Local
Tuesday, December 6, 2022, 11:30 AM – 4:15 PM
Join us for an in-person training featuring expert panelists and in-depth discussions on the upcoming 2024-2025 State Operating Budget. Sponsored by Community Solutions and Advocates for Ohio’s Future. Cost: $30. More information and registration here.
Where I live, the seasons change fast. We’ve barely put away our jack-o’-lanterns in Kansas City when a cold wind blows in from the prairie, bringing down leaves — and soon after that, ice storms and snow.
But no matter how cold it gets, we always look forward to seeing family and friends over the holidays. We all want our homes to be filled with joy, comfort, and the people we love the most.
But many of us will miss someone at the holiday table, because our country’s overdose crisis now touches almost every family and community. Overdoses took over 108,000 lives this year, more than any year on record. Overdose deaths affect all of us — whether we are Black, brown, or white, and whether we live in a big city or a small town.
Every one of these deaths is a tragedy. It’s also a tragedy that so many lives could have been saved with effective and proven treatments like buprenorphine, a form of Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT), the gold standard of care for opioid use disorder. But outdated laws stop providers from prescribing this lifesaving care.
December 4, 2022, 4:00 PM
“Compassion & Responsibility in This Time of Turmoil: with our Heads, Hearts, Words and Hands.”
The theme reflects that we live in a time of turmoil – that calls for both compassion and responsibility. IACO has used the phrase: Heads, Hearts, and Hands – as part of our annual Prayer Gathering in the past -- to reflect that we need to “understand” the issue and values that bring us together (with our Heads); we need to “feel” the hopes and needs expressed (with our Hearts); and we need to take “action” (with our Hands).
This year, we also want to think about how in our “interactions” with others, we can both “hurt and heal” (with our Words). We live in an age where through social media, words can and have been weaponized to defame those who have an opposing view from the speaker. Participants are asked to bring a vegetarian dish for the potluck.
Location: University Baptist Church, 50 W. Lane Ave., Columbus.
In its continuing private interest- and large public institution-dominated efforts to avoid the popular democratic reforms that remade almost all US cities in the second half of the nineteenth century and even more in the early twentieth-century Progressive Era, Columbus, Ohio (which continues to need its state’s name to be recognized) created “area commissions” and “district organizations” in the early 1970s. It was one of many anti-public dodges to avoid representative democracy and maintain private interests, often bought and sold with mayors’, city councils’, and major departments’ participation. This is the well-known Columbus Way.
These are strange entities, full of contradictions, pursuits of self-interest, and both active and passive deceptions. The only serious commentary I have found is a few pages in geographer Kevin Cox’s Boomtown Columbus: Ohio’s Sunbelt City and How Developers Got Their Way (2021), the only scholarly documented study of Columbus in print.
Cox highlights the complications and contradictions:
The Ohio Nuclear Free Network is asking concerned people who want to stop the spread of radioactivity (and corruption) in Ohio to write a letter to be sent as testimony opposing this bill. It does not have to be long. Copy some of our talking points or write something in your own words.
STOP HB 434: The Ohio Nuclear Free Network has created a fact sheet with 30 concise points on why this bill is dangerous and precedent-setting: OHIO HOUSE BILL 434, Information for Legislators.
WRITE A LETTER AS OPPOSITION TESTIMONY to HB 434
Drum roll please … within approximately one month, cannabis will … or should … take center stage at the Ohio Statehouse. That is when the General Assembly is mandated by the Ohio Supreme Court to follow the rules regarding citizen initiated statutes. Legislators must consider Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol (RMLA) Act. Will they, is a matter of debate.
Semantics
But first terminology. Should the non-medical cannabis market be called “recreational” or “adult use”? The problem with “recreational” is that it sounds like a sport, say, a hemp football. The term “adult use” is a better fit because it frames use as belonging to those over age 21, nullifying opponents’ arguments about kids.
The Process
Friday, December 2, 2022, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM
Firefighters - it's time! This December 2, we are getting back out in the streets of our nation's capital to sound the alarm on the climate emergency. Join Jane Fonda and friends for a day of inspiration and action. Make your voice heard and demand a cleaner, greener, healthier world. And of course, wear your red! Can't make it in person?
Not to worry – the event will be live-streaming on firedrillfridays.com, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, so you can rally with us from wherever you are.
After a high-ranking North Korean official requests asylum, KCIA Foreign Unit chief Park Pyong-ho (Lee Jung Jae) and Domestic Unit chief Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo Sung) are tasked with uncovering a North Korean spy, known as Donglim, who's deeply embedded within their agency. When the spy begins leaking top secret intel that could jeopardize national security, the two units are each assigned to investigate each other. In this tense situation where if they cannot find the mole, they may be accused themselves, Pyong-ho and Jung-do slowly start to uncover the truth. In the end, they must deal with an unthinkable plot to assassinate the South Korean president.
Taking place in the 80s against the backdrop of a cold war between the two Koreas, "Hunt" tells an engrossing tale of a spy agency conducting a smoke out operation to root out a mole. Understanding that the film takes place in the 80s, the set is designed to match the era down to even the smallest detail. Although the circumstances surrounding the film are based on actual events in history, the story itself is a work of fiction in its entirety.
Nothing like a mysterious disappearance to get our minds off Ohio’s miserable political situation and Ohio State’s one-sided loss to Michigan.
On Tuesday, dispatch.com broke the story that OSU President Kristina Johnson would be departing in the spring with more than two years to go on her contract that pays her upwards of $1 million in salary and benefits. The article contained a curious reference to staff complaints leading to an investigation by the trustees leading to her requested departure.
Of course, nobody is talking for the record. The OSU trustees are notoriously closed-mouthed about such matters despite keen public interest in the inner workings of Ohio Land Grant University.
Perhaps a complaining staff member will come forward and spill the beans, but it could mean risking one’s livelihood if outed.
The leaves what is left of the news media that regularly covers the Capitol City and its signature university.
Many of the reporters who might break the whodunit story are connected to OSU in some way, shape or form and dare not bite the hand that feeds them.