Peace Activist Bruce Gagnon is Coming to Santa Rosa!!

Bruce Gagnon is on a speaking tour on the west coast this month and we are lucky to get him to speak at two events in Santa Rosa. Bruce is a FANTASTIC speaker and is one of the most fun and fabulous people I've ever met in my life. Don't miss him! Here are the two events in Santa Rosa:

Thursday April 12th, 7pm
Newman Auditorium
Santa Rosa Junior College

1501 Mendocino Ave, Santa Rosa

Friday, April 13th,  6pm – 9pm
POTLUCK! Bring something to share! 

The Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County

467 Sebastopol Ave., Santa Rosa

More Info: http://pjc.drupalgardens.com/ 

He has speaking stops through California, Oregon and Washington States. For a full itinerary, go here: thttp://www.space4peace.org/actions/bg_speaking_tour_2012.htm

Bruce is the coordinator of the international Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org) and as such works as a full time peace activist, organizer, and writer. He is a Veteran for Peace who served in the Army during the Vietnam War. He also has an awesome blog here in blogger land (http://space4peace.blogspot.com/).

Bruce Robinson interviewed Bruce for his KRCB (91 FM)  radio show "North Bay Report" to be aired on Thursday, April 12th. But you can listen to it now here on their website: http://krcb.org/201204123137/north-bay-report/the-new-cold-war.  Bruce will be interviewed live on KPFA (94.1 FM) Friday, April 13th, at 8am on the radio show "Project Censored" with  Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff. Listen Live or the show will be archived here: http://www.projectcensored.org/radio-archive/.

I joined the Global Network over a decade ago because of its focus on space issues - weaponization and militarism of space, missile defense, nuclear power and weapons and space debris. The GN was a natural fit for me as a space ecologist and peace activist and I've been on the board for a several years, attending their conferences and actions over the years around the world. The common goal of the member organizations in the Global Network is "To Keep Space for Peace" and to end the extension of endless war on Earth into space. Unfortunately, the US government, its allies and the corporate aerospace military industrial complex have been working towards "Full Spectrum Dominance" of the planet as shown in this brochure produced by the US Space Command. Below is a parody song I wrote on the matter showing more images from this brochure and other sources from aerospace corporations, "War in Heaven."

Recently I organized a speaking tour in Hawaii, where GN members Bruce Gagnon, Dave Webb from the UK (http://www.caab.org.uk/) and myself, met with peace activists in Hawaii (http://hawaiipeaceandjustice.org/) who are working to end (or live with) the expanding militarism in the Pacific Region. Bruce and Dave then traveled from Hawaii to Jeju Island in South Korea (Santa Rosa's sister city!) to give support to the people there who are peacefully resisting the destruction of their island paradise to build a naval base to house US Aegis cruisers. (http://www.savejejuisland.org).

Bruce's interest and knowledge in space, war and peace is very impressive but even more than that, his devotion to peace, to cross the line, get arrested, risk his life and liberty for global peace and social justice is a true inspiration.  Please share!

The UN Coverup on the Health FX of Nuclear Radiation

I watched this video earlier today on Russian TV in which Dr.Chris Busby, British scientist and expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation, says that what is most similar between Fukushima and Chernobyl is how much we are being lied to about the seriousness of the consequences. He actually said that Fukushima may be worse because of the high population in the area. 

I  have sadly spent the rest of the day learning about one of the most evil and horrific scientific and political coverups of all time.


First stop I found this article by Dr. Busby on the Fukushima Radiation Risks: 
http://www.thepowerhour.com/news4/busby_radiation.htm
In it he says that an independent european group of scientists working on the The Low Level Radiation Campaign (http://www.llrc.org) predict that 

 Radioactivity form the Fukushima Catastrophe is now reaching centres of population like Tokyo and will appear in the USA. Authorities are downplaying the risk on the basis of absorbed dose levels using the dose coefficients of the International Commission on Radiological Protection the ICRP. These dose coefficients and the ICRP radiation risk model is unsafe for this purpose.  17,000 cancers will be caused by Fukushima within the 200 km contamination zone by 2061.

So why do we keep hearing 'experts' say that ''the radiation levels are safe' " It is because they are basing the risk on an old outdated and wrong model. It is the ICRP (http://www.icrp.org/) risk model that the UN and its organizations such as IAEA and UNSCEAR uses to determine the risk due to low level radiation.  The ICRP risk model was developed after the Hiroshima nuclear blast and includes exposures and dosages due only to EXTERNAL gamma radiation, not any INTERNAL RADIATION!! It is an entirely outdated model and has been falsified over and over again but these scientific results are suppressed. So. every time you see a chart that shows the health consequences of radiation doses, they are all WRONG because they are based on the ICRP model which is what IAEA and every agency at the UN uses and as well as text book, every reporter and every educator, including me. Up until today. I will no longer perpetuate the lies and coverup. 

