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Dear Editor,
  I, for one, am thankful that the Good Lord has blessed our Ohio Republican legislators with an ounce or two of God-given common sense. I am referring, of course, to our right-of-center lawmakers' efforts to further relax gun laws here in Ohio. (Proposals would ease more gun restrictions.)
  After all, what is more important here in Ohio, in the 21st century, than the question of packing heat in public? Unemployment, the loss of Ohio manufacturing jobs, the growing disparity between rich and poor, the crumbling infrastructure? Please. All of these pale into insignificance when compared with the question of- can I pack a .357 magnum without a permit into my chosen house of worship? Can I bring big heat to the Little Tots Daycare Center? Can I study philosophy at OSU while maintaining my ability to blow away half of the classroom, if they, say, disagree with me regarding how many angels can dance on a pinhead? These are deep questions and deserve our legislators single-minded attention. Kudos to Ohio's Republican leadership for maintaining their laser-like focus on this pressing issue.

When the Ohio State men’s lacrosse team faced perennial powerhouse Duke in the first round of the NCAA tournament on May 9, it felt a little bit like déjà vu to what the Buckeyes football team went through against Alabama in the Sugar Bowl.
  Just like their football brethren, the lacrosse team was facing a team with a national championship pedigree from a seemingly unbeatable conference. Duke had won the national title in 2013 and 2014 and had a string of eight consecutive national semifinal appearances. Like the SEC, the ACC and the Blue Devils seemed to be the cream of crop with all five of their teams qualifying for the postseason.
   And finally like the football team, no one gave Ohio State much of a chance. Final score: Ohio State 16, Duke 11.
  “Not many people believed we could win that game,” said senior defensive midfielder Ryan Borcherding, whose team lost to Denver 15-13 in the second round on May 16 to finish 12-7 overall. “A lot of people had written us off before the game. To be honest, I think Duke had written us off before the game, too.

  Mad Max: Fury Road, Hollywood’s latest attempt to revive a moribund franchise, drew a lot of attention even before its release by causing outrage among “Men’s Rights Activists” for daring to portray women as capable, heroic human beings. All their fuss is because the titular character (updated from Mel Gibson to Tom Brady) is joined on this outing by Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), an action hero cast from the same mold as Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conner. In fact, Fury Road is every bit her story; Max is just along for the ride as she helps a post-apocalyptic tyrant’s harem escape to freedom.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The American Embassy welcomed the arrest of a
Thai army general on charges "related to migrant smuggling, abuses,
trafficking" and other crimes after President Obama and the U.S. State
Department voiced support for Myanmar's victimized Muslim Rohingyas.

When heavy-set Lt. Gen. Manas Kongpan, 58, turned himself in on June
3, police charged him with human trafficking, illegal detention, and
assisting foreigners to illegally enter Thailand.

"After eight hours interrogation at a police station in Songkhla
province last night, police decided to charge him with nine more
offenses, including concealment of dead bodies, physical assault, and
conspiring in a transnational crime, police say," Khaosod's English
news site reported on June 4.

Lt. Gen. Manas, detained without bail on June 4, is the highest
official to be arrested and linked to deadly Asian trafficking
syndicates, sparking optimism that Bangkok's coup-installed military
regime is cracking down on the gangs.

Police arrested more than 51 others on the same 13 charges --

Geeks are taking over the Greater Columbus Convention Center once again this weekend for the 2015 Origins Game Fair. Origins is one of the biggest gaming conventions in the country, and it has a long history right here in Columbus. Run by the non-profit Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), the convention highlights independent and small-press tabletop games, miniatures wargames, card games, and role-playing games alongside offerings from big names like Wizards of the Coast (publishers of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering) and WizKids (makers of HeroClix).

