businesses have been forced to get creative to keep their doors open and customers happy while power supplies remain unreliable.
Is Using a VPN to Watch Sports Illegal? Here’s What Actually Happens
Using a VPN to get around sports blackouts and geoblocks can help you stream games, but you may be breaking the terms of service of some streaming services.