Lars Clausen, activist and author

Lars Clausen is a member of a group I am in
which is discussing and planning
a Cohousing/Intentional Community project. He
is also an engineer, a pastor, an author, and
a unicyclist. And an activist, which, in my
view, is a very good thing to be. In 2003, in
the "One Wheel - Many Spokes" ride, he rode
his unicycle through all 50 states to
raise awareness of the Inupiat people on the
Seward Peninsula and to raise money for the
Seward Peninsula Endowment Fund.

In 2005, Lars did a 1,000 mile "Straight Into
Gay America" unicycle ride for Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GBLT)
rights. Each of these rides is the subject of
a book by Lars.

Please visit his websites:

One Wheel

Straight Into Gay America

Read his newsletters about the rides, the people
he met on the rides, and the conversations he
had with them. Read about how he came to be
a supporter of GBLT rights. You can even read
the first three chapters from "Straight Into
Gay America" online for free, and who knows,
maybe you'll want to buy his books!

Jim Allyn's First Law of Forwards

Today I received a forwarded email about the
“Olympic Torch” virus. Since it seems that nearly
everything I have forwarded to me is false, I
assumed this was too, and knowing that there are
several sites on the internet that research and
expose internet hoaxes, I Googled it. At the top
of the search results list were hoax warnings from
breakthechain.org, urbanlegends.about.com, and
hoax-slayer.com. There is no “Olympic Torch”
virus. It's a hoax.

A few days ago, I received one about a missing
girl, Penny Brown. So I did a Google search for
“Penny Brown”, and at the top of the search
results were hoax warnings from
urbanlegends.about.com, snopes.com,
breakthechain.org, and hoaxbusters.ciac.org.
There is no missing girl named Penny Brown. This
particular hoax has been circulating on the web
since September of 2001, almost 5 years now, yet
people continue to pass it on. When I told the
woman I received this message from that it was a
hoax and that she should check out things like
that before passing them on, she responded, “Who
is it harming?”

Who is it harming? Well, there have been several
different versions of that hoax circulated, and
some of them included a phone number or email
address to contact if you had information. And
these poor people were flooded with calls and
emails asking about Penny Brown. How would you
like to receive 200 phone calls or emails a day
about a missing girl who you don't know, who
doesn't even exist? I know I wouldn't care for
it.

The version of this hoax that I received said
Penny Brown was the daughter of the manager of the
WalMart store in Longs, South Carolina. Other
versions say she's the daughter of the manager of
Long's Drug Store in Southern California, or the
manager of a Metro-Richelieu grocery store. I'd
bet those stores didn't appreciate getting
hundreds of calls about a missing girl that
doesn't exist, either.

But there's more to the answer to “Who is it
harming?” than I realized. Besides the people who
wind up being annoyed with hundreds of calls and
emails, it harms real missing kids. Once you've
received enough of these messages, and you've
figured out that they are hoaxes, what do you do
when you receive a genuine report of a missing
person? That's right, you delete the email and
ignore it. It's the “boy who cried wolf”
syndrome. And the groups who actually help locate
missing children, like CodeAmber and
TeamAmberAlert, spend time looking for children
who don't exist. Several of these organizations
have posted warnings about the Penny Brown hoax and
others like it, and are asking people not to pass
these things on.

Please, if you receive anything of this nature,
check it out before you pass it on. If you find
that it's a hoax, let the person you received it
from know and ask them to to tell everyone they
sent it to not to pass it on.

Here's some of the sites that have the straight
scoop on internet hoaxes:

Snopes

Break the Chain

Urban Legends

Hoax Busters

Now, you're probably wondering, what the heck is
“Jim Allyn's First Law of Forwards”? Here it is:

“The likelihood of an email forward containing any
truth is inversely proportional to the number of > characters preceding each line.”

If you agree, pass this on.

How often do you receive a forwarded email ending
with “If you agree, pass this on, if not delete
it.”? It seems to me I get at least one a week.
And how often do you agree? Most of the time I
disagree, since the author is generally someone
who seems to have nothing to say, but says
something anyway, and clearly didn't think before
saying it. Often they include statements which
are untrue, but are presented as fact.

When you get one of these, don't just delete it –
respond to it! Point out the errors and
misinformation in it, and present the facts. Then
email your response to the person you got the
forwarded email from, and ask him to pass it on.
If the email you received has the CC: list of all
the people the email was sent to, send your
response to all of them. Why just delete this
trash when you can respond with facts?

And remember:

If you agree, pass this on!

Ways We Resist War Conference

On Friday, May 5, and Saturday, May 6, I attended
a conference entitled “Ways We Resist War” at the
University Friends Meeting House in Seattle. The
conference was presented by the Nonviolent Action
Community of Cascadia (NACC), in conjunction with
the Spring meeting of the National War Tax
Resistance Coordinating Committee.

