Below are two articles that nicely illustrate the cunning methods that ALL multinational mining, exploration, drilling, energy extractive or oil transporting corporations use to try to sanitize what in reality are greedy designs to enrich corporate stakeholders by raping, stealing, exploiting and permanently polluting the land, water and air that really has always belonged to the indigenous people and who simply want to protect what has always been theirs.

The first article illustrates how an otherwise respected major educational institution like Duke University (of Durham, North Carolina) could be easily bamboozled by financial enticements from an exploitive corporation. (Duke University was, incidentally, founded and funded by robber baron James Buchanan Duke,an exploitive tobacco and electric power industrialist that at one time acquired a monopoly on cigarettes and thus gained enormous wealth by marketing a highly addictive and deadly product.)

Little Eater, a concept restaurant designed to promote more organic, produce-based foods and support local farmers, has expanded operations into a stand-alone restaurant in Clintonville at High Street and Deland Avenue. While there are still some animal products on the menu, vegan options are significantly represented. And, everything I have tried there was excellent, bursting with delicious flavor and colorful appeal.

Their fresh, vegetable-based, seasonally inspired foods are revitalizing. Their warm soups are comfortably satisfying and they have recognized that even vegans deserve dessert. The Columbus Vegan Meetup had a delightful experience there recently and we are grateful to entrepreneurs empowering vegan access and affordability.

As humanity’s population is rapidly growing and technology is constantly evolving, it is urgent for our cultural traditions and infrastructures to evolve into a model that is consciously consistent with our values: energy efficient agricultural production and a sustainable model of human coexistence with fellow earthlings.

Your heroes aren’t perfect. That’s the lesson of The Last Jedi, the latest feature film installment in the Star Wars series. Your heroes aren’t perfect, and they can’t single-handedly save the universe. Sometimes they try to run from their problems. Often – okay, pretty much always – they make mistakes, and not just little ones. Sometimes they fail, with tragic consequences. They can help us, but ultimately we have to save ourselves.

It’s there when Rose finds Finn, great hero of the Resistance, sneaking into an escape pod because he’s convinced their ship is going to be destroyed. It’s there when General Leia slaps Poe for his showboating that ultimately worked but at the cost of far too many lives. And it’s there when Luke refuses to help Rey because his last attempt at training new Jedi went so horribly, horribly wrong.

It’s not a bad message to find us at the end of 2017, a year that, in progressive politics, has been more about movements than personalities. Heroes haven’t saved us. Leaders haven’t saved us. It’s all been down to ordinary people.

Like the title character Jessica Chastain portrayed in last year’s Miss Sloane, the woman she plays in Molly’s Game is driven by fierce ambition and copious amounts of pharmaceuticals. Though the current film is a typically literate effort written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, I can’t help preferring its trashy predecessor.

The main problem: Despite the new flick’s snappy dialogue and intriguing story, it’s hard to care about Molly Bloom. Based on an actual woman who made a fortune organizing high-stakes poker games, Chastain’s Bloom comes across as someone who cares only about success.

To be sure, there’s something admirable about Bloom’s ability to carve a place for herself in a secretive world dominated by men. There’s something even more admirable about her determination to forge her own path after some of those men—especially a poker entrepreneur named Dean (Jeremy Strong) and a movie star known only as Player X (Michael Cera)—attempt to control her.

We’ve heard this story too many times before, but it’s worth repeating in Columbus because the local version of this reality is so surreal and wrong it’s almost as if this community has refused to process it.

The West Side’s golden age was replaced with a casino that hasn’t revitalized the West Side as hoped, and is essentially sucking money out of Central Ohio at an increasing rate.

A few miles past the Hilltop in the years following WWII, two huge manufacturing plants emerged. General Motors built an auto-parts plant at the corner of West Broad and Georgesville, and in walking distance from this plant, White Westinghouse built a plant manufacturing dishwashers.

“The West Side was hopping,” says lifelong Hilltop resident Jim Ogden. “Both those plants were running three shifts a day.”