Leave My Child Alone! --a new group teaching parents how to stop the very intrusive recruitment tactics of the military, including getting their kids off
the Pentagon's list of 30 million potential recruits,:
(...a joint effort of the Defense Department and a private contractor, disclosed last week, to build a database of 30 million 16- to 25-year-olds, complete with Social Security numbers, racial and ethnic identification codes, grade point averages and phone numbers. The database is to be scoured for youngsters that the Pentagon believes can be persuaded to join the military...), and getting your kids off the School district records lists (
School districts are required under Section 9528 of the No Child Left Behind Act to release student records to military recruiters or risk losing funding, but they are also required to inform families of their Opt Out rights. Notification varies wildly across districts, and it's a bit of a crapshoot whether families know or not.)
More on this from Bob Herbert here:
The Army's Hard Sell
posted by amberglow
on Jun 29, 2005 -
68 comments
Numbered Among the Dead The life's work of Marla Ruzicka, a 28-year-old American activist, had become door-to-door polling in Iraq to assess the number of civilian casualties of the war. She became one on Sunday, dying in a
suicide bomb attack. "The Marines have nicknamed me Cluster Bomb Girl because I would hear of places where they had gone off," she said in a
2003 interview, "and I would ask them to help me clear the area."
posted by rcade
on Apr 18, 2005 -
55 comments
Campaign for Democracy and Human Rights in Iraq! Some hundred or so bloggers are sporting logos supporting democracy and human rights in Iraq, just twenty-four hours after a campaign was kicked-off by
Dean's World blog publisher Dean Esmay. The campaign is supported by the
Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, an activist umbrella group of pro-Democracy Iraqi organizations inside and outside of Iraq. It's a groundswell that will hopefully counter the anti-democratic and anti-Iraqi spirit of recent ANSWER demonstrations, and notable here because it's at this point strictly a blogworld phenomenon, but one that might actually have an effect in the real world.
We'll see. Cyber-activism up until now has mainly been ineffective, and the feeling of many activists (cf. Barlow) is that it's more a distraction from real-world activism than an aid. Pro-democracy bloggers are a different breed from many traditional, trend-driven activists, and this might be the difference.
posted by BubbaDude
on Feb 16, 2003 -
137 comments
