SPAN Ohio's Lobby/Advocacy Day in Columbus is Wednesday, April 19th, 8:30AM to 5PM.

We are extending this opportunity again so you can sign up to attend our in-person meetings with legislators on that day!

You do not need to be experienced in lobbying. You will be paired up with other experienced lobbyists from SPAN.

Dee Chavez

Chair Lobby Committee

dee49@fuse.net

513-413-1178

This isn’t your Crazy Mama’s off-campus anymore. Nor is it your Papa Joe’s or Mean Mr. Mustard’s.

Above on left is a picture sent to us by an Ohio State student of a marker board from an off-campus “House Ministry” of roommates letting everyone know how long they’ve self-restrained from watching porn (i.e., “Flogging your dolphin”).

The image on the right is a show poster from last year promoting a concert to raise awareness of “cult activity on campus.” Kool-Aid Man wrapped with a snake is a nice touch.

There are still pockets of cool campus, but those halcyon days (sorta) of the late 1980s and early 1990s are long gone. Replaced of course by the corporate-lame South Campus Gateway mixed-use complex.

Yet what also is a headscratcher is how Christian youth ministries have gained a startling foothold around OSU over the previous two decades. First was Xenos, which began in Columbus in the 1970s, and rebranded recently as “Dwell.” Xenos, as many are aware, is known for its off-campus group homes or “House Ministries.”

Who would have expected that the BRICS nations could rise as the potential rival of the G7 countries, the World Bank and the IMF combined? But that once seemingly distant possibility now has real prospects which could change the political equilibrium of world politics. 

Germany has shut its last three commercial atomic reactors.  

Thus Satrday, April 15, 2023, marks a day that will live in joy and promise.

The world’s fourth-largest economy has gone post-nuclear.

While the conjoined atomic power and weapons industry wastes uncounted millions pushing yet another doomed-to-fail “nuclear renaissance,” Europe’s biggest economy has steered itself toward a sustainable green-powered future. 

For more than a half-century, a powerful Solartopian movement has fought reactor construction in Germany.  

A key early uprising came in the rural community of Wyhl, where thousands of No Nukers physically occupied the site of a proposed radioactive waste dump.  Films of the action circulated worldwide, helping to inspire mass non-violent occupations at Seabrook, New Hampshire, Diablo Canyon in California, and dozens of other reactor sites around the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Germany’s Green movement achieved significant parliamentary clout.  In early 2011, it set a massive national demonstration to shut the nation’s 19 reactors.

Detested by most residents, “hated” to use the word regularly repeated by Columbus Police, and used without obeying the law by relatively few, the plague of unregulated electric scooters is one of Columbus’ few marks of distinction. With almost all other distinctions, this is another grade of F for failure; P for profiteering; C for corruption; V for the City’s violation of its own laws and its residents’ rights. This is The Columbus Way.

Columbus is the largest US city with no policy for regulating electric scooters. See, for example, John Seabrook, “The E-Scooters Loved by Silicon Valley Roll into New York” (The New Yorker, Apr. 19, 2021; for related humor, Fred Noland, “The Scooter Menace,” Sept. 19, 2022). /Other cities pursue a variety of means of regulating scooters—with more or less success—especially for safety and the physical environment.

The slogans that scooters benefit the physical environment or “enhance mobility” (one of the Division of Public (aka Private) Service’s favorite self-promotional terms) are shown over  and over to have no merit. That never matters to the City of Columbus.