I’m very late in reporting on my field trip to D.C.¹ and the first annual teach-in “Confronting the Global Triple Crisis – Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction” and nearly missed my opportunity to pump up the National Day of Climate Action. But if you are already convinced or even just curious y’all come

Saturday November 3, 2007.

For the Boston folks a few possibilities:

8:45 AM Cambridge City Hall – “Walk for a Climate Revolution” arriving at St. Paul’s Cathedral (near Park St T) at:

10:30 AM St. Paul’s Cathedral (near Park St T) – “The BIG One” will conclude about 12:00 N with a send off for the:

12:00 N St. Paul’s Cathedral (near Park St T) – “Revolutionary Ride” stopping at Alewife T station @ 1:00 PM then on to Concord. You CAN take a bike on the Red Line .

Otherwise follow the “Join an Action” link on the Step It Up 2007 website.

For the “my revolutionary fervor is bigger than yours” crowd, I will simply point out that Bill Mckibben, who organized this and the first one last year, caught some tear gas at the WTO demonstration a while back. Can a former Crimson President have street cred? Darfur, by the way, is about oil, imperialism, AND global warming.²

¹by carbon friendly public transportation.

²IOU a cite.

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.

Former Secretary of the Navy¹ and now Senator Jim Webb² thinks it is. What is Kyl-Lieberman?³ It is an amendment, offered by Senator Jon Kyl and Senator Joe Lieberman, to the 2008 Department of Defense Authorization. As Senator Webb says,

…amendment No. 3017, the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which among other things–and most troubling–would designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The fear, as mentioned below, is that this reclassification of part of the Iranian military might be used by the neocons to justify bombing Iran under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force:

This is not the way to make foreign policy. It is not the way to declare war, although this clearly worded sense of the Congress could be interpreted this way. These who regret their vote 5 years ago to authorize military action in Iraq should think hard before supporting this approach, because, in my view, it has the same potential to do harm where many are seeking to do good.

Or:

This proposal is DICK CHENEY’s fondest pipe dream. It is not a prescription for success. At best it is a deliberate attempt to divert attention from a failed diplomatic policy. At worst it could be read as a backdoor method of gaining congressional validation for military action without one hearing and without serious debate.

The original version has apparently been rewritten slightly to no good effect. The best reportage is by Carah Ong at Iran Nuclear Watch.

Check out Crooks and Liars and Talking Points Memo.

[More links to come. bbl ]
¹Under Ronald Reagan no less!

²But at least he’s a Democrat which is not much in and of itself, but he did introduce the measure to try to get more time for rest and retraining between combat tours for the troops. It was denouced by the neocons as a “backdoor” way of winding down the war in Iraq.

³The flippant footnote answer is, “the shortest but regrettably cryptic way I could think of to get a quasi-punchy title and still appear to be doing more than recycling persistant internet Bomb Iran rumors.

The offical logo of the Boston Globe on their building on Morrissey
Boulevard, Dorchester, MA [near UMass Mandela and the JFK Library].
Technical augmention is by the StopTheBioLab Coalition.

NIH funded study OK’s NIH “Biodefense” Lab siting.

With the release of the court mandate Final Environmental Impact Report [FEIR]

It is not quite leaving the fox to watch the hen house. It is asking the fox to outsource the watching of the hen house.

The Stop the Biolab Coalition has cases before both the State and Federal Courts. The case with the State was heard by the Supreme Judicial Court on September 5. BU asked for a continuance in the Federal case.

NIH Community hearing Thursday Sept 20, 2007 Faneuil Hall.

On this 45th anniversary of James Meredith being barred from entering the University of Mississippi, thousands of demonstrators are in Jena, Louisiana to protest the highly questionable prosecutorial conduct of the local DA, one Reed Walters. The story has finally penetrated the conventional media, but Democracy Now! has been on it for some time.

Thursday evening in Harvard Square:

This is news? Well, the Director of National Intelligence has released a new National Intelligence Estimate.¹ It has something that can be taken out of context for pundits of every flavor. So you have a large variance within a single report.²

I would like to offer also the assessment by seven serving military who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times which has rightfully inspired voluminous commentary – on the net at least. It is so powerfully written that everyone feels compelled to comment on it. Some even wondered whether soldiers who may not have college degrees could have written it by themselves. I can’t, at the moment, recall anything by a Harvard author of comparable power.³ I submit that the piece has such extraordinary power in part because they did what no one else does. “Write only what you know.”

The piece has seven authors, yet has a clear unanimous voice. I submit these authors have learned lessons that only shared suffering can teach – the suffering they went to prevent, the suffering they may have caused in the attempt, the suffering they may have felt about that – the suffering that they shared amongst themselves and with the Iraqi people.

