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The recent killing of Henry Green has spawned protests and a deeper look into the practices and tactics of the Columbus Police. Witnesses stated that there appeared to be no reason for the two officers to shoot Green, who had no criminal record. Police claimed Green brandished a gun. The Franklin County Coroner said Green was shot seven times.

The question of whether the Columbus Police Department disproportionately targets Blacks for violence is best answered with direct evidence, including statistics. A new “police accountability tool” created by the website Mappingpoliceviolence.org is useful in this debate.

Mappingpoliceviolence has studied police violence throughout the nation from January 2013 to June 2016. The group’s focus is on the police forces in the 100 largest cities in the country, where 28 percent of all people are killed by police. The Black population of these major cities is 21 percent but Blacks comprise 39 percent of all people killed by police.

One thing is clear about the Smart City grant. Columbus and its sprawl is about to become a petri dish to “creatively reengineer our urban transportation networks” so to avoid global warming and connect the underserved to good jobs. This is the altruistic vision some national pundits have consecrated Columbus with.

The grant is heady stuff for “Test City USA.” A $150 million public and private work-in-progress to test sci-fi transportation technology such as driver-less cars. A plan to build neighborhood hubs with electronic vehicle charging stations that will also have bikeshare and carshare services.

The US Department of Transportation and host of corporate partners – including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., which chipped in $10 million – chose Columbus over 78 other cities, such as Austin, San Francisco, Portland and Denver.

And while our traffic congestion and its pollution doesn’t compare to Denver’s problems, Central Ohio needs to reengineer its transportation and do it in a hurry. For the last several years anyone who commutes into Columbus has painfully dealt with ongoing major road construction to end the outerbelt’s bottlenecks.

British director Stephen Frears’ latest biopic, about wannabe chanteuse Florence Foster Jenkins (the much Oscar-ed and “much-er” Oscar-nommed Meryl Streep), is a winning motion picture on many levels. Florence Foster Jenkins is at all times highly entertaining and occasionally downright hilarious. Based on the real life, eponymous Jenkins, it is a saga about a woman with limited (if any) vocal talent who somehow managed to pursue a career singing classical music. Let’s take a look at some of the dimensions Florence Foster Jenkins explores.

The stylish-looking film shot by London-born director of photography Danny Cohen (who was Academy Award-nominated for 2010’s The King’s Speech) has a “veddy” English sense of class. Florence makes it abundantly clear that Jenkins was a member of the 1% whose wealth enabled her, through a variety of ruses ranging from audience padding to influence peddling - of critics, elite figures in the rarified world of classical music, such as vocal coaches, music hall impresarios and the  renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini (John Kavanagh), etc. - to buy her way onstage.

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.

This article first appeared on Reader Supported News

Only so long you can keep this charade
Before they wake up and see they’ve been played
Too many people with their livin’ at stake
Ain’t gonna take it.
The comin’ round is going through
The comin’ round is going through.

t’s not often a single stanza can sum up a whole political system. But those words from Bonnie Raitt ring truer every day as this pathetic “selection” season lurches ever deeper into astounding ugliness.

As evidenced by her new album, Dig in Deep, and her current concert tour, the opposite is true of Ms. Raitt, whose astonishing talent and endless heart just keep growing.

By way of disclosure, I’ve had the privilege of working with Bonnie on nuclear and other issues since 1978.

At the end of July I had the good fortune to see her perform at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. She is on a long tour now, and if you get the chance to catch one of her shows, don’t pass it up.

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

Responses to recent police killings of Black men show just how deep the racial divide is in this country. There is an “us” versus “them” mentality at play. The “enemy,” according to some, are the Black Lives Matter protestors who are challenging the continued assault on the lives of Black people by the police. The police are being undermined by criticisms of their behavior and unable to do their job of protecting the public. If we accept what Donald Trump is shouting and tweeting at us, we live in a country overwhelmed by crime and violence, and we need to return to the good old days when America was great and safe. Well, Donald Trump and I share a common birth year and skin color but very little else – even the America that we both grew up in.

If your name is Donald Trump, or Dick Cheney, or George W Bush, then don’t bother reading this.  This article is to help the rest of us to better understand how Donald Trump et al think.  The psychiatric literature has long known that people with narcissistic personality disorder, also called the narcissistic sociopath, are far more common at the upper end of politics and business in the United States.  About 1% of people in general show the criteria of the condition, yet 20% of CEOs in “Fortune 500” companies and many politicians in this country have these characteristics. 

So it pays to know how these people think since it allows us to accurately predict their behavior.  The cause of narcissistic personality condition can be summarized in three words: low self-esteem.  The person’s thinking process is overwhelmed with the need to show them as powerful and important.  It is much more common in men than women, and, thus, testosterone, one of the key driving forces of emotional behavior, powers this condition. 

Horny hotdog questions the meaning of life

Is Sausage Party the Donald Trump of animated films?

Stylistically, they have more in common than you might think, being both foul-mouthed and self-consciously outrageous.

Politically and philosophically, on the other hand, they couldn’t be more different. While Trump panders to his supporters by appealing to their fears and frustrations, Sausage Party dares viewers to question the assumptions on which most of us base our very existence.

Set in a huge grocery store, the R-rated comedy stars Seth Rogen as Frank, a hotdog in love with a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig). Like other food products in the store, they look forward to the day when they’ll be liberated by a “god”—that is, a shopper—who will take them to the “promised land.” Only then will Frank and Brenda finally be able to satisfy the carnal needs that have been denied them by their moral scruples, not to mention the plastic packages that separate them.