Wednesday, August 2, 11:30am-1:30pm
Columbus Citizen Police Academy, 1000 N Hague Ave, Columbus, Ohio 43204
*****Emergency Call to Action*****
Jeff Sessions is a fascist, racist man who has no place in the White House. Sessions has white supremacist ties, a racist and homophobic legislative record, and a history of opposing voting rights, however, is the top law enforcement officer in the country.
When Sessions was up for a federal judgeship in 1986, Coretta Scott King — the late widow of Martin Luther King, Jr. — begged the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote against his appointment. Senators on both sides of the aisle ultimately considered him too racist for the job, based on his disparaging comments about African Americans. He reportedly said the NAACP and ACLU were “Communist-inspired” and “un-American,” calledone of his black staff members “boy,” and joked that the worst thing about the KKK was its marijuana-smoking members.
In 2007, he argued that immigrants “create culture problems,” steal jobs from Americans, and that their “numbers cannot be too great.”

Nuclear News: One good, two bad -- Take Action Now

Good News: Historic Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons Adopted at United Nations

The United Nations Draft Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted on July 7, 2017. The Treaty commits signatory governments to criminalize all forms of nuclear weapons research, manufacturing, testing, possession, use or threats to use nuclear weapons, among other provisions. At least 130 countries participated in the negotiations, with only one voting against. Nuclear-armed states, including the United States, did not participate. The Treaty will be opened for signature on September 20, 2017. The Treaty will enter enforcement 90 days after at least 50 countries have ratified it.

Bad News: Congress pushing through a “Mobile Chernobyl” Bill

I wasn’t bowled over by last year’s Ghostbusters remake, which seemed like a waste of a good cast. Even some of its fans seemed to like it mainly because it broke new cinematic ground by portraying women as competent professionals rather than man-obsessed flakes. This helped to make up for the fact that it wasn’t a great comedy.

That said, I wouldn’t have minded seeing the Ghostbusters team regroup long enough to interrupt the chief spirit’s reign of terror in A Ghost Story. Frankly, I don’t think the spirit himself would have minded, as he leads a pretty dreary existence. In fact, “reign of terror” is a misnomer—it’s more like a reign of tedium.

In the version of the spectral world created by writer/director David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon), ghosts have the ability to travel backward or forward through time, but they’re confined to one geographical location. Thus, the unnamed spirit in question (Casey Affleck) spends his days hanging around the ranch-style home he inhabited with his equally unnamed partner (Rooney Mara) before being killed in a traffic accident.

I have been a Jonathan Coulton fan for a few years. I can’t even remember where I heard of him first – his body of work entertains songs about science to pure satire of anything ranging from pop culture to politics.  One thing is for certain, I’m sure that I found him on the internet. Jonathan Coulton began his career by building a fanbase primarily on the internet. A place where once society believed would be a water hole for us to gather and exchange ideas, to be connecting and finally united. Our current political state has proven how difficult that dream has been to accomplish, now more than it has ever been. The main underlying theme for Solid State, Jonathan Coulton’s ninth studio album, is that of coping in a dystopian but rather in the present future. Many of the songs sound as though they would be a setting in a distant world of a Post-Modernist’s nightmare, but hits very close to home with how things actually are. In interviews, Jonathan expresses how this is the idea behind his concept album, but doesn’t really delve into the political aspect of it.

Something extraordinary has happened in Washington. President Donald Trump has made it clear, in no uncertain terms and with no effort to disguise his duplicity, that he will claim that Tehran is cheating on the nuclear deal by October—the facts be damned. In short, the fix is in. Trump will refuse to accept that Iran is in compliance and thereby set the stage for a military confrontation. His advisors have even been kind enough to explain how they will go about this. Rarely has a sinister plan to destroy an arms control agreement and pave the way for war been so openly telegraphed.