Where I live, the seasons change fast. We’ve barely put away our jack-o’-lanterns in Kansas City when a cold wind blows in from the prairie, bringing down leaves — and soon after that, ice storms and snow.

But no matter how cold it gets, we always look forward to seeing family and friends over the holidays. We all want our homes to be filled with joy, comfort, and the people we love the most.

But many of us will miss someone at the holiday table, because our country’s overdose crisis now touches almost every family and community. Overdoses took over 108,000 lives this year, more than any year on record. Overdose deaths affect all of us — whether we are Black, brown, or white, and whether we live in a big city or a small town.

Every one of these deaths is a tragedy. It’s also a tragedy that so many lives could have been saved with effective and proven treatments like buprenorphine, a form of Medically Assisted Treatment (MAT), the gold standard of care for opioid use disorder. But outdated laws stop providers from prescribing this lifesaving care.

In its continuing private interest- and large public institution-dominated efforts to avoid the popular democratic reforms that remade almost all US cities in the second half of the nineteenth century and even more in the early twentieth-century Progressive Era, Columbus, Ohio (which continues to need its state’s name to be recognized) created “area commissions” and “district organizations” in the early 1970s. It was one of many anti-public dodges to avoid representative democracy and maintain private interests, often bought and sold with mayors’, city councils’, and major departments’ participation. This is the well-known Columbus Way.

These are strange entities, full of contradictions, pursuits of self-interest, and both active and passive deceptions. The only serious commentary I have found is a few pages in geographer Kevin Cox’s Boomtown Columbus: Ohio’s Sunbelt City and How Developers Got Their Way (2021), the only scholarly documented study of Columbus in print.

Cox highlights the complications and contradictions:

Drum roll please … within approximately one month, cannabis will … or should  … take center stage at the Ohio Statehouse. That is when the General Assembly is mandated by the Ohio Supreme Court to follow the rules regarding citizen initiated statutes. Legislators must consider Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol (RMLA) Act. Will they, is a matter of debate.

Semantics

But first terminology. Should the non-medical cannabis market be called “recreational” or “adult use”? The problem with “recreational” is that it sounds like a sport, say, a hemp football. The term “adult use” is a better fit because it frames use as belonging to those over age 21, nullifying opponents’ arguments about kids.

The Process

Damn those Marxists!

You know their game, right? They want to spew truth and real history at our kids. No doubt they’re also in favor of dropping charges against Julian Assange, who (as all real Americans know) deserves 175 years in prison for exposing — with the help of the New York Times, The Guardian. Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País — embarrassing realities about U.S. foreign policy.

How do I know the Marxists are behind this? The Heritage Foundation tells me so. In their dismantling of good old Critical Race Theory, they explain that it’s “an academic discipline founded by law professors who used Marxist analysis to conclude that racial dominance by whites created ‘systemic racism.’”

After a high-ranking North Korean official requests asylum, KCIA Foreign Unit chief Park Pyong-ho (Lee Jung Jae) and Domestic Unit chief Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo Sung) are tasked with uncovering a North Korean spy, known as Donglim, who's deeply embedded within their agency. When the spy begins leaking top secret intel that could jeopardize national security, the two units are each assigned to investigate each other. In this tense situation where if they cannot find the mole, they may be accused themselves, Pyong-ho and Jung-do slowly start to uncover the truth. In the end, they must deal with an unthinkable plot to assassinate the South Korean president.

Taking place in the 80s against the backdrop of a cold war between the two Koreas, "Hunt" tells an engrossing tale of a spy agency conducting a smoke out operation to root out a mole. Understanding that the film takes place in the 80s, the set is designed to match the era down to even the smallest detail. Although the circumstances surrounding the film are based on actual events in history, the story itself is a work of fiction in its entirety.