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Socially Just Dining: Comune

Comune opened in the Nationwide Children’s Hospital corridor on Parsons Avenue in mid-November to the delight of the surrounding neighborhood. The Columbus Vegan Meetup community has been abuzz with accolades. Even our celebrity chef of international fame, Del Sroufe of the film “Forks Over Knives,” praised the soup and the chocolate cake as “some of the best ever” for their world-class flavor. If you are looking for a finer dining (though not quite a white tablecloth level) atmosphere and high caliber food, you now have another comprehensive plant-based, vegan-friendly option, from appetizer to dessert and coffee, tea or other libations.  

   

The holiday season is in full swing with lots of exciting vegan community events to get involved in. VeganShift and the Columbus Vegan Meetup are doing their monthly “Second Saturday Ask a Vegan” lunchtime dine-in event on Dec 8, and It’s All Natural is doing their annual Holiday Pop-up Market on Dec 9. Vegan Shift has partnered with Stomping Grounds to deliver a dinner and dancing New Year’s Eve Party.  

    

Comune

Earth Over the Brink

Glacier National Park is drip drip dripping into a puddle.

People and companies and governments are cutting down trees to burn them to save the planet from global warming, mixing the sacrificial trees with oh-so-clean coal, and in Detroit with tires, and in North Carolina with chicken shit.

Others are hacking down old forests to grow marijuana where it’s least likely to be found: another great benefit of drug prohibition.

Over 95% of California’s wild game was mercilessly slaughtered between 1865 and 1890.

Ted Turner is liberating the remnants of the bison in the American West on the model of the liberation of Baghdad: they end up $18 a plate.

Ranchers are luring wolves with sheep carcasses and tracking wolves’ radio collars like a Saudi hit squad tracking a journalist, before playing American Sniper.

Endangered species are being hunted just as viciously by lobbyists.

APHRODITE’S HOLIDAY SHOW Theater Review

The Actors’ Gang has long been among my favorite theatre companies. Over the years I’ve attended their hard-hitting dramas and trenchant satires, from Tim Robbins’ early anti-Iraq War Embedded to an adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 that commented on the Bush regime’s torture policy to the antiwar classics Bury the Dead by Irwin Shaw and the docu-play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine about the pacifist Berrigan Brothers and so on. To be fair, the intrepid troupe has presented its fair share of comedies, too - more often than not performed by thesps donning commedia dell’arte masks in original works written by Robbins, such as Harlequino - although these productions often contain heavy doses of social commentary along with hearty laughs.

 

But with The Gang’s Aphrodite’s Holiday Show it is, as Monty Python pithily put it, time “now for something completely different” at the Ivy Substation. In this 90 minute variety show performed without intermission the usually thought-provoking Gang here lets its collective hair down with a diversion designed to maximize merriment during this season of mirth and goodwill to all people.

The Bush Family Dynasty and Prescott Bush’s Love Affair with Fascism

I was involved in pro-peace, anti-war, anti-US Imperialism efforts during the most hideous years of the Reagan/Bush administrations (from 1980 – 1992) that resulted in the deaths and sufferings of millions of innocent people in virtually every South and Central American nation you can think of.

 

As I remember the many innocent – often “disappeared” - war-refugees who suffered, starved and died at the hands of my war-profiteering national leaders, I am unable to shed any tears for the guilty ones, even if they are now dead or dying, for they were war-mongers that never apologized for their misdeeds. They were members beholden to Wall Street and War Street whose intentions made them responsible for brutal massacres, assassinations, torturing, mass killings, starvation and the impoverishment of millions of innocents that wanted to live in peace  in their homeland that had been targeted for exploitation by my once-beloved homeland.

 

Are Genes Pseudo-Science Driven by Racist Patriarchal Plutocrats?

 A new film called A Dangerous Idea argues that the concept of the gene will be looked back on (if humanity lives long enough) in the way that we look back on claims of “royal blood” and skull size as justifications for power and social status. The film makes the case that eugenics and (its more recent name) genetics has been driven by the same interests as those past claims.

Rally for BDS - Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel

A big sign on a sheet saying Stand Against Oppression Stand for Justice for Palestine

Wednesday, Dec. 5, 5:30pm
William Oxley Memorial Statue, 181 Oval Sr. S, OSU campus
Gathering at Thompson statue at 5:30 and then marching together to the USG meeting to present our resolution for BDS. The USG meeting starts at 6:30 pm in the senate chamber on the second floor of the Union, and there will be an open forum where anyone can speak for up to two minutes in support of our resolution.

