“Everyone’s Name was Muslim” –  Lauryn Hill 1998

At 9:45 pm on a Tuesday, I sat in a Palace Theater chair. People were at the theater to see their favorite singer, Ms. Lauryn Hill. The men who were present were on a very wise weeknight Valentine’s related date. Women were dressed up like it was a special occasion to be in a theater on a school/work night.

On stage, the deejay played a mixture of Marvin Gaye, Chance the Rapper and current club bangers. I thought playing Chance was apt because I spent years describing him as all three of the Fugees wrapped into one human.

At 9:58 pm, Lauryn Hill’s full band took the stage. At 10:03 pm, we were on all of our feet singing along to “Everything is Everything” off the 1998 musical masterpiece, “The Miss-Education of Lauryn Hill.”

Between the choruses of “What Will Be/Will Be” leading into “Father Forgive Them/They Know Not What That Do?” there was a transcendence of the tension created from not my president’s desire to scapegoat the humans from past imperialist actions to divide America with the malicious intent of utilizing misunderstanding and ignorance for transgressions of greed.

The Well, located in the southeastern outlier of central Ohio city of Lancaster, is a fantastic gem that rivals the best of local socially just dining experiences. The Well gives careful consideration of where and how the food they serve is produced (non-GMO, organic, locally sourced), and prepare it with nutrient dense and deliciously creative, and yet familiar flavor combinations. The menu is predominantly vegan or veganizeable, entirely gluten-free, low to no sugar, low to no oil, and includes probiotic rich foods.

The atmosphere, energy and food speak to wellness, with their consideration for the various health concerns and sensitivities people may have. They have even attempted to mitigate potential contamination of chemicals and plastic by using all glass, and metal food service products (even stainless steel straws) and bio-degradable to-go containers. If you are traveling southeast of Columbus during the work week, you must stop in here.

Alcohol is a big problem on college campuses and underage drinking is a major slice of the problem. The connection between excessive alcohol consumption and violence and sexual assault is well established.

Ohio State University has its share of student drinking issues, as have most U.S. colleges. When OSU decided to sell beer to students at football games last season, it needed a public relations gimmick to cover over a dubious decision.

So athletic director Gene Smith and his minions came up with the following story line: We'll use some of the beer profits to hire more OSU police officers.

It turns out that the first season of beer peddling netted the athletic department over $1 million. Recently, OSU held a PR fest to announce the hiring of more police with the beer money.  

Last time I checked the OSU athletic department's annual revenue was $167 million and it was turning a tidy profit of $13 million. Smith could put $1 million a year into hiring more police any time he wants to and hardly miss it.

rump proposes to increase U.S. military spending by $54 billion, and to take that $54 billion out of the other portions of the above budget, including in particular, he says, foreign aid. If you can’t find foreign aid on the chart above, that’s because it is a portion of that little dark green slice called International Affairs. To take $54 billion out of foreign aid, you would have to cut foreign aid by approximately 200 percent.

Alternative math!

But let’s not focus on the $54 billion. The blue section above (in the 2015 budget) is already 54% of discretionary spending (that is, 54% of all the money that the U.S. government chooses what to do with every year). It’s already 60% if you add in Veterans’ Benefits. (We should take care of everyone, of course, but we wouldn’t have to take care of amputations and brain injuries from wars if we stopped having the wars.) Trump wants to shift another 5% to the military, boosting that total to 65%.

Now I’d like to show you a ski slope that Denmark is opening on the roof of a clean power plant — a clean power plant that cost 0.06% of Trump’s military budget.

What may be America's most dangerous, decrepit and disastrous nuke is facing Judgment Day. And it could cost you both your money and your life. The infamous Davis-Besse reactor, near Toledo, is at the breaking point. It is poised to lose hundreds of millions of dollars for its owners and Ohio rate payers. So, of course, the "free enterprise" Republican legislature is poised to give those nuke operators a massive bailout. To the tune of more than $4 Billion (that's not a typo).

Natural Gas is cheaper. New gas plants far in excess of DB are under construction. Ohio has tremendous wind resources, far in excess of anything we will ever need and far more than it would take to replace DB. Thanks to spectacular technological advances in recent years, that wind power—along with new solar panels—is cheaper, safer, cleaner and more reliable than the nuke, and would create thousands of jobs beyond the few hundred at Davis-Besse.