Fri, April 26-Sun, April 28
Ohio Union, 1739 N. High St.
A variety of topics including: Medical Issues and Developments, Healthcare and Safety, Partners, Spouses, and Family, Legal Issues and Employment, Youth and Aging Needs, Homelessness, Mental Health, Legislative Updates and more. Tickets: transohio.ticketleap.com/symposium2019. transohio.org.

Last week I tweeted this: “The U.S. military wants to fly small nuclear power plants into wars in order to power the wars’ weaponry. Because there was some chance we might not all die fast enough if nothing this stupid was tried.” I linked to a report on this insane idea. Someone replied: “The Navy already does this.”

True enough. Submarines and aircraft carriers engage in this lunacy, and we take it for granted. Submarines also haul nuclear weapons around the world’s seas, ready to intentionally or accidentally destroy the world as needed.

But some people don’t take anything for granted. Westminster Abbey, next door to Parliament, in London, is hosting a ceremony of thanksgiving to properly thank God for 50 years of nuclear weapons in the water. Oh, well, you might think, that makes sense to give thanks for having survived such behavior this long.

No, no, no. You misunderstand. They’re thanking God for having created the nukes and subjected the world to the risk of apocalypse, not for the incredible luck of having thus far survived it.

Max Blumenthal’s new book, “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump,” is over 300 pages and wastes not a word. It also does far more than it claims.

“This book,” Blumenthal writes, “makes the case that Trump’s election would not have been possible without 9/11 and the subsequent military interventions conceived by the national security state. Further, I argue that if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks would have almost certainly not taken place. And if the Twin Towers were still standing today, it is not hard to imagine an alternate political universe in which a demagogue like Trump was still relegated to real estate and reality TV.”

The resurrected Columbus Destroyers open the season this Saturday night on the road against the Albany Empire (7 pm broadcast on CD102.5), but Destroyers’ head coach Matt Sauk isn’t letting on who will be under center and their starting quarterback could be a game-day decision.

“We’ll name a starter when we line up for the first play of the game,” said Sauk, who himself played quarterback for Utah State and in the Arena Football League (AFL).

The Destroyers have two quarterbacks in camp at the Bo Jackson Dome in Hilliard. Rookie Grant Russell from Newark, Ohio, and 36-year-old AFL veteran Danny Southwick. In the AFL it’s all about the quarterback all the time, where 98 percent of the plays are passing attempts.

On a recent weekday at camp the 6'4″Russell took the majority of snaps with the first-team offense. Barely recruited out of Newark High School, Russell found a home at Division II Ohio Dominican University where he started three seasons and excelled, completing 72.5 percent of his passes in 2017, and was named Great Midwest Athletic Conference player of the year.

Let’s be blunt: As a supposed friend of American workers, Joe Biden is a phony. And now that he’s running for president, Biden’s huge task is to hide his phoniness.

From the outset, with dim prospects from small donors, the Biden campaign is depending on big checks from the rich and corporate elites who greatly appreciate his services rendered. “He must rely heavily, at least at first, upon an old-fashioned network of money bundlers -- political insiders, former ambassadors and business executives,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

Biden has a media image that exudes down-to-earth caring and advocacy for regular folks. But his actual record is a very different story.