Coming to America – hoping to surf Ohio

A balding white guy with red framed glasses and facial hair smiling sitting at a table with his arm around a bald black man in a white and black designed sweater also smiling

Who knew the war-torn Congo and Hollywood would meet in Ohio and make for a good movie subject?

Keida Mascaro – that's who. 

"I gotta make this movie – here, 100% in Columbus, with Columbus money and as much Columbus talent as possible," said Mascaro of New Americans, his and writer Jeffrey Newman's drama about a former Congolese boy-soldier-turned-refugee-turned-immigrant landing here wearing his decades-old refugee camp Surf Ohio t-shirt and a desire to find a certain Ohio amusement park he became aware of in the refugee camp. 

"He comes to Columbus because of that shirt and an old '80s cassette Columbus radio mix-tape that has an Ohio amusement park ad," Mascaro explained at the Luck Brothers coffee shop after his post-Thanksgiving workout. "It's his dream, escaping the nightmare horrors of civil war and the get-nowhere camp and finding a paradise of amusement parks and maybe some surfing. Of course reality butts in and his extended family is there for him to a point. His PTSD and naivete complicate matters something fierce."

Minor Party Election Consequences are NOT Minor: Libertarian and Green parties’ future in peril

Young white man with tousled brown hair wearing a blue T-shirt that says BEXLEY in white letters and he's waving a very tiny flag and kind of sneering at the camera in a bored way

In Ohio, the 2018 election held consequences for the third party candidates for governor – both myself (the Libertarian Party candidate) and Constance Gadell-Newton (the Green Party candidate) had to earn at least 3 percent of the vote to secure ballot access for our political parties over the next four years, due to the latest restrictive ballot access laws made by Republicans in the statehouse.

Unfortunately, we both failed to meet those margins, even with our vote totals combined. While there is a legal precedent for the Libertarian Party of Ohio to challenge any ruling from the Secretary of State that we are no longer a recognized political party (both the language of the law and a previous court case in the Sixth Circuit proves that minor parties get two statewide elections to meet any ballot access requirements) it’s hard to say if our Republican overlords who now firmly run this state will allow that to happen. Secretary of State-elect Frank LaRose, while hailed in several newspaper endorsements as someone who has worked “across the aisle,” is probably just another Ohio GOP shill ready to do their bidding.

It Was Not Trump – Ohio Is Not Red: Cordray Fails to Tag DeWine with GOP Corruption

White man in a dark suit, white shirt, red tie with shaggy blonde hair with a pensive worried look

It was not Donald Trump who did in Ohio Democrats on November 6th.

Ohio has not turned Republican.

It was Richard Cordray's fault.

The Ohio Democratic Party's opportunity to take power in 2018 depended on gubernatorial nominee Cordray convincing the voters, especially rural ones, that change was in order because of Republican Party corruption in state government.

This seemed eminently doable based on the ECOT scandal with $180 million lost and the wrongdoing in state government headlined by the resignation of the House Speaker.

Unfortunately, Cordray, his running mate Betty Sutton, and their four ticket mates Steve Dettelbach, Kathleen Clyde, Zack Space and Rob Richardson failed individually and collectively to make the case that their opponents in particular, and the GOP in general, had profoundly failed Ohioans and deserved to be defeated. Cordray, Dettelbach, Clyde and Space all lost by about 4 percent, Richardson by 7 percent.

Twelve years ago, Ted Strickland and company hung the Coingate scandal around the necks of the GOP and took four of five state offices.

Bob Bites Back: The Purge-Election Year

White woman with short brown hair smiling and displaying a white computer-looking machine with a big screen

Well it took all of two weeks after the election, but as expected, our newly-elected Lieutenant Governor and objectively racist Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has pledged to continue the mass purging of black, minority, young and poor voters.

Husted speaks with smug hypocrisy when he says “…we must also preserve the integrity of our elections.” Our ultra-conservative US Supreme Court in another of its infamous 5-4 decisions granted Husted the power to throw people off election rolls after missing two federal elections. The final verdict comes when the wayward voter fails to respond to what looks like a piece of junk mail sent by Husted.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals stopped the purge-crazed Husted from eliminating more than a million voters prior to this November’s election. Their ruling reinstated voters who had been purged going back to 2011, when Husted first took office.

In a just and democratic society, Husted would be serving time in prison instead of second in command of our state.

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