The Euopean Commitee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) (http://www.euradcom.org/) has developed and tested a new risk model that is based on internal absorption and exposure to radiation. Their model correlates higher cancer rates due to low dosages that are 100x greater than the ICRP model. They have made their study available online free due to Fukushima. http://www.euradcom.org/2011/ecrr2010.pdf

Here is what Dr. Busby says about the different models: 


Take the dose which is published by the authorities. Multiply it by 600. This is the approximate ECRR dose for the mixture of internal radionuclides released from Fukushima. Then multiply this number by 0.1. This is the ECRR 2010 cancer risk.

Most of this is clearly explained in this video http://vimeo.com/15382750

which took place in Stockholm, 22nd April 2009. The recently resigned Scientific Secretary of the ICRP, Dr Jack Valentin  conceeds to Dr. Chris Busby,  that the ICRP model can not be used to predict the health effects of exposures and that for certain internal exposures it is underestimates the risk by up to two orders of magnitude (100 times).  He also said that as he was no longer employed by ICRP he could agree that the ICRP and the United Nations committee on radiation protection (UNSCEAR) had been wrong in not examining the evidence from the Chernobyl accident, and other evidence outlined below, which shows large errors in the ICRP risk model.  Transcript of the video:

euradcom.org/2009/lesvostranscript.htm

The UN's report on the health consequences of Chernobyl  from UNSCEAR is here:http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html  

It is full of lies: 31 workers dead, 2000 children from leukemia. What is astounding to learn is that the IAEA only counts deaths that have been verified by Los Alamos and its equivalent in France - two nuclear bomb makers!!  This is madness. Did you know that? 

The independent European Group published a study you can download for free

http://www.euradcom.org/publications/chernobylbook2009.htm

and the New York Academy of Science published a study based on Russian science research that claims that some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of the Chernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow.

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment 

you can read on google books or here is a review

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23745

Another VERY important video to watch is "Nuclear Controversies"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8746168177815160826#

a film made by acclaimed Swiss journalist Wladimir Tchertkoff in which he shows scientists debating the science at the UN regarding the health consequences of the Chernobyl accident. If you are a self proclaimed 'realist' or 'rationalist' you may not like this video because it does show sick children. Many of  you all think that this somehow disqualifies an argument, if there is anything emotional or human about it. So get over it. We are all human. Buck up and watch the Russian scientists rage at the UN liars. THey know the consequences. Their families are dying. And Russian scientists are jailed for publishing their scientific studies that dispute the political line. It doesn't make them irrational. It makes them passionate. And there is a huge real difference. 

Why is this information suppressed? Why do these agencies keep using the ICRP model when it is clearly false and underestimates risk? I think it is partly due to greed and technology worship. We want to believe that technology and science can save us. We are in a nuclear quagmire. And who is going to pay to clean up the radioactive mess around the world? We are in a nuclear quagmire and we have no idea how to get out of it. So the UN underestimates the risk and promotes

And  BTW, let us never overlook that GE, who pays no taxes, built the Fukushima reactor and 23 'sister' reactors in the US. Are they liable for any of this? No. You can see here if there is one near you.  http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/list-power-reactor-units.html


Please spread the word. 


After I posted this, I found this brilliant OpEd piece 

The U.N. Would Never Lie to George Monbiot

by Joe Giambrone that deconstructs the recent debate between long time anti-nuclear activist, Dr. Helen Caldicott, and pro-nuke 'environmentalist' George Monbiot. The debate video is also posted there.  

Women's History Month

March is Women's History Month! Quick - name a famous woman scientist!  Can you? Well, I asked my physics class yesterday to name a woman dead or alive who has made a contribution to science and the only name any one could drum up without racing to their cell phones to look it up was of course: Marie Curie - and that was a struggle, I had to give hints. And then I asked them to name men and, you betcha, the names flew out. Why the discrepancy? Is it because there are no women in history who have made a contribution to science? The answer of course is an emphatic NO. Without getting on my feminist high horse and arguing that women have been written out of history by the dominant group to perpetuate marginalization, blah blah blah....let me just point you to a few songs I wrote to try to bring some parity to our history.

Hi Tech Girl:  A Brief History of Women in Science

Annie Jump Cannon

And for fun: Einstein's Angels

And here is an excellent website: 4000 Years of Women in Science:

http://www.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/


And here is a website that I helped Geoff Marcy make a million years ago on the History of Women in Astronomy:    http://astro.berkeley.edu/~gmarcy/women/history.html

Lovon!