As serving military, the authors took a big risk in publishing their piece. Editor and Publisher quotes the military saying they will not be disciplined.

——–

Someone stop me before I blog myself into homelessness.

¹This is not really the NIE. It is the declassified summary. Does this matter? My tautological answer? More than the Bush Administration would care to admit. [The rumor passed along by Rachel Maddow is that the classified version says al-Maliki has got to go.] Also, it isn’t really a new NIE it is an update to the January 2007. Does this matter? I doubt it.

² No wonder nobody besides Noam actually reads these things.

³For this comparison, I include myself.

This Sunday, the American Psychological Association will vote on a moratorium on its members participating in the interrogation of military detainees. Their annual convention in San Francisco started this morning. Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez dedicated this morning’s Democracy Now to the Padilla verdict and the APA moratorium. Reporting from San Francisco, they had on two members of Psychologists for an Ethical APA. Dr. Steven Reisner, faculty member at NYU Medical School and Dr. Stephen Soldz, Professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and author of the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. The APA leadership declined an invitation to appear.

I’m coming late to this story. Democracy Now has 22 segments about it including an in-depth interview with former APA president and perpetrator of the infamous Stanford Jail Experiment, Philip Zimbardo [including video clips from the original experiment]. Underlying the controversy is the secret transformation of the SERE program, initiated during the Korean War, from preparing flyers to resist if captured and tortured to “enhanced interrogation” techniques – scientifically engineered extraction of information from human captives. The APA response to this depends a lot on “what did they know and when did they know it?” The best single account I’ve seen is by Mark Benjamin appeared appeared on Salon and was mirrored by Stephen Soldz on Psyche, Science, and Society. The APA has attempted, over time, to address the issue, but the “dissidents” think a moratorium is the only real answer. According to them, the superego really hit the fan when:

A recently declassified August 2006 Department of Defense report confirms that psychologists were directly responsible for the development and use of techniques defined by the International Red Cross as “tantamount to torture.” These techniques continue to be employed against enemy combatants in Guantanamo and other military and CIA run facilities.

The APA conference has a program series, Ethics and Interrogations: Confronting the Challenge. The presenters page for this track, lists only two names with a connection to Harvard.

Robert Kinscherff, PhD., Esq.,whose gazillion government, professional association, and academic positions, includes an appointment to the Harvard Medical Faculty.

Herbert C. Kelman, Ph.D., is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus.

I don’t yet know the Harvard connection to the “dark side, if you will.” Stay tuned.

-30-

Zone of Protection around outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, Surrey England August 2007. Graphic: timesonline.com.

In response to an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease in Surrey, England health authorities have established the zone of protection shown above. Near the center of it, is a research establishment [as the Brits say] called Pirbright that houses samples of the offending virus. The establishment was carefully designed. Outbreaks simply cannot occur. But it appears it did.

This is yet another of a continuing history of biolab outbreaks documented by local activists opposing the siting of such a facility in Boston’s largely minority neighborhood of Roxbury. BU is claiming that it is a done deal. Local activists say no!

Dorchester People for Peace Hosts:

Tonight! Monday, August 13, BU’s Bubonic Biolab: Update On A Community Hazard 6:30pm (refreshments), 7-9pm, program. Vietnamese American Community Center, 42 Charles St., next to Fields Corner T Station¹

Boston University is building a Level 4 “Biodefense” Laboratory across the street from Boston Medical Center. When finished, the laboratory will experiment with the most deadly organisms in the world, for which there is no known cure. Laboratory researchers may combine and engineer the organisms to make them even deadlier and more contagious. Roxbury residents who live near the lab have been fighting to stop it for more than two years. Come hear them describe the progress they are making and the crucial court hearing that’s coming up in September.

Speakers:
Klare Allen, coordinator, Safety Net
Laura Maslow Armand, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
and community residents, state and federal attorneys, and local scientists.

• history of the Biolab
• safety concerns
• progress on stopping the Biolab
• the September court hearing
• how to get involved

Don’t miss this timely update!

Wheelchair accessible. Free, refreshments served. For more info or if you need childcare, a ride, please call 617-282-3783.

¹The Red Line splits at Andrew. Take a train destined for Ashmont.

New documentary on the Iraq War Opens in Select Cities Including Cambridge Today!

The official website has trailers and a full listing of cities.

In Cambridge, there are several showings daily at the Kendall Square Cinema .

New in this film, Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Sidney Blumenthal says that this has the White House worried that Colin Powell might become an open critic of U.S. Iraq policy.

See Linda Count the cost of the war.

Economist Linda Bilmes ‘80 from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government documents the toll. I first heard of her when the national press noted her publication, together with Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University, “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War: An Appraisal Three Years After the Beginning of the Conflict.” Their estimate – $2 trillion – differed by a factor of four from official estimates. Their analysis included the cost of treating wounded veterans. Official estimates did not.

