I would like to tell you something about human depravity and illustrate just how widespread it is among those we often regard as ‘responsible’. I am going to use the Democratic Republic of the Congo as my example.

As I illustrate and explain what has happened to the Congo and its people during the past 500 years, I invite you to consider my essential point: Human depravity has no limit unless people like you (hopefully) and me take some responsibility for ending it. Depravity, barbarity and violent exploitation will not end otherwise because major international organizations (such as the UN), national governments and corporations all benefit from it and are almost invariably led by individuals too cowardly to act on the truth.

The Congo

Prior to 1482, the area of central Africa now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo was part of the Kingdom of the Kongo. It was populated by some of the greatest civilizations in human history.

Slavery

There’s something Nasty in the Columbus Watershed.  In the Upper Scioto Watershed, farm crops are growing, cattle and sheep are grazing and in the middle of 13 of these farm fields, one can see an old oil well from days gone by - rickety, rusted, out of commission relics - one might think.

But these abandoned vertical oil wells have become something of a hot destination for the Fracking Industry.  When a well is fractured to release natural gas, millions of gallons of fresh water is mixed with toxic chemicals, and through the fracture process radioactive elements combine with the toxic water that flows back up.  This Frack water waste is so deadly that the industry is desperate to find ways to dispose of it.

In comes enterprising landowners and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR).  ODNR permits this Toxic Frack Water Waste to be injected in these old abandoned vertical oil wells, and these wells don’t have holding tanks at the bottom - so the toxic waste, or “brine” as they like to call it, injected deep into the earth, rocks and soil, can leak, seep, spill and migrate into the Columbus Watershed, our drinking water source.

Now that Donald Trump has punked out on peace in Korea, it’s time to give that Nobel Prize to the guy who really deserves it: Dennis Rodman.

Please sign the moveon.org petition urging the Nobel Committee to give him the award.  

Actor/playwright Tom Dugan’s superb award winning one-man show Wiesenthal is a must-see for anyone who loves great acting, writing, drama, human rights and/or Jews, plus hates fascism, crimes against humanity, war and atrocities. For almost 90 minutes sans intermission Dugan flawlessly incarnates Simon Wiesenthal, the greatest postwar Nazi hunter, who as a private entity tirelessly helped track down up to 1,100 Hitlerian war criminals and torturers from his cramped office in Vienna.

Dugan’s mesmerizing saga is set there, although as the title character he spins tales that transport us throughout Europe’s concentration camp archipelago (which Simon describes as “when barbarism met technology”) to Buenos Aires where the Final Solution’s über-bureaucrat, Adolf Eichmann, was hiding out and back to Austria, where Anne Frank’s captor lived in plain sight. Indeed, Wiesenthal’s peregrinations take us through the heart of darkness that, he fears, is harbored somewhere deep within the inner labyrinths of all men.

Some 360,000 Americans now work in the solar industry, more than in nukes and coal combined. In fact, more Americans are now working in California’s solar industry than are digging coal nationwide. And the U.S. wind business now employs more than 100,000 people.

But President Donald Trump wants to change that. He has already slammed the solar industry’s growth by slapping a 30 percent tariff on imported Chinese panels, slowing installations nationwide.