Nineteen-sixty-eight was the like the runaway carousel in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Strangers on a Train. The Vietnam War, the assassinations of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and United States Senator (D-MA) Robert F. Kennedy within two months of each other, the chaos at the Democratic convention in Chicago, urban rebellions and their attendant horrors in black enclaves across the United States, the black gloved fists at the 1968 Summer Olympics, the election of former Vice President Richard Nixon to the presidency–these things and more made it an annus horribillis. Yet at the same time, sports magic was happening in Columbus, Ohio.

Saturday, April 27, 2019, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM.
Keynote Speaker:  Michael Lighty, Sanders Institute Fellow.  Conference fee: $40.00.  Workshops and lunch provided.  Scholarships available.  Location:  Quest Business and Conference Center, 8405 Pulsar Place, Columbus, Ohio.  Register at www.spanohio.org.

Fri, April 26-Sun, April 28
Ohio Union, 1739 N. High St.
A variety of topics including: Medical Issues and Developments, Healthcare and Safety, Partners, Spouses, and Family, Legal Issues and Employment, Youth and Aging Needs, Homelessness, Mental Health, Legislative Updates and more. Tickets: transohio.ticketleap.com/symposium2019. transohio.org.

Last week I tweeted this: “The U.S. military wants to fly small nuclear power plants into wars in order to power the wars’ weaponry. Because there was some chance we might not all die fast enough if nothing this stupid was tried.” I linked to a report on this insane idea. Someone replied: “The Navy already does this.”

True enough. Submarines and aircraft carriers engage in this lunacy, and we take it for granted. Submarines also haul nuclear weapons around the world’s seas, ready to intentionally or accidentally destroy the world as needed.

But some people don’t take anything for granted. Westminster Abbey, next door to Parliament, in London, is hosting a ceremony of thanksgiving to properly thank God for 50 years of nuclear weapons in the water. Oh, well, you might think, that makes sense to give thanks for having survived such behavior this long.

No, no, no. You misunderstand. They’re thanking God for having created the nukes and subjected the world to the risk of apocalypse, not for the incredible luck of having thus far survived it.

Max Blumenthal’s new book, “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump,” is over 300 pages and wastes not a word. It also does far more than it claims.

“This book,” Blumenthal writes, “makes the case that Trump’s election would not have been possible without 9/11 and the subsequent military interventions conceived by the national security state. Further, I argue that if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks would have almost certainly not taken place. And if the Twin Towers were still standing today, it is not hard to imagine an alternate political universe in which a demagogue like Trump was still relegated to real estate and reality TV.”