SPACE WEEK ORGANIZING PICKING UP

Pentagon's "Full spectrum dominance"

• I am working now to promote our 10th annual Keep Space for Peace Week which will be held October 2-9 in local communities around the world. So far we are off to a good start and the showings of the new documentary film Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space will take our message that week into new countries like Spain, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Our mailings of the space week flyer have gone out and posters had previously been sent to our key contacts globally. We are starting to hear from folks who will be organizing a local event (vigil, film showing, public meeting). Media work will follow in the coming weeks.

• Even though the Indian government has rejected the holding of our 18th annual international space organizing conference I will still be going to India. I will attend what will now be a national conference in Nagpur on October 9-11 and then head on to Bhopal, Agra, Jammu, and Srinagar where I will give some talks.

• I have heard from around the country that some peace groups who are working to get the new START Treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) passed refuse to talk about U.S. "missile defense" deployments at their public events. The treaty, not yet ratified by the U.S. Senate, is a bilateral nuclear arms reduction pact between the U.S. and the Russian Federation that was signed in Prague on April 8, 2010. Just yesterday I read that Vladimir Putin was expressing deep reservations about Obama's plan to deploy "missile offense" systems in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czech Republic and likely Georgia -- all near Russia. Putin has long warned that these deployments could kill the new START Treaty so you'd think that groups holding events would want to make the public aware of these connections. One activist wrote me today saying that in her community the group hosting the event to push the START Treaty ratification won't even let her announce Keep Space for Peace Week. Myopic organizing if you ask me.

• It has been blazing hot here all week and our summer in Maine is the hottest in recorded history. What makes it all the worse is that we have to keep all the windows shut in order to prevent the dust cloud from the road work outside from covering us head to toe. The progress seems to be slow out there as they are just a couple doors beyond our house now but seem to find all kinds of reasons to keep dropping dump truck loads of dirt near us.