Progressive voters in central Ohio know that they should take the time to investigate the candidates and issues before they cast a ballot in the March 17 primary election. Being an educated voter is essential for the democratic process to work.

But people have very busy lives. Work and family obligations can take a lot of time and energy. It’s even harder if you’re a single parent, or you have to work several low-paying jobs to make ends meet. It’s much easier to vote with the sample ballot that the Franklin County Democratic Party mails to your home and distributes at your polling location.

The FCDP sample ballot lists the party’s candidate endorsements for the U.S. House; the Ohio House, Senate, and Supreme Court; and local offices, including the FCDP Central Committee who represent the 152 wards in Franklin County.

The sample ballot doesn’t encourage voters to educate themselves about the candidates and issues. It includes one simple directive: “Vote for every endorsed Democrat on your ballot.”

In other words, trust us. We’re looking out for what’s best for you, your family, your community, and the nation.

As the human onslaught against life on Earth accelerates, no part of the biosphere is left pristine. The simple act of consuming more than we actually need drives the world’s governments and corporations to endlessly destroy more and more of the Earth to extract the resources necessary to satisfy our insatiable desires. In fact, an initiative of the World Economic Forum has just reported that ‘For the first time in history, more than 100 billion tonnes of materials are entering the global economy every year’ – see ‘The Circularity Gap Report 2020’ – which means that, on average, every person on Earth uses more than 13 tonnes of materials each year extracted from the Earth.

On August 9, 2019 the commander-in-tweet attacked “Liberal Hollywood” for having “great Anger and Hate! …The movie coming out [which] is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence and then try to blame others." The movie in question was The Hunt and the day following Trump’s Twitter tantrum Universal Pictures pulled the Blumhouse Production from its scheduled theatrical release on Sept. 27. Of course, if anybody knows anything about great Anger and Hate! and inflaming and causing chaos, it’s the president. But Universal didn’t scratch opening the movie solely because the studio was heeding the counsel of a world class expert in rendering incendiary public statements.

A new freely downloadable book

I would like to announce the publication of a book, which discusses the most serious dangers which the world faces today. The book may be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:

http://eacpe.org/app/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Linked-Dangers-to-Civilization-John-Scales-Avery.pdf

Contrasting rates of change

Cultural evolution depends on the non-genetic storage, transmission, diffusion and utilization of information. The development of human speech, the invention of writing, the development of paper and printing, and finally, in modern times, computers and the internet: all these have been crucial steps in society's explosive accumulation of information and knowledge. Human cultural evolution proceeds at a constantly accelerating speed, so great in fact that it threatens to shake society to pieces.

A critical factor accelerating the spread of coronavirus in the United States is our lack of universal health care.

As we debate the costs of providing medical treatment for all, and as the virus tears through the fabric of our society, it’s become clear that many of the factors accelerating the spread of illness and death associated with this new plague are associated with the for-profit nature of our health care system.

Because we have a patchwork medical system whose primary motivating engine is corporate profit, rather than a unified public medical system whose motivating engine is the health of the public, communicable diseases are treated in a mindset of individual outcome. Our system focuses on the immediate needs of insured patients rather than treating the overall disease as a public emergency, thus hampering the containment and treatment of epidemics like these.