Global

I have been in a funk since the day after last year’s presidential election. About a month before the voting, I began to feel as though Donald Trump would beat Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I thought the only hope was that she could eke out a win through the Electoral College. Well, we all know that didn’t happen.

“First Person Singular” is an occasional column that focuses on impactful personalities in Central Ohio. 

It is written by JP Marat, a DJ and Producer for WCRS FM Community Radio in Columbus.
 

Super Heroes
 

When I was a kid my idols were super heroes like The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and Luke Cage. When I got a bit older, I gravitated towards military commanders (oh youth!). It’s only as an adult that I’ve come to appreciate the last great hero of our age . . . a Columbus Parks and Recreation Department staff worker.
 

Everett Smith

When Columbus Blue Jackets defensemen Seth Jones was traded to Columbus two years ago hardly anyone took notice because the team was in their usual mid-season funk and headed for another year out of the playoffs.

But now the entire city is beginning to jump out of their seats – even African-Americans, a group not often associated as hockey fans because almost all NHLers are white. They’re taking notice because Seth Jones is black and a star-in-the-making. He made the NHL all-star roster this year. Better yet, he embraces the fact he’s an African-American role model in a sport that has slowly warmed to African-Americans. In a way, he’s a pioneer for the 21st century.

“There have been a few African-American kids who have come up to me and said, ‘You’re my favorite player,’ ” said the 22-year-old Jones to the website The Undefeated recently.

Columbus in the past has been labeled a “Black middle-class” capital of the world. Yet many young African-American children have lamented the city lacks a “pro team.” But there is a pro-team and local African-American children are starting to take notice.

For a lot of IT geeks, information security – InfoSec – has been little more than a hobby that lets us delve into the world of online spy tech. Most of us haven’t been doing anything any more illegal than the occasional movie torrent or text to a pot dealer, and the average InfoSec geek has traditionally been more likely to be a Breitbart-reading Reddit troll than someone who is actually part of a marginalized group.

That’s got to change, and soon, because the Breitbart-reading Reddit trolls are now running the asylum, and the only free speech they actually care about is their own.

In December’s issue I went over some basics: turn off geotagging, use encrypted cloud services, use the Tor browser whenever you can. But those were kinder, gentler days, when we didn’t yet know that we were walking right into the worst case scenario, as much as we may have suspected it.

Airport resistance is the biggest step forward by the U.S. public in years.

Why do I say that? Because this is unfunded, largely unpartisan activism that is largely selfless, largely focused on helping unknown strangers, driven by compassion and love, not political ideology, greed, or vengeance, and in line with activism around the globe. It's also targeted at the location of the harm, directly resisting the injustice, and achieving immediate partial successes, including very meaningful successes for certain individuals. It's gaining support from people never before engaged in any activism. And it shows no signs of any significant undesirable side-effects. This is a movement to be built on, and I have an idea what a next step should be.

Prominent Americans, peace activists, and organizations have created an open letter to President Donald Trump asking him to end U.S. war in Afghanistan. It reads:

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is well into its 16th year. In 2014 President Obama declared it over, but it will remain a political, financial, security, legal, and moral problem unless you actually end it.

Happy Year of the Rooster!

Thank you for inviting me. Thank you to Archer Heinzen for setting this up. Of course I wouldn't have come had I known UVA's basketball team would be playing Villanova at 1 o'clock. I'm kidding, but I'll catch it on the radio or watch the replay without the commercials. And when I do I can guarantee only this: the announcer will thank U.S. troops for watching from 175 countries, and nobody will wonder whether 174 wouldn't be just about enough.

I wish I could also guarantee that UVA will win, but this is where sports monkeys around with rational thinking. I don't actually have any say over whether UVA wins. So I can turn my wish into a prediction "We will win" and then declare that "we" won as if I'd been involved. Or let's say that UVA blows it. Then I can remark that "we" decided to keep London Perrantes in the game even though he had a sprained wrist and the flu and had just lost one leg in a car accident, even though the obvious fact is that were I really the coach I would never have done that, just as -- if I fully controlled the U.S. government -- I wouldn't actually spend a trillion dollars a year on war preparations.

California can require Monsanto to label its popular weed killer Roundup as a carcinogen, although the corporation maintains that the product is harmless, according to a ruling by a judge in Fresno, California.

California would be the first state to order this level of labeling if this decision by the California Carcinogen Identification Committee is sustained by further court action. . Monsanto previously sued the nation's foremost agricultural producing state by filing court motions to the effect that California’s carcinogen committee acting under the powers given to it by Proposition 65, had illegally based their decision for mandatorily requiring the warnings on “erroneous” findings by an international health organization based in France.

What is Roundup and what is the problem with its chief ingredient, glyphosphate?

The sense of resistance was fierce:

“Grab ’em by the profits” . . . “Keep your hands out of my wherever” . . . “NOT DECLAWED” . . .

But it was also, oh Lord, joyous — in a scraped raw kind of way, you might say. For instance, the young woman with the bullhorn, who led the chant where I was walking, had almost no voice left as she shouted “Show me what democracy looks like!” But as soon as the marchers shouted back, “This is what democracy looks like!” she threw her vocal cords back into it, and somehow, oh, somehow, I could feel it: the birth of a movement.

Here's why I ask. Maddow devotes many minutes on MSNBC stirring up hatred of Russia in order to establish that there is a vague possibility that President Donald Trump might be corrupted by a foreign government.