Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens- Davidowitz ( Harper Collins, 2017) review by Marjorie Prince This is not a book I would normally read, let alone recommend.  But this witty and provocative volume engaged me, a technology skeptic, in ways I had not expected.  Stephens –Davidowitz  studied economics and Harvard, then became a Google data scientist and now a New York Times writer and self-proclaimed “internet data expert”  He convinced me of his expertise.  Stephens-Davidowitz wrote his Ph.D dissertation on “The Cost of Racial Animus on a Black Candidate: Evidence Using Google Search Data.”   Most interesting to students of history is the use of…

A Vietnam Veteran’s View of Burn’s and Novick’s “The Vietnam War”   By Mark Fleming, an activist with Veterans For Peace, chapter #109, Olympia WA   Early into the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS documentary The Vietnam War, my reaction was “if only…”  If only the United States had recognized that Ho Chi Minh led a genuine independence movement based on the same ideals that drove America’s own war for independence.  If only US leaders had seen the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu as a warning of Vietnamese determination.  If only President Kennedy had the political courage to follow the advice of military and civilian advisors who understood that America could not defeat Vietnamese resistance and who recommended reducing the…

My latest letter to the editor by Larry Kershner Between 1940 and 1996 the United States spent nine trillion dollars on nuclear weapons including platforms development (aircraft, ICBMs, submarines and support facilities, command and control systems, maintenance, nuclear waste management and administrative costs). The US has produced more than 70,000 nuclear warheads since 1945. This is more than all of the other nuclear states combined. The costs for nuclear research, development, deployment, defense and dismantlement since 1940 is the third most costly government expenditure after general defense and the Social Security program. By February 2006 over $1.2 billion had been paid in compensation to US citizens for exposure to nuclear accidents in the US nuclear weapons program. Production, maintenance and…

Grassroots Lobbying Via Advocacy Teams by Louise Lansberry   Founded in 1943 by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) lobbies Congress and the Administration to advance peace, justice, opportunity and environmental stewardship.  FCNL fields an expert team of lobbyists on Capitol Hill and works with a grassroots network of tens of thousands of people across the country to advance policies and priorities established by a Governing Committee.  FCNL is a nonpartisan organization that seeks to live the values of  integrity, simplicity and peace as it builds relationships across political divides to move policies forward. Three years ago FCNL established a new strategy for enabling people at the grassroots level to get…

Reframing the Trump Election A review of Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need (2017) by John M Repp The epigraph of No Is Not Enough:  “I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has.” John Trudell, Santee Dakota activist, activist, artist, and poet (1946-2015) Naomi Klein’s thesis is contained in her title. She encourages the various progressive movements in the United States to start meeting with each other to see what connects them. Klein writes that an informal beginning of such collaboration was happening at Standing Rock. Then Trump got elected. She describes a two-day gathering in Toronto in the spring of 2015 for Canadian progressive…

After Mitchell and Jessen: Why the Truth of U.S. Torture Still Matters by Rob Crawford  published in the Seattle Times, page A9, Tuesday September 5, 2017 with the title “Put an end to the crime of torture”     The fight over civil war monuments reveals a crucial fact about our political culture: how we remember history matters.  Unjust institutions and the ideologies that support them benefit from a distorted, forgotten or unknown history.  White supremacy is Exhibit A.  On the other side, every movement attempting to right past wrongs must engage in a struggle over how the past is represented. The anti-torture movement, working to ensure that the torture regime put in place during the Bush-Cheney administration never happens again, faces…

To protect our planet, and ourselves, we need to ban the nuclear bomb by Beth Brunton |First published in Real Change August 2nd, 2017 reprinted by permission of author   Are you doing your best to protect our people, planet and just prosperity? Yes, thank you. You reduce or recycle, you bike or bus, you vote for the greenest candidates and policies to prevent climate change and other disasters. What else could you do? You could add to your to-do list: ban nuclear bombs to keep our people and planet safe from mass destruction. Nuclear weapons are a greater threat than ever, but you can join the new nuclear abolition movement growing here and all over the world. How can one bomb destroy…

The Art of Unarmed Uprising a review of Mark Engler and Paul Engler. This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century.(New York: Nation Books. 2016) by John M Repp The Engler brothers start their story with an account of the campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 1963. The campaign was very carefully planned. The strategy was to create a public crisis and a media event using a combination of several nonviolent tactics like lunch-counter sit-ins, boycotts of merchants who displayed “whites only” signs, marches and the intention to fill the jails. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of SCLC, expected someone would be killed…