Once upon a time if you were stopped by the police, and for whatever reason, found yourself being the victim of police brutality, even with witnesses, you would lose in a court of law based on the “word” of the police officer(s) involved.
  If the police officer, after he shot a “suspect,” called in to the station to report “Man down, man shot, he took my Taser,” it would be assumed by the dispatcher that the officer needed back-up and shot the “suspect,” eight times, in self-defense. The news and media reports would tell the public that the “suspect” died as a result of the police officer using “necessary force” to protect himself. Although many of us who heard the police explanation and the news reports didn’t believe we were getting the truth, there wasn’t much we could do or say about it and eventually, like all of the other times, the story would fade away.

What if Columbus was a Zero Waste City by 2040? Sound impossible? Interestingly enough, a city with about 30,000 more people aims to reach that goal by 2020. San Francisco has a landfill diversion rate of over 80 percent. A “green team” is employed to ensure residents and businesses help clean up their city and a massive composting program was created to reuse food waste that then is used as fertilizer. Green jobs and nutritious food would be a win-win arrangement to make Columbus more green.
  To some, a single object that best symbolizes towering landfills could be the notorious styrofoam take-out container, but the greatest image for throw-away culture today is the pitiful, plastic grocery bag. Columbus is considering measures to place a surcharge on such bags or to even, potentially, ban them. If the capital city adopts such initiatives, we will consciously decide to further care for our neighborhoods and natural landscape and to move towards zero waste.

Stagnate to Striding

Lightning flashed across Kentucky skies a few nights ago. "I love storms," said my roommate, Gypsi, her eyes bright with excitement. Thunder boomed over the Kentucky hills and Atwood Hall, here in Lexington, KY's federal prison. I fell asleep thinking of the gentle, haunting song our gospel choir sings: "It's over now, It's over now. I think that I can make it. The storm is over now."

I awoke the next morning feeling confused and bewildered. Why had the guards counted us so many times? "That was lightning," Gypsi said, giggling. The guards shine flashlight in our rooms three times a night, to count us, and I generally wake up each time; that night the storm was also a culprit.

As the day continued we saw large pools of water had collected at each entrance to Atwood Hall. Prisoners from drought-ridden areas wish they could collect the rainwater and send it home. Fanciful notions, but of the kind, at least, that can help us remember priorities. I suppose it's wise, though, to focus on what can be fixed. The elevator here, for instance.

Blackwater guards are in one incident at least finally being sentenced to prison for murder today. But their boss will be speaking at the University of Virginia on Wednesday.

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, visited Charlottesville 8 years ago and explained some of what's wrong with private mercenaries.

He said that the Pentagon is useless to politicians because it doesn't make campaign "contributions". But when you take a big chunk of that enormous military budget and give it to private companies, you free it up to come back (some portion of it) to politicians every campaign season.

Thus you trade higher costs and less oversight for a built-in generator of systemic pressure for more wars. It's win-win-win.