Stephen Hawking and the Physics Showgirl

Last week after returning from a lovely vacation in Hawaii, I got an email from one of my favorite physicists (and fans) Kip Thorne, asking me to fly down to Pasadena to perform at a private party for Stephen Hawking. The party was to be held at a local jazz club for about 20 close friends and family after his public talk at Caltech on Tuesday, January 18th. Just what The Physics Chanteuse likes best: emergency performance requests from and for the ROCK STARS of physics!

Stephen, who is Kip's best friend, spends a month each year at Caltech to work with his relativity buddies, always gives a big public talk. The crowd of hopeful fans some of whom waited all day to see the rock star of physics, stretched in a long line across the Caltech Campus. I felt sorry for them because the VIP seats filled up at least half of the auditorium. I nabbed two seats inside the roped off area in the second row for my self and my sister Bergen. Fans who didn't make it in watched outdoors on the lawn with large screen projections of the talk blasting.

Beckman auditorium was packed with so many super smart people you could feel the collective brain power buzzing like a 60 hertz hum in a Best Buy store. The energy was so intense it felt like the place might collapse in on itself into a black brain hole due to the gravitational force of the collective IQ there. If a bomb had dropped on the place, relativity and quantum gravity theory would be set back for years to come. Stephen was pushed down the red carpet amidst a cheering standing ovation by one of his hot blonde bombshell assistants wearing a little black dress and stiletto heels. In the photo I'm blurred out behind Stephen's right shoulder, clapping.

Stephen gave a biographical talk "A Brief History of My Life," that included tales and photos of his humble origins and how he got into physics. To tell you the truth, I was going through such crazed pre-performance anxiety that I didn't absorb most of the talk. I remember him telling us that he was bored through most of school in his youth, that his home was almost bombed by a V-2 in London in WW2, that his father did not want him to study math, and that he holds a chair at Cambridge in math, though he never had any formal training past high school - he is self taught. I remember his metallic voice confessing that he was grateful for his illness because it forced him to focus on his research. You can read more details about his talk here at the LA Times. Being nervous and anxious, I welcomed the hypnotic distraction provided by the sign language interpreters who had the most fantastic signs for physics phrases such as 'big bang,' 'collapse,' 'imaginary time' and 'no boundary birth' and the like. Caltech has the most kick ass science signers I've ever seen. The elegant hula-bali-kathac-moudra inspired hand jestures dancing to Stephen's harsh mechanical robot voice was mesmerizing and performance art in and of itself.

I thought the best part of the talk was when Kip took the stage and shared some insights into how Stephen communicates and does physics. Kip has known Stephen for over 45 years as both a fellow relativist black hole time warper physicist and best friend. Kip showed us how Stephen uses his eye brows to communicate: raising them means yes; doing nothing means no. He told us that since Stephen lost the use of his hands years ago, and thus the ability to write formulas and equations - the hammer and chisels of a theoretical physicist - he has reinterpreted the algebraic theories into geometrical representations that he sees and solves in his mind. Kip told us that Stephen can solve many problems faster in his mind than others can do with their pencils and paper. Kip's love and respect for his friend was palpable, inspiring. Kip later told me that Stephen is the longest survivor of ALS and that he has outlived his prognosis by some 40 years due to sheer joie la vivre. And perhaps his longevity is in part due to the mega doses of Vitamin B he has taken since being diagnosed, as suggested by his father who was a biologist specializing in parasitic diseases from Africa.

After the talk, Kip and Stephen, along with his sextet of assistants, flew out of auditorium at light speed to the after party location where I was slated to perform. Kip's wife Carolee Winstein, a professor of Neuroscience at USC and a wonderfully kind fun woman, drove me to the venue: RedWhite and Bluezz - a wine and jazz club in Pasadena. We had the back room which was about the size of my living room. Kip, the host, stood on a chair and welcomed the guests and invited everyone to order food and drink. Stephen was lovingly spoon fed by another buxom assistant.

After about an hour of partying, Kip introduced me. It was very casual: I controlled the boom box playing my CD with a remote control while I sang so I could pause and start the songs and adjust the volume. There was no microphone so I just belted the songs which wasn't a problem in the small room. I thanked Stephen and Kip for being my 'muses' (am I worthy? eek gads ;-) and sang three short songs that I wrote with their inspiration: Big Bang, Black Hole Disco, and Lovon Boson. I shimmied and sashayed around the room, around Stephen, trying to keep it sultry but not too sexy, out of respect to Stephen's son and daughter in-law who were present, and out of sheer intimidation. I mean!

During Big Bang, something happened and Stephen's assistants jumped into action, turning on a respirator or some machine and swarming around him. Although Stephen can breathe on his own, he requires assisted respiration several hours per day and while he is sleeping to give his body sufficient oxygen. I looked to Kip for cues and kept on singing and dancing. In such situations, the show must definitely go on. After the third song, I was given an ovation and calls for an encore, so I sang one of my favorite songs, Kip Warp, which is a parody of the song Time Warp from Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was a big hit and a great way to end the show. I gave hugs and kisses to everyone who wanted them and finally relaxed with a glass of Chardonnay and mingled.

