It was one year ago today that Environmental Court Judge Stephanie Mingo declared that “City of Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther is the source of the ex parte communication” in the case of the Greyhound bus station on Columbus’ west side. Judge Mingo should have revealed the Mayor’s name during the Emergency Status Conference that was held on October 12, 2023, 26 days before the mayoral election. Judge Mingo was well aware of the implications of announcing Andy Ginther’s name as the ex parte communicator just 26 days prior to Election Day.  She had a duty to tell the public who it was and what was said and her silence brings into question judicial partiality of a high-ranking city official. This was a clear abuse of power and the mayor made the phone call to get an advantage in the election. The mayor tried to obstruct official business of the court.

The paradoxical phrase, 'running away forward' is one of the most apt descriptions that illustrates the state of Israeli affairs now. 

 It seems that everything that Israel has done in the past year or so is a mere attempt to deny, distract from or escape imminent future scenarios - all of which are bleak. 

 Indeed, the last year has repeatedly proven that Israel's military supremacy is no longer able to win wars or decide political outcomes. 

A Franklin County map from 1892 of “ancient earthworks,” or Native American burial mounds and other structures, may show that Shrum Mound on the near West Side does have a sibling mound nearby, after all.

The map, uncovered by fringe historian and author Fritz Zimmeran, is pictured above with an arrow pointing to two mounds. One of those dots is believed to be Shrum Mound (pictured on right), which is on present-day McKinley Avenue. It is one of region’s last remaining conical Native American burial mounds. The Ohio History Connection believes it was constructed by the Adena people 2,000 years ago and possibly homage to a distant mountain.

No doubt, map making from the late 1800s was an imperfect task. Nevertheless, the map suggests there are two Adena burial mounds off McKinley Avenue, as amateur historians have speculated for decades. They have dubbed the second mound “Quarry Mound” (pictured on left) and Shrum Mound stands stoically in a small public park on the banks of the quarry roughly three hundred feet away.

If you stop and think about it, we’ve come up with a lot of doozies in our history. Like the genocide of 20 million Native Americans. Or the enslavement of 12 million kidnapped Africans. Or us invading Vietnam and killing 4 million Asian people for no reason at all. We are not a good people. We have a non-stop cavalcade, a sordid laundry list of evil deeds that led us directly to last week, to the point where we the people, by popular vote, elected a 34-time convicted felon, a fascist, and a civilly-charged and convicted sexual abuser to be our 47th president of the United States. And we did so after he clearly and quite honestly warned us that he was going to do a mass round-up and deportation of nearly 15 million people. And that he would consider executing people he referred to as “the enemy within” (i.e. his political opponents and those who were disloyal to him).