The conference included a variety of panel
discussions and individual presentations, on
subjects including counter-recruitment, campus
organizing, war tax resistance, building
nonviolent alternatives, civil disobedience and
Plowshares actions, and veterans organizing for
peace. For me, the highlights of the conference
were definitely the talk Father Roy Bourgeois gave
on Friday evening, and the presentation of Sister
Jackie Hudson on Saturday afternoon.

Father Roy is the founder of SOA Watch, an
organization founded to watch and report on the
activities of the School of the Americas at Fort
Benning, Georgia, and to work for the closing of
the SOA. For those of you who don't know, SOA,
also known as School of Assassins, can only be
described as a training center for terrorists.
SOA graduates have been involved in the
kidnapping, rape, torture, and massacre of
hundreds of thousand of civilians in Latin
America, and in the assassination of religious
leaders like Archbishop Oscar Romero of El
Salvador. In addition, many Latin American
dictators, including Manual Noriega, were trained
at the SOA. (The name of the SOA was recently
changed to The Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation, often abbreviated WHISC or
WHINSEC.)

I was very impressed by Father Roy. He speaks
very calmly and quietly, yet with obvious passion
for his mission. You can't help but seeing that
he cares very deeply for the victims of the SOA,
and he truly feels their pain. Father Roy has
been involved in a number of civil disobedience
actions to call attention to the SOA. In his talk
at the conference, he spoke of his first action.
He and two others bought military uniforms, and
entered the SOA as officers. They took with them
a very loud boombox and a tape of Archbishop Oscar
Romero's last sermon. They hid out until it was
dark, then climbed a tree and played the tape.
The Military Police soon showed up with guns and
spotlights, and ordered them to climb down from
the tree, or they would be shot down. They did
climb down, but left the boombox in the tree,
playing the tape in an endless loop. He spent
time in prison for this action and for others.

I was also very impressed by the presentation of
Sister Jackie Hudson. Sister Jackie has also been
involved in nonviolent civil disobedience actions.
On October 6, 2002, Sister Jackie and two other
Dominican nuns cut the chain on the fence
surrounding silo N-8, which contains a Minuteman
III missile armed with a 300 kiloton nuclear
warhead. They poured their own blood on the lid
of the silo in the form of the cross, hammered on
the lid, and prayed until they were arrested.
Sister Jackie showed a video, entitled
“Conviction”, telling the story of this action.
Watching the video, it was clear that all three
sisters are very serious about working for the
elimination of nuclear weapons in the world.

I admire Father Roy and Sister Jackie for their
dedication to peace, for their willingness to take
actions to call attention to the issues of the SOA
and nuclear weapons knowing they could be arrested
and imprisoned for their actions, and for their
amazing dedication to what Father Roy referred to
as the “higher law” - the law of God.

As the conference included the spring meeting of
the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating
Committee, there were many war tax resisters
present. War tax resisters are people who refuse
to pay all or part of their taxes because their
conscience will not allow them to support the
killing of other human beings in war. I hadn't
realized the war tax resistance movement was as
big as it is. One slogan I often heard from war
tax resisters, and also saw on bumper stickers and
buttons is, “If you pray for peace, why pay for
war?”

Also present at the conference were other
activists, including one who has attended the
annual protest at the gates of the SOA every year
since the protest began in 1990, and has been
involved in protests in Crawford, Texas, the home
of George W. Bush. Another participant in the
conference, Peg Morton, is a 75 year old activist
who has been involved in numerous protests,
including illegally entering Fort Benning during an
SOA protest.

Others speaking at the conference included Antonia
Juhasz, author of “The Bush Agenda: Invading the
World, One Economy at a Time”; Glen Milner, an
activist with the Ground Zero Center For
Nonviolent Action; Tom Brookhart, President of
Chapter 92 of the Western Washington Veterans For
Peace; Jelani Jackson, a student at Seattle
Central community College and counter-recruitment
organizer; and many more.

I would like to consider myself an “activist in
training”; a person who wants to make the world a
better place. It was tremendously inspiring to
attend this conference and meet with those who
have been on the front lines of the movement for
peace.

I highly recommend that you visit the following
sites for more information:

The Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia: NACC

National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee: NWTRCC

SOA Watch: SOAW

A 40 page list of notorious graduates of the
School of the Americas, and some information on
the crimes they are responsible for can be found
at: Grad List (PDF)

The Wikipedia page on the SOA is here: SOA on Wikipedia

Information on the torture manuals used at the SOA
can be found here: Torture Manuals

In addition, I highly recommend you see the video
“Conviction”, featuring Sister Jackie Hudson, when
it comes to a theater in your area. For those of
you living in the Northwest U.S., the premier
showing will be June 4, 2006 at 6:30pm at the
Capitol Theater in Olympia, Washington. I suspect
the video will also be available for purchase
online, probably at the Ground Zero Center For
Nonviolent Action: GZCFNA