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When he looks at senior Alana Gaither, Otterbein University football coach Tim Doup doesn’t see the first female football player to score points in the Ohio Athletic Conference or the holder of the female record for the Ohio High School Athletic Association’s longest field goal, according to MaxPreps.com.

 What Doup sees is a great place kicker. Nothing more. “As an athlete, she is no different than anyone else, to be honest,” says Doup, whose team opens the season Sept. 6 against St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y. “At first, it was a little different. You do get some reactions from the guys. ‘Is this for real?

Do we really have a female kicker?’

 “Now I forget sometimes I have a female on the team to be quite honest. The only thing different is she dresses somewhere else. She is one of the guys.”

 “None of my coaches have ever treated me differently,” says Gaither, who made 32 of 40 extra points and 5 of 6 on short-range field goals during the last two seasons with the Cardinals. “I’m a human being who can kick a football and that’s all that matters to them.”

Columbus is a very geeky city — so geeky, in fact, that it’s home to not just one long-running annual anime convention, but two! Over the weekend between August 22nd and 24th, the Hyatt Regency Hotel played host to the smaller and younger but no less ambitious of the two, Matsuricon.

The Ohio Roller Girls closed out their regular season with a tough pair of victories over the Steel City (Pittsburgh) Roller Girls on Saturday August 30. This was easily one of the more physical bouts of the season. Both the All-Star charter team and Gang Green landed another point in the win column, with the All Stars advancing with a buy in the first round of the playoffs. The Eastern playoffs are a 16 team double elimination tournament to be held in Evansville, Indiana from September 19 through 21.

OHRG All Stars vs Steel Hurtin'

The charter team matchup between Columbus and Pittsburgh began without a whisper of points for our hometown heroines as Steel Hurtin's defense held the All Stars scoreless for first six jams. Ena Flash, a player not often seen in the jammer position finally got Ohio on the scoreboard for three points in the seventh. Ohio chipped away at Pittsburgh's lead for another two jams and until the Smacktivist took advantage of a power jam to land three grand slams and pull the All Stars ahead 28 to 24 at the end of the tenth.

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America By Kiese Laymon

Many fine authors hail from the South, that most distinctive region in the country. It seems that southerners have voices and story telling skills like no others in America. Kiese Laymon, a son of the south, joins the long line of southerners who have dazzled us with their literary skills.

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America isn’t a book about suicide per se; it’s a collection of searing essays about the daily, slow death and dying marginalized people go through as they come to grips with the harshness and hopelessness of their lives.

President Obama has authorized surveillance drones over Syria, and is threatening to begin airstrikes in Syria, along with the ongoing strikes in Iraq. All without Congressional approval. The Syrian government has said that airstrikes in its airspace would constitute an act of aggression. Tell President Obama: Don’t bomb Syria or Iraq!

We’ve seen the pictures and read the news. ISIS is certainly frightening, and we’re deeply concerned about the people of Syria and Iraq. US military intervention in the region has historically been counterproductive. We've seen this from the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. What’s needed is a political and humanitarian solution to the crisis, not more violence.

Remarks at North Carolina Peace Action Event in Raleigh, N.C., August 23, 2014.

Thank you for inviting me, and thank you to North Carolina Peace Action, and to John Heuer whom I consider a tireless selfless and inspired peacemaker himself.  Can we thank John?

It's an honor for me to have a role in honoring the 2014 Student Peacemaker, iMatter Youth North Carolina. I've followed what iMatter has been doing around the country for years, I've sat in on a court case they brought in Washington, D.C., I've shared a stage with them at a public event, I've organized an online petition with them at RootsAction.org, I've written about them and watched them inspire writers like Jeremy Brecher whom I recommend reading.  Here is an organization acting in the interests of all future generations of all species and being led -- and led well -- by human kids.  Can we give them some applause?

In the 1920s and 1930s, anybody who was anybody tried to figure out how to rid the world of war. Collectively, I'd say they got three-quarters of the way to an answer. But from 1945 to 2014, they've been ignored when possible (which is most of the time), laughed at when necessary, and on the very rare occasions that require it: attacked.

What a flock of idiots the leading thinkers of a generation all must have been. World War II happened. Therefore, war is eternal.  Everyone knows that.

But slavery abolitionists pushed on despite slavery happening another year, and another year.  Women sought the right to vote in the next election cycle following each one they were barred from.  Undoubtedly war is trickier to get rid off, because governments claim that all the other governments (and any other war makers) must go first or do it simultaneously. The possibility of someone else launching a war, combined with the false notion that war is the best way to defend against war, creates a seemingly permanent maze from which the world cannot emerge.

A long list of prominent individuals has signed, a number of organizations will be promoting next week, and you can be one of the first to sign right now, a petition titled "Call For Independent Inquiry of the Airplane Crash in Ukraine and its Catastrophic Aftermath."

The petition is directed to "All the heads of states of NATO countries, and of Russia and the Ukraine, to Ban-ki Moon and the heads of states of countries on the UN Security Council." And it will be delivered to each of them.

The petition reads:

"Set up an impartial international fact finding inquiry and a public report on the events in Ukraine to reveal the truth of what occurred.

"Why is this important?

"It's important because there is so much misinformation and disinformation in the media that we are careening towards a new cold war with Russia over this."

That's not hyperbole. It's the language of U.S. and Russian politicians and media.

Barack Obama's horrific re-escalation of the war in Iraq gouges open the unhealed wounds of an illegal intervention perpetrated by a disgraced president who has never been prosecuted for his crimes against humanity.

Obama's renewed drone attacks, which may soon be joined by returning "boots on the ground," come as we hear definitive proof that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger treasonably intervened to prolong the Vietnam War in 1968, resulting in seven more years of senseless war and countless thousands of American and southeast Asian casualties.

Will we now see the same in Southwest Asia that we once saw in the Southeast?

Obama's unconscionable actions remind us that George W. Bush's "shock and awe" invasion of Iraq was built on a foundation of deliberate lies and led to a horrible tsunami of senseless death and crippling expense.

And now it rips open the terrible untreated bleeding that began in 2003 and guarantees the prospect of endless murder and destruction that Obama long ago promised to end as part of his covenant of election.