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What happens when you talk to the public about drones

Editor's Note: The Know Drones Tour will be at the Free Press Second Saturday Salon on July 14.
 The purpose of the 2012 Know Drones Tour is to do sidewalk public education, working with other groups to help generate a citizens movement to stop US drone attacks and to stop further development and sale of killer drones and spy drones.

The first phase of the tour was conducted between April 12 and May 27, when the tour team visited the home districts of five members of Congress who are on the Congressional Unmanned Systems (Drone) Caucus.

Here are observations based on street corner conversations with hundreds of people over the last month and a half in Brooklyn, southern New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore and northern Maryland as well as at a national convention of the Islamic Circle of North America held in Hartford last weekend.

1. In spite of the increasing press coverage of drone warfare, and drones coming to US airspace, most people with whom we spoke did not know in any meaningful way what drones are or how they are being used. Most were surprised to learn

Wisconsin: None dare call it vote rigging

If vote-rigging prospers, none may call it vote-rigging. It simply becomes the new norm. Once again, the universal laws of statistics apply only outside U.S. borders. The recall vote in Wisconsin produced another significant 7% discrepancy between the unadjusted exit poll and the so-called "recorded vote." In actual social science, this level of discrepancy, with the results being so far outside the expected margin of error would not be accepted.

When I took Ph.D. statistics to secure my doctorate in political science, we were taught to work through the rubric, sometime referred to as HISMISTER. The "H" stood for an explanation of the discrepancy rooted in some historical intervention, such as one of the candidates being caught in a public restroom with his pants down and a "wide stance" soliciting an undercover cop. The "I" that came next suggested we should check our instrumentation, that is, are the devices adequately reporting the data?

Join Green Party walking group in Columbus Pride Parade

Join us to support Pride!
The Franklin County Green Party has a walking group permit to join the Columbus Pride Parade Saturday, June 16. We'll meet at the southwest corner of State and Front Streets at 10:45am. Step off is at noon. We'll be wearing Fitrakis for Congress T-shirts.

Contact: Fitrakis for Congress or send a message to Fitrakis for Congress on Facebook.

614-374-2380 (Bob Fitrakis)

Ohio nuclear update

Sierra Club No Nukes Summit

The Sierra Club No Nukes Summit was held May 4-7 in Washington, DC. Four members of our committee joined 80 other activists from 19 states and Canada. On Friday and Saturday we heard keynote speakers; Sunday was strategic planning; Monday we met with Sierra staff at the Club’s downtown office and activists visited legislative offices. Ohioans met with Jonathan McCracken and Ben Cohen at Sherrod Brown’s office.

In our strategic work, separate groups outlined outcomes for 1) stopping new reactors; 2) phasing out and shutting down old reactors; 3) ending “front end” nuclear processes including uranium mining and enrichment while promoting cleanup of toxic mining sites and enrichment sites; and 4) ending a legacy of irresponsible handling and disposal practices for low level nuclear waste and opposing consolidated storage of high level irradiated spent nuclear fuel.

The national No Nukes Team is currently in the process of forming 4 Working Groups, each dealing with one of the 4 strategic areas, with the goal of launching our Nuclear Free Campaign in the near future.

Japanese officials used claims of inaccuracy to divert release of critical radiation data despite validating concerns

Japanese officials have failed to justify why it took them over a month to disclose large-scale releases of radioactive material in mid-March at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

A special government tool had been producing critical maps, and other data, hourly since the first hours after the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami, some of the maps clearly showed a plume of nuclear contamination extending to the northwest of the plant, beyond the areas that were initially evacuated.

Japan’s nuclear safety agency and the science ministry had data on the spread of radioactive materials that could have prevented unnecessary radiation exposure, but decided to sit on it instead of reporting it to the crisis management center at the prime minister’s office.

Accurate or Not?

The ministry has argued that the data was only predictions and releasing it could have caused unnecessary public disorder, and since the tsunami had knocked out sensors at the plant: without measurements of how much radiation was actually being released by the plant, it was impossible to measure how far the radioactive plume was stretching.

