After Action Reports

Boston

More to come.

Around the Country [Piclinks]

More to come. Reports are starting to come in to the National Site.

The decision to do regional rallies rather than one big one in Washington, is in my opinion, a good one. For one thing, it makes it possible for more people to reach their demonstration by ground. October 27, 2007 was an anti-war demonstration with a good carbon footprint.¹ There probably was a greater number of people at the 11 regional rallies than could have gone to DC. But how to maximize the benefit of those greater numbers? Keep those action reports and blogs coming. Frank Capra didn’t know from internet.

¹In fact, per capita, much better than the No War, No Warming demonstration the week before, but with a focus on civil disobedience, it kinda had to be in one place - at least at this point in time. And with a much smaller number of people their carbon footprint was not bad.

I think it’s time we stop
Hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.

Rain or Shine!

[It’s a link. I couldn’t get embed to work with WordPress.
Then again, I didn’t try all that hard.]

One of eleven regional demonstrations [includes a video by Robert Greenwald].

Medea Benjamin is scheduled to be in Boston. I hope she remembers to not get arrested on Friday. She wil, no doubt, be taking relatively carbon friendly transport being on the “no-fly” list and all.

Μήδεια at the State of the Union 2007 Protest. [Photo: Wikimedia]

For What It’s Worth II, III, IV, V, VI, Wikipedia.

Separate Oil & State [Photo No War, No Warming. Click Pic for Flickr pix.]
More from Indymedia.

Bill McKibben was the first to make me aware that the importance of access to a vast store of low entropy carbon, is often undersold in describing the rise of capitalism. Normally, the Protestant ethic and/or Yankee ingenuity is center stage. The primeval ferns, having slowly but relentlessly done work against the second law of thermodynamics for millions of years, are just stage dressing. Fossil fuels look like lifeless ooze and/or rocks, but it has one essential property due to the action of life - the ability to progress to lower entropy state. This biogeological piggy bank has made a huge contribution to the rise of capitalism. Unfortunately, it has led to enormous as yet unaccounted costs of production.² One of these mega-externalities is the release of Carbon Dioxide and the consequent global warming. The crisis over ownership of low entropy carbon, predicted in the early ’70’s¹, is well upon us. The Carbon Wars of Acquisition are here, but are we facing Carbon Wars of Ejection - social dislocation due to global warming? You might check in with Bill McKibben.

This is Head of the Charles weekend and the Yard is posted with security regulations. Among them that access to the Houses, which includes Adams, will be restricted. I would be remiss, if I did not point out that Harvard’s Law Enforcement Community would like non-Harvard people to be the guest of a Harvard student. There will be other chances to see him. And I will be reporting on my trip to the First Annual:

IFG Teach-in: Confronting the Global Triple Crisis - Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction

¹James Ridgeway, The Last Play: The Struggle to Monopolize the World’s Energy Resources, Mentor/New American Library 1974.

²It has also had deleterious effects on economic theory by encouraging the erroneous assumption that the human econosphere is unbounded. It is potentially unbounded in an astrophysical sense, but there is a very large investment barrier presented by the gravitational well of the earth that makes states outside it effectively inaccessible on a time scale comparable to the global warming crisis.

Forgive the Drudgism. Obviously, most of the world would prefer the U.S. not bomb Iran. There are of course exceptions. As for the American People, it’s hard to tell. They clearly want out of Iraq, which is in part why the administration needs to hang violence in Iraq on Iranian heads. But as Bush paraphrases the old African Proverb, “You fool me once shame on you. You fool me … you can’t get fooled again.”¹ Here, The Newshoggers mirror the claim by the UK’s Daily Telegraph that SecDef² Robert Gates is replacing a disabled Condi Rice as the administrations voice of restraint. Given the reports of discontent in the top ranks of the military. It may be true.

¹As I understand it, the African Proverb says,”You fool me once. shame on you. You fool me twice, shame on me.” I can’t confirm that this is actually an African Proverb or where in Africa it is believed to have originated. Google is not the obvious way to find out. I think asking a human is the way to go. “You can’t get fooled again,” is from England, i.e. The Who. Or for the monolingual, like me, the English Wikipedia Page. Apparently, the Dutch speaking world links to their page more often the English speaking world.

²The military name for the position once known as Secretary of War. This was well before the understanding that “defense” means maintaining the permanent ability to fight two and half simultaneous wars.

Pulitzer¹ winner Seymour Hersh published Shifting Targets in the New Yorker on Sunday.² The article details the shifting of targets from the broader “all possible nuclear installations throughout Iran” to the narrower “installations of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.” Since the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment makes the Guard terrorists, this is a shift from ‘preventing’ nuclear proliferation to ‘fighting terrorism’. It is a shift over a period of months within Iran. You might have thought Sy meant shifting the target from Iraq to Iran. That shift is on a larger scale in space and time³, but I’m sure Sy wanted you to think about that too.

About 20 minutes of this morning’s Democracy Now! is with Sy as well as clips of Too Much Cappucino Ferino claiming that Bush is pursuing every possible diplomatic avenue JUST AS HE DID WITH IRAQ!

¹Sy won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for exposing the massacre by U.S. Armed Forces of over 300 [and possibly as many as 500] unarmed civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.

²I was off the net, looking in people’s book bags.

³One of the joys of having studied condensed matter physics - thermodynamics and kinetic theory specifically - is the idea the theories are often incomplete. When they are, knowing the scale on which the apply is important. Stronger theories often contain multiple scales with a definite relationship between them. (|Neo) Classical Economics has the significant flaw, that while the sphere of effective economic activity has definite scales, the theory does not. My proposal to President Drew, require the economists to study Kinetic Theory, before they claim to be emulating Physics. The sociologists are much less brazen.

Photo: David Schankbone, Wikimedia

The war in Iraq isn’t going to expand tenfold overnight. By simply doing nothing, the Democrats can rest assured that Bush’s bad policy will simply keep failing. War with Iran, on the other hand, can still be prevented.

Major Scott Ritter USMC [Retired.] truthdig.org

My brother is a sailor¹. It took him three tries to get himself to Viet Nam. I filed for Conscientious Objector, but lotteried out. During Christmas Break 1991 we talked about the impending war with Iraq. I told him that we would be lucky if it came out as well as Viet Nam. It looked, for a bit, like I might be wrong, but in the span of time, it appears I was right. I am a bit like Cassandra.

The sailors refer to the Marines as Jarheads. Marine Lt. Jonathon Kendrick in A Few Good Men, says of the sailors, “We like you boys just fine. Whenever we go somewhere to fight, you boys always give us a ride.” I never thought I would like Jarheads, but then I learned about Major General Smedley Butler who wrote War is a Racket. He’s my fave Jarhead.

I’m working on a third Jarhead. He knows a lot of evolutionary biology. He wonders if we [humanoid carbon units] will ever learn to live together. Or will we extin(ct|guish)² ourselves. Professor, we need more than wishful thinking from you. As always, I have a seedling of a plan. Think Social Darwinism vs. Evolution of Cooperation.

¹ He is officially retired, but he still has to show up now and then.

²This is an example of what computer scientists refer to as a regular expression. It is equivalent to (extinct|extinguish) which means “extinct or extinguish”. Regular expressions obey a Type-3 grammar in the Chomsky Hierarchy.