Editorial

I will not be allowed to vote in this election. My registration has been stricken from the rolls. I can prove it. I know how it was done, who did it and I have a paper trail. I'm not alone. I can prove, with paper trail, that at least one other person was illegally stricken from the Ohio voter rolls. In all, 1.2 million people were purged in Ohio. An unknown but large number of them, like the two us us were purged illegally. Donald Trump is claiming that the election is rigged, though I doubt he has the intellectual capacity to understand how.

If a person believes that the basis of human knowledge, to only slightly paraphrase Neil DeGrasse Tyson, is investigation rather than divine revelation one accepts that global climate change is real. If one is not wealthy enough for their grandchildren to live under a dome or not live at all, one sees it as a problem. If it is a problem that “they” must solve, “they” should make sacrifices. A first thing to sacrifice for them is the leisure activity of golf.

There are forgeries and there are fakes. In the Art world, the difference is quality. Extending that metaphor, the Ohio Department of Corrections just made a Mona Lisa knockoff using finger paint on a paper bag. One might laugh, pat them on the head and blood test them for lead poisoning, but this is not art, this is retaliatory discipline. Their fake charges have placed one man in isolation without contact with his family, lawyer and access to phones. Other prisoners are on hunger strike in support of him.

Bruce Schneier is the Bill Nye of computer security. He has made a career of both as a cryptographer and as someone who can make computer security issues accessible. I've been reading his works for over twenty years. I fought to have has first book Applied Cryptography used as a text when I was in my third year in college. In his field, he is an absolute heavyweight. He is also a noted civil libertarian on privacy issues and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which for the unfamiliar, is the ACLU of the internet.

It was noted by media organizations not fully integrated into the establishment that the Washington Post ran 16 negative articles on Bernie Sanders in 16 hours between March 6th and March 7th during the Democratic party debate in Flint Michigan.

The recent trove of Democratic National Committee emails leaked by Guccifer 2.0 via Wikileaks continues to yield gold like Smaug's horde. One thread of emails shows a CNN staffer soliciting edits from both the DNC and the Clinton campaign prior to turning her work in to her editors. Maria Cardona's work background shows she receives two paychecks, one from CNN and the other from an inside the beltway PR firm. Yet she takes her marching orders from Luis Miranda, the Communications Director of the Democratic National Committee.

On July 14 a forum on police community relations was held at the New Birth Christian Ministries on Refugee Road. The turnout, which included City Council Staffers and off duty police was less than half the size of recent local protests against police murder. There was a panel discussion which included a Westerville police department representative, City Council President Zach Klein, three representatives of the Columbus Police Department and Civil Rights Attorney Sean Walton.

Party conventions long ago ceased to be places where platforms are decided, decisions are made or votes are cast. Everything material that a party does is meaningless at a convention because the real decisions made by real power brokers happened already. Conventions are media events designed to boost a candidate and create “momentum” enough to keep the public from being fatigued by another three months of speeches full of promises that will never be kept. Well, that is the normal case.