Through October 31
Sean Christopher Gallery Ohio, 815 N. High St. Suite H & N, Columbus, Ohio
Columbus-based photographer and videographer Adam Berta welcomes you to his extended exhibition, “Adam Berta’s Protest Photography ends October 31 ” at Sean Christopher Gallery, Columbus Ohio during Regular Gallery Hours, by Appointment or choose a Virtual Option. Partial proceeds from all sales of artworks from the exhibit will benefit the Equal Justice Initiative @eji_org

Gallery Visits
Thursday Oct 29, Open Gallery Hours 3:30-530pm or by appointment
Friday Oct 30, Open Gallery Hours 3:30-530pm or by appointment
Saturday Oct 31, Open Gallery Hours 1:30-4:00pm

For all off-hours by appointment visits schedule in advance by calling (614) 327-1344

Here’s a piece of paradoxical news that puts even the looming U.S. presidential election in perspective: Nuclear weapons are now (or soon will be) . . . good Lord, illegal.

Armageddon is against the law!

Well, sort of. And the Trump administration doesn’t agree. Indeed, no nuke-armed nation has, as far as I can tell, anything but contempt for this infringement on its right to blow up the world (only if necessary, of course). War and peace, it seems, exist in parallel universes.

 single election administrator in Detroit could give Donald Trump four more years.

Election protectionists warn that she was key to Trump’s illegitimate victory in 2016, and that she could do it again in 2020 if she is not removed (not likely at this point) or intensely monitored.

Four years ago, Trump was awarded Michigan’s 16 key Electoral College votes based on an official margin of less than 11,000 votes. But more than 70,000 ballots from around the state came in without presidential preferences — a state record.

These “beheaded” ballots were allegedly cast by voters who stood in line for hours, only to apparently not bother to choose between Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Sophisticated hackers can perpetrate ballot beheading with a well-known algorithm that has surfaced in numerous US elections. In 2004, a similar outcome on Indigenous reservations helped give New Mexico to George W. Bush.

Whenever you hear something repeated, it feels more true when you hear it repeated. In other words, repetition makes any statement seem more true. So anything you hear will feel more true each time you hear it again.

Each of the three sentences above conveyed the same message. Yet each time you read the next sentence, it felt more and more true. Cognitive neuroscientists like myself call this the “illusory truth effect.”

Illusory truth is one consequence of a phenomenon called “cognitive fluency,” meaning how easily we process information. Much of our vulnerability to deception in all areas of life revolves around cognitive fluency.

The heated 2020 presidential election incites the question for Ohioans: what has Trump done for the people of Ohio?

We have indeed set records these past four years – from jobs to factories and agriculture – and why are we tired of these records being broken? Because they’re all going in the wrong direction.

Economic inequality, unequal development, and leveling of labor has plagued the rust belt the past 40-plus years. This is the understandable context for rural Ohio, some of suburbia and some blue-collar pockets of Ohio’s turn to populism when it was presented with a right-wing, anti-establishment populist candidate promising an alternative to the “status quo.” 

Trump has proved, however, to be a hollow right-wing populist in the lack of real economic development outside of the tax cuts and deregulation (a very mainstream conservative political strategy) that mostly benefited the top income brackets. His promises to revitalize some of Ohio’s most struggling working-class regions, like Northeast Ohio, have fallen short.

Trump in 2017 told Youngstown, Boardman, and the Mahoning Valley: “Those jobs have left Ohio, (but) they’re all coming back.”