A Pretext for War

author James Bamford also appears. His previous works, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, reveal the inner workings of the National Security Agency. He obtained much of the information by filing for declassification under the Freedom of Information Act. Bamford was raised in Natick, Massachusetts and got his law degree from Suffolk County Law.

A significant number of Republican Senators have publicly called for a change in strategy in the war in Iraq. Nonetheless, they have blocked even a hint of a timetable with the threat of filibuster that none dared call filibuster¹. Surely, in the cold sober light of CSPAN2, those Senators would be forced to put their vote where there mouth is. Or at least that’s what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV] hoped. But NO!!! After 30 hours of debate, the Senate voted 52-47 to end debate and vote on the Levin-Reed² Amendment to the Defense Authorization Act for 2008. Falling short of the 60 votes required, the amendment did NOT come to a vote. Senator Reid withdrew the the Defense Authorization Act from the floor, leaving open the possibility of resubmitting Levin-Reed at a future date. Presumably, pressure on the Repugs will be greater in September.

The best account I’ve seen, including full text of Levin-Reed, is at BobGeiger.com.

How much of a change in strategy are we talking about?

Not a lot. Levin-Reed calls for a reduction in troops in Iraq to be completed by April 2008, but leaves some in place indefinitely. Presumably their role would be limited. It does nothing to reduce the number of American paid mercenary soldiers in Iraq. Lastly, and most important for the long term, it leaves the door open for “redeployment” in the region. It may be a turn in course, but it is not an obvious turn away from the neo-conservative pursuit of hegemony. With the Lieberman amendment already attached to the the Defense Authorization Act, Levin-Reed might merely mean a turn in the course of the pursuit of hegemony away from Iraq toward Iran. That would not be a course for survival.

*I’m goin’ for a little Matt Drudge thing here.

¹A cloture vote to end debate and bring a measure to a vote, requires 60 of the 100 votes. Rather than say filibuster, the Repugs simply say, “you know it takes 60 votes?”

²The homophonic Senator Jack Reed [D-RI] is distinct from the Majority leader.

Some recent reports have suggested “diplomatic progress.” However, the Guardian Unlimited suggests that the debate in the White House has shifted towards Dick Cheney’s desire to attack.

Senate Unanimously Adopts Lieberman Amendment to Confront Iran on its Attacks on American Soldiers

Last Wednesday, in consideration of the Defense Appropriations Act, the Senate voted 97-0 to confront “the Islamic Republic of Iran over its proxy attacks on American soldiers in Iraq.“

The impeachment movement has notched up in the wake of what is almost certainly a deal to keep Veep Cheney’s former Chief of Staff from telling what he knows. If this has convinced you, get on board while I elaborate the case for other folks. I have seen the site, off and on, between DNS¹ errors. There are, no doubt, traffic bursts on the site as various internet sites point to this new site. I wonder also if there is a “wheel war” with Cheney loyalists hacking the DNS servers. Stay tuned.

To the “What Good Will It Do?” crowd and the cornucopia of leftish necessitarian groups pursuing their own private visions of the end of history, I will simply point out that the list of coalition members includes many of your counterparts, ranging from The World Can’t Wait to The Nation. I say “notched up” because of the breadth of this list.

I first heard about this site last night. I was signer number 95. Today July 6:

¹Domain Name System, the nodes on the net that convert domain names e.g. impeachcheney.org to IP [Internet Protocol] addresses. These are the numbers that are actually embedded in each and every packet of a message to tell the nodes where it is going.

Dan Ellsberg on Amy and Juan.

Archived streams [audio and video] available.

Don’t do what I did. Don’t wait ’til the war has started. Don’t wait until the bombs have fallen against Iran. … Obey your oath to the Constitution … not to the Commander in Chief…

Daniel Ellsberg to those with modern equivalents of the Pentagon Papers in their safes.

In honoring Beacon Press¹, which published the Pentagon Papers² thirty five years ago, the Unitarian Universalist Church held a convocation in Portland Oregon. Dan Ellsberg was invited to recount his part in getting the papers to Beacon. Also asked to recount his part was former Senator and Presidential candidate Mike Gravel.

¹Beacon Press is sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church.

²Thirty five other publishers had refused to publish them.

The Senate Judiciary Committee released a letter Thursday indicating that the Department of Justice will investigate whether DOJ head Alberto Gonzales tried to bias the testimony of his former aide Monica Goodling’s testimony before Congress about the firing of U.S. Attorneys.

Monica Goodling, Gonzales’s former White House liaison, told Congress last month that the attorney general “made me a little uncomfortable” when he asked about her recollection of events leading up to some of the dismissals.

