Our kills are clean and secular; theirs are messy and religious.

“In their effort to create a caliphate across parts of Iraq and Syria,” CNN tells us, “ISIS fighters have slaughtered civilians as they take over cities in both countries.

“In Syria, the group put some of its victims’ severed heads on poles.”

Stomach-churning as this is, the context in which it is reported – as simplistic maneuvering of public opinion – numbs me to its horror, because it quietly justifies a larger, deeper horror waiting in the wings. To borrow a phrase from Benjamin Netanyahu, this is telegenic brutality. It’s just what the U.S. war machine needs to justify the next all-out assault on Iraq.

“In another instance caught on camera,” the CNN report continues, “a man appears to be forced to his knees, surrounded by masked militants who identify themselves on video as ISIS members. They force the man at gunpoint to ‘convert’ to Islam, then behead him.”

In 1990, in the Badlands of South Dakota, a team of paleontologists found the biggest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that had ever been discovered.

Then, about two years later, all hell broke loose.

It sounds like the plot of a new Jurassic Park sequel, but it’s actually the description of Dinosaur 13, a documentary by Columbus native Todd Douglas Miller. If you think big government poses more of a potential threat than a big, extinct carnivore, you’ll find it scarier than anything Steven Spielberg could have dreamed up.

The team was led by brothers Peter and Neal Larson and included Susan Hendrickson, the first person to stumble upon the fossil. According to the participants’ accounts of that fateful August day, they instantly realized the momentousness of their discovery.

President Obama may want us to sympathize with patriotic torturers, he may turn on whistleblowers like a flesh-eating zombie, he may have lost all ability to think an authentic thought, but I will say this for him: He knows how to mark the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin fraud like a champion.

Before nuclear weapons, after nuclear weapons . . .

“The latter era, of course,” writes Noam Chomsky, “opened on August 6, 1945, the first day of the countdown to what may be the inglorious end of this strange species, which attained the intelligence to discover the effective means to destroy itself, but — so the evidence suggests — not the moral and intellectual capacity to control its worst instincts.”

Dr. Elaine Richardson is a very accomplished human being. She founded the OSU Hip Hop Literacies Conference which has brought the Dream Defenders, Chuck D, MC Lyte, Dr. Christopher Edmin and many other prominent Hiphop thinkers to our fair city over the years. Dr. E has won countless awards including the Ohio State University Community Cultural Icon Award. Ohio State University College of Education Diversity Award and National Council of Negro Women Community Service Award. In 2013, Dr. E was named one of Cleveland Ohio’s Top 25 Most influential African-American Women Award in 2013.

Saturday, August 9th Dr. E will be performing at the Frank Hale Center’s MLK Lounge, 154 12th Avenue on OSU’s Main Campus in support of her recent memoir PHD (Poor H* on Dope) To PHD: How Education Saved My Life.