They called her the luckiest dog in the world, or so read the ad for an adorable puppy who had just been rescued from a kill shelter in Athens County and was now residing at a shelter in Columbus. We visited her on New Year’s Day 2010. My husband knew if he put her in my arms, I’d be hooked, and I was. We took her home and named her Rosie for the Buckeye’s glorious Rose Bowl victory that same day.

Rosie grew into a spotted black and white mutt about the size of a border collie. She was an athletic Frisbee dog: no toss too long, too crooked or too high. Like all dogs, she chased squirrels and barked at mailmen. She ran through the woods scaring up birds and sniffed deeply in the grass for scents only a dog could know. She led the proverbial dog’s life.

Now it is Milwaukee. On Saturday, a car with two African-American men was stopped for “suspicion.” The men fled, the policeman pursued, and the driver, reportedly armed, was shot and killed.

And Milwaukee exploded. Angry crowds confronted police, set fires, threw rocks. At least half-dozen businesses — including a grocery store, a gas station and an auto parts shop — were robbed or destroyed. The Saturday shooting was part of a weekend filled with violence in Milwaukee. Five people were shot and killed overnight Friday.

Milwaukee law mandates an investigation of any police shooting. Immediately, focus goes to the harsh relations between police and the community. But to understand the reaction to the shooting, it is necessary to go much deeper.

I realize that, living here in the United States, the nation doing the most in the world to create wars, proliferate nukes, and destroy the habitability of the earth's climate, I really have a duty to pick someone in the United States as the worst individual human being alive.

It’s the smallest thing in the world. Does the tennis ball land inside the line or outside? But somehow, as I watched this 60-second YouTube clip of an Australian tennis match last January, and heard an explosion of joyous approval surge from the crowd, I could feel the planet shift.

Or at least it seemed that way for an instant.

In the clip, a tennis player named Jack Sock tells his opponent, Lleyton Hewitt, whose serve has just been declared out, that he should challenge the call. A little humorous disbelief bounces around the court, but eventually Hewitt says, “Sure, I’ll challenge it.” A judge reviews the tape and declares that the serve was in . . . and the crowd lets loose an enormous cheer.

The Manson tribe was not the only wolfpack of murderous maniacs to inhabit a remote ranch in L.A. County in order to foment a helter-skelter race war in America. Before the U.S.A. entered World War II, Nazi sympathizers endeavored to create a Hitlerian enclave at Murphy Ranch in Rustic Canyon, according to the new drama Blueprint for Paradise. Members of the Silver Shirts - a pro-Nazi organization with militia-like aspects - were suspected of drilling and training at this 50 acre compound near Pacific Palisades. Perhaps even more mindboggling is that in their effort to build this dystopia dedicated to the eugenicist “ideals” of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryan super race, an African American architect was hired to render the eponymous blueprints for the goosesteppers.

In this riveting world premiere written by Laurel Wetzork the