James Rowley, Bloomberg News.

Harvard Alum (’79, HLS ‘82) Glenn A. Fine, the DOJ Inspector General, joined Head of the DOJ Office of Professional Repsponsibility H. Marshall Jarrett in a reply to the Judiciary Committee that this would be investigated.

Earlier this year the OPR attempted to investigate the role of DOJ lawyers in crafting the National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program. The investigation was closed when OPR was denied the necessary security clearances. According to Torture Alum, the President personally made the decision.
Tearing up the pea patch?

My thesis advisor grew up in Opelousas, Louisiana¹. They had a saying about achievement. Does it apply to the Senate Judiciary Committee?

On Wednesday, the Judiciary Committees of both the Senate and House issued subpoenas for the testimony of two former White House staff – former White House Counsel Harriet Miers, who was nominated for the Supreme Court and Sara Taylor, the former political director at the White House.

¹To the charge of Yankee chauvinism, I must plead gulity as charged. Earlier I said Tuscaloosa, which is in Alabama. This is particularly serious in the light of Hurricane Katrina. The Gulf Coast, which was in many ways neglected before, has been profoundly neglected since. A small bit of light – Tulane Law has been working with area residents to get some of the promised government relief. Points on the posterity book for the Late Larry for taking some of their folks in. The hard question, as always, how many?

¹There always is at least one (wo|)man behind a manager otherwise they wouldn’t be a manager. N’est pas?

Alternet relays an article by Ben Landon of United Press International, Iraqi Troops Face Off Against Striking Oil Workers. The arrest warrants accuse the strikers of “sabotaging the economy”. Its hard to tell whcih labor demands are causing what reaction from the government, but:

The demands include union entry to negotiations over the oil law they fear will allow foreign oil companies too much access to Iraq’s oil, as well as a variety of improved working conditions.

refering to a law before the Iraqi parliament governing the long term [~30 year] “production sharing agreements.”  In drafts to date the law would grant the lion’s share of the profits to foreign [outside of Iraq] oil companies. Labor intervention in these agreements is certain to meet with disfavor in the “foreign investment Community.”

In the first few hours after the U.S.-Iran talks, the wire services offered no specifics, offered differing acounts of when the next meeting would be, and cast a generally negative light on the outcome. It was only later that the highly non-specific “broad general agreement” was offered. According to Michael Hirsh and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek diplomacy generally and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice specifically are “on the ascendancy” in the administration against Cheney’s desire for war with Iran. One of their sources is former U.N. Ambassador [i.e. Rice subordinate ] and Cheney intimate John Bolton. Hirsh and Hosenball claim that Bolten and others leaving the government have weakened Cheney’s position.

Secretary Provost Dr. Rice is not the first Secretary of State to go head to head with Veep Shooter Cheney. Jeff Stein of the Congressional Quarterly, reports that Cheney’s office actively tried to undermine the “One China” policy forged by Nixon and affirmed by George W. Bush. At stake was possible nuclear war with China.

Stein quotes Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations:

“The Defense Department, with Feith, Cambone, Wolfowitz [and] Rumsfeld, was dispatching a person to Taiwan every week, essentially to tell the Taiwanese that the alliance was back on,” Wilkerson said, referring to pre-1970s military and diplomatic relations, “essentially to tell Chen Shui-bian, whose entire power in Taiwan rested on the independence movement, that independence was a good thing.”

Wilkerson said Powell would then dispatch his own envoy “right behind that guy, every time they sent somebody, to disabuse the entire Taiwanese national security apparatus of what they’d been told by the Defense Department.”

According to China experts Richard Bush and Michael O’Hanlon:

A Taiwanese declaration of independence, they said, “could result in the first major war between nuclear weapons states in history, with no guarantee it would be successfully concluded prior to a major escalation.”

Maybe it’s a good thing Cheney’s star is falling? Then again, maybe we should be sure that it is. With the senior military opposed to war with Iran, maybe there is some hope that it won’t happen. Their view is based largely on logistics. Hegemony is just too expensive – in treasure and blood. Slightly more hopeful is to hear a deeper question finally by asked in the “liberal media” i.e. somebody besides Noam. What kind of relationship do we want with the world?

After rally at Harvard’s Holyoke Center announcing tentative settlement.

At a brief rally¹ in front of Harvard’s Holyoke Center, negotiators from S.E.I.U. local 615 announced a tentative settlement with Allied-Barton, the company which increasingly supplies contract security guards to Harvard. No details were provided pending ratification of the membership. Union members will now vote in shifts and sometime next week, we’ll know.

¹So brief that I only caught the aftermath what with lunch and Tealuxe and all.