the guy by the door …

Brothers consulting on their computing environment.

While not ready for Vista, we were ready for a new scanner/ copier/ printer.

Coco and Jo at Pine St somewhere in the South.

Jo was our mother. She took me to see “Gone with the Wind.” I don’t remember how many times.¹ My mother went into reveries about men with gleaming sabres on horseback². She remembers how handsome Billy Westmoreland looked in his uniform when he came to church³. I suspect “The Wind Done Gone⁴” is more my style.

¹Frankly Scarlettⁱ, I don’t give a damn.

²She was, however, partial to gray uniforms.

³I guess West Point Gray was close enought for herⁱⁱ. She could have held out for Annapolis Blue, but she married a Pennsylvania Dutch school teacher. Go figure.

⁴Make-believe, it would seem, in the Mind of the Law is real enough to merit the attention of the Eleventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Was this case really about the money or was it about who owns history?

^IJo was a redhead too, but I was more circumspect with her.

^IIShe thought Billy got a raw deal about that “Viet Nam businessⁱ.”

ⁱShe was aware of the cautionary departing address of President/General of the Army Dwight David Eisenhower, for whom she and Guy both voted, but it seems to have had little or no effect on either of them.

[A picture of Gustavo which is in my other pants at the moment. Stay tuned.]

Actually, 9/11 truth has been in Harvard Square and Boston for quite a while, but this Saturday and Sunday folks from around the country will be gathering here to continue the investigation of the role that the Bush administration may have had in the events of September 11, 2001. Was it misfeasance or malfeasance aforethought? Former owner of Camp Casey¹, Cindy Sheehan, and former CIA agent Ray McGovern will be here.²

*If you don’t know this you’re even more nerdulent than I am. It’s Jack Nicholson, playing Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in “A Few Good Men.” If you haven’t seen it Tom and Demi are both very hot in uniforms.

¹Peace and People with Disabilities activist Bree Walker bought it from Cindy.

²Ray is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. Ray has supervised the preparation of PDB‘s. [I can’t go. I have to guard the liberry. You can blog it!]

It was quite beautiful. Several acapella groups sang.
There was an intimacy. Was I intruding by being there?
But the message is for the world:

I’ve never known when it wasn’t this way.
I had forgotten that it doesn’t have to be this way.

It doesn’t. We must change it.

TeenAIDS.org is having a two day symposium webcast live. Day Two [today] is being webcast from Harvard. Curiously, they rented a satellite truck rather than use Harvard’s net. I’m guessing they understand institutional sociodynamics.  Put that in your Berkman Center and decrypt it.

The number of people who died from AIDS since November 26, 2007:
17,333 [taken 2:30 PM Novmber 28, 2007]. Robert Wilson’s
Toplogical III behind it. Science Center, North Yard.

I was living in New York City¹ when it broke out². It was “a gay disease” at the time. The wrath of God? Or act of man? In any case, it is a “gay disease” no longer. Especially not in Africa where it is much more prevalent than the U.S. The American gay community organized for the medical community to search for a cure and organized to promote safe sex practices especially in their own community. Research has not found a cure. It has found lots of things that help a little and some things that help some. The latter are quite expensive. Lives can be prolonged in America, but not in Africa. The gay activists bemoan the resurgence of AIDS in their midst. Their fellows have grown tired of being careful.

That’s the situation as I understand it, but then I haven’t been following the pandemic anything like carefully. Perhaps not having had a date in this Millenium has made me feel immune. Or perhaps newer shocks have pushed out the old.

The good news is that Harvard is gearing up to celebrate World AIDS Day. Included, the lighting of:

They have related events schedule for slightly more than a month. I’ll try to get links.

¹I lived on the Bowery a few steps from Delancy Street at the time, but I was homeful. I shared a loft with my college friend Beriau.

²That is, the “official” Center for Disease Control outbreak.

Still at it and canvasing Harvard Square.

Dan canvasing for GreenPeace in Harvard Square. Harvard’s third

oldest building, Wadsworth House is in the background.

WikiLeaks went live again. No evidence of foul play has appeared. No explanation of the the outage has been offered either, but the TOR Project did release a new version and the release note admitted that the previous version had a bug which would cause servers to be down for hours at a time.1 WikiLeaks returned with an “open source”2 article analyzing the contents of the Guantanamo document leaked through the site earlier. Stephen Soldz of Psychologists for an Ethical APA finds further evidence of complicity between APA psychologists and Pentagon sponsored torture.

¹I apologize for taking so long to follow up. I should have “unwarranted” this rumor sooner.
²The intelligence community has adopted this phrase to describe gathering intelligence from sources that are not restricted. In this case, the “value added” is “connecting the dots” that are otherwise out in the open.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

“We call on you and the President to relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law we all learned to love many years ago.”

I don’t see the Decider Commander Guy or Torture Alum relenting on much of anything. So the question comes, is this ad a real response or is it a bunch of Harvard trained lawyers who had only one course in ethics as 3L’s dealing out the minimum possible dose of ersatz Veritas? Somebody should ask them.

¹McKey and James are the children of Allen Berkman. I’m unclear on their relationship, if any,^a, with Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman who gave Harvard $5.4 Million to “grow” and rename the Law School’s Institute for Internet and Society.

