Leaders provide vision. They help people understand where they are, how they got there and what they must do to go forward. They help calm nerves and strengthen courage. They are steady in times of trouble, inspiring in times of demoralization.

Donald Trump’s reaction to the terrorist acts in Egypt, Lebanon, Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., both divides and weakens us. And for the most part, his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination have allowed him to lead the Republican Party and its run to the White House to ignominy.

Americans are understandably worried. We have been fighting wars in the Middle East for over a decade. We lost thousands of lives and spent literally trillions of dollars in a wrong-headed war of choice in Iraq. We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, producing failed states and generating more terrorists. Now we are trying to take out Assad in Syria even as his mortal enemy ISIS takes credit for terrorist horrors in Paris and Beirut. The violence keeps spreading; the terrorists keep reviving. And Americans grow more and more worried.

resident Obama’s oval office talk on terrorism promises more of the same failed strategy based on no serious reconsideration of changed reality. From the top, by focusing on 14 Americans killed in San Bernardino, the President plays into the terrorists’ hands. President Obama, like the rest of the US establishment, appears to have learned nothing since President Bush played the fear card after 9/11, then used it to terrorize the Muslim world with ever more disastrous results (carried on by President Obama). 

Justifiable suspicions about what happened surfaced straightaway after the incident.

The alleged perpetrators, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, appear to have been used as convenient patsies – the same way April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Dzhokhar were unjustly framed for a crime they didn’t commit.

False flag attacks are used to stoke fear, to enlist public support for planned domestic and foreign horrors. Events post-9/11 are well-documented. What’s unfolding now looks like more of the same – the phony pretext of combating ISIS, state-sponsored high crimes at home and abroad.

Eyewitnesses to the San Bernardino shooting said three white gunmen in black military attire, armed with assault rifles, were responsible.

In 1960, two Ohio State students would hang out on folk night at Larry’s Bar, just south of the corner of Woodruff and North High. The two formed the folk duo The Sundowners, and almost certainly played their first show either at Larry’s or down the street at the Sacred Mushroom, across from the student union. The first was named Jim Glover, who subsequently moved to Greenwich Village and had moderate success as part of the duo Jim and Jean. The other was Phil Ochs.  

  Ochs, who had lived intermittently in Columbus even before he attended OSU, would eventually follow Glover to New York in 1962 and began playing Village coffee shops and folk clubs. In early 1964, he released his first album for Elektra records, “All the News That’s Fit to Sing.” He became friends of a sort with Bob Dylan, who the following year went electric at the Newport Folk Festival and transcended into pop stardom with the release of “Like A Rolling Stone.”  

Would it be presumptuous to compare the Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach's stunningly textured musical pallet to Michelangelo's abilities to lay on his back and paint heaven on a basilica?
  A little hoity-toity, maybe?
  A bit much perhaps?
  Well, how 'bout comparing Auerbach to another great Italian, soundtrack supremo Ennio Morricone? He was the man who put the sonic spaghetti in the westerns genre (Good, Bad, the Ugly) and 600 other sundry films.
  Because, frankly, my darling, what I heard at the LC Pavilion Dec. 3 from his new band The Arcs put me in a zone of stupefied analytical wonder. This guy is amazing. Give him a handful of minutes, a crazily rocket-shaped guitar and a band wired to his brain, this guy's songs will take you places you've never been.