Did you miss the July Free Press Second Saturday Cyber-Salon?

If so, here's a run-down of what happened and how you can be involved next time!

Speakers were Mia Santiago, one of the founders of the Columbus Freedom Coalition spoke about that group that works with prisoners and on social justice issues.

OSU Professor Pranav Jani discussed the current struggles to make change with the city and police force and had a great analysis on how we can keep the momentum going.

We saw a series of photos taken by Paul Becker who has been a persistent documentarian of the events happening since the George Floyd murder protests began.

Mary Jane Borden spoke about the racist drug war. Victoria Khan, Angelica Warren and Amy Wolfinbargerof the Ohio Rights Group spoke on marijuana issues. We heard about the atrocious drug charges brought against Peggy Sue Kimmel and Glenn Keeling of Mercer County, Ohio.

Nicholson Baker’s new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, is staggeringly good. If I point out any minor complaints with it, while ignoring, for example, the entirety of Trump’s latest press conference, this is because flaws stand out in a masterpiece while making up the uniform entirety of a Trumpandemic Talk.

Baker begins as if he has an unanswered and possibly unanswerable question: Did the U.S. government use biological weapons in the 1950s? Well, yes, of course it did, I want to reply. It used them in North Korea and (later) in Cuba; it tested them in U.S. cities. We know that the spread of Lyme disease came out of this. We can be pretty confident that Frank Olson was murdered for what he knew about U.S. biological warfare.

It’s not clear at first, as it seems later, that Baker is suggesting much more uncertainty than he actually has — presumably because that’s what you do toward the beginning of a book in order to not scare away the fragile readers.

Asia, Europe, Immorality, North America, South America

Nicholson Baker’s new book, Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, is staggeringly good. If I point out any minor complaints with it, while ignoring, for example, the entirety of Trump’s latest press conference, this is because flaws stand out in a masterpiece while making up the uniform entirety of a Trumpandemic Talk.

Baker begins as if he has an unanswered and possibly unanswerable question: Did the U.S. government use biological weapons in the 1950s? Well, yes, of course it did, I want to reply. It used them in North Korea and (later) in Cuba; it tested them in U.S. cities. We know that the spread of Lyme disease came out of this. We can be pretty confident that Frank Olson was murdered for what he knew about U.S. biological warfare.

“There are so many . . . primitive tribes — they don’t understand anything.”

The global movement to end racism must turn its attention to the world’s most vulnerable cultures — the indigenous people of Planet Earth — who are still enduring the forces of colonial genocide.

They are, after all, still obstacles to the planet’s moneyed interests.

I say these words not simply because protecting tribal cultures is humane, but also because it could well be crucial to everyone’s survival, including yours and mine. The dismissive arrogance evident in the above quote remains all too common. Those people are . . . savages, whatever, choose your judgmental noun.

The speaker above — the founder of India’s Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, a.k.a., KISS, which is the world’s largest “boarding school” for indigenous children — called them monkeys. Some 30,000 indigenous, also known as Adivasi, children attend KISS, where, according to Survival International, they are shamed and forced to give up their languages and their cultures and become, you know, regular people.

Wednesday, July 15, 2020, 4:00 PM