^aIf you are a Christian Fundamentalist, there is guaranteed to be a relationship at the root at least. I, however, think evolution to be a more robust description, but I do not know how to compute the root set of the human genome. I would guess it unlikely that McKey and James are descended from chlorophyl based life, with Jack and Lillian descended from hydrogen sulfide metabolizing organisms.

The SLAM fast for contract security guards has moved into the post action phase. This is the phase where people try to figure out how to get Havard to actually do what it agreed to do to end the fast. I’ll have a lot to say about this, but there is a more pressing issue.

Another fast for a different cause is, as far as I can tell, still going on:

Photo: Chelsea Collonge, No Nukes Hunger Strike Blog

Students on several campuses of the University of California are fasting to end nuclear weapons research at the University. The Harvard Inititative for Peace and Justice posted an appeal for support on their list. The fasters have a blog with pictures and a suggested letter to the UC Regents.

Most of the Arts First events are over, but the photo exhibit by Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin¹ will be open M-F 9-5 on the 4th floor of Boyleston Hall through May 18. Stefan has heightened my sense of buyer’s remorse in spending a ton of money on a Canon Digital Rebel XT. The eye of the photographer in finding the good shot can make a 5MP point-and-shot do just as well most of the time.²

¹Stefan assures me that if he marries a hyphenated woman, they’ll do something with more panache than triple hyphenation.

²For the benefit of Ryan et. al. in Economics, I’ll just point out that free market fundamentalists pretend that barriers to entry don’t exist, while stock market analysts rely heavily upon it. And for Gustavo, a single person cannot sell anything. He can offer something for sale. It takes a buyer to make a sale. At least one flavor of Harvard’s would be Trotskyites are a little fuzzy on their capitalism. And most have bigger ruling class pensions than I do.

Their placards say “Support Harvard Workers” and “Stand for Security”. This action specifically supports employees of Allied-Barton¹stationed at Harvard. To the administration, they are not Harvard employees. Outsourcing is the major tool in Harvard’s 30 year long program to deunionize the Harvard’s low wage labor force.²

From 1995 to 2001 the Harvard Living Wage Campaign sought to address this issue, culminating in the sit-in in May of 2001. That group included “direct employees” as well as employees of contract workers. In H.E.R.E., Harvard has both. Sadly, the current crop of students doesn’t care about “direct” employees.

Nonetheless, after taking the above picture and officer of HUPD admonished me to get prior approval from University Spokesperson Joe Wrinn. Here’s the thing, one time photographer and union activist has put down his camera lets administration determine what he writes. I’m going the other way.

To Wit, Wherefore, Hut Sut, and So Forth

Robert W. Iuliano, Esq. you are hereby admonished to cease and desist from prior restraint of the free press and interference with a duly elected Union official engaged in concerted labor activity.

That said, I would like to apologize to the officer involved in the event that he be the same as the officer who admonished me to not walk through a hard hat area.

¹The first phase of Bob‘s outsourcing of security at Harvard was to hire Malden based Security Systems International. They were bought by Allied which then merged with Barton.

²The late Polly Price, ‘director of human resources’ made much ado about Harvard being a good place to work. It depends. Marxian analysis though incomplete is useful. Bob was the Assistant General Counsel. He lost – big time.

Former U.S. Representative Elizabeth Hottzman [Wikipedia]

Radcliffe and Harvard Law School Alum1 Elizabeth Holtzman2 has an article in the Los Angeles Times, Alberto Gonzales’ safety net. In June of 2005, the Nation published her article Torture and Accountability, in which she describes Gonzales’ role in helping Bush evade the War Crimes Act of 1996. The Wikipedia account goes on to observe, “The adoption of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, by rewriting the War Crimes Act, appears to immunize the Bush administration and others against possible legal challenges regarding war crimes,3“

In Pushing Back on Detainee Act, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, describes the devastating experience of he and his colleagues lobbying against the death of Habeas Corpus. He is confident that it will be overturned in the courts – in perhaps a year.

For those who missed it, the Military Commissions Act was signed the day after Michael Chertoff visited his alma mater, Havard Law School. I wonder what our Law faculty told him to pass along to the prez. I wonder who, if anyone, from Harvard Law went with Michael Ratner to Congress. Much as I like the color orange, they also serve who take names and ask questions in class. And if they hide behind big furniture, try outside.

¹I miss the mild pedantry of knowing no Latin except genger inflection and the odd plural. For readers of an earler edition, genger infliction is when I ask a woman for a date.

²She really is from Brooklyn. Dean Elena went to Hunter College High School which is in Manhattan. If I got it wrong I’m blaming the Alumni Office for failing to correct me.

³Two references are provided:

• Micheal Ratner, Pushing Back on Detainee Act, The Nation, October 4, 2006 (web only). He also co-hosts Law and Disorder Radio.
• Michael C. Dorf, Why The Military Commissions Act is No Moderate Compromise, Findlaw an open-source-alike website.

If you end a line with a superscript and put the “more” break imediately after, the tag that generates the “more”  is inserted  before the  closing “sup” tag. This leads to  unpredictable results in subsequent  posts on the page.

Does anyone know how to embed html in a post title? My e-mail moniker is “randy.f”. It liveth in the duchy of “earthlink.net”.

Thanks to Mathew Cardinale of the Atlanta Progressive News for a slightly polished version of the full text and Representative Dennis Kucinich for the original. -30-