The spread of sacrifice zones

Chris Hedge's and Joe Sacco's new book, "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt," is a treasure. Hedges wrote the plain text. Sacco produced the text-heavy cartoon sections and other illustrations, which even I -- not a big fan of cartoon books -- found to enrich this book enormously.

Hedges and Sacco visit Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to examine the misery of the Native Americans who remain there. It's nice to think that we've corrected our crimes through political correctness, and yet they continue uninterrupted -- unconscionably, intolerably, tragically. Here the human stories are told, and told by those affected and by those resisting and struggling to set things right. Ironically, the victims of the United States' first imperial slaughters are now disproportionately suffering the pain common to veterans of recent U.S. wars. That same pattern of widespread military experience is found in each of three other sections of the book as well, while other communities in this country have virtually no participation in the military.

“Buddy, please put your hood.”

Once I did put it on, Omar motioned for me to push back some loose strands of hair still visible outside my hooded sweatshirt. Long-haired men, though a typical sight in some regions of Afghanistan, are apparently not very common in Kabul. Covered up to his satisfaction, I followed close behind as we made our second attempt to enter the university through a second gate. We slipped handily past the guardpost, and made our way into the men’s dormitory.

Omar had been visiting the community house of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, where I was a guest and partner organizer through my role as co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. In an effort to improve human conditions in Afghanistan, he is starting to build bridges between the APVs and his university classmates. It was his fifth visit to the house when he met me and offered to bring me to meet some of them.

U.S. military acknowledges realty of human-induced global warming

Note that in this hot, never-ebbing, electoral season, global warming is not among the issues given much attention. This is the case despite the fact that the trend in rising temperatures and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise at crisis levels, and that 97% of all climate scientists have been persuaded by the best scientific evidence that global warming is having increasingly deleterious and disruptive effects on the climate. Recent polls find that an increasing percentage of respondents agree that global warming is occurring, that it is caused by human activities, most notably by the burning of fossil fuels for energy, and that the government should take actions that would reduce the problem.

If we lived in a more politically responsive time, government would pass and enforce a carbon tax and undertake massive support for renewable energy, conservation, and efficiency policies. As the matter stands, the Republicans in the U.S. Congress oppose and would surely stop any such legislative initiatives and the Democrats with other priorities have not pressed the issue.

Please Sign Petition for Jason Robb who is on Hunger Strike in the Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP)

A petition was started to support Jason Robb, one of the Lucasville Five on death row for the Lucasville uprising, who started a hunger strike on 6-6 because he was again refused to be placed on the "normal" level of security with other Death Row prisoners (Level 4). Please sign the petition to the warden of OSP, if you have not yet done so (we are now at 28 signatures): Just click on the link and it will bring you to the petition.

Change.org Jason Robb petition

Find out more about the Lucasville Five at:

Lucasville Amnesty

There is also made a "Page" on Facebook that can be "liked":

Facebook Lucasville Amnesty

Please forward the petition for Jason to anyone you think is willing to sign, and read more on his hunger strike here:

Jason Robb Hunger Strike

The almost-scoop on Nixon's 'treason'

In late October 1968, Beverly Deepe, a 33-year-old Saigon correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, came upon a story that could have changed history. A six-year veteran covering the Vietnam War, she learned from South Vietnamese sources that Richard Nixon’s campaign was collaborating behind the scenes with the Saigon government to derail President Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks.

On Oct. 28, Deepe sent her startling information to her Monitor editors in the United States, asking them to have the Washington bureau “check out a report that [South Vietnamese Ambassador to the United States] Bui Diem had sent a cable to the Foreign Ministry about contact with the Nixon camp,” she told me in a recent e-mail exchange.

At that moment in 1968, the stakes surrounding Nixon’s secret contacts could hardly be higher. With half a million U.S. soldiers serving in the war zone – and with more than 30,000 already dead – a peace deal could have saved countless lives, both American and Vietnamese. Progress toward a settlement also could have meant defeat for Nixon on Election Day, Nov. 5.

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