One very interesting person I chatted with was Leonard Mlodinow, a physicist who recently co-wrote a book with Stephen, The Grand Design, currently at the top of the NYTimes best sellar's list, about how a 'designer' is not needed for the creation of the Universe. I'm waiting to get a signed copy to read it but even more interesting than that, is the new book he is co-writing with that quantum blasphemer, Depak Chopra! The two will 'debate' in print the claims Chopra makes about quantum phenomena as applied to human consciousness, psychology and paranormal phenomena. That should be a fun read! Len has also written quite a bit for TV including many of my favorite shows such as Next Generation. All dressed in NYC black, the dude is one cool geek!

All in all, it was a fascinating evening filled with a very interesting eclectic group of people: physicists, billionaires, authors, actresses, nurses, lawyers, neuroscientists, torch singers, and party crashers all partying and mingling with and around that super famous miracle man and rock star of science: Stephen Hawking. I've performed for many famous scientists, billionaires and nobel prize winners at all sorts of straight and bizarre gigs and venues all over the world - from CERN where the LHC lives to a medieval castle in Sweden during a IT boar hunt, but this one took the proverbial cake! I think this gig will rank as one of the best I will ever have - an opportunity of a lifetime. A big thanks to Kip for inviting me and to my dean at SRJC, Kimberlee Messina, for covering my classes I had to miss at the last minute to make the trip.

Of course, one never knows who will need an emergency performance from the Physics Chanteuse next! You? Stay tuned!

To Boldly Go Unbiased!

Maybe it is because I'm a feminist, or because I've experienced decades of gender bias in the sciences, or because as a science songwriter, I work diligently to be gender sensitive and inclusive in my lyrics, I don't know why, but when I came across explicitly gender biased lyrics in a kid's science song yesterday, I got pissed and had to take action. Monty Harper is a children's science songwriter and performer who is doing good work in science outreach to kids in Oklahoma where he is based. I learned about him yesterday when I received an email he posted to a listserv of science songsters requesting financial support for a CD music project he is working on "Songs from the Science Frontiers" featuring his original songs about science research in Oklahoma. The project sounds worthy of support and I was even more impressed with his using the online funding service Kickstarter to try to fund the production costs. I was ready to click and fund, until I listened to the sample song, "Ain't it Beautiful, " a cute diddy about USDA scientists in Oklahoma trying to combat the Russian wheat aphid which is a major pest worldwide of wheat, barley, and other cereal crops. The gender bias was in the hook:

Ain't it beautiful; Ain't it clever
Ain't it just about the best news ever
How science feeds our global needs
When man and nature work together

Man and nature? Just hearing and seeing that antiquated generic gender biased word representing all humanity made my stomach turn. This is a new song. This song was not written in 1955 before civil rights or gender bias and equity issues became part of our common social knowledge. So I contacted Mr. Harper and told him I was interested in his project and possibly supporting it but that I had an issue with his gender biased lyrics and suggested that he change the lyrics to be more gender neutral. After all, girls and women are at least half of the global population and girls and women are severely underrepresented in the sciences, it seems like a no brainer to try to be as inclusive in educational lyrics as possible. Why not change the lyric to "When humans and nature work together" or use the term 'people' or 'we.' Mr. Harper was as resilient as the modified wheat grain. He replied:

Unfortunately our language has gender bias built into it. The word
"man" in "Ain't It Beautiful" is meant in the sense of "mankind." I
think most people get that....I'm not sure using the word equates to perpetuating a bias.

Well Mr Harper, scientific research would suggest otherwise. In a quick online search I found a study on gender bias in the english language which concluded:

This evidence demonstrates that the use of "generic" masculine and even other grammatically neutral terms in effect serves to exclude women from the English language. The resulting masculine bias in our language reflects and reinforces the pattern of male dominance in society.

We need to err on the side of perpetuating inclusion and not exclusion in education and especially in the sciences. In my opinion it is lame and sexist to continue to use such outdated and biased lyrics in a science song for kids! I can't support a project that perpetuates gender bias in any form. Look, even Star Trek the Next Generation changed the famous final frontier motto from:

"...to boldly go where no MAN has gone before."

to
"...to boldly go where no ONE has gone before."

Star Trek is so universally inclusive, "one" includes ALIENS!!!! We should aspire to be as inclusive with our species.

Mr. Harper, please modify your lyrics so they are gender neutral and inclusive so that all children can be inspired and included in the final frontier of science. That is a project I can and will support.