Though the exhibitor hall doesn’t open until Thursday and the big events don’t get started until Friday, the convention itself officially starts on Wednesday, June 3rd, and scheduled events run well into the night every day from then until the convention’s end on Sunday, June 7th. The official book of scheduled events is nearly 250 black-and-white, text-only pages. There’s never a question of whether there’s anything to do at any given moment at Origins, there’s only the matter of choosing what out of all the abundance of options sounds best — and how to fit eating and sleeping into that schedule.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand's expensive international tourism effort
to downplay its reputation as a sexual playground suffered a rude
setback after three British soccer players appeared in a published
video laughing and shouting racist and vulgar abuse during their
Bangkok orgy with three Thai women.

The government's costly Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT)
promotional organization earlier said it was "very proud" to work with
England's Leicester City team and club, before three of its players
appeared romping in a hotel bed with the trio of unidentified Thais.

Uncensored clips online display the young men merrily shouting insults
at the obedient women while ordering them to perform orally and as
lesbians while the naked group of six cavort.

"Licky, licky, you slit eye," one of the men says, convincing a young
woman to approach another female who is sprawled on the bed.

"Leicester City budding stars, including boss Nigel Pearson's son,
were filmed taking part in a vile orgy in which a local girl was
racially abused in Bangkok," reported Britain's Sunday Mirror

Hatim Kanaaneh has written a fictionalized account, Chief Complaint: A Country Doctor's Tale of Life in Galilee, based on his experiences as a village doctor during the past half-century, a doctor who traveled to the United States for his education and returned to Palestine to practice his craft. His dialogue-heavy stories reach back to before 1948, merging folklore with myth and legend, featuring in the opening vignette a larger-than-life comedic but sensitive giant as short on wits as he is strong of muscle and heart.

“Nope, nope, nope,” was Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott’s answer to the question whether his country will take in any of the nearly 8,000 Rohingya refugees stranded at sea.

Abbott’s logic is as pitiless as his decision to abandon the world’s most persecuted minority in their darkest hour. “Don’t think that getting on a leaky boat at the behest of a people smuggler is going to do you or your family any good,” he said.

But Abbott is hardly the main party in the ongoing suffering of Rohingyas, a Muslim ethnic group living in Myanmar, or Burma. The whole Southeast Asian region is culpable. They have ignored the plight of the Rohingya for years. While tens of thousands of Rohingya are being ethnically cleansed, having their villages torched, forced into concentration camps and some into slavery, Burma is being celebrated by various western and Asian powers as a success story of a military junta-turned democracy.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Armed kidnappers in Myanmar seized young girls
and other ethnic Rohingyas, brutalizing and imprisoning them on
overloaded boats to sell them to traffickers and corrupt officials in
Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, survivors said according to New
York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The forced victims were mingled among thousands of other stateless
Rohingya Muslims who voluntarily paid to escape racist oppression in
Buddhist-majority Myanmar, also known as Burma, HRW said in a May 27
report titled: "Accounts from Rohingya Boat People."

A dozen local men "dragged me to the boat, they had sticks and
threatened to beat me," said Yasmine, a 13-year-old girl from
southwest Myanmar, according to HRW.

"I screamed, I cried loudly. My parents were weeping, but they
couldn't do anything," she said.

"The [boat] doors were always locked. The smugglers put the food and
water through a small hole, we never saw them. We were only allowed to
go to the toilet once a day," Yasmine said.

Six men, "Buddhists from Bangladesh, they had knives and guns. They

There’s a category of political intellectuals who proudly proclaim themselves “realists,” then proceed to defend and advance a deeply faith-based agenda that centers on the ongoing necessity to prepare for war, including nuclear war.

These intellectuals, as they defend the military-industrial status quo (which often supports them financially), have made themselves the spokespersons for a deep human cancer: a soul cancer. When we prepare for war, we honor a profoundly embedded death wish; indeed, we assume we can exploit it for our own advantage. We can’t, of course. War and hatred link all of us; we can’t dehumanize, then proceed to murder, “the enemy” without doing the same, ultimately, to ourselves.

That isn’t to say there’s an easy way out of the mess we find ourselves in, here in the 21st century. Indeed, I see only one way out: a critical mass of humanity coming to its senses and groping for a way to create a peace that that has more resonance than war. We don’t have much political leadership around this, especially among the planet’s dominant — and nuclear-armed